Buffalo Jump Blues (25 page)

Sean removed the parachute cord from his belt pack. Levi looked up at him, the flames of the fire dancing in his pupils. The words he was speaking were gibberish. The only word Sean recognized was ‘Papa-san.'

“Papa-san isn't here,” Sean said. “Lie down. Put your hands behind your back.”

Levi was Sean's size, younger, stronger, and had nearly killed Melvin Campbell with his fists only a few hours before. But he slowly relinquished his hold on his brother, whose eyes were unseeing now, and let him slip to the ground. He lay down beside him and brought his arms behind his back.

At first, Sean thought the blood on Levi's hands was from his brother, then he saw where two fingers were missing. Sean looked over at the shotgun, which had burst apart where the action met the back of the barrel. It had exploded when Levi pulled the trigger, the hot metal shearing off his fingers. Sean realized that if the gun had fired without exploding, he would probably be dead now.

He called Ida over and had her cover him with the handgun while he tied Levi up. He had never tied anyone up before, but forty feet of
paracord did the job, even if the only knots he knew were fisherman's knots.

He sat back. He felt lightheaded but strangely laden, too, as the adrenaline began to flush out of his system and an ache settled into his bones. He became aware of the whirring of the rattlesnake and wondered if it had been rattling all along and he'd blanked it out. It made a white noise behind Ida's voice, which rose and fell, telling John it was all okay now, her words a mantra. It rattled off and on for a time after she stopped talking and sat cradling John's head in her lap. Then there were just the odd sparks snapping out of the fire.

A
t the Blackfeet Community Hospital in Browning, Sean found Joseph asleep in the ICU waiting room, his head lolled back, breathing with his mouth open.

Sean stirred him awake, briefly told him what had happened, and asked about Melvin Campbell's condition. John said he was going to make it, that the doctors had been able to relieve the pressure on his brain caused by the hematoma.

“They took like a Black and Decker to his skull,” he told Sean.

“Wasn't he shot?” Sean said.

“No, man, it was the blow.” He made a fist. “But I found a hole in the headboard that looked like a bullet hole. I don't see how anybody could have missed, though. It's a tiny room.”

“I don't think anybody missed.” Sean told him what John had said about Brady ordering his brother to shoot the old man and Levi hesitating because he was afraid of spirits.

“A white guy misses on purpose because of ghosts? On a rez? That's like irony or something, huh?”

“Something like that,” Sean said. He was thinking down the road, as he had been since they'd marched Levi Karlson down from the cliffs. It had taken them a long hour to reach the Highlander, because with his hands tied behind his back, Levi kept falling, and John Running Boy needed Ida's support. The baling twine had cut off the circulation below his ankles for so long that he had to hobble, his feet feeling like blocks of wood as they struck the earth.

The rancher who had promised Sean a conversation about buffalo
was not too pleased with the one they had on his porch about a dead man and a knife. That was an understatement. But he made the call to the tribal police, and it was in his living room that Joseph's brother-in-law and another officer named Laboeuff had taken their statements, after which they had taken Levi Karlson into custody. How long he'd stay in custody was the question Sean turned over.

To start with there was a jurisdiction issue. Levi had committed battery on Melvin Campbell and abetted in the kidnapping of Ida Evening Star on tribal land, but the plateau above the cliffs where he was apprehended straddled the border between the reservation and the Lewis and Clark National Forest.

Another problem was that the only eyewitness to the assault charge was the victim, who was lying in a barbiturate-induced coma to prevent his brain from swelling. And what else really did they have on Levi Karlson? Kidnapping? That was the word of a Blackfeet Indian who was avoiding state extradition, along with a private detective who had no standing on the reservation, and a quarter-white Chippewa Cree woman who waved a tail for a living. Against their word was an Ivy League lacrosse player in good standing with the law, whose father owned enough pulp timber to print the
Times of India
. Sean's pessimism had been ingrained by the master, Martha Ettinger, who had seen too many “assholes,” her blanket description for nearly all criminals—“training wheel assholes” or “TWAs” encompassing the rest—walk.

