Dead in Her Tracks Page 3

  He twisted on the volume knob, thumbed the mic, and spoke into it, watching Elle flicker away into the hot steam of midmorning.

  4

  Elle straggled along another four miles. After two of them she regretted not begging more food off the old timer at the gas station. Her stomach, which had been a quiet and shriveled walnut for the past few days, was shrieking a list of demands.

  With nothing to eat, she doused it in water from the canteen, but the water only made her stomach cry harder. She kept moving, tried to focus on the slap of her feet on tar.

  The sun climbed, her shadow stretched before her on the dotted yellow lines. She had changed into a dirty tank-top, and her exposed shoulders were beginning to feel crispy. She made a mental note to look for sunscreen at the next highway exit, wherever that might be. Ten miles? Five hundred?

  The hunger got worse, and she was just beginning to feel faint again when she came across the first of the pyres on the side of the road.

  She came to a smart military halt and stood there, tasting the sharp odors of gasoline and burnt rubber. At once she felt cold; there was something watchful about this place, and it left her with an eerie feeling. She brought the canteen to her lips and drank while she studied the blackened pillars.

  Four telephone poles had been burned, their high-tension cables snapped and their masts streaked with soot. Burnt refuse was piled at the base of each — mesh frames from box spring mattresses, the wire skeletons of couches, a blackened baby’s crib. Smoke rose from the rubble in slow, weepy wisps.

  They reminded her of something — she wasn’t sure what, but it made a gnawing apprehension crawl up her stomach, and the fresh, wailing hunger lowered its head and slunk away.

  Following the line of poles, she saw a pickup truck parked lengthwise across the highway, perhaps a half-mile distant. There was a decal of some kind painted on the door, and a man was stretched out on the hood, his back against the windshield. He was too far away to discern much beyond a vaguely mannish form.

  Elle watched the truck cautiously, and when she saw no movement, she wandered over to the closest telephone pole. The debris piled around the base was mostly ash, but scattered among them were body parts and bones. Arms and legs blackened by fire, protruding femurs and splintered tibias, rib cages and severed feet that were soggy with melted footwear.

  People had been burned here. Immolated. Sacrificed.

  Gosh, it must have been hot, she thought. Hot enough to melt shoes. That was an expression, right? Hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, hot enough to draw flies. Hotter than a billy goat with a blowtorch.

  The breeze shifted then, and the smell hit her full-on; a tepid, sickly-sweet odor of rot and chemicals, and she held her breath, but couldn’t look away.

  She saw the frayed ends of rope on the ground, and realized then what these poles had conjured in her mind — sacrificial pyres, punishment for witchcraft or treason in bygone eras. Her mind pieced it together. Something had been strapped to the telephone pole and a bonfire lit beneath it. A burning at the stake, that’s what this had been.

  She nudged aside one of the logs with her foot, and a skull rolled out from behind it. She stepped back, looked sharply at the truck down the road. Whoever was sitting on it hadn’t stirred.

  A moan drifted up from one of the poles farther up the line, and she looked, saw something struggling at the base of the pyre. A corpse, its features melted to a mushy lump, pulled itself from a heap of ash by one arm, began dragging itself towards her, turning its sightless head this way and that. Its other arm ended just below the shoulder in hanging, tattered flesh.

  It can’t see me, she thought, ever the analyst, but it knows I’m here.

  She watched it get to the edge of the road, not particularly worried. It tumbled hard onto the pavement, reached out one final time, and then its good arm snapped just above the elbow. The thing lay there, immobile and pathetic, snapping its jaw in her direction.

  So they had burned the dead here in great pyres, then, had somehow managed to corral them to the poles. How many could you burn at each one? Ten? Twenty? The method confused her. How on earth did you get that many dead to stay in one spot?

  She stepped around the wriggling body, continued down the road. It stopped making noise once she’d gained some distance. She focused on the parked truck and started towards it.

