The Red Power Murders

by Thomas King

  Thinking about Claire and her son had the same effect on Thumps as thinking about Noah Ridge, and when he looked down at the speedometer, he discovered he was well over the speed limit. It would be a fine irony if his curiosity and concern landed him a ticket. Not that he had any money. The trip north had been expensive, and the lack of cash was why he had said yes to Hockney in the first place.

  The sheriff was another annoyance.

  Thumps had to smile. Claire, Stick, Noah, Hockney. Might as well add Freeway to the list of people who annoyed him. Not that the cat was people in the Judeo-Christian sense of the universe.

  Maybe the fault was in him. Maybe it was one of those days where everything annoyed him. Maybe he should try to be more understanding, more giving.

  THE TURNOFF FOR Moses Blood’s place was a dirt road that was easy enough to find during the day and almost impossible to see in the dark. Thumps found it on the second try. Moses liked to refer to the two-mile track of potholes and gullies as a driveway, but then Moses had a sense of humour. As Thumps tried to keep his oil pan intact and his springs from bottoming out, he wondered how much Moses knew about Lucy Kettle and particularly about her brother, Grover. If anyone on the reservation did know, it would be Moses.

  As Thumps started down the side of the coulee, he could see Moses’s house in the distance and the tangle of old trailers behind it. Trailers were common-enough sights on the reservation. People bought trailers, and people sold trailers, and when a trailer was too old to be bought or sold, it made its way to Moses’s fifty acres of bottom land and arranged itself among the other trailers.

  If the trailers had had horns and a tail, from a distance, Thumps might have mistaken them for a herd of buffalo.

  He had asked Moses about the trailers more than once, and the old man had always seemed pleasantly surprised by Thumps’s interest.

  “They’re just resting,” Moses told him. “They’ll move on when they feel like it.”

  Stick’s Mustang was parked in front of the house. Thumps sat in the car where it was warm and measured the distance from where he was to where he wanted to be. Next to Moses’s wood stove. And then he undid the seat belt, vaulted out of the car, and walked briskly across the snow as it cackled at him underfoot. Just as he got to the house, Moses opened the door and held out a cup of tea.

  “Oki,” the old man said. “Come on in. I’ve been expecting you.”

  MOSES’S HOUSE WAS TOASTY, and Thumps could feel happiness filling his body for the second time today. The tea helped. It was hot and sweet, and Thumps ignored the bits of twigs and leaves and flowers floating just off the bottom.

  “You want to watch some television?” Moses handed Thumps the remote control. “They got some pretty interesting stuff on television these days.”

  Moses had the biggest television set on the reservation, and every Saturday night, during hockey season, his house was packed.

  “The other day they had this guy who tried to kill the president.” Moses brought up the movie schedule. “He was mostly dark blue with lines all over his body and every time someone tried to shoot him, he would disappear into smoke.”

  Thumps put his nose into the cup and inhaled the warm vapours.

  “And there was this other guy who had these steel claws come out of his hands whenever he got upset and a woman who could control the weather.”

  A Mormon bishop on his way from Cardston to Salt Lake City had stopped by Moses’s house one afternoon to say hello and asked what a Native elder was doing with a large-screen television in his house. Couldn’t see the small one, Moses told him.

  “Boy, we could have sure used that kind of a woman last summer.”

  “Stick around?”

  “You bet. He’s out back talking to the Nephews.”

  The Nephews, Thumps remembered, was what Moses called the bank of computers that Stick had cobbled together in one of the trailers. Evidently trailers and computers talked to each other because, somehow or other, most of the orphaned computers from the band offices and elsewhere found their way to the orphaned trailers.

  “Of course, being able to turn into smoke and disappear is pretty handy too.” Moses went to the stove and poured himself another cup of tea. “Politicians do that all the time. It’s sort of what Lucy did.”

  Moses looked slow, but Thumps knew from personal experience that no one could make a turn in the middle of a conversation faster than the old man.

