Nate Rosen Investigates

by Ron Levitsky

  Still gazing at the map, Belle lapsed into silence.

  Pearl said, “That’s why we’ve moved so carefully on this project. We want it to be done just right. Tasteful, respecting the environment and the feelings of all those concerned, especially Native Americans like Saul True Sky. Isn’t that right, Mr. Cantrell?”

  The engineer shifted in his chair. “That’s right. The first thing Mayor Gates and Mrs. Whistler said, when they hired me, was to treat the land with respect.”

  “Oh, really?” Jack said. He placed his briefcase on the table and clicked it open. It had the same rich smell of leather as a new saddle. He unrolled a long blueprint, so that it faced Pearl.

  “Recognize this?”

  She blanched. “Where’d you get this?”

  He drew his finger across the block letters at the top of the document. “Is this how you’re going to tastefully maintain the environment of Bear Coat—by building Wild West World?”

  “What?” Grace studied the upside-down blueprint.

  Jack pointed to different parts of the plan. “This is Panner’s Paradise, where you can pan for gold nuggets, here’s Big Bronco Ranch, which offers trail rides—your place, isn’t it, Belle? Over here is Buffalo Bill’s Shooting Gallery. There’s the Buffalo Petting Zoo, adjacent to Buffalo Chip Bingo. I believe that’s where the pasture is divided into numbered squares and one bets where the buffalo will place its next dropping. Biodegradable—is that where your concern for the environment comes in?”

  Pearl said, “We were just toying with some ideas.”

  “And let’s not forget your empathy for the Native American. Right there, up on Saul True Sky’s ridge, you’re toying with Injun Land—including the Crazy Horse Gift Shop. I particularly like this drawing in the corner. I suppose if you’re making a Western version of Disneyland, you should have an Injun Joe mascot instead of Mickey Mouse.”

  Pearl’s lip trembled, but she only shook her head, tossing the curls from her shoulders.

  Huggins said, “Look, Mayor Gates told you the economic problems Bear Coat faces. You’re from out of town. Los Angeles no less. I don’t expect you to understand . . .”

  “Bear Coat’s my home,” Jack said, “as much as it is any of yours. Certainly more than Mr. Cantrell’s, who is, I believe, also from L.A. and no doubt will be returning there as soon as his masterpiece, Wild West World, is completed.” He looked at each member of the town council. “I’m not sure how the profits from this enterprise are going to be divided, but finding out is just a matter of time. However, it’s clear this project represents far more than the mere survival of a town. It’s about what these things always are about—money, and ultimately, power.”

  Huggins banged his fist on the table. “What if it is? We’ve got the whole town behind us, and what have you got—one crazy old Indian.”

  Jack smiled at Huggins, as if waiting for a store clerk to make change. The other man started to say something, when Belle grabbed his arm. He sputtered; then, assuming his usual posture, he leaned over his clutching hands.

  Jack said, “I don’t believe Saul True Sky is crazy, and I don’t believe the media will find him crazy either. He’s a holy man, one who sees visions and can heal people.”

  Huggins grimaced. “The hell he can. He’s not much more than a vagrant who’s already served time for one murder and may be put away for good this time.”

  “I have faith in Mr. True Sky, his lawyer here, and the American judicial system. Besides, with the usual lengthy appeals process, the case may go on for another five to ten years. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Rosen?”

  The other lawyer nodded.

  “There, you see? From my knowledge of Saul True Sky, I can assure you that nothing will dissuade him from defending both the land he loves and the religious principles it represents to him.”

  Huggins was about to reply, when Belle said, “Shut up, Roy.” Leaning over the table, she looked directly at Grace. “We don’t want to hurt your father, but we’ve got to have that road run through his land. These plans are just somebody’s jackass ideas that’ll have to be scaled down to size. We’re all willing to do what we can to accommodate Saul—isn’t that right?”

  Pearl nodded emphatically.

  “The bottom line is—we’ve got to have that road. What do you say, Grace? For the sake of the town. It’s your future too—yours and Stevie’s.”

