Night of the White Buffalo: A Wind River Mystery

by Coel, Margaret

  Father John didn’t say anything for a moment. He drew a long black line under the name Josh Barker. Then another line. “Josh never came to the mission.” Then he added, “As far as I know.” He had no idea who the man in the confessional had been.

  The cowboy started to get up, then settled back in, the dark shadow of a new thought playing on his face. “Some Indians took a shot at me last night. Trying to scare me off. I hear there’s been other pickups shot at around here. Those Indians don’t like outsiders like Josh or me taking jobs they think belong to them. I been thinking . . .” He nodded and stared off into space. “I was awake all night trying to put it together. The way I got it figured, those Indians scared off Josh and other cowboys. Either scared them off, or . . .” He let the rest of his thought hang in the air. “The guy they really hated was the one hiring the cowboys. I figure they’re the ones that killed Dennis Carey.”

  “You reported what happened?”

  The cowboy nodded.

  “I suggest you talk to FBI agent Ted Gianelli. He’s investigating Carey’s murder.”

  “I’m thinking I’ll have a talk with the widow. I hear she’s hiring new hands. I get on the ranch, I figure I might get a line on what happened to Josh.” He jumped to his feet and started for the corridor. The straight back, the squared shoulders said it all: One way or another he would find Josh Barker. He had no intention of talking to the FBI.

  Father John got up and went to the window. The silver pickup backed onto Circle Drive, gravel spraying behind the rear wheels. Then it shot forward. He could see the silver flashing through the cottonwoods. He was thinking about the beautiful Irish girl who had sat in his office in the same chair Reg Hartly had occupied. Nuala O’Brian, black-haired and blue-eyed, freckles sprinkled over her nose, had driven across the snow-blown plains from New Mexico looking for Jaime Madigan. He’d been raised Catholic, she had said, so it made sense that he might’ve come to the mission if he’d gotten into trouble. What kind of trouble? He had asked. She had shrugged. She didn’t know, but there was always trouble, wasn’t there? He’d told her the truth and watched the blue eyes darken in frustration and fear: He had never met Jaime Madigan. He had suggested she file a missing person report with the FBI and the tribal police. She had shaken her head, and he wondered if she had filed any reports. She had seemed so defeated—a little stoop in her shoulders—as if the mission had been her last hope. Jaime Madigan, he remembered, had also worked on the Broken Buffalo.

  He walked down the corridor and found the bishop bent toward his own laptop.

  “News is spreading.” The bishop barely glanced up. “More visitors coming. Whole area will be affected.” He was smiling at something on the screen, probably a picture of the white calf.

  Father John said he was going out for a while. The bishop nodded, still smiling, eyes glued to the screen.

  21

  HE FOUND RANCHLANDS Employment wedged between a coffee shop and an outfitter halfway down Main Street. The office and the stores shared the same flat-roof, white-brick building with the sun blinking in the plate glass windows. Riverton was crowded. A group of people stood in front of the restaurant across the street waiting for lunch. Pickups, SUVs, and cars filled the spaces at the curbs. He had to drive two blocks beyond the office, make a U-turn, and drive back before he saw another pickup pulling out. He parked the Toyota into the vacant space and switched off the CD player. The notes of “Di sprezzo degno se stesso” hung in the breeze for a half second. He headed down the sidewalk past the outfitter, with displays of saddles, bridles, blankets, wading boots, and fishing poles, and let himself through the door with the initials RE imprinted on the front like a brand. A bell jangled into a small waiting room with three plastic chairs against the window and a small table littered with used magazines. A counter bisected the room. There was no one behind the desk on the other side. The odor of coffee clung to the office.

  Father John walked over and pressed the bell on the counter. The sharp noise punctuated the cacophony of the door bell, which was still jangling. A minute passed, then another before a side door opened and Steve Mantle emerged, carrying a coffee mug. “Been expecting you,” Steve said. “Come on back and have a seat.” He motioned with his head toward the far end of the counter. “Just brewed some fresh coffee. Tempted?”

