Wild Indigo

by Sandi Ault

  Roy took off his hat and ran his fingers through his thick shock of silvery blond hair. “You didn’t have that wolf of yours with you, did you?”

  I shook my head no. “The pueblo dogs don’t like the way Mountain smells.”

  “Good. Okay now, who was the guy?”

  “Jerome Santana.”

  “Santana.” He thought a moment. “I don’t think I knew him. You know him?”

  “Yeah, I knew him.”

  “Friend?”

  “Kinda. I was visiting his mother when—”

  “Yeah, I just had my ass chewed at the tribal council office about that,” he cut in. “We’ll talk about that later on. Right now, I gotta go speak with the Gs. Who’s the agent in charge?”

  “Diane Langstrom.”

  “You already talked to her?”

  “Just briefly. We’re going to talk again.”

  “So this was a suicide. You were a witness, you gave her your statement. That’s pretty much it, right?—other than getting the buffalo back.”

  I winced.

  His eyebrows lifted. “What?”

  “I saw him, Roy. Yeah, it looked like a suicide, there was no one else around, he didn’t even try to get out of the path of those bulls. But I still don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “He looked like he might have been drugged.”

  “On drugs, or drugged?”

  “I knew the guy. He didn’t do drugs.”

  “You tell that to Langstrom?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “She doesn’t see any evidence of foul play.”

  “Okay, then. She’s in charge.”

  “Yeah…only she’s wondering about it, too.”

  The Boss blew out a blast of air. “Well, I don’t know what we can do with that. Normally the coroner could do a drug screen but we’re on Indian land—no jurisdiction for the county M.E. unless this is a suspicious death. And the tribal government won’t want an autopsy, they have a religious thing about that. The only way we’d have an autopsy is…” Roy’s head slumped to one side. “Aw shit. This could get to be a real mess.”

  “It would take an act of God now, and probably an exhumation, too. The tribe has already taken the body to ceremony.”

  “Already? How’d that happen?”

  “Like I said, Langstrom had no evidence of a crime.”

  Roy batted the brim of his hat with one hand, knocking the dust off of it. He gripped the crown and then paused and looked out at the mountains. “And you think there was a good chance he might have been drugged?”

  “I don’t know, Roy. He wasn’t…” I searched for a way to say it. “…right.”

  “Well, when the medical examiner doesn’t get invited to the party, then it’s up to the FBI to make the call for an autopsy. You said you told Langstrom your suspicions?”

  I shook my head yes.

  “And she thought it smelled funny, too?”

  “She called her superiors in Albuquerque; they told her to let the tribe have the body, keep the file open, and send ’em the reports for now. She looked Santana’s corpse over good, got pictures, told me to put everything in my report. There was nothing to keep the tribe from taking the body. Without evidence of foul play, it’s their ball game. And it was getting late in the day—you know their thing about the sun not setting on a spirit in passage.”

  “Well, how bad do you want to pursue this drug thing? We could have a real mess here.”

  “I know.”

  “Up to now, the council seemed to be more worried about the fact that you were out here when the pueblo was closed than they were about losing one of their own. The war chief must have reminded me five or six times how it’s Quiet Time. I got my butt dragged through a steel trap about it.”

  “Yeah, they were all over me when they got here. Even when I pointed to the body and told them what had happened. They tried to shoo me off like a fly until I reminded them I had to call the FBI.”

  Roy blew air out of his nose loudly. “Well, we’ll have a big damn stink if you’re going to call this thing anything but a suicide. We’ll be in a cold war with the pueblo, and our asses will be strapped to the FBI’s on this one like Siamese twins. If the tribe already took the body, it’ll be an uphill fight. Big fight. Nobody can win, either. I don’t see a happy ending on this one. This could make us both a lot of enemies.”

  “So, what do you want me to do? Lie in my report? Not mention that he looked like he’d been drugged?”

  “I didn’t say that.” The Boss put his hat back on and straightened the brim. “I don’t know, Jamaica. You get yourself into the weirdest predicaments. At least you weren’t hurt.” His eyes panned around. Then he noticed my Jeep. “Jesus Christ!”

  It was dusk now and the open-sided hull of my white Cherokee stood in relief against the dark face of the mountains. Dozens of flashlights swarmed like fireflies in the foothills beyond as Indians and BLM personnel hunted for stragglers from the herd in the deep shadow of the tall peaks. The radio I had obtained for the roundup squawked and sputtered as members of the search party talked to one another. Roy had moved to the front of my vehicle and was staring at the smashed windshield and the concave front quarter panel. “Damn! You’re lucky to be alive. You know that?”

  I didn’t say anything. I remembered Jerome Santana’s eerily blissful expression just before he died—he looked as if he felt lucky.

  The Boss shook his head repeatedly as he circled the vehicle, studying the damage. “I don’t know what it is about you. I put you on as liaison to the pueblo so you’d have to relate with two-legged animals every once in a while. I thought maybe putting you closer to civilization would keep you out of trouble after that fiasco last spring. But look…” He pointed to my car, then put his forehead into his hand and rubbed at his temples.

  Roy had been my field manager for six and a half years, the whole time I’d been with the BLM. Before this assignment, I’d been one of a handful of resource protection agents—the Range Riders—charged with riding the fence lines in open territory. Only a few months ago, Roy had transferred me from the high-terrain work I loved after I’d gotten involved in a life-threatening situation. A priest friend of mine had been murdered, and I had launched my own unofficial investigation. This culminated in a backcountry standoff that proved deadly. I’d solved the crime, but narrowly escaped suspension by the BLM for overstepping the bounds of my authority. And both the Boss and I had had to endure a lengthy internal investigation.

  Roy’s voice brought me back to the present: “Well, this Warm Hands guy said he doesn’t need our help, says he has most of the herd rounded up. Why don’t you go ahead and call your people in.”

  “Okay, but I’m staying.”

  “Suit yourself, but when your crew’s done and gone, you git, too. No more visiting.” He opened the door of his truck, then looked over his shoulder at me. “And before I forget, I want to see you in the office first thing on Monday morning. I’m going to get a look at that incident report before it goes anywhere else.”

  “Okay, Boss.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll go say howdy to the FBI.” He started to climb in the truck, but paused, turned. “You want to hear something funny?”

  “What?”

  “On the way here, I got a call from one of the county commissioners. He was hotter than a chile pepper because two Texans were sitting in a hot tub a few miles up the road to the ski valley, at some tourist trap, and a couple of buffalo came smashing through the privacy fence. Caught ’em with their skivvies off. Said it would hurt the tourist trade having things like this happen. Now I ask you: where else could you go and have wild animals crash your hot tub party? You just can’t get that kind of action anywhere else!” He chuckled, savoring his own wry humor. Then he got in his pickup and drove toward the knot of tribal officials, FBI, and tribal police gathered in the broken pen where Jerome Santana had died.

  Later
, as the last traces of daylight began to burn crimson and then fuchsia against the black tips of the mountains on the west edge of Grand Mesa, I heard a faint sound from the direction of the pueblo. As I focused in on it, closing my eyes to suppress one sense and heighten another, I heard a chorus of wailing, a call like the voices of dozens of wounded souls. I pulled my field glasses from the floor of my Jeep and trained them on the ancient structure of the pueblo—the southwest edge that was four stories of adobe. Lining the multitiered rooftop, having climbed to the highest point in the village on their aspen-pole ladders, the village priests wrapped in their white blankets were stark against the lapis lazuli sky. They were ululating to the vanishing sun, a miserable song of dying, loss, and sorrow.

  Long after dark, when the roundup of the buffalo had broken off for the night, I drove past the cemetery at the pueblo. Torches burned and family sat in a semicircle on the ground beside the grave of Jerome Santana, who would have been washed and buried before the sun went down on that day. Because they believed his spirit would remain near the corpse, gathering the lessons and love garnered in this lifetime, relatives would stay beside the body, keeping vigil for four days, until his spirit had made the journey to the next world. A woman, wrapped head and body in a white blanket, struggled to her feet as I drove past, her face a dark mystery within the moonlit shroud she wore, her voluminous, tall white moccasins like thick, pale trees growing beneath the dark hem of her skirt. She was facing my direction, and her body turned slightly to follow me as I drove slowly past. Because of my job, I was one of only a few nonresidents allowed to drive within the reservation boundaries during this holy time preceding the Indigo Falls pilgrimage. I could not see the face of the woman, but I knew who it was.

  It was my friend and mentor, my medicine teacher, my pueblo mother, and the mother of the man who died. It was Anna Santana.

  2

  Momma Anna

  Earlier that day, I had worked with Momma Anna in her kitchen. Bundles of dried wild spinach, ropes of garlic, and ristras of dried chiles hung from the vigas that stretched across the ceiling and supported the earthen roof. She was working over the enormous thigh of an elk, shaving the meat from the slab into thin, transparent strips. She wielded an old bone-handled knife with a wide, tarnished blade. Blood dripped into the sink, and flies buzzed around. Momma Anna shooed them off the flesh, away from her face. As she worked, she threw the meat strips into a bowl of dried chile, ground garlic, salt, and sugar. After she’d cut a bowlful, she tossed them in the spices with her hand, fished them out, and heaped them onto a Styrofoam plate. She handed the dish to me. “Take,” she grunted.

  I stepped out the back door into the garden, where Momma Anna worked tirelessly through the short high-desert growing season to produce a few rows of onions, garlic, chiles, corn, squash, and herbs. I walked across the caked clay soil, dried now from the heat of the summer—the plants sunburned and wilted—to a little pen where Momma Anna had strung lines of string between the fence poles. I carefully arranged the slices of elk meat so that they hung evenly in the hot sun. The flies swarmed to these new, moist strips, as the last batch had already begun to dry and harden. I draped a piece of cloth over each line to discourage the insects.

  I went to the brush arbor and dipped water from the olla into a galvanized pan. I was careful to use only two dippers of the precious liquid to wash my hands. Then, as I’d been taught, I emptied my washing water into the bucket the dogs drank from. A mutt bitch and her three pups were lying under the apple tree in the backyard, gnawing on bones Momma Anna had given them when she’d first begun to carve the elk. Fresh, meaty joint knuckles distracted the dogs from trying to raid the pen for our jerky.

  I wiped my face with my still-wet hands. I looked across the row of wild chokecherries along the fence line into the pasture beyond, where horses grazed in the shadow of Sacred Mountain. White cumulus clouds piled into puffy shapes in the turquoise sky, but they had failed to make much rain during this monsoon season. Momma Anna said that meant an early, hard winter.

  I walked back into the kitchen. “You not cover your hair,” Momma Anna said.

  “I just went to the back of the house. There’s no one out there.”

  She shook her head, pressing her lips together. “It Quiet Time. They could see you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Quiet Time: a holy time for the pueblo, when old ways and religious rituals were observed, and visitors and outsiders were not allowed on the reservation.

  “You wash hands?”

  “Yes.”

  Now the old woman wrestled with a long, tough piece of sinew, working it up the bone, shaving the meat away from it to pull it out in one piece. “In old time,” she said, tugging at the stubborn strand, “we save that, use to sew. Those moccasins—sewn with deer sinew. Grandma Bird made me—my first Corn Maiden dance.”

  I looked at the tall, white, bootlike moccasins—footwear that all the women of Tanoah Pueblo wore for ceremony. A whole deer hide was softened and whitened for each shoe, then sewn to a sole made from buffalo leather. The long leg of the moccasin stretched to the top of the wearer’s thigh, but then was rolled down into thick, soft folds that came to the knee, making the women’s legs look like large, round aspen trunks beneath their long skirts.

