“And who the hell are you, man?” he said when I was inside. “Another rich lawyer bearing the white man’s burden? Another cop? Maybe a social worker?” I took off my glasses and hat. “Nope. You don’t look social enough, man.”
“Just a guy looking for a favor,” I said, paused at the end of the bed, and we could hear the jailer drop the dead bolt with a clunk that seemed to shake the snow off the barred windows.
“A favor?” he said. “Wow, man, I am honored, but I ain’t exactly on the uphill side of success right now. You can dig it, right, man.”
“I just want you to look at a picture for me,” I said, taking out the eight-by-ten of the poachers.
“And what are you going to do for me, man?”
“I’ve already done it,” I said, “the night you got shot.”
“The rent-a-cop,” he sneered. “Jesus, man, you look good for a rent-a-cop. So you saved my life, man. Big fucking deal.”
“I’ll make a good witness at your trial,” I said, “and at least you can beat the assault with a deadly weapon—”
“What trial, man?” he said. “I’m copping a second degree on the armed robbery, so I’m looking at Deer Lodge whatever happens.”
“You don’t care what I say at the pre-sentencing hearing?”
“Who listens to jerks like you, man,” he said, “so you ain’t got shit to trade.”
“Money?”
“How much?”
“You tell me, tough guy.”
“Five hundred and a television in this stinking goddamned room,” he said, “and that’s my first and last price.”
“I can’t do nothing about the entertainment, son,” I said, “but the five is okay.”
“You got it on you?”
“Sure,” I said, “but they’ll just take it away from you.”
“Hey, man, I ain’t no jerk,” he said, as if I was. “I been there before. Ain’t nobody gonna take it off me.”
Screening the door window with my back, I counted out five bills, and handed them to him with the photograph. As he leaned over to slip the money into his crotch, he started coughing. When he worked up a bloody froth, I leaned over for the stainless-steel bowl, let him spit and catch his breath.
“You okay?” I asked. “Need a nurse or anything?”
“Fucking service in this hospital is for shit, man,” he gasped, then glanced at the picture. “Don’t know the white dude, man, or Brother Bear, man…” He laughed and brought up another coughing fit, more blood. “And I don’t know the other dude’s name—he’s not one of us, he’s a breed, Assiniboin, Cree, I don’t know, don’t even live on the res, man, just hangs out at the bars in Stone City—ask Tante Marie.”
“Tante Marie?”
“The grandmother lady, man,” he said, then sighed and told me how to find her, stirred in the bed in the telling and pulled out the end of his lung drain from the bedside bottle.
“You sure you don’t want me to call the nurse?”
“Not only do they have piss-poor service here, man,” he gasped between shallow breaths, “but this hospital is renowned for its shitty drugs.”
“Thanks for the help,” I said and held out my hand.
He stared at me for a long time before he took it and gave it a brief pump, but our eyes held—his, growing dark and deep like that narrow passage to the other side, where the eternal springtime sang, where the maidens’ breath always smelled sweetly of honeycomb, where the ghostly deer leaped lightly into the humming flight of the arrow. He had nearly made it this time, and his knowledge made the back of my throat taste bloody and raw. Next time, his eyes said, he would go.
—
The clouds had lifted and the snow stopped, but as we eased across the black ice up Wilmot Hill toward the reservation, the pickup rose into the lowering overcast, and a corn-snow squall swept out of the gray fog and lashed at the windshield. Even though I had the heater cranked all the way up, Simmons and I had been cold too long and tired, and the cold air seemed to rush into the cab on clattering hooves.
“How long’s it been since you had a drink?” I asked Simmons.
“Not since you left that night,” he said, tugging at his tie, “and it’s really weird, you know, I don’t seem to want one.”
