by Joseph Flynn
John Tall Wolf stood on a small knoll on the fringe of the glade and took it all in. He recalled Maj Olson’s comment about the foolhardiness of trying to arrest Alan White River and seize the train before the night’s purging of tortured souls took place. She’d said it would make Custer look smart. The analogy was more apt than John had first realized. A premature move by law enforcement would indeed have resulted in a massacre: theirs.
Maj had positioned herself at John’s side and said in a quiet voice, “Looks like I’m the only paleface here, huh?”
The FBI contingent, with help from the state police, was watching all the roads out of the rez. DeWitt had summoned up a helicopter and a marksman to take to the air in the event Bodaway tried both an assassination attempt and an off-road escape. DeWitt had told John and Maj, “Try not to get killed. I think both of you show promise.”
John had laughed. After DeWitt had left, though, Maj had asked, “Was that just a bit of pep talk or do I have a law enforcement future beyond Amtrak?”
“Let’s see how things go, before we do any career planning,” John had said.
Now, he asked Maj, “You really weren’t kidding about your Pequot heritage, were you?”
“Unh-uh. If the Mormons were straight with me, and that’s their reputation, then it’s real.”
“That’s the case, don’t worry about your skin color. This is a solemn occasion, but it’s not a religious ceremony that has to be kept secret.”
John looked for the BIA agents who had spread out through the crowd. The problem with that was, he’d met them only that day, their faces weren’t familiar and they were dressed like all the people who’d worn contemporary clothing: flannel shirts, jeans and boots. They were armed, of course, but it was likely most of the adult men — and plenty of the women — were, too.
Nobody had a peep to offer about seeing the M-4 Maj had slung over shoulder.
Neither that nor her fair skin.
A few of the younger men and women who passed by did cast admiring glances at the Yamaha YZ450Fs dirt bikes resting behind John and Maj on their aluminum kickstands. Maj took a watch out of a pocket and glanced at it.
John said, “That looks like a timepiece a conductor would use not a cop.”
Maj smiled. “My father gave it to me as a joke when I got my Amtrak job. But it keeps perfect time. And it always reminds me of how my dad makes time for me anytime I need it. If White River’s on schedule, we should be seeing him right about … now.”
The old train thief appeared on the near side of the locomotive. The sun had just dipped behind the nearby mountain and torches, both flaming and electric, were lit against the growing darkness. Alan White River didn’t look anything like John now, not in terms of the way he was dressed. He wore a beaded leather war shirt and buckskin pants and moccasins. His recently cut and dyed hair was covered by an eagle feather headdress.
White River mounted a wooden platform that had been placed opposite the point where a train crew would enter the locomotive’s cab. He waited for the people on the other side of the train to join the crowd in front of him. Everyone made accommodations, seemingly with the ease of tributaries joining a main water course. No shoving or jostling was evident, only a fluid rearrangement that provided the best sight lines for all concerned.
Maj was impressed. She looked at John and said, “These people are working together here.”
“United,” John said.
Dropping her voice, Maj added, “I’d always wondered if that sort of headdress White River is wearing is authentic.”
John nodded in affirmation. “It’s more often associated with Great Plains tribes like the Sioux and the Kiowa, but there was a cultural drift that extended westward, too.”
Maj was about to ask another question when she noticed John tense.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Looking around, straining to see against the deepening night, John said, “Maybe a couple things. Occupying the high ground is usually a good thing, but not when it makes you a target.”
Maj understood. “You’re thinking Bodaway has a rifle?”
“A rifle and a night scope. Maybe he can see us and we can’t see him.”
“Damn, I should’ve thought of that. Let’s —”
John placed a hand lightly on her arm. “We’ll move in just a minute.”
“Why wait?”
“Because if White River and Arnoldo played us all for suckers and intend to turn all those loyal followers down there against us, we’ll hear of it any moment now.”
The old chief in native clothing began to speak, but neither John nor Maj understood a single word of what he said. They didn’t speak Apache. For that matter, neither did most of the crowd. After a moment, White River switched to English, the lingua franca of Native North Americans in the twenty-first century.
White River said, “We are here to remind the world, or at least those who will visit the museum where this train will reside, that the progress the railroads brought to the white society was purchased by lies, theft and murder.”
Many heads in the crowd bobbed in agreement, but otherwise the gathering was silent, intent on hearing White River’s every word. Even the wind had died, letting the old chief’s words carry to the far reaches of the crowd. That was good for communication, but it brought the same disturbing thought to both John and Maj.
Calm air made accurate shooting much easier for a sniper.
The dancing and weaving torchlight complicated things.
But the bright, steady light of a full moon would be available soon.
More than enough illumination for a marksman using a night scope.
White River continued, “Before we are finished here, you will hear stories of broken treaties, stolen hunting grounds and outright mass murder. More important, this train will hear them, too. The sorrows of our people will become as much a part of it as its steel. Anyone who comes to look upon this train will feel our heartbreak, know of the crimes committed against us. They will never be able to forget a part of their history they have never learned or have chosen to ignore or forget. What we do here tonight will force all those who look upon this train to open their eyes to our history, too.”
