Next to Last Stand

by Craig Johnson

  Vic nodded and reached down to pet Dog, who had settled between our barstools again, giving up on going home. “Top-flight police work.”

  I shrugged. “I like to think I’m pretty keen as to what’s going on around me. I guess I could’ve waited till she used signal flags or a carrier pigeon.”

  Vic leaned in a little farther. “How’s your chin?”

  Picking up my Rainier, I took a swig and then held the cool can against the scraped skin. “I think I need a face transplant.”

  “See if you can do something about that little piece of ear that’s missing too.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Or that scar that dissects your eye.”

  “Okay, that’s enough.” I glanced up at the TV. “What the hell, we’re watching this again?”

  The Bear glanced over his shoulder. “This is a different one.”

  “Which Custer is this?”

  “Either Errol Flynn or Ronald Reagan . . . I think Reagan is Custer and Flynn is Jeb Stuart.” He studied the screen. “Or the other way around.”

  “Errol Flynn played Custer in one of these.”

  He snapped his fingers. “This is the one. I believe it is They Died with Their Boots On, or as we like to call it on the Rez, They Died with Their Facts Wrong.”

  “I think Santa Fe Trail is the one that Lucian dislikes.”

  The Cheyenne Nation studied the screen. “I can see why, the tone of the movie was pro-slavery, which I found off-putting back in the sixties and do not find any less so now, come to think of it.”

  “What’s with all these Custer movies?”

  “It is the week of the battle, and TMC is showing a Custer film every night.” He restored Vic’s dirty martini. “Personally, I am awaiting Little Big Man on Saturday.”

  We all studied the screen with no sound. “From the landscape, it looks like they fought the battle down in Wheatland.”

  “Yes, and too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Look at the number of warbonnets; you would have thought the Seventh Cavalry was being attacked by an entire nation of chiefs.” Fetching his soda water from the bar back, I watched as he added a strong dollop of gin. “These movies make me drink.” He took a swig as the swarms of Indians galloped in and out of the screen in a sort of mindless way. “The battlefield does not look anything at all like the Little Bighorn Country and no credit is given to Gall’s infantry and Crazy Horse’s cavalry, which neatly hemmed Custer’s command in and then finished them off.”

  We watched as the cinematic Flynn, the last man standing, took a bullet to the chest as yet another warbonneted chief grabbed the stanchion of the Seventh and rode off into the black and white sunset of, well . . . Wheatland. “You think Custer was the last one killed?”

  “Do you mean was he the last one to shoot himself?” He shook his head. “I do not.” He glanced back at the map of North and South Vietnam on the wall behind him. “You remember what it was like when we were choppered into Khe Sanh and the VC overran the barricades?”

  Grunting into my beer, I nodded my head. “I remember it most vividly.”

  “I would imagine it was like that, only a great deal worse.”

  Sitting there safe on my barstool, I thought about that day and more important the night—the confusion, the terror, the futility, and finally the exultation as we’d made it, the last being a luxury the Seventh Cavalry hadn’t received.

  “I hope you two Westerners don’t mind, but this Custer stuff bores the shit out of me.” Vic, uninterested in the conversation, reached out and turned over a Durant Courant, flipping a few pages as she sipped her drink. “You want to know what Custer was thinking there at the end?”

  The Bear volunteered. “Where did all these Indians come from?”

  “Exactly.” She pulled the paper in closer. “Hey, your buddy Charles Lee Stillwater is in here.”

  “The obituary?”

  “Yeah.” She read and then surmised. “Doesn’t sound like the Courant filched out any more information than we already know.”

  “No name and address of survivors?”

  “No.” Vic stood, a little unsteady. “I think I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I just need to go to the bathroom, all right?”

  The Bear studied her. “There is a Custer shrine in the men’s facilities and seeing as you two are my only remaining customers, you are welcome to visit it.”

  She placed a hand on the bar to steady herself as Dog rose again, hope springing eternal. “A shrine, in the toilet?”

  “Yes.”

  She trundled off, walking the wooden floors of the Red Pony Bar & Grill like they were the deck of a pitching ship heading ’round the Horn. “Boy, you Cheyenne know how to hold a grudge.”

  “Well, you have to remember that my people were only given citizenship in 1924.” Watching her go, he turned to me. “She drank a lot tonight.”

  I reached down and petted Dog as he sat, not completely giving up on calling it a night. “I think today was hard on her.”

  “Because?”

  “Kids were involved; she had to sit with them and the wife while I dealt with this Gibson guy.” Studying the partial painting, I pushed it toward him. “You want something new for your shrine?”

  He turned the canvas and looked at the two combatants. “So, I take it this is not an antiquity of great value?”

  “According to the Brinton Museum, a couple hundred bucks at best.”

  His eyes came up, and he continued to study me. “How are you?”

  I sighed. “Waiting on a vision.”

  “As we all are.” He glanced after Vic and then waited a moment more before introducing another mildly hurtful subject. “How is Cady?”

  “All’s quiet on the southern front.”

  “But you have spoken to her?”

  “Not for a couple of weeks, no.” I stared at the surface of the bar, at all the little stains, nicks, and dents. “Charley Lee was one of her favorites.”

