The Spider's Web (12 page)

Roseanne stayed against the door, watching the white truck damaged on the left side back up and jerk forward. It shot past the rear of her car. She listened to the engine roaring across the asphalt until the sound blended into the low hum of traffic out on Federal.

 

 

SHE DROVE ACROSS Riverton, south on Highway 789, right onto the reservation, all of her senses on alert, as if a thousand needles had pricked her skin, replaying in her mind everything Ned had said that last time. Maybe he had told her about the business, and she hadn’t realized what he was talking about. She pushed away the idea. He would never have told her anything that would cause her trouble. She felt a brief tingle of something she remembered as happiness: maybe Ned had still loved her after all.

She kept coming back to this: If Dwayne found out that she had seen Ned even once, he would think she was lying about the business. He would find her again—anyone could find her. The same hours at Walmart, the stupid, reeking house. She had to find someplace else to stay. Talk the supervisor into giving her another shift. Everything had to be different.

She took another right and fishtailed onto a dirt road. The plains floated outside the windows, rising and falling with their own rhythm. The miles clicked on the odometer. She tapped the brake pedal, swung into a dirt yard, and stopped at the corner of the gray house. She jumped out of the car, slamming the door behind her, and raced up the wooden steps. The door was unlocked, as usual. She pushed it open and went inside. Aunt Martha was sprawled on the sofa, starring at the flashing images on the TV. Cartons crusted with days-old takeout lay scattered over the coffee table and linoleum floor, and odors of burned coffee, mustard, and old hamburger mingled with the smells of whiskey.

“About time you got home.” Aunt Martha lifted one eye in her direction. She wore a baby blue robe, and her breasts hung over the tie that had worked its way up from her waist. Her gray hair was matted, sweat-pressed to her head. “Some guy was here to see you.”

“Some guy?” Roseanne stopped next to the sofa and looked down at the woman who had gone back to staring at the TV. A rerun of
Beevis and Butt-Head
jumping around. “Who was it?”

“When did I get to be your secretary, Miss High and Mighty?” The pink spot wiggled at the top of the old woman’s scalp. Roseanne felt disconnected, floating in space. How had she come to be living in a gray house with an old woman she called Auntie, when Martha wasn’t her auntie at all. She was no relation, except she had married Roseanne’s uncle, and somehow, after accidents and diabetes and alcoholism had run their course, they were all the family left on the rez. The survivors.

“I need to know who it was.” Roseanne felt her muscles stiffen.

“Dwayne somebody.” Martha fumbled for the remote in a stack of cartons and turned up the volume. Cartoon voices rose over the laughter and tinny music.

“You told him where I was!” Roseanne screamed at the woman. It took all of her strength not to pick up an empty whiskey bottle and hurl it at the woman’s head.

Aunt Martha turned sideways and stared up at her, daring her, Roseanne thought. Begging her, even. Make it easy for her, put her out of her misery. “Some big secret, you working at Walmart?”

Roseanne spun around and hurried down the hall. She went into Aunt Martha’s bedroom and shut the door. The room smelled of the old woman, the unwashed hair and dirty nails, the dry, flaking skin, the whiskey odors rising off the tangle of blankets on the bed. She pulled open the top drawer in the dresser and rummaged through scraps of underwear, nothing more than rags. Then the second drawer, a jumble of tee shirts and shorts, a wadded up black skirt. Inside the bottom drawer were the same kind of torn and soiled shirts and slacks. Her fingers ran over the surface of a box in the corner, and she yanked it past the clothes and flipped back the lid. An assortment of necklaces and bracelets, chains broken, glass stones missing. She closed the lid, put the box back, and kicked the drawer shut. God, it was pathetic the sum of the old woman’s possessions.

She bent forward, resting her forehead on the edge of the dresser. She had wanted so much more. How they had talked, she and Ned, about the ranch he would buy: their own house, fine horses in the corral, a small herd of cattle, bales of hay in the pasture. He was saving most of his salary, he had told her, and she was saving, too, a little bit out of each paycheck after she had bought food and given money to Aunt Martha. “We’ll get it,” Ned had said. “Trust me, Roseanne. Someday, we’re gonna have our own place.” They had hiked up in Sinks Canyon and were sitting on rocks, boots propped against the rocks down slope, listening to the sounds of the Popo Agie rushing by below. She pressed her eyes shut. She could see them now up on the mountain. Wearing blue jeans torn at the knees, Ned in his red plaid shirt, she in a pink tee shirt. Last summer, another lifetime. “It won’t be long now.” She could almost hear his voice.

She pushed herself off the dresser, flung open the closet door, and started slamming the hangers aside, kicking at the mismatched shoes and boots strewn over the floor. Then she lifted herself on her tiptoes and rummaged through the piles of faded blankets and towels until her fingers hit a hard surface. This was it—she knew by the weight as she pulled the cigar box off the top shelf, the sound of metal knocking inside. She sank to the floor, lifted the lid, and took out the black M1911 Colt .45 automatic pistol that her uncle had brought home from Vietnam. She jammed the gun inside the waistband of her blue jeans and picked up the loaded magazine.

“What the hell are you doing?” Aunt Martha swayed in the doorway, blinking down at her. “Get out of my closet!”

Roseanne pushed the cigar box into the debris of shoes and got to her feet. “None of your business,” she said, pushing past the old woman, the magazine tight in her grip. She ran back down the hall, grabbed her backpack off the floor where she had dropped it, and flung herself past the door out onto the stoop. In a moment, she was backing across the yard. Then she put the gear into forward and drove out onto the road, the image of Aunt Martha in the side-view mirror, gray hair straggling over her shoulders, leaning out the front door.

