Night of the White Buffalo: A Wind River Mystery

by Coel, Margaret

  “Are you Debbie?”

  “You still in?” He nodded, set a chip in the center, and she dealt out the cards. Not much different from the last hand. He watched Debbie pull the chips toward her and place the cards in the discard pile.

  “I’d like to talk to you,” he said.

  “We aren’t allowed to fraternize.” The mask didn’t crack, but—maybe he imagined it—a flicker of light in the dark eyes.

  “I’m looking for a friend who’s gone missing. Josh Barker? He liked twenty-one.”

  “Gone missing?” Her hands stopped moving. “Look, you want to play or not?”

  Reg set the remaining two chips into the middle. She dealt the cards. He looked down at the eight of spades and the two of diamonds. She had given herself another jack. With her luck, the face-down card would be an ace.

  He brushed his own cards, and she dealt him a jack. Then she flipped over her other card. A two of clubs. It was his turn to collect the chips. “You know Josh?”

  “Maybe.” She put the played cards into the discard pile. “I deal. I don’t talk.”

  “You take a break?”

  “Fifteen minutes.” She gave a little nod toward the sliding glass doors. “Out front so I can smoke.”

  Reg walked back through the casino wondering which other dealers might know Josh. Debbie was his best bet. He had seen the flare of interest in her eyes. The officer, still at the door, followed him outdoors. “You need to park in the lot.”

  “I’ll be out of here in a few more minutes.” Reg could see the struggle going on behind the fleshy jowls and the paper-thin lips. Cowboy shot at tonight. Poor guy could have been dead.

  “Make it fast.” The officer shifted his massive body around and went back through the sliding doors.

  It seemed longer than fifteen minutes, at least twenty or twenty-five, but here was Debbie walking across the sidewalk. He liked the way she carried herself, like a prize filly who knew she was a prize. She was shaking a cigarette out of a package. Then she fumbled with a lighter. He reached over, took the lighter from her, and watched her bend toward the little flame. She stood up straight and took a deep draw. He handed her lighter back. She slipped it and the cigarettes into the front pocket of her slacks. They made a little rectangular outline against her thigh.

  “Where you from?”

  “Colorado. We grew up together, Josh and me. I drove up here to find him. His mother’s dying.”

  “Why don’t we start by you telling me about Josh. Is that the kind of guy he is? Just takes off and leaves. Goes missing, AWOL, the minute he thinks somebody’s getting too close? Gonna make demands?”

  Bingo, Reg was thinking. Debbie not only knew Josh, she’d been in a relationship with him. “No,” he told her. “Josh is not like that. What happened?”

  “That’s just it,” she said, blue-gray smoke coming out of her nostrils. “Nothing happened. I mean, aside from the fact that I fell for the guy, and I told him so. Poof!” She waved away a cloud of smoke. “He disappeared. I figure he took off ’cause, you know, he didn’t want to be with me.”

  “I doubt that’s the case.”

  “Arapaho girlfriend?”

  “You know what I think?” He hesitated, then plunged on. “I think he’d been looking for you for a long time.”

  Debbie gazed at the cigarette burning down between her fingers, then looked away, fighting for control.

  “You meet here?”

  She nodded, seemingly grateful to move to solid ground. “He was good at twenty-one. Won most of the time. I worried the pit boss might get suspicious, but it was legit. I need this job. I’m not throwing any games, not even for Josh. Maybe I knew . . .” She stopped and considered, watching smoke trail upward. “He’d be gone, and all I’d have was my job, so I better take care of it.”

  “Where was he working?”

  “Broken Buffalo. Where else? God, did he love buffalo. Didn’t love that ranch, though. They worked the hands like slaves. Paid them a little on what was owed them. Always promising to pay the rest soon as they had a sale. They never seemed to have a big enough sale. You ask me, that place was barely hanging on. Josh thought so, too. He got away when he could, and I tried to set my work schedule around times he might get off for a few hours. We usually met at my place. Little house my grandfather left me on the rez. I try to keep it from falling down around me.” Tears were running down her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. She nodded a thanks. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Saturday night, end of June. He told me he was going to quit the ranch, soon’s he collected his back pay. He said he’d get hired on someplace else. There’s an agency in Riverton that lines up cowboys with jobs. He was going to talk to them. He never said he was leaving. He never told me good-bye.”

