Watching Eagles Soar

by Margaret Coel

  Vicky got to her feet. She dug through her purse and handed the other woman her business card. “Ernest is going to need a lawyer,” she said. She was thinking that Sylvia Redbird might also need a lawyer.

  * * *

  Howie Thunder stood in the doorway of the tri-level house with faded, yellowish siding. The door had swung open before Father John had gotten out of the pickup. The Arapaho had the look of a general awaiting the arrival of his troops, arms rigid at the sides of his gray uniform. Yet, there was something removed and vacant about him, as if part of him were somewhere else. Forty minutes ago, he’d called the mission. “Can you come over, Father? Need to talk.”

  Father John had told the Arapaho he was on the way. He’d been half expecting the call since he’d heard the news on the radio this morning: Jose Montecon, indicted leader of a drug ring on the reservation, had been found shot to death on Blue Sky Highway. The police reported he’d been killed sometime in the middle of the night. The responding officer was Howie Thunder. Ironic that Howie was the one to find the drug dealer’s body. Three weeks ago, Father John had spent most of the day helping Howie and Myrna get their teenaged daughter, Patsy, into another rehab center. Father John walked across the strip of bare dirt that lay between the pickup and the wooden stoop in front of the house. A hot gust of wind swept across the open fields, pressing his shirt against his skin.

  “How’re you doing?” he said.

  Howie was backing into the house, tossing his head, beckoning Father John to follow. “Thanks for coming by,” he said. “I can’t get her calmed down.”

  “Her?” Father John had assumed Howie wanted to talk about finding Montecon’s body, but it was probably Patsy he was worried about, or possibly Myrna. He stood inside the door a second, letting his eyes adjust from the brightness outside. Curtains were drawn across the front window, leaving only a faint outline of light at the edges. The sofa and chairs looked like black shadows. Thin streaks of sunlight from the kitchen in back ran like water across a corner of the vinyl floor. The light winked in the metallic frames of three photos arranged on a table next to the sofa. A door leading to bedrooms on the right was closed. He could hear the faint, intermittent sound of weeping.

  “Myrna’s in there . . .” Howie nodded toward the closed door. “Can’t get her to stop crying.” He let out a sharp sob.

  “Sit down,” Father John said. He took hold of Howie’s arm and guided him through the shadows to the sofa. Then he pulled up a wooden chair and sat down across from him. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  The Arapaho seemed to be gathering his thoughts. Finally he said, “Day before yesterday, Patsy overdosed. Meth and alcohol.” He dropped his head into his hands and sobbed out loud. Tears glistened between his brown fingers. After a moment, he said, “Just got out of rehab, was doing real good. This time, we thought . . .” He let the rest of it trail off.

  “You thought she’d make it.” Father John set a hand on the man’s shoulder. Beneath the hard seams of the uniform shirt, he could feel the trembling that ran past the man’s skin and muscles, into his bones. From somewhere in the house, beyond the closed door, came the quiet, rhythmic noise of weeping.

  “Montecon and that other slimeball, Redbird, must’ve gotten hold of her again. Got her back on meth. Seventeen years old is all she is, Father.” The words came in jerky monosyllables. “Two days ago Myrna answers the phone. Patsy’s boyfriend says she can’t wake up. Can’t wake up? Myrna says. She thought Patsy spent the night with her girlfriend. Myrna calls me right away. I was just finishing up patrol. I notify the dispatcher, and the ambulance has Patsy in the emergency room before Myrna and me got there. Docs say she’s in a coma. Maybe she’ll come out, maybe not. They don’t know.”

  Howie dropped his head and stared down at his hands clasped in his lap. The moisture dropping from his cheeks made little black tracks across the front of his gray shirt. “We stayed with her all day, all night, and most of yesterday, watching that plastic tube drip fluids into her to keep her from dying. I held her hand. It was cold, Father, cold as death. We seen her eyelids move once in a while, like she was trying to open them, trying to come back. That’s how we knew our little girl was still alive.”

