At Ease with the Dead

by Walter Satterthwait

  I slipped the pistol into my windbreaker pocket. Grainy-jointed and stiff, I pulled myself to my feet. I looked at my watch. Six-thirty. “You’ve talked to him?” I said.

  “Some.”

  “I think we should get out of here, all of us, before we talk some more.”

  He nodded.

  As I rolled up the sleeping bag, Daniel collected the canteen and the bag of sandwiches. We walked to the cabin and Daniel knocked on the door.

  Peter Yazzie opened it. He was an old man, thin, tall but stooped now, moving slowly, cautiously, as though his spine had fused and any suddenness might shatter it. He wore scuffed boots, faded jeans, a black shirt spotted with pale blue polka dots, and a threadbare navy-blue peacoat, opened. His white hair was drawn back in a bun and circled by a plain black headband. His face was lined and slack, the leathery brown skin hanging loose from the bone. His eyes were rimmed with red and completely desolate. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who looked so stricken, so defeated.

  Perhaps it was his cousin’s death; perhaps Daniel Begay had told him. But I sensed that this was something more, something that penetrated to the core, a grief so total and final that it could never be expunged.

  He nodded to me as Daniel introduced us, and then, looking down, stood back to let us in. He shut the door behind us.

  I looked around. Everything neat and functional, no clutter anywhere along the wooden floor. Two more windows flanking the stone chimney. A small fireplace, swept clean. In one corner, a swaybacked army cot, an olive drab blanket pulled taut over the mattress, and a red wooden dresser. An upturned wooden box serving as a nightstand, and atop it a kerosene lamp. In the opposite corner, a kitchen area: sink, cupboards, a card table. Cans of food, a loaf of bread on the table. To my right, crowded like an afterthought into the northwest corner, a boxy partition with a door; the bathroom, probably.

  I turned to Peter Yazzie. His glance danced away. “You want coffee?” he asked me, the gruffness making his voice sound as though he hadn’t used it lately, or had perhaps used it too much.

  “We should leave,” I said. “We can get coffee later.”

  He nodded, still not looking at me. Beside the door stood an unpainted wooden table, slightly lopsided, that held an old blue canvas carry-all. Without another word he picked up the bag, wrapped his left arm around it, and opened the door.

  The rifle bullet hit him in his left side and tore a ragged red hole in the back of his coat. The sound of the shot, a flat brutal crack, came only an instant later, even before the carry-all began to tumble to the floor.

  Daniel Begay was faster than I would’ve thought possible. He dropped the canteen and the sandwiches, scuttled to the entrance, slammed his cane at the door. The door banged shut. A second later, another bullet plowed through it, popping splinters off the wood.

  Daniel bent over and grabbed Yazzie’s arm and pulled. I darted to his side and grabbed the other arm, and together we towed the man away from the door, out of the line of fire.

  Peter Yazzie was still alive. His eyes were open wide, moving slowly back and forth, and he was breathing. With every breath, a thin whistling noise trilled from his chest. The lung was punctured.

  We had to close off that wound, and soon.

  Daniel Begay had the same thought, and acted on it before I could. He glanced around, then quickly limped over to the canteen and the plastic bag of sandwiches, grabbed the bag, dumped the sandwiches to the floor. He hurried back to Yazzie and unbuttoned the man’s wet shirt.

  The entry wound was half an inch wide, circled by a ridge of meat pushed up from beneath the frayed skin. Blood was sputtering, pink and frothy, from the hole. I didn’t want to think what the exit wound would look like.

  Daniel Begay folded the plastic bag and pressed it against the wound.

  “The blanket,” he snapped.

  In a crouch, I dashed across the room, yanked the blanket from the cot, and dashed back. The man with the rifle must’ve seen the movement, because the nearest front window exploded, bits of glass scattering through the cabin, rattling against the floor.

  “Hold this,” Daniel Begay said to me, and nodded to the patch of plastic.

  I handed him the blanket, put my gloved right hand against the bag. Through the plastic, through the leather of my glove, I could feel the heart moving down below the ribs like an anxious bird.

