He admitted he’d been a little rough on Caleb at first, but that was an uncle’s job—to provide the structure and training fathers were too lax or soft to give; assuming the boy had any sort of real father to begin with. Hiram Buck had never met Thomas Begay, but he had heard plenty about him, all of it bad. Not the kind of bad he could live with either. It was the stupid kind of bad brought on by drinking and lack of self-respect. Hiram was not a drinker himself, but he had seen plenty of it. He was now the eldest and, by default, head of his family. It was no longer a “band” as it once had been, but it was all they had left, and he was in charge of it. There was no one coming up capable of taking his place as far as he could see, certainly not George Jim.
~~~~~~
Hiram drove up to his nephew’s shabby, little trailer. George Jim was his dead wife’s nephew. His wife Tilde and her sister had died within months of each other. The doctor said in both cases it was their heart, probably genetic. Both women were quite overweight and of a querulous nature.
George Jim was a slow thinker but could usually be relied on to do what Hiram told him, and he was an excellent shot with a rifle. He was a rough-mannered, short-tempered boy who liked to fight, but today he looked like a whipped dog and would not look up as he opened the door for his uncle. Hiram pushed his way silently past him into the unkempt little trailer, which had once belonged to George Jim’s mother.
“Where’s my horse?” he said softly. “You did at least pick up the horse, didn’t you?”
These soft-spoken words of his uncle were a very bad sign. George Jim cringed.
The disastrous news of George Jim’s failure had reached Hiram only hours before. The young niece who delivered the message was visibly shaken by the rage Hiram flew into and on her return home had stopped to warn George Jim.
He would not look at his uncle, but there was a spark of hope in his voice as he replied, “I got him alright. He’s in the corral out back.” He licked his lips and launched into it. “That sonofabitch horse of yours threw his head up just as I fired. By the time I worked my way off the rim and back around to my truck and trailer, that Navajo and the boy was already gone.” He wished his Aunt Tilde were still alive. She was the only person who would ever stand up to Hiram. She had been a big woman, nearly as big as Hiram, and some said smarter, but just as mean natured. Not having any sons of her own, Tilde had doted on George Jim and had often run interference between him and Hiram. George searched now for something distracting to say. “You need to get some shoes on that horse. The quarters in the fronts are starting to break out, and he’s got a crack in his off hind. He’s going to cripple up on you if you don’t work on those feet.”
Hiram’s eyes narrowed and he now spoke in a deadly whisper. “Don’t you ever tell me how to do anything. You don’t tell me what to do! I tell you what to do!” He backhanded his nephew, spinning George Jim halfway across the room and onto the floor. “A twelve year old could have done that job up in the canyon. You knew that horse would not pass the water without stopping. I told you that…and they would get off to let him drink. I set everything up for you. Even rolled the log out on the point so you would have cover and a rest to shoot from.” Hiram was nearly shouting now, breathing hard and spitting his words through clinched teeth. “I spent all morning up there! Making sure everything was right. What! You only had one bullet? You couldn’t take another shot?”
“I didn’t want to hit the boy. You said to be careful of Caleb!” George Jim was still on the floor and had not even tried to get up. His right arm guarded his face and slobber was dribbling off his chin. He figured he was going to die right there in his mother’s ratty, old trailer.
He started to say it was not his fault… But Hiram drew back a boot as though to kick him, then pointed a threatening finger. “Don’t say another single word! I ought to kill you for this. But, I’m not. I’m going to give you one more chance—a chance to make things right, and then if you can’t…then I’m going to kill you.”
Hiram shook his head in disgust at his nephew and went slamming out of the trailer. He stood cursing in the yard for a moment then walked around back, briefly checked his horse over, and with a final expletive toward the house, loaded the horse and left for the sale barn.
George Jim pulled himself up onto the couch, waiting for the pounding in his ears to stop and thinking what a very lucky person he was to still be alive. A great wave of relief passed over him as he heard his uncle’s truck pull out of the yard.
~~~~~~
Later, Hiram Buck sat at his kitchen table and counted his money for the third time. The tickets from the stock sale were scattered near the brown grocery sack on which he was scribbling figures. Again and again, with the stub of a pencil, he added the numbers together. He hoped somehow he was in error, that there might actually be more money than these figures allowed. He finally had to admit, however, that numbers do not lie. He was still hundreds of dollars short of his goal.
The woman at the bank would be disappointed. He sighed and crumpled the paper sack into a ball. He could feel everything slipping away. How could this relatively small amount of money determine the course of a man’s life.
The fact was Hiram Buck had no friends left, not a single person he could call on, even for so small an amount of money as this. In olden times it was said of the Ute: “There is no term in their language for rich or poor in regard to material goods. A man who says he is rich means he has many friends; being poor means he has no friends.” Hiram Buck was a very poor man indeed.
