The Long Night of Winchell Dear

by Robert James Waller

  When Winchell Dear acquired the Two Pair by bluffing on exactly that hand against a foolish young rancher named Rick Cobbler, the Indian had been living back in Diablo Canyon for six months. The first Winchell had heard about him came from the rancher who leased grazing rights on the Two Pair.

  “You’re aware of the Indian, aren’t you?” Jack Stark had asked.

  “What Indian?”

  “Lives in the canyon at the rear of your place, six miles back. Been there for a while, not sure how long; probably’s got legal squatter’s rights by now, though I doubt if that’s of much concern to him. Ol’ Fayette or Fayette junior, either one, would have run him off, pronto, ándale. But young Rick didn’t seem to care who came and went on the land.”

  “How’s he get by out there, the Indian?” Winchell asked, picking up on the indirect criticism Jack Stark was leveling at him.

  “Don’t know. I have suspicions he takes a yearling now and then. The boys tell me some eagle feathers have been turning up at the arts and crafts mall downtown, but nobody’s saying where they’re coming from, and I haven’t noticed any Mexican eagles on the cliffs around here for some time. That might be a cash crop for him. There’s no grass or water in the canyon, so the stock stays out of there, and so do I. Saw him only once, from a distance, kind of a rough-looking hombre. Just thought you ought to be aware of the fact he’s back there.”

  In the time since he’d owned the Two Pair, Winchell had never seen the Indian. After Jack Stark had mentioned the squatter, Winchell saddled the nine-year-old paint he’d bought and rode back into Diablo Canyon, past the old La Ceila silver mine on the south slope of Guapa Mountain, the mine having been abandoned fifty years past. On his first trip, he dismounted and explored La Ceila’s main tunnel into the mountain, stepping carefully along the rails where ore cars once moved and watching for snakes that favored the cool darkness of the tunnel when the white sun of June laid the desert bare and kilnlike.

  Forty feet into the tunnel, a secondary horizontal shaft cut off to his right. Thirty feet farther, his flashlight caught the end of rails and the ground beneath them. Winchell squatted near the vertical shaft and dropped a stone into the darkness, straining to hear when it hit bottom, and could hear nothing. He found a larger rock and repeated the drop. This time there was the faint sound of impact after perhaps two seconds. The shaft apparently went at least a hundred feet or a little more, dropping like the stone into the belly of Guapa Mountain.

  The old mine had an unsettling effect on Winchell Dear, and he retraced his steps toward the light and rode on toward Diablo Canyon. Deep in the canyon, not far from a hundred-foot-high volcanic tooth, he found a canvas-and-wood shelter roofed over with pine branches. There were signs all about that someone was living there, including blackened cookware and blankets and a freshly picked bouquet of yellow primrose placed neatly in an earthen pot, but no Indian. He called out in a friendly way, hoping the Indian might show himself. Nothing.

  But every six months or so, Winchell Dear would find a side of venison hanging from the desert willow back of his house, swinging slowly in the morning breeze and starting to draw flies. Some kind of rent, he figured, and let it go at that. The Indian wasn’t bothering him, he didn’t need to bother the Indian.

  And Peter Long Grass was content with that state of affairs. Twenty years back, not long after the mess up at Wounded Knee when the feds laid siege to the place, he’d become disillusioned with the American Indian Movement and started drifting. A longshoreman for three years in San Francisco, two years in a Nevada jail for assault with a deadly weapon when a cowboy insulted him and Peter had taken after him with a broken beer bottle, seven more as an ordinary seaman in the merchant marine. Life went on, and so did Peter Long Grass, day after day shoving back and pushing down a vague impotent fury he could neither express in words nor fully banish from wherever it lay within him.

  Riding his thumb and mostly his legs down a West Texas highway thirty months ago, he’d started thinking about all the open country around him, hundreds of miles of it. He’d walked ridges, looking down into canyons, until he’d found a spot as deserted as America could offer. Near the canyon entrance was a volcanic upthrust of the kind his grandfather had talked about.

