Walking Back The Cat Page 3

  "Metaka Oysin" Eskeltsetle murmured as the powder, confirming something he suspected, dusted the intruder's feet.

  The dark-skinned Apache boy with the streaks of paint on his face and a wooden knife in his belt sidled up behind the Indian, who was his father. "Does he got a name, Skelt?"

  "It's Finn."

  "Why'd Shenandoah call him Saint Louis?"

  Never taking his eyes off Finn, Eskeltsetle spoke to the boy. "Your mother's got a way of coming at things from a different direction than most, Thomas," he observed. "I expect there's no injury done if you was to call him Saint Louis too."

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  "All right, my man Nahkahyen," agreed Gianahtah, the Always Ready. "Our ways are purer."

  "Talk to us about the Dine" Petwawwenin, the Smoker, said to Eskelt-setle.

  "Yeah, tell us more about the People."

  Eskeltsetle nodded gravely. "There is an unbreakable bond between the Apaches and the Earth Mother, a bond nourished by an unquenchable thirst for prophecy. It was predicted the white man would come to our shores long before Columbus discovered America — "

  "You left out supposedly, man," said Gianahtah, the Always Ready.

  "Columbus supposedly discovered America," said Alchise.

  Nahkahyen, the Keen Sighted, spoke up. "When Columbus discovered America, two million of us, more maybe, maybe more, was already here."

  Chewing on mescal root, the young Apaches avoided Eskeltsetle's irritated gaze.

  Covering his eyes with his bare arm, Nahkahyen, the Keen Sighted, groaned softly. "For too long," he said, his voice choking with rage, "Apaches have been fair game for serial killers called white men. For too long we have been forced into concentration camps called reservations, where our women die in childbirth, our children die of whooping cough and influenza, our braves die of rotting of the liver brought on by alcohol. Serveriano's death at seventy-seven was the exception to the rule. Until I was twelve I didn't know an Apache could die of old age."

  Nahkahyen, the Keen Sighted, leaned forward and rubbed his fingertips in the still-hot cinders, then marked his face with three distinct ash-gray streaks. The gesture, used from the dawn of time by Apaches about to set out on the warpath, was not lost on the braves in the wickiup. Several of them grunted in respect.

  "I have spoken to Mr. Early in New Jerusalem," announced Nahkahyen. "I told him about the man in the green bow tie who comes to our casino to humiliate us." There was a murmur from several of the braves. Eskeltsetle closed his eyes. "Mr. Early has made an appointment for me," Nahkahyen continued, "with a state prosecutor in Santa Fe a week from Wednesday."

  Suddenly everyone was talking at once.

  "Remember what happened to Klosen, the Hair Rope, when he shot his mouth off. . ."

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  "Remember what happened to Uclenny, the Rapid Runner, when he threatened to spill everything to the newspapers. . ."

  "When Baychendaysan, the Long Nose, set out for New Jerusalem, he disappeared from the face of the earth . . ."

  "Remember the stomach cramps," Eskeltsetle said. "It is child's play to poison the drinking water which comes from the Sacred Lake."

  From the hills outside the wickiup came the nasal ripple of a bluegrass banjo; furious groundswells of turbulent arpeggios, one bursting on the back of another, broke against a shore. Gianahtah, the Always Ready, turned on Eskeltsetle. "What about the stranger who sails on the wind to Watershed?" he asked.

  "How is it you permit him to remain among us?" demanded Alchise.

  Eskeltsetle did not respond immediately and no one, not even Alchise, dared to interrupt his silence. Finally Eskeltsetle looked up at the sage smoke swirling under the curved roof of the wickiup. The smoke suddenly thinned, revealing a large black spider, an insect sacred to the Apaches, clinging to the center of a web. "I have read it on the wind that brought the stranger my wife calls Saint Louis," Eskeltsetle said huskily. "The coming of the one with Navajo blood in his veins is clearly an omen. He has been sent to us by Wakantanka, the Great Spirit, to right a wrong."

  "I got nothing against the occasional rain dance when there's a drought," Nahkahyen, the Keen Sighted, muttered with a raw laugh. Smiling crookedly, he reached up and crushed the spider between his thumb and forefinger. "But listening to the weather forecast can have a lot to do with its success."

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  about how your grandfather went to Washington to meet the president," he reminded him.

