Seized

by Lynne Cantwell

  “You think She’s a demon?” Shannon asked.

  I thought about it for a minute, but finally I had to shake my head. “No. She didn’t feel evil to me. I don’t know that She felt like a force for good, but She definitely didn’t feel like a force for evil.”

  “That’s what I felt, too,” Shannon said. “Not good or evil – just powerful.”

  “Truthful,” Joseph said. “She spoke the truth to me. Truth is neither good nor evil – it just is.”

  “She didn’t speak the truth to me about everything,” I insisted. “If I were an Indian, I think I would know it.”

  George laughed. “If that Sioux goddess told you you’re Indian,” he said, “you’re Indian.”

  “He’s right,” Joseph said, grinning. “White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman knows the truth. No matter what your mother told you.”

  I blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “Family trees are sometimes more like a thicket,” Looks Far rumbled. “You must have some Indian blood somewhere in your lineage. Many Americans do, and don’t know it. Indians who escaped the reservation would try to pass as white, to fit in better with the culture.”

  “Do you guys live on the rez?” Shannon asked brightly. I marveled anew at how she could get away with asking those kinds of questions without getting shot. Must be something they teach in social worker school.

  “I live here,” Looks Far said simply, gesturing around the wickiup. It dawned on me then that the back half of the wickiup was his sleeping area, and the colorful pots and baskets along the walls were functional storage space.

  “Thank you for inviting us into your home,” I said sincerely, and he smiled.

  “Joseph lived here with me for many years,” he continued. “We moved away from the reservation when he was just a boy, after his parents died in a car crash.”

  “I’m sorry,” Shannon said, turning to Joseph.

  He shrugged. “They were drunks. Grandfather was pretty much raising me anyway.”

  “Still,” she said, and placed a hand on his forearm.

  “Thanks,” he said, and was quiet for a moment, until she released his arm. He shifted in his chair. “Anyway, I got tired of the isolation up here after a while, so a few years ago, I moved in with George.”

  “An agreement I have rued ever since,” George said with a wink. “He leaves the place a wreck.”

  Joseph rolled his eyes at his roommate and continued, hooking a thumb at him. “This big liar and I worked construction until the bottom fell out of the housing market. Now we’re picking up odd jobs wherever we can. I still come up here to help Grandfather with the sweats, though.”

  “You do hold them professionally, then?” I asked Looks Far. “I was kind of wondering why there wasn’t anyone else here today.”

  “This one was special,” he said.

  We left with nothing resolved. I still had misgivings about the whole enterprise, and had no idea where, or even how, to begin. We traded cell phone numbers and agreed to keep in touch. And that, I fervently hoped, was that.

  Snow had begun to fall while we ate, enough so that I had to brush off the Cube’s windows before we could get on the road. Looks Far’s miserable driveway was still passable, but I whispered a prayer under my breath as we made the descent in first gear, and breathed much more freely when we turned onto the county road.

  Almost immediately, my phone chirped. “Check that for me, would you?” I asked Shannon.

  She fished the device out of my purse. “Missed call. No, several missed calls. And three voicemails. All from Brock.”

  My stomach turned over. I had not thought about him since before the sweat began – back when I was a carefree woman with a gangbusters career who was engaged to a terrific guy. Now I didn’t know who I was. I put out my hand for the phone.

  First message: “Hey, sweetie, how are you? Miss you tons. Sorry I didn’t get to see you yesterday – the other side filed a last-minute motion in my big case and I had to spend the whole day in court. Hoping to connect with you tonight, though. Call me.”

  Second message: “Hey, sweetie. Where are you? Tess said you were working from home. But I drove by your place at lunch and didn’t see your car. Hope you didn’t have to go to the doctor or something. Anyway, give me a call. We should make plans for Vail this weekend.”

