by David Treuer
“No,” said Harris. “No, that ain’t true.”
The sheriff looked hard at Felix.
“So that ain’t true.”
“That’s my girl,” said Felix.
“So it is true.”
“That’s my girl,” said Felix.
“Jesus Christ. Fine. Fine, fine, fine.”
So her body was loaded onto a canvas stretcher, covered with a white sheet, and handed down the narrow stairs like a ham in paper. And Felix, looking very out of place, rode in the back of the cruiser, last in the caravan of official vehicles that sped off toward the county seat, though now there was no rush. Everyone watched them go. Felix sat straight in the backseat with his hands on his lap and his cap dusting the headliner. He looked for all the world like one of those cigar-store Indians; for all the world as though he’d been turned to wood. They watched until the dust and the heat and the grasshoppers—surprised, interrupted—resumed their dreary duties of marking time in a place where time didn’t matter anymore.
* * *
They saw the Jew that day. And they remembered him later when they bothered to think about it. This was 1952, and no one had seen a Jew on the reservation before. Even the men who had served in the war hadn’t seen any. None in Minneapolis in 1944, when they had been fed roast beef at the Milwaukee Road Depot before shipping out. And none in Europe, either. Not alive. Not dressed, anyway, as this one was, in a black suit and a black hat. They saw him step off the train and adjust his hat and wipe his forehead and then disappear into the Wigwam only to reappear a few minutes later with a small suitcase in one hand and a soda in the other and set off down the highway.
“What was that?” asked Billy Cochran.
The others looked after him as he walked out to the highway and turned west, picking his way through the uncut weeds on the shoulder of the macadam.
“Christ Almighty, I think it was a Jew,” said Dickie Jr., who’d been to Mittelbau-Dora.
“A what?”
“The last of his goddamn tribe.”
A NOTE ON SOURCES
Although this is entirely a work of fiction, I consulted many people and many books in the course of constructing it. Books that were particularly helpful were Anthony Beevor’s The Second World War and D-Day: Battle for Normandy. Also very helpful were Jack Myers’s Shot at and Missed: Recollections of a World War II Bombardier, Brian O’Neill’s Half a Wing, Three Engines and a Prayer, and John Comer’s Combat Crew: The Story of 25 Combat Missions over Europe from the Daily Journal of a B-17 Gunner. I have also quoted from the B-17 Pilot’s Training Manual, available at:
http://www.merkki.com/bombardiers_of_usaaf_in_world_wa.htm.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the Lannan Foundation for its generous support. My time spent as a Lannan Resident in Marfa, Texas, saw this novel to completion. I would also like to thank Adam Eaglin and Becky Saletan. I am in debt to you both and couldn’t have done it without you.
I would also like to thank Gretchen Potter and my children, Elsina, Noka, and Bine, for enduring long absences and disappearing acts into the northern woods, the deserts of West Texas, and into those even more baffling interior landscapes where novels are born. My beautiful children—you gave me all the reason to venture out and even better reasons to venture back. Thank you.
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