I was done with this shit. I pulled my gun up and slowly moved to the door. I waited for five seconds, then made my move. I stood back and kicked the flimsy door. It made a crumpling sound as it gave way, and I nearly fell on my face as it opened.
“Who’s there? Come out now!”
My eyes adjusted to the light, and I saw a window was open, the wind blowing in. Trash was scattered all over, and there was a large hole in the corner of the floor. The wooden floor had rotted out, leaving the pink insulation exposed. It looked like dirty cotton candy. Feeling foolish, I slowly moved to the little bathroom and stuck my head in. No one in there, just a filthy toilet and more rubbish. One room left.
The bedroom door was ajar, and I pushed it open with my foot but stood back in case anyone took a shot. I waited a few seconds, trying to stay as still as possible.
No gunfire, so I slowly moved inside the doorway. There was no one there either, just a small bed, a dresser, and more trash. I relaxed a little.
I poked my foot in one of the piles on the floor. It looked like mostly food wrappers and empty beer cans. I didn’t see anything that looked like heroin. I started going through the drawers. Nothing, just an old phone directory, matches, ballpoint pens, and a few razor blades.
Then I saw it. Son of a bitch.
A package of balloons, the little ones used to wrap up heroin and other drugs. Sure, they were just balloons, but I didn’t think Rick Crow was having too many kids’ parties in this shithole. I felt anger rising up through my spine like a red wave.
But a bunch of balloons didn’t prove anything. Ben had said there was no solid evidence linking Rick to heroin, and I hadn’t seen any clear sign that junk was being sold here. I could use the money, but something about this job still seemed wrong. It was hard to believe that a two-bit hustler like Rick had the connections for serious drugs. Maybe someone had given Ben bad information—someone who wanted to set Rick up. There was no shortage of people who’d be happy to see Rick gone, and I was one of them. But I still needed to be sure that this job was legit.
I sifted through the garbage with my foot, looking for anything else that might give me more information. I picked up a notebook on a counter and leafed through it. There was a little writing on the first page. Some random numbers and a name: Martin Angel. The name wasn’t familiar to me, but I could look it up later. I poked around a bit more, looking for some clues. Nothing. On a whim, I picked up the filthy little twin mattress to see if there was anything underneath.
A box of .38 Super ammo.
But no gun.
THERE WERE ONLY THREE restaurants on the rez. A sandwich shop, with perpetually soggy cold cuts and wilted vegetables, the grill at the Depot bar, and JR’s Pizza, a shack selling something that vaguely resembled Italian food. I had a few bucks left—after buying some smokes—and wanted to treat Nathan, so I took him to the pizza place, which was his favorite. There was a flyer tacked outside the restaurant with a picture of a smiling young woman: MISSING, DONNA FLYING HAWK, HAVE YOU SEEN ME? A grungy rez dog sat on the sidewalk outside the place, eating what looked like a dead bird.
The place was tiny, with a small counter and a couple of broken-down tables and chairs. A handwritten sign taped to the drink cooler proclaimed WALL OF SHAME. It listed the people who’d passed bad checks and the amounts they owed: Yolanda White, $9.27; Stephanie Turning Heart, $19.48; Owen Bear Runner, $47.77. The one thing I liked about JR’s is that they had Shasta Cola, the low-rent Coke alternative I’d grown up drinking. My mother brought home six-packs when I was a kid, and I still loved them. They had a deep sugar punch that was like a horse kick to the head. We grabbed two cans and sat down.
“What do you want, a large pepperoni?” I asked him.
He grinned. “Sure, if you can afford it.”
“Yeah, I got you covered.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“Nothing. Wanted some food. You have a good time last night?”
“It was okay. Just hung out with Jimmy. Probably go over to his place tomorrow.”
I knew he wouldn’t tell me about his social life. He’d become more secretive as he entered his teenage years, but I’d figured out how to get him talking. He and Jimmy had become obsessed with UFOs, life on other planets, and why humans hadn’t been contacted by these space aliens yet. They would talk on their cell phones for hours, arguing about theories that explained why there’d been no contact from extraterrestrial beings and whether it was a good idea to send out a message from humans to the stars, directed at alien civilizations. Given the living conditions on the rez, it wasn’t hard to figure out why the boys were so fascinated with worlds far away from here.
