Eagle, Kathleen (11 page)

Anybody
who knew him, she thought. She'd had no doubt that he was going to play
basketball some way, somehow, somewhere. She'd known he was completely absorbed
in the dream. She understood now that they had both gotten away. Parts of them
had. For a time.

She
watched the dealer she'd been observing make another unwarranted payoff to the
same player. The dealer would probably be out of a job tomorrow. If he wasn't,
Helen would find out why.

"Do
you catch a lot of muckers when you view the tapes?" she asked.

"Muckers?"
Carter laughed, as though the threat of a handmucker was pretty remote. A
handmucker had to be able to palm cards, a rare skill. "We get some
cheaters, but they're not usually very accomplished. We caught a dealer running
a scam last winter."

"I
remember you telling me about that one." She smiled innocently. "The
tapes they showed when I took my dealers' classes were amazing. Some of the
tricks people use would be hard to catch."

"You
don't have to worry too much. The eye in the sky sees all." He nodded
toward the nearest security camera.

"But
the eye in the sky doesn't report it until someone views the tapes, and that
someone would have to watch those tedious things pretty carefully."

He
started ticking off the list of "someones" on his right hand.
"You've got your tribal people, you've got Ten Star, you've got Security,
you've got me and my assistants. You've always got somebody looking at those
tapes." He paused. "Why? Did you spot something fishy?"

"No,
but I'm watching. I'd love to see a good card cheat in action." She
smiled. "I think it would be fun to catch one."

"You
wanna land a big fish, Helen?" He gave the Blue Sky wink. "Go after
the one that got away."

Reese
wasn't sure how the ceremony
was supposed to be done, so he decided to
make it up as he went along,
the Indian way.

The
Indian Way could be a solemn way or a twinkle-in-the-eye way, depending on
which Indian's way you were talking about. With Roy Blue Sky it was hard to
tell sometimes, so Reese decided to improvise a little. If he did something
wrong, he would feel it. The eyes in the night would see, and the hand in the
night would turn him, the Indian Way. Or Roy Blue Sky's way, the way that
haunted him now.

He
made his bed for the night in the bower his father had built behind the house
at least thirty years ago. It was a rough, round, open-sided structure that was
restored and newly thatched with leafy cottonwood branches every spring. The
derisive term "squaw cooler" had been ditched somewhere along the
way—during the seventies, probably—in favor of calling the structure a shade
during the day and a cooler at night. Sleeping in the cooler had been a summer
treat, especially on hot nights.

Everybody
had had one when Reese was a kid. Old people loved to cool their heels there
when the afternoons turned boxy houses into ovens. Kids loved to sleep there
after the adults had gone inside for the night. And Reese was about to perform
the final ceremony there. It felt right to do it this way, and so it must have
been. The old way was to burn the lodge, and that was still done on rare
occasions. But when he'd thought about torching the whole house, it felt wrong,
and the feeling, right or wrong, was all he had to go by.

The
feeling was right when he gathered the sage, made the fire pit, assembled his
father's personal belongings, the black-and-white shepherd dogging his every
step. He liked having someone there when he felt like saying something, and he
liked how the dog cocked his head as though he was hanging on every little
word. Saying "Let's go find some matches" had Crybaby's ears on high
alert. Maybe he was confusing
matches
with
meat.
"You hang
with me tonight, and I'll make it worth your while."

And
the dog obliged, even though, unlike Reese of late, he had a night life to tend
to. There were rustlings in the brush to be investigated, shifting shadows in
the pasture to be checked, a springing toad to be nosed. Reese sat cross-legged
on his pallet of canvas tarp, sleeping bags, and blankets, toying with the
matches. He lit one just to watch it flare up, just to smell the sulfur.
Fascinating. He'd accidentally started a prairie fire once because he'd been
fascinated by the flash and the smell of matches. The volunteer firefighters
had told his father about the matches they'd found. "Damn deer
hunters," Roy had said. Reese remembered hiding behind the bedroom door,
listening, terrified. When the men left, he'd emerged to face his father, who
examined his small, sooty hands, touched his singed hair. All he said was,
"You get caught setting fires, they'll take you away. Then you'll be
eating squash soup and sleeping on a cold, hard floor somewhere."

Reese
hated squash, always had, and he wasn't sure he could actually sleep on the
ground anymore. But he was going to try. He watched the sun set behind the hill
where his father had died.

"Roy
Blue Sky's own Last Stand Hill," he told the dog. "Was that how it
was, him taking the high ground up there? It's picture-perfect this time of
day, isn't it? I ought to come back more often, just to look at the sky."

