Winter Counts(78)

26


It was early in the morning when I went home, still dazed and numb. Marie met me at the door when I walked in, her hair askew and wearing one of my old Megadeth Tshirts, her eyebrows furrowed together in an angry line.

“I called you like thirty times. I thought something had happened.”

“I was at my sister’s grave. All night. Left my phone in the car, fell asleep at some point. There’s some bad news. Turns out that—”

“I heard,” she said. “My dad told me. I’m really sorry. But you should have left a message. I called everyone looking for you. Tommy, my dad, even Jerome. No one knew where you were. I thought maybe the drug guys had shot you.”

“Needed some time,” I said. “Sorry.”

She softened. “You hungry? Let me make you some breakfast.”

“We got any of those corn cakes left?”

I hadn’t realized how carved out I was. I sat at the table as she brought food to me. I felt my mind begin to clear as I inhaled cornbread, berries, and strong dark coffee.

“So tell me what’s going on,” she said. “My dad said they found the car Nathan was riding in, but no one was in it.”

I finished my coffee and poured another cup, then told her about the abandoned car and the smashed cell phone. The fact there was practically no chance of finding them without a description of the car they were now driving.

“What are they going to do?” she said. “The police.”

“I don’t know. He just said to trust him, that they’d call when there was news.”

By the look on her face, I could tell she had the same degree of trust in the feds that I did. She poured herself a cup of coffee and put it in the microwave to warm it up.

“I have an idea,” she said. “I don’t know if you’re going to like it. Here’s the deal. I was trying to find you last night; like I said, I even called Jerome Iron Shell. Thought you might be over there, drinking sodas or something. Jerome usually knows what’s going on around here.”

I nodded. “He’s a good guy.”

“Anyway, I told him about Nathan, that he’d possibly been, you know, captured, and we didn’t know where he was. Jerome said there’s a way to find missing people.”

“Yeah?” I didn’t know where this was going.

“He said we need to have a yuwipi. Most people think it’s for healing, but he said it’s also used for other stuff, like finding missing objects—or people.”

I started to say something, but she kept going. “He said if you pray hard enough at the ceremony, the spirits will grant your request, tell you what you need to know.”

A yuwipi. I’d never been to one. If a person was badly ill, people gathered at a house with the windows completely blacked out, then the medicine man would be tied up with ropes and wrapped in a star quilt. Then a ceremony would supposedly call up the spirits, who would heal the sick person and release the yuwipi man from the ropes. I’d never heard it could be used to gain information or find missing people. But I knew one thing. It was a goddamn waste of time. And right now, time was critical if I had any chance of getting Nathan back alive.

“Hey, that’s really cool of you,” I said. “It’s great you’re thinking about Nathan. Appreciate it. But right now, I need to—”

“Don’t patronize me,” she said, stirring her coffee.

“What?” I saw that a little had spilled out of her cup.

“I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to shut me up. But you need to listen. I’m just going to say it—Nathan doesn’t have much time, if he’s still alive. That’s a shitty thing to say, I know! But you’ve got to get past your own crap. About our traditions. Now’s the time to use whatever you can. I don’t know if it’s the spirits or the placebo effect or whatever, but I’ve seen things at ceremony I can’t explain.”

She pointed with her lips to the corn cakes on the table, asking me to hand her one.

“Marie, I hear you. I’m not disagreeing with you about ceremony. But I can’t see taking a whole day for some yuwipi right now, not when I can be out scouring the streets.”

“It’s not a whole day! Maybe two or three hours. And it’s done at night. When you’d be finished looking. Why wouldn’t you try this?”

“I don’t know, let me think about it. Maybe in a few days, if Dennis can’t find anything. We’ll talk about it then.”

She looked out the window toward the light. “Actually, I already told Jerome to start getting ready. The ceremony is tonight. When the sun goes down.”

I DROVE AROUND the streets of the reservation, looking for something out of the ordinary, something that would give me a clue as to where Nathan might be. I went down back roads and dirt paths, places that didn’t appear on any GPS system. I covered the main streets quickly, then worked my way to the outskirts, driving to the small hamlets and communities of the rez, not really towns, just homesteads where people congregated to be near others and gain some comfort amid the vast spaces of the territory, the land that had been promised to us but whittled away by thousands of official seizures, done under cover of federal rules and regulations.

After a long time, I realized it was pointless. I felt foolish, thinking I might stumble onto the guys that had abducted Nathan. They could be anywhere from Rapid City to Denver or beyond. I called Dennis, hoping for some good news. He picked up right away and said there was no new information, but the search was ongoing. He’d contact me the minute anything turned up. His tone was abrupt, and I wondered if he felt guilty or was just busy. The last communication from Nathan had been exactly twenty-four hours ago. The critical time period.