Bad News Page 16

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  She said, “Maybe you could show me around, when I move out there. Would you like to do that?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. Then he imagined all those creeps from high school who used to put him down all the time, and all those girls from high school who wouldn’t go to the movies with him, and he saw himself walking around the reservation, right in front of them all, with Little Feather Redcorn walking right next to him, smiling at him and talking to him. In the summer, maybe she’d wear a bikini.

  “You’re smiling,” she said.

  Oops. “Well,” he said, noticing that his hands were wet on the steering wheel, “I’m happy for you. Coming home and all.”

  “Little Feather,” she said, her voice low. “You can say it, Benny, come on.”

  He watched the road, as though it might at any second do something unexpected. He inhaled. “Little Feather,” he said.

  “Hi, Benny,” said that low and honeyed voice.

  He took another breath. “Hi, Little Feather,” he said.

  “Now we’re friends,” she told him, “and here’s Whispering Pines. Just drive in and bear to the right. I’ll get money out of my wallet and—”

  “You don’t have to pay me anything,” he said. “Not now that we’re friends.” He inhaled. “Little Feather,” he said.

  “Why, thank you, Benny,” she said. “Bear to the right here. That’s where I live, down there. You see the motor home?”

  “Is that yours?” he asked.

  “Yes, I drove here in it from Nevada, all by myself,” she said. “Park here, right in front of it.”

  He stopped the Subaru but left the engine running. “That’s a long way to drive, all by yourself,” he said.

  “It got scary sometimes,” she admitted, “to be completely on my own like that, but I thought, I’m going home, going to my people, and that made it better.”

  Gee, Benny thought, if only we could really be friends with Little Feather, if only Uncle Roger and my almost-uncle Frank could talk with her and see how really nice she is. Except, it wasn’t really her they wanted to keep out, they wanted to keep out anybody who could ask questions about how they were running the casino.

  “Isn’t it funny,” she said, not opening her door, “how we got along right from the beginning? Maybe it’s because we’re almost from the same tribe, but here I am, and I don’t even really know you, and I’m telling you all about myself.”

  “I like to hear you talk,” he said, which he knew was true and thought might be clever.

  “I tell you what, Benny,” she said, “if you won’t take any money because we’re friends, at least come in so I can show you where I live. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “Well, uh . . .” he said, wondering what was best to do, thinking he’d already had more experiences today than he could entirely deal with and it might be best just to go home and lie down for a while.

  She rested a hand on his forearm, with a touch like warm electricity. It tingled all the way up to his ear. Smiling at him, leaning closer to him so that a faint but powerful musk crept into his nostrils and his skull and his brain, she said, “Wouldn’t you like to come in, Benny?”

  He swallowed. He inhaled. He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I would like to come in.”

  26

  * * *

  East,” Tiny said.

  Dortmunder had been half-asleep. Now he turned to look at Tiny, who was spread across the Jeep’s backseat, and said, “Tiny? You say something?”

  “I said ‘East,’” Tiny said.

  Dortmunder looked around at the night. It had already been full dark when they’d left the Tea Cosy after dinner for the four-hour drive south, and now it was nearly one in the morning and they’d just crossed the Triborough Bridge onto Grand Central Parkway, bypassing Manhattan, juking over from the Bronx to Queens. Late on a Friday night, but there were still a lot of drivers in passenger cars all around them, most of them likely to be drunk.

  “East,” Dortmunder commented. “You mean we’re driving east,” he decided.

  “Southeast,” Tiny said.

  Kelp, at the wheel, had just turned off onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Dortmunder nodded. “You mean now we’re going southeast,” he said.

  “That’s what the car says,” Tiny told him.

  Dortmunder twisted around again to get a full double-O of Tiny back there. “Whadaya mean, ‘That’s what the car says’?”

  Tiny pointed to where Dortmunder’s halo would be, if he had a halo, and said, “Right there.”

