Cold Dish wl-1

by Craig Johnson

  “Are you armed?”

  I felt a little guilt along with the pressure of the pancake holster at the small of my back. “Yep, why?”

  He shrugged. “I just like to know.” We drove on for a while. “Do not shoot anybody, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I watched the passing cottonwoods and scrub sage. “Where to first?” he asked.

  “You tell me.”

  “Oh, no. I am just the scout on this expedition.”

  “I thought you guys left that stuff to the Crow.” He hunched over the wheel a little more and grunted. This was the response to the Crow in general; most of the Cheyenne I knew still hadn’t forgiven Kick in the Belly for scouting for Custer; most of the Indian Nations I knew about hadn’t forgiven each other much of anything. This had not been lost on the federal government, since they had put reservations of warring tribes alongside each other with regularity. “Where can we get some coffee?”

  “White Buffalo.”

  I nodded and listened to the heater motor begin to squeal as a few drops of antifreeze dripped from the core onto the brittle, rubber floor mat and trickled a sickly green toward my boot. “Is the heat on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t want to start with the Little Birds. You wanna try and dig up Artie Small Song first?”

  The White Buffalo Sinclair station was located diagonally across from the Lame Deer Community Center and next to it was Baker’s IGA. I wondered if we were taking our chances by going by the Community Center, since it was an outpost for Indian Affairs, a thought that was solidified by the green Jeep Cherokee that sat parked diagonally at the corner of the building. The IA is really into gadgets, and the sleek little Jeep conveyed that in spades. Their units bristled with antennae, roll cages, push bars, divider screens, radar, laser, radios, and an assortment of firearms that were locked in place all over the inside of the vehicle. There were eagles on the side, with feather tips at the quarter panels that seemed to swirl in the wind even though the thing was parked. No stars, though. I didn’t question as Henry carefully guided his rattletrap of a truck past the Center and pulled up alongside the White Buffalo Sinclair, but then couldn’t resist the temptation. “Problem?”

  He threw open the door and slid out. “No, I just do not like cops.”

  When I looked behind the counter at Brandon White Buffalo, I started feeling good about my own cholesterol intake. I never worked at the carnival, but I’m guessing he was about 375 pounds if he was an ounce. He was a lot taller than either of us, and he seemed twice as wide and thick. His head was as big as the pumpkin I had been shooting at yesterday, and he even looked like a jack-o’-lantern. It was the smile. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile that big in my life, with or without the gold. Like the rest of him, the smile seemed to fill the room; against it, the fluorescent lighting of the White Buffalo’s world didn’t stand much of a chance. The hairnet that held copious amounts of the blue-black hair in place as he came around the counter in his bright green apron didn’t diminish his image. I noticed the clear plastic gloves on his massive hands, and forearms as big as Easter hams. Brandon White Buffalo had been making breakfast sandwiches, and he carried two with him as he came. Standing there, as he walked by, was like watching a passing train. His voice was like Henry’s, halting in a charming way, but as deep as the bass in a three-piece combo.

  “Little Brother, where have you been?” I watched as the Buffalo wrapped up the Bear and easily lifted him from his feet. Henry didn’t squirm or make noise; it would have been useless against such overwhelming warmth. He just hung there, his feet dangling about six inches from the ground. “You have been up to no good?”

  Henry started to respond, but it was halfhearted. I watched as the Buffalo’s arms began to close, the plastic-covered hands crossed at the small of Henry’s back still gently holding the sandwiches. I watched as Brandon’s tendons and muscles slowly became more pronounced, but how his eyes remained flat and mischievous. The Bear’s face was just starting to show tinges of red, but he dare not let any of the saved air in his lungs escape. If he exhaled, his ribs would collapse like a fragile structure of wooden dowels. Henry’s face was slightly higher than Brandon’s, his chin about two inches from the Buffalo’s forehead. Henry could easily head-butt him, but I guess that wasn’t the point. I wondered if this was an everyday thing, if Henry had to run this gauntlet every time he came into the White Buffalo Sinclair. I would get my gas somewhere else.

