by Thomas King
“I don’t see why not. He would have needed one to check out all the systems.” Ora Mae lowered her eyes and her voice. “Hear you’ve been hitting on my woman.”
“I just bought her dinner.”
“Platonic, right?”
Thumps hitched his pants. “Absolutely.”
Ora Mae fished a pen out of her drawer and slid it across the desk. “Keep it that way.”
Bridge Street started off as a two-lane road that ran behind the industrial section of Chinook. Once it crossed Lincoln, it turned into a narrow, weedy laneway that dead-ended in the Songbird Trailer Park. According to Ora Mae’s note, this was where Floyd was living.
Number fifty-seven was a beat-up single-wide with a blue-and-white awning and a high porch that sagged to one side. What was it about trailers that Indians liked? Probably the price. Or maybe after being pushed from one end of the country to the other, Native people had gotten attached to having wheels on their homes.
Thumps parked the car across from the trailer.
“You got business here?”
Thumps turned to find a large man in a T-shirt and shorts. Cradled in the crook of his arm was a pump shotgun.
“Or you just a tourist?”
“I’m visiting Floyd Small Elk. Number fifty-seven, right?”
“Cop?”
“No.”
“You got a name?”
“DreadfulWater. Thumps DreadfulWater.”
“Bert,” said the man. “You’re parked in my driveway.”
Thumps couldn’t see anything that resembled a driveway. In fact, there was no room for a driveway, unless Bert moved the trailer off the lot.
“Do you know if he’s home?”
“Ask him yourself.” Bert and his gun headed back inside the trailer. “You got three minutes to move your car.”
Number fifty-seven looked quiet. The screen door was closed, but the inside door was open. It didn’t mean that Floyd was there. Chinook was one of those towns where people actually felt safe leaving their doors open.
Thumps knocked. If Floyd was home, Thumps didn’t want to surprise him.
“Hey, Floyd. It’s me, Thumps.”
The air wafting through the screen door was cool. Floyd had air conditioning. Thumps knocked again and peered in through the screen.
“Hey, Floyd!”
If Floyd wasn’t at Shadow Ranch and he wasn’t at home, half a dozen explanations were possible. Maybe he really was sick and in bed. Or maybe he had gone to the doctor’s. Maybe he was grocery shopping. Maybe he was seeing someone. Or maybe Thumps wasn’t the only person to whom Floyd had talked.
There were those maybes again.
Thumps was running through the range of possibilities when he heard the first sound, the irritating creak of a door opening somewhere inside the trailer. And then silence.
“Floyd?” He tried the screen door. “We need to talk.”
The second sound was hard, quick, and metallic, and Thumps was just able to duck away from the door as the first two shots tore through the aluminum siding where his head had been. He didn’t wait to see where the next one went. He rolled off the porch in one motion, in time to see Bert come charging out his front door.
“Get down!” shouted Thumps as he slid across the hood of his car to the safety of the far side. Two more shots. Thumps heard the first one hit the Volvo. The second zipped across the road and rattled off Bert’s cast-iron barbecue.
“What the hell!” For a large man, Bert was amazingly fast. As Thumps crouched behind his car, Bert pumped and lowered the shotgun in a single motion and blew four large holes in the side of Floyd’s trailer. “Floyd, you stupid sonofabitch!”
If it was possible to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, Thumps was there. In the middle of a crossfire with no place to go. If the shooter in the trailer didn’t get him, Bert probably would. All Thumps could do was huddle against the rear tire as Bert and whoever was in the trailer lobbed bullets at each other.
And then, as quickly as it started, the shooting stopped. No yelling. No gunfire. No birds singing. Just the smoke from Bert’s shotgun and the nasty smell of cordite. Thumps eased his head over the hood of his car, making sure he wasn’t in Bert’s direct line of fire.
“That was a new barbecue, you stupid sonofabitch!” And Bert put two more shots into the trailer, sending Thumps diving back to the safety of his tire. “Thirty percent off at Kmart!”
