The surface of the ice changed as he walked. There was a rim of broken ice plates, then a slick surface. Ice told stories, Joe knew. Whatever happened could be seen and felt by examining the ice. Something had crashed through here, and the water had recently frozen back over it.
It was a frozen human hand, reaching up through the ice, not a branch. As he stood above it, he could see the body below, and the source of the glow beneath the surface: headlights. He felt his heart race as he stared, and a line of sweat broke out across his forehead, beneath his wool cap. He could see her face beneath the ice, despite the bolts of thick black hair that slowly whorled around it in the current. Her eyes were open, looking upward, her mouth set in a pout. She wore dark clothing. There was a light band of flesh between the top of her black jeans and the bottom of her coat. Her name was Jessica Lynn Antelope, and she had been a basketball star.
• • •
THE STORY the ice told him was this:
The night before, the pickup truck that was now on the bottom of the lake had gone off the old two-track road that rimmed the bluff. It must have been going fast, he thought, to have launched this far into the lake. The truck had crashed through the ice and settled on the deep floor of the lake, with its rear end down first so the headlights pointed up. The engine was obviously killed in the water, but the battery held enough of a charge to power the lights a day later.
Jessica Lynn Antelope had been in the pickup, either as the driver or a passenger. She had attempted to swim to the surface toward the hole the truck had made. Whether she’d drowned before she froze to death would be a toss-up. Joe wondered if she realized, before she died, that her grasping hand had broken through the rapidly forming new skin of ice into the twenty-below air. As the water froze, it had trapped her arm and held it fast in its grip. Now her body swayed slowly in the current, her hair sweeping across her face in a fan dance.
He said, “Jesus,” and dug in his parka for his cell phone to call the sheriff.
• • •
JOE WAITED in his pickup on the shore of the lake—engine running, heater blowing full blast—for Sheriff McLanahan and the tow truck to arrive. His toes in his boots burned as they thawed out. He was still annoyed at the tone of the conversation he had had with McLanahan.
“You found her, huh?” McLanahan had said with a heavy sigh.
“I think it’s her,” Joe had said, remembering Jessica from seeing her on the basketball court. She had gained weight since those days, her face was round, like a hubcap.
“Her mother called a few hours ago, said she hadn’t shown up this morning. We always give missing person calls a few days if they come from the res, since those people vanish for days on end most of the time.”
“‘Those people’?” Joe repeated.
“You know what I’m talking about,” McLanahan said. “They operate on Indian time. If they say they’ll be someplace at nine, there’s no reason to worry until one or two. Same thing with the missing person calls. They always show up somewhere eventually, usually hungover.”
“This is Jessica Antelope we’re talking about,” Joe said.
“I know, I know. But she hasn’t played in five years. You know about her.”
Joe did. He had heard. And he had seen her a few times since. But he chose to remember her from the basketball court, when he and his daughter Sheridan would drive to the reservation simply to watch her play. Sheridan had idolized Jessica Antelope, studied her, tried to emulate her on the court. But despite Sheridan’s grit and determination, she could not run as fast, pass as cleanly, or score forty points a game. Jessica had a blinding crossover dribble that compared legitimately to those of the great NBA point guards as she brought the ball down the court, and she left opponents flailing at air in her wake, and fans gasping. Joe had never seen a girl play basketball with so much natural grace and style, and neither had anyone else. Sheridan still had photos of Jessica Antelope, clipped from the Saddlestring Roundup, taped to her wall. Jessica had led the Wyoming Indian Lady Warriors, made up of only seven Northern Arapaho girls, to the state championship game, where they lost, 77–75, to Cheyenne, a much larger school. Jessica scored fifty-two points in the loss.
