Barbara Gow’s house had gray siding, once white, and a red asbestos-shingle roof. A single box elder stood in the front yard and a swayback garage hunkered hopelessly in back. A waist-high chain-link fence surrounded her holdings.
“It looks pretty bad,” she said sadly. They were ten minutes off the expressway, in a neighborhood of tired yards. The postwar frame houses were crumbling from age, poor quality and neglect: roofs were missing shingles, eaves showed patches of dry rot. In the dim illumination of the streetlights, they could see kids’ bikes dumped unceremoniously on the weedy lawns. The cars parked in the streets were exhausted hulks. Oil stains marked the driveways like Rorschachs of failure.
“When I bought it, I called it a cottage,” she said as they rolled into the driveway. “God damn, it makes me sad. To think you can live in a place for thirty years, and in the end, not care about it.”
Sam Crow closed one eye and stared at her with the other, gauging the level of her unhappiness. In the end, he grunted, got out of the car and lifted the garage door.
“I hope Shadow Love’s okay,” she said anxiously as she pulled into the garage.
She had picked them up ten minutes after Sam called her. As they headed back to her house, they crossed the street that the apartment was on. There were cars in the street. Cops. The raid was under way.
“He was due back,” Sam said as they got out of the car. “With all those cops in the street . . .”
“If he wasn’t there when they arrived . . .”
“If they didn’t get him, we should be hearing from him,” said Aaron.
Barbara’s house was musty. She was never a housekeeper, and she smoked: the interior, once bright, was overlaid with a yellowing patina of tobacco tar. Sam Crow dragged the duffel bag up the stairs. Aaron headed for a sitting room that had a foldout couch.
“You guys got any money?” Barbara asked when Sam came back down.
“A couple of hundred,” he said, shrugging.
“I’ll need help with the groceries if you stay here long.”
“Shouldn’t be too long. A week, maybe.”
Twenty minutes later, Shadow Love called. Barbara said, “Yes, they’re here. They’re okay,” and handed the phone to Sam.
“We were afraid they got you,” Sam said.
“I almost walked right into them,” Shadow Love said. He was in a bar six blocks from the Crows’ apartment. “I was thinking about something else, I was almost on the block when I realized something was wrong, with all those cars. I watched for a while, I was worried I’d see them taking you out.”
“You coming here?” Sam asked.
“I better. I don’t know where they got their information, but if they’re tracking me . . . I’ll see you in a half-hour.”
When Shadow Love arrived, Barbara stood on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek and took him straight into the kitchen for a sandwich.
“Somebody betrayed us,” Shadow Love said. “That fuckin’ Hart was in the street outside the apartment. He’s passing out money now. The hunter cop too.”
“We’re not doing as well as I hoped,” Sam confessed. “I’d hoped Billy would get at least one more and that John would make it out of Brookings . . . .”
“Leo’s still out and I’m available,” Shadow Love said. “And you can’t complain about the media. Christ, they’re all over the goddamned Midwest. I saw a thing on television from Arizona, people out on the reservations there, talking . . . .”
“So it’s working,” Aaron said, looking at his cousin.
“For now, anyway,” Sam said.
Later that night, Sam watched Barbara move around the bedroom and thought, She’s old.
Sixty, anyway. Two years younger than he was. He remembered her from the early fifties, the Ojibway bohemian student of French existentialists, her dark hair pulled back in a bun, her fresh heart-shaped face without makeup, her books in a green cloth sack carried over her shoulder. Her beret. She wore a crimson beret, pulled down over one eye, smoked Gauloises and Gitanes and sometimes Players, and talked about Camus.
Barbara Gow had grown up on the Iron Range, the product of an Ojibway father and a Serbian mother. Her father worked in the open-pit mines during the day and for the union at night. Her mother’s Bible sat in a small bookcase in the living room. Next to it was her father’s Das Kapital.
As a teenager, she had done clerical work for the union. After her mother died, leaving a small insurance policy, she’d moved to Minneapolis and started at the university. She liked the university and the talk, the theory. She liked it better when she heard the news from existential France.
Sam could still see all of that in her, behind the wrinkled face and slumping shoulders. She shivered nude in the cold air and pulled on a housecoat, then turned and smiled at him, the smile lighting his heart.
“I’m surprised that thing still works, much as you abuse it,” she said. Sam’s penis curled comfortably on his pelvis. It felt happy, he thought.
“It’ll always work for you,” Sam said. He lay on top of the blankets, on top of the handmade quilt, impervious to the cold.
She laughed and left the room, and a moment later he heard the water start in the bathroom. Sam lay on the bed, wishing he could stay for a year or two years or five, wrapped in the quilt. Scared. That’s what it was, he thought. He put the thought out of his mind, rolled off the bed and walked to the bathroom. Barbara was sitting on the toilet. He stepped in front of the vanity and turned on the water to wash himself.