  Howie lifted his palms against his face and wiped away the moisture. Then he reached around the armrest and picked up one of the metallic-framed photographs. “There she is, last year before they got her on meth,” he said, holding out the photo, staring down the length of his arms, as if the girl herself had moved out of reach. “So much life in her. She’s so pretty.”

  “Yes, she is.” Even in the shadows, the girl’s eyes shone with light. Black, curly hair hung loosely about a face that still had the soft, unformed look of a child. Father John could feel his own muscles tense. Meth and alcohol were a lethal combination.

  “She’s an artist,” Howie said, tossing his head one way, then the other.

  For the first time, Father John noticed the small paintings arranged on the walls. There was a picture of the golden brown prairie rolling into blue mountains, another picture of a cluster of white tipis with dark shadows flung over the prairie, and one of a black horse grazing in the pasture.

  “I took her out to the pasture the day she painted it,” Howie said, nodding toward the painting. “Rigged up some branches to set her easel on. Fourteen years old, she was. She said that horse was so beautiful, she wanted to capture him forever. She painted most of the day, and when I came back for her, she’d captured that stallion. There he was on the canvas, true as life. It’s gonna kill Myrna, if . . .”

  “Try to have hope,” Father John said.

  “I brought Myrna home yesterday. Fixed her a little dinner, but she couldn’t eat. Finally got her to sleep—God, she was exhausted. So was I, but I had to go out on patrol. We were shorthanded, and we had a tip Montecon was on the rez looking for Redbird. Redbird got to him first. Shot him in the head this morning. The bastard deserved to die. Redbird’s gonna get what he deserves, too. Gonna be sitting in prison the rest of his stinking life. Soon’s my shift ended, I took Myrna back to the hospital. Nothing had changed.” Howie pushed himself off the sofa. “Will you talk to her?” he said. “I’m awful worried about her.” He raised a palm, then made his way around the sofa and opened the door. His boots made a clacking noise in the hallway. In a moment he was back. “She says come on in.”

  Father John followed the Indian down the darkened hallway and into a small bedroom. Myrna was propped up on the bed, facing the opposite wall, her expression as rigid as the wood headboard she leaned against. She was dressed in blue jeans and a tee shirt, her face red and puffy, her black hair flung across the pillows around her. Clumps of tissues lay on the floor beside the bed. A faint light glowed in the closed curtains, giving the room the feel of twilight.

  “I’m so sorry about Patsy,” Father John said, perching on the chair that Howie had pushed behind him. “She’s in God’s hands, Myrna. Try to believe God is taking care of her.”

  “She’s gonna die.” Myrna turned her head toward him—a slow, robotic movement.

  “Patsy’s gonna live.” Howie leaned over and ran his hand over his wife’s forehead, as if she were a patient with a delusional fever. “That scum that got her on the stuff is dead. The other druggie killed him. They won’t be hurting her again. She’s gonna get on with her life.”

  The woman swallowed hard, then leaned into the pillows and went back to focusing on some point across the room. Another painting, Father John realized, another picture of the black stallion.

  “Let’s pray together,” he said. “Our Father, Who art in heaven . . .” Howie’s voice joined his own. Then, after a moment, the timid, frightened voice of Myrna.

  * * *

  Father John hurried through the front door of the administration building and nearly collided with Vicky on the concrete stoop. “Whoa!” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

 
; “It’s a bad time. I’ll call you later.” She turned toward the steps. The sunlight glistened in the black hair brushing the shoulders of her blue blouse.

  “Hold on,” he said. Vicky never came to the mission unless something important had come up. “Is everything okay?”

  Vicky turned back and locked eyes with him. “I wanted to thank you for advising Ernest Redbird to turn himself in. He surrendered to the police in Denver yesterday.” She gave a little wave, letting her hand drift in the space between them. “Somebody’s probably waiting for a priest.”

  “Howie Thunder,” he said. “His daughter’s taken a turn for the worse. I’m on my way to the hospital.”

  “Oh, my God. Poor Myrna and Howie. I’ll ride along, if it’s okay.”

  Of course it was okay, Father John thought, conscious of her presence next to him in the pickup. They’d worked together on a lot of cases, more than he wanted to think about. He hated the homicides, suicides, and arrests—the tragedies—they’d been involved in, yet he couldn’t bring himself to regret the time they’d spent together.

