Cold Dish wl-1

by Craig Johnson

  Melissa is Northern Cheyenne. In the photograph, she has dark stalks of healthy hair arching to her shoulders, but there are small discolorations there and at her throat, multiple bruises, and a contusion at the jawline. I hear noises when I summon up these wounds. To the trained eye, her features might appear a touch too small, like the petals on a bud not yet opened. Her almond-shaped eyes are unreadable. I keep remembering those eyes and the epicanthic folds at the inner corners. There are no tears. She could have been some half-Asian model in one of those ridiculously perfumed glamour magazines, but she is that poor Little Bird girl who was led into a basement and gang-raped by four teenage boys who didn’t care that she had fetal alcohol syndrome.

  Three years ago. After all the proceedings and counterproceedings, filings and counterfilings, the case went to court in May. I remember because the sage was blooming, and the smell hurt the inside of my nose. The girl in the photo had fidgeted and twisted in her seat, sighed, placed her hands over her eyes, then pulled her fingers through her hair. She crossed her legs and shifted her weight and laid her head, facedown, on the witness stand.

  “Confused…” That’s all she said, “Confused…”

  There are other photographs in the file, color ones I’d clipped from the Durant High School yearbook. In a fit of comic relief, I had left the blurbs from their yearbook attached to the pictures: Cody Pritchard, football, track; Jacob and George Esper, fraternal twins in birth as well as football, tie-and-fly club, and Future Farmers of America; and Bryan Keller, football, golf, debate, student council, honor roll.

  They had inserted a broomstick into her, a bottle, and a fungo bat.

  I was the reluctant investigating officer, and I had known Mary Roebling since we were kids. Mary teaches English at Durant High School and is the girls’ basketball coach. She said she had asked Melissa Little Bird about the marks on her face and arms but couldn’t seem to get a straight answer. Later, Melissa complained about abdominal pains and blood in her urine. When Mary demanded to know what had happened, Melissa said that she had sworn that she wouldn’t tell. She was worried that she might hurt the boys’ feelings.

  Ruby says I get the file out about once a week since the trial. She says it’s unhealthy.

  At Mary Roebling’s request, I went to the high school in the afternoon during basketball practice. While the girls ran laps, I took off my badge, cuffs, and gun and placed them in my hat behind her desk. I sat in the office and played with the pencils until I became aware of the two of them standing in the doorway. Mary was about six even and had told me quite frankly that the only reason she had gone to the junior prom with me was because I was one of the only boys in class who was taller than she. She towered over the Little Bird girl and kept her from backing though the door by placing her hands on Melissa’s shoulders. The young Indian was coated in a youthful glean of sweat and, if not for the marks on her face and shoulders and the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome, looked like she had just been freshly minted. I held up one of the American Number Two pencils and said, “I can’t figure out how they get the lead on the inside.” To my surprise, her face became suddenly dark as she contemplated the issue. “I figure they got these trees that have the lead already in them.” Her face brightened in the relief of having the riddle solved.

  “You’re the sheriff.” Her voice was childlike and carried all the trust in the world. I was back twenty-five years with Cady in front of a Saturday morning Sesame Street, watching “Policemen Are Our Friends.”

  “Yep, that’s me.” Her eyes had traveled all the way from the rounded-toe boots to the matted silver hair that I’m sure was sticking out at undefined angles.

  “Blue jeans.”

  We were the third county in Wyoming to adopt blue jeans as regular duty uniform, but it was one of the downfalls of our particular brand of vehicular law enforcement that the common populace rarely saw us from the waist down. “Yep, big around as they are long.” Mary tried to stifle a laugh, and the girl looked to her, then back to me. Rarely do you get those glimmers of unadulterated love and, if you’re smart, you pack them away for darker days. I started to get up but thought better of it.

  “Melissa, is your uncle Henry Standing Bear?” I figured the best way to get started was to establish some kind of personal reference.

  “Uncle Bear.” Her smile was enormous. Henry was one of the most understated prophets I knew and one of the most personally interested individuals I had ever met.