  “Never can resist the temptation.” Father John went over and lifted a section of counter. Steve had set the mug down on the desk and was gathering up magazines and papers that spilled over the seat of a wooden side chair. He dropped the stack next to the coffee mug and started back across the room. “How do you take it?” he called over one shoulder.

  “Milk or cream. Powdered is fine.”

  Steve disappeared behind the closed door. Father John could hear the quiet shuffling of a focused task. Then the man was back, carrying a mug like an offering. He handed it across the desk and sat down in a swivel chair. Father John perched on the side chair and took a sip of coffee. The hot liquid bit at his throat.

  “Been doing a little research this morning,” Steve said, rolling closer to the computer screen. “Pretty slow lately. Most ranches have all the help they need. Only one hiring is the Broken Buffalo.” He was tapping at the keys, the hunt-and-peck method, fingers moving quickly. “Here we go. Placed a couple of cowboys out on the Broken Buffalo a year ago last spring, six months or so after the Careys bought the place. Jack Imeg and Lou Cassell. I heard they left last fall. Dennis Carey showed up and said he was looking to hire a couple more hands. I had some cowboys looking for work, so I sent them over. Rejected all of them. They were good men, experienced with buffalo. So I called Dennis. ‘Don’t seem like I understand what you’re looking for,’ I told him. ‘Maybe you’d better tell me what you didn’t like about those cowboys.’ ‘Like them just fine,’ he said. That was a lie. He didn’t hire a one. Told me he had a small operation. Everybody had to get along real good. So he had to go with his gut feelings on whether the cowboys would fit in.”

  He tapped a few more keys and stared at the screen a long moment. “I interviewed all those cowboys. They’d fit in anywhere. Professionals, you know what I mean? Grew up on ranches around here, born in a saddle. Worked with horses and cattle since they were knee high to a grasshopper. Live in the outdoors, all kinds of weather. Nothing bothers them. Totally self-sufficient, those guys. A rare breed, getting rarer, you ask me, with more small ranches selling out to so-called agribusiness. Fancy name for corporations. It’s like these cowboys are left over from another time. Hell, they can live off the land their whole lives. Hunt, fish, eat wild veggies and fruits. Tan skins and sew up their own clothes and moccasins. Use buffalo sinew for the thread and buffalo bones for awls, just like the Indians used to do. They can even fight off grizzlies. Know a couple of cowboys that did just that, and lived to tell the story, too. Most of them hired out to get enough money to start their own spread. None of them was good enough for Dennis and Sheila Carey.”

  “Too independent for the Careys? Maybe they thought they wouldn’t take orders, or wouldn’t stay around.”

  “Wouldn’t stay around? You ask me, nobody stays around that place. I had a mind to tell Dennis Carey to take his business somewhere else. There’s a ranch employment agency in Casper covers the whole area. But my business is not that good.” He heaved a long sigh. “Can’t afford to drop clients even when they’re nuts. So I sent over more prospects, and they hired a couple. Jaime Madigan and Hol Hammond.”

  “Jaime Madigan?”

  “Irish lad. Red hair, freckles as thick as buffalo stew.” Steve Mantle leaned forward and squinted at the computer screen. “Came from someplace in Ireland I never heard of. Grew up roping cattle, like he was in the West. Always wanted to come here, and one day he got enough together to fly himself and his girlfriend to New Mexico. Worked a couple years on a ranch on the Pecos until the owner sold out to a corporation. You know him?”

  Father John
shook his head. He told Mantle that he had met Madigan’s fiancée last winter when she had come looking for him. He could still feel the worry, the desolation in the young woman wringing a tissue in her hands. Jaime would never leave me. She had finally returned to New Mexico, he supposed.

  “Jaime left the ranch in February,” Mantle said. He had been missing a month, Father John was thinking, when Nuala O’Brian had come to the mission. “Both of them, Jaime and Hol, collected their pay, packed up their gear, and took off. Told Carey they had a line on work in Idaho. He asked me to send over some prospects. We went through the same dance for a couple weeks. Nobody quite what they were looking for. Nobody that would fit into that ranch of theirs.”

