He was sorry her idea of asking the Tribal Council for help hadn’t worked out. He’d never thought much about the Tribal Council before, just knew it was there and people sometimes went to it to ask questions and get permits and things, but he’d always assumed it was something important, like the United States government or something. But when he saw Mr. Dog there, in the Town Hall, and saw what the meeting was like, he knew even before he talked to Mr. Dog that there wasn’t much chance Little Feather would find any help there. So that was another avenue closed.
Driving south, his fantasy was that, when this was all over, Uncle Roger would really give Benny that very good high-paying job at the casino he’d been hinting about, and Benny would go to Little Feather and tell her how bad he felt about her not getting to be Pottaknobbee on the reservation, and he would offer to build her a house on the reservation that would be all hers—he wouldn’t even live there—and she could ask him to visit sometimes or not; it would be strictly up to her.
And after all, she was a licensed blackjack dealer in Nevada; she could surely get a job at Silver Chasm casino, and Benny happened to know those dealers made very good money. So in his fantasy, Little Feather was robbed of her birthright without knowing it or knowing who’d done it to her, and Benny would make it up to her with a house on the reservation and a job at the casino and the presence of his company whenever she wanted it.
Phew. No wonder he couldn’t sleep.
Uncle Frank Oglanda had flown in a chartered plane from Plattsburgh yesterday to La Guardia Airport in New York City, and had taken a taxi to the graveyard where Joseph Redcorn was buried, where he had found the grave and marked it on a little map he made. He had also learned that the graveyard was locked at night, but he’d wandered around and come across a broken part of the fence where people could get through, and he’d marked that on his map as well. Then he’d taxied back to La Guardia and flown back to Plattsburgh and BMW’d back to Silver Chasm, and this morning he’d described it all to Benny, saying, “You’ll have to carry the coffin in through the break in the fence, sort of carry it sideways to get it through there, but it isn’t far from there to the grave. It’ll be easy, strong young fellas like you.”
It wasn’t easy. They found the right graveyard, no trouble, and down a long, dark, deserted, silent street surrounded by cemeteries, they found the small opening in the fence and parked the yellow van right next to it. When they got out of the van, there was a cold, nasty little wind that nipped at them and picked at them like ghosts, ice-cold invisible spirits coming at them out of the graveyard. Even though, naturally, they didn’t believe in all that stuff.
Now they had to wrestle this big heavy box out of the van and across the grass and through the narrow opening. The box was kind of slimy and dirty and kept wanting to slip out of everybody’s hands and crash onto the ground, which would be very bad if it happened. Also, it was hard for more than two people to carry the box, even when they weren’t trying to ootch it sideways through the opening in the fence, but the box was certainly too heavy to be carried by any fewer than three people, so the whole trip was difficult and exhausting and more than a little scary.
Also, though all three had brought along flashlights, it proved to be impossible to hold a flashlight and carry a coffin at the same time, so they did most of the carrying in the dark. Above them stretched a partly cloudy winter sky, with a very high half-moon sometimes laying its platinum wash over everything and sometimes hiding behind a cloud as though a light had been switched off. That was when the icy fingers of the wind plucked at them the worst.
When they finally reached the Redcorn grave and could put the coffin down, they were all completely worn-out, and the real work hadn’t even started yet. Panting, gasping, plodding through the last of the fallen leaves, shining their flashlights around at last, they trudged back to the van and got the shovels and the plastic tarp they would use to pile the dirt on, and brought it all to the grave. And then, with a communal sigh, they got to it.
The way it worked, two of them dug while the third kept a flashlight on them. Benny was in charge, saying when it was time for the flashlight guy to switch to a shovel, and he didn’t even cheat, but ran it as fair as he knew how, because he knew Geerome and Herbie were watching him and would put up a terrible bitch if they thought he was trying to pull a fast one.
The work was hard but mindless. They dug and dug and dug, and then at last Geerome’s shovel hit something that went thunk and he said, “Here it is.”
“Finally,” Herbie said.
Yes, finally. It was almost eleven at night by now, and they still had a lot to do. Benny was the one with the flashlight at this point, and he leaned down closer to shine its beam on Geerome’s shovel. There was wood down there all right, dark brown and solid under the crumbly lighter brown of the soil. “Okay, great,” he said. “I think we just clear one end, and then maybe we can pry it up.”
“Wait a minute, Benny,” Geerome said. “It’s my turn with the flashlight. Come on down here.”
The other two were now waist-deep in the hole. Benny said, “I’m not sure I can jump down there. What if I busted the wood or something?”
“We’ll help you,” Geerome said, and leaned his shovel against the side of the hole to show he was serious. Then he and Herbie held their hands up, and Benny leaned forward even more, and half-jumped, half-fell into the grave, all three of them tottering a bit. They might have fallen over if it weren’t for the sides of the hole pressing in on them.
“Give me the flashlight,” Geerome said, and a huge white light suddenly glared all over them. Benny, wide-eyed, astounded, terrified, could still make out every crumb of dirt on the cheeks of Geerome and Herbie, the light was that bright, that intense.
And so was the voice. It came from a bullhorn, and it sounded like the voice of God, and it said, “Freeze. Stop right where you are.”
They froze; well, they were already frozen. The three Indian lads standing in a row in the grave squinted into the glare, and out of it, like a scene in a science-fiction movie, came a lot of people in dark blue uniforms. Policemen. New York City policemen.
And with them came a capering old man in a threadbare cardigan and a rumpled hat, who cackled, actually cackled, as he cried, “Gotcha this time! You think you can just traipse around in here with all your flashlights and I’m not gonna know about it? You come back once too often, you did! I gotcha!”
30
When things got slow, Kelp liked to go to the safes. They were in the closet in the other room, which was all he could think to call a room with a bed in it that you didn’t sleep in. Anne Marie called it the guest room, but Kelp had never happened across any guests anytime he’d ever gone in there, if you didn’t count the occasional cockroach, which can happen in even the best-cared-for apartment in New York. So it was the other room. And in its closet were the safes; four of them at the moment, in a row on the floor.
This is a kind of safe that isn’t much made anymore, but your better-quality house or apartment wall is very likely to contain one. They are round and black and made of thick iron, and are a little smaller than a bowling ball. They have a round steel door on the front with a dial in it, and they have little iron ears, pierced, that angle out for mounting the safe on the studs inside the wall.