The Work of Wolves (24 page)

"Seems you don't have an answer," Greggy said coldly. "Well, Mr. Earl Walks Alone, I'd say you were trespassing. And it ain't like you wouldn't know. I remember right, there's
NO TRESPASSING
signs all over that fence up there. And since you're in high school, I assume you can read. So if you saw those horses like you say, it ain't all that clear who's breaking the law, is it? Things ain't so simple like you think, are they?"

Earl had no answer. He wanted to be angry again, but the overwhelming power of the sheriff and his position were palpable in the room, stifling even Earl's anger, turning him into exactly what the sheriff wanted to see—a troublemaking Indian who thought he could get away with something. Earl felt dirtied inside and out. He wished he were someplace else. Anywhere else.

"And you think I can just go walking up there and have a look," Greggy went on. "Ever occur to you police have to obey the law? I can't go traipsing up there without I get Magnus Yarborough's permission. Or a warrant. And I gotta say, Earl, you being as quiet as you just somehow got, I ain't about to embarrass myself in front of a DA by askin for a warrant."

Earl wanted to say something. Anything. But couldn't.

"Suppose I could ask Magnus," Greggy said. "'Course if I do that, he might decide he's the one oughta be pressing charges. So what do you think I oughta do, Earl? You want I should ask him?"

The air conditioner rattled and wheezed.

"Funny how silent you got, Earl," Greggy said. "Let me give you some advice. You get outta that chair and walk out that door without sayin another word, and you leave Magnus Yarborough alone. If you do that, I may just consider this whole thing not worth pursuing. And you have no idea, Earl, how much trouble that'll save both of us. You have no idea at all."

C
ARSON WAS ALONE IN THE OLD HOUSE
after supper, sitting in the dimming light filtering through the heavy drapes his grandmother had put on the windows years ago. The phone rang. Earl had said he'd let Carson and Willi know when he'd talked to Greggy Longwell. Carson rose, expecting no good news.

Rebecca's voice in his ear jarred him. He hadn't expected to hear from her again. She'd told Magnus about their relationship. In having spoken, she'd made a choice more lasting than the choice she'd made in the doorway of that abandoned house. Carson could not deny, in spite of his loss, that the first choice was hers to make. But why the second? Why speak to Magnus? She should have known him better. She'd told Carson of realizing the foolishness of trying to change her first husband. How could she be so ignorant of the man she was now married to? Or so ignorant of herself? Carson had seen himself compressed within the round, wet eye of the wounded cow, and in that eye he was holding a rifle while behind him white clouds moved. Those clouds seemed to form themselves from the albumen around the eye, move across the dark pupil, fade into the white again. A merry-go-round of cloud. And a tiny, warped, misshapen man in the middle of it, holding something that looked like a stick.

Carson had seen that stick enlarge within the eye and wind itself around the pupil. He'd seen the little man's hand grow larger than his head within the curved distortion. A mushroom of lumpy knuckles. The sound, when it came, seemed to come from the world of the eye, bursting from it into the world where Carson stood. The last thing that small world produced. Then there was only Carson in the world he was in, with the high, white clouds above him streaming horizon to horizon, and he a little man watching a mass of flesh quiver and then still and that other, tiny world dry out and fade.

He wouldn't allow himself the luxury of regret for doing a necessary thing. But that day he'd seen much needless suffering. Seen suffering substituted for speech. Suffering as a message. He knew it was Magnus's message. Knew it had its source from some constricted place inside the man. Yet he laid the rifle down next to the cow and said—to himself, to the world that was not listening except, in the aftermath of the rifle's report, to know that ordinary sound could begin again—"Jesus, Reb. Why?"

"Carson? Are you there?"

"Yeah. I'm here."

It was too good to hear her. But she'd made that choice. She'd spoken to Magnus. Carson did not allow his voice to express more than the words it shaped. She heard. For a while they were connected by nothing but silence, by the fact that each of them held a plastic handset in different places, unknowingly imitating each other's posture, connected by nothing but potential: If either of them spoke, the other would hear.

"He's outside," she said. "I don't know how long. I may not have much time."

