Cold Dish

7

We all have a list of the vehicles we forever despise. Mine began with the dull yellow ’50 Studebaker in which I learned to drive. It had the finely honed suspension and thrilling acceleration of a large rock. Another on the list was the M-151A1 Willys Jeep that the Corps made me drive in Vietnam, which flipped over a lot and which had the torturous habit of kneecapping me every time I went for third. But the one that has been the continual thorn in my vehicular side has always been Henry’s ’63 three-quarter-ton pickup truck. I was with him the day he bought it. We were in Denver for Game Day, sitting in a small Mexican restaurant behind old Mile High, the football stadium that didn’t look like a shopping mall. I read the Post ’s sports section, and he read the classifieds.

Three-quarter ton, V-8, four-speed, Warn lock-in/lock-out hubs, grill guard, headache rack, saddle tanks, and the heaviest suspension ever forged by man. The thousand-dollar price tag seemed too good to believe, and it was. They said it had been used to get Christmas trees from a farm they had over in Grand Junction; they didn’t say it had also been used to harvest them. It looked like it had come out of the ugly forest and had hit every one of the ugly trees. If there was a straight piece of metal on it, I was unaware of where it might be. It looked like it had been painted with crayons and poorly. The truck was mostly green, while the grill guard and headache bar were phosphorescent orange. He called it Rezdawg, and I called it misery. We had never taken a trip in it where it had not either broken down, run out, gone flat, overheated, or spontaneously burst into flames. “Get in.”

“No.” Henry had made me run, in the snow.

“Get in.”

“No.” He wanted to go to the Rez early, so I had to get a continuance on court day and cancel lunch with the judge.

“Get in.”

“No.” He had made me change my clothes, twice.

“Look…” His hands were wrapped around the steering wheel, and the majority of his face was hidden behind the hair. “We are undercover here.” I looked longingly at my comparatively brand-new truck, with a motor, suspension, and heater that worked; but my truck also had very large golden stars on the doors. They were handsome stars with the snow-capped Bighorn Mountains rising from an open book in their center, but incognito they weren’t.

He had opened the passenger-side door, and I was looking through the holes in the floorboards at the melting snow. Part of the dashboard was turquoise, part of it was white, and the large mic of an antiquated citizens’ band radio was bolted to the front edge over the shift lever. There was a shifter; a transfer-case lever; a worn, white steering wheel; and an unending number of chrome handles and knobs guaranteed to dislocate, jab, or stove anything that might come in contact. Most of the windows were cracked, and there were no seat belts. At the top of the antenna, even though there was no radio, perched a little, dirty-white Styrofoam ball that read CAPTAIN AMERICA. “It’s gonna break down.”

“It is not going to break down. Get in, I am getting cold.”

His breath was clouding the inside of the glass, and I looked down at the heater box, which was taped together with duct tape. “As I recall, the heater in this thing, among other things, doesn’t work.”

“I fixed it.” He really was undercover, dressed in a gray hooded sweatshirt, army field jacket, and a khaki ball cap that read FORT SMITH, MONTANA, BIG LIP INVITATIONAL CARP TOURNAMENT. “Come on, get in.” I gave up and crawled onto the multilayered seat, repaired most recently with small bungee cords and a used Pamida shower curtain.

The truck had always been an enigma in Henry’s carefully ordered life, but it was something primal and important to him. He could have had it fixed, I mean really fixed, but he didn’t. Somehow, in all its ugly glory, it signified something about the thin-chested kid whose glittering eyes knew something I didn’t and never would. No matter how far he went, no matter what he did, he would always be from what we were going to today.

The truck wasn’t turning over. I saw his hand in his fingerless gloves holding the key to the right and two urgent red lights in the instrument panel that said GEN and OIL. He nodded knowingly like he knew what it was saying. “Do you have any jumper cables?”

After we pulled my truck over and got the Rezdawg started, we headed out slowly, because that was as fast as Rezdawg would go. We rolled like a Conestoga wagon across the bridge that divided the county from the reservation, and in a blink of an eye we were in a foreign country, a sovereign nation unto itself. The topography didn’t change all that much. The sun was up, and the light glowed from right angles highlighting the ridges and peaks in greeting-card warmth. The sharp edges of the turned pastureland pointed out the work ethic of the passing owners, some prepared for the arriving winter, some not.

Numbers always come to mind when I’m on the Rez, social numbers, government numbers, and life expectancy numbers: The average Indian dies eleven years before his white brother. I spent a lot of time ignoring these numbers when I was with Henry; they got in the way of seeing the people, and I had learned a long time ago that seeing these people was important.

“Are you armed?”

