VICKY HOLDEN SMOOTHED the front page of the Wind River Gazette over her desk and glanced at the headlines on the front page. Crews Battle Wildfire. Charter School Approved. Demonstrators Arrested.
The front door cracked shut, sending a tremor through the pine-planked floor of the bungalow that served as her law office. It stood on the corner in a block of bungalows doubling as offices and arts and crafts shops west of Lander’s Main Street.
The hushed voices—a protective note sounding in the voice of her secretary, Esther Sundell—filtered through the double glass doors that separated her office from the reception room.
A potential client might have wandered in off the street, but she doubted it. More likely, the visitor was one of Esther’s relatives. They were always stopping by, wanting to borrow her car, borrow some money, and Esther was generous. In her fifties now, the woman lived the Arapaho Way, the way of the ancestors, which meant that she probably gave away everything she didn’t need. She respected Esther for that.
Vicky went back to the newspaper. Three local men had been arrested at the Great Plains Casino for harassing employees and patrons. Andy Yellowman, Leon Black, Martin Wolf. Arapahos, she knew by the names. According to a spokesperson for the Wind River police, the men taken into custody were employed by Jack Monroe.
Captain Jack Monroe. Vicky turned the page. The captain had made several appearances in the Gazette over the last two years, while waging his own war against Indian gaming, preaching about the dangers and evils, trying to drum up enough outrage to stop the casino from being built on the reservation. Despite his efforts, the Arapaho business council had approved the casino. It had been open two months now.
The doors swung inward, and Vicky looked up. Esther had positioned herself in the opening and was leaning on the knobs, her short, stout figure blocking the view of the outer office. “You’ll never guess who’s here.” She kept her face unreadable, but Vicky caught the flash of surprise and disapproval in the woman’s brown eyes.
“Why don’t you tell me,” she said.
“Adam Lone Eagle.”
Vicky felt her heart lurch. She hadn’t heard from the Lakota lawyer in six weeks, not since they’d had dinner together in Hudson. Two days later, she’d read in the Gazette that Lodestar Enterprises had hired him to handle in-house legal work at the casino. She’d told herself she wasn’t surprised. It was so predictable. Lodestar had been hired by the business council to manage the casino, and the council had always found outside lawyers to handle the tribal legal work—white men, usually—as if the council couldn’t see her, one of their own people. She’d tried to tell herself she no longer cared, but she could still feel the warm flush that had come into her face when she’d read the news.
Adam had never said a word.
Vicky got to her feet and, brushing past Esther who moved back along one of the doors, went into the outer office. Adam stood in front of the desk, as tall and good looking as she remembered: the black hair slicked back around the narrow, sculptured face with the high cheekbones, the long nose with the crook at the top, the dark eyes with the direct, unflinching look, and every part of him imprinted with the confidence and sense of superiority of his Lakota ancestors. He wore a white, short-sleeved dress shirt, opened at the collar, and dark slacks with knife-like creases that folded into the tassels of his polished shoes. Lawyer clothes, she thought, the kind he’d been wearing last spring when she’d needed a lawyer and had gone to Casper to hire him.
“Come in.” She waved the man forward.
He led the way into her office, nodding at Esther as she stepped back, then closing the doors. For a half-second, Vicky thought he was about to put his arms around her. She flinched, then walked around her desk and gestured toward one of the barrel-shaped visitor chairs arranged in front. “Have a seat,” she said, dropping into her own chair. “What brings you to Lander?”
An amused look came into Adam’s face. He took the chair she’d indicated, settled back, and adjusted the creases in his slacks. “How have you been, Vicky?” he said, ignoring her question.
She smiled. So the pleasantries were to be observed. She’d tried to come right to the point, like a white woman, but he wanted to talk like Indians.
She was fine, she told him. Why hadn’t he told her he’d taken the job? And how was he doing? Also fine, doing great. He brought up the weather, and she joined in. He could have called. The long heat spell, the dry, parched earth, when was it going to rain? On and on she went, making small talk, and all the while, folding the newspaper, setting it to one side, rearranging a stack of papers. She didn’t care. She picked up a pencil and began tapping out a slow rhythm against the edge of the desk.
