“Even if I did, why would I tell you?”
“Because it would be in his best interest to talk to me.”
“Yeah? And why’s that?”
“I think a good case could be made that he killed Rayette and Alex.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Is it? What if he was afraid Alex was going to turn him over to the sheriff?”
“I already told you Alex wouldn’t do that.”
“You mean Kakaik.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’ll make a deal with you. Tell Lonnie I want to talk to him. He can arrange it anywhere, anytime he likes, in any way he thinks will make it safe for him. If he’s able to convince me that he had nothing to do with killing the Kingbirds, I’ll stop dogging him. Otherwise, I’ll find him on my own and drag his sorry ass to the sheriff myself.”
“I’d love to see you try that, old man.”
Cork held him with his gaze. “I’m thinking that now Kingbird’s gone, the Red Boyz are going to look to you for leadership. Believe me, Tom, I wish you luck. Talk to your cousin and have him call me. Or call me yourself.” He held out a business card. Blessing made no move to open the screen door and accept it, so Cork slid it into the crack between the edge of the door and the frame. “If I don’t hear from one of you by the end of the day, I start hunting Thunder.”
Cork turned around and headed toward his Bronco. At his back Blessing called, “You come onto the rez, maybe it’s you who gets hunted.”
Cork kept walking.
NINE
Will returned in the late afternoon. Lucinda had finally been able to get the baby to nap, and when her husband came in the front door, she put her finger to her lips.
“She’s sleeping,” she whispered and waved him to the kitchen.
He looked dumbfounded at the plates and pans of food that filled the counters-casseroles, salads, breads, desserts.
“What’s all this?”
“People have been bringing things all afternoon so I don’t have to worry about cooking. It’s been kind of them, but it’s also been hard to get the baby quieted.”
He sat at the table while she made coffee. The whole while he stared at the window above the sink and said nothing.
She’d been numb all day, focused both on the baby, who’d cried most of the time, and on being cordial to the good-hearted people who dropped by with food. She thought the grieving would come when she wasn’t so busy, so tired, and when she was alone. The grieving for Rayette anyway. The grieving for her boy Alejandro had been done long ago. The man who called himself Kakaik-what a horrid sound, like a hungry bird-she didn’t really know. In so many ways, he had become like his father: a stranger to her. Who knew what was in their heads or in their hearts? Frightening, if you thought about it too much, that you could live with a man for twenty-six years and not truly know him. Was she alone in this?
“They’ll release the bodies tomorrow,” Will said when she brought his coffee. “I talked to Nelson at the funeral home. He’ll take care of things. The visitation will be Tuesday evening. The service will be on Wednesday.”
“Thank you for taking care of things,” she said.
He sipped his coffee and stared out the window.
Rayette had told her that Alejandro was a warm, loving man but that she didn’t always know what was going on with him. He would sit for long periods and stare, and where his mind was he wouldn’t share with her. Rayette suspected that in those times he was somewhere in the past, because often he would clench his teeth and his jaw would go rigid. He didn’t talk about the past, she said, except in generalities, and she thought there were a lot of things that had hurt him. Lucinda knew what some of those things were. There had always been tension between Alejandro and Will, often open hostility. Will said it was natural. Sons always challenged their fathers, and it was a father’s duty to prepare his son for the challenges of life. If that was true, then Will was perfect for the job. He was a hard man, a hard father.
“Where’s Ulysses?” Will asked.
She began to wipe the counter. “He left a while ago. He took his guitar. You know how he is. He needed to get away by himself and play his music and think.”
“I wanted to talk to him.”
Good, she thought, with a brief sense of hope. Uly needs to talk.
“He left the damn garage door open again,” Will said.
She turned and glared at her husband. “Did you love him?” The words came out before she’d even thought them; if she’d thought first, she might not have spoken. She stared into his eyes, those dark Ojibwe windows that he never let her see through.
“What?”
