Still, it was hard to think of them dead. He could see Eddie at his wedding, a full Lakota ceremony, Eddie in his best—and only—black suit, and Donna like a pale yellow flower, and Jubal and James Comes In Sight and Earl Black Elk. That had been at the Rosebud, in the summer of 1988. Later, he had brought Eddie out to the coast and got him a job with Offshore Films.
That was over with now.
Something had to be done about what had happened. Somebody ought to open the thing up, see what truth there had been in it. It would be nice to find some truth in the old men. Something to believe in, even this late in his life.
Because there was something real in Jubal’s story. The proof of it was that someone had killed them all. He pulled the clipping out of his pocket and read it again, read that he had come to Billings too late.
FIVE DIE IN POLICE ACTION
POMPEYS PILLAR. An attempted armed robbery ended in death for one Native American youth at a local gas station here yesterday. An unidentified Indian male was killed while attempting to rob Bell’s Oasis. The owner, Joseph Bell, resisted the attempt, shooting one of the robbers. Montana Highway Patrol attended the scene and assisted Mr. Bell. Bell was wounded in the action. Four other members of the gang exchanged fire with the police and managed to elude capture. An immediate search was initiated by the authorities.
Bell was taken to Sweetwater General Hospital, where his condition was described as good.
In a bizarre followup, the morgue wagon taking the deceased robber from the scene was hijacked en route, along with two attendants, Daniel Burt and Peter Hinsdale. It became the focus of a countywide search that culminated in a violent police action in the vicinity of Arrow Creek, off the Ballantine side road, where a Montana Highway Patrol sergeant tracked the wagon and confronted the gang members at approximately 11:00 last night.
An exchange of fire ensued, including, according to police sources, bow-and-arrow fire. One gang member was shot and killed by the MHP sergeant, and another female gang member was seriously injured in the exchange. Officers answering the call came under fire while proceeding toward Arrow Creek and succeeded in killing another male gang member.
During the minutes following, officers discovered a large fire raging one half-mile up the creek. An elderly male was found dead at the scene, apparently of a self-inflicted knife wound. A macabre footnote emerged later, when it was discovered that the body of the gang member killed at Bell’s Oasis was completely burned in the fire—which enveloped a scaffold-type burial platform—in what appears to have been a Native American funeral ritual.
MHP Lieutenant Eustace Meagher is in command of the investigation. Since crimes involving Native Americans fall under federal jurisdiction, Special Agent in Charge Frank Duffy of the FBI Helena office will oversee the case to determine if this action signals another outbreak of violence by Native American terrorist groups.
Tragically, one of the morgue attendants, teenager Peter Hinsdale, was brutally slain by his captors before the police could free him. His partner, Daniel Burt, was found unhurt, tied to a tree a few hundred yards from the site of the fire. Also wounded at the scene was Officer Illario Benitez of the MHP.
Lieutenant Meagher credits the finding and capture of the gang to Staff Sergeant Beauregard McAllister of the MHP, who sustained severe injuries during the fight. Sergeant McAllister is being treated for his wounds at Sweetwater General Hospital and is listed in stable condition. Sergeant McAllister is the police officer who was involved in the Hilltop Mall shooting last year, which resulted in the capture of an escaped armed robber and a controversial lawsuit. Sergeant McAllister, a nineteen-year veteran of the MHP, is that force’s most highly decorated officer, having been involved in twenty-seven combat situations during his time on the MHP, as a patrol officer, and as a member of the Combined Strike Force, which targeted armed professional criminals throughout the state.
The female gang member, whose identity has not been released, is also being treated at Sweetwater General. Her condition is listed as grave.
All told, three gang members are reported as killed in the related actions, and one dead of self-inflicted wounds. Their names are being withheld pending notification of next of kin.
Spokespersons for the Society for the Protection of Ethno-American Rights (SPEAR) have protested the shootings and the publicity surrounding them. The American Civil Liberties Union of Montana, acting for SPEAR, will apply to the courts for intervenor status. The ACLU promises that every aspect of this case will be carefully examined to insure that no violation of due process took place.
SPEAR Delegate Maya BlueStones cited last week’s police-chase incident in Hardin, which resulted in the death of a Crow woman and her child and the serious injury of a Crow man. BlueStones suggested that these incidents show a pattern of “racial bias” and “institutional hostility toward Native Americans which must be exposed and addressed.”
Assistant DA Vanessa Ballard has refused to comment at this time, saying only that the Hardin incident has no connection with the robbery attempt at Bell’s Oasis, and that the investigation continues.
The investigation continues. Was that more tin-talk, or was there some kind of doubt in the minds of the officials? Gabriel had never heard of a police department being careful about releasing the names of criminals. They were the first thing out, like coup counts on the lodge pole. See who we caught? See who we killed for you?
See what fine killers we are?
Perhaps. And perhaps no one had properly tested their skills.
