The Work of Wolves (49 page)

"Let the sonofabitch go," Carson yelled.

Ted looked back, grinning. Then he withdrew his arm and stood on the ice, hair ragged around his head, coat gaping as the car rolled forward, the door wide open. Finally Ted turned and shuffled away from it, spiderlike, his feet scurrying over the ice.

The car was only about ten yards away from him when the lake made a sound like a sigh.

The car was gone, nosing down without a splash, its taillights for just a moment pointing upward like red eyes as the water poured in the open door, and then the ice was barren except for snow upon it. And the four of them.

Ted looked back over his shoulder at where the car had been. Then he looked down to his feet. He lifted his face and stared at the other three, halfway between them and the open water. They stared back at him. Willi unconsciously lifted a hand toward him, as if to pull him in. For a moment more Ted stood, a statue carved and frozen. Then a grin spread on his face, and he turned into a crazy, sooty magician whose magic was a danger and who hadn't escaped unscathed but who nevertheless had triumphed. He waved his hand as if to erase the world, then walked grinning up to the others.

"Let's get off this ice," he said.

They gathered around him, wrapped him into their group, and all four turned toward shore.

"Like the old Lakota used to say, if your car burns up, drowning don't hurt it much," Ted said.

"I told you the old Lakota did not have cars," Willi informed him.

They grinned at each other.

"That right? Did you know that, Earl?"

"No. I never realized that."

"I knew it," Carson said.

"Well," Ted mused, "they're gonna say it when I'm an old Lakota."

They reached the shore, climbed the bank.

"Now we gotta get home without attractin attention," Carson said.

"We can go across country to my place," Earl said. "If we stay in the draws, we might be OK. Then I can take you all home."

"I hope my mother here is not up yet," Willi said.

"What are you goin to tell her if she is?"

"I do not know. What would happen if I told her the truth, do you think?"

No one could guess.

F
OUR DAYS LATER
Earl was at his desk at school, trying to concentrate on the math problem scrawled across the board. He had seen the solution before Mr. Edwards finished writing the problem, but he was trying to pay attention anyway, to sink into the mundane step-by-step of the problem's working out. If he didn't, he kept seeing the horses falling under the thin gold ring of the new moon above the Badlands. He kept smelling the dust their bodies raised when they fell. When he'd gotten home after taking the others to their houses, he'd stepped into the shower, and dust had run off him like mud off a pickup. It had collected in the bottom of the shower, and he'd had to use the soles of his feet like squeegees to force it down the drain. He'd found blood on his clothes and had washed the garments in the shower, too, and seen the red streaks turn pink and drain away.

When he'd walked into school this Wednesday morning, the place seemed quieter—or more, it seemed that he carried a bubble of silence around him that caused people to stop talking when he neared and to glance at him and glance away. As he was hanging his coat in his locker, he felt a touch on his shoulder and turned around, expecting some prank, but instead it was Meredith Remembers Him, walking by, reaching out and touching him, letting her fingertips slide off his shoulder and across his shoulder blade, a line of touch he felt all morning, and looking back over her shoulder as she walked and saying, "Morning, Earl." And when he walked in the door of his first-hour math class, he felt that envelope of silence, momentary, fleeting, before the buzz in the room resumed. No one said anything to him as he took his seat, but he felt eyes on him. He wondered if there was something wrong with him. Were the dust and blood he still felt on his skin actually visible? Were people seeing something about him that he didn't see when he looked in the mirror?

He was trying to concentrate on the steps to the math problem when he felt another hand on his shoulder, immediately erasing the residue of Meredith's easy fingers. It was Tyler Ellison, whose favorite relief from boredom was pulling a hair out of his head and tickling Earl's ear with it, or poking Earl in the back with a ballpoint pen or writing on his neck. Tyler made no bones about disliking Indians. His grandfather had disliked them and so did his father, and Tyler was determined to maintain the family tradition. It troubled him immensely to be seated behind Earl in math class, and it troubled him even more that Earl surpassed him in the class by leaps and bounds, though Tyler had no qualms about peeking over Earl's shoulder during tests, and Earl had often felt Tyler's hot breath against his neck and heard his small, raspy breathing as he leaned forward, trying to see Earl's answers.

