The Ghost Walker

by Margaret Coel

  This was their church, the Arapahos’. They had built it and painted the walls with sacred symbols: the lines and circles that symbolized the journey of life. Above the front door they had painted the figure of the crucified Christ, the staked warrior, like the warriors in the Old Time who had staked themselves to the ground so that enemies might vent their anger upon them while the people escaped. On the wall next to the altar, they had painted a yellow daffodil, so that a flower might always grace the altar, even in winter. Father John knew the Arapahos considered the Mass only one of the many ways to worship the Great Mystery, the Shining Man Above. There couldn’t be too many. He offered Mass for the body in the ditch.

  By the time Mass ended, daylight filled the church. Back in the sacristy, Father John removed the green chasuble he’d worn this morning—green symbolized life and hope—while Leonard Bizzel, the caretaker, placed the chalice and prayer books in the cabinet. Leonard hadn’t reached fifty yet, but he moved with the deliberation of an old man. Every act received the same minute attention. “Bad things goin’ on,” he said.

  The Arapaho had obviously skipped the preliminaries and gotten to what was bothering him: the dead body. The moccasin telegraph must have set a record for sprinting news across the reservation, Father John thought. Then he remembered Leonard’s son was on the BIA police force.

  “That ghost don’t get a proper burial, it’s gonna cause plenty of trouble.” Leonard lingered on each word, as if it were an oracular pronouncement. “How come you seen the body?”

  “The Toyota broke down on Rendezvous Road. I was walking to the highway to hitch a ride when I spotted it,” Father John explained as he hung the vestments in the closet.

  “Ghost’s causing trouble already.”

  “A radiator hose popped.”

  “Ghost did it,” Leonard said.

  * * *

  Father John retraced his steps to the priests’ residence under a sky the color of blue-tinted glass. The snow sparkled in the early morning sun. He tried to push thoughts of the body to the edge of his mind by mentally ticking off the day’s schedule: bills to pay, phone calls to return, meetings to arrange, people to counsel. He should call one of the parish priests to find out about last night’s meeting. Scratch that idea, he decided. The bishop’s representative would eventually call him with the news plus a reprimand for not attending.

  What he did want to do was drive out to Joe Deppert’s place to see how the old man was doing after his surgery. And Banner expected him at Fort Washakie to meet with the local FBI agent. Any report of a dead body on the reservation meant the FBI would be involved; major crimes in Indian country fell in FBI jurisdiction. But how the day went depended on when Jake Littlehorse returned the Toyota.

  He could smell bacon frying as he came up the stairs to the concrete stoop in front of the priests’ residence. He piled his parka and the rest of his winter gear on the bench inside the entry as Walks-on shuffled down the hallway, tail wagging, a red Frisbee in his mouth. “Later,” Father John said, patting the dog’s head before following the aroma into the kitchen.

  Father Peter sat at the table, his head bent into the Wind River Gazette. The old man’s frizzled white hair wrapped like a muff around a circle of pink scalp. Elena was at the stove scrambling eggs and tending wide slabs of bacon in a pan. Little dots of grease spouted into the air.

  Elena had been the housekeeper long before Father John had heard of St. Francis Mission. With her round face and stocky build, the old woman had the look of the Cheyenne, or the Shyela, as the Arapahos called the people who had traveled with them across the plains. She had once told him how her grandfather had been a Cheyenne dog soldier. When he saw the beautiful Arapaho girl who came with her family to the Cheyenne village to trade, he had approached her father and asked permission to marry her. Her father had agreed because it was a dog soldier who asked. After they were married, they had lived with her people, and the dog soldier became one of the Hinono eino.

  “I’ll have my eggs fried this morning.” Father John bent over the old woman, unable to resist teasing her a little.

  She scooped the scrambled eggs onto a plate and laid a couple of pieces of bacon alongside, flashing him the kind of exasperated look his mother had turned on him when he was a kid. “Behave yourself,” she said, handing him the plate, “or that ghost’ll shoot his ghost arrow at you and give you a big pain.”