Lord, did I want one. Whiskey for warmth in the gut, for fire to burn the ugly taste of violent death out of my throat, whiskey for laughter. I thought about stopping at the Wilmot Bar for a quick one, at least one, but my old friend Jonas no longer stood behind the bar, surveying his domain like a crazed dwarf king. Like too many of the old ones, the crazy ones, he was dead. Fat Freddie, the Chicago cop; and silent Pierre, who had drunk the English language right out of his brain; Leo from Mahoney’s, the recorder of our faces; and good Simon the Roamer. Dead. Me, too, according to recent reports. But maybe it was really true, I was really dead. What a wonderful joke. After death, the crossing over, we find neither heaven nor hell, not even happy hunting, but just more of the same sad, silly life we thought we left behind. Confusion and muddle, disorder and despair.
But just as I worked myelf into an alcoholic’s glorious and sober self-pity, as we rolled past the shadowy outline of the Wilmot Bar, we popped out of the clouds and into the blinding winter sunlight firing black off the snowfields. I locked all four wheels of the pickup, scrambling in my pockets for the new sunglasses. When I had them on, I saw before me the snow-capped towers of the Cathedrals glistening against a sky as blue as the backside of heaven, the sort of vision that makes you forget tire chains and frostbite, makes you remember why you live in Montana until you die.
—
Tante Marie, Billy had told me, was the most honored woman among the Benniwah, the keeper of the tales, the teller of the sacred stories, and in a tribe where all the grandmothers, once having put away the bloody stain of womanhood, were honored for their patience, wisdom, and kindness, and entrusted with the most treasured objects of a tribe that had nearly disappeared, the children and the old stories. Tante Marie was the grandmother of grandmothers, more obeyed than a war chief, more trusted than a peace chief, and more powerful than the lawyers who advised the tribal council.
Even with all that tradition resting on her shoulders, Tante Marie didn’t live in a teepee or an earthen lodge, but in a small yellow frame house up the Middle Fork of the Dancing Bear, just beyond where the South Fork Road turned south up the north side of the Diablos, a road that led into the mountains past the old C, C&K sections, the abandoned mine and over the divide to Camas Meadows and my grandfather’s timberland. Fifty yards down the Middle Fork Road beyond her house set the locked gate that protected the last bit of sacred Benniwah land from the roaming gangs of white-eye hunters, fishermen, and beer drinkers.
Because it was on a school-bus route, the Middle Fork Road had been plowed that morning, and it looked as if the South Fork Road had been too, which seemed odd, but maybe the Forest Service was keeping it open for loggers. A small school bus was parked in front of her house, and past it I could see a new gate across the Middle Fork Road. When I was a kid, the old gate was an easy one, and we could either shoot the lock off or ride around it on dirt bikes, but over the years, every time I saw that gate it had become a more formidable barrier. Now it was constructed of steel pipe, fastened with a Master padlock as large as a sandwich, set in concrete and flanked by rocky berms higher than a man’s head. A long-dried and frozen coyote skin had been draped over the top rail.
After I parked behind the school bus, I asked Simmons to wait in the pickup, then trudged toward the shoveled walk where the drifts were piled four feet high on either side, my rich man’s shoes useless in the snow. They had had even more snow than we had down in the Meriwether, and some of the drifts reached nearly to the roof eaves.
When I paused on the front steps to try to kick the snow out of my shoes, a deep voice, happy in its seriousness, rumbled inside the small house.
“…and that, little grandchildren,” it said, “is why poor Brother Rave
n is cursed with his black, black feathers and his ugly caw. He traded his pollen-yellow feathers, his sky blue and his cloud white, traded even his once sweet song that filled the air with the sacred rainbow, traded his honor for one chew of the white man’s tobacco, and even to this day, little grandchildren, he caws and caws but cannot spit that bitter, dishonorable taste away…”
Then the voice grew soft and low, the words indistinct, replaced by the shuffle and hum of children, broken now and again by respectful laughter.
When Tante Marie opened the door, she saw me but ignored me so furiously that I naturally stepped aside to watch as she gently ruffled black-haired heads before she tucked them into snow hoods and patted tiny rumps to speed them on their merry way. Although they still had wonderfully solemn looks gracing their faces, the line of small children filing out the door toward the bus carried happy smiles, bronze cheeks glazed with apple, and dark, singing eyes. The driver, an old snaggled-toothed man named Johnny Buckbrush, who knew me from my deputy sheriff days, glanced at me once, then lowered his eyes. I had known him in his days of shame.
