Red Earth White Earth

by Will Weaver

  In mid-sentence Wicks gunned the engine and hurtled the car forward. Ahead on the road Guy saw Indians running toward a truck. It was the truck with the high wooden rack in back. The rustlers. Some of the Indians, caught in Wicks’s spotlight, scattered and ran across the road and into a field. The truck lurched from the ditch up onto the road. Wicks tried to block its path. But the truck, heavy-bumpered and tall, did not give way. Cassandra screamed. The Ford slammed into the front left wheel of the sheriff’s car, spun it down into the opposite ditch. The car engine killed and would not start again. Wicks swore and jerked at the steering wheel.

  “You fucking Dinks!” he screamed. He leaped out and emptied his pistol—crashing tongues of fire—at the Ford. Cassandra covered her ears and dropped from sight in the rear seat. The Indian truck raced away, unimpeded, into the night.

  Then Wicks turned to stare across the road into the field where some of the Indians had run. He grinned. He uncased the heavy binoculars, strapped them on. Then he opened the trunk. The trunk was layered with weapons. Wicks thought a moment, then selected a short carbine that was like no deer rifle Guy had ever seen. He slammed a hand-long clip into the rifle. “Sent this back from the last good war, one piece at a time, U.S. mail,” Wicks said. “You two stay in the car, keep the lights off. I’m goin’ to round up some bad Dinks.”

  Faraway lightning, brief shudders of yellow on black, was the only color. When it struck, Guy could see for an instant into the field. The field was unplowed grain stubble. Populating the field in dark humps, like elephants moving across savannah, were scores of great round straw bales. In one lightning strike, like a slide flashed onto a screen, Guy saw an Indian running from one big bale to another.

  “Come out of the field with your hands up,” Wicks shouted.

  There was silence.

  Wicks repeated the order.

  “Come get us,” a voice called from somewhere deeper in the field. A second Indian yipped fox-like from the left, a third barked from the right. For several minutes there was only silence. Cassandra held on to Guy.

  Suddenly Wicks’s rifle split the silence, one whiplike report that ended in a scream deeper in the field. “My leg—my leg!” someone began to scream. Then another burst of fire from Wicks’s rifle.

  “Stop him!” Cassandra cried. “He’s killing them!”

  Guy felt the round tube of a flashlight. He flashed it inside the car, on the dashboard, on the radio. He tried the switch labeled “Dispatch.” A woman’s voice answered.

  “We need an ambulance,” Guy said quickly and gave the location.

  One of the switches said “Outside Microphone.” Guy flipped the microphone switch. “Wicks,” Guy said. His voice spilled metallic and hollow across the field. “Wicks, I called for an ambulance.”

  “Get off that radio!” Wicks screamed. “Get off or you’ll end up in jail for interfering with a law officer!”

  “I called for an ambulance, do you need help?” Guy repeated.

  Wicks fired two rounds close over the roof of the car. Guy threw Cassandra to the floor and extinguished the flashlight.

  “He’s snapped—he’s gone crazy—what are we going to do?” Cassandra breathed.

  Guy thought for a moment. Then he reached out and felt Wicks’s twelve-gauge standing upright in its holder. He fumbled briefly, then released the gun. Quietly he eased open the door away from the field and pushed Cassandra out. They crouched there, Guy with the twelve-gauge. Then Guy reached back inside for the radio transmitter. He took a deep breath.

  “The law officer in the field has night-vision binoculars. He can see you when you can’t see him,” he called.

  Glass rained on them. A rip of lightning on thunder. Cassandra flattened herself on the ground. But it was not lightning. Wicks had shot through his own car. Wires sputtered and sparked somewhere behind the dash. He screamed at them from somewhere in the field, “When I take care of these Dinks then I’m coming back for you, Pehrsson,” Wicks shouted. “You and that bitch lawyer of yours. You interfered. You got in the way.”

  Guy leaned back against the side of the car.

  “Now what?” Cassandra whispered. Her voice quavered once, then held.

