Leaning Land by Rex Burns

police would be much help anyway.” He braked as the road fell suddenly into a gully whose vertical walls, carved into fluted columns of dark red sand, twisted away, higher than the vehicle. “Some truth to that, I guess. A lot of Indians don’t talk to each other about dead people—bad manners because it brings bad luck.” Shifting into first, he eased the truck up the other side, going slowly so the rear wheels would not kick loose on the stony road. “Tabeguache Wash—leads off into Tabeguache Canyon maybe ten miles that way.” He wagged a hand toward the lowering sun. “All the land around here runs off west that way—’The Leaning Land,’ my people call it. Another hundred and fifty miles, it all drains into the Grand Canyon.” He shifted through the gears as they picked up speed and the bumps came more rapidly again. “That’s air miles. You follow one of the canyons, it could be two, maybe three hundred miles, it winds around so much.” Then, “I think he was maybe killed by somebody.”
    “What makes you think that?”
    “He was on foot.”
    Wager waited for more explanation, but none came. “What about an accident? Hitchhiking and hit by a car, or drunk and passed out?”
    “Didn’t drink—hated the stuff, his stepmother says. And no Ute with a car’s going to walk or hitchhike unless it’s broke down. His wasn’t broke down, what I heard.”
    Gabe considered that. “Any idea who might want to kill him?”
    A flash of white teeth. “Somebody who didn’t like him, I guess.”
    Wager didn’t laugh; it was true, not funny. “Why didn’t he live on the reservation with the rest of his family?”
    Ray glanced at Wager. “How much do you know about the Utes?”
    “Used to haul in my share of drunk Native Americans when I patrolled Larimer Street. Some of them were Utes, I guess.”
    Another quick grin, this one with a slightly bitter twist. “I can’t tell a German from a Frenchman, either, and you Native Hispanics all look alike, too.” The truck tilted heavily to Wager’s side as the two-rut track swung across a wide shoulder of slickrock webbed with cracks that held sprouts of tough grass and stunted sagebrush. “Rubin didn’t want to live here. And under the new tribal rules that came in three years ago, he was no longer eligible to even if he’d wanted to; got to be at least half-blood to live on the reservation, now. That was so the government doesn’t have to give money to so many people. Rubin’s dad, Marshall, his father was Mexican and his mother a Squaw Point Ute from here. Mildred Bow. That made Marshall Del Ponte half Ute. The grandfather took Marshall’s mother over to the San Luis Valley, raised cattle on a ranch owned by the Del Ponte side of the family. That’s where Marshall was born. He married a white woman over there and had Rubin—quarter Ute—then he divorced her and left San Luis and moved back here to Squaw Point Reservation, married a Squaw Point girl, Isabel Sena. Marshall died maybe five years ago. Drank himself to death, of course. So Rubin’s brother and sisters are three-quarters Squaw Pointe Ute and they can live here. That’s generally the tribe on this reservation, Squaw Point Utes. Them and a few from the White River and Uncompaghre tribes.” He explained, “Most of the Ute Mountain Utes are down on the Ute Mountain Reservation—down in Four Corners near Cortez and Towaoc. Most of the Uncompaghre and White River tribes are up in Utah—Uintah and Ouray reservations. The Southern Utes—my tribe—are on the Southern Ute reservation over by Ignacio: the Kapu’ute band and my band, the Mowhache. We’re all Utes, but we come from different tribes and different bands. So even if we all look alike, we’re not all like, see what I mean?”
    Wager nodded. “I see.” Some of it, anyway—the general picture, which was all he wanted to have to know right now. The complexity of Rubin’s family ties and the tangle of his cousins sounded even