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 from 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 here, 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 here than you do.”
“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.”
“Jessica!” Linnie shrieked, flailing at Heywood, her bare palms slapping his naked skin, leaving white handprints.
“I thought she was in the truck!” Heywood yelled in self-defense, trying to ward off her blows. “There wasn’t anything I could do!”
“You could have grabbed her hand and pulled her out,” Joe said calmly. “You could have taken her to the hospital.”
Linnie was whaling away at him now, her hands balled into fists, swinging like an eggbeater.
“Linnie…” Joe said.
“Damn you!” Heywood cried, backhanding her across the face. “Stop it! I was freezing and wet. Smudge drove us into the goddamn lake! There was nothing I could do!”
Linnie was thrown back, but kicked at him hard. The heel of one of her feet caught him under the heart and brought a groan.
Joe had his weapon out, finding it in the folds of his clothes. “Darrell, you’re under arrest. I think the charge is officially ‘reckless endangerment.’ Kind of describes your whole life here, I’d say. You could have helped Jessica Antelope, but that wouldn’t have fit your little movie here, would it?”
Heywood howled in response and stood up, tearing the top of the sweat lodge off, diving naked through the hole, his big body thumping on the ground outside.
It wasn’t hard for Joe to follow the footprints in the snow, weaving in and out of the brush toward the river. And when Darrell Heywood began to moan, he was easy to locate.
Joe pushed through the brush.
Heywood had slipped on the ice of the river and fallen and was now stuck fast to it, his entire belly glued to the surface.
“I’m freezing here,” he said between sobs. “I can’t get free. I’m going to freeze to death.”
Joe shuffled across the ice and squatted down in front of Heywood.
“Hey, White Buffalo,” Joe said. “A real Indian would know not to run across a frozen river naked, I think.”
Heywood spat, and cursed. Said, “I’m freezing to death.”
“You’ve got a while yet,” Joe said. “But it’s not going to feel good when they peel you off.”
Heywood sobbed, his tears freezing instantly on the ice.
Joe saw the flash of wigwag lights bouncing off the low-hanging woodsmoke, heard the sirens coming.
“You never saw her play,” he said. “You didn’t know what she could do.”
Le Sauvage Noble (The Noble Savage)
In reality, the source of all these differences is, that the savage lives within himself, while the social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him.