Girl Gone Missing

by Marcie Rendon

  “I gotta go,” he said softly. “You’re my main snag, right?”

  When Cash didn’t answer, he hugged her tighter. “Right?”

  “Right,” whispered Cash. She felt him get out of bed and heard him pull his clothes on. Heard him walk out of the bedroom and across the kitchen floor. Heard him take a leak in the bathroom. Felt him, more than heard him, lift the sheet over the doorway and look at her one more time. Felt him drop the sheet and go back across the kitchen floor and out the door. She lay without moving for a good five minutes. Then she got up, made sure the apartment door was locked, grabbed one last beer—drank half of it as she smoked another cigarette—then fell sound asleep.

  For the first time ever that Cash could remember, she slept until the clock on her dresser said nine. She sat up and looked at the window. It was daylight outside. She rolled out of bed and ran bath water. She wrapped a towel around her naked body and started a pot of coffee. Once it boiled, she shut off the burner to let it cool down a bit. She went back into the bathroom and slid into the tub. Three cigarettes later she got out, dried off and got dressed. She didn’t look at herself in the mirror. She knew her eyes would be blank slates. She had seen those eyes too many times before.

  She filled her Thermos with hot coffee and pulled on her jacket. She walked back to the Casbah to retrieve the Ranchero, then drove over to the Moorhead side of the river and headed north to Ada. The snow-covered fields flashed by as she drove. Even with a thin layer of gray clouds covering the sun and sky, the glare from the miles and miles of white reminded Cash of stories she had heard of early settlers going snow-blind. Or their wives going snow crazy in their isolated sod huts on the endless prairie.

  She had never heard those kinds of stories about her own people who had for centuries lived with the vastness of the Valley, moving into the Valley in the warm season and back into the northern forests in the winter.

  She parked on the street in front of Wheaton’s house. She needed—really needed—to see his face, to see the certainty that was always there for her in his eyes. She gave a quick rap on the door and walked in. Gunner met her first, ears perked, stared at her with that “what are you doing here?” look in his dog eyes. Cash bent down and grabbed his ears. “I was here first, so get over it.”

  “What?” asked Wheaton coming out of his living room.

  “Nothing.”

  Wheaton looked at her, then the dog. He went into the kitchen and asked, “Coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  Another figure emerged from the living room. It was Geno Day Dodge from Red Lake. It was his dad, Tony O, who had been killed over by Halstad. Cash had helped Wheaton find his killers. When she had made the trip up to Red Lake to find his family, she had met all his kids. If she remembered right, Geno was the third in a line of seven. She nodded hello to him and looked at Wheaton. Her turn to raise eyebrows.

  Wheaton handed her a cup of coffee and motioned at a chair by the kitchen table. Geno walked back into the living room where Cash could hear canned laughter erupting from the TV. Wheaton sat down at the table, tilted his head toward the living room and told Cash how Geno had showed up two days earlier. He’d remembered that Cash said her friend was the county sheriff in Ada. Apparently his older sister MaryJane was taking care of the littlest one at their aunt’s house. The second to youngest had been nabbed by social workers. Geno thought they were living at a foster home in Fertile or maybe Twin Valley. His older brother and the one a year younger than Geno had moved in with an uncle who lived on the other side of the Red Lake village. Geno didn’t want to go to a foster home, so he hitchhiked to Ada and showed up at Wheaton’s office, asking for Cash or a cop named Wheaton. He told Wheaton he was willing to do any work needed. Suggested maybe he could be janitor at the jail in exchange for a place to sleep and a meal a day.

  “I didn’t have the heart to turn him away. He’s gonna sleep here. Maybe do a bit of cleaning at the jail. I told him he has to enroll in school on Monday. I’ll figure out something to tell the principal.”

  Cash nodded agreement. Drank her coffee. “I forgot to give this to you,” she said as she placed her award from the Twin Cities on his kitchen table. The edges were a little furled and there was a small coffee stain on one corner. “It’s been in my glove box. I keep forgetting to give it to you.”

  Wheaton read it. He looked at her and smiled, a smile that reached his eyes. “Good one,” was all he said. It was enough—but not quite enough—to fill the enormous void created by all of the losses she’d had during her short lifetime. But she kept those feelings from her eyes and grinned back at Wheaton.

