Leaning Land (30 page)

“There’s water up there.”

Ray’s voice pulled Wager back from wherever his mind had drifted. “What?”

“Water—we’re almost at Yogovu Springs. That’s what we call it, anyway. The Navajos call it something else.”

“OK.”

“Almost” was part of that ill-defined thing called time and Wager wasn’t sure how much had gone by, but after a while Ray guided his horse toward a crack in the baking sand and Wager felt his own horse’s pace quicken. Then it became choppy as they left the surface and twisted down through ledges of stone and gravel and scree into the slit of smooth-walled rock and a blessed shade that lifted the weight of the sun from his shoulders. His horse snorted, tugging against the reins, and Wager ducked beneath the bulges and shelves of sandstone that pressed in from the sides of the twisting corridor. The sandy floor tilted down more steeply and Wager could no longer see the sky; the light bounced indirectly so that shadows disappeared and illumination seemed to come off the walls that brushed his knees, that closed in behind him, that glided open in front. A cool dampness tickled his sense of smell and a moment later the passage twisted tightly to end at a giant pothole of steep walls and distant open sky. The floor of the hole was almost covered by a pool of water. It lay clear and still, ringed by a gently sloping beach of coarse gravel and stones tufted here and there with wiry grass. The upper end of the slope ended at polished stone walls that reached a hundred or more feet straight up and were banded in varying shades of red, and were coated here and there by vast sheets of black oxidation. The lower end tilted into water so clear that it was hard to tell which rocks were under the surface and which were above.

The horses lunged forward to thrust their sucking muzzles into the pond before Ray, allowing them a few quick gulps, hauled their heads back.

Wager felt the dryness of his mouth as he listened to the horses drink.

“Look there.” Ray pointed toward something on the bank about five feet away.

Wager made out freshly scraped sand and dislodged rocks at the fringe of the pond. “Luther?”

“Has to be. One horse and not too long ago—the ground’s still a little bit damp. Figure six, maybe eight hours, max.”

Ray dug into a saddlebag for something that looked like a kind of pump and dropped the end of its clear plastic hose into the pool, away from the horses. “Filter—even Indians get giardiasis.”

Ray gave the horses a series of slow drinks while Wager pumped water through the filter and into the canteens. Then they left the distant circle of sky and headed back up the crevice to the desert above.

At dusk, they paused on the lip of a series of benches that stepped down and away toward a vast bowl of purple darkness. Far on its other side, beyond the rim of the earth, the dying sunlight flared a deep, final red.

“If he builds a fire, we should be able to see it.”

“How close are we to Montezuma Creek?”

“It’s down that way. All this drains off toward the San Juan River, and that goes a hundred or so miles over to the Colorado. Some pretty wild country in there. The Navajo reservation starts just down there. See those lights?”

Wager could make out a tiny white cluster of glowing specks that seemed to quiver and dance in the heat still rising from the earth. “Is that the town of Montezuma Creek?”

“Naw, we’re a long way from there. That’s the Hatch Trading Post, just inside the reservation boundary. Luther’ll be more over there, where it’s dark. There’s a state highway there—Luther’ll have to cross it. Probably tonight, just to be safe.”

“Do we keep going in the dark?”

Ray glanced at him, his expression blurred by the thickening twilight. “He’ll reach Henry Begay’s place tomorrow afternoon. I’d like to catch up with him before he does. You up to it?”

“Whatever it takes.”

“Let’s go a little longer, then.” Wager thought he heard a faint note of approval in the man’s voice.

They were going again before dawn, Ray shaking Wager’s shoulder to pull him out of an exhausted and dreamless sleep and into the chill gray light. The small tin pot of water boiled quickly over the thin glow of the burner and he and Ray stirred powdered coffee into their cups to wash down the breakfast of dried eggs and ham and to warm their cold fingers around the heated aluminum.

“I suppose I should charge you for eating up the office vacation supplies,” said Ray. “But it tastes so bad you probably want the tribal police to pay you.”

“Tastes better than some of the things I cook. And there aren’t many dishes to wash.”

Ray, flattening the small mound of empty food packets and packing them into a plastic trash bag, shook his head. “You must be some awful cook.”

By the time their shadows had shrunk to half their original length, they had crossed the empty lanes of a lonely highway and dropped down another series of rocky benches toward the swirl of canyons and gullies and the miles of piñon-dotted mounds and humps of rock that had spent the last million years resisting erosion.

