Another Man's Moccasins

by Craig Johnson

  “No.”

  She looked at me, hurt and not understanding, recrossed her legs under the silk yukata, and smoothed the Stars and Stripes on her lap. The military newspaper had become her version of See Spot Run.

  It was early at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge, and we were the only ones there. The bartender, Le Khang, would come in a little after six and make coffee but would quickly depart when he figured there was no profit margin in my custom. The last three mornings he hadn’t shown up at all, leaving the coffee making to Mai Kim. She was always in the bar when I was there, always anxious for another English lesson. She had dragged a stool over from the bar and sat there, perched in anticipation.

  She took a sip of her coffee; she didn’t like coffee but felt that drinking it advanced her cause in becoming American. She cocked her head. “More lesson, yes?”

  “No.” I blew a breath from my distended cheeks and tripped my fingers along the piano keys, abusing Rachmaninoff’s Concerto no. 2

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  in C Minor, which matched my mood in the key of melancholy. It was the Adagio sostenuto that my mother had imprinted into my soft head, evening after evening. Somehow, the Harlem Stride didn’t mesh with the quiet mornings just off Tan Son Nhut’s Gate 055.

  Not dissuaded, she unfolded the wrinkled and yellowed copy of Stars and Stripes. I had been doing my part for the winning of hearts and minds by working with her on her English. She had settled on an article warning against using C-4 explosives as a fi eld-cooking implement and was miffed that I’d shown little enthusiasm for her presentation. She cleared her throat and sat up straight. “Cookie with fire . . .”

  I automatically corrected her. “Cooking, not cookie.”

  “Cooking with fire . . .”

  “Mai Kim, I really don’t feel like doing this this morning.”

  She straightened her paper with a brisk gesture to let me know she wasn’t pleased with my interruption. “What matter with you?”

  “Nothing. I just don’t want to do this right now.”

  She watched me over the newspaper as I sipped the coffee she’d left for me on the corner of the piano. “Battalion command has issy-ued a dire-connected . . .”

  “Issued a directive.”

  She looked hurt. “That what I say.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  She was reading again. “ Con-cern-a-ring the use of C-4 plas-catic espelosove . . .”

  “Plastic explosive.”

  She nodded and studied the paper as if it had tried to trick her.

  “Plastic explosive.”

  She was an excellent mimic and a pretty good student. “Mai, please?”

  “Resydoo may result in C-4 poisonee, an’ fumes from encoseded quarter . . .”

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  “Enclosed quarters.”

  “Enclosed quarters, that what I say.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  She ignored me and continued. “Can be etremelousely dangerous.

  Wepeaon Speshulist Mack Brown report that atatempie to stamp-out C-4 can produss explosion. . . .” She turned to me, looked over the rim of her cup, and winked. “I get that one right, yes?”

  “Close enough.”

  She saw the uninterested look on my face and continued to study me. “You no like coffee, cowboy?”

  “No, your coffee is fine.” I continued poking at Rachmaninoff with an extended forefinger. “You ever have a shitty job that you didn’t enjoy doing?” I glanced up at the tiny prostitute sitting there in the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge. “Forget I asked that.”

  Mai Kim’s story was not a unique one in the rural villages of Vietnam; when she was eleven, she had been sold. She was fifteen now, and the four years of use in the world’s oldest profession had aged her like the major who had greeted me upon my arrival. Maybe it was the place; youth could not be maintained without innocence.

  She blinked and folded the paper in her lap. “You no like here?”

  I swiveled on the beat- up piano bench and rested the coffee cup on my knee, finally giving her my undivided attention. I could hear in the distance, but approaching, a group of Kingbees tipping their motors and flying over for a morning patrol. I’d learned that the H-34s, with their thirty-two- cylinder radial engines that sat right under the cockpit, were slower than the UH-1s but treasured for the large chunk of metal between the pilots and whoever might be shooting up at them. “It’s not that.”

  She folded her arms. “What it, then?”

  “Then what is it.”

  “Then what is it?”

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  I smiled at her Wyoming accent.

  Baranski and Mendoza had become irritated with my hardheaded naiveté and had begun spending more time on other investigations, leaving me with hours to sit and contemplate what I wasn’t getting done. Just as the major had intimated, the locals had quickly made me, and simply being observed talking with me had become reason for suspicion. But the hookers still talked to me; at least Mai Kim did.

  I looked into the face of what seemed like the only friend I had in the place and wondered how long she’d keep talking to me if I didn’t start holding up my end. “You know about the drugs.” She nodded her head with concentration. “There was a young man who died after visiting the air base.”

  “Lot of men die after visiting air base.”

  I looked up at her. “This one was different.”

  Henry studied the sleeping Indian.

  “Different than what I know.”

  “Crow?” I leaned against the counter.

  He took a deep breath. “Yes, but not River or Mountain Band. He is something else.”

  I pointed toward the moccasins. “The bead pattern is one I’ve never seen; it’s geometric, but not the Crow that I know.”

