Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Six

It’s Monday morning, and the crowd at the café is thinner than I have ever seen it. The pandemic is taking its toll in many ways. In rural areas all over Montana, a majority have refused to practice respiratory protection. Many of the quarter million bikers traveling to and from the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally left their fluids and fouled air for us to deal with.

Down the street, kids in Black Lives Matter T-shirts and masks are singing “We Shall Overcome.” Twenty yards away, a counter-group wearing red MAGA hats has gathered around a flatbed truck flying the Stars and Stripes and blue-and-white Trump flags. Individuals from each group stray to the other and chat or shake hands. This is Missoula. The year is still 1968 and the flower children are everywhere. The symbol most associated with the city is the peace sign that overlooks the downtown area and the university campus. Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to hold federal office, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the sweetheart of the IWW, are patron saints. When Donald Trump came to town during the 2020 campaign, the word “liar” was spelled out in large white letters on the side of the mountain behind the university so the president could have a good view from Air Force One.

In front of a pawnshop across the street from the courthouse is a different kind of group. They have long rifles. At least one is carrying an AR-15. Jeremiah and I are sitting by the café window with a view of Broadway and the daily traffic and the Doughboy statue on the courthouse lawn, one hand hefting his ’03 Springfield with the bayonet fixed, the other hand frozen above his head, bringing up his squad, men who may have disappeared inside clouds of mustard gas over a century ago. I think of my father, who went over the top at both the Marne and the Somme.

It’s a bluebird day, the kind that shouldn’t go wrong, the kind you want to lock in a safe as proof that the earth abideth forever. The boy with the AR-15 has his back to me; he’s tall and wears a camouflage jacket and half-top boots and a flop hat; his hair hangs over his ears. A thirty-round magazine juts from the well of his weapon. With a bump stock, he could spray down dozens in under one minute.

Jeremiah and I order, then he follows my line of sight. “We’re watching them,” he says.

“Watching whom?”

“The Second Amendment crowd.”

“They’re not out there about the Second Amendment, Jeremiah,” I say. “They’re there to menace and intimidate.”

“How do you prove it?” he replies. His hair is dark, freshly clipped, lightly oiled, his skin without blemish. His features make me think of a 1930s leading man. He’s wearing a cheap suit with a checkered shirt and a navy blue tie. He looks more scholar than cop, more outlier than joiner. His eyes brighten in the hope that I won’t comment anymore on the latitude given to people who belong on an ice floe south of the Aleutians. “What did you want to tell me?” he asks.

“Know a state trooper named Ruby Spotted Horse?”

His eyes are flat. “Lives on the res? Yeah, she got some ink about three years ago.”

“For what?”

“Shot and killed a guy at a rest stop on I-90. He’d busted out of a holding cell in Washington. He raped and murdered two children.”

Since Fannie Mae’s death, every coarse or cruel word or image I hear or see is a serpent that curls around my heart and then slithers away and goes to work on another organ, all of this before I can process what I’ve seen or heard. “Give me the short version, okay?”

“She smoked him in the dark,” he says. “No witnesses. She thought he had a gun. He didn’t. She popped him four or five times. It looked like a bad shoot to me. But she didn’t use a throw-down, so that was on her side. You didn’t read about it?”

“Fannie Mae developed seizures about three years back. Her feet curled up like claws. I didn’t pay much attention to local news for a while.”

I just became the martyr with his tragedy on his sleeve. I’ve done it before. Why? To get even with the world.

The waitress puts plates of waffles and scrambled eggs and hash browns and bacon for Jeremiah in front of us. She’s stout and in her late thirties and has pale red hair with streaks of blond in it. She leans across the table to put a fresh ketchup bottle with the salt and pepper and hot sauce; her hip brushes against Jeremiah’s shoulder. “You guys need anything else?”

“We’re fine, Betty,” Jeremiah says.

“Just holler,” she says, and winks.

“Go ahead,” he says to me, although his eyes are on the waitress’s rump.

“I got into a situation with a man named John Fenimore Culpepper. He had his son paint a swastika on my barn door. I should have let it go. Instead I went to Culpepper’s house. Ruby Spotted Horse had been the responding officer when I made the 911 call because of the swastika. So I went to her home yesterday morning to tell her I had shown bad judgment.”

