“What’s happening?” Jimmy Lonekiller said as Davis reappeared. “What was that music? Sounded like —”
“Quiet,” Davis said, “Come on. We need to hurry.”
“Go,” Davis said to Jimmy as they turned off the road and up the brush-choked track through the trees. “No use trying to sneak up. They’ve heard us coming by now.”
Sure enough, the squatters were already standing in the middle of the clearing, watching, as the jeep bumped to a stop in front of them. The man in the red baseball cap stood in the middle, his face dark with anger. Beside him stood a washed-out-looking blond woman in a faded flower-print dress, and, next to her, a tall teenage boy wearing ragged jeans and no shirt. The boy’s hair had been cropped down almost flush with his scalp.
The woman was holding a small baby to her chest. Great, Davis thought with a flash of anger, just what a bunch of homeless drifters needed. Running out of places for people to be, but not out of people, hell, no….
The red-haired girl was standing off to one side, arms folded. Close up, Davis revised his estimate of her age; she had to be in her middle to late teens at least. There didn’t appear to be much of a body under that thin blue dress, but it was definitely not that of a child. Her face, as she watched the two men get out of the jeep, was calm and without expression.
The van came rocking and swaying up the trail and stopped behind the jeep. Davis waited while Roy Smoke and the other four men got out — quite a force to evict one raggedy-ass family, but Captain Ridge believed in being careful — and then he walked over to the waiting squatters and said, “Morning. Where you folks from?”
The man in the red baseball cap spat on the ground, not taking his eyes off Davis. “Go to hell, Indian.”
Oh oh. Going to be like that, was it? Davis said formally, “Sir, you’re on Cherokee reservation land. Camping isn’t allowed except by permit and in designated areas. I’ll have to ask you to move out.”
The woman said, “Oh, why can’t you leave us alone? We’re not hurting anybody. You people have all this land, why won’t you share it?”
We tried that, lady, Davis thought, and look where it got us. Aloud he said, “Ma’am, the laws are made by the government of the Cherokee nation. I just enforce them.”
“Nation!” The man snorted. “Bunch of woods niggers, hogging good land while white people starve. You got no right.”
“I’m not here to argue about it,” Davis said. “I’m just here to tell you you’ve got to move on.”
The boy spoke up suddenly. “You planning to make us?”
Davis looked at him. Seventeen or eighteen, he guessed, punk-mean around the eyes and that Johnny Pissoff stance that they seemed to develop at that age; ropy muscles showing under bare white skin, forearms rippling visibly as he clenched both fists.
“Yes,” Davis told him. “If necessary, we’ll move you.”
To the father — he assumed — he added, “I’m hoping you won’t make it necessary. If you like, we’ll give you a hand —”
He didn’t get to finish. That was when the boy came at him, fists up, head hunched down between his shoulders, screaming as he charged:“Redskin motherfu —”
Davis shifted his weight, caught the wild swing in a cross-arm block, grasped the kid’s wrist and elbow and pivoted, all in one smooth motion. The boy yelped in pain as he hit the ground, and then grunted as Jimmy Lonekiller landed on top of him, handcuffs ready.
The man in the red cap had taken a step forward, but he stopped as Roy Smoke moved in front of him and tapped him gently on the chest with his nightstick. “No,” Roy said, “you don’t want to do that. Stand still, now.”
Davis said, “Wait up, Jimmy,” and then to the man in the red cap, “All right, there’s two ways we can do this. We can take this boy to Cherokee town and charge him with assaulting an officer, and he can spend the next couple of months helping us fix the roads. Probably do him a world of good.”
“No,” the woman cried. The baby in her arms was wailing now, a thin weak piping against her chest, but she made no move to quiet it. “Please, no.”
“Or,” Davis went on, “you can move out of here, right now, without any more trouble, and I’ll let you take him with you.”
The girl, he noticed, hadn’t moved the whole time, just stood there watching with no particular expression on her face, except that there might be a tiny trace of a smile on her lips as she looked at the boy on the ground.
