Vicky turned around and started down the narrow hallway lined with all types of books—legal books and manuals and bound files—conscious of the sharp clack of Gianelli’s boots on the floor behind her, his arm reaching past her to the doorknob. Before he could open the door, she said, “How come Father John found the body?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Moccasin telegraph didn’t mention it.”
“The grandparents were worried about Kiki, so Father John went looking for him.” The door swung open, and Vicky stepped out into the hallway. “Lucky guy,” Gianelli said, leaning against the doorjamb. “Saw Giselle at the Caracalla Baths. I’d give this,” he said, making a sawing motion across his forearm, “to hear an opera sung there. Good to have him back, isn’t it?”
Outside, Vicky started the Jeep, then waited a moment. She would go to St. Francis Mission. She would pretend that nothing had changed, as if he had never left.
“FIVE CALLS THIS morning while you were at the funeral.” Lucy set the message slips on the desk. “You should be three men,” she said.
Father John fanned the slips and glanced over them. The usual calls. Janice Birdsley wanted to set up counseling appointments for her and her daughter. Kate Swifter resigned from the religious education committee. Needs time for elderly mother, Lucy had scribbled across the bottom of the slip. Could you visit the old lady?
Here was a message he didn’t want. He stared at the swings and curlicues of Lucy’s handwriting. Father Bill Rutherford. Please return his call. Lucy must have noticed what he was looking at because she said, “That’s your boss, right? The provincial? You should ask him to send another priest.”
“I’ll think about it. Anything else?” Father John looked up at the girl hovering about the desk. She had settled into the job, as if it had been hers all along, waiting for her to claim it.
“You like that movie?” She nodded at the DVD of The Covered Wagon on the corner of his desk. He had watched the DVD last night, lost for a couple of hours in the sweep of the black-and-white prairies, the long line of covered wagons rolling against the sky, the headlong clash of emigrants and Indians. He kept looking for familiar faces among the Arapahos and Shoshones, and at one point, he was sure he spotted Goes-in-Lodge, the old Indian playing the role of chief. He had been one of the leading men who had brought the Arapahos to the reservation in 1878. There were photos of him around the rez—in the schools and the convenience stores.
“It’s pretty good,” he said. “You like silent movies?”
“Silent? You mean like no talking? Like in the olden days?”
“They didn’t have to talk,” he said. “They used their eyes and their expressions. They could talk with their hands.” He picked up the DVD and handed it to her. “Arapahos are in this one.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You might like it,” he said. Then he told her that it belonged to Andrew Wallowingbull, and he would have to return it.
“Arapahos in the movies?” She lifted a skeptic eyebrow and stared at the yellow-and-red-and-black DVD cover a moment. “What the heck.” She tucked the DVD against her. Looking as if she were about to leave, she said, “You had a visitor this morning. That lawyer came around.”
“Vicky Holden?” Father John sat back in the chair. So many things in Rome he had wished he could share with her—the way the rain glistened on the pavement in the narrow streets, the skylight illuminating the face of Bernini’s St. Theresa in Ecstasy, the old lady plucking at his black suit jacket, begging him in Italian to pray for her, the wealthy parishioners insisting that English tutors give their children a proper British accent. All of it, she would find interesting. But she hadn’t come to the welcome home feast; she hadn’t stopped in to say hello. He had known with the certitude as strong as steel that she hadn’t wanted him to return. “What did she say?”
“She’ll be back.” Lucy hesitated a moment before she went on: “I heard about her going off to be a lawyer and coming back. Works in a fancy office in Lander. How long did she go to school?”
“A long time. Would you like to be a lawyer?”
“No way.” Lucy gave a quick shrug. “How about you?”
“Do I want to be a lawyer?”
“How many years did you go to school?”
“After high school? About fifteen. Thinking about becoming a Jesuit?”
“Yeah, right.” She shook her head, rolled her eyes, and pivoted about, her sneakers padding down the corridor.
