Death Where the Bad Rocks Live

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “I’d leave him alone.”

  “He’s all right. I think he’s warming up to me.”

  Manny spotted the cat curled under Clara’s car and reached in to ease the cat out. It came alive, hissing, leaping on Manny’s bandaged arm. Manny shook his arm violently and the cat lost its hold, skidded into the far wall, and retreated back under Clara’s car. It squatted on its haunches, hissing, demanding a rematch.

  “Looks like he’s warming to you just fine.”

  “Give him time,” Manny said as he walked away, all the while expecting Norman to leap again.

  “Speaking of time, what time will you be on the rez tomorrow?”

  Manny, his eyes darting to the front door of the house, whispered to Willie through the open window. “All depends what time my Viagra loses its potency.”

  CHAPTER 9

  OCTOBER 8, 1927

  “I would aim two inches over his back.” Moses studied the four-by-five mulie through his binoculars. The buck’s wide rack peeked through heavy sagebrush, the deer’s body hidden by the brush. “Yes. Two inches. He is two hundred yards.”

  “I think he’s farther than that.” Clayton snuggled behind the rifle stock.

  “Things seem farther away here in the Badlands. Two inches. Trust me.”

  The .45-70 barked and the muzzle flew up. It settled back down onto the dead juniper where Clayton had rested the gun. Clayton recovered just in time to point at the deer disappearing over the embankment. “Shit! Right over the top of him.”

  “Maybe next time you’ll listen.” Moses stood and cradled his rifle as he started through sagebrush.

  “Where the hell you going?”

  “Get supper.”

  “With a .22?”

  Moses smiled. “I have killed most game with a .22. Trust me.”

  “We should be eating venison.”

  Moses prodded the rabbit roasting over the fire with his knife; the fat dripping down onto the flames crackled and hissed. “We would be if you had listened. We will go out again tomorrow morning and find your trophy buck.”

  Clayton sat cross-legged on the ground in front of the fire and wrapped his saddle blanket around his shoulders. “Gets colder than a well digger’s ass here at night.”

  “Cold and clear.” Moses pointed up to a sky that never ended. As far as he could see, Wakan Tanka had provided the two-leggeds with wonderment they could never fully comprehend.

  “Big Dipper is full tonight.” Clayton shivered and inched closer to the fire.

  “The Old Ones would have said the Seven Council Fires are alive tonight, talking and deciding what they will do tomorrow.” The constellation seemed to move, to wink and to gyrate as it fought to remain free of low clouds obstructing their vision.

  “All I know is a man could freeze to death here in the middle of summer. If we get lost, we’re done for.”

  Moses sliced off a piece of rabbit breast and put it on a plate beside wild turnips and onions. He nodded to the sky as he handed Clayton the plate. “See Wachpi Owanhilla? What you wasicu call the Big Dipper? He will never lie to us, he will always show us the way home as long as we can see him. So do not worry about getting lost.”

  Clayton cut his rabbit breast in two and speared it with a fork, blowing on it as he talked. “We’ve got tomorrow to hunt, then I got to get back to the ranch, and you got that job in Rapid City in three days. If you’d let me drive you we could shave a day off both our trips and have an extra day to hunt.”

  “I hate riding in that car of yours. It is noisy and it smells bad, like you wasicu.”

  Clayton tossed a rock at Moses that bounced off his moccasins. “At least sleep on it.”

  “All right,” Moses said after biting into a rabbit leg. Juice dripped onto the back of his hand and he licked it off. “But you sleep on something as well.”

  “What?”

  “Hannah. When are you going to marry her?”

  “This again? I know your sister-in-law expects me to tie the knot. But I’m a slow starter.”

  “Not so slow that you did not already have a son with her. Samuel is a fine boy, but he needs his father close. And my Hannah needs a husband.”

  Clayton stood and tossed the rabbit bones into the sagebrush before untying his bedroll from his saddle. “I just have to wait. I intend to marry her just as soon as this election is over.”

