Walking Back The Cat Read online

  Robert Littell

  here centuries before Jesus was born," Eskeltsetle explained over the throb of the motor. "Apaches say, when you walk you leave your breath hanging in the air. If you breathe deeply you can breathe in the breath of the Ancient Ones who lived here before us."

  Eskeltsetle pulled up in the shadow of the cliff. While Doubting Thomas scurried after butterflies, Finn fitted another small balloon with a transmitter and released it into the air. He picked up the signal on his receiver and tracked it until the signal faded. "If we start here," Finn announced as he studied the logging map, "we'll finish up smack on the watershed of Watershed Station."

  With everyone pitching in, Finn unrolled the balloon on the ground. Eskeltsetle rigged up a giant fan to the car battery and started to blow air through the hooped crown into the hollow of the envelope. Finn lashed two propane canisters to the aluminum frame of the gondola and hooked up the fuel lines. As the skin of the balloon stirred restlessly on the bed of goldenrod, he lit off the burners, aimed the nozzles and dispatched a bubble of hot air into the balloon. Doubting Thomas whooped excitedly as The Spirit of Saint Louis billowed, then slowly righted itself. The gondola strained against the mooring lines. Doubting Thomas and Shenandoah clambered into it alongside Finn. Eskeltsetle circled them, slipping the mooring lines.

  "Oooooooooh," Doubting Thomas shrieked as the balloon plucked the gondola off the ground.

  In her mind's eye Shenandoah saw the earth slide away, then slowly rotate under the gondola like a globe spinning on its poles. It was the first time she had detached herself from planet Earth, the first time she had felt lighter than air. Her head swam with exhilaration. "Why, we're standin' dead still," she called to Doubting Thomas. "It's the world that's backin' away from us."

  "Come off it," the boy scolded her. He waved wildly to Eskeltsetle, who had climbed onto the hood of the pickup. "I'm innocent, okay, but I'm not stupid."

  "What do you know?" Shenandoah shot back. "The sun durin' the day, the stars at night, they all spin round the earth." She smiled at Finn, drawing him into her little conspiracy. "Imagination is everythin'."

  Below them the world unfolded like a map. First came the field filled with Indian paintbrush and goldenrod and Eskeltsetle waving from the hood of the pickup, then the slope of the ridge with the firebreak cutting

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  Walking Back the Cat

  through it, then as far as the eye could see groundswells covered with scrub oak and ponderosa pine and fir. Finn leveled the balloon off at six hundred feet. Shenandoah spotted a herd of mule deer darting through a stand of aspens and two hawks circling over a canyon. "You was right," she told Doubting Thomas, shaking her head in awe. "Forget the goddamn school. You oughta drift with the wind forever."

  Smiling anxiously, she added, as if she were just discovering it, as if the discovery were an original sin, "If you're gonna go hog, hell, you might as well go whole hog!"

  Walking Back the Cat

  vation and told the story, no one believed him." Eskeltsetle cleared his throat. "Me too, when I tell them what I see, they don't believe me."

  Finn, soaking gaskets in a can filled with gasoline, looked up. Something in Eskeltsetle's tone riveted him. "What do you see?" When Eskeltsetle didn't answer, he added, "It has got to do with the casino, doesn't it?"

  "What makes you say that?"

  "Something's going on there. I watched Shenandoah dealing some joker with a green bow tie a while back —I could see she was double-dealing everyone and letting him win. She admitted as much when I put it to her."

  Eskeltsetle peered at Finn over what was left of the engine. "What else did she tell you?"

  "She said they'd tickle her to death if she told me any more." Finn came around to Eskeltsetle's side of the engine. At the far end of the field, a pack of Apache boys, half naked and painted for war, scampered downhill toward Rattlesnake Wash, whooping as they ran. "The joker with the bow tie turned up again last weekend," Finn went on quietly. "Shenandoah double-dealed him again. This time he waltzed off with forty thousand bucks. I followed him out to the parking lot. He was driving a white Suzuki jeep. It had a Taos E-Z Mart privileged-parking sticker on the rear window. The joker in the green bow tie shouldn't be hard to find."

