by Draker, Paul
That was the sanitized version, anyway—I was leaving out a lot. Unlike my MIT classmates, nearly all of whom were prep-school valedictorians with fat scholarships, I was a dirt-poor ’08er who had to cover the forty-thousand-a-year tuition on my own. But nobody here needed to hear about how I had managed that.
Cassie took a small bite of food. Watching the delicate way her mouth moved, I found myself wondering what it would be like to kiss her. But I had no business thinking anything like that. No business at all. I shoved the thought away and looked back at James.
“I’m curious about something, too,” I said. “I checked the news and didn’t see a single word on any site about McNulty’s murder.” I suddenly remembered my manners and looked at Christina in apology. “I’m sorry. That’s not really an appropriate topic for dinner conversation.”
“It’s okay, Trevor.” She smiled warmly at me. “My husband’s the tribal chairman, so just about anything’s fair game at our table. We’re sorry to hear about your loss.”
James nodded. “But we don’t see any reason to turn our reservation into a media spectacle over it, and neither does the Navy or anyone in law enforcement. At least, not until the killer is found.”
I thought about that a bit. It seemed surprising that the news media could be kept at bay this way. But then, an Indian reservation was a unique kind of place—and a closed military base located on a reservation, doubly so. Access could readily be denied, especially if federal and local law enforcement agencies were cooperating with the tribe and the Navy to enforce a news blackout.
We were operating in a gray area, with rules I didn’t completely understand.
“So how does that work?” I asked. “Is the Pyramid Lake reservation technically even part of the State of Nevada? Or not?”
“Geographically we are, but legally we’re not,” James said. “Tribal sovereignty is protected by federal law. That means we’re very much a separate nation here, Trevor, with an inherent right to self-government. Our treaties are with Congress and the federal government, not the State of Nevada. We do maintain a great relationship with state authorities, but they have to play by our rules when we let them on our land. For example, the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department is here, working alongside the tribe, but only because we’ve asked them to help since we lack the manpower and experience to deal with a crime like this on our own.”
“So the reservation is like a foreign country, but inside U.S. borders,” I said.
“More or less. We have our own tribal courts, our own police. We enact our own criminal and civil laws, which are often completely different from the laws of the surrounding state. Hence the proliferation of Indian casinos. Although, for our tribe, with Reno only thirty miles away, gaming doesn’t bring too much to the table.” He grinned. “Pun intended, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “But I’m still not clear on how much autonomy you actually have here.”
“Well, we and we alone determine who is officially enrolled in our tribe and who isn’t; who is allowed to enter reservation land and who isn’t. But ‘autonomy’ is the wrong word to describe us. In addition to being members of our tribes, we Indians are all United States citizens, too, Trevor. And we’ve served our country with pride and distinction.”
He nodded toward Billy. “We’ve fought alongside our European-ancestry counterparts in every war—even the Civil War, on both sides. We’re patriotic Americans. And we’ve paid a very high price for the special relationship we have with the federal government and for our exemptions from state law: we’ve effectively ceded most of our ancestral lands to the United States.”
“But as you say, the reservation isn’t exempt from U.S. law,” I said. “Murder in Indian Country is a federal crime.”
James Barry nodded. “The FBI has an ‘Indian Country’ task force dedicated to protecting tribal communities.”
“So where does Homeland Security fit into the picture?”
“New kid on the block,” James said. “Trying to carve out more of a role for themselves, even where none exists—they feel obliged to stick their nose in.”
“And get it caught in a door.” Cassie laughed her musical laugh. “Speaking of which, Trevor, what did you say to Bennett to get him so bent out of shape?”
I hid a grin. “Pretty much what your uncle just said. Only I put it a little less diplomatically.”
I took another bite of the fish, which was really good, although I preferred the rabbit. I didn’t buy the glib explanation James had given for Bennett’s presence, not at all. It didn’t explain fourteen trips in six months, or his arrival the night before McNulty’s murder.
“So who do you guys think really killed McNulty?” I asked.
“No idea,” James said. “It’s a strange one—ritualistic, almost.”
I nodded. “Does the way he was killed match any of your people’s old legends or stories?”
He shook his head. “No, but it matches one of your people’s.”
I raised an eyebrow at that.
“The simoniac,” he said. “From Dante Aligheri’s Inferno.”
“My people? Dante? Do I look Italian to you?”
James laughed. “Okay, I apologize for the generalization. That was rude of me. But technically, Dante was Florentine, not Italian.”
Still, now that I thought of it, Dante was exactly what McNulty’s body, stuffed headfirst in the geyser, had reminded me of. I could almost picture the medieval woodcut image now—a half-remembered illustration I’d seen somewhere, depicting a scene from Dante’s Inferno. I’d have to Google it later.
“So in Dante’s version of hell, I guess simoniacs get buried head-down in a burning pit, with their feet sticking out.” I frowned. “But what is a simoniac, anyway?”
“Someone guilty of the sin of simony,” Cassie said. “The conferral, transfer, or resignation of ecclesiastical offices for worldly gain. Like accepting money to ordain someone new into the priesthood, or taking money to let someone out of the priesthood—both of which, apparently, were common practices back in Dante’s day.”
