Picture Perfect Part 27

Yesterday, Ca.s.sie had asked Cyrus to take her to Paha Sapa, the Black Hills. She knew that fossils had been found nearby, and that there had been controversies about removing them from the sacred lands of the reservation. It wasn't that she was planning to start a huge excavation, which the tribal council would certainly veto, but she was itching to at least find the clues that would lead her to believe there was something below the surface-the pitted rock, the overgrown vegetation. She felt compelled to take advantage of living among the Sioux, scant miles from their ancient burial grounds. For years, her colleagues had been trying to get access to places like this, and had repeatedly been refused.

Today she had borrowed Abel Soap's army-issue jeep and packed a picnic lunch. Just in case, she told herself, she'd tossed in a pick and a spade that Abel had offered her from his junk shed. Cyrus had swung himself into the jeep like a man much younger. "You know," he said, "Sioux kids believe that the bogeyman lives in the Badlands."

Ca.s.sie had smiled. "I'll take my chances."

But several hours later, with the strange smooth rock-scape spread in front of them, it was easy to see why impressionable kids would believe such a thing. Unlike the peaks and turrets of most of the Black Hills, the Badlands were flat and low, like a hollow of gigantic boulders that over time had melted into each other. The wind moaned through the spa.r.s.e pine trees that lined the upper ridge, and swept into the knotty valley like a whirlpool.

"You going down there?" Cyrus asked, coming to stand beside Ca.s.sie on the ledge.

Ca.s.sie glanced at him. "Why? Are you coming?"

"h.e.l.l, no," Cyrus said. "I can think of better places to die."

A chill ran down her spine at his words. "What do you mean by that?" she asked, but Cyrus had walked to the back of the jeep and could not hear her.

He returned with her pick and her shovel, and held them out. "You want these?"

Ca.s.sie nodded and tucked them into the belt she'd borrowed from Cyrus. She'd taken to wearing other people's clothing since hers no longer fit. She watched Cyrus pull a piece of cold meatloaf out of the hamper and sit cross-legged on the ledge in front of her. Gingerly she reached over the edge with her foot, gripping a rock and feeling for a toehold as she began her descent into the valley. She ran her hands over the stone walls, supple as marble and veined with lichen.

"Should have brought a Ghost Dance shirt," Cyrus called from somewhere above her. "That way the bad spirits can't get you."

"That's a good idea," Ca.s.sie said, panting, not having the slightest idea what he was talking about. "And after I find one, I can make a fortune selling them to the doomsday preachers on the Avenue of the Stars." She slipped her foot down another notch in the natural ladder, nearly twisting her ankle on the rounded surface of the boulders that made up the valley floor.

"Don't laugh," Cyrus said. "There really were shirts that the People believed kept you invincible. My great-grandfather had one. They were sort of a fad in the 1880s, part of a new dance that was supposed to bring back the dead warriors and the buffalo, a whole new world without the white man." Cyrus stood up and leaned over the lip of the valley. "You gonna eat the meatloaf?" he yelled.

"No," Ca.s.sie said. She shaded her hand with her eyes. He was twenty feet above her, looking down, as if his interest could guarantee her safety. "You go ahead."

"Well, anyway, my great-grandfather brought the Ghost Dance from a Paiute medicine man back to the Sioux. And he had this shirt with him, painted with the sun, the moon, the stars, and magpies. Dorothea has it packed away somewhere. As long as you were wearing that shirt, no harm could come to you."

"Like a rabbit's foot," Ca.s.sie said, digging with her pick at a little notch in the rock. Even if she did find something, she thought to herself, it would probably be a mastodon, not an ancient human.

"Yeah," Cyrus said, "except it didn't work like it was supposed to.

The white army thought if it was such big medicine, the Sioux had to be planning some kind of attack against them. So they told the People they couldn't do the Ghost Dance."

Ca.s.sie felt the sun heat the crown of her head, and she was reminded of her first days in Tanzania with Alex, when she had believed that nothing could go wrong; that truly, they were invincible. Who was she to judge a Ghost Dance shirt? Love, at least at the beginning, could be just as powerful a charm.

