Two Medicine (34 page)

“
She was beaten to death,
and I couldn’t even go to her fucking funeral.” I reached forward
into the console and grabbed his pack of Marlboros and pulled out a
cigarette. Ronnie took no notice. I lit one and breathed the vapor
deep, through my entire body it seemed, like it was a life-saving
gas that could finally kill something bad inside.

“
Maybe it doesn’t make any
sense… but I got to find out who did it to her,” I said as I
breathed out the smoke.

I looked out the passenger
window and Ronnie turned up the music. Neither of us said a word
the rest of the trip.

We eventually got
to the diner
,
called “The Sunrise,” and parked out front. We
walked in and were greeted by a long counter where customers could
sit, and there were a few tables near the walls as well. The place
was old, outdated, with old fridges and freezers and desert display
cases – but I liked the classic and retro feel of the place. The
afternoon sun poured in through the big window in front and created
a nice glow.

We sat at a table near the
door and looked over two laminated plastic menus that were shoved
between a catsup bottle and mustard jar. An older woman was
stocking things behind the counter, whose job it was to run the
register as guests were leaving, it looked to me. A pretty girl
probably in her twenties came over with two glasses of water and
set them down. She had soft brown hair, falling in wavy streams,
lit by the sun that clipped the side of her head as she stood in
front of us. She had most of her hair pulled back with a leather
string, and she had very large brown eyes that held the light. A
thin figure was hidden by a t-shirt and jeans – no waitress
uniforms for The Sunrise, apparently.

“
Hey Ronnie and company,”
she said, giving us a casual smile. “What can I get
you?”

Ronnie looked up at her.
“Sky! Well I’ll be damned…” He smiled broadly at her, but she
regarded him with a strained smile.

She turned to me. “And you
must be Will.”

“
Yeah,”
I said. “Are you the
Sky
that knows Clayton?” Ronnie looked at the two of
us in turn as we spoke.

“
Know him?” she asked,
with an amused expression. “I live with him, so yea I’d say
so.”

“
Sky’s Clayton’s
girlfriend,” Ronnie said.

Sky studied me for a
moment. “Clayton told me you’ve been asking about Alia.”

I nodded slightly.

“
What was she to you?” Sky
asked.

“
What do you mean?” I
said, caught off guard by her direct manner with me.

Sky folded her arms,
hugging the two menus she was going to drop on the table for us.
Ronnie sipped his coffee and kept watching us both.

“
I mean
what I just said, what
was
she to you?”

I couldn’t read the
expression on Sky’s face for any clues as to what she was getting
at, or to whose side she was on – Clayton’s or mine – but it seemed
she didn’t trust me for some reason, or that she was genuinely
confused about me, one or the other. Of course, I considered, she
may just be seeing me as some city boy tourist who had a fling with
a local Indian and then went on clinging to the memory of that
fling after the girl’s grisly death...

“She was what I was
looking for,” I said, staring back at Sky.

As if that was a right
answer, Sky reached down and placed a menu in front of Ronnie and
I, and said, “Listen, you come by our place tonight, Will, for
dinner. I want some time with you.”

Ronnie looked up at her as
she said this, and then at me again.

“
You know where we live?”
She asked.

“Yea,” I said, reaching
down to feel the crumpled post card that Clayton had scrawled on in
my pocket.
I got an invite from your drug
dealer boyfriend.
“But,” I said,
hesitating, “is Clayton gonna play nice?”

“Don’t worry about him,”
she said. “He’s harmless. He’s not the one you should worry
about.”

As she walked away to
place the orders Ronnie and I gave her, Ronnie swore under his
breath. “You are gonna get yourself is a shitload of trouble,
Chiefy. You just gonna show up at his place and walk in? Jake lives
there too you know…”

Jake – a variable I had
not really considered. He had this mysterious quality to me – a
shadowy presence in my mind that I had not figured out in any
specific terms yet.

I shrugged, trying to
present an image of carelessness but probably not succeeding. “Sky
found Alia in the woods, Thunderbird told me – it was the only
thing helpful he
did
tell me. And Clayton dated her – she
lived
there. So his place was the
center of her world, a hub of her last days. I want to be there and
see it.” I thought about walking into that house and what I may
encounter. “Or maybe I am just going crazy.”

“I think so,” Ronnie
nodded said, nodding dolefully.

After we
ate
,
I had Ronnie
drive me over to the address that I found for “Gary and Susan.” I
told him that he owed me one favor for the free breakfast I had
provided him, and I promised to not involve him in any more
“bullshit” as he put it, after one more lecture from him about
“minding my own business.”

When we got to the address
we saw that it was an empty, abandoned house – I wasn’t very
surprised. Lots of houses were empty in Browning. And, anyway,
nobody would have stuck around after something like that had
happened – after “Gary” had done his work. Alia’s foster dad being
charged with child molestation – it was too small a town. There was
no “For Sale” sign in the yard, but you could tell that nobody was
in the little white ranch house. The grass and weeds were grown
high in the front and side yards, the dark windows didn’t have
blinds or curtains in them, and there was just emptiness about the
place that was distinctive.

Ronnie sat watching me
sourly as I stood on the street next to the weedy driveway, just
looking around. Across the street was a run-down old house with a
small front porch; on it I saw a hugely fat woman sitting in an
old, metal rocking chair. She sat there smoking, watching us, and
had a small TV on the porch on a stand set in front of her. A black
cat sat near her on the porch, watching me as well.

I walked over to the
porch. The woman didn’t shift her gaze, but also didn’t seem
surprised at the fact that I was walking up to her
house.

“
Hi,” I said.

“
Hi,” she said back, in a
husky voice. She reached for her ashtray and flicked out the
ash.