Another old man in buckskin climbed onto the platform next to White River.
He introduced himself as Daniel Four Bears of the Cheyenne and began to speak of the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado in 1864. More than a hundred members of his tribe, mostly women and children, were slaughtered — and this was perfectly in keeping with the policy of the territorial governor, John Evans, that policy being the genocide of the native people.
“The military and the railroad men put it more bluntly,” Four Bears said.
“They called it disposing of the Indian menace.”
Maj felt her jaw tighten in outrage, and then John tapped her shoulder.
She looked and saw him lift his eyes. The moon was rising.
It was time for them to find Bodaway, before he found them.
Bodaway nestled among a cluster of bushes on a mountain foothill perpendicular to the speaker’s platform outside the Super Chief. From his position he could put a round into the right ear of whoever was talking up there. Comfortable in a kneeling position, his head rose no higher than the tallest shrub. He was all but invisible.
Even if a high-def camera found him, though, all it would see was an individual wearing the face paint and the headdress he’d bought in Santa Fe. If he had to run, he’d be able to rise to his feet quickly. Not that he intended to escape on foot. His dirt bike lay on its side five feet behind him. He’d disappear in a heartbeat.
If things really went to hell, his ultimate means of escape was strapped to his back.
The Leupold scope on his weapon diminished any reflections off its lens, kept the image quality sharp and increased the amount of available light that reached his eye. Bodaway smiled when he saw his great-grandfather step onto the platform to address the crowd. The guy was as old
as the hills, but he still looked every inch a man who was meant to lead others into battle.
Not just symbolic fights. Not mystical conflicts. Not rhetorical debates.
Bodaway couldn’t hear the old man’s words, but he’d read his speech.
The audience seemed to be buying into it. If hundreds of people had started to jeer and boo, he would have heard that. Nobody objected vocally. Not that he could tell.
That was enough to make him sigh.
When would the country’s first people pick up arms?
Only when they were about to vanish from the earth?
By then it would be too late.
In Bodaway’s earlier incarnation, as Thomas Bilbray honors graduate in engineering, he had thought to request an assignment to the infantry. Only he happened to run into a down on his luck Vietnam Vet, a fellow Native American, one night shortly before reporting for duty. The guy had been wearing an old-fashioned army utility jacket and holding up a sign: Will work cheep. It was the misspelled word that most touched Bilbray. He gave the man fifty dollars and told him it would be his honor to buy him dinner.
They ate in a chain steak house, sat in an out of the way booth. The vet needed a bath among other things. He wouldn’t have been allowed in on his own. But Bilbray’s appearance was not just immaculate, it was starched. He also slipped the hostess a twenty and whispered to her that the old guy was his uncle and had been wounded in service to his country.
That last bit turned out to be true. The vet said he’d been an 11-Bravo, an infantryman. He’d been in-country three months when he got shot in the leg. The enemy round took out the bottom half of his right calf and he hadn’t been able to walk right since. Made it damn hard for him to hold down any kind of a job, what with just a sixth grade education.
“Damn thing was, I never got to shoot anybody over there,” the vet said.
“Why not? Just the way it went?”
“For one thing, those little bastards were sneaky as hell. You’re out humpin’ the boonies, you never see ‘em. You’re walkin’ through a ville, hey, they’re all just rice farmers out walkin’ their water buffalo. It was up to me, I’d’ve dinged ‘em all. Only they had these damn things called rules of engagement. Don’t shoot the papa-san unless he’s handin’ you a live grenade. Shit. We never had a chance over there.”
When Bilbray told the vet he’d be reporting for active duty soon, he got a piece of advice for his generosity. “Stay the fuck out of the infantry, whatever you do.”
With those words fresh in mind, Bilbray took the engineering job the army gave him, thinking he could always ask for a transfer after he got the lay of the land. But he never did. The brass put endless limits on its front line soldiers. Rules of engagement still applied.
The old vet had it right. You got into a fight, the only rule should be ding ‘em all.
That being far from the case, Bilbray served out his four year ROTC commitment and was discharged. Along the way, though, he picked up every military skill he could, marksmanship being prominent among them. Others included demolition and jumping out of airplanes. The brass humored him that way because he was good at his job and hinted he might want to go infantry when he re-upped.
Only he didn’t reenlist. The people he’d deceived weren’t amused, but there was nothing they could do. He’d fulfilled his obligation and done it at a superior level.
During his time in service, as he matured intellectually and emotionally, Bilbray came to ask himself for which causes would he actually be willing to ding people. Being as egocentric as anyone else, he decided he would be willing to kill and, if he couldn’t avoid it, die for his own people. Native Americans.
It wasn’t six months after his discharge that his great-grandfather came to him with this insanely great idea: steal a train that symbolized the white man’s conquest of the red man. By that time, he thought of himself by his true name, Bodaway, and he jumped at the chance to play a part. Only to be bitterly disappointed in the end.
Great Grandpa intended to give the damn train back.
