Leaning Land (17 page)

Ray did the introductions. Wager thought that Ramey Many Coats looked more like an Indian should look: high and prominent cheekbones, a strong chin. Thick black eyebrows made an almost continuous line over his black eyes and straight nose, and the hairless flesh of his dark, wide face was heavy, making his head seem almost overlarge for his stocky body. Two thick braids of glossy black hair hung down behind his ears to his chest. He said, “Welcome to my lodge,” and shook hands like a white man, squeezing Wager’s fingers in a signal of strength.

“I hear you’re investigating the death of my cousin.”

Apparently, Ramey wasn’t as superstitious as Luther about speaking of the dead. Wager glanced at Ray. “I didn’t know you and the Del Pontes were related.”

“Through his grandmother. She was the aunt of one of my wife’s mother’s cousins.”

“Just about everybody at Squaw Point is related, more or less,” said Ray. “Same thing on my reservation.”

“It is our way,” said Ramey. “We are all family. It’s how we have survived what the white man has tried to do to us.”

“It’s also what happens when you have less than eight hundred people living together for four or more generations,” said Ray.

“What can you tell me about Rubin?” asked Wager.

The long feather bobbed stiffly as the man’s head nodded. “Let’s go out of the sun.” He led them up the scarred steps to the veranda, which held a miscellaneous collection of well-used lawn furniture. “Sit down—be comfortable in my lodge. You’ve come a long way in the heat. You want some soda pop? Ice water?”

Wager shook his head; Ray nodded.

“I’ll get you something to drink.” He went through the open door into the quiet dimness of the house, stepping lightly and quietly despite the stacked heels of his cowboy boots.

Wager and Ray sat in silence on the aluminum-and-web chairs until Ramey came back out. The necks of three frosty 7Up bottles dangled between his thick fingers.

Ray took a long drink and used the bottle to tip back the bill of his cap, then wiped the cold glass across his forehead. Wager sipped at his.

Ramey set his hat carefully on the veranda rail beside him and took his own deep drink. To form the two braids, his black, glossy hair had been parted tautly in the middle and showed a line of white scalp. After a slightly muffled belch, he asked, “You think somebody killed my cousin?”

“We don’t know how he died—that’s one of the problems. Do you think somebody wanted him dead?” Wager asked.

The man’s heavy shoulder lifted a bit. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. I didn’t know much about him. He was my cousin, but he didn’t live here with the people.”

“Did you see or talk to him any time before his death?”

The man answered with measured solemnity, “It would be hard to talk to him after his death.”

Wager heard a slight noise from the tribal policeman beside him; but the younger man, too, was stone-faced. For the first time, Wager had a sense of the distance between them and himself as a non-Indian, a distance magnified by their shared, if masked, laughter. “Any time shortly before his death.”

“No. Not shortly. A couple of months ago, maybe, I hired him to drive one of my horse trailers down to Towaoc.” He glanced at Ray. “The Four-Corners winter race.”

“How’d you do?”

“Pretty good. Won more than I lost.”

The tribal policeman didn’t seem surprised.

“Did Rubin ever mention any kind of deal he was involved in?” Wager asked.

“Not to me. I heard from some other people that he was working for that FBI man or somebody.”

“That’s all you heard? Nothing more specific than that?”

“I wasn’t interested in hearing anything more. His business was his business, not mine.”

“Who did you hear it from?”

The man’s thick eyebrows shrugged. “Around. A couple of people told me. Rubin always liked to talk, you know? Always talking about his big plans. Not many people paid much attention to him anymore.” He gazed off toward the splintered cliff of red and orange and white rock that formed the sun-washed face of Dark Mesa, a half mile or so away. “We figured that was the white man in him.” Then he said, “You tell me you don’t know if Rubin was killed by somebody. But you talk like you think he was. Why?”

Wager had to admit that he didn’t have much that was concrete, just some circumstantial facts. “Well, he was working for Agent Durkin—he was looking into any ties between the Constitutional Posse and people on the reservation. Trying to get information about the two government men who were shot. And, like Ray says, his body was found a long way from anywhere. How’d he get there, and why? Most important, we have no explanation for the death of an apparently healthy man who did not drink.” Wager waited for Ramey to say something, but the heavyset man remained silent. “He was also excited about some recent deal. He said he had something that was finally going to have value, and he met with someone the morning he disappeared—the same morning he was supposed to be on a scheduled trip to Phoenix. Do you have any idea what that might have been about?”

