of finally meeting the woman her husband had loved all his life.
“Is she here?” Camilla asked.
“No.”
“But she’s coming?”
“I told her,” Willie replied. “She said she would think about it.”
“What do we do?”
“We wait.” He went toward the refrigerator. “Can I offer you something to drink?”
“No, thank you.”
“Beer, Cork?”
“Sure, thanks.”
Willie took out two bottles of Leinie’s Original, unscrewed the caps, and handed a bottle to Cork.
“Migwech,” Cork said.
“I heard your windshield took a bullet,” Willie said.
“A deer slug actually.”
“Careless hunter?”
“Yeah.” Cork let it go at that.
Willie clearly wasn’t interested in pursuing the topic. He looked at Camilla Little with great interest and said, “I always knew this day would come. And I guess I knew that Jubal would have to be dead first.”
Which was Cork’s sentiment exactly.
The week before his wedding, Jubal Little came north. He came quietly, and Cork might not have even known he was in town except for Willie Crane.
When Winona returned to the reservation after her rescue from the McMurphys, she kept mostly to herself. Whenever he encountered her, Cork found a woman who’d grown beautiful in a distant way and who eyed him as if he were on the far side of some secret knowledge that was hers alone and who spoke to him as if he were very young in his understanding of the world and she very old. The Shinnobs on the rez talked about her as if she were some kind of witch.
Because Jubal came north a lot, Cork often saw his old friend, although they didn’t connect in the former way. The powerful friendship of youth was mostly memory, but a good one still, and one they both respectfully acknowledged.
The powerful connection between Jubal and Winona did not diminish over the years, but it was a relationship kept deep in the shadows. A small town and the rez, especially, were difficult places to keep secrets. Even so, if Cork hadn’t already known the whole history of Jubal and Winona-two halves of a broken stone-he’d have suspected nothing. When he heard about Jubal’s engagement, it made him wonder. It also made him a little angry: What about Winona? But it was, after all, none of his business. Until early one summer morning when he received a desperate call from Willie Crane.
He was a deputy with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. He’d worked late the night before, a fatal accident on Highway 1 because of an unusually thick fog, and then the paperwork after. He was groggy but woke up quickly when Willie explained the situation.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he promised.
It wasn’t yet dawn, just the promise of morning in a faint evanescence above the tree line to the east. He drove fast, and the whole way, Willie’s words kept echoing in his head: Jubal’s going to kill Winona.
The sky was peach-colored by the time he reached Winona Crane’s little house outside Allouette. Her truck was parked in the dirt drive, alongside her brother’s modified Jeep, but Jubal’s vehicle was nowhere to be seen. In the garage, Cork thought, looking toward the small structure so rickety a strong wind might blow it down. If Jubal and Winona didn’t want anyone to know he was there, that was the place for him to park.
As Cork approached, Willie opened the front door. From inside came Jubal’s voice, drunk and angry.
“Why, goddamn it? Give me one good reason.”
Winona’s voice in reply was measured. “I’ve given you several, Jubal. You just won’t hear them. That’s always been a problem for you. You hear only what you want to hear.”
“And what I want to hear now is one word. Yes. That’s all. Just yes.”
“No.”
Something broke-smashed against a wall.
“He has a gun,” Willie told Cork. E-as-agun.
Cork entered carefully. Winona sat at the Formica-topped table in the tiny dining room. Her hair was a little wild, but it was a look that seemed to be more from sleep than anything else. She wore a kimono, an odd dressing gown, Cork thought, for a Shinnob on the Iron Lake Reservation. He’d never been inside the house, and he was surprised by what he saw. The walls and shelves and every available flat surface held images and icons and sculptures, things that he associated with a variety of religious traditions: a fat ceramic Buddha; a Celtic cross; a clay plate kiln-fired and painted with Navajo symbols; a figure with an elongated neck, African-looking and carved from what might have been ebony; little finger cymbals of the kind he’d seen in photos of Tibetan monks. It felt clean but cluttered, like a mind in search of truth and stuffed with too many ideas of what that was.
Jubal Little towered over Winona, his back to Cork. He wore boxer shorts, nothing else. His broad back was thickly muscled and his skin deeply tanned. On the speckled Formica of the tabletop stood a bottle of Maker’s Mark Kentucky bourbon, the red seal broken, but no glass that Cork could see. He did see, as Jubal waved his hands, the gun that Willie had warned him about.
The house lay mostly in the gloom of a day not yet arrived. Only one light was on, a little lamp on a table in the corner behind Winona, a lamp with a tan shade decorated with images of dream catchers.
“Then there’s nothing to be done,” Jubal said with a despair that didn’t quite ring true. “I’ll kill us both.”
Winona’s eyes shifted from Jubal to where Cork and Willie stood. Jubal must have seen, because he turned to face them.
“Well, what do you know? Dick Tracy’s here.”
“Morning, Jubal,” Cork said.
“Is it?” His eyes, bloodshot, swung toward a window. “The dawning of a new day. Fuck.”
Cork looked at the firearm in Jubal’s hand, a small-caliber stainless-steel handgun with a rosewood grip. An expensive boutique weapon, he thought, but it could do damage. “Jubal, that gun has me a little nervous. Mind putting it down?”
“I like the feel of it in my hand. This is one thing I can control.” He threw a disappointed glance in Winona’s direction.
“I understand,” Cork said. “It’s just easier to talk-for you, Winona, me-if the gun’s not a part of our conversation. And I don’t know what you’re upset about, but I can absolutely guarantee you that Winona’s more likely to be amenable if you’re not threatening her with a gun. True, Winona?”
Winona Crane’s face was as implacable as the face on her ceramic Buddha. “He’ll get the same answer from me, gun or no.”
That wasn’t the help Cork was looking for. But he said, as if it was exactly the answer he’d expected, “There, you see, Jubal. The gun’s of no use here. Put it down and we can talk this out.”
Jubal studied Cork. He swayed a bit as he stood there, a skyscraper in a mild earthquake. He said, “You took a gun from me once. I told you never to try it again. Remember?”
“I remember. And, Jubal, I won’t try to take it from you. I just want you to put it down so that we can talk.”
“I’m done talking.” He turned the barrel of the gun toward Cork, his face a stone mask as he pulled the trigger.
Cork’s heart gave a kick, but that was all that happened. The gun didn’t fire.
“Not loaded,” Jubal said and laid the firearm on the table.
Cork walked straight at Jubal and, when he was within distance, dropped him with a right cross that Jubal, if he saw it coming, did nothing to stop.
Cork breathed fast and angry. He eyed Winona, who hadn’t moved, hadn’t shown any surprise in anything that had occurred, as if she didn’t care in the least or maybe had known all along how it would play out.
“What’s this all about?” he said.
