Red Knife (12 page)

B
y noon the sun had come out and it was warm enough to have lunch outside. Annie and Cara Haines sat on the wall of one of the brick planter boxes that lined the entrance to Aurora Area High School. Five years earlier the district had consolidated with several of the smaller districts surrounding Aurora, and a new high school had been built. Annie hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but she understood there was a lot of discussion about the location of the building. The site that was finally chosen was a large meadow near the gravel pit at the edge of town. From the windows of the rooms facing west, the tall gravel conveyor was visible, rising from the pit like a long-necked prehistoric beast spitting rock. East, the view was of the parking lot in front of the school, and beyond that, the houses of Aurora, side by side, lining the streets that headed toward the lake nearly a mile distant.

“I’m thinking of going camping this weekend,” Cara said. “Maybe Slim Lake. Want to go?”

“I’ll be helping my dad at Sam’s Place.”

“Right. Fishing opener. My dad says your dad should wait to start the season.”

“Why?”

“All this trouble with the Red Boyz. The shots last night. He thinks folks will stay away from Sam’s Place for a while. Actually, he thinks I should stay away from you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s serious?”

Cara looked toward the parking lot where a group of guys were clustered around Gary Amundsen’s red ’67 Mustang convertible. Gary’s father owned Amundsen’s Auto Body, and both Gary and his father were car freaks.

“About nights, he’s serious. Once it’s dark, he doesn’t want me hanging with you. He’s afraid of what he calls ‘collateral damage.’”

“That’s so bogus.”

“I don’t know, Annie. What if we’d been with your dad last night?”

Allan Richards came out the front door with two other boys. Richards was a tall kid with a bad complexion and an attitude to match. He tossed a green tennis ball in the air as he walked. As he passed, he glanced at Annie and Cara with a dismissive
whatever
look and headed toward the red Mustang. Annie didn’t pay much attention. She was trying to decide if she should be pissed at Cara or Cara’s father.

“Kind of a sunshine friendship,” she finally said.

“He’ll get over it. Give it a couple days. And we can, you know, still do the library and stuff.”

“What about Slim Lake? He was okay with that?”

“I didn’t ask him. Anyway, it would be away from town, away from your dad. Kind of out of harm’s way.”

Annie saw Uly Kingbird and Darrell Gallagher crossing the parking lot, coming from town. She’d been surprised to see Uly at school that week. She’d figured that because of the tragedy in the family, he’d be home for a while. But the Kingbirds, she remembered, were not a family that cried. She hadn’t had a chance to talk to him, but he seemed okay. Even though the temperature was easily in the high sixties, Gallagher wore his long black leather coat, à la
Matrix.
As they got nearer, Allan Richards pointed their way and said something to his buddies gathered around the Mustang. He started walking a course that would intercept them. A couple of the other boys trailed after him.

“Hey, Red Boy,” Richards called. He was still tossing his tennis ball.

Uly kept walking, as if he hadn’t heard.

“Hey, I’m talking to you.” Richards stepped in front of Uly and Gallagher, blocking their way. “You deaf or just stupid?”

Uly said, “I’m just going inside, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay.” Richards grinned and glanced back to see if the others around Amundsen’s Mustang were watching. “I think you should take the day off, because the truth is, I can’t stand being in the same building with you.”

He tossed the ball at Uly. It bounced off his forehead and Richards caught it. Uly tried to move past, but Richards stepped in his way.

Gallagher said, “Why don’t you just leave him alone.”

Richards turned and bounced the ball off Gallagher’s forehead in the same way he’d done it to Uly. “Why don’t you make me, freak-boy.”

Gallagher made no move against Richards, just stood silently with his hands in his long black coat.

“Go on,” Richards said to Uly. “The Red Boyz aren’t welcome here.”

“I’m not one of the Red Boyz.”

“Know what we do to Red Boyz around here? Open ’em up with buckshot, that’s what.”

He popped the ball off Uly’s forehead again. This time Uly followed it back. He tackled Richards. Together they fell backward and ricocheted off a green Taurus wagon, knocking the side mirror from its mount. They hit the pavement with Uly still in Richards’s grasp. The car alarm on the Taurus began to bleat mercilessly. Richards was taller and heavier, but Uly was all rage and he wrapped up the bigger boy in the furious hug of his arms as they wrestled. Annie leaped from the planter box and raced toward the Taurus. The Mustang crowd came, too. They formed a loose circle around the two kids writhing on the asphalt. Annie moved to intervene, but Gary Amundsen blocked her way.

