by Shadow Prey
“Did Bluebird have any people besides his wife and kids?”
“Huh.” Dooley stopped to think. He was halfbreed Sioux, with an Indian father and a Swedish mother. “He might have an aunt or an uncle or two out at Rosebud. That’s where they’d be, if there are any left. His ma died in the early fifties and his old man went four or five years back, must have been.”
Dooley stared sightlessly through the sunny window. “No, by God,” he said in a creaking voice after a minute. “His old man died in the summer of ’seventy-eight, right between those two bad winters. Twelve years ago. Time passes, don’t it?”
“It does,” Lucas said.
“You want to know something about being an Indian, Officer Davenport?” Dooley asked. He’d stopped cutting Lucas’ hair.
“Everything helps.”
“Well, when Bluebird died—the old man—I went off to his funeral, out to the res. He was a Catholic, you know? They buried him in a Catholic cemetery. So I went up to the cemetery with the crowd from the funeral and they put him in the ground, and everybody was standing around. Now most of the graves were all together, but I noticed that there was another bunch off in a corner by themselves. I asked a fellow there, I said, ‘What’s them graves over there?’ You know what they were?”
“No,” said Lucas.
“They were the Catholic suicides. The Catholics don’t allow no suicides to be buried in the regular part of the cemetery, but there got to be so many suicides that they just kind of cut off a special corner for them . . . . You ever hear of anything like that?”
“No, I never did. And I’m a Catholic,” Lucas said.
“You think about that. Enough Catholic suicides on one dinky little res to have their own corner of the cemetery.”
Dooley stood looking through the window for another few seconds, then caught himself and went back to work. “Not many Bluebirds left,” he said. “Mostly married off, went away east or west. New York and Los Angeles. Lost their names. Good people, though.”
“Crazy thing he did.”
“Why?” The question was so unexpected that Lucas half turned his head and caught the sharp point of the scissors in the scalp.
“Whoa, did that hurt?” Dooley asked, concern in his voice.
“Nah. What’d you . . . ?”
“Almost stuck a hole in you,” Dooley interrupted. He rubbed at Lucas’ scalp with a thumb. “Don’t see no blood.”
“What do you mean, ‘Why?’ ” Lucas persisted. “He cut a guy’s throat. Maybe two guys.”
There was a long moment of silence, then, “They needed them cut,” Dooley said. “There weren’t no worse men for the Indian community. I read the Bible, just like anybody. What Bluebird did was wrong. But he’s paid, hasn’t he? An eye for an eye. They’re dead and he’s dead. And I’ll tell you this, the Indian people got two big weights off their backs.”
“Okay,” said Lucas. “I can buy it. Ray Cuervo was an asshole. Excuse the language.”
“I heard the word before,” Dooley said. “I wouldn’t say you was wrong. And not about this Benton fella, either. He was bad as Cuervo.”
“So I’m told,” Lucas said.
Dooley finished the trim above Lucas’ ear, pushed his head forward until his chin rested on his chest, and did the back of his neck.
“There’s been another killing, in New York,” Lucas said. “Same way as Cuervo and Benton. Throat cut with a stone knife.”
“Saw it on TV,” Dooley acknowledged. He pointed at the black-and-white television mounted in the corner of the shop. “Today show. Thought it sounded pretty much the same.”
“Too much,” Lucas said. “I’ve been wondering . . .”
“If I might of heard anything? Just talk. You know Bluebird was a sun-dancer?”
“No, I didn’t know,” Lucas said.
“Check his body, if you still got it. You’ll find scars all over his chest where he pulled the pegs through.” Lucas winced. As part of the Sioux ceremony, dancers pushed pegs through the skin of their chests. Cords were attached to the pegs, and the dancers dangled from poles until the pegs ripped out. “There’s another thing. Bluebird was a sun-dancer for sure, but there’s folks around saying that a couple years ago, he got involved in this ghost-dance business.”
“Ghost dance? I didn’t think that was being done,” Lucas said.
