Out of Season (19 page)
As we were preparing to leave her to her petunias, Estelle turned and asked, “Mrs. Finnegan, are there many antelope out here? Do you often see them?”
The woman frowned. “Now, sometimes,” she said. “We used to have a herd of nearly fifty that would roam of an evening.” She took a step forward and pointed. “You see that swale down past the fence? Well, they’d even come right in there.” She turned and smiled. “The little ones, you know. They’re so fetching. Just like little fractious goats.”
“Fractious goats,” I repeated and chuckled. “You say there used to be more of them than there are now?”
“Oh my, yes.” She paused to ponder the numbers, brightened and added, “But they move so much, you know. It’s so hard to tell. There must be some, because we still get the occasional hunter.” She smiled. “Most of the time, they’re lost too, especially if they’re from the city.”
Armed with one of the county maps that purported to show every road, trail, or cow path that had ever been worn into the Posadas prairie, and with Charlotte Finnegan’s instructions to “just stay north of the rise there,” we set out. Immediately behind one of the barns, we stopped for a barbed-wire gate and I held it open while Estelle drove the Bronco through. I managed to get it closed again without being bitten by the wire.
Away from any thoroughfare, the New Mexico prairie took on a marvelously textured beauty of lines, shadows, and patterns. I relaxed back in the seat, my right hand curled over the panic handle above the door, letting Estelle cope with the vague two-track.
“Tawny,” I mused aloud. “Tawny and russet.”
“Sir?”
“The colors out here. Tawny and russet.” I heaved a sigh. “You know, Martin Holman never really felt at home out here. All the years he lived in Posadas, the one love he never cultivated was being able to just enjoy the quiet of the prairie.”
“He preferred the solidity of asphalt,” Estelle said, but there was no ring of condemnation in her tone.
“I think he felt a little threatened by the vastness of country when it wasn’t neatly marked up into manageable chunks,” I mused. I let go of the panic handle and let the bumps gently nestle me down into the seat. “And he liked to plan ahead.” I cleared my throat. “You know, every once in a while he’d ride with me, and I know it used to drive him crazy when I’d turn off the headlights, open the windows, and just idle along, listening.” I chuckled. “He was forever asking me what I was listening
for.
” I turned and gazed out the window. “And I could never really give him an answer that he understood.”
“You probably would have been just as uncomfortable and out of place at one of his service-club luncheons,” Estelle said, and I laughed.
“For sure. And on an occasion or two, I was.” We fell silent for another dozen bumps or so and then I said, “You know what colors you’re going to have to get used to up in Minnesota?” Estelle shot a glance at me and then looked heavenward.
“Yes, sir.” And then, no doubt weary of hearing about it, she added, “White and green.”
“That’s it,” I agreed. “In the summer, it looks like green corduroy up there. Lumpy little hills, all roundy and green. And in the winter, white corduroy. Your mother is going to go crazy. Then the rest of you.”
“My mother is looking forward to the move, sir.”
“I know. You’ve said that before. It’s hard to believe. From Mexico to Minnesota. Ouch.”
“Maybe after all these years without any water, she’s ready to see some of it standing around.”
“Standing around is right,” I said. “You guys are going to end up buying a boat.”
“That sounds like fun, sir. Another year or two and
los niños
can learn to water-ski.”
“Don’t enjoy the place too much,” I muttered. “And I’ll get it.” I opened the door as she slowed for another gate, this one little more than a tangle of barbed wire snarled between two posts. I found the end that would cooperate and swung the whole thing to one side.
Back in the truck, I picked up the map. “If that’s the rise that Charlotte was talking about, then the windmill is just beyond it.” The road almost immediately forked, and I added, “To the right.”
After another hundred yards, we idled up to the edge of a major arroyo. The two-track, in truly optimistic fashion, just plunged down one side, across two dozen feet of loose sand and then up the other side. The arroyo was at least twenty feet deep, and I could picture us stuck in the bottom while Dick Finnegan stood up on the rim and laughed.
“You might want to put it in four-wheel-drive,” I said, but Estelle was already accelerating.
