Cold Skies

by Thomas King

  “He’s expecting you.” Cooley disposed of most of the sandwich in two bites. “Maybe I should drive you out there.”

  “Drive me?”

  “You don’t look so good.”

  “You don’t need to drive me to Moses’s place.”

  “That’s true,” said Cooley, “but it’s a nice day and on the way, you can tell me all about the dead guy at the motel, and I’ll tell you about Claire’s new boyfriend.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “I don’t think you have anything to worry about, but women see the world differently than men.” Cooley gave the refrigerator an affectionate pat on his way to the door. “Oh,” he said, “just so you know, you need more cheese.”

  Nine

  The inside of Cooley’s pickup was warm, and Thumps was having trouble keeping his eyes open.

  “Stick said I should mention the boyfriend to you.”

  Stanley Merchant, or Stick, as he was known to everyone except his mother, was Claire’s only child. The last time Thumps looked, Stick was twenty-two or twenty-three and still living at home because, to paraphrase the bank robber Willie Sutton, that was where the food was.

  “He said he didn’t want you to hear it from a stranger,” said Cooley. “Blackfeet guy from Missoula. A lawyer. Roxanne says he’s pretty good-looking. Got a bunch of muscles that show.”

  “Claire’s a grown woman.”

  “Absolutely,” said Cooley. “Don’t figure she’s all that impressed by muscles.”

  Thumps let his hand stray to his side. Part of his waist was leaning against the top of his belt.

  “Now a lawyer might be a different matter.” Cooley leaned on the wheel. “And he has a nice car. BMW or a Lexus.”

  “Why does Moses want to see me?”

  “Don’t you want to know about the lawyer’s car?”

  “Claire will tell me if she wants me to know.” Thumps tried to keep his voice casual and uninterested. “What about Moses?”

  “He needs your help.”

  Thumps couldn’t imagine Moses Blood needing anybody’s help. “You know what kind of help he needs?”

  “Sure,” said Cooley. “That’s why he sent me to get you.”

  AS THEY LEFT the highway and drove onto the reservation, Thumps realized that he hadn’t been to Moses’s place in several months. That was bad manners at the very least, with no room for an apology.

  “What happened to the trailers?”

  The last time he had come out, Moses had had an assortment of some fifty trailers spread out on the fifty acres of bottomland.

  “They’re migratory.” Cooley held the wheel steady and let the truck find its own way down through the ruts. “They come and go.”

  “Migratory? Trailers?”

  “That’s what Moses says.”

  MOSES BLOOD WAS waiting for them under a large cottonwood. He was dressed in jeans, a blue work shirt, a white straw cowboy hat. Normally, he wore a pair of red runners, but today, for some reason, he was barefoot. The red runners had always struck Thumps as curious, but Moses told him that cowboy boots hurt his feet and that red was the colour of dawn.

  “Hope you’re hungry,” said Cooley as he swung the truck around and stopped. “Moses cooked up a batch of his chili and cornbread.”

  Thumps had never had Moses’s chili, but he had heard about it. Depending on whom you talked to, it was either wonderfully delicious or murderously hot. Duke Hockney had had the chili on several occasions and said it was “frisky.”

  “Ho,” said Moses, “real nice day.”

  “Hi, Moses.”

  “Cooley,” said Moses, “bring your uncle a chair. He’s moving kinda slow.”

  That was how Thumps felt all right. Slow.

  Cooley set up a folding chair next to the plywood table. “That chili ready?”

  “You bet,” said Moses. “It’s always good to see young boys eat.”

  Thumps didn’t feel all that young, but the smell of the chili and the cornbread reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Cooley was already filling his own bowl. Evidently, the sandwich he’d made out of all the food in Thumps’s refrigerator had only annoyed his appetite.

  The chili was hot. It wasn’t frisky. It was hot. Not so hot that you couldn’t eat it, but hot enough to bring tears to your eyes and make your nose run. Even with the cornbread as a buffer, the chili was a lightning strike in dry grass.

  “Chili’s good.”

