Eagle, Kathleen

Roy
Blue Sky had heard the owl's warning call for three nights straight. He would
not have stepped outside his house after midnight on the fourth night if it
hadn't been for Crybaby, who had gotten himself locked out of the yard again.
With a sad, whimpering howl, the dog begged to be let in. Roy flipped the
switch for the yard light. Nothing happened. He kept forgetting the damn thing
was burned out.

"Quit
your whining, now. Where were you when I called before?" The chain-link
gate squeaked on its hinges. The dog skulked past, brushing against Roy's
jeans. "Damn, you smell like you rolled in something dead. Good thing you
stayed away while that woman was here. You come around a woman smellin' like
that, I'll pretend I don't know you."

But
since it was dark and the woman was gone and it didn't matter how Crybaby
smelled now, Roy leaned down to ruffle the black-and-white shepherd's stinky
fur.

Then
he noticed something else out of place.

"Who
left that gate open? Did you do that, you stinkin' old mutt?"

He
was sure he'd hooked the latch on the pasture gate after he'd shown his two
flashy paints off to his visitor. The horses had gotten out on the road by now.
They couldn't resist an open gate.

He
glimpsed a flicker of white up the road before it disappeared below the rise.
The dog whined and wagged his whole butt, looking for more petting.

"What
did you do, stand there and watch them walk away?" Roy closed the gate to
the yard and headed down the rutted approach toward the highway, dog at his
heels.

It
was a black-velvet Dakota night, and the two-lane county road was not well
traveled, even less so since the casino had been built on the Bad River cutoff,
twenty miles south. But the night was never silent in the summertime. The tall
grass housed night-song creatures, and the whispering cottonwoods gave perch to
the owl, whose call struck old ears as an ominous thing.

Roy
wasn't thinking about the owl as he walked, but about his visitor and how
pretty she was for a fair-skinned
wasicu
woman. This was a thought he
would not voice, not even to the dog, so he kept up his grumbling as if he'd
turned on a recording. "You're supposed to be a stock dog, you know. Your
father before you was a damn good stock dog. You quit whinin' and start usin'
your instincts, you'll see it's in your blood."

The
dog was spoiled, of course. Spoiled from the time he was a pup, and Roy had
nobody to blame but himself. He'd spoiled his dogs the way he'd spoiled his
sons, by not expecting a whole lot. He hardly saw Reese anymore, and Carter
wouldn't have much to do with him since he'd called his son's employers
"just another pack of thieving gangsters" at a tribal council
meeting.

It
had to be said. Wasn't anything personal. Carter was always telling Roy he had
to start thinking like a businessman if he was going to lead the Bad River
Sioux into the twenty-first century, but officially calling the Ten Star Casino
Management Company mobsters was straight-tongue business. Nothing personal.
Personally, he liked some of those guys. White guys, most of them, but you'd
have to be white to be able to come up with the money it took to get a casino
going. They were friendly enough, and they'd given him some nice gifts. They
gave a lot of people nice gifts. But the casinos weren't bringing in the money
they should, and nobody could tell Roy any different. He knew damn well there
were some shady dealings going on somewhere.

"Hey!
Get over here, mutt." The dog was slicing through the ditch grass, getting
ahead of the game, but he turned tail when Roy clapped hand to thigh. "You
stick by me until we can see them from the hill. We'll pull a sneak-up on 'em.
You rush in and spoil it now, I'll be eatin' dog soup tomorrow."

The
dog ducked back and got behind him. Roy laughed. Crybaby was no dummy. The
woman had made a big fuss over the mutt, called him pretty puppy, old as he
was. Old as Roy was, she could have had him wagging his tail, too, had she
called him pretty. Pretty smart for an old buzzard, pretty funny, pretty spry,
pretty anything. She was the kind of a woman who made a man think about what
tricks he still might have left in him to impress her with, just to get one of
those devoted-daughter kind of smiles. Storytelling was about all he could come
up with, and she liked his stories. Stories about the old days always pleased
young white women.

She
was a dealer down at Pair-a-Dice City, the casino his younger son managed.
Carter hadn't hired her himself, but the boy sure turned on the old Blue Sky
charm full blast whenever he got near her. That bothered Roy a little because
the woman had been around before, years ago. She'd been Reese's girl for a
while, so it didn't seem quite right, Carter's behavior. It was no good,
brothers trying to wear each other's old shoes. Somebody was sure to feel a
pinch. His sons could act tough and independent, but underneath it all, they
both were touchy over matters of the heart, each in his own way.

