Death Where the Bad Rocks Live Read online

  “You claim to tell the future in those visions you have.”

  “You do not sound convinced.”

  Clayton laughed. “If they’re anything like the visions I get when I have too much rotgut, they’re scary.”

  “I cannot say—I have never drank.”

  “Then conjure me up a vision and tell me how long this storm’s going to last.”

  Moses stopped painting. He set the badger hair brush on the palette and closed his eyes. Ignorant wasicu who knows so little of the scope and powers of Wakan Kin. If Clayton were not so in need of an education, I would have left him in one of those fast flooding gullies. Moses opened his eyes. “Perhaps one day you will ask me for a vision.”

  “And you’d paint something like that, wouldn’t you?” Clayton walked around and bent to the crème colored muslin encased in a hasty wood frame propped against the easel. Clayton cocked his head to both sides, moving so as to study every inch of the yet unfinished painting. “This what they call an abstract? Don’t look like anything we have hanging back at the house.”

  Moses covered the palette with a damp cloth and draped a wet burlap sack over the painting. He stepped back and filled his pipe from a stone urn on the table. He studied the bone skewer he tamped his tobacco with. How could this wealthy wasicu ever understand the ways of the Lakota? If he told Clayton the skewer he tamped tobacco with once pierced his chest muscles until it tore loose the first time he had danced to the sun at twelve, Clayton would not understand.

  “You know, you get me a nice mulie buck and I’ll buy you a nice ivory tobacco tamper.”

  Ignorant man.

  Moses pocketed the sharpened bone. He leaned back in his chair as Clayton cocked his head at the other paintings adorning the walls, others propped against the table and cupboard in the one-room cabin. The paintings hanging on the walls moved eerily in time with the wind whistling through the cracks in the mud chinking. At just twenty years old, Moses had as little experience with the wasicu as Clayton had with the Lakota. Moses had been told many things about the Whites from his father. Kills Behind the Tree had walked with a bitter limp the rest of his life from a 7th Cavalry trooper’s bullet to his thigh at Wounded Knee. He had clung to his low opinion of White men until the day he died from the White man’s consumption disease. Moses constantly fought against his father’s opinion of the wasicu so it did not skew his own judgment. “This painting is abstract because you are not willing to learn the meaning of the vision.”

  “What meaning?” Clayton pulled the cloth covering away. “Looks like some crows feeding on a dead coyote.”

  Moses sighed. “If I tell you, will it help you understand the Lakota better?”

  “Might.” Clayton sat on a chair beside Moses and scooted close. “Try me.”

  “See that sunrise?” Moses gestured with his pipe to the top of the painting. “That represents my people rising after the flood.”

  “Like the one Noah went through?”

  Moses shrugged. “Could be. And below the flood, on the banks of the river it left behind, beside the dead coyote, there are soldier’s uniforms that have been trampled into the mud when my people rose again.”

  “What’s with the cows? Looks like they haven’t eaten in a coon’s age.”

  “They have the sickness of the rocks.”

  “What sickness?”

  Moses ignored him. “The coyote in this vision represents the enemies of the Lakota that have been brought to atone for their injustices against us by the Great Mystery. And the cows looking on are witnesses to these atrocities against us.”

  “You saying Indians are going to rise up and trample us Whites?”

  “It is what I saw in a vision.”

  Clayton stood and backed close to the door. “Sounds pretty hostile to me.”

  “It is not. Trust me.”

  He covered the canvas once more and stood. The rain had stopped, and the only water Moses felt when he opened the door was rain trickling off the roof and dripping onto his head. He breathed deep, holding it as long as he could before he let it out. He always loved that time right after a summer rain, loved the smell and what it did to nourish the land. It was times such as these he most appreciated the Thunder Beings’ power, when their terrible violence was replaced with life-giving rain and a newness it brought. But he knew that within an hour, perhaps less, the Badlands would soak up the rain like it soaked up everything else that lived here. And little trace of the Thunder Beings’ work would remain.

