Yellow Bird

by Sierra Crane Murdoch

  It was Irene who noticed when her mother’s spoons went missing, who said one day in her blunt manner, “Mom, your son is using. He’s taking your spoons and using them for drugs.”

  “Oh my,” Madeleine replied.

  No one could blame Madeleine for failing to notice something unfamiliar to her. Lissa liked to joke that her grandmother could not tell the difference between sage and marijuana: “She smells weed, and she’s like, Gee, that’s good. My kids are praying.” But to Irene, at least, the change was obvious: Alcohol was becoming a side note to more devastating addictions.

  If the flood had tethered the people to the same past, money was dividing them by their futures.

  And it was not only tribal members suffering the impacts of the boom. “You know a white boy went missing from Mandaree,” Lissa announced one day. “He went missing from Tex’s place.”

  Now even Irene did not know how to respond. Madeleine simply replied, “Oh my,” and no one said anything after that.

  * * *

  —

  WHENEVER LISSA VISITED the new house in White Shield, she sat in the living room or at the kitchen table and talked over the din of the television, or if the day was warm, she went out on the porch, drank coffee and smoked cigarettes, and watched pelicans lift up from the sloughs. Her visits had become easier since the first reunion after her release from prison, but they were not exactly comfortable. For one thing, her mother, who wore her hair in a tight perm, still regarded Lissa distantly, as if at any moment she might pull a childhood stunt. The rest of her discomfort Lissa owed to how hot her relatives kept the house during the winter. The heat made Lissa want to shout, “Mitákuye oyás’in!” like one did in the sweat lodge before the holy man threw open the door.

  Lissa rarely mentioned KC to her mother. The first time she did, it seemed that Irene did not hear. The second time, Irene replied, “You better be careful. These people are not good people. They could come after you or somebody in our family.” Madeleine had agreed.

  Lissa recognized in their warnings a fear so familiar to her that she regarded it as its own species of fear, endemic to the reservation. “When you leave back to Fargo, we still have to be here,” her relatives said, as if Lissa’s distance shielded her from the political reality of reservation life. In a certain sense it did: The tribe provided almost everything on Fort Berthold—work, shelter, lunch for elders, grants to pay medical bills or attend the Indian National Finals Rodeo. People said it paid to be a friend of a councilman or, better yet, family, and if friend became foe, the consequences could be grave. “You remember Evangeline,” Irene said—Irene’s best friend who once spent a winter in a tipi outside her tribally owned house after someone in tribal government locked her out on a grudge.

  Still, Lissa knew it was not just out of fear that her relatives warned her—they also respected Tex Hall. His reputation had grown in the year since Wayne, Irene’s husband, died. Recently, a photo had circulated of Tex shaking President Obama’s hand at a White House Christmas party, and it seemed, anyway, that he spent more days traveling to Washington, D.C., and other cities than at the tribal headquarters. The boom had given him this power, in part, with Fort Berthold already producing a fifth of the oil coming from North Dakota. Tex wielded this fact like a club, threatening to pull out of a state tax agreement if the legislature did not amend it in the tribe’s favor. He had come to be seen by many as a gatekeeper to the reservation. To do business on Fort Berthold, it was rumored, one had to win his favor. This was of little consequence to the Yellow Birds, none of whom worked in the industry, but it mattered to them that Tex was powerful and, more important, that he was family.

  “Tex, I admire him!” Irene told Lissa one day. “He is a leader in a lot of different ways. But when people start going up the ladder, you know, sometimes they start losing their mind as far as greed is concerned. You be careful. There’s different layers to people, and sometimes we don’t know all the layers. These people he’s working with, they could go after you.”

  * * *

  —

  HER RELATIVES’ DEFENSE of Tex disturbed Lissa. Even if their chairman was not responsible for the disappearance of a man from his property, should they not hold him accountable to find out who was? And if James was responsible, then why did they not worry that a murderer was at large on their reservation, enabled and enriched by their chairman?