“No,” the woman said again. “Vernon, no, you can’t let them take Ricky —”
“All right,” the man said. “We’ll go, Indian. Let him up. He won’t give you no more trouble. Ricky, behave yourself or I’ll whup your ass.”
Davis nodded to Jimmy Lonekiller, who released the kid. “Understand this,” Davis said, “we don’t give second warnings. If you’re found on Cherokee land again, you’ll be arrested, your vehicle will be impounded, and you might do a little time.”
The boy was getting to his feet, rubbing his arm. The woman started to move toward him but the man said, “He’s all right, damn it. Get busy packing up.” He turned his head and scowled at the girl. “You too, Eva May.”
Davis watched as the squatters began taking down the tarp. The girl’s long red hair fairly glowed in the midday sun; he felt a crazy impulse to go over and touch it. He wished she’d sing some more, but he didn’t imagine she felt like singing now.
He said, “Roy, have somebody kill that fire. Make sure it’s dead and buried. This place is a woods fire waiting to happen.”
Davis lived in a not very big trailer on the outskirts of Cherokee town. Once he had had a regular house, but after his wife had taken off, a few years ago, with that white lawyer from Gatlinburg, he’d moved out and let a young married couple have the place.
The trailer’s air conditioning was just about shot, worn out from the constant unequal battle with the heat, but after the sun went down it wasn’t too bad except on the hottest summer nights. Davis took off his uniform and hung it up and stretched out on the bed while darkness fell outside and the owls began calling in the trees. Sweating, waiting for the temperature to drop, he closed his eyes and heard again in his mind, over the rattle of the laboring air conditioner:
“Oh, when this world is all on fire
Where you gonna go?
Where you gonna go?”
It was the following week when he saw the girl again.
He was driving through Waynesville, taking one of the force’s antique computers for repairs, when he saw her crossing the street up ahead. Even at half a block’s distance, he was sure it was the same girl; there couldn’t be another head of hair like that in these mountains. She was even wearing what looked like the same blue dress.
But he was caught in slow traffic, and she disappeared around the corner before he could get any closer. Sighing, making a face at himself for acting like a fool, he drove on. By the time he got to the computer shop, he had convinced himself it had all been his imagination.
He dropped off the computer and headed back through town, taking it easy and keeping a wary eye on the traffic, wondering as always how so many people still managed to drive, despite fuel shortages and sky-high prices; and all the new restrictions, not that anybody paid them any mind, the government having all it could do just keeping the country more or less together.
An ancient minivan, a mattress roped to its roof, made a sudden left turn from the opposite lane. Davis hit the brakes, cursing — a fenderbender in a tribal patrol car, that would really make the day — and that was when he saw the red-haired girl coming up the sidewalk on the other side of the street.
Some asshole behind him was honking; Davis put the car in motion again, going slow, looking for a parking place. There was a spot up near the next corner and he turned into it and got out and locked up the cruiser, all without stopping to think what he thought he was doing or why he was doing it.
He crossed the street and looked along the sidewalk, but he couldn’t se
e the girl anywhere. He began walking back the way she’d been going, looking this way and that. The street was mostly lined with an assortment of small stores — leftovers, probably, from the days when Waynesville had been a busy tourist resort, before tourism became a meaningless concept — and he peered in through a few shop windows, without any luck.
He walked a couple of blocks that way and then decided she couldn’t have gotten any farther in that little time. He turned and went back, and stopped at the corner and looked up and down the cross street, wondering if she could have gone that way. Fine Indian you are, he thought, one skinny little white girl with hair like a brush fire and you keep losing her.
Standing there, he became aware of a growing small commotion across the street, noises coming from the open door of the shop on the corner: voices raised, a sound of scuffling. A woman shouted, “No you don’t —”
He ran across the street, dodging an oncoming BMW, and into the shop. It was an automatic cop reaction, unconnected to his search; but then immediately he saw the girl, struggling in the grip of a large steely-haired woman in a long black dress. “Stop fighting me,” the woman was saying in a high strident voice. “Give me that, young lady. I’m calling the police —”
Davis said, “What’s going on here?”
