A Far Gone Night (12 page)

“Well then, what benefit have
others
derived from your steadfastness through your trials?” Ernie asked.

“You want me to say that my exposing the evil and corruption and fraud around the
Soderstrom
murder benefitted others, don’t you?” I said.

“Didn’t it?” Ernie continued.

I paused, not because I didn’t know the answer, but because I didn’t want Ernie to have the satisfaction of my quickly agreeing with him. So I paused a little longer. Then I said, “Yes.”

“You haven’t lost your faith,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I still love God. But it’s no fun. Well, there is some fun in putting on my white hat and righting wrongs. I do so enjoy smacking bad guys, Lord forgive me.”

“So, through the testing of your faith, you have remained steadfast through it all—losing Karen and Michelle and Annie, losing Liv, losing Ruth, losing your friend Horace,” Ernie said.

“I don’t feel very steadfast, though.”

“You can’t trust your feelings,” Ernie said.

“Thank you!” I said. “That’s why I don’t
have
any feelings.”

Jan punched my shoulder, then stood up on her tiptoes and whispered “You are
such
a dweeb” in my ear.

“Let’s go back inside,” I said. “I’m getting cold.”

We hung around the fire in the fireplace, dozed intermittently, looked in on a couple of football games on TV, and pretty much consumed the day. When the moon came up through the clouds, the snow stopped melting and shone in glittering blue glory, and we simply turned out the lights and stepped outside and took it in.

An occasional sheaf of snow slipped from a branch and sifted to the ground, pulling more snow from other branches and making soft little avalanches. The woods had, indeed, filled up with snow. I thought about Lunatic Mooning.

At one point in the day, while I was seeking a little piece of privacy, looking out my bedroom window into the deep woods with the black trees outlined against the white
land, that
was when I resolved to not include Harmon Payne in my snooping.

He has this annoying habit of always wanting to do everything by the book. I have a different book, employing dormant skills last year to defend myself from nefarious types who tried to discourage me, beat me up, blow me to bits, and have me snuffed by a pro. Getting back in “the game” pulls me in, and I go with it.

Besides, there was the look on Moon’s face when he realized the dead girl was his niece. His usual stoic manner had slumped for a moment, and I felt compelled to do something about it. There were questions that needed answering. Who had murdered Cindy Stalking Wolf? Why was she naked? Why shoot her in the first place? Was it a message of some kind? Where did she come from, besides upriver? Who would I need to talk to? What happened to the fingerprints and photographs of the girl?

Moon and I would investigate and introduce the killers to a streamlined, direct, and lawyer-free justice system. We would head north to the reservation, the “
rez
.” I was counting on Lunatic Mooning to get us into places by dint of his Ojibwa-Chippewa-
Anishinabe
blood. I had a hunch he could be effective in motivating
recalcitrants
, and I wanted to be there when he was. In the meantime, I had to let time pass. I had no choice, but I didn’t like it.

Thanksgiving Day began with a light breakfast, then football games followed by dinner at 3 PM. Superior food, good wine, and entertaining conversation flowed like pure joy until late in the afternoon when we finished and Ernie and I took care of the dishes and kitchen cleanup. Jan had prepared huge amounts of food, with multitudinous leftovers already in the freezer for my future meals. She is a precious woman.

Outside, the snowmelt continued, and little pockets of bare ground began to appear like spots on a Dalmatian. We could hear big chunks of snow falling from the roof and the nearby trees, punctuating the warmer weather, although it had still not reached 40 degrees.

Once, I found myself jiggling my truck keys in my hand, not knowing how they had gotten there. I quickly put them away, but Ernie noticed. He just smiled and looked away. I hate to embarrass myself, but I have had lots of practice. One would think I could overcome it.

Just as it was growing dark, Carl
Heisler
called and asked if he and Molly could drop by. He said the roads were fine and he wanted to meet my friends, since Molly had described them to him so delightfully when they met at The Grain. In short order they showed up and joined us in the living room in front of the fire and near the television after I had given them a brief tour of the house since it was their first visit. As I have said before, I value my privacy.
Maybe a little too much.

I was glad to see them for reasons other than my growing friendship and respect. Carl had been at the shootout during the
Rockbluff
County Pork Festival a year ago last summer, and I appreciate him. Molly is simply a delight, and another member of a marriage to be admired. Having them in my midst now was useful in diverting conversations from me and my problems, and more toward theological discussions intermixed with commentary on the football games we were watching with the sound turned low.

I suspected the
Heislers
hadn’t come by just to say “Happy Thanksgiving!” and chat about football, and I was right. When there was a brief lull in the conversation and a series of lame commercials on the television, Molly looked around the living room and into the foyer and said, “I really like your home, Thomas.”

“Thanks, Molly,” I said, “but you know I killed two men in this house.”