  “I got the recipe from a Mexican Indian who came to visit me.” Moses leaned forward and lowered his voice. “He said it was a secret and not to tell anyone else.”

  “The recipe?”

  “No,” said Moses, “the ketchup.”

  The food was bringing him back, bite by bite. Thumps wasn’t as tired now.

  “Maybe you boys want to take off your shoes.”

  Cooley slid off one of his boots, taking the sock with it. “There was an anthropologist who came by and told Moses that Indians were in tune with nature. Said that Indians could feel the rhythms of the earth.”

  Moses stretched his legs and wiggled his toes into the short prairie grass. “What about it, grandson, you feel the rhythms?”

  “Nope,” said Cooley, “what about you?”

  “Nope,” said Moses, “but it always feels good to get out of those runners.”

  “Cooley said you might need my help.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” said Moses. “I might need your help twice.”

  “Sure.”

  “See,” said Moses. “I knew your uncle wouldn’t let us down.”

  “What do you need?”

  Moses looked at the sky. Off to the west, the clouds were beginning to bend into an arch. A hard wind would be up by evening.

  “A walk,” said Moses. “First, we should probably go for a walk.”

  “A walk.”

  “See what all the commotion is about.” Moses wiped his hands on a towel. “But the rumours are not good.”

  THUMPS FOLLOWED the two men along the river bottom. With any luck, the walking would be flat and the distance short.

  Cooley gestured at the coulees on the far side of the river. “Last year, a company out of California got Indian Affairs to give them a ten-year lease on the Bear Hump.”

  Thumps had a flash of Archie standing in front of the water poster. “Orion Technologies?”

  “That’s right,” said Cooley. “Orion is supposed to have a way to map aquifers.”

  “Whites like to measure things,” said Moses. “They measure how cold it is, and how hot it gets.”

  Cooley held up his wrist. “They measure time.”

  “Yes, that’s true.” Moses chuckled and moistened his lips. “They even measure women’s breasts. Have you ever measured a woman’s breasts?”

  “No,” said Thumps, “can’t say I have.”

  “Good to know the Cherokee are a civilized people,” said Moses.

  “But you’ve looked at them,” said Cooley.

  “Looking is okay,” said Moses. “Just so long as you look in a respectful manner.”

  “Orion has their monitoring wells all over the Bear Hump,” said Cooley. “There’s one just on top of the coulee.”

  “Whites like to count things too,” said Moses. “If they’re not measuring, they’re counting.” Moses raised his face to the sky. “If I was a White man, I’d be counting those birds.”

  Thumps hadn’t noticed the buzzards before, but there they were, floating above the land on the thermals.

  “They arrived this morning,” said Moses.

  Buzzards weren’t an unusual sight. You could always find one or two patrolling the skies. But now there were at least a dozen birds hanging above the land, turning in slow circles.

  “Come on,” said Moses. “We better go over and see what’s got them upset.”

  “Upset?”

  “Sure,” said Moses. “Those ones are smart. Those ones are cautious. They don’t like surprises. That’s why
they circle around and take their time looking. They see a dead deer or a dead cow, they say, ‘Okay, we recognize that,’ and then they swoop down and have a good feed. But if they don’t like what they see, they stay away.”

  Thumps shaded his eyes. “Where exactly is this test well?”

  “Across the river,” said Cooley. “Right below those birds.”

  THE RIVER WAS low enough to ford at the sandbar. From there, Moses led them up a deer trail that wound its way along the side of the coulee. He didn’t move fast, but he was steady, and Thumps had to scramble to keep up. Cooley kept jogging ahead and then coming back like a large puppy out for a run.

  “You want to stop to rest?”

  “No,” said Thumps, “I’m fine.”

  “Breathing pretty hard.”

  “Feel good.”

  “The trick,” shouted Cooley, kicking up dust as he bounded up the slope, “is to be in tune with nature.”

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

  AT THE TOP of the coulee, Moses stopped and turned his face to the wind. “You smell that?”

