Death Without Company

5

It was a zoo, like it always was. Maggie and the Bear were sorting through a container full of Mennonite photographs, which were destined for a spring show at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art. The box the photos were in was for a Stetson Open Road model, a hat I had threatened to switch to about a month ago until Vic had voiced the opinion that I would look like LBJ. I looked up at the numerous and sundry pots and pans that glittered copper in the tasteful light of the small votive candles that were everywhere in the room and in the reflections of the bay windows that looked out over a receding hill and ancient sea. It was a culinary island, an eating oasis at the edge of a snowy ocean, and it was cozy, even with the other forty-three Indians eating, drinking, drumming, and roaming around the place.

I tried to concentrate on my appointed task of cutting onions, but the six conversations and the drumming were making it difficult. There were about a dozen of us who were seated and standing around the center island and, as near as I could tell, I was the only one working. I took a break and looked around to give my eyes a chance to clear.

This house knew my secrets. It knew about the time Henry and I had gotten so drunk after a junior varsity Sadie Hawkins Day dance that we had slid from the roof adjoining Henry’s room and dropped twenty feet only to be saved by the deep snow below. Henry’s father, Eldridge, came and got us, sitting us at the kitchen table and forcing us to drink bootleg hooch for the rest of the night until we both threw up and passed out. When he made us eat eggs and Tabasco sauce the next morning, he explained that if we were going to be drunks we should know what the life was like. The house knew about the night I had called from Los Angeles to tell Henry about being drafted by the marines only to find that he had received a similar letter in Berkeley from the army. The house remembered when I had introduced Henry to my new wife, Martha. It remembered when Cady was two and established the ritual of barking like a seal for the McKenzie River salmon that always seemed to be on hand. It had been the nerve center for getting out the Indian vote when I had run for sheriff the first time. It knew when Martha had died of cancer, and it had contained the both of us when I had come to tell Henry that four high school boys in Durant had raped his niece. The house knew a million sorrows, a million victories, and Henry and me apiece. It knew when you were hungry, it knew when you were sad, and best of all it knew when you needed comfort.

I looked longingly at the dark beer in the glass to my left through watering eyes, but I had made myself a promise that I wouldn’t have another sip until I had finished cutting another onion. I cheated and took a swig.

“Lawman, do you have those onions cut?”

I sat my glass back down. “I need some nourishment.”

“Yes, the onions are holding us up.” Brandon White Buffalo had pressed me into service when we had arrived, while Henry had absconded with my date. Brandon was the owner/operator of the White Buffalo Sinclair station in Lame Deer.

I looked around the table and knew just about everybody, including Lonnie Little Bird, who sat in his wheelchair, so close to my stool that you couldn’t tell his legs were missing. “When is Melissa coming home?”

He smiled so broadly that I thought his head might crack open. “She comes back tomorrow. Um-hmm, yes, it is so.” A product of fetal alcohol syndrome, Melissa was finishing her first semester at a community college in South Dakota. I had known the Little Birds for years. They were important in a case that I had solved less than a month ago and so, every once in a while, Lonnie would wheel himself into the office and give me updates on Melissa’s progress. “She’s liking school?”

“She is liking basketball. Um-hmm, yes, it is so.”

I went back to slicing. I yelled to Brandon. “How small do you want these onions?”

He glanced over. “Halves lengthwise into half-inch strips, Lawman.” I shrugged. For me eating was a necessity, but for Henry it was art, and the coda of his art was ease and originality. I was surprised he was allowing Brandon to do the cooking, but it was under close supervision. I glanced at the Bear and Maggie Watson, and it seemed as if they were sitting awfully close to one another. I stuck the knife out to get his attention above the halting tempo of the numerous Cheyenne conversations. “What are we making again?”

He glanced up. “ Ga xao xa ot.” He looked at my blank face. “Vietnamese.”

I thought about it and continued in a loud voice. “I don’t remember having anything like this when I was over there.”

“That is because everything you ate over there came out of an American can.”

“I had a lot of Tiger beer.”

“I do not think that could be considered a gourmet item.” He reached over and touched Maggie’s arm as she smiled and looked back at him. They were drinking white wine; I didn’t like the stuff. I remembered a French expatriate at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge who advised me that the stuff was all right for in the morning when you don’t feel well or for the ladies.

