Blood Ties

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “Smoke break,” Sonny said. He offered one to Nick, who accepted. He offered another to Johnny, who declined.

  While Nick and Sonny lit their smokes, Johnny let his eyes wander. The lake far below glinted mountain blue, disappearing down the length of the valley against a backdrop of mountains. A few hawks circled high, black dots against the sky bowl. Johnny breathed in the scent of pine needles, and as the cigarette smoke reached his nostrils, he glanced at Sonny and Nick.

  Johnny thought it was curious, watching them together. Nick, strong and silent, always seemed a physical threat. But Sonny, always talking, made the decisions, like when to take this break.

  “Here’s what I been thinking,” Sonny said as he looked past them toward the ranch house. “We need to make a statement.”

  Sonny waited for someone to ask what statement. Nick, of course, didn’t. Johnny was still thinking how Sonny had talked about Doris and was in no mood to talk at all.

  “This spring it was Wounded Knee,” Sonny said. “Remember, Nick? We’re holed up in a church in the middle of nowhere Dakota, fighting over nothing, and we had the FBI and army all over us like we’d taken Fort Knox.”

  Sonny drew a long drag. “Best of all, they had reporters and cameras in there like it was a new civil war. You tell me, wasn’t that some kind of statement?”

  Johnny had listened to Sonny before and still didn’t know exactly what it was they wanted to make as a statement. After considering that for a few seconds, he expressed his question out loud.

  “That we can’t be pushed around, man. Right now, there are a couple hundred broken treaties. Government should be delivering on promises. We can scare them into it. That’s just a start.” Sonny’s voice picked up speed. “What I figure is we make Wounded Knee look like it was a friendly party. We got to go further, man. Make a real impact.”

  Sonny made a righteous fist and pumped it a few times. “What I’m saying is we do what’s happening across the world. Terrorism.” He grinned at Johnny and Nick, who both looked surprised. “You heard me right. Terrorism. Bulldoze power lines. Pollute their drinking water. Burn buildings. Whatever it takes. We go traditional, man, like our ancestors. We play with their stupid heads, like the Sioux and Apache. Strike fast, then leave. Like a whirlwind, hit and go, become invisible so they wonder if it really happened, except just like the old days, they see the burning wagons and know the terror is real.”

  Sonny’s eyes blazed. “Thing is, we’ll be a spark. There’s plenty like us in other tribes. They can keep the fire going where they live. Then the whites will know what an uprising is all about. We’ll unite all the tribes. Whatever we demand, we’ll get. Treaties honored. Our land back.”

  Nick remained expressionless. Johnny couldn’t believe he was hearing right. He wondered if his friend Harold Hairy Moccasin knew these two would go as far as Sonny was suggesting.

  “First thing,” Sonny said, “is we call ourselves the Native Sons. We leave notes or send letters every time we strike. Before long, we’ll be headline news.” Sonny was nearly at the end of his cigarette. He pulled a last drag. “Maybe we should start by claiming the train derailment as ours. Gives us a track record. Gives us credibility. The media like that.”

  Sonny’s eyes narrowed. “You in, Johnny?”

  Johnny realized Nick was watching him closely, too.

  “You in?” Sonny repeated. “Think what happened to Doris. You can get them back.”

  Johnny thought it was convenient for Sonny to remember Doris now, when he wanted something from Johnny.

  “Let me think about it,” Johnny said.

  Nick and Sonny exchanged glances.

  “Told you,” Sonny said to Nick.

  Nick shrugged.

  Sonny ground his cigarette out beneath his boot heel. He pointed at the post pounder. “I saw this guy once, he was holding a post to steady it, let his thumb rest on the top of the post. Weight came down, no more thumb. Plenty of blood and yelling, but no more thumb.”

  Ever since they’d put the first post in, Johnny had thought of nothing else but that possibility.

  Sonny shook his hand with theatrical hurt. “Hard thinking about something that painful, ain’t it?”

  Johnny nodded agreement. There was something weird about the way the conversation had turned.