  Clayton joined Moses in the doorway and he turned his head and held his breath. Clayton was sicamna, bad smelling. Moses found Clayton’s odor offense, yet here was another opportunity to understand the wasicu. Perhaps he’d find some way to convince Clayton he needed to cleanse daily, both physically and spiritually.

  Clayton pointed to stars peeking around from the Thunder Beings shifting wings, dark clouds passing by. “The Big Dipper’s most visible clear after a rain. What do you Indians have to say about it?”

  “Sure you want to know? The answer is not simple.”

  “What the hell else do we have to do until we go hunting in the morning?”

  Moses chin-pointed to the night sky. “What you call the Big Dipper has seven stars. That is why there are the Seven Council Fires of the Lakota. They were given to us—along with all the stars—by Wakan Tanka. We say they are the breath of life, the woniya, of Wakan Tanka.”

  Lightning flashes in the sky to the south where the storm had escaped lit Clayton’s face for a brief moment before burning out. “And over there?” Clayton pointed to the west. Between flashes of light, a tall butte jutted up out of the floor of the Badlands, dark and ragged and uninviting. “What’s that?”

  “That is Galigo Table, what the Old Ones called Escape Mesa.” Moses wrapped his lips around the catlinite pipe and inhaled the tobacco mixed with sweet sage, exhaling it so slowly so as not to frighten the smoke away. He allowed the fragrance of sweetgrass to linger just a moment longer. Good spirits like wacanga. “Some say that is where Big Foot’s Minneconjous fled to escape capture after Wounded Knee, and where they danced the Wanagi Wacipi, the Ghost Dance, before meeting their fate on Wounded Knee Creek.”

  “My father talks about that sometimes. Says those Indians picked a fight and ran off to Galigo Table.”

  Moses paused, closing his eyes, and breathed deep, his chest filling with air. And sadness. The wasicu version of the tragedy was far different than the Lakota’s. “They actually fled to the Stronghold table just beyond, the place of many Ghost Dances leading up to the…battle.”

  “Can we ride over that way sometime?”

  “Sometime. But tomorrow is the last day to hunt. I got to get you back to your ranch before your father puts a bounty on my scalp.”

  “That’s if we even see anything worth killing.”

  “We will.”

  “I’m not so sure there’s even any game here like you claim. I don’t even see any heads hanging on your wall. Only thing resembling something you killed is that mountain lion hide on your bunk.” Clayton pointed to a tawny, thick-hided cougar pelt that served as a blanket.

  Moses tamped his pipe against his heel and the burnt ashes fell outside. “There is nothing hanging on my walls because we do not kill for trophies. We kill to survive, killing with great reverence for the animal we hunt.”

  Clayton laughed. “Did you have reverence for whatever we ate last night?”

  “The rabbit? Sure, and I will kill a squirrel, maybe a badger, before I get you home, all with equal reverence and thanks for sacrificing its life for us. But we will get your prize to hang on your wall. Now we better get some sleep so we can get up early so the sun can bake your white skin one more day.”

  “No wonder Dad forbade me to come here.” Clayton’s hat fell off as he craned his neck up to look at the high canyon walls. He dismounted and grabbed his hat, holding it to his chest as he squinted to look at scrub junipers clinging tenaciously to shale cliffs a hun
dred feet above the floor of the Badlands. Even at this distance, exposed roots jutted out of rock as if stretching to catch whatever moisture might happen to fall. A hawk hunting in the morning lit on one of those junipers and looked down on them. “Nothing grows here. It’s ugly.”

  Moses dismounted his mule and wrapped the reins of his packhorse around his hand. He led them along the narrow half path snaking down toward the floor of the Badlands, a one-animal path. Clayton led his own horse. It snorted and pulled at the hackamore and kicked up loose rocks that plummeted down the cliff.

  “There is beauty here. My people used this place for sanctuary for longer than even the winter counts tell us. That alone makes this a beautiful place. Besides, things grow here if you know where to look.”

  “Well, I’m looking and I see nothing worth writing about.” Clayton leaned over the edge and jerked back. Loose rock careened off siltstone outcroppings. The sound bouncing off the floor below made the hair stand on his neck. “You trying to get me killed?”

