In The Falling Light (28 page)

“You stop right there!” The boy’s voice was
high and frightened, and it was followed a second later by the
BOOM
of a gunshot. Jumping Crow flinched, seeing the boy
standing near the hood of the Pontiac, his gun belt in one hand,
pistol in the other. Beyond, the girl was running into the desert.
BOOM-BOOM!
The white muzzle flashes lit the night, and the
girl fell.

Jumping Crow felt the whiskey coming back
up, and he vomited into the sand as the boy turned towards him. The
Navajo wiped a palm across his lips and started to straighten,
seeing the boy’s face contorted into a mask of hatred, his lips
peeling back from his teeth in a snarl. He raised the barrel of the
pistol, and Jumping Crow lunged forward, grabbing his wrist and
slamming his larger body against the young deputy, crushing him
against the Pontiac’s fender, the pistol between them.

BOOM!
They both jumped, and Thomas
saw the boy’s eyes go wide a moment before his body went slack.
Jumping Crow released him and stepped back, and the deputy slid to
the ground, dropping onto his side next to a whitewall tire. The
belly of his shirt was a spreading darkness which quickly darkened
the sand beneath him. His eyes stared sightlessly up at the
stars.

Jumping Crow stood over him, trembling, his
own blue work shirt wet with the boy’s blood. He looked at his
palms, dark and glistening in the moonlight, and somewhere in the
distance a coyote howled.

He started to run.

San Juan County sat in the extreme southeast
of Utah, part of the “Four Corners” territory where Utah, Colorado,
Arizona and New Mexico met. It was bordered on the south by the
Navajo Nation, and was as desolate and remote as the southwest got,
a place of wind-carved canyons and strange sandstone sculptures,
deserts and mountains, sagebrush and lonely stretches of desert.
Its isolation made it attractive to Bad Men, and it was the Mormon
Church who first sent in settlers to establish the county, creating
a “point of interception” for bank and train robbers, horse
thieves, cattle rustlers and renegade Indians. It was a place which
quickly established a tradition of men rushing home – even from
church services – to get their horses and guns to take up the chase
of outlaws. In its history, gunfights between lawmen and outlaws
were far more common than in more notorious locations like
Tombstone and Dodge City.

Sheriff Edgar Bybee was proud to be a part
of that tradition, proud of the star on his chest and the big
handled six-shooter on his hip. As he drove along Route 191 in his
1936 black and white Pontiac – purchased new for him by the county
two years ago – he cocked an elbow out the window and enjoyed the
pink glory of a desert sunrise. The little town of Bluff wasn’t too
many miles down the road, and his plans included an easy day
checking in on Glen Parsons, along with a meal and a slice of apple
pie at Rawling’s Luncheonette.

At forty-three, Bybee made $1,830 a year,
plus the car, gas and a uniform allowance. In these hard times –
the papers were calling it the Great Depression – he considered
himself lucky to have a stable, good-paying job and a place to live
when so many across the country didn’t. Bybee was grateful for his
many other blessings, as well. Last night he had taken his wife to
see the new Spencer Tracey movie “Boy’s Town” in Monticello, and
after the movie he basked in her affection over ice cream. He had
the respect of his deputies, the county and the church, his
daughter Jeanie was set to marry a fine young man, and FDR was in
the White House setting things right. All was well in his
world.

Maybe it was the wink of early morning
sunlight on chrome, maybe the circling crows, but his eyes picked
out the car in an instant. A chill hit him when he saw the white
roof. Few folks out here had cars, and he knew of only one with a
white roof. Bybee slowed and turned onto the dirt trail, and a
minute later pulled to a stop behind Deputy Glen Parsons’ patrol
car. As he stepped out a cloud of crows lifted off a shape lying in
the shade near the front tire, screeching their indignation at
being disturbed in their meal, black feathers drifting down from
the abrupt departure. Sand and rock crunched under his boots as he
approached his fallen deputy, and he felt a blackness surge within
him. He crouched beside the twenty-five year old, his eyes welling
as he took the pistol from the stiff grip and checked the cylinder.
Good boy. He’d gotten off four rounds before being gut shot, and
though Bybee hoped he had hit his killer, he could see that someone
had stripped Glen naked. It was a depraved defilement which he
struggled to understand.

