Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Three

Four days later, on a cold Sunday morning, I drive up a long, steep-sided pass that opens onto the Flathead reservation and the Jocko River and mountain peaks that pierce the clouds and stay snowcapped year-round. The valley is elevated above Missoula, as though it were scooped out of the sky and created separate from the rest of the earth, a place where the moon and stars hang atop the hills even as the pinkness of the morning rises to meet them.

I fill my gas tank, the pump spout like a chunk of ice in my bare hand, my eyes watering in the wind, then I rumble across a wood bridge and follow a dirt road along the Jocko, the boulders steaming in the current, the gold leaves of the willows floating like fish eels on the riffles. The remoteness of the countryside, the sparsity of human structures, the absence of traffic and commerce, and the hush of the morning leave me in awe and make me wonder if the traces of Eden are not still with us.

I pull into a driveway and park in front of an old two-story house surrounded by birch trees, half of the house lit by the sun, the glass in the dormers as black as obsidian. A cruiser is parked in the barn, the front end pointed out. There are no other vehicles in sight, not even a tractor. My tap on the door sounds like a gunshot.

Ruby Spotted Horse opens the door, keeping the chain on, in a blue robe with a towel wrapped around her head.

“What are you doing on my porch?” she asks.

“I’d like to speak with you.”

“Have you heard about calling someone before you go to their house, particularly early on Sunday morning? How’d you get my address?”

“I fish up here with the tribe lawyer.”

“How convenient,” she says. Her eyes have a purple tint, and I cannot tell if it is because of the shadows or because they are deeply recessed in her face. “Sir, you’re staring at me.”

“Sorry.”

“Mr. Broussard, I respect you, but you shouldn’t have done this.”

“What if I come back in a few hours and take you to lunch?”

“This isn’t about the swastika, is it?”

“Not directly.” The grass in the lawn is brown and stiff with frost. I can smell a smokehouse and meat dripping into the ash. I hear bugles blowing and echoing out in the hills, sounds that are imaginary but which I never rid myself of. A fat tabby cat walks down the porch rail and jumps with a thud by my foot, then begins doing figure eights on my legs.

“A man named John Fenimore Culpepper threatened me,” I say. “He also goes by the name Johnny B. Goode. I strung a tripwire full of aluminum cans around my house.”

“So?”

“Montana is a stand-your-ground state.”

Her jaw tightens. She takes off the chain. “Get in here, Mr. Broussard.”

The living room wallpaper is water-stained and cracked, the design faded into extinction, the carpet threadbare. The couch and chairs look as though they have never been vacuumed. The woodwork in the trim and the staircase is probably mahogany or walnut and a hundred years old. A solitary light fixture hangs from the ceiling, the tiny yellow bulbs flickering inside the fluted shades.

“Why are you looking that way at my house?”

“I didn’t know there was a Victorian home on the reservation. I’ve never noticed it.”

“So now you know. Let’s get back to the man who threatened you.”

“I bear an animus toward people who preyed on my daughter, and I’d like to shorten their life span. So instead of doing that, I started thinking of ways to take out my anger on an ignorant man who probably forced his son to vandalize my barn.”

She looks sideways, then back at me. “You’re actually talking about capping someone? And you’re telling this to a police officer in her home?”

“I guess that sums it up.”

“One of us has a problem, Mr. Broussard. Either you’re insane or I have shit for brains, meaning I just let you in my house.”

“Goodbye,” I say.

My shoes leave wet prints through the frost on the lawn as I walk toward my Toyota pickup. I bought it twenty years ago when I had far less money than I have now. Back then I lived a simpler life with my daughter, and now I would burn every dollar in my possession in order to get her back. The sun is yellow and cold above the hills, and snow is blowing off the peaks of the Mission Mountains. I feel a loneliness that is almost unbearable.

I pull open the driver’s door of the truck, my hand dead to the cold of the handle, my stomach flopping for the fool I have made of myself.

“Come back, Mr. Broussard!” Ruby Spotted Horse calls from the porch.

I smile and shake my head.

“I was too hard on you! Please, Mr. Broussard. I don’t want you on my conscience.”

I retrace my steps and reenter the house. The cat goes inside with me, tail straight up, stiff as a broomstick.

“I need to get dressed,” she says. “There’s some muffins and coffee in the kitchen.”

“That’s very nice of you, Miss Ruby.”

“You’re from the South?”

“Why do you think that?”

“Your manners.”