  Third message: “Naomi? Listen, about Vail and shopping for a ring and all that – this really, really bites, but it turns out I’m going to be stuck here at the office all weekend on this matter that blew up on us on Thursday. I am so sorry. Let’s plan on going Monday. I know, I know, that’s Christmas Eve and the mall will be a madhouse. But I want to put a ring on your finger Christmas morning in the mountains. Miss you.”

  I got out of voicemail, feeling like a heel. “He wants to go ring shopping,” I said.

  “That’s exciting,” Shannon said. Then she looked carefully at me. “Or is it?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Wednesday night seems like it was a lifetime ago. Things were so different then.”

  “You hadn’t received marching orders from a goddess yet,” she said, nodding.

  “Was all that even real?” I said, kicking the wipers up a notch. “Or did we all just have, I dunno, complementary hallucinations?”

  Shannon started to laugh, and then couldn’t stop. Listening to her set me off. Ten cathartic minutes later, we could speak again.

  “It was real,” she said. “At least, it was to me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was to me, too.” For a few minutes, the only sounds were the wipers swishing back and forth.

  “Boy, it’s really starting to come down,” she said. “Are you going to call him back?”

  “Later. When we’re off the road.”

  The drive should have taken us no more than forty-five minutes, but there was an accident on 36, and then we hit a backup on Sheridan near Berkeley Lake – drivers stopped at some of the intersections were having trouble getting going again on the slippery road. Two and a half hours after leaving Looks Far’s wickiup, we pulled into Shannon’s unplowed driveway.

  I unpeeled my fingers from the steering wheel. “Can I just stay here tonight?”

  “Of course,” she said, patting my shoulder.

  “You’re a good friend,” I said gratefully.

  “Not as good as you think,” she grinned. “I was going to hit you up for a ride to my office tomorrow anyway. My car is still there.”

  Over a cup of tea, we wrestled again with the questions that had dogged us since the sweat, but no new insights occurred to us. I sighed. “I’m done in. Maybe things will look better in the morning.”

  “Makes sense to me,” she said. “Are you going to call Brock?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah.” She made herself scarce while I dug out my phone.

  “Naomi!” he caroled. “Thank God. I was about to call the Mounties.”

  “Hi, sweetie,” I said. “Sorry I’ve been incommunicado. I did work from home this morning, and then Shannon and I ran up to Boulder for the afternoon and got caught in traffic coming back. The roads are just miserable.” That was all pretty close to the truth, I thought.

  “Ah, the People’s Republic,” he said. “Did you see any toddler beauty queens?”

  “Nope, not a one,” I replied, giving my standard response to his standard question, “either dead or alive. No, Shannon had one of her woo-woo things going on up there, and I agreed to tag along.” It occurred to me, as I said it, that I didn’t know how White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman would feel about my use of the word “woo-woo” in connection with her. I winced, awaiting divine retribution. Luckily for me, none came.

  “Is she properly blissed out now?”

  It had never occurred to me before how much of Brock’s humor tended toward sarcasm. “She’s fine,” I said. “Listen, about the ring shopping….”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. And now I’m not sure I’ll be able to go Monday, either. These
guys really have me by the short hairs. I’m going to be at the office all fucking weekend – we’ve got calls and meetings scheduled nearly wall-to-wall.”

  I blinked. This was beginning to feel familiar, and not in a good way.

  “I am really sorry, Naomi,” he said again.

  “I am, too,” I said lightly. “I could care less about the ring, in a way. But I miss you, Brock. I guess I’ll see you at the office Monday. Maybe you can escape for a fifteen-minute coffee break and we can catch up then.”

  “It’s a date,” he said.

  “I love you,” I said, but he’d already hung up.

  I stared at the phone for a while, then sighed and stretched out on the sofa, pulling an afghan over me.

  Fifteen minutes later, Shannon walked through the living room. She stopped and regarded me with amusement. “Sleeping with the lights on these days?”

  “You assume I’m sleeping.” I sat up, wrapping the afghan around my shoulders. “I think he’s stepping out on me again.”

