Winter Counts

by David Heska Wanbli Weiden

  I steadied the little revolver and waited for my shot. I saw him aim his gun, his eyes squinting in the hazy light. I sighted mine on his chest and fired.

  Missed! The shot went wide, and I pulled the trigger again. The gun clicked harmlessly, telling me I was out of ammunition and shit out of luck. There should have been one more round, and I realized it hadn’t been fully loaded. Christ, how could I have made the fucking rookie mistake of not checking the cylinder?

  Even before I heard the boom, I felt a stinging sensation in my shoulder. I’d been hit. I waited for the second shot, but it didn’t come. I looked over and saw Loco hunched over his gun, which must be out of ammo, or maybe jammed.

  Either way, I still had a chance. A slim one. I tossed the revolver on the floor and looked for something to use. The cattle prod was lying on the ground by Nathan, so I ran over to him. I was picking it up when he yelled, “Uncle! Watch out!”

  Loco was coming at me again, gun in hand, having fixed his problem. I took a quick glance at the cattle prod, fumbling for the power button. There was usually a safety switch, and I had to hope it had already been turned off.

  Loco stopped and put his sights at me, expecting that I’d run for cover. Instead, I went straight at him, much to his surprise. I thrust the prod onto his chest, right on his blue polo shirt, and hit the trigger. The voltage coursed through his body, and he fell down, shaking.

  I stood over him and shifted the hotshot directly on his neck, hoping it was strong enough to disable him forever. I hit the power again, and watched as fifty thousand volts surged through his nervous system. I kept it there until he stopped moving.

  The pain in my shoulder was getting worse, much worse. It felt as if somebody’d stuck a hot grandfather rock from the sweat lodge directly into my body. And if the bullet had hit an artery, I was in deep shit. I noticed that my shirt was drenched with blood, which wasn’t good. I looked around for something to use as a bandage, anything I could stick on there to stop the bleeding.

  Then the world rotated away as I was pulled backward onto the ground, my gaze fixed on the light fixtures up on the ceiling. It took me a second to realize that there was an arm around my neck, choking me. Loco was behind me, squeezing the breath from my lungs. He’d somehow shaken off enough electricity to put down a buffalo.

  I struggled to pry his arm loose, but he had me in a sleeper hold. The move was highly effective; I’d used it many times when I needed to incapacitate someone. His right arm was looped around my throat, and his other pushed against my neck, cutting off the flow of both blood and air. He increased the pressure on my larynx, and I started choking, knowing that I had about ten seconds before I’d go unconscious.

  I tried turning my head to open my airway, without success. My only chance of breaking a choke hold was to force his arms off my neck. I started clawing at them, but the loss of blood from the gunshot had weakened my strength, and I couldn’t get any leverage. My vision started going gray around the edges.

  I could hear Nathan yelling something at me. What was it? It seemed like he was saying he was proud of me. I didn’t think there was a goddamn thing to be proud of—I’d had clean shots at Loco and flat out missed. Then I’d failed again with the hotshot. I thought about my life ending in this crappy building, how everything I’d experienced and lived had brought me to this place, this moment.

  “The prod! The prod!”

  Suddenly I understood that, while Nathan was tied to the chair, he’d somehow managed to kick the cattle prod toward me with his foot. I grabbed it with my right hand and stabbed blindly at Loco with it. Startled, he lessened the pressure for a second, which gave me an opening. I finally broke his choke hold and breathed in deeply, the oxygen flooding my cells as I stood up.

  Loco was kneeling on the ground and I kicked him hard, stunning him and knocking him on his back. “Fuck you!” he hissed.

  “No, fuck you, wanagi.” Ghost. Loco was an evil spirit, and it was time to banish him from this world and send him to the next.

  I took the cattle prod and jammed it into his right eye socket. He screamed, and I leaned in with all of my weight, inserting the device as far as I could into his head. I pushed down until I felt resistance, the back of his skull. He started shaking, his body jerking and convulsing, then he began to babble and drool, trying to express some final thoughts.

  I wouldn’t take any chances this time. I hit the power switch on the hotshot, sending the voltage directly into his brain, frying whatever was left in there. His head shuddered and trembled, but I kept at it until he wasn’t moving at all.

