Death Along the Spirit Road (9 page)
Read Death Along the Spirit Road Online
Authors: C. M. Wendelboe
“Either way, he leaves the rez when the case is solved.” Yellow Horse stepped closer to Manny, and Willie stepped closer to Yellow Horse. “When he’s done when this, he won’t care one whit about the resort or us.”
“Of course he will.” Sonja stepped beside Manny and turned to the crowd. “Agent Tanno is doing the job he was assigned. He has roots here. Of course he cares about the project over and above the homicide investigation.”
Sonja’s hair whipped across her face, and brushed Manny’s cheek. He drew in a breath as he caught her essence floating by.
Two other reporters interrupted Yellow Horse, who stepped in front of the KELO man. Manny held up his hand as they jostled for position. “There’s nothing I can say.” He turned to leave when someone gently squeezed his arm. “Can I call you later?” Manny tried reading something other than professional curiosity in Sonja’s blue eyes. “When you have something new?”
“Of course. Call here. The dispatcher will be able to reach me.” He didn’t trust himself further, and hastily walked inside the justice building.
He stopped just inside the door and listened. Cars started and voices grew fainter. “What the hell was that?”
“We haven’t had the press flock here since the Wounded Knee takeover, from what Aunt Lizzy says. We’re just not used to it.”
“We’re just lucky to get through that unscathed.”
“You don’t know how lucky.” Willie handed Manny a cup of coffee and led him to the break room. “If that looker out there, Sonja Myers, had her way, she would have torn into you. Literally. You might have been walking around with just your BVDs.”
For a moment the appealing thought crossed Manny’s mind but he brushed it off. A beautiful woman tearing into him. Unlikely, unless it was to get an exclusive on the investigation. “You can bet she has other reasons for coming to my aid out there. Besides, I’ve got other things on my mind this morning, like how to approach Reuben.”
Willie dropped into a chair across the table from Manny. “What are you going to say? It’s been thirty years since you talked with him.”
Manny shrugged. “You know my brother?”
Willie whistled. “Who around here doesn’t?”
“Trouble?”
Willie shook his head and sipped his coffee. “Never. Since he was paroled from the state penitentiary, none of our officers has had official contact with him. He keeps to himself, spends most of his time lining up masonry jobs for his Heritage Kids. But Reuben carries a reputation from his AIM days that would stop a wildcat.”
Manny had researched Reuben and learned that most of the Heritage Kids were high school dropouts, troubled Lakota youth from dysfunctional homes, kids who just needed a strong hand to guide them. Reuben Tanno was that strong hand. Manny heard good things about Reuben’s kids: Many had cast off their wild streaks and become productive. But Reuben could not help them all, and some of his kids never changed. Some mirrored Reuben, unable to be tamed. It brought back conversations with Unc, how Reuben had been sent to an Indian boarding school but ran away so many times that they gave up bringing him back. “Reuben’s a hard worker. Or rather, he sees that his kids are hard workers. He drives them until they’re too tired and beat to get into trouble.”
“All their construction contracts here on the reservation?”
“Most, because of Reuben’s natural intimidation, as much as the quality of their work. Even if Reuben wasn’t a ’Nam vet, people remember him from his AIM days and he lands most contracts here.”
Manny finished his coffee and tossed the cup into the round file. Reuben had enlisted in the Marines when Manny was only four years old. He had missed his brother, but Unc kept Manny’s adoration alive by reading Reuben’s letters about actions in South Vietnam. Except for their parents’ funeral, he had seen Reuben only once in all those years, when he was wounded landing in a hot LZ near Hue and spent a month recovering at home. Manny wanted to be just like him then.
When Reuben was discharged, he joined the American Indian Movement just in time for the takeover of Alcatraz in 1969. Manny was only eight then, yet he pleaded with Unc to let him join his brother. But Uncle Marion’s disdain for Reuben had escalated with the violence and heavy-handed tactics AIM used to enforce their ideologies, and his mood turned foul whenever Reuben’s name was mentioned. “He’ll only end up with a bullet in his head in some ditch, or making license plates in a federal lockup somewhere.”
“But if I could only see him for a little bit, just talk with him, Unc, I know he’d listen to me. What he’s doing is good.”
“But it’s not good.” Unc had hefted Manny on his enormous lap and spoke as a father speaks to his child. “Their objective is right: Indian sovereignty and Lakota rights. But their militant methods will destroy us.”
Unc told him little about Reuben after that, but Manny heard things whispered around the reservation from AIM supporters: Reuben in the middle of the AIM takeover of Mount Rushmore when Manny was ten; Reuben at the Custer riot in 1973; Reuben in the lead of the Wounded Knee takeover the same year. Reuben’s name had been venerated around the reservation for masterminding campaigns that brought the government to its knees. Even his being a suspect in several deaths on Pine Ridge couldn’t dampen Manny’s idolization. Reuben would never—could never—murder anyone. Especially another Lakota.
Until Billy Two Moons’s death when Manny was fifteen. Reuben confessed that he murdered Billy Two Moons and everything changed. People looked differently at Manny, and Manny grew to loathe Reuben’s AIM connections ever since. And even though he knew Reuben’s confession was sound, that it was obtained legally and without coercion, a small part of him believed Reuben was innocent. Killing another Oglala to save himself, perhaps, but not murder.
“What do you know about the Two Moons killing?”
“Jeeza. That’s required reading with Lieutenant Looks Twice. Billy Two Moons, who never had a pot to pee in, drove a new Chrysler 300 to deserted China Gulch right out of Hill City. That’d be …”
“In 1976,” Manny finished. “Same year they found Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash with a bullet in her head.”
