Bad News

34

Benny Whitefish had never been so scared in his life. Two nights in the New York City jail at Rikers Island, a terrible place, where even the name sounds like some obscure punishment: The rikers are there, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll get riked.

Benny and Herbie and Geerome, the three little Indian boys, cowered together in the middle of a great horde of mean, tough men, hoping only not to attract attention to themselves. They couldn’t sleep at night; they had to keep staring and gulping and feeling their hearts beat up in their throats while they listened to all the whuffles and snrrs and phoots of the great resting rabble all around them. And they could only catnap by day, when the herd shuffled and grunted and just kept moving around. Meals were impossible, though they did manage to drink coffee, which forced them into the lavatory a lot, all together. None of them wanted to go in there by himself.

A very junior partner of Otis Welles, the tribes’ high-powered, high-priced New York lawyer, came to see them Tuesday afternoon, following their first night of terror, to assure them they would be spending Tuesday night at Rikers Island as well. His name was O. Osgood Osborne, and he could not have been more indifferent. He didn’t see three terrorized country boys from the reservation in front of him, way out of their depth in the big city; all he saw was a case. You handle the case this way, and it comes out that way, and you charge for your time, which includes travel time. That was how he saw it, and he made no attempt to hide the fact.

Anyway, when Benny, through chattering teeth, begged this ally to explain at least what was going on, what was going to happen, he did oblige. They had committed, it seemed, several misdemeanors, plus a few class C felonies—which was the first Benny knew that felonies come in classes, like air travel—and they would eventually have to plea-bargain to community service or suspended sentence or possibly a brief incarceration (the three moaned in unison, which O.O.O. didn’t notice, or anyway didn’t react to), but for the moment, the first issue was to get on a judicial docket to get before a judge to have bail set. Once bail was set, Uncle Roger would pay it—the thought of Uncle Roger doubled Benny’s terror—and they would be free to depart from Rikers Island and return to the reservation. That would be leaving the United States, of course, which was technically a violation of bail terms, but they wouldn’t be leaving New York State, so that made it all right.

The other thing O.O.O. wanted to tell them, straight from Uncle Roger, was that this episode had been all their own idea; they’d done it because they were very religious and wanted to rescue Joseph Redcorn from nonsacred ground, and that’s why they chose someone not from the Three Tribes to take Redcorn’s place. DNA had had nothing to do with it, and, in fact, they’d never even thought about DNA and didn’t know what it was.

Furthermore, no one had put them up to it, nor had anyone discussed the idea with them, nor had they discussed it with anybody else. Was that clear? The three little Indians nodded their heads convulsively, and then they were taken away from O.O.O., back to Satan’s Brigade, and another night of trembling wakefulness.

The next and last time they saw O.O.O. was Wednesday afternoon at two, in a courtroom in Queens in a building that had been put up by the federal government during the McKinley administration, which was a long time ago. Additions and alterations had been performed on the building over the years, all as cheaply as possible, to save the taxpayers money and leave a little something for the contractor’s uncle, the alderman. Electric wires and steam-heat pipes snaked and sliced this way and that, a sprinkler system spiderwebbed overhead, and air-conditioning ducts had recently been jammed in somewhere. The result was that the courtroom looked like a basement, although it was on the third floor.

In this courtroom, Benny and Herbie and Geerome stood penitently beside O.O.O. and before a fat, mumbling black female judge who never looked up from the writing she was doing on several documents. Benny never did understand what she was saying or what was happening, partly because of the judge and the place itself, but mostly because Uncle Roger was behind them, seated on a spectator’s bench amid a number of hookers, pimps, grandparents, people with bandages on their heads, and cops. Uncle Roger didn’t look happy.

The ritual in front of the judge took five minutes, and then more ritual in front of a cashier’s cage took twenty minutes more. The three little Indians signed their names to things without knowing or caring what the things might say, while O.O.O. told them with bored indifference what to do but not why. Then he shook their hands, startling them all, but that, too, was apparently part of the ritual, because he did it without exactly making eye contact with anybody, and then he left, and in his place stood Uncle Roger.

“Nice work,” he said.

In the car, on the long drive north, Uncle Roger had more to say. Benny got the brunt of it, because Uncle Roger had made him sit in front, while Herbie and Geerome perched like choir-boys on the backseat. “A simple matter,” Uncle Roger kept saying. “It’s a simple matter. You go down there and dig a hole and fill it in again. You don’t attract attention to yourself!”

“I’m sorry, Uncle Roger.”

“Why the hell did you do it at ten o’clock, when there’s still people around? Any idiot knows you go there at two, three in the morning.”

Benny didn’t feel he could answer that with the truth, which was that he and Herbie and Geerome had agreed it would be too frightening to go to a cemetery that late at night, so he said, “That’s just when we got there, I guess. We just didn’t think, I guess, Uncle Roger.”

“Didn’t think! I’ll say you didn’t think! Flashing a lot of lights around, I suppose. Were you playing the goddamn radio?”

“No, sir!”

It went on like that, Uncle Roger mostly chewing them out for being such meatheads, but occasionally wondering out loud what the hell they were going to do now about the Little Feather problem, with a guard on the grave and an order from the judge that their stupidity had made possible.

After a while, during a pause in the tirade, Benny found himself thinking about his own relationship with Little Feather, which he supposed was pretty much on the rocks now. He wondered briefly if somehow that relationship, the fact that he’d gotten to know Little Feather and she’d gotten to like him and trust him, if that could be used to help Uncle Roger with this problem, but then he decided the smart move was not to mention his relationship with Little Feather at all. It would be better, most likely, if Uncle Roger never knew about that.

Don’t volunteer, Benny told himself, inching toward wisdom. Keep your mouth shut, he told himself, and except for the occasional “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” “I’m sorry, Uncle Roger,” that’s what he did.

The one thing he knew for sure was, he never wanted to get riked again.