  I knew a story about Brandon White Buffalo; it happened a number of years ago and had to do with his mother’s house up near the Montana border. It was a dry camp, and the old girl didn’t have the money to drill a well, so Brandon dutifully made the trek into Durant’s public park every Saturday morning to the municipal water station where they had a machine that dispensed public water. A teenaged Turk had been there with a couple of his buddies when Brandon had rolled the fifty-five gallon drum off the back of his truck and began filling the barrel with the hose. They were boys and nudged each other and began giggling as the steel barrel grew fuller and fuller. Brandon heard the giggling and looked up with that beatific smile of his. The hose got loose and sprayed the crotch of his pants, and Turk and his friends laughed even louder. Brandon joined them, shaking his head. Calmly, Brandon White Buffalo squatted, grabbed the barrel, and lifted it onto the tailgate of the crouching pickup. In one swift push, the barrel slid into the back of the truck, and Brandon closed the tailgate. He smiled, danced a little dance to help dry off his pants, and waved at the townies as he drove away. At this point, Turk told me, no one was laughing.

  There really wasn’t much I could do for Henry, other than pull out my gun and shoot Brandon. I figured the Buffalo would just eat the bullet like he ate life. “Brandon, do you think you might be hurting him?”

  The Buffalo glanced at me and then looked back at the Bear. “No, he is very tough. He deflowered my sister, and you have to be tough for that.”

  “You… should… know…” It was a tortured reply through gritted teeth, shot out in bursts, but it was enough. I watched the seismic tremors begin at the base of Brandon’s huge back, building and filling his lungs, exploding in short blasts that blew Henry’s hair back until they overtook the Buffalo and he dropped the Bear, laughing with a joy that shook the racks. When he regained his breath, he stood over Henry with his arms apart. “Little Brother, I have lovely sandwiches!”

  We sat on the plastic window seat, Henry and I on one side, Brandon taking up the entire bench seat on the other. We ate our sandwiches and drank our coffee from hot cups that read ALWAYS FRESH. I watched Henry catch up on the last month. “Anything new with Lonnie?”

  The Buffalo shifted his weight and laid an arm along the seatback. “It is a sad story of the Little Birds, with Margie drinking as much as she did an awful lot of the life went out of the family, but perhaps it is better that she passed?” His eyes turned to me. “You lost a wife too, Lawman?”

  I was surprised. “Yes, I did.”

  “It is a horrible thing to lose, a wife?”

  His conversation was made up of questions, giving it a philosophical bent; I wasn’t sure which ones I should answer, so I just answered them all, “Yep.”

  “They say it’s like losing part of yourself, but it’s worse than that?”

  “How so?” Two could play this game.

  “When they are gone, we are left with who we are after we were with them, and sometimes we don’t recognize that person?” He patted the table between us to show that no harm had been meant. “You will be all right, Lawman. He’s a good man, this man you are left with?” He turned back to Henry before I could reply. “You should go see Lonnie, he asks about you. You are bad about your family?”

  The Bear ignored the chastisement and smiled into his coffee. “I will. Is he home today?”

  “He has no legs, so where would he go? He’s home everyday; he watches television? He watches everything. It is as if he thinks the things on the
television aren’t happening if he’s not there to watch?”

  “He might be right.”

  “Mm-hmm, yes. It is so…” At which they both began snickering slyly and not looking at each other. I waited for a moment, then the Buffalo turned to me. “Have you met Lonnie?” I admitted I had. Years before the trial, I had been forced to convince Lonnie that just because a vehicle in town had been left running didn’t mean that you could take it for a little spin. “Mm-hmm, yes, it is so.” They burst out laughing again. If Lonnie had been there, he would have been laughing, too.

  The conversation switched to Cheyenne and, through Henry, I discerned that Melissa was not living with her father and had been spirited off by one of the many aunts that lived closer to town. In a while, they switched back to English. “So, he might be living with his mother?” They were talking about Artie Small Song now.

  “Yes, that girl he was going out with from Crow Agency? She decided she did not like his drinking?”

  “He is drinking again?”

  The big, netted head bobbed slightly. “Yes.” He glanced at me and nodded some more, ever smiling. “You like your sandwich, Lawman?”

  I took another bite and chewed; it really was good. “Best on the Rez.”

