Death on the Greasy Grass

by C. M. Wendelboe

  Manny learned that ten years later Conte Eagle Bull had distinguished himself at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and later Conte, peacemaker among the Oglala, would be confined to the Red Cloud Agency, later Pine Ridge. The man’s exploits in battle had earned him the job of Boss Farmer, a high and treasured position that he held until his death three years before the Wounded Knee Massacre. Conte’s reputation for honesty would stay with the Eagle Bull family their entire lives.

  Manny swallowed. Soon he’d meet the stuff legends were made of.

  CHAPTER 22

  Harvey stopped in front of the log house as two men on horseback rode past them. They gave Manny’s government car only a passing glance as they made their way to the barn. Manny stopped the car in back of Harvey’s truck and started getting out when Wilson Eagle Bull emerged from the house. His turquoise-tipped braided ponytails bounced on his chest as he descended the steps. With his starched white shirt and bone choker, he gave the impression he was about to greet his campaign committee. He stood on the steps, arms crossed, looking at his foreman.

  “Harvey usually tells me when we have company.” Wilson’s voice, a mellow speaker’s voice, held a tone and timbre that demanded attention. Unc had told Manny about the great Lakota orators, those rare leaders who mesmerized crowds with just the sound of their voices: Spotted Tail and Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, commanding yet not demanding.

  Harvey took the steps three at a time and stopped beside his boss. “I would have warned you but that one took my phone.” He pointed to Reuben, who fished the phone from his pocket and tossed it to Harvey.

  “Not old Harv’s fault,” Reuben said. “I held his cell phone for safekeeping.”

  Wilson nodded. “Then why the little parade here?”

  Manny stepped between Wilson and Reuben and started digging his ID wallet out.

  “I remember who you are, Agent Tanno.”

  Manny pocketed his ID case. “It was necessary to keep Harvey’s phone so we could make it to your house without coming away in pieces.”

  Wilson turned to Lumpy and eyed his clothes. “And you are the acting chief?”

  Lumpy nodded.

  “Dressed like that?”

  “We’ve been working on a case,” he sputtered.

  “And you?” Wilson asked, smiling. “Who are you that you intimidate Harvey?”

  “Reuben Tanno.”

  Wilson’s eyes widened for the briefest moment of recognition, and he turned to Manny. “Since when does the FBI employ felons?”

  “Since when does a senatorial candidate employ thugs like Harvey and the rest of your crew?”

  Wilson broke into a wide smile. “I’m glad I don’t have to debate you during this campaign.” He turned to Harvey. “Since when don’t we cooperate with law enforcement?”

  Harvey stood speechless, smashing a bug with the toe of his boot.

  “Oh, just go help Pete and RePete with the horses. I’m hauling these mares up to Crow Agency myself Monday.”

  “Thought you were busy with your campaign, Boss.”

  Wilson dropped his eyes. “Sam Star Dancer’s memorial service is Tuesday. Figured I’d take them up when I go.”

  “Kind of soon since we don’t know for certain if it was Sam that got burned to death?” Manny said.

  “Chenoa’s convinced it was Sam who burnt up in that house fire.” Wilson blew his nose with a white handkerchief bearing the image of an eagle sitting on the hump of a buffalo, the logo of the Eagle Bull family. “I understand the autopsy will be completed this weekend and Chenoa will have the closure she needs.”

  Manny was convinced legal closure, not emotional closure, was on Chenoa’s mind. With Sam declared dead, she could go on with ranch business far more efficiently than with him alive.

  “Must have been a real shock to have such a good friend die so suddenly?”

  Wilson’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Manny. “What do you mean?”

  “Old Marine buddy like Sam was. I understand you were his CO in ’Nam.”

  Wilson locked eyes with Manny. “I was Sam’s commanding officer in ’Nam. Back before he took to the bottle and disgraced himself and the Star Dancer clan. You might say we grew apart after the war. I only saw him a few times since we rotated back to the world.”

  Manny let it drop for the moment.

  “I’m taking three registered Black Angus cows to Crow Agency.” Wilson seemed to anticipate Manny’s question. “The Star Dancer champion stud is waiting my ladies.” He turned to Harvey. “Go get them loaded.”

