Walk a Black Wind

19

The telephone woke me up. The sun was up, and the wind from my open window was almost warm. October weather-winter and spring coming and going in autumn.

“Fortune,” I said into the receiver, wishing for the ten-millionth time that I had two arms and could get a cigarette while holding a phone without the contortions I had to go through one move at a time, the phone tucked under my chin.

“Gazzo, Dan. Got a pencil and paper?”

I gave up on the cigarette, got the pencil and paper.

“Go ahead, Captain,” I said.

“Ralph Blackwind was born at the Pine River Agency, Pine River, Arizona, on July 12, 1929. Lived there until he went into the army in April 1950. Want the prison report?”

“I’d like to hear the official version, yes.”

“Convicted of assault-with-intent-to-murder, December 1953, sent to Auburn. Difficult prisoner, bad record of fights. He escaped with three others in October 1956. A prison guard was killed. Two prisoners were killed, one apprehended fast, but not Blackwind. The surviving prisoner stated Blackwind was drowned in a lake. No body found at first, intensive all-states manhunt continued for months without any trace of Blackwind. Body finally located in lake that matched Blackwind every way that could be matched. Search for him continued less intensively for two more years. Declared

officially dead in 1959.”

I was silent, “It sounds pretty convincing.”

“Yeh, it does, but you never can be sure without a positive body all the way,” Gazzo said. “At the time of his escape, his known relatives were his father, Two Bears Walk Near, at the Pine River Agency; a brother, John Two Bears, also Pine River Agency; and a sister, Woman Of Two Bears, Pine River Agency. They were all checked out and watched. His friends too.”

“Where is Pine River?”

“In southeast Arizona. Nearest town is Fort Johns, about six hundred people strong. Nearest big cities are Flagstaff, and Gallup, New Mexico. Phoenix is the only real city near, after that it’s covered wagons. The Agency itself is a small reservation, maybe two hundred people on a lot of land. Apache, the Indian people say, but they admit the names sound more like Navajo.”

“What about our suspects and Carl Gans’s killing?”

“Most of them have no alibis. Only Anthony Sasser, and I wonder about him. He was close to Zaremba, stands to cash-in on Zaremba’s holdings, and has the only real alibi. Not even your client, John Andera, has one this time. We’ll follow up.”

His voice wasn’t optimistic. Somehow, a big piece was missing-the key piece. Maybe it was out in Arizona.

“I guess I take a jet,” I said.

“Take your snake-bite kit, too,” Gazzo said, and hung up.

Now I had my cigarette. I didn’t want to go to Pine River, or even to Phoenix. I’m a city man. But I called, and got a seat on a jet that left for Phoenix in two hours.

We’re a homogeneous nation now, and Phoenix has culture and country club suburbs where the middle-class rich throw parties just like those of East Orange or Bridgeport. The automobile began the homogenizing, the movies carried it ahead, and the jet and TV completed the process. The rough pattern of misshaped grits we used to be is smoothed into a thin gruel from one end of the bowl to the other, sugared by comfort.

I went right out on a smaller plane to Flagstaff, and hired a car there. I drove out east along route 66, and the difference came to meet me. Outside Phoenix the land was still there-the “west” they know even in Vladivostok. A dry land of buff-and-red-ocher color with its wiry gray brush; the long, flat mesas; the red cliffs; the high blue sky bleached almost white by the sun. You could still imagine the yipping bark of the Cheyenne and Apache riding down on the wind and dust. A strong wind, blowing the dust, and a feeling of winter that would pile snow like a sheet of lava here. A snow that would isolate the Indians and ranchers for months sometimes, and only their knowledge, and today the helicopter, would keep them alive. A barren, dead land where no one should live, and our largesse to the Indians. If it could grow even grass, we’d steal it.

I turned off on highway 77, and then onto a blacktop county road through the one-street town of Fort Johns, and finally into the town of Pine River that didn’t even have a street. It was a ragged double row of adobe shacks and hogans along the blacktop road. Dry dirt yards were littered with pieces of broken machines and cast-out appliances. There was a flat-roofed adobe restaurant festooned with signs, and a single one-pump gas station facing it across the highway. The blacktop road led straight as an arrow between the shacks, and vanished into a completely empty distance.

I parked at the restaurant. Indians sat against its walls. They wore jeans, sheepskin jackets, and broad-brimmed white stetsons-all identical except for their boots. Behind the restaurant some Indian women sat in a circle, wearing the voluminous, decorated Indian dresses with long, full skirts. Two younger girls stood apart from them wearing jeans and shirts like the men. The older women ignored them.

