Journal of the Dead (16 page)

“This is it,” Les said, looking up at the arches with his hands plugged into his pockets. “It’s not the Great Wall of China, but this is what makes it all happen.”

He explained that the original flume had been build of wood but had washed away in the flood of 1893. It had been part of Charles Eddy and Pat Garrett’s vast irrigation project, which ultimately turned out to be an expensive lesson in the dangers of water gambling. In front of him the Pecos flowed peacefully, a light breeze licking facets onto its surface and rustling the cattails on its shore. But it had a capricious temperament. It had flooded a dozen times in the town’s history, and just as often the desert had squeezed it into a trickle, bringing the farms and cattle ranches to the brink of annihilation.

Fifty yards downriver was what looked like a shorefront ruin: a series of square, algae-lined cement tanks, open to the sky and set
back from the river. A decadent, sulfurous wisp in the air betrayed the presence of a mineral spring. Was it the ruin of an old wash tank, or a flooded building foundation? It was impossible to tell.

“Oh,
that,”
he said with a sardonic grin. “That’s the spa.”

The spa had been Plan B, the very source of the town’s name. It was one of the Southwest’s first attempts at marketing itself as a retirement community, but it was clearly ahead of its time. Few could make the illustrious European connection, and most of those who did knew a smelly gurgle in the middle of a sun-stricken territory when they saw one.

Williams’s next stop was the highest point in the area, a five-hundred-foot-high hill on the west side of town. Toward the summit, the houses grew in size, and at the crest were lawny and elaborate pueblo-style spreads with spotless adobe walls and two-car garages. In the suburb of a large city, the houses would have never stood out, but here they were mansions. Who lived in them?

“Mostly people who work for the WIPP,” Les said without a beat, referring to what is now the town’s main industry, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which proudly claims the title of being “the world’s first underground repository licensed to safely and permanently dispose of transuranic radioactive waste left from the research and production of nuclear weapons.” Few towns had wanted to host the project, but Carlsbad had lobbied hard for it, and it had brought hundreds of jobs and millions in government revenue. It had begun operations just that March, and not even Les could help marveling at Carlsbad’s nouveauo richeo, the nuclear-waste barons, high on their hill. “There used to be nothing up here,” he said. “We used to drive up here and park when we were kids.”

Inspiration Point?

“Something like that.”

Below was the whole town, brushed into life by the river’s water and motionless in the heat except for the occasional spear of sunlight on car metal. Beyond the river’s reach the desert lay endless and empty, a giant piecrust that seemed poised to color the little city brown at any moment. It had nearly done so several times, and one can’t help thinking that Carlsbad’s greatest bulwark against civic evaporation lies not in the flow of the Pecos, but in the stubbornness and tenacity of the townspeople. One gets the impression that, if the river turned to dust tomorrow, instead of leaving they’d simply devise a way to sell sand.

Only two things had ever dragged Les away: college and the Vietnam War. In college, he had joined a work-abroad program that sent him to the Philippines and Greenland, and after getting his bachelor’s degree he enlisted in the navy. Aboard a guided missile cruiser, he saw action on the gun line off North Vietnam. After his tour of duty, he entered law school at the University of New Mexico, but almost as soon as he passed the bar the navy recalled him. They sent him to Pearl Harbor, where he spent three years in the Naval Legal Service Office. By the time he was honorably discharged, Les had seen more of the world than he ever imagined, and he was certain where he belonged. He made a beeline straight back to Carlsbad.

His first job was at the district attorney’s office, where he worked for five years, became head of the office, then left to try his hand at private practice. He practiced general law, doing everything from divorces to torts and even some criminal cases. There were two rules he always followed. He told his clients point-blank
that if they were guilty then he would not represent them unless they actually
pled
guilty, and he also warned them that if he found out they were lying, then they would have to find another lawyer. He had only been lied to one time, by a client charged with the inglorious crime of “scouting”—using bait in a deer hunt. Luckily, the man’s wife had called him the day before the trial and confessed that her husband was guilty as sin.

After a few years in private practice, he concluded “that most people were more interested in using lawyers to help them get away with things than actually honoring the law and the truth.” He went back to working for the district attorney with the same certainty of place that had brought him back to Carlsbad.

Les wasn’t prone to fancy legal maneuvering, storytelling, or stepping out beyond what he knew to be true. It was a conservative approach, reflective of his faith that if he stuck to the facts, true justice would—or at least should—follow. His gift was for cutting through the smokescreens that defense lawyers threw up, for simplifying a case to its indisputable golden core. And, as for the core of the Kodikian case, if the murder investigation found an alternative motive, fine; if not, there was still one thing he knew, and when he pointed it out, he did so with great conviction.

“You don’t get to kill someone in the state of New Mexico just because they ask you to,” he said. “That is the law.”

The only other case of his that had received so much media attention had been a death penalty case he and the district attorney, Tom Rutledge, had tried against Terry Clark, a man from the nearby town of Artesia who had kidnapped, raped, and then murdered a nine-year-old girl. The case had gone on for thirteen years, reappearing in the news like a season. Clark had appealed the sentence
twice, lost both times, and ended up being the first man executed in the state in forty years. Les didn’t like to talk much about that case, either, but there was a little-known detail about the Terry Clark case that Raffi Kodikian and his family were probably better off not knowing.

Terry Clark was the 1 in Gary Mitchell’s 100–1 record of death penalty cases. Les Williams and Tom Rutledge were the only prosecutors in the state who had beaten the broncobuster at his own game.

I
f you look at a good map of New Mexico long enough, you begin to see that the names of certain places aren’t really names at all, but stories. No Agua. Dead Man’s Lake. Dead Horse Gulch, Skeleton Canyon. They tell of inglorious battles against a rugged landscape that were lost long ago.