  It was a white Ford from the 1970s, with big knobby tires and a dusty gold star on both doors. Its hood seemed as wide across as a dining room table, and the man lying on it had his hands clasped over his broad stomach and a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth. He watched her approach peaceably enough; he remained where he lay, puffing on his cigarette and flicking ashes off the side of the vehicle. Nestled in the crook of one arm was a brown paper bag and a red plastic thermos.

  He was dark-complexioned, large and fiftyish, with wiry, graying hair tied in a ponytail. He wore a khaki vest with flapped chest pockets that made her think of war zone photojournalists. He noted her approach with a stony watchfulness, the way he might have regarded a stray dog wandering near.

  Elle was going to say hello, but he reached into one of the chest pockets of his vest and produced a battered notebook. He flipped it open like a traffic cop writing a ticket, and said, “You Mrs. Stetler?” in a voice like an upright bass.

  “I-” she broke off, more startled by her own foggy memory than the stranger’s knowledge. Stetler… was that right? It sounded right. She nodded.

  “Doctor Eleanor Stetler, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota?”

  “Yes…”

  “And you’re the county medical examiner there, is that right?” He gazed at her, and she noticed how impossibly smooth his skin was for a man with gray temples.

  “Yes,” she said. “Or, I was.”

  The stern face melted away, and he broke into a broad, warm smile. When he did, his eyes visibly brightened, like a car flicking on its high beams. He slid to the end of the truck and let his legs dangle over the grill, and stuck out his hand. “My name’s Jon Door,” he said. “Welcome to the Crow Nation, doctor.”

  She accepted the hand with a tentative brush of his fingers, which were soft and unblemished. She said, “How do you know who I am?” and thought, I barely remember it myself.

  “Why, Mr. Powell — the man who runs the little store down the way. We have a deal; he keeps me apprised of whoever’s coming my way, and I let him stay in business. He’s okay, for a white man.”

  “I think he told me to avoid you,” she said.

  Jon Door grunted as though that was to be expected. “A complicated man,” he said.

  “I only told him my first name.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “You told him your job, and where you’re from. We still have the internet here, see, in the Indian Affairs office. Some days it works, and some days it doesn’t, but today it worked. I went in there and typed in doctor - Eleanor - Sioux Falls and it came up with the Minnehaha County Health Department’s website, and there you were. There was even a picture.” He suddenly gazed off at the horizon, looking profoundly puzzled. “Hey, what’s that mean, anyway? ‘Minnehaha County.’ It’s like Minnesota, but with a laugh at the end.”

  She smiled back, feeling a little girlish in the presence of this friendly man with the graying braid and the impish eyes. “That should be on the highway sign,” she said. “Now Entering Minnehaha County — Minnesota, With a Laugh.”

  He chuckled, a little too loud. The bright eyes stayed on her, and he reached behind him and picked up the brown paper bag and the thermos. “Here,” he said, “I brought you lunch.”

  “No thanks,” she said. “I’m not hungry.” Which was, of course, a big fat lie. Just the sight of the bag with the neatly folded top had roused her stomach again. It made her think of school lunches and picnics in the park. Potato salad and cold cuts and giant pickles that bled brine down your chin.

  “I hope you like plain
salami,” he said, ignoring her. “There hasn’t been any real cheese for months. So I made you a salami sandwich on white bread with mayo. Salami lasts forever, it seems like.” He held out the bag and shook it, tempting her, like a squeak toy for a dog.

  “I’m really not hungry,” she said again, but now there was a tremble in her voice.

  “Okay, but you’ll be plenty hungry, if you keep going north,” he said. “At least try the coffee. Real coffee, not even instant. Brewed it myself.”

  She watched him, speculative, then looked around in both directions. There were no trees or buildings or even tall grass on either side of the highway. They were alone, she and this man with the sack lunch, for as far as she could see.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s just us.” He held out the thermos, shook it. She heard something slosh inside, and suddenly there went her hand, reaching for it despite her strict orders to the contrary.

