Red Earth White Earth

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Red Earth White Earth Page 18

by Will Weaver


  The second man nodded, as did two other men nearby.

  “I mean, it’s happening right now but nobody can see it,” the first man said. “Nobody except the Jews, that is.”

  All the men who had listened drew on their cigarettes and took long drinks of coffee as they thought about that.

  Cassandra slowly closed her mouth. She stared far away for a moment. “Maybe if I think of this as embassy work . . . ,” she murmured to herself.

  “I’m here on business,” Cassandra explained, tearing the cellophane on a pack of Virginia Slims. “I work for Senator Howard Stanbrook. Most of the time I stay in Washington, but occasionally I come out in the field. To put out fires, as they say in the business.”

  “So what’s burning in Flatwater, Minnesota?” Guy asked.

  “Howard—Senator Stanbrook—has been getting a lot of calls and letters from some particularly angry-sounding constituents who live on White Earth. They’re worried about their land. The Indian land claims,” she explained. “So Howard sent me out to take care of it.”

  “It?” Guy said.

  “The legal stuff,” she said. “That’s what I do. I research things, reassure people that the law is on their side, that nothing bad is going to happen to them, fix things if I can, then leave.” She lit a long, thin cigarette.

  An expensive-magazine-woman attorney. In Flatwater.

  “Then back to Washington,” Guy said.

  She nodded.

  The waitress poured them more coffee, staring all the while at Cassandra Silver’s hair, her clothes.

  “So this fire in Flatwater,” Guy said. “How long do you think it will take to put out?”

  She shrugged. “Right now in Washington the cherry blossoms are starting. I’d like to be back when they’re still in bloom.”

  Guy smiled at her.

  “So what about you?” she asked abruptly. “Who are you?”

  “Guy Pehrsson,” he said.

  “I remember your name,” she said immediately. “I mean, who are you really?”

  Guy drank coffee.

  “See it my way,” she said. “This seedily dressed fellow comes along in an even seedier truck that’s pulling something cows eat. The man tries to fix my car, can’t, so shoots and burns it. But in his truck he’s got this perfectly dear little dachshund wearing what looks to be a gold-plated collar. He has a briefcase, inside which are a lot of papers about some business in California. Also in the briefcase are two very literary, hardcover novels, along with a copy of Rose Grower’s Monthly, to which it appears he has a subscription.”

  “You always go through other people’s briefcases?” Guy said. The bitch.

  “Only when it seems right,” Cassandra Silver replied.

  They talked. He told her he grew up in Flatwater, tried farming briefly, but left. He did not tell her the circumstances of his leaving or about his family. He told her he now owned an electronics company in Palo Alto, but did not explain how he came to own it. He was back for a short visit.

  Cassandra told him she had grown up in Boston and went to law school at Yale. She told him she liked law because it was a system like a jigsaw puzzle, whose pieces, if you studied them long enough, all fell into place. She told him she owned a condominium not far from M Street in Georgetown. Twice she mentioned a friend named Clark who worked for the Justice Department. She said she thought the solution to this White Earth land trouble was probably fairly simple; the Feds would have to pay off the Indians, which is what the Indians invariably wanted anyway. Then everybody would be happy.

  As they talked Guy stared increasingly at her mouth, her long straight teeth, the shiny cut of her hair, the whorls of her ears, her long fingers and perfect nails. She looked better the more he looked. In fact, she was that rare type of woman who looked better and better the closer you got. Once she stopped talking to stare at him in return.

  Separated by the table, by their coffee cups, Guy thought of an advertisement he had seen recently in some magazine, a cigarette ad. In it were a man and a woman, dressed up, at a party, and leaning toward each other from opposite sides of a gaming table. The woman’s hand covered some cards. The man’s hand was circled around a stack of black chips that he was thinking of moving. But in the moment of the photograph the man and the woman just stood there, eyes locked into each other’s. It was the ad of the eighties. They were both waiting. Your move.

