Another Man's Moccasins

8

I took Cady with me to make the sixty-six-mile loop over to Sheridan after we’d worked out in the morning. We were just passing Lake DeSmet along I-90 with Dog seated between us. She had her sandals kicked off and her legs folded up on the seat the way she always did.

I noticed she’d dressed for Michael’s arrival later that day in a bright turquoise broomstick skirt and a black-sequined, cap-sleeved T-shirt. She was wearing a stylish straw cowboy hat with a leather strap adorned with conchos and lots of feathers on top of her auburn hair. Her earrings matched her skirt. Biker/cowgirl haute couture. She glanced up at me and continued to pet Dog. “Don’t make fun of my hat.”

“I haven’t said a word.”

“You were thinking about it.”

I set the cruise control and settled back in my seat. “It’s a very nice hat.”

“Don’t.”

I glanced at her. “What?”

“You were going to try and be funny.” She took a deep breath and looked out her window and back down the Piney Creek valley.

This is the point where as a father you’re supposed to say something—the right thing—and I wondered what that might be. She was obviously nervous about Michael’s arrival, and it was my duty to assuage some of the anxiety. “You look great.”

Her head dropped, and I waited. “I’m wearing the hat because of the scar.”

“Oh, honey . . .”

“I just thought at first . . .” She was silent for a moment, but it wasn’t because there was nothing to say. “My hair is too short; I haven’t gotten enough sun. . . .”

“You look great, honest.” I passed an eighteen-wheel truck and steered back in our lane. “It means a lot to you, this visit?”

She reached out and adjusted the air-conditioning vent, then readjusted it back to the same position. “Yes.”

There was something I’d been meaning to talk with her about, and this was the closest to an opening I’d gotten. I’d decided that as a parent I would adopt a relationship with my little redheaded, large-eyed daughter that was based on an unrelenting truth, and it had become the only language we both understood. “Well, this’ll be a good opportunity for the two of you to spend some time really getting to know each other even if it’s just a couple of days.”

I was hoping it sounded better to her than it did to me.

“What’s that supposed to mean? ”

It hadn’t.

“I just think it’ll be a good visit; before, you had these roles—he was a police officer and you were a victim. . . .” I glanced over and then quickly returned my eyes to the road. “It was a hospital and then it’s been phone calls. I just think this’ll be a good opportunity for the two of you to be in a more natural setting and really get to know each other.”

“That’s the second time you’ve used the word ‘really,’ meaning we don’t know each other now? ”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Really? ”

It seemed to me her mind was rapidly getting better. I tried my last hope, the authoritarian patrician voice of reason. “Cady . . . ”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

We drove the next twenty minutes in silence as I took the second Sheridan exit, turned off Main, and made the gradual ascent to the Veterans Administration. The VA had taken over Fort Mackenzie, and it was in a gorgeous spot on a plateau just north of town with vast, feathering cottonwoods and solid, redbrick buildings. We passed the unmanned guard shack and the rows of conifers stretching shadows across the pavement, and she decided to talk to me again. “So how come I never met this Quincy Morton guy?”

“He was before your time.”

“More stuff that happened before I was born?” She glanced around as I wound my way through the fortlike buildings. “So, you had a hard time after the war?”

I thought about it. “I don’t know if I’d call it a hard time.... It was a confusing time, and I was looking for some answers. Quincy wrote me and said he was transferring to Sheridan from Detroit.”

She watched me. “Did Mom help?”

“Yes, but she wasn’t in Vietnam, and I think I needed somebody who had been.”

“What about Bear?”

I shrugged. “He wasn’t around.”

I could feel those composed, gray eyes on the side of my face. “It doesn’t seem to have affected you.”

I parked the Bullet under the shade of a tree and left the windows partially down for Dog. I thought of the contract I’d made with her. “Well, it did.”

When we got out of the truck, I noticed she left the hat on her seat.

The Sheridan founding fathers had lobbied for Fort Mackenzie as protection against hostile Indians. The fact that there were only 23,133 Indians spread over an area roughly the size of Europe; that this count included men, women, and children; or that it was 1898 and the director of the U.S. Census Bureau had stated plainly that the frontier was dead, didn’t appear much in the argument.

Pretty cagey, those Sheridan politicians—realizing the economic advantages that accrued by having an army post nearby. The market for local goods, especially beef, would increase, and the fort would provide jobs for a burgeoning workforce; it would also supply young West Point cadets to whom the founding mothers could marry off their daughters. One can only imagine the looks on their faces when the first troops of the Tenth Cavalry, Companies G and H, disembarked from the Sheridan trains, and were—buffalo soldiers.