But the scouts didn’t care about the loss. Jessica Antelope had been offered full-ride scholarships to over twenty universities, including Duke and Tennessee, the national powers. Instead, Jessica stayed on the reservation to take care of an ailing grandmother, she claimed. Then she gained weight, a lot of it. She drank beer and liquor with her friends. She took crystal meth, the scourge of the reservation, and was arrested for dealing it. Joe had seen her several times in the elk camps of out-of-state hunters, where she’d been hired as a camp cook. Joe suspected she was chosen for other services as well, and it pained him. Those hunters had no idea that the chubby twenty-two-year-old Northern Arapaho scrambling their eggs was once the greatest basketball player in the state of Wyoming.
Joe had heard Jessica had fallen in with Darrell Heywood and his friends on the res as well, and he hoped it wasn’t true.
• • •
JOE STOOD on the shore of the lake with Sheriff McLanahan, two deputies, and the tow truck driver. The temperature was now thirty degrees below zero, and the exhaust from the tow truck engulfed them in a foul-smelling cloud.
“There’s no way we’ll get that truck out of there tonight,” the driver said. “We’d have to hire divers to hook up the cable, and nobody in their right mind would come out tonight to do it.”
“What about Jessica’s body?” Joe asked McLanahan.
The sheriff shrugged. “She’ll still be there tomorrow.”
“What if there’s someone else in the truck?” Joe asked, exasperated.
McLanahan shook his head. “They’ll keep,” he said. “They aren’t going nowhere.”
Joe shot him a look.
“Besides, we know who was in the truck with her,” McLanahan said. “There’s a guy in the clinic with hypothermia. It’s her brother, Alan Antelope. He’s called ‘Smudge’ on the res, I guess. He showed up last night—somebody dumped him at the emergency entrance and took off. He’s in a coma, and hasn’t said anything.”
“So it was Jessica and her brother,” Joe said. “Damn, what were they doing out here?”
McLanahan shrugged. “Why do Indians do anything they do?”
“Did you ever see her play basketball?” Joe asked.
The sheriff shook his head. “I heard she was pretty good,” he said.
“She was the best I ever saw,” Joe said.
“We used to play Wyoming Indian in high school,” McLanahan said, addressing the tow truck driver more than Joe, launching into one of his stories that were always about him. “Those fucking Indians could run the court like there was no tomorrow. Run-and-gun, no set plays. They’d just try to run you right out of the building. They’d score ninety or a hundred points a game, but they didn’t play defense so we’d score ninety against them. During time-outs they’d sit on the bench and light up cigarettes. I kid you not. Fucking cigarettes on the bench.”
Joe turned away, started walking back to his truck. He could hear McLanahan going on, the driver laughing.
“When we’d run against ’em in cross-country, they’d do the same damn thing. One of ’em ran until his heart exploded in his chest. Too much smoking and drinking. Shit, they’d have other Indians stationed at the finish line just to stop their runners so they wouldn’t keep running and end up in the next county . . .”
• • •
“DARRELL HEYWOOD,” Marybeth said to Joe at home in the bathroom. “You hate that guy, don’t you?”
Joe was soaking in the tub, trying to thaw himself out. Feeling in his legs and arms was returning under the steaming water, but it hurt. After his teeth stopped chattering, he’d told her about finding Jessica Lynn Antelope in the ice.
Marybeth le
aned against the doorway, arms crossed, wearing a thick robe. She looked well scrubbed and attractive, he thought. Her blond hair was mussed from a pillow, and her legs, what he could see of them beneath the robe, were firm and white. Sheridan and Lucy had been in bed for hours, since it was after midnight when Joe had gotten home. Marybeth had stayed up for him, reading a novel in bed.
“I don’t know if ‘hate’ is the right word,” Joe said. “I don’t appreciate him. I don’t like what he stands for.”
“Hasn’t he given hundreds of thousands to the reservation?” Marybeth asked. “Out of some trust fund he’s got?”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “But I don’t like his attitude. He pretends he’s an Indian. No, not that. He pretends he’s an Indian, but he thinks he’s better than them. Am I making sense?”
“Hardly,” Marybeth said with a slight smile.
