Hawk Moon (2 page)

The La Costa settlement has been the subject of controversy ever since its gambling casino opened three years ago. While the majority of La Costas are happy with the casino, others cite the Sandra Moore murder as evidence that the crime rate has significantly risen since legalized gambling came to the settlement.

Tribal Leader Jess Conroy argues that the casino has enabled more than twenty tribe members to open their own businesses in and around the settlement - everything from a small grocery store to an insurance agency, Conroy notes - and that the crime rate has not risen significantly. "We attract the ‘Mom and Pop’ type of gamblers; Conroy said. “Not the ‘mob’ type."

The La Costa tribe has had a long history of difficulties. They were a peaceful group of Plains Indians even before the coming of the whites, the target of several other tribes who wanted their hunting and fishing land. In 1779 more than half the La Costas were killed in a savage three-day war with two other Plains tribes.

The La Costa fared no better with the United States government. Two major treaties were broken by Washington and three times in six years, many young La Costa men died battling the infamous Colonel Daniel Ransom ('The Pride of West Point') whose obsession with destroying the La Costa tribe, historians note, stemmed from the time when he was slapped in front of his men by a young La Costa woman he was trying to embrace.

In this century, the La Costa have lived quietly on their settlement but have suffered from critical unemployment, chronic bad health and an adjoining white community that has never completely accepted them.

It was in this setting that the Moore sisters, Sandra and Karen, grew up. Now Sandra is dead and the same fate is feared for her sister. Investigation continues.

H
e was scared and I didn't blame him.

His name was Iron Crow and he was a La Costa Indian. He was also eighty-six years old and about to fly in an airplane for the first time in his life. His sister, who was eighty-three, wasn't crazy about the idea of him flying but she'd finally given in.

We had struck a deal, Iron Crow and I. I would take him flying in exchange for him helping me write my piece on how white explorers, traders, and settlers had swept across the Plains in the last century, driving out, among others, the Crows, the Kiowas and the Cheyennes. He was a gifted storyteller and knew many tales.

I was up in this part of Iowa to do a little fishing and relaxing, staying five miles due east of a river where pike, bass and perch practically waved white flags and begged you to catch them; and only ten miles north of the limestone cliffs where a famous Indian brave, Big Raven, had jumped to his death rather than surrender to the white cavalry officer who had stalked him across four states. I was waiting for Dr. Lawrence Esmond Ph.D., Big Raven's biographer, to meet me here. He was attending a week-long conference in Chicago where he'd planned to stay only two days. But as yet he hadn't been able to get away and I'd be here till he did.

We stood in a field of buffalo grass in an Iowa meadow on a warm October morning, an arc of geese heading southward down the soft blue sky, and a beautiful sleek mahogany roan running the piney hills to the east. On the wind was the scent of autumn smoke and Indian-summer heat.

Iron Crow was old but he was sweet old, almost boyish
old, his wrinkled head and stooped body gussied up in a fancy white Stetson with a single eagle feather sticking out of the band. The rest was a blue western shirt and stiff new jeans and decorative moccasins. He was at the age when the adult becomes the child again. The way he eyed my open-cockpit biplane so apprehensively, he might have been a six-year-old getting his first sight of the school bus that would take him far, far away to a land of dragons and other assorted monsters. Around his neck, on a piece of rawhide, he carried a small black crow's feather he'd told me would bring him luck.

Silver Moon, his sister, a woman just as stocky of body and nervous of eye as her brother, clutched his hand and then leaned over and kissed him. They'd both dressed up for this occasion — she was wearing basically the same outfit as Iron Crow except for the tan Stetson and the red shirt — and there was something touching about that. I could see them as little kids on a hardscrabble reservation, and the notion made me happy and sad at the same time.

"He's going to be fine," I said.

"You won't try nothin' fancy?" Silver Moon said.

"Nothin' fancy?"

"I seen you flyin' out here yesterday. All them loops or whatever you call them."

I smiled. "I was just showing off a little. I won't try anything like that with Iron Crow."

"I'm gonna trust you on that," she said. Given all I'd learned about the Native American tribes of Iowa in the past few months, I knew how difficult it was for her to talk about trusting a white man.

"I appreciate that."

Iron Crow smiled, revealing a set of gleaming store-bought teeth. "I just hope I don't wet my pants when we get up there."

Silver Moon, always the kid sister, nudged him with an elbow. "That's what I was thinkin'." She looked at me and shook her head. "Iron Crow's got this bladder problem. You don't want to get him excited or nothin'."

Then she grinned with her own sparkling set of store-boughts. "Course, sometimes he pees and he ain't excited at all."

"She forgot to get me my diapers," Iron Crow said. "Last time she went to the grocery store, I said over and over, be sure to get me my diapers, and so she comes back home and guess what she forgot to get?"

"Your diapers?"

"Exactly."

I
wore my standard Snoopy gear — leather jacket, leather flying helmet, leather gloves and goggles — while Iron Crow wore the jacket I'd asked his sister to bring along. I'd lent him my spare Snoopy helmet, too. With his grinning false teeth and fierce ax of a nose, he looked like Snoopy's granddad.

The plane is a biplane built in 1929 with a completely rebuilt 1953 Fairchild engine and a nice new yellow paint job — the color of the sun covering the cloth and wood that cover the heart and soul of this particular machine. The machine was suddenly a haze of blue smoke. The propeller cleaved the air with the great poetic power that would help lift us up in a few moments.
Oil pressure. Fuel valve. Booster magneto coil.
These words are lost on modern planes, yet they are vital to old barnstormers like this one.