“Some guys came down from Canada, tried to start it up. They had a drum, went around to all the reservations, collecting money, dancing. Scared the heck out of a lot of people, but I haven’t heard anything about them lately. Most Indian people think it was a con game.”
“But Bluebird was dancing?”
“That’s what I heard . . . .” Dooley’s voice trailed off and Lucas turned and found the old man staring out the window again. There was a park across the street, with grass worn brown by kids’ feet and the fall frosts. An Indian kid was working on an upturned bike in the middle of the park and an old lady tottered down the sidewalk toward a concrete drinking fountain. “I don’t think it means much,” Dooley said. He turned back to Lucas. “Except that Bluebird was a man looking for religion.”
“Religion?”
“He was looking to be saved. Maybe he found it,” Dooley said. He sighed and moved close behind Lucas and finished the trim with a few final snips. He put the scissors down, brushed cut hair off Lucas’ neck, unpinned the bib and shook it out. “Sit tight for a minute,” he said.
Lucas sat and Dooley found his electric trimmers and shaved the back of Lucas’ neck, then slapped on a stinging palmful of aromatic yellow oil.
“All done,” he said.
Lucas slid out of the chair, asked, “How much?” Dooley said, “The regular.” Lucas handed him three dollars.
“I haven’t heard anything,” Dooley said soberly. He looked Lucas in the eyes. “If I had, I’d tell you—but I don’t know if I’d tell you what it was. Bluebird was the Indian people, getting back some of their own.”
Lucas shook his head, sensing the defiance in the old man. “It’s hard to believe you said that, Mr. Dooley. It makes me sad,” he said.
Indian Country was full of Dooleys.
Lucas quartered through it, touching the few Indians he knew: a seamstress at an awnings shop, a seafood broker, a heating contractor, clerks at two gas stations and a convenience store, an out-of-business antique dealer, a key-maker, a cleaning lady, a car salesman. An hour before Bluebird’s funeral was scheduled to begin, he left his car in an alley and walked across the street to Dakota Hardware.
A bell over the door jingled, and Lucas stopped for a moment, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Earl May came out of the back room wearing a leather apron and flashed a smile. Lucas walked back and watched the smile fade.
“I was about to say, ‘Good to see you,’ but I guess you’re here to ask questions about Bluebird and that killing in New York,” May said. He turned his head and yelled into the back, “Hey, Betty, it’s Lucas Davenport.”
Betty May stuck her head through the curtain between the back room and the store. “Lucas, it’s been a while,” she said. She had a round face, touched by old acne scars, and a husky voice that might have sung the blues.
“There’s not much around about Bluebird,” said Earl. He looked at his wife. “He’s asking about the killings.”
“That’s what everybody tells me,” Lucas said. Earl was standing with his arms crossed. It was a defensive position, a push-off stance, one that Lucas had not seen before with the Mays. Behind her husband, Betty unconsciously took the same position.
“You’ll have trouble dealing with the community on this one,” she said. “Benton was bad, Cuervo was worse. Cuervo was so bad that when his wife got down to his office, after the police called her, she was smiling.”
“But what about this guy in New York, Andretti?” Lucas asked. “What the hell did he do?”
“Andretti. The liberal with good accountants,” Earl snorted. “He called himself a realist. He
said there were people that you have to write off. He said that it made no difference whether you threw money at the underclass or just let it get along. He said the underclass was a perpetual drag on the people who work.”
“Yeah?” said Lucas.
“A lot of people want to hear that,” Earl continued. “And he might even be right about some people—winos and junkies. But there’s one big question he doesn’t answer. What about the kids? That’s the question. You’re seeing a genocide. The victims aren’t the welfare queens. The victims are the kids.”
“You can’t think this is right, these people being killed,” Lucas argued.
Earl shook his head. “People die all the time. Now some folks are dying who were hurting the Indian people. That’s too bad for them and it’s a crime, but I can’t get too upset about it.”
“How about you, Betty?” Lucas asked. He turned to the woman, disturbed. “Do you feel the same way?”
“Yeah, I do, Lucas,” she said.