I felt a little guilt along with the pressure of the pancake holster at the small of my back. “Yep, why?”

He shrugged. “I just like to know.” We drove on for a while. “Do not shoot anybody, okay?”

“Okay.”

I watched the passing cottonwoods and scrub sage. “Where to first?” he asked.

“You tell me.”

“Oh, no. I am just the scout on this expedition.”

“I thought you guys left that stuff to the Crow.” He hunched over the wheel a little more and grunted. This was the response to the Crow in general; most of the Cheyenne I knew still hadn’t forgiven Kick in the Belly for scouting for Custer; most of the Indian Nations I knew about hadn’t forgiven each other much of anything. This had not been lost on the federal government, since they had put reservations of warring tribes alongside each other with regularity. “Where can we get some coffee?”

“White Buffalo.”

I nodded and listened to the heater motor begin to squeal as a few drops of antifreeze dripped from the core onto the brittle, rubber floor mat and trickled a sickly green toward my boot. “Is the heat on?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t want to start with the Little Birds. You wanna try and dig up Artie Small Song first?”

The White Buffalo Sinclair station was located diagonally across from the Lame Deer Community Center and next to it was Baker’s IGA. I wondered if we were taking our chances by going by the Community Center, since it was an outpost for Indian Affairs, a thought that was solidified by the green Jeep Cherokee that sat parked diagonally at the corner of the building. The IA is really into gadgets, and the sleek little Jeep conveyed that in spades. Their units bristled with antennae, roll cages, push bars, divider screens, radar, laser, radios, and an assortment of firearms that were locked in place all over the inside of the vehicle. There were eagles on the side, with feather tips at the quarter panels that seemed to swirl in the wind even though the thing was parked. No stars, though. I didn’t question as Henry carefully guided his rattletrap of a truck past the Center and pulled up alongside the White Buffalo Sinclair, but then couldn’t resist the temptation. “Problem?”

He threw open the door and slid out. “No, I just do not like cops.”

When I looked behind the counter at Brandon White Buffalo, I started feeling good about my own cholesterol intake. I never worked at the carnival, but I’m guessing he was about 375 pounds if he was an ounce. He was a lot taller than either of us, and he seemed twice as wide and thick. His head was as big as the pumpkin I had been shooting at yesterday, and he even looked like a jack-o’-lantern. It was the smile. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile that big in my life, with or without the gold. Like the rest of him, the smile seemed to fill the room; against it, the fluorescent lighting of the White Buffalo’s world didn’t stand much of a chance. The hairnet that held copious amounts of the blue-black hair in place as he came around the counter in his bright green apron didn’t diminish his image. I noticed the clear plastic gloves on his massive hands, and forearms as big as Easter hams. Brandon White Buffalo had been making breakfast sandwiches, and he carried two with him as he came. Standing there, as he walked by, was like watching a passing train. His voice was like Henry’s, halting in a charming way, but as deep as the bass in a three-piece combo.

“Little Brother, where have you been?” I watched as the Buffalo wrapped up the Bear and easily lifted him from his feet. Henry didn’t squirm or make noise; it would have been useless against such overwhelming warmth. He just hung there, his feet dangling about six inches from the ground. “You have been up to no good?”

Henry started to respond, but it was halfhearted. I watched as the Buffalo’s arms began to close, the plastic-covered hands crossed at the small of Henry’s back still gently holding the sandwiches. I watched as Brandon’s tendons and muscles slowly became more pronounced, but how his eyes remained flat and mischievous. The Bear’s face was just starting to show tinges of red, but he dare not let any of the saved air in his lungs escape. If he exhaled, his ribs would collapse like a fragile structure of wooden dowels. Henry’s face was slightly higher than Brandon’s, his chin about two inches from the Buffalo’s forehead. Henry could easily head-butt him, but I guess that wasn’t the point. I wondered if this was an everyday thing, if Henry had to run this gauntlet every time he came into the White Buffalo Sinclair. I would get my gas somewhere else.

I knew a story about Brandon White Buffalo; it happened a number of years ago and had to do with his mother’s house up near the Montana border. It was a dry camp, and the old girl didn’t have the money to drill a well, so Brandon dutifully made the trek into Durant’s public park every Saturday morning to the municipal water station where they had a machine that dispensed public water. A teenaged Turk had been there with a couple of his buddies when Brandon had rolled the fifty-five gallon drum off the back of his truck and began filling the barrel with the hose. They were boys and nudged each other and began giggling as the steel barrel grew fuller and fuller. Brandon heard the giggling and looked up with that beatific smile of his. The hose got loose and sprayed the crotch of his pants, and Turk and his friends laughed even louder. Brandon joined them, shaking his head. Calmly, Brandon White Buffalo squatted, grabbed the barrel, and lifted it onto the tailgate of the crouching pickup. In one swift push, the barrel slid into the back of the truck, and Brandon closed the tailgate. He smiled, danced a little dance to help dry off his pants, and waved at the townies as he drove away. At this point, Turk told me, no one was laughing.

