Killing Custer

by Margaret Coel

  She tossed her head and let out a squeal that might have come from a tiny, trapped animal. She clasped her arms over her chest and hugged herself. “I knew it would happen.”

  “You knew your father would be shot?” Madden had pulled the notepad and pen out of his shirt pocket.

  “Call it a premonition, if you like,” she said. “I had a vision.” She pivoted toward Father John. “Arapahos know all about visions. I went to the theater last night to hear Custer, that is, my father channeling Custer. He gave his glorious victory speech from after he had routed Jeb Stuart at Gettysburg, saving the Union army, and practically winning the whole damn Civil War. He even bragged about his victories against the so-called savages on the plains.” She pushed herself off the railing, stepped across the porch and dropped onto the wide armrest of a wood chair. “On the drive home, the sky was gray, thick with clouds, and the road was dark. My headlights barely picked out the way. I remember leaning over the steering wheel, watching for deer or antelope. The clouds started to part, making a black, star-filled trail across the sky. The trail climbed over a ridge, and the clouds on either side looked like hills. I saw my father on horseback galloping along the trail, over the ridge, away from me. The clouds closed around him, and the sky turned gray again. I knew he would die. And you know what else? I had the feeling that maybe he deserved to die. I didn’t go to the parade. I didn’t want to see it happen.”

  Madden scratched something in the notepad, then looked up and cleared his throat. “Anyone threaten your father? Any altercations he told you about? Enemies in the area?”

  She shrugged and stared at the floor planks. “Indians,” she said. “Arapahos, whatever. Two of them came to the theater. They sat in the back row across the aisle from me. Stoic-faced and still as statues. I watched them the whole time Custer . . .” She broke off and lifted her eyes. “Sometimes I don’t know who he was, my father or Custer. He went on and on about his glorious victory at the battle of the Washita against the murderous Cheyennes, one of his favorite themes. From what I’ve read, Washita was a massacre of a camp of peaceful Cheyennes. Women, children, and old men. Somehow the great Custer had missed the large camp of hostile warriors nearby. If he had waded into them, it probably would have ended his career eight years earlier. The whole time he was bragging about Washita, I kept my eye on those Indians. Half expected one of them to jump up and shoot him. He switched to the Little Bighorn, how it should’ve been his crowning glory. Would have made him president, except for the treachery of his subordinates, Reno and Benteen. They deserted him, he said. Nothing about Crazy Horse and his warriors, as if they didn’t matter.” She shook her head, and Father John wondered if she was speaking of Custer or of her father. “Those Indians didn’t even blink.”

  “Would you recognize them if you saw them?” Madden asked.

  “They looked Arapaho. Long faces, prominent cheekbones, hooked noses.”

  Father John took a moment, trying to piece together a reason for anyone to come to Indian country, pretend to be Custer, and brag about fighting the Plains Indians. He asked if she had called her father and told him about the vision.

  She nodded. “I called his cell the minute I got home and pleaded with him to cancel the parade. He laughed. What would the Seventh Cavalry do? Troopers from all over the country. The beginning of the season. He made one excuse after the other. Dozens of parades and rodeos scheduled across the West. Montana on June twenty-fifth for the reenactment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Should they just cancel everything and go home? ‘Remember, Dottie’—he called me Dottie. He used that deep Custer-like voice he put on whenever he gave a speech. ‘To die in the saddle is a worthy death.’ I’d heard him talk like that before. It was what Custer believed.”

  Dorothy stared out across the yard as if she were expecting another vision. The dirt driveway stretched between mounds of sagebrush and brown sand hills. Gusts of wind swept off the hills and knocked against the logs of the house. The floor planks squeaked. After a moment, Father John asked if she might like him to call other family members.

  “Others? There’s no one but Dad and me,” she said, pulling her gaze away from the yard. “Mom died ten years ago. Dad stayed in the army a few years, then retired. After that, Dad became crazy obsessed with Custer. He no longer had any life of his own, so he decided to live Custer’s.” She gave a little laugh that sounded as if she were choking. “He’d always been an amateur historian. Loved the Civil War. He could quote Lincoln word for word. But he was always drawn to Custer, and pretty soon he moved on to the Indian Wars. Following Custer around, I guess. It was like he was reborn. He was Custer. You believe in reincarnation, Father?”