  "Don't go fillin' your son's head with crazy Apache stories," Shenandoah called after them.

  "They're not crazy Apache stories," Eskeltsetle retorted from the door. "They're actual history, pure and simple."

  Shenandoah began clearing the dinner dishes off the trestle table. "So what is it you do when you're not flyin' balloons to ghost towns that ain't on any map?"

  Carrying the empty beer bottles, Finn followed her into the kitchen. "If you mean what do I do for work, I do anything. I wash dishes. I dig fence holes. I split logs. I pick lettuce."

  "Just what we needed to make a dent in Watershed's unemployment statistics —another jack-of-no-trades!"

  "If things get real tight, I make butter."

  When Shenandoah looked quizzically at him, Finn laughed. "I shared a jeep back during the Gulf War with a black second lieutenant from Tennessee. His last name was Pilgrim, I never did learn his first name. I hear he works for some congressman in Washington now. Anyhow, one night while we were batting our arms and legs to keep from freezing to death he told me the story of the two frogs trapped in a bucket of milk. If you heard it, stop me. One frog figured the situation was hopeless and drowned. The other flailed away with his frog's legs and made butter." Finn flashed a sheepish smile. "That's me, flailing away. With my frog's legs. Making butter."

  Shenandoah worked the pump, spilling water onto the dishes piled in the deep sink. "Eskeltsetle told me you was in the Gulf War. Did you get to see the desert?"

  Finn leaned back against a "Death by Chocolate" poster thumbtacked to the wall, finishing off a bottle of beer. "That's all there is in Saudi Arabia—desert."

  "How long you spend there?"

  "Five months, fourteen days, twenty-three hours."

  "What did you do with yourself? To pass the time, I mean. Me, I get off on watchin' the sun rise in the Painted Desert, but I'd go ballistic if I had to watch it for five months."

  "I eventually went ballistic, but that's another story," Finn said. "In the Gulf I was a Special Forces meteorologist. The first thing after the sun

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  rose, the last thing before it set, I'd launch a small helium balloon which gave off radio signals. Then I'd track the balloon with a tiny receiver, something about the size of a Walkman, to map the ground winds. That way the support helicopters and planes could approach targets so the smoke wouldn't hide them."

  Finn tilted back his head and swallowed a mouthful of beer. "The Gulf's not on the same planet as Watershed," he went on, wiping his lips on his sleeve. "When I wasn't out on patrol I used to serenade the dunes with my banjo. I counted stars. I counted how many days I had to go before getting my discharge papers." He laughed under his breath. "I turned in squares."

  "What's turnin' in squares supposed to mean?"

  "Yeah, well, when someone gets lost in the desert, which happens all the time on patrol —the desert has no permanent landmarks, which makes navigation difficult—when someone gets lost they send out search parties. You mark the spot where the missing person was last seen, okay? Then you start turning in squares, each leg longer than the leg before it." Finn shook his head, a faraway look in his eyes. "Sometimes it felt as if I spent the entire war turning in squares. Sometimes I think I've been turning in squares my whole life."

  Shenandoah, her back to Finn, asked quietly, "What did you lose back there in the desert?"

  Finn raised his eyes and studied the back of her neck. "Polaris."


  "Who's Polaris?"

  "Polaris is the North Star."

  Shenandoah glanced over her shoulder and their eyes met. "You look young but you sure talk old." Wheeling on the heel of a bare foot, skipping nimbly over the sleeping cat, she pushed through the screen door into the night. Returning a few minutes later with a turn of firewood, she deposited it on the floorboards in front of the wood-burning stove and fed a split log into the stove. Cranking up the flame, she filled an old casserole with water and set it to heat.

  After a while Finn asked, "So are you Suma Apache?"

  "I had a great-grandma who was Suma. My Apache name's the same as hers, Ishkaynay. Turns out that Ishkaynay—try not to smile —means 'boy.' "

  "Who tacked that on you?"

  "The local warriors took to callin' me Ishkaynay when I came to live in Watershed. It's what comes of bein' flat-chested. Apache men are into

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  Apache liberation, but they ain't worked up a sweat yet about Apache women's liberation." She tested the water, decided the temperature was right and poured it into an enamel bowl with a bone handle. She carried the bowl into the main room. Finn trailed after her. With a snap of her wrist she closed the curtains over the large plate-glass window with

  3AOT2 JM3W3Q d3H2fl3TAW

  written across it. "Went an' put them up yesterday," she remarked, fingering the stiff material. "Turnin' the old curtains into slipcovers for the pickup seats. Turnin' the old slipcovers into original Apache miniskirts for our Indian handcraft store."