  The smell was faint, and it wasn’t so much a smell as it was a vague stench.

  “Not a deer,” said Cooley. “And it’s not a cow.”

  Moses wiped his hands on his jeans. “More bad news.”

  The monitoring well sat in the middle of the prairie. It wasn’t much to look at, just a pipe and a wellhead boxed in by a cyclone fence with a padlocked gate. Someone had hung a large No Trespassing sign on the wire.

  The woman lay in the prairie grass looking up into the sky, as though she were keeping track of the birds overhead. She had been shot once in the chest and once in the head.

  “Margo Knight.” Cooley squatted beside the body.

  “You know her?”

  “She came to council last year when the wells went in,” said Cooley.

  “I remember,” said Moses, “because her name rhymes with Fargo.”

  “That was one scary movie,” said Cooley. “Especially when they put that guy in the chipper.”

  “The other man did most of the talking,” said Moses.

  Thumps found the pamphlet Archie had given him. “This the guy?”

  Cooley nodded. “That’s him. We told him that he shouldn’t be drilling holes on Bear Hump, that it was tribal land.”

  “They were nice,” said Moses. “But they didn’t listen so well.”

  “I’m going to have to call the sheriff. Tell him what’s happened.” Thumps looked back the way they had come. “Is there any easier way to get here?”

  “Sure,” said Cooley. “The highway is just over there.”

  “You mean we didn’t have to walk?”

  “There’s nothing like a good walk,” said Cooley.

  “As acting sheriff,” said Moses, “you could deputize me and Cooley.”

  “The acting sheriff thing is just a rumour,” said Thumps.

  “I always wanted to be a deputy,” said Moses.

  “And you can use my cellphone,” said Cooley. “For official business.”

  The cellphone signal was weak but serviceable. As Thumps waited for Hockney to answer, he wondered if Moses was right about the buzzards. Maybe the birds were smart. Maybe they had taken a good, hard look at the corpse and had decided to give it a wide berth. All in all, Thumps couldn’t fault their decision to stay in the sky.

  If he had wings, that’s exactly where he would be.

  Ten

  Cooley used his cellphone to take pictures of the dead woman and the ground around the monitoring station. Then he took a couple of shots of the three of them standing on the prairies with the dying sun stretching their shadows out across the land.

  Thumps walked to the edge of the coulee and looked down on the river.

  “We still on the reservation?”

  “Yes and no,” said Cooley. “Everything on that side of the river is reservation. Everything on this side is reservation land as well, but not everyone agrees.”

  “So this is Bear Hump?”

  Cooley turned his face toward the mountains. “When we negotiated the Treaty of 1836, the Hump was part of the reservation.”

  “But the Whites changed the treaty when we weren’t looking.” Moses shook his head. “You got to watch them. If they’re not measuring stuff, they’re busy changing things.”

  “We’ve been trying to get the land back,” said Cooley, “but treaty cases move slowly.”

  “Sometimes,” said Moses, “they stop and stand still.”

  Cooley held his phone up and took a picture of the rolling hills and the dark forests in the distance. “My dad and I used to go hunting in the lodgepole pines. Good fishing streams up there.”

  The mountains were a deep purple now, and the light was fading quickly. Thumps zipped his jacket and turned up the collar.

  “How long you figure before the sheriff gets here?” Cooley shoved his hands in his pockets. “’Cause I’m thinking I should take Moses home.”

  “Say Yes to the Dress is on at nine,” said Moses. “Tonight the bride has to choose between a Stella York mermaid trumpet with cap sleeves and an Edgardo Bonilla ball gown with an illusion neckline.”

  “We’ve seen this one before,” said Cooley. “So we won’t be disappointed with the choice the bride makes.”

  “I can stay with the body.” Thumps checked his watch. “Catch a ride back with Duke.”

  “You got a cellphone?”

  “Nope.”

  “Too bad,” said Cooley. “If you had a cellphone, you could call Stick while you were waiting.”

  Stick had never been happy with Thumps in Claire’s life, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to sit around and let some muscle-bound lawyer from Missoula come along in a fancy car and drive off with his mother.

