Buffalo Jump Blues (22 page)

“Joseph.” Making his tone reasonable and hating the implication. A grown-up talking to a child, or worse.

“What am I, your fucking Tonto?”

“No, it's that—”

“Ain't no ‘no.' How long you known John? Like for an hour? I've know him ten years. Besides, you don't even have a gun. What are you going to do if those bad boys are there? Throw Whisker Bill here at them? He'd just lick their face.”

I
f Harold Little Feather was with them, he'd have followed the clues like the teardrops of a blood trail. Invisible, perhaps, but there all the same and, Sean knew now, had been all along. He'd allowed himself to be sidetracked by Ida's past with Gary Hixon, had for a time even entertained the idea that Gary had told John about his relationship with Ida, or that John had deduced it, and that he had used the cover of the night to kill Hixon in a jealous rage. But John's recollection of finding Gary's body had matched Martha's down to the details of the rock that served as his headstone, and if he'd been intent on covering something up, Sean would have guessed that John would have maintained that he'd never seen Hixon at all after he fell off the cliff.

More important, to believe John was a killer meant that Sean had to overlook the basic humanity and honesty he'd read in the young man, to believe that was simply a front that he presented. Sean was better at reading people than putting together puzzles of deception, and he knew in his heart that John was no more a killer than Theodore Thackery was.

No, it was not John who had brought him here. Brady and Levi Karlson had laid down the trail before him, and the question wasn't what they would do when they caught up with John Running Boy, but whether Sean was too late to stop it. Buying a tribal license, hitting a few lakes, that was just a cover story if anyone questioned their presence on the reservation.

“You scared, bro?”

Joseph had been uncharacteristically quiet during the drive from Heart Butte.

“Nothing wrong with being afraid,” Sean said. “Are you?”

“A little, I guess.”

They parked at the dirt track turnoff and Sean raised his binoculars. The Highlander wasn't there. Nor were either of the cars that John and Ida had driven up from the Madison Valley.

“Campbell's truck is gone,” Sean said. He had handed over the binoculars and noticed that Joseph's fingers were making them shake.

“You think he's in there?” Joseph said. “Maybe they're all there. Or—”

“Listen to me, Joseph. Are you listening?” Joseph's lower jaw was vibrating. “Stay here with the rig. If the good guys are home I'll give you a high sign. If you don't see me back on the porch in fifteen minutes, call your brother-in-law. No, make that thirty.”

“I'm coming with you.”

“Smarter if one person stays with the rig.” Giving him the out.

“Yeah, man, it's just . . . I'm fuckin' shaking.”

“Stay here. Here's the phone.”

“Oh, man, I'm sorry.” Joseph was squeezing his hands, his knuckles bled white.

“Nothing to be sorry about.”

Relieved that he'd have only his own neck to protect, Sean unwrapped Joseph's grandfather's rifle from a blanket in the backseat. It was a Marlin Model 95, .32-20 caliber engraved on the half-octagonal barrel. Back at the house, Sean had tied a length of monofilament to a twist-on lead weight used to sink your fly leader—
Good thing I'm not a dry fly purist,
he'd thought—and knotted the other end around a piece of cloth, makeshifting a bore cleaner. He'd jacked open the lever, dropped the twist-on down the chamber, and pulled the monofilament out through the muzzle. The cloth came out black and he'd repeated the process until a cloth came out clean. The cartridges were of more concern, the brass so old it was mottled like
lichen. He had only four, fed them into the magazine and chambered one. He raised the hammer block safety and started walking up the road, not glancing back at Joseph. He felt his hands sweating on the rifle.

Two hundred yards from the house, he left the road for a ribbon of tree cover. Walking on the exposed stones of a dried-up creek bed, he came up on the house from the back side, spotting Ida's Tercel, which was parked behind the detached garage. Three windows on the ground floor of the house, two on the second. No curtains and nothing to be done about the exposure he'd risk unless he waited until dark, which he had no intention of doing. He worked to the edge of the trees, felt himself breathing, then ran, bent over, across open ground until he reached the detached garage. He raised to his toes to peer in a smeared window and saw John Running Boy's Fairlane. So, maybe they were home and had simply been keeping the vehicles out of sight, as Sean had advised them to do. But if they were here, why hadn't they answered the phone? Another twenty yards to the house, down on hands and knees to stay under line of sight from the ground-floor windows. He put his ear to the crack around the back door. He heard no sounds from within and waited for his heart to come back into his chest. He wiped the sweat off his palms and brought the hammer to full cock.