“I think that’s him.”

Wager pulled himself back from the distance. “Where?”

Ray, his uniform cap pulled low over his eyes to filter out the glare, pointed toward a broad triangle of level and brush-choked sand. It was bordered on two sides by gullies and washes that dropped steeply into the beginnings of canyons. The far side of the small plateau ended at the foot of a reef that stood as erect as a rooster’s comb and ran for a couple of miles, a cracked and ragged barrier of almost maroon sandstone.

Wager peered through the distance and finally saw that one of the dark specks he’d thought was merely another squat piñon or cedar tree was slowly moving. It was too far away to distinguish man from horse, but with recognition Wager could make out the shape of a man’s shoulders and head above the bulk of the animal he straddled. “You’re sure that’s Luther?”

Ray nodded. “His horse. A pinto.” He glanced at Wager. “And that small tattoo on his left hand, you can’t miss that.”

Wager strained harder; he couldn’t even make out the man’s arms. “How can you … ?” Then, “Oh—that’s a joke.”

“I thought it was kind of funny.”

Wager’s lips lifted in a brief smile. “How long before we reach him?”

“Couple hours, if he don’t see us.”

They had been riding for half that time when Ray’s small radio crackled faintly from a saddlebag. He pulled up to fish it out and aim the antenna toward the northeast. Wager tried to stifle a groan as he hauled himself out of the saddle and unscrewed a canteen cap.

A pinched voice sounded loud in the desert silence. “Qwana’tua? Come in—this is Durkin. Qwana’tua?”

“Go ahead, Durkin.”

“Suspect apprehended. Repeat: suspect apprehended. Search is cancelled.”

Ray glanced at Wager, who shrugged and said, “Nichols?”

“Is that Nichols? You arrested him?”

“Affirmative. Suspect was apprehended at Grand Junction and is now in custody. Consider the case closed—return to base for further instructions.”

Both Ray and Wager studied the slowly moving figure in the distance. “That’s good news for Luther,” said Wager.

Ray nodded. Then he reached into the saddlebag and pulled out a map. He held the paper near the microphone and crackled it. “You’re breaking up—say again all after ‘affirmative.’ ”

The thin voice repeated itself, louder.

Ray held the radio at arm’s length, rattling the paper harder. “I can’t … you … breaking up … over.’’ He turned it off and dropped it back in the leather pouch.

“His case may be closed and Luther may be safe. But we still need to talk to him.”

Wager grunted and hauled himself back into the saddle.

Gradually, the glimpses of the man ahead became clearer to Wager, and after an hour or so he could make out the checked cloth of his flannel shirt, the high dome of his black hat, the patterns on the pinto horse. Wager did not see Luther look back their way, but for a while the man stayed the same distance and even seemed to increase it a little. Ray goaded his horse into a quicker walk. Wager’s own horse stepped faster, the jolting stride uncomfortable to Wager and Wager’s stiff riding uncomfortable to the horse.

“He knows we’re behind him,” said Ray.

“Why doesn’t he run?”

“Hey, where can he run to?”

Wager looked at the world surrounding them: a chaos of twisting gullies and washes, of red-and-white mounds and reefs and buttes that rose from those unnamed and contorted crevices, hundreds of square miles of heat-paled sky over an empty tumult marked only by an occasional crooked telephone pole. He figured Ray was joking again. Well, he was young. Wager could not remember telling jokes when he had been younger—as a matter of fact, he couldn’t remember laughing very much, either, even before he’d joined Homicide. But Ray’s life was a different one, and he saw the world differently, too. Maybe he even saw it as a better place than Wager did. If so, that would probably change in time, but that wasn’t Wager’s worry. Luther and the man hunting him were Wager’s worry. Fortunately, Ray was able to do well what he did—be a tribal cop—and he knew this tortured landscape far better than Wager. Those skills and that knowledge would help Wager get his job done, and that was the only thing that counted.

They began closing in again. Ray followed lines of convergence that shortened the distance every time the rough ground forced Luther to change direction. At the end of a half hour or so, they were close enough for Wager to see the man’s saddlebags and a scabbard that showed a rifle butt rising just in front of the man’s left knee. Finally the man guided his horse down into one of the larger gullies and out of sight among thrusts of rock and tangles of brush and cedar clumps. When Ray and Wager followed down the slope of slickrock, their horses’ hooves clattering loudly in the silence, they saw Luther’s riderless horse grazing on a small patch of weeds. The man himself sat smoking in the shade of a larger tree, waiting for them.

