The Silent Spirit (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Page 2

  “Why would someone want to kill him?”

  “You think they was gonna let some Indian get to be a big movie star that everybody looked up to?” Kiki threw his head back and stared up at the ceiling a moment. “Changed everything when Charlie got killed. My great-grandmother, Anna was her name, went to work to take care of her boy, put some food on the table. Worked like a man in the fields, driving the rigs, baling hay, only she was a little woman with a baby strapped on her back. Took whatever work she could get just to keep her boy alive. Worked herself to death, that woman did. Grandfather said when she died there wasn’t nothing left of her, just a sack of bones and swollen fingers. Cataracts so bad she couldn’t see nothing.”

  He dropped his head, squared himself at the edge of the table, and locked eyes with Father John. “You believe in justice?” he said.

  “It’s an imperfect world, Kiki.”

  “What kind of answer is that? You believe in justice is what I want to know.”

  “I believe in justice, but justice isn’t always possible.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, you’re wrong about that. I say it’s about time we got some justice for what was done to the family. Changed everything, ruined Anna’s life, ruined my grandfather’s life. You know how hard he had it? Going off to war, getting shot up in the Pacific, laying in a hospital bed for eight months, then coming back to the rez and trying to find work. Only there wasn’t no work on the rez, and nothing for Indians anyplace else. You know what that’s like? My own dad grew up feeling hungry all the time. So he started drinking, ’cause you know what? You ain’t so hungry when you’re drunk. Runs his pickup off a cliff, him and Mom inside, and it wasn’t no accident. He got fed up. Couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “Listen, Kiki.” Father John clasped his hands and leaned over the table. “You can’t change the past. You can’t make things right.”

  Kiki refilled his coffee cup. For a long moment, he stared at the steam curling over the rim. Then he said, “I thought about doing that.”

  Father John was quiet.

  “Driving off a cliff. I mean, it’d be easy. Then I thought, no way. Why should we keep paying for what Charlie’s killer did? I figure Grandfather’s got a right to know why his father never came home and why everything got changed. He’s got a right to some kind of justice.”

  “How do you expect to learn the truth in Hollywood?”

  “It’s a storytelling place, right? That’s what they do in the movies, tell stories.”

  “There’s no one left from the 1920s,” Father John said.

  “Stories are still there, I figure. Somebody knows what happened. Some old white geezer waiting to die heard the story and knows what happened. All I gotta do is find him.” He was staring at Father John. “What?”

  Father John realized he’d been shaking his head. It was the Arapahos who talked about the past as if it had happened yesterday, every detail in place, the weather, the jokes, the way an ancestor had walked and laughed. “You’re putting a lot of trust in the ability of white people to remember the past,” he said. He could still see the perplexed look on the faces of the students at the Jesuit prep school in Boston where he had taught American History, as if history were a foreign country they saw no reason to visit. He had tried to make history come alive, to help the students understand that it was important. Every semester, one or two students seemed to get it, and he had been content with that. That was success.

  He left Kiki where Gas Hills Road peeled off the highway, a blurred figure in the brightness, backpack hanging off one shoulder, obsessed with the past, Father John thought, as if he had exchanged one addiction for another. Traffic was light, judging from the faint tire tracks in the snow. It could take a while for him to catch a ride. Before Kiki had gotten out of the pickup, Father John had fished a folded fifty-dollar bill out of his blue jeans pocket. Money left over from the sabbatical in Rome. There hadn’t been any reason to use it until now.

  2

  FATHER JOHN DROVE through the tunnel of cottonwoods that separated Seventeen-Mile Road from St. Francis Mission. Snow blew off the branches and showered the windshield. Ahead the mission buildings around Circle Drive glistened in the sunshine, remnants of the past that remained rooted in place while the rest of the world had moved on—the yellow stucco administration building, the white church with the spine that seemed to sway against the sky, the old stone school that was now the Arapaho Museum, the redbrick residence, the traces of concrete foundations—ghosts of buildings that had once existed.

