by James Grady
“That’s going a little far. You reading his rights?” Brad Halsted says. I’m surprised it is the real estate agent who speaks up for his friend, not the lawyer. My eyes skitter to Flo’s, and it dawns on us that Rob knows something about the murder.
“You want to get involved in this?” the deputy asks Brad Halsted.
The sheriff has more cards than anyone in town and he knows how to stack the deck. Brad’s son got a DUI his junior year of high school, and we’re all pretty sure he forgot to mention it on his college applications. He has two more years to go at Cornell. One phone call might change that. Shaking his head, Brad folds.
So does John Junior. “Spent half an hour looking for that casing,” he tells the sheriff. “It’s always some little thing.”
They escort him into the blizzard and the backseat of the squad car.
Someone exhales. I move to Mindy, still on the stool. She hugs me tight and I can feel her tremble. No one moves. No one speaks. For the first time, my uncle is silent. He sits in the booth, handkerchief in both hands, eggs over easy half-eaten on his plate.
There is no satisfaction. It’s not like TV with a standoff between the criminal and the law. It’s not an Agatha Christie novel with a soliloquy explaining why. Without a motive, it feels like a random game of Clue: the banker did it, in the field, with the automatic.
* * *
Over the next few days, facts flurry together. John Junior thought his wife was having an affair. He followed Nancy around town and saw her talking to Sullivan in his car, heads tilted together, behind the bowling alley. He didn’t know that she’d been gathering information about the Bar None feedlot, where she’d snuck in and taken photos of forty dead horses rotting in pens filled with soggy manure. We learn that it was Rob who picked up John Junior from Sig’s farm after the murder and drove him back to town. Not an accessory, but an accomplice nonetheless.
He still comes in early—Hey, College Girl, have you signed up for your classes yet?—trying to be friendly like before. We don’t talk to him. Flo pours his coffee now.
We’re glad Mindy’s back to tending her steer. Good thing too. It’s almost fair time. Theodore’s up to 1,200 pounds. She spends more time blow-drying his hair than I do mine. We still don’t understand how the killer could be someone we know, someone who contributed to my college fund every morning. “I smiled at a murderer while serving him breakfast,” Flo murmurs to herself. It’s the first time we’ve ever seen her fazed. After the trial, John Junior ends up in the state pen. We feel sorry for his mother. Folks shake their heads and say this never would have happened if John Senior were still alive.
You can see the wind today. It whips car antennas in the parking lot, it turns the pasture across the highway into an ocean of light-green waves. Tumbleweeds blow by the gas pumps, through town, on their way to the rest of the world. Won’t be long and I’ll follow.
Dark Monument
by Sidner Larson
Havre
Back when I was alive, we knew better than to chase yesterday, but here you are, blood of mine, a full-grown man with no more sense than those wandering orphan ponies we called catch colts.
I flew into Denver and then changed planes for Helena. It would take a couple more hours to get to Havre from Helena than from Great Falls, but I didn’t mind because it would allow me to drive through the healing space of Wolf Creek Canyon and give me time to think. I upgraded to the biggest rental car available in case I needed to sleep in it, tossed my duffel bag in the backseat, and hit the road around six p.m.
Havre, Montana. Shit. After nearly thirty years gone and now sixty-some years old, I was on my way back to Havre. Havre of the underground tunnels where hookers and Chinese railroad workers once roamed. Havre where the Indians were treated so badly in the old days that the Catholic Church had to send Black Robes to intervene with the other whites. Havre where my great-grandfather was the government scout and packer who found Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce for General Miles at the time of their desperate flight to Canada.
Didn’t like the son-of-a-bitch Miles, but I took a job, so I did it. Indians like me keep their word, Colt.
It was about ten when I arrived. I drove slowly through town toward the Montana Bar, shocked to see the entire block was now a parking lot. Back when, there’d been three bars and a hotel, with the Montana on the east end. Wiped from the face of the earth, I thought. Biblical. Or at least corporate, which does not reward family, community, or “cities” in the middle of nowhere with no industries or oil or glitter and populations the size of Havre’s not-quite ten thousand souls.
