Red Earth White Earth

by Will Weaver

  Suddenly Guy looked up and listened. Downstairs the conversation had ceased, the tinkling glassware fallen silent. A woman’s voice rose and fell. It was Madeline.

  Guy jammed the pages inside his shirt and ran to the balcony. Below, Stanbrook was backed up against the smoking swan. Madeline was speaking rapidly. Stanbrook was looking about for his aides, all of whom stared open-mouthed at Madeline.

  “You set aside land for whooping cranes—you save land for bald eagles—you save land for grizzly bears—for mountain sheep. You stop building dams and bridges because of some damn fish called a snail darter. And none of these are even people!”

  “One of my staffers will help you,” Stanbrook repeated. Several young men in suits stepped forward. Cassandra and two of the young lawyers conferred. Then the two lawyers came up behind Madeline.

  “You don’t know the Indians,” Madeline said. She turned to include the rest of the room. “If you knew what it was like to be an Indian right now you couldn’t stand here and drink champagne! But maybe you don’t know about real people at all,” she said, softer, as if she’d understood something for the first time. “Maybe people are just numbers to you. People are percentages on the voter polls, blocs on questionnaires. People to you are like . . . like blackbirds baked in a pie that every six years you cut up and eat.”

  The two men with artificial smiles each took Madeline by an elbow and began to ease her away from Stanbrook and toward the door. Guy came fast down the stairs. Cassandra called out to him but he didn’t stop. The two men were carrying Madeline by her elbows through the door. Guy, pushing through the crowd, grabbed the shortest lawyer from behind. He locked his arm around the man’s neck, then caught the second lawyer by his tie and jerked his face down under his other arm. Madeline stumbled free.

  “Guy—no!” Cassandra shouted.

  He looked back to the crowd. Everyone stared. He looked down to the lawyers, whose faces were turning red. He pushed them away, toward the party.

  “Come on, Guy,” Madeline said.

  Guy went.

  Just before the door slammed shut he heard Stanbrook say loudly, accusingly, “Who invited them, anyway?”

  Out on the highway, Guy drove in silence. Madeline blinked back tears, then blew her nose and sat staring straight ahead.

  “That’s the second party today we’ve gotten chased from,” Guy said after another minute. He turned to grin at Madeline, reached to touch her hair.

  She did not smile. She shook her head. “Madwoman makes scene,” she muttered.

  “Madwoman’s son goes berserk, chokes lawyers in revenge attempt,” Guy answered.

  Madeline laughed once, and wiped at her eyes again. But then her smile faded. She shook her head from side to side and looked into her lap.

  “Hey, you were great,” Guy said.

  “I blew it,” she said.

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Yes I did. I should have kept calm, should have talked about unemployment on the reservation, about the alcoholism. I should have talked numbers, percentages. That’s their language.” Her eyes welled again with tears.

  Guy was silent. “What’s ours, I wonder,” he murmured.

  As they drove back to the reservation the sun’s yellow deepened across the fields and trees. Short shadows grew from the bottom of fence posts and telephone poles. It was suppertime. However, neither of them was hungry after the crackers and shrimp and champagne. Neither did they have anywhere to be. So Guy drove.

  He put in a tape, some Strauss waltzes. Along the highway sparrow hawks sat on the telephone cables, their little talons knuckled around the humming wire, their tails flexing for balance as they watched for mice twenty feet below in the grass of the ditch. When the car drew even the hawks always dropped away. The white undersides of their wings flashed in the sun as they dipped in low figure eights over the field, then planed back to their perch to stare down again.

  Guy brought the car at sundown to the west side of No Medicine Lake. The lake was a waveless sheet of orange. He pulled over and stopped. “I want to check on something,” he said. Madeline followed him. They walked through the orange light and the cooler shadows of the pines, downhill toward the water. Guy began to slip from tree to tree as he neared the shore. Madeline did the same without asking why.

  Soon they stood behind a gnarled pine whose roots snaked like spider legs into the water. Among the roots, on the clear sand and rocky bottom, the water trembled. Fish. Hundreds of suckers spawning.

