“Everybody, this is Breeze,” Cork said. “Breeze, these are the people who’ve come a very long way to help you.”
“Fuck your help.” She spoke toward the red Formica.
“Where have you been, Dad?” Jenny asked.
Cork said, “Could I get a cup of that coffee while you’re at it, Shinny? Black?”
“Sure thing, Cork.”
Jenny’s father stood directly behind Breeze, as if to block her escape should she try. “I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to drive over to Windigo’s place and check it out for myself. I no sooner get there than one of the SUVs loads up and takes off. I decided to follow it.”
Shinny brought Cork a mug and then one for Breeze. “Black?” he said to her.
“You got cream and sugar?” A sulky request.
“Coming right up.”
Cork stood sipping from his mug. He looked dark, haggard, but the coffee seemed to brighten him some. He went on: “The SUV drove to one of the thrown-together workers’ camps Shinny told us about. Dropped Breeze off there at a place hardly bigger than an outhouse, then took off. I peeked in a window—Christ, the place didn’t even have curtains—and saw what was about to go down, knocked on the door. Guy opens up. I flash this at him.” He took a badge wallet from his shirt pocket and flipped it open. Jenny had no idea what it actually was, but it looked like official law enforcement. As fast as he’d opened it, he flipped it closed. “I tell him I’m working for Williams County Social Services. I tell him the girl’s a runaway, underage, I’m taking her with me. I tell him if he doesn’t want to be cited for soliciting sex from a minor, he’ll just step aside and let me do my job. He bought it, and here’s Breeze.”
“And here’s Breeze’s cream and sugar,” Shinny said, setting before her on the table the little ceramic pitcher, a small, matching sugar bowl, and a spoon.
She fixed her coffee, stirred, took a sip. They all watched in silence, as if this was some exotic ritual.
“They’ll kill you,” she said.
“They might try,” Cork replied.
She put her mug down and finally looked at each one of them carefully. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“We want to know about Windigo and that trailer,” Cork said.
“Windigo? I don’t know anything about anyone named Windigo.”
“Maybe you know him as Angel,” Cork said.
It was clear that she did, but it was also clear that she wasn’t going to give them what they wanted.
“What’s your name?” Cork asked. “Your real name?”
“Fuck you,” she said.
“Sounds Chinese,” Shinny said.
Jenny smiled, but the joke didn’t register with Breeze. She drank more coffee, sullen and silent.
Cork moved to the kitchen doorway and leaned there, casually. “I want to know about the men who keep you in that trailer.”
“They don’t keep me there. I stay because I want to.”
“Of course you do. Who are your roommates?” When she didn’t reply, Cork said, “Let me show you something, Breeze.” He disappeared into the living room and came back a moment later with a photograph in his hand. He laid it on the table in front of her. It was a photo of Raven Duvall, taken at the clinic on the Iron Lake Reservation, as she lay beaten and bruised on the examination table. “One of Angel’s girls when he didn’t need her anymore.”
“She did something to deserve it,” Breeze said.
Jenny said, “There’s nothing anyone could do to deserve this.”
“Fuck you, bitch.”
Henry spoke for the first time since the girl had joined them. “Are you hungry, granddaughter?”
“I’m not your granddaughter.”
“Are you hungry?” he asked again, unfazed.
She didn’t look particularly well fed, and the idea of food seemed the most agreeable thing suggested to her since she’d arrived.
“I guess I could eat.” As if it nearly killed her to admit it.
“How about scrambled eggs with cheese, some Canadian bacon, toast with huckleberry jam?” Shinny suggested brightly. “Best breakfast in all of Indian country, I promise.”
Jenny gave him a hand, and in a short while, the kitchen smelled wonderfully of the meal. Shinny filled a plate and set it in front of Breeze. As he did this he said, “Haw mushkay. Doe ksh kay ya oun hey?”
The girl looked up at him, startled.
“Lakota,” he said to her with a smile. “Rosebud?”
She lowered her eyes and concentrated on her food.
They all put breakfast on their plates, and eating seemed to bounce their spirits up a bit.
Then Daniel said exactly what Jenny had been thinking. He said, “They probably know about us by now.”
Cork set his plate on the counter. “Probably. I made a play a lot sooner than I would have liked. I hoped maybe it was Mariah in that SUV. When I saw what was going to go down out there in that camp, even though it wasn’t Mariah, I just couldn’t let it happen. Sorry, Breeze.”
Oddly, she didn’t appear upset. The food seemed to have had a positive effect on her disposition. She said offhand, “I’ve done him before. I’ll probably do him again.” She’d eaten her food, every last crumb. Jenny wondered if she might be thinking of licking the plate.
“There’s more, Breeze,” Shinny said. “If you’d like.”
“Hell, yes. I don’t eat this good ever.”
“Who cooks?” Jenny asked.
“Me or one of the other girls. Mostly we make Hamburger Helper, pizza out of a box, shit like that.”
“None of the men cook?”
“Right.” She rolled her eyes. “Who are you guys? Not cops, I can tell.” She glared at Jenny’s father. “Well, you, maybe.”