Ramey listened as Wager spoke, his black eyes on Wager’s mouth as if he wanted to see each word and to study it. After a while he answered Wager’s question with one of his own. “Didn’t you talk to his brother Luther? What did Luther tell you?”

“He didn’t tell us much. Just that Rubin had spoken to him and some other people about some kind of important deal coming soon. He said he knew nothing about it, but he thought you might.”

Ramey took another long drink from his bottle and gave another belch, more subdued this time, as he looked toward the mesa. “I didn’t see Rubin before he died. But he was always talking about his deals. He talked a lot.”

“When you did talk to Rubin, did he mention any names? Luther said there could be some white men involved in whatever it was.”

“No.” He finished the 7Up and set the bottle on the board floor of the veranda. The planks had been painted sky blue a long time ago, but now raw, gray wood showed in many places where sandy boot soles had ground through the color. “When do you think Rubin was killed?”

“It could have been the day he disappeared, the seventeenth. Not much after that.”

Ramey nodded slowly, apparently thinking back. “I was in Denver on tribal business that day, me and Julian Cloud. We drove to Denver on the fifteenth and came back on the twenty-third.”

Ray finished his pop and set his bottle near Ramey’s. “Do you have any idea why Walter Lawrence was killed?”

Again, the man countered with his own question, directed at Wager. “You think him and Rubin were killed by the same man?”

“I have no evidence one way or the other. What about the government workers? Do you have any idea why they might have been killed?”

Ramey Many Coats sat, unmoving, before he spoke. “No idea why. But I think it was white men who killed the government people.”

“Why?”

“I think it was maybe a white rancher. They have hard feelings about the government changing their way of life. Now they’re learning what it is like.”

“The Constitutional Posse?”

“Maybe. No Indian would kill those men. Why should he? Those men brought no harm to my people.” The strong jaw thrust out. “The white wolves have killed off all the game and now they eat each other.”

“Aw, come on, Ramey!”

“I am not an apple like you, Ray Eagle Son.” He emphasized the policeman’s translated last name, black eyes narrowed slightly as he stared at him. They were about the same age, late twenties, but because of his bulk and the rumbling, measured pace of his speech, Ramey seemed much older. “Maybe the tribal council should think over your contract when it comes up in September. Maybe our people need someone who is more proud of his race.”

“Maybe the tribal council needs a member who is Squaw Point Ute and not somebody whose grandfather’s father was a Jicarilla Apache!”

“My mother is Squaw Pointe Ute and her mother and hers before her.” He slapped his chest. “I am Ute of the Squaw Point tribe and not one of those Southern Utes who do everything the BIA tells them to do and never make no trouble for the white man.” He abruptly swung his body to face only Wager. “Rubin Del Ponte maybe had something somebody wanted. That is maybe why he was killed. I don’t know what it was, and I don’t know who did it. But maybe you should talk to Luther Del Ponte again. Maybe he knows more than he has told you about. That is all I have to say.”

They had been riding in silence for about five minutes when Wager finally muttered, “I feel like we told him more than he told us.”

“A Many Coats usually gets the better part of a bargain.”

“Any idea why he’s siccing us on Luther?”

“No … .They don’t like each other, that’s for sure. And I’ll bet Ramey knows a lot more than he told us. But just what kind of game he’s playing, I don’t know.”

Wager asked, “You going to keep your job?”

“Not if Ramey has much to say about it, I guess. Given the pay, it’d be no big loss.” He sighed away the worry. “I really don’t know how I got hired in the first place, except Ramey wasn’t ready to stir up any more resentment among the people by putting another relative on the payroll.” His dark face lit up with a wide grin, “Probably they were all in jail at the time.”

“What’d he mean, he’s not an apple?”

“Red on the outside, white on the inside. An Uncle Tonto figure.” Ray snorted. “He gets a lot of mileage from playing the stage Indian—I’ve heard he goes back to Washington and talks about ‘forked tongues’ and ‘great white father’ and ‘gone with the buffalo.’ But they eat it up, Gabe; that’s the kind of Indian those white people want to see. And I got to admit he usually comes back with more money for the tribe—and for the Many Coats, of course.”