“Let them finish it,” he said.

“Get out of my way, Gary.”

Annie tried to move around him, but Randy Shaw slipped next to Amundsen and stood with him shoulder to shoulder, forming a human wall.

“You heard him,” Shaw said. “It’s between them.”

Annie tried once again to maneuver around them, but Shaw reached out and shoved her roughly back. Anger flared red in her vision. She responded to his shove with one of her own, far fiercer than his had been. He hadn’t expected it. His eyes showed his surprise and he stumbled backward and fell over Uly and Richards. As he went down, he hit his head on the door handle of the Taurus. He came to rest in a heap on top of Richards, who’d finally managed to pin Uly beneath him. For a moment it was chaos on the ground as they all fought to separate.

Then Amundsen yelled, “Hey, stop it, you guys. Randy’s bleeding bad.”

Shaw seemed confused. He reached a hand to the back of his head, and when he brought it around in front so that he could see, his face went white. His palm and fingers were dripping red.

“Jesus,” he said. “Oh shit.”

Uly and Richards separated and stood up. Shaw struggled to stand and finally found his feet. He turned the back of his head toward Amundsen. “Dude, is it bad?”

“I can’t tell, Randy. There’s too much blood.”

Amundsen was right. Blood welled up bright crimson through Shaw’s blond hair and fell in huge drops onto the black asphalt. Annie’s rage vanished, replaced by a terrible fear.

“Break it up, guys! Break it up!” Mr. Bukoski, who taught math, shoved his way through the circle of boys. He was more Mack truck than man, and he was the school’s head football coach as well. “Let me see.” He took a good look at the back of Shaw’s head, his fingers sifting through blond hair and blood. “Might take a stitch or three, but you’ll be fine. Here.” He yanked a folded handkerchief from his back pocket and put it over the wounded area. “Hold that there. Come on.” With his bloody hand on the boy’s shoulder, he turned Shaw toward the school. “Kingbird, Richards, O’Connor. I want you in the office. Now. And that’s my car. Somebody’s going to pay for a new mirror.”

Annie trooped with the others behind Mr. Bukoski and Randy Shaw. When she passed Cara, who still sat on the planter box, Cara mouthed,
You were awesome, girl.
Annie made no reply and followed the others into the dark of the school building.

When she got the call, Lucinda was in the middle of changing Misty. She lifted the baby, whose bottom was clean but still bare, from the changing table and carried her to the phone in the hallway.
Aurora Area High School,
the caller ID indicated. Her thought was that Uly had forgotten something important and wanted her to bring it, a request he’d made occasionally in the past.

When the principal explained to her what the situation actually was, she assured him that her husband would be there soon. She called Will.

“It’s Uly,” she told him. “There’s been some trouble at school. A fight. A boy was hurt.”

“Uly do the hurting?” He sounded almost hopeful.

“I don’t know. Can you go? I have the baby.”

“I’ll take care of it, Luci.”

She spent the next hour and a half worrying. A call from school hadn’t been uncommon with Alejandro, but Ulysses never got into trouble. He was too quiet, something Will complained about. It was true that Uly didn’t talk much. He lived inside himself. But his father was the same way.

She’d just put Misty down for a nap when she heard the car pull into the drive and the thump of car doors slamming. She reached the kitchen just as the side door opened and the two walked in. Ulysses came first, looking sullen, as always. Behind him, Will didn’t look too upset.

“Go on to your room. I’ll let you know what I decide,” he said to his son’s back.

“Yes, sir.”

Uly skulked past his mother without looking at her.

“Are you all right?” She reached out and held him back gently with her hand. She looked into his face. “You’re not hurt?”

“I’m fine, Mom.” He didn’t pull away, but waited until she’d removed her hand, then moved on.

With an old, familiar hurting in her heart, she watched him leave her.

Will took off his jacket and hung it neatly on a hanger he kept on a peg near the back door. He never tossed his coat over the back of a chair, never left his shoes in the living room, and he never suffered this kind of laxity in others. His military training.

“He’s been suspended for the rest of the week,” he said. “I’m hungry. What do we have for lunch?”

“What happened?”

“He got into it with a couple of other boys. One of them ended up with a bloody head.”

“Bad?”

“Looked worse than it was. Head wounds are like that.”