  She sat next to me and gave me a hug. “Maybe he really is stuck at work all weekend,” she said.

  “Mmm, yeah, and maybe we all had complementary hallucinations this afternoon.” That got a snort out of her. “I could buy it,” I went on, “except he only uses the f-word when he’s lying.”

  Which Shannon knew; in fact, she had originally pointed it out to me. Again, this is why I want her in charge of the global hive mind. She notices things.

  Brock hates the word “fuck”. Back when we were in law school, he would lecture me when I used it: it’s vulgar, it dishonors the most loving act two people can perform, and so on. Sometimes, when I was in a certain mood, I would say it just to annoy him. It was entertaining to watch him go off. (I did say I could be a bastard.)

  Then about five years ago, not long after Shannon and I had met at a yoga class, I got it into my head that we needed to go – nay, we could not survive another year without going – to Nederland for Frozen Dead Guy Days, the mountain town’s annual celebration in honor of the resident who rigged up his own personal cryogenic freezer and had himself put into it when he died. I had never been, and I decided we simply must see the coffin races and drink a toast to the dead guy. So I rounded up law school classmates and friends from work, and Shannon came with the guy she was dating at the time – there were nine or ten of us, all told – and reserved rooms at a B&B in Ned so we wouldn’t have to drive home drunk every night.

  I rode up with Brock Friday afternoon and we checked into the B&B. Then we met up with everybody else in the beer garden, and then began wandering around, checking out the bands and so on – the usual stuff you do at a festival. Brock and I hooked up that night, and I guess we were kind of hanging on one another the next morning because several people commented on it. But as the morning went on, he became more and more distant. Then he disappeared after lunch.

  We had agreed to see the coffin races as a group, but Brock didn’t show for the rendezvous. I was becoming increasingly concerned, and probably said, “Where the hell is Brock?” three or four hundred times. Then one of the guys in our group told me he had seen Brock at a bar up the street. He said he had told Brock it was time for the meet-up, but Brock told him he wasn’t interested in watching a “fucking corpsicle race.”

  I said, “He actually said the word ‘fucking’?”

  “Direct quote, yeah,” the guy said. “Why?”

  “Because he never says ‘fuck.’ He hates that word.”

  “Well, he said it just now.”

  So we all went along to the races without him, and although I was pretty upset, I tried to have a good time. I also consoled myself with the certainty that we’d meet up later. I mean, Ned’s not that big a town – the whole festival is only a couple of blocks long. But he never turned up, either the rest of the day or that night. Never came back to the B&B. And was MIA all day Saturday, too.

  I finally saw him again Sunday, as everything was winding down. He was sitting on a bench, nuzzling a giggly girl who looked to be about sixteen. God help me, I marched up to him and interrupted them by saying, “So is she why you skipped the ‘fucking corpsicle race’?”

  “Get off my back, Naomi,” he said.

  “I’m not on your back, Brock,” I said. “I was worried about you. We all came up here together for the festival, and you took off without saying anything to anybody.”

  “I don’t have to report my every move to you!” he yelled.

  I stepped back, fighting an urge to yell back at him. “No,” I said finally, in tones as frosty as the March air, “no, you don’t. But you could have told somebody.”

  “Is she your girlfriend?” Giggles asked then.

  “Fuck, no,” Brock said, looking hard at me.

  “Fine,” I said, glaring back. “The rest of the group is leaving now. Should I go back with them?”

  “Do whatever you want.”

  I rode home with Shannon and her guy, blubbering and complaining all the way. They were good sports about it, but still, it’s kind of embarrassing to think about now.

  Anyway, it was on that ride home that Shannon said, “What’s his deal with the word ‘fuck’?” So I told her how Brock objected to it. And then she said, “So he only says it when he’s lying? Because you are his girlfriend, whether he wants to admit it to himself or not.”

  That’s when the light bulb came on. I realized that during the years I’d known Brock, I had, in fact, heard him drop the f-bomb a handful of times – and it was always when he was lying. Shannon and I decided he did it when he was stressed out over the chance that he’d be caught.

