7th Sigma (6 page)

“Now that's annoying,” said Ruth.

Kimble was more than annoyed. He hefted the small clay crock of honey they'd just traded four loaves of bread for. “That was the
last
. I really wanted to try the honey on some bread.”

Using some fine dark dust, Ruth checked the glass pieces for fingerprints, but the glass was still clear from the last cleaning. They did find some more boot prints though, in the threadbare yard.

“Looks the same,” Ruth said.

Kimble pointed at the right heel. “It is. That crack is the same.”

“Get some of that scrap cardboard and draw a full-sized picture. One you could hold up to a boot.”

“Yes, Sensei.”

There was one spare pane of glass stored in the cupboard beneath Ruth's bed and it was the work of a few minutes to place it in the frame. Summer was full on and there was no need of the second glazing until later in the year, but Ruth put it on her list anyway.

Kimble was comparing his drawing with the boot print.

“Not bad,” Ruth said, looking over his shoulder. She tucked the drawing in her shoulder bag. “Fetch the dishpan, the one with the onions in it.”

“And the onions?”

“Put them in the sink for now.”

When he returned with the plastic tub, she carefully placed it over the boot print in the dust, then weighed it down with an adobe brick.

“Stay here,” she told Kim. “I'm going to talk with Martha.” She pointed two fingers at her own eyes.

Kimble bobbed his head. “Right, Sensei. I'll watch.”

*   *   *

THOUGH
Ruth had picked up the larger pieces there were still glass shards on the sill, counter, and floor, so Kimble gathered them all up. Goat-heads were bad enough—he had no desire to step on glass. It was a hot afternoon and stuffy in the cottage. He opened all the windows of the cottage, found a basket to put the onions in, and thought about the bread that was gone.

He deeply resented whoever stole the bread. Making more was really a six-hour job, between heating the
horno
, preparing the dough, and baking. In the summer, it was the sort of thing you began at dawn, before it got too hot.

There were many chores that could be done. They needed more clay from the riverbank for pottery, but he couldn't watch the cottage from there. Same problem with fishing or seining for crawdads. He could do laundry, but they'd done it two days before.

It was the worst time of day for it, but everything he needed to mix more adobe for bricks was already on site over by the dojo. He locked the cottage door, hung the hard, plastic key around his neck, and headed over there.

He stopped short.

There were two horses tied to the small cottonwood by the spring, one with a riding saddle and one with two filled canvas panniers on a pack saddle. The visible brand was the Bar Halo, a small ranch west of town belonging to the Kenney family. This wasn't too surprising. Ruth had let it be known that locals traveling her way were welcome to the spring's water, but he didn't see any of the Kenneys, or Orse, their hired hand. He heard distant movement and looked around the half-completed dojo wall.

Sandy Williams was in the garden, stealing tomatoes.

The kitchen garden was on the far (northern) side of the pond, handy to water, with a plastic mesh rabbit fence around it. Deer could jump (and had) right over the fence but they mostly watered down in the bosque. Also, the nearest neighbors' sheepdogs tended to keep the deer away from the top of the bluff.

Not very good at keeping people out, though.

“I'm seeing a couple of dozen Romas and a bunch of cherries in your basket,” Kimble said loudly, from the other side of the pond.

Williams jerked around, a half-eaten tomato in his hand.

“Looking at your face and your coveralls, you've gone through another dozen, as well. That'll be six dollars. Then there's the matter of the broken window, the stolen crock of beans, and my loaf of bread.”

Williams dropped the half-eaten tomato in the dirt prompting a cry from Kimble.

“Don't
waste
! What did you say to me when you tried to sell me those rotten eggs? ‘You drop it, you bought it'?”

“Didn't have any choice, kid. Coyotes got my chickens last night. It was the last straw.” Williams walked out of the garden gate. “Your house unlocked?”

“Sensei is going to beat the absolute crap out of you.”

“We'll see about that. Anyway, I saw her head into the village just now. I'm done with this town—I'm gonna be long gone by the time she gets back. Just need a stake for the road and I know she's got it.”

