Murder on the Red River

by Marcie R. Rendon

  About fifteen miles out of town, her headlights grazed the ruts of a logging road off to the right. She pulled in and drove about a quarter of a mile before backing her truck as close into the trees as she could get. She reached under the seat for her flashlight.

  She stood in the dark and listened to the night sounds. In the far distance she could hear a car. A few minutes more, she saw the car continue north on the main road. She was in a good place. No one was going to come down this road tonight. She listened again before switching on the flashlight and scouring around in the truck bed of the Ranchero. After shaking the road dust off everything, she made a bed for herself with the quilt, covering herself with the wool blanket she had stashed there too. She went back into the cab of the truck and pulled her .22 from behind the seat. Made sure it was loaded and went to sleep with it hidden under the quilt with her hand on the rifle butt.

  The sun woke her. The fall morning air was crisp. She shoved the blankets back under the two-by-fours, unloaded the rifle, dropped the .22 bullets into her front pocket and put the rifle in its place behind the front seat. She jumped in the cab and turned on the heat full blast. She lit up a cigarette and cranked the driver’s window about three inches to let the smoke drift out. If she leaned forward on the steering wheel, she could see the occasional car drive by on the main road—farmers going into town for a needed part or to pick up feed. She finished her cigarette and crushed it out in the ashtray. No point in starting a forest fire today, she thought, shifting into first and pulling out into the overgrown ruts of the logging road. Her mouth tasted like stale beer and cigarettes. The thermos on the seat beside her had a mouthful of coffee left in it. Cold, but it covered the taste from the night before. Foolish to try the radio, nothing but static up here in the woods.

  Cash smoked and drove. The weather was good. Sun was shining with the occasional thin white cloud. No cotton candy clouds today, just streaks of white. She thought about the stand she had seen along the road when she was lying down in her truck bed, the guy dead in the field with knife wounds in his back. Thought about the guys last night and the rugged comments they’d made about her.

  There wasn’t a name Cash hadn’t been called: squaw, whore, stupid, heathen. She had heard them all. These days, she mostly just ignored irrelevant behavior. She shrugged and took another drag of her cigarette. Free beer and free games all night. What did she care?

  Ahead she saw a sign that read: RED LAKE RESERVATION, NO TRESPASSERS ALLOWED. She laughed. These Red Lakers had all kinds of Indian Pride. Their reservation was the only closed reservation in the state. Meaning they didn’t fall under state jurisdiction. Meaning they fell under federal jurisdiction. Which is what Wheaton meant when he said that as a county law man he didn’t have any jurisdiction up this way. Which explained the feds in the suits standing back there in a cornfield where a Red Laker’s body had been found.

  Cash finally reached the main road that halfway circled Red Lake, the lake itself.

  She braked at the stop sign. Plain logic told her that if she turned east she would run into the town of Red Lake. If she followed that road farther north, it would take her to Ponemah, where they still practiced the old medicine. About the only people who took that road were folks who lived there.

  Somehow that direction didn’t feel right anyways. Cash turned left. She kept the truck in third gear and drove slowly, watching the sides of the road. The stand would be on the north side. She could see it in her mind’s eye.

  Here and there a crow flew. There it was. Grey weathered pine boards, probably from an old front porch, had been nailed together to create a three-by-four-foot table. The two legs on each end had branches from a birch tree nailed in an X to steady the table. The ditch grass had been trampled down.

  There was a driveway leading to the lake. Cash turned down it. Straight ahead, a fairly new boat sat at the lake’s edge, with nets hanging on a makeshift rack close by.

  Animal traps hung from another tree. And there, in the pines, was a rundown government HUD house. Weathered red paint. Weathered, unpainted steps leading to the screen door that had seen too many kids and too many reservation dogs. At one time the window trim must have been painted white, but was now a dirty grey. The picture window had a makeshift curtain, an Indian-print bedsheet. Even from the outside one could tell it was nailed back and that a safety pin held a corner up to let some light in.

