Chapter One – Wallace

When Mother goes off island to visit Aunt Thelma, Sissy howls and screams for me. I bang on Sissy’s door until my fists drain warm and creamy blood. Sissy’s door opens. Father’s puffy, three-fingered hand smacks me down the back stairs into the kitchen. A woman in pink shorts asks me how I slept. She smokes a cigarette while she spreads salted butter and raspberry jam on the heel of a loaf of warm and crusty bread. She hawks a louie onto the floor and eats the bread.

Wallace woke up. The smell of cigarettes and yeast bread baking gave way to the sound of a lonely barking dog. He pushed the button on his Timex Expedition Indiglo. It was 4:27 a.m. Mrs. Sockalexis’s stupid beagle. Maybe one hour of sleep. He looked at his hands. No blood. He rubbed his head.

Early May was a crazy moose time of year, so he wasn’t surprised when Cliff called and asked him to come by the house and bring his moose rifle, chain saw, and blue tarps. He was surprised, though, to see Bobby Curtis, city councilman and lawyer, of counsel with Chuck, Rollins, and Benjamin, a top-drawer firm who did a chunk of the tribe’s business, lying outside Cliff’s back door. Dead. 

He glanced through the door. No one inside. They tarped Bobby and curled his body between two boat seats. Cliff put several firearms next to him, then went back into the house and brought out an armload of old bamboo fly rods. On his third trip, he put three ash pack baskets filled with fancy baskets into the stern of the boat. Camouflage? On his last trip, he opened the truck door and put two briefcases on the seat between them. He told Wallace he would like to drop the stuff at Paula’s before they headed upcountry. Those were the last words he spoke until they got stuck on that miserable skidder trail somewhere off T2475.

Cliff said that he arrived home early, about 4:30, opened the door, and startled Bobby Curtis, who stopped slapping his fourteen-year-old daughter Cindy’s tits and face when he saw him. She lay naked on Cliff’s leather recliner. Bobby Curtis smiled as he pulled up his pants and covered his slug-like pecker. Cindy puked onto a side table. Cliff said he went crazy on Bobby.

Cliff said he twisted Bobby’s neck, smashed him to the floor, and kicked him in the head for a very long time. He said he didn’t remember when Bobby stopped moving. When he looked up, Mamere crawled toward him from Cindy’s bedroom. He wrapped Cindy up in the afghan his grandmother made for her eighth-grade graduation and carried her to her bed. He put Mamere beside Cindy and called his cousin Paula, who was, surprisingly, still at the health center. Paula nursed Cindy and Mamere while Cliff dragged Bobby outside. That’s when he called Wallace. 

Cliff said that Cindy, Paula, and Mamere were on their way to Subique. Cindy’s mother lived there, as did a medicine woman who would help them heal. Mamere had two goose eggs about to hatch on her forehead, and Paula was worried that she had a concussion, because she was speaking in Old Indian. 

Cliff shrugged, looked right at Wallace, and said, “You know she always does that when she’s drunk.” 

Wallace nodded. He thought he knew where they were going, so he took the tar road up to Township 41, Indian land. The road turned to gravel. An hour later, someone in a truck blinked their lights at them. They pulled onto logging road T2475 and followed the truck for close to fifteen miles before turning off onto a rough skidder trail, where they got stuck again. Roger, who had the point and thirty feet of heavy chain in his GMC ton dually, effortlessly pulled them out.

They arrived at a small clearing lit up by two sets of truck lights. Wallace looked at the cedar tree that one of the guys was pulling over with a skidder. It looked pretty limber until lots of roots came up. He and Cliff carried Bobby’s body to the tree and tossed it under the roots, into a hole that was more than six feet deep. When the skidder operator slacked up on the cable, Bobby disappeared as tree food. A couple of hours later, Roger cut down the tree. Now it was just one log in a truckload heading for a shingle mill in the western part of the state. The stump was Bobby’s gravestone. 

Six men stood quietly around Bobby’s tree, drinking some cold ones. After half an hour, Cliff thanked everyone. “No problem, bud,” the mourners replied. That was the most recent of many cedar burials in which Wallace had participated, and every one of them had been for a real bastard or particularly slimy bitch. Unsolved deaths? You bet.

It was a quiet ride home. When they got close to the reserve, Cliff said, “I don’t think I can stay in that house tonight. Why don’t you drop me off at Paula’s?”

Wallace nodded.

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