Crow Fair (21 page)

Juanita hardly knew what a shaman was and would have pictured someone on the Discovery Channel, feathered, painted, beaded, perhaps belled—certainly not someone dressed like this or presenting a calling card. His name was Rudy, and he seemed like an Olympian in his tracksuit and Nike shoes. He explained that he was an anthropologist and arid lands botanist, whose work had led him to discover a spiritual being living under a sandstone ledge on the Medicine Bow River, also named Rudy. It had taken seven years for the two Rudys to track each other down and become the united Rudy now standing before Juanita and touching a button of her blouse for emphasis. Juanita
felt the heat rise. “I was out in the prairie. It was a hot day. All I could hear was wind and crickets or birds. Then the grass seemed to creak under my feet and I could feel the other Rudy was near and coming to me. The wind stopped as Rudy arrived. It was a lighthearted moment, Juanita. I said, ‘Welcome aboard.’ And that quick, I was unified. I was undivided, united as one, the one and only Rudy. But now there was … something else.” He seemed disturbed by Juanita’s hard, restless gaze. She let him follow her into the house, where she dug her phone out of her yellow, fringed purse hanging on the doorknob. She called her husband. “Pat, I’ve got a shaman here at the house. When are you coming home? You heard me. How on earth should I know? He says he’s a shaman.” She cupped the phone and said to the stranger, “What exactly is a shaman?”

“That’s a long story. I—”

“He says it’s a long story. Okay, sure, see you in a few.”

She hung up. It would not be a few minutes, more like a day, before she saw Pat. But the ruse had an immediate effect on Rudy the shaman: panic.

“Does he mean literally ‘a few minutes’?”

“Maybe five. He has to stop for cigarettes.”

Rudy the shaman burst through the door at a dead run. Juanita watched him windmill down the driveway and out onto the county road, stooping to pick up some kind of pack at the corner. She grabbed the phone again.

“As soon as I told him you were about to arrive, he ran for it.”

“Juanita, listen to me, you need to call the sheriff.”

“And tell him what? I had a shaman at the house?”

“What does that even mean?”

“Pat! I don’t know. I told you that.”

“Well, call anyway and then call me back. Or I’ll call them. No, better you, in case they need a description.”

“Aren’t you just assuming this guy is a criminal?”

“Maybe that’s all a shaman is, for Chrissakes. Just call and then call me back.”

At first, Juanita resisted making the call, then, realizing Pat wouldn’t let it go, she picked up the phone. Sheriff Johnsrud was at a county commissioners’ meeting, but she was put through to Eric Caldwell, his deputy.

“Hi, Juanita.”

“Eric, some strange guy stopped by here. Said he was a—something or other. When I told him Pat was due home, he ran out the door in kind of a panic.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“I don’t think it’s a big deal, but Pat insisted I call.”

“Pat has a point. Describe this guy, would you, Juanita? What’d you say he was?”

“I can’t remember, but he was wearing kind of a tracksuit, good-looking guy, maybe thirty-five, odd but with nice manners and one of those big watches tells you how far you walked, wavy brown hair, and talked educated like.”

“Whoa, Juanita, you did get a pretty good look!”

“That’ll do, Eric.”

“Okay, we’ll check it out.”

“Do me a favor, call Pat on his cell or he’ll fret.”

Afterward, Juanita had to piece the story together. Sheriff Johnsrud came back from the commissioners’ meeting and joined Eric in scouring the area between the Riley place on the county road and the edge of town, down by the Catholic church and the ball field. They confronted Rudy just past the Lewis and
Clark Memorial. When he went for something in his backpack, Sheriff Johnsrud shot him. Looking at the body, Johnsrud said, “He’s done. Stick a fork in him.” Eric pushed the backpack open with his foot and said there was no gun. Neither spoke until Johnsrud mused that they should go get one, and Eric nodded. “That way,” said the sheriff, “it’s a senseless tragedy.”

Rudy, a low-risk mental patient, had just walked out of the Warm Springs hospital. The backpack contained pebbles, a dead bird, and a book on teaching yourself to dance. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky for a week in Rudy’s hometown on the Wyoming border. He could have walked there in half a day.