  “Ernest has been cleared of any connection to Montecon’s death,” she was saying. Father John glanced over. Vicky kept her eyes straight ahead, her profile backlit by the sunshine flaring in the passenger window. “He was at a party in Denver with his girlfriend until two in the morning the day of the murder. At least fifty people saw him. Nine o’clock in the morning, he showed up at a day-care center to drop off his girlfriend’s little boy. There’s no way he could have been on the reservation around six.”

  Father John glanced over at her again. “Six? The newspapers and radio said Montecon was killed in the middle of the night.”

  Vicky met his eyes for a brief moment. “That’s what the FBI and the police thought at first, but the coroner determined that Montecon had only been dead about an hour before Howie got there. Ernest still faces charges for dealing drugs. He’s being transported here from Denver.”

  “The coroner’s certain about the time of death?” Father John gripped the steering wheel hard. Something about this latest piece of news made him uncomfortable.

  “About six, the autopsy said. Even without a murder charge, everyone’s clamoring for Ernest’s head. I intend to ask for a change of venue. He doesn’t stand a chance of a fair trial close to the rez. Too many families have been hurt by the meth that Montecon brought here. A local jury won’t want to hear how Montecon forced Ernest to sell the drugs. How he was an addict, out of control, doing what he had to do to get his own drugs. He’s sorry for what he did. He’s cleaned up his life, John. I think he deserves a break.” Father John turned right into the parking lot of Riverton Memorial Hospital, the time of Montecon’s death still running through his mind. Before the autopsy report, everyone had believed Montecon had been killed in the middle of the night.

  Everyone, he was thinking, with the exception of Howie Thunder. Shot him in the head this morning, Howie had said.

  Death invaded the hospital corridor like an invisible gas. It fell over the sloping shoulders of the doctor in green scrubs coming through the metal swinging doors and two white-clad nurses hovering over papers inside a glass-enclosed cubicle. Vicky was aware of the synchronized rhythm of her footsteps with Father John’s on the hard vinyl floor.

  “The family’s with her,” the receptionist at the desk outside the intensive care unit had told them. “They’re having a ceremony. You can go back.” Father John stopped outside an opened door, and Vicky stepped past into the small room crowded with people—a blur of brown faces and black hair, blue denim shirts and blue jeans propped against the tan walls and perched on the windowsill. The odor of sage filled the air, pushing back the scent of death. She moved to the side to make room for Father John. Patsy Thunder lay on the narrow bed, face turned upward, eyes closed. The thin contours of her body rose against the white blanket pulled up to her shoulders. Myrna and Howie occupied two chairs at the side of the bed.

  Will Standing Bear, one of the elders, stood at the foot. His gray hair was pulled back into a ponytail, his face skull-like beneath the wrinkled brown skin. Slowly he lifted a metal pan over the dead girl. A faint trail of smoke from the burning sage drifted around the edges of the pan. “Hevedathuwin nenaidenu jethaujene,” he prayed in Arapaho. “Hethete hevedathuwin nehathe Ichjevaneatha haeain ichjeve.”

  Vicky felt the words falling over her like a cool rain. She understood the meaning; she’d heard the prayer so often. Your soul will live forever. Your soul goes to God to our home on high.

  When he’d finished the prayers, he lowered the pan and set a lid on top. The cuffs of his blue shirt stood out from the thin, knobby wrists. Someone pulled a chair around and he dropped down onto the seat, not taking his eyes from the dead girl. The room went quiet, except for the sounds of breathing. After several minutes, the elder stood up. Leaning over, he patted Myrna’s shoulder, then Howie’s. Then he nodded at Vicky and Father John as he made his way out into the corridor. The others started stirring about the room. One by one they leaned toward the couple and whispered condolences before following the elder through the door.

  “She’s with the ancestors now,” Howie said, after they had all left. Myrna let out a little sob and curled toward the bed, dropping her head onto the edge.

  “I’m so sorry,” Vicky said, aware of Father John’s words blending with her own.