He picked up the receiver and dialed the provincial’s office. An interim appointment, Bill Rutherford had said. One month, six months, a year. He hadn’t been back three weeks; it never occurred to him that a permanent pastor might be found so soon. A man picked up at the other end, a priest assigned to the provincial’s office, and Father John said he was returning Father Rutherford’s call. “Sorry, Father,” the priest said. “You just missed him. Care to leave a message?” There was no message, Father John told him.
He had pressed the cutoff button and started to return the next phone call when he heard the thrum of an engine on Circle Drive, the sound of tires plowing through the snow. All vehicles had a similar sound, he thought. And yet he knew that it was Vicky’s Jeep. He heard the door slam, a dull thud softened by the freezing temperature, and her footsteps coming up the steps. Cold air swooshed across his office as the front door opened and closed. There were footsteps in the corridor, then Vicky stood in the doorway.
Father John got to his feet. “Vicky,” he said, walking around the desk. It was like the first time he had seen her: standing in the doorway, surveying his office, her dark eyes finally settling on him. So you’re the new priest everyone’s talking about. Her voice a mixture of hardness and softness, and that had caught his attention. He had known who she was—the Arapaho lawyer he had heard about. He had expected her to be tough. It was the softness he hadn’t expected, or how beautiful she was. No one had thought to mention that fact to a priest.
“It’s good to see you.” He crossed the office, thinking he would take her into his arms—a welcome embrace between two old friends. But something about her stopped him, something forbidding. A gulf that he couldn’t bridge.
She had already moved past him, unbuttoning the black coat she was wrapped in. A green fuzzy scarf was tied at her neck, and she loosened it so that it draped over the front of the coat. “You’re looking good,” she said. “Rome must have agreed with you.”
Father John stepped back and motioned her to a chair, but she wouldn’t take it, he was certain. She would pace the floor unable to sit still until she had talked out whatever had brought her to the mission.
“Coffee?” He kept his voice light and noncommittal, as if she were just another parishioner who had stopped in. “It’s pretty good. Lucy made it.”
“No, thanks,” Vicky said. “I had a long chat with Lucy earlier. Your new assistant?”
“Helps to keep the place running.” Father John walked over and leaned against the edge of the desk. He stopped himself from asking how things were going at the law firm. She would decode the real question: How were things between her and Adam? At any rate, he could sense by the way that she strolled over to the window, then walked back into the center of the office that the preliminaries were over.
“So you went looking for Kiki. What sent you to the river?” she said.
He told her that Kiki’s girlfriend thought he might have gone there.
“To buy drugs?”
“Andrew and Mamie say Kiki was clean.”
“The autopsy report confirms that,” she said. “Somebody took him to the river and left him to die.” Vicky threw up one hand in a gesture of helplessness. “Maybe Kiki went somewhere else to buy or sell drugs, ran into trouble, went on the attack for some reason. Look . . .” She spun toward him. “I’ve talked to someone who says that’s what happened. He says he had to defend himself. The problem is, I don’t have the slightest idea of who he is. No name. No references. N
othing. Just a voice on the phone and . . .” She hesitated a moment. “In the darkness.”
“You believe this man killed Kiki?”
“He expects me to work miracles, get Gianelli to agree not to press charges because it was self-defense. He’s scared and he’s not thinking straight. He’s suicidal. I have to find him.”
Father John took a moment. He was getting the picture. Whoever the man was, he had chosen to remain anonymous. He had called Vicky and, somehow, managed to see her. And he had reeled her in. He was desperate. “He’s Arapaho, isn’t he?” Father John said. Vicky would do everything possible to help one of her people.
She gave him a half smile and quickly looked away.
“He’ll get back to you,” he said, trying to reassure her.
“It will be on his terms. I have to find him first, talk to him face-to-face. It’s the only way I can convince him to come forward. Adam . . .” She paused and headed back to the window. “With our firm behind him, he would have strong representation. There’s every chance we can see that he’s exonerated.”