  The wornness of it reminded Cash of the house where she had spent the first three years of her life. Except her mom’s house had been a two-room tarpaper shack. With no running water or indoor plumbing. Which wasn’t all that uncommon back then. Cash remembered visiting the white neighbor kids, and they had outhouses too. But their houses were painted white. And they had a mom and a dad. Not just a mom living off the county, a mom who tended to drink a bit too much most weekends and ended up in the ditch more often than other mothers seemed to.

  Cash remembered that after that roll in the ditch, the county social worker became the constant female adult in her life. She would pull into their driveway and load Cash into her big black Buick and drop her off at a different white farm home.

  The farmers’ wives tended to harshness. Cash learned to duck her head out of a slap’s way. She learned to take a beating stoically. She learned that behaviors that had made her mom throw her head back and laugh made these other women go red-faced and shame her into silence.

  Cash learned to be watchful. Wary. Not to make too much noise or sudden moves. Do the dishes and sweep the floors when told. She learned these women believed that cleanliness was next to godliness and that her permanently tanned skin was a mark of someone’s sin.

  She would go to bed each night in the stranger’s house looking out the window at the stars, wishing for home. Back then, she didn’t have a sense of time. Was she in one home a week? Two months? She never knew. She just knew the joy that filled her heart when the social worker pulled up, put her back into the thin, bare clothes she had arrived in.

  In those first years, each time, Cash had expected to be driven home. Back to her mom. It never happened. Cash searched each new school for her brother and sister. She didn’t understand. At their mom’s, they always had something to eat even if it wasn’t the full spread the farmers wives put out. Sometimes her mom didn’t have the gas money to drive into town to get the water jugs filled and they would drink the rainwater from the rain barrels next to the house. They all slept curled in one big bed, kept warm by a kerosene stove in the winter months. There was always laughter. No swatting, no shaming. She and her brother climbed trees to the very top. She and her sister made mudpies and fed them to each other, their mom pouring a bucket of rainwater over them to wash them off.

  Cash remembered other nights when Wheaton had stopped her mother. Told her she shouldn’t be drinking and driving with kids in the car. Her mom would laugh and promise to get them home safely. He would always say to her as she turned the car back on, “Might be a good idea to stop drinking, you know.” And her mother would laugh, say sure and wave goodbye.

  Cash wished she could remember what happened the morning she woke up in jail. She had never gotten the courage to ask Wheaton.

  With that thought, Cash threw the Ranchero into park and looked around the Red Lake yard. There were lots of tire tracks. There was a shadow standing in what she assumed was the kitchen. She got out of the truck. It was colder here by the lake than she had expected. She reached back into the cab and put on her jean jacket and stuck the half-empty pack of Marlboros into the front left pocket. She walked up the weathered steps and knocked on the door. A girl child—about seven, black hair, with eyes just as black—cracked the door and looked up at her.

  “Your ma home?”

  The kid nodded.

  “Can I talk to her?”

  The girl shut the door and Cash waited, listening to the waves of the lake gently ease to shore. The woman who came to the door was a few inches taller than Cash. She was wearing a pair of black pants and a
man’s worn plaid work shirt. On her feet were scuffed penny loafers, no socks. Her hair was black, wavy with strands that had escaped the rubber band holding it back. And her questioning eyes were as black as her daughter’s.

  Cash said, “Mind if I come in? I’m from down by Fargo, originally from White Earth, but been living and working in the Valley most of my life.”

  The woman said, “My husband is working down there, driving grain truck.”

  Cash said again, “Mind if I come in?”

  The woman opened the door and pointed with a tilt of her head to the kitchen table. Cash went over and sat down. In the center of the table were salt and pepper shakers, the glass kind you find in restaurants. A melamine plate with pale white commodity butter. A bowl with some sugar. An ashtray with a couple roll-your-own ends stubbed out in it.