Quincy Morton’s office was not in the same location; in fact, nothing was. I hadn’t been to the VA for a while, and it appeared that the place had gone through quite a growth spurt. It was good to see Quincy again, and when I described the big Indian in my jail, he definitely knew who he was.

“You realize I’m under no obligation to give you any information without the proper authorization?”

“I am and, if it makes you uncomfortable, I can go over to Chuck Guilford and get the avalanche of paperwork sliding, but that’s not going to help this man I’ve got sitting in my holding cell.”

I watched as Quincy twisted his fingers into his wooly beard, which was now curlicued with a gray that I didn’t remember. It was easy to see how the plains Indians had made the association between the soldiers’ hair and the coats of the roaming herds. He adjusted his glasses, glanced at Cady, and then crossed to a large oak file cabinet and knelt down. I noticed the drawer he pulled out was the bottom one, W-Z.

White Buffalo. Had to be.

He pulled a thick file from the hanger and came back over, setting the folder on the edge of his desk; I noticed he didn’t sit. “I’m taking this lovely lady over to the dayroom in ward five, which has mediocre coffee but a glass solarium with incredible views of the mountains.” He hooked his elbow out to Cady, and she smiled and joined him at the door with her turquoise skirt twirling. He plucked an ID off the navy blazer on his coat rack. “The file stays in my office, but I will expect you in fifteen minutes. It’s a voluntary lockdown ward, but just tell them you’re with me and they’ll let you in.”

He shut the door.

I pulled Quincy’s chair closer to the desk and looked around the room; I guess I was avoiding the file. The therapist had a framed poster from the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody of the Tenth Cavalry buffalo soldiers on the wall, a couple of unopened Meals-Ready-to-Eat on his bookshelf, and a fake hand grenade on his desk with a small plaque that read, IN CASE OF COMPLAINTS—PULL PIN. At least I assumed it was a fake grenade.

There was a white adhesive label on the cover of the file that read Virgil White Buffalo.

Virgil.

I thought about the author of The Aeneid and Dante’s supposed guide through hell. I studied the folder and hoped his travels had been more pleasant. They hadn’t.

It had taken the full fifteen minutes to get through the file, and since I’d left Quincy’s office on my way over, my mind repeated only one word.

God.

It was a cloudless day, if hot, and I took a deep breath and smelled the pungent fragrance of cut grass. I thought about what I’d read as I walked across the trimmed sidewalks leading to ward 5. I stopped at the double-paned Plexiglas doors and watched as the officer came over. I mentioned Quincy’s name, and he told me to go down the hall to the second right and to just keep going.

They were sitting at a small round table on which were three thick-handled coffee mugs and a white plastic carafe. I sat and listened as they continued their conversation, which was mostly about Michael’s impending visit and Cady’s plans to return to Philadelphia after Labor Day.

I sat and gazed out at the mountains and thought some more about what I had read back in the doctor’s office.

God.

Cady slid me a mug of coffee. “Quincy says you saved his life.”

I turned my head and looked at her. “Yep? Well, he’s delusional and that’s why they keep him in a place like this.”

Figuring that she wasn’t likely to get the story out of me, she turned to Quincy, who told her a tale that made me sound like Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. He said that I’d talked so much about Wyoming that when a job came up in the Veteran’s Administration in Sheridan for a post-traumatic stress disorder coordinator, he and his wife, Tamblyn, had made the jump and never looked back.

“We had only three black people in Wyoming at the time, and I was in charge of trying to achieve a racial balance.”

Quincy shook his head, patted Cady’s arm, and pointed to another set of double Plexiglas doors leading outside to a grass field so green it looked chartreuse. “There’s a walkway through there that leads to another walkway that surrounds the parade ground and then to a big mansion that used to be the fort commander’s residence. There’s a ballroom upstairs with a hardwood floor and bay windows that look out on the mountains. ” He waited a moment. “You should see it.”

Cady, used to being dismissed from my more indelicate law enforcement conversations, nodded and squeezed my shoulder as she passed, looking back at Quincy. “If you decide to keep him, you can’t; we need him too much.”

The Doc smiled. “He’s too smart; the smart ones are always trouble.” We watched as an attendant pushed the door open, and she slipped off her sandals to walk across the parade ground barefoot. “My God, Walter. What an amazing young woman. . . .”

I watched her pick her way across the field, periodically skimming a foot across the blades of soft grass, before walking on. “She’s a punk.”

He turned to me, and his concern was palpable. “She told me about the problems in Philadelphia.” I nodded but didn’t say anything, wondering exactly how much she’d told. “It appears as if she’s progressing magnificently.”

