by Phil Bowie
A little girl across the table frowned, squinted, and said, “You’re all dusty, mister.”
“Oh, yeah, well, he’s been working,” Joshua said.
“My favorite color is purple,” the girl said. “Are you Joshua’s daddy?”
“No, honey, I’m just a good buddy.”
“Where is Joshua’s daddy?”
“He can’t be here.”
“Does Joshua have a daddy?”
“Eat your broccoli,” Sam said.
The girl made a face and said, “I think broccoli’s ahs-gusting.”
A hefty freckled boy at the table behind them tugged on Sam’s sleeve and said, “Listen, listen. My Mom got this at a yard sale.” The boy pushed a button on his plastic watch and the watch said, “A baby’s gotta do what a baby’s gotta do.”
“Well, I hear that,” Sam said.
The smiling teacher walked by and said, “It’s nice to have Mr. Bass here with us today, children, but we still have to eat our lunches, now, don’t we?”
Sam took a sporkful of his broccoli.
After lunch he stopped at the General Store and looked over their small faded stock of movies. It wasn’t exactly Blockbuster. He picked out the gritty Elmore Leonard story Last Stand At Saber River, with Tom Selleck as a rancher fighting to reclaim his land and the love of his wife after the Civil War.
He chose another one he hadn’t watched in some time, Larry McMurtry’s Streets Of Laredo, a sequel to Lonesome Dove, about the flinty Texas Ranger Captain Coll, played by James Garner, who goes on a hunt for a blond, blue-eyed Mexican boy filled with an icy killing rage and wearing the chilling aura of a cocked pistol, loose on a murderous rampage with a scoped rifle. Sissy Spacek plays a two-dollar whore gone good who eventually saves Coll after the ruthless boy killer leaves him for dying. Sam liked to watch the intense tale to study the ribbons of honor and raw courage running through it. That was probably the distilled reason he liked to watch most of the great westerns. He remembered two particularly powerful lines from Streets Of Laredo. Commenting on the fallen Coll, Sheriff Goodnight says, “Life’s but a knife edge, anyway. Sooner or later a man slips and gets cut.”
“Mr. Bass, I think you’re the only one on the island who rents those old westerns,” Danielle said, “so why don’t you just keep these for a week or so? No extra charge.”
“Waaal, I’m surely much obliged, ma’am.”
“That’s a terrible John Wayne.”
“Hey, you recognized him, didn’t you?”
He worked until dusk, stopped in at The Privateer for a cheeseburger plate and a draft, and then rode home in the early darkness to clean up. Valerie would be working until nine and Mrs. Bradley was watching Joshua. He might as well spend a while doing much-postponed paperwork while he watched one of the movies.
At eight-thirty his beeper went off and he called Val at Sonny’s. She asked if he’d eaten and he said more or less, so she told him she would grab a bite after work and then head home, inviting him over for coffee and some of her date-filled cookies at about nine-thirty.
“Talk about an offer I can’t refuse,” he said.
Joshua was in bed asleep by the time he got there, and Valerie had just bid goodnight to Mrs. Bradley, who always walked to and from her house two sandy streets away.
“You know, I wouldn’t mind watching Josh on nights like this,” he told her.
“No. It’s not right to expect you to do that on a regular basis and besides, Mrs. Bradley needs what little I pay her.”
She lit three clustered candles on the coffee table and set up a classical CD to play low on her stereo. She arranged a plate of date cookies, poured fresh-brewed coffee, and they got comfortable on the couch.
“How was your day?” he asked.
“Bearable. I found out the Geo’s heater won’t work but you know I bought the car from Fred, Sonny’s brother-in-law, so Fred says he’ll fix it. I’ll go over to his place in the morning, he’ll bring me back here, then take the car to work on it. Josh can ride the school bus. So, no problem. It’s my regular day off and I know you need to work, so I’ll spend it cleaning up around here and making something really special for our supper.”
She turned toward him with a serious expression. “I’ve been thinking, Sam. I can get a few days off around Christmas when Josh is out anyway. What would you think about us going up to the mountains? I want you to meet my people. Especially my grandfather and my uncle and his family, but the others, too.”
