His father had been killed on the Row, he said. As had his father before him and his father before him. "They were killed in the street like dogs. Beaten and stabbed while other people, white people, stood there laughing." "But that's against the law."
"Don't make no difference on the Row. The law has no power there. Never has, never will."
"How old is the Row?" Full Moon asked.
A shadow passed over his father's face. "Old."
"How old?"
"It was here before the town. Rojo Cuello grew up
around it."
"Is it older than—?"
"It's older than the tribe," his father said, and that shut him up. Full Moon looked down at the street, and though he'd felt nothing before, there now seemed something sinister about the false fronts on the old buildings, about the wooden sidewalks and the hitching posts. It looked like a street out of a western, the type of movie he loved best, but at the same time it looked different, set apart from that glamorized screen world in a way that he could not identify.
Older than the tribe.
That scared him, and he wondered why his father had brought him there.
"I will die on Death Row also," his father said quietly.
Full Moon could still remember the horrifying, frightening feeling that had lodged in the pit of his stomach when his father spoke those words. "Let's get out of here," he said.
"It won't happen now."
"If we don't come back, it can't happen at all."
"It don't make no difference."
"Why?" Full Moon was close to panic, as unnerved by his father's attitude of resigned fatalism as by the substance of his words. "We could move. We don't have to stay on the reservation. We could move to California."
"No matter where I move, no matter what I do, I will have to return."
"If you know what's going to happen, then you know how to change it," Full Moon said.
His father shook his head. "If you know what will happen," he said softly, "it will happen."
He had been right.
He'd been killed on the Row less than two years later.
And Full Moon had watched him die.
He stopped the next day by Lone Cloud's house. "You heard?" he asked after his friend had opened the door, invited him inside, and the two of them were seated on the couch.
Lone Cloud looked away, nodded. "I heard."
"What do you think?"
"I haven't seen anything."
"I know that. But what do you think?"
"I think they killed our fathers. I think we should blow the fuckers away."
Yes. Full Moon found himself nodding. He'd known that he had to return to Death Row, but he hadn't known why he needed to return or what he was going to do when he got there. But this sounded right. No, it felt right.
"What if they're ..." His voice trailed off.
"Ghosts?" Lone Cloud finished for him.
Full Moon nodded.
"Dead or alive, we kick their asses."
Full Moon smiled. The smile grew. Then he started to laugh. He hadn't realized how tense he'd been, how tightly wound. This whole thing had frightened him more than he was willing to admit, and it felt good to laugh again.
Lone Cloud smiled back at him, but there was no humor in it.
Full Moon thought of the way the man with the mustache had smiled at him from across the casino.
His own smile faded, his laughter dying.
"We're going to kill those sons of bitches," Lone Cloud said.
Full Moon nodded. "Yes," he said.
But was that really what they should do? Was that what their fathers would have wanted? Revenge?
He didn't know.
He felt like a teenager again, unsure and indecisive. His father had not been there for his high school years, but Full Moon had always acted as though he was, behaving the way he thought his father would want him to behave, doing things that he thought would make his father proud. Somehow, though, he had always fallen short. It was not that he had not done well, it was just that he had the feeling that his father would have expected more from him.
What would his father expect him to do now?
"I think we should talk to the council," he said. "Tell them our plans."
Lone Cloud snorted. "What for? It's a free country. We don't need their permission."
"They know more than we do," Full Moon said. "Maybe they can help us."
Lone Cloud thought for a moment. He nodded. "Okay. But we'll tell them. Not ask them. Tell them."
"Deal."
He let Lone Cloud do the talking when they met with the convened council later that afternoon. His friend was typically forceful in his presentation, typically defensive in his attitude.
"No," Black Hawk said vehemently when Lone Cloud finished. "No guns. You cannot bring guns."
"Why not?"
"It is not the way."
"It's our way," Lone Cloud said.
Black Hawk stood with difficulty, his hand shaking as his finger pointed at the younger man. "No!"
"We're not asking you, we're telling you," Lone Cloud said.
The other council members looked nervously at each other.
"You will die!" Black Hawk said. His voice was an enraged whisper.
"Then what should we do?" Full Moon asked him.
"You are the one who saw the men. You go there—"
"They killed my father, too."
Black Hawk glared at Lone Cloud. "You did not see them."
"What do I do when I get there?" Full Moon asked.
"I do not know. Perhaps it will be revealed to you."
"What do you think?" Full Moon asked his friend as they left the meeting a few minutes later.
"We bring the guns," Lone Cloud told him.
He dreamed that night of a saloon. The type of saloon that could be found in old westerns.
Or on Death Row.
There was no liquor behind the bar of the saloon, only jars filled with organs floating in watered-down blood. Skeletons, posed as stereotypical gamblers, sat around the round oak tables.
Full Moon stood alone in the middle of the saloon. From outside, he heard the sounds of a gunfight: shouting, then shooting, then silence. A moment later, he heard boots on the wooden sidewalk outside. A tall man was silhouetted from behind by the sunlight. He walked through the swinging doors into the saloon, and as he came into the room, Full Moon saw that the man was his father.
His father tipped his hat, and the top of his head came off. Blood poured down his face in even rivulets. "You killed me, son," he said. "You killed me."
They set off in the morning, leaving just after dawn in Lone Cloud's pickup.
Full Moon brought a .22.
Lone Cloud brought a .45 and a shotgun.
They did not speak as they drove through the desert. Lone Cloud was at the wheel, and Full Moon stared through the passenger window at the empty, overgrown parking lots and the abandoned, broken-windowed buildings that periodically fronted the highway.
He thought about the men he'd seen in the casino. What if they weren't ghosts? he wondered. What if they were regular men, men who just happened to have aged well?
They weren't.
But did that make any difference? He didn't know. The men had killed his father, and Lone Cloud's father, and he supposed they deserved what they were going to get, but it was still a dirty business and the whole situation made him extremely uncomfortable.
Full Moon cleared his throat, turned away from the window. "I've never killed anyone before."
Lone Cloud did not take his eyes off the highway. "Neither have I. But they have."
"What will that make us if we do kill them?"