"You know of Sitting Bull?" Cyrus said. "That's how he died. He was living the old ways, ghost-dancing at Standing Rock, and the government agents got the tribal police to arrest him for it. His own people."

He shook his head. "When he fought back, they started to shoot. Sitting Bull was killed, and most of the Sioux with him were too."

Ca.s.sie turned her face up when Cyrus started to laugh; it was the last sound she'd expected to hear on the heels of his story. Her pick was suspended midswing. "Now, picture this," Cyrus said. "Everyone's looking around, trying to make sense of what's happened, and suddenly a horse shows up and starts weaving around in a circle."

"Sitting Bull's?" Ca.s.sie asked, transfixed.

Cyrus nodded. "Before he came to the reservation, Sitting Bull traveled with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show, and this circus pony had been a parting gift. So when the shots that killed Sitting Bull rang out, this horse comes out of nowhere and goes into his routine. Seems that was the way they had started the show."

Ca.s.sie's hand had dropped to her side. She found herself listening only to Cyrus, to his story and to the cry of a hawk somewhere in the distance. She slowly stuck her pick inside the belt loop, beginning the ascent out of the bleached valley.

Up top, she sank down beside Cyrus, rubbing her arms, trying to remember even one anecdote her mother might have told her that hinted she came from stronger stock than her own parents. But all she could recall were stories of a southern graciousness that Ca.s.sie later learned did not exist, and the wheeze of her mother's slurred voice falling off in midsentence. "Your grandfather told you this?" Ca.s.sie asked.

Cyrus nodded proudly. "Like I've told Will. And you."

Ca.s.sie winced at a st.i.tch in her side. Her body was not what it used to be. This child was already making demands. She smiled past the pain and hauled herself to her feet. "We can go now."

Cyrus peered at her carefully. "Did you find anything?" he said, surveying her empty pockets, the untouched spade.

In the past, for Ca.s.sie, anthropology had meant physically taking something away, but now the thought of chipping at the Black Hills made her feel a little sick. She was starting to wonder if the excavation of a culture had to involve laying open the earth. She imagined Cyrus's great-grandfather spinning in his Ghost Dance shirt; Sitting Bull bleeding on the cold ground while only a circus pony pranced in his honor; Will perched on a pine-board floor learning his history through his grandfather's voice. There was some phrase the Sioux used as a sort of benediction when they ended a ritual. Dorothea tossed it out the way she herself would casually say "G.o.d bless you" to sneeze. Ca.s.sie frowned, furrowing her brow, until the words came to her: Mitakuye oyas'n. "All my relatives."

Ca.s.sie closed her eyes and pulled tight the edges of Cyrus's tales; she pictured again that dancing horse. "Yes," she said. "I found exactly what I came for."

ALEX THOUGHT THE MAN RESEMBLED A FERRET. HE HAD SHINY LITTLE brown eyes and a pointed nose that looked pert on Ca.s.sie but rodentlike on Ben Barrett. He was telling the Hard Copy reporter that he had never even had a common cold, much less been on his deathbed in some Augusta hospital like that liar Alex Rivers was saying.

"And what's more," Ben Barrett, his father-in-law, sputtered, "I haven't heard from my little girl at all this year." Something had been edited here, so that when the camera cut back to Ben he was blearyeyed. He nodded his head. "He's covering something up, ayuh."

Alex took a deep breath and settled himself as deeply as possible into Michaela's office couch. Several feet in front of him Herb paced back and forth, riffling through every tabloid on the supermarket stand, all of which had different suggestions for what had happened to Ca.s.sie, ranging from kidnapping to murder at Alex's hand.

It wouldn't have been a big deal-Alex had won slander suits before-but Ca.s.sie had been gone for two months, and this was her own father. The more the rumors flew, the more the magazines questioned Alex's calm and Alex's silence. One of the tabloids had even gotten a statement from the latest private investigator Alex had hired-something noncommittal, but Alex had fired him immediately for talking. Ca.s.sie had called him that one time, but Alex hadn't told anyone.

It had taken the edge off his fear for her safety, yet it had not altered his plan of action. He still had detectives digging for information. Ca.s.sie had said she would call again, and maybe she would, but if in the meantime Alex discovered her whereabouts, he'd be on his way. After all, if she had the right to leave, he had just as valid a right to convince her to come back.

