Another Man's Moccasins

by Craig Johnson

  Her face was about eight inches from mine. “What?”

  “I just . . . I don’t know if . . .”

  In the dim light of the hall, her eyes shone, and I found myself studying the haloed glow. “What?”

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  “What we did, that one time, was out of context and now we’re back . . .”

  She slowly went up on tiptoe and her hand trailed to the back of my neck as she pulled, and the distance between our faces decreased. “What’a ya say we slip out of these uniforms and get out of context again?”

  I brought my hands up to the small of her back and felt her shiver like a colt.

  Contrary to popular belief, the best kisses don’t start lip to lip. This one started at the scar at my collarbone, nibbled its way up the muscles at the side of my neck, and paused at my jaw. I was having trouble breathing when I heard her moan, and it sounded as if it were coming from somewhere else, somewhere east and not so long ago. I turned my face to allow our lips to meet, but she’d frozen and had turned her head toward the holding cells.

  We both stood there breathing, and her voice caught. “I think the prisoner is waking up.”

  I nodded and watched as her arm and face slipped away.

  I caught her and pulled her in with one hand, placing the tip of my chin on top of her head and holding her there for just a moment, not talking. I felt her sigh and then loosened my grip.

  “I guess I better get back in sight.”

  I watched as she moved the folding chair and sat in plain view of the Indian, who immediately quieted down.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I was thinking about asking you out on a date.”

  Her head rose, and the dark gold of her eyes again shone, the lengthy canine tooth exposed like an ivory warning fl are.

  “A what? ”

  I could feel my courage heading for the hills. “That’s what we used to call it back in the old days—dating.”

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  “Really?”

  “Yep.” I’m pretty sure my face was taking on a little color, but I braved it through and went back to pick up the trash from the counter. “What do they call it now? ”

  The half-smile smirk stalled there like a cat playing with a mouse as she looked up at me. “Sport fucking.”

  I lingered beside her for a moment and then glanced at the big Indian before heading out. It just seemed like our tim-ing was never right. She waited till I was halfway down the hall before calling after me. “You sure you go? Me love you loooooooooong time. . . .”

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  I took Cady with me to make the sixty-six-mile loop over to Sheridan after we’d worked out in the morning. We were just passing Lake DeSmet along I- 90 with Dog seated between us.

  She had her sandals kicked off and her legs folded up on the seat the way she always did.

  I noticed she’d dressed for Michael’s arrival later that day in a bright turquoise broomstick skirt and a black-sequined, cap-sleeved T-shirt. She was wearing a stylish straw cowboy hat with a leather strap adorned with conchos and lots of feathers on top of her auburn hair. Her earrings matched her skirt.

  Biker/cowgirl haute couture. She glanced up at me and continued to pet Dog. “Don’t make fun of my hat.”

  “I haven’t said a word.”

  “You were thinking about it.”

  I set the cruise control and settled back in my seat. “It’s a very nice hat.”

  “Don’t.”

  I glanced at her. “What?”

  “You were going to try and be funny.” She took a deep breath and looked out her window and back down the Piney Creek valley.

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  This is the point where as a father you’re supposed to say something—the right thing—and I wondered what that might be. She was obviously nervous about Michael’s arrival, and it was my duty to assuage some of the anxiety. “You look great.”

  Her head dropped, and I waited. “I’m wearing the hat because of the scar.”

  “Oh, honey . . .”

  “I just thought at first . . .” She was silent for a moment, but it wasn’t because there was nothing to say. “My hair is too short; I haven’t gotten enough sun. . . .”

  “You look great, honest.” I passed an eighteen-wheel truck and steered back in our lane. “It means a lot to you, this visit?”

  She reached out and adjusted the air-conditioning vent, then readjusted it back to the same position. “Yes.”

  There was something I’d been meaning to talk with her about, and this was the closest to an opening I’d gotten. I’d decided that as a parent I would adopt a relationship with my little redheaded, large-eyed daughter that was based on an unrelenting truth, and it had become the only language we both understood. “Well, this’ll be a good opportunity for the two of you to spend some time really getting to know each other even if it’s just a couple of days.”

  I was hoping it sounded better to her than it did to me.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? ”

  It hadn’t.

  “I just think it’ll be a good visit; before, you had these roles—he was a police officer and you were a victim. . . .” I glanced over and then quickly returned my eyes to the road.

  “It was a hospital and then it’s been phone calls. I just think this’ll be a good opportunity for the two of you to be in a more natural setting and really get to know each other.”

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  “That’s the second time you’ve used the word ‘really,’

  meaning we don’t know each other now?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Really?”

