Death Along the Spirit Road

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “I’ve been studying the old ways, too,” Willie volunteered. People told Manny things, all sorts of things, most times without his asking. His balding hair and potbelly dropped people’s guard and they opened up to him.

  “Who are you studying with?”

  “Margaret Catches.”

  “One of the Porcupine Catches whose dad was a holy man on the Rosebud?”

  “The same. She’s a true Winyan Wakan, perhaps one of the last of the sacred women here. My aunt Elizabeth studied the holy ways with Margaret. She had to give it up when her finance officer position got to be too many hours. Aunt Elizabeth is the only reason Margaret agreed to take me under her wing and teach me the old ways.”

  The old ways. Uncle Marion had taught Manny the old ways once, taught him the four Lakota virtues of bravery, fortitude, wisdom, and generosity, and breathed them daily. Unc believed that Lakota children chose their parents, not the other way around. Lakota call their children inipi, sacred, and Unc lived that as well. He’d never hit Manny, never demeaned him, never made comments that would harm him in any way. If Manny had to choose his parents, he could have done no better than his uncle Marion. Not to say that Unc’s hand didn’t occasionally find Manny’s backside, but Unc never had a smile on his face when he did it.

  Unc had been a contradiction in cultures. He had converted to Catholicism when the Jesuits determined the Lakota needed something deeper than their traditional beliefs. Unc and Manny attended every Sunday mass and every Saturday confession. He had enrolled Manny in catechism and lorded over him to ensure his lessons were to the Brothers’ satisfaction. But despite all Unc’s efforts, Manny had rebelled against traditional teachings. Like his brother, Reuben, who’d rebelled against authority all his life. If Reuben had been raised by a man such as Uncle Marion, perhaps he would have taken a different path. Reuben’s Red Road wouldn’t have landed him that long stretch in prison.

  Yet, Unc’s teachings remained with him always, and it was those lessons that caused him to choose this fork in his own Red Road. “There but for the grace of that loving man,” he whispered to himself, “I could have gone Reuben’s way and been on the opposite of the law . . .”

  “I was lucky.”

  “I didn’t catch that,” Manny told Willie.

  “I was lucky that Margaret knew Aunt Elizabeth so well and agreed to tutor me.”

  “And who is your aunt Elizabeth?”

  Willie smiled. “Most people call her ‘Lizzy.’”

  Manny turned sideways in the seat. “Reuben’s ex-wife Elizabeth?”

  Willie nodded.

  Manny whistled. “I didn’t realize she was your aunt. How is my sister-in-law?”

  “Just fine. Doing a great job as finance officer for the tribe the past eight years.”

  “Finance officer. Now that’s impressive.”

  “She went to night school, and worked her tail off. She won’t admit it, but she was floundering after she and Reuben got divorced. She needed something in her life, so she got her degree and began working for the tribe. When her boss died in a car wreck, Aunt Lizzy was the only one qualified for the position.”

  Before Manny could learn more about Elizabeth, they approached the crime scene. Willie drove toward the hill where Jason was murdered.

  “Stop here for a minute.” Manny left Willie in the cruiser and stepped close to the mass grave that overlooked the Wounded Knee massacre site.

  Unc taught him that this site overlooking the shallow valley below was sacred, and Manny had rebelled against even that. Yet as he stood looking at the grave site, he knew it was sacred. Hairs rose on his arms, numbness weakened his legs, and his ancestors tugged at Manny’s soul. Something else haunted him, taunted him. Something else he couldn’t identify.

  Below Cemetery Hill, a tall slender marker jutted skyward like the finger of a dying warrior proclaiming the mass grave. Manny walked up the hill to that hallowed ground. When he reached the top, he stood with his head bowed, praying to the Wakan Tanka of the Lakota, and to the Christian God of the Jesuits. He prayed for purity in doing his job and for wisdom not to violate this place where so many unarmed Lakota were slaughtered that frigid December morning in 1890.

  Wakan Tanka unsimalaye. Wakan Tanka pity me. Tears distorted his visualization of the ancient crime scene, for this had been the scene of a crime. A crime that the Lakota had never resolved, a crime that Unc had never resolved.