  He watched as Harvey disappeared into the barn before turning back to Manny and Lumpy. “I appreciate his loyalty, but there’s no reason to shake you down.” He motioned to wrought iron chairs lined up on the porch. “Sit. Please.”

  Manny followed Reuben and Lumpy onto the porch and dropped into a chair across from Wilson. Reuben tried squeezing into a chair and finally stood and leaned against a porch support.

  As he waited for Wilson to speak, Manny looked over the property to the stables painted bright red and with new green shingles, to the old outhouse behind it with the half-moon carved out of the door, listing slightly but still useable, to horses with their heads in a feed trough in an adjoining corral, their tails swishing flies, muscles twitching in the morning heat.

  “I’m assuming you’re here because of that officer that got shot down the road yesterday.”

  Lumpy nodded. “Officer With Horn. He is my investigator.”

  Wilson shook his head. “Terrible. Just terrible for the reservation.”

  “Even worse for Willie,” Manny said.

  “Of course. I didn’t mean anything . . .”

  Manny waved the comment away. “What can you tell us about the shooting?”

  “Just what Harvey told me. The men went back to work after your officer left, and the next thing they know there’s a helicopter coming in on an LZ. He and some of the hands drove down the road to see what was happening, but they couldn’t get close. Tribal cops had both ends of the road blocked, so they returned and went back to work.”

  “And Harvey didn’t talk with my guys?” Lumpy said. “Tell them the last they saw Willie was when Degas lit out after him?”

  Wilson looked away. “Harvey doesn’t like cops . . .”

  “Can’t say I do either,” Reuben volunteered.

  Wilson glanced at Reuben. “Harvey had a few nips of his hip flask that morning. He’s a good man, but Harvey needs a drink now and again to get him through the day. He didn’t go down to the roadblock ’cause one more DUI and he gets serious time. You know serious time, don’t you?”

  “The finest gated community in the state.” Reuben smiled.

  “Anyway, Harv gave the cops a wide berth getting back to the ranch.” He turned to Manny. “And I know what you’re thinking—same thing that Johansson would bring up during the campaign—what, do I have riffraff working for me.”

  “Carson Degas is a little more than just riffraff,” Reuben said.

  Wilson fidgeted with his hair ties. “Look, I got a soft spot for men working to turn their lives around, especially capable men like Harv. And Carson. Harv said your officer came to the house looking for Carson. Why?”

  Manny stood and rubbed his butt, hoping the metal chair slats hadn’t made permanent lines on his backside. He debated how much to tell Wilson, and concluded they needed to find Degas badly. He weighed Wilson’s loyalty to Degas, and decided to chance confiding in him. Manny explained how Degas’s photo had been captured on Thelma Deer Slayer’s camcorder going into Ian Tess’s tent and swapping the ammo. “Where is he?”

  “That’s why Pete and RePete . . .”

  Avoiding the question? “Those two we passed on horseback on our way in?”

  “Yes. Bob and Bo Myers.”

  “Twin brothers that w
ent down for that Scottsbluff mom-and-pop stickup four years ago?” Reuben asked.

  Wilson looked down at his boots. “Everyone needs a second chance. Anyone could screw up once. They did a year in the county . . .”

  “Only ’cause they cut a plea,” Reuben said.

  Manny never asked Reuben where he got his information. He just knew it went beyond the moccasin telegraph. “It’d look bad during the campaign if it got out. Like hiring Degas. Where did you say he was?”

  Wilson shrugged. “He disappears now and again.”

  Manny looked sideways at Wilson.

  “It’s true,” Wilson insisted. “He’s probably in some lockup. Degas likes his booze. Harvey tells me Degas goes out of his way to visit off-reservation towns that don’t like us NDNs, or we aren’t treated well. Degas looks enough like a Lakota he plays that part well in bars. Goads cowboys into fights and lowers the boom.” A slight smile played on Wilson’s lips. “If he wasn’t such a genius with horses, I’d have put the run on him by now.”