The
tall grass sketching its silhouette on the pink-and-blue sky reminded him of a
tattered little storybook someone had read to him so long ago that his mind's
ear could not identify the voice. Long before he'd set any fires, before he'd
seen a basketball, before he'd known what squash was. But he remembered
repeating the words "Great-Grandpa Bunny Bunny" after the reader and
touching the beautiful Easter egg colors that streaked across the sky on the
page. His father could not have been the reader. His father's stories were
recited, not read from a book, and they never mentioned bunnies. Rabbits,
maybe, and there were always grandmothers and grandfathers, but no
bunnies.

"Where
did Grandpa Bunny Bunny come from, then?" he asked aloud, and then he
laughed. "Must have hopped in off the Bunny Trail and left those painted
eggs in the church yard, huh? And the sky, did he paint this sky like the story
said?" He half expected an answer, and when he didn't get one, he pressed
further. "Or is that your job now? Western sunsets by Roy Blue Sky."

He
heard deep, distant laughter on the wind. It made him smile.

"What?
Not a fitting legacy, old man? How should I picture you, then?" The wind
carried the laughter away. He waited for a new image, but nothing came to mind.
"I want to know where you are. Do you wander the hills and draws at night
looking for offerings left by the hunters? If I throw some meat out there, am I
feeding you or the dog?"

Crybaby
yawned noisily and stretched out on his side.

The
first stars were beginning to appear in the evening sky. Pale spirits these
were, maybe old searchers who had to get started early. Or maybe they were new
to the heavens, the eager young souls running ahead of the pack. That was what
Reese would be when he got there, one of the runners. No aimless wandering for
the Big Gun. He'd be a streaker. A shooting star.

Run,
then, Big Man. Run as far and as fast and as high as you can.

Ah,
yes, the familiar dare.

"Yeah,
I ran. I flew. Hell, I
soared.
Is that what you're doing now?"
Whatever the old man was doing, he'd left something behind. Reese could feel
it. "Am I keeping you? Do my thoughts trap you here? If I say your name,
will that bring you near?"

I
am as near as blood. Better than anyone, you have
always known
this, whether you name me, claim me, or blame me. I am your father. I live in
you.

"Yeah,
right," Reese muttered as he arranged the oak and dry cottonwood the way
he'd been taught when he was a boy.
But by whom?
"None of the
above."

He
was simply doing his damn duty, and thinking about the old man felt like part
of that. He didn't want to go overboard with any kind of seance. He wanted to
know where his father had gone, was all, whether he was in a good place. He
wanted him to be in a good place, not wandering around worrying about
unfinished...

"What
unfinished business?"

Damn,
who was he talking to?

The
dog had gotten bored and kicked back for a nap. Reese was keeping himself
company now. Roy Blue Sky's Last Stand Hill was just a black slump on a purple
horizon now, and soon even the tint would be gone. Soon he would light the
fire.

"I
tend to think that if you can't rest, it doesn't have anything to do with what
happened on that hill," he said as he rubbed another wooden match between
his thumb and forefinger. "There's only the question of who did this to
you, and even if we find the answer, that won't change anything. We know that.

"And
so I give away your pickup and your rifles and burn your shirts and pants, and
then what? Then you leave me alone?" No answer. Nothing but the rattle of
dry leaves on top of the bower behind him. "If it's done the way you want
it done, then that's it. You let me go." He squatted, struck the match on
his thumbnail, blinked at the flame. "And, yeah, then I'm left
alone."

The
dry tinder at the base of his sturdy tipi of firewood flashed and popped, like
the camera his Auntie Lil was always dragging out on holidays. It had been a
long time since he'd thought about that damn camera or all the coaxing it had
taken to get him into the picture with his smaller, cuter cousins. "Bean
Pole," they'd called him then, and Auntie Lil had told him not to scrunch
down but to stand up tall, like his Uncle Silo, who had been his father's buddy
long before they'd become brothers-in-law.

But
Roy Blue Sky was the last guy Silo would have picked to marry his beautiful
baby sister. Roy was too old for her, too wild, too poor, too damn ugly. He'd
already been married once, and Bernadette was barely out of high school. Auntie
Lil loved to tell the story about the time Roy had won himself a bride by
losing a fight with Silo. She had given Reese the photograph that went with the
story, the one she'd taken when Bernadette had disappeared for two days and
come back married. " 'He looked so pitiful,' your mother said, 'all busted
up and still swearing he'd keep on fighting until I said yes.' " That was
the closest his parents had come to posing for a wedding picture—the tall,
slender beauty with hair down to her waist and the triumphant groom nearly
twice her age, standing beside her with a fat lip and a shiner.

