“I feel like those burglars in that movie with the kid when his parents forgot him,” Marie said.
“Home Alone?”
“That’s the one.”
“Hope it turns out better for us than it did for them.”
WE WALKED TO THE BACK DOOR of the tribal office building. No lights were visible from the outside. Marie opened it with her key.
“Hello?” Marie’s voice rang out down the hallway.
No answer.
“I think we’re good,” she whispered. I handed her a flashlight and turned mine on.
We walked down the hall, our beams lighting the way. It was eerie in there, like being in a dim underground tunnel. Marie was quiet now, her cheery mood gone as the reality of our actions became clear to her.
“There it is,” Marie said, pointing her flashlight at a closed door. It had a lever handle lock, not the standard cylinder, which I knew I could open.
“Shit,” I said, pulling out my screwdriver. “Never worked on one of these before. Keep your light on it.”
I grabbed the lever to check the tension and twisted it. To my surprise, it turned all the way and the door swung open.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. Marie shone her flashlight, and I peered inside. Piles of papers, several coffee mugs, a few framed photos. It smelled like Delia’d left some food out to spoil, the odor sickly sweet like a rotten apple. I picked up my flashlight and waved it around the room. Delia’s computer was an older desktop model, set off in the corner.
“That what you’re looking for?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said in a low voice. “Should be no problem, unless the password’s been changed.”
“You do your thing. I’ll be in the hall by the door.” She sat down in Delia’s chair as I moved out of the room. “Hurry.”
She didn’t respond, her attention focused on the computer.
I walked down the hall to the back door. The plan was for me to wait there and make sure no one came in. I sat down on an old plastic chair, the flashlight by my side. I could see through the window into the darkness beyond, pitch-black, no cars or lights visible from my vantage point. Then my eyes adjusted to the night, and I could see a stand of trees next to an empty lot, the weeds blowing slightly in the wind.
I tried to stay focused on the road, watching for cars, but my mind wandered, and I remembered playing with my friend Will as a child in a field not far from here, both of us no more than seven or eight, chasing each other in the grass. Then we’d seen the sky darken abruptly as thousands of butterflies flew by, landing on us, our entire bodies covered with them. I’d laughed and shrieked with delight, but Will was terrified. He ran away, screaming, convinced that he’d committed some terrible sin, and the butterflies had somehow punished him for his deeds. Will and I were never really friends after that; I sensed he’d associated me with his terror and fright from that day, but we never spoke of it, both of us taking our separate paths. Last I heard, he’d moved to California, getting as far away from the reservation as he could.
My memories were interrupted by a set of headlights off in the distance. Although faint, they were headed our way. I glanced over my shoulder—no sign of Marie. The headlights grew closer, and the vehicle started to slow down.
Shit, were they coming here? Could it be the cleaning crew or some worker, come to finish a project? I thought about running down the hall and getting Marie, but I waited. Better to stay in the hallway and let her finish. I instinctively felt for the knife in my back pocket as I rehearsed several cover stories.
Then the headlights came to a complete stop about a block away. My heart pounded as I readied myself. Why were they stopping there? There were no houses close by, just an empty field. The lights turned off, and I saw a faint glow inside the car. A match or a lighter, for a cigarette or maybe some peji. Probably just teenagers, or maybe someone from the bar, stopping to spark up before the long drive home.
I began to relax, and realized I could use a smoke myself. I watched the glimmering in the car with some envy. After a while, the headlights turned back on, and the car drove away. A few minutes later, I heard a noise from down the hall. The sound of a door closing, then footsteps. The beam of Marie’s flashlight became visible, and she appeared in the darkness.
“You finished?” I asked, shining my light on her.
“Let’s go,” she said, and I saw her face was strained, a sour look playing across her features. We left as quickly as possible after checking to see that Delia’s door was closed and the computer had been turned off.
“You find what you were looking for?” I asked once we were in the car and a few miles away.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s not good.”
“Tell me.”
“Just like I thought, the grant money’s nearly gone. I found bank statements, check receipts, credit card payments. All the money was funneled to some company, none of it used for the bison program. It’s embezzlement, fraud. No wonder she wanted me out of the office.”
I looked over at her face. She looked despondent, not triumphant. “So what’s wrong?”
“I found the company. The one she’s been using for the illegal payments.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s called Indigi-Cultural Cuisine, LLC,” she said. “Lack’s business. He’s been working with her. To steal from the tribe.”
THE NEXT MORNING, she showed me the photos and copies she’d made of all the receipts and payments from the grant account.
“Are you sure this is Lack’s company?” I asked.
“Positive. I authorized a payment for the food truck to the same account. Trust me, I’ve already gone over this in my head a thousand times. As the assistant director, I should have been notified of all disbursements. She kept the payments on a different account so I couldn’t see them. As far as I can tell, about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars are gone.” She poured herself some tea and brought me some coffee.
“My God,” I said. “This is insane. Is it possible that Lack’s not involved—that maybe it’s someone else from his restaurant working with Delia?”
