“You should listen to him.”
“I know. It’s just so hard Lissa. I wish I could talk to every person who’s read that page, received or seen the letter. I just wish I could sit down with all of them and explain.”
Lissa had been waiting for an opening like this and now composed her message carefully. She wondered if Sarah would be willing to answer questions about the day KC disappeared. Did she remember what time he arrived at the office? How long did he stay? Did he speak to James? Did he mention that he “needed to tie up loose ends”?
Sarah answered eagerly. She could not remember what time KC arrived, exactly, but she believed it was in the late morning or early afternoon. She had seen him for only five minutes, when they talked about his plans to go to Oregon. “I honestly don’t know what he did after he left the office we were in,” she wrote to Lissa. “James said he said hi to him, talked about his grandpa’s health and drinking too much.” She couldn’t remember KC saying anything about “loose ends.”
“Did he have his truck with him when he arrived or when he left?” Lissa asked.
“Oh, that I don’t know,” Sarah replied. “I was never outside while he was there. I would assume he was in his truck.”
“And no calls after he left?”
“No calls that I know of!”
It was almost eleven o’clock. “Well I’m going to head to bed,” Sarah wrote. “Thanks for talk as always. I hope I didn’t keep you up too late. Have a good night:-)”
Over the following months, Lissa asked Sarah many questions about KC. Often, Lissa repeated these questions—whom did he talk to, what did he say—as if sorting a complex array of details, though what Sarah had witnessed was rather simple, and it became clear that Lissa was searching for inconsistencies in her account.
The story Sarah told did not vary, however: KC had come into the office, handed her his company credit card, and chatted for five minutes about his vacation plans. He had not wanted to take a vacation, but he had seemed tired and depressed, and at a company meeting prior to his disappearance, everyone decided he should take a break. When Sarah saw KC, he had been more upbeat, she said, looking forward to visiting his grandfather. Then he went outside, and Sarah never saw him again. James told her he had spoken to KC, but not for long, since “whenever James is at the office people swarm him asking questions.” She had tried calling KC in the weeks after that, as did James, but KC did not answer. When it seemed he was gone, Sarah canceled his paychecks.
Sarah knew KC had been miserable in Texas, heartbroken by his breakup with his girlfriend. “I actually never met her,” she wrote Lissa. “KC made her seem like she was so sweet and so nice. He always said he expected they would get back together.” About other employees, though, Sarah knew comparatively little. She knew Ryan Olness—the investor from Arizona who eventually fled the reservation—perhaps the best, since he had lived with her and James. “It was sort of strange,” Sarah wrote to Lissa. “He had all these big plans for ND like restaurants and roustabout and a million other things and nothing ever happened.” She knew the least about Robert Delao, the worker who arrived after KC disappeared—whom Lissa knew to be a snitch. When Blackstone left the reservation, Delao stayed behind to work for Tex at Maheshu. Delao still lived in Mandaree, while Sarah and James lived in Watford City, the town off the reservation where they relocated Blackstone. They rarely saw Delao anymore, Sarah said.
“If [Delao’s] such a bad person why are they not focusing on him too?” Lissa texted one day.
Sarah didn’t know: “I’ve wondered that too.”
“I mean cause he’s a convicted murderer.”
“He claims that info isn’t true, but I don’t know.”
“Between you and me I know it’s a fact. He did time for it. Lots of time.”
“What!?! Really, lots of time?”
“I never told ANYONE but you! I don’t see putting him out there like that cause he did his time and I heard he regretted it.”
“Wow, I won’t say anything. It’s not my place to. But still crazy.”
Lissa felt Sarah was being mostly honest with her—more honest, perhaps, than Lissa was being with Sarah—but she did not believe Sarah was above a lie. In late April, Jill claimed on Facebook that Sarah and James had been “kicked off the rez.” Lissa asked Sarah if this was true, but Sarah denied it. “We’re not working on the Rez by choice,” she wrote. “We had to shut down our business on the Rez because people were being so rude. Why is Jill so focused on us:-(…It’s crazy, it’s like she gets bored and just wants to get people going again.” Three weeks later, Lissa tried once more, this time mentioning she had heard a rumor that Sarah and James “got into it with Tex.” Sarah denied this, as well: “We are completely on good terms we just don’t have a company working with him anymore. People just think since Blackstone water doesn’t exist then something bad must have happened and it didn’t.”