Willie nodded. “Rumor was floating around back then the FBI got their hands dirty with her murder.”
“But you know that’s wrong?”
Willie nodded. “The lieutenant goes out of his way to educate every new officer on that period. ‘So history won’t repeat itself,’ he says. Lot of things that AIM spouted back then were wrong. Lot of things came to light, like some AIM women helped drive Anna Mae from that safe house in Denver to where she was murdered here.”
“And Billy Two Moons was just another AIM victim.”
Willie nodded. “Some guy from Mitchell with a cabin back up in China Gulch found Two Moons with five .45 slugs in him, and an open can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in his lap.”
“And Alex Jumping Bull, who went missing the same night, was never found.” Manny dug deep into the mind of a fifteen-year-old boy whose love for his brother had just been trashed.
“No one saw or heard from Jumping Bull again,” Willie confirmed. “Even though he and Two Moons were inseparable. There was speculation that Reuben killed him, too, and dumped him somewhere that same night, but Reuben never confessed to killing Jumping Bull.”
“I know.” Since joining the bureau and teaching interviewing and interrogation at the academy, Manny had studied Reuben’s confession so many times that he knew it by heart. And every time he read it, something on the fringes of his mind told him the confession was soured. Reuben admitted to the murder with little prodding by the detectives, but he couldn’t remember little details of the murder scene, such as the position of the Chrysler, or the brand of beer littering the car. Reuben told sheriff’s deputies he didn’t know such details because it was dark, and he was drunk. Manny wanted the confession to be bogus, because he wanted Reuben to be innocent. As a naïve youngster, he had wanted to see his brother exonerated. As a veteran lawman, he knew Reuben’s confession was legitimate. Reuben was a murderer.
But now Manny was back on Pine Ridge, close enough to his brother that those feelings surfaced again. “Am I the only one that thinks it strange that Two Moons would be on that dark road alone?”
“Why so strange?” Willie opened his snuff can and took a dip. He put it in his lower lip and rubbed the excess on his pants leg. “I go for drives all the time by my lonesome. Nothing odd about that.”
“Do you park in the middle of nowhere? Drinking by yourself?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Then park with your girlfriend?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“All right then. The point I’m making is a man doesn’t drive miles into the country to sit and drink alone. Someone must have been with Two Moons. The Pennington County Sheriff’s Office called in the State Department of Criminal Investigation. Their evidence techs pulled Two Moons’s prints from a beer bottle, but they also found another set on the car-door handle. They didn’t have enough points for identification because the prints were either rubbed or smudged. The only thing the fingerprint tech could say with certainty is that the second set didn’t belong to Two Moons.”
“Or the store owner.”
“The deputies ran that angle down. They rolled a set of elimination prints from the liquor-store clerk in Custer where Two Moons bought the beer. Nada.”
“How about Alex Jumping Bull? He went missing the same time as the killing. Even Lieutenant Looks Twice thinks that Jumping Bull was in the car with Two Moons that night.”
Manny nodded. If Reuben had copped to killing Two Moons, admitting to killing Jumping Bull wouldn’t have added any more time to his sentence. “All I know for certain is I’m no closer to nailing Reuben—if he’s Jason’s killer—than I was this morning. Let’s drive.”
Willie slowed as he turned onto Highway 41 toward Oglala. This road conjured frightening memories of bodies dead in the roadway, pools of blood drawing an army of ants on a humid summer afternoon. This road memorialized a black culmination of the violence that was Pine Ridge in the 1970s. Unc tried shielding Manny from the realities of living in the poorest county of the nation, and the most violent. But whenever Manny huddled with his school buddies, they swapped stories about the bodies that had been found scattered around the reservation like White kids traded rumors of their favorite sports stars. And this road leading to Oglala was connected directly to that violence; this road could take them to Cuny Table, then on to Red Shirt Table if they wished.
But they wouldn’t be driving there, as Agents Williams and Coler had been on that June day in 1975. Williams and Coler had been ambushed on the anniversary of Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn. Manny had just gotten out of school that day after a wrestling meet, in which he trounced Lumpy on the mat. Manny met some friends at Big Bat’s for celebration burgers when the news came in: Two FBI agents were shot to death on the road to Oglala. “Do you know we require academy students to study the ambush of Williams and Coler to learn how not to make a traffic stop?”
“I guess I got mixed feelings about them,” Willie said. “No one had a right to kill those guys, but they foolishly chased those militants into their own stronghold in an unmarked car.”
Manny felt just the same back when it happened. The moccasin telegraph quickly got word around back then, and people said the agents had been harassing AIM members. When the agents tried to stop a pickup-load of Indians, they fled, and innocent, peace-loving Lakota merely defended themselves against government intrusion.
Manny swore by that version until he became an FBI agent, when the incidents would be studied, the tactics dissected. He learned that the agents had no chance that day. He read eyewitness accounts of the militants shooting them so many times they couldn’t have survived, even if help had arrived on time. Manny, the rebellious teen who wanted to follow his big brother’s path, believed they deserved their fate. Manny, the eager FBI agent who wanted to stand up for justice, came to look with contempt upon those who murdered Williams and Coler. Peltier was the only man convicted in the murders, and had remained in jail since. Manny despised the FREE LEONARD PELTIER bumper stickers that could still be seen on reservation cars even today.
They crested a hill overlooking a shallow valley with trailers on forty-acre lots. “Which one is Reuben’s?”
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