home under the cottonwood trees beside the San Juan at Shiprock. Empty and untidy and cramped and silent. At Lordsburg, he pulled into a service station, filled his tank, and sat awhile studying the map Bernie had sketched on her napkin. He would delay the depressing arrival at his trailer by finding the formal entrance to the Tuttle Ranch. He’d use another couple of hours finding the place on the other side of that huge spread where Bernie had caught up with the Seamless Weld truck.
Finding the front entrance of the Tuttle Ranch was simple enough. The elderly lady at the Giant Station cash register explained it.
“Get off Interstate 10 at Gage, take County Road 2, and then 20 toward JBP Mountain and—”
“Hold it,” Chee said. “Show me on my map.”
The cashier frowned, looked at the map, put her pencil tip on a hump labeled “JBP Mountain” and traced it along. “Then past Soldiers Farewell Hill, right here, and take the turn south toward the Cedar Mountains”—she tapped with her pencil point—“and then you pass Hattop Mountain”—another pencil tap—“and turn right on a dirt road there. It’s graded but they never put any gravel on it. You’ll see a big corner post at the junction pointing southward and a sign on it says ‘Tuttle Ranch.’ But if you’re looking for Tuttle, he’s not there much. Lives somewhere back east.”
The sign nailed to the corner post was painted in neat red block letters: TUTTLE RANCH—SEVEN MILES. The legend neatly painted below read: PRIVATE PROPERTY. ENTRY BY PERMISSION ONLY.
Chee paused here a moment, comparing the landmarks Bernie had indicated on her napkin to the large-scale Benchmark map he kept in his truck. After about ninety minutes, several wrong turns, and much dust, he found the road along which Bernie had followed the Seamless Weld truck, and the ridge she had mentioned crossing just before she had reached the locked gate and encountered Tom O’day. He stopped on the ridge, got out his binoculars, and checked. He saw the gate, but no one was there to open it for him even if he could show them a reason they should. He scanned the landscape. Mountain ridges in every direction, but dry mountains here. Far to the east the Floridas and to the west, the Big and Little Hatchets. Far beyond them and blue with distance, the ragged shapes of the Animas and Peloncillos. Chee was comfortable with the emptiness of his tribe’s Four Corners country, but here all he could see seemed to be a lifeless total vacuum.
But not quite lifeless. Across the fence and far down the ridge away from the locked gate his eye caught motion. He refocused the binoculars. Five great gray beasts, two with long curved horns, were walking in a line down a slope. But going where?
Apparently into a playa where runoff water would collect if rain ever fell here. In the playa a windmill stood beside a circle of what seemed to be a water tank.
The sound of an engine. Chee shifted his binoculars toward it. A truck towing a horse trailer was rolling down the hill toward the gate.
Chee climbed into his own pickup and headed for the gate. The driver of the ranch truck was standing behind it now, looking about thirty years younger than the man Bernie had described. About seventeen maybe, grinning, with his hat pushed to the back of his head.
“ ’Fraid you hit a dead end here,” he said. “I can’t let you through.”
“I saw your sign,” Chee said. “But maybe you can help me out with some information.”
“If I can. Where you from?”
“Up in San Juan County. Navajo Reservation.”
“I saw you was Indian,” the boy said. “But down here we got a lot of Indians, but mostly the local tribe and some Apaches. Got three of them on our team.”
Chee studied the boy, “Football, I’d say. You a tight end, or maybe fullback.”
The boy laughed. “Little school there at Gage. We played six man. We didn’t have all those positions.”
“If you could unlock that gate for me, I’d go down that road just far enough to take a look at that new watering tank you’re putting in.”
“Watering tank down the road? I don’t know nothing about that. The only water tank out that direction is way over yonder.” He pointed in the direction of the playa where Chee had seen the windmill. “In the spring, and again after the rainy season, water drains down into that low place, and soaks in. They put a little windmill there to pump it into the drinking tank when the playa goes dry.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Chee said. “But a man at the Chevron station at Lordsburg told me about it. He’s a rancher around here somewhere, and I was telling him about the trouble we were having keeping our stock watered, and how I was looking for some used tanks we could buy. Anyway, he said the Tuttle Ranch was putting in some new tanks for those African animals you’re raising and was selling off their old metal tanks.”
The boy shrugged. “News to me.”
“This fella said it involved some sort of new construction a few miles inside the Southeast Gate. Would this be the Southeast Gate?”
“Hey,” the boy said. “I bet I know what he was talking about.” He pointed. “They’re putting in some sort of a structure over the hill there.” He pointed. “Just three or four miles beyond that hill. There was a crew in there doing some digging and pouring concrete. They put up a house of some sort and mounted a little windmill on it, but I think it was just to run an electric generator, and the building was to store stuff in. I don’t think it had anything to do with water. And then just yesterday I was by there and the sparks were flying. They were doing some metal cutting and welding. Working on pipes, it looked like. Nothing like a water tank.”
Chee considered that. “Well, the man at the Chevron said they were installing a windmill to pump water for the animals.”
The boy was grinning. “I heard that too. But it’s to run a little electric generator. To get to the water table here, you’d have to drill down damn near like an oil well. Hundreds of feet. Probably thousands. Take’s a big rig to do that. Nothing like that’s been in here.”
“I’d sure like to see what they’ve done,” Chee said. “How about it? No harm done.”
“They don’t give me the key.”
“Why don’t I just climb over the fence and walk over there. Not more than three or four miles you said?”
The boy took off his hat, studied Chee thoughtfully, rubbed his tangled blond hair, and restored the hat.
“No, sir. I’d just have to get out my cell phone here and report it. And somebody would come out and run you off. And maybe I’d get fired.”
So Chee said thanks, anyway. He drove back up the hill he’d come in on and found what he was looking for— fading tracks leading off from the road in the proper direction. They would have been made hauling in post hole diggers, posts, spools of wire, and all else needed when that formidable fence was built. Chee jolted down the tracks to the fence, and along it, around the slope of the hill, and up the next one. Near the top of it he stopped. The gate where he met the boy was out of sight now, but in the valley below he could see down where a little building stood with a small windmill mounted on its roof.
He got out his binoculars again and studied it. The boy was right. The blades were connected on the platform to a drive shaft that terminated in what was probably a gearbox. That was mounted atop what looked like the housing for a generator. Chee could also make out insulated cables running down one of the walls of the shack and disappearing into it. It was not an unusual sight for Chee. Many family outfits around the reservations established such electrical sources for their hogans to run refrigerators and their television sets. But what would it be used for here? Hard to tell from what was visible to him. But he could make out the edge of what appeared to be a fairly large excavation. There were pipes in that.
Back on the access road, he headed for Interstate 10 and then turned north toward Shiprock. It had been a long, long day of driving and a total, absolute waste of time. Almost anyway. He had learned that Bernie was getting along a lot better without him than he was without her. And he had added another vague little bit of information to be considered in a vague murder case, which was none of his business anyway. Officially not his affair.
But Bernie was his affair. At least he wanted her to be. And Bernie’s boss seemed to have a peculiar interest in this welding truck and in what Bernie saw beyond the Tuttle Ranch gate. He was feeling increasingly uneasy about that. He was suspecting what Bernie had photographed had nothing to do with anything as innocent as watering exotic animals.
13