  “I believe we continue our journey after this life. We’re in the hands of God.”

  Dorothy stood up and walked back to the railing. The wind caught her hair and blew it across her face. She looked out at the yard through the flailing strands of hair a moment before sweeping it aside and tucking it behind her ears. “I believe in reincarnation.” She swung around, light flashing in the blue eyes. “I saw it in my father. He changed into somebody I’d never known and couldn’t understand. As if Custer never died at the Little Bighorn, like it was all some terrible mistake for him to have been cut down at thirty-seven years old. So my father was reliving Custer’s life, giving him more time.”

  “I understood your father had a wife,” Madden said.

  “Wife?” Dorothy tipped her head back and gave a forced laugh, as if the idea was preposterous. “Custer had a wife. The indomitable Libbie. The only reason my father married the woman was because she channeled Elizabeth Custer. Custer needed Libbie. Crazy.”

  “How can I get in touch with her?” Madden asked.

  “I wouldn’t know. I met her once. That was enough. In her little calico frock and sunbonnet and lace-up boots, staring adoringly at my father. She was a big hit with the crowds at the Bighorn reenactment. The grieving widow.”

  “Where was home?”

  “For Custer? On the plains, galloping here to there. Oh, you mean my father. He traveled in his RV.”

  “I’ve spoken with Nicholas Veraggi and Philip Osborne,” the detective went on. “They told me your father was buying a ranch outside Dubois.”

  “Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen.” The woman rolled her eyes. “Not exactly Custer’s favorite people. I believe he detested them. Maybe he was just jealous. After all, they survived the Little Bighorn.”

  “What about Veraggi and Osborne?” Father John said. “Did your father detest them?”

  This seemed to stump her. She walked back to the chair and plopped down on the seat. “It’s hard to say, isn’t it? Where my father left off and Custer began?”

  “Did your father close on the ranch?” Madden went on.

  “I have no idea,” she said. “He and Mom had a ranch outside Laramie. Who knows when he was last there. He came to see me a couple of days ago and said he’d sold the ranch and intended to buy one near Dubois. He said he had invested the money he’d made off the ranch and expected to pay cash for the Dubois place. It would be for me, he said, when his time came. I told him it wasn’t necessary. ‘You want to be a father now?’” She gave a sharp laugh. “A little too late, I told him. Besides, my divorce settlement left me just fine, thank you very much. Ronny Winslow may have been a womanizing sonofabitch, but he was a rich one. You ask me, the RV was Dad’s permanent home. I don’t think he had any intention of settling down again on a ranch. Do you really think Custer could have settled down?”

  “Do you know the location?”

  “He called it the old Stockton place.”

  Madden’s pen scratched at the notepad. “You’ve been very helpful,” he said, fishing a small wallet from his shirt pocket. He removed a card and handed it to Dorothy Winslow. “Call me if you think of anything else. Anything at all.”

  * * *

  THE HIGHWAY MEL
TED into a shimmering white light under the blazing afternoon sun. Detective Madden peered through the sunglasses he’d pushed onto his face, both hands on the wheel. Knuckles popped like white pebbles. He hunched forward to see beneath the rim of the lowered visor. “A real mess on our hands,” he said. “Indians fighting whites. Not good for Lander or the rez. We’ve been trying to work together for years now. Something like this comes along and blows everything out of the water.”

  Father John didn’t say anything. He watched the light moving ahead like the mirage of a white-capped river. As long as Madden assumed one of the Indians had shot Garrett, there would be tension between Indians on the rez and whites in Lander and Riverton. Chances were, someone at the theater would identify the Arapahos Dorothy had seen, and Madden would start with them. Father John could almost hear Lou Morningside’s voice: “Easy to blame us. Indians just waiting to go to town and shoot a white man. Makes sense to white people.”

  “Until the investigation is over,” Father John said, “we don’t know what really happened.”

