The Work of Wolves (22 page)

He realized Norm had asked him something. He looked up from the last coals of the fire, glowing now through the dusk, and saw that Norm was waiting for an answer. Then he realized that Norm had just asked him to go on with what had happened on the hillside the other night. It took Earl several seconds to surface from the stories Norm had told him and find again the one he'd come here with. For a moment they all got mixed up in his head—his father planting trees, his mother turning her face toward a door through which a body bumbled, his uncle laughing at his inability to kill himself, the three horses standing on the hill. Then he separated them and told Norm what had happened.

"We have to do something," Willi had insisted. "We must tell someone about this."

"Tell someone?" Carson's voice was bleak.

"The police will stop this. They will arrest this Magnus."

"The police," Carson said, his voice even bleaker. "That's Greggy Longwell."

Earl was standing to the side, letting them talk. But he knew what Carson meant.

"We don't have a 'they' when it comes to police," Carson said to Willi.

"You do not have a 'they'?"

Carson seemed about to explain to Willi, but he changed his mind. He looked at the three horses behind Willi and said, "This ain't either a yours problem. It's mine. I'll have to deal with it."

"Why do you say that?" Earl asked quietly.

He'd been silent so long his own voice surprised him.
That was a stupid move,
he thought to himself as Carson turned and stared at him. Earl stared back.

"Just the way it is," Carson said.

"Just the way what is?"

Carson shut his eyes, and his face went slack, and Earl heard his intake of breath, as if he were seeing the answer to the question inside him but were sucking it back in, keeping it. When he opened his eyes again his voice was tight.

"I ain't had a big impression you want much to do with this all," he said. "So what's it matter? I'm sayin it's my problem. So why 'nt you leave it be?"

Good question,
Earl thought.

But what he said was, "I don't know. Maybe it's because I found these animals, you know?"

"And I'm sayin they're my concern. For reasons of my own. I'll take you home, and you can forget this place. That ought a make you happy."

"Happiness is not the thing to look for here," Willi said.

"Then I'll take you home and you can be unhappy," Carson said tersely.

In the silence that followed, Earl thought,
Take the door. He's holding it open.
He remembered the math problems he'd been trying to work before Carson and Willi picked him up. He could return to them, and tell his mother and grandmother something neither lie nor truth about where he'd been, something vague about driving around with a couple of friends, and if his mother asked who, he'd mention Willi, say the German kid had gotten attached to him and was always asking questions about Lakota traditions. That would divert them, and Earl could return to equations and differentials and the green lines of the graphing calculator his mother had bought for him, spending money she didn't have so that he could follow those lines right out of Twisted Tree. Those elegant lines. Those mapped solutions.

There was the Red Road of the good life, Earl thought, and there was the Black Road of the bad life, and there was the Green Road of the math life—not good and not bad, but pure, with such neat intersections.

And there was where he was standing right now, which seemed to be no road at all.

The Wire Road, maybe,
Earl thought. The wire road, with its cutting barbs, that went nowhere even if, like a tightrope walker, you could balance on it. Dance and jump. Even then you just returned.

Take the door,
he thought.
Walk away. Be the Careful Indian now. Take any road, as long as it leads somewhere.

But he couldn't. Maybe it was Carson—the way that, underneath his confident mask, Earl sensed this other thing. This other being. Earl didn't know whether he was angry at Carson for his secrecy or if he felt sorry for him and wanted to help him. Or both. He didn't have time to sort it out.

"I don't think so," he said.

"You don't think so what?"

"That I'll go home."

Carson's stare was bleak, antagonistic. Then Willi said, "What are you going to do, Carson? This problem that is yours. How will you solve it?"

"Cut the wire," Carson said, still staring at Earl, his voice tight. "In fact, I'll do it right now."

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a pair of pliers, started toward the fence. But Earl reached out and grabbed his wrist as Carson tried to pass him—not hard, but enough to stop him.

"That won't solve anything," Earl said. "How far do you think they'll go, you know?"

Carson looked around. Earl went on. "They're gonna start grazing right away. They'll stay right here. Be real hard to find again."

