The Silent Spirit (A Wind River Reservation Myste)

by Margaret Coel

  “Snitches deserve punishment,” Bellows said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You come into Tracers looking for me.” Bellows held up a gloved paw. “You and that Rap lawyer. Troy told her I was at the house in Ethete, ain’t that right? So you and her come looking for me, make sure I match the description that bastard give her. Don’t think I don’t know where to find her.” He swung his head back and forth and let out a raspy laugh. “Now ain’t that funny. You a priest.”

  Father John didn’t say anything. He kept his eyes on the man.

  “Over at Tracers with the lady. Your parishioners know what you’re up to in the evenings, Father?” he said, drawing out the word.

  “Get to the point.”

  “You paid off Hun at the bar to point me out. Well, Hun ain’t gonna be pointing at nobody for a while. You seen what you come for and you went running to the fed, ain’t that right?”

  “Your name never came up, Bellows.”

  “I’m supposed to believe that, you lying priest. You’ll say anything to save your neck. How come the fed started coming around, asking stupid questions? Pulling in Lennie here.” He lifted an eyebrow and looked slantwise in the direction of the guy with the bat. “Trying to get him to rat me out. Where was I the night Kiki got offed? Why’d I do it? Says the federal grand jury’s gonna indict me for murder one, and the boys are gonna be accessories, so they’d better save their own skins.”

  “Kiki Wallowingbull was a friend of mine.” Father John said, his gaze still on Bellows. At the periphery, he could see Lennie inching forward. And beyond, headlights turning into the mission, weaving through the cottonwoods.

  “So what?”

  “So I wanted to make sure you weren’t the guy that killed him.” The headlights bounced over Circle Drive.

  “You snitched me out . . .” Bellows balled his fists and dropped his head, like a bull about to charge.

  “Hold on.” Father John made himself stay in place, holding Bellows and the bat guy in his gaze. Thinking, he would have to take out the bat guy. The instant the bat lifted, he would deflect it with his arm and throw his weight into the guy. Playing all of it out in an instant, like a silent movie racing in his head. The others would be all over him, but he’d have a couple seconds. The headlights splashed around them. “I don’t think you killed Kiki,” he said.

  The guy with the bat did a sideways turn into the headlights. “We got company.”

  “Get him now!” Bellows lurched forward. Father John felt the blow rip through him like a cannonball. He managed to land a fist in the man’s windpipe that put him off balance, but then the others were on him. Someone ripped his arm back and started shoving it toward his shoulder. He was floating in a blaze of klieg lights, dark figures stumbling around, actors all of them.

  He was barely aware of the thwack of a door shutting and a man’s voice shouting: “Back off, you sonsobitches!” There was the crack of a rifle shot.

  The figures around him froze in place. Father John felt the pressure ease off a little but his arm was still immobilized. He couldn’t move. It was all he could do to stay on his feet.

  “Let him go!”

  Bellows straightened his shoulders and turned toward the dark figure gripping the rifle, backlit by the headlights. “What’re you gonna do, old man? Shoot all of us?”

  “Nah, Bellows!” It was Lucky Meadows, one of the AA regulars. He took a step forward and lifted the rifle. “I’m just gonna shoot you.”

  Bellows stayed still a moment. “Let’s get outta here,” he said finally. He made a marching move, and the others shifted toward him. Father John realized his arm was free.

  “You ain’t goin’ nowhere.” Lucky kept the rifle pointed at Bellows’s chest. Father John was thinking that the man had slogged through the jungles of Vietnam with a rifle on his back. He could bring a bighorn sheep down with a bullet in the heart from across a mountain.

  “Nobody moves ’til the cops get here.”

  “You crazy, old man?” Bellows shouted. “You know who you’re talking to? Maybe you don’t like living.”

  Father John managed to work his arm down. It felt like a log, numb and stiff with pain circling at the edges. Thank God, it wasn’t broken. He headed past the Indians, rubbing his arm, trying to coach the circulation back.

  “Called the cops on my cell soon’s I seen what was goin’ on,” Lucky said when Father John moved in beside him. “On the ground,” he shouted. “Facedown!” The rifle was still trained on Bellows.