Even as we tipped forward for the trip down, she said, “I think it’s plenty hard,” meaning the beckoning arroyo bottom, where we would plunge up to our axles and churn to a helpless stop. She was right, of course. We thumped across the bottom, a sprinkling of sandy gravel over bedrock, and roared up the other side.
As soon as we were level again, I could see the windmill, still tiny in the distance. “Over there,” I said.
I released my death grip on the panic bar and pulled the pile of photos out of the folder. I riffled through them until I found the block-house windmill shots, one of the house, the other of the windmill itself. I held them together, then looked over the top of the prints at the terrain ahead of us.
“This is it,” I said. “If you park on that rise, we can walk over.”
Outside the truck, the sun was hot. The breeze out of the west was just hard enough to make itself a nuisance, and I left my Stetson in the truck and pulled a Sheriff’s Department cap down hard on my head.
One of the problems with being fat, old, and bifocaled is that uneven ground becomes a major challenge. Estelle strolled beside me, scanning the surrounding terrain, musing about this and that. I walked with my head down, planting my boots in the few flat spots between the bunchgrass and the cacti.
The two-track beside us had been beaten into a powdery, pockmarked trail by the cattle, but the tracks were not fresh. Several tire prints ran past the windmill, but none angled over to it. The two-track was an arterial to elsewhere, with the windmill abandoned for another time when the water table might recharge.
The windmill was stationary, its rudder locked over so that the motor wouldn’t continue to drive the pump up and down. The galvanized-metal cattle tank, three feet high and a dozen feet across, had seen better days. Dark with rust from the times it had once held water, it was dented and far from level. And it probably leaked like a sieve, too. At one time, the water had puddled on the east side of the windmill tower, and when the cattle had waded in, they’d stomped a quagmire that had compacted the earth six or seven inches lower than the surrounding dry prairie.
I walked up to the tank and rested my hands on the rim. It was stone-dry inside. “In the photo, it looked like there was some water in here,” I said.
“Just the shadow of the tank rim,” Estelle suggested.
To the north, the block house nestled in a grove of junipers and greasewood. It looked even smaller than it had in the aerial photo.
I tried to imagine Philip Camp’s Bonanza flying overhead, coming in low and fast from the west. In order for Holman, seated on the right, to shoot the photo of the windmill, the flight path was just to the north, over the small rise behind the block house.
“So,” I said, “we’ve got an old windmill and a dry stock tank.” I turned and sat on the edge of the tank, arms crossed over my belly.
Estelle had the folder of photos, and she pulled out the one of the house. “Let’s go see,” she said.
“See what?” I muttered, but doggedly followed, determined to enjoy the tawny and russet colors of the dried vegetation, and now, the worn stones of the block house.
Maybe Martin Holman had become a fan of early south-western ranch architecture. And then, to give him the credit that he’d been perfectly capable of earning in the past couple of years, perhaps he’d seen something here that wasn’t immediately obvious to me.
The block house was ninety paces from the windmill, slightly uphill. Roughly rectangular in shape, it was situated against the slope of a small mesa, its length running almost north-south. One door, perhaps the only one, was on the south end, facing the windmill.
Every time I saw one of these remnants from the homestead era, I marveled at how much physical labor the people had invested in the vain hope that the land would bloom for them, that the cattle would run fat and sleek, that this hundred-sixty-acre gift from their benevolent government would offer the magic they sought.
I ambled up to the structure and put my hand gently on the wall, feeling the cool silence of the stones. Some of the blocks showed shaping marks where the builder, sitting in the hot sun, chisel in hand, had whacked off the rock spurs that prevented a good, solid fit.
The walls were surprisingly square, still vertical after years of every manner of assault that the fickle weather could hurl at them.
The roof beams had been of juniper, and fragments stuck out from the upper portion of the walls.
Estelle was moving slowly along the outside wall, head down, searching the ground, and while she did that, I went inside, slipping past a jumble of roof boards and beams that had crashed across the doorway.
No doubt hunters had used the house in years past, but there was no sign now of their fires. Over in one corner, a wooden crate with “California Oranges” stenciled on its side had been crushed by one of the rocks that had slipped from its position high up, just under one of the ceiling-beam sockets.