Jeremiah’s eyes are veiled. He drenches his waffles with maple syrup and parks a fork-load in his mouth. “That was the only reason you went there?”

“Sunday is a bad day to be alone,” I reply.

He tries to smile and is probably embarrassed by my candor. “I know what you mean,” he says. “But I’m kind of lost here. What can I do to help?”

I can’t concentrate. Someone is shouting through a megaphone. The Trumpers, the BLMs, and the people with guns are looking down the alley on a side street. Two uniformed policemen are running through the traffic toward the alley. Jeremiah drops the blind on the window glass and says, “Forget those guys. What happened at the res?”

I tell him everything: the incongruity and Gothic ambience of Ruby Spotted Horse’s nineteenth-century home, her care of injured or neglected animals, the field of pumpkins left to rot when her neighbors could probably use the food, the lock on a cellar that supposedly contained only preserves, the huge object that thudded twice into the door like the heavy bag in a boxing gym, worse, the scraping of claws, her disingenuous explanation about preserve jars exploding.

“You searched the cellar?” Jeremiah says.

“No, the light switch was in the back.”

“There was no sign of anyone in the room?”

“Not that I saw.”

“I’d just blow it off,” he says.

“Blow it off? Whatever hit the door must have weighed over two hundred pounds. It knocked dust in my face.”

“Did you talk to the tribal police?”

“I don’t want the lady to look bad in front of her people.”

He squeezes his temples. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe she keeps a crazy relative down there.”

“One that has claws?”

“Look, Aaron, there are times in our lives when we shouldn’t trust our senses. Maybe this is one of them.”

“Say again?”

“It’s just a thought.”

I try to control my feelings. People of my generation have few confidants, because there are fewer and fewer people who understand the America we grew up in. Most would not recognize the names that to us were as important as Bunker Hill. I carried my best friend down a trench in a place called Pork Chop Hill and dropped him when a 105 burst ten yards from me. My friend may have ended up a lab rat north of the Yalu. The Communists transported four hundred POWs with them into China, perhaps even into Russia, for use in medical experiments. I will never find out the fate of my friend, and thinking about it is for me a perfect hell.

I stick two fingers in my shirt pocket and remove the folded piece of yellow notepaper I picked up from Ruby Spotted Horse’s cellar floor. I unfold it and press it flat on the table and slide it toward him. I can see the ink and the wispy penmanship clearly on the yellow paper and almost hear the voice of the poor soul who wrote the message. “I took this from the cellar.”

“What is it?”

“Read it.”

He glances at the page. Then picks it up and turns it over. “What’s going on here, Aaron?”

“What’s going on? Someone’s life is in peril.”

“There’s nothing on this paper.”

“Cut it out.”

“Look for yourself.”

“I don’t have to.”

He lets out his breath slowly. He looks at the waitress, and I know he wants to be with her and not me. Or with anyone except me. “I think you need to rest, Aaron.”

“Look me straight in the face and tell me again there’s nothing on that paper.”

He makes a sucking sound with his teeth. A crowd has formed by the alley. A thin Black kid with gold-peroxided hair is sitting on a bicycle, talking to the cops. Three white kids have taken the position against a brick wall inside the alley, leaning on their arms, their feet spread, all of them in tight, dirty jeans and biker boots, a cop shaking them down. One of the kids is the boy who was carrying the AR-15, although he is not carrying it now. He’s also the same kid who painted the swastika on my barn door.

I get up from the table and refold the notepaper and return it to my shirt pocket. I remove a crisp bill from my wallet and lay it on the tablecloth. “You think Jackson’s face should be taken off the twenty-dollar bill?”

“Haven’t given it much thought.”

“You ought to. The Indians were his loyalest allies. He betrayed them and put them on the Trail of Tears. On the way to Oklahoma, they were raped, starved, and murdered.”

“Sit down, Aaron. We’ll work this out. What would Fannie Mae want you to do?”

“Don’t you or your colleagues use her name.”

I feel naked, as in a dream. The sounds in the room slow to a crawl, then drain through the floor. The people at the tables are frozen in place and stopped in midspeech. Our waitress gives me the blank look of a mannequin, her face distorted, her tray about to spill. Jeremiah has also become painted on the air. I leave the room hurriedly, bouncing against chairs that seem bolted to the floor.

