CHAPTER SEVEN

Forty-five minutes after the meeting ended, the community building’s parking lot had finally cleared out. Junior had been holding a man in cowboy boots over his head, but when Chief Byrd caught Starr’s attention she’d set aside her amusement and moved through the crowd to stand eye to eye with Junior until he lowered the man to his feet.

Starr knew where her bread was buttered.

If the BIA got one whiff of dissatisfaction from Byrd they could pull her from the post. She wasn’t so invested in the reservation that she was loath to leave it, but she was dedicated to staying out from under the BIA’s microscope. She’d gotten the job. Now all she had to do was keep it. Until she could figure out what to do next.

The crowd was already starting to lose interest when she braced Junior against the back of the Bronco and pulled a pair of cuffs from her belt. She could feel him go still all at once, strength building like a gator right before it launches into a death roll, that tense split second between fight or forfeit.

Once she’d gotten his meaty wrists into the cuffs and packed him into the old Ford, Starr used both arms to wave the last lookie-loos along, like she’d seen cattle ranchers do with a reluctant herd.

“Go on,” she said, walking around to the driver’s side of the Bronco, feeling for all the world like she’d fallen down some Wild West version of Alice’s rabbit hole. One man was pointing at the spray paint and laughing.

Starr yanked on the door several times before its hinges whined open, then got behind the wheel and wiggled the keys in the ignition until the engine grumbled to life. Junior was taking up half the bench seat; she hadn’t felt the need to put him in the back. She’d seen plenty of mean drunks, but she didn’t think Junior Echo was one of them. He was just big. And she knew what that was like. Assumptions were made. She’d heard the comments her whole life. Big-boned. Tall drink of water. She’d gotten her dad’s height, his tawny skin, his thick dark hair, and none of her mother’s daintiness. The fine-tuning had missed her, all except her mother’s green Irish eyes.

“Okay, let’s get you home,” Starr said, “but you’ll have to tell me where to turn as we get closer.”

She put the Bronco in gear and glanced at Junior, who was leaning his head on the passenger window. He nodded and she drove ahead and to the right, where the road curved away from the community center and the rows of houses surrounding it. Junior began working the cuffs on his wrists.

“I’ll take off the cuffs when we get there,” Starr said.

She had briefly considered putting Junior in the cell overnight, but she didn’t want to keep an eye on him. Besides, she had one drunk in there already, and she’d just have to deal with him in the morning. She’d rather roll a fat one, slip into her ratty bathrobe and smoke up the garage of her rental than worry about getting this big lug some food and water while he sobered up behind bars.

Although Junior had looked to be only five beers in while the meeting wore on, closer proximity had revealed the familiar smell of whiskey on his breath. Maybe the beer had been to keep the buzz going, but the whiskey…well, that’s what had tipped the scales in his favor. The way she saw it, he’d be more work if he slept it off in the box. This wasn’t her fight anyway. What did she care whether these people sold oil from under their land? They could sell organic cow shit to tourists and call it art for all she cared.

All she had to do was give the appearance that she could do her job. Keep the peace. Hang on until she knew what to do next, if there was a next. It didn’t feel like it most days. She thought sometimes about putting the barrel of the Glock in her mouth, feeling the cold steel and only a moment of doubt before blanking into sweet oblivion. But she wasn’t ready to see her daughter, assuming there was an afterlife.

Starr couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d let Quinn down, deeply disappointed her in some cruel way she couldn’t identify. It was like catching fog with a butterfly net, this feeling.

And now there was Chenoa, who was old enough to go where she pleased without her mother’s permission. When Starr had entered the marshal’s office after leaving Odeina’s trailer, the phone was already trilling. Odeina hadn’t even given her time to search for Chenoa—if she was going to search at all. Starr thought of the picture taken of Chenoa at her graduation last year. Starr was starting to see Chenoa around the edges of her mind when her thoughts should be focused only on Quinn. That damn Odeina was getting in her head.

“Shut up,” Starr muttered.

“What?” Junior glared at her.

“Not about you.” But she did wonder. What made Junior Echo tick? For someone who carried amber bottles around like pacifiers, he seemed overly invested in fighting the pipeline.

Junior was built like a linebacker who’d gone soft in the gut and jowls. He had looked settled but now seemed like he could fly into a rage at any moment. This wasn’t Chicago, she reminded herself. Things were different here. After she put Junior in cuffs, Byrd had pulled her aside to say that the big man had tried to start another fight last week; three men had pulled him off a local at the Trading Post. Watch him, Byrd had warned.