The knob turned and the door pushed open. Sean had a sense of déjà vu. Little more than an hour ago, he'd felt a queasiness in his stomach entering Joseph's house. Not fear so much as anxiety, dread. A wanting to get it over with. He felt that again, felt his gut clenching like a fist.
Just breathe,
he told himself.

It took less than a minute to check the ground floor—living area, kitchen, the bathroom, well-thumbed
Reader's Digest
s and issues of
Indian Country News
in a rack. Melvin Campbell's bedroom door was closed, but the staircase to the second floor beckoned and he decided to clear the rooms up there first, not liking the possibility of someone being above him. He peered into the small bedroom where
Campbell kept his journals. John Running Boy's clothes were heaped on the bedcovers, but no John Running Boy. He checked the upstairs bathroom, then opened the door to the second bedroom and was surprised to see Ida's backpack zippered open. He would have expected them to be sharing a bed, but apparently not. He shook the thought from his mind, the distraction of any thought, and went back down the stairs.

He stopped at the bottom step.

On the floor of the living room was Campbell's gnarled walking stick, half protruding from under the sofa. Sean had never seen Campbell without that stick within reach of his hand. His eyes moved to the closed bedroom door. He came up to one side of it, reached out a hand to turn the knob, and pushed the door open with the muzzle of the rifle. Nothing happened and he edged to where he could peer inside. He could smell the tang of urine mixed with musty old man smell before he saw him.

Melvin Campbell was lying spread-eagled on the bed. He was dressed in the same black-and-white checked flannel shirt Sean had seen him wearing on his first visit. The shirt had been ripped open, the buttons torn from it and scattered across the floor. A bruise colored the exposed part of his sternum, and the left half of his face was swollen and purpled. A film of blood on his upper lip swelled into a half bubble, collapsed, then swelled again.

Sean felt for the pulse. A thread of metronome under his fingertips, the chest rising and falling with an irregular stutter.

He could hear the Land Cruiser coming up the drive, its harsh idle, then, jarring in the silence, the trill of a red-winged blackbird from the strip of dried watercourse.

“You here, Cuz?”

Joseph was standing inside the front door, holding Sean's metal fly rod case in a batter's crouch. Sean had completely forgotten about Joseph.

“Call 911,” he said.

—

Courage, true courage and not the semblance that is the absence of fear, is an earned commodity. Sean knew a little about this, for he was one of those people who opened the door without taking stock of consequences, who failed to consult the barometer of fear that others rely on to give pause. True, he'd entered Campbell's house with a rifle in his hand, but he would have opened the door with nothing but the change in his pocket if it had come to that. Lack of discretion was the missing chip in his armor.

Joseph's fear was more rational. He'd been nearly paralyzed by it only a half hour before, and the courage it had taken to drive up when Sean had failed to signal, to expect the worst and walk through the door with only a rod case for protection, was a triumph of will, leaving Sean no doubt about who had been the truly brave man.

While they waited for the EMTs, Melvin Campbell reached out with a livered hand, clamping his fingers over Sean's forearm as he attempted to speak. But his voice was more a feathering of breath than an utterance, and it was Joseph who discerned that he was asking for paper. In belabored scrawl, the veined hand shaking, he had produced a single illegible word, then, after a pause, attempted a second word before his strength failed him and he dropped the pen. Campbell brought his forefinger to his face, which Sean had wiped with a washcloth although he was bleeding again from his nose, and then used the dripping finger to scrawl haphazard lines in blood, some straight, others jagged like lightning bolts, the lines tipped with triangles. He brought the hand back to his face and rubbed at the blood, then with an effort faced his palm, pushing it toward Sean.

“High five,” Joseph said. “He's telling you he wants a high five.”