Lucas peered at them for a moment, studying Earl’s face, then Betty’s. They were the best people he knew. What they thought, a lot of people would think. Lucas shook his head, rapped the counter with his knuckles and said, “Shit.”
Bluebird’s funeral was . . . Lucas had to search for the right word. He finally settled on peculiar. Too many of the gathered Indians were shaking hands, with quick grins that just as quickly turned somber.
And there were too many Indians for one guy who wasn’t that well known. After the coffin had been lowered into the ground, and the last prayers said, they gathered in groups and clusters, twos and threes, talking. An air of suppressed celebration, Lucas thought. Somebody had lashed out. Bluebird had paid, but there were others still at it, taking down the assholes. Lucas watched the crowd, searching for faces he knew, people he might tap later.
Riverwood Cemetery was a working-class graveyard in a working-class neighborhood. Bluebird was buried on a south-facing slope under an ash tree. His grave would look up at the sun, even in winter. Lucas stood on a small rise, next to one of the city’s increasingly rare elms, thirty yards from the gravesite. Directly opposite him, across the street from the cemetery and a hundred feet from the grave, were more watchers. The catsup-colored Chevy van fit into the neighborhood like a perfect puzzle piece. In the back, two cops made movies through the dark windows.
Identifying everyone would be impossible, Lucas thought. The funeral had been too big and too many people were simply spectators. He noticed a white woman drifting along the edges of the crowd. She was taller than most women and a little heavy, he thought. She glanced his way, and from a distance, she was a sulky, dark-haired madonna, with an oval face and long heavy eyebrows.
He was still following her progress through the fringe of the crowd when Sloan ambled up and said, “Hello, there.” Lucas turned to say hello. When he turned back to the funeral crowd a moment later, the dark-haired woman was gone.
“You talk to Bluebird’s old lady?” Lucas asked.
“I tried,” Sloan said. “I couldn’t get her alone. She had all these people around, saying, ‘Don’t talk to the cops, honey. Your man is a hero.’ They’re shutting her down.”
“Maybe later, huh?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think we’ll get much,” Sloan said. “Where’re you parked?”
“Around the corner.”
“So am I.” They picked their way between graves, down the shallow slope toward the street. Some of the graves were well tended, others were weedy. One limestone gravemarker was so old that the name had eroded away, leaving only the fading word FATHER. “I was talking to one of the people at her house. The guy said Bluebird hadn’t been around that much. In fact, he and his old lady were probably on the edge of breaking up,” Sloan said.
“Not too promising,” Lucas agreed.
“So what’re you doing?”
“Running around picking up bullshit,” Lucas said. He looked one last time for the dark-haired woman but didn’t see her. “I’m headed over to the Point. Yellow Hand’s up there. Maybe he’s heard something more.”
“It’s worth a try,” Sloan said, discouraged.
“He’s my last shot. Nobody wants to talk.”
“That’s what I get,” Sloan said. “They’re rootin’ for the other side.”
The Point was a row of red-brick townhouses that had been converted to single-floor apartments. Lucas stepped inside the door, pushed it shut and sniffed. Boiled cabbage, a few days old. Canned corn. Oatmeal. Fish. He reached back to his hip, slipped the Heckler and Koch P7 out of its holster and put it in his sport coat pocket.
Yellow Hand’s room was five floors up, in what had once been a common-storage attic. Lucas stopped on the landing at the fourth floor, caught his breath and finished the climb with his hand on the P7. The door at the top of the stairs was closed. He tried the knob without knocking, turned it and pushed the door open.
A man was sitting on a mattress reading a copy of People magazine. An Indian, wearing a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows, and jeans and white socks. An army field jacket lay next to the mattress, along with a pair of cowboy boots, a green ginger-ale can, another copy of People and a battered volume of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Lucas stepped inside.
“Who are you?” the man asked. His forearms were tattooed—a rose inside a heart on the arm nearer to Lucas, an eagle’s wing on the other. Another mattress lay across the room with two people on it, asleep, a man and a woman. The man wore jockey shorts, the woman a rose-colored rayon slip. Her dress lay neatly folded by the mattress and next to that were two chipped cups with a coil heater inside one of them. The floor was littered with scraps of paper, old magazines, empty food packages and cans. The room stank of marijuana and soup.