I watched her as she talked, the delicate way that her lips moved. They were pretty great lips, really well defined, and they always seemed to have a fresh coat of lipstick even though I had only caught the application a few times. She was positively brilliant now, flushed with the excitement of the exotic, alien surroundings and with the Bear’s stories.

“So, the onions are the first part?” He didn’t answer, but she stopped listening and smiled. “So, the onions…”

The response was a little sharp. “Yes.”

I waited a moment to let him know that he’d hurt my feelings. “I was just asking.” He nodded, sighed, and looked back at Maggie. “Well, I just want you to know that you’ve hurt my feelings.” I leaned toward Maggie so that she could feel my pain. “See… tears.”

She laughed, I sighed and felt a large shadow cast over me from behind; Brandon White Buffalo was a good six inches taller than I. He took the cutting board full of onions with a pair of gigantic hands, and I watched as the plate disappeared. The festivities had started at the Shoulder Blade Elders Center and then had followed Henry Standing Bear home, where the party was always waiting to begin. It was such a wonderful name, Shoulder Blade Elders Center. It sounded like a place where you could go and get a few things straightened out by men and women who had been down the trail you were now traveling, a place where they could lay a leathered hand on your shoulder, look into your eyes through the cataracts, and help make a few things clearer. Things like that happened at the Durant Home for Assisted Living, but they were harder to come by, as there was just no romance in the place’s name and therefore in its consideration.

I glanced down at the photograph Henry and Maggie were studying. It was of a uniformed man in riding boots handing an American flag to a small group of what might have been Indian chiefs. The flag draped between them like something to catch the promises. I noticed the uniformed man’s end swooped lower, allowing anything that might have been inside to escape. The Indians looked at the flag as if they weren’t quite sure what to make of it. The chiefs wore crisp white shirts, woolen vests, beaded moccasins, and a collective countenance of long-standing indifference. I recognized the land behind them, the few trees and the undulating hills that made up the majority of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation’s topography. I could even make out the shadow of the photographer on the legs of another white man in a baggy suit who stood to the right. I noticed this shadow did not touch the Indians, as if they were immune. There was another chief in full war bonnet to the right; his lips were pressed together, and he was the only one looking directly at the camera as it attempted to steal his soul.

I looked at the dynamic people surrounding the table, a people who had been cheated, frozen, starved, and hunted almost into extinction, a people who, with the combined nations of the Brules, Sansarcs, Minneconjous, Hunkpapas, Ogllalas, and Blackfeet, fought the United States of America to a standstill. My money was still on them.

I watched as the giant took the assembled ingredients and retreated to the stove. He added a little oil and the onions to a large frying pan set at medium heat. He tossed in a pinch of salt and some garlic and juggled the handle of the cast-iron skillet without the assistance of a pot holder.

Maggie was talking to Henry again, the only conversation that was in English, but Brandon had brought the cutting board back. “More.”

I continued to toil in the fields and listened to Henry and Maggie, to the cadence of their talk-not so much the words, but the rhythm. It joined with the wonderful language that encircled us, and I recognized echoes of another time and another woman. Not so long ago, I had sat in a kitchen similar to this one and listened to Vonnie’s melodic laughter and, like soundings into a dark, deep, and liquid place, the vibrations were stirring me; they continued to lap like ripples in a strong current. There was a desperate need to make the right choices concerning matters of the heart.

I thought about Maggie Watson. As much as I hated mysteries, she loved them. For me, the cipher was a rosary bead fed through thumb and forefinger, but for her it was catching butterflies. I was an investigator, and she was a fortune hunter. People loved treasure and must have been happy to hear from her; generally, I was not that lucky.

I turned the onions, halved them, and began cutting the half-inch slices, barely avoiding slicing my left index finger as well; Henry’s knives were very sharp. After I finished the last quarter, my eyes were drawn back to Maggie. When I looked, she was looking at me with the sea blue at full tide. She smiled just a little and then turned back to Henry. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to chase a ghost through someone else’s body, to try and capture a part of someone who was lost by taking someone who was found.

“You’ve cut yourself.” It was a small slice just at the last joint. It wasn’t bad, so I started to stick it in my mouth, but she reached across the island, took my hand, and turned back to Henry. “Do you have any Band-Aids?”

“Bathroom.” He watched us for a moment. “I will get them.”

