1.
“Owen!”
The sound comes from outside the barn, a thin and plaintive wail drifting on the wind from the main hospital. Billy shakes his head, knowing the source.
“Owen, no, no, I’m sorry, no –”
The sound cuts off abruptly.
The barn is warm, humid, the dairy cows packed in their stalls, munching hay with bovine contentment. The grassy smell of cowshit fills Billy’s nostrils, dank but somehow comforting. He shrugs out of his coat while he watches the old man at work.
The whites call him John Bird but, in the old tongue, his father’s given name is Bad Bird, which means bat. Not for the first time Billy thinks about the fact that the name he himself was given at the school, William Morgan, doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a name, drawn from a hat for all he knows. Billy never thinks about his old name. Lately his father has taken to calling himself Crazy Cow, a joke at his own expense, given where he is. Chief Crazy Cow. Bad Bird hums to himself as he mucks out the last stall, moving with slow, precise efficiency.
“You’ve been all right then?” Billy says now, taking out a cigarette paper and clumsily rolling tobacco into it. He rarely smokes but knows that his father will enjoy one. The old man still has a reverence for tobacco and is not allowed it here.
Bad Bird shrugs. “Don’t let them catch you with that,” he says, without looking up, speaking the old tongue. He understands English just fine but refuses to use it, the opposite of his son. “They say that tobacco winds us crazies up. Or maybe it winds up the cows. I don’t remember. A lot of stupid things are said here and it’s best to not listen too closely.”
“You’re not crazy.” Although of course he is, which is why he’s here at Warm Springs, the Montana State Hospital for the Insane, why he’ll never leave. A humane place for the ill in mind, those needing rest and recuperation. Or so they say.
It’s also a place for those who need to be kept away for the safety of others, and for their own. Those like his father, Bad Bird. Those like Elizabeth Parker, Sol’s wife, calling again for the son she thought she’d killed all those years ago. He doubts that they’ve told her that, now, Owen truly is gone. What’s the point in that.
Eventually, deeming the shit-mucking complete, Bad Bird straightens up, resting his weight on the pitchfork’s handle and taking the proffered cigarette from Billy. He leans forward to accept a light. The old man’s seamed face crinkles into a satisfied smile as he pulls the smoke into his lungs. For a long while they don’t speak, his father simply enjoying the cigarette, humming under his breath again.
Watching Bad Bird smoke, looking at the sharp implement in his father’s hand, Billy wonders again about the wisdom of allowing a lunatic the use of a pitchfork. Once, he’d asked Dr Rideout about it. The work, the animals, it helps keeps him calm, Billy, he’d been told. Billy isn’t inclined by nature to doubt Dr Rideout, Sol’s brother, but he, Billy Morgan, still has the scar on his shoulder, the one his father put there years ago with the business end of a hatchet.
His father does seem calm, though. Lucid, right now anyway, so Billy supposes the doctor is right. This hospital, with its various failings, the accusations of mismanagement and corruption, is still a better place for his father than the reservation is, after all; here, people can look after him, make sure he eats and, most importantly, keep him from mischief. If Bad Bird is kept content shoveling cowshit in a dairy barn, so much the better.
His father is saying something now, which takes Billy a moment to translate. “The job is fine, Father,” he replies in English. “I’m safe.” Safe enough. For now.
Bad Bird glares at him, his eyes buried deep in the hollows of his leathery face. Billy’s father doesn’t ever seem to age; he’d looked ancient when Billy was a boy, and that was a long time ago now. Bad Bird is like old wood, merely getting denser and harder, more himself, as the years pass. He looks it, his rough, dry skin the brown-orange of ponderosa bark, his long grey hair the color of a cottonwood.
“That place is poison, boy. Remember the story of Rabbit Woman.”
Billy doesn’t reply. The last time he’d seen his father, Bad Bird had been far less sanguine than he is now, screaming from the little room in which he was being held, given another of the series of icy baths that are supposed to calm him. Apparently the cowshit therapy doesn’t always work.
The People had a story: Rabbit Woman, who dug up Moon’s carrot, even though Sun had told her that doing so would unleash great ills on the world. For whatever reason, Bad Bird believes that Moon’s carrot had lived in the hill under Butte, that it had turned to gold and silver and copper and, now that it had been dug up, there would be nothing but sorrow and pain and death unleashed on the world.