She swung around and walked toward him again. “I figure he must have been part of Kiki’s circle. Maybe he dealt him drugs, or maybe Kiki was the dealer. What do you know about Kiki? Who are the people he associated with? The girlfriend, what’s her name?” She moved so close that he caught the faint smell of sage in her hair, and the freshness of snow and cold. “What do you know?”
Father John put up the palm of one hand to still the questions in her expression. Then he told her how Kiki had spent a week in Hollywood hoping to find out what happened to Andrew’s father back in the 1920s. “Charlie Wallowingbull,” he said. “One of the actors in The Covered Wagon. After the movie was made, he went to Hollywood to promote it. That was in April 1923, and he never came back to the rez. The family has always believed he was murdered.”
Vicky turned her head and stared into space. “My grandfather used to talk about how his father had been in the movies,” she said, pulling something new out of her memory. “Arapahos and Shoshones were the real Indians in some of the cowboy-and-Indian films. One time, when I was a kid, he took me to the movie theater in Lander to see one of those old movies. Part of Indian heritage week.” She gave a little shrug. “The place was packed with more Indians than came to Lander in an entire year. Everybody was excited. They clapped and cheered when the movie ended. I remember how proud I felt.”
She looked back at him. “Could be an excuse Kiki gave the old people. You know, a trip to Hollywood to look up the past.”
“Gianelli’s working the drug angle,” Father John said. “He thinks Kiki went to LA to buy drugs, bring them back to the rez, and cut out the usual distributors. It could have gotten him killed.”
Vicky started patrolling the worn carpet again. “So this guy could also be involved in drugs. Even if he was protecting himself against Kiki, if the assault occurred during a drug deal, he would still be looking at serious charges. Purchasing and distributing controlled substances. Maybe felony murder. It explains why he wants to remain anonymous. And why he wants assurances up front from Gianelli before he comes forward.”
She stopped pacing and faced him. “What do you think?”
Father John took a moment. It all made sense in a rational, logical way. Kiki’s body dumped at the river—a place where drug deals went down, where other drug dealers would find the body. An example of what happens if anyone tries to sidestep the usual way of doing business.
And yet the logic couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that had taken hold of him. The sound of Andrew’s voice kept running through his head: He’s clean now. Making a new life. He’s sorry for messing up, trying to make things right. All a man has is his reputation.
“According to his grandfather, Kiki was through with drugs,” he said. “He was trying to straighten out his life.”
A kind of knowing smile came into Vicky’s expression, as if she were smiling to herself. “That’s the problem with kids like Kiki,” she said. “They can always convince the people who love them the most. It works for everyone. The kid can keep dealing drugs and his family can remain in blissful denial. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen it before.”
He had seen it before, he was thinking. He tried to return her smile, but he couldn’t shake the discomfort. Something different about Kiki’s case. Kiki was trying to do something for his grandfather, right a wrong somehow in the past, bring Andrew the truth about his own background, get some kind of justice.
“What’s the girlfriend’s name?” Vicky said.
Father John leaned over the desk and pulled a pad and pen out of the drawer. He wrote down the name and the address of the little house. “She works at a new nail salon in a strip mall on Federal,” he said, tearing off the sheet and handing it to her. The touch was swift, her hand as soft as silk. It was so good to see her again.
“Be careful,” he said. “Seems like I’ve said that to you before.” He shook his head and smiled at that. He might have saved his breath. Vicky would do everything she could to help her client. Her own safety? She would think about it later, if she thought about it at all.
He watched her slip the sheet of paper inside her bag and fling the scarf around her neck. She stood still. “How long will you be here?” she said.
Father John spread his hands. “For a while,” he said. For a long time, he would have liked to say. But Bill Rutherford would call back.
“It’s good to have you here.” There was something forced in the words, he thought, as if she had decided it was something she ought to say.
