The Witch Tree, page 16
Her face clouded, then she said, brightly, “I know what you’re up to,” and, playfully, she bumped her shoulder into his. “But you were going to tell me about those stars… right there.” She pointed.
“Gashkendam Gaag,” he said, hoping that would be it.
“Which means?”
“The Lonely Porcupine.”
“Does not.”
“Actually, it really, truly, actually, totally does mean that, cross my heart and hope to–”
“Don’t please?”
“What?”
“Die?”
“Sally,” he said, wincing. “Just–” He had to tell her, and just this moment, or he’d lose his resolve. He’d had it in his mouth, like a stone he’d tumble out, since they’d eaten, “–I wish….” he began, but she cut him off.
“Things were different? Well, I wish, too,” she said. “And just now for this one thing, and after – after you can tell me whatever horrible news you’re just so… dying to have to tell me. Okay?”
She pointed to the dipper again. “So?”
“Ojeeg-annung. The Fisher,” he said, only, wasn’t it just like Sally to pick it, and just now?
She had an uncanny way of gauging his moods, and hadn’t she, all this evening, been the one who’d steered things? Gotten them here, in it some cockeyed Sally plan to change his mind?
“So, this Ojeeg?” she said.
Christ, what was there to do but get on with it? “He’s up there, his body, see, ” he pointed, “that’s the… dipper part, and the handle of it, that’s his tail, where the arrow’s stuck in it.”
Side by side, they sat saying nothing, and the peepers, in a chorus, trilling like life itself.
“That’s it?” Sally said. “‘…that’s his tail, where the arrow’s stuck in it.’ I’ve been waiting all this time for that?”
He swept his hand to his right, hoping to distract her, get her off onto something else. “What’s that one?” he asked.
“Arcturus.”
“And that one?”
“Orion.”
“And–” He pointed.
“That’s – Leo, and Virgo, and… there–” she pointed now, south west, “Canis Major, that’s the Big dog, and–”
He’d pasted a bland, inviting look on his face, “And?”
Sally smiled. “Oh, no. No, you don’t,” she said. “I’m not going to let you off the hook so easy.”
“Awww, Sally. Really? Come on, dammit! It’s just a bunch of made up, old timey….”
“Bullshit?” she sang out, in a charmed irritation, and he shot back, “Well, I didn’t say that.”
“For once,” she said, “after all this time, could you just tell me what’s in that head of yours? And don’t joke. For once, just this one time, don’t you dare tell me it’s all ‘bullshit.”’
“Look,” he said, “you stop saying you’re crazy, and I’ll stop saying everything’s… bullshit.”
She extended her hand, and they shook on it.
“So, I’ll start,” Sally said, “‘Once upon a time,’” and she set her head on his shoulder, pressed his arm.
“There was this hunter, Ojeeg, the Fisher,” he said, “and Peboan, that’s the north wind, he raked everything with snow, driving the animals away, and all the year long, so Ojeeg was starving.”
“And Ojeeg had a wife, and she was starving, too, right?”
“Osin. How’d you know?”
Looking up at him, she smiled. And hers was a very pretty face, in moonlight, and things ending. “Some things,” she said, “you just know, like there was son, too, wasn’t there.”
“Yeah, a son. So, Ojeeg took him hunting, and Peboan tore at him, too, the boy, bit at his hands and feet and nose, wanted his life, and Ojeeg knew it, but was powerless against him.”
“And,” Sally said, “along comes a magical animal, right?” Glancing over at her, he was scowling. “Anthro 101,” Sally quipped. “It’s in Grimm’s too, but… everywhere… sort of. So….”
“There happened to be a squirrel in a tree–”
She kissed his cheek, “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I just? Don’t I get a point or two for that?”
“So, this squirrel, it says to the boy, ‘Grandchild, tell your father you need summer to come.’ So the boy did that, crying and carrying on like the squirrel told him to, and Ojeeg decided to look for it, this… summer.”
“Nice,” Sally said, “and this Ojeeg, he…”
“…cut a hole in the ice and dived to the bottom, but it was all just rocks. He wrestled a Windigo–”
“What’s a Windigo?”
