Two Medicine

by John Hansen

  “Were you drunk?” I demanded.

  He shook his head. “No. I was sober. Been drinking a river since then though, yes sir. I’ve barely eaten, barely slept, barely worked since I did it; but I’ve been drinking.”

  My mind flashed to the police photos Greg had obtained. “How did you get her out there without leaving footprints?”

  Larry looked down at his glass. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “After I laid her body down in the woods, I could see deep prints of my boots everywhere. I broke off a branch and swirled it around in the mud and dirt until it was unrecognizable.”

  I shook my head and cursed him under my breath bitterly. I couldn’t think of what to say.

  He suddenly looked back up at me, took a deep breath, and drew himself up with resolve. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to the BIA and confessing – no two ways about it. My truck still probably has some evidence of her on it, I’m sure. It was banged up in the front by the hit, but it was banged up already before in the front so I don’t know what’s there.”

  He shook his head mournfully. “I’m going away for life, and I don’t know what’s gonna happen to Phyllis. But I gotta finally do what is right.” He choked out the last words and then slowly sank his head onto his arms on the table, crying in violent sobs, his shoulders heaving.

  I just sat there and watched him. I felt cold and dead inside, and knowing who killed her finally had changed nothing in me, not yet. I wished for a moment that he had never come to get me. I imagined, one final time, Alia’s little body smashed up in the woods, now seeing her dragged by Larry into some dark recess in the trees. Her sweet face pressed down in the dirt.

  “I was sober twenty years before all this,” Larry said quietly, looking up slowly staring off into the dark corners of the kitchen, as if looking for something, or someone, else to talk to.

  “Did you know I did a tour in Vietnam when I was seventeen?” he asked me. “Lied about my age.”

  I said nothing but just watched him through teary, stinging eyes.

  “Well, I had a brother, Carl, who I was closer to than any man on earth. He was the best man I’ve ever known. He was two years older than me; and he took over for the family at thirteen years old – after my father died. Carl was mature and a strong man, Will, even at that age. A man; and he always took care of me and my sister. I looked up to him like a father. He’d protect me from bullies, take care of me when I had a stomach ache, and read to me and sissy at night.” Larry sniffed back tears.

  “Years later he sat me down and told me, the day I was to ship off to Vietnam, that if anything ever happened to me over there, that he would go over there and get me… Can you believe that? He said that.”

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “Car accident,” Larry let out a bitter laugh, or a cough, it was hard to tell which with his voice so choked with emotion.

  Larry stood up heavily, and dumped his glass into the sink. He rinsed the glasses out and placed them on a rack to dry. He turned to go, and on his way out I heard him say, “I wish he was here now.” He said it in a tender, child-like voice.

  I got up and walked over to the phone, walking very slowly as to not lose my balance. I dialed Greg’s work number at the main station, which I knew no one would answer at this time, and said into the voicemail: “This message is for Greg. This is Will at Two Med. Greg, give me a call in the morning first thing.”

  I tried to sleep that night but could not keep my eyes closed – not even with the hospital meds still working their magic through my system. I felt more in shock than anything else, not angry, strangely, or bitter.

  The sweat lodge, the attack, Ronnie’s involvement, and, finally, Larry killing Alia, all ran through my mind in a whirl of images. I was amazed that the man who had killed Alia had been sleeping only yards from my room all this time… had been only a few feet away from me each day, as I wandered the Park and lurked around Browning, talking to neighbors and tribe councilmen and everyone about Alia. I realized Jake must have simply gotten Alia’s earrings from her room at Clayton’s, and then sent them to me in a blunt attempt to scare me off.

  Now two primary questions haunted me the most: why then did Jake attack me? And how was Ronnie actually involved? Then a third, new question floated up from the pain and haze of my wounded head: What was going to happen to Larry?

  By the time that daybreak hinted its arrival in the greying sky outside my window, I had resolved to tell Greg what happened, and the BIA as well. Regardless of anything else, Greg should know, I reasoned. Siegfried and Roy suddenly flew in through a crack near the window, startling me; and then they clung to the roof, nestling into the same exact spots they chose every morning.

  I got up very sore and stiff from the bed. I hobbled over to the window and witnessed, for the first time, the rising sun lighting up the peaks of the mountains visible from my window. Thin clouds were set vividly aflame with red-orange and vivid gold. I pushed open the window further and cold, crisp air flowed past my face; it smelled of water and pine. Larry had always bitched that nobody else got up to see the sunrises but him, that we all missed it, and he had finally gotten me to see one – the worst way possible.

  I showered as best I could with my wounds and bandages over my neck and cheek. I looked at myself in the mirror after the shower and found that I didn’t look as bad as I expected, aside from the long dark bruises along my back and legs and innumerable scratches and scrapes everywhere. I did actually look like a man who had fallen down a ravine.

  Satisfied that I was presentable enough, I walked quietly downstairs to the kitchen. I found a pen and pulled out some paper from a notebook, and sat down at the table. Nobody was up yet, not even Larry or Phyllis, and I wanted to get my thoughts straight without distraction. I set out two blank pieces of paper in front of me and put the notebook away. Two letters to two men.

