The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Page 13

  Father John moved back through the articles, studying the photos of Wounded Knee taken with telescopic lenses. Some Indian men, standing guard, holding shotguns and rifles. Another photo of three women stooped over a campfire, preparing food, much like the photos he’d seen of women in the villages in the Old Time. There was even a photo of a woman carrying a baby on her back. He studied the faces, but the photos were blurred and grainy; they could be photos of anyone.

  “Were you there, Liz?” he said out loud into the building’s quiet. He sat back, half expecting the sound of Ian’s boots clambering down the corridor to see who might have come in, then he went back to the website. He clicked through three pages before he spotted another article that looked promising: “AIM Member Shot.”

  It was what he’d been looking for. The Gazette. August 13, 1973. A Lakota man who went by the name of Brave Bird was fatally wounded by a Wind River police officer in a shoot-out in Ethete last night. According to a police spokesman, Brave Bird’s real name was Daryl Redman, whose last known address was Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

  The local FBI office confirms that Redman was a member of AIM wanted by the FBI on charges related to the takeover of Wounded Knee last February. The FBI had believed he was hiding on the Wind River Reservation, but had been unable to locate him. The Wind River police received a tip about his possible whereabouts and had gone to a house in Ethete to check it out. “He came out firing,” said the police spokesman. The officer who shot Redman was identified as Jesse Moon.

  “We think other AIM fugitives may be hiding on the reservation,” said a spokesman for the local FBI. “Like Redman, they adopt pseudonyms and try to blend in to the local population. They are armed and dangerous. People should not approach them, but should notify the police or the FBI.” The spokesman also cautioned that harboring such fugitives is a federal offense. “Anyone who helps them could be sent to prison with them,” he said.

  “Got a minute?” Ian’s voice cut through the quiet.

  Father John looked up from the computer screen. He hadn’t heard his assistant in the corridor, but now he was standing in the doorway, head thrust forward like a pony poised to lurch into the room.

  “Take a seat.” He nodded toward one of the side chairs pushed against the wall, then clicked on exit and watched the site vaporize on the screen.

  “Made up your mind yet?” Ian said. He folded his lanky frame onto the edge of the chair.

  Father John shifted his gaze across the top of the screen to the other priest. He stopped himself from asking, “About what?” He knew Ian was talking about Rome. Forget about the sabbatical, he’d been telling himself, hoping the provincial would also forget, and everything would go on, the way it had for the last nine years. Who was he kidding? It had never left his mind; it had only been hiding in a shadowy place where he’d refused to look, and it had jumped out, flashing and screaming, before Ian had even finished his question.

  He got up and walked over to the window. The cottonwood branches moved sideways in the breeze; little furrows of wind ran through the grasses. Walks-On sprawled next to the steps at the residence, intent on the bone wedged between his front paws. The sky was a dome of clear blue glass, and in the distance the peaks of the Wind River range shimmered in the sunshine. This was home. He turned back. “I’m not ready for a sabbatical,” he said.

  Something like a shadow crossed Ian’s face. He swallowed and seemed to make an effort to assemble an expression that appeared neutral and unconcerned, but the effort left Father John with the sense that Ian was disappointed, that he was waiting for the chance to run the mission.

  “I spent a wonderful month in Rome a few years ago,” Ian said.

  “Did you?” Father John tried to keep his own expression neutral. He braced himself for a recitation of the interesting, historical, beautiful places in Rome meant to nudge him into taking the sabbatical.

  “Wouldn’t mind going back.”

  Father John held the other man’s gaze a moment, then he walked around the desk and dropped back onto his seat. This was new, a curveball when he’d been expecting a straight pitch. “You’d like to take the sabbatical?”

  “What would you think?” Ian hurried on. “I’ve been reading up on the deliberations in Rome about ways the Christian message might be manifested in non-Western cultures. I haven’t been here as long as you…” He raised both hands as if to ward off an objection. “But I’ve been here long enough to contribute to the conversation.”