  “Do what he says,” Bellows shouted.

  They started to drop, one by one. Knees and toes of boots digging into the snow. Then they were stomach down, faces turned sideways. Sirens had started out on Seventeen-Mile Road. Lennie coughed into the snow.

  “You’re next,” Lucky said to Bellows.

  “This ain’t got nothing to do with you.” Bellows raised both hands, palms outward in the Plains Indian sign of peace. “You let us get outta here, I won’t forget it.”

  “I killed better men than you. You got one second to get on your face.”

  Bellows got on his knees, eyes locked on Lucky, anger and hatred shooting out of the black pupils. Sirens blasted through the quiet. “You’re gonna pay, old man,” Bellows said, his voice filled with menace.

  Then he was on his stomach, setting the side of his face into the snow as two police cars slid to a stop, blue, yellow, and red lights flashing on the roofs. Wind River Police shone on the doors. The sirens cut off, leaving an echo hanging in the air.

  The doors flung open, and four officers emerged. Gripping black pistols, they came forward in a phalanx. “What’s going on, Father?” one of them said.

  “Goons tried to kill Father John,” Lucky said. “I got here just in time. Had my rifle in the truck.”

  “Okay. Drop the rifle,” the officer said, and Father John realized that Lucky still had the rifle on Bellows. He leaned over and set the rifle in the snow.

  Other vehicles turned into the mission, and a line of four pickups started around Circle Drive. Engines ground to a stop; doors snapped open. “Stay back,” one of the officers shouted. “Police business. Best you drive on out of here.”

  Parishioners all of them. They stood their ground, arms folded, watching, just as Father John knew they would. St. Francis belonged to them. They wouldn’t leave until they knew everything was okay.

  Another officer had pulled out a radio. “Disturbance at the mission,” he said, the radio close to his mouth. “Six Indians involved. Need backup.”

  “Is it true, Father?” The first officer stepped forward while the others took up positions around the men spread-eagle on the ground. “They came here to kill you?”

  “They wanted to teach me a lesson,” he said. His body was on fire.

  “They were beating him up when I got here,” Lucky said.

  “You need an ambulance?”

  “No ambulance,” Father John said. No ambulance and no hospital and no painkillers to take off the edge and bring the old thirst for whiskey crashing over him, washing him away. He would have to push through this.

  “I’m going to need a statement.”

  “Right,” he said.

  25

  FATHER JOHN SPOTTED the Jeep in the rearview mirror as he turned into the mission grounds. A few car lengths behind, and long shadows of cottonwoods falling over the snow-packed road between the Jeep and his pickup. Vicky was behind the steering wheel, holding on tight, he imagined, her expression hard set with whatever was racing through her mind. He had been gone six months, yet in the moment she had walked into his office, he had felt as if he had never left, everything about her exactly the way he remembered.

  He drove around Circle Drive and slid across an icy patch of snow into his parking place below the window of his office. He lifted himself out in a blur of pain and waited until Vicky had pulled in alongside, then opened her door. She gathered up her bag on the passenger seat and dropped out of th
e Jeep.

  “Do you have a few minutes?” she said.

  He waved her ahead, then took her arm to steady her on the ice, although he was probably the one who needed steadying, he realized. Her arm felt small and thin beneath the sleeve of her black wool coat. He moved ahead up the icy steps that he had sprinkled with salt earlier and flung open the massive wood door. Lucy had turned the light on, and a column of light flowed out of the corridor and into his office on the right.

  “I can make a fresh pot of coffee,” he said, leading the way. The stale smell of coffee permeated the office. What was left of the coffee he had made earlier this morning looked black and thick in the pot that sat on the table next to the door.

  “No. No.” She waved away the suggestion. “This won’t take long.” She had set her bag onto the chair and was already patrolling the office. It always made him want to smile—her way of handling things was so different from his. No sitting at the desk, pondering, thinking, attempting to create perfectly logical syllogisms—in the Jesuit way. Sometimes logic had nothing to do with the truth.

  He hung up his jacket, then he went over and half sat against the desk. “Tell me what’s bothering you,” he said.