It had been too obvious that Rudy was harmless. The doctors at the Warm Springs hospital made such a huge point of it that the whole town was embarrassed. Dan Sheare at the Ford dealership said it was like they had shot the Easter Bunny, “Town Without Pity,” and so forth. So Sheriff Johnsrud conceded the terrible misfortune and took full responsibility. After all, he had fired the shot. But eventually Johnsrud changed, or everyone thought he had, though some admitted they would’ve changed, too, if such a thing happened to them, or else they concluded they were only imagining the sheriff was any different than he had always been. Eric, however, who had been born right there in town, moved away. Eventually people quit asking where Eric had got off to, just assuming he had landed on his feet somewhere. Probably his sister still heard from him. She lived over where the first post office burned down giving her a great view of the mountains.

When, sitting under the Dos Equis beer umbrella, Pat joked that Eric had left law enforcement, Juanita startled herself by spitting in his face. Things had started to go wrong for them,
though it didn’t seem so at first and not really for a while afterward, because the Cancún trip had provided needed relief, especially for Juanita, who found she could still turn a few heads on the beach. “Oh God, we’re not really going back to Montana,” she said on the last day. Pat said, “I hate to think how much we’ll miss these warm sea breezes,” but that wasn’t what she meant at all, at all, at all.

During a pensive moment in the airport, while waiting to board, Pat said, “Tell me honestly, Juanita, why did you spit in my face?”

“I admit I thought about it.”

“Darling, you didn’t think about it, you did it. You spit in my face.”

“I did?”

Juanita found this very disturbing. She knew she’d thought about it but … really?

Winter went on well into April, and they both were working very hard, trying to become a “unit” again, but the word itself had lost its meaning. They had been one for so long they couldn’t comprehend why it had become so hard. They couldn’t understand what was happening to them in other ways, either. For example, Carol Hayes, the sheriff’s dispatcher, who worked at the courthouse down the hall from Juanita and was just about her best friend, right out of the blue told Juanita to her face that she was a bitch on wheels. Juanita was astonished.

“What can you possibly mean!”

“Isn’t it obvious, Juanita?”

Juanita shrank into the files and deeds of her musty corner and went off to lunch with her head down. She didn’t want to dignify Carol’s remark by asking further what it meant, and as a result it just hung over her like a cloud. She quit going to the
window and staring in the direction of their house, almost visible beyond the poplars at the fairgrounds. Oddly, she became more efficient. The small annoyance she once felt at being confined to this room was gone. There was a kind of relief in feeling she belonged here, as though the fight had gone out of her. And what good had that been anyway? Now, when asked about her job, she said simply, “It’s a living.”

Pat’s situation had become more precarious. While rehabilitating an old priest after rotator cuff surgery, he had been a bit zealous, causing a new tear. It was quickly repaired, but the surgeon appeared at physical therapy and rebuked Pat, who would remember the vehemence, if not the words particularly, and the fact that the surgeon, still in his scrubs, wore the most beautiful pair of oxblood loafers, slippers almost, with the thinnest of soles. Pat was so friendly with the staff that he was ashamed to have been scolded in front of them like a dog or a child. They couldn’t look at him, either.

The exceptionally long winters—the drifted driveway, the circles of ice in the windows, the days that abruptly ended in afternoon—might have had something to do with it, but that same hard April they decided to put the place on the market. They made no secret of thinking it a case of good riddance and didn’t mind letting the neighbors and their former friends know it. They put up a
FOR SALE BY OWNER
out front and awaited results.

At the courthouse, Juanita held up their deed for Carol the dispatcher to see. “This will have a new name on it for the first time in ninety years. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Where do you think you’re headed?”

“I’ll let you know.”

Carol went back to her desk opposite the front stairs. There
wasn’t any point in talking to Juanita anymore. Pat used to be so much fun, too. Now he was a regular sad sack; so maybe Juanita came by this new disposition honestly. The truth was, they didn’t know where they were headed, but since they had never before known liquidity, they were sure it would come with ideas they didn’t yet have, ideas resembling hopeful points on the map. This confidence came and went, and there was little to be gained by mentioning the dread that seemed to seep out of nowhere.