“I hope so.”

He studied me. “What’s worrying you?”

I groaned. “That she’s pushing too hard, that she’s not pushing hard enough, that we’re doing too much physical and not enough intellectual, that we’re doing too much intellectual and not enough physical. . . .”

He laughed. “You haven’t changed, Walter.”

I took a deep breath and tried to wash my anxiety through my lungs. “I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, Doc.”

“It is.” He sipped his coffee. “You read the file.”

“I did.”

“And? ”

I looked into my cup and a past that made my coffee appear transparent.

“And if I ever labor under the supposition that I’ve had a hard life, I’m going to think of Virgil White Buffalo.”

He set his mug down and pulled in his chair. He listened to the story of Ho Thi Paquet and nodded gently at the smooth surface of the table without interrupting—a ritual I’d remembered. When I finished, he looked up at me. “Do you think he did it?”

I took another breath. “I didn’t until I read that damn file.”

We sat there in the comfortable silence we’d cultivated from long ago before he spoke again. “I just went back there.”

“Where?”

“Vietnam.”

"Why? ”

He laughed. “It sounds like you’ve still got some issues.”

“Issues, hell; I’ve got volumes.”

I poured him some more coffee as he continued to laugh. “I took Tamblyn and we went back just last year, stayed at the Morin Hotel in Hue. We’re sitting there having breakfast and drinking Buon me Thuot-style coffee and watching the nuts fall off the bang trees like incoming...” He took a sip.

I nodded. “What was it like, other than nuts? ”

He smiled. “Everybody’s trying to sell you something.” He glanced back up at me. “We took Route 1 through Da Nang to this old fishing town, Hoi An—motor scooters all over the place and not a single water buffalo. Shops everywhere with paintings, jewelry, and T-shirts. The nightclubs in Hue have names like Apocalypse New and M16. I showed Tamblyn Red Beach 1 and Red Beach 2, where we dropped off the first American ground troops.” It was a long pause, and it was only then that I figured he was talking to himself. “All in all . . . it was pretty strange.”

I sipped my coffee and looked off to the few narrow and melting snowfields on the mountains. “Maybe we won after all.”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

The same air force major as before was still the security officer, and DeDe Lind, the Playboy playmate, was still on the wall of the Quonset hut and insisting it was August. “I find it strange that you were posted here by the provost marshal to investigate the overdose of a soldier but ended up in Khe Sanh in an exploding helicopter.”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked back at the folder on his desk, which contained the hospital discharge papers. It’d been almost a week, and they’d tried to send me back to Chu Lai and battalion HQ, but I told them that I wanted to return to Tan Son Nhut. “It says here that the swabos have you up for a Navy Cross and a Silver Star.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’d you do up there in Khe Sanh, sink a submarine?”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked up through the thick glasses. “What was that?”

“No, sir.”

He studied me a good long time with the dead eyes. “Your official investigation was to be four weeks in length, but I’m going to see about getting that rescinded to three and get you out of here early.”

“Sir, but my orders from HQ...”

“You mean those orders about an investigation that you ignored because you were out joyriding in Khe Sanh?” I didn’t say anything, so he stood up and walked around his desk. He looked at my arm, still in the sling, and the sutured split on my eyebrow where I’d run into Henry. “How’s that investigation going, Lieutenant?” I started to speak, but he cut me off. “The job you were sent here to do? How’s that going?”

My head hurt, and I figured informing him that drugs were rampant in every part of the country and that I’d been warned off by his own personnel wasn’t going to make my situation any better. “Not so good, sir.”

He folded his arms and sat on the edge of his desk. “In the remaining time period in which we are to be blessed with your presence, you will confine yourself to this investigation and to this air base.” He shook his head at my incompetence. “Do you read me?”

I thought about those comic book manuals for the M16s. “Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

It was late in the afternoon—that point in the Asian day when the sun seemed like it just wouldn’t die. I walked out to Gate 055 and to the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge with the explicit idea of getting epically hammered. There weren’t too many people in the place, so I got four beers from the bar and retreated to my weapon of choice. I took off my sling and tossed it on top of the piano, doodled a little in the key of F and then attempted to slide into some Fats Waller.

Mai Kim came over and pulled up a bar stool to watch me play. The Stars and Stripes was folded up under her arm, but she didn’t ask for a lesson. I guess my mood was evident. She hovered there, though, looking at me. “Hey, Mai Kim.”

She smiled and crossed her legs. “Hi, you back?”

“For a little while.”

She looked concerned. “You go to America?”

I sipped the first of the second brace of beers. “Eventually, but for now it will just be BHQ in Chu Lai.”

