Читать книгу Murder on the Red River - Marcie R. Rendon - Страница 8

Moorhead, the Minnesota side of the Red River

Cash got up the next morning, a Friday, and walked to the Casbah and retrieved her Ranchero. She drove across the bridge to Moorhead before turning north into farm country on the Minnesota side of the river. Both small cities—Fargo and Moorhead—are married to the Red River which meanders beyond the Canadian border. As Cash drove, the sun came up, warming the morning air, causing mist to rise from the trees lining the river.

Folks, Cash included, didn’t think anything of putting on a hundred miles in a day’s worth of driving. Everything here was just around the corner. But just around the corner could be thirty miles or more. If a stranger stopped and asked where the Wang farm was, chances are the answer would be similar: just a bit up the road—meaning five or ten miles.

Farmers got up at 4:30 to eat breakfast before driving in to the Fargo Implement shop to buy tractor parts when the shop opened at 7:30 am. They drove back to the farm, replaced the parts and spent until sundown in the field. Without cleaning up, many would drive the three or four or ten miles into the nearest town for a beer before heading home to shower up, eat the wife’s home-cooked meal, go to bed and start the day over again the next morning at 4:30.

This time of the morning was Cash’s favorite time to drive. The only other folks out were farmers and farm laborers like herself. She lifted four fingers off the steering wheel in a courtesy wave as she passed them.

She loved the vast expanse of farmland in either direction. Fields of wheat or oats stood waiting to be combined. Potatoes still in the ground. Hay fields plowed under, straight black furrows from one end of a field to another, the Red River tree line a green snake heading north. The leaves giving just a hint of fall colors.

She remembered someone telling her that the river was used to send furs north to Hudson Bay in Canada in the early 1800s. Once the area was open for homesteading, the plains on either side of the river filled with Scandanavian immigrants, felling trees and marveling at the rich topsoil. Some became the richest farmers in America, usually the ones who hired on folks like Cash. Others struggled, barely making ends meet with the harsh winters, springtime floods and short growing season.

The Red River Valley—or just the Valley as folks born and raised there called it—wasn’t even a valley. Cash had learned in seventh-grade social studies class that the Valley really was an old glacial lakebed. All of this land was flat because some giant glacier had shaved it flat while moving north. And every year it flooded.

This year hadn’t been too bad. Every spring the winter runoff of melted snow and ice from tributaries that fed the river would fill to overflowing. In the worst flood years, for as far as the eye could see in either direction, there would be a lake of muddy floodwater. Cash had spent many a spring helping sandbag the riverbank in Fargo or nearby farms in a fight with the rising waters. In those years, the Valley reverted to its original lake size. Floodwaters covered the area seventeen to twenty miles east. The river disappeared. The only way you could tell it was there was by the treetops meandering in the same direction Cash was now driving.

The social studies teacher, a farm kid who grew up and went to North Dakota State College and got a teaching degree because his dad wanted something better than farm life for his kids, proudly claimed the floods replenished the valley’s two-foot thick, nutrient-rich topsoil.

Black gold, as the farmers called it. So while the growing season this far north was short—usually from May to August with potato and beet harvest going into September and October—this part of the country, this country that Cash called her own, was known to the locals as the breadbasket of the world.

Cash had been working as a farm laborer since she was eleven when one of her foster mothers—one in a long line of foster mothers—decided she couldn’t stand the sight of Cash. Something about Cash’s dark hair and perpetually tanned skin next to her blond daughter’s peeling sunburn drove the woman crazy. She banished Cash to the fields to work with the men.

At eleven, Cash was barely four foot, nine inches and certainly less than a hundred pounds. A shave over five feet is where she stood now and more than a sack of potatoes, she thought. Back then she was smaller than the hay bales she was required to throw or the potato sacks she was told to fill. But she was quick and smart and what she lacked in physical strength, she made up for in sheer determination.

The men laughed at her size, admired her willpower and soon had her driving tractor and truck that had foot gears rigged with wooden two-by-fours so she could reach.

When the farm boys teased her about being a girl working with the men and asked why she was driving tractor instead of canning pickled beets, she would always reply, “I need the cash.” Except the only cash she got was from her foster father when he hired her out to the neighboring farmers—he would only give her ten dollars of whatever they were paying. By the end of beet hauling season that first year, Renee Blackbear was forgotten and Cash was the girl-kid farm laborer all the men knew.

After a season in the fields, Cash decided there was no way she was going back to washing dishes, canning food and dusting ceramic trinkets from the old world. She started getting up a half hour early each morning and doing a routine of sit-ups, push-ups and isometric exercises she’d learned in sixth-grade gym class. All to build muscle strength. She sabotaged her housework by burning holes in sheets while ironing and over-seasoning whole kettles of stew meant to feed a household. While each insured a beating, it wasn’t long before she was once again banished outdoors to work with the men.

Now at nineteen, Cash worked year-round as a farm laborer. At the end of each growing season, she drove grain truck from sunup to sundown.

This morning she drove north on Highway 75 on the Minnesota side of the river. One by one, she passed through the small sleeping towns of Kragnes, Georgetown, Perley and Hendrum, nothing moving anywhere except for the occasional pickup truck.

When she got to Halstad, she turned toward the rising sun, away from the river. She parked at the Anderson farm, climbed into a Massey Ferguson grain truck and headed to the farm’s north forty. She spent the day driving back and forth alongside the combine as it poured wheat into the bed of her truck. When it was full, she drove back to the Anderson farm to unload. The truck creaked and groaned as she levered the bed to dump the grain, then stood guard, watching for overflow. The grain flowed with a thick, soft swoosh into the mouth of the auger, feeding the grain up into a steel bin. The noise from the auger motor overpowered any other sound on the farmstead.

At noon she ate lunch in the shade of the truck. She chased down a tuna sandwich with coffee from her red thermos, picking wheat chaff off the bread before taking a bite. For dessert, Anderson gave her a mason jar of homemade lemonade and a chocolate chip cookie his daughter had made for her 4-H project. And then it was back to work.