“Two boys? He was fighting with two boys?”

“The principal couldn’t get a straight story from anybody, so what really happened is still unclear. They were all suspended. Including Anne O’Connor.”

“Annie? What did she have to do with it?”

“Not sure. Like I said, the kids were all pretty tight-lipped.” He opened the refrigerator and peered inside. “How about heating up some of that leftover lasagna?”

“You told Uly you’d let him know what you decided. Decided about what?”

“Appropriate punishment.”

“Punishment? He’s been suspended, isn’t that punishment enough? And I know Uly. Whatever happened, he didn’t start it.”

He spoke with his head deep in the refrigerator. “There are rules, Luci. One of the rules is that you don’t get into trouble at school.”

“But you’re happy he fought back.”

“Of course I am. Someone attacks, you have to respond. If you don’t, you lose respect and it’s important that the enemy respect you.”

“Enemy? Will, these are just high school kids. And this isn’t a war.”

He pulled out the pan of lasagna, folded back the aluminum foil that covered it, and sniffed. “Life
is
war, Lucinda.” He held out the pan for her to deal with.

C
ork drove across the rez to the old mission, a small one-room building in the middle of a large clearing. The mission, nearly a hundred years old, had fallen into disrepair, but several years earlier a priest known affectionately as St. Kawasaki had spent a lot of his own time and resources to restore the structure in order to celebrate Mass there periodically. Most Shinnobs on the rez who were Catholic were used to driving to St. Agnes, in Aurora. They always appreciated, however, a service in their own community.

Behind the mission, bordered by a wrought-iron fence, was a cemetery begun when the mission was first built. It was an assortment of gravestones, chiseled markers, crudely wood-burned plaques, and crosses. There were also a number of grave houses, which were low wooden structures built over the burial plots, an old Ojibwe tradition. Two open graves lay waiting to be filled. On the following afternoon, the bodies of Alexander and Rayette Kingbird would do the filling.

Cork leaned against the fence. The afternoon was sunny and warm. He wrapped his hands around the top rail and felt all the heat the black iron had absorbed. It was from the sun, of course, but he knew it could just as well have come from the fire of the collective anger contained in the burial ground. So much death dealt out so unfairly, betrayal in every form—hunger, disease, outright murder. His grandmother’s people were interred here, and their blood ran hot in his veins. Still, he was more Irish than Ojibwe, and he observed that his own shadow lay outside the fence. It was only because of the angle of the sun, but in that convergence of circumstance, he saw the accusation that had dogged him all his life. In Tamarack County, a place where history was a litany of lies and a long saga of distrust, he was considered neither Ojibwe nor really white. He understood that he would always stand outside the fence.

He left the mission, drove a quarter mile east, and turned onto an old logging road overgrown with timothy grass and wild oats. The road cut along a ridge that overlooked the clearing. He pulled to the side, parked, and grabbed his binoculars from the back of the Bronco. He climbed to the top of the ridge, which was thick with second-growth jack pines. The mission was clearly visible, a small white box in the middle of a field of green. A single road—Mission Road—bisected the clearing. West, the direction from which Cork had come, the road led toward Allouette. East, it headed toward the back side of the Sawbill Mountains, where it dead-ended in difficult bog country. He lifted his field glasses and was able easily to follow the gravel road west about a mile, where it curved out of sight among the pines. The dust kicked up by his Bronco still hung, ghostlike, in the corridor that ran between the distant trees. East, the road ran straight and he could see even farther. He swung the lenses toward the mission. The open graves of the cemetery were like black eyes staring back.

The clearing was empty now, but tomorrow it would be filled with people from the rez. Cork wouldn’t be among them. He’d be up there on that ridge with his binoculars.

Take a hawk’s-eye view,
Meloux had advised.

White men didn’t have a name for the ridge, but the Ojibwe did. They called it Kakaik after the great war chief. It was the name Alexander Kingbird had taken when he formed the Red Boyz, a name with a simple meaning: Hawk.

Jo poured water into the coffeemaker on the counter. She kept her back to Cork.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was on the rez, out of cell phone range, otherwise I’d have been there, you know that.”

“I didn’t need you there, Cork. I told you last night I’d take Stevie to Dr. Barron.” Her spine was an iron pole. “That’s not the point, anyway. The point is that I worried myself sick when I couldn’t get hold of you to tell you what the doctor said. I saw you lying dead out there somewhere with your back torn open just like the Kingbirds.”

