Trickster's Point Read online

  There was a powerful energy at work during the shoreline lunch that day, something unspoken but palpable, and it flowed between Winona Crane and Jubal Little. They barely looked at each other, and that, in itself, was a dead giveaway to Cork. They were two of the most striking people he knew—Winona with her flowing black hair and soft, tawny skin and fawn eyes; and Jubal with his big, chiseled body and good looks and easy grace—yet it was as if, over that long hour of lunch, they didn’t exist for each other.

  When they separated to return to their work, Cork watched closely. Jubal, though he did his best to fight it, couldn’t help looking over his shoulder at Winona Crane, who was eyeing him from a safer distance.

  That Winona preferred Jubal—hell, what girl wouldn’t?—stung Cork, and he found himself envying his friend. It was something that he often felt and that he fought against, but there it was. Jubal had been blessed in so many ways, with good looks and an incredible build and an easy way with people that won them over instantly. Compared to him, Cork felt small and unimportant. But where Winona was concerned, Cork thought maybe there was hope. He could see clearly that neither Jubal nor Winona was prepared to acknowledge how they felt, so he held to the naïve belief that as long as it went unspoken, the attraction might pass, and Winona’s eyes would someday open to what Cork had to offer, smaller offerings maybe, but given with a full heart.

  Late that afternoon, they returned to LeDuc’s store. From the bed of the pickup, Cork, Jubal, and George unloaded burlap sacks filled with the wild rice that would eventually be dried, parched, hulled, winnowed, and shared. George gave them Big Chief grape sodas, and Cork called his mother to come and get them. While they waited, Cork and Jubal strolled through Allouette toward the shoreline, where the broad, sparkling blue of Iron Lake stretched away to the west.

  “Winona’s something,” Cork said. “But if she doesn’t watch herself, she’s headed for trouble.” It was a warning to Jubal, whose own reputation in Aurora was sterling. But Cork didn’t fool himself. A good part of his motivation was to plant a kernel of doubt in Jubal’s mind that might keep him from turning his attention to Winona.

  Jubal stared absently at the sky. “I guess.”

  “We worry about her.”

  “We?” Jubal said.

  “Those of us who are Shinnobs.”

  “Shinnobs?”

  “It’s short for Anishinaabeg.” Cork said it as if being Ojibwe set him and Winona apart from Jubal, put Jubal on the outside of an intimate connection that he and Winona shared but Jubal never could.

  Jubal suddenly broke away and stomped angrily to the edge of the water.

  Cork caught up quickly and said to his friend’s back, “You okay?”

  “What is it with you and being Indian?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jesus, just look at this place.” Jubal pointed toward the gathering of mostly BIA-built homes and trailers that was Allouette, where many of the streets were still unpaved and a lot of the yards were covered with skeletal dandelion stalks that stood in grass long unmowed, and where rusting cars, tireless, sat up on cinder blocks. “Who’d want to live in a place like this? And look at you. You don’t even look Indian.” Jubal picked up a rock and flung it at the water as if the lake had insulted him.

  “I’m only a quarter Ojibwe,” Cork said. “But look at you. You could pass for Indian in a heartbeat.”

  “That’s because I am, stupid.”

  The admission hit Cork like the rock Jubal had thrown at the lake. “What?”

  “My name’s not Little. It’s Littlewolf. Jubal Littlewolf. My mother changed it after we left Montana. She didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Jubal picked up another rock and another, taking out his anger on the lake.

  “You tell anyone what I’m about to tell you,” he said, facing Cork with a fistful of stones, “and I’ll break you into pieces.”

  “I won’t say a word, I swear.”

  Jubal turned away and stared where the sunlight danced on blue water with a lightness that seemed to mock his dark mood. “My old man’s not dead.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In prison. Deer Lodge. That’s in Montana.”

  “What for?”

  “Manslaughter.” With a grunt as if it pained him, Jubal wildly cast stone after stone, which the lake swallowed with barely a ripple.