  His fists bounced off the surface of the table and our coffee cups hopped with little ringlets emanating from the centers of the dark liquid. “Best in the world!” I nodded my head in agreement and smiled back as Henry’s attention was drawn out the window.

  “Does his mother still live out near Rabbit Town?”

  The big arms crossed over the green apron, but the smile held. “Little Brother, I’m beginning to think that you didn’t come here today because of my beautiful sandwiches or because you love me?”

  Henry’s eyes rolled to the ceiling but then quickly rested on the Buffalo. I had seen that look before. It wasn’t a look you could stand for long; it burned. It burned because he cared. I watched the Buffalo to see what kind of effect it had on him, but the only thing that happened was that I heard drums, far in the distance. I’m sure they were just in my head but, as I thought this, I could see the Buffalo’s head nod ever so slightly keeping time with my drums. His eyes stayed locked with Henry’s, and I’m sure he heard them, too.

  When we got outside, one of the tires was flat, so I loaned Henry a quarter and we pumped it back up. He said it would hold, and I cursed the day the truck was built. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I noticed that the Cherokee was gone. We couldn’t afford tricked-out Jeeps with the measly budget we had. I had a truck that was two years old, but the rest of the force either had five-year-old vehicles or, like Jim Ferguson, drove their own and got reimbursed for mileage. I had meant to call in to the office while at the Buffalo’s place, but it had slipped my mind; some way to run a murder investigation.

  The Little Bird case had gone to the jury at 2:50 on the afternoon of September 16, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the county who noticed it on the calendar that hung on the bulletin board behind the witness stand. The trial and all its paraphernalia seemed to take on the lessening expectations of some television movie of the week. I had to remind myself that it was real.

  The jury was charged with reaching a decision on nine counts: one charge of conspiracy; four counts of aggravated assault, involving the use of the broom and bat and the act of oral sex; and four counts of sexual contact, in which the defendants were charged with fondling Melissa’s breasts and forcing her to masturbate them. They were also given a list of fifteen lesser charges. I remembered Vern Selby leaning over his desk and clasping his hands into a joined fist. He instructed the jury to ponder two main questions: Was force or coercion used against Melissa Little Bird; and was the Cheyenne girl mentally defective; and, as an auxiliary, did Cody, George, Jacob, and Bryan know that, or should they have known that?

  The judge had explained that coercion was not simply the use of brute force but that it could be a subtler process; that the jury would have to decide if Melissa had been conned into going into the basement; whether she had been vulnerable because of her psychological condition; whether the size and configuration of the basement intimidated her; or whether the number of boys and what they had told her before she left had pressured her into submitting.

  Vern didn’t look up when he changed gears; he just kept looking at his collective fist and talking like one of those auctioneers at an auction where nobody’s buying anything. He told them that the legal term mentally defective did not mean that someone was slow or retarded. It meant that a person did not understand that she had a right to refuse sex or was incapable of refusing; and, that to convict on this charge, the jury would have to agree that the defendants knew or should have known that Melissa Little Bird was defective.

  Lucian and I had had a long conversation about it after the trial; he said you had to do what you could do, and you did it the best you could; that if things turned or didn’t turn out the way you wanted, you let it go. If you did anything else, you were opening yourself up to very bad things. I hadn’t let it go, so was that where I was now, in the land of very bad things? Was I there alone, or was Melissa there with me, dragging our red rowboat across the teepee rings of the high plains? And who else was there with us, under those black and blue skies, carrying a very large caliber buffalo rifle?

  “What are you thinking about, badass?” I didn’t respond, just sat there looking out the windshield at things to come. “You know, I think I will start calling that the Little Bird Look.”

  I stared at the decrepit chrome antenna shivering in the velocity of roughly forty-five miles an hour. Captain America was hanging in there. Yea, verily, though I walked through the valley of very bad things… I was going to have to bring Turk back up from Powder Junction, and there was a dark little part of my soul that was looking forward to it. I told that dark little part to shut up and go curl up in a corner, and it did, but not completely. It never did, not completely.

  “It is the one where the eyes bug out a little, and those two little lines dig in at the corners of your mouth.” He turned back to the road. “It is very manly.” I continued to look through the glass and attempted to un-bug my eyes. “I wish I had a look like that…”

  I needed a change of subject. “You still have your horses?”

