Another Man's Moccasins

by Craig Johnson

  “And Eli survived?”

  “I understand there were behavioral problems even then, and he was shuttled off to foster homes. He now has his own gallery over in Hot Springs, South Dakota; Native abstracts, but things are difficult.” I nodded and, after a moment, he turned to watch me. “What?”

  I took a deep breath and set the cruise control at ninety.

  “So blooding the medicine is like a curse?”

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  The Cheyenne Nation frowned. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  I felt my face tighten. “Well, it appears to be holding.”

  I noticed that one of the highway patrolmen had pulled a green vehicle over at the top of a far hill and hit the brakes. I slowed my truck and slid in behind the Dodge as the shapely blonde in mirrored glasses placed a hand on her hip, near the Glock, and looked back at us from the driver’s side door of Tran Van Tuyen’s Land Rover.

  Rosey wore short black search gloves, with undone pearl snaps that revealed pale skin at the wrists of her tanned arms.

  She straightened her campaign hat as she walked toward us with Tuyen’s license, registration, and insurance card in her hand.

  I liked how she walked and smiled. “How you doin’, Troop?”

  She tipped her sunglasses down and looked at me. “Have we got some kind of Vietnamese migration going on?”

  “He’s the grandfather.”

  Her demeanor changed immediately. “Oh.”

  I glanced up at Tuyen, who was still calmly seated in his vehicle, but who was adjusting his rearview mirror to look at us. “How fast?”

  She leaned an elbow on my truck and glanced back at him.

  “Borderline, eighty- three.”

  “Let him go? He’s had a rough couple of days.” Her eyes came back to mine, and the delicate parchment of the skin at her high cheekbones reminded me of someone else who had been beautiful.

  She nodded, and the eyes went down only to come up slow.

  “You owe me one.” She handed me the paperwork and smiled crookedly. I was feeling a little warm, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the temperature.

  As she strutted back to the black Dodge and climbed A N OT H ER

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  in with one last glance, I turned to Henry. “It’s you, right? I mean . . . it’s not me.”

  He frowned. “No, it is you. Some women have very peculiar tastes.”

  I climbed out and walked up to Tuyen’s vehicle as Rosey slipped back onto the highway like a glossy panther looking for prey and disappeared over the hill. Tuyen turned to look at me as I leaned on his door. I noticed that the hard case I’d seen at the ghost town had now gravitated to the passenger floor. I handed him his identification and then looked up and down the empty highway. “Headed back to your motel? ”

  He stuffed the license back into his wallet and fl ipped the other papers into the center console. “Yes.”

  “Mr. Tuyen, would you have any idea if Ho Thi was traveling alone?”

  He looked at me, his face unchanged. “What? ”

  “I got some information that your granddaughter may not have been traveling alone and was wondering if you would have any idea who might’ve been with her in the car.”

  I watched as he stared at the steering wheel. “I . . . I have no idea.”

  I crouched down and placed both arms on the sill. “Do you think you could contact your organization back in California and see if there’s anyone else missing?”

  “Certainly.” He began reaching for his cell phone, which was plugged into his dash.

  “That’s okay, you’re not going to get service till you get down into Powder Junction.”

  He tried to smile, but his face remained grim. “Outside the veterinary offi ce?”

  “Yep.”

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  He took a breath. “You think that Ho Thi might have been traveling with someone?”

  “It’s possible.” I nudged the brim of my hat back.

  He nodded. “I will contact Children of the Dust and see if anyone else is missing.” He glanced at me and then to the rolling hills that seemed to recede in the distance, a terrain so broad it hurt your eyes. “This is most distressing.”

  “Yes, it is.” I stood and gestured back toward Henry. “My friend and I are going down to Powder Junction and ask a few more questions. Are you going to be in your room?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll have lunch at around one?” He looked up at me with a questioning expression, and I called back over my shoulder. “There’s only one restaurant in Powder Junction. It’s the one connected to the bar.”

  Henry studied the side of my face as I pulled around Tuyen’s vehicle and jetted back up to ninety. I glanced at my best friend in the world as I thought it all through, watching as Tran Van Tuyen pulled out after us and followed at a slower speed. “Do you think I’m prejudiced? Really?”

  “Yes.” I glanced at him, and his smile was sad. “We all are, to a certain point—unfortunate, is it not?”

  As he watched me, I watched the green Land Rover recede in my rearview mirror. We were both silent the rest of the way to Powder Junction.

  The Dunnigan brothers were easy to find—they were now haying the opposite side of the highway, the giant swathers working like prehistoric insects along the gentle slopes of the barrow ditch. I turned on my light bar emergencies, slowed my truck, and pulled in ahead of the big machines.

  Den slowed his swather and stopped only inches from A N OT H ER

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  my rear quarter- panel. I got out and looked up at him, but he didn’t move from the glass-enclosed cab of the still-running machine. James was already out of his, had climbed down, and was hustling to get to me. He raised a hand, his thin arm hanging in the frayed cuff of his shirt like a clapper in a bell. I glanced up at Den, who pushed his ball cap back on his head and didn’t look at us. James smiled nervously. “Hey, Walt.”

