Death Where the Bad Rocks Live

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “I’m investigating Gunnar Janssen’s death.”

  “Ham said he’d been found with a bullet hole to his head someplace in the Badlands.” Dozi chuckled.

  “You don’t sound too upset.”

  Dozi shrugged. “Gunnar always was a chickenshit. I always thought that bastard fled to Canada when he lost his school deferment.”

  “What do you know about his death?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Judge High Elk said Gunnar may have upset some hawks with his anti-Vietnam activities. That piss you off back then?”

  “Not enough that I would hurt the little bastard for it. We argued now and again, but we always parted friends.”

  “I understand you hiked that part of the Badlands where Gunnar’s body was found back in your college days. Even Judge High Elk said you were both on Pine Ridge looking for Gunnar the week after he went missing. You with the judge all that time? Maybe Gunnar was alive when you found him back then.”

  Dozi dropped the feet of his chair onto the floor and stood. He was several inches shorter than Manny, but put together like he could safely walk Harlem or Watts at night. Even Pine Ridge during a powwow. “You accusing me of offing Gunnar?”

  “Maybe you found him in 1969. And he was alive then. Or maybe you’re protecting someone else that found him alive.”

  “Why would I have wanted Gunnar dead?”

  Manny scooted the chair away from the desk. “Who knows. But it’s more than coincidental that you and the judge went to the reservation the same week he went missing. Too coincidental, like someone fitting your description waltzed into the Spearfish PD and seized the arrest report along with the microfiche. I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  “What arrest report?”

  Manny had gotten used to interviewing people who lied for a living, professional criminals who could weave tall tales while they wept, or feign anger as they swore on their mothers’ graves or to God on Bibles. Manny recognized Dozi had evolved beyond that category of professional liar, into the realm of someone who was comfortable lying and believing it. His expression remained flat until a slight grimace broke across his face. “You sure it was me?”

  “Sure enough that we could take a ride to the police department in Spearfish and let the records clerk eyeball you.”

  “What makes you think it was me? She mention grease?”

  “Why would she?”

  Dozi jabbed his thumb in his chest. “The way I reek, someone could smell grease on me a block away. Hardly what a Secret Service man might smell like. And these.” He pointed to his oil-soaked combat boots.

  “Let’s say you clean up pretty good.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Looks like a black suit waiting to go to the cleaners.” Manny kicked the laundry bag under the desk, and the shoes beside it. “Nice pair of polished wing tips. I’ll bet you look just fine in your black suit and shoes, dark aviator glasses that’re around here somewhere. I’ll bet you could fool any secretary at a small police department.”

  Dozi’s hand went to the bulge in his shirt pocket. “Got no time to waste driving to Spearfish. Sturgis Bike Week starts in two weeks. And I have to help Ham prep for Senate hearings before that. Besides, Ham don’t like his friends being harassed.”

  “You saying Judge High Elk would interfere with an open homicide investigation? Now how would that look in front of the Senate hearings?”

  The smile fled Dozi’s face and his brows merged into a menacing stare. This must be the scary look Helga referred to, Manny thought, because a tingle of fear crept up his spine, and his elbow brushed his Glock in the holster under his jacket. Dozi leaned across the desk and his thick, callused hands rested on the edge as if he intended to spring over it. Thoughts of being locked in an angry gorilla’s cage kept creeping into Manny’s mind. “I don’t want any of this entering into the hearings. Got it, Agent Tanno?”

  “I’ll do my job. If it lands on the steps of the Capitol during the Senate confirmation hearings, so be it.”

  Dozi stepped around the desk, and Manny felt the pistol with his forearm, gauging if he could draw it before Dozi had him by the throat. He concluded he couldn’t. “Maybe I did make that arrest report disappear. Maybe I can make most anything disappear.”

  “Maybe you made Gunnar disappear.”

  “And maybe I can make weasels that fabricate lies about Ham disappear.”

  “Now you’re threatening me. Maybe I go to the federal prosecutor and get a warrant out for you. They don’t take threats on federal agents lightly.”