  Eskeltsetle settled cross-legged onto the ground and started to breathe deeply through his nostrils. He reminded himself that Finn had been sent on the wind by Wakantanka to right a wrong. Why this sudden loss of nerve? When he had calmed down he said, "I guess, hanging around Watershed Station, you were bound to find out."

  Finn sat cross-legged facing Eskeltsetle. "Who's shaking down the casino, Skelt? Is it the Mafia?"

  Eskeltsetle raised his eyes to stare at the sky. It was easy to see he was aching to answer the question but was afraid to take the plunge.

  "Why don't you tell me?" Finn asked.

  "It's risky, knowing."

  "It's my skin."

  Eskeltsetle fingered the beaded buckskin pouch tied to his belt. "Not yet. I need to check it out."

  "With who?"

  "With the guy who runs the show."

  Walking Back the Cat

  been branded. His lungs filled with sweet oxygen, his heart filled with sweet bliss. He started to laugh out loud. He laughed until his voice was hoarse, he laughed until his laughter echoed through the cloud, he laughed until the tears streamed down his leathery cheeks.

  In the history of the world, had anyone other than Moses looked on the face of Wakantanka and lived? It could only be a sign that the Great Spirit was pleased with his servant Eskeltsetle; that his messenger, who had come to Watershed on the wind, would deliver the Apaches from their enemies; that the time was fast approaching when the white man's civilization would rot away; that the sacred valleys and sacred hills and sacred rivers and sacred lakes would soon be restored to the Dine.

  Walking Back the Cat

  Tooahyaysay glanced at Eskeltsetle, who nodded encouragement. Reluctantly, the old Apache turned back to Finn.

  "A year and a halfback . . ." He cleared a frog of nervousness from his throat. "A year and a halfback, Baychendaysan, the Long Nose, talked the tribe into getting into the casino business. He didn't invent the idea, it was the brainstorm of Mr. Early over in New Jerusalem, who was so hot on it he personally walked the dossier through the state offices in Santa Fe. Eight months ago, right after the casino opened, a white man turned up in Watershed. He wore tinted eyeglasses even though it was raining. He was driving a jet black Cadillac with New Mexico plates and tinted windows. He sat in the car eating a wedge of pizza and listening to opera on a tape deck. He did not get out of the car until the aria was over. When the music ended he strolled across the casino to my small office. The door was not marked but he seemed to know exactly where it was. He entered without knocking. His small feet were fitted into soft leather shoes that came to a point. He asked for me by name. He told me his name was Dewey, but he did not say whether Dewey was his given name or his family name. He told me I should think of him as the representative of an international organization with Sicilian roots. He said something about how the people he worked for would provide protection for the Rattlesnake Casino, in return for which they would expect periodic payments in unmarked funds."

  "What kind of protection?"

  "Against cars being stolen from the parking lot. Against the casino burning to the ground. Against the poisoning of the Sacred Lake, which is the reservoir from which we draw our drinking water."

  "He could have been bluffing," Finn said. "You could have told him to get lost."

  "At first we did refuse," Eskeltsetle said.

  Tooahyaysay said, "The man who called himself Dewey narrowed his eyes and shook his head very slowly and left without a word."

  "Two days later," Eskeltsetle picked up the story, "everyone in Watershed came down with stomach cramps and the runs—everyone except the twenty or so who'd been drinking beer instead of the water that's piped down to us from the Sacred Lake.
"

  "A week later Dewey turned up again," Tooahyaysay said. "He told us the next time they spiked the water they would do it with a thimbleful of cholera microbes."

  Robert Littell

  Eskeltsetle continued in an urgent whisper. "We had a big tribal powwow. I counseled caution. I suggested that we give them the money and buy time. Everyone more or less agreed. But a few weeks after we started paying protection, Baychendaysan, the Long Nose, cracked. He climbed onto a chair and said it was blackmail, pure and simple. He said no way would the Apaches let some white honchos milk the casino. Next day he got into his pickup and roared off toward New Jerusalem to blast the story all over the front page of The Occasional Chronicle. But he never turned up in New Jerusalem, he never spoke to Mr. Early. His pickup was found in a ditch off the S-curves between here and New Jerusalem. It was empty. Baychendaysan, the Long Nose, disappeared from the face of the earth."