  Since that weekend, she and I had observed him do the same thing a few more times. Sometimes it was because he had ditched me for another woman, as he had done in Nederland; sometimes it was at work, when he had cut a few too many corners on an assignment and was trying to cover his ass.

  “Why does he have to lie to me?” I asked her now, kneading the edge of a throw pillow. “If he wants to break the engagement, why doesn’t he just say so?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t,” she said. “Maybe he wants to have you, and some fun on the side, too.”

  I cut her a sideways look. “You make him sound like an asshole.”

  She touched her index finger to the tip of her nose. Then she stood. “I’m turning in. Should I leave the lights on?”

  “No,” I said, sinking back down on the sofa. “I think I’ll pretend to sleep for a while.”

  No further dreams troubled my sleep that night. I supposed the goddess had said everything to me that she intended to say – for now, at least.

  After a breakfast of coffee and English muffins, I ran Shannon over to her office. The snow had stopped overnight and the roads were in fairly good shape, so I decided to go home, shower and change clothes, and then go into the office. I figured that working would take my mind off the ethical dilemma White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman had handed me: do her bidding or protect Jehovah? Besides, as a practical matter, I had lost a full day of work Friday, what with one thing and another. I was going to have to put in a few hours over the weekend or be totally screwed Monday.

  All right, I had an ulterior motive for stopping by the office: I wanted to see whether Brock was really there, and really working. Although I did actually have work to do, too, honest.

  On the way from home to the office, I stopped on impulse at the drug store and picked out a “miss you” card. Then I hiked through the slush to work. The temperature was popping up in a hurry and the snow was melting fast. One thing you can say about semi-arid Denver: snow doesn’t usually last long. At home in Indiana, this stuff would compact and crust over, new snow would fall on top, and so on, all winter long. Then it would turn gray from pollution, then a nasty grainy black from road dirt, and finally we’d be rid of it in April. Here? Three or four days, tops, and what didn’t melt would evaporate. Granted, it was a different story at the ski resorts, and thank goodness for that.

  I shrugged
off my coat and hung it on the hook behind my door, then signed the card and slipped down the hall to Brock’s office. He wasn’t there, but his lights and computer were on, and a document was up on the screen – so he was making it look good, at least. I propped the card between his keyboard and monitor, and then idly scanned the top layer of paper on his desk. He had a couple of books open; one of them was turned to a chapter on property rights and eminent domain. I took a better look at the document on screen. It was a memo to our client, Durant Development Co., regarding their plans to acquire a huge piece of property near Boulder for a casino and vacation condo development tentatively called Indian Mesa.

  I blinked. “Oh, no,” I said, “it couldn’t be.”

  “What couldn’t be?” Brock stood just inside his doorway.

  “Sweetheart!” I said, snatching up the card from the desk and handing it to him. He pulled me to him and kissed me. Then he released me and opened the card. I got a smile out of him, and another long embrace, and some murmured “missed you”s and so on.

  Then I pulled away. “So tell me what’s stolen you away from me this weekend,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, his arm around my waist, “Durant is trying to buy up some undeveloped land off Route 36 near Boulder for a casino development, but the owners are playing cat-and-mouse with him. They agreed in principle to the sale months ago, but now they’re balking and want to pull out. Durant wants us to find a way to persuade the land owner to go through with the deal.”

  “That’s why you went to court Thursday?”

  “Yeah. We tried to get the judge to enforce the contract, but he’s put off the hearing ‘til Wednesday. So we need our ducks in a row by then. Fucking lousy timing, if you ask me,” he said disgustedly.

  There’s that word again, I thought. “Where is this place, exactly?” I asked. “I wonder whether Shannon and I went past it yesterday.”

  “You probably did and didn’t realize it. It’s not far off 36.” He excavated a set of plans from the mess on his desk and unrolled them. “Here we go.”