  Guy tried the radio. It was dead. Then he felt the twelve-gauge, jacked a shell into the chamber.

  “I heard that, Pehrsson,” Wicks called. He laughed. “That shell you just loaded? It’s bird shot. Fifty yards and all it does is sting. What you need is a rifle, Pehrsson. ’Cept they’re all locked in the trunk and I’ve got the key.” He laughed again.

  But the end of Wicks’s laugh hooted. It was like someone had thumped him on the back in mid-laugh. Guy heard choking noises. Then a brief groaning.

  “Wicks?” Guy called.

  There was silence.

  “Wicks . . .”

  Suddenly the night was split by an Indian war cry—a high wailing scream that sounded all around them. Cassandra scrabbled toward Guy.

  “Wicks?” Guy said again.

  But there was only silence in the field.

  They waited several minutes. Guy kept his finger on the trigger of the shotgun.

  Nothing.

  Carefully Guy eased back into the car. With the flashlight, he lit the dashboard, found the spotlight. Keeping his head down, he played the beam into the field. It brought no gunfire. No cursing from Wicks. He slowly raised his head over the side of the car, then directed the beam among the round bales. Far out he saw someone lying on the stubble. Closer and to the right he saw two legs sticking out from behind a big straw bale.

  “The shooting is over,” he called into the field. “If you need medical help, stay where you are. The shooting is over.” For long moments he looked at the shotgun in his hands, then laid it in the seat. He crossed the ditch. The barbed-wire fence squeaked as he swung over it; his heart raced at the noise. Then, parallel to the yellow path of light, he slowly walked into the field.

  Guy approached the feet behind the bale. The feet were turned sideways. Behind him he heard the barbed wire squeak as Cassandra followed him into the field. He came around the bale and shone the flashlight down. Wicks. Wicks with a long steel arrow through his chest.

  “Wicks!” Guy whispered. Wicks’s eyes were open. A black thread of blood ran from his left nostril across his cheek. Guy knelt beside him. “Wicks—I’ll get an ambulance.” But in the bright glare of the flashlight, Wicks’s eyes did not blink.

  Guy started at a sudden gasp. Two steps behind him, Cassandra stared.

  “Go back to the car, goddammit,” Guy said.

  “No,” she whispered. “Wicks . . . is he . . . ?”

  “Dead.” Guy turned the light to the other figure, then walked forward.

  A young Indian lay staring up into the black sky. His eyes held the same empty stare as Wicks’s. The Indian’s left leg was exploded nearly in half just above the knee. The leg hung on mainly by the bloody fabric of his pants. Underneath his torn leg was a wide stain of blood. The blood was a dark red throw rug on the pale blond stubble of the field. Red earth, white earth.

  “Not him, too,” Cassandra whispered.

  Guy put his hand on the side of the young Indian’s neck. Nothing. Guy nodded and stood up.

  Back at the car, Guy sat in silence with one arm around Cassandra, who breathed deeply, as if trying to catch her breath. Suddenly he pushed her away. “Wait here a minute,” he said.

  “Where . . .”

  “Just one minute—I’ll be right back.”

  She stared a moment, then nodded.

  He walked back into the field and around the straw bale toward Wicks—then stumbled to a halt. Two Indians surrounded Wicks. One held the crossbow. One was kneeling on the ground beside Wicks. His knife was drawn and Wicks’s cap was off.

  The Indians stared up at Guy.


  Guy stared at the Indian with the drawn knife. The Indian looked down at Wicks, then up to Guy.

  “Don’t,” Guy said.

  “Why not?” the Indian hissed. “Look at what he did to Sonny! Sonny’s dead.”

  “So is Wicks,” Guy said, looking to the Indian with the crossbow. He had seen him before at the Humphrey Center, had seen him arguing with Tom. “Wicks is dead. It’s even.”

  “It’s not even,” the Indian said. “It’s not close to being even.”

  They all were silent for a moment. The Indian with the crossbow suddenly stepped backward out of the light. “What do we do about him?” he said. Meaning Guy.

