Murder on the Red River

by Marcie R. Rendon

  Standing in the field next to the man lying lifeless, she surveyed the land around her.

  Her home reservation, White Earth, was forty miles to the east. She knew it was where her mother had been born and raised, except for a short stint in a federal boarding school. It was one of the things she seemed to remember someone telling her about her mom. Red Lake Reservation, where Wheaton seemed to think the man in the field was from, was about 135 miles northwest as the crows fly.

  In 1968, the Valley was a draw for migrant farm workers. In the spring, migrants from Mexico came north to hoe the weeds out of the beet fields. With wives and ten to twelve children per family, they spent the wet spring and muggy summers living in shacks not even the Indians would live in. Their language was fast. And often. A singsong of eeee’s wafted across the furrowed fields from early morning until late into the summer evenings as the smell of freshly made flour tortillas and magical spices drifted from their shacks.

  Theirs was a musical language unlike the absence of language of the Swedes and Norwegians, many who still spoke with the heavy accent of their mother tongue, a deep brogue some were ashamed of and hoped their children would lose. They were a solid people who spoke mainly of rain and broken machinery or the cost of a bushel of wheat on the Grain Exchange. They listened to the farm market report each morning on the radio out of Minneapolis.

  In the late summer and early fall, after the Mexican migrants had headed back south, another shift of farm migrants arrived. When they did speak, they spoke Ojibwe to each other in voices barely heard. A nod of the head could mean come here or are you kidding me? A hand gesture might say come closer or don’t you dare. It was a body language so subtle it left some folks thinking the Indians could read each other’s minds. Which wasn’t unheard of either.

  When talking to whites, they mostly didn’t talk unless a yes or no was required. They had a different way of walking on the earth even in the Red Wing lace-up boots they wore to keep the dirt and wheat chaff off their legs. They came to drive grain trucks up and down the wheat fields, to drive the beet trucks and then wait in line at the Crystal Sugarbeet plant just north of Fargo until the wee hours of the morning to unload before heading back to the fields. They came to load and stack hay bales and to put a hundred pounds of potatoes into gunnysacks.

  Few came with family. Lone men and women off the neighboring reservations drifted into the small farm towns to work paycheck to paycheck. Some went back home on weekends, checks in their back pockets. Others drank away the money in the few bars that would serve Indians.

  Cash vaguely remembered black-haired, dark-skinned aunties who spoke enough Spanish to get into the bars that refused to serve Indians but would serve Mexican migrants. The aunties would come stay for the season, sleeping on blankets rolled out on the floor of the tiny two-room house Cash’s mom had lived in. When Cash thought about it today, she wasn’t exactly sure who the aunties belonged to or how she belonged to them. Everyone older was an auntie or uncle, grandpa or grandma. Anyone close in age was designated cousin status. The workers who came to the Valley stuck together as family regardless of bloodline.

  Cash never knew her father. She had a vague memory of her mom and the aunties talking about him coming back from the Korean War and buying the house in the Valley on his GI benefits. He had seen the world and wanted a life off the reservation. Her mom and aunties had laughed until tears ran their black mascara. Cash still didn’t know what they found so funny about that. She remembered the aunties, their dark hair in pin curls, smoking filterless cigarettes, drinking boiled coffee, laughing about going into town, rolling the eeee’s off their tongues while they practiced saying town names like Hermosillo and Chihuahua as places to claim they were from if asked by the bartender.

  There were other Indians who stayed in town. They roomed above the bars in makeshift hotels, where bar owners cashed the checks for room and drinks. Cash looked at the man lying facedown in the cornfield. He had probably roomed in town, although some of the richer farmers actually had bunkhouses for the late-season field workers.

  She walked back to Wheaton’s car with him. He had his hand on the door handle but she could tell he still had more to say to her.

  He took his hat off and ran his hand over his buzz cut. He put his hat back on and raised an eyebrow. “What brought you out this way this morning? Thought you were working this week for old man Swenson?”

