“Next thing I remember, I was getting pushed out of a car in front of the hospital.”
“Who pushed you?” Joe asked. “Who else was in the truck when it went into the lake?”
Smudge started to speak, then stopped himself. “Nobody. Just me and Jessica.”
“So someone asked you to keep your mouth shut. You do remember that, then?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” Smudge said, shaking his head from side to side in an exaggerated way.
“Sure you do,” Joe said. “Who told you to keep quiet? Who else was in the truck?”
“No one, I said. Man, could you get me a nurse?”
Joe tried not to glance at the call button hanging on a cord near Smudge’s shoulder.
“I’ll get you the nurse when you tell me who else was in the truck when it went into the lake.”
“That’s extortion,” Smudge said.
“Yup,” Joe said.
“I need something,” Smudge said, rubbing his arms with his hands as if killing ants that were crawling on his skin. “I need something bad.”
“Your sister didn’t make it,” Joe said. “Remember her?”
Smudge looked up, stopped rubbing. His eyes glistened. “Jessie?”
“Yes. She tried to swim to the top, but she didn’t make it.”
Smudge nodded. He knew.
“She was the best basketball player I ever saw,” Joe said. “My daughter worshipped her.”
“Yes,” Smudge said. “She was good, man.”
“She was more than good,” Joe said, remembering what Sheridan had said that morning. “Why didn’t she keep playing?”
Smudge shrugged. It was as if Joe had asked him why Jessica liked chocolate over vanilla.
“Didn’t she ever say?” Joe asked.
“Why are you asking me about her basketball?” Smudge asked angrily. “She didn’t care about that so much. Why are you asking me? Get a nurse.”
“Did she ever know how good she really was?”
“You white people. All you care about is how good she was at a stupid sport.”
“Better than keeping her down with the rest of you, like you did,” Joe said in a flash of rage.
Smudge said, “Fuck you! Get me a nurse. I’m dying here.”
Joe was across the room before he even realized it, his fingers squeezing Smudge’s windpipe, Smudge turning red, his eyes bulging.
“Who was in that truck with you?”
Smudge told him.
“That’s who I thought,” Joe said, releasing Smudge.
The door to the room flew open, an angry nurse filling it.
“What are you doing to him?” she demanded of Joe.
“I thought he was choking,” Joe said, backing away, not quite believing what he had done, how angry he had been. “I think he’s all right now.”
It was dark, already fifteen below. Joe cruised his pickup on the gravel roads of the Wind River Indian Reservation. Less than half of the streetlights worked. Wood smoke from the chimneys of tiny box houses refused to rise in the cold and hung like London fog, close to the ground.
He had always been taken by the number of basketball backboards and hoops on the reservation. Nearly every house had one, and they were mounted on power poles and on the trunks of trees. In the fall, during hunting season, antelope and deer carcasses hung from them to cool and age. In the summer, they were used by the children. This is where Jessica had learned how to play.
Beyond the homes, the brush grew thick and high along the river. The road coursed through it, and Joe slowed, inching his way along the road, looking for a sweat lodge he had been told was there.
When his headlights lit up the squat dome covered in hides, Joe keyed the mike on his radio and called Sheriff McLanahan.
“Knock, knock,” Joe said, shoving aside the heavy elk hide that covered the doorway. A thick roll of steam greeted him, the steam smelling like burning green softwood and human sweat.
“Hey, close the frigging door!” a man shouted inside, and a female giggled.
Joe ducked through the doorway, squatting under the low ceiling. The air was thick with steam and light smoke, so thick he could barely breathe. The only light was the flicker of the fire beneath the cast-iron pot of boiling water filled with herbs, roots, and leaves.
It took a moment for Joe’s eyes to adjust, but as they did he could see the two people inside across from him. Linnie Antelope, Jessica’s younger sister, naked and gleaming with the reflection of the fire, her wide young face staring at Joe, her eyes glazed over and vacant. A meth pipe sat on an upturned coffee can lid near her thigh.
Darrell Heywood was next to her, fat, white, and sweating. His long blond hair was stuck to his neck and chest with perspiration. He had no body hair.
“Joe Pickett,” Joe said. “I’m the game warden.”
“What the fuck is a game warden doing here?” Heywood asked, “You’ve got no jurisdiction on the reservation. We’re a sovereign nation.”
“We?” Joe asked rhetorically. “I thought you were from Connecticut.”
Linnie giggled, then stifled the sound with her hand. Joe thought she looked a lot like Jessica, when Jessica was younger. But Linnie was just skinny; her arms were sticks. She didn’t play basketball.
“You’re breaching etiquette,” Heywood said. “You don’t just come into another man’s sweat lodge. You must be invited in. And you aren’t invited.”
God, it was hot in there, Joe thought. He was already sweating beneath his heavy winter clothes.
“It’s important,” Joe said. “I couldn’t wait for an invitation. I wanted to talk with you before the sheriff got here and took you off to jail.”
He let that sink in.
Heywood had heavy cheekbones and a thick brow and bright blue eyes made brighter from the pipe. “What are you talking about?”
“You know,” Joe said.
Heywood looked around the structure as if someone there could interpret for him.
“Darrell knows everything,” Linnie said, her laugh a tinkle.
“Shut up, Linnie,” Heywood scolded, then turned back to Joe. “The sheriff has no more jurisdiction than you do here.”
“You’ve got a thing about jurisdiction, don’t you?” Joe said. “But the sheriff is calling the tribal police. They’ll be here together.”
Heywood’s face was red from the heat, but got even redder. “Get the hell out of here. Now.”
“You just left her out there,” Joe said. “She was trying to swim to the surface. In fact, her hand was sticking up out of the ice when I found her. If you’d stuck around just a few minutes longer, you might have helped her out.”
Heywood just glared.
Joe said, “You made it to shore after the truck went into the lake and called one of your friends to pick you up from the pay phone in the campground. As far as you were concerned, both Smudge and Jessica went down to the bottom together.”
“You’re crazy, man. You can’t prove that.”
Linnie, though, had withdrawn from him, and was now looking back and forth from Heywood to Joe.
“Smudge must have gotten out on his own,” Joe said. “I can’t imagine you and your friends taking him to the hospital out of the kindness of your heart, but you couldn’t just leave him there. Unlike you, he had no body fat to keep him warm. But you just left Jessica back there, didn’t you? You didn’t figure she was tough enough to try and swim out, did you?”
“Look,” Heywood said, “I told you to leave—”
“Is he talking about my sister?” Linnie asked, her voice high, unmodulated, unhinged.
“But you never saw her play,” Joe said. “You didn’t have a clue how tough she was, how talented she was. You never saw her potential. You didn’t think of her that way.”