The Work of Wolves (6 page)

"I don't know. They didn't drown any villages here, I guess."

"What do you mean, drown villages?"

"You been to Lake Oahe?"

"My family took me there. It is the biggest earth dam in the world."

"Why do you think those walleyes get so big there? My uncle says it's because they're living in Indian houses. There used to be Indian towns along the Missouri. They're under water now. They just dammed the Missouri up and told people to move. But hey, the walleye fishing improved. My uncle says everyone else is feasting on Indian, so why not give the fish a chance?"

Willi's moonfaced attentiveness encouraged Earl to go on. "Once they got to building dams, they couldn't stop," he said. "First they dammed all the rivers, and when they ran out of rivers they went to little creeks. Like this one, you know? Norm—my uncle—calls it a bad case of addictive behavior. He thinks the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation need to attend Dam Builders Anonymous."

At a powwow Earl had once talked to a tourist from Florida who told Earl he'd come to South Dakota to go scuba diving. Earl had thought the man was joking until he described going into Oahe, sinking beneath the waters into silence. Then he saw, opening through the murk below, the rooftops of houses, gray rectangles, silt-coated, strange in the dimming light. He felt he was entering another world where time had ceased, suspending the forms of things. He descended fifty feet toward those roofs: a world cold, austere, and lifeless. He stood, finally, on a rooftop and looked into a murky street and then dropped off and floated down, and when he hit the bottom dirt clouded up in a slow, roiling storm. An open door awaited him, the gaping interior of a house. He wanted to walk through those abandoned houses, watch the bubbles of his breath rise to the ceilings, roll upward on the slightest slopes. He wanted to touch the furniture abandoned there, to sit in rocking chairs, sway them against the water's resistance. He wanted to pretend to smoke a pipe or read a paper. But he couldn't enter the house. He stood in the doorway and felt a power forbidding him. He looked down the gray, receding street, and fear entered him. As if here, even with air, he could drown.

When Earl was twelve, Norm had taken him to the top of the dam here at Lostman's Lake. Earl pointed out the
NO TRESPASSING
sign to his uncle, but Norm strode past it. "Two things, nephew," he said. "The first is, your mother isn't happy you're with me at all, so you're already stepping outside the lines. And the second is, that's a government sign."

Norm wiped sweat from his eyes and walked along the top of the berm until he got to the very center. He stared across the twenty acres of stilled water, hooking his thumbs in his pants pockets. Earl, standing next to him, did the same.

"They've sure got that creek shut down, hey?" Norm asked.

Earl nodded, unsure how to respond.

"But I guess we knew that without strutting up here to have a look. Just thought you ought to see it."

Norm walked away, and as he passed it he grabbed the
NO TRESPASSING
sign in his large hands. His shoulders bunched beneath his T-shirt, and with a quick jerk he twisted the sign clear around so that the post looked screwed into the ground and the
NO TRESPASSING BEYOND THIS POINT
faced inward and seemed to be speaking to people born on top of the dam, keeping them off the hills beyond. The post torsioned back and forth when Norm let go of it, and the sign made curious, catlike crying noises, sheet metal under stress—whing, whing, whing—as Norm strode away, long black braid swinging on his back.

No one had ever bothered to straighten the sign. Earl saw it shaking off moonlight, scattering it into bits and pieces, as he and Willi walked past the dam.
Like a lost code for wind,
he thought,
some equation no one understands.
He'd trespassed onto the face of the dam that day with Norm, and when Norm twisted the sign to face the other way, it was like he'd trespassed off again. Alien everywhere he went.

A BARBWIRE FENCE
demarcated the end of public land and the beginning of Magnus Yarborough's spread. Hung over every fourth fence post were old tires with
PRIVATE PROPERTY: KEEP OUT
hand-painted on them in white. Earl used one of the tires to steady himself as he climbed over the fence. Willi followed, teetering as he swung his leg over, the steel post shaking under his weight. He jumped down and turned around.

"Where are the horses?"

This was an adventure for him, a new experience.

