The Drowning Man (7 page)

Vicky took a moment. She stared past Adam and the easel with the map of the Red Cliff Canyon area, a new thought forming in her head. “How was Father John contacted?” she said.

“Indian stopped him over in Ethete.” This from Norman. “Didn't want to come to the tribal offices himself…”

“It could be the same contact.” Vicky could feel her heart speeding up. Amos Walking Bear could be right. Whoever had taken the first glyph had come back for another one, and sent the same man to try to collect a ransom. Which could mean that Amos's grandson could be in prison for a murder he didn't commit.

“Another reason not to bring on a lot of publicity,” Adam said, glancing at Vicky as he stepped back to the table. “The Indian'll disappear, just like last time.”

“Another problem.” Norman said. He was bouncing his tipied hands off each other. “Newspaper reporter keeps poking around, she'll find out that the petroglyphs aren't all that's been stolen up in the canyon. Thieves've been taking small artifacts for some time now. Mona and her staff came across several mounds that were dug up recently.”

“Artifacts are also missing?” Vicky said.

The tribal councilmen were nodding in unison, heads bobbing over the long table. “Ancient tools, bones, who knows what else was taken,” Norman said. “Probably sold on the black market, same place the Drowning Man will disappear into if we don't get it back.” The corners of the man's mouth pulled downward. His eyebrows folded into the deep crease above his nose. “You'd be surprised at how much money people are willing to pay for old bones. Anything that's Indian, they don't care, they lay out their money. Don't have any respect. We don't need the newspapers telling folks about artifacts and even more valuable petroglyphs.”

“The alternate road will speak for itself,” Adam said. “Fewer curves, easier grade. We don't need to involve the press.”

“How soon can you write up a proposal for the BLM?” Norman said.

“Right away,” Adam told the chairman.

Norman nodded. “We made real progress here. You two…” Norman glanced from Adam to Vicky. “I'd say you know what you're doing. We're gonna go into regular session, take a vote on going forward with this. We'll get back to you.”

Adam thanked the councilman, then walked over and held the door open, waiting. Vicky picked up her briefcase and walked past him. “Annie said one of the elders came in,” he said, closing the door behind them.

“If you knew that, Adam, then you knew why I was late.” Vicky started down the corridor ahead of him.

“This was an important meeting.” Adam's footsteps clacked alongside her on the tiled floor; his shoulder brushed hers.

Vicky didn't say anything for a moment. She should not have to explain to Adam Lone Eagle that it would have been impolite to refuse to see Amos Walking Bear. It was what had made their partnership possible, the fact that Adam understood the Arapaho Way. Finally she told him the old man was convinced that his grandson had been convicted seven years ago of a crime he didn't commit.

They were outside now, walking across the gravel to her Jeep. She opened the door and faced him. He'd stopped a few feet behind her, staring across the lot, squinting against the sun that gave his face a reddish cast, his own briefcase hanging next to the leg of his khaki trousers. This had nothing to do with her arriving late for the meeting, nothing to do with Amos Walking Bear's unexpected visit. “What's going on, Adam?” she said.

When he turned toward her, Vicky saw the absent look in his black eyes, as if they hadn't just suggested a possible recourse to the BLM's decision, as if they weren't in the parking lot in front of the stone building that housed the tribal offices, the life-size metal sculpture of Chief Washakie guarding the front door. He had gone somewhere else.

Adam said, “We'll have dinner tonight, Vicky. We can talk about it then.”

THE PICKUP'S ENGINE
gave off an intermittent belching noise that punctuated the music of “Perchè tarda la luna” as Father John drove north across the reservation. The vastness of the area was monumental—the reservation itself melting into the plains, a flat, empty landscape with plateaus that rose out of nowhere, arroyos that cut unexpectedly through the earth, and thin roads that snaked into the brush. In the west was the gray smudge of the foothills of the Wind River Range. The sky was cloudless, the color of cobalt, pressing down everywhere. He'd gotten used to the emptiness of the plains, the sense of timelessness. It was familiar and comfortable. He passed the small sign at the edge of the road—
Leaving the Wind River Reservation
—and drove on.

It had been past noon before he'd gotten away from his desk and walked down the corridor of the administration building to tell Ian that he'd be gone a few hours. Parishioners had been dropping by all morning; the phone had rung nonstop.
Not good, Father, another petroglyph gone. Spirits gonna be upset. We gotta get the Drowning
Man back.
He'd tried to reassure the callers, but all the time, he'd sensed that he was only trying to reassure himself. And each time he'd reached for the receiver, he'd wondered if this was the call, if this was the dealer. But the man hadn't called. Not last night, not this morning.

Outside his window, the foothills began moving closer, patches of scrub brush and stunted pines crawling over the slopes. On the other side of the road ahead, the line of high bluffs came into view, jagged red slopes shining in the afternoon sun. Now and then a pickup or sedan had shimmered in the oncoming lane a moment before sweeping past. He let up on the accelerator. It was easy to miss the turnoff into Red Cliff Canyon, nothing more than a dirt road on the left that meandered into the foothills before beginning the climb into the mountains. There was a ranch directly across from the turnoff, he remembered—the Taylor Ranch. He could see the house and barn and outbuildings rising out of the earth now, an uneven collection of log walls and metal roofs stacked against the red slopes of the bluffs.

