Winter Counts(26)
You’d think I would have been grateful to Marie and at least expressed my thanks, but instead I projected my anger and humiliation onto her and left without saying a word. After that, I avoided her, just as I tried to elude my own shame and sorrow.
Of course I saw Marie around in high school—she was the smart girl with the weird clothes, half Osage, the one putting up posters for PETA and the World Wildlife Fund. I, on the other hand, focused more on drinking beer, lifting weights, and listening to heavy metal music, even paying forty bucks for a Slayer tattoo on my shoulder. Marie’s father was elected to the tribal council during this time, which put even more pressure on her. Reservation politics, then and now, are a cesspool of nepotism and favoritism, and grudges and feuds run deep. Marie tried to stay out of the fray, but she would be drawn in to disputes and clashes, even though none of it was her doing.
I lost track of her after high school, although I’d see her in passing at the grocery store or gas station. As for me, I wandered through years of crappy jobs in Mission, Valentine, and Rapid City. Because of drinking and general fucking up, I was fired from jobs in construction, roofing, auto repair, and dishwashing. I had some girlfriends, but nothing serious. One girl said she loved me, but then she ran off with a dude from Pine Ridge.
My career as a hired thug began when Lonnie, one of my high school buddies, told me about his sister, Angela. She’d been living with her boyfriend in Norris and was five months pregnant. The boyfriend had gotten blackout drunk and got it into his head that the father of the baby was another man. So he beat the crap out of her, trying to end the pregnancy. He succeeded. She miscarried the next day but kept quiet about it. Lonnie found out and called the tribal police. They referred the case to the feds, who didn’t even bother to interview Angela in person. Instead, they just did a phone call and declined to prosecute, calling it a standard spousal abuse case, not worth their time. Two months later Angela killed herself and her cat, leaving nothing living in the tiny house. She’d wrapped the dead cat up in a little star quilt that had been intended for their baby.
Lonnie told me this story a few months after it happened. He was a pretty stoic guy but broke down during our conversation. I felt something twist inside myself like a razor blade, and I told Lonnie that I’d take care of the boyfriend, whose name was Rulon. I tracked him down in Two Strike, already shacked up with another woman. After I finished with him, he wasn’t able to make a fist or turn a doorknob again, and I hoped the asshole would think about Angela and their baby every time he had to ask for help. Lonnie tried to give me some money for what I’d done, but I wouldn’t take it.
Word got around after a while, and others began to approach me, asking to help them get some justice. Sometimes they called it revenge, but I suppose that depended on your point of view. At first I only took a few jobs, ones where I was really angry over the circumstances, like the case where a guy forced his young niece to perform sex acts on him. But over time I became less picky, and I took almost any job. I didn’t think too much about it—after all, if the cops wouldn’t do anything, what was wrong with a private enforcer taking action?
Yeah, I liked the fighting. Ambushing some asshole, pounding the crap out of him, teaching him a lesson—I never felt so alive as when I was administering some righteousness. When I started fighting, I’d lose myself, enter a zone where I stopped thinking. Often I’d forget who it was I was pounding and begin to imagine I was back in junior high school. It was like being in a dream, except that the fighting began to feel like my real life, and everything else felt hollow, fake. One time I was hired to beat a guy who’d broken his girlfriend’s arm, so I broke his, then made him lick the filthy public toilet at the convenience store until he vomited and passed out. I knew I had a problem, but there was no support group for hired vigilantes.
Marie never liked the way I made my money, and it became an issue in our relationship over time. She and I had met again some years after high school, and we had our first adult conversation at the Derby, an Indian bar in Valentine, Nebraska. Natives knew to stay out of the other three taverns in town, unless you were looking for a fight with a group of drunken white dudes.
I’d been drinking some Bud Lights, waiting for the pool table to open up, and she’d sat down next to me. I looked at her in surprise and we started a conversation, a conversation that continued for the next few years, until I said the one thing that Marie couldn’t forgive. The words I wanted to take back more than anything.
“Let’s move over here.”
Startled, I looked up from my tacos and my memories and saw the guy I’d nearly knifed just two hours earlier, and who might have shot me. The cop dressed like a gang member.
We moved to a table outside on the patio, away from the other customers.
“Thanks for driving out here.” He grabbed a Jarritos coconut soda from the counter and sat down. “All right, tell me what you know about Rick Crow. You two from the same area as him?”
“We are,” I said. “So what’s going on? He under investigation?”
“Let me ask the questions,” he said. “You said something about drugs on the reservation. Tell me the details.”
Marie and I looked at each other. She shook her head a little.
“Can we ask who you are, who you work for?” she said.
“Yeah, sure. I’m Dennis, DPD,” he said. “We’re investigating some individuals in the area.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. I couldn’t make out the fine print, but I think the word police was on there.