Another Man's Moccasins

The only tracks were indeed the ones that Tuyen and I had made, but they ended at the cemetery—above that, there were no tracks, no broken grass, nothing to indicate that anyone had been up here in ages. I caught my breath. It was still early, and the heat of the day had yet to push us into triple digits. I didn’t want to be up here in a couple of hours, when the sun reached its zenith and Bailey would feel something like the fifth ring of hell.

The union hall was up and to my right, standing alone like a weathered lighthouse amid the storm toss of the rocks.

I leaned on the iron railing surrounding the cemetery, then immediately regretted it, the dark metal feeling as if it had been just pulled from the smelter. I thought of Saizarbitoria at the jungle gym back in Powder Junction and smiled. Maybe the Basquo was learning fast, or was it that I was learning more slowly?

I found myself reading the tombstones, the names, and the single date on seventeen of them, and thought about the survivors walking the path next to the graveyard. I wondered if they saw those dead miners who had been trapped in the dark tunnels beneath my boots.

I thought about the two bottles of water in my shooting bag, which I had left back at the truck, and turned the corner. I’d taken only a dozen steps into the high weeds when I heard the rattling sound, the one that makes westerners freeze and wonder why they didn’t wear their high-top leggings.

As Lonnie Little Bird would say, he was a big one, um hmm, yes, it is so; twelve buttons at least and only about ten feet away. Again contrary to popular belief, you can’t judge a rattler by his buttons since they shed and accumulate a new pod three or four times a year. It didn’t matter, he was big, and neither of us was in a mood for counting.

He was curling in an "S” and backing away from me, the majority of his body as big as my forearm. He had backed himself up against one of the rises on the stone steps, and there was nowhere else to go. He coiled himself tighter and flicked a dark tongue at me as the vibrating tail shook beside his rectangular-shaped head.

“Howdy.” I figured now was as good a time as any to test Henry’s theory. He didn’t respond and stayed compacted, the dark eyes shining like black beads. “You haven’t seen anybody come by here lately, have you?” His head dropped a little as I began raising my hand very, very slowly. “That’s what I thought.”

I could go for my sidearm, but the thought of what the .45 round might do after hitting the stone step gave me more than a little pause, so I continued raising my hand till I got it to the brim of my hat.

The buzzworm’s head dropped a little again, and I froze.

It was my fault really, disturbing him as he’d peacefully sunned himself after indulging in a brunch of field mouse or sagebrush lizard. I could have introduced myself as the sheriff and told him about the important case I was working on, but he didn’t seem interested and I was more than beginning to doubt Henry’s theories on interspecies communication.

I chucked my hat in a tight curveball, low and outside; he hit it in the sweet spot, then disappeared into the rocks that stuck out in shelves to my right.

I took the two steps and picked up my hat as a few rocks kicked loose and joined the scree at the bottom. He probably wasn’t alone. “Hey, there’s an Indian asleep in front of the dry-goods store, why don’t you go bite him?”

I looked at the crown of my hat—there was a scuff and stain where the rattler had hit it. I was about due a new hat, anyway. I tugged the battered palm leaf back on my head and continued up the steps with a more wary eye.

The union hall was a masterful piece of early-twentieth-century architecture, with castellated cornices and a unique second story and balcony. The structure had weathered the century better than the ones below as few people were willing to make the rest of the hike up the hill—that, and the rattlesnakes. There was still glass in the windows and, although the transom above the doorway was cracked, it still shone with the high gloss of old lead. There was a chain padlocked through the door handles, but one end had pulled loose and hung below its match. The damage was old, and there were no marks in the dust that covered everything.

The paneled door rested heavily on the sill, but I lifted it and pushed in and it swung wide with a grating noise from the old hinges. There was an entryway leading to the offices in the back and a stairwell to the right, nothing looking as if it had been disturbed in as far back as the dust remembered. I walked through the empty offices and listened to the soft squeals of the wide-plank floor.