That "he" that needed no clarification. Magnus at the periphery, his movements framing this conversation.

"The horses, Carson," she said. "They're gone."

He heard strange, faraway sounds. It took him a few seconds to realize she was crying but trying to hide it from him. Then she gave up trying to hide it and sobbed, "I don't know what he did with them. All three of them, Carson. I don't know how long they've been gone. I couldn't call until now. I never had a chance."

Her weeping cut through Carson's desire to reserve himself. Or preserve. Cut through his anger. He'd been so caught up in his own sorrow, his own coming to grips with everything, that he'd never imagined hers. Never imagined what she might be going through in that house that, even before Magnus knew anything, she'd called a prison with nice fixtures. What was it like now? What emptiness and sorrow, what anger, did it harbor? Rebecca had said the rich have better ways of keeping secrets. Better lies. And now she was afraid to use the phone.

Carson closed his eyes. It was hard to for him to believe Magnus exerted that kind of control over her. Yet he himself had been lured into the black pickup with the man, been trapped there to witness that grill crashing into the running cow's back legs, turning them to bloody straw. And Carson had found himself paralyzed, unable to move. He thought of Magnus's words:
That bitch won't run away again.

He suddenly knew, like a gray mold exposed and flaking in his chest, that she wasn't crying only for the horses.

"What'd he do to you, Reb?" he asked. Even in his own ear, his voice was grainy—bits and pieces of voice patched together. Barely holding.

He could tell she had the receiver away from her mouth. Strangled sounds, very far away. He pictured her—couldn't help it—with her face turned aside, tears falling. That hair.

"Rebecca," he said. Was aware he'd used her full name, pronouncing every syllable. "I'm just goin a wait. And then you're goin a tell me. OK?"

Another few seconds of silence. Then her voice came back, stronger, closer, still broken.

"Oh, God," she said. "You derail me."

That he didn't expect. "Derail you?"

"I thought you'd be worried about the horses. I didn't think you'd..." She stopped.

"I know about the horses."

"You know?"

"What'd he do to you?"

She didn't answer.

"Did he hit you?"

Silence. The son of a bitch.

"How bad, Reb?"

"He slapped me. No fists. But it was hard. I'm bruised. My face."

She choked. Couldn't tell him about her face.

Spinning, spinning. How had it gone this far?

Or had it always been there, a spiral, a spring, wound tightly inside Magnus? And they had just released it?

Carson tried to stay right here. With her. Tried to stay calm, impassive. "He ever done that before?" he asked.

"No. Not that. I shouldn't have pushed him so far."

"You know what that is, Reb? Bullshit."

The force of the word stopped her crying. Then she said, "It is, isn't it?"

"It is. This is him, not you."

"I don't know him, Carson."

But you knew that,
he thought.
You told me that.

What he said was, "What do you want me to do?"

"Nothing. Anything you do will make it worse. Promise me, don't do anything."

"I ain't about a make a promise I might not keep."

"There's nothing you can do."

She was right. He knew it.

"You're alone right now?"

"He's just outside. Don't come over here."

"I'm not thinkin that. Get out of there."

"I just wanted you to know about the horses. That's all."

"Leave the sonofabitch."

"Where would I go?"

"Figure it out later. Just leave. Get in a car and drive."

"It's over. He's still angry, but—"

"Shit like that ain't ever over, Reb. This ain't no time to kid yourself."

"Do you know where the horses are?"

"They're alive. It ain't the horses I'm worried about right now."

"Oh, Jesus. I'm going to cry again if you keep doing that."

"I trained you, too. I got a right to be as concerned for you as the horses."

She laughed—a painful laugh, but a laugh. Good, in its small and painful way, to hear.

"Goddamn, Carson," she said. "I wish—"

He wanted to hear what she wished, but he wouldn't let her go there. "This ain't a time for wishing, either," he said. "Another kind a bullshit. Just slows you down. Take the first chance you get and leave."

"He's coming. I've got to go."

Just like that the line was dead.

W
ILLI WATCHED EARL'S MOUTH MOVING
, and he heard the words, but Earl had to say them twice—"He's not going to do anything"—before Willi comprehended them. He felt stupid, as if he no longer understood the language here. And even when he did comprehend what Earl was saying, it seemed impossible.