Sean reached her at four in the morning, after the doctor on night shift upgraded Campbell's condition from critical but stable to serious.

“Is he conscious?” Martha asked.

“They took him off the coma drugs, but I don't think they'll let anyone talk to him for a few more hours. And it happened at night. He might not be able to identify his attacker even when he comes out of it.”

“And you're calling me why?”

“For advice. Joseph's brother-in-law seems to be the one in charge, but he's not being very forthcoming about the situation. All I get is what I get from Joseph.”

“The sit . . . u . . . a . . . tion,” Martha said, emphasizing each syllable, “is there's going to be an investigation. If they run their ship like we run ours, they have forty-eight hours to charge him with a crime or they have to cut him loose; that depends on the investigation and if he cops. Has he been interviewed?”

“He gave a statement after the doctors worked on his hand, but not much of one. I don't think he admitted to a damn thing. Joseph says he used his phone call to call his dad, who sent a lawyer out from Seattle. He'll be here tomorrow, I mean today. Four, five hours from now.”

“So he's not cooperating. Tell you what. Stay in cell range and I'll get back to you. I've got no idea what protocol they follow up there as to lawyer visits, detention policy, any of it. I'll talk to Harold. He'll at least know a good Indian lawyer. You might need one.”

Sean couldn't help wondering if talking to Harold was just waking him up from the other side of the bed.

“Bet he's pissed at me, huh?”

“I think Harold's mood is the least of your problems. Papa-san's lawyer is going to try to paint the three amigos as the bad guys, you can bet the farm on it. All of you gave statements, right?”

“We did. I just told John and Ida to tell the truth.”

“And the truth shall set you free? Keep dreaming. But for your sake, I hope that's true.”

—

Sean had gone outside to talk, had wandered under the stars a ways, and turned around to see John and Ida sitting on a bench near the emergency room entrance. John was lying on his back while Ida massaged his feet. Sean sat down on the grass and asked how John's ankles were doing.

“They said another hour and I'd have lost my feet,” John said.

“Levi hit him in the chest pretty hard, so they were worried about his heart swelling, but they don't think there's any internal bleeding,” Ida said.

“What happened before I got there?”

“You mean, where did they jump me?”

Sean nodded.

“Brady had his gun on me before I got to the top. I was just going to put the shotgun together when he got the drop. He told me to hand over the pack and then got all mad because he couldn't figure out how to assemble the gun. He took the shells out and told me if I didn't put it together for him, he'd have Levi do things to Ida. It was dark enough that he couldn't see my hands, so I dropped the buttstock on purpose and grabbed a stone off the ground when I picked it up. I wedged it up into the barrel before I attached the action. I figured if he shot it, the stone would at least throw off the shot. But I didn't really think it was going to blow up.”

“What happened after Brady took it from you?”

“He marched me over to the fire and Levi hit me a few times. When he hits you, it's like you can't breathe. It's like he's a grizzly bear or something, gets this rage in his eyes. But Brady was the scary one. He talked like there was an invisible person beside him. He scared the hell out of me.”

“Well, your stone worked,” Sean said. “It saved my ass.”

“Yeah, maybe, but if it wasn't for Ida we'd all be dead. She only acted like she was afraid. Tell him what you told me.”

Ida pulled at a cigarette and looked off into the night.

“I'll tell him,” John said. “Her mother knew this story about Indians kidnapping a white girl to make her a slave. It was in a magazine.”

“She wasn't a slave,” Ida said. She flicked the ash of the cigarette. “They took her so they could adopt her into the tribe. I'll tell it.”

She passed the cigarette to John as Sean listened to her story, how Indian boys had raided a white settlement and stolen some ice skates.
When the river where they were camping froze over, the boys put the skates on and fell on the ice. Then they let the girl have a turn and she stumbled around, too, falling on her face, and everybody laughed. After that, they had no reason to hide the skates from her, and one night after everyone had gone to bed, she put them on and skated away down the river. She'd known how to skate all along. She was just lulling them into complacency, waiting for the right moment to escape.

