PLACE; Eight Stories

By David V Ainsworth

This is a collection of eight short fiction stories heavy on irony. The common denominator among this otherwise diverse collection is that the setting of each story inspired its telling. This book will entertain you and make you more interested in the world around you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Ainsworth
• Release date: Jul 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781087893570

David V Ainsworth

The author is an international maritime lawyer, a novelist, a winemaker, a former U S Marine officer, a former stevedore superintendent on the San Francisco waterfront, and world traveler.

Book preview

Thunder River Man

The party of eight middle-aged tourists in three oar boats had been rafting on the Colorado River since departing the Lee’s Ferry landing below Lake Powell Dam four days earlier. Now, at sunrise, their guide led them on a steep uphill trail away from their campsite on a sandbar beside the river coursing through the Grand Canyon. It was already hot.

They climbed for an hour on burning quads up a side canyon before encountering a surprisingly verdant cataract of water with broad-leaf desert plants on either side of the falling water carving through the otherwise barren rock. The trail bent to follow the cataract upward and grew steeper, and the air hotter, the higher they climbed.

Gradually, they began to hear a faint roaring sound in the distance above them. The direction from which the sound came was indistinct, seeming to come at them from first one redwall rock face and then another as they ascended. It grew louder as they approached a rocky ledge looming above them and over which the cataract beside them flowed.

Perspiring heavily, queasy, and gasping for air, the woman named Shirley led the column up the last hundred feet of elevation to the ledge. As the trail crested the ledge, she walked gratefully into a bubble of cool mist and stared up in stupefaction. A tube of clear water ten feet in diameter shot out of a hole in the Muav limestone face, fell sixty feet, and crashed onto the rock ledge directly in front of her. Then, it spilled over the ledge and stitched the green ribbon they had been following down a thousand feet against the hot colors of rock to join the great river. She sat down on a moist bench of rock in the mist zone thirty feet from the waterfall, her senses surfeited by the concussion of the water on the rock and the cool shock of the mist. Thinking excitedly of the folks back in Wisconsin, she reached for the camera in her cargo pants. They aren’t going to believe this.

As she framed the picture, she glimpsed a shadowy form in the falling water. In her peripheral view, she saw something hit the polished rock and slide until, deflected by a boulder, it stopped close enough to her to make a sloshing sound. She lowered the camera and looked directly into the face of a heavily clothed man with blue skin and a stone spike protruding some eight inches from one eye socket. It took several seconds before the others saw her arms waving and heard her screams over the roar of the cascade.

* * *

A National Park Service helicopter dropped down on the exposed top of the Moav limestone just above the source of Thunder River, and a young woman stepped out. Ducking her head in the airspace below the whirring rotors, she hurried past a second helicopter already on the cap rock and picked a trail through loose tailings sloping down toward three men standing on a rock shelf beside the waterfall below. The mini-avalanche her boots created in the talus slope helped propel her downward with one hand firmly on her sidearm and the other on the radio attached to her belt. Her jet black ponytail stuck out of the back of her Coconino County Sheriff’s Department baseball-style cap. The features of her Navajo bloodline showed below the brim of the cap.

A tall, lean, Caucasian man about fifty years old and wearing an iconic, flat-brimmed Smokey hat stepped forward. Sweat discolored much of his short-sleeve National Park Service shirt.

Deputy Chee I expect. I’m Paul Anderson.

Afternoon, Ranger Anderson. Kimberly Chee. What do you have?

Well, Federal and State jurisdiction over homicides overlap here in the Park, so I called your Sheriff Trask. He said he would get you involved. Said you were Navajo and had a cousin in Indian law enforcement who knew his way around spiritual matters.

She nodded. My cousin is a Navajo policeman over in Shiprock. He’s interested in the traditional ceremonies of the People. What’s that got to do with your situation here?

Anderson’s glance directed Deputy Chee to the body laid out away from the waterfall.

A river rafting party was up here admiring the view when that guy came rocketing out in the water and nearly hit a woman, Anderson said. Gave her a bit of a shock, I’m told.