  I wrote for a minute and re-read my words. Satisfied with the wording, I folded up the first page. I wrote “Larry” on the front and set it aside.

  I wrote a paragraph on the next paper, writing carefully and pausing frequently. Once finished, I read over the words again. I walked upstairs and slid the letter under Ronnie’s door. Then I walked across the dark, empty store and left out of the front doors, near where Larry parked his truck. I slid his letter under one of his windshield wipers.

  *The two letters are printed at the end of this book, reader. It is best if you wait to read them until you reach the end.

  Forty

  I got the canoe unlocked and put the oar in the boat (the same one Larry had used, which I found in the back of his truck) and shoved off alone onto the glass-smooth lake. The valley around me was coming alive and I could hear tiny Black-capped Chickadees chirping from all over across the water. Ducks flew off in the distance across the surface, which reflected Mount Sinopah at the farther end. A foggy mist lay on the far bank below the summit, obscuring the feet of the mountain. A moist coolness flowed across the surface and over my face as I paddled over the dark and silent water. Skimming along perfectly quietly, with hardly any effort, I breathed in the smell of Two Medicine in the early morning, as if the lake was a sleeping life form of its own.

  I remembered Alia and I’s day on the water, and how she had told me about her family, her past. I remembered how closely she sat near me in the boat, how I could smell her; I remembered her voice, how she talked. I played the whole series of events with her and I meeting all over again as I paddled.

  I wished she was in the canoe with me now and that we had the valley to ourselves, for good.

  As I got to the south end of the lake I turned the nose of the canoe into the runoff area where the little river began which connected the two lakes. I scraped over some rocks in the shallow stream before getting to the deeper part, where the river widened and the current slowed.

  I remember seeing the meandering river on the maps when I first looked at Two Med, and recollected the river had a name but I couldn�
��t remember what. It was only about twenty feet across at its widest and very shallow in most places – only a foot or two deep. I didn’t have to paddle as the current slid me past the rocks and roots underwater, quickly and silently. I passed some camp sites where tents sat encircled with coolers, chairs, clothes hanging to dry and little tables had been set up. A couple of the camps though were already busy with activity, early-risers cooking on little propane stoves or over newly-lit campfires; the raw aroma of bacon, eggs, toast, cinnamon buns and coffee. A couple of other sites were packing up to leave. No one saw me floating by.

  After a while I spied Greg’s house in the distance beyond the small pines along the bank, and I paddled over to the edge. I stepped out into the water and dragged the canoe up the bank to the weeds beyond some trees. I walked through the trees over to Greg’s lawn and then climbed up his back porch steps, resting on a bench that ran the length of the house. I looked at my watch and it was 6:50. I didn’t want to wake them by knocking, and I figured Greg would be up soon anyway so I settled back to wait. I wondered what Larry would do when he got my letter.

  I eventually heard someone in the kitchen and carefully looked through the sliding glass door, hoping I didn’t see anyone naked or anything like that. Greg was in a bathrobe making coffee. I knocked softly on the glass door and he looked up sharply, then recognized me and smiled with a curiosity that grew into alarm when he saw my bandages. He motioned for me to come in, giving me the “shhh” sign as I slid the door open.

  “Dee’s asleep,” he said in a whisper, and sat me down at the kitchen. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “That’s what I came to talk to you about. Do you have a few minutes?”

  He nodded, and then said, “Let me get you a cup of coffee and we’ll sit out back.”

  We were soon planted back on the bench again, with a mug of coffee in our hands. The morning was coming up bright and clear, the sky overhead was now a light, bird’s egg blue.

  “I was almost killed by Jake after the powwow,” I told him. “Some of his friends tracked me down on the road, after the powwow was over.”

  I told him about the sweat lodge, and then how I found myself out on the road. I told him about the attack and about Larry coming to my rescue. For some reason, I stopped right at the point of telling him that Larry had accidentally killed Alia. Something held me back.

  As I spoke, Greg looked more agitated by the second. “Jesus Christ. Look, I’m sorry Will; I got a call in from the station that there was some major trouble in the camp with some drunk kids. It turned out to be a total false alarm, a prank; and now I think I know who made that call – to get you and I separated.”

  “Jake probably, or one of his gang,” I said, resting my head back on the wall behind us. My neck ached as I stretched back against the house. “I’m not sure how much Clayton is wrapped up in this – if at all – but Jake has got to be the one running the drug deals that the BIA and feds are focused on. I don’t know why else he would try to kill me in front of everyone like that.”

  Greg shook his head. “You don’t see it, Will? He killed Alia, I knew it all along. And he thinks you’re bringing the heat around Browning, bringing focus to it all. You got him scared.”

  “He didn’t seem very scared.” I thought about Larry’s confession, and then a new idea occurred to me.

  “What I don’t get,” Greg said, growing more energized as sipped his coffee, “Is that Larry just happened to be driving by and saw you in the woods?”

  “That’s what he told me.” I shrugged.

  I watched Greg running over the logic (or lack thereof) of my story in his head; and I didn’t want him to start picking apart the details too closely, not yet.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked him.