VICKY READ THROUGH the corrected pages of the logging contract with Martinson Corporation of Dover, Delaware, as if the largest logging and timber company in the West were actually run from Delaware. A soft nighttime quiet had settled over the bungalow, broken by the intermittent sound of a dog barking outside, a car crawling down the street. Evening was a good time to work, after Roger and Annie had left and the phones had stopped ringing. She told herself it had nothing to do with the empty apartment, now that Adam wasn’t around, or that he hadn’t called in a week. She was used to being alone.
Hi sei ci nihi
, the grandmothers called her. Woman Alone.

She forced her thoughts back to the contract. Similar to the previous contracts, except for the section titled “Revenues.” The Wind River tribes would collect a higher percentage of revenues, a change that the company lawyers had hardly blinked at, as if they had been expecting it for years. Well, it had taken years—she could hear Adam’s voice in her head—before Indian people had their own lawyers to look out for their interests. She hit another key and sent the document to Annie’s computer. Tomorrow Annie would clean up the spacings and titles, check the spelling, and print out two copies. One for the Joint Business Council of the Arapaho and Shoshone tribes and one for the law firm in the modern brick building on Main Street that, not long ago, had been the offices of Holden and Lone Eagle.

Then she hit another key and typed in a search for burglaries, Lander, Wyoming. Lines of black type filled the screen, most about burglaries in Cheyenne or Sheridan or Cody. A few with Lander in bold type. She clicked on the first site: a rash of burglaries in Lander in the 1930s, executed by an outlaw gang that broke into houses, stole everything they could carry off, and vanished into the Wyoming wilderness. White men, she guessed, by the tone of barely suppressed admiration for the gang’s audacity and success.

She moved to the next site, a small article about burglaries in the spring of 1955. Police had been called to the break-ins at two houses in the western part of town. There was a follow-up article under the headline “Arapahos Guilty.” She skimmed down the text: three Arapaho men in their twenties charged, convicted and sent to prison. Witnesses swore they had seen them loitering in the neighborhood of recent house burglaries, and one witness placed them near the late-night burglary of a shoe repair shop.

She wondered what kind of shiny lawyer straight out of law school had been appointed to represent the three Arapahos. She knew by the tone of the article that they had been convicted before they had ever stepped inside the courtroom. Guilty of being Indians.

She scrolled through other sites looking for recent break-ins, an uneasy feeling starting to nag at her. Marcy had seen Dwayne and Lionel taking cartons out of Ned’s van, but what did that mean? It was possible she was mistaken. Maybe she imagined what was going on, made up a story to explain what she hadn’t understood.

Vicky scrolled to the next page and looked down the list of sites as irrelevant as the others. The problem was, Marcy had told Gianelli about the cartons, and now they would take on a life of their own, become their own reality.

She stopped on the bold black words: “Break-ins, Lander.” A brief article from the Lander newspaper:

Vicky scrolled back to the top and studied the date: March 16. Ned Windsong was still in the area.

She typed in another search looking for burglaries in Jackson Hole, and this time, every site on the first page looked relevant. She clicked on the first site. An article from the
Jackson Hole Daily
filled the screen:

Vicky read through the next site, a blog by one of the home-owners.

There were six other sites. All follow-up newspaper articles, urging the police to capture the outsiders that had set the town on edge, urging people to lock their doors and report any unusual behavior.

Vicky closed the last site and stared at the screen that went from black to swirling blues, reds, and yellows. The burglaries had taken place while Ned Windsong was in Jackson Hole, just as the burglaries in Lander occurred while he was here. Circumstantial evidence, to be sure, like the testimony of witnesses in the 1950s who happened to spot three Arapahos at the time of the break-ins, but strong enough, coupled with Marcy’s story, to tie Ned to a burglary ring with Dwayne Hawk, Lionel Lookingglass, and a girl named Roseanne. Gianelli would have pulled the information on the burglaries by now. He would make the connections, draw the conclusions, and start wondering whether Marcy might have also been involved. It was only a matter of time before he would want to interview her again.

 

 

ROSEANNE LEANED AGAINST the door and knocked again. She had been knocking for five minutes, she was sure. She glanced around. The only vehicle parked in front of Berta’s house was her own. Darkness was pressing down, filtering through the cottonwoods. She could make out the remnants of last night’s party, the beer cans scattered about, the little clumps of trash, the gray ashes of campfires. The backpack felt heavy and awkward over her shoulder. She went back to knocking. “Be here, Berta,” she said, under her breath.

“Roseanne?”

She swung around. Mervin was standing at the corner of the house, all arms and legs and skinny neck popping past the collar of his white shirt.

“Thought I heard somebody knockin’,” he said. “I been in the barn feeding the horses. Berta’s not here.”

“Can I come in?” Roseanne said.

Mervin stomped across the hard-packed dirt and jumped onto the stoop. She had to squeeze herself against the wood railing while he shoved a key in the lock and pushed open the door. “Berta says we gotta keep things locked up ’til Dwayne and Lionel get arrested. You never know about them two. They could come around, start trouble.” He stepped inside, expecting her to follow, she knew. He turned on a table lamp, and she watched the way the circle of light burst across the sofa and coffee table, pushing the shadows back into the edges of the living room.