Chee walked over to the corpse followed by the ranger.

He looks to be an Indian, said Anderson.

Any ID or personal effects on him?

"A plastic wallet with a few dollars, but no ID, credit cards, business cards. Nada. His clothes labels all read Fabrique en Chine. I guess the trading posts are part of the global village too. Check out the spear point in his eye. What do you make of that? And that colored ribbon around his neck?"

Search me, Chee said. He looks a little different. I don’t think he’s Navajo. Or Hopi. Maybe Apache. He’s dressed way too warm for the season. I wonder if he’s been camping--or hiding out--up in high ground.

Anderson waited, but Chee only studied the water emerging from the hole in the rock.

I’ve heard of Thunder River. Never seen it, though. Wonder where all that water comes from, she said.

Anderson pressed. Will you check with your cousin to see whether there’s something here us Anglo-types don’t see? Death by a stone spear in the eye--assuming that is the cause of death-conjures up the possibility of ritualistic killing. Oh, and all of his limbs are severed but positioned back in his clothes. A sadistic killer at large in the park is something we’d have to react to--maybe close the park. Anyway, none of us know anything about wind-talking or skin-walking or any of that kind of stuff.

Chee ignored his characterization of Navajo spirituality.

Sure, I’ll take some digital photos of the body and send them over to Shiprock to see what they think. Me, I don’t know what to make of this guy. Usually a floater is about the color of boiled pork. This guy is blue. You said the arms and legs are severed?

Yeah. Just held in by the clothes. Where they’re separated from the body doesn’t look like a cut exactly. There aren’t any sawing or cutting marks on the bones. The joints seem to fit together cleanly. Neck looks broken but not severed.

Deputy Chee pulled out her mobile device and took a number of photos of the body and the surroundings.

I’ll take this back to the substation in Page and ask around about Indian fugitives or missing persons. And see what my cousin thinks. Can your chopper drop me back at the South Rim parking lot? My department car is there.

Anderson nodded and spoke into his radio giving instructions to the pilot. He gave Chee his card. She put it in her shirt pocket and started the slog back up the talus slope to the Park Service helicopter in which she arrived.

Anderson signaled his men to start rigging a basket for the body to be winched up to the other helicopter for transport to the coroner’s office in Flagstaff.

* * *

Back in Flagstaff, Chee was reassigned from patrol duty to Criminal Investigations. The mystery surrounding the corpse found at Thunder River had gotten everyone’s attention within the office. The Park Service’s growing anxiety over whether a threat to public safety existed manifested itself in multiple phone calls floating the idea of a joint public statement with the county sheriff. Ranger Anderson was rank conscious and addressed his many inquiries to Sheriff Trask personally. Were there any outstanding missing persons cases on any of the surrounding Indian Reservations? Did the ritual killing hypothesis fit any known MO for criminal activity in the area? Trask had nothing to give the Park Service and pestered Deputy Chee about the speed at which she was digging.

When the coroner’s preliminary report came in the next morning, it stated that the decedent’s cause of death was hypothermia, together with blunt force trauma not unlike that of a victim of a high-speed automobile collision. The coroner was still evaluating other curiosities about the condition of the body. He had nothing to report about the stone implement in the eye of the corpse, except that it was not the cause of death. The Park Service and Sheriff Trask agreed to issue a press release merely reporting the fact that an unidentified man had been found dead in one of the Canyon’s waterways and that the death was under joint investigation by both offices.

* * *

Deputy Chee did not relish being in the Flagstaff office and at the end of Sheriff Trask’s yo-yo. She was too new to the department to have been through an election cycle before, but she recognized the hyper-vigilance of the Sheriff in conspicuously monitoring the various cases pending in the office, notably hers, as the product of being up for re-election this year. So, she opted to do her work on the road via her mobile device as much as possible.

Early the next morning, Deputy Chee put a hundred and thirty miles on the Department SUV before stopping for breakfast at the Ranch House Grill in Page. She picked