  He turned to the bar back and punched NO SALE on the mammoth, brass cash register, popping open the tray and then shutting it in the beginning ritual of closing the bar I’d witnessed a million times. “If things are slow, why not go down there?”

  I gestured toward the closed money tray and started to get out my wallet. “What do I owe you?”

  He gestured toward the canvas. “I will take the painting for my bathroom.”

  I nodded, raising my beer as he lifted his own drink and we toasted. “Deal.” He nodded, and I thought about Cady. “I’m not so sure she wants me down there.”

  “She loves you.”

  “That, as you well know from your own dealings with family, does not mean she wants my company.”

  “We could go steal your granddaughter—we Cheyenne have a longstanding tradition of such things.”

  “And then I can go share a cell with Dean Gibson when my daughter and assistant attorney general get through with me?”

  “I will come visit you in Rawlins.”

  He glanced over my shoulder, and I turned to watch Vic weaving between the chairs and tables, finally making it to her stool as I took her elbow and helped her get a good seat. “I think I’m drunk.”

  “Yep, I think you are.”

  She glanced at Henry. “Too much firewater.”

  He nodded. “Could be.”

  “I’ve never been in the men’s room before; that’s some shrine you got in there.”

  Slipping off my stool, I stood as Dog raised his head to look at me. “I’ll be right back, then we’ll go home, okay?”

  Disgruntled, the Canis dirus lowered his massive head back to the floor.

  Crossing past the pool table, I entered the alcove and took my customary right to the bathroom door with the sign that read BRAV
E, across from the one on the other side of the hallway that read BRAVER, which sometimes confused the tourists. A famous quote from the Lakota chief Red Cloud states that men do that which is difficult while women do that which is impossible.

  I’d been in the restroom of the Red Pony so many times that I didn’t even see all the stuff, but it was testament to the Bear that no one ever molested or stole the things hanging there. There were a few pieces of graffiti that had been scrawled on the walls, proclamations such as Crow got the land and Lakota got the glory, while the Cheyenne did the fighting! Or pithy remarks like Custer wore Arrow Shirts! Or, Custer got Siouxed!

  Finishing the business at hand, I continued to look around at the hair-pipe breastplate, a faded-blue kepi, and a dented bugle and wondered how much of the stuff was real.

  There was artwork too. A Kevin Red Star, a Joel Ostlind, and some more predictable alcohol-oriented prints, including the ubiquitous Custer’s Last Fight, a Budweiser poster complete with cardboard frame that I’m pretty sure has hung at one time or another on the walls of every bar and saloon in the entire American West.

  Zipping up, I stepped over to the sink and washed my hands, still looking at the mass-market poster over my left shoulder. I pulled out two paper towels and dried my hands as I turned to look at the dramatic display I’m sure I’d seen there the entirety of my adult life.

  Tossing the paper towels away, I leaned in and examined the piece.

  At the bottom, printed into the cardboard frame, was a plate that presented Custer’s Last Fight as a gift from the King of Beers. My eyes couldn’t help but go to the center where a longhaired Custer, replete with windblown red scarf, gripped an obviously empty revolver by the barrel and swung a sabre.

  Two things as just a start—Custer had cut his hair before the battle, and the Seventh Calvary expeditionary force had not been issued sabres for the action. As to the scarf, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t correct either.

  Such is the nature of nitpicking when it comes to military history, the first and foremost inaccuracy being that there were no survivors of what has long been referred to as a massacre when in all actuality there were thousands. They just happened to be natives.

  Staring at the image of the man, historically correct or not, I couldn’t help but wonder at the decision-making process that had led to his death—the personal, professional, and political demons that had rushed him headlong to his destruction on that sunny hillside on June 25, 1876. And as I stepped back a bit in order to take in a broader scope of the print, I also thought about how few times historical figures actually died alone, but at the same time, how many other lives they took with them.

  Just as with the movie on the television in the bar, there seemed to be an awful lot of warbonnets scattered across the battle in the poster, and even stranger were the Zulu-style shields the natives carried. The cavalrymen were definitely getting the worst of it, with some being clubbed, some stabbed, some shot, and more than a few already being scalped.

  It was about then that my gaze drifted to the left.

  There, in the corner of the print, was a strangely familiar, bonneted native raising a war club in preparation of bringing it down on a soldier who hung on to his other arm.

  4

  “It took a year to complete back in 1885 and was over sixteen feet wide and nine feet tall.” Holding the large art book open, I read from page two, an alphabetical advantage when researching an artist by the name of Adams. “He was born in Zanesville, Ohio, the son of William Apthorp Adams, a lawyer who traced his ancestry back to John Adams of Boston, one of the Founding Fathers.”

  Sensing a disinterest, I raised my head to peek over the mountainous landscape of books between me and my undersheriff, who was sprawled across the surface of the Absaroka County Library table as if she were collapsed from boredom. “Can we go shoot something? Because if we don’t, I think I’ll just shoot myself.”