  Dozi sat on the edge of his desk, his eyes narrowed, fists clenched, and Manny expected him to spring over the desk. Let him, he thought, his hand falling on a crescent wrench at the corner of the desk. The son of a bitch might get a meal, but I’ll take a good bite out of him on the way down.

  “Do what you need to, but I don’t expect Gunnar’s death to taint Ham’s chances of that appointment.”

  His eyes locked with Manny’s for a long moment before Dozi turned on his heels and disappeared into the shop. Manny wasn’t aware he’d been holding his breath in anticipation of Dozi’s attack. He breathed deep now, knowing he’d come close to fighting for his life. He’d wanted to tell Dozi he had nothing that would come out in the Senate hearings, no proof that he or Ham knew about Gunnar’s murder, a murder apparently swallowed by the Stronghold, a place that kept all its secrets safe.

  CHAPTER 14

  FALL 1934

  Senator Clayton Charles drew in a deep breath, holding it for a long moment before letting it out. His horse snorted as he stood in the stirrups glassing the Badlands with his binoculars. “It’s great to be out of the city.”

  “Too many people, huh?” Moses Ten Bears looked down into the valley, scouting for the telltale movement of antlers among the cactus and sagebrush and dead cottonwoods dotting the dry creek bed below.

  Clayton massaged his backside and handed his binoculars to Moses. “As hard as this is sitting the saddle for the last week, it beats being in D.C. People make me nuts there. I tried driving there, but all I manage to do is go in circles and get lost.”

  “Maybe you legislators should straighten out the roads there. Pass one of those cockamamie laws you rush through when it benefits the wasicu.”

  “Now don’t get started on that again. Roosevelt has appointed John Collier secretary of the Interior. Good man. Very pro-Indian. He’ll push for laws that’ll help the tribes. Besides, the traffic in D.C. is a local problem—not one for the U.S. Senate. But let’s find that buck out there with Samuel’s name on it.”

  “Where is Samuel?” Moses looked around for the boy, finally spotting his roan gelding picketed beside a rock outcropping. “There is his horse, but where is he?”

  Clayton accepted the binos and let them dangle by a leather thong around his neck. He pointed past the gelding to a large mesa, large and lifeless like the rest of the Badlands. “Renaud spotted a nice buck grazing with some does close to your cows. He and Samuel took off across country.”

  Moses cursed under his breath. Wakan Tanka keep me from hurting that ignorant White man from New York when I catch up with him. “I knew I should have refused to let that blowhard come hunting with us.”

  Clayton exaggerated a pained look, his mouth drooping down sadly. “He only wanted to bag a buck he could hang in his office. What did he do wrong?”

  Moses ignored Clayton and dismounted, tying his mule to a clump of sagebrush. “Leave your horse. Quickly.” Moses slung his rifle across his back and started on a steady trot toward the saddle of hills Clayton had pointed out, looking at the ground as he turned toward the sun, reading shadows, imperfections, places that pointed where Samuel and Renaud had gone.

  Clayton ran to catch up. “Slow down.”

  Moses glanced over his shoulder but didn’t slow. Clayton was a running back in college, but he struggled to keep pace with the steady gait Moses set.

  Moses came to the crest of a hill a
nd shielded his eyes from the light. Clayton stopped beside him, doubling over for breath as he held his side. “What the hell’s the rush?” Clayton sucked in air, wheezing. “Samuel knows how to get back to the cabin. He won’t lose Renaud.”

  “I’m not worried about that. They are headed toward where the cows go when they thirst. They are going to the place where the bad rocks live.”

  “What the hell you talking about, where the bad rocks live?”

  “The place where wakan sica—the evil sacred ones—live. There.” Moses pointed to two tiny figures walking up a hillside leading to a saddle of dirt. Moses started toward them when Clayton grunted. Moses glanced back as Clayton stumbled over a cactus before losing his balance on the popcorn shale and tumbling to the ground.

  “Catch up when you can.” And Moses disappeared over the hill.

