So much for mysticism. So much for the Ghost Dancers.
The white man will become like a mist on water and blow away.
The bluecoats will fall from their horses and sink into the grass like blue birds falling out of the sky into a deep lake.
And their forts will fade away.
And the pa-sapa, the Black Hills, will be free of them, as a bear can shake itself free of lice.
And the bighorns and the deer and the wolves and the buffalo will come back like a black tide returning. And the young girls will wear shells and beads, and the Crow and the Absaroke and the Flathead and the Pawnee will slip away to other lands. It will be as if no white ship had ever come to this land, no pony soldier ever marked it, no Terry nor Custer nor Sheridan had ever come to hunt us like antelope in our own country.
Gabriel grinned and threw a pebble at a circling crow. Down in the bowl, Joe Bell was sitting on his front porch, staring at the setting sun and drinking from a brown bottle. An old dog, maybe a setter, was lying on the patchy grass in front of the porch. A horse was neighing in the barn; Bell had not let them out to run, nor had he taken them hay or water. The wind was blowing up the slope toward Gabriel. He could smell the barn and the horses, a strong ugly scent of rotting hay and manure and moldy lumber.
If you took away the phone lines and the power poles, and the satellite dish on the hill behind him, it could be any year in the past.
It could be 1877, the year Crazy Horse was killed, bayoneted in the belly by a man named Private Gentles as Little Big Man and another held his arms. Bayoneted again through the back and into his kidney. He fell down on the red dirt then, and they wanted to stab him again.
“Let me be, my friends,” said Crazy Horse. “You have got me hurt enough.”
Touch The Clouds was there, seven feet tall, and he bent down and picked up Crazy Horse and carried him into a soldier’s bed. “He was a great chief,” said Touch The Clouds, “and he cannot be put into a prison.”
That was at Camp Robinson, on September 6.
The soldiers watched through the window and knew that something important had happened here, thinking that they had killed a big man and would be big men because of it. But they were wrong. No longer would they be big men on a big land, but only drovers and tinsmiths and clerks who once had fought Crazy Horse, who was dead and would now live forever unchanging, while little deaths awaited each of them, and little sticks to mark them, and a big land to swallow them up beneath the long grass and never speak their names again.
That was the Lakota consolation. It had been a bitter consolation. Gabriel looked around at the rolling hills, at the softness and the light that lay everywhere around him, and then he looked down at the red-faced man hobbling back and forth on his dirty acre of ruin, and it seemed to him that the ugly little collection of brown buildings was like a bruise on the skin of the countryside.
Doc Hogeland’s office was on the top floor of Sweetwater General, at the southern end of a long marble-floored hallway lined with Western art. Just inside the double-glass doors that set off the administrative offices, a marble pillar supported a huge Remington bronze of four wild cowhands riding runaway broncos and firing pistols into the air. It looked like a bronze tornado of motion, as much an expression of torque as it was historical art.
Beyond the glass doors, the atmosphere had that indescribable scent created by a great deal of old money. A crystalline woman glided forward on oiled manners and intercepted them in the middle of a Navajo rug in pewter, ochre, and sage purple, colors that were reflected and subtly echoed in every feature of the office suites.
She led them down a passageway toward a set of carved Mexican doors. The handles were steer horns. Brass cartridges were hammered into the wood in a geometric pattern. She opened the doors and swept them with her into Doc Hogeland’s private office.
It opened like a ride up a long slope to reveal a vista encompassing most of downtown Billings and extending all the way to the low blue bluffs on the south bank of the Yellowstone. The floor was a Navajo pattern of varicolored sandstone and baked clay. A bank of glass windows ran fifty feet from wall-to-wall and ceiling to floor. The room was filled with yellow light, and the sky outside seemed to press against the glass like a visible force. From somewhere off to the right a stereo murmured something graceful by Chopin. The floor seemed to rise gently to the massive oak desk, dark and battered. In the bright sunlight, it was almost impossible to see if anyone was in the chair. A shape rose up into the penumbra, and a barrel voice drummed out at them.
“Mizz Ballard! You destroy me! And Beau! You look like a bowling trophy with all that brass! Thank you, Mrs. Miles!”
Mrs. Miles inclined her head and dematerialized.
The shape gathered itself out of the glare and formed into a tall, big-bodied old man with a soldier’s carriage, a ragged shock of white hair above a craggy rock of a face, weathered and windburned, forceful without belligerence, with brilliant blue eyes glittering out of the recesses of his skull. He came forward at a lope, like an old wolf, and enfolded one of Ballard’s hands in both of his.
“Vanessa. Have you married that fellow from Helena yet?”
“No, Doc. I threw him out.”
“Excellent! I won’t have him shot, then. Unless he hurt you?”
“Don’t have him shot yet.”
“Come here, child, give an old man a memory!”
Ballard gave him a kiss on his seamed and scarred old cheek, standing on her toes to do it. Hogeland Senior rose above her like a butte, massive and blunt, full of force and gravity. His smile broke across that face like a shaft of sunlight striking a peak. She could feel herself being warmed by it, and her own rush of affection for him.
