Red Knife (13 page)

T
he visitation was held at Nelson’s Funeral Home. Annie had been there over the years for other visitations and memorial services. Also, when she was a sophomore, she’d gone on a field trip organized by her biology teacher, Mr. Dexter, an odd man, short and balding, full of gruesome stories about the strange parasites he’d seen inhabit people’s bodies when he was a Peace Corps worker somewhere in Indonesia. The mortician had taken the class on a tour of the prep room, explaining how he prepared a body for burial and showing them the instruments and the bottles of chemicals. It had seemed alien and cruel and unnecessary to Annie. Why not simply let go of the body in the same way the spirit did?

Nelson’s was one of the nicest of the old houses in Aurora. Bigger, more luxurious homes had been built on Iron Lake, but Nelson’s, with its gingerbread trim, its wraparound porch, and its cupola, seemed elegant in a way that suggested there was some sort of etiquette to the aftermath of dying. The biological stuff of body preparation Annie could do without, but some of the traditions that accompanied death felt right, like the visitation. Gathering to offer comfort and to remember the life that had gone before the death seemed fundamental and natural to a transition that Annie thought was probably more difficult for the living than for the dead.

Annie and her family paused at the door to the room where the visitation was in progress. On the tour she’d taken, the mortician said that it had once been a grand dining room and held a table that could have easily seated twenty. Now it contained two dark-wood caskets placed side by side, a number of flower arrangements, several photographic memorials that had been created on poster boards and positioned on display tripods in the corners of the room, and a lot of people talking quietly. Her mother signed the guest register while her father wrote a check to the St. Agnes Early Education Fund, which the Kingbirds had designated for memorial contributions.

Annie went on ahead. Across the room, Uly stood peering at one of the poster memorials. She wandered over, but he was so intent he didn’t notice her. He seemed to be focused on a photograph of him and Alexander standing together on a white diving raft in the middle of a lake. Uly was short and skinny; Alexander was much taller, much older, a young teenager with a developing physique. He wore a broad smile. Uly stared warily at the camera, as if he was on a raft drifting out to sea.

“Where was it taken?” Annie asked.

“North Carolina, I think. Lejeune,” Uly said. “Probably just after we moved there.”

“Alexander looks happy. You look like you just lost your pet turtle.”

“Alex liked moving. He was good at it. Dad would get a new posting, we’d hit a new base, a new town, and Alex was out the door getting to know the place, the people. Charisma. He had it in spades.”

“You didn’t like moving?”

Uly shook his head. “Staying in one place seemed better. Safer. Till we moved here.” He thought a moment, then smiled. “Alex got us kicked out of base housing once.”

“How?”

“I’m not sure exactly. It involved a cherry bomb, a bag of dog crap, and the base commander. Alex was never much impressed by authority. It was the only time Dad ever hit him. Slapped him across the face.” He wasn’t smiling anymore. “That part I remember.” He turned to her. “Sorry about today.”

“It wasn’t your fault. I really like the way you lit into Allan Richards. He’s such an asshole.”

“I wanted to kill him,” Uly said. “If I’d had a gun, he’d be dead.”

The pupils of Uly’s eyes were a swirl of green, and what Annie saw in them made her think of the threatening look of the sky before a hailstorm. She struggled to find a way to help him out of the dark hole into which he seemed to be sliding. “I’ve been thinking. What if we did another piece for church? Everyone loved what we did last Sunday.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t have to give me an answer right away.”

“He just did.”

Annie turned and found Darrell Gallagher at her shoulder. He was dressed, as usual, entirely in black, which should have been appropriate for the occasion, but somehow felt instead like an insult. The sly smile on his face made everything about him feel off.

“You have an annoying habit, Gallagher, of butting in on other people’s conversations.”

“And you have an annoying habit, O’Connor, of breathing,” he shot back.

“Think about it, Uly,” she said.

He didn’t answer. He turned away in Gallagher’s company and drifted off. Why did Uly hang with someone like Gallagher? she wondered. But she knew the answer: Being alone was worse.