“What’s the latest on the Martians?” I asked.
He squinted at me, checking to see if I was making fun of him. “Well, Jimmy still argues for the distance argument, but I been telling him that a Bracewell probe shreds the theory. Remember I told you about that?”
I didn’t remember, but I nodded.
He went on. “It just makes sense, but he won’t give it up. Yeah, the closest intelligent society may be millions of light-years away, but they must have sent a probe out! Why wouldn’t they want to find other worlds? Worlds with intelligent life? Not to mention, their civilizations developed millions of years before ours, so there gotta be like thousands, maybe millions of probes out there, but we haven’t seen one! Why not?” He looked at me expectantly.
“Uh, because they ran out of fuel?”
He rolled his eyes, then took a drink of his soda. “Jeez, no. The probes are obviously running on nuclear fusion. They can’t run out of fuel.”
“Okay, so why haven’t any alien ships found us yet?”
“Probes, not ships! Ships contain living creatures, which can’t survive thousands of years while traveling. Probes are AI, like robots; they can travel for millions of years because they’re machines.”
“All right, so why haven’t any alien probes discovered Earth?”
“Because obviously there are no probes! They would have found us by now. It’s only logical. If there were any alien probes, they would have detected our radio and TV transmissions, duh! So, process of elimination, the only possible answer is the simulation theory.” He looked at me with a triumphant smile.
I was enjoying this. “What’s the simulation theory?”
“It says that our world is just a computer simulation created by advanced beings to study us, and we don’t even know that we’re in it.”
“Like the Matrix movie?”
“Yes, exactly! Except that the rebels in the movie were able to escape from the matrix. We can’t do that. Not yet, anyway.”
“So who controls this matrix? Are we like the people in that movie, just batteries for their civilization? What do they want from us?”
He finished his Shasta and grabbed another one out of the cooler. “Well, that’s the part I haven’t figured out yet. I been thinking, if someone could learn how to alter the simulation, then maybe they could reprogram it, go back in time, maybe do something.”
“You mean like change something that already happened?”
“Yeah, I guess.” He looked away from me.
I could tell what he was thinking. Although he’d hidden them, he had pencil drawings of his mom buried in his drawers at home. Pictures of his mother dancing at a powwow, drawings of her holding him as a baby, pictures of her graduating from school. Drawings of what she would have looked like if she’d lived. Some elaborate drawings, some just simple pictographs like those used in our winter-counts calendar. He’d never shown me the pictures, but I’d seen them.
Our pizza arrived, and Nathan started eating like it was his last meal. I took a bite. Cardboard covered with tomato soup and commodity cheese. Disgusting. I’d had real pizza before. I let him go at it while I sipped my Shasta.
After we finished, it was quiet. He started messing around with his phone, and I decided to give it a shot. I knew Nathan had fooled around with pot
a few times, but I’d never given him grief for it. Maybe he knew something about the other stuff.
“Hey, you hear anything about heroin around here?”
He looked up from his phone. “No. Why do you ask?”
“Somebody said Rick Crow might be starting to bring it in. You ever talk to him?”
“I know who he is, that’s all.”
“C’mon, don’t bullshit me. I know he sells peji, beers. You see any harder crap going around?”
“I’ve heard some of the kids talk about pills, I guess, but I never heard nothing about heroin,” he said. “Maybe monkey water, I don’t know. I think they do more of that stuff over at Pine Ridge.”
“Okay, but let me know if you hear anything.” I finished the last of my Shasta. “Hey, can you check out a name on your phone for me?”
My cell phone was an old-fashioned flip model, without any fancy features. We both got cheap mobile phones at the Walmart just over the border in Nebraska, but his model had text messages and the internet.
“Yeah, what is it?”
