Next to Last Stand

by Craig Johnson

  Conrad watched the two of them go and then turned to me. “I hope you find who did this, Sheriff.”

  His grip was sure, and I watched him depart through the front doorway. “Thanks, I do too.”

  The bartender arrived with the check.

  $638.42.

  No Count.

  * * *

  —

  As I turned the corner at the landing at the top of the stairs, I was pretty sure there was a fight going on down the hall and slowed my pace, as it appeared to be coming from our wing.

  Stopping in the hallway, I listened some more, but the noise had died down, so I drew the magnetic key card from my pocket and started to run it through the device on the lock just as the noise started up again from the room next door.

  I stood there assuring myself that it wasn’t the kind of altercation that needed any interference and then tripped the lock on our door and followed Dog into the darkened room with the television blaring.

  Vic sat in the bed naked, the sheet tucked under both arms with the remote in her hand as Dog jumped up to join her.

  Carefully placing my wrinkled rented jacket on the back of a chair, I turned it and sat, taking off my boots. “What’re you watching?”

  “The Legend of Custer.”

  “Bad?”

  “Very. The only person I think I recognize is the guy who rode the bomb in Dr. Strangelove . . . ?”

  “Slim Pickens.”

  “Yeah—anyway, you can’t watch anything for the bacchanalia going on next door.”

  I dropped a boot and pried off the next one, all the while listening to the noise. “How long has that been going on?”

  “Forever.”

  “Well, how nice for them.”

  “How ’bout you go and pound on the door?”

  “I don’t really want to do that.”

  “How ’bout I do it?”

  “I don’t really want that either.”

  She flipped off the TV, and I had to admit there was an abundance of animallike noises emanating through the wall. “Then what?”

  “If you can’t fight ’em . . .” I dropped my second boot with a thunk and smiled at her. “Join ’em.”

  * * *

  —

  Jaya “Longbow” Long was truly impressive in an easy, nonchalant way, dribbling the ball on the outskirts of the game. As she passed it between her legs and then casually spun it on a finger like a rotating planet, I guessed her age to be seventeen going on thirty-five.

  There were boys at the Montana Girls Basketball Three-on-Three state championship because, well, there were girls.

  She was tall, like her aunt, Lolo Long, tribal police chief on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and the boys on the sideline waved to her, but she ignored them, instead watching the opponents from the Crow Reservation she would soon play. The Cheyenne and Crow had been adversaries for thousands of years, and the basketball competition did little to convince anyone that members of the two tribes had ever buried the hatchet, except into one another.

  The girls were ferocious, using their feet to trip, and sabrelike elbows to crowd their way into the semifinals. The three young women from Lame Deer representing the Cheyenne stood by and watched the trio from Hardin as they attempted to put a lid on a Polson team from the Flathead Reservation.

  “Are there any non-Indian girls who play basketball in Montana?”

  The Cheyenne Nation turned to look at Vic. “Not as well as we do.”

  Glancing down the bleachers of the outdoor event, I was glad we’d gotten to Billings early—the place was packed. Granted, we were only an hour away from two of the biggest reservations in Montana, so the native presence was very strong, and you got the feeling that there was a lot of tribal pride on the line. There were four half-courts on North Broadway when the competition had started, but now that we were only one game away from the championship, the action had centered right in front of us.

  One of the Crow girls faked a layup and then pivoted and passed the ball to another, who dropped a ten-footer with nothing but net. There was a thunderous cry from the assembled masses, and you knew that the majority of the audience was, indeed, Crow.

  Jaya Long stood in the other court with the ball tucked under one elbow as she watched the Crow players congratulate one another, something I hadn’t seen the Cheyenne women do after they had beaten the strong Hardin team earlier. They had simply walked off the court and stood together but not looking at one another, instead, watching the other teams the way red-tailed hawks sit on fence posts and watch field mice.

  Predatory.

  “They are going to take a thirty-minute break, so we can go down and you can meet her.” Henry stood, but Vic remained seated.

  “You’re not going?”

  She shrugged. “I’ll save our seats.”

  I followed the Bear, and we squeezed out of the aisle, clanged down the aluminum steps, and moved through the crowd to stand at the curb. A breathtaking, tall woman with an interesting, scythelike scar saw us and approached, swinging her dark hair back.

  “Coaches and contestants only, beyond this point.”

  Henry smiled. “How do you know I am not a coach?”

  Chief Long didn’t smile. “Because no one in their right mind would let you be responsible for youth.”

  “She’s got a point.”

  Long stopped, and I found it amusing that she and her niece stood in exactly the same posture. “Hi, Walt.”

  “Hi, Lolo.”

  “Nice scar.”

  I gestured toward the young woman now shooting foul shots with the assistance of one of her teammates. “Another athlete in the family?”

