by Lee Lamothe
He glanced up at her, then away.
She knew she’d lost him, gotten sidetracked, her riff had gone nowhere. She held her palms up at him. Her hands were tiny, her fingers long, her fingertips looking stupid for a cop, a result of the sloppy white French manicure she’d given herself the night before, drunk and talking aloud to the absent Ray Tate. “Start again: I know this isn’t about me, all this. But at your place with Misha? That is what it’s all about. Your twelve-year-old. Beautiful girl. Smart girl. Broken nose, blood everywhere. For me, Ronnie, that’s the blood on the snow, that’s the wolves. That’s my winter kill.” She studied him and reached her right hand straight up. “I saw Misha and that blood, and I wanted to …” She made a fist above her head and pulled it down, “… just pull you from the sky.” She felt her face turn to sadness, the muscles going wherever they wanted. She didn’t know, yet. Hadn’t decided. He had to give her something. She glanced at the door. Instinctively, she had it. She gave him power without surrendering any of her own and stared at his face until he looked back at her. “Don’t make me like that, man. Don’t make me like them. Please, don’t.”
Ronnie sagged a little. He looked like, given the choice, he’d rather take the beating. “I’m sorry, Djuna … Sergeant Brown.”
“Don’t tell me, Ronnie. Tell Misha.” There was a thick cudgel with dark stains at the business end leaning against the drawers on her side of the desk where he couldn’t see it. It wasn’t hers: it was called the Abo-Swatter and it had notches in it where the guys had tallied their Saturday night rodeos. There were a lot of notches, but none of them fresh. When she’d come up from the city, transferred back and promoted, she’d lined up the guys and told them where to head in. No one spoke to her after that except about the work, but she’d gone the distance in the cop trade and killed a man in the line and that came with its own respect, if not friendship.
“How we going to do this, Ronnie? Me or the elders?”
He looked at her.
She smiled, her hair spiky and jet black. She looked like a backup singer in the videos broadcast through his satellite dish over from Chicago. The handcuffs weren’t necessary. Everybody on the Rez loved something about her.
“Elders.” He sucked his lips. “Elders. I’ll take a tribal council. Okay?”
It wasn’t strictly legal under state law. Self-rule and tribal councils made the pale jowls in the state capital quake, preventing them from dispensing human mercy as though it was a gift, as if fairness and dignity were special rights to be bestowed.
She nodded. “Elders, okay. What they say goes. I’ll stand by it, you stand by it.” She came around the desk in her slippers, seeming not much taller standing up than she was sitting down. Even removing the handcuffs let her reveal her technique: she placed a gentle hand flat on his shoulder while she operated the key. Ray, her city cop, had taught her that. She was ready to jump away from him if Ronnie went off, to get the stick from behind the desk, to hope her guys outside the door came boiling in when she called out.
But Ronnie just massaged his thick wrists. He didn’t want to frighten her and waited until she’d stepped away before nodding his head and getting up off the chair. “I’ll be home, when they want me. The elders. Sergeant … Brown.”
As she pulled on her knee boots, she gave him a luminous smile of perfect little chicklet teeth and took her round hat from the peg by the door. “Ah, c’mon, Ronnie, man. My name’s Djuna. I’ll give you a drive.”
She felt like a city suburban mom piloting the Expedition. She wouldn’t let Ronnie ride chained in the cage in the back like a prisoner in case his Misha saw, although strictly speaking he was still in custody. The top of his head almost touched the headliner. He was silent beside her. There was a type, she knew, who went quiet, gathering in their mind the slights and grudges of the day, mixing them together like a violent brew that reached fission and the next thing you knew you were on the floor in incredible pain, going holy-fuck, and covering up your vital organs as the guy tried to kick you to death. She’d been there twice, each time when she walked into a Saturday-night bar powwow and sparked off some deep thinker for whom a uniform was the last crucial ingredient in the wild beverage percolating inside. Both times it was the Native men who waded in and got her free, protected her, wrestling the guy off her and out the door. They wouldn’t hold him for arrest; things weren’t that way and she had no right to expect that.
