Watershed, page 17
Dicky Kills Enemy came back to my house later that day alone with two large pea green canvas packs filled with food staples. “You know, food is really heavy,” he said, putting the bags down with a thud on the floor just inside the door. Snow melted off his black leather boots. “How long will it take to get there? What is it, like twenty miles?” He wore a semiautomatic .45 pistol strapped to his side.
I wanted to get going as quickly as possible, as I didn’t know whether Davies would be showing up, drunk or otherwise, and I felt anxious to get underway before good sense returned and I changed my mind. I lifted one of the bags in a test and groaned, then set it back down. “With this load, it might take us most of the day.”
Dicky nodded.
I tossed an extra pair of snowshoes to him, one at a time. “You ever use those?” I asked.
“No.” He examined them, tracing the wood and sinew with his finger.
“It’s not too hard. We might need them. We might not.” I pulled two lighter weight, nylon backpacks from my closet and tossed them to the floor by the food. “Why don’t you divide the food between those two bags,” I said.
“Repack it?”
“Those bags are lighter and they won’t get soaked like the canvas ones.”
Dicky understood and set to work quickly. I collected my map and my compass and my shotgun, and shoved a bunch of shells into the pockets of my parka. Then I stopped and my stopping must have been conspicuous because Dicky looked at me and asked what was wrong.
“Nothing,” I said, taking the red, plastic-cased shells from my coat and putting them on the counter. I unloaded the shotgun and leaned it against the wall by the refrigerator.
“You’re not taking the gun?” Dicky asked.
“Too heavy.”
Dicky didn’t question me, just continued loading the packs. “Personally, I didn’t think you would help us, but my grandfather said you would. He likes you. He’s never wrong about people.”
“What about you? Do you like me?”
“I don’t know,” Dicky said. “Do you like me? I usually like people who like me.” Finished with packing the food, he sat on the floor and watched as I retied my boots. He looked at the cabin walls, at the couple of photographs of birds I had hanging, and scratched his head. “Tell me, why are you helping us?”
“I wasn’t planning on it, I can tell you that.” I grabbed my gloves from the kitchen counter. “At first I was just curious, I guess, about Louise, about what had happened to the FBI men and, all of a sudden, I was involved, because of my own stupidity, but involved. I couldn’t seem to help that part.”
“But now?”
“Now, I know there’s something bad wrong on the mountain. If there is the kind of shit Bisset and your grandfather think is up there, then we could be talking about murder.”
“You can’t murder Indians,” Dicky said.
“What?”
“Murder is a legal concept. You can kill an Indian, but you can’t murder one. You’ve got to have a law against it before it’s murder.”
Article XIII. All animosities for past grievances shall henceforth cease; and the contracting parties will carry the foregoing treaty into full execution, with all good faith and sincerity.
It was sunny out and we walked with our jackets open. Dicky Kills Enemy was in better shape than I had been in some time, but luckily I was in the lead and so controlled our pace. He hardly seemed to feel the climb when I had to take my first rest.
“You work out?” I asked.
“A little. Remember, I’m probably ten years younger than you are,” he said.
“I’ll try to keep that in mind.” I slipped my arms from the straps of the pack of food I was carrying and sat on it. “We’re almost to the dam I told you about.”
Dicky lit a filterless cigarette and let the smoke come back through his nose; he pushed the match out in the snow.
Still breathing hard, I said, “You know smoking’s not good for your lungs.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve been trying to quit.”
We sat quietly for a minute or so, then Dicky chuckled to himself.
“What?” I asked.
“There was this Plata boy who asked his father how we Indians get our names. The boy’s father said, ‘Son, when your sister was born, I looked out the teepee and saw that the moon was yellow like corn and so we named her Yellow Moon. And when your brother was born I looked out and saw a young elk run through our camp and so we called him Swift Elk. And when your baby brother was born I looked out and there was a bad storm coming, so we call him Storms Quickly. But tell me, why do you ask, Two Dogs Fucking?’”
I laughed at the old joke and I could see that Dicky had enjoyed hearing himself tell it.
“How’d you meet up with Bisset?” I asked.
“We were in college together. The University of New Mexico. We were Lobos.”
“So, what happened? You drop out?”
“Tyrone did. I finished. American Studies, so-called. I want to go to law school. John Hat and I graduated together.”
I pulled a couple of candy bars from my pocket and offered one to Dicky. He took it and unwrapped it, then turned it over to look at the package.
“I just want to be sure there’s no coconut in this,” he said. “I hate coconut.”
“Allergic?”
“No, I just hate it. The texture of it, you know?”
We sat for a while longer and when I felt ready, I stood up and got the pack situated on my back. “I don’t mind telling you that I’m scared enough to turn back any time now,” I said.
Dicky nodded and I could see that he was scared, too.