That remark dampened conversation and season’s greetings for a few seconds. Carl said, “One of the old German hymns we sang in church this morning, Thomas, was ‘Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted.’ There’s a line that ends, ‘was there ever grief like this?’ and I thought of Jesus on the cross, of course, but I also thought of you. You have born up well through everything, and yes, I even know about Ruth and what happened there. Molly told me. Yet, you do not lash out at people, you do not seem self-pitying, and I believed you when you told me during one of our sessions at The Grain o’ Truth that you retain your faith.”

“Steadfast. That’s what he is,” Ernie said.

“Exactly,” Carl said.

“And by the way,” Molly piped up, “if you hadn’t killed those two men, they would have killed
you
. I’ve never taken a life, yet I know it’s a big thing, but sometimes necessary. I hope you can get past it, and I think you probably have. But what encourages me, and one reason I love you, is what Tim Keller wrote about trials.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“When you face trials, you can disobey and or disbelieve, or you can believe God. It seems to me, to
us
,” she said, gesturing to the Timmons and Carl, “that you believe God.”

“I do believe God,” I said, “but I’m hoping now that my share of trials is played out. Maybe He will parcel them out to somebody else, present company excepted.”

“I’m afraid maybe not,” Ernie said. “There’s something about this dead girl you found in the river that makes me edgy. I know the authorities are investigating, but you’re the one who found her. That means you’re involved.”

“I agree,” Jan said. “I just have a feeling about that, so you know I’ll be praying for you to just be wise and safe.”

Suddenly everyone was nodding their heads and I was saying thanks and turning the sound up for the football game, a hint to stop talking about me. What I really wanted to do was go for a long run on the wet blacktop at the end of my drive.

I want people to pray for me. I
need
people to pray for me. But it makes me uncomfortable when they do it in my presence. Pride, I suspect, but there it is.

A short time later the
Heislers
bade us good evening and, soon after, everyone went to bed; Ernie and Jan together, me alone.

I did not immediately fall asleep, even though Gotcha did her best to lead the way, slipping into soft snoring shortly after I closed the door to my bedroom. With food and friends and football no longer center stage, my mind drifted to the life and death of Cindy Stalking Wolf, a girl in the approximate age group of my dead daughters. I couldn’t shake that thought.

The last time I looked at the clock, it was 3:15, and I know I didn’t fall asleep right after. But the next morning the smell of coffee once again nudged me awake. I looked at my clock again. It read 6:13. I heard Gotcha snoring at the foot of the bed, got up and dressed, and padded barefoot past my slowly-awakening Bulldog and into the kitchen. Jan was cooking breakfast again, cheese grits and bacon. Too bad she’s married.

“Good morning, Thomas.” She handed me a big mug of light-colored coffee. “Fifty-fifty, coffee and Baileys, right?”

“Yes. I thought you two might sleep in this morning. We were up fairly late, minds numbed by football, bodies stuffed to the gills, and a snowy night outside the windows.” I sipped my coffee. Perfect.

“Normally, yes, but we need to get on the road. We’re going to drive straight through.
Already packed the car and ready to go while you were snoring.
Ernie checked the weather channel and the roads are clear everywhere. We hate to leave so quickly, but we really miss our boys.”

“And I’ll miss you guys.”

“
But
, you have things to do.
Things to check out.
In this dead girl’s case, maybe a calling.”

I didn’t say anything. I looked out the kitchen window. Snow was still melting.
Good.

Jan took my hands in hers and looked into my eyes. “Thomas, we love you. And I want to tell you that maybe you should just go ahead and live. All is not lost, and when I say ‘live,’ you might consider spelling that word with just three letters. I saw how she looked at you.”

“
Aaaand
,” Ernie said, coming in through the front door and stomping snow from his feet, “we need to turn you
loose
so you and Lunatic Mooning can help bring those killers to justice forthwith.”

After a quick breakfast, prayers for travel mercies, a handshake from Ernie and a kiss from Jan, they were out the door.

“Call me if you need backup, Thomas!” Ernie shouted after Jan slid into her seat and he went around the car and opened the driver’s side door, “even though I know you won’t. We’ll pray for you—strength and protection and effectiveness.”

“Shalom!” I shouted, waving, grinning in spite of myself.

“Shalom!” he called back, got inside, shut the door, and slowly pulled away and down the drive.

I love Jan and Ernie.

As their car disappeared around a stand of trees down my drive, my one thought was that, now I could get to work. Actually, there was another thought, about Liv Olson, but I shouldered it aside.
For now, anyway.

Then I went inside and called Lunatic Mooning.

T
he big Packard rumbled smoothly northward, as if the very automobile had purpose and focus and intent to provide correction. It was driven by more than Lunatic Mooning: It was driven by blood.

