The Spider's Web (2 page)

Lionel was shouting and pounding on the screened door that jumped and banged against the frame. The whole neighborhood was probably watching. Then Dwayne yanked open the door and pushed against the inside door. They fell into the house, bumping and clawing at each other. “Where the hell are you, Ned?” Lionel shouted.

“She’s not gonna let him come,” Roseanne said out loud. The sound of her own voice gave her a jolt of surprise. She realized that, for a while, she had let herself believe that the white girl was gone. But the truth had come roaring back. She was still inside with Ned.

Roseanne turned away from the house and stared out her window. The wind mowed down the tufts of wild grass that sprouted in the dirt yards. Her mouth had gone dry. She could have followed Ned, she was thinking. Nothing had stopped her from moving to Jackson Hole, finding another dead-end job, but Ned had promised to send for her. There was something important in that.

The screened door banged open. Lionel came out first, Dwayne pushing against him and both of them stumbling down the steps and plunging for the truck. Lionel turned the ignition as he slid behind the wheel. He gunned the motor and the truck jumped backward with Dwayne still righting himself on the passenger seat, struggling to pull the door shut. Then they pulled a U-turn and shot out onto the road.

“What’s going on?” Roseanne leaned forward. “What happened in there?”

“We gotta get outta here,” Lionel said. She could see the speedometer needle jiggling at fifty miles an hour as he sped down the bumpy dirt road. He took a sharp turn that flung the truck across a dirt yard, then wheeled out onto another hard-packed road, the truck rocking and dust ballooning along the sides.

“Tell me!” She pounded a fist into Lionel’s shoulder. “Ned. What about Ned? Is he okay?”

“He’s dead,” Dwayne said, looking sideways at her.

She flung out her fist and connected with the hard curve of Dwayne’s jaw. He flinched and rolled his head against the door frame. “Jesus,” he said. “Take it easy.”

“What do you mean?” She grabbed a fistful of Dwayne’s shirt. “Tell me,” she shouted.

“He’s dead, Roseanne.” This from Lionel, gripping the steering wheel, peering down the ribbon of asphalt coming at them at eighty miles an hour. “Somebody tore up the place.”

“He can’t be dead,” Roseanne said. “We have to go back. We have to help him.”

“Don’t you get it? There’s no helping him. We gotta get away.”

She was shivering with the tremors that had started in her legs and moved into her stomach and chest, and were now shooting into her arms. “Why?” someone said. It was the little voice she’d had as a child.

“Somebody shot him,” Lionel said. “He’s on the bed, got a hole the size of a baseball in his chest. White girl’s dead, too, over in the corner.”

Roseanne fumbled in her jeans pocket for her cell. “We have to call 911. They can help him.”

She felt the hard edge of Dwayne’s hand cut against her arm. The cell bounced across the floor. “We don’t have nothing to do with this. The fed finds out we were at the house, what’d’ya think’s gonna happen? Lionel and me ain’t going back to prison, got it?”

“You sure the white girl’s dead?” Lionel looked over at the man in the passenger seat.

“She was dead.”

“Maybe I seen her move a little.”

“You didn’t see nothing.”

“We’ve gotta get help.” Roseanne leaned down and ran her hand over the scraped floor, groping for the phone. She wrapped her fingers around the warm plastic and flipped open the top.

“Shut that cell,” Dwayne said. “You know what’s good for you.”

Roseanne did as he said. She was shaking so hard, the cell slid out of her hand and thudded back onto the floor. Her mind was blank now, a big, vacant space that Ned Windsong had once filled.

“We never went to the house.” Dwayne leaned back, ropy forearm hanging over the seat, fist clenched. “You got that? Anybody asks, that’s what you say. Long as we stick together, we’re okay. There wasn’t nobody around. Even if somebody seen us, they can’t prove nothing. It’ll be our word against theirs. You open your mouth, and you’re gonna be like Ned.”

Roseanne could feel herself nodding like a robot. The sobs had started, rising in her throat like hard rocks that she could neither swallow nor spit out. Dwayne was a blurred face in the background moving under water. What was before her was the image of Ned Windsong and a hole as big as a baseball in his dear chest.