She shrugged. “For some reason I remembered that story when Levi got the jeans for me. He didn't check the pockets, so he didn't know I had a knife. I decided to act like I was a coward and wasn't any threat and waited for the right moment.” She looked down at her hands, her body looking lost in the work shirt Sean had given her after the policemen took her bloodstained shirt into evidence. Again she looked off. Maybe it was beginning to sink in, killing a person. Sean wanted to tell her it would get worse before it got better, but it would get better. At least that was what he told himself.

“This is where you guys are.” It was Joseph, walking out of the floodlit entrance of the emergency room. “Man, I've been looking all over for you.”

“You found us,” John said. “Do you know when we can go home?”

“Yeah, that's why I was looking. My brother-in-law says we can all go home, but nobody can leave the rez. Looks like you and Mr. Whiskers are going to share the couch,” he said to Sean.

“How long do you think it will take to straighten this out?” John said.

“What? You have a bad day and you aren't an Indian no more? All of a sudden you're worried about time? It takes what it takes.”

Ida struck a match and lit another cigarette. She pressed it to John's lips. Joseph took it and put it under his heel. “I thought you was quitting.”

“Don't you know that smoking's traditional?” John's voice went up on “traditional,” making a question of the word.

“You see how it is,” Joseph said. “You want to do something that's bad for you, you just say, ‘It's traditional,' and that makes it okay.”

“Fuck you, Joseph,” John said.

Sean saw Ida staring off to the east, where a smear of lavender made an inroad on the horizon. A good fishing hour, an even better one for the comfort of a couch and a brittle-whiskered cat.

I
t took four days to straighten it out, at least to the extent that Sean was granted release from the reservation—Joseph convincing his brother-in-law that if Sean was requested to come back to answer more questions or provide testimony, he would. He also managed to wiggle off the hook with the state of Montana, after an off-duty game warden hiked up to the jump with a GPS and determined that Sean's involvement in the events was restricted to the reservation.

Melvin Campbell's condition improved sufficiently for him to make a statement identifying his attacker as being a man. But it was dark in the house and his eyesight without his glasses bordered on blindness, so he couldn't identify Levi Karlson, or even if his attacker had been white. That left the preponderance of evidence against Levi being the sworn statements of Sean, John Running Boy, and Ida Evening Star, and though their stories concurred, Levi's recounting of events was equally plausible—a classic “he said, she said” dispute, or in this case “he said, they said.”

The surviving brother admitted knowing John Running Boy from a prior visit to the reservation, said they had become friendly and decided to drive to the buffalo jump to sit around a campfire and pass a bottle, Ida and Sean tagging along for fun. An argument had ensued between Brady and John, who both fancied Ida, and when the argument threatened to turn violent, Ida had produced a concealed weapon and stabbed Brady in the throat. Levi had wrestled with John over the shotgun, which had exploded and injured his hand.

Levi's story provided no explanation for the injuries on John's
ankles, nor did he admit to ever being in Campbell's house, let alone firing a handgun in his bedroom. The bullet might have linked him to the assault on Campbell if it could be proven that the .380 ACP belonged to the Karlsons, not to Ida Evening Star. But the jacketed bullet from the “pipsqueak” caliber passed through a weak spot in the wall and was never found, expending its energy somewhere along the 49th parallel.

Taking his lawyer's advice not to add to his statement or answer any questions about the discrepancies in his story while the lawyer threw his weight around, Levi stayed mute, and after spending two nights in the Browning jail he was released pending further investigation. As tribal authorities had no extradition agreement with the state and vice versa, it meant that in all likelihood he would neither be arrested nor papered to provide testimony as to the particulars of the death of his brother.

