Buffalo Jump Blues (14 page)

T
he convenience store clerk had seen her all right. An Indian caught the attention, especially a woman with different-colored eyes. “Like a heeler,” she said. The woman had paid cash to gas two vehicles. The clerk pulled the receipt. They'd been printed at eight twenty-eight, nearly thirty minutes ago. Sean went for the moon, asking if the woman mentioned where she was heading. The clerk shook her head; her dangling earrings were shaped like Idaho, with the hoops attached to the panhandle. “She's pretty,” she said. “Very feminine. She said thank you and smiled. Most people don't do that.”

Sean waited while she ran his credit card for his fill-up, then had to do it again when Joseph walked up holding bags of chips and soft drinks.

“We're going to need munchies,” Joseph said. “You got any tunes? We could buy a CD. Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard. Charley Pride, he's a Montanan. You ever hear him sing ‘The Snakes Crawl at Night'?”

“I don't have a deck. You'll have to settle for talking to me.”

“Hey, the oral tradition, I dig it,” Joseph said.

Sean worked through the gears. Now that he had direction, he considered trying to reach Martha. She'd have the authority to have a trooper stop the Fairlane and hold John Running Boy for a chat. They'd be reaching the I-90 interchange within a half hour and a Fairlane wouldn't be hard to spot. He traced the outline of the phone on his right front pants pocket, then made his decision.

Martha didn't answer, so he speed-dialed the department and reached Judy Woodruff, who patched him through to Undersheriff
Walter Hess. Sean switched the phone to speaker and handed it to Joseph so he could keep his hands on the wheel.

“Gary Hixon, huh? You figure he's the John Doe?”

“That's the name Joseph's brother-in-law took down,” Sean said.

“John Running Boy, would he be armed?”

“He'd be more likely to have a bow than a gun.”

Silence. Then: “I'll see what I can do about posting a patrolman at the interchange. But it's a short staff week, no promises.”

Joseph shook his head. “Shit, man, what are you doing? Making me an accomplice in arresting my own neighbor? You can let me out of this fucking heap right now.”

“Nobody's arresting anybody,” Sean said. “I just want a chance to talk to him before he does something stupid.”

“Like what?”

“Like make himself a fugitive. He isn't going to be able to hide forever. It digs him a hole with the state and makes him look guilty as hell, and the border doesn't mean squat if he's in trouble with somebody else.”

“You're trying to make it sound like you're on his side,” Joseph said. “But aren't you violating some kind of privacy thing?”

“My contract with Ida expired. And she made it clear she doesn't want me to dig any deeper into the ground. Besides, she found the man she hired me to find, or he found her.”

“Then why we laying down all this track? 'Cause you want to know?” The way he said it made it sound absurd. Maybe it was absurd, but they were nearing the crossroads and Sean had other things to think about.

“There's the pig,” Joseph said.

The cruiser was parked in the Lucky Lil's Casino adjacent to the overpass. Sean pulled in beside it and the trooper stepped out. He was crew cut, official-looking in his dark greens and Smokey the Bear hat, the new issue, the hats that didn't make them look like cabdrivers.

“Are you Sean Stranahan? County called with your vehicle description.”

“I'm Sean.”

“Who's your passenger?”

“Joseph Brings the Sun. He came from the Blackfeet Reservation to ID a body.”

“The guy who fell over the cliffs. I heard about it.”

“Yes. Did you see the Fairlane?”

“No. I parked so I could see if the vehicle turned east or west on the interstate or stayed on the two eight seven. I didn't spot a Tercel, either, but compacts look alike, one could have slipped by.”

“If someone wanted to stay out of sight, could he have continued north by bypassing this junction?”

The trooper thought a moment and nodded. “Sure. All you'd have to do is take the Old Town Road a couple miles east of here. Old Town under the overpass to Price, to Hilltop, Salt Gulch, hook back onto the two eight seven on Old Woman's Grave Road. Hidden Montana, there's lots of it just sees tumbleweeds and cattle.”

Sean thanked him and the man said sure and be careful. “You know what they say—‘Ninety percent boredom, ten percent terror.' You pull somebody over who's on the lam, the ratio goes upside down.”

Sean got back on the road, thinking about that. He'd decided to bring Joseph because he thought a friend of John's could act as a conduit if they ever caught up. He saw now that that had been a reckless decision; he had no right to involve an innocent party in what could wind up as a confrontation.

“Hey, man, was that a strip club we passed?”

Sean snapped back to the present.

“Yeah, Puss N Boots.”