The nature of Blackstone’s separation from Maheshu was one thing Lissa suspected Sarah was lying about. Another thing was Brian Baker, whom Lissa now believed was a pseudonym, just like Nadia Reinardy. Once, Sarah had lamented to Lissa about the posters, “It just doesn’t make since,” and Lissa thought, Sense, not since. Brian had made the same mistake. “Hey how’s Brian?” Lissa texted Sarah. “Now that I talk to you I never talk to him.” Sarah replied that he was busy but well and “happy that he got us two talking.” A few weeks later, Brian was back in touch.
Still, Lissa believed Sarah was beginning to trust her. One day in May, Lissa asked why James and KC used steroids. Sarah said she didn’t know, and Lissa replied, “White folks are funny! Ya’ll never really talk about the IMPORTANT things! Lol.” Her bluntness seemed to put Sarah at ease, and Sarah began to share more about herself: James was always working, she said—more than she was willing to work—and they had been spending more time apart. Sarah often left North Dakota to see friends in Arizona and California, or to visit her parents in Washington. Her father was a doctor; her mother, a wildlife biologist. “She’s obsessed with birds and animals,” Sarah wrote. “Every time we went on vacation as kids, the first thing my mom would do was buy a bird book so she could identify everything while we were there. Even with plants and trees, like which ones you could eat. And which ones you could use if you touched stinging nettles to make it stop hurting.” Sarah was twenty-six, a year older than Shauna. In college, she had studied hotel management.
Lissa was beginning to think Sarah was innocent in that she truly did not know what happened to KC, but other things perplexed Lissa. Could Sarah be guilty of the fraud Jed McClure, the investor, accused her of? And how could Sarah not wonder about James, with everything in his past?
Lissa often asked after James. “Same as always with him,” Sarah once replied. “Nothing stresses him out I swear and I’m always stressed over everything.”
“What does James say about all this?”
“I always ask him stuff after we talk, and he always says people will make whatever stories they can cause he says for some reason people always want to tear him down. Then he apologizes to me for having a record because he knows how sad this all makes me. It kills me that people claim to hate me or think I’m a bad person. I always tell him as long as he’s honest to me I’ll stay by his side, but I NEED honesty.”
“I understand his point,” Lissa replied, but had Sarah never at least wondered? “I mean for real you can’t tell me it hasn’t crossed your mind.”
“Yes I’ll be honest, I do ask what if…But I made him promise me NOTHING bad after all his past…and he promised…”
“What if it was just some accident that he can’t admit?! Like a fight that got outta hand? I mean, those two”—KC and James—“were messing with steroids!!!!”
“Honestly I never saw either of them really upset. They’re surprisingly both really happy people.”
Lis
sa tried one more angle: “Well between you and I,” she wrote, “I have heard stories about how demeaning and controlling he is towards you.”
“Really?” Sarah wrote. “I won’t say anything to him.” They fought over business, she said, over truck repair bills and employee troubles, “but nothing crazy.”
“Just don’t let anyone cut you down and make you feel like you’re not worthy cause you are. If you ever feel like he’s all you got don’t feel that way. Sounds like you have a lot of people who care! I’m one.”
“Thanks Lissa:-)!!! I’ll tell you one thing, I honestly hate business ha ha. James loves it and it’s what he does. But it’s hard for me cause everyone has problems or is mad all the time, and I just want things to be smooth.”
“I feel for you.”
“Talking with you has BEEN SO NICE!!! I definitely consider you a friend.”
“I worry bout you ya know? I know YOU didn’t do anything to KC! If I thought that I wouldn’t be talking to you. I just hope he’s found and all this bs goes away! Hope you keep in close contact with your folks so they don’t worry so much!”
“Oh I hope he’s found!!! And hopefully he’s just hiding from all of us. You know what someone told me the other day? They thought maybe KC was behind all these posters, met up with someone with a bunch of money who knew James from years ago.”
“Really?” Lissa replied. “Who has that much money to blow?”
