Another Man's Moccasins

by Craig Johnson

  He smiled and inclined his head to Baranski as the matinee idol turned to me. “Lieutenant Longmire, this is Hollywood Hoang.” The small man extended a hand, and I shook it; his nails were clean, clipped, and polished, his skin lotioned smooth— I figured him for quite the dandy. “Hollywood here can get you anything you need.” He grinned at the helicopter pilot. “Hollywood, I need to score a pound of leg-endary Montagnard grass. How much?”

  “One carton Marlboro.” His accent had just a touch of French and was remarkably cultured even with the lack of prepositions. He glanced at me. “This for you, Lieutenant?”

  “No.”

  Baranski was laughing. “You get my point?”

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  The flyboy interrupted. “Half carton.”

  “That’s okay, thanks.”

  “Half carton is very good price.”

  “I’m sure, but I’m really not interested.”

  He gave a slight shrug and smiled. “If anything you need, I get for you.”

  I watched him swagger back to the bar and glanced at Baranski.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Anything. Anything you want, he can get. He was Central Office of South Vietnam when they were fighting the French, but now he’s got ties to the CIA, so whatever you want he can get it.” He watched me as I scraped the rest of the palm tree off my beer label and stared at the table. “Hey, don’t make the long face, Longmire. Battalion headquarters don’t know shit. Do you have any idea how many personnel we have going in and out of here every day?” He leaned back in his chair, waved his cigarette in the air, and laughed. “This air base is roughly the size of LaGuardia Airport back in the states. We got air force, navy, and army personnel, not to mention you grunts; we got South Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thais, Laotians, and the odd NVA running through this place every day. Now, do you think we have any idea what they’ve got with them when they get here, what they have when they leave, or what they might’ve left here once they are gone?”

  I looked up. “Tough job.”

  “Impossible is more like it.” He took a deep breath and leaned in, placing his elbows on the table and looking at me over the empties. “The shit is everywhere, and if you go around asking a bunch of stupid questions and causing a lot of trouble, you’re going to end up dead; that’s your business.” He pointed a finger at his most recent partner, still passed out on the table. “But you might get us killed, too, and that shit is a no-go. You sabe?”

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  I looked at him blankly, still trying to figure it all out.

  “Look, fucking new guy. I was sent up here six weeks ago; I drink too much, smoke too much, bird-dog a few ao dai . . .” He glanced around and then leaned in even closer. “And then I got with the program. I’m an investigator with CID. And then along comes Second Lieutenant Walter Longmire and we’ve got a new sheriff in town?

  Fuck you.” We sat there in silence, looking past each other, listening to the music and the idle chatter at the bar. “Why don’t you tell me what it is that’s got the bug up battalion’s ass, and I’ll try to narrow our field of operations.”

  “U.S. Marine PFC James Tuley, of Toledo, Ohio.”

  Baranski thought about it. “Never met him.” The horn section in

  “Rescue Me” started up from the jukebox as the blond man shouted,

  “Damn it, I said no more splib music!”

  A few more of the black soldiers glared at us as I slowly started to stand. “Well, you missed your chance. He died of a heroin overdose in-flight from this air base about two weeks ago.”

  He shook his head and motioned for two more beers. “So let me guess; there’s a Governor Tuley, or a Senator Tuley back in O-hi-O

  that wants to know why his little boy died of a drug overdose in sunny South Vietnam?”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything about how James Tuley’s father was neither a senator nor a governor, but a night watchman at an automobile parts plant. I didn’t say anything about a Marine investigator who took an interest when he read that a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird was found on the body of the young man from the wrong side of the Toledo tracks.

  I took my beer from the passing waitress and moved toward the battered upright alongside the bar. More than a few faces watched my approach. It was time to introduce the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge inhabitants to live music and to the wonders of 32 CR A I

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  James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Joe Turner, Art Tatum, and the Harlem Stride.

  Real soul music.

  “Rise and shine, buttercup.”

  I raised my hat from the side of my head, just far enough to see two handcrafted Paul Bond boots and two knees, one real, the other artificial. I lowered my hat, effectively blocking the view. “Go away.”

  He kicked the underside of my bunk. “Get up, we got work to do.”

  Lucian Connally had been sheriff of Absaroka County the twenty-four years previous to my administration; he was a rough old cob who had lost his leg to Basque bootleggers back in the fifties, the prosthetic of which I was preparing to twist off and use to beat him to death. “I worked all night, old man, now go away.”

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t do too good of a job ’cause yer Indian’s over at Durant Memorial, takin’ the place apart.”

  I raised my hat again. “What?”

  “He come to, and he’s over there payin’ ’em back for Sand Creek.”

  I hustled off the bunk. “He’s Crow, not Cheyenne.”

  “He’s one pissed-off Indian, is what he is.”

  It was a disaster.

  The ER staff, assuming that the EMTs had given the wounded man a sedative, had rolled him into an examination area and left him until an overworked internist could get to him. A child with an ear infection, an elderly man with chest pains, and a woman going into premature labor had distracted the doctor.

