Mean Spirit, page 33
“Go get Moses Graycloud,” Jess Gold said to the Indian deputy, Willis.
A few of the boys sat down on the ground.
It was almost evening by the time Willis returned with Moses. Along with them walked Okeena. She was silent and guarded. The sheriff was relieved to see Moses. “Come talk some sense into your wife’s hard head.”
“What’s going on?” Moses asked, as if the deputy had not already told him.
“Bats. She won’t let us exterminate them.” The sheriff handed him a megaphone. He looked at Okeena. “Who’s she?”
“A family friend.” Moses took the megaphone, held it at his mouth, and looked up toward the cave. “Belle!” he called. But there was no answer. “Belle,” he cried out again. “Can you hear me? I’m coming up.” He didn’t bother to wait for her answer. He began to climb up the hill toward the stony entrance.
“Be careful. She’s really dangerous this time,” Jess said as he stood aside to let Moses pass.
It wasn’t long until they heard Belle and Moses talking from inside the cave. They listened for the descent of the old couple, but suddenly a gunshot cracked open the air. The men hit the dirt and Jess blurted out, “She shot him!” But then, the voice of Moses spoke out through the megaphone. “I’m staying here,” he said. “If anyone comes up here, I’ll shoot.”
“They’re all going crazy,” said Jess. He looked toward where Okeena had been. She was gone.
Only a moment later, a throng of Hill Indians loomed up out of the land itself.
“Where did they come from?” asked Jess Gold. “I’ve never seen any of them before.”
His deputy pointed up toward the red hills.
Gold seemed bewildered. “You mean they come from Kansas?” Then he saw Joe Billy and Martha among them. He hardly recognized Martha. And the hog priest was there. The Red Hawk fellow from South Dakota. And Horse. He didn’t see Jim Josh who had taken off his shoes and was massaging his pale feet.
He watched them go toward the cave.
Belle was prepared to resist arrest. She stood at attention while the lawkeepers looked around the land in search of another way to enter the cave.
Finally, Jess Gold sent one of the boys down to town to call in reinforcements from the state police.
One man laughed, “We’re going to call out the militia for a fight over bats?”
“Tell them it’s a potentially dangerous situation.” Jess Gold turned to where he’d last seen the deputy. “Willis!” he called sharply. “Where’s Willis?” he asked one of the boys, his eyes scanning every face.
The boy pointed up to the cave.
* * *
Dr. Levee had heard about the standoff and reached Sorrow Cave at the same time as the state police. By then it was almost dark.
With the arrival of the reinforcements, even the air had seemed to relax. The men felt more comfortable. They squatted and lighted cigarettes and talked about work and money and the valuable bats.
Belle looked proud and arrogant as she sat at the mouth of the cave in the graying light, a gun in her hand.
Levee glimpsed Michael Horse. The old man was standing at the entrance to the cave, talking to Belle. Levee was confused. He’d thought Horse was dead.
The sheriff talked to the officer from the state, then called up to the cave, “Belle. We’re going to do as you ask and leave.”
“Leave?’ asked one of them. “Leave? You ought to have your head examined.” But the sheriff ignored the protests, even when the men began to move about and talk to one another about what a bad decision it was to leave the Indians in the cave. “You’re setting a precedent here,” said one of them. “Now they’ll resist everything.”
“Yeah,” said another one. “We’re within the law here.”
Jess Gold formed a megaphone with his hands and yelled up the hill, “We’ll leave. But we’re coming back. We want you out of there by tomorrow.”
Up at the cave, the people heard the men depart. “Did we win?” asked one of them.
But others weren’t so sure. “He’s lying,” Belle said. She could feel them there, but nevertheless, that night inside the cave, after the old women tried to help the bats that were injured and the men placed the bodies of dead bats outside the cave, the people laughed and talked. They were light-spirited. They drank from gourds of water the Hill People had carried along with them. Up in the sky was a full moon. “It looks like a gold coin,” someone said.
“Don’t say that. It will probably get stolen.”
But they were relieved at the way things had turned out. The deputy, Willis, had defected, if only for a little while. He sat with them, happy to be with so many of his own people again. He smiled contentedly.
The priest was happy that night in so much company. The people had grown to love him and his face was a little rosy. Now and then he would talk to someone in his philosophical manner. He turned once to James Josh and said, “I think, I think we are the earth. Do you know that?”
Josh smiled at the man. “Yes, we are,” he said. He looked into the priest’s eyes.
