big as small canyons cut the bleached landscape.
Lord God shouts again. Ruby hurries on, the wind ripping her father's voice into the past. The field of rabbit bush and sage jiggles before her eyes. She cuts a zigzag path through cactus, cold air stinging her face.
The wind fills her ears with a loud buffeting roar. She stops to catch her breath. Behind her Lord God still follows, struggling against the gusts, losing her. She takes off again, her legs feeling thick and clumsy. To the west roils a dust cloud like a billow of sandblast. The early- morning sun reflects against it, against the clouds of prairie dust boiled loose by downdraft in the foothills of the mountains. The clouds churn, swirling tongues of dust spreading across the plains and heading toward Ruby alone in the murk.
S o u t h o f P u e b l o a red- tailed hawk perches on a telephone pole. It has not eaten in two days. Below it a prairie dog scuttles into its burrow. Trucks thunder by on Interstate 25, drafting gusty diesel wind, ruffling the parched brown grass. Another prairie dog strays from its burrow until the hawk swoops low with talons outstretched. The prairie dog darts below. The hawk banks, curls toward the highway, and is flapping its wings to regain height when a passing truck clips it with a shiny side mirror. Caught by the wind, the hawk's body tumbles into the right lane of traffic.
Passing vehicles run over it twice before a Subaru slows and pulls onto the shoulder. The driver sets his emergency brake and turns on his flashers, watching the stream of traffic. He pulls on leather gloves as he rummages on his floorboard for a paper sack. He unfolds it, watching a tractor- trailer rig in the distance.
Ward Costello gets out of the car and stands in the shudder of tailwind gusts off the diesel rigs, hurries across the right lane. A truck blasts its horn. He eases the hawk's broken body into the paper sack, taking care not to crush the cinnamon- colored tail feathers. The truck honks again. At the last minute Ward trots to the shoulder and gives the trucker a wave, cradling the paper sack like a swaddled baby.
He opens the bag wide enough to give the hawk a preliminary inspection. The tips of its primaries are ragged, indicating stress from pollution or inadequate diet. One of its talons is broken off to a stump. He smooths the mottled feathers, waits for a break in the traffic, and stares at the dead hawk's red tail feathers sticking out of the paper bag. It looks like something being smuggled.
A northwest wind blasts a thin scrim of dust over his windshield. Ward turns on the wipers and merges into traffic. On either side of the freeway, tall white wind turbines straddle the interstate like an invasion of alien propeller giants. Their enor mous blades rotate slowly. A herd of antelope grazes in the stretched- out morning shadows of the turbine towers.
He heads into the outskirts of Pueblo, a no- man' s- land of abandoned strip malls with jagged- teeth windows, ratty vacant lots, and dusty Mexican restaurants. The blackened husk of a burned XXX adult bookstore. A dark brown sky spreads in the west.
His cell phone rings and rings. He fishes it out of the console, sees the caller ID display, and cringes: his sister- in- law. After the rings stop the beeps begin, telling him he has voice mail, telling him to be connected, demanding that he pay attention, for God's sake. Telling him no matter how much he wants to be alone he can't be. He listens to the message, the only way to stop the idiotic beeping.
Nisha's voice is all about broken promises, suicide- hotline desperation. The electric bill is over four hundred dollars, she says. If he doesn't pay, they're going to turn off the power. It's his house, so he has to pay it, doesn't he? Legally? Isn't he financially liable? This is a country of laws, isn't it? True, she happens to be living there now but she has no job and no money. What does he expect? It's his house she's sitting, right?
Please help me please. Why did you leave me? You touched me and that's okay. I wanted you to. But you left and you don't talk to me now? Are you ashamed of me? Of us?
Ward listens as her voice fades in and out on the spotty connection. Nisha's voice resembles her sister's. Like voice mail from the dead. This isn't her only similarity: The last night Ward stayed in his home he slept with Nisha. Even her body, her spicy smell, was like Sita's, like sleeping with a twin. Only needier. She wanted to marry him. She wanted him to bless her with child. She said her time was running out.
The next morning he walked out of the house, leaving her naked in his bed, her sleeping body sprawled atop the white sheets, her mocha skin and darkly painted eyes, arms wrapped around a pillow and black hair tumbled and thick. He will pay the power bill. If it comes to it, and it will, he will deed the house to her and assume both the financial and moral debt.
On voice mail she begs him to come back. Come home soon, she pleads. Don't forget me now. You can't forget me, can you? I know you can't.
O n t h e o t h e r s i d e of town George Armstrong Crowfoot tries to avoid the severed head. He has bad dreams and a thing like that, once seen, skyjacks your nightmares like a special guest star. Like a relative with a shot liver who won't go home and won't quit asking where you hid the whiskey. George has never seen a severed head except in movies, and he figures special effects are good enough.
Mosca won't shut up about it. The infamous head. Said to be that of outlaw Black Jack Ketchum, hanged in Clayton, New Mexico, in 1901. When the trapdoor opened and Ketchum's body dropped twelve feet to the noose bite, his head popped clean off, shocking the crowd of morbid onlookers. Now Jimmy Rodriguez, aka Mosca (the Fly), says he won it in a poker game.
Right, says George. I believe that.
What? You think I'm lying? You calling me a liar?
What I find hard to believe is you winning a poker game.
You never seen me play, says Mosca. I got a poker face. I got luck.
George Armstrong Crowfoot does not believe that either. Mosca works with him on patrol for the Department of Nuisance Animal Control, and George knows anyone who stoops that low likely isn't a lucky bastard. Not to mention that Mosca is skinny and tattooed, like an overgrown Chihuahua. Crowfoot frowns and sniffs. Oh, Jesus. What's that smell?
Mosca sniffs the bowling- ball case. Oh, Black Jack's got an aroma, yes, he does. Mosca worries open the zipper. Behold the mighty, he says.
The skin is leathery, shrunken. Stiff as dried masking tape. A rictus pulled back to evince a death- scream grimace, reveal a set of long yellowed teeth. A black mustache all wiry and tangled above the grimacing maw.
George frowns at the head and says, Black Jack Ketchum was hanged in 1901. This individual looks to be only a few years departed, you ask me. Wouldn't Ketchum be not much more than a skull by now?
It's Black Jack's head, says Mosca. I shit you not.
Whatever you say, hombre. But before you get your panties in a wad, maybe you ought to take this to the Antiques Roadshow people. One of those queens will set you straight.
I don't need any queen to tell me what's what.
Antiques Roadshow, repeats Crowfoot. They talk about provenance and whatnot.
What's provenance?
Proof of where it came from.
I don't need proof. I got a head.
Right.
He's well preserved is what he is. Like my grandmother. We had to dig her up for an inquest thing. To prove if my grandpa poisoned
