Reason To Believe (26 page)

"It oughta tell you something." Tanya turned to Clara for confirmation, gesturing graphically. "Huh? A guy drops his pants, and, I mean, there's his important credentials, right there."

"For marriage?"

"For whatever. Men don't need to hang a sign around their necks. They got it hangin' between their legs."

TJ gave an incredulous hoot. "Have you ever been married, hey?"

"I lived with a guy for three years. Same thing."

"I don't think so."

"Sure it is. It's the same thing. You sleep in the same bed, eat the same food, your money is his money,
his
money is his money." Laughing, Tanya straightened and shoved her hands into the pockets of her short-waisted parka. "It's just like marriage except that when you get tired of each other, splittin' up is easy. You just walk. Neat, clean, simple."

"What about children?" Clara wondered.

"Mine are with my mother. That was my mistake." Tanya studied the ground, then tapped a rock with her needle-toed cowboy boot. "I should'a never had kids. But I did, you know, so... what're you gonna do?"

TJ looked at Clara. "You never know what you're getting there, either, right?"

Tanya looked up. "You mean kids? Course, you get knocked up, you know what you're getting. You're getting a kid. But I figured out you don't have to put up with any guy who doesn't treat you right. I don't know about you, but any guy lays a fist on me once, he don't get no second chance. I mean, he's history." She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, which was presumably where the past lay. "And he don't sleep around when he's livin' with me. I've got my pride, you know? I've got house rules. No aces in the hole."

Tanya studied each woman in turn, trying to assess the impression she was making with her hard-line ethics. Interpreting wide-eyed stares as admiration, she smiled. "It's just the same as being married, except you've got your house rules instead of a marriage license. One piece of paper's as good as another."

"You've got this all in writing?"

"Not exactly." She tapped the dark roots at her temple. "Got it all up here."

"Mmmm." Clara had no words.

TJ nodded in agreement. "What exactly made you decide to come on the ride... It's Tanya, isn't it?"

"Tanya, yeah. I tell you, I read that story about all these guys goin' on this ride to remember the tragedy at Wounded Knee, like a tribute kind of thing, and my heart just pounded." She slapped her hand over her chest and tipped her head to the side. "I just thought, oh, this is so meaningful. You know, for healing and for kind of an awareness thing, and I thought, jeez, you know? I've gotta do this. I mean, I really felt
called
in a way."

"Really," Clara said, with TJ echoing a syllable behind her.

"For one thing, I'm interested in anything to do with horses. I love horses. Been around 'em all my life. Cowboys, horses..."

Tanya glanced over her shoulder, momentarily distracted by a chorus of male laughter at one of the campfires. But she missed only half a beat. "And the Indian people in this country got a real shitty deal, when you think about it. I mean, we've got Indians in Oklahoma, of course, and—" With a quick shrug she launched a small, half-apologetic laugh. "Lots of

Indians, right? I mean, obviously. Cherokee, mostly. Of course, some of them are pretty well off. I mean, they've got more money than I'll ever see, some of them, but what the hell? They got it comin'. If you think about it, they really got screwed by that Cherokee removal deal. That was bad news."

"Sure bothered me when I read it," TJ allowed, glancing at Clara.

"Course, it happened a long time ago, like this Wounded Knee deal. But we can't let it happen again. That's why—" Tanya hugged herself with genuine enthusiasm. "I feel like we're almost making history, don't you? With all those cameras following us?"

"Almost."

"Clara used to teach history," TJ said.

"A teacher?" Tanya sounded surprised. "You're married to Ben, right? He is a very nice—" Her eyes rounded appreciatively. "And what a hunk of cowboy. I mean, you can just tell..."

The laughter again drew Tanya's attention to the clutch of men with their faces burnished by firelight, and she drifted away like the proverbial moth drawn to the flame.

"Yes, ma'am, you sure can," Clara muttered.

"I don't think she's gonna last long." TJ shot Clara a conspiratorial smile. "Not if my father hears about her checking out anybody's credentials."

