The Shadow Dancer (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Read online

  He didn’t believe it. No Arapaho would just leave without telling his family. And Minnie and Louise were Dean’s family. They’d raised him from infancy, from the day after his father, Minnie’s only child, had died in a car accident. Dean’s mother, seventeen years old and terrified, had shown up at the front door. Twenty below zero outside, Minnie once told him, snow so deep that the girl’s footprints across the yard looked like post holes, and she’d handed Minnie a bundle wound in blankets and said, “Your grandson. I can’t take care of him.”

  Minnie had tried to get the girl to come inside, but she’d turned and run back through the post holes, hopping through the swirling snow on one leg, then the other. Minnie had begun unwrapping the hard, still bundle, shaking with fear that the baby—God! She hadn’t known about the baby!—was already dead, frozen to death.

  “Have you contacted the police?” he said finally.

  Minnie was shaking her head, eyes closed against the possibility. “We don’t want the police, Father.” She opened her eyes and gave him a look that pleaded for understanding. “Dean’s a good boy, never had trouble with the police. Louise and me, we don’t want the police to know his name. Far as they’re concerned, Dean Little Horse don’t exist, and that’s how we want to keep it. They hear he’s missing, they’re gonna classify him with the losers and drunks that hang out at the bars.”

  “Fort Indians,” Louise said.

  Father John understood. The drunken Indians who, a hundred years ago, had hung out at the forts, trading their buffalo robes and their women, everything they had, for another drink of whiskey. Oh, yes, he understood. He’d traded his career for whiskey.

  “Dean was twenty-three last March.” Minnie scooted to the edge of the sofa. “He’s got himself a college degree, knows all about computers, You’re a white man. You tell me where he might’ve gone off to.”

  Father John had to glance away from the raw fear in the women’s eyes. They both knew that Dean Little Horse could have gotten into serious trouble—a reservation Indian, making his way in the outside world. There were people who’d run an Indian off the road if they saw him. He’d been in the backseat of a van once, on his way to speak at a luncheon for local businessmen. The Toyota had been sputtering, in need of new spark plugs, and they’d offered to pick him up. Four white men and the Indian priest, careening down the highway toward Riverton, and an Indian standing alongside the road, waiting to cross.

  “Let’s see how high he jumps,” the driver called out.

  “Yeah, go for it.” The others whooped and hollered. The van veered toward the Indian, who jumped back, stumbled, and fell into the ditch.

  “Stop!” Father John had shouted. Even the memory brought the heat into his face.

  “Hey, Father.” The driver’s head had swirled around, as if he’d forgotten who was there. “No harm done. Just a little joke.”

  “Let me out,” he’d said.

  “Hey, what about your talk?” One of the businessmen seemed to realize what had happened. “Lots of people gonna be disappointed.”

  They were a quarter-mile down the highway when the van finally pulled over. He’d crawled past the brown-trousered legs, freed himself, and slammed the door. The van had squealed into the traffic and he’d run back to find the Indian, but the man was gone.

  He felt his skin prickling. Dean was like that Indian. He could be lying in a ditch somewhere. He said, “I’ll have a look around Lander.”

  “Oh, would you, Father?” The fear in Minnie’s eyes dissolved into a look of such trust and expectation that he could almost feel the weight of it settling over his shoulders.

  He said, “I’ll need some information. Dean’s apartment. The name of his company.” He pulled out the small notepad and pencil he always carried in the pocket of his plaid shirt.

  Minnie recited the addresses, telephone numbers, all from memory.

  Father John wrote quickly. “What about his friends?”

  “Friends?” Minnie was quiet, and he glanced up. Her dark eyes were like stones. “Kids he went to high school with on the rez, lot of ’em moved away. Far as I know, Dean was making new friends. He never had trouble making friends. Everybody likes Dean.”

  “I think he had a girlfriend,” Louise said, her voice small and tentative.

  “Oh, Louise.” Minnie gave the other woman an impatient look. This was well-trodden ground. “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “Too busy to come for dinner last few Sundays,” the other woman persisted. “Only normal a good boy like Dean would find himself a nice girl to spend Sundays with.”