The Expedition knew the way. It smoothly rolled past the bent, perforated stop signs, heading out of town beyond the shacks and cracked foundations of the government houses. Djuna Brown drove with the big red ball on the floor behind her, but all the troops left theirs on the dash. She didn’t, because she wanted people to know it was her coming.
Ronnie didn’t seem to want to talk, so she let her mind muse, think about Ray Tate, something she’d thought she’d have stopped doing by now but instead did more frequently, wondering if he even remembered her.
When she drove off the rutted driveway of Ronnie’s sloping shack he was on his knees, forehead to forehead with Misha. She seemed to be comforting him. Ronnie’s mostly absent wife was in the doorway, a shapeless woman in a colourless shift dress, barefoot and pregnant again. There was cardboard over the windows of the shack. There was no uncontaminated water in the area and empty cardboard cases of state government plastic bottles were stacked up in the shade against the crumbling porch, shaped into a doghouse, a long, twitching snout poked out.
She took the long way back, looping dirt roads through some of the most beautiful country she could imagine. She’d been told Canada to the north was even more stunning, but she couldn’t imagine that. At the lift of a rise, she stopped the Expedition in the middle of the road and stared sadly down into a river where a creek bled effluent that looked like noxious green tea, now that the lumber mill up the other side, out of sight, was back in operation. A sign on the mill’s office said WO/NR. Ostensibly, it meant Work Office, Northern Initiative. In reality it meant Whites Only, No Injuns. The sawmill workers were tough but they found their own places to water themselves after a shift; the grim ramshackle bar in town was a little too edgy for them, so they drove thirty miles the other way and Djuna Brown’s guys had had to yank a lot of wrecks off the road and pry bodies out of windshields.
Above the feeder creek the water was pristine and thick with beautiful silver fish. Below, in the morning sun, it was fouled with fish with bulging eyes gasping on their sides.
But Ray would love it here, she thought, slipping the truck into gear. He’d be a mysterious striding ghost, climbing the folds of the hills and sinking into the shadows of the valleys, an easel over his shoulder and his clutch of paintbrushes and charcoal sticks in a hip holster. She imagined him talking to himself. Back when they were partners down in the city looking for the X-men, the traffickers who sold party drugs, she remembered him driving the bosses nuts with his rambling soliloquies. The Natives wouldn’t bother him because they recognized a slightly crazy soul, the spiritual worth of it.
They’d planned, after they got fired for thoroughly fucking up the X-men case, to take what buyouts they could negotiate and head to Paris, where he’d paint and she’d … well, she was sure she’d find some creative muscle to exercise. She didn’t see herself as an artist’s moll, stretching his canvases and darning his old denim shirts. But Ray loved his city streets, the young chargers for whom he felt responsible, strange for a doorstep baby who’d been raised in the grim cycle of state foster homes where the only loyalty was to survival. And they never got fired anyway. Ray took some bullets and closed it down for the shooter, a psycho ex-city cop, and Djuna Brown became a hero, crossing the thickest of lines and leaving a fat pervert dead in the dirt, a killer drug network broken, and a kidnapped girl rescued. A movie production company had flown her out to Los Angeles but she was too modest about her exploits to fit their dramatic needs, although a mannish script assistant swore true West Coast love for Djuna Brown’s little red slippers.
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Two miles outside town she passed a trio of Native men walking along the highway, each carrying a long tube of rolled newspaper with thick moss poking out the ends. They turned at the distinctive sound of the Expedition engine and for a moment they showed fear, ready to head into the bush. Then they recognized her and nodded, and she slowed and offered rides. One, a slim man with a potbelly, declined politely. They didn’t have fishing rods or poles; from one man’s vest pocket she could see a length of fishing line looping out. The edges of the man’s hands had deep scars where the tackle lines had been grooving for decades, hand over hand to retrieve the fish. They all remained in easy silence for a few moments, then one of the men, she couldn’t tell which one because no one’s lips moved, made the perfect caw of a raven. She laughed, slipped into gear, and eased the truck away.