  Figuring it would unsettle him, I leaned on the front blades of Den’s machine. “Hello, James. I’ve got a few more questions for you and your brother, if that’s okay.” I watched as he took off his sweat-soaked straw hat, the red clay trapped in the perspira-tion on his forehead looking dark as bloodstain. James gestured to Den, who reluctantly shut the swather off, threw open the glass door, and walked toward us on the front frame of the machine. I allowed the Dunnigans to assemble before asking my questions.

  Den looked down at us; he had pulled out a small cooler from the cab, sat, and started to eat his lunch. “We haven’t found any more bodies, if that’s why you’re here.”

  I ignored him. “James, when you met Ho Thi Paquet, the young woman in the . . .”

  “Was that her name?”

  I studied him for a moment. “I’m sorry, James. Yes, it was.”

  He nodded and looked at his scuffed- up ropers, which were wrapped twice with duct tape. “When you met Ho Thi at the bar, was she alone?” They both looked at me, but the only emotion I could read was confusion.

  Den unwrapped a sandwich and opened a bottle of Busch, squeezing the cap between his fingers and pitching it into the high grass, before he finally spoke. “In the bar?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Well, yep. I mean the bartender was there.”

  “Anybody else?”

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  They looked at each other, and then James answered in a soft voice. “No.”

  “When you came outside, was there anyone else in her car?”

  Den squinted into the sun and chewed a bite from his sandwich. “No.”

  I nodded. “Guys, the next question is going to be a little personal. Where did you have sex with her?”

  James looked worried and glanced at Henry, who had gotten out of the Bullet and had become more interested in farm-ing equipment than I
’d ever seen him. “In the truck.”

  “Your truck.”

  “Yep.”

  I nodded. “Parked where?”

  “Out near Bailey.”

  “She rode with you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then what?”

  James’s neck was turning red as he glanced back at the Bear. “Well, I went first . . .”

  “No, I mean after.” He looked up at me. “After you and Den had sex with her, did you drive her back to her car?”

  They replied in unison. “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t see anyone in the car with her?”

  They replied in unison again. “No.”

  “What time was it when you let her off ?”

  The two brothers looked at each other, and James started to speak before being cut off by Den, who threw the remainder of his sandwich into the open cooler and snapped it shut.

  “How in the hell should we know what time . . .”

  James silenced him with a hand, the other clutching the brim of his hat as he thought. “We stopped cutting at about A N OT H ER

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  three, spent a couple of hours with her in the bar; then a little over an hour with her out at Bailey, and then brought her back to town.”

  “So, six, six-thirty?”

  “Yeah.”

  I nodded. “All right, if you fellas see or hear anything . . .”

  James shifted his weight toward me, and I stopped speaking. His eyes welled up. “Walt, there’s somethin’ else.”

  Den’s voice exploded as he crouched down between us, still on the front rail of the swather, with the beer bottle dangling from his fingers. “James, God damn it, he don’t want to hear that shit!”

  I looked back at James as he cleared his throat. “I been havin’ some strange things happen, seein’ things, I mean.”

  Den climbed down. “James.”

  The older rancher worried the corner of his mouth with an index finger. “After we found her on the side of the highway . . .”

  Den yanked off his ball cap. “God damn it!”

  James leaned in a little, and I got the first whiff of black-berry brandy. “After you talked to us the first time?”

  I nodded. “Yes?”

  “And we all knew she was dead?” I waited but said nothing.

  A few cars passed by on the highway, but James’s eyes stayed steady with mine. “Walt . . . do you believe in ghosts?”

  Of all the things I was thinking James Dunnigan might reveal, a steadfast belief in the paranormal might’ve been close to last. I ignored Henry, who redirected his gaze from James to me. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  James interrupted, and his voice carried an edge. “It’s a pretty simple question—do you think dead people come back?”

  I thought about recent circumstances and felt an unease 194 CR A I G J O H N S O N

  growing in the tightness of my chest. I thought about seeing Indians on the Bighorn Mountains during a blizzard, whose advice was that it was sometimes better to sleep than to wake.

  I thought about a battered cabin on the breaks of the Powder River, with fl oating scarves and brittle paint that fl aked away from the whorls of cupped wood like sheet music. I thought about Eagle helmets and ceremonies and cloud ponies.

  “James . . .” My voice caught in my throat like a vapor lock and sounded strange, even to me. “To be honest, no, I don’t think the dead come back.” My voice caught and his head dropped, just a little. “Because I’m not so sure they ever leave.”

  He looked back up. “I seen her.”

  “Who?”

  “I swear I seen her.”

  Den erupted again. “God damn it, James! They’re gonna put you in a home!”

  “Ho Thi, I seen her.”

  I placed my hand on the old rancher’s bony shoulder.

  “Where, James?”

  “Bailey.” He looked to the left and a little north, as if somebody might be listening. “In the ghost town.”