"Loud as you are, probably in the next county by now," Earl said.

But as they topped the rise above the lake, the horses came into view, standing in a depression invisible from the road. The animals stood inside a second barbwire enclosure fifty yards away—unmoving, and so close together they might have been a single, three-headed animal carved from rock. A small plume of steam rose behind them, and the sound of trickling water reached Earl's ears.

"Take it slow," Earl said.

They approached carefully, the animals alert and nervous. One of them left the group and moved to the far side of the small enclosure, then returned, bobbing its head. Dust rose from the grass, turned silver in the moonlight, a low, metallic, shining cloud. The animals glowed within it.

"See?" Earl pointed to a white diamond on the forehead of one of the horses. "That's what I saw from up there."

He looked back at Tower Hill. He could see the faint glow of the fire illuminating the treetops and above the trees the red lights snapping on and off high in the stars.

The horses backed away as Willi and Earl approached—not so much fearful as careful, waiting to see what they would do. Earl saw the source of steam and waternoise. A small artesian spring trickled out of the ground, collecting in a small hole hastily dug near the fence, its excess heat dissipating in clouds of vapor. Earl walked around the pen to where the water pooled. Willi followed. The horses circled the other way.

Earl held his hand over the water, felt the steam against it, then dipped his fingers quickly in. The water was hot but not unbearable. He pulled his hand out, shook the water off.

"This is kind of odd, you know?" he said.

"How is it odd?"

Earl looked around as Willi stooped and felt the water. The pen was maybe thirty yards across, perfectly square, made of wire so new the points of the barbs glittered. The only land Earl could see in any direction was the top of Tower Hill, which meant the pen was invisible from anywhere but that point, sunk behind the rolling rises around it.

"I don't know," Earl said. "Just odd, you know? A brand new fence. No rust. The fence posts are all straight yet. Why would anyone build a pen like this and stick three horses in it? With just that to drink?"

Willi pulled his hand out of the water, shook it, wiped it on his pants. The wire gleamed softly in six parallel lines, and the white tops of the steel fence posts punctuated the darkness in neat and regular array, anchored at the corners by wooden posts smelling of creosote. Earl watched Willi pick a tuft of dark hair off one of the barbs, rub it between his fingers, let it go. The wind caught it, carried it into the darkness.

His own words had made Earl vaguely uneasy. "I ought to be going home," he said.

"Why is that horse standing funny?"

The horses had settled down. The veil of dust they'd raised from the grass had dropped, and their scent came more distinctly, like old wool soaked in vinegar. Earl had turned to leave, but he turned back now and looked where Willi pointed. The horse with the white diamond on its forehead stood with its back left leg curled up, putting no weight on it.

"Likes to stand that way, I guess," Earl said.

Willi walked around the fence toward the horses. As he did they moved slowly away, the diamond-marked horse holding its rear hoof off the ground.

"Look how it walks, Earl."

"It limps a little. I got homework to do, you know?"

"Is not it odd that horse is, what did you say, limping?"

There was curiosity and excitement in Willi's voice. Earl thought of what his mother would say if she knew he'd gone to the party on Tower Hill, even if he hadn't taken a drink. And if he got caught out here. It was true, they were just looking at the horses, but the place made him feel he shouldn't be here. Made him feel that if they were caught here, bad things would happen. He tried to shake it off with a little internal narrative.
The Careful Indian doesn't like what he sees. Notice how he shies away from the fence, while his companion, the Wannabe Indian, approaches the horses.
But it didn't work Earl couldn't rid himself of the feeling the place gave him.

"Horses limp for a lot of reasons," he said.

"I think this is very odd, Earl."

"But you probably think a lot of things are odd out here, you know? Anything can make a horse limp. Maybe this pen is to help it heal. So it won't run."

"I don't think so, Earl. I think there is something wrong here."

