by John Sayles
–above the photo Mrs. Hickey sent, Wayne Lee smiling at the camera in a motorcycle racing outfit, his helmet under his arm, and then the phone numbers and e-mail addresses to contact. Nice-looking boy, like an actor on a TV show if his hair was shorter, and Marjorie is sorry she never got to meet him.
And probably never will.
“So much room to get lost in.” Mrs. Hickey is staring out the window at the prairie again, brooding. This time of year, no wildflowers out, the cattle mostly in at their winter feed lots, it is pretty bleak. And then with the wind, rocking the car sideways now and then as they travel west on 23.
“E-mails, telephones, all that stuff,” says Marjorie, resigned to tuck in between water trucks and go their speed, “make you forget how big the world is.”
“He’d be passing everybody right now, Wayne Lee.”
She hopes it’s only an observation and not a criticism of her driving. There’s just as many trucks in the opposite lane, coming into the rez, and weaving in and out to pass won’t get you anywhere.
“Couldn’t bear to wait for anything, even when he’s little.”
“They had him on Ritalin,” says the sister from the back seat. “Or else he’d be bouncing off the walls in school.”
The sister still has her arms folded across her chest like she has since she got here. Either she thinks this is a waste of time or is jealous of Wayne Lee getting all the attention. “She likes girls,” Mrs. Hickey muttered the first minute they had alone, as if this explained everything.
The trailer is just off the highway and Marjorie pulls over. There’s an ATV parked out front, same model as what the Cunningham kid has got, only with nice-looking Indian Power and Fueled by Frybread stickers on it. Marjorie hasn’t heard about anybody in Dickyboy’s family getting an oil lease.
She probably bangs on the door too hard, but the TV is on real loud inside, a game show playing, probably cranked up to compete with the constant rumble of trucks going by. Olivia Burdette answers, wearing a sweatshirt for some sports team, a big wolf head on the front of it. She looks puzzled to see them.
“Yeah?”
Marjorie’s mom used to go to the bingo with Olivia, said she could handle five cards at once and smoked a pack of Luckies before the night was over.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Burdette– is Dickyboy home?”
“He in trouble?”
“No, Ma’am, but we’re trying to find somebody that he knows.”
Olivia scowls at Mrs. Hickey, trying to place her and coming up with nothing. Dickyboy is her grandson, living with her on and off since his father checked out and his mother Ella had the breakdown.
“Yeah, he come by today. Out back,” she says, and closes the door.
There’s a shed out back that’s been patched with different materials over the years, and a metal DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on the door knob. Marjorie gets one of her twinges and signals for Mrs. Hickey and the sister to hang back.
“Let me go first.”
With the oil money and whatnot floating around, there’s more guns than ever on the rez, and as her heartthrob Steve Earle sings, a pistol is the devil’s right hand. She doesn’t knock, but calls out loud.
“Dickyboy? It’s Marjorie Looks for Water.”
Some quick shuffling of items inside, then the reply. “What do you want?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Wayne Lee Hickey.”
Nothing for a moment, just the truck noise from the road.
“Never heard of him.”
“Come on, Dickyboy, it’s just me and his family here. No cops, no problem.”
Another long moment and then he opens the door. He looks too wide to fit through it, the whites of his eyes tinted red, not a happy boy.
“What about him?”
“You knew him. Know him.”
“I seen him around.”
“When’s the last time?”
“Can’t say.”
He looks past her to Mrs. and the sister.
“This is Wayne Lee’s mother and his sister”– what was her name again?– “Patty. He’s gone missing.”
Dickyboy shrugs. “I ain’t in charge of him.”
He was a nice boy, smart, and she babysat him regular on bingo nights. Glued together plastic battleships.
“I’m not interested in whatever you’re up to,” she says, holding his eyes with hers. “It’s just everybody says that you and that Dylan Foster who was in the accident were hanging around with him. Riding in that Camaro.”