The woman looked around. “Oh,” she said, looking pleased, not letting go the girl’s arm. “I’m glad to see you, officer. I’ve got a little shoplifter for you.”
The girl was looking at Davis too. If she recognized him she gave no sign. Her face was flushed, no doubt from the struggle, but still as expressionless as ever.
“What did she take?” Davis asked.
“This.” The woman reached up and pried the girl’s right hand open, revealing something shiny. “See, she’s still holding it!”
Davis stepped forward and took the object from the girl’s hand: a cheap-looking little pendant, silver or more likely silver-plated, in the shape of a running dog, with a flimsy neck chain attached.
“I want her arrested,” the woman said. “I’ll be glad to press charges. I’m tired of these people, coming around here ruining this town, stealing everyone blind.”
Davis said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t have any jurisdiction here. You’ll need to call the local police.”
She blinked, doing a kind of ladylike double-take, looking at Davis’s uniform. “Oh. Excuse me, I thought —” She managed to stop before actually saying, “I thought you were a real policeman.” It was there on her face, though.
Davis looked again at the pendant, turning it over in his hand, finding the little white price tag stuck on the back of the running dog: $34.95. A ripoff even in the present wildly inflated money; but after a moment he reached for his wallet and said, “Ma’am, how about if I just pay you for it?”
The woman started to speak and then stopped, her eyes locking on the wallet in his hand. Not doing much business these days, he guessed; who had money to waste on junk like this?
While she hesitated, Davis pulled out two twenties and laid them on the nearby counter top. “With a little extra to pay for your trouble,” he added.
That did it. She let go the girl’s arm and scooped up the money with the speed of a professional gambler. “All right,” she said, “but get her out of here!”
The girl stood still, staring at Davis. The woman said, “I mean it! Right now!”
Davis tilted his head in the direction of the door. The girl nodded and started to move, not particularly fast. Davis followed her, hearing the woman’s voice behind him: “And if you ever come back —”
Out on the sidewalk, Davis said, “I’m parked down this way.”
She looked at him. “You arresting me?”
Her speaking voice — he realized suddenly that this was the first time he’d heard it — was surprisingly ordinary; soft and high, rather pleasant, but nothing to suggest what it could do in song. There was no fear in it, or in her face; she might have been asking what time it was.
Davis shook his head. “Like I told that woman, I don’t have any authority here.”
“So you can’t make me go with you.”
“No.” he said. “But I’d say you need to get clear of this area pretty fast. She’s liable to change her mind and call the law after all.”
“Guess that’s right. Okay.” She fell in beside him, sticking her hands in the pockets of the blue dress. He noticed her feet were barely covered by a pair of old tennis shoes, so ragged they were practically sandals. “Never rode in a police car before.”
As they came up to the parked cruiser he stopped and held out his hand. “Here. You might as well have this.”
She took the pendant and held it up in front of her face, looking at it, swinging it from side to side. After a moment she slipped the chain over her head and tucked the pendant down the front of her dress. “Better hide it,” she said. “Ricky sees it, he’ll steal it for sure.”
He said, “Not much of a thing to get arrested for.”
She shrugged. “I like dogs. We had a dog, back home in Georgia, before we had to move. Daddy wouldn’t let me take him along.”
“Still,” he said, “you could have gone to jail.”
She shrugged, a slight movement of her small shoulders. “So? Wouldn’t be no worse than how I got to live now.”
“Yes it would,” he told her. “You’ve got no idea what it’s like in those forced-labor camps. How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” she said. “Well, next month.”
“Then you’re an adult, as far’s the law’s concerned. Better watch it from now on.” He opened the right door. “Get in.”
