Death Along the Spirit Road (15 page)

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Authors: C. M. Wendelboe

BOOK: Death Along the Spirit Road
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“Don’t let Lumpy see you saving my butt.”
“He won’t know a thing. This is my own gun.”
Willie drove while Manny wrestled with the adjustment straps. He hadn’t worn a shoulder holster since he first started with the bureau. It had been cool back then, in a Don Johnson-
Miami Vice
kind of way. But experienced agents were right: Real cops didn’t wear shoulder rigs. He fidgeted until he got it comfortably positioned under his armpit, eased back in the seat, and thought of what he’d say to Reuben. He’d told Willie the truth: It didn’t matter if Reuben was Jason’s killer, Manny would arrest him. But it did matter. He wanted Reuben to be innocent of Jason’s murder like he’d wanted Reuben to be innocent of Billy Two Moons’s murder. And if he’d read Reuben right yesterday, they might have an outside chance of patching things up.
He envied Willie’s relationship with his aunt Elizabeth and their extended family back at Crow Creek, envied how they looked after one another.
Tiospaye
had always been the cornerstone of Lakota society, where family ties took precedence over everything else.
Tiospaye
determined how people conducted their lives.
Manny and Reuben were the last of their
tiospaye
. Manny admitted that he wanted some relationship with Reuben, even if only limited. He’d lie awake many nights, fighting to drive his brother from his thoughts, to forget old promises from Reuben that he would always be there if Manny needed him. If only he hadn’t talked with Reuben yesterday, this would just be another assignment to complete before he returned to the academy. He damned his brother now as he damned him untold times after he went to prison.
Willie hit a rut, and the shoulder strap bound into Manny’s armpit. He wrestled with it until it was loose, then settled back in the seat and listened to Willie. After his folks had drowned at Big Bend Dam near Fort Thompson on the Missouri River in South Dakota, Elizabeth had brought him to Pine Ridge to live with her and Erica. He told Manny how he had no other living relatives except for his aunt Lizzy and his cousin Erica.
In many ways Willie and Manny shared similar backgrounds. Like Manny, Willie was left orphaned. And like Manny, a loving relative took Willie in as her own. Elizabeth had welcomed Willie into her family and treated him as an equal with Erica. Again the importance of the
tiospaye
reminded Manny of the Lakota way, going back when warriors failed to return from a hunt or a war party: the surviving family members raised the orphaned children as their own.
“Aunt Lizzy said your uncle raised you since you were five.”
Manny smiled. He always smiled when he thought of his uncle Marion. “My aunt Sadie died of complications from diabetes the year I was born, and Unc’s only son died at Chosin in Korea. When my folks died in a car wreck, he took me in even though he couldn’t afford another mouth. We were so poor, the only pet we could afford was a tumbleweed.”
Willie laughed. “We didn’t have much either, but we didn’t want for anything.”
The reservation was peppered with the Willies, people who possessed none of the things that White people worked so hard for. Yet the Willies were happy with their lot. Deep inside, Manny wished he could reconnect with that life he once had. If only Quantico wasn’t on another planet than Pine Ridge.
The droning car motor helped Manny drift in and out of sleep. The aching in his head was now just a dull thud, and he was grateful for the chance to close his eyes. The thump-thump-thump of the tires on highway expansion strips acted like the sound machine he used back home to drown out traffic noise. He dozed in and out, the exhaustion of the last three days evident in his aching muscles and sore joints. In just a few days, the reservation had beaten him to a draw on the homicide case, and had aged him.
When the car had left pavement for a washboard dirt road, Manny awoke massaging his stitches.
Damned thing’s more a two-track than a road.
He tried to place where they were. Cows, whose ribs and spines threatened to burst from their skin, stood grazing on sparse scrub bushes on one side of the gravel road. In the ditch on the other side of the road, a Chevy van sat abandoned, every multicolored fender shot full of holes. A six-pack of empty beer bottles littered the grass around the van. “Modern Indian artifacts,” Unc used to say. Willie swerved to miss the glass.