The raven’s call kept her smiling the rest of the way into town.
She’d been invited to a sweat lodge after she first came back, an offer rarely made to a woman, never mind a black one. It was a low den, smoky with smouldering willow branches, with cracks in the woven tree limbs above her. Glowing hot rocks were carried in on forked sticks and gently laid in a small depression in the earth floor. A man set up a worn concave stone full of water, and another man, with a broom tied of brush and leaves, sprinkled the water onto the hot stones. There was chanting; she stripped off her T-shirt and shorts and sat naked in the humid almost-dark, surrendering.
She’d felt as if she were suffocating, the sweat rivers pouring individually from each scalp follicle and down her back. As she sweated something out of herself, she saw in the middle of her mind the sweat, black threads of thoughts and confusions, turn to silvery estuaries as her spirit cleansed itself, purified. It might have taken hours but she didn’t know, because she was stoned on herself and the smoke and the rhythmic murmurs of the three men in there with her. It was rancid with human seepage and the little tied bundles of tobacco and herbs smoking on the hot stones, and she seemed to not blink for five or ten minutes at a time, not until she remembered to. The lodge was very dark and close and she’d been told it was called the Mother’s Womb.
One man had asked: “What are you, sister?”
She said, for no discernable reason, “Raven,” the image, not the word, flying itself into what remained of her drained mind.
“Go outside. Now.”
One man held the thick blankets back from the doorway and she ducked out as naked as birth into the first cold day of creation, lit by a new light and populated with unheard sounds and unrecognizable colours and she heard every leaf rustle against itself, heard the individual microscopic boulders of sand shifting under a soft breeze. There in front of the low lodge was an inky raven perched on a mossy stone. It called to her and she laughed in return, a laugh her breath had never created before.
She was thinking of that day, of imagining a raven and then finding one, as she pushed open the door to the detachment office and her corporal handed her the printout of an email. Before she took it she had a sudden unbidden image of Ray Tate’s face in her mind, and the email said the State Police were assisting the city during the epidemic. Manpower was requested.
“Right,” the corporal said. “As if.”
She said, “You’re Acting. You’re in charge until I get back.”
He, who she’d overheard identifying her only by the monosyllabic name of a body part, smiled and said, “Yes, Sergeant Brown.”
She saw his smile was genuine and appreciated that he was just a kid, an untested boy-cop who’d lose a lot if he ever had to cross the thickest of lines, inhaling his own gun smoke, watching someone die to death at his feet.
She was packed and at the detachment office, and her lieutenant said there were lots of cars down in the city. “They don’t have a problem of vehicles, Sergeant, they’re parked all over the fucking town. What they have is have a problem of no one to drive them. Take the nine o’clock Amtrak.” He flipped her a State credit card and stared at her. “You sure you want to go? They got this plague going down there, I guess you heard? They’re quarantining people. They’re gonna have riots. That place is finished.”
Her corporal silently drove her to the railway station. After she dragged her carryall from the back of the Expedition, she leaned in the window. “Look, you don’t have to be afraid, you know? Go out, talk to them. They’re just people, same as you and me. Ask them where the good fish are, where the good hunting is. Ask a question, even if you already know the answer. Give them that, at least.” She stared at him. She wasn’t sure she was getting through.
He nodded and looked away through the windshield. She thought he was going to laugh: a midget black girl sergeant telling a buff farm boy how to bale hay. But when she spoke he had to at least listen: she’d killed a gunman in the line and it entitled her to a measure of respect. She got her stripes by smelling her own gun smoke, not down in the capitol with her legs open.
She was fearful for the people up there, what might happen if she wasn’t around. This must be how Ray Tate feels about his kid cops. She started to try again, “Tom, listen to me just one listen, okay, you got a toolbox —” She gave it up and made a sad little smile. “Good luck, Tom.”