She climbed into the car and he closed the door and went around. As he slid in under the wheel, she said, “Okay, I know what comes next. Where do you want to go?”
“What?” Davis looked at her, momentarily baffled. “Well, I was just going to take you home. Wherever your family —”
“Oh, come on.” Her voice held an edge of scorn now. “You didn’t get me out of there for nothing. You want something, just like everybody always does, and I know what it is because there ain’t nothing else I got. Well, all right,” she said. “I don’t guess I mind. So where do you want to go to do it?”
For a moment, Davis was literally speechless. The idea simply hadn’t occurred to him; he hadn’t thought of her in that way at all. It surprised him, now he considered it. After all, she was a pretty young girl — you could have said beautiful, in a way — and he had been living alone for a long time. Yet so it was; he felt no stirrings of that kind toward this girl, not even now with her close up and practically offering herself.
When he could speak he said, “No, no. Not that. Believe me.”
“Really?” She looked very skeptical. “Then what do you want?”
“Right now,” he said, “I want to buy you a pair of shoes.”
An hour or so later, coming out of the discount shoe store out by the highway, she said, “I know what this is all about. You feel bad because you run us off, back last week.”
“No.” Davis’s voice held maybe a little bit more certainty than he felt, but he added, “Just doing my job. Anyway, you couldn’t have stayed there. No water, nothing to eat, how would you live?”
“You still didn’t have no right to run us off.”
“Sure I did. It’s our land,” he said. “All we’ve got left.”
She opened her mouth and he said, “Look, we’re not going to talk about it, all right?”
They walked in silence the rest of the way across the parking lot. She kept looking down at her feet, admiring the new shoes. They weren’t much, really, just basic white no-name sport shoes, but he supposed they looked pretty fine to her. At that they hadn’t been all that cheap. In fact between the shoes and the pendant he’d managed to go through a couple days’ pay. Not that he was likely to get paid any time soon; the tribe had been broke for a long time.
As he started the car, she said, “You sure you don’t
want to, you know, do it?”
He looked at her and she turned sidewise in the seat, moving her thin pale legs slightly apart, shifting her narrow hips. “Hey,” she said, “somebody’s gotta be the first. Might as well be you.”
Her mouth quirked. “If it ain’t you it’ll prob’ly be Ricky. He sure keeps trying.”
With some difficulty Davis said, “Turn around, please, and do up your safety belt.”
“All right.” She giggled softly. “Just don’t know what it is you want from me, that’s all.”
He didn’t respond until they were out of the parking lot and rolling down the road, back into Waynesville. Then he said, “Would you sing for me?”
“What?” Her voice registered real surprise. “Sing? You mean right now, right here in the car?”
“Yes,” Davis said. “Please.”
“Well, I be damn.” She brushed back her hair and studied him for a minute. “You mean it, don’t you? All right…what you want me to sing? If I know it.”
“That song you were singing that morning up on the reservation,” he said. “Just before we arrived.”
She thought about it. “Oh,” she said. “You mean —”
She tilted her head back and out it came, like a flood of clear spring water.
“Oh, when this world is all on fire
Where you gonna go?”
“Yes,” Davis said very softly. “That’s it. Sing it. Please.”
Her family was staying in a refugee camp on the other side of town; a great hideous sprawl of cars and trucks and buses and campers and trailers of all makes and ages and states of repair, bright nylon tents and crude plastic-tarp shelters and pathetic, soggy arrangements of cardboard boxes, spread out over a once-beautiful valley.
“You better just drop me off here,” the girl said as he turned off the road.
“That’s okay,” Davis said. “Which way do I go?”
At her reluctant direction, he steered slowly down a narrow muddy lane between parked vehicles and outlandish shelters, stopping now and then as children darted across in front of the car. People came out and stared as the big police cruiser rolled past. Somebody threw something unidentifiable, that bounced off the windshield leaving a yellowish smear. By now Davis was pretty sure this hadn’t been a good idea.
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