CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Archie Chatto sat beside his court-appointed attorney, wishing he could steal a watch. Any watch would do, Timex, Bulova, Omega, something from a Walmart rack. A Rolex would be best. Its sweeping minute hand would time his jump with great precision, and he could sell it later—the essence of Apache punctuality.
Was that a Rolex on the prosecutor’s wrist? Probably a cheap Chinese knock off. State lawyers were all about show. They only pretended to be thieves.
“What time is it?”
Archie’s public defender flinched at the question. He crossed his lips with his pointing finger and made a shushing sound. A shameful show of disrespect. Archie thought he might take the lawyer’s finger with him when he went through the window.
Make a necklace of the bones. Sell it to a white woman in Santa Fe. Use the money to buy a watch, then throw the watch away. Indian symbolism, as meaningless as the American Flag, but the idea made him smile. A warrior did not clutter his mind with the arithmetic of minutes.
Sudden changes in the temperament of horses, the unexpected appearance of a flock of crows, the scent of fear carried on the wind—these things were the springs and gears of Indian time. But in courtroom 334, there was only a round clock mounted on the wall, cleverly positioned so the judge and jury could see it easily, but the defendant could not. For the third time that day, Archie twisted in his well-worn wooden chair and checked the time.
His court appointed attorney nudged him and whispered, “Sit still, Archie. You’re making the jury nervous.”
Who could have imagined a jury of Archie’s peers would be seated so quickly, seven men, five women, and an alternate of each gender? “Three Native Americans,” his defense attorney had told him.
“That’s a lucky break.” The lawyer’s name was Tim, or was it Tom. Archie’d had so many young white lawyers over the years, as interchangeable and inappropriate as clowns at a Shriner’s circus. They saw no differences between the tribes.
White people thought of Indians as one large, dysfunctional family—a pod of red-skinned dolphins swimming in a sea of shared European oppression.
“Not an Apache among them,” Archie whispered to his lawyer. There was a Creek and a Choctaw—that was to be expected in Oklahoma—but the third Indian juror was a Pima man. The Pima had been fighting the Apache for a thousand years, and from the look in this juror’s eyes, they weren’t done yet.
It was a good thing Archie had an escape plan. Medicine was strong in Robert Collins. The boy was no warrior, but luck and courage filled him to the brim.
Archie twisted in his chair once again. Two thirty, time to put his end of the plan into motion. He was no oral historian, but he would tell a story to this judge and this jury, and his story would end in splintered glass and freedom. Archie was prepared.
He’d braided his hair in the Lakota style, the way Sitting Bull posed for photographs. He wore prison khaki trousers held up by a buffalo hide belt beaded with colored porcupine quills. He wore a T-shirt with a picture of Geronimo, Cochise, and Victorio on the back, and the words Homeland Defense written underneath. Pinned to the shirt was a button that advocated freedom for imprisoned Sioux activist and convicted murderer, Leonard Peltier. The myth of Indian solidarity.
Tim (or Tom) approved of the braids and the belt, but he didn’t like the shirt or the button.
“Rule one is don’t scare the jury.”
Archie Chatto was the young lawyer’s first Apache client. He didn’t understand the function of intimidation in a culture built on heroic violence. He didn’t understand that a warrior’s most powerful weapon was the fear of his enemies. Storytellers used fear too. It put the audience in the proper frame of mind.
“Rule two is don’t scare the judge.”
Now it was time for Archie to scare his own attorney. “Tell Rakestraw I want to make a confession now.” He crossed his arms over his chest and waited for the young lawyer’s predictable response.
Tim (or Tom) reacted to his client’s statement with a four-letter word. “What?”
American English is loaded with colorful expletives. Shit would fit the circumstances perfectly. Even a simple, “Damn!” would be OK. Archie was disappointed in the young man’s limited vocabulary.
“Tell the judge I want to confess.” Archie said it louder this time, loud enough to make the judge tap his gavel.
The public defender put his hand on his client’s shoulder, then pulled it back when Archie glared at him. “The state’s case is weak,” the lawyer said. “The agent’s body has never been found. We have three Indians on the jury. We just might win this thing.”
The judge tapped his gavel again. Archie wondered how long the young man would have to practice law before he realized that a traditional Apache could never win in court. The Apache concept of crime was far too flexible to withstand the scrutiny of common law.
“The federal agent’s blood is on my hands. I want to confess.” He said those words loud enough for everyone to hear. Judge Rakestraw’s gavel hammered like a nervous woodpecker.
Archie stood and addressed the judge. “I want to explain what happened here in this courtroom, so the words can’t be bent into new shapes by journalists and politicians.” Pure Indian stereotype, like a line from Black Elk Speaks. Chief Dan George couldn’t have said it better.
The judge told Tim (or Tom) to control his client, as if anyone in the courtroom thought that was possible. It wasn’t proper for a defendant to confess without negotiation on his part by a competent attorney.
“You understand this is a death penalty case,” Judge Rakestraw told Archie. “A confession in open court negates your opportunity for appeal. You don’t get a second bite of the apple.”
White men talked about apples when they were about to give in, something to do with the Bible and the treachery of women. Archie was making progress.
“One bite is enough,” he said. “In the end, a warrior only has his story. I will tell mine now, so people will know exactly how things were.”
Since Oklahoma became a state, no defendant had made an allocution in open court after a jury had been seated. Judge Arthur Rakestraw told Archie to watch his step.
“Be careful, Mr. Chatto. A great deal hangs in the balance.” There was emphasis on the word hangs.
“Apaches are careful in a different way,” said Archie. Always outnumbered, always outgunned. Being careful meant fighting to the bitter end. “I will confess carefully.”
The judge made it clear there would be no chance for legal trickery. Archie had already made a public statement against interest declaring himself guilty of the crime. He could not retract it later. He would be allowed to describe the conditions and circumstances of the murder, but he could not attribute the act to accident or self-defense.
“You are confessing to the crime of capital murder,” Judge Rakestraw said. “Do you understand?”
“Is it all right if I pace while I confess, your honor? Apaches get nervous when they sit.”
“You can skip around the courtroom if it makes you feel better,” the judge told him. “So long as you don’t run for the door.” On Judge Rakestraw’s cue, one of the two overweight bailiffs moved to cover the potential escape route.
Archie turned to face the public seating area. An old white man with suspenders and a tobacco-stained shirt sat in the front row. He flashed a broad toothless grin and nodded acknowledgement of Archie’s attention.
Two journalists sat in the back. One jotted information onto a steno pad, and the other made entries on a PDA in violation of the judge’s strict policy forbidding the use of electronic devices.
The minute hand on the clock behind the journalists jerked forward one notch in time. Two forty-one p.m.
Usen help me.
“I was warmed by the sun, rocked by the winds and sheltered by the trees as other Indian babes,” Archie said. “I was living peaceably when people began to speak bad of me. Now I can eat well, slee
p well, and be glad. I can go everywhere with a good feeling.” He repeated the same quotation from Geronimo every time he surrendered to authorities. He had said it so often, he no longer had to refer to notes. It was Archie’s preferred way to end a struggle, unless there was a gunfight. The words didn’t have the same impact if they were spoken from behind cover.
“I never knew the name of the agent who followed me from the Jicarillo Apache reservation in Arizona, across the state of New Mexico, and into the Oklahoma Panhandle.” It is no mean task to track a Bedonkohe warrior, especially in the modern era when a running man can jump onto a moving train, then jump off where he chooses and steal a car. A fugitive can exchange the stolen automobile for a horse or a mule and ride across the wilderness. When his animal becomes weak or thirsty, the running man can strike out on foot.
“Following such a trail is difficult, and I have great respect for the nameless agent whose spirit now lives in time’s shadow.” Archie scanned the jury. They were buying it, except for the Pima man.
Archie raised and spread his arms to demonstrate just how much respect he had for the dead agent. In doing so, he demonstrated his impressive musculature and the large number of blue monochrome tattoos that started on his fingers and disappeared under his sleeves of his T-shirt. No one who saw those arms could have the slightest doubt that Archie Chatto was a dangerous man.
“Many foreign tribes have passed through the narrow strip of Oklahoma where almost no one lives.” Archie told the court about the blue-eyed explorers from the other side of the world who visited hundreds of years ago and recognized the special power of the place.
“They left ritual marks on rock walls shielded from the sun except for days of special significance, the summer and the winter solstices and the equinox.”
Archie made a slow circuit around the rectangle of space defined by the lawyers’ tables on the north, the judge’s podium on the south, the jury box on the west, and the windows on the east. He paid homage to each of the principal directions with a pinch of imaginary corn pollen. He could see confusion on Judge Rakestraw’s face and in the eyes of all the jurors except for the three Indians. They understood the significance of the special days when light and darkness wrestled for control of the world. They understood the respect an Apache had for the four directions.
“The boundaries between the past and the present are thin at the high and low places of the desert plains. A quiet man can hear the echoes of ancient songs.”
Archie drew in his breath and held it to show how calm and quiet an Apache could be, even in a room filled with enemies. Judge Rakestraw held his breath as well. So did every person in the courtroom—all waiting for the conclusion of an Apache legend.
Archie wouldn’t disappoint. “I moved in the spaces between the rocks. I brushed against old symbols left by tribes who abandoned that place without giving it a name. Power marked my skin and stained my clothing.” He told the jury how the residue of power glowed after sunset, “Energized by the light of the full moon, as the legends promised.”
“I heard the drums of ancient people. I smelled the smoke from their cooking fires, and in the silent moments between my heartbeats, I listened to stories my ancestors told to pass the time.”
Archie whispered a few words in the pure, untainted language of his people, incomprehensible to the judge and jury, but as clear and powerful as thunder.
“Whether the federal agent heard the songs and stories I cannot say. If he did, then he was a fool to pursue me when I stepped into the past.” Archie brushed his eyes across each person in the jury box, then turned to face the courtroom clock. The minute nudged the number twelve and the hour hand centered on the number three. Archie Chatto’s story was nearly finished.
“We stepped into the distant past, the federal man and I, to a time and place where the authority of his government had not been born.”
Warriors sat in a circle around a central fire. They passed a pipe and sent their prayers to the full moon on clouds of sacred smoke. Their medicine chief walked outside the circle, listening to the spirits of the night, waiting for Usen to send him a vision. On his fourth circuit, two strangers blocked his path. The medicine chief waived his staff at Archie and the agent and then at a stream bed that had been dry so long its muddy bottom had frozen into stone.
“There were footprints pressed deep into the rock by a large animal who walked there while Usen made the world.”
The medicine chief’s meaning was clear to Archie. “The odor of fast food and automobile exhaust greeted me as I raced along the footprint trail. I knew this was the pathway home.” The hole in time was only large enough for one. The federal agent might have reached it first, but he stopped to draw his weapon.
“I could hear the bullets fly past me as I sprinted through the centuries.” Nothing could stop an Apache warrior if he ran in a sacred manner and kept his mind on the business of survival. Archie Chatto turned to face the judge; the time had come to put his fate into the hands of his co-conspirators.
He hardly felt the glass pane shatter into crystals as he flew through the central courtroom window. The judge, the jury, the bailiffs, and even Tim (or Tom) were so stunned by the noise and the glittering display, they did not notice when Archie’s Lakota braids came unfastened from his recently scissored hair and fell below their line of vision.
If anyone in the courtroom had rushed to the window quickly enough, they would have seen Archie bounce twice on the air mattresses Big Shorty glued to the top of the garbage truck, but they did not. The people in courtroom 334 had witnessed the miracle of human flight through time. They had seen Archie Chatto run in a sacred manner, and knew there was no point in giving pursuit.
Sarah looked at her watch. It was 3:01 and the truck was parked beneath the central window of courtroom 334. Its front bumper wedged against one of the metal doors that connected the courtyard with the interior of the building.
Maybe that’s the way it was supposed to be. Maybe guards would try to come through that door. She gave her head and shoulders a violent shake, like a high jumper preparing for a run at a new personal record. She was starting to believe this crazy plan might work, but it couldn’t really. Even if she managed to turn the garbage truck around, she would never get it past the guard station. The security police would have subdued Big Shorty and Robert by then. Alarms would sound within the courthouse. Without question, the plan was doomed to fail. Every one of them would be arrested. Sarah would be the only one who could not claim innocence by reason of insanity.
A perfectly parked garbage truck was still something to be proud of. It took another violent head and shoulders shake to eliminate those thoughts. By then she heard the sound of falling glass and the thump of something heavy on the Ace Hardware air mattresses.
Stage two.
Sarah had only a moment to consider how quickly things were going, just as Archie and Robert had planned. Racing toward disaster at the most efficient speed.
Archie opened the garbage truck door and told her it was time to go.
“Leave the truck. We’ll walk from here.” He was putting on a corduroy sport coat rescued from the trash chute.
“It’s amazing the things people throw away,” he said.
Sarah followed him without question, the way Apache women have been following men into desperate situations for centuries. She finally understood why Indian women had such quiet ways. They were stunned by the calamity of the world. Nothing left to say.
Big Shorty and Robert waited for them at the guard station. Officer Lemonjello and his partner lay unconscious in a shady spot, their heads tipped back, their airways clear. Robert had put his first aid training to work once again.
“Spirit powder?” She realized that had been part of the plan all along, the second distraction Big Shorty had told her about without divulging details.
Archie took the officers’ sidearms and stuck them in his belt. He also rescued a handcuff key, which he put into h
is mouth.
“In case we are arrested,” he said with no apparent speech deficit.
He stepped into the guard station, opened a DVD recorder, and removed two discs.
“My picture will be on the five o’clock news,” Archie said, “But the rest of you will remain my anonymous accomplices.”
“Shouldn’t we hurry?” Sarah could hear police sirens, but she wondered why the courthouse guards weren’t running into the street.
“When alarms go off, the elevators shut down and the exterior doors automatically lock,” Archie told her. “An emergency response team, most likely SWAT, will surround the building and then conduct a room-to-room search. Standard operating procedure.”
“You got a haircut.” Robert leaned forward and examined Archie’s new look. The change in appearance hadn’t even registered with Sarah.
Archie said, “I’m assimilating into the dominant white culture.”
Sarah thought that would take more than a haircut, but the change was dramatic.
“Time for us to start searching for Marie,” Archie told Sarah. “Did you remember to park a getaway car nearby, or will we be walking?”
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