William Krueger: Red knife

Stevie, who seemed not to know better, kept pressing. “Where?”

“They were found in the meadow behind the house.”

“I mean where were they shot?”

Her father looked up from dishing roasted potatoes onto his plate. “In the back,” he replied after a long pause.

“Was there lots of blood and stuff?”

“Stephen,” his mother said, “that’s enough.”

“I was just wondering.” He lingered over his green beans. “Why did they want you there?”

“Alex and Rayette were Ojibwe. The sheriff thought that because I’m part Ojibwe, I might be able to answer some questions they had.”

Annie used this as her opening to ask about something that had been on her mind for quite a while. “You and Mr. Kingbird were friends once, right, Dad?”

“We’re not unfriendly now.”

“I mean like tight.”

“We played football together. Because we shared Ojibwe blood, he probably talked to me a little more than other people. Folks saw that as tight, I suppose, but I never really knew him. I don’t think anybody did. He never let anybody that close.”

Annie said, “I like Uly’s mom better.”

Her father smiled. “You want to know the truth, so do I.”

“But she seems, I don’t know, subdued. Like she’s afraid of him.”

“That might be a cultural issue,” her mother said. “She’s Latina. I believe it’s not unusual to be submissive to your husband, at least in public.”

“I think Uly’s afraid of him,” Annie said.

Her father said, “Has he told you that?”

“Not in so many words. I just get that feeling.”

Stevie piped in, “Uly sure plays the guitar good.”

“He’s always seemed a little troubled to me,” her mother said. “Do you ever see him at school, Annie?”

“He’s only a sophomore, so we don’t have any classes together. But I see him sometimes, yeah. He gets picked on, mostly by guys who’re huge losers and looking for somebody they think might be a bigger loser than them. Allan Richards, for example.”

“Richards?” Her father looked up from his plate. “That wouldn’t be Cal Richards’s boy, would it?”

“That’s him.”

“Cal Richards.” He shook his head. “Now there’s one sick soul. Sounds like the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.”

“Will you help the sheriff?” Stevie asked.

“A little bit maybe. I’m going back to the reservation this afternoon to talk to a couple of people.”

“Oh?” Annie’s mother said. She didn’t sound thrilled.

“I need to talk to George LeDuc, Jo. And as long as I’m out that way, I might as well drop by the Blessing place and have a word with Tom.”

“Mom, can Trixie come in?” Stevie asked.

“Yes, but don’t feed her at the table. I’ve put some scraps aside for her for later.”

Stevie got up to let the dog in. Annie waited until she thought he couldn’t hear, then asked the question that had most been on her mind.

“Do the shootings have anything to do with Kristi Reinhardt?”

“I don’t know, Annie.” Her father stabbed another piece of pot roast, but paused before he put it on his plate. “Buck Reinhardt is a strange man. But, you know, if this is all about his daughter, I can almost understand.”

He seemed ready to say more, but Stevie came back in with Trixie at his heels, and her father went back to eating.

What she would remember whenever she thought back on that conversation was the powerful confusion of compassion and anger she saw on her father’s face. That and how much the look scared her.

Thomas Blessing lived with his mother, Fanny, in a one-story frame house that, as long as Cork could remember, had been in desperate need of a new coat of paint. The house was a god-awful purple, something out of a psychedelic nightmare, and Cork had often wondered if one reason Fanny didn’t paint it was that nobody was stupid enough to manufacture the color anymore.

The house stood near a crossroads on the eastern side of the rez. On the other side of the road stood the abandoned ruins of an old gas station, a gray derelict that stared hollow-eyed at the Blessing place. Several years before, a photographer for National Geographic had shot the old place, and the photo appeared in the publication, run with an article about the plight of the rez: the deterioration, the drunkenness, the desperation. It hadn’t been an unfair article, Cork had thought at the time, but it had made the situation on the rez sound hopeless. The Ojibwe may have lacked many things, but they’d never lacked for courage and they’d never lost hope.

Behind the Blessing house was a marsh full of cattails and red-winged blackbirds. In the summer, the marsh was home to great blue herons that waded among the lily pads with awkward majesty and bent with a formal-looking stiffness to snatch at fish and crawdads.

It was Fanny Blessing who answered Cork’s knock. She appeared to be headed out. A big black purse hung on her shoulder and a jean jacket was slung over her arm.

“ Boozhoo, Fanny,” he said, offering the familiar Ojibwe greeting.

“If you’re here to arrest Tommy, I ain’t going to stop you,” she said.

She was a heavy woman. She was also a smoker, had been since she was a kid, and she was paying the price: emphysema. She wore a tube that ran from her nostrils, over both ears, and down to a small green oxygen tank, which she pulled around beside her on a little wheeled cart. She was a couple of years younger than Cork and had been a wild one in her day. Fanny had loved a good time, loved Wild Turkey with a beer chaser, loved dancing in bars and at powwows, and loved men, no-good men especially. She’d had three children by three different fathers. One had died young, a drowning. The middle one, a girl named Topaz, had run away when she was sixteen and, as far as Cork knew, hadn’t been in touch with Fanny since. Thomas, her youngest, was the only one left with her, but she didn’t seem particularly inclined to want to keep him.

“I know whatever you’re here for, he probably done,” she said. “All that crazy Red Boyz shit.”

“I haven’t done anything,” Tom Blessing said from somewhere in the room behind her. “And even if I did, he wouldn’t be taking me anywhere, Mom. He’s not the sheriff anymore.”

“Just here to talk to Tom, if you don’t mind,” Cork said.

“He’s the one you got to convince.” She waved away her responsibility. “You two go at it. Me, I’m heading to the casino.” She let the screen door slam shut behind her and maneuvered past Cork with her oxygen cart in tow.

Thomas Blessing stepped into the light that fell through the doorway into the living room. “I keep telling you,” he called after her, “it’s like taking water from a lake and just pouring it back in.”

Cork figured he was speaking about the checks each registered tribal member received as a share of the profits from the Chippewa Grand Casino, south of Aurora. Fanny took the money then gave it right back at the slot machines.

“What do you want me to do?” she called as she opened the door of her big white Buick, which was parked next to her son’s black Silverado. “Sit around all day listening to the preachers on television? Least at the casino I can smoke without you giving me a lot of crap for it.”

She settled her oxygen tank in the passenger seat, kicked the engine over, backed onto the road, and shot toward Aurora.

Blessing looked at Cork coldly through the screen door. “What do you want?”

“You heard about Alex and Rayette?”

“Nothing happens on the rez we don’t know about it right away.”

“What do you think?”

“I think Buck Reinhardt just bought himself a ticket to hell.”