I was the reluctant investigating officer, and I had known Mary Roebling since we were kids. Mary teaches English at Durant High School and is the girls’ basketball coach. She said she had asked Melissa Little Bird about the marks on her face and arms but couldn’t seem to get a straight answer. Later, Melissa complained about abdominal pains and blood in her urine. When Mary demanded to know what had happened, Melissa said that she had sworn that she wouldn’t tell. She was worried that she might hurt the boys’ feelings.
Ruby says I get the file out about once a week since the trial. She says it’s unhealthy.
At Mary Roebling’s request, I went to the high school in the afternoon during basketball practice. While the girls ran laps, I took off my badge, cuffs, and gun and placed them in my hat behind her desk. I sat in the office and played with the pencils until I became aware of the two of them standing in the doorway. Mary was about six even and had told me quite frankly that the only reason she had gone to the junior prom with me was because I was one of the only boys in class who was taller than she. She towered over the Little Bird girl and kept her from backing though the door by placing her hands on Melissa’s shoulders. The young Indian was coated in a youthful glean of sweat and, if not for the marks on her face and shoulders and the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome, looked like she had just been freshly minted. I held up one of the American Number Two pencils and said, “I can’t figure out how they get the lead on the inside.” To my surprise, her face became suddenly dark as she contemplated the issue. “I figure they got these trees that have the lead already in them.” Her face brightened in the relief of having the riddle solved.
“You’re the sheriff.” Her voice was childlike and carried all the trust in the world. I was back twenty-five years with Cady in front of a Saturday morning Sesame Street, watching “Policemen Are Our Friends.”
“Yep, that’s me.” Her eyes had traveled all the way from the rounded-toe boots to the matted silver hair that I’m sure was sticking out at undefined angles.
“Blue jeans.”
We were the third county in Wyoming to adopt blue jeans as regular duty uniform, but it was one of the downfalls of our particular brand of vehicular law enforcement that the common populace rarely saw us from the waist down. “Yep, big around as they are long.” Mary tried to stifle a laugh, and the girl looked to her, then back to me. Rarely do you get those glimmers of unadulterated love and, if you’re smart, you pack them away for darker days. I started to get up but thought better of it.
“Melissa, is your uncle Henry Standing Bear?” I figured the best way to get started was to establish some kind of personal reference.
“Uncle Bear.” Her smile was enormous. Henry was one of the most understated prophets I knew and one of the most personally interested individuals I had ever met.
I gestured for her to sit across from me and rolled up the left sleeve of my shirt to display the ghostly cross-hatchings that stretched back from my left hand. “I got hurt playing pool with your uncle Bear up in Jimtown, once . . .” The girl’s eyes widened as she sat in the chair opposite me, and she instinctively reached to place a forefinger on the marbled flesh of my forearm. Her fingers were cool, and her palms were strangely devoid of any lines, as if her life was yet to be determined. I reached across the desk slowly, sliding a palm under her chin and lifting to accentuate an angry contusion at the jawline. “That’s a good one, too.” She nodded with a slight movement that freed her face, and she dropped her eyes to the desktop, which informed us of the potential for the president’s physical fitness award. “How’d you get that?” She covered the offending jaw with a quick look to the side and a through-the-eyebrow glance at Mary.
“Melissa, I’m not here to hurt anybody, but I also want to make sure that nobody hurts you.” She nodded and began gently rocking back and forth, hands firmly clasped between her legs. “Has anybody hurt you?” Her attention stayed with the glass-covered surface of Mary’s desk.
“No.”
I studied Melissa’s reflection and tried to imagine her as she should have been. Her people were strong, clear-eyed Cheyenne from the Northern Reservation, with a little Crow from her maternal side. I tried to see a Melissa who hadn’t had the spark of curiosity robbed from her by a mother who had ingested too many I-90 Cocktails—Lysol and rubbing alcohol—when she was pregnant. Melissa should have been a beautiful Indian maiden standing on the rolling, grassy hills of the Little Big Horn, arms outstretched to a future that held promise, security, and freedom. When I looked up, it was as if she had read my mind, that we had shared a vision. She had stopped rocking and was looking at the diamond snaps on my shirt.
“It was romantic.” She said it flat, as if emotion would only rob her statement of its impact. Her eyes returned to the desk.
I leaned back in the office chair, allowing my fingertips to remain on the edge of the beveled glass. “What was romantic, Melissa?”
She spoke to the desk. “The walk.”
* * *
I was out of beer, Cady still hadn’t called, and I had given up on Doctor Leonard’s sheepskin cover as the salvation of a future well-coordinated interior. I needed a Rainier and some company so I cranked my hat down hard, buttoned my sheepskin jacket up tight, and stepped into the horizontal snow flurries that were whipping around the corner of the house. I figured I’d drive the half mile down the paved road to the Red Pony. I stood there on the planks for a moment, listening to something above the wind, wings whirring only thirty feet off the ground as the geese honked their warning cries to each other in an attempt to get south. Maybe they had waited too long to leave. Maybe I had, too.
Off in the distance, I could make out the neon pony cantering in the darkness and a small number of peripheral trucks parked in the adjacent gravel lot. As I got closer, I could see that the inside lights of the bar were not on and felt a surge of panic at the thought of having to drive all the way back into town for a beer. I parked the truck and could make out a few figures moving in the darkened window of the carryout. Couldn’t have been a blackout; the red neon pony shimmered across my hood and up the windshield. I pushed into the wind to open the bar’s glass door and came within inches of running into the owner and operator of the Red Pony, Henry Standing Bear.
Henry and I had known each other since grade school when we had gotten into a fight at the water fountain, and he had loosened two of my teeth with a roundhouse left that had came from the Black Hills. We had played against each other in the trenches of interior linemanship from peewee through high school, whereupon I finished up at USC, lost my deferment, got drafted by the marines, and went to Vietnam. Henry had made a halfhearted attempt at the white man’s educational system at Berkeley and had learned enough to protest against it before being rewarded for his efforts with an all-expense-paid, four-year vacation with the Special Forces SOG group at An Khe. It was here that Henry said he had learned of the white man’s true vision and power, of his ability to kill the largest number of individuals in the most effective manner possible.
Upon his return to the States, Henry had reattempted college life but found that his ability for being lectured to had deteriorated. He returned to political activity in the seventies and had been a seminal member of every Native American movement for the next ten years. Sensing that revolution is the industry of young men, however, he returned to Absaroka County for the funeral of the grandmother who had raised him and somewhere came up with enough cash to finance a deal with the Foundation that would transform an old Sinclair station, the only public building in Crossroads, into a kind of half-assed bar that he called the Red Pony. Henry had been known to read a great deal of Steinbeck. It was in the Foundation’s interest to promote the bar, if for no other purpose than to keep the shit-caked rubber boots of the locals out of their oriental-carpeted meeting rooms.