  “I get it, Father. You’re holding out for the Indians, like you’re one of them. You gotta admit Indians hated Custer back in history, and Indians don’t forget. The way I see it, this was their chance to bring Custer down a second time.” He wiggled his shoulders as if to work out a cramp and went back to staring ahead under the visor.

  Outside the land rolled away from the highway like waves on a brown ocean with debris of sagebrush and clumps of wild grasses floating on the surface. The sky dropped all around, the color of a blue wildflower. “Garrett could have had enemies.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Madden said, shooting him another glance. “I’m not the kind of investigator that starts with a theory of who’s guilty and overlooks any evidence that proves otherwise. Those guys exist. Give a bad name to every detective in the country. We’ll take a close look at Garrett’s private life, business dealings. But we also have to talk to those Indians in the parade. Bureau of Indian Affairs Police will cooperate. They’ll bring them in. Somebody saw something, and we have to find that person.”

  Father John watched the rolling brown hills flatten into the outskirts of Lander. Sagebrush and wild grasses gave way to a string of warehouses, trailer parks, gas stations, and motels. Garrett’s murder was the kind of case that crossed jurisdictions and involved police on both sides of the reservation’s border. “This big an area, we have to cooperate,” the BIA Police chief had told him once. “Otherwise the bad guys could step across a line and disappear. Police can’t cross the lines, so nobody would be looking for them.”

  “You can help us, Father.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Talk to the Arapahos at St. Francis. Any Shoshones on the rez you know. A murderer’s on the loose, and it’s to everybody’s advantage—Indian and white—to bring him to justice. Tell them we’re investigating everybody, not just Indians.”

  Father John hoped that was true. He wanted to believe the man. But he’d been at St. Francis long enough to know how easy it was, despite all good intentions, to fall into the old mind-set: A crime committed in town? Indian must be guilty. Guilty of being Indian. “I’ll tell them,” he said. He wasn’t sure he could convince them.

  Madden slowed down and pulled into the curb behind the red Toyota pickup. Everyone in the area knew the old pickup that Father John had driven since he’d arrived at St. Francis. Old then, and that was ten years ago. He had to smile at the idea that he couldn’t go anywhere without someone spotting the pickup. “You can hear it coming,” Vicky Holden had once told him.

  He thanked the detective, got out, and was about to shut the door when Madden held up a hand. “You’ll call me if you hear anything, right?” he said.

  “How about I call the BIA Police?” Father John said.

  * * *

  FATHER JOHN FOLLOWED the curve of the highway into Hudson, then crossed the border onto Rendezvous Road and headed into the reservation. Clouds drifting across the sun cut some of the glare. Still he drove with the visor down against the bright sky, his cowboy hat pulled low. To the west were the small white houses of Arapahoe, and in the distance the blue, snow-streaked peaks of the Wind River range. He stopped at the sign on Seventeen-Mile Road, then made a right and headed for the blue billboard with the words St. Francis Indian Mission. Another right past the billboard and he was in the tunnel of cottonwoods. Mounds of fluffy white cotton lay like snow under the trees.

  A sense of peace usually came over him as he drove into the mission, but not this afternoon. The mission was quiet, yet he couldn’t shake the sense that the quiet was temporary, the quiet on a hillside before the battle. A knot of apprehension tightened inside him as he turned onto Circle Drive and drove past the yellow stucco administration building, the wide driveway that led to Eagle Hall and the guesthouse, the white stucco church with geometric symbols of the Arapaho painted in red, blue, and yellow, the old gray stone school that was now the Arapaho Museum. In front of the redbrick residence was a small tan two-door sedan. Someone with long black hair in the driver’s seat.

  Father John pulled in next to the car and got out. By the time he’d walked around the front of the Toyota, Darleen Longshot was leaning on the top of the open door of her car. She looked shaky and pale, reluctant to let go of the door.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “I gotta talk to you, Father.”

  4

  DARLEEN LONGSHOT WAS small with nervous hands that ran up and down the thighs of her blue jeans. Her eyes were dark, red-rimmed, and sore-looking, as if she hadn’t been able to stop crying. “I’ve been waiting for you, Father,” she said in a husky, smoke-ravaged voice. “I’m going crazy.”

