Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [26]
“Did he have any enemies?” asked Odd. I don’t know what book he was playing from, but it seemed like a reasonable question.
The parents looked to our guide, as though he may be better able to field that question. “We are all family here,” he volunteered. “We have our disagreements, but we eat the same food, sleep under the same sky. To kill my son would be to kill your own, to kill yourself. James was killed by a white man.”
Why was I part of this? I felt embarrassed and ashamed to watch this frail old couple put through this. They had lost a son. I still had a son.
“Then, did he have any enemies among the whites?” asked Odd.
“Yes,” said his father, “One.”
We looked at him dumbly, but it had no effect on him. “And who would that be?” I asked, finally.
“Someone who did not want him with that girl.”
If they seemed to know little about their deceased son, they knew nothing at all about his girlfriend, Jeannie Olson. It was a new romance, his first serious girlfriend, revealed to them by one of the brothers, who teased James about it, because she was white and an inch taller than he. They had misgivings about it, not that such a thing had never happened before, to other young people, and even some people not so young, but when it had it created awkward self-consciousness for the couple and contempt from the community and usually ended in shame and regret.
Our old guide said, “To quote Woody Allen, ‘The heart goes where it wants to go.’”
I burst out laughing, I couldn’t help it. The old guy smiled. Score one.
Odd fell into a lazy pattern of throwing the ball for the dog, a question here, a question there. I eased back into the cast off seat of the totalled pickup, relieved that he had not yet opened his arms and cried, “Mom! Dad!” The old guide who claimed to have known him back then had not yet put his finger on who he had been. It was like trying to remember a name that escapes you.
“What about that old hermit,” Odd asked.
“Wayne Coffey?”
“Was that his name?”
“Wayne was not a hermit,” said Mr. Coyote. “He was in my father’s house, and my father was in his. It was only later when he was old and tired of all the noise, that people started to talk about him. Wayne had no hatred in his heart for anyone.”
“Could be whoever did it is dead,” I said.
The three Indians looked at me as though sorry for my stupidity.
“No,” said Odd, with authority, “he is not dead.”
Now, they looked at him, but in a different way, like he was the smart one.
“He?” said I. “How do you know it’s a he?”
“Could a woman shotgun two innocent people?”
“Catch me on a bad day.”
“It was a man,” said Odd. Then, “I wish I could see that pick-up they were in that night.”
“It’s out in the shed,” the father said.
“You still have it?” asked Odd. I couldn’t believe it myself.
“You can’t sell a vehicle somebody’s died in, unless you sell it to a white man, and I couldn’t do that.”
We stepped through the mud to one of the several sheds, this one big enough to hold a car. The dog had given up on the game, but followed Odd’s heels as if trying to impress a new master. It was slow going because James’ father had to wheel his oxygen tank through the mud, but once outside the shed it was all gravel. I stomped the mud off my Rockports. The woman swung open the two wooden doors to the shed.
“It’s under that,” said David, that being a dusty blue tarp. Odd took one corner, I took the other, and we pulled the tarp away, laying it out on the gravel. The truck was white, scarred and dinged, with a canopy over the bed, and spread on the bed was a mover’s blanket. There was little room left in the shed for anything else, though spare parts hung from nails in the walls.
“Can we push it out into the light?” asked Odd.
“You can,” said David. “I’ll watch.”
The vehicle was