  “I talked to a cowboy out there today. He said Josh never worked there.”

  Debbie let the cigarette butt drop out of her hands. She ground it with a heel until it was a brown smudge on the pavement. Then she looked at him out of wide, uncomprehending eyes. “That’s crazy. Josh worked hard for those bastards.” She jerked her head sideways and looked away, as if a thought had struck her unexpectedly. “You don’t think . . . ?” she began.

  “Josh didn’t kill the owner.”

  “No.” She let out a long sigh. “He could never kill anyone. But I wasn’t surprised when I heard Dennis Carey got shot on the highway. We have a crazy shooter on the rez.”

  Reg was quiet. He decided not to tell her that he’d been shot at tonight.

  She turned toward him, and said, “I hear Carey got shot up close. Like he knew the killer, even pulled over for him. Wouldn’t surprise me if one of those cowboys finally killed him. Wouldn’t surprise me at all.” She lifted her lovely chin and stared up at Reg. He was thinking that Josh would never have walked away from this girl. “Where do you think he went?”

  “He might have gone looking for another job. Montana. Idaho.”

  “Only place he wanted to go was home. Colorado. He talked about it all the time. He was going back to the family ranch, talk to his dad about raising buffalo. He said I’d like it there.” She was crying full out now, dropping her face into her hands, shoulders shaking.

  Reg drew her to him. He could feel the softness of her, the love for his buddy deep inside her. “I’m gonna find him,” he said.

  * * *

  ADAM WAS USUALLY quiet, Vicky thought. He never liked to talk about his trips—even a short trip to Denver—as if he would have to relive the experience by talking about it, and living it once had been enough.

  Tonight he had hardly stopped talking, but not about the trip. He had heard about the white buffalo calf before he came by her office to pick her up for dinner, and it had set him off. He was like a bronco that couldn’t stop bucking in the chute. She had finished her spaghetti in the casino restaurant, and he had eaten only half of his. The restaurant was full. She could feel people at the adjacent tables glancing over, as if Adam were an actor delivering a monologue.

  “A white buffalo calf on the rez!” He must have said it a dozen times. Pine Ridge, Rosebud, those reservations he could understand. The Creator had sent white buffalo woman to his people. Why would the calf, a sacred symbol of the Creator, come to another reservation?

  Vicky waited until he took a breath, then she said, “White Buffalo Woman came to all the nations.” She had grown up with the stories. All the relatives, seated around Grandfather, listening to stories of the ancestors. No matter how bad the times, or how poor they had been, the Creator never forgot his people. White Buffalo Woman had appeared to the Lakota so that all the nations would know and remember. She had promised to send the multitudes of buffalo. She had promised to return in the hard times.

  Adam had talked on about listening to the same stories. Sitting around the fire in his grandfather’s t
ipi out in back of the house the government had built. The old man, Adam said, had preferred to live in a tipi. She had laughed at the memory it stirred. Her grandfather said that his father had been the same. A lot of the old Indians didn’t want to give up the old ways when they came to the reservations. He didn’t want to live in a wood box. She could hear her grandfather’s voice; it made her feel like a child again. He kept the ponies in the house. They liked it there.

  “Tell me about the calf.” Adam twirled the spaghetti and took another bite. He chewed slowly, thoughtfully, his eyes on her.

  “Larger than a lamb, although it looks very small and . . .” She wanted to say vulnerable, but she heard herself say: “Holy. The rest of the herd kept its distance. Even the buffalo must know.”

  Adam smiled, then took another forkful of spaghetti. “I wouldn’t want to be around if the herd thought anybody meant to harm her. Let’s go together tomorrow to see her.”