After just singing and shouting at it.
Hell, one go at the train with a power washer, it’d be good as new.
But then he’d learned about two people, John Tall Wolf and Marlene Flower Moon, who’d do their best to foil what little symbolism his great-grandfather hoped to achieve. Two Native Americans working against their own kind. He knew better than to think there was any short term way to displace white domination in the U.S., but now he had it in mind that it would be cool to twist the power structure’s damn noses every so often.
Steal a Super Chief and fill it not with the grievances of his people but with their shit.
Then give it back.
Come up with other ideas like that. Have fun pulling them off.
If creeps like Tall Wolf and Flower Moon were obstacles … well, then they had to go.
And there was no time like the present to start getting rid of them.
The moon was rising and Bodaway started to search the crowd through his scope.
John and Maj slipped through the crowd surrounding the Super Chief. People let them pass without comment, as accommodating as ever. Most listened intently to the speakers on the platform, often with tears in their eyes or with expressions of barely repressed rage on their faces. But mothers and fathers also took care of their little ones, letting them sleep in their arms or carving out small patches of grass for them. Husbands and wives placed supportive arms around each other. Older couples held hands.
Everyone present felt waves of emotion sweep over them. So much tragedy. So much sorrow. But there were moments of triumph, too. Battles won even as the war was being lost. All this went into the train. Bodaway had it exactly backward. Excrement could be washed away; the stain of their agonies would be indelible, a part of the Super Chief until it was melted down for scrap. By that time, everyone who had seen it would have learned their stories.
John and Maj, though intent on finding Bodaway and staying alive, couldn’t help but be affected. Even so, they kept moving, looking for the man who would turn an occasion of healing into yet another episode of innocent blood being shed. As the moon rose, set and yielded to the sun of a new day, John and Maj kept moving and searching. Several times, they spotted both Arnoldo and White River also passing through the throng. The other two men created credible replicas of John, all the more so at the kind of distance from which a sniper might work.
The only giveaway John noticed was the pace at which White River moved. At his age, he walked with a far more measured step. Some of that, though, could be ascribed to the limitations of threading his way through a crowd. At least that was how it might look through a telescopic sight. Or so John hoped.
Arnoldo, on the other hand, was closer to John in both age and movement. The similarity struck John deeply. He’d never had a sibling, hadn’t expected to feel a sense of family with his cousin, but there was one. It was unexpectedly real and welcome.
Still, White River was the one who aroused a deeper curiosity. Was he family, too? Through John’s biological father? John would never think of anyone but Haden Wolf and Serafina Wolf y Padilla as his real parents. It would be very interesting to think he had, what, a grandfather, he might come to know?
The last thing he’d ever expected to find on the rez was family he’d welcome.
After all, his maternal grandmother was the one who wanted to put him in the ground.
Maj tapped John on the shoulder. Gave him a nod of her head. The two of them took shelter behind a ponderosa pine.
She said to John, “Either this Bodaway guy is one patient SOB, he can’t sort out who’s who or he’s decided not to pull his trigger.”
“I haven’t seen White River for a while. Maybe he found Bodaway. Talked him out of becoming a killer.”
Bodaway was tired but determined. He’d now assumed a sitting position, his legs crossed in almost a tailor fashion. He had to concentrate to keep his heavy head from droop
ing. He thought he’d seen Tall Wolf several times last night. He’d almost taken the shot on the first sighting, but then passing behind his target he thought he’d seen another man who resembled Tall Wolf.
He’d quickly acquired the second target and, yes, this man looked like Tall Wolf, too.
He tried to go back to the first target to compare the two, but that man had lost himself in the crowd. When he tried to go back to the second man— a decoy or the real Tall Wolf? — he, too, was gone.
Over the course of the night, Bodaway had found there were at least three men who looked like Tall Wolf moving through the throng, as far as he could tell through his scope. There may even have been others he had missed spotting. Shooting the genuine target would have established a reputation for Bodaway as someone willing to kill for his people. Taking out the wrong man, an innocent person, would make him look like a fool to everyone.
A bloodthirsty madman who deserved nothing more than to be hunted down.
The rising sun made closer examination of his target possible, but Bodaway had never seen Tall Wolf in person, only in the photographs Maria Black Knife had clipped and shown him. The real BIA man might have left by now, gone to make arrangements to take possession of the newly haunted Super Chief. Shooting an impostor who lingered below would give him some satisfaction, but knowingly doing that would make him look worse than a fool. He would be revealed as a spiteful loser. The kind of man no one would ever follow.
Then, again, maybe he was never meant to lead.
Bitter now and more tired than ever, Bodaway took one last sweep of the setting below him. He didn’t see either the real Tall Wolf or any decoys. What he did see was his great-grandfather wearing his headdress and once again standing on the platform next to the Super Chief. With him was a woman he’d also never met in real life, but whose pictures he’d also studied: Marlene Flower Moon.
Unless there were decoys of her on hand, too. For that single moment, Bodaway gave up on the idea of shooting anyone. Maybe he’d just build highway bridges the rest of his life.