  Steve tapped another couple of keys and blinked at the screen. “Finally hired on Josh Barker and Rick Tomlin.” He looked up. “You ask me, that was a mistake, with all their careful interviewing. Tomlin was a troublemaker. In the bars whenever he got time off, or took the time. Maybe you read about him in the Gazette. Got in a fight at a bar in Riverton last June. Accused some Arapaho of assaulting him. Case was supposed to go to trial a couple days ago, but Tomlin never showed up.” He was shaking his head. “He was one cowboy that didn’t fit the mold. I wouldn’t call it professional to accuse somebody of assault, make yourself the star witness, and not show up. Can’t recall the Arapaho’s name.”

  “Arnie Walksfast.”

  “You know him?”

  Father John nodded. He was thinking that he’d known Arnie since he was a kid. Came out for the Eagles a couple of seasons. A good fielder, and the best hitter on the team. The next season, he didn’t show up. Father John had gone over to the small house with blue paint peeling off the sideboards and a musty odor of old things inside. Arnie’s mother had raised him alone. Father John wasn’t sure about the boy’s father. He had never heard the man mentioned. Arnie was getting hard to handle, he remembered the woman saying, running with the wrong bunch. She had been crying, and trying hard not to cry, sinking deeper and deeper into an overstuffed chair, as if it could have swallowed her. He had told her he’d be glad to talk to Arnie, and she had said she would ask him to stop by the mission. She couldn’t tell him to go. Order him to go. Warriors don’t take orders, she’d said. Arnie had never shown up, and Father John had gone back to the house two or three times. Just Arnie’s mother, sinking into the chair, desolation clinging to her like smoke.

  Arnie had been in and out of trouble ever since. Father John had gotten used to seeing his name in the newspaper, or hearing the news on the moccasin telegraph. It was Vicky who fought to keep him out of jail. From the rumor he’d heard, Vicky had managed to have the assault charges reduced in a plea deal that sent Arnie off for another round of rehab.

  Still, it was strange that the cowboy who’d accused Arnie of assault had failed to show up.

  “What happened to Rick Tomlin and the other cowboy?”

  “Same as the others. Packed their gear . . .”

  Father John put up a hand. A pattern was emerging; always a pattern, if you could detect it. Beneath the obvious lay the logic. “All the cowboys white?”

  “Yeah. Dennis never came right out and said he wouldn’t hire Indians. The guy was savvy. Didn’t want to bring any federal busybodies down on him for discrimination, but I got the message. Didn’t trust them, even though I placed lots of Indians that turned out to be steady, hard workers. Nobody can manage horses like Arapahos, I told him. He was sitting in your chair. He just shrugged. He said, ‘You know the kind we like.’”

  The pattern surfaced like a bunch of dots that formed a picture after you’ve stared at them long enough. But something else caught Father John’s attention. “Two cowboys were from Colorado. What about the others?”

  Steve went back to tapping keys and blinking at the screen. “Colorado, New Mexico, Utah.”

  “Nobody from around here.” Another pattern, the picture dark and steady now. “Why do you think the Careys only hired outsiders?”

  Steve Mantle shrugged. He pushed back from the computer and stared off into space, as if he might find the answer. “I told you, Carey was nuts. Don’t repeat that, please. I don’t want word getting out I’m bad-mouthing clients. What am I saying? You’re a priest. Used to keeping secrets, huh?”

  Father John took a moment. There was still something else, flitting past like a whisper. He tried to listen hard, but the whisper drifted away. Finally he put on his cowboy hat and was about to thank the man and get to his feet when he grasped the rest of the pattern. “Looks like the Careys hired cowboys two at a time. And they both left at the same time. Is that right?”

  Steve Mantle sat quietly. “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly?”

  “Sent four or five applicants to the ranch in June after the last cowboys left. Dennis hired two, like usual. Carlos Mondregan and Lane Preston. They’re still there. Been sending cowboys over the last few days since that white buffalo calf was born. So far Dennis . . .” He paused and drew in a deep breath. “Sheila’s had to take over, and she’s hired five. Still looking, from what I hear, but the word’s out now. Cowboys are going to show up at the ranch on their own. Don’t need the help of old Steve Mantle.”

