Sulfur Springs

by William Kent Krueger

  “Hola,” she said brightly. “Lost tourists?”

  “Not lost,” I said.

  “Mister, nobody who isn’t from here comes to Sulfur Springs unless they’re lost.”

  “Not lost,” I said again. “But hungry.”

  “Well, then, you’ve come to the right place. Take a table, I’ll bring you a couple of menus. Anything to drink?”

  “Cerveza,” I said, one of the few Spanish words I knew.

  “Water for me,” Rainy said.

  “Una cerveza fría,” the woman said with a laugh. “And a water.”

  We sat at a table. Kenny Chesney ended his song, and the juke fell silent. The two guys at the bar went on drinking their beers, not speaking a word, waiting, I was pretty sure, to overhear what we might have to say. Rainy elbowed me and nodded at the uniform.

  “In a minute,” I said. “The beer first.”

  It came, and God bless her, our barmaid brought it in a frosted glass. She put Rainy’s water down, too, along with the promised menus.

  “What’s good?” I asked.

  “What isn’t?” she said. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

  I took a long draw on the beer, and it was every bit as satisfying as I’d hoped.

  “So,” I said. “If he’s not here, where is he?”

  “I don’t know, Cork.” She sipped her water.

  “He gets his mail here. That doesn’t mean he lives here.”

  The uniform turned on his stool. “You folks looking for somebody?”

  “Peter Bisonette,” Rainy said. “My son.”

  “Bisonette,” the uniform said, as if testing the word. “Don’t believe I know anyone named Bisonette here.”

  He was stocky, middle-aged, hair thick and silver. Hispanic. He wore a sidearm, a revolver. I was pretty sure it was a Smith & Wesson .38 Police Special, which was the same weapon I’d worn when I was sheriff, and also my father before me.

  “How about a guy named Rodriguez?” I asked.

  The uniform laughed. “Mister, in a border town like Sulfur Springs, asking about a guy named Rodriguez is like asking in Minnesota about a guy named Johnson.”

  “Minnesota? Why Minnesota?”

  “If you’re not from Minnesota, I’ll eat Sylvester’s hat.” He lightly slapped the ball cap the old-timer wore. “You talk that flat talk I hear every Saturday on A Prairie Home Companion. Love that show. You ever met Garrison Keillor?”

  “Afraid not,” I said. “Any fatalities reported around here lately?”

  “Just yesterday. A biker. Snake bit him and he was so panicky driving himself to the hospital that he ran his Harley off the road.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. You worried about your son, ma’am?”

  “A little,” Rainy said.

  “And this Rodriguez?” The cop looked at me.

  “Not so much about him. You part of the local constabulary?”

  “Mister, I am the local constabulary.” He slid off his stool and came over. “Mike Sanchez.”

  “Cork O’Connor.” I shook the hand he’d offered. “This is my wife, Rainy.”

  “How do, ma’am?”

  “I’d be better if I could find my son,” she said.

  “When did you last hear from him?”

  “Yesterday. He called. Then nothing.”

  “Kids,” the cop said with a shrug. “They’re like that. Call you when they need something, but otherwise about as conversive as a rock. Am I right?” He glanced back at Sylvester for agreement, then said, “Gets his mail here, huh?”

  “This is where I’ve sent all my letters and cards for the past year or so,” Rainy said.

  “That is curious,” Sanchez said. “Does he work around here?”

  “He used to. In Cadiz.”

  He mulled that over. “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll ask around. If I hear something, I’ll let you know. You have a number where I can reach you?”

  I wrote down Rainy’s cell phone number on the back of one of my business cards and handed it to him.

  He read the card and squinted at me. “Confidential investigations? You’re a P.I.?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Any good?”

  “I make a living.”

  “Well, hell, you don’t need my help, then.”

  “On the contrary,” I said. “I’ve always found the cooperation of local law enforcement to be of the highest value. I was a cop, too, for a lot of years. Sheriff of Tamarack County, Minnesota.”