“The cottage is locked and even if you break in you'll never find it.”

“So it
is
in the house,” said Williams.

Crap.

Williams set the tomatoes down and stepped into the pond. “I'll bet
you
know where it is. I'll bet you even have a key.”

Kimble's first impulse was to run hard and fast, back toward town. Even if Williams pursued him on horseback, there were places he could go no horse could follow.

But he doubted Williams would follow. Instead Kimble thought he'd kick in the door and ransack the cottage. Williams had done it once before, so he knew where
not
to look. He might find Ruth's savings this time.

Kimble circled to the left along the edge of the water. “You steal those horses? The council will ride after you for that. They'll send for the Rangers, too.”

Unlike Ruth and Kimble, the Kenneys had lived in the town since before the Exodus. They were respected and well liked and stealing livestock was considerably more frowned on than just stealing food.

“Of course, if I were you I'd rather the Rangers caught me. The council might decide to go all Western on you, horse thief.” It was an idle threat. Nobody had been hanged in Perro Frio, but it had happened elsewhere in the territory.

Williams, thigh high in the water, turned to track Kimble. “Shut up, you little faggot!”

Kimble began backing away from the pond's edge. “You know what's worse than a horse thief? A drunk and a horse thief!”

Williams surged forward through the water, and then stumbled. Kimble had moved sideways to put the old tractor between him and the man and Williams' toe caught it. Flailing his arms around for balance, Williams fell forward, sending a green tidal wave before him.

Kimble turned and ran back toward the horses, intending to at least let them go, scare them away, so they'd find their way home. He fumbled with the reins, but Williams had not used a slipknot and the horses, jerking away from Kimble's rush, had tightened the knots. Williams pounding feet grew closer and Kimble darted north, toward town, horses still tied.

The knots will slow him down
, Kimble thought, but Williams didn't even pause at the horses. Kimble was struggling through the brush, slowed by the mesquite thorns, but Williams seemed to plow right through, closing fast.
I'll never make the road
, Kimble thought, and cut left, toward the bluff top. He knew a spot with a ledge halfway down and a sloping face below where it was possible to descend the fifteen-foot drop into the bosque.

He felt fingers claw at his back and he swerved hard, then sprinted the last bit to the cliff top, opening the gap between them. Panting, he turned, knees bent, facing Williams.

If Kimble was panting, Williams was wheezing, his face beet red. Seeing Kimble stop, he slowed, managing a breathless, “Ha! Trapped yourself.” William stepped closer, wide-stanced, ready to cut Kimble off if he tried to dart right or left. He gestured. “I see that string around your neck.”

Kimble's top two buttons had come loose as he'd run through the brush and the end of the key was visible against his skin. He stood up straighter and tugged the string, so the key dangled. “This old thing?”

Williams lunged, arm darting forward like a striking snake.

Kimble stepped back off the edge of the bluff. As he dropped, he reached up and grabbed the sleeve of Williams' outstretched arm from beneath.

Kimble went down the cliff-face feet first, his toes scudding along the dirt and rock, his free hand dragging down the face, until he stopped hard, on the ledge. Williams arced overhead, a look of sudden shock and surprise on his face as he pitched forward. Kimble turned just in time to see him crash though the branches of a Russian olive tree, then slam into the ground below.

He didn't get up.

Kimble came down the last sloping bit of the bluff with a tumbling cloud of dirt and rocks. He approached Williams cautiously. There was a huge knot on the man's forehead and a bone was sticking out of his upper left arm. He was breathing, though, and the sluggish bleeding around the protruding bone didn't seem arterial.

A quarter of an hour later, Ruth came back, riding pillion behind Matt Kenney. With them rode Kenney's sons and half the village council, all on horseback and packed for an extended chase.

Kimble told them where the stolen horses were and led them around, the horse-friendly way, into the bosque where Williams lay.

“Too bad he didn't break his fool neck,” said Matt Kenney. “What happened, boy?”