  Lissa wondered if her relatives even believed her. No doubt it was hard for them to imagine that Tex could be involved in something so sinister, but the way they averted their eyes when she shared the story with them made Lissa suspect they were even more loath to believe it for the fact that it had come from her. She hated to feel disbelieved. She brimmed with an old anger as her memory ushered forward old complaints: Everyone was suppressing their pain with something, Lissa thought. Madeleine buried hers in the church, prayed it away with beads and rosaries, while Irene hardly seemed to do anything but work. Even Michael, who had taken Lissa in so many times, and whom she called her “dad,” had his own methods of escape, she believed. He had been a professor at universities all over the country, and by the time he returned to direct the Tribal and Indigenous Peoples Studies program at North Dakota State University in Fargo, he had taken up traditional methods of meditation. The way Michael put it, he was “decolonizing” his mind. He wrote books on the subject, delivered lectures around the world. He believed that by returning to spiritual ceremonies and contemplative practices, Indigenous people could rewire their brains to heal from the trauma of colonialism. “Neurodecolonization” he called it, as if you could will the settlers to leave your body, exorcise their whiteness right out of you.

  What her dad said made sense to Lissa, and she had been influenced by his thinking. She admitted that, at times in her life, she had felt proud of her relatives’ successes, their piety.

  But now, suddenly, she resented it all. The rosary beads. The university titles. The fancy words used to describe the Indian Condition. These seemed to her like props in a performance meant to trick an audience into believing everything was okay. But everything was not okay. What was wrong with plain suffering, with showing the world how much you hurt? This, Lissa decided, was why she had drawn so close to her uncle Chucky. While others hid their shame under glossy exteriors, Chucky had not tried to hide his anymore. Chucky had suffered in the open.

  In the final year of his life, his slip toward death had become a march, louder and more determined. He had begun to pass out standing up. Lissa saw him in this state only a few times, but her relatives told her it happened often. Some no longer seemed to notice when Chucky fell, numbed by the regularity of his drinking.

  One day, while Lissa was visiting White Shield, Chucky passed out in a ditch by her grandmother’s house. Lissa went to look. His pants were wet, so she returned inside and laid towels on Chucky’s bed. A cousin helped her carry their uncle to his room, where, with the gentle precision of a hospice nurse, Lissa stripped his clothes, bundled them, and stuck them in a bag. In the kitchen she found a pair of latex gloves, which she wore as she scrubbed the mess from his skin. She rolled him onto his back and washed him again, pulling the towels from beneath him and lifting his torso to straighten the bedsheet. Over his groin she laid a hand towel. Then she went outside and scoured the dirty towels with a hose.

  The next time Chucky fell in a ditch, Lissa had been in Fargo. Her relatives told her their versions of the story—how Chucky had been drinking when an acquaintance pushed him out of a car not far from his mother’s house. Madeleine and Irene had gone out for an errand, and when they returned to the house, they found Chucky inside, still drunk. He lunged at his sister, pulling on her perm, as Madeleine yelled for him to stop. He spent that night in a mental health clinic in Minot, where Lissa reached him by phone.

  “I pulled your mom’s wig out,” he said.

  “I heard,” Lissa said. “That’s f
ucked up, Uncle, but kind of funny.”

  Chucky did not remember the fight. He knew only what he had been told—that he had yanked on his sister’s curls, and then his mother had leapt up and they all fell to the floor, and he had kicked someone in the face.

  “Come down here to Fargo,” Lissa said.

  “No, you’re sober. I don’t want to do that to you.”

  “I tell you what, they opened a wet house here,” where he could drink but still have shelter. “Let’s get you a room. That way we know you’re safe. It’s too cold for you to be just running around anyway.”

  “All right.”

  “Seriously, Uncle. If you want to die, go ahead. You’re grown. You said that before, and that’s your decision, but I just want to be there with you.”

  Chucky did not call Lissa when he arrived in Fargo. She heard he was there from an aunt, whom he had visited in Bismarck.