  He looked at me and thought for a second. “Arrest Jake. Call the cops and have them send a car to Rick’s – talk to him too.” Greg took a thoughtful sip of his coffee. “Think you can identify the others that attacked you?”

  “Maybe, it was pretty dark and rainy most of the time. But yea, maybe.”

  “Larry could, I bet,” Greg said, getting up from the bench. “I’ll give him a call in a bit and see what he can remember.”

  I held onto his sleeve to stop him. “Best leave him out of it.”

  Greg looked at me. “Why?”

  Is telling half a truth the same as a lie? “He was out that night doing something he wouldn’t want to have to explain.” I told Greg that Larry had visited a hooker’s house and that he couldn’t handle that being exposed – that it would ruin Phyllis and his whole lives.

  “He’s so distraught over the whole thing, the attack, and everything, that I don’t think he’ll ever go within a mile of Browning again,” I said. “After what he did for me; I want to protect him.”

  “But he’ll need to be a witness against Jake, at least!”

  “I don’t think so, Greg. If you can just leave him out of this; I would consider it a personal favor to me.”

  “But how will you explain things then? How would you have gotten back to town?”

  “It’ll just look like they meant only to rough me up, scare me a little, and then I hitched back with some stranger,” I said. “Simple as that.”

  Greg looked dubious, but was eager to get a call into the BIA and report the attack, so we separated after he asked me a few more questions about the ordeal, basically making me repeat it all again as he scribbled quick notes.

  Soon he was at the phone in his kitchen, talking to the ranger station at the main lodge and then putting a call into the BIA in Browning. His exited chatter made me remember how much he had wanted to be a real cop, and was so on board initially with my amateur investigation; and then how much he had pulled back after facing the resistance at home and at work. Now he must have felt vindicated.

  Not long after we got ready and he told Dee some bare details on what we were doing, we were tearing off down the road in his truck. Greg advised that I’d have to come down to the BIA office to make a formal statement, but I had already intended to anyway so I went along with it. Larry’s involvement was still officially off the record, and the more time went by the more conviction I had as to how to deal with him.

  We got to the BIA office within the hour, and I was soon sitting, once again, in Olsterman’s office, facing his big messy desk with its coffee stained papers and dusty tape recorder. Greg had left me there to check in with the other rangers at the main lodge and fill them in on the plan for that day.

  Olsterman was late arriving and I waited about ten minutes until he eventually walked into this office, shutting the door behind him. I watched his face as he came in; he looked the same as before – the same big egg-shaped head with a police officer’s hat jammed down onto it, which he took off and hung on a rack as he settled into his chair – the same red face with eyes close together and the stubbly, grey-white beard. He did not look particularly pleased to see me sitting in his office again. I wondered suddenly if Larry had already contacted him and confessed.

  “Greg filled me in on the phone.” He said in his slow drawl as he heavily sat down in his leather desk-chair. “And it seems like you’re lucky to be alive young man.”

  “I don’t feel too lucky,” I said, stretching my neck a little bit, feeling the tape from the bandage pulling against my skin.

  “Are you willing to make a statement?” He reached over and pulled the tape recorder closer to him.

  “Of course.”

  The officer reached over and grabbed his legal pad, and set it in front of me, handing me a pen. “First we’ll record your verbal statement; then you write it out – make it as detailed as you can. Start with the beginning, where you were when you got to the powwow, and so on.”

  I told him the whole story except with Larry carefully removed, and then wrote down the same version, also not mentioning Ronnie in any of it. As I spoke I remembered that the staff could place Larry with me at the hospital, so I quickly added,
to make it fit, that once I got back to the store Larry drove me in to get treatment.

  I felt squeamish about not reporting everything I knew, but then again I felt like I owned this story and the truth behind it – that I had earned the truth and that I had purchased it at some great costs to my self – with blood. As for Ronnie, I still didn’t really know how involved he was, and I wanted to know where he fit in before I ratted him out – that’s what the letter to him was for.

  I finished the meeting by formally pressing charges against Jake for assault and battery. I tried to water-down how close he had come to killing me because I felt like the bigger the criminal case got as far as the attack, the more it would be investigated and the my story wouldn’t hold up. I just wanted Jake finally arrested and the cops to start interrogating him and soon the drugs connection would get out, so I put him out of my life for good. He was a now a dangerous and unpredictable factor that I wanted to get rid of.

  After I was done the officer had a deputy give me a ride back to Two Med. I was apprehensive. Would Larry be there? Would Ronnie? What would I say to either them? Was it even safe to be back?

  As we turned off into the parking lot of the store I saw that Larry’s truck was still where I had left it that morning. I had the BIA cop drive me over to the back of the store and let me out – I was feeling the pain and soreness returning after the ER’s meds had finally worn off and I could barely turn my head as I got out of the cop car.

  As I walked towards our back porch I saw Ronnie stock still like a lanky statue, leaning against the railing, a smoking cigarette between the fingers of his hand. He looked over at me and then the cop car with dismay and then turned his gaze back up to the mountains our side of the lake, as if taking in the air. The telescope mounted on the railing beside him pointed down at the ground.