  That meant water. During the far rides of September into Mexico for plunder and slaves, the Comanches had known such rocks acted as cisterns and could be relied upon in dry years. Peter Long Grass climbed nearly to the top of the upthrust and studied the crevices, judging how water might run in the rainy season. He’d traced the possible routes and on the second day found water. Eight feet up from the base was an overhang, and under the shelf was a pool two feet deep and four in diameter. Drinking from it, he smiled; the water was colder than he had expected, which meant the upthrust not only collected rainfall, but also contained a spring somewhere in its innards.

  Peter Long Grass had walked the fifteen miles into town and spent most of his remaining cash on supplies. It required half a dozen trips over the next month to outfit his camp. He had no money for a weapon and could not have purchased one anyway with a felony record and identification that would not pass scrutiny. So, for a day and a night, he hunkered and poked at his fire and tried to revive everything his grandfather had said and shown him about the old ways, the making of spear and bow and arrow from the materials at hand. His recollections were flawed, but he called up some things and concentrated harder until his memories fused with distant chants his grandfather had sung, working out the technology by method and experimentation. In time, the spear was straight and the bow drew tight and the five feathered arrows were true at forty yards.

  Making common cause with no one, and in the way things were said at one time, Peter Long Grass had drawn the buckskin curtain and gone back to the blanket. The old man who owned the ranch seemed not to care about him. And though Peter Long Grass cared nothing for the old man, either, it was proper to pay for squatting privileges, only and for no other reason than because it was the right thing to do. So twice each year, walking strong through the desert night, he would leave venison swinging from the desert willow near the ranch house.

  He was aware of the cave on the west side of the property, near the foot of Guapa Mountain, though he did not know it was named Long Rifle Cave and was called that because of the skeleton and gun found there forty years ago by Fayette Cobbler. The entrance was a vertical drop of eight feet, but someone had placed a stick-and-rawhide ladder down to the floor. After that, the cave went on for a few yards before closing to a tunnel only slightly wider than the Indian’s shoulders.

  In the seventh month after having laid claim to his small piece of Diablo Canyon, Peter Long Grass crossed over the mountain to explore the cave, hoping to find an ancient arrowhead or two and thereby complete the circle he was making with his years. He searched the floor of the cave and found nothing except a rusted beer can and a plastic potato chip sack, other hunters of artifacts having already been there and having left some of their own artifacts behind.

  An hour before dusk, he climbed out of the cave and began moving up Guapa Mountain. The sound of falling scree lower down caught him, and he went to ground when he heard it. A Mexican woman was coming up a trail from the foot of the mountain. She wore a serape even though the weather was still warm. At the mouth of the cave, she pulled the serape up and off, and Peter Long Grass noticed a small bundle tied around her waist. The woman went into the cave and was in there only a few minutes before emerging without the package. She brushed herself off and stood for a moment, looking around.

  “Hola,” Peter Long Grass said, and rose from where he’d been crouching behind a clump of desert rose.

  The woman turned, drew quick air in her surprise, and grunted as if she were about to speak, then halted speech and considered him while he considered her.

  “Who are you?” she eventually asked.

  “I am Peter Long Grass, and who are you?”

  She continued to look at him, not breaking her g
aze, saying nothing. At one time, it was clear to him, she had been handsome, perhaps beautiful. And though her face carried the lines of long trouble, only thirty pounds of weight kept her from still being attractive in the way Peter Long Grass saw things. In a certain way, she was still nice to look at even as she perspired through parts of her light dress where it pressed against her. Something about the way she held her body, some confidence in her manner as she looked at him, as if she had been around men and understood all they might think and do. That didn’t bother Peter Long Grass, for he had been around many women and understood, so he believed, much of what they also might think and do.

  “I am Sonia Dominguez, and I work for the owner of the ranch.”

  “I live in Diablo Canyon,” Peter Long Grass said.

  “And how long have you lived there?”

  “For a time.”

  “Does he know you live there?” She tilted her head slightly in the direction of the ranch house, though it was around the mountain and out of sight.

