Death Where the Bad Rocks Live (2 page)

Clayton promised to meet them here an hour ago. Ellis’s car had no heat and even Moses shivered as he fought to stay warm from the
Waziya
, the killing North Wind, which seeped through the cracks in the side window. “He must have had car trouble. He is always on time. He is close, though.”

“How the hell you know that? More of your medicine man mumbo jumbo?”

Moses ignored Ellis the Ignorant, as he called him, and shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. When Clayton had asked him to ride here with Ellis, Moses had refused at first, but Clayton persisted. Moses relented, not because Clayton was a sitting U. S. senator, but because Moses never refused his friend. He had agreed to guide the geologist here, an act Moses was growing to regret. He had always suspected the greedy little bastard could not even carry on an intelligent conversation. Now he had his proof.

The biting wind whistled through a crack in one side window, bringing snow and fine dust inside, accompanied by that same roaring engine sound that grew louder. Moses turned in the seat to look out the fogged-over back window. The B-17 flew even lower this pass, heading straight toward them, following the jagged terrain of the Badlands. “They’re flying too low.”

“What?” Ellis turned in his seat to look out the back window. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped as he spotted the bomber bearing down on them.

“I think they are going to drop their bombload,” Moses said, matter-of-factly.

Ellis screamed and yanked on the door handle, while Moses watched the bomber coming closer. The aircraft was near enough now that Moses saw the turret gunner fog the inside glass with his hot breath, heard the engines drown out Ellis’s screams, smelled the avgas exhaust from the quad motors as strong as the odor of Ellis’s moonshine.

Ellis hit the starter button on the floorboard with his foot and the Buick coughed to life. He ground gears and double-clutched just as the first bombs exploded fifty yards behind them. Pressure ruptured their eardrums. Moses cupped his hands to his bloody head and prayed silently to
Wakan Tanka
, the Great Mysterious, praying that his journey to the Spirit Road would be successful.

Another bomb exploded closer to the car. Overpressure blew out the windows. Ellis screamed, but Moses could not hear him or the other bombs detonate. All was silent. All was peaceful. All he heard was the prayers in his head, silent and chilling as the killing North Wind.

The aircrew did not score a direct hit, but that mattered none. Ellis lay slumped against the steering wheel, blood flowing freely from his nose and mouth and lifeless eyes. Moses looked down at the large piece of windshield glass protruding from his own chest. His hand feebly grabbed for his medicine bundle on the thong dangling around his neck.
Soon,
Wakan Tanka.
Soon I’ll meet you along the Spirit Road.

Willie jerked the wheel, skidding the Durango on the loose dirt, the back end of the SUV dropping off the edge. Manny yelled. Willie screamed. The wheel spun in his hands. He stood on the brakes, dust engulfing the Dodge, obscuring the two-hundred-foot drop-off. It rocked to a stop, and Manny opened his eyes. He chanced rolling his window down, chanced a look at the drop-off that could kill them both. Scrub trees on the floor of the Badlands looked like tiny weeds. The alkaline floor below looked like an unwelcome grave, sagebrush sitting like tiny headstones.

“Now what do we do?”

Willie smiled, but the sweat rolling down his face betrayed his fear. “We can pray.”

“You better pray we don’t get out of this in one piece.” But Manny’s idle threat revealed his own fear. He chanced another look out his side window. The Durango teetered over thin air that Manny had no intention of stepping into.

“Got any ideas? You’re the one that got us into this fix.”

“Not my fault this road’s so narrow.”

“Would you rather have brought my bureau car?”

“Not with you driving.”

“Like I could do worse?”

Willie put the Durango into four-wheel drive and tapped the foot feed. Tires spun without catching, the back end swaying in empty air.

“Stop! You’re making it worse.”

Willie put the Dodge in
PARK
and sat back in the seat, closing his eyes and breathing hard. “The winch,” he said, opening his eyes and looking around. “There.”

“There what?”