At twilight she got into her Ranchero and cruised through Halstad on her way south, revisiting the towns of the morning. Cars were parked headfirst in front of the liquor stores or bars in each town. Trucks were lined up at the grain elevators waiting to be weighed. Street lights popped on.

Cash drove on through Moorhead and crossed the river into Fargo. She ran up the stairs to her apartment, threw her work clothes into a pile on the floor and pulled on some cleaner clothes from the stack on the chair, heading back down the stairs and over to the Casbah.

The joint was full. Someone had stuffed quarters into the jukebox and a couple of drunks were Walking After Midnight with Patsy Cline. Cash ordered a couple Buds and put her quarters on the table. She played till closing time, losing track of the number of games won and bottles drunk. Some farmer dude grabbed her around the waist and slow danced while stroking her long hair, murmuring ah baby in her ear.

Jim showed up right at closing. Cash figured he had put the wife to bed, maybe taken her to a movie in Moorhead. She never asked about his wife although rumor had it she had been head cheerleader back in high school. Cash also knew he hadn’t been drafted because his older brothers were already serving. As the youngest brother, he had gotten a deferment to stay on the farm. Now Jim was at the Casbah for his Cash fix. Cash obliged and once again kicked him out in the wee hours of the morning.

Saturday Cash woke up at sunrise. Years of getting up at five to feed chickens, water dogs, milk cows and cook breakfasts was a habit more ingrained than the hangover from the alcohol she drank each night. Cash swung out of bed and pulled on the jeans she’d dropped on the floor the night before. She grabbed her shirt off the chair by the bedside and buttoned it up.

She needed coffee. She had a tin coffeepot like she had seen in the cowboy movies. She liked that she could dump in a handful of Folgers, put the whole thing on the hotplate. By the time she’d tossed water over her face and brushed her teeth in the cracked porcelain sink in the small bathroom, the coffee would be boiling. She would shut the hotplate off so the grounds would settle. The coffee could cool a bit while she brushed out her hair.

While Cash didn’t pay much attention to her looks, all the guys in the bar raved about her hair. It hung below her waist. In one foster home, they had chopped it off so that she had looked like a boy all that year. Even now she shopped in the boys’ section at JCPenny because boys’ clothes were cheaper than girls’ and the boys’ jeans fit her skinny hips better than the ones in the women’s or girls’ department. But the humiliation of having her head shaved stuck with her. Her one vanity was her long, dark brown hair.

Cash turned on the radio and sat down at the small table in her makeshift kitchen to drink her morning coffee. The window overlooked the Northern Pacific Railroad tracks. If she leaned a little forward and to the left, she supposed she could catch a glimpse of the corner of the Casbah. But her attention was caught by the radio announcer talking about a body that was found in a stubble-field thirty miles north of the FM area off Highway 75.

The announcer was saying that Sheriff Wheaton had been sent out to check on a suspicious pile of rags in the middle of the field and found a body.

Cash jumped up and pulled on the cleanest dirty socks she could find and put on her tennis shoes. She poured the remainder of the coffee into her Thermos and hooked her keys on the little finger of the hand that carried a white cup. Within five minutes she was on Highway 75 headed north, back on the Minnesota side of the Red.

Thirty minutes later Cash leaned against her mud-spattered Ranchero and watched Wheaton talk with two men. All three stared down at the flattened stubble. A body lay there, his head facing towards the river, away from Cash. Except for their black suits and Wheaton’s sheriff’s uniform, they could have been any three men discussing next year’s corn crop, the price of wheat on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange or the odds that the Sox might take the World Series.

Cash reached into the pocket of her jacket for a crumpled pack of Marlboros. She tapped one out and put it to her mouth, fished in her jeans pocket for a book of matches. With a practiced left-hand move, she lit it one-handed by bending a match over the back of the matchbook. It was a trick she’d learned from one of the vets returning from Viet Nam. In a drinking binge at the end of last summer, they had sat drinking out in a cornfield. He had shown her the one-handed match trick. You need it in the jungle, he said, so you can keep your other hand on your rifle at all times. “Of course, there are times when you are out on patrol and you just don’t light up at all ’cause the tip of a lit cigarette lets the gooks know exactly where your head is.”

Cash had practiced the one-handed trick until she got it down, suffering small black sulphur burns on her thumb before she got the hang of it. That soldier had re-upped as soon as he could. He had come into the Casbah for one last hangover before shipping out. Said he just couldn’t make it out here in the real world. He was going back until the war was over or they shipped him home in a bag. Sometimes Cash thought about him and wondered where he was, other times she just didn’t want to know.

She exhaled the smoke upward where it joined lazy fall clouds—fat like cotton candy—drifting slowly across the sunlit August sky.

The field where the men stood edged up to the Red River tree line. Cash reckoned that this close to the river it was probably feedlot corn a farmer grew, silage to feed his animals over the winter—not the cash crops of the larger acreage fields one or two miles away.

Cash put her left heel up on the Ranchero’s front bumper. She rested back on the hood, warmed by the late summer sun, wondering if the body in the field was cold or if the sun was warming him too. She couldn’t tell much of what had happened to him. She assumed it wasn’t a natural death or Wheaton wouldn’t be here and neither would the two guys dressed in suits. Around here, men only wore suits for church or if they worked at the bank.

One of the suits bent over and lifted the dead man’s left shoulder. Cash saw then the man was Indian. Wheaton glanced her way.

When she first pulled up, he had acknowledged Cash’s presence with an imperceptible nod of his head, had made a subtle hand gesture that she read as don’t come closer. She had gotten out of her truck, leaned against the front, watching.

She and Wheaton had known each other a long time. Back when she was three, her mother had rolled the car—with her three kids in it—in the big ditch north of town. All Cash remembered of that roller coaster ride was her brother and sister landing on top of her. Many times, come to think of it.

Wheaton had set Cash down on the long wooden bench in the waiting room of the jail. He went back out to the car and carried her mother in, even though her mother had walked up out of the ditch and seemed perfectly coherent and rational when she explained to Wheaton that all she had done was swerve to miss a skunk. But then she must have passed out.