“So?”
He’s just a little younger than Jimmy was when he left, Marjorie only nine then and riding in to Yellow Earth to see him get the pictures taken in his dress uniform. So handsome. He said Parris Island wasn’t so bad, just a lot of screaming and pushups, and you only did one tour, 365 days, where the fighting was. And then he got on the bus and they never saw him again.
“What was he up to?”
“He was a driver for Chairman Killdeer’s company.”
“I mean hanging around with high school kids?”
Dickyboy shrugs again. Drop sixty, seventy pounds and lose that sullen look and he’d be good-looking.
“Liked to party,” he says. “Sold a little pot.”
“A little.”
“When he had something,” says Dickyboy, practicing his hard-eyes for the day the police come to see him, “he’d share it or sell it.”
“He liked young girls?”
“What do you think?”
“Anyone in particular?”
He looks away then. He used to go with the Chairman’s stepdaughter, Fawn, back in junior high, and there’s rumors about her, but none involving Wayne Lee Hickey.
“Tina,” he says.
“I don’t know a Tina.”
“She lives out south of Yellow Earth, on a farm. Tina Dollarhide.”
With True Crime you never know what little bit of evidence will be the key. You build the picture, try to get into people’s heads, follow your hunches. It was embarrassing the one time she contacted America’s Most Wanted and it turned out to be somebody else when they caught him, but Mr. Glaser at the finance company really did look like the guy from New Jersey who killed his whole family, or at least what the face-artist had guessed he’d look like twenty years later. And he did give her a creepy feeling, like they say certain people get when they’re in the room with a genuine psychopath.
“Anybody you can think of,” she asks, Mrs. Hickey standing just behind her now to hear better, “who might have wanted to do Wayne Lee harm?”
“Naw,” says Dickyboy, flicking a glance of what might be sympathy to the mother. “He was a cool dude.”
SPARTINA, WHICH IS HER whole name, is not in, so they are sitting with Clemson Dollarhide. Her uncle Brewster has grazing scenes by the same painter up on his rec room wall– you can’t miss the style. Each one in this room has got a different breed in the distance– Angus against dry yellow grass over here, Charolais white on a green hill over there, a huge herd of Herefords spread out over the fireplace mantel. He’s asked them to come in and sit, old-school polite and formal, and takes his time getting into his chair.
“I never had the pleasure of meeting your son,” he says to Mrs. Hickey. “But I’ve heard some about him.”
“Your daughter knows him?” The sister now, Pat, getting bolder as the long day wears her mother down.
“That’s what I understand. She’s still at school. Fashion Club, I believe.”
Something tense here, Marjorie thinks. The way he’s sitting, and it isn’t just arthritis.
“Has she ever talked to you about him?” she asks.
“We had”– and here the old man looks up as if searching for a word– “we had a discussion. Some might call it a heated discussion.”
“Because–?”
“Because it isn’t appropriate for a young lady of her age to be spending time with somebody his age.”
His gaze comes down to Mrs. Hickey, not hostile, just straight talking.
“As a matter of fact,” says Mr. Dollarhide, “I’ve been looking for your son myself.”
“To have a word with him–” Marjorie says, trying to head it off.
“To kick his young ass and tell him to stay away from my granddaughter.”
Mrs. Hickey is just staring holes into the man. It’s clear that in her mind her son has never been guilty of a single thing, not even the felonies he did time for back home.
“But you didn’t track him down?”
“No. And I already told Crowder I had my rifle in the back seat, but that was just a precaution.”
Marjorie turns to Mrs. Hickey and Pat. “Sheriff Crowder is in charge over to Yellow Earth,” she says. “We talk to him tomorrow.”
“If he is missing,” says Mr. Dollarhide, “it’s because he has chosen to absquatulate.”
“Abs– what?”
“To retreat without honor.”
In the True Crime books sometimes the perpetrators are very bold, almost daring the detectives to come after them. But Marjorie isn’t feeling a killer vibe in here.