  It seemed to me her mind was rapidly getting better. I tried my last hope, the authoritarian patrician voice of reason. “Cady . . .”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  We drove the next twenty minutes in silence as I took the second Sheridan exit, turned off Main, and made the gradual ascent to the Veterans Administration. The VA had taken over Fort Mackenzie, and it was in a gorgeous spot on a plateau just north of town with vast, feathering cottonwoods and solid, redbrick buildings. We passed the unmanned guard shack and the rows of conifers stretching shadows across the pavement, and she decided to talk to me again. “So how come I never met this Quincy Morton guy? ”

  “He was before your time.”

  “More stuff that happened before I was born?” She glanced around as I wound my way through the fortlike buildings.

  “So, you had a hard time after the war?”

  I thought about it. “I don’t know if I’d call it a hard time. . . .

  It was a confusing time, and I was looking for some answers.

  Quincy wrote me and said he was transferring to Sheridan from Detroit.”

  She watched me. “Did Mom help?”

  “Yes, but she wasn’t in Vietnam, and I think I needed somebody who had been.”

  “What about Bear?”

  I shrugged. “He wasn’t around.”

  I could feel those composed, gray eyes on the side of my face. “It doesn’t seem to have affected you.”

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  I parked the Bullet under the shade of a tree and left the windows partially down for Dog. I thought of the contract I’d made with her. “Well, it did.”

  When we got out of the truck, I noticed she left the hat on her seat.

  The Sheridan founding fathers had lobbied for Fort Mackenzie as protection against hostile Indians. The fact that there were only 23,133 Indians spread over an area roughly the size of Europe; that this count included men, women, and children; or that it was 1898 and the director of the U.S. Census Bureau had stated plainly that the frontier was dead, didn’t appear
much in the argument.

  Pretty cagey, those Sheridan politicians—realizing the eco-nomic advantages that accrued by having an army post nearby.

  The market for local goods, especially beef, would increase, and the fort would provide jobs for a burgeoning workforce; it would also supply young West Point cadets to whom the founding mothers could marry off their daughters. One can only imagine the looks on their faces when the first troops of the Tenth Cavalry, Companies G and H, disembarked from the Sheridan trains, and were—buffalo soldiers.

  Quincy Morton’s office was not in the same location; in fact, nothing was. I hadn’t been to the VA for a while, and it appeared that the place had gone through quite a growth spurt. It was good to see Quincy again, and when I described the big Indian in my jail, he definitely knew who he was.

  “You realize I’m under no obligation to give you any information without the proper authorization?”

  “I am and, if it makes you uncomfortable, I can go over to Chuck Guilford and get the avalanche of paperwork sliding, 13 0 CR A I G J O H N S O N

  but that’s not going to help this man I’ve got sitting in my holding cell.”

  I watched as Quincy twisted his fingers into his wooly beard, which was now curlicued with a gray that I didn’t remember. It was easy to see how the plains Indians had made the association between the soldiers’ hair and the coats of the roaming herds. He adjusted his glasses, glanced at Cady, and then crossed to a large oak file cabinet and knelt down. I noticed the drawer he pulled out was the bottom one, W–Z.

  White Buffalo. Had to be.

  He pulled a thick file from the hanger and came back over, setting the folder on the edge of his desk; I noticed he didn’t sit.

  “I’m taking this lovely lady over to the dayroom in ward fi ve, which has mediocre coffee but a glass solarium with incredible views of the mountains.” He hooked his elbow out to Cady, and she smiled and joined him at the door with her turquoise skirt twirling. He plucked an ID off the navy blazer on his coat rack. “The file stays in my office, but I will expect you in fifteen minutes. It’s a voluntary lockdown ward, but just tell them you’re with me and they’ll let you in.”

  He shut the door.

  I pulled Quincy’s chair closer to the desk and looked around the room; I guess I was avoiding the file. The therapist had a framed poster from the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody of the Tenth Cavalry buffalo soldiers on the wall, a couple of un-opened Meals-Ready- to- Eat on his bookshelf, and a fake hand grenade on his desk with a small plaque that read, IN CASE OF

  COMPLAINTS—PULL PIN. At least I assumed it was a fake grenade.

  There was a white adhesive label on the cover of the file that read Virgil White Buffalo.

  Virgil.

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  I thought about the author of The Aeneid and Dante’s supposed guide through hell. I studied the folder and hoped his travels had been more pleasant. They hadn’t.

  It had taken the full fifteen minutes to get through the file, and since I’d left Quincy’s office on my way over, my mind repeated only one word.

  God.

  It was a cloudless day, if hot, and I took a deep breath and smelled the pungent fragrance of cut grass. I thought about what I’d read as I walked across the trimmed sidewalks leading to ward 5. I stopped at the double- paned Plexiglas doors and watched as the officer came over. I mentioned Quincy’s name, and he told me to go down the hall to the second right and to just keep going.

  They were sitting at a small round table on which were three thick-handled coffee mugs and a white plastic carafe. I sat and listened as they continued their conversation, which was mostly about Michael’s impending visit and Cady’s plans to return to Philadelphia after Labor Day.