  I gestured for her to sit across from me and rolled up the left sleeve of my shirt to display the ghostly cross-hatchings that stretched back from my left hand. “I got hurt playing pool with your uncle Bear up in Jimtown, once…” The girl’s eyes widened as she sat in the chair opposite me, and she instinctively reached to place a forefinger on the marbled flesh of my forearm. Her fingers were cool, and her palms were strangely devoid of any lines, as if her life was yet to be determined. I reached across the desk slowly, sliding a palm under her chin and lifting to accentuate an angry contusion at the jawline. “That’s a good one, too.” She nodded with a slight movement that freed her face, and she dropped her eyes to the desktop, which informed us of the potential for the president’s physical fitness award. “How’d you get that?” She covered the offending jaw with a quick look to the side and a through-the-eyebrow glance at Mary.

  “Melissa, I’m not here to hurt anybody, but I also want to make sure that nobody hurts you.” She nodded and began gently rocking back and forth, hands firmly clasped between her legs. “Has anybody hurt you?” Her attention stayed with the glass-covered surface of Mary’s desk.

  “No.”

  I studied Melissa’s reflection and tried to imagine her as she should have been. Her people were strong, clear-eyed Cheyenne from the Northern Reservation, with a little Crow from her maternal side. I tried to see a Melissa who hadn’t had the spark of curiosity robbed from her by a mother who had ingested too many I-9 °Cocktails-Lysol and rubbing alcohol-when she was pregnant. Melissa should have been a beautiful Indian maiden standing on the rolling, grassy hills of the Little Big Horn, arms outstretched to a future that held promise, security, and freedom. When I looked up, it was as if she had read my mind, that we had shared a vision. She had stopped rocking and was looking at the diamond snaps on my shirt.

  “It was romantic.” She said it flat, as if emotion would only rob her statement of its impact. Her eyes returned to the desk.

  I leaned back in the office chair, allowing my fingertips to remain on the edge of the beveled glass. “What was romantic, Melissa?”

  She spoke to the desk. “The walk.”

  I was out of beer, Cady still hadn’t called, and I had given up on Doctor Leonard’s sheepskin cover as the salvation of a future well-coordinated interior. I needed a Rainier and some company so I cranked my hat down hard, buttoned my sheepskin jacket up tight, and stepped into the horizontal snow flurries that were whipping around the corner of the house. I figured I’d drive the half mile down the paved road to the Red Pony. I stood there on the planks for a moment, listening to something above the wind, wings whirring only thirty feet off the ground as the geese honked their warning cries to each other in an attempt to get south. Maybe they had waited too long to leave. Maybe I had, too.

  Off in the distance, I could make out the neon pony cantering in the darkness and a small number of peripheral trucks parked in the adjacent gravel lot. As I got closer, I could see that the inside lights of the bar were not on and felt a surge of panic at the thought of having to drive all the way back into town for a beer. I parked the truck and could make out a few figures moving in the darkened window of the carryout. Couldn’t have been a blackout; the red neon pony shimmered across my hood and up the windshield. I pushed into the wind to open the bar’s glass door and came within inches of running into the owner and operator of the Red Pony, Henry Standing Bear.

  Henry and I had known each other since grade school when we had gotten into a fight at the water fountain,
and he had loosened two of my teeth with a roundhouse left that had came from the Black Hills. We had played against each other in the trenches of interior linemanship from peewee through high school, whereupon I finished up at USC, lost my deferment, got drafted by the marines, and went to Vietnam. Henry had made a halfhearted attempt at the white man’s educational system at Berkeley and had learned enough to protest against it before being rewarded for his efforts with an all-expense-paid, four-year vacation with the Special Forces SOG group at An Khe. It was here that Henry said he had learned of the white man’s true vision and power, of his ability to kill the largest number of individuals in the most effective manner possible.