  Half the table was covered with more melamine plates. Each plate held beads of a different color: red, white, yellow, green. The front piece of a moccasin, half-beaded with a red flower, sat next to the plates of beads.

  On the floor was a stack of three birchbark baskets, each with a different size of pinecones in it.

  The woman placed a cup of hot coffee in front of Cash and motioned to the sugar bowl. She also set out a plate of smoked whitefish and a piece of frybread. She leaned against the kitchen counter and took a sip of coffee from a cup she had poured for herself.

  “Thanks,” said Cash. “I haven’t eaten yet today. I slept along the road last night. By the way, folks call me Cash.” She broke off some of the frybread. Without a word, the woman handed her a knife. Cash put some butter on the frybread.

  While she was chewing the woman spoke. “Did you run into my husband down that way? Folks call him Tony O. When he can, he plays baseball. Hits the ball like that Cuban guy, Tony Oliva, that plays for the Twins. You coming with news about him?”

  She took another sip of her coffee without ever meeting Cash’s eyes. When she spoke again, there was quietness in her voice that hadn’t been there before. “He’s been working the fields down that way. Driving grain truck. He should be home any day now.”

  “How long has he been gone?” Cash asked.

  “Little less than a month.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything for sure.” Cash said. Picking bones out of another piece of whitefish.

  “Sure you do,” the woman said, sitting down at the table and fingering the beads on the half-finished moccasin. “Shoulda been him pulling into the driveway, not a stranger.”

  Cash looked at the woman, then back at the girl-child hiding, peeking out from down the hallway. Looked like there was a bathroom and probably three bedrooms that way. A tattered couch that had suffered one too many jumps from some child. A blue-and-white yarn god’s eye hung above the couch.

  Cash pulled the pack of Marlboros out of her pocket. Offered the pack to the woman who took one. Cash reached into her back jean pocket and pulled out a book of matches from the previous night’s bar. Lit her own cigarette, then handed the book to the woman.

  “You have other kids?” Cash asked.

  The woman’s eyes softened for a second and she answered, “Yes, five more. The bigger ones are out in the woods right now gathering pine cones.”

  “I saw the stand at the driveway. They sell to white folks?”

  “Yeah, those white women paint ’em silver and gold for Christmas decorations. Buy ’em from the kids. The money helps out. Our baby’s sleeping in the back bedroom. She’s the reason Tony O went to drive truck this year. More mouths to feed. Most of the time we just get by with him fishing and trapping. Works on cars sometimes. But this year he decided to go to the Valley. You haven’t said yet whether you seen him or not.”

  Cash took a drag of her cigarette. Blew the smoke out before answering. “I didn’t meet him. And I’d hate to tell you something and be wrong.”

  The woman’s eyes went back to wariness. “Tell me what you know. Long way to drive for not knowing me or him. Know you didn’t just come for breakfast.”

  Cash looked at her and didn’t know of any way to not say what she knew. She had never told anyone before that her husband was dead. She had never been the one to catch someone’s first tears of rage or grief. She didn’t know facts. What she knew was a knowing that had brought her to this woman’s kitchen table. As she sat there and smoked and formed the words she would say, fear and tears built in the woman’s eyes.

  “Has he been hurt?” she asked. She stood up from the table and walked to the counter and to the sink and back to the table. “Is he in the county hospital? Is he hurt?”

  Cash said, “I don’t know. There was a man killed.”

  The woman flung her coffee cup into the sink. It shattered. Out of the corner of her eye, Cash saw the young girl skitter toward one of the back bedrooms.

  “What the hell?” the woman yelled. Then she sat back down at the table. Put her head in her hands. Took a drag of her cigarette. Looked at Cash with eyes even blacker with rage, even blacker with fear. “What the hell you got to tell me?” The words breathed out with smoke.

