Apache Country (6 page)

The three men went back to the receiving
office and sat down in the waiting room. It was dark outside now.
Tom Cochrane took his cigarettes out of his pocket and looked at
the pack thoughtfully for a moment before speaking.

“We’re getting no place with this guy,” he
said.

Jack Irving nodded agreement. “No fucking
comment,” he muttered.

Easton said nothing, the implications of
Ironheel’s silent signal still spinning around in his mind. He
couldn’t have read it wrong. But what did it mean?

“That reminds me,” he told them, shaking off
his preoccupation. “Charlie Goodwin’s office is sending an attorney
over to represent him.”

Goodwin was the senior partner in the law
firm that contracted much of the County’s public defender work.
When Easton told him Ironheel had waived his right to an attorney,
his reaction was immediate. McKittrick knew better than to allow a
suspect in a murder case to waive, it was a direct infringement of
Ironheel’s Constitutional rights, he’d get someone over as soon as
he could, and so on. Of course, Easton thought sourly, the fact
that representing a suspect in a high profile murder case with
national media attention could be very good for business had
nothing whatever to do with it.

“So when does this hotshot arrive?” Tom
Cochrane asked.

“Sometime tomorrow morning would be my
guess.”

“Tell you what,” Cochrane said,
mock-brightly. “Let’s go back in there with a riot baton and appeal
to his better nature.”

Easton smiled and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I know how you feel, Tom,” he said. “You gave it your best
shot.”

Cochrane shrugged philosophically. “There’s
still time,” he said. “That guy is hiding something. I could see it
in his eyes.”

“Yeah,” Irving said. “But what?”

Help me, Easton thought. He couldn’t have
been mistaken. What Ironheel had silently said was help me.

When Easton got home, Grita was in the den
watching TV. She gave him one of her you-did-it-again looks and
lumbered off into the kitchen with her nose in the air. He followed
her in.

“I made burritos,” she said. He could feel
the weight of her reproach.

“Things ran late,” he said. “Honest, I’m
sorry.”

“Is okay,” she said, her tone making it clear
that okay it most definitely was not. In Grita’s world, people ate
their meals at the appropriate time: eleven o’clock at night was
not one of them.

“You work too hard,” she said. That was as
close as Grita would allow herself to come to saying ‘I forgive
you.’

“Now you mention it, I could eat something,”
Easton told her. “I’ll just go up and look in on Jessye first.”

She looked at him the way she always did when
he came in late and said that, like she might go stand in the
doorway and stop him. “Don’t you go waking her up, now,” she
warned. “She got school tomorrow.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

No question, Grita was Easton’s rock and
foundation. For more than five years now his life had revolved
around her, his earth orbiting her sun. When his wife Susan had
died so suddenly, so unexpectedly, he had gone completely off the
rails. And stayed that way for a long, blank, empty time during
which everything slid away, like a curling stone on ice. Steeped in
self-pity, drinking too much, he forgot to shower or shave, hanging
around in dirty old sweats, staring out the window. There wasn’t
anywhere he wanted to go, nobody he wanted to see. People stopped
calling, invitations dried up. He didn’t care. Jack Daniels was the
only friend he needed.

He was pretty nearly all the way down to the
bottom of the bottle when Ellen Casey just marched in to his house
and took over. Didn’t ask, didn’t apologize. Just sat him down and
read him the riot act. She wasn’t angry. It would have been easier
if she had been.

“You’re a drunk, David,” she told him “Worse
still, you’re a slob. You keep carryin’ on like this and they’ll
kick you out of the Sheriff’s Office, and you can be damned sure if
that happens, someone from Child Protection is going to take your
daughter away from you – for good. Is that what you want?”

“Aw, Ellen, it’s not that bad …”

“Yes it is!” she snapped. “And whether you
like it or not, you are going to shape up. Starting now.”

She attacked the unkept house as if it were
an enemy. He watched shamefacedly as she poured all the liquor down
the sink, threw out all the spoiled food, stacked greasy plates in
the dishwasher, crammed dirty shirts and soiled underwear into the
washing machine, then scrubbed and vacuumed the place till it
practically begged for mercy. There was a contained fury about the
way she worked, as if maybe she was exorcising a few demons of her
own.