“I have an excuse for being the least educated person in the room,” I said. “Undergrads at MIT chose our nontechnical electives by how little effort we would need to actually spend on them.”
But I was thinking through the implications of what Cassie had said, and not liking where that line of logic was leading me.
Time to change the subject.
“Izabui,” I said, and Cassie stiffened. Stifling a grin, I pretended not to notice. “Coyote the Trickster—what can you tell me about him, James?”
Glancing at Cassie, James cleared his throat. “The Trickster is common to almost all Native American belief systems. But different tribes characterize him differently. He doesn’t necessarily correspond to the Christian concept of the devil at all. Christina, how would you describe Coyote?”
Cassie’s aunt paused to consider the question for a moment. “Well, he’s a powerful deity—brother to Esa the Wolf, creator of the world,” she said. “But Coyote’s a mischief maker, a socially inappropriate character who uses his powers irresponsibly, often causing great trouble for everyone—himself included. He’s prideful, cunning, and a consummate liar, but he’s not really evil. He has a noble aspect to him as well, and his actions often benefit mankind either directly or indirectly. Most of the Paiute stories about Coyote end with him either narrowly avoiding death, or getting himself killed and then returning to life. The mortals around him usually don’t end up that lucky, however.”
She looked at Cassie’s brother. “You have something to add, Billy?”
Billy crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “We Paiute have a lot of stories about the Trickster, it’s true. But we’re also thoroughly modern folk, and sometimes a coyote is just a coyote. When I find one sniffing around our backyard or getting too close to one of our chickens…” He winked at me. “I shoot it.”
CHAPTER 37
After dinner,
Cassie stood at the kitchen sink and washed dishes. I picked up a towel. She looked at me in surprise when I took a dish from her to dry, but then she relaxed and we fell into a wordless rhythm.
“I have to admit, when you promised to behave I didn’t really believe you,” she said afterward, drying her hands. “You’re full of surprises.”
Through the doorway into the family room, I could see James sitting in an easy chair next to a sideboard displaying colorfully beaded wicker baskets. He was wearing rimless half-glasses and answering e-mails on an iPad. Christina sat on the couch with her knees tucked under her, a glass of wine in one hand and a pen in the other, circling things in a cooking magazine. Billy knelt in front of the fireplace, laying a fire.
“I like your family,” I said to Cassie. “It must have been tough to leave.”
She gave me a penetrating look, and then slid her cool, long fingers into mine and tugged me toward the hallway. “Come here,” she said. “I have something I want to show you. Maybe it’ll make more sense to you then.”
Old sepia-toned photographs, framed in dark wood and matted with white, hung against the sage-colored wall. The oldest clearly dated back well over a century. I saw somber native faces: groups in formal seated poses or men and women standing alone, wearing heavy-looking suit coats or traditional beaded, fringed buckskin attire. Nobody was smiling in any of the pictures. Judging from the condition of the photos and styles of non-Native clothing, they seemed to be organized in roughly chronological order.
Cassie stopped in front of the oldest image, which wasn’t a photo at all, but a small relief carving in wood under the frame’s glass.
“Chief Truckee—Old Wuna Mucca, or One Moccasin,” she said. “My great-five-times maternal grandfather. According to Paiute legend, Esa the Wolf created mankind as two brothers and two sisters—a dark pair and a light pair—but they couldn’t get along. As punishment for their constant fighting, he separated them, banishing the lighter siblings and sending them away across the ocean. So when Chief Truckee laid eyes on the first white explorers—”
“My ancestors the Florentines, no doubt.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Try to be serious, Trevor. I’m talking Lewis and Clark here. Chief Truckee embraced them with open arms, believing his long-lost white brothers had finally returned from across the sea. Later, he befriended General John Frémont, the military governor of California and future U.S. senator, and fought alongside him in the Mexican-American War. Old Chief Truckee stayed friendly toward whites all his life, even after an ill-prepared expedition of westbound settlers passed by Pyramid Lake in the fall of 1846 and not only stole most of the tribe’s winter food supply but also burned the rest for some bizarre reason. Without that food, a lot of our people starved that year. But the settlers of that ill-fated expedition ended up doing even worse damage to themselves. They got snowbound in a mountain pass for the entire winter, and half of the eighty-seven people died. The rumors about the survivors—and what they had done to survive—were worse…”
“Cannibalism,” I said. “You’re talking about the Donner party.”
She nodded. “Indians never ate each other. My people were horrified by what they heard. Stories spread that all white people ate human flesh, that they liked eating Indian children the most. Despite Chief Truckee’s best efforts, mistrust took root, and his son-in-law…”—she moved on to the next photograph—”…Poito, who succeeded Truckee to become Chief Winnemucca, generally held a dimmer view of his white neighbors’ intentions. He was a war chief more often than not.”
I inspected the picture. Even in his double-breasted, large-buttoned greatcoat, Chief Winnemucca looked like a hard-ass. There was a grim, iron-jawed majesty in the set of his impassive features.
“He looks tough,” I said.
