Watershed, page 13
They all laughed and I found myself laughing softly with them.
“Where is Louise?” I asked.
“She’ll be here a little later,” Bisset said. He was sitting directly opposite me and was now lighting a cigarette with a wooden match. He shook the match out and it dropped on the paper in which his burger had been wrapped. “She says you helped her out in a big way.”
“Not really,” I said. “I just kept her from freezing to death out in the snow. That’s all.”
Matthew Crow Feather looked at me and laughed, nodding his head as if with approval.
“Do you know anything about the FBI agents who were killed up at Plata Mountain?” I asked.
“You cut right to it, don’t you?” Bisset said. He exhaled a cloud of blue smoke and scratched his chin with the same hand that held his cigarette. “What would you say if I told you the agents who were up there wanted to help us, wanted to give us some information that could help us out?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what I’d say. Is that in fact what you’re saying?”
“Louise didn’t shoot them,” Bisset said.
I pushed my half-eaten burger away and looked at the stack of dishes in the sink. “What’s it like to be a fugitive?” I asked.
He looked at me, then said, “Actually, I’m not wanted for anything.”
“Officially,” Leonard Hat added.
“Officially,” Bisset said, leaning back in his chair.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Why? For all I know, by now I am wanted for something.” His easy smiled faded, he leaned forward, and he asked me if I’d ever heard of an anthrax bomb.
“An anthrax bomb?” I asked. “You mean, like the disease cattle catch?”
Bisset nodded. “I’ll tell you a little story. In 1942, the British started trying to make a bomb that would eliminate livestock, soldiers, everybody. They used anthrax. They set one off on an island in Gruinard Bay over there in Scotland. The island is still contaminated. Nobody can go there. All the rabbits turned black. The United States government bought the bombs or took them or whatever. The army has been illegally storing anthrax bombs and other kinds of biochemical agents on the north end of the reservation.”
I didn’t believe what he was telling me, but I didn’t know why I didn’t believe him. The government was doing secret experiments, like the Tuskegee thing, all the time, and I realized that that was the scariest part of all, that in spite of knowledge of past transgressions, I still resisted belief in a new one, somehow believing that my country was somehow me, maybe. But it wasn’t my country.
“In underground tanks.”
Matthew Crow Feather groaned.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“We know.”
I looked at his eyes and I saw that he, at least, believed his story. I shook my head slowly. “If what you’re saying is true . . .” I stopped and pictured the terrain in my head. “It depends on where the stuff is. Any leaks would be carried by the groundwater to Silly Man Creek right into the Plata or down the Dog into the lake or simply into the aquifer. It’s all wells on the reservation.”
Tyrone Bisset was nodding.
Each and every cranial nerve is attached to some part of the surface of the brain, but these fibers also extend deep into the nucleus of the brain, the center of the gray matter The nerves emerge from the brain, pass through tubular prolongations in the dura mater and leave the skull through foramina at its base, on the way to their final destination.
James Reskin was the last person I expected to greet at the door of my place in Denver. It was about seven in the evening, a week or so after the new year, and I had been going over some aerial photographs spread out on the coffee table. He stepped into my apartment with a nervous, brisk stride, pacing back to the door once he was fully in, then bouncing over to the sofa and sitting with his legs apart, his elbows on his knees, his face in his gloved hands.
I stood at the door, which was still open, the knob of it still in my hand, staring at him, wondering how best to put “What the hell are you doing here?” but he spoke first.
“I heard you broke up with my little girl,” is what he said, lifting his face and looking at me.
I closed the door, but still stood by it.
He went on, “She called all upset, saying that you were a monster who couldn’t love anybody but yourself, but you’ve probably already heard all that. Anyway, good for you. You’re too good for her. She’ll drag you down into the pit and sewer with her and you’ll never climb out. So, I say, good for you.” He took a long, deliberate breath. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
I walked over to the chair beside him and sat on the edge of it. “It’s not?”
“No, Robert, I just want to talk.”
“Talk.”
“You know that I am an unhappy man.” There was no need for his waiting for a signal of agreement from me. “Isaiah 38:1 says, ‘Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live.’ Well, Robert, you’ve seen my house.”
I nodded.
“‘Thou shalt die and not live.’ How about that? What do you think?” He leaned forward and started to push around the photographs on the coffee table.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “What do you want to talk about?” His eyes were on the photos. I noticed his down-filled parka and I realized that I was warm without a sweater. “Would you like to take off your coat?”
“No, thank you. I’m still a little cold, in fact.” He looked at me with weak eyes.
“Did you just drive all the way from Santa Fe?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll make you some tea, okay? That’ll warm you up.” I walked over to the kitchen area and began to fill the kettle from the tap.
“You’ve seen my house, haven’t you?” he asked. “By house, you know I mean my family, my life.”
“I’ve seen it,” I said.
I switched on the burner with its familiar clicking until there was a flame and placed the kettle over it, then turned to see that Reskin was holding a pistol. He held it in his lap, rubbing his hands over it as if it were a smooth ball. Hesitantly, I walked back to Reskin and sat on the chair beside the sofa.