He slowed for the turnoff ahead, the interruption of dirt at the side of the road. The pickup bounced past the sagebrush that lapped at the doors and the tape skipped across the opening notes of “Signore, ascolta!” The pickup started winding upward, spitting out clouds of dust that sprinkled the windshield with a fine, gray film. Then he was in the canyon, climbing along the mountainside. Past the edge of the road on the left, the slope dropped into a creek that looked like a silver ribbon flung over the rocks. He kept one eye on the slope rising on the other side for the flat-faced boulders with the carved images. They were hard to spot, he knew. There were people who drove through the canyon and had no idea the petroglyphs were there.

He kept the pickup at about fifteen miles an hour, he guessed—the odometer had stopped working a few years ago—switching his gaze between the road and the rocky, tree-studded slope, looking for remnants of the rock that had held the Drowning Man. Odd, he thought. It was the one petroglyph easy to spot, if you knew where to look, but now that it was gone, it was as if the rock itself had faded into the mountain.

The pickup banked into another curve. As he came out of it, he spotted the line of pickups parked ahead, tilting sideways toward the barrow ditch. On the other side, a camper stood in a wide, bare-dirt area that jutted over the drop-off into the creek below. Beyond the camper, close to the edge of the drop-off, were a pair of green canvas tents, the walls dented in the breeze.

Father John stopped behind the row of pickups and got out. The sounds of
Turandot
floated outside with him. He slammed the door, leaving the tape playing, and scanned the slope. The natural resources director and some of her staff were probably up there somewhere, hidden by the rocks and scrub brush, the mountain itself, just like the petroglyphs. The sun was hot, and the warm breeze plucked at his shirt sleeves. He lifted one hand and pulled his cowboy hat forward to shade his eyes.

Then he saw it: about a hundred feet up the slope, the broken sandstone boulder where the petroglyph had been. The face looked empty and gray with jagged ridges left by chisels and hammers. A sharp sense of loss stabbed at him, the loss of something beautiful that should have stayed. He was only half aware of the sound of a door banging shut.

“Disgusting, isn't it?” A woman's voice cut into the silence.

Father John swung around. She was walking across the road from the improvised campsite, a tall, slim woman, probably in her thirties, wearing blue jeans and a red tee shirt, with long black hair that emphasized the intense dark eyes of the Arapaho.

“Hi, Mona,” he said, shaking her hand. “Father O'Malley from St. Francis.”

“I remember you.” The woman nodded, as if that were the extent of the polite preliminaries that were required. “I take it that you read about the stolen petroglyph and wanted to see for yourself,” she said. “We've had people up here all yesterday looking for the place where the petroglyph used to be. Most of them had never noticed it when it was here.”

“I saw it. It was beautiful.”

That seemed to please her. She looked past him up the slope, her eyes resting, he knew, on the jagged, gray scar. He said, “The thief sent a message to the tribes. Norman Yellow Hawk thought you'd want to know.”

As she brought her eyes back to his, her features settled into a look of acceptance, as if the news didn't surprise her. “We can talk over there,” she said, tilting her head toward the campground.

Father John followed the woman across the road to the camper, where she pulled the door open and, one boot on the metal step, looked over her shoulder. “Something to drink? Coke?”

He said a Coke would be fine, and she lifted herself into the camper, leaving the door hanging open. In the shadows inside, he could see her rummaging inside a cooler that stood on the floor. There was the sound of swishing water and clinking ice cubes. Finally she came back outside carrying two cans of soda. She kicked the door shut behind her.

“We can sit in the shade,” she said, handing him one of the Cokes and starting around the camper. He popped the tab, took a long drink of the sweet, syrupy liquid that dropped like a cold rope inside his chest, then followed her. She'd already pulled a webbed folding chair open in a square of shade and was in the process of opening another, her Coke on the ground in front of other chairs that leaned against the white wall of the camper.

“All the comforts of home.” She gestured for him to take a chair, scooped up her Coke, and sat down in the other one. “Even got a shower in there,” she said, lifting the can toward the camper. “I'm staying here for a few days to keep an eye on the canyon—you know, after that newspaper article. Couple of my staff are here. We're taking new photographs of the glyphs, cataloging and updating our records. I guess Norman told you we found out the glyphs aren't the only artifacts that have been looted. Some of the mounds in front of the glyphs have been disturbed. Tools, bones, that kind of thing, probably gone. Now the logging companies are making noise about widening the road. You heard about that?”

Father John nodded, and she hurried on: “The lawyers think they're gonna stop it; I say, good luck. We want to get as much data as we can before construction gets started.” She stopped, took a long drink from her Coke, and swiped at her lips with the back of one hand. She was pretty in a natural, disarming way, as if that were something she didn't know. A fine web of tiny lines fanned from the corners of her dark, intense eyes. “What's this about a message?” she said.