Hiram was contemplating an amount of money that could change his family’s life—not that he cared so much for the welfare of the family anymore. He thought there were few of them left who were worth the powder to blow them to hell. His nephew George Jim was a good example. Recently back from a tour of military duty, he had seen a good bit of action, acquitting himself as well as could be expected. The military conceded he was a very good shot with a rifle and a fine tracker, but that was about the extent of any God-given talent. When, finally, they couldn’t figure out what else to do with him, he had been given a “Section Eight” discharge by army doctors. They had a more politically correct term for it now, but the meaning was the same. George Jim currently seemed content to just hang around his mother’s old place, living on a small disability check. Hiram had given his sister-in-law that little piece of ground at the behest of his late wife; now he regretted it.
The original quarter section of land his grandfather left him was dwindling away—already relatives had wound up with over a fourth of it. True, they had paid Hiram for their small plots; nonetheless, at least they were family, and he did still wield considerable control as head of the clan. His grandfather had been one of the smartest men their band had ever produced, parlaying a small government land allotment into a rather admirable private holding—a holding he had thought might someday benefit his grandchildren. The old man, in his last years, had personally selected Hiram as his single heir, thinking he, like himself, would continue to look out for the family.
Hiram liked to believe he had the family’s best interest at heart, but it had become complicated these last few years, and now, with Tilde gone, his heart was no longer in it.
This bank foreclosure was something he did not fully understand. Tilde had always taken care of these things; it had not been his job! What he had finally been made to understand by the loan officer was that the grace period on his long-overdue loan payments had ended some time ago. Without the arrears being paid in full by next Thursday morning, the sheriff would be notified to serve an eviction notice on his remaining parcel of land. Hiram had begun saving for this eventuality when the notices first started appearing in his rural mailbox. He had placed them all in a little package in his closet, but he never looked at them and had only opened the first one or two. Over the past months he had sold off nearly everything of value, including the last of the cows, one of which was not even his. That cow was now in brand inspection hell, and any
help it might provide would come too late in his estimation. The problem was his grandfather had placed the land in a family trust. None of it could ever be sold, except to a blood relative. What had been meant to preserve the land for the family now insured its loss. The one possible salvation was his niece Sally Klee.
The people who had come to Sally Klee in secret, trying to buy her silence in the Greyhorse case, had let it be known they would pay good money for the silence of other prosecution witnesses as well. While they thought Thomas Begay might be approachable in this regard, they had been advised Charlie Yazzie would not. “Something would have to be done about Charlie Yazzie,” they said.
Sally Klee had at first been disinclined to take advantage of this dubious windfall, thinking it something beyond her ability to deal with, at least on her own. She had been back for several months and could now see she had little future with her Ute cousins. In a moment of panic, she felt she had no other choice but to go to her Uncle Hiram and tell him of the offer to buy her silence.
It did not take Hiram Buck long to convince her that it was indeed a golden opportunity and certainly in her and the children’s best interest, not to mention a chance to repay her adoptive clan for their generous support over the years. Hiram felt so strongly in this regard he immediately moved Sally’s son and daughter to separate families among the relatives for safekeeping. He told Sally it was for their own good. It would shield them from harm, he said.
He later took charge of the negotiations himself and assured those people he could take care of Charlie Yazzie and Thomas Begay as well should Thomas prove to be a problem money couldn’t fix.
Sally now grew beside herself with worry for her children and felt she made a serious mistake in going to Hiram. She was terrified at what might happen should she not fall in with Hiram’s plan. It had never occurred to her he would involve her children. She had grown up watching his manipulation of other family members and knew what he was capable of when crossed. Sally Klee did not consider herself a smart person, but she did have her people’s instinct for survival. She well understood that desperate people must sometimes do desperate things.
The Horse
Thomas fiddled with the air conditioner as Charlie’s new government-issue truck ticked off the miles to Cortez. “This air is really nice. Not quite hot enough for it yet, but it’s nice to know you have it when you need it.”
Charlie glanced over at him and raised an eyebrow. “That Dodge you bought has air, doesn’t it?”
“Well, yeah, but you have to rev that diesel up quite a bit before the compressor kicks in. Just idling around town it sort of dies away. It seemed to work okay when we bought it this spring.”
Charlie nodded. “Isn’t that always the way?”
“Yep, that’s how it goes. First your money, then the hose.” Thomas had picked up a lot of these little sayings back when he was drinking and still liked to work them into the conversation from time to time.
What Thomas didn’t like was the idea of poking around up there in Ute country. The Ute were a curious people, at least those related to Sally Klee were. In past times they were nomads, roaming their huge homeland with only what they could carry on their backs—unlike the Dinè who built permanent hogans and did a little rudimentary farming. He knew it rankled the Ute that they’d once controlled one of the largest areas of the Rocky Mountains and now had to be satisfied with much less. The Navajo, on the other hand, were a fairly sedentary people, living, for the most part, in small family groups. Yet, the Navajo Nation consisted of more than 25,000 square miles, including vast coal and even some timber reserves—the largest Indian reservation in the world. Admittedly, most of that land was sand and rock, but even those portions might have oil and gas reserves. The Dinè felt quite fortunate whites had been unaware of those mineral reserves when they had finally ceded this land to them.