  "The Long Nose was not the only one to disappear," Tooahyaysay said. "Klosen, the Hair Rope, announced he was going to see the county sheriff. A week later his body was found slumped over a telephone in his girlfriend's mobile home in a trailer park outside New Jerusalem. The county coroner ruled he had been electrocuted by lightning while talking on the telephone during a thunderstorm. A few months later Uclenny, the Rapid Runner, said he was going to follow the man in the green bow tie and turn him in to the state cops."

  "Uclenny was found hanging from the rafters of a barn outside of Taos," Eskeltsetle said. "The county coroner ruled it was a suicide."

  "This is what Shenandoah calls tickling someone to death," Finn remarked.

  Recounting what had happened to Apaches who had tried to put an end to the blackmail made Tooahyaysay perspire. He pulled a bandanna from his hip pocket and mopped his brow. "Last month," he said, whispering now, "Nahkahyen, the Keen Sighted, made an appointment with the state prosecutor in Santa Fe. He died inside the building before he could see the state prosecutor."

  "What killed him?" Finn wanted to know.

  "A heart attack," Tooahyaysay said.

  Eskeltsetle kept his hooded eyes fixed on Finn. "Nahkahyen was twenty-seven."

  For several moments the only sound came from Rattlesnake Wash murmuring over volcanic boulders. Eskeltsetle's Apache nostrils flared. A wild look came into his bloodshot eyes. "I read it on the wind that brought you to Watershed Station, I read it in the shaft of sunlight that struck the altar

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  Walking Back the Cat

  inches from my foot. You are the messenger of Wakantanka. You have been sent to us by the Great Spirit to ride the wild horse."

  Finn wasn't enthusiastic. "Last time I rode a wild horse, it ended badly for the horse." He shrugged. "Look, I'm willing to try, but I wouldn't know where to start."

  "The Suma Apaches have a guardian angel," Eskeltsetle told Finn. "Begin with him."

  Walking Back the Cat

  another of the streams we got here'bouts, which is a tradition I more or less kept up when I bought the Chronicle. Do you fish, Mr. Finn? Do you make your own flies or do you use store-bought? Not that it tells me much about you that Mr. Sigmund Freud couldn't have figured out shrinking you on one of those leather couches of his for six months."

  Chuckling at his own joke, Early reread the back of the envelope. "Skelt here has a sixth sense about lots of things, including when the fish are running and where. He wants me to give you five minutes of my precious time." Early cracked a fat knuckle; the sound reverberated through the room. "I'm all ears."

  Squinting over the rims of his glasses, sucking absently on his cigar, he heard Finn out. Then he swiveled in his chair and stared out the window so that Finn would not notice how rattled he was. Who had been feeding Finn fairy tales about the Mafia shaking down the Apache casino? That old fart Eskeltsetle, who thought he had a special line to God? Or the asshole accountant Tooahyaysay, the one they called the Strong Swimmer? Or one of the hothead braves who sat around moaning about how the white man had cheated and murdered Apaches a hundred years ago as if it had happened yesterday?

  Early stared down at the traffic on Main Street. Leaning forward, he felt the strength drain from his legs, but he forced himself to keep his eyes on the street. Years before, some thirty pounds lighter and running Treasury agents out of Thailand, Early had been initiated by a Cambodian gunrunner delivering AK-47s to the Khmer Rouge into the mysteries of chod, a Buddhist concept that encouraged you to embrace the thing you feared most. Early's gunrunning friend had practiced what he preached; since death was the thing he feared most, he had slept in the same bed with his dead mother for a week before burying her. The exercise hopefully stood him in good stead the day the Khmer Rouge, discovering rust on the AK-47 firing pins, beheaded him with a dull sword. The thing Early feared most was heights, so in tight situations he fortified himself by practicing chod. Now, gazing down, a cold sweat formed on his upper lip as the street, four floors below, swam in and out of focus. His breath coming in short gasps, he swiveled back to face Finn, loosened his tie and ran a thick forefinger between his starched collar and thick neck.

  "You all right?" Finn asked.

  Early ignored the question. "What brings you to our corner of New Mexico, Mr. Finn?"

  Robert Littell

  "If I told you you wouldn't believe me."

  Early sucked on his cigar. "Try me."

  "The wind. Literally." Finn explained how he had set out from the Pacific Rim and sailed on the jet stream until his propane ran out.