  He closed his eyes. Unarmed Sioux reached out to him for help, but there was no help as Seventh Cavalry troopers cut them down in volley after volley of gunfire. A young mother ran terrified past him as blood spurted from the infant she cradled in her arms, moments before she was shot in the back and fell to the ground.

  Screaming mothers and stumbling elders sought refuge in dried creek beds, but the soldiers pursued. Faces leered with anticipation as they chased their prey and gleefully finished them off with rifle fire, then turned to look for more victims.

  Wakan Tanka unsimalaye. But there was no pity for Manny, no relief as he envisioned the burial detail recovering bodies. With rude shovels, soldiers pried corpses from the frozen ground and drug them over to the edge of a single deep hole. There would be no Sending Away ceremony for these people. Manny cried.

  “This was the last stand of a proud race,” Unc had told him every year that they made their pilgrimage here. “The last hope of people torn from their nomadic roots, people separated from everything that nature had gifted to them.” Manny had fought his feelings back then as he fought his feelings now. These dead were not like him. He was a modern man, melding what Lakota remained with what the Whites taught.

  He fought the urges dragging him back to what he once was, but they jerked him back. The wind. Always the wind. It blew from everywhere. It blew from nowhere. The ghosts of long dead Lakota rode those winds, dead ancestors that kept yanking him back where Unc had always wanted him to be. Back where he resisted until his soul tore in shreds.

  “You OK, Manny?”

  He hadn’t heard Willie come up behind him.

  “You zoned out there. You all right?”

  Manny faked a smile while he dabbed at the tears. “My uncle Marion brought me here once a year. Unc would pass an eagle feather through sweetgrass smoke, and ask Wakan Tanka to protect those buried at this spot. Now there’s the Big Foot Memorial Ride for people to remember the massacre, but back then this is how we paid homage.”

  Willie nodded. “Been on that trail ride. Colder ’n a witch’s tit riding two weeks from Standing Rock. But when we got here, we connected with the old ones. You feel it, too?”

  “No,” Manny lied again, and he turned away down the hill toward an incongruous round rock building with a concrete roof shielded from the wind. Inside the Information Center, devotees of the American Indian Movement stood eager to hand out brochures and flyers to anyone who came. The Indians who manned the center thought things would be different if the progressives were not in office; if traditionalists ruled Pine Ridge their power would return. Those people dreamed of a return to the 1970s when AIM was at its strongest. But those people were not Manny’s people, and they didn’t speak for the majority of the Oglala on Pine Ridge.

  Manny shrugged. “Better get to looking at the crime scene while there’s still light.” He put his sunglasses back on to hide his red eyes and climbed in the car. Willie drove to a spot between the memorial and the village of Wounded Knee, with its dozen or so houses and trailer homes. Yellow police tape flapped loose from its stakes, waving as if to get their attention.

  Willie parked just outside the tape and led Manny around the plastic perimeter. “This is where the Red Cloud Resort was gonna be built.” Manny admired Jason Red Cloud’s optimism at the venture, at his ability to secure such a vast amount of privately owned land. The resort was going to cover an area as big as ten football fields. By anyone’s standards, and especially by reservation standards, it represented a substantial undertaking.

  “How did Jaso
n ever get the tribe and landowners together? They never agree on anything.”

  “You’ll have to ask Aunt Lizzy about that. This is the first time this has been tried here on the rez.”

  They stayed just outside the yellow tape as they walked around the meadow that was to be the Red Cloud Resort. Manny nodded to metal chairs placed in a semicircle facing a lectern in the center of the field. “Expecting an audience?”

  Dry Dakota dust swirled around. The gunmetal-hued grit that settled on the chairs grated on Manny’s lips and he spit.

  “Jason was to break ground here tomorrow. The media and dignitaries planned to be here in droves. That’s another reason the lieutenant’s furious about the murder. He was supposed to introduce everyone. He claimed it’d help his career, and he spent days memorizing everyone’s name.”

  Manny remembered too well Lumpy’s memory. As tribal cops, Lumpy kept everything anyone did wrong in his own special scorecard in his mind, to be dredged up at a later date when it suited him.

