Montana (11 page)

He shrugged one shoulder.

“Maybe because of Johnny,” she pushed again. “Or Frank.”

He jerked in his chair. “Frank? Frank had nothing to do with what happened to Mary Alice.”

Johnny had earned no such denial, Lola noticed. But since Wilson had mentioned Frank first, she decided to go with it. “Funny thing. That’s what the sheriff said, too. Why not? Because he’s brain-damaged? Or because he drinks?”

Wilson took off his glasses, pulled out his shirttail and polished the lenses. There was no discernible improvement. His eyes were a blur behind them, but his square unlined face hardened as he replied. “He doesn’t drink.”

“But I thought . . .” Lola stopped. She remembered Frank reclining on the sidewalk outside Jolee’s store, hitting her up for booze money. Or maybe she’d just assumed that’s what he wanted. She heard a voice in her ear, that of every editor for whom she’d ever worked: “Assume makes an ass out of u and me.”

“A lot of people think that.” Wilson’s sigh was deep and lasting. “The staggering, the slurring. That’s the brain damage. You should have known him before. He could shoot a bird out of the air before anybody else even realized it was up there. Came back from the war with so many medals he looked like a pincushion. Yeah, they handed out those medals like candy. Shame they couldn’t hand him a new brain. Then he could have gotten a real job when he came back instead of the trouble he got caught up in.”

Lola wondered what kind of trouble people got into around Magpie. She thought of the billboards, of Joshua’s sister retching into the jail’s lidless steel toilet. “Meth?”

“Booze.”

“But you just said he didn’t drink.”

Somewhere in the building, a phone rang and rang. A child’s high voice floated along the corridor outside the conference room. “He doesn’t drink the stuff,” Wilson said. “He smuggles it. At least, that’s what I think is going on. He’s been wandering more than usual. And he’s been flashing money around.”

Lola thought he’d finally said something she understood. The Canadian border was so close. No matter the country, no matter which side of the border you were on, she thought, there was always something that sold for more money on the other side, and somebody was always scrambling to cash in on that fact. Entire tribes in Afghanistan supported themselves by hauling everything from opium to ammo to melons across the border. Booze was a prized commodity in all of those places, being theoretically off limits in Muslim countries. But here? She said as much to Wilson.

“Only the worst drinkers go to the package store. Alcohol’s such a problem on the reservation that there’s a stigma to buying it in public.”

“Why not just go to Magpie and drink there?”

“Think about it. You can go to town with a lot of whitepeople in your face remarking about drunk Indians. Even though they’re sitting on a barstool right next to you, you nursing one drink for an hour while they have four or five, somehow you’re the one who’s the drunk. Or you can sit at home. What would you rather?”

Lola didn’t know how to politely phrase her next question. “How’d he do it? I mean, if he couldn’t hold a job—”

Wilson seemed to know what she was getting at. “How’s a dummy run a smuggling operation? Easy. He doesn’t. Somebody else does. Frank’s just a courier. The people who set him up know what they’re doing. They need an Indian, and who better than Frank? One who can’t think his way to why he shouldn’t do it, and won’t question why they’re only paying him half the money they’d pay somebody with a working brain.”

“Why do they need an Indian?”

The phone rang again in the other room. It stopped, and then a phone at Wilson’s elbow buzzed. “Just now?” he said into it. “Okay. Thanks.” He put it down and rested his hands on the table. They were stiff and twisted as old rope. Lola tried to imagine the diminutive bits of obsidian turning within them as he crafted the cribbage pegs. “Smuggling’s easier for us,” he said. “Stuff comes in from Canada. The reservation goes right to the border. And don’t forget, we’re a sovereign nation. Homeland Security might not like it, but we don’t need passports to cross the border as long as we’ve got our tribal ID cards. Frank’s contacts could hand over the stuff in Canada and he could bring it down here and sell it for twice what somebody’d pay in town. Tribal police have been watching him, trying to figure out who’s supplying it. But they’ve got to patrol the whole reservation, three thousand square miles. And they mostly deal with misdemeanors. The serious stuff goes to the FBI. And it gets even more complicated if a crime involves both a tribal person and a nontribal one, which is likely in this case. Then the county gets in on the action. When something crosses the border, you can add Customs and the Border Patrol to the mix. The confusing stuff falls through the cracks. And up here, everything is confusing. As you can see.”