“Where are we?”
Willie smiled and turned the radio down. “Just turned onto Route 100 from 18. Your snoring drowned out the radio for the last half hour.” He turned KILI off. “They give you something strong for the pain there at the ER?”
As if in response to Willie’s question, the squad car hit a rut, and pain shot sharp and deep into Manny’s stitches. A reflex reaction jerked his hand up to his head, and he hit his forehead. Now the throbbing stitches in his hand took his mind off the pain in his head.
“I kick myself in the ass now that I didn’t take the painkillers they offered.”
They drove the remaining eleven miles on Route 100 in silence, until Willie slowed for the dirt road leading to the construction site. Fine dust built up on the windshield. They turned and caught a crosswind, and dirt and mortar dust blew off a large concrete-block foundation. Willie stopped the cruiser in front of a dirty Dodge pickup with a magnetic sign on the side announcing that a
Lakota Country Times
reporter was on-site. “Damned Yellow Horse,” he muttered.
Manny couldn’t see Yellow Horse, but tops of people’s heads bobbed just above the basement rim as they walked back and forth. “He’s got to be down there.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“Making my life miserable.”
Willie and Manny walked around the brick pile and peered over the edge. Five feet down, Reuben straddled a chalk line. He held a trowel in one hand while four boys, stripped to the waist and glistening in the hot morning sun, handed bricks to another boy. The fifth boy, larger and older than the rest, broke block for a corner piece. He tossed the brick to another boy, also stripped to the waist. “Lenny.”
“You met him?”
“First day when I rolled into town.” Lenny tossed the brick to one boy and accepted a clean one from another boy. “What’s the skinny on him?”
“That’s Lenny Little Boy. And that kid that’s sixteen-goingon-twenty is his brother, Jack. They’re a couple bad ones. They’ve been in more shit than ten plumbers.”
Jack slung the hammer effortlessly. “Wielded the hammer like it was a part of him,” the witness had told Officer Slow Elk. Each time the boy struck the brick, the sound carried to Manny’s head and he winced while he fought to leave his stitches alone.
Nathan Yellow Horse, holding a reporter’s notebook, stood in front of Reuben. Yellow Horse wrote while Reuben worked the concrete on the trowel while he talked. Reuben had just grabbed the corner brick from Jack Little Boy when he spotted Willie and Manny. After dropping it, Reuben put his hands on the small of his back and arched. Sweat ran down from his face and chest and soaked his jeans.
“
Kola
,” he called out. Yellow Horse looked up at Manny and pocketed his notebook. Reuben grabbed a bandana from his back pocket and dried his neck. He ran the bandana over a wide scar that ran diagonally over one pectoral muscle. Reuben had picked up that wartime souvenir when an incoming RPG hit the Con Thien mess hall one morning in 1967.
Another scar, the result of a fight with some Minneapolis policemen three years later, started at his neck and ended at his upper shoulder. The eagle tattooed across his chest flew a little lower these days, its wings drooping across tired muscles. Still, Reuben was well preserved for his age, and Manny patted his own potbelly without thinking.
“
Kola
. Come down here, and help me and Nathan. Real work will do wonders for you.”
“I can see Yellow Horse is working up a sweat.” Manny stepped to the edge of the hole. The boys stopped working. They glared at Willie’s black Oglala Sioux Tribal Police uniform, then at Manny, who they now knew was an FBI agent. One boy stood clenching his fists, his bare pecs flexing, while another spit his chew into the dirt and glared at them with taut neck muscles. Another boy slipped a knife from a belt sheath and picked his nails, holding it so that the sun glinted off the blade and reflected in Manny’s eyes.
Jack Little Boy elbowed his way in front of the others and clenched the hammer while he tapped it against his thigh. He cinched up on the handle as if he had intentions to use it.
“Come down and we’ll visit,” Reuben repeated.
“Let’s talk up here,” Manny said.
