Steven Havill: Scavengers

“Vaguely. As I recall, she lives over south of you a bit.”

“Not far enough south. I can hear her damn dogs most of the time.”

“So you’re going to take pictures of Eleanor and her dogs?” Estelle stirred up a vague memory of a waddling, fat woman given to wearing long, flowing dresses and dirty white tennis shoes. “If I remember correctly, a year or two ago Howard Bishop tried to negotiate a fence dispute settlement between Mrs. Pope and one of her neighbors.”

“Good memory,” Gastner said. “But that wasn’t just a neighbor. That was Eleanor Pope’s son.”

“That’s right…it was. I don’t remember how that turned out, either. Except Howard went out there about a dozen times.”

“What happened is that the son moved to Deming for a while, until the fence either rotted away, or Eleanor forgot just what it was for. The son’s name is Denton, by the way. Denton Pope. Goes by ‘Woody.’ And we’re all happy to know that Denton is back, although he’s not living next door to his mother this time. He’s living with her. And none of that gossip, for what it’s worth, is why I need a photographer. I can use one of those point and shoot things, but this is a little more tricky. What do you have on the agenda tomorrow? Gayle tells me that you have a little problem out east of the MacInernys’ gravel pit.”

“A John Doe.”

“Ah, one of them.”

“Found dead with a gunshot wound to the head and facial damage where someone pounded his teeth to pieces with a rock.”

“Huh. Anybody we know?”

“Not yet.”

Gastner chuckled. “You’re a wealth of information, sweetheart.”

“We just don’t know much yet, Padrino . Jackie Taber is working through a lead or two. We’ll see what she turns up.”

“Jackie’s coming along pretty well, isn’t she? I was always impressed with her. A good, solid cop.”

“Yes, she is.”

“So can you fit in a few minutes tomorrow? It’s got to be in the morning, though. Fairly early.”

“That’s not possible for Linda, then. She and Jackie are planning to be out at the MacInernys’. They need the early sun. I’ll swing by, though. Just what is it that we’re taking pictures of?”

Gastner hesitated. “It’d be easier just to show you.”

“Is eight too early?”

“Eight would be just right. Why don’t I pick you up. We’ll do breakfast. It’s a great way to start the week.”

Estelle grinned. For Bill Gastner, padrino , or godfather, of her two children, retirement from the Sheriff’s Department hadn’t brought a change of habits. For him, the day was half over by eight o’clock, and he’d no doubt be on his second breakfast…maybe third, depending on how much of the night before he’d been up and prowling the county. For him, insomnia was more of an old friend than an affliction.

“That sounds good, sir,” she said. “Take care of yourself.” She switched off the phone, trying to conjure up a clear picture of Eleanor Pope’s place at the end of Escondido Lane, almost on the southern outskirts of the village. She knew the property ran right up to the tall board fence that marked the back of Florek’s Auto Wrecking yard. Beyond that, she drew a blank-particularly about what Eleanor and Denton “Woody” Pope might be doing that would attract the attention of the New Mexico livestock inspector.

The village of Posadas, seat of a New Mexican county with fewer residents than an average suburban shopping mall on a busy Saturday, nestled against the southern skirts of Cat Mesa. Twenty miles south, the San Cristóbal mountains formed an east-west buttress between Posadas County and northern Mexico.

The rise of Cat Mesa and the spread of the border mountains molded a giant funnel for the prevailing west winds that bent the range grass into permanent tawny arcs with all the seed heads flagging eastward.

When she stepped outside that Monday morning, Estelle Reyes-Guzman felt the chill of the wind even as it bucked and swirled around the protective mass of her Twelfth Street home. Although the temperature hovered in the low forties, and before noon would break sixty that late February day, the open, windswept prairie east of the village where Linda Real and Jackie Taber were working would live up to its bleak reputation.

A battered white Ford four-wheel-drive pickup truck with state government plates was parked at the curb in front of the Guzmans’ home. The faded spot on the passenger door’s paint marked where the magnetic New Mexico Livestock Inspector’s shield usually was affixed. Bill Gastner watched Estelle approach, then leaned across the seat, yanked the door handle, and shoved the passenger door open.

“Hey, there,” he said.

“Good morning,” Estelle replied, not altogether sure that it was. She slid the heavy camera bag on the floor in front of the seat and clambered up into the high-slung truck. Something as simple as getting into a vehicle had become a major effort, and Estelle puffed out her cheeks and shook her head. “Sorry about yesterday.”

As she settled onto the seat, Gastner hunched forward with both hands on the steering wheel, regarding her critically. “Nothing to be sorry about. You’re moving kind of slow this morning, too,” he said.

She leaned back and let her hands relax in her lap. “Twice as fast as yesterday, though.”

He pulled the truck into gear. “ Y Mamá? ”

Estelle nodded. “She asked this morning if we could drive down to Tres Santos sometime soon. That means she must be feeling better.”

“That might be kinda good for her,” Gastner said. “To get out and about like that. Is someone staying in her old place down there?” Compared to the tiny Mexican village where Teresa Reyes had spent her entire life and where Estelle had spent her childhood, Posadas was a metropolis. In Tres Santos, Teresa Reyes’ four-room adobe house nestled under a grove of unkempt cottonwoods. One stump, close to the riverbed, bore so many carved initials and signatures on the smooth, iron-gray wood that it had become something of a historic directory.

Estelle remembered long, patient sessions as a child, rubbing the faint older markings with paper and pencil, trying to decipher them. Her favorite had been an ornate PV polished by the years of wind and weather until the serifs that ended the strokes were just a hint in the wood. Below the initials was the ghost of a date, and Estelle had stroked the paper with the smooth graphite until she was sure that it read 1911 . Her active imagination conjured up a burly Pancho Villa standing in front of the cottonwood, six-gun strapped to his waist, sun hot on his shoulders, penknife in hand, its sharp tip delicately nipping at the gray wood. At that time, her young mind hadn’t seen the sense of admitting that the initials could just as easily have been carved by Pablo Vallejos, who had lived across the river behind the school, or Porfirio Villanueva, who for more than three decades had managed one of the copper mines.

“You remember the Diaz family?” she asked. “They live next door to Mamá ’s?”

“Sure.”

“Roberto, the oldest son, was renting Mamá ’s for a while. He and his wife. But they moved to Juarez.”

“Your mother lived in that little place for a long, long time.”

“Her whole life,” Estelle said wistfully. “That makes an even eighty years. And then one morning she trips doing something as simple as emptying a pan of water out the back door, and there goes the hip.”

“God,” Gastner grunted. “The thirty-five years that I’ve been in this town seem like an eternity. I can’t begin to imagine eighty years looking up at the same bedroom ceiling.”