"Hmmm. You know what I think?" Clara reached for the coffeepot with her gloved hand. "I think a certain hunk of a cowboy might appreciate a cup of coffee."

Two cups in hand, she joined Ben at the campfire outside the tipi, where he was swapping tales with Howard, Elliot, and Cheppa. "There's fresh coffee on the camp stove, over by Ben's pickup," she announced as she handed Ben a cup. With his eyes he gave warm thanks.

She offered the second cup with a gesture at large. "I'd go back and bring the pot, but I'm so stiff and so sore, I don't think I can walk that far."

"Just park yourself," Howard said. "We'll help ourselves."

Ben made room for her beside him on the tarp he'd thrown on the ground. "You didn't think you could ride that far either, but you did. It's always the last two miles that seem the longest."

"Right." She used his shoulder for support as she eased herself down. "I may have no concept of distance, but if that's your idea of
two
miles..."

"'Oh, Ben,'" he warbled, imitating her. His eyes sparkled with mischief. "'I can't go on. I'm going to die. But I'm going to kill you first.'"

She was too tired to smack him, so she laughed. "I did make a fuss, didn't I?"

"I was gettin' worried there. That's exactly what you said when Annie was born. I had to do some fast talkin' then, too." He winked at her. "But she hung in there," he told Howard, seated nearby. "She's tougher than she looks."

"Hell, I know how tough Mrs. Pipestone is," Howard said. "She broke up a fight once, between me and Skunk High Eagle. Grabbed me by the collar." Howard hooked his arm over his shoulder and demonstrated the hold on his own jacket. "Scratched the back of my neck."

"I didn't mean to scratch you, Howard, and I did apologize for that, but as I remember, you were about to make mincemeat out of poor Sidney."

"Skunk
meat." Howard laughed. "I had a hell of a time explaining those scratches to my girlfriend. She wouldn't believe I got 'em from Mrs. Pipestone."

"You didn't tell her that, did you?" Clara smiled. She enjoyed reminiscing about her teaching days, especially with reformed hellions, like Howard.

"Good thing there were witnesses."

"Oh, dear. Witnesses. Did I transform myself into Mrs. Hyde right before your very eyes?"

"I thought some raving
gigi
had come flyin' down the hall. Caught us off guard is what you did. Threw us off balance."

"The metamorphosis happens rarely, but when it does, I surprise even myself." A prim smile suggested untold potential. "As for my behavior during the last
hundred
miles today, I do feel a teeny weeny bit chagrined. Sort of the way I did the morning after Anna was born, looking back and remembering how—" she glanced at Ben "—vocal I'd been the night before."

"Cha-what?" Cheppa asked Elliot, chortling. "Does she mean she was moanin', moaaanin' the blues?"

"You were there?" Howard asked Ben, sounding genuinely interested. "You watched your kid get born?"

"Watched? Hell, I coached."

"While I did all the hard labor," Clara supplied.

"Damn, I just dropped my ol' lady off at the hospital and told her to call me when she needed a ride home." Howard paused, grinning, but nobody laughed this time. "Just kidding. I checked in later, found out we got a boy."

Ben raised his coffee cup in Howard's direction. "You should'a been there, man."

"I thought I'd just be in the way." Howard shrugged meekly. "She-it, nobody said anything about me stayin', so I beat feet outta there and just let her do her thing."

"I was told—" Ben cast his wife a pointed look "— that if I knew what was good for me, I'd damn sure better be right there for the whole show. Kinda surprised some of those IHS nurses, havin' me stick around. But it turned out to be one hell of a ride." He nodded. "Next time, Howard."

"Next time," he echoed distantly as the fire absorbed his attention. "If she lets me back in the house after this. She didn't really want me to come. She don't trust me as far as she can throw me." Still staring, he chuckled. "Can't imagine why."

Anna appeared in the dim margin of firelight, looking for her parents. Ben waved her over, and Clara made space for her between them.

