Out of Season

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Estelle Reyes-Guzman tricked me into a few hours of fitful rest. As an enthusiastic insomniac, regular sleep had eluded me for years. Over time, I’d stopped fighting the fashion that said sixteen hours awake followed by eight hours unconscious was the norm. And I didn’t do those nifty little “wolf naps” of fifteen to thirty minutes that some folks use to recharge their batteries. Instead, I tended to plod along, working as best I could until I fell flat on my face from complete exhaustion. It was a system that seemed to work for me.

Unfortunately for others around me, I often made the mistake of thinking they wanted to partake of the same schedule.

When I suggested again that we drive up and talk to Johnny and Maxine Boyd, Estelle looked at her watch, an uncharacteristic hesitation that prompted me to look at mine.

“We’d be up there at about nine-thirty,” I said, and Estelle grimaced.

“I need to go home for a few minutes, sir. We were up all last night and I haven’t seen los ninos since yesterday. They’re going to forget I’m their mother. And if she doesn’t get some time off, Erma is apt to go insane.”

She grinned. “And much as she adores them, I don’t think Mama would last long with those two all by herself.”

“Let me holler at Linda, too,” I said. “She’s got to be dead on her feet.” I followed Estelle out of Martin Holman’s office. Ernie Wheeler was still working dispatch, and he was leaning forward, his fingers poised over the mike’s transmit bar.

“Posadas, three-oh-seven.” Eddie Mitchell’s voice was quiet and crisp.

Ernie tapped the bar. “Three-oh-seven, be advised that one-eight-niner Baker Mike Nora is registered to Patrick Salazar, Three-twenty East Bustos, Posadas. No wants or warrants.”

“I knew that,” Mitchell muttered, a rare departure for him from standard airwave protocol. “Three-oh-seven is ten-eight.”

“He’s tired, too,” I said as Wheeler signed off with the repeated number gibberish that the FCC demanded.

Wheeler turned to regard Estelle and me. “Eddie’s been up on the hill working around the lake and in that area, hoping maybe there was someone camping that we missed in an earlier sweep.”

The lake was nothing but a deep, black-water-filled hole, the remains of an old quarry just up the hill beyond Consolidated Mining’s operations. It was a popular party spot, despite the Forest Service fence and half a dozen signs warning of imminent danger to life and limb if anyone took a plunge into the cold water.

“Call him in and send him home,” I said to Wheeler. “Tell him I said so.”

I heard quiet footsteps behind me and turned to see Linda Real. She held another fistful of photos. She managed a game smile, but I could see she was among the walking dead herself.

“You might want to look at these,” she said and handed the photos to me.

“I might. I might also want to get some sleep. You can do the same. The feds will be here in full force tomorrow, transferring the wreckage to the hangar. I need people bright and in gear come morning.”

I tapped her on the shoulder with the photos. “That’s a condition of employment, Linda. Your first sixteen-hour shift is over. We’ll see you here at eight sharp.”

She started to say something about the pictures, pointing toward one of them. I held them away from her.

“Linda…” and when I was sure she was hearing me, I added, “Go home. Now. Just forget explanations. Just turn around”-I took one shoulder and urged her in the proper direction-“and walk out the door. Get in your car, go home, and get some rest. It’s that easy.”

“Well said, sir,” Estelle murmured, and I glanced sharply at her. She grinned at my mock reproof. “I’ll see you here in the morning,” she added. “We’ll run up to the Boyds’.”

And my advice to others turned out to work pretty well. I took the pictures home, dropped them on the kitchen table and started the coffeemaker. While it popped and gurgled, I spread out the photos. With a powerful twinge of regret, I realized just how much I would have liked to ask Martin Holman what had attracted his attention to this scrubby section of prairie.

And I had to give him credit. Aerial photography was not easy without the proper equipment. It was hard to stick a camera against the Plexiglas of the aircraft’s cabin and shoot past the reflection, the haze, the bouncing. Even without a magnifying glass, I could count the vanes on the windmill. The rudder was latched to the side, braking the mill and keeping it stationary. On the rudder, the name of the manufacturer was clearly legible.

The windmill’s sucker rod drew water up and into a pipe that fed a circular stock tank. The tank looked to be about twelve feet in diameter and perhaps three or four feet deep. The shadow cast by the west wall of the tank cut a dark line across the other side. I squinted hard, couldn’t make out the detail, and grunted to my feet. I rummaged in one of the kitchen utility drawers and found one of several magnifying glasses that I owned-all of which took turns being lost somewhere in the house.

With that, I could see that the tank was less than a quarter full. “Huh,” I said. The area around the windmill was beaten flat by cattle hooves.

A second photograph showed what had been not much more than a dark shadow in the first print. Sure enough, off to the northwest of the windmill were the remains of an old stone building. The roof itself had caved in, exposing the top of the stone walls and the ends of several of the roof beams.

The county-in fact, most of the state-was dotted with similar structures, some built just after the First World War, some thrown together as late as the 1950s. In almost every case, the homesteaders had found that the vagaries of the New Mexico climate made their lives miserable. It would have been more pleasant living as a street person somewhere. And in almost every case, it was the lack of water that drove them away.

In good times, a twenty-foot-deep, hand-dug well in a lucky spot might produce bountiful water for a little while. Then it would take the expense of drilling fifty or sixty feet, and a windmill to suck the water to the surface. And finally, if the ranchers had the money and the patience, the major well-drilling rigs would smoke down through hundreds of feet of rock, sometimes finding usable water, sometimes not.

I looked at the photo of the stone house for several minutes, sipping coffee, wondering what life in that little twelve-by-sixteen shack must have been like fifty years before, when a trip into town was an hour in a jolting Model A Ford, itself twenty or more years old by that time. Maybe Martin Holman had wondered the same thing and that was what had prompted him to take the photo in the first place.

“And whose windmill is this?” I said aloud to the quiet kitchen. I didn’t recognize it, but that meant nothing. That was another question for Johnny Boyd. Maybe he knew just where it was…and maybe he knew just why Sheriff Holman had wanted a photo of it.

I would have liked to talk to the rancher right then, but my heavy eyelids told me that it made sense to wait. The windmill wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was Johnny Boyd. Come morning, he’d have half an army swarming around his ranch.