“Look, Vicky,” he said finally, and she knew that they were about to come to the point of his visit, “I’ve thought about you a lot. I’ve wanted to call you.”
Vicky didn’t say anything. She stopped tapping and set the pencil on the desk blotter. Why did she care so much? Three evenings together earlier in the summer—they’d gotten on well, she’d thought—and then, nothing.
“Truth is,” Adam went on, “after I took the job at the casino, what was I going to say to you? ‘Sorry, Vicky. Your tribe just retained a Lakota lawyer instead of you?’ ”
“You’re a good lawyer, Adam.” She struggled to keep her voice steady.
“Let’s be honest here, Vicky. We both know why the business council didn’t suggest you to Lodestar. You’re a woman. Why would they suggest a woman when Lodestar could go two hundred miles away to Casper and hire a man, Indian to boot? You’ve gone up against the traditions. You’re not back at the tipi building the fires, cooking the meals, and mending some warrior’s buckskin.”
Vicky had to smile at that. Most of the women on the rez were like Esther, trying to earn a little extra money for their families. But she wasn’t like them. She’d stepped out ahead, like a warrior. She was alone—Hi sei ci nihi, Woman Alone.
“Traditions are slow to change, Vicky.”
She stayed quiet, unflinching. She would not give Adam Lone Eagle, or anybody else, the satisfaction of admitting the truth of it. If she admitted the truth, even to herself, she would have to close her office and go somewhere else.
Adam had leaned back in his chair. “Fact is, Vicky, Lodestar Enterprises should have retained you, and I told them so.” He shrugged and looked past her a moment. “They said they’d made their choice. I could take the retainer or leave it, and frankly, I needed the work. It’s not the most exciting legal work I’ve ever done. Mostly contracts.” He smiled and waved a hand toward the desk, as if whatever work she was doing was bound to be more interesting, as if he’d done her a favor by taking the casino job.
“What about restraining orders?”
“You’ve read the paper.” Adam nodded at the newspaper on her desk. “Captain Jack Monroe’s a pain in the neck, causing a lot of trouble. We finally got the Wind River police to take notice yesterday. They hauled off three of Monroe’s troublemakers. We have to take the legal steps to make certain they don’t come back. Which means, yeah, I’ve got more work than I can handle, so I told Stan Lexson—he’s the casino manager—that I’d like some help, and he agreed. I told him I want you. It’s a great opportunity, unless you’re too busy.”
Adam paused, and in that moment, Vicky knew that he knew the truth. Two real estate leases, a couple of divorces, one child custody case—that was the extent of her practice this month, not enough to pay both the rent and Esther’s salary and still pay her own expenses, including the payments on the used Jeep Cherokee she’d purchased last summer. She’d been living off her savings for a couple of months now. Everybody on the rez probably knew she was struggling to stay in business. The moccasin telegraph never missed a juicy piece of gossip.
“I’ll be up front with you, Vicky,” Adam was saying. “Like I said, it’s routine, boring work. Mostly contracts with suppliers. Nothing flashy, but it pays well and”—he gestured toward the outer office�
�“you can keep your own practice. I’m still handling a few clients in Casper. What do you say?”
Vicky pushed herself to her feet. She turned toward the window and, running a finger along the glass, stared outside. The sky was as blue and luminescent as a signal flare. A funnel of shade from the ponderosa spread over the lawn, but the rest of the backyard was bathed in the glaring white sunlight.
“I don’t know, Adam.” She should jump at the chance, she was thinking. She needed the security of a good retainer. A couple of months ago, she wouldn’t have hesitated, but things had changed. She looked back at the man on the other side of the desk. “There’s a lot of controversy over the casino.”