  Manny studied the area, and fought the urge to swear at Lumpy. “Didn’t he assign anyone to guard this place until I got here?”

  Willie shook his head. “He said the evidence tech got all he could when he processed the scene. ‘Even a Hotshot federal Apple couldn’t find anything else of value here,’” he told me.

  How much evidence had been destroyed since the tribal cops left? Powerless to rectify Lumpy’s screwup, Manny breathed deeply to calm himself. “Where was Jason killed?”

  “Over here.” Willie led Manny to a shallow dip in the field where the crime scene tape was held fast by a wooden stake. Even before they got to the spot, Manny pinched his nostrils shut. Putrid blood from corpses left rotting at a hundred crime scenes bred familiarity with that smell, and he never got used to it.

  Willie started to cross the tape, but Manny stopped him. “Were you here this morning when the scene was processed?”

  “Sure. Just after sunrise.”

  “Then show me where the evidence tech and everybody else walked in and out.” We don’t need any more of the crime scene tainted.

  Willie retraced steps where other officers had entered and left the scene. Manny squatted and looked into the sun as he studied the ground. Shadows cast by the late-afternoon light provided the right contrast to reveal impressions in the dirt. He squinted: An outline made by evidence paint had been nearly blown clean. The paint depicted the faint outline where Jason had lain in death. A substantial amount of blood had soaked the dirt under Jason’s head. The sun revealed distinct tire tracks.

  “Is this where Jason parked his truck?”

  “Yes. The lieutenant thinks he backed it in here and waited for the killer.”

  Manny bent low and ran his hand over the impressions. The wrecker’s tire marks, where the dually had backed up to hook onto Jason’s truck for the ride to the police impound, remained clear and deep. Other tracks beside the wrecker’s were faint and growing fainter. “Rapidly aging,” as Unc taught him. Jason’s lug tires had made deep impressions. The other tire tracks beside it were narrower, lighter. “Anyone working the crime scene drive up here?” he asked.

  “Jeeza! No way! My job was to make sure no one drove up here and messed things up.”

  “Then whose car made these tracks?”

  Willie stepped closer, careful not to disturb them, and squatted beside Manny. “These are the tracks the evidence tech cast this morning. We didn’t know anything about them except they weren’t any of our outfits. What do you make of them?”

  Manny’s reputation often caught up with the real-life Senior Special Agent Tanno. He knew Willie had read his case write-ups in the FBI Bulletin, because he was asking about recent cases on the drive up here. Willie asked about the child abductor Manny caught at the Rosebud four years ago, and about the serial rapist and murderer at Lower Brulé two summers after that. Those cases set him apart from other investigators, and made them look at him with awe. Willie expected him to conjure up some insightful analysis, like the tracks belonged to a 1999 Chevy Lumina, and the tires are R78x14 Firestones. With one bad shock and driven by a midget transvestite missing two toes. But Manny didn’t have any magic answers. “All I know is they’re new mud-and-snows. And by the clarity of the impressions, they haven’t been run very much.”

  “Jeeza. New tires. That’ll narrow it down.”

  Manny nodded. How many times had Unc sent him out to help a friend who had blown a tire? Everyone around here rode skins on their cars, and people called them “maypops,” because they may pop at any time. Manny called them “willpops,” because with cords poking through the treadless rubber of the tires, flats were inevitable. Even government cars rode baldies. Only high-ranking folks with some stroke had new tires.

  “You know anyone around here running new rubber?”

  Willie shook his head. “The lieutenant bought a new Mustang last month, and there’s a few other new cars I’ve seen now and again. Could be a rental. Bet your Hertz got new tires.”

  “Bet it does. What else did forensics find?”

  “Sweetgrass,” Willie answered. “I thought that was odd.”

  “Sweetgrass is pretty common around here.”

  “But not crushed up. Like someone conducted a ritual. That’s what Margaret uses in her ceremonies, crushed sweetgrass.”

  “And nothing was said of the cut-grass?”

  Willie’s smile faded. “What cut-grass?”

