The Threepersons Hunt

“Actually they’re not related. Will Luxan was an old buddy of Joe’s old man. Luxan comes from someplace way over in New Mexico but he’s lived here maybe forty years. He sort of got adopted by Joe’s grandfather. Later on he married into the tribe. They call him Tio Will but he’s nobody’s real uncle. Incidentally Joe’s old man was a San Carlos, he moved up here when he married into the clan here.”

“So Maria belonged to Joe’s father’s clan and that’s why they weren’t supposed to marry each other?”

“Yeah. What are you, Hopi?”

“Navajo.”

“Then you’ve got the same setup.”

“More or less. You think there might be a chance Joe would head for his in-laws’ in San Carlos?”

“I doubt it. They never could stand him.”

“You must have been soft on Maria Poinsenay,” Watchman said; he wanted it out in the open.

“She was pretty deep in my guts, yeah.”

“But she married Joe.”

“Joe married her. He was a big hero back from the Army and I was way the hell down in Tucson at law school.”

“Are you San Carlos?”

“No, I’m White Mountain but there’s branches of my clans down on the San Carlos and I used to work down there summers. I met her the summer before Joe came back from the Army.”

“But then you had to go back to law school and he moved in on her.”

“Man, I wish I knew how in hell he ever forced her into it.”

“Forced her?”

“Well I mean she wasn’t stupid. Picking him over me?” It was evident Victorio still had a few things to learn about the ways of the human heart. Self-consciously he adjusted the hang of his suit jacket.

“Tell me about Joe. What’s he like? How does his mind work?”

“It doesn’t. He’s a reacter. Lets his feelings push him around like a wind pushing a tumbleweed.” Victorio seemed pleased with the image; he paused to savor it. “He was always getting into fights over nothing at all. Getting drunk and beating up on people if they looked at him cross-eyed.”

“All that stopped after he got married, didn’t it?”

“I guess Maria kept him in line. Like I said she was pretty bright. She’d know how to keep him out of jail.” Rage began to simmer at his lower lids again.

Watchman said, “She died on the highway and the next day Joe broke out of Florence. Now there’s got to be a co

“Sure. He got the news and went berserk. It’s not the first time. It never took much to make him fly off the handle—you never saw a temper like that son of a bitch has got. I’ve still got a scar on my arm where he went through my shirt with a busted beer bottle.”

“What was the fight about?”

“You’d have to ask him. I was having a beer minding my own business and all of a sudden he was all over me.”

“Were you both dating Maria then?”

“I had the inside track. Maybe that was what set him off. God knows what goes on inside that pea-brain of his.”

Watchman didn’t ask who’d won the fight. Victorio didn’t look like much of a brawler.

Watchman said, “All right, let’s say he went berserk. That prison breakout was pretty well pla

“All I can tell you is try Will Luxan. Joe always thought the world of Uncle Will. Other than that I’ve got no ideas. For all I know he’s halfway to China now—either that or trying to rig up a bomb to blow up the prison with. I wouldn’t put that past him.”

“It sounds a mite fanciful.”

“When Joe gets mad he hits anything within reach.”

“I’ll bear that in mind. Who else knew him well?”

“Oh all kinds of people, I guess. Jimmy Oto, he’s still around Whiteriver. They used to hang out together at the roadhouse just after Joe got out of the Army. That old mealymouth LaSalle over at the mission might give you an item or two, but whatever he tells you, use a grain of salt. The old bastard’s still somewhere in the Victorian age, he’ll tell you all about the plight of the noble savage. You talked to Angelina yet?”

“His sister? No. I understand she’s in Showlow.”

“She’ll be back by after-supper drinks time. She works at the roadhouse. You ought to treat her with the kind of respect you’d show a skittish mustang filly.”

“Why? What’s wrong with her?”

“In that family they’re all a little crazy in the head. Joe’s brother was killed in Korea going up against a whole Red Chinese battalion single-handed with a Browning automatic rifle. He got the Medal of Honor for it but he also got dead.”

“What does Angelina do over there? Wait tables?”

“A little of everything. She sings a song now and then, she serves beer and setups, she runs the cash register. Sometimes she just sits in the corner. Hell I don’t know. The place belongs to Will Luxan and I guess he’d keep her on whatever she did. He kind of feels obligated to the family.”

“I understand she’s not married.”

“She married a white man back, oh, six-seven years ago. It didn’t take, they got divorced maybe six months later. She’d be a good-looker if she put some weight on, but every man I know of that’s tried to date her up ended up with a black eye sooner or later. Anyhow nobody wants to marry into that clan, they haven’t got two pesos to rub together. Joe and Angelina, they’re the last of the line.”

The thought made Victorio grin. “And high time too.” Then his smile coagulated. “Listen, I’d kind of like for Joe to get found, so if you need a hand you just let me know. You’ll find it’s a taut town up here, most folks don’t like to hear any questions about anything at all from outsiders. I’ll see if I can help offset that a little.”

“Thanks,” Watchman said. Then he went out.

7.

Watchman had the feeling there was going to be no way to untangle the Threepersons chase from the water dispute. Water was the basis for survival in this country—and Joe Threepersons was astraddle the whole mess: an Apache who’d worked for the Rand interests, a Reservation Indian who’d been convicted of murdering the Rand foreman.

This Reservation fell away from northeast to southwest. From the high escarpment of the Mogollon Rim it plunged through timbered mountain country of streams and lakes; down through scrubby hills; across these valleys where Whiteriver and Fort Apache squatted in the dust; out along red-clay plateaus, then down the steep pitch of the Salt River Canyon. Beyond that river was the San Carlos which was a separate Apache Reservation of an area some two hundred thousand acres larger than the Fort Apache Reservation; but the San Carlos was poor land mostly, if not desert then something close to it. The fortunes of the Arizona Apache tribes were dependent mainly upon the natural wealth of the White Mountain high country: the timber, the grass and above all the water.

But across the Reservation boundary the Anglo ranchers had drilled their wells, depleted the water-table and cut off the flow into the string of reservoirs that not only gave the Apaches a lucrative recreational enterprise but stored up water for all the farm country below. Without irrigation from the lakes, the farms would blow away like Okie acres in the dust bowl.

By now half the Apache lakes were cracked mud flats with shallow ponds in their centers. Stunted fields of corn and greens stood withered under the sun and if the newspapers were right it would be the worst crop year in twenty-five years on the Fort Apache Reservation, come harvest time.

The Rands claimed the Indians weren’t making good use of the water when they did have it. It was true enough. Watchman had seen it on the Navajo Reservation and it was the same thing here: the grandsons of Cochise and Geronimo were not farmers, they hadn’t been born to the soil and even under expert agricultural guidance they still managed to ruin half the land they farmed by neglecting to terrace it, by refusing to rotate crops and by stripping it for planting so that the midsummer cloudbursts inevitably scraped off all the topsoil and left the Apache farmer with nothing but eroded rock shelves and sand and clay. But they were learning. It took time: you didn’t make farmers into Indians in two generations and it wasn’t realistic to expect the reverse to happen any faster.