Two Medicine (49 page)

“Dee’s asleep,” he said in
a whisper, and sat me down at the kitchen. “What the hell happened
to you?”

“That’s what I came to talk to you about. Do
you have a few minutes?”

He nodded, and then said,
“Let me get you a cup of coffee and we’ll sit out back.”

We were soon planted back on the bench
again, with a mug of coffee in our hands. The morning was coming up
bright and clear, the sky overhead was now a light, bird’s egg
blue.

“I was almost killed by
Jake after the powwow,” I told him. “Some of his friends tracked me
down on the road, after the powwow was over.”

I told him about the sweat
lodge, and then how I found myself out on the road. I told him
about the attack and about Larry coming to my rescue. For some
reason, I stopped right at the point of telling him that Larry had
accidentally killed Alia. Something held me back.

As I spoke, Greg looked
more agitated by the second. “Jesus Christ. Look, I’m sorry Will; I
got a call in from the station that there was some major trouble in
the camp with some drunk kids. It turned out to be a total false
alarm, a prank; and now I think I know who made that call – to get
you and I separated.”

“
Jake probably, or one of
his gang,” I said, resting my head back on the wall behind us. My
neck ached as I stretched back against the house. “I’m not sure how
much Clayton is wrapped up in this – if at all – but Jake has got
to be the one running the drug deals that the BIA and feds are
focused on. I don’t know why else he would try to kill me in front
of everyone like that.”

Greg shook his head. “You
don’t see it, Will?
He
killed Alia, I knew it all along. And he thinks you’re
bringing the heat around Browning, bringing focus to it all. You
got him scared.”

“
He didn’t seem very
scared.” I thought about Larry’s confession, and then a new idea
occurred to me.

“
What I don’t get,” Greg
said, growing more energized as sipped his coffee, “Is that Larry
just happened to be driving by and saw you in the
woods?”

“That’s what he told me.”
I shrugged.

I watched Greg running
over the logic (or lack thereof) of my story in his head; and I
didn’t want him to start picking apart the details too closely, not
yet.

“
What are you going to
do?” I asked him.

He looked at me and
thought for a second. “Arrest Jake. Call the cops and have them
send a car to Rick’s – talk to him too.” Greg took a thoughtful sip
of his coffee. “Think you can identify the others that attacked
you?”

“
Maybe, it was pretty dark
and rainy most of the time. But yea, maybe.”

“
Larry could, I bet,” Greg
said, getting up from the bench. “I’ll give him a call in a bit and
see what he can remember.”

I held onto his sleeve to
stop him. “Best leave him out of it.”

Greg looked at me.
“Why?”

Is telling half a truth
the same as a lie?
“He was out that night
doing something he wouldn’t want to have to explain.” I told Greg
that Larry had visited a hooker’s house and that he couldn’t handle
that being exposed – that it would ruin Phyllis and his whole
lives.

“
He’s so distraught over
the whole thing, the attack, and everything, that I don’t think
he’ll ever go within a mile of Browning again,” I said. “After what
he did for me; I want to protect him.”

“
But he’ll need to be a
witness against Jake, at least!”

“
I don’t think so, Greg.
If you can just leave him out of this; I would consider it a
personal favor to me.”

“
But how will you explain
things then? How would you have gotten back to town?”

“
It’ll just look like they
meant only to rough me up, scare me a little, and then I hitched
back with some stranger,” I said. “Simple as that.”

Greg looked dubious, but
was eager to get a call into the BIA and report the attack, so we
separated after he asked me a few more questions about the ordeal,
basically making me repeat it all again as he scribbled quick
notes.

Soon he was at the phone
in his kitchen, talking to the ranger station at the main lodge and
then putting a call into the BIA in Browning. His exited chatter
made me remember how much he had wanted to be a real cop, and was
so on board initially with my amateur investigation; and then how
much he had pulled back after facing the resistance at home and at
work. Now he must have felt vindicated.

Not long after
we got ready and he told Dee some bare details on
what we were doing, we were tearing off down the road in his truck.
Greg advised that I’d have to come down to the BIA office to make a
formal statement, but I had already intended to anyway so I went
along with it. Larry’s involvement was still officially off the
record, and the more time went by the more conviction I had as to
how to deal with him.

We got to the BIA office
within the hour, and I was soon sitting, once again, in Olsterman’s
office, facing his big messy desk with its coffee stained papers
and dusty tape recorder. Greg had left me there to check in with
the other rangers at the main lodge and fill them in on the plan
for that day.

Olsterman was late arriving
and I waited about ten minutes until he eventually walked into this
office, shutting the door behind him.
I
watched his face as he came in; he looked the same as before – the
same big egg-shaped head with a police officer’s hat jammed down
onto it, which he took off and hung on a rack as he settled into
his chair – the same red face with eyes close together and the
stubbly, grey-white beard. He did not look particularly pleased to
see me sitting in his office again. I wondered suddenly if Larry
had already contacted him and confessed.

“Greg filled me in on the
phone.” He said in his slow drawl as he heavily sat down in his
leather desk-chair. “And it seems like you’re lucky to be alive
young man.”

“I don’t feel too lucky,”
I said, stretching my neck a little bit, feeling the tape from the
bandage pulling against my skin.

“Are you willing to make a
statement?” He reached over and pulled the tape recorder closer to
him.

“Of course.”

The officer reached over
and grabbed his legal pad, and set it in front of me, handing me a
pen. “First we’ll record your verbal statement; then you write it
out – make it as detailed as you can. Start with the beginning,
where you were when you got to the powwow, and so on.”

