Death Where the Bad Rocks Live (40 page)

“You sure?”

Reuben shrugged. “As sure as I can be with maps this old. You said they went into the Stronghold to find the place where the bad rocks live. Legend has it the bad rocks live in this area.” Reuben tapped Micah Crowder’s map. “Maybe they didn’t go there to find the rocks. Maybe they just went in there to pray. Like good Lakota do.”

Manny blushed. “Your point?”

“A man takes the hardest trail when he wants to lose someone. You figure they’re trying to stay lost?”

Manny nodded.

“I don’t. My intuition is their trek into the Stronghold has nothing to do with you hunting them. I figure they took the easy trail. A man doesn’t go into that country and make it any harder for himself than he has to. Not if he wants to survive.”

“But these maps are so old. Trails change almost daily. How will I know which trail is the right one?”

Reuben set the glasses on the map and sipped his soda. “Pray,
kola
. Pray to
Wakan Tanka.
When you have your doubts, draw upon your own intuitions. Remember the vision you had of Jason Red Cloud’s
wanagi
? It was no accident that his spirit sought you out. You’ve always had the gift. You’ve just always denied it.”

“How will that help me?”

“When you pray, the Spirit Helpers will show you the way.”

“I deal in realities.”

Reuben laughed. “See. You’re still denying it. You want me to go with you?”

Manny thought about that. Having his brother along, former Marine and AIM enforcer, would have assured his safety.
But he couldn’t take a felon along,
kola
or not. “Willie and I will have to go it alone. Thanks for the offer.”

Reuben nodded. “Understood. But when you find this trail, you’ll know it. It has been used for generations by Lakota hunters seeking elk and deer. And primitive men used it before that, driving buffalo herds over the side of these steep cliffs. But take care,
misun
. Marshal knows that country better than anyone, and I understand Alex High Elk is no slouch either. Watch your back trail if you think they pose a danger for you. And game is scarce there. And water. Pack well.”

Manny smiled. “We’ll pack like we’re there for the duration.”

“You do that. And you be careful when you get close to where the bad rocks live. I want you to come back to me.”

Manny laughed. “Sure, I’ll be careful of the legend.”

Reuben took off his glasses and leaned closer, a stern look on his face, as if he were a schoolteacher educating a child. “Men have been stumbling into that place and never coming out again for so long it goes beyond just legend. Since before the time of our winter counts, oral history tells us of men dying by the rocks and never returning.”

Manny forced a smile. “I deal in realities, remember? Not the stuff of campfire tales.”

Reuben scooted his chair close enough that Manny smelled the jerky on his breath. “If you do nothing else I tell you, take care of where the bad rocks live. I want my brother back, even if he is a lawman.”

“Oh I intend on coming back.”

“It’ll be even harder with that bum shoulder. You’ll need to change that dressing every day.”

Manny’s hand shot up instinctively to the shoulder with the oversized bandage.

“I want you to have the strength, the wisdom to make it there. And back. I want you to be pure.”

“Hard to be pure when I’m so pissed someone shot me.”

“And you have no idea who?”

“Too dark. But I’m putting my money on one of those two men hiking somewhere in the Stronghold.”

Reuben stood and stretched and jerked his thumb toward the bank. “Just to make sure you come back, we’ll sweat, you and me, there in the
initipi
. And when you come out, your heart will be pure.”

Reuben tossed Manny a towel and led the way down the creek bank to where rocks heated on a fire. He knew it would do no good to argue with Reuben about entering the sacred sweat lodge. Nor was he certain he wanted to argue. He would need purity to go where the bad rocks live.

FALL 1941

Clayton put his hand on Moses’s arm and pointed to cows at a watering hole nestled in a deep valley between two towering sandstone spires. “Those your cows? The ones Renaud bought the mineral blocks for?”

Moses nodded. “What’s left of them. They just keep getting sicker. But don’t go near them—they’re wild and mean as hell.” Moses shook his head as Clayton eyed the cows, amazed that Clayton never saw the obvious things in life. Growing up on a cattle ranch should have taught Clayton how dangerous wild range cows could be. Even cows weakened by sickness.

“When do we get to where the bad rocks live?”

“Don’t be so anxious.” Moses led the pack mule through a narrow passage that opened up into a vast valley of million-year-old rock and shifting shapes. “Men have never been heard from again after seeing the rocks.”

Clayton laughed. “I’ll take my chances with that old legend,
as long as we can find a suitable route to build a road into them.”

“How much room will the drivers need?”

Clayton reined his horse and turned in the saddle. He pointed to where they had just ridden. “That’s about as narrow as the trucks can take. Any narrower and they won’t be able to get the mining equipment through. The last thing I want is to bankroll an operation that depends on just mules to get the rock out.”

They resumed riding down the winding, steep slope toward the floor of the Badlands. The sun dipped low over the two tall buttes on either side of the giant sandstone saddle. Moses pointed to a clearing large enough to picket their horses and mule, with their backs to a wall of rock two hundred feet high.

