Shell Shaker

by LeAnne Howe

  “If you insist,” Auda said politely. Then loudly to those gathered around, “But Adair and I were just about to hold an auction and relinquish a memento from our childhood, our family’s allotment deed.”

  “Oh God, Auda shut up. You’re a terrible drunk, a shot or two of Jack Daniels and you turn into a complete toad.”

  “Four terrible toads,” said Auda, proudly. As they reached the exit, she turned and shouted theatrically, “Elvis has left the building!”

  Together they walked her sister down the street to her hotel. Auda chattered like a child, associating one thing with another. She noted the weather, then recited a list of Choctaw words for tornado, hurricane, and volcano. She blabbed about her new boyfriend Red, “the future of our tribe.” She told the clerk at the front desk that Adair had been voted the girl most likely to become a professional boxer by her high school classmates.

  “Her nickname was ‘Living War Club,’ ” Auda reported proudly. When the clerk ignored her, she whispered, “If I ever have to lecture to another audience like that one again... I wish our ancestors would march into the room and shoot them all with a bazooka.” Thankfully by the time the elevator opened on the seventh floor, Auda’s battery was running low and she passed out in her hotel suite.

  Adair asked him to wait while she got her sister settled. She came back out and extended her hand. “I don’t know how to thank you, Mr...,”

  “Gore Battiste.”

  Adair took back her hand, but not before she’d registered the smell of his hair, his unbuttoned jacket, his loosened tie. “My sister is a brilliant woman, but tonight she wasn’t herself.”

  She decided against making any more excuses for Auda, she didn’t know him well enough to have to explain. Gore merely smiled, but there was something very sly about the way he looked at her, as if he knew what was going through her mind. She suggested that they have dinner and he agreed. The two of them had a quick meal in the hotel’s restaurant. Afterwards they went up to her room.

  She stepped in close and put her arms around his neck. When she kissed him, he did the only thing he could and still call himself a red-blooded Indian. He kissed back.

  “I want to do this the right way, but I don’t have time,” he said. “I wish I did, but you live in New Orleans. I live in law school.”

  She didn’t answer, but led him to bed. Later she would say she had forgotten his name, but remembered how his skin submerged into hers. Of course she was lying, she knew his name, although her inclination was to forget it. She remembered everything about Gore Battiste: his crooked little smile, what high school in Tulsa he graduated from, how he liked to have his feet rubbed.

  Adair notes the time, 6:45 A.M. She walks into the ladies’ room at LaHarve and Hennepin, looks in the mirror, and says loudly, “Forget him. It’s been nine years, he’s not going to call.”

  A year or so after the one-night stand with Gore Battiste, she had decided to cultivate a new image, different from the one he would remember of her. She couldn’t stand the thought of running into him again and looking the same, like nothing had changed for her—after him. She cut her long hair into a short bob like Louise Brooks, the silent film star of the twenties who said, “If I bore you it will be with a knife.” She took to wearing men’s loafers. Smoking Cuban cigars, expensive contraband she acquires from the N’awlins Blue Bloods, some of whom call her a “bachelorette,” code for “we’re not sure whether she’s a lesbian or not.” She knows they could care less. This is New Orleans, after all. As long as she makes money for them, she could be a serial killer and they would turn a blind eye.

  Adair tells herself that having a routine and the solitude of wealth makes her feel secure—not chasing after some Alabama Conchatys lawyer with a last name that sounds uncannily like “Baptiste.”

  Another thing. She discovered that night that she wasn’t the only one in the family with a temper. Recently she’d come to think of Auda as a timid little academic poring over books. All true, but there was another side to Auda that she kept hidden. Even Gore remarked that night that Auda had the makings of a true leader. “Too bad she feels so unworthy.”

  Adair returns to the comfort of her leather chair. She still has a few minutes before the market opens at eight, so she peruses the paper. The lead story says fall has arrived in New Orleans, chilling the gulf city with record low temperatures of seventy degrees. She chuckles at what N’awlins people call “chilly.” She scans the rest of the headlines and a small news item jumps out. “Teen Savagely Killed by Pet Python.” She puts down her coffee and pulls a pair of antique gold-plated scissors from her desk drawer. She methodically cuts the gruesome report out of the newspaper, and whistles as she reads how a New Orleans teenager was strangled by his eleven-foot-long pet python, Pocahontas. “Well, no wonder,” she says aloud.