“You’re looking great, Johnny,” I said, “a new man.”
“Thank you, Milo,” he answered, his face turned away from me as he followed the troop of happy children.
Tante Marie watched them until the bus was loaded and on its way, watched until it passed a granite outcrop beyond the South Fork turn, then she looked at me, and said, as if it were a command, “Yes.”
From the way Billy had talked about her, I expected some sort of Hollywood version of a female shaman, an ancient English actress in wrinkles and copper face, draped in buckskin and beads, but Tante Marie was a large, strong woman, wearing high heels that matched her beige sheath. Her long, heavy face, framed by a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, could have belonged to a Mexican, or an Italian, or a rich white woman with a deep-water tan.
“Yes,” she said again.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but I couldn’t help overhearing the end of your story, ma’am—and please correct me if I’m wrong—but wasn’t it the Indian people who introduced the white man to tobacco? When Columbus discovered—ah, the Indies.”
“True enough,” she said as if this were a question she had waited all her life to answer. “Indian people smoked—tobacco, kinnikinnick, red-cedar bark—but we smoked for ceremony, not for pleasure, for what you white people might call prayer, thanksgiving for the sun and moon, the wind and rain, the coming, and going, of life. Smoking for pleasure, for the tobacco lobby and the government subsidy, for sophistication, is hazardous to your health.” Then she flicked a finger against my breast pocket, and the cellophane of the cigarette pack rattled like a snake.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, “you win,” trying to be friendly, but the face she offered me had been carved out of something harder than stone. “Billy Buffaloshoe sent me,” I explained, “for a favor.”
“A favor?”
“Yes, ma’am,’ I said again, tugging the rolled photograph out of my overcoat pocket. “Did you know Billy was in jail?” I added, but her face didn’t even bother to answer. She knew everything. “Maybe I can help keep him out of prison.”
“Ha,” she snorted, “he was born for Deer Lodge.”
“Maybe I can help postpone his fate,” I said. “Do you know this man?” I asked, holding up the picture.
She took it and looked at it for a long time, nodded, then stepped back inside the house out of the snow glare and removed her glasses. I started to follow, but she raised that stony gaze and I moved away, nearly falling on the icy porch. While she stared at the photo and I tried to regain my balance, one of the bright-blue EQCS garbage trucks rumbled around the outcrop and turned up the South Fork Road.
“What the hell—” I started to ask.
“They have the reservation contract,” she explained, and left it at that. “Which man?”
“The Indian.”
“Is it about the bear?”
“Sort of,” I said. Tante Marie wasn’t the kind of woman I wanted to lie to. “The bear and other things.”
“He’s the sort,” she said, nodding, “to do something like this. A jailhouse Indian, a mixed breed without honor. His real name is Charlie Two Moons, but he calls himself Charlie Miller. At this time of day you can find him—” She paused and looked at me. “Take off those glasses and that silly hat.” After I complied, she said, “You’re a Milodragovitch, aren’t you?”
“Should I confess, ma’am, or admit it proudly?”
“It’s your name,” she said, “you decide.”
“I am the last of the Milodragovitches,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “How badly do you want to find this man?”
“I’ll find him,” I said, “with or without your help, ma’am.”
“Not if I make a telephone call,” she said. “I’ll trade you my help for Camas Meadows. We’ll even buy it at a fair price.”
“Okay.”
“I love a joke, coyote tongue,” she said, not laughing. “You’ll do everything you can to have Billy placed on probation in my care?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right. At this time of day you can find Charlie Two Moons leaning on a bar down in Stone City.” I must have raised a frozen eyebrow because she answered a question I didn’t ask. “Before I came home to the land,” she said, “you might have found me there, too.”
“Thank you.”
“You’ve got frostbite on your face,” she said, then reached up to peel a tiny sliver of black skin off the side of my cheek. “Take care of it.”
