The Shadow Catcher

He starts playing Indian, looking ancient and severe which kind of creeps me out but then he lowers the headdress onto the square of felt again and touches it. “No one in my family will ever trade in tribal pawn, we will not touch it, most of all the pieces that you see in jewelry stores in Santa Fe and Phoenix have been stolen one way or another, sometimes from burial sites. They tell you in those stores that native people have brought the pieces in for cash to purchase liquor or to make the next support payment but that’s not the truth. A piece like this — how much do you think the Heald Museum would offer? I’d have to ask my daughter but I think this is Plains Indian, perhaps Chinook or Nez-Percé, from the 19th century. But — touch it — it feels as if it’s just been made. Someone’s taken expert care of it. When I looked at it I had to ask myself what is this elder Negro gentleman doing with this artifact? He saw me hesitate and I think he thought I had no interest in it so he quickly showed me this.” He unwraps a second item from the felt, a bracelet. It’s made of very high standard molded silver but the square stone in the center, two inches on each side, is unlike any that I’ve ever seen.

“—bone?” I wonder.

“Snow turquoise.”

“—snow?”

“White. White turquoise. Very, very rare. But look at it more closely.”

He passes it to me and I turn it toward the light. A copper vein runs through the center of it, almost in a perfect oval and within the oval shape other copper-colored lines delineate some features while two distinct round shapes of blue turquoise stare out, like eyes.

“It’s a face,” I marvel.

“My father called this piece The Shadow Catcher. And he’s the one who made it.”

He turns the bracelet around and shows me the silversmith’s stamp on the back in the shape of a standing bear. “That’s my father’s mark. ‘Owns His Shadow.’ That was my father’s name. Bear Clan.”

“So of all the pawn shops in all the cities in the West—”

“Native craft cooperative.”

“—so of all the native craft cooperatives in all the cities in the West this guy with my father’s papers and your father’s bracelet walks into—”

“This is not my father’s bracelet. This one is.”

He slides up his sleeve and shows me a similar one, not a duplicate, exactly, made of the same stone but with only a trace of the other’s distinct facial image.

“He made two bracelets from the same piece of snow turquoise. One he kept for himself. That’s the one that I wear. The other, with the face in it, he gave to his friend because the face inside the stone looked so much like him.”

I stare at the image in the piece of turquoise — copper-colored hair and beard, two piercing blue eyes…

“Who was his friend?”

“Edward Curtis. The photographer you mentioned.”

“Are you messing with me, Lester?”

I have to ask but I can tell he isn’t.

“When the man showed me this bracelet I must have looked as if I’d seen a ghost. I couldn’t help it. I looked at him and said, ‘Who are you?’ And his eyes grew round and he parted his lips as if to speak and clutched his chest and then fell down. I went around the counter and I held his head and he looked at me, desperate. I had to leave him on the floor to go call 911 and when I came back I could see he’d had a stroke, one eye was closed but that other eye—” He stops, then tells me—“pleading. I think he knew that he was going to die. He was trying to tell me something. So I had to follow him to here. With these”—he indicates the jewelry—“and these.” He shows me a set of keys and I notice what appears to be a house key among them.

“He’s wearing a wedding band, so he must belong to someone.”

“He left his car in my daughter’s parking lot. I was thinking I could search it for his address. Then they told me they had found his closest living relative, and that you were on your way.”

We stare toward the open door of the room where Mr. Wiggins lies unconscious.

“I saw his driver’s license,” I mention. “I know where he lives.”

We exchange another look, and Lester weighs the old man’s house keys in his hand. “Middle of the night,” he mentions. “Can you stay ’til daylight?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t want to leave, in case he wakes up.”

“I can understand that”

“I have a duty to him.”

“Yep.”

“Even if he has a wife, she would be very old, like him. We don’t want to wake her up and scare her. Another heart attack.”

“—still. I think she’d like to know. Given his condition.”

“Better that we wait ’til morning.”

“—okay. You’ve got a point. I know what those unexpected calls are like. The news that you don’t want to hear.”

He studies me. “—your father?”

“—for starters.”

“How did he die?”

“Suicide. — yours?”

“—in his sleep. We didn’t know his age but figured ninety-seven.”

“And he really knew Edward Curtis?”