And then we were off, racing down a field of buffalo grass, Iron Crow crying out in exultation and terror.

W
e stayed airborne for forty minutes. I didn't do any hot-shotting at all. As a boy I'd watched the scratchy, sacred films of my uncle barnstorming in a biplane very much like this one, and I knew from the time of my ninth birthday that I'd been born in the wrong generation. New planes might be bigger and sleeker and faster, but they had none of the old romance. Today, however, I wasn't trying to impress anybody, not even myself. Here was a man who still remembered the days of covered wagons and the corpse of a dead Indian bringing three dollars if you dragged it back to the reservation — and he'd never flown before. And I wanted it to be nice for him. He deserved good memories. God knew, he had plenty of bad ones.

He shouted, he whooped, he pointed, he even tried to stand up a few times. But mostly he just grinned with his store-boughts and let the cool autumn winds carry us along the soft swift currents. Below sprawled hills and cornfields and creeks and red barns and brown-and-white cattle and the small town of Moon Valley, Iowa. From up here, you could see that the artist Grant Wood had gotten it right, after all. Cartoon-ish as some of his paintings looked, they recreated perfectly the swell and swoop and sway of the rolling green countryside that always gave the impression of deep seismic undulation, the way the shadows and shapes and textures of it seemed to change so fast.

The only thing that didn't fit in this graceful painting of the countryside was the casino, a long, sloping building crosshatched with neon and blaring with loud tinny country and western music. The parking lot was half-full, and this on a weekday morning. On weekends and holidays, traffic was backed up three miles to the highway. Occasionally, they were even bringing in lounge acts from Vegas. I had no doubt that Wayne Newton would someday be out here, shameless in headdress and singing ersatz "Indian" songs. Some of the tribe, Iron Crow included, didn't like the casino, objecting that the place made them too much like the white men who had exploited their own tribesmen all these years — but the casino was bringing new and prosperous life to the reservation, and who could object to that? There was a new health clinic, a new activity center on the reservation, and several houses were planned for La Costas with young families. And while a group of white businessmen managed the casino now, tribal members hoped to take over complete management in five years.

We flew on, easy, steady, safe, Iron Crow concerned only once when the engine sputtered a little.

But most of the time he was positively beatific, a veritable bird, as one with this old open-cockpit barnstormer.

When I told him we needed to go back, he frowned and looked as unhappy as any other little kid might when you told him you were going to take the magic away.

"I
didn't wet my pants," Iron Crow smiled at his sister.

"I know," she said. "That was the first thing I looked for." They both laughed.

Iron Crow was still a little wobbly when we got back to the car, flying in a biplane making some people unsteady on their
feet for a time. Two teenagers from the small airport took care of my plane for me. I'd flown over from my place near Iowa City and then rented this Chevrolet for a few days.

On the way back to town, Silver Moon wondered aloud if she might not try a little flying, too.

"You'd be scared, Sis," Iron Crow said in his older-brother tone.

"Bet I wouldn't be," Silver Moon said, taking up the mantle of little sister.

They were in the back seat, at their own choice. Stocky as they were, maybe they felt they needed the extra room.

"So you enjoyed it, Iron Crow?" I said as I drove.

"Very much. Could we go again?"

I noticed that he still hadn't taken his Snoopy helmet off. Apparently he liked wearing it.

"If I'm around here long enough, sure."

"Maybe we could do a roll or two."

I smiled at him in the mirror. "I think we'd better wait a while for that one."

Silver Moon laughed. "I think you've started something here, Robert Payne."

"Maybe I have," I smiled.

And that was when we heard it, the siren of a boxy white ambulance racing down Moon Valley's main street. West, it was headed. Toward the casino.

"Serves them right," Iron Crow said, nodding to the ambulance. Not all the La Costas had been in favor of building the casino. "Goddamn gambling, anyway. It's not right."

"Pardon his French," Silver Moon said.

We drove on for another five minutes, countryside becoming the dusty streets of a small Iowa town, and Iron Crow said, "Oh shoot, I did it, Sis."

"You sure did," she said.

She leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder with a stubby, insistent finger. "He did it, Mr. Payne. He peed his pants."

"You shouldn't've forgot my diapers, Sis," Iron Crow said. Did I tell you that, Robert, that she forgot to buy me my diapers?"

I grinned at Silver Moon in the mirror. "Yeah, I guess I do remember you saying something about that, Iron Crow." Silver Moon grinned back.

A
fter I dropped Iron Crow and Silver Moon off at the settlement, where they lived in a handsome new house trailer thanks to the money that the casino had started paying each member of the tribe, I walked back to my car in time to see a group of young children doing a ceremonial dance behind the small concrete block building that was their grade school. Casino profits probably accounted for the new roof that was just now being put on. The tar smelled hot and rubbery in the sunlight.

I'd learned just enough La Costa to understand that the ancient dance the boys and girls were doing celebrated the journey of the sun as it helped sustain the men and women of the tribe who built new buffalo-hide teepees before the snows came.

The children sang in strong, proud voices in the dusty schoolyard, symbolizing with the quick, precise movements of their fingers and hands the long distant days when the tribe had lived in round bark lodges called wickiups, and when their clothing was made of deerskin, and when their headdress was a tuft of horsehair dyed red and tied in the manner of a scalp lock, with the rest of their heads shaved clean.