I drove the rest of the way through town with the hair on the back of my neck standing up. It was like driving through a fog bank full of ghosts. I gripped the steering wheel, put my foot back on the accelerator, and emerged on the other side of town, headed for Chinook. The Bear Paw Battlefield was fifteen miles farther south, and I yearned to get out there to listen for the spirits on the morning breeze. I shit you not, when things are right you can hear voices along the creek below the monument.
I picked up my phone as the Plainsman Bar outside of Chinook came into view, eerie in the darkness and looking like it had been closed for quite a while. Elizabeth answered on the second ring and I said, “I just passed the Plainsman.”
“Okay,” she replied, “I’ll meet you at the Chief Joseph Motel.”
Motel? Man leads his tribe damn near a thousand miles, beating the hell out of the US Cavalry most of the way until I come along, then takes a stand and surrenders so his women and kids won’t get killed, and what—they name a seedy motel after him? And you stay there?
It took me awhile to roust the motel clerk, a disheveled older woman who grumpily shoved the registration card my way, then went to the front window to see if I had a “floozy” in the car. Not that the clerk cared, as long as I paid.
The room smelled of dust that had probably been there since the eighties when Elizabeth and I first used these highway “cabins” as our rendezvous, our safe place. Tan bedspread, a couple of saggy pillows, a chair, a table, a TV on a chest of drawers (one wouldn’t close), a bathroom with a shower that dripped. I tried not to pace a hole in the thin carpet as I left the room open to the night.
Elizabeth filled the doorway twenty-three minutes after I got there. Her hair was longer and darker, lined with silver, but she’d kept her elongated beauty. She still had full breasts and good legs.
We stood staring at each other like a couple of teenagers.
“Thanks for coming,” she said. “And meeting me here.”
“Why not in Havre?”
“I don’t know, it’s not like before, I guess.”
Fine woman, bad liar, and you know it, but as usual you are letting her lead you on, Colt.
“Not like before,” I said.
“When we were married to other people.”
“We buried all of that. And both of them. It’s too bad, but . . .”
“Yeah,” she said. “But letting some secrets out on Main Street won’t do anybody any good now.”
You got no idea what she means, do you?
She sat on the chair. I sat on the bed.
“Besides, if you really can help, I don’t want Bill to know you’re going to until.”
“He has always considered himself bigger and better than anybody else until,” I said. “Especially when the anybody else is somebody like me.”
I grew up part Gros Ventre Indian, on the Fort Belknap reservation in Montana, smack in the middle of the Grovons’ ongoing battle with the modern world. All these hundreds of years since we were “discovered,” many of us came from the mingling of blood, both a devastating and strengthening thing.
Least you got that right.
“Wild Bill” Wendland was a rich white kid from up on the Hi-Line—the stripes of highway and railroad that run across the top of Montana and smack through Havre. Bill had gone to law school someplace back east, then come home to claim his due. He’d been
a customer when I ran a tavern, liked to hang out because Elizabeth and her husband drank there, even though there were classier joints in Havre. Elizabeth’s husband never figured out why she preferred it, but Bill’s eyes figured us out even as he brazenly put the moves on her in front of her husband. The husband was a “lots of potential” man who’d peaked in college. As Elizabeth worked her way up the academic ladder of success, eventually becoming a dean, she’d been unable to make him strong or successful, though part of his problem might have been the cancer slowly eating him. We didn’t know about that until years later.
Wild Bill had been a bad customer in every sense of the word, even before his lecherous behavior toward the marriage-trapped woman I loved in secret until my own wife saved herself, dumped me, and I wandered away from Havre. I realized how deep Bill’s badness ran in those confusing times one hot summer night in the parking lot outside my bar. I’d carried a bucket of beer bottles out to the trash and turned around to see Bill had left the jukebox country-and-western songs and followed, probably to mock or challenge me in that rich, small town–jerk way of his. But headlights caught us standing there before either of us could say a word.