“What if they don’t approve of me?”
“Besides the facts that you’re a white cowboy and they’re at least part red Indians, and you pilot a machine that’s only about the size of that Wright Brothers’ string bag, and you do a really bad John Wayne, and if left to your own devices you’ll eat like a junkyard dog, and you drive a Jeep that sounds like a stock car race, what’s to not approve of?”
“You Indians can be cruel. I should have known. I’ve seen enough westerns. I guess this means we’re getting serious here.”
“If you’re saying you haven’t been getting serious, mister, you can put that cookie right back on that plate.”
Sam smiled and took a bite of cookie and a sip of coffee. “All right. We’ll fly if you want to. Maybe get them to pick us up at the airport? Maybe there’ll be snow. Josh would like that. Me, too. We can build us a snow person.”
“Uncle John has a pickup I know he’ll let us use. Don’t worry, you’ll like them all. Grandfather will probably ask you a lot of questions. He’s from a generation when the elders were supposed to seriously question a young man who was courting one of their young women.”
“Tell me about the Cherokee. And tell me about your family. And about what it was like growing up on the reservation.”
She drew her legs up and sat sideways facing him, leaning her head slightly onto the couch back, her hair glossy in the candlelight and her dark eyes bright, looking off into a distance, and her voice became mesmerizing.
“Cherokee was never an Indian name. We were the Tsalagi, and we went back ten thousand years to the first people who wandered here from Asia. When DeSoto came in 1540 there were twenty-five thousand of us and we claimed as our hunting grounds an area that’s now parts of eight states. We were the strongest of all the Southeastern tribes. We never lived in teepees. Our cabins were made of poles woven with split river cane, covered with smooth plaster that was mixed from clay and grass. We had a chief and he had a right hand man and a speaker. The center of government and ceremonial life was a seven-sided council house that held five hundred, and there were seven clans. Seven women sat among the council members and their opinions were always respected. The fire in the center of the council house was kindled from seven woods. The council held court and made laws, but most crimes were avenged by members of the wronged family. If we had to fight against the Creek or others the Kalanu or war chief would take over, there would be a ceremony, and the warriors would vow never to stain their weapons with the blood of children or old people or those who couldn’t defend themselves.
“Each family had a hothouse for ceremonies and for keeping warm through the coldest nights. A family would gather around the fire in the hothouse and a myth-keeper would recite the sacred legends. One of my favorites that my grandfather told me when I was a little girl, by the fireplace in his house, was about Ataga’hi, the magic lake. Way back up in the high mountains, beyond the headwaters of the Oconaluftee River, there’s a place where if you listen carefully, mingled with the whisperings of the wind in the trees you can hear hundreds of birds in flight. If you fast and you say all the right prayers and you keep a vigil through the night, at dawn you might catch a glimpse of Ataga’hi. Its waters are violet, fed by springs in the cliffs, and there are many birds and fish and the tracks of animals are all around. If a bear is wounded by a hunter and if he can make his way to the lake and go in, when he comes out his wound will be healed. It’s the medicine lake of the animals, so they keep it invisible from human
s.”
She told him how, in 1738, half their number had died of white man’s small pox. And how, in 1838, 7,000 soldiers had driven 17,000 Indians from their mountain homes to the Oklahoma wastelands, 4,000 dying on the way from exposure and brutality.
“That was the Trail Of Tears,” Sam said.
“Yes. About a thousand had hidden back in the high woods of the Smokies. An old man named Tsali was one of the last to be rounded up, with his wife and two sons and his brother-in-law Lowney. As two soldiers were pushing the small group along a trail one of them prodded Tsali’s wife with a bayonet. Tsali talked to his sons and Lowney quietly in the old tongue, setting up a trap for the soldiers at a bend in the trail. Tsali feigned tripping. Lowney and Tsali’s son Ridges grappled with one of the soldiers and Tsali swept the other soldier’s legs from under him. As the soldier fell his gun went off and he shot himself in the head. He was dead. The other soldier ran, and Tsali and his family went way back up into the caves. The Army put out word that if Tsali and his family would give themselves up the remaining Indians would be allowed to stay in the mountains. Old Tsali surrendered and they sentenced him, Ridges, and Lowney to die.”
