Smudge started to speak, then stopped himself. “Nobody. Just me and Jessica.”
“So someone asked you to keep your mouth shut. You do remember that, then?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” Smudge said, shaking his head from side to side in an exaggerated way.
“Sure you do,” Joe said. “Who told you to keep quiet? Who else was in the truck?”
“No one, I said. Man, could you get me a nurse?”
Joe tried not to glance at the call button hanging on a cord near Smudge’s shoulder.
“I’ll get you the nurse when you tell me who else was in the truck when it went into the lake.”
“That’s extortion,” Smudge said.
“Yup,” Joe said.
“I need something,” Smudge said, rubbing his arms with his hands as if killing ants that were crawling on his skin. “I need something bad.”
“Your sister didn’t make it,” Joe said. “Remember her?”
Smudge looked up, stopped rubbing. His eyes glistened. “Jessie?”
“Yes. She tried to swim to the top, but she didn’t make it.”
Smudge nodded. He knew.
“She was the best basketball player I ever saw,” Joe said. “My daughter worshipped her.”
“Yes,” Smudge said. “She was good, man.”
“She was more than good,” Joe said, remembering what Sheridan had said that morning. “Why didn’t she keep playing?”
Smudge shrugged. It was as if Joe had asked him why Jessica liked chocolate over vanilla.
“Didn’t she ever say?” Joe asked.
“Why are you asking me about her basketball?” Smudge asked angrily. “She didn’t care about that so much. Why are you asking me? Get a nurse.”
“Did she ever know how good she really was?”
“You white people. All you care about is how good she was at a stupid sport.”
“Better than keeping her down with the rest of you, like you did,” Joe said in a flash of rage.
Smudge said, “Fuck you! Get me a nurse. I’m dying here.”
Joe was across the room before he even realized it, his fingers squeezing Smudge’s windpipe, Smudge turning red, his eyes bulging.
“Who was in that truck with you?”
Smudge told him.
“That’s who I thought,” Joe said, releasing him.
The door to the room flew open, an angry nurse filling it.
“What are you doing to him?” she demanded of Joe.
“I thought he was choking,” Joe said, backing away, not quite believing what he had done, how angry he had been. “I think he’s all right now.”
• • •
IT WAS DARK, already fifteen below. Joe cruised his pickup on the gravel roads of the Wind River Indian Reservation. Less than half of the streetlights worked. Woodsmoke from the chimneys of tiny box houses refused to rise in the cold and hung like London fog, close to the ground.
He had always been taken by the number of basketball backboards and hoops on the reservation. Nearly every house had one, and they were mounted on power poles and on the trunks of trees. In the fall, during hunting season, antelope and deer carcasses hung from them to cool and age. In the summer, they were used by the children. This is where Jessica had learned how to play.
Beyond the homes, the brush grew thick and high along the river. The road coursed through it, and Joe slowed, inching his way along the road, looking for a sweat lodge he had been told was there.
When his headlights lit up the squat dome covered in hides, Joe keyed the mike on his radio and called Sheriff McLanahan.
• • •
“KNOCK, KNOCK,” Joe said, shoving aside the heavy elk hide that covered the doorway. A thick roll of steam greeted him, the steam smelling like burning green softwood and human sweat.
“Hey, close the frigging door!” a man shouted from inside, and a female giggled.
Joe ducked through the doorway, squatting under the low ceiling. The air was thick with steam and light smoke, so thick he could barely breathe. The only light was the flicker of the fire beneath the cast-iron pot of boiling water filled with herbs, roots, and leaves.
It took a moment for Joe’s eyes to adjust, but as they did he could see the two people inside across from him. Linnie Antelope, Jessica’s younger sister, naked and gleaming with the reflection of the fire, her wide young face staring at Joe, her eyes glazed over and vacant. A meth pipe sat on an upturned coffee can lid near her thigh.
Darrell Heywood was next to her, fat, white, and sweating. His long blond hair was stuck to his neck and chest with perspiration. He had no body hair.