  According to the New Orleans police, the eighty-pound snake was quite aggressive. When they found seventeen-year-old Jean Forgeron dead in the basement of his home, his body was covered with bites. An autopsy revealed that he’d been suffocated. Pythons suffocate their prey before swallowing it whole, although police said there was no indication the snake had tried to swallow the boy.

  “She was hissing and playing with her kill,” said police sergeant Adrien Duchesne. “The snake had to be shot before we could retrieve the body,” he said. The paper went on to quote the boy’s bereaved father: “Pocahontas was such a sleek little thing when we bought her. We didn’t know that someday she would grow into a killer.”

  Adair pulls out her file marked “personal” and thumbs through her clippings. The past couple of weeks the newspaper has been lousy with uncommon deaths: “Tourist Eaten by Alligator in Florida.” “Man Killed at Same Train Crossing after Surviving Similar Crash in 1929.” “Dog Shoots Master.” That was a particularly interesting case to her. It happened during a hunting outing when a spaniel stepped on the trigger of a shotgun and blasted his owner in both legs. The man bled to death before he could be taken from the field to a hospital.

  She doesn’t know why, but she’s fascinated with the macabre. Saving the newspaper clippings has become a hobby. She keeps another folder of clippings on Redford McAlester. She fingers through a few. From 1989. “McAlester Cuts Ribbon at Opening of Casino of the Sun.” “Casino Gives Away Millions, Monthly!” “Casino Chief McAlester Announces Wholesale Indian Store.” Then 1990. “Casino Funds Elderly Housing Project.” If you just read the headlines, the Choctaws seem pretty prosperous, but then why are her mother and so many of the elders working to undo McAlester? For months there have been rumors on Wall Street about a tribe laying off large sums of money in foreign bank accounts. She tried talking to Auda about it, but her sister clammed up. Adair thinks she’s figured it out, but she’s patient. She’ll wait for more information before she makes a move against her sister’s lover.

  Just as she’s about to put away the file she hears a peculiar sound coming from outside her office door, like something heavy being dragged across carpet. Then a muffled pop goes off like a toy gun.

  Pow! Pow! Pow!

  A sound from her childhood. She remembers hunting in the library of the Billy house. The sway of fringe as she tracked a large invisible bear behind her mother’s portières. Something made her stop as if her heart had failed. A glint of gunmetal, and the next thing she knew she’d smashed the butt of her toy on the moveable lump running along floorboards. She ran, yelling to her father, who pulled the bloody thing off the oak floor. After that, the two of them went on hunting parties, raiding the basement in search of bigger invaders. He called her “Pichahli.” Mouse Master. In a soothing voice he said she was the true hunter of the family. That whatever she tracked she would find.

  A few weeks later she bragged to her girlfriends in the fourth grade.

  All my Barbie dolls have fur coats.

  Ah-h-h... where did you get them?

  Trapping and skinning rats with my dad.

  Ooo-oo... yuk.

  The dragg
ing sound grows louder. LaHarve and Hennepin is a stodgy old New Orleans firm. Rarely do they have furniture moved at this time in the morning. She opens the door. Nothing there except a fax envelope taped to her door. She rips it open with her scissors, reads the contents: McAlester dead. Auda and Susan arrested. Come home. Uncle Isaac.

  She lights another cigarette and inhales deeply. She thinks for a moment about what her strategy should be. The next move. She checks the opening stock quotes and calls her New York trading desk.

  “Stanley, sell ten thousand shares of General Electric for me. Yeah,” she says in a smoky voice, “I know it’s going up but sell it just the same, I need the cash flow. I’ll get my assistant to give you my account number.” She then calls her secretary and asks him to telephone an Oklahoma attorney named Gore Battiste. “Call the Oklahoma Bar Association if you have to, I’m sure he’s listed.”

  A mixture of dread and arousal invades her. What if he doesn’t remember her. What if he’s married with nine children. The trick will be to pretend she doesn’t care, one way or the other. Besides, she’s got to concentrate on what’s truly important: her family. She walks back to the window and watches the sky. At last the morning smog lifts off the river like a blanket. Already the sky is turning a sour blue. It reminds her of a story her father told her.