“This is a .32 caliber pistol,” he said. “It’s not a big gun. Do you think it will do the job?”
“What job would that be?”
“If I put the barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger, will this pistol kill me for sure?”
“You’re the doctor,” I said and I was wondering if I could get to the telephone without tipping him any further.
“Yeah, I’m the doctor. ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ Is that how that saying goes?”
“You’re full of sayings tonight,” I said and smiled stupidly at him. “Did you say it’s a .32? I’ve shot a .38 before, but never a .32. Would you mind if I took a look at it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Does your wife know where you are?”
“What the hell does she care? The heathen.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes for a second, then looked at me. “You believe in Jesus, don’t you?”
My instinct was to lie, but instead, I said, “No, I don’t.”
“So you’re a heathen as well,” he said.
“I’m afraid so.”
His eyes fell to the weapon in his lap. He shook his head. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil. His staff, blah, blah, blah.”
“You don’t really want to shoot yourself.”
“Yes, I pretty much do,” he said, calmly.
“To answer your earlier question—No, I don’t think a little pistol like that is a sure killer. You’ll more than likely fire the bullet just far enough into your brain to become a vegetable.”
“You think so?”
I nodded. “May I look at it more closely?” I asked.
He held it toward me for a closer look, but he didn’t intend to give it to me. As luck would have it, the whistle of the kettle startled him and he dropped the thing. I picked it up and stepped away toward the boiling water.
“Give it back,” he said, standing.
“Wait a second,” I said. I was over the sink now and unloading the pistol. “Let me get the tea and then we can talk and then I’ll give it back to you.”
“You promise?”
“I’m getting the tea.”
Reskin sat back down.
Those were anxious days, when my grandfather was in Atlanta testifying for Bunchy Cooke. Even my mother was worried about him. She was trying to keep busy by making me cookies and soup and asking me what were my favorite foods now that I was a teenager. An hour didn’t go by that I failed to think of Grandfather. I imagined him standing up like in the movies and the clerk asking him to put his hand on the Bible and swear, and him declining the opportunity by saying, “As much as I’d love to press my hand upon that book to ensure it stays shut, I will pass and take a civil oath.”
My mother had just set a plate of cookies on the coffee table and settled down with a book when she looked at me and said, “You’re concerned about your grandfather, aren’t you?”
I nodded. “What would you do?” I asked. “If somebody came here with a wound, would you help him?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Would you call the police?”
My mother studied my face and I knew she was trying to find an answer that was instructive, that would serve me later in life, so that if anything bad ever happened to me she could, at least, dissolve some guilt by the thought that she had tried to teach me better.
“Would you call the police?” I asked again.
Still she had no answer as she played with the corner of a page of the book in her lap.
“Neither would I,” I said.
12
Bisset looked at me from across the table and asked flat out, “How much money do you have?”
“On me?”
“No, all together, everything.”
“I’ve got some savings. A few thousand, I guess. Why?”
“May we have it?”
“No.”
And that was that. There didn’t seem to be any hard feelings or any second thinking about my response. My “no” was simply accepted. “How do you guys support yourselves on the run like this? If this is being on the run.”
“We used to get checks for our land,” John Hat said. “Good old Form 5-5525. How much land do we own, Leonard?”
“One-ninety,” Leonard said. He was drinking a beer now and peeling the label from the bottle.
“Yeah, the BIA used to collect the lease money from the white rancher who grazes his cattle there and send us a check four times a year. But now, since we’ve been in AIR, the checks don’t come. The rancher still grazes his cattle, but the checks don’t come. We still have the same post office box in Mobridge, but the checks don’t come.”
Bisset coughed and got up to fill a glass with water from the tap. “We get money by asking the way I just asked you. Sometimes, people just give us money. Sometimes. We work, but that’s hard because the FBIs come to the job and ask around, and then no more job.”
Louise entered through the back door with the man she had been with at the zoo. She smiled politely at me, but not in a way that suggested friendship. “You’ve met everyone?”
“Yes,” I said.
“This is Dicky Kills Enemy,” Louise introduced the man with her, not pausing as she moved to set down the small paper sack she was carrying on the counter.
I stood and shook his hand. Looking at his face, I recognized something in it. “Are you Hiram’s son?”
“Grandson.”
I could see the resemblance not so much to Hiram but to the uniformed man in the photograph on Hiram’s wall, the son killed by the Korean War.
“We didn’t shoot any FBIs,” Bisset said to me, turning us all back to why I had been chasing Louise.
“I believe you,” I said.
The phone rang and Leonard Hat picked up and listened. He put the receiver down. “Cops on the way.”
My head was swimming now as I found myself being hurried out and into a midseventies Ford sedan with Louise, Bisset, and the twins. Matthew, Carlotta, and the others piled into the van and we left the house with the lights on inside. I understood what was going on and I also comprehended the gravity of their situation, if not their complete story. It was painfully familiar to me, and for whatever reasons—sincere or stupidly romantic—I was sympathetic to these people. Bisset drove the Ford, its lifters knocking under the hood, and Louise sat in the back between me and John Hat. The car smelled of motor oil, gasoline, and fried food.