She took a sip of tea and said, “The soldiers stood them against three trees. Tsali said if he was to be shot he would rather it be by his own people than by the white soldiers. They gave guns to three Indian men and Tsali told them to go ahead and do it. So because of Tsali and his son and brother-in-law, we have that scrap of land in the most rugged part of the mountains. The Qualla Boundary.
“It was beautiful and strange growing up there. You have this wonderful ancient culture always pulling at you, and then you have a friend whose father earns extra money by letting tourists take his picture standing beside a little tin teepee, wearing a plastic war bonnet from Taiwan. Some of the teenagers have this current of anger running in them. The reservation is dry because liquor really does poison something in us, but bootleggers near the reservation sell bonded booze and moonshine so there’s alcoholism. There’s depression. But there are also some of the finest wood carvings and jewelry and pottery and crafts you’ll find anywhere. We still have a chief and a tribal council, all elected now. Some of the people try to preserve what was best about the old ways. And it’s so beautiful up there, the worst of the land for cultivating when they let us keep it, but some of the most attractive, it turns out, for the tourists. There’s a big casino. Draws white men and their money from all over. I’d like to think it’s the Indian way of getting even, but the place carries a white name and I’d be willing to bet that if you took a close look at the books you’d find the profits are mostly white, wouldn’t you?
“No bet from me,” Sam said.
“You know my parents died when their pickup slid on a patch of ice on a mountain road, and I went to live with my grandfather, Wasituna. He taught me a lot. He’s an expert with the blowgun, and one of the last who knows how to make the best kind from river cane and the darts for it from locust feathered with thistledown. He can still kill a running rabbit with it at sixty feet. His father, Goingback Lightfoot, lived to be a hundred and five, and was said to be a witch, maybe the last of the Tskilegwa.
“Grandfather Wasituna tried to teach me Kituhwa, the old language. I can understand it but I’m not fluent. I have a book by Mary Chiltoskey and I’m teaching Joshua a little of it, trying to relearn it myself. So many of the words have a simple beauty in them. Talutsa means basket. Bluebird is tsaquoladagi. Colt is aginasoquili. Wolf is waya. Candle is ukanawiatsvsdodi. Don’t attempt that one.” She smiled. “A white man can tie a knot in his tongue just trying it.”
“Why did you wind up out here on the Banks?”
“When Joshua’s father was killed in a car wreck, in the same way my parents died, I just had to get away. At least until I could go back some day and really see the beauty in the mountains again. I drove east until I couldn’t go any more. And it’s beautiful here, too, in a different way. Open and vast and most often serene. But now I want to go back to visit, and I want them to meet you.”
“I’ll be proud to meet them, Val.”
“Good. We’ll make plans tomorrow, then. Right now…”
“What?”
“You know, there’s a last time for everything we do in life,” she said quietly with a sadly wistful smile and with the candle flames burning like a long-ago council fire in her Tsalagi eyes. “We ought to live with that in mind but we never seem to. Let’s go into my bedroom, Sam Bass, and make love like it’s for the very last time.”
11
BEFORE DAYBREAK ON FRIDAY THE SILVER BLAZER MOVED south on I-95 at no more than five miles per hour over the posted limit. It was rigged for surf fishing with four expensive rods standing upright in plastic tubes mounted to the front bumper. The four-wheel-drive vehicle had oversized all-terrain tires and had, in fact, been used frequently for surf fishing jaunts by its owner, D.J. Arguillio, brother-in-law to Montgomery Davis. Tonight it was wearing a different plate, though.
Davis was driving. He had a stainless Bodyguard Air-weight .38 Special in a soft oiled-leather shoulder holster under his black windbreaker. With only a five-round cylinder and a two-inch barrel it was strictly for close-up. It had a shrouded hammer that would not snag if you had to get the gun out fast. He favored revolvers because, although they tended to be inherently loud and could not be effectively silenced, they left no brass behind. You didn’t have to rack a slide back to chamber the first round and cock it like with most autos, either, and it never jammed like a lot of the autos could. Just snatch it out and pull the trigger.