Wheaton laid her down in one of the cells without locking the barred door. Cash watched him walk farther back into the jail and return with a grey army blanket and a pillow. Talking more to himself than to the little girl on the wooden bench in his jail in the dark of night, he muttered, “You’ll have to sleep out here. I’m not putting no two-year-old in a cell, even though there’s a bed in there. You don’t need that memory haunting you. There, it’s a little hard but, hey, you have to use the bathroom or anything?”

Cash shook her head no. She thought it best she just stay put. And she didn’t tell him she was three not two.

She could hear her mom breathing. She lay down on the bench. It was hard. And the wool blanket was scratchy. But even at three, she knew it was best not to talk or complain.

Her brother and sister were at the county hospital, but the hospital wouldn’t keep Cash because nothing appeared to be wrong with her. The nurses said the two older ones wouldn’t be going to school the rest of the week and that the youngest was best kept with her mother. Wheaton had tried to argue with them. But maybe having to care for three children, two of them hurt—and a drunk mother—had made him give in to the hospital staff.

Cash had no memory of her first morning waking up in jail. And no memory of what happened to her mom. Or her brother and sister, for that matter.

After that night came a succession of white foster homes, most of which she chose not to think too much about or remember. Once she learned to drive truck, she had been working any and all farm labor jobs anyone would hire her for.

And for whatever reason, she and Wheaton had developed a bond, he the county cop and she the county’s lost child. He was the one who showed up for her track meets at school. Bought her a wool sweater each Christmas. She didn’t have the heart to tell him the wool made her skin itch, probably because it reminded her of sleeping in his jail house.

He brought a second-hand bike to one of the homes for her. She rode that bike until the tires were threadbare. When the county moved her, the family kept the bike, like they kept all good things. Anything new or worth something always stayed with the foster family. Cash left the homes with a paper bag or a small cardboard box of the shabby clothes she had arrived in. She missed that bike. She didn’t know why Wheaton looked out for her. Didn’t ask. He didn’t say. It worked for both of them.

When she first arrived at the field, there had been an exchange of words among the three men with frequent scowls her way. Whatever Wheaton told them about Cash seemed to assuage their discomfort at having a fourth—actually fifth—person present at what was clearly a crime scene.

Their conversation finished, the two men shook Wheaton’s hand and walked to their car, a black Olds. As they passed Cash, they looked at her but didn’t speak. Cash took a drag of her cigarette and blew the smoke skyward.

Wheaton came over to the truck, kicked her front tire and said, “You might wanna put some air in here.”

Cash nodded her head toward the car pulling away. “Who’s that?”

“Federal folks, they said.”

“What are they doing here?”

“The guy laying over there, I think, is from Red Lake. Federal jurisdiction.”

“How’d he die?”

“Stabbed.”

“Stabbed?”

“Yep. Looks like down over here. Come on.” Wheaton walked back six yards on the gravel road. He knelt down, pointing with his right hand. “You can still see the blood. I think they must have stopped here to take a piss, and this guy got stabbed. The last time these ditches were mowed was last month some time. See how the grass is rolled down?”

“Maybe they just shoved him outta the car.”

“Maybe.”

“How’d he end up in the field then?”

“Guess they carried him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who is it?”

“Don’t know for sure. No ID on him. He had a Red Lake baseball program folded up in his back pocket. The feds said they were heading back north to talk to some folks up there. But them Red Lake folks keep to themselves. Doubt anyone will talk to them. The feds being white and all.” Wheaton looked at her. “Not like they would talk to one of their own anyways.”

Cash kicked a clump of dirt and smashed down another one, feeling the hard ball of dirt smush to silken silt. “Tell me more about this guy here. Can I go look?” she asked, already cutting down through the ditch and across the field to where the man lay. She walked in the dirt between the rows of corn stubble, not wanting to get her ankles scratched up, her shoes making soft impressions in the dirt. When she got to the body, she saw the other men’s footprints, including three sets that weren’t Wheaton’s cowboy boots or the suits’ black dress shoes.

The footprints were working men’s shoes.

The dead man wore yellow leather work boots, blue jeans and a blue wool plaid shirt. She knelt down where she could see the cut that had gone through his woolen shirt and into his chest. There were two stab wounds. One on the right, one on the left.

“He was probably stabbed on the right from behind and then again there on the left, whoever was doing it, aiming for the heart.”

“Where’s the knife?”

“That’s what we wondered too. No knife that we’ve found. Other than that, not much to tell. Dead Indian. Looked like he was working. Didn’t smell any alcohol. Fact is, if I had to say anything I would say he must have been driving grain truck. You know how the chaff gets into all the cracks and creases of your clothes. Big guy too. Think whoever did this must have had to surprise him to get him down.”

“I don’t recognize him. But he does look like a Red Laker. Money?”

“None on him.”

“Old man Fjelstad pays by check for folks working his fields.” She paused. “Probably cause it’s his bar in town that’ll cash ’em.”

Wheaton laughed. “Yeah, well,” was all he said.

Cash shielded her eyes from the sun and looked up at Wheaton. He was a bit over six feet tall, sturdy, like maybe in his high school years he had played football but now, at the other end of his forties, he was just sturdy. Where the other Scandinavian farmers around here sported tan lines of white skin under their farmer hats or the back of their necks that wasn’t covered by their shirt collars, Wheaton tended to overall tan. When he took his sheriff’s hat off to wipe his brow, the tan of his face almost matched the top half above his hat line and between his hairline.

He wasn’t as dark as the man lying in the field, but he wasn’t as white as the suits either. Cash often wondered about Wheaton and who his people were, but she had never worked up the courage to ask.

As long as she had known him, he had been the law. She had probably known him longer than she had known anyone in her life, but she really knew nothing about him. Only once had she been to his house. It was after a girls’ out-of-town basketball game, and the school bus had arrived back late into town because of a snowstorm. She was living in a foster home outside of Ada, the county seat where Wheaton worked. The coach had let her into the school to call her foster dad. He was angry because the bus was late, had left instead of waiting for her and wasn’t coming back into town again. Cash didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t walk home in a snowstorm, and the other kids’ parents had already left.

