"It's pretty country," Mr. Adams said. "I envy you your vacation. I wish I was going fishing tomorrow."
"It's been years," Cotton said. "I hope I haven't forgotten how."
The man had boarded at O'Hare field in Chicago, where Cotton changed planes. Cotton had guessed he was a seasoned traveler-basing the guess on two shreds of evidence: Mr. Adams had picked an aisle chair on the seating chart-a choice Cotton thought he would make himself when he had flown enough to tire of looking out plane windows at the tops of clouds. And he had an easy, friendly facility for starting idle conversation, which Cotton suspected one who traveled endlessly among total strangers might develop to pass away the time. At the capital airport, Cotton had picked out among those waiting three men who might be watching him. One had hurried off to board a United flight to New York, one had disappeared, and his last, and most likely, prospect, had disillusioned him by meeting a young woman with two small children amid much hugging and kissing. Thus it restored some of Cotton's faith in his judgment to learn that the man whom the stewardess placed next to him was indeed a seasoned traveler-a salesman for National Cash Register who worked out of Denver, and who was now heading for home, and who liked to talk about hunting.
"I always start mine the first week in November, when deer season opens in the San Juans up above Durango. But once in a while I've hunted down in New Mexico-mostly back there on the west slope of the Jemez. Is that where you fish?"
"Usually up on the Brazos," Cotton said. "Way up high above the falls but below the meadows. Do you know that country?"
"I guess not," Adams said. "How do you get in there?"
"There's an old Forest Service logging road that leads west from the highway between Tres Piedras and Antonito. It winds past San Antonio Mountain, and up San Antonio Creek, and then past the Lagunitas Lakes and over the ridge, down into the gorge of the West Fork of the Brazos. Maybe thirty miles of dirt, but the fishing is good. Not many people know about it."
"How about deer up there? Is that where you're going tomorrow?"
Cotton hadn't actually seriously decided to go fishing. It had been nothing more than a conversational ploy. But, as he thought about it, he felt the pull of the silence, and the sun, and the cool high-country breeze, and the remembered thrill of a trout fighting on his line.
"That's where I'll go," he said. "I can hardly wait."
The no-smoking-fasten seat belts sign flashed on. Cotton watched the crest of Sandia Mountain move under the plane's wing, its thick dark green fir forests broken with bright yellow splashes of aspen. And then the rumble of wheels going down and Albuquerque was sprawled below them.
The Frontier Airlines 707 landed at Santa Fe airport just at noon. Cotton took a cab to La Fonda, and ate a late and leisurely lunch at a table by the massive fireplace. He sat, legs stretched, finishing the pewter pot of coffee, watching the pi¤on logs consuming themselves in the flames, and marveling at his mood. He should, he thought, feel self-disgust, shame at running. But he felt none of this. Instead he felt more relaxed than he could remember. Loose and easy. Relieved. Free.
For the first time since he had hung up the telephone (How long had it been? Only about eighteen hours. That seemed incredible.), Cotton felt he could think about all that had happened Monday without lapsing into mind-buzzing confusion. He sipped his coffee, reviewing Monday as if it involved some other person-some stranger. It seemed to have nothing at all to do with the real John Cotton, who sat here with the warmth of the pi¤on fire against the side of his face and a meal of La Fonda's chile con queso equally warm inside him. Considered through this odd, comfortable lens of detachment, the events of yesterday seemed fantastic. He had once, briefly, during an illness of the regular man, written movie reviews. What could he call Monday's series of events? Bum plotting? Too much for the audience to swallow? Something like that. Why would whoever-it-was first force his car off a bridge in a well-conceived plan to kill him and then politely call him on the telephone and warn him away? Why all the trouble, the box and the photograph, when it would have been simpler to shoot him-and certainly surer? Cotton grinned at that, thinking he had run, sure enough, and that an audience would hardly buy a hero with such rabbity habits, who ran without shame or the slightest twinge of conscience.
He refilled the cup with the last coffee from the pot and added sugar and cream.