THE INSTANT THE truck topped the rise, Roseanne saw the lights flickering in the cottonwoods ahead. The booming noise grew louder, like the rumble of a train in the night. It was dark now, a few stars flickering in the black sky. She huddled in the backseat, afraid she would be sick. Ned might still be alive and she could do nothing—nothing—to help him. She could feel some part of herself already slipping away.

Lionel must have been standing on the gas pedal because they flew down the road. Then a sharp turn, and they bounced across the borrow ditch and the rutted earth and skidded to a stop halfway between the trucks parked in the trees and the blocklike house with blue siding. Shadowy figures darted around the vehicles, in and out of the streaks of light from the campfires. Sparks danced in the air like fireflies. A thumping, undulating wall of noise from a CD player fell over the truck the instant Lionel cut off the ignition.

Nobody moved. Then Dwayne turned around, lights striping his face. “We come straight here from your place. Got it?”

Roseanne managed a nod. She was still pressing her palm against her mouth, fingers digging into her cheeks. Lionel pushed on the door handle and kicked the door open. She managed to open the back door and follow him outside, stomach churning, acid eating at the insides of her throat. A skinny guy with black braids and floppy arms lunged out of the shadows as Dwayne came around the hood.

“Where’s Ned?” His voice boomed over the rift of drums. She recognized him the instant he stepped into a shaft of light. Mervin Oldman, Berta’s nephew. He looked up to Ned. He had begged him not to move to Jackson Hole. Then he had gotten Berta to try to talk him out of it. “They’ll eat you alive,” Berta had told him. “Rich folks’ll invite you to their big houses and show you off like some kind of artifact they stole outta a museum. Their own pet Indian. They’ll piss you off pretty bad.”

Ned had laughed. “I’m gonna be wiring the big houses, so nobody’s gonna piss me off.”

“Ain’t he here?” Lionel said. Roseanne spun about and watched the lies creep like shadows across his face. The sour-breath smells of whiskey and beer wafted over her. “Had to wait on Roseanne here to get herself together. Figured Ned and his white girlfriend was already here.”

“Haven’t seen ’em yet.” Mervin shrugged his thin shoulders and headed back into the trees.

Roseanne leaned against the side of the truck to get her balance, then started toward the house. She felt the hard pressure of Dwayne’s hand on her arm, yanking her backward. “Where you think you’re going?”

“I’m going to the bathroom.” Roseanne tried to pull herself free, but his fingers were like a tourniquet compressing the muscles and bones in her arm. “Do I get your permission or do I pee on your boots?”

He gave her a shove at that. She felt the knobs of her spine hit the hard surface of the truck, and for an instant she thought her legs would give way. She pushed herself off the truck and started for the house as fast as she dared, aware of the crunch of sage and dried grass under her sneakers. The image of Ned floated ahead in the darkness.

She stumbled through the front door and into a living room lit by a white rectangle of TV light. Shadowy bodies lay sprawled over the sofa and chairs and curled on the linoleum floor. The sound of grunts and snores mingled with the close smells of beer and whiskey and ketchup and stale food. The music outside sounded muffled and far away.

“Hey, Roseanne.” A hand rose up and swiped at her as she picked her way through the prone bodies. “Wanna beer?”

She kept going. The kitchen was wedged in a corner between the dining area and the back door. An appliance light flooded the stove and spilled across the counter to the sink where a large, square-shaped woman was running water over a yellow plate, swiping at it with a brush.

“Berta?” Roseanne could hear the relief in her own voice. She had been hoping Berta would be here. Sometimes she left when Mervin threw a party and pretended the party wasn’t going on. Mervin was her brother’s boy, but he was her own now, she always said, ever since a drunk had run down her own boy in Riverton, and he was just thirteen, starting to live. Mervin had been about eleven, and from then on, he could do pretty much whatever he wanted, as far as Berta was concerned, just so long as he stayed alive.

Berta swung around, surprise flashing in her dark eyes. She was in her forties, with long black hair streaked with gray, caught in back by a beaded comb. A few strands spilled about her face. “Party too much for you?” she said, her eyes settling down.

“Something’s happened.” Roseanne glanced toward the living room, half-expecting Lionel or Dwayne to show up. The shaking started again, and she clasped her hands together to keep them from flying away.