  Daniel reached into his pocket, plucked out the switchblade, snapped it open. He slashed the blade through the blanket, tore a strip away, folded it, and slipped it under Yazzie’s peacoat, searching for the wound in his back. Daniel Begay’s eyes and mouth showed nothing as he worked.

  “Okay,” he said, and took over the plastic bag. His right hand was red now, as though he’d dipped it in paint. He used his left to arrange the blanket over Yazzie’s shoulder and down his front. Without looking at me, he said, “The other one will be coming to the back, in a circle. Through the trees.”

  If he wasn’t there already.

  “Mr. Yazzie,” I said.

  He looked at me, his face pale and damp. Shock.

  “Mr. Yazzie, do you have a gun here? A rifle, anything?”

  He looked at Daniel Begay. His eyes were loose in their sockets, confused and dazed.

  Daniel Begay spoke Navajo to him, spoke it again, and after a moment Yazzie whispered something.

  “The dresser,” Daniel Begay said, and nodded to the far corner. “His nephew’s gun, he says.”

  I duckwalked over to the dresser, checked that it couldn’t be seen from the window, and then stood and jerked open the top drawer. Empty.

  The second drawer. Clothes: shirts, jeans, underwear. Nothing else.

  I found it in the third drawer, wrapped in an oily cotton rag. It was a U.S. Army Walker Colt, one of the heaviest handguns ever made. This was an original, not a replica, and it was well over a hundred years old.

  An antique. A relic.

  But the gun was in good shape. I could see the gleam of oil at the base of the hammer. And everything I needed to get it working was lying there beside it: a small can of powder, a powder measure, a buckskin pouch filled with lead balls, a tin of caps, a can of Crisco, a small funnel.

  It wasn’t a rifle, but it was a weapon, and right now we needed all the weapons we could get.

  I’d played with an Italian copy of a similar gun once. A friend in Santa Fe owned it, a black powder fan, and he’d dragged me out into the country one Saturday to put it through its paces. It was noisy when it went off, and it produced as much smoke as a locomotive, but its heavy eight-inch barrel, despite the smooth bore, made it more accurate than my stubby thirty-eight.

  The other front window exploded, glass spinning through the air. The bullet slammed against the fireplace, whined off the stone and into the floor.

  No one inside here had moved; the man with the rifle was only giving us something to think about.

  I scooped up everything and brought it with me to the floor. I ripped off my gloves. I opened the can of powder first, smelled it. It smelled fine to me, but I had no idea how it was supposed to smell.

  “Daniel.”

  He looked at me.

  “Matches.”

  He frowned but said nothing. With his left hand he reached into his coat pocket, found the matches, tossed them over.

  I pinched out a few grains of powder, put them on the floor, struck a match, held it to the powder. Foosh: a flare of flame, a puff of white smoke.

  Okay.

  I used the funnel to fill the brass measuring tube. The knurled knob at the tube’s bottom was drawn down, exposing the calibrations on the inset tube. It was set to forty grains. Forty grains was what Jorge had used, back in the arroyo north of Santa Fe.

  I upended the pistol, poured powder from the tube into the first chamber in the cylinder. I opened the buckskin pouch, shook out a ball, seated it atop the powder. I clicked the cylinder forward until the chamber was beneath the loading lever, and pushed the lever down against th
e ball.

  “Two things you must be careful with,” Jorge had said. “You must leave no air space between the ball and the powder. If you do, the charge may explode back on you, and perhaps take off your hand. And you must make certain that the top of the ball is flush with the top of the chamber. If it protrudes too far, it will jam the cylinder.”

  I clicked the cylinder forward. The top of the ball was where it was supposed to be. There was a fine shaving of lead around the lip of the chamber. I flicked this off, opened the Crisco, scooped out a dollop with my finger, slopped it over the ball. Waterproofing.

  I glanced at Daniel Begay. He had taken off his coat and used it to prop up Peter Yazzie’s feet. Yazzie was muttering softly in Navajo now. Daniel said something, put his hand on the man’s forehead.

  Time was skipping away. By the time I finished with Peter Yazzie’s blunderbuss, an army of overweight idiots could’ve circled around the cabin.

  Just do it, I told myself.