  Around daybreak, they fly through the air like sparklers. I’ve seen them. They muddy up the sky.

  Who does?

  Bad spirits.

  How do they do that?

  They fix up themselves, then they fly. Blood drips off them and glitters in the sun like red rain. It’s so beautiful you’ll want to catch it with your hands, but don’t. That’s when they can slip inside you. Better watch out, or you’ll lose yourself to them.

  Adair unlocks the mahogany cabinet next to the window and quickly pours herself a shot of scotch. She feels oddly elated. She raises her glass, gesturing toward the morning sun. “To my sister Auda, who finally killed the bastard.”

  4 | Choctough

  DURANT, OKLAHOMA

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1991

  Life is trying on Choctaws in Durant.

  Isaac Billy can’t work. There’s a gate in his head. Just as he feels he’s on the verge of a supreme insight, he remembers yesterday and is stymied. Two thousand five hundred acres surrounding his hometown were burned up in a prairie fire in the wee hours of Sunday morning. A short time later his niece, Auda Billy, was found sitting on the floor next to the dead chief, her dress splattered with his blood, the murder weapon beside her. Much to his horror, his sister Susan Billy had confessed to the assassination. Currently, every Choctaw in the county whose last name is Billy is being harassed by police.

  Isaac has been accosted too. At eight-thirty this morning a deputy from the sheriff’s office presented him with a warrant to search his sister’s garage. It seems the town’s most treasured sculpture, Durant’s Big Peanut, was stolen sometime after midnight. The gray, four-foot long heavy cast-aluminum statue was a gift to the city from a businessman who’d wanted there to be a downtown attraction that honored local peanut growers. The deputy claimed he was ending speculation by members of the Peanut Growers’ Club that the sacred nut was hidden in the Billy garage. Of course, he found nothing, but the deputy told Isaac that he’d also issued an APB on the Choctaw student who’d turned a perfectly good 1976 Delta 88 into Durant’s Big Peanutmobile.

  “Last summer, during the Fourth of July Parade, everyone thought those plaster casts of our peanut were pretty funny—glued on the car like wings. But with the peanut gone missing...well, no one’s laughing now, Mr. Billy.”

  “Maybe you need to find your sense of humor, Vernon,” Isaac replied.

  “Be careful, sir, murder and mayhem are no laughing matter. College students, especially artists, are always troublemakers. I figure he probably knows who stole the peanut. Or perhaps he took it himself. Remember this: whoever steals art generally turns killer.”

  Isaac just stared in disbelief. He’d known Vernon Klinkenbaird since he moved into town with his parents in 1980. The young deputy couldn’t be much over twenty-one. “I’m due back at the county office,” he said, adjusting his weapon, then himself, before speeding away in an unmarked car.

  “Odd,” he mutters now, remembering the incident. Isaac looks at the gray haze in the sky and thinks it’s sinking. He blames all this on the heavy satellites roving the world announcing every fifteen minutes that yesterday his sister confessed to murdering Choctaw Chief Redford McAlester. As he crosses the street to his newspaper office a Winnebago almost runs him over. The woman behind the wheel slams on the brakes and jumps out of the vehicle. She runs toward him wearing a short tight skirt, waving a microphone like a baton. “You’re Isaac Billy, are you not?” she demands.

  A foreigner. Isaac stares at the woman whose hair is the color of sweet potatoes.

  “I’m so sorry, sir. I’m not accustomed to driving on the wrong side of the road,” she says, giggling. She tells him she’s a reporter for CNN and wants to get a feed for the BBC.

  Typical Brit, he thinks. Feeding off the misery of Indians has always been their greatest joy. As she chatters on he decides he’s being interviewed by the Duchess of York. She’s perky. Smartly dressed. She has small white teeth, and is kind of chubby the way he likes younger women. Yup, she’s Fergie, all right. He’d read somewhere that she’s writing children’s books. Things must be getting tough in England if the Duchess of York has had to start freelancing.

  Isaac is amazed that the English are paying any attention to the Choctaws. He understands why the Irish are interested in them. They have something in common: colonialism and potatoes. Choctaws never liked the English. Isaac believes they’ve always preferred Les Français. Better food. Even Dixon DuRant, the town’s founder, was half Choctaw, half French.

