Well. It wasn’t that she was counting on Fitzroy and Irwin, but she sure was tied in with them, and she no longer shared their high opinion of themselves, not after this new trio had showed up.
At first, Fitzroy had seemed like the genuine article. He’d met up with her in Reno, where she was dealing at one of the smaller casinos—family trade, crappy tips—and after a few verbal dance steps, during which she hadn’t been able to figure out what he was up to, he finally introduced her to Irwin, and together they told her the scheme.
Well, who ever knew being an American Indian could be worth that much money? It was almost worth putting up with Native American (one of the more redundant of redundancies) from the same clowns who talk about flight attendants and daytime dramas and the height-impaired.
Little Feather had understood from the beginning that although they needed a full-blooded American Indian to work their scheme, one with the right background, they didn’t necessarily need her. The plains were full of Navajo and Hopi and Apache with dead grandpas. So she’d concentrated her attention on being just the right little squaw for their needs, until now, when the game had actually started.
It had started. The letter had gone out, over her signature, giving her whereabouts, telling her story. Would it fly? Or was there something Fitzroy and Irwin had forgotten that would come sneaking up behind her to bite her on the ass?
It was Andy and John and Tiny that had shaken her faith in Fitzroy and Irwin. Until then, she’d thought she was safe in their hands, she’d thought they were brilliant and brutal, and she’d thought nothing could stand in their way. For instance, they’d known the scheme couldn’t work if even one extraneous person knew about it, and so they’d made sure the extraneous people along the way, meaning the grave diggers in Nevada, didn’t survive their knowledge. Little Feather had never killed anybody, and she hadn’t killed those two, or been around when it was happening, but she didn’t mind it as a fact. A couple of loser winos; they were better off. So long as she didn’t have to watch, no big deal.
But now, these new three. They came on kind of goofy, but underneath they were pros in some way Little Feather didn’t know about. She’d never quite met their like before, and it seemed to her the most significant thing about them was how they refused to get worried. Well, John, he always looked worried—that was obvious—but worry didn’t interfere with them, that was the point.
And the picture of Tiny, casually holding the live grenade, was pretty well guaranteed to stick in the memory.
Riding along, thinking it over, watching Lake Champlain’s cold, pebbly gray surface off to the left of the road, she said, “Be interesting to know what they think of the letter. Andy and so on.”
Irwin kept his concentration on his driving, but Fitzroy half-turned to look back at her. Pretending surprise, he said, “Little Feather? Don’t you trust your own judgment?”
“My judgment, fine,” she told him. “It’s your judgment and Irwin’s where I’d like a second opinion.”
After that, there wasn’t much conversation in the car. And then, when they got to the Four Winds, there stood the recently black Jeep, parked in front of Irwin’s room, empty. Pulling in beside it, Irwin said, “That is the same Jeep, isn’t it?”
“I don’t imagine,” Fitzroy said, “we’re looking at its final color change. But where do you suppose they are?”
They all got out of the Voyager, looking this way and that, and Irwin said, “Suppose they got cold and they’re waiting in the office?”
“Wouldn’t they see us drive in?”
Little Feather said, “Fitzroy, why don’t you look in your room?”
They stared at her, then at the closed door of Fitzroy’s room. Fitzroy bustled to it, pulling out his key, muttering something about “Can’t possibly” or some such, and when he got the door open, there they were, watching a soap, Andy in one of the two chairs, John in the other, Tiny a kind of profane Buddha on the bed, back against the headboard.
“There you are,” Andy said, cheerful as ever, getting to his feet as John offed the TV with the remote. “Little Feather, here, have my chair.”
Fitzroy seemed to have lost some of his self-assurance. “Did you,” he asked, “did you ask the maid to let you in?”
“Oh, why bother people when they’re working?” Andy said. “Come on, Little Feather, take a load off. We all wanna see this letter of yours.”
I’m enjoying these clowns, Little Feather thought as she crossed to say, “Thank you, Andy, you’re a gentleman,” and take the chair that had lately been his.
Fitzroy, sounding put out, said, “I’m surprised you haven’t read the letter already. It’s in the drawer over there.”
Andy affected hurt surprise. “We wouldn’t poke around in your personal possessions, Fitzroy. We all respect one another, don’t we?”
From the bed, Tiny said, “Yeah, we’re all gonna get along now, that’s the idea.”
John said, “We’re all kinda anxious to see this famous letter.”
“Show it to them, Fitzroy,” Little Feather said. “Let’s see how it plays.”
Fitzroy could be seen to decide not to make a federal case out of a simple breaking and entering. They’d been invited, and here they were. “Of course,” he said, crossing to the room’s flimsy little desk. “I’m quite proud of it, in fact,” he said, opening the drawer and taking out the copy they’d made at the nearby drugstore. “Only one copy, I’m afraid.”
So the way they worked it, Tiny stayed where he was on the double bed, holding the letter, and Andy and John sat to either side of him, scrunched on the edges of the mattress, and all three read it at once. And Irwin took the opportunity to sidle into John’s chair.
They finished, and Tiny handed the letter to Andy, who stayed where he was but leaned forward to hand it to Fitzroy, saying, “Has a nice naïve quality to it.”
“Thank you,” Fitzroy said.
Tiny rumbled, “United at last with my own people.”
Irwin grinned. “Heart-tugging, that part.”
John said, “How much of it is true?”
“Almost all of it,” Fitzroy assured him.
The three stayed where they were. Crowded together on the bed, the wide man in the middle, the other two bracing themselves with feet out to the side, they looked like an altarpiece from some very strange religion, but none of them seemed ready or willing to move.
John said, “All those named in the letter, that family tree?”
Holding the letter, Fitzroy went down the names: “Joseph Redcorn, he’s real. You know that, you met him.”
Andy said, “You mean, we unburied him.”
“Exactly. His daughter-in-law Harriet Littlefoot Redcorn, she’s real, or she was. She’s dead, but there are records.”
John said, “And Doeface?”
“Harriet’s daughter,” Fitzroy said, nodding. “Completely real. All trace of her is lost.”
“And her daughter.”
“You mean Little Feather here,” Fitzroy said.