She leaned forward to look at my face and the bandages on my forearm. “You hurt?”

I looked up and was struck by the symmetry of her China-doll face, framed by the black silk hair. “Not so bad.”

“You sad?”

“A little.” I continued to look at her and noticed she seemed down, too. “How ’bout you?”

She smiled a flicker of a smile that died before it could catch. “Tennessee boyfriend, he no write.”

“He rotate home?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “What you think about?”

“A girl.” I thought about the blonde back in Durant and wondered if she was still around.

She seemed even sadder. “American girl?”

“Yep.” I continued to vamp the stride piece “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” my left hand alternating between single notes at the lower portion of the keyboard and chords toward middle C.

She made an attempt at brightening, the smile catching a little at the corner of her mouth. “This my favorite song, you play.” I kept the title to myself, even though I think she knew it, and continued playing. “You tell me about America?”

“Big subject...”

She reached out and stroked the side of my brow, careful to avoid the stitches. “Tell me favorite place again.”

“Back home?”

Her fingers brushed through my hair and then settled on my shoulder. “Yes.”

The words flowed like the stream I was thinking of, and I smiled back at her. “There’s a spot in the southern part of my county in Wyoming, by the Hole in the Wall down near a place called Powder Junction.”

“Hole in the Wall?”

“Yep. I told you, remember? It’s a famous spot where the outlaws used to hide out.”

“Outlaws.”

“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” She nodded her head in recognition. I thought about how, after serving three-quarters of his sentence, George LeRoy Parker had been brought before Governor William H. Richards and declared that he would never rob another bank in Wyoming. He was released and, true to his word, never robbed another Wyoming bank—nobody said anything about Colorado. “They took cover near where Buffalo Creek spills out of the canyon just as you get to these gigantic red walls that run fifty miles.” I thought about the big, wary trout that swam in the sun-sparked cold waters below the narrow-leaved willows. “There’s an old ghost town called Bailey, and near there, it’s the best fishing in all the Bighorn Mountains.”

“Bailey, Bighorn Mountains.”

“Yep.”

“Mai Kim!” Le Khang’s voice called from the other side of the room. She turned and looked at him and at the ready airman with the mustache who stood by the counter.

She looked at me, smiled, and got off her stool. “You go back there?”

I set my bottle back on the piano and stared at the keys. “I don’t know . . .”

She slipped her hand from my shoulder onto my wounded arm and carefully stroked the gauze and bandages that were wrapped there. “This girl, she there?”

I laughed a short exhale. “Yep.”

She gave me one last pat on the shoulder before walking away. “You go back.”

I drank steadily through the afternoon, the weight of my wounded arm sloping my shoulder farther and farther down until it was all I could do to continue raising my one hand to play.

I’d probably gone through an entire case of beer by the time I noticed it was full night; the crowd was pushing in against me. I’d also noticed that Le Khang hadn’t brought any more beer over for a while, a sure sign I had been cut off.

Rescue came in the form of a familiar powder-blue arm, which reached across and placed another beer next to all the empties on the flipped-up cover of the zebra-striped, grained piano.

“How you feelin’, Hollywood?”

He smiled and sat on the edge of the bench, and I noticed how little room he took up in comparison to Henry Standing Bear. Hoang had been released only two days after the incident at Khe Sanh, had already been reestablished to active flight duty, and had flown three more missions since the beginning of the week. “I buy you beer.”

“Thanks.”

He continued to smile at me. “You drunk.”

“Stinking.” He looked puzzled. “Stinking drunk.”

He brightened, always game for another piece of American slang. “Stinking drunk?”

“Stinking. Drunk.”

He held his beer up to mine as he chanted the phrase to himself. I picked up the bottle, wet with condensation, and tipped his. The English lesson made me think about Mai Kim, and thoughts of her battered away at the waves of alcohol that kept rolling onto the beaches of my mind. “Where’s Mai Kim?”

He looked at me blankly. “She not here.”

“Where is she?”

“She gone.”

I drank my beer. “Oh.”

I scratched my head and watched as my hat slipped off and fell on top of the foot pedals of the piano. Hoang reached down and snagged it and placed it back on my head backwards. “You stinking drunk!”

I pushed back and stood, none too steadily, and waited for the world to stop moving. It was getting late, and I decided to make the long trek back to the other side of the airfield where they’d lodged me in the visitors’ barracks. Hoang was next to me and put an arm on mine to help me steady a persistent list. “You go home?”

“Yep.” I stuck a hand out to grip the piano, which provided a little more support than the compact pilot. “If I can.”

“I help you.”