Michaela was the one who had initially spread the excuse of Ca.s.sie being with her sick father, and at the time, under the pressure of the Oscars, it had seemed like a good story. After the first couple of detectives couldn't turn up any clue to Ca.s.sie's whereabouts, Alex had even started to believe his own lie.

The videotape of the Hard Copy show fizzled to a series of black and white stripes, and Michaela heaved herself out of her chair and shut off the VCR. "Well," she said. "The proverbial s.h.i.t has. .h.i.t the fan."

Alex rubbed his finger along his upper lip, trying not to feel as if he was on trial. Herb leaned toward him, so close that when he yelled Alex could see the spittle catch at the ends of his mustache. "Do you know what this could do to you?"

"Herb," Alex said calmly, "I just won three Oscars. People aren't going to forget that so fast."

Herb glared at Alex, shaking his head. "What they remember is the bad, the sensational. Like whether the Best Actor cut his wife up into little pieces and buried her in the bas.e.m.e.nt."

Alex stiffened. "Give me a break," he said. But his mind was already racing. Herb and Michaela would stand beside him, but they would demand the truth. They would want to know why they had been kept in the dark.

He was going to have to give a flawless performance in front of the two people he'd trusted enough to see him with his guard down.

Michaela settled into the wing chair across from him as if she had all the time in the world. Overhead, the ceiling fan whistled. "Okay,"

she said, drumming her fingers on her stomach. "What the f.u.c.k is going on?"

Alex lowered his eyes, unwilling to give them the whole truth, but using instead the shock value of the statement they would never expect to hear. "Ca.s.sie left me," he murmured, and he let the ache he kept tight under wrap work its way to the surface all over again.

THE BENT-WILLOW FRAMES OF THE SWEAT LODGE REMINDED Ca.s.sIE of a woolly mammoth. There was something about the curved bars of wood that made them look like ribs, as if a creature had sloughed its way to the middle of the plain to die. She sat down on the cold ground, opened the notebook she'd bought a month before, and pulled a pencil stub from her coat pocket. Flipping to a blank page, she surveyed the sketches she'd done to pa.s.s the time when she had first arrived: skull dimensions, 3-D images of the hand, a multilayered mock-up of an Australopithecine man she wanted to use as a handout in one of her courses. But in the weeks she'd spent on the reservation, her drawings had changed. She wasn't sketching skeletal figures from her research anymore. Here was a picture she'd done of Dorothea, asleep in the rocker; and one of a buffalo herd that she'd re-created from Cyrus's stories; and another, a memory left from a dream in which she'd seen the face of her baby.

Maybe it was the stripped-down atmosphere of Pine Ridge that had changed her sketching style. In L.A., there was so much glitter surrounding you that cutting back to the basics was refreshing. But here, where there was little but the Spartan stretch of land and sky, every word you spoke and relationship you wove and picture you drew embellished itself into a thing of substance.

Ca.s.sie tucked the pencil behind her ear and critically a.s.sessed her mammoth, then glanced at the rough willow frame that had inspired it. How strange it felt to look at things and-instead of reducing them to their skeletal elements, as she'd been trained-to see so much more than what had been laid before her.

She was so engrossed in her mammoth sketch that she did not hear the footsteps behind her. "If that's a ta-ta' ka," Cyrus said, "you've got it all wrong."

Ca.s.sie glanced up at him. "It's a mammoth," she explained. "Not a buffalo."

Cyrus squinted. "Mammoth," he muttered. "Whatever you say." He waved his book of crosswords in front of her. "You gonna give me back my pencil?"

Ca.s.sie flushed. "I didn't mean to steal it. I couldn't find any others."

Cyrus made an indeterminate noise and held out a hand to Ca.s.sie.

"Get up," he sighed. "You're going to freeze that baby."

She waved him away. "Let me do the tusks. I'm almost finished."

She sketched for a moment. "There," Ca.s.sie said, tilting her pad up to Cyrus. He looked at a picture of a sweat lodge that had a trunk and tusks growing out of its flap door. "What do you think?" she asked.