The car rattled to a stop and out of the driver’s side came JoeBoy Eagleman. There were a few Indians, like JoeBoy and me, who had been around both the white towns and the reservations since we were kids. He was a friend, about six feet tall and slender. He had a wooden crutch under his left arm, and his left leg was crooked below the knee, marking him as one of polio’s last easy victims in America. He stood on the parking lot gravel in the headlights of his car and said in a singsong Indian brogue, “Hey, I’m lookin’ for you, Bill, ennit?”
Bill, a good three inches taller and probably thirty pounds heavier, sneered at the Indian with the crutch. “Whyn’t you come over here then?”
“I can’t walk too good, ennit!” JoeBoy replied, limping ahead a couple steps.
“That’s too bad, ain’t it?” Bill said, mocking the all-purpose Indian phrase.
“Hey, I come to tell you to quit those lawsuit things you doin’ on my brother Tennyson.”
“The law’s the law. Even for your kind.” Bill grinned. “Maybe especially for your kind.”
“What you doin’, finding that shit to take him to court, bust him flat paying for lawyers so he’s got to sell the land to you? That’s what you’re doin’, ennit?”
Bill growled: “Fuck you, smoked meat.”
“Hey, fuck you too, then.”
Bill walked toward JoeBoy. “You better get outta here before I kick your Indian ass!”
“Come over here and make me then, ennit?”
JoeBoy moved back a step, tossing his crutch to the side. Then he crouched, putting weight on his good right leg while raising his fists. Bill punched with his right hand. JoeBoy deflected the swing with his left and hit him so hard on the chin that Bill dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
JoeBoy nodded to me and picked up his crutch.
Splayed on the ground, Bill fumbled around under his hips, reaching for his back pocket, where he could have—
JoeBoy swung the tip of his crutch through Bill’s legs and slammed him hard in his crotch. Whatever Bill was reaching for got forgotten as the hotshot lawyer doubled up and grabbed his throbbing groin with both hands.
JoeBoy climbed in his car and drove off.
Bill slowly raised himself to his hands and knees. From where it had fallen on the gravel, he scooped up a short-barreled revolver like the cops carried on TV when we were kids. “You saw! That was assault and battery! Call the cops.”
“You call the cops,” I said. “I’ll tell them and everybody else what I saw. You threatened him, he defended himself, and then you got your ass kicked by an Indian with a crutch and a bum leg.” I laughed, even as the notion nudged my wandering what if’s: what could the law do?
Bill pushed himself to his feet. “You fucking . . . Indian!”
“Don’t worry about your tab tonight. On the house.”
The house of my bar and marriage lasted only another two years, but that was longer than JoeBoy’s brother, who Bill hit with every possible lawsuit he and his money could conjure up out of life in Montana. But while the Eagleman family lost their ranch, they always told the part of the story where JoeBoy kicked that lawyer’s ass and I was the witness.
And that story is what sent JoeBoy’s auntie to see me as I was packing up the last of my stuff in the bar to wander in a new direction. I was leaving Elizabeth, my ex-wife, and my tavern behind to become one of the oldest law students in University of Minnesota history, in an attempt to reinvent my life away from Havre.
Don’t you know we never get to leave who we are, just like we never get to go back and be someone else? You think I didn’t have regrets about Looking Glass?
A few weeks before I thought I was leaving Havre for good, Wild Bill was acquitted of raping an Indian girl from the Rocky Boy reservation.
JoeBoy Eagleman’s aunt walked in through the front door I’d kept unlocked so I could carry boxes out to the U-Haul.
“Here,” she said. “I want you to make that Wasichu suffer.”
She handed me one of the Montana Bar jackets I’d bought for the softball team I sponsored over the years. Bill’d played on the team just long enough to get a jacket and piss off everyone in the league.