He was wearing an ancient plaid shirt buttoned to the neck, and jeans so old and faded they looked like Japanese paper. His face was scored and carved in fissures and lines and creases, his skin as dark red as Montana earth.
Hogeland put an arm like a tree limb across Ballard’s shoulders, resting it lightly on her, and extended his right hand to Beau.
Beau took it at the full extent of his arm, shaking it solidly and smiling at Dr. Hogeland, suppressing the urge to say “sir.”
“Beau! How is Bobby Lee? Six now, am I right? I got her a little something. Just a minute—it’s around here somewhere … yes.”
He reached down behind his desk and brought up a small square packet, wrapped in navy blue paper with silver stars, bound up in a silver ribbon. He handed it to Beau and enjoyed watching Beau’s discomfort. As usual, the old man had him off-balance.
“Hell, Doc. That wasn’t necessary!”
The doctor shook his massive head, raised his heavy hand. “Presents are never necessary. That’s why they call them presents. If they were necessary, we’d call them taxes, and nobody’d ever get any. It’s just a little thing. I remember she loved horses. I found a little carving in Los Angeles last week. It’s a copy of one of those Chinese pieces. The Flying Pony. I think she’ll like it.”
Beau hefted the package. The “little thing” weighed ten pounds, and it was probably brutally expensive.
“Will you bring her around someday? I could show her the—well, I guess a hospital isn’t a little girl’s idea of amusing. Would you let me take her for a spin in the plane? You could come, too!”
The last thing Beau was going to do was to let the old man fly him anywhere in that cruise missile.
“Not for me, Doc. But Bobby Lee would love it. I’ll talk to Maureen about it.”
When he mentioned Maureen’s name, the old man’s face changed. Then he grinned and slapped his hands together.
“Well! May I offer you something? It’s too early for liquor, but I have Evian—terrible stuff—and coffee?”
They agreed on coffee. Dr. Hogeland served it himself, the delicate porcelain cups like eggshells in his big hard hands. He settled them all down on a battered old leather couch and chair grouping beside the window, Hogeland in the big ch
air, Ballard and Beau with their backs to the window, facing him. He raised the cup to his lips, sipping carefully, watching them over the rim as they tasted the brew.
“Good? Excellent. Had it in from Coeur d’Alene, special mail order. Montana’s a fine country, but so God-cursed dull about food and drink, it might as well be Connecticut.”
They set their cups down on the table. “So, Beau. How’s that leg? I had Malawala up here in an absolute snit.”
“It’s fine. Hurts a bit. I’ll live.”
“Dangerous work, I hear. A tragedy, however you look at it. So many lives cut off.”
“Yes. I wish it had—I wish there could have been some way to avoid it.”
“I know you do, Beau. Back on duty already?”
Ballard cut in. “Well, we have the shooting board tonight. He can’t be back on active until the board sits on it. Which brings us to the point—”
Dr. Hogeland raised his hand, palm out, his long supple fingers spread in a fan.
“In a moment, my dear. While I have you and Beau here, I want to clear up a small matter that I find … troubling.”
Ballard and Beau looked at each other.
Ballard shrugged. “Certainly, if we can discuss it. It doesn’t have any evidentiary connection with the … incident?”
Dr. Hogeland’s face softened as he watched her talk. He took a clear aesthetic delight in observing such a beautiful creature living and breathing in his presence.
“You may wish to judge this for yourself. I merely wish to apprise you of certain … oh, damn! My son’s here, in the next office! He’s got something to say, and I wanted him to say it in front of—to say it to Beau’s face.”
Beau tensed visibly. He cleared his throat and let out a long breath. “Dwight is here?”
“Yes, Beau. I have no other son.”
He seemed to wait in quietude, without expectations, as complete inside himself as a carved totem, beyond the passions and anxieties of younger lives. Ballard was literally squirming.
“I’m not sure I’m ready to discuss this case with him, Doc. He’s taken a brief with the ACLU for these Indian rights people. There’ll very likely be—we’re sort of in opposition, Doc.”
“I’m fully aware. This is another matter, and I’d like you to hear Dwight on the issue personally. I believe that listening to Dwight now will … will help, rather than render a complex situation even more convoluted.”
Ballard looked at Beau, shrugged. Dr. Hogeland saw the signal and smiled at them. “Thank you. I take it as a personal favor.”
He reached out and touched a fingertip to a brass plate next to the chair. In a brief moment, Mrs. Miles floated through the door and hovered at his shoulder.
“Ask my son to step in here, would you, Mrs. Miles?”
• • •
Gabriel felt a pain in his chest and realized that he had been holding his breath. A pulse thumped at his carotid, and his hands were sweating. That was what happened to you when you dragged out all the old miseries and fingered them over and over. Living in the past had killed his friends.
Mysticism and fanatical belief.
This landscape seemed to hypnotize a man. Too much light and space. There was a kind of narcotic here. So this thing that had come to watch him here, to stand beside him as he looked down at Joe Bell, was just what it appeared to be. Only a wind in the dry grass, and perhaps something of a dream or a wish or a need for company, and partly a trick of the light. Or of the shadow. Something that breathed itself out of the ground when Gabriel walked across its grave. A curved place in Gabriel’s mind where life had worn his thoughts away and the nothingness showed through the way a mirror wears away and you see the clear glass of which it is made.
