You didn’t explain such feelings; you ignored them or you rode with them. There was more to be learned from what people said than could be found in their words. It was their faces and voices and the way they looked away; it was in the way they used their hands and the way they breathed.
They resented him because he was the outsider but that still left too much out. They were overreacting to him. They were lying to him, almost all of them, and it was because the town had something to hide. Joe, probably. Joe, and something more. If it wasn’t guilt it was suspicion, and not all of it was directed at Watchman.
There were layers of secrets; what made it strange was that it was an Indian town—such intrigues were expected in Anglo communities but that was because they weren’t real communities, they weren’t tribes. Indian skeletons were usually on view to all because there were no closets to hide them in.
But here dark spirits had been stirred up. And he was beginning to sense that if Joe wasn’t dug up soon there would be an explosion of violent forces.
He parked in front of the Broken Arrow and grinned at himself for his melodramatic imaginings. But when he got out he locked the car.
6.
They were mainly pickups and dusty Chevys and Fords and that was why he noticed the Volkswagen. He couldn’t determine the color in this light but it was a dark shade. He found it unlocked and looked for the registration slip but it wasn’t in the car; he made a note of the license number and went into the roadhouse.
The lights were no brighter than before but this time he didn’t have to accustom his eyes to a change from bright sunlight. The place was well populated but not overcrowded. The same one-armed bartender and a helper now, and a man at the register in place of Luxan’s teen-age daughter. The bartender was very fast, probably faster than most who had two arms—he had to prove something.
Watchman didn’t wait in the doorway. It was too much like putting himself in a picture frame for inspection. He went to the near end of the bar and waited for a beer and when it came he carried it toward the back of the room. Men at the bar turned to glance at him and there was enough challenge in their eyes to show they knew about him. But it wasn’t a gamut; their resentment only simmered.
The decibel level of talk had dropped when he had entered. The room had had time to size him up and the talk resumed its former level until Angelina Threepersons left the corner table and carried her guitar to the stool on the bandstand. Then some of them stopped talking and looked at her, anticipating her song. Some others kept on talking as if they’d heard her before and didn’t think much of her act.
Watchman took a small table and tipped his chair back against the wall. There were a few Anglos in the place— three in a bunch at the bar and two others, singly, talking with Apaches at tables. They were probably local sawmill technicians and livestock managers but ten years ago you wouldn’t have found them in a place like this. The old barriers had come down. Allowing an Indian girl to sing non-Indian songs would have been unthinkable in an earlier generation.
The girl tuned up, not hurrying; she bent her ear over the f-holes of the guitar and ignored her audience.
There was a mournful quality to her, as if her gauntness were the product of sadness. The lamps bleached her face of color; it was a tired face, striking, the bones as fragile as a sick child’s but the mouth and eyes creased by life. Once he’d had to tell a nine-year-old girl her puppy had been run over. Before she’d absorbed it completely and started to bawl there had been an expression on her face, quizzical and disbelieving and yet saddened and enraged all at once. Angelina Threepersons reminded him of that.
When she started to sing he was surprised by the repertoire. They were Kristofferson songs—Sunday Morning Coming Down and Bobby McGee and Help Me Make It Through The Night—and she did them well with a country twang and a husky deep delivery. But she sang without looking at her audience; she was singing for herself. Her music went into Watchman’s bones with melancholy lassitude.
A fat Indian got up from his seat to Watchman’s right and carried his empty glass toward the bar for refilling; it left a gap through which Watchman saw two familiar faces—Dwight Kendrick’s and Thomas Jeffords Victorio’s. Kendrick swiveled his gaze around and it passed across Watchman casually and kept turning until it reached the girl on the bandstand; for a moment Kendrick pretended he hadn’t seen Watchman but then he thought better of it, looked back and nodded. He said something and Victorio looked over his shoulder and lifted a glass of whiskey in Watchman’s direction. It might have been an invitation but Watchman ignored it. He acknowledged the attention with one hand and returned his glance to the girl. A few minutes later he picked up movement in the edge of his vision and turned to see Kendrick and Victorio making their way to the door, and out.
After the third song Angelina carried the guitar back to the corner table and left it standing up on the seat of a chair. She walked to the bar. Her legs weren’t particularly long but she had a languid way of moving, or perhaps again it was weariness. She was wearing a black cowboy shirt with pearl buttons and a sheathed red skirt that almost reached the floor. The points of her shoulders were pronounced, exaggerated by the masculine tailoring of the shirt. The bartender spoke to her and handed her a tray and she carried it toward the front of the room. Watchman followed her with his eyes. Her black hair, tied in a bun, bobbed among the tables.
He drained his beer and when she was on her way back with a tray of empty glasses he waved her over.
“Another beer?”
“A little talk. When you get a minute.”
“You must be the Navajo.”
“Highway Patrol,” he said.
He reached toward his wallet but she spoke quickly. “I’d sooner not talk here.” She looked back across the room but the bartender was talking to someone. She turned her face toward Watchman and her quick smile was pretty but it was mocking and left an uncertain aftertaste.
“Name a time and place,” he said.
“Have you got your car here?”
“Beat-up Volvo right outside. What time do you finish here?”
She looked down at the tray, thinking, and then she gave him an up-from-under glance. She seemed amused. “We’re not too crowded. Let’s get it done with—I’ll be out directly.”
He left and sat in the car with his elbow out the window. The spot where the dark Volkswagen had been was empty. He hadn’t noticed anybody leaving the place except the two lawyers and Kendrick drove a Corvette. So it was Tom Victorio’s and that was no real surprise; Victorio had been sweet on Maria and he’d have needed no big excuse to go down to Sunnyslope to visit her while Joe was tucked away in prison.
A surmise; a check on the license number would confirm it. So it puts Victorio at Maria’s house the morning before the breakout. How does that help locate Joe? It didn’t and he put it aside.
She came out of the roadhouse and looked for his car. He flashed the headlights at her and watched her come toward him. Her stride was still lazy but he sensed the tension in her.
She slid in beside him. “We can just sit here if you don’t want to waste gas.”
“I like the way you sing.”
“And I’m far too talented for this dump.”
“You could be. If you worked at it.”
“I guess I don’t want it that much.” She gave him a head-on look for the first time since she’d got into the car. “Are you a cop or a talent scout?”
“Come on,” he said, “don’t get hard-boiled. I’m trying to find your brother, I’m not making a pass.”
“Now that’s odd,” she said, “because I like to think I’ve learned to tell the difference between the serious customers and the ones that are just looking. Browsing, you know.” She was mocking him again. She leaned toward him, her left arm sliding across the back of his bucket seat. “I’m trying to buy my crippled nephew an operation so he can play the trumpet again. Would you care to contribute?”