  Though I knew he was dead this time, I glanced down at his body to make sure. After a moment of staring at the corpse, I was convinced, then decided to sit down. I wanted to cut Nathan loose, but the pain from the gunshot was back in full force, and I felt tired. Exhausted, really. I stretched out on the floor and looked around for Nathan. The butane torch was still burning on the ground, blue sparks glimmering. I tried to tell Nathan to turn the damn thing off, but I couldn’t spot him, and I don’t think he heard me. I thought he was speaking, telling me something, but whatever he was saying, I couldn’t understand. It didn’t matter now anyway.

  When I tried to stand, I couldn’t make it up. Time seemed to expand and contract, and I could feel my thoughts pooling in my head. I wondered what sort of bullets Loco used, and if he’d used a hollow-point that had fragmented in my body. I reflected about what happens when a bullet explodes inside you, how dozens of little shards ricochet and bounce around, slicing open veins and arteries.

  It started to hurt to lie on my back, so I curled up on my side. It felt good to rest after the day I’d had. I thought I saw an eagle fly above me in the room, which didn’t make any sense. I heard sounds, but they were just like the ghostly voices in my dream, fleeting and evanescent.

  Though Nathan was really yelling at me now, I still wasn’t listening. I thought again about the vision I’d had in the yuwipi, and the little child—the lost bird—who had been shot by the soldier at Wounded Knee. The baby had looked at me in her last moments, and that’s when I’d seen everything I would ever need to know. The expression on her face was compassionate, and I saw she’d accepted her fate and wanted me to understand that. She wanted me to know that I was forgiven, and that there was mercy for me and for all the wounded and the lost. I focused on the baby, her little face filled with love, and closed my eyes.

  Epilogue

  Nine Months Later

  I pulled into the parking lot for the powwow. Nathan got out of my truck, a used Ford F-150, and ran out to find his girlfriend, Shawna, who was already there. He’d been running cross-country at his new high school and had discovered he had a talent for it. He was talking about running cross-country and track at college, and he and Shawna spent every night discussing various combinations of universities they could attend together.

  All charges against Nathan had been dropped once it became clear he’d been framed. But it had taken him some time to recover from the incident at the slaughterhouse. For a long while, he had trouble sleeping and suffered from a pretty deep depression. He wouldn’t go to school—claimed there were too many bad memories there. But after a few months he started to open up, largely due to Shawna, who’d come by to visit him. He’d transferred to her high school, and it had made all the difference. He wasn’t the same person he’d been a year ago, but maybe none of us were.

  Guv Yellowhawk had confessed and was serving fifteen years for various charges. Ben’s widow, Ann, had left the reservation in shame and anger, denying that Ben had ever sold drugs despite the overwhelming evidence otherwise. The feds arrested the remaining members of the Denver gang and were working to capture the leaders of the cartel. For now, there were no pain pills or heroin being sold on the rez, but I knew it would be impossible to keep that stuff away forever.

  Delia Kills in Water was arrested for embezzlement after an investigation showed that she’d been working with Ben, not Lack, to defraud th
e government by diverting funds from the bison grant. Chef Lack had cooperated fully with the authorities and was cleared of any wrongdoing. Delia had been able to post a hefty bond to get out of jail while she awaited trial, and had retained Charley Leader Charge to represent her. Word on the street was that she planned to blame everything on Ben Short Bear at her trial. Nearly everyone thought that Delia would be convicted, but I wasn’t so sure. She’d never paid for her crimes in the past, and I wondered if she’d escape justice again.

  As for me, I’d spent a few weeks in the IHS hospital recovering from my injuries, and don’t remember much from that time. Nathan had been there as well, receiving treatment for the burns to his arms and chest. They told me I’d nearly died on the floor of the slaughterhouse, but they’d been able to bring me back. I guess it wasn’t my time. They had to leave pieces of the bullet in my shoulder bone, and I’d never be able to raise my arm above my head again without pain, but I had no complaints. I just wished I’d been a better shot.

  I gathered the two star quilts out of the back of my truck, along with the baskets for the giveaway. The small arena was already crowded, and the grand entry for the dancers would take place in two hours. An elderly man held the door open for me, smiling, as I walked inside with my items. As I set the baskets and star quilts at the front of the stage, I spotted the drum group off to the side. I went over to greet them and gave them a carton of cigarettes.

