I’ve tried telling Sitting Bull many times before what will happen to him five years from now, after he’s left the show and gone back to his people. Perhaps he has refused to listen. Or perhaps the future and the past can’t be changed, only seen. I don’t know. Perhaps the uncertainty itself drops me here, like a pigeon shot out of the sky.
“The future and the past are our two most difficult battles,” Sitting Bull says. “They are not battles we are always meant to win.”
Everything is both fragmented and familiar. Yellow. The smell of apples. Our most difficult battles.
I tell him that I can’t get back to the right time. I can get to the cabin, with the She-wolf and the baby. I can creep through the yellowing grass and pause outside the window. The Wolf isn’t there. He’s just left the house. He hasn’t returned.
I become immaterial when I try to linger without purpose. I am stuck and exhausted with the effort. And when I come back, my body hurts and my foolish hand shakes.
And meanwhile, here at this place where I’ve landed, a mallet rings against a stake. A show horse whinnies. Here, tents are going up. Life is moving forward.
“I can’t arrive at the right moment,” I tell Sitting Bull.
“What is the right moment? What is it you want to do, daughter?”
I can feel myself raising the gun, sighting down the barrel, feeling the power of life and death in my hands, thinking: run.
“I’ll decide when I’m there.”
“But you have been there, Watanya Cicilla. You’ve looked into the Wolf’s eyes. You’ve smelled his fear. Did it make a difference?”
This wasn’t something Nieman had shown her.
Ruth wasn’t done reading, but her phone rang and she brought it to her ear.
“I didn’t get through all of it yet,” she said.
“He didn’t want to send me the whole document, just a badly typed sample. He said the original was handwritten, but he didn’t share that. Everything about him sent up red flags, most of all the fantasy element of Annie Oakley somehow having visions or whatever is supposed to be happening there.”
“What did you tell him?”
“One, that even in terms of fiction, I wasn’t convinced.”
“Wait. Did Bert say this was fiction?”
“No. But I didn’t like him. He was cagey. It seemed like he wanted to pick my brain without giving anything in return. And when I started questioning some of the Oakley stuff, he came back telling me I wasn’t an Oakley expert, that he’d find his own.”
“So, you sent him to me.”
“Are you kidding? I was trying to save you from him. This was—yeah—February of last year. You were just home from the hospital. I mentioned your name so that he could look up your publications.” Ruth had only two journal articles and a published conference paper to her name, but she appreciated that Joe considered them worthy of mention. “I didn’t give him your email or phone number or anything, and I certainly didn’t encourage him to reach out. So, wait—is this guy bothering you now?”
“No,” she said. Nieman—or Bert, or Bert Nieman?—had been willing to mail only a typed, out-of-context excerpt to Joe Grandlouis, a young history professor with an impressive CV of publications online. Later, he’d decided to entrust the full journal to her, an unemployed Oakley scholar of no renown. Maybe she was simply the last logical possibility. Or maybe she was the most logical possibility.
Googling Ruth’s name, he would have easily found an announcement about the forthcoming Annie Oakley book, back when it was forthcoming, on the university press website. He also might have found a newspaper article detailing Ruth’s crash. Maybe he knew what she had in common with Annie Oakley—a serious midlife accident, to say the least—and thought she’d be vulnerable to a hoax. Or perhaps he’d gathered that her circumstances were the only reason she might have a sufficiently open mind.
“He has been in contact with me,” she told Joe. “He sent me a journal—not fiction, or that’s not how he presented it. And he has something more I want. Some follow-up letters he hasn’t bought yet.”
“But he didn’t show you this letter or whatever it is?”
“No.”
“What’s he asking from you?”
“Nothing.”
“What’s the problem, then?”
“Well, actually, he’s dropped out of touch before I got to see all that he had.”
“That sounds like good news. Anyway, if he was trying to pawn off something extremely dubious, he’s barking up the wrong tree. You’re the last person to believe in some cockamamie story about Oakley and Sitting Bull and visions.”
But what if she was exactly the person who would believe?
She wanted to tell Joe so much, but she only said, “I’ve changed, Joe.”
But Joe was off on his own tangent. “Hey—those horrible scenes I used to write about the women and children at the camp just before the Battle of the Greasy Grass, and Custer setting up nearby so they could terrify them and take them as prisoners? I used to get off on that stuff.”
“It was why we broke up,” she said. It had come to her in a flash: how his insistent dwelling on graphic details had soured their very last road trip together. It was just hours after they’d visited one particularly grim Native American historical site together that they’d called it quits.
“What?”
“We broke up, that summer before my last year in grad school. After an argument about just that: glorifying morbid historical details.”
“That’s not why we broke up.”
Joe was always so certain about everything.
“Anyway,” he said when she wouldn’t argue with his statement, “it’s true you never liked the dark stuff. Or you’d take one tiny hit, the same way you’d take one hit off a roach—a little American slavery, a little bit of Auschwitz—and pass it back, quick. You’d talk about the stuff that didn’t scare you, because it was already a cartoon in your head. But the deep-dark shit, no way.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t refer to Auschwitz as a cartoon.”
She tried to say it in a lighthearted way, but that wasn’t how he received it.
“Don’t talk down to me, Ms. McClintock. You and I both know what happens to genocide that’s already been processed and monetized by Hollywood so many times that it doesn’t give modern people nightmares, when it should.”
There was a tense silence, not even a crackle over the phone line. For a moment, Ruth thought maybe Joe had hung up. But then she heard the squeak of his office chair, followed by a sigh.
“Ruth, I was only trying to say that I’m the one who has mellowed out. I get it now.”
She waited, still holding her breath. This was a new Joe—one who stepped back from the brink.
He asked, “You know John Greenleaf Whittier?”
“Vaguely.”
“Poet, mid-1800s. He has a poem that goes, ‘The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din / Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in . . .’”
“Echoes. Yes.”
“More than echoes. Friggin’ howls. But do we subject people to that? I think about the stuff I used to write, and then I think of Reka and Thomas. I think of the readers who might have their own kids. It feels wrong to pull some of those emotional strings. It’s too easy to make people squirm and hurt. Easier than making them think.”
“You’re right.”
“I am? That’s a first.”
“And you were right back then, too. Maybe it should hurt sometimes.”
“Tell me more.” She could hear the smile in his voice, trying to find his way back into a less prickly conversation. But this was serious.
Ruth said, “You said I couldn’t be a historian if I couldn’t stomach all the bad things that human beings did to each other. Maybe you reveled and r
anted a little too much. But I . . .”
She paused. Why had they broken up again?
She could picture Iowa, on the roof of her apartment in the heat of a summer night, with Joe, smoking and drinking cheap red wine. A disagreement not about history, but about her own sister. Kennidy was having a bad time. Joe thought Ruth should talk her sister into an extended visit. Ruth was wary. Kennidy always seemed angry with her, contemptuous even. On top of that, Ruth needed her own space. She needed to contain the chaos of Gwen and Kennidy and everything she’d left behind. Whereas Joe was the opposite, open to conflict and complications.
They had fought then. They had kept fighting about other things, but that late summer disagreement had set the pattern. When Kennidy died, in October, they were done.
“You thought I could help her . . .” she started to say to Joe. The image was so real, suddenly. She could see the Iowa stars overhead. She could feel her lip at the edge of the tin cup. She could smell the cheap grapey wine. “But I didn’t face things. I looked away.”
Just as she had during her visions of Scott. As she had so many other times in her life.
Silence. That was how it was on the phone with Joe: the silences could be long.
He finally asked, “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
There it was, retrieved from forgetfulness. Carried up from the basement archive of abandoned memories.
They’d broken up because of Kennidy. Or rather, because of Ruth’s reaction to Kennidy and her problems, her need to shut down and close out everyone, especially Joe. It disturbed Ruth that she’d remembered this so inaccurately, that it was something Joe could have told her, if she’d ever asked. Before the accident, she wouldn’t have asked. She hadn’t wanted to know.
“Jesus, I’m a selfish bitch sometimes,” she said.
“Easy.”
“No, I am. I have been. First into the lifeboat, that seems like my motto.”
“But don’t lifeboats have room for, like, sixteen or twenty people?”
“Damn it, Joe.”
“Okay,” he said, then more softly, “Okay, okay. I know what you’re saying. You know how many of my cousins overdosed or killed themselves? Five. Another two in prison. Am I glad I moved away? Hell, yeah. Do I feel like shit for moving away? Hell, yeah.”
Ruth waited for him to say more, but when he didn’t, she took a deep breath. “Anyway, your Sitting Bull essays. And the thing Bert sent you.”
“Right. You were the one to tell me two years ago that Sitting Bull wasn’t really Annie’s mentor. You told me that your sharpshooter and my chief possibly weren’t all that close, beyond the pet names.”
“Back then I thought they weren’t.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m open to other interpretations.”
“Oh, great. So now you think I should have listened to the guy?”
“Wait. Listened? Do you mean literally? Did you actually talk to Nieman?”
“To Bert. Yeah. He sent me the letter first, physical mail. I called him when I couldn’t make heads or tails of what he’d sent me. But it was hard to understand him.”
“Foreign accent?”
“No, throat cancer. He didn’t explain that when he first reached out to you? He told me plainly he was dying, stage four, and that was . . .” Joe paused and whistled. “Shit. That was a year and nine months ago.”
They talked just a few minutes more about Sitting Bull and the moccasins he had given Annie Oakley, the ones made by his daughter. While Joe talked, Ruth stayed quiet, thinking.
The ones he’d worn at the Battle of Little Bighorn, Custer’s Last Stand—the battle Sitting Bull had predicted because he’d had a vision just weeks earlier.
The moccasins he had worn during the battle. The very same ones Sitting Bull had given to Annie Oakley, another seer—and maybe more than just a seer.
It was starting to click, even as they finished the call, but Ruth wasn’t ready to tell Joe everything. She needed to read the rest of what Bert had sent first. Joe wouldn’t understand the context of that letter fragment he had. He couldn’t possibly guess why Annie Oakley would have written it, or to whom.
Ruth read the end of the extract, squinting at her phone.
“You’ve looked into the Wolf’s eyes. You’ve smelled his fear. Did it make a difference?”
“I can’t remember.”
“You’ve been looking into his yellow eyes all your life. You cannot arrive there because you are always there.”
Riddles are not what I want, only his counsel. He is the only person in whom I can confide. Not Frank. Not any of my nieces. Only this old Chief, nearly as lost in my world as I’d be in his.
“I need him to hurt,” I say.
“He is hurting.”
“I need to feel him hurting. I need him to run.”
“And so he runs. But you are the one who gets no rest.”
Reece? You around?
He didn’t immediately reply. Unusual.
Sorry for yesterday. But I have big news.
Still nothing. He must be away from his phone. Maybe he was working at the café.
Reece, it isn’t just clairvoyance or neurosis, either.
She’d tell him in person, the thing they should have come out and admitted from the start.
It’s time travel.
22
Ruth
Heading outside to meet her ride, Ruth saw a man hammering the new for sale sign into her yard.
“Whoa, whoa,” she said, hurrying over to stop him, but the chore was already half done. He’d excavated a hole near the curb on the property adjoining hers. Van, her neighbor, had just come out as well.
“I’m really sorry about this. Hi—Ruth. Gwen’s daughter.” She held out her hand. “We haven’t really talked since I took over my mom’s place, but I think I came over to your house once when I was about twelve.”
Her hand was still awkwardly extended. “For a class assignment. Oral history. You told me about your family’s Minnesota roots, how you used to own this whole street and all kinds of farmland.”
He looked at her hand for a long moment before taking it and then squeezed her knuckles in a tight, dry grip that hurt a little. “Of course, I remember.”
He’d been handsome once, she could tell, but he made no effort to smile or appear neighborly now. He wouldn’t look her in the eye. He just kept looking at the hole in his lawn, his jaw moving as he sucked on a piece of hard candy. She smelled licorice.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I don’t know how they made the mistake. Unless you’re selling your house, too? My realtor keeps saying they’d love to tear down both our houses and put new four-bedrooms up and down this whole street. But I suppose that might be good for you—don’t you own those empty lots across the street, too?”
He said nothing. It was amazing, actually, his ability to sit there showered by questions and not bother answering.
The man with the excavator tool stood looking at the both of them, offering no apology.
More tersely, Ruth said, “The realtor knows my address—obviously. They shouldn’t have done this.”
“Well,” Van said. “I’m sure this fella here can fill it back in. Can’t you?”
“No problem at all.”
“All right. Good.” Van turned away. He was already walking back to his house, his hands shoved into the pockets of his satin baseball jacket. An old guy, but lean and strong, like an aging cowboy.
This was the man who had sold her mother the house at a below-market price. He could answer Ruth’s questions. She had never thought of just knocking on his door, because for her, answers came from archives, from documents, preferably not from people—especially not ones who wouldn’t look her in the eye.
She should knock on his door ano
ther day and try harder. But right now, she was intent on getting to the café right away to meet Reece.
Still, Ruth’s eyes lingered on the neighbor as he walked slowly back to his house: stiff gait, lean frame and bony shoulders, the sheen of his blue jacket with gray cuffs and, just when he turned sideways, the flash of an arm patch—almost impossible to make out at this distance—featuring a blue bird and a red maple leaf.
They retreated to a café table in the far back, next to a low bookshelf full of old board games with boxes split at the seams. Ruth caught Reece looking at the mess with the same disdain with which he’d contemplated her garage full of poorly stored crap. He tried to dress sloppy—flannel shirts, long bangs—but was in fact a perfectionist, compulsive and neat.
Also, possibly, he could hold the occasional grudge.
“You’re not upset, are you?” she asked.
“Why would I be?”
“Our walk,” she said. “Maybe I didn’t respond with enough empathy when you told me about what happened to you last summer. I wasn’t as attentive as I should’ve been.”
“No. That’s fine.”
A teenage girl with an apron was passing close to their table, pushing a broom. “Reece?”
He looked over his shoulder. “Five minutes.”
Reece had placed a tiny notebook and pencil on the table, taking extra care to line up the pencil next to the pad so it wouldn’t roll away. Next to it, he had one of his Sharpies. His phone was conspicuously absent.
On Ruth’s side of the table was the printout of what Joe had shared with her, from the “pivot point” Annie kept returning to while trying to reach the Wolves.
“You go first,” he said, gesturing to the pages on the table. “Read what you’ve got.”
She could see he was excited, even if he wouldn’t admit it. After she finished reading the letter fragment, Reece clapped, reciting, “‘And so he runs.’ Go get ’em, Annie.”
“But those aren’t the final words. The final words are about her not getting any rest. She’s not at peace with what she’s doing. I’m afraid to say it out loud. If you were . . . anyone else, I wouldn’t say it.”
Annie and the Wolves Page 15