Feeling Tyler's hand now, Earl braced himself. He pretended to ignore the touch. But as usual Tyler wouldn't accept such displays of ignorance. He pressed harder, and Earl heard his own name whispered, faint as passing wings. "Hey. Walks Alone."

Earl still didn't turn around. He saw the students immediately surrounding him surreptitiously turn their heads and glance at him, but he pretended not to have heard Tyler whisper his name. Then the hand left his shoulder, and he thought that perhaps for once Tyler was going to give up.

Then he heard Tyler's whispered voice again, words fluttering by, moth wings at night, recognized only after they were gone. "Way to go, Walks Alone. You done all right."

AND SO THE KNOWN
and the not-known got mixed up, until it seemed no one in Twisted Tree could tell the difference. Or those who could weren't speaking. Silence began to say more than words. Stories became random—bats at dusk, flickering, yet intent, impossible to follow. Goat Man was here. He was there. Mrs. Germain even reported seeing him in the Donaldson's Foods parking lot, a thin, moving shape under the blue, static lights, crouching for a moment behind the glowing wires of the carts in the cart corral.

When Greggy Longwell entered Jerry's Place, things were almost the same as they'd always been: the men at their dice cups casting for breakfast, the early-morning women lifting and setting down their heavy mugs stained with lipstick, people lifting their faces and greeting him as he walked to his favorite booth, and the men who occupied it with him as hearty or subdued in their "good mornings" as they always were. Except that Greggy noticed the conversation in his booth lost all speculation. No one seemed to have opinions any more. Conversation was all crop prices and weather. Greggy got tired of hearing about snow.

FOR SEVERAL MILES
headlights had been in Earl's mirror. He'd taken Ted to talk to a man about a car for sale, but Ted and the owner couldn't reach an agreement, and Earl was taking Ted home. The headlights behind him maintained an even distance, just close enough to partially blind him whenever he glanced in the mirror. He was happy to get to the turnoff to the little-used gravel road that led to Ted's place. But the headlights followed him onto it. What were the chances? He was about a mile down the road, having just topped a rise and descended into a dip, when the headlights were joined by new lights, red and blue ones, stabbing out of his mirror and into his eyes. His heart leapt in his chest. He looked at his speedometer, found nothing to accuse him. He pulled to the side of the road.

"What the hell's this about?" Ted asked.

"I don't know."

"A cop stopping us on a gravel road? What'd you do?"

'Nothing. I don't know what's going on. I was being careful, you know?"

Ted opened the glove compartment. "You got your registration in here?"

"I don't know. Do I need that?"

"You ain't ever been stopped before?"

A car door slammed behind them.

"Here it is." Ted lifted the registration and proof of insurance out of the glove compartment. As he handed it to Earl, Greggy Longwell's face appeared, gazing through the side window.

"Longwell," Ted murmured. "What the hell? He can't stop us on the rez, can he?"

"He just did."

Earl was suddenly aware that they were at the bottom of the depression and that no one could see them from anywhere, unless someone just chanced to come down this forsaken road. Outside the window Greggy now stood upright, his hand on the holster of his gun, waiting. Earl rolled his window down.

"Evenin, gentlemen," Greggy said.

"Good evening."

Ted poked Earl on the shoulder, made a backward motion with his fingers to indicate Earl should show Greggy the vehicle registration. Earl handed it up, but Greggy didn't take it from him. He merely looked down at it, but kept his hand on the butt of his pistol. Earl let the registration rest on the window frame.

"Mr. Walks Alone and Mr. Kills Many," Greggy said. "Out for a drive."

Ted poked Earl again, and Earl held the documents up toward Greggy, but Greggy ignored them. Earl let them drop onto his lap. An ominous silence descended.

"We're on the rez," Ted said. "You can't stop us out here like this."

"Probably true," Greggy said.

"We want, we can just drive away."

"Probably true, too."

Earl thought, however, that would not be wise.

"The thing is," Greggy said. "I ain't even here."

Ted and Earl glanced at each other, then at the dark hill in front of them. Earl realized Greggy had shut off his rack and even his headlights. They were in deep darkness, with only the cone of Earl's headlights to give any vision, and the thin half-moon sliding across the sky.