“Joe Pickett,” Joe said. “I’m the game warden.”
“What the fuck is a game warden doing here?” Heywood asked. “You’ve got no jurisdiction on the reservation. We’re a sovereign nation.”
“We?” Joe asked rhetorically. “I thought you were from Connecticut.”
Linnie giggled, then stifled the sound with her hand. Joe thought she looked a lot like Jessica, when Jessica was younger. But Linnie was just skinny; her arms were sticks. She didn’t play basketball.
“You’re breaching etiquette,” Heywood said. “You don’t just come into another man’s sweat lodge. You must be invited in. And you aren’t invited.”
God, it was hot in here, Joe thought. He was already sweating beneath his heavy winter clothes.
“It’s important,” Joe said. “I couldn’t wait for an invitation. I wanted to talk with you before the sheriff got here and took you off to jail.”
He let that sink in.
Heywood had heavy cheekbones and a thick brow and bright blue eyes made brighter from the pipe. “What are you talking about?”
“You know,” Joe said.
Heywood looked around the structure as if someone there could interpret for him.
“Darrell knows everything,” Linnie said, her laugh a tinkle.
“Shut up, Linnie,” Heywood scolded, then turned back to Joe. “The sheriff has no more jurisdiction here than you do.”
“You’ve got a thing about jurisdiction, don’t you?” Joe said. “But the sheriff is calling the tribal police. They’ll be here together.”
Heywood’s face was red from the heat, but got even redder. “Get the hell out of here. Now.”
“You just left her out there,” Joe said. “She was trying to swim to the surface. In fact, her hand was sticking up out of the ice when I found her. If you’d stuck around just a few minutes longer, you might have helped her out.”
Heywood just glared.
Joe said, “You made it to shore after the truck went into the lake and called one of your friends to pick you up from the pay phone in the campground. As far as you were concerned, both Smudge and Jessica went down to the bottom together.”
“You’re crazy, man. You can’t prove that.”
Linnie, though, had withdrawn from him, and was now looking back and forth from Heywood to Joe.
“Smudge must have gotten out on his own,” Joe said. “I can’t imagine you and your friends taking him to the hospital out of the kindness of your heart, but you couldn’t just leave him there. Unlike you, he had no body fat to keep him warm. But you just left Jessica back there, didn’t you? You didn’t figure she was tough enough to try and swim out, did you?”
“Look,” Heywood said, “I told you to leave—”
“Is he talking about my sister?” Linnie asked, her voice high, unmodulated, unhinged.
“But you never saw her play,” Joe said. “You didn’t have a clue how tough she was, how talented she was. You never saw her potential. You didn’t think of her that way.”
“Jessica!” Linnie shrieked, flailing at Heywood, her bare palms slapping his naked skin, leaving white handprints.
> “I thought she was in the truck!” Heywood yelled in self-defense, trying to ward off her blows. “There wasn’t anything I could do!”
“You could have grabbed her hand and pulled her out,” Joe said calmly. “You could have taken her to the hospital.”
Linnie was whaling away at him now, her hands balled into fists, swinging like an eggbeater.
“Linnie . . .” Joe said.
“Damn you!” Heywood cried, backhanding her across the face. “Stop it! I was freezing and wet. Smudge drove us into the goddamn lake! There was nothing I could do!”
Linnie was thrown back, but kicked at him hard. The heel of one of her feet caught him under the heart and brought a groan.
Joe had his weapon out, finding it in the folds of his clothes. “Darrell, you’re under arrest. I think the charge is officially ‘reckless endangerment.’ Kind of describes your whole life here, I’d say. You could have helped Jessica Antelope, but that wouldn’t have fit your little movie here, would it?”
Heywood howled in response and stood up, tearing the top of the sweat lodge off, diving naked through the hole, his big body thumping on the ground outside.