"We were just trying to sneak a few chips, and Auntie TJ tried to put us on cleanup detail." Anna dropped to her knees, crawled into the wedge between her parents, and rested her head on her father's thigh. "Oh, Daddy, I'm so tired."

"What're you daddying me for, little girl? This was your idea." He smoothed errant locks back from her face and tugged tenderly at her scraggly braid. "You'd better hit the sack so you can get up early and do this all over again tomorrow."

Anna groaned.

Her dad patted her puffy parka. "You're not gettin' saddle sores already, are you?"

"I might be. You get used to it, though, don't you?"

"Some parts of you get used to it. It didn't take me long to get used to bein'
back in the saddle again."
He sang the last part, and a couple of bass voices around the fire joined in on the last notes, ebbing into a round of chuckles.

"Your dad was one hell of a rodeo cowboy," Elliot said. "You remember that?"

"We've got some pictures," Anna said drowsily.

"You saw Dad ride lots of times, Anna. Don't you remember?" Clara was surprised when Anna rolled her head back and forth. "Has it been that long?"

Ben sighed. "Yeah, it's been a while."

"I remember playing 'pop stand' under the bleachers," Anna recalled dreamily. "I was playing with a girl named Crystal or Jewel or something like that, and we collected a bunch of cups and stuff under there and pretended we had a pop stand." She thought for a moment. "And I remember they had to shoot a horse one time."

"That was a bad scene. Real freak thing, like you hear about somebody fallin' some crazy way and ending up..." Ben turned to the men sitting across the fire. "It was that time in Fort Yates when one of the horses broke its back. They had to put him down right there."

"There was this boy who came and told us to come and see, but when I got up to the fence, Dad caught me." Anna sat up as the story flooded back to her. "You picked me up and carried me back toward the pickup, remember? I said, 'Don't let them do it,' and you said, 'He's hurting real bad.' Then I heard the shot. It felt like a crack of lightning slashing right through me, and you said, 'He's okay now.'"

"And you asked me how it felt to die," Ben recalled quietly.

"And you said, 'All the pain stops.'"

"You remember all that?" His eyes were warm with wonder, his smile spreading slowly across his face. "How come you don't remember seein' me ride?"

"I remember thinking, if it could happen to a horse, maybe it could happen to a cowboy, too."

"So you played pop stand. Smart girl." He patted her knee. "Well, Annie-girl, you'd better get to bed, 'cause we're gonna blow
this
pop stand pretty early in the morning. Okay with you?"

She nodded, gave her father a peck on the cheek, then—much to Clara's surprise, for it had been a long time—gave her mother one too. "Good night, parents of mine," she quipped saucily, and headed for the tent.

"Must be hard, with your family in Bismarck and you workin' on the rez," Elliot said. "Everybody's drivin' back and forth these days, one way or the other. You get home on weekends, or what?" No one answered, so he didn't press. "Hell, I didn't even see Bismarck until I was about thirteen."

Ben was uncomfortable with the brief silence that followed. "Indians didn't like to stray too far from home for a while there. They'd say, hell, look what happened to Big Foot's band. I'm stayin' right here." He gestured solicitously. "Bring on the commodity cheese and the chopped beef in a can."

"Hey, Mrs. Pipestone," Howard jumped in, poking his lips out at Clara. "You ever had an Indian fortune cookie?"

"What's that?"

"Piece of fry bread with a food stamp in the middle."

There was knee-slapping laughter, and a resonant
"Tuwale!"
from the other side of the fire. The laughter abated gradually, hanging on with a stray chuckle, then amiable quiet warmed by the sound of crackling wood.

"I never left the rez 'til they drafted me," Elliot said. "Some white guy says, 'You gotta fill out this paper.'" A dry leaf served as a prop, brandished by the storyteller. "I'm an Indian, hey. I'm used to fillin' out papers with form numbers on 'em, so I—" He made a flourishing scrawl in the night air. "Pretty soon I'm way the hell out in bum-fuck Egypt totin' an M-16 and shootin' at anything in the jungle that moves."

"In Egypt?" Clara asked innocently.