In the end he trusted in his experience and let the hour of the wolf do it all for him. It was the same in Billings as it had been in the Philippines and Belfast and Quito; it was in the hearts of people to drift and have bad visions at a certain time each night, between three and four in the morning. In the dead watch, his Section commander had called it. In the hour of the wolf, terrible dreams come to the sleeping and a great weight settles on the hearts of those who are awake. In hospitals, most of the dying do it between three and four. In the homes, it is always at three or four that the wife, who has been sitting dead-eyed and staring at her hands on the kitchen table since midnight, finally takes the knife and climbs up the stairs toward the bed in which her husband lies twisted in his sheets, breathing through his mouth, smelling of warm meat. Wars start at three, as it did in the Gulf, when the warplanes brought new thunder and a fresh point of view to the mullahs in Baghdad. Trust in the hour.
The lobby was empty as a train station, a wide underground cavern containing a lake of polished marble, dimly lit by hidden spotlights. The registry office was dark behind the plastic. The doors hushed closed behind him as he slipped across the floor, a tall black figure, his long coat billowing out behind him, going from light to shadow and back into light as he passed beneath the ceiling lamps far overhead.
He took the stairs and climbed, in silence, hearing his steps and his own breath and under that the slow mechanical exhalations of the hospital, of its buried machinery and the thousand little pumps and bellows and servomotors that kept it running, kept the patients afloat in the endless crossings of a sickbed night.
The stool and the newspaper were still there, but the cop had gone. The long hallway that led to the double doors was dark. The smell of antiseptic and floor wax was strong in the air. The sound of a radio was coming from somewhere. Gabriel tried to place the song, a faint reedy whine echoing from a sideroom somewhere on the floor. It was “Dust in the Wind,” by Kansas.
He covered the fifty feet like a crow flying over a pond, settling into the darkness by the doors, his breath slow and his mind quiet as he listened hard. Muted sounds. Intermittent electronic flutings, changing in rhythm as the patients rose and sank on the tides of their lives. The huff and discharge of air from pumps and valves. “Dust in the Wind” still, louder now. He placed his left hand on the door and eased it open six inches.
A long hallway with a nurses’ station in the middle of it, about fifty feet down. One wall
of the hallway was glass, and beyond the glass partition a row of beds, perhaps ten of them, each one surrounded by medical support machinery, monitors, video screens flickering with heartbeats and blood pressure readouts. At the station, he could just make out the top of a woman’s head. She was seated, head slightly forward and down, apparently reading something behind the partition, out of his sight. He could see the motion of her shoulder as she turned the pages. The sound of the radio was coming from her desk.
Movement. Another nurse was standing by one of the patients on the far side of the glass wall, shaking a vial of liquid. She leaned forward over the mounded form on the bed and seemed to touch a cheek. The tenderness of the motion appealed to Gabriel, gave him a feeling for her. He stepped through the doors and glided across the hall to an open doorway.
The nurse at the station had not moved. The other one, beyond the glass wall, was moving from one bed to the next, straightening a sheet, changing a pillow, concentrated and isolated in her work.
From the new position, a few feet back in the darkened storeroom, he stood and watched the beds, searching for Donna’s shape, for some quality that would reveal her. Under their hospital sheets and bound up in the machinery, each patient looked like food for spiders, waiting in their bindings. Tiny green lights pulsed and blinked and sketched glowing geometric figures against the dimness of the ward.
He waited until the nurse had finished her rounds. She stopped by the sealed doors and looked back over her shoulder at the line of beds, as a gardener might do leaving a greenhouse, seeing to the hothouse flowers, feeling their heat and the water in the air, feeling the dim life in each burning bed.
Under the overhead lamp, she looked young and very white, a source of light. She stepped through and closed the door softly behind her and walked to the station. She stood a minute, looking down at the seated nurse, who did not look up. She smiled, reached over the partition, and picked up a magazine. She walked around the station and came down the hall toward Gabriel, her rubber-soled shoes whispering on the terrazzo. She reached the doorway where Gabriel stood motionless in the darkness, stopped there, caught in a spotlight, her yellow hair as violent as fire, tiny blond hairs shining on the curve of her white neck, her face in a dark shadow.
Gabriel breathed slowly through his mouth, moved nothing, thought nothing, a darker darkness in the storeroom.
She folded the magazine, looked at her watch, looked into the storeroom, looked into Gabriel’s face, still turning, turning around now to look back at the desk. She smiled again and walked away to the double doors. Gabriel heard them open, felt the rush of hallway air as she stepped outside, heard her short gasp, and then her voice, soft, a whisper.
“You’re back—where’d you go?”
A man’s voice, a baritone rumble, something he could not make out. The policeman was back.
He heard their voices cut off as the spring-loaded doors swept closed again. Gabriel stepped out of the storeroom and walked quickly toward the duty desk. A heavy-set older woman was nodding over her folded hands, in front of a row of television monitors and alarm lights. Gabriel leaned over the desk and touched her gently with his left hand, feeling for the little nodule behind her left ear, pressing that, then taking her weight as she slipped forward onto the desk, settling her onto her forearms, on one cheek, breathing more deeply now, through slackened lips.
In the long ward, he walked past the beds, past the gray ovals of faces, hearing their uneven breathing, listening to the beeps and chuffs and droning of the machines. In one bed he caught the wet oystershell glitter of open eyes turning as he passed, saw the head swivel as he glided by. He stopped at that bed and stared across the sheet at the man, who stared back at him, unblinking, tubes running into his nostrils.