  Cash shrugged. “You know how it is. Sometimes I just get a feeling and I follow it. I got up early and heard it on the news so I drove out this way as fast as I could. When I passed Standard Oil in town” —she pointed with her lips to the east—“and looked over this way, I saw your cruiser and thought I’d come by and see what you were doing. You know.” She shrugged again, her eyes asking if he understood. “Now I see you were probably wanting me to come this way anyways,” she said. They both chuckled. It had happened many times before when Wheaton had thought about Cash and she had shown up moments later. Or the other way around.

  “The thought did cross my mind,” he said. “Listen, I’m done here for the day. I imagine that if you pulled your truck up there in the Oye’s driveway, up there by the migrant shacks, no one would bother you. Maybe stay around here for awhile and see what you think. Those guys are headed up towards Red Lake. They won’t be back for awhile.”

  “You don’t want to go up there yourself?”

  “Can’t. Just like my badge doesn’t do me any good over there on the North Dakota side,” Wheaton said, pointing across the river, “us county law folks don’t have any jurisdiction on Red Lake. Made it a law in ‘53. Red Lake’s the only reservation in the state we can’t go on anymore. I’m gonna drive into town and tell the county doc to come pick up this guy. Take him into the hospital and see if he can tell us anything else. You take it easy, Cash.”

  He got into his car and made a U-turn on the gravel road, the stones rattling against each other. Cash watched the cloud of road dust billow behind him as he drove away. When the dust settled, she walked slowly back towards where the body lay. There wasn’t much blood to see, just the flattened stubble like a cow or deer had lain down in the field. She squatted down and put her hand where the man’s beating heart had been and felt the sadness from the earth crawl up her arm.

  Chilled, with a shiver running up her left side, Cash stood and walked back to her Ranchero. She got in, slid the heat switch over to let warm air blow out the vents and then drove about 800 feet to the old driveway that led into the abandoned Oye’s farmstead. Memory is what told her where the driveway was as grass had grown up and over the gravel. Two strips of shorter grass indicated where cars and farm equipment had entered the farmstead years ago. The family had moved out to Montana. County gossip said that old man Oye had bought a ranch and had a thousand head of cattle.

  Cash remembered back to when she was a child. Old man Oye would stop by to visit her mom, coming back from hunting trips out to Montana. Never any game in his truck but a pocketful of silver dollars that he would toss and spin in the air and hand out to whichever kids—white, Indian or Mexican—happened to be standing around waiting to be entertained. Older now, Cash figured the Montana trips were more about gambling than hunting.

  When she was warm enough, she got out and climbed into the back of her truck. She pulled an old quilt out from under a couple of two-by-fours, rolled up her jean jacket and laid down on her back, hands folded under her head. The sun was bright and she shut her eyes. She put her hand over her eyes. Red sunlight filtered first through her fingers and then through the skin of her eyelids.

  She could hear crickets and frogs down by the river. The leaves of the cottonwood trees lining the river bank created music in the wind that stilled her. Soon she was lost in time, her body floating up and out of the truck bed and following the trail of a soul gone northeast to say good-bye to loved ones. She saw a gravel road with a stand, almost like a food stand where one would sell berries, but this one had a basket of pinecones on it. Bir
chbark baskets were filled with pinecones. Children, five or six of them, crowded ’round the stand. The oldest was barely a teen. The youngest held on to the teen’s scrawny hip. She looked around to memorize the place in her mind, searching for landmarks—the stand, the pine trees, a hunting trail heading north a bit down the road.

  Was this the road where the children had come from? It ran east to west.

  Just then Cash heard the dry crackle of leaves and smelled a faint odor of decay. It brought her back to her own body, lying in the truck bed of her Ranchero.

  A deeper chill than even the one she had felt earlier caused her to sit up and put her jean jacket back on. She climbed out of the truck bed and reached into the open window for the pack of Marlboros sitting on the dash. She’d have to get another pack at Mickey’s bar before driving back into Fargo. She lit the cigarette again with the left-handed move of the matchbook. It would be a few more hours before sunset, but this bend of the river seemed darker somehow and colder. She shivered.