Outside, the world shifts back into overdrive, cacophonous, blaring, the sun eye-watering bright. The BLM kids are playacting a giant arrest, lying facedown on the sidewalk and the courthouse lawn, their wrists crossed behind them as though cuffed. The situation at the alley is winding down. The Black kid on the bike says the three white kids stopped him and demanded he show them identification. He also says they accused him of carrying a gun and being a member of Antifa. He didn’t have a gun and claims he has lived in Missoula since he was four months old. He’s obviously frightened.

The cops give citations to the three white kids, who walk away grinning at one another. In the background I see John Fenimore Culpepper, Leigh’s father, coming fast across the courthouse lawn, his face as tight as a drumhead. I’m sure he’s on a collision course with me. I start to raise my hand in caution. He goes right past me and grabs his son’s arm so hard I think he’s going to lift him in the air and shake the teeth out of his head.

“What’d you do, boy?” he asks.

“Nothing, Daddy.”

“Where’s your rifle?”

“Locked in the truck.”

“Why’d you single out the boy on the bike?”

“He’s a nigger. I thought—”

The father slaps him so hard that spittle flies from the boy’s mouth. “You don’t use that word. Not now, not ever. Who are those boys with you?”

“Guys from school.”

“They use that kind of language?”

“I didn’t mean nothing, Daddy.”

Culpepper’s face is filled with conflict, like that of a man who knows his best efforts in life will never be enough. “I understand, son. But there’s other ways. Don’t be ganging up on the colored boy. That ain’t our way.”

A towering uniformed policeman walks up, his shoulders huge, the back of his neck pocked with scars that look like they were burned into his skin. He removes his shades, his expression amiable. “Everything all right?”

“This here is family business,” Culpepper says.

The policeman gazes at the street. “When you hit people, it becomes my business.”

“Yessir,” Culpepper says.

“Have a good day,” the police officer says, and walks away. Culpepper’s nostrils are white around the rims, his breath audible. His eyes remain fastened on the policeman’s back, his jawbone flexing. Then he notices me. “You mixed up in this?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Good question,” I say. “Mr. Culpepper, you correct your boy for using racist language and bullying a Black kid, but you sic him on me. Can you explain that?”

“It’s your kind that cause the trouble.”

“I’m glad you cleared that up.”

“I’ll send a painter out to your house, Mr. Broussard. Now let us be.”

But I can’t, and he knows it just as I do. An aberrant social contract in America was created when the first British ships set sail with their cargo of slaves packed like spoons belowdecks, a repository of bilge and rotted rations and the stench of sweat and feces and corpses and stillborn infants and raped women who killed themselves by chewing open their veins. My ancestors, an elite group, profited from those ships. Culpepper’s Cockney ancestors did the dirty work. They threw their souls over the gunwales, along with the corpses they pulled with ropes out of the hold every morning, and later were the custodians of the whip and the branding iron in the sugarcane fields where I grew up, and forever after were taught by the oligarchy that Black people were their enemy, lustful, subhuman, idle, and mendacious, respondent only to the pillory: the only human beings lower than themselves and, at the same time, the only creatures over whom they could have total power, and none of that has changed, no matter what we tell ourselves.

“You got something to say?” Culpepper asks.

“I’d like for you to look at a piece of paper for me.”

“What?”

“Look at this piece of paper. Tell me what’s on it.”

“Did you get loose from a crazy house?”

“Just tell me. I’ll leave you alone.”

He takes the notepaper from my hand, drops his eyes, then stares into my face, barely able to contain his anger.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Culpepper?”

“I know the devil’s work when I see it. Take it.” He tries to hand me the notepaper.

“What did you see?” I ask.

He throws the notepaper at me. A gust of wind blows it end over end across the courthouse lawn and into the street. I run after it, but it’s sucked under a truck and disappears. Culpepper has cupped his hand around his son’s arm and is walking him as fast as he can down Broadway. I go after him, bumping against people on the sidewalk. Culpepper turns around, his mouth twisted, the gaps between his teeth exposed. “I got a knife,” he says.

I raise my hands in surrender, then see Jeremiah McNally watching from across the street, his face sad, as though a dear friend has departed from his life.