  “Shit, nobody even told me,” Lissa said when her aunt called. After her aunt hung up, Lissa tried to call Chucky, but he had lent his cell phone to a cousin. Finally, Chucky called her from a hotel bar. He would not tell her which hotel.

  “I’m drinking,” he said. “I don’t want you to come over here.”

  “I’ll come sit with you,” said Lissa.

  “You’re on probation.”

  “Fuck probation. I want to know where you’re at,” she said, but still Chucky refused.

  After he left the bar, he called Lissa again from his hotel room. She pleaded with him to tell her where he was, but he would not. He told her he would die that night, so Lissa borrowed Micah’s phone and kept her uncle on one line while she dialed relatives on the other. It was late; no one answered. Now and then, Chucky fell quiet, and in these pauses, Lissa dialed every hotel in the Fargo phone book. None had a Charles Yellow Bird.

  At five A.M., her phone shut off. She was still in her clothes from the day before. She brewed a pot of coffee and took Obie and Micah to school.

  She had made Chucky promise to call her again, to meet her for breakfast, but he did not. Just after eleven o’clock, Lissa received a call from a relative she had tried to contact the previous night. Chucky had been found in his hotel room, the relative said.

  Two days after her uncle’s body had been returned to the reservation, Lissa went by the hotel where her relative said he died. It was one she had dialed while she spoke to Chucky, a grim building with a hallway like a basement corridor. “You’re sure he’s not there,” she had pleaded with the clerk, but now she knew why the clerk had said he was not: He had checked in as “Charles Bird.”

  Lissa passed the clerk without stopping and walked straight to the door of the room where she was told he had been. “Can I help you?” a janitor asked. Lissa explained; the janitor nodded and said he was sorry. Did she want him to open the room?

  “No,” she said.

  She stood at the door, thinking of her uncle’s body. She had been told the belt left no marks. The ceiling was low, so he had landed on a knee, kneeling as if before a woman, or God, his arms lifted slightly and stiffened by his sides. It was an odd pose, but it made sense to her, as if Chucky had at last confronted the spirit that possessed him. She hoped he had. She hoped he had broken free of it. On the phone, she had tried to coax this spirit away. “You can take his physical body,” she had warned, “but you’re never going to take his spirit, because I love him, because my power is stronger than yours.”

  As she stood at the door, a wan woman came into the hallway, and then the clerk appeared around the corner and began hollering for someone to get out, and Lissa thought the clerk was hollering at the woman but then realized the clerk was hollering at her.

  Lissa looked at the janitor, at the woman, at the clerk.

  And then she saw that Chucky’s spirit was gone, and the thing that had taken his body but not his spirit was still there—she could see it—in their skin and in their eyes.

  She had to go. “I’m glad my uncle got out of here,” she said to them. “May God save you.”

  * * *

  —

  NOW TWO YEARS had passed since Chucky died, and still Lissa recalled the night before his death so clearly that it was as if she had lived it not just once.

  She often thought of what her uncle had said to her that night. He had said a lot of things, but one thing he kept coming back to. He had been reading about human DNA, about the way our family histories are imprinted on our nucleotides. He said that our bodies remember. Some scientists believed that our genes could be turned on or off by the things our ancestors had seen or done or the things we ourselves had seen or done, so it was possible that our fates were decided by former lives and that our lives, in turn, decided the fates of our grandchildren.

  Imagine that, Chucky had said. No such thing as innocence at birth. Violence, like milk, passed from grandmother to mother to son.

  Imagine that. Imagine how impossible it is to stop something like that.

  6

  The Flyer

  THE STATE INVESTIGATION INTO THE disappearance of Kristopher Clarke had stalled. In January 2013, after Lissa returned from Washington, Jill received an email from Steve Gutknecht, the agent based in Williston. “Not much new,” he wrote. “I still work on this case daily….I get calls from people claiming to have seen KC all over the world but none ever pan out.” Meanwhile, Lissa was trying to reach Mike Marchus, the agent she knew in Minot. He seemed to be ignoring her calls, and when she texted him to arrange a meeting—to give him the documents she had collected from the courthouse in Oregon—he replied that it was not his case.