  Upon his return to the States, Henry had reattempted college life but found that his ability for being lectured to had deteriorated. He returned to political activity in the seventies and had been a seminal member of every Native American movement for the next ten years. Sensing that revolution is the industry of young men, however, he returned to Absaroka County for the funeral of the grandmother who had raised him and somewhere came up with enough cash to finance a deal with the Foundation that would transform an old Sinclair station, the only public building in Crossroads, into a kind of half-assed bar that he called the Red Pony. Henry had been known to read a great deal of Steinbeck. It was in the Foundation’s interest to promote the bar, if for no other purpose than to keep the shit-caked rubber boots of the locals out of their oriental-carpeted meeting rooms.

  We looked at each other, his expression carrying the quiet selfdeprecation that usually held some hidden meaning. “Beer, Tonto?” he asked as he handed me an open Rainier and continued past with what appeared to be a tire iron in the other hand. I looked through the poolroom into the bar proper and could make out about eight people seated on stools, outlined by the fluorescent glow of the beer coolers. Big night. I took a sip and followed him to the far end of the room where he seemed to be preparing to tear apart the wall. Leaning against the offending structure he slipped the flat end of the tire iron behind the weenie-wood that made up the interior of the bar.

  “You forget to pay your REA bill again?” He paused for a second to give me a dirty look and then put all 220 pounds into the tire iron and propelled the four-foot board from the wall, with nails still attached, to clatter at our feet. I bent from my vantage point to look at the ringshanked holes in the plaster surface that lay underneath the removed board. Henry’s face was, as always, impassive.

  “Damn.” Without another word, he slipped the tire iron beneath the next board and popped it to the floor. Same result. “Damn.”

  I figured it was time to ask, “Are we redecorating, or are we looking for something specific?” He gestured to the wall with a hand that pleaded and threatened at the same time.

  “Fuse box.”

  “You covered it up with boards?”

  Another sidelong glance. “At least I have walls.”

  Henry was one of the chosen few who had been to the cabin. His statement was hard to refute. “I’ve been thinking about getting an imitation sheepskin cover for my recliner.” This got a long look.

  “Are you drunk?”

  I gave the question thought. “No, but I’m working on it.” He grunted a little laugh and popped off another board, which added to the considerable pile that was collecting at our feet.

  “Damn.” He placed the tire iron in the next board. “Cady call you?”

  “No, the brat.”

  “Huh… She called me.” He popped the board loose to reveal the gray cover of an ancient fuse box. “Yes.”

  I turned to look at him. “What?”

  He tapped the small, metal cover and glanced at me. “Fuse box.”

  “Cady called you?” His eyes were dark and clear, the far one split by the strong nose that I knew had been broken at least three times, once by me.

  “Yes.”

  I tried to contain myself and sound casual, but he had me and he knew it. “When did she call?”

  “Oh, a little while ago…” His casual was far more convincing than mine.

  With a forefinger he pulled open the small metal box to reveal four fuses that looked as if they hadn’t been changed since Edison was a child. The box itself was rusted out in the back, victim of some age-old roof leak. The conduits surrounding it were rotten and peeled back, revealing frayed tendrils of green and black corroded wire. The four fuses were covered in a thick coat of dust and were surrounded by sockets, which held a strange patina of white and green crystals. They looked like two sets of angry eyes embedded in the wall, just waiting to unleash 220 volts into anything that came close.

  He placed a hand on the uneven surface of the plaster where he had taken most of the wall apart and leaned all his weight against it. His other hand brushed back the crow-black hair, smattered with touches of silver, in an arch over his shoulder and down the small of his back. “One in four, I like the odds.”

  “Did she say anything about calling me?”

  “No. Hey…” He bristled with mock indignation and gestured to the fuse box. “I have a situation here.”

  I tried to be helpful. “They’ve got little windows in them so you can see which one is blown.” He lowered his head and squinted into the box.

  “It is not that I do not trust your home-improvement skills, even though I know you do not have any.” He carefully wiped the dust from the surface of the four fuses. “They are all black.”

  “Do you have any extras?”