There really wasn’t much I could do for Henry, other than pull out my gun and shoot Brandon. I figured the Buffalo would just eat the bullet like he ate life. “Brandon, do you think you might be hurting him?”

The Buffalo glanced at me and then looked back at the Bear. “No, he is very tough. He deflowered my sister, and you have to be tough for that.”

“You… should… know…” It was a tortured reply through gritted teeth, shot out in bursts, but it was enough. I watched the seismic tremors begin at the base of Brandon’s huge back, building and filling his lungs, exploding in short blasts that blew Henry’s hair back until they overtook the Buffalo and he dropped the Bear, laughing with a joy that shook the racks. When he regained his breath, he stood over Henry with his arms apart. “Little Brother, I have lovely sandwiches!”

We sat on the plastic window seat, Henry and I on one side, Brandon taking up the entire bench seat on the other. We ate our sandwiches and drank our coffee from hot cups that read ALWAYS FRESH. I watched Henry catch up on the last month. “Anything new with Lonnie?”

The Buffalo shifted his weight and laid an arm along the seatback. “It is a sad story of the Little Birds, with Margie drinking as much as she did an awful lot of the life went out of the family, but perhaps it is better that she passed?” His eyes turned to me. “You lost a wife too, Lawman?”

I was surprised. “Yes, I did.”

“It is a horrible thing to lose, a wife?”

His conversation was made up of questions, giving it a philosophical bent; I wasn’t sure which ones I should answer, so I just answered them all, “Yep.”

“They say it’s like losing part of yourself, but it’s worse than that?”

“How so?” Two could play this game.

“When they are gone, we are left with who we are after we were with them, and sometimes we don’t recognize that person?” He patted the table between us to show that no harm had been meant. “You will be all right, Lawman. He’s a good man, this man you are left with?” He turned back to Henry before I could reply. “You should go see Lonnie, he asks about you. You are bad about your family?”

The Bear ignored the chastisement and smiled into his coffee. “I will. Is he home today?”

“He has no legs, so where would he go? He’s home everyday; he watches television? He watches everything. It is as if he thinks the things on the television aren’t happening if he’s not there to watch?”

“He might be right.”

“Mm-hmm, yes. It is so…” At which they both began snickering slyly and not looking at each other. I waited for a moment, then the Buffalo turned to me. “Have you met Lonnie?” I admitted I had. Years before the trial, I had been forced to convince Lonnie that just because a vehicle in town had been left running didn’t mean that you could take it for a little spin. “Mm-hmm, yes, it is so.” They burst out laughing again. If Lonnie had been there, he would have been laughing, too.

The conversation switched to Cheyenne and, through Henry, I discerned that Melissa was not living with her father and had been spirited off by one of the many aunts that lived closer to town. In a while, they switched back to English. “So, he might be living with his mother?” They were talking about Artie Small Song now.

“Yes, that girl he was going out with from Crow Agency? She decided she did not like his drinking?”

“He is drinking again?”

The big, netted head bobbed slightly. “Yes.” He glanced at me and nodded some more, ever smiling. “You like your sandwich, Lawman?”

I took another bite and chewed; it really was good. “Best on the Rez.”

His fists bounced off the surface of the table and our coffee cups hopped with little ringlets emanating from the centers of the dark liquid. “Best in the world!” I nodded my head in agreement and smiled back as Henry’s attention was drawn out the window.

“Does his mother still live out near Rabbit Town?”

The big arms crossed over the green apron, but the smile held. “Little Brother, I’m beginning to think that you didn’t come here today because of my beautiful sandwiches or because you love me?”

Henry’s eyes rolled to the ceiling but then quickly rested on the Buffalo. I had seen that look before. It wasn’t a look you could stand for long; it burned. It burned because he cared. I watched the Buffalo to see what kind of effect it had on him, but the only thing that happened was that I heard drums, far in the distance. I’m sure they were just in my head but, as I thought this, I could see the Buffalo’s head nod ever so slightly keeping time with my drums. His eyes stayed locked with Henry’s, and I’m sure he heard them, too.

When we got outside, one of the tires was flat, so I loaned Henry a quarter and we pumped it back up. He said it would hold, and I cursed the day the truck was built. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I noticed that the Cherokee was gone. We couldn’t afford tricked-out Jeeps with the measly budget we had. I had a truck that was two years old, but the rest of the force either had five-year-old vehicles or, like Jim Ferguson, drove their own and got reimbursed for mileage. I had meant to call in to the office while at the Buffalo’s place, but it had slipped my mind; some way to run a murder investigation.