Charlie wasn’t sure yet how he was going to handle this matter with Hiram Buck. He had no proof of wrongdoing at this point. He thought the key might lie in finding Sally Klee and her daughter. He suspected Sally would not be easy to find.
Charlie’s search of related Legal Services case files also produced no useful information, and calls to various chapter houses came up empty too. Sally’s last known address (never verified) now came up listed as unknown. Thomas had not come across anything of use in Farmington either. It was now in the back of his mind that something bad might have already happened to Sally and possibly his daughter as well. There was a hard, cold thing in the pit of his stomach when he let himself think of it.
There wasn’t much traffic on an early Sunday morning approaching Cortez, and purely on a hunch, Charlie decided to stop by the sale barn to see if they had a ticket documenting the sale of Hiram Buck’s cows. If, indeed, he actually sold any cows, his address should be on the ticket.
Though it was Sunday, the business office was open, along with the cafe and loading docks. Saturday night horse sales ran late into the evening, and many buyers chose to pick up their animals Sunday morning.
As they parked the truck in the crowded lot, Thomas looked around at the still-full corrals and whistled. “It must have been quite a sale!” He climbed down from the truck and ambled over to the holding pens, Charlie not far behind. “I need to get me another horse,” he declared. “That mare of the old man’s is getting a little long in the tooth for any serious work.” Thomas knew horses and learned how to ride about the same time he learned how to walk, as did most Navajo boys. Even Charlie had learned to ride at an early age, though he had grown a bit rusty in his time away from the reservation. Charlie’s father had been a well-known contender at the local rodeos, and his grandfather bred good horses according to those who remembered him.
As they leaned on the fence rail, Charlie mentioned how much he had liked that horse of Hiram Buck’s. “I really don’t have a place to keep a horse right now…I’m just sort of thinking ahead. If we get us a little place, I wouldn’t mind having a couple.”
Thomas noted the “us” and “couple” and smiled to himself. “Well, you know you can always keep horses out at our place.” He thought it would be good to have more than one horse about. Horses do better when there is more than one.
“I’ll think about that,” Charlie said as they left the corrals and made their way through the parking lot back to the business office.
A tough-looking white woman with large tortoise-shell glasses was in charge of several younger girls wading through the paperwork the state required in a livestock sale. A double line formed at the counter—one for buyers, another for sellers. The boss woman stood behind the girls, arms folded across an ample bosom, alert to the slightest error. Charlie pushed forward between the lines and flashed his gold badge at the woman, who put on her mean face and motioned him to a clear spot at the end. She put her hands on the counter and leaned forward menacingly. “How can we help you?” She was clearly annoyed and in no mood to waste time on Charlie.
Charlie held her gaze and kept the badge in her face. “We need some information regarding a sale you may have made yesterday.”
Thomas was somewhat taken aback at Charlie’s attitude with this authority figure. Other Indians, waiting their turn, smiled and nudged one another as the woman hesitated, finally stepping back and dropping her hands. “What’s the name?” she asked.
Charlie put the badge away. “Hiram Buck.”
“Buyer or seller?”
“Seller.”
The woman reached over and took a sheaf of papers from the girl in charge of those transactions and expertly leafed through them. “Hiram Buck…three cows. One of them a no-sale due to a hold by the brand inspector.” She looked up at Charlie for a moment. “Is this about that brand inspection?”
“Possibly. I need an address on him.”
The woman wrote down the address on a pad, tore it off, and passed it to Charlie, who thanked her and turned to go.
“Just a minute!” the woman called after him. “There’s a
nother ticket here. He brought in a horse later in the afternoon for the evening sale.”
Charlie turned. “What kind of horse?”
“Eight-year-old sorrel gelding. It hasn’t been picked up yet. Pen 104, if you need to look at it.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the clock and lowered her eyes. “We’re only in the office till noon.”
Again, Charlie thanked the woman, who sniffed and thrust the tickets back to a helper to straighten out. She shook her head, watching Charlie and Thomas through the front window as they walked toward the government truck.
Halfway to the Chevy, Charlie paused, looking thoughtful. “Let’s go look at that horse.”
Thomas, still slightly awed by the way Charlie had bulldozed the office manager, fell into line behind him without a word. Charlie was getting to be quite the smart-ass Indian, he thought proudly. Pen 104 was down a series of alleyways. Most of the stock in that section had already been picked up. The horse had its head over the gate, and Charlie recognized him immediately even before they reached the pen. He opened the gate and held his hand out for the gelding to snuffle on. Thomas came in behind him and looked the horse over with a critical eye. Charlie talked to it in a low voice and rubbed its jaw, which he thought had a calming effect. The horse spent the morning tossing his head and trotting around the pen, calling anxiously to the others as they were led off by their new owners. This gelding had not been to town much and was out of his element.
“This is the horse Hiram Buck lent me to go get Caleb,” Charlie said. “I had a hunch it might be. I’m surprised he would let him go at auction. It’s a better horse than that.” Charlie felt a growing affinity for this gelding. He still thought it may have saved his life back up there in the canyon.
Boy Made of Dawn Page 4