  Cash said, “I don’t know anything for sure. There was a man killed. The county sheriff, name’s Wheaton, said there was no identification on him. There’s some federal agents coming up this way today. I imagine they’re over in Red Lake right now asking questions. They probably took some pictures and will be asking around trying to identify who died back there.”

  “So what are you doing here? How the hell did you get here? You don’t even know it’s him.”

  “No, I don’t. Wheaton, the county sheriff, thought it might be a good thing if I drove up, tried to find out some things.”

  “You don’t even know if it’s my husband. Lots of men from here go down and work the fields.”

  “I know. I told you I don’t know anything for sure. What I do know is that I dreamt that pinecone stand down at your driveway. Guess that’s why I pulled in here.”

  “You dreamt that?”

  “Yeah. Sorta. Maybe more like I went to the field where this guy died and saw the stand.”

  Tears ran down the woman’s cheeks. “Saw it?” she asked. She fumbled for the cigarette in the ashtray only to realize all that was there were the butts. Cash took out another Marlboro, lit it and handed it to her before lighting one for herself.

  “Yeah. I’m sorry. I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong.”

  “You hope you’re wrong.” The woman snorted. Sat smoking, looking out the window towards the lake.

  Cash heard the girl child coming back down the hallway, stopping at the corner. Not giving up her place where she could run back to safety if need be. She heard a baby babbling. She saw a black Ford sedan pull into the driveway. She and the woman watched the two men—the same two who had stood in the field back down in the valley by Red River—get out of the car. The car doors slamming silenced the woods and the lake.

  The two men stood looking first at Cash’s truck. For a moment, Cash was worried they recognized her Ranchero from the field where Tony O’s body had lain, but the men’s attention quickly turned to the boat, then to the house.

  She decided it might be better to be out of sight just in case. She stood up and said, “I’ll go sit with the baby if you want.” The woman nodded. In those seconds, the anger was gone. The fear was gone. The loss was gone. The woman’s face had become a mirror of emptiness.

  Cash got up and moved down the hallway, following the girl child who led her to the first doorway. Cash paused, looking in the room and seeing an Indian baby swing, gently moving above a double bed covered with a worn quilt.

  There was a sharp rap at the screen door and Cash watched the girl child run down the hallway to the door and crack it open the same six inches she had opened it for Cash. A deep voice said, “Is your mother home?” The little girl shut the door. Looked at her mom and ran back towards Cash. They both went into the bedroom. The girl crawled up on the bed and pushed the swing that was heavy with baby. Cash sat on the edge of th
e bed quietly, so as to overhear the conversation happening in the kitchen.

  “Are you Josie Day Dodge?” was the first question asked by one of the men in the black suits. The woman must have nodded her head yes because the next question was, “We have a photograph here, not a pretty picture. But we need you to look at it.” There was another long pause.

  The baby stirred in the swing, made noises that threatened to turn into wails. The girl looked at Cash and tipped the swing a little so Cash could see the baby. Swaddled tight, arms straight down her sides. All Cash could see were two chubby cheeks, black eyes that must run in the family, and the porcupine-quill hairdo—two-inch long black hair that stuck straight up. When the baby’s eyes caught Cash’s, there was a faint smile and a pleasant babbling sound. Cash leaned back and rolled the baby out of the swing into her arms. The bed creaked with the movement.

  One of the men out in the kitchen asked, “Someone else here?”

  Josie Day Dodge—now Cash at least knew her name—answered in a voice tight with grief, “Just my cousin and the babies.”

  “Mind if we look?” Footsteps without an answer. Neither Cash nor the girl looked up at the man when he stood in the doorway. Cash ran her fingers through the baby’s porcupine hair while the girl sat on her knees next to Cash looking intently into the baby’s eyes. Out of the corner of her eye, Cash saw black polished shoes—of nicer leather than the farmers around the Valley wore to church—and the black legs of creased suit pants. The shoes stood there a moment and then turned and walked back into the other room.