  So Dortmunder faced front again, put his head way back, and saw, tucked under the Jeep roof, above the windshield, a kind of black box. It had bluish white numbers and letters on the side facing the rear seat, glowing in the dark:

  S E 41

  As Dortmunder looked, the S E changed to S. He looked out at the road, and it was curving to the right. “So now it’s south,” he said.

  “You got it,” Tiny told him. “Comin down, that’s what I been doin back here. Watchin the letters. A whole lotta S. A little N there when Kelp got confused on the Sprain.”

  “The signage stunk,” Kelp said.

  Dortmunder looked at Kelp’s profile, gleaming like a Halloween mask in the dashboard lights. “Signage,” he said. “Is that a word?”

  “Not for those pitiful markers they had back there,” Kelp said.

  Dortmunder decided to go back to conversation number one, and said to Tiny, “And the numbers are the temperature, right? Outside the car.”

  “You got it again,” Tiny told him.

  Forgetting about signage, Dortmunder said to Kelp, “Did you know about that?”

  “Did I know about what?”

  “Southwest,” Tiny said.

  “The car here,” Dortmunder explained to Kelp, “it tells you which way you’re going, south, east, whatever, and what the temperature is outside. It’s up there.”

  Kelp looked up there.

  “Back on the road!” Dortmunder yelled.

  Kelp steered around the truck he’d been going to smash into and said, “That’s not bad, is it? The temperature outside, and which way you’re going.”

  “Very useful,” Dortmunder suggested.

  “A car like this,” Kelp said, “you could take this across deserts, jungles, trackless wastes.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said. “How many of these things do you suppose have been across deserts and jungles and trackless wastes?”

  “Oh, two or three,” Kelp said, and took the exit, and Tiny said, “South.”

  They were coming at the cemeteries from a different highway this time, so they did get a little lost, despite everything the car could do to help. Still, eventually they found Sunnyside Street, and drove slowly down it in the darkness until they reached the broken part of the fence, where Kelp jounced them up over the curb.

  Dortmunder found it was a lot easier to move the fence out of the way when Tiny was the other guy doing the lifting. Kelp drove through, they put the fence back to position one, and they walked along behind the Jeep, which from the rear still looked something like a Jeep. “It’s just a little ways along here,” Dortmunder said, moving his lips.

  And there it was. Kelp angled the Jeep off the path, and its lights shone on the gravestone that was now, through no fault of its own, a liar.

  Dortmunder said, “What we got to find is another one from that year or close to it.”

  Peering at Redcorn’s dates, Tiny said, “Birth and death both?”

  Kelp, joining them from the Jeep, said, “I don’t think so. The main thing is, he should be in the box the right length of time.”

  “Well, let’s see how tough this is gonna be,” Tiny said. He walked over to Joseph Redcorn’s stone and smacked it in the middle of the name with the heel of his hand, and it fell over on its back.

  “Well, don’t get too mean with it, Tiny,” Kelp said. “We don’t wanna crack it.”

  Dortmunder
had been looking around the neighborhood, having to squint as he moved farther from the lights of the Jeep, but now he straightened and said, “Here’s a good one.”

  The other two came over to look, and stood solemnly gazing down at the tombstone. It was very like Redcorn’s, thin, a foot wide, maybe two feet tall, weather-stained, with rounded upper corners. It said:

  BURWICK MOODY

  Loving Son and Husband

  October 11, 1904–

  December 5, 1933

  “That’s the day Prohibition ended,” Dortmunder commented.

  Tiny looked at him. “You know stuff like that?”

  “I like it when they repeal laws,” Dortmunder explained.

  Kelp said, “You notice, the wife didn’t put up the stone, the mother did.”

  “The wife was still drunk,” Tiny suggested.

  Dortmunder said, “Whadaya think, Tiny? Can this go over there?”

  Tiny stepped over to Burwick Moody’s marker and gently pushed it over onto its back. “Piece of cake,” he said. “You guys each take a corner at the bottom there, I’ll take the top.”

  The bottom corner, Dortmunder found, was rough, cold, wet, and nasty. “This job has too many graveyards in it,” he muttered, but then he lifted along with the other two.