• • •
IT WASN’T HARD for Joe to follow the footprints in the snow, weaving in and out of the brush toward the river. And when Darrell Heywood began to moan, he was easy to locate.
Joe pushed through the brush.
Heywood had slipped on the ice of the river and fallen and was now stuck fast to it, his entire belly glued to the surface.
“I’m freezing here,” he said between sobs. “I can’t get free. I’m going to freeze to death.”
Joe shuffled across the ice and squatted down in front of Heywood.
“Hey, White Buffalo,” Joe said. “A real Indian would know not to run across a frozen river naked, I think.”
Heywood spat, and cursed. Said, “I’m freezing to death.”
“You’ve got a while yet,” Joe said. “But it’s not going to feel good when they peel you off.”
Heywood sobbed, his tears freezing instantly on the ice.
Joe saw the flash of wigwag lights bouncing off the low-hanging woodsmoke, heard the sirens coming.
“You never saw her play,” he said. “You didn’t know what she could do.”
In reality, the source of all these differences is, that the savage lives within himself, while the social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him.
—JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Jimmy Two Bulls was driving Sophie’s Citroën C6 fast but not well—he kept missing third gear—and each time he did it, Sophie would make a little intake of breath that, in other circumstances, he once thought cute. The dark highway was slick with greasy rain that filmed the windows and beaded on the hood. Oncoming headlights appeared with less and less frequency. The car was new and belonged to her husband.
“Do you know where we are?” Sophie asked. The car smelled of damp flowers and her scent. The drying blood on his shirt smelled ripe and metallic, reminding him of a deer hunting trip he once took with his uncle in the rain.
“No.”
“I can see Paris,” she said, gesturing toward the massive orange smudge that defined the horizon and was always out there in the dark, looming, the band of light closed tightly on top as if by a kettle lid of storm clouds.
“So can I. But every turn I make seems to take us farther away.”
“Maybe we can stop and ask someone how to get there. We took a wrong turn somewhere.” Lovely accented English, filled with those swooping little girl squeaks sophisticated French women used, which sounded like erotic baby talk.
“Have you seen anyone to ask? I haven’t.”
They’d left the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show forty-five minutes before. He was still wearing his quill breastplate.
He ran over something in the road that rattled the windows and made the steering wheel jerk. Whatever it was, he’d glimpsed it at the last second in the headlights, but not in time to steer around it. The object had been dark, long, tube-like, sodden.
“What was that?” she asked, alarmed.
“Don’t know,” he said. “A tree branch maybe.” Or a cat.
“A tree branch?”
“Maybe,” he said, grinning despite himself, “a human arm. It kind of looked like a human arm. My bud Fred Sitting Up ran over an arm once on the road back from a Valentine, Nebraska, beer run to the res. He didn’t remember it until two days later, and by the time he said something about the arm, we found out a dozen other cars ran over it, too. It looked like a flattened dead snake by the time the cops found it. Never did hear who it belonged to.”
“What are those lights ahead? They don’t look like streetlights.”
“They’re not.”
“What, then?”
“Fires. Burning cars.”
“Shit!” she said, her eyes wide as she stretched back in the car seat, pressing her feet against the floor as if applying the brakes, the fine ropy muscles of her calves and thighs defining themselves on her long bare legs.
“It always cracks me up,” Jimmy said, flipping his braided hair over his shoulder, “how when things go to hell you people say ‘shit’ in English. ‘Shit’ was Marcel’s last word.”
“You’re scaring me, Jimmy.” She pronounced it Jee-mee.
He looked over at her and laughed bitterly. “I’m scaring you?”
She screamed, “You must turn around, Jimmy! Jimmy!” Jee-mee! JEE-MEE!
• • •
IT WAS LYLE BEAR KILLER, Jimmy’s cousin from Pine Ridge, who’d been the one who convinced him to come over with promises of good wine, good wages (the Wild West Show needed authentic natives for the nightly 6:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. performances at Disneyland Paris), good food, and beautiful French women who wanted to have American Indian babies. Sure, Jimmy’d heard the stories but he had trouble believing them. French society women? Married French society women? Just for showing up in traditional dress, acting inscrutable and a little mystical, they’d take you home or to a hotel and fuck you all night long? How could this be possible?