“Martin Angel,” I said, spelling it for him. “Maybe in Colorado.”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket while I made my way to the men’s room. I got the key from the counter and went inside. There was an ancient gas-station vending machine mounted on the wall, advertising three different products for the bargain price of only seventy-five cents each. Genuine Horny Goat Weed, which promised to enhance desire and improve performance; the Quickie Marriage License, apparently a phony certificate for those in a hurry to consecrate their sacred pizza-shop union; and scented, neon-colored condoms. The circle of life.
When I returned, Nathan handed his phone to me and I looked down at the screen. MARTIN ANGEL, WELLNESS RELIEF CENTER, 1280 S. FEDERAL, DENVER.
Wellness Relief Center? What was it, a massage parlor? Then I scrolled down further. COLORADO’S BEST CANNABIS DISPENSARY.
4
The next day, I decided I’d give one last shot to learning more about Rick Crow’s activities, whatever they were. It was no surprise that Rick Crow had a marijuana connection down in Denver. But that didn’t necessarily mean he was involved with heroin. On the other hand, I needed the money, and I liked the thought of putting the hurt on Rick. I just had to make sure that I wasn’t stepping in someone else’s mess. If anyone knew what the deal might be, it was Jerome Iron Shell. Jerome was a medicine man and knew everyone and everything in town. He ran a sweat most Saturdays at his house, so I could talk to him there.
When I pulled up, he didn’t seem surprised to see me. His long gray hair hung down over a bright-blue Pendleton-style jacket, the kind you buy at powwows for forty bucks and a wink.
“Need any help?” I asked him.
“Sure. Give me a hand with these stones.”
I grabbed the pitchfork and wedged it under one of the grandfather stones in the pit. Jerome and I took turns moving the grandfathers to the fire box.
“You want to take a sweat?” he said. I was surprised he’d asked—he knew that I didn’t do ceremonies. But maybe if I did sweat, he’d be willing to give me some information. Or maybe I’d hear something from one of the others there. And hell, it couldn’t hurt.
“Yeah, okay. But I got to head home right after.” I grabbed another stone with the pitchfork. “Hey, ask you a question?”
He nodded.
“You hear anything about Rick Crow selling heroin?”
“Heroin?” He shook his head. “No, that’s not his deal. He smokes some peji, sells a little. Why? You gonna go after him?”
“No, just asking. Listen, keep this quiet, okay?”
I noticed Jerome’s grandson Rocky and about fifteen other people standing outside the lodge. Jerome pointed at the crowd, and Rocky placed three buckets of water inside the lodge. Jerome nodded, and everyone took off their shoes and the men took off their shirts. Some were wearing gym shorts, others just towels. The people wearing eyeglasses stuck them in their shoes outside the tent. I briefly wondered if I was wearing clean boxers, then stripped off my jeans and shirt and crawled into the lodge with the others. I sat down next to the drummers. It had been a long time since I’d sat in a sweat lodge, and I wondered if I’d remember what to do in there.
After a few minutes, the drums started pounding and someone began to sing. After they finished, Jerome started to pray in Lakota. I listened to his words, not understanding most of it, though I could grasp the basic meaning. Then Jerome poured a bucket of water over the rocks. I heard a hissing sound like a large, angry snake as a huge cloud of steam filled the lodge. Then he closed the door, enveloping us in darkness. I tried to get comfortable, but my legs kept bumping into someone else’s. It was hard to breathe, and I could feel sweat already pouring down my chest. The heat was excruciating, beyond words, and I lost track of time. My lungs felt like they were burning from the inside, and I tried to keep my mind off the extreme temperature by listening to the sound of my own breathing and the drums, which had started again.
I tried to focus on the beat of the drums, but became distracted by someone sobbing on my left. It sounded like one of the women, but it was hard to tell. The crying and wailing went on for what seemed like hours, and it began to rise and lower in pitch, so it became less like sobbing and more like a chant of some sort. Then it sounded like the sobbing was somebody speaking or whispering very softly. It seemed important that I understand what was being said, and I tried to quiet every thought so that I was utterly still.