  Nick walked over to the tractor and started it. The engine throbbed. Nick turned on the PTO, and the hydraulics engaged.

  Sonny walked a few steps away and found a rock the size of a softball. He set it on top of the fence post underneath the post pounder.

  Nick released the weight, and the hydraulics slammed it downward, crushing the stone on top of the fence post. The exploding stone sounded like a gunshot. Granite dust sprayed across Johnny’s face.

  Sonny moved beside. Johnny. Nick moved on the other side.

  “Johnny,” Sonny said above the sound of the tractor engine, “yesterday, you talked a little too much to the FBI pig. What you got to decide is who you’re with. Us? Or them?”

  Sonny took Johnny’s right arm. Nick took the other.

  Johnny tried to pull free, but they were bigger and stronger.

  Sonny wrapped Johnny in a bear hug. Nick let go of Johnny’s arm. He reached into his back pocket for a short piece of rope. Within seconds, he had trussed Johnny’s ankles, using a flourish as if he had hogtied Johnny in a rodeo event.

  Nick went to the tractor, took a coil of rope from beside the tractor seat, and wrapped it around Johnny’s arms.

  “You ain’t saying much,” Sonny said. “Something you should have done yesterday.”

  Johnny was more frightened than he had ever been in his life but saw little use in protesting or begging. It was obvious they’d planned this; he doubted he could get them to change their minds. Nor did he want to give them the satisfaction.

  They lifted Johnny and carried him horizontally toward the fence post. Finally, Johnny squirmed and kicked, but it was too late. They placed the back of his head where the softball-sized stone had rested a minute earlier, leaving him to stare upward at the hydraulic weight.

  They set his feet down, but Sonny grabbed his hair and pulled it down hard to keep his head on the fence post, and Johnny couldn’t move. He was half crouching, with his back. to the pole, and had no choice but to keep his head tilted all the way back, with the weight poised only a few feet above his eyes.

  “Don’t blink,” Sonny said. “Otherwise, you might miss the fun.”

  Nick had his hand on the switch. Johnny couldn’t see it, but he sensed it.

  “Think of a watermelon,” Sonny said. “That’d be your skull. Busted like a watermelon under a baseball bat.”

  Johnny felt an intense urge to urinate. He concentrated on holding his bladder and tried not to cry.

  “That’s enough,” Nick said to Sonny. “Let go.”

  Sonny released Johnny’s hair. Nick unwrapped the rope around Johnny’s arms. Johnny pushed off the post and straightened, wobbling to keep his balance. He bent down to untie the rope that was around his ankles.

  “You don’t know it,” Sonny said, “but you’re already in. You were in the day you started working here. You try backing out, you talk to the FBI pig again, we’ll take you into the mountains and let the wolves pick your bones clean.”

  Sonny hit the switch, and the hydraulics drove the weight down, shuddering the fence post another six inches deeper into the ground.

  Understand?” Sonny said. He grinned. “Can you live with it?”

  “Yeah,” Johnny said. “I understand.”

  3:38 p.m.

  Kelsie McNeill waited until the back end of Michael’s truck rounded the corner at the end of the block, then crossed the street to the department store. On the other side, standing on the sidewalk, she looked both ways. Nobody was watching her. But then, that was little comfort. To this point, she had not once known when she was being watched.

  After taking a deep breath to calm herself, she walked into the department sto
re. She glanced at an old-fashioned round clock above a pyramid display of discounted disposable diapers. The clock read 3:40. She had twenty minutes until Michael was to return for her. She prayed the FBI man would be waiting.

  He was. Standing exactly where she had asked, in the sporting-goods department, test-casting a fishing rod. He wasn’t wearing the suit that made him appear awkward. He’d replaced it with faded jeans and a lightweight tan sweater.

  He hadn’t noticed her yet, and the lines on his face were soft with thoughtful sadness, as if his mind was far from the fishing rod in his hand. She wondered if that was his usual private face and decided, impulsively, that she liked him, although in his twenties, he was definitely ancient.

  Kelsie took another deep breath and tried to make her approach casual, examining prices on tennis equipment and pretending not to notice him until she was nearly upon him.