Sean opened his hand and they pressed palms. The effort seemed to exhaust Campbell and he sank back in his bed. A minute of labored breathing later, he had reeled back into a state of unconsciousness.

“We need some fucking
Grey's Anatomy
here,” Joseph said, his voice a half octave higher with panic.

“He's going to be all right, Joseph. His breathing is already stronger than when I found him. Look at this. What's he trying to say?”

Bllod Brot

—> <——> <——
>—> <—>

“They look like fucking arrows, man, I don't know.”

“What about the words? Could it be ‘Bold'?

Joseph nodded. “Yeah, maybe.”

“‘Brot,'” Sean said. “‘Brothers,' maybe.” His mind leafed through pages of his memory, something sliding along the edge of thought. “‘Blood Brothers,'” he said. “Not bold brothers, blood brothers. He couldn't write it so he used his hand. He made me his blood brother.”

Sean hadn't told Joseph about the pact that John Running Boy had made with the Karlson twins.

“They were at the pishkun,” Sean said. “They cut their hands and pressed them together. The arrows here mean the pishkun. The Indians finished off the buffalo with arrows. Melvin's telling us that's where they are.”

“You mean on the Madison River?” Joseph said.

“No, here on the reservation. The buffalo jump on the Two Medicine, where they were when your brother-in-law told them to leave. Melvin's telling us that's where they've taken John and Ida.”

F
orty miles down the road, following the directions on a map that Joseph had scribbled on the back of the bloody paper, Sean wasn't so sure. He'd waited until the ambulance pulled up before leaving, telling Joseph to stay with Campbell in case he regained consciousness and could better explain himself. Now he wondered if he should have done the same instead of blindly forging ahead through unfamiliar country, the day in decline, knowing neither what to expect nor what to do once he got there. “There” being vague enough, a series of cliffs that John Running Boy had said stretched at least several miles. Now Sean wished he'd questioned him more closely, for the only detail he could recall was that from the top they had seen a sacred mountain with an unpronounceable name. Which was next to meaningless. The horizon was jagged with mountains, their crags still stippled with snow.

Coming up a long rise in third, Sean pulled to the side before the road crested and climbed on foot the remaining distance to the top. He sat down and rested his elbows on his thighs to steady his binoculars. This was where Joseph's map had taken him, where the ink ended. Below him the sun glanced off bends of the Two Medicine as it snaked through an amphitheater of grasslands with bands of cliff showing chalk white, separating the green basin from the paler sage color of the upper elevations. Beyond and farther to the west, the sheer faces of the Front Range made a solid wall.

Sean mentally separated the field of view into quadrants bisected by the road, which arrowed into the distance before disappearing
behind a peninsula of land. In took him ten minutes of glassing, but he found what he was looking for in the far northwest quadrant, a glint like a fishing spoon winking from the depths of a river. Above him the clouds looked solid enough for angels to dance on, casting enormous moving shadows, so that he lost the glint almost as soon as he'd marked it. Three miles away, maybe four, near the base of an isolated butte. It was a car, although he couldn't eliminate a piece of old ranch machinery. In any case it was metallic, and as the only vehicles Sean had seen in twenty miles were two Depression-era trucks tipped into an outside bank of the Two Medicine River, some rancher's idea of erosion control, he thought there was a good chance it was the Highlander.

He fought the impulse to drive closer. This was no time to ride in with guns blazing. Especially not with a saddle rifle that hadn't earned a brass tack in close to a century. He walked back to the Land Cruiser and rummaged around, finding a length of parachute cord that he cut a few feet from to makeshift a carrying strap for the rifle. He put the rest of the cord into a belt pack, along with a liter of water and a tin of sardines, then remembered his bear spray and looked for it for five minutes before recalling that he'd lent it to Katie Sparrow in June, when she was riding horseback patrol in Yellowstone Park and wanted a backup.

He slipped the rifle over his shoulder, then abruptly shrugged it off and covered it with a blanket in the backseat. A vehicle was lifting a trail of dust as it crested the hill he'd just walked down from. It was a flatbed truck, its shot leaf springs shuddering on the washboard road surface. The driver's side window came down as the truck idled to a stop. The driver gave Sean a once-over and raised his eyes. He had a big impassive face alligatored by weather. He removed a hat with a feed store logo to reveal a two-toned forehead.