While Clayton disappeared over the next hill with Moses’s rifle, Moses unsaddled their horses and mule, and began rubbing them down with clumps of gama grass he’s pulled from beside a fallen cottonwood. The horses jumped when Clayton’s shot echoed off canyon walls, but the mule remained with head bent nibbling grass at the outside edge of the clearing.

Moses had just finished rubbing Clayton’s horse down when he tramped over the hill toward their camp, a rabbit slung over his shoulder. “That all you found to shoot?” Moses taunted him.

“Hell, all you gave me is this little .22. What the hell am I supposed to kill with it—elk?” Clayton answered.

“Been done before. But we’ll make do.”

Within minutes, Moses had both skinned the rabbit and tossed the innards into the brush, saying a silent prayer that brother coyote would find the morsels and not go hungry tonight.

Clayton rubbed sand on their metal dishes to clean them while Moses put the pan aside for their breakfast in the morning. He grabbed his pipe and tobacco pouch from his knapsack and began filling it while he settled back against a boulder. With the sun down, the temperature had dropped thirty degrees in the last two hours, and Moses pulled his collar around his neck.

Clayton squinted into the darkness as he tossed more cottonwood logs into the fire. He started to sit back down, squinted again, and retrieved the whiskey flask from his back pocket.

“You expecting company?”

Clayton shook his head as he took a long pull of the whiskey, squinting into the darkness just beyond the periphery of the campfire.

“Then why such a big fire? You expect some bogeyman to come sneaking up on us tonight?” To punctuate his question, Moses tossed a pebble and hit Clayton on the foot. Clayton jumped and spilled liquid down his chin.

“Damn it,” he sputtered, wiping his face with the back of his hand. “You got me spooked with talk of some damned rocks killing people. About how folks come into this part of the Stronghold and never come out.”

Moses chuckled. “You’re pretty brave for a war vet.”

“Cut it out.” Clayton capped the flask, his attention still somewhere past the cracking campfire flames.

“All right. But I never said the rocks kill people. I said men don’t come back from here once they see them. Maybe they come to the place where the bad rocks live and just decide to stay. Maybe it’s the paradise you
wasicu
always seek.”

“Well, I got other places I want to live my life out, and it doesn’t include a damned desert full of rocks that kill and crawly things that bite the hell out of me.”

“Don’t forget the mountain lion that might sneak into
camp and take a chunk out of your White butt. Besides, this desert will make you rich, if what Ellis says is true.”

“It’ll make us both rich.”

Moses spat in the dirt. “Told you before, I don’t want any of your money.”

“All right then. It’ll make the tribe rich.”

“If things go as you plan.”

“If? What makes you think they won’t? You got the mining permits approved, didn’t you?”

Moses nodded and tamped the faint embers of his pipe on the bottom of his boots. “But I’m not so sure it was the right thing to do.”

Clayton tossed another log onto the fire. It crackled and spit, tiny embers shooting upward into the dark, cold night like miniature meteors. He dropped in the dirt beside Moses, staring into the darkness, flames reflecting off his cold blue eyes. “Now what’s changed your mind?”

Moses looked sideways at him, and went back to studying the flames licking the logs. “I had a vision that you treated the tribe on this mining deal like you’ve treated the people you sell whiskey to.”

“We’ve been through this for the eleventy-eighth time—I had to raise money somewhere to get elected. And haven’t I done more for the Oglala than any other senator? And suddenly you don’t trust me?”

Moses frowned. “That’s my problem—I do trust you. Despite what my vision tells me will happen, I trust you to do right by the tribe.”

“That’s the spirit.” Clayton slapped Moses on the back and took a last pull from the whiskey flask for the night. “Things will be all right for all of us. Trust me.”

Willie parked the Durango off the trail running along the hill overlooking Marshal’s cabin. Manny unloaded their supplies one arm at a time, the shot shoulder throbbing with the effort. Each had thrown in an ALICE pack with enough MREs and freeze-dried entrees and water to last a week, even if they didn’t kill any game for meat.

“Sure the outfit will be all right here? They might see it.”

Manny adjusted the hip strap on his pack and tested the weight on his shoulders. “They’re both gone over more hills, farther than I’d like to think about. Only way they’ll see your Durango is if they come back here. Marshal might, but we can live with that. He’s not a…”

“Suspect?” Willie finished. “Hard to think of a federal judge as a murder suspect, enit?”

Manny adjusted his holster so the pack’s hip straps rode lower. “I still don’t think he’s our man. But it is suspicious he disappeared at the moment we needed to talk with him. And
Sophie driving his Suburban somewhere out here to pick him up, I’m thinking.”

Willie let out the hip strap on his pack, as if he had gained some of the weight back he’d lost since he started falling into whatever mental abyss guilt falls into.

They dug their heels into the loose gravel and alkaline dirt leading to Marshal’s cabin, top heavy with their packs. When they reached the shack, they took a breather and walked to the porch and bent down. He studied the tracks on the wooden planks of the porch floor. Nothing had disturbed the dust today.