  “Of course not.” He held up the roll of pennies that had been hidden in his front shirt pocket. “I have these.” He smiled the coyote smile, the one that had made offensive linemen part their hair in the middle, NVA officers sweat between their shoulder blades, and otherwise intelligent women occupy bar stools in his immediate vicinity. Henry was the dog that wouldn’t stay on the porch.

  I watched with great apprehension as his fingers began twisting one of the rusted fuses from its corroded green outlet. The muscles on his forearm writhed like snakes rolling under sun-baked earth. To my knowledge, Henry had never lifted a weight in his life, but he still carried with him the tone of the warrior and was betrayed only by a very small amount of baggage at the middle. As the applied pressure began to take its toll, the glass knob turned and the remainder of the building went black. “Damn.”

  Hoots and laughter came from the darkness as we stood there trying to see each other. “I don’t think that was it.” I listened to him sigh and replace the fuse, and the lights from the beer coolers once again lit up the far room. There was a smattering of applause from the patrons.

  “She did not say anything about calling you.” He was still staring into the metal box, his odds having improved dramatically.

  “So, what’d she have to say?”

  “Nothing much. We talked about you.”

  “What about me?” Throughout the entire conversation, he studied the fuse box with the half-smile that told me he didn’t take either the electrical crisis or my familial life all that seriously. Cady and Henry had a symbiotic, avuncular relationship that had led her into a quasi-bohemian lifestyle. She was professionally adept at billiards and darts, had majored in Native American Studies at Berkeley, his almost alma mater, had continued on to law school at the University of Washington, and was now an attorney in Philadelphia. When together, they spent the majority of their time whispering to each other, pointing toward me, and giggling. The thought of the two of them conspiring at long distance was enough to worry me but, with Ruby’s involvement, something was definitely up.

  Deciding on the fuse diagonally opposite the first, Henry reached in and boldly twisted. The red neon horses that had stampeded across the parked vehicles outside flickered off to more cheers from the peanut gallery. From his lack of response, I wasn’t sure if Henry had noticed. “The pony…”

  “Damn.”

  He screwed the fuse back in. The neon roan paused and then leapt across the hood of the Bullet. The flurries were letting up; the bad
weather had decided to whistle on down the Bozeman trail to the rail-heads. The bar held a kind of conspiratorial coziness what with the subdued light of the beer coolers filtering through the cracks in the dividing wall. The soft murmur of small talk provided a buffer against the landscape that was now scrubbed with snowflakes.

  “So, what about me?”

  He tapped one of the remaining fuses accusingly with an index finger. “She is worried that you are still depressed.”

  “About what?” He looked at me, decided better of it, and looked back at the fuse box. I pushed off the wall and stepped carefully over the nail-laden boards that covered the floor. “I need another beer.”

  “You know where they are.” I started to turn, but he caught me by tapping on one of the last two fuses. “The suspense is killing you, right?” I made a quick face, placed the empty beer bottle on the edge of the pool table, and bent over to pick up one of the boards. I spread my feet in a good, open stance and held the bark-covered board on my shoulder with both hands. This got a look. “You are going to knock me loose from this if I get electrocuted?”

  I shrugged. “It’s what friends are for. Besides, I want to see if anybody in this county has worse luck than me.”

  “Not yet.” He twisted the next to last fuse and, to our amazement, absolutely nothing happened. We both looked for any absence of light, strained to listen for any lack of humming from the assorted coolers, heaters, and fans. Henry looked to the ceiling in deep concentration.

  “Well, at least I didn’t have to hit you with the board.”

  “Yes, but now we have to do the penny part.” He nudged one of the coins from the paper roll and held it up for me to view.

  “Where do you get this ‘we’ shit, Kemosabe?”

  “Have you not ever done this before?”

  I lowered my board, careful to avoid the nails. “No.” We had reached the conceptual stage of the project, so Henry joined me in leaning against the pool table. “Have you?” He crossed his arms and considered the single lowest common denominator of legal tender.