“Are they in there?” Stevie asked. He nodded toward the polished, closed caskets at the other end of the room. His black eyes and the bandage over his nose made him look like he’d gone through hell, which he had. Jo had taken him to see Dr. Barron that morning, and the repair procedure had been scheduled for Thursday. At the moment, Stevie didn’t seem much bothered by his broken nose.

“Not them,” Cork said. “Only their bodies.”

“I know that. Their souls are gone and stuff. I meant are their bodies really in there? It’s not just for show?”

“They’re really in there. Why wouldn’t they be?”

“They were pretty messed up, right?”

“That’s probably one of the reasons the caskets are closed.”

Stevie stared at the two coffins as if trying to imagine Alexander and Rayette Kingbird lying inside on the soft satin, their bodies ripped apart by buckshot.

Lucinda Kingbird stood near the caskets talking with a constant stream of people. Cork spotted Will Kingbird standing alone a good distance from his wife, his hands clasped behind him, looking like a soldier at parade rest. Although he’d been born and raised on the Iron Lake Reservation, he hadn’t made an effort to reconnect with his Ojibwe roots when he returned to Tamarack County. The Shinnobs who’d come to the visitation, Rayette’s relatives mostly, spoke to him only a moment before moving on. It was the same with the others who’d come, many of whom were parishioners from St. Agnes. Kingbird wasn’t the kind of man who invited long conversations.

“See Annie by the poster board over there?” Cork said to his son. “Why don’t you go keep her company for a few minutes?”

Once Stevie had gone, Cork headed toward Kingbird.

“Will,” he said in greeting.

They shook hands, firmly and briefly.

“I just want to say how sorry I am about Alexander and Rayette.”

Kingbird’s eyes were dark—his Anishinaabe heritage—and they were difficult to read. Also an Anishinaabe trait. But there was something that made Kingbird’s eyes different from other Shinnobs. The Anishinaabeg loved to laugh, and in their eyes there was always a spark of humor. Not in Kingbird’s eyes.

“You know,” Kingbird said, “you were probably the last person to see Alex alive.”

“No, that would have been whoever killed him.”

“I can tell you who killed him. Buck Reinhardt.”

“A lot of good law enforcement people are looking hard at that possibility, Will, and they’re not finding any evidence.”

“Looking hard? An investigator name of Rutledge came to my shop yesterday. I told him about the customized Robar shotgun I sold Reinhardt. He said there wasn’t much they could do with that. Said you can’t prove anything with buckshot the way you can with a bullet. He told me Elise Reinhardt swears her husband was home when Alex was killed. Know what I told him? Give me an hour with Reinhardt and I’d get the truth out of the son of a bitch.”

“This isn’t that kind of war.”

“Once the shooting starts, there’s only one kind of war.”

Cork kept his voice low, not wanting to disturb the others at the visitation, and said, “Will, I’m sorry about what’s happened, I really am, but I don’t think it helps to think of any of this in military absolutes.”

“I’ll tell you about the military. When I was a kid, didn’t matter if I did a thing right. If my old man had it in his head to hit me, he’d hit me. The corps, you do a thing right, it means something and they remember. You think I’m rigid. I think I’m consistent. I see the world in terms of consistency. Reinhardt killing my son is entirely consistent with the man Buck Reinhardt has always been.”

“I’m not going to disagree with you, Will, but your thinking seems a little narrow to me. Reinhardt wasn’t Alex’s only enemy.”

“He’s had enemies for a long time. It wasn’t until Buck Reinhardt lost his daughter that somebody killed him. You’re going to tell me that doesn’t prove anything. That’s because you see yourself as a reasonable man and reasonable men don’t rush to judgment. You have any idea how many times I’ve seen reasonable men stand by and do nothing while the worst shit you can imagine goes down?”