  “Mr. Billy, just look into the camera and I’ll give you the lead-in,” commands the pretty Duchess.

  He clears his throat and prepares to respond.

  “Sunday afternoon of the autumnal equinox, a holy day as far as Choctaws are concerned, seventy-year-old Susan Billy confessed to the murder of Redford McAlester, Chief of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the fourth largest tribe by population in the United States. I’m talking with Isaac Billy, brother of the assassin. Sir, would it be fair to say that yesterday’s savage-style assassination was an ancient Choctaw ritual, a kind of coup d’état, so to speak, so your family can gain control of your tribe?”

  Just like always when he doesn’t want to respond, Isaac feigns ignorance and performs like a John Wayne Indian, something he learned at boarding school. With a stubby gnarled forefinger he tilts his 10X Stetson back on his forehead. Looks down at the ground kind of uncertain-like. Kicks it like he’s sorry, and pidgin speaks, “Me—no—Inkilish.” Pausing innocently, then, “Chishke ut chi pisa okpulo aiahni mut alla nakni in na fohka foka Chichi tok,” which roughly means “your mother thought you were ugly, so she made you dress like a boy.” Isaac wishes he hadn’t said that, but knows she can’t understand Choctaw. When she fires another question, pronouncing her proper British very loudly and slowly as if he’s deaf, Isaac decides she is a royal fool.

  “Was–there–a–love–triangle–between–Chief–Redford–McAlester–Auda–Billy–and–your–sister–Susan–Billy? Is–this–murder–perhaps–the–simple–act–of–rage–by–an–older–woman–jealous–of–her–daughter?” she shouts.

  Isaac explodes, but the words come out sounding like a whisper. “Osano chi samanta Osano!” He smiles wide for the camera, tips his white cowboy hat and turns his back. Calling someone a horsefly, or bloodsucker, is a terrible insult to a Choctaw. But he sighs deeply. The English are used to being called worse. Yup, much worse.

  “Imoshe,” the television cameraman says, as he peers from behind his bulky equipment.

  Isaac turns around and recognizes a distant relative. Someone who, as a boy, once sat on his lap. Someone who still affectionately addresses
him as “Imoshe,” a sign of respect, Uncle. Worse still, someone who is freelancing for CNN. Isaac considers the possibility that his “nephew” will give him away to the British. After all, they are filming in front of his newspaper office. The sign on the door plainly advertises, in English, “Isaac Billy, Editor-in-Chief.”

  “Come on, Miss,” urges the Choctaw cameraman. “He doesn’t know anything. He’s just an addled old man.”

  Isaac waits in front of his office, sniffing the breeze until the Winnebago belonging to the Duchess of York disappears. He wonders how the English outsmarted Indians. Quickly loading his computer, printer, and office mail into his truck, he heads east. He’ll lay low at his ranch outside of Soper, Oklahoma, and reason things out. So what if Redford McAlester is stone dead, Isaac says to himself. McAlester’s body was measured for a wooden suit years ago. “Yup, he really was.”

  Like old-timey radio tubes signaling to outer space, shiny aluminum cans and glass bottles flicker in the sun along Highway 70. They are visible now that the fire burned away the prairie grass. Isaac frowns and his throat tightens, seeing all the trash bunched up along the shoulders of the highway. Car litter makes him angry. Whites say that Indians weren’t doing anything with the land; well, certainly nothing like this.

  Forty-seven miles out of Durant on Highway 70, the land is still smoking from the blaze. Nervous firefighters remain posted along the farm-to-market roads, patrolling for more fires. The cemetery headstones at Muddy Boggy Creek are covered in soot and look like black tongues sticking out of the ground. As he passes the old church, Radiance Is Accomplished, volunteers sift through the debris. Memories of Yesterday, the junk shop where he occasionally stops and flirts with the owner, is destroyed. But in the Indian town of NeKoosa, the Choctaw Bus Stop, Mom’s Choctaw Movie Rental, and the Okie Welding Shoppe have survived. Durant isn’t the only city affected, he says to himself.

  The words your sister confessed keep repeating in Isaac’s head. He thinks of things he should have said to Fergie. Indian chiefs aren’t the only ones who get savagely done in. There have been others. President Kennedy. Lord Mountbatten. Choctaws aren’t the only ones with blood on their hands.