  Moses smiled. “If that were the case, you would be gone now.”

  The trail broke out into a large flat of dirt and they stopped in the shade beside an overhang of volcanic rock. There they tied their horses and Moses’s mule to a large boulder. The packhorse shook its head and the sound of antlers clanging together on the pack saddle echoed like gunshots. Clayton ran his hand over the enormous mulie rack tied to the saddle, and grabbed the water bladder from the packhorse. “This’ll look great over the fireplace—it’s even bigger than the one Dad got eleven years ago.”

  Moses grabbed a handful of sparse gama grass and began rubbing his mule’s withers. The air was too dry, too hot, and whatever sweat the animal created instantly evaporated. Rubbing the mule’s muscles would help with circulation, and ease the animal’s soreness. They had miles yet to go before the mule could drink at the cabin, and Moses had no desire to carry the critter back. “We took the life of the deer, but we did so with reverence, as we do for every living thing here.”

  Clayton stopped midswig. “As ugly as this place is, there’s something about it that makes me want to come back.” He took a last drink before capping the bladder. “Keeps my mind off the war. And off Laren.”

  “The girl at the dance?”

  “Does it show?”

  Moses nodded. “I figured it would take a girl to distract someone like you have been.”

  “She wanted me to leave the dance with her, but all I wanted to do was stay and get drunk. She made me drink a lot more than I wanted to.”

  “No man can make another do anything.”

  Clayton’s smile faded. “A woman can. She told me that night she’d be leaving for South America. Missionary work. So remote she couldn’t even send me a letter. And all I wanted to do is get in the missionary position with her.”

  Moses took the water bladder from Clayton. “Know her long?”

  Clayton sat on a sandstone table, eroded by wind and water, and dried the inside of his hat with his bandanna. “Since school days. I think I always loved her. Now I put the run on her with my wild ways.”

  “You did not tell your father you had broken up.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Intuition. Trust me, he thinks the world of Laren, and he will be upset when he finds out.”

  Clayton kicked a rock with the toe of his boot. “He thinks she’s too good for me, but figures she could straighten me out. He keeps talking about having a grandson to bounce on his knee. He’ll be furious when he finds out I drove her away.”

  “I know how he will feel.”

  Clayton spit on a centipede scurrying across the ground. “You? How could you possibly know how he’ll feel?”

  Moses leaned back against the outcropping and grabbed his pipe from his pocket. “I looked forward to being an uncle once, to having a baby nephew to bounce on my own knee. But brother Trusty died at the Marrne. He was fee patented. A citizen. His wife tried to talk him out of enlisting, but all Trusty would say is that we Lakota have a warrior tradition to uphold. That he was akicita, and he enlisted in Pershing’s army. He was sent to the front in France with the first wave of doughboys. He never made it past that first forest of barbed wire the Krauts strung for our men.”

  Clayton became silent and hung his head and, for a moment, Moses heard sobbing. When Clayton looked up, the corners of his mouth drooped with the sadness of a man holding the world inside his heart. He wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve. “I’ve been there. Seen more than my share of men die in those same barbed wire traps, stuck while the Germans machine-gunned them. Tell me, did Trusty have children?”

  “He did not have time. He married Hannah a month before the war.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  Moses shrugged. “She is Oglala—used to such sorrows, especially death. It was not the first time a Lakota woman was widowed because her man died an honorable death in battle.”

  “She ever remarry?”

  “No.” Moses stood and stretched. “A shame, too. She is a good woman. And most beautiful.”

  “How come you didn’t bring her along on this hunt?”

  Moses laughed, then stopped when he recalled Randolff’s account of Clayton’s mother dying on a game hunt. “Our women do not hunt. They stay at home and await the triumphant return of their men back to the teepee and all that.”

  “Maybe she’ll come along next time. Maybe I’ll get a chance to meet her.”

  Moses smiled again, and for the first time in recent memory, his heart was happy for his brother’s wife. “You would like her. Trust me.”

