“You found her, huh?” McLanahan had said with a heavy sigh.
“I think it’s her,” Joe had said, remembering her from seeing her on the basketball court. She had gained weight since those days, her face was round, like a hubcap.
“Her mother called this morning, said she hadn’t shown up this morning. We always give missing person calls a few days if they come from the res, since those people vanish for days on end most of the time.”
“‘Those people’?” Joe repeated.
“You know what I’m talking about,” McLanahan said.”They operate on Indian time. If they say they’ll be someplace at nine, there’s no reason to worry until one or two. Same thing with the missing person calls. They always show up somewhere eventually, usually hungover.”
“This is Jessica Antelope we’re talking about,” Joe said.
“I know, I know. But she hasn’t played in five years. You know about her.”
Joe did. He had heard. And he had seen her a few times since. But he chose to remember her from the basketball court, when he and his daughter Sheridan would drive to the reservation simply to watch her play. Sheridan had idolized Jessica Antelope, studied her, tried to emulate her on the court. But despite Sheridan’s grit and determination, she could not run as fast, pass as cleanly, or score 40 points a game. Jessica had a blinding crossover dribble that compared legitimately to those of the great NBA point guards as she brought the ball down the court, and she left opponents flailing at air in her wake, and fans gasping. Joe had never seen a girl play basketball with so much natural grace and style, and neither had anyone else. Sheridan still had photos of Jessica Antelope, clipped from the Saddlestring Roundup, taped to her wall. Jessica had led the Wyoming Indian Lady Warriors, made up of only seven Northern Arapaho girls, to the state championship game, where they had lost 77–75 against Cheyenne, a much larger school. Jessica had scored 52 points in the loss.
But the scouts didn’t care about the loss. Jessica Antelope had been offered full-ride scholarships to over twenty universities, including Duke and Tennessee, the national powers. Instead, Jessica stayed on the reservation to take care of an ailing grandmother, she claimed. Then she gained weight, a lot of it. She drank beer and liquor with her friends. She took crystal meth, the scourge of the reservation, and was arrested for dealing it. Joe had seen her several times in the elk camps of out-of-state hunters, where she’d been hired as a camp cook. Joe suspected she was chosen for other services as well, and it pained him. Those hunters had no idea that the chubby twenty-two-year-old Northern Arapaho scrambling their eggs was once the greatest basketball player in the state of Wyoming.
Joe had heard Jessica had fallen in with Darrell Heywood and his friends on the res as well, and he hoped it wasn’t true.
Joe stood on the shore of the lake with Sheriff McLanahan, two deputies, and the tow truck driver. The temperature was now thirty degrees below zero, and the exhaust from the tow truck engulfed them in a foul-smelling cloud.
“There’s no way we’ll get that truck out of there tonight,” the driver said. “We’d have to hire divers to hook up the cable, and nobody in their right mind would come out tonight to do it.”
“What about Jessica’s body?” Joe asked McLanahan.
The sheriff shrugged. “She’ll still be there tomorrow.”
“What if there’s someone else in the truck?” Joe asked, exasperated.
McLanahan shook his head. “They’ll keep,” he said. “They aren’t going nowhere.”
Joe shot him a look.
“Besides, we know who was in the truck with her,” McLanahan said. “There’s a guy in the clinic with hypothermia. It’s her brother, Alan Antelope. He’s called ‘Smudge’ on the res, I guess. He showed up last night — somebody dumped him at the emergency entrance and took off. He’s in a coma, and hasn’t said anything.”
“So it was Jessica and her brother,” Joe said. “Damn, what were they doing out here?”
McLanahan shrugged. “Why do Indians do anything they do?”
“Did you ever see her play basketball?” Joe asked.
The sheriff shook his head. “I heard she was pretty good,” he said.
“She was the best I ever saw,” Joe said.
“We used to play Wyoming Indian in high school,” McLanahan said, addressing the tow truck driver more than Joe, launching into one of his stories that were always about him. “Those fucking Indians could run the court like there was no tomorrow. Run and gun, no set plays. They’d just try to run you right out of the building. They’d score ninety or a hundred points a game, but they didn’t play defense so we’d score ninety against them. During time-outs they’d sit on the bench and light up cigarettes. I kid you not. Fucking cigarettes on the bench.”
Joe turned away, started walking back to his truck. He could hear McLanahan going on, the driver laughing.
“When we’d run against ’em in cross-country, they’d do the same damn thing. One of ’em ran until his heart exploded in his chest. Too much smoking and drinking. Shit, they’d have other Indians stationed at the finish line just to stop their runners so they wouldn’t keep running and end up in the next county…”
“Darrell Heywood,” Marybeth said to Joe at home in the bathroom. “You hate that guy, don’t you?”
Joe was soaking in the tub, trying to thaw himself out. Feeling in his legs and arms was returning under the steaming water, but it hurt. After his teeth stopped chattering, he’d told her about finding Jessica Lynn Antelope in the ice.
Marybeth leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, wearing a thick robe. She looked well scrubbed and attractive, he thought. Her blond hair was mussed from a pillow, and her legs, what he could see of them beneath the robe, were firm and white. Sheridan and Lucy had been in bed for hours, since it was after midnight when Joe had gotten home. Marybeth had stayed up for him, reading a novel in bed.
“I don’t know if ‘hate’ is the right word,” Joe said. “I don’t appreciate him. I don’t like what he stands for.”
“Hasn’t he given hundreds of thousands to the reservation?” Marybeth asked. “Out of some trust fund he’s got?”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “But I don’t like his attitude. He pretends he’s an Indian. No, not that. He pretends he’s an Indian, but he thinks he’s better than them. Am I making sense?”
“Hardly,” Marybeth said, with a slight smile.
“He gives them money, but he doesn’t help them,” Joe said. “He likes the idea of being close to the Indians because it feeds his ego. But he preys on them, is what I think. They’re not stupid. He treats them like children, is what I’m trying to say. It’s that he doesn’t give them any credit that they’re real human beings. To him, they’re cartoon characters. People of the earth, or something.”
Joe remembered being in a small audience a couple of years ago, when Darrell Heywood gave the dedication for a new monument on the lawn of the Tribal Center. Heywood had designed the monument and, of course, paid for it. The granite obelisk was dedicated to the struggles of the Northern Arapaho and the Shoshone who shared the reservation. The ceremony took place shortly after Heywood actually moved there, after he began growing his hair long and single-braiding it Indian-style, when he began to insist everyone call him by his Indian name, White Buffalo. Heywood’s talk was rambling and self-indulgent, Joe thought, more about how profoundly he had been moved as a child when he first read about Pocahontas than about the struggles of the Northern Arapaho or Shoshone. How angry he was when he read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, how inspired after reading Black Elk Speaks. He confessed how he felt more connected to the Natives and their love of nature and mysticism than he ever was with his own parents. Heywood described, in fits and starts, his brief history of dropping out of college, traveling the country, participating in powwows and Sun Dances, the peyote-inspired vision he’d obtained that showed him he was related to his Native brothers and sisters by a psychic bloodline, how he’d found himself here, in Wyoming, home at last. He urged his brothers and sisters to resist the materialistic evils of the white man’s culture, to not get caught in their trap of predation based on money, power, and industry. To go back to what they were, what made them speciaclass="underline" being children of nature. Pure. Superior. Uncorrupted. He never mentioned his trust fund and inheritance at the time, Joe recalled.