He told her about the Indian and the ransom message. She rolled her eyes to the sky when he mentioned the 250,000 dollars, and he continued, filling her in on his conversation yesterday evening with Norman. “We're hoping that the man the Indian works for will call.”

“Why you?” she asked.

Father John shook his head. “The Indian didn't want to be recognized,” he said finally. Then he told her his theory that the Indian might be the same man who had contacted the tribes about the stolen glyph seven years ago.

“I heard about that.” Mona Ledger lifted her face toward the mountain across the road. “A pair of losers cut out the glyph and got into a fight about the money. One of them ended up dead, and the Indian messenger took off. It was the last the Arapahos and Shoshones heard about the glyph.”

“Norman doesn't want it to happen again.”

She tipped her head back and drained the last of her Coke, then squeezed the can until the sides cracked together, and got to her feet. “Hang on a minute,” she said, darting around the corner of the camper.

Father John finished his own Coke and waited. He could hear the woman moving about inside: an object clanked against a hard surface, a cabinet door slammed shut. Then she was back, carrying a large photograph album. She pulled the folding chair forward, sat down, and opened the album between them. The cellophane pages fell back naturally, as if they were the usual pages consulted.

Mona shifted the album sideways until it was resting on Father John's thigh. “These photographs were taken seven years ago. This is the Drowning Man.” She pointed to one of the photographs pressed under the cellophane.

He stared at the familiar image: the elongated, rectangular body, the squared head, and the truncated arms sticking out to the sides, the small, squared feet that jutted from the truncated legs. Surrounding the figure were wavy lines, like ripples of water. He felt again the sharp sting of loss.

“The elders say that petroglyphs are images of the spirits that live in the rocks,” Mona said. “They say the spirits themselves carved their images. The spirits have guarded this canyon from the beginning of time. So when an image is taken, the spirit leaves the canyon. The other spirits will leave, too, if all the trucks and heavy equipment move in here and start widening the road.” She closed the album, slowly, reverently, he thought, as if the paper images themselves were sacred. “Would you like to climb up and see some of the other petroglyphs?”

 

HE'D FORGOTTEN HOW
steep the slope was. It had been two or three years since he'd been in Red Cliff Canyon to view the petroglyphs. From the road, the slope looked like an easy uphill stroll, but he could feel the hard pull in his calf muscles. Mona Ledger was about ten feet ahead, long legs zigzagging around the boulders, brush, and clumps of stunted trees. He tried to stay in her path, stopping from time to time to catch his breath and look down. The highway slithered across the brown plains like a large, silver snake. At the foot of the canyon, the buildings of the Taylor Ranch looked like the painted image on a canvas.

He took in another gulp of air and hurried to catch up. Mona had pushed away the branch of a pine and was standing inside the other branches that dipped around her. Next to her legs, he could see the small, bullet-shaped boulder with the image carved into the face.

“A glyph like this is especially vulnerable to thieves,” she said when he'd reached her. “It stands alone and it's small. The only protection is this tree. Chances are most people who hike up here have never noticed it. And over there”—the branch swung back into place as she stepped away from the tree and nodded toward a place farther along the slope—“those glyphs are clustered on massive sandstone outcroppings. Much more difficult to extricate a carving.”

Mona started walking toward the outcroppings, and Father John stayed in step, their boots drumming an irregular rhythm on the underbrush and the hard earth. Coming toward them was a tall man in a tan, wide-brim hat with a string of brown leather that dangled under his chin and flopped against his yellow shirt. A few yards above, a young woman crouched at the base of a clump of rocks, peering upward at a carved image through the lens of a camera.

“We've got a visitor,” Mona called out.

The man stopped and waited next to the dead branch of a pine tree that straddled the slope. “This is Father O'Malley from the mission,” Mona said, tilting her head backward. “Father, meet my assistant, Cliff Fast Horse. Been taking care of these glyphs for the last several years.”

“Didn't do a good enough job.” The Arapaho ran his gaze across the slope. His black eyes were flecked with sadness.

“You're only one person,” Mona said. “Couldn't check the canyon every day.” She turned back to Father John. “That's the problem, not enough personnel. This is BLM land. They have one preservation agent working this whole region. We're talking hundreds of miles of empty land. The tribes have Cliff here, trying to oversee the sacred sites in the area.”

“Have a look.” Fast Horse pivoted about and headed toward the outcroppings. Father John waved Mona ahead, then fell in behind.

“We've been trying to learn all we can about the glyphs.” Fast Horse tossed the information over his shoulder. “Last couple of summers, an archeologist and some students from the university were working up here trying to date them. Started with radiocarbon techniques. From the patina on the rocks, they proved some carvings are a thousand years old, but they also found two or three that date back two thousand years. The Drowning Man was one of them. We were hoping that the team could continue the studies this summer, uncover a few mounds at the base of the glyphs and locate the tools used to carve the images. They can date tools, bones, and other objects and corroborate the radiocarbon dating.”