The Eagle Catcher

by Margaret Coel

  Vicky pushed back against the hard wooden slats in the chair. She’d heard that several wells on the reservation had stopped pumping this summer. Ernest wasn’t the only Arapaho to wake up one morning and feel the effects of even a few oil pumps standing mute as dead trees. When the oil companies decided to shut wells down, there wasn’t much the business council could do. That didn’t mean somebody like Ernest, who depended on the $200 or $300 per capita payment coming to his family every month, wouldn’t be furious at the chairman of the council.

  “Ernest hates Harvey,” Anthony went on. “He might’ve gotten drunk and decided to do something real stupid, stupider than usual. Why aren’t you questioning him? Why isn’t he in this ...”Anthony clenched his jaws. “Why isn’t he in jail?”

  Banner drew in a long breath and turned sideways, looking straight at the FBI agent’s profile. “He’s right about Ernest feuding with Harvey. Goes back to when Ernest fell out with his grandfather, Will Standing Bear. Will was real disappointed Ernest couldn’t get his act together, with all his drinking. So he started taking an interest in Harvey. Harvey was his Sun Dance grandson, you know.” Banner looked as if he was about to launch into an explanation of how the elder had become Harvey’s grandfather in the Sun Dance years ago and how that created a spiritual bond, which lasted a lifetime, but thought better of it. “Will helped Harvey get elected to the business council. Ernest’s been jealous of Harvey ever since,” he said.

  Vicky had forgotten about the falling out between Will and Ernest. It had happened at least ten years ago, about the time she had left the reservation to go back to school. The elders had enormous influence on who got elected to the business council. If things had been different, it might have been Ernest sitting on the council instead of Harvey.

  “Do you really think Ernest could have ...” Vicky stopped. It was hard to imagine someone she’d grown up with as a murderer.

  “We’re asking the questions here, counselor.” Miller didn’t look up, and his pen hadn’t slowed down.

  “That’s what I was gonna find out,” Anthony said, ignoring the agent.

  “So that’s why you ran out the back door? So you could talk to Ernest?” Banner looked as if he had just slapped the last piece of the puzzle in place.

  “I was afraid you’d jump to conclusions and think I murdered Harvey. You’d throw me in jail, then you could go home, pop a few beers and watch the Red Sox while Ernest roams around free as a deer. Just what’s happened.” Anthony’s words were crisp with sarcasm.

  As if he hadn’t heard, Miller opened the briefcase and pulled out the zip-lock bag. He pushed the bag down the table toward Anthony. “This look like Ernest Oldman’s knife?”

  “That’s my knife,” Anthony said. “Harvey gave it to me on my fourteenth birthday. He had my initials engraved on it.”

  “The lab will confirm that this knife was used to kill Harvey Castle,” Miller said confidently. He placed the bag back in the briefcase and snapped the lid shut.

  “I haven’t seen my hunting knife since July fourth,” Anthony said.

  “You lost it?” Banner asked, hope tracing his face.

  “It was stolen up at Washakie reservoir.”

  “Stolen?”

  “Yeah. It was in my tackle box in the back of Harvey’s pickup. Harvey and I were fishing at the reservoir. When we got back to where we’d parked, it was gone.”

  “The pickup?” the chief asked. Miller was pushing his pen across the notebook, his expression unchanged.

  “Just the knife out of the tackle box.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do? There was nobody around. I was mad as hell it got ripped off. It was just a knife anybody could get in any sporting goods store in Wyorning. Only thing that made it special was my initials, and the fact Harvey gave it to me. That’s all.”

  “You saying whoever took your knife intended to kill Harvey and make it look like you did it?” Banner asked.

  “Damn right that’s what I’m saying. Whoever took that knife must’ve recognized Harvey’s pickup, saw the tackle box in the back, decided to have a look, and hit the jackpot. This is a setup, man. I’ve been set up.”

  Father John came toward them as Vicky led Anthony out of the compartment into the hallway. She saw the grin spreading slowly across the priest’s face, but there was worry in his eyes.