“Who is watching the fire?” Belle asked Horse.
“Do you remember I told you that Ona Neck would be up there someday? Well, she is.”
“Is she grumbling about it?”
“She is.” Horse was proud of Belle, but he said nothing more.
That night, for the first time, Okeena noticed the black meteorite that hung from a leather thong around Belle’s neck. “Oh, look,” she said. “Star-Looking’s meteorite.”
Several people went over for a closer look.
“Usually I keep it hidden. But tonight I thought the stars would like to see it.” Belle sat back. She tried, but failed to get comfortable on the stone floor. “You know, I wouldn’t give up this night for a featherbed.” She squirmed. She felt the ghosts of children in the cave, but she didn’t say it. She said, “I don’t know when I’ve felt better.”
That night children slept on the hard stone floor while the adults talked happily.
By the next morning, except for the dead and injured, the bats were gone. Their disappearance confirmed Horse’s belief that the cave extended even farther back, deeper than he already knew, into the ground. He thought the bats must have left through the hole in the wall. He began to feel the walls of the cave. “There are other rooms behind here, I’m sure of it. I’ve already found another entrance.” He pulled at the stone by the hole. A piece of rock crumbled off and clattered to rest near his feet.
Then he saw a line of army ants in the cave. They were disappearing at the floor of the back wall. Horse grew excited. “See? This is it. This is the way to the rest of the cave.” He further explored the wall with his fingers, then knelt down and pulled at the stone by the floor.
“Could it go back much farther?” Joe Billy wondered aloud as he knelt beside Horse and put the blade of his knife between two stones.
“Yes, anything is possible,” said Father Dunne, and he, too, bent to help them.
After prying around, they found a small opening, with its stones perfectly disguised in a rough corner of the dry cave. The opening was narrow, barely big enough to allow a man to crawl through, and on the other side, there was another spot of light than the one Horse had already seen, just enough to give him hope.
The men bent and squeezed in through the opening. The ceiling was low. Belle watched the soles of Joe Billy’s shoes vanish through the corner. Stace Red Hawk went next, and the older men followed, and then one by one all the people entered the back of the cave and were gone except for Belle and Moses who remained behind in order to stand guard.
Behind the wall was a network of caverns, but only a few were accessible. Joe Billy and Stace discovered the first of the larger chambers. Inside it were the mummified remains of a human being. Joe Billy leaned over the mummy. It smelled dusty and its teeth were exposed. His father had told him the stories of the old ones, here before their own time, but Joe had always thought Sam Billy meant they were spirit people from myth or legend.
Jim Josh followed the younger men into the chamber. He carried his shoes in his hands, but he worried about stepping on a scorpion.
Joe Billy touched and examined several little pots that had been placed around the body. They were perfect vessels, red clay, round, and open. Each of them had been painted with a spiral design. In one of the pots were kernels of an ancient corn and when Josh saw the seeds, he lost all interest in scorpions and reached out toward the pot. “Let me see those,” he said. He picked up one of the kernels. He reached into his pocket and took out the jeweler’s glass he carried there, looked through the curved glass, and studied the pale yellow kernels carefully, then without being seen, he slipped a kernel into his pocket.
From behind him, the priest spoke, “Sorrow runs deeper than we ever knew or could have guessed.” But just then Joe Billy found a ceremonial room and found inside it a large item wrapped in buckskin. He pulled the buckskin aside just enough to see the familiar brown fur of one of the bears who had, in earlier times, populated the region. He pressed the leather back into place.
On the wall there were paintings of bats. Red bats. In a hallway there were blue fish, and more bats with red, opened wings, and the paintings of black buffalo. It was a sacred world they entered and everyone became silent and heard a distant dripping of water in the caveways, the echoing sounds, the breathing of earth.
“Don’t touch,” said one of the mothers to her children.
In the caves, they were intruders. Invading an older world, the silent places of the ancient ones, all of them knew that they would not be back, that they would seal this world away forever when they left, so they looked around and let the vision of it come to rest inside them and then they followed Stace Red Hawk on through the passageway until they squinted at the sunlight, blinked, and saw the great expanse of land in the distance, the Blue River running right beneath them, with steam rising off the water in the growing warmth of day.
Belle yelled through the opening. “They are coming back. Fix the hole. I hear them talking.”
They knew they weren’t safe from the law. Horse leaned over to pick up a stone. “Can you hold them off?” he asked Belle.
