Lizardskin (30 page)

The Sweetwater lobby was crowded with arriving visitors and strolling patients. They took an elevator up with a group of Indians, silent and solid in jeans and cowboy shirts, the women broad and blunt as boulders, the men long-bodied and heavy-featured, with black braids and deep dark eyes. They stared at Beau’s tan patrol uniform. The oldest, a big slope-shouldered man with gundog eyes and a bad complexion, spoke to Beau as the doors opened and they filed out.

He held the doors back with one massive horned hand.

“Hey, McAllister. You come out to the Rosebud one day. You tell them you want to see George Cut Arms. You tell your people Satanka-Witko come back now. We don’t lose no more babies.”

Beau looked at him awhile. “What are you talking about?”

The men watched each other for a full minute.

“Satanka-Witko.”

George Cut Arms let the doors close. He never broke his eye-to-eye with Beau. The car seemed to reek of threat.

“What the hell was
that
all about, Beau?”

“Damned if I know.”

“What was he saying? Santana something? Scary guy.”

“Satanka. Satanka-Witko. That’s the Lakota name for Crazy Horse.”

Ballard looked troubled. “The Rosebud’s Sioux, isn’t it? Over in South Dakota? Near Mission?”

“Lakota. Sioux’s a white name.”

Ballard was watching his face. Beau could feel her questions unspoken, but all he had for an answer was another question. “That’s three, isn’t it?”

“Three what, Beau?”

“Everything comes in threes.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Indians, Vanessa. That’s three times now, and each time, it was an Indian.”

“I’m pretty sure I have no idea what you mean.”

“I know,” said Beau. “Neither do I.”

Gabriel waited, watching Bell as the sun rode the blue curve of the sky. As the day passed, a freshening wind blew the clouds away. Now the sun came out, and suddenly the heat was on his shoulders and he could feel it warming the tears the cat had put in him. It felt good, and he took his shirt off to let it work on him.

He was vividly aware of the land around him and the sky above him; it seemed as if they breathed with him. The sounds and the smell of the land came into him complete, releasing the gathered tension of so many years spent in foreign places, listening to jagged foreign tongues, assaulted by sights and smells that were alien to him.

Maybe there had been a day, just like this one, a spring day in a forgotten year. Maybe a Lakota just like him had waited here and watched an enemy down in that bowl of bottom land. It would have been a good place for it, and the land had not changed at all. Only the people were gone from it now, as if the land were an empty house still echoing with the sounds of those who had lived there. The thought comforted him, although there was psychic vertigo in it, like looking at a long line of mirror images of himself, an infinite chain of Lakota men standing in this same place, with time the surface of the glass.

Then a strange feeling came over him, and it made him look suddenly to his right. It seemed to him that someone was standing there, in the tall grass, watching him.

There was nothing. The wind moved in the grass, and a last shadow of cloud passed over the bluff.

Yet he could
feel
it, as strongly as if it were true.

And now when he looked away, he thought he could see … something standing there. Tall and dark, like him, with black hair that blew in the soft wind. Its face was turned away from him, but it knew that Gabriel was there.

Then Gabriel turned again to look directly at it, and there
was nothing but the grass and the sunlight and the sound of the wind. A chill shook him like a dog shakes a rat.

Now this, he knew, was what Jubal would have called a sign. And Gabriel wanted to let that feeling take hold of him, surrender to it. But he shook it off. Sink into your delusions, and you drown, as the Ghost Dancers did.

In 1890, in the Drying Grass Moon, Kicking Bear had come back from a Fish Eater—a Paiute—named Wovoka.

Wovoka had told them that Jesus Christ had taught him this dance, and that it was a dance that would drive the white men off the land, that a great wave of new earth would come and all the Ghost Dancers would rise into the air as the wave passed underneath them, carrying away all the white men and their engines and buildings and soldiers, and then the ancestors would come back, and the buffalo, and it would be as if the whites had never come.

This dance was called the Ghost Dance, and they learned to dance it at Cheyenne River Agency and at Pine Ridge and Standing Rock. They danced it all through the Falling Leaves Moon and the moon that followed, danced it until even Sitting Bull was dancing it, and the federal men decided they had seen enough of this dance and they sent Bear Coat to see William Cody and ask him to come and get Sitting Bull and the others to stop this dance.

