Walk a Black Wind (15 page)

Felicia said, “When the white ranchers upriver open their dams because they have too much water. The whole river is dammed, the ranchers own the water. They'll kill any man who tries to get it from them, make them share with the Indians.”

“How many Indians are there here?”

“In the area, thousands,” Paul Two Bears said. “On the Agency just two hundred and ten. It's all ours.”

He laughed as he waved an arm to encompass the whole, barren countryside, and we climbed the opposite bank. The trail wore up over the rim of the valley, and down again into a narrow arroyo where three hogans clustered. We went into the middle hogan. An old man sat on rugs against the rear wall.

“This man has come to talk, Grandfather,” Paul Two Bears said to the old man.

The old man was short and heavy. His dark brown eyes were alert in a face incredibly wrinkled and creased with ridges that looked as hard as rock. His face was the color of wet leather. He watched me with his lively eyes.

“About what you told my sister,” Felicia said, and added, “Grandfather.”

The word was awkward on her lips, strange to her, but eager, too. The old man smiled at her, and spoke to me:

“What I told her was for her.”

He had a soft, clear voice with no real accent. An educated voice. He was dressed in older Indian clothes as if he had spent his life here, but his voice had been other places. I guessed that he was very old, as everyone said.

“She's dead,” I said. “I want to find who killed her.”

“Why?” he said.

“To know that the person won't kill anyone else.”

The old man thought about it. “She was my granddaughter. It's good to find a granddaughter at my age. This one here is also my granddaughter. She is alive. Is there danger for her?”

“I don't know,” I said. “There might be.”

He nodded. “You want to know, but you must know already, or you would not be here.”

“I guess, I don't know,” I said. “Your granddaughter came looking for her father, your son, but what did she find?”

“Only she could have told you that.”

“What had her other grandfather told her?”

“That my son was her true father.”

“She knew that from someone else. Is your son alive?”

“Only my son knows if he lives,” the old man said.

“Was he killed in the escape from prison fifteen years ago?” I said.

The old man sat for a time. He didn't close his eyes, but he wasn't seeing the interior of the hogan anymore. Then his old body seemed to sit straighter.

“My name is Two Bears Walk Near, I am ninety-six years old,” he said, speaking lower but harder. “The white men do not know who I am, who we are. We live inside the invisible walls of our ways. The white men say they know who we are, but they don't, and that is good. What a white man knows he must take. He cannot help himself, it is his way to take. He took our land, our water, our freedom, and our life. He took our tribe. On the documents we are called Apache. We live as Navajo. We are one with all Indians. But we are really Comanche. A remnant lost when I was young, and the white men wrote us down as Apache, so we lost our past. They took our names, made them empty names. There was a Sioux once called Man Afraid Of His Horses. That was not his name. His name was—Young Men Are Afraid Of His Horses, because he was a greater trainer of horses that the enemy feared. But the white men stole his true name. In our language my son has a name—He Who Walked A Black Wind. His name was given on the day as a boy he dared to walk out alone toward a tornado while the rest of us hid. The white men made him ‘Blackwind,' so stole his name. What no man can steal is his life. Each man alone knows his own life, knows if he lives or only walks.”

Now he closed his eyes. Not because he was tired—I sensed that he could talk all day—but as if to listen to his own words again, and see if he had said it the way he wanted to. For him, conversation was a form of art, of literature.

“That is philosophy,” I said. “I have to deal with the smaller facts. A lost daughter wants to come home, wants a live father.”

“Perhaps home is not a good place,” the old man said, his eyes open again. “I'll tell you about my son. Another story. History this time, not philosophy, Mr. Fortune. At my age all I have are stories. Our stories are part of our whole lives, not separate works of art. There is no difference between a story and an event. Our stories are your facts, too.”