  Before he left Flatwater with the ground feed, Guy found Cassandra Silver a room at the Lumberjack Hotel on Main Street. He also found her a rusted but mechanically sound ’68 Chevy Impala. The Chevy had been abandoned at the Shell station because of an engine overhaul bill; the mechanic was glad to be rid of it.

  “Thanks,” Cassandra said, glancing at the hotel behind, at the Chevy parked in front. “I think.”

  They shook hands again, two pumps this time. She had strong fingers.

  “So I’ll be here, I guess,” she said. “I have to spend some time in the courthouse looking through deeds and abstracts, that sort of thing.”

  “Good luck,” Guy said. He turned away.

  “So . . . ,” she said.

  Guy stopped and waited. He guessed this was hard for her. Guessed that she had a difficult time being nice to most men.

  “So if you’re in town, stop by,” she said. “You can tell me more about Flatwater, Minnesota. I’ll buy you lunch at the Red Caboose.”

  “Maybe I’m married,” Guy said.

  Her jaw sharpened and her cheeks reddened with anger. “Maybe I don’t give a damn,” she said.

  Guy stopped for gas on the way out of town. At the station he looked over a rack of souvenirs of Flatwater under a scratched glass counter. Teacup-sized birch bark tom-toms. Beaded necklaces. Rubber tomahawks. Brightly dyed chicken-feather headdresses for kids, all made in Taiwan. In the end he chose a postcard to send to Susan at Stanford. The picture on the card was an aerial view of Flatwater in summer. The town looked white and clean. The river beside it was a shiny blue sleeping garter snake that had swallowed an egg. The fields around were square and green. From the great height you could make out occasional tiny tractors and cars. But no people.

  20

  The following day Guy stayed on the farm and fixed things. In the barn he fixed a sparking light switch and its broken wire. He fixed two broken steps on the hayloft ladder. He called a tire service in Detroit Lakes to come and fix the tractor’s tires, which had lost both air and fluid from two bullet holes. “Indians,” Martin said.

  In the shop he worked on Martin’s pickup. He removed the wheels and hubs to check the brake shoes. The Ford was barefoot. Its curved brake pads were worn to their rivets, and the rivets had scored long circular gouges across the face of the brake drum the way glaciers drew hard stone across soft.

  He checked his watch: 3:00 PM. There was still time. He levered off the other hubs and put them in a box. Their soot blackened his hands and wrists, and he could see a fuzzy dark smudge down the side of his nose. He threw a blanket over the front seat of the Mercedes and drove fast to Flatwater.

  At Ken’s Machine Shop the machinist checked his watch and scowled, but fit the Ford’s hubs onto the turning lathe. As the hubs began their slow turning, a carbide dressing point settled on the drums like a phonograph needle onto a record. Guy watched the sparks for a minute. Then his stomach began to rumble. He’d forgotten to eat lunch. He looked down at his dirty hands, his coveralls. No one at the Red Caboose would care.

  At the Caboose afternoon coffee drinkers stood packed in the entryway drinking coffee from cups and saucers as if they were attending a stand-up cocktail party. The Red Caboose was a real caboose, long and narrow and always short on room, but today the Caboose was particularly crowded. Guy saw why. Taking up three full tables in the center of the cafe, only half visible behind tall stacks of large books,
was Cassandra Silver.

  Guy wove his way forward among the cups and saucers. Cassandra sat bent forward over the table. Beside her was a nearly full ashtray of half-smoked cigarettes, a nearly empty cup of coffee. She was wearing reading glasses, a red flannel shirt, the top two buttons open. She held the pink tip of her tongue between her teeth as she wrote rapidly on a yellow legal pad. Feeling Guy’s presence beside her, she said, “No more coffee.” Then she looked up and blinked.

  “Mr. Pehrsson!”

  “Miss Silver.”

  Her gaze traveled from his smudged face down his coveralls to his boots, then back up. He glanced briefly down her open shirt. He liked what he saw.

  “I had no idea there were coal mines in Flatwater,” she said.

  Behind Guy, several men laughed.