  Father John swallowed back the impulse to laugh. An obvious solution, and it hadn’t even occurred to him. The provincial wanted someone in Rome with experience on a reservation, someone with insight on bringing Christianity to indigenous people around the world. And he had another Jesuit eager to come to St. Francis who could take Ian’s place.

  “I’ll talk to the provincial,” he said.

  “I’d like to come back, John. You know, after the sabbatical…”

  “No guarantee,” Father John said. That was the thing that had made him ignore the whole idea. He could feel it now, like a hard knot in his stomach. If he left St. Francis, there was no guarantee that he would ever return. The same was true for Ian. Another Jesuit would come; everything would change, and the future would form and reform into shapes that would be different from anything either of them might imagine.

  “I wouldn’t want to go unless I could be assured of a position here when I return.” A hard note of stubbornness sounded in Ian’s voice. He wouldn’t have to go at all, Father John was thinking. He was the one the provincial wanted to take the sabbatical. He could almost hear Bill Rutherford’s laugh when he told him that Ian wanted the sabbatical, but only on condition…

  Ian got to his feet and started for the door. He set a hand on the frame and looked back. “I guess I shouldn’t pack my bags just yet,” he said, giving a half nod, as if he were reluctant to let go of the possibility.

  Father John stared at the phone and listened to the sound of Ian’s footsteps receding in the corridor. Finally he lifted the receiver and pressed the keys for Bill Rutherford’s office. The voice on the other end sounded lethargic and bleary with the heat of the Milwaukee summer. “Sorry, Father O’Malley, the provincial isn’t available at the moment. What is this about?”

  “He knows what it’s about,” Father John said. “Ask him to call me.” He could hear the relief in his voice. He wouldn’t have to speak to Rutherford right away, listen to the urgency pulsing down the line: “You’re the one I had in mind, John.” It was a brief, blessed reprieve from the inevitable. He still had time.

  He hit the off button, then started over again, this time pressing the keys for the Wind River Police Department. “This is Father O’Malley,” he told the woman who’d picked up. “Let me talk to Chief Banner.” Art Banner had been the police chief on the reservation as long as Father John had been at the mission. He couldn’t imagine the police department without Banner, but then, in a reverse way that made him stifle a laugh, he couldn’t imagine himself without the mission.

  “Sorry, Father.” The woman’s voice was friendly, as if she were chatting with him across the desk. He tried to picture the operator who sat behind the glass window, answered the phone, and buzzed in visitors: a little overweight, short black hair, always smiling. “Chief’s in a meeting,” she said. “Probably be tied up another hour or so. Want me to have him call you?”

  Father John glanced at his watch. Almost nine o’clock. He’d planned on stopping by the senior center this morning for coffee with some of the elders and he promised Irma Dancer when she was about to be released from the hospital last week that he’d visit her at home, which should put him in Fort Washakie by eleven. “Tell Banner I’ll stop by later,” he said.

  He set the receiver in the cradle and waited, half expecting the ringing to begin. Bill Rutherford would expect him to take the sabbatical, and he wouldn’t allow much time for him to change his mind.

  Father John closed the book on Sitting B
ull and made a small attempt at straightening the desk. Then he crossed the office and lifted his cowboy hat off the rack. He walked down the corridor and told Ian he’d be gone the rest of the morning, then retraced his steps and let himself out the front door, hurrying he realized, before the phone started to ring.

  14

  THE BROWN HOUSE had a vacant look about it—no vehicles parked in the dirt yard, no towels or blue jeans flapping on the lines strung along one side. Still, it was the only brown house she’d passed on Mill Creek Road. She slowed down for a right turn and bounced across the barrow ditch. Fresh tire tracks crisscrossed the dirt. A vehicle had been here not long before. She stopped near the wooden stoop at the front door and turned off the ignition. If Ruth Yellow Bull was home, she would have heard the Jeep. If she wanted visitors, she’d come outside. It wasn’t polite to step onto the stoop and bang on the door.