“Nope,” she said. “His company’s a sole-owner corporation. He’s the only one who handles the accounts. There’s no question she’s been making payments to him for false expenses. I even pulled up the invoices she made up. Bogus receipts for catering weddings, baby showers, seafood purchases, you name it. I know none of that happened, I would have heard about it at the restaurant if Lack was doing any catering.”
“You’re sure?” I said. “Those sound legit.”
“Not too many ten-thousand-dollar wedding receptions around here.” Her face was drawn. “No wonder Lack stayed here longer than he’d planned. He’s been getting all these phony payments. I’m guessing Delia probably split it with him.”
“You find any evidence of that?”
She nodded. “Yeah, bank deposits to her personal account, a few other receipts. She’s been cheating the tribe, no doubt. Probably find more scams, if I looked deeper.”
“So what are you going to do? You finally got Delia, you can expose her as a thief and fraud. Just like you’ve been saying all these years.”
“Yeah, she’s the worst. Stealing money from the people—makes my blood boil.”
“Well, she can rot in jail,” I said. “Embezzling government funds—the feds won’t ignore that. She’ll probably get ten years or more.”
She took a drink, then frowned. “You don’t get it. If I report Delia, Lack goes down too. All the good work he’s doing to help our people is over. So what do I do? Take out Delia and send Lack to jail? Then the oyate really suffer. Send two people to prison, hurt the entire tribe. No justice in that.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Those assholes steal over a hundred thousand dollars from the tribe, they deserve prison time,” I said. “Live in a cage, shit in a metal bowl—that’ll be some justice.”
“Right, and the indigenous food revolution stops. He’ll
be disgraced, which is fine, but so will the movement. Not to mention, the government will never award us another grant.”
“It can’t be just one guy with the healthy food?” I said. “There must be others talking about Native cooking and all that.”
“Not really. He’s the one getting the word out there in the press. He gets arrested, the media would jump all over it.”
“Can’t you report Delia and leave Lack out of it?”
“I thought about that, but there’s a paper trail leading to him. No way the prosecutors would miss it.”
This seemed incredible to me. She was actually planning to let these thieves steal a huge sum of money from the tribe and walk away. This wasn’t the Marie I knew.
“All right, I get that you don’t want to involve Lack,” I said. “I don’t agree, but I see your reasons. But if you don’t rat out Delia, she’ll just keep stealing. From the people. You think about that?”
She sighed. “Yeah, I have. All night long. Best I can come up with is this: maybe after the election, I go to my dad and tell him to keep Delia away from accounts payable. But I know him. He’ll start asking questions and figure it out.” She looked over at me, and I saw the anguish on her face. “Probably the best thing is for me to stay out of it, go become a doctor. Then I can at least help a few people. Instead of just fucking everything up.”
She put her head down on the table, only her black hair visible, her shoulders shuddering slightly.
I didn’t know how to comfort her, not when she was in such pain. I settled for a hand on her arm, the scabs and calluses on my knuckles contrasting against her soft skin. After a while, she took my hand, and we stayed there, silent.
24
The next weeks were hard. Marie remained depressed about the fraud she’d uncovered and wounded by the discovery that Lack was just another swindler. She’d believed in his work to change Native diets, which made the discovery all the more painful. Despite my attempts to persuade her, she stood by her decision not to report the embezzlement, because she didn’t want to derail the work Lack was doing nor create a scandal for the food program on our reservation. As for me, I would have happily sent both Delia and Lack to prison, but Marie had to work this out on her own, and she’d decided to focus on the greater good. She was convinced that Delia and Lack would receive the fate they deserved, that the universe would ensure it. I was skeptical, but kept my opinions on fate and justice to myself.
Not to mention, I had my own issues to deal with. Although I tried not to think about it, Nathan still had to wear the wire in order to fulfill the terms of his agreement with the prosecutors. He’d been laying low at school as he’d been instructed, waiting to hear from the heroin dealers and not raising any suspicions. He didn’t say anything more to me about kids bullying him at school, although I didn’t know if this had anything to do with my intervention with Ray Sits Poor or if he was just keeping quiet about it.
One afternoon, Nathan said he had something to tell me.
“Leksi, I saw those guys. You know, with the drugs. They were hanging around after school, and they asked if I wanted to buy some. I said yes.”
He looked at me like he’d done something wrong, but I think he was just scared. Scared of wearing the wire, scared of kids finding out what he’d done, scared that his life might change. Again.
“I’ll call the lawyer.”
I CONTACTED Charley Leader Charge first. When I finally got in touch with him, he said he’d phone the investigators right away and I should wait to hear from them. It didn’t take long. Dennis called me within the hour, said he’d start setting up the sting. Dennis spoke to Nathan on the phone, said that Nathan should talk to the dealers and find out when they could deliver the drugs. He told him to ask to buy more heroin, about ten times what he’d bought before. If they asked why he was getting so much, Nathan was to say that half of it was for a friend. He was to make sure that the deal would go down at the school, either inside or nearby. As soon as Nathan set up the day and time for the buy, he’d be fitted with the listening device. The wire.
The next morning Nathan went off to school, where he’d set up the purchase. He’d call me when it was confirmed, then he’d come home and meet with Dennis. They’d need about thirty minutes to get Nathan wired up. The reality began to sink in.