  I loaded all six chambers and fitted caps to all six nipples behind them. Normally, with a gun like this, you’d load only five chambers, keep an empty below the hammer. Especially if you were planning to lug it around. It had no transfer bar like a Ruger, no hammer safety like a Smith. The only safety on the gun was a pin at the rear of the cylinder that slipped into a notch on the hammer, holding the hammer between chambers so that, theoretically, the hammer wouldn’t accidentally smack down on a cap.

  But I wanted six shots. I needed as much armament as I could carry.

  I tugged on my gloves. Time to go.

  Ducking, I scurried over to Daniel Begay. His hand was still beneath the blanket, still holding that square of plastic to the mouth of the tunnel that led to Peter Yazzie’s lung. I reached into my pocket, plucked out the Smith and Wesson, held it toward him.

  “You know how to use this?” I asked him.

  He nodded and took it in his left hand.

  “You’re going to have to cover the front window,” I said. “Don’t show yourself, but take a shot at him now and then. Keep him busy. All right?”

  He looked down at Peter Yazzie. In the pallid damp face, the eyes were closed now, the mouth was open. His breath came ragged, catching in his throat. He didn’t have much time. Daniel looked back up at me. He nodded again.

  Crouching, I grabbed Peter Yazzie’s carry-all, dragged it across the floor to the nearest rear window, and slowly raised it up against the glass.

  Nothing happened.

  Keeping clear of the window, I stood up, slipped its latch, pushed it open.

  The other man, Ramon or Pablo, could be out there, waiting for something more interesting than a carry-all. Waiting for me to do exactly what I was doing.

  I hefted the Colt. It was heavy, five or six pounds of metal and wood. If I missed when I shot at someone, I could always throw it at him.

  I turned the cylinder until its pin clicked into the hammer’s notch. The loaded gun was as safe now as it was ever going to be. I unzipped my windbreaker, stuck the weapon inside, zipped up the windbreaker.

  Go.

  I swung away from the wall, caught the sill with my left foot, kicked myself out.

  I landed on my right foot, stumbled, went down, caught the ground with the palm of my left hand, righted myself and then scrambled toward the nearest tree.

  The shot came at me from off to the left.

  24

  That stumble probably saved my life. The shot whistled through the air my head would’ve occupied if I’d been upright. By the time he got off his second shot, I was behind the tree.

  He was about fifty yards away, using the trees for cover himself. The pistol sounded like a nine-millimeter, which meant he might have thirteen or fourteen rounds left in the clip.

  He had more ammunition than I did, but at the moment we did have a few important things in common. Each of us wanted to dispose of the other, and each of us wanted to get close enough for a clear shot without, in the process, getting disposed of.

  I wondered briefly what had happened to Gary Chee. Where was he and his Winchester? Why hadn’t he honked his horn to warn us?

  Then, off to the left, I saw a movement at the cabin. I looked back and saw Daniel Begay at the window. I waved him away. He nodded, as expressionless as always, and disappeared. A moment later, a muffled shot came from inside. Daniel, keeping the rifleman busy.

  The ground sloped more steeply here. Two or three yards down to my right, a small ragged ravine ran roughly perpendicular to the contour of the hill, then veered off to follow the slope westward. If I could reach it, I should be able to get close to the shooter, come up on his left without being seen.

  Keeping behind the ponderosa, I lowered myself to a crouch. I cocked the hammer of the big Colt and took a quick glance around the tree trunk.

  His gun cracked and a bullet thudded into the tree. He had moved closer.

  I pulled the trigger, not aiming at anything, just trying to get his head down. The big pistol boomed and flame shot from the barrel through a billow of white smoke. An impressive performance—but I was busy taking advantage of the smoke, hiding behind it as I rolled along my length down the hill toward the ravine. I heard another shot, and then I was tumbling over the edge.

  Four feet down, I landed heavily on my hands and knees, banging the knuckles of the hand that held the Colt.

  Okay. He couldn’t see me now. But I couldn’t see him, either.

  Move.

  Still on my hands and knees, I scuttled forward between the rocks. Despite the cold that turned my breath to vapor, sweat was prickling down my side.