  All of it familiar, he thought. He had spent six months in Rome, helping out at St. Ignatius’s parish and spending long hours in a vel veted, brocaded conference room inside the Vatican Library discussing ways to bring the Christian message to indigenous people around the globe. At the table were priests from Africa and India, South America and Central America, the far reaches of Siberia, and he, the only priest from North America. He would close his eyes and see the mission, the scratches on the old wooden doors at the entrance to the administration building, the paint peeling at the corner of the church, and the light glowing in the stained glass windows in the evenings.

  He parked in front of the administration building and watched Walks-On in the rearview mirror bounding across Circle Drive, a red Frisbee clutched in his jaws, snow billowing about. The dog was on him as he got out of the pickup and Father John patted his head and told him to drop the Frisbee. Walks-On pirouetted a couple of times on his single hind leg before depositing the Frisbee at Father John’s boots. He picked it up, tossed it into the field, and watched the dog chase underneath, snatch the Frisbee out of the air, and lope back. It was a game they always played. When he came home, Walks-On was waiting, the beat-up, cracked Frisbee or an old, half-peeled tennis ball tight in his jaws. He had bought him a new Frisbee and a good rubber ball before he’d left for Rome, but Walks-On preferred the old, familiar toys.

  They were alike, Father John thought, two strays no one had wanted. The golden retriever puppy with the crushed leg in the ditch out on Seventeen-Mile Road that first winter Father John was at St. Francis, and the alcoholic priest fresh out of rehab, still recovering, not quite whole. He gave the Frisbee a hard toss, sending it to the far side of Circle Drive. Old Father Peter had taken a chance on him. And he had brought the puppy home after the vet had removed his hind leg—a three-legged dog he called Walks-On. In an odd way, he thought, the name seemed to fit both of them.

  Walks-On came running back, the Frisbee clamped tight, wagging his tail, the joyous look of expectancy in his eyes. Father John sat on his heels, patted the dog’s head, and scratched his ears. “We’ll play later,” he said. He couldn’t resist tossing the Frisbee one more time before he started up the concrete steps in front of the administration building.

  A rectangle of sunshine bathed the corridor inside, nearly obliterating the black-and-white portraits of past Jesuits that lined the stuccoed walls. The old wooden floors squeaked under his boots. His office was on the right, the door always open. He had hung his jacket on the coat tree and sat down at his desk when he heard the clack of footsteps in the corridor.

  Lucy Running Bear darted into the office, barely breaking the rhythm of her footsteps. She was pretty, he thought, seventeen years old with the look of a child still about her, black hair that ran over her shoulders, a silver ring in one nostril, and red nail polish. She plopped a stack of messages on the desk, then proceeded to give him a running account: they missed him at the social committee meeting, but he shouldn’t worry. She kept detailed minutes. Ada Longfellow had a baby boy last night; Johnny Yellow Feather fell on the ice and broke his hip and was in Riverton Memorial; Muriel and Ernie Whiteman needed an appointment for counseling.

  “And by the way,” she said, giving him the intent scrutiny he used to give students who arrived late for class, daring them to come up with a plausible explanation, “Jack Many Horses and Blanche Curfey are still in the hospital, in case you were thinking about visiting.” />
  “On this afternoon’s schedule,” he said. Even with an assistant priest, there was always so much to do—visit the old and sick, counsel parishioners, oversee social programs, Alcoholics and Gamblers Anonymous meetings, religious education and confirmation classes. The daily Mass, the weekly confessions. But there was no assistant priest.

  Then, yesterday morning, Lucinda Running Bear had appeared in his doorway. There he was, trying to straighten his desk, locate his files, and settle himself back into his office that had been taken over for six months by Father Ian McCauley, and there was Lucinda, sprawled in a side chair, squeezing a tissue and patting at the moisture on her cheeks, going on about how her daughter, Lucy, had dropped out of high school. Which would only lead to trouble, and wasn’t that a fact? She was at her wit’s end. What could she do? Would he talk some sense into her?

  Not two hours later, Lucy sprawled in the same chair. A pretty girl, even with the blue tattoo of a snake that ran up her right arm—her medicine, she told him when she caught him looking at it. There was a mixture of innocence and defiance about her, as if she could will herself older and more experienced than her seventeen years. High school was boring, she said; she was never going back, no matter what her mother said. What did her mother know anyway?