Reese
had missed seeing Auntie Lil at the funeral. He'd heard she was having some
health problems, and he needed to check in on her while he was here. He hadn't
been too good about such things recently, but going through the old man's
belongings had stirred up some sentimental notions in him about being
duty-bound.

How
the hell could a guy get sentimental about
obligations'?

He
hoped the fire pit was far enough from the cooler. The flames were licking the
sides of the firewood tipi, and if the wind shifted, he could end up with more
bonfire than he was bargaining for.

And
then they 'd take him away. Not to a cold floor, but to a cold, white,
antiseptic room, where he'd lie on a table and listen to people talking about
him in hushed tones. "No way should a guy in this condition be playing
basketball for a living."

No
way should he have given it up. If they hadn't taken him away that time, if
they hadn't hooked him up to those machines and eavesdropped on the private,
personal workings of his body, maybe he would have gone down again. Down and
out in a blaze of glory. Or maybe not. It would have been a weighty gamble, the
only kind worth taking.

He
fed a pair of jeans to the flaming cone too quickly, creating an indignant
cloud of smoke.
Break it down,
he thought. A step at a time, a piece at
a time. The Indian way took time. Took it but did not measure it or begrudge its
passing. He tossed a piece of sage into the flames. The pungent scent filled
his passages, cleared his head. A pair of white boxers burst into flames, then
another sprig of sage.

No
rush, take your time; set it up, aim, and shoot.

"I
remember this shirt."

He
recognized the scrolling on the yoke and the small three-corner tear in the
back tail. It was the Western shirt his father had made him wear to the spring
dance he'd dreaded attending in the eighth grade. But he'd gone because there was
a girl he'd wanted to please, and that afternoon he'd asked for something new
and nice to wear.

He
knew damn well there was no money for new clothes at the end of the month, the
end of a long, hard winter, the end of what had turned out to be his father's
very last binge. But he'd asked anyway, partly to make the old man sorry to
have to turn him down.

His
father had found the shirt in the back of a drawer, said he'd worn it only once
or twice because he'd wanted to save it. Save it for what? Reese had wondered
silently. It was an old-fashioned, ugly thing. But there was something about
the way the old man had unfolded it and held it up for his inspection that kept
him from saying anything. There was some rare, wistful thing in his father's
eyes that made him put the damn shirt on and leave the house in it, even though
the sleeves didn't quite reach his wrist bones.

He'd
gotten a little wild himself that night. He'd been too shy to ask the girl to
dance, which was probably a good thing, since he'd never learned any of those
moves, so he'd claimed a seat at the top of the bleachers and watched his
classmates fumble with this foolish, foreign courtship ritual. "White
dancing," it was called, and the eighth-grade version was mostly girls
dancing with girls, shaking their skinny hips for the guys in the bleachers.
What a contrast, he thought now, with "Indian dancing," for which it
was the men who wore the colorful plumage and strutted their stuff in the
middle of the circle. In the old days the women had performed a more sedate
step on the perimeter, the better to view and evaluate and select.

Maybe
that was what the basketball court was for. But if that were the case, why
hadn't he been selected? Hadn't he shone pretty damn bright in that arena, even
without any plumage? He'd outdone them all, outdone himself on many occasions.

Outdid,
outplayed, and outgrew, didn't you, Blue?

Not
that night, as he recalled. The night of his eighth-grade spring dance, he'd
ended up in a beat-up Chevy with a bunch of guys and a bottle of Everclear,
altogether hell-bent on feeling good and doing bad. They'd smashed some glass
just to hear the noise. They'd broken into an old storage shed behind the
community center only because Reese had been tall enough to boost Titus Hawk
through the only window. Later Reese had caught his father's shirt on some
barbed wire while making his escape from the three-hundred-pound cop who'd
nearly nabbed them.

The
next day the old man had said nothing about Reese's all-too-apparent hangover.
Without a word, Roy had accepted the torn shirt and disappeared into his room
with it. Reese had never seen him wear it, figured he'd discarded it for the
tear and maybe the shame when his son confessed to his part in what became
known as the Spring Dance Rampage. It had taken Reese all summer to work off
his share of the damages, and even then the old man had had to kick in with
part of the money. And
even then,
he'd not said a word.