When Tiffany was very little, the family went to Crow Agency in Montana where her father said he would take odd jobs with a friend. Those were dark times at Crow Agency. The mother and father drank alcohol every day. Her older brother, who walked her to the old Roman Catholic pre-school and later to the Crow School during a long Montana winter of deep snow and low cold, dressed her in jogging pants in the morning, and boiled noodles for her at night. That was how she started at Crow Agency.
The mother and father fell into something Crow elders called waywardness. Drinking and using hard drugs meant fighting. The mother was Shoshone, not a member of Crow Nation, an outsider, but she did not shrink under threat by any rival. She was a slim but wiry woman, and she fought plenty.
One night, Tiffany’s bother crawled into her camping bag and held her on the living room floor while a truck idled outside the tiny Crow Nation house where they stayed. Some people had come to the house to fight their mother.
Three women screamed from out in the night, giant black figures descending on the small house through the high beamed lights of the truck, their shadows rising across the roof and walls. The mother slurred insults from above and the lumbering shadows began kicking the door, buckling it, and the mother told them to wait, and they did, and she went out into the loose gravel of the yard to fight them. The mother was game. She knew how to fight, and most other women, however tough they may be, did not. Being tough and winning fights are two different things, the mother had told Tiffany.
The truck muffler bubbled behind loud voices and feet skidding on gravel. Long narrow giants grabbed and lurched like ecstatic dancers in shadows on the roof and walls above the children on the floor. A woman who was not the mother began shrieking and then went quiet with the dull thudding of blows landing hollow on her body. In the camping bag, the children held one another, afraid the women would come into the house for them, but they never did. Someone panted with effort. There was the sound of dragging across the loose ground, and then the lights of the truck swept out of the room and were gone.
To her brother’s surprise, it was the mother, unconscious, with her face down in overgrown grass when they left for school. She had been bested, three on one. They nudged her to see if she was alive, but Tiffany knew she was. She could feel her fighting. She could feel her asleep, near death, in the yard through the night.
They went from Crow Agency in Montana to Wind River in Wyoming to stay with Grandmother Oldman. They called their mother’s mother Kimama, a Shoshone word for butterfly. It’s what the people called her.
Kimama was a very short, very plump woman, and was quiet but enjoyed company. She walked around her small garden tending to vegetables but otherwise rarely left her three-room house. Kimama would have friends in and Tiffany would play next to the table of women playing hearts. They became aunties of Tiffany and called her their little crow girl and she didn’t know until many years later that these women were young.
On a bright spring day, the mother came to Wind River to take her and her brother back to Crow Agency. The mother was very drunk and her yelling became wailing. She threatened Kimama. The mother threatened Kimama’s life and meant it.
Kimama came in, used the phone for a few moments, and went around back into her garden. The mother came and leaned into the doorway of the house holding open the screen door.
“Where’s Barney?” she said loudly.
“Playing baseball,” Tiffany said.
The mother watched Tiffany a long while. Tiffany watched the television.
“You’re a pretty one. You’ll find out what being pretty means.”
Sunlight framed the mother in the doorway to the dark house, shining her neck, wet with tears. Tiffany watched the big television. Lisa Simpson had won an essay contest on why America is great, had been sent to Washington, D.C., only to witness congressional corruption. The mother held onto the lintel of the doorframe, the screen door pressing her back. A low white car pulled into the driveway and the mother went out to confront it, the screen door banged behind her. Tiffany went into the kitchen and stood on a chair. In the back of the house grandmother walked around in the garden among the new green spouts, in the front, a tall bold-faced Arapaho woman stepped from the car. Her name was Bernice Whiteman and she played cards with Kimama. The people called her Bernie.
Bernie opened the passenger door of the car and told the mother to get in. She was smiling, she sounded friendly. The mother stood a long time, thinking, options working between them. Bernie in a black tank top, standing casually, her bare arms crossed on the roof of the low white impala. The two women watched one another, patiently. Bernie Whiteman rested her chin on her forearms and began to grin. After more time and silence, the mother sat down in the passenger seat, and Bernie drove away. Dust hung over grassy slopes. It was the last time she saw her mother.
Things were good for Tiffany on Wind River. Then Kimama went to the hospital one day and did not come back. Tiffany was thirteen.
Every so often, friends of her grandmothers came by to make sure she was okay and bring her leftovers. Bernie Whiteman came, watched her prepare herself a meal, and drank a crumply can of beer that she wore in the back pocket of jeans that hung from her hips; golden can beneath a braided belt. They talked about school and TV and Bernie told her that if she got any prettier she would fly away, but that she had to be careful, being pretty is a dangerous thing. You need to fly away when you get scared.
Bernie said, “What’s for supper?”
Tiffany fried pork chops and boiled a side of Minute Rice.
Bernie sat and smiled broadly, impressed. She had been drinking and when Tiffany offered food, she refused.
“Is your brother Barney sending you money?”
“Yes.”
“Did Kimama leave a bit for you?”
“Yes.”
“Is the Shoshone Nation giving you a bit?”
