Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

And with that, the man pushed right past them into the building. He ducked under the counter, walked through to Grice’s office and sat down in his chair. He did just about everything but put his feet up on the desk. The sheriff looked like he was about to split his skull.

“I’ll need your full cooperation,” said the man, swiveling from side to side on Grice’s chair.

“That a fact?”

“And your discretion.” He jerked a thumb at Prince. “Is this boy trustworthy?”

“Reckon so. Ike’s got a good record with the department. And he’s not much on talking.”

“You a native, son?”

“My father was, sir.”

That got him. That always got them. Wrong way round. Instead of some guy having an adventure, tasting a little dark meat, he now had to think about a white woman doing it with an Indian.

“Seems I got myself a regular Lone Ranger and Tonto combination,” he snorted, turning his flash of anger into a joke. “Well, let’s get down to it. We have to check out everything, no matter how slight. My office received a communication from a Miss Evelina Craw, said she suspects you have a German spy in the area. Says he’s transmitting messages.”

Grice grinned. “Sounds to me like you’ve had a wasted journey. Miss Eve-lina’s not the most reliable source. She’s talking about Methuselah. He’s a crazy old bird lives out at the Pinnacle Rocks. Or under them, I should say. Been out there twenty-some years. He’s no more a German than I am.”

“Under them?”

“Dug out a cave with his own two hands. He bought a silver claim off Miss Evelina’s daddy, back when he owned the Bar-T, but everyone knows there’s not a cent of silver or anything else out there. Oh, there was, up in the Saddlebacks, but that was all mined out years ago.”

“Get to the point, Sheriff.”

“The point? You should probably just turn round and go back to Los Angeles. Miss Evelina’s got too much time on her hands.”

Outside, the men in the truck were smoking cigarettes, upending canteens. The official, whoever he was, hadn’t thought to bring them in out of the sun.

“I see,” he said, examining a scuff on the toe of his wingtip. “Methuselah. You have his real name?”

“How about you tell me your name first?” Grice was openly angry now.

The man looked blankly at him. “You may as well call me Munro. The rank’s captain.”

“Captain Munro. What are you a captain of?”

“Being a pain in the ass, it seems. Don’t be obstructive, Sheriff Grice. Yesterday you took a call from your boss, saying to afford me every assistance. You remember that call, right? Every assistance. That’s you affording me, not the other way around. So, if you could just tell me the man’s name, we can wrap this thing up sooner rather than later, and I can let you go about your no doubt urgent official business.”

Grice’s face was a mask. “He’s called Deighton. I had someone check the claim papers when Miss Evelina first brought it to my attention. There weren’t nothing to it. She’s an old woman. Never married. She gets ideas.”

“Well, my information is this Mr. Deighton has radio equipment. He may or may not be a danger, but if he’s transmitting, then it’s a matter of concern.”

“What in hell would he be transmitting?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out. If you and your boy would care to show me the way, we can leave right now.”

As Ike Prince well knew, it was Grice’s afternoon for going over to the Barrington place and solacing himself with the widow. He had no interest in driving all the way out to the Pinnacles and rousting out Methuselah. But they got into Munro’s car, Ike riding shotgun beside the uniformed driver, the sheriff grumpily sitting in the back, as far away from Munro as he could get.

It was a long hot silent journey.

As they left the highway and started down the rutted track toward the Pinnacles, Prince looked out the window. Overhead a white contrail bisected the sky like a scar. Since the start of the war, the military seemed to be all over the desert. There were barbed-wire fences and trucks on the roads and signs saying NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER. Day and night you could hear the distant boom of ordnance from the bombing range on the far side of the Saddlebacks. Sometimes there came a sound like rolling thunder and you’d look up to see a silver shape moving too fast to be a conventional plane. The Air Force was testing some kind of new super-aircraft. Secret technology. Mysterious lights at night.

No one ever asked Ike Prince what he thought of the war, or the mystery lights, or anything much at all. And if they didn’t ask, it wasn’t his place to say. About Methuselah, for example. About why the old man chose to live in a hole under the rocks. He knew more about Methuselah than Methuselah knew about himself.

When she got sick and realized she was going to die, his mother had said to him, Remember who you are . He was a little boy then, but he remembered, so when they came and took him off to the orphanage, he was stronger than some others. He might have been a half-breed orphan, but he had an inheritance: He knew his father’s true name.

Not that he boasted about it. Some things grow more powerful when kept in the dark.

Everyone in the high desert knew the story of Willie Prince. It was a dime-novel story, a radio-serial story: the last real manhunt of the Old Frontier. It was also an Indian story, and any Indian story always has two versions. The white version told how Willie Prince, a whiskey-crazed brave, kidnapped a child and was chased for almost a week over the desert, until he turned and made a stand on the Pinnacle Rocks and got shot down like a dog. Most people didn’t know there was any other. Maybe a few old ladies on the reservation told it over their quilting. And him. How Mockingbird Runner fell in love with a white man’s woman, how that white man was consumed with jealousy and came after him with a posse, how he ran in the old way, outpacing them as easily as a mule deer outpaces a tortoise, until he came to the crossing-place, the sky hole between this land and the Land of the Dead. How he fooled the white man into thinking he was a corpse, by swapping his bones with the bones of a dead coyote. How he escaped to live a long and happy life in Snow-Having, far to the west.

Some people remembered, some didn’t. Few knew the name of the jealous white man, or that afterward he was driven insane by the guilt of what he thought he’d done. Very few indeed knew he came back to the rocks to dig for Willie Prince, trying to cross over and take his place in the Land of the Dead.

No one but Ike — no one living — knew Willie Prince ever had a son.

It wasn’t his place to say any of that.

Finally, the Pinnacles rose up through the dust, three spires connecting earth and sky. When Ike saw them, fear landed on his shoulders and wrapped him like a cloak. He knew why he had avoided the rocks. And why they tugged at him, like a thread caught on a cactus spine.

They got out of the car and at once a wind rose up. The dust was in Ike’s eyes and nostrils, working its way between his teeth. Munro crammed his hat lower on his head and gave an order to his NCO, who deployed the soldiers. The wind whipped the running men’s pant legs around their ankles, sent little curls and whirls and vortices of sand scooting up off the ground.

Sure enough, there was a radio antenna perched about twenty feet up on the rock, a kite of metal rods with a length of wire spooling down into the mouth of a man-sized hole. There was junk lying about on the ground around it, tools and scrap and lumber. An ancient Model T, rusting and half filled with sand, was parked by a mound of what looked like mine tailings; its seats, all busted springs and sprouting horsehair, were propped up on some bricks under the overhang to make a sort of couch. There was a washing line with a faded denim workshirt and a pair of long johns pegged to it. There was a woodpile and an ax. From down in the hole came the sound of a crackly swing band. It sounded like one of the FM stations out of Los Angeles.