  “All right,” he said, clapping Anthony on the back and winking at Vicky. “How’d you work this miracle?”

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, hurrying down the hallway and past the deputy’s station without acknowledging the two figures hunched in front of the monitors. She wanted Anthony out of the building before anybody had second thoughts.

  Outside on the asphalt lot, she fumbled in her leather bag and pulled out the key to the Bronco before facing the tall priest with the tan cowboy hat pulled low over his forehead and the band of sunburn across the bridge of his nose like a warrior’s paint.

  “They don’t have squat,” she said, explaining how she had telephoned the federal magistrate and talked him into releasing Anthony on a personal recognizance bond. Of course Miller had objected, but it was for the record only. There wasn’t enough evidence to keep Anthony locked up. He wasn’t supposed to leave the reservation. What was new about that? The government had been trying to keep Indians on reservations for the last hundred years.

  “Good work,” Father John said. He was smiling at her, and she felt the warm sense of being appreciated by a man, not just appraised.

  Ignoring the young Indian next to her, she said, “Somebody’s gone to a lot of trouble to put this on Anthony. Stole his knife while he was fishing at Washakie reservoir, used it to murder his uncle, then hid it out on the powwow grounds under some sagebrush to make it look as if he’d tried to hide it, knowing, of course, that it would be found.”

  “Not somebody. Ernest,” Anthony said.

  “Ernest Oldman?” Father John looked surprised.

  Anthony nodded toward the red-brick building behind them. “I told them inside how Ernest hated Harvey. That bastard killed him.”

  “Hold on,” Vicky said, placing one hand on the young man’s arm. “Right now you’re the one under suspicion. That’s what we have to worry about. If you want me to help you, Anthony, you’ve got to tell me everything you know, starting with the name of the friend you spent the night with.”

  Anthony stepped back, shaking his head. “There’s no way I’m going to involve her in this.”

  So it was a girlfriend he was protecting. Vicky had guessed right. And from the expression on Father John’s face, she knew he had guessed what they were talking about.

  “You are in some serious trouble, Anthony,” she said, trying to control her irritation at his calm stubbornness. He was so like Lucas, except that Anthony still had a chance to make something of his life while Lucas ... It had been a long time since she’d even seen her son. The Hinono eino needed the young people like Anthony. They couldn’t afford to lose one of the brightest, not for stubbornness.

  “Vicky’s right,” Father John said, placing one hand on the Arapaho’s shoulder as if to nudge him toward revealing the name.

  “No way,” Anthony said, shaking his head. “She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “In that case, get yourself another lawyer.” Stepping toward the Bronco, Vicky shot a look at Father John that said, “Talk some sense into him.” She flung open the front door and slid inside, slamming the door hard. She felt the heat of anger in her face as she caught sight of the two men in the rearview mirror, one white, the other Indian, standing in the parking lot, looking after her as the Bronco squealed onto the street.

  8

  VICKY GUIDED THE Bronco down the broad main street of Lander. Flat-faced, two-story buildings stood side by side, like ponies tethered together in a corral. Late-afternoon shadows floated down the buildings and out onto the sidewalks past wooden boxes of wilting petunias. An array of pickups, al
l different colors and sizes, lined the curbs.

  She could still feel the warmth of anger in her face. She gripped the steering wheel as she swung the Bronco onto Highway 789 and held it steady all the way to Hudson. Anthony would have to level with her, tell her everything. There was no other way. This wasn’t just his life, his future, for Christ’s sake. This affected the people. Everything Anthony might be able to do someday for the people could be lost at this moment, torpedoed into oblivion.

  It should be like it was in the Old Time, Vicky thought. In stories of the Old Time that grandfather had told her while she was growing up, the best people always stepped forward to help the others. Took their places, ran to their responsibilities, became leaders; chiefs looked out for the people. Now the best, like Anthony, wanted to look out for themselves, and that made her angry. Angry at him and angry at herself, because she’d come to care so much about such things, and there was so little she could do.