“It’s a cannibal, and the only way to – kill one, you’d have to melt it, like… your Wicked Witch, see? You have to get it to drink hot fat, since it’s made of ice and doesn’t feel anything.
“A windigo’s pure, selfish evil….”
“So, like… ” Sally said, “my Dragon Lady, or – like she was, anyway–”
“Yeah,” he said. “Like your Dragon Lady. The world’s full of windigos, isn’t it?”
“So what does Ojeeg do?”
“He wrestled the Windigo, but it wouldn’t tell him where summer’d gone. So Ojeeg climbed the highest tree, Peboan biting him, and so bad that he lost one of his ears.”
Sally smiled up at him, pinched his ear. “Sounds familiar.”
Buck flinched, swatted her hand away. He hadn’t wanted her to make the connection, but now she had. “Come on. Will you just… let me finish? Jesus, Sally. Really?”
She pulled him closer; he wasn’t going to so much as acknowledge what she’d said.
“So, he needs,” she said, “companions… to help, right?”
“Right, he got otter, beaver, lynx, and wolverine to go with him. He’d try to go through the sky, see if summer was up there.
“If they jumped, they could scratch the sky. Otter, trying to jump up, slid back to earth. Lynx tumbled, scratched ravines with her claws. Beaver tried to catch himself with his tail, made landslides.
“Which left just Ojeeg and wolverine. And Wolverine, being so tough, he chews and claws right through.”
“And what’s up there?” She’d balanced herself on her elbow, there in profile. Her question a rhetorical one, since she already knew.
“Heaven, like… all that, you know, sunsets and flowers ‘n’….
“‘Bullshit’?” Sally said. “Remember, you said you wouldn’t? And I’m not crazy.”
“So, the problem is,” he said, “it’s all locked up in mocucks – cages. Or, what of it they could take.”
“God, of course. That’s so… perfect. Everything you want, it’s always locked away, isn’t it?”
He’d brought his thermos, and he poured a cap of coffee, and they shared it, bats overhead, darting.
“Come on, you can’t just leave it like that,” Sally said, “that’d be… just… too awful.
“You have to finish what you started.”
He stared off in the dark, and the impress of what she’d said weighing heavily on him.
“So,” he said, “Ojeeg and wolverine break up all of the cages, and send all of what was in them down into the world.”
“Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto, and… robins singing in spring, and tulips, all colors, and–”
“Yeah, like that,” he said, and a memory of his life before the relocation coming to him:
A lake, mirror smooth and lily dappled, set afire in sunset, and an egret, flying blue winged through it.
“And?” Sally said, and elbowed him.
“Wolverine went down while Ojeeg held the hole open, and Ojeeg got hit by one of sky people’s arrows.
“And that is what you’re seeing.” He pointed now, with his chin. “The Fisher, stuck up there, and the arrow in his tail.”
Sally picked at something on her navy pea coat, in some private conversation with herself.
“Don’t be like The Fisher, okay?” she said, then glanced up at him, and – shocked at himself – he nodded.
So, she’d won. He couldn’t say it, not now. Couldn’t do it, either. Leave her, stuck on Dupont.
“After, could you?” she said, so that the hairs on his neck stood up. “Could you really?”
And as if he’d known all along, he said the very thing he’d told himself he wouldn’t:
“After, I’ll come for you, I promise.”
The following morning, before leaving for work, he took Eli’s .38 from the drawer to the right of the sink. He hesitated a moment, thought, What if Jen needed it? then shucked the knife from the block and set it on the counter.
The Russian had done well enough with one and, Jen, no doubt, could too, were there a need to.
36
Amid the machine gun rattle of pneumatic tools, the whir and chutter of the compressor and the general din – the hiss of cutting torches, the grunt of the hydraulic rack, voices shouting over it: “Roll it over HERE! RIGHT HERE! THAT’S IT! STOP!” “SHOOT A COAT OF PAINT ON THIS SHIT BOX, ALL RIGHT?!” – and swimming in the stink of burned rubber, glazing compound, and paint, and he didn’t know what all else – he endured an interminable, suffocating morning.
