But whatever. It wasn’t my concern and I’d hear people talking about it at Vinnie’s mother’s house if I happened to be there. They were all Ojibwa at heart, whether Bay Mills or Sault or Saginaw or anywhere else. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Canada, it didn’t matter. When you got right down to it, they were all one people, and that was my original idea, thinking that if Vinnie and Buck were going to go hide somewhere, it would be on another reservation. Now, at last, we had one small clue to help point us in that direction.
It was only an hour from Cadillac to the Saginaw rez, through more open flatland until we hit the Au Sable State Forest and then finally the highway running south from Clare. A few more miles through the heart of the rez and we hit Mount Pleasant. We were in the middle of the mitten now. If you held up your right hand as a map of the Lower Peninsula and pointed to the center, that’s exactly where’d we be. Pickard Street runs east and west through the center of town, and you can find just about any chain restaurant you want. We kept going a few blocks until we saw the Five Guys. We parked and went inside.
“We should eat something,” Lou said, looking at his watch. It was past lunchtime by now. “It’ll make us think better.”
I didn’t argue with him. We ordered a couple of hamburgers, and as we were waiting I looked around the place, as if Vinnie and Buck would be sitting right there at one of the tables. They called our number a few minutes later, and that’s how we saw the way they ran their operation there. They’d tape your receipt with your magic number on it, right there on the outside of the brown paper bag.
I didn’t feel like burning an hour sitting down for lunch. I would rather have taken the food in the car while we drove around the rez. But Lou insisted.
“Let’s sit here and let it sink in for a while,” he said. “Vinnie and Buck may have sat right here at this table. Just yesterday.”
“Something tells me they didn’t do that,” I said. “If that bag was in his truck…”
“They ate on the run, okay. But just the same, let’s watch out the window for a while, get the rhythm of this place. I bet you something will come to us.”
So that’s what we did. I don’t know if we ever got into any kind of rhythm, or what the hell that even means, but we did get to sit there for a few minutes and plan out our next move.
And yes, we were both starving. Taking a few minutes to eat a couple of big hamburgers was the right idea.
“So imagine you’re Vinnie,” Lou said, wiping his mouth after a big bite. “You’ve got your crazy cousin with you, and you’re trying to take care of him. He’s bleeding-”
“So you take him to the hospital.”
“But you’re worried about him getting in trouble.”
“You take him to the hospital anyway.”
He waved that away. “If you go to the ER with a gunshot wound, they have to call the police, am I right? Isn’t that the rule?”
“Gun, knife, anything deadly,” I said. “Actually, any kind of violence at all. If you’ve been assaulted in any way, bad enough to go to the hospital for treatment, then they’re supposed to call it in.”
“Seriously? Anything?”
“That’s the Michigan law. It might be different in other states.”
“Damn,” he said. “But okay. That makes my point even stronger. As soon as Buck walks in with a gunshot wound, the police are on their way.”
“So where else would they go? And why all the way down here?”
“Because they know somebody. Buck, Vinnie, one of them. They come down here because they’ve got a friend on the rez who can help them without calling the cops.”
“It’s the biggest reservation in the state,” I said. “Where would we even start?”
“We already have. We’re retracing their steps. Backwards, maybe, but we know they drove to that farmhouse and left Vinnie’s truck there. Before that, they were here.”
He gestured to the counter.
“There’s no drive-through here,” he said. “Did you notice that? That means they were standing right there at that counter. Or maybe just Vinnie, I don’t know. But he was right there like twenty-four hours ago.”
“So what are we going to do, ask the cashier if she remembers seeing an Indian man with long black hair? She probably sees a hundred of them every day.”
“I don’t see a lot of long hair here,” Lou said, looking around the place. “But no matter. It wouldn’t do us any good even if she was here yesterday and even if she did remember him. I don’t imagine they talked about much more than what he wanted on his hamburgers.”
“Okay, so we’ve gotta take one more step backward. To wherever they were before they came here.”
“That’s the idea,” he said, wadding up his wrapper and throwing it into the bag. “Let’s go find it.”
A simple enough plan, even if I had no idea where we’d begin.
There was a walk-in clinic just down the street from the Five Guys. It seemed way too much to ask for this to be the place where Vinnie and Buck had come for help, but we walked inside and right there on the wall was a board with all of the doctors’ names. They were Indian names, all right. But we were just off the rez now and these were not the kind of Indians we were looking for.
“Patel, Singh, Alyeshmerni,” Lou said, going down the list. “Yeah, I’m thinking we’re not going to find our long-lost friend of Vinnie or Buck here.”
“We need to find something on the rez itself,” I said. “But even if we find the right place, how are we gonna know? If they came down here to get Buck treated off the books, how can you expect the doctor to talk to us about it?”
“That’s the tricky part,” Lou said as we got back into the car. “We’ll have to rely on the old eyeball test.”
I looked over at him.
“You know the eyeball test,” he said. “I mean if you were any kind of cop…”
“I know the eyeball test,” I said. “You ask them a question and you watch their eyes. If they’re lying, you’ll know it.”
“So you’ve done it before.”
“A few hundred times. Once in a while it even works.”
We spent the next half hour driving around, looking for the clinic. We knew it had to be there. Any decent reservation would have a walk-in clinic and this one was so far beyond decent. We drove by the Soaring Eagles Casino and it was truly spectacular, even bigger than the Sault tribe’s Kewadin. It even had its own entrance road, with a big sign arching over it. We kept going past that and finally found the clinic just a few blocks to the south. It was called the Nimkee Medical Clinic, and, no surprise, it looked so clean and new and state-of-the-art, you’d feel lucky to be wheeled through the front doors with a bullet in your head.
“I can’t believe any of this,” Lou said as he drove through the parking lot. There was a covered canopy you could stop under, complete with valet parking, so you could walk into the place without being bothered by the weather. “I told you about the Paiutes in Moapa Valley, right? With the coal plant next door?”
“You mentioned it, yes.”
“You know what kind of…”
He took a breath.
“Never mind,” he said. “If these people are making a good life for themselves, then more power to ’em. I’m gonna go talk to somebody.”
“You’re going to?”
“We’re on the rez now, Alex. Besides being an obvious paleface, you look like a cop, too.”
I didn’t fight him too hard. Probably because I knew he was right. This was the one place I’d be of no use to anybody. I sat there and babysat the car while he walked through the front doors. I looked at my watch. It was almost three o’clock. This day had started up in Sault Ste. Marie, staking out Dukes, rousting him, getting his story. Then down to Cadillac to see just how badly one could trash a nice farmhouse, not to mention four vehicles. Now we were here on the Saginaw rez, still trying to retrace Vinnie and Buck’s steps. It didn’t feel like the longest day of my life quite yet, but then the day was still young.