  “I think he’s hoping you’ll chase the guy away.”

  “Yeah,” said Thumps, “I’m sure he is.”

  “Roxanne knows all about the guy,” said Cooley. “In case you’re curious.”

  Thumps had to admit he was curious. Claire didn’t start relationships easily. He had had to work hard just to get her attention. And keeping her attention had been just as difficult.

  “Not sure I want to do that.”

  “Don’t blame you,” said Cooley. “She’s my auntie, so I’ve got blood to protect me.”

  Roxanne Heavy Runner was a thick, handsome woman who had been the band secretary through at least six different chiefs. People who didn’t know her might think she was mean. In truth, she was just stern and somewhat inflexible. So far as Thumps could tell, there were few shades of grey in Roxanne’s world. If there were any at all.

  “If Claire wants me to know, she’ll tell me.”

  “That’s the attitude,” said Cooley. “Make her come to you.”

  Thumps was fairly sure that’s not what he had meant.

  “Just like the sheriff,” said Cooley.

  “The sheriff?”

  Cooley pointed his lips in the direction of the highway. “Make him come to you.”

  THUMPS WATCHED COOLEY and Moses drop down the side of the coulee and work their way back to the river. In some ways, it might have been better if he had gone with them. The sheriff was not going to be happy with another dead body, and Hockney was known to shoot messengers.

  Claire hadn’t mentioned the new boyfriend when she called earlier in the day, though there was no reason why she should. The two of them had never been exclusive. Thumps tried to think how he would describe his relationship with Claire. It was romantic, most of the time. And it was sexual, some of the time. By and large it was a series of starts and stops, warm with moments of high passion, but never hot enough to start a fire. A couple of years back, there had been some talk of living together, but then Claire was elected chief and that was that.

  Comfortable? Is that how he would describe their relationship?

  Thumps was trying to picture a muscular Blackfeet lawyer from Missoula i
n a German sports car when the sheriff’s cruiser popped out of the prairies, kicking up a rooster tail of dust as it bounced along the uneven ground. It skidded to a stop by the cyclone fence, but the cloud the sheriff had been dragging along behind him kept coming, and Thumps only had enough time to turn his back as the whirlwind rushed by him and went sailing away into the evening sky.

  Duke stayed behind the wheel, safe and snug, and waited for the storm to clear before he opened the door.

  “Hear Claire has a new boyfriend.”

  Thumps brushed the dirt out of his hair. “We didn’t touch the body. Left all the fun stuff for you.”

  “We?”

  “Cooley took pictures.”

  “Wonderful.” Hockney walked around the body. “Do we have any idea who she is?”

  “Margo Knight.” Thumps handed Duke the brochure. “She worked with Lester. They were in town for the water conference.”

  “You check her purse?”

  “Nope.”

  Duke squatted down next to the body. “Shot twice.”

  Thumps stuck his hands in his back pockets. “Looks like we found our missing bullets.”

  Duke hooked Knight’s purse with his little finger and stood up. “Your powers of deduction are amazing.”

  Thumps supposed that the sheriff had called Beth. It wouldn’t do to leave a dead body on the prairies overnight.

  “You catch up with Chivington yet?”

  “Funny thing happened to Norm.” Hockney’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Seems he had to go out of town.”

  “Out of town?”

  “On business.”

  The evening breezes were cool. The buzzards were still overhead, but there were fewer of them now. Thumps wondered where they slept at night, wondered if they slept on the wing. Moses would know that. So would Cooley. He should probably know it, too.

  “Number 11.” Duke held up a motel key. “Right next door to Lester’s room.”

  Thumps rolled the sleeve of the woman’s jacket between his thumb and forefinger. “Jacket’s expensive.”

  “Do tell.”

  “So is the dress,” said Thumps. “Purse is a Prada. Two thousand dollars, easy.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s all wrong.”

  “You can say that again,” said Hockney. “Who the hell pays two thousand dollars for a purse.”