Wind and Lies, page 2
“As legal officer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, I am serving you with a notice to quit the reservation. A civil trespass case has been filed in Federal District Court in Tucson requiring you to appear and show cause why you shouldn’t be compelled to remove yourself and your followers from Indian land.”
“It’s God’s land.”
“Well, right at the moment it belongs to the Papago tribe,” Joshua said. “You have no permission to be here.”
“I have God’s permission.”
Joshua smiled benignly. “You have the absolute right to assert that in your defense at the show cause hearing. I’m sure that Judge Buchanan will consider it.”
“God is my judge.”
Edgar’s drawl returned. “Cut the bullshit, ya old fart. Yer out here turnin’ Indin boys inta slaves and screwin’ the girls. God ain’t got nothin’ t’ do with what’s goin’ on here.”
The man’s eyes opened wide and reddened noticeably. His nostrils pulsed, and he looked like a bloodhound sniffing the wind. His hands became fists and he stepped toward Edgar.
Joshua placed his rubber-tipped cane in the man’s chest and stopped him with it. The man looked at Joshua, surprised, and visibly assessed him. He lowered his fists and glowered at Joshua and Edgar.
“Thou sons of Satan!” he bellowed.
Joshua couldn’t fully suppress a smile. “Listen, pal,” he said, “you are so clearly full of shit that it’s hard to imagine anybody buying into your crap. But that part of it isn’t my business. This reservation is my business, and you have no right to put buildings on it and farm it. That OSC on the floor there”—he pointed with his cane—“says for you to either get off the reservation within ten days or tell Judge Buchanan why you won’t leave.”
Edgar was staring at one of the women sweeping. His face became sour and he turned to the old man.
“Who’s that?” he said. “One a yer daughters?”
The man gritted his teeth.
“She’s one a yer wives, ain’t she, ya old pimp? She cain’t be more’n twelve years old.”
The man again gathered his hands into fists. Joshua stepped closer to him. The man slowly relaxed his hands.
“It is an abomination to look lustfully upon the countenance of a married woman,” the man thundered. He lifted his arms above him in a hieratic gesture and looked toward the ceiling. “May the Lord of hosts strike down those who transgress His ordinances.”
Edgar breathed deeply and shook his head. “Let’s get outta here,” he said to Joshua. “This asshole’s crazier’n a rabid skunk.”
They got back into Edgar’s car, looked at each other, and laughed.
“Was I tellin’ ya a lie about that asshole?”
Joshua shook his head. “Hard to imagine anyone believing that he’s a prophet.”
“Yeah, it’s damn sad,” Edgar said. “These people out here are so damn poor and uneducated that they’ll follow anyone who gives ‘em a few bags a groceries and promises ‘em it’s all gonna get better.”
“Where’s he from?”
“Way up north just below the Utah border, a little town called Short Creek. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, had a revelation a hunnerd years ago that the good ol’ boys oughta have as many wives as they could afford. So bein’ faithful followers a ‘the Prophet’—that’s what they call Joseph Smith—a lot of ‘em jumped on the idea. But when Utah couldn’t get statehood without guaranteein’ the gov’ment that there wouldn’t be no more polygamy, the church president at the time, whoever he was, suddenly had a revelation that the good ol’ boys could only marry one woman from then on. Some of ‘em didn’t take too kindly to the new revelation, so they moved to godforsaken isolated little farmin’ villages and kept their way a life. A few like this asshole Porter marry girls no older’n ten, eleven.” Edgar shook his head. “It’s downright sick. He calls his outfit the ‘Church of the True Vision of the Latter Days.’ But the only vision he’s after is some little girl squattin’ on his pecker.”
Joshua grimaced. A clap of thunder reverberated against the hills and echoed several times.
“I’ve had the missionaries over to my house several times,” Joshua said. “Persistent young men. Real true believers.”
“Yeah, there are plenty a them. ‘Round these parts, the Mormons send missionaries to the Indins and the white folks both. I’ve listened to ‘em a few times. The mainstream ones mean well, they got a lotta faith. They believe that Jesus came to North America after he was crucified and rose again, and converted the Indins. The Indins are supposed to be the descendants of Lehi and his family, who came here from Jerusalem hunnerds a years before Jesus. One a Lehi’s sons was named Laman, and he was some kinda bad guy, so God cursed him by makin’ his skin dark, and from then on all the dark-skinned natives a North America are called Lamanites. So these Lamanites are the modern Indins who are also descendants of the Israelites, and the Mormons think it’s their duty to bring ‘em all back to the fold.”
Joshua shrugged. “Well, I guess everybody has a right to believe anything he wants.”
“‘Cept’n if it causes other folks harm,” Edgar said. “And this nutcase Josiah Porter is doin’ a lotta harm.”
The rain started with a crash of thunder. It pelted the windshield and soon overcame the capacity of the windshield wipers.
“Damn,” Edgar said. “It done got us.” He stopped his car two miles east of Sells and headed back to the tiny town.
