“That’s some better than the Navajos.”
“Cuncon,” Victorio said. “You know what Cuncon means?”
“No.”
“Big shit.” Victorio laughed out of the side of his mouth. “No shit. It means big shit. Except in the anthropology books, they call it large feces.”
“Sure.”
“In the old days the people up there shat big turds because they had plenty to eat. The soil was damned good, they had all kinds of corn and pumpkins and stuff. But that was because they didn’t farm it full time. Right now you can’t even grow cactus up there, it’s right down to sand and bedrock. But those Twagaidn clans never moved away from there.” Victorio was talking from the gut and his speech was beginning to lose its veneer of law-school polish; the cadences were older, he sounded more like an Apache.
He seemed to realize it; he twisted the side of his mouth defensively. “Anyhow you want to look out when we get out of the car. It’s the kind of dump where you can end up in a garbage can with a pleat in your skull.”
The road narrowed and deteriorated. Past the last valley farms it climbed into dry hills. It went north for a mile, the car’s elongated shadow racing alongside, and then turned past the back of a hogback ridge until the Volvo lost the race and the shadow was out ahead. “Jesus,” Victorio said, “you think this heap’s going to hold together?”
“I pray a lot about that. It’s beginning to sound like a busted shock absorber to me.”
The road went through a roller-coaster dip and climbed between the shoulders of eroded hills; half a mile farther it entered a narrow climbing canyon, clinging to a shelf against one steep wall.
“Next bend’s a killer, you might want to tap your horn.”
The road curled slowly along the side of the cliff and swung abruptly out of sight three hundred yards ahead. Watchman shifted down into second. Victorio pointed past him to the left. “You can see Cuncon down there now.”
Beyond the bend the opposite ridge had crumbled away in prehistoric time, leaving a wide cut through which could be seen a tilted dusty table of earth. Maybe a dozen wickiups were scattered around; their condition looked wretched. It seemed ten degrees hotter up here but that was probably visual, the reflex association of heat with barren dust: nothing bigger than weeds grew among the rocks anywhere in sight.
Coming up on the bend Watchman hooted twice and listened for an answer; there was none and he put the car dead-slow into the bend, lugging it in second. Hairpin was hardly a word for it; the road virtually doubled back on itself along a steep downward tilt.
He glanced to his right through the windshield, halfway through the turn. Something glittered at him from the tumble of rocks four hundred feet below.
He braked, stopped, set the emergency, got out and walked to the lip of the bend.
The tracks showed where it had gone over. For a moment he had lost sight of it but he found it again by taking two slow side steps; the sun winked off the broken glass and that drew his eyes.
The battered steel had crumpled a great deal and was not very different in color from the drab rocks around it. What had made him stop the car was the square-cornered shape of the tailgate, sticking up at an odd angle. The cab had been crushed almost flat and one wheel, complete with tire, lay twenty feet away on a flat rock.
It had come to rest more or less right side up but it had tumbled several times getting there. Various impacts had squashed the whole thing and twisted it into the proportions of a wrecked buckboard wagon.
Victorio walked up to his shoulder and made sounds in this throat.
Watchman glanced back at the tracks where the wreck had crumbled two pieces of the edge going over. There was no guardrail.
Victorio said, “Shit. He sure as hell didn’t get out of that alive.”
“Let’s go down and have a look.”
“I wouldn’t leave my car right there. Next guy comes around the bend’ll push you right over to join the pickup down there.”
Watchman moved the Volvo fifty feet farther down the road and then they started looking for a way to get down into the gorge on foot.
10.
He’d seen them worse. The head-ons on the limited access highways, like the one that had wiped out Maria Three-persons. But the pickup was bad, bad enough.
The door had come off halfway down the mountain and got stuck between boulders. Evidently Jimmy Oto had flung himself out of the opening in a desperate plunge but the pickup had toppled over on him and then slid on down to the bottom. Oto’s body was barely recognizable.
“Dear sweet God,” Victorio muttered. Watchman looked away. Victorio swung violently away and soon Watchman heard him retching in the rocks.
He peered into the crushed cab. All the glass had burst; shards of its glittered everywhere. The roof had squashed the steering wheel. The column stick seemed to be in the second-gear position, which was where it would be, going around that bend.
Victorio came slowly over. “Sweet sweet God … what are you looking for?”
“How long did he live up here?”
“I don’t know. Most of his life.”
“He knew that bend, he could have cornered it blindfolded,” Watchman murmured.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m looking for evidence that it wasn’t an accident.”
11.
Somebody might have been waiting in a car. Heard the pickup coming and lunged forward from the concealed side of the bend, and shoved the pickup right over the edge. It could have happened like that. If it had there would be traces of car paint somewhere. He examined every exposed surface but there was nothing but rust and raw broken steel and the mottled grey paint. The nonfunctioning tail-light was still intact, improbably. The rear bumper and fenders hadn’t taken too much punishment.
Victorio said, “Why would somebody want to do that on purpose?”
“I don’t know. But it’s too much of a coincidence.”
“Hell he was always a reckless son of a bitch.”
“He never got this reckless before. Why today?”
“Why not today? Everybody dies.” Victorio buried his face in the crook of his elbow and wiggled his head, rubbing his eyes on the cloth. When his arm dropped away he looked stunned.
“Have they got a phone up here?”
Victorio didn’t respond. Watchman stood up and spoke louder. “Any phones up here?”
Victorio shook himself. “No. No phones, no electricity. Hell they’ve only got one well for the whole village.”
Watchman looked up across the canyon bottom but Cuncon wasn’t in sight from here. There was a mound of pocked massive boulders and it was a hundred feet or more up to the bottom of the earth-cut through which he’d had his glimpse of the settlement from the high road. Here there was nothing but rocks and weeds and the twisted remains of Jimmy Oto and his old pickup truck.
Victorio said, “He won’t tell us much now, will he.”
“That’s why he’s dead.”
“What?”
Watchman knew it in his guts but there was no way to explain how.
Victorio took two paces toward him. He looked baffled. “You trying to say Joe wiped him out to keep him quiet?”
“How would I know?” Watchman almost snapped it. He turned away and got down on his back and slithered underneath the rear corner of the pickup; it was the only corner that still left enough clearance to crawl under, and that was only because it was propped up on a twofoot boulder.
The drive shaft had telescoped against itself and burst. The two halves of the front axle had jabbed themselves into the ground at odd angles and the engine had fallen through the frame to lie on the rocks. There was no sign of the tail pipe or muffler; they had to be somewhere up on the cliff. The shattered oil pan had made a viscous puddle behind the engine and Watchman could see the socket of one headlight where it lay on the ground like a severed eyeball. The fuel tank was bent and dented but it hadn’t burst and there had been no fire; there must have been a slow leak somewhere because he could smell the fumes. They weren’t strong enough to alarm him.