As the crow flies wl-8

by Craig Johnson

  Lolo Long gently slapped him in the back of the head. “The Pima Indian who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima.” She glanced at me and gestured toward Nate. “This is what we fought for-you know that, right?”

  “When was that?”

  She looked at him. “Iwo Jima?”

  “No, the song. When was it released?”

  I thought about it. “Before I went to Vietnam, ’64 I’d guess.”

  He made a face. “The sixties? No wonder I don’t know it.” He looked at the CD player as if it held the Dead Sea Scrolls. “Wow, man.”

  I glanced at the chief. “Well, we need to go up to the Jimtown Bar anyway. I don’t think anybody’s going to remember anything, but we’ve got to leg it out. I’ve got a couple of hours before Cady and Lena come back from Colstrip.” I gestured toward the computer again. “Can you play the part with the woman’s voice?” He did, but the only word that I could discern was the word dome/dose/dole.

  Lolo Long had a strange look on her face. “Play it again.”

  Nate did as he was told and then played it again and again.

  I leaned a little forward to get her attention as she stared at the blank screen. “Anything?”

  She didn’t hear me, or she was concentrating.

  “Do you know who it is?”

  Even Nate turned to look at her, but she shook her head. “No, I thought for a minute, but…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  I studied her. “You’re sure?”

  She straightened and stepped back from the counter. “Yeah.”

  I sighed and looked at Nate. “You?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, I wish I did. Believe me.”

  “I do.” I patted him on the shoulder. “We’re going to head up to Jimtown and ask around. Do you think you can keep manipulating the recording so that we can try and get more out of it?” I paused. “Without putting it on the air?”

  He smiled and looked at the lights still blinking on the phone. “Hey, man, I may have produced a hit here.”

  Chief Long had been silent in the five miles up to the notorious drinking establishment; it had been a quick five miles, but five miles nonetheless.

  She slid the Yukon to a stop in front of the steel-red posts sticking up in front of the Jimtown Bar’s front door-likely there to keep the patrons from instituting an impromptu drive-through-and sat staring at the dash, the midday sun drying the irrigation water in the surrounding hay field with wisps of vapor trailing up from the ground.

  “Something wrong?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “About?”

  She looked at me as if I’d just fallen off the official sheriff’s-only turnip truck. “I’m just wondering how complex this case is, you know?”

  I nodded. “It usually is complicated when it concerns matters of the heart; things tend to get venal and earthy.”

  She pressed her lips together. “So you don’t think it’s a hidden gold mine or about nuclear weapons?”

  I smiled. “No, I don’t; I think it’s something small, something personal, and probably something stupid.” I waited a moment. “You got anything you want to tell me, Chief?”

  She looked at me for a longer moment and then pulled the handle and threw open her door. “Not really.”

  The Jimtown bar itself isn’t an impressive sight, but the beer can pile out back most certainly is. Documented by National Geographic and Guinness World Records as the largest beer can pile in the world, it dwarfed the actual bar, where the twin mottos, which appeared on the back of souvenir ball caps, had always been WHERE THE CAN OF WHUPASS IS ALWAYS OPEN, and FRIDAY NIGHT SPECIAL, SHOT, STABBED, OR RAPED. I got tired the way I always did when approaching such establishments and hoped that Luanne, the proprietor for the last few miraculously quiet years, was about.

  I started to follow Long toward the door but paused when I saw an old, faded powder-blue Dodge with a white replacement door that read COLSTRIP CONCRETE and a phone number belying its age with only four numerals.

  I stopped.

  The moment must have lasted longer than I thought, as Lolo paused with her hand on the front door of the bar and looked at me. “Something wrong?”

  I thought about repeating the conversation in reverse but decided her mood wasn’t conducive. “I’ve seen that truck before.”

  “There are only a couple of thousand vehicles on the Rez, so I bet you have.” She pushed the door open but instead of going inside turned to look at me. “Where?”

  “Birney.”

