As the Crow Flies

by Craig Johnson

  She turned her full attention to me, placing her broad back against the bars of the holding cell. “No. I mean, we were listening to Clarence and Artie; I don’t think anybody paid much attention to anything else.”

  “Did you hear music in the background?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Well, fortunately, I’ve got an expert in the field who says he can help us out.”

  “Who?”

  “The jail breaker.”

  She looked dubious. “Nate?”

  I gestured toward the snoring man. “He’s got a vested interest.”

  “I can call my mother and have her bring in food and Artie-sit.” She nodded and continued chewing her coffee. “As you know, we’ve got a shower here; would you like to use it?”

  I ruffled my hand through my hat hair, I’m sure causing it to stand up at all angles. “Is that a hint?”

  She did her best to suppress the grin caused by my appearance but failed miserably. “Could be.”

  I didn’t have any clean clothes to change into, but Chief Long was kind enough to loan me a shirt from Tribal Police supplies with a nifty little patch set like hers but with the name PRETTY WEASEL printed on the pocket. “Is this my undercover name?”

  She drove south on the gravel road leading to the radio station, the tail end of the Yukon swinging around behind us like a flat-track racer. “What?”

  I braced a hand against the dash. “Nothing.”

  KRZZ’s was not the most inspiring of buildings, but then most everything concerning radio rarely is. I’d done a brief semester as a freshman at KUSC, University of Southern California’s student radio station, where I had been the worst DJ they’d ever heard. The programming in the early sixties was almost exclusively classical and didn’t require a great deal of talk between the twenty minute tracks, but even I had to admit that I was horrible.

  It looked to be a utilitarian building from the sixties with a slab roof and a wall of small-pane windows overlooking what there was of downtown Lame Deer. The white paint was peeling off the concrete block, and the front screen door was propped open with a cardboard box full of CDs that had been marked on the side with the plea, TAKE ME, I’M FREE! There was a battered Honda Civic in the parking lot as well as Artie’s truck.

  Lolo parked and we got out. I could hear music drifting through the open door, John Trudell’s Bone Days, a stream of consciousness blues opus I recognized from hanging around Henry.

  In the tubular-style font of the seventies were the words KRZZ, LOW POWER—HIGH REZ, the lettering also peeling like a second-day sunburn.

  “Looks like Native radio’s seen better days.”

  Inside there was a green carpet that showed the fiber grid underneath, and a surplus steel government desk where a pretty-enough young woman, who was a friend of Melissa Little Bird’s, was working on a book full of Sudoku. She raised her head as we entered. “Can I help you?”

  Lolo looked at the large poster behind the girl’s head—it was a badly done offset print of four men dressed in period western costume with the words REGGAE COWBOYS, I SHOT THE SHERIFF in red. She glanced at me. “No offense.”

  “None taken.” I thumbed my Tribal Police patch. “Anyway, Poppa’s got a brand new bag.”

  The young woman was uncertain, looked at the two of us, and decided the only course was to repeat her request. “Can I help you?”

  I smiled. “I’m sorry. Is Nate here?”

  She rolled her eyes toward the inner sanctum and immediately went back to the puzzles as we turned and made our way into another room with a few more desks and a glass wall that gave a view of the “on-air studio,” principally discerned by the large red light with white lettering that read ON AIR. Nate was standing in the middle, swaying to the Native beat-poet’s words and the searing guitar accompaniment.

  I stepped forward and knocked on the thick glass. The young man couldn’t hear us with the headphones on, so I knocked a little louder, afraid that if I applied much more pressure the glass would most certainly fall out of the frame onto the floor.

  Nate finally swayed around so that he was looking at us and immediately motioned that we should join him through the door he pointed to at the left.

  KRZZ’s studio was a world apart from the tawdry outer office where the receptionist sat—there were multiple computer screens, sound boards with about a hundred slide controls, and banks of CD and computer inputs. The inside of the room was covered in acoustical foam and at the center was a stylish, air-cushioned chair. There was another window to the outside, but it was so plastered with Indian Power, AIM, Thunderchild, and New Day Four Dances Drum Group stickers that I doubted you could tell the weather by looking out of it.

