bedroom at the end, turned the corner, and saw him standing with his hands on his hips. “You better come look at this.”
I walked over to the open door of the closet and looked in. There were enough weapons in there to arm a small platoon. There were FAL. 308s, AK-47s, MAC-10s, and the M-16s leaned against the inside wall. There was even an Armalite M-50 and a collection of Mossberg 12 gauge, short barrel, and tactical shotguns. Even sitting on the wooden cases of ammunition, in a dental hygienist’s closet, they looked deadly. Some of the guns were civilian versions, but others were fully automatic and fully functional. I leaned against the doorjamb and crossed my arms. “Wow.”
“Yes.” He looked sad. “I am guessing Artie does not have a federal license for all this automatic stuff.”
“Maybe he’s gonna open a store?”
“Yes. Guns-R-Us.” He leaned in for a closer look. “Is that an M-50?”
“Looks like to me.” I poked my head in and looked in the other corners. “I bet if we dig in those crates down there we’ll find ourselves a couple of. 45 ACPs that match the dies in the other room.” I looked around. “Maybe this is a conversation we should have in the truck?”
He followed me out after closing the closet door, and I felt a lot better when we were standing on the porch. I think I heard a few low growls as we walked off the steps, but the mad rush for our heels didn’t come. We leaned against the front of the truck’s grill guard and talked. It had turned out to be a beautiful day, and the temperature was rapidly approaching forty-five. I unbuttoned my jacket and put an arm up. “Well, I’ll tell you what I didn’t see in there.. ”
“Yes. Artie’s taste in weapons seems to run au courant.”
I turned to look at him. “I’m pleased to see that some of that high school French took.”
He continued to look at the house. “Oui.”
“What do you know about Artie, other than his momma don’t love him no more?”
I waited while he composed himself. I don’t know if not knowing Artie was a full-fledged militia-ist or if weighing the odds on his being guilty of murdering Cody Pritchard embarrassed him, but his jaw set and the eyes hardened.
“Artie is an angry young man.” He paused. “What do you know about him?”
I had looked Artie up and came clean. “He’s got two cases of aggravated assault, one pending. He did a domestic for spousal abuse over in South Dakota and has two unpaid speeding tickets here in Wyoming.” I waited a moment. “You seem to be taking this personally.”
He shook his head. “I am reacting to the lost potential.”
“Yep, I know you wouldn’t know anything about that angry young man stuff.”
We both shook our heads. “No.”
I had to push the truck this time, twice. The first time, it jumped when he let out the clutch and barked all the skin off my right shin. The second time, with my arm locked straight with the effort of moving the two-ton beast, it stoved my shoulder and blew a sooty cloud of smoke and unburnt gas in my face. I climbed in and shut the door. “I hate this truck.” We drove back toward Lame Deer on 39, and I peeled off my jacket and laid it on the seat between us. I thought about where we were headed, about Lonnie.
I wondered how long it would take for the Little Bird look to come back.
Jim Ferguson wore a gun at the trial; that alone was enough to make me laugh, but the context robbed me of my sense of humor. It was before Vic, so my two deputies were Lenny Rowell and Jim. Jim kept fussing with his belt, and Lenny was trying to catch a nap as he leaned against the bookcases of burgundy leather-covered Shepard’s Wyoming Citations. I told Jim to get his belt adjusted because fidgeting deputies with guns made the common populace nervous and excused myself to go to the bathroom. When I got there, Lonnie Little Bird was trying to get his wheelchair into one of the stalls. The county hadn’t gotten around to putting in handicapped facilities, and Lonnie wasn’t fitting. He looked up through his coke-bottle glasses and smiled. “Mm, hmm. Yes, I am having troubles. It is so.”
I looked around. I hadn’t noticed anybody on the way in. “Lonnie, is there anybody to help you?”
“Mm, hmm… Mm, hmm.” He continued to smile. “You.”
