“You’re assuming they know the buyer.”
“I’m thinking they were supposed to make the delivery as soon as Trevor gave the all clear. It wouldn’t do for him to have any contact with the artifacts or to try to deliver them to Colorado or Nevada or California himself. Too many chances for things to go wrong.”
“I’m not following you,” Father John said. He couldn’t shake the impression of the man who had walked into his office as if it were a corporate boardroom and announced that he intended to make a donation to the mission. “Trevor could have sold the artifacts legally,” Father John said. He had asked Trevor why he wanted to donate them to the museum and Trevor had hesitated before he said, I’ve sold a lot of Indian artifacts in my time. Sold them out of the tribes. Let’s just say I’d like to see the artifacts go where they belong.
“You’re forgetting something, John,” Eldon said. “The million-dollar insurance policy. Trevor could sell the artifacts on the black market and still walk away with insurance money. The perfect scam.”
The director stood up and went over to the window. He stared outside for a couple of seconds before he turned back. Lips drawn into a thin line against his teeth; eyes darting about the office, as if he were searching for something solid to hold onto. Father John had seen the same look on the faces of parishioners during counseling, just at the moment they finally faced themselves and whatever they had done—cheated on their wives, stolen from an employer, neglected their children. “I can’t stop thinking…” Eldon seemed to struggle with the words bunching in his throat. “I could have prevented this.”
The office went quiet. From the back office came the clack of computer keys—the bishop writing this Sunday’s homily. Gianelli sat motionless, not taking his eyes from Eldon White Elk. An experienced interrogator, the fed, Father John was thinking. Like a counselor, knowing when to speak and when to listen.
Eldon folded himself back into the chair, clasped his hands between his knees and leaned forward. “I never should’ve listened to Trevor. Never should have called the shipping company and told them to keep the cartons in a warehouse at the airport.” For a moment, Father John thought the man might burst into tears.
Gianelli took a moment before he stood up and started for the door. He turned back. “Riverton police are checking the warehouse security cameras. If it looks like that’s where the artifacts were stolen, they’ll have jurisdiction. Right now, we’re all working together. Call me if anything comes to mind,” he said. Then he disappeared into the corridor. The door wheezed open and slammed shut.
Eldon was shaking his head. Finally he stood up and began backing toward the door. “He’ll never find those men,” he said. “They’re gone, like the artifacts.”
Father John listened to the director’s footsteps on the old wooden floor in the corridor. Again the opening and shutting door. Maybe the idea of Trevor Pratt arranging for the artifacts to be stolen made logical sense, he was thinking. But it was like the piece of a puzzle that didn’t fit anywhere, a lost piece mixed up in the wrong box. He couldn’t shake his own sense of the man. Looking for redemption for whatever he had done in the past, the Indian artifacts that he had helped to take away from the tribes. A man who had wanted to atone for the past.
13
THE HOUSE LOOKED deserted, small with faded gray paint and blinds half-pulled in the front windows. The Toyota pickup bumped across the borrow ditch and nosed over the bare dirt yard. So much land and sky and emptiness surrounding each house, Father John thought, that the houses themselves seemed empty. Even with laundry flapping on lines outside, breaking the quiet. But there was no laundry outside the gray house. Behind the house, the barn doors were open. He parked a few feet away and walked into the cool shadows inside the barn. Daylight splayed on the dirt floor, the tack hanging on the walls, the horse stalls facing each other. The faint, hollow rhythm of metal on metal mixed with the whistling noise of the wind. A dun-colored horse stood silent in a stall on the right. Seated on a stool, shoeing the horse’s left hoof, was a man in a yellow checkered shirt and dark cowboy hat.
“Cam?” Father John said.
The man in the cowboy hat gave the horseshoe another tap before he dropped the hoof and stood up. “Heard that old pickup of yours,” he said, tossing his head in the direction of the road. He was probably in his mid-twenties, slim, muscular build, black eyes slitted against the afternoon brightness, and the rough, crooked face of a man who had been in too many bar fights.