Junior said nothing as the wheels bumped along the road. Then he made a dismissive sound, pshh, so quietly that Starr wondered at first if it had been her imagination. “You don’t belong here,” he said.

Starr looked him over and shrugged. She couldn’t really argue. She felt the same way. She didn’t give a shit about this place or the people here, and she sure didn’t give a shit about this guy. He could say whatever he wanted. It couldn’t be worse than the things she told herself.

“Left here?” She wasn’t exactly sure where he lived, not in the dark, even after Byrd’s general directions.

Junior grunted and then motioned with his head, and she steered the Bronco onto a lane that didn’t look much like a road. Prairie grass that grew tall between the dusty tracks rustled against the undercarriage of the old Ford as cool November air drifted through the open windows and into the cab. Starr had rolled her window down to keep Junior’s sourness at bay. It was as if the stench of anger and alcohol came straight out of his pores. If she and Junior didn’t both hate themselves so much, they might have been comforted by their commonality.

“Your dad was a real son of a bitch, ya know that?”

“I know it,” she said. “Were you acquainted? Back then?”

Junior laughed, a deep, hoarse sound. She heard the cuffs rattle in his lap.

“Hell, we grew up together. He shaved the eyebrows off one of the Annuas brothers at powwow one year,” he said. “They woke up mad as wet hens, all of ’em.” He stared out the open window, remembering. “All because they’d chased him through the fairgrounds for having that stupid look on his face, same one he always had.”

As a kid, her dad’s left eye hadn’t tracked with his right. Lazy eye, he’d called it, and said he’d worn a patch to correct it.

“He thought he looked like a pirate, but he looked like a fist magnet,” Junior said, shaking his head. His shoulders vibrated with laughter. “What an idiot.”

This wasn’t one of the stories her dad had told while peering at his past through the bottom of a bottle. Starr was quiet as the Bronco rattled down the lane, carrying them deep into the reserve and toward Junior’s place.

“You there when he died?” Junior asked, serious now.

“Yep,” she said. She’d been loyal to the end, even though her old man surely hadn’t deserved it. All those years of drinking. All those years she’d taken care of everything. She’d been a kid. “You knew him pretty well, sounds like.”

What in the…Starr pumped the brake as a deer leapt across the road, coming within inches of the Bronco’s hood. She and Junior both looked to the ditches, watching for more. She thought of her old man, dead and gone; of the ache and relief and shame that he’d been six feet under before Quinn was born, a grandfather her child would never have. Then later, the pain of it all that kept pushing its way to the surface. Pain Starr held on her own. No one to carry an ounce of it, not anyone but her.

“He was my best friend,” Junior said. “Once.” Silence filled the space, whatever molecules weren’t already crowded with the scents of sweat and leather and beer and whiskey—and something else, underneath. “Then he took up with a white bitch and I never saw him again.”

“Fuck you,” she said, just as headlights came over a rise and a car nearly hit them head-on. She floored the gas pedal to avoid a collision, jerking the wheel right and then back, enough to bang the side of Junior’s head against the doorframe, fast and hard.

Junior growled, a guttural sound from deep in his chest, but she didn’t care. She’d fight him right here if she had to, take the cuffs off and go at it, take the big, drunk man to the ground. She should have put him in the box until morning. Next time she would. This wasn’t a mistake she would make again.

As Junior suspected, it was true that her mother hadn’t exactly approved of her dad’s side of the family. Starr didn’t remember much of her mother, except being punished when she ran through the house with her dad whooping and dancing. That was in the before, when her dad’s joking and laughing filled the family’s Chicago apartment with sunlight.

“There,” Junior said, pointing, as they came to the top of a rise. Starr couldn’t see anything new as she turned onto a narrow lane, but when the Bronco veered right and down, the headlights revealed a tiny cabin, its exterior a mismatch of plywood and its yard a weedy cemetery for transmissions and tires.

“You think you’re gonna come in and save us,” Junior said when Starr cut the engine and opened her door. There was a slur to his speech. “What do you know about us, anyway? What did he tell you? He was gone, never came back. Never wanted to come back, I’ll bet. Think you’re better, like your old man…”

“Sit tight,” she said, and slammed the door, which sent the old Ford rocking on its tired shocks. Then she walked around to the passenger side to let him out. His words were like a watery stream: on and on they went, no end in sight from where she stood.

“…didn’t need him here, but not once…did he…” Junior was still rambling, spittle flying, as she reached for the handle, wrenched the door open and pulled him out of the truck, all three-hundred-some pounds of him, thick as a side of beef and about as elegant.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Colonizer, huh?” Junior said once he’d slid from the seat, gained his balance and noticed the spray paint.