When Bad Bird is finished with the first, Billy rolls and lights up another cigarette for him, making one for himself as well. For a long time, they smoke in silence, he and his crazy old man, breathing in the smell of hay and warm cow farts and the taste of stale, cheap tobacco.
Later, Billy walks the grounds with Dr Rideout.
“He seems better.”
Ag Rideout just shrugs. John Bird is a dangerous and unpredictable man who, although given to long bouts of lucidity, will remain here until he dies. Given the old man’s years, that won’t be long. Really, John Bird shouldn’t even be here, should be on the reservation, an awful idea, but state bureaucracy is what it is. Fortunately, Dr Rideout had been able to pull strings as a favor to his brother.
“How’s Sol?” Ag says now.
It’s Billy’s turn to shrug. The brothers rarely see one another, so how to describe the last year? Sol’s angry doesn’t begin to explain things. Sol’s ashamed and full of guilt about Owen and broke and drunk all the fucking time are the facts of the matter, but that doesn’t scratch the surface of what it means, even for a brother. Sol is in trouble is about as close as he can get, but saying it feels like a betrayal. If Sol wants his brother to know, he’ll tell him himself.
“He’s been better,” is what he finally settles on.
Dr Rideout seems to understand; he reaches his hand over with a long arm, giving Billy’s shoulder a squeeze, sighing.
They walk the grounds for a while longer, Dr Rideout giving him the latest on Elizabeth Parker – she’s having a bad spell again, lately – a report that Billy knows Sol will never ask for, and which Billy will never offer.
Billy’s not entirely surprised to see his uncle, Marked Face, squatting outside the squalid little tavern in Anaconda, just down the road from Warm Springs. Billy just wants a beer, maybe a few, today; he’s tired of talking and merely wants some quiet, some time to himself before he has to get back to Butte for Nancy’s fight. He wants to be alone but, more often than not, lately, whenever he comes through Anaconda after visiting his father, his uncle is somehow there, waiting for him. For an old man who decries the ways of the whites, and who lives God knows where up on the reservation, Marked Face is in Anaconda often enough. If his uncle had been a normal man, Billy would just assume he was here at the tavern to cadge a drink, but Marked Face is different, and did things for reasons of his own.
“Uncle,” he says, checking a sigh, trying to push down the unease he always feels around the old man. His uncle is as crazy as Bad Bird, crazier maybe, given to rants and curses, violence; the fact that he isn’t locked up somewhere, or dead, maybe just means the scary old fucker is too wily.
By way of response, Marked Face spits in the dirt between Billy’s feet, then reaches out a hand to rub the mark away, drawing a circle in the dust when he’s finished.
Billy tries to ignore whatever witchcraft the bastard thinks he’s just laid on him. “Buy you a drink?”
Marked Face rises to his feet, moving smoothly and gracefully, given his age, drawing the ratty old blanket he wears closer around himself. Billy notes that, again, for a man who claims to hew to the old ways and who hates whites, his uncle has on a store-bought Pendleton shirt, jeans, and a decent, if battered, pair of leathe
r work boots. The old man tosses his chin towards the southeast, towards Butte, the long white braids he wears flipping across his neck like dead snakes. His eyes are black river-rocks, flat and empty.
“Did my brother ever tell you what the People called that place, that place you and your white friends are digging up?” He speaks the old tongue, his voice low and graveled, full of contempt.
Billy thinks back through the stories that he’d heard before being sent off to the government school, most of them only dimly remembered by now. He has no idea what the old name for Butte’s hill is, doesn’t care, really, so he shakes his head, shrugging.
There are a long few seconds as Marked Face just stares at him with what seems like – to Billy – unreasonable anger, even for an old lunatic like his uncle. So I fucking forgot the name, if anyone ever even told it to me, Billy thinks. And you know what? The place is called Butte now and that’s what it will always be; it doesn’t matter what name the tribes gave it, because they’re gone, so to hell with you.
Marked Face stares, looking like he wants to slap him out of pure disgust. Billy takes a short, involuntary step backward and then his uncle laughs, sharp barks that the old man wraps up with another spit between Billy’s feet, an oystery gob that he leaves there in the dirt this time.
