Death on the Greasy Grass (4 page)

Manny started walking past the knife displays, turning back to the scalping knife. Hairs were standing at attention along his arms and the nape of his neck. He swayed, unsteady, as the face of the warrior emerged slipping the knife from his belt sheath. Ageless stains on the blade exposed the blood of another's tribe. And obscured the blood of his friend's—his own. Manny felt his legs buckle, and Willie caught him.

“You okay?”

Manny nodded.

“You getting visions again?”

“Never.”

“You're still in denial.”

Manny forced a smile. “What, you're offering me a twelve-step program for vision seekers?”

“Suit yourself,” Willie answered. “But I think you need to talk with Reuben. They're becoming more frequent.”

Older brother Reuben, the only sacred man Manny knew—or trusted in these matters—had only riddles as to how and why the visions crept up on Manny at odd times. “I'm okay.”

Willie shrugged and moved on to another table, while Manny moved in the opposite direction. He bent to a beaded elk-skin dress lying neatly beside an eagle feather fan. A chief's daughter's dress. Imperfect rows of red and black and yellow glass trade beads told the story of a Blackfoot woman making the dress over a warm fire one frigid wintery night.

And the red catlinite pipe next to it, the stem and bowl properly detached. An old man had passed the pipe around to guests in his tipi over a hundred winters ago, saving his pipe adorned with ermine skin and hawk feathers only for ceremonies. Manny was aware that he knew it had belonged to a Cheyenne elder. He knew, yet he drove it from his mind. Visions just didn't happen without a reason, without the Creator's hand guiding him. At least not to a City Sioux.

“Quality is an understatement.” Willie had walked a row over and stood in front of a table displaying pottery. He clasped his hands behind him as he leaned over, examining the relics.

Stumper picked his teeth with his pocketknife as he stopped beside Willie. “Things were simpler back in the day.”

“You got that right,” Willie agreed. “Men had to hunt and fight and protect the
tiospaye
. The hard stuff. All women had to do was some fleshing and cooking. Take care of kids.”

Manny nudged Willie. “Go back home and tell Doreen women had it good back then.”

Willie backed away, his eyes widening. “You're not going to tell her what I said, are you?”

Manny smiled. “The mad Lakota woman? Not on your life. She'd be as likely to kill the messenger.”

Willie breathed a sigh of relief. Doreen Big Eagle had put her brand on Willie last year and held him by the short hairs. They even talked of setting a wedding date.

Stumper leaned across the table and winked at Willie. “Sounds like your honey's got you where she wants you, big guy.” He backed up when Willie leaned across to grab him. “Now us Crow warriors, we wear the breechclouts in our families.”

“Bullshit,” Willie said. “You're no different than us.”

“We are. Back in the day, we did the fighting and hunting. Swapped stories over campfires while the women did the simple things, everyday things, like set aside what to use for TP when you finished your morning constitution.”

Willie shrugged. “Guess they used paper, same as the settlers. Same as the soldiers.”

Manny shook his head. “We NDNs didn't have a lot of paper to go around. I'm thinking knowledge of the softest prairie grasses was worth their weight in corncobs.”

“You're probably right.” Willie put his hands on his hips and looked around the tables. “Anything missing?”

“What the hell do I look like?” Stumper asked. “A psychic?”

Willie started around the table, and Manny stepped between them. “Do you have an auction flyer?”

Stumper stood with his neck craned up, glaring at Willie, holding the stare long enough to show Willie he wasn't intimidated by someone so much bigger. Stumper turned and led them through Harlan's office door, a portal to a different world than the neat organized room they'd just left. Gone was any façade of organization and tidiness, buried somewhere in all the clutter and trash littering the office. The large room appeared smaller because of the amount of garbage strewn about. Manny stepped over empty beer bottles, many half-full of stale brew. The decaying yeast-malt odor caught in his throat and he turned away.

A half-smoked Chesterfield sat where it had died on the edge of Harlan's desk, imprinting the wood with another black mark.
Who the hell smoked Chesterfields anymore?
Yet, Manny resisted the urge to snatch the snipe and the matchbook beside an overflowing faux rattlesnake ashtray and light up.
Did Willie struggle like that? Standing among all the beer and booze bottles in Harlan's office, did Willie feel the overwhelming urge to grab a beer?