So Jimmy applied for a Warrior-Wrangler job online even though he’d never been to war or ridden a horse except for a gray-white swayback on his grandfather’s South Dakota ranch. He used the money he’d saved as a teaching assistant at Black Hills State to buy the handsome porcupine quill breastplate, outlandish fringed and beaded buckskin leather jacket, moccasins, and butter-soft deerskin pants at the Prairie Edge store in Rapid City, all the time feeling a little embarrassed, keeping his head down, the same kind of feeling he’d once had buying a package of condoms at the 7-Eleven along with a copy of Indian Country News he’d never read and a package of gum he’d never chew. He read and reread the emails from Lyle describing his sexual exploits in sophomoric, pornographic prose. Lyle claimed he had three illegitimate children he knew about and four “in the oven.”
It took a month for Disney to send a lady out to interview Jimmy and others, to assess their authenticity, show him where to sign on the employment contract and strict Disney behavior agreement. She was enthusiastic, said, “They’ll love the name ‘James Two Bulls’! It’s a wonderful name!” Even though by “they” she meant “Disney,” he replaced it with the words “French women” in his mind. That night, he broke up with half-white, half-Lakota Jasmine, master’s degree in women’s studies, who seemed to coil up while he told her and then strike suddenly, calling him a contemptible gigolo, among other things that didn’t sting as badly as he imagined they would.
“But,” he said slyly, “I’ll be doing some women studies of my own.”
“They don’t want you, you bastard,” Jasmine spat. “They want a brainless dar
k-skinned buck! They want some child of nature!”
“It’s just nice to be wanted,” he said.
• • •
WITH HIS AUTHENTIC American Indian garb in its own suitcase (along with some medicine wheels, feathers, beads, and other totems Lyle said they liked over there, and two rolls of Copenhagen chewing tobacco for Lyle and the Wild West crew), Jimmy flew Northwest Airlines from Rapid City to Minneapolis to Amsterdam to Paris in February. Lyle was at the airport to greet him.
Lyle introduced him around to the other Indians at the show, some fellow Lakotas from Pine Ridge, a few Montana Crows, a gaggle of Wyoming Shoshones, a few too many damned haughty Nez Perce from Idaho, as well as the white cowboys from the same states plus Texas and Colorado. Most of the cast were ridiculously thankful for the Copenhagen, which was unavailable in the EU. Jimmy was assigned to feeding and cleaning up for the horses and buffalo in the stock area outside the auditorium during the day, and he did bit parts in the moodily lit religious ceremony as well as manning the chute gate for the indoor buffalo stampede. He learned to paint his face. Everyone admired his beaded buckskin jacket, even the actor who played Buffalo Bill. Since everybody wore costumes, Jimmy felt comfortable in his.
He met Sophie in March.
• • •
THEY WORKED FIVE NIGHTS ON, two nights off at the Wild West Show. Every performance, every night, was sold out with French families who wore cheap straw cowboy hats, ate chili, drank beer and wine, and whooped and hollered on cue. Jimmy shared Lyle’s flat and paid half the rent. During the long gray days of winter they slept late, shopped, cooked, read, and showed up at the Wild West Show mid-afternoon, in the back, where the stock was kept and the dressing rooms were located. They usually came even on their days off, because it was the only place they knew where everyone spoke English, although a few of the Montana and Wyoming cowboys were on their second or third two-year contracts and had married French women and were learning the language. The dressing rooms for the American Indians were kept dark by choice, and either traditional flute or gangster rap played on individual CD players. The Crows smoked marijuana, having somehow convinced Disney personnel that it was part of their religion, which infuriated a couple of the cowboys who insisted, in vain, that Jim Beam was part of theirs.