  “Lucy Kettle, right?”

  “That’s what you came to talk about, isn’t it?”

  “You knew her?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Moses. “Only her name was Many Horses. Kettle was her dad’s name. He was Cheyenne or something like that.”

  “What happened?”

  Moses looked up from his tea. “Nothing.”

  “I knew her.”

  “I know,” said Moses.

  “But I thought she was from Oklahoma.”

  “Oh, that,” said Moses. “That’s just kids and parents. Her and her mom used to fight all the time, so Lucy took her dad’s name and put her mother’s name away, and then one day she disappeared. Like that guy in the movie.”

  “What about her brother?”

  “Grover?” Moses leaned back in the chair. “He’s a pretty good boy. Got a temper, that one. But he’s real good with horses. He can talk to them, and they talk to him.”

  “You know where I can find him?”

  “Nope,” said Moses, “but Stick might know. Come on. Let’s go see what the Nephews have to tell us today.”

  THUMPS HAD FOLLOWED Moses to the trailer that held the computers several times, and each time the old man seemed to take a different way. He’d enter the door of one trailer, walk through it to the back door, come outside for a moment, and then climb back into another trailer, and make his way from that one to another one until, as if by magic, they would arrive at a trailer that was marked with a sticker that warned about possible radioactivity.

  “Don’t worry,” said Moses as he always did. “It used to be one of those X-ray things.”

  “I know,” said Thumps.

  “That X-ray would shine a light right through you.” Moses patted the side of the trailer. “But it’s okay now.”

  Stick was sitting in front of a row of monitors playing a game. Thumps had no idea which one it was. They all looked the same. Once, he had bought something called The 7th Guest, which turned out to be bizarre and boring, a game that was little more than a set of puzzles with graphics set against creepy music. How anyone could sit in front of a screen for hours and be entertained by something so mind-numbing was beyond him.

  Of course, Thumps wasn’t sure there was any great difference between video games and television. At least with the video games you got to move your fingers.

  “Look who’s come to visit us.”

  Stick didn’t even turn. “Shut the door.”

  Thumps was in favour of that. Moses sat down next to Stick and looked at the screens.

  “Are you winning?”

  “See that guy there?” said Stick, pointing to a blue blob with a flash of yellow. “That’s Custer.”

  “Yes,” said Moses. “That’s him all right.”

  Thumps moved in and changed his angle. “The Battle of the Little Bighorn?”

  Stick smirked. “Battle of the Washita. Don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it.”

  Thumps didn’t actually dislike Stick. But the combination of youth and arrogance was wearing. The kid wasn’t stupid, but he was annoying, and today annoying was a mortal sin.

  “November 27,” said Thumps, “1868. Custer and the Seventh Cavalry ride into Black Kettle’s village. Black Kettle and his wife were killed. More than fifty Cheyenne women and children were taken prisoner. Custer burned the village and shot all the horses.”

  Now Stick looked annoyed. Good.

  “Yeah, but the Cheyenne wiped out Major Elliott’s detachment.”

  “Her father was Cheyenne,” said Mo
ses. “Maybe she was related to Black Kettle.”

  “Maybe,” said Stick, turning back to the game. “All the stuff I found is there.”

  On the floor next to Stick was a box filled with paper.

  “All this on Lucy Kettle?”

  “Lucy Kettle. The Red Power Movement. The FBI. Some interesting shit.”

  Thumps looked at the box. The easy thing to do would be to take the box and let things lie. “Talked to your mother.”

  Stick didn’t even look up. “Thought she dumped you.”

  “Asked me to have a man-to-man talk with you.” Thumps felt a smile coming on as he said “man-to-man.”

  “You’re not my father.”

  “Always nice to have people who care for you,” said Moses.

  “He doesn’t care for me,” said Stick. “He just wants to have sex with my mother.”

  “Sex is good too,” said Moses. “Calms you down. Helps you get to sleep.”