  The Indian on the ground stood up. He still held the bare knife.

  “Was that you on the loudspeaker?”

  Guy nodded.

  The Indian stared for a moment, then sheathed his knife. “Nothing,” he said.

  “He knows me,” the crossbow Indian said.

  “We know him,” the other Indian said. “Come on.” The Indians faded into the darkness.

  Guy waited a few moments, then bent beside Wicks. Carefully he felt Wicks’s pockets until he found it. He unsnapped Wicks’s right shirt pocket and removed the little Baggie containing the tiny brown jar. He stood up, walked deeper into the field, and stuffed the Baggie far inside one of the big straw bales. In the distance sirens wailed.

  He hurried back to Wicks’s car. In the back seat he put his arm around Cassandra and she leaned close to him. At first she just curled against him. Then she put her other arm around him and slowly pulled him tighter. She hung on, and buried her face against his neck. Guy lowered his face and slowly kissed her hair, her ear, pulled her tighter against him. Her face turned up to his. Tears glinted on her cheeks. In the darkness their lips searched for each other. Their noses and chins collided as their lips found, then lost, then found each other again and again as they held each other.

  But the sirens grew louder.

  Finally they pulled away. They looked out the window. Across the black prairie, flashing red lights rose and fell like heat lightning before a storm.

  33

  Zhingwaak’s story “The Crabs Who Went to War.”

  Once upon a time there was a village of crabs who lived by a stream. The young warrior crabs wanted adventure. One of them said, “Why don’t we paint our shells, put feathers in our whiskers, fast, and learn something about war?”

  “Yes, yes,” all the other young crabs said.

  One young crab went out from the village to find the most dangerous foe. Soon he found it, a raccoon. The raccoon lay there like a gray rock with fur. The raccoon was either dead or sleeping. So the young crab hopped back to the village and told the other crabs to come see what he had found.

  The young warrior crabs in the village made ready to march on the raccoon. But an old lady crab, who long ago had had her hands bitten off by a raccoon, cried to them, “Don’t go—don’t go!”

  But the young warrior crab who found the raccoon, which was certainly dead, called out, “Don’t listen to the Old Woman-Who-Knows-Nothing!”

  So off the young crabs went.

  Soon they found the raccoon. They formed a circle around him. They began to poke at him with their spears. They hopped back and forth with their spears. They sang, “Pick—jump! Pick—jump!” They kept picking at the raccoon and jumping back, picking and jumping, picking and jumping.

  Suddenly the raccoon woke up from his nap. He whirled about and ate several of the warrior crabs in one bite. That day the raccoon had a feast of crabs without even having to hunt in the stream.

  Back in the crab village the old woman crab worked alone to keep the campfire. She sang:

  Miskwaakone, miskwaakone.

  Fire blazes up, fire blazes up.

  Dibi misan, dibi misan.

  From where will the firewood come?

  34

  The day after the deaths of Bradley Wicks and James Allen “Sonny” Bowstring, Guy and Cassandra sat in the Flatwater courthouse with an FBI agent from Minneapolis, a small, immaculate man with thin brown hair combed forward, then looped across his forehead and secured with some sort of spray that smelled like strawberry jam.

  Guy realized he was hungry. It was four in the afternoon; he had been in the courthouse since dawn. He drank more coffee. Cassandra sat slumped beside him. Their shoulders touched, but she drew away whenever someone walked by. The FBI man typed something. Guy paged through a tattered House Beautiful magazine. He looked at the pictures of people in their houses. He thought of his own living room in his own house in California. His couch. His books. His picture window. His plants. But the images of his own house were like photographs in the magazine. Photos of someone else’s house.

  “You walked into the field a second time,” the agent said again.

  Guy nodded yes. He waited.

  “Why?”

  “To make sure I had done everything necessary,” Guy said carefully.

  “Everything necessary,” the agent said.

  “To help anyone who needed help,” Guy said.

  The agent turned to Cassandra. “And that’s when you heard voices for the second time?”

  She nodded.

  “Whose voices?”

