Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Eight

It’s three p.m. Tuesday. I’m in Pablo, Montana, pulling into the Flathead Tribal Police headquarters way up on the res, almost to Flathead Lake. The vastness of the country, the enormity of the Mission Mountains, is literally breathtaking. The ranches, particularly the old ones with giant slat barns, seem miniaturized and clinging to the earth.

I called earlier and told the dispatcher I wanted to make an appointment and report an event that occurred at the home of a resident on the Flathead Reservation. It was not an easy call to make.

“What kind of event?” the dispatcher asked.

“One that might involve a kidnapping. Or worse.”

“What’s the name of the resident?”

“Ruby Spotted Horse.”

“She’s a state trooper,” the dispatcher said.

“That’s why I’m troubled.”

“Well, you sure came to the right place.”

His comment sounded strange. I would soon find out why. I introduce myself to an officer at the counter by the entrance of the building. He points at a uniformed officer at a desk in the corner. “That’s Ray Bronson,” he says. “He’ll be glad to take care of you.”

I walk to Bronson’s desk. He’s drinking coffee and looking out the window either at the mountains or two young women who have parked their camper in the police parking lot and are photographing a pasture with llamas and horses in it. The wind is up, flattening the long stretches of yellow and brown grass, blowing the young women’s hair back in their faces.

“I’m Aaron Holland Broussard,” I say. “Do you know Trooper Spotted Horse?”

“I should,” he says. “Have a seat. You want some coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

He has brown hair and a narrow face and the biggest, most unnaturally white teeth I have ever seen. “Ruby’s in trouble of some kind?”

I don’t know where to begin. “I was at her house Sunday morning. I think somebody was locked in her cellar.”

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

“Sir?”

“She’s a little crazy. Was it a guy down there?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t see anyone?”

“No, but I—”

“You heard the person?”

“Yes. I also found a note on the floor. The person who wrote it was begging for help.”

“The note was on the floor of the cellar?”

“Correct.” I notice a strange mannerism in him. His gaze is invasive, as though others are public property.

“You were inside the cellar, but you didn’t see anyone?”

“Yes,” I say.

“I’m getting kind of confused. You have the note with you?”

“It got blown away in the wind. In the traffic in front of the Missoula courthouse.”

He has a ballpoint in his hand and a legal pad on the desk but has written nothing down. “What happened to your head?”

“It’s just a little cut.”

“Fall in the bathroom? That’s where most home accidents happen. I mean with older people.”

“Who cares?”

“You’re telling me some strange things here, Mr. Broussard.”

“Maybe I’m talking to the wrong man.”

His gaze wanders around on his legal pad. “No, you got the right man. I’m Ruby’s former husband. Eight years ago her niece was raped and murdered. Nobody was ever in custody. Three years back she shot and killed the same kind of guy who killed her niece. Ever since, she’s developed a few kinks in her head. Unless you subscribe to that artsy-fartsy stuff that goes on in Arizona.”

My temples are throbbing. “Two things, sir. Number one, you shouldn’t be interviewing me, and number two, I don’t know what the state of Arizona has to do with any of this.”

“They got these cults around Sedona. They think corn came out of a hole in the ground. That’s where they say the gods live. I’m not making this up. You want me to talk to Ruby or not?”

“I didn’t mean to encumber your day.”

“What did you say your occupation was?”

“I’m a novelist.”

“Science fiction?”

“How’d you know?”

I get up and go out the door. The dispatcher catches me outside. He’s very young and has a tight haircut and earnest eyes and the kind of innocence I hope he will never lose. “Got what you needed?” he says.

“Yes, thank you,” I reply. “Why did you send me to Officer Bronson?”

“I didn’t. He heard me and you talking on the phone and said he knew you and he’d take care of whatever was going on at Ms. Spotted Horse’s place. That was okay, wasn’t it?”

“You bet,” I say.

I cross the Bitterroot River and rumble across the cattle guard and park among the trees by my veranda. My home was built in 1903, and I added two barns and a chicken house and created three pastures that I rotate. I love the main house for its dowelled woodwork and dormer windows and the little second-story balcony that protrudes from Fannie Mae’s bedroom. But it’s a lonely place now, and the silence can be like entering a bathysphere. For that reason I am guilty of sometimes wanting any intrusion of any kind that will free me from the moment a cop knocked on my door and told me my daughter was dead. Down the slope, someone is hammering on my barn, smacking nails with a sound like the clean crack of a pistol.

As I walk through the trees, I can see the Ford-150 that has a bullet hole punched crisply in the rear window. A broad-shouldered woman wearing a red baseball cap and cargo pants and a long-sleeve corduroy shirt and nylon vest is nailing a board in place on the barn wall. There are three cans of paint or stain on the ground. The entire barn door has been repainted; the swastika is gone. She turns around, her face as blank and rough as pig hide. Her hair is bleached the color of fresh sawdust and wadded under her cap.