  “Any idea of who she is?” Father John said.

  Minnie squared her shoulders and drew in a long breath. “Dean never said anything about a girlfriend. I think . . . I really think he would have told us.”

  Father John slipped the notepad and pencil back into his pocket, then got to his feet. “Look,” he said, taking in both women. “We’d better only give this one day. If I don’t find him, I want you to promise to file a missing persons report.”

  Minnie pushed herself out of the sofa. “Louise and me, we feel a lot better already.” She glanced around at her sister pressed against the cushions, as if to ward off a blow that only she saw coming.

  “Tell Dean to call us right away, Father,” Minnie said. “Tell him how we been awful worried.”

  Father John jammed down on the accelerator. The pickup thumped over the hard-packed dirt and onto the road. An uneasy feeling set like a rock in his stomach. Nobody dropped off the earth for four days. Something had happened. He should have insisted that Minnie go to the police immediately, but he knew it wouldn’t have done any good. No amount of reasoning could break through the logjam in the woman’s eyes. He was going to have to try to find her grandson. He had to get as much information about Dean Little Horse as he could, and he had to get it fast.

  2

  The sun had burned hot all day, and now the heat pressed down over the flat, open stretch of plains on either side of Blue Sky Highway. Vicky Holden eased up on the accelerator. Ahead a line of traffic waited to turn into the graveled parking lot in front of the Arapaho tribal head-quarters. She stopped behind a white pickup, her turn signal clicking in rhythm with the flashing light on the pickup. The air seemed hotter than on the highway at sixty miles an hour with the breeze blowing through the Bronco.

  She didn’t mind the heat, the smell of dry sage in the air. Reminders that she was home again after four months at Howard and Fergus, her old law firm, trying to convince herself she belonged in a steel-and-glass skyscraper on Seventeenth Street in Denver. She belonged on the Wind River Reservation, where not every foot of earth had been paved over and there were still the open spaces and sky that had always sheltered and comforted her people.

  The traffic inched forward. Vicky could see what was causing the bottleneck: a dozen men and women—all Indians—circling the entrance to the parking lot, waving placards and shoving baskets at the vehicles that slowed past. They looked young, early twenties, she guessed, with calm expressions that might have been painted on the dark faces. The women wore long, white gowns that brushed the tops of their moccasins; the men, white shirts and trousers with fringe dipping over the shoulders and running down the arms and legs.

  A semi slowed past, the driver gawking out his window. Then the white pickup swung into the turn and Vicky followed, bouncing over the gravel past the Indians. The men’s clothing was made of buckskin, like the clothing of the warriors in the Old Time. The women’s dresses were muslin. Now she could make out the painted symbols on the clothing: blue bands for her people, whom the other plains tribes called the Blue Sky People; yellow circles and crosses for the sun and the morning star; red thunderbirds for the eagle, the messenger of the Creator, and squiggly lines radiating from the eyes, the symbol of lightning.

  A placard thrust itself across the windshield and Vicky stomped on the brake. Red block letters said: HESUNA’NIN IS THE WAY. PREPARE FOR THE NEW WORLD.


  The placard slid past, and for a second, she caught the eye of a tall, muscular man with black braids that hung over the designs painted on his shirt. His features—the knife-edged mouth, narrowed eyes, and fleshy nose—seemed to sink into his flat face. He thrust a basket into her opened window. A few coins lay in the bottom. She pushed the basket away.

  The man—Pueblo, Ute, Cheyenne, Lakota, she wasn’t sure, but he didn’t have the sculptured face of the Arapaho—stepped back and glanced around, the narrowed eyes issuing orders to the others. Then he started across the parking lot toward a black truck, a hopping motion, as if his left leg worked independently from the rest of his body. The others moved out of the circle and marched behind him like a precision drill team. He waved the placard overhead and shook the basket in a slow, jerky rhythm.