I half tripped over the piano bench and watched as everyone moved away. There was a brief upsurge of nausea, and I belched, which made me feel a little better. “I’m okay.”

As I turned and shambled toward the open doorway, Hoang raised one of my arms and slipped under to help me navigate what now appeared to be the pitching deck of the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge. I pulled away and fell down the two wooden steps that led out of the bar.

I rolled over and stared up into the hazy star-filled night. “Ouch.”

Hoang’s face was above mine. “You fall.”

“I guess I could use a little help.”

The Vietnamese pilot grabbed an arm and helped me get to my feet. He was surprisingly strong and half led, half supported me as I wavered down the deserted red-dirt road. He nodded his head. “You save my life.”

I looked at the ludicrous figure of the tiny man in the powder-blue jumpsuit and white silk scarf. “When?”

“You funny guy.”

I stopped and saluted the two air policemen who were stationed at Gate 055. The APs asked Hoang if I was going to make it or should they call a patrol with a jeep or maybe a forklift. Hoang shook his head and explained that we would walk the perimeter to the next gate to give me a chance to sober up. He also explained how I’d saved his life.

They said that was great.

He then explained how I’d saved other people’s lives, too.

They said that was great, too.

I puked.

I don’t think they thought that was so great.

Hoang supported me as we walked along the fenced boundary and looked at the moonlight casting down on the high whitewashed walls of the old French fort—Hotel California, as the locals referred to it. It didn’t look real, or it looked too real, and I felt like I was on some movie set where we would walk behind the structure and see the two-by-four bracings that held up the naked backs of the walls.

The nausea was creeping up in my throat again, and I stopped, leaning against something and sitting on a hard surface. “Hey, Hollywood, you ever see Beau Geste?”

“No, but need to talk to you.”

“One with Ronald Colman?”

He looked a little worried. “No...”

“Gary Cooper?”

“No.”

I looked at Hoang, who was blurred and wavering in the close strangeness of the Vietnamese night. “How about Gunga Din, did ya see that?”

"Lieutenant... need to tell you something.”

“What?”

He looked around. “Need to tell you something.”

I ignored him and started reciting Kipling.

You may talk o’ gin and beer

When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,

An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;

But when it comes to slaughter

You will do your work on water,

An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.

He edged away. “Lieutenant . . .”

I shook my head and immediately regretted it. “Doesn’t matter.”

I looked down and saw that my hand was resting on a cemetery headstone. I focused and saw more of them around me; they stretched into the late-night mist, thousands of them, and with the moonlight it was as if they were glowing like teeth. A dog barked in the distance, the sound rolling toward me like the cutting edge of harsh whispers.

When I looked up, Hoang was gone.

Quincy had gone back to work, and I’d made the march across the VA parade ground with my boots on.

It was Ranald Slidell Mackenzie that the fort was named after, and it was his residence to which the Doc had sent Cady. I thought about him and the history of the place as I crossed the foyer and climbed the steps to the upstairs ballroom. Mackenzie graduated West Point in 1862, number one in a class of twenty-eight. He fought in the Civil War and, before it was over, he’d been wounded four times, received seven brevets, and was a major general in charge of an entire division.

In our part of the country, however, his fame arose from the defeat of Dull Knife, the Cheyenne chief, and his village. On a cold November day in 1876, on the Red Forks of the Powder River, a spot just up the creek from where I’d been the day before, Mackenzie and four hundred men of the Fourth Cavalry, along with four hundred Indian scouts, took the Cheyenne chief and his 183 lodges by surprise. He destroyed the village and their supplies and effectively ended the nomadic lifestyle of the Northern Cheyenne nation.

Henry Standing Bear liked to remind anyone who would listen that Mackenzie died in his sister’s home on Staten Island, New York, in 1882, victim to the later stages of syphilis and, as Lucian would say, crazy as a waltzing pissant. It was, Henry also noted, not an unpleasant enough death.

Cady was standing in front of one of the large casement windows and was looking out at the last thin remains of snow that clung to the shadowed crevasses of the rocky heights. She was still barefoot. She turned and the broomstick skirt swayed as the wide-planked oak floor popped and echoed under my approach.

She raised her arms. “Dance with me?”

I smiled and took her hand. “There isn’t any music.”

“Sure there is.” She placed my other arm behind her back and led me in a fanciful waltz, her face tucked against my shoulder. We wheeled around the empty and silent ballroom, and I thought about Virgil White Buffalo and watched my daughter as her head rose and she smiled. After a full sweep of the dance floor, I bent down to kiss the U-shaped scar at her hairline and attempted to keep time to the counting of my blessings.