  “Whose brilliant idea was that?”

  “Dad’s. He likes Hannah well enough. Thinks she’s a beautiful woman and will make me a fine wife. But he figures it’ll hurt my chances if, well, if people…”

  “If people knew you married an Indian? Is it your father that feels that way, or you?”

  Clayton kept his eyes on his bedroll. “This election’s just too important for me to lose. Too important to the Sioux. To all Indians suffering on reservations. You want some politician pushing for assimilation to land the Senate seat again?” Clayton tossed his bedroll beside the fire and grabbed a mason jar of whiskey. He dropped onto the ground and sat warming his feet by the fire. He handed Moses the jar and snatched it away just as Moses reached for it. “I know what you’d do with it—you’d smash it.”

  “And rightly so. You do not need that.”

  “It’s the good stuff.”

  “Not like the bathtub gin you sell us Indians?”

  “Look, I’ve been selling to Indians since I started coming here hunting with you. Your people want it. I can supply it. And not rotgut that will kill them. Can they help it if the politicians outlawed booze?”

  “It has always been outlawed here on the reservation. The stuff you sell them is that cheap crap. We Lakota cannot handle the good stuff, let alone that panther piss.”

  Clayton lit a Chesterfield with an Ohio Blue Tip and tossed it into the fire. “At least people know what I sell them won’t hurt them.”

  “Sure it does. Look at all the broken homes, the failed families because of that. Besides, the cheap stuff has the most profit margin.”

  Clayton laughed. “Guess you have been studying other things than being a medicine man.”

  “Sacred man. I know some things of healing the body. What I heal is Indian sickness—things that come out of the night and whisk a person’s soul away. Like that rotgut that whisks a man’s will away, steals his ambition to be more than another drunk passed out under a rock.”

  Clayton shivered and wrapped his blanket tighter around him as he stared wide-eyed past the fire into the night. “You’re too busy studying the old ways that you forget there are new ways to be understood, new things coming down that will affect your people. The best thing that could happen for you Oglala is for me to get elected to the Senate. Then I can introduce legislation that’ll help all the Sioux. And allow me the freedom to marry Hannah.”

  “And be a proper father to Samuel?”

  “Of course.”

  “Spend time with him like a father should?”

  “Look—I’d love to take Samuel to the movies. To ball games.”

  “But you can’t risk being seen with an Indian son?”

  Clayton kicked a dirt clod. It skipped once along the ground before it bounced off a boulder as big as a Buick. “Dammit, people just don’t see you Lakota like I do. People would judge me by the Indian son I had and there goes the election. At this point I can’t risk people knowing Samuel’s my son, both for my election and for what I can do for the reservations.”

  Moses thought of the wasicu, of their need for status, their need for money. “And if people knew you had a atkuku wanice, a son without a father, people would not give you the money you want.”

  “Elections cost money—more than even my father’s willing to invest—and my liquor sales go into that election fund. Now how about that extra day hunting? I promise to drive you to work on that warehouse project.”

  “It is a hotel,” Moses corrected. “The Alex Johnson, at least it will be when it is finished. That railroad man sent a man all the way to Pine Ridge just to ask
me to paint for him. That is money I will come by honestly that will help my people more than your moonshine.”

  Clayton shrugged and took another short pull of whiskey. “You going to paint one of your visions for this Alex Johnson?”

  Moses shook his head while he spread his own bedroll by the fire. “No, but he said I could paint anything that comes to mind on those bricks they are laying on the lobby floor.”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “What the hell you going to paint?”

  “A Whirling Log.”

  “You sure you haven’t been tapping into my jar here?”

  Moses laughed. “Never.” He drew in the dirt with a twig. “This is the Log.” He drew opposing right angles in the dirt. “See how the hands point clockwise—it is the Navajo’s powerful solar symbol.”

  “You think anyone will know what this means a hundred years from now, when they trample on the bricks as they’re hauling their luggage into the hotel?”

  “Someone will. Trust me.”