“He gives them money, but he doesn’t help them,” Joe said. “He likes the idea of being close to the Indians because it feeds his ego. But he preys on them, is what I think. They’re not stupid. He treats them like children, is what I’m trying to say. It’s that he doesn’t give them any credit that they’re real human beings. To him, they’re cartoon characters. People of the earth, or something.”
Joe remembered being in a small audience a couple of years ago when Darrell Heywood gave the dedication for a new monument on the lawn of the Tribal Center. Heywood had designed the monument and, of course, paid for it. The granite obelisk was dedicated to the struggles of the Northern Arapaho and the Shoshone, who shared the reservation. The ceremony took place shortly after Heywood actually moved there, after he began growing his hair long and single-braiding it Indian-style, when he began to insist everyone call him by his Indian name, White Buffalo. Heywood’s talk was rambling and self-indulgent, Joe thought, more about how profoundly he had been moved as a child when he first read about Pocahontas than about the struggles of the Northern Arapaho or Shoshone. How angry he was when he read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, how inspired after reading Black Elk Speaks. He confessed how he felt more connected to the Natives and their love of nature and mysticism than he ever was with his own parents. Heywood described, in fits and starts, his brief history of dropping out of college, traveling the country, participating in powwows and sun dances, the peyote-inspired vision he’d obtained that showed him he was related to his Native brothers and sisters by a psychic bloodline, how he’d found himself here, in Wyoming, home at last. He urged his brothers and sisters to resist the materialistic evils of the white man’s culture, to not get caught in their trap of predation based on money, power, and industry. To go back to what they were, what made them special: being children of nature. Pure. Superior. Uncorrupted. He never mentioned his trust fund and inheritance, Joe recalled.
“So you think Jessica deteriorated because she hung out with Darrell Heywood?” she asked.
Joe thought for a moment. “Yup,” he said.
“But that didn’t put her in the lake, did it?”
“It might have been a factor,” Joe said. “He’s fairly well known for taking good care of his friends.”
“Meaning he supplied them with alcohol and drugs,” Marybeth said. “It’s so sad.”
“It is,” Joe said. “Giving alcohol to an alcoholic makes him happy, but it doesn’t help him. Buying stuff for people who won’t work makes you popular, but it doesn’t get them a job or any self-respect.”
“Are you thawed out yet?” she asked.
He looked up. “Why? Do you have something in mind?”
• • •
LATER, JOE SLIPPED OUT OF THE BED and pulled on his robe against the cold that sliced into the house through the walls. He stood at the window, looking out at the night. He could feel the furnace working, fighting a holding action against the outside and not winning. A light snow fell, but the night was so cold that the flakes hung in the air and didn’t land. He thought of the moan of the ice and Jessica’s hand reaching through it toward the sky.
“That was nice,” Marybeth said from bed, from somewhere beneath the quilts.
“She was the best point guard Sheridan and I have ever seen,” Joe said.
• • •
AT BREAKFAST, Joe told Sheridan about Jessica Antelope.
“Who is she?” Lucy asked.
“She used to play basketball,” Sheridan said, her eyes moistening but her face holding steady. “Dad and I used to watch her.”
“Was she as good as you?”
Sheridan exchanged looks with Joe. “She was a lot better,” Sheridan said. “You know those pictures on my wall?”
“Oh,” Lucy said, and went back to her cereal.
“Sorry, Sheridan,” Joe said. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
“If I could do what she did,” Sheridan said, “I wouldn’t waste my talent like that. Why didn’t she keep playing, Dad?”
“I don’t know. She’s the only one who could answer that.”
“What was wrong with her?” Sheridan asked. “Didn’t she know how good she was?”
Joe couldn’t answer that one, either.
• • •
HE DROVE to Dull Knife Reservoir after breakfast and watched as divers in thick winter dry suits chopped Jessica Lynn Antelope’s body out of the ice. When they pulled her free, her body was dark and limp and lay on the surface of the lake like a wet rag until the EMTs loaded her onto a gurney. Her frozen arm stuck out of the blanket like an antenna. The ambulance stayed until they could determine whether there were any more bodies.