  She finished her coffee, said she had to get going. Before heading out the door, she stepped into the living room and nodded goodbye to Geno. He nodded back.

  Cash headed west toward the Red River. Like a magnet, she was pulled to the field northwest of the town of Halstad where Tony O’s body had been found. She parked on the road and got out of her truck. She stood on the edge of the road, looking at where Tony O had died, leaving a wife, who died shortly after him from a broken heart—although folks would say it was from drinking—leaving seven children. One who was way too young to have to decide between being sent to a foster home, moving into an already overcrowded relative’s home or hitchhiking to a new life on a girl’s statement that her friend was a cop. Cash walked back to her truck and leaned across the edge of the truck bed. Still looking across the field. Looking at the cottonwood trees and oak that snaked along the river a few hundred yards away.

  She looked down and saw the sleeping bag Mo had given the girls to wrap around themselves on the ride from the Cities to Ada. A thick, Army-green, sleeping bag. The sight of it hurt Cash’s heart. She had forgotten it was back there.

  She climbed up into the truck bed, zipped the sleeping bag shut and crawled in. It was ice cold, but soon warmed up from her body heat. It smelled of cheap perfume from the girls, cigarette smoke from Mo—or was that the smell of pot? She burrowed down into the bag, closing the top around her head to keep her body warmth in.

  And then she started to cry.

  Deep wailing sobs of grief.

  She remembered the last time she had seen her mom. She remembered all the times Wheaton had been the only person to show up at one of her school events. She remembered the note Mo left on her table when he re-upped. It was on her dresser with the one lone letter from him. She remembered Josie Day Dodge throwing a glass jar across her kitchen, the glass shattering, when she realized her husband, Tony O, was dead.

  Cash wiped her nose on her jacket sleeve.

  She heard Longbraids’s voice saying, “You’re my main snag, okay?”

  Cash curled into a tighter ball and cried some more.

  The top of the sleeping bag was cold and wet with tears and snot. Cash took a deep breath and stuck her head outside. The cold air hurt her lungs, but she crawled out of the sleeping bag, out of the back end of the truck, and threw the bag on the gravel road behind the Ranchero. She jumped into the cab of the truck. With fingers shaking from the cold, her whole body shivering, she turned the truck on and drove back and forth over the sleeping bag, screaming obscenities, screaming until she was exhausted and couldn’t scream anymore.

  She threw the truck in neutral with the brake on and lit a cigarette, swiping the heat knob to full blast.

  She turned the rearview mirror so she could look at her face. Damn, her eyes were almost puffed shut from crying. Her hair pulled in thick strands out of the single braid. She smoothed her hair down as best she could. She got out and gathered up the tattered sleeping bag, threw it back into the bed of the truck, turned the truck around and drove without thinking.

  She headed northeast. Up by Shelly and a small town everyone made fun of named Climax. Having spent her entire teen years working for farms in this area, there was no chance of her getting lost. She drove, smoked cigarettes, let her mind drift as aimlessly as her truck.

  She pulled off to the side of the road once
to drop her jeans, squat and pee. Damn, it was getting cold. She drove some more. Sometimes on paved county roads and sometimes on gravel farm roads.

  She figured she was somewhere near Twin Valley when she saw a country church sitting all alone on the prairie. And in a small plot next to the church was a cemetery with a handful of marble headstones and a few wooden crosses. There was a mound of fresh dirt that caught her eye.

  Snow and gravel crunched under her feet as she got out of the cab. It was a tiny grave. Not much more than three feet long. There were granite headstones marking off a larger area around the smaller grave. Maybe it was a family plot. She walked closer reading names and dates.

  A blast of freezing air stopped her in her tracks. She looked at the plot of graves she was standing in front of. A headstone for a Reverend John Steene stood next to one for his wife Lillian. Their date of birth was followed by unblemished granite waiting for a date of death. Cash looked at the two other graves in the family plot. They were small graves, all with the last name Steene.

  Cash read the dates of birth and the dates of death. She read them again, did the math in her head. Each was the grave of a child who had lived only two years. And the children had been born two years apart. The new grave didn’t even have a headstone.