  Madeline’s eyes lit. Guy put his fingers to his lips, motioned for them to lie down. They lay on the bank and slowly eased their faces over the edge to watch the fish. The biggest suckers were the females, heavy-bellied, coarse-scaled. The females swam in the shallowest water, their dorsal fins exposed to air, sunlight glistening on their backs, their salmon-colored bellies dragging the rocks, feeling Braille-like the coarse grain of the sand and stone. They coursed back and forth. Suddenly they halted. They shuddered. A yellow tapioca of eggs spewed beneath them. At the same moment the darker, smaller male suckers arrowed in from deeper water. The males jostled each other and wildly sprayed pale jets of semen that disappeared in the sand-roiled water like milk in tea.

  They watched the spawning fish until the sun pulled its light down into the west trees and the lake turned purple. Madeline shivered. Then they walked back up the hill and drove on to Tom’s house.

  32

  It was dark by the time Guy drove back into the farmyard. Across by the machine shed, just beyond the yellow halo of the yard lamp, sat a car with a star on its side. Leaning against it, a pair of binoculars dangling from crossed arms, was Bradley Wicks.

  “I was gettin’ nervous,” Wicks said. “I was thinking all sorts of funny things.”

  “Like I said,” Guy said, slamming his door, “this is so much fun, why would I want to leave?”

  Wicks grinned, his new teeth flashing in the yard light. “You’re a kick, Pehrsson, really.”

  Guy glanced down at the binoculars. They were long-chambered and heavy, with several dials on them.

  “You like these? Take a look,” Wicks said. He held them out.

  Guy fit the rubber cups to his eyes, moved them toward the yard light. Everything showed red.

  “Your basic rose-colored glasses,” Wicks said, grinning. “Here—you don’t need no yard light with these.” He pushed the glasses toward the dark grove. The trees leaped from a black wall to red, individual pines, their knobby cones, their sharp needles. “Brought them back from the last good war,” Wicks said. “Dink glasses, I call them. Saved my life more than once.”

  Guy handed them back. He thought for a moment of pretending to drop them, but didn’t.

  “So let’s round ’em up and ride,” Wicks said, carefully fitting the glasses into a black leather case. “One phone call,” Guy said.

  In the house Martin sat with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s watching Wild Kingdom. Guy realized it was Saturday night. “What does Wicks want on a Saturday night?” Martin asked. “He wouldn’t peep to me.”

  “Me,” Guy said, dialing the Lumberjack Hotel. “I’m an honorary rider tonight.”

  “I’ll be on patrol myself one of these nights,” Martin said, pouring more whiskey into his coffee cup.

  “How’s that?” Guy said, turning and cradling the receiver as it rang the Lumberjack.

  “The Defense League. We’ve had enough of gas stealing, cattle rustling, tire slashing, buildings burned. The sheriff’s department says they don’t have any money for more deputies, so we’re gonna watch out for ourselves from now on. We’ve started our own patrol.”

  Guy stared at Martin. Cassandra answered her phone. Someone else spoke in her room. A man’s voice. Impatient, resonant.

  “Just a second,” Cassandra said to Guy. Guy listened but the phone was
silent. He could feel her palm over the receiver. “Okay, yes?” she said again to Guy.

  “Maybe I’m interrupting something,” Guy said.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Then again, maybe it needs it.”

  The man’s voice spoke again.

  “Interrupting?” Guy said.

  “Yes.”

  They were both silent for a moment. “I’m leaving with Wicks now,” Guy said.

  “Don’t talk about anything except the weather,” she said immediately. “I’ll meet you in . . . a half hour.”

  “All right.”

  “Where?”

  Guy thought for a moment. “Call the dispatcher at the sheriff’s office. He can get through to Wicks’s car. We’ll meet somewhere east of No Medicine Lake.”

  The man’s voice spoke again, closer to the phone this time. Guy recognized Stanbrook’s voice.

  “I’m sorry, I have to go,” Cassandra said.

  “Okay,” Guy said. When she didn’t reply he realized she was speaking to Stanbrook.

  She returned to the phone. “Remember, only the weather,” she said.