"There,
see?" They'd topped the hill alongside the road and spotted their quarry.
"Grazing the right-of-way, look-in' for a chance to play chicken with some
trucker." Roy could hear one coming, or feel it maybe, even before the
headlights came into play. "This one goes by, we'll cross over and get
around them. Then you'll stay on that side, and I'll come back to this side.
Got that? Walk 'em home easy. Like cake, like pie."

The
expression made him smile. He'd said it to the woman when he'd shown her how to
play Using Hoofs, demonstrating how easy it was to spear a string of deer foot
bones on a wooden pin on the first try—"like cake, like pie." He'd
shown her the old game before he told her one of his stories about gambling,
about how the Lakota had been gamblers long before there were any casinos,
before any of them had seen a deck of cards. She'd wanted to try her hand at
the game right away, and he knew he had to get her into it first, before he
could get her into the story. She was that kind of a woman. The do-it-herself
kind. She'd gotten the hang of it pretty quickly. She had good hands. Dealer's
hands.

Woman's
hands. Deft and delicate. Watching those hands find just the right grip on the
fat end of the stick, the way she tested the feel and the balance, made a man
wish and wonder and remember while he watched. Universal, eternal woman's
hands. Necessary hands. Pretty hands. Her name was Helen, and she was quick and
lively and fun to be around. And she had something on her mind, something she
wanted Roy to know. She hadn't told him what it was, and he didn't think she
would, not just out-and-out. He wondered whether it would still be weighing on
her next time he saw her. He wondered how forthright she really wished she
could be.

If
it was about her job, he knew she wasn't supposed to tell him anything, but she
didn't have to. She'd been a teacher before, worked for the Bureau of Indian
Affairs. Not too many teachers took up dealing blackjack. He figured her for
the one who had been sent to investigate. Who else could she be? How clever
they were to send a woman. Roy himself had filed the complaint with the
gambling commission. He suspected some kind of cheating, big cheating, but he
didn't know who was involved or how. Indirectly he had sent for her. He didn't
want her to tell him anything, just to do her job.

"You
think she's a plant?" he asked the dog as he eyed the grass beyond the
blacktop. "She smells like one, don't she? Stay here, now, and don't let
those horses cross the road.
Ssst. Hiya."

Roy
smiled against the dark and trotted back across the highway. He was trying to figure
out what sort of plant the woman smelled like. Must have been some garden
variety, the kind he didn't know too much about. Reese would know. Reese was a
city boy now, and he probably knew plenty about the smell of garden flowers on
a woman's skin. Once the boy had started playing basketball on television,
seemed like there was no shortage of women hanging around him. No wife, but
plenty of women.

Carter,
on the other hand, had been married three times, twice to the same woman. Roy
felt bad for his two grandchildren. They were pretty confused. Some fathers had
a way of doing that to their kids, and Roy himself had been one of them.
Thinking about it touched off a vague, all-over ache in him.
For their own
good
was so easy to say these days. A hundred years earlier he'd have made
a good father, but in this century he was a flop.

A
flip-flop. Got started later than most, which was probably why he hadn't been
much of a breeder. No staying power. Finally they'd managed to get Rose, who
had been her mother's special flower until Reese had come along. Roy hadn't
seen Rose in a while. She lived in Oregon, never came home anymore. Reese was
next, and then came Carter, and then... ah, that bone-deep ache again. Then
he'd given Carter away, and later, years later, he'd taken him back again. No
wonder the boy had two faces. And Reese, well, Roy had shortchanged Reese, pure
and simple.

But
his boys were men now, and there was little he could do to help or harm them.
He figured he had one more chance to do right in this life, and that chance had
begun to take shape with his reelection to the council. Some people were
already saying they'd like to see him run for chairman next time around. Maybe
he would, but with age, he had gained the wisdom to take one go-round at a time.

"That's
the beauty of it, ain't it, you ol' whiner? The reward for living this long.
Stay back, now." He was herding the two horses along the right-of-way
while the dog guarded the flank from the opposite side of the road. The mare
tried to make a break for it, but the dog yapped as he moved into position to
head her off. "That's right, you talk to them. They got a lot to learn
yet."