At some point I must have fallen asleep despite the heat, because I dreamed that my sister, Sybil, was next to me. She whispered things I didn’t understand at first, and I felt sad and told her to go away. But she kept telling me, over and over, to remember the birds. And to hurry. Remember the birds. And the lost bird. What does that mean? I asked, but she wouldn’t say any more.
We must have gone through four rounds in there, but I couldn’t remember. The sweat ended when Jerome shouted “Mitakuye oyasin!” and I crawled out into the light. As I drank cool water, I thought about my dream and what it meant. Then it came to me.
The year our mom died, Sybil and I had drawn a picture of dead birds on our winter-counts calendar to represent her death. That winter, not only had our mother passed away, but it had been so cold on the reservation that many birds froze to death as well. To us, that time had always been the year our mother and the birds left us.
BY THE TIME I GOT HOME from the sweat, it was late. The lights were on, so I knew Nathan was there, probably asleep or playing video games. He’d been alone all day, but he knew how to take care of himself. I was exhausted and hungry. No fresh food left in the fridge, but I found an old frost-covered Tombstone Pizza in the bowels of the freezer. I heated it up in our ancient microwave, which required five extra minutes to cook anything.
I settled back with my soggy pizza and contemplated the Rick Crow situation. I still couldn’t figure out why Ben would offer me five large to take care of Rick instead of just going to the feds. I understood why he wouldn’t go to the rez police. By federal law, tribal police couldn’t prosecute any felony crimes that happened on the rez. Jerome had told me that this law was because of the murder way back in the 1880s of Chief Spotted Tail. The killer had been banished, but not jailed. He said the wasicus were so upset by the Native way of justice that they passed a law taking away our right to punish our own people. So tribal courts could only charge misdemeanor crimes—little stuff, like shoplifting or disorderly conduct. The tribal police had to refer all felonies to the federal investigators. But the feds usually declined to prosecute most of them. They’d follow through on some, usually high-profile cases or violent crimes. But standard sex assault cases, thefts, assault and battery—these crimes were usually ignored. And the bad men knew this. It was open season for raping any Native woman, so long as the rape occurred on Indian land.
When the legal system broke down like this, people came to me. For a few hundred bucks they’d get some measure of reve
nge. My contribution to the justice system.
But heroin was different. This wasn’t a wife-beating or car theft, crimes that the feds never gave a shit about. Busting a heroin ring would get major press and probably make some federal prosecutor’s career. Ben had to know that, so why wouldn’t he take his intel to the FBI? Maybe he was being straight with me, and there wasn’t enough hard evidence linking Rick to the dope.
I’d had enough for the night, so I went to go check on Nathan. I could see that his lights were on, so I’d turn everything off and cover him with a blanket. I opened the door and saw that he was passed out on his bed, all of his clothes still on, one arm hanging down at his side.
“Dude, why don’t you get into your shorts and get under the covers?”
He didn’t respond.
“Nathan, let’s go to bed, I’m tired.”
Still no response.
“Nathan?”
I looked at him closely. His face and lips were gray, almost blue. I saw an empty balloon, a lighter, and some crumpled, burned foil on the floor. There was an acrid vinegar odor in the air.
Oh no.
“Nathan, wake up! Get up!”
I tried to sit him up, but he was too heavy and fell back onto the bed. I pulled his eyelids up. His pupils were tiny and dark, like miniature black holes, and his skin felt cold and clammy. I slapped his face, hard.
“Nathan, open your eyes! Wake up!”
No response, but I saw his chin move, just a little. I ran to the living room for my cell phone. The IHS hospital was fifty miles from here, and the tribal police station about twenty. The tribal cops were my only hope.
My hands shaking, I dialed the number.
“Police.”
“This is Virgil Wounded Horse. My nephew—he’s overdosing! He won’t wake up, you need to send—”
“What is your address?”
“Please hurry, he’s unconscious—”
“I need your address, sir.” He sounded pissed off, like I was stopping him from going home after a long shift.
“Eighty-three and Spidergrass Road—we’re the only house out here.”
Winter Counts Page 3