“This was in the backseat of the car the night Bill Wendland raped my niece. After he did it, she got away and ran off carrying it. She threw it away but I went back and found it.”
“You should give this to the police,” I told her.
“Hah, them were barely believing my girl, and she didn’t think to tell me ’bout it until after that judge let him off.” She shook her head. “You was witness once to him. That damn jacket’s got the name of your place on it, so now your place is stuck bein’ witness with it, too.”
She walked out before I could figure out what to say.
I kept the jacket and held my tongue. I wanted to help but didn’t know how, figured after I became a lawyer I’d find a way to right the old wrong. But that would have meant coming back to Havre. I never forgot about the girl but I never did a damn thing, either. I sure as hell never made Wild Bill suffer for what he’d done.
* * *
And now, thirty years later, Elizabeth and I sat in a cheap and musty motel out of sight of Havre’s eyes as she told me what he’d been up to lately.
“All the time since you left, all the time even before my husband died, it didn’t matter if one of his wives was around or not. Bill’s . . . I don’t think he even really wants me. He just wants me to suffer because I wouldn’t say yes to him but I said yes to you.” She shrugged. “I need a lawyer, one he doesn’t own.”
“You need a friend too, not just a lawyer. How bad is it?”
“Relentless. And invisible. Forget about whatever happens in the streets or grocery store. He’s a big donor to the college, serves on all sorts of boards, they even give him an office, and yeah, maybe there’s some way that’s also spinning bucks for him, but mostly he does it because he loves the clout, the power. He’s been pushing the college to ‘modernize’ by dumping my humanities programs to replace them with computer classes and how-to-be-a-cog business classes. He doesn’t give a shit, but he lets me know that if I want to stop the squeeze and save the department so I’ll still be a dean, what I have to do is . . .”
“You said stuff happens in the streets?”
“The usual harassment most women get, but a couple times . . . I’ve seen his car drive through the alley behind my house. Or parked just up the block with him sitting in it. I called the cops once and he told them he was pulled over to take a call, just like the law says.”
He was stalking her at night. I couldn’t say what I was thinking. Fearing. All I could say was: “I’ll talk to him.”
She laughed. “Like that’ll do any good.”
“Some words weigh more than others.”
“Bu
t—”
“No. No more tonight. You called me to come help. I will.”
Outside, the high prairie wind blew from the west, over the motel, toward Havre.
“It’s late,” I said. “Why don’t you stay?”
“Aren’t we kind of old for this?”
“Yes.”
She looked at me a long moment, then took her purse into the bathroom.
I turned off the rest of the lights and sat on the bed, watching as she took off her clothes. I pulled back the covers and lay down. A few minutes later, she stretched out beside me.
We were still for a while and then I traced the contours of her face and breasts with my fingers. She was wet when I touched between her legs and I rose and settled on her like a dark bird seeking her white flesh. I entered her quickly, opening my senses at the same time, and knew that although time and distance had intervened, our old connection was still alive and well.
Afterward, we didn’t talk about what was going on. I couldn’t stop myself from telling her about my great-grandfather, Louis Shambo, and the Battle of the Bear Paw where he shot Looking Glass, war chief of the Nez Perce, as they tried to escape from Idaho to Canada.
When I was kid, my friends and I used to ride up to the battlefield to look for shell casings and smoke cigarettes in the willows along the creek below the monument at the top of the hill. People still leave offerings inside the wrought-iron fence that encloses the spot where my great-grandfather shot Looking Glass as he raised his head to look out of the rifle pit he had dug.
* * *
The next morning, Elizabeth and I bought coffee at a gas station near Havre after we left the motel. We filled our cups and sat, listening to news of the latest mass shooting on the radio.
“Jesus,” I said, “what’s the world coming to?”
“What do you think I should do?” she asked.
“Give me a chance to do,” I told her.
“After all these years, now it’s my turn?” she said.
“It was always your turn. Just never my time.”
She shook her head but her face wouldn’t tell me what she was really thinking.