  “Well,” she said, loudly and in false, brittle tones, “what a surprise. Aren’t you the man who stopped by our ranch yesterday afternoon?”

  He squinted at her and snapped his fingers in recognition. “McNeill, right?”

  She was grateful he caught on so quickly. She hadn’t left much of an explanation in her message, only a time and place to meet. She hadn’t even left her name. Instead of playing along, he could have just as easily replied by asking her why she’d asked to meet him here. Which could be a disaster if the watcher was nearby and listening.

  “Right,” she said. “I’m Kelsie McNeill. Hey. Thinking of buying the fishing rod? Up in the hills you’ll find great spots for trout. Ask my daddy; he’ll tell you where.”

  A strange expression crossed his face, and he set the rod down. “Not buying,” he said. “Just remembering.”

  “Oh.” There didn’t seem anyplace to go from there. Standing beside him, she picked up a plastic tackle box and flipped through the empty trays.

  “You could have left a number for me to call you back,” he said quietly. “A telephone conversation is much more private than pretending all this.”

  “No!” Then, realizing how intensely she’d spoken, she softened her voice. “I was afraid someone else might answer when you called.”

  Clay regarded her calmly. “That should tell me plenty – but it doesn’t. Miss McNeill, what is this about? Why are you afraid someone in your family will know we talked?”

  Aside from television, Kelsie had never known anyone to speak in the slow, drawn-out fashion of this man. She enjoyed hearing the soothing cadence of his voice.

  “It’s not that I’m afraid they’ll hear. It’s that I’m afraid for them.”

  “You have me at a loss, Miss McNeill.”

  “I need help,” she blurted. “But if I don’t keep it secret I’m asking for help, someone else might be killed.”

  He took the tackle box from her hands and set it on the shelf. She hadn’t realized she’d been snapping the lid open and closed while she spoke.

  “I still don’t understand your problem,” he said. “But if I can help, I will.”

  She began to relax. There had been no disbelief in his reaction to her comment. One of her fears had been that he might laugh at her, call her suspicions ridiculous. After all, he worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she was just a hick from a Montana ranch.

  “Someone is following me,” she said.

  “Right here? In this store?”

  She smiled. It seemed like her first smile in years. “No, at the ranch. He leaves me creepy notes.”

  “Miss McNeill, I appreciate your trust in my badge. However –”

  “Last night, he snuck into my house and watched me while I slept.” She twisted the bangs of her blonde hair. “He even took some of my hair.”

  “Miss McNeill, please don’t misunderstand me. When I said I would help if I could, I meant it. Unfortunately, the Bureau is limited by jurisdiction. I cannot involve myself in something the local authorities should handle.”

  “They can’t!” She heard the edge of hysteria in her voice and forced herself to speak calmly. “Sheriff Fowler knows my daddy. Just today, the sheriff dropped by the ranch out of the blue and had coffee with him and Michael and Lawson.”

  “Michael and Lawson?”

  “My brother and cousin.” Kelsie said. “If I went to Sheriff Fowler,” she continued, “he’d go to my daddy, and then Daddy would go crazy trying to catch this guy, and then this guy would know I had told about the letters, and he would find a way to kill my daddy.”

  “Miss McNeill –”

  “No,” she said. “You have to believe me.”

  “What I believe doesn’t matter,” he said. “This is still a local matter.”

  “But you’re looking for whoever killed Doris Samson, right? That’s what my daddy told me. And that’s why you needed to talk to her brother Johnny yesterday, right?”

  “Yes, but –”

  “Whoever visited me last night was the one who murdered Doris Samson,” Kelsie said. She didn’t want to tell him. It was too awful, feeling like she was the reason Doris Samson had been killed. She knew, though, she couldn’t do this alone. The tall, shy FBI man seemed to be her only hope, and it seemed he was slipping away. “He wrote about it in one of the notes. He said he was jealous because...” Kelsie swallowed a few times. She definitely didn’t want to talk about Nick Buffalo. But if that’s what it took to convince this FBI man, she would have to do it. “Because, well, there’s this guy I thought I liked. Nick Buffalo. But Nick Buffalo liked Doris.”