  He knelt by the bars and examined the medicine bag and moccasins, though I noticed he touched neither, and nodded.

  “ Kicked- in- the- Belly.”

  I waited a moment. “You mind telling a heathen devil white man what that is?”

  He pivoted and sat on the floor with his back to the cell, which Dog took as an invitation and joined him. “Eelalapi’io, a shunned band, one of thirteen exogamous maternal clans; fourth clan, grouped with ackya’pkawi’a, or Bad War Honors.” I watched as he thought about it, first categorizing the 4 4 CR A I G J O H N S O N

  information and then translating it so that it would be relatable to me linguistically and culturally. “ Seventeen- twenty-seven, or thereabouts, there was a Crow war party led by Young White Buffalo that raided the Fat River country and came back with a very strange animal. This animal was as large as the elk but with rounded hooves, a long tail, and mane; it had no antlers, and the tribe was very interested in this new thing.

  A brave got too close to the rear of the animal and touched it.

  The creature struck the man as quick as lightning, knocking him to the dirt, where he rolled and clutched his midriff.”

  “A horse, hence, Kicked- in- the- Belly?” I plucked the olive-drab field jacket from the top of the bag, crossed the room, and sat in the chair with my arms folded over the backrest. “It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, unless he’s got a hiding place out there that my guys couldn’t find.”

  “Nothing on him?” Henry continued to pet Dog.

  “Just the matches, knife, photo wallet, and medicine bag, but Saizarbitoria is down there now going through the stu
ff in the tunnel.” I could see Henry was having the same doubts I was. “Why would he leave her lying out there where anybody could see her?”

  He stopped petting Dog and playfully pulled at one of his long ears. Dog opened his eyes but nothing else. “I understand he is not a reasonable individual?”

  “He’s tried to kill everybody he’s come in contact with so far, if that’s what you mean.” He nodded and, as I thought about the story, I connected it to the owner/operator of White Buffalo’s Sinclair Station up on the Rez. “Is the young White Buffalo in that story an ancestor of Brandon White Buffalo?”

  “Probably.”

  I glanced toward the cell. “Is Brandon related to this one?”

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  Crow in the holding cell. “I know most of Brandon’s family.

  Brandon’s father is Cheyenne, but the White Buffalo are Crow, and it is possible that some of them adopted the relatives of the mother.” He shook his head and turned back to me. “I do not know this man, but I am unfamiliar with some of the Crow bands, especially Kicked- in- the- Belly.” He raised a thumb to the cell behind him. “He resembles Brandon.”

  “You mean in raw tonnage? ”

  Henry snorted a soft response. “I can make some phone calls and check the tribal rolls.” He stayed motionless for a moment, and I knew there was more.

  “What?”

  “The medicine bag is warrior society—Crazy Dogs and Crooked Staff.” Dog looked up at his name, but Henry scratched behind his ears, and he settled his broad head back onto the Indian’s lap.

  “Big deal?”

  He nodded in a barely perceptible manner. “Great warriors.”

  I lifted the back of my hat and felt the bandaged lump.

  “Myself, a deputy, two HPs, and a couple of hospital orderlies can attest to that.”

  “Crazy Dogs are the fifth and least structured of the warrior societies—they committed themselves to death in battle.”

  I had heard of such things. “Kamikazes?”

  “In a sense. The death is not to be foolish or useless; it is to be beneficial in the battle as it is fought.” He paused for a moment. “It is said that these individuals are known to become very reckless in their lifestyle.”

  I nodded along with the solemnity. “And Crooked Staff ?”

  He took a breath and looked back at me. “Every spring the leaders of the war societies would give out four staffs to the 4 6 CR A I G J O H N S O N

  newest members. These young men were to plant their staffs upon meeting the enemy and tie themselves to them, essen-tially fighting to the death. This provided a rear guard to any action and supplied further impetus to the war party to rally and come to the young warrior’s assistance.”

  I unfolded my arms and tossed him the field jacket. “What do you make of that?”

  He turned to one side, so as not to disturb Dog, and opened the jacket as I had. He flipped the snap-buttons back and examined them, something I hadn’t thought to do. “Scovill Manufacturing, tropical issue; no liner buttons on the inside.” He looked up. “He looks to be our age.”

  “Yep.”

  “Army surplus, or . . .” He let the sentence hang there between us.

  “Or what?”

  The dark hands smoothed the broad back of the thread-bare field jacket. He looked at the horned medicine shield and the words RED POWER. “Or . . . he is one of us.”

  Henry Standing Bear didn’t mean Indian.

  Santiago Saizarbitoria had had a rough morning; he hadn’t gotten beat up by the Indian like the rest of us, but he had to go through the things in the tunnel. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

  Saizarbitoria was the Basque contingency of our little depart-ment and my second bid to keep our median age under fifty.