  Before he left the house to join Wicks, Guy paused by Martin. Martin didn’t look away from the TV.

  “This Defense League patrol,” Guy said. “Does the sheriff’s department know about it?”

  “I was telling Wicks, but he stopped me. He said he didn’t want to know. He said what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt.” Martin grinned conspiratorially.

  “Somebody’s going to get dead because of the Defense League,” Guy answered. “You shouldn’t hang around with those people.”

  Martin turned. “Who should I hang out with then—the goddamn Indians?”

  “Hang out with me,” Guy said softly.

  “You’re busy,” Martin said. “Every night you’re busy.”

  Guy paused. In the yard, Wicks honked the horn.

  “After tonight I’m not busy anymore,” Guy said. He stepped toward his father. But Martin turned away, poured more whiskey.

  Wicks drove slowly north on the reservation. Yellow and red pinpoints of light blinked on his radio, which occasionally coughed with static.

  “Some weather coming in,” Wicks said, glancing down at the radio, then through the black windshield. “Can tell by the squawk box, plus my face. The wires,” Wicks explained. “I got enough wires in my face to make a radio. Whenever the weather changes I can feel the wires tighten up. It’s like my face is a banjo and every new weather front tunes it up a few notes. Wicks’s Weather Radar.” He grinned.

  Wicks flashed the long, yellow arrow of his spotlight across the passing farmsteads. He let the light play in the darkest corners of the farms. Behind buildings. Underneath tractors. Along fuel barrels. Down the rows of trees in the black windbreaks that ran along the north sides of the buildings.

  “I read once where some guy went to the dentist and afterwards he kept hearing voices,” Wicks said. “Like radio announcers. Singers. It drove him crazy. Went to see a shrink, spent all sorts of money. Thought he was nuts. Turns out the metallic fillings in his teeth were picking up a local radio station. Truth,” Wicks said, turning to Guy. “I read it in Reader’s Digest.”

  Guy nodded.

  “The flyboys dropped us twenty miles inside Dinkland,” Wicks said in the next breath. “Me and a spotter. I handled the rifle, he had the glasses. We’d find high ground and just lay there for three or four days. He’d watch the trails and I’d sleep or rub down the rifle. Sooner or later the Dinks would start to move on the trails. Then I’d set up my tripod, get the distance nailed down. We’d watch the Dinks through the glasses until we picked out who was in charge.”

  Wicks grinned. “Once we picked out a big fat northern Dink in full uniform. Even had some sort of lieutenant’s cap with a brass star on it. He had a big, hairy mole on the right side of his neck too. We watched him set up a wide board and roll out a map on the board. He started to trace his finger along some trails on the map. The little Dinks were all sitting around him on the ground, watching. There was some breeze, five miles an hour, maybe less. The big Dink was out there sixteen hundred yards so I allowed eight inches. I waited. Finally the big Dink pulled his hand away from the map and turned to face the little Dinks. He put his hands on his hips. I could see his lips moving. I just knew what he was saying—‘Any questions, class?’ Just like old Mrs. Lincoln in history class, standing in front of those pull-down world maps. You remember her, right?” Wicks said to Guy.

  “Right,” Guy said evenly. He watched Wicks’s hands on the steering wheel. His fingers were loose, slid easily back and forth as the road curved, as the wheel turned.

  “Anyway, I let out my breath—you always shoot best with no air at all in your lungs,” Wicks explained, “and squeezed off the round. From the recoil the shooter never gets to see what happens. But the spotter does. ‘Bingo!’ my spotter said, and started to crank up the radio real fast like to call the flyboys. I put the scope back on the Dinks. They were running around like bees with a rock thrown into their hive. The big Dink was down and the map behind looked like somebody’d thrown a bucket of bloody puke on it. ‘Right in the kisser,’ the spotter told me later.”

  Wicks let the light play into a field. Two deer raised their heads; their eyes were four luminescent pearls.