  Vicky had no idea who the Indians were, and the realization made her feel as if she’d happened into an alien place, not her own place at all. Even the moccasin telegraph had failed to reach her since she’d returned to Lander. Had she remained on the reservation, where she belonged, instead of living and working in town, she would know. She would be connected.

  She tried to push away the sense of being adrift. She was back home, after all; Lander abutted the southern boundary of the reservation. She swung right and parked in front of the squat brick building, once a school, now the tribal offices. She grabbed her briefcase from the passenger seat and crossed the sidewalk to the glass door.

  A blast of cool air rushed over her as she stepped into the dark-tiled entry: receptionist’s desk against the opposite wall, plastic molded chairs along the side walls. Two elders had pulled their chairs forward and were staring out the door. One of them grinned at her. “We was bettin’ on whether they was gonna let you pass,” he said.

  Vicky smiled at the elders, then walked over to the receptionist, a strikingly pretty young woman who leaned sideways around the computer monitor with the poise of an expert rider turning her pony. Vicky gave her name and said she had an appointment with Norm Weedly.

  “He’s waiting.” The woman’s eyes switched to the corridor on the right.

  Vicky found the office: third door on the left, TRIBAL WATER ENGINEER printed in black letters on the pebbly glass. She was about to knock when the door swung open. Weedly gripped the edge. Tall and wiry, with ropelike muscles in his neck and forearms, wearing blue jeans, yellow plaid shirt, and hiking boots. Arapaho, in his early forties, Vicky thought, close to her own age.

  “Come on in.” Weedly ushered her into an office not much larger than an outsized closet. Two chairs and a metal desk with papers and folders sloping across the top took up most of the space. Motes of dust hung in the column of sunshine that slanted through the window. Tacked on the walls were maps of the reservation and aerial photos of the major rivers—Wind River, Little Wind River, Popo Agie—that spilled out of the mountains and into a spidery system of irrigation canals. Other photos showed views of the main reservoirs: Diversion Dam up north and, to the west, Bull Lake Dam, an earthen wall paved with concrete that contained a lake the color of turquoise.

  “How ya doing?” Weedly threw the question over one shoulder as he walked around the desk. He sank into the swivel chair, picked up a folder, and motioned for her to take the straight-back chair next to the door.

  Vicky sat down, settled the briefcase on her lap, and fielded the small talk about the weather, the heat spell—early this year—all the polite preliminaries to the real purpose of the meeting.

  Finally, the water engineer cleared his throat and said, “So, what’s your opinion on our problem with the Wind River, counselor?”

  Vicky felt a little flush of satisfaction. Her people had finally asked for her opinion on an important matter—the ongoing damage to the Wind River and to the fish and wildlife from the inadequate stream flow. There were a lot of lawyers in big-name firms with more experience on water issues and Native American rights than she had, and yet Weedly had called her—a fresh look at the problem, he’d said. Whatever she suggested, he’d promised to take to the JBC, the Joint Business Council, which represented the Arapahos and the Shoshones, the two tribes that shared the reservation.

  Vicky raised the flap of her briefcase and extracted the clear-plastic-covered report she’d spent the last two weeks writing. “We have to go back to court. We don’t have a choice.” She handed the report across the desk.

  Weedly flinched. She might have handed him a fire-cracker about to explode in his face. He stared at the plastic cover. “Not gonna happen, counselor. JBC’s had decades of lawsuits over water, enough to satisfy anybody’s litigious nature, and when it was all done, State Supreme Court gave the state the right to control the amount of water in the rivers.”

  “But the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed our treaty rights to the water.” Vicky heard the stridency in her voice.

  “All well and good, but the state still decides how that water can be used.” The engineer jumped up and turned toward the photos behind his desk. “State has a lot to say about the amount of water in the reservoirs and irrigation canals,” he said. He might have been talking to himself. “And every year, after the spring runoff piles up silt against the dam headworks, the local irrigation district decides to release walls of mud into the Wind River.” He turned back to her, a mild look of surprise in his expression, as if he’d just remembered she was there.

