Free Leaning Land by Rex Burns Page A

“Just over there. Terrible thing, him dying like that.”
    “Did you know him very well?”
    “Not as well as I know some of the other folks around here. He wasn’t around home that much. I know his wife, Sharon, a lot better.” His cheeks suddenly darkened with a blush. “I mean, she comes in the store to do shopping and mail letters, you know. So we have a chance to talk some. Rubin was always off somewhere with his trucking business, so I didn’t know him so well.” He added, “Seemed like a nice fella, though. Always friendly.”
    “You’ve lived here long?” Wager glanced across the dimly lit store. The aisles were narrow and flanked by a little of everything, ranging from canned and dried foodstuffs to hardware and beauty items. A chiller near the entry held soda pop and beer, another just beyond the cash register and fronted with sliding glass doors showed dairy goods, ice cream, popsicles, a small variety of frozen dinners, bags of frozen vegetables, wrapped packages of meat and fish and poultry. There were no shopping carts—they wouldn’t fit through the cramped aisles—but a short stack of plastic tote baskets sat beside the check-out counter. That was a small space cleared between displays of candy and tobacco, most of which was the chewing kind.
    “About three years now. Came from California about three years ago when I bought the store. Love it here—it’s peaceful, you know?”
    “Ever hear of anyone who might want Del Ponte dead?”
    “Oh, no. Maybe some of his relatives over on the reservation could tell you something.” A tilt of his head in another direction. “But I never heard anything like that.”
    “Have you ever heard of the Constitutional Posse?”
    Herrera’s eyes widened momentarily and he blinked. “Just that some folks belong. I don’t. I don’t really know much about it. I can’t tell you much about it.”
    “Is Mrs. Del Ponte home now?”
    “Sure—she’s … I mean, she’s usually home … . Got her two kids and only one’s in school, you know, and so she has to stay home.”
    Wager asked a few more questions about local people Del Ponte might know and where they lived. Egnarville was different from Denver and far more spread out. But the network of a victim’s friends and acquaintances, relatives and enemies, was familiar; and despite the empty sky, the distant glimmer of snowy peaks, the wind that made the only sound, Wager was beginning to feel at home.
    Sharon Del Ponte had one of those faces that seemed to be dried down to basics: small, triangular eyes, thin nose, full lips. She wasn’t what Wager would call pretty, but she wasn’t exactly plain or ugly, either. She might have been better-looking when she was in her teens—probably when she married Del Ponte—but there was enough left which, with the bushy red hair that made her face seem even more doll-like, could cause some men to look twice.
    “I heard he was telling people he worked as an informer. We didn’t talk about it though.” Her full lips pressed together a bit. “Somebody told the newspaper he was. It was in the newspaper with the story about him being found.” She sat in a turned-wood rocking chair placed to look through the picture window at the swing set in the sandy front yard. There, a child climbed alone up the small slide, carefully slid down, and then turned to climb again: he or she did it over and over, deliberately, learning early what life was all about. “I don’t think they should’ve put that in there.”
    The house was a prefab, the “wide load” kind you saw being trucked in halves down the highway on flatbed trailers, to be set up on a cinder-block foundation somewhere. Early American. That was what the wooden chairs and table, the red-and-white checkered curtains and wall paneling were called, Wager remembered. Early American, maple stain. Framed pictures of mountains and lakes hung here and there on the dark walls, and children’s toys had been dropped and