Escaped at lunch to the bench outside The Kruller, until, like an exclamation, Ambrose threw his arm up in the Paradise lot, and they started again. In each setting of cables; each unbending of fender, or hood, or trunk lid; each welding of a broken frame, was one more hurdle overcome, one more obstacle circumnavigated, and the day endless, because he was resigned to it now, getting to Carol, and today.
She’d be in the house, and alone – Dr. Miller, again, traveling on business; he’d called his clinic, and had been told he was away – and here was Ambrose, the ticket to what he needed.
And then, the day was done. In the lot he slid into Eli’s car, revved the engine, and Ambrose turned – goggles, and that frown.
Yeah, you watch, he thought, and pulled into traffic, you go and tell Old Lester I left early.
Just up from the Paradise, in an neighborhood of swanky, bright condominiums, he parked behind a Volvo sedan. Got it started in seconds, then swung smartly from the curb.
Minutes later he eased up the alley where he and Eli had sat watching the Paradise that first day.
He waited, amid the rush, and noise, and commotion, and when Ambrose pulled out of the lot, he followed.
Ambrose, ahead of him, made a box of the Uptown area, nosing his car through traffic. It wasn’t that Ambrose knew he was being followed, he was just taking precautions. So it didn’t surprise him when Ambrose turned onto Lakeshore Drive, as if to take in the scenery, the sailboats in their berths. It was a one way, so Ambrose could tell, exactly, who was behind him. If anybody.
Buck, having canvassed here with Joe, was familiar with the area, though, and he paralleled Lakeshore Drive, one block over, to catch Ambrose at the stop sign at the north end. Turned east with him, then drove back into Tonto Town, right into Eli’s neighborhood.
Out of his car, Ambrose scooted up a sidewalk, went around the building directly across from the Evergreens, then ducked through the rear door. So, had Ambrose been watching them?
If he was working for Dr. Miller, it made sense he would have.
He checked Eli’s gun at the small of his back, then was out of the car and moving up the alley.
The apartment was a mirror version of Eli’s, here the same foyer and stairs up to the dilapidated apartments. Even the smell of urine and vomit and wood rot was the same. He found the apartment and stood with his ear to the door. Ambrose, inside, had set to something, in it a clatter of pots, the hiss of gas and the rough frrrrt, of a match being struck. Cooking sounds, and he stepped back, circled his head on his neck, then lifted his shoulders, readying himself.
He bent on one leg, as if for a pitch, and with everything in him, pivoted and kicked the door with his heel, the door exploding inward, and he charged inside with it, into darkness – lit only by the stove, there four flowers of blue flame. And no pan there. A table, chromed legged, in front of it.
At the window opposite, a chair faced Eli’s unit, camera gear strewn around its legs.
A phone sat on a second chair, the receiver off the hook and a woman’s voice saying, If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again. He stepped further into the dark, and there was a sudden hissing, a spray in his face, blinding him, and the door slammed shut.
He ducked low, then swept his arms up to catch Ambrose’s head from behind, in the crook of his elbow.
Hefted him off his feet and ran him headfirst into the wall, choking him with his forearm. And just when he thought Ambrose would go under, he blurted, “I’m a COP! LET – GO – !”
“Prove it,” he said, his knee in Ambrose’s back.
“Bear talked to one of your tribal policemen,” he said, “the week he was back up north. About the fake accident.”
Ambrose kicked at him. But it was in irritation, the whole business having become something else.
“It got shunted to me, since I was working undercover on it down here, and I had to know.”
Buck pushed with his forearm, but’d already stepped back.
Ambrose glared. “Let me go,” he said.
He let go of Ambrose, and Ambrose shook it off and turned. No goggles, it was odd seeing his eyes.
“When I talked to him, he begged me not to tell you–” Ambrose said. “Told me you’d go off half cocked if you found out what Eli was into, and how deep it went. And didn’t you just?”