“Are you ready for this?” Marie asked while she brewed some tea, the Sparrow’s Tears blend.
“Don’t have a choice. Just hope Nathan can keep it together today. This shit is tough on me, must be a hundred times worse for him.”
“One more thing,” she said, pouring herself some black tea and adding a little sugar. “I don’t know if this is the right time, though.”
“Go ahead. Nathan’s stuff won’t get going until later today.” I watched Marie stir the tea, little swirls of darkness in her cup.
“Okay. So, here’s what’s going on.” She hesitated. “I guess you know I’ve been kind of down. The thing with Lack and Delia. Delia, she’s always been terrible, but I thought Lack was a good man, my friend. To find this out, it’s been . . .” She shook her head. “Now I don’t have a job, and it doesn’t feel right to work at the restaurant anymore. So I’m thinking maybe it’s time for a fresh start.”
She poured herself more tea, even though her cup was nearly full.
“Thing is, I have to give my answer to med school in two weeks. The one in Albuquerque. You know, I didn’t want to say anything about this while Nathan was around. But I have to make a decision soon. Be sure I’m comfortable. With everything.”
I’d been putting Marie’s med-school issue out of my mind. But now it was here.
“What are you going to do?”
“It’s what I’ve been working for, right?” she said. “Maybe I can do some good for the people this way. I mean, everything I did at the tribal office was for shit. And my folks are absolutely hysterical about it. They’d have one daughter who’s a banker and one doctor. That’s their dream, to show how accomplished their children are—not rezzy at all. Mom says she’ll disinherit me if I don’t accept. She hates it here, wants me to leave and move to a city. But this is my home.”
“Is this your dream, or your parents’?”
She looked away from me and began putting away the clean dishes in the drying rack. She’d come up with a new pattern of stacking bowls, cups, and dishes, a configuration she said made more sense than the haphazard scheme Nathan and I had been using.
“I don’t know anymore. Maybe it never was my thing. The school’s so damn far away. I mean, would you be able to visit me? I could come back for winter break and a few weeks in the summer. But that’s probably it.”
She stopped for a moment and looked closely at her teacup, like it had a minor flaw that no one but she could see. “I guess I’m wondering about you and me. What’s going to happen? You know, we’re good together. It’s different—better—than it was before. You’ve changed. A lot. You’re not trying to run away anymore—from what’s been chasing you.”
She put the cup down. “But what happens if I leave? Will you go back to being an enforcer? Do I get a phone call in a year telling me you’ve been killed, so I have to mourn the man I love?”
Love. A word we’d never used before. Did I love her? Of course. I always had. And if I loved her, then I had to do what was best for her. But I didn’t know what that was.
She looked over, waiting for me to say something.
THERE IS NO WORD for goodbye in Lakota. That’s what my mother used to tell me. Sure, there were words like toksa, which meant “later,” that were used by people as a modern substitute. She’d told me that the Lakota people didn’t use a term for farewell because of the idea that we are forever connected. To say goodbye would mean the circle was broken.
I pondered this. I sensed we needed to say goodbye to our old lives, whatever they were. Soon Nathan would cross a line he never knew existed, and Marie would be committing to a new life and career in New Mexico. Could I say
goodbye to her?
And me? I didn’t know what was in store for my world. Maybe it was time to stop taking vigilante jobs and get a new profession. I couldn’t even remember the person I’d been before I started beating people up. All around me I saw Natives doing good work: Marie with medical school, Ben at the tribal council, even Tommy with his new passion for cooking. Perhaps it was time for me to take up something new, something that didn’t involve using my fists. I remembered that before my father died, I’d helped him fix cars. He’d give me some little job and show me how to do it. Even though I must have been only seven or eight years old, I recalled the satisfaction I’d felt when I’d helped him with some minor repair. Taking out some part of an engine, putting it back in. The feeling of fixing something, not breaking or damaging things—or people. Maybe it was time for a long goodbye, farewell to what we’d known and lived, breaking the circle, severing our ties.
IN THE AFTERNOON I put my thoughts aside while I waited for Nathan’s phone call. Drug dealers were not known for their reliability, so the buy might not happen right away. I watched an old movie on TV, something about a con man and his mother. Then the door opened, and Nathan walked in.
“Everything all right? Thought you were going to call,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Got really hungry, didn’t have any money for a snack.”
“You talk to the guys?”
He opened the refrigerator and looked inside. Marie had cleared out most of the junk food he liked to eat. “Yeah, for like a second. They’re coming after school tomorrow. With the stuff. When school ends, around four o’clock.”
I wondered how he was so nonchalant. Maybe it was just an act, or the hubris of early adolescence. But perhaps it was for the best. I called Dennis and told him the buy was on. He said that Nathan should come home right after school tomorrow—early if he could—and meet with his team. They’d put the wire on him, give him some money for the purchase and a burner phone, and he’d go back to school to meet the dealers. After the buy, they’d be arrested and this whole mess would be over. Nathan would have satisfied his obligation to the prosecutors, and the charges against him would be dropped. We’d put our lives back together. If we could.
Winter Counts Page 21