When the hand was finished and the bettors paid off, he took the bill from me. “Changing a hundred,” he said. The pit boss gave him a nod.
I waited until the next hand was underway. “You didn’t come see me in the hospital,” I said.
“I’ve been working,” he said. “Dealer shows nine.”
“You came and saw me the last time,” I said. “Suddenly you’re too busy? Did they change your hours?”
“Twenty-two,” he said, after the first woman drew a ten to her twelve. “Alex, I can’t talk right now.”
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “I think I know why you didn’t come by.”
“Twenty-five,” he said, after the man drew a nine to his sixteen. “Alex, please.”
“You should have split the eights, sir,” I said to the man. From the look on his face, my advice was not appreciated. “I think you didn’t come by,” I said to Vinnie, “because you were consumed by guilt.”
He showed no reaction. He kept dealing. The third player stood on seventeen.
“Your turn,” he said to me. “Would you like a card?”
I just looked at him. The other three players looked at me.
“A card for you, sir?”
I slipped my hands under the table and gave it a little experimental nudge. “This thing isn’t too heavy,” I said. “I wonder what would happen if I flipped it right over.”
“You would be removed from the premises, sir,” he said.
“It would make a hell of a show, though, wouldn’t it?”
“Would you like a card, sir?”
“What I would like,” I said, “is for you to come outside with me.”
“Alex, I just got on this table,” he said. “I can’t leave.”
I gave the table another nudge. This time all the little piles of chips fell over. The three other players looked around like they were expecting somebody to help them.
Vinnie closed his eyes. “Finish the hand,” he said. “Then we’ll go.”
“Give me a card,” I said.
He put a six on my fourteen. Then he threw over his hole card and showed nineteen. “You win,” he said. He cleaned up the table, then signaled for the pit boss. “I have an emergency,” he said to the man.
The boss looked at me and then gave a little wave. Another dealer was there in three seconds to take Vinnie’s place.
I waited until we were in the parking lot. Then I started thinking about where I should hit him first. The problem was, I wasn’t sure that I had the strength to lift my arm high enough to swing at him. And I didn’t feel mad enough to start kicking him. Not yet, anyway.
“Tell me something,” I said. “What happened to that big lecture you were giving me about Indians not interfering in each other’s lives? That whole story about how your mother didn’t even make you go to the dentist. You make your own way, you choose your own path, all that bullshit.”
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“What about kidnapping Dorothy from my cabin?” I said. “Isn’t that interfering with her life? Just a little bit?”
He looked out at the road. A cold wind picked up. I barely felt it.
“So when are you going to explain this to me?” I said. “Before or after I beat the living crap out of you?”
“Alex, don’t.”
“Why do you say that? Because you don’t want to hurt me? You don’t want to have to use some secret Indian chokehold on me?”
He looked at me. “Stop it,” he said.
“How many of you guys did it take?” I said. “She must have put up quite a fight.”
“In case you’re forgetting,” he said, “I was in jail the night she was taken.”
“Yes, you were. But you’ve only got, what, seven hundred cousins? How many came out that night?”
“How did you find out?” he said. “Who told you?”
“Guess what, Vinnie. Nobody had to tell me. Some of us white people can figure things out ourselves. I knew it wasn’t Bruckman and it wasn’t Molinov. Neither of them even knew she was with me until the next day. Even if they did know, they wouldn’t have known to go to that second cabin. It had to be somebody who actually saw me take her there. Somebody who was in the woods, watching us.”
He looked away again.
“It also explains why she opened the door that night. They must have tricked her. What did they do, call her by her Indian name?”
“I didn’t know about any of this,” he said. “I swear. I didn’t know. I told you Jimmy and Buck were with me when I went after Bruckman. When I got arrested, I guess they kept following them. Bruckman and Dorothy, both. When Dorothy ran out on him that night, they split up. Buck followed Dorothy to the bar, then to the Glasgow, then to your place.”
“Of course he’s good at following people,” I said. “He’s an Ojibwa.”
“Will you knock it off?” he said. “He’s a college student. He’s gonna be a lawyer one day. He and my other cousins, I don’t know how to make you understand this, Alex. They’ve seen too much. This guy Bruckman, he had taken one of our people from us. Then he brought her back, like he was rubbing our noses in it. And he was trying to sell drugs to our people, Alex. To some of us, the ones who don’t know better. He was another white man trying to destroy us. They decided it was time to start doing something about it.”
“I came to that jail the next day and bailed you out,” I said. “You’re telling me you had no idea any of this was happening?”
“No,” he said. “I swear to you.”
“So when did you know, Vinnie?”
He hesitated.
“When did you know?”
“The night you were arrested,” he said. “I saw her.”
“Wait a minute, the night I was arrested? On the bridge? The next morning you came over and helped me clean up that last cabin, and you were asking me why I was still trying to find her.”
“I wanted you to stop,” he said. “You’d been through enough.”
“My God, Vinnie. Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“I didn’t think I had to,” he said. “It sounded like you were done with it.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “And all this time, up until that night, you didn’t have the slightest idea that your own cousins took her?”
“I don’t live on the reservation,” he said.
“That’s not a very convincing answer.”
He looked at me. He didn’t say anything.
“When we went to talk to her parents,” I said. “When I thought they were acting strange and you gave me your big speech about the way of the Ojibwa, was that all a sham? Did they already know?”
“I think her parents knew she was safe,” he said. “That’s all. They didn’t know anything else.”
“And everybody just let me run around trying to find her?” I said. “Do you have any idea what I went through?”
“You were looking for Bruckman,” he said. “My cousins probably didn’t want to stop you from finding him.”
“You mean if I found him…,” I said.
“They would have taken care of him,” he said.
“Listen to you,” I said. “You sound like the Mafia or something.”
“No,” he said. “Just a new generation, Alex. We’ve been through too much. We’ll do whatever it takes to save our people.”
“Beautiful,” I said. “I’m moved.”
He didn’t say anything.
“So where is she now?” I said. “Where did you see her?”
“In Canada,” he said. “She wanted to call you.”
“Why didn’t she?”
“They didn’t want her to,” he said. “They didn’t want… I mean, they wanted to wait.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The people who are taking care of her.”
“The people who kidnapped her,” I said.
“No.”
“They came into the cabin,” I said. “And then they dragged her out of there.”
“It didn’t happen that way,” he said. “That’s not what they told me.”
“There were people in that cabin,” I said. “And they did a nice job of busting up the furniture.”
“No,” he said. “They’re helping her. They’re getting her cleaned up…”
“Is that what she told you?”
“Yes,” he said. “And she asked me to tell you something, too. She said to say that she’s sorry she got you involved in this, and something else about your pipes.”