Adam stood up. He leaned over the desk, gripping the edge and fixing her with the kind of determination that sent a little shiver down her spine. He would be a formidable adversary in the courtroom. “Controversy? There isn’t any controversy, despite what that crackpot Monroe says. People know that Great Plains Casino is the best thing that ever happened to the reservation. There’s more than a hundred Arapahos working there, and the profits are going to mean better health care, better schools, development of other jobs. The casino’s a good thing, Vicky. Monroe’s been proved wrong, and he can’t stand it. The man’s on a mission, thinks he has to save Indians from the evils of gambling. He’s tried to stop Indian casinos all over the country. Most of the time he fails, like he did here, but he keeps going. Now he thinks if he harasses people going to the casino he can close the place down. He thinks he can get Arapahos to stop working there and stop gambling there.”
Adam stepped back and straightened his shoulders. A thick blue vein pulsed on the side of his neck. “Look, Vicky,” he began again, a more patient tone this time. “Come to the casino. Meet Stan Lexson and his people. Look around. Get the lay of the land, and see what you think. What can it hurt?”
Vicky allowed the quiet to close around them a moment, like an invisible cloud moving through the office. From somewhere beyond the cloud came the muffled clacking of computer keys. She couldn’t ignore the facts: If she didn’t get some business soon, she would have to let Esther go—the first rung down a plunging ladder. Next would be the office; she’d have to work out of her small apartment. And after that, she would have to leave her people again, this time for good.
She heard her own voice cutting through the quiet, agreeing to stop by the casino this afternoon, and then she was walking Adam out, past Esther’s desk—the woman curled toward the monitor. After Adam had let himself out the door, Vicky watched the Lakota hurry down the walk, shoulders squared, white shirt clinging to his broad back. He got into a new green SUV parked in the only shade at the curb.
For the briefest moment, Vicky felt as if she were watching a lawyer who’d won a case for his client. The victory had left him even more confident and jubilant, unaware that the client had been diminished somehow and compromised.
“Well, never thought Adam Lone Eagle’d have the nerve to show his face around here.” The secretary’s voice came from behind her. The clacking had stopped.
Vicky turned back. “What do you mean?” she asked, although she knew what Esther was talking about.
“Just like one of them Sioux, butting in what’s none of their business.” Esther raised both eyebrows and stared at the ceiling, the set of her jaw as firm as the gray curls framing the round, brown face. “Just like Lodestar to bring in an outsider to do the law work, when that casino belongs to Arapahos, and you’re the one should’ve been hired. Everybody’s saying so.”
That was just great, Vicky thought. All the gossip about her career on the moccasin telegraph. “What do you say?”
“I say”—Esther had the same kind of defiant gaze that Adam had leveled on her—“none of our business what lawyer the casino hires. Makes no difference to us.”
“Keep saying that.” Vicky gave the woman a thumbs-up, then went back into her office. She stood at the window again, looking out at the maze of sun and shadows, trying to sort out the conflicting feelings boiling inside her. What Adam said about the casino was true, and yet there was another side, the shadow side. The divorce case she was handling—Larry and Renee Oldman—was a result of gambling. At the bingo hall, on the Internet, and now at the casino. Larry had lost the house and the truck, and still he couldn’t stop.
The truth was, she wouldn’t have hesitated to take a retainer when Lodestar had hired Adam. But now—now there were Larry and Renee and Esther’s relatives borrowing money to pay gambling debts and . . . she wasn’t sure she wanted to be a part of it.
Vicky lifted her black bag out of the desk drawer, then retraced her steps across the office to the front door. Before she made a decision, there was something she had to do.
The secretary blinked up at her, then began rummaging through the papers on her desk. She pulled out a small notepad. “Where can I reach you, in case there’s an emergency?”
“You can’t.” Vicky threw open the door and stepped out into the heat, which was blasting across the front yard like a blowtorch.
5
VICKY DROVE NORTH on Highway 287, which flowed like a river of asphalt through the open stretch of plains, baked in the sun and dotted with clumps of wild grass and sagebrush. Outside her window, rising against the sky in the distance, were the blue-shaded foothills of the Wind River range. A hot wind crashed through the open windows, drowning out Clint Black on the radio and rattling the brown paper bag on the seat beside her. On her way out of Lander, she’d stopped at a convenience store and purchased some gifts: a couple of bags of tobacco, two packages of cigarette papers, four cans of chili.