“Not anymore, Breeze,” Cork replied. “We’re just people trying to find a lost kid. Know any?”
“Like a little kid, you mean?”
“Like you.”
“Right,” she said and gave a hoarse laugh, full of derision.
“Her name’s Mariah,” Jenny said. “Mariah Arceneaux. But she probably goes by another name. Candi, maybe. I’ve got a picture of her.”
Jenny dug in her purse and pulled out the shot of Mariah they’d been showing everyone. She put it on the table in front of Breeze.
The girl glanced at it, and Jenny could see recognition register on her face.
“She’s with you and the others at the trailer?” Jenny asked.
Breeze stopped talking. Shinny set another plate of food in front of her, but she didn’t make a move to eat.
“Those men won’t hurt you,” Cork said. “We won’t let them, I promise.”
She mumbled something.
“What did you say, Breeze?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t need your fucking promises.”
Because promises have been made to you before, and they’ve been broken, Jenny thought. And she wondered, had it been that way all her life?
“All we want is to take Mariah home,” Cork said. “If you want to go home, too, we’ll take you.”
“Home?” The very word seemed poison. “Are you fucking kidding me? Home is why I ran away.”
Meloux said, “Granddaughter, if you could go anywhere, where would you go?”
She stared at the old man as if he’d spoken a foreign language.
“Dream a little,” he said gently. “Where?”
She looked out the window at the distant, dun-colored hills. She was quiet a long while, then she said, “Denver.”
“Why Denver?” Meloux asked.
“An aunt there. I visited her a couple of years ago. She has a nice place. You can see the mountains.”
“What does she do in Denver?” The old Mide’s voice was so soothing it made Jenny want to curl up in
his lap.
“Works in a hospital. Like a nurse’s aide or something. A real good job.”
“If we got you to Denver,” Cork said, “to your aunt’s place, would you help us?”
She came out of her dream. “I don’t even fucking know you.”
Meloux said, “Every promise I have ever made I have kept, granddaughter. If you help us, we will help you go wherever you want. This, I promise.”
She looked into Meloux’s soft brown eyes, and her own eyes became windows to the terrible struggle going on inside her. A lifetime of broken promises pitted against a child’s deep desire to be safe and to be free.
Please let her believe this old man, Jenny prayed. Please let her believe this one promise.
But in the end, her history killed her hope. Her answer was still “No.”
That tiny word took the air from the room.
Then Cork’s cell phone rang. He glanced at the display and left the kitchen to take the call.
“So,” Breeze said, “I suppose you’re going to turn me over to social services, right?”
“No,” Jenny said. “We’ll just keep you safe until this is over, then we’ll let you go.”
“Just go?”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it? And no matter who we turned you over to, in the end, you’d just run away, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, yeah.” Something seemed to come to her suddenly. “You’re really going to fuck with Angel?”
“We’re going to get our friend away from him, whatever that takes.”
“You know about the cops, right? That’s why you’re not just turning us all in?”
“What about the cops?” Jenny asked.
“Angel’s got ’em in his pocket. Don’t you know how it is out here? Everybody’s making money, so why shouldn’t the cops? That’s how they figure it, anyway.”
Jenny glanced at Daniel. The argument for doing this on their own had just become immeasurably stronger.
Cork came back in. “That was Duluth PD. Simon Wesley turned himself in this morning, spilled everything about Carrie Verga and John Boone Turner and the Montcalm. Duluth PD wants to talk to me at my earliest convenience.” He leveled a look at Breeze, one Jenny couldn’t read. “We’re going to take your friends down,” he said. “You can go down with them, or you can buy yourself a ticket to freedom. The choice is yours.”
“You really aren’t cops?”
“We really aren’t.”
“And you really would get me to Denver?”
Cork gave a nod toward Henry Meloux. “I’ve never known this old man to lie. He’s made you a promise. You can believe it.”
She looked again at the barren hills all around them, thought about it a long time, and finally said, rather wistfully, “Denver.”
Chapter 38
* * *
They moved quickly after that.
Breeze told them about the situation in the trailer. There were two men—Windigo, whom she knew as Angel, and a guy called Brick. That was the only name she knew him by. She said he was mixed, Lakota and white, but not from Rosebud like her. She thought he might be from Standing Rock. There were three other girls, and Mariah was one of them. One of the other girls was also from Minnesota, White Earth, maybe. The other was from Pine Ridge. Because the men in the oil fields worked crazy hours, the girls had crazy, unpredictable schedules. They could be called out anytime, night or day. Like her, they were all under fifteen.
Breeze was clear: if they were really going to take down Angel and Brick, there was no way she was going back to that trailer. They didn’t want to leave her alone, so Shinny called his sister. He explained that he had an emergency and would she mind coming over to his place for a little while. She was there in ten minutes. Her name was Vonda Fox. She looked to be in her late forties, a big, commanding woman. Shinny had told them that Vonda pretty much raised him, worked now for the Three Affiliated Tribes social services, in their Child Care Assistance program, and could handle a girl like Breeze. He introduced them all and gave her a thumbnail idea of what was going down. She looked them over skeptically. “I think you need a bigger war party” was her only comment. Then she eyed Breeze. “That all you got to wear?”
