The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (42 page)

“I’ve heard of the Chisum Trail all my life,” she said.

“There are two of them,
” I said, “
one named after
a Chisholm spelled C-h-i-s-h-o-l-m
and one after John Chisum, who was a fascinating character.”

“How so?”

“He was in Texas during the Civil War so he was allied with the Confe
de
racy. But he freed all his slaves.”

“
He had to after the war.
”

“
He did it
on the day the war began.
Including one
he bought from someone passing through on the way to California because he didn’t like the way her owner was treating her. He
sold
beef to the Confederacy for feeding the
rebel
soldiers but kept the Confederate money just long enough to buy more cattle. So he didn’t suffer financial ruin when the war ended because his wealth was in cattle instead of Confederate money.”

“It sounds like he knew the Confederacy was going to lose right from the beginning. Do his descendants still live in Lincoln County?”

I smile
d
at her.
“If I didn’t know you were from Canada, I might think you were one of them. He was a handsome man with
a
delicate small mouth like yours
.”

She laughed. “I suspect his descendents don’t have my coloring.”

“You’re probably right. He had brown eyes, and yours are a dazzling green.”

“I meant my skin color.”

“I suspect all his descendents have your skin color.”

She paused in thought.
“His only children came from the slave women he owned?”

“They came from his wife.
He married the slave he bought from the person going to California. Her name was Jensie.
They had two daughters, so none of his descendents are named Chisum.“

We turned to li
ght
chit
chat over desert
until she said, “Where do you see this going.”

“Well, I’m thinking maybe a second slice of
pastel de tres leches
and another glass of Gruet.”

She gave me an indulgent smile. “I meant us, Hubie.”

“I like us,” I said.

“We haven’t been tested,” she said.

“Do we need a blood test? I didn’t think they did that anymore.”

She laughed. “I like your sense of humor and your iconoclastic attitude, but…”

“But what?”

“This is our third date, and we haven’t been out in public.”

I pointed down to my cast. “When this thing is o
f
f, I plan to show you off all over town.”

“Some people may not ople maylike that.”

“I understand that. With all the paranoid feelings about immigrants, some people may object to my dating a Canadian, but I say to them in the lingo of your national sport, go puck yourself.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

I nodded.

“But you’re not going to acknowledge it.”

“It doesn’t deserve acknowledging.”

“I like you a lot, Hubert Schuze.”

“And I like you a lot, Sharice
Clarke
.”

The
silk
runner was not big enough to cover a Scrabble board, so I cleared the table and brought the board out
. She was trouncing me as easily as she did at her house, but
I had hope. T
here was
a
‘t’
in a long vertical word, and I had
a ‘p’
to put immediately to its left
and an ‘o’ and
a ‘y’ and
some of the other letters required for ‘pterodactyl’. But I never got all the letters I needed. What I did manage to do was spell ‘ptomaine’.

It was a pyrrhic
victory.

44

“So
Carlos Campos Castillo
skipped town to avoid the wrath of
Alonso Castillo Maldonado
.”

“Either that,” I said, “or
Hector Campos Gomez
skipped town to avoid the wrath of
Jesus Zaragosa Padilla
.”

“Don’t confuse me
,”
Susannah said
.
“
I’m going to call
Carlos Campos Castillo
‘The Dead G
uy
’
and
Alonso Castillo Maldonado
‘The
Hunting
G
uide
’
.”

“We do
n’t know that Carlos Campos is The Dead G
uy.”

“Maybe not, but he’s the leading candidate
. He provides just what we needed to solve the dilemma.”

“
Yeah,” I said, “someone who’
s from La Reina which explains why he coul
d
have participated with the local P
e
ni
t
ente
s
. And he
had already left town for another reason
which explains why no one is looking
for
him.
”

I thought about that for a minute then said, “
But the reason he left was
because
he was
afraid The
Hunting
Guide
was going to take
r
evenge on him f
or the exploding firewood. Given that,
why
would
he come back?”

“It’s obvious, Hubie. The
Hunting
Guide must have promised
The Dead Guy
he wouldn’t harm him, sort of given him amnesty.”

“Why would T
he
Hunting
Guide do that? I met him, remember? He doesn’t look like the sort of guy who forgives and forgets. And the local sheriff described him as the meanest
hombre
in town. So The Dead Guy must have given The
Hunting
Guide money, the deed to s
ome property,
water rights or
something. There had to be a
quid pro quo
.”

Her shoulders twitched. “Don’t use that awful phrase.
Every
time I hear it
,
I picture Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector.
”

“Okay, I’ll just say they struck a deal. But what was it?”

“Easy. The
Hunting
Guide promised not to take revenge. And The Dead Guy promised to re-enact the Crucifixion.”

“
Being crucified i
s a pretty drastic thing to do just to get The
Hunting
Guide’s forgiveness.”

“Not if The Dead Guy was already one of the Penitentes, a member in good standing, so to speak. Maybe he genuinely wanted forgiveness, not just from The
Hunting
Guide, but from God for all his sins.”

I had to admit her theory made sense. But that’s all it was – a theory. There was not a single fact to back it up.

I had the topo map in my lap, but didn’t really need it.
By this point,
I knew every dune and boulder by
both their Christian names and their
apellido
s
.

We reached the spot from which I had twice been lowered over the cliff
.
From there, t
he course I had taken on foot that ended when I fell and sprained my ankle was chosen because it was a straight line to La Reina. A straight line may be the shortest
, but it isn’t necessarily drivable. I had walked between boulders and some sturdy junipers.

So I had to start
navigating again
at that point because
Susannah had to find ground suitable for
the
truck.
I had my head turned looking at
Ce
r
ro Roto
with a protractor in my hand to make a better estimate of the angle when she slammed on the brakes and yelled, “I don’t believe it!”

I turned in my seat and looked through the windshield at a beat up old Bronco
. I
t was one of the most
beautiful sights I’d ever seen.

“You were right, Hubie.
It wasn’t stolen. It was just driven away.”

We were only two hundred yards away from the rim, but in a small depression.

“If I had walked this way, I would have avoided spraining my ankle and all the other stuff that happened.”

“You can’t change fate, Hubie. And you probably wouldn’t want to even if you could. If you hadn’t chipped your tooth, you wouldn’t have seen Sharice until your next regular check-up, and by then she might have met someone else.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“So this is what you thought we would find. This was your hunch.”

“It was my hunch, but I wasn’t sure we would find it. There
’
s
a lot of open territory up here. We could’ve missed it.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

She shut off t
he truck
and w
alked
to the Bronco. It looked unchanged. The keys were in it. I opened the door.

“Wait,” she said. “Don’t touch anything. There could be clues in there.”

“What kind of clues?”

“Fingerprints, a thread from a garment, a crumb of food
,
anything.”

“Anything is right. It’s
over thirty years old. There are probably enough threads in there to weave a blanket and enough food crumbs to feed a rugby team. And how would we find and collect them? We
’
re not CIS profe
s
sionals.”