“Now you, you big ape,” she said, arms
akimbo. “Climb into that damned shower and don’t come out until
you’re squeaky clean.”

Early every day, right on the button, she
would come by and check him over before shunting him off to work.
She cleaned the house, took care of the laundry, drove Jessye to
kindergarten, picked her up in the afternoon, cooked evening meals
for them, sometimes even stayed and watched TV.

After a month or two when things more or less
got back on the rails she hired him a housekeeper. It was a Friday,
he remembered. Margarita Gutierrez was a large woman who weighed
maybe two hundred pounds. She had a nut brown, unlined face, and
big brown eyes that met his unafraid. She told him she was forty
eight years old and that she had definite opinions about certain
things, and if any of them bothered him, he better tell her right
now. She would not work for anyone who drank heavy or brought women
home. Or for anyone who smacked their children or for anyone kicked
their dog. He said that wasn’t a problem and she said very well.
The following Friday she moved in.

Jessye had been just a baby then, and
couldn’t get her mouth around the name ‘Margarita’, so they settled
on calling her what she could say, ‘Grita.’ That had been nearly
five years ago, five years in which Grita had become his counselor
and confidante, support team and cheering section, guardian angel
and goad. As for Ellen Casey, even if he had known how, he had
never been able to find a way of thanking her, nor did she ever
present him with an opportunity to do so. She would never even
discuss the matter. “Everybody hits white water some time or
other,” was all she would say, and again, he instinctively knew as
she said it she was talking more about herself than him. “You just
have to get past it.”

He went softly up the stair to the bedroom
where he found Jessye sprawled across her bed, the duvet kicked
off, both her arms thrown over her head, her long, light brown hair
slightly damp with perspiration. Because she wouldn’t wear pajamas,
he had some T-shirts done with silly names on them for her to wear
to bed. The one she was wearing tonight said ‘Mrs. Ticklespot.’
There was a place just above her third rib you only had to touch
and she’d explode with giggles. That was where the name had come
from.

She looked angelic and Easton smiled as he
remembered an old saying: ‘The devil was an angel, too’. He kissed
his daughter very gently on the forehead so as not to wake her. She
smelled of No More Tears.

“I love you, Mrs. Ticklespot,” he
whispered.

As he came down the stairs he heard the ping
of the microwave. Grita had heated up the burritos and some refried
beans and set a place for him at the pine table in the kitchen.
Coffee was gurgling through the machine.

“Sit,” she told him. “Eat.”

“You still mad at me?”

She h’mphed. “Jessye got a gold star at
school today.”

“I could use one of those myself,” he said
ruefully.

“She wanted to tell you herself.”

He sighed and got up to get a Rolling Rock
out of the fridge, took a chug as he stood there, then sat down.
The burritos were good and hot. There were a lot of Mexican
restaurants in Riverside that made good burritos, but nobody made
them the way Grita did.

“We made an arrest in the Casey murder,” he
told her. “That’s why I was late.”

It was his way of explaining why he hadn’t
been home in time to say goodnight to Jessye and hear how she got a
gold star. Grita knew it, too. It was kind of a code they had
devised. She nodded, which meant it was okay now.

“It was on the news. They said an Apache.
That surprise me.”

“Why?”

“Apache like the Mafia, usually only kill
each other,” she said. “Must be nearly ninety years since a
Mescalero killed a white man.”

“This guy’s not a Mescalero, he’s a
Chiricahua,” he said.

She gave a tiny shrug. “Same difference.”

Easton was intrigued. “How come you know
about Apache?”

She tried to look inscrutable and he hid a
grin. Margarita Gutierrez, woman of mystery. “Plenty of us
Chihuahuans got a little bit Apache in them,” she said.

One thing Grita hated above all was political
correctness. She would not use the word ‘Hispanic.’ With her, it
was a straight call: people of Spanish descent who lived in the US
were Mexican-American. Or Chihuahuan. Or Venezuelan or Caribbean or
Puerto Rican or Chilean. But never Hispanic. She said only those
sinverguenzas the politicians would make ‘Mexican’ a dirty
word.