The roads were clear, even though it was still early morning. The blacktop that stretched and curled ahead of us like a blacksnake had an occasional frosty patch, but the heavy car forged ahead with nary a slip.

Moon’s ’51 Packard is in mint condition, his means of transportation and a diversion from his business, not to mention the demands of women in various small towns he is rumored to be courting.
An escape and a source of pride.

In silence, we drove on, taking a state highway for miles,
then
departing for blacktop roads shortly before we reached the Iowa-Minnesota border. We drove into forest filled with oak and elm and tamarack trees, lakes every few miles glinting in the sunlight. A few family farms appeared here and there, lonely outposts in the world of corporate farming, eking out a living from crops and livestock on dwindling acreages, the last of a dying breed. We passed several abandoned farmsteads as well, houses sagging, skeletal barns where paint had long since disappeared, and empty feed lots.

Growing up as a boy in Clinton, my friends and I made fun of farmers, characterizing them as dumb, non-verbal, and unsophisticated.
Unlike us, of course.
As I grew and learned and observed, I realized they are typically intelligent, well-educated, and solid businessmen who use computers and spreadsheets to operate their lands.

We said nothing for miles. Then, as we crossed into Minnesota, “The Land of a Thousand Aches” I used to call it, Moon, keeping his eyes on the road, said, “I know the dead girl is Cindy.”

I didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes,
then
I spoke. “I do, too.”

Moon said, “Thank you for not condescending and offering false hope. We both know.”

A mile later, I said, “Yes.”

Worn out from so much idle chatter, we didn’t speak for a while after that, allowing our vocal chords to recover from the constant yammering.

After a few miles, Moon slowed down as the forest grew deeper, thicker, and closer to the road. He was looking for something, and he finally found it; an old gravel road leading off to the right into the woods. Three or four miles later, we came upon a rusty sign that proclaimed, “
Chalaka
Reservation of the Ojibwa-
Anishinabe
Nation.”

“Why don’t they include ‘Chippewa’?” I asked. “You used that when I first met you.”

“It is a white man’s term, a corruption of ‘Ojibwa.’ I should have left it out, but, since you knew nothing about my people, I used it to ease you out of your ignorance.”

“You are a kind and thoughtful man.”

“And you are discerning.”

We crunched on for several miles and then the woods opened up into a clearing where
a half
-dozen homes were scattered around a small lake. The homes were wooden and small, in various stages of disrepair. Newer SUV’s were sprawled out in the unkempt yards, and every home had a satellite dish. We pulled up in front of an unpainted wooden house with smoke curling out of the chimney. Moon put the Packard in park and cut off the engine. A pair of mixed-breed behemoths, half pit-bull and half
chainsaw,
came around from behind the house, growling and walking stiff-legged, ruffs up.

“Are you packing?” I asked, eyeing the dogs, then the houses.

“Not this trip.”

“That does not comfort me.”

Moon ignored my comment and spoke. “This man is a Ruling Elder in the Tribal Council. He is old and wise, and knows much about the
Chalaka
Reservation. I respect him. He will tell us things. We must not push. Do not offer to shake hands. Do not look him in the eye.”

Moon opened his door. “The dogs will not bite me.”

“Great. What about me?” I asked, sliding out on my side.

“Fairly good odds,” he replied, and swung out of the car.

“Which way?”
I asked over the top of the Packard, keeping an eye on the dogs, each of which was in the 130-pound range. They looked like they could use Gotcha for
a volleyball
.
If she let them.
In the distance, near each house, other dogs looked our way and began barking. Moon said nothing.

I decided to follow Moon’s lead. I felt awkward, completely out of my element, a ham sandwich at a bar mitzvah, an honest politician in Congress.

Moon and I approached the house, walking slowly. Both dogs came up to Moon and sniffed and began wagging their tails. Then they came up to me, sniffed, but did not wag their tails. Of course, they didn’t drag me into the woods for the fun of it, either.

The front door opened and an old man stood there. I expected an ancient prophet with shoulder-length white hair, a blind man with milky eyes, softly chanting and shaking a stick with feathers and bones on it. A bear claw necklace.
Maybe wearing a buffalo robe across his stooped shoulders.

“
Anin
!” the man said
,
smiling at Moon, looking over Moon’s left shoulder. I followed his gaze and saw nothing but trees.

“
Anin
!”
Moon replied
,
nodding to the man we had come to see.

“
Boozhoo
,” he said to me, glancing over my shoulder. I wondered what he was looking at besides me, but decided to not ask; then I remembered Moon’s instruction about eye contact.

The man’s name was Fire Bear,
Ishkode
Makwa
in Ojibwa. His hair did not disappoint. It was shoulder length and white. My preconception died there, however. He was wearing a purple Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt, faded blue jeans, and cowboy boots. The man’s age was hard to ascertain, but my guess was late 70s. A little on the plump side, his eyes were black and lively from what I could tell, since, true to Moon’s information, he did not give me eye contact.