To hell with it, Cotton thought... Screw 'em all. Screw Danilov. Screw the entire, total, bleeding zoo. He would write a letter to Hall one of these days and tell him a little-but probably not much. And he would write Janey Janoski. No, he would call Janey. And tell her what? The whole business, probably.
You know that rabbit I was hunting, Janey? Well, he turned out to be a tiger and he chased me out of town.
The irony might appeal to her. He wished that Janey were here-sitting across this table from him-and the wish was suddenly intensely strong. He turned his thoughts to Wingerd, remembering Wingerd's tired, lined face, Wingerd's eyes watery behind the lenses. The offer from Roark might have been tempting for the money in it if he had needed money. But he didn't. Not particularly. A single man whose vices are inexpensive could hardly avoid stacking up some savings over the years. And the idea of being a politician's handler was unappealing. It was working the wrong side of the street, and years of considering office holders as the natural adversary had conditioned him against a switch. Even for Paul Roark. He pursed his lips.
Even Roark? He had turned down Roark's offer at about five. The phone call had come at about seven. Would it have come if he had accepted Roark's offer? What happened in Wingerd's office after he left? Had Wingerd picked up the phone and reported to someone the failure of a job offer that was really a bribe? The speculation rankled. It meant accepting that he had totally misjudged Paul Roark. That the man was either ruthlessly ambitious or utterly corrupt. And it meant accepting that Wingerd would involve himself in murder. Wingerd, who was basically still a member of the fraternity, a lifelong newsman, a wearer of the badge.
He paid the check and walked out through the lobby, exchanging "Good afternoons" with a youngish man hurrying toward the bar. "A politician," Cotton thought, and quickly felt ashamed of the guess. He had somehow forgotten this about Santa Fe, this casual friendliness. On the plaza he sat on a bench and submitted to a shoeshine. For his quarter, he learned that the boy's name was Arsenio Rodriguez, that St. Michael's had moved to a new site on the west side of the city, had become coeducational, and no longer accepted boarding students; and his shoes, when the conversation was over, were no worse than before.
He walked up San Francisco Street past the Cathedral, along the long brick wall which once guaranteed the privacy of the girls at Loretto Academy. (It was now, he noticed, closed and empty. Where had all the girls gone?) The sun was warm, the air cool. The ravens were still operating in their noisy fashion out of the cottonwoods along the Santa Fe River. Cotton felt an impulse to whistle, and did so-some tune he had heard somewhere.
He turned up the river, using the unpaved pathway on the river side of Alameda Street, and crossed on the Delgado Street bridge. It was here, he remembered, that the secrets of the atomic bomb had been handed to the Russians. Doctor Klaus Fuchs, wasn't it? British physicist on the staff at Los Alamos, who had picked this little concrete span as the meeting place with the courier from the Soviet embassy. Cotton wasted a moment looking at a plaque commemorating this dark but historic deed. Under the bridge a small, clear stream of water was running-telling Cotton that the Public Service Company had not turned off the river as it usually did in the autumn. That meant that the summer had been wet, that the reservoirs up Santa Fe Canyon were full, and that autumn fishing would be good. He would walk back downtown and buy himself his fishing gear. He would arrange to rent a car-or better a pickup truck-from Hertz. And tomorrow he would go fishing. But first he had a mission to complete.
In five minutes he was walking east on Acequia Madre, along the mother ditch which fed Santa Fe's network of minusc
ule irrigation canals, walking slowly past familiar adobe walls. Behind the walls were the houses which-when he was a boy-were the homes of friends. Here was where Eloy Sisneros had lived. (The sign on the mailbox now said Thomas Sanchez.) And there was the house of the Saiz family, whose youngest daughter (what was her name?) had once been the object of his amatory ambitions.
At the corner of Camino Sin Nombre he was hurrying. And there it was-three houses down the narrow unpaved street. Smaller than he remembered, and a little grubbier with increasing age, with the block wall he remembered walking along now missing some of its blocks. A small girl doing something with a rope on the front porch, the cottonwood in which he and Charley had built their treehouse missing from the side yard, a fat woman emerging from the side door and looking curiously at the stranger who stood there by the street looking at her house.
