I’ll be damned.
I thought about waiting for fingerprints but, if my pen pal was the one who killed Devon, he wasn’t that stupid. I pried a finger under the flap and opened it. It was the same place-card stock, this time with the typewritten message that read GO BACK TO THE INDIAN. Same dropped out spot on the typewritten O.
I stared at it and suddenly felt someone at my side. I started and turned with the football helmet automatically swinging back.
“Whoa, big guy.” She was short, dark-haired, and wore a black leather jacket with the collar turned up. A bottle of beer dangled from her hand as she turned and placed both elbows on the railing with utter nonchalance. She took a sip. “Don’t do it. Human life is a valuable commodity…” She paused for a second. “Ah, fuck it, I can’t remember the rest.” Vic turned and looked at me, then at the helmet in my hand. “But I can see why you’d want to jump after last season.”
10
“So, are you trying to fuck my mother?”
I watched the taxi driver’s head turn toward us as she finished off the beer and dropped the empty bottle on the floor of the cab. The driver’s voice was high and foreign. “Madam?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m the emissary from Wyoming; you don’t write, you don’t call.” She propped an elbow on the sill of the open window and pushed her fingers into the black hair. “You didn’t answer my question.”
The driver’s voice rose again. “Missus?”
“Why would you ask that?”
She looked out at the city night speeding by. “I got a flight in earlier and saw the two of you at my Uncle Alphonse’s. You looked pretty cozy together so I didn’t want to intrude.”
“Kind lady?”
I sighed. “Your mother has been a great help.”
“You say that like I’m not gonna be.”
The driver wasn’t giving up. “Madam?”
Vic looked annoyed and glared at him through the rearview mirror. “What!?”
He sounded apologetic. “You cannot leave that beer bottle in the cab.”
Vic looked at him for a moment and then picked up the container by sticking an index finger in the opening. “This bottle?” She then slung it from the open window and over the railing into the Schuylkill River. I almost rebroke my nose on the Plexiglas divider when the driver hit the brakes.
It was only a three-block walk the rest of the way to the hospital, and I watched Vic as she soaked up her hometown. “No, I can see that you’re going to be a great help.” She looked different in the city, as if she were home. She didn’t blend in Wyoming, but here it was as if all the pieces fell into place. I had never seen the clothes she was wearing-the black leather jacket, black T-shirt, black slacks, and black Doc Martins. “Does your family know you’re here?”
“Only Alphonse. I went in after you guys left.”
“How come you didn’t come in before?”
She pursed her lips and glanced toward the river. “I like to time my entrances.”
The security guards at HUP looked up as we passed by but looked back down as we went up the escalator to the elevators on the mezzanine. Vic stopped and was looking at the note. “It could only mean Henry.”
“That’s what I thought, but I don’t get it.”
“Maybe the Indian will.” She threw an arm up to hold the automatic doors of the elevator. “You got a key to Cady’s place?”
I stood there, unsure. “You’re not coming?”
She shook her head. “I don’t do this kind of thing well, so I just don’t do it.”
“Don’t you want to say hello to Henry?”
“I’ll see him soon enough.” It was an awkward moment, but then she smiled and gestured behind me with her chin. “Normally, I’d say let’s go get the asshole who did this, but I think somebody beat us to it.”
I had to blink to adjust my eyes to the artificial light in the ICU. I could smell burning cedar and sage. The night nurse started to stand but noticed it was me and sat back down. She looked at the helmet in my hand and just smiled. Evidently, Henry had already worked some magic just by getting the clearance that would allow us to perform the ceremony.
He turned and looked at me, registering no surprise when I told him that Vic had arrived. I looked at the intricate arrangement of items in the room. “It is already working.”
I handed the Bear the football helmet. “Good thing you didn’t need a tomahawk or I would’ve had to go to Atlanta.”
He studied the helmet and the wings with trailing feathers. “This will do.”
There was a buffalo skull at Cady’s feet with the nose pointed toward her. There were two black stones by her right side on the bed, two red ones on her left, and a red one and black one on the pillow above her head. There was a ceramic bowl that was filled with dirt on one of the carts. Evidently, as a stranger in a strange land, the Bear had great gathering skills.
He put the helmet on one of the monitors, and I watched as he laid sticks on the bed in two parallel lines with each pair of ends joined by a V-shaped connection; it was a Hetanihya, or Hetan, a man figure. It looked as if the Bear was performing a Cheyenne sweat lodge ceremony but without the sweat or the lodge.
His beaded medicine bag was also draped over the cart; he took his ceremonial pipe, the bowl of which was carved from catlinite into the shape of a buffalo, from it. He fit the buffalo into the stem, filled the pipe, lit it, and then drew a circle around the Hetan with the stem. He puffed on the pipe for a while, then motioned me to the opposite side of the bed and handed it to me. I smoked for what I thought was a commensurate amount of time, then handed it back to him. We went through four bowls of tobacco, and then the Bear scattered sweetgrass and juniper on the stones surrounding Cady. He picked the pipe up and pointed it to the cardinal directions and rested it against the buffalo skull, the stem between the horns. Then Henry took a medicine bundle out of the green velvet bag that he always carried with him-and which, according to him, had saved him from dying of a gut-shot wound deep in a Bighorn Mountain blizzard. He placed the bundle on the pillow by Cady’s head and handed me an old turtle rattle that was decorated with teeth and hair and deer toes. I wasn’t told to shake the rattle, so I remained still. Henry spoke in a quiet but authoritative voice.
“Spirits, hear me; think especially of me, a miserable man. Those that enter my sweat lodge for safety, going out may they leave behind all that is bad. Take thought of them; that good may come to them, take thought.”
He stopped and took a deep breath, and the next part was spoken as if it had just occurred to him. “Let horses of different colors come to them.” He nodded toward the west-facing windows and gestured toward the buffalo skull. “Your pipe is filled; come and smoke. When they go out of my sweat lodge, may some good go with them. To the places whence they came, may they all take good luck. May all their relatives receive good; their children let them embrace with joy. Let their way lie along the good road.”
The emotion was creeping into his voice. “That our patients may arise with ease, take thought of them; let them once more walk about with joy.” His voice caught in his throat, and it was only then that I realized he was speaking English.
“Who are ye that taught this custom? I do not claim to know anything; I am poor; I am far from knowing anything. Old men taught me this way, and if I make a mistake, turn it to good. Everything I ask of you, grant me. Henahi! ”
I shook the rattle four times, as instructed, and then listened as Henry sang eight songs in Cheyenne. When he finished, he slumped into the chair beside me with his hands trailing to the floor.
I reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “Thank you.”
He nodded and smiled knowingly. “It worked.”
I looked at him, then at Cady, and back at him. Nothing seemed to have changed. I got up and took a closer look, knowing that Henry didn’t make statements like that lightly. I turned back and looked at him. “How can you tell?”