It’s impossible to know just how many souls have been lost in the desert of southern New Mexico over the ages; like the sea, the desert is good at keeping its victims’ secrets. There are, however, several legendary episodes that provide an idea of the scale of suffering the desert is capable of wreaking on those who enter it without enough water.

One occurred in September 1681, an age in which the history of the American West was written by Spain. That summer, the local Pueblo Indians had violently rebelled against their Spanish colonizers, driving them out of Santa Fe and northern New Mexico in what later came to be known as the Pueblo Revolt. The
survivors of the uprising, about twenty-five hundred Spanish men, women, and children, fled south and gathered at Fray Cristobal, a waypoint about halfway between Santa Fe and El Paso, a few miles from what is today the White Sands Missile Range. They were refugees, with no other option but to retreat farther south to the protection at El Paso. Between them and their destination lay the same ninety miles of flat and completely waterless desert that the founders of Santa Fe had called
el Jornada del Muerto,
“the journey of the dead.”

What ensued was one of the worst human disasters that ever befell colonists in North America. The crossing began on September 14, with the refugees marching toward the
Jornada
in what was already a sorry-looking column. Several witnesses who saw the group just prior to their departure described it as mostly barefoot women and children, with no more water than they could carry in small containers and only enough food for two days. The lack of adequate supplies was considered a temporary problem, however, because the column was expecting to be met early on by twenty-four wagons with relief provisions sent from El Paso. So they sallied forth into the dunes and yucca, unaware that the rescue wagons had not even left yet.

No eyewitness accounts of the passage remain, but dark math tells part of the story. It takes nine days to cross the
Jornada
on foot, which would have left the party without food—and probably almost no water—two or three days into their trek, about twenty miles from the nearest aid. The only hope for survival was in the promised wagon train; as the situation deteriorated, their eyes would have been trained ahead, futilely searching for the convecting shape of a horseman on the horizon. The dying would have
begun very quickly, with the healthiest of them forced to witness the rapid demise of their children and elderly as they fell from heatstroke and heat exhaustion. “A disorganized multitude of families, of exhausted, stricken mothers, of haggard fathers staggering along with dying babies in their arms, of children sobbing piteously for food and water, of a lengthening line of new graves,” is how the historian Cleve Hallenbeck pictured it.

There is almost no shade in the
Jornada;
stopping to rest only meant that it would take longer to meet the supply train. As the weak fell behind and families tarried to attend to their loved ones, the line of refugees would have extended for miles, with the dazed walking past the dead and wondering how long it would be before the corpse on the side of the trail was their own. Nightfall meant temporary relief from the heat, but with an average low in mid-September of fifty-two degrees, many would have been shivering, their water-deprived blood thickened and unable to warm them.

Somewhere near the southern end of the
Jornada,
the overdue wagon train and its precious barrels of water finally appeared. The weary, half-dead refugees limped into El Paso, their number diminished by nearly six hundred. As Hallenbeck grimly notes: “It meant fifty or more deaths per day, or a new grave every one thousand feet.”

In 1862 New Mexico’s desert surprised yet another group of newcomers, this time Confederate Americans, an army of rebels with dreams of conquering themselves an empire that stretched all the way to the Pacific. They were led by an overweening brigadier general named Henry Sibley, and in May 1861, they crossed the Rio Grande, twenty-five hundred strong. The campaign came to a
halt ten months later, and they never got farther than Albuquerque. During the battle of Glorieta Pass, a Union cavalry brigade snuck around to their rear and annihilated their supply train, effectively forcing them to fall back to Texas or starve. Like the Spanish, they were forced to retreat into the desert, and their trip back to Texas became one of the most hellish marches of the Civil War.

The retreat began in mid-April with the main body of Sibley’s Brigade heading south out of Albuquerque along the Rio Grande, shadowed by a Union army under the command of Col. Edward Canby. Sibley’s immediate goal was Fort Bliss, three hundred miles downriver. Following the river all the way to the fort was risky, however, because the route would take him right past the Union stronghold of Fort Craig. He chose to avoid the fort by swerving west, into the arid Magdalena Mountains, then sneaking back out onto the river below Craig. When the rebel column snaked off toward the waterless mountains, Canby made no attempt to follow. He knew that the rebels were about to confront an enemy far more formidable than he: the high desert.

As the column entered the range, lugging their cannons and what little remained of their supplies, the retreat quickly deteriorated into every man for himself. A Confederate private named A. B. Peticolas wrote of the nightmarish trek in his journal: “No order was observed, no company staid together, the wearied sank down upon the grass, regardless of the cold; the strong, with words of execration upon their lips, pressed feverishly and frantically on for water. Dozens fell in together and in despair gave up all hope of getting to water and stopped, built fires, and fell asleep.”

Each night, some slept for good; each day was a race between what tiny water pockets the mountains offered, if pockets could be found at all. To ease their journey, they cast off everything. They buried most of their cannons. Clothes were abandoned, rifles, ammunition. They dumped everything that might slow them down until all that was left to abandon was one another, which they did. The sick and the weak were left behind to fend for themselves against the wolves. A year later, a Union captain named James “Paddy” Graydon retraced their trail:

“On passing over the route of these unfortunate men… I not infrequently found a piece of a gun-carriage, or part of a harness, or some piece of camp or garrison equipage, with occasionally a white, dry skeleton of a man. At some points it seemed impossible for men to have made their way.”

By the time the force reached Fort Bliss, they were in such poor condition that Sibley decided to abandon New Mexico altogether and fall back to San Antonio, Texas, which meant another six hundred miles of marching, much of it through the Chihuahuan. Sibley was so disgusted by the outcome of the invasion that in his final report on the campaign he had these bitter words: “The Territory of New Mexico is not worth a quarter of the blood and treasure expended it its conquest.”