  Another second, and Elena had placed a mug of coffee on the table, scooped up the empty dishes in front of Father Peter, and sauntered over to the sink. Father John set his plate down and took the vacant chair across from the old priest, still engrossed in the Gazette. Father Peter was the temporary assistant at St. Francis, but temporary was beginning to look more and more permanent. There weren’t a lot of Jesuits clamoring for assignments on an Indian reservation in the middle of Wyoming.

  When Father John first came to St. Francis, Father Peter had been the superior. But four years ago, a heart attack had sent the old man into retirement. There he was last fall at Ignatius Center, immersed in his beloved Shakespeare, when the Provincial had called him back.

  Now their roles were reversed. Father John was the superior, responsible for operating the mission and looking after his elderly assistant. A couple of mornings when Father Peter hadn’t appeared at breakfast, he had pounded on the old man’s bedroom door, fearful of what he might find.

  Father Peter pushed the newspaper toward him. “You made the front page, my boy.”

  Father John glanced at the headline: PRIEST REPORTS BODY IN DITCH. Then his eyes ran down the column. It was all there: Father John O’Malley, pastor at St. Francis Mission, claiming to have found a dead body last evening in the ditch on Rendezvous Road. Chief Art Banner explaining how the police were unable to locate any body.

  “Now, you wouldn’t be having visions, would you?” The old priest’s blue eyes twinkled, but Father John knew he was only partly kidding. Probably all the Jesuits expected him to fall off the wagon sooner or later. It had happened before.

  He washed down a forkful of eggs with a sip of coffee, giving himself a moment to reply. “People will think so,” he said finally, “if the body isn’t found.” That’s what really bothered him. The fact that the body might never be found. An unknown dead person, with no one to grieve for him or remember him. No one to bury him.

  “‘Alas, poor ghost.’” The old priest sighed again and looked away a moment. Then, his eyes back on Father John’s, he began waving a knobby finger. “You could’ve been dead out in that blizzard yourself.”

  Father John drained the last of the coffee and smiled at the old man. “Always carry emergency supplies in the winter. I believe that was the first lesson you taught me.”

  “Well, you might have fixed the pickup.”

  “But then I wouldn’t have found the body.”

  Father Peter leaned across the table, a mixture of mirth and irritation in his eyes. “Are you saying you don’t carry emergency supplies because they might keep you from finding dead bodies?”

  “Sounds logical.” Father John pushed back his chair and got to his feet. He liked bantering with the old Irish priest. He reminded him of his father.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what’s logical,” Elena said, turning partly from the sink, hands submerged under billows of soapsuds. “That ghost wants to do his mischief. He’s not ready to go to the spirit world yet.”

  4

  It was almost noon before Jake Littlehorse wheeled the Toyota around Circle Drive, and Father John called Banner to say he was on his way to Fort Washakie. He drove Jake the thirty miles back to the garage and, after paying him what came perilously close to the last of the mission’s ready cash for January, he followed the highway across the southwestern edge of the reservation. At a junction he turned onto a narrow road that shot straight west. Every few miles, he passed a painted frame house with a propane gas tank propped on spindly metal legs in the snow-covered yard, a couple of trucks scattered about, laund
ry stiff on lines out back, and a TV antenna perched on the roof.

  He turned north on Highway 287, which skirted the foothills of the Wind River Mountains. Stands of cedars and lodgepole pines, their branches heavy with snow, flashed by to the west. In every other direction, the plains, sparkling like a field of diamonds, stretched into the blue sky. Sunlight glinted off the hood, danced over the highway ahead. He squinted against the brightness.

  It was on drives like this through the open spaces that he missed the music of his favorite operas filling up the cab. The plaintive notes of “Si, mi chiamano Mimi” and “Vesti la giubba,” or the rousing rhythms of “Torreadoer en garde” lifted him out of himself. And “Nessun dorma” he loved. Sung by one of the masters, it encompassed everything beautiful in the world. But the Toyota had never boasted a working radio, let alone a cassette player, and the portable player he used to keep on the seat had been broken. There was no telling when he could afford to buy another. He tried to content himself with humming the arias, sometimes launching into a chorus and surprising himself that he knew the words.