“Are you a good guy or a bad guy?” he said.

“I'm a good guy.”

He nodded as if it was the answer he'd expected. “Reason I ask is
back the way I came, I give a fella some water for his radiator and damned if he didn't say he was a good guy, too. That's about your month's quota, this part of the country.”

“The rest are bad guys?”

“I wouldn't call
them
bad guys. But the outfit they work for, there ought to be a hunting season ever' day but Christmas. You got to respect a man's religion.” The stone face cracked into a smile, though not an inclusive one that stretched as far as Stranahan.

“I was just going to take a hike,” Sean said. “See if I can find any cairns where they used to have the buffalo jumps.”

“That's the same thing the other guy told me, close enough. I'll tell you what I told him. This is tribal land and about three miles west it becomes Forest Service. I can't stop you from walking on either one, but I'll ask you not to disturb anything. Reason I'm here is I have a contract with the council to identify the pishkuns and place GPS waypoints on spots where I think we should dig. Last few years we've had two digs about four miles southwest of here, found buffalo bones compacted thirty foot deep. Deepest layers a thousand years old. Scapulas arranged like Stonehenge, even some bits of bone carved into toys for tiny tots.”

He opened his glove compartment and handed Sean a carved turtle the size of a skipping stone.

“There's a war going on here, 'case you didn't know it. Been going on in the Badger Two Medicine for thirty years, ever since the BLM and Forest Service issued oil leases without consulting the tribal council. Inadequate EIS. Direct violation of Endangered Species Act. You look out from the top there, far as you can see there's evidence of traditional hunting. One campsite alone, six hundred tipi rings. Six hundred
and one.
Drive lines, piled-up rocks, go on for
miles
. These were some of the biggest mass-scale hunts for buffalo in North America. This is where you weep tears for your fathers, where they wept tears for their fathers and their fathers for their fathers. Sacred land. But the man wants to dig it, frack it, could give a shit. And all
we got to fight them is our National Indian Congress and Pearl Jam, bunch of Indians looking like white men and half a dozen longhairs wishing they were Indians. Myself, I see a rig out here isn't part of the archaeological groups, it's either a rock climber or it's the man. Now, I can tell you aren't the man, just as I could with the other one. My guess is maybe you're looking for him, or you're looking for what he's looking for. Agitated young fella, didn't speak a single word of truth. And him an Indian, disrespecting his elder like that. You want to tell me? 'Cause I can't even guess.”

“Was he driving a red truck with a grille like a cow catcher?”

His lack of answer was affirmation. “Like I said, you want to tell me?”

“If I told you, then I'd be making up a story. It's a private matter. There's a woman involved.”

The man drummed the fingers of his left hand on the truck door, his big arm hanging outside the window. He slowly nodded. “That's the one thing you could have told me I'd believe.”

He cocked his head. “Here's my problem. This young man, he had a shotgun in the rig. You, I come up over the top, I thought I might have seen you put a rifle back in your vehicle. If this is some cowboy-Indian shit, you're about a hundred and thirty years too late. You kill our people with pieces of paper now, been happening a long time.”

“We're on the same side,” Sean said.

“Same side of what?”

Sean didn't answer.

The man drummed his fingers. “Lester, this is none of your business,” he said under his breath.

“I give you my word,” Sean said.

“You and that boy, you straighten it out, I'm the ranch you passed about four miles back down the road. Stop by and we'll talk buffalo, won't even mention the female of the species. Put my mind to rest that you're all right. Otherwise I'll be up worrying about people I don't even know.”

“I'll do that,” Sean said, and turned back to his truck.

“Aren't you forgetting something?”

Sean felt the turtle in his hand and handed it back.

“You and that other fella, you're like young people in the city, all of you preoccupied, walking around with your head down, pecking at your phone. It's called ‘not being present in the moment.'”

“That's what women can do to you,” Sean said.

The stone face cracked again, the smile better this time, reaching farther.