The Highwayman: A Longmire Story (Walt Longmire #11.5)(5)

I studied the rack. “Which is Bobby Womack’s?”

He touched one at the upper left-hand corner. “This one right here.”

“Can I see it?”

“No.”

I glanced at Henry. “Do you mind if I ask why?”

He filled himself a cup from the urn and leaned against the counter. “When I first got here, every once in a while . . . not every day, but every once in a while, I’d come in and that mug, Bobby’s mug, would be turned back around to where you could read his name.”

“So why can’t I look at it now?”

“I superglued it down.” He turned and rinsed his mug in the adjacent sink and then carefully dried it and put it in its cubby just below Womack’s. “You know what they call him?”

“Heeci’ecihit.” The Bear leaned back and laced his long fingers in his lap. “That is what the Arapaho have always called him. Heeci’ecihit—the Highwayman.”





2




“His mother liked the R & B singer. She had one of those console record players, and she used to play Sam Cooke and Bobby Womack albums all the time, so she named her only son Bobby.” The dreadfully obese Arapaho man shook his head. “Since the singer’s name was Womack, she thought they must’ve been related somehow. Couldn’t ever convince her otherwise, especially after he did a country album.”

“Is she still alive?”

“Oh no, long dead. I think sometime back in the eighties.”

“Are there any Womacks still around?”

“There’s an aunt, I think, over in Fort Washakie, but I’m not sure exactly where. She’d probably be in her nineties by now.” Sam Little Soldier smiled. “Hey, I heard you had lunch with Kimama—how’d that go?”

I shrugged. “She’s calling me Bucket.”

He studied me. “You are kind of beyond the pale.”

“So, Bobby was the first Arapaho trooper?”

“The very first of the people to become a flat-hat, yes. It was quite a stir for a while—he was about as famous as Sacajawea around these parts. There were a lot of people who were offended by it, though, said he’d gone over to the other side, but Bobby, he was just like that—always helping people.”

“So, you knew him pretty well?”

He nodded. “We went to school together.”

“Where?”

Sam gestured to the area around his office. “Right here. They started Central Wyoming College up in 1966, and Bobby and I got in in ’68 when they were still having classes in the basement of a bank downtown. We both played basketball for the Shaman and then transferred down to Laramie.”

Henry raised an eyebrow. “The Shaman?”

Sam nodded. “That was the name of the sports teams before they changed it to the Rustlers.”

“I think I like ‘Shaman’ better.”

Sam laughed. “Yeah, me too, but we got too many First Nations/Indigenous Peoples/Aboriginal Americans/Natives around here to go for that.”

“Was Bobby tall?”

He shook his head. “No, he was a little guy, but one of those bundles of baling wire and tough as hell.” The three-hundred-pound man reached over his shoulder, pulled down one of the numerous black-and-white photos on his wall in the Wyoming Public Radio office, and handed it to me. “Front and center, holding the ball, the one with the black socks. He was one of the most gifted power forwards I’ve ever seen. He was fast, too fast for all these corn-feds around here. Played on dirt his whole childhood, barefoot. Then the high school came along and gave him shoes and a wooden floor? He was unstoppable.”

First I studied the younger and much thinner version of the man in front of us and then the young Bobby Womack sitting in the photo, a dark swatch of hair covering one eye with the other taking all comers, looking into the camera and maybe the world. “What happened in Laramie?”

“Some guy from Arizona State side-checked him and that’s when his knee went; walked with that limp the rest of his life. He finished his degree, though, and we all figured he’d teach and maybe coach somewhere, but that’s when he put in with the Highway Patrol.”

Pulling my eyes away from the young man in the photo, I looked at his friend. “With a bad knee?”

Sam laughed and parts of his anatomy jostled to join in. “Yeah, even with a bad knee he outdid everybody at the academy.”

I handed him back the memories. “Hard to believe.”

“Yeah, well . . .” He set the photo on his desk and studied it. “That was Bobby.” A moment passed, and then he glanced at Henry, finally resting his dark eyes on me. “So, why are you two world shakers down here asking questions about Heeci’ecihit?”

I smiled. “So, you know the legends?”

“Oh, yeah. The Highwayman of the Wind River Canyon . . . Tribal story. After the incident, the old women would threaten their children with him.” He stuck out a fat finger and shook it at me. “You don’t do what you’re supposed to, Heeci’ecihit will come and get you!” He laughed. “Bobby would’ve loved that—he was one of the worst kids on the rez.”

“What changed him?”

Sam chuckled. “He grew up—every once in a while it happens—been there, done that. Hell, you know as well as I do that young outlaws make the best lawmen.” He studied us some more. “But you still haven’t answered my question, and I’m wondering why you would come down here and start asking people about old ghost stories.”