  Cash took a long drag on her cigarette. She tried to remember the first time she had experienced leaving her body. In one foster home she’d been forced to sit for hours on a chair as punishment for one infraction or another. One day in the middle of a daydream, she floated out of her body and into the yard where her foster mother was hanging men’s work jeans on the line. Freaked out, she thudded back into her body on the chair, wondering what the heck had just happened.

  That evening when the foster mother ordered her off the chair and sent her out to bring in the laundry, Cash’s heart jumped when she saw the clothesline hung with men’s work jeans. She quickly swiped clothespins and jeans, threw them in the basket and hurried indoors.

  One day at the Bookmobile, she read about a yogi who meditated and traveled out of his body. For the next six months, she checked out every book she could on meditation and practiced meditating when she was forced to sit on the chair. She got in a lot of practice.

  She decided to talk to Wheaton about her experiences. He was someone she trusted to not think she was too weird. He had looked at her over his coffee cup and said, “Yeah. I’ve heard some Indians can do that kinda stuff as well as India Indians. Just don’t go floating off and not come back.”

  After a couple more sips of coffee he had looked at her and said, “You have dreams too, I s’pose.”

  “Yeah, sometimes.”

  “Don’t let them scare you. Just remember them. Someday you’ll know why you have them.”

  Neither had ever talked about it again.

  Half-finished with the cigarette, she climbed into the truck. Pushed in the clutch, shifted into reverse and backed out of the grassed-over driveway.

  Farm work didn’t know weekends. Laborers could get Sunday morning off to go to church, but it was Saturday and she was late for work. Svenson had five grown sons to help him out even if Cash never showed, but Cash was a woman of her word.

  When she pulled into his farm driveway, Svenson’s wife appeared at the farmhouse screen door, waved and hollered, “They’re over at the old homestead, just drive on over,” before letting the screen door slam behind her. Cash turned around and headed north another couple of miles to the old homestead. That was where Svenson’s relatives from Norway had originally settled when the government was giving out 160 free acres to new immigrants. As each immigrant son came of age, they got married and started their own new homestead.

  Cash pulled into the field crossing, parked and stood by her pickup waiting for the old man to come the length of the stubble wheat field. He was driving a Massey Ferguson tractor, pulling a plow behind it. The chug of the tractor’s engine got louder as he approached and silence filled the air when he shut it off at the end of the furrow. He climbed down. Cash could tell just from the way he moved that his arthritic knee was acting up.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said.

  Svenson wiped his brow with a red hankerchief he pulled from his back pocket. “If you can finish plowing this forty, I can run the wife into town. She wants to pick up some fixin’s for the church dinner on Sunday.”

  “Yep,” said Cash, already climbing up on the tractor. Sven must have gotten to the field at sunup because he was more than half done. Cash plowed till about five, then drove the tractor and plow over to the field she knew Sven would plow next. She walked across the dirt furrows, climbed into her Ranchero and headed back to Fargo.

  She took a quick bath and changed into clean clothes. She grabbed the thin quilt off her bed and a box of .22 shells from the top dresser drawer. Down at the Ranchero, she checked to make sure her .22 rifle was still behind the seat before heading back on the road. One of the things she had learned from all her out-of-body meditation practice was that sometimes she really did see things. Another thing she had learned over the years was the only person she could trust was herself and so more often than not she chose to follow her quirky intuitions.

  She drove north through Halstad, stopped in another smaller town to buy some cigarettes. She used the restroom of the town bar and continued north, cutting cross-country on gravel roads.

  At some county junction, there was a township so small she missed the name as she entered the village. It was dark. She cruised the main street, the only street, trying to decide between two bars, one on the south end of town, one on the north. The north-end one looked a little more rundown, probably a little more welcoming to a dark-haired female pool player. She pulled headfirst into a parking spot close to the one streetlight on the block. Reached into the glove box and pulled out a hairbrush, which she pulled through her hair before braiding it down the middle of her back. Never knew what kind of trouble one could run into in these small-town bars in northern Minnesota. One braid was less of a handful to grab than a whole head of hair.