Winston was in the front passenger seat wearing voluminous jeans, a red plaid flannel shirt, and a dark blue windbreaker. He was left-handed. He had a compact blued-steel nine millimeter Smith auto that fired twelve rounds and had an ambidextrous external safety. It was in its nylon clip-on belt holster, with an extra magazine in an attached pocket, slid under the seat now because it made him uncomfortable to wear it. There was a silencer for it in his suitcase. He was looking idly out the side window into the passing glare of Newark Airport. The bright landing lights of three huge airliners were spaced out maybe two minutes apart floating down the glowing night sky. Four big jets were single-file on a taxiway awaiting takeoff clearances, their tall tails lit up like billboards.
Donny was in the back seat studying a North Carolina map with a Mini-Maglite. He was of average height and thin with a blond military buzz cut. He wore desert fatigues. All of his gear was behind the backseat in a black leather sports bag, along with their suitcases, a yellow plastic tackle box, and a metal tool box. Wrapped in an old blanket there was a stubby Heckler and Koch MP5 SD2 submachine gun with a fixed butt stock and a built-on silencer, with two 30-round box magazines full of 9mm Parabellum.
Donny was twenty-nine but he spoke in a little-kid voice that irritated Winston. He said, “How about we stop for coffee?”
“All right,” Davis said. “After we get on the turnpike I think there’s a service area not far along. Past Rahway. We could use gas anyway. We’ll talk there. I want to spread out the map.”
“There are some things I don’t like about this setup,” Donny said.
Davis said, “We’ll talk at the service area.”
“The first thing I don’t like it’s an island and there’s no bridges.”
“You hear the man?” Winston said laconically, still looking out the side window. “Shut the fuck up.”
At the service area Davis parked under a light close to the fast food restaurant. There weren’t many other cars in the lot. He got a ten by thirteen manila envelope out of his suitcase and told Donny to bring the North Carolina map. Inside he pointed to a booth well away from the few other people, near a window. He told Donny to go get the coffees and some donuts or whatever else looked fresh. When he got back Davis spread out the eastern three folds of the North Carolina map and used his finger to trace the highway.
He spoke in a lowered voice. “We’ll take I-95 all the wa
y down here to Rocky Mount, then go east on sixty-four, about a hundred and twenty miles to Roanoke Island and on over to the islands. There’s only one road, route twelve south. At Hatteras, maybe sixty miles down, there’s a free ferry over to Ocracoke. Then it’s fourteen miles to the town at the bottom end of the island. The town and the island have the same name. Once we’re on the island there are three ways off. About every three hours there’s a toll ferry out of the town harbor southwest to Cedar Island here, a two-hour-and-fifteen-minute run. There’s another toll ferry from the harbor three times a day east over to Swan Quarter on the mainland. A two-and-a-half-hour run. Last ferries leave from the harbor at five-thirty in the afternoon. The other way is back over on the Hatteras ferry at the north end of the island, only a forty-minute run and it’s free. No ticket people to deal with and probably more cars, so we’re less likely to be remembered on that one. Last one leaves seven-thirty at night. Then nothing leaves until five in the morning. The schedules are in here.” He tapped a big finger on the manila envelope, which bore a label from the North Carolina Division Of Travel and Tourism. “I’ve got a room reserved two nights at a place called the Pony Island under George Harvey, paid up with a money order, in case we get stuck outside the ferry schedules. It’s possible they could seal off the island by shutting down the ferries, but there’s no law of any kind on the island, just a few Coast Guard people.”
He folded up the state map and drew another small map out of the packet in the manila envelope. It was of Ocracoke Island and the village. He spread it out. “The town is grouped around the harbor pretty much. Airstrip’s about a mile from the town center. He lives right there, on Teach’s Lane. There’s a picture of him here in the envelope. Strake had it. It was taken at some party in Vancouver. There’s another recent shot in a newspaper clipping. He’s using the name Sam Bass. Strake found out he drives an old Jeep Wrangler; the plate number’s in here. I want you both to study it all—the pictures, the notes, the layout, the ferry schedules. You’ve got time. We won’t be there until at least late afternoon. So get it all in your heads.”