It took half the day to hook up the pickup and winch it through the ice onto shore. The ice broke with the sound of explosives as they pulled it through.
Joe hung back, watching closely as the sheriff looked in the cab of the pickup.
“Dead men everywhere,” McLanahan declared loudly, and a hush fell over the workers, EMTs, and sheriff’s office personnel.
Then McLanahan reached through the broken-out side window and showed everyone an empty sixteen-ounce Budweiser can. “At least two six-packs of dead men in there,” he said, nodding at the can. “The official beverage of the Wind River Indian Reservation.” Everyone laughed.
Joe sighed and left the scene. He hated McLanahan’s casual racism. Worse, he hated the fact that in too many instances, McLanahan was right.
• • •
ON HIS WAY to THE HOSPITAL, Joe called Nate Romanowski on his cell phone. Nate lived alone in a stone house on the bank of the Twelve Sleep River, where he flew and hunted falcons and lived well with no visible means of support. Joe trusted Nate even though most feared him, and Joe knew Nate was intimate with the tribal council of the reservation as well as many of the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho who lived there.
Nate had already heard about the discovery of Jessica Antelope’s body.
“Did they find anyone else?” Nate asked.
“Not yet.”
“That surprises me,” Nate said. “I can’t see Jessica and her brother out together by themselves. They were always surrounded by other people.”
Joe told him what the sheriff had said about Alan.
“Smudge,” Nate said, and Joe could picture him nodding.
“Why do they call him that?”
“When he was a little boy, his face was always dirty,” Nate said. “His grandmother called him Smudge. It stuck, because his face is still always dirty.”
“Hmm.”
“I’d see if Smudge will talk to you,” Nate said. “He’s Jessica’s only brother, although he’s a real meth head. She’s got a sister, too, named Linnie. I’d check to make sure she’s all right. Linnie and Smudge hang out with Darrell Heywood. There might have been more than the two of them in that pickup.”
“I hope not,” Joe said, imagining other bodies drifting in Dull Knife Reservoir, their lifeless bodies bumping up against t
he thick shield of ice.
• • •
JOE STRODE DOWN THE HALLWAY of the hospital, found the door with a placard on it that read ALAN ANTELOPE, and went in to find Smudge awake and alert and trembling violently.
Smudge was slight and dark and reminded Joe of a ferret. He had a huge blade-shaped nose and furtive eyes that didn’t hold on Joe for more than a second. His head was abnormally small, perched on the end of a long neck like a balled fist.
“I thought you were supposed to be in a coma,” Joe said, closing the door behind him.
“I wish I was,” Smudge said, his voice a buzz-saw timbre. “I’m a fucking hurting unit, man.”
Joe looked Smudge over, saw no wounds.
“I need something,” Smudge said.
“You’re withdrawing from meth,” Joe said, as much to himself as to Smudge. “That’s what hurts.”
Smudge’s face screwed up into a petulant fist. “Yeah, man, that’s what hurts. Go tell the nurses I need something. They don’t even know I’m here.”
“They know,” Joe said. “They just don’t know you’re awake. How long have you been conscious?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Not long.”
“What do you remember about getting here?” Joe asked.
Smudge thrust his fist of a face toward Joe to show his impatience. “I don’t remember anything,” he said.
“You don’t remember being in a pickup with Jessica? Out at Dull Knife?”
Smudge sat back as if he’d been slapped. Joe watched his eyes. Smudge was recalling something.
“We were in my truck,” Smudge said slowly. “Out by the lake . . .”
“That we know,” Joe said. “What else?”
Smudge shook his head. “It was dark, I know that.”
Joe rolled his eyes.
“Next thing I remember, I was getting pushed out of a car in front of the hospital.”
“Who pushed you?” Joe asked. “Who else was in the truck when it went into the lake?”