“Closest I ever been to a strip club was polar bear day at Kipp Lake, watch some overweight white mama break the ice. You ever been inside?”

“Once. A woman hired me because her husband was coming home late every Wednesday and she didn't buy the explanation. I said I'd follow him, but that would cost her my day rate plus expenses, and she wanted me to solve it in my armchair for a flat fifty. So I told her to check the mileage before and after his work next time around, and it's twenty-two miles. I take a compass and make a circle on the map with a radius of eleven miles. The line intercepts the club. They advertise half cover to see the show on Wednesdays, it's a regular ad in the
Star
. By coincidence, the next Wednesday I'm going fishing on the Jefferson and duck in to see if he's there. He's tucking a bill into the G-string of a dancer who's got a balcony you could do Shakespeare from. I snapped a photo for the wife.”

“I'm impressed, man,” Joseph said. “No, I really mean it. I would have never thought of a compass.”

“Don't be too impressed. He threatened to beat me up and she stiffed me the fifty, so how smart was I?”

The urgency of the past two hours was in the rearview now; they'd either find them or they wouldn't. Whatever happened it would be hours down a deserted highway, owls hunting in the headlights, the occasional glimpse of stars in an overcast sky.

“Is that a weasel tail in your braid, Joseph?”

“Yeah, an ermine. It's considered sacred because it changes color with the season, so it symbolizes the cycle of life. My mother weaves it back in every time I wash my hair, says as long as I'm wearing it I'll be safe, keep away the spirits. I got a story, you want to hear it?”

“Sure,” Sean said.

“You know about Indian Relay?”

“Tell me.”

Joseph claimed that Indian horse racing was North America's first extreme sport, because when you are leaping off one galloping horse and throwing yourself onto the bare back of another for the next lap, shit happens. He'd raced right through his teens until one race where he was acting as the mugger for his older brother. The mugger was
responsible for holding on to the horse that the rider had just jumped off of, and if he lost control of the reins, the team was disqualified. He'd managed to hold on, even as the thoroughbred reared up and fell over backwards, breaking Joseph's leg when it came down. The tibia had to be plated and pinned in four places.

“I couldn't walk for like six months. That's when I started putting on weight. Nothing's sorrier than a fat fucking Indian with a flattop. Anyway, that was the end of Indian Relay.”

It was a good story—that was just the bones of it—and it got them to Townsend, to the flat black stain of Canyon Ferry Reservoir, to the outskirts of East Helena. Then Joseph tilted his head back and fell asleep.

—

Sean gassed up again at Augusta, shivering in the dead silence of two in the morning.

“Where are we?” Joseph said. He rubbed at his eye sockets with closed fists.

“Middle of nowhere.”

“Looks like Augusta. I was born six miles north of here.”

“Really? I didn't think there was anything six miles north of here.”

“No, there's the bridge over the Sun River. I wasn't due for another three weeks and my mom was visiting her sister, who was living with some white guy in Helena.”

“So is that how you got your name?”

“Yeah. She pulled over to the side of the road when her water broke and got a blanket out of the backseat. She had me on the bank of the river. After I was born she fell asleep, and when she woke up, the sun was on the water. You know how a lot of Indians, their names change as they grow up, but I was always Joseph Brings the Sun.”

They drove the six miles and Sean pulled over. Joseph raised his eyes. “Scene of the crime,” Sean said, and they walked down to the river upstream of the bridge.

Joseph looked at his feet. “Right here, I think. It was August, so the gravel bar would be more exposed. She used to joke that she should have named me Joseph Brings the Mosquitoes.” He shivered in the chill night. “This is only the second time I been here.”

They looked at their silhouettes on the moonlit face of the river. Sean was reminded of the bison he and Martha had seen, its image rippled by the current.

“I know you ain't my cuz, like you don't even know me that well, but you're the closest to a white friend I ever had.”

Sean was genuinely touched. Joseph was one of those people who are inherently kind, so open, so quick to accept you into their lives that you want to change yourself to be more like them, to reclaim a lost innocence. It made him think of Martinique Carpentras, who had simply opened her arms and whom he had melted into from the start, and who was now out of his life. It also made him think about Vareda Beaudreux, whose brand of attraction was more that of the bullsnake with its forked tongue, beckoning the hapless rat, then encircling it in her coils.

“You're thinking I'm a sentimental Indian, what you got yourself into?”

“No, I was thinking about a couple women I used to know.”

Joseph laughed.

Sean said, “You know, I have a friend who's Blackfeet. He's the one lent me the tipi. Right now he's sleeping with a woman I was seeing last year.”

“And you're friends with him?”