  It was heavy, but not impossible. Tiny walked backward, looking over his shoulder as he detoured them around other tombstones, and Dortmunder and Kelp followed him, hunched side by side over the corners they carried, shoulders touching as they shuffled along, gasping a little, sweat already popping out on their foreheads into the cold night air.

  At the former Redcorn place, they put the Moody slab on the ground, picked up the Redcorn slab, and schlepped it the other way. There, while Dortmunder and Kelp held the stone in an upright position, Tiny got to his knees and karate-chopped the loose dirt until it was solidly packed around the base and no longer looked as though anything had been disturbed.

  When they’d done the same thing with Moody’s monument at Redcorn’s previous residence, Tiny stood and whapped the dirt off his hands and the knees of his trousers as he said, “And we get to do this again.”

  “The night,” Dortmunder said, “before they take the sample. We’ll find out when that’s gonna be from Little Feather, and for sure the tribes, if they’re gonna pull anything, they’ll do it before then.”

  “Nothing for us to do now,” Kelp said, “but leave.”

  “Well, I’m ready,” Dortmunder said.

  As they walked along behind the Jeep back toward the break in the fence, Tiny said, “Be a kick in the head, it turns out that isn’t her grandfather after all.”

  Dortmunder said, “What? Little Feather? Why not?”

  “Well, you never know,” Tiny said. “Could be nobody told her, but she’s adopted.”

  “Thank you, Tiny,” Dortmunder said. “I was almost beginning to relax.”

  27

  * * *

  The Tribal Council functioned mostly like a zoning board. Back in the good old days, the Tribal Council had waged war against tribal enemies, had overseen the distribution of meat after a hunt, maintained religious orthodoxy (a combination of ancestor and tree worship at that time), punished adultery and theft and treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors, arranged executions, oversaw the torturing of captured enemies, conducted the young men of the tribe through the rites of manhood, and arranged marriages (most of which worked out pretty well). These days, the Tribal Council gave out building permits.

  Tommy Dog was chairman of the Tribal Council for this quarter, he being a Kiota and the chairmanship alternating every quarter between the tribes, to be fair to everybody and to distribute the power and the glory equally, and because nobody wanted the damn job.

  But it had to be done, so on the first Saturday of every month, in the Tribal Longhouse (aka Town Hall), more or less at 3:00 P.M., the chairman of the Tribal Council would gavel the meeting into session, only hoping there would be a quorum, meaning seven out of the twelve members would be present, and that there would be no new business. There was sometimes a quorum, and there was always new business, and today, Saturday, December 2, there were both.

  Unfortunately, some of the old business was still around as well, including a festering quarrel between two neighbors over in Paradise concerning the placement of neighbor one’s septic vis-à-vis neighbor two’s well, and which came first. The neighbors no longer would speak to each other at all, and would speak to other people only at the top of their voices, and neither of them would budge until hell froze over, so it was the usual first-Saturday fun. Everybody sat around on the wooden folding chairs in the knotty pine–paneled meeting room and listened to those two Oshkawa rant and rave about each other. Everybody knew the Oshkawa were overemotional anyway.

  In the middle of it all, Tommy noticed a stranger come in and take a wooden chair in the back row. Well, not a stranger exactly—Tommy knew Benny Whitefish, had known Benny Whitefish the little squirt’s whole life—but he was a stranger here, in that Benny was most unlikely to have any business before the Council, and people who didn’t absolutely totally drag-out have to be at these meetings for whatever business or permit reasons they might have were never here, the lucky stiffs.

  Tommy Dog was sixty-three. Over in the United States, he was an electrician, and a good one, but he didn’t work much these days, hadn’t worked much for maybe twenty-five years; just enough to keep his union card, really. The casino distributed enough money to everybody on the reservation so nobody had to work if they didn’t want to, but Tommy was one of those who’d found life without meaningful activity could be amazingly boring after a while, so he kept on being an electrician from time to time, just to keep his hand in, and otherwise he hung around the reservation and watched the young ones come along. Some of those girls, boy, they could get a man in trouble, he didn’t pay attention to himself.