“Except for murder,” Lola said, trying to bring him back to the matter at hand. The last thing she wanted was a dissertation on reservation crime. “That’s pretty straightforward. What if Mary Alice found out who was behind the operation and they killed her? Or, better yet, got Frank to do it for them? Did the brain damage affect his aim?”

Wilson rearranged the cribbage boards. “Doesn’t matter whether it did or didn’t. Frank didn’t do it.”

“But he knew Mary Alice had been shot.” She told him about the first time she’d seen Frank, in front of the store, crooning “Poor Mary Alice.” And then again at the funeral.

Wilson got up and walked across the room and rummaged through a stack of newspapers. He returned with a copy of the
Express
from the day after Mary Alice’s shooting. “Everyone in town knows how she died.”

Lola took the paper from him and skimmed through the story. “Here,” she said. She ran her finger under the sentence. “ ‘Carr was shot in the head,’ said Sheriff Charlie Laurendeau.”

“The head,” she told Wilson. “It said the head. Not the face.” And she drilled her forefinger into her cheek, mimicking Frank’s motions after the funeral. “The only people who knew where Mary Alice was shot were the ones who saw her. That’s me, Verle, Charlie, and the coroner. And then, the person who shot her.”

She knew her irritation showed. Didn’t care. The day was slipping away with nothing to show for it. Lola wanted to go back to her motel and check out the name of the group that had paid for the campaign flier she’d picked up at Johnny Running Wolf’s meet-and-greet. But first, she needed to ask Wilson about Johnny. Not when he was pissed, though. Which he appeared to be, in about equal measure to her own frustration.

“So Joshua’s your nephew,” she said, hoping to lessen the tension. “That’s such a Biblical name.”

Wilson went to work on his glasses again. Lola heard the building’s outer door open and close. The woman from the front desk crossed before the window. The wind shook out her hair in a dark shining sheet and laid it back down over her shoulders. She walked a few steps away from the building and bent the upper part of her body. She straightened, her lips pinched around a cigarette.

“Joshua’s mother was one of those Jesus Indians got dragged off to boarding school,” Wilson said. “Some of those people listened to the missionaries. Some not. She was one who did. She named her daughter Judith because she liked the story about how Judith saved her people by deceiving Holofernes and cutting off his head. Same thing with Joshua—the way he blew his trumpet, the walls coming down. Said those oldtime Indians could have used a Joshua when they attacked the whiteman forts. I don’t think that’s quite what the missionaries had in mind when they taught her about Joshua and Judith.”

Lola wrested her attention from the window. She imagined Joshua’s mother, a young girl torn from her family, force-fed Bible stories along with strange unpalatable foods and customs. Taking the stories and turning them to fit her own world. “I like that,” she said. “Is their mother still alive?”

Wilson shook his head. “No. She died. Long time ago. Their gran’mother raised them. But at least we got to keep them. Not like Johnny.”

He’d circled back to Johnny without any urging from her. The conference room door swung open and the woman from the front desk stuck her head in, delivering warring scents of fresh air and cigarette smoke. Lola directed murderous thoughts her way. “I’ve got to go to class,” the woman told Wilson. “I’ve ordered a pizza for the council meeting later. If the phone rings, can you grab it?”

Lola looked at the telephone at the other end of the table and wondered if she could disable it by the sheer intensity of her stare. She needed Wilson to keep talking. The woman left without closing the door. “You were telling me about Johnny. About how you didn’t get to keep him,” Lola said. She added a nugget from the overheard conversation between Johnny and Riley. “I know they took him away when he was a little boy. That must have been hard.” And just like that, with Lola nodding as though she’d heard it all before, he told her.

How Johnny’s mother ran off with a whiteman from Chicago, taking her son with her, cutting off all connection with her people so that nobody heard from them again, not even when her mother died. Wilson’s voice eased into singsong recitation. “That old lady went to church twice every day, praying for their return, mourned in the old way, too, just for good measure, singing songs all day and night, but couldn’t do it right because no one knew whether they were alive or dead. Wore herself out. Couldn’t sleep, wouldn’t eat. Some say she just blew away, like the fluff from a cottonwood tree, floating up into the sky. That she’s a cloud now, up there still, flying over the land, seeking her child and gran’child.” His big hands sketched a wispy flight and Lola followed their motion.