  Vicky waited for a couple of minutes before she got out. She slammed the door hard. The warm breeze whipped her skirt around her legs, and she could feel the sun burning past her hair into the back of her neck. She gave it another minute, then walked up the wooden steps and knocked on the door, trying to ignore the idea jabbing at her like a spear. Maybe she had become whiteized, like the grandmothers said. All those years in Denver going to school, working in a large, white firm—she, the token Indian—and what had she really been doing? Trying to be white? Trying to forget who she was, where she’d come from? Becoming a ho:xu’wu:nen? A lawyer living by the white man’s rules, and all the time, losing some part of herself.

  I came home! She’d wanted to say to the grandmothers when they’d turned away from her at the powwows or the tribal meetings and whispered among themselves, loud enough so that she could hear. Well, look at her. Don’t she think she’s something? Made herself real big, like a chief. Don’t she know, women don’t have no business being chiefs? It was Ben Holden who had been like a chief, a leading man on the reservation, and she had left him, just driven off one day. It amazed her when she thought about it. Had she really believed she could make it on her own? Woman Alone, the grandmothers called her—Hi sei ci nihi—because it was true. And yet it was strange, about the name. It had given her strength and courage, and she knew that even when the grandmothers had turned away, they had still blessed her with the name.

  And here she was banging on the front door of a house on the rez, like a white woman. There was no sound inside, no scrape of footsteps or clack of a door. Nothing except the faint reverberation of her own pounding. She stepped back and glanced around. A dark pickup was coming down the road, the bed swaying as if it might break away from the cab, little clouds of dust swirling around the tires. The pickup slowed a little, then dived to the right, jumped across the barrow ditch and plunged toward the Jeep. It slid to a stop, both doors swinging open. A heavyset woman with gray hair that hung in clumps around the shoulders of her denim shirt and a round face marked by deeply set lines and what might have been old scars got out of the pickup. Two little boys, maybe eight or nine, piled out on the passenger side and started pushing and pummeling each other until one of them was down on the ground, the other kicking at his legs. “Knock it off,” the woman shouted as she came around the hood of the Jeep.

  “Ruth Yellow Bull?” Vicky had to shout, too. One boy was crying, the other yelling. She stepped off the stoop.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m Vicky Holden.”

  “Oh, yeah. You’re that lawyer lady.” Without moving her feet, Ruth Yellow Bull rolled herself sideways toward the two boys, still jabbing and yelling at each other. “Shut up, you hear me? I have to come over there and kick your butts?” She rolled back. “What d’ya want?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about a girl named Liz. She was active in AIM back in the seventies.”

  Ruth Yellow Bull didn’t say anything at first, but her eyes narrowed, as if she were trying to bring something into focus, something forgotten. “Why’d you come here?” she said finally.

  “I understand you were part of AIM back then.”

  “So what? Lots of people joined up.” She turned back to the boys, this time stomping her feet in a half circle. “Get them bags of groceries into the house,” she shouted. Vicky noticed the three brown bags in the bed of the pickup, propped against the rear of the cab. It was a moment before the kids stopped wrestling and sauntered over to the pickup. The taller boy lifted out two bags and smashed them into the chest of the other boy, who staggered off, fighting to keep the bags upright. Then the other kid dragged the last bag across the bed and over the side of the pickup and headed for the house.

  “Grandkids,” Ruth said. “Who needs ’em?”

  Vicky tried to catch the younger boy’s eyes, then the older boy’s, but they kept their eyes averted and plodded on, brushing past her. “Is their mother at work?” Vicky heard herself asking. Gray dust streaked the small brown faces and clung to the plaid shirts and blue jeans. The boys’ hair, black and knotted, seemed stuck to the wrinkled collars of their shirts, and she wondered if this was how her own children had looked, unwashed and uncared for, after she had left them. She blinked back the idea; her mother had loved them and taken good care of them, that was the truth, just as her mother had loved and taken good care of her.

  “Work? Yeah, she’s at work all right, at some meth house. Look, I don’t know nothin’ about AIM. Whoever sent you here is a damn liar if they said I did.”