The sheriff sighed deeply, the sound of a
much older man, and stood, turning slowly and squinting, trying to
make sense of it. An auto stop gone wrong? Why so far down this
dirt track, why not the side of the road? Had Glen seen something
out here and pulled in? Bybee checked the ground, looking for tire
tracks and finding only the Pontiac’s. He saw the broken liquor
bottle, saw a confused shuffle of boot prints and bare feet which
didn’t add up. Inside the car he found Glen’s uniform trousers
wadded up on the front seat. In the back was a long, Navajo skirt
with a torn waistband.

As he looked around once more, a scrap of
color out among the sage and cactus caught his eye, a flutter of
movement. More crows took flight as Bybee approached, and he ached
to find a dead man, a stranger who had murdered Glen but then
succumbed to his deputy’s bullets. Instead he found himself
standing over the body of a girl lying face down. One bullet wound
low in her back was exposed, much picked-at by the crows. The other
was hidden behind a bloody shred of blouse. What in the world had
happened here? He didn’t like the answer which kept coming back to
that question.

“I trust in your strength, Lord,” he
whispered, and then began the grim task ahead of him.

An hour later he was once more on the road,
his heart heavy, his beliefs violently shaken. The Pontiac ran low
at the rear, and the tarp covering what was in the trunk couldn’t
keep out the rising smell. Bybee drove with all the windows
down.

He might have missed the man sleeping in the
shade of a rocky outcropping beside the road, had it not been for
the coyote. The bone-thin animal, patchy with mange, darted out
into the road from the right, making the sheriff stomp the brakes
and lock the tires in a smoking skid. The police cruiser came to a
stop at an angle on the highway and stalled out, Bybee gripping the
wheel so hard it could have cracked. Through the windshield not ten
feet away was the sandstone outcropping, a figure stretched out
beneath it.

The sheriff left the car in the road and
walked over, nudging the sleeper with a boot. He was a Navajo, a
farm worker or drifter by the poor condition of his clothes and
faded jacket, and as the man snorted and rolled over to face him,
Bybee saw the blood on his shirt.

The sheriff gave the man a sharp kick to the
leg, his pistol in hand. “Ease up out of there real slow, fella.”
He clicked the hammer back.
“Real
slow.”

Jumping Crow squinted at the harsh daylight
and raised a hand to shield his eyes. A white man with a gun. A
lawman. He did as he was told and climbed to his feet.

Sheriff Bybee recognized him from around the
county. Tom-something? Crow? “Turn around, hands behind your back.”
The Navajo turned slowly, and the sheriff rammed the muzzle of the
revolver hard against the base of his skull. “Gimme some trouble.
I’ll put your brains on the rock.”

Jumping Crow didn’t give him any trouble,
just put his wrists together slowly so the white man could lock on
handcuffs. Then he was pushed to the back of the police car and
shoved inside, the door slamming hard behind him.

“Gimme your name, fella,” Bybee said,
getting the Pontiac moving towards Bluff again.

“Thomas Jumping Crow.”

“You kill my deputy?”

A long pause. “Yes, sir.”

Bybee struggled not to take the Lord’s name
in vain. “He caught you doing something awful, didn’t he?”

Another pause. “No, sir.”

“Liar!” Bybee pounded the steering wheel.
“He caught you raping that girl. Then you killed him and her, and
made it up to look like something else. Right? You answer me!”

Jumping Crow began to weep. “I…I did such a
bad thing.”

“You’re flippin’ right you did, fella!”

Jumping Crow was crying harder, his head
down. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t give a gol-durn for your sorry. You
just shut up back there before I decide I’m not a decent man.”
Bybee was flushed and his hands trembled on the steering wheel, his
mind filled with the images from the deputy’s car, the crows rising
from the girl’s corpse, wondering how he would explain it all to
Glen’s folks, to his own wife. And there were darker thoughts, ones
which he forced away.