The Little Bird case had gone to the jury at 2:50 on the afternoon of September 16, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the county who noticed it on the calendar that hung on the bulletin board behind the witness stand. The trial and all its paraphernalia seemed to take on the lessening expectations of some television movie of the week. I had to remind myself that it was real.

The jury was charged with reaching a decision on nine counts: one charge of conspiracy; four counts of aggravated assault, involving the use of the broom and bat and the act of oral sex; and four counts of sexual contact, in which the defendants were charged with fondling Melissa’s breasts and forcing her to masturbate them. They were also given a list of fifteen lesser charges. I remembered Vern Selby leaning over his desk and clasping his hands into a joined fist. He instructed the jury to ponder two main questions: Was force or coercion used against Melissa Little Bird; and was the Cheyenne girl mentally defective; and, as an auxiliary, did Cody, George, Jacob, and Bryan know that, or should they have known that?

The judge had explained that coercion was not simply the use of brute force but that it could be a subtler process; that the jury would have to decide if Melissa had been conned into going into the basement; whether she had been vulnerable because of her psychological condition; whether the size and configuration of the basement intimidated her; or whether the number of boys and what they had told her before she left had pressured her into submitting.

Vern didn’t look up when he changed gears; he just kept looking at his collective fist and talking like one of those auctioneers at an auction where nobody’s buying anything. He told them that the legal term mentally defective did not mean that someone was slow or retarded. It meant that a person did not understand that she had a right to refuse sex or was incapable of refusing; and, that to convict on this charge, the jury would have to agree that the defendants knew or should have known that Melissa Little Bird was defective.

Lucian and I had had a long conversation about it after the trial; he said you had to do what you could do, and you did it the best you could; that if things turned or didn’t turn out the way you wanted, you let it go. If you did anything else, you were opening yourself up to very bad things. I hadn’t let it go, so was that where I was now, in the land of very bad things? Was I there alone, or was Melissa there with me, dragging our red rowboat across the teepee rings of the high plains? And who else was there with us, under those black and blue skies, carrying a very large caliber buffalo rifle?

“What are you thinking about, badass?” I didn’t respond, just sat there looking out the windshield at things to come. “You know, I think I will start calling that the Little Bird Look.”

I stared at the decrepit chrome antenna shivering in the velocity of roughly forty-five miles an hour. Captain America was hanging in there. Yea, verily, though I walked through the valley of very bad things… I was going to have to bring Turk back up from Powder Junction, and there was a dark little part of my soul that was looking forward to it. I told that dark little part to shut up and go curl up in a corner, and it did, but not completely. It never did, not completely.

“It is the one where the eyes bug out a little, and those two little lines dig in at the corners of your mouth.” He turned back to the road. “It is very manly.” I continued to look through the glass and attempted to un-bug my eyes. “I wish I had a look like that…”

I needed a change of subject. “You still have your horses?”

A little breath of air came out as he responded, “My uncle’s horses, yes.” Henry never claimed the horses, even though they had been his for more than ten years. It was because they were Appaloosas. He felt about Appaloosas the way I felt about his truck; they were here just to piss him off. Henry figured that the reason the Cheyenne had always ridden Appaloosas into battle was because by the time the men got there, they were so angry with the horses they were ready to kill everything.

“We should go out and ride sometime.”

He turned to look at me again, his eyes bugged a little this time. “You hate horses.”

I didn’t hate horses, I just didn’t like them. I didn’t really want to go riding; I was just hoping the shock value of the statement would change the subject. “The founding fathers used to say that riding was good for the digestion.”

“Whose founding fathers?”

“Mine. Your guys didn’t even have horses until you stole them from the Spanish… We headed over to the Mission?”

He smiled and nodded. “Yes.”

Like most of the houses on the reservation, the St. Labre Mission had a basketball court out back. It was a rough looking place, with large chunks of the asphalt crumbling off at the edges in pieces as big as softballs. What little paint there had been to signify the out-of-bounds, foul, and three-point areas had long since faded into the dark gray of the asphalt’s aggregate. It had a steel backboard painted to depict a war shield in faded and chipped reds, blacks, yellows, and whites. There was a hoop with no net, and despite the cold there were four young men playing a game of pickup in their shirtsleeves; one of the T-shirts read MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COWBOYS and another read FIGHTIN’ WHITIES in fifties script. The boys were classic Cheyenne, tall and lean, with a touch of casualness that betrayed their age. I wondered why they were here and not in school, but I figured I had enough on my plate without being a truant officer. He cut the motor and started to get out. “Do me a favor and stay in the truck.”

