He nodded. “I’ll call him.” He rested his hands on the top of his cane and looked out over the canyon.
Neither of us spoke for a while. The sky was clear, the day was bright but breezy. The wind made a faint low whistle as it gusted over the canyon rim.
Daniel Begay said, “You did a good thing, Joshua.”
I frowned. “A lot of people died.”
The flat black brim of his hat dipped as he nodded. “But you did what you could.”
“Wasn’t enough, was it?”
He shook his head. “You got to make peace with it. You got to remember that things balance out.”
The wind tugged at my hair. Somewhere in the canyon, it moaned around the rocks. “At ease with the dead,” I said.
He looked at me, eyebrows raised slightly.
“Something Alice Wright told her granddaughter,” I said. “About herself. She said she was at ease with the dead.”
Daniel Begay’s hat brim dipped again. “That’s what you got to do. Get to the place where you’re at ease with the dead.”
“It’s going to take a while, Daniel.”
“Sure,” he said. “It always does.”
After I left Daniel Begay and Canyon de Chelly and the bones of Ganado, I drove to the Ardmore Trading Post. It was sixty miles in the wrong direction, but sixty miles, after what I’d already driven, didn’t seem like much. And I wanted to see the place where Dennis Lessing and Elena Ardmore had known each other.
And maybe someone there—maybe Elena’s nephew, John—would be able to answer the questions I still hadn’t answered myself. Why had Dennis Lessing’s wife been having self-destructive relationships with Lessing’s students? Had she been involved with Jordan Lowery as well? Had Jordan been, as I suspected, the one who told her about Lessing’s affair with Elena? And if so, how had he known?
I noticed the three new telephone poles as I drove up to the squat wooden building. The old poles, neatly sawed at the base, lay in the brown caliche beside the road.
Inside, the trading post looked like an extremely ambitious 7-Eleven that had fallen on hard times. There were candy racks and soda coolers and rows of canned goods, but there were also bags of flour and rice and corn on the shelves, and bolts of cloth, and yellow and red boxes of ammunition. Everything seemed dusty and disused.
A man sat behind the counter on a stool, reading Soldier of Fortune magazine. He was in his thirties, too young to be Elena and Carl Ardmore’s nephew. I asked if John Ardmore was around.
He looked up. He was small and wiry and suspicious. The small veins of his cheeks and nose were bright red. “You selling?”
I shook my head. “A friend asked me to look him up.”
“What friend?”
“Vasco da Gama.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He’ll be disappointed. You know where John is?”
He shrugged and looked down at the magazine. “Out back. Working on the car.”
I thanked him and he ignored it and I ignored that and went out the front door and around the side of the building.
An old Jeep was parked behind the store, its hood up, and a man was bent over the engine, his back to me.
“Mr. Ardmore?” I said.
Ducking out from under the hood, the man straightened up and turned around. He was in his sixties, slim and erect, wearing boots and jeans and a zippered denim jacket. His hair was swept back from his forehead in a thick white mane, and the face beneath it was a weathered version of the face I’d seen staring out from the UTEP yearbook in El Paso. No elaborate handlebar mustache, but the same dark deep-set eyes, the same strong cheekbones, the same wide sensual mouth.
He frowned slightly and said, “Help you?” and I realized that I hadn’t spoken.
“Yeah,” I said. I smiled. “Sorry. You reminded me of someone.”
His grin came quickly and easily. “I hear tell everyone’s got himself a double. Guess you seen mine someplace.” He plucked a stained handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his knuckles, then offered the hand. “John Ardmore.”
I shook the hand. “Joshua Croft.”
“Pleasure. What can I do for ya?” He leaned back against the Jeep, hands along the fender.
“A man in El Paso asked me to stop by here if I was ever in the area. He used to know your aunt and uncle.”
Ardmore nodded. “This fella got a name?”
“Dennis Lessing.”
He looked at me blankly for a moment, then shook his head. “Know some folks in El Paso. Don’t recollect no Lessing, though.” If he was lying, he deserved an Oscar.
“It was a long while ago,” I said. “Before your time.”
He grinned again. “Not much went on before my time. I been here since the Flood. Me and Noah used to shoot pool.”
“This was in the twenties. ’Twenty-four, ’twenty-five.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Well now, that does go back some. He knew Elena and Carl?”
“Yeah. He was pretty impressed by both of them.”
He nodded. “Good people. The best. Raised me like their own. Better, maybe. Everybody liked ’em. I get folks come through ever’ summer, lookin’ to say hello to ’em, and they been gone now for years. Carl went in ’fifty-seven. Elena in ‘sixty-three.”
I took a breath, let it out. “Well, if I see him again, I’ll tell him.”
“In the twenties, huh? He can’t be no spring chicken himself, this frienda yours.”
“Nope.”
“You tell ’im, he’s ever up in this neck of the woods, come on by and say hello. We’ll get us some coffee and shoot the shit a while. Can’t offer no beer. Not allowed on the Res.”
“I’ll tell him,” I said.
“Which way you headed?”
“East. Santa Fe.”
“Got time for some coffee yourself?”
“Thanks, but I’m running late.”
“You come back through here, you make sure you stop in and spend some time.”
“I’ll do that.”
We shook hands again and I left.
Some questions can’t be answered, and some questions shouldn’t be asked.
That was almost five months ago. It’s spring again. The buds are sprouting on the trees, the tourists are sprouting on the Plaza.
Daniel Begay has been through town a couple of times. Rita told me she’s seen him, but she’s never said what they talked about and I’ve never asked. He and I had lunch once, and he insisted on paying. In June I’m meeting him at Asayi and we’re going to do some serious fishing. I still don’t really know who he is, what he is, but I’ve got an idea or two.
In February I bumped into Lisa Wright on San Francisco Street, downtown. She’s showing her work in a gallery here now. She looks a little older, a little more wary around the eyes, but still very beautiful. She told me she was getting married in the summer. It was cold, and we were both in a hurry, and we exchanged numbers and promised to call, but neither of us ever did.
It seemed to me that she had become, at least partially; at ease with the dead in her life.
I haven’t, not really. Now and then Alice Wright wanders through my unguarded moments. Now and then I see Peter Yazzie and his cousin. Now and then I wonder about Emmett Lowery. And sometimes, less often now, I can hear that terrible small sad sigh of Pablo’s.
But, as Daniel Begay said, things balance out. Rita called me at my house two nights ago. At first I thought she was crying. Soon I realized she was laughing so hard she couldn’t talk.
“Joshua” she said for the third time, and then she laughed some more.
I started laughing myself, laughing at her laughter, and feeling ridiculous for it, and laughing at that. “What is it, Rita?”
She caught her breath. “Listen. Listen to this.”
I listened and I heard nothing. “Rita? Rita, you there?”
“Did you hear it?”
“Hear what? What am I supposed to hear?”
“My toes.” More laughter.
“What?”
“My stupid toes. My toes, Joshua. They’re moving.” She laughed again.
“Rita—”
“I can move my toes, Joshua. Don’t you understand?”
And then I did. “I’ll be right over,” I told her.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Richard Brenner, Bettsy Byrne of Computer Bazaar, Cathleen Jordan, Tasha Macklin of Murder Unlimited, Priscilla Ridgway of MWA, and Janwillem Van de Wetering. Thanks again to Jeanne W. Satterthwait and Jonathan Richards and Claudia Jessup. Special thanks to B.E. Kitsman, without whose help this would have been nothing.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1990 by Walter Satterthwait
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At Ease with the Dead Page 22