  The barmaid returned from the kitchen. “Ready to order?”

  “Hang on a sec, Sierra,” Sanchez said. “Rainy, has your son been known to have a beer now and again?”

  “Maybe,” Rainy said.

  “Sierra, you ever serve a young man named Peter Bisonette?”

  She gave it some thought. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Why?”

  “These folks’re looking for him. Gets his mail here in Sulfur Springs, apparently. Got a photo or something?” Sanchez asked Rainy.

  She took out the picture she’d shown to the postmistress. The barmaid studied it and shook her head. “Never saw him before. Sorry.”

  Sanchez opened his hands as if to say, See? We’re all in the dark. He shook my hand again and returned to the bar.

  When we left, Officer Mike Sanchez and Sylvester were still sitting at the bar. The cop called a good-bye to us and promised a second time to let us know if he heard anything. The post office was closed by then. We got into the car, and I thought I was stepping into an oven preheated for roasting a chicken. Heading back down the main street, I looked into my rearview mirror. The postmistress was standing in front of her office, shading her eyes against the sun, staring at us like we were a couple exotic birds she might never see again.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  “Someone’s lying.” Rainy’s voice was as cold as the day was hot.

  “That’s a given,” I said. “We saw half the residents of Sulfur Springs, and they all claim to know nothing about a young man who, at the very least, has collected his mail there for the past year.”

  “Why would they lie?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Why don’t we talk to Peter’s current employers, the Harrises? Maybe they can enlighten us.”

  I had no idea how to find the Harris property. Saunders had simply said it was on the other side of the Coronados, the mountains to the east of Cadiz. I stopped and studied the Arizona highway map I’d picked up at the car rental office in Tucson. Just beyond the Coronados were a couple of towns—Hebron and Lacabra—little dots on the map, just like the dot for Sulfur Springs. We could get to them by returning to Cadiz and circling north of the mountains or by taking an unimproved county back road that branched off just outside Sulfur Springs and stayed south, which would easily save us an hour of driving time.

  We took the back road and almost immediately rounded a hill and came to a barren flat where a community of trailers sat like bricks baking in a kiln. I spotted lots of motorcycles parked there, alongside Jeeps and trucks with oversize wheels, probably designed to help navigate rugged desert tracks. Canvas tarps had been stretched from some of the trailers, shading tables and lawn chairs. There wasn’t a human being in sight, no one outside in that intense heat. I recalled the two bikers who’d roared down the main street of Sulfur Springs and who’d seemed so out of place to me.

  “Paradiso,” Rainy said.

  “What?”

  She pointed toward a sign made of weathered gray wood that was nailed to a post. The word PARADISO had been burned into it in black letters.

  “Paradise,” Rainy said. “Could have fooled me.”

  “You seemed pretty fluent with Spanish in your conversation with the postmistress back there. I didn’t realize you could speak it so well. Or, hell, at all.”

  Once we were past the trailer community, Rainy became intent on
studying the landscape, her eyes scanning the barren stretch to the south, as if expecting something to come at us suddenly out of Mexico.

  “Not much call to use it in Tamarack County,” she finally said.

  “You learned it while you were at the U of A?”

  We’d shared our histories, or I’d thought we had, so I knew that Rainy had been a student at the University of Arizona, where she’d met her first husband. They’d divorced after four years and two children, and Rainy had moved back to Wisconsin, where she’d finished her education as a public health nurse and had raised her kids as a single mother. About her time in Tucson, I knew almost nothing. About her first husband, I knew only that she preferred to discuss him as little as possible.

  “More or less,” she said, and I could tell from her tone that was the end of this conversational thread.