“Stop shooting!” shouted Thumps.
The trailer looked completely peaceful now. Behind him, Thumps could hear Bert shoving more shells into the shotgun.
“You got a gun?”
“No.”
“I got a pistol in the house you can use.”
Thumps had carried all sorts of guns and rifles when he had been a cop, and he hadn’t cared much for any of them. The National Rifle Association’s assertion that guns didn’t kill people, that people killed people, was disingenuous at best. Actually it was bulls hit. Guns were dangerous. All by themselves, they were dangerous. People just made them more dangerous. When you had one in your hand, you felt invulnerable. You felt protected. You felt empowered. Most of all, having a gun made you feel you had a God-given right to use it, that once you had gone to all the trouble of loading it and cocking it, you should use it.
“Bert.” Thumps slowed himself down, so Bert could understand each word individually. “Call the police.”
“Hell,” said Bert. “No way they could miss that little celebration.”
“Call them anyway.”
Bert stood there for a moment, looking petulant and hurt. “Yeah, well, just remember, I saved your life.”
The inside of Floyd’s trailer was dark and cool and didn’t look much the worse for wear—if you didn’t count the bright sunshine streaming in through the bullet holes in the walls. One of Bert’s blasts had hit the stove and shattered the glass front. Another had blown a hole in one of the cupboards, and thick brown liquid was dripping onto the counter. It looked like syrup, but Thumps wasn’t all that interested in knowing whether he was right or not.
“Floyd.”
The living room and kitchen were empty.
“Floyd, it’s Thumps. I don’t have a gun.” Thumps eased the bathroom door open. “That was Bert.”
If Thumps had been in the trailer when Bert opened up, he would have headed for the bathtub. But this idea wouldn’t have been as good it sounded. Instead of cast iron and porcelain, the tub was one of those thin plastic affairs that could barely hold water.
He worked his way down the narrow hall. Floyd was in the master bedroom. On the floor. Thumps didn’t have check the man’s pulse to see whether he was dead or alive.
“Jesus, did I do that?”
Bert was standing in the doorway, his shotgun at the ready.
“No, you didn’t do that.”
“Yeah, but I might have.”
“Did you call the cops?”
“Not yet. What do you want me to tell them?”
“Tell them there’s been a shooting.”
“You sure I didn’t do that?”
Thumps sighed and took the shotgun from Bert with a little more enthusiasm than was needed. He worked the pump until he was sure the gun was unloaded. “You see any pellet holes in the walls?”
Bert looked around the room. “No.”
Thumps gestured to Floyd’s body. “That look like a shotgun wound to you?”
Bert cocked his head to one side. “No way. Small calibre.”
“Exactly.” Thumps handed the shotgun back to Bert. “Now call the police.”
“So, I didn’t kill him.”
Thumps could feel himself getting cranky. “Better luck next time.”
“Right,” said Bert, and he lumbered back down the hall and out the front door.
Thumps followed him as far as the kitchen. The back door by the side of the refrigerator was open.
The backyard was nothing but hard dirt and sunburnt weeds. The shooter must have left this way. Thumps stood on the steps and looked around. Beyond the yard, the slope ran down to the river. The willows were thick there, and a man could disappear quickly.
Thumps thought about trying to track the shooter. There was no easy way to get through the willows without leaving some sort of sign, a sign that even Thumps could follow. Then again, the man was armed, and tracking him through heavy cover could be deadly.
Maybe Thumps should put Bert on the scent. Men with guns. The idea had a certain poetic tension. Not that the contest would be fair. If the killer was waiting in the willows, Bert would be a large and easy target. Besides Bert wasn’t the killer type. For all his noise, he was probably little more than an irresponsible gun enthusiast.
When Thumps came out of Floyd’s trailer, Bert was relaxing on his porch. The shotgun was nowhere in sight.
“You want a beer?” He held up a six-pack.
“No, thanks.”