Cyrus rubbed his hand down over his face to hide a smile. "I think it looks like a sweat lodge," he said. He reached for Ca.s.sie's hand and pulled her to her feet.

"No imagination," Ca.s.sie p.r.o.nounced.

"It's not that," Cyrus said. "How come white people look at a puddle and try to tell us it's the ocean?"

Ca.s.sie fell into step beside him. "Maybe I should watch a sweat," she suggested, offhand, thinking if she sounded nonchalant Cyrus would be more inclined to agree. Being an anthropologist, she had convinced herself that her interest was purely natural. She would have loved to know what went on inside the frames, which stood as testaments to the young boys who fasted under the tutelage of medicine men in an effort to understand themselves. She had seen the reverence with which Linda Laughing Dog's oldest son had prepared himself for the ritual. He had come back drained and exhausted, but glowing from the inside as if he now knew how to fit together the pieces that made up his life.

If only it could be that easy.

"Ecu' pica'sni yelo'," Cyrus said. "It's impossible."

"It would be an intriguing piece of research-"

"No," Cyrus said.

"I could sit-"

"No."

Ca.s.sie tossed him a smile, and for a moment, Cyrus forgot that she saw prehistoric beasts in the frames of sweat lodges, that she was using every trick in the book to be admitted to the inner circle of a Lakota rite of pa.s.sage. He considered-not for the first time-how odd it was that Ca.s.sie, who had carved her place in his family, had come to them through Will, who had always wanted out.

Shaking his head, Cyrus stretched his arms over his head. He laid the book of crosswords on the frame of the sweat lodge and started to walk over the ridge that swelled farther east of the house. "Le'ci u wo,"

he said. "Come here." When he reached a small copse of trees that rested at the base of a larger hill, he stopped. "This was where Will built his sweat lodge," he said.

"Will?" Ca.s.sie said, surprised. "I didn't think he'd be into that sort of thing."

Cyrus shrugged. "He was young at the time."

"He never told me," Ca.s.sie said, realizing as the words were spoken that although Will knew the intimate details of her private life, there was a great wealth of information about Will Flying Horse that she did not know. She tried to imagine Will at the same age as Linda Laughing Dog's son, with his thick black hair long down his back and his muscles just starting to take a man's shape. "Did it work?"

Cyrus nodded. "Not that he'll ever admit to it," he said. "In my grandson's mind, being one of the People is something you can discard, like an old jacket." He was standing with his face to the wind, and Ca.s.sie watched him cup his hands around the air as if he needed to keep it all from rushing by so quickly.

"Is that why he left?"

Cyrus turned to her, his black eyes sharp and measuring. "Don't you think that's something Will ought to tell you?"

"I think it's something Will would go out of his way not to tell me,"

she said carefully.

Cyrus nodded, admitting the truth of Ca.s.sie's statement. "You know that Will's mother was wasicu w'nyan, like you," he said. "You know that Will worked on the tribal police force before he moved." He took a step forward, willing to tell Ca.s.sie his grandson's secrets but unable to look her in the eye while doing it. "The tribal police are like any other small police force, I guess. They do the usual-breaking up domestic spats, taking home drunks, keeping the kids from drinking beer down at the lake. And they pretty much turn their heads if it makes sense-you know, they don't want to get one of their own in trouble, so they're likely to give a warning instead of a fine.

"Will was a good officer. He'd been working there for five years or so. Everyone liked him, and that kind of thing was important to Will."

Ca.s.sie nodded; she understood. "About five months ago there was a big accident right in Pine Ridge town. Drunk driver. Some guy drove another car off the road, killed a family of four, and then wrapped his own jeep around the telephone pole in front of the general store. Course, he walked out of his car without a scratch."

Cyrus closed his eyes, remembering the sirens of the beat-up police cars that he'd heard even in his sleep; the dark blood on the front of his grandson's regulation shirt when he'd come home that night. "A long time ago Will's parents were killed in a car accident by some crazy drunk wasicu salesman; that's how come he grew up with us. So I suppose something just snapped in him when he saw that man get out of his car. He walked over and beat him within an inch of his life. Took three other tribal officers to get him away. Will was fired about a week after that."