She hit the power button on the radio. The music dissolved in the wind. She preferred the sound of the wind. It reminded her of summer nights when she was a kid, curled up on the double bed in the back room of grandmother’s house, with three or four cousins curled up around her, the room so hot they’d kick the blanket onto the floor and giggle at the way the wind whistled through the windows and made the white muslin curtains dance like puppets on strings.
For the last ten minutes, she realized, she’d been stuck behind a camper with Texas plates. There was a steady stream of pickups and campers crawling along the highway: tourists heading north to Yellowstone Park, she guessed, and most of them stopping off at Great Plains Casino about ten miles ahead. When there was a break in the oncoming traffic, Vicky pushed down on the accelerator and swung out around the camper. Another mile and she turned right onto Plunkett Road, leaving the traffic behind.
She drove east over the ridge, feeling calmer, more at one with herself the farther she went into the reservation, the bluffs and arroyos and prairie rolling away below. Left on Mill Creek Road, right on Trosper. Deep in Arapaho land now. The Shoshones lived to the west and farther north, but the small, rectangular-shaped houses, painted white or blue or yellow, scattered along the road, like blocks dropped onto the dusty earth, belonged to her people. Towels and sheets and shirts flapped on the clothes-line poles, and old pickups and sedans stood at odd angles in the bare-dirt yards, some without wheels, propped up on cement blocks. In one yard, a couple of kids were kicking a ball through clouds of dust. A man in blue jeans, shirtless, sat on the front stoop, drawing on a cigarette, keeping watch, his brown shoulders hunched against the sun.
She wondered if the gossip on the moccasin telegraph had reached the houses out here. Of course it had. The whole reservation was probably talking about the fact Lodestar had hired a Lakota lawyer while she was left struggling to keep her office open. She laughed out loud, her voice muffled in the wind. The moccasin telegraph worked on a need-to-know basis. Gossip reached those who needed to know, and she was the last one who needed to know what was being said about her.
Vicky stepped gently on the brake and pulled left, bucking over the logs laid across the ditch. She stopped next to a small, white frame house, lifted the paper bag off the seat, and got out, slamming the door hard. The wind wrapped her skirt against her legs and blew her hair
into her eyes. She balanced the paper bag on the hood, combed back her hair with her fingers, and readjusted the beaded barrette at the nape of her neck. The house was quiet. A loose piece of siding snapped in the wind.
Holding the bag in both arms, like an offering, Vicky started down the side of the house. A few feet beyond the back door was the brushshade, small and rectangular-shaped, with willow branches tied to the log frame to form the three walls and the roof. Through the opening, Vicky could barely make out the two old people seated at the metal table in the blue-tinted shade.
She stopped outside and waited until the old man lifted his eyes from the newspaper spread open on the table. “Looks like we got ourselves a visitor,” he said, anticipation ringing through his tone. “Come in, come in,” he said, motioning her into the shade. “Get yourself outta the heat.”
It was at least twenty degrees cooler inside. After a second, her eyes began to adjust to the dimness and the two old people started to emerge out of the shadows. Will Standing Bear was thin as a bunch of willows inside the long-sleeved plaid shirt. A silver belt buckle shaped like a buffalo rose up at his narrow waist, and gray-streaked hair, cut short around the chiseled face, drew attention to his hawk-like nose. And Josephine, plumper, softer, and wearing a blue gingham dress, her hair almost white and pinned into a roll behind her ears, lifted her eyes from the tiny colored beads she was sewing onto the white deerskin moccasin in her lap.
“Sorry to bother you, grandfather, grandmother,” Vicky said, using the polite term for elders. She nodded from one to the other, then set the bag of gifts on the dirt floor.
“Bother? You ain’t never a bother to us, Vicky.” Will was on his feet, opening up an aluminum, webbed chair that had been folded against the wall of willow branches. He shoved the chair toward her. “Only bother is, you don’t come around often enough.”
“Help yourself to some iced tea.” Josephine jabbed a threaded needle into the moccasin and tilted her head toward a small table that held a plastic pitcher and a stack of glasses.
Killing Raven (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Page 3