“You want to know who killed Floyd?” Bert belched once, a controlled and almost delicate burp.
“You know who killed Floyd?”
Bert nodded. “Some people think that because I’m fat, I’m stupid. Bet you get that all the time.”
Thumps sucked his stomach in.
“Being Indian,” said Bert. “People see you’re Indian, and right away they figure you’re going to steal something they have.”
Touché, thought Thumps, more than a little embarrassed that Bert had caught him out.
“I had a couple of Indian friends who used to say they were Italian. But Indian fat or Italian fat or poor-white fat is still fat. You know what I mean?”
Thumps knew exactly what Bert meant.
“So, it pains me to tell you that your friend Floyd was killed by an Indian.”
“An Indian?”
“Sure as hell wasn’t an Italian.”
Thumps didn’t want to ask the next question. “What did he look like?”
Bert opened a can and took a long drink. “Good-looking kid. Skinny. No ass. Maybe twenty. Long hair. Wore it in a ponytail.”
A couple of dozen young men from the reserve probably fit that general description, but Stanley Merchant fit it perfectly.
“You talk to him?”
“He asked me where Floyd lived.”
“What was he driving?
“Green Mustang.” Bert looked over at Floyd’s trailer. “He didn’t park in front of my driveway.”
So, Stick had been to visit Floyd. That was not good news. When Bert repeated his story to Sheriff Hockney, as he certainly would, Duke would see Floyd’s murder as an attempt to cover up Takashi’s murder. And that would settle any questions of Stick’s guilt.
“You hear anything?”
“Heard them yelling at each other.”
“You hear a gunshot?”
“The Simpsons were on.”
“When did he leave?”
“Don’t know,” said Bert. “Before you got here. He a friend of yours, too?”
Thumps looked back down Lincoln Street, out past the Songbird Trailer Park gates. In a little while, the sheriff’s white Ford would be tearing along the road, and Thumps would have to explain what he was doing at Floyd’s place and how the trailer had gotten shot up. No matter how Thumps tried to slice his story, it was going to come out thin.
“No point your waiting around,” said Bert. “Sheriff’s going to have a lot of questions.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
“Not going to lie,” said Bert. “He’ll ask me about Floyd, and I’ll tell him what I know. Then he’ll ask me about the holes in Floyd’s trailer, and I’ll have to tell him about getting shot at.” Bert looked at his barbecue with mournful eyes. “Just got it two days ago.”
“He’ll ask you if anyone came by to see Floyd.”
“Maybe. And if he does, I’ll have to tell him about the kid with the Mustang.”
“He may ask you if there was anyone else.”
Bert smiled, and Thumps could see that he had been wrong. The man did have a sense of humour. “Maybe he will, and maybe he won’t. Not my place to do his job.” Bert waved his hand toward the entrance to the trailer park. “Of course if he finds you here, I won’t have to tell him anything.”
“Thanks.”
“Hell,” said Bert, “you didn’t shoot my barbecue.”
Thumps was out of town before his breathing returned to normal and his heart stopped banging around in his chest. Things were definitely getting out of hand. Takashi was dead. Floyd was dead. The sheriff was not a happy man to begin with. Two killings in his town in a week were going to make him downright unpleasant.
THIRTEEN
Thumps did not drive to the townsite and the band offices. Claire would probably still be stuck in meetings, and the last thing Thumps wanted to do was to exchange artillery rounds with Roxanne. At the top of Old Man Coulee, he turned off and headed west. While no one on the reserve owned land outright, different families had occupied particular pieces for so long, no one questioned their right to be there. The high, hard ridge at the foot of the mountains, and the circle of bottom land that had been created as the Ironstone looped its way south, had always been Merchant land. It had been Claire’s great-great-grandfather’s summer place. Her great-grandfather had built a cabin there. Her grandfather had added a barn.
