Stony Mesa Sagas. Chip Ward

aspen leaves above her as a music more peaceful than music, something like it but without pretense or conception. She saw how the wind pulsed and whorled across an open horizon of rice grass and sand, leaving a signature that was the same rippled pattern she saw on the sandy bottoms of the stream beds they crossed. She heard ravens comment on her passing and watched the slow, effortless spiral of hawks so far above her that they appeared as dark specs in an azure realm.

      She listened to her own breath. The rhythm of her footsteps crunching across the earth held her attention for hours. In the end, she learned to take pleasure in simple things like clean socks, shade when hot, sunshine when cold, laughter, an unexpected kindness, honey in her tea. For the first time in her life gratitude and grace bore forgiveness.

      It was at night when she got it. She was lying in her sleeping bag looking up. She had never seen so many stars. The Milky Way. Shooting stars! She gazed into eternity and found it beautiful beyond words. And then she realized it was all beautiful. And good. And right. Enough. All of it: the steep ravines, the dragonflies, the trees, the fragrant meadows, the stink of sweat, the rose-lit cliffs at dawn, cold showers, and the crackling fire at night. All of it was good and so was she. For the first time in her life she belonged to a place that made perfect sense.

      “It’s all connected!” she blurted out in the dark. “It goes round and round. Forever! And we are this momentary synthesis of sunlight, soil, and rain, seeing and feeling it all. That’s our gift, to see the beauty! The beauty of all of it!”

      “Shut up, Liz!” said a counselor.

      “Yeah, Liz, plug your hole!” added Junior Crenshaw, who was busted for secretly filming the girls’ locker room at his school and then uploading it to YouTube.

      “From now on, call me Luna,” she replied.

      And then she lay back on the bundle of clothing that served as a pillow and watched her breath rise and drift away on a current of air that had been flowing forever and would never end, joining together her and a billion other breathing creatures, human and wild, into one luminous, dancing, shared river of life.

      A year later, Liz Waxwing, now Luna, was home. She made peace with her mother, Virginia Waxwing. Back from the wilderness, Luna discovered that her mom was actually warm and smart and it was not that hard living within the boundaries her mom set for her. She made new friends and finished high school near the top of her class. The day after graduation her mother told her that unconditional love goes on forever but devotion has phases. After eighteen years of putting her own life on hold while raising a shimmering smart daughter, she was leaving with a friend to ride horses in Spain, sail to Bora Bora, and climb mountains in Patagonia.

      She did all that and more and Luna watched from a continent away, always a continent away. Luna’s mom was a moving target that was hard to contact. Although Luna loved her mom and wished her well, living independently was harder than she thought it would be. She admired her mom and was pleased for her but she wished she was near. She missed the bond with her mother, the security of that. She didn’t appreciate how much she needed her until she was absent.

      Luna accepted her independence. When she looked into a mirror she saw her mother’s high cheek bones and the subtle cleft of her chin and she realized that as the years passed she would acquire the same laugh lines framing the same wide eyes. She would realize that as she lost her mother, she also became her.

      Luna left for college on a handsome scholarship and support from the man she considered her ex-dad. Because the land healed her and made her whole she intended to return the favor. She majored in wildlife biology and became active in a community garden near her campus. She spent her vacations climbing through slot canyons in Utah and Arizona. After graduation, she did a brief internship with a professor doing research on the relationship between voles and soil moisture. Then she joined the Seafold Ledges Tar Sands Alliance and devoted herself to setting up their website and organizing demonstrations.

      “My love of the land is like that,” she told Hip Hop Hopi. “It’s not just likeable land that needs nurturing. A pretty place like a national park will always have its defenders. The Sea Ledges has no fans. It’s the stray dog of the American West.”

      “Sounds like you want to take it home and give it a bath,” Hoppy responded. They both laughed. She asked him why he was there.

      “I’m just tired of rich guys fucking up the atmosphere. This is where it starts.”

       Chapter 3

      Bo Hineyman’s ranch hand, LaVerl Woody, found the body. It was flopped across a smashed glass table that held a diorama of a trout in a brook underneath a shimmering surface of blue-green glass. Bo bought it for ten thousand dollars in an art gallery in Santa Fe. The stuffed trout, suddenly free from its glass enclosure, stared blankly at Hineyman’s finely-tooled lizard skin cowboy boot, which was pointed at its face.

      The heads of a dozen dead beasts, including antelope, elk, cougars, deer, moose, and bison stared down from the wall at what was surely a classic crime scene. Bo Hineyman himself simply stared at the ceiling. His face was purple but there were no wounds on his body to indicate a struggle. But the overturned chairs, tipped lamps, and paintings tilted at odd angles testified to a violent struggle. The sheriff concluded Hineyman had been strangled but sent the body off to be autopsied just to be certain.

      The list of Bo’s potential enemies included just about anyone who worked for him or had encountered him, even briefly. The sheriff had two deputies and a dozen volunteers, mostly men with four-wheel-drive trucks who could help search for and rescue tourists who got lost on the county’s hundreds of miles of dirt roads. Sheriff Dunk Taylor had never investigated a murder but knew it would be more demanding than his small and inexperienced team could handle.

      The sheriff rarely ventured far from the pillar of his own perspective. He looked around and concluded there were good people and bad. Bad people rarely turned good but good people sometimes turned bad. Either way, people who commit crimes do so foolishly and recklessly. They make mistakes. Find the mistakes and you catch them. But fine-tuned forensic work and lab costs were more than Boon County could afford. It was easier to look first at motives so he could cut to the chase and avoid all that painstaking and expensive analysis. Sometimes it just wasn’t needed.

      Otis was the obvious suspect. Everyone knew he hated Bo. Otis was a nice guy but ever since he made a solemn vow to his mother to give up drinking, the man could be pretty ornery. Maybe he just lost control. The sheriff had seen otherwise good people do regrettable things when they lost their tempers. Or when they were drunk.

      An hour after he was notified of Hineyman’s demise and given a rundown on the crashed-up condition of the Hineyman house, Sheriff Taylor knocked on Otis’s front door. He wasted no time in case Otis had indeed gone nuts and was still a danger to the community that included his very own family, friends, and neighbors. As a precaution he asked his deputies, Eldon Pratt and Lamar Hanks, to stand behind him with their hands on their holstered weapons. “Don’t draw it unless I say so,” he told them. He was worried they might accidentally shoot him in the back and regretted his refusal to send them to the police training academy. The budget wouldn’t support that, and besides, the kind of crimes that happened in Boon County were pretty minor and didn’t require expensive training that Eldon and Lamar probably couldn’t pass anyhow. The job of deputy in Boon County was an entry level position. If you were good, you left for some place where they paid higher wages and had a better benefit package. It was no use investing in a guy who might leave as soon as he upgraded his resume.

      The sheriff knocked and knocked. Otis finally appeared, his comb-over undone in wisps above a week’s worth of whiskers. Otis wore stained sweat pants and a sleeveless t-shirt. He looked awful and didn’t smell much better. Dunk Taylor was greatly relieved to see he was non-frothing, even docile. Temporarily anyway.

      “Otis, where were you last night?” the sheriff asked.

      “Camping.”

      “Where?”

      “Spider Woman Mesa.”

      “When