  He’d transferred up from Rawlins where he had worked in the high-risk division of the state’s maximum-security correction facility, or what we used to call prison in the old days, and Vic had nicknamed him Sancho before they had even met. He was lowest on the proverbial totem pole here in town, so he usually worked Sundays because he had to and because he had a wife A N OT H ER

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  with a child upcoming and needed the overtime. He was sitting on the bench in the outer office drinking a cup of coffee and flirting with Ruby. Henry continued making his phone calls.

  Dog kept nosing one of the garbage sacks at Sancho’s boots, but he kept pushing the beast’s muzzle away. Dog didn’t take it personally and plopped down beside the bench to wait for the deputy to open the bags. Santiago motioned to one of them.

  “There was a lot of dead stuff in his belongings.”

  I glanced at the bag that was tied-off. “Dead stuff ?”

  “Skulls, hooves, and things like that. I don’t think we should open this one indoors, especially since it’s kind of hot.”

  “Granted. And the other?”

  He looked a little dejected. “You’re not going to like this.”

  He reached in and took out a small, cheap black purse that he had put in a ziplock.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “About a third of the way back in the tunnel.”

  I got up with a sense of finality as Santiago followed me to the holding-cell counter. We donned our disposable latex gloves and began the preliminary. Dog followed us and the second bag.

  The pocketbook was covered with mud only on one side and was waterlogged where the water of Murphy Creek had entered the unzipped cavity. We began by opening the main compartment. There was an imitation silk scarf, which I carefully allowed to unfold toward the floor. “Doesn’t look expensive.”

  Saizarbitoria nodded and continued to write on the property roster attached to the clipboard at his lap. “Except for the mud, the pocketbook looks new.”

  “Yep.” I dropped the scarf into an evidence bag and reached in again, pulling out a set of keys on a remote. “GM.”

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  My deputy looked at the fob. “Yeah.”

  There were some other keys but they had no manufacture or code numbers. I dropped them into another bag and set them aside.

  There was a romance novel with a bodice-ripper cover of a young woman standing on a cliff with an ocean below her. It was in French and dog-eared about a quarter of the way through, but there was nothing else peculiar other than a zippered pouch that matched the purse, which was filled with about eighteen dollars, all in quarters.

  I picked up the pocketbook and started thinking about the young woman who had owned it. It was possible that she was a dust child—a child of a Vietnamese mother and an American father. One generation removed, she still looked Vietnamese to me. “Sancho?” He looked up. “Get the car keys checked.”

  He scribbled on the margins of his legal pad. “Got it.”

  There was a side compartment on the purse. I unzipped it, and there was a photograph plastered against the inside in a crease where, if you weren’t looking, you’d never find it. I turned and looked at Santiago. “No money except for the quarters, no ID, and a book in French. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”

  “Yes.” He looked up from the clipboard. “What’d you find on him?”

  I glanced at the sleeping giant in cell one. “There was a child’s wallet with some photographs but nothing really incriminating and nothing current except a matchbook from the Wild Bunch Bar.”

  “You want me to head back down to Powder Junction?”

  “Yep, please. I’m afraid Double Tough and Frymire are going to be laid up for a while, and I still haven’t heard from the Ferg.”

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  I pulled the photo from the damp insides of the purse lining and flipped it over to look at it. It was old and sun-
faded, curled at the edges where the water had soaked the paper. It was a snapshot of an Asian woman on a barstool. She was reading a newspaper with a man seated at a piano to her right with his back to the camera. He was wearing fatigues, and his face was partially turned. He was big, young, and heavily muscled with a baby face and a blond crew cut.

  And he was me.

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  My daughter held my hand. Ruby and Henry sat at the reception desk and looked at me, Henry with the receiver still at his ear.

  Saizarbitoria had put our set of photographs of the young woman’s body on Ruby’s desk, and they lay scattered beside the battered snapshot. I had sent Sancho to Powder Junction to ask some questions at the Wild Bunch Bar, and Lucian lay on the entryway bench, still thankfully sound asleep.

  “Daddy?” She was nuzzled up close, standing right next to me with her arms trailing down mine and her chin at the scar tissue on my clavicle. “Daddy, is it possible . . .?”

  I looked at her, and it was almost as if she wanted it to be true. “No.”

  “Then why would she be here?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Ruby looked again, studying the photos with renewed vigor. I faced the blue yonder in her eyes, and she nodded.

  “Walt, they could be related.”

  I compared their faces. There was a resemblance, but with the swelling and discoloration of the victim in our photos, it was hard to make the leap.

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  Or I simply didn’t want to.

  Henry began speaking into the phone in Cheyenne; I could understand the references to Brandon White Buffalo, but that was about it.

  She was smiling at the camera, and she had great teeth, just as I’d remembered. There was a nervousness in the smile, though, a wayward tension that showed that she wasn’t used to having her photograph taken.

  I thought about the body of the dead young woman by the highway and tried to connect it with the smiling woman in the old photo and to the one in my memory. I reached down and turned one of our photographs so that the profile of the woman matched the snapshot. Some of the bone structure was the same.

  I glanced at Henry, and it looked like he was on hold again.

  He nodded toward the pictures. “It is possible.”