  Finn said, "Everyone's getting promoted."

  Shenandoah almost smiled. Fluffing a cushion, she settled down on it with her legs crossed and her back against the wall, added salt crystals to the warm water and began soaking her fingertips.

  "What that for?" Finn asked.

  "It's what I call wet work," Shenandoah replied. The gray cat, ambling in from the kitchen, sank down next to her and fixed its unblinking eyes on Finn. "I do this twenty minutes a day come hell or high water," Shenandoah allowed. "A girl has got to keep her fingers supple . . ."

  Nursing his bottle of beer, Finn wandered around the room. Everything in view—the window curtains, the pickup seats covered with the old curtains, the frayed Navajo scatter rugs—seemed washed out, bleak. The only splashes of color came from bouquets of freshly picked wild-flowers—scarlet bugler, yellow clover, purple larkspur, red onion skin, goldenrod—spilling from number-ten cans filled with water. The wide wooden shelves along two walls of the room were heaped with spare pickup parts. Old-fashioned wooden milk boxes filled with more spare parts were piled one on top of the other on either side of the front door.

  "There's an order behind all this disorder, a method to all this madness," Shenandoah explained from the floor. "It's like on a ship. You got to know how to look at it. My husband happens to be the used-pickup king of northern New Mexico."

  "I saw the pickups lined up in the field when I landed."

  "Skelt has got more than forty out there," Shenandoah said with some pride. "He's a certified mechanical genius. Maybe one out of three pickups towed in here—you oughta see some of them, they're ripe for the

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  junk heap —one of three he puts back together and sells off real good. The ones he can't put back on the road he cannibalizes and sells the spare parts off them there shelves."

  Finn said something about how the Suma Apaches appeared to have a good thing going in Watershed.

  "We got the pickup business," Shenandoah said. "We got Skelt's navy pension —he put in twenty years on destroyers, which is where he learned about machinery. We got the Social Security checks of the twelve Apaches in the Suma old-age home who couldn't get into regular old-age homes because they was Apaches. We got the Indian handcraft store specializing in Apache miniskirts and Apache art printed by driving cars over inked woodblocks. We got the fireworks concession. We also got two hundred and fifty-five mouths to feed, which is all that's left on earth of the Suma Apaches. We're the smallest Indian tribe in America, living on the smallest Indian reservation in America."

  "How do you make ends meet?"

  "Ain't easy. The big thing we got goin' is the casino we started up weekends and holidays," Shenandoah said. "That's why I soak my fingers; I deal poker. Gamblin's not allowed in New Mexico, but this ain't New Mexico. This is an Indian reservation, which means the federal Indian gamblin' laws apply. When the county gets around to pavin' over the road up from New Jerusalem, why, we're gonna go an' open the casino seven days a week and tap into the tourist trade. We been tryin' to get the state to run power and phone lines up here for years. Hell, we'll run our own lines up here. There'll be no unemployment in Watershed. All our kids'll get to go to Harvard and the reservation'll pick up the tab. The Suma Apaches could become the richest tribe in America, if only . . ."

  "If only?"

  "I'm glad you asked," Shenandoah said, changing the subject abruptly. "My dad was a professional Texan and a professional gambler and a Baptist and a Democrat, in that order. He hated Catholics even though my mother was one, and Republicans. He almost always won at cards, but he won more from Catholics and Republicans. He began each meal with a prayer. 'Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest I am hard to turn.' My father was a question mark to me." She rolled her eyes. "Life is buzzin' with question marks, as opposed to answer marks. How does a thermos know to keep hot liquid hot and cold, cold? How come the cave dudes could paint perfect buffalo, but their drawings of each other

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  look like a child did them? Why does a potato get soft when you boil it and an egg get hard?"

  Finn sank onto a pickup seat. "Where did you grow up?"

  Shenandoah's eyes focused on a memory. "In a car. I was always on route. My dad was lookin' for the ultimate poker game." She smiled anxiously. "Sometimes I wake up nights thinkin' I'm curled up in the back of one of those old four-door Chevies with the big tail fins."

