The Threepersons Hunt

Luxan came outside and pulled the door shut behind him. It was a slight and he meant it to be noticed. “I know why you are here.”

His speech had the liquid gutteral r’s of the older Indian generation. He was a man who would not think it archaic to state that he had talked with the sun and the earth and the river and they had told him not to cooperate with the white-Indian outsider.

Watchman said, “Grandfather, I’d like to help your nephew Joe.”

“I am no longer an uncle to this one. I can’t help you.”

“I understand he always turns to you when he needs wise counsel.”

“I have told him many years ago not to come here any more times.”

“He might come to you now, Grandfather. He has no one else. His wife is dead.”

“Yes I know that. She was witched, I hear.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“It is what they say.”

“Who would want to throw a spell on Joe’s wife?”

“I don’t know. But I heard she sure got real sick before she went out in that car.”

“Do you think Joe will come back here now?”

“I don’t know what that one might do.” Luxan’s face hardened like dark polished wood. “But he would be a fool to come here. He would know it is where they look first.”

“Where else would he go?”

“The whole world of mountains and aeserts is out there.” Luxan’s big lips went all shapes when he talked. His hair had distributed a powdering of dandruff on the shoulders of his dark satiny shirt.

Beyond the house Watchman saw a teen-age boy on a donkey driving three cows in toward the little corral in the woods. A magpie pecked at lice on the back of one of the cows.

Luxan said, “I can see what is in your head. If you wish to see if he is in my house you can come look.”

It was a challenge and Watchman did not turn it down out of politeness. He followed the old man inside. Luxan moved with deliberate strength; age had not hurt his coordination.

The front room on the right was a living room, twelve by fourteen. The furniture was what you could buy in the trading post: inexpensive, functional. There were two old stuffed chairs in need of reupholstering. The room had no closets and no occupants and Watchman followed Luxan out of it across the hall into the other front room. There were two bunks and some children’s wooden furniture. Watchman opened the closet and got the smell of old sneakers. He said, “I guess you’re a good businessman.”

“I work hard and I have a great many brothers-in-law.”

There was another children’s room, two double-deck bunks in it and a litter of clothes and wooden toys. Opposite it was a slightly larger bedroom with a straw tick on the floor. Watchman looked in both closets and the bathroom. Across the hall was another empty bathroom and then Luxan showed him the utility room with its oil burner and water heater, and after that the corridor emptied into a kitchen that ran the width of the back of the house.

The twelve-year-old boy and a younger brother sat at a chrome dinette table playing checkers. A middle-aged woman with the lean handsomeness of a grande dame stood beside the stove chopping vegetables into a colander. A girl about fourteen, with the same face as the girl in the roadhouse but no lipstick, was reading a book at a small wooden table in the far corner. There was a small refrigerator and a sink and a lot of open shelves, and the whole back wall was windows looking out upon arid fields that rolled away beyond the fringe of cottonwood trees.

“It’s a very fine house, Grandfather.”

Luxan was the only person in the room who acknowledged that Watchman existed. All the others including Luxan’s wife were staring at fixed points on the walls or the floors. The twelve-year-old boy was continuously raking the hair back from his forehead; with an impatient gesture he slammed a checker across the board and said, “King me,” and cleared his throat because his voice was changing.

“Now I have told you and your own eyes have told you he is not here,” Luxan said.

The older boy who had brought the cows in came through the back door and stopped in his tracks to lay a narrowed stare against Watchman. He didn’t speak at all.

Watchman said, “It is possible you’ll see Joe, or hear from him.”

“It is possible.” Luxan conceded nothing.

“He ought to give himself to me. It will be bad for him if we have to find him ourselves.”

“He has made his trouble,” Luxan said. “Let him get out of it by himself.”

“Why have you turned against him, Grandfather?”

“I’ll tell you, men get bad sometimes. Sometimes they’re witched bad and sometimes they just get bad.”

“And Joe got bad, and you wash your hands of him.”

He wasn’t sure Luxan understood the idiom. But Luxan said, “Joe never wanted to help anybody, he was never any good to his own clan. He made a lot of fights and finally he didn’t have any friends around here at all.”

“That when he took the job on the Anglo ranch?”

“Around that time, I think.”

“And you haven’t talked to him since then?”

“I saw him one time, maybe two times when they arrested him that time. Before he went away to the prison.”

“But not since then.”

“I always told him he shouldn’t get drunk from too much beer. But he stopped listening. When a man stops listening to his elders there isn’t anything more they can do for him. He has his trouble, we all know this—but he has to find his own way out of it this time.”

Puritanical righteousness and forgiving compassion made a strange admixture in the old man. Watchman thanked him and made his way out of the house, feeling no closer to the fugitive Joe than he’d felt twelve hours ago.

3.

Driving to the mission he passed the Agency cop Pete Porvo. Porvo’s prowl car was headed the opposite way and he didn’t wave when Watchman passed him; there was a nod but not a smile of greeting.

The mission was right on the road below Cedar Creek. Watchman braked to avoid hitting a pariah dog on the oil-smudged road. He turned around and parked facing Whiteriver and when he got out two women were watching him: an Apache, her baby riding on a cradleboard on her back, and a big Anglo woman in olive corduroy trousers too large for her buttocks.

“Mrs. LaSalle?”

“Yes?…”

“My name’s Watchman. I wonder if the pastor’s around.”

“He just went to tape up the garden hose. You’ll find him in the workshop.” She shaded her eyes and pointed the way.

It was summer vacation and there were no children around the mission school. It was a little greener than the ones up on the Navajo Reservation but the mock-adobe architecture, the severity of it, was enough of a reminder to put the taste of brass on Watchman’s tongue. These were the schools where Indian kids were flogged for acting like Indians instead of whites. The missionaries were maybe a little less weak and venal and corrupt than their predecessors but they still believed you had to drill private notions of greed into Indians before they could become Christians and be saved.

George LaSalle was binding fricton tape around the hose nozzle like a tourniquet. Watchman started talking and then listened, and found LaSalle to be a vigorous old zealot filled with a lot of prejudicial nonsense from the Rousseau lexicon of antiquated idealism: “I understand my Inyans, you see.”

LaSalle evidently had been born unawares and his many years’ experience among the simple savages hadn’t taught him anything. He was the sort of white man who indulged in self-flagellating atonement for the sins of his ancestors against Indians but his atonement took the form of insensitive charities and terrible advice. The key to the behavior of men like LaSalle was their conviction that the tribes were their personal wards.

“I tried to set him on the straight and narrow, God knows. But that boy’s a pipperoo, I swan. A jim-dandy horseman, by the way—I kept telling him, if he only applied himself he’d be a crackerjack rodeo performer.”