The Fugitives (42 page)

IT MAY INTEREST
you to learn that Indians, Native Americans, have a long and rich history of gambling, and that, contrary to certain strands of received wisdom, the advent of casinos on Indian land and under Indian management and supervision is hardly another unwelcome instance of outside culture intruding upon and perverting Native American ways. Games of chance, guessing games, games involving hoops, sticks, bones, dice—fortunes, almost necessarily consisting of the most personal of belongings, including wives and children, were lost to these games; Indian folklore relates numerous tales in which bereft losers, men
down on their luck,
as the saying has it, seek out or benefit from supernatural intervention in order to recover these lost chattels. And, often, more: that’s the familiar element to these stories, the one that resonates with the contemporary sensibility: the winners
want more
; that famous and apocryphal Indian who wants for nothing because he only takes what is
enough,
who gives according to his abilities and receives according to his needs, is nowhere to be found in these authentic tales of being human.
All this and more,
the Indian says, having regained his beloved wife, his daughter: he takes the other man’s wife, even though he thinks she’s ugly, he takes the other man’s daughter and puts her to work, he takes his saddle horse and hides and baskets and beads and shells; the Indian’s supernal virtue is absent from these stories, if it ever was there to begin with. In them, the Indian stands forth as human: an appetite, a desire for intoxication of all kinds, an erect penis. Only a nation Puritan to its very roots could, once the living threat at the edges of its settlements had been vanquished and pacified, cast that threat in its own image: the Puritan Indian, the self-denying Indian, the Indian who happily
goes without
is America’s first great literary invention, one never to be topped.

Yes, and so Bobby—who hadn’t the slightest interest in table games, who felt that to stake money on the outcome of a game of chance was to be a fool—had no difficulty finding people—Indians—willing to accept his bets on collegiate sporting events, particularly Division I football and basketball games. Bobby did not consider himself a gambler, and had contempt for those who were. He described his betting as recreational. And yet more and more frequently I found myself accompanying him on his visits to an Indian man named Wendell Banjo. Wendell Banjo lived in Petobego, in a mobile home set amid the weeds on a patch of ground before an old frame house which had fallen into an advanced state of decrepitude. On the way there and back, Bobby would invariably deride the interior of Wendell Banjo’s mobile home, which apparently was filled with whatever furniture from the collapsed old house had been able to fit inside it, comparing it to what he declared was the
beautiful environment
of Manitou Sands. Bobby’s belief in the beauty of Manitou Sands was tantamount to certain knowledge; to him it was inconceivable that anyone at all might find it to be gauche or overdone or unrefined. Bobby had managed to develop good taste, but his taste had its limits, as any useless and vain affectation should. More to the point, he had tremendous confidence in the beauty of Manitou Sands, and believed that it inspired confidence in the guests. His dismay at Wendell Banjo’s evident lack of pride appears to me to have been his way of expressing his confusion over the very reality of a Wendell Banjo in his life, a life that he had elevated so as to be in daily proximity to such beauty, to such a
beautiful environment
; confusion over the fact that he needed to take Wendell Banjo, his dealings with him, as seriously as he did. The larger the amount he owed to Wendell Banjo (which I was able to gauge only by the fullness of the plastic bag from the casino gift shop that he carried with him), the more bitterly Bobby complained about Wendell Banjo’s lack of ostentation, his disinterest in style or fashion or what Bobby sometimes referred to as
the finer things
. He would always conclude by insisting that he had laid his last bet with the man. But within the week we would again be driving to Wendell Banjo’s mobile home with the ruined house behind it.

One day, before we were to drive to Petobego, Bobby called me into his office and asked me to close the door behind me. He sat with his arms folded across his chest for a minute and then reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a semiautomatic pistol. He passed it to me and I checked the magazine and the chamber and then put it into my pocket. He did not carry a plastic bag from the gift shop with him on that day. When we arrived at Wendell Banjo’s place, Bobby asked me to get out and stand beside the car while I waited for him. He went inside and I waited. After a short time Ryan Labeots, one of Wendell Banjo’s employees, came out of the mobile home. I’d spoken to Ryan on several occasions, but that day he just sat on one of the steps and watched me. I leaned on the fender of the car and returned his look. I would not have hesitated to use the gun had I thought that Bobby was in any danger. As I settled into staring at Ryan, he seemed to grow nervous and uncomfortable. He was not a formidable person; he was a big, fat boy who wore oversize clothes and affected a sparse mustache on his upper lip. I was aware that I knew very little about the protocol that obtained there under such circumstances. I could shoot Ryan and then shoot Wendell Banjo, and Bobby and I could leave without troubling ourselves further, but I didn’t know what would happen after that. I trusted in Bobby to guide me; he seemed to be at ease, to have done well, surrounded by
the finer things
in the
beautiful environment
that made him so proud. I didn’t think to implicate Bobby, nor did I question his dubious decision to bring, in place of the customary plastic shopping bag filled with cash, a loaded firearm. Finally, Bobby emerged from the mobile home. Ryan moved a little to make room for him as he started down the steps, an unconsciously considerate gesture that utterly dissipated the implicit threat his presence was supposed to convey. As Bobby walked toward the car, and me, Wendell Banjo came through the door and stood silently on the top step to watch us go.