“We called it a hill, boy. Just a hill, somewhere to hunt. A place to cut poles for lodges. There was good rock for arrowheads there, too, in the old days, they say.” He cackles again. “How’s your father?”
Billy just shrugs again, wanting to slap his uncle now. “He’s OK. Working with the cows.”
“He try to kill anyone lately?” Marked Face says, scoffing, rubbing the thick scar that runs from the corner of his eye down his cheekbone. Billy has to keep himself from rubbing at his own shoulder.
“He’s working with the cows.”
Marked Face spits again. “Haven’t seen you for a while, boy. I heard about that fire. Bad business. Lot of people dead, they said. Not a place for men to dig, that hill, to crawl around like ants in holes, for no good reason. What was under the earth didn’t matter, before the whites came. You remember that. What lived underground was put there at the beginning of things, and there it should stay.”
Billy’s tired of it all, his family and the stories and crazy old men. Every time he comes to see his father he winds up feeling this way, worn out and disgusted and vowing to never come back, and yet here he is, again, skipping back to the same old shit like the needle on a scratched phonograph.
“You should maybe go talk to your brother, then, Uncle,” he says, “because I’ve heard it all. Two of you old fuckers can talk until you’re blue in the face, tell your old stories, sing your fucking songs. Worked for you pretty well up to now, all that bullshit, hey?” He spits on the ground himself. “I got to go find a ride. I got to work tomorrow.”
He’s surprised to see Marked Face smiling at him. He forces himself to stay still as the old man takes a step closer, leaning in to whisper into his ear, his breath oddly sweet.
“You should have some respect, Nephew. You’re not as white as you think you are, so you listen to your old uncle, hey?” Marked Face steps back, holding Billy with his river-rock eyes. “You remember this word, white man: omanaahstoo?”
“Raven.” Billy mutters it, unwilling to hold his uncle’s gaze. He feels small and wonders if he’ll ever lose the fear he still has of Marked Face, of his father, or if he’ll always be that same scared, bleeding little kid he was before the school, trying to fight them off when they went on a tear, getting beat to shit for his troubles. They’re old men now and Billy is as big and strong as he’ll ever be, but just the sight of them peels the years back, leaves him a puny, weak thing again. He forces himself to look up into his uncle’s smiling face. It isn’t a smile he likes, has never liked; it’s a smile that hides black things behind bright white teeth.
“You’ll see Raven, soon enough, you’ll see him at night. That’s what I came here to tell you, Nephew. I had a dream. I had a dream of you and Raven.” Without another word, Marked Face turns and walks away, pausing after a few steps to spit again. “Be seeing you,” he calls over his shoulder.
Billy has no idea what that was all about but, as he watches his uncle walk away, he wants that beer, maybe a few, even more now. For fuck’s sake, why does it have to be like this all the time? And why does he even bother with these sad, lunatic bastards any more. Just die already, you old fuckers. Give me some peace.
He pushes the tavern door open, steps inside into the cool, smoky dark. Curses old men and crazy Indians. Fuck them, fuck them all, fuck the lot of them.
2.
“Goddamn it, get your fucking hands up, Nancy!”
Fist meets flesh with a hollow, meaty thump. Big Nancy folds over into the follow-up punch that tears across the stub of his ear, is lifted back up upright with the left to his chin. Sol can see Nancy’s legs start to buckle, and he rubs his hands across his own face, gritting his teeth and squinching his eyes shut. Come on, not yet. When he opens them, Nancy is still standing, somehow, but his eyes are glassy; he stumbles into Faraday’s next combination to the body, absorbing the blows with stolid distraction. Left, right, left, left, like a butcher pounding steak, and then Nancy lets loose with a wild, looping right of his own, which Faraday calmly ducks before chiming the side of Nancy’s head again. Nick Faraday is a fair bit older than Nancy, if a shade smaller, but has experience, skill, guile. An actual boxer. Jesus Christ, Nick, the fuck are you doing? Sol isn’t sure how much longer Nancy’s going to last at this rate. He glances surreptitiously at his pocket watch and, when he looks up, sees that Sean Harrity is looking over at him, tapping his own, as if to say third round.