"Like Goat Man," Greggy said pleasantly. "Ain't that how he is? He's there, and then by God he ain't? That's me right now. Wouldn't surprise me none if you two could see right through me. That's how much I ain't here."

"What do you want?" Ted said tonelessly.

"Just wanta talk. Want some good conversation."

"Right." Ted's belligerence surfaced. "You got lonely. Decided you needed to talk to a couple Indians."

"Something like."

Earl and Ted stared out the windshield.

"Thing is," Greggy continued, hooking one thumb in his belt, leaving the other hand on his holster, "no one else seems a wanta talk to me any more. I ain't just Goat Man. I'm the goddamn Maytag repairman. Lonely as hell. Goddamn shame, ain't it? Gotta stop a couple fine gentlemen like you out here in the middle a nowhere just to find someone who'll talk to me."

"Let's go, Earl."

"Bambi died."

"Bambi died?!" The unexpected news shocked Earl.

The sheriff's flat eyes gazed at him impassively. "Got hit. What you'd expect. Kid says he didn't turn one way or the other. Kept a straight line. Dog was gettin old."

This news was a final drop. Sorrow overflowed in Earl. The dog wasn't even his. But he felt that if he opened his mouth, sorrow would leak out of it like a milky, vaporous liquid. He knew for sure tears would come. He looked away from Greggy. It was just too much.

"I shoulda stopped that game, maybe," Greggy said. "Trouble is, wasn't my jurisdiction. What I think is, that dog just liked those lights. Musta filled the whole world for him. And he just finally forgot they weren't the whole world. What I think, anyway."

Earl looked back up at the sheriff, startled. Greggy met his eyes directly.

"Sometimes those lights can't be avoided, I guess," Earl said.

"Sometimes they can't."

Ted interrupted. "You telling me you followed us out here to tell us Bambi got hit?"

Greggy reached his left hand to Earl's outside mirror, twisted it so it stuck out away from the car, and looked into it. "Like I said, I ain't even here. See? Can't even see myself. Nothing but night in that mirror."

"If you got no reason for stopping us, I think we oughta be going."

"Didn't you usta have a car? That Citation with them bad headlights?"

Earl and Ted looked at each other.

"I was always waitin for them headlights to give out entire. Ticket you. What happened to that car? Why's Mr. Walks Alone chauffeurin you around?"

"A relative's got it. My cousin."

"Your cousin." Greggy pushed the mirror back in Earl's direction. "There. That about right?" It wasn't even close. The mirror shot out into space, catching a single star in its center. "Your cousin from around here?"

"New Mexico."

"New Mexico. You got a Navaho cousin, do you? And I'm guessin he's borrowin that car for a real long time."

"Something like that."

"It's good havin relatives, ain't it?"

Ted only nodded. For a while silence reigned. It was awfully dark. It was awfully quiet.

"You stopped us because you wanta know my family tree?"

"I'd be fascinated. But no, that ain't really it."

Greggy looked into the cast of Earl's headlights, the gravel road with its small pebbles throwing shadows ten yards long.

"No," he said. "I'm mainly just lonely. No one's talkin to me any more. 'Course I always got things to think about. Puzzles, you might say. Part a the job, puzzlin is. Most a the job, really. So even on nights when no one's speedin or crossin the center line, and everyone's headlights are workin fine, I'm not generally bored. Spend all my time puzzlin."

"That right?" Ted asked. "I always thought you were doing cross-stitch."

"I never cross-stitch in my car. But here's the thing about puzzlin. Usually I get all sortsa help. Most of it ain't worth a damn, but still. Anywhere I go, people're offerin me advice. Clues. Half my job is sortin it out. Most things, I got 'n excess of information. Too damn much. Confuses the issues. Makes it harder to figure out what happened."

"Fascinating," Ted said, truculently. Earl had withdrawn from the conversation. He watched the star in his mirror creep slowly off center as the earth turned.

"Oh, it is," Greggy said. "But there's a thing goin on right now that's more damn puzzlin than the puzzle itself. You two heard anything about them horses disappeared off Magnus Yarborough's place? Again?"

Earl had reached out with his fingertips to push the mirror and bring the star back into the center. He jerked his hand at Greggy's question, and stars streaked through the mirror as if all the heavens were falling.