  “People are already coming.” She glanced at the tables around them. “Most of the people here will probably be at the ranch tomorrow. Of course we can go,” she added, seeing the shade of disappointment moving across his face. The traveling around the country, the meetings in corporate offices of oil and gas companies, the fancy suits and expensive ties—all of these things had bothered her, she realized, raised questions she couldn’t answer. Who was he? Always some part of Adam that seemed blocked off, reserved for the world he moved in, a world that revolved around oil and gas and water and timber on reservations, and had nothing to do with her world of DUIs and wills and adoptions and keeping some scared Arapaho out of jail.

  But here was someone different. Here was the Adam Lone Eagle she had been trying to find, the Lakota with memories of the old stories and ceremonies, the descendant of warriors and chiefs, stunned, shocked, excited about the miracle of a white buffalo calf. He hadn’t forgotten who he was; she was the one who hadn’t understood that.

  They lingered over cups of coffee, both reluctant, Vicky realized, to break the quiet sense of having landed somehow on the same ground. She was aware of the crowd waiting at the hostess desk, and so was Adam, because he caught her eye and motioned that they should be going.

  Vicky saw the cowboy as she and Adam stepped past the sliding glass doors. Tall and thin in a ropy, muscular way, with a tan cowboy hat, walking around the front of the silver truck she had seen parked out at the Broken Buffalo. She hurried across the sidewalk. “Excuse me?”

  The cowboy jerked his head in her direction, then came back around the truck. Vicky was conscious of Adam moving in beside her. “Reg? You’re looking for your friend from Colorado. We talked earlier today out at the buffalo ranch. Any luck?”

  The cowboy nodded slowly, as if he had finally placed her. “The Indian lawyer lady,” he said. “I’ve found some people who said my buddy Josh worked on the Broken Buffalo. No doubt about it.”

  “You should report him missing.” That made two cowboys missing, she was thinking. One named Josh, the other Rick Tomlin. “Both the BIA police and the FBI.”

  He was still nodding. “I’m going to the ranch tomorrow and have a talk with the owner lady.”

  “Listen, Reg. I told Sheila Carey you wanted to talk to her about Josh. She said that if you showed up, she’d have you thrown off the ranch.”

  “Thrown off the ranch?” He gave a loud guffaw. “Well, now I know I gotta go see what that lady’s all about.”

  * * *

  “WHAT WAS THAT all about?” Adam kept one hand on the steering wheel and stared into the shaft of the headlights ahead on Highway 789. Traffic seemed lighter than when they had driven over to the casino. Still, more vehicles than usual. The TV had been reporting the news of the white buffalo calf since late this afternoon. The news was going viral.

  “The cowboy’s here looking for his buddy, Josh Barker, who according to some guy at the Broken Buffalo Ranch, never worked there. Another cowboy, Rick Tomlin, the main witness against my client, has also disappeared.”

  “Cowboys drift on the wind. Maybe whoever said Josh hadn’t worked there just didn’t know him.” He glanced over at her. Pinpricks of light from the dashboard jumped in his eyes. “You should be grateful the witness took off before the trial.”

  20

  ELENA LOOKED DRESSED up for Easter. A flowery blue dress cinched at her waist and a little pink scarf tied over her head. She wore the usual black sturdy-looking shoes with ties that flopped about as she came into the office.

  “Everything okay?” Father John stood up. The old woman seldom walked over to the administration building. The residence was her domain. She had on shoes for walking a hard-dirt path on a ranch.

  “Dinner’s in the slow cooker. Ready whenever you and Bishop Harry want to eat, in case I don’t get back.”

  “There will probably be a huge crowd.”

  “I don’t mind standing in line. It’s a small sacrifice.” She tilted her head toward the window and the white pickup on Circle Drive, exhaust shooting from the rear pipes. “My grandson, Jeff, is taking me. The sacred calf blessed us.” She hesitated, and when he didn’t say anything, she went on: “Jeff never showed any interest in the old stories and the old ways. Basketball and video games, that’s all he thinks about. Who cares about the ancestors? They’re dead.” She shook her head, drawing in her lower lip. He could see her blinking back the tears. “He saw the calf on TV last night, and everything changed. Wanted to know the old story of White Buffalo Woman, how she changed into a buffalo and promised she would return when we needed her. Now she is with us again, a holy spirit from the Creator Himself in that little white calf. Well, Jeff kept me up most the night, wanting to know more and more. I told him what I remembered my grandfather telling me. I don’t mind saying, I thought my heart was gonna burst with happiness.”

