Blood Trail - C. J. Box [79]
Joe read from the yearbook. “She scored fifty-two points in the championship game?” he said. “Good Lord!”
“Oh, she was good,” Mrs. Thunder said, shaking her head. “Alisha was on that team too,” and pointed her out in the team photo.
“Was Shannon—um, Shenandoah—recruited by colleges?” Joe asked.
Mrs. Thunder nodded enthusiastically. “She was offered full-ride scholarships to over twenty universities, including Duke and Tennessee, all the national powers. We were so proud of her.”
“Where did she go to school?” Joe asked.
“She didn’t,” Mrs. Thunder said sadly.
Joe shook his head, confused.
“Shenandoah’s grandmother got really sick, so she stayed on the reservation to take care of her. I think she was scared—there was so much pressure on her—and I told her that, but she said she would go to college and play basketball when her grandmother was better. Like all those schools would just wait for her.”
She looked up at Joe, moisture in her eyes. “I get disappointed to this day when I think about the potential she had and the opportunity she missed.”
Joe nodded, prodding her on.
Mrs. Thunder looked down, as if she didn’t want Joe to see her eyes, didn’t want to see how he reacted to an all-too-common story on the reservation. She said Shenandoah did, in fact, nurse her grandmother for a year, then two. Her devotion was extraordinary for a girl her age, she said, but didn’t entirely mask the fact that part of the reason she stayed was because of her fear of leaving the cloistered reservation for the punishing high-profile world of big-time college sports—or at least that’s what Mrs. Thunder surmised. Plus, there was the pressure from those she’d grown up with, her friends and family and coaches. Too many people lived vicariously through her, saw her triumphs as their triumphs. When she failed, they failed too.
“Kind of like me,” Mrs. Thunder said. “I’m guilty of that as well. I think of a lot of these kids as my own, and I wanted her to do so well, to make us all be able to say, ‘I knew her when.’”
“Where did she go?” Joe asked gently, knowing where she ended up but not how she got there.
“Nowhere, for way too long, I’m afraid,” she said. “The time away from sports didn’t do her any good. She gained a lot of weight the way kids do when they’re used to playing sports all the time and they just stop. It was pretty obvious after a couple of years that it would be tough if not impossible for her to get a recruiter interested, even if they still remembered her. But that’s me speaking . . . I don’t even know if she tried.”
Shenandoah started running with the wrong crowd, she said, a bad mixture of Indians and town kids. She got involved with alcohol and drugs, and was arrested for dealing crystal meth, the scourge of the reservation as well as small-town Wyoming. Her grandmother died and Shenandoah drifted back and forth from the res to town. Mrs. Thunder said she’d hear of Shenandoah from time to time, that she worked as a barmaid, a waitress, even as a roughneck on a coal-bed methane crew. She hired out as a cook and a guide for elk camps as well, Mrs. Thunder said, raising her eyebrows as she said it.
Joe grunted. While there certainly were legitimate cooks for elk camps, there were also “cooks”—mainly younger women—who provided other services for well-heeled, mainly out-of-state hunters. Joe had seen and met some of the camp cooks in the mountains, and it was obvious few knew anything about making breakfast. He felt the same irony and sadness Mrs. Thunder conveyed as he imagined the scenario and looked at Shenandoah Yellowcalf ’s bold face and eyes in the yearbook. Those hunters had no idea that the chubby twenty-year-old Northern Arapaho “camp cook” they’d hired was once one of the greatest basketball players in the state of Wyoming, he thought. He searched his memory; there was something familiar about the story. Something about a young female Indian camp cook. Something he’d heard years before when he was a trainee working under