Joshua always brought along his shaving kit and a change of clothes when he went to Sells, because more often than not he was forced to stay overnight in the BIA office. It was either the weather or the condition of the highway or car trouble or you name it. And it was never a pleasant experience, but at least it wouldn’t be so boiling hot in the office after this rain. He had also taken to carrying along the latest novel he was reading, just in case. But this time it wasn’t a novel, it was a collection of plays by Tennessee Williams. Joshua had seen an off-Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie a couple of years ago, and it was terrific. Now he was reading Williams’ current Broadway hit, A Streetcar Named Desire, and he found it mesmerizing.
They parked in front of the BIA and ran under the porch overhang onto the wood plank sidewalk. Water was dripping through leaks in the overhang everywhere, but at least it protected them from the torrent of rainfall. Edgar found the key and opened the door. It had cooled off to about eighty degrees and was almost pleasant inside the office. Joshua sat down on the sofa against the wall and immediately started reading. Edgar paced and stared out the window. By five-thirty, the rain began to slacken slightly. Edgar stood moodily looking out the window at the drab, bedraggled town. “I reckon I’ll go on over to the tribal headquarters, see if I can stir up a game a checkers with Francisco or one a the boys. I’ll be back when the rain stops.”
“See you next month,” Joshua said sourly.
Edgar chuckled. “Yeah, ‘pears to be a permanent condition.” He ran outside, got quickly into his car, and drove away.
The Church of the True Vision of the Latter Days had three meetings each week. The regular church service was on Sunday. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings beginning at about seven o’clock, there were special prayer services which all potential converts were urged to attend. There were always several cartons of old clothes and canned food in the meeting hall, and the single requirement was that they were distributed only after the services to Indians who had been there from the start. Sunday’s service went on literally all day, punctuated only by an austere lunch served at noon. But the weekday sessions were usually only a couple of hours. So many more Indians attended weekdays than Sundays.
At eight-thirty, Edgar parked in front of the meeting hall beside several old pickup trucks and a few horse-drawn wagons. It had stopped raining an hour ago, and the clouds had dissipated. Out here where there were almost no electric lights to dull the sky, the myriad stars flickered brightly like guttering candles which appeared close enough to pinch.
Edgar opened the door of the meeting hall just a few inches and peeked inside. Two bare bulbs hanging over the stage illuminated a young Papago man who was gesturing with both arms over his head, looking toward the ceiling, speaking Papago in a prayerful voice. Darkness shrouded the forty or fifty people sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the stage. Edgar crept into the hall and sat down quietly on the floor next to the door.
The Papago man slowly dropped his arms and bowed his head. Then he stretched forth his arms, intoned some kind of benediction over the audience, and left the stage. Two young white girls carried a wooden box to the stage and laid it down in front. It was two feet square and a foot high and was painted with gold leaf. On the front of it facing the congregation was a carefully painted picture of a coiled diamondback rattlesnake.
The Prophet Josiah came out of the side room followed by Sister-wife Miriam, and they mounted the stage. He was dressed as always in the once black suit and vest and white shirt. Miriam was almost as tall as her husband. She wasn’t wearing the sun bonnet that had almost hidden her face the other times that Edgar had seen her, and he was startled at how strong her face appeared. Her gray hair was pulled tightly to the back of her head and plaited in two thick braids that were pinned around the sides of her head. She wore no makeup, and her skin had the appearance of wrinkled parchment. She was almost as heavy as her husband, and she wore an unbelted long white robe which emphasized her stoutness. But rather than ugly or ungainly, she appeared commanding, even regal, like one of those bigger than life Brunhildes in the German operas.
Josiah ceremoniously took off his suit coat, folded it neatly, and laid it on the floor. He rolled up his sleeves. Then he looked around the congregation of his wives, children, and Papago Indians.
“If you believe not in signs, then you are not a Christian,” he bellowed.
The abruptness of his expostulation, the loudness of it, riveted all eyes upon him.
“Once I did not know the true God,” he continued, his voice now resonant and softer. “The Devil had seized upon me to drag me under. But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually till it fell upon me.”
Josiah’s face was bathed in the light of the strong bulbs suspended from the ceiling. He appeared genuinely kind, Edgar thought, the first time he had seen him this way, like a saint with a halo around his head in one of those old paintings that hang in churches. He got down on his knees behind the box, his arms extended heavenward.
“It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spoke unto me, calling me by name, and said, pointing to the other—This is my beloved Son. Hear Him!”
Josiah began to sway, and strange sounds came from his mouth, words with no meaning, gibberish, cries of anguish and exaltation. It was absolutely electrifying. Edgar was fascinated, as was everyone in the meeting hall. The sounds stopped, and Josiah lowered his arms to his side and fixed his kindly stare above the congregation.
“Thus did our Prophet, Joseph Smith, tell us of his revelation, and thus have I told you of the selfsame revelation that has shown God and His Son to me. I have seen a vision, and who am I that I can withstand God, or why does the world think to make me deny what I have actually seen? And for any of the unbelievers who might yet doubt that I am the successor to the revelator of the one true Church, God has bestowed upon me the gift of the words of his only begotten Son, as preserved for us by the Apostle Mark: ‘And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.’”