“He was tough. Winnemucca was always in favor of war with the whites, and in 1860 he got his wish. The Pyramid Lake wars were the last, bloodiest large-scale battles between Indians and whites in Nevada Territory.”
“What set it off?” I asked.
“The usual thing. Some men from Williams Station, a nearby stop on the Pony Express, kidnapped two twelve-year-old Paiute girls who were out digging roots. They kept them tied up in the station cellar for days, raping them, until their father found out where they were. Winnemucca’s son Natchez accompanied the father on a war party to free the girls. They killed five whites.”
I couldn’t help but picture Amy, hurt and terrified, and myself in that father’s shoes. My jaw clenched with anger.
“I’m surprised they stopped at five,” I said. “I would have kept going, scorched the whole fucking state clean.”
Cassie glanced sideways at me and slid her hand free from mine.
“It’s not so simple as that,” she said. “These things never are.”
I took a breath, staring at the pictures. “Sounds simple enough to me.”
“You think so? To punish the Paiute for the raid, a militia of a hundred men, under the command of a Major William Ormsby. rode to Pyramid Lake. But the Paiute knew that war was inevitable, so they were prepared. Chief Winnemucca, along with his son Natchez and his nephew Numaga, led a group of warriors who lured the hundred vigilantes into an ambush in a narrow pass, killing eighty of them and wounding the rest before they fled.”
The framed photo of Numaga was in traditional attire: furs and bead-fringed fabric. He held a bow and a single arrow, with more in a quiver slung across his back. He looked just as imposing as his uncle, but more contemplative, almost melancholy.
“Ormsby took an arrow through the face in the fighting,” Cassie said. “Natchez Winnemucca tried to save his life, telling him to pretend to fall while he fired another arrow over Ormsby’s head. But it was too late; the first arrow had been poisoned, and Ormsby died anyway. The Paiute left the mutilated bodies of the white vigilantes and their horses lying scattered about—a horrifying display that the militia’s reinforcements stumbled across the next day.”
“But why would Natchez try to save Ormsby, an enemy coming to kill his people?” I asked.
“Like I said, it’s complicated. At the time, Natchez’s sister—Chief Winnemucca’s sixteen-year-old daughter—lived in Carson City with the Ormsbys. Her grandfather, Chief Truckee, had encouraged her to do it so she could learn English, and for years the Ormsby family had treated her just like their very own daughter.”
I didn’t say anything, but I was starting to understand what Cassie meant about things not being so simple. She eased us farther along the wall, and stopped in front of a picture of a regal woman in a tasseled native outfit.
“That sixteen-year-old girl, Natchez’s sister, was my great-great-great grandmother Sarah Winnemucca. She watched volunteers from three states accompany the U.S. Army to take revenge on her tribe and her family, slaughtering, breaking, and scattering her people. Five years later, Army troops came across more of her relatives in a camp of old men, women, and children, including her father, Chief Winnemucca’s, other daughter and his infant son. They killed them all, throwing his baby son into the fire.”
“That’s fucked up,” I said.
“Many Paiutes saw Sarah as a collaborator with the Army and an apologist for the whites. Each of her three marriages—all to white men—ended in heartbreak and divorce. But she didn’t let any of it embitter her. She assumed the leadership of the Northern Paiute people and worked tirelessly for Indian rights, even traveling to Washington, D.C., and meeting with President Hayes to petition for reform of the corrupt agency system. She was the first Native American woman to publish a book in English.”
Cassie smiled. “Sarah’s real passion was always education. She felt it was the only way to truly improve things for our people in the long term. She opened a school for Indian children, to try to preserve our culture while giving them the literacy and skills they needed to succeed in the new world they found themselves in. With no government support or funding, her school didn’t stay open long, but she never sto
pped trying.”
“She seems like an amazing person,” I said.
Cassie nodded, and pain crossed her face. “I think about all this, and I can’t breathe sometimes, like it’s a weight on my chest. Like everyone expects me to live up to it somehow.” She gazed at Sarah’s picture again, then shook herself and looked away. “She casts a long shadow, Trevor. Maybe I just needed to get out from under it for a while.”
I followed Cassie down the hallway, past more contemporary photographs, but she didn’t pause until she reached the end, near the doorway that led into the family room. Then she suddenly turned and leaned her back against the wall, cushioning her tailbone with both hands and looking up at me, like a high-school girl lounging against her locker and chatting with a boy between classes.
“Sorry,” she said. “I hope I didn’t bore you too much with stuff that’s all ancient history now.”
I grinned. “Okay. Let’s see it.”
She shook her head, looking nervous. “Go on in. By now, my aunt and uncle are probably wondering what we’re up to.”
I beckoned her away from the wall, curious to see the picture she was concealing from me. A boyfriend, maybe?
“Tre-vor,” she said in an exasperated whisper. “Just go.”
Still grinning, I shook my head and leaned over her, craning my neck to peek at the wall behind her.
She planted a palm against my chest to shove me away, but I wrapped my fingers around her wrist and gently pulled her off balance toward me, revealing the picture behind her back: a high-school graduation photo.