  “Here.” Manny squatted and grabbed a spindly green stalk from the middle of the tire print where it had been run over and imbedded in the dirt. He touched the sharp slender leaf, and instantly blood appeared on his finger. “Now where does cut-grass grow in these parts?” he mumbled with his finger in his mouth.

  Willie dropped his head. “Riverbanks. Ponds. Places that are a hell of a lot wetter than this place.”

  “Well, we haven’t found the Holy Grail.” Manny nudged Willie. “Just one more thing to keep in mind, though. Now show me precisely where Jason died.”

  Willie pointed to a spot three yards from where Jason had parked. The depression in the dirt was blown clear, but the large pool of blackened blood showed Jason’s position where he was killed. Manny knelt and ran his hand over the dirt.

  Willie knelt beside him. “Find something?”

  Manny looked into the light and studied depressions around where Jason had lain. Someone had walked around the murder scene to make those prints; their flatness stood in contrast to the deep V marks made by Willie’s boots. “These are shallow but they should have been obvious hours ago. Did the tech take a cast of any?”

  Willie shrugged. “Not while I was watching them. What is it?”

  “Shoe prints. Blowing clear pretty fast. They’re older than the tech’s footprints, and the soles are flat. Hard to age, Unc told him. When the wind blows strong, tracks can fool you into thinking they’re older than they are. Sometimes he and Unc would close on the animals they tracked, then let the animal go its way. Other times they killed the animal for the food, but always with a deep respect for the gift of its life. It had been years since he had to study tracks such as these, but something about these footprints gnawed at him.

  “It’ll give you a chance to reconnect with your roots,” Niles had told him when he explained Manny’s temporary assignment to Pine Ridge. “Practice up on that tracking you are always so good at.”

  “But I got a class starting up. I’ve got prep work I have—”

  “Reconnect like you did a couple years ago when you went to the Rosebud Reservation.” Niles ignored him.

  “Screw you. I got no desire to reconnect with my roots. Any more than I wanted to connect with my roots that time you sent me to Lower Brulé. Or Standing Rock. Or Crow Creek. You know Niles, if you had half a brain, your ass would be lopsided.”

  “Now, Manny.” Niles smiled at him, and ordered another drink. “I am not going to fire you, so don’t get potty-mouthed. Just take the assignment, and solve the case so you ca
n come back here and teach.”

  “And wonderful Supervisory Agent Ben Niles will get the credit for solving the homicide. You might even get promoted for it.”

  “I might. After all, a good supervisor knows how to assign his resources.”

  Niles’s resource would now have to take all his knowledge of Pine Ridge and more to solve this case in two weeks before the academy started.

  “Here’s another print,” Willie announced proudly. He ran his hand over a faint depression. “And one there, going in another direction.”

  “You look at Jason’s shoes?”

  “They were hiking shoes with Vibram soles. Not smooth like these.”

  Manny stood and heard snap, crackle, and pop in his knees. He needed to get some road time in to work out the kinks. “Looks like the killer was worried that someone might come along and spot him. Looks like he turned all around. Watched everywhere while he waited for Jason.”

  “Or maybe he looked around after he killed him.”

  “That’s another possibility.” Willie’s chest puffed slightly. “In any event, the killer wasn’t worried about covering his tracks. These prints are so faint, the only thing I can tell about them is that they are big shoes. Maybe size ten or larger.”

  Willie put his foot beside the track. “At least ten.”

  “And Jason had Vibram-soled hikers so it wasn’t his.”

  “I understand you knew him.”

  Manny hesitated. “I knew him through my brother, Reuben. I was quite a bit younger than them.”

  “The lieutenant said your brother and Jason were active in AIM together.”

  “They were.” Manny had looked up to Reuben and the others in the American Indian Movement. Manny’s friends constantly prodded him for stories about Reuben, stories about AIM’s takeover of government offices in the name of Red rights, or stories about retribution against store owners hostile to Indians. Tales abounded of AIM Indians fighting non-AIM Indians who had sold out to the wasicu. People pressed him so much about his older brother’s exploits that Manny was often the center of attention himself. Lumpy wasn’t the only one who accused him of taking the easy way off the reservation rather than face the Lakota problem. Reuben had stayed and fought for Red rights. Too bad he chose to toe the wrong side of the line.