  Stick’s eye was black and purple, and it was still swollen. Thumps had seen injuries like this before. Especially with drunks who tumbled out of the bars in the early hours of morning full of rage and immortality.

  “You know there’s no profit in pissing her off.”

  Stick looked up from the monitor. “Tell her you hit me. That’ll make her happy.”

  It was a family trait, Thumps decided. There was no give in either one of them. No elasticity. No compromise. Just hardpan and stone.

  “You should think of Thumps as your uncle,” said Moses. “Always good to talk things out with an uncle.”

  Stick made a growling sound and retreated to his computer world.

  Moses patted Stick on the back. “Don’t forget that time your uncle helped you.”

  “He got me shot.”

  “But he saved your life.”

  “He got lucky.”

  Lucky was what Stick had been, Thumps remembered with some annoyance. The kid had been a suspect in the shooting death of a computer programmer at Buffalo Mountain. He hadn’t killed the man, but instead of turning himself in, he took off, thinking he was going to solve the case himself, and wound up getting shot by Andy Hooper. Thumps could still remember that night, waiting in the hospital, wondering if Claire’s only child was going to die before he even began to live.

  Moses stooped down, picked up the box, and handed it to Thumps. “Hard to be polite when your eye hurts.”

  Thumps sighed and took the box.

  “Let us know if this helps to solve the mystery.”

  “What mystery?”

  “What happened to Lucy,” said Moses. “We’ve been wondering about that for years. Always hard to understand the present if you don’t understand the past.”

  MOSES WALKED THUMPS back to his car, telling the story of each of the trailers they passed through.

  “Pat Pretty Weasel bought this one in Edmonton from a guy who worked oil rigs. There were oil stains everywhere and when Pat pulled up the carpet, he discovered that the underlay had at least four barrels of heavy crude in it.

  “Roxanne Heavy Runner’s mother used to live in this one. When her mother passed, Roxanne was going to live in it, but the memories were too strong, so she got a house at the townsite instead. Her mother used to make the best tea on the reservation. You can still smell it.

  “This one belonged to Floyd Small Elk. He was killed in the bedroom. Cooley brought this out and left it with me and asked me to park it where it would get lots of sunshine.”

  As they moved from trailer to trailer, Thumps caught glimpses of the sky. It was darker now, heavy with sorrow and snow, and it reminded him of the sky on the Northern California coast all those years ago. They had found Anna and Callie under such a sky.

  “Your car doesn’t look too happy,” said Moses.

  There were tiny icicles forming on the Volvo’s wheel wells, and the front bumper was shivering. “It doesn’t like cold weather.”

  “You should take it someplace warm.”

  Thumps put the box on the hood. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  Moses watched a flock of geese in the distance. “You know, sometimes an old story comes along and you can’t remember how it goes. Sometimes it helps to hear a story again.”

  Thumps picked up the box and walked to the side of the car. “This is a lot of paper.”

  “It’s recycled. The other side has band-meeting stuff on it.” Moses opened the back door. “They say some good things about her, and they say some bad things too.”

  “Any of it true?”

  “All stories are true.”

  Thumps put the box on the seat and shut the door a little harder than usual, to let the car know he wasn’t in the mood to hear complaints.

  “So, she never came back.”

  Moses dragged the toe of his boot across the ground so that the dark earth showed through the thin layer of snow. “Not yet.”

  ELEVEN

  Archimedes Kousoulas owned the Aegean, the only bookstore in Chinook worth the mention. For years, the Aegean had been the only bookstore in town, but a hole-in-the-wall storefront affair called Gone with the Wind had opened next to the barbershop on Main, and one of those chain things had set up shop in the mall. Gone with the Wind dealt in used paperbacks, mostly romance and adventure fiction, while the store at the mall sold the latest bestsellers, books with large advertising budgets, books that had been turned into movies. Books that people who didn’t read books bought for other people who didn’t read books. Thumps had gone there once, looking for a good book on digital photography, and made the mistake of asking one of the assistant managers for a recommendation.