I told him the whole story
except with Larry carefully removed, and then wrote down the same
version, also not mentioning Ronnie in any of it. As I spoke I
remembered that the staff could place Larry with me at the
hospital, so I quickly added, to make it fit, that once I got back
to the store Larry drove me in to get treatment.

I felt squeamish about not
reporting everything I knew, but then again I felt like I owned
this story and the truth behind it – that I had earned the truth
and that I had purchased it at some great costs to my self – with
blood. As for Ronnie, I still didn’t really know how involved he
was, and I wanted to know where he fit in before I ratted him out –
that’s what the letter to him was for.

I finished the
meeting by formally pressing charges against Jake
for assault and battery. I tried to water-down how close he had
come to killing me because I felt like the bigger the criminal case
got as far as the attack, the more it would be investigated and the
my story wouldn’t hold up. I just wanted Jake finally arrested and
the cops to start interrogating him and soon the drugs connection
would get out, so I put him out of my life for good. He was a now a
dangerous and unpredictable factor that I wanted to get rid
of.

After I was done the
officer had a deputy give me a ride back to Two Med. I was
apprehensive.
Would Larry be there? Would
Ronnie? What would I say to either them? Was it even safe to be
back?

As we turned off into the
parking lot of the store I saw that Larry’s truck was still where I
had left it that morning. I had the BIA cop drive me over to the
back of the store and let me out – I was feeling the pain and
soreness returning after the ER’s meds had finally worn off and I
could barely turn my head as I got out of the cop car.

As I walked towards our
back porch I saw Ronnie stock still like a lanky statue, leaning
against the railing, a smoking cigarette between the fingers of his
hand. He looked over at me and then the cop car with dismay and
then turned his gaze back up to the mountains our side of the lake,
as if taking in the air. The telescope mounted on the railing
beside him pointed down at the ground.

I hobbled up the stairs
and sat down on a chair. Ronnie turned and looked at me, looking
over my various wounds, and then shook his head mournfully and
stared back out over the valley.

“You got my letter?” I asked.

He nodded. “So they really
did it,” he said. “Jake told me he was going to take you out but I
didn’t believe him. That psycho’s been threatening it for so damn
long.”

“You believed him enough
to tell Larry to come get me.”

“Well if it was going to
happen, I knew it was going to happen then after the
powwow.”

I thought back to when I
had first met Ronnie, that morning I had arrived fresh from the
jammer bus, it felt like years ago. There was so much about him I
had yet to know. “You got my letter?”

He nodded, still facing
away from me. “When Thunderbird called the store last night to see
if you were back from the powwow, and when he said Greg had left
you there, I got this feeling... this feeling that Jake was going
to make his move. I didn’t know who else to tell but Larry… of all
people – that’s the insane part of all this.”

He flicked the cigarette
out over the grass and turned and leaned against the rail, facing
me. He nodded to where the cop car had been. “So am I going to
jail?”

I looked at him for a
moment. “There’s a bag of pills from the hospital on the kitchen
counter. Go get it for me please.”

He went in and then
returned with the bag and a glass of water. I popped one of the
bottles open and swallowed a large, pain pill.

“So tell me what you are
into with Jake and the rest of them.” I stopped trying to look at
him which craned my neck, and I sat perfectly still so as not to
move one battered muscle.

Ronnie just stood there
for a minutes, frowning and thinking. “That big bag of weed was
just the beginning.” He turned and pulled his cigarettes from his
pocket and lit it on, the flame of the lighter illuminating his
moustache for a second. “Clayton and Jake and I had gotten to
talking, you know, when I first got her and needed to buy some
week. They told me that they had a connection in Canada that could
get me a lot more, a whole lot more, but that they had no market
for it, not enough customers, not here in Browning. I told Clayton
I knew a lot of drug people in Detroit and how Detroit was a
bottomless pit of all kinds of vices, that folks would buy anything
there – which is true.”

He took a long drag from
his cigarette and blew it out slowly from his nose. “It was mostly
just bullshit talk, and Clayton seemed kind of reluctant to get
going after a while. But Jake came to me here at the store one day
and said he had already gotten things off the ground and had a
truck coming in from Calgary with two hundred pounds of weed that I
was going to have to transport back to Detroit, with one of Jake’s
guys going with me to make sure it went smoothly.

He took a drag off his
cigarette. “I just thought ‘Oh shit, what have I got into?’ The
whole thing started getting too crazy, Will, and it became more
about Jake and less about me – and Clayton wasn’t even in the
picture anymore.”

“So Clayton wasn’t
involved – not in my thing either?” I asked.

Ronnie shrugged. “He kind
of was at first, but then he quit it and after insane Jake started
running the show. Jake said he had two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars of the family money tied up in the weed deal, and that I
was going to have to deliver some funds from Michigan soon to help
buy him out or I be dealing with ‘some bad people from the North.’
That was it for me. I mean I needed money, I have a lot of debts
back in Michigan, but not enough to get killed or put in jail
over.”

“So you bailed.”

“I tried to, but Jake said
he’d be going to Detroit with me within a few days, or that he’d be
going to my funeral in Detroit in a few days. He also told me that
he had decided to get you out of the picture at the powwow because
you were stirring up the BIA over Alia’s death.”

Ronnie smoked the last
grain of tobacco above the filter and then flicked the second
cigarette out into the grass. “I guess now he’s going to get
arrested, and maybe that will put a stop to this whole debacle.”
Ronnie seemed resigned to some new fate that involved everyone
going to jail. All of his energy and toughness had evaporated from
him – maybe all blown out in a final, defeated cloud of cigarette
smoke.