“I'm friends with both of them.”

Joseph shook his head. “You're even more fucked up than I thought you were.”

Sean nodded, saw the shadow of his head move on the water.

“You know, a while back there, you asked me what I was doing, paying out of pocket for a goose chase, it got me thinking because it's a question I ask myself all the time. That woman who's with my
friend now, she once said that I step into shit even if there's only one horse in the pasture. She meant it as a compliment, but it's not like I have a choice. I have to keep going and see if I can step into shit, even if that means getting beat down along the way and losing faith in mankind, which is all the lesson you get out of it sometimes. But if I don't make the effort, then who will? Maybe nobody will.”

Joseph nodded, but Sean wasn't really talking to him anymore.

“There was this guy I used to work with—old Irish ex-cop who did some snooping for my grandfather's law firm. Smelled like Old Spice and hung his shoulder holster on a hat rack. Kind of guy you see in old movies. He told me investigations was like drinking blood, you just kept going until somebody stuck a stake in your heart. I used to think what he meant was that it was the adrenaline, the action. And that was part of it, but there was something else, too. He was saying what you get addicted to is the search. It's like this river. You have to take it upstream to find the source, and you have to follow it downstream to see where it goes. When you take on a case, you're not at the beginning or the end of the river, but somewhere in between, and you don't know which way to go, so you end up going both ways until you figure things out. You go until you know.

“To me, this isn't just about John Running Boy. I want to know who drove those buffalo over the cliffs. I want to know who, and I want to know why, and I want to know about the guy who died there. I want the guilty to pay for their sins. There's a purity in that kind of pursuit. It's black and white.” He gave a short laugh. “Unlike the rest of life.”

Sean stopped himself there, embarrassed that he'd given voice to the code he lived by, something he'd seldom confessed, even to lovers.

But Joseph was nodding. “No, I understand. The futile gesture. Stepping into shit, getting your ass beat down—that's the Indian way.”

H
eart Butte, five a.m. A drizzle of rain. A dog walking crooked up a straight street. Sean idled past the house where John Running Boy lived with his mother. All dark.

“What kind of a car does John's mom drive?” He looked up and down the street, the odd vehicle parked here and there.

“Subaru wagon, an old one.”

He drove on to Joseph's place. The cat lying on the doorstep stood up and stretched.

“You sure you won't come in? You need sleep, man.”

“I know I do. And I'll get some in the rig.”

“Why won't you let me come? I can help. John and I go back some.”

“We've been though this. I'm not going to put you in a position where something can happen.”

“Fuck, man. I'm the one gave you Gary Hixon.”

“And I appreciate it. Say hi to your mom for me.”

Joseph shook his head, but he opened the door. “I guess I'll be seeing you, then.”

“You will.”

Sean left him standing in the street, the cat rubbing against his legs. Then he saw him in the rearview, running up.

“Hey, you might need this.”

Joseph reached behind his neck and worked his fingers. He handed Sean the ermine tail through the open window. “Keep you safe,” he said.

“Don't you need it?”

“Nah, man, I'm okay.”

“Thanks, Joseph.” Sean tucked the tail into his shirt pocket.

“You bulletproof now, Cuz.”

“Maybe, but does it work against arrowheads?”

“Yeah.” Joseph laughed. “All kinds of shit.”

—

By the time Sean glimpsed the house on the hill, the sun had drawn its highlighter across the horizon. Long lines of birds were backlit on the telephone wires. Above them, to the east, the striated peaks of Glacier Park brooded above a gauze of fog.

Even before raising his binoculars he knew that the sedan parked beside Campbell's old truck was probably Ida's Tercel, and a glance through the glass confirmed it. Sean wondered if they had ditched the Fairlane or perhaps there had been mechanical difficulty. He walked a short length of the road. The surface was damp and he had not gone far before he found what he was looking for. Back at Ida's trailer, he had examined the Fairlane's tread, a repeating W pattern with the left rear worn on the edges from running at too low a pressure. A similar pattern snaked down the left-hand side of the lane, but not the right. So it had gone in this way, but not returned. Maybe it was parked behind the house. The important thing was that the hare had gone to ground.

He got back behind the wheel, having no plan and too tired to formulate one. He slowly motored up the road, scattering magpies that were squabbling over the flattened remains of a gopher. He pulled up behind the Tercel. No sound but the staccato of the straight six. Sean got out and leaned against the hood. He fingered the ermine tail in his pocket as the motor ticked down.

A long minute passed before the turtlelike head of Melvin Campbell appeared at the door. He was hunched nearly horizontal, his unbuttoned flannel shirt draping him like a horse blanket.