  “You ready?” said Jerome, who’d walked up behind me. He’d recovered from his collapse at the yuwipi and wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened to him at the ceremony. He’d only said that he saw some “bad stuff.” I think he’d had the same vision as me, but had somehow taken the full brunt of the pain into his own being, so that I could go out and save my nephew.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Nathan and I took a sweat last night. Felt good.”

  “All right. We’ll get started in about twenty minutes.”

  I went over to my baskets, checking to see if we had enough gifts for the crowd. Nathan and I had gone to the dollar store in Rapid City and bought hundreds of little soaps, washcloths, kitchen utensils, kids’ toys, and a big bag of rubber bands, then spent the night wrapping up the individual bundles, along with Nathan’s friend Jimmy, who helped out for a few hours.

  “Yo homes!”

  I looked up and saw Tommy, still in his kitchen uniform. We hugged. I could smell the wild onions he’d apparently been chopping before he came to the powwow. He was working as a line cook at the new casino restaurant, Rations. Lack was starting a chain of these restaurants at Indian casinos across the country, and ours was the first. By all accounts, Tommy had been a model employee, and was talking about becoming a chef himself.

  “Where’s Nathan?” he said. “Don’t tell me he ran off with that little girlfriend of his!”

  “No, he’s around. They’re both here. He’s excited. Is Velma coming?”

  To everyone’s surprise, Tommy and Velma were spending most of their time together, having drinks at the Depot, dinners at the restaurant, and arguing about music nearly constantly.

  “Yeah, she’s here! Having a smoke out back. Still need me to help with the gifts?”

  “Yep. Should get started soon. I’ll go find Nathan.”

  I scouted the arena and found Nathan with Shawna in a corner, engrossed in a deep discussion. “Nathan, it’s time. Shawna, you want to help hand out the stuff?”

  “Sure!” she said with a bright smile.

  We walked back to the front of the stage, where Jerome was adjusting the microphone. I’d given him tobacco, as well as some to his grandson Rocky, who was helping out. There were five large baskets of gifts and two star quilts by the front of the stage. There was only one thing missing.

  “Hope I’m not late.” Marie kissed me, and I smelled her perfume as well as the aroma of the dishes she’d been preparing at the restaurant. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and left to help her assistants bring in large pots of bison stew and baskets of corn cakes for the crowd to eat after the ceremony was over.

  Not long after the death of her father, she’d gone off—alone—to the Black Hills for a week to grieve for him and come to grips with what she’d done. When she got back, I tried to talk with her about it, but she said she wasn’t ready. She did say she’d realized medical school wasn’t for her, that she’d always known it, and that she’d honor her family by following her true path, which was working as a chef and changing the eating habits on the reservation. She loved cooking and creating new recipes, all based on the principles of indigenous cuisine, and Lack had put her in charge of the restaurant. It would be a long haul to replace frybread culture, but she and Lack were making a start. Lack had even flown in this week to help Marie with the preparations for the feast.

  Jerome signaled to the drum group, and they played an honor song while everyone stood up. After they finished, Nathan, Shawna, Tommy, Velma, Marie, and I went into the crowd, handing out gifts to the people. We gave the soaps, shampoos, and kitchen stuff to the adults and the toys to the kids. After we were done, Nathan and I sat down in two chairs at the front of the stage, and Rocky draped the two star quilts around our shoulders. Jerome went back to the microphone, picked it up, and started speaking.

  “Today we join in giving these two men their Lakota spirit names. Nathan Wounded Horse and Virgil Wounded Horse are important members of this community, and it’s about time they were named. When they pass on to the spirit world, they’ll call out these names, and the spirits will know who they are.”

  He brought an eagle feather over to Nathan and tied it in his hair. “Nathan Wounded Horse, your spirit name is Tatanka Ohitika; that means ‘Brave Buffalo.’ You earned this name through your courage—your bravery—in the face of harm and death. You stared at your enemy’s face and stood strong. You are a true Lakota warrior, the Seventh Generation. Tatanka Ohitika, we greet you.”

  Nathan looked down, embarrassed by Jerome’s words.