Cotton turned and walked away. He was puzzled at himself-and half angry. What had he expected to find? This was exactly what he had consciously expected-certainly no worse. Then why this intense disappointment? Had his subconscious anticipated the cottonwood and Charley Graff in it? Some journey backward to warmth, to someone to be alive with? Tomorrow, perhaps, while he fished it would sort itself out.
14
John Cotton sat against the fire-killed fir snag and considered his problem. The pool was behind an outcropping stratum of granite. It was maybe four feet deep and it would be home for several cutthroat trout. Since the pool was deep and protected, one of them would almost certainly be large. But Cotton could see no way to get a hook into the deep water without spooking the fish. A growth of willow overhung it. He had tried fifteen or twenty casts from downstream. Each time he had either hooked a willow twig or the line, caught by the vagrant breeze, had fallen short into the current. Drifting the salmon egg in from upstream hadn't worked either. The current whipping past the outcrop slid the fly line past the backwater pool. It might be possible to crawl close enough to the pool from the opposite side. In a little while, he would wade across and try it. But now he was hungry. He opened his creel, still stiff with newness. Among the seven small trout, cold, limber and slippery in the wet grass, he had pulled to protect them, he found a can of Vienna sausages.
He ate absently, trying to think of the pool, of the tense expectancy when his hook finally hit its surface, of the sudden excitement when the trout struck. Instead he found himself thinking of numbers in McDaniels's notebook, of the thin smoke seeping from a plastic toy in a cigar box, and of the anger of Roy Hall's outburst in the House gallery. Hall's cynicism justified his presence here, justified the sensuous comfort of the warm, high-altitude sun on the back of his jacket and his pleasure in this day. But Hall's cynicism was Hall's, and not his own. Hall's was deeper, eroded by more years into a different personality. Cotton turned it over in his mind. Perhaps Hall, basically, was a pessimist while he was an optimist-still believing that man was more than a biped shorn of feathers, that the public, given some information, could govern itself. Or perhaps it was the opposite-that Hall cared more than he did and felt more deeply. For the first time since he had packed his bags in his apartment, he felt guilt.
He had no business being here. He should be back at the capitol completing whatever job it was that McDaniels had started. But there was the catch. What job? He had no doubt at all that the threat against him was intended to protect something from public exposure. But what? He tried to re-create the chronology. His car had been bumped off the bridge after he had spent the afternoon in the Highway Department records. But it must have been planned before that. So he might have inspired this murderous fear in the Park Commission office, or by the questions he asked in the Insurance Department, or even by the files he had checked out at the Supreme Court library. By Monday-before the cigar box and the telephone call-he had poked just about everywhere he knew McDaniels had poked.
Cotton dug a hole in the peat moss and buried the empty sausage can. He simply didn't know where to start looking. If he could find the story and break it he would destroy any reason for killing him. But could he stay alive long enough to find it?
The breeze had died now. Cotton could hear it faintly in the spruce which topped the ridge behind him. But here, and through the marshy meadow across the stream, nothing stirred. From far to the east, across the timbered ridge which climbed toward the truncated peak of Broke Off Mountain, a file of puffy white clouds were being pushed slowly across the deep blue sky by a wind which didn't reach this valley. Cotton listened, straining his ears for the dim, echoing clap of sound which would mean a hunter's rifle shot far away across the timbered hills. He had heard nothing all morning and he heard only silence now. Most of the mule deer which browsed this high country in the summer must have moved to warmer levels when the aspens turned. There would be little now to draw the hunters this high into the mountains.
The last sign Cotton had seen that other humans shared this planet with him were the sheepherders who had ridden up when he had stopped to try his luck on San Antonio Creek. An old man and a boy, riding horses still frisky with the morning cold. Cotton grinned.
