Death Where the Bad Rocks Live (23 page)

Samuel took his rifle from his shoulder. “What did you do that for? That’s the best buck I’ve seen all year.”

Moses glared at Renaud, the fat man with the marked French accent still extricating himself from his rifle sling. “The cows.” Moses chin-pointed below to four cows that gathered around an alkaline watering hole near where the deer had disappeared.

“We wouldn’t have shot your cows. I know better than that.”

“I know you would not have.” Moses ran his hand through Samuel’s hair and looked into the boy’s ice blue eyes. Other children taunted him, Moses had heard, because of those blue eyes. Clayton’s eyes. Moses had wanted this hunting trip to be special for Samuel, something he could keep and hold aloft for the other boys to see when they were being mean and vicious to him. But he had to protect Samuel. “You cannot come to this place.”

“Same as any other in the Badlands.”

Clayton stopped beside them and bent over, gasping to catch his breath as wind-kicked white alkaline dust swirled around him and clung to his sweat-drenched face. He looked askance at Renaud LaJeneuse still wrestling with his rifle sling. He leaned over and moved it off the fat man’s shoulder. “You’re not going to frighten us with that old legend about the rocks again.”

Moses frowned at him. “This is where the bad rocks live and you should not—we should not—be here. Bad things happen here.”

“What bad things?” Renaud watched the hills wide-eyed as he fingered his rifle. “Only bad things around here are Indians that don’t like us White men,
n’est ce-pas
?”

“There is at least one Indian here that is growing a dislike for a particular White man.” Moses put on his best sneer and towered over Renaud. He moved away, his eyes darting between Moses and clumps of sagebrush high enough to hide a man. Ever since Clayton had showed up at the cabin with the Frenchman from New York, the man had been looking over his shoulder. Indians, he said, were still on the warpath, hunting and scalping White men wherever they found them. Or that was the claim around his New York law office. All the man could do since coming here to hunt was worry about a raiding party. And sweat. Kills Behind the Tree had told him stories about French traders, honorable men, decent men,
men that treated the Lakota with respect in their dealings with them. Men unlike this fat, unkempt man from New York City.

“Is that true about the rocks?” Renaud’s fear was rubbing off on Samuel. His eyes darted to the underbrush as if expecting something to jump up and pounce on them.

Moses bent low and draped a hand around the boy’s shoulders. “There is truth to every legend, even one as old as that. You must promise me never to come here again. Never go to that land between those large buttes.”

“I promise,” Samuel said solemnly. “But where will I find a buck as big as that?”

“I will show you another place. We will eat venison tonight.”

Samuel’s face lit up.

“How about we shoot one of those scrub cows.” Clayton had marginally recovered as he continued gasping for breath. “There’s not much to them, but we could have some thin steaks, though we’d get more meat out of a mulie. Those critters yours?”

Moses nodded. “What is left of them. I never said I was a good rancher. Just said I tried my hand at it.”

One cow raised its head and looked in their direction as if knowing they were talking about them, then hung its head in shame once more as it lapped at the murky water in the pool. Flies clustered around the critter’s face, yet it didn’t even have the strength to swat them away with its tail.

“There’s something wrong with them. Copper deficiency maybe. Sulfur or iron in the water. Supplements might help. Or mineral blocks.”

Moses shook his head. “Maybe you did not notice it ’cause you live in Washington, but there is a Depression going on. And this is one Indian that cannot afford supplements for his cows. This is not exactly the Charles Town Ranch.”

“No shit.” Clayton sat on a rock and shook out a Chesterfield. He offered Moses one, but he shook his head.

“I’ll take one.” Clayton gave Renaud a cigarette that the fat man slipped into a brass holder before lighting.

“Up until the day he died Dad never had to give cows supplements at Charles Town—the grazing at the ranch was that good.”

“Made no difference, though, when the bank foreclosed on him.” Moses saw the pain in Clayton’s face, and he regretted bringing up the foreclosure that had driven Randolff Charles to slip a rope around his neck and step off the barn loft one overcast afternoon.

“Still, those critters lack something,” Clayton said quickly as if expelling the bad memories. “They’re pretty sluggish.”

“The bad rocks make them sick.”

“What’s with these bad rocks?” Renaud watched smoke rings filter skyward. “Rocks don’t live, let alone hurt people.”

Moses took off his Stetson and wiped the sweat inside with a bandanna. “Everything lives: the rocks, the trees, Mother Earth. Everything you see has a soul. Everything you see lives. The bad rocks live. And they live to make their revenge on men who cross their path.”

Clayton laughed and flicked his cigarette butt into a clump of sagebrush. “Will you leave that legend alone for one day and find Samuel a decent-sized deer. I’m starving for something besides rabbit and porcupine.”

Samuel picked up the burlap firewood sling and shut the cabin door behind him. Moses watched him leave before he returned to the painting propped on his easel. He mixed beef tallow with the earth paste to bind it to the muslin cloth.

“I would like to spend more time with the boy.”

Moses flicked his match into the woodstove and shut the metal door. “Then why do you not?”

Clayton shrugged. “Been busy.”

“You are his father.” Moses mixed yellows and dark purples until he got the nightshade he wanted and began dabbing it on the canvas. Renaud had brought pigments from his native France, and canvas as a peace offering to Moses, and Moses used them sparingly.

