Winter Counts(29)
“What do you think?” Marie said. She’d been pretty quiet during Dennis’s tirade.
“He’s crazy if he thinks I’d let Nathan wear a wire. No fucking way. Too dangerous.”
“But he said Nathan would be safe, they’d be watching him the whole time.”
I looked over at her. “You’re not suggesting I agree to this?”
“Well, he said this was the best way to stop the cartels—get at the bosses or whatever. They’re the bad guys. Maybe Rick could stay out of it.”
Again she was trying to protect Rick Crow. Jealousy blossomed in my gut like a bout of food poisoning. I said calmly, “Why is it so important to keep Rick out of it? If he’s working with them, he should go to jail too.”
“I’m just saying the important thing is to keep the drugs off the rez. Look, you know I’d never want Nathan to be in danger. But what happens if no one stops those guys? Maybe they keep selling, and he gets some of that stuff again.”
I glanced over at her and saw that her arms were folded across her chest, so that the top of her shirt puffed out. “Yeah, but I’m sure the cops can find somebody else to wire up. Doesn’t have to be him.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But it sounds like it’s not that easy to arrange these, uh, stings, or whatever they’re called. If it were, they’d have already shut them down.”
“Don’t know about that. I just know Nathan has been through enough. They can find another rat.”
“Rat? How is someone a rat if they’re doing a good thing? In my world, that person is a hero. You think Crazy Horse would be afraid to go after bad guys?”
“I don’t know what Crazy Horse would do,” I said. “Just know I’ll fight my own battles.”
It was funny that Marie—the sometimes-pacifist—was invoking Crazy Horse, the Lakota who vowed to fight the white men until his last breath.
“Nathan won’t wear a wire. He’s no snitch. That’s my decision—and it’s final.”
We rode in silence back to the motel.
THE NEXT MORNING, Marie was still mad at me. Maybe I’d been too stubborn, not willing to consider her views, but it was impossible for me to be neutral when it came to Nathan’s safety. Yes, he was my nephew, not my son, but Indians never made that distinction. Nieces, nephews, cousins—these were all viewed as family by Natives, not as lesser kin that could be ignored. Of course this sometimes led to some titanic battles between family members. I knew quite a few tiospaye on the rez where warring relations had refused to speak to each other for decades.
I waited for Marie to finish a phone call to her father. When she was done, we both needed caffeine, so we drove on Colfax Avenue until we found a place called La Capulina, which looked like a coffeehouse but might have been a bicycle repair shop, given that there were about fifteen bikes parked outside, the old-fashioned kind that didn’t have gears or brakes. Most of them had wicker baskets on the handlebars. These bicycles were cute, but would last about ten minutes on the pitted and scarred roads of the rez.
Inside, the coffeehouse resembled an abandoned factory, with bare metal walls and jagged fixtures, but strangely, a variety of objects were haphazardly scattered around the room: antique wheelchairs, battered birdcages, hand-stitched pillows, and dozens of old cameras—Polaroids, Honeywells, many I didn’t recognize. Behind the counter was a man in his mid-twenties with a full brown beard and long waxed mustache. He was dressed in old-fashioned mining garb, as if he’d just stepped out of a quarry in 1850s Appalachia, minus the dirt and grime. He said something to me, but it was hard to hear over the music playing in the background, which sounded like a car’s transmission seizing up. I moved closer to the counter, where it was marginally quieter.
“I said, what can I start for you?”
“Two large coffees, one black and one cream,” I replied.
“Today we’re brewing La Mestiza. These are washed beans from Guatemala, the terroir is Southern Huila, and the varietal is Caturra. If you’d like to read the cupping notes, I have them right here. It’s a light and clean body with the aroma of caramel popcorn and brown sugar. And I’m sorry, we don’t serve any milks with our coffee. We want you to experience the flavor and bouquet of the coffee, not of some hormone-infested animal product.”
“Uh, okay, fine.”
We waited about ten minutes for him to make the coffee, which involved grinding some coffee beans and setting up an oddly shaped funnel over a jug and then pouring one molecule at a time of boiling water into the funnel. The whole thing reminded me of chemistry class, nothing like the Indian brewing process of tossing some grounds into a coffeepot over a fire. I have to say, the coffee was pretty good, maybe even exceptional, nothing like the java they served at Big Bat’s in Pine Ridge. This was no small compliment, as Big Bat’s coffee was widely considered to be the best in a hundred miles. Of course, the fancy coffee had better be good, given that each cup cost roughly the price of a pound of Folger’s.
We took our coffees to the patio, being careful not to spill a single expensive drop.
“Hey,” Marie said, “I’m sorry if I gave you a hard time about Nathan. I just want the best—for him and the rez. But it’s your decision.”
I was relieved that Marie’d had a change of heart. Yesterday I’d wondered if she’d be so willing to send a young kid into a drug buy if it was her own child. But maybe that was unkind.