  “Beneath these clothes I’m really very clean,” Guy said. The men laughed again, slightly louder this time. Cassandra’s lips opened in a half smile. She leaned back from her writing and removed her glasses. Guy sat down.

  Her eyes were red-rimmed, her forehead faintly shiny with oil. She rubbed her eyes and looked across the table. Guy followed her eyes across the big books, their tiny gold lettering on flaky leather bindings. “Deeds, Becker County,” they all read. They started in 1869 and came to 1984. The covers of the later books were embossed plastic, like large credit cards.

  Cassandra shook out another cigarette and lit it. She drew deeply, then looked around before she spoke. She lowered her voice. “Mr. Pehrsson, your family’s farm wouldn’t by any chance lie within the boundaries of the White Earth Reservation?”

  Guy nodded yes.

  “Too bad,” she said.

  That afternoon she explained as she drove. “There are, to put it mildly, some very odd transfers of land from Indians to whites. Most of these transactions took place between fifty and eighty years ago. But that doesn’t make the holes in them any smaller. Then there are treaties.” She drove her Chevy with one hand, smoked with the other while she looked across the reservation fields.

  “So the Indians are onto something,” Guy said.

  “That’s foregone by now,” she said. “My job is to strike a compromise, make both sides, Indians and whites, feel like they came out ahead.”

  Guy looked out his window. The April fields were dirty white from the thin crust of snow that remained. The flat land stretched away and ended at the low, green hills of the inner reservation.

  He wondered who Helmer had bought the farm from. There had been no mention of Indians. Guy had never seen a deed or title. But then he didn’t really care, either. Helmer’s land would pass to Martin. Martin would piss it or spend it away, as he was doing right now. And Guy didn’t care. He was through with the land. Of that he was very sure.

  Cassandra talked more about the disputed land, the opposing claims, the title troubles. Clouded title, she called it. Guy listened but did not comment.

  “This bores you?” she said suddenly, turning to look at him.

  “I’m listening.”

  “You sure as hell don’t seem very interested, considering your family’s land is involved.”

  “I don’t live here.”

  “But your family does. You grew up here and they’re still here.”

  Guy nodded.

  “What’s your story, anyway?” she asked. “How can you not care about the place you grew up on?”

  “Easy. You just walk away one day and don’t come back.”

  “But you’re back,” she said, turning to look at him.

  They drove into the hills. Jack pines lined the road, which curved up and down, around tiny lakes and sloughs. The glacier had come through here and it had been bored, Guy always imagined. After grading the farmland flat, the glacier had been bored to tears, bored enough to rear up and dance. The tiny lakes, the steep hills were the result. The largest and bluest of the glacier tears was No Medicine Lake.

  Cassandra and Guy were headed to the east side of No Medicine and a land sale there. At auction were twenty acres of lakeshore lots. The lots were owned by Lyle Price, the banker, and Walter Whittaker, an old attorney. The two men owned most of Main Street in Flatwater, thousands of acres of farmland, and the entire shore around several lakes. The land and lakeshore they bought during depression years; together they kept track of tax-delinquent lands and were there at the courthouse, checkbooks in hand, the day the land went tax-forfeit.

  Now, in 1984, Price and Whittaker, along with assorted real estate agents and lawyers, were subdividing and selling the lakeshore. Price-Whittaker Developments, Inc., advertised in large newspapers such as the Fargo Forum and the Minneapolis Tribune. Price-Whittaker did not bother to advertise in Flatwater. They knew nobody besides them had time or money enough to build a vacation home.

  All this Cassandra explained to Guy, who listened, nodding. He waited for her to get some of the Flatwater history wrong but she didn’t.

  “I understand now why you work in the Red Caboose Cafe,” he said.

  Cassandra smiled. “In Washington you have to be at the right parties; in Flatwater, the right cafe.”

  And if Cassandra knew about Price-Whittaker and the land sale on No Medicine Lake, so did the Indians. On Monday a small, black-bordered notice had appeared in the Flatwater Quill:

  The White Earth Anishinabe Tribal Council opposes

  the sale of lakeshore so-named “Hiawatha Acres” on

  No Medicine Lake. What is not owned cannot be sold.