  In February, Lissa gained company in Fargo—her brother Percy, who had sailed through the window of a pickup truck as it slid on a patch of ice. Percy had lost a kidney, his spleen, and a significant amount of blood. He spent a week in the Minot hospital before Lissa took him home and set him up in her bedroom. Percy could hardly walk, nor could he sleep, so he spent nights studying algebra from a textbook one of the boys had tossed on the floor, and picking tunes on an electric keyboard that stood beside the couch. Three times a day, Lissa came home from the shop to change his bandages. In the evenings, she made simple dinners—tuna sandwiches and avocados sliced in half—before going to work on the case.

  She was beginning to assemble a list of workers who had come and gone from Blackstone, among them drivers who wrote to Jill with tips, as well as some whose names Rick Arey had mentioned to Lissa. In the months since Rick left Blackstone, there had been turnover, he said. James had hired a pusher to replace KC, and two investors had left the company. The first investor, Ryan Olness, was from Arizona; the second, Jed McClure, lived in Chicago. Both men were in their thirties and had met when Ryan ran a company that manufactured synthetic cannabinoids called “spice.” Ryan would claim he delivered “chemical” to Jed; Jed would deny ordering the drug. In any case, authorities had determined that spice was illegal, and Ryan was being criminally charged. When Jed met James through a mutual friend, he and Ryan decided to give the oil fields a try. As Jed explained in an email to Jill, James returned their initial investments but not their agreed-upon share of Blackstone’s profits. Jed planned on confronting James but was fearful of doing so in person. Ryan had spent several months working in the Blackstone office, and in the spring of 2012, he had fled North Dakota. Ryan was afraid James would “send someone after him,” Jed explained, and had asked that his contact information be removed from Blackstone records.

  There was also an odd story involving two truck drivers who left Blackstone and then came back. George Dennis and Justin Beeson were their names. According to Rick, Justin was a “whiner,” a “spoiled brat,” and George “smoked too much pot.” Rick doubted either was capable of murder, but Lissa did not want to rule them out. It intrigued her that both George and Justin had left Blackstone around the same time as the investor from Arizona, Ryan Olness. She wondered why they
left and why, later, they returned to work again for the company. George interested Lissa in particular, since his cousin was in touch with Jill. Three months before KC went missing, this cousin had traveled with George to Fort Berthold and observed that George was “really close to James.” George asked James to give the cousin a job, but “the day I talked to James to inform him of my abilities as a mechanic he asked me a question that gives me chills,” the cousin explained. “I am in the military and told him I have small arms experience. He asked me, ‘So that means you can kill people for me?’ He said it with a smirk which I took as a joke because I have never been asked that before.”

  The strangest story of an employee quitting Blackstone involved a driver named Paul, who was friends with Rick. Paul had been a reliable driver, and unlike other men, he claimed James never cheated him. Still, after KC disappeared, something had not seemed right at Blackstone, Paul told Rick. Paul moved into a trailer behind the Maheshu shop with a new worker James had recruited named Robert Delao. Paul had no idea where Delao had come from, and he had a bad feeling about him. One day in the trailer, Paul was scrolling through Jill’s Facebook page when Delao entered and asked what Paul was doing. “Paul kind of got freaked out,” Rick said. “He closed his laptop and went to make a sandwich or something, and when he came back, his laptop was open. Delao had been looking at what Paul was looking at.” That night, Paul got drinks with James and Delao. “They were trying to feed him shots, and Paul was like, ‘No, I better not.’ He went home the next day. He called me. He was like, ‘I swear to God, I’m next.’ A week later, Delao calls. He says, ‘We’ve got all kinds of work. We need you to get back here.’ ” Paul did not go back.