“I want to talk to this granddaughter,” says Mrs. Hickey, eyes hard and fixed on Clemson.
“I’ll tell her you come by. Leave one of those flyers.”
He’s still a suspect, for sure, but not likely to give anything up that he doesn’t want to. The paper has done a couple articles about his fight with the state over right of way for the oil people, got drilling operations on properties all around him that have to loop way around his land to get to the highway. Acting as his own lawyer and not doing a bad job of it, from what she can tell. Good for old people to have a hobby.
Mrs. Hickey stands and Marjorie and Pat do the same. Time to leave.
“I do hope you find what you’re looking for, M’am.”
THEY MEET IN GINGER’S Café across the street from the Yellow Earth Cinema, which is featuring The Expendables. That’s me, thinks Danny Two Strike, pulling up to the curb. A tired action hero trudging toward one more payday.
“You fellas planning a bust?” asks the waitress who pours their coffee, a local woman in her forties.
“If you don’t have real milk instead of that damn whitener,” says Will, “it might be this place.”
“I’ll get you some.”
“So,” says Danny, sitting back, “I say it’s fifty-fifty he’s in Mexico, drinking margaritas and waiting for the whole thing to blow over.”
“Could be. With some of the characters Skiles has got hanging around him, if he was mad at me I’d want to blow town.”
“But then you got more than half a brain and aren’t a drug dealer.”
“Good point. I brought Clem Dollarhide in for a talk, but there was nothing there.”
“What’s he got to do with Wayne Lee Hickey?”
“Hickey’s been seeing his granddaughter Tina.”
“Seeing.”
“Assume the worst.”
“She’s not eighteen yet.”
Tina Dollarhide works at the Havva Javva. Very nice girl, seems sensible–
“If we ever find the guy,” says Will, “I can try to bust him for it. But she’s all worried and weepy about him disappearing, so I don’t expect any cooperation.”
“The one I’d love to nail is that Skiles.”
“Stand in line. But through the wonders of subcontracting, I can’t get much of anything on him. Jim Wilson from the Bureau is looking into his financial dealings, but those boys take forever.”
“He and Harleigh have called it quits.”
“Good for Harleigh.”
“And they were tight. Vacation together, went out hunting.”
“Bows and arrows?”
“I doubt it. Think he got an elk last year, Brent.”
“Which suggests a rifle. Which he can’t have, not with a felony record.”
“You’ve checked? He’s got a record?”
“It isn’t a record, it’s a double album,” says Will. “Fraud, robbery, assault, jumping bail a couple times, credit card theft.”
“Assault?”
“Two convictions. Did county time in Texas. The officer I talked to there says they were readying a drug indictment when he left. The thing is, most of his business here is in his wife’s name. Some tax deal.”
“You could get a writ, search his house.”
“He doesn’t have a house. The one he built is in his wife’s name.”
“And she is–?”
“His wife.”
“Right. And she might be terrified of disappearing like Wayne Lee Hickey.”
Both of them have had bad guys waltz out of their jurisdictions due to insufficient evidence, both have guys just as bad still infecting their turf. It would be nice to take one off the board.
Will digs into his turkey burger, checking out the street through the window. Danny knows the reflex, in or out of uniform– whatever is going on is my business. He tries to remember back before he put his antennae out, before he noticed every out-of-state license plate or trailer with a funny smell coming out of it. He’s only been shot once, by the wife in a domestic he was breaking up, who claimed she was trying to hit her boyfriend but they both knew that was bullshit. The guy put her in the hospital again just last week, jaw wired shut, the wife just shaking her head with oxycontin eyes when Danny asked her to testify.
“So tell me,” says Will, still gazing out the window, “you ever been in a relationship with somebody from a totally different world?”
A personal question from Sheriff Crowder.
“Well– I married Winona, who was like Dakota Sioux with a vengeance. “
“But you were both Indians.”