  After three or four awkward yards, I cocked the Colt’s hammer again and poked my head and the gun barrel over the lip of the ravine.

  A good thing I did. He was thirty feet away and he was running directly toward me through the trees. He was a big man, and getting bigger, and he wore a shiny black leather jacket and carried a fat black automatic pistol in his right hand. I don’t know why he didn’t go for the ground when he saw me, or swerve for cover behind a tree. Maybe he couldn’t check the momentum of his run. Maybe he’d seen the white smoke and realized that I was outgunned. Maybe he just wanted to get this over with.

  But he did see me and, still at a run, he raised the pistol and the barrel spouted fire as he started shooting. Chips of rock raked my cheek.

  I aimed the Colt at his middle—no time to line up the sights—and pulled the trigger. The gun jumped in my hand and instantly the cloud of smoke obscured him. I fired through it twice more, blasting away at the spot where I thought he’d be.

  When the smoke cleared, I saw that he was down.

  I climbed up from the ravine and approached him, the Walker cocked in my hand. Two rounds left.

  He was on his back, both arms outstretched. His pistol, a Beretta, lay on the brown pine needles a few feet from his right hand.

  There was no mustache above his lip, so presumably this was Ramon. I’d hit him twice, once in the stomach and once—a fluke shot, one of the two I’d sent into the smoke—directly through the heart. He was dead. He looked very surprised about that.

  I was surprised too, and something like molten lead lay at the pit of my stomach.

  I took a deep breath, told myself that later I could be as sick as I wanted to be. Right now there was work to do.

  I picked up the Beretta, tucked the Colt under my left arm. I thumbed the automatic’s magazine release and the clip popped into my hand. Eight rounds left, and one in the chamber. I snapped the magazine back into the butt, bent over, and checked Ramon for an extra clip. Found it in the left pocket of his jacket. Shoved it in my windbreaker pocket. I put the big Colt down on the ground beside Ramon. I wouldn’t need it now.

  I looked back at the cabin. Daniel Begay stood at the far window watching me. I nodded to him and he nodded back. Then I set off through the trees, uphill, toward the rifle. Overhead, beyond the tangle of branches, the sky had gone from gray to pale opalescent blue.

 
Twenty yards from the cabin, taking cover behind a tree, I waited and watched until Pablo fired again.

  There.

  He and his rifle were up the mountainside about a hundred and twenty yards away, hidden behind a jumble of gray boulders at the far end of a small scraggly clearing in the pines.

  To reach him, I made a wide swing around to the right, coming at him slowly and cautiously through the trees. The big ponderosas were widely spaced, their trunks as thick and straight as Doric columns. There was very little underbrush here—the branches overhead had choked off the sunlight, leaving only a slippery brown blanket of pine needles along the uneven slope. And there were no animals, no flittering birds, no capering squirrels. Except for the intermittent crack of rifle fire and, twice, a dull distant pop as Daniel Begay used the Smith and Wesson, the shadowy forest was as hushed as an empty cathedral.

  I was perhaps a hundred feet away when I first saw him, a figure in a red windbreaker hunkered over the rifle.

  I began to move even more slowly then, Natty Bumpo in the tall timber, listening to my own movements around the whisper of my own breath. Watching out for loose twigs and branches among the brown needles. Placing the ball of each foot against the ground first, and then, gently and firmly, the heel. By now, Pablo would be wondering what had happened to Ramon. If he were smart, he’d be worried. So far, I had every reason to believe that he was smart.

  But I got to within thirty feet of him. Close enough, I decided. And then, as I watched him, I saw the thick shoulders suddenly tense beneath the windbreaker, tautening the red fabric, and I knew that he realized he was no longer alone. I knew he was getting ready, preparing himself for the swing to the left. A simple matter: bringing up the rifle, firing as he turned. The rifle was a scoped Mini-14, semiautomatic, no bolt, no lever, all he had to do was keep pulling the trigger.…

  Holding the pistol in both hands, sighting down along the barrel, I stepped away from the tree. “I hope so,” I said. “I really do hope you try it.”

  He didn’t move. He might have been carved from wood.

  “Right hand in the air,” I said. “Put the rifle down with your left. Very slowly.”