The marshal decals had been the only new things on her service vehicle, and now both were ruined with graffiti. The tagged door reflected how Junior saw her—white. How everyone here saw her. As an outsider who didn’t belong. But to her mother’s side of the family she’d been too Native. She wasn’t enough for anyone.

“Dad said I was half.”

Junior smiled at her, a great lopsided expression, and shook the cuffs in front of him to remind her to remove them. He watched as she worked through one pocket, then another, to find the key.

“He taught you that much, at least,” he said, “that you’re an Indian too.”

“Native American,” she said, then corrected herself. “Indigenous. That’s what it is now.”

“That why you’re here? Wanna fulfill your dream to be a real Indian?”

“Well,” she said, “that’s awful sweet of you.”

“Or you wanna cash in, figure you can get oil money, get that per cap?” he said. “Maybe you think your daddy’s some kind of magic Indian, called you back to this place from the great beyond? Gotta be one or the other.”

Starr stepped back and took a deep breath, still searching her pockets, one by one, for the key. She took her time. If she let him out of the cuffs too soon, she’d be tempted to say he took a swing at her so she could get in a few punches.

Around them the night was as dark as she’d ever seen it. Without the glow of city lights, the Bronco was a spotlight aimed at the worn cabin, everything around it sinking into night. Junior took a few rolling steps toward her and then settled into another tirade, shaking the cuffs on his wrists. The more impatient he became, the slower she looked for the key.

The dry prairie grass behind her rattled with hidden movement. She looked again at the cabin, the glare of headlights bleeding into it through a front window. The light cast long shadows against an interior wall, the glow yellow and shifting like a broken yolk. A buzzing began in her head.

“Hey, you got company?”

“Just my Yella dog.” Junior craned his neck to look over the roof of the Bronco at the cabin. “He oughta be out here barking. I keep him chained to the front steps when I’m gone so he don’t go off with the coyotes. Did that once, gone for two weeks. Thought he’d never come back—”

Junior interrupted himself by sending a long, loud whistle into the dark. Then he tilted his ear to the silence.

“Get these off of me.” He stepped toward her, wrists outstretched.

Starr couldn’t tear her eyes away from the headlights’ play against the bare window, the wall, the shadows inside the cabin. Had she seen something move?

“You keep it unlocked?”

“Yeah, nobody’s coming out here, messing with me.” He nodded, then seemed to have a new thought. “Hey, don’t go in there, man. You don’t need to go in there. C’mon.”

Starr stared intently now, cataloging the shadows inside the cabin. This one a bare-bulb lamp. That one a piece of low-slung furniture. Now something new.

Against the beam of light shooting through the cabin’s window and onto the interior wall, a shadow grew larger. Starr tried to blink it away. Closed her eyes. Opened them. Yet there it was. She could make out a new shape, separate from its shadow, in profile: breasts, slim shoulders, a delicate face. And above it all, antlers, striving upward from a soft mass of fawn-colored hair.

She felt strangely out of time, the buzzing louder now.

Starr thought suddenly of the old woman at Odeina’s. The image of Lucy Cloud’s wizened fingers stretched out like antlers turned words loose in Starr’s head. Deer Woman; spirit animal; once a victim, now a victor; a cautionary tale with hooves. Starr could feel the story come alive within her.

Her father had talked of Deer Woman long before Starr saw the mask on Odeina’s wall, long before the old woman and her tall tale. But maybe—maybe for the first time—Starr wondered whether she’d known Deer Woman from the moment she’d clung to one last hope that her daughter would be found alive.

She wanted nothing more than to draw close, run her fingertips over Deer Woman’s face, curl her fingers in her soft hair. Touch her.

A solution or a trap. Wasn’t that what the old woman had said? Starr tried not to think about the old woman’s story, but it kept rising through her consciousness and now there was no stopping it. Deer Woman felt to Starr like the embodiment of the one thing Starr believed: that enforcing the law and carrying out justice were very different. People would always find a way around the law—she’d seen it herself many times in Chicago as defendants she’d collared walked away from court proceedings without consequence—but justice was a different matter. Justice could still be served when external laws fell short, and she was a woman willing to make things right, as long as she could live with the sacrifice.

“Stay here,” she told Junior, keeping her eyes on the house. “Don’t move. I mean it. You move, you even breathe, I’ll shoot your fucking head off.”

Starr didn’t listen for a response, just moved to the driver’s side of the Bronco and switched off the lights, then slipped toward the cabin with her service weapon held low and balanced by her flashlight. Insects whirred in stereo, momentarily stopping as she passed them. At the rickety stairs leading to the front door she could see the chrome glint of a chain around one end of a post. Her eyes followed the chain under the wobbly stairs to where a yellow Lab lay, its legs drawn protectively around its soft belly. A blank eye stared up at her, a dark puddle of blood like an obscene moat around its head.