  He had offered her a job. She blinked at him several seconds, disarmed, he’d thought, bereft of the ammunition she’d brought along. All the arguments dissolved into nothing. He could use some help, he told her. The filing cabinets were a hopeless jumble. The printer was out of ink, and he hadn’t been able to find the surface of his desk beneath the clutter. He needed someone to answer the phone, greet the drop-ins when he wasn’t there, which was a big part of each day, work on the computer—bulletins for Sunday Mass, agendas for meetings of the social committee, ladies sodality, men’s groups, the schedules for the ushers, and the Sunday drum groups. An endless list of minutiae that kept the mission running. He would pay her what he could; he was sorry, but it wouldn’t be much. He had expected her to refuse.

  A job? she said. Sure, she could use a little money.

  Now he thanked her for the messages. The girl seemed to have thrown herself into the job, and she was certainly organized. As soon as she had pivoted about and headed back down the corridor to her office, he had called Muriel Whiteman and set up a counseling appointment for later this afternoon. He returned the other calls, then went back outside and cut new tracks through the snowy field enclosed by Circle Drive, Walks-On running alongside. As soon as he opened the door to the residence, the dog raced past and skittered down the hallway toward the kitchen. A spicy smell drifted through the sounds of running water, the clank of metal and glass. He tossed his jacket and cowboy hat onto the bench and followed Walks-On into the kitchen.

  Elena stood at the sink, swishing dishes in soapy water and laying them in neat rows in the rack on the counter. “A little early for lunch,” she said, throwing a glance over one shoulder. She was somewhere in her seventies, although she had never volunteered her age. “Old enough to know something,” she would say whenever the matter came up. She was half Arapaho, half Cheyenne, a short woman, barely reaching his shoulder, with tight curls of gray hair, the rounded face of the Cheyenne, the fiery determined eyes of the Arapaho, and a white apron cinched around a thick waist.

  “Just had coffee and toast.” Father John pushed a chair out from the table with his boot and sat down. He had eaten a bowl of oatmeal, two pieces of toast, and a cup of coffee this morning before he’d gone to the senior center. Two more cups of coffee there. Coffee and toast in Riverton.

  “You’ll get a paunch on you, you don’t watch out,” Elena said, turning around and facing him. She was so like his mother, the way he remembered her when he was a kid, cooking dinner in the tiny kitchen in the corner of what passed for a living room in the daytime and his and Mike’s bedroom at night. The flat sat above his uncle’s saloon on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. He could still close his eyes and summon the faint odors of whiskey and beer and the muffled shouts of laughter and the clink of bottles that floated up the narrow stairway and seeped through the flat. And his mother, piling plates high with mashed potatoes and hard-fried hamburger patties and canned peas, fussing over him and his big brother. It was the image he held on to, before the last years when she no longer knew either of her sons.

  “What do you know about Kiki Wallowingbull?” he said.

  Elena was quiet a moment, wiping her hands on the apron. Finally she stepped over to the table and sat down. “Why’re you asking?”

  “He was hitching out on Seventeen-Mile Road this morning, and I picked him up. He’s on his way to California.”

  “That’s good news.” Elena clasped her hands across her middle and sat back. “Let him sell his drugs and raise hell out in California. We don’t need the likes of Kiki Wallowingbull in these parts.”

  “You think he’s still dealing?”

  “You think wolves turn into lambs?” Elena shrugged. “I’d say he’s doing what he’s always done, causing trouble, giving his grandfather all that heart trouble. Wonder the old man’s still walking around. Raised that boy themselves, him and Mamie, after their own son drove his pickup off a cliff, him and Kiki’s mom both drunk inside. Andrew and Mamie took the boy in, wasn’t about to let him go to some foster home where nobody’d love him or teach him the Arapaho Way. That’s the kind of thanks Andrew gets for all the trouble. Kiki don’t want to live the Arapaho Way. So what’s he doing, going off to California?”

  “He wants to learn about his family.”

  “That’s a laugh. He never cared about family.”

  “Maybe he’s trying to change, make up for the past.”