  I sat and gazed out at the mountains and thought some more about what I had read back in the doctor’s offi ce.

  God.

  Cady slid me a mug of coffee. “Quincy says you saved his life.”

  I turned my head and looked at her. “Yep? Well, he’s delu-sional and that’s why they keep him in a place like this.”

  Figuring that she wasn’t likely to get the story out of me, she turned to Quincy, who told her a tale that made me sound like Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. He said that I’d talked so much about Wyoming that when a job came up in 132 CR A I G J O H N S O N

  the Veteran’s Administration in Sheridan for a post- traumatic stress disorder coordinator, he and his wife, Tamblyn, had made the jump and never looked back.

  “We had only three black people in Wyoming at the time, and I was in charge of trying to achieve a racial balance.”

  Quincy shook his head, patted Cady’s arm, and pointed to another set of double Plexiglas doors leading outside to a grass field so green it looked chartreuse. “There’s a walkway through there that leads to another walkway that surrounds the parade ground and then to a big mansion that used to be the fort commander’s residence. There’s a ballroom upstairs with a hardwood floor and bay windows that look out on the mountains.” He waited a moment. “You should see it.”

  Cady, used to being dismissed from my more indelicate law enforcement conversations, nodded and squeezed my shoulder as she passed, looking back at Quincy. “If you decide to keep him, you can’t; we need him too much.”

  The Doc smiled. “He’s too smart; the smart ones are always trouble.” We watched as an attendant pushed the door open, and she slipped off her sandals to walk across the parade ground barefoot. “My God, Walter. What an amazing young woman. . . .”

  I watched her pick her way across the fi eld, periodically skimming a foot across the blades of soft grass, before walking on. “She’s a punk.”

  He turned to me, and his concern was palpable. “She told me about the problems in Philadelphia.” I nodded but didn’t say anything, wondering exactly how much she’d told. “It appears as if she’s progressing magnifi cently.”

  “I hope so.”

  He studied me. “What’s worrying you?”

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  pushing hard enough, that we’re doing too much physical and not enough intellectual, that we’re doing too much intellectual and not enough physical. . . .”

  He laughed. “You haven’t changed, Walter.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to wash my anxiety through my lungs. “I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, Doc.”

  “It is.” He sipped his coffee. “You read the file.”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  I looked into my cup and a past that made my coffee appear transparent.

  “And if I ever labor under the supposition that I’ve had a hard life, I’m going to think of Virgil White Buffalo.”

  He set his mug down and pulled in his chair. He listened to the story of Ho Thi Paquet and nodded gently at the smooth surface of the table without interrupting—a ritual I’d remembered. When I finished, he looked up at me. “Do you think he did it?”

  I took another breath. “I didn’t until I read that damn file.”

  We sat there in the comfortable silence we’d cultivated from long ago before he spoke again. “I just went back there.”

  “Where?”

  “Vietnam.”

  “Why?”

  He laughed. “It sounds like you’ve still got some issues.”

  “Issues, hell; I’ve got volumes.”

  I poured him some more coffee as he continued to laugh.

  “I took Tamblyn and we went back just last year, stayed at the Morin Hotel in Hue. We’re sitting there having breakfast and drinking Buon me Thuot–style coffee and watching the nuts fall off the bang trees like incoming . . .” He took a sip.

  I nodded. “What was it like, other than nuts?”

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  He smiled. “Everybody’s trying to sell you something.” He glanced back up at me. “We took Route 1 through Da Nang to this old fishing town, Hoi An—motor scooters all over the place and not a single water buffalo. Shops everywhere with paintings, jewelry, and T-shirts. The nightclubs in Hue have names like Apocalypse New and M16. I showed Tamblyn Red Beach 1 and Red Beach 2, where we dropped off the first American ground troops.” It was a long pause, and it was only then that I figured he was talking to himself. “All in all . . . it was pretty strange.”

  I sipped my coffee and looked off to the few narrow and melting snowfields on the mountains. “Maybe we won after all.”

  Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

  The same air force major as before was still the security officer, and DeDe Lind, the Playboy playmate, was still on the wall of the Quonset hut and insisting it was August. “I find it strange that you were posted here by the provost marshal to investigate the overdose of a soldier but ended up in Khe Sanh in an exploding helicopter.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He looked back at the folder on his desk, which contained the hospital discharge papers. It’d been almost a week, and they’d tried to send me back to Chu Lai and battalion HQ, but I told them that I wanted to return to Tan Son Nhut. “It says here that the swabos have you up for a Navy Cross and a Silver Star.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’d you do up there in Khe Sanh, sink a submarine?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He looked up through the thick glasses. “What was that?”

  “No, sir.”

  He studied me a good long time with the dead eyes. “Your official A N

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  investigation was to be four weeks in length, but I’m going to see about getting that rescinded to three and get you out of here early.”