  CHAPTER 8

  A hotel guest, gaudy in his Bermuda shorts and flowered shirt, elbowed past Manny getting through the entryway of the Hotel Alex Johnson. I wonder if that fool knows how ridiculous Hawaiian garb looks in South Dakota. The man ran to a set of double doors at the end of the lobby and disappeared inside. The clerk behind the desk looked after the man before doing a double take, watching Manny as he walked around the lobby. Guess the Alex Johnson will have two celebrities today: the first Lakota Supreme Court nominee and the first Lakota FBI agent. He cursed the Rapid City Journal for pasting his picture over the front page with the Red Cloud homicide two months ago. He’d prayed his notoriety—as the FBI agent that had failed to solve the Red Cloud case—would fade. But it hadn’t, and Manny often felt people’s accusing looks as he walked by or entered a room.

  It surprised Manny that so few people occupied the lobby today during the height of the tourist season, and he figured most folks were here to listen to Judge Alexander Hamilton High Elk. But that was all right: that gave Manny the freedom to wander the hotel lobby without others gawking at him.

  He looked about in awe at the grandeur of the historic hotel and wondered at the vision to build such a place in the middle of the west. Starting the day before Mt. Rushmore construction began in 1927, Alex Carlton Johnson had spared no expense in incorporating Indian and German themes into the architecture of the building. Journalists of the day proclaimed the Alex Johnson the Showplace of the West, while people in modern times echoed that sentiment.

  Manny stepped onto bricks laid by craftsmen seventy-five years ago, the bricks hand fired, many with Indian symbols painted on them. The bricks with the swastika particularly fascinated Manny, and he could only guess about the artist who had painted them. The symbol had special meaning to the Navajo, though he had forgotten what, like he had forgotten many things Indian since leaving the reservation. Far too many things lost over the years of living in the east.

  Judge High Elk’s secretary had instructed Manny to wait in the lobby where the judge would meet him after his talk to the local bar association. Manny dropped into an overstuffed paisley chair that wrapped its enormous arms around him as it had others before him for three-quarters of a century. He closed his eyes, imagining the people that had enjoyed the chair’s comforting embrace, imagining what stories they had whispered to the old chair as they sought solace in it.
/>   Clapping from the large conference hall snapped Manny awake. The applause subsided, but grew again until it bounced off the walls, and came full around to where he sat: the judge getting a standing ovation, he was certain, as he did wherever he spoke. Or so the press reported always happened whenever Judge High Elk honored people with an appearance.

  Manny turned his attention to one wall spanning the length of the lobby. Lakota artifacts, quivers and arrows and lances, weapons of war, adorned that wall, along with artifacts of peace: a ceremonial pipe of red catlinite, and framed copies of broken treaties between the Lakota and the government. The artifacts shared the wall with railroad memorabilia. Alex Johnson had been vice president of the Chicago and North Western Railroad, and had been as proud of his connections with the railroad as he was fascinated with Indian life.

  The applause stopped and a small, pale man in a black suit too large for him threw open the conference room door. He pushed his long sleeves over his wrists and stood there as if he were a movie usher directing young neckers to leave. Manny caught the man in the Hawaiian garb in the middle of the crowd, jostled around while being pushed from behind as the crowd filed out of the room.

  Manny averted his eyes, his gaze drawn to a wall, not to the two enormous buffalo heads standing guard on either size of the oversize mantel, but to the painting hanging between them. He had heard that the Alex Johnson had acquired an original Moses Ten Bears piece—only five of which were known to have survived the Oglala sacred man—but this was the first Manny saw of the painting since its unveiling last month. Manny took in the subdued colors, almost an abstract, and the nebulous meaning of the painting. The Rapid City Journal article claimed the hotel had bought the painting in honor of the nomination of Alexander Hamilton High Elk to the Supreme Court.

  “Remarkable, isn’t it?” A voice spoke so softly behind him Manny barely caught it, yet the tone and timbre sent goose bumps scurrying across his forearms. A tall Lakota with sky blue eyes, kind eyes, met his gaze. The eyes were set on either side of a nose so straight one could set a ruler along it, and an angular, muscular neck sported a bone choker. “Did you know Moses Ten Bears and my grandfather were best friends?”