  "How did you stumble across the green-bow-tie story?"

  Finn didn't want to bring Tooahyaysay into the conversation if he could avoid it, so he said, "I was hanging around the casino. I recognized the guy wearing the green bow tie. Each time he drops a handful of thousand-dollar chips on the table and starts betting as if it's never crossed his mind he could lose. I've seen him do it twice now. The first time he walked off with a hundred and ten thousand, the second time forty thousand."

  "How can you be sure he's not just someone with a knack for five-card stud?"

  Finn said, "Someone phones up the casino before Green Bow Tie turns up. The someone tells them how much the casino is supposed to lose."

  "Assuming the man in the bow tie is milking the casino, who's he working for?"

  "It's got to be the Mafia; everyone knows they shake down casinos."

  Early's little eyes receded into his fleshy face. "Sounds to me like the Apache accountant Tooahyaysay has been feeding you a cock-and-bull story. Maybe he's embezzling the money and trying to cover up the loss. Maybe he's letting one of the Apaches milk the casino to bring the profits down in the ledger."

  "I don't know anyone named Tooahyaysay."

  Early grunted.

  "The last time Green Bow Tie showed up," Finn said, "I followed him out to the parking lot across from the casino. He was driving a white Suzuki jeep. There was a Taos E-Z Mart privileged-parking sticker pasted on the rear window. It ought to be child's play to track this joker down and check out the story."

  "You willing to repeat all this to the FBI?" Early asked.

  Finn shrugged. "I got nothing to lose."

  "When you're young, life is like a long slow ocean voyage and death is like the horizon; no matter how much you sail toward it, it's always a comfortable distance out there ahead of you."

  "Are you trying to tell me I could get in trouble?"

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  Walking Back the Cat

  Early leaned back in his swivel chair, which creaked under his weight. "The year The Occasional Chronicle came out with its first issue, Mark Twain said something about how the difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. If there's a grain of truth to what you're saying, trouble, Mr. Finn, is the nearly right word." He snickered in appreciation at his turn of phrase. "Tell you what—I'll lay your story on the Feds and get back to you."

  Robert Littell

  kicked
at the creature with his free foot and flailed at the water with his arms, but he couldn't free himself from the clutch of the monster. Inch by inch he was dragged deeper into the lake. Looking up as his breath ran out, he thought he saw the pinpricks from the dawn of time exploding as they struck the surface of the mystical lake.

  Robert Littell

  of them carried a makeshift stretcher, from which water still dripped. On the stretcher was a body covered by a tattered Navajo blanket. The group stopped in front of the porch. Alchise looked up at his father. "We found him floating facedown in the Sacred Lake," he said. He wiped sweat or tears away from his eyes with the sleeve of his only arm. Then he drew back the blanket so Eskeltsetle could see the dead man's face. "Someone's trying to make it look like the Strong Swimmer went and drowned," Alchise said with a bitter sneer.

  Tears spilled from Shenandoah's eyes. "Where will it end?" she whispered harshly.

  Finn came around the side of the general store and joined them on the porch. "It could have been an accident," he insisted. "He was an old man. He could have been fishing and fallen in. Where the chalk cliffs come down to the water's edge it's impossible to climb out."

  Shenandoah turned on him furiously. "Why do you think they called him the Strong Swimmer? Even at his age he could have swum across the lake and back ten times."

  "Tooahyaysay," Eskeltsetle murmured. "Wakantanka forgive me for what I have done to you."

  Shenandoah reached for Finn's arm and drew him to her and breathed into his ear. "If I'm right about Tooahyaysay," she said, "if he was murdered, you're next on the Mafia's hit list. You know things you shouldn't know." She murmured a prayer. "Oh, Sweet Jesus, who looks after the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, look after Saint Louis and Doubting Thomas and Skelt and your suffering servant, me."

  Hugging herself to control the trembling, she added by way of amen, "You bet."

  Robert Littell

  "My agent friend says we need to be discreet. His kid's team is coming up to New Jerusalem tomorrow night for a Little League play-off. There's a doubleheader. The Albuquerque team plays second. He says he'll slip across the fields and meet you in the abandoned yucca rope factory behind the stadium at ten."