She whispered loudly, “You can get out?”
“Yes, over by the river. I found another opening. We have to climb down, but I think we can make it.”
Horse and some of the younger men piled rocks back over the entrance. From their side, Belle and Moses smoothed out the stones, spread soft dust across them. Belle was worried. “If you look close, you can see it. It’s not so good.”
Horse filled the bullet hole with a small stone from the other side.
At that moment, the sheriff yelled into the mouth of the cave. “Your last chance!” but neither Belle nor Moses replied and both were hastily smoothing out the wall when the sheriff threw in a tear gas bomb.
A visible wall of oily smoke went up in the cave. Belle and Moses both began to cough. They put their hands up to their weeping eyes, and walked out of Sorrow Cave, wheezing and coughing and rubbing their eyes.
“Where are the others?” asked the sheriff.
“What others?” Belle’s face was burning and red. “We are alone here.” She bent over and wiped her swollen eyes on the hem of her skirt. It only made things worse.
The lawmen and their new posse looked inside the cave. They shone a light, but the gas was thick and they did not enter far enough to see the narrow opening. They saw only that no one else was there.
“They got past us,” said the state officer.
When the gas cleared up, the boys went inside the cave to look for the remaining bats. “They scared them away. They lost us all our money,” said one, but he stopped to pick up the carcasses just outside the entrance.
While they were writing up the reports, Jim Josh walked up from behind the sheriff. “Morning,” he said. He looked sly.
Jess Gold looked at him sharply. “How’d you get out of that cave?”
Josh’s face went blank. “Cave?”
Jess glared in the old man’s eyes. “So that’s the way it’s going to be.” He looked from Josh to Belle to Moses, and spoke over his shoulder to a deputy. “Take the Grayclouds in and book them, will you?”
The deputy nodded. Belle and Moses got into the police car without a fuss. They were still wiping their eyes and lips when Stace strolled up. From the car, Belle saw him stop to talk with Levee. Then the deputy drove them to jail.
“Where the hell did you come from?” asked Levee.
“I’ve been in the hills.” He pointed to the barren-looking place above them.
“Ballard said you went home to South Dakota.”
Stace stopped short. “What?” Then he said to Levee, “He read my letter.”
Levee eyed his friend. “What letter?”
“How else would Ballard know where I’d gone? I sent a letter to my sister.”
Levee took this in for a few seconds.
“He’s in on this, Levee. I know it.” Stace’s voice began to rise.
“Ballard wouldn’t read your letter.” Then he reconsidered. “Maybe. Maybe he would. He probably doesn’t trust you either.”
“No. I’m sure of it. Ballard knows something he isn’t telling.”
“No wonder everyone thinks you’ve cracked up.”
The Hill People had followed Stace and Josh out from the other opening to the cave. No one saw them walking up the hill. As they walked, the heat waves shimmered up above the land, wavered for a little while, then settled back down, and the people were gone.
* * *
Later that morning, at the jail, Belle heard Willis, the half-breed deputy, talking with the sheriff.
“Where were you?” Jess Gold asked.
Willis sounded nervous. “I tried to get in the cave last night,” he lied. “They caught me though. They wouldn’t let me leave.”
Belle laughed to herself. She covered her mouth with her hand as if she might be caught grinning.
“You mean they held you against your will? Two old people?”
Belle listened for his answer and heard only a faint “Yes.” She was afraid the young man would lose his job.
The sheriff looked at Willis. “How did you get away?”
“I snuck out this morning.”
“How many people were there?”
Willis looked stumped. He thought for a moment, then he remembered that Belle and Moses were probably the only ones there when the law arrived. “Just the Grayclouds,” he said.
“You mean two old folks held you prisoner?”
“She had a gun.”
Jess Gold shook his head back and forth. He was thinking that he was sick of Indians and there was not a one of them in the whole bunch that wasn’t rotten in some way or other. Even Willis, half white, was lying.
Later that day, Louise Graycloud came to bail out her parents. She said to her father, “I can understand Mama being here, but you?”
And when the sheriff returned with Belle, from the women’s cells, Louise said, “Why can’t you act normal?”
“This is normal,” said Belle. But something on the wall caught her attention and she had a strange look in her eyes. She didn’t turn toward the sheriff for fear he would read her mind. She knew the blood had drained away from her face. But she saw it. On the new yellow geologists map was an oil pool blacked in on her land, beside the spring where the seepage had materialized. She thought fast, turned toward Louise. “Where did you get the money to pay our fines?”