  “I was hoping you’d find some legal loophole for us to keep the Wind River from dying.” He shifted his gaze above her head, as if the river itself had suddenly come into view. “This summer . . .” He halted, then stumbled on: Hot weather. Silt. Evaporation. River dies, might never be able to reclaim it.

  Vicky got to her feet—she always thought better on her feet—and walked over to the window. Outside, the black truck was gone. Only a few pickups and her Bronco stood in the lot. She felt shaky with a sense of futility and helplessness. What had he expected of her? A miracle? Was she supposed to find a loophole that had just happened to slip by the scrutiny of other lawyers?

  She turned back to the man standing ramrod straight behind the desk. “Bull Lake Dam is the key,” she said, gesturing toward the photo of the thick turquoise finger of water crooked into the green mountains. “One hundred and fifty thousand acre-feet of water. Everything below the dam”—she swept her hand over the map of the reservation—“depends on the water stored here.” She held the man’s gaze. “I suggest we file a federal lawsuit based on our rights as a sovereign nation to regulate water quality in the rivers. We ask the feds to impose water quality standards, which would ensure a better stream flow and cleaner water. A limited lawsuit.”

  “No such thing. We’d be opening up the whole complicated water issue again. Last thing the state’s gonna want to see.” He leaned over his desk and flipped the edge of the plastic cover, as if he should open it but didn’t want to, and Vicky wondered if he would ever read the report.

  “You said yourself the river will die.”

  “JBC won’t go for it.” His fingers scratched at the report.

  Vicky drew in a long breath. “I’d like to get on the agenda for the next JBC meeting.”

  “I’ll give the council your report.” Weedly pushed the plastic across the desk. “You lawyers,” he said, a lighter tone now, “never give up hope the courts can settle everything. Problem is, Vicky, we have other issues with the state. We might be sovereign, but take a look.” He gestured toward the map of Wyoming, the reservation a large block of red in the center. “We’re surrounded. We depend on the state for maintenance on state roads across the rez, money for schools, welfare programs. Let’s say we file another lawsuit on the water issue and the federal court says, yeah, Indians got the right to regulate water quality in our rivers. You think the state won’t make us pay in other ways?”

  “That shouldn’t happen.”

  “Yeah? Aren’t you forgetting something? The Indians lost the war.”

  Vicky got to her feet. She gripped the briefcase
hard; the leather felt flimsy and wrinkled in her hand. Did everything have to be filtered through a prism of the past? Would her people always be immobilized by the old fears?

  She said, “What about the agenda?”

  “Won’t do any good.”

  “I’d like to try.”

  Weedly was quiet a moment. In his eyes, Vicky saw the smallest flicker of possibility. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said finally. Then he started around the desk and stretched out a sinewy hand for the tan cowboy hat on the coattree in the corner. “Past quitting time. I’ll walk out with you.”

  Vicky led the way across the deserted lobby, the receptionist’s chair pushed into the desk, the two plastic chairs angled toward the door. Outside, the late afternoon heat lay over the parking lot like an invisible ceiling. The sun was high above the mountains, a red-orange flare that cast blue shadows over the foothills in the distance. An engine thrummed out on the highway. Except for the Bronco and a green Ford pickup—Weedly’s vehicle, she assumed—the parking lot was empty.

  “The Indians took their placards and baskets and left,” she said.

  “Good news.” Weedly kept in step across the sidewalk. “Last week they were up at Fort Washakie disrupting traffic. Did the same over at Arapaho. Mostly, people ignore them, so they go back up into the mountains to wait for the end of the world.”

  “What’s it all about?”

  The man threw her a sideways look. “Where you been?” There was a hint of amusement in his voice. He knew she’d been working in Denver.

  “On another planet.” She’d been back only a month, hardly enough time to settle into a new office in Lander and write the report Weedly had asked for. She still had a sense of displacement, as if she’d stepped out of herself for a while and now had to get used to her own skin. There was so much to catch up on.

  “James Sherwood, you know him?” Weedly gestured with his head toward the entrance to the lot where the Indians had been circling about.