“Got a minute?” Father John said.
“You here about the missing relics?”
Father John nodded.
“Mickey Tallman said I know anything, he’s a liar. Been holding a grudge since we was kids. Man can’t stop living in the past. You want to talk? Sure we can talk.” Cam set the hammer on top of the stall’s half wall, shouldered past Father John and went outside. “One condition,” he said, starting across the yard toward the gray house. Father John fell in beside him. Boots made a soft thud on the hard, dusty earth.
“What’s that?”
“You gotta give me a hand, Father, talk sense into Mickey Tallman, tell him to stop lying. I gotta share the blame with my great-uncle for what happened more than a hundred years ago? It’s crazy. Now Mickey’s put the word on the moccasin telegraph that I must’ve stole the artifacts before they got to the museum.” He ignored the two steps, hopped up onto the wooden stoop at the back door and flung it open. “I’m clean now,” he said, stepping inside. Father John followed him into a closet-sized kitchen that felt hot and damp with the smells of coffee. A green Formica-topped table had been pushed against the wall below the window. Dishes, pots and pans, and an assortment of cereal boxes and cans of soup were stacked on the counter next to a white plastic coffee brewer with a half-full glass container.
“No more doping,” Cam said. He nudged a chair away from the table with his boot and motioned for Father John to sit down. “No more drinking and hanging out with lowlifes and fighting. Left all that behind. Got me a nice wife now. Donna Wolf. You know her? Folks used to live on the rez.”
Father John nodded. He remembered a little girl with a quick smile and long black braids squirming between her parents at Mass Sunday mornings. The Wolfs had moved to Oklahoma to take care of elderly relatives. Evidently Donna had come back. She couldn’t be more than eighteen, he was thinking.
“We’re gonna have a kid,” Cam said. “I got me a fine spread here, raising a little hay out in the field, and I been picking up jobs at a garage in Riverton. Donna works at the diner.” He plopped down across from Father John. “Made some bad mistakes, I’m not denying it. But I paid my debt to society, did three years in Rawlins, and I ain’t never going back.”
“Why do you think Mickey blames you for the missing artifacts?” Father John said. With Mickey’s accusations on the moccasin telegraph, he was thinking, Gianelli might decide to have a talk with Cam after all.
“I hate him, and Mickey knows it.” Cam jumped to his feet and turned toward the counter. “Fixed up some coffee a while ago. Want some?” He was already filling two mugs that he had dragged from behind a cereal box. He handed one to Father John, took his chair, and sipped from the other one. Through the archway, Father John could see the dim light filtering past the blinds in the living room. The coffee was barely warm and strong, laced with coffee grounds. “Damn near ruined my life,” Cam said. “I got reason to hate him, the dirty snitch. Him and me were hijacking stuff together, but he turned snitch, got himself a deal and walked off. He was the one got me involved. Easy way to make some bucks, he told me. Wasn’t for Mickey Tallman, I never would’ve gone to Rawlins. So now he’s saying I want revenge, so I stole his ancestor’s belongings.”
Cam took a drink of coffee, then set the mug down. “We go back a long ways, Mickey’s people and mine, all the way to the Buffalo Bill days. My ancestor, Sonny Yellow Robe, got himself adopted by Mickey’s ancestor, Chief Black Heart. I remember the stories my grandfather told about
Sonny. How he escaped from the Carlisle School. Walked all the way from Pennsylvania to Oklahoma.” He shook his head. “Can’t blame him. I would’ve done the same if they’d locked me up in that place. Indian kids got beaten for speaking their own language. Had to speak English all the time, ’cause they was trying to turn them into white kids. Grandfather said Sonny used to go out into the fields and sit behind a tree and talk to himself in Arapaho, he was so scared he’d forget how to speak to his own family if he ever got home. When he did get back, all his family was dead, except for Lulu, his sister. She had moved here, ’cause her husband was a northern man, Emmett Merryman. I come from them.”
“When did the bad blood start?” Father John took a sip of the coffee.
