Whoa. That was unexpected. “You two aren’t close?”
“No. I keep my distance from him and have asked him to do the same.”
“Why’s that?”
Another pause.
“Come on. You wouldn’t have said something if you didn’t want to talk about him.”
Another affirmative chin bob. “How well do you know Hiram?”
“I’ve crossed paths with him, mostly on a professional basis.”
“Professional. Right.” He snorted. “Even half blind and crippled I ain’t the embarrassment to our family name and our heritage that he is as a ‘professional.’”
“You the only one in your family who’s feels that way?”
“There is only us these days. The rest of our line has died out.”
“I hear ya there. No more males are left in our family to carry on our name either.”
Hightower cocked his head. “I can’t tell by the way you speak… are you Lakota?”
I nodded, realized he couldn’t see it and said, “Some. My mother was part Minneconjou.”
“Ah.”
I couldn’t tell if his response was meant to be insightful or condescending. “What?”
“Then do you know the old stories? Of Iktomi, the trickster?”
“A little.”
“Then think of Hiram… like Iktomi.”
Sweet baby Jesus in a manger. Parables were my least favorite part of Indian mythology. Why couldn’t he just say what he meant? Rather than comparing a person to a rock or to a turtle or to smoke and expecting me to draw my own conclusions? I pretended to contemplate his wisdom for thirty seconds before I asked, “How so?”
“No matter how many times Hiram sheds his skin and tries to become someone else, the flesh beneath that skin remains red, not white.”
Just another barbed reminder that race was always an issue in our culture, even within the same family.
“Being Indian isn’t a hobby. Neither is being honorable.”
Okay. I’d missed something. “What’s being honorable have to do with anything?”
“It has to do with everything,” Josiah chided me. “You ask him if what he’s been doing is honoring our ancestors.”
“Is this about him working for Kit McIntyre?”
Another no-answer, stoic-Indian moment.
Which pissed me off. If Josiah wasn’t tight with his brother, how the hell did he know what Hiram was up to? I said as much.
Josiah faced me. I swear a jolt of power shot through me.
“When you see Hiram next, you ask him if he’s proud. Tell him I told you to ask.”
Before I could demand clarification, the nurse called his name and chattered loudly as she rolled him out of sight, leaving me with more questions than answers.
My appointment was a waste of time. Nothing’d changed with my eye or my vision. I’d say it was a relief, but it just added another layer of frustration of being stuck in limbo in all aspects of my life.
I called Jake to check in, but mostly to get directions to Hiram Blacktower’s place. I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish. Josiah’s remarks unsettled me, and since I’d already gotten into a pissing match with Hi’s boss, I didn’t have anything to lose by paying Hiram a friendly visit.
Hiram’s place was more run-down than I’d anticipated-not a good indication of his success in real estate or that Kit was paying him better than slave wages. I unhooked the lopsided gate at the entrance, pulled through the opening, got out again, relatched it behind me, and then putted up the driveway.
The house looked to be a one-room shack. The siding was a morass of colors plastered at odd angles in a poor man’s attempt at a mosaic. The lone front window was covered in tinfoil. Probably switched out with plastic wrap in the winter months.
Four vehicles were parked in the yard. A Ford F-150, a Pontiac LeMans with the front end accordioned, a Dodge truck, and some type of foreign economy car. For a second I had an urge to check around the front end to see if chunks of grass hung off the grilles of either truck. Or if the sides were scratched from barbed wire. Or if it’d make that grinding noise if I started it up.
Did I suspect Hi had played the make-Mercy-a-hood-ornament game last night? Hell yes. I suspected everyone with a pickup, which left roughly 99.9 percent of the entire population of South Dakota.
My gaze tracked the high line wire that swooped from the pole by the road to the house. At least Hi had electricity out here; some folks didn’t. I doubted he’d dug a well, so he’d have to haul water. I saw the faded blue plastic tank centered in the back end of the Dodge and knew he hadn’t been the one who’d chased me-at least, not with that truck.
A horse stared at me from behind a rickety fence. I shivered and looked away. Horse one; Mercy zero. As I looked beyond the broken-down corral, I noticed a thatch-covered hut that resembled a dirt igloo. A sweat lodge. A heap of good-sized rocks stood off to the left. Wood was piled around the perimeter. Smoke snaked out of the top of the hut. I glanced at the clock in the truck. Hiram was performing a sweat? At this time of day? When it was already a million degrees? Just another reminder Hi wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box.
Hiram stretched out of the tiny door of the sweat lodge and squinted at me. I couldn’t see his lower half, and I knew most guys did the sweat naked. I so didn’t want a glimpse of Hiram’s dangly parts.
He waved vigorously.
I especially didn’t want to see swaying dangly parts. I almost threw my truck in reverse.
Hiram strode toward me, not buck-ass nekkid, but wearing a robe and a gigantic grin.
I climbed out of the cab. My ankle was still sore and I didn’t feel like walking to meet him halfway, so I leaned against the driver’s-side door and nonchalantly looked around at where he hung his moccasins. Stacks of stripped, long pine poles, probably for tipis, were evenly stacked on the other side of the fence. That bit of neatness surprised me, given all the rest of the broken, worthless crap piled everywhere else.
“Mercy Gunderson. What’re you doing here?”
If the gleam in his eye was any indication, he believed I’d shown up to talk to him about Kit’s offer. I’d keep that as an option to keep him talking. I used the old standby: “I was in the neighborhood.”
“Really? So you here on official business?”
“Might say that. I was just at the VA. I ran into your brother.”
Hiram stopped. “You saw Josiah? Umm. How is he?”
“As good as a partially blind, crippled veteran can be, I suppose. He said you don’t come to see him much.” The little white lie was a test to see if Hiram regarded his relationship with his brother in the same light that Josiah did.
“Nope, I don’t. I ain’t got a lot of free time,” said the man standing in his bathrobe, late in the afternoon.
I nodded. “I imagine working as Kit’s gopher keeps you scrambling.”
“I am not his gopher. I am his assistant.” His hands came out of his pockets, and he crossed his arms over his chest in a defiant posture. “He’s taking me to a real estate seminar in Spearfish next week.”
“Sounds promising.”
“Josiah put you up to this? Making me feel guilty for having a job?”
“No, I just wondered why Josiah’s so unhappy about you working for Kit. When it seems you’re apparently having some success. Is it jealousy?”
Hi relaxed slightly. “No. Josiah just don’t understand how the world works; he never has. He went from Ma taking care of him to the marines taking care of him to the VA taking care of him. He ain’t ever had to punch a clock. Never had to worry about being hungry. Never had to worry how he was gonna come up with money for living expenses. And he thinks being a wounded Indian soldier makes him a warrior like our ancestors, and gives him the right to… forget it.”
I understood what Hi left unsaid. Some guys in the service were total jerks before getting injured, and a permanent disability made them only jerkier, more demanding and, in most cases, more impossible to be around. “Well, he talked about honor and pride, saying something along the lines about you doing stuff he didn’t approve of.”