  “Welcome to the nerve center. Federal grants can go only to actual transmission equipment. Say what you want about Herbert His Good Horse, he knows how to write grants.”

  It was an impressive setup. “I guess.”

  “Hold on just a second.” He reached up and, just as the song finished, swung the elevated mic in front of his face. “John Trudell, my brothers and sisters, just a human being trying to make it in a world that is rapidly losing its understanding of being human. It’s ten o’clock in the AM, daytime for you Indians, and you’re listening to KRZZ 94.7, Low Power—High Rez, the voice of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Nestaevahosevoomatse!”

  He touched another button on the computer and a strong drum beat filled the studio with background singers chanting something I vaguely recognized. “Are they singing about Mighty Mouse?”

  Nate smiled. “Yeah, a group called Black Lodge. It’s a favorite of the kids down at the elementary school.”

  I pulled the CD out of my pocket, slipped it from the paper envelope, and handed it to him. “This isn’t likely to make it on your top-ten list.”

  Lolo added, “Even with a bullet.”

  Nate put the CD in one of the players, punched a few buttons, and we listened to the beginning of the recording before realizing we were hearing it over the same speakers as the Mighty Mouse powwow song.

  “Is that going out over the air?”

  He rapidly hit a few more buttons and made a face. “Just a little.”

  “I don’t know if this is a two-party consent state, but I’m pretty sure we could get sued for what just happened.”

  He shrugged. “We’ll just keep it between ourselves.”

  “And a couple of thousand listeners?”

  He adjusted the volume on another off-air track. “I think you’re overestimating our listenership.”

  I glanced at the studio phone as the lights began blinking, not unlike the ones in my office that regularly plagued me. “Uh huh.”

  We ignored them and carefully listened to the recording again, but I couldn’t make out anymore than I had before. Nate’s fingers jigged on the computer keyboard, and then he hit a button on the CD player. “I downloaded it to the computer, so now we can manipulate it any way we want.”

  The Sudoku woman flung open the studio door. “Nate, did you just put some kind of crazy shit on the air? People are calling and want to hear the John Trudell song about Mighty Mouse again.”

  “Um, tell them it was a demo.” He flicked his hand at her, and she disappeared. He hit a few more buttons and turned down the on-air volume, and we were once again listening to the hiring of a hit man.

  We got to the portion where I thought I’d heard music; Nate’s fingers tapped on the keyboard and isolated the track, bringing the background noise up and the primary voice down, allowing us to hear the melody of something.

  “Do you recognize that song?”

  He listened intently to the simple chord progression but shook his head. “No.”

  Lolo leaned in and propped an arm on the counter. “Play it again.”

  Nate did as he was told, and we listened to the music as he lifted the volume—a strong bass-baritone and a chicka-boom rhythm passed through the speakers.

  “Jail was often his home


  They’d let him raise the flag and lower it…”

  The rest was lost in the background noise and angry voices.

  “Johnny Cash—that’s The Ballad of Ira Hayes.”

  Nate looked at me. “Who?”

  Lolo Long gently slapped him in the back of the head. “The Pima Indian who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima.” She glanced at me and gestured toward Nate. “This is what we fought for—you know that, right?”

  “When was that?”

  She looked at him. “Iwo Jima?”

  “No, the song. When was it released?”

  I thought about it. “Before I went to Vietnam, ’64 I’d guess.”

  He made a face. “The sixties? No wonder I don’t know it.” He looked at the CD player as if it held the Dead Sea Scrolls. “Wow, man.”

  I glanced at the chief. “Well, we need to go up to the Jimtown Bar anyway. I don’t think anybody’s going to remember anything, but we’ve got to leg it out. I’ve got a couple of hours before Cady and Lena come back from Colstrip.” I gestured toward the computer again. “Can you play the part with the woman’s voice?” He did, but the only word that I could discern was the word dome/dose/dole.

