The Templar's Code

CHAPTER 25

Hansel and Gretel. Still mucking around Lovett’s cottage.

Tonto Sinclair lowered the binocs and set them on the dashboard. He’d parked the Ford F100 behind an abandoned single-wide. Out of sight. He figured that like the candypants foreigner who earlier trashed the joint, they were looking for buried treasure. White birds of an avarice feather. According to his buddy Bear Mathieson who ran the Gas ’N’ Go station, Hansel was an Englishman.

How fucking ironic was that?

’Cause anyone familiar with tribal history knew that it was the English motherfuckers who triggered the Narragansett demise. History 101. They came. They saw. They conquered.

In need of a smoke, Tonto reached for the pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket. With an impatient shake of the wrist, he loosened one from the pack and clamped his lips around the filter, sliding it from the pack. Another one of life’s little ironies, he mused as he clicked the lighter. Had it not been for a pack of smokes, he’d never have found out about Yawgoog. Or the treasure. Or what really happened when Verrazano and his knights made landfall.

It’d been hot as hell that July morning in ’03 when he pulled into the Charlestown smoke shop to buy a pack of Marlboros. He’d spent the previous night in the county lockup on a drunk and disorderly charge stemming from a verbal altercation that he’d had with a redneck who made the mistake of calling him a drunken, shiftless injun. The drunken part he owned up to; he had downed a twelve-pack of PBR. But shiftless, he wasn’t, having clocked fifty hours that week at the sawmill. His fuse short, he sought redress with the classic one-two sucker punch — jab-straight, then right-to-the-body.

The fuse wasn’t any longer the next morning when he staggered into the reservation smoke shop, foul mood courtesy of a thin, lumpy mattress, a bad hangover, and a flatulent cellmate. He’d just handed a fiver to the gal behind the counter when a trio of Rhode Island state troopers suddenly stormed through the shop door. Two of the uniformed bastards had their weapons drawn. The third had a snarling German shepherd on a lead. Lips curved in a malicious grin, the head trooper yelled, “Everybody! Hands where we can see them!”

Endowed with an innate distrust of authority figures, Tonto made damned sure that the trooper who tried to arrest him—for buying a fucking pack of smokes! — got a good look at both his hands. Right before he balled them into fists and let the bastard have it with a hard right hook. Like it was the punch heard around the world, all hell broke loose inside the smoke shop.

In the end, everyone got hauled away in cuffs. Including a fifteen-year-old stock boy.

Although Tonto knew why he’d been arrested — aggravated assault against a state trooper — he had no friggin’ idea why the troopers led an armed raid against the reservation smoke shop. It wasn’t until his arraignment hearing that the public defender informed him that the state of Rhode Island did not take kindly to reservation Indians selling tax-free cigarettes, thereby screwing the state of Rhode Island out of one hundred million dollars in yearly tax revenue.

Jesusfuckingeronimo! He got sentenced to two years at the John J. Moran corrections facility because of an unpaid tax bill! Like his life wasn’t shit already, no sooner did the judge bang the gavel than his old lady up and left him for a trucker she met at a travel plaza on I-95.

Real quick, Tonto found out that prison does one of two things to a man: Either he becomes a better criminal or he becomes a better man. In his case, he became a better Narragansett. And wouldn’t you know, the road to redemption started with a pack of smokes.

He’d been at Moran about three weeks when a tree trunk of a Native named Annawon Tucker hit him up for a cigarette. Down to a half pack, he grudgingly obliged the request.

“Ever think about getting a new name?” the impertinent bastard asked.

Stuck with the moniker since he was kid, Tonto shrugged. “Beats the hell out of Felix.” A name he’d always despised, Tonto the lesser of the two evils. And what was he supposed to call himself, Running Turtle? Or some other dumb-ass Indian name?

“When you’re ready to man up and hit the Red Road, you let me know.” With that cryptic remark, Annawon took his leave.

The Red Road.

A lot like the Yellow Brick Road except this one led to a traditional peespunk. A sweat lodge where men went to cleanse their spirits and purge their bodies. And didn’t that scare the shit out of him? Although he lived on the rez, Tonto had never been a road warrior. Never been interested in tribal history or learning the traditional ways. What was the point? The white man had long ago decided that the Native peoples were a minority not a nation. Wearing a wampum necklace wasn’t going to change that.

But for some reason, Tonto couldn’t get the “invite” out of his head.

Maybe it was the thinly disguised insult about manning up. Maybe it was the boredom of being in prison. Whatever the reason, for the first time in his life, he was suddenly curious.

It started out simple enough, Annawon regaling him with tribal history while they shared a few smokes. Those first lessons were all about the glory days, the Narragansett once a powerful tribe, ruled by “kings” who collected tribute from the lesser bands like the Wampanoag and the Niantics.

But all of that changed in the seventeenth century when the first white colonists arrived. From then on out, nothing went right for the Narragansett people.

First there was the smallpox epidemic of 1633. In 1643, the Narragansett invaded the Mohegan’s turf and got their asses kicked. Then, in 1676, they suffered monumental losses when they went to war against the English motherfuckers. To punish the Naragansetts’ defiance, the motherfuckers rounded ’em up in droves and shipped ’em off to sugar plantations in the Caribbean. By the time the nineteenth century rolled around, the few remaining Narragansett in Rhode Island became unwitting victims of the government’s “detribalization” policy, the reservation sold right out from under them. In 1978, after years of legal wrangling with the federal and state governments, the Narragansett were awarded eighteen hundred acres. Small recompense given the centuries of broken treaties and empty promises.

After one of these depressing history lessons, Tonto conversationally remarked to Annawon, “It’s like we’re a cursed people.”

“More truth in that than you realize. The day the white man stole Yawgoog’s Stone, that was the day the Light left the Narragansett people. We’ve been wandering around in the darkness ever since.”

“Who the fuck is Yawgoog?”

It was a few moments before Annawon replied.

“Yawgoog was a white man like no other. For generations, he and his extended family lived in a village in the middle of the Narragansett territory. And then Verrazano and his knights showed up and slaughtered everyone in the village. Except for Yawgoog’s son. The Narragansett gave refuge to the boy who, like the eldest son in each generation, took the name of the father, Yawgoog. The Narragansett shared the ceremonial pipe with Yawgoog. And in return, he shared with us the secret of the sacred stone. When he died, Yawgoog entrusted the stone to the Narragansett. Not long thereafter, the English stole Yawgoog’s Stone. And that’s the real reason why our People were nearly decimated into oblivion. We broke our sacred trust with Yawgoog. We can’t reclaim what’s rightfully ours until we reclaim Yawgoog’s Stone.”

Tonto didn’t know it at the time, but his irreverent question, and Annawon’s surprising answer, would change the course of his life. Because it occurred to him, and Annawon was in complete agreement, that if Yawgoog’s Stone could be found, the curse that had been hanging over the Narragansett for the last four hundred years would be lifted.

But, like most things in life, there was a catch. The infamous catch-22. He needed the white man’s expertise to find the damned stone. He wasn’t an archaeologist. Or a historian. But, thanks to Annawon, he knew his tribal lore and the Yawgoog tales inside and out.

Sadly, Annawon no longer walked the earth, having succumbed to lung cancer in ’08. Which made Tonto even more determined to find Yawgoog’s Stone.

Flicking his cigarette butt out the pickup window, he shifted on the bench seat, adjusting the bolt-action Winchester that rested on top of his thighs.

When cruising the Red Road, a warrior best have his tomahawk at the ready.