  Cassandra steered the Chevy to follow yellow auction pennants tied to trees. She turned onto a frozen, rutted road leading toward the lake. The road builders, sometime last fall, had not bothered to cut down the pines but let the bulldozers push them over. The Chevy followed the rough-blazed road downward. Guy realized they were only a mile or so from his old sledding hill. His and Tom’s and Mary Ann’s.

  At the end of the road was a line of parked cars. Big cars with electric windows. Cassandra stopped behind a burgundy Cadillac. The car carried the sticker of a Minneapolis auto dealer. Ahead of the Cadillac were Thunderbirds, Buicks, two more Cadillacs. Just beyond the cars was a yellow-bannered path that led out of sight, through big Norway pines, down toward the lake.

  Guy and Cassandra followed the path downward. In the snow and dirt were the flat footprints of men’s dress shoes, occasionally the sharp heel and toe points of women’s high heels. Suddenly Cassandra grabbed Guy’s arm and sucked in her breath.

  Guy looked up. An Indian blocked their path; he had stepped from behind a tree. He wore a fox-skull headdress whose jaws were eating his head. The Indian had long black braids, wore tribal leathers, moccasins, and carried a long-handled, thin-bladed hatchet on his belt.

  “Good afternoon,” he said without smiling. “Welcome to White Earth, home of the Chippewa-Anishinabe people.”

  “Good afternoon,” Cassandra murmured from behind Guy’s shoulder. Guy nodded.

  “Please look through one of these,” the Indian said, handing them a flier. His braids swung as he spoke. “And have a nice day.”

  Guy glanced again at the hatchet.

  Cassandra took a flier from the Indian, who stepped aside, back behind his tree. They walked on, looking over their shoulders. Another group of men in Burberry-type raincoats came behind them. Guy and Cassandra watched as the Indian stepped from behind his tree. The raincoated men stumbled to a halt like sheep in a chute.

  Guy led the rest of the way down to the lake. Cassandra followed, reading the flier, muttering as she walked. Guy glanced over her shoulder. A thunderbird and bear logo rode the letterhead: “White Earth Anishinabe Legal Services, Inc.” The text below was a long legal description—dimensions, lot numbers, township, section, and range—of the lakeshore development. Guy let his eyes skip farther down to “Preliminary Title Opinion.” Below that he read, “. .
. sufficient ambiguities of title and transfer as to encumber the land heretofore described in favor of legal heirs or assignees of the White Earth Chippewa/Anishinabe People.” It was signed, “Ma’iingaans, President, Tribal Council.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Cassandra murmured, still reading the legalese. But Guy was more interested in the scene below.

  In a clearing, outlined against the gray ice of No Medicine Lake, was a raised wooden stage covered with bright green Astroturf. The artificial grass said funeral, but a polka band was setting up to play. At the front of the stage was a battery-powered loudspeaker; at the rear, a red portable generator. To the right, on the snow beside the stage, was a portable bar around which Lyle Price, Walt Whittaker, the real estate agents, and their buyers had clustered. Rather than face the bar, the lake, or each other, the small, well-dressed crowd stood in a tight half circle facing out, as if they were buffalo and the short brown bar was their baby. For in the woods were Indians.

  There were Indians in the trees. Eight or ten Indians, dressed in tribal leather and fur, some in hawk’s-head capes, sat unmoving high up in the bare crowns of oak trees like prehistoric birds.

  There were Indians in the bushes. A dozen or more Indians, dressed in coyote- and fox-skull headdresses, sat hunkered on their heels here and there up the side hill. Some were visible only by the toothy grin of their animal-skull headgear.

  In all there were less than twenty Indians. More than forty whites. But the Indians had the high ground. Had the auction site surrounded.

  Guy laughed. Cassandra looked up from her flier. She gasped and grabbed Guy’s arm as she saw the pterodactyls in the trees. Then her eyes widened farther as she began to spot the fox- and wolf-skull Indians crouched in the brush.

  Guy steered her along toward the bar.

 

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