Her father had left the land, moved his family into the townsite, and gone to Los Angeles to find work. While he was away, the barn burned down, and the cabin collapsed under the weight of wind and weather. But when he returned, years later, the land was still there. He didn’t build anything but he did what his great-grandfather had done and moved his family onto the land each summer. When her father died, Claire did what her great-grandfather had done and built a house.
Claire’s house sat on high ground overlooking the river. It was a pre-fab house, a remnant of one of the many economic ventures that the tribe had been encouraged to try. The majority of these had been the bright ideas of some eager bureaucrat in Washington, ideas that were generally ill-conceived, always under-funded, and never supported any longer than the next election.
The house was a long rectangle wrapped in sky-blue-and-white aluminum siding, and it reminded Thumps of Floyd’s trailer, except that it was larger and didn’t have wheels. It was not a pretty house, nothing like the ones featured in the home-and-garden magazines, and Claire’s only attempt at landscaping had been to drop a pad of four large concrete slabs in front of the porch. The rest of the yard was dirt and long grass. Thumps had always thought that houses on the prairies looked tentative, as though they didn’t quite belong, as though they had paused on the land to rest a while before moving on.
He pulled his car to the west side of the house where no one could see it from the road. Normally, he would have left it out in plain sight so Claire wouldn’t be surprised when she came home, but there was the off-chance that Stick might show up, and if he saw the Volvo parked in front of the house, he might run.
As Thumps sat in his car and waited, his stomach began growling, and he suddenly realized that he had missed lunch. The cherry pie and coffee were long gone, and the shootout at Floyd’s trailer had delayed dinner. Now he was stuck in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to eat. Maybe Claire would feed him when she came home.
Thumps got out of the car and walked to the edge of the ridge. Below him, the Ironstone snaked across the prairies, black and silver in the early evening light. The temperature was beginning to drop, but it would never fall anywhere near comfortable. Thumps settled in on the shady side of a basalt outcropping and watched the river.
Now there were two deaths. Takashi’s was still a mystery, but Floyd’s was simple enough to figure out. He had been killed because of what he knew or what he thought he knew. Had he tried to extort money from the killer? Why had Stick gone to see Floyd? A teenager with a passion for justic
e and an ex-con with a taste for larceny shouldn’t have much in common. Yet Bert’s description left no doubt that Stick had been to the trailer.
In the end, everything came back to Stick.
Claire didn’t get home until the sun was long gone behind the mountains. As soon as he saw her car coming up the road, Thumps stepped out from behind the house so she would have time to adjust to his being here.
“Hi.”
Claire had a dress on and she looked good, but she didn’t seem any happier than the day before, and as she stepped out of the car, Thumps realized that his appearance had probably raised her hopes. He tried to look as sombre as possible.
“Nice dress.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“What?”
“You don’t have to look like bad news.”
“It’s not all bad news.”
“You found Stanley?” Claire could see the answer on his face, and Thumps knew it.
The mountains had turned a deep blue in the evening air, and the dark clouds were ringed with light. Thumps didn’t want to tell Claire about Floyd. Not right away. Not with this panorama to look at. Not until he got something to eat.
“You eat yet?”
“Why?” said Claire. “You asking me out?”
Dinner was hot dogs and baked beans out of a can. And a salad. All in all, it was good. The ketchup helped. Claire didn’t say much. A little shop talk about the council and about Roxanne’s showing up at the band office with a new boyfriend.
“Where’s he from?”
“Why does he have to be from somewhere else?”
It was a rhetorical question. Roxanne had long ago worked her way through all the men, eligible and otherwise, in the immediate vicinity.
“They serious?”
“Roxanne thinks so.”
“That why you’re wearing a dress?”
Claire dumped her plate in the sink. “Had a meeting with the bank. And the FBI gave us a call.”
“Takashi?”
“Dead body on reservation land is an FBI body.” Claire stood by the sink and looked out the window. “You know that.”
Which was all Claire needed—the FBI, the sheriff, and Genesis Data Systems, all scurrying around the reserve, turning over stones, kicking up dust, and making a nuisance of themselves.