Someone pulled up into the driveway in a brown four-door. It was the same shade of brown as Pat’s grandfather’s shot-up Plymouth rip-rapping the irrigation dam upstream. They watched from the edges of the front window, careful not to seem eager. The driver’s door opened, and a pair of narrow legs in old farmer pants swung out, resting on the ground. The driver gingerly slid out and shut the door: a woman perhaps just entering old age and remarkably unkempt, the wild gray hair pinned off her forehead with a red plastic comb, her barn coat done about the waist with twine. Walking unsteadily, she stared hard toward the house; she did not have the look of a prospect.

Pat and Juanita opened the door before the woman could knock. She made no attempt at introducing herself. “Yes?” said Juanita, Pat at her side attempting, “How can we help you?”

“I’m not sure you can,” she said distantly, looking from one to the other, and then just stopped. She had green eyes. Later, when Pat and Juanita remarked on them to each other, it seemed to start a conversation that went nowhere.

“What brings you here?” Pat asked like some sort of radio announcer too hearty for this small stalemate.

“A glass of cold water out of that spring behind the house.”

“Why, most certainly! You know, it’s piped right to the faucet. So why don’t you come in. I’ll bet you’re thirsty.”

“For some of that spring water.”

“You shall have it!” said Pat in that same hale voice, causing Juanita to glance quickly at him.

“How did you know about the spring?” Juanita chirped.

“I was told about it.”

They sat the woman down at the kitchen table made of cottonwood planks from the old stall barn. Pat had fitted the planks together with perfect joints when they were first married. This encumbrance they also intended to leave behind, because, as Juanita said, “It weighs a ton.” Pat felt they could have taken it but didn’t want to argue.

Juanita went to the sink and filled her tallest glass, and as she started to turn toward the refrigerator, the woman said, “No ice,” so Juanita turned back and set the glass of water before her. The woman nodded thanks. Pat sat at the far end tilting back his chair, hands behind his head in a pantomime of nonchalance.

The woman drained the glass and held it to eye level as though to look through it. Staring thus, she said, “I’m Rudy’s mother, the dead boy.”

Pat pulled his chair upright and set his hands close to him on the table. Juanita grinned with pain. “I’m so sorry.”

Pat said, “We’re both so sorry.”

“Oh?”

After a long silence, Juanita asked, “Is there anything we can do?”

“Sure,” she said, fishing a cigarette out of her coat and lighting it with a beat-up old Zippo. Pat and Juanita refrained from mentioning how much they hated smoking. The woman held the
cigarette between her second and third fingers, as if in the middle of her hand. “You can tell me about his last day here.”

“I can do that,” said Juanita, getting braver. “He—Rudy—really just turned up and immediately started talking about his life like I had known him before.”

“You had known him before?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay.”

“Oh yes, and then, uh, we were just chatting in general, well, really it was quite brief, and he told me he—”

“He gave you some reason to call the law?”

“Well, ma’am, I have to be honest, he kind of frightened me the way he, the way he was talking.” Juanita was startled to hear her own voice rise so quickly.

The woman took the cigarette from her mouth but kept it in her hand in front of her face. “That wasn’t no lie. Rudy was a shaman.”

“We don’t even know what that is!” cried Pat.

The woman got up and dropped the cigarette hissing into the nearly empty water glass. “I just feel like you made a big mistake, but I guess time will tell if it hasn’t already.”

At the door they assured her they felt just as bad as she did. She shook her head slightly; she seemed to wonder at them. “I wouldn’t have done that,” she said. “I’d of had more sense.”

They watched her go to her car. They expected her to say something or glance back, but no. In the house, when Juanita said she had eyes like a cat, Pat didn’t seem to pick up on it, remarking instead that she must have been a great beauty in her day. He left the room, and Juanita emptied the cigarette butt into the sink before going to the window. The car was already gone.