“I borrowed it from Josh.” Then she looked haughtily at her mother. “You’re speaking to me now?”
That silenced Belle. Then she put her arms around Louise and kissed her and held her tight. Her eyes welled with tears.
“Mama, I am proud of you,” Louise said. She buried her face in her mother’s soft chest and heard the woman’s heart beating beneath the heavy meteorite that had fallen all the way, burning, from the stars.
* * *
Deputy Willis had noticed the strange expression on Belle Graycloud’s face and after she left the jail, he stood staring at the same map. “God, she’s got oil out there on her allotment land.”
Gold went to stand in front of the map beside Willis. “That map is just conjecture. An oilman had it drawn up. It’s a speculation of what might be in the area. I’m glad you mentioned it. We should take it down in case someone gets ideas about Belle’s land.” He took it off the wall and put it in his desk.
Willis thought out loud, “I’ve been thinking about all these crimes. We’re all sure, us Indians, I mean, that Hale is the killer.”
“Who knows? He’s always been real good to people here. Still, it could be anyone. Your guess is as good as mine.”
* * *
Later that day, Jess Gold walked across town to the Blue Store. He was stiff-looking, Palmer thought when he saw him, and his jaw was tight. Palmer smiled at the man. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“Well, we’ve got a problem,” Gold said as his eyes took in the store.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Just today I heard my deputy talking on the phone.” But he interrupted himself and changed the subject. “Where do you keep your safe?”
Palmer looked worried. “In back,” he said. He gestured toward the door at the far end of the store. “Why?”
“Well, it’s Willis. He’s in trouble. Gambling or something. I overheard him tell someone he was going to rob you tonight.”
“Rob me?” Palmer grew anxious.
“Yeah, I’m sorry to say it. He’s been a good one. One of my best, up to now.”
He went on. “But there’s more to it than that. I want to stay here with you tonight and catch him red-handed.”
“Sure, whatever I can do to help out.”
“Maybe you could stay here, just sit with me, maybe back me up. We probably won’t need it, but I’d feel better. He’s armed.”
“I see.”
“Why don’t you stay out here near the register and I’ll hide in back. We can catch him by surprise.”
A few of the boys sat down on the ground.
It was almost evening by the time Willis returned with Moses. Along with them walked Okeena. She was silent and guarded. The sheriff was relieved to see Moses. “Come talk some sense into your wife’s hard head.”
“What’s going on?” Moses asked, as if the deputy had not already told him.
“Bats. She won’t let us exterminate them.” The sheriff handed him a megaphone. He looked at Okeena. “Who’s she?”
“A family friend.” Moses took the megaphone, held it at his mouth, and looked up toward the cave. “Belle!” he called. But there was no answer. “Belle,” he cried out again. “Can you hear me? I’m coming up.” He didn’t bother to wait for her answer. He began to climb up the hill toward the stony entrance.
“Be careful. She’s really dangerous this time,” Jess said as he stood aside to let Moses pass.
It wasn’t long until they heard Belle and Moses talking from inside the cave. They listened for the descent of the old couple, but suddenly a gunshot cracked open the air. The men hit the dirt and Jess blurted out, “She shot him!” But then, the voice of Moses spoke out through the megaphone. “I’m staying here,” he said. “If anyone comes up here, I’ll shoot.”
“They’re all going crazy,” said Jess. He looked toward where Okeena had been. She was gone.
Only a moment later, a throng of Hill Indians loomed up out of the land itself.
“Where did they come from?” asked Jess Gold. “I’ve never seen any of them before.”
His deputy pointed up toward the red hills.
Gold seemed bewildered. “You mean they come from Kansas?” Then he saw Joe Billy and Martha among them. He hardly recognized Martha. And the hog priest was there. The Red Hawk fellow from South Dakota. And Horse. He didn’t see Jim Josh who had taken off his shoes and was massaging his pale feet.
He watched them go toward the cave.
Belle was prepared to resist arrest. She stood at attention while the lawkeepers looked around the land in search of another way to enter the cave.
Finally, Jess Gold sent one of the boys down to town to call in reinforcements from the state police.
One man laughed, “We’re going to call out the militia for a fight over bats?”
“Tell them it’s a potentially dangerous situation.” Jess Gold turned to where he’d last seen the deputy. “Willis!” he called sharply. “Where’s Willis?” he asked one of the boys, his eyes scanning every face.