  Now Jerome came over to me with an eagle feather in his hand. “Virgil Wounded Horse, your spirit name is Tatanka Ta Oyate, Buffalo Nation. This name means you are a defender and guardian of the community. You are our inyan hoksila, our stone boy, the protector who is made of rock and can’t be hurt. Our legend tells us that inyan hoksila once faced a great enemy, one much larger and more powerful than him. But inyan hoksila refused to surrender, and he looked the enemy straight in the eye and it shattered into a thousand pieces. You too gazed in the face of evil and did not turn away. Tatanka Ta Oyate, we greet you.”

  As he finished tying the feather in my hair, I saw that the people were cheering and shouting. I thought that maybe someone had walked in with the food, but I realized they were cheering for me. I saw Marie with tears in her eyes, Nathan clapping, Tommy standing next to Velma, both of them whooping and hollering, and even Lack standing and applauding.

  Before I began the ritual of the handshakes, I reflected for a moment about my sister, my mother, and my father, what they’d lost and what they’d sacrificed. Nothing could make up for those losses, but perhaps tonight the circle could close. The passing of winter, the coming of spring. I adjusted my feather and turned to the people.

  Nathan and I walked clockwise around the arena, shaking everyone’s hands, accepting their congratulations and thanks. I looked over and saw that he was smiling, happy to connect with our community, the young ones, the elders, even the kids from his school. I let him take the lead as we moved through the crowd.

  Near the end of the circle, an older woman whispered in my ear and asked if she could speak to me when we were done. I motioned for her to meet me in the lobby.

  “I’m Charlene. Charlene Two Crow. I know you’re the guy who helps people when the police won’t do nothing. I heard you’re not doing that no more, but thought I’d talk to you anyway, ask you something.”

  I wanted to be with Marie and Nathan, but the pleading look on her face kept me there.

  “Here’s the thing. My dau
ghter Crystal used to live with this guy, a real jerk, and she had a baby with him. Robin is her name, really cute girl, she’s four now, almost five. Few months ago, the guy beat the hell out of Crystal and took Robin. We don’t know where he took her, maybe out of state; we can’t find her, no one knows where they are. Crystal called the tribal cops, they sent the case over to the feds, but they won’t do nothing, say they don’t have enough evidence. Crystal cries every night. We don’t know what to do.” She looked down at the ground, not meeting my eyes. “But see, I got a few hundred dollars saved up, it’s right here.”

  She pointed at her bag, an old purple tote bag with a Native design. It reminded me of the one my sister had carried.

  “Can you help us? Get our little girl back?”

  I wondered what to say.

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction, but it is informed by current and historical events. To serve the dramatic narrative, I’ve freely invented places, events, locales, and incidents, as well as fictional characters who bear no resemblance to any actual persons. I’ve tried to stay generally faithful to my sense of life on the Rosebud Reservation, but I encourage readers interested in these issues to explore some of the many scholarly and historical books on these topics.

  I’m frequently asked two questions about this book: Do private enforcers actually exist on reservations, and are felony criminal cases occurring on Native lands often declined by federal authorities? The answer to both questions is yes. Private vigilantes (or “hired thugs,” as Virgil is insultingly called by Ann Short Bear) are a part of Native life on many reservations, although there’s been no empirical study of the profession, as far as I know.

  However, the problem of federal authorities under-prosecuting certain felony offenses on reservations has been well documented. Because of the Major Crimes Act passed by the US Congress in 1885, federal investigators generally have exclusive jurisdiction over felony crimes on reservations, yet they often decline prosecution in these cases, even when the perpetrator has been apprehended. Although the percentages vary from year to year, federal authorities frequently refuse to prosecute murders, assaults, and sex crimes referred from tribal police departments. Recent figures from the government indicate that over thirty-five percent of all referred crimes are declined and over a quarter of those cases are sexual assaults against both children and adults. The reluctance of federal agencies to prosecute certain felony crimes on reservations is well known in Indian Country, and there’s no shortage of academic and journalistic accounts on this topic. A good place to start is the book American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle for Self-Determination and Inclusion, by Stephanie Woodard. Other useful resources are American Indians, American Justice, by Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, and Braid of Feathers: American Indian Law and Contemporary Tribal Life, by Frank Pommersheim. Regarding opioids and heroin distribution systems, I’m indebted to Sam Quinones and his wonderful book Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic.