The Man Who Fell from the Sky

by Margaret Coel

  Vicky had clasped the old woman’s hand in an effort to reconnect, she supposed, and smiled at the other grandmothers before taking her leave. She walked among the grandfathers, paying her respect, and moved through the crowd, searching for familiar faces. Smiling, nodding. Making small talk against the thumping drums, the swish of moccasins on the hard-packed dirt. She was walking back through the parking lot when she heard the footsteps behind her. She slid into the Ford as Cutter took hold of the door and leaned toward her. “Leaving so soon?” He was grinning, eyes shining. “I was hoping we could talk. Catch up.”

  “Maybe some other time.” She tried to pull the door shut.

  “How about dinner?”

  “I’m pretty busy.”

  “I hear the Lakota that’s been hanging around took off.”

  “You can’t always believe the moccasin telegraph.”

  “What about it?”

  “The moccasin telegraph?”

  He tossed his head and gave out a bark of laughter. “Dinner.”

  Vicky hesitated. Something about Cutter drew her in: Trying to reconnect, trying to find himself in his people. Struggling with the kind of emptiness that she recognized in herself.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said, pushing the door shut. She caught a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror, staring after her, as she drove away.

  Now Ruth poured a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. “Cutter called this morning.” She motioned Vicky into the chair across from her. “He offered to come over, but I told him, ‘Go to the powwow. Enjoy yourself. We don’t all have to be dead.’”

  “Any word from the fed?”

  “It was an accidental death by drowning, but he won’t say so.” Ruth tilted her chin and stared at the ceiling. “They’re still waiting on autopsy results. Maybe they think Robert got drunk and fell into the lake.”

  “Did the fed say that?”

  “He didn’t have to.” She slurped the coffee. “Wanted to know if Robert had been camping. Did he have a tent? ‘Tent?’ I said. ‘Are you kidding?’ He always took a cooler with sandwiches and a thermos. But he slept in the bed of the pickup under the stars. He would never wrap himself inside a tent. It would be like crawling inside a coffin.” She shrugged and set the mug down hard on the table. “At least the fed’s no longer hammering about suicide. I been thinking I need to go to the lake, see where Robert died.”

  “We can do that.”

  * * *

  THE ROAD CLIMBED into the mountains. Every time the Ford took another turn, Vicky had a sense of the earth dropping away. The reservation shimmered in the far distances below, and vehicles crawled along Highway 26, sunlight flashing off chrome. The Ford punched deeper into the sky. Ruth was saying something about how Robert loved going to the mountains. An Arapaho of the plains, where the sky dropped all around, in love with the mountains! “We are blue-sky people,” she said. “We came from the blue sky, the way I heard the story. You ask me, it wasn’t the mountains Robert loved. It was the hunt for treasure.”

  Vicky gripped the wheel tighter as they started down into the valley. Around and around until Bull Lake came into view, a silvery mirror reflecting the sunlight. Patches of wildflowers glowed red, blue, and yellow among the pines. “Did he come here often?”

  “I never asked.”

  Vicky drove around another curve and pulled the visor down against the sun. They were dropping fast, the lake coming up to meet them now. Another couple of turns and the road flattened out and ran straight ahead like a racetrack. She pressed down slightly on the accelerator and gave the Ford its head as it bounced and skidded over the ridges of tire tracks. A phalanx of investigators and coroner’s officers had been here. Ahead was a strip of land that jutted into the lake, a half circle of yellow tape arched from the shore. She nudged the Ford to a stop. “Looks like this is the place.”

  Ruth stared straight ahead, past the yellow tape swinging in the breeze, to some point in the lake. She was silent.

  “We don’t have to go over there.” Vicky had started to open the door. The sweet smells of wild brush and wildflowers and the lake invaded the Ford.

  Ruth pushed her door open, swung out, and slammed the door behind her. Before Vicky caught up, Ruth was closing in on the tape. She stopped for a moment, as if she had encountered a wall, then pushed the tape down with one hand and climbed over. “I have the right,” she said.

  Vicky stepped over the tape and followed Ruth around the clumps of grass and willows, the purple flares of pasqueflowers. The water made a swishing noise as it washed onto the narrow band of sandy shore. A fish was jumping out in the lake.

  “So this is where Robert died.” Ruth kept walking until the water lapped around her sandals. She turned away from the lake. “I can feel him here. He didn’t want to die. He was surprised.” She spoke slowly, parsing the words. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  Vicky shook her head. She could hear her grandmother’s voice: What happens in a place stays in a place, changes the place forever.

  The breeze riffled Ruth’s hair, plucked at her blouse. She came forward and dropped onto a boulder. “I want to sit here awhile.”

  Vicky backed away to give the woman solitude and space. The yellow tape snapped and danced. All of this—a life—for a treasure hunt? It seemed ridiculous, a cruel joke. She had heard rumors of buried treasure since she was a kid. Butch Cassidy himself had buried his loot in the mountains and left behind a map, but no one she knew had ever seen it. Still the story persisted, along with a thousand other stories and rumors and what-ifs that drifted across time and kept the present a prisoner to the past.

  Except for the tire tracks, the ground looked undisturbed. A little to the right of where Ruth was sitting was a deeper set of tracks. Robert could have parked there, and the fed had impounded the pickup. Mute testimony to what had happened.

  She stepped back over the tape and started walking along the road, past the spot where Robert’s truck had sat, taking in the stretch of rocky, gray mountains around her. Looking for what? Some sign, something unusual. What had Robert done? Driven to the lake, parked, and then what? Decided to spend the night? Sitting on the shore, maybe on the rock where Ruth sat now, eating sandwiches, washing down each bite with a sip of warm coffee? Walking into the lake—the freezing water from the snow running off the high peaks—stumbling, falling. Giving up? Lying down and drowning? Incredible. She had known Ruth and Robert since they were kids. Strong as oxen, both of them. Like the people in Old Time, unbowed by the hardships that came their way.

  She realized she had walked a good half mile. She glanced back. Her Ford looked solitary, out of place, parked at the side of the road, the mountains rising above, and on the other side, the strip of land stretching into the lake. Ruth, a small, quiet figure on the rock. She started off again, and that is when she saw it: a campsite in the brush across the road from the lake. Tire tracks ran off the road toward the site. She followed the tracks, picking her way around the brush and boulders. Activity here, but when? A week ago? A month ago? She could hear Grandmother’s voice in her head: Tracks remain forever. Tracks of the wagon trains plowing across Indian lands were still here. Tracks of mules and wagons hauling gold out of the mountains were still here. In the most pristine places with no one else about, the past was here.

  Someone had camped here around a fire pit. Ashes and blackened pieces of wood chips littered the pit. A vehicle had been parked on the far side, depressions of the wheels far enough apart to suggest a truck. Bigger than a pickup.

  What happened? She heard the demand in her own voice. As if the campsite, the fire pit, the tire tracks, the mountain itself could provide an answer.

  The brush crunched behind her, and she swung around. Ruth was coming toward her. Cross-country, through the prickly pears and rocks and scrub brush. Yellow paintbrush lay trampled behind her. She gestured toward the fire pit. “C
ampsite?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “So that’s why the fed wanted to know if Robert had a tent.”

  “There’s no telling how old this campsite is.”

  “Could be recent,” Ruth said. “Could have been here days ago. Could have been here when Robert died.”

  “I’m sure the fed is looking . . .”

  “Looking for what? A truck or SUV with people who watched my husband die in the lake and drove out of here? Didn’t try to help him?” Ruth’s voice rose into the mountain quiet. Moisture glinted in her eyes. “Drove onto the road and away from here. South Dakota. Montana. Not caring what happened?”

  “Ruth, we don’t know . . .”

  “Don’t tell me I don’t know! The truth is everywhere. In the lake, the shore, the rocks. He didn’t want to die, Vicky. Robert did not want to die.”

  7

  THE STAINED GLASS windows glowed red, yellow, and blue in the morning sun. Technicolor patches of light lay over the pews and the brown faces of the parishioners. A low undercurrent of prayer, like the hum of electricity, ran through the small church. “Our Father who art in Heaven. Hallowed be thy name.”

  Father John looked around at the parishioners scattered about the pews. He knew everyone by name. His own family seemed remote, far away, another time and place. The people here were his family now. The elders and grandmothers, the mothers poking kids to their feet, the squealing babies, the bored, stone-faced teenagers. A big, unwieldy, imperfect, and beautiful family. Odd how it always came as a surprise to find himself at a mission in the middle of Wyoming. He had never imagined himself a priest. Then something had started happening to him. A nudging, a calling. Unspoken questions that left him twisting and turning in the night, demanding an answer. Whom shall I send? Finally he had answered: Send me, Lord. Send me.

  After Mass he stood outside with the sun bouncing off the white stucco church and shook hands, wishing his parishioners a good day, a happy day, telling the elders he would stop at the senior center for a cup of coffee this week, promising Mary Louise White Bonnet he would visit her mother in the hospital. At some point he noticed the white man hanging back, shifting from one foot to the other on the patch of grass that lay between the church and Circle Drive. His parishioners ignored the man. After they had filed past on their way to coffee in Eagle Hall, the white man walked over and extended a fleshy, bearlike hand. “Father O’Malley?” He hurried on, not waiting for an answer. “Todd Paxton. We’re making a documentary about Butch Cassidy. I’m the director. Would you have a few minutes?”

  He had it then, the reason his parishioners had given the man a wide berth. Probably wasn’t anyone on the rez who hadn’t been inconvenienced by the filming, stuck in long lines while the actors rode across the prairie.

  The man had the smooth hand of someone who worked with cameras or computers, not horses or cattle. Like the hands of his parishioners, hardworking, outdoor hands. “Give me a few minutes,” Father John said. He wanted to walk back through the church, check the pews for keys and glasses and baby bottles, hang up his chasuble and alb in the sacristy closet, fold away his cincture, put the Mass books in the cabinet. “Go on over to Eagle Hall and get yourself a cup of coffee. I’ll meet you there.”

  Father John made his way past the tables and groups of people. Shaking hands again, smiling, patting the old people’s shoulders. The air in the hall was a fug of fresh coffee smells. Outbursts of laughter punctuated the low roar of conversations. Elena, the mission housekeeper, blocked his way and handed him a mug of coffee. “A little cream, the way you like it,” she said. She knew everything about him, this elderly woman with gnarled, arthritic hands and hair the color of steel cropped around her head. She was probably in her seventies, although she might have crossed into her eighties. The subject never came up, since it made no difference. She ran the residence, ordered the bishop and him around the way she had been ordering the priests around at St. Francis for decades. She was a living archive of memories. He thanked her and took the coffee. So like his mother sometimes, he thought, it was uncanny. Running the kitchen and the house and everything beyond. Praying for one of her sons to become a priest, like all Irish mothers of her generation. Give a son to God and he will be yours the rest of your life. No other woman to take him away.

  Todd Paxton sat alone at a table in the far corner. Dark hair falling over his forehead, narrowed, observant eyes glancing about the room. Arapahos flowed around him, coffee cups and doughnuts in hand, eyeing the white man in their midst—the stranger—and moving on. Father John pulled out a chair across from the director, sat down, and took a sip of coffee.

  “Hope this isn’t an imposition.” Paxton occupied himself pushing a half-filled cup in a little circle about the table. “Lot of people here to see you.”

  “It’s not an imposition. What can I do for you?”

  The man stopped pushing the cup and leaned forward. “We’ve been filming on the rez for a week now. Next week we intend to film at the Hole in the Wall up in the Bighorns where Butch and his gang hung out, then move on to Brown’s Canyon on the Wyoming-Utah border. My research suggests Butch spent a lot of time there. The place was desolate; deputies and posses avoided it. Would’ve been like riding into an ambush.” He laughed softly. “I am definitely getting the vibe that Butch was a smart man. The reason he and Sundance didn’t get caught was because Butch outsmarted the law. Except for that one time, of course, when he went to the Wyoming prison for stealing a horse. We’ve been filming all the places he knew around here. Lander. Dubois. The Wind River. The Little Wind River. Ethete. Arapahoe. The powwow. You name it, we have footage.”

  “Powwow?”

  “And farmers’ markets. Provides context, gives a sense of life on the rez today. I understand it was different a hundred and thirty years ago, but it’s the same people. Arapahos and Shoshone. People don’t change that much. I found a book with photographs of life on the rez in the early days. They had powwows and get-togethers.” He took a quick drink of coffee, set the cup down, and pushed it away. “But we need more. We need to talk to people with stories about Butch handed down in their families. People whose ancestors knew him, hid him on their ranches. I’m hoping you can put me in touch with folks like that.”

  Father John sipped at his own coffee for a moment. His parishioners were still flowing around the table, leaving a space between the director and themselves. “Have you talked to Arapahos?”

  “We got nowhere. Oh, they’re very polite. Didn’t tell us to back off or go away. Smiled, said they’d check with a few people who might know someone and get back to us. I know the old skiddoo when I see it. No sense in riling us up by saying you don’t know anybody and if you did, you wouldn’t be telling us. Just smile and smile. Works every time. Left us hoping every day that the next day we’d get an interview with somebody who had stories about Butch.”

  “I can make some inquiries.”

  “Ah!” Paxton threw up both hands. “I wish I had a dollar for all the times I’ve heard that.”

  “There’s a white woman from an old family in the area. I can see if she’d be willing to talk to you. Do you have a card?”

  “White?” Todd Paxton fumbled in his jeans’ side pocket, withdrew a small metal envelope, and extracted a card that he pushed across the table. “I was hoping you’d suggest some Arapahos.”

  There were probably a lot of Arapahos with stories, Father John was thinking. Families that had straggled onto the rez with Chief Black Coal and Chief Sharpnose after the Arapahos had been hunted across the plains with nowhere to go, no more lands to call their own. The government had sent them to the Shoshones. They had asked Chief Washakie if they could come under his tent, and the Shoshone chief had taken pity. That was in 1878. Fifteen years later, Butch Cassidy had ridden into the area.

  “I’ll check around.” He slipped Paxton’s card into his shirt pocket and got to hi
s feet.

  The director had already stood up and was pushing the chair into the table. He glanced toward the door, as if he were plotting a path across the plains. “I’d appreciate it.”

  Father John watched the man weave through his parishioners and step outside, a dark figure against the sunlight. Then he started through the crowd, visiting, exchanging polite pleasantries. He stopped at the table where Elsa Lone Bear was sitting, pulled a vacant chair over with his boot, and sat down a little behind her left shoulder. She turned toward him. “That white man the film director?”

  “His name is Todd Paxton.”

  “What’s he doing here?” Elsa was in her twenties, part of the younger generation, teaching fifth grade and trying to find a way between the past and the present.

  “At the mission?”

  “No. What are they trying to prove? Butch Cassidy was a long time ago. Times have changed.”

  “The landscape doesn’t change much.” He was thinking that Butch Cassidy had seen the same mountains, the same rivers, the same prairie stretching into an almost always blue and cloudless sky.

  “The people don’t like a lot of attention, you know.”

  He nodded. He had come to realize that Arapahos liked to be the observers.

  “Would it be all right to stop by later to see Eldon?”

  “Oh, Grandfather would like that. Hasn’t gotten out much lately. He’s been having trouble with his ghost leg. The one that burns like fire even though he lost it in that automobile accident twenty years ago. The doctor says the nerves still think the leg is there, so they keep sending out pain signals.”

  “The past has a way of hanging around.”

  “Do we ever get free?”

  “Is that what you would like?”

  She turned her head and stared out over the hall. The crowd was smaller now. The plates of doughnuts gone. Coffee smells turning musky and stale.