  Clayton bolted upright and his head hit the side of the cabin beside his cot. “What the hell’s going on? What’re you doing?”

  “Painting.”

  Clayton fished his pocket watch out of his trousers draped over a chair at the foot of the bunk. “I can see that, but at friggin’ five o’clock in the morning?”

  “And?”

  “And it’s too damned early.”

  “You said you wanted to get an early start on that mulie.”

  “But not this damned early.”

  Moses laid his palette beside the partially finished muslin cloth and covered it against the rising morning heat. “The Old Man is Dancing. Or as you White men say, daylight is burning.”

  “What old man?”

  Moses laughed and handed Clayton a cup of coffee to help shake off the sleep. He pointed to the rays of light coming through the cabin’s solitary window. “Those rays of light every morning is the Old Man Dancing. He signals another day, another adventure. I love this time because you can see the Old Man and the Anpao Wichanpi.”

  Clayton swung his legs over the bunk and cussed as he spilled hot coffee on them. “I don’t want to go out and spot the Morning Star again. If I get up at all it’s to have some breakfast.”

  “Fair enough.” Moses bent and opened the trapdoor under the cabin that contained his perishables protected from the Badlands heat by cool sand. He grabbed bacon he’d cured last week and sliced off enough for Clayton. He added wood to the cookstove and waited for the stove to heat. Shimmering heat rising upward and sideways from the wind whistling through chinks in the cabin made the paintings leaning against the walls seem to live, to move. Moisture popped off the skillet as he slapped the bacon into a frying pan. “Hand me those eggs.”

  Clayton grabbed four eggs that Moses had liberated from a sparrow’s nest yesterday. “What the hell’s this supposed to be?” Clayton had tossed the cloth covering the painting back and stood, head cocked, scratching his testicles while he eyed the painting. “Looks kind of spooky.”

  Moses snatched the cloth from Clayton’s hand and covered the painting again. “It is Hiram Crow Foot’s vision. And it is personal.”

  Clayton backed away as he threw his hands up. “Sorry.”

  “No harm.” Moses turned back to the cookstove.

  “You know you could make some serious money selling your paintings.”

  “They are not mine. They belong to others.”

  “But you said most folks don’t want them when you’re done. That they throw them away when they see them, right?”

  The wind carried the odor of bacon and eggs past Clayton’s nose. “What else good would they ever be?”

  “They will help my people. One day they will.”

  “How?”

  Moses shrugged. “Not sure. Just got the feeling.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Manny reached over and turned off KILI. The powwow music gone, his headache instantly subsided.

  “Not much different than that Scandinavian hip-hop you’re always listening to. Even Janet would agree with me.”

  “Polka is not hip-hop. And where’s your trainee this morning?”

  “I convinced Uncle Leon she should do some background research on Marshal Ten Bears.” Willie smiled and turned off BIA 18 toward Oglala. Once, this part of the reservation had been particularly hostile to law enforcement. In the 1970s, FBI agents Ron Williams and Jack Coler were murdered here trying to serve an arrest warrant on an American Indian Movement member. Manny recalled that day when he and his school chums huddled around the police scanner blaring outside the gas station, listening to U.S. Marshals and BIA police rush to the scene. Even now the people here shunned and distrusted authority. And Manny represented all that was hated about the federal bureaucracy. They wouldn’t hesitate to spit on the Great Manny Tanno like any other federal lawman.

  A three-door Mercury, a passenger door missing in action, passed them. Black smoke spewed over the Oglala Sioux Tribal Durango, and Manny tasted the oily exhaust as the Merc limped around them. The old driver brushed a fallen headliner out of his face as he clutched the wheel tightly with one hand and dragged on a cigarette with the other. The car looked like every rez rod on Pine Ridge, with its FREE LEONARD PELTIER bumper sticker in support of the only man convicted in Coler’s and Williams’s deaths.

  “Don’t expect the red carpet here.”