But Cody would not do that.

So in the Horn Shedding Moon, in December of that year, an Indian policeman named Bull Head came to Standing Rock and told Sitting Bull that he was under arrest for dancing the Ghost Dance. Catch-the-Bear got his rifle and fired it at Bull Head, and Bull Head, wounded, fired back as he was falling, and that bullet hit Sitting Bull, knocking him down.

Red Tomahawk had come with Bull Head to help him arrest Sitting Bull. So he shot Sitting Bull through the head and killed him. And when Big Foot heard that they had killed Sitting Bull, he started to take his own people to Pine Ridge, to see if Red Cloud could keep them safe from the federals. On the way, they ran into Major Samuel Whitside
and four troops of the Seventh Cavalry. Big Foot was sick with tuberculosis, but Whitside made him march all the way to Chankpe Opi Wakpala in South Dakota. Because Crazy Horse was buried somewhere along this creek, the Hunkpapas and the Minneconjous—Teton, just like Gabriel—went along without trying to fight. And on the morning of December 29, a fight started. His father had told him that a soldier tried to take away a rifle from a young man, and the young man, who was deaf—his name was Black Coyote, a troublemaker who was not held in respect by his own clan—that young man fired his Winchester and then the Seventh Cavalry killed three hundred of them, shot them with rifles and Hotchkiss guns right on Chankpe Opi Wakpala, where Crazy Horse was buried, a place the federals called Wounded Knee, and that was the end of the Indian nations.

So much for mysticism. So much for the Ghost Dancers.

The white man will become like a mist on water and blow away.

The bluecoats will fall from their horses and sink into the grass like blue birds falling out of the sky into a deep lake.

And their forts will fade away.

And the
pa-sapa
, the Black Hills, will be free of them, as a bear can shake itself free of lice.

And the bighorns and the deer and the wolves and the buffalo will come back like a black tide returning. And the young girls will wear shells and beads, and the Crow and the Absaroke and the Flathead and the Pawnee will slip away to other lands. It will be as if no white ship had ever come to this land, no pony soldier ever marked it, no Terry nor Custer nor Sheridan had ever come to hunt us like antelope in our own country.

Gabriel grinned and threw a pebble at a circling crow. Down in the bowl, Joe Bell was sitting on his front porch, staring at the setting sun and drinking from a brown bottle. An old dog, maybe a setter, was lying on the patchy grass in front of the porch. A horse was neighing in the barn; Bell had not let them out to run, nor had he taken them hay or water. The wind was blowing up the slope toward Gabriel. He could smell the barn
and the horses, a strong ugly scent of rotting hay and manure and moldy lumber.

If you took away the phone lines and the power poles, and the satellite dish on the hill behind him, it could be any year in the past.

It could be 1877, the year Crazy Horse was killed, bayoneted in the belly by a man named Private Gentles as Little Big Man and another held his arms. Bayoneted again through the back and into his kidney. He fell down on the red dirt then, and they wanted to stab him again.

“Let me be, my friends,” said Crazy Horse. “You have got me hurt enough.”

Touch The Clouds was there, seven feet tall, and he bent down and picked up Crazy Horse and carried him into a soldier’s bed. “He was a great chief,” said Touch The Clouds, “and he cannot be put into a prison.”

That was at Camp Robinson, on September 6.

The soldiers watched through the window and knew that something important had happened here, thinking that they had killed a big man and would be big men because of it. But they were wrong. No longer would they be big men on a big land, but only drovers and tinsmiths and clerks who once had fought Crazy Horse, who was dead and would now live forever unchanging, while little deaths awaited each of them, and little sticks to mark them, and a big land to swallow them up beneath the long grass and never speak their names again.

That was the Lakota consolation. It had been a bitter consolation. Gabriel looked around at the rolling hills, at the softness and the light that lay everywhere around him, and then he looked down at the red-faced man hobbling back and forth on his dirty acre of ruin, and it seemed to him that the ugly little collection of brown buildings was like a bruise on the skin of the countryside.