Goddamn it.
“Get your fucking hands up, Nancy!” Sol yells through his cupped fingers. “Don’t just fucking stand there and let him hit you!” If Nancy hears, he makes no sign, just ducks his head and mulishly wades into another series of blows. If Faraday was a better puncher, this fight would have been over long ago, had it been on the level. Once, a fighter had told Sol that each punch had to have the weight of a baby dropped off a building, a disturbing – and yet surprisingly apt – description of how a fist should land. Nick Faraday, the fucking moron, is quick and has some technique but, for a relatively big man, his punches still lack some mustard. Which is fortunate, as Nancy has to last at least another minute.
“Goddamn it, Nancy, hands up!” Sol glances at his watch again. He and Sean have set the fight to three two-minute breaks and then, if the fighters are still going after that, last man standing. Which would be Nick Faraday, by prior agreement, in the third fucking round. Not now. The final break is still over a minute out and Nancy is never going to make it at this rate. Sol glances around the crowd, looking for a path to the exit, just in case. He looks back up just in time to see Faraday plant his forehead into Nancy’s already broken nose.
“The hell!” Sol shouts, waving a hand. “Pat, the fuck are you doing? That’s a goddamn foul!”
The referee, a loose title at best, gives Sol a disgusted look. “You shut your hole, Parker, and let the boys fight.”
Jesus Christ, Pat. It’s not like you don’t know what’s going on here. Keep Nancy up or I’m well and truly fucked. We all are.
Sol needs a drink.
3.
The year since the fire hasn’t gone well for Sol Parker.
Twenty-one men died in the Pennsylvania fire, twenty-one of their brother miners. Of the two-hundred plus men working the Penn that February day, nineteen never came out; later, most of their bodies were found up on the 300 level, lying where they’d finally suffocated. Two other men, who’d gone back into the mine with the rescue parties, died because their Draegers hadn’t been serviced and primed with enough oxygen. The fire wasn’t fully contained until the first week of April, concrete bunkers built to keep the burn and smoke from spreading to the other mines, the Penn itself requiring tunnel collapses and hollowed-out levels to final
ly smother the blaze.
The body of Owen Parker hasn’t yet been found.
Sol had been responsible for the boy, way he was for all of his crew; Sol had told his son that he’d get him out, had promised, and failed, completely and thoroughly. The name of his son now one more to add to the long and storied list of the people Sol’s let down in his life. He doesn’t know, still, just how he’d lost him, so close to safety, but it doesn’t fucking matter because he had. Owen is still just as dead, his bones somewhere down there in the dark, alone. His boy, for whom he’d done fuck-all over the course of Owen’s short life, aside from dumping him with Ag and his family to raise, when Sol’s own grief over Lizzie had gotten too sharp. Maybe that was the best thing he could have done at the time, but now it feels cheap and miserly, selfish and weak. Just when the boy had come back into Sol’s life he’d failed him again, one last time.
It couldn’t be helped, Sol, the boys said, through their own tears. It was an accident and you got all us out and we’d be dead without you. The kid knew this job was dangerous, Sol.
No he hadn’t, though, not really. He was just a fucking kid looking for some work, maybe saw that his dad was doing all right down the mine and thought to try it on for size, a way to get out from under his uncle’s thumb, see something of the world, make his own way. Just a kid wanting to put food in his belly, but fucked by the mine. By the Company, by his failure of a father. Fucked for a few more dollars of copper.
The miners were angry, getting angrier. All of them. Twenty-one of their brothers, gone. This wasn’t a freak accident, a cage cutting loose or a bad explosion. These men died because the ACM cared so little for basic safety precautions, because that costs money. That’s it. A fire suppression system, sprinkler lines at the collars, might have stopped the burn cold. It’s not like the technology didn’t exist. Their brother miners, dead for the fucking bottom line; they will be one day too, most likely. Rumor has it that Frank Little is pushing forward his trip to Butte, to use his weight and savvy to try to keep the workers from letting anger burn into something reckless and destructive, something that wouldn’t help Labor, another repeat of the Union Hall debacle or something even worse. He’s coming to Butte to channel their anger into something sharper, something stronger.
The Trials of Solomon Parker Page 5