* * *
—
IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to discern Lissa’s true feelings toward Sarah from their messages, or, for that matter, Sarah’s feelings toward Lissa. Both seemed to be masterful liars—cheerily aware of being lied to, if unable to identify the lies the other told. “Do you ever speak with Nadia anymore?” Sarah wrote not long after Lissa asked about Brian. Lissa replied that she did not and changed the subject.
But between lies, their dialogue was strangely genuine. When Sarah spoke of her closeness with her parents, her frustration with James, or her sense of displacement in the oil fields, Lissa believed her; and Lissa’s concern for Sarah’s well-being was not all fakery, either. By the end of the spring, Lissa realized she cared for Sarah, as if all her pretending had made it so. They called or texted nearly every day. Lissa looked forward to their conversations and stayed on the phone as long as Sarah was willing. She believed Sarah had no one else to confide in. Once, Sarah described her parents as “really nice” people who think “everyone is good and the sky is blue and life is perfect.” Sarah had told them about the defamation suit she filed against Jill, she said, but she withheld almost everything else, doubting they would understand.
Lissa’s feelings toward Sarah were hardly an exoneration. Sarah still believed in James’s innocence, a state of denial that Lissa found maddeningly irresponsible. Later, Lissa would reflect, “It wasn’t so much that I thought Sarah was guilty but that maybe she knew more than she’s ever led anyone to believe.” Lissa often thought about Sarah’s call to Robert Clarke, when she cried into the phone: “It made Sarah sound like less of a sociopath than James. I mean, why would she start crying, other than the fact that she was probably adding things up on her own already, wondering how she could have gotten herself so involved in something? But she turned around and carried on. What did she think? This was all going to go away on its own? My guess is she thought there would be a reasonable explanation someday, and it just kept getting worse.”
Lissa could think of one more reason why Sarah would remain loyal to James: Lissa recognized in the way Sarah spoke of him the mentality of an abused woman—not physically abused, necessarily, but manipulated and controlled. The more Sarah came to trust Lissa, the more Lissa wondered if she could break Sarah’s trust in James. Friends of Sarah’s would later say how strange it was to them that someone so independent and smart ended up with a man like James. Lissa did not find it strange at all. People had said the same thing about her. “Put me in a room with twenty men, and you can be sure I’ll pick the abusive alcoholic,” she said.
Lissa knew how it was to be controlled, as acutely as she knew how to control. Once, when asked if she felt guilty for exploiting a mentality she knew so well—a mentality that, at one time in her life, had led her back to a man who tried to kill her—she said she did not. Lissa believed that although Sarah was controlled by James, Sarah was his “backbone.” James needed her clean record to register their companies, establish credit, and purchase equipment. Beyond that, Sarah was, in Lissa’s terms, “a perfect lieutenant.” None of James’s ventures had ever worked so well until he married Sarah: “I saw that James would be nothing without her, and I wanted to break him down any way I could,” Lissa said. “I wanted him to lose his business. I wanted him to lose all the power he had. I didn’t want to destroy Sarah, but in one sense I kind of had to, to get what I wanted. I kind of had to help her, in a tough love kind of way, to evolve. She was clueless. She couldn’t smell the danger that was right under her nose.”
10
The Search
BY THE END OF MAY 2013, winter loosened its grip on the reservation, and people emerged from the dark warmth of their homes, and weekends filled with picnics and softball games, and the lake echoed with pop songs thrumming from the radios of drifting boats. The powwows began in June, first in Twin Buttes, the southernmost segment; and then in Lucky Mound, White Shield, Mandaree, and Four Bears. For many years, the final powwow, in early August, on the bank of the lake, had attracted the best dancers and singers, but on the first weekend of July that year, Mandaree drew a lively crowd as well. Oil companies donated $20,000 to the celebration, which, with private contributions from Mandaree families, amounted to the largest pot of powwow cash in the segment’s history. Dancers and singers came from all over the continent—Arizona, Montana, Wisconsin, Saskatoon—to compete for the generous prizes, and the Mandaree councilman, in a nod to industry, named the powwow “The Heart Beat of the Bakken.” In addition to the dancing and singing contests, there were horse races, bingo games, a rodeo, fireworks, an egg toss, tug-of-war, a basketball tournament, a chili cook-off, a battle of the bands, and a parade of rez cars. There were contests to determine who had grown the biggest turnip or beaded the prettiest earrings, who could rattle her tongue the fastest or war whoop the loudest, who could devour the largest watermelon or fry the most delicious fry bread.