“Did you love Alejandro?”
“He was my son.”
“You barely spoke to him in the last two years.”
“We said what needed saying. We understood each other.”
“Do you think he loved you?”
“He respected me. That’s more important. Why talk about this now, today?”
Yes, why? The worst possible time to talk about what could not be changed.
But she pressed on. “He came to me once when he was twelve. It was when you were stationed at Lejeune. He asked me, ‘Mama, does God love me?’ And I said of course he loves you. And he asked, ‘Does God love Uly?’ And I said yes, very much. And he asked, ‘Does God love Papa?’ And I said God loves everybody. And he looked at me with such disappointment in his young eyes and he said, ‘Then it doesn’t mean anything, does it.’ And he walked away.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“I don’t know. He never brought it up again.”
“Why would you think of that now?”
“It’s not just now. I’ve thought about it from time to time. I always intended to ask him someday what he meant. Now it’s too late.” She hadn’t looked away from his face. She almost never focused on him this way. It made him uncomfortable to be watched. “Will, who killed them?”
“Who do you think? Buck Reinhardt, that’s who.”
“What do we do?”
“We wait to see what the sheriff does.”
“And then?”
He got up and rinsed his cup at the sink. “I’m hungry, Luci.”
He was finished talking about this. She knew that no matter what she said now, the discussion was over.
“Come back and sit down,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll fix you something.”
He kept his back to her. “You’ll eat, too?”
She took his cup and put it in the dishwasher. “It’s not good to eat alone,” she said and turned her mind to the meal.
TEN
In addition to being the elected tribal chairman of the Iron Lake Ojibwe, George LeDuc was a successful businessman. He ran the general store in Allouette, the larger of the two communities on the rez. He was in his early seventies, a bear of a man with hair gone gray, but still plenty of vigor in him, enough to have fathered, a couple of years earlier, a daughter of whom he was magnificently proud.
His wife, Sarah, was half his age and had plenty of energy herself. She’d convinced LeDuc to have an addition built onto the store, and she’d put in a little coffee shop she called the Moose Mocha. It had done well, become a gathering place for folks on the rez and also for whites using the new marina and boat-launch facility that the tribe had built at the edge of town, on Iron Lake.
The store was closed on Sundays, but the Moose Mocha was open and doing a good business when Cork walked in. Sarah was behind the counter, steaming milk for a latte. Sarah’s sister Gloria was at the register. LeDuc was nowhere in sight.
Cork approached the counter. “ Boozhoo, Sarah. George around?”
She peeked from behind the big stainless-steel coffee machine and smiled. “In back, taking out the garbage.” She had to speak loudly, above the hiss of the steam. When the sound stopped, she said more quietly and with great concern, “We heard about Alex and Rayette. It’s all anybody’s talking about. What a tragedy.” She carefully poured th
e steamed milk into a cup containing espresso. “We heard you were out there, too.”
“For a little while,” Cork said.
She paused in spooning foam onto the surface of the drink and her face contorted, as if she was in pain. “Shot in the back, we heard, like it was a hit or something. Is that true?”
“It appears that way.”
She was a plain woman but her dark eyes were beautiful and when she was happy there was a sparkle to them, as if they were full of stars. It was her eyes, LeDuc often said, that had won him over. They didn’t sparkle now. “Drugs?” she asked.
“That’s one of the possibilities.”
LeDuc came in from the back. “Cork! Thought I heard your voice.”
Sarah handed the latte to her sister and turned to her husband. “He says it’s true, George.”
“What’s true?”
“About the Kingbirds. Shot in the back.”
LeDuc’s face showed all the emotion of a sandstone wall. “I’ve called a council meeting for tomorrow.”
“Got a few minutes free, George?” Cork said.
“Okay?” he asked his wife.
“Go on,” she said.
