William Krueger - Red knife

Reinhardt was in his midsixties. There was a story that had floated around Aurora since Cork was a kid, about when Reinhardt was a young man working for a logging outfit contracting for Weyerhaeuser. The story was that Buck could lift a McCulloch chainsaw in each hand and attack a trunk from two directions at once, so that he felled a tree in half the time it took anyone else. As a kid, Cork had believed it. When he was older, as a result of his summers in college during which he logged timber to earn tuition money, he realized how ridiculous the story was. He figured Reinhardt had started it and kept it going. He didn’t doubt, however, that Buck had the strength and the balls to give it a try. Reinhardt still had the body of a man twenty years younger. His hair was white and he wore it in a long ponytail. He was handsome, knew it, and was an incurable-often offensive-flirt.

Buck Reinhardt stood up. His son put a hand on his arm, but the man shook it off. He reached Cork at the same time that Johnny Papp returned with the coffeepot.

“Put his breakfast on my tab, Johnny,” Reinhardt said.

“Just having coffee, Buck,” Cork told him.

“A man ought to start the day with more’n that.”

“I had breakfast at home.”

“But no coffee?”

“Not today.”

“Something interrupt?”

“Not really.”

“I thought maybe, like some of us, you had a son of a bitch pounding on your door at all hours, bothering your wife.”

There were other folks eating breakfast. They’d been carrying on their own conversations, but as Reinhardt’s voice rose, the other voices fell silent.

Reinhardt wore an unbuttoned shirt with the sleeves cut away and the tail hanging out of his pants. Cork nodded toward the gun belt visible across Reinhardt’s waist. “What’s with the hardware, Buck? Planning on shooting your scrambled eggs if they try to make a break for it? Or do you carry all the time these days?”

Reinhardt swept his shirttail back, revealing a strong side holster that nestled what looked to be a Glock, maybe a 19.

“I do when I think some crazy Indian might get it in his head to take a shot at me.”

“Probably a lot of folks besides the Ojibwe wouldn’t mind doing that, Buck.”

Reinhardt let his shirttail fall back into place. “Why are you sniffing around my house, O’Connor? What are you after?”

“Mostly I wanted to be sure you knew that before he died, Alex Kingbird asked me to arrange a meeting between you and him.”

“Elise told me. Said you didn’t tell her what for.”

“He felt bad about what happened to Kristi. He wanted to make things right.”

“All he had to do was give me Lonnie Thunder.”

“That may have been exactly what he had in mind.”

“Lot of fucking good that does me now.”

“I just thought you might want to know.”

“That Kingbird’s dead doesn’t bother me at all. If I had a whiskey right now, I’d drink to the son of a bitch who killed him. That he died before he could give me Thunder, now that’s a pisser. And, listen, I don’t appreciate you going around telling people I’ve been lying about that night.”

“I never said you were lying, Buck. Only said I didn’t see you on the road you should’ve been on.”

Dave Reinhardt left the table and walked to the counter. “Take it easy, Dad.”

“Fuck if I will. This man’s harassing me and my family.”

“I don’t think it’s gone that far,” the younger Reinhardt said.

“You taking his side?”

“I’m just advising a little restraint here, Dad.”

“Or what? You’ll arrest me?” Buck laughed cruelly. “You don’t have jurisdiction, Davy. And though it grieves me to say so, boy, you don’t have the balls neither.”

Buck spun away and returned to the table. “Come on, boys,” he said. “Time’s a wastin’ and we got trees beggin’ to be trimmed.”

He dropped a fistful of greenbacks on the table and led the way out, his crew following without complaint or comment. His son watched him go, then turned to Cork.

“He doesn’t mean most of what he says. Buck’s ninety percent bluster.”

“And ten percent bullshit. Doesn’t leave much for a person to cozy up to, does it, Dave?”

Reinhardt said nothing more. He headed outside, following where his father had gone. Cork turned back to the counter. “Johnny, mind putting this coffee in a cup to go?”

Henry Meloux lived on an isolated peninsula called Crow Point that jutted into an inlet far north on Iron Lake. There were two ways to get to Meloux’s cabin: You used a paddle or you used your feet. Cork guided his Bronco along the paved county road north, then turned east onto gravel. He drove until he came to a tall, double-trunk birch that marked the trail to Meloux’s. He parked and began to walk. For almost a mile, the trail cut through national forest land, then it crossed onto the reservation. Cork had walked the trail many times. If what George LeDuc said was true, Alex Kingbird had recently done the same.

When he broke from the trees, Cork saw the small cedar-log cabin perched at the far end of the point, set against a sky full of sluggish gray clouds. He was upwind, and in a few moments Walleye, Meloux’s old dog, had his scent and let out a couple of lazy, requisite barks.

Meloux had just brewed a pot of coffee and he offered Cork a cup. Though he was an old man, in his early nineties, it was clear from everything about him that he still had a lot of road ahead before he found his way onto the Path of Souls. He walked slowly, but that was less the result of age than patience. Meloux was a member of the Grand Medicine Society, one of the Midewiwins, a Mide. His life had been engaged with healing the bodies and spirits of those who sought him out. He’d helped Cork on many occasions and, in one significant miracle of healing, he’d brought a traumatized Stevie O’Connor back to a wholeness of soul. Not long ago, Cork had been of significant help to Meloux, locating a son lost to the old man for decades, healing a wound so painful to the old Mide that it had nearly killed him. The threads that bound these two men together were many and long and ran deep.

Meloux’s hair was like a long breath of white wind. He wore overalls, a flannel shirt, and scuffed boots. Cork sat with him at the table in the old man’s one-room cabin, a place that felt as welcoming as home. It was furnished simply: a bunk, a table and three chairs handmade from birch, a cast-iron stove, a small chest of drawers. Meloux used kerosene lanterns. He drew his water from the lake. Twenty yards toward the trees stood an outhouse.

“Alex Kingbird,” the old man said. “Kakaik. A name to be proud of.”

“You called him Kakaik?”

“That was his name.”

“Not legally.”

“Legally?” Meloux laughed. “A man is who he wants to be.”

“Who was Kakaik?”

“To me, someone who asked questions. In that, he was like you.” The old Mide smiled.

“Did he come for healing?”

“I think that was not in his mind. But probably it was in his heart. He wanted to be a man of clear thought. He did a lot of cleansing.”

“Sweats?”

“And other things.”

“What did you think of him?”

Meloux had brewed the coffee in a dented aluminum pot on his stove. Like Cork, he drank from an old, blue-speckled enamel cup.

“If I lived in the days of my ancestors,” he said, “he would have been a man I wanted as a war chief.”

Walleye had settled himself in a corner of the cabin. He’d stayed alert for a few minutes, but when it was clear the men were going to pay him no attention, he dropped his head on his paws and closed his eyes.

“Henry, did Kingbird say anything to you about Lonnie Thunder?”