  Slowing past the family restaurants and stores on Hudson’s main street, Vicky made a left turn onto Rendezvous Road. The blacktop cut diagonally across the reservation’s southeastern corner, slicing through fields of sagebrush and wild grasses and running parallel to the Popo Agie River. The river had been named by the Crow people. It meant “Beginning of Water.”

  At Little Wind River Bottom Road, Vicky took another left, then a right onto a narrow dirt road. The magistrate had also said that Anthony was not to contact Ernest Oldman, which, by implication, extended to her as Anthony’s lawyer. But she was no longer Anthony’s lawyer. She had just fired herself.

  She made a sharp left into a driveway, and the Bronco veered sideways, spitting up clouds of dust. “Oldman” was etched on the lopsided wooden sign hanging on a rail fence. Ernest still had part of his great-grandfather’s name.

  Arapaho names were funny business. Vicky was always explaining to white people why some Arapahos had Indian names, others didn’t. Grandfather had often told the story. Names belong to individuals, like fingerprints, the whorl of ears, the sheen of hair. They symbolize the person’s spirit. And names can only be given away to someone who has the same kind of spirit. It is a special gift, when someone gives you his or her own name.

  But Mathias Cooley, the first government man at Wind River, didn’t like Indian names. It was too hard to keep track of his charges when people in the same family had different names. While her great-grandfather was alive, the agent couldn’t do anything about it. But as soon as Chief Black Night had died, Mathias Cooley set about bestowing proper English family names on Arapahos. The name of Ernest’s grandfather was shortened from Old-Man-Who-Carries-Spears to Oldman. Harvey Castle’s grandfather, White Eagle, got the name of a medieval dwelling place. Other Arapaho families received names of famous people, which accounted for the Franklins, Washingtons, Lincolns, and Roosevelts on the reservation. One family became Chaucer. Mathias Cooley must have been laughing up his sleeve at that one.

  She had loved her first name, the name grandfather had given her, Bi’h’ih Be’i’no. It meant Singing Deer. On the night she was born grandfather had told her, he had gone into the foothills to pray for the new human being soon to come into the world, and as he prayed he had heard the deer singing. Her mother called her Vicky because school was easier for Indian kids if they had names like white kids. When she came back to the reservation, after she had been away all those years—seven years for her BA and law degree and three years in the Denver law firm—the elders gave her a new name, Hi sei ci nihi. Woman Alone.

  Vicky stopped the Bronco behind a battered white pickup with a cracked windshield. Ernest’s one-story house, with green paint peeling off the sides, squatted in the middle of a patch of dirt strewn with old tires, beer cans, scraps of paper, and torn cardboard boxes. A white propane tank stood on short metal legs alongside another pickup, rusted out and sagging to one side. Next to it lay a yellow refrigerator, a rope tied around the middle. Vicky could see Jenny Oldman pulling laundry from the clothesline that angled off a back corner of the house. Jenny must have heard the Bronco, but she didn’t turn around.

  Vicky slammed the Bronco door and walked down the driveway. The house looked like most houses on the reservation, some bi-levels, others tri-levels. How the houses came to be was one of grandfather’s favorite stories. The warriors had come home from places like Normandy and Okinawa and Iwo Jima and had found the people still living in tipis and shacks. So they went to Washington and asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs people, “What were we fighting for?” After the warriors asked that, Arapahos got houses like other Americans. Her generation was the first to be born in houses. Her mother had been born in a shack. Her father, like her grandfather, had been born in a tipi.

  Jenny kept her back toward Vicky, dropping clothespins into a bucket at her feet, adding to the stack of laundry piled over one arm.

  “Jenny? How are you?” Vicky asked, walking up slowly behind her.

  “Why’d you come here?” Jenny reached up and pulled another towel off the line, her cotton dress straining across thin shoulders. A thick black braid hung partway down her back.

  “How are the kids?”

  The pile of laundry started to slip from Jenny’s arm, and Vicky reached out to help steady it. It was then she saw the angry purple bruise that spread from Jenny’s right eye across her cheekbone.