A stubborn tone had crept into Willi's voice. Earl realized he was in an argument. He'd once heard a Belgian man who had come to live on the reservation challenge the way a naming ceremony was performed. The man insisted he'd studied the ceremony, and it had been done incorrectly. No one could convince him that the way it was done in real life was more correct than the way it was written down. But the Belgian held captive the men he argued with. They felt the need to convince him he was wrong, and as long as they felt that need, he controlled them. Earl didn't want to give Willi that power. This fence and the horses penned within it might make perfect sense, as Earl had just said, but he wasn't going to argue the point.

"All right," he said. "If you say it's odd, it's odd. I'm going home."

He turned, leaving Willi and the horses behind. When he crested the rise, Lostman's Lake appeared below him, a brilliant, ragged oval of water filled with the moon. Against that lighted surface, the silhouette of a bat suddenly appeared below Earl, its wings folded. An instant, and it was gone. It startled Earl. Then he heard the sound of wings, a soft clacking in the air coming from all over, an unintelligible conversation murmurous and strange, and he realized the bats were all around him, that he was walking through a storm of them, invisible in the darkness. From nowhere, air rushed against his ear, and he heard the suck of wings inches away. Earl imagined the bat tumbling upward over his head, its small, tight face following the myriad reflections of its own voice. A white moth floated by, then suddenly disappeared, but Earl could not see the bat that had swallowed it.

W
ILLI WATCHED EARL'S HEAD
, shoulders, and torso rise out of the darkness of the hill to be silhouetted against the background light of the southern stars. Then he watched Earl's shape sink down again. He looked again at the horses, and he knew that Earl was wrong. Horses might limp for many reasons, and there might be a reason to pen them up, but Willi knew that
odd
was not the right word for what he saw before him. That required a darker word that conveyed the foreboding Willi felt, the sense that his heart was made of some elastic material that had been thinned and stretched and was leaking downward through his chest. It was the same feeling he'd had when he first visited his grandmother. That, too, had first seemed merely odd.

The white diamond on the horse's forehead bobbed up and down. In the darkness that white diamond seemed almost a bird. A white bird flying up and down within a cage.

He remembered his grandmother's pale white hand, the finger she raised from the arm of her chair. "Look around you," she said. "Cages are everywhere."

"No," he told her. "You're wrong."

But here he stood, having crossed land and water both, before a cage. He could almost hear his grandmother's voice.
You expected something different?

"
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO GO
?" his father had asked him.

Willi nodded.

"A year is a long time."

"I know."

"What do you hope for?"

His father was speaking like the history teacher he was, as if Willi were one of his students writing a research paper and his father were quizzing him on what he expected to find. Distant. Reserved. Aloof. Examining his student's reasoning.

Willi pinched the leather on the arm of the chair where he sat, saw the leather bunch between his thumb and finger. He released it, pinched again. "I don't know," he said.

"You must have something?"

"I want to know about the Lakota people."

"What about them?"

"Their rituals. Their ceremonies. Their language."

"Why do you want to know these things?"

Willi felt resentful. Did there have to be a reason? "We've made such a mess of the world," he finally said.

He looked out the big window behind his father at the city of Koblenz. Over the lower edge of the window, he could just make out a partial curve of the Rhine, moving gray and swift. The smoke stack of a boat labored from one edge of the window to the other, working upriver. On the walking path along the far bank, a pedestrian appeared in a gap between trees, indistinct, male or female, coat open and flapping, then disappeared again.

"You think the Indians have an older knowledge," Willi's father said.

Willi pinched the chair again, watching his fingertips turn white as the blood was pressed from them. "Maybe," he said, defensively. "At least they haven't destroyed things."

"You have your books. Your
Indianer
club. Its powwows. That's not enough?"

"That's still us. Germans pretending to be Indians for a while."

"Us," Willi's father repeated. He gazed at Willi. Willi met his eyes for a few moments but couldn't hold them and looked out the window again, now just sky and trees and edge-of-river. Finally his father spoke again: "If you wish to go, I have no objection, Willi. I just want to be sure you're sure. You may find, though, that people are the same everywhere. That there is not the difference you think between us and them."