  Grace felt her face grow warm, as everybody looked at her. Under the table, Jack’s fingers curled around her hand and held it tightly. That was all she needed.

  “My father says no. I’m sorry, Belle.”

  “But you could talk to him. If he’ll listen to anybody, it’d be you.”

  She almost smiled. “Father only listens to his spirits. There’s nobody on earth that can tell him what to do.”

  Sighing, Belle leaned back in her chair. “Then we’ll see you in court.”

  Almost before she’d gotten the words out, Huggins was on his feet. Bending close to the mayor, he whispered hoarsely, “Told you it was a waste of time.”

  Pearl gazed at the blueprint like a coyote over fresh kill, as Jack rolled up the paper and put it into his briefcase.

  “Shall we go?” he said.

  Rosen was sniffing the air.

  “What is it?” Grace asked.

  “Something . . . some aroma. Are you wearing perfume?”

  “No.”

  Jack said, “Must be my cologne—Triumph. Like it?”

  They walked downstairs and out the door.

  “Whew!” Jack said grinning. “It’s almost as hot outside as it was in there.” He offered his hand to Rosen. “By the way, very nice to meet you. You’re from the Committee to Defend the Constitution?”

  Rosen nodded.

  “Wonderful organization by reputation. I know a few attorneys in the ACLU. I admire the civil-liberties work you all do.”

  “Seems you’ll be doing some of it yourself.”

  “Defending Saul on his religious beliefs—right. Should be fun.”

  Grace grimaced. “You’ll have to deal with Roy Huggins. I’ve never liked that man.”

  Jack laughed, then put his arm around her. Usually something like that embarrassed her, even when Steve had occasionally held her in public, but she didn’t mind this time. She relaxed against him and smelled his cologne. She felt small and safe.

  He said, “Don’t worry about Huggins. I’ve dealt with men like him all my life. You know his type—a racquetball player. Stands in one place on the court, huffing over his sweating belly and trying to smash a little rubber ball to pieces against a wall. Any real challenge would kill him.”

  Rosen said, “I take it you prefer tennis.”

  “Love the game. Can’t find too many here who play. Do you?”

  “Sorry. What about Grace?”

  “No, tennis is too tame for her. She’s a champion reiner. You should see her ride.”

  Grace said, “I’ve been trying to get Jack on a horse.”

  He laughed. “No thank you.”

  Rosen said, “You strike me as the type to play the ponies, rather than ride them.”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Do I? Well, back in L.A. I did go to the track with a client now and then. God, it was better than playing golf with them.” To Grace, “You’re still competing this Saturday?”

  “I don’t know. Father’s in so much trouble.”

  “Oh, but you have to. And you’ll come too, Mr. Rosen.”

  “Call me Nate.” He checked his watch. “You’ll excuse me now. Andi Wojecki’s taking me up to the ridge. I want to look at the area where Gates was murdered.”

  “Of course. I would like to get together soon. It might be to our mutual advantage to collaborate.”

  “Sure. I’ll see you both later.”

  Rosen walked across the street to the newspaper office.

  His arm still around Grace’s waist, Jack said, “I was going to ask you to lunch, but you must be tired. Poor thing,
aren’t you usually in bed at this hour?”

  Nodding, Grace imagined him in bed beside her. She turned away for a moment, so he wouldn’t see her face burning, and said, “I’m not tired at all. You know, I am kind of hungry.”

  Chapter Seven – THURSDAY AFTERNOON

  Just as some things were never discussed in the yeshiva, some words were never spoken. Rosen remembered, once in the prayer room, a boy saying the word bamot to an older student, who quickly hushed him and hurried away. Having never heard the word, Rosen later asked the rabbi what it meant.

  Taking him aside, the old man stroked his long beard and half-whispered, “It means a high place. A place where people gathered before the Temple was built by Solomon.”

  “You mean Shiloh.”

  He shook his head. “Shiloh kept the Ark and was, therefore, sanctified. These other . . . bamot were not good. The people who prayed there fell to evil ways, even to the worship of Baal. Go back to your books. It’s not good to dwell on such places of evil.”

  Rosen hadn’t thought of that conversation for twenty-five years, but suddenly those words whispered in his ear, as Andi’s car rumbled past True Sky’s house up toward the ridge. The old Indian would be there, praying to the spirit of White Bear and calling to his gods, as the Canaanites might have called to their false deities three thousand years before. As the ridge loomed closer, Rosen’s hand moved to brush a sidelock from his cheek, a sidelock he’d cut off twenty years before.

  Andi parked behind a van, near a beehive-shaped hut. White with large blotches of rust, the van had been hand-lettered on the side, ike’s fix-it. On the rear bumper was a faded sticker, McGovern for President.

  Although the sun shone hard through a clear sky, a cool breeze blew across the tall grass. Ike walked up the other side of the ridge, his arms carrying three or four logs, which he dumped onto a pile of wood near the entrance to the hut.

  Dropping to his knees, the Indian motioned to Rosen. “I want to teach you something.”

  Rosen knelt beside Ike and watched him prepare a fire.

  “First I put four logs facing east-west, to honor the winds that come from those directions. I crisscross them with four going north-south. Now I set these bigger pieces up straight, against each other, like I was making a tipi.”

  Rosen pointed toward the hut. “Is the pile supposed to look like that?”

  “It does to the spirits. What you’re pointing to ain’t an ordinary tipi. It’s an oinikaga tipi.”

  Andi stood over them. “It means a sweat lodge. He’s preparing it for an inipi—a ceremonial sweat.”

  Ike smiled up at her. “You’re a smart girl—not just all legs. I’m making ready to heat them.” He nodded toward a pile of about two dozen stones near the sweat lodge.

  Rosen walked to the stones and, picking one up, examined it carefully. “Wasn’t a stone like this the murder weapon?”

  Andi nodded. “It probably came from that pile. To your right are the Indian remains that Albert Gates and Saul were arguing over, the afternoon of the murder.”

  The skeleton was surrounded by a rope staked at four corners, each bearing an official seal. The grass within the cordon was matted and torn, probably from the police gathering evidence.

  Andi said, “The cops took away Gates’s digging box. It was over there, near the head. Guess everything else’s like it was when the murder took place.”

  The skull stared back at him through empty sockets. The skeleton’s shoulder blades and ribs were half-exposed, so that it appeared to be slowly rising from the ground after a hundred years of sleep. It was nothing, Rosen kept telling himself, just the earthly remains from which the soul had long since vanished. Yet he had been taught that the dead were resurrected in bodily form. If there was something of the body left, after all these years, had the soul really gone?

  Andi shivered. “Lots of remains like this are around here from the 1870s and ’80s. Think of him lying in the ground for over a hundred years.”

  Ducking under the rope, Rosen poked through the loose dirt near the skull, moved to the neck and shoulders, then along the ribs, several of which were broken. A thin leather package, the wotawe, lay half-buried against the third rib.

  “Here’s a wooden tip—probably from one of the picks Gates was using. What’s this?”

  He felt something brittle in the earth well below the third rib. It was a thin piece of oxidized iron, which crumbled in his fingers. Wiping his hands, he said, “Let’s go over what happened. Will True Sky, Saul’s son, discovered Gates’s body near the skeleton.”

  “No, not here.” Andi walked past the sweat lodge. “It was closer to here. From the marks made in the ground, the police figure that Gates was hit where you’re standing but crawled over here and died. Have you seen Saul’s vision pit?”

  Rosen joined her and looked into a narrow trench about five feet deep, barren except for some dried evergreen twigs smelling faintly of cedar.

  Andi said, “That’s where Saul was when Gates was murdered.”

  “Not a very good place for him to be—a few feet from the dead man.”

  “I told you before,” Saul True Sky said, coming up behind them, “I wasn’t there.” The Indian held a deer’s antlers and a buffalo skull.

  “Police Chief Cross Dog found you there in the pit.”

  “Most of the night I had traveled far away with White Bear. We visited our grandfathers and saw the buffalo run.”

  “You didn’t see or hear anything involving Albert Gates’s death.”

  “No. Here, this goes by the fire.”

  Rosen laid the antler beside Ike, who used a match to light the stacked logs. Returning to the sweat lodge, he watched True Sky place the buffalo skull near the entrance. The Indian tied offerings of sweet-smelling tobacco to the buffalo horns. Then he handed one of the stones to Rosen.

  “Help me take these over to Ike.”

  Rosen looked at the green moss covering the stone. “Pretty.”

  “They’re sintkala waksu—bird stones. My friends, the starlings, made these marks on them. My grandfather could read the future in these marks. These are good stones.”

  “The fire won’t split them?”

  “It’s more than that. They’re stone people that come from the earth. During the inipi they listen to our problems, clear away all our bad thoughts, and put us in touch with Tunkashila, the Creator. You know what inyan is?”

  Rosen shook his head.

  “It’s rock like this, but it’s more. Inyan was the first of all things. Everything else came from inyan and took a portion of its blood.”

  “Was this inyan a person?”

  “Long ago, Inyan Hoksi, Stone Boy, made the first inipi and brought his dead uncles back to life. Some say that he sent his mother and uncles into the sky to be stars and that he made the buffalo girls into flowers.”

  “Yesterday, looking up at the ridge, Andi called Stevie ‘Stone Boy.’”

  “My grandson knows the story well, as all Lakota should. Stone Boy teaches us what to do, but also what not to do.”

  Rosen stared at the stone in his hands. “My people consider the Ten Commandments holy. They were written on two tablets of stone.”

  “Moses has a Lakota name. It’s Inyan Wasicun Wakan—Holy White Stone Man. Come on, the fire’s beginning to get hot.”

  It must have been several minutes before Rosen looked away from the stone; the pile had already gone down nearly a third, as True Sky trudged back and forth. Rosen loaded a half dozen in his arms, carrying them to the new pile near Ike.

  Just as they were finishing, a tow truck drove up from the other side of the ridge. A young man stepped down from the driver’s seat. He wore a mechanic’s work clothes with the name “Will” stitched on the shirt.

  “Sorry I’m late, Dad.”

  “Mr. Rosen, this is my son.”

  “I’ve been looking foward to meeting you. We have some things to talk about.”

  Will had a strong grip, but h
is eyes shifted away. The truck’s passenger door opened, and Stevie jumped down. He held the door handle, as if ready to crawl back inside.

  Will said, “Dad, I didn’t know what to do. The school called Gracie, but she ain’t been home all day.”

  “She’s still in town. What do they say is wrong with the boy?”

  Will ran a hand through his thick black hair. “He got into a fight with some of the other kids. Nobody knows what the hell it was about, but he’s suspended for the rest of the day. Gracie’s got to take him to school tomorrow morning and straighten it out. The boy’s gonna have hell to pay, when she finds out.” He suddenly flashed a smile. “Hello, Andi.”

  She nodded a reply but remained by the sweat lodge, gripping one of the tipi poles. Glancing at Rosen, she blushed.

  Will looked her up and down and grinned.

  True Sky said, “Remember why you’re here. You must come in the right spirit.”

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve done an inipi. Now with this problem with Stevie, maybe I’ll just skip it.”

  “I made this inipi for Ike, to turn him away from drinking. I know your spirit is not right either, so you’ll just join us. It’s good you brought the boy—he’s old enough.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Gracie’ll raise hell as it is. You know how she feels about this kind of stuff. I’ll just take him down to the house.”

  “You’ll both do this.”

  True Sky motioned to Stevie, who came forward, head lowered, and stood before his grandfather. The old man lifted the boy’s face and stared deep into his eyes.

  Biting his lip, Stevie blurted, “It’s the things they say. What they call us.”

  “It’s not your fault. You’re too young to understand what they say doesn’t matter. I want you to go into the house and bring my chanunpa.”

  The boy’s eyes grew wide.