  “Oh, my God,” Vicky blurted. She felt a knot tightening in her throat as she instinctively put an arm around the other woman’s shoulders and pulled her close. The pile of laundry between them smelled like fresh, sweet sage.

  Jenny started to cry. “Don’t look at me,” she said, pulling back and shaking her head. “He don’t mean it. He ain’t like this normally. He loves me and the kids, you know he does. It’s just that things’ve been so bad since that job on the highway ended and the wells stopped pumping, so he got to drinkin’ again.”

  Vicky took the clean towels and diapers and little shirts from Jenny’s arm and laid them in a basket near the concrete stoop at the back of the house. Two small brown faces with wide eyes peered shyly around the top step, then quickly pulled back. Lucas and Susan had been like that, small and vulnerable. She felt herself trembling. Trying to swallow the knot still in her throat, she walked back to Jenny who was standing over the bucket single-mindedly plunking in clothespins like a child at a game.

  “When did it happen?” Vicky asked.

  “It don’t matter.” The last clothespin hit the ground. Jenny leaned over, scooped it up, and laid it in the bucket.

  “Yes, it does. It matters, Jenny.” Vicky heard her voice rising.

  Jenny straightened up and looked straight at her. The white of her eye was the color of a raw beet. “It was my fault. I should’ve just let him alone. Only I was so worried, not knowin’ where he was last night, so I started at him when he come in this mornin’.”

  “You need to get away for a while,” Vicky said, glancing at the small red bruises going to blue on Jenny’s arms. “Get the kids, and I’ll take you to the shelter.” Vicky knew it was impossible for Jenny to get away herself. There was no telephone in the house. Only one of the pickups was in running condition, and Ernest probably kept the keys.

  That’s how it was for many of the women on the reservation. The shelters were in Ethete—the Circle of Respect for women, the Circle of Love for children—but the women were miles away out on ranches, surrounded by open spaces. The old feelings of helplessness and rage flooded over Vicky.

  Jenny was shaking her head again. “Soon’s he stops drinkin’, he’ll be fine again, and I just won’t cross him.” Picking up the bucket, she walked over to the stoop. “You don’t understand,” she said.

  “Yes, I do.” Vicky followed her. “You know that. Ben used to get drunk and beat on me, too, like I was some kind of kettle drum. I was scared like you. But I knew it had to stop, so I made it stop.”

  “You got divorced, Vicky.” Jenny pivoted around, then slumped against the stoop. “I’m not strong like you. And I�
�m not smart like you, either. You think I can go off and go to college and become a big lawyer? How’d I get by, just me and the kids?” She started crying.

  Vicky was staring at the other woman, but all she could see was her own life flashing across her mind like a grainy black-and-gray film. She lifted the two kids into the pickup, jammed the key in the ignition, prayed the engine would turn over, held her breath, and stomped on the gas pedal. She was flying, flying out of the driveway, down the road. She drove ten miles before she knew where she was going, and then she turned around, retraced her route three miles, and followed the road that led to the house where she had grown up. Mama piled pillows and blankets on the living room sofa for her and spread blankets on the linoleum floor, the cold linoleum floor, for the kids, all the time saying, “A wife belongs with her husband. You stay here ’til it blows over.” And she saying, “It won’t blow over, Mama. It’s never going to blow over. ”

  Vicky forced herself back into the present. She wasn’t the one in danger now. She wondered where Ernest had been last night, but she checked herself before asking. Better not give Ernest any other excuse to hit his wife. She would find out herself. “Ernest inside?” she asked.

  “He ain’t gonna want to see you.” Jenny pulled a tissue from her pocket and began blowing her nose.

  “He’s going to see me anyway,” Vicky said.

  Vicky walked up the stairs of the concrete stoop, stepping over the black space where part of the middle stair had been, and rapped on the screen door. Then she opened it and walked through the small kitchen into the darkened living room. Ernest slouched in a recliner with gray stuffing poking out of the sides. A stash of empty beer bottles lay on the linoleum floor. The white light from the television flickered across his face.