Doc Hogeland’s office was on the top floor of Sweetwater General, at the southern end of a long marble-floored hallway lined with Western art. Just inside the double-glass doors that
set off the administrative offices, a marble pillar supported a huge Remington bronze of four wild cowhands riding runaway broncos and firing pistols into the air. It looked like a bronze tornado of motion, as much an expression of torque as it was historical art.

Beyond the glass doors, the atmosphere had that indescribable scent created by a great deal of old money. A crystalline woman glided forward on oiled manners and intercepted them in the middle of a Navajo rug in pewter, ochre, and sage purple, colors that were reflected and subtly echoed in every feature of the office suites.

She led them down a passageway toward a set of carved Mexican doors. The handles were steer horns. Brass cartridges were hammered into the wood in a geometric pattern. She opened the doors and swept them with her into Doc Hogeland’s private office.

It opened like a ride up a long slope to reveal a vista encompassing most of downtown Billings and extending all the way to the low blue bluffs on the south bank of the Yellowstone. The floor was a Navajo pattern of varicolored sandstone and baked clay. A bank of glass windows ran fifty feet from wall-to-wall and ceiling to floor. The room was filled with yellow light, and the sky outside seemed to press against the glass like a visible force. From somewhere off to the right a stereo murmured something graceful by Chopin. The floor seemed to rise gently to the massive oak desk, dark and battered. In the bright sunlight, it was almost impossible to see if anyone was in the chair. A shape rose up into the penumbra, and a barrel voice drummed out at them.

“
Mizz
Ballard! You destroy me! And Beau! You look like a bowling trophy with all that brass! Thank you, Mrs. Miles!”

Mrs. Miles inclined her head and dematerialized.

The shape gathered itself out of the glare and formed into a tall, big-bodied old man with a soldier’s carriage, a ragged shock of white hair above a craggy rock of a face, weathered and windburned, forceful without belligerence, with brilliant blue eyes glittering out of the recesses of his skull. He came
forward at a lope, like an old wolf, and enfolded one of Ballard’s hands in both of his.

“Vanessa. Have you married that fellow from Helena yet?”

“No, Doc. I threw him out.”

“Excellent! I won’t have him shot, then. Unless he hurt you?”

“Don’t have him shot yet.”

“Come here, child, give an old man a memory!”

Ballard gave him a kiss on his seamed and scarred old cheek, standing on her toes to do it. Hogeland Senior rose above her like a butte, massive and blunt, full of force and gravity. His smile broke across that face like a shaft of sunlight striking a peak. She could feel herself being warmed by it, and her own rush of affection for him.

He was wearing an ancient plaid shirt buttoned to the neck, and jeans so old and faded they looked like Japanese paper. His face was scored and carved in fissures and lines and creases, his skin as dark red as Montana earth.

Hogeland put an arm like a tree limb across Ballard’s shoulders, resting it lightly on her, and extended his right hand to Beau.

Beau took it at the full extent of his arm, shaking it solidly and smiling at Dr. Hogeland, suppressing the urge to say “sir.”

“Beau! How is Bobby Lee? Six now, am I right? I got her a little something. Just a minute—it’s around here somewhere … yes.”

He reached down behind his desk and brought up a small square packet, wrapped in navy blue paper with silver stars, bound up in a silver ribbon. He handed it to Beau and enjoyed watching Beau’s discomfort. As usual, the old man had him off-balance.

“Hell, Doc. That wasn’t necessary!”

The doctor shook his massive head, raised his heavy hand. “Presents are
never
necessary. That’s why they call them presents. If they were necessary, we’d call them
taxes
, and nobody’d ever get any. It’s just a little thing. I remember she
loved horses. I found a little carving in Los Angeles last week. It’s a copy of one of those Chinese pieces.
The Flying Pony
. I think she’ll like it.”

Beau hefted the package. The “little thing” weighed ten pounds, and it was probably brutally expensive.

“Will you bring her around someday? I could show her the—well, I guess a hospital isn’t a little girl’s idea of amusing. Would you let me take her for a spin in the plane? You could come, too!”

The last thing Beau was going to do was to let the old man fly him
anywhere
in that cruise missile.

“Not for me, Doc. But Bobby Lee would love it. I’ll talk to Maureen about it.”