I climbed into my car and drove to the reservation office. Maybe this would be simple. Perhaps Davy Cloud, if he was still alive, which I doubted, was living only miles away on the reservation. As I parked and got out I peered up to see that the sun was giving in to a sky that looked like snow. Inside, I found a lone woman sitting at a desk behind a long, high counter.
“What can I do you for?” she asked.
“A man could hear that a couple of ways,” I said.
“A man could,” she said. “But a man won’t.”
“Fair enough.” I put the photograph on the counter. “I’m looking for this man.”
“I’d be looking for him, too,” the woman said. “He’s a looker.”
I nodded. “But he’s about eighty now.”
“Oh.”
“His name is Davy Cloud.”
“No Davy Cloud,” she said. “There’s a Roberta Cloud. No Davy Cloud.”
“He’s Roberta’s son.”
The woman looked at me with a sidelong glance for a second. Then she might have shaken her head. I wasn’t sure.
“Could you check?”
“Check what?”
“Don’t you have a register or a roll or something?”
“Yes, we have a list of everyone in the tribe. Is he Arapaho?”
“He’s Roberta Cloud’s son.”
“Okay, I’ll look up Roberta.” She walked to a desk and sat at it, facing a computer screen. “We just digitized what we have. Here’s Roberta. No mention of a son. But that wouldn’t be that strange. Eighty years ago some people just had their kids and that was it. No paperwork, no nothing.”
“A reservation phonebook?”
She came back to the counter, reached under it, and pushed the thin volume that was the phonebook toward me. “Look for yourself. One Cloud. Roberta Cloud.”
“I believe you,” I said. “Do you have any old phonebooks?”
“No.”
“Is there a library on the reservation?”
She shook her head. “There’s a library in Lander.”
“Thank you. Sorry to come in with such strange questions.”
“Every week some wasichu comes in here looking for an Indian nobody knows.”
She was joking, but she had used Lakota slang for a white person and it kind of rankled me. “I’m not white,” I said.
“You’re not Indian,” she said.
“True enough. Have a good day, ma’am.”
I drove to the library in town. It was late in a steel-gray afternoon. I asked the cliché of a librarian at the reference desk if they had old phonebooks. They had some for Lander and a few for the reservation. Apparently the reservation hadn’t started keeping a phonebook until seven years earlier. Still, I looked through all of them. I had nothing better to do with my time.
I found a computer, got online, and found a couple of David Clouds. Not one was Native. All were young and none were in Wyoming. And as usual I felt a little sullied by having been online.
I drove to a diner and tried to find some food. It should have been easy, given that I was in a restaurant, but it was not. The chicken soup tasted like soap and the club sandwich’s only memorable attribute was that it was enormous. The waitress was an older woman who seemed well aware that the food was substandard.
“I would ask you if everything’s okay,” she said and left it at that, just filled my mug with coffee and walked away.
When she came back, I asked her how long she’d worked there.
“Twenty years,” she said.
“That’s a long time,” I said.
“You bet your sweet ass that’s a long time. Now every week feels like twenty years.”
“Sorry,” I said. “You ever have any Arapaho men work in the kitchen?”
“A couple. A Sioux guy worked the kitchen last year.”
I showed her the photograph. “You ever see him?”
She studied the image. She gave it a good, very long look. “Nope, never seen him.”
“That picture was taken about thirty years ago,” I said.
She turned her head to the side like a dog and said, “There is something familiar about him.”
“So, maybe he worked here?” I asked.
“What’s his name?”
“Davy Cloud.”
She shook her head, but said, “He does look familiar. But all Indians look alike to me.”
“Well, okay then.”
“No, he hasn’t worked here since I’ve been here. I know that much.”
“Thank you.”
“Sure thing.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot,” she said.
“Is this chicken soup?”
She glanced quickly back at the window. “That’s what I’m told. It’s bad, right?”
“Tastes like soap.”
“It tastes exactly like Palmolive dish soap. Exactly like it.” She smiled at me as if we were sharing some important knowledge.
“Why didn’t you mention this when I ordered it?”
She shrugged.
I put the photo back in my breast pocket.
I walked into two other restaurants, for no reason except that I had time to kill and didn’t know what else to do, showed the photo, and got strange looks. When it was getting late I wandered into a run-down tavern with pool tables and a jukebox and ordered a beer. I said hello to the woman who was working the bar. A couple of bikers shot a game behind me. I thought, what the hell, and pulled out the photograph.
“Excuse me, miss, but have you ever seen this man?” I asked the bartender.
“What are you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you a cop?” At the word cop I heard the pool game stop briefly. “You some kind of private eye?”
“No, I’m an engineer.”
That didn’t help clear things up at all, so I decided to change my story. I told the next person that Davy Cloud had come into an inheritance. The heavyset blond young man with two sleeves of tattoos showed great interest.
“Is there a finder’s fee?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Then why are you looking?” he asked.
“Friend of the family.”
“Fuck that.” He went back to playing pool.
“Let me see that picture,” a woman said.
I did.
“I know that guy.”
“You do?” She was about twenty and wouldn’t even have been born when the picture was taken.
“Yeah, that’s that Indian actor. What his name?” She bumped her forehead with her fist a couple of times. “Damn it. Sherry, come over here.”
Sherry did, along with three leathery bikers. They all looked at the picture together.
The first woman said, “What’s that guy’s name? He was in that movie with Hal Kilmer.”
“Val Kilmer,” Sherry corrected her. She thought, gently pounding her own forehead with her palm. “Graham Greene. He was in that Dances with Wolves.”
“Val Kilmer wasn’t in that,” a biker said.
“The movie was Thunderheart,” Sherry said. “I know my movies. Yeah, that’s Graham Greene.”
I looked at the picture. I’d seen both of the movies and he did look a little like Graham Greene. In fact, he looked a lot like Graham Greene. Then I felt like an asshole for thinking that maybe the two men looked alike, as if it was because they were both Indians.
One of the bikers stared at me. He had a cliché red bandanna tied over his hair. “You know this guy?” he said, more an accusation than a question.
“Trying to find him for a friend.”
“Why?”
“Some inheritance thing,” the first guy I’d talked to said as he was taking his shot at the table.