CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The sun was setting when Starr arrived at Odeina’s trailer and knocked on the screen door. It bounced against its tracks, making a hollow metallic sound.

Starr disliked Odeina, which she knew was neither professional nor fair. Maybe she even hated her. But she understood her. Understood the fear and grief and burgeoning anger, all rolled into one big blunt that had to be smoked, even if you weren’t into that sort of thing. Even if you were already so high you were sick with the spinning.

Nothing. Starr looked around from her perch on the top step in front of the trailer and quelled the urge to kick in the door. She needed a slug of whiskey, something to calm the rage that was starting to build. So much could have been different if her father had returned to the home of his people. She would have lived a different life, maybe even one in which she felt like she belonged to something larger than herself. It was an alternate history in which Quinn might still be alive.

Starr kicked at the door with the toe of her boot, then creaked the screen open and peered through the door’s tiny window. The living room TV threw color and light against the interior and was loud enough to block the sound of her knock. Slowly, Starr turned the knob and walked in. “Knock, knock,” she announced. “Hello?”

She felt the soles of her boots land on the linoleum. The kitchen was as she remembered it. Clean. Worn. She searched for Odeina but found the old woman instead, settled in her usual place, a living room chair, under a mound of blankets.

“This was my dream,” said Lucy Cloud.

“Odeina here? I was supposed to meet her.” Starr had promised Odeina that if she stopped ringing her cell phone at two-hour intervals she would come to the trailer to talk. The last thing Starr needed right now was this old woman leveling fairy tales at her like a threat.

“My dream was that you were lost. But you were not alone. It was not a god with you, not as you think of a god,” the old woman continued, as if Starr had not spoken at all. “She is a spirit….”

Starr squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted to throw a kitchen chair through the window. She looked around to see who the woman was talking to. It was like stepping into the middle of a conversation.

“But Deer Woman is not one of the Little People,” said the old woman, looking straight ahead at the masks on the opposite wall. “Little People are spirits that can be helpful or devious. They can move from one form to another. Like fairies they are, or maybe like your leprechauns.”

This Starr understood, having read to Quinn every book she could find about fairies, which Quinn loved. And, having grown up in Chicago, land of the Saint Paddy’s Day celebration, where even the river turned green, Starr knew leprechauns.

“Deer Woman too appears as she chooses. Half woman, half deer. A deer completely. A woman with hooves for feet. She stands at the boundary between worlds and is often a welcome visitor. But not always. Here—sit.” Her crooked fingers came out from under the blankets and she pointed from Starr to the couch opposite her chair.

Starr obliged, sitting uncomfortably under the masks. She strained her neck to keep an eye on them.

“Like all of our people who have known pain, Deer Woman has a dark side. She has a thirst for vengeance. Do you know how she came to be?”

Starr shook her head, rubbing her hand across the back of her neck. This was exhausting. She didn’t have time for the ramblings of this old woman right now. She’d done everything right, played by the rules, played her part, given her heart. Now her daughter was gone and she was here, among a people she would never understand. More young women were dying, going missing, and she felt powerless to save them.

What fresh hell was the Saliquaw Nation? Being here was like waking up from a twenty-year coma and realizing the world has changed, has gone on without you. And here she was. She’d toed the line to keep bad juju or karma or whatever at bay so that it wouldn’t be visited on her daughter, her one good thing. For this reason, she’d taken every shift, worked every beat assignment, then every case that involved tailing a detective as a rookie; then she took on her own homicides, with the dedication of someone who knew the dead and wanted to hang the living. Dealt with the families of victims, too much even. Made a promise once; learned not to do it again, but still did in her head and in her heart, even if she never said it out loud.

She knew that somewhere deep down she’d already promised she would find Chenoa. Give the family some closure, even though she had started to understand that closure might never come.

And she was hungry. Always hungry. The buzzing began at the back of her head while the old woman watched her expectantly. Maybe angry women were actually just hungry. Fucking hungry. Tired of counting and keeping track and doing it right and smiling when in the end it didn’t matter anyway. We washed our faces and put on lipstick and wore uncomfortable shoes and didn’t eat dessert and we fucking smiled and smiled and smiled until our interior spaces became molten.

Starr stood from where she’d been perched on the couch. Was Lucy Cloud speaking? Starr couldn’t hear anything over the buzz in her ears, the way the floor swam under her boots. Maybe her problem was hunger. All the calculations to make sure she didn’t take too much from this life, not more than she was owed, and now she was hollowed out and ravenous.