  “Good, good,” he said, watching her unscrew the cap. “Bet it’s been quite awhile since you had real coffee. There’s no cream, but I threw some sugar packets in the bag, if you take it that way. We got plenty of sugar. Not much dairy, but all the sugar packets you can suck on. Some of my men found a Krispy Kreme, completely intact. Cleaned the place out.”

  “Thank you,” she managed. The smell of the hot liquid made her head swim. Steam rose when she poured it into the cap, and she blew on it before taking a sip. She felt a weakness in her knees, and had to put a hand on the edge of the truck.

  “You sure you don’t want this?” he asked, shaking the bag in her direction again. It made that swishy, crinkling sound again, and she nearly tore it from his hands. She got the sandwich free, bit into it savagely, and he pitched back his head and laughed, a deep and rolling sound from his belly, a Santa Claus laugh.

  “Tell me, doctor,” he said, after his laughter had subsided, “have you seen any dead today?”

  She shook her head, mouth full, then bobbed it in the direction of the telephone poles. “Just one, over there.” She swallowed. “What is that, anyway?”

  “That’s where we burned the last bunch,” he said. “Can’t have them wandering on to the rez, you know, so when they come, we burn them out here, before they can get too close. You would’ve walked right into a gang of them, if you’d come this way yesterday.”

  “You burn them?” It was as she’d suspected, and her mind took renewed interest in the concept, skimming over its possibilities. “How do you get them to stay in the fire?” she asked. “And, how do you contain them? Don’t they… don’t they chase after you?”

  “I suppose they do,” he said, and smiled again. “Eleanor, I can see you’re very bright. I’m glad you came.”

  He really had an infectious smile, and it made her inclined to cooperate, and to thoughtlessly disregard how he’d smoothly dodged her question.

  Be careful, part of her cautioned — that same scientific voice that often alerted her to certain unpleasant realities. Some people can do that, like a parlor trick — smile and nod and just make you like them.

  Colin had been able to do that.

  “That’s why I can’t figure out why you’re unarmed, a smart woman like you,” Door said. “Mr. Powell told me that, too, and that’s about as foolish a thing as I can imagine. I’d say you’ve been real fortunate making it all this way. You’re like the lucky fool in a play or a movie who blunders through the plot and wins at the end. Like Forrest Gump or someone. Religious folks, they’d say you have a god or an angel watching out for you.”

  She shrugged, gave a guarded nod. Took another bite.

  “Maybe a god brought you to me.”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “I wasn’t headed here. I’m just walking.”

  “Just walking, walking like the dead,” he said, and nodded. “You almost look like one yourself.”

  She didn’t answer, stuffing the last of the sandwich into her mouth.

  “What about living? Seen any people on the road today?”

  “No,” she said. “Just you and the man at the gas station. I haven’t seen anyone else since Wyoming.”

  “Good, that’s good,” he said. “Did he tell you about me?”

  “Not really. He just said to stay on the highway and off the reservation.”

  “Right,” Door said. “That’s good advice. I’ll be honest with you; if I hadn’t found out you were a doctor, I’d have shot you. I was going to take a rifle to one of the overpasses and wait for you to come along.”

  Her chewing mouth ground to a slow halt, and she scrutinized him, wondering if this was one of those times she was misinterpreting a joke.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “It's nothing personal, doctor, but I’m a war chief. The first Crow war chief in decades, and I’m serious about it. We don’t let outsiders on our land. Those days are over.”

  “But I’m just passing through.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But we’re doing well here, on our rez. There are nearly four hundred of us at Lodge Grass. We got food and electricity and heat. And if I let anyone pass through, they’ll tell others. They might come back with more.” He sighed, a deep hollow sound in his gut. “So far I’ve caught seven whites and one black on Crow territory, and I don’t want to catch any more, but they keep coming, and I can’t take the risk.”

  “So you just shoot them,” she said. It was a question but came out sounding like a statement. “All of them. You don’t even talk to them first.”