Still, he wished it would go away, because it distracted him. He tried hard to think in such a way that his mind would not present him with these distractions. He spent a long time trying to do this, as the sun began to ride down the blue slope of the sky and the living things in the hills around him became used to his presence. The crows went back to hunting, and the hawks went back to the sky, and the snakes moved the dry grasses again. And the thing would not go away. It came no closer and did not try to speak. It would not be seen direct but stayed just at the edges of Gabriel’s vision. So after a long time he accepted that it was here, a product of fatigue and stress, maybe the drugs Dr. Sifton had given him, and of thinking about the past too much, about history and dreams and the ability of a people to delude themselves to death.
Beau and Ballard made careful small talk with Doc Hogeland for a few minutes. Then Hogeland’s secretary returned, Dwight Hogeland following as a tender trails a sloop.
Dwight was in full Wall Street today, an Ermenegildo Zegna double-breasted blue pinstripe, shirt as white as the Ku Klux Klan, and an acid-green power tie with little blue ducks all over it, Dwight’s concession to zaniness. He seemed scalded and avoided looking directly at either Beau or Vanessa.
“Dwight! Thank you for waiting. I know this is a busy day for you. We’ll make this as brief as possible.”
“Thank you, Dad.”
Dwight sat down in a bone and leather chair, setting his briefcase at his toes. He leaned back, overbalanced, and caught himself with a hand on the chair arm. They all pretended not to notice it.
“Well, Dwight,” said his father, his face a mask and his voice free of paternal inflection. “Perhaps you should begin this.”
“Certainly, Dad.”
He collected himself with a clear effort and now made direct eye contact with Vanessa Ballard. Beau realized with a shock that Dwight’s eyes were gray again. He must have taken the contacts out. It unnerved him, and he missed Dwight’s first few phrases. Gradually, Dwight’s message developed through the murk of his circumlocution like a black-and-white photograph in a tray. A crime scene shot.
“… and in this climate of heightened awareness of abuse, it is vital to retain reservations. Nevertheless, we all must, in a sense we are compelled to … exercise personal vigilance … of wrongdoing. Of course I am mindful of the implications and the immediate judicial consequences of such an allegation. However it is not safe simply to disregard them if they are brought to our attention—”
Ballard set her cup down hard. “Christ, Dwight! Spit it out! Disregard what?”
Dwight straightened at her tone, sitting upright in his chair.
“This is an informal meeting. I am under no compulsion to provide this information to you! I think you should be—”
“Son, if you can’t say it in ten words, go lie down till you can.”
Dwight looked at his father, his face a pool of varied emotional currents. He looked back at Ballard, his face an aggressive jut of chin bone and frowns.
“I spoke—I had a long consultation with Beau’s ex-wife on Sunday night. She has—detected signs of—there’s been some blood spotting, and Maureen is a nurse, and she’s convinced that—Maureen McAllister intends to have Bobby Lee examined by a specialist to determine whether Bobby Lee has been the victim of some kind of sexual assault!”
The air in the room crackled with unspoken rage.
“Does my ex-wife have a theory about who might be doing this to Bobby Lee?”
Dwight turned and looked directly at Beau, his face white and tight. It came to Beau in a burst of pale cold light that he was looking at a man who, for some reason beyond Beau’s understanding, hated him intensely. And he knew in that same terrible moment that Dwight was going to name him. He tasted his own vomit at the back of his throat.
Beau put his cup aside delicately, stood up, stepped across to Dwight, gathered the front of his shirt and his Ermenegildo Zegna suit into his left fist, dragged the man to his feet, and cuffed him hard with a flat right hand sideways over his left ear. Dwight let out a sound between a bleat and a yelp.
Bracing as Dwight stumbled, Beau supported him and straightened him back up again, and held him steady long enough to hit him again, backhand, across the right cheek.
His Highway Patrol ring drew blood on Dwight’s cheek, raking the skin open under Dwight’s right eye. A ribbon of shiny scarlet began to descend from Dwight’s nose. Beau watched it swelling with a certain kind of scientific detachment while Dwight struck at him, twisting, trying to bring a knee up into Beau’s belly, but Beau was in too close and it was happening too suddenly; you could see the shock—the disbelief—that there would be physical consequences to a legal assault. Dwight’s world was cracking open—Beau could see these emotions flickering over Dwight’s face.
As an afterthought, he drew his right fist back—now he could hear Vanessa shouting at him, but it was a long way away—and he turned his fist vertically and thumped Dwight twice—very, very hard—right on the bridge of his nose. He watched with a feeling of clinical satisfaction as Dwight’s eyes reddened with pain and his mouth opened and shut like a gaffed trout. Someone was pulling on his upper arm now, and he let go of Dwight’s suit jacket, and Dwight dropped back into the chair. Now the nose was blossoming like a spring rose, and red veins stood out on his cheeks.
Explain that on your next television appearance, kid.
Lizardskin Page 24