The morning desert rolled by. The sheriff
spoke in a quieter voice. “You’re gonna swing for this, Navajo.
Gonna tie the knot myself.” Utah had two approved forms of death
penalty for aggravated murder; hanging and firing squad, though
there hadn’t been a hanging since 1912. The most recent murder of a
police officer was in 1923, a Salt Lake City patrolman named David
Crowther, shot down by a man with a concealed .32 revolver. It took
three years before the shooter was tracked down in California,
returned to Utah and convicted. Bybee was a young deputy himself
then, and accompanied his sheriff on the long drive to Salt Lake to
show rural law enforcement’s support of the execution by firing
squad. They waited outside the county courthouse with a large
contingent of lawmen from across the state, while sentence was
carried out in a fenced lot out behind the building.

For a time, from 1851 to 1888, Utah had a
third method of execution; beheading. In theory it was to be
carried out by the sheriff of the county in which the condemned was
convicted, but there was no record of it actually being used
anywhere in the state. No official record, that was. In law
enforcement circles there was a well-circulated story – accepted as
fact – that in 1887 a man known as Navajo Frank was beheaded by the
Kanab County Sheriff after being convicted on a charge of “Raping a
white woman.” The weapon of execution was said to be a common axe
the sheriff retrieved from his own woodpile.

Bybee glanced up at his mirror to see the
man seated behind him. Jumping Crow was quiet, his head down,
shoulders slumped. He didn’t even deny the murder. The sheriff had
no illusions of how a jury would receive all this, for though the
white communities were neighbors with the Navajos, there was no
great love between them. In the eyes of San Juan County’s
residents, the Indians took their rightful place among the other
dusky-skinned folks; people of low moral character, ignorant, dirty
and prone to savage abandon. If there was one story which
articulated this feeling it was the well-known tale of Latigo
Gordon.

In the late 1800’s, Gordon was a cattle
company foreman who specialized in harassing farmers by burning hay
sheds and barns and even houses. When summoned to the county seat
to answer for his offenses, he took a shot at a county
commissioner’s son. He missed, and was charged with both mayhem and
attempted murder. A jury acquitted him, citing that no one had ever
impeached Gordon’s reputation before this one event, and that even
though he fired his pistol at a man, he hadn’t meant to do any
harm. As far as the mayhem charge, well, they were mostly Navajo
farms he burned. Latigo Gordon went free.

Several years later, Gordon courted a young
lady in Blanding, and received permission from her father to marry,
but not before insisting Gordon have a conversation with the
bishop.

“Have you ever killed a man?” the bishop
asked.

“I don’t think so,” Latigo replied, “unless
you count the nigger I caught bathing in a watering hole, and kept
pushing his head under until he didn’t come up again. But that
probably wouldn’t count.” Apparently it didn’t, because the wedding
went ahead as planned with the bishop himself presiding over the
ceremony.

No, there would be little sympathy for a
Navajo drifter who murdered a well-liked, church-going deputy.

Bybee’s patrol car bumped over railroad
tracks, the sign that he was within the Bluff town limits. “When we
stop,” the sheriff said, “I’m gonna move you inside to a cell, and
you’re gonna be as nice and quiet as you are right now,
understand?”

Jumping Crow said nothing, just kept his
head down.

In his law enforcement career, this was the
worst Edgar Bybee had seen. Twenty years earlier he had been a much
younger man, fighting the Kaiser in the trenches of France. The
things he had seen still lived within him, though somewhat tempered
by time and peace, wife and home and church. Still, they were awful
sights, and he had no trouble recalling them. Yet somehow, the
sight of that murdered boy and the half-naked girl out in the
sagebrush was worse. The carnage of war was to be expected, but
this…this violation… It was something beyond sin.

Glen Parsons had been a San Juan County
deputy for five years, hired by Bybee personally, as much a son as
an employee. His parents had a tidy little farm in Blanding, and
Glen could have worked the land beside his daddy if he’d wanted to,
but he chose the law instead. A single man with good prospects, he
lived in a little apartment attached to the Bluff Jail, provided by
the county. Glen was a deacon in the church, a scout leader, even
pitched in with church-sponsored food and clothing drives for the
Navajos. A good boy, a respected boy. A fine deputy.

And a rapist and a murderer.
These
words had been circling the edges of Bybee’s conscious thought like
coyotes watching a sick antelope, waiting for it to weaken before
pouncing. Now they burned before him, not to be ignored.