Standing outside, shivering in the cold, Cash didn’t know what to tell her coach who was sitting in his car, engine running, ready to drive the couple of blocks to his own house. When Cash saw Wheaton drive by the school, she was scared enough to just once ask for help. She waved at him. He rolled down his car window. Through chattering teeth, she explained the situation. He opened the passenger door and said, “Get in.”

At his house he had made her hot chocolate. He lit the pilot light of the gas oven, opened the door and told her to sit in front of it. The heat poured out and warmed her. It was a small house with almost nothing in it. No pictures on the walls. A small stack of plates in the cupboard that she saw when he opened the door to get her a cup for the hot chocolate. There was a well-worn couch in the living room and a small black-and-white TV set on an endtable.

“You married?” she dared to ask.

“Nope. No time,” he’d answered.

She took a long time to drink the milk, not wanting to leave the warmth. She finally set the empty cup down.

“Ready?” he asked.

“I guess.”

On the drive out to the foster family, both of them were quiet. Wheaton said, “You go in and go to your room. I’m gonna have a short word with Mr. Hagen.”

Cash did as she was told. For the rest of the winter, Mr. Hagen always picked her up on time. If Wheaton happened to drive by the school, Mr. Hagen would make a sloppy hand salute and say under his breath, “Yes sir, Chief.” His wife stopped giving her desserts after supper. At the end of basketball season, the county social worker showed up and moved her to another farm in another township.

Cash shook the memories from her head, stood and dusted the dirt off her hands and knee. She looked to the river and the tree line that snaked north. It was the land, this Valley, she felt the closest to. The land had never hurt her or left her. It fed and supported her in ways that humans never had. She heard the cottonwoods sing. Felt the rain coming before the clouds showed themselves. Smelled the snow before it arrived.

The town folks made fun of the farmers who would stand around in the fields, tamping dirt clods down with their work shoes, chewing a strand of straw or ditch grass, scanning the horizon. Town folks thought they were stupid because they didn’t talk much. Cash knew—because she knew—each of them heard the land, felt the rhythm of the seasons. That tamping of dirt clods said how dry the fields were, told them when to pray in church for rain or for god to send the clouds away.

Standing in the field next to the man lying lifeless, she surveyed the land around her.

Her home reservation, White Earth, was forty miles to the east. She knew it was where her mother had been born and raised, except for a short stint in a federal boarding school. It was one of the things she seemed to remember someone telling her about her mom. Red Lake Reservation, where Wheaton seemed to think the man in the field was from, was about 135 miles northwest as the crows fly.

In 1968, the Valley was a draw for migrant farm workers. In the spring, migrants from Mexico came north to hoe the weeds out of the beet fields. With wives and ten to twelve children per family, they spent the wet spring and muggy summers living in shacks not even the Indians would live in. Their language was fast. And often. A singsong of eeee’s wafted across the furrowed fields from early morning until late into the summer evenings as the smell of freshly made flour tortillas and magical spices drifted from their shacks.

Theirs was a musical language unlike the absence of language of the Swedes and Norwegians, many who still spoke with the heavy accent of their mother tongue, a deep brogue some were ashamed of and hoped their children would lose. They were a solid people who spoke mainly of rain and broken machinery or the cost of a bushel of wheat on the Grain Exchange. They listened to the farm market report each morning on the radio out of Minneapolis.

In the late summer and early fall, after the Mexican migrants had headed back south, another shift of farm migrants arrived. When they did speak, they spoke Ojibwe to each other in voices barely heard. A nod of the head could mean come here or are you kidding me? A hand gesture might say come closer or don’t you dare. It was a body language so subtle it left some folks thinking the Indians could read each other’s minds. Which wasn’t unheard of either.

When talking to whites, they mostly didn’t talk unless a yes or no was required. They had a different way of walking on the earth even in the Red Wing lace-up boots they wore to keep the dirt and wheat chaff off their legs. They came to drive grain trucks up and down the wheat fields, to drive the beet trucks and then wait in line at the Crystal Sugarbeet plant just north of Fargo until the wee hours of the morning to unload before heading back to the fields. They came to load and stack hay bales and to put a hundred pounds of potatoes into gunnysacks.

Few came with family. Lone men and women off the neighboring reservations drifted into the small farm towns to work paycheck to paycheck. Some went back home on weekends, checks in their back pockets. Others drank away the money in the few bars that would serve Indians.

Cash vaguely remembered black-haired, dark-skinned aunties who spoke enough Spanish to get into the bars that refused to serve Indians but would serve Mexican migrants. The aunties would come stay for the season, sleeping on blankets rolled out on the floor of the tiny two-room house Cash’s mom had lived in. When Cash thought about it today, she wasn’t exactly sure who the aunties belonged to or how she belonged to them. Everyone older was an auntie or uncle, grandpa or grandma. Anyone close in age was designated cousin status. The workers who came to the Valley stuck together as family regardless of bloodline.

Cash never knew her father. She had a vague memory of her mom and the aunties talking about him coming back from the Korean War and buying the house in the Valley on his GI benefits. He had seen the world and wanted a life off the reservation. Her mom and aunties had laughed until tears ran their black mascara. Cash still didn’t know what they found so funny about that. She remembered the aunties, their dark hair in pin curls, smoking filterless cigarettes, drinking boiled coffee, laughing about going into town, rolling the eeee’s off their tongues while they practiced saying town names like Hermosillo and Chihuahua as places to claim they were from if asked by the bartender.

There were other Indians who stayed in town. They roomed above the bars in makeshift hotels, where bar owners cashed the checks for room and drinks. Cash looked at the man lying facedown in the cornfield. He had probably roomed in town, although some of the richer farmers actually had bunkhouses for the late-season field workers.

She walked back to Wheaton’s car with him. He had his hand on the door handle but she could tell he still had more to say to her.

He took his hat off and ran his hand over his buzz cut. He put his hat back on and raised an eyebrow. “What brought you out this way this morning? Thought you were working this week for old man Swenson?”

