Along the dawn-lit tracks of the Santa Fe railroad line the big Indian comes running. The man is quicker than his bulk implies, fleet feet flying over the splintered wooden ties. But he’s breathing heavy, thick shoulders and ropy legs stippled with beads of sweat, dark stains pooling about the neck and arms of his patchwork gym shirt.
Dean Goodnight skips over the polished steel rails, hopscotching into the bombed-out neighborhood east of Oklahoma City. He lopes across the warehouse district, gaining ground under a cat’s cradle of sagging telephone wires, partway done with his morning run. Power lines shimmer in the half-light overhead.
In the pooled glow of a distant streetlamp, two teens are tagging five-point crowns on the broadside canvas of an abandoned storefront, marking their territory with hissing bursts of acrylic. Latin Kings, real go-getters from the looks of them, decked out early in the team colors. Black and gold.
Dean detours down a side street, trailed by the rattle-crack shake of spray cans being primed. The two-toned tantrum of a police claxon sounds down the alley. A few blocks ahead an OCPD police cruiser, gumball lights strobing the street in official reds and blues, has T-boned an old Plymouth sedan. Two of OKC’s finest are busy putting the hurt on some poor, enormous mope, wrestling the giant shirtless kid to the ground and into a rear chokehold. A second black-and-white is curbed a half block from the action, front doors flung wide, and behind it, a safe distance from the bust, a well-intentioned badge counsels an emaciated woman and her hysterical, yammering child. The boy looks to be about four, maybe five, years old.
Intesha.
Dean stops running.
His hands raised—everyone needs to know he’s unarmed—Dean walks slowly in the direction of the disturbance. The fourth officer on scene, a marbled fellow overseeing his partner’s interaction with the woman and child, invites Dean to join them with a terse wave.
“You live around these parts?”
Dean lowers his hands.
“Yes.”
“Where?” A veined palm rests on the man’s gun butt.
The younger officer is staring across the roof of his cruiser at Dean, ignoring the woman and her kid. His face is vague, almost apologetic, under a hard night’s growth of stubble.
The boy is sobbing, “Inki!”
“Twenty-fifth,” Dean says. “Near Hudson.”
“What’s the name of that park there? The one with the playground?”
“Andy,” says the badge interviewing the woman.
“Goodholm Park.”
“Hold up, Andy.”
“The hell, Paul! I’m interrogating here.”
“Andy. I know this guy.”
“What’s your name, son?”
“Dean Goodnight.”
“That’s him.”
Officer Andy unbuttons his holster and crowds in close.
“Collared him before?”
“I wish. He works for Paxton.”
Officer Andy steps off shrugging. He leans against the trunk of the black-and-white, the car’s shocks popping audibly, and settles into a more comfortable skin.
“You’re a public defender?”
“Investigator,” Dean says. “Mostly capital cases, these days.”
Dean recognizes the officer taking the woman’s statement, Paul, and nods.
Officer Paul doesn’t return the favor.
“That’s the guy I was telling you. The one got Williams off.”
“Williams?” officer Andy asks his partner. “The skell? Williams the spitter?”
Paul nods, directing his attention back to the woman, a tweaker type painted into acid-washed jeans and a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt.
“Inki!” the child is shouting, face knotted with anger. “Chim achukma? Sa yoshoba!”
Officer Andy admits a rough smile, as if recalling an off-color joke.
“So you’re playing for the other team. We lock ’em up . . .”
“He sets ’em loose,” officer Paul finishes.
Dean shifts his weight from one sole to the other.
Intesha, intesha.
“What’s going down here tonight, guys?” asks Dean.
Officer Andy pops a thumb over his shoulder, in the direction of the ongoing scuffle. “Gigantor over there killed a meth dealer name of Carl Jefferson. No mean feat, if it’s true. Jefferson was a six-foot-eight homeboy. Used to play college basketball. Didn’t just kill him, either. Tortured the guy. Drowned him in bourbon, I hear. We get a tip he’s been living in the Plymouth, pimping out the missus here, and it’s on. Bad guy collared. Case closed.”