  “In California?” Elena laughed. She started to push herself to her feet, then sat back down hard. A shadow of comprehension crossed her face. “You telling me he’s looking for his great-grandfather? Went to Hollywood to be in the movies and never come back?”

  Father John nodded.

  “Nobody cares about that anymore.” She turned partway in the chair and gazed at the window for a long moment. An invisible film might have been flickering across the glass. “People here used to be proud of all those warriors, and women, too, that was in the cowboy-and-Indian movies. They used to say, ‘We showed ’em what real Indians was like, not those painted-up white boys and girls with feathers on their heads. Real warriors riding over the plains and fighting for our lands. Real Indian women taking care of things and cooking the food. Made everybody proud, ’cause the movies showed that we were people living in villages and hunting the buffalo. When the white men came, we had a right to protect what was ours.’ ”

  Father John waited a moment before he said, “I think Kiki’s trying to make up for the trouble he caused. Give something back to his grandfather.”

  Elena gave him a long searching look. “Maybe he’s on the run from trouble here,” she said. “Might be California’s a good place to hide. All them people out there, he figures he can get lost.” She gripped the edge of the table and pulled herself to her feet. “I’ve known that boy since he was no bigger than a grasshopper, and I’m telling you, there’s something off about him. Always has been, ever since his daddy drove off that cliff. Left him full of anger. It’s like a hot oil bubbling inside him. I wouldn’t believe nothing he said. If he’s going to California, I say good riddance.”

  She swung around, marched back to the sink, and plunged both hands into the soapy water. Then she looked back. “You gonna be here Sunday?”

  “Far as I know.” He never knew from one day to the next where he might be. He was the interim pastor at St. Francis Mission for a while. The provincial might call today, and tomorrow he would be on his way again, but he was here now. That was what he tried to hold on to.

  “Good,” she said, bent into the task of washing the dishes.

  Father John headed back down the hallway, pulled on his jacket, and grabbed his hat. He let himself out the door and retraced his own tracks t
hrough the snow. There would be a feast after Mass on Sunday to welcome him back. A surprise; he wasn’t supposed to know. But he knew his parishioners would hold a feast. It was the Arapaho Way. He had wanted to tell Elena that the whole idea made him uncomfortable, that he preferred to slip into the old routine as if he had never been gone. But how could he tell her he didn’t want the women to go to all the trouble of preparing a feast that he wasn’t supposed to know about?

  VICKY RECOGNIZED THE determined thud of Adam’s footsteps in the outer office before the knock sounded on the door. Then he was in her office. She kept her eyes on the computer screen, but in her peripheral vision, she saw him walking toward the desk, black hair slicked back, broad shoulders and dark, handsome face with the faint scar on his cheek.

  They were partners: Vicky Holden and Adam Lone Eagle, attorneys at law, the black letters on the pebbled glass door said. An Arapaho and a Lakota with an office on the second floor of a beige brick building that fronted Main Street in Lander, a short distance from the border of the Wind River Reservation where she had grown up. Spacious and neat, everything in its place, with polished desks and upholstered chairs and yards of muted gray carpeting, and a secretary and an associate lawyer on the payroll. Sometimes she felt as if she had landed on the far side of the earth.

  Adam settled into the chair on the other side of the desk. She could feel him waiting. Still she took her time before lifting her eyes from the lines of black type and turning toward him. The brief she’d been writing had to do with tribal water rights and whether the Arapahos and Shoshones should develop a plan to sell the water they owned to a town like Riverton, located within the reservation’s exterior boundaries, but not part of the reservation. The tribes could compete with the water consortium that had supplied water to Riverton for years. A very important issue, Adam had said after last week’s meeting with Lawson Newman, the tribal water engineer. And in the tone of his voice, she’d heard the capital letters: VERY IMPORTANT. The kind of case that mattered, that would make a difference for her people, the Arapahos. The kind she and Adam had agreed to take on. They would go forth, do battle on behalf of important issues. But why did the issues feel so empty, so devoid of flesh and blood, lacking the people who used to wander into her office, brown faces long and worried, muffled voices asking if she could help.