“Thank you, but the South is a state of mind rather than a place. Much of it is good, but much of it dark, thanks to our replication of original sin in the form of the Middle Passage. John Calvin and Cornelius Jansen spat in the punch bowl as well.”

She seems to examine my words inside her head, then picks up the cat and drops him heavily in my arms. “Meet Maxwell Gato.”

She goes upstairs and I go into the kitchen with the cat. Through the window I see lambs playing in a shed built on the side of an unpainted barn, stacks of baled hay, a swayback mare with a blind eye and skeletal ribs, a blue roan in a pen (part of the treatment for laminitis), a fawn without a mother at the stock tank, a cat with a pasty pink medicine smeared on a patch of mange, an Old English sheepdog, its eyes buried deep in its fur. I pour some dry cat food in a bowl for Maxwell Gato. He crunches a few pieces, then jumps on the counter and stares out the window.

“Want to go outside with your pals?” I say. “Well, let’s go out there and see what these fellows are up to.”

I cradle Maxwell Gato in my arms again. I can hear him purring and feel his warmth against my chest. Then I start toward the back door. To my left is a stairwell that descends into the cellar. Maxwell Gato is tensing in my arms, trying to straighten his body, digging in wherever he can.

“What’s wrong, Maxwell?” I say.

One claw almost takes off my right nipple; he tumbles on the floor, then bolts for the living room. I let him outside and watch him run past my truck into a field of unharvested pumpkins that resemble deflated basketballs. I return to the stairwell and the back entrance. I have no idea why the cat became so frightened. I click the stairwell light on and off. Nothing happens. In the gloom at the bottom of the steps I can make out a door and a steel U-shaped padlock hanging from the hasp.

I unconsciously touch my shirt where Maxwell Gato hooked me and realize I have dropped a gold ballpoint given to me by my daughter. I descend the stairs in the semi-darkness, one hand tight on the rail, feeling each step with the heel of my shoe. The air is cooler now and smells like a cave.

Something slams into the wood from the other side of the door, rattling and stressing the padlock, knocking dust into the air. After a pause, there’s another blow against the door, this one even harder. The object on the other side of the door, one that is obviously mobile, has weight and density and a ferocious level of self-destructive energy and is driven by an intelligent source, one that may possess arms or legs or fingernails or claws, because I heard scraping sounds against the wood.

I go up the stairs two at a time, my heart pounding. Ruby Spotted Horse is at the top of the stairs. “What are you doing down there?” she says.

“The cat scratched me and I dropped my ballpoint.”

She clicks the light switch up and down. “The bulb must have burned out. Come up here before you hurt yourself.”

“What’s in that cellar?”

“Preserves and canned goods. Why?”

“Something hit the door.”

“Sometimes my fruit jars blow up.” She motions for me to keep coming up the stairs. “Those steps are not reliable. You’re about to give me a heart attack.”

She’s wearing jeans and a cowboy shirt unsnapped at the top; her hair is damp and uncombed, the towel gone. I know she is lying about the cellar and that she heard the same sounds I did, which caused her to hurry to the back of the house.

“Did you hear me, Mr. Broussard?”

I reach the top of the stairwell, breathing as evenly as I can, the floor solid under my feet, the rectangular world of predictability at the ends of my fingers. “I know what I heard and what I saw, Miss Ruby.”

“I think you’re a little confused.”

“That’s not flattering.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”

“How about the truth?”

She chews her lip. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. Okay, wait here. I’ll get a flashlight. I’ll also try to find the key to the padlock. I misplaced it a couple of days ago. If I can’t find it, I’ll bring a crowbar, and we’ll rip off the hasp and break anything else of your choosing.”

“I’m sorry to make trouble for you,” I say.

“For a few minutes, can you just say nothing at all?”

She goes into the kitchen, and I hear her opening and shutting drawers and cabinets. A phone rings, and she begins talking and walking deeper inside the house. I hear her footsteps coming back toward the brief hallway that leads to the cellar stairs. “You still there?” she says.

“Take your time,” I reply.

She walks away again. Finally she returns with a flashlight and a key. The key is threaded onto a long ribbon of gingham tied in a loop, and I wonder how anyone could lose it.

“Excuse the delay,” she says. “That was my ex. If you have a telephone pole up your ass and want to drop the hammer on a genuine sack of dog turds, let me give you his address. Oh, I forgot. You’re tied up with a swastika on your barn door.

“Anyway, we need to get your ballpoint. You also have blood on your shirt. We need to get that fixed, too. Now get behind me. This is still my house.”