The boy pointed up to the cave.
* * *
Dr. Levee had heard about the standoff and reached Sorrow Cave at the same time as the state police. By then it was almost dark.
With the arrival of the reinforcements, even the air had seemed to relax. The men felt more comfortable. They squatted and lighted cigarettes and talked about work and money and the valuable bats.
Belle looked proud and arrogant as she sat at the mouth of the cave in the graying light, a gun in her hand.
Levee glimpsed Michael Horse. The old man was standing at the entrance to the cave, talking to Belle. Levee was confused. He’d thought Horse was dead.
The sheriff talked to the officer from the state, then called up to the cave, “Belle. We’re going to do as you ask and leave.”
“Leave?’ asked one of them. “Leave? You ought to have your head examined.” But the sheriff ignored the protests, even when the men began to move about and talk to one another about what a bad decision it was to leave the Indians in the cave. “You’re setting a precedent here,” said one of them. “Now they’ll resist everything.”
“Yeah,” said another one. “We’re within the law here.”
Jess Gold formed a megaphone with his hands and yelled up the hill, “We’ll leave. But we’re coming back. We want you out of there by tomorrow.”
Up at the cave, the people heard the men depart. “Did we win?” asked one of them.
But others weren’t so sure. “He’s lying,” Belle said. She could feel them there, but nevertheless, that night inside the cave, after the old women tried to help the bats that were injured and the men placed the bodies of dead bats outside the cave, the people laughed and talked. They were light-spirited. They drank from gourds of water the Hill People had carried along with them. Up in the sky was a full moon. “It looks like a gold coin,” someone said.
“Don’t say that. It will probably get stolen.”
But they were relieved at the way things had turned out. The deputy, Willis, had defected, if only for a little while. He sat with them, happy to be with so many of his own people again. He smiled contentedly.
The priest was happy that night in so much company. The people had grown to love him and his face was a little rosy. Now and then he would talk to someone in his philosophical manner. He turned once to James Josh and said, “I think, I think we are the earth. Do you know that?”
Josh smiled at the man. “Yes, we are,” he said. He looked into the priest’s eyes.
“Who is watching the fire?” Belle asked Horse.
“Do you remember I told you that Ona Neck would be up there someday? Well, she is.”
“Is she grumbling about it?”
“She is.” Horse was proud of Belle, but he said nothing more.
That night, for the first time, Okeena noticed the black meteorite that hung from a leather thong around Belle’s neck. “Oh, look,” she said. “Star-Looking’s meteorite.”
Several people went over for a closer look.
“Usually I keep it hidden. But tonight I thought the stars would like to see it.” Belle sat back. She tried, but failed to get comfortable on the stone floor. “You know, I wouldn’t give up this night for a featherbed.” She squirmed. She felt the ghosts of children in the cave, but she didn’t say it. She said, “I don’t know when I’ve felt better.”
That night children slept on the hard stone floor while the adults talked happily.
By the next morning, except for the dead and injured, the bats were gone. Their disappearance confirmed Horse’s belief that the cave extended even farther back, deeper than he already knew, into the ground. He thought the bats must have left through the hole in the wall. He began to feel the walls of the cave. “There are other rooms behind here, I’m sure of it. I’ve already found another entrance.” He pulled at the stone by the hole. A piece of rock crumbled off and clattered to rest near his feet.
Then he saw a line of army ants in the cave. They were disappearing at the floor of the back wall. Horse grew excited. “See? This is it. This is the way to the rest of the cave.” He further explored the wall with his fingers, then knelt down and pulled at the stone by the floor.
“Could it go back much farther?” Joe Billy wondered aloud as he knelt beside Horse and put the blade of his knife between two stones.
“Yes, anything is possible,” said Father Dunne, and he, too, bent to help them.
After prying around, they found a small opening, with its stones perfectly disguised in a rough corner of the dry cave. The opening was narrow, barely big enough to allow a man to crawl through, and on the other side, there was another spot of light than the one Horse had already seen, just enough to give him hope.
The men bent and squeezed in through the opening. The ceiling was low. Belle watched the soles of Joe Billy’s shoes vanish through the corner. Stace Red Hawk went next, and the older men followed, and then one by one all the people entered the back of the cave and were gone except for Belle and Moses who remained behind in order to stand guard.