“I'm afraid I have company,” he said, peering up through forward-hanging strands of his hair.

“I know who's here, Mr. Campbell.”

“I'm afraid you're mistaken. I don't want to insist that you go, so I'll ask politely that you respect my privacy.”

“It's okay. Tell him to wait where he is.” Ida's voice sounded weary and resigned.

Campbell's head craned toward the house. He pivoted on his cane and tapped his way inside as she appeared at the door.

“Don't you look like hell,” she said to Sean.

“I could say the same about you.”

Her face was shiny, her eyes dimmed, her hair lank and lifeless. She leaned back against the porch railing, hooking one boot over the other as she had the first time he'd met her at the Trout Tails Bar and Grill. She lit a cigarette and dragged the smoke into her lungs.

“I thought you didn't inhale. Sacred medicine and all that.”

She blew the smoke out and took another drag. “What did you do, drive all night?”

“About an hour behind you. All three hundred and”—he took a couple steps and looked through the open window at the odometer—“thirty-six miles.”

“Congratulations. You found me. You can go back home now.”

“Someone died, Ida. We know who it was now, a man named Gary Hixon. I'm not going anywhere until I talk to John about it.”

“You don't have a voice here.”

“I just want to know what happened. That's all. Where's his car?”

She stubbed out the cigarette. “It's in the garage. You wouldn't believe how much money it cost to drive it here.”

“Yes, I would.”

She shook her head. “I really did like you. It wasn't easy for me to blow you off. I even thought, before this happened . . . when you were at the trailer. But you kept everything business.”

“It was you who kept it business.”

“No, sitting with you, I felt guilty because I was supposed to be
thinking about a boy I once knew, and here was a man who made me lose my focus.”

“So I missed out on seeing the star.”

“I wouldn't go that far.” It brought the corners of her mouth into a smile.

Sean shrugged. “Bad timing.” It was a strange conversation to be having with the world waking up. He yawned, which triggered her to yawn, too.

“When did John show up at your door?” he said.

“The day I told you to call off the dogs, earlier that afternoon. He'd followed me from the day before, so he knew where I lived. I hadn't seen him since we were kids, but somehow he wasn't a stranger. We still had the same shorthand, finishing each other's thoughts.”

“How did he know you worked at the bar?”

“He says he didn't. Someone on the reservation told Gary that an Indian girl he'd once known was working at a mermaid bar in the Madison Valley. He walked in and there I was.”

“Who walked in, John or Gary? Are you saying you knew Gary Hixon?”

He heard her exhale as she shook her head. “I shouldn't tell you this . . .”

A short silence stretched.

“Tell me what, Ida? How can I help him if I don't know what's going on?”

She stepped off the porch and joined him in the drive.

She lowered her voice. “I knew Gary from when I lived outside Browning. We were all kids together, the three amigos. But like I told you, I moved around a lot. There was a year in high school—this was back on Rocky Boy—Gary was in school there, too. His family had moved to Box Elder and we were in the same year, and he was a big basketball player and that sort of threw us together, because I played on the girls' team. We had something going for a while, but he had something going with another girl, too, and she got pregnant and
that was that. Anyway, Gary never told John about us because he knew John thought of me as this idealized person who was stuck in some kind of amber in his mind, the girl who was his first kiss.”

“So John doesn't know about you and Gary?”

“He knows we were in school together, he doesn't know what I told you. John's got plenty to worry about without worrying about that. And it doesn't mean anything now. It's only John who matters. I'm his lifeline. That's what he calls me.”

“So when you were in my studio, you lied to me.”

“No, I told you what I knew
then
. I guess Gary did come into the bar that night, but he had short hair and I didn't recognize him. It was John I saw looking at me, not Gary. I didn't even know that Gary was in the picture until John told me what happened at the jump.”

“What happened at the jump?”

“John's going to have to tell you that. He's sleeping now. I don't think he's slept in days.” She hesitated. “I wasn't planning to come up here with him, you know. I was just going to give him some money, but he was so alone, you don't know what he went through. It haunts him, not just what happened to Gary. And he wasn't sure the car would make it back, so if I drove, too, then he'd get here one way or other before anything could happen.”

“What did he think would happen?”

It was circling the same ground, and before Ida gave him the same answer they heard the determined rapping of the walking stick. The door opened.

“How can an old man eavesdrop when it hurts to stand up?” Campbell said.

As Sean and Ida followed him back into the house, Campbell stretched a sinewy arm toward the love seat.