I looked back at him, concern in my eyes. “Even if they don’t hit the open man on the give and go?”

He closed the door, and I watched him saunter toward the court. The word insouciance was invented for Henry and, against it, the teenage version suffered. The Bear was doing vintage James Dean, and it made the boys look like a bunch of basketball-playing Pat Boones. I wondered if they knew Henry. Everybody out here was related in a complex order of extended family. I wondered how many the Bear helped. I had been with him when he made the numerous deposits into the various accounts, a hundred dollars here and a hundred dollars there. I also knew that all the groceries he bought in town didn’t end up at the bar. All of these actions made up an intricate network that provided for the individual without exacting the cost of self-respect.

Henry stopped at the edge of the pavement and leaned against the opening in the sagging chain-link fence, his thumbs hooked in his jeans. They looked at him, sneaking glances, figuring that whatever he wanted was his problem. It would be interesting to see how quickly he could make his problem theirs; it didn’t take long. After a fade away from the far corner, the ball deflected off the hoop and bounced right over to him. He didn’t move, just lodged the ball to a stop with his boot.

They fanned out as they came, like coyotes approaching their first wolf. One of them, the tallest one, said something, and Henry nodded by throwing his head back a bit and inviting them closer. The tall one started to stoop for the ball but pulled up short. The Bear must have said something. Nobody moved, then I saw the back of Henry’s head shift slightly, and the teenagers started laughing, all of them except the tall one. He cocked his head to one side and said something back, and I would bet it wasn’t pleasant. A brief moment passed, and Henry bent over and came up with the ball, spinning it in both hands. From the movement of his head, I could tell he was talking trash. The tall kid nodded, turned, and started walking back toward the court as Henry took one step after him, lined up, and shot. It wasn’t anything all that miraculous, about a twenty-five foot jumper that bounced off the rim twice and fell through, but for a guy who hadn’t held one of the things in ten years, it wasn’t bad. The tall kid turned and looked at him. Henry spread his hands out in an apologetic gesture and walked over to the young man. Throwing a paw around his shoulders, he steered him back over to the group. They were all talking and laughing now, with a few gestures from the boys indicating the road behind the Mission’s Indian School and beyond. They tossed Henry the ball again as he turned and started back for the truck. I saw him stop, look at the much greater distance to the basket, then shrug and throw the ball back to the tall one. It would have been showing off. The boys helped push start the Rezdawg, and we got going again. “You know, I remember a time when you would have made that shot, nothing but net.”

Artie Small Song’s mother lived up a dirt road off 566 going toward Custer National Forest. It looked like a cliff dwelling with the parted-out vehicles and abandoned, lesser trailer homes wedged into the rock walls of the little canyon. It was a grand location, if a little cluttered, and the farther you went back into the place, the older the vehicles got. By the time we climbed our way to the trailer that had a little stovepipe with a trail of smoke coming out, I was looking for the original wheel. I asked him to park the truck headed down the hill, which he did after a little grumbling. Once again, I waited and wondered why it was I was even here.

I rolled down the window as far as it would go, about halfway, and breathed. The sharp contrast of the canyon air mingled with the musty warmth of the truck. There was one thing I liked about Henry’s truck, even if I never told him: its comfortable smell of old steel, earth, and leather. I had grown up in old trucks like these, and there was a security there, a sense memory that transcended brand names and badge loyalties. I looked around at the assembled vehicular dreams and thought about the mobility of western longings. None of the wheels around me would likely ever roll again, but were there any deep-seeded passions still harbored in the sun-dried interiors and slowly rusting bodies? It was doubtful, but hope does tend to roll eternal.

He was on the makeshift porch, talking to an older woman through a closed screen door. His hands hung loose to his sides; after a while the inside door closed, and he returned. He grinded the starter a few times, then quietly turned the wheel and coasted down the hill, hopes dashed.

“Well?”

Once the truck lurched to a start, he mumbled, “A different girl-friend.”

We followed 566 to 39, took a right, and headed north. “Would the gun be there or with his mother?”

The response was a little ominous. “Artie always keeps his guns with him.”

Artie Small Song’s latest hit didn’t live too far from the cutoff that headed back to Lame Deer. Alice Shoulder Blade was a dental hygiene student at the college in Sheridan but spent her weekends back on the Rez with Artie. Henry said that chances were she wasn’t there, it being a Wednesday, but you never knew when Artie might pop up. It was a smallish, white house with wooden clapboard sides and a bare dirt yard that had a number of dogs asleep alongside the foundation and under the porch. When we drove up they roiled out at us from all directions and made a great show of attacking the truck and raising a general Cain. There was one blue-heeler/border collie mix; the rest were anybody’s guess. Henry rolled down his own window as he parked and growled very loudly, “Wahampi!” The dogs slid to a stop, yelped, and ran back under the porch, so far back I couldn’t see them. As he opened his door, he paused and looked at me. “Lakota for stew. Those dogs are Sioux from Pine Ridge.”