He invited us inside, and there I found a tidy, humble, well-kept interior. I could smell bacon in the overheated room as my glasses fogged over. An enormous, high-
def
television was tuned to a college football game and a big, leather recliner was positioned eight feet from the screen. There was a coffee cup and a bag of Doritos on a small table next to the chair.

Fire Bear found his remote and buttoned off the TV. He and Moon spoke in Ojibwa for a while as I cleaned my glasses with the hem of my sweatshirt, and then we went outside, to a small
firepit
ringed with flat pieces of rock stacked about a foot high. We pulled together blue plastic Adirondack chairs into a tight circle and sat, facing each other.

Fire Bear pulled a pack of Camel cigarettes from inside his sweatshirt, broke open one of the cigarettes, and tossed bits of tobacco into the air, addressing each of the four directions briefly, muttering in Ojibwa. He passed the pack to Moon, who took out a cigarette, then offered the pack to me. I took out another cigarette and passed the pack back to Moon, who returned it to Fire Bear. We lit up from a matchbook that Fire Bear withdrew from his sweatshirt. We smoked slowly in silence.

Since quitting smoking in fourth grade, I had not had a cigarette in my mouth. Once, after a particularly edgy op in the mountains of Turkey, I had smoked hashish and didn’t like it, or the nightmares.
Snakes.
And, again, deep in the Peruvian mountains after a particularly bloody “intervention,” I had taken a joint offered to me by a native ally and smoked. But when I found myself giggling while looking at the corpse of an enemy who had been shot to pieces, I put out the dope and hadn’t smoked anything again until that moment.

I fought off a couple of shallow coughs and managed to smoke my Camel. It did not taste good, it did not make me light-headed,
it
did not sooth my nerves, which were pretty steady to begin with, even with the two dogs eyeing me from their position at Fire Bear’s back door.

After we finished smoking, Lunatic spoke with the old man for a few minutes. They stood. I stood. They headed back to the house. I followed. At the back door, Moon said, “
Migwech
,” which I took to mean thanks or so long or something like that, so when Fire Bear looked toward me, I said “
Migwech
,” too, and he nodded. Then Moon and I walked around the outside of the house while Fire Bear went in the back door. The dogs followed closely. We got in the big, gray Packard.

I let out a sigh of relief.

“You have questions, Thomas?” he asked, starting the engine and turning the car around, pointing it back down the road.

“Hell, no.
I am copacetic with the meeting.
Seemed pretty much up front to me.
Clear, concise, and coherent. Why would I have questions?”

“Thomas, you are amusing.”

“I’m a natural-born entertainer, Moon. I appreciate your recognizing it.”

Lunatic nudged the Packard forward and we rolled slowly back down the road, tires grinding on the gravel. He took a deep breath and said, “Most people on the
rez
have dogs. My people like to have warnings when someone is approaching.
Defense.
My people do not usually look others in the eye. We see it as a penetrating intrusion of the soul. He did not shake hands with you because that is a white man’s custom, not Ojibwa.”

“Okay, so what about smoking? I didn’t see a peace pipe. I
mean,
Camel cigarettes?”

“We smoked
biindaakoojige
, tobacco, because of our belief that the smoke carries our prayers to the creator,
Kitchimanidoo
.”

The car carried us through the trees which clung close to the road. Very little shoulder if one needed to pull off the road. Dusk was descending. Moon drove slowly, deep in thought. Neither one of us said anything until we were nearly to the end of the reservation. Then I took a chance.

“Does Fire Bear know anything about Cindy?”

“He believes she is dead.”

“Why?”

“Last week he felt what he called a ‘lack of her presence’ in his spirit, and so he sang to help guide her onto the Path of Souls.”

I took that in for a few minutes. It was a little eerie, to tell the truth, but I had seen other examples of eerie religious beliefs, many of them in rural Georgia. “Does he know what happened to her? How she died?”

“No. One thing, though. He said it was not white men. He said it was a
magimanidoo
, a devil spirit of the Ojibwa.”

I wasn’t about to disbelieve. Neither was Moon. I could tell by his darkening mood that he believed, and that he would do something in response.

“Who would know the details,” I asked. “I mean, who do we talk to next?”

“A bad man.”

I lit up.
“Where?”

“Here on the
rez
, but the other side. There are over seven thousand square miles on the
Chalaka
Reservation. It will take a while to get there.”

“Who is he?”

“He is Ojibwa but calls himself Henry Thurmond. He has a bar on the edge of Crow’s Wing. That’s a village of just a few hundred people. Not far from the town,
Chalaka
, where the casino stands.
Deals drugs, favors, protection.
Might be linked somehow to the casino, but hard to prove.”