Manny picked his way between two file cabinets piled high with cases of Budweiser. A four-pack of Mike's Hard Lemonade sat atop the beer as if Harlan had crowned it king of the office.
Lemonade for hot summer nights, no doubt.

“Harlan always live like a hog?” Willie moved an empty bottle of Beaver Tail Ale from the desktop. “And always drink the good stuff?”

Stumper laughed and kicked a bottle of Moose Drool from the chair leg before dropping into the railroad chair missing one arm. He propped his feet on the desk and grabbed a paper clip from it. “Harlan was like those competition eaters that stuff as many eggs or hot dogs in their mouths as possible. Except he liked his booze. He took his drinking seriously. I guess I'd call him a professional alkie.” Stumper laughed again and started picking his teeth with the paper clip as he nodded toward the cases of Budweiser stacked on the file cabinets. “He kept those for guests. And yeah, he always lived like this. When he had auctions, he shut the blinds so no one could see what a pig he was.”

Willie tossed the beer bottle into the round file and it broke. Harlan wouldn't have minded. “It would take me a month in my worst days to drink this much.” He motioned to the beer. “He must have had a lot of guests.”

Stumper leaned against the chair and the rusty springs squealed in pain. “Harlan hated to drink alone, and the door was open to other competition drinkers like him.”

“Anyone in particular came around for free beer?”

Stumper nodded. “Sampson Star Dancer.”

Manny brushed an empty Cheetos bag on the floor and sat on the corner of the desk. “You know this Star Dancer?”

“Who doesn't.”

“Star Dancer,” Willie breathed as if he knew the name. “Star Dancer.”

And in Manny's collective memory, he'd heard of the Star Dancers of Crow Agency, too. “Seems like there was a Montana state senator years ago named Star Dancer.”

Stumper nodded. “Good memory. Smoke Star Dancer. Held the state office for six terms.”

“Any relation to Harlan's drinking buddy?” Willie picked up papers from the desk, and absently put them down.
Keep your mind off the beer
, Manny thought.

“Sampson is Old Smoke's son.” Stumper stood and stretched his back. “Or should I say, Smoke's outcast son. Old Smoke never cottoned to Sam's drinking, and neither did the rest of the Star Dancer clan. Sam was a big disappointment for the old man, but at least his daughter amounted to something.”

“She around here?”

“She is. Fact is, she's the one that kicked Sam out of the house after Smoke died. As fed up with Sam's boozing as Smoke was, he just couldn't bring himself to kick his only son off the ranch. But Chenoa did. She just couldn't take any more of Sam getting tossed in the pokey and finally gave him the bum's rush.” Stumper set cases of beer on the floor to reveal a Montana State Tourism calendar hanging on the wall behind the cabinets. “This is Chenoa.”

“Chenoa Star Dancer?” Willie said.

“Chenoa Iron Cloud now,” Stumper added. “Face of Montana Tourism.”

“Know her?” Manny asked, waving his hand across Willie's eyes. He walked to the wall and grabbed the calendar with the picture of a woman on an Appaloosa stallion. Shiny black hair falling in braids over taut breasts, and a bone choker encircling her muscular neck. She grinned at the camera with perfect teeth, and her gaze seemed to follow Manny as he stepped over trash to stand beside Willie.

“She was my first love,” Willie said.

“You've met her?”

“In a way.” Willie handed Manny the calendar. “I got her picture hanging up in my locker at the police station back home.” Willie's dreamy eyes roamed over the photo. “I've loved her for about twenty years.”

“But you're only twenty-three.”

Willie shrugged. “I guess it just seems like I've always been in love with her.”

Manny turned the calendar to the light and eyed it from different angles. Chenoa's eyes continued to follow him, and Manny suddenly fell under her spell as Willie had.

Stumper grabbed the calendar and hung it back on the wall. “Take a breath you two. She's married. And”—he turned to Willie—“she's older than Manny.”

“No way.”

“Way.” Stumper grinned and leaned against the wall. He'd abandoned the paper clip and stood working the tip of his pocketknife between his teeth. “And there's hardly any makeup on her face.”

“If she's older than I am . . .”