  He shrugged at her flat words, continued. “We kill them, and it’s a better death than they can expect out there.” He waved a hand, palm down, at the empty prairie around them. “We don’t let other tribes come here either, but I admit I give them a chance when they do. Caught two Seminoles up from Oklahoma, and I gave them the chance to join us. The man did, and he’s still with us today. Good man, Billy John from Tulsa. But the woman, you know, she was proud to be Seminole.”

  He threw away his cigarette and it fell in a smoldering pile on the side of the road, and he slid off the side of the truck. He was a tall man, she saw, and fit for his years. He had a modest paunch but an athletic grace to his movements. He stepped towards her, not exactly threatening, but his towering height made her uncomfortable, and she backed away.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I told you, you’re safe. We need a doctor, and here you are.” He paused to stretch out, leaned over to touch his toes. When he did, she saw he had a knife with an ornate bone handle clipped to his belt, and what looked like a gun under his shirt.

  He straightened back up. Looked at her.

  “I want you to come back with me, to my people. As my honored guest.”

  “Thank you,” she said carefully, “but I can’t. I’m… I’m walking.”

  “We really need your help,” he said, and stepped closer. “There’s a shortage of medical staff. People are sick.”

  “I wish I could,” she said, “but I’m not really a doctor like that. I worked in a lab. I wouldn’t know the first-”

  “Eleanor,” he said, “get in the truck.”

  He put his hand to his waist where the fancy knife hung, and the too-bright eyes locked on her.

  5

  The war chief drove, and Elle listened. He smoked one cigarette after another, lighting the next crumpled Parliament off the ember of the last. For a man so preoccupied with medical care, she thought, he sure liked his cancer sticks.

  He talked about the rez; about his projects. He’d constructed a wall around the town of Lodge Grass, he told her. It had saved them all from a horde of dead who stumbled in from the east one morning and stacked ten deep around it. He told them about their coal mine, which still operated, and which they used to generate electricity.

  “Gordon figured that out,” he said. “He taught science at the high school, before.”

  He told her about greenhouses and rain catchers, irrigation projects for their crops. A trade deal negotiated with t
he city of Billings, which was turning out to be quite lucrative. There were guard towers along the wall, he said. They could see anyone coming.

  “So you can understand why we can’t just let strangers pass by,” he said. “The Crow Nation is an oasis, get it? In a desert of thirsty people. We can’t help everyone, it’s all we can do to feed ourselves at this point. That’s why I have to make the hard choices, sometimes. That’s why you would’ve been dead, if we didn’t need someone with medical experience. You might've seen one of us, or noticed tire tracks going off the highway, onto the rez. And you might've told people.”

  They were going by an exit ramp, and he swerved off the highway at the last moment and turned onto a nameless secondary road. The old truck bucked and roared with the rough treatment, its springs whining. Soon they were loping over scarred concrete, moving fast towards distant, bald hills.

  “You googled me,” Elle said, after some time. “You saw my credentials. I’m not an MD, I’m a clinical pathologist.”

  “You go to medical school for that, don’t you?”

  “Sure, and you spend the rest of your career with cadavers in a lab.”

  “Well, right now all we’ve got in our clinic is one LNA, and he’s not a very good one.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said patiently. “I’m trained for autopsies and research. Setting bones and dressing wounds — you’d be better off with a med student.”

  “We don’t have a med student,” Door said simply, and seemed uninterested in further debate.

  A sign rose out of the tall grass by the road. WELCOME TO CROW COUNTRY, it said. Underneath, someone had spray painted a crude skull and crossbones.

  “You should’ve just let me walk on by,” she said, in a low, tired voice. “I would’ve stayed on the highway and probably walked through to Billings. I don’t think I’d have even noticed your town. You ever think about that?”

  “Nope,” he said, and didn’t elaborate.

  They drove on in silence. A barrier of some kind soon rose from the grass in the distance. It was long — it stood maybe ten feet high and curved away in either direction. It had at least the breadth of a football stadium, and they were headed right for it.