He pointed to a large boulder off the path away from the drop-off. “If I can run the winch cable off the front bumper around that rock, we might be able to ease it back on the road.”

Willie opened the door and started to step out. The SUV tilted more to the open air and Manny grabbed his arm. “You step out and this thing’s gonna drop over the edge. With me in it.”

“Well, we got to do something.”

“How much you weigh?”

Willie shrugged. “Two forty. Give or take.”

“Well, I’m one eighty…”

“Diet’s not working, huh?”

Manny ignored him. “If I slide behind the wheel when you step out, it might not change the balance much.”

“Worth a try.”

Manny crawled over the radio console and slid behind the wheel as Willie opened the door and stepped onto the road. The Dodge rocked, threatened to tip off the cliff before it settled back into an uneasy silence. Manny held his breath as Willie unbolted the winch cable from the front bumper and slowly ran it out. He reached the boulder. Manny breathed.
Willie circled the rock and secured the hook end to the cable itself. He walked back to the Durango. “Hand me the winch remote from above the visor.”

Manny grabbed what looked like a garage door opener and handed it through the window.

“When the cable tightens, I’ll signal you and you stick this baby in
LOW
.”

“And it’ll get dragged back onto the road?”

Willie laughed. “Either that or the cable will break, and you and the outfit will do a double gainer off the side.”

“You don’t seem too worried about it.”

Willie grinned. “I’m not the one inside. Here goes.”

A steady whirring reached the inside of the Durango, and Manny took several deep breaths, his hand on the gearshift, foot on the brake, ready to stick it in
LOW
.

“Now.”

Willie stepped away from the Durango, remote in hand, cable tightening. Manny stepped on the accelerator. Play in the cable gone, the front tires bit into the dirt, rear tires still dangling over the Badlands. The back tires jerked, the SUV jolted ahead, back tires back on hard ground. Manny skidded to a stop inches from the boulder. He put it in
PARK
and sat back in the seat. Sweat had flowed freely, staining his shirtfront, and he grabbed his bandanna and wiped his forehead.

Manny stepped out and walked to the edge of the drop-off. A chill ran over him as he fought down a vision of him and Willie and the Dodge caroming off the cliff and coming apart in a hundred pieces before reaching the floor of the Badlands. He backed away and joined Willie, who had reversed the winch and stood watching the cable run back on the spool. “Another few inches and we’d be in the Happy Hunting Grounds.”

“Spirit Road,” Willie called over his shoulder.

Manny sat on a rock and closed his eyes, aware once again
that he had a heartbeat, and that it slowed to normal. If he were a better driver, he’d demand Willie let him take the wheel. But Manny drove crappy, which only recently had been upgraded from driving shitty.

“Whenever you get around to it, feel free to drive a little slower.” Manny wiped his face and the inside of his Stetson with his bandanna. “The victim’s been dead for years. It’s not like we got to race to get there. Hell, you’ve been racing around all morning. Look at yourself—didn’t even shave. And what you got on your shirt, last night’s pizza?”

Willie rubbed his hand over his stubble that hadn’t been shaved yesterday either, and he picked at some kind of food dried to the front of his uniform shirt. “Been having things on my mind lately.”

Manny suspected Willie bordered on full-blown depression, his life teetering over the ledge like the Durango had just been, threatening to drag Willie down. Even his recent appointment to Oglala Sioux Tribal Police investigator hadn’t rescued him.

Willie shut the remote off and slipped the hook over the cable, securing it. “I got to see a man about a horse.” Willie stepped away from the Dodge to relieve himself. Manny suddenly felt the urge as well, surprised he hadn’t peed his pants as he sat teetering over the edge a few moments ago. As he turned and unzipped, he realized the whole place was his urinal.