"Me llamo Cirilio Maestas," the old man had said, "y este est mi nieto, Antonio Maestas." Cotton had thought-with instant disapproval-that the boy was about ten years old and should have been out of the mountains and into the classroom at least a month ago. And then Maestas had shown him the raw bearskin bundled on the pack horse, and told him that the boy had shot it, and looked at the boy with such pride and love that Cotton immediately retracted all considerations of truancy.
"I was after some strays and the boy was there at the camp when Se¤or Oso came down out of the timber after the sheep. And Tony here got the rifle out of the tent and when el oso charged him, the boy here, he shot him."
The rifle was an old, worn, short-barreled.30-30 carbine-not the sort of weapon with which a prudent man would shoot a six-hundred-pound black bear. And certainly not a bear that was uphill from him.
"Antonio no es ni¤o," Cotton had said. "Es hombre. Muy hombre."
At that Antonio had blushed, and Cirilio Maestas had unpacked his pot and made coffee while the boy rode back up the ridge to keep the sheep moving. They talked while the coffee brewed, the old man asking what had happened in the world since he had ridden in for groceries a month ago.
Nothing Cotton could think of seemed as significant as Antonio, thin and small, standing among the scattering sheep with that rusty carbine facing the downhill charge of the bear. But he told Cirilio Maestas of a new federal ruling on mutton and wool imports, and a plan to increase social security payments, and that he had read in the New Mexican that the Highway Department would complete paving the road from Tres Piedras to Taos. And then, when they had finished their coffee, the old man had done something that Cotton wished Leroy Hall could have seen. He had taken a can of Prince Albert from his jacket pocket, rolled a cigarette and laid it carefully on a rock beside their fire. Then he had rolled a second cigarette. Cirilio Maestas had then placed the cigarettes side by side on his palm and extended them to Cotton.
"Quiere usted un cigarillo?" he had asked. It had taken Cotton a second to appreciate the nature of this courtesy-to realize that the old man had paid him the ineffable compliment of presuming Cotton was too polite to accept a cigarette if only one had been rolled. Cotton had accepted the cigarette and smoked it-although he had sworn a month ago never to smoke again and suffered hard weeks of withdrawal pains to keep the pledge.
Cotton smiled again, thinking of it and of what Hall would say.
There, perhaps, was the difference. Hall wouldn't believe in Cirilio Maestas. "Cousin John," he would say, "romance lives on in your mountains. You sure you didn't meet Don Quixote and Sancho Panza?" Maybe that's the difference. Leroy Hall sees the infinitely corruptible citizen, the Roman mob rejecting Brutus in favor of Mark Antony. John Cotton thinks there's some Se¤or Maestas in everybody.
He was suddenly aware that something had moved. Upstream a weasel had come out onto a partly burn
ed log which had fallen into the stream. It stared intently into the water, looking for an unwary trout. Cotton noticed its fur was turning white. In a month, when the summer fur was shed, it would be an ermine worth twenty dollars to a trapper. He sat motionless, thinking the animal would vanish if he moved. But then it looked directly at him, curious but not afraid. It occurred to Cotton that the weasel was undisputed lord of the rocky slope behind him and the small wilderness of marsh grass. It had never met anything it couldn't whip. The same had been true of the badger he had seen downstream earlier. It had sat on the cliff above its hole and whistled at him while he fished-a derisive, disrespectful challenge.
Cotton pushed himself stiffly to his feet, and picked up his flyrod. Something had gradually gone out of this day. In two or three more hours long early shadows of autumn would move across this valley. He would take down his flyrod and walk the two or three miles downstream to his rented car and drive the thirty rocky miles back to the highway, and that would be the end of it. The snow was already overdue. Soon this stream would be buried under three feet of it, and the weasel would be pure ermine and he and the badger and snow birds would have these mountains to themselves. And where would he be? He would be where he had to be. This day had been stolen. He could not really enjoy it with an unfinished job heavy on his mind.
Tony Hillerman - The Fly on the Wall Page 10