“Cop,” said Lucas. He stepped fully into the room and looked off to his left. A third mattress. Yellow Hand, asleep. “Looking for Yellow Hand.”
“He’s passed out,” said the tattooed man.
“Drinking?”
“Yeah.” The man rolled off the mattress and picked up his jacket. Lucas pointed a finger at him.
“Stick around for a minute, okay?”
“Sure, no problem. You got a cigarette?”
“No.”
The woman on the second mattress stirred, rolled onto her back and propped herself up on her elbows. She was white, and older than Lucas thought when he first saw her. Forties, he thought. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Cop to see Yellow Hand,” said the tattooed man.
“Oh, shit.” She squinted at Lucas and he saw she was missing her front teeth. “You got a cigarette?”
“No.”
“God damn, nobody ever got no smokes around here,” she whined. She looked at the man beside her, poked him. “Get up, Bob. The cops are here.” Bob moaned, twitched and snored.
“Leave him,” said Lucas. He moved over to Yellow Hand and pushed him with his toe.
“Don’t fuck w’ me,” Yellow Hand said sleepily, batting at the foot.
“Need to talk to you.”
“Don’t fuck w’ me,” Yellow Hand said again.
Lucas prodded him a little harder. “Get up, Yellow Hand. This is Davenport.”
Yellow Hand’s eyes flickered and Lucas thought he looked too old for a teenager. He looked as old as the woman, who was now sitting slouched on the mattress, smacking her lips. The tattooed man stood bouncing on his toes for a second, then reached for a cowboy boot.
“Leave the boots,” Lucas said, pointing at him again. “Wake up, Yellow Hand.”
Yellow Hand rolled to a sitting position. “What is it?”
“I want to talk.” Lucas turned to the tattooed man. “Why’n’t you come over here and sit on the mattress?”
“I ain’t done a fuckin’ thing,” the man snarled, suddenly defiant. He was rake thin and had one shoulder turned toward Lucas in an unconscious boxing stance.
“I’m not here to fuck with anybody,” Lucas sa
id. “I’m not asking for ID, I’m not calling in for warrants. I just want to talk.”
“I don’t talk to the fuckin’ cops,” the tattooed man said. He looked around for support. The woman was staring at the floor, shaking her head; then she spat between her feet. Lucas put his hand in his pocket. The attic space was crowded. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t worry about a couple of derelicts and a drifter, but the tattooed man exuded an air of toughness. If there were a fight, he wouldn’t have much room to maneuver.
“We can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way,” he said softly. “Now get your ass over here or I’ll kick it up between the ears.”
“What you gonna do, cop, you gonna fuckin’ shoot me? I ain’t got no knife, I ain’t got no gun, I’m in my own fuckin’ apartment, I ain’t seen no warrant, you gonna shoot me?”
The man stepped closer and Lucas took his hand back out of his pocket.
“No, but I might beat the snot out of you,” Lucas said. Both the older man and the woman were looking away. If the tattooed man jumped, he would have no support from them. Yellow Hand wasn’t likely to help the stranger, so it would be one on one. He braced himself.
“Take it easy, Shadow, you don’t want to fight no cop,” Yellow Hand said from the mattress. “You know what’d happen then.”
Lucas looked from Yellow Hand to the tattooed man and guessed that the tattooed man was on parole.
“You know Benton?” he snapped. “He your PO?”
“No, man. I never met him,” the tattooed man said, suddenly closing his eyes and half turning away. The tension ebbed.
“All I want to do is talk,” Lucas said mildly.
“You want to talk with a gun in your pocket,” said the tattooed man, turning back to him. “Like all whites.”
He looked straight at Lucas, and Lucas saw that his eyes were light gray, so light they looked as though cataracts were floating across his irises. The man’s body trembled once, again, and then settled into a low vibration, like a guitar string.