  But the point is, Tommy Dog knew Benny Whitefish, knew his entire family, and knew Benny to be a harmless young layabout with no more call to be at a Council meeting than a parakeet. So what was he doing here?

  I’m afraid I’m gonna find out, Tommy thought grimly as Benny shyly smiled and waved a greeting at Tommy from his perch at the back of the room.

  The septic-vs-well problem was held over to the next meeting, as usual, for the town attorney to consult his law books yet again to see if he could come up with just one more compromise that would be completely unacceptable to both parties. Most of the other old business was also held over, and so was some of the new business, though a couple permits were issued.

  Whenever there was a vote, which was about every three minutes, everybody got very solemn as Joan Bakerman, the secretary, read out the motion now to be dealt with, and some member agreed to make the motion, and then another member agreed to second the motion, and then Joan Bakerman polled the present members, calling out each name in turn, and each one responding, “Yeah,” or, “Yes,” or, “Yep.”

  Finally, it was done, and they all cleared their throats, scraped their chairs noisily over the floor as they got to their feet, hitched their trousers (men and women both), yawned discreetly, wished one another well, and got the hell out of there. All except for Tommy Dog, who saw Benny rise hesitantly to his feet and knew Benny’s moment had come.

  Yes. After everybody else left, Benny came down the aisle between the rows of folding chairs and said, “Hi, Mr. Dog.”

  “Afternoon, Benny,” Tommy said. “You wanted to talk to me?”

  “Yes, sir, for a minute, if I could, if you got a minute.”

  “I got a minute,” Tommy told him, in a manner that suggested he might not have two minutes. “Sit down here.”

  They sat in the front row and Benny began grimacing and looking at the floor and twisting the leg of his blue jeans with his fingers and jouncing his foot up and down. Tommy watched this display for a few seconds and then said, “I guess this is where you say you don’t know where to start.”

 
; “Well, it’s Little Feather Redcorn!” Benny blurted out.

  Oh boy. What dumb bonehead trouble had Benny wandered into now?

  Tommy had not himself seen the Redcorn woman on TV, but a lot of the people he knew had seen her, and everybody agreed this was some tough cookie. A hardened crook and a con-woman criminal. Did she have her hooks in Benny Whitefish?

  On the other hand, what would she—or anybody else, really—want her hooks in Benny Whitefish for? Moving toward an answer to that question, Tommy said, “Met up with her, did you?”

  “Yes,” Benny said, then immediately reddened and jerked upright hard enough to make his chair complain, and cried, “No!” He stared wide-eyed at Tommy, then away, then said, “Uncle Roger told me to watch her.”

  Tommy hadn’t expected this. “Watch her? What do you mean, ‘watch her’?”

  “To look for her accomplices,” Benny said, then leaned toward Tommy, bug-eyed with sincerity, to say, “But she don’t have any accomplices! Mr. Dog, I think she’s telling the truth, you know? I been following her for days now, and she don’t have any accomplices at all. I think she really is Pottaknobbee.”

  Tommy said, “Aren’t they gonna do something in court?”

  “Oh, sure,” Benny said, “but Uncle Roger and Uncle Frank, they just don’t want her around. Even if it’s all true, they don’t want her there. They told me so themself.”

  I thought they were smarter than that, Tommy thought, smarter than to tell Benny Whitefish anything at all. He said, “I suppose they just like things the way they are.”

  “Boy, they sure do,” Benny agreed. Then at last, he got to it: “Mr. Dog,” he said, full of earnestness, “could you talk to them?”

  “What, Roger and Frank?” Tommy recoiled from the idea.

  “Sure,” Benny said. “Tell them the Tribal Council don’t want to throw Little Feather out, not if she’s really Pottaknobbee.”

  Noticing that use of the first name, Tommy said, “I think we all oughta leave that to the courts, don’t you, Benny?”

  “But—The Tribal Council’s the law here, isn’t it?”