Buffalo Jump Blues (6 page)

Martha dropped her chin into one hand as she squatted to peer down at the body. The man was dressed in dark, bloodstained jeans, tennis shoes, and a mustard-colored long-sleeved shirt. He wore a ratty piece of bison robe cut like a vest, hair side out, with buttons made from bits of wood. Before dying he had curled into a fetal position with his arms wrapped around his knees. His eyes had gone from glassy to opaque and had begun to shrink back into his skull.

“He's an Indian,” Martha said.

S
ean Stranahan had been renting an art studio at the Bridger Mountain Cultural Center since the day he'd arrived in town. The rent was ridiculously cheap, but the manager had balked. She already rented to a dozen artists and had an eye toward diversity. Put on the spot, Sean told her he was a licensed private detective who'd worked for a law firm in Boston, the only lie being the tense, his license having expired. But it had the desired effect and he'd got the room. Hence the discreet
Private Investigations
etched into the rippled glass door pane, underneath
BLUE RIBBON WATERCOLO
RS
, though he wasn't strictly tied to the medium. The capital letters paid the rent, that and seasonal work as a fly fishing guide on Sam Meslik's outfitter's license. The scripted letters were what got him into trouble.

Hearing steps in the hallway, he raised his eyes from the half-completed oil on the easel. He took a masculine pride in knowing who was passing down the hall by the cadence of the footsteps on the travertine tiles. He didn't know these footsteps. Nor did he recognize the rap at his door.

“Come in,” he said.

Sean paused with his brush raised as Ida Evening Star opened the door. She closed it behind her and leaned back the way she'd leaned against the porch rail at the bar. But the easy silence of the night before wasn't as easy this time around.

“You aren't wearing your tail,” he said.

“I don't work today. I told you that.”

“So you did.”

“You really are a private detective. I wasn't sure last night.” She nodded to herself. “Men will say anything, you know, anything at all.”

“Honesty is one of my more dependable virtues. Please, have a chair.”

But she was running her eyes around the room, taking in the paintings on the walls. “This one,” she said, pointing to a watercolor of a serpentine river, white pelicans painting their reflections at the point of an island, “I think I know this place.”

“That's the Missouri River near the Dearborn junction.”

“Eagle Rock,” she said.

“That's right. How do you know it?” Sean stood his brush in a Mason jar of spirits and scrubbed his stained fingers on a turpentined towel.

“Oh,” she said at length. “It's on the way from here to there.”

“Here to where?”

“Browning. I lived there when I was a girl.”

“That's the Blackfeet Reservation. I thought you were from Rocky Boy.”

“There, too. My father worked for Indian Services. We moved from one rez to another. Blackfeet, Flathead, Northern Cheyenne, Crow. Finally back to Rocky Boy. I'm not from anywhere, really. My family was Little Shell Chippewa. We were called the landless Indians.”

“How did you find me?”

“Molly Linklatter. She's the Queen of the Waters.”

“Ah, Sam Meslik.”

She nodded and finally took up his offer for a chair, but not before he ran his eyes up and down. She was wearing a jersey top and tight-fitting black jeans that revealed the outline of what looked like a folding knife in the right front pocket. Open-toed leather sandals. Her hair was gathered in a ponytail and looked dull, in stark contrast to the fiery hues of her eyes.

“It's called heterochromia,” she said, anticipating his question.
“Actually, I have heterochromia iridis, which means the irises are different colors, and I have central heterochromia, too, which means each eye is more than one color. You see it in dogs more than people.”

“I have a Sheltie with mismatched eyes, one brown, one blue. Yours are . . .”

He looked closely. The left eye had a narrow gold ring around the pupil, radiating to a wide green band. The right had a dark brown ring like a starburst that bled into a band of purple.

“My mother told me my left eye was my white eye, that her side of the family, the Little Shell Chippewa, had interbred with French fur trappers and the clan was identifiable by their green eyes. She said my right eye was my Indian eye. Then I learned that it could be because of an injury when I was little. I accused her of dropping me on my head, but she didn't remember that. But then there were chunks of our life she didn't remember.”