Then she was gone. Boots clacking, the swooshing noise of the front door opening, and the blast of cold air floating through the office before the door thudded shut.
13
1922
“MOVE IN, MOVE in!” James Cruze stomped past, shouting into the black megaphone. Waving an arm at the cameraman behind the rectangular, boxlike camera made of smooth-looking wood—mahogany, perhaps, but William wasn’t sure—with brass fittings that gleamed in the sun, a crank on the right side and two reels of film on the top. A round lens protruded like a giant eye from the front. Another lens jutted from the right, above the crank. The cameraman dipped forward and peered with one eye into the side lens. His other eye was wrinkled shut. The camera stood on a tripod, which made it almost the same height as the cameraman. A clicking noise started up, like the noise of a bird leaping about, as he turned the crank.
So many lessons to learn about white men. And now this: the way they melted into their machines, became a single force. All of it—camera, tripod, man—stationed on the carello. Other men stood like guards on each side of the carello, which they pushed back and forth, whatever Cruze said, while the camera remained steady. If the camera moved, William realized, the players would look jerky up on the screen, like jackrabbits jumping about.
“Get the eyes when the old man comes out!” Cruze’s voice burst from the megaphone, a force large and deep. A man in a black cowboy hat standing to the side lifted a violin and started playing a fast-paced melody that, William knew, was meant to help the players move quickly about. “Action and emotion in the eyes,” Cruze said. William had heard the director say that before, and always the carello had rolled closer to the players, the way it was rolling now toward Fort Bridger.
William was at his place outside the fort with a couple dozen other Indians. Charlie stood a few feet away, looking like he’d missed his best shot at a buffalo and wouldn’t eat for a week. “Fort Indians!” Charlie had scoffed last night when Cruze went over today’s shooting. William had felt the familiar knot tighten in his stomach. Charlie might refuse to play one of the drunken Indians that hung around the forts in the Old Time begging food and whiskey, mostly whiskey. Trading buffalo robes, trading their wives and daughters for whiskey. “So that’s what they think of us,” Charlie had said.
William had spent most of the evening trying to convince Charlie that it was just a story. An untrue thing. J
ust like the building that looked like Fort Bridger wasn’t true. Yet if William hadn’t seen the white men putting up the walls, he would have believed the impossible—that they had moved Fort Bridger from the banks of the Platte River in Wyoming to the Nevada desert. But that was another lesson about white men. There was no limit to what they might do. They had found photographs of the real Fort Bridger and constructed another fort, so true that the buffalo Indians who used to trade at the fort wouldn’t have known the difference, if they hadn’t seen the imposter rising in front of their eyes.
Except that the untrue fort was nothing more than a single wall with a wooden door in the middle, which made it all the more fantastic because it seemed to be so much more than it was. He’d spent some time yesterday watching the carpenters build a wooden platform behind the wall. And now the platform had been turned into a room at Fort Bridger, with a wooden table, chairs, and narrow beds piled with buffalo robes. Muslin curtains hung on rods at the sides of the room. The cameramen had pulled the curtains this way and that, testing the amount of light and shadow that fell over the platform.
One wall, a platform, open air, and curtains. It wasn’t true.
“You don’t understand,” Charlie had said. “Stories are true. I’m not goin’ be a fort Indian.”
William had gone to find McCoy. He was in his own tent, light glowing in the canvas, reading a book, a gas lamp on the table. And McCoy had gone running to the Indian camp, long legs stretching out like the legs of a yearling. William had run after him. Any trouble and the Indians would be sent packing. That was the way McCoy had put it.
William had waited outside the tipi, listening to the low rumble of voices. McCoy’s voice firm with sympathy. Charlie’s voice angry at first and finally sinking into a low mumble. McCoy gave him a nod when he came out, and William knew that McCoy had reminded Charlie that in two weeks they could collect their money, ride to Milford, and board the train. They could go home.
The Silent Spirit Page 12