Earl let go of Carson's wrist. Carson gazed around a moment, then put the pliers back in his pocket. "I'll take 'em to my place, then," he said. "Hide 'em there. Anyway, what's it matter to you?"

"Did you train these horses?"

Earl wasn't quite sure where the question came from. He just asked it, and he saw Carson's head jerk back, his eyes glint, and that strange possession surge to the surface of his face. And suddenly he knew why he recognized it so well. It was his mother's expression when he'd seen her in unguarded moments, times when the work she was studying would fall into her lap and she would stare at the wall, or in the middle of a discussion about some injustice when she'd seem to slip away, forget what she was talking about, and go silent. Had he seen that face bending over his bed the night his father died? Had he woken to it, swimming upward out of sleep toward it? Confused it with his dreams?

For a moment Earl thought Carson would refuse to answer. He struggled with whatever was inside him. Then he got it under control. "Yeah," he said. "I trained 'em."

"You got an idea why Yarborough's doing this?"

"I might."

Earl waited. Carson said nothing more.

"But we don't need to know, is that it?"

"There're people involved. Who don't need things gettin around."

"That is what happens," Willi said. "There is a secret. People agree to keep it. For all different reasons. And then more secrets come. And more. It grows."

He intoned this so somberly that both Earl and Carson turned to him, wondering what he was talking about, but Willi didn't explain.

"I don't care about secrets, you know?" Earl said. "You can keep them. I'm talking about something practical. If you trained these horses and you know anything about them and they disappear here, it's not too hard to solve for
x.
Your ranch is going to be the first place Magnus looks. Then he'll be the one bringing in Greggy Longwell."

Carson didn't reply, but Earl saw he'd reached him.

"Willi's right," he said. "We need to let the law take care of this. Even if it is Greggy Longwell."

Carson shook his head. "Longwell and Yarborough are like this," he said. He wrapped his middle finger around his index finger. "I say something to Longwell, he'll call Yarborough. An he'll make up some story. Turn it against me. It'll turn out I abused these animals when I trained 'em. Who knows? Even if Greggy don't believe it, the whole thing'll go places I don't want it to go."

"Still," Earl began, but Carson shook his head.

"I can't talk to Longwell," he said. "So if someone's gonna do it, it's gonna be one a you. Longwell'd get a real kick outta Willi here. A foreigner comin in an reportin this. He'd take that real serious. So who's that leave?"

Both he and Willi stared at Earl.

"How do you like that?" Carson said. "Three guys standin on a hill, and the best candidate they have for talkin to Greggy Longwell's an Indian."

Earl's defenses shot up. He felt the blood rush to his head. Then he saw the beginning of a grin appear on Carson's face.

Norm went beyond a smile to laughter when Earl told him. "That cowboy's got it right," he said. It was dark now, crickets rocking the world, and the coals of the fire the faintest glow, far away.

"He does," Earl said.

"Too bad those horses aren't on the rez. You could talk to the police here."

"Just like that it was decided, you know? Without even deciding anything. I didn't even have a say in it."

Norm's chair creaked. "I see," he said. "So you're thinking maybe you should just forget it."

"Greggy Longwell won't listen to me."

"Probably not."

"Should I just forget it, then?"

"What do you think your mother would say if you asked her?"

"She'd tell me to be careful. She'd say this is nothing but trouble and stay away from it. I know she would. She'd tell me not to step into someone else's trouble."

"You got it right, I think," Norm said. "That sounds like Lorna to me."

Earl felt relieved. His mother was rescuing him. "So you think that's what I should do?" he asked. "Stay away from it?"

"If your mother would tell you to leave it be, why are you talking to me and not her?"

Earl sat stock-still in his lawn chair, trying to take in this sudden reversal. His gut twisted at the thought of Greggy Longwell's suspicious eyes turned on him.

"I don't know," he finally said.

"You oughta be getting back. Your mother is probably waiting."

"She is."

Time passed.

"I suppose I have to talk to him, don't I?"

"I suppose you do. If you think so."

More time passed.