*
At the dam, Dicky let out a low whistle. “This is some piece of work,” he said. “When you said dam, I thought you meant like a bunch of sticks and rocks, like a beaver dam or something.” He whistled again. Then he saw the pipeline stretching away as far as we could see. “I don’t get it.”
I pointed up the mountain. “Somebody doesn’t want to contaminate the lake with whatever’s up there. But apparently they don’t give a shit about Indians.” I stood and grabbed my load, a little angrier and more determined to get to the compound. “Let’s get going.”
. . . it is possible, in the name of the Holy Trinity, to send all the slaves which it is possible to sell . . . of whom, if the information which I have is correct, they tell me that one can sell 4,000. . . . And, certainly, the information seems authentic, because in Castile and Portugal and Aragon and Italy and Sicily and the islands of Portugal and Aragon and the Canaries they utilize many slaves, and I believe that those from Guinea are not now enough . . . In any case there are these slaves and brazilwood, which seem a profitable thing, and still gold.
Grandfather was staring out the window at a young couple passing the house. It was a warm, spring day, which offered a small assembly of clouds in the southwest. I could see the clouds over the trees as I gazed out the window with him.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“He has a meeting at noon.”
“Are you okay, Grandfather?”
“I’m tired, Robert.” He looked at his hands and rubbed the tips of his quavering fingers against his thumbs. “Some people just seem to live day-to-day and nothing gets to them. They get jobs, lose jobs, have babies, bury babies. And they just keep going.” He shook his head and took a deep breath. “Hey, you want to go see if we can find us a pig? We can go out for a couple of hours and be back before dinner.”
“I don’t know if we should go hunting,” I said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“It’s a great idea, Robert,” he said. “It’s the right idea.”
“Looks like rain.”
“So? What’s a little rain?”
It was well after nightfall when Dicky and I topped the ridge behind the little church; the hike had taken less time than I had estimated. The whole compound was lit up like daytime from big floodlights surrounding it. The clear night was exceptionally cold and I shivered, and pulled up my hood and cinched it. There were soldiers and cops and armed cowboys everywhere to the south and east of the church. There was an armored personnel carrier parked about a hundred yards away from the building, about three hundred yards from us. There was brush all the way down the hill to the church, the kind of dense brush that in the summer would shelter snakes, and the light didn’t illuminate the north side as brightly. Still, I didn’t want to go down. I had pretty much made up my mind not to, and was about to tell Dicky that I had gotten him this far and now he was on his own, when the sound of footsteps crunching through the snow and the sight of flashlight beams sweeping the darkness behind us sent the two of us crawling, packs on our backs, pushing into the wet cold of the ground. We made noise, the cans rattling in our packs, and the lights washed over the brush all around us as we scrambled along on our bellies. We were nearly to the rear doors of the church when I saw a beam of light rake out, then come back to settle on Dicky’s pack.
Somebody shouted from behind us. A couple of men yelled for us to stop, then there was a single shot that I took to be a warning. Dicky whispered back to me to follow him.
We crawled another few feet and the night erupted in gunfire. The flashing hurt my eyes, the reports stung my ears, and I nearly wet myself when I realized I was a target. The men on the ridge were firing down on us and the fire was being returned from the rear door and the broken stained-glass windows of the church.
“Hurry up! Hurry up!” voices shouted at us.
I rose to my feet and ran hunched over behind Dicky. I saw a tear form suddenly in his pack as a bullet penetrated it, and he fell, but he got up and kept moving and soon we were inside the building; the sound of the firefight had fallen to a shot every few seconds. I was panting and crawling across the planks until I was well into the middle of the floor, where I kicked my feet as if I were on fire or covered with spider webs. The room was lit by a couple of lanterns that shaded the room yellow and shook unreal shadows against the walls, reflecting brassy light off the shell casings by my feet. I looked around slowly, trying to believe it all, trying to see what there was to see, not believing for one second that I was really there. Tyrone Bisset was standing at the front window, looking out into the bright floods.
“I’m glad you could make it,” he said without turning around to look at me.
All I could say was, “Oh, shit.”
I slipped out of the pack and leaned my back against the leg of a table. “Tell me I’m not stuck here. Tell me I can walk out that door and go back to my house.”
“I can’t tell you that,” he said.
Dicky had his pack open and was unloading it, and handing the goods to Louise and another woman I didn’t know. The place smelled of sweat and wet wood and spent gunpowder. I watched Louise as she opened a large can of cling peaches, her little hands struggling with the can-opener blade of a Swiss Army knife. Beyond her, beyond the galley kitchen, I saw two men sitting on the floor. They were tied back-to-back and gagged; their ankles were bound and their feet bare. One of them was staring at me. Next to the hobbled men was a trunk, the old steamer kind like the one I took to college my first year.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” I said.
“That’s going to be tough,” John Hat said, coming over and helping me to my feet and then into a ladder-back wooden chair. He sat beside me. “Scared?”
“No,” I said.
“Me neither,” he said.