  Father John smiled. “I’m glad to hear it.” He had been on the reservation for ten years now. He had seen a number of young men like Jeff turn away, wanting to be modern, wanting to be like everybody else. But he had watched many of them turn back and stay strong.

  “It’s okay? My taking time off?”

  He nodded, still smiling. It wasn’t necessary to say anything. They both knew that Elena pretty much ran things.

  Father John waited until the old woman’s footsteps receded in the corridor and the heavy front door banged shut before he sat back down at the laptop open on his desk. It had surprised him how quickly the news out of the Casper TV station had burst across the internet. Dozens of newspapers, radio shows, TV news shows had featured the white buffalo calf. Dozens of blogs posted on the significance of the calf. He read through several. All filled with wonder. So much longing, he thought, for something holy in the world.

  He shut down the laptop, waiting while it cycled silently through different phases before the screen went dark. A four-year-old laptop, practically an antique, but he was attached to it. Familiar with its ways. He was about to start down the corridor to tell the bishop he was going out for a while when he heard the thrum of an engine coming around Circle Drive. He walked over to the window and watched a silver pickup bump to a stop in front of the administration building. A tall cowboy in a tan hat jumped out of the driver’s seat. He had the slump-shouldered, bowlegged look of a rodeo rider. His boots scraped on the concrete steps.

  Father John went out into the corridor and motioned the cowboy inside. “How can I help you?” he said.

  “Looking for the priest around here.”

  “You found him. Father John O’Malley.” He could feel the cowboy’s gaze taking in his red plaid shirt and blue jeans, his cowboy boots.

  “You got a minute?”

  Father John ushered the cowboy into his office. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward a side chair. It wasn’t often cowboys wandered into the mission and wanted to talk, but from time to time they wandered in. Working on a ranch a hundred miles from anything that resemb
led a town, lonely, something gone wrong in their lives, and they found their way to the kind of place they remembered from when they were kids, a timeless, steady place, like a church or a mission. “Where you from?”

  “Colorado Plateau. Name is Reg Hartly.” Father John shook the man’s hand. He could feel the tension beneath the rough, calloused palm.

  “How can I help you?” Father John walked over and sat on the edge of the desk.

  “I got a buddy that’s gone missing. Came up here and hired on the Broken Buffalo last April. Left in late June. Nobody’s heard from him since. Not his girlfriend, not his folks. His Mom’s dying, so I came to find him. Josh Barker. I was hoping you might’ve run into him.”

  “What makes you think he came to the mission?”

  “I heard he got crossways with the owner. Figured if there was some trouble, he might’ve come looking for advice. His folks are Catholic, and Josh got brought up that way.”

  Father John stood up, went around the desk, and sat down. The old leather chair creaked under his weight. I committed murder. The voice from the confessional had never left his mind. In the middle of the night, driving across the rez, opera blaring, walking down the path to the residence, the voice trailing him: I committed murder.

  He pulled over a pad and wrote Josh Barker on the top. Below the name, he wrote: Broken Buffalo. April–late June. There were no murders on the rez in June, nothing reported in the news, no bodies found. Dennis Carey wasn’t shot until last week, long after Josh Barker had left. And yet, Sheila Carey had convinced herself one of the cowboys who had worked on the ranch had killed her husband. If Josh Barker was the man in the confessional, what had he done?

  “What kind of trouble do you think your friend was in?”

  The cowboy shrugged. “Didn’t get on with the owner. From what I hear, nobody did. Cheated on the hired hands, paid late and then only part of what was owed. Always promising to settle up. Look.” The cowboy held up one hand. “I know somebody shot the SOB. Wasn’t Josh. He had too much going for him. Someday he was gonna take over the family ranch on the Plateau and build it up. He had plans, Josh, and he wasn’t stupid. No way would he throw away his life over some cheating rancher. I figure he would’ve lit out of here, if he was able.”