Cash shrugged. “You know how it is. Sometimes I just get a feeling and I follow it. I got up early and heard it on the news so I drove out this way as fast as I could. When I passed Standard Oil in town” —she pointed with her lips to the east—“and looked over this way, I saw your cruiser and thought I’d come by and see what you were doing. You know.” She shrugged again, her eyes asking if he understood. “Now I see you were probably wanting me to come this way anyways,” she said. They both chuckled. It had happened many times before when Wheaton had thought about Cash and she had shown up moments later. Or the other way around.

“The thought did cross my mind,” he said. “Listen, I’m done here for the day. I imagine that if you pulled your truck up there in the Oye’s driveway, up there by the migrant shacks, no one would bother you. Maybe stay around here for awhile and see what you think. Those guys are headed up towards Red Lake. They won’t be back for awhile.”

“You don’t want to go up there yourself?”

“Can’t. Just like my badge doesn’t do me any good over there on the North Dakota side,” Wheaton said, pointing across the river, “us county law folks don’t have any jurisdiction on Red Lake. Made it a law in ‘53. Red Lake’s the only reservation in the state we can’t go on anymore. I’m gonna drive into town and tell the county doc to come pick up this guy. Take him into the hospital and see if he can tell us anything else. You take it easy, Cash.”

He got into his car and made a U-turn on the gravel road, the stones rattling against each other. Cash watched the cloud of road dust billow behind him as he drove away. When the dust settled, she walked slowly back towards where the body lay. There wasn’t much blood to see, just the flattened stubble like a cow or deer had lain down in the field. She squatted down and put her hand where the man’s beating heart had been and felt the sadness from the earth crawl up her arm.

Chilled, with a shiver running up her left side, Cash stood and walked back to her Ranchero. She got in, slid the heat switch over to let warm air blow out the vents and then drove about 800 feet to the old driveway that led into the abandoned Oye’s farmstead. Memory is what told her where the driveway was as grass had grown up and over the gravel. Two strips of shorter grass indicated where cars and farm equipment had entered the farmstead years ago. The family had moved out to Montana. County gossip said that old man Oye had bought a ranch and had a thousand head of cattle.

Cash remembered back to when she was a child. Old man Oye would stop by to visit her mom, coming back from hunting trips out to Montana. Never any game in his truck but a pocketful of silver dollars that he would toss and spin in the air and hand out to whichever kids—white, Indian or Mexican—happened to be standing around waiting to be entertained. Older now, Cash figured the Montana trips were more about gambling than hunting.

When she was warm enough, she got out and climbed into the back of her truck. She pulled an old quilt out from under a couple of two-by-fours, rolled up her jean jacket and laid down on her back, hands folded under her head. The sun was bright and she shut her eyes. She put her hand over her eyes. Red sunlight filtered first through her fingers and then through the skin of her eyelids.

She could hear crickets and frogs down by the river. The leaves of the cottonwood trees lining the river bank created music in the wind that stilled her. Soon she was lost in time, her body floating up and out of the truck bed and following the trail of a soul gone northeast to say good-bye to loved ones. She saw a gravel road with a stand, almost like a food stand where one would sell berries, but this one had a basket of pinecones on it. Birchbark baskets were filled with pinecones. Children, five or six of them, crowded ’round the stand. The oldest was barely a teen. The youngest held on to the teen’s scrawny hip. She looked around to memorize the place in her mind, searching for landmarks—the stand, the pine trees, a hunting trail heading north a bit down the road.

Was this the road where the children had come from? It ran east to west.

Just then Cash heard the dry crackle of leaves and smelled a faint odor of decay. It brought her back to her own body, lying in the truck bed of her Ranchero.

A deeper chill than even the one she had felt earlier caused her to sit up and put her jean jacket back on. She climbed out of the truck bed and reached into the open window for the pack of Marlboros sitting on the dash. She’d have to get another pack at Mickey’s bar before driving back into Fargo. She lit the cigarette again with the left-handed move of the matchbook. It would be a few more hours before sunset, but this bend of the river seemed darker somehow and colder. She shivered.

Cash took a long drag on her cigarette. She tried to remember the first time she had experienced leaving her body. In one foster home she’d been forced to sit for hours on a chair as punishment for one infraction or another. One day in the middle of a daydream, she floated out of her body and into the yard where her foster mother was hanging men’s work jeans on the line. Freaked out, she thudded back into her body on the chair, wondering what the heck had just happened.

That evening when the foster mother ordered her off the chair and sent her out to bring in the laundry, Cash’s heart jumped when she saw the clothesline hung with men’s work jeans. She quickly swiped clothespins and jeans, threw them in the basket and hurried indoors.

One day at the Bookmobile, she read about a yogi who meditated and traveled out of his body. For the next six months, she checked out every book she could on meditation and practiced meditating when she was forced to sit on the chair. She got in a lot of practice.

She decided to talk to Wheaton about her experiences. He was someone she trusted to not think she was too weird. He had looked at her over his coffee cup and said, “Yeah. I’ve heard some Indians can do that kinda stuff as well as India Indians. Just don’t go floating off and not come back.”

After a couple more sips of coffee he had looked at her and said, “You have dreams too, I s’pose.”

“Yeah, sometimes.”

“Don’t let them scare you. Just remember them. Someday you’ll know why you have them.”

Neither had ever talked about it again.

Half-finished with the cigarette, she climbed into the truck. Pushed in the clutch, shifted into reverse and backed out of the grassed-over driveway.

Farm work didn’t know weekends. Laborers could get Sunday morning off to go to church, but it was Saturday and she was late for work. Svenson had five grown sons to help him out even if Cash never showed, but Cash was a woman of her word.

When she pulled into his farm driveway, Svenson’s wife appeared at the farmhouse screen door, waved and hollered, “They’re over at the old homestead, just drive on over,” before letting the screen door slam behind her. Cash turned around and headed north another couple of miles to the old homestead. That was where Svenson’s relatives from Norway had originally settled when the government was giving out 160 free acres to new immigrants. As each immigrant son came of age, they got married and started their own new homestead.