“He was chasing me. Wanted the key to the cottage. I knew there was a ledge there. He didn't.”

“Serves him right. If he'd just ridden on by, we might never have caught him. Those were my best two horses. They can really
move
. Let that be a lesson to you, boys,” he said to his own teenage sons. “Don't be greedy.”

They found the missing bread and the crock of beans among Williams' belongings in the pack saddle panniers. While he was still unconscious, they extended his arm until the bone slipped back under the muscle and splinted it. He woke up before they finished rigging the horse litter and threw up all the tomatoes he'd eaten.

“There's justice,” said Ruth. Later, after they'd taken him away, she said, “Now tell me what really happened.”

He did.

“And was it wise to confront him while he was stealing the tomatoes?”

“They were
our
tomatoes, Sensei.”

“Because a vehicle
should
stop at a crosswalk does not mean you should step out in front of a speeding truck. Be more careful in the future. Let him eat tomatoes … while you take his horses.”

“Sensei!”

She gave him bread with honey. “Just be more careful.”

“Yes, Sensei.”

5

Kimble and the Not-Dog

The monsoon season began well, the first two weeks of July, with a series of afternoon thunderstorms, but thereafter the clouds threatened but dropped their water on other watersheds. By the middle of August, the Puerco was down to a trickle, though many of the river's beaver dams still held good water. The grass and brush, green during the two weeks' rain, were now brown and dry again.

Concerned about fire, Ruth and Kimble cleared brush in a hundred-foot safety zone around the house and dojo. When filling the rooftop water barrel, Kimble hauled extra water for the grass on the live roof, to keep it from drying out.

The Village Council began inspecting chimneys, ordering the installation of ceramic spark grates on some, the removal of close trees in other places. They scheduled a time to tour Ruth's place.

Kimble exhibited a teen's outrage. “What business is it of theirs what happens on your land?”

“What direction is the wind blowing?”

It was a hot dry wind from the south, perhaps fifteen miles per hour.

The village was north of their place.

Kimble's righteous anger shriveled. “Oh.”

When the council inspected Ruth's
horno
they said, “Nice that it's so close to the spring. You've got green stuff close around, but no baking on windy days, okay?”

Ruth had grown up in southern California and knew wildfires all her life. “Certainly. We only bake once a week as it is, but no—no baking on windy days.”

The water level in people's wells began dropping. Ranchers who normally watered their livestock from catchment ponds began taking their livestock to the beaver ponds on the river. Ruth's closest neighbors began dropping by, with her permission, to get drinking water from the spring.

“My well's gone all silty,” said Rooster Vigil, the sheep rancher across the road. “It's doing for my garden, but you have to let it settle to drink. Far quicker to come over here.”

Rooster was walking his sheep down to the Puerco once a day, to water them at the clay-lined catchment where the spring runoff ran down the bluff. He'd floated the notion of having them water above, at the dojo pond, to avoid the roundabout route, but Ruth had pointed to her garden and said, “Sorry. I'm having enough trouble keeping deer and rabbits out.”

“Sheep manure is good for growing.”

“I wasn't even thinking about sheep poop. Make that ‘Hell, no.'”

Rooster had laughed and left with his five-gallon jug of water.

After that it became a weekly chore for Kimble to collect sheep manure down by the catchment to add to their compost piles. “And it's low in phosphorous,” Ruth told him.

“It still stinks.”

Tempers rose as water levels in the beaver ponds fell. As livestock weakened, coyote predation increased on lambs and calves. Some ranchers became obsessed with finding coyote dens. Other ranchers just gathered their animals tightly at night and kept watch.

One morning, while Rooster Vigil was filling his water jug at the spring, he yawned widely, his jaw cracking.

Ruth, harvesting ripe tomatoes and snap peas frowned at him. “You all right, Rooster?” There were dark circles under the rancher's eyes.

Rooster shrugged. “Trey Cruz lost some lambs last night.” The Cruz place was south of Rooster's. “I haven't, but I've been sitting up most nights.”