“Yes.”
Despite having been raised Crow and being part white; Kimama had seen to it that both Tiffany and Barney were members of the Shoshone tribe. Proving their blood on their mother’s side and recording their names as Oldman, the children became blood Shoshones in band records with a tribal Elder present. That way she could stay at the house.
Bernie was satisfied with the situation and drank down another beer.
Tiffany didn’t tell Bernie that the town store, owned by the Shoshone nation, had a man with reading glasses who worked the cash register. She learned to wait until people left the store, and when it was empty, the man at the register would look over his reading glasses and hand her a can of Campbell’s Chunky soup without speaking. A girl in her grade at the Shoshone school, who always wore dresses, and had tangled hair, told her the secret of Chunky Soup, as she called it. Tiffany walked with the girl, each carrying their can. After Kimama died, Tiffany spoke less and less and the tangled haired girl walked with her more and more. The girl with thick hair that wound into ropey black strings would bike with a can of soup tied in her dress all the way to Tiffany’s house. Her name was Paula Fraser.
Tiffany and Paula entered their teenaged years on Wind River with nothing but time on their side. Paula showed Tiffany how to break in, and Tiffany showed Paula how to steal. Once Paula opened the door of possibilities that came with thievery, Tiffany walked through it boldly, and like most things she tried, she excelled.
Paula spoke passionately about her plans for them one winter night celebrating Paula’s January birthday, drinking wine coolers and smoking nation cigarettes. Tiffany would be fifteen in December. Paula wore a narrow skirt, snug to her thighs. She made it out of a dress from the Good Will charity, shortening it mostly. Punk and rap MP3s played on a small speaker loud in the small house, hugged in deep snow.
“I’m a thief. I live by the thieves’ code.”
Like much of what Paula said, it was lyrics from a punk or rap song. When she wasn’t talking to Tiffany, she had her headphones in, riding her bicycle along rough village roads, or
thumbing rides. Paula had a plan, and now she had a partner. She also had a .32 caliber pistol, a small black autoloader she stole from the middle drawer of a construction superintendent’s desk in her village. She carried it against her belly in the high waistband of her skirt, hidden by the bulk of a wool cardigan. Her black hair turning to dreadlocks, she wore thick black rimmed glasses from the charity bin at the tribal office.
“I’ll dust a motherfucker,” she loved to say.
“You look like the teacher’s pet at a school for the mentally insane,” Tiffany countered.
“I’m a villain and a punk,” Paula said. “Wear your boots if you go to school today, its super cold out,” Paula told her.
“I love you, Paula,” Tiffany said.
“I love you too, dummy.”
“You’re my only true friend.”
Paula based her plan on two facts about the world that she found readily observable: Every man wants to lay you and every woman has something to steal. Even a church has cash. Paula lay on her stomach scrolling through songs on her MP3 player, deciding on a bouncy rap track. She turned over and blew smoke up to the ceiling.
“I’m serious.”
“I’m serious too,” Tiffany said.
“Older kids get caught stealing because they’re dumb. They break into a place without even thinking about it first. They could get killed, shot to shit, without knowing what they died to get their hands on.”
“It’s dumb to take something that’s worthless just to take it and then get caught with it later, or get shot up for nothing. We will only take cash. We will save enough cash to move to the City. We just have to bike around to see where cash is.”
Paula had begun to sketch out robberies and had collected the tools to get into most places.
“The signs above cash registers always say there is no cash on premises. It means that they take the money out when they leave. But if we try a stick up during the day in Washakie, we will get our asses filled with lead.”
They squeezed their slight bodies through a small window into the back office of a gas station along the highway. Tiffany in first, rolling onto a desk. They pried into the cash register on the floor of the store, by the light of the gasoline pumps, mosquitoes swarming over the broad glow in the dull prairie night. A car came by at a strangely slow speed, its headlights washing into the store, they sat still with the cash box on the floor, and the car passed. There was nothing to take.
The second robbery was the same. They snipped the lock off an ice cream parlor and entered, again, nothing of value. The next day, sleeping late on mattresses on the floor at Tiffany’s, they had nothing to show for their effort. They skipped school to go to the City of Lander, a larger centre on the western side of the Reservation with plenty of businesses. They rode their bikes through the streets in the middle of the prairie night, under sporadic streetlights, avoiding dangerous groups of kids by cutting through alleys. Searching and smoking, they stood on their bikes in a back lot until the lights went out in a beauty salon, and waited until the woman got into her car and drove out. They entered with ease but found no cash. That was the night they tried Paula’s plan.
Unlike the insurance business earlier in the week, where they slid in through an unsecured window in a bathroom but again found no money, in the beauty salon, they showed the woman that they had broken in. Leaving drawers open on her reception desk. The next night when the woman left, they followed her to her house and marked it down.
That summer they robbed proprietors by marking where they lived and entered their houses while they were at work and a few times, while they were home asleep, taking the deposit pouches, cash boxes and bank rolls before they had been deposited. These “proprietor thefts” as a local newspaper called them, plagued Lander that year. More shop owners, night managers and businesspeople began to have side arms in their homes. The girls began a collection of pistols, although they were supposed to take cash only, they could use reservation contacts to sell handguns for good money in the city.