  Howie got to his feet and turned toward them. “She had hopes and dreams. She was gonna be a great artist, show her pictures in big museums. She was gonna get married and have lots of kids like she wanted. He stole all that from her. Stole all that.” His voice trailed off. He stared past them, and in that moment Vicky saw something move behind the black eyes, almost like the shadow of the images that the man himself was watching.

  She stepped back and leaned against the doorframe. The edge bit hard into her back. Let it not be true, she thought.

  Howie continued talking, his words measured and deliberate, like a slow-motion rerun of the tape playing nonstop in his head. “Stole her life,” he said.

  The words filled the room like physical objects, as real as the chairs or the bed of the dead girl. “Stole her from us, stole everything. He deserved to die.”

  Father John placed a hand on the man’s arm, and it was then that Vicky knew it was true. “God have mercy on you, Howie,” he said.

  “Bless our little girl, Father,” Howie said, turning slowly toward the bed. “It’s too late for me.”

  The Woman Who Climbed to the Sky

  The Ninth Commandment: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.

  Vicky Holden followed the gray-uniformed guard through the cell block of the Fremont County jail. The crash of a steel door behind her echoed off the cement-block walls and metal bars on either side of the corridor. The air was thick with odors of sweat and disinfectant. Someone was shouting above the jumble of radio and TV noise that pressed around her. Who was it—which client?—who said that the worst part about being in jail was the noise?

  The guard stopped at a closed door on the right and leaned forward, peering for a moment through the small window. “Sure you wanna go in alone? He’s one mad Indian.”

  Vicky swallowed back the impulse to admit the truth. She didn’t especially like the idea of being alone in the consultation room with Phillip Blindy. The Arapaho had a reputation on the Wind River Reservation for being a hothead, somebody you walked across the road to avoid. Once, he took a wrench to a customer who didn’t like the way Phillip had repaired his truck. Now he’d been indicted in the shooting death of James Moon.

  Midmorning yesterday, the telephone had rung at her one-woman law office in Lander. “Vicky?” The federal magistrate’s voice. “Indian named Phillip Blindy needs a defense. You’re on the case, Counselor.” She’d been half expecting the call. The only Arapaho lawyer in the area—why wouldn’t the magistrate appoint her?

  She
’d spent the rest of the day and most of the night going over the charging documents and grand jury transcript, a knot of futility tightening inside her. There was a witness who’d seen the two men fighting outside Phillip’s garage about an hour before Moon was shot on Cedar Butte Road. The murder weapon was found next to the body—a .22- caliber pistol registered to Phillip. He admitted he was involved with Moon’s wife, Gloria, and, to make matters worse, he had no alibi.

  Vicky said she’d be fine alone with Phillip.

  The guard lifted a bushy eyebrow, regarded her for a moment with renewed interest, then jammed a key into the lock. “We got him handcuffed,” he said, pushing the door open. “Press the button if you need me.”

  She stepped past the guard’s protruding stomach and set her briefcase on the metal table in the center of a small room that smelled of oranges and baloney, as if somebody had eaten lunch there not long ago. A large red button projected from the wall on the side of the table where she sat down. The door clanged shut, sending a ripple of noise through the quiet.

  Across the table, a muscular man about six feet tall stood with his back to her, forehead pressed against the square, mesh-covered window. His black hair was tied into a ponytail that bisected the back of his orange jail jumpsuit.

  “About time you got here,” he said, turning away from the view of the sheriff’s cars lined up in a row in the parking lot. The dark eyes narrowed in accusation as he swayed forward, wrists cuffed in front, arms pulled into a V. “You know what it’s like? Locked up in hell?”

  “Sit down, Phillip.” Vicky waited while the man kicked at the chair across from her until it was far enough out that he could slide onto the seat. The handcuffs clanked against the metal table.

  “I’ll need your story,” she said, unzipping her briefcase. She withdrew a yellow legal pad and pen.

  The Indian was quiet a moment—head tilted back, eyes fixed on the ceiling. The fluorescent light spilled over the wide brown face, the clenched jaw. “Moon got what was comin’ to him,” he said, lowering his gaze to her. “Somebody shot his sorry ass.”