  “Voices. Just voices. I wasn’t very close.”

  The agent squinted at her, then turned to Guy. “And it was then you saw the Indians.”

  Guy nodded.

  “And how would you describe them?”

  “Black hair, brown skin,” Guy said.

  The agent waited.

  “We’ve been through this several times,” Guy said. “You’ll recall it was just after midnight, which means it was dark outside. Indians tend to look alike at night.”

  “But you grew up around Indians.”

  “I grew up with Indians in daylight. At night I slept.”

  The agent’s lips turned down. He checked off something on his list, then turned to Cassandra. “What about the vehicle, the one that rammed the deputy’s car?”

  “Some sort of truck,” Cassandra said. “We told you that.” She lit another cigarette. It trembled briefly in her fingers.

  “A blue truck,” the agent said. “We have paint chips, blue ones.” He stared at Guy.

  “Blue, black.” Guy shrugged. “It was dark. There was a storm. Check the weather report.”

  “We know about the weather that night,” the agent said. He paused and looked at his notes again.

  “There was a file in Wicks’s car with your name on it,” the agent said again to Guy. “An empty file.”

  Guy shrugged.

  “Why were you riding with Wicks that night?”

  “We went to the same high school,” Guy said. “We were . . . acquaintances. I’m back here on vacation. He invited me along.”

  “And why were you along?” the agent said quickly to Cassandra.

  She swallowed but did not look at Guy; they had talked about this. They had agreed on what to say. “I . . . wanted a closer look at reservation life,” she said evenly.

  “Which you got,” the agent said.

  Cassandra looked down to her cigarette ash.

  The agent glanced over his papers once again, then checked his watch. For long moments he stared at Guy and Cassandra, then snapped shut his briefcase. The local police officers came into the room, stared as the agent stood up and slowly buttoned his overcoat. “Go for the truck,” he said to them.

  Guy took Cassandra back to the Lumberjack. She did not want him to come in. He returned in the morning and found her working, in bed, with the shades drawn. Opened books and yellow sheets of paper littered the bed and floor. Her ashtray overflowed.

  “You slept?” Guy asked.

  She shook her he
ad no, and looked back to her papers.

  “How about some breakfast then?”

  “Not hungry.”

  Guy paused a moment. “You want to talk? About last night?”

  “No—I just want to work—alone!” She stared at him with angry eyes.

  “Suit yourself,” Guy said, and left.

  He hadn’t been able to sleep either, so he did the next best thing.

  Back on the farm, Guy drove Martin’s big new John Deere tractor; Martin had gone to a Defense League meeting at Doc’s. In the enclosed cab of the John Deere was a radio. There was air-conditioning. Tinted glass. A soft seat with a tiny, shock-absorber piston underneath, a seat that felt not unlike the one in his Mercedes. It was the first time Guy had driven a large tractor with a cab, and it took him several minutes to find the right switches and hydraulic levers. He did not turn on the radio or the air-conditioning.

  He steered the tractor, the plow trailing, along the end of the field of oat stubble until he spotted the faint depression of the dead furrow, then lowered the plow. He brought up the rpms and headed downfield. He waited for the drag and pull, for the jolt in his spine of the plow irons scraping over stones. But the power of the big tractor drew the plow through the damp earth like a potter’s knife through wet clay. In the new tractor he could not feel the plow, nor hear it scrape, nor smell the fresh-cut earth. It did not feel like he was plowing, but only driving a tractor down a field. He kept looking behind. Finally he stopped the tractor mid-field. He cranked open the windows of the cab as far as they would go. Left open the door.

  He plowed in even rectangles about the field. Straight lines. Square corners. Turning left and left and left again. He reached the next dead furrow sometime toward midday. One land complete. Twenty acres. He stopped the tractor and got down. The pale green field was now a quarter black. The nearest overturned furrows glistened brightest, their moisture turned up to the light like the freshly cut dark meat of a peach. The sheen of each successive furrow dulled. At the dead furrow where he had begun, the overturned earth from sun and breeze had already dried on top and reflected no light.