  “Extended family. She was having trouble at home, so I allowed her to stay in my basement but only if she lived by the rules.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  She turned to look at the young player. “Pretty well. She’s got her senior year to go but there’s already interest from the UConn, Duke, Stanford.”

  “So, she’s smart too?”

  The Northern Cheyenne Tribal Police Chief growled. “Too smart for her own good.”

  I glanced at Henry and then back to the chief. “So, there’s a problem?”

  “She’s a teenager, so there are nothing but problems—you had one of those, didn’t you?”

  I thought of my daughter and granddaughter down in Cheyenne. “I did and another one to go someday.”

  “There’s the stuff you normally have to contend with, but this is a little different.” She sighed, running a hand through her hair. “Threats.”

  “What kind of threats?”

  “Life-threatening threats.”

  Henry inclined his head and lip-pointed. “Show him the note, Lolo.”

  She reached into a pocket inside her jacket and produced a copy of a note that had been on the kind of paper you’d find in a school binder. She handed it to me and folded her arms.

  I studied the typewritten words, which were pretty horrific, describing actions and making threats on par with the worst I’d ever seen. “Where was this given to her?”

  “Here in Billings.”

  “At an event or game?”

  “No, when she and some friends came up to see a movie, it was left under the windshield wiper of her car.”

  I flipped it over, looking for something that might resemble a clue. “Another student? I mean, it is notepaper from something like a binder.”

  Long shook her head. “I don’t think that’s the language or idiom of a high school student, do you?”

  “Not really, but I’m assuming you talked to her friends?”

  “I have.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing.” She took the paper back. “You don’t think this note has a racist slant?”

  �
�It does.”

  “Ever heard of the Brotherhood of the North?”

  “No.”

  She refolded the note and pocketed it. “It’s a white supremacist hate group here in Montana—you might want to check them out.”

  “You think they’re responsible for the threats?”

  “It fits their MO.”

  “How many contacts has she received?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  I sighed. “Since?”

  “It all started with a feature article they did in the Billings Gazette, which got picked up on the AP wire, along with some TV and radio interviews.”

  “You contacted the local authorities?”

  She cocked her head, the dark hair covering one eye. “I am the local authorities.”

  “Sounds like you need a bodyguard for her.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at insouciance personified with a basketball, still shooting foul shots. “Among other things.”

  I gestured toward the Bear. “You’ve got the best in the world right here.”

  She studied me. “I need an investigator.”

  “You are an investigator.”

  “I need a white investigator. Nobody is taking this seriously, but if I get you on board, then people might start paying attention—besides, as much as I hate admitting it, you’re the best.”

  “Well, as much as I’d like to help, I don’t see . . .”

  “She’s like a daughter to me, Walt. I don’t think I could stand it if something happened to her.”

  “It’s not even my state . . .”

  “Things wouldn’t heat up until late fall, early winter; months away.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Just meet her.” She turned and yelled. “Jaya!”

  The young woman didn’t respond and kept shooting, even though it was pretty obvious that she’d heard her aunt.

  “Jaya Long!”

  I watched as she finally turned, at the stiffness in her neck and the pride of her strut as she approached—and all I could think of was a kid I’d known years ago, a kid with too much muscle and not enough brains headed off to play offensive line for the University of Southern California. A crew-cut kid in a hand-me-down pickup truck who had never seen the ocean—a kid who thought he had the world by the tail and would soon come to figure out that that world’s tail was something you’d do well to never, ever grab.

  Jaya got close, and I could see she was about six feet tall, a smidge taller than her aunt, and that she made sure the older woman knew it. “Yeah?”

  Giving her a good helping of silence, Lolo gestured toward us. “This is Henry Standing Bear and Sheriff Longmire.”

  There was a flicker of recognition as she glanced at the Bear, who had played in a Montana high school state championship himself back in the day and was a legend across the high-plains courts. Then she looked my way and immediately flicked me into the aged dustbin the way only a young woman’s eyes can.

  I extended a hand. “Walt Longmire, nice to meet you.”

  She ignored the hand and didn’t make eye contact. “Sheriff, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  Lolo crowded in, her face inches from her niece’s. “You greet this man properly with the respect he deserves—he is meeting you as an act of consideration and you do not ignore another person’s consideration.”

  The teen backed away a half step, gesturing toward the court. “I’ve got a game.”

  “If you don’t behave properly, this game and any others will be put on ice until you can learn to control yourself.”

  She dropped her head with an exasperated sigh, and when her face came up with a dazzling grin, the transformation was pretty impressive. She extended her hand. “Jaya Long, so pleased to meet you.”

  I shook the hand. “Nice to meet you too.”

  The smile slammed shut like a door as she turned to her aunt. “Can I go now?”

  Lolo stared at her for a moment and then gave a curt nod, and we watched as Jaya loped off to join her teammates.

  I glanced at Lolo and leaned over to her ear. “Are you sure you’re not the one who wrote those notes?”