Again he began to sway, and he sat back on his haunches and uttered sounds of no meaning and spoke rapid words. His eyes were glazed over with detachment, and he was in the throes of new tongues. It went on for fifteen minutes, like an opera in a language Edgar had never heard, and the rich bass voice of Josiah the Prophet mesmerized them all. And then he leapt to his feet and stretched his hands up to touch the hem of God’s garment or His outstretched hand or to caress His feet, and it startled everyone. They watched in awe as the Prophet leaned over, threw off the top of the box, reached in seemingly carelessly, and withdrew a three-foot-long diamondback rattlesnake in each hand.
Edgar stared in wide-eyed fascination. He had seen a Pentecostal minister speak in tongues once, but he had never seen anything like this.
Josiah slowly waved the snakes in front of his face like an orchestra director with two batons. He was speaking in tongues again, and he continued babbling and passing the snakes before his face for twenty minutes. Then he placed one back in the box. The other he held a few inches from his face, peering directly into its eyes as though he were trying to hypnotize it. He held it by the neck with his right hand and stretched his left hand to the side, still staring at the snake. Sister-wife Miriam walked up to him, handed him a small drinking glass, and left the stage.
He brought the snake’s head slowly down to his left forearm, and in a split second the rattler flashed its fangs into the Prophet’s meaty forearm. Everyone in the congregation jumped and gasped, but Porter uttered no sound of pain, and the saintly look on his face did not change. He stretched the snake forward to the audience, milking its venom rapidly into the glass by pressing its upper fangs over the rim for ten seconds. Then he dropped the snake into the box and drank the venom from the glass.
Edgar was almost dizzy with the insanity of it. It was not the drinking of the venom that was so repugnant. Papago healers had long used increasing doses of venom to immunize men and women who came into frequent contact with snakes. It didn’t happen in Sells or at San Xavier anymore, because they were too urbanized. But in some of the more remote areas of the Big Reservation, where there were still many rattlesnakes, such folk medicine was commonly employed.
But what so sickened Edgar was watching Josiah Porter intentionally cause the snake to bite him. The only word to describe that was nuts! The Gospel of Mark, that “they shall take up serpents,” could hardly be conceived by Edgar as a prescription for normal conduct, but rather as a symbol that genuine faith in Jesus would protect you even from a lethal serpent. But Josiah took the words literally. Edgar couldn’t observe any more of this lunatic’s act. He stood up quietly and left the meeting hall.
He sat impatiently in his car waiting for her to come out. It had been too dark inside to see if she was there, but she usually came here on Thursday nights. At least she had told him that she did.
A half hour later, the door opened, and a small boy switched on a yellow bug light over the door. The people filed slowly out of the hall, and he saw her.
His eyes narrowed, and he gritted his teeth.
Chapter 2
It was a hell of a way to have to spend a Monday morning. The stink was almost insufferable. FBI Special Agent Roy Collins took a small jar of Vicks out of his jacket pocket and placed a daub on his upper lip under his nose. Ordinarily Chuy Leyva would refuse the proffered jar, but this was the worst-smelling body he had ever been near.
Roy was shorter than Chuy and a bit overweight. He wore his blond hair in a butch haircut. His light brown eyes showed no emotion. He was thirty-seven years old and had seen hundreds of bodies in his twelve years with the Bureau. Jesus “Chuy” Leyva was physically his opposite, tall and powerfully built, black hair to his shoulders held by a headband of faded red muslin. Because of two silver stars earned as a marine on Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, and because his father had been a member of the Papago tribal council, Chuy had been hired by Edgar Hendly as the Indian policeman for the San Xavier Reservation. His title was “chief of police,” even though he was the only policeman on San Xavier.
She was nude, lying on her back in the middle of the tiny room which served as both living room and bedroom. Her age was no longer determinable, since her skin had turned black and her eyes and much of her face had been eaten away by maggots. Chuy walked out of the shack with Henry Enos. Collins remained inside examining the body.
“Melinda Lopez,” Henry Enos said. Enos had been chief of police for the six-officer Big Reservation police force for eight years and knew everyone in Sells.
“How’d you find her?” Chuy asked.
“She didn’t show up at tribal headquarters this morning. She works Monday, Wednesday, Thursday. Real unusual for her not to show. Francisco Romero came over to check on her.”
“Did he touch anything?”
“He said no. He’s waiting at headquarters. Didn’t like the smell.”
Chuy nodded, frowning. “What’s your best guess?”
Henry Enos shifted his feet uneasily. “You gotta talk to the chief, Chuy. He’s got plenny to say.”
Chuy folded the pad and put it in his pocket. He walked back into the tiny tar-paper and adobe shack with a corrugated tin roof. It was almost a hundred degrees outside and well over that inside.
“How about I open a couple of windows?” he said to the FBI special agent.
Collins was kneeling next to the torso, scrutinizing it closely. “Yeah, sure. Whoever did it came through the front door and left the same way.”
Chuy slid up the two windows in the room, and nothing changed. The stench was still as thick and nauseating as before.
“What do you think?” he asked, walking up to Collins.