“And Swedes and Italians are both white people.”
“I get it.”
“It took me a couple years to figure out I was never going to be invited to join her club.”
“Which you wanted?”
“Honorary member, sure, I was willing to go that far. But her club was her personality, not her, like, tribal affiliation.”
“And you and that Ruby?”
Danny is stunned for a moment, recovers.
“You know about that?”
“I’m not supposed to?”
Try to keep a secret on the fucking reservation. Danny has only had one call from Ruby since she left to work for the Lummis, lots of complaining about the weather, saying how him coming there would improve her mood a hundred percent. Totem poles in the drizzling rain– it depresses him just thinking about it.
“Her people and mine never even met in the old days, much less warred against each other,” says Danny, “but mostly she’s a lot more educated than me.”
“That’s what I mean, different worlds.”
“You thinking of marrying an extraterrestrial or something?”
Will frowns, shakes his head slightly. “I figure you should be willing to meet someone halfway. But halfway between Yellow Earth and New Center is different than halfway between here and China.”
“She’s Chinese?”
Will shakes his head again. “She’s a field biologist.”
“Nature Girl!”
“That’s what you call her?”
“If she had an Indian name it would be Dances With Rodents.”
Will laughs. “She’s not totally dorky or anything.”
“I’m sure she’s great. Looks good in those khaki shorts.”
“The thing is, she’s younger.”
“How’s your lateral movement these days?”
Will had been a basketball, football, and baseball standout in high school, not quite Division 1 material but a force to deal with.
“My knees pop when I roll over in bed.”
“Right. The older you get, the less flexible you are. So if something feels good right now, I wouldn’t overthink it.”
“You’re saying this could be my last shot?”
Dann
y can see that the man is serious, seriously asking his opinion. “Have you ever thought about who you’d be,” he asks, “if you moved away from here?”
SPARTINA WAITS TILL THE car is out of sight, till her grandfather stops walking around, obviously upset by the visit. She came in through the back, quiet as usual, and heard the last part of it. Something has happened. Something bad. And she’s sure it has to do with the guy he worked for, that Brent who got Fawn pregnant and then wanted her to have it fixed.
Tina takes her shoes off and pads past her grandfather, who doesn’t hear so well anymore, and into the kitchen. She knows if she uses her cell phone there will immediately be a record of who it is, but maybe from a landline–
She uses the old rotary in the kitchen, the dial loudly clicking as it rolls back into position. Once Fawn came over and made fun of it, saying with a phone like that the whole house should be in black and white. The dispatcher answers.
“Sheriff Crowder, please?” she says, pressing her mouth close to the receiver. “It’s personal.”
The woman says he’s not in but can connect him if this is his sister again. Tina says it is and there is a little wait.
Sheriff Crowder comes on the phone.
“Brent Skiles who owns the truck company?” she says. “He’s got guns in his house. Like army guns that can’t be legal, lots of them.”
And hangs up.
THEY DON’T TALK ON the way back, Mrs. Hickey staring out at the empty plain again. Marjorie remembers when the Google Earth thing became available and she found Khe Sanh in Vietnam on it and went to the satellite view, zooming down in to check out the area where Jimmy disappeared. He was on a patrol ‘outside the wire,’ the Marines said. And they took fire and some were killed and wounded and when it was all over Jimmy wasn’t accounted for. And sure, maybe like her mother always says, he could have been hit on the head and got amnesia and be a prisoner there with no idea who he is, but all Marjorie thought staring at the different splotches of green, like a whole country of camouflage cloth, was how are you going to find a set of dogtags in all that?
There’s still not an affordable room to be had in Yellow Earth or Watford City, so the Hickeys are staying with her, Mrs. Hickey on the foldout and Pat on an air mattress on the floor. If she’d let Chairman Killdeer know this he probably would have found something better, but he’s got an agenda of his own and it was clear Mrs. Hickey didn’t trust him.