  “Do you have a title?” the clerk had asked him.

  “No, I’m hoping you can recommend a book.”

  “We don’t really do that.”

  “But you sell books on digital photography.”

  “Absolutely. And if you know the title you want, we can find the book.”

  The Aegean had originally been a Carnegie library. But when a new library had been built in the late ’80s, the old building had been put up for sale. It should have sold right away, but it had been in terrible condition. The roof leaked. The windows had rotted. The foundation had shifted. The plaster had crumbled. The wiring and plumbing had to be replaced. There was a certain majesty to the old edifice, but most people could see the building for what it was.

  A money pit.

  So, most everyone in town was surprised when Archie bought the old library and slowly but surely coaxed it off its deathbed and brought it back to health.

  Walking into the Aegean was always a surprise. For a variety of intangibles—the soft, shafting light, the high ceilings, the endless shelves of books, the narrow mezzanine that ran the circumference of the main room—the inside of the building always felt more spacious than the outside would suggest. Whatever the reasons, stepping into the bookstore was like stepping out of one universe and into another.

  Archie was on the mezzanine putting books on shelves.

  “Hey, Archie.”

  “Thumps!” Archie put the books on the floor, came clanging down the spiral staircase, and dragged Thumps to the large library table in the middle of the room. “What do you think?”

  Spread out on the table was a series of crude drawings.

  “What are they?”

  “Ideas,” said Archie, holding one up. “For the photographs.”

  Thumps had to look closely to figure out what was happening. “So, this is supposed to be Ridge standing in front of . . . an American flag with his arms . . . crossed.”

  “Right,” said Archie. “Everybody likes patriotism. And here’s one of him standing in front of city hall.”

  Thumps could feel his eyes folding shut as Archie picked up each sketch and explained the pose.

  “Herb Stockley said we could use his 1957 Pontiac Star Chief convertible for this shot.”

  “Archie . . .”

  “You don’t have to use all my ideas.” Arc
hie slipped the drawings into a manila envelope. “Just the ones you think are good.”

  Thumps took the envelope because Archie was a friend and because there was nothing else he could do. “Thanks.”

  “Guess what else?”

  Thumps had his own set of questions, but there was a ritual to life with Archie, and in that ritual Archie’s questions came first.

  “A postcard?”

  “Nope.”

  “A book?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can I stop now?”

  “Wait till you see it,” said Archie, looking pleased that Thumps had not been able to guess.

  Archie’s first love was books, but he wasn’t monogamous. He collected early postcards, vintage photographs, old maps. Posters. So long as they had a western theme, which for Archie meant cowboys and Indians.

  “I found it in a shop in Seattle.” Archie went to one of the large map files. “You don’t find one of these just any old day.”

  It was a poster, and it showed a large steamship in the background, all black and white and red and bright, knifing through an emerald green sea while in the foreground, surrounded by the silhouette of palm fronds, an Indian in a full headdress clutching a spear peered out of the jungle at the approaching ship. “Cosulich Line Trieste” was printed in bold letters across the bottom. In the lower left corner was “A. Dondou,” which was, Thumps supposed, the artist’s name, while in the lower right corner was “Arti Grafiche S. D. Modiano-Trieste.”

  The Indian was etched in red so you could see him amidst the foliage.

  “Late 1920s?”

  “Maybe early ’30s,” said Archie. “The company’s not in business anymore, but when it was, it specialized in cruises to the Americas.”

  “So, that’s how they imagined the Americas.”

  Archie shrugged. “That’s how everyone imagined the Americas.”

  “Is it for sale?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “The pictures you take of Noah Ridge.”

  Thumps watched the ship breaking through the waves and the Indian hiding in the woods, waiting for the tourists to arrive. New World fantasies. Old World fears. He wondered how many tickets this poster had sold.