“But he came back,” prompted Lola. Afraid to say even that much. Which, apparently, was too much.

Wilson got up and walked away from the story. He made a slow circuit of the room, stopping before the map. A dog the color of dust sneaked past the window and lay down in the middle of the road. A car approached. The dog stirred and settled itself more comfortably on the sun-warmed pavement. The car swerved around it and continued down the road in the wrong lane. If Wilson needed a break, Lola was willing to give him one. She was not, however, going to leave. She joined him at the map. “What’s this?”

“That’s the reservation.”

“All these squares, I mean.”

“That’s the land that the whitepeople gave us that wasn’t theirs to give. After they put that land in one of their forever treaties, they turned around and opened it up to homesteaders. So, whitepeople own a good chunk of this so-called Indian reservation. We’re trying to buy it back, bit by bit. You can see.” He put a round-knuckled finger to the map and she could indeed see how some of the squares were darker than the others, more recently colored in. But there were still plenty of blank spaces among them. He rubbed his thumb over one of the bigger blanks. It took a misshapen bite from the reservation’s southern border, a tongue of land probing abruptly north in an otherwise unbroken east-west line. “This one here along Two Medicine River—we thought we had it. But the deal fell through.”

She drew her finger along the Canadian border. “What’s this?” A few miles to the north of the border, another area was colored in.

“That’s the Blood Reserve in Canada. We’re all the same people, but the whiteman governments saw fit to split us up. Used to be their reserve came down to the border, but then Canada pushed the reserve boundary north. Don’t know why. Did they think a few thousand Indians were too dangerous to have us all together?”

Lola wondered when he would get back to Johnny. He turned to the display case with the beaded dress. The glass was dusty and he pulled his sleeve down over his wrist and ran his forearm across the surface. The dress within was pale and sueded, its yoke and sleeves covered in beadwork zigzags of blue and orange, sky and sunset. “That must have taken forever,” Lola said.

“Winters are long here. Especially back in the old days.”

She thought that maybe Wilson was trying to teach her a lesson about forbearance. She gave a tense nod, trying to imagine a woman, hands red and stiff with cold, sitting within a wind-buffeted tipi whose fire threw off uneven bursts of heat and light, forcing a needle through the thickness of hide to form those lightning designs with beads no larger than sesame seeds. Maybe the women sat together as they worked. Gossiped, laughed. Friendship an insubstantial barrier against hunger, cold, too-early death. The beaded patterns shimmered on the dress. How had her thoughts wandered so far from Mary Alice?

“Johnny Running Wolf, he’d been gone a long time when he came home,” Wilson said.

Lola held her breath and kept her face to the glass.

“Long, long time. Frank was the one first recognized him. They’re cousins. It was Frank’s wild pony smashed Johnny’s nose when they were kids. Johnny tried to ride him. Pony threw back his head. Blood everywhere. His mother drove him to the whiteman doctor in Magpie, thinking he’d be better than the reservation hospital. But that doctor just wiped up the blood and left the nose the way it was. Wasn’t for that nose, nobody would have known him when he came back. All that time gone, and living amongst whitepeople. He didn’t know anything when he returned. Not our prayers, our traditions, our ways. Not even something as simple as turning left going into a house or a lodge. Take this business of running for governor.”

Lola turned to him but nothing in his face had changed, and he was standing there with his hands in his pockets like he was still talking about the dress. “He never even asked the elders. Just up and drove to Helena one day and filed the papers. We found out about it in the newspaper.”

Lola floated a theory. “Is there any chance Johnny could be involved in the smuggling? To get money for his campaign, maybe?”

Wilson’s “no” was quick, decisive. “Sure, people can support themselves on it. But as I understand it, campaigns need big money. Just look at how Johnny’s running around all over the state. Driving that outfit, taking private planes for the longer trips. Where’s he getting the money for that? We got him a job when he came back, a good lawyering job, going down to Helena and lobbying for the tribe. Paid for a new suit and gave him a per diem and everything. But we didn’t pay him enough for that big white outfit, and it’s for damn sure he’s got more than one suit these days.”