  Finn finished the rest of the beer. "Was Watershed really a ghost town until the Apaches evicted the ghosts?"

  Shenandoah concentrated on her soaking fingers, which were incredibly long and delicate. "Watershed's got a hell of a history. Back in the 1870s the off-duty soldiers posted along the Rio Grande used to comb the hills looking for what the Apaches called yellow iron. One fine day some damn fool pony sergeant panned gold out of Rattlesnake Wash, which runs into and out of the lake you passed over. Next thing you know a town sprang up on the crest of the hill above the wash. They went and called it Watershed Station because it was on the watershed line of these hills. The general store here sits smack on a local divide, which makes it just about the highest buildin' in Watershed." Suddenly Shenandoah looked as if she were fighting back tears. "If I was to stand upstairs in my bedroom and cry, which ain't likely as I used up my ration of tears before I came to live in Watershed—but if, I was to, cry, the tears, when they hit the ground, would flow west an' wind up in Arizona. If I was to cry in Doubtin' Thomas's room, the tears'd flow east and irrigate Texas."

  Finn said, "Texas is hundreds of miles from here."

  "Don't matter none. A scientific fact is a scientific fact. Watershed was booming until the twenties," Shenandoah went on. "The Atlantic and Pacific Mining Company operated a general store, a saloon, a Western Union office, a lumberyard, a livery stable, a feed yard, a hotel, also a county jail, also a casino down at the south end of Sore Loser Road. They even had theirselves a whorehouse, which is where the old-age home is today. The upstairs bedrooms have still got mirrors on the ceilin's. When they're not lookin' at satellite television workin' off the generator out back, the old folks stretch out on beds and watch theirselves grow older in the mirror."

  Shenandoah lifted her hands from the enamel bowl and shook off the water and dried her fingers on the fur of the purring cat. "What's keepin' Skelt? He's got to be tellin' Thomas the history of the
Apaches from the

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  year one, you bet." She took a deck of cards from a sewing box and began to shuffle them with a slow, flowing motion of her fingers and wrists.

  "You know any tricks?"

  "Hell, yes." Shenandoah held the deck in her left hand and showed Finn the top card. "Queen of hearts." She put the queen of hearts back on top of the deck. Then she dealt Finn the top card and herself the next card.

  "Look at your card."

  Finn leaned forward and flipped over his card. It was the seven of spades. He turned over her card. It was the queen of hearts.

  "I double-dealed you, Saint Louis. I dealt you the second card. I use a technique called the two-card push-off. You could do it if you practiced a few thousand hours and soaked your hands in warm water twenty minutes a day."

  "I don't believe I'm seeing what I'm seeing. Show me more."

  "You want me to show you more." She set out five hands of five cards faceup on the floor, then began to scoop them up. "When a hand's over with I can scoop up the discards so that, say, the four jacks that was scattered in the discards wind up on the top or bottom of the deck. Okay, watch close. Now I'm gonna give the deck what we call a riffle shuffle." She divided the deck into two packs and begins to riffle them together. "So what I'm really doin' is countin' the cards as they spring off my thumbs and arrangin' the deck so the jacks will all come to yours truly on the next deal. I started with the four jacks on the top, right? When I finish shufflin', the four jacks will be fifth, tenth, fifteenth and twentieth from the top."

  Finn shook his head. "That's plain impossible."

  Shenandoah was getting a kick out of performing. She laid out five hands of five-card stud. One after another the four jacks fell to her.

  "Do you ever lose?" he asked as she flipped over the last of the four jacks.

  "Let's just say I got a better chance of winnin' than the next guy."

  "Where did you say you did your wheeling and dealing?"

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  stub of a pencil and noted in a small book the winning numbers at a roulette table. Every once in a while the fat man would lean forward and drop a hundred-dollar chip onto a number, then grimace as the young Apache working the table raked it in. Finn himself lost ten dollars betting the even numbers, and five more when snake eyes turned up at a crap table. He drifted over to a blackjack horseshoe and watched the action for a while. A heavily made-up middle-aged woman wearing a two-tone cowboy shirt and a pink Stetson patted the empty chair next to her. "Bring me luck—set yourself down next to me, young fella," she said with a rasp. A long filter-tipped cigarillo bobbed on her lower lip as she talked. When Finn hesitated, she said, "Honest to God, honey, I don't bite."