There could have been any number of explanations but if you had to put your money on just one of them it had to be Angelina’s theory. From that it followed that Joe was not hiding up. He wasn’t the quarry, he was the hunter; he wouldn’t disappear into a hidden lair, he’d come out. He’d come out shooting.

The incestuousness of the past was disturbing: all the people, ostensibly enemies, who kept crossing paths in the Threepersons case. Kendrick marrying Charlie Rand’s ex-wife. Calisher maybe sleeping with Joe’s wife. Harlan Natagee, the alleged sorcerer, sending his red-power thugs out to harass Rand while Rand allegedly sent his own thugs to rifle Kendrick’s files. Angelina seeing Joe and Maria at Cibecue when Joe insisted he had been shooting Ross Calisher in a place two hours’ drive from there. Boundaries and water rights; reds and whites. Maria: levelheaded and ambitious, or tart and fast as a doxy? Joe Threepersons: a red man with a white job, and the victim of both worlds. It was taking a long time to accrete an impression of Joe: a young man gone to seed, clinging to the hem of hope and watching the fabric crumble away upon the death of Maria and Joe Junior. A savage killer bent on brutal revenge? Or a confused man hiding in the mountains battling his own conscience?

Victorio sat down and pushed a fresh beer in front of him. “I hate a noisy silence.”

Pools of poor light fell into the room from the nicked wall-lamps and the red discs in the ceiling. The place was gloomy and empty with a stale late-afternoon silence.

“It comes down to money,” Victorio said. “You see that. The sixty-five thousand.”

“You’re talking about Charles Rand, aren’t you.”

“Anybody else around here got that kind of money? Don’t you see how it fits together, man?”

Watchman considered the beer. “If your people are anything like my people they don’t talk about how much money they’ve got salted away. Unless they haven’t got any, then you hear about it. People like Will Luxan, Harlan Natagee, that medicine man, what’s his name?”

“Rufus Limita?”

Watchman nodded. “They’ve probably got cash socked away somewhere. Not every red man on a Reservation is dirt poor. It’s bad form to show it, that’s all.”

“How come you don’t want to believe it’s Rand? It’s got to be Rand, damn it.” Victorio’s head moved quickly with his impatient talk; strands of black hair had come loose of his headband and fell over his eye.

Watchman said, “Think about it. If the money man was Charles Rand he’d hardly choose Dwight Kendrick to be his executor.”

Victorio’s eyes brightened and then shifted away; he scowled. “God knows I’d love to see something pinned on that son of a bitch Rand.” Victorio drained his beer and wiped his upper lip. “Maybe he found Calisher in the wrong bed. Gwen slept around.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“God knows. You know how rumors are.”

“She was having an affair with Kendrick before she divorced Rand, I gather.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. The first I knew of it was after she got the divorce. After that Kendrick started dating her, and they got married about a year or a year and a half later. Actually I don’t think Rand knew about it at the time. But what’s that got to do with this? Gwen could have been sleeping with Calisher too.”

“A little while ago you were just as eager to see Joe’s head in that basket.”

Victorio grinned. “Yeah, I guess I was.”

“How far would you go to help?”

“Help what? Find Joe or clear him?”

“One may lead to the other.”

Victorio shook his head. “I don’t know any more about it than you do but I guess I’d be willing to try. I keep remembering that yarn you heard about my car being down there that morning in front of Maria’s house. If Joe heard the same yarn you heard it still could be me he’s gunning for.” He felt the knot of his necktie and poked his jaw forward to stretch his throat against his collar.

Watchman pushed his chair back and stood. “Let’s go talk to Jimmy Oto.”

“Me?”

“He knows you.”

“I doubt that means much. You ever see a bulldozer shoving rocks over military graves in the movies? That’s Jimmy.”

“I’m not asking you to hold my hand. But he might say something to you that he wouldn’t say to me.”

“I doubt it. But if you say so.”

9.

Watchman filled the Volvo at Will Luxan’s pumps and Victorio told him where to drive: back into Whiteriver and then left up a dirt-road fork. “You may not believe it when you see where he lives. It’s where the local derelicts go when they go slumming.”

“Things weren’t all that rich where I grew up, either.”

Victorio went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Babies dying with sores on their mouths. You know eight Apaches have starved to death on this Reservation in the past ten years and five of them lived up here in Cuncon. They get in hock to the trading post, up to their asses, and once they get too far in the hole the store won’t let them buy anything except for cash. It used to be you could always count on your relatives but that was before welfare. And the old ones that haven’t got any family left and can’t read the welfare forms to fill them out—they’re the ones you find by the smell. Man it breaks your heart. The Indian Bureau gets that damned appropriation from Congress every year, a thousand dollars for every Indian in the country, and it all ends up in some white crook’s pocket and these people starve to death. You know the life expectancy down here? Forty-six years.”

“That’s some better than the Navajos.”

“Cuncon,” Victorio said. “You know what Cuncon means?”

“No.”

“Big shit.” Victorio laughed out of the side of his mouth. “No shit. It means big shit. Except in the anthropology books, they call it large feces.”

“Sure.”

“In the old days the people up there shat big turds because they had plenty to eat. The soil was damned good, they had all kinds of corn and pumpkins and stuff. But that was because they didn’t farm it full time. Right now you can’t even grow cactus up there, it’s right down to sand and bedrock. But those Twagaidn clans never moved away from there.” Victorio was talking from the gut and his speech was beginning to lose its veneer of law-school polish; the cadences were older, he sounded more like an Apache.

He seemed to realize it; he twisted the side of his mouth defensively. “Anyhow you want to look out when we get out of the car. It’s the kind of dump where you can end up in a garbage can with a pleat in your skull.”

The road narrowed and deteriorated. Past the last valley farms it climbed into dry hills. It went north for a mile, the car’s elongated shadow racing alongside, and then turned past the back of a hogback ridge until the Volvo lost the race and the shadow was out ahead. “Jesus,” Victorio said, “you think this heap’s going to hold together?”

“I pray a lot about that. It’s beginning to sound like a busted shock absorber to me.”

The road went through a roller-coaster dip and climbed between the shoulders of eroded hills; half a mile farther it entered a narrow climbing canyon, clinging to a shelf against one steep wall.

“Next bend’s a killer, you might want to tap your horn.”

The road curled slowly along the side of the cliff and swung abruptly out of sight three hundred yards ahead. Watchman shifted down into second. Victorio pointed past him to the left. “You can see Cuncon down there now.”

Beyond the bend the opposite ridge had crumbled away in prehistoric time, leaving a wide cut through which could be seen a tilted dusty table of earth. Maybe a dozen wickiups were scattered around; their condition looked wretched. It seemed ten degrees hotter up here but that was probably visual, the reflex association of heat with barren dust: nothing bigger than weeds grew among the rocks anywhere in sight.