Death Along the Spirit Road (4 page)

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Authors: C. M. Wendelboe

BOOK: Death Along the Spirit Road
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“You ever want to leave? See what’s over the next hill?”
“Once,” Willie answered. “Once I wanted to be an FBI agent. So I went to college in Vermillion right out of high school. Belted out my criminal justice requirements. I even filled out a federal application. But whenever I’d come back during break, I’d always hear dead elders calling me, like they wanted me to stick around. You ever get that feeling, that some lost soul was tugging at your arm, forcing you to return?”
“Not really,” Manny lied.
“Well, I’d get those feelings, like something digging at me, something was holding me tight and wouldn’t let me go.”
Since crossing onto the reservation yesterday, something had tugged at Manny, too. He couldn’t identify it, and the gnawing persisted.
“So now I’m enrolled at the Oglala Lakota College. Someday I’ll be an investigator with the tribe.”
“So you don’t intend leaving the reservation like I did? Accept a cushy federal position with the bureau? Maybe the Marshals. There’s not many Indians in federal law enforcement. You could name your ticket.”
Willie blushed, and Manny lightly touched his arm. “Don’t feel bad, I’ve heard it all before. Uncle Tomahawk. Apple Indian—Red on the outside and White on the inside. I’ve been called everything from a stinking bureaucrat to an out-and-out traitor to the Red race.”
“I didn’t mean …”
“Of course you didn’t,” Manny answered, and changed the subject. “How long have you been on the force?”
“Be a year next month.” A grin lit Willie’s face. Manny had Willie’s enthusiasm for law enforcement—once. “With the college credits I already have, and some online work, I’ll have my bachelor’s within a year. Even though I’m the newbie, college will help when an investigator slot opens up.”
As long as Lumpy isn’t the one deciding.
There wasn’t a campus on Pine Ridge back then, in Manny’s college days as a tribal cop, and he had to drive to classes at Black Hills State in Spearfish twice a week. Lumpy had ridiculed him, taunted him, told him good cops didn’t need college. Even though Lumpy still had no education, his intelligence, combined with his ruthlessness and ability to play reservation politics, had allowed him to float to the top. Like a turd in a toilet.
“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 Jason 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.

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