  A little breath of air came out as he responded, “My uncle’s horses, yes.” Henry never claimed the horses, even though they had been his for more than ten years. It was because they were Appaloosas. He felt about Appaloosas the way I felt about his truck; they were here just to piss him off. Henry figured that the reason the Cheyenne had always ridden Appaloosas into battle was because by the time the men got there, they were so angry with the horses they were ready to kill everything.

  “We should go out and ride sometime.”

  He turned to look at me again, his eyes bugged a little this time. “You hate horses.”

  I didn’t hate horses, I just didn’t like them. I didn’t really want to go riding; I was just hoping the shock value of the statement would change the subject. “The founding fathers used to say that riding was good for the digestion.”

  “Whose founding fathers?”

  “Mine. Your guys didn’t even have horses until you stole them from the Spanish… We headed over to the Mission?”

  He smiled and nodded. “Yes.”

  Like most of the houses on the reservation, the St. Labre Mission had a basketball court out back. It was a rough looking place, with large chunks of the asphalt crumbling off at the edges in pieces as big as softballs. What little paint there had been to signify the out-of-bounds, foul, and three-point areas had long since faded into the dark gray of the asphalt’s aggregate. It had a steel backboard painted to depict a war shield in faded and chipped reds, blacks, yellows, and whites. There was a hoop with no net, and despite the cold there were four young men playing a game of pickup in their shirtsleeves; one of the T-shirts read MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COWBOY
S and another read FIGHTIN’ WHITIES in fifties script. The boys were classic Cheyenne, tall and lean, with a touch of casualness that betrayed their age. I wondered why they were here and not in school, but I figured I had enough on my plate without being a truant officer. He cut the motor and started to get out. “Do me a favor and stay in the truck.”

  I looked back at him, concern in my eyes. “Even if they don’t hit the open man on the give and go?”

  He closed the door, and I watched him saunter toward the court. The word insouciance was invented for Henry and, against it, the teenage version suffered. The Bear was doing vintage James Dean, and it made the boys look like a bunch of basketball-playing Pat Boones. I wondered if they knew Henry. Everybody out here was related in a complex order of extended family. I wondered how many the Bear helped. I had been with him when he made the numerous deposits into the various accounts, a hundred dollars here and a hundred dollars there. I also knew that all the groceries he bought in town didn’t end up at the bar. All of these actions made up an intricate network that provided for the individual without exacting the cost of self-respect.

  Henry stopped at the edge of the pavement and leaned against the opening in the sagging chain-link fence, his thumbs hooked in his jeans. They looked at him, sneaking glances, figuring that whatever he wanted was his problem. It would be interesting to see how quickly he could make his problem theirs; it didn’t take long. After a fade away from the far corner, the ball deflected off the hoop and bounced right over to him. He didn’t move, just lodged the ball to a stop with his boot.

  They fanned out as they came, like coyotes approaching their first wolf. One of them, the tallest one, said something, and Henry nodded by throwing his head back a bit and inviting them closer. The tall one started to stoop for the ball but pulled up short. The Bear must have said something. Nobody moved, then I saw the back of Henry’s head shift slightly, and the teenagers started laughing, all of them except the tall one. He cocked his head to one side and said something back, and I would bet it wasn’t pleasant. A brief moment passed, and Henry bent over and came up with the ball, spinning it in both hands. From the movement of his head, I could tell he was talking trash. The tall kid nodded, turned, and started walking back toward the court as Henry took one step after him, lined up, and shot. It wasn’t anything all that miraculous, about a twenty-five foot jumper that bounced off the rim twice and fell through, but for a guy who hadn’t held one of the things in ten years, it wasn’t bad. The tall kid turned and looked at him. Henry spread his hands out in an apologetic gesture and walked over to the young man. Throwing a paw around his shoulders, he steered him back over to the group. They were all talking and laughing now, with a few gestures from the boys indicating the road behind the Mission’s Indian School and beyond. They tossed Henry the ball again as he turned and started back for the truck. I saw him stop, look at the much greater distance to the basket, then shrug and throw the ball back to the tall one. It would have been showing off. The boys helped push start the Rezdawg, and we got going again. “You know, I remember a time when you would have made that shot, nothing but net.”