  “Red or White?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” I glanced at the truck one more time, then caught the heavy glass door and followed her into the interior gloom, lit only by the red neon spelling BAR in the small window. It was still well before opening time, but a familiar character sat on one of the massive log stools bolted to the concrete floor.

  Thom Paine had been the unofficial mayor of Jimtown for as long as I could remember; half Cheyenne and half Crow, he was the perfect peacemaker for the just-off-the-Rez bar. He was a small man, so his best technique for breaking up beer brawls was to get the patrons to laugh with an unending stream of politically incorrect Native humor mostly borrowed from Herbert His Good Horse. He leapt off his stool as soon as he saw us. “ Haho! ”

  Lolo held up a hand to stop the coming tirade as I wandered over to the jukebox at the far end of the bar. “Thom, is Luanne around?”

  “No, she went to Billings for a hair appointment.” His voice became more excited as he thought of a joke to tell. “I got this one off the morning show the other day-there were these two cowboys out ridin’ and they came onto this Indian lying on his belly with his ear against the earth.”

  I thumbed through the machine’s old-style tabs as Long’s voice sounded dubious. “She left you in charge?”

  “No, Nattie Tyminski is here, but she’s in the bathroom.” He continued with the joke as if she hadn’t interrupted. “The one cowboy turns to the other and says, ‘See that Indian, he can put his ear to the ground and hear things from miles away.’”

  I got to the end of the song listings and then went back in the other direction just to make sure I hadn’t missed it.

  “About that time the Indian looks up at them and says, ‘Covered wagon pulled by two oxen, one white, the other speckled, one man, one woman, three children and a black dog-wagon full of all family supplies.’ The one cowboy looks at the other one and says, ‘That’s amazing.’ The Indian continued, ‘Yes, ran over me about a half-hour ago.’”

  Lolo chuckled in spite of herself and glanced toward the two bathroom doors, one marked “SQUAWS,” the other “BRAVES,” that led toward the pool table past the jukebox where I stood. “Thom, sometimes…” And she finally laughed wholeheartedly.

  His eyes almost disappeared in the folds around the sockets. “It makes me happy to see you laughing the way you used to, Little-Lo. You don’t laugh enough anymore.”

  She gently placed a hand on his shoulder. “I guess it’s the job, Thom.” She took a deep breath and glanced over to me. “I’ve had some help with that lately, though.”

  I leaned against the jukebox and tipped my hat back in an aw-shucks manner. “No Ballad of Ira Hayes.”

  She let the hand slip from the mayor’s shoulder and crossed to me. “No?”

  “No.” I glanced at Thom. “When’s the last time they changed the music on this machine?”

  He shook his head, looked at the floor, and then back to us. “Never that I know of.”

  “That means that Artie didn’t call from here.”

  She studied me. “Then where?”

  “Could’ve been anywhere: a cell phone in Artie’s truck, a home stereo, or a radio station.”

  Thom watched us like we were a tennis match, but I cut him off before he could start in with the jokes again. “The key is the woman; if we know who the woman is then we know where the place might’ve been.”

  “And why are you tell
ing me this?”

  “Because I think you know who she is.”

  It was at that point that the Squaws bathroom door opened and two individuals of separate sexes exited. One was an obese woman with a modified beehive hairdo and way too much makeup; the other was a skinny white guy with a shaved head, a flame tattoo spiraling up his neck, and sunglasses, despite the gloom inside. The man held a brown plastic grocery sack and looked very surprised to see us.

  I smiled. “Mr. Kelly Joe Burns-I see you have your belt on.”

  He paused there for a second, pushed Nattie Tyminski toward us, and then dodged behind the bar through the doorway toward the back. It took both of us to catch the screaming woman, who stumbled, fell halfway to the floor, wrapped one arm around me and the other around Chief Long’s leg, and held on for dear life.

  The chief was the first to disentangle, and she lithely leapt over the bar and through the back door. “Arrest her!”