Behind the wall was a network of caverns, but only a few were accessible. Joe Billy and Stace discovered the first of the larger chambers. Inside it were the mummified remains of a human being. Joe Billy leaned over the mummy. It smelled dusty and its teeth were exposed. His father had told him the stories of the old ones, here before their own time, but Joe had always thought Sam Billy meant they were spirit people from myth or legend.
Jim Josh followed the younger men into the chamber. He carried his shoes in his hands, but he worried about stepping on a scorpion.
Joe Billy touched and examined several little pots that had been placed around the body. They were perfect vessels, red clay, round, and open. Each of them had been painted with a spiral design. In one of the pots were kernels of an ancient corn and when Josh saw the seeds, he lost all interest in scorpions and reached out toward the pot. “Let me see those,” he said. He picked up one of the kernels. He reached into his pocket and took out the jeweler’s glass he carried there, looked through the curved glass, and studied the pale yellow kernels carefully, then without being seen, he slipped a kernel into his pocket.
From behind him, the priest spoke, “Sorrow runs deeper than we ever knew or could have guessed.” But just then Joe Billy found a ceremonial room and found inside it a large item wrapped in buckskin. He pulled the buckskin aside just enough to see the familiar brown fur of one of the bears who had, in earlier times, populated the region. He pressed the leather back into place.
On the wall there were paintings of bats. Red bats. In a hallway there were blue fish, and more bats with red, opened wings, and the paintings of black buffalo. It was a sacred world they entered and everyone became silent and heard a distant dripping of water in the caveways, the echoing sounds, the breathing of earth.
“Don’t touch,” said one of the mothers to her children.
In the caves, they were intruders. Invading an older world, the silent places of the ancient ones, all of them knew that they would not be back, that they would seal this world away forever when they left, so they looked around and let the vision of it come to rest inside them and then they followed Stace Red Hawk on through the passageway until they squinted at the sunlight, blinked, and saw the great expanse of land in the distance, the Blue River running right beneath them, with steam rising off the water in the growing warmth of day.
Belle yelled through the opening. “They are coming back. Fix the hole. I hear them talking.”
They knew they weren’t safe from the law. Horse leaned over to pick up a stone. “Can you hold them off?” he asked Belle.
She whispered loudly, “You can get out?”
“Yes, over by the river. I found another opening. We have to climb down, but I think we can make it.”
Horse and some of the younger men piled rocks back over the entrance. From their side, Belle and Moses smoothed out the stones, spread soft dust across them. Belle was worried. “If you look close, you can see it. It’s not so good.”
Horse filled the bullet hole with a small stone from the other side.
At that moment, the sheriff yelled into the mouth of the cave. “Your last chance!” but neither Belle nor Moses replied and both were hastily smoothing out the wall when the sheriff threw in a tear gas bomb.
A visible wall of oily smoke went up in the cave. Belle and Moses both began to cough. They put their hands up to their weeping eyes, and walked out of Sorrow Cave, wheezing and coughing and rubbing their eyes.
“Where are the others?” asked the sheriff.
“What others?” Belle’s face was burning and red. “We are alone here.” She bent over and wiped her swollen eyes on the hem of her skirt. It only made things worse.
The lawmen and their new posse looked inside the cave. They shone a light, but the gas was thick and they did not enter far enough to see the narrow opening. They saw only that no one else was there.
“They got past us,” said the state officer.
When the gas cleared up, the boys went inside the cave to look for the remaining bats. “They scared them away. They lost us all our money,” said one, but he stopped to pick up the carcasses just outside the entrance.
While they were writing up the reports, Jim Josh walked up from behind the sheriff. “Morning,” he said. He looked sly.
Jess Gold looked at him sharply. “How’d you get out of that cave?”
Josh’s face went blank. “Cave?”
Jess glared in the old man’s eyes. “So that’s the way it’s going to be.” He looked from Josh to Belle to Moses, and spoke over his shoulder to a deputy. “Take the Grayclouds in and book them, will you?”
The deputy nodded. Belle and Moses got into the police car without a fuss. They were still wiping their eyes and lips when Stace strolled up. From the car, Belle saw him stop to talk with Levee. Then the deputy drove them to jail.
“Where the hell did you come from?” asked Levee.
“I’ve been in the hills.” He pointed to the barren-looking place above them.
“Ballard said you went home to South Dakota.”
Stace stopped short. “What?” Then he said to Levee, “He read my letter.”
Levee eyed his friend. “What letter?”
