The Threepersons Hunt

In a land of scarce rainfall water meant everything: without it land was valueless and therefore water was more valuable than the land itself. But in the century of the Indian Bureau the water rights of the western tribes had been reduced steadily and both the rights and the water had evaporated.

The Anglos who believed in things written on paper had the words in their favor. The treaties by which the Indians occupied their Reservations had been drawn up a century ago in a time when it had not occurred to anybody to specify any relationship between the land itself and the water that fed it. Water rights were not mentioned in the treaties or the government-tribe agreements or the Acts of Congress which shaped the legal boundaries of Federal-Indian relationships. It was on the strength of these omissions that the Rands based their arguments: there was no mention of Indian water rights in any of the treaty agreements and therefore, if rights were not mentioned, then there were no rights.

To Rand the issues were financial. To the tribe they were life-or-death. It was possible the Calisher murder had nothing to do with water rights but the complications which now ramified from it had everything to do with them. The tribe would aid and abet Joe Threepersons not merely because he was a member of the tribe but also because his enemies and the tribe’s enemies were the same. And if by hampering white justice the tribe could help put Charles Rand’s tail in a crack, the tribe would make a lot of sacrifices to see that happen.

What it meant, in the end, was that Joe Threepersons was going to be damned hard to find.

CHAPTER FOUR

1.

THE WIND blew the smell of exhaust across the apron of the Shell station.

It was a two-stall garage with one pit and a stall without a lift, a concrete floor with a grease-clogged center drain. A can of kerosene stood in the front corner with a potato stuck over its spout. There was only one man on duty and all Watchman could see of him was his bowed back and legs. The man’s head was out of sight under the yawning hood of a half-ruined Ranchero.

Fifty yards north of the station stood the roadhouse, the Broken Arrow, set back behind its dusty parking lot. It was a big rectangle sided with brown boards; there were no windows at all. The name of the place was painted in a faded crescent across the movie-set false front and an illuminated Coors Beer sign overhung the front door. The place had a forbidding aspect, like a slaughterhouse: the grim solid walls without windows gave the impression someone was ashamed of what went on inside.

It had to be fairly new because it had only been legal to sell whiskey on Reservations for a few years but the Broken Arrow looked as if it had stood there as long and as immutably as the mountains behind it.

Watchman got tired of waiting and went inside the stall to show himself.

“Be with you in a sec.” The man was touching a bare finger to the engine block—testing the cylinders by the old, but still best, method. If an engine is missing on one cylinder, touch a hand to each cylinder. The one that isn’t hot is the faulty one. But you need tough skin.

“I’m all alone here right now. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“It’s all right. I’m looking for Will Luxan.”

The mechanic looked up over his shoulder. A chinless youth with inquisitive eyes. “He just left. He’s either over at the Arrow or you find him home, house back there in the trees.”

Watchman thanked him and asked him to fill the Volvo and check under the hood when he had a minute. He left the mechanic in communion with the Ranchero engine and walked across the pebbled dust toward the roadhouse. The sun was dropping toward the Salt River district and on the red macadam road the inbound traffic was heavier than it had been. The automatic jabbed his spine when he went up the porch steps to the brown door.

The Broken Arrow had red lenses in the ceiling and fake oil lamps along the walls and old posters of Jeff Chandler and Jimmy Stewart fighting the Indian wars. It was a low-budget imitation of a nightclub with short picnic tables and benches in place of booths, and rickety wooden stools along the bar. There was a little bandstand raised eight inches off the floor at the far end of the room beyond the end of the plank bar which ran two-thirds the length of the right-hand wall. The place was redolent of stale beer and tobacco smoke. It was too dark to tell how clean or filthy it might be.

Gradually his eyes adjusted and peopled the room with five-drinkers at the bar, two men at a back table, a one-armed Apache tending bar and a girl at the register in a long black dress with a white imitation-lace apron.

She had very wide cheeks and the vivid lipstick didn’t suit her. Watchman asked her about Luxan and she pretended she hadn’t heard him. He asked again and she said, “He ain’t here.”

“Then I’ll try his house.” He began to turn away.

“No …”

“Why? Isn’t he home?”

Her face closed up, intransigent in bitterness. “You just got to bother him, don’t you.”

“You think he’s got something to hide?”

“Oh for God’s sake.” Irritably she kicked the long skirt away from her feet with a backward flick of her heel. She couldn’t have been much more than eighteen.

“What makes you think I’m going to make trouble for him?”

“I heard about you,” she said.

“What did you hear?”

“Nothin’.” The surly downward glance; now she was a fourteen-year-old, the cabaret costume and lipstick forgotten because she was rattled.

“What are you to Mr. Luxan?” He threw in the mister to reassure her.

“Daughter. What difference that make to you?”

“Well I don’t mean your daddy any harm.”

“That ain’t the way I heard.”

“Take my word for it.” He left the place, thinking at least she had spunk; sense always came later.

2.

In Indian society there was fierce competition for status and prestige; success was important and was measured in symbols or in possessions. Ambition was not frowned upon but greed was—you found no moneylenders within the tribes and that was what enabled white traders to get rich because they were the only ones who charged interest for money borrowed.

The size of Will Luxan’s house was a surprise and he hadn’t made that kind of money by amassing capital and lending it out. Therefore he was a man of imagination and a hard worker. The house was half again the size of any house Watchman had seen in the town proper. It probably had four bedrooms and more than one bathroom.

It was washed in pink stucco and had a red roof of half-round tiles. A degree of care had been used in situating it; the big old trees that crowded up close against it had been there a lot longer than the house had. Luxan had his own private cottonwood grove here.

Four cars browsed in the driveway, none of higher rank than a three-year-old Pontiac sedan. There was a basketball on a patch of grass in the yard and a swing hung from a cottonwood limb, made of a length of rope and an old truck tire. A nondescript but well-fed puppy wagged its tail at Watchman. From the profusion of cars and other evidence he judged Luxan had a sizable number of children.

A boy of eleven or twelve answered his knock and Watchman asked if Mr. Luxan was home. Through the open hallway he could smell beef cooking. The boy told him to wait here and Watchman winced at the boy’s show of dislike. Evidently the moccasin telegraph had him confused with the boogie man.

Luxan’s appearance was anticlimactic. He wore baggy pants cinched by a belt at the top, like a mail sack; he smelled of the gasoline he had used to wash the grease off his hands. He was a big man, at least sixty years old, twenty pounds overweight and hair shot with grey. A sprig of hair stood up disobediently at the back of his head, glistening with the water with which he’d tried to stick it down.