  She stopped pacing and faced him. “Jason Bellows was indicted for homicide this morning. I have to find the man who’s been contacting me.”

  He understood immediately. “Your anonymous caller doesn’t have any reason to be found.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “He’ll live the rest of his life waiting for a knock on the door. I can help him clear up this whole matter. He’ll have his life back.”

  “Vicky . . .”

  She swung toward him and put up one hand. “I know,” she said, and that made him swallow a smile. How was it she knew that he was about to tell her it could be dangerous to locate a man who believes he had gotten away with killing another man?

  “I’ve met with Professor Gorsuch. She has already warned me.” Vicky turned and went back to carving out the circle on the floor. “I heard the sorrow in his voice, the remorse. I heard the fear that he would be taken from his child, that his child would grow up without a father.”

  “How do you expect to find him?”

  “The same way Kiki did. I’m going to LA to see Susan this weekend, and I intend to stay a few days and see if I can learn what it was that Kiki found. I need your help. What did Kiki do in LA? Where did he go? Who did he talk to? You’ve been talking to people on the rez, haven’t you?”

  He nodded, and this time he did smile. How well she knew him. “I haven’t come up with much. Nobody I’ve talked to mentioned anything about Kiki in LA.”

  “Whatever he came up with out there, I think it could have led to his death.” She started around in the circle again. “The caller has never told me what made him kill Kiki, just that it was self-defense. Now Jason Bellows has been indicted and he’ll probably be convicted. Drug dealer, gang leader. Assaulted anybody that crossed him, including you.” She stopped again and swung toward him. “I heard about last night,” she said. “How are you?”

  He shrugged. “A little stiff and sore.” Not quite the truth, he was thinking.

  “Bastard.” She spit out the word and went back to pacing. “Bellows belongs in prison all right, but not for a murder he didn’t commit. God!” She pushed her hair back, letting the thick black strands run through her fingers. “Gianelli and the U.S. attorney have been waiting for a case with enough evidence to convict him, and now they have it. Troy Tallfeathers, one of our former clients”—she threw up both hands and lifted her eyes to the ceiling—“happened to go to the house at Ethete where Kiki was knocked out. He’ll testify that he saw Bellows hitting him. One of Bellows’s gang members, Lennie Musser, will back him up. It was Troy who dumped Kiki’s body at the river on Bellows’s orders.”

  Father John had to look away. He could still see the barren snow scape along the banks of the Little Wind River, the snow lifting in the wind. The image of Kiki’s body, thrown down the bank, legs bent and arms askew, eyes fixed on the sky, and the surprised expression frozen on his face. The image would never leave him. Left there to die by a man named Troy Tallfeathers.

  Vicky had stopped pacing; something had gone out of her now, some spark. She looked small, huddled inside the big black coat. “Bellows wanted Kiki left where other druggies—anybody who might consider moving into Bellows’s territory—would get the message. But he was wrong. I think Kiki went to the house to talk to somebody about what happened to his ancestor and ended up dead. I can’t prove it unless I find the caller.”

  Father John leaned across the desk and rummaged through the folders that Lucy had set in the metal rack. He lifted out the folder with the articles, photos, and notes he had been compiling and thumbed through the pages until he found the photo of Arapahos and Shoshones taken during rehearsal in Hollywood for the Indian show. “Charlie and his friends William Thunder and James Painted Brush are on the right,” he said, handing the photo to Vicky. He told her that all of the Arapahos and Shoshones had returned to the reservation when The Covered Wagon was finished. Then fifty of them had gone to Hollywood in the spring of 1923 to promote the movie. “Charlie and Anna were married while he was home,” Father John said. “She was pregnant with Andrew when he left for Hollywood.”

  Vicky studied the photo, shaking her head. “Imagine,” she said. “Ancestors prancing around a stage in Hollywood, roping plaster cows, wearing skins and moccasins, talking with their hands. I’m sure the audiences were amused.” She waited a beat before she asked when Charlie had disappeared.