  “Yes, he knows.”

  “And you live there, that is all?”

  “Yes. I hunt and gather most of what I need. What do you do for him?”

  “I cook his food, clean his house.”

  She looked behind and beyond the Indian. “We seem foolish standing here. I have supper warming on the stove. Would you like something to eat? I live only half a mile to the east.”

  Peter Long Grass touched the inside of his cheek with his tongue and looked up the lower run of the Permian Basin stretching out for a hundred miles behind Sonia Dominguez. Nothing out there, no homes or other sign of permanent life. He could see a lone semi-trailer-truck moving west on Route 90, heading for El Paso or some place of no more consequence to him than El Paso.

  He shifted to the woman again. “Food would be nice.”

  “We must wait for darkness. He can see my adobe from the main ranch house and might object to the two of us going there.”

  “I understand.”

  They sat near the mouth of the cave for nearly an hour, looking up the great dry stretch of the basin, saying little, which was not difficult for Peter Long Grass since he had lived with silence or at least its cousin for a long while, years of silence. The woman sat with her arms around her knees, serape folded neatly beneath her as a cushion. Nothing was said about what the woman might have been doing in the cave and what she had left behind in there.

  There would be time for finding whatever it was, the Indian thought.

  He will never find it, Sonia Dominguez thought.

  She’d pointed north and east. “See that outline of what looks like a road coming around Dagger Mountain over there about five miles?”

  “I see it.”

  “That is the remains of what is called the Great Comanche Trail. They used it on their raids into Mexico. It is said they were fine, hard riders and the most fearsome of all the Indians.”

  Peter Long Grass nodded and studied the trace of his ancestors.

  “I wonder why they were called Comanche,” she remarked, making conversation.

  “It was a name given by the Utes—Komàntcia—meaning anyone who wants to fight all the time.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I am Comanche.”

  “Do you want to fight all the time?”

  “No.”

  A few miles north, the Davis Mountains had turned blue, then purple hazed, preparing to fuse with the night.

  Sonia Dominguez stood up and said, “I am sometimes lonely out here.”

  “So am I,” replied Peter Long Grass. “It is a place designed to cause loneliness.”

  They walked toward the adobe, along the rim of a large dirt tank scooped out of the earth to catch runoff from the mountain. A small pool of stagnant water lay in the tank’s bottom.

  The woman carried the serape over her left arm and stumbled once. Peter Long Grass caught her as she took a quick step to her right for balance, near a mesquite bush. There had been an immediate sound from under the bush, like the rustle of dry leaves as they blow and twist in autumn wind.

  “Stay back from that bush,” he said quietly.

  “Why?”

  “One of our friends is under there, I think.” He placed his right forearm across his chest, palm of the hand downward, and moved it away from him with a slight waving motion. “He means no harm. Like all of us, he wants nothing more than to be left alone except for those times when the solitudes become loneliness.”

  She looked over her shoulder as they walked past the bush. “Why do you say that…about wanting to be alone?”

  “Not many things or people in the larger world make your life easier, and most try to take it in the other direction. A kind of wanton meanness has gradually formed out there, and I want no part of it. I have had enough of bad and have become a fugitive from the world.”

  So saying, he unsheathed his four-inch skinning knife and expertly cut the stems of six yellow flowers, then handed them to her. “These are evening primrose, sometimes called night candle in other places. My grandfather once told me the oils from them help to heal cuts and bruises.”

  He later discovered a path around the corrals that circumvented the main ranch house and did not require coming over Guapa Mountain in order to reach the adobe where Sonia Dominguez lived. That was good, because over the next two years he went to the adobe every week or so, and it would always be late when he looped around the corrals and headed for Diablo Canyon. And Guapa Mountain was a difficult climb when you were tired, when you were still feeling the effects of sotol and the warm, experienced softness of Sonia Dominguez, who took from you exactly what she needed and gave as much hard sweetness back to you as she took for herself. And when her breath came short and shallow, she would be saying quiet, unintelligible things.