“How did you end up with them?” I indicated the men who were tied up with a nod.
“They decided to chase us and got too close.”
“Why were they chasing you?”
John Hat started to laugh. Tyrone Bisset was standing beside me now and he was laughing, too. “They were trying to get their leader back,” Bisset said. “He’s in the trunk.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Custer,” John Hat said. “We’ve got Custer in the trunk.”
“How’s he looking?” I asked.
Soon the whole room was busy with laughter, and now plates of food found laps, including mine. Louise handed me a cup of water as well and I studied her face.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes. What about you?”
“How’s your mother?”
“She died.”
I swallowed some of the water and took a bite of jerky.
. . . I have always felt, ever since I was a young officer in the Army, a great interest in the welfare of the Indians. I know that formerly they have been abused and their rights not properly respected. Since it has been in my power to have any control over Indian affairs I have endeavored to adopt a policy that should be for your future good, and calculated to preserve peace between whites and Indians for the present; and it is my great desire, now while I can retain some control over the matter, that the initiatory steps should be taken to secure you and your children hereafter. If you will cooperate with me I shall look always to what I believe is for your interests. Many of the Indians who accepted at an early day what we have proposed to you today are now living in houses, have fences around their farms; have school houses, and their children are reading and writing as we do here.
My grandfather insisted that we split up. He told me that he would swing wide and come back over the dike and so flush any hiding animals out toward me. We’d never hunted that way before and I had a bad feeling about it.
“I think we should stay together,” I said. “We’ve never split up before.”
Grandfather was rubbing the barrel of his shotgun and then smelling the gun oil on his fingers. “We can’t always be together, Grandson. This world is made to be felt alone. Everything important you do alone. Do you know what I mean? Even falling in love. And some things especially. So, I’ll come up through the big laurels and you be ready, okay?”
Bisset was sitting in front of me, his braid coming undone over his shoulder. “Dicky tells me you saw the dump site.”
“I took pictures of it.” I said. “I guess he told you about the dam and the pipeline. I took pictures of those, too. A couple of rolls, actually. Above the dam is a clearing and it’s not natural and it’s melting snow like something’s buried there.”
“You’re sure about the function of the dam?” he said.
“I know this drainage. The only reason can be to divert the runoff down into the Silly Man and so into the Plata. Right here.” I pulled the canisters of film from my pocket and gave them to him. “I also marked the sites on my map.”
Bisset grabbed my shoulder. “Thank you.” He then walked over to the FBI hostages. “See this,” he said to the them, holding the cans of film in front of their gagged faces. “Proof. Now maybe they’ll listen.”
Louise came over and touched my face, seeming smaller than ever, then she was at another table loading rifles.
I waited at the bend of the river. The bottom was quiet, the wind gently pushing through the boughs of the cypress trees. A flicker hammered briefly on a tree somewhere far off, and then its sound was swallowed by mist and drizzle. I recalled my grandfather’s stride as we had gone in our separate directions: sure steps, as his steps used to be. The rain started to fall in earnest. I sat in there in the mud, waiting, crying.
In the morning, Bisset had written a letter of demands, including the fact that he now had something to substantiate their claims about the stored chemicals. One of the agents was untied—a short, fat man with a receding hairline—and Bisset gave him the letter, told him to take care of it, told him to remember his partner.
The FBI man looked around the room at all of us and then at his partner. “Your asses are cooked,” he said.
“You’d better hope not,” Bisset said.
John and Leonard Hat walked with the man through the front door. I moved to the window to watch. The man’s naked feet looked so pink against the snow. The sky was so clear. The soldiers and cops stood in the distance, motionless, static as if they weren’t quite real. Then something happened. A shot was fired from somewhere and then, just like the night before the air was full of bullets. Glass flew everywhere. Before I hit the floor I saw the unmoving game pieces across the flat lot and pasture move to take cover behind vehicles, bend to single knees, raise their weapons, and point them in our direction. When all was silent again and the air was again electric and thick with the pungent smell of gunfire, John and Leonard Hat lay dead on either side of the dead FBI man. Louise shoved a black and heavy rifle in my hands. Absently, I took it and sat on the bench near the rear wall. I could feel the oil of the weapon on my fingers and I raised them to my nose to smell it.
Colder air came through the window as darkness fell. Louise put some pieces of a broken chair into the woodstove and closed the doors. Bisset was sitting at the table, the yellow canisters of film in front of him. He was shaken by the loss of the Hat brothers. He looked over at the bound FBI agent and said, “I ought to just kill you right now. Even better, I ought to let you walk out that door so your own people will do it.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the rolls of film and I kept feeling my grandfather, hearing his voice, remembering the sound of that report from his shotgun that rainy afternoon. I got up and walked to Bisset.
“Give me one of the rolls,” I said.
Bisset looked at me. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m going to take a roll of film to the Naturalists’ Conservancy office in Denver.”