  Manny grabbed his pen and notebook. People expected investigators to take notes, even if he didn’t take them down or need them. “How long he work for you?”

  Wilson looked to the clouds for the answer. “Year and a half about.”

  “Exact date?” Manny pressed. He often crowded people he interviewed: crowded people made mistakes, said things they hadn’t wanted to come out. Wilson took no chances; his answers were weighed, calculated. Wilson had been grilled before. “It’s important.”

  Wilson sighed and turned to Lumpy and Manny. “Follow me.”

  “Us felons will stay outside,” Reuben said. “Wouldn’t want candidate Eagle Bull shaking me down for stolen silverware or a crystal sugar bowl.”

  They followed Wilson inside through the portal to his world, a world populated with buffalo robes hanging on walls, deer and elk skins draped over chairs, and couches sporting antlered arms. Pendleton blankets and star quilts, uneven stitching telling Manny they were older than he by at least a century, adorned display racks situated around the room.

  Wilson led them past a mountain lion mount snarling at a gray wolf above a fireplace mantel, both mounts showing patches of hide gone as if they’d had the mange, the mountain lion missing two claws on one foot. Wilson stopped and nodded to the scene. “They’ve seen better days.” He reached up and brushed a cobweb off the wolf. “My great-grandfather, Conte Eagle Bull, killed those two the first morning his band was interned here.”

  “Odd choice of words, Mr. Eagle Bull,” Lumpy said. “Interned.”

  Wilson leaned an arm on the mantel, his shirt pulling taut, revealing muscles that still held their youth despite gray hair around his temples and wrinkles around his eyes. “You’re Lakota, and you don’t understand our plight?”

  Lumpy started to speak, but Wilson continued. “What would you call it if your entire family were uprooted from their hunting grounds. You ever been to the Powder River Country?”

  Lumpy shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “Well you ought to go, and see what prime country we Lakota gave up to live on this barren land. I’d call that being interned.”

  But Manny understood. Unc would gather young Manny around the fire in their one-room cabin and tell tales of the Lakota. One of the stories Unc instilled in him was the forced move of the Oglala to Pine Ridge following the Battle of the Greasy Grass. The soldiers sought to avenge Custer’s annihilation, and with the help of the Crow, they hounded the Lakota bands until, exhausted and faced with starvation, the Oglala had surrendered. Only then did they learn they were to make Pine Ridge their new home, in a land that was nearly impossible to farm as their Indian agent demanded. And impossible to subsist on with hunting, as the game had gone the way of the buffalo.

  They followed Wilson into his office, and he started plucking file folders from pigeonholes in his rolltop desk. “I got Degas’s date of employment here somewhere.”

  Lumpy drew in a quick breath and nudged Manny. He motioned to a glass case in the room adjacent to Wilson’s study. “Check that display out.”

  Many followed Lumpy into a great room lined with Navajo rugs and Hopi pottery displayed on oak stands. An Arapaho cradleboard hung next to Kiowa moccasins, both beaded on every inch of the deer hide. But it was the long glass display case, suspended at eye level and running the length of one wall, that caught Manny’s interest. He stopped at one end of the case, his heart skipping a beat he was certain. Since the Red Cloud homicide, where he had had to rely on Willie and others for insight into Indian artifacts, Manny had begun studying his heritage. He had taken two online courses in Indian artifacts from the University of Wyoming and one on relics at Rapid City Community College. He had begun appreciating his roots. And he appreciated Wilson’s display.

  Manny stood in front of a beaded pouch, the light blue background a contrast with red and yellow hourglass patterns on the flap and pouch front. Sinew stitching had faded through the years, and the elk skin was cracked. The pouch may have hung from a hunter’s saddle as he dressed a deer he had killed, his bloody hands brushing the side of the leather, a fleshing knife displayed beside it.

  An assortment of belts hung next to the pouch, lazy stitched, others decorated with dyed porcupine quills, authentic all and old. Manny felt compelled to reach out and touch the glass as he closed his eyes. An Oglala wife had sat cross-legged around a tipi fire one wintery night, belt resting in her lap, porcupine quills soaking in her mouth until they were pliable enough to flatten and sew onto the deerskin.