“It’s an act?”

Ray considered for a few minutes before answering. “Not exactly. I mean, sure, he gets most of his Indian talk from watching old movies on TV. You know, Jeff Chandler playing Geronimo. But at the same time, he has a right to it. I mean, it’s phony, yes, but it’s also real because it’s the real way a lot of white people see us. Now, if you talked that way, people would say ‘Yeah, Gabe’s pretending to be an Indian.’ But when an Indian talks that way, they say, ‘Now there’s a real Indian!’ ” He lifted his cap to let cool air blow across his damp hair. “Some of the kids on the reservations, it’s the only mythology they have. They act that way because they think it takes them back to their roots. Others don’t know any other way to act around white people because they haven’t been given a chance to grow away from that.” Another grin. “Frankenstein Indians, I call them. Creatures of the myth!” More seriously he said, “It’s kind of sad, though. What it shows is that these kids have no sense of belonging, no sense of self off the reservation except for what the white people think they should be. That’s why there’s so much resentment against these New Agers who run around pretending to be Indians—it’s a further debasement of what little sense of Indianness is left.”

Wager, not looking for a lecture, kind of wished he hadn’t asked the question and tried to get back to the real topic. “Why do you think Ramey wanted us to know he had an alibi when Rubin died?”

“Yeah, he did, didn’t he? Made that real clear.” Ray guided the wheels around a bed of soft sand in the road. “Well, he’s a Many Coats so he’s got a permanently guilty conscience. I don’t know, maybe he stands to profit somehow from Rubin’s death and wants us to know for sure that he couldn’t have killed him.”

“We better go back and talk to Luther again.”

Ray nodded. “Let’s stop off in town first. Let’s talk to Isabel and Cynthia, first. You got time?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

Luther’s mother and sister lived in one of the military-style houses that were arranged along the curving lanes and fenceless sandy lawns of a transplanted suburbia. A two-room bungalow that looked like all the others in shape and color, it shared the waterless and worn grass of its neighbors. A small strip of petunias and marigolds planted at the house’s foundation looked wilted in the midday sun, and waited for the relief of the house’s shadow to reach them. Some children’s toys were scattered in a sandy play area scratched beside the small concrete landing. Through the open front door came the thin, mechanical laughter of a television show. Ray tapped his fingers against the frame of the screen and then politely gazed away from the dimness inside to wait for an answer; a few moments later, a woman wearing a brightly flowered muumuu came to the door.

“Mrs. Del Ponte? Isabel Sena Del Ponte?”

“Yes? Somebody get hurt?”

“No, nothing like that.” Ray introduced himself and Wager. “We’d like to ask about Marshall’s son, your stepson. The one who lived off the reservation.” That was the way Ray avoided Rubin’s name.

“Why?”

“To try and find out what happened to him.” That was the way he avoided the word “dead.”

“I don’t know what I can tell you.”

“Neither do we.” He smiled. “That’s why we’re here.”

She thought about that then opened the door. “Come in. You want something to drink? Coffee?”

They both declined, Ray apologizing for interrupting her morning and saying that they wouldn’t be staying very long.

She was almost as tall as Wager, and the muumuu draped over a body that, though thickened with age and childbearing, was still lanky. Her hair, streaked with gray, was gathered into a knot at the back of her neck and held with two large wooden pins. She took a coloring book and some crayons off the sofa and gestured for them to sit, then settled herself in a rocking chair that was padded with bright blue cushions. The television in the kitchen was still chattering and Wager could hear the tink of silverware against a dish and the occasional voices of talking children. Her daughter’s probably—the one who would be working at the food-stamp office this time of day.

“Can you tell us when you last saw this person?”

“Four weeks ago, maybe five. When we had the big rain.”

“End of February,” Ray explained to Wager. Then to the woman, “Here?”

“No. I was visiting my son. He came by.”

“Do you remember what they talked about?”

She stared at the worn carpet that hid the creaking floor boards, but that wasn’t what she saw. “Horses. They always talked about horses and racing. And the sheep, what the spring lambing was going to look like.”