“Yes, ma’am,’ I said, “and I do appreciate your help.”
“Don’t mention it, coyote tongue,” she said, then shut the door so firmly in my face that I felt as if I had been locked out of someplace very important.
—
Stone City sat just west of the Benniwah Reservation, the sort of small ugly town you find embedded like a tick along the borders of dry reservations or military encampments, a town forged of homesickness and grief, greed, a town of bars and pawnshops where nobody ever grew up. I found Charlie Two Moons in the fifth joint we tried, huddled over a shot of bar bourbon and a short draw of beer. He had looked large in the photograph, but in real life he was one big son of a bitch, at least six-six and grown up toward two-seventy, and there was no way even two of us was going to waltz this half-drunk and completely unhappy giant out of the bar.
“What’s happening, boss man?” Simmons asked while the bartender ignored us.
“I think maybe we better have a drink,” I said. “See that big dude behind me? Well, we need to have a serious conversation with him about a felony.”
“How did you ever get into this business, man?”
“It was back in my hard-drinking days, bud, and I don’t exactly remember,” I admitted as I rapped my knuckles on the bar to get the bartender’s attention.
The silence in the small bar was suddenly very intense. A group of day-drinkers at a back booth stopped laughing, the three other customers at the bar besides Charlie Two Moons halted their drinks in midair, and the bartender gave us a murderous scowl. But he came down the bar anyway, slowly.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” he said as if we were going to need more help than he could provide.
“Yes, sir,” I said as if I hadn’t heard the silence. “My friend and I would like shots of Black Jack and beer backs,” I ordered, lifting a fifty from my wallet, “and get yourself one too, sir—hell, get everybody in the bar one…I just hit the poker game at the Slumgullion down in Meriwether, so let’s all have a drink for luck.”
“For luck,” the bartender said, seeming to imply that we were going to need that too.
But after I bought a second round for the house, the silence eased, Simmons and I took a deep breath and sipped slowly at our drinks.
“You hear the one about the great North Dakota artist?” Simmons whispered in a low voice. In Montana, what the rest of the country calls “Polack j
okes” we set in North Dakota.
“No,” I said.
“The North Dakota Historical Society hired the most famous painter in the state,” he whispered even more quietly, “to paint a giant mural depicting the Battle of Little Bighorn, and when he finished, they had this big party for the unveiling, all these fat-cat preachers and society matrons gathered to see the finest work of North Dakota’s greatest painter. But when they pulled back the curtain, there was this picture of a huge goddamn fish with a halo over its head surrounded by thousands of Indian couples balling.
“Of course, all the fat-cat preachers swallowed their snuff and all the society matrons peed in their girdles and everybody went charging out of the room in a great North Dakota huff. So the president of the historical society goes over to the artist, who has been too busy admiring his work to notice the fuss, and he says to the painter, ‘What in the world do you call this?’ And the painter smiles and says, ‘ “Custer’s Last Words.” ’ ‘ “Custer’s Last Words”?’ the president says. ‘Right,’ the artist says. ‘ “Holy mackerel, I’ve never seen so many fucking Indians.” ’ ”
When Simmons finally stopped giggling into his hand, he added, “You can understand what made me think of that, boss—‘Custer’s Last Words.’ ” Then he laughed again. Some people will laugh at anything.
“I love a joke, coyote tongue,” I said, quoting Tante Marie, “but how are we going to get this big son of a bitch outside?”
“No problem,” Simmons said. “He’s on his way out now.”
I picked up my change, and we followed his wavering gait out into the cold, windy street. As I came up behind him I slipped my Buck folding knife out of my pocket and opened it.
“Charlie Two Moons,” I said, grabbing his right shoulder with my left hand, and jabbing the blade into his right armpit through the wool coat and shirt until I felt flesh. “If you jump, man, you’ll never lift that arm again.” When he hesitated, I gave him a bit more of the knife point, and the sharp, unexpected pain took the fight out of him. He puked without jerking forward, then spit on the sidewalk.
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