“Suit yourself.” Reuben dropped his trowel and started the climb up from the hole in the ground. He grabbed the block pile and hoisted himself out of the basement. He winced in pain and massaged his leg. “Don’t ever grow old, little brother.”
He offered Yellow Horse his hand and pulled the thin man up.
“What you doing here?”
“Follow-up,” Yellow Horse answered. “Getting the native perspective on Red Cloud’s murder. Anything you want to say?”
“Not particularly.”
“Then you won’t mind me interviewing your prime suspect?”
“Who said he was my prime suspect?”
“Two interviews with Reuben in two days is more than coincidence.”
“Who said I talked with him already?”
“I have my own ears on the rez.” Yellow Horse smiled.
“Which I confirmed.” Reuben limped to a large pile of mortar bags sitting on a pallet. He grabbed a bag and dropped it beside a Coleman cooler. He eased himself onto the bag as he rubbed his leg. “A touch of arthritis. It’s hell getting old. But I’m not too old to rehash old times for Nathan here.”
Yellow Horse flicked on his pocket recorder and thrust it at Manny. “Tell me why you automatically assumed the killer is Lakota?”
“Leave.”
“And why pick on your own brother? You got something to prove, Agent Tanno?”
“You’re interfering with my investigation. Leave.”
Yellow Horse stepped closer and held the recorder to Manny’s mouth, prompting Willie to step between them. “Man told you to leave, Nathan.”
“We’ll see what Lieutenant Looks Twice has to say about this.” Yellow Horse turned on his heels and tripped over a concrete bag that had broken open. He fell to the ground as dust rose and engulfed him. He sputtered and beat his hands against his pants as he walked to his car.
“Give Lumpy my best,” Manny called out, and turned to Reuben. He’d opened the cooler and set the water bottles aside before he tipped it over his head. Water cascaded down his face, chest, and back, and he shook his head like a wet sheepdog as he ran his hand through his gray hair to get it out of his eyes.
“Water?”
“Not for me,” Manny said. Reuben’s Heritage Kids peeked over the edge of the foundation.
“At least sit so I don’t get a stiff neck looking up at you.”
Manny grabbed a concrete block and sat across from Reuben.
“It’s so nice to have another visit from you tribal boys today.”
“Another visit?”
“Your esteemed Lieutenant Looks Twice waddled over here. He felt compelled to check our building permit.”
“Why would he do that?” Willie asked. “Not our job to enforce building codes.”
Reuben shrugged. “Guess he’s still stuck in the past. Trying to be like one of Wilson’s goons. Back in the 1970s, they did all sorts of things that didn’t come with their job description, like whatever the tribal chairman wanted. Which often had nothing to do with police work. By the way, Officer With Horn, has my brother been teaching you anything about the lost art of homicide investigation?”
Willie stiffened. “He has.”
“Why’d you tell Yellow Horse I talked with you already?”
“He already knew it.”
“How?”
“You’re the FBI, you figure it out. Like maybe he’s been following you around.”
“Or maybe he’s got someone checking the radio log for him,” Willie said.
Reuben grinned. “Sure. Like your old school chum Lumpy. But you didn’t come here to solidify our budding relationship.”
He ignored Reuben’s comment and told him about the artifacts, as much to gauge his reaction as to explain his visit. When he said the antiquities had been returned to the Prairie Edge, Reuben sat expressionless.
“I am glad someone returned them.” Reuben fished into his pocket for his pipe and tobacco. He tamped his bowl with a used Sun Dance skewer. Manny thought of that skewer once piercing Reuben’s chest muscles and he shuddered as much out of fear as respect. “They should have been returned. The Lakota artifacts would be impure in the hands of someone who doesn’t deserve them.”
“But they’ll be resold,” Willie said. “Some are near priceless, and I don’t know any Indian who can afford them. Some
wasicu
will buy them.”
“Then the White dude will come by them legally,” Reuben snapped. His face flushed. The old Reuben’s anger rose to the surface. Then he was calm once again, talking low, talking evenly. “If a Lakota was in possession of stolen artifacts, it shames us all.”

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