  “What about Liz? She was an Arapaho who went to Pine Ridge. It’s possible she was at Wounded Knee before she came back here. You might have run into her, or heard about her.”

  “What the hell’s this all about?” Ruth crooked both elbows and set her hands on her waist, fingers spread apart across her ballooning abdomen. She bent her head forward, like a bull ready to charge.

  “It’s possible she was murdered,” Vicky said. “It could be her skeleton that was found out in the Gas Hills.”

  The woman dropped her hands and went over to the stoop. Gripping the railing with one hand, she swung her thick legs onto the first step, then the second, and finally planted herself in front of the door, which hung open into the shadows of the living room. Past the edge of a sofa, Vicky could see the two boys jostling in the kitchen. The sounds of paper crackling and something hard bouncing across the floor drifted outside.

  Still holding on to the railing, Ruth looked down. “Don’t got nothing to do with me.”

  Vicky tipped her head back and locked eyes with the woman. “I heard you were at Wounded Knee,” she said.

  “Who the hell you been talkin’ to?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I understand there were other Arapahos at Pine Ridge,” Vicky said, not taking her eyes away. “Could I come in? I’d like to talk to you for a moment. It’s possible you might remember.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to remember. Maybe it don’t matter anymore, ’cause it’s over and done with. It’s the past, and ain’t you heard, the past is deader than a skinned rabbit. What’s it to you, anyway?”

  “It’s a cold case,” Vicky said. “I’m trying to find something that will keep her murder from being buried in a file with a lot of other unsolved murders. I’d like to see her given a proper burial, with her own name. Whoever killed her has gotten away with it for more than thirty years. I’d like to see him brought to justice.”

  “I don’t know nothing about it. I don’t know nobody by that name.” The woman hesitated, her lips working around soundless words. Then she said, “Besides, maybe she deserved what she got.”

  In the narrowed eyes and the set of the woman’s jaw, Vicky realized that she was lying. She waited a moment, allowing the lie to grow between them, like an expanding bubble that couldn’t be ignored. “Why, Ruth?” she said. “Because she’d talked to the police, and the police killed one of the AIM members? Is that why she deserved to die?”

  The woman leaned forward until the railing cut into her fleshy middle. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I do
n’t know nothin’ about that time. Maybe I was stoned, so I don’t know what came down.” She lifted her head and gazed for a long moment across the road and beyond, to the empty plains. Finally she pushed off the railing, swung around and stepped into the house. “Forget about it.” She threw the words over one shoulder. “Nobody cares what happened then.”

  “You know what he did to her, Ruth.” Vicky called out to the woman’s back, hoping she wouldn’t slam the door shut. She had to hold her hair back against the gust of wind that swept across the yard, blowing up billows of dust. “He beat her up first, broke most of her bones, knocked out her teeth. He took her to a desolate gulley and put a bullet in the back of her head. He’s a monster, Ruth, and I think he’s still on the rez.”

  Ruth turned back, her eyes like black lines slashed across the flesh of her face. Her lips were moving, forming and reforming around silent words as she negotiated some track in her head. Vicky held her breath and waited. Then something new came into the woman’s expression, some acute look of fear that turned her features into an icy sculpture. She grabbed the edge of the door and, stepping backward, slammed the door shut.

  Vicky waited a moment, half hoping that the door would open again, that the woman would say, “Come in; I’ll tell you all about her.” Because she was certain now that Ruth Yellow Bull knew a girl named Liz. She knew.

  The door stayed closed. From inside the house came the muffled noise of the boys yelling and the sharp, staccato notes of Ruth’s voice punctuating theirs.

  Vicky went back to the Jeep and crawled inside. She felt limp with frustration. She was so close, so close. She’d found someone who knew about that time, knew about a girl named Liz. But she wouldn’t tell what she knew. She’d closed the door on that time just as she’d slammed the front door on her and Father John. It was over. All over, she’d said. It was dead.