Lizardskin (20 page)

The Arikara had butchered the Hidatsa and the Mandan, and the Assiniboine had slaughtered the Dakota, in the time before the beginnings, when the Assiniboine had come running from the Ojibway, who were running before the French in Canada, and they all fought each other for the forest lands around the Great Lakes and Minnesota. Even the Pinda-Lickoyee name for the Dakota, the Sioux, was taken from an Ojibway word, Nadouessioux.

Down in Texas and New Mexico and Oklahoma, the Comanche murdered the Wichita, the Arapaho made slaves of the Kansas, and the Apache slaughtered everyone they could catch, especially the Spanish.

Then the Spanish had Texas and New Mexico stolen from
them
by the Isantankah, and the Isantankah went after the
Apaches—Gallantin’s raiders pulling two hundred dollars for an Apache scalp on a countertop in Santa Fe—and then in his turn, Gallantin murdered by the Yuma, who got rubbed out by the Kiowa, who got pushed into reservations by the pony soldiers and the tall-black-hat people.

And the horse cults? The great myth of the Plains Dakota?

The Dakota time of the horse had been less than a hundred years—something
they
had learned to steal from the Comanche, who stole
their
horses from the conquistadores.

Yun!
Even the dirt in Montana was red, as if it had been soaked in blood. That was the way of it. The land had not been forever. It was borrowed from time, and soon they had to give it back. Everyone imagined that their time of privilege was god-given and forever. No god gave anything forever. The gods gave you something so that they could watch you get killed for it. Look back over your shoulder as far as your farthest father, and you see your own future.

And his time with the Defense Intelligence Agency—that had been more of the same, but done in the dark with Deniability Assured and everyone taking an oath to Protect the Administration, everyone hand-picked from Section. They’d called themselves the Skull and Bones in honor of the boss, an inside joke at the firm. And everyone they had killed had earned it, if not by their own actions, then by their inheritances and the blood that had been spilled in the gaining of them. No one was innocent. No one was pure. Every people had sins on their foreheads and blood in their pockets.

Still, it was hard to think of them dead. He could see Eddie at his wedding, a full Lakota ceremony, Eddie in his best—and only—black suit, and Donna like a pale yellow flower, and Jubal and James Comes In Sight and Earl Black Elk. That had been at the Rosebud, in the summer of 1988. Later, he had brought Eddie out to the coast and got him a job with Offshore Films.

That was over with now.

Something had to be done about what had happened. Somebody ought to open the thing up, see what truth there had been
in it. It would be nice to find some truth in the old men. Something to believe in, even this late in his life.

Because there was something real in Jubal’s story. The proof of it was that someone had killed them all. He pulled the clipping out of his pocket and read it again, read that he had come to Billings too late.

FIVE DIE IN POLICE ACTION

The investigation continues
. Was that more tin-talk, or was there some kind of doubt in the minds of the officials? Gabriel had never heard of a police department being careful about releasing the names of criminals. They were the first thing out, like coup counts on the lodge pole. See who we caught? See who we killed for you?

See what fine killers we are?

Perhaps. And perhaps no one had properly tested their skills.

In the end he trusted in his experience and let the hour of the wolf do it all for him. It was the same in Billings as it had been in the Philippines and Belfast and Quito; it was in the hearts of people to drift and have bad visions at a certain time each night, between three and four in the morning. In the dead watch, his Section commander had called it. In the hour of the
wolf, terrible dreams come to the sleeping and a great weight settles on the hearts of those who are awake. In hospitals, most of the dying do it between three and four. In the homes, it is always at three or four that the wife, who has been sitting dead-eyed and staring at her hands on the kitchen table since midnight, finally takes the knife and climbs up the stairs toward the bed in which her husband lies twisted in his sheets, breathing through his mouth, smelling of warm meat. Wars start at three, as it did in the Gulf, when the warplanes brought new thunder and a fresh point of view to the mullahs in Baghdad. Trust in the hour.

The lobby was empty as a train station, a wide underground cavern containing a lake of polished marble, dimly lit by hidden spotlights. The registry office was dark behind the plastic. The doors hushed closed behind him as he slipped across the floor, a tall black figure, his long coat billowing out behind him, going from light to shadow and back into light as he passed beneath the ceiling lamps far overhead.