He put the Expedition into gear.
She stepped back, and when he drove away, she made a complex hand signal at his departing truck and went into the train station.
Chapter 5
In front of the old cut-stone courthouse on Soldiers’ Square, Ray Tate sat on his balled-up raid jacket and studied the bird droppings on the wide steps. His artist self and his detective self engaged one another: the splashes of the runny avian stuff had a natural textured aspect that appealed to his abstract painterly eye; the velocity, direction of spatter, and thickness spoke to his deductive talents as well as to his appreciation of crazy Jackson Pollock. One particularly wide glob, a little shiny and red and with no drag to any direction, told him the bird had recently perched on one of the eaves, held its ass over the edge, and bombed one straight down, perfectly vertical. Another sample had extreme fingering: the bird had been in flight north at a good speed. He deduced that the caked bird shit had been dropped at the end of the previous spring, when a lot of the birds headed north full of southern berries. Uncoagulated blood was thinner than bird shit but the principles were the same. On the walls of the academy training house, and at real crime stages afterwards, he could tell which way a knife had swung, what velocity a baseball bat had picked up in its travel. Spatter was the murderer’s brush stroke: it spoke to the miscreant’s enthusiasm and talent.
The gunshot fella had been wrong. The sun had burned off the dawn into a sharp, still morning. The stars-and-bars hung from the flagpole, limp as a rag. In front of the courthouse, the morning parade of miscreants lounged in the sunlight on the steps, unintelligibly welcoming each other with yo-bloods and huhs and slapping boneless high-fives. They talked bail and jail with depressed, drooping lawyers in sagging suits and bad haircuts. Three members of the Flying Fukienese Dragons, in black sateen gang jackets with Mandarin collars, wore white surgical masks decorated with toothy shark’s mouths, lifting them only to take drags on cigarettes or to spit dangerously near passersby. A haunted bum clutched his chest and bent over, coughing sputum near the war memorial while four plainclothesmen backed away in a pack, looking back as though they wanted to kick his lungs out.
Back in his uniformed days, Ray Tate had liked being in court. It was the culmination of his work. He was good on the stand. He gave good fuck, the prosecutors said. When a clerk offered him the bible and asked if he swore to tell the truth, Ray Tate held the book with reverence, crossed himself, said, “I do so swear,” and bit his knuckle. He stood erect in the box in his uniform, his hat on the ledge, hands clasped either front or back, but usually back because it gave a less defensive posture, and spoke exactly enough words to answer the question asked. Every second question, he’d answer directly to the judge or jury. Whenever he was asked about an action or stat
ement of the accused, he’d glance over at the dock while answering, essaying that his answer applied to this specific accused and no other individual on earth. His entire posture said Nothing Personal; he seldom needed rehabilitation by the Prosecutor. The defence lawyers usually got him out of the box as quickly as possible.
The fingerman from Homicide was late. Ray Tate used the time to wander his mind through Paris, where he’d never been. It would be like this, he thought: observing passersby, a glass of something cool and European as his elbow rested on a round metal table, a snobby waiter hovering in the background. A thick coil sketchpad would be awaiting inspiration. His fingernails would be caked with primary colours, his knuckles black with charcoal. Cobblestones would be an endless slick geometry, diminishing into the vanishing point of coffin-shaped rocks, defined and perfect and endless into infinity.
Djuna Brown would’ve been in there too. He imagined swaggering narrow Frenchmen leering at her cocoa skin, at her spiked shiny hair poking from under a cocky beret. She’d wear a scarf looped at her long throat and would look as exotic as Paris itself.
He didn’t make a picture of himself, but his garb wouldn’t be faux biker or the blue suit with chevrons on his arms, although he loved that old blue bag. There’d be no holster in his boot, no badge chained around his neck. He cherished the badge, but sometimes it had come to feel like an anchor, preventing him from soaring someplace. And with his earlobe shot off he fancied himself as an amusing half-a-van Gogh.