  Lolo Long had a strange look on her face. “Play it again.”

  Nate did as he was told and then played it again and again.

  I leaned a little forward to get her attention as she stared at the blank screen. “Anything?”

  She didn’t hear me, or she was concentrating.

  “Do you know who it is?”

  Even Nate turned to look at her, but she shook her head. “No, I thought for a minute, but…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  I studied her. “You’re sure?”

  She straightened and stepped back from the counter. “Yeah.”

  I sighed and looked at Nate. “You?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, I wish I did. Believe me.”

  “I do.” I patted him on the shoulder. “We’re going to head up to Jimtown and ask around. Do you think you can keep manipulating the recording so that we can try and get more out of it?” I paused. “Without putting it on the air?”

  He smiled and looked at the lights still blinking on the phone. “Hey, man, I may have produced a hit here.”

  Chief Long had been silent in the five miles up to the notorious drinking establishment; it had been a quick five miles, but five miles nonetheless.

  She slid the Yukon to a stop in front of the steel-red posts sticking up in front of the Jimtown Bar’s front door—likely there to keep the patrons from instituting an impromptu drive-through—and sat staring at the dash, the midday sun drying the irrigation water in the surrounding hay field with wisps of vapor trailing up from the ground.

  “Something wrong?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “About?”

  She looked at me as if I’d just fallen off the official sheriff’s-only turnip truck. “I’m just wondering how complex this case is, you know?”

  I nodded. “It usually is complicated when it concerns matters of the heart; things tend to get venal and earthy.”

  She pressed her lips together. “So you don’t think it’s a hidden gold mine or about nuclear weapons?”

  I smiled. “No, I don’t; I think it’s something small, something personal, and probably something stupid.” I waited a moment. “You got anything you want to tell me, Chief?”

  She looked at me for a longer moment and then pulled the handle and threw open her door. “Not really.”

  The Jimtown bar itself isn’t an impressive sight, but the beer can pile out back most certainly is. Documented by National Geographic and Guinness World Records as the largest beer can pile in the world, it dwarfed the actual bar, where the twin mottos, which appeared on the back of souvenir ball caps, had always been WHERE THE CAN OF WHUPASS IS ALWAYS OPEN, and FRIDAY NIGHT SPECIAL, SHOT, STABBED, OR RAPED. I got tired the way I always did when approaching such establishments and hoped that Luanne, the proprietor for the last few miraculously quiet years, was about.

  I started to follow Long toward the door but paused when I saw an old, faded powder-blue Dodge with a white replacement door that read COLSTRIP CONCRETE and a phone number belying its age with only four numerals.

  I stopped.

  The moment must have lasted longer than I thought, as Lolo paused with her hand on the front door of the bar and looked at me. “Something wrong?”

  I thought about repeating the conversation in reverse but decided her mood wasn’t conducive. “I’ve seen that truck before.”

  “There are only a couple of thousand vehicles on the Rez, so I bet you have.” She pushed the door open but instead of going inside turned to look at me. “Where?”

  “Birney.”

  “Red or White?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” I glanced at the truck one more time, then caught the heavy glass door and followed her into the interior gloom, lit only by the red neon spelling BAR in the small window. It was still well before opening time, but a familiar character sat on one of the massive log stools bolted to the concrete floor.

  Thom Paine had been the unofficial mayor of Jimtown for as long as I could remember; half Cheyenne and half Crow, he was the perfect peacemaker for the just-off-the-Rez bar. He was a small man, so his best technique for breaking up beer brawls was to get the patrons to laugh with an unending stream of politically incorrect Native humor mostly borrowed from Herbert His Good Horse. He leapt off his stool as soon as he saw us. “Haho!”

  Lolo held up a hand to stop the coming tirade as I wandered over to the jukebox at the far end of the bar. “Thom, is Luanne around?”

