The Threepersons Hunt

Watchman peeled back his sleeve to look at the time and Rand took the hint. “All right, I didn’t mean to ride my hobbyhorse. But you wanted to know why it’s important to get that killer fast and get him quiet. I’ve told you.”

“I intend to find him as fast as I can, Mr. Rand. But I’m not up here to do special favors for you.”

“You find him, that’s all. I don’t care who you do it for. And make sure he doesn’t find you first. You wouldn’t be the first man he killed. He’s a son of a bitch with a rifle.”

“So I hear. If you were to send those men of yours after him—where would you tell them to start looking?”

“Now that’s the first smart question you’ve asked me. All right, I’d prowl Whiteriver. I’d send my boys into every tumbledown wickiup in town. That’s where his worthless friends hang out—that’s where his sister lives. He’ll be around there, scrounging food like a pariah dog.”

“Then I’d better get at it. Unless you had something else to say to me.”

“I’ll say this much. You’ll likely have to kill him, if he doesn’t kill you first. He’s a real old-fashioned Apache. I don’t know about the Navajos but these Apache still hang onto the old war virtues. Of course they’re not allowed to practice them any more and that’s why they spend more time drunk than working, but they value those old-time notions. When it comes to a boy like Joe Threepersons, he’s likely to figure it’s better to have a lost cause to fight for than no cause at all. He’s not going to quit and give up the first time he sees a cop get close to him.”

“I’m begi

“Look out he doesn’t give you a chance to admire his marksmanship. All right, I won’t hold you up. But I’m keeping a close eye on this—you just remember I’ve got access to a few ears down in Phoenix.”

Watchman expected his superiors wouldn’t let him forget it.

He gave Rand a crisp nod—Rand didn’t offer to shake his hand—and swung toward the Volvo.

A long time ago he’d given up arguing with men like Rand. Underneath their veneer of anthropological knowledge there beat the hearts of Custer’s kind. Whites like Rand were spoilers who couldn’t leave the land alone; their real attitude, which none of them would admit out loud, was something on the order of If God meant them to be white men He’d have made them white in the first place.

Sure. And if God meant us to fly in airplanes He’d never have invented the railroad.

The squabble between the Apaches and the Rands wasn’t fundamentally legal. It was a conflict of ways of thought. These Indians made poor farmers because to plow the ground was to stab the bosom of White Painted Woman. The Sioux Crazy Horse had said, “One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.”

Pete Porvo was watching from the corral gate when Watchman turned the car around and drove out.

3.

The plateau highway had reddish pavement as if the surrounding red earth had bled across it. Up in the foothills a welcome-to-Apacheland billboard said in detachable bright-red letters “FIRE DANGER EXTREME.”

He came down a bend past the Assembly of God mission at Cedar Creek, and then past the little Baptist mission where the subject had been schooled and married, Pastor Geo. S. LaSalle, and up a little grade with the serrates of hazy mountains making lavender teeth on the horizons. He was 175 miles out of Phoenix and it was half-past four when he came downhill on the approach to Fort Apache past the cluster of cheap new Mutual Aid Houses.

The occasional windmill … a grass valley, a stream with cottonwoods, then Fort Apache, the old Army buildings crumbling where they hadn’t been shored up for use as part of the Theodore Roosevelt Indian Boarding School (Bureau of Indian Affairs).

On up the road toward Whiteriver he passed the sawmill of the Fort Apache Timber Company, then the dusty rodeo arena and a good stand of shade trees. The mountains crowded in closer and he rolled into town past the imposing single-story building that housed the headquarters of the White Mountain Tribal Council. Beyond it squatted the Whiteriver trading post and the town’s gas station, WE DON’T LOAN TOOLS.

Along the dirt roads that spider-webbed out from the center he could see kids on donkeys lassoing dogs for practice. A fat woman in a pink squaw-dress waddled out of the trading post and climbed into the driver’s seat of a badly sprung pickup. Loose horses and colts browsed along the road shoulders.

Watchman parked in front of the trading post. Four Apaches on the trading post verandah watched the Volvo from under their high-domed hats, and behind Watchman a car approached with a gravel-crunching rumble of slow-rolling tires.

It was Pete Porvo’s white Agency car. Watchman stepped out of the Volvo.

The agency prowl car pulled over and Porvo left the engine idling when he got out.

“I wasn’t following you. Just had to come this way myself, that’s all.”

“Sure,” Watchman said. “They told me I’d find Joe’s sister up here.”

“Angelina. She ain’t seen him or heard from him.” Muted sensations of dislike floated off Porvo like heat waves. He added, “I believe she drove up to Showlow this morning. Be back tonight around eight, eight-thirty—she works over to the roadhouse nights.”

“Thanks.”

Porvo laid one arm along the roof of his car and pointed toward the council house. “You might want to talk to Mr. Kendrick, he’s the one handled Joe’s case at the trial.”

“He’s here now?”

“Got an office over there. That’s his Corvette parked around back.” Porvo slid down into the seat and spoke through the V-notch between the windshield and the open door: “I come up with anything, where’ll I find you?”

“I’ll be poking around here a while.”

“We ain’t got anything in town you could call tourist accommodations,” Porvo said overcasually, and pulled the door shut.

Watchman stood there, the sun warm on his face, watching the prowl car shimmy away faster than it needed to.

The men on the porch watched him with undisguised suspicion. They also knew. The moccasin telegraph had done its work.

He went inside the trading post because it was always the center of communication and gossip.

It was cool inside and a lot bigger than the branch trading post at Chinle where he’d grown up. Cowboy hats hung from the beam above the cash-register counter. On a pillar above a calendar which notified debtors that it was July 8 there was a carefully printed misspelled sign, BUILDING SUPPLES. Three females in bright patterned dresses stood browsing the notions shelves like the Three Bears: a fat woman about Watchman’s age and a girl about thirteen with an infant girl in her arms.

It was one of the last old-style general stores, part supermarket, part feed-and-grain, part clothing emporium, part hardware, part Woolworth’s. Some wit had hung a little wood box on the wall with a three-inch slot in its lid: DO NOT PUT MONEY IN THIS BOX.

There was a smell of leather harness. Watchman bought a pack of spearmint gum.

“You know Joe? Joe Threepersons?”

The girl behind the cash register was in her shy teens and she only shook her head, not meeting his glance. But there was a man at the bulletin board whose face swiveled when Watchman spoke. Watchman took his change and broke open a stick of gum. “You know Joe?”

“Maybe I heard of him,” the man said, and went outside on bowlegged boots with the heels run down on the outsides.

The four men on the porch were watching the door without blinking. Watchman let them have their look at him. “I guess you heard I’m looking for Joe Three-persons.”

Nobody made any answer of any kind. Watchman said, “There might be a reward,” and stepped out into the sunlight and walked toward the council house.

A breeze moved dust across his path and a boy on a horse choused a seventy-dollar cow down the street. Watchman felt the prod of the flat S&W .38 automatic against his spine where it rested under his shirt in the thin Myers holster; it was inconvenient there but it was out of sight and he didn’t want to alarm people. He had to remember not to sit back too fast in wooden chairs or the thing would thud like a bomb.