Steven Havill: Twice Buried

“Good morning, Reuben,” I said. Almost in slow motion, he released his grip on the wall of the house. I wasn’t sure that he recognized me. He turned his head slightly and I pushed my Stetson back on my head so the brim didn’t shadow my face.

“ Senor ,” he said. “ ?Cuando va a venir Estelita? ”

I relaxed a little. That was his standard question on those dozen or so occasions each year when I spoke with him. His grandniece had spent considerable time with Reuben, especially after Rosa’s death. The old man had been one of Estelle’s major worries when she’d accepted a job with a sheriff’s department up in the northern part of the state. It had been her mother who had finally convinced her to leave Posadas…and convinced her that the old man would do just fine without her. And he had.

I smiled at him. “ La semana proxima ,” I said, exhausting most of my abilities to speak Mexican. Estelle was not coming that next week. Reuben had forgotten that we were driving south for the christening of Estelle’s first child.

The old man muttered something I didn’t catch and waved a hand as he turned to go back inside. As he turned, I saw that he was still wearing the revolver. And it wasn’t a little.32 topbreak, either. I could see enough of it to recognize the heavy Colt Single Action.

He shuffled to the door and pushed it open. The bottom edge scraped along an arc worn in the wooden floor. The door hadn’t fit properly when he’d hung it and hadn’t improved with time.

Inside, the little cabin was the deep cool that only stone houses offer. That was the extent of the amenities. The place stank-a rich, permeating, choking potpourri of odors that would take a week to categorize and isolate. The dogs were no doubt responsible for much of it. Judging by the thick tapestry of pet hair that clung to every fabric surface, the animals owned the place.

I took another step farther inside as Reuben shuffled toward the ancient round-top refrigerator. The cabin was dimly lit, its clutter mercifully hidden by shadows. Dominating the far wall was a massive stone fireplace whose mantel had been hewn from an alligator bark juniper log sixteen inches in diameter that Reuben had pulled down off the hill behind the cabin with a team of horses in 1945.

Reuben scrabbled around inside the nightmare that was his refrigerator and found two brown bottles of beer. He set one by the sink and handed the other to me. I twisted off the top and extended the bottle to him, then reached past him to take the other. I wondered how long it had been since he’d been able to manage a twist top.

“Where are the dogs?” I asked. He frowned and took a long drink of the beer.

“You want to sit down?” His voice was soft and gentle, the Mexican lilt heavy.

“I can’t stay that long, Reuben.” I turned and looked around the room as my eyes adjusted to the dim light. “Usually the dogs are on top of me,” I said.

“Someone poisoned them.” He said it so simply and quietly that at first I wasn’t sure that I’d heard right. But he didn’t repeat himself. Instead he leaned against the sink and tipped the beer bottle. His hand, the dark brown skin tight against the bones and tendons, was steady.

“Poisoned them? When? What are you talking about?”

He waved a hand. “Three, four days. Maybe Saturday.”

“That’s last week,” I said. “You found them dead?”

“Yes.” He regarded me steadily over the beer bottle.

“Where did this happen? Right here at the house?”

Reuben shook his head. “One crawled to the truck. I find her there, half under it. The other two I find later, down in the field near the road.”

“You’re sure they were poisoned?”

Reuben nodded. I waited for a moment, hoping he would continue, but he remained silent.

“I wish you had called us, Reuben.” He lifted one eyebrow and said nothing. After a week, the trail would be as stone cold as his dogs. “Where are the dogs now?”

“ Enterrados .” Buried. He waved vaguely in the direction of the pasture behind the trees, down toward the county road.

I took a deep breath and shook my head. “Any ideas who might have done it?”

His nod was almost imperceptible.

“Who?”

“You want another?” He indicated the beer bottle in my hand. I had yet to take a drink.

“No, thanks. Who did it, Reuben?”

He shrugged that universal Mexican shrug that meant about a thousand different things, from “I don’t know” to “the world is ending tomorrow.”

I tried one more time. “You know that if we can prove who did it, we can put them in jail. We can do that.” I saw a trace of amusement in the old man’s eyes. He didn’t believe me and neither did I. We could go out to where he’d buried them, dig them up, take tissue samples, and have the lab tell us three weeks later that, sure enough, the dogs had been poisoned. But without a witness, the case would fall flat.

I changed tracks, hoping that he’d drift back to the subject of the dogs on his own.

“The ladies at the post office were a little upset this morning. Your revolver made them nervous.”

“ ? Porque? ” His voice was the lightest of whispers.

“Maybe because you dropped it? They said you did.” He nodded and said nothing. I mentally sent out a distress call to Estelle Reyes-Guzman. English was as awkward for Reuben as Mexican was for me. Our conversation was never going to slip into that easy gait where men speak their hearts. “Would you do me a favor and not wear it into public buildings, Reuben? Maybe even leave it at home? ? A casa? ”

He shrugged again and set his beer bottle down near the sink. I did the same. “If you need anything, will you call me?” I realized how stupid that sounded the instant I said it, but Reuben Fuentes had the good grace not to say, “I would call you, Senor , if I had a telephone.”

I stepped toward the doorway. The sunlight was harsh after the cool shadows of the house. “Can I stop by every couple days to check on you?”

He shrugged. “ Si quiere .” He held onto the doorjamb as I stepped away from the cabin. “You know,” he said, “it took me almost two hours to bury those dogs.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish you’d let me help.”

“The soil is pretty hard. Lots of rocks. They could have helped, but they didn’t.”

“Who could have helped?”

“ Hijos .”

“What kids?”

“On the road, you know. They were on the-” he stopped and pantomimed holding onto handlebars.

“Motorcycles? Motorbikes?”

“ Si . The two of them. They saw me digging. They could have helped.”

Reuben was living in the wrong century. If he expected two youngsters out from town on a lark to stop, hop a barbed wire fence, and offer manual labor, he was more senile than I thought… especially if they recognized him. Even saying “Good morning” to an old, smelly, gun-toting legend like Reuben Fuentes was the stuff of which Truth or Dare games were made.

“You didn’t recognize them?”

He shook his head and waved a hand again.

“Do you think it was kids who killed the dogs? Maybe on a dare? Something like that?”

He shook his head immediately, reinforcing my impression that he had a culprit already in his shaky sights.

“I really wish you’d let us help you, Reuben.”

“You tell Estelita to come visit,” he said, and I knew our conversation was over.

I thanked him for the beer and settled into the seat of the patrol car, cussing myself for being such a gutless wonder. I should have pushed him into a chair and struggled my way through his language and mine until he understood that we could help him find the son of a bitch who killed his pets. All he had to do was tell us what he knew.