Above his bed, a monitor glowed green. Gabriel watched the numbers. They did not change. He was an Indian man—he had been in some kind of fight or accident. He was bound up in bandages and his arm was held out in a brace. His ribcage was also in a plaster cast. The man made no sound, and the green letters did not change. His heart rate did not alter.
Of course. The Crow man who had been in the accident. A tractor-trailer accident. Gabriel remembered the receptionist talking about it, when he had asked about his missing uncle. And the article in the Billings paper.
Maybe the man was dreaming awake. After a while, the effort of seeing this black shadow was too much for him, and he closed his eyes again.
Gabriel found Donna Sweetwater Bent in the seventh bed.
He had to look for a long time before he recognized her. Her head was shaved and bound in a skullcap of white cloths. A bridged tracheal tube ran into her throat under her small chin. Her brown skin looked yellow in the half-light. Her cheekbone was huge, blue and swollen, an obscenity of broken bones and eruptions of raw skin. Stitches pierced her. One eye was open, blind as a cataract. The other was closed. Beside the bed, a machine on a rollaway cart was doing her breathing for her, as noisy as a steam-press as it forced life into her and then pulled it back out. The monitor above her bed showed traces of heartbeat, and the peaks and troughs of her brain waves were flattened and languid, like sand dunes in a soft wind.
He came around and stood by her bed, looking down at her.
He remembered her third birthday. She had worn her hair in pigtails and someone, her mother who died the following month, had given her pink sandals. Her smile was incandescent. Relatives came in trucks and old cars. The party was held in a dusty lot at the back of Jubal’s farmhouse. The sky had been clear and blue. It seemed to soar above the mountains like a vast blue wave. If you looked up at it long enough, it would pull you up into it and carry you away over the low yellow hills and past the black mountains to a high snowbound crest, where you would die far from your people, far from everything that held you in one shape.
You would be like water poured from a bowl.
You would sink into the earth again and be as if you had never been. That had happened to many of them.
That had happened to him.
He pulled the tape player from his coat pocket and laid it down on the pillow by her head. He had some trouble getting the headphones to fit over the skullcap. Donna did not move. Her green numbers did not change. The machine pulled at her and pushed at her.
He pressed the PLAY button and stepped back. The batteries were new. The machine would play the song endlessly, over and over again, until the nurses found it or the power drained away. Under the steam-press sound of the machine, he heard the droning of the singer’s voice, a tiny scratchy sound, like a wasp trapped in the sunroom of an empty house, beating itself to death in the heat and the dryness, unable to imagine what this hard nothing was that kept it shut in and trapped. Its wings buzzed again.
He was standing there for a long time, hearing the wasp sing in Donna’s ears. He was remembering now. There was a lot to remember. It came back in a river of pictures and sounds. He felt it pull at him as a river pulls at you when you stand too close to the current.
He seemed to float far above Donna’s face, to see her from a great height. He felt the wings of his black coat move around him. He felt a hawk inside him. He could hear its wings, and when he put a hand on his skin under the shirt, he could feel the wings beating.
Afterward, he could not judge how much time had passed. It was as if he had been picked up and carried to a strange country, yet when he opened his eyes again, he had not moved.
He leaned over and kissed Donna on her ruined cheek. She smelled of Novocaine and alcohol and dry cotton. She had no breath. Her lips looked as if they were stitched shut.
He went back to the duty station. The nurse had not moved. He stood beside her for a while, studying the computer screens in front of her. One showed a list of information files. A cursor blinked at him.
He moved it to ADMISSIONS and hit RETURN.
It asked him to type in a name.
He typed M C A L L I S T E R and hit RETURN again.
The screen went
blank and the cursor blinked its idiot blink. Beside him the woman moved her head and said “later” in a little-girl voice. The screen shimmered and beeped.
MCALLISTER, June?
MCALLISTER, Beauregard?
MCALLISTER, Vernon?
He moved the cursor to MCALLISTER, Beauregard, and punched the RETURN key.
CONFIDENTIAL PLEASE KEY IDENT NUMBER
He thought about it for a moment. The nurse said “don’t” and sighed again.
There was a purse sitting on the floor under her station. He picked it up and found the wallet. Inside the wallet he found her ID card. He typed in her number. The machine went blank.
A second later, it read:
MCALLISTER, Beauregard
663877/t404 MSP MEDIPLAN
DOB 27/07/46
Single Six Ranch
RR #3 Lizardskin MON
TERRY WING
ROOM 404 EAST
Dr. Malawala
Dr. Butkis D. Psych.
STABLE
DO YOU WISH HISTORY?
IF SO CURSOR TO D2
He studied it for twenty seconds. Then he cursored to ADMISSIONS again and typed in BELL, Joe. He hit RETURN.
Another wait. His senses were quivering now. He was taking far too long. That nurse would come back and step through the door and he’d have to do something about that, and about the cop behind her. That would be the end of his anonymity. Whatever he did would make the morning papers.
The screen flickered and filled up.
BELL, Joseph
66210/t509 VA MEDICAL
Lizardskin Page 16