“
I was looking for the
people that may have lived in that house over there,” I said,
pointing a thumb behind me.

Her eyes shifted past me
to the house, and then back at me. “You lookin’ for Alia?” she
asked, with a sideways grin showing around her fat, doughy
jowls.

“
No. I was looking for her
foster parents actually, Gary and Susan?”

She wrinkled up her brow.
“Hell, they ain’t lived there for two years. What you want with
them?” She took a long drag from her cigarette.

I looked back at the
house. “… just looking for them. Sorry to bother you.”

As I turned and stared to go, she said, “Did
you know Alia?”

I stopped and looked back at her. “Yes.”

She reached down to ash
her cigarette again. “Do you know she’s dead?”

“
Yes.”

She looked past me at the
house again. “If you know Gary and Susan you know what happened
there, right?”

“
Yes,” I said again, now
watching her closely.

“
I moved in here right
before he got arrested; it was big news in town here of course... A
high school teacher, foster parent, such a respected man…” She took
a big drag from her cigarette. “Alia must have been ten, eleven
then.”

She smiled. “I remember my
first day here, after my son had moved in my stuff. I was out here
on the porch, trying to hang a plant, and here comes this cute
little black-haired girl, pony-tails swinging, coming over like she
owned the place.”

She chuckled at the
memory, and her big, flowery gown heaved a bit. “She came up and
asked me if I needed help moving in, and said if I wanted to I
could come over for dinner with them.”

She looked over at the
house again, and her face became grim. “She was probably looking
for help... Tryin’ to get some other adult over there.”

She shook her head slowly.
“I didn’t trust that bastard Gary the first moment I saw him, and
he had a sneaky, dirty look to him. But the whole town thought he
was a saint.” She looked down at the black cat beside her. “But I
knew something was up at that house.”

The big lady let out a big
sign, then took another drag at the cigarette. “I wish I coulda
helped her, goddammit I do. I shoulda run over Gary in my car. Alia
was a real sweet girl, you know. She left pretty soon after that,
but while she was here, whenever I saw her, she’d waive and smile.
Went out and bought me cigarettes and pop sometimes
too.”

I tried picturing Alia as
a little girl, innocent, before the shaming of that house. “Did you
keep in touch with her? Did you know her this last
year?”

She shook her head and
looked out over her yard. “No. She moved more into town and I never
saw her again, except a couple of times just around. I don’t get
out much.” She regarded me again. “So why
are
you here exactly?”

I sighed and shook my head
and ran a hand though my hair. “I was hoping to find out what
happened to her.”

“
You’re not from
Browning.” She looked at me, studying me a bit. “Where are you
from?”

“
Two Medicine.”

“
Ha!” she snorted. “Then
you don’t know anything about this here place.” She snubbed her
cigarette out. “Where you from before that?”

“
Georgia.”

She gave another “Ha!” to
that, and then said, “If you were friends, you know she wanted
nothing to do with that bastard over there. She never came around
here.”

I looked back at the house
and I couldn’t blame her. I thanked the woman and started walking
towards Ronnie’s car.

“
Come by again sometime if
you want,” she called out to me as I walked. “We don’t get any
visitors out here.”

Twenty-Eight

After Ronnie and I drove back to Two Med I
immediately borrowed his car again, giving him thirty bucks for gas
to avoid any protest, and drove off towards Clayton’s address. I
rolled the driver’s window down and let the evening breeze blow
through the car.

I settled back in the driver’s seat and I
thought about what I had been doing and saying the last few days. I
wondered if I was losing track of things, wasting time, and if and
when I was going to “make things worse” as Ronnie warned. I didn’t
feel worse though; I actually felt more a peace, especially at
times that I was talking to someone about her death, like I was
getting closer to something that would solve it all in my head.

I thought about Alia’s
life some more as I drove – her small, reduced life of just
surviving and escaping. I tried to piece together the parts of her
world I had gathered, her foster families, the tribe, the
reservation, Thunderbird, the diner, Clayton and Sky, visiting the
store, then me. Me at the cash register, riding in the canoe,
sitting on my bed, listening to me sing with a big grin on her
face. I tried to picture me and the store in her mind, with her
eyes, how she saw it. It was too foreign though, I couldn’t see the
world like her. I didn’t grow up in this desolate place on the
reservation.

I picture for the
hundredth time her lifeless body trampled, bloody, battered in the
dirt, although I had still never seen it. I wondered what Greg’s
stolen photos actually showed. I tried to imagine her last moments,
of… what? Fear? Terror? Pain? I hoped so greatly that she was
somehow spared the pain. I shut that idea out of my mind
immediately because it stung to think about, too painful for me to
consider. Imagine a loved-one being tortured…

I reached down to Ronnie’s
pack of Marlboros and got one out, lighting it and tossing the
lighter back into the ashtray like he did. I needed to stop smoking
soon or I’d never stop, I thought. I switched on Ronnie’s stereo
and let the songs wash over my mind and a cover my thoughts – cloud
over my worries as I drove through the evening sunset to meet
Clayton Red Claw and God knows what else.

Clayton’s house
was
a small one-story,
little box at the end of a street, not far from town. I had yet to
see a large house in Browning, in fact – every building seemed
small, old, forgotten. Houses were usually one-story ranch homes,
but mobile homes and trailers were just as common as houses.
I drove up to the house, checked the address on my
postcard with the number on the mailbox, and parked.

I noticed music coming
from the main room as I walked up to the door, and it sounded like
Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride.” I rang the doorbell and after a
minute Sky came to the door. She was dressed in a very small top
and jean shorts, which showed off her lithe, tan legs that ended in
flip flops. It was the same thing Alia had worn. Tonight, Sky had
her straight hair done up in a bun with chop sticks shoved into the
mass of dark hair to keep it up.