As Manny did dust control on his own side of the car, he marveled at tawny sandstone spires towering a hundred feet above the Badlands floor that had lured people to their deaths in this remote part of the reservation that George Custer dubbed “hell on earth.” Most people would agree with that assessment. At first glance, nothing could exist in this desolate landscape, no one could survive here for long, in this land that hosted barren hilltops overlooking a million years of change. The siltstone and sandstone and mudstone makeup of the
Badlands caused it to change daily, adding to the danger of getting swallowed up and never being found by anyone. As if the Badlands wished it that way.

“Come back tomorrow and you will get lost,” Uncle Marion had told young Manny every time they ventured here to search for fossils, or pluck herbs for the upcoming winter, or harvest smelly skunkbrush sumac for making the baskets that Unc sold.

But the Old Ones knew this place teemed with life. The Old Ones only had to walk dry creek beds and gullies to locate the rabbitbrush the elk and deer grazed on to feed their horses, or locate yellow-waving sunflowers to harvest their nutrient-rich seeds. The Old Ones recognized that golden currants grew only on north-facing hillsides and where to pick them, using the summer-blooming plants in making pemmican. Most people saw the Badlands as an unforgiving place. Most people dared take only day trips and counted themselves fortunate to have made it out at the end of the day.

But to the Lakota, this was the Sheltering Place, the Stronghold, and it had sheltered and protected their ancestors well for hundreds of years. But this Sheltering Place demanded payment for those not strong enough—or savvy enough—to decipher her riddle of survival.

Thirty feet above them on the side of the hill some ancient Lakota woman had dug a cooking pit. Unc would send Manny scrambling up such a hillside, where he would filter the dirt through his fingers, filter remnants of charcoal from such stone-lined fire pits. And sometimes Manny would be rewarded with a bone scraper, sometimes with potsherds that had survived the centuries. Sometimes he found only a fire pit abandoned in haste.

Finished with their duty, Manny and Willie climbed back in the SUV and drove slow along the narrow trail. “How do you suppose those ordnance techs found that body?”

Manny shrugged. When the bomb disposal technicians had called it in, they were certain the skeleton in the car had been there since the Army Air Corps had bombed there during the war. “I’m anxious to find out how a man ended up in a bombing range he must have known was hot.”

“Unless he died long after this part of the range closed after World War II.”

They’d get their answer soon enough as they drove over a rise and down the other side, inching their way between two enormous hills consisting of millions of years of volcanic ash and sandstone topped by dried mud shale the consistency of popcorn. A solitary fifty-foot spire, eroded at the base by shifting winds and flash floods, seemed to teeter like a giant mushroom defying gravity.

Manny thought back to one of the first times he had been there. “Look over there,” Uncle Marion had pointed out when he had brought Manny here to gather herbs. “That’s where Kicking Bear led his band after Big Foot’s Minneconjous were killed at Wounded Knee.”

Manny squinted, shielding his eyes from the bright sun fighting to stay alive just above the jagged ridges. “Do people drive down there?” he had asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“There are cars down there.”

Unc shook his head. “Practice targets for the Air Corps during World War II. They drug old cars down there to bomb when they ran out of dinosaur fossils to obliterate.”

Manny turned back. Unc’s mouth had assumed that downturned look he always got when he was saddened. “What’s wrong, Unc?”

“The government. Kicked a hundred families off their land to use it for that bombing range,” Unc explained as he looked away. “Paid them little or nothing at all, and most never moved back after the war. Nothing ever changes—the government
takes from us Indians and leaves little more than a memory of what we had.”

Manny remembered—or thought he remembered, though those days grew somewhat cloudy as he aged—that he had seen Unc cry for the only time.

The Durango dropped into another rut right before the road took a sharp turn away from the venerable sentry and revealed a three-axled van idling beside the rusting hulk of a bombed-out car. Three men sat in the shade of the van, one smoking and staring at the car while the other two slept, ball caps pulled low, feet outstretched. A long boom extended in front of the contraption like the long snout of a dinosaur that swam in the warm waters once flowing here. As the Durango approached, smoker nudged sleepers, and they all stood.