I could feel my courage heading for the hills. “That’s what we used to call it back in the old days—dating.”
“Really? ”
“Yep.” I’m pretty sure my face was taking on a little color, but I braved it through and went back to pick up the trash from the counter. “What do they call it now? ”
The half-smile smirk stalled there like a cat playing with a mouse as she looked up at me. “Sport fucking.”
I lingered beside her for a moment and then glanced at the big Indian before heading out. It just seemed like our timing was never right. She waited till I was halfway down the hall before calling after me. “You sure you go? Me love you loooooooooong time....”
8
I took Cady with me to make the sixty-six-mile loop over to Sheridan after we’d worked out in the morning. We were just passing Lake DeSmet along I-90 with Dog seated between us. She had her sandals kicked off and her legs folded up on the seat the way she always did.
I noticed she’d dressed for Michael’s arrival later that day in a bright turquoise broomstick skirt and a black-sequined, cap-sleeved T-shirt. She was wearing a stylish straw cowboy hat with a leather strap adorned with conchos and lots of feathers on top of her auburn hair. Her earrings matched her skirt. Biker/cowgirl haute couture. She glanced up at me and continued to pet Dog. “Don’t make fun of my hat.”
“I haven’t said a word.”
“You were thinking about it.”
I set the cruise control and settled back in my seat. “It’s a very nice hat.”
“Don’t.”
I glanced at her. “What?”
“You were going to try and be funny.” She took a deep breath and looked out her window and back down the Piney Creek valley.
This is the point where as a father you’re supposed to say something—the right thing—and I wondered what that might be. She was obviously nervous about Michael’s arrival, and it was my duty to assuage some of the anxiety. “You look great.”
Her head dropped, and I waited. “I’m wearing the hat because of the scar.”
“Oh, honey . . .”
“I just thought at first . . .” She was silent for a moment, but it wasn’t because there was nothing to say. “My hair is too short; I haven’t gotten enough sun. . . .”
“You look great, honest.” I passed an eighteen-wheel truck and steered back in our lane. “It means a lot to you, this visit?”
She reached out and adjusted the air-conditioning vent, then readjusted it back to the same position. “Yes.”
There was something I’d been meaning to talk with her about, and this was the closest to an opening I’d gotten. I’d decided that as a parent I would adopt a relationship with my little redheaded, large-eyed daughter that was based on an unrelenting truth, and it had become the only language we both understood. “Well, this’ll be a good opportunity for the two of you to spend some time really getting to know each other even if it’s just a couple of days.”
I was hoping it sounded better to her than it did to me.
“What’s that supposed to mean? ”
It hadn’t.
“I just think it’ll be a good visit; before, you had these roles—he was a police officer and you were a victim. . . .” I glanced over and then quickly returned my eyes to the road. “It was a hospital and then it’s been phone calls. I just think this’ll be a good opportunity for the two of you to be in a more natural setting and really get to know each other.”
“That’s the second time you’ve used the word ‘really,’ meaning we don’t know each other now? ”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Really? ”
It seemed to me her mind was rapidly getting better. I tried my last hope, the authoritarian patrician voice of reason. “Cady . . . ”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
We drove the next twenty minutes in silence as I took the second Sheridan exit, turned off Main, and made the gradual ascent to the Veterans Administration. The VA had taken over Fort Mackenzie, and it was in a gorgeous spot on a plateau just north of town with vast, feathering cottonwoods and solid, redbrick buildings. We passed the unmanned guard shack and the rows of conifers stretching shadows across the pavement, and she decided to talk to me again. “So how come I never met this Quincy Morton guy?”
“He was before your time.”
“More stuff that happened before I was born?” She glanced around as I wound my way through the fortlike buildings. “So, you had a hard time after the war?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know if I’d call it a hard time.... It was a confusing time, and I was looking for some answers. Quincy wrote me and said he was transferring to Sheridan from Detroit.”
She watched me. “Did Mom help?”
“Yes, but she wasn’t in Vietnam, and I think I needed somebody who had been.”
“What about Bear?”
I shrugged. “He wasn’t around.”
I could feel those composed, gray eyes on the side of my face. “It doesn’t seem to have affected you.”
I parked the Bullet under the shade of a tree and left the windows partially down for Dog. I thought of the contract I’d made with her. “Well, it did.”
When we got out of the truck, I noticed she left the hat on her seat.
The Sheridan founding fathers had lobbied for Fort Mackenzie as protection against hostile Indians. The fact that there were only 23,133 Indians spread over an area roughly the size of Europe; that this count included men, women, and children; or that it was 1898 and the director of the U.S. Census Bureau had stated plainly that the frontier was dead, didn’t appear much in the argument.
Pretty cagey, those Sheridan politicians—realizing the economic advantages that accrued by having an army post nearby. The market for local goods, especially beef, would increase, and the fort would provide jobs for a burgeoning workforce; it would also supply young West Point cadets to whom the founding mothers could marry off their daughters. One can only imagine the looks on their faces when the first troops of the Tenth Cavalry, Companies G and H, disembarked from the Sheridan trains, and were—buffalo soldiers.
Quincy Morton’s office was not in the same location; in fact, nothing was. I hadn’t been to the VA for a while, and it appeared that the place had gone through quite a growth spurt. It was good to see Quincy again, and when I described the big Indian in my jail, he definitely knew who he was.
“You realize I’m under no obligation to give you any information without the proper authorization?”
“I am and, if it makes you uncomfortable, I can go over to Chuck Guilford and get the avalanche of paperwork sliding, but that’s not going to help this man I’ve got sitting in my holding cell.”
I watched as Quincy twisted his fingers into his wooly beard, which was now curlicued with a gray that I didn’t remember. It was easy to see how the plains Indians had made the association between the soldiers’ hair and the coats of the roaming herds. He adjusted his glasses, glanced at Cady, and then crossed to a large oak file cabinet and knelt down. I noticed the drawer he pulled out was the bottom one, W-Z.
White Buffalo. Had to be.
He pulled a thick file from the hanger and came back over, setting the folder on the edge of his desk; I noticed he didn’t sit. “I’m taking this lovely lady over to the dayroom in ward five, which has mediocre coffee but a glass solarium with incredible views of the mountains.” He hooked his elbow out to Cady, and she smiled and joined him at the door with her turquoise skirt twirling. He plucked an ID off the navy blazer on his coat rack. “The file stays in my office, but I will expect you in fifteen minutes. It’s a voluntary lockdown ward, but just tell them you’re with me and they’ll let you in.”
He shut the door.
I pulled Quincy’s chair closer to the desk and looked around the room; I guess I was avoiding the file. The therapist had a framed poster from the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody of the Tenth Cavalry buffalo soldiers on the wall, a couple of unopened Meals-Ready-to-Eat on his bookshelf, and a fake hand grenade on his desk with a small plaque that read, IN CASE OF COMPLAINTS—PULL PIN. At least I assumed it was a fake grenade.