The conversation switched to Cheyenne and, through Henry, I discerned that Melissa was not living with her father and had been spirited off by one of the many aunts that lived closer to town. In a while, they switched back to English. “So, he might be living with his mother?” They were talking about Artie Small Song now.
“Yes, that girl he was going out with from Crow Agency? She decided she did not like his drinking?”
“He is drinking again?”
The big, netted head bobbed slightly. “Yes.” He glanced at me and nodded some more, ever smiling. “You like your sandwich, Lawman?”
I took another bite and chewed; it really was good. “Best on the Rez.”
His fists bounced off the surface of the table and our coffee cups hopped with little ringlets emanating from the centers of the dark liquid. “Best in the world!” I nodded my head in agreement and smiled back as Henry’s attention was drawn out the window.
“Does his mother still live out near Rabbit Town?”
The big arms crossed over the green apron, but the smile held. “Little Brother, I’m beginning to think that you didn’t come here today because of my beautiful sandwiches or because you love me?”
Henry’s eyes rolled to the ceiling but then quickly rested on the Buffalo. I had seen that look before. It wasn’t a look you could stand for long; it burned. It burned because he cared. I watched the Buffalo to see what kind of effect it had on him, but the only thing that happened was that I heard drums, far in the distance. I’m sure they were just in my head but, as I thought this, I could see the Buffalo’s head nod ever so slightly keeping time with my drums. His eyes stayed locked with Henry’s, and I’m sure he heard them, too.
When we got outside, one of the tires was flat, so I loaned Henry a quarter and we pumped it back up. He said it would hold, and I cursed the day the truck was built. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I noticed that the Cherokee was gone. We couldn’t afford tricked-out Jeeps with the measly budget we had. I had a truck that was two years old, but the rest of the force either had five-year-old vehicles or, like Jim Ferguson, drove their own and got reimbursed for mileage. I had meant to call in to the office while at the Buffalo’s place, but it had slipped my mind; some way to run a murder investigation.
The Little Bird case had gone to the jury at 2:50 on the afternoon of September 16, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the county who noticed it on the calendar that hung on the bulletin board behind the witness stand. The trial and all its paraphernalia seemed to take on the lessening expectations of some television movie of the week. I had to remind myself that it was real.
The jury was charged with reaching a decision on nine counts: one charge of conspiracy; four counts of aggravated assault, involving the use of the broom and bat and the act of oral sex; and four counts of sexual contact, in which the defendants were charged with fondling Melissa’s breasts and forcing her to masturbate them. They were also given a list of fifteen lesser charges. I remembered Vern Selby leaning over his desk and clasping his hands into a joined fist. He instructed the jury to ponder two main questions: Was force or coercion used against Melissa Little Bird; and was the Cheyenne girl mentally defective; and, as an auxiliary, did Cody, George, Jacob, and Bryan know that, or should they have known that?
The judge had explained that coercion was not simply the use of brute force but that it could be a subtler process; that the jury would have to decide if Melissa had been conned into going into the basement; whether she had been vulnerable because of her psychological condition; whether the size and configuration of the basement intimidated her; or whether the number of boys and what they had told her before she left had pressured her into submitting.
Vern didn’t look up when he changed gears; he just kept looking at his collective fist and talking like one of those auctioneers at an auction where nobody’s buying anything. He told them that the legal term mentally defective did not mean that someone was slow or retarded. It meant that a person did not understand that she had a right to refuse sex or was incapable of refusing; and, that to convict on this charge, the jury would have to agree that the defendants knew or should have known that Melissa Little Bird was defective.
Lucian and I had had a long conversation about it after the trial; he said you had to do what you could do, and you did it the best you could; that if things turned or didn’t turn out the way you wanted, you let it go. If you did anything else, you were opening yourself up to very bad things. I hadn’t let it go, so was that where I was now, in the land of very bad things? Was I there alone, or was Melissa there with me, dragging our red rowboat across the teepee rings of the high plains? And who else was there with us, under those black and blue skies, carrying a very large caliber buffalo rifle?
“What are you thinking about, badass?” I didn’t respond, just sat there looking out the windshield at things to come. “You know, I think I will start calling that the Little Bird Look.”
I stared at the decrepit chrome antenna shivering in the velocity of roughly forty-five miles an hour. Captain America was hanging in there. Yea, verily, though I walked through the valley of very bad things… I was going to have to bring Turk back up from Powder Junction, and there was a dark little part of my soul that was looking forward to it. I told that dark little part to shut up and go curl up in a corner, and it did, but not completely. It never did, not completely.
“It is the one where the eyes bug out a little, and those two little lines dig in at the corners of your mouth.” He turned back to the road. “It is very manly.” I continued to look through the glass and attempted to un-bug my eyes. “I wish I had a look like that…”
I needed a change of subject. “You still have your horses?”
A little breath of air came out as he responded, “My uncle’s horses, yes.” Henry never claimed the horses, even though they had been his for more than ten years. It was because they were Appaloosas. He felt about Appaloosas the way I felt about his truck; they were here just to piss him off. Henry figured that the reason the Cheyenne had always ridden Appaloosas into battle was because by the time the men got there, they were so angry with the horses they were ready to kill everything.
“We should go out and ride sometime.”
He turned to look at me again, his eyes bugged a little this time. “You hate horses.”
I didn’t hate horses, I just didn’t like them. I didn’t really want to go riding; I was just hoping the shock value of the statement would change the subject. “The founding fathers used to say that riding was good for the digestion.”
“Whose founding fathers?”
“Mine. Your guys didn’t even have horses until you stole them from the Spanish… We headed over to the Mission?”
He smiled and nodded. “Yes.”
Like most of the houses on the reservation, the St. Labre Mission had a basketball court out back. It was a rough looking place, with large chunks of the asphalt crumbling off at the edges in pieces as big as softballs. What little paint there had been to signify the out-of-bounds, foul, and three-point areas had long since faded into the dark gray of the asphalt’s aggregate. It had a steel backboard painted to depict a war shield in faded and chipped reds, blacks, yellows, and whites. There was a hoop with no net, and despite the cold there were four young men playing a game of pickup in their shirtsleeves; one of the T-shirts read MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COWBOYS and another read FIGHTIN’ WHITIES in fifties script. The boys were classic Cheyenne, tall and lean, with a touch of casualness that betrayed their age. I wondered why they were here and not in school, but I figured I had enough on my plate without being a truant officer. He cut the motor and started to get out. “Do me a favor and stay in the truck.”