He was a small man, even counting the two missing legs, and it was relatively easy to lift him up and hold him as he unbuttoned his pants. I sat him on the toilet. The grin never left his face. He had a large head with prominent ears. The nose was flat and looked like it had been broken numerous times. There was a rumor that the old guy had played professional baseball for one of the teams in the Midwest but, as far as I knew, it was only a rumor. He spoke as I started to close the stall door. “Mm, Sheriff?”
I paused. “Yep, Lonnie?”
“You know how old I am, Sheriff?”
I figured about sixty-five. “No, Lonnie. I can’t say that I do.”
“Mm, fifty-three years old. Yes, it is so.”
Jesus. “Lonnie, that’s pretty young.” There was silence for a while, and I was afraid I had said something wrong. “Lonnie?”
“Mm, sometimes I think it’s very old.” Another pause, and I zipped up and moved over to the sink to wash my hands. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve been here a very long time.”
I pulled out a paper towel and dried my hands. “Yep, I feel like that sometimes too, Lonnie.”
“These boys, the ones that have done this thing to my daughter?” My breath caught in my throat. “It’s a bad thing they’ve done, yes?”
I leaned against the counter and looked at the stall door. “Yes, it is a bad thing that they have done.” There was a long silence, and I was glad no one could see my eyes well in anger and frustration. “Very bad.”
The voice that came back was soft. “Mm, I get confused sometimes, and I just wanted to ask you.”
When I got back to the courtroom, the jury light was glowing red.
There was a small dish attached to Lonnie’s house that brought in the world, and I’m pretty sure who had ordered and paid for it. Henry’s eyes were beginning to glaze over as Lonnie gave us his version of what was happening on this particular daytime drama, but I did my best to pay attention. “The problems started at the health clinic, that’s where Dirk begged Catalina to not go through with the abortion. Cat agreed and said she was looking forward to having a family, mm-hmmm, mm-hmmm… But I’m not so sure. After they left the clinic, there were complications, but the doctors said she would be all right, so Dirk dropped her off at the mansion and went over to see Latisha. But when he got there, Latisha told him that he needed to be with Catalina now that she is pregnant, so he left, but that’s okay ’cause now Latisha is with Ben, and he seems to be a good fellow. Mm, hmm. Yes, it is so.”
Lonnie watched soap operas because there was no baseball in November. The rumors of Lonnie’s playing pro ball turned out to be true. There was baseball paraphernalia scattered in a few spots around the place, baseball bats tucked into corners, old gloves stacked up on shelves. There were pictures of Lonnie standing around with Cubs, Billy Williams and Ferguson Jenkins; Cardinals, Lou Brock and Joe Torre; Reds, Tony Perez and Johnny Bench, whom he blamed for ending his career. “After I saw him coming up, I just didn’t see any reason to go on playing. He’s part Indian too, you know. Choctaw. Mm, hmm.. Yes, it is so.”
The only thing that outnumbered the baseball pictures were photographs of Melissa. The only photographs I had of Melissa were not good ones. I stopped before an especially wonderful one of her in full dancing regalia, seated on a Palomino in front of a painted teepee. Its frame had started out as gold but was now rusted and tarnished at the edges. It was likely it was taken down and handled a great deal. I thought about defects, about the rape, the trial, and the Little Big Horn reenactment where I had seen her last. Lonnie probably thought about those things a lot, too.
It was nearing one o’clock, and Lonnie had wheeled himself into the kitchen to instruct Henry how to make the pickle-loaf, yellow American sliced cheese, and Kraft-spread sandwiches on Wonder Bread that would be our lunch. This was my kind of food, but Henry’s gourmet sensibilities were having a hard time of it. “Lonnie, I buy you good food, why don’t you eat it?”
“Your good food is complicated and takes too long to make. Mm.. There are Vlassic pickle stackers in the door there.”
With a sigh, Henry returned to the refrigerator, retrieved the jar of sliced pickles, and got ice from the freezer side of the appliance. “Lonnie, are you buying all that frozen food off the Schwan’s truck again?”
He looked over at me through those thick, metal-frame glasses, needing an ally. And if Lonnie had said that