“I mixed a couple of cans to match the original,” she says. “It’s got the same brownish-red shine now. You also had a board busted loose. I didn’t have a replacement, so I put some storm latches on it.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Can you tell me who you are, please?”

“My last name is Stokes. I live in Victor.”

“Since that’s Mr. Culpepper’s Ford, I assume he sent you here.”

“You assume wrong. That’s my truck, not his.”

“Why do you have this interest in me, Ms. Stokes?”

“I don’t have any interest in you at all.”

“I’m confused. You’re standing on my property, but I’m of no importance to you?”

“That notepaper you showed John Culpepper. Something about kidnapping and somebody getting killed. We believe in the Bible. We say, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ You upset a member of my congregation.”

“You have a church here’bouts?”

“That’s none of your goddamn business, is it?”

“No, ma’am, it’s not.”

She drops her hammer in a toolbox and plants her hands on her hips and straightens her shoulders, her chest almost popping her shirt. “Got anything else you want to say?”

“Yes, there’s no need for you to come back here,” I reply.

She huffs air from her nose and raises her eyes to my forehead. “You got blood coming out your bandage.”

“Thanks for telling me.” I start walking uphill.

“Hey!” she says.

“Yes?”

“You trying to be a smart-ass?”

I try to reach the trees before she starts in again.

“Don’t turn your back on me, mister,” she says.

I keep going. She says something, but her voice is lost in the wind. The horses are nickering in the pasture, the light fading in the pines. I know genuine hatred when I see it. I grew up in a culture that nursed it for generations. Ten miles from my home on Bayou Teche, a twelve-year-old Black boy was sentenced to death on the basis of a confession he gave with no counsel, and he was electrocuted not only once but twice because the executioners were drunk. I get to the veranda and mount the steps slowly and open the door and go inside, the muscles in my back as tight as knotted rope. I lock the bolt and look through the curtain. Ms. Stokes is standing by her truck, talking into her cell phone. She thumbs the phone into her cargo pants and loads her toolbox and paint cans on the truck bed and slams the tailgate and drives away, her windows down, obviously indifferent to the rawness of the wind and the dust funneling from her tires.

I shower until my skin is red and put on a fresh bandage and clean, soft, unironed clothes, then cook pancakes and scrambled eggs for my dinner. I have never done well with vegetarianism, and twice have gotten food poisoning from salad oil, but the day after the policeman came to my door and told me Fannie Mae was dead, I changed my diet to hers. The irony is I cannot taste what I eat or even remember what I had for lunch, if anything.

The sun is below the mountains now, the sky sprinkled with white stars, the surface of the Bitterroot glazed with moonlight. Through the kitchen window I see a pair of headlights coming up the dirt lane. The six o’clock local news carried a story about two armed men who committed three robberies in the Lolo area. The images on a security camera showed the two suspects in a darkened parking lot, wearing hoodies and breathing masks, each with a pistol. The headlights turn into my drive. I pick up my .45 and click on the porch light and look through the curtain on the door glass. The vehicle is a state police cruiser. I push the .45 between the cushion and arm of a stuffed chair and open the door and step outside. “How you doin’, Miss Ruby?” I say.

She gets out of the cruiser and walks up the steps, her face shadowed by the brim of her hat. She doesn’t speak.

“Would you like to come in?” I say.

“I’m not sure what I’d like to do.”

“Is this about my conversation with Officer Bronson? I didn’t single him out to speak with. When I went to the tribal headquarters, I was told to sit down at his desk. When I found out who he was, I told him he shouldn’t have been interviewing me.”

“You have no idea of the harm you’ve done.”

“That was not my intention.”

“I’d like to shoot you.”

“Well, I can’t help that. I’m fixing to eat. Why don’t you join me?”

“Mr. Broussard, I think you’re from the other side of Mars.”

There are many social problems that come with age. One is you know what people are going to say before they say it, but if you have any wisdom, you will not interrupt them or attempt to change their mind.

“You’re not going to say anything?” she asks.

“I feel like I betrayed you, but I had to talk to someone. I picked up a note on your cellar floor written by someone begging for help. What was I supposed to do?”

“I didn’t know about that. What did the note say?”

I tell her. Her hands are opening and closing as though she doesn’t know what to do with them; her eyes are lost in thought. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“Because nothing you told me about that cellar made sense.”

She looks sideways at me, her face softening. “What happened to your head?”

“I used it to break the glass on my gun cabinet.”

“You did what?”

“It was an emotional moment.”

