They drove into San Miguel past the strip signs: MODERN CABINS-EAT-BAR amp; GRILL-AIR CONDITIONED-SALES AND SERVICE-ALL CARDS
HONORED-REASONABLE RATES. It was a company town and it was the only town of any size on the plateau. The interstate highways had bypassed the region and it was untouched by mushrooming population because few living things could survive in it: in winter the snow drifted deep and in summer the heat could reach 135 degrees, and so the twenty-five thousand square miles were mostly uninhabited except for ranches, filling stations, crossroad bars, campgrounds, and the town here that had grown up around the big open-pit diggings of the San Miguel Copper Company. Most of the surrounding land was Federal-Reservations, National Forests. For active men and women San Miguel was a dead dull town; the mine and smelter employed 12,400 workers and a good many of them spent their weekends in Las Vegas, which was one hundred fifty miles away but the nearest entertainment available to them.
The main street was nine blocks of parking meters and facelifted chain stores, a grain warehouse, used-car lots with flapping pennants, three gas stations, the company-owned San Miguel Bank amp; Trust, the Hollywood Beauty Salon (“What Price Beauty? Free Estimate!”). Rusty pickup trucks and muddy Chryslers were parked on the slant at a few meters and the clinging film of red dust coated everything-the display windows, the beer joints, the hamburger drive-in, the laundromat and the baroque old Paramount movie show with its Moorish marquee.
Watchman parked in front of the Copper King Cafe and plugged a nickel into the meter. “I’ll meet you inside.” He walked on past Woolworth’s to the corner, turned by the bank entrance and went into Zane’s Jewelers next door. Behind the glass counter the old man looked up from his watch-repair bench, jeweler’s glass perched on top of his spectacles.
“So. You’ve come to ransom the ring? I thought it was about time.” The old man got it out of the safe and Watchman bent over the countertop on his elbows, laboriously scrawling out the check in his crabbed hand. When he looked up the old man had placed the pale blue velvety case by his elbow.
The old man picked up the check and examined it as if he suspected its worth; held it up against the light, flapped it back and forth and blew on it, although Watchman’s pen was a ballpoint.
Watchman popped the velvet lid open and the ring winked at him with all its facets.
“You gotch self a beauty there.”
“I guess so,” Watchman said. “It sure cost enough.”
“Hell, I give it to you cheap. Anybody else had to pay a hundred more. Some of us appreciate what you people do for us.” The old man said it accusingly. He filled out a receipt and pushed it across the counter.
Watchman gave it a wooden look. “At least us redskins only scalp enemies. You always skin your friends like this?”
The old man was hurt. “Sam-Sam!” He spread his hands wide in the Old World gesture of helplessness, head cocked to one side. “You can afford it, you’ve got a steady job.”
“Aeah. The pay’s bad, but the work’s terrible.” He snapped the little box shut and put it in his pocket. “Thanks.” And went outside with his hand in the pocket touching the velvet-covered hardness of the ring case. Going around the corner he was picturing Lisa, her lovely eyes, the surprise of delight that would shine in them; he almost crashed into old Jasper Simalie on the bank steps.
“Jesus, Tsosie, you want to look out where you are going.” Old Jasper was grinning.
“ Yah’a’teh, Jasper?”
Jasper Simalie still had a full bush of hair, grayshot and thick but very short; he had a big round Navajo face, deep square brackets creasing it right down past the mouth into the big dependable jaw. He had put on a few pounds since they had measured him for his guard’s uniform and he was beginning to look a little like W. C. Fields as the Bank Dick, with the grey seams straining around his shoulders and paunch. He had a big forty-five in the black Army holster at his waist and the policeman’s cap was tipped far back on his head.
Watchman grinned and poked his jaw toward the cafe. “Buy you a lunch.”
“Naw. I got to es-stick close to the bank.” Jasper indicated the green armored truck parked across the street in the shade. “It’s the fourth Friday.”
Every second and fourth Friday of the month the company-owned bank had a heavy load of cash brought in from Salt Lake to meet the payroll needs of the mine and smelter. On weekends the casinos over in Vegas wouldn’t accept out-of-state payroll checks and San Miguel accommodated its employees by cashing their checks before they set out for the Nevada weekend.
It was one of the regional facts of life they had impressed on Watchman when they had assigned him to the district. At first he hadn’t believed the size of the sums involved but when you worked it out it added up. You had more than twelve thousand workers drawing down an average wage of two hundred dollars a week. With a biweekly payroll that added up to five million dollars every two weeks. If five thousand of those men drew half their pay in cash that came to a round million dollars, part of which made a one-way trip to Las Vegas. Usually it didn’t come to that much but the bank had to prepare for the maximum and so every other Friday morning the armored truck brought in one million dollars in tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds: largely hundreds, because the big bills were popular with weekend gamblers. The truck waited all day and after closing it would transport whatever was left back to the head office in Salt Lake City. It was a long day’s run and the Utah office provided maximum security: the armored truck carried four guards and was convoyed by two cars, one in front and one behind, each containing two armed men. The run itself was judged to be that risky. But once the money reached the San Miguel bank it appeared to be safe enough, partly because the eight armed guards and the driver hung around the bank all day but mostly because the single highway through town could be stoppered at both ends on five minutes’ notice to prevent getaways. There were no other roads out. Not even dirt tracks. And the buckled terrain around the flats was impassable to anything but goats.
Even so, these Fridays were tense for old Jasper. He was the head guard: the safety of all that cash was his responsibility.
Jasper took it very seriously because it had taken him thirty-five years to work his way up to this job from a sheep-flock beginning in a hardscrabble back-country hogan forty miles from Kiacochomovi village on the Window Rock Reservation. Jasper and Sam Watchman’s father had been Agency Policemen at Canyon de Chelly together; Jasper was like an uncle to Watchman and he still called Watchman by his Navajo name, which was Tsosie Duggai, and Watchman loved the fat old man with deep fond warmth.
Jasper flapped a hand toward the bank door. “I keep telling Mr. Whipple we ought to put in some of them bank protection devices. We going to get hit one day.”
“I doubt it. More likely they’d go for the truck out on the highway someplace. Up in Utah.”
“With all that armor plate and all them guards?”
“If they hit the bank how are they going to get out of here? You want to relax, Jasper.”
“Maybe. I es-still think we ought to put in some cameras and bulletproof plexiglass panes for them tellers to work behind.”
“You’ve got a good alarm system and a big gun on your belt. But I’ll tell you what, Jasper, if you really want to keep the bad guys scared off maybe you ought to get yourself a feathered headdress and a tomahawk.”