  That first night, she waited until the Indian was gone, then walked back to the cave in darkness. She lighted a kerosene lantern only when she was in the cave and used the throw of it to remove her packages from behind a rock where she had hollowed out the earth. That had been her hiding place for years, but it would no longer serve. Fifty yards west, a rock ledge jutted out. And with a spade and by lantern light, she dug back under the ledge until there was space for the packages. She wrapped them in a plastic bag and shoved them well and firmly into the space, then replaced the stones and dirt, patting the tailings flat and smooth before dusting over all of it with a cedar branch to disguise any evidence that she had been there. Even a Comanche could not discover sign when there was no sign, she guessed. Satisfied with her work, she turned east toward the adobe.

  The diamondback located the rabbit nest and found it empty. Minutes earlier, three coyotes had come by on the slink and cleaned it out, gobbling all that was warm and furry and hopeful there in the grass. They had even caught the mother rabbit, reluctant to abandon her young and staying too long and finally becoming confused by the triangulated approach of the coyotes. The diamondback hesitated, then took his seven feet in a northwesterly direction, toward the ranch house, still hunting. Sometimes there were mice in the grass near the house foundation.

  Twice Winchell Dear had seen the snake. And though, in the way of most Texas ranchers, he killed any rattlesnake that happened by, this big one having lived for so many years somehow deserved to live more. As long as it stayed away from the house. Each time he’d seen the diamondback, it had been evening and along a ranch road a half mile from the house. Once, the snake simply crossed the road in front of him. He’d been on foot that time.

  The second occurrence had come when he was mounted, and his horse shied well before Winchell saw the diamondback off to one side. Disturbed by the lurching horse, the snake rattled with a sound that carried for thirty yards. Winchell Dear reined in the paint and quieted her, watching the snake from well back.

  “Here’s the deal, old fellow. You stay out here in the desert and there’ll be no bad blood between us. Come any closer to the house and I’ll kill you, just as I did one
of your brothers two months ago when he decided to sleep against the stone steps out front.”

  The horse, still afraid, snorted and tried to buck. Winchell Dear steadied the paint and from ten yards away continued to study the diamondback, now coiled into strike position, tongue flicking, rattles sounding. From the time of his boyhood, Winchell had regarded the snakes with a mixture of wariness and admiration. There was elegance about them, like the great sharks of the ocean, clean and pure in design and intent. They carried no unnecessary accoutrements or, far as he could tell, hazy dreams of random possibilities for their lives. And in the case of the diamondbacks, they meant no harm to humans unless it appeared the same might come to them.

  The snake quieted for a moment, looking directly at Winchell Dear, it seemed. “Think I’ll give you a name, big fellow. Maybe…let’s see, Luther might do it. Old poker-playing friend of mine named Luther Gibbons would probably appreciate the likeness between him and you.”

  Winchell turned the paint for home, rode a few yards, and called back over his shoulder, “Remember our deal, Luther. Stay out here, and I’ll leave you alone. Show up near the house, you’ll get a load of twelve-gauge double-aught buckshot that’ll make your head disappear into nothing.”

  HALFWAY TO DIABLO CANYON, the Indian hunkered down, troubled by the shape of what he’d seen in the last hour. He sifted dirt in one hand, cupping a mound in his palm and letting it sprinkle back to where he’d found it. Through the window of the ranch house: Why was the old man wearing a shoulder holster with a pistol in it? Old man holstered and rodded up, and the profile coming off Guapa Mountain. It smelled wrong, like a bad wind from Odessa when you could catch a whiff of the oil patch a hundred miles away as it rode the face of a blue norther.

  He hurried on to his camp, lit a fire, and squatted again, letting the images form and dissolve. No conclusions, but no diminishing of the thing he felt, something to do with the half-light of an obscure malevolent presence that was up and about. If not exactly evil, then at least the absence of good, which usually amounted to the same thing in the world of Peter Long Grass. After a while, he let the fire burn down, gathered up some tools, and began to retrace his steps.