They stepped outside into the warm late afternoon. Across the street stood the new community center where the tribal council met. It also housed a free clinic, a number of the reservation business offices, a gymnasium, and a recreation room. LeDuc said, “I’m listening.”
“George, I’m looking for Lonnie Thunder.”
“I haven’t heard anything. Talked to his father a couple of days ago. Ike says he hasn’t seen Lonnie in a while, but that’s not unusual. He’s probably hiding. Hell, Buck Reinhardt’s running around loose out there. I was Lonnie Thunder, I’d hide.” He looked past Cork, at Iron Lake, which was visible through a stand of oaks, its surface satin blue. “Think it was Reinhardt killed the Kingbirds?”
“If I was sheriff, he’d be at the top of my list. But I’m thinking there are other possibilities.”
“Some folks around here are saying it was because of drugs.”
“Maybe. I’d like to talk to Lonnie Thunder about the shootings.”
“Why Thunder?”
“I spoke with Kingbird last night. He wanted me to arrange a meeting with him and Reinhardt.”
“Kingbird and Reinhardt? I’d like to’ve had a ringside seat for that. What was he thinking a meeting would accomplish?”
“He told me he was going to offer Buck justice.”
LeDuc chewed on that. “Any idea what he meant?”
“It might be that he was considering giving Thunder over to the sheriff.”
“And Thunder got wind of it and killed him and Rayette?” He didn’t look convinced.
“Maybe he didn’t start out thinking he’d kill Kingbird, it just ended up that way. Things got out of hand.”
“Maybe. Nobody ever accused Lonnie Thunder of having any sense.” The lines around LeDuc’s eyes went deep and he was quiet. “I was Kingbird, I’d have given Thunder over without a second thought. Everybody on the rez knows about those videos, knows what he was up to with those young girls. Any of us got our hands on him, believe me, we’d deliver a little Ojibwe justice before we turned him in.” He shook his head. “I can’t understand him protecting Thunder. Kingbird was smart. There was a lot to admire about him. A few weeks ago he came into the store. We talked for a good hour. I challenged him on the whole drug thing, told him the Red Boyz were a blight on the Anishinaabe name. Accused him and his gang of preying on the weakness of others. Know what he said? Said the Chippewa Grand Casino did the same thing, just had the power of law behind it, and law didn’t make a thing right. Had himself a point there, I suppose. This was before anybody knew what Lonnie Thunder had been up to with those young Shinnob girls. Kingbird got pretty quiet after that. You know he’d been seeing Henry Meloux?”
Meloux was a Mide, a member of the Grand Medicine Society, a healer of the body and spirit. He was god-awful old and lived by himself in an isolated cabin far north on the rez. He was also a man Cork respected and loved above all others.
“I had no idea,” Cork said.
“You want to know the truth, once you got past all the things you think about gangs, Alex Kingbird had a lot to recommend him. Shame he wasted it on the Red Boyz and the likes of Lonnie Thunder.”
ELEVEN
For an hour and a half in the afternoon, Annie played softball at the high school field. It wasn’t a scheduled practice, but many of the girls from the team liked to get together this way on the weekends. They were leading the division and wanted to keep their edge. Besides, they all loved the sport and loved each other and loved being young and totally free on a warm May Sunday.
They finally broke up and went their separate ways. Annie walked toward home with Cara Haines, who played first base. Cara was like a grasshopper, with a slender body and long arms and legs. Normally Annie had to walk double-time to keep up, but as the two girls made their way together through Aurora, they moved slowly and hardly spoke.
They were seniors, with graduation less than a month away. In the fall, Cara was going to college at Concordia, in Moorehead, Minnesota. Annie was going to college, too, although that hadn’t always been her plan. Before she entered high school and softball became one of her greatest passions-maybe her greatest-she’d intended to become a nun. It had been a clear vision for her since she was very young. By her sophomore year, however, both her love of softball and her growing interest in boys had blunted her sharp resolve, and her intentions had altered slightly. She’d decided that she would first go to Notre Dame, pitch for the Fighting Irish, and then, perhaps, give herself over as a bride to Christ. Unfortunately, Notre Dame hadn’t offered her an athletic scholarship, but the University of Wisconsin had. So at the end of August, Annie was headed to Madison, and the question of what path lay beyond that, spiritual or otherwise, was put on hold.