Starr clicked off the flashlight and set it on a step, wiping her wet palm on her jeans. She moved toward the door and turned the knob, the click too loud for her liking. She reached for her shoulder, where a mic should have been clipped, to call for backup. No radio. Right, she was on the fucking rez. Why hadn’t she hired a deputy? She thought of the thin stack of résumés on her desk and wanted to kick her own ass.

“Tribal marshal,” she called, and pushed the door, which swung inward with a stutter, its awkward angle caused by a now-broken hinge. It was quiet in the house, except for the sound of Junior outside, who had taken to calling his dog at regular intervals.

“Yella!” he bellowed. “Yella!”

Starr let out a long breath. Just clear the house and get out, she told herself, then reached back to grab her flashlight off the step so she could move fully into the room. A single lamp, its shade missing, near the one front window. Check.

Starr scanned the room, hoping she’d find a mounted buck on the wall. Hadn’t she seen antlers?

Do you see a deer in this house? she asked herself. Focus. Stupid questions get you killed.

Junior’s cabin turned out to be one long room. Beside the lamp, a sagging couch listed against the far wall. In a dark corner an upholstered armchair vomited stuffing from its cushions. There were amber bottles everywhere: on the floor, the couch, even stacked on top of a television crowned with rabbit ears, an aluminum-foil flag affixed to one rod in a crooked salute. She’d seen Chicago crack houses in better shape.

Nothing moved, save some small thing scurrying along the wall toward an alcove that was the shack’s kitchen. There were no other sounds in the place, except those coming from Junior outside, threatening to move from where she’d left him.

Starr stepped onto a loose carpet remnant that covered most of the living room floor and felt a crunch under her boots. It sounded like stepping on soda crackers but smelled of stale air and something not unpleasantly gamy. Like roast pheasant. Maybe duck. But starting to go bad, as though it had been last night’s dinner. Or the night before’s.

Starr moved forward to take cover behind a floor-to-ceiling structural beam situated in the center of the room. Deep breath, deep breath.

She swung around and stepped wide, pointing her Glock into the kitchen alcove she’d spotted. It was empty except for a few sparse shelves and a counter set against the back wall of the cabin. She had to breathe through her mouth now, working to identify the smells that assaulted her nose. WD-40. Sweetgrass. Metal shavings. Stale grease. Something wicked this way comes, she thought, and wondered where that line was from. Strange thoughts popped into her head at the worst moments. Wrong. It was all wrong.

Beyond the stench of a congealed mass that had been left to sit in a pot on the stove, Starr could feel a heavy presence, dangerous and just out of reach.

There was one more place to search. Starr came out of the kitchen alcove and moved to her right, heading again toward the back of the cabin. With her foot she prodded open the only interior door. She’d presumed it led to a bathroom, and she was right. But it too was empty.

Starr shook her head, hoping to rattle her brain back into place. It wasn’t possible, was it? Deer Woman was a myth, and she knew better than to get tangled in the stories her father had told. But Odeina’s mother-in-law…

Don’t fall for it, she told herself. It was late and she was exhausted. She hadn’t eaten yet; she wanted to fuel up with the weed waiting for her at home, work her way through a bag of Cheetos when she was done. Chase it with Jameson. Tall. Neat.

At the back of the cabin there was a door that probably opened right into the wilderness. Trees. Grass. Creatures. It was getting more difficult to tell what was truly wild.

What had she seen in the shadows? The place was empty. No deer. No woman. She holstered her gun and, with a shaky sigh, leaned against a wall. She’d take a breather, then make her way out the back door, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the mess outside.

She’d have to be the one to tell Junior about the dog.

Above the back door Starr noticed a wooden rack holding a rifle, and walked closer. The rack was covered in a coat of dust, nothing disturbed. There had not been a recent reach and removal.

The tines of an antler curled around one of the wooden hooks of the gun rack, the tip of each tine painted red. Was this new? Impossible to know. She lifted her flashlight, the antler’s minute grooves making canyon upon canyon of shadow, except where blocked by something else. Flowers in miniature, like little white daisies on slender green stems, had been braided into a loop and tossed over an antler tine.

Starr reached up and pushed a finger through the dust. She opened the back door to the thick night and stood shivering with leftover adrenaline in the cold Oklahoma wind. Somewhere in the inky woods beyond was the rustle of movement.

For one wild moment she saw a deer, impossibly dark against the pitch, its antlers beckoning her to come forth, come forth.