  Ignoring her, I continued reading as the nice young lady from the front desk appeared with a few more books, depositing them onto the table with a smile and then leaving without a word. “He studied at the Boston Academy of Arts, under Thomas S. Noble, and later at a Cincinnati art school and served in the army during the Civil War, where he was wounded while aboard the USS Osage at the Battle of Vicksburg. Late in the 1870s, he moved to Saint Louis, where he found work as an artist and engraver, and I guess it was there that he painted Custer’s Last Fight.”

  She raised her head, propping it up with a hand, elbow on the oak surface. “I’m bored.”

  I gestured toward the miniature mountain range of books between us. “Doesn’t any of this interest you?”

  “No.”

  I went back to Dorothy Harmsen’s American Western Art. “As models, he used actual Sioux Indians in battle dress and cavalrymen in uniforms of the period.” Pulling another book from the pile, I flipped a few pages, revealing the painting, Custer escaping the fold between two pages by a scant inch. Studying the thing, I sighed. “I’d say he was relatively accurate with the cavalrymen, but half the Indians look like Zulus.”

  The first having failed, she tried another tack. “I’m hungry.”

  “He created it for two members of the Saint Louis Art Club, which took the painting on the road and charged people two bits to see it.”

  “Can we go eat?”

  My eyes were drawn back to the two-page spread and then to the cardboard version I’d procured from the bathroom of the Red Pony Bar & Grill. “It didn’t make as much as they hoped and was sold to a saloonkeeper there in Saint Louis who hung it in his barroom.”

  She snapped a finger and leveled it at me. “There’s an idea, let’s go have a drink.”

  “But the saloon went bankrupt, and the painting was acquired by the largest creditor: a small, local brewery owned by one Adolphus Busch.”

  Her interest perked, if only a little. “As in the Anheuser-Busch?”

  “Yep. In 1895 the brewery gave the painting to the Seventh Cavalry, but evidently it was destroyed in a fire in 1946.” Closing the tome, I placed it on a stack and reached for another. “This is incredible history.”

  Slapping a hand on top, she thwarted my progress. “This is incredible bullshit—who cares, Walt?”

  Sliding the book toward me from under her hand, I flipped it open, working my way through the directory. “I do.”

  “It doesn’t change anything. You’ve got the guy, who I assume died of natural causes?”

  “Isaac hasn’t finished the autopsy just yet.”

  “I don’t see what our official involvement is at this point.”

  “A million dollars in an oversized Florsheim shoebox.”

  She sat back and looked at me. “That’s going to end up going to the IRS—case closed.”

  I lifted the folder that held the partial painting. “And what, pray tell, do you make of this?”

  “I, pray tell, make nothing of it.” She leaned forward, lowering her voice. “It’s a stupid copy somebody did of a famous painting. Get it framed and put it on your wall or give it to Henry to put in his bathroom shrine to Custer.”

  Opening the folder, I studied the canvas. “I want to get it professionally looked at.”

  “Where?”

  “Cody.”

  “Why Cody?”

  “The Buffalo Bill Center of the West.”

  “You’re going to drive that crusty piece of canvas over to a museum in Cody?”

  Nodding, I gathered up the books and stood, carefully placing the partial painting and the valueless cardboard version under my arm. “I’ve made up my mind.”

  “Can we have lunch first?”

  “I was thinking tomorrow, after I’ve had a chance to call them.”

  “Okay.”

  “I thought maybe I’d hit the Little Bighorn Battlefield along the way or on the way back.”

&nb
sp; She stood as I gathered the books, relieved that this research portion of the investigation was over. “It’s on the way?”

  Starting out, I paused at the front desk to hand the stack over to the nice young woman there. “Sort of.”

  “Is Henry going?”

  “Why?”

  “Henry always goes when it’s a sort-of deal.”

  I nodded as we exited the building and climbed into my truck. “I’ve always found it best to keep the Indian scouts close in Custer country.”

  She reached back and petted Dog. “Amen to that.”

  * * *

  —

  The Busy Bee was pretty packed, but we were able to snag a spot at the counter. I slipped off my jacket, draped it on the stool, and studied the light reflecting off Clear Creek. “Custer was a teetotaler.”

  Vic slid onto the stool beside me. “Maybe he should’ve drank.”

  “But it’s funny, don’t you think, that a lot of his fame is due in part to a poster printed by a brewery?”

  “You really are into this shit, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged. “Among other things, I’m interested in what Lucian said about the commercial value of the dead and the ability of corporations to give everlasting life to individuals who might’ve otherwise faded into obscurity.”

  “Walt, I read about Custer in grade school back in Philadelphia.”

  “Yep, but would you have if that painting hadn’t existed?”

  “I thought you and Lucian agreed it was his wife who mounted that campaign to make him famous?”

  “She did, but she couldn’t be in every bar in America spreading the word. I mean there are towns, counties, state parks, motels, restaurants, souvenir shops . . .”

  “Walt, you can’t credit all that to a single painting.”

  “Maybe not, but it certainly helped.”

  “Baloney.” We turned to find the owner and operator of the Busy Bee Cafe standing before us with an order pad in hand. “I’ve decided to just tell you what the special is before you ask—thick-cut baloney sandwiches with fried green tomatoes and mayo with fries, only four dollars and ninety-nine cents.”