Indignant, Ca.s.sie turned to Cyrus. "That's ridiculous. He could have sued them."

Cyrus shook his head. "Too many people wanted Will gone. See, the family that was killed belonged to the visiting brother of one of the elementary school teachers. White. And the drunk driver Will nearly murdered was Lakota." Cyrus whistled through his front teeth. "A white family getting killed was a tragedy, to be sure, and there was no question in anyone's mind that the drunk driver, red or white or whatever, was going to go to trial. But what Will did-flying off the handle like that-was a mistake. Will didn't seem to have his priorities straight.

All of a sudden everyone was remembering that he was iyeska, half white, and that seemed to be the half that was in control, since a fullblood Indian would've cut the guy some slack."

"How could they possibly see that as a racial issue?" Ca.s.sie said, folding her arms across her chest. "What must your neighbors think of me?"

"They like you," Cyrus said. "You blend in with the People. Not because you try to, but because you don't try not to. Will-well, Will was always building walls, standing a little ways apart."

Ca.s.sie thought about Will in Los Angeles, standing out just as sorely as he had at Pine Ridge. She thought about the beautiful quilled moccasins and the deerskin mural packed in boxes in his Reseda apartment. She thought of him beating a drunk driver until his knuckles were sc.r.a.ped and bruised, until blood covered his uniform, until it became impossible to tell if the man was Lakota or white. She thought of what she might have said to him if she'd known all this earlier: that she now knew, from personal experience, you just couldn't shut your eyes and pretend a part of your life didn't exist.

Mindlessly, Ca.s.sie bent down and picked up a branch of a young willow sapling that had broken off during a storm. She flexed the stick in her hands, bending it in half, testing its endurance, considering what Cyrus had told her. And when the willow snapped, tried to its limit, she was not surprised at all.

WILL COULDN'T GET AWAY FROM ALEX RIVERS. HIS NAME WAS IN every newspaper, every magazine, splayed across the racks at the supermarket. He'd seen his picture so many times he was willing to bet he knew Alex's features better than Ca.s.sie did. He was even starting to feel sorry for the guy. In the wake of some statement made by Ca.s.sie's father, rumors had flown. Ca.s.sie had become some kind of Jimmy Hoffa mystery, and Alex was suffering the consequences.

The article he was reading said that the j.a.panese firms backing Mac- beth had withdrawn their support, leaving Alex as the sole creditor for a forty-million-dollar flop. Supposedly his Malibu apartment was up for sale. His next two film deals had disintegrated; his silence regarding Ca.s.sie's disappearance was universally d.a.m.ning, traced to either his culpability or a sick obsession with his career that obliterated everything else. There was even a nasty hint that the reason an Oscar winner like Alex Rivers had nothing else in the works was because he couldn't keep his head out of the bottle long enough to find a decent script.

Will folded the magazine in half and stuck it behind the sun visor of the squad car. "How much longer?" he asked, turning to Ramo'n, still his partner.

Ramo' n stuffed the rest of his fried egg sandwich in his mouth and checked his watch. "Ten minutes," he said. "Then it's showtime."

Tonight he'd been a.s.signed to a charity ball. It was given by some organization whose name he'd forgotten, and it sponsored a very worthy cause-some handicapped children's ranch in Southern California. Still, Will couldn't believe this was the way he had to earn a living.

The highlight of the evening involved seven sagging society matrons wearing beaded evening gowns and five-foot-tall floral headdresses concocted by a variety of florists from the Tournament of Roses parade. The women staggered down a runway, smiled in spite of the steel back braces supporting their necks, and supposedly raised a s.h.i.tload of cash.

Will and Ramo'n were there to keep a semblance of order.

What was even more shocking was the fact that they were needed.

Three hours before the shindig even started, some skinny little twit with a nametag that read Maurice had accused another florist of stealing his birds-of-paradise. Will had to pry him off the thief's back, after he'd already stomped on a once-white string of lilies.

"Let's go," Ramo' n said, pulling himself out of the car.

Will set his cap low over his eyes and walked toward the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He told himself this was not just a security guard's job. He told himself he'd make detective soon.