“I like to see young couples sit together,” he said after they had all sat down. “Back in my time there was none of this rampant promiscuity, so you had to make do sitting close and holding hands. It was more romantic.”

“We aren't a couple, Melvin.”

“So you say.”

The ease of their speech made Sean think that Campbell had spent more of the past hour talking with Ida than with John Running Boy, and yet in the custom of country people the world over, the subject that brought them together would be the last to be broached.

Sean had been fighting a buzzing in his head ever since leaving Heart Butte, a back-on-land vertigo that caused him to drift away as Melvin's and Ida's voices receded into background noise. An indeterminate span of time had passed when he felt a draft of air from an open window, then a sudden creaking of steps snapped him back into the room. Seeing Ida's alarmed look, he followed her eyes to a wavering shotgun barrel, the muzzle drawing invisible circles on his chest.

“Is he the one you were talking about? Did you tell him I was coming here?”

The man standing at the bottom of the stairs was shirtless, wearing jeans that sagged from his hips.

Sean tried to keep his voice calm. “I followed her. And I'm here to help you, if you'll let me.”

“You don't know anything about me.”

“It's okay, John,” Ida said. “You can trust him.”

John lowered the shotgun to his side, the muzzle only in Sean's vague direction now, though he felt his lungs expanding each time the cavernous bore crossed his body. It was a pump with an exposed hammer, and Sean could see that the hammer was cocked.

“I'll ask you to please put my gun down,” Melvin Campbell said. “That old pump has scattered nothing but feathers for eighty years, and that's not going to change now. We do not threaten our fellow man in this house.”

“He's a goddamned snowman,” John said.

“Regardless of heritage.”

Sean saw John's capitulation, his acknowledgment of the one voice of authority that he recognized. An absurd few moments passed as
he searched for a place to put the shotgun, settling on propping it in a corner by the bookcase. As John turned his back, Sean let out a held breath and felt Ida's hand close over his wrist. She squeezed it briefly. He looked at Campbell, who was touching his pursed lips to the rim of a coffee cup, the thin hairs at the corners of his mouth searching like a cat's whiskers.

“I'm sorry,” John said.

Campbell set down the cup.

“Come sit with us. Ida, would you please bring more coffee? I've had quite enough excitement this morning, so I'll have the decaf; it's the jar with the green lid. And a tablespoon of the condensed. As an old man I drink it rez style.

He turned to Stranahan. “I got the habit back in the days when everybody got the USDA commodities boxes. You'd get the milk and that big block of cheese. John, do you remember that or were you too young?”

“My mother got them,” John said. “That was the best cheese.”

“It was,” Campbell said. “You can't buy it that good in a store.”

Campbell's attempt to engage John in small talk left Sean in the wings, from which he took advantage to observe the young man. John was more slightly built than he had supposed he would be, with shoulder-length hair that he presently tucked behind his ears. Ida had been right. He had grown into a strikingly handsome man, his mouth finely drawn under a straight aquiline nose. His chiseled cheeks flexed with an involuntarily tic.

Melvin Campbell assumed his role of authority as Ida returned with the coffee. “John, please sit with Ida. Sean, I'll ask you to bring the chair over from my desk.” Turning to John, he said, “We're not here to stand judgment, but we do want to understand what happened.”

“What's to stop him from turning me in, having them come get me?” He turned his head in Sean's direction without meeting his eyes.

“He's not here for that purpose,” Campbell assured him, “but it
wouldn't matter if he was. The state claims an extradition code, but neither our nation nor the Crow recognize the statute. That doesn't prevent a judge from issuing a bench warrant for arrest, and the tribal court can consider the warrant, but in practice such requests are usually denied.”

“So I'm safe.”

“As long as you are a recognized member of the Blackfeet Nation.”

“I got my tribal ID card. I've been here all my life.”

“Then we can put that issue behind us.”

Campbell took a sip of coffee and turned his gaze upon Sean. “Montana considers our requirements unreasonable. Yet there is no quid pro quo process for tribal authorities to extradite fugitives from outside reservation borders. So it is the old story, the white man demanding the Indian make concessions while offering an empty hand in return.”

He rapped the metal tip of his cane on the pockmarked floor. “John, you are among friends. I promise if you unburden yourself, we will be able to offer assistance.”

The young man hung his head so that the hair fell forward, and it was with his face half hidden and his right hand gripping Ida's that he began to speak.

“I'm responsible for a terrible thing,” he said.

He stopped, the ticcing of his facial muscles wrinkling his cheek. It was trying to begin near the end, and Melvin Campbell gently steered him to that place upriver where the story was easier to start.