Cash pulled into the field crossing, parked and stood by her pickup waiting for the old man to come the length of the stubble wheat field. He was driving a Massey Ferguson tractor, pulling a plow behind it. The chug of the tractor’s engine got louder as he approached and silence filled the air when he shut it off at the end of the furrow. He climbed down. Cash could tell just from the way he moved that his arthritic knee was acting up.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said.

Svenson wiped his brow with a red hankerchief he pulled from his back pocket. “If you can finish plowing this forty, I can run the wife into town. She wants to pick up some fixin’s for the church dinner on Sunday.”

“Yep,” said Cash, already climbing up on the tractor. Sven must have gotten to the field at sunup because he was more than half done. Cash plowed till about five, then drove the tractor and plow over to the field she knew Sven would plow next. She walked across the dirt furrows, climbed into her Ranchero and headed back to Fargo.

She took a quick bath and changed into clean clothes. She grabbed the thin quilt off her bed and a box of .22 shells from the top dresser drawer. Down at the Ranchero, she checked to make sure her .22 rifle was still behind the seat before heading back on the road. One of the things she had learned from all her out-of-body meditation practice was that sometimes she really did see things. Another thing she had learned over the years was the only person she could trust was herself and so more often than not she chose to follow her quirky intuitions.

She drove north through Halstad, stopped in another smaller town to buy some cigarettes. She used the restroom of the town bar and continued north, cutting cross-country on gravel roads.

At some county junction, there was a township so small she missed the name as she entered the village. It was dark. She cruised the main street, the only street, trying to decide between two bars, one on the south end of town, one on the north. The north-end one looked a little more rundown, probably a little more welcoming to a dark-haired female pool player. She pulled headfirst into a parking spot close to the one streetlight on the block. Reached into the glove box and pulled out a hairbrush, which she pulled through her hair before braiding it down the middle of her back. Never knew what kind of trouble one could run into in these small-town bars in northern Minnesota. One braid was less of a handful to grab than a whole head of hair.

Cash reached behind the driver’s seat and pulled out her cue stick in its leather case. She hesitated a moment, then took the cue out of the case. She knew that white farm folks tended to not like anything too Indian up here in northern Minnesota and she didn’t want to risk damage to the one possession, next to the .22, she was attached to.

The place smelled like every other bar in the state. She scanned the place as she walked in. Noted the couple nuzzling in the back booth. The jukebox against the east wall. The mandatory town drunk on the end barstool, well into his nightly stupor. A couple of young farmer dudes shooting pool. They looked up at her, took in the cue stick and smirked at each other.

“Hey, baby, women’s lib doesn’t reach this far north,” the one in a checkered shirt hollered. His buddy, still wearing his manure-crusted work shoes, laughed and swigged a drink of his beer. “Wowee, we got a girlee here thinks she can shoot.”

Cash walked up to the bar and ordered two Buds. The bartender asked to see her ID, which she pulled from the back pocket of her jeans. Cash looked him defiantly in the eyes as he scanned the ID. “You don’t look a day over twelve, kid,” is what he said, inspecting the front, back and edges of the ID. But he served her the beers. Cash walked over to the pool table, past two women sitting in another booth. Must be wives or girlfriends of the farmer boys. Cash put her beers on the ledge that lined the wall and her quarters up on the pool table. She perched on a red leather barstool to wait her turn. The guy with the crappy shoes wasn’t half bad.

Checkered Shirt couldn’t bank for shit. She figured she would have to let them each win at least once, play for beers initially, then switch to cash in about an hour. She had been driving for hours it seemed, much of it on gravel roads that had covered her truck in a fine layer of dust. It was dark, and she would have to sleep in her Ranchero. Thank god, she was in the woods, the real woods, the pinewoods of northern Minnesota. Easy to hide a truck and a woman sleeping in it.

Checkered Shirt lost when he called the wrong pocket for the 8-ball.

Cash walked over to the table and slid her quarters in. The clunk of dropping balls was music to her ears. She put the rack on the table, flush with the green cushion, squatted and used two balls to a hand to fill the rack. Positioned the balls just so. Stripe. Two solids. 8-ball between two stripes. Two solids, a stripe, a solid. Stripe, solid, stripe, solid, stripe completed the rack. She slid the rack back and forth positioning the lead stripe just so on the circle. The rack was tight. “Straight eight?”

Crusty Shoes answered, “We were playing last pocket, but I’ll switch to straight eight for you, doll.”

Doll, my ass. Cash chalked her cue while he postured for the break. Sipped her beer, hip resting on the barstool. Crack. Balls scattered. Her opponent war-whooped as three balls dropped. Two stripes and a solid. Being a gentleman he chose the solids and ran four. Cash made the fifteen and scratched trying for the eleven.

Cash overheard Checkered Shirt say to his girl, “She brought her own cue stick for looks. Can’t shoot for shit.” Cash let the farm boy win the game and put up another pair of quarters. She watched Checkered Shirt lose to Crusty Shoes. When their game was over, Cash smiled to herself, plugged in her quarters and asked her opponent if he wanted to play for beers.

“Sure,” he said. Cash drank for free until closing time. Crusty Shoes was an easygoing loser. Checkered Shirt got more angry and foul-mouthed as the night wore on, complaining to his girl, wondering why the damn squaws don’t stay on the reservation where they belong and how come drunken Indians were takin’ all my money, honey. Cash just played and drank.

When the bartender gave the last call, Cash scratched on the eight, shrugged her shoulders, finished her beer and broke down her cue. As she walked by the boys’ booth, Checkered Shirt’s girlfriend slurred bitch. Cash, though tempted to finish something, steeled her resolve and left.

She lit up a Marlboro before turning the key in the ignition and backing out. She didn’t feel drunk at all and wished she had bought a six-pack for the road. Too late now. As she headed out of town, she checked the rearview mirror more than once to make sure the boys and their girls hadn’t decided to follow her. No headlights appeared. When the jack pines started to line the road on either side, she slowed and scanned for a turn-off road. It was too late to keep driving. She needed to sleep before hitting the reservation tomorrow.

About fifteen miles out of town, her headlights grazed the ruts of a logging road off to the right. She pulled in and drove about a quarter of a mile before backing her truck as close into the trees as she could get. She reached under the seat for her flashlight.