  After getting the woman to her feet, I handcuffed her to the refrigerator and went outside to take a quick look at the blue Dodge. I busied myself for a moment and then went to the right in the direction of the as-big-as-a-very-large-house giant pile of beer cans but couldn’t see where Lolo and Burns might’ve gone.

  I stopped by a Dumpster, which was made out of a couple of fifty-five-gallon drums sitting on a crumbling concrete pad next to the huge pile, and listened; it sounded like the cans were being stepped on and were sliding down the hill.

  I approached the gigantic assembly and worked my way around the periphery-Lolo Long with her sidearm drawn was thirty feet above me and was panning the. 44 around the area. She must’ve half-seen me and swung the big Smith toward my chest.

  “Whoa, Chief!”

  She raised the barrel of the revolver skyward. “Where is he?”

  “You don’t know?”

  She slipped on the mountain of crushed aluminum and almost fell. “No, he disappeared.”

  I circled the base of the thing, held in check by the remnants of an old foundation, and figured that must’ve been how “the largest pile of beer cans in the world” had started; somebody had run a wheelbarrow out the back and dumped them into the place where a building must’ve been in the twenties, and the tradition had continued on into the twenty-first century. The smell of stale beer, even in the moderate heat of the morning, was sinus clearing.

  “Where did you lose him?”

  She screamed in frustration, finally forming words. “I followed him up over this trash heap, and when I got to this side, he was gone!” She took a step and then slid down and fell in a tumbling avalanche. “Damn it!”

  I stood there watching the slipping cascade of cans. “Well, I guess there’s only one thing to do.” She stood back up and watched as I drew my Colt and raised my voice. “Throw a few shots into this pile and see what happens. If he’s in there, I’ll probably get him.”

  There was a wheelbarrow load that hadn’t made it to the mountain proper, smaller and more scattered than would’ve hidden a man. I raised my. 45, snapped off the safety, and pulled the trigger-a few cans flew into the air.

  So did Kelly Joe Burns.

  As I’d suspected, he’d slipped and fallen but had been smart enough to realize that the mountain of cans could provide a fine hiding place, at least before I threatened to shoot it.

  If we’d thought Kelly Joe was fast before, we hadn’t seen anything. The man practically levitated from the cans downgrade from where Chief Long sat and about a third of the way around the base from where I stood before remembering to throw the bag he held over the top of the pile.

  We both yelled at him to stop, but we might as well have been talking to the wind in both solidity and velocity. As I circled the base, I pointed toward the spot where he’d been buried. “Get the bag!”

  She stumbled and slid as I ran after the world’s fastest non-Indian.

  Back at USC, as an offensive tackle, I had been able to outrun any other two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man in Southern California for forty yards; we were now more than a couple of decades past that, I was coming up on my forty yard limit, and Kelly Joe Burns didn’t weigh close to two hundred and fifty pounds.

  He had run toward the road but had circled back to the front of the bar, and I could hear the sound of the Dodge’s starter, grinding away.

  I stopped at the edge of the asphalt and attempted to catch my breath by bending over and placing a hand on one of my knees for support as I pulled the coil wire from my shirt pocket and dangled it like a dead rat for him to see.

  He looked at me, threw open the door, and ran across Route 39 just as an eighteen-wheeler bellowed down the road from Colstrip. The white cattle truck locked its brakes and blew its horn, and I watched as Kelly Joe slid underneath and came up on the other side.

  “You’ve got to be kidding…”

  I skimmed around the rear end of the Freightliner full of unhappy cows when another horn sounded and caused my heart to skip like a warped record album. I was pretty sure I’d checked for oncoming traffic, but was surprised to find both of my hands, one still holding the. 45, on the hood of a Baltic blue 1959 Thunderbird convertible.

  The car had stopped, and my daughter and soon-to-be in-law stared at me with stunned looks on their faces. I coughed and held up one finger as I lurched off the stationary Ford into the barrow ditch after Kelly Joe.