She turned back to me as he left the room, and I noticed the blue of her eyes was deeper around the edges, like the color was falling from her pupils back into the white ocean. She smiled at all the people around us, finally settling on me. “I’ll apply pressure.”

Boy howdy.

The second bottle was red, so I had a glass. Every so often, Maggie would look over and I would hold up my finger and indicate my wound as an excuse for not joining in the conversation, but she wasn’t buying it. She made a living out of poking into forgotten spaces, and I was an intrigue she couldn’t solve.

I excused myself to go to the bathroom, took care of business, washed my hands, and leaned my arms on the bathroom sink. I looked at my face. It wasn’t a bad face other than needing about eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, a haircut, the loss of about twenty pounds and ten years. My chin was too big, along with my ears, and my eyes were too deep set. I leaned back to my full arms’ reach, and I looked a little better. I still wasn’t sure about the beard, but it hid a lot.

It was easier when there was a case to distract me, but with Charlie Nurburn alive and Mari Baroja having died of apparently natural causes, there wasn’t any corner of my mind in which to take refuge. Just the same, when I got back into town tomorrow morning, I would have to make sure I called Bill McDermott and the courthouse. Something still wasn’t squaring up somehow. I suppose my next step would be to go to the Durant Home for Assisted Living again. Common sense told me to just let it go, but I had never regarded that voice as being either common or sensible.

I thought about Maggie and how passion was a difficult thing to sustain, but that friendship had a pace that could go on forever. I guess it was that moment that I firmly decided she and I would just be friends. It was disappointing but a relief. I had made a decision. I stepped out of the bathroom and was greeted by my best friend.

“How is your finger?”

“I think I’ll live.”

He took a deep breath. “I followed you here to talk you into what you are in here attempting to talk yourself out of.” The dark hair, the dark skin, the dark eyes, it was like he was carved out of mahogany. Some golem of the Northern Cheyenne, but I knew the heart that rested there.

“You make it sound like a new car.”

He waited as someone slipped by us and went into the bathroom. “Are you sure you are okay?”

I told him about the dream, which had featured Mari Baroja.

He listened quietly and nodded periodically. At the end, he smiled. “It would appear that you now have an advocate in the Camp of the Dead.”

My knowledge of the intricacies of Indian religion was spotty, but I knew about the camp, a place where the Cheyenne tribal ancestors gathered in the afterlife. The elders in the Camp of the Dead sought the society of interesting people in this one. There were items that carried their touch, like the old Sharps buffalo rifle that Lonnie had given me a month ago that stood in the corner of my bedroom. I could see that rifle as we stood there, the long, heavy barrel glowing with a ghostly sheen, cold to the touch like a dead body. I could see the beaded dead-man’s pattern on the fore grip, the ten distinct notches at the top of the stock, and the way the gray feathers ruffled even when there was no discernible breeze, messages from the dead on the wings of owls.

We waited as the person from the bathroom passed us with a smile. “Any more advice?”

“You should be able to figure the rest out for yourself.” He was silent for a moment. “If you cannot, then we are going to need more time than this conversation will allow.”

On the way back, I stopped off at the massive refrigerator, took out a beer, and paused to look at a few of the photographs lying on that end of the center island. The top one was of three boys, one standing and the other two seated. They wore what looked like military uniforms, and the relaxed quality of their posture was only belied by the tension in their eyes. I knew why; their hair had been cut by the teachers at the Indian boarding school from which, if they were lucky, they got to go home for a visit every two years. I slid it over and looked at the next.

Willy Fighting Bear and Zack Yellow Fox were standing between a couple of ornery-looking Appaloosas and were wearing two of the most enormous cowboy hats I had ever seen, the kind from an earlier period that must have been meant to protect the wearer from meteor showers. Willy and Zack looked comfortable, even though they had probably been in the saddle a good fourteen hours. My dad knew them and had said they were two of the finest horseman he had ever seen. I slid this one over and looked at the next.

I knew Frank White Shield. He was in full Cheyenne chief ’s regalia and was standing between his two sons, Jesse and Frank Jr.; they were in their army dress uniforms, circa 1943. Frank Jr. died in Okinawa, while Jesse went to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands with the Seventh Infantry Division as a sniper. He became famous for tying himself high in the trees so that if he were shot the Japanese would never know if they had scored a hit. They finally did, but never knew.