R
AY GREETED THE
man in Ute. Luther lifted his hat to wipe a wide palm across his sweaty forehead and nodded back to both of them before resettling the hat in the groove it had pressed in his straight black hair.

“You been following me a long time.”

The tribal policeman swung down from his creaking saddle, and Wager followed stiffly. “Couple days.”

The horses snorted their own greetings and ambled over near the pinto to help it crop the tough weeds.

Luther reached under one of his braids to lift his package of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket in an offer; Ray took one to hold in his palm. Wager shook his head. Ray, too, squatted; Wager didn’t. Standing felt good, and it felt good to move his legs without having a horse between them. He was also more comfortable being between Luther and that rifle holstered on the pinto’s saddle.

“You going to see Henry Begay, Cerise tells me.”

“Got to.”

Ray nodded, dragging his fingers through the powdery sand between his scarred boots. “His place is just over there, isn’t it?” Ray tilted his chin down the draw to where it opened into a distant view of the next lower shelf of earth.

“A few miles. Maybe ten.” A wag of his head. “Real close … real close.”

Overhead, somewhere beyond the heat haze that made the sky a silvery blue, Wager heard the tiny, hollow roar of a high flying jet liner. Headed for Los Angeles probably. Maybe from Denver, maybe from somewhere farther east. No contrail, so he couldn’t tell exactly where it crossed the sky. When it was gone, he heard the distant twitter of some bird from one of the narrower gullies that fed the wash, and an occasional sigh of wind through the stiff needles of the cedar that shaded them.

“Be better if you tell us about it, Luther. Henry Begay won’t be able to help you much if you don’t speak from your heart.”

Another gentle surge of wind along the ragged walls of the wash seemed to carry a slightly different sound, so faint that Wager wasn’t sure he really heard it. It was an insect of some kind: distant and small. An almost metallic whining that reminded Wager of a tiny engine straining to pull up a hard hill, and he wondered how far they were from any of the faint two-wheel tracks that picked their way through the writhing watercourses that scarred the land. Then the wind faded and the sound was gone.

Ray tried again. “Ramey Many Coats has some strong medicine, all right. He knows how to hex people. If you got him after you, you’re going to need Henry Begay, all right.”

Luther, squinting, pulled the smoke of his cigarette into his lungs. The brim of his hat dipped once in a nod.

“But Luther, I tell you this—sometimes a lot of people hex themselves. I had a cousin once, he hexed himself. Tried to blame it on a witch, but the witch didn’t know anything about it.” Another slow dribble of sand from between his fingers into a growing mound. Luther waited for Ray to go on. “He went to two or three medicine men, paid a lot of money. Didn’t do no good.”

“The witch was stronger.”

“No. The witch didn’t know anything about it, not until after it was all over. Didn’t have any reason to hex my cousin, either, because he hadn’t done anything to the witch.”

“Sometimes they don’t need a reason.”

“This one didn’t need a reason because my cousin did it to himself. Made his own bad luck. You want to know how?”

“I guess you’re going to tell me anyway.”

It was Ray’s turn to nod. “What he did was kill a man. That wasn’t so bad because he was drunk, so it was kind of an accident. You know: didn’t mean to do it, it just happened. But he hexed himself when he woke up sober and saw the man lying there and took the man’s money. It was a lot of money. Didn’t give it to the man’s wife or kids. Nothing to make amends, you know, just took it. Bought himself a new car, bunch of other stuff. Thought he could get away with it.”

“You catch him?”

“Not me. Happened a long time before I became a cop. No, my cousin started having real bad luck, so he went to this medicine man and said some witch had hexed him. But he didn’t tell him about killing the man and taking his money. So the singing was no good. Tried everything. No good. Sold his new car to pay for a new medicine man. Still no good. Sold his horses. Sold his house and land. Didn’t tell the new medicine man the real reason, just that he was hexed. No good. Sold everything. No good. Left his wife and kids, went to L.A.—figured if he left the reservation the hex wouldn’t follow him. No good. Lots of bad luck out there—drunk, jail, begging down in Pershing Square. Everything. No good.” Ray smoothed out the mound of fine, pink sand and started another one. It looked like a small anthill.