Inside the restaurant two men ate at a long counter, both Indians. The woman behind the counter was also Indian.

“I’m looking for the Pine River Agency,” I said.

“Why?” she said.

“I want to find a man named Two Bears Walk Near.”

“He’s an old man. He might be dead. I don’t know.”

“I’ll find out,” I said.

“You’re looking for the two women? Only one of them’s there now. The other left.”

“How do I get there?” I said.

“Two Bears Walk Near is very old. A chief, if we had any chiefs anymore. You want his son, John Two Bears.”

“I want Ralph Blackwind,” I said.

She wiped her hands on the old skirt she wore. “You go a mile south, a gravel road to the left. Two miles in is the trading post.”

One of the men who had been eating got up and went out without paying. I followed him out. The Indian crossed the highway to the gas station and went inside the office. I got into my rented car, and drove the mile to the gravel road. A battered sign read: Pine River Agency.

The gravel road rattled my teeth all the way. It was full of holes and boulders I had to drive around. It wound down through deep arroyos until there was no more sign of the highway behind me, or of any life I knew. I was back in another century. Smoke seemed to rise out of the rocks themselves in the distance, no buildings in sight. Until I came over a rise and saw a rocky valley on the banks of a dry river bed. There was a rambling adobe building with a sign: Trading Post, Pine River Agency. A few smaller adobe shacks, and some hogans, were scattered up the slopes of the valley with a few pinto ponies and two good horses wandering among them.

I parked and went into the trading post. A tall Caucasian sat at a desk behind a store counter. He was alone, and I realized that I had seen no one in the whole small valley.

“I’m looking for Two Bears Walk Near,” I said.

“He’s old,” the man said without turning.

He was adding a column of figures. They didn’t seem to add to what he wanted, so he began to add them again.

“Also Ralph Blackwind,” I said.

“You’re late,” he said.

“I usually am, but I try.”

He turned and looked me over. “Good for you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Did Ralph Blackwind ever come home?”

“Naturally,” he said. “An Indian always comes home to the land.”

“Naturally,” I said.

“Their spirits return,” he said.

He hadn’t even looked at my missing arm. He turned back to his column of figures, began to add them again.

“Where do I find Two Bears Walk Near? I know he’s an old man. It’s all right.”

“You listen,” he said.

“Then say something,” I said, as two people walked in the trading post door. A man and a woman.

He was a small Indian with long hair held by a hair-band. Perhaps twenty-four, he wore the same Levi’s, jacket and cowboy boots. The woman also wore jeans, but the kind from Saks-Fifth, and her sheepskin jacket was too big for her: Felicia Crawford. Now I knew what that Indian in Pine River had done in the gas station office-called them here at the agency.

“Hello, Felicia,” I said.

“This is Paul Two Bears,” Felicia said. “My cousin.”

“Dan Fortune,” I said, and held out my hand.

He didn’t take it. “You had a long trip,” he said.

“Not if I get some answers,” I said.

Felicia said, “Francesca was here for two weeks that first month, Mr. Fortune. She told me in her first note. Just that it was wonderful here, a great moment, she knew who we were. So I came to see.”

“That’s all she said? All you knew? Not about your father?”

“Not then, no.”

“Now you know,” I said. “What else did Francesca learn?”

The young Indian, Paul Two Bears, said, “She talked to my grandfather. He says he’ll talk to you too. Come on.”

I followed them out. The man at the desk was still adding his column of figures. I had the feeling that he would sit and add all winter until he got the answer he needed, or until the answer was so obsolete it could be forgotten. He didn’t look discouraged. He sat back, lighted a cigarette, and considered what to do next to make the figures add to what he needed.

Paul Two Bears and Felicia led me down a worn path, and across the dry river bed. Nothing grew anywhere. The only animals were the horses. There were no electric lines, no gas pipes, and the only telephone line reached the trading post and stopped there.

“Is there ever water in the river?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” Paul Two Bears said.

Felicia said, “When the white ranchers upriver open their dams because they have too much water. The whole river is dammed, the ranchers own the water. They’ll kill any man who tries to get it from them, make them share with the Indians.”

“How many Indians are there here?”

“In the area, thousands,” Paul Two Bears said. “On the Agency just two hundred and ten. It’s all ours.”

He laughed as he waved an arm to encompass the whole, barren countryside, and we climbed the opposite bank. The trail wore up over the rim of the valley, and down again into a narrow arroyo where three hogans clustered. We went into the middle hogan. An old man sat on rugs against the rear wall.