Stumper tapped the picture. “Old Smoke was in his eighties when he died, but he looked late fifties, early sixties. Chenoa's got his genes. She never ages. She looks the same as when she was runner-up in the Miss Montana pageant nineteen years ago.”

“Who were the idiots,” Willie asked, “that awarded her only runner-up?”

Stumper smiled. “There was a bit of a scandal that year. Seems like Chenoa came out for the swimsuit competition wearing a skimpy two-piece. Little more than three Band-Aids. Judges had to ding her on that.”

“Oh, I bet they'd have liked to ding her,” Willie said, staring dreamy-eyed at the calendar.

Manny turned to Stumper. “Why did Sam hang around with Harlan? Birds of a feather sort of thing?”

Stumper slipped on an empty pizza box as he walked to a door and caught himself on the wall. The latch was broken, probably sometime after the Earth's crust cooled, and Stumper swung the door open. He nodded to a small room. “Harlan let Sam crash here when he needed it. And he needed it often with all the beer he and Harlan put away.”

Manny walked past Stumper into a room barely big enough to turn around in. He pulled the string on a bare bulb suspended from the ceiling. Two surplus military cots hugged a wall stained brown with tobacco juice and beer suds. Budweiser cans overflowed a cardboard Miller High Life box doubling as a trash can.

“Not nearly big enough for someone named Sampson,” Willie said, ducking to avoid the bulb swinging from a breeze through a broken window.

“Don't let the name fool you,” Stumper said, careful not to brush up against anything filthy in the room. “Sam's a runt, and the room fits him just fine. Smoke thought Sam would grow up tough with a name he had to defend.”

“Sort of like ‘A Boy Named Sue'?”

“Sort of.”

“Did it?”

“Did it what?” Stumper asked Manny.

“Make him tough?”

Stumper shrugged. “He was a tough one in 'Nam, from what I hear. But back home, he was just some drunk staggering down the street that people laughed at and veered around so they wouldn't waffle him.”

Manny nodded to the other cot in the room, a blue wool military blanket with USN in faded white lettering adorning the front. A piece of wood had been stuck under a broken leg on the cot, yet it still listed to the starboard. “Harlan crash here, too?”

Stumper shook his head. “That one's for Itchy. Harlan just passed out in his chair.”

Willie and Manny looked to Stumper for an explanation. “Itchy Iron Cloud. Cubby's—Chenoa's husband Cubby's—kid brother. They kicked Itchy out of the house when he started getting into more trouble than he was worth while still in high school. Harlan lets him crash here with Sam when he needs it.”

“Drunk?”

“Some of that. More a drug problem than the booze with Itchy.”

Willie brushed past Stumper and stepped into the doorway, eying Chenoa's photo. “So if I get this right, Chenoa's brother, and her husband's brother, both hung with Harlan?”

Stumper smiled. “Just a nice, little dysfunctional family, don't ya think?”

Manny followed Stumper out of the tiny room back into Harlan's office. He slipped on a Twinkie wrapper and caught himself on the edge of a filing cabinet, spilling a stack of flyers onto the floor. Manny bent and grabbed them. “The Beauchamp Collection,” Manny read aloud, placing the stack back on top of the cabinet.

“A unique chance to own a piece of history,” Willie read over Manny's shoulder. “You heard of this?”

“Who hasn't?” Manny grinned.

“Well, excuse the hell out of me,” Willie said, giving Manny a dirty look. “I don't get up here to Crow Agency often.”

“It's not like I get up here either.”

“Then how you know about this Beauchamp Collection?”

“I just know things.” Manny smiled again, waiting for that to sink in. “Look, the sale of this collection's been all over the news. I just didn't realize Harlan was the consignee.”

Stumper tapped the flyer with his finger. “This collection has been advertised for months on the Internet, and every western newspaper you'd ever pick up. Every serious relic collector in the country—if not the world—will want to bid on the items.”

Manny spread the flyer out on the top of the filing cabinet. It listed items ranging from parfleches used to carry personal items, to quivers stuffed with arrows made of local hickory, some tipped with stone points and others with metal trade points. Buffalo robes traced to pre-reservation days were listed next to Pendleton wool blankets used by fur companies plying the mountain region.