  He had driven about forty miles when he slowed down along the main street of Fort Washakie, the little community that meandered into the foothills. He set the Toyota into a vacant space in the parking lot next to the Wind River Law Enforcement Center, a one-story building with red-brick walls and a sloping red metal roof edged with snow.

  Inside, several Indians lined up in front of a glass-enclosed cubicle, while other Indians, mostly young, waited in the green plastic chairs along the walls. Father John greeted a couple of people he recognized as occasional members of his congregation. The young woman behind the glass looked up and motioned him to a side door. After disappearing a moment, she opened the door, glancing about as if to make sure no one else tried to enter.

  “Chief Banner’s waitin’ for you, Father,” she said scoldingly.

  Father John pulled off his gloves and unsnapped his parka as he walked down the corridor. The string of overhead fluorescent lights cast a white glare over the glass-paned doors and the beige walls. Little clouds of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Somewhere a phone was ringing, and the sound mingled with the clack of his boots on the tile. A voice with the unmistakable timbre of the chief’s drifted through an open door. He rapped one knuckle against the jamb before stepping inside.

  “Here you are,” Banner said, swiveling around in the chair behind a desk. It reminded Father John of his own desk, piled with papers and folders awaiting his attention.

  “Meet Mike Osgood, new FBI agent in these parts.” The chief flung an arm toward the man in one of the wood chairs on the other side of the desk.

  Osgood sprang to his feet and extended his hand. His grip was firm, despite his slight build. He looked to be about forty, with a light complexion, hair almost as black as Banner’s, and eyes almost as dark. The navy blue suit with the white shirt and yellow tie knotted at the collar gave him a serious look, but he seemed relaxed and confident. “I understand we have a dead body floating around the reservation,” he said.

  Banner pressed a button and barked into the phone. “Sergeant Deerkill, on the double.” Then to Father John, “We’re gonna need a statement.”

  Father John hung his parka over the back of the vacant chair and stuffed his gloves into the crown of his cowboy hat. Then he sat down, balancing the hat on one knee. Just then a young policeman in the same kind of BIA uniform—light-blue shirt and navy trousers—that Banner wore entered the office. A tape recorder was in his hand. “This here’s Sergeant Deerkill,” the chief said.

  The young man had the high forehead, the sunken cheeks, and deep-set black eyes of the Lakota. “Amos Deerkill,” he said, setting the recorder on the desk and perching on the corner. He leaned forward to shake Father John’s hand, then the agent’s.

  “We want you to tell us everything you saw last night,” the chief said. “How you found the body, what it looked like, anything you can remember. Never know what might help.”

  Father John leaned back against the chair and began explaining how he’d been driving down Rendezvous Road when his pickup popped a radiator hose and stalled.

  “Ghost made it break down,” Banner interrupted. Rocking back in his chair, he peered across the desk, as if daring anyone to question it.

  “Ghost?” This from the agent.

  “Yeah,” said the chief. “You got a body, you got a ghost. The ghost is causin’ trouble already. That’s why we gotta find the body and get it buried before that ghost causes any more trouble.”

  The agent turned toward Father John. The message in his eyes was so obvious Father John knew neither Banner nor the young sergeant would miss it: We white men must strive to be rational.

  Father John said, “Every soul deserves the blessings of a proper burial.”

  The agent threw out both hands. “Okay, okay. Can we just continue?”

  Again Father John started explaining, trying to recall all the details. The more he talked, the more the story began to sound preposterous. No wonder Father Peter thought he might be having visions. The FBI agent probably thought the same.

  “You get the license on the Chevy that picked you up?” This time the agent interrupted.

  Father John admitted he’d been so glad to get a ride, he hadn’t noticed the license. He described the driver: male, early twenties, light complexion, blond stubble on his chin. Not a local.

  “What makes you think so?” the chief asked.