  “Nick Buffalo.”

  There, she thought, she had his attention. “Nick and I were kissing that night. Someone saw me with Nick. At least, that’s what the note says. And that someone went and killed Doris to get back at Nick and to teach me a lesson, and the note said I couldn’t tell anyone or other people would get killed, and I was thinking that since you’re in the FBI, maybe you can keep it secret and no one will know you’re helping...”

  She stared at the floor, leaving a long pause in their conversation, long enough for them to hear an entire announcement over the intercom about a blue-light special in kitchenwares.

  “Note?” Clay finally said. “I would appreciate the opportunity to read it.”

  She put her hand in her back pocket and almost pulled it out to hand him. Then she remembered that someone might be watching and resisted the impulse.

  “Where is that tackle box?” she asked. “I might buy it for my daddy’s birthday after all.”

  She smiled sweetly and reached for the tackle box he had returned to the shelf. She opened it again to inspect it. As discreetly as she could, she palmed the note with her other hand and as she closed the tackle box, slipped it inside.

  “Nope,” she said. “I don’t think this is big enough for all the tackle my daddy has.”

  She placed the box back on the shelf, maintained her sweet smile, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “It’s in there. Read it and meet me in the record department. I don’t have much time left.”

  In a louder voice, she continued. “Well, it was nice meeting you.”

  She stuck out her hand to shake his good-bye.

  “Nice seeing you, too, Miss McNeill. Take care.”

  Clay managed to hide his smile until she turned her back and walked away. Sweet kid, he thought, but she’s watched one too many spy movies. Of course, the charade was so obvious, any Russian agent would have died from the strain of trying to hold in his laughter. And that move slipping the note into the tackle box; she had telegraphed it like a Charlie Chaplin routine.

  A watcher? In her bedroom last night? It didn’t make sense. Maybe she was looking for a way to explain how a boyfriend had ended up there. If that was true, it bothered him that she had brought in Doris Samson’s death. A kid that sweet and innocent-looking, a person would hope for more from her.

  On the other hand, hearing Nick Buffalo’s name had certainly been a jolt. If the sheriff hadn’t learned Nick’s last name yet, maybe Clay could find Nick and
talk to him first.

  Clay reached for the tackle box. He opened it, unfolded the note, and began to read. He felt his half-smile freeze as he read several sentences into the note.

  If I have to pull your soul out of your body to keep you, I will make myself dy too and we will have life together beyond the flesh.

  This was a death threat.

  . . . the feather is your warning. And that is their punishment.

  Adrenaline hit Clay in a burst.

  . . . Doris died to punish him.

  Him? Nick Buffalo?

  The eagle leaves a feather when it takes its prey...

  Feather! Unless there had been a leak somewhere in the sheriff’s office, the killer was the only person outside of the investigation who would know of the feather found in Doris Samson’s mouth.

  I am your Watcher.

  This guy was for real.

  Clay refolded the note and put it in his back pocket. He wanted to run to the record section of the department store, but he managed to make it look like a stroll. He saw Kelsie McNeill standing at the far wall beneath a Beatles poster. She smiled hesitantly in his direction at his approach.

  Every once in a while, when he failed to guard against it, Clay would see a girl and wonder how his own daughter might have looked had she reached that girl’s age. Now, seeing Kelsie flipping through the records, he pictured what his daughter might have looked like in her teens. He was sure she would have been equally pretty and equally innocent, and he thought of how he’d fight for her. In that moment, a white rage against the Watcher filled Clay Garner, and he knew the fight had become personal.

  “Kelsie?”

  “You read the note?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. He thought of Flannigan and what he’d said. The monster wasn’t in its cage. “I’ll give you all the help I can.”

  10:50 p.m.

  “Fran, we can’t tell you how much this break meant for us. How can we thank you enough for baby-sitting?”

  “Pish-pash,” the old woman said. “It was no trouble at all.”