“How can you tell?”

Henry knocked. “Cheyenne dogs would wait quietly, till you got out of the truck.” Nobody answered, so he knocked again. This time, the force of his knocking jarred the door open about two inches, and we looked at each other. “On the reservation, this constitutes an invitation.”

I thought about the numerous laws, both federal and local, that I was breaking as I crept in after him. There wasn’t a whole lot there, only a few pieces of furniture and a framed picture of Alice at what I’m sure was her senior prom. There were lots of boxes scattered around the living room, filled with hunting clothes, old lace-up boots, videotapes, and reloading equipment. It was difficult to discern whether Artie was moving in or out. “Maybe Alice doesn’t live here anymore.” This to the roll of the eyes and a turn of the back as he checked the small kitchen.

I kneeled by the box containing the reloading equipment and took a look at the dies; the ones that were in the machine read. 223. Henry came back through and wandered farther down a short hallway, checking each room as he went. I carefully rummaged through the loading box and came up with a small wooden container of dies in separate cardboard; the third one I pulled out was old and didn’t have any markings. Automatically, I reached to the pancake holster at the small of my back. By the time I had popped the safety strap and pulled the. 45 out, Henry had returned from the hallway. When he saw the gun, he stopped and quickly looked around the little house, finally returning his look to me. “What?”

“What?”

“The gun?”

“Checking the caliber on his dies.”

He stretched his shoulder muscles. “Jesus, you scared the shit out of me.”

I smiled and unlocked the safety, pressing the side of my thumb against the button, allowing the magazine to slide into my other hand. I rested the die on the closed wooden box and thumbed a shell from the Colt, setting the bullet next to the die. The circumference was identical. Artie Small Song could reload Sharps. 45-70s. “Okay, if I were a gun in this house, where would I be?”

We both said it at the same time, “Closet.”

I carefully repacked the dies, placing everything back in the box as it had been. Then I popped the bullet back in the magazine, reloaded my weapon, and replaced it in the holster. I followed Henry down the hallway to the only bedroom at the end, turned the corner, and saw him standing with his hands on his hips. “You better come look at this.”

I walked over to the open door of the closet and looked in. There were enough weapons in there to arm a small platoon. There were FAL. 308s, AK-47s, MAC-10s, and the M-16s leaned against the inside wall. There was even an Armalite M-50 and a collection of Mossberg 12 gauge, short barrel, and tactical shotguns. Even sitting on the wooden cases of ammunition, in a dental hygienist’s closet, they looked deadly. Some of the guns were civilian versions, but others were fully automatic and fully functional. I leaned against the doorjamb and crossed my arms. “Wow.”

“Yes.” He looked sad. “I am guessing Artie does not have a federal license for all this automatic stuff.”

“Maybe he’s gonna open a store?”

“Yes. Guns-R-Us.” He leaned in for a closer look. “Is that an M-50?”

“Looks like to me.” I poked my head in and looked in the other corners. “I bet if we dig in those crates down there we’ll find ourselves a couple of. 45 ACPs that match the dies in the other room.” I looked around. “Maybe this is a conversation we should have in the truck?”

He followed me out after closing the closet door, and I felt a lot better when we were standing on the porch. I think I heard a few low growls as we walked off the steps, but the mad rush for our heels didn’t come. We leaned against the front of the truck’s grill guard and talked. It had turned out to be a beautiful day, and the temperature was rapidly approaching forty-five. I unbuttoned my jacket and put an arm up. “Well, I’ll tell you what I didn’t see in there.. ”

“Yes. Artie’s taste in weapons seems to run au courant.”

I turned to look at him. “I’m pleased to see that some of that high school French took.”

He continued to look at the house. “Oui.”

“What do you know about Artie, other than his momma don’t love him no more?”

I waited while he composed himself. I don’t know if not knowing Artie was a full-fledged militia-ist or if weighing the odds on his being guilty of murdering Cody Pritchard embarrassed him, but his jaw set and the eyes hardened.

“Artie is an angry young man.” He paused. “What do you know about him?”

I had looked Artie up and came clean. “He’s got two cases of aggravated assault, one pending. He did a domestic for spousal abuse over in South Dakota and has two unpaid speeding tickets here in Wyoming.” I waited a moment. “You seem to be taking this personally.”

