Steve Hamilton - Winter of the Wolf Moon

“Give me a card,” I said.

He put a six on my fourteen. Then he threw over his hole card and showed nineteen. “You win,” he said. He cleaned up the table, then signaled for the pit boss. “I have an emergency,” he said to the man.

The boss looked at me and then gave a little wave. Another dealer was there in three seconds to take Vinnie’s place.

I waited until we were in the parking lot. Then I started thinking about where I should hit him first. The problem was, I wasn’t sure that I had the strength to lift my arm high enough to swing at him. And I didn’t feel mad enough to start kicking him. Not yet, anyway.

“Tell me something,” I said. “What happened to that big lecture you were giving me about Indians not interfering in each other’s lives? That whole story about how your mother didn’t even make you go to the dentist. You make your own way, you choose your own path, all that bullshit.”

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“What about kidnapping Dorothy from my cabin?” I said. “Isn’t that interfering with her life? Just a little bit?”

He looked out at the road. A cold wind picked up. I barely felt it.

“So when are you going to explain this to me?” I said. “Before or after I beat the living crap out of you?”

“Alex, don’t.”

“Why do you say that? Because you don’t want to hurt me? You don’t want to have to use some secret Indian chokehold on me?”

He looked at me. “Stop it,” he said.

“How many of you guys did it take?” I said. “She must have put up quite a fight.”

“In case you’re forgetting,” he said, “I was in jail the night she was taken.”

“Yes, you were. But you’ve only got, what, seven hundred cousins? How many came out that night?”

“How did you find out?” he said. “Who told you?”

“Guess what, Vinnie. Nobody had to tell me. Some of us white people can figure things out ourselves. I knew it wasn’t Bruckman and it wasn’t Molinov. Neither of them even knew she was with me until the next day. Even if they did know, they wouldn’t have known to go to that second cabin. It had to be somebody who actually saw me take her there. Somebody who was in the woods, watching us.”

He looked away again.

“It also explains why she opened the door that night. They must have tricked her. What did they do, call her by her Indian name?”

“I didn’t know about any of this,” he said. “I swear. I didn’t know. I told you Jimmy and Buck were with me when I went after Bruckman. When I got arrested, I guess they kept following them. Bruckman and Dorothy, both. When Dorothy ran out on him that night, they split up. Buck followed Dorothy to the bar, then to the Glasgow, then to your place.”

“Of course he’s good at following people,” I said. “He’s an Ojibwa.”

“Will you knock it off?” he said. “He’s a college student. He’s gonna be a lawyer one day. He and my other cousins, I don’t know how to make you understand this, Alex. They’ve seen too much. This guy Bruckman, he had taken one of our people from us. Then he brought her back, like he was rubbing our noses in it. And he was trying to sell drugs to our people, Alex. To some of us, the ones who don’t know better. He was another white man trying to destroy us. They decided it was time to start doing something about it.”

“I came to that jail the next day and bailed you out,” I said. “You’re telling me you had no idea any of this was happening?”

“No,” he said. “I swear to you.”

“So when did you know, Vinnie?”

He hesitated.

“When did you know?”

“The night you were arrested,” he said. “I saw her.”

“Wait a minute, the night I was arrested? On the bridge? The next morning you came over and helped me clean up that last cabin, and you were asking me why I was still trying to find her.”

“I wanted you to stop,” he said. “You’d been through enough.”

“My God, Vinnie. Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“I didn’t think I had to,” he said. “It sounded like you were done with it.”

“I can’t believe this,” I said. “And all this time, up until that night, you didn’t have the slightest idea that your own cousins took her?”

“I don’t live on the reservation,” he said.

“That’s not a very convincing answer.”

He looked at me. He didn’t say anything.

“When we went to talk to her parents,” I said. “When I thought they were acting strange and you gave me your big speech about the way of the Ojibwa, was that all a sham? Did they already know?”

“I think her parents knew she was safe,” he said. “That’s all. They didn’t know anything else.”

“And everybody just let me run around trying to find her?” I said. “Do you have any idea what I went through?”

“You were looking for Bruckman,” he said. “My cousins probably didn’t want to stop you from finding him.”

“You mean if I found him…,” I said.

“They would have taken care of him,” he said.

“Listen to you,” I said. “You sound like the Mafia or something.”

“No,” he said. “Just a new generation, Alex. We’ve been through too much. We’ll do whatever it takes to save our people.”

“Beautiful,” I said. “I’m moved.”

He didn’t say anything.

“So where is she now?” I said. “Where did you see her?”

“In Canada,” he said. “She wanted to call you.”

“Why didn’t she?”

“They didn’t want her to,” he said. “They didn’t want… I mean, they wanted to wait.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“The people who are taking care of her.”

“The people who kidnapped her,” I said.

“No.”

“They came into the cabin,” I said. “And then they dragged her out of there.”

“It didn’t happen that way,” he said. “That’s not what they told me.”

“There were people in that cabin,” I said. “And they did a nice job of busting up the furniture.”

“No,” he said. “They’re helping her. They’re getting her cleaned up…”

“Is that what she told you?”

“Yes,” he said. “And she asked me to tell you something, too. She said to say that she’s sorry she got you involved in this, and something else about your pipes.”

“My pipes?”

“Something about your pipes freezing.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve been losing a lot of sleep over that. It’s been my biggest problem this week.”

“I’m just telling you what she said.”

“Okay,” I said. “You delivered the message.”

“Alex, I don’t know what else to say. I swear, I really didn’t know anything until…”

“Save it,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any more. You didn’t know about this because you didn’t want to know. If you knew, you would have had to tell me. And you didn’t want to do that. And we both know why.”

I looked in his eyes. For the first time since I had known him, I felt the distance between us as he looked back at me. I knew that, even if we ever found a way to get over this, the distance would always be there.

“Tell me this,” I said. “Whatever happened to that bag? I hear there’s quite a load of, what did they call it, wild cat in there?”

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “As far as I know, she didn’t have it when they took her.”

“Of course she did,” I said. “Your cousins are sitting on enough drugs to stay high for the rest of their lives. Or whoever those people are in Canada. And they’re not even sharing it with you?”

He just looked at me, his shoulders back like he was ready to jump on me. “I was feeling pretty bad about what happened to you,” he said. “You’re making it a lot easier on me.”