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think and see.
    In front of the altar was a wooden plaque of bread, raw meat, tobacco, and cornmeal; some of the cornmeal was scattered over the floor. A fire had been built next to the altar. In the ashes, Youngman found the pine needle strings and juniper bark. He dropped the charred bark when he saw the rabbit in a corner of the shed. The rabbit was flayed but not dressed, and the throat was slit for the blood to drain out alive, paint for Abner’s god.
    The truth was, the deputy understood the rabbit and the painting little better than Franklin had. Youngman had been away from the reservation too long and part of him, no matter how long he stayed now, would always be white. He’d lost the thread. He didn’t believe in anything, let alone the gods of a medicine man who pumped gas. All he knew was that Abner said he was going to end the world.
    He squatted by Abner and lifted the mask. Abner’s mouth gaped full with clotted datura. If death was gruesome, Abner didn’t know; or he had known and been prepared. Anyway, he couldn’t have felt a thing.
    “Uncle,” Youngman asked, “what are you up to? What the hell are you doing?”
    Abner gazed up at his friend, all eyes and teeth. The skin that wasn’t sliced was punctured by small claw marks. Despite rigor mortis, some of the wounds were still damp.
    Sniffing, Youngman recoiled. The same smell as in Joe Momoa’s corral. Around Abner’s body, the serpentine was stained with ammoniac pitch.
    Abner’s eyes were dry. Relaxed pupils had folded into slits. Goat eyes.
    “I don’t get it, Abner. I don’t know what or why. You don’t want to help me?”
    Abner’s teeth, like most reservation Indians’, were thin posts corrupted by decay. The jaw held a stiff grin.
    “Okay, uncle.” Youngman closed the eyes.
    He wrapped the body in a sheet and carried it to the back of the jeep. He returned to the shed for the photographs. Proper police procedure preserved the site of any suspicious death. For whom and for what, he asked himself. He was about as much police as there was, unless Arizona troopers were called in. For a dead Indian, they’d come in one week, maybe two. It wasn’t a murder. There were animals in the desert. Things happened.
    The sand painting was beautiful, complete and beautiful and totally mysterious. From where Youngman had moved Abner, in the middle of the rank stain, was the sprawled negative silhouette of a body.
    “Son of a bitch.” Youngman kicked the sand painting. Red grains, blue grains, yellow and white sprayed the walls. When the ground looked like a desecrated work of art, he began kicking the black outline of the silhouette. Ammoniac pitch stuck to his boots. He picked up loose sand and poured it over the outline. The outline faded, but showed through the sand. He looked up. A desert skink was watching him from an orange crate shelf on the wall. Fly wings protruded from the lizard’s jaws. It jumped as Youngman ripped the shelf from the wall. He broke the shelf over his knee, dropped the halves onto the stained floor, and lit a match. And snuffed it between his fingers. Wasn’t going to do any good to burn the place down.
    “Dead. Just plain dead.”
    As Youngman came out of the shed, he heard the coughing of thunder north from the mesa. A ladder of dark clouds climbed into the sky. Within the clouds, lightning exploded like bombs. A wind scurried ahead of the storm.
    The deputy put his jeep in gear and pulled out towards the clouds. A ball of sagebrush bounced by in the opposite direction.
    The faces you could see in clouds, Youngman thought. Sad faces with gray and blue cheeks. Puffed up. Eyes closed and ready to cry. Just water, no atomic rain. No end of the world.
    “You blew it,” he said to the man in the sheet. “You didn’t end the world, only yourself. A man your age ought to know the difference.”
    The thunderheads kept climbing. The hot air of the desert was a wall that the clouds had to scale, until there were two