  “What the hell,” Cash said out loud, and a cloud of cold air swirled around her face.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The National Crime Information Center database reported that 2,758 Native women were missing or murdered in 2018. That number grows. As more Native women have disappeared or been murdered, our female relatives have created tribal, local and national platforms to call attention to this epidemic. In 2019, it is estimated that up to 4,000 Native American women are missing or were murdered in Canada. In the United States the number is estimated to be close to 3,000. First Nations people comprise only four percent of the total Canadian population. In the United States we are only one percent of the total population. Given those numbers, the high rate of missing and murdered Native women should be seen as a national tragedy.

  The trafficking and murder of women and children, of all races, is a worldwide epidemic. Girl Gone Missing skirts around the edges of that story. Two true cases were the murders of Tina Fontaine (2014) and Savanah Greywind (2017). Both women were dumped in the Red River of the North—the river Cash, the fictional character of this book, crosses daily to go to school or work. In this story, I hope to honor all missing, murdered and unwanted women.

  There is another backstory within this story. Following the boarding school era, there was a time in which Native children were removed from their homes and fostered into white homes. On a national level, an estimated twenty-five to thirty percent of Native children were taken and placed in non-Indian homes or institutions up through the mid-1960s. In Minnesota those numbers jump significantly. An estimated sixty percent of children were removed from Red Lake Reservation and between forty to sixty percent were removed from White Earth Reservation during this foster care era.

  The Indian Adoption Project created by the Bureau of Indian Affairs occurred simultaneously. This federal program existed from 1941 to 1967 and allowed adoption agencies to systematically remove Native children from their birth parents. Eighty-five percent of them were placed in white adoptive homes. In the Southwest, this adoption process allowed Mormons to take thousands of Navajo children to work their farms. The Catholic Church and other Christian denominations took Native children from other tribes and placed them for adoption in non-native homes.

  Because adoption records of these children were sealed, many lost their tribal identities and information that might lead them back to their families of origin. It is unknown how many Native youth faced the predicament that both Wheaton and Mo faced in Girl Gone Missing. This book is a work of fiction, yet this dis-inheriting of adopted tribal youth when they came of age is a common story throughout Indian country. It was one more way to “disappear” Native people from the national consciousness.

  It is my hope that you, reader, will search farther for the truths once you have read this story. It is my hope that you also see how generous Cash is in her rescue of girls who are different from her. I hope you see the resilience that inhabits us as Native people.

  Miigwetch.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So many people have made this writing gig possible. The ‘Women from the Center’ writing group. Always—Danny, Eileen, Jeanne and Liz, Diego. All the folks who read Murder on the Red River and then asked ‘How is Cash doing? What is she doing?’ Questions that made me sit down and attempt to give you an answer. Lee Byrd for a painless editing experience. My children and grandchildren who continue to tolerate the absolute silence I require to write—no TV, radio, Netflix, YouTube. They live in techno-cultural deprivation so I can write. And of course, ALL the women in my life who have helped with children, food and emotional sustenance, you are in my heart forever. Chi miigwetch to you all.

  Photo by TPT Public TV

  MARCIE R. RENDON is a citizen of the White Earth Nation. Her novel Murder on the Red River won the Pinckley Prize for Debut Crime Novel, 2018. In honoring Marcie, the Pinckley judges acknowledged “Rendon’s sense of place and her creation of an unforgettable character who forges her own way in a challenging world.”

  Murder on the Red River was a Western Writers of America Spur Award Finalist, 2018, in the Contemporary Novel category. It has been translated into German and Italian. Marcie has written two nonfiction children’s books: Pow Wow Summer (Minnesota Historical Press) and Farmer’s Market: Families Working Together (CarolRhoda). She was recognized as a 50-over-50 Change-maker by Minnesota AARP and POLLEN, 2018. With four published plays, she is the creative mind of Raving Native Theater. She curates community-created performance and stages Native scripts. Diego Vazquez and Rendon received the Loft’s 2017 Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for their work with women incarcerated in county jails.

  Most importantly, Rendon is a mother and grandmother.