“This man has come to talk, Grandfather,” Paul Two Bears said to the old man.

The old man was short and heavy. His dark brown eyes were alert in a face incredibly wrinkled and creased with ridges that looked as hard as rock. His face was the color of wet leather. He watched me with his lively eyes.

“About what you told my sister,” Felicia said, and added, “Grandfather.”

The word was awkward on her lips, strange to her, but eager, too. The old man smiled at her, and spoke to me:

“What I told her was for her.”

He had a soft, clear voice with no real accent. An educated voice. He was dressed in older Indian clothes as if he had spent his life here, but his voice had been other places. I guessed that he was very old, as everyone said.

“She’s dead,” I said. “I want to find who killed her.”

“Why?” he said.

“To know that the person won’t kill anyone else.”

The old man thought about it. “She was my granddaughter. It’s good to find a granddaughter at my age. This one here is also my granddaughter. She is alive. Is there danger for her?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There might be.”

He nodded. “You want to know, but you must know already, or you would not be here.”

“I guess, I don’t know,” I said. “Your granddaughter came looking for her father, your son, but what did she find?”

“Only she could have told you that.”

“What had her other grandfather told her?”

“That my son was her true father.”

“She knew that from someone else. Is your son alive?”

“Only my son knows if he lives,” the old man said.

“Was he killed in the escape from prison fifteen years ago?” I said.

The old man sat for a time. He didn’t close his eyes, but he wasn’t seeing the interior of the hogan anymore. Then his old body seemed to sit straighter.

“My name is Two Bears Walk Near, I am ninety-six years old,” he said, speaking lower but harder. “The white men do not know who I am, who we are. We live inside the invisible walls of our ways. The white men say they know who we are, but they don’t, and that is good. What a white man knows he must take. He cannot help himself, it is his way to take. He took our land, our water, our freedom, and our life. He took our tribe. On the documents we are called Apache. We live as Navajo. We are one with all Indians. But we are really Comanche. A remnant lost when I was young, and the white men wrote us down as Apache, so we lost our past. They took our names, made them empty names. There was a Sioux once called Man Afraid Of His Horses. That was not his name. His name was-Young Men Are Afraid Of His Horses, because he was a greater trainer of horses that the enemy feared. But the white men stole his true name. In our language my son has a name-He Who Walked A Black Wind. His name was given on the day as a boy he dared to walk out alone toward a tornado while the rest of us hid. The white men made him ‘Blackwind,’ so stole his name. What no man can steal is his life. Each man alone knows his own life, knows if he lives or only walks.”

Now he closed his eyes. Not because he was tired-I sensed that he could talk all day-but as if to listen to his own words again, and see if he had said it the way he wanted to. For him, conversation was a form of art, of literature.

“That is philosophy,” I said. “I have to deal with the smaller facts. A lost daughter wants to come home, wants a live father.”

“Perhaps home is not a good place,” the old man said, his eyes open again. “I’ll tell you about my son. Another story. History this time, not philosophy, Mr. Fortune. At my age all I have are stories. Our stories are part of our whole lives, not separate works of art. There is no difference between a story and an event. Our stories are your facts, too.”

His eyes remained open, but became distant again. “Many years ago when I was a very young man, perhaps fifteen, there was nothing here but our camp on the reservation. The nearest walls and white men were at Fort Johns. We young men were angry, violent. A lot of bad things had been done to us by the settlers and soldiers. Remember, this was 1890. The Apache were still free, still at war. We young men listened to the tales of the Apache, and we were angry to be men like them. So we planned a raid on Fort Johns.

“There were only thirty-five of us, but Old Nana had once terrorized all of the Southwest with only ten Apaches. We were Comanche, better than Apache. We were very brave, very young. So we prepared our raid. The old men were against us, but they were afraid to stop us, or even talk against us. Many of them were as foolish as we were. All but one old chief. In Council he stood up and spoke against us-we were fools, children; our weapons were useless; we hadn’t fought in our lives; our whole small tribe hadn’t fought for twenty years; we didn’t know how to fight, or what war was like; the soldiers at Fort Johns were veterans; we wouldn’t even get near the Fort unseen; the only way for our tribe to survive was to keep our ways and bide our time and stay away from the white man until there was a new day. That was what he said.

“And he said that if the Council did not stop us, he would do it alone. The Council failed to agree. The raid was to go on. That one old man got on his horse and started for Fort Johns. He told us that he would warn the soldiers. He rode off alone, so we killed him. Ten of us rode after him and killed him.

“That old man was my grandfather.”