The two young women had spent their lives in Aurora, had followed the same streets, passed the same houses, taken for granted all the details that had outlined and helped define their existence. College didn’t mean they were traveling to the ends of the earth, but they weren’t just leaving Aurora, either. They were leaving their childhoods behind. Something important was ending, and often these days Annie found herself trying hard to notice everything about her hometown, to gather up all the small perfect pleasures and store them in her heart.
“I got a job this summer,” Cara said. They were walking past the shops on Oak Street, most of which were closed on Sunday except in the summer-tourist season.
“Yeah? I thought you were going to work with me at Sam’s Place. I already told my dad you would.”
“My uncle has this friend who runs some kind of outfitter thing in Montana, near Glacier. He’s giving me a job.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know exactly. But it’s Glacier. I was there a couple of years ago. It’s awesome.”
“So when do you take off?”
“The day after graduation. Unless we make it all the way to the state championship. I’ll stay for that.”
Annie had the sudden, sinking feeling that they were already drifting apart. “It’s all going to change, isn’t it,” she said.
“Don’t go all sloppy on me.”
Annie stopped and stared down Oak Street where the concrete was shaded by all that was familiar: Pflugelmann’s drugstore, the tall clock tower of the county courthouse, the old Rialto theater, Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler, and the dozens of other shops and alleyways and street corners that were already beginning to feel lost to her.
“Sometimes I think all I want is for nothing in my life to change, ever,” she confessed.
Cara turned and gazed down the street in the direction from which they’d just come. “I guess I know what you mean. But we’ll be back. You know, Thanksgiving, Christmas. And, hey, we can party without the whole town knowing every detail.”
Annie laughed. “I’ve seen you when y
ou drink. Girl, you’re so loud the whole frigging state can hear you get crazy.”
From up ahead came music in a familiar style. Annie recognized the pluck and strum of Uly Kingbird on his guitar. She spotted him sitting alone at the top of the county courthouse steps. His eyes were closed and he seemed lost in his music.
“Come on,” Annie said, and started toward Uly.
Cara held back. “Oh, God. You heard what happened to his brother?”
“Of course.”
“Look, I don’t know him. He’s always creeped me out. What am I supposed to say?”
“It’ll be all right. Come on.” She crossed the street. “Hey, Uly,” she called from the bottom of the courthouse steps.
He opened his eyes and stared down at her. His fingers kept working the strings. It sounded familiar, but Annie didn’t recognize the tune. It sounded like it might have been Bob Dylan, whose music Uly loved, partly because of the connection with the Iron Range. Maybe a Dylan tune Uly had rearranged.
“I heard about your brother,” Annie said. “I’m sorry.”
Beside her, Cara said, “Really sorry.”
Uly sang, “And now you’re gone forever and now you’re gone for good.”
“Are you okay?” Annie asked.
Uly sang, “You’ve taken that long lonely walk into that dark wood.”
“Look, if you need to talk or anything-”
Uly strummed a sudden, harsh cord, cutting her off.
“Jeez,” Cara said. “She’s just trying to be nice.”
“I’ll follow you there someday,” Uly sang. “The choice it isn’t mine. I can see the end a’coming like a freight train down the line.”
Cara grabbed Annie’s arm. “You’re not going to stick around for this, are you? Let’s get out of here.”
Annie shook off her hand. “I’ll go when I’m ready.”
“Fine. I’ll walk home alone.”
“Fine.”
Cara spun away and crossed the street in long, angry strides.
Annie turned back to Uly, whose fingers never left the strings of his guitar.
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