“Shadow Love’s still watching that movie,” Barbara said. The sounds of TV gunfire drifted up the stairs.
“Zulu,” said Sam. “Big fight in Africa, a hundred years ago. He says it was better than the Custer fight.”
Barbara stood up and flushed the toilet as Sam dried himself with a towel. “Is this the end?” she asked quietly as they walked back into the bedroom.
He knew what she meant, but pretended he did not. “The end?”
“Don’t give me any bullshit. Are you going to die?”
He shrugged. “Shadow Love says so.”
“Then you will,” Barbara said. “Unless you go away. Now.”
Sam shook his head. “Can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“The thing is, these other people have died. If it comes my turn and I don’t fight, it’ll be like I turned my back on them.”
“You’ve got a gun?”
“Yeah.”
“And this is all necessary?”
“Yes. And it’s almost necessary that we . . . die. The people need this story. You know, when we were kids, I knew people who rode with Crazy Horse. Who’s alive now to talk to the kids? The only legends they have are dope dealers . . . .”
“So you’re ready.”
“No, of course not,” Sam admitted. “When I think about dying . . . I can’t think about dying. I’m not ready.”
“Nobody ever is,” Barbara said. “I look at myself in the mirror, on the door . . .” She pushed the bedroom door shut, and the full-length mirror mounted on the back reflected the two of them, naked, looking into it. “ . . . and I see this old woman, shriveled up like last year’s potato. A clerk at the historical society, all gray and bent over. But I feel like I’m eighteen. I want to go out and run in the park with the wind in my hair, and I want to roll around on the grass with you and Aaron and hear Aaron putting the bullshit on me, trying to get into my pants . . . and I can’t do any of that because I’m old. And I’m going to die. I don’t want to be old and I don’t want to die, but I will . . . . I’m not ready, but I’m going.”
“I’m glad we had this talk,” Sam said wryly. “It really cheered me up.”
She sighed. “Yeah. Well, the way you talk, I think when the time comes, you’ll use the gun.”
Shadow Love paced.
Sam lay at Barbara’s right hand, asleep, his breathing deep and easy, but all during the night Barbara could hear Shadow Love pacing the length of the downstairs hallway. The television came on, was turned off, came on again. More pacing. He’d always been like that.
Almost forty years earlier, Barbara had lived a half block from Rosie Love, and had met the Crows at her house. They had been radical hard-cases even then, smoking cigarettes all night, drinking, talking about the BIA cops and the FBI and what they were doing on the reservations.
When Shadow was born, Barbara was the godmother. In her mind’s eye, she could still see Shadow Love walking the city sidewalks in his cheap shorts and undersize striped polo shirt, his pale eyes calculating the world around him. Even as a child, he had had the fire. He was never the biggest kid on the block, but none of the other kids fooled with him. Shadow Love was electric. Shadow Love was crazy. Barbara loved him as she would her own child, and she lay in her bed and listened to him pace. She looked at the clock at 3:35, and then she drifted off to sleep.
In the morning, she found him sitting, asleep, in the big chair in the living room, the chair she once called her mantrap. She tiptoed past the doorway toward the kitchen, and his voice called to her as she passed: “Don’t sneak.”
“I thought you were asleep,” she said. She stepped back to the doorway. He was on his feet. Light was coming in the window behind him and he loomed in it, a dark figure with a halo.
“I was, for a while.” He yawned and stretched. “Is this house wired for cable?”
“Yeah, I got it for a while. But when there was nothing on, I had them turn it off.”
“How about if I give you the money and you have them turn it back on? HBO or Cinemax or Showtime. Maybe all of them. When the heat gets heavy, we’ll really be cooped up.”
“I’ll call them this morning,” she said.
At midmorning, after breakfast, Barbara got a stool, a towel and a pair of scissors and cut Sam’s and Shadow Love’s hair. Aaron sat and watched in amusement as the hair fell in black wisps around their shoulders and onto the floor. He told Sam that when old men get their hair cut, they lose their potency.
“Nothin’ wrong with my dick,” Sam said. “Ask Barb.” He tried to slap her on the butt. She dodged his hand and Shadow Love flinched. “Watch it, God damn it, you’re going to stick the scissors in my ear.”
When she finished, Shadow Love put on a long-sleeved cowboy shirt, sunglasses and a baseball cap.
“I still look pretty fuckin’ Indian, don’t I?”
“Get rid of the sunglasses,” Barbara said. “Your eyes could pass for blue. You could be a tanned white man.”
“I could use some ID,” Shadow Love said, tossing the sunglasses on the kitchen table.
