“So he was due back when?” I said as I turned off the main road. “A couple of days ago?”
“Yeah, they should have dropped him off on their way back.”
“Do you have this guy’s phone number?”
“Tom left me Albright’s cell phone number. I’ve left a couple of messages, but haven’t heard back yet.”
“So maybe he hasn’t gotten them yet,” I said. “Maybe they’re just still up there.”
“It’s a fly-in hunt, Alex. They take you to the cabin, then come back for you a week later. By then you’re ready to come home, believe me.”
“You’re up there all by yourselves for a week?”
“They usually come back once during the week to check on you, fly out any animals you’ve taken. But aside from that, yeah, you’re up there all alone. Depending on where you go, it’s usually a long way from anywhere.”
“So where did they go? Isn’t there a lodge there or somewhere they take off from?”
“I’ve been trying,” he said. “Nobody’s answering. I know the phone service is kind of unpredictable up there, but damn, it just gives me a bad feeling.”
“But not bad enough to call the police?”
He thought about it for a moment. “You know what’ll happen if I do that. If they find out he’s up there, he’ll go back to prison.”
The driveway had four cars in it already, so I pulled off onto the edge of the road.
“More cousins,” he said as he got out. “This will be fun.”
I followed him around to the back door. There were toys everywhere-a red car, a big plastic yellow house with green shutters, even a wooden fort like something out of the Old West. “What do they do in this fort?” I said. “Play cowboys and Indians?”
“You’re funny,” he said. “Are you ready?”
“With all your family in there, we’re gonna play that game right now. I’ll be General Custer.”
He shot me a look. “Don’t bring any of those jokes inside,” he said. “Okay?”
“Lead the way.”
As he opened the door, the heat and noise hit us. There were at least twenty people in the kitchen, some men sitting at the table, some women holding young children. Two other children raced into the room, stopped to stare at us for a split second, and then raced out even faster.
One of the men stood up and put his hand on Vinnie’s shoulder.
“You’ve met my cousin Buck,” he said to me.
The man shook my hand. As he looked at me, his face told me absolutely nothing.
“I seem to remember,” I said.
Vinnie introduced me around to the rest of the room. It was all a blur after the first three or four names. There was a pot of coffee brewing in one of those big machines you see in restaurants. Another half-empty pot was keeping warm on the top burner. Without saying a word, one of Vinnie’s uncles poured me a cup.
“Your mother is in the bedroom,” Buck said to Vinnie. “She wants to see you.”
Vinnie asked me to wait out here in the kitchen. He went down the hallway like a man walking his last mile.
A couple more kids ran into the room and around the table. A woman yelled at them, while another woman right next to her gently rocked a baby in her arms. That baby could obviously sleep through anything.
One man broke open a pack of cigarettes and passed them around. Soon the air was filling up with smoke. Nobody looked at me. Not once.
I shifted back and forth on my feet, looked out the window at the cold, hard ground in the backyard. The telephone rang. A man picked it up. One of Vinnie’s cousins-not Buck, but some other cousin whose name I wouldn’t have remembered for a million dollars. He turned his back to me and talked in a low voice.
This is what Vinnie left, I thought. A house like this, on land owned by the tribe. All this family around him. Even if he lived in another house on the reservation, the family would be there. Maybe not all at once like this, but they’d come, one by one, every single day. That’s the way it works here. Your door is always open. Some days, I thought it was a great thing. It was something I envied. Today it was making me dizzy.
Vinnie moved off the rez, and his family still hadn’t accepted it. Hell, maybe they blamed me for it, like I was the one who kept him there. Move up to Paradise, Vinnie, away from your family. Buy your own land, build your own cabin. Live there all by yourself like a lonely white man.
I stood there for another few uncomfortable minutes, until Vinnie finally poked his head back in the room and beckoned me down the hallway. I sidestepped a couple of the kids to get to him. “What’s going on?” I said.
“She wants to talk to you.”
“Why does it feel like I’m going to see the principal?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. She just wants to ask you a couple of questions.” He led me down to the master bedroom and opened the door. The room was empty.
“Where is she?”
“She’s in the bathroom,” he said. “You’re company, so she had to get fixed up.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for leaving me out there with the rest of your family. We had a great time together.”
“They don’t dislike you, Alex. They just don’t understand you. In fact, they worry about you.”
“They worry about me?”
“Sure, you should hear them talk about you. My mother especially. She thinks you walk around carrying too much pain.”
“If your cousins ever get me alone in a dark alley, then I’ll be carrying some pain.”
He shook his head. “Alex, Alex…”
Vinnie’s mother came in before I could say anything else. She was wiping her hands on a towel.
“Mrs. LeBlanc,” I said, taking her hand. She was a large woman, round and soft around the edges, with big brown eyes. She was the epicenter of the whole family-hell, probably the entire reservation. She carried herself like she had long ago accepted the responsibility.
“Alex,” she said. “It’s good to see you. Please sit down.”
She steered me into the one chair in the room, and then sat herself down on the edge of the bed. Vinnie stood in the doorway.
“I appreciate your coming down here,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.” Whenever she talked about Paradise, this town not even thirty miles away, she made it sound like it was in the Arctic Circle.
“No trouble at all, ma’am.”
“You know my son Thomas is missing.”
“I wouldn’t say he’s missing yet, ma’am. Vinnie says he’s just a couple of days overdue.”
“Yes, from this hunting trip,” she said. “With these men we don’t know. This trip with my one son pretending to be the other.”
“You know that Vinnie’s been helping me,” I said. “I mean, this is why-”
“He’s my youngest child, you know. And he’s already had his share of trouble.”
“I know,” I said. “But there could be so many explanations for why he’s not back yet. I don’t think there’s any reason to be worried yet.”
She waved that away like so much smoke in the air. “You know,” she said, “when my oldest son was born, my husband’s mother asked me to call him Misquogeezhig. You know what that means.”
“Red Sky.”
“Yes. It’s actually a very peculiar name.”
I was about to make some remark about that, but held my tongue.
“It comes from the Waubunowin, the Society of the Dawn. That’s what the Red Sky is, you know-the eastern sky when the sun comes up at dawn. The Waubunowin, they were outcasts, and most of the tribe were afraid of them. They thought the members of this society had strange powers. My mother-in-law, I knew she had always been interested in the Waubunowin, but when she asked me to give this name to my firstborn, I was not happy. I thought it meant that my son would grow up one day to be an outcast himself.”
I looked up at Vinnie. He did not move, or make the slightest sound.
“My mother-in-law said to trust her. So I did. That is how Vincent was given the name Misquogeezhig.”
“For what it’s worth,” I said, “I think it’s a good name.”
“Yes, well, then I had two daughters. My mother-in-law had no interest in naming them. So I thought to myself, this is good. She is done with the naming of my children. But then I had my other son, Thomas. And she said to me, you must name him Minoonigeezhig, which means Pleasing Sky.”