"He is the sheriff," Willi said. "He is the law. How can he not anything do at all?"

He caught the way he reversed the sentence, felt even stupider.

Earl lifted a shoulder. "Like you say, he's the law."

"But if he will not anything do"—there it was again, that reversal; he had to pay attention, had to be alert—"what do we do? Is there someone else we can tell?"

They were standing near a corner of the school. Earl had stopped by Willi's locker just before school ended. He hadn't spoken to Willi but to the locker, as if he were merely stopping to look at a Magic Marker drawing above the lockers, of a football helmet and a player's name—
BEST OF LUCK, LANCEII
—one of dozens of such drawings made by the cheerleaders in preparation for the weekend game. Earl stood near Willi, gazed at the drawing, and quietly said, "See you outside." Then he walked away. The girl next to Willi's locker looked at him, but he didn't know whether she'd heard what Earl said or not.

Now Willi waited for Earl's response. The shadow of the school building cut across Earl's face from left eye to chin. Dust drifted across the parking lot from where students were spinning their tires when they hit the gravel at its edge. Shining in the sun, this dust obscured with its brightness the right side of Earl's face, but in the shadow of the building it disappeared, leaving the air clear, and out of that dark clarity Earl's left eye gazed at Willi.

"We can tell anyone we want, you know?" Earl said.

Willi shifted position to get out of the sun and could see Earl's face tight, his jaw set hard. He'd never seen Earl's face that way, and he could hear only pure, acid sarcasm, with no joking, in Earl's voice.

"But there is no one who can do anything?"

"It all goes back to Longwell. Maybe we screwed up, you know? If we'd told a veterinarian, say, and convinced him, he might've convinced Longwell. But now anyone we tell would go to Longwell. And he's not believing anything."

"What did he say?"

Earl shook his head.

"Is not there anything we can do, then?" Willi asked.

"There must be something. I don't know what. But I'm not letting this go."

Willi had never heard Earl so determined. He remembered how Earl had walked away from the pasture the first night, left him standing there. Remembered how he hadn't wanted to see anything wrong. Earl seemed to know what he was thinking. "I don't like being called a liar, you know?" he said.

Another student spun his tires at the edge of the parking lot, and dust rolled toward them. They watched it approach, let it engulf them.

"If I were you," Earl said when the air cleared, "I'd try to have a good time here. Talk your family into taking you someplace you haven't seen."

"I haven't seen the Badlands. But what do you mean?"

"You don't live here. You're wandering through, you know? Like, you're taking pictures. This horse one didn't turn out. That's all."

Willi felt his face flush. "I am not just wandering through," he said hotly.

Earl looked at him with those angry, determined eyes. "Well, that's something," he said. "You going to become an Indian, then? Become a true-blood Lakota? Stay here and live on the rez?"

Willi didn't know how to defend himself. He knew Earl was not really angry at him but was angry at everything, and mostly at whatever had happened with the sheriff. But he didn't know how to tell Earl that this was not a question of blood. Or even a question of home. That some things pushed you into wherever you were. They put you there. Or maybe it was your home that followed you. Home and family and blood. Followed you. And you found them—in the night, under the stars, with steaming water pouring from the ground. And horses dying.

Willi hadn't thought the old woman could come to haunt him here, in the heart of this continent, on a Lakota reservation, among the people of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. He was thinking about her more now than he had in Germany, though he'd come here partly to escape thinking of her. It was almost as if she'd ridden in the plane with him, a whisper of pale skin and lavender scent. She inhabited his dreams here, and when he woke in the mornings, she emerged out of the whorled patterns in the ceding above him: the wisps of her hair, the wrinkles of her dry and velvet skin.

For a while she'd been unable to follow him here. The confusion of new things had overwhelmed her: the powwows, the singing, the dancing, the speech patterns, the land itself, the ceremonies—all the things Willi had hoped for. He'd had a sense the world could be new again, revived. Had a sense the Lakota people had an older knowledge, and that knowledge could frighten her away, a wind blowing her like dust off the floor of his mind.