  “He killed someone?”

  “That’s what manslaughter means, stupid.”

  “I’m not stupid.” Cork waited a minute for Jubal to empty his hands, then asked cautiously, “Why?”

  Jubal finally sat down on the shoreline, and Cork sat down beside him. The day was hot, but an easy wind blew out of the west and skated across the lake and cooled them. Jubal pulled a long blade of wild grass from the ground and viciously tore it apart, bit by bit, as he spoke.

  “My dad’s Blackfeet, full blood. He’s a carpenter. Builds houses and stuff. Built houses,” Jubal corrected himself. “Four years ago my aunt Chrissy, that’s his sister, she was . . . well, she was raped . . . by three white cowboys. It was in a town called Mosby way the hell out in the eastern part of the state. She was working in a bar there. The Mosby cops, they wouldn’t do anything about it. I guess the cowboys talked like it was some kind of joke. My dad went out there, and when he came back one of the cowboys was dead and the other two were in the hospital, beat up real bad. They arrested him, and at his trial, he said he was just doing what the law wouldn’t. What the white man’s law wouldn’t. There were lots of people in Mosby who swore Aunt Chrissy was drunk and acting slutty and asking for it. Me, I didn’t believe it for a minute. I never saw her like that. They were lying through their teeth. But that frigging jury, they convicted my father, and he’ll be in Deer Lodge until he’s an old man.”

  Jubal finished torturing the blade of grass and pulled another.

  “It was a big deal in Montana. Reporters crawling all over us all the time, even after the trial was done. We got letters and calls. Some of them were from people who thought my dad got a raw deal, but a lot of them were just stupid assholes saying dirty, hurtful things to my mom. We were living in Bozeman. Got to where we couldn’t walk down the street without being stared at, so Mom decided she had to do something. We moved to Denver for a while, and she changed her name. And mine. It was pretty hard for her, I guess, all alone, so we moved up here because we could live with my aunt. She made me promise never to talk about what happened in Montana.”

  They were both quiet a long time. Jubal tore at the blade of wild grass until there was nothing left.

  “I guess I understand why you told me he was dead.”

  “I never actually said he was dead,” Jubal shot back defensively. “Whenever anybody asks, I just say I lost him and let them think what they want. But he’s as good as dead.”

  “You don’t ever talk to him?”

  “Why would I?”

  “He’s your dad.”

  “He should’ve thought about that before he went off and killed a man.”

  “He probably didn’t plan on killing anybody.”

  “What difference does that make? He should’ve stayed home where he belonged, and then he’d still be with us.” Jubal yanked a handful of wild grass and heaved it as if throwing another stone at the lake, but the blades went nowhere, just fluttered to the ground at his feet.

  “So,” Cork said, trying to find slightly different ground to cover, to give Jubal room to move away from his anger. “Why Little? Why not your mom’s maiden name or something?”

  Jubal finally cracked a smile. “Her maiden name’s Krupfelter. I told her I’d never be a Krupfelter. We compromised with Little.”

  “Why not Wolf? That’s kind of cool.”

  Jubal stood up, rose to his full height, and grinned down at Cork. “I like the look on people’s faces when I tell them my name is Little.”

  Cork’s mother came to get them, and they rode back to Auro
ra. Although the sky stayed blue and Jubal had brightened, it still felt to Cork as if they were under a cloud the whole way. Jubal asked to be dropped off on Center Street, and there they separated, each kid heading toward a home where the sound of a man’s voice was a rare thing now.

  That night, as he lay in bed, Cork thought about Jubal’s father and Jubal’s anger. The truth was that, after his own dad died, Cork was sometimes angry with him, too. There were still moments when, in his thinking, he held onto a little stone of bitterness, wondering uselessly why his father chose to have a job in which he wore a gun on his belt every day. But Jubal’s dad had worn a carpenter’s belt, and what had hung from it had been a hammer, and, in the end, this hadn’t made any difference. Jubal’s father had been lost, too.