“I’m sorry, Jo.”

“But not sorry enough to step back from this whole Kingbird mess, huh?” She turned and gave him a look that could have frozen fire. “How’d you sleep last night?”

“Restless.”

“Restless?” She almost laughed. “I don’t think I slept at all.”

They stared across a silence that lay between them. Finally Cork said, “Where’s Annie?”

“Upstairs.”

“What did she have to say?”

“Not a lot. She shoved the Shaw boy. He hit his head and bled all over everything. She’s been suspended from school and from softball.”

“Ouch. What did the Shaw kid do that made her shove him?”

“Why don’t you go up and get the story from her yourself.”

He walked out of the kitchen.

“Would you like some coffee when it’s ready?” Jo called to him.

“Yeah, save me a cup, thanks.”

“I’ll be glad to bring it up.”

He paused in the dining room and turned back. Through the doorway, he could see her standing at the counter. The offer to bring his coffee to him upstairs was, he understood, a small bridge across the chasm that had been her anger.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’d like that.”

He found Annie in her room, lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Her leather ball glove was on her left hand. In her right was an old softball, scuffed and dirty. She didn’t see her father at first. Cork stood in the hallway just outside her room, watching her toss the softball and catch it in her mitt. She was a slender young woman, with red hair that was often untamed and a face that freckled significantly in summer.

“Hey, slugger. Hear you did some damage today,” he said.

She took the glove off, nestled the softball in its palm, and set it on the bed beside her. “It was an accident.”

“The damage maybe. How about the shove?”

“What did Mom tell you?”

“Not much. I’m mostly in the dark.”

He strolled in and sat next to her. She stared at her left hand, which looked so much smaller now that her big glove was gone.

“What’s the story?” he said.

“Allan Richards started giving Uly Kingbird a lot of crap. You know, about his brother and all. It was pretty hurtful stuff. Uly finally lit into him. Richards is way bigger, so I went over to, I don’t know, try to help somehow. A couple of other guys stepped in to stop me. Shaw was one of them. I tried to get around him. He shoved me. I shoved him back and he went down. That’s about all there is to it.”

“Except for the gallon of blood he lost.”

“Yeah, except for that.”

“What do you think?”

“Huh?”

“About the whole situation,” he said.

“I probably shouldn’t have shoved him.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I guess you shouldn’t respond to violence with violence?”

“That’s a question.”

Annie dumped the softball out and slid her glove back onto her hand. She gave the leather palm a couple of hard thumps with her fist.

“The truth is, I don’t know that I’d do anything different,” she finally said. “Those guys were total jerks.”

“Okay. As long as you’re willing to accept the consequences. Your mother told me you’ve been suspended from school and from the softball team.”

Her eyes narrowed in anger. “That part’s unfair.”

“School or the softball team?”

“Softball.”

“Are you suspended permanently?”

“I can’t play in the game on Friday. Winning the conference depends on this one. So if we lose, it’s as good as permanent.”

“I’m sorry, kiddo. That’s hard, but under the circumstances, understandable.”

She didn’t respond for a minute. Finally she said grudgingly, “I suppose it’s like you said. If I think it was the right thing to do, I need to accept the consequences.” She picked up the softball and slapped it into her glove. “I just wish I’d done some damage to Allan Richards while I was at it.”

Cork couldn’t help smiling. “So how did Uly do with the Richards kid?”

“He had him for a while, but Allan’s a lot bigger. Kind of a David and Goliath thing, only Uly didn’t have a slingshot. Am I, like, grounded or anything?”

“I’ll talk to your mom, but I think missing the playoff game is enough.” He stood up. “Your mom and I are going to the visitation for the Kingbirds tonight. You want to come?”

“Yes, thanks. Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“When I was a kid and I had to take the garbage out at night, I was scared sometimes that there were things hiding in the bushes. You know, monsters and stuff. I was always sure they were going to jump out and get me.”

“What about it?”

“That’s how I feel right now. Not about me specifically, but about everybody and everything here. It feels like there’s something scary hiding in the bushes, you know what I mean? I keep thinking that any moment it’s going to leap out and…I don’t know what exactly, but I’m kind of afraid.”

She looked up at him as if she expected her father to put her fear to rest.

Cork gave her the only thing he had, which was company in her concern. “Hell, Annie, I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t scared, too.”