  “No, she went to Billings for a hair appointment.” His voice became more excited as he thought of a joke to tell. “I got this one off the morning show the other day—there were these two cowboys out ridin’ and they came onto this Indian lying on his belly with his ear against the earth.”

  I thumbed through the machine’s old-style tabs as Long’s voice sounded dubious. “She left you in charge?”

  “No, Nattie Tyminski is here, but she’s in the bathroom.” He continued with the joke as if she hadn’t interrupted. “The one cowboy turns to the other and says, ‘See that Indian, he can put his ear to the ground and hear things from miles away.’”

  I got to the end of the song listings and then went back in the other direction just to make sure I hadn’t missed it.

  “About that time the Indian looks up at them and says, ‘Covered wagon pulled by two oxen, one white, the other speckled, one man, one woman, three children and a black dog—wagon full of all family supplies.’ The one cowboy looks at the other one and says, ‘That’s amazing.’ The Indian continued, ‘Yes, ran over me about a half-hour ago.’”

  Lolo chuckled in spite of herself and glanced toward the two bathroom doors, one marked “SQUAWS,” the other “BRAVES,” that led toward the pool table past the jukebox where I stood. “Thom, sometimes…” And she finally laughed wholeheartedly.

  His eyes almost disappeared in the folds around the sockets. “It makes me happy to see you laughing the way you used to, Little-Lo. You don’t laugh enough anymore.”

  She gently placed a hand on his shoulder. “I guess it’s the job, Thom.” She took a deep breath and glanced over to me. “I’ve had some help with that lately, though.”

  I leaned against the jukebox and tipped my hat back in an aw-shucks manner. “No Ballad of Ira Hayes.”

  She let the hand slip from the mayor’s shoulder and crossed to me. “No?”

  “No.” I glanced at Thom. “When’s the last time they changed the music on this machine?”

  He shook his head, looked at the floor, and then back to us. “Never that I know of.”

  “That means that Artie didn’t call from here.”

  She studied me. “Then where?”

  “Could’ve been anywhere: a cell phone in Artie’s truck, a home stereo, or a radio station.”
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br />   Thom watched us like we were a tennis match, but I cut him off before he could start in with the jokes again. “The key is the woman; if we know who the woman is then we know where the place might’ve been.”

  “And why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I think you know who she is.”

  It was at that point that the Squaws bathroom door opened and two individuals of separate sexes exited. One was an obese woman with a modified beehive hairdo and way too much makeup; the other was a skinny white guy with a shaved head, a flame tattoo spiraling up his neck, and sunglasses, despite the gloom inside. The man held a brown plastic grocery sack and looked very surprised to see us.

  I smiled. “Mr. Kelly Joe Burns—I see you have your belt on.”

  He paused there for a second, pushed Nattie Tyminski toward us, and then dodged behind the bar through the doorway toward the back. It took both of us to catch the screaming woman, who stumbled, fell halfway to the floor, wrapped one arm around me and the other around Chief Long’s leg, and held on for dear life.

  The chief was the first to disentangle, and she lithely leapt over the bar and through the back door. “Arrest her!”

  After getting the woman to her feet, I handcuffed her to the refrigerator and went outside to take a quick look at the blue Dodge. I busied myself for a moment and then went to the right in the direction of the as-big-as-a-very-large-house giant pile of beer cans but couldn’t see where Lolo and Burns might’ve gone.

  I stopped by a Dumpster, which was made out of a couple of fifty-five-gallon drums sitting on a crumbling concrete pad next to the huge pile, and listened; it sounded like the cans were being stepped on and were sliding down the hill.

  I approached the gigantic assembly and worked my way around the periphery—Lolo Long with her sidearm drawn was thirty feet above me and was panning the .44 around the area. She must’ve half-seen me and swung the big Smith toward my chest.

  “Whoa, Chief!”

  She raised the barrel of the revolver skyward. “Where is he?”

  “You don’t know?”

  She slipped on the mountain of crushed aluminum and almost fell. “No, he disappeared.”