“Just a minute,” Barbara said. She went upstairs and came back a few minutes later with a man’s billfold, all flat and tired and shaped to another butt. “It was my brother’s,” she said. “He died two years ago.”
The driver’s license was impossible. Her brother had been four years older than she, and bald and heavy. Even with the bad picture, there was no way Shadow Love could claim to be the man in the photo.
“All this other stuff is good,” he said, thumbing through it. Harold Gow had credit cards from Amoco, Visa and a local department store. He had a membership card from an HMO, a Honeywell employee’s ID without a photo, a Social Security card, a Minnesota watercraft license, a credit-union card, a Prudential claim card, two old fishing licenses, and other odd bits and pieces of paper. “If they shake me down, I’ll tell them I lost my license on a DWI. When an Indian tells them that, they believe you.”
“What about you guys?” Barbara asked the Crows.
Sam shrugged. “We got driver’s licenses and Social Security cards under our born names. I don’t know if the cops have those figured out yet, but they will.”
“Then you shouldn’t go out on the street. At least not during the day,” Barbara said.
“I’ve got to talk to people, find out what’s going on,” Shadow Love said.
“You be careful,” Barbara said.
Shadow Love was in a bar on Lake Street when an Indian man came in and ordered a beer. The man glanced sideways at Shadow Love and then ignored him.
“That Welfare guy’s down at Bell’s Apartments handing out money again,” the Indian man told the bartender.
“Christ, half the town is drinking on him,” the bartender said. “I wonder where they’re getting all the loot?”
“I bet it’s the CIA.”
“Boy, if it’s the CIA, somebody’s in trouble,” the bartender said wisely. “I met some of those boys in ’Nam. You don’t want to fuck with them.”
“Bad medicine,” the Indian man said.
A man at the back of the bar yelled, “Nine-ball?” and the Indian man called, “Yeah, I’m coming,” took the beer and wandered back. The bartender wiped the spot he’d been leaning on with a wet rag and shook his head.
“The CIA. Man, that’s bad business,” he said to Shadow Love.
“That’s bullshit, is what it is,” Shadow Love said.
He finished his beer, slid off the stool and walked outside. The sun was shining and he stopped, squinting against the bright light. He thought for a moment, then turned west and ambled down Lake Street toward the apartments.
Bell’s Apartments were an ugly remnant of a sixties housing program. The architect had tried to disguise an underlying prison-camp barrenness by giving each apartment a different-colored door. Now, years later, the colored doors together looked like a set of teeth with a few punched out.
Behind the building, an abandoned playground squatted in a rectangle of dead weeds. The hand-push merry-go-round had broken off its hub years before and had rusted into place, like a bad minimalist sculpture. The basketball court offered pitted blacktop and bare hoops. The swing sets had lost all but two swings.
Shadow Love sat in one of the swings and watched Larry Hart working his way down to the first floor of the building. Hart would look at a piece of paper in his hand, knock on a door, talk to whoever answered, then move on. Sometimes he talked for ten seconds, sometimes for five minutes. Several times he laughed, and once he went inside and came back out a few minutes later, chewing something. Frybread.
The problem, Shadow Love thought, was that there were too many people in on the Crows’ secret. Leo and John and Barbara, and a bunch of wives who might know or have guessed something.
The Crows had been proselytizing for years. Though they had stayed resolutely in the background, their names were known, as was the extreme nature of their gospel. Once those names popped up on a police computer as suspects, they’d go right to the top of the hunters’ list. That normally wouldn’t be too much of a problem. The cops’ resources in the Indian community were minimal.
Hart was something else. Shadow Love had known him in high school, but only from a distance, in the days when the boys in one grade didn’t mix with the boys in the grades above. Hart had been popular then, with both Indians and whites. He still was. He was one of the people and he had friends and he had money.
Shadow Love watched him working down through the building, heard him laughing, and before Hart reached the bottom level, Shadow Love knew that something would have to be done.
• • •
Hart saw Shadow Love sitting in the swing as he walked toward the steps that would take him to the bottom floor, but he didn’t recognize him. He watched the man swinging, then dropped into a blind section of the stairwell. Five seconds later, when he came out of the stairwell, the man was gone.
Hart shivered. The man must have simply gotten off the swing, walked around the bush at the edge of the playground and gone down the street. But that was not the effect Hart felt. The man was there when he went into the stairwell and gone a few seconds later. He had vanished, leaving behind a swing that still rocked back and forth from his energy.
It was as though he had disappeared, as Mexican wizards were said to do, changing into crows and hawks and jumping straight up in the air.
Indian demons.
Hart shivered again.
A block away, Shadow Love was on the phone.
“Barb? Could you pick me up?”