  Moses caught movement to his right. Samuel and Renaud had crawled to the rim of the saddle nestled between two high hills. Renaud struggled to get the rifle off his shoulder, the sling hung up on his shirt that was more suited for an African safari than a Badlands hunting trip. Samuel shouldered his own rifle, taking aim at a deer in the distance, when Moses yelled, clamoring up the dirt hill beside them, waving his arms. The buck eyed them for a brief moment before darting over the ridge.

  Samuel took his rifle from his shoulder. “What did you do that for? That’s the best buck I’ve seen all year.”

  Moses glared at Renaud, the fat man with the marked French accent still extricating himself from his rifle sling. “The cows.” Moses chin-pointed below to four cows that gathered around an alkaline watering hole near where the deer had disappeared.

  “We wouldn’t have shot your cows. I know better than that.”

  “I know you would not have.” Moses ran his hand through Samuel’s hair and looked into the boy’s ice blue eyes. Other children taunted him, Moses had heard, because of those blue eyes. Clayton’s eyes. Moses had wanted this hunting trip to be special for Samuel, something he could keep and hold aloft for the other boys to see when they were being mean and vicious to him. But he had to protect Samuel. “You cannot come to this place.”

  “Same as any other in the Badlands.”

  Clayton stopped beside them and bent over, gasping to catch his breath as wind-kicked white alkaline dust swirled around him and clung to his sweat-drenched face. He looked askance at Renaud LaJeneuse still wrestling with his rifle sling. He leaned over and moved it off the fat man’s shoulder. “You’re not going to frighten us with that old legend about the rocks again.”

  Moses frowned at him. “This is where the bad rocks live and you should not—we should not—be here. Bad things happen here.”

  “What bad things?” Renaud watched the hills wide-eyed as he fingered his rifle. “Only bad things around here are Indians that don’t like us White men, n’est ce-pas?”

  “There is at least one Indian here that is growing a dislike for a particular White man.” Moses put on his best sneer and towered over Renaud. He moved away, his eyes darting between Moses and clumps of sagebrush high enough to hide a man. Ever since Clayton had showed up at the cabin with the Frenchman from New York, the man had been looking over his shoulder. Indians, he said, were still on the warpath, hunting and scalping White men wherever they found them. Or that was the claim around his New York law office. All the man could do since coming here to hunt was worry about a raiding party. And sweat. Kills Behind the Tree had told him stories about French traders, honorable men, decent men, men that treated the Lakota with respect in their dealings with them. Men unlike this fat, unkempt man from New York City.

  “Is that true about the rocks?” Renaud’s fear was rubbing off on Samuel. His eyes darted to the underbrush as if expecting something to jump up and pounce on them.

  Moses bent low and draped a hand around the boy’s shoulders. “There is truth to every legend, even one as old as that. You must promise me never to come here again. Never go to that land between those large buttes.”

  “I promise,” Samuel said solemnly. “But where will I find a buck as big as that?”

  “I will show you another place. We will eat venison tonight.”

  Samuel’s face lit up.

  “How about we shoot one of those scrub cows.” Clayton had marginally recovered as he continued gasping for breath. “There’s not much to them, but we could have some thin steaks, though we’d get more meat out of a mulie. Those critters yours?”

  Moses nodded. “What is left of them. I never said I was a good rancher. Just said I tried my hand at it.”

  One cow raised its head and looked in their direction as if knowing they were talking about them, then hung its head in shame once more as it lapped at the murky water in the pool. Flies clustered around the critter’s face, yet it didn’t even have the strength to swat them away with its tail.

  “There’s something wrong with them. Copper deficiency maybe. Sulfur or iron in the water. Supplements might help. Or mineral blocks.”

  Moses shook his head. “Maybe you did not notice it ’cause you live in Washington, but there is a Depression going on. And this is one Indian that cannot afford supplements for his cows. This is not exactly the Charles Town Ranch.”

  “No shit.” Clayton sat on a rock and shook out a Chesterfield. He offered Moses one, but he shook his head.