He shook his head. “I am reacting to the lost potential.”

“Yep, I know you wouldn’t know anything about that angry young man stuff.”

We both shook our heads. “No.”

I had to push the truck this time, twice. The first time, it jumped when he let out the clutch and barked all the skin off my right shin. The second time, with my arm locked straight with the effort of moving the two-ton beast, it stoved my shoulder and blew a sooty cloud of smoke and unburnt gas in my face. I climbed in and shut the door. “I hate this truck.” We drove back toward Lame Deer on 39, and I peeled off my jacket and laid it on the seat between us. I thought about where we were headed, about Lonnie.

I wondered how long it would take for the Little Bird look to come back.

Jim Ferguson wore a gun at the trial; that alone was enough to make me laugh, but the context robbed me of my sense of humor. It was before Vic, so my two deputies were Lenny Rowell and Jim. Jim kept fussing with his belt, and Lenny was trying to catch a nap as he leaned against the bookcases of burgundy leather-covered Shepard’s Wyoming Citations. I told Jim to get his belt adjusted because fidgeting deputies with guns made the common populace nervous and excused myself to go to the bathroom. When I got there, Lonnie Little Bird was trying to get his wheelchair into one of the stalls. The county hadn’t gotten around to putting in handicapped facilities, and Lonnie wasn’t fitting. He looked up through his coke-bottle glasses and smiled. “Mm, hmm. Yes, I am having troubles. It is so.”

I looked around. I hadn’t noticed anybody on the way in. “Lonnie, is there anybody to help you?”

“Mm, hmm… Mm, hmm.” He continued to smile. “You.”

He was a small man, even counting the two missing legs, and it was relatively easy to lift him up and hold him as he unbuttoned his pants. I sat him on the toilet. The grin never left his face. He had a large head with prominent ears. The nose was flat and looked like it had been broken numerous times. There was a rumor that the old guy had played professional baseball for one of the teams in the Midwest but, as far as I knew, it was only a rumor. He spoke as I started to close the stall door. “Mm, Sheriff?”

I paused. “Yep, Lonnie?”

“You know how old I am, Sheriff?”

I figured about sixty-five. “No, Lonnie. I can’t say that I do.”

“Mm, fifty-three years old. Yes, it is so.”

Jesus. “Lonnie, that’s pretty young.” There was silence for a while, and I was afraid I had said something wrong. “Lonnie?”

“Mm, sometimes I think it’s very old.” Another pause, and I zipped up and moved over to the sink to wash my hands. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve been here a very long time.”

I pulled out a paper towel and dried my hands. “Yep, I feel like that sometimes too, Lonnie.”

“These boys, the ones that have done this thing to my daughter?” My breath caught in my throat. “It’s a bad thing they’ve done, yes?”

I leaned against the counter and looked at the stall door. “Yes, it is a bad thing that they have done.” There was a long silence, and I was glad no one could see my eyes well in anger and frustration. “Very bad.”

The voice that came back was soft. “Mm, I get confused sometimes, and I just wanted to ask you.”

When I got back to the courtroom, the jury light was glowing red.

There was a small dish attached to Lonnie’s house that brought in the world, and I’m pretty sure who had ordered and paid for it. Henry’s eyes were beginning to glaze over as Lonnie gave us his version of what was happening on this particular daytime drama, but I did my best to pay attention. “The problems started at the health clinic, that’s where Dirk begged Catalina to not go through with the abortion. Cat agreed and said she was looking forward to having a family, mm-hmmm, mm-hmmm… But I’m not so sure. After they left the clinic, there were complications, but the doctors said she would be all right, so Dirk dropped her off at the mansion and went over to see Latisha. But when he got there, Latisha told him that he needed to be with Catalina now that she is pregnant, so he left, but that’s okay ’cause now Latisha is with Ben, and he seems to be a good fellow. Mm, hmm. Yes, it is so.”

Lonnie watched soap operas because there was no baseball in November. The rumors of Lonnie’s playing pro ball turned out to be true. There was baseball paraphernalia scattered in a few spots around the place, baseball bats tucked into corners, old gloves stacked up on shelves. There were pictures of Lonnie standing around with Cubs, Billy Williams and Ferguson Jenkins; Cardinals, Lou Brock and Joe Torre; Reds, Tony Perez and Johnny Bench, whom he blamed for ending his career. “After I saw him coming up, I just didn’t see any reason to go on playing. He’s part Indian too, you know. Choctaw. Mm, hmm.. Yes, it is so.”