  CHAPTER 7

  Rainy held him. The wind had grown stronger, and the little cabin creaked around them as they huddled together under her quilt. They both smelled of sage and cedar, which Rainy had burned and blown over Cork to cleanse his spirit. Strands of her long hair lay fallen across his chest. Whenever she moved her head, Cork felt as if the lightest of fingers were trailing over his heart.

  “Jubal was ashamed of being Blackfeet,” she said. “I understand. When we were growing up—you, me, him—if you were Indian, more often than not you were looked on as ignorant and savage. Or worse, someone to be pitied and condescended to.”

  “He got over it,” Cork said.

  He felt her sigh. “In a big way, I’d say.”

  A gust of wind threw what sounded like a handful of sand against the window in the cabin’s western wall.

  “Must be sleeting,” Cork said.

  “I’m glad you didn’t try to drive home tonight.” She kissed his shoulder, then was quiet, listening. “Do you really think someone followed you here?”

  “I could have sworn I heard a voice out there in the woods.”

  “Traitor,” Rainy said. “What does it mean?”

  “If it was real, I don’t know. If I only imagined it, then I’m probably crazy. Crazy with guilt, maybe.”

  “Why? You didn’t kill him,” she said.

  “Before he died, he told me things, things he swore he’d never told anyone. Secrets, Rainy. Some of them were about me and him. Some were about him and Winona. Some about Camilla. Jubal’s whole life seemed to be about secrets, things he knew but couldn’t share. Or was afraid to.”

  “Why afraid?”

  “Just too revealing for a man as powerful as Jubal, I guess.”

  “Even the secrets about you and him?”

  “That was maybe the weirdest thing of all. He said all his life he’d envied me. All his life, he’d tried to best me. And in the end, it was me who’d bested him.”

  “He envied you?”

  “I know. I don’t get it either.”

  “What did he mean, that in the end you’d bested him?”

  “Again, I don’t know, Rainy. Those three hours with Jubal were confusing. He rambled. He did a lot of reminiscing about when we were kids. He spilled his guts, all those transgressions and regrets. And then, at the last, he died with a smile on his lips.”

  “Maybe you were his confessor.”

  “Maybe. The oddest thing of all, though, came near the very end. He said a name he’d never mentioned to me before. Rhiannon.”

  “Who’s Rhiannon?”

  “Beats me, but she was clearly important to Jubal. By then, he was out of his head most of the time. These were his words as I heard them, which wasn’t very clear, because he was speaking barely above a whisper by then: ‘Rhiannon. The worst sin of all. God will send me to hell because of her. Pray for me. Oh, Jesus, pray for me.’”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him I’d pray for him, but that I didn’t believe in hell. He went quiet again and his eyes went unfocused. A few minutes later he said, clear as a bell, ‘I can see it. My God, it’s beautiful.’ He looked me in the eye, Rainy, and for that moment, he was there with me, I mean really there. He said, ‘This pain, all this pain. It’s nothing, Cork.’ Then he smiled. And then he died.”

  The wind ran around the cabin and threw sleet as it passed. Rainy propped herself up on her arm and stared at him in the dark.

  “Rosebud,” she said.

  “Rosebud?”

  “The sled in Citizen Kane.”

  “That movie always put me to sleep.”

  “You’ve got a Rosebud here. It’s the last name he said, so it must be very important to him, don’t you think?”

  “Honest to God, Rainy, I don’t know what to think.”

  A knock came at the cabin door, unexpected and surprising, and it startled them.

  Rainy called out, “Who is it?” but received no response.

  Cork said to her quietly, “Meloux?”

  “He’s not deaf. He’d answer me.”

  Cork threw back the quilt and swung his legs off Rainy’s bed. He was dressed only in boxer shorts. The cabin floor was ice against his bare soles. He crept to the door, stood a moment listening, then swung the door wide. The wind rushed in, a bitter shove against his body, full of sleet pellets that peppered his face and chest. He squinted at the night, but without a moon or any stars to shed light, the dark was impenetrable.