Sean was less concerned with Levi walking than he was with Ida being charged with second-degree murder. Self-defense was difficult to claim when no one had assaulted her, and a verbalized threat of rape, even if supported by corroborating recollections of others at the scene, was not in itself sufficient justification for stabbing a man in the neck. But Sean and John had both heard the click as Brady drew back the hammer of the pistol before inserting it in her ear. That was a lie Sean could live with and John could go along with, if it ensured her release, and along with Brady's prints on the gun, it did. There was still the possibility of the FBI becoming involved, especially as Karlson was non-Indian and his death was being investigated as a major crime, a combination that gave the bureau authority. But federal gears turned reluctantly when it came to reservation matters, and when Sean visited Melvin Campbell's house to say his good-byes, the legal entanglements that clouded their futures had lifted, if not cleared.

—

Sean heard the tapping of the stick on the floorboards and steeled himself as the knob turned. He hadn't seen Melvin Campbell since his release from the hospital and expected the old man to be more stooped and turtlelike than ever. He was shocked when Campbell greeted him with eyes that reached the level of his own.

“I thought I was growing in reverse, but apparently that was coyote playing a trick on me.”

Campbell said that a physical therapist had introduced him to the McKenzie method of back extensions, coaxing the protruding disks in his lower spine back where they belonged, and enabling him to stand fully erect for the first time in almost thirty years. “A Blackfeet elder with a yoga mat, what would our grandfathers think?” He offered Sean coffee, and when Sean went to make it, tugged his sleeve. “Good for me to move around,” he said.

They had their coffee in the living room, which had been thoroughly cleaned and really was a living room now, not simply the place to park yourself that it had been on prior visits. Campbell said that Ida and John had agreed to move in for the rest of the summer, to help him get a handle on his papers. The curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian had been by, had oohed and ahhed over his collection of verbal histories, but then detailed the considerable transcription work that needed to be done before they were suitable to archive.

“For posterity,” Campbell said. “So this old wind talker will be a voice on the wind after his spirit has departed.”

Sean asked him where the “kids” were, and Campbell smiled.

“That Ida, she's a serious one. I think she's the influence that young man needs. When she goes back for the fall semester I'm hoping that will make John want to follow. He never got his diploma, but I got him enrolled in a summer program to earn the credits. He'll have them if she has anything to say about it. Young man in love isn't too hard to steer.”

“I didn't think they were that way,” Sean said.

Campbell smiled. “I saw how you looked at her, but there's no
future there. The only reason they're in separate bedrooms is to appease my antiquated notions of propriety. But I know every board in this house, and they don't squeak under the feet of my wife's spirit. I don't let on that I know.”

He rose to shake Sean's hand. He said that Ida and John were down at the trailer, that his tenant had moved and he had put John to work renovating the property while it was vacant. “I'm sure they'll want to see you,” he said.

It was a fine morning, the Precambrian thrust of the mountains gold and the valley green, and Sean decided to walk the lane that connected the properties, to breathe some fresh air before spending the next six hours behind the wheel. Lupine had grown up in the fields and on the strip of grass dividing the lane, and where the ruts bent around a copse of trees he caught a glimpse of the trailer, and saw that John and Ida were sitting on the seat of the swing set in the yard. The set was repainted red and the one lopsided seat had been replaced by a board that swung level. John was dragging a toe to make the seat twist as they swung, Ida to his left as she had been in the old photos. Sean remembered that John liked her to sit on that side so that the eye in which he saw his reflection was the one with the purple iris. Sean also remembered Ida telling him that that was where they had first kissed. He had a feeling that if he stayed they might revisit the moment and that he would feel like an interloper in someone else's story. He'd been a part of it for a while. Now, he realized, he wasn't.

“You never were going to see that birthmark,” he said, exhaling a breath. His voice was greeted by the snorting of a whitetail buck, which bounded away through the aspens, waving his white flag. He walked back the way he had come. It was still a fine day and the old country lane was something out of a poem and he was free to walk it. After a while, he whistled.