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  In the meantime, the slumbering giant had awakened.

  Luckily, Double Tough and two of the HPs were still at the hospital when the excitement began. He had thrown the gurney and then began yanking very expensive machinery to throw next. They had charged him en masse, only to be plucked off one by one like the gurney and the pricey machinery. The tide shifted when Frymyer joined the fray, and the four men were able to get the Indian down long enough for the internist to pump enough Thorazine into him to knock out a buffalo.

  The two HPs who had participated in the newest melee were sitting on the hood of one of their cruisers—Ben Helton’s nose was still bleeding, and Jim Thomas was nursing a hand that was wrapped up to the elbow.

  Lucian nudged me as we stood there; he couldn’t help but give them the needle. “How you doin’, girls?”

  Ben, the older of the two and the one with the broken nose, spoke through the assembled cotton and gauze with a muffl ed, nasal voice; he was going to have two black-eye beauties. “Piss on you, old man. Where the hell have you two been?”

  Lucian said it like it was manifestly obvious: “Why, safely out of harm’s way.”

  Jim, the other wounded trooper, nodded. “He wakes up again, you call game and fish and tell ’em to bring a dart gun.”

  We continued into the emergency room, where Frymyer was seated on the floor of the hallway. His hands were bloody, his uniform was torn, and one ripped sleeve draped down over his elbow, which was in a sling, showing a more than prodi-gious bicep. The entire side of his face was bruised, from the eye socket to the jawline, and the eye that looked up at us was almost closed shut.

  �
��You all right?”

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  He nodded and then gently touched the swelling at his face. “But Double Tough’s arm is dislocated.”

  Lucian glanced at me. “Maybe he ain’t as double tough as we thought.”

  Frymyer started to stand, but I lowered myself down to his level instead. I pulled the remainder of his sleeve back up his arm. It was a shame that it was ruined since he’d just gotten his Absaroka County patch set and had sewn them on himself. “I asked how you are?”

  “I guess I’m okay.” He probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue. “Except I think I’ve got some teeth loose.”

  I took a closer look at him and his ruined shirt, noticing the name bar on his chest, which read FRYMIRE. “You spell your name with an ‘I’ and not a ‘Y’?”

  He stretched his jaw. “Yeah, like yours.” He tried to smile but quickly regretted it. “It’s okay, they still cash the checks.”

  He paused and looked down the hallway to where the Durant Memorial Massacre had taken place. “The internist says they can’t handle anything like this guy, and as soon as they get him patched up, we have to take him.”

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  I wandered back to the holding cells and watched the big Indian sleep.

  They had carted him over from the hospital, and he seemed to be, as the nurses would say, resting comfortably.

  The term barrel-chested did not apply to him—he was more like refrigerator-chested. He cleared his throat and swallowed a few times; I watched as the muscles bunched and relaxed under the bandages.

  The report from Durant Memorial indicated hemorrhaging of the short strap muscles of the neck surrounding the thyroid gland in front of the larynx, with a slight fracture of the hyoid bone and possible damage to the esophagus and trachea.

  I thought about the Vietnamese woman. If he had been anywhere near normal, I would have killed him but, for now, I was glad that I hadn’t.

  They had cleaned him up and supplied him with cloth-ing from the hospital laundry—one of those show-me-your-ass gowns that they stick on everybody. It must have been an XXXXL, but it still strained across the width of his shoulders. I had a thought and retrieved a pair of gigantic sweatpants from my office that read Chugwater Athletic Department, a joke 3 6 CR A I G J O H N S O N

  gift from Vic, and hung them on the bars. If I woke up in like situation, the first thing I’d want would be a pair of pants.

  They had pulled his hair back, and it was the first time I’d gotten a really good look at his face. It was broad, almost as if it had been stretched to fit his oversized frame, with a strong brow, a very prominent nose, and a mouth that was wide with full lips. There was a dramatic, caved-in spot at his left brow and a lot of scar tissue. It wasn’t what you could call a handsome face, but it was certainly full of history, hard-fought history. The creases in it were deep and, even though it was sometimes hard to judge the exact age of Indians, I fi gured he and I were pretty close.

  The hospital had sent over his clothes, which rested in a Hefty bag on the kitchenette counter. I figured I’d fish out the moccasins and put them in the cell for him and then thought there was no time like the present to go through his things.

  I put on my latex gloves.

  The moccasins were on top; they were intricately beaded in a pattern unlike the other Crow work I’d seen. It was Crow, there was no doubt, but a variation on a theme. The soles were still damp from our altercation in the tunnel, and there was a little bit of dried mud on the edges, but that was the only wear that I could find on them. Whatever else the giant’s habits were, the moccasins were something important. I placed them inside the cell and continued my search.

  There were a few personal items that had been placed in a ziplock. I pulled the plastic bag out and looked at the contents.