“You want to tell me some more about Apache?”
he asked her.

She frowned. “Like what?”

“How they tick. Why they act like they
do.”

“They Apache,” she said with a shrug, like
explanation was unnecessary. Or impossible.

“Come on, Grita.”

She sighed and settled not ungratefully into
a chair opposite him at the table.

“Listen, patrón. Apache not like you, not
even like me. They live different. Think different.”

“How, for instance?”

“Just … different. Different way of looking
at life. Different beliefs, different needs. You know what Apache
call white men?”

“Biliga’ana?” Easton guessed.

She shook her head. “That’s Navajo. To their
face, Apache call white men indaa, sort of means Anglo. But when
there’s no white men around, the diehards use the old Apache name,
pinda’ lick’ oye.”

He repeated the word. “What does it
mean?”

“Something like ‘white eyes.’ It’s not a
compliment.”

“What about Mexican people?”

“We called Na’kalyes. They don’t like us
much, either. Don’t like anyone much. They believe one day their
God, Yusn, will destroy us all. Everyone except the Apache.”

Yusn, the Creator, Life Giver, had promised
the Apache that in His own time the world and everything in it
would be destroyed, she explained. But after four days, the Apache
would return from the dead, the buffalo would return to the plains
and the antelope to the hills, and the land would belong to the
Apache forever.

“You want to hear Apache song? Yusn’s
promise?”

“You know it?”

“Bit,” she said.

It was more of a chant than a song, atonal,
throaty, with a strange broken rhythm. The alien sounds hung in the
air after she stopped.

“What does it mean?” he asked her.

Grita frowned. “Something like … Yusn gave us
this land.

Through our forefathers it has come to
us.

It was our land before the white eyes
came.

It is still our land.”

“And they really believe that?”

She nodded emphatically. “That is Yusn’s
promise made long ago to Apache people, and a lot of them believe
it gonna happen one day. They might not tell a white-eye they do.
But they do.”

“They hate us that much?”

“Not hate,” she said. “More like, despise.
Look down on.”

Easton got up and poured himself another cup
of coffee. His back ached and he stretched, then yawned
uncontrollably.

“You need to get some sleep,” Grita said.

“It’s been a rough day,” he admitted. “Think
maybe we earned a nightcap?”

Grita looked disapproving, then her fierce
frown dissolved into a broad and wicked grin. “Any that malt whisky
left?” she said.

He got two of the heavy crystal whisky
glasses Susan’s parents had bought them for a wedding present, and
poured them each a couple of fingers from the bottle he had bought
himself for Christmas, as much to prove to himself he didn’t need
it as for any other reason. It had cost a leg and an arm but he
figured that if he took one drink a week, it would last through his
birthday. But that was before he made the mistake of letting Grita
try it. After Glenkinchie, forget tequila. She picked up the glass,
rolled the whisky around in it and sniffed it. Then she took a sip
and rolled her eyes.

“Good job I din found out about this stuff
when I was twenty,” she giggled, and for a moment he caught a
glimpse of the pretty girl she must once have been. A little over a
year after she and her husband were married by Father Tafoya in the
little adobe church at Pacheco, Patricinio had been run down and
killed by a drunk driver. That had been more than thirty years ago.
She had worked seven days a week every week of her life since.

“Where did you learn all this stuff about
Apache, anyway?” Easton said to her.

“My grandmother lived at Santa Rita, near
Silver City. Her people traded with them. One or two of them
married Chiricahuas.”

“Mangas Coloradas was a Chiricahua,” Easton
said. “And Cochise.”

She smiled. “Also Geronimo.”

“We treated them all so badly. We lied to
them and we stole their land and after we sent the entire United
States Army to make war on them, we shipped what was left of them
to a mosquito-ridden sandspit in Florida and left them there to
rot.”

“They haven’t forgotten,” Grita said, taking
another sip of her whisky. Easton’s glass was empty and the urge to
have another tugged at him. He disregarded it. He could do that
now.