He took the stairs and climbed, in silence, hearing his steps and his own breath and under that the slow mechanical exhalations of the hospital, of its buried machinery and the thousand little pumps and bellows and servomotors that kept it running, kept the patients afloat in the endless crossings of a sickbed night.

The stool and the newspaper were still there, but the cop had gone. The long hallway that led to the double doors was dark. The smell of antiseptic and floor wax was strong in the air. The sound of a radio was coming from somewhere. Gabriel tried to place the song, a faint reedy whine echoing from a sideroom somewhere on the floor. It was “Dust in the Wind,” by Kansas.

He covered the fifty feet like a crow flying over a pond, settling into the darkness by the doors, his breath slow and his mind quiet as he listened hard. Muted sounds. Intermittent electronic flutings, changing in rhythm as the patients rose and sank on the tides of their lives. The huff and discharge of air from pumps and valves. “Dust in the Wind” still, louder now. He placed his left hand on the door and eased it open six inches.

A long hallway with a nurses’ station in the middle of it, about fifty feet down. One wall of the hallway was glass, and beyond the glass partition a row of beds, perhaps ten of them, each one surrounded by medical support machinery, monitors, video screens flickering with heartbeats and blood pressure readouts. At the station, he could just make out the top of a woman’s head. She was seated, head slightly forward and down, apparently reading something behind the partition, out of his sight. He could see the motion of her shoulder as she turned the pages. The sound of the radio was coming from her desk.

Movement. Another nurse was standing by one of the patients on the far side of the glass wall, shaking a vial of liquid. She leaned forward over the mounded form on the bed and seemed to touch a cheek. The tenderness of the motion appealed to Gabriel, gave him a feeling for her. He stepped through the doors and glided across the hall to an open doorway.

The nurse at the station had not moved. The other one, beyond the glass wall, was moving from one bed to the next, straightening a sheet, changing a pillow, concentrated and isolated in her work.

From the new position, a few feet back in the darkened storeroom, he stood and watched the beds, searching for Donna’s shape, for some quality that would reveal her. Under their hospital sheets and bound up in the machinery, each patient looked like food for spiders, waiting in their bindings. Tiny green lights pulsed and blinked and sketched glowing geometric figures against the dimness of the ward.

He waited until the nurse had finished her rounds. She stopped by the sealed doors and looked back over her shoulder at the line of beds, as a gardener might do leaving a greenhouse, seeing to the hothouse flowers, feeling their heat and the water in the air, feeling the dim life in each burning bed.

Under the overhead lamp, she looked young and very white, a source of light. She stepped through and closed the door softly behind her and walked to the station. She stood a minute, looking down at the seated nurse, who did not look up.
She smiled, reached over the partition, and picked up a magazine. She walked around the station and came down the hall toward Gabriel, her rubber-soled shoes whispering on the terrazzo. She reached the doorway where Gabriel stood motionless in the darkness, stopped there, caught in a spotlight, her yellow hair as violent as fire, tiny blond hairs shining on the curve of her white neck, her face in a dark shadow.

Gabriel breathed slowly through his mouth, moved nothing, thought nothing, a darker darkness in the storeroom.

She folded the magazine, looked at her watch, looked into the storeroom, looked into Gabriel’s face, still turning, turning around now to look back at the desk. She smiled again and walked away to the double doors. Gabriel heard them open, felt the rush of hallway air as she stepped outside, heard her short gasp, and then her voice, soft, a whisper.

“You’re back—where’d you go?”

A man’s voice, a baritone rumble, something he could not make out. The policeman was back.

He heard their voices cut off as the spring-loaded doors swept closed again. Gabriel stepped out of the storeroom and walked quickly toward the duty desk. A heavy-set older woman was nodding over her folded hands, in front of a row of television monitors and alarm lights. Gabriel leaned over the desk and touched her gently with his left hand, feeling for the little nodule behind her left ear, pressing that, then taking her weight as she slipped forward onto the desk, settling her onto her forearms, on one cheek, breathing more deeply now, through slackened lips.