His eyes remained open, but became distant again. “Many years ago when I was a very young man, perhaps fifteen, there was nothing here but our camp on the reservation. The nearest walls and white men were at Fort Johns. We young men were angry, violent. A lot of bad things had been done to us by the settlers and soldiers. Remember, this was 1890. The Apache were still free, still at war. We young men listened to the tales of the Apache, and we were angry to be men like them. So we planned a raid on Fort Johns.

“There were only thirty-five of us, but Old Nana had once terrorized all of the Southwest with only ten Apaches. We were Comanche, better than Apache. We were very brave, very young. So we prepared our raid. The old men were against us, but they were afraid to stop us, or even talk against us. Many of them were as foolish as we were. All but one old chief. In Council he stood up and spoke against us—we were fools, children; our weapons were useless; we hadn't fought in our lives; our whole small tribe hadn't fought for twenty years; we didn't know how to fight, or what war was like; the soldiers at Fort Johns were veterans; we wouldn't even get near the Fort unseen; the only way for our tribe to survive was to keep our ways and bide our time and stay away from the white man until there was a new day. That was what he said.

“And he said that if the Council did not stop us, he would do it alone. The Council failed to agree. The raid was to go on. That one old man got on his horse and started for Fort Johns. He told us that he would warn the soldiers. He rode off alone, so we killed him. Ten of us rode after him and killed him.

“That old man was my grandfather.”

20.

“The raid failed, of course, we were all killed or captured after a few shots. We went to prison, our tribe was severely punished, almost broken, and we have been poor and weak and forgotten here ever since. But that is not my story.”

He was an artist in his way, that old man—an artist with words, the oral tradition of literature. In that hogan he had us all mesmerized, hanging on every word: Felicia, Paul Two Bears, myself. He spoke as a master writer writes, satisfying our simple need to know the end, to know what had happened, and then sweeping it away while holding us for his real story.

“My story,” he said, “is honest anger turned to black rage. We young men had an honest anger then, but we let it become a dishonest rage inside us that let me kill my own grandfather. My son, He Who Walked A Black Wind, was the same in his time. He was a boy of honest anger, good for himself and the tribe, but the white man is intelligent, he knows by intuition how to dominate, enslave, weaken. The white man sent my son to war in Korea, took his anger and made it into a rage—a rage first against strangers, then against his own family, and then against life itself. Indians are communal, one with the land. White men are not, and my son in his rage lost the land and his past and became white. He took the ways of white men, the values, and it doomed him to his fate.”

The old man made a sound in the hogan, maybe it was a sigh, I couldn't really tell. He had me paralyzed with the force of his flowing words. But he made some sound, and his voice became sad, almost tired.

“My son wanted to build among us, live with us with his wife. When she did not want this, his rage made him do the act that lost him his work with the land, and so lost him his life. A man's work is his soul. When I came from prison in my time, I too walked far from here. But I learned that you cannot defeat people by becoming as they are. I learned that my grandfather had been wise, and I came home to wait for bur time, to keep our ways ready. My son came from prison a white man, driftwood on an empty river.”

A master, the old man, bringing us all back into the hogan and the present by his change of voice, his own return to a tone that was tired and normal and in the present.

I said, “But he is alive? Somewhere?”

“He still walks,” the old man said. “I don't know where.”

“You told Francesca that?”

“Her other grandfather had already told her. A letter from my son had come to him years ago. The white grandfather perhaps liked my son, he did not tell what he knew.”

“But he told Francesca, and she came here. What did you tell her?”

“That my son did not die from that prison. Many months after, he came here. The police had been here, had looked, and had not found him. He was a man who knew the land and the wind. He came home without being seen by anyone, but he did not stay. He knew he could not stay here. He left in the night as he had come. Once he wrote from Los Angeles, and once from the place of a man he had known in the army.”

“Harmon Dunstan? His captain?”

“That was the man.”

“This was all fifteen years ago?”

He nodded. “Later, the money began. It came without words or name, but I knew he sent it. A lot of money each time. The money has been good, but granddaughters are better. I found two new granddaughters. I am glad.”