Lissa attended many of the powwows that summer to hand out missing person posters and spread word about KC. Some men and women in her sun dance circle avoided powwows, lamenting the capitalization of spiritual tradition, the conspicuousness of tribal wealth; and indeed, the dancers’ regalia appeared more expensive every year. Still, Lissa liked to go. Her aunt Cheryl had been a champion traditional dancer, and when Lissa was a child, Cheryl taught her how to dance. Lissa came to prefer traditional dancers, who wore simpler clothing and moved more subtly, to fancy dancers, who wore neon ribbons and feathers. “If you watch closely,” Lissa would say, “you’ll see the ones that really have the spirit, the teachings, because they’re the ones with the footwork.”
She enjoyed perusing the stalls that formed a ring around the grounds. She bought gifts for relatives, fabric for a sun dance dress. She tried on turquoise necklaces and ran her hands over leather. The quality of goods had improved since the boom. The vendors, like the dancers, had come from farther afield, since tribal members had more money to spend. Lissa liked to take it all in—bison hides and deer antlers, medicine wheels and packets of herbs, and all the trappings one needed to sew a dress: porcupine quills, feathers, fringe, Venetian glass beads, tin cones for the jingle dresses, cowry shells, bone pipes, abalone disks, fabric, ribbons, needles and thread.
In summer, clouds descended on the prairie like flocks of birds, constantly landing and lifting. The sky weathered to dark gray. The mustard bloomed bright yellow.
Lissa rarely stopped in White Shield anymore but went straight on to Mandaree, where she drove the back r
oads and sometimes wandered on foot through the draws and wider canyons. Before the boom, it had been easier to wander the reservation, and many tribal members did. They fished, camped, hunted, and gathered medicine. Although fences divided cattle pastures, it had been easy to slip between strands of barbed wire or to lay down a gate. Now hundreds of oil wells dotted Mandaree, and on new roads bisecting allotments, companies posted signs reading OILFIELD TRAFFIC ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT. The companies had little legal ground to keep people off the land, since they did not own it, but the signs, if not the traffic, discouraged tribal members from wandering.
Lissa considered it an act of resistance to wander, and that summer she covered more ground than in any year before. Marks of the boom were everywhere. Even land that remained intact was on its surface changed: creeks and sloughs sucked dry, the water purchased or stolen; the prairie littered with food wrappers, plastic bottles, scraps of carpet, aluminum flashing, jerricans, busted work boots, bullet casings, oily rags, electronics, cigarette cartons, and empty tins of chewing tobacco; and a dense smog overlaying it all. Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency had sued a company for failing to properly limit pollution at their well sites on the reservation. One day, Lissa wandered behind the Maheshu shop and came across what looked like a heap of giant condoms. They were filter socks for straining contaminated water after it had fracked a well, before the water was injected, again, into an old well for disposal. Each gram of a used sock contained up to seventy picocuries of radiation, fourteen times the amount allowed in North Dakota landfills. Since the Bakken generated seventy-five tons of filter socks a day, and since the only landfills that accepted the socks were located out of state, the socks were often found stashed in abandoned buildings or dumped in fields.
Among the places Lissa searched most often was a canyon near Mandaree, where the border of Fort Berthold skirted the Little Missouri River. An allotment there belonged to an uncle on her grandmother’s side and, being so close to the river, reminded Lissa of the bottomlands before the flood. Cattle roads threaded between tall clay bluffs and groves of cottonwood thickening toward the bank. Lissa had chosen the area because it seemed a likely spot for a body to be buried. It was not far from the Maheshu shop, nor from the main road, and yet it felt remote, the topography too varied and too close to the river for it ever to be drilled. A gate guarded the entrance to the allotment, but apart from an earthmover rusting on a hillside, there were few signs anyone went there. The roads cut through sagebrush and canyons formed by sudden rain, one road so impassable that Lissa had to park and cross on foot over fallen logs onto a grassy rise on the other side. There, poking from a vast, green slope, were prairie dog mounds. The rodents stood on their back legs to greet her, sounding an alarm, and if she stayed long enough, they forgot her as they grazed and dug new portals to their underground city.
Yellow Bird Page 20
