Didn’t like the son-of-a-bitch Miles, but I took a job, so I did it. Indians like me keep their word, Colt.
It was about ten when I arrived. I drove slowly through town toward the Montana Bar, shocked to see the entire block was now a parking lot. Back when, there’d been three bars and a hotel, with the Montana on the east end. Wiped from the face of the earth, I thought. Biblical. Or at least corporate, which does not reward family, community, or “cities” in the middle of nowhere with no industries or oil or glitter and populations the size of Havre’s not-quite ten thousand souls.
I drove the rest of the way through town with the hair on the back of my neck standing up. It was like driving through a fog bank full of ghosts. I gripped the steering wheel, put my foot back on the accelerator, and emerged on the other side of town, headed for Chinook. The Bear Paw Battlefield was fifteen miles farther south, and I yearned to get out there to listen for the spirits on the morning breeze. I shit you not, when things are right you can hear voices along the creek below the monument.
I picked up my phone as the Plainsman Bar outside of Chinook came into view, eerie in the darkness and looking like it had been closed for quite a while. Elizabeth answered on the second ring and I said, “I just passed the Plainsman.”
“Okay,” she replied, “I’ll meet you at the Chief Joseph Motel.”
Motel? Man leads his tribe damn near a thousand miles, beating the hell out of the US Cavalry most of the way until I come along, then takes a stand and surrenders so his women and kids won’t get killed, and what — they name a seedy motel after him? And you stay there?
It took me awhile to roust the motel clerk, a disheveled older woman who grumpily shoved the registration card my way, then went to the front window to see if I had a “floozy” in the car. Not that the clerk cared, as long as I paid.
The room smelled of dust that had probably been there since the eighties when Elizabeth and I first used these highway “cabins” as our rendezvous, our safe place. Tan bedspread, a couple of saggy pillows, a chair, a table, a TV on a chest of drawers (one wouldn’t close), a bathroom with a shower that dripped. I tried not to pace a hole in the thin carpet as I left the room open to the night.
Elizabeth filled the doorway twenty-three minutes after I got there. Her hair was longer and darker, lined with silver, but she’d kept her elongated beauty. She still had full breasts and good legs.
We stood staring at each other like a couple of teenagers.
“Thanks for coming,” she said. “And meeting me here.”
“Why not in Havre?”
“I don’t know, it’s not like before, I guess.”
Fine woman, bad liar, and you know it, but as usual you are letting her lead you on, Colt.
“Not like before,” I said.
“When we were married to other people.”
“We buried all of that. And both of them. It’s too bad, but...”
“Yeah,” she said. “But letting some secrets out on Main Street won’t do anybody any good now.”
You got no idea what she means, do you?
She sat on the chair. I sat on the bed.
“Besides, if you really can help, I don’t want Bill to know you’re going to until.”
“He has always considered himself bigger and better than anybody else until,” I said. “Especially when the anybody else is somebody like me.”
I grew up part Gros Ventre Indian, on the Fort Belknap reservation in Montana, smack in the middle of the Grovons’ ongoing battle with the modern world. All these hundreds of years since we were “discovered,” many of us came from the mingling of blood, both a devastating and strengthening thing.
Least you got that right.
“Wild Bill” Wendland was a rich white kid from up on the Hi-Line — the stripes of highway and railroad that run across the top of Montana and smack through Havre. Bill had gone to law school someplace back east, then come home to claim his due. He’d been a customer when I ran a tavern, liked to hang out because Elizabeth and her husband drank there, even though there were classier joints in Havre. Elizabeth’s husband never figured out why she preferred it, but Bill’s eyes figured us out even as he brazenly put the moves on her in front of her husband. The husband was a “lots of potential” man who’d peaked in college. As Elizabeth worked her way up the academic ladder of success, eventually becoming a dean, she’d been unable to make him strong or successful, though part of his problem might have been the cancer slowly eating him. We didn’t know about that until years later.
Wild Bill had been a bad customer in every sense of the word, even before his lecherous behavior toward the marriage-trapped woman I loved in secret until my own wife saved herself, dumped me, and I wandered away from Havre. I realized how deep Bill’s badness ran in those confusing times one hot summer night in the parking lot outside my bar. I’d carried a bucket of beer bottles out to the trash and turned around to see Bill had left the jukebox country-and-western songs and followed, probably to mock or challenge me in that rich, small town — jerk way of his. But headlights caught us standing there before either of us could say a word.
The car rattled to a stop and out of the driver’s side came JoeBoy Eagleman. There were a few Indians, like JoeBoy and me, who had been around both the white towns and the reservations since we were kids. He was a friend, about six feet tall and slender. He had a wooden crutch under his left arm, and his left leg was crooked below the knee, marking him as one of polio’s last easy victims in America. He stood on the parking lot gravel in the headlights of his car and said in a singsong Indian brogue, “Hey, I’m lookin’ for you, Bill, ennit?”
Bill, a good three inches taller and probably thirty pounds heavier, sneered at the Indian with the crutch. “Whyn’t you come over here then?”
“I can’t walk too good, ennit!” JoeBoy replied, limping ahead a couple steps.
“That’s too bad, ain’t it?” Bill said, mocking the all-purpose Indian phrase.
“Hey, I come to tell you to quit those lawsuit things you doin’ on my brother Tennyson.”
“The law’s the law. Even for your kind.” Bill grinned. “Maybe especially for your kind.”
“What you doin’, finding that shit to take him to court, bust him flat paying for lawyers so he’s got to sell the land to you? That’s what you’re doin’, ennit?”
Bill growled: “Fuck you, smoked meat.”
“Hey, fuck you too, then.”
Bill walked toward JoeBoy. “You better get outta here before I kick your Indian ass!”
“Come over here and make me then, ennit?”
JoeBoy moved back a step, tossing his crutch to the side. Then he crouched, putting weight on his good right leg while raising his fists. Bill punched with his right hand. JoeBoy deflected the swing with his left and hit him so hard on the chin that Bill dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
JoeBoy nodded to me and picked up his crutch.
Splayed on the ground, Bill fumbled around under his hips, reaching for his back pocket, where he could have—
JoeBoy swung the tip of his crutch through Bill’s legs and slammed him hard in his crotch. Whatever Bill was reaching for got forgotten as the hotshot lawyer doubled up and grabbed his throbbing groin with both hands.