“Early on, from what I heard,” Cam said. “Chief Black Heart got back from the Wild West, but Sonny never came home. Seems when they got ready to board the ship, Sonny was nowhere around. Grandfather said the Show Indians could come and go as they liked. All Buffalo Bill expected was that they showed up for the performances. He wasn’t their keeper, you know what I mean? He treated them with respect. So if Sonny didn’t want to go home, that was okay with him.”
He took a moment, regarding the coffee as if he had just noticed the grounds floating around. “Trouble started when Black Heart’s regalia never arrived. So his people started saying that Sonny must’ve stolen it. Black Heart never said that, my grandfather told me. Fact is, Black Heart tried to stop the stories. He said Sonny wouldn’t do such a thing. He claimed something happened to Sonny, and somebody else took the regalia. But a lot of people on the rez still think Sonny Yellow Robe was a no-good lowlife that stole from the chief that adopted him.”
Father John took another sip of coffee. “What did your grandfather think happened?”
Cam shook his head. “He didn’t want to believe what the Tallman clan said. What could he do? Sonny never showed up, and neither did the regalia. There was other stories, he said, about Indians that sold their valuable stuff. Sooner or later, most of them came home, but some didn’t. Maybe Sonny was one of them, only he sold Black Heart’s stuff.” He pushed the chair back and got to his feet. “Hold on a minute,” he said before he disappeared into the dimness of the living room.
There was the sound of drawers opening and shutting and papers rustling. Cam was back, clutching a small brown envelope. He spilled the contents onto the table: three yellowed postcards. “One thing Sonny learned at Carlisle was how to read and write,” he said, dropping back onto his chair.
Father John picked up the nearest postcard. The paper felt like fabric, flimsy and worn, the black writing faded almost to dark red. The postmark at the top said, “Paris, May 20, 1889.” A brief message, a few sentences scribbled in a painstaking, schoolboy hand: Dear Sister, We arrived in Paris with no troubles. Indians that said we would fall off the edge of the waters was real surprised. Everybody here loves Indians. Try to touch us, checking if we’re real. Your loving brother, Yellow Robe. On the back was a black-and-white photo of the Eiffel Tower.
He looked at the second card. A photo of the Monumento a Colón in Barcelona, the postmark dated January 17, 1890, and another brief message. Dear Sister, We are on tour now and have been in Spain for three weeks. Some Indians got sick in Barcelona. Four Ogallala died, and they’re buried far from the ancestors. I am fine. Will write more later. Your loving brother, Yellow Robe.
The last postcard came from Berlin, mailed on July 23, 1890. Dear Sister, We have been to many cities in Italy. The pope himself blessed the Wild West Show Indians. We are in Germany now. I’m almost used to riding the train. Everybody here wants our regalia for keepsakes. They pay a lot of money for headdresses. Herman Marks, the interpreter, buys things from Indians and sells them to Germans. I won’t sell anything. Will write later. Your loving brother, Yellow Robe.
“Three postcards, that was all grandfather got from his mother,” Cam said. He swept the postcards back inside the envelope. “He said she was real sad her brother never came back. She always missed him. She never believed what Black Heart’s people said.”
“If he wouldn’t sell his own things,” Father John said, “it’s hard to imagine he would have sold Black Heart’s.”
“Tell that to Mickey,” Cam said.
Father John got to his feet, thanked the man for the coffee, and started for the door. He turned back. “The fed might stop by to ask you a few questions.”
A look of bafflement crossed Cam’s face, followed by the shock of understanding. He straightened his shoulders and thrust his head back. The muscles in his jaw twitched. “You saying he believes Mickey’s lies?”
“Look, Cam,” Father John said. He didn’t want Cam to be surprised when Gianelli’s white SUV drove up. He had counseled a lot of ex-convicts. They believed they carried a bull’s-eye on their foreheads, that the police and the sheriff and the fed would always look at them first, ask a lot of questions about whatever crime they were investigating. If was as if they could never wipe the slate clean, get away from the past. A couple of men he’d counseled had panicked when a police car drove into the yard, fled out the back door, taken off running. They had spent time in jail for evading police officers. “Agent Gianelli’s talking to anybody on the rez who might have a connection to the artifacts. You can explain that Mickey Tallman blames you for what your ancestor might have done.”