  12

  I released the button on the microphone again but still heard nothing. The Cheyenne Nation stepped up on the boardwalk out of the sun and pulled the brim of his ball cap down low on his forehead. “Anything?”

  I hung the mic back on the dash and shut the door. “No. It must be the rock walls.”

  He leaned against one of the support posts and looked down the ancient ruts of Bailey’s main street and then up to the cliffs hanging over us like red waves. The sun was high, there was no discernible shade, and somehow it seemed even hotter out here. “There are a number of footprints, along with yours, up near the cemetery.”

  I had canvassed the town while Henry had headed up the rocky outcropping near the union hall. I nodded and hung my Ray-Bans in my uniform pocket to rest the bridge of my nose.

  “That’s where I found Tuyen, at the cemetery.”

  “There are rattlesnakes up there.”

  “I figured.” There was a cross rail between two of the supports, so I walked over and sat on the outside, continuing to look up and down the dusty, dry, and empty street. “James said he saw her out by the road.”

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  “James says his dead mother makes coffee for him in the morning.”

  I looked up at him through a squinted eye and immediately regretted taking off my sunglasses. “There’s that. . . . But just in case this mystery girl does exist, he says he saw her out by the road. Now, where else could she be?”

  “Making coffee?” I gave him a longer look. “All right; assuming she does exist, we are assuming that she does not wish to be found?”

  I looked to the east and then north at the union hall and the scrub pines and scattered cottonwoods along Beaver Creek. It wasn’t hard to imagine Bailey as the bustling little town it must have been before the disaster. You could almost see the horses tied off to the railings, the draft wagons, and the narrow- gauge locomotive chugging and steaming to a stop at the mine tipple at the end of the street. “Yep. Assuming she exists, she ran off after her friend was killed and dumped alongside the highway.”

  He came over and sat on the other end of the railing. “She was not killed in town.”

  “No, too much of a chance of being spotted.”

  “And away from the highway.”

  “Yep.”

  He nodded, the wooden- nickel- profile looking off toward the cemetery. “Do you think she witnessed the murder?”

  “It would go a long way toward explaining why she’s hiding.” I watched as a red- tailed hawk was chased by two smaller birds, and wondered how Vic, Cady, and Michael were doing.

  The Bear turned back and stared at the side of my face as a slight breeze came up, hotter than the still air. “You know, there is something funny about this town. . . .”

  “You mean besides the fact that there are no people?” I could be a smart- ass, too.

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  “Yes, besides that.”

  “What?”

  “There is no church.” He glanced up and down the street, perhaps expecting one to appear. “If there was one, it would be up near the cemetery, but there is no foundation, nothing.”

  I stood, stepped down, and walked into the street, turning to look up at the old mine. “Did you check the union hall while you were up there?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Henry flipped his legs up on the railing and leaned back against the post. He pulled his ponytail loose from above the adjustable strap of his hat, which he put over his face. “I told you, there are rattlesnakes up there.”

  I stared at the embroidered fish on his hat. “Since when are you afraid of rattlesnakes?”

  “I am not, but they told me that no one had been up there since Tuyen and you.”

  “Oh, right.” I put my sunglasses back on. I noticed he w
asn’t moving. “What are you doing, taking a nap?”

  “Yes. I assumed it was the only sensible thing to do while you checked the union hall.”

  I looked up the street and at the high, razorlike grass leading to the lone building on the hill, past the dark pyramid of the coal tipple—perfect ambush territory for rattlers. “What makes you think I’m gonna go do that?”

  The hat remained over his face, muffling his voice. “I knew you would not believe me about the snakes.”

  Rattlesnakes shed in August. Their eyes become cloudy, and they grow uncomfortable, pissed off, and strike out at anything; contrary to popular belief, they do not always rattle before striking.

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  Part of the trail leading past the cemetery was still visible to the left of the cliffs, with a few rock steps that turned the corners where hard men descended into the ground to bring up soft fuel. I paused at one corner to see if the Cheyenne Nation had moved, and it hadn’t.

  Most of the American public had been hoodwinked by the director John Ford in the forties and fifties into believing that the entire West looked exclusively like Monument Valley, where he filmed most of his movies. It was a vista that had become emblematic, and I had to admit that my view of the Hole in the Wall, with its bold crimson palisades and the hazy flux of the horizontal landscape, looked a lot like Monument Valley.

  The only tracks were indeed the ones that Tuyen and I had made, but they ended at the cemetery—above that, there were no tracks, no broken grass, nothing to indicate that anyone had been up here in ages. I caught my breath. It was still early, and the heat of the day had yet to push us into triple digits. I didn’t want to be up here in a couple of hours, when the sun reached its zenith and Bailey would feel something like the fifth ring of hell.

  The union hall was up and to my right, standing alone like a weathered lighthouse amid the storm toss of the rocks.

  I leaned on the iron railing surrounding the cemetery, then immediately regretted it, the dark metal feeling as if it had been just pulled from the smelter. I thought of Saizarbitoria at the jungle gym back in Powder Junction and smiled.

  Maybe the Basquo was learning fast, or was it that I was learning more slowly?