“So you think Jessica deteriorated because she hung out with Darrell Heywood?” she asked.
Joe thought for a moment. “Yup,” he said.
“But that didn’t put her in the lake, did it?”
“It might have been a factor,” Joe said. “He’s fairly well known for taking good care of his friends.”
“Meaning he supplied them with alcohol and drugs,” Marybeth said. “It’s so sad.”
“It is,” Joe said. “Giving alcohol to an alcoholic makes him happy, but it doesn’t help him. Buying stuff for people who won’t work makes you popular, but it doesn’t get them a job or any self-respect.”
“Are you thawed out yet?” she asked.
He looked up. “Why? Do you have something in mind?”
Later, Joe slipped out of the bed and pulled on his own robe against the cold that sliced into the house through the walls. He stood at the window, looking out at the night. He could feel the furnace working, fighting a holding action against the outside and not winning. A light snow fell, but the night was so cold that the flakes hung in the air and didn’t land. He thought of the moan of the ice and Jessica’s hand reaching through it toward the sky.
“That was nice,” Marybeth said from bed, from somewhere beneath the quilts.
“She was the best point guard Sheridan and I have ever seen,” Joe said.
At breakfast, Joe told Sheridan about Jessica Antelope.
“Who is she?” Lucy asked.
“She used to play basketball,” Sheridan said, her eyes moistening but her face holding steady. “Dad and I used to watch her.”
“Was she as good as you?”
Sheridan exchanged looks with Joe. “She was a lot better,” Sheridan said. “You know those pictures on my wall?”
“Oh,” Lucy said, and went back to her cereal.
“Sorry, Sheridan,” Joe said. He couldn’t tell what Sheridan was thinking.
“If I could do what she did,” Sheridan said, “I wouldn’t waste my talent like that. Why didn’t she keep playing, Dad?”
“I don’t know. She’s the only one who could answer that.”
“What was wrong with her?” Sheridan asked. “Didn’t she know how good she was?”
Joe couldn’t answer that one, either.
He drove to Dull Knife Reservoir in the morning after breakfast and watched as divers in thick winter dry suits chopped Jessica Lynn Antelope’s body out of the ice. When they pulled her free, her body was dark and limp and lay on the surface of the lake like a wet rag until the EMTs loaded her up on a gurney. Her frozen arm stuck out of the blanket like an antenna. The ambulance stayed until they could determine whether there were any more bodies.
It took half the day to hook up the pickup and winch it through the ice onto shore. The ice broke with the sound of explosives as they pulled it through.
Joe hung back, watching closely as the sheriff looked in the cab of the pickup.
“Dead men everywhere,” McLanahan declared loudly, and a hush fell over the workers, EMTs and sheriff’s office personnel.
Then McLanahan reached through the broken-out side window and showed everyone an empty sixteen-ounce Budweiser can. “At least two six-packs of dead men in there,” he said, nodding at the can. “The official beverage of the Wind River Indian Reservation.” Everyone laughed.
Joe sighed and left the scene. He hated McLanahan’s casual racism. Worse, he hated the fact that in too many instances, McLanahan was right.
On his way to the hospital, Joe called Nate Romanowski on his cell phone. Nate lived alone in a stone house on the bank of the Twelve Sleep River, where he flew and hunted falcons and lived well with no visible means of support. Joe trusted Nate even though most feared him, and Joe knew Nate was intimate with the tribal council of the reservation as well as many of both the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho who lived there.
Nate had already heard about the discovery of Jessica Antelope’s body.
“Did they find anyone else?” Nate asked.
“Not yet.”
“That surprises me,” Nate said. “I can’t see Jessica and her brother out together by themselves. They were always surrounded by other people.”
Joe told him what the sheriff had said about Alan.
“Smudge,” Nate said, and Joe could picture him nodding.
“Why do they call him that?”
“When he was a little boy, his face was always dirty,” Nate said. “His grandmother called him Smudge. It stuck, because his face is still always dirty.”
“Hmm.”
“I’d see if Smudge will talk to you,” Nate said. “He’s Jessica’s only brother, although he’s a real meth junkie. She’s got a sister, too, named Linnie. I’d check to make sure she’s all right. Linnie and Smudge hang out with Darrell Heywood. There might have been more than the two of them in that pickup.”
“I hope not,” Joe said, imagining other bodies drifting in Dull Knife Reservoir, their lifeless bodies bumping up against the thick shield of ice.
Joe strode down the hallway of the hospital, found the door with a placard in it that read ALAN ANTELOPE, and went in to find Smudge awake and alert and trembling violently.
Smudge was slight and dark and reminded Joe of a ferret. He had a huge blade-shaped nose and furtive eyes that didn’t hold on Joe for more than a second. His head was abnormally small, perched on the end of a long neck like a balled fist.
“I thought you were supposed to be in a coma,” Joe said, closing the door behind him.
“I wish I was,” Smudge said, his voice a buzz-saw timbre. “I’m a fucking hurting unit, man.”
Joe looked Smudge over, saw no wounds.
“I need something,” Smudge said.
“You’re withdrawing from meth,” Joe said, as much to himself as to Smudge. “That’s what hurts.”
Smudge’s face screwed up into a petulant fist. “Yeah, man, that’s what hurts. Go tell the nurses I need something. They don’t even know I’m here.”
“They know,” Joe said. “They just don’t know you’re awake. How long have you been conscious?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Not long.”
“What do you remember about getting here?” Joe asked.
Smudge thrust his fist of a face toward Joe to show his impatience. “I don’t remember anything,” he said.
“You don’t remember being in a pickup with Jessica? Out at Dull Knife?”
Smudge sat back as if he’d been slapped. Joe watched his eyes. Smudge was recalling something.
“We were in my truck,” Smudge said slowly. “Out by the lake…”
“That we know,” Joe said. “What else?”
Smudge shook his head. “It was dark, I know that.”
Joe rolled his eyes.