“I’m not talking to the fed or any other cop.” The anger in him seemed to have hardened into something more implacable. For the briefest moment, Father John wondered if Mickey Tallman was right, if Cam Merryman was capable of taking revenge on the man who had sent him to prison.
“Can you account for your whereabouts Monday night?” he said.
“Right here, where I belong, minding my own business The fed can go chase his tail around.”
“Donna can vouch for you?”
He took a moment, swiped his tongue over his lips. “Donna was at the diner ’til midnight.”
Father John closed his eyes and pinched the small part of his nose. Plenty of time to take the artifacts before midnight, he was thinking. And yet, all Gianelli would get from Mickey Tallman was a theory of a man looking for revenge. Unless… He looked at the man sitting statuelike. “Anything else between you and Mickey?” he said.
Cam took his time, drawing an invisible square on the table with his mug. “He thought Donna was gonna marry him. Drove him crazy when she left him and started up with me. He thinks he can lay the theft on me, I’ll go back to prison, and Donna will come running back to him. I’m never gonna let that happen.”
14
THE TRIBAL OFFICES sprawled over a flat patch of earth south of Ethete Road. Father John wheeled between clumps of sage brush and gold-tipped wild grass into the dirt parking lot. He stopped at the end of a row of pickups and road-weary sedans that faced the one-story, gray frame building. The double glass doors parted, and an Arapaho, tall and stocky looking, black cowboy hat pushed high on his head, headed toward a pickup, clutching papers in one hand. Father John got out and followed the imprints of the man’s boots. A wild-goose chase, he was thinking. A hunch. The afternoon was hot, the sun beating down and the wind whipping the heat. He could feel the heat burning through his shirt.
The temperature dropped ten degrees inside the building. The whir of a motor blowing cool air through the vents mingled with the low buzz of voices behind closed doors that ran down the corridor and the muffled clack of footsteps on hard vinyl floor. On the right were the offices of the tribal council, called the business council because, along with the Shoshone business council, the members conducted the Wind River Reservation’s business with the outside world. Oil and gas leases; timber and water rights.
“Hey, Father!” Betty Youngman clasped her hands on the counter and leaned forward. Last spring she had graduated from the University of Wyoming, pretty girl, exuding college idealism, with wide-set intelligent eyes and black hair that hung about her shoulders and shone in the overhead light. “What brings
you to the center of the world?”
“Buzz Moon in?”
“Officially tied up with important matters,” she said. “Always in for you.” She motioned him after her down the corridor to a door with a plaque that read: “Cultural Resources.” She rapped once before pushing the door open halfway. “You got company, Buzz,” she said. The girl gave Father John a smile and turned around.
The door sprung back and a large man in his fifties with the fit look of a man half his age and long, gray-streaked black hair pulled into a ponytail loomed in the opening. “Good to see you, Father,” he said.
“Got a minute?” Father John stepped inside the small office with books and file folders piled on shelves that made a U around three walls and crowded the narrow window overlooking the back parking lot. The books had an unsettled look, as if they might break free and topple over a desk nearly buried under piles of papers. “Excuse the mess.” Buzz busied himself clearing stacks of papers and books from a straight-back chair. He motioned Father John toward the chair and, wedging himself between the desk and a wall of shelves, dropped into a chair. “Hot for this time of year,” he said, wiping at his forehead. He might have been standing in the sun, dripping sweat.
Father John balanced his cowboy hat on one knee The polite preliminaries came first. Talk about the weather, the latest news on the rez. Fifteen kids heading off to college this fall, and wasn’t that great? He was accustomed to the Arapaho Way—live in dignity with respect for others. He liked the slower motion, the willingness to take a little time, acknowledge the other person’s humanity before launching into business.
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