  Holstering the sidearm felt like the right thing to do in front of Cady and Lena, and besides, I figured I wasn’t going to really have to shoot Burns. There was a well-worn trail at the base of the ditch beside a barbed-wire fence. I looked north, then started off south-my daughter kept pace with the Thunderbird in low gear and Lena, having folded her arms on the door sill, sat up on her knees to look down at me as if she were in a parade.

  “What are you doing?”

  I coughed again and struggled to get enough air to reply. “Chasing a drug dealer.”

  “I thought you were chasing a murderer.”

  I glanced around and jogged on. “This is kind of a side bet.”

  They accelerated and kept up, Cady driving, Lena talking. “Two felonies with one stone?”

  “Something like that.”

  She turned and was talking to Cady. “The driver says to remind you that you have a luncheon in thirty minutes.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  There was another brief conversation. “The driver says to tell you that we’re taking it on faith that since you’ve holstered your weapon, your life is not imperiled?”

  I was getting a little of my air back and responded, “He may run me to death, but he’s not armed, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want our help? We do our best work from concours vintage automobiles.”

  I waved them on. “I bet.”

  They sped off, and I watched as the driver didn’t spare the horses.

  Good girl.

  It was pretty much a straight shot along Rosebud Creek, so other than a few high stands of grass, I could see about a hundred yards heading south and left toward Lame Deer. I glanced out at the swathed fields to my right and could see all the way across that flat area as well. No one.

  I stopped as I remembered something Henry had once told me-something about a culvert nicknamed the “time tunnel,” which was somewhere in the area. It was reputedly filled with mattresses so that those who had imbibed and didn’t want to run the risk of becoming the forgotten dead up on Route 39 could sleep it off. Dire stuff, but better than being roadkill.

  I turned and looked north. I had automatically followed the flow of the traffic on my side of the road and started south, but what if the time tunnel was north? It was a crap shoot.

  Standing there for a moment more, I made a decision, turned, and began trotting back up the path. After about three hundred yards, I came to a culvert and stopped. The grass was high and only a little water spilled from the corrugated pipe, which was almost as tall as a man.

  I thought about the last time I
’d climbed in one of these things and had almost been killed by a big Crow by the name of Virgil White Buffalo. I reached around to my back and felt for my venerable Maglite, but then remembered I wasn’t wearing my duty belt.

  Standing there, I could see that there was an uneven light at the end of the tunnel where it opened out on the other side. The smell of the place was less than inviting, but in I went, crouching down and once again pulling the Colt from the small of my back. “Kelly Joe, if you’re there I want you to know I’m coming in!”

  Nothing.

  I kept a wide stance and trudged over the first mattress that smelled more disgusting when I stepped on it. I cleared my throat and tried to breathe shallowly, in hopes that the odor wouldn’t overtake me before I got out.

  Stepping to one side, I watched as some sort of snake slithered from under the mattress and continued on in the direction from where I’d come. I started talking to the animals again. “You’re not the variety I’m looking for.”

  I turned and reached the halfway point, where one of the mattresses was bunched against another. Thinking that it was pretty much the only place where someone could hide in the confined space, and with a few more flashbacks to the other culvert down on Lone Bear Road, I put a foot on the mattress and pushed. Burns once again flung himself from cover and ricocheted down the culvert like a pinball. I thundered after him but tripped on the corner of a soggy sleeping bag and fell forward. I scrambled to get to my feet, but it was slippery and I knew in my heart of hearts that I was going to lose him.

  God hates a quitter, so I staggered forward and watched as he got to the opening at the other end and the bright sunlight lit him up like a candle.

  That was when the candle snuffer came down with a vengeance.

  Lolo Long must’ve been waiting above the tunnel on the other side, and I watched with a great deal of satisfaction as she landed on Kelly Joe with all six feet of everything she had. She planted him face first in the mud with a knee at his back as she grabbed two fistfuls of his wifebeater T-shirt.

  He struggled to get at her, but it was like a replay of the events at Clarence’s house when she’d pig-wrestled him.

  I staggered out into the light as she slapped her cuffs on Burns and dragged him to his feet, his entire body smeared with blackish mud.