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By Root 610 0

Even while panicked and shooting at moving targets, he was still a good marksman. He blasted the skull off one soldier, shot the arms off two others and the leg off a third, had six bullets pass through the ribs of a few officers and one zip through the empty eye socket of a sergeant. But even without arms, legs, and heads, the soldiers came for him and knocked him to the ground, where they pulled off his skin in long strips, exposed his sweet meats, and feasted on him. Just before two privates pulled out his heart and tore it into halves, the little cop watched a lieutenant, with a half-decayed face framing one blue eye, feed the big cop’s cock and balls to a horse whose throat, esophagus, and stomach were clearly visible through its ribs.

That night, as the Seventh Cