Windigo Island

by William Kent Krueger

  “Back and forth where?” Jenny asked. She sipped her coffee. It was good and strong and made her like Shinny even more.

  “There are whole housing communities the oil companies have thrown up here. Mobile homes, little shanties, prefabs, you name it. Anything that’ll put a roof over an oil worker’s head. You look at some hillsides, and it’s like a tiny military base. People are turning their garages into temporary housing, renting out vacant rooms. Little food operations, mom-and-pop diners, opening up out of home kitchens. There’s so much money to be made here. I mean, these guys, they get paid a shitload for what they do, and they’ve got nothing to spend it on.”

  “But they can buy a fourteen-year-old girl for a while,” Cork said.

  “Yeah,” Shinny said soberly. “My guess is the girls get ferried to these workers’ communities. Maybe they’ve got one or two guys lined up, or, hell, maybe they go from trailer to trailer. I don’t know.”

  Jenny thought about the stories they’d heard from Louise, about the days she’d worked the big boats in Duluth, going from bunk to bunk. She thought, Things never change.

  There was a cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall, and the little wooden bird gave one call. Shinny looked up at it and said, “The real birds’ll be carrying on in a few hours. Maybe we should all get some shut-eye and figure this thing out in the morning.”

  He had a spare room with a twin bed, which they all insisted Meloux take. He was looking more and more worn-out. Jenny was given the living room sofa. Daniel said he’d roll out his sleeping bag on the floor. Cork said he’d sleep in his Explorer.

  When the house was dark and quiet, Jenny lay thinking about the man they’d come looking for, thinking that everything they knew about him was frightening. Worse than Wolf, Raven had cautioned. That was hard to imagine.

  “Daniel?”

  “Yes?” His voice came from the floor, sounding wide awake, like her.

  “There’s something else.”

  “Something else? What do you mean?”

  “A selfish reason I came. It’s not just because I’m concerned about Mariah.”

  He fell silent, waiting patiently for her to continue, in the way Jenny had come to expect of him.

  “Downwind of the devil,” she said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve been trying to write a book about what happened to me and my family when we found Waaboo. It’s not working. I don’t know why. But I’ve been thinking about Mariah, about her story and the story of girls like her. This is a story I can write, Daniel. I know I can. But to do that, I need to see this through to the end. I know that sounds mercenary.”

  In the dark and into the quiet, Daniel said, “No, I get it.” Then he said, “Downwind of the devil?”

  “A title maybe?”

  “I like it,” Daniel said. “The hunting motif and what we’re hunting. Sounds very Hemingwayesque to me though.”

  She laughed softly. “May I read some of your poems one of these days?”

  “I think that could be arranged.”

  Later, when sleep still eluded her, she said, “Did you bring your gun?”

  “My Glock? It’s locked in my truck.”

  “Is it a powerful gun?”

  “Standard issue. It’s durable, does the trick. Why?”

  “Have you ever shot anyone?”

  “I’ve only fired warning rounds.”

  “Do you think you could?”

  “Shoot someone? I’m trained for it.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  He didn’t answer for a while, and Jenny appreciated this, appreciated that he didn’t give her some bullshit macho reply.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I’d like to believe I’ll never have to find out. But if it came down to it, I’d like to believe I wouldn’t hesitate. Lives might depend on it.”

  Another period of quiet followed. She could feel him lying awake, like her, in that long, dark night. Finally she asked a question that had been bothering her from the moment they’d set out for Williston.

  “Shouldn’t we let the police here know what’s going on?”

  “Do we know what’s going on?”

  “Aren’t we pretty sure?”

  “And what do we tell them when they ask how we know this? That the information came from a man your father worked over?”

  “We could lie.”

  “The point I’m making is that law enforcement is just that. It enforces laws. All laws. Some of what we’ve done has already crossed a legal line. Things are complicated now.”

  “And they’ll only get more complicated.”

  Daniel said only one more thing to her that night and clearly with a measure of regret. He said, “Yeah. They will.”

  • • •

  Morning came too early, after much restless dreaming. Jenny woke to the smell of brewing coffee. She got up from the sofa, tiptoed past Daniel in his sleeping bag, and went to the kitchen, where an early, golden light poured through the windows and flooded the room. Shinny was there, his braid undone, his hair hanging long and loose down his back. He wore gray sweatpants and a yellow T-shirt with a big dream catcher on the back. He was barefoot. When she walked in, he was pulling mugs from the cupboard and setting them in a line on the counter near the coffeemaker.

  She said quietly, “Good morning.”

  He turned and smiled. “Boozhoo. Anish na?”

  “Good, thanks,” she said.

  “Slept well?”

  “Not long enough.”

  “I get that. Coffee’ll help. Be ready in a minute. Have a seat.”

  Jenny sat and took in the kitchen, which the night before she’d been too tired to appreciate. The room was done in retro. The cuckoo clock on the wall. The dining set—red Formica table­top, shiny, steel frame chairs with red vinyl seats. Kitschy salt and pepper shakers shaped like Dutch windmills. On the counter, a vintage radio of yellow and red plastic. Even the mugs he’d set out were retro, each bearing an image of a Warner Bros. cartoon character—Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn, Wile E. Coyote, Tweety.

  Beyond the windows she saw rolling hills, seared brown by the summer heat and the dryness of the high plains. Among those hills, great rock bluffs thrust up, dark and volcanic-looking. From where she sat, the whole landscape appeared torn and rugged and bare. But the air outside was full of the promising song of birds. She wondered was there a place on earth that had no birds? If so, she never wanted to go there.

  She scanned the kitchen again, marveling at the care with which it had been decorated. “Are you married, Shinny?”

  He poured half-and-half from a carton into a little ceramic server. “Was,” he said. “Not anymore. Maybe never again.”

  She didn’t want to pry, but failed relationships were so much a part of her own history that she was always—a little morbidly, she sometimes thought—curious about that experience in the lives of others.

  “Children?”

  “Nope. Part of the problem. I’m sterile.”

  “You couldn’t adopt?” Prying again, but in for a penny, in for a pound.

  He opened the refrigerator and put the half-and-half back on a shelf. “Fine by me, but my wife—ex-wife—wanted children of her own. I get that. She married a guy must be a sperm fountain. She’s got six kids now. You have kids, Jenny?”

  “One. He’s three. His name is Aaron Smalldog O’Connor. We call him Waaboo. Short for Waaboozoons.”

  “Little rabbit,” he said with approval.

  “You know Ojibwemowin?”

  He opened a bread box on the counter and took out a loaf of something heavy-looking. “Some,” he said and pulled a serrated knife from a block of knives. “Also some Arapaho, some Dakota, a little Crow. Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa, of course. This is the reservation of the Three Affiliate
d Tribes, after all. Pays to be able to talk with your neighbors, you know.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, what does Shinny mean? Is that your real name? Is it Mandan?”

  He smiled broadly. “It’s an old Plains Indian game. Kind of like hockey. I did a research project about it when I was in high school. The name stuck. My given name is Clarence. I like Shinny a lot better.”

  “What do you do here? When you’re not playing shinny.”

  “I’m in charge of waste management on the rez. But my real interest is in the health of the land here. We’re in trouble, let me tell you.”

  “The oil drilling?”

  He slid a cutting board from a drawer, set it on the counter, placed the loaf in the center, and began slicing the bread. “We sit right on top of the Bakken Formation. That’s about two hundred thousand square miles of oil- and gas-bearing shale. Current estimates are that the formation contains more than two billion barrels of recoverable oil. But it’s deep underground, and to get it out of the rock requires fracking. You know about fracking, of course.”

  She told him she did.

  “Nobody really knows the ultimate effect of fracking on an environment. Or that’s the official stance. Me, I believe it’s going to be absolutely devastating. We’ve already had the largest oil spill on land in U.S. history here. And those communities thrown together to try to house all the workers, God, are they a blight. You can’t go anywhere without hitting road construction. All this in the name of the almighty dollar. Jesus, they rape our women, they rape our land, and they call us the savages.” He’d been slicing the bread with a kind of vengeance. Now he stopped and stared outside the kitchen windows at the distant brown hills. “I know a lot of people see this area as nothing but wasteland. To me it’s infinitely beautiful. I’d love to keep it that way.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jenny said. Feeble, but she didn’t know what else to say. “It must be difficult.”

  He shrugged it off and went back to slicing bread. “If I didn’t have my music to fall back on, I’d probably go crazy. That’s how Daniel and I first got together, you know.”

  “Drumming, right? At powwows?”

  “There’s that, but we jam together, too.”

  “Daniel’s a musician?”

  He looked up from his work. “He didn’t tell you?”

  “He hasn’t said a thing.”

  He laughed. “I can guess why. The accordion’s his instrument.”

  “The accordion?”

  His laugh was rich and deep. “Yeah. An accordion-playing Shinnob. Go figure. But he’s damn good. You should hear him when we do zydeco.”

  “Zydeco?”

  He eyed her with curiosity. “You and Daniel, there’s something there, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “He’s a good man. You could do a lot worse.”

  “Now there’s a ringing endorsement.” Daniel stood in the kitchen doorway, running his hand through a head of unkempt black hair.

  Jenny smiled at him, and the first thing she said was “The accordion?”

  He gave Shinny a cold glare. “You told her?”

  “Time you came out of the closet, amigo.”

  “Why the accordion?” she asked.

  Shinny said, “You want coffee before you answer that one, Daniel? It’s ready.”

  He poured them all mugs, and they sat together at the table and sipped the good brew in silence, while the birds sang outside the windows and morning sunlight gilded the room.

  “The accordion,” Shinny finally said, smiling at Daniel. “This is a story I haven’t heard.”

  “Okay.” Daniel sounded as if he was settling into a tale he’d told before, but not one he particularly liked telling. “My grandmother loved Lawrence Welk. When I spent weekends with her, we watched his show, which was in reruns by then. So it started out being something I did because I loved my grandmother and to be, you know, a good grandson. Funny thing was, I ended up liking it, especially the guy who played the accordion. His name was Myron Floren. For my ninth birthday, my grandmother gave me an accordion and money for six months of lessons. A couple of weeks later, she had a heart attack and passed away. What could I do? I learned to play.”

  “That’s lovely, Daniel,” Jenny said.

  Shinny laughed. “I told you you could do worse, Jenny.” He took a sip from his mug and glanced toward a window. “By the way, where’s your father?”

  “Sleeping in his Explorer.”

  “Explorer’s gone,” Shinny said. “Was gone when I got up this morning.”

  Jenny stood and went to the kitchen window above the sink, where she could see the street out front. The place her father had parked the night before was empty. “I don’t know where he went.” She looked back at Daniel. “Did he say anything to you?”

  “Not a word.”

  She returned to her seat. Her gut began to knot. She stared into her coffee, into the little world reflected on its dark surface. “I still think we should bring the police into this.”

  Neither of her companions spoke immediately. Then Shinny said, “You don’t look Indian.”

  “My grandmother was true-blood Iron Lake Anishinaabe. I’m one-eighth.”

  He nodded. “Around here, looking the way I do, the way so many of us do, being Indian pretty much defines how we’re perceived. You walk into an off-rez community, and you get looked at. You get watched. You get judged. On the basis of your genes alone. Most of us have been stopped by white cops for no other reason than we’re driving a truck with reservation plates. We’ve had altercations with white people, and more often than not, the guy who shows up wearing the badge, a white guy, doesn’t much bother to see our side. Not all cops out here are like that, but enough that you just never know. So trusting law enforcement runs against the grain.”

  “So does vigilantism,” Jenny said. “Look, I want to help Mariah, I really do, but I’m concerned about going at it on our own. I have this overwhelming sense that people are going to get hurt.”

  “Someone has already been hurt, Jennifer O’Connor.”

  They all turned and found Henry Meloux walking slowly into the kitchen.

  “That coffee,” the old man said. “I would pay gold for a cup.”

  “Have a seat, Henry,” Shinny said, rising. “And the cost is your company.”

  “Migwech,” the old man said. He looked at Jenny. “You slept better than your father.”

  “You knew he was gone?” she said.

  “I heard him drive away. It was very dark.”

  “Black, Henry?” Shinny asked. “Your coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  Shinny brought Meloux the mug with Wile E. Coyote on it. The old man studied the image and said, “Thin. Not a good hunter, I would guess.”

  “Abysmal,” Shinny said with a laugh.

  The old man drank his coffee and closed his eyes, savoring the flavor, the warmth, the caffeine promise.

  “You meant Raven Duvall?” Daniel said. “Already hurt?”

  Henry lowered his mug and opened his dark eyes. “Before that girl, they hurt others. Hurt is what they know, all they know.”

  “So hurt for hurt, Henry?” Jenny said. “And we do the hurting?”

  “When we walk the Path of Souls, Jennifer O’Connor, we leave the hurt and the hurting behind.”

  “You’re advocating killing these men?”

  Meloux cupped his mug as if warming his old, blue-veined hands. He looked deeply into her eyes and spoke softly. “If you kill a wolf for the pleasure of it, that is one kind of killing. If you kill a wolf because it has attacked you, that is another kind of killing. If you kill a wolf that has been caught in the jaws of a trap and injured beyond healing, that, too, is a different kind of killing.”

  “There are good killings, Henry?”

 
“There are necessary killings.”

  “And who decides what’s necessary?”

  “That is always a matter of the heart.”

  “I can’t accept that, Henry.”

  “You have never killed.”

  “And I hope I never have to.”

  “Granddaughter, I hope that, too.”

  “Look, we’re not going to kill anybody,” Daniel said. “If I thought that, I wouldn’t be here. There’s a way of getting Mariah away from Windigo without resorting to bloodshed.”

  “You brought your gun,” Jenny pointed out. “Are you familiar with Chekhov?”

  “What’s Chekhov got to do with this?” Shinny asked.

  Daniel stared at Jenny while he answered Shinny’s question. “Chekhov said that if you hang a gun on the wall in the first act, you have to use it by the third.”

  They all heard the sound of the Explorer returning, the sudden cutoff of the engine, the thud of a door closing, then another. They heard the little cry of hinges as the front screen door opened and shut. They heard the tread of footsteps across the floor of the living room. They waited for Jenny’s father to come into the kitchen. When he finally appeared, he wasn’t alone.

  Chapter 37

  * * *

  The girl with him was no older than Mariah Arceneaux, but she was not Mariah. She wore a tight yellow skirt that barely covered her butt, a tight red top, red heels with straps. A little white purse hung over one shoulder. Her face was a mask of heavy, but carefully applied, makeup. She was Indian. And she was pissed.

  “Got a chair for our guest, Shinny?” Cork said.

  “Take mine.” Daniel stood up.

  The girl eyed the vacant seat as if it were the electric chair and made no move to fill it.

  “Sit down, Breeze,” Jenny’s father said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “You’re going nowhere. You might as well be comfortable.”

  “Coffee?” Shinny asked.

  Breeze swung her gaze toward him, appraised him, and said, “What the hell.” Then she did, in fact, flop down into the chair Daniel had offered. She clutched her purse in her lap and stared at the Formica tabletop.