  I tried to tell myself it wasn’t important that there were clearly many details of Rainy’s past I didn’t know. We’d only been married three months, newlyweds almost. Although we’d known each other for years before that, I was beginning to understand there were depths to Rainy I had yet to plumb. Because of what little she had told me and her secretiveness about the rest, I was beginning to suspect that those depths were quite dark. I could have pressed her, but one thing I knew about Rainy for sure was that until she was ready to share these things with me, I’d just be beating my fists against a hard, closed door.

  We were near enough to the wall along the border that as we went into and out of dry washes and arroyos, its tall, dark, flat face loomed and then disappeared from our sight. I watched three vultures circling above the cacti and mesquite, and it made me think of the cartoons I’d seen forever of people dying of thirst in the desert and saying something funny. At that moment, the prospect didn’t strike me as particularly humorous.

  We came out of a wash, and as we crested the next rise I hit the brakes. A white Chevy Tahoe was parked across the road, blocking our way. Along the shoulder perpendicular to it sat another vehicle, identical. Both had light bars on top and broad green slashes down the rear doors, and as I drew up to them, I saw the writing across the sides: BORDER PATROL. Several uniformed officers stood beside the vehicles, taking a good, hard look at Rainy and me through our windshield. One of the officers separated himself from the others and approached our rental car. When I’d made the travel arrangements, I’d requested a Jeep Cherokee. The one they gave me was clown-nose red.

  I lowered my window, and the heat of the afternoon flooded in.

  “Afternoon, Officer,” I said.

  “License,” he replied in an even tone.

  I pulled it from my wallet and handed it over.

  He read it and said, “Minnesota. Long way from home.”

  “You sound like Texas to me,” I said. “Long way from home.”

  He smiled briefly. I knew I probably didn’t fit any demographic he might be concerned about. He bent and looked through my window and studied Rainy on the other side of the Jeep, and any friendliness vanished from his face. He handed my driver’s license back and walked around the front of the vehicle to Rainy’s side. She lowered her window.

  “You have a driver’s license, ma’am?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I see it?”

  Rainy opened her purse, drew out her wallet, found her license, and gave it to the officer. He looked at it carefully, then eyed her for an uncomfortably long time.

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked.

  “Are you a citizen of the United States, ma’am?”

  “I was born in Wisconsin,” she said.

  He considered this. “My wife’s brother lives in Chippewa Falls. You know where that is?”

  “Ninety miles east of the Twin Cities. They brew Leinenkugel’s beer there.”

  He nodded, but didn’t seem a hundred percent satisfied.

  “Does my skin color concern you, Officer?” she said. “I’m an enrolled member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe, the indigenous people in our neck of the woods. I’m an Indian.”

  “You didn’t look Mexican to me, ma’am, but I couldn’t quite place you. We have to be careful. I hope you understand.” He returned her license. “Where you folks headed?”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” I said. “Somewhere around Hebron or Lacabra.”

  “Most visitors take the north road. Safer.”

  “Trying to save a little time.”

  “Your business there?”

  “Looking for someone. Family.”

  “Name?”

  “Bisonette.”

  “Is that first or last?”

  “Peter Bisonette.”

  The officer turned and called toward the others in uniform. “Jake, the name Peter Bisonette ring a bell?”

  “Nope,” one of them called back. “Should it?”

  “Can’t help you, Mr. O’Connor.”

  I nodded toward the vehicle blocking our way. “Kind of an odd place for a speed trap.”

  “Move it,” the officer called, and one of his companions got into the Tahoe. “Sorry to have detained you folks. You’re free to go on your way.”

  I raised my window, and when the Border Patrol’s Tahoe had moved aside, I continued down the back road.

  “Did you see the vultures circling back there?” I said. “What interested them, do you suppose?”

  “I don’t even want to think about that,” Rainy said. “Do I look Hispanic to you?”

  “Your skin’s pretty dark these days. Black hair and brownish eyes, too. But to me you don’t look Hispanic. You look beautifully Ojibwe.”

  “If I was white, he wouldn’t have taken a second look at me.”

  “Probably not.”

  “It doesn’t upset you?”