  “Anybody?” Rainy called to him.

  “No one,” Cork said.

  “Come to bed then.”

  He stepped back to close the door. That’s when he noticed the arrow. It was lodged approximately in the place where, if the pine door had been an upright man, the razor-sharp broadhead tip would have pierced his heart. Cork pulled it free from the wood, took one last look into the night, then shut out the wind and the cold.

  “Would you mind lighting your lantern?” he asked as he came toward the bed.

  “What is it?” She sat up and turned to the nightstand.

  Cork heard the scratch of a match head over the strike strip of the box, and a flame bloomed in her hand. She lit the lantern and adjusted the wick. Cork sat on the edge of the bed, cradling the arrow in his hands.

  “That was the knock?” Rainy asked.

  “Guess so.”

  “A hunting arrow?”

  Cork nodded. “And look here.” He ran his index finger across a word printed finely and delicately in white paint along the length of the gray carbon-composition shaft.

  “What does it say?”

  Cork held it close to her so that she could see for herself.

  “Traitor,” she read out loud.

  His perplexity and concern must have been obvious, because Rainy put a warm, reassuring hand on his arm. “It’s disturbing, I know. But there’s an upside. At least it proves you’re not crazy.”

  * * *

  Cork woke to the hoarse barking of Walleye, Meloux’s old yellow dog. He opened his eyes, saw the gray of that morning seeping through Rainy’s windows, and realized he was alone in bed. He got up, pulled on his socks, and went to the nearest window. Outside, dingy-looking clouds hung wet and heavy over the North Country. The ground on Crow Point was salted with sleet pellets. Walleye sat on his haunches, his attention focused on the outhouse that stood twenty yards north of Meloux’s cabin. As Cork watched, the old Mide emerged from the tiny structure and, instead of heading back to his own cabin, came toward Rainy’s. Walleye followed behind.

  Cork took his pants from the chair where he’d laid them folded the night before and slipped them on. He was buttoning his flannel shirt when the old man entered without knocking.

  “I was beginning to think you were going to hibernate this winter, Corcoran O’Connor.” Meloux walked to the empty chair at Rainy’s table and sat while Cork drew on his boots. Walleye had come in, too, and flopped at Meloux’s feet. “Rainy told me about your visitor last night.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it a visit, Henry.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “A warning, maybe.”

  Cork took the arrow from the stand where he’d put it in the night and ha
nded it to Meloux, who looked it over carefully.

  “A warning, you say? About something you have done or something you should not do?” the old Mide asked.

  “You tell me, Henry.”

  “If I could tell you, Corcoran O’Connor, I would not have asked.”

  Cork sat down across the table. “Have you given any more consideration to what we talked about last night?”

  Meloux reached into the pocket of the plaid mackinaw he wore and pulled out a creased sheet of paper, which he handed to Cork, who unfolded it and laid it on the tabletop. Meloux had written on it in pencil.

  “You asked about those Sam Winter Moon taught to hunt in the old way and who were still alive and still on the reservation. Those are all I could think of, but it is not everyone.”

  “You’ve forgotten some?”

  The old man seemed mildly irritated by his suggestion. “I may not see so good anymore, Corcoran O’Connor, but my brain is still as sharp as the head of that arrow.”

  Cork had no doubt it was true, but there the similarity ended, for in the sharpness of the old man’s brain there was no sinister purpose.

  “Though we were good friends, Sam Winter Moon did not share everything with me or with others,” Meloux explained. “He was a man who, for his own reasons, sometimes kept secrets.” The old Mide gave Cork a penetrating look. “Who does not?”

  Cork slowly went down Meloux’s list of names. The handwriting was small and precise. Meloux had been taught at the Indian school in Flandreau, South Dakota, where the administrators and teachers had done their best to pry the Indian out of him and fill the void with all things white. They’d done a poor job of it. Meloux had, indeed, learned from them but, for the most part, not the lessons they’d intended.