“Yeah? What?” Berta threw her own look in the direction of the living room. “One of them jerks come on to you? They’re all drunk.” Disgust flared in her eyes, and she blinked it back. “I told Mervin, this is the last party. Trouble is, he’ll just find a party somewheres else. Least I can keep an eye on him here.”

“It’s not that,” Roseanne said. Keeping her voice low, she told about going to Ned’s house. “Lionel and Dwayne came running outside. They said Ned was dead.”

“Dead!”

“It can’t be true.” She was crying now, the words choking out of her. “They said he was shot in the chest. He might still be alive. He could be ...”

“You call 911?”

“They wouldn’t let me.”

“What?”

“They don’t want to get involved. They think the fed will try to pin it on them.”

“Ned the only one there?”

Roseanne peered at the woman through the moisture in her eyes. Berta knew about the white girl; everybody knew. “The girl’s there,” she said. “Lionel said maybe she was moving.”

“My God! We gotta report this.” Berta grabbed a towel and began drying her hands.

“They’ll kill me if they find out I called the police.”

“Go on back to the party,” Berta said. “Make sure they see you.” She tossed the towel onto the counter, walked over to the phone, and lifted it off the hook.

 

 

FATHER JOHN PRESSED down on the brake pedal and steered the old Toyota pickup toward the flashing red, blue, and yellow lights. He could see the dark uniforms of the Wind River Police milling about the vehicles parked in front of a small, blocklike house. Lights flared in the windows and the opened door. A couple of officers bumped into each other in the doorway.

He switched off the motor and got out. Nobody seemed to notice another pickup in the swirl of colored lights. The night was hot, as if all the heat of the day had compressed against the earth. The black sky was filled with stars. It was the first Tuesday in July, the Moon when the Buffalo Bellow, in the Arapaho Way of naming time. It could have been peaceful here. He wondered if that was ever the case.

Another murder on the reservation. How many murders had he been called out on in the ten years he had been at St. Francis Mission? More than he could count, and all the calls the same: “Sorry to bother you, Father. We got another dead body. I’m sure the family would appreciate . . .”

And he would go. John Aloysius O’Malley, Jesuit priest, Irishman from Boston, pastor of a mission church on the Wind River Reservation. Boston was so long ago—another life teaching American history in a Jesuit prep school and drinking himself senseless on the weekends—that he seldom thought about it. This was home now. The call from the dispatcher at the Wind River Police had come thirty minutes ago. A dead body in a house in Arapahoe. No positive ID, but the house was in the name of Ella Windsong. Father John’s heart had gone into overdrive. The last he’d heard, Ned Windsong, Ella’s nephew, had been staying at the house.

He realized he had been hoping there was some mistake, but this was the same house he had come to last year to anoint Ella’s father, Albert, before he died. The Windsong family had been parishioners at St. Francis Mission longer than he had been here. He had known Ned since he was a kid, brown face and big teeth, playing first base on the Eagles baseball team. Ned had moved to Jackson Hole for a while, but then he’d come home. He’d stopped by the mission twice, something on his mind each time, Father John thought, but when he tried to ask, Ned had shrugged away the question. He was going to go into the Sun Dance, he said. Donald Little Robe, one of the elders, would sponsor him, be his spiritual grandfather, teach him the prayers and the rituals and help him catch up to the other dancers who had been preparing for most of the year. “I wanna get back to myself,” Ned had told him.

“There you are, John.” Ted Gianelli, the local FBI agent, emerged out of the shadows and colored lights. “Coroner’s about to bag the body. You want to say a prayer first?”

Father John fell in beside the fed through the tunnel of official vehicles—white Jeep, coroner’s van, three or four white police cars with BIA Police on the sides. Homicide was a federal case, he knew, but the rez police would assist Gianelli in gathering evidence. “You have a positive ID?” he said.

“Not official.” Gianelli was six foot two, a couple inches shorter than Father John, but there was bulk to the man—barrel-chested, thick-necked, and dark hair going to gray. Twenty-five years ago he had been tackling ballcarriers for the New England Patriots. He still looked as if he could stop a grizzly bear.

He stopped and Father John felt the pressure of a mitt-sized hand on his arm. “Girlfriend says it’s Ned Windsong. Somebody shot him in the chest. We found the casing; looks like a .380 caliber. No weapon anywhere. I’m sorry, John. I know you knew the guy.”