  Father John flipped through the file folder and pulled out the letter from Tim McCoy that Andrew had loaned him. “The evening of April 10.” He handed her the letter. “Charlie didn’t show up at the Egyptian Theatre for the premiere, and William rode up to Cahuenga Pass where the camp was. He wasn’t anywhere around. McCoy checked with the police. There were no reports of a dead Indian. There’s more,” he said, and he gave her the copies of the articles on Missy Mae Markham from the movie magazines and the photo James Painted Brush had taken.

  Vicky took a moment to scan through all of it. Finally she looked up. “You think there was something between a movie star and Charlie? White woman and Indian? That would have caused trouble, all right.”

  “She’s looking at Charlie,” Father John said, “but William is looking at her.”

  “Oh, my God.” Vicky slapped the little pile on the desk. “A love triangle.”

  Father John slipped the papers back into the folder. “Missy Mae Markham earned millions for the studio,” he said. “A public scandal involving an Indian would have destroyed her at the box office.”

  “Maybe they ran off together. Disappeared. Charlie and the movie star.”

  Father John tapped the folder. “One of the photos shows her in Flagstaff with Jesse Lasky after Charlie disappeared.”

  Vicky walked over to the window and looked out. The gray daylight cast a silvery sheen on her hair. She could hear a truck gearing down on Seventeen-Mile Road. Finally she turned around. “Did Kiki see the photo of Charlie and William with Missy Mae Markham?”

  Father John nodded. Then he told her what Felix Painted Brush had said, how Kiki had studied the photo a long time. “Kiki was looking for the truth,” he said.

  “The truth!” Vicky walked across the office, picked up her black bag, and dug out her cell phone. “Whatever the truth is,” she said, tapping on the keys, “Kiki got hold of the man who has been calling me.” She made a half turn toward the door and tilted her head against the cell. “Dede, this is Vicky Holden,” she said. “Jason Bellows has been indicted and he’s in the county jail. Call me. I need your help.” She closed the cell, slipped it back into her bag, and set the bag over her shoulder. “I have a plane to catch,” she said.

  26

  April 1923

  CHARLIE SWUNG THE rope overhead then snapped it down over the wooden calf at the far corner of the stage. In an instant, the calf c
lattered across the floorboards, and Charlie pulled the rope into a tight circle. The crowd standing around burst into applause. Actors and ac tresses, big stars some of them, William had heard, rehearsing and shooting moving pictures on the studio’s backlot. Beyond the stage, he could see cameras set on tripods in front of the other stages. Except it looked like the shooting had stopped and most everybody had come over to the rehearsal stage to watch an Arapaho lasso a wooden calf. Charlie was good at it. He could rope a calf running five horses’ length ahead, but nobody on the reservation ever came around to clap and cheer. It was a job, cowboying.

  Trouble was, there weren’t so many jobs lately, so he and Charlie and the others had gotten back on the train at Rawlins and ridden all the way into Los Angeles with their ponies and tipis in the baggage cars. They arrived in LA two days ago. Everything looked different. Palm trees growing along the streets, pepper trees and lemon trees and orange groves running over the hillsides, and motorcars driving up and down alongside carts pulled by horses and red streetcars screeching on iron rails. They rode their ponies all the way to Hollywood, with the big white sign on the mountainside that said Hollywoodland. A policeman stood on a box at one of the intersections and directed the traffic. They rode down Hollywood Boulevard and on out to Cahuenga Pass where Mr. McCoy said they should set up camp. “No telling how long we’re gonna be here,” he had said.

  The longer the better, William thought. The pay was good, and all they had to do was put on an Indian show every night at the Egyptian Theatre. And tonight was the moving picture premiere. They had been rehearsing three hours now. Charlie was swinging the rope high and kicking the heels of his boots against the plank floorboards. He let the lasso fly and, this time, caught a tree stump that toppled sideways and came clanking toward him. Another roar of applause went up. The crowd started stomping their feet on the dusty ground, and out of the corner of his eye, William saw Missy Mae Markham standing a little ways off, the blond head cocked to one side, a sad, shrunken look about her. She was all in black: black dress with a black shawl around her shoulders. Still she was beautiful, her skin and hair all white and golden. Charlie had seen her, too, because he was looking her way as he yanked the rope off the stump, wound it into a thick circle and slung it over his shoulder.