  “He drove past me. He didn’t intend to stop, but something changed his mind.”

  Banner and the young sergeant both nodded, as if that was all the proof necessary to determine the driver came from elsewhere.

  “We’ll get this typed up for you to sign,” the chief said as the young policeman picked up the recorder and disappeared into the corridor.

  “Lab boys got two casts of boot prints out at the site. And they found something else.” Banner opened a brown envelope, extracted a plastic ziplock bag, and tossed it across the desk.

  The agent looked at it first, then handed it to Father John. He turned the bag slowly in his hands. Inside was a necklace strung with red, white, and black beads and yellow porcupine quills. The colors symbolized the four sacred movements at the center of life: the four winds, the four directions, the four seasons, the four periods of the day, the four quarters of the world. It might be worn by either a man or a woman. Returning the bag to the chief, he said, “Arapaho.”

  “Yeah. Just like the star quilt. Looks like we got ourselves a dead Arapaho. Only nobody’s been reported missing on the rez lately.” Banner turned toward the agent. “People usually go missin’ in the summers. Mostly hikers, hunters, or fishermen who get lost in the back country and fall off a cliff somewheres.”

  “Dead bodies don’t just appear,” Osgood said. “They’re always related to some event.”

  The chief sighed. “Weekend was pretty quiet. Two other calls last night. Truck went off Seventeen-Mile Road. Driver’s at Riverton Memorial. Domestic disturbance out north. Man’s in jail; woman went to her mother’s. That’s it. Friday night, Lander police got one call involving Arapahos. Loud party at the Grand Apartments. Citation issued to one Annie Chambeau. Saturday night, another call, same apartment. Claimed she’d had an intruder, but no sign of him.”

  The agent slipped a small notebook and pen from the inside pocket of his jacket. “Annie Chambeau,” he said. The pen scratched the paper. “I’ll talk to her. Maybe something happened at the party that led to somebody getting killed. I’ll see you get a report.” He glanced up at the chief.

  Father John had been here long enough to understand that various law enforcement agencies navigated a maze. The BIA’s territory was the reservation, but serious crimes, such as murder, brought in the feds. Something like this—a party in Lander, a possible murder, a corpse that may or may not still be on the reservation—jurisdictional lines began to blur. Something like this demanded a lot of cooperation.

  “I�
��ve got other sources I intend to interview,” the agent said. Getting to his feet, he strolled over to the coatrack next to the doorway and pulled on a gray overcoat. “Nobody can keep a body hidden forever. Sooner or later it’s bound to turn up.” He touched two fingers to his forehead in a little salute before turning into the corridor.

  Banner levered himself out of his chair and swept one hand over the multicolored map of Wind River Reservation tacked to the wall behind his desk. “Truth is, that body could be anywhere in thirty-five hundred square miles. Could be up here.” The chief pointed to the northwest where the Shoshones lived. “Or here.” His hand ran along the southern half: Arapaho land. “Chances of finding that body, if somebody doesn’t want it found, are about a zillion to one.”

  “What about the Chevy pickup?”

  The chief shrugged. “Some white guy lost on the reservation in a blizzard.” He traced one finger along the map. “He picked you up a little ways past Rendezvous Road and drove two miles down Highway 789 to Jake’s garage. Most likely, he kept goin’. Could be in Colorado by now.”

  Father John stared at the map. He couldn’t shake off the uneasy feeling about the young man who had given him a ride. The cold determination, the ruthlessness. And he had lied about being from around here.

  “Suppose he’d been on his way to Rendezvous Road to retrieve the body,” Father John began, sorting his thoughts out loud, searching for some logical path. “Suppose he saw me on the highway and decided not to chance turning onto Rendezvous Road. He stayed on the highway and deliberately passed me. Then he decided to pick me up in order to find out if I’d been on Rendezvous Road and had seen the body.” He didn’t say what was becoming obvious: Had he told the man about finding the body, his own life might have been in danger.

  The chief flopped back into his chair. “The guy that dropped that body got the hell outta there. Why would he take a chance on goin’ back?”