“You know what the other boys call Samuel? They call him
atkuku
. Bastard. And if you ever cared enough to ask him, you would know he got that shiner from taking on half the school bullies that call him that. The boy needs a father.”

“I’ve been tied up lately…”

“And Hannah needs a husband. She is a very good woman.”

Clayton flung his cigarette butt into the stove. “Damn it, we’ve been over this a hundred times. I don’t have time for a family right now.”

“But you got time to plan for one of those socialite weddings you politicians are so famous for.”

“Keep your voice down,” Clayton said, his eyes darting to the door. “Renaud will come back any moment and I don’t want him hearing about any wedding. How’d you find out?”

“Maybe I had one of my visions about…what is her name, Heaven?”

“Heather.”

“And she is White, so my vision tells me. I am sure that will help your political career in Washington, even though it will leave no chance for a family here with Samuel and Hannah.”

Clayton turned, his fists clenching in time with the tensing of his jaw muscles, and Moses recognized the fire in his eyes he saw that first night he met Clayton at the dance, the fire that forced him to beat two Lakota boys senseless. “Haven’t I done all I could for the Sioux? You know Pine Ridge has more than
its share of WPA projects. That’s my Washington political clout making that happen.”

Moses set aside the badger brush, and mixed burnt ashes with blueberry stain on his palette with a thin knife. “Your influence is all over the reservation,” he said as he peeked around his easel at Clayton. “You are selling more
mniwakan
on Pine Ridge than ever before.”

“I haven’t sold whiskey here since Prohibition ended.”

“I know you do not—you have Alan Brave Heart Bull running shine for you.”

“Shush. I told you I quit,” Clayton whispered, his fists clenched into balls as he watched the door. Clayton could snap at any moment, and Moses had no desire to hurt him again. They’d been friends too long. “Set the table while I see if the
wahanpi
is done.”

While Clayton set mismatched plates and forks on the table, Moses lifted the lid from the stewpot and tested the venison stew, adding more salt just as Samuel came in from the cold with a carrier full of firewood.

“Smells great,” he said and stacked the firewood in the log holder beside the stove. Clayton was a fool. Moses would have given all the visions in the world for a fine son like Samuel.
Perhaps Betty and I will one day have a son like him.

The door flew open and Renaud stepped in, buttoning the fly on his dungarees as he elbowed the door shut. The front of his pants were wet where he’d pissed into the wind. Again. “What’s for supper?”

“Venison,” Moses answered. “If you wash your hands.”

Renaud shook his head and trudged to the washbasin. Moses looked down his nose in more ways than one at the dirty, fat man from New York. Many White men that Moses encountered were dirty and unkempt. Renaud was more so, something that surprised Moses. He’d heard attorneys—particularly those preying on people in the big cities—always
dressed like they were going someplace. Right now, Moses wished Renaud was going someplace beside the dinner table.

Renaud dried his hands on the flour sack and stepped around Moses to the painting. He tossed aside the cloth covering the painting and gasped.

Moses reached over and grabbed the covering, but Renaud put his hand on Moses’s arm. “Just a moment.” He stepped back and cocked his head, examining the painting from different angles. “Your technique is everything Senator Charles said it was.”

Moses threw the cloth over the painting and motioned to the table. “I did not realize Clayton was an art critic.”

“Just an amateur,” Clayton volunteered. “Nothing like Renaud here.”

“Thought you were an attorney?”

Renaud laughed and took out a snifter. He took little sips of the whiskey. “I make my money as a lawyer. Art is my hobby. My passion. Now if these were for sale…”

“They are not.”

“So Senator Charles tells me,
mon ami
. But at least you might be willing to accompany some of your work to New York, maybe D.C.”

“Why?” Moses began ladling stew into deep bowls. “What possible reason would I have to do that?”

“Just think of what you’re keeping from the public, man. People have a right to know that the Sioux have great interpreters in canvas equal to anything the Europeans have ever had.”

“Still does not answer my question—why would I want to go there?”

“My friend,” Clayton said, draping his arm around Moses’s shoulder, “like Renaud here said, he’s a great appreciator of art. If he says people would clamor to see your work, he means it. And it’d give you a chance to see places you’ve always heard about.”

“And it would mean money,” Renaud added.

“I got all the money I need.”

“Then for the tribe,” Renaud pressed. “I could arrange for a substantial donation to the tribe in your name.”

“For doing what?”

“For bringing some of your work to New York and showing people what this reservation has produced. For meeting the very man that could produce work like this.”

“It’d go a long way to help the tribe meet expenses,” Clayton pressed. “Times are tough for everyone.”

“Let me ponder this after supper. And after Mr. LaJeneuse washes his hands again.”

“Do you have to go to Pine Ridge tonight?” Clara’s low-cut negligee rippled and bounced as she crossed the room to where Manny stood between twin eagles perched on either side of the fireplace mantle. “I had something special planned for tonight.”

“Willie and I have to hit the ground running tomorrow morning. Early. I’d hate to make the drive there in the morning with just a few hours sleep. You know how tired I’ve been lately.”

Clara blew out the candles. Thin, faint tendrils of smoke rose upward. “Well it’s not like I’ve been keeping you up. I haven’t even been able to
get
you up. When will you go to your doctor and get a prescription for Viagra?”

“I already have,” he blurted out, moving away from Clara and dropping onto the couch. “Don’t seem to make any difference.”