She stood in the dark and listened to the night sounds. In the far distance she could hear a car. A few minutes more, she saw the car continue north on the main road. She was in a good place. No one was going to come down this road tonight. She listened again before switching on the flashlight and scouring around in the truck bed of the Ranchero. After shaking the road dust off everything, she made a bed for herself with the quilt, covering herself with the wool blanket she had stashed there too. She went back into the cab of the truck and pulled her .22 from behind the seat. Made sure it was loaded and went to sleep with it hidden under the quilt with her hand on the rifle butt.

The sun woke her. The fall morning air was crisp. She shoved the blankets back under the two-by-fours, unloaded the rifle, dropped the .22 bullets into her front pocket and put the rifle in its place behind the front seat. She jumped in the cab and turned on the heat full blast. She lit up a cigarette and cranked the driver’s window about three inches to let the smoke drift out. If she leaned forward on the steering wheel, she could see the occasional car drive by on the main road—farmers going into town for a needed part or to pick up feed. She finished her cigarette and crushed it out in the ashtray. No point in starting a forest fire today, she thought, shifting into first and pulling out into the overgrown ruts of the logging road. Her mouth tasted like stale beer and cigarettes. The thermos on the seat beside her had a mouthful of coffee left in it. Cold, but it covered the taste from the night before. Foolish to try the radio, nothing but static up here in the woods.

Cash smoked and drove. The weather was good. Sun was shining with the occasional thin white cloud. No cotton candy clouds today, just streaks of white. She thought about the stand she had seen along the road when she was lying down in her truck bed, the guy dead in the field with knife wounds in his back. Thought about the guys last night and the rugged comments they’d made about her.

There wasn’t a name Cash hadn’t been called: squaw, whore, stupid, heathen. She had heard them all. These days, she mostly just ignored irrelevant behavior. She shrugged and took another drag of her cigarette. Free beer and free games all night. What did she care?

Ahead she saw a sign that read: RED LAKE RESERVATION, NO TRESPASSERS ALLOWED. She laughed. These Red Lakers had all kinds of Indian Pride. Their reservation was the only closed reservation in the state. Meaning they didn’t fall under state jurisdiction. Meaning they fell under federal jurisdiction. Which is what Wheaton meant when he said that as a county law man he didn’t have any jurisdiction up this way. Which explained the feds in the suits standing back there in a cornfield where a Red Laker’s body had been found.

Cash finally reached the main road that halfway circled Red Lake, the lake itself.

She braked at the stop sign. Plain logic told her that if she turned east she would run into the town of Red Lake. If she followed that road farther north, it would take her to Ponemah, where they still practiced the old medicine. About the only people who took that road were folks who lived there.

Somehow that direction didn’t feel right anyways. Cash turned left. She kept the truck in third gear and drove slowly, watching the sides of the road. The stand would be on the north side. She could see it in her mind’s eye.

Here and there a crow flew. There it was. Grey weathered pine boards, probably from an old front porch, had been nailed together to create a three-by-four-foot table. The two legs on each end had branches from a birch tree nailed in an X to steady the table. The ditch grass had been trampled down.

There was a driveway leading to the lake. Cash turned down it. Straight ahead, a fairly new boat sat at the lake’s edge, with nets hanging on a makeshift rack close by.

Animal traps hung from another tree. And there, in the pines, was a rundown government HUD house. Weathered red paint. Weathered, unpainted steps leading to the screen door that had seen too many kids and too many reservation dogs. At one time the window trim must have been painted white, but was now a dirty grey. The picture window had a makeshift curtain, an Indian-print bedsheet. Even from the outside one could tell it was nailed back and that a safety pin held a corner up to let some light in.

The wornness of it reminded Cash of the house where she had spent the first three years of her life. Except her mom’s house had been a two-room tarpaper shack. With no running water or indoor plumbing. Which wasn’t all that uncommon back then. Cash remembered visiting the white neighbor kids, and they had outhouses too. But their houses were painted white. And they had a mom and a dad. Not just a mom living off the county, a mom who tended to drink a bit too much most weekends and ended up in the ditch more often than other mothers seemed to.

Cash remembered that after that roll in the ditch, the county social worker became the constant female adult in her life. She would pull into their driveway and load Cash into her big black Buick and drop her off at a different white farm home.

The farmers’ wives tended to harshness. Cash learned to duck her head out of a slap’s way. She learned to take a beating stoically. She learned that behaviors that had made her mom throw her head back and laugh made these other women go red-faced and shame her into silence.

Cash learned to be watchful. Wary. Not to make too much noise or sudden moves. Do the dishes and sweep the floors when told. She learned these women believed that cleanliness was next to godliness and that her permanently tanned skin was a mark of someone’s sin.

She would go to bed each night in the stranger’s house looking out the window at the stars, wishing for home. Back then, she didn’t have a sense of time. Was she in one home a week? Two months? She never knew. She just knew the joy that filled her heart when the social worker pulled up, put her back into the thin, bare clothes she had arrived in.

In those first years, each time, Cash had expected to be driven home. Back to her mom. It never happened. Cash searched each new school for her brother and sister. She didn’t understand. At their mom’s, they always had something to eat even if it wasn’t the full spread the farmers wives put out. Sometimes her mom didn’t have the gas money to drive into town to get the water jugs filled and they would drink the rainwater from the rain barrels next to the house. They all slept curled in one big bed, kept warm by a kerosene stove in the winter months. There was always laughter. No swatting, no shaming. She and her brother climbed trees to the very top. She and her sister made mudpies and fed them to each other, their mom pouring a bucket of rainwater over them to wash them off.

Cash remembered other nights when Wheaton had stopped her mother. Told her she shouldn’t be drinking and driving with kids in the car. Her mom would laugh and promise to get them home safely. He would always say to her as she turned the car back on, “Might be a good idea to stop drinking, you know.” And her mother would laugh, say sure and wave goodbye.

Cash wished she could remember what happened the morning she woke up in jail. She had never gotten the courage to ask Wheaton.