I looked at the next few photographs. There was one of a group of men and women standing around with the church in the background, and there was one of a young man with beaded leggings standing on a makeshift baseball field. I looked at the broad smiling face and the delicate way the nimble, dark hands held the ball. I could hear the snap when it hit the pocket and the catch phrase of a man without legs, “Um-hmm, yes, it is so.”

The words had escaped my smiling lips before I was aware. I looked at Lonnie Little Bird who was involved in a whimsical conversation at the other end of the kitchen. I tried to imagine him playing professional baseball before losing his legs to diabetes. Lonnie with legs. I took a deep breath along with a swig of beer and made my way to the other side of the kitchen where my romantic fate awaited.

She was leaning on the counter with one elbow, the palm of her hand supporting her chin. “ I thought only women went to the bathroom together.”

She shifted to the other palm and was suddenly a lot closer. “He’s a good friend.” I squeezed in and popped an elbow on the table and rested my chin in my own palm only a little ways away from her face. “I’m beginning to think that you are, too.” I smiled and looked down at the table. The flame of the candles shifted like the owl feathers on the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead. There was something bothering me about something I’d just seen, an inkling of sorts, but nothing I could pin down. Was it something in the photographs or something Henry had said? I looked back up to Maggie just as Henry came back in, and I’m sure I looked like I had just broken a vase. Maggie, on the other hand, leaned back in her chair, reset a pixie chin on the palm of her hand, and batted the blue like a signal. “How’s dinner coming?”

He smiled and joined Brandon at the stove. I sat there for a moment and stared into her eyes, but it became too much, so I glanced out the window. I watched the flakes fly at the pane and momentarily pause before slipping away. It was as if they were trying to drift through the glass and remind me of something that skipped like a stone on smooth water.

The photographs, it was something in the photographs.

I stood quickly, made my way around the room, and threaded through the crowd until I was standing over the assorted snapshots. They were as I’d left them. I studied the one of Lonnie with the beaded leggings that encased the now missing legs and could see him sweeping through the infield like a red-tailed hawk, the top grain leather sailing toward first like a war lance; but it was the car that was parked to the side along the foul line, a large convertible, fancy for the period in two-tone paint that had pricked my thoughts.

I slid the photo aside and looked at the next. A small group of Indians were gathered around the same car. The automobile was closer in this shot, and I could make out the buffalo hood ornament and the letters running down the chrome.

Maggie had followed me and placed her hand on my arm. “Is there something wrong?”

“There is.” I let my heart slow back to normal and looked at the photo again. “Let me ask you.” I placed a finger on the picture for clarification. “Does that look like a 1950 Kaiser?”

She leaned in and inspected the car in question. “I’m not so sure about the year, but the front emblem says Kaiser.”

There was only one white man in the photograph, and I was pretty sure who he was. Henry had come over to my other side, and I shifted my finger. “Does the name Charlie Nurburn ring a bell?”

His eyes narrowed as he studied the image. “Yes, I have heard that name.” He breathed for a moment. “From the southern part of the county, sold bad liquor for a year or so. He blinded and killed some of my people.”

I shook my head and studied the tall, thin man in the photo. “That sounds like Charlie, all right.”

His head shifted. “This involves a case you are working on?”

“Yep.” I thought about it. “No. I mean there really isn’t a case, and he’s really not a part of it since he’s alive and living in Vista Verde, New Mexico.” I stopped talking for a moment to allow myself to think.

I turned to look at Henry, but as I did, the lines on his face disappeared, his cheekbones were more pronounced, and water trailed from the crow-wing black hair. His shoulders were narrow, before the high-octane testosterone of adolescence had made an all-state middle linebacker out of him and, when he smiled, the canine baby tooth that had stayed with him through junior high suddenly reappeared.

“You are chicken!”

I looked down at him and the swirling water of the Little Powder near the confluence of Bitter and Dry creeks. A bridge was to our right, with a black framework that loomed against the brilliant blue of a July day. My spine felt as though it was falling through my rib cage, and a cold chill scraped along my arms and shoulders. “I am not!” I yelled back.

“Then jump!”

I looked down and instead of the man-sized boots, I saw a pair of scrawny, sunburned legs that shot from a pair of cut-off jeans to bare feet. I shifted, and the sheet metal I was standing on popped back against my weight.