  8

  Bits of ribbon fluttered from the budding branches of a stunted juniper, the National Forest Service having decided to allow the dancing prayer flags to have their day, and every other, since 1876.

  “We don’t know. We just come by here and there’s another one tied to the branches, hundreds of them, actually.” She leaned out the window of one of those elaborate golf carts the park rangers use to patrol the battlefield. “The Indians aren’t as bad as the tourists. There was a man who wanted to know why we didn’t plant grass and water the hill, since it was a gravesite after all.”

  “I guess they miss the point.”

  The older woman poked her Smokey Bear hat back on her silver locks. “Sand, rocks, and sagebrush; that’s the way it was when they died, and it’s the way it should stay. I swear if they had their druthers there’d be beer and hotdog stands and souvenir shops right here on the hill.”

  The history books say that there were no survivors at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but there were thousands, thousands who waited after the battle for the other cavalry boot to drop. The combined nations of the Lakota and the Cheyenne, and even the five Arapaho who had fought, knew that a retribution was coming—they just didn’t know when.

  Vic slipped her thumbs into the back pockets of her jeans and looked down the ridge that had carried the Seventh to their doom. “I can’t believe I’ve lived here all these years and never been here. I mean I saw it from the highway . . . But here, it’s different.”

  I waved goodbye to the ranger and regarded the prayer tree one last time before stepping up with my friends. “In what way?”

  “Fucking haunted.”

  It was a difficult statement to argue with, standing there above the winding river with the trees that had witnessed the battle and the mountains—our mountains—strung along the horizon, scraping the afternoon sky raw.

  “Private Charles Windolph.”

  Vic looked back at me. “He one of those markers down there?”

  “Nope, but he said that what he saw here would haunt him to his grave. Men staggering around in circles, confused and bleeding, wandering through the broken skirmish line at the ridge that looked down at the bloodstained grass and the waves of heat that distorted the vision of the dying men who lay there screaming for water while others farther down the slope were being hacked to bits by Lakota and Cheyenne warriors.”

  “This Windolph guy, he was here?”

  “Yep. He had arrived in New York six years previously—had left Germany to avoid getting conscripted in the Franco-Prussian War, but he couldn’t get a job, mostly because he couldn’t speak English, and so he figured a great way to learn the language might be to join the army. Faulty logic. He was with Colonel Benteen, Company H, up here farther down the ridge, and he got a Medal of Honor for providing cover fire for the men who were attempting to get water.”

  Vic kneeled and plucked a piece of grass from the hillside and placed the stem into her mouth. “He survived?”

  “Till 1950, buried over in the Black Hills.”

  “I thought there weren’t any survivors?”

  The Cheyenne Nation shook his head, turned, and walked past us. “None of Custer’s personal command survived.”

  We watched as he continued across the roadway, dodging the tourist buses and quietly unaware of the looks he was receiving from the many tourists who were probably sure they were seeing the living embodiment of Crazy Horse or a distant relative of Sitting Bull.

  “He gets emotional up here.”

  She smiled a sad smile. “I can understand that.”

  “His people may have won the battle, but in the end they lost the war�
��nomadic tribes with nowhere to be nomads.

  We eventually followed Henry and entered a walkway on the other side where a large mound of earth rose up with the memorial to Wooden Leg and the Unknown Warrior, with red dirt at its center and wall panels for each of the tribes that fought there, and above them, the outlines of the Spirit Warriors, who stretched horizontally—ghostly figures.

  The Bear stood there, looking through them at the high-plains sky, taut and threadbare blue; a few people walked around the place, giving him room. “Many Cheyenne children were born on the trail north from our imprisonment in Oklahoma; women would fall back in the hollows or clumps of sage to give birth to children whose mouths and noses were held shut to keep them from crying as the long knives . . .”

  “Cavalry.” I interpreted.

  The Bear nodded and continued. “Would ride past. Then the women carrying their children would sneak through them in the night to rejoin the tribe. These children would learn the most important Cheyenne virtue first—silence.” He smiled back at us. “There is a saying among my people that none are truly defeated until the hearts of their women are on the ground.”

  Vic attempted to get the chronology straight. “This is before the battle?”

  “Yes, there were many things that led to this travesty, including the Battle of Washita River where Custer took his Cheyenne wife.”

  She turned to look at him. “You mentioned that back at the bar.”

  “Mo-na-see-tah, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Little Rock. After the battle in Oklahoma, some fifty-three women and children were used as human shields and then taken captive by the Seventh Cavalry. By all accounts, the young woman was beautiful, and Custer took her as his own. According to Benteen, Chief of Scouts Ben Clark, and the histories of my people, she bore him a son.”

  “Holy crap.”

  “There’s some conjecture about that.” They both looked at me. “Custer contracted syphilis while at West Point, which evidently left him sterile, leading some to believe that it was his brother, Thomas, who impregnated the girl.”

  “These guys were real charmers, huh?”