The only thing that outnumbered the baseball pictures were photographs of Melissa. The only photographs I had of Melissa were not good ones. I stopped before an especially wonderful one of her in full dancing regalia, seated on a Palomino in front of a painted teepee. Its frame had started out as gold but was now rusted and tarnished at the edges. It was likely it was taken down and handled a great deal. I thought about defects, about the rape, the trial, and the Little Big Horn reenactment where I had seen her last. Lonnie probably thought about those things a lot, too.

It was nearing one o’clock, and Lonnie had wheeled himself into the kitchen to instruct Henry how to make the pickle-loaf, yellow American sliced cheese, and Kraft-spread sandwiches on Wonder Bread that would be our lunch. This was my kind of food, but Henry’s gourmet sensibilities were having a hard time of it. “Lonnie, I buy you good food, why don’t you eat it?”

“Your good food is complicated and takes too long to make. Mm.. There are Vlassic pickle stackers in the door there.”

With a sigh, Henry returned to the refrigerator, retrieved the jar of sliced pickles, and got ice from the freezer side of the appliance. “Lonnie, are you buying all that frozen food off the Schwan’s truck again?”

He looked over at me through those thick, metal-frame glasses, needing an ally. And if Lonnie had said that little green men had deposited the eight boxes of Hot Pockets in his freezer, I was going to agree. “I feel sorry for him when he drives all the way up the driveway.” I nodded as he continued. “We have good talks; he is from Kentucky.” I nodded some more.

It was a little single-level ranch house that must have been built in the fifties, and the only things that kept me from thinking I was on one of those family sitcoms from the period was the amount of Indian art and craft that decorated it and the concrete ramps that led up to the doors of the spotless house. Lonnie Little Bird was on a campaign to get his daughter back from that gaggle of aunts in closer to town. This campaign meant Lonnie didn’t drink, Lonnie didn’t smoke, and Lonnie didn’t use the Lord’s name in vain, at least when any of the aunts were in earshot. There was Barq’s root beer in the refrigerator beside the pickled pig’s feet, and that’s what we were drinking. I finished off the end of my two sandwiches. “When did Artie sell that rifle, Lonnie?”

“Mm, hmm. About a year ago. He sold that gun to that Buffalo Bill Museum over in Cody. Yes. It was winter, and he needed the money.” He took a swig of his root beer and studied the Formica for a moment. “Not everybody has a nice house like mine…” His eyes glanced furtively at Henry. I got the feeling Lonnie liked secrets. A moment passed. “Sheriff?”

“Yep, Lonnie.”

“Do you think that Artie did this thing to this boy?”

I picked up the root beer can and looked at it; as near as I could figure it had been about twenty years since I had tasted the stuff. “Well, I’m just checking everything out, everything and everybody.”

He smiled. “Mm, hmm. Am I being checked out also?”

I looked at the little spark behind the glasses and wasn’t going to be the one to tell him that without any legs he was kind of low on our list of suspects. “Just following up on all the leads, Lonnie.”

He continued to smile but looked over to Henry and said a few short words in Cheyenne. Henry glanced at me, then back to his cousin, and then got up and walked out, turning the corner at the hallway. My eyes returned to Lonnie with a question, but he only sat there looking back through glasses so thick you could see little rainbows at the edges. After a moment or two I heard Henry returning down the hallway, his boots padding softly on the wall-to-wall carpeting. When he turned the corner again, he was carrying an old leather rifle scabbard with the straps you attach to a saddle hanging down, unbuckled. Due to my recent course of study, I recognized the Sharps butt plate that stuck out the end. When he got to the counter, he handed the weapon to me. I looked up at Lonnie, who gestured for me to take out the buffalo gun.

I carefully slid the rifle from its wool-lined sheath and rested the butt on my knee, and it was the most beautiful gun I had ever seen. It wasn’t in as good shape as Omar’s, there were scratches along the stock and the part of the foregrip that was wood, but each scar had been lovingly poulticed with oil and polished to a gleaming sheen. The metal had not been so lucky. Someone had taken steel wool to it at some point, and the ruddy sepia tone of its original color only showed in small creases; the rest was ghostly silver. There was a simple cross of brass tacks in the stock, the pattern a great deal like the one on the side of Red Road Contracting’s truck, and ten distinct notches along the top ridge of the stock. The foregrip had three red-wool trading-cloth wraps ornamented with quillwork and with smaller feathers than I had seen on the scabbard of Omar’s gun or, lately, in plastic bags. I touched the feathers and looked at Henry. “Owl.” Messenger from the world of the dead indeed.

I turned the rifle around and looked at the magnificent pattern beaded underneath. Lonnie looked at me through the magnifying glasses. “Mm, hmm. The pattern is called Dead Man’s Body. Yes, it is so.”