Jim knew. He closed his eyes. The pain reached a crescendo and suddenly stopped. Just stopped.
Ezra’s voice rose and was filled with emotion. “You ain’t exactly the easiest man to live with, neither,” he said.
And with that, Jim died, a victim of his success.
The Master Falconer
In the midnight forests of the Bighorn Mountains, below timberline, all movement and sound ceased with the approaching roar. Elk quit grazing and raised their heads. Squirrels stopped chattering. The increasing roar caused the ground to tremble. And suddenly the stars blacked out as the huge aircraft skirted over the mountaintops, landing lights blazing, landing gear descending, the howl of jet engines pounding downward through the branches into the earth itself. The tiny town of Saddlestring, Wyoming, was laid out before the nose of the plane like a dropped jewelry box, lights winking in the night against black felt, the lighted runway just long enough for a plane this size to land on, but just barely.
The next morning, Nate Romanowski slipped out of Alisha Whiteplume’s quilt-covered bed on the Wind River Indian Reservation, pulled on a loose pair of shorts, and searched through the cupboards of her small kitchen for coffee. He tried not to wake her. There were cans of refried beans and jars of picante sauce, home-canned trout in Mason jars, but no coffee except instant.
As two mugs of water heated in the microwave, he opened the kitchen blinds. Dawn. Early fall. Dew and fallen leaves on the grass, dried into fists. A skinned-out antelope buck hung to cool from the basketball hoop over the garage.
Nate was tall, rangy, with sharp features and a deliberate, liquid way of moving. His expression was impassive, but his pale blue eyes flicked about from the hollows of his sockets like the tongue of a snake. Sometimes they fixed on an object and forgot to blink. Alisha said he had the eyes of a hunter.
“What are you doing out there?” she said from the dark of the bedroom.
“Heating water for coffee. Want anything in it?”
“Not instant. There’s a can of coffee under the sink in the bathroom.”
Nate started to ask why she kept coffee in the bathroom, but didn’t.
“Bobby has been coming over in the morning and stealing it,” she said in explanation. Bobby was Alisha’s brother, known to Nate as Bad Bob. “I hid it so he has to go steal it from someone else.”
Nate found a five-pound can of Folgers under the sink, and set about making a pot.
While it dripped and the aroma filled the kitchen, she came out of the bedroom wrapped in a blanket so long it brushed the floor. He glimpsed her thin brown feet and painted nails, and looked up to see her naked shoulder, a valentine-shaped face, bed-mussed black hair. Her eyes were obsidian pebbles perched over her cheekbones. He had yet to tire of simply looking at her.
“Did you hear that big plane last night?” she asked.
“I heard a roar. I thought it was me.”
She smiled. “You did roar, but earlier. You were sleeping when the plane came over us. It seemed really low. I felt you tense up when it came over, like you were going to jump out of bed and grab a gun.”
Nate didn’t respond. She padded over and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Do you know who is in the plane?”
He shrugged and said, “I’ve got an idea.”
“Are you going to say?”
“No, not yet.”
“You drive me crazy,” she said.
“You drive me wild,” he said, putting his own hand over hers.
“I’ve got to take a shower,” she said, slipping from his touch and reaching out to hook a strand of his long hair over his ear. He liked the intimate familiarity of the gesture. “I’ve got to get to school by seven-thirty. Playground duty.”
“I’ll bring you a cup of coffee when it’s done.”
“That would be nice,” she said, and left.
Alisha taught third grade and coached in the high school. She had a master’s degree in electrical engineering and a minor in American history and had married a white golf pro she met in college. After working in Denver for six years and watching her marriage fade away as the golf pro toured and strayed, she divorced him and returned to the reservation to teach, saying she felt an obligation to give something back. Nate met her while he was scouting for a lek of sage chickens for his birds to hunt. When he first saw her she was on a long walk by herself through the knee-high sagebrush in the breaklands. She walked with purpose, talking to herself and gesticulating in the air with her hands. She had no idea he was there. When he drove up she looked directly at him with surprise. Realizing how far she had come from the res, she asked him for a ride back to her house. He invited her to climb into his Jeep, and while he drove her home, she told him she liked the idea of being back but was having trouble with reentry.
“How can you find balance in a place where the same boys who participate in a sun dance in which they seek a vision and pierce themselves are also obsessed with Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty: Black Ops?” she asked. Nate had no answer to that.
She said her struggle was made worse when her brother Bob intimated that he always knew she would come back, since everybody did when they found out they couldn’t hack it on the outside. She told Nate that during the walk she had been arguing with herself about returning, weighing the frustration of day-to-day life on the reservation and dealing with Bobby against her desire to teach the children of her friends, relatives, and tribal members. Later, Nate showed her his birds and invited her on a hunt. She went along and said she appreciated the combination of grace and savagery of falconry, and saw the same elements in him. He took it as a compliment. They went back to her house that night. That was three months ago. Now he spent at least two nights a week there.
Nate was tying his hair back into a ponytail with a rubber band when Bad Bob Whiteplume entered the kitchen from outside without knocking. Bad Bob was halfway across the kitchen before he saw Nate in the doorway.
“I smelled coffee,” Bad Bob said, squinting at Nate and looking him up and down. “You’re here again, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Boinking my sister?”
“Say that again and we’ll have to fight.”
Bad Bob was shaped like a barrel and had a face as round as a hubcap. His hair was black and it glistened from the gel he used to slick the sides down and spike the top. He was wearing buckskins with a beaded front and Nike high-tops. Bob owned Bad Bob’s Native American Outlet convenience store at the junction, which sold gasoline, food, and inauthentic Indian trinkets to tourists. He also rented DVDs and computer games to boys on the reservation. The back room was where the men without jobs gathered to talk and loiter and Bob held court.
Smiling and holding his hands palms up, Bob said, “Okay, I won’t say it again. But your scalp would look good hanging from my lance.”
“Why are you talking like an Indian?”
“I am an Indian, Kemo Sabe.”
“Nah,” Nate said. “Not really.”
Bob poured himself a cup of coffee and sipped it, looking over the rim at Nate. “You haven’t commented on my garb.”
“I was waiting for you to bring it up.”
“Ten of us are in a television commercial,” Bob said. “They’re shooting it up on the rim. The new Jeep Cherokee, I think.”
Nate took a moment to say, “I guess they don’t build a Northern Arapaho.”
“No,” Bob said, grinning, thrusting out his jaw. He was missing every other bottom tooth, so his smile reminded Nate of a jack-o’-lantern. “I’ll suggest that to them, though. You should see the director. He’s from L.A. He’s scared of us.”
“Must be the Nikes.”
Bob laughed, the sound filling the room. “We told him we wouldn’t do it unless they increased our talent fee from five hundred a day to seven-fifty. We scowled. He caved.”