She turned to face the masks. Which one would she wear to become something else? What kept her in line other than the bounds of her own mind? What were expectations but a prison? The carved mouth of the deer mask turned higher at the corners. Starr was hungry now and she was going to take and take and take until she was satiated, her face pushed so far into her offender’s flesh that the blood ran from her nose and chin, pushed so far that even her forehead was red.

The old woman began to cackle from her chair.

What if we took an eye for an eye? thought Starr. Would women still be raped, beaten, abused, taken, killed, hurt? What if women blew that shit up, stopped waiting for cops or detectives like her, who failed anyway?

Most people didn’t realize that police, that detectives especially, were useful only after the fact. After the fight, the assault, the murder. After a million little deaths. They came later, always behind the eight ball. Always trying to undo a knot that had already been pulled tight. She was only a part of the cleanup crew. No matter how many killers were caught and, if their victims’ families were lucky, sentenced, it was too few. Far too late. Her daughter was already dead. She felt the rage coming on like a sickness. Fuck those motherfuckers. A voice swirled in her head. Fuck. Those. Motherfuckers.

“You feel her,” said the old woman. She lifted her arms, her fingers holding up tufts of hair.

Starr had forgotten Lucy was there. That she was still in Odeina’s trailer. That she was the marshal in this godforsaken place. She was tired of keeping up appearances. Starr let her mask slip, and then reached for the one on the wall, the one always watching her, the one shifting and changing and bleeding.

“Deer Woman,” said Lucy Cloud.

Both women looked at the mask Starr held in her hands.

“Once, long before my time in this body, there was a woman who was savagely raped and left for dead in the woods. The spirits sent a fawn to lie beside her so she would not die alone. She folded what was left of her battered body around the fawn, the way a mother curls around her baby, a comfort to them both. That might have been where it ended, with yet another woman’s anonymous death.”

The old woman gazed into the distance, into some other world.

“But the spirits knew what the woman did not, that with her death, her attackers would go unpunished. Her cries for justice became a transformation; the spirits granted the deepest wish of her angry heart. She was reborn. Time and again. She would appear in human form at powwows, at ceremonies, after too many passes of the bottle around fires that created the only light in the woods. She lured away men who were unaware of her true nature. They noticed only later, in that moment when death comes, that she had not feet but hooves; saw her details only when she trampled them to death. Do you know how long it takes to trample someone to death? To kick a man’s belly and chest and skull until he lies twitching in the dirt and leaves? Long enough for him to realize he is going to die. Long enough.”

Starr listened. Maybe for the first time, she listened to the old woman like she wasn’t crazy. Shouldn’t the young learn from the old? Wasn’t her duty to respect her elders? And what had this woman seen? Her own hurts and transgressions, her own many deaths.

“See, they came for me too. I was young and nimble. When the truck stopped, and the men called to me, I ran. Across the open spaces, and then into the brush, fast as my legs could carry me. Still, they caught me. When they were done I understood what it was to be hunted, and I saw Deer Woman for myself. Her eyes were alive with a woman’s sharp intelligence. There were antlers growing out of her hair. She had hooves.”

Starr was fully present now, fully aware and fully listening. Could she grow hooves where her feet were, burst antlers out of her unlikely head, put her strong hands around a soft neck and crush until death met between their locked eyes?

“Deer Woman lives on. She continues to punish those who prey on innocence.”

Starr nodded; the floor became firm again.

“You know it’s true,” the old woman continued. “You’ve seen her, haven’t you? And you know where she is.”

At this, the buzzing in Starr’s head went still. The old woman was right—she had seen Deer Woman in the yolky light of Junior’s window that first night—but she was also wrong. Starr had no idea where Deer Woman could be.

“Lead them to dance with her, Carrie Starr. They don’t know that she can be banished through tobacco and chant, or that the only way to save themselves is to see her hooves before she has them alone. They don’t know enough to be afraid. Deer Woman is in you—all that anger funneled through the ages.”

“Okay, enough, enough,” Starr said. A feeling ran, alive, just under her skin. The old woman folded her arms back under the blankets. The clock in the trailer’s living room struck six and the old woman’s neck twisted so her ear could catch the sound of chimes.

“Ah, it’s only an old story,” said Lucy Cloud, shaking her head as if she could see something far above the wall of masks.

Starr felt like she’d been at sea, her legs unsteady as she went from carpet to linoleum and opened the door to leave.

“If you want to find a girl,” the old woman called, “you should follow a man.”