  Manny groped his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes that he no longer kept there for such stressful emergencies; a Camel moment, as he referred to such times. “Tell me about it. People here find out an FBI agent is snooping around and things might get interesting. At least they don’t hate you tribal cops as much.”

  “That’s some consolation. That just means they’ll kill me last.”

  They passed the hamlet of Oglala and continued eight miles farther north, past Reuben’s trailer.

  “We could stop for a neighborly visit, since you get along so well with your brother now.” Willie’s disgust was strong in his voice, his sarcasm biting, his unsaid accusation of Manny associating with a convicted murderer hanging in the air.

  “Reuben and I are trying to work things out. Got to—he’s the only family I got left.” Willie drew in a quick breath and he became silent, morose as he drove, and Manny wished he could take back his words. Willie’s aunt Lizzy had been the only family he had left, and now he didn’t even have her. It hadn’t helped when Manny had pointed out that he did have family, that Reuben was his uncle by marriage to his aunt Lizzy. That reinforced Willie’s belief that Reuben’s criminal influence had been his aunt’s eventual downfall. All Willie had were the monthly visits she was allowed since being admitted to the psych ward at the state hospital.

  Manny wanted to give some words to ease Willie’s pain, but he had none. All Manny could do was empathize with him. Manny felt his own guilt that he’d betrayed Reuben for the past twenty-five years, believing his brother guilty of the murder that sent Reuben to the state penitentiary. Since returning to Pine Ridge to work the Red Cloud homicide two months ago he learned the truth about Reuben: He might have been a violent enforcer for AIM, but he was innocent of the murder that sent him up. Manny wanted to tell Willie all these things, tell him he knew how it felt to betray one you loved, but he could not. Reuben’s secret was destined to remain locked inside that safe that only he and Reuben could unlock.

  “Tell me how things are going with Doreen,” Manny said, quick to get Willie’s mind off his aunt Lizzy. “Last you mentioned, you two were getting pretty serious.”

  Willie stopped in the road to allow a skunk family to cross. Three kits waddled behind their mother, her tail high and defiant in the air, challenging anyone to come near her brood. “She suggested I move in with her.”

  “What’s the holdup?”

  “Me. I’m kind of set in my ways. Women always want to change a guy.”

  “Is that something you’ve learned in your vast twenty-th
ree years? Or did you read that in Maxim?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Manny knew. Since moving in with Clara, she had led him down the domestic path, a trail that was both unfamiliar and frightening to him. But a path that just might have more rewards than not, if he gave Clara a chance. “Maybe you should give Doreen a shot at domesticating you.”

  “And do what? She’s already griping about the way I’ve been dressing…”

  “Well it wouldn’t hurt you to change clothes once a week.” Manny flicked dried egg off Willie’s shirtfront.

  Willie slapped Manny’s hand away. “Then she wants to know wherever I go. It’s none of her business.”

  “It is if she cares about you.”

  Willie cranked up the music again and Manny knew their conversation was ended for now.

  They continued in silence on the road toward Red Shirt Table. Willie slowed when he found the two-track that led to Sophie High Elk’s house. Deep ruts remained from when it last rained, and Willie fought the wheel to keep the Dodge on top of them. Milkweeds and cocklebur bushes had claimed the road, but a few pushed into the dirt showed a vehicle had recently driven these ruts.

  “I’d feel better if we could have called her first.”

  “Protocol?” Manny shrugged. “All that would have done is alert her we were coming, and she’d be gone when we got here. Or have her story rehearsed about Judge High Elk’s whereabouts.”

  “Think she’d lie for him?”

  “Would your mother have lied to protect you?”

  Willie shrugged. “Don’t remember her. I was too little when I came to live with Aunt Lizzy.”

  “Then Elizabeth? Think she’d lie for you?”

  Willie frowned. “She would have before I put her in the loony bin.”

  Manny touched Willie’s shoulder. “You didn’t put her there. She’s sick and needed help. Point is, she’d lie to protect you as surely as Sophie would lie to protect the judge. Besides, it’s not our fault she doesn’t have a phone.”