The old man stood up, almost without effort, and walked out of the hogan. No one followed him. I heard a horse walk slowly away toward the higher mesas. He was a strong old man. I looked at the young Indian, Paul Two Bears.

“Harmon Dunstan, and L.A., that's all she knew?”

“That's all we know here,” Paul Two Bears said.

“What about that money?”

Felicia said, “It came at irregular intervals. The first time in October 1957. Maybe fifteen times since. A lot of money, at least five thousand dollars each time. No pattern.”

“But no more letters. As if he was making money, but was ashamed of it, or afraid to reveal himself to anyone?”

“I don't know why,” Felicia said.

“He'd murdered a prison guard, Felicia,” I said, “and he was supposed to be dead. He had to hide. But his people here wouldn't have told on him. So why not write?”

She was silent. I thought about it. A whole new identity, maybe, and afraid to risk even a letter to Pine River? The date of that first letter with money crawled in my mind—October 1957. Where had I heard it? Then it came to me—Carl Gans! The bouncer's dying words—October, fifty-seven. Over and over.

“How long have you been here, Felicia?” I asked.

“Since the night I saw you. They wouldn't talk to me at first, until I proved who I was.”

“You've been here ever since?”

Paul Two Bears said, “She has been here. She didn't leave.”

He had guessed why I wanted to know even though I hadn't mentioned Abram Zaremba or Carl Gans yet. But what did it prove? That they would lie for her, or that it was true, take your pick.

“I like it here,” Felicia said. “I feel at home.”

“Francesca told you she liked it here, but she left.”

Paul Two Bears said, “Francesca was more restless, she had to find her father. We told her that my uncle was a lost man, that he wouldn't even want her to find him. She had to look.”

“You don't, Felicia?” I said.

“I don't know. It's not so important to me, I guess. Fran felt more rejected by Mother than I did, more lost in Dresden.”

“How much do you know about what happened in Dresden eighteen years ago? When your father came for all of you?”

“Only what they know here. Tell me, Mr. Fortune.”

I told her. I also told her about the murders of Abram Zaremba and Carl Gans. Her eyes grew wider, and darker, and more afraid. When I finished, she said:

“All because Fran was looking for our father?”

“I don't know that,” I said.

“Her scar,” she said. “Shot because of our father. I remember the nightmares. As if, somehow, Fran remembered it more. The shock of the wound in her memory, maybe.”

“Maybe,” I said.

She said, “What did happen to Fran, Mr. Fortune?”

“There are a lot of possibilities still,” I said. “She went to Harmon Dunstan, and then she moved on. I think she picked up a fifteen-year-old trail. The trail of a man supposed to be dead, and with a prison guard murder hanging over his head. A fugitive, Felicia, hiding one way or another. How would he know who she was? Just some girl trailing him. And even if he did know her, what could she have meant to him by now?”

“You think he …? To stay hidden? No!”

“Maybe her murder was more to do with Abram Zaremba, and the lawyer Mark Leland, and the Black Mountain Lake project, after all. I don't know,” I said. “Or there could be someone else who doesn't want Ralph Blackwind found.”

Felicia said, “I'm afraid. Afraid to know.”

“We'll have to find him before we know anything,” I said. I looked at Paul Two Bears. “What does he look like, Two Bears?”

“I never saw him,” the youth said. He took a small snapshot from his jacket. “My father had this picture. It's our only one, and it's twenty years old or more.”

It was a photo of a youth in Levi's, boots and stetson, standing beside a pinto pony. The wide brim shaded his face, and it was hard to tell how dark he was. Beside the horse, he seemed about five-feet-seven-or-eight, and his skin was shining smooth. He resembled none of the men I knew in the case, but twenty hard years had passed. A lot had happened to Ralph Blackwind, but you can usually see the man of forty in the youth of twenty-two or so.

Usually, but not always, no. Some men change a great deal between twenty and forty, especially with hard living and weight, and the young Indian in the photo was whip thin. Still, if he was anyone I knew, there should have been a hint at least, a feeling. Unless—?