  The image of the hunter that had killed the deer the belt was made of loomed large. Manny opened his eyes, rubbing them, but the image persisted. The hunter stalked a two-point buck, rifle at the ready, brass tacks embedded in the stock reflecting the sun bouncing off the snow he crept on.

  Manny forced himself to turn from the glass, shaking his head, clearing his mind of the scene. He had been witness to another scene from the past, and he’d talk with Reuben about it later.

  He started walking away from the case when two scalp locks, grisly, long, wrinkled, and dried, fluttered inside the glass case. Manny struggled to turn away, but the need to know the scalps’ story grew too strong. He turned, staring at them, his hand poised inches from the glass. Had the scalps actually fluttered? Had they called to him, or was that just another imagining like the woman sewing her hunter-husband’s belt?

  Manny’s pulse quickened. Images flashed in his mind. The urge to run as strong as the need to stay. But his feet remained solidly planted in front of the case like cornstalks anchored into black soil. He reached out his hand, drew it away, dropped it onto the glass. A shock rose up his arm, through his body, the scalp locks talking to him.

  Manny shuddered as a Crow warrior faced a charge by two Lakota overlooking the Battle of the Little Big Horn. The two warriors shot the Crow, one dropping off his pony and running to the corpse, knife in hand. The other Lakota, still seated on his horse, raised his rifle. Manny tried to scream a warning, his throat closed to any sounds, spitting the taste of black powder from his mouth as a cloud settled over the scene. When a breeze moved the powder cloud away, the Crow warrior lay on his back beside the lifeless Lakota his companion had shot, accusing eyes fixed on his killer.

  Manny swayed, his knees buckling, weakening, and he leaned against the display case.

  “That glass might break!”

  Manny shook his head, the image gone, his balance returning.

  Wilson hooked his arm through Manny’s and steadied him. “Hate to have you fall through and cut yourself up. You okay?”

  Manny looked back to the scalp locks sitting silent and immobile behind the glass. “Blood sugar spike. Damned diabetes.”

  Lumpy took Manny’s other arm. “You want me to drive you to Indian Health?”

  “No.”

  “Need a candy bar?”

  “I might,�
� Manny said, staring back at the display case. As long as I keep away from those scalps I might not.

  Wilson followed Manny’s gaze and nodded to the scalp locks. “I kept asking Grandfather Biford about those scalps. Grandfather was a wicasa wakan. I thought for sure a holy man would tell his grandson about them. But the only thing he’d say is that Great-Grandfather Conte scalped an enemy in battle at the Little Big Horn. I kept pressing him about it. I always thought there was more to the story, but he never said more. And my father never explained them. He always kept me away from the scalps.”

  “Was he?” Lumpy asked. “Was your grandfather a sacred man?”

  Wilson laughed. “I guess, if there really is any such thing. Tradition has it that someone’s got to be a holy man, so I guess it was my grandfather’s turn.”

  Manny nodded to the display case. “You must hold some store in tradition?”

  Wilson laughed again and chin-pointed to the glass case. “I keep this collection because it meant something to my family. My family collection. That’s as far as tradition will allow me to go.”

  “But you dress traditionally,” Lumpy said.

  “This?” Wilson flicked his hair ties and ran his finger under his choker. “These are just props. An Indian running for Senate is expected to look Indian.”

  “Doesn’t sound like something you want to stump on the campaign trail.”

  Wilson’s smile faded and he frowned at Manny, then at Lumpy. Gone was his naturally resonant voice, replaced by a low, guttural sound as he stepped toward them. “My attitude stays in this house. Got it?”

  “I do,” Lumpy said.

  Wilson glared at him.

  Lumpy put up his hand and forced a smile. “Honest Injun.”

  Wilson turned to Manny, silent, assessing Wilson’s sudden change in demeanor. Wilson blinked.

  “We’ll leave you—and your attitude—as soon as we have the information we need on Degas.”

  Wilson turned away and walked to his desk. “Here’s the information you need.” He thrust a slip of paper into Manny’s hand. “The date I hired Carson. His duties. Is there anything else, Agent Tanno?”