On the way back to Manitou Sands, Bobby described, in unprecedented detail, the furnishings and decor in Wendell Banjo’s mobile home. He talked about it exhaustively and with the special contempt one reserves for those who don’t fully avail themselves of their privilege. Then he was silent. He didn’t say a word until after we’d gotten back and then said only that I was to make sure that nobody bothered him for the rest of the day, a job I was only too happy to take on.

FROM HERE, THE
rest of the story is merely a matter of mechanics. I promise that, in due time, I will deliver the rest. I want to pause, though, to comment on how the doomed often are badly served by narrative. Whatever remains for the doomed to do before they meet their end, it is tainted to the exact degree that the audience has foreknowledge of their fate. The doomed character, though—he imagines, plans, anticipates, expects, looks forward to. His life is not the dull continuum of a beast, plodding unknowing from day to day, from season to season, year to year, until it meets knife or needle: even the simplest of us are, have to be, able to imagine how we will accommodate ourselves to a future that hasn’t happened yet, while knowing as well that it may never happen, not to us. The thing we don’t know is just how much of it may never happen.

And so while I went about my business
in all innocence,
as the saying goes, Bobby began to devise his scheme that very afternoon, in cunning silence. If he treated me more kindly than usual over the days that followed, I am willing to ascribe his motivations partly to residual sentiment rather than pure calculation (we did share a history), although I know better, I may know better, I certainly
should
know better. In the end, is there a difference? It was unnecessary to be especially kind; as ever, I was not inclined to suspicion as far as Bobby was concerned. But if I had been at all mindful, I might have become wary of the anxious way that Bobby asked me each day for the running tally of the money I would soon be transporting to South Richmond. I assumed it was concern about the considerably larger-than-usual amount—perhaps even concern for me, for my safety and security. If I had been mindful I might have discerned that Bobby’s anxiety had been supplanted on Friday by relief, and that his relief had been supplanted on Sunday by greed. I didn’t know then that Bobby owed Wendell Banjo $220,000, including the vigorish Bobby had agreed to for paying late. By Sunday I could report that roughly twice that amount would be transferred to South Richmond. Bobby harbored a few lingering doubts about his plan; that amount served to dispel them. I don’t know that I can blame him; to fantasize about money is the perfect idiot’s delight.

I made it easy for Bobby in many ways. On Sunday evening, when I was preparing to leave to drive east, he asked me to meet him on the road heading up into Manitou County, at an old gas station that had been closed for at least as long as I’d lived there. I pulled in under the canopy that had once sheltered the pumps from the elements. Bobby jogged out of the shadows under the eaves of the garage and told me to pull my car around to the back. He said that he needed to drive me somewhere to show me something. I parked and then we drove together to the state hospital grounds. I recall being mildly annoyed because while I was getting mud on my shoes and slacks, Bobby was dressed in old khakis and sneakers. He had a flashlight to light the way as he hurried us through the groves. Finally we came to the clearing and Bobby stopped. I was out of breath; we both were panting in the dead quiet. He gestured at the running board of a small backhoe that was parked there and suggested that I sit. As I was lowering myself onto it, I noticed a dead crow lying on the ground. I pointed it out to Bobby.

“What the hell happened to it?” he said. “Take a look at it, would you?”

As I bent over to examine it more closely, not even the faintest presentiment came to me. He shot me in the back of the head.

Here Bobby was stricken by grief and guilt. He sat on the running board and wept over my body. As well he should have: I will stress once again that Bobby could have relied absolutely upon my aid and discretion; Bobby knew that, had always known it. Under other circumstances he would have valued it, and while he even wished that he could have valued it under these circumstances, my life stood between him and his own safety, between him and the fulfillment of his wishes, finally and most decisively between him and his gratification, and not long after he started digging the hole for my body, he began to blame me. It took over an hour for him to dig a hole deep enough to bury me in, strip me of my identification and belongings, fill the hole in, and disguise it. It took another hour to get back to my car, drive it down the fire road to the beach, and then walk back to the gas station. Finally he had to change his clothes and find a place to dump them and then a different place to dump my things. By the time he returned to Manitou Sands he was filled with self-righteousness. He felt good about himself. Gradually he came to feel, faintly at first and then fully and unselfconsciously, that I was to blame for my own death. And as his plan began to work as if of its own accord, so that the crime I was supposed to have committed became a story other people pressed upon him, a story that he pretended to accept only reluctantly, he began to believe that the story was true.