  “That he scrutinized you a little more carefully because of your skin color? Not really. If he’d harassed you, that would have been different. He was just doing his job, which isn’t an easy one, I imagine.”

  “Spoken like a member of the club,” she said.

  “Club?”

  “Those who wear or have worn a badge.”

  “Is that really what’s upsetting you?” I said.

  “Peter is half-Mexican. He looks very Hispanic. What if he was driving one of these roads and was stopped by the Border Patrol?”

  “If he was respectful and wasn’t doing anything he shouldn’t, he would probably be just fine.”

  “Your Native blood doesn’t show, Cork. You don’t get looked at twice. To be Indian anywhere, and to be Mexican as well, especially here, can you imagine how difficult that is?”

  “I can, Rainy. And I hope you understand that I can also imagine how difficult it must be to be a Border Patrol officer. A conscionable officer, anyway. Back there, I just saw a man trying to do a tough job. I didn’t see any disrespect.”

  “You were with me, Cork. Isn’t it possible that made all the difference?”

  “Rainy, if we’re going to get through this, we can’t fight each other.”

  “You’re right.” But when she said it, her words were still hard.

  Beyond the Coronados, we entered a broad basin with blue mountains along the far horizon. I turned north, and once again we climbed slowly onto a high plateau that was a mix of grassland and irrigated fields. Soon I began to see, as we had on our way to Cadiz, an occasional vineyard, dark green against all the other colors that had been washed pale by the sun.

  The town of Lacabra was little more than a crossroads with a few new-looking homes, a gas station, a farm supply and implement store, a restaurant called the Golden Fork, and a hacienda-style building with a sign out front advertising Arizona wines. I figured we had the best chance of tracking down the Harrises at the farm store. We hit pay dirt inside, got directions, and Rainy and I turned around and headed back the way we’d come.

  We arrived at a cutoff that shot east toward vineyards nestled against rugged hills. The sign at the juncture read HARRIS RANCH ROAD. We’d passed it on our way into town,
but I hadn’t been watching. We followed the road among the vineyards, under a stone arch into which had been etched the words SONORA HILLS CELLARS, and approached a grand home of tan adobe surrounded by palms. A hundred yards to the right, hard against a hillside, stood a large structure that looked like a warehouse. In front sat a forklift, a dusty F-150 pickup, and a motorcycle. Wooden pallets stood stacked against the building, whose broad door was open. We parked beside the pickup, got out, and walked to the opened door.

  “Sorry, folks. No tours today,” called a voice from the cool shade inside.

  “Not here for a tour,” I called back.

  We stood in the doorway, facing a huge room full of tall silver tanks and racks of wooden kegs. I couldn’t see anyone.

  “If you’re here to help with the harvest, that’s not for another month.” The voice came from somewhere near the back, behind the silver vats.

  “We’re looking for Peter Bisonette.”

  “Just a minute.” In less than that, two men slipped from between the tanks. The first appeared to be about my age, mid-fifties, slim but in good shape, with a little brown mustache that matched his hair. He sported glasses and wore jeans and a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows. The guy who followed him was taller, well over six feet, and much older, though hard to say exactly how much, with a full head of white hair, a big nose, big hands, and a big, wistful smile.

  “Looking for Peter?” the younger man said, as he approached. He had a rag and was wiping his hands of what appeared to be grease.

  I glanced at Rainy and saw relief all over her face. Finally someone who admitted to knowing her son.

  “Yes,” I said. “We were told he works here.”

  “What do you want with him?” the older man asked.

  Rainy said, “I’m his mother.”

  “Rainy Bisonette?” The younger man seemed surprised and pleased. “Then you must be Cork. This is a real pleasure.”

  Rainy said, “We were told at the Goodman Center that he works here now.”

  “That he does,” said the older man.

  The younger one finished wiping away the grease and held out his hand. “Frank Harris. And this is Robert Wieman.”