  Momma Anna had laid out many of her ceremonial items here on the kitchen table: her jish, or medicine pouch, which was a small, beaded deer hide bag on a thong to wear around her neck; a soft, square elk pouch to store the jerky in; a long, flat beaded belt; turquoise jewelry; a cloth bundle of loose turkey and eagle feathers; and her traditional blanket shawl. Beside these lay a neatly folded Pendleton blanket, which Momma Anna would roll behind her saddle when she rode to the Indigo Falls one week from today for the annual pilgrimage of her people—a ceremonial journey homeward to the Eye of the Great Spirit.

  As I waited for the next round of jerky strips, I noticed the neglected poinsettia in the kitchen window, still lingering from Christmas when I’d given it to her as a gift. It was drooping, thirsty. I took a dipper of water to the window box and gave it to the plant.

  “No water him,” Momma Anna said, pointing to the small succulent in the dish next to the poinsettia. “He not like water. Only money.”

  A few coins rested in the dish beside the peyote plant.

  Momma Anna wiped her hands on her apron. “Now. We talk about him, we have to feed him.” She went to her purse, which was hanging from its strap on a peg near the door. She fished out two quarters. “Here, you feed him, too,” she said, and handed me one of the coins.

  I watched her press the quarter against her forehead and close her eyes, as if she were making an offering to a deity. Then she threw the coin in the dish and went back to the sink to shave more meat. I put my quarter in the dish with the plant.

  “That’s peyote, right?” I asked.

  “That a herb. No talk about him more or we have to feed him again.”

  I remembered earlier in the summer when Momma Anna had told me she and the other women were going to gather herbs. I’d asked if I could go along but she’d made some excuse about my yellow hair scaring the herbs away. My attempts to learn from Momma Anna were never fed by asking questions, but rather by events like today, when we simply shared time together and I observed what she did.

  This Tanoah mentor of mine had “adopted” me some time ago when we’d met at an art show. It was in the month she called Nuúpapana, Night Fire Moon, mid-December. I was passing by when her display threatened to collapse, and I helped her prevent this calamity. Once we’d stabilized her things, I fetched a hammer and some nails to help her remount her beautifully crafted dream-catchers, bone chokers, and silver and turquoise jewelry. We’d visited a little; I’d tried to buy a bracelet from her, but she insisted upon giving it to me. Later, in the parking lot, she’d hurried up to me breathlessly to invite me to have Christmas dinner at the pueblo with her family. She pressed a piece of paper with a phone number written on it into my hand
. “That my son Frank, my daughter-in-law Lupé phone; I not have one. You call. This week. Lupé tell you how to come.”

  “But why? You don’t even know me!” I asked.

  “You no mind. I am told do this. You come.”

  She started to trundle away, her blanket shawl pulled around her against the winter cold. She turned back. “What your name?”

  “Jamaica. Jamaica Wild.”

  “What kind name that? You white girl. You not from Jamaica, right?”

  “No.” I gave a nervous laugh. My name had always been cause for unwelcome comments and unsuccessful explanations. “My mother named me Jamaica. She…I guess…when I was born, I think she just dreamed of being anyplace besides where she was.”

  “Where she now?”

  I drew in a breath. “I don’t know.” There was a long silence while we studied each other. “She left. When I was very young.”

  The Indian woman looked at me and pressed her lips tightly together, shaking her head. “You call me Momma Anna,” she said.

  3

  Truth or Dare

  Diane Langstrom was a stunning but deadly woman. She was almost six feet tall in her hiking boots, and I had heard that she was an expert in a variety of martial arts. Her auburn hair was cut so short it might have looked masculine except that she also had beautiful features and a lean but clearly feminine body. She had worked her way up to field inspector position in the FBI by sheer will and incredible drive. Earlier that evening, at the scene of Santana’s death, she had told me that she wanted to talk with me away from the tribe. We had agreed to meet at the gas station in the tiny village of Cascada Azul, just beyond the outer boundary of the reservation. With the pueblo on Quiet Time and no tourists, the station had closed at sundown. Diane was waiting, her car idling, when I pulled in the lot.