“Murder one?”
“That’s for the D.A. to decide.”
The two more distant officers, amped from the arrest, have hauled their collar to his feet and now have him spread-eagled before the Plymouth’s headlights. The guy’s a real leg-breaker, standing six-foot-five if it’s an inch, and one of the badges is whispering at his head, nose to nape. He’s reading the man his rights in a tone that says you have no rights, in a tone that says you’re mine, shitbird, when the suspect’s head jerks back to butt the officer in the face, breaking his nose.
Everyone watches the policeman, blood flooding into his lips, chin-check the collar into a prone position. His skull tattoos the Plymouth’s hood with a metallic whoomp!
“You know, I’ve heard a little bit about you, actually,” officer Andy says to Dean. “That bartender girlfriend of yours, what’s her name?”
The little boy babbling and the dispatch crackling from inside the police cruiser: That’s a ten-six. Please stand by. Over.
“Sam,” Dean says.
“Right. Sam. Sam from behind the bar at Flip’s. You’re a lucky man, Mr. Goodnight. She is one hot smoking blonde on . . .”
Dean risks three steps away from officer Andy, in the direction of the arrest.
“Stop right there, public pretender.” Andy hauls his girth from the black and white’s trunk. “Unless you’re looking to spend a night in lockup, too?”
“For what?” Dean says. “Contempt of cop?”
Intesha, intesha, intesha.
Dean walks around the police cruiser, he’s breathing hard again, approaches the skinny woman and her child.
“My name is Dean Goodnight. I’m with the public defender’s office. Don’t talk to any of these guys until someone from our office comes to help. Tell your husband the same. We’ll get a lawyer down to the jail today, if at all possible. Though it could be tomorrow . . .”
“Billy ain’t my husband,” the woman interrupts. She’s really soaring this morning, jaw working, her mouth sounding that sick clicking meth-head music.
“Boyfriend then,” Dean says.
The girl grinding what’s left of those molars.
“Pimp?” officer Paul asks helpfully.
“Don’t answer that,” Dean says to the woman. “What’s your name?”
“Willa.”
“Billy’s Choctaw,” says Dean. “Am I right? Part of the Nation?”
Again with the teeth. Willa is exceedingly disinterested in her circumstances.
“Alright Willa,” Dean says. “You make sure Billy doesn’t talk to these policemen, got me? Here or at the jail. I’ll get somebody over there to help him just as fast as we can manage. Do you understand?”
Willa snorts, says, “Do I look like a halfwit to you?”
Officer Andy is laughing.
“You know when you first walked up, Mr. Goodnight, I thought you were just one of these porch monkeys. Out jacking hubcaps in the wee small hours.”
“Just out for a run,” Dean says.
“Have to make our quota some other way then, I guess.”
“I hear there’s a code seven at the donut shop this morning.”
“Haha! Hear that Paul? Goodnight’s a real smart guy. Next thing you know he’ll be arguing cases.”
Stepping from the curb, heading back the way he came, Dean accelerates into a dogtrot. The graffiti crew has moved on, spooked by the police cruiser. The outlines of a wildstyle burner shine from the storefront, the unfinished pattern dripping dry in the morning light.
Sun’s up. Time to work.
• • •
His skin is the color of cinnamon. His boss jokes that Dean sports a sort of sixth sense. Put Tonto on the case, he says, and his bullshit detector will sniff out the truth. During gaps in the small talk Dean’s coworkers wonder if he might be tapping into the things they’ve left unsaid, plucking secrets from the depths of those uncomfortable silences.
He runs five miles every day—rain-or-shine is what they say—and has yet to reach the end of himself. If he pushes hard enough, Dean believes, the world might still give way.
They call him Tonto at work. Dean plays along.
Intesha is a Choctaw word describing the snare-drum thrum from a rattlesnake tail.
Intesha: stay away.
Intesha: there is danger here.
Intesha: keep your distance.