“It’s cold out here. Let me talk to you in the cruiser, Mr. Broussard.”

“I don’t like sitting in cop cars. Come inside.”

“No.”

“A woman named Stokes was here earlier,” I say.

“Virginia Stokes?”

“She didn’t give her first name. She painted my barn door. The whole door, not just the swastika. She also repaired a board in the wall. You know her?”

“If she’s Virginia Stokes, she did a five-bit in Idaho. Second-degree homicide. She ran over a guy outside a bar, then backed over him. You didn’t get her mad at you, did you?”

“Maybe a little.”

She looks at her watch. “I’m off the clock in nine minutes, so I guess no one will object too much if I go into your house. I’m going to tell you a few things that might make you uncomfortable. You can believe them or not. But don’t you ever come to my home again without calling first. Also, you will never discuss me with my ex-husband.”

The swing on my veranda is empty and weightless and rhythmically squeaking in the wind. The moon has moved into the southeast and, I suspect, hangs over the great barren emptiness of the Big Hole, where history ended for the Nez Perce.

“Why do you hesitate, Mr. Broussard?”

“I fear the content of your knowledge, Miss Ruby. I don’t know if I want to be in possession of it. That said, please come inside.”

“You want me gone from your door, don’t you?” she replies.

“No, I would never say that to you.” I push open the door and let her walk ahead of me.

She removes her hat in the living room. The chandelier is lit above the dining room table, the Irish lace tablecloth snow-white, the two place settings I’ve kept for Fannie Mae and me immaculate and untouched by others and ultimately macabre if not perverse. “You have a nice home,” she says.

“Sit down, Miss Ruby. I’ll get our food.”

“You’d better hear what I have to say first.”

I have long called myself a believer, but even to myself I have never quite defined what I believe. I think the universe is infinite, but the terms “infinity” and “eternity” are abstractions that have no physical correlation. The possibility that matter can act as its own architect and create the human eye or brain strikes me as irrational. The great mystery for me has always been the presence of evil in the human breast. Animals kill in order to survive. The record of humankind is so bad we cannot look at it squarely in the face or dwell on its memory lest we become subsumed by it. No? Try watching the 1937 Japanese footage of their own crimes in Nanking. Or the footage from Auschwitz or Dachau or photographs from My Lai. Or read medieval accounts of disembowelment and burning of a condemned man’s entrails, followed by the drawing and quartering of his body, all of it performed alive.

Ruby Spotted Horse asks me to tell her everything I told her former husband. I do as she asks. When I finish, she says, “Ray Bronson is the most selfish human being I have ever known. He’s also a dirty cop, one with no bottom. Am I getting through to you?”

“I think I get your drift.”

“The cellar isn’t just a cellar, Mr. Broussard,” she says. “It’s a conduit into a cavernous world that has never been plumbed. The people there are dead, but they have the power to come back among the living. You’ve heard of the Baker Massacre on the Marias?”

“Wait a minute. Say all that again.”

She repeats the same statements. They obviously embarrass her.

“Yes, I know about the massacre,” I say. “The leader of the village was a Blackfoot named Heavy Runner.”

“Major Eugene Baker, the officer who murdered all those innocent people, is under my house. Or a spirit who looks like him.” She watches my face. I try to show neither belief nor disbelief. “What did you do with the note you picked up from the cellar floor?” she asks.

“Showed it to Jeremiah McNally. He’s in the sheriff’s department.”

“Yeah, I know him. What did he say?”

“That there was no writing on the page.”

She nods passively. “What did you do then?”

“Showed it to John Fenimore Culpepper. He read the message and got upset. Why can an ex-Klansman see the handwriting and not a sheriff’s detective?”

“Spirits like Baker belong to a group called the Old People. They can manipulate good people and use their virtues against them, but they can’t possess them. People in the system are a different matter. McNally is in the system. So am I.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The Old People plant themselves in the system. They need a banner above their heads. Religion, country, anything that justifies kicking lots of butt.”

“How about Culpepper? He saw the writing on the note. Just like I did.”

“Culpepper is probably more complex than we think.”

“I’m having a little trouble with this, Miss Ruby. No offense.”

“But you don’t dismiss it?”

“My father was the most intelligent man I ever knew. He used to say that science and art are nothing more than the incremental discovery of what already exists. He also believed the material world is an extension of an unseen one.”

We are sitting at the table, her hat crown-down on the lace tablecloth. Her eyes are moist.

“Did I say something wrong?” I ask.

“You have to forgive me. There aren’t many people who have your attitude. There’s one other thing I have to say.” She gazes at a silver-framed photo of Fannie Mae and me on our cherrywood sideboard. “The Old People can mask themselves as family members who have recently died. Has anything unusual happened around your property recently?”