The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) (10 page)

“John!” Ian’s boots pounded behind him.

Father John swung around. The other priest was closing the gap between them.

“You might like some company,” Ian said. “The guy’s drunk. You never know…”

Father John put up one hand. He could finish the thought himself—you never know what a drunk might do. “It’ll be okay,” he said, starting back across the field. He’d faced drunks before. He knew drunks. He’d been one.

He bounded up the concrete steps in front of the church and let himself through the double doors. He could hear the pickup crunching the gravel on Circle Drive. A column of bright light ran down the aisle, then disappeared as he pulled the door shut behind him. The faint odor of alcohol wafted through the small vestibule. He stepped into the back of the church. There was no one in the pews. “Hello!” he called. The sound of his own voice vibrated through the emptiness.

He started down the aisle, glancing at the pews. Somebody had dropped a black coin purse and someone else had left behind a pink scarf. He slid along the kneelers, picked up the items and continued down the aisle. No sign of anyone, yet the black pickup was still out in front when he came in. A sense of uneasiness came over him. He could feel his muscles begin to tense. The man had sent Ian for him, hoping that he’d come alone. He’d wanted to meet him alone, but where was he?

A shushing noise, like that of a boot slipping on tile—the unsteady footstep of a drunk—came from the sacristy. Father John crossed between the tabernacle that resembled a miniature tipi and the drum that served as an altar. The door leading to the back hall and the sacristy stood open, even though Ian would have closed it, he was certain.

Father John stepped into the hallway. The outside door at the end also stood open, like the door to the sacristy itself, and the smell of alcohol was so strong that he held his breath, trying not to breathe it in, yet wanting to at the same time. He stepped into the sacristy, the odor filling the air like incense. Everything neat and tidy, just as Ian had left it, except that one of the cabinet doors was slightly open, as if someone had attempted to shut it in a hurry. He looked inside the cabinet. A single stack of white altar linens, the pottery bowl and chalice that he used for the Communion bread and wine. There was nothing valuable in the sacristy, but the man—whoever he was—hadn’t known that.

He put the items he’d found in the church into the cabinet and stepped into the hall. He closed and locked the outside door, then walked back into the church, moving slowly now, deliberately. The pickup was still outside, which meant the man was somewhere, waiting for him.

FATHER JOHN MADE
his way slowly down the aisle, watching the side aisles, the vestibule for any sign of movement, of shadows shifting. Quiet permeated the church, like the quiet of a vault punctuated by the fall of his own footsteps on the thin carpet. He had the sense of someone watching him.

“I know you’re here,” he said. The sound of his voice reverberated around him. “Come out.”

He was almost at the last pew when the figure of a man slid from behind the pillar that braced the right side of the vestibule. He planted himself in front of the door, swaying forward and backward in an obvious effort to get his balance. The smell of whiskey rolled off him in waves. He was slightly built with stooped shoulders, a baseball cap pushed back on his head, strands of black hair hanging about his face. He wore blue jeans, a dark shirt and a black leather vest that even in the shadows looked worn and scuffed. Father John tried to place him. In the congregation at Sunday Mass? At a powwow or celebration or meeting? It was no good. He’d never seen the Indian before.

“Who are you?” He stopped at the entrance to the vestibule, a few feet from the man, struggling to ignore the invisible presence of alcohol in the space between them.

The Indian shrugged. “Hear you’re lookin’ for information.”

“You were on the rez in the seventies?”

Another shrug. “I ain’t had nothing to eat in a while.”

“Let’s go to the residence.” Father John took a step into the vestibule. “You can have some breakfast.”

The Indian shook his head. He shifted his weight against the door, then stood still, as if he were grateful for the support. “You got some cash?”

Father John didn’t take his eyes from the man. It wasn’t food he wanted. He’d gone into the sacristy, trailing an odor of whiskey, looking for something he could pawn, something that might be worth enough cash for a bottle. Today’s bottle, and tomorrow he’d figure out how to get another bottle. He knew who the Indian was then. One of the park rangers—the drunken Indians that hung around the park in Riverton, living from bottle to bottle, like the fort Indians who had hung around the forts in the Old Time, addicted to the soldiers’ whiskey, willing to sell anything—blankets and horses and women—for a bottle of whiskey. Somehow the moccasin telegraph had reached the Riverton park, and the Indian had seen the way to get some cash.

Father John’s instincts were to tell him to leave, that he could come back when he wanted to go into rehab, when he’d had enough, when he wanted help. And yet, the Indian could have been involved with AIM thirty years ago.

“It depends,” he said. “What do you know?”

The Indian’s dark eyes darted about the vestibule. He pressed himself against the door. “Her name,” he said.