“Yeah.”
To her brother, she said, “You go do what you gotta do. Breeze and me, we’re going to dig through some old clothes down at the office, find something decent to cover this girl’s ass.”
Shinny was a hunter. He took two rifles and a box of cartridges from a gun case in his bedroom. Jenny remembered that early on in their search for Mariah her father had said that he didn’t like the idea of firearms being involved, that he didn’t want anybody hurt. But when he saw the rifles now, he nodded and said to Daniel, “Bring your sidearm.”
When they left New Town, Jenny could hear the bell of a church calling the faithful to worship. It was Sunday, a day for rest and for reflection on the divine. Their day, Jenny suspected, would hold something entirely different, and she felt her gut already twisting at the dangerous unknown ahead.
It took almost an hour to reach the trailer. They drove through Williston on the way. Even though it was Sunday morning, the place felt like an anthill of activity. Dust everywhere, coating cars and buildings, choking the air. It was kicked up by a constant stream of trucks rumbling along the highways that intersected the town. All the roads seemed torn up, undergoing construction. The big rigs rolling over them hauled long pipes and great cement prefabbed structures and spider webbings of steel. They passed hotels, whose lots were completely filled, the spaces taken up by pickups and SUVs wearing coats of red dust. The town was eating into the prairie like an ugly cancer. The thrown-together communities that housed the men working the oil fields reminded Jenny of photos she’d seen of the spare, platted bases at the South Pole, and she couldn’t help wondering what became of human beings who lived too long without beauty.
South of Williston, they turned off the highway and took a dirt road east through hills still untouched by the blight of the town’s sprawl. After fifteen minutes, they mounted a crest and Jenny saw the Missouri River below. The river itself was a lazy, red-brown flow between hills covered with the baked, brown grasses of a late, dry summer. Along the banks there were green stands of cottonwoods and other thriving vegetation. In the distance, tall bluffs exploded out of the ground along the river’s course, dark against the broad, pale wash of the sky.
On top of the rise, the road divided and Cork braked to a stop at the fork. He pointed along the branch that headed southeast, toward a long, elevated finger of land nearly a mile distant, a promontory above the river, crowned with a copse of cottonwoods.
“It’s hard to see without binoculars,” he said, “but the trailer’s in those trees. If we come at it from this road, they’ll spot us long before we get there.” He nodded toward the southwest branch of the road. “Up there is where I parked last night and watched.”
Cork took the right fork, which climbed a slight ridge that paralleled the Missouri. The trees on the wooded promontory below them moved in and out of their sight line. After nearly a mile, he stopped again.
“My binoculars are in the glove box, Jenny. Will you hand them to me?”
She did as he asked, and he left the Explorer. They all got out with him, Meloux and Daniel and Shinny Fox and Jenny. They walked through the dry ground cover off the road, sending grasshoppers flying before them. The air smelled parched, and the dirt under their feet felt soft and dry as ash. Her father hunched and moved ahead a dozen yards and, with a gesture of his hand, signaled them to keep low. He brought the binoculars to his eyes and studied the scene below. From her vantage, Jenny could now see the clearing in the trees where the trailer sat. It was a good-size mobile home. Two dark SUVs were parked in front. There was a long, white, pill-shaped tank off to one side, which she figured contained propane. In Tamarack County, a lot
of the rural homes used propane for heating and cooking, and those white tanks were a common sight.
It was going on ten o’clock by then. The sun was already high, the day hot and dry. Except for the buzz of the grasshoppers, there wasn’t a sound in the hills around them.
“Steel grates across the windows. To keep people out or to keep them in?” Cork said. “Both SUVs are there. I think we have them all corralled inside. I don’t know how long that’ll last, so we should move fast.”
Shinny pointed toward a shallow fold that ran down the hillside below them. It was studded with rock outcrops that provided modest cover. “We could make our way down that little gulley there. They might not see us.”
“But if they did, they’d know exactly what we were up to.”
“What about coming at them from the back?” Daniel suggested. “The trees’ll provide ample cover.”
“That’ll take too long,” Cork replied. “One of them might head off by then, maybe with Mariah.”
“What do you suggest?” Shinny said.
Cork lowered his binoculars. “We drive up to the front door, and I knock.” He turned back toward the Explorer.
• • •
His plan was to play the same card he’d played earlier at the oil workers’ camp when he’d taken Breeze into his custody. That would get his foot in the door. The rest of them were to stay hunkered down out of sight in the Explorer. When he’d ascertained that Mariah was inside, he’d give the word, and Daniel and Shinny would come running.
“And how exactly are you going to give us the word?” Daniel asked. It was clear he wasn’t entirely on board with the plan.
“I’ll have my cell phone on and in my hand. You’ll be able to hear everything.”
“I think there should be two of us inside,” Daniel said.
“Why?” Cork had reached the fork and was preparing to turn onto the branch that led to the tree-capped promontory and the trailer.
“Better logistics,” Daniel replied. “Someone to make sure the door’s unlocked and open if you’re otherwise occupied.”