  “’Course I had my bad luck too,” Wicks said. “My own fault, really. A sniper should never fire more than one round. Sniping is like poaching deer,” Wicks said with a grin. “One shot sounds like it comes from everywhere and nowhere. The second shot gives away your location. One early morning I missed a Dink who was loaded down with mortar shells. I wanted to see him light up so I tried him once more, running. The chopper boys took a while to get to us. We took some fire. I remember my face going numb. Later the chopper pilot sent me a little plastic bag of my teeth they found on the chopper floor.

  “But shit,” Wicks said, his fingers tightening into fists around the steering wheel, “even that was better than this. Riding posse down the back roads. Scraping drunken Indians off the road. Filling out reports every goddamn minute of my life.” He turned to Guy. “All these fuckin’ Vietnam vets make such a big stink about their problems. Their head problems. Well, that’s all bullshit. They’re just pissed off and depressed because they can’t ride around with loaded guns smoking the best fuckin’ weed they’d ever get, only they didn’t know it then.”

  Wicks looked back to the road. “Same with all this shit in the Middle East—the Arabs, the Jews, Lebanon. Shit, the magazines are full of it all the time, right? But you ever take a close look at the pictures, at the faces of those young boys with the AK-47s and grenade launchers and the automatic pistols? Hell—those boys are having the time of their lives. Going to school and gettin’ married and raisin’ kids is pretty thin soup compared to racin’ around in the back of a truck with a bunch of your buddies and a fifty-caliber fire stick mounted on top. That fucking war over there goes on because what the hell would they do if it stopped? A lot of wars are like that. . . .”

  Guy looked closely at Wicks for a moment. At that moment Wicks’s radio coughed and the dispatcher said Cassandra Silver’s name.

  Wicks gave his location. As he hung up the receiver he turned to Guy. “Your attorney, well, well,” Wicks said. “I thought this was between you and me.”

  “Still could be,” Guy said.

  Wicks touched his shirt pocket, pulled out the cocaine bottle, glanced at it, then put it back. “I got a little deal for you. I need some information about some bad Indians,” Wicks said. “They like to steal cattle, burn buildings when people are away, that sort of thing.”

  Guy waited.

  “These bad Dinks—Indians, I mean—hang around the Humphrey Center, hang around your buddy Tom LittleWolf,” Wicks said, turning to stare at Guy.

  Guy met his
gaze.

  “I want to know what the fuck goes on in that Tribal Council Office. I want names. I want names ’cause I’m gonna sort out some bad apples, cart them off to graystone college in St. Cloud,” Wicks said. “I figure there’s about twenty Indians around here who need to be gone. And I want to be the one to tell them good-bye. You get me their names, anything else that will help, and I lose your little brown jug with your big thumbprint on it.”

  Ahead on the road Guy saw car lights, parked. It was Cassandra.

  “Well?” Wicks said.

  “Let me think about it,” Guy said.

  “No hurry,” Wicks said. He glanced at his car clock. “It’s eleven o’clock. I’ll give you till midnight.”

  Cassandra joined them in Wicks’s car. She carried a yellow legal pad, took the back seat. “I understand you’re charging my client with possession of cocaine,” she began.

  Wicks turned off his radio.

  “Once during a night drop the flyboys read their maps wrong and dropped us in a swamp,” Wicks said softly, dreamily. “Time we got onto high ground, we looked like we were tarred and feathered. Only we were the feathers and the leeches were the tar. They were as long as a baby’s arm. Each one we pulled off took a hunk of skin the size of a quarter.”

  Cassandra swallowed and looked at Guy. His hand out of sight behind the seat, Guy took away her pen.

  They listened.

  Wicks talked about punji stakes. About night watch. About the coral snake that his spotter leaned onto with his hand. The snake bit him in the soft flesh between his thumb and index finger. Wicks killed the snake, then took his knife and scooped away all the soft meat between the thumb and first finger like spooning seeds from a cantaloupe. But the snake had hit a vein. The spotter died in convulsions on the Medivac chopper.

  Wicks talked in a low monotone. Once lightning flashed far away; Wicks flinched and jerked the steering wheel. The car slid half into the ditch, then back up. Cassandra’s mouth hung open.

  He talked on. Guy watched the clock. It was ten minutes to midnight.