“She drank?”

“My family was the opposite of the stereotype. My father got drunk exactly once in his life. But I hardly ever remember my mother sober.”

A lull came over the room, a silence in the wake of her confession.

“Is that a knife in your pocket or are you happy to see me?” Sean said. He offered an encouraging smile.

She fished the knife from her pocket. “Don't you know that Indians always carry knives, Mr. Stranahan?”

“Call me Sean.”

“Sean. May I?” She opened the knife one-handed and flipped it. It turned over twice, the point burying into the wood of the desk. The blade vibrated, then stood still between them. She leaned back in the chair, fingering a wayward strand of hair. She looked critically at it. The tips were tinted an insect green.

“Chlorine?”

She nodded. “About once a week I put color on the ends and treat it with a cream that's used to condition horses' manes. Otherwise, people would think I was punk.”

“I doubt that.”

“The worst are the headaches. Every night, the water runs out of my ears onto the pillow. And my eyes burn. I could wear goggles, but who wants to look at a mermaid wearing goggles? It's the same reason I don't wear a nose clamp.”

“Sacrifice for your art and you shall be rewarded.”

She gave him a sideways look.

“It's something my mother said when I told her I wanted to be a painter. I think she got it from someone famous. My father didn't agree.”

“You're a very good one.”

“Thank you. I'm a better artist than I am a detective. Or fishing guide. Though I've spent the past few years being a relative failure at all three endeavors. Tell me something, was it just a coincidence we were both looking at the sky last night?”

“What was it you said when I asked if you were really a detective? ‘Sort of.' Well, that's my answer—‘sort of.' Sam pointed you out when I was with Molly. It was like, ‘That guy over there, the disreputable-looking one with the black man, I taught him all I know and he's still a fuckup.' You know how Sam talks.”

Sean had to laugh. “That I do, but the disreputable part is the pot calling the kettle black. For the record.”

“Anyway, it was in the bar about a week ago. He was going to introduce us, but something came up. And when you walked out on the porch it was dark, and it was dark when I'd seen you before, so I wasn't sure until you came over. I thought, ‘Ah, here's the guy I wanted to ask a question.' I was going to ask you then, but you had to be someplace else and I had to swim.”

“And I thought I'd cast a spell over an attractive woman.” Sean smiled. “A mayfly nymph at that.”

“I've seen those things. They don't look very appetizing.”

“They are to a trout. That black man you saw is Kenneth Winston. The Chippewa Nymph is his creation. Ken is one of the best fly tiers in the world. We call him Hot Hands.”

“I should feel honored, I suppose.”

Sean smiled. “See, this is you getting to know me better. That's so that the next time I see you, you'll point out the star you're named for.” He mimed rolling up his sleeves and placed his palms on the table. “What can I do for you, Ida?”

She would either get to the point now or back away from it, and Sean found that despite the encouragement in his voice, which was simply his nature, he didn't care one way or the other.

His apathy, though “apathy” was not an adequate word for the pall that cast over him, was a reflection of just how much the past couple months had changed him. The last time he'd countersigned one of his standard contracts, he'd ended up buried in a grave of horse remains. A man had died and Sean had been the one who made him die. He'd managed to live half a lifetime without killing anyone, and the next half, provided he had one, he'd live with the fact that he had. That and Martha turning out the light had darkened his outlook on life, and he'd followed his despair into a hole of self-pity protected by irony, and with only minor assistance from the traditional, mood-altering suspects.

As his mind drifted, Ida was speaking. He held up a finger. “You were in the tank and saw who? When did this happen? Start over.”

“Well, that's just it,” she said. “It was last Thursday and I'm not sure what I saw. The people behind the bar are kind of a blur, and I'm not like Molly or Jessica, I don't go up against the glass and flirt with the men.

“A modest mermaid.”

“It's being duplicitous, I'm aware of it. I'm flipping my tail and here I am casting judgment.”