  “Come in.” Father John ushered her up the front sidewalk to the concrete stoop at the front door. He reached past her, pushed open the door, and followed her inside. The quiet of late afternoon suffused the residence. No sounds of Walks-On, the golden retriever he’d found by the side of Seventeen-Mile Road five years ago, scrambling down the hallway on three legs. No music, no television voices. This was the time of day the bishop and Walks-On walked down to the Little Wind River at the edge of the mission.

  “We can talk in the study.” He nodded the woman into the small room on the left. After she had settled in one of the visitor’s chairs, he walked around and sat down in the old leather chair behind the desk. Stacks of papers, folders, envelopes spilled across the surface, nearly burying the laptop. He tried to keep up with the routines of the mission—bills to pay, thank-you notes to write for checks that spilled out of envelopes from people he had never heard of, phone calls to return, elders to check on, parishioners to visit in the hospitals—but it was like riding across the plains, topping each bluff only to spot a higher bluff ahead.

  The chair creaked as he leaned back. He grasped the armrests and waited while the woman across from him dabbed a tissue at her eyes and blew her nose.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, leaning sideways to stuff the tissue into her jeans pocket. “I don’t mean to be a nuisance.”

  “You’re not a nuisance. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “It’s Mikey.” She drew in a long breath and held it a moment before blowing it out like smoke. “You remember my kid?”

  “Of course.” A small kid with a wedge of black hair that hung in his eyes. Not much good at batting or throwing the ball, but he could run like the wind. If a pitcher put him on base, the Eagles could count on Mikey scoring a run. It had been several years since Mike Longshot had come around the mission. On those Sundays when Darleen came to Mass, she came alone.

  “Mikey never came home from the parade this morning,” Darleen said. Her voice so small he had to lean forward to catch the words. “I been waiting for him all afternoon. I’m so worried I don’t know what to do.”

  “You expected him home right away?” Father John tried to keep his own voice soft, like a blank
et that might absorb the woman’s fear.

  “I didn’t know what to expect after . . .” She clasped and unclasped her hands, then dipped her mouth against her fist. “I was there. I seen what happened to Custer. I seen what the warriors did.”

  Father John looked away a moment. He could see it still: warriors galloping around, cavalry stalled, horses plunging. “Are you worried that Mike had some part in it?” he said.

  She looked up. Her dark eyes were clouded with fear. “He didn’t have anything to do with it. Mikey would never be part of murder. He’s not dead inside. He couldn’t kill anybody. He can’t even stomp on a spider. He likes watching all kinds of living things, just watching and seeing how pretty they are.”

  “What worries you, Darleen?”

  “They’re going to say he did it.”

  “Who?”

  “The warriors. I know how their minds work. The cops start coming around, asking a lot of questions, getting too close, one of them will swear he saw Mikey pull out a pistol and shoot Custer. All the others will back him up, and the cops are going to be so happy they solved the case. Big newspaper headlines about how clever they are. Another Indian thrown in prison. Who cares?”

  “What’s going on, Darleen?”

  Her hands were kneading the air above her lap. She opened her mouth and emitted a muffled strangling noise, as if she were choking. Father John jumped to his feet, but she threw out one hand. “You know . . .” she began, then sank back against the chair and dropped her eyes in a gesture of defeat. “Mikey’s different. He was never like other boys.”

  Father John nodded.

  “He’s special, my Mikey. Rob and I knew we’d been given a special child almost from the time he was born. And we were grateful that the Creator had trusted him to us. He’s sensitive. When his daddy died in that car wreck, I thought Mikey was going to lay down and die, too. It was a long time before I could get him interested in doing anything. You remember how you came to the house and talked him into playing with the Eagles?” She had started crying, blurring the words and running her palms over her eyes. “Best thing ever happened to Mikey,” she managed. “He started coming out of it. Made friends. But as he got older, boys turned on him. They saw he was different. They forgot. Lots of Raps forgot the Old Time. The ancestors would’ve treated Mikey like a holy person. They would have respected and admired him because the Creator gave him two spirits. Male and female.”