  “I’ll take one.” Clayton gave Renaud a cigarette that the fat man slipped into a brass holder before lighting.

  “Up until the day he died Dad never had to give cows supplements at Charles Town—the grazing at the ranch was that good.”

  “Made no difference, though, when the bank foreclosed on him.” Moses saw the pain in Clayton’s face, and he regretted bringing up the foreclosure that had driven Randolff Charles to slip a rope around his neck and step off the barn loft one overcast afternoon.

  “Still, those critters lack something,” Clayton said quickly as if expelling the bad memories. “They’re pretty sluggish.”

  “The bad rocks make them sick.”

  “What’s with these bad rocks?” Renaud watched smoke rings filter skyward. “Rocks don’t live, let alone hurt people.”

  Moses took off his Stetson and wiped the sweat inside with a bandanna. “Everything lives: the rocks, the trees, Mother Earth. Everything you see has a soul. Everything you see lives. The bad rocks live. And they live to make their revenge on men who cross their path.”

  Clayton laughed and flicked his cigarette butt into a clump of sagebrush. “Will you leave that legend alone for one day and find Samuel a decent-sized deer. I’m starving for something besides rabbit and porcupine.”

  Samuel picked up the burlap firewood sling and shut the cabin door behind him. Moses watched him leave before he returned to the painting propped on his easel. He mixed beef tallow with the earth paste to bind it to the muslin cloth.

  “I would like to spend more time with the boy.”

  Moses flicked his match into the woodstove and shut the metal door. “Then why do you not?”

  Clayton shrugged. “Been busy.”

  “You are his father.” Moses mixed yellows and dark purples until he got the nightshade he wanted and began dabbing it on the canvas. Renaud had brought pigments from his native France, and canvas as a peace offering to Moses, and Moses used them sparingly.

  “You know what the other boys call Samuel? They call him atkuku. Bastard. And if you ever cared enough to ask him, you would know he got that shiner from taking on half the school bullies that call him that. The boy needs a father.”

  “I’ve been tied up lately…”

  “And Hannah needs a husband. She is a very good woman.”

  Clayton flung his cigarette butt into the stove. “Damn it, we’ve been over this a hundred times. I don’t have time for a family right now.”

  “But you got time to plan for one of those socialite weddings you politicians are so famous for.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Clayton said, his eyes darting to the door. �
��Renaud will come back any moment and I don’t want him hearing about any wedding. How’d you find out?”

  “Maybe I had one of my visions about…what is her name, Heaven?”

  “Heather.”

  “And she is White, so my vision tells me. I am sure that will help your political career in Washington, even though it will leave no chance for a family here with Samuel and Hannah.”

  Clayton turned, his fists clenching in time with the tensing of his jaw muscles, and Moses recognized the fire in his eyes he saw that first night he met Clayton at the dance, the fire that forced him to beat two Lakota boys senseless. “Haven’t I done all I could for the Sioux? You know Pine Ridge has more than its share of WPA projects. That’s my Washington political clout making that happen.”

  Moses set aside the badger brush, and mixed burnt ashes with blueberry stain on his palette with a thin knife. “Your influence is all over the reservation,” he said as he peeked around his easel at Clayton. “You are selling more mniwakan on Pine Ridge than ever before.”

  “I haven’t sold whiskey here since Prohibition ended.”

  “I know you do not—you have Alan Brave Heart Bull running shine for you.”

  “Shush. I told you I quit,” Clayton whispered, his fists clenched into balls as he watched the door. Clayton could snap at any moment, and Moses had no desire to hurt him again. They’d been friends too long. “Set the table while I see if the wahanpi is done.”

  While Clayton set mismatched plates and forks on the table, Moses lifted the lid from the stewpot and tested the venison stew, adding more salt just as Samuel came in from the cold with a carrier full of firewood.

  “Smells great,” he said and stacked the firewood in the log holder beside the stove. Clayton was a fool. Moses would have given all the visions in the world for a fine son like Samuel. Perhaps Betty and I will one day have a son like him.