  There was a bandana, a book of matches from the Wild Bunch Bar down in Powder Junction, and an old KA- BAR knife that looked to be of Vietnam War vintage—one of the good ones, with a separate pouch for a whetstone. I opened the bag and pulled out the knife; it was roughly eight inches long. I slid A N OT H ER

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  the blade from the worn sheath and felt the keen edge, then slipped it back in the sheath and placed it on the counter for the property drawer.

  Under the bandana there was a pink plastic photo wallet, the kind a little girl would have had. It had white plastic whip-stitching along the sides, and the clear vinyl that held the photos was clouded and brittle. There were only two photographs in the wallet.

  The first one was of a woman staring off to the right; it was the kind of strip photo you got at an arcade in sets of four, black and white, the emulsion fading just a little at the edges.

  She had dark hair, part of it draping across her face, half hiding the smile that was there. She was quite beautiful in a simple, matter- of- fact way.

  The other was of the same woman seated at a bus station, the kind you see dotting the high plains, usually attached to a Dairy Queen or small café. She was seated on a bench with two young children, a boy and a girl. She wore the same smile, but her hair was pulled back in a ponytail in this photo, so her face was not hidden. She looked straight at the camera as she tickled the two children, who looked up with eyes closed and mouths open in laughing ecstasy.

  The sun must have been behind the photographer, because there was a very large shadow of the man who was taking the photograph, and it didn’t take much imagination to figure out who it might be. At the back of the laughing little family was a tin RC Cola sign with a chalkboard hung below that was slop-pily hand lettered and read Powder River bus Lines, Hardin 12:05, and in smaller print, Indians must Wait OUTSIDE. I read along the foxed edge of the photo and could just make out the date, August 6, 1968. I closed the wallet and set it aside.

  Well, he was definitely Crow.

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  There was also a hand-stitched medicine bag in the ziplock, with a few straggling ends of fringe left. It was beaded in a primi-tive pattern that looked like an animal of some sort with a wavy line through its body. It might have been either a bear or a buffalo, as they were the only animals who could have a heart line.

  I put it and the wallet inside the bars, alongside the moccasins.

  The field jacket was regular issue, but it came as no surprise that there were no identification marks. It was in rough shape and smelled bad, but there was a design on the back of a war shield and the words RED POWER were painted in now-faded crimson.

  I needed my expert.

  I folded the rest of the clothes and returned them to the properties bag, popped the knife in, and carried the collection out to Ruby in the front offi ce. I sat on the corner of her desk and threw my gloves in the wastebasket. Dog looked at them, but I told him no and reached down to pet his head. “Thanks for coming in on a Sunday.”

  She smiled. “I had things to do on the computer anyway.”

  “We may have to call the Ferg.”

  “He’s floating the Big Horn. You’re not going to be able to get him until tomorrow, if at all.”

  I sighed. “Still no word from Saizarbitoria?”

  She shook her head no, looking past me at the unconscious ex-sheriff asleep on the bench behind me. “There’s Lucian.”

  “Uh huh. How about Double Tough and Frymire?”

  “Repaired to their respective lairs, to lick their collective wounds.”

  I nodded. “Any word from DCI or the HPs?”

  She looked like she was tired of answering my questions.

  “No.”

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  Ruby didn’t have to work weekends, but nine times out of ten she’d be here, answering the phone and keeping the machinery of Absaroka County’s law enforcement juggernaut staggering forward. I reached out and gave her a playful poke on the shoulder. “Hey, did you hear a
bout my fi ght?”

  She batted the neon-blue eyes in all innocence. “I hear he wiped the floor with you.”

  “He did.”

  “Aren’t you getting a little mature for that kind of foolish-ness?”

  I felt the bandage patch and the knot at the back of my head. “He was fighting; I was just trying to escape with my life.” She shook her head at me, and I decided to change the subject. “How about my daughter and the Cheyenne Nation?”

  “As of an hour ago, they were finishing up lunch and going to work out.”

  I made a face. “That’s my job.”

  “They thought you might be busy.”

  “I am, but that doesn’t mean I can’t continue with my responsibilities.” I stood, feeling out of the loop, so I changed the subject again. “I guess we should start by checking the VA here in Durant and the one over in Sheridan; maybe they’ve heard of the guy. An Indian this big is going to be hard to miss.”

  She studied the sad resolution in my eyes. “What’s the matter?”

  I avoided the highly calibrated, direct, blue lie detectors that reflected up at me. “Maybe I should just go see if she’s all right.”

  She covered her smile with a hand and turned back to her computer, all mock seriousness. “Maybe you should.”

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  I stood there, valiantly attempting to cover the ground where I stood. “Henry doesn’t know her workout schedule.”

  She still didn’t look at me. “Right.”

  “I think I’ll go down there.”

  She nodded. “You do that.”

  Having set everybody straight, I headed down the crumbling steps behind the courthouse, past the Uptown Bar-bershop and the Owen Wister Hotel, and went in the alley entrance of Durant Physical Therapy. I was almost halfway up the steps to the old gym when I heard Henry’s voice, patient but persistent. “Two more . . .”

  Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1967