At the age of seventeen, Tiffany Oldman and Paula Fraser went to Denver and rented a one-room apartment in a rundown building in a small inner city enclave where American Indians lived.
55.
To the rear of the Jackal’s garage, deputies followed one another in single file; automatic rifles pointed at the long grass, they took position behind a junked eighteen-wheeler.
Sheriff Hargrove watched the front of the garage and motel through the dark tinted windows of a motor coach. His black clothed deputies crowded in around him. Teton County deputies and Jackson police would assault the garage from the graveled lot at the buildings front, with cover provided by deputies in the rear. His assault squad, in full black tactical gear and armor, assault shotguns and automatic submachine guns, had prepared for combat. He’d seen to that.
Sheriff Hargrove felt sharp, for the first time in days. The pulse of combat troops around him absorbed into his own energy, his into theirs, quickening into one another’s pulse, like horses running along the railing in a corral, working in harmony. As the moments fell away, and the prospect of small arms contact became real, his senses focused further and his mind cleared.
The tactical assault team would follow him over the dusty lot of the wrecking yard and into the dank quarters of the heavy equipment garage, a battering ram dropping the door, and he would enter the dark filth of service bays along the office and demand complete passivity from anyone present. He had seen it a hundred times clearing door to door. When you kicked in the door with force, they panic, some panic right and live, some panic wrong and die. With enough force and surprise, sheer aggression carries the moment. It was a part of his mind now, the logic of aggression.
Trouble rarely came from taking a building; trouble came from sitting around waiting beforehand with too much time to think, for tiny details to grow in significance, for loose ends to start to tangle. Trouble always came from letting time offer new risks. An assault team could veer from the plan and look at other options, see problems and patterns where none had been before. Despite all the planning in the planning, there were always moments of uncertainty. In those moments, anything could happen. He could delay, for only a fraction, and let an outlaw biker pull his piece, draw it up and, faced with life in federal prison, pull the trigger on him. In moments like those, you could leave the world. Yolanda, taken care of with enough insurance money for the boys, would have a nice life. A better life than he had given her. A better life than they would have with him. Whatever else about this hardscrabble state, they still honored lawmen. There was still time to be known as a man that had done some good. You only ever had a small window to do something right.
The target’s whereabouts came from Brouwer, of course, the relentless Brouwer. To help make ends meet, Candy Bear Belanger was taking shifts at the motel cleaning rooms. Changing the bed sheets that morning, a shadow came across the small curtained window behind her, along the sidewalk, a figure looked in at her as she smoothed the yellow sheet on the old mattress. Standing in the opened door of the motel room, the sun bright behind him, Donald Swain seemed taller, more physical, as though he had grown. He had been a prospect, nobody, an underling, now he seemed to grow into the door and into the room before her, but he hadn’t moved. Then he was gone. Having watched him enter the service garage, she sat down on the partially made bed. That was early morning.
56.
Paula said they were good looking enough to get real waitressing jobs and it was true. They wrote fake resumes and got jobs as hostesses in nice restaurants a bike ride from their place. Tiffany learned to speak slowly and up in her nose to hide any sound of the reservation. Speaking like that came naturally to Tiffany as she revered the rich white women of reality TV.
“I do it by remembering to say every syllable in each word and look into the other person’s eyes and nod when they speak.”
“Staring into someone’s eyes is freakish, a fucking creep does that,” Paula said.
“Make eye contact and speak slowly until the other person looks away. It means they know you are better than they are.”
Paula lay on her back on the rug smoking, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white,” she said. “It figures you think like you do. You’re half white and half right.” Paula was Shoshone and proud, “Not Arapaho, not a cracker, I’m Newe and true, through and through.”
While Paula’s thefts were basic break-in robberies, Tiffany’s plans were for much more lucrative fraud. One afternoon she took a credit card for payment from a table of four young blonde women with identical hair at Sunday brunch and the Master Card failed. She asked the paying woman over so as not to embarrass her in front of her friends and again the Master Card would not process the transaction. The woman dug through a large leather bag and eventually an Amex responded with payment. After the woman left, her manager, an African American girl only a few years her senior, told her that next time she should ask for an ID. If the card is a fraud, asking for an I.D will scare them and they will pay cash. People worry you will record their name. People use fake credit cards.
Tiffany and Paula walked the blocks of apartments in their neighborhood, bundled in heavy parkas and snow boots, long afternoons searching group mailboxes, through piles of discarded flyers, in recycling bins, for brochures offering new credit cards or offers of extra credit. Some offers claimed easy credit for any application and had partially filled out the form in prospective clients’ names. The girls created credit cards by applying with information pieced together from dumpsters and recycling bins.
They wore scarves at automated teller machines, pulled the entire value of the card in cash, and threw the card away. They went through many cards that winter and were able to fill shoeboxes with cash.
Dream of the Wolf Page 25