"It wasn't you, uncle."

"Wasn't me?"

"I know. Even if Mom doesn't. It wasn't you."

Earl did not look, but he heard his uncle draw in his breath. The fire had diminished into darkness. The silence coming from where Norm sat was long and deep. Out of the corner of his eye Earl saw his uncle lift a hand to his face. The silence went on.

Finally, in a voice high with restraint, Norm said, "Thank you, nephew."

Earl waited a little longer. He was about to say good-bye when Norm spoke again. "There's so much blame around here. Our biggest resource, nephew. If we could mine blame on the rez, we'd all be rich."

W
ILLI WATCHED THE TUNA CASSEROLE
slide across the table toward him. It came like a boat, riding over the double warp in the Druseman's table and then down again, until it anchored in front of him, a square, white ceramic bowl filled with noodles and chunks of tuna with melted cheese and crumbs on top. A hot dish: Willi heard it as two words. He'd expected Indian tacos to be good. At the powwows he'd attended in Germany with his
Indianer
club, where everyone lived in tipis for a week and dressed in traditional Indian clothes and talked of some day going to Pine Ridge, Willi had eaten Indian tacos and anticipated eating them in South Dakota. But he'd never heard of Tuna Hot Dish, and when his American mother first served it, he'd been overcome with pleasure and surprise.

But this time he looked up at Kathy Druseman, whose hands had pushed the bowl toward him. "
Nein, danke,
" he said, speaking German because she wanted to learn the language.

She caught something in his expression or tone, and her own face changed to worry. Her hand fluttered at her collar.

"
Bist du ... ?
" She fumbled for the word. "Sick?" she finished.

Willi smiled for her. "I am fine," he said. "I am full. Even for Tuna Hot Dish."

"Hotdish," she corrected him, saying it as one word.

She smiled, plucked the bowl from the table, took it to the counter, and scooped the contents into a plastic bowl she called Tupperware. "Is everything all right?" she asked.

"Everything is fine."

"Things are all right at school?"

"They are fine "

She scraped the last of the Hot Dish into the Tupperware and pressed a lid on. Willi heard air whoosh out.

"You're not having trouble with any of the teachers?"

"No. They are good."

"Do you miss home?"

She turned and faced him, holding the sealed bowl in front of her.

"Miss?" It was a usage he wasn't familiar with.

"Are you lonely? Would you like to see your parents?"

"A little. Maybe."

"If you want to call them, you know you can."

Willi's program had guidelines about calls to home. They were supposed to be limited, to allow students to adjust to their new culture. But Willi had called home so seldom that Kathy Druseman was constantly urging him to. He felt a small surge of tenderness for her and a small surge of guilt for misleading her. He went out of the kitchen and made a show of taking the phone off the hook at the top of the stairs so she would hear it. He carried the handset to his room, shut the door, threw it on the bed, watched it bounce. He went to the window. He could see the Badlands scraping the sky to the west, the sun nearly touching their tops. The Drusemans had taken him to the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore, to the Nebraska Sand Hills and the Niobrara River, to Denver and the Rocky Mountains, to Minneapolis and its lakes and the Mall of America, but for some reason they'd bypassed the Badlands.

He could walk to them, he thought. He imagined doing it—going downstairs, out the door, down the highway toward the sun, until the land changed around him. He thought of getting lost in that big, unpeopled country. From here, from this window, it appealed to him—to be where no one was. Where nothing had been spoiled by people, nothing touched or changed. He imagined himself out there, small and alone. But he knew he wouldn't do it. He turned from the window and looked at the phone again.

He thought of calling Earl. He wanted to know if Earl had talked to the sheriff yet. But if he hadn't, calling would only irritate him. Until that night on Tower Hill, Earl had ignored Willi, and Willi felt that even now Earl wished he could ignore him, but the horses prevented that. Willi was the stranger here. Why did he feel more involved in what was happening than Earl seemed to be? He half-envied Earl his disengagement, his mistrust of what seemed obvious to Willi. Willi couldn't strike from his mind the way the horses stood with bowed heads, ribs beginning to show.