They stood an arm’s length apart, glaring. Only, what Ambrose had said made sense of… everything about him. Ambrose’s warnings, his being at the shop, his mysterious comings and goings, his… sucking up to Lester and being involved, deeply, in the staged accidents.
“So, how was all of this supposed to have worked,” Buck said. “What happened with Bear?”
“I told him I would take care of it, and I did. That guest at the lodge, in from Detroit the week Bear got shot? He was ours. Protection, for your brother, after he became bait in our operation. We let word out, down here, that Bear’d IDed the cops on the accident, was a witness.
“The plan was, we’d arrest whoever came after Bear, and we’d plea bargain him into giving them all up. If anybody, we thought it’d be Vern.”
“Lester’s gopher?”
“He’s no gopher, he’s a full on psychopath. Both of them are, Vern and Cleve. They’re into… sexual stuff, too – but they work out alibis, being twins. Got so hot down in Tennessee, they moved up here.”
Ambrose spun a chair over to the table, kicked a second one toward Buck. “Sit,” he said, and they did.
For a time they only regarded each other warily, each, in turn, offering up nothing.
“Look,” Ambrose said, finally. “Bear wasn’t alone with anyone after he talked to us – until Miller. And who’d think Miller’d be the–
“Guy with a reputation like him? And what’d he need money for, a ‘successful’ doctor?”
“You messed up,” Buck said, his voice cutting.
“It was Bear’s idea, to be bait. Not mine. And what did we know? So Bear picks Miller up in Warroad, like he’s done umpteen times before. It’s hunting season, right? And there, at the government docks, Miller shoots him, and in full sight of everyone, and you on shore.”
All that had seemed strange, only he’d thought then, what could it be but an accident – Dr. Miller, carelessly stowing his gear in the boat, shooting his brother – that or murder.
“So, why there?”
“If it had happened on reservation land, it would have been an FBI case, and we would have come in heavy, gotten a warrant on Dr. Miller and searched his house on probable cause. The whole bit.
“By taking Bear out where he did, Miller only had a couple local cops looking into it. Acquaintances even. Anybody but us.”
“You’re FBI?”
“Goin’ on five years, reservation crimes.”
“That’s why you had that Warroad cop talk to me after, tell me it was a shut and closed case. To keep me out.”
Ambrose nodded. “I’ve been tryin’ to keep you out of it since you first stuck your big nose in. You damn near turned everything upside down. From the first, you’ve been a nightmare. Here we were thinking we’d get to Miller, later, when he screwed up, but he didn’t.
“Because you, screamin’ murder, well, all that did was get Miller to dig in, be all the more careful.
“So when Ruben ran, a witness for us if there’d ever been one, Miller took him out, and Eli called you, and there was no holding you back.” His mouth pursed, Ambrose said, “We even went to your old man to see if he could talk some sense into you, but he told us his talking to you would only make it worse.”
“Why,” Buck said, embarrassment heating his face, “of all people, would you go to my father – to Od?”
Ambrose snorted. “You don’t know shit about what your old man has been up to, do you.”
He felt it, first as a constriction in his face, as surprise, and then a scalding shame for having gotten it so terribly wrong.
“Your old man’s been behind things down here, and for the longest time, and once through Joe. Joe wasn’t selling vacuum cleaners, or CutCo Knives, or anything else; he was a low on the totem pole fixer.
“Where’d you think all that money he was handing out came from? He picked it from trees?
“You know all that… shit they send us instead of money to float businesses and our lives? Harvesters, and combines, and farrowing gear – all that junk none-of-us can use, since we aren’t – and never were – farmers?
“And it all just seems to… fall apart until no one knows where it all went? Like we’re too dumb to keep it running?
“All that gets turned into cash, and men like your father, and like Joe, see to it that it goes where it’s needed.
“Your old man, though, he’s the Fixer of Fixers. Top dog. So much so, some got to callin’ him the International Bank of Ode.”
A ringing in his ears, Buck first felt a near rage at it. Sometimes, as a boy, he’d barely had the clothes on his back.