Sean smiled. Despite his current state of indifference, he liked Ida Evening Star and had been intrigued from the start. Any attractive woman who could flick a folder open one-handed was his kind of trouble. He knew he'd say yes to whatever she asked of him and perhaps that's what he needed, a job, a paying one so he'd have to pay attention, something to drag him out of the doldrums.

“So who was it you thought you saw?”

“Someone from a long time ago, from Browning.”

“When you were a girl.”

“We moved there when I was eight. We left on my twelfth birthday.”

“Go on.”

“There was a boy who lived with his aunt. They called him John Running Boy, because he ran everywhere. He had a corduroy shirt that was his father's and he wore it almost every day. When he ran, the shirttail waved behind him like a flag. He had a crush on me.”

“Did you have a crush on him?”

The light behind her eyes changed, seemed to draw inward to a pinprick of intensity as she paged back through the years.

“No. Not at first. He was a year younger, and that's a difference when you're a kid, and I was half a head taller, but later, he . . . grew on me. I guess that's a way to put it. He's the first boy I ever kissed. We were sitting on a swing set and his face got serious and he kissed me. I'll never forget it.”

“What happened?”

“We moved. My father got assigned to the Flathead Reservation and it was a couple hundred miles. Kids are cats. They move on where people feed them, they only look back for a little while.”

“And you never saw him again?”

She shook her head. “Not until last week.”

“Ida . . .” Sean hesitated. “This John Running Boy, how old would he be now?”

“I'm twenty-six, so he would be twenty-five.”

“And he looks Indian?”

“He's full-blood Blackfeet.”

“Do you know why I'm asking?”

“I know about the body they found at the cliffs yesterday, if that's what you mean. It was in the newspaper this morning.”

“Okay . . .”

“It isn't him.” Her voice was firm.

“You said you couldn't see clearly through the glass and he would be what, ten years older than the last time you saw him?”

“Twelve.”

“Then how can you be sure the man you saw wasn't the one who died?”

“Because the man who came into the bar last week was there again last night, about an hour after you left.” She leaned back in the chair.
So there.

“You saw him last night?”

“No. But Vic did, and he saw him last week, too, the first time he came in. It was the same person.”

“Bartender Vic?”

She nodded.

“What is it you want me to do, Ida?”

“I want you to find him. I can pay you.”

Sean's face was skeptical. “You'd probably be wasting your money. Say I do find him. He may not be the man you saw in the bar. Do you want to open up that chapter of your life all over again?”

“But I do know it was him. It's only my eyes that can't be certain.”

Sean waited for her explanation. She seemed to make up her mind and stood from the chair. Reaching her left hand into the pocket of her jeans, she pulled out an arrowhead and placed it on the desk. The head was small and shiny black, no more than an inch long.

“It's a bird point,” Ida said.

Sean fingered it, the rippled edge carefully, for it was very sharp. He knew next to nothing about arrowheads but nodded his appreciation. “What's it chipped from?” he asked. “This looks too dark to be flint.”

“The secondary process is called pressure flaking, where you push the tool against the stone instead of striking it. That's what makes the serrations. It's obsidian. That night, after I swam, I was going to go look for the man in the bar, but he was gone by the time
I changed. Vic handed me this. He said the man had told him to give it to me.”

“That's all he said?”

“That's all, just to give it to me.”

“And you think John Running Boy made this.”

She nodded. “He learned flint napping from a man whose name I can't remember, an Indian with a white name. Anyway, this man lived up the lane from the trailer where John lived with his aunt. Even when he was seven, he napped beautiful points. Sometimes he'd give me one. I had a collection in a goldfish bowl.”

“Do you still have them?”

“Not the ones in the bowl. When the goldfish died, my mother got in one of her moods about cleaning things out and she dumped the bowl into the trash. She said she didn't know the points were in there, but she did. She never liked John. She said he stunk like an Indian.”

“But she was mostly Indian herself. Right?”

“She didn't mean how he smelled. She meant his circumstances, living with his aunt in a trailer. John was just a village dog to her, running with his shirttail flapping. She wanted me to do better than him.”

“So you don't have any of his arrowheads except this one, which a man who reminded you of him gave to someone to give to you.”