  Father John didn’t say anything for a moment. At least for now, the pattern was broken.

  And yet, it had only been broken in the last couple of days. “According to my count,” he said, “you placed six cowboys on the ranch in the last year and a half. Dennis hired them in pairs. They quit in pairs. Is that usual?”

  “Coincidence.” Steve lifted his shoulders, then let them fall. “Cowboys ride the range, bunk together, eat together. They get to talking. One plants an idea in the other’s mind. Heard of a good opportunity in Idaho or Montana. Always rumors on the cowboy circuit, so they decide to take off together.”

  “You see the same thing on other ranches?”

  Steve was quiet a moment, staring down at the keyboard. Finally he looked up. “Broken Buffalo’s the only place I ever seen it.”

  22

  THE BROWN PICKUP parked in front of the administration building didn’t look familiar. Father John drove around Circle Drive, his eyes on the pickup. A long dent—a slash—along the driver’s side. Splotches of primer paint here and there. Frame sinking on bald tires. The pickup might belong to any number of people on the rez.

  He pulled in next to it. As he got out, he saw an Indian emerge from the shadows in the alley between the administration building and the church. Shuffling, bent partway forward, as if an invisible rope were pulling him along. He glanced up past the brim of a brown cowboy hat. “Got a minute, Father?” he called.

  “Of course.” Father John knew the man. Lewis White Feather, in his fifties with the look of a man thirty years older, placing one boot after the other on the gravel as if the earth might shift beneath him. He had the grooved, weatherworn features and the sallow, yellowish complexion of a man who had divided his time between the outdoors and the bars. Father John could smell the whiskey from ten feet away.

  “Been waiting for you.” Lewis drew up next to him. He was making an effort—oh, Father John recognized the effort—to appear steady and in control when everything was spinning out of control. “You heard about the calf?”

  “I have.”

  “She’s a miracle from the Creator. Don’t matter how bad things get, the Creator is still with us. Still cares about what happens to the people. I went out to the ranch this morning. Had to wait a couple hours with a bunch of other Indians for some white cowboy to escort us out to the pasture. ‘Escort.’ That’s what they call it. Hurried us along after we got out there, but I left my gift of tobacco. Tied a medicine bag to the fence. There was lots of gifts going up on the fence. Folks paying respect and leaving signs of thanksgiving. You know what a white buffalo calf means?”

  “Hope.”

  The Indian grinned and nodded. “We got hope. We
can do better. Spirit come to let us know we aren’t alone. The Creator is with us. We forget that lots of times. I came here to take the pledge.”

  “Where would you like to take it?” Father John tried for a smile of encouragement. He had given the pledge to many Arapahos. An oath, taken on the Bible, not to drink alcohol for a month or two months or longer, if the man—or the woman; he had pledged many women—thought they could do it. Lewis had taken the pledge two or three times before. He had managed to stay sober afterward. Until the end of the pledge period.

  “I went out by the Little Wind River while I was waiting. I can feel the spirits of the ancestors there.”

  “Hold on a minute.” Father John took the steps in front of the administration building two at a time and let himself inside. Bishop Harry’s voice floated down the corridor. The phone had probably been ringing since he’d left with people wanting to talk about the calf. Whenever there was what he thought of as a touchstone, a junction between Indian beliefs and Christianity, the phone started ringing. People dropped by. What do we think about this? He had asked himself the same question. Even the bishop, he knew, had asked the question. Sometimes there was no knowing, no explaining. Only accepting that the Creator worked in mysterious ways.

  He took his Bible from the shelf behind his desk, found his stole in the drawer, and hung it around his neck. Outside, Lewis was staring down the alley toward the trees that fringed the river. He fell in beside the man, trying to keep to Lewis’s slow, deliberate pace. Past Eagle Hall, past the guesthouse, where Lewis had stayed a couple of years ago after his wife, Marty, had thrown him out. Set his moccasins at the front door, was how Lewis had explained it.