“How else would Ballard know where I’d gone? I sent a letter to my sister.”
Levee took this in for a few seconds.
“He’s in on this, Levee. I know it.” Stace’s voice began to rise.
“Ballard wouldn’t read your letter.” Then he reconsidered. “Maybe. Maybe he would. He probably doesn’t trust you either.”
“No. I’m sure of it. Ballard knows something he isn’t telling.”
“No wonder everyone thinks you’ve cracked up.”
The Hill People had followed Stace and Josh out from the other opening to the cave. No one saw them walking up the hill. As they walked, the heat waves shimmered up above the land, wavered for a little while, then settled back down, and the people were gone.
* * *
Later that morning, at the jail, Belle heard Willis, the half-breed deputy, talking with the sheriff.
“Where were you?” Jess Gold asked.
Willis sounded nervous. “I tried to get in the cave last night,” he lied. “They caught me though. They wouldn’t let me leave.”
Belle laughed to herself. She covered her mouth with her hand as if she might be caught grinning.
“You mean they held you against your will? Two old people?”
Belle listened for his answer and heard only a faint “Yes.” She was afraid the young man would lose his job.
The sheriff looked at Willis. “How did you get away?”
“I snuck out this morning.”
“How many people were there?”
Willis looked stumped. He thought for a moment, then he remembered that Belle and Moses were probably the only ones there when the law arrived. “Just the Grayclouds,” he said.
“You mean two old folks held you prisoner?”
“She had a gun.”
Jess Gold shook his head back and forth. He was thinking that he was sick of Indians and there was not a one of them in the whole bunch that wasn’t rotten in some way or other. Even Willis, half white, was lying.
Later that day, Louise Graycloud came to bail out her parents. She said to her father, “I can understand Mama being here, but you?”
And when the sheriff returned with Belle, from the women’s cells, Louise said, “Why can’t you act normal?”
“This is normal,” said Belle. But something on the wall caught her attention and she had a strange look in her eyes. She didn’t turn toward the sheriff for fear he would read her mind. She knew the blood had drained away from her face. But she saw it. On the new yellow geologists map was an oil pool blacked in on her land, beside the spring where the seepage had materialized. She thought fast, turned toward Louise. “Where did you get the money to pay our fines?”
“I borrowed it from Josh.” Then she looked haughtily at her mother. “You’re speaking to me now?”
That silenced Belle. Then she put her arms around Louise and kissed her and held her tight. Her eyes welled with tears.
“Mama, I am proud of you,” Louise said. She buried her face in her mother’s soft chest and heard the woman’s heart beating beneath the heavy meteorite that had fallen all the way, burning, from the stars.
* * *
Deputy Willis had noticed the strange expression on Belle Graycloud’s face and after she left the jail, he stood staring at the same map. “God, she’s got oil out there on her allotment land.”
Gold went to stand in front of the map beside Willis. “That map is just conjecture. An oilman had it drawn up. It’s a speculation of what might be in the area. I’m glad you mentioned it. We should take it down in case someone gets ideas about Belle’s land.” He took it off the wall and put it in his desk.
Willis thought out loud, “I’ve been thinking about all these crimes. We’re all sure, us Indians, I mean, that Hale is the killer.”
“Who knows? He’s always been real good to people here. Still, it could be anyone. Your guess is as good as mine.”
* * *
Later that day, Jess Gold walked across town to the Blue Store. He was stiff-looking, Palmer thought when he saw him, and his jaw was tight. Palmer smiled at the man. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“Well, we’ve got a problem,” Gold said as his eyes took in the store.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Just today I heard my deputy talking on the phone.” But he interrupted himself and changed the subject. “Where do you keep your safe?”
Palmer looked worried. “In back,” he said. He gestured toward the door at the far end of the store. “Why?”
“Well, it’s Willis. He’s in trouble. Gambling or something. I overheard him tell someone he was going to rob you tonight.”
“Rob me?” Palmer grew anxious.
“Yeah, I’m sorry to say it. He’s been a good one. One of my best, up to now.”
He went on. “But there’s more to it than that. I want to stay here with you tonight and catch him red-handed.”
“Sure, whatever I can do to help out.”
“Maybe you could stay here, just sit with me, maybe back me up. We probably won’t need it, but I’d feel better. He’s armed.”
“I see.”
“Why don’t you stay out here near the register and I’ll hide in back. We can catch him by surprise.”