He cocked his head and laughed, the skinny fists resting on the narrow hips. “You are chicken!”

I stared at the faded yellow paint on the metal, the chrome strip with the letters indented, Powder River sediment lying in the lower edges. I looked at the buffalo standing on the hillock of the hood’s crest and the large K insignia… and jumped.

I refocused my eyes in the kitchen and met his. “I know where it is.” I turned to look at Maggie. “Stuck in the bank of the Little Powder, about a mile from here.” I tapped the picture for emphasis. “This very car.” I looked again. “Along with seven or eight other cars that are used to hold the bank where it curves under the bridge.”

His voice doubted me. “How long has it been there?”

I smiled. “As long as I can remember. It was there when we were kids.”

He smiled for a moment, and I watched as he made the journey. “You cracked your head open there.” He didn’t move for a moment. “This is important?”

“Maybe.” I continued to look at the photograph. “This is the car.”

He shrugged. “There were not that many two-tone Kaiser convertibles on the Rez.”

The blue eyes shifted back to the photograph, and her lips thinned in concentration. “Why would somebody bury a practically new car in the river bank of the reservation?”

I looked closely at the man I assumed to be Charlie Nurburn. He was thin, tall, with the thumbs of his bony hands hitched into the front pockets of his work pants. You could just see two pearl-handled automatics sticking out from the waistband, and there were two more in a crossed, two-rig shoulder holster. Charlie Nurburn was well armed. His jeans looked like shedded snakeskin that rolled at the cuffs to reveal a scuffed pair of lace-up logging boots. An old CPO jacket was draped on his narrow shoulders, and a flannel plaid shirt buttoned up to the turkey throat. He wore one of those old hunting caps, the ones with the earflaps that tie on top, perched at a rakish angle to the left. I looked at the face and could make out what appeared to be a gold tooth, front and right. I tried to see a woman-beater and a murderer behind the lowered eyebrows that hid his eyes, but he looked like everybody else. It’s that kind of thing that worries me.

If Charlie had left Absaroka County forever back in 1951, why wouldn’t he have taken his almost brand new Kaiser with him? I looked at the two of them. “This is the man who was married to the woman in the nursing home, the Basque woman who just died.”

Maggie Watson took a seat on the nearest stool and folded her hands over her lap. “What woman in what nursing home?”

“Mari Baroja, the one that was married to Lucian.”

It took a good three seconds for the Bear to respond. “What?”

“Mari Baroja is the woman that died in the nursing home. She and Lucian Connally were married for a couple of hours back in the mid forties before her family annulled it. He said that he didn’t see her again till about a year ago when she got planted in the Durant Home for Assisted Living. For some reason, Lucian has suspicions that the cause of her death might be more than natural, so I locked up her room and called in an ME from Billings for a general. He says she probably died of heart failure, but there are millions of dollars being pumped out of the ancestral manse down at Four Brothers.”

“And that is the Baroja place?” He raised an eyebrow as I nodded. He looked like he was getting ready to ambush a stagecoach. “Motive, yes, but is there a case here?”

“During the autopsy it was discovered that Mari Baroja was beaten and, during consequent conversations with Lana Baroja, Isaac Bloomfield, and Vern Selby, I discover that Charlie Nurburn was possibly the slimiest thing to ooze across the surface of the earth until his disappearance under ever increasingly mysterious circumstances.”

He still looked puzzled, and I was aware that most of the conversation in the room had stopped. “Lana Baroja is?”

I took Henry by the arm and steered him to the far side of the kitchen. I apologized to Maggie as we receded. I pressed Henry into a corner. “Lana Baroja is the granddaughter of the deceased and clearly of the opinion that Lucian Connally had something to do with the death of her grandfather.”

“I thought you said that he is alive.”

“It’s complicated. Also, it appears to be common knowledge that Mari Baroja and Lucian were involved in a Thursday afternoon tryst that lasted for years, but Lucian doesn’t admit to the affair.” I thought for a moment. “That and a ’50 Kaiser imbedded in the bank of the Little Powder for as long as we can remember.”

“So, we are talking about two potential murders separated by more than fifty years.”

I stood there for a while looking at him. “What do you think?”

“About what?”

“Do you think Lucian did it?”

For the first time that evening, the Cheyenne Nation was silent.