“Biochemical agents?” I said, the sound of it unreal in my head and mouth.
Louise looked at me. “We’re not sure. That’s what those FBIs were going to tell us. They said they had documentation.”
“So what were they, Indian sympathizers or something?” I adjusted my feet on the floor, which was cluttered with cans and loose papers. “I mean, how did they know about it?”
“We don’t know how they knew,” Bisset said. “The FBI men have been hanging around some of the rez’s forever, especially since we started mentioning stuff that wasn’t right. They help out the “apples” on the reservations. One of the FBIs who got killed was an Indian, the other one was black. They were supposedly trying to help us. That’s what they said they were doing. The Indian was from Florida, a Seminole.”
Hearing that made me think of Davies and how odd it was that she alone was investigating the case, especially given her predilection for alcohol. It all felt wrong, the FBI story, the story I was getting now. A light snow began to fall. I noticed the flakes as we waited for the stoplight at a busy intersection. People crossed the street in front of us; some tried to see through the windshield.
“Where are we heading?” I asked.
“We’re going to let you out pretty soon,” Bisset said, rolling down his window a little so he could flick the glowing ashes of his cigarette outside.
I turned to Louise. “Just tell me half of what you know. I’ll settle for that,” I said. I wanted to learn something before I was asked to get out of the car.
“You know all there is to know,” Bisset said, glancing at me through the rearview mirror. “But you can tell me something. Why did you lie to the FBI?”
“I don’t like the FBI,” I said quickly.
“Just like that,” Bisset said.
“Just like that.”
“Man doesn’t like the FBI,” John Hat said.
“You want to hear a funny thing?” Bisset said. “We don’t know that mountain very well. I mean, like, Dicky Kills Enemy, that’s his reservation, but he doesn’t even know the mountain. He’s essentially a city boy.”
“What are you saying?”
“He grew up mostly in Los Angeles. He doesn’t know the land, like where the canyons go and how to get from one place to another quickly without being seen and all that.”
“And that’s where I come in,” I said. “That’s why you came to the zoo.” I was looking down at Louise, but she didn’t look back.
“You don’t have money,” Bisset said.
I pushed Reskin’s unloaded pistol down into the front pocket of my trousers, which was very uncomfortable, and then took the tea over to him. I blew on mine and took a sip, but he just put his mug down on top of the photographs and leaned back into the sofa. He pinched the bridge of his nose again and seemed to sway a bit.
“Would you like me to call Karen?” I asked. “If you give me the number I can call your wife.”
“No.”
“I think I ought to call someone.”
He waved a hand at me as if he didn’t care what I did, then, becoming aware of his gloves, peeled them off and shook his hands as if they were going to sleep on him.
I got up and moved toward the phone, but stopped as I noticed the man’s eyes. They were bloodshot and weak, but why not?—he had just driven all the way from Santa Fe. Still, I knew there was something else—his pupils seemed dilated. I could feel my heart beginning to race.
“Dr. Reskin, did you do something?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you take something?”
He looked at me and I could see that he was all screwed up inside, that he couldn’t focus, that he was lost and scared, and his body was covered with the trembling I had so many times observed on his daughter.
“Aw, shit,” I said and in spite of his weak protest, I picked up the phone and dialed 911 and told the dispatcher that I thought my friend had just taken an overdose of some kind of medicine.
Reskin tried to stand, then fell across the sofa, muttering to himself. “Look at my house,” he said. “Look at my house. There is no order. Look at my house.”
I called Karen.
“Oh, Robert, Robert, I’m so glad it’s you. I’m sorry about everything,” Karen said.
“That’s not why I’m calling. It’s about your father.”
“Oh, him,” she said with disdain. “Well, what about him?”
“He’s here in my apartment.”
“He’s what?”
“He drove up from New Mexico and there’s something wrong with him. The ambulance is on the way.”
“He’s at your apartment?”
“Listen to me, Karen. I think he’s tried to kill himself. He told me he wants to die. I think he took something. He’s all weird. I’m going to ask the paramedics to take him to Mercy. That’s the closest hospital. Mercy. Did you get that?”
“Okay, okay.”
President Truman: The bill makes perfectly clear what many men and women, here and abroad, have failed to recognize, that in our transactions with the Indian tribes we have at least since the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set for ourselves the standard of fair and honorable dealings, pledging respect for all Indian property rights. . . . It would be a miracle if in the course of these dealings—the largest real estate transaction in history—we had not made some mistakes. . . . We stand ready to correct any mistakes we have made.
The story of my grandfather’s presence in Atlanta and willingness to testify was reported several times in our city newspaper, along with a photo that didn’t look much like him and some scary editorials and letters to the editor. My grandfather was called a troublemaker, a black militant, a criminal, and—by someone who allegedly signed her letter “A Black Woman From Hopper”—he was called a “no-good-who-was-old-enough-to-know-better.” My father called two days after they left for Atlanta and told me, after my insistent inquiry, that the prosecution was trying to keep my grandfather from taking the witness stand.
