Michael Collins - Walk a Black Wind

A master, the old man, bringing us all back into the hogan and the present by his change of voice, his own return to a tone that was tired and normal and in the present.

I said, “But he is alive? Somewhere?”

“He still walks,” the old man said. “I don’t know where.”

“You told Francesca that?”

“Her other grandfather had already told her. A letter from my son had come to him years ago. The white grandfather perhaps liked my son, he did not tell what he knew.”

“But he told Francesca, and she came here. What did you tell her?”

“That my son did not die from that prison. Many months after, he came here. The police had been here, had looked, and had not found him. He was a man who knew the land and the wind. He came home without being seen by anyone, but he did not stay. He knew he could not stay here. He left in the night as he had come. Once he wrote from Los Angeles, and once from the place of a man he had known in the army.”

“Harmon Dunstan? His captain?”

“That was the man.”

“This was all fifteen years ago?”

He nodded. “Later, the money began. It came without words or name, but I knew he sent it. A lot of money each time. The money has been good, but granddaughters are better. I found two new granddaughters. I am glad.”

The old man stood up, almost without effort, and walked out of the hogan. No one followed him. I heard a horse walk slowly away toward the higher mesas. He was a strong old man. I looked at the young Indian, Paul Two Bears.

“Harmon Dunstan, and L.A., that’s all she knew?”

“That’s all we know here,” Paul Two Bears said.

“What about that money?”

Felicia said, “It came at irregular intervals. The first time in October 1957. Maybe fifteen times since. A lot of money, at least five thousand dollars each time. No pattern.”

“But no more letters. As if he was making money, but was ashamed of it, or afraid to reveal himself to anyone?”

“I don’t know why,” Felicia said.

“He’d murdered a prison guard, Felicia,” I said, “and he was supposed to be dead. He had to hide. But his people here wouldn’t have told on him. So why not write?”

She was silent. I thought about it. A whole new identity, maybe, and afraid to risk even a letter to Pine River? The date of that first letter with money crawled in my mind-October 1957. Where had I heard it? Then it came to me-Carl Gans! The bouncer’s dying words-October, fifty-seven. Over and over.

“How long have you been here, Felicia?” I asked.

“Since the night I saw you. They wouldn’t talk to me at first, until I proved who I was.”

“You’ve been here ever since?”

Paul Two Bears said, “She has been here. She didn’t leave.”

He had guessed why I wanted to know even though I hadn’t mentioned Abram Zaremba or Carl Gans yet. But what did it prove? That they would lie for her, or that it was true, take your pick.

“I like it here,” Felicia said. “I feel at home.”

“Francesca told you she liked it here, but she left.”

Paul Two Bears said, “Francesca was more restless, she had to find her father. We told her that my uncle was a lost man, that he wouldn’t even want her to find him. She had to look.”

“You don’t, Felicia?” I said.

“I don’t know. It’s not so important to me, I guess. Fran felt more rejected by Mother than I did, more lost in Dresden.”

“How much do you know about what happened in Dresden eighteen years ago? When your father came for all of you?”

“Only what they know here. Tell me, Mr. Fortune.”

I told her. I also told her about the murders of Abram Zaremba and Carl Gans. Her eyes grew wider, and darker, and more afraid. When I finished, she said:

“All because Fran was looking for our father?”

“I don’t know that,” I said.

“Her scar,” she said. “Shot because of our father. I remember the nightmares. As if, somehow, Fran remembered it more. The shock of the wound in her memory, maybe.”

“Maybe,” I said.

She said, “What did happen to Fran, Mr. Fortune?”

“There are a lot of possibilities still,” I said. “She went to Harmon Dunstan, and then she moved on. I think she picked up a fifteen-year-old trail. The trail of a man supposed to be dead, and with a prison guard murder hanging over his head. A fugitive, Felicia, hiding one way or another. How would he know who she was? Just some girl trailing him. And even if he did know her, what could she have meant to him by now?”

“You think he…? To stay hidden? No!”

“Maybe her murder was more to do with Abram Zaremba, and the lawyer Mark Leland, and the Black Mountain Lake project, after all. I don’t know,” I said. “Or there could be someone else who doesn’t want Ralph Blackwind found.”

Felicia said, “I’m afraid. Afraid to know.”

“We’ll have to find him before we know anything,” I said. I looked at Paul Two Bears. “What does he look like, Two Bears?”

“I never saw him,” the youth said. He took a small snapshot from his jacket. “My father had this picture. It’s our only one, and it’s twenty years old or more.”

It was a photo of a youth in Levi’s, boots and stetson, standing beside a pinto pony. The wide brim shaded his face, and it was hard to tell how dark he was. Beside the horse, he seemed about five-feet-seven-or-eight, and his skin was shining smooth. He resembled none of the men I knew in the case, but twenty hard years had passed. A lot had happened to Ralph Blackwind, but you can usually see the man of forty in the youth of twenty-two or so.

Usually, but not always, no. Some men change a great deal between twenty and forty, especially with hard living and weight, and the young Indian in the photo was whip thin. Still, if he was anyone I knew, there should have been a hint at least, a feeling. Unless-?

“Was his face changed by the war, or later?”

“Not the war so much, my father said, but by his escape from North Korea, and by prison later,” Paul Two Bears said. “The escape changed his whole expression, and his face was beaten in prison fights. My father said he was badly scarred in the prison break, too.”

No one I knew in the case had serious scars. I thought about all the money he had sent to Pine River. A man with a lot of money, scars on his face, and a need to hide.

“Was he very dark?”

“No, his mother was half-Caucasian,” Ralph Two Bears said. “My grandfather’s last wife. Ralph was born when the old man was fifty-four. His hair wasn’t black, either. Dark brown, going gray even fifteen years ago, my father said.”

“What color eyes?”

“Dark brown, like all of us.”

I nodded. “All right, I’ll go back and see if I can follow Francesca’s trail. You want to stay here, Felicia?”

She thought, looked around the inside of the hogan. “No, I’ll go back with you. I suppose I want to know, and I want my mother and fath

… Dad Crawford, to know what I’ve found here. Later, maybe… I can come back.”

Paul Two Bears said, “I’ll come with you.”

That was the way we left Pine River, the three of us.

We landed at Kennedy early in the cold afternoon. I walked Felicia and Paul Two Bears to their Allegheny Airlines flight for Dresden. I didn’t ask her what she planned, or give her any advice. I had a hunch she already knew her plans. She wasn’t a halfway girl anymore.

I caught a taxi to Forty-second and Fifth Avenue-the Main Library. I got the microfilm for The New York Times for the whole month of October 1957. Carl Gans had named a date, too, as he died-October tenth. I ran the film through the viewer. The story was on page three on October eleventh, as I realized Carl Gans had known it was. Trying to tell me fast at the end.