Joe had heard Jessica had fallen in with Darrell Heywood and his friends on the res as well, and he hoped it wasn’t true.
Joe stood on the shore of the lake with Sheriff McLanahan, two deputies, and the tow truck driver. The temperature was now thirty degrees below zero, and the exhaust from the tow truck engulfed them in a foul-smelling cloud.
“There’s no way we’ll get that truck out of there tonight,” the driver said. “We’d have to hire divers to hook up the cable, and nobody in their right mind would come out tonight to do it.”
“What about Jessica’s body?” Joe asked McLanahan.
The sheriff shrugged. “She’ll still be there tomorrow.”
“What if there’s someone else in the truck?” Joe asked, exasperated.
McLanahan shook his head. “They’ll keep,” he said. “They aren’t going nowhere.”
Joe shot him a look.
“Besides, we know who was in the truck with her,” McLanahan said. “There’s a guy in the clinic with hypothermia. It’s her brother, Alan Antelope. He’s called ‘Smudge’ on the res, I guess. He showed up last night — somebody dumped him at the emergency entrance and took off. He’s in a coma, and hasn’t said anything.”
“So it was Jessica and her brother,” Joe said. “Damn, what were they doing out here?”
McLanahan shrugged. “Why do Indians do anything they do?”
“Did you ever see her play basketball?” Joe asked.
The sheriff shook his head. “I heard she was pretty good,” he said.
“She was the best I ever saw,” Joe said.
“We used to play Wyoming Indian in high school,” McLanahan said, addressing the tow truck driver more than Joe, launching into one of his stories that were always about him. “Those fucking Indians could run the court like there was no tomorrow. Run-and-gun, no set plays. They’d just try to run you right out of the building. They’d score ninety or a hundred points a game, but they didn’t play defense so we’d score ninety against them. During time-outs they’d sit on the bench and light up cigarettes. I kid you not. Fucking cigarettes on the bench.”
Joe turned away, started walking back to his truck. He could hear McLanahan going on, the driver laughing.
“When we’d run against ’em in cross-country, they’d do the same damn thing. One of ’em ran until his heart exploded in his chest. Too much smoking and drinking. Shit, they’d have other Indians stationed at the finish line just to stop their runners so they wouldn’t keep running and end up in the next county…”
“Darrell Heywood,” Marybeth said to Joe at home in the bathroom. “You hate that guy, don’t you?”
Joe was soaking in the tub, trying to thaw himself out. Feeling in his legs and arms was returning under the steaming water, but it hurt. After his teeth stopped chattering, he’d told her about finding Jessica Lynn Antelope in the ice.
Marybeth leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, wearing a thick robe. She looked well scrubbed and attractive, he thought. Her blond hair was mussed from a pillow, and her legs, what he could see of them beneath the robe, were firm and white. Sheridan and Lucy had been in bed for hours, since it was after midnight when Joe had gotten home. Marybeth had stayed up for him, reading a novel in bed.
“I don’t know if ‘hate’ is the right word,” Joe said. “I don’t appreciate him. I don’t like what he stands for.”
“Hasn’t he given hundreds of thousands to the reservation?” Marybeth asked. “Out of some trust fund he’s got?”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “But I don’t like his attitude. He pretends he’s an Indian. No, not that. He pretends he’s an Indian, but he thinks he’s better than them. Am I making sense?”
“Hardly,” Marybeth said with a slight smile.
“He gives them money, but he doesn’t help them,” Joe said. “He likes the idea of being close to the Indians because it feeds his ego. But he preys on them, is what I think. They’re not stupid. He treats them like children, is what I’m trying to say. It’s that he doesn’t give them any credit that they’re real human beings. To him, they’re cartoon characters. People of the earth, or something.”
Joe remembered being in a small audience a couple of years ago when Darrell Heywood gave the dedication for a new monument on the lawn of the Tribal Center. Heywood had designed the monument and, of course, paid for it. The granite obelisk was dedicated to the struggles of the Northern Arapaho and the Shoshone, who shared the reservation. The ceremony took place shortly after Heywood actually moved there, after he began growing his hair long and single-braiding it Indian-style, when he began to insist everyone call him by his Indian name, White Buffalo. Heywood’s talk was rambling and self-indulgent, Joe thought, more about how profoundly he had been moved as a child when he first read about Pocahontas than about the struggles of the Northern Arapaho or Shoshone. How angry he was when he read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, how inspired after reading Black Elk Speaks. He confessed how he felt more connected to the Natives and their love of nature and mysticism than he ever was with his own parents. Heywood described, in fits and starts, his brief history of dropping out of college, traveling the country, participating in powwows and sun dances, the peyote-inspired vision he’d obtained that showed him he was related to his Native brothers and sisters by a psychic bloodline, how he’d found himself here, in Wyoming, home at last. He urged his brothers and sisters to resist the materialistic evils of the white man’s culture, to not get caught in their trap of predation based on money, power, and industry. To go back to what they were, what made them speciaclass="underline" being children of nature. Pure. Superior. Uncorrupted. He never mentioned his trust fund and inheritance, Joe recalled.
“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 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?”