The place was home to pack rats, but not much else. I toed the dirt floor with my boot. The earth was powdery, churned up by cattle when they’d wandered inside before the roof had caved in.
A bit of metal caught my eye, and I stooped and picked up an empty cartridge casing. The brass was dull and lifeless, and the end where the bullet had been was crushed flat.
I wet my thumb and rubbed the base of the cartridge, then held it up to try to read the head stamp. After several attempts, I gave up.
“Sir?” Estelle said. Her voice was muffled behind the wall.
“Inside,” I said.
“Can you come here for a minute?”
I picked my way out and walked around the side of the building. Estelle was standing near the wall with her back to it, facing east.
“Can you make this out?” I asked and handed her the casing.
She turned it this way and that, frowned, and read out loud, “Remington UMC, twenty-five thirty-five.” She looked up and handed the casing back. “That’s an old one. And it’s been here a while.”
I nodded. “What’d you find?”
She grimaced and looked at the wall beside her. “This is the north wall,” she said. “Am I right?”
I glanced over my shoulder at the afternoon sun. “Sure enough,” I said.
“Now, if this is north, that means that Sheriff Holman snapped the picture as they were flying west, and he tripped the shutter when the plane was actually a little way
west
of here.” She stepped away from the wall and held an arm up. “About there.”
“He was sitting on the right side of the aircraft, so that’s right,” I agreed. “He got the windmill, and then in the background, looking north, this structure. And so?”
Estelle opened the folder and took out the photo. “The sun is in the pilot’s face,” she said, holding up the photo. I tilted my head back so my bifocals would have a chance to bring the thing into focus. “The airplane is moving right along, and Martin takes the photo.”
“Remember that the Bonanza is a low-wing aircraft,” I said. “Unless they’re in a steep bank, the wing’s going to be in the way. So in order to take that photo, he’s got to actually turn and shoot almost over his shoulder.” I held up both hands, miming the photographer, and twisted to my right. “He’s shooting back and down.”
“That’s right,” Estelle said. “Back and down. The east wall of the house is in the shade, and it casts a pretty good shadow away from it, to the east. Right here.” She touched the photo with her little finger. “There’s no shadow on the west side.”
“Couldn’t be,” I said and looked at her quizzically. “So what’s your point?”
“What’s this, then?”
“Where?”
“Here,” and this time she slipped the pen out of her pocket and used it as a pointer. “The shadows are hard and well-defined. I mean, look at the windmill’s shadow, sir. You can count every cross brace. But what’s this?”
I frowned. Turning the photo didn’t help. “Let me see,” I said, and walked back to the northeast corner of the old house and stood facing east. If I stepped just a pace to the north, away from the building, the western mass of the structure didn’t block the sun, and it became a soothing warmth on my back.
“And directly in front of you, sir, is your shadow.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said.
“But look at the picture,” she persisted. “There is a shadow there. It’s not perfectly definite because of the distance. But it is a shadow.”
“Sure enough,” I said. The dark mark, little more than what would be left by a careless touch of a fine-line marker, stretched out from the northeast corner of the building, just about the same distance as my shadow was then doing.
“There’s nothing here to cause a shadow, sir.”
I turned and studied her face, then looked at the photograph, then back at her. She waited for me to catch up, her black eyes excited.
“You’re saying that someone was standing right here?” I asked.
“I think so. We need to have Linda enlarge this section. If she can’t do it, maybe the FBI labs can do something.”
“They can do anything,” I said. “If the government can read license plates from satellite images, it certainly can enhance this. But wait.” I stepped away from the house again and raised an arm. “The Bonanza is flying along, close to a hundred fifty miles an hour or so. I don’t believe that Martin Holman could have seen someone standing behind this building.”
“I don’t believe so either, sir. But look at the angles.” She raised her arm next to mine and swept it across the sky along the path that the airplane must have flown. “Whoever it is, he sees the plane and ducks behind the building here, out of sight. Now right there”—she stopped the swing of her arm—“is about where the airplane must have been when Martin took the photo.”