“No, no, I have relatives up here, I was just visiting them. I get to ride the train free,” he said. “What were you doing in Fraser?”
“Uh, nothing, just traveling, we’re tourists.”
“I thought I detected an accent. Australian?” he asked.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re Australian,” I said, and then, realizing that John might blow the gaff and make the man suspicious, called him over.
“John, come over, David here was asking where we were from and I was saying we’re just a couple of bums from Australia, traveling around the world.”
“Yeah, we’re from Sydney, Sydney, Australia, going to Chicago now,” John said, giving me a look. The North Belfast accent was so unlike the well-known accent from the south of Ireland that you could conceivably confuse it with Australian.
“Chicago, how come you came out here?” Redhorse asked.
I looked at him. There was something about him. Something not quite right. Where had I heard that name before?
“We got on the wrong train at Denver,” I said, “we were heading to Chicago but we got on the wrong train. West instead of east. Going to Chicago, then New York and then Europe.”
“Wrong train, huh? Not surprised, they don’t tell you anything at Denver. Lucky you noticed you were going west. The life, though. I’d love to travel the world, but I’m afraid to fly, always have been, you’ll never get me on a plane,” Redhorse said.
“Statistically, it’s the safest way to travel, safer than the train, much safer than a car,” John said.
“Well, that’s not the way I see it. If you have a car crash or a train crash it’s not necessarily fatal, but in almost every plane crash everybody dies,” Redhorse said.
John said something back, but I was having trouble concentrating. The ketch wanted to find a home. Redhorse was making me nervous. He said something to John. They both looked at me.
“Alex, David was asking what sports we play in Australia,” John said, giving me a nudge.
“Oh, lots of sports, Australian Rules football, cricket, rugby, that sort of thing, you don’t play them in America,” I said.
“You’ll never guess what my favorite sport is,” Redhorse said with a big grin.
John shrugged.
“Go on, guess,” Redhorse said, nodding.
“I don’t know, baseball?” I suggested.
“No. Think about it, what would be the most unlikely sport I could play?” he said, barely able to contain a chuckle.
“I really don’t know, football, I mean, soccer,” I said.
“No, basketball,” he said impatiently, and then cracked up laughing.
Neither John nor I got the joke.
“Don’t you see?” he said, choking with giggles.
“Not really,” John said.
“You have to be six foot plus. Seven foot plus. Jeez. I thought basketball was big in Australia, that’s what I heard, I heard it was getting big over there,” Redhorse said.
“Oh, oh, yeah, it is, sure we watch it, don’t we, Alex?” John said.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, regretting this whole Australian thing now.
“What’s your favorite NBA team?” Redhorse asked without suspicion.
“Um, favorite team, well, um, oh yeah, I like the, uh, Harlem Globetrotters, they’re pretty good, they always seem to win,” John said, and I nodded in agreement.
Redhorse looked at us strangely for a second and decided to change the subject.
“So are you boys students?”
“Yes, we’re on our gap year, we’re traveling the world before going back to university,” I said.
“Yeah, like I say, love to do that, but you can’t go by boat, it’s too expensive. Besides, I don’t like to be away from the reservation for too long, my family lives there, I am the only one that lives in Denver.”
“You’re an Indian?” John asked.
“Yes.”
“Cool,” John said.
“From what I read, the Native Americans around Denver got treated pretty rough,” I said.
“I suppose you read about the Sand Creek Massacre,” Redhorse muttered, and threw away his cigarette, immediately lighting another.
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s good that people know that history, but it’s the wrong focus, there were many little massacres and killings that never got recorded, they stole all this land from us, Denver is stolen land, these mountains are stolen land, not that we claimed to own them, we were the guardians of it, the white man claims to own it,” Redhorse explained quickly and deliberately like he’d said this all before many times.
“Is that what you do for a living, then? You’re a lawyer, an advocacy person?” I asked him.
“No, no, I’m a cop,” Redhorse said with a little grin.
John looked at me, froze. I shook my head slightly. We weren’t going to react, we weren’t going to run for it, we weren’t going to do anything stupid at all.
“You’re a policeman?” John asked hesitantly.
“Yes.”
“What type, like traffic or drugs or—”
“I’m a homicide detective,” he said flatly.
“You’re a homicide detective?” I found myself asking.
“Yes, I know what you’re thinking, I’m too short to impress people, I can’t intimidate witnesses, that sort of thing?” Redhorse said, again, like he’d done this speech many times before too.
“No, I wasn’t thinking that.”
“No? Well, a lot of people do think that, they think I’m too short and they think because I’m an Indian and my parents live on a reservation that I get drunk all the time. Well, they don’t and I don’t and I’ve got one of the highest clearance rates in the department.”
“I’m sure you have, I wasn’t thinking any of those things, I’m sure you’re a great detective,” I said.
“I am,” he agreed.
“W-what are you working on at the moment?” I asked.
John had turned white, lapsed into silence; he was sucking desperately on his cigarette and generally drawing attention to himself.
“Where’s that train?” he was mumbling quietly.
“Oh, well, I’m running the RH department. Not leading any particular case,” he said.
“Ok,” I said. “What’s RH?”
“Robbery Homicide,” he said flatly.
“No interesting cases you can talk about?”
“Well, my big headache is a felonious assault that’s become a murder now the victim’s died. The lawyers are saying that the suspect didn’t have his Miranda rights read to him in Chinese within twenty-four hours of his arrest. Both victim and suspect were Chinese. A lot of eyewitnesses, but we might have to let him go. That sort of thing is out of our hands, though. DA’s problem, not ours. Still, if he gets off, it’s in our files. It makes me crazy.”
He shook his head, clenched his fists, obviously upsetting him a bit to think about this, to think about guilty men getting away with a terrible crime. I smiled nervously.
“Where is that bloody train?” John said again.
I smoked and told myself to relax. The cop seemed ok. Like most cops, he’d want to complain about his work. The best thing to do was ease him by keeping him talking until the train came. Still, my mind wasn’t thinking as clearly as it could and we had obviously fucked up somehow by mentioning the Harlem Globetrotters. Any question would do.
“So this Miranda, whatever happened to him? You always hear about the Miranda rights on TV. NYPD Blue, Law and Order, all that, but you never hear about Miranda. He must have got off because they didn’t read him his rights? Is that right?” I said.
“Yeah, it is, Ernesto Miranda got away with kidnap, torture, and rape on a retarded girl. Shit, man. But the story has a happy ending,” Redhorse said with grim satisfaction, his eyes lighting up, so that even in the moonlight I could tell they were a deep brown.