With that thought, Cash threw the Ranchero into park and looked around the Red Lake yard. There were lots of tire tracks. There was a shadow standing in what she assumed was the kitchen. She got out of the truck. It was colder here by the lake than she had expected. She reached back into the cab and put on her jean jacket and stuck the half-empty pack of Marlboros into the front left pocket. She walked up the weathered steps and knocked on the door. A girl child—about seven, black hair, with eyes just as black—cracked the door and looked up at her.

“Your ma home?”

The kid nodded.

“Can I talk to her?”

The girl shut the door and Cash waited, listening to the waves of the lake gently ease to shore. The woman who came to the door was a few inches taller than Cash. She was wearing a pair of black pants and a man’s worn plaid work shirt. On her feet were scuffed penny loafers, no socks. Her hair was black, wavy with strands that had escaped the rubber band holding it back. And her questioning eyes were as black as her daughter’s.

Cash said, “Mind if I come in? I’m from down by Fargo, originally from White Earth, but been living and working in the Valley most of my life.”

The woman said, “My husband is working down there, driving grain truck.”

Cash said again, “Mind if I come in?”

The woman opened the door and pointed with a tilt of her head to the kitchen table. Cash went over and sat down. In the center of the table were salt and pepper shakers, the glass kind you find in restaurants. A melamine plate with pale white commodity butter. A bowl with some sugar. An ashtray with a couple roll-your-own ends stubbed out in it.

Half the table was covered with more melamine plates. Each plate held beads of a different color: red, white, yellow, green. The front piece of a moccasin, half-beaded with a red flower, sat next to the plates of beads.

On the floor was a stack of three birchbark baskets, each with a different size of pinecones in it.

The woman placed a cup of hot coffee in front of Cash and motioned to the sugar bowl. She also set out a plate of smoked whitefish and a piece of frybread. She leaned against the kitchen counter and took a sip of coffee from a cup she had poured for herself.

“Thanks,” said Cash. “I haven’t eaten yet today. I slept along the road last night. By the way, folks call me Cash.” She broke off some of the frybread. Without a word, the woman handed her a knife. Cash put some butter on the frybread.

While she was chewing the woman spoke. “Did you run into my husband down that way? Folks call him Tony O. When he can, he plays baseball. Hits the ball like that Cuban guy, Tony Oliva, that plays for the Twins. You coming with news about him?”

She took another sip of her coffee without ever meeting Cash’s eyes. When she spoke again, there was quietness in her voice that hadn’t been there before. “He’s been working the fields down that way. Driving grain truck. He should be home any day now.”

“How long has he been gone?” Cash asked.

“Little less than a month.”

“Well, I don’t know anything for sure.” Cash said. Picking bones out of another piece of whitefish.

“Sure you do,” the woman said, sitting down at the table and fingering the beads on the half-finished moccasin. “Shoulda been him pulling into the driveway, not a stranger.”

Cash looked at the woman, then back at the girl-child hiding, peeking out from down the hallway. Looked like there was a bathroom and probably three bedrooms that way. A tattered couch that had suffered one too many jumps from some child. A blue-and-white yarn god’s eye hung above the couch.

Cash pulled the pack of Marlboros out of her pocket. Offered the pack to the woman who took one. Cash reached into her back jean pocket and pulled out a book of matches from the previous night’s bar. Lit her own cigarette, then handed the book to the woman.

“You have other kids?” Cash asked.

The woman’s eyes softened for a second and she answered, “Yes, five more. The bigger ones are out in the woods right now gathering pine cones.”

“I saw the stand at the driveway. They sell to white folks?”

“Yeah, those white women paint ’em silver and gold for Christmas decorations. Buy ’em from the kids. The money helps out. Our baby’s sleeping in the back bedroom. She’s the reason Tony O went to drive truck this year. More mouths to feed. Most of the time we just get by with him fishing and trapping. Works on cars sometimes. But this year he decided to go to the Valley. You haven’t said yet whether you seen him or not.”

Cash took a drag of her cigarette. Blew the smoke out before answering. “I didn’t meet him. And I’d hate to tell you something and be wrong.”

The woman’s eyes went back to wariness. “Tell me what you know. Long way to drive for not knowing me or him. Know you didn’t just come for breakfast.”

Cash looked at her and didn’t know of any way to not say what she knew. She had never told anyone before that her husband was dead. She had never been the one to catch someone’s first tears of rage or grief. She didn’t know facts. What she knew was a knowing that had brought her to this woman’s kitchen table. As she sat there and smoked and formed the words she would say, fear and tears built in the woman’s eyes.

“Has he been hurt?” she asked. She stood up from the table and walked to the counter and to the sink and back to the table. “Is he in the county hospital? Is he hurt?”

Cash said, “I don’t know. There was a man killed.”

The woman flung her coffee cup into the sink. It shattered. Out of the corner of her eye, Cash saw the young girl skitter toward one of the back bedrooms.

“What the hell?” the woman yelled. Then she sat back down at the table. Put her head in her hands. Took a drag of her cigarette. Looked at Cash with eyes even blacker with rage, even blacker with fear. “What the hell you got to tell me?” The words breathed out with smoke.

Cash said, “I don’t know anything for sure. There was a man killed. The county sheriff, name’s Wheaton, said there was no identification on him. There’s some federal agents coming up this way today. I imagine they’re over in Red Lake right now asking questions. They probably took some pictures and will be asking around trying to identify who died back there.”

“So what are you doing here? How the hell did you get here? You don’t even know it’s him.”

“No, I don’t. Wheaton, the county sheriff, thought it might be a good thing if I drove up, tried to find out some things.”

“You don’t even know if it’s my husband. Lots of men from here go down and work the fields.”

“I know. I told you I don’t know anything for sure. What I do know is that I dreamt that pinecone stand down at your driveway. Guess that’s why I pulled in here.”

“You dreamt that?”

“Yeah. Sorta. Maybe more like I went to the field where this guy died and saw the stand.”

Tears ran down the woman’s cheeks. “Saw it?” she asked. She fumbled for the cigarette in the ashtray only to realize all that was there were the butts. Cash took out another Marlboro, lit it and handed it to her before lighting one for herself.