  Cash reached behind the driver’s seat and pulled out her cue stick in its leather case. She hesitated a moment, then took the cue out of the case. She knew that white farm folks tended to not like anything too Indian up here in northern Minnesota and she didn’t want to risk damage to the one possession, next to the .22, she was attached to.

  The place smelled like every other bar in the state. She scanned the place as she walked in. Noted the couple nuzzling in the back booth. The jukebox against the east wall. The mandatory town drunk on the end barstool, well into his nightly stupor. A couple of young farmer dudes shooting pool. They looked up at her, took in the cue stick and smirked at each other.

  “Hey, baby, women’s lib doesn’t reach this far north,” the one in a checkered shirt hollered. His buddy, still wearing his manure-crusted work shoes, laughed and swigged a drink of his beer. “Wowee, we got a girlee here thinks she can shoot.”

  Cash walked up to the bar and ordered two Buds. The bartender asked to see her ID, which she pulled from the back pocket of her jeans. Cash looked him defiantly in the eyes as he scanned the ID. “You don’t look a day over twelve, kid,” is what he said, inspecting the front, back and edges of the ID. But he served her the beers. Cash walked over to the pool table, past two women sitting in another booth. Must be wives or girlfriends of the farmer boys. Cash put her beers on the ledge that lined the wall and her quarters up on the pool table. She perched on a red leather barstool to wait her turn. The guy with the crappy shoes wasn’t half bad.

  Checkered Shirt couldn’t bank for shit. She figured she would have to let them each win at least once, play for beers initially, then switch to cash in about an hour. She had been driving for hours it seemed, much of it on gravel roads that had covered her truck in a fine layer of dust. It was dark, and she would have to sleep in her Ranchero. Thank god, she was in the woods, the real woods, the pinewoods of northern Minnesota. Easy to hide a truck and a woman sleeping in it.

  Checkered Shirt lost when he called the wrong pocket for the 8-ball.

  Cash walked over to the table and slid her quarters in. The clunk of dropping balls was music to her ears. She put the rack on the table, flush with the green cushion, squatted and used two
balls to a hand to fill the rack. Positioned the balls just so. Stripe. Two solids. 8-ball between two stripes. Two solids, a stripe, a solid. Stripe, solid, stripe, solid, stripe completed the rack. She slid the rack back and forth positioning the lead stripe just so on the circle. The rack was tight. “Straight eight?”

  Crusty Shoes answered, “We were playing last pocket, but I’ll switch to straight eight for you, doll.”

  Doll, my ass. Cash chalked her cue while he postured for the break. Sipped her beer, hip resting on the barstool. Crack. Balls scattered. Her opponent war-whooped as three balls dropped. Two stripes and a solid. Being a gentleman he chose the solids and ran four. Cash made the fifteen and scratched trying for the eleven.

  Cash overheard Checkered Shirt say to his girl, “She brought her own cue stick for looks. Can’t shoot for shit.” Cash let the farm boy win the game and put up another pair of quarters. She watched Checkered Shirt lose to Crusty Shoes. When their game was over, Cash smiled to herself, plugged in her quarters and asked her opponent if he wanted to play for beers.

  “Sure,” he said. Cash drank for free until closing time. Crusty Shoes was an easygoing loser. Checkered Shirt got more angry and foul-mouthed as the night wore on, complaining to his girl, wondering why the damn squaws don’t stay on the reservation where they belong and how come drunken Indians were takin’ all my money, honey. Cash just played and drank.

  When the bartender gave the last call, Cash scratched on the eight, shrugged her shoulders, finished her beer and broke down her cue. As she walked by the boys’ booth, Checkered Shirt’s girlfriend slurred bitch. Cash, though tempted to finish something, steeled her resolve and left.

  She lit up a Marlboro before turning the key in the ignition and backing out. She didn’t feel drunk at all and wished she had bought a six-pack for the road. Too late now. As she headed out of town, she checked the rearview mirror more than once to make sure the boys and their girls hadn’t decided to follow her. No headlights appeared. When the jack pines started to line the road on either side, she slowed and scanned for a turn-off road. It was too late to keep driving. She needed to sleep before hitting the reservation tomorrow.