Cork didn’t reply. His attention had been grabbed by a contingent of the Red Boyz who’d appeared in the hallway outside the viewing room. He knew them all: Tom Blessing, Daniel Hart, Elgin Manypenny, Rennie Decouteau, Jessie Hanks, and Bobby Oakgrove. Most were young, eighteen or nineteen. They’d dressed neatly, in clean dark pants, white shirts, some colorful vests. They all wore their hair long. Some had braided it, others let it fall loose beneath a leather band or a folded bandanna bound about their heads and adorned with an eagle feather. In the Ojibwe culture of long ago, the eagle feather signified that a warrior had killed another in battle. What it meant to the Red Boyz, Cork didn’t know.

Will Kingbird saw where Cork was looking. He turned, and both men waited for the Red Boyz to drift in.

Lucinda Kingbird did not want to be there. She did not want to have to talk to these people who offered her kindness in a time they believed must be terrible for her. She did not want to feel bad for not being full of the emotions they expected. The cordial smile she wore wearied her. She wondered, as she had from the beginning of this whole tragic mess, if she truly was different from other people; if, because she did not feel like grieving for her son, something was terribly wrong with her.

She had never fit in. She had never felt as if she was somewhere she could call home. In Aurora, people were pleasant to her, but it was clear that she was an outsider. She was not white, nor was she Ojibwe. She was Latina; she spoke with a slight but noticeable accent. In Tamarack County, no one seemed quite certain what to make of her. Although Will had grown up here, he’d made no effort to reestablish his connection with his people. He was comfortable as an outsider. Lucinda believed she should have been, too. When she’d married a career marine, she’d become a nomad, a chronic outsider. Over time, she should have adjusted. But she’d never grown used to feeling different, feeling watched. She’d only grown accustomed to feeling alone.

“There shoulda been a wake.”

Lucinda turned at the sound of the old voice and found Tillie Strangeways staring at her in accusation. Tillie was Rayette’s great-aunt, an old woman who reminded Lucinda of an apple long fallen off the tree: leathery, bitter, shriveled to a little ball of wrinkles. She was a caustic old woman who referred to Lucinda as “that Mexican.” She was accompanied by Ginger, Rayette’s cousin.

“Good evening, Tillie,” Lucinda said, and put on her cordial smile.

“Why didn’t you hold a wake?” the old woman croaked. “They don’t do that in Mexico?”

“Grandma,” Ginger said.

“All I’m saying is there shoulda been a wake. Two, three days. With singers.”

Lucinda hauled up as much graciousness as she could summon. “My husband made all the arrangements.”

The old woman squinted and scanned the room. “Where’s the baby?”

“I told you, Grandma,” Ginger said. “Justine’s taking care of Misty tonight.”

Tillie Strangeways seemed shocked, though Lucinda suspected it was all drama. “Justine? That girl don’t have the sense God give a retarded cow.”

Ginger offered Lucinda an apologetic look and said to the old woman, “Come on, Grandma. Let’s go see Uncle Leonard. He’s talking about making fry bread for after the funeral tomorrow.”

“Leonard? Fry bread?” Everything seemed to shock Tillie. “That boy couldn’t fry a rock.”

Whatever that meant.

As soon as the women left, Lucinda saw Jo O’Connor coming her way. She was tired, but once more tried to smile.

“Lucinda, I’m so sorry.” Jo hugged her gently.

She and Jo worked on the education committee for St. Agnes and helped with the Christmas pageant every year. In a hopeful sort of way, she felt close to Jo.

“I didn’t know Alexander well, but I knew Rayette and I thought she was a wonderful mother and a fine person,” Jo said.

I didn’t really know Alejandro either,
Lucinda wanted to tell her.
And if a mother doesn’t know her son, who does?
Long before this terrible thing happened, she’d lain awake nights wondering if she loved Alejandro enough. But how can you love someone you don’t know? And now, with all these well-meaning people around her, she wondered why grief was not tearing her apart.

“How’s Misty?” Jo asked.

“She is wonderful.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help, please let me know.”

There was something, yes, but Lucinda couldn’t say it, not there, not like this, with so many around to hear.