“Are we talking about the skeleton found in the Gas Hills?”

The Indian gave a half nod.

“How do you know her?”

“Back then—” He hesitated, then plunged on. “I get home from Vietnam, everything’s going to hell on the rez, just like before. No jobs, nothin’ to do, no place to go. Signs everywhere: No Indians Wanted. Indian gets killed, nobody cares, and there was guys getting beat up and run over, and the cops sayin’, ah, go ahead, kill yourselves off. Then AIM Indians show up and say, why we livin’ like animals? We’re not animals. They say, show respect, get some respect. They say, we got rights, and we gotta make the whites give us what’s ours.” The Indian started rubbing his forehead with the knobs of his fingers, as if he’d hit a blank wall in his mind and wanted to jog his thoughts back into place.

“Did you join them?” Father John said.

“You got somethin’ to drink?”

Father John shook his head. So that was what the Indian had been looking for in the sacristy—the wine that he and Ian consecrated at Mass. He wondered if the Indian had seen the bottle of grape juice that the pair of recovering alcoholic priests at St. Francis Mission sipped at the consecration. “Maybe you oughtta try to eat something…”

The Indian was shaking his head so hard that his shoulders also shook, as if he were in a spasm. “I gotta get some cash,” he said. “You got money around here? You take up collections, right? You gotta have some money.”

“Tell me about the girl,” Father John said. “Was she part of AIM? Is that how you knew her?”

“They was mad at her.”

“What do you mean? Who was mad at her?”

“Everybody. Jesus, Father, you gonna let me have some money or not? I gotta get a drink. I’m sick, see.” He thrust out his hands. They were quivering. “I’m real sick.”

“I can help you get help,” Father John said.

“I need a drink, okay? I’ll tell you about the girl, and you give me some money, okay?”

“What about her? What had she done?”

“Shot off her mouth to the police, told ’em where one of the big shots was hiding out, got him killed, that’s what she did.”

“Do you mean the AIM member killed at Ethete?”

“Look.” The Indian put his hands out again. They were shaking harder. “I’m telling you what I know, okay? It wasn’t like I was one of ’em, the big shots. They come from other places, and they was givin’ the orders around here. I marched in some demonstrations, carried signs around, and I got a few bucks. It was like a job or something. Then they had all that trouble up on Pine Ridge—them AIM Indians took over the town, and that was something. I mean, who would’ve thought a bunch of Indians could take over a town, and this being in the 1970s, I mean, not a hundred years ago! Afterward some of the big shots came here, that’s what I heard. Hiding right here under the Feds’ noses, and they never found ’em until the girl opened her mouth.”

“Who was she?”

The Indian didn’t say anything. He was staring down one leg of his blue jeans at the floor.

“Come on,” Father John said. “You know who she was.”

“You gonna give me the cash?”

“We’ll talk about it later. Who was she?”

“Arapaho, that’s what I know. I heard she was livin’ up at Pine Ridge, and that’s how she got mixed up with AIM. I heard she was a singer, always singing, like she had plans to be a big star, make recordings and all that, like she wanted to be somebody.”

“You said you knew her name,” Father John said.

“I only seen her one time after the big shot got killed. There was a meeting, and a lot of people come out for it, and everybody was mad as hell, I remember that. Well, she comes to the meeting. We was all shocked. I mean, she’d been in jail! She’d talked to the police! It was like she wanted to die or something. Why didn’t she get outta here, go hide someplace else? Instead, she comes walking in like she didn’t know what was goin’ on. She was holding a baby, I remember that. I started feeling sorta sorry for her, ’cause she had a baby and wasn’t nobody there gonna help her. She was small, you know, and real pretty, and she had her hair all braided up, like she’d braided up all her troubles and they wasn’t gonna bother her no more. That braid hung all the way down her back. I remember her walkin’ in the room, climbing around people, stepping over everybody’s feet, and the guy sittin’ next to me says, ‘What the hell’s Liz doin’ here?’”

“Liz.” Father John repeated the name slowly, letting the sound of it burrow into his mind. The skeleton in the Gas Hills was a girl named Liz. “What was her last name?”

“I only seen her that one time. How would I know? She’s Arapaho. I remember ’em saying, how come a Rap talked to the cops? Jesus, Father, I’m in bad shape.”

“You need help, man. I can take you to detox at the hospital.”

“I need a drink, okay? What d’ya know about it?”

“I know a lot.”

The Indian let out a strangled laugh. “You don’t know shit.”

“I’m an alcoholic like you.”

The Indian tried to stare at him, blinking several times as if he wanted to bring the alcoholic mission priest into focus, and finally looking past him into the church. “I gotta get a drink,” he said.

“What happened to her?”

The Indian was staring at the floor. “Heard she took off, got away.”

“What makes you think she’s the skeleton?”

“’Cause they was so mad at her for snitchin’. Got me to thinkin’, maybe she didn’t get away. Maybe they put a snitch jacket on her and she got killed.”

“Who are we talking about? Who was mad at her?”

“Everybody. We hated snitches.”

“Who are you? What’s your name?”

“I don’t got a name now. Used to, maybe, I don’t remember.”

“What do they call you in the park?”

“Joe. They call me Joe. We got a deal, right? I give you her name, you give me some money.”

Father John dug the crumbled bills out of his jeans pocket and flattened them against his palm. Six one-dollar bills. He set them in the brown hand stretched toward him, shaking and eager.

“Come back when you’re ready to quit,” he said. “I’ll help you.” If I’m still here, he thought. Then another thought: Ian would help the man. It didn’t matter if he was here; the mission would go on.

The Indian clutched the money a long moment before he began stuffing it into his vest pocket, as if he were reluctant to let it out of his hand. Then he turned to the door and, shifting from one foot to the other to get a firmer purchase on the floor, gripped the door knob and started to pull, floundering backward as he did so. Father John reached out to steady him, then took hold of the edge of the door and swung it open. He stayed with him down the steps and out to Circle Drive. The black pickup was no longer there, and he realized it must have belonged to the woman coming out of the church. The Indian kept going, planting one foot in front of the other, weaving a little with each step before taking another plunge ahead. Father John watched the man until he’d reached the tunnel of cottonwoods and blended into the shadows that striped the road. He’d wanted the cash, that was all, but he’d known something. The girl’s name was Liz.

“God help you,” he said out loud, as if the Indian were still standing there. Or maybe it was the girl he was praying for, he wasn’t sure. “God help them both,” he said.

A ROW OF
pickups stood in front of the Sunrise Café, bumpers nudged against the curb. Parked on the far side of the parking lot were three semis. Through the plate glass windows, Vicky could see the cowboy hats and baseball caps bobbing over the tables as she pulled in between two of the pickups. The minute she opened the door, aromas of coffee, hot grease, and cinnamon floated toward her on the low-pitched sounds of men’s voices. She walked over to the end of the counter, conscious of the heads turning along the counter, the eyes staring at her across rounded, thick-set shoulders. She kept her own eyes on the white woman with hair bleached the color of a yellow crayon and a white apron tied around her wide waist, jaws working a piece of gum as she poured coffee into a cup halfway down the counter. After a moment, the woman set the metal pot onto a burner and started toward Vicky. “What can I get ya?” she said.

“Is Donita in?”

“Donita?” She tossed her head toward the swinging metal door with a window at the top that framed a small view of the kitchen. “She’s cookin’. Who should I say wants to see her?”

“Vicky Holden,” she said.

“You that Indian lawyer I heard about?”

Vicky ignored the question. It hit her that it might make things uncomfortable at the café for Donita if the owner thought she was in some kind of trouble with the law. “Would you mind telling her I’d like to see her for just a moment?” she said.

The woman chewed on the gum for a half second, considering. Then she turned and disappeared through the metal door that swung behind her, squealing on the hinges. Through the window, Vicky watched her sidle next to a tall woman with black hair caught in a donut-shaped bun who was flipping pancakes at a grill. Another moment passed before the waitress pushed back through the metal door. “You’re gonna have to wait. Donita’s busy now. Want some coffee?”

Vicky said that would be fine and settled onto the stool still warm from the buttocks of the trucker who had just gotten up and was ambling over to the cash register by the door. She sipped at the coffee when it came and kept one eye on the metal door. The coffee was almost gone when the door finally swung outward. The woman walking over was probably in her sixties, with slim shoulders, honey-colored skin and black hair gone to gray and pulled back so tightly that it gave her face a strained look. She resembled other members of the White Hawk family, Vicky thought. Donita’s brother had been a couple of years ahead of Vicky at the mission school.

“You tryin’ to get me fired?” she said. “Boss don’t like personal business on his time.”

“Sorry,” Vicky said. “I don’t want to cause you any trouble. Is there someplace else we could meet? I’d like to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“The seventies on the reservation.” Vicky paused a moment, then she said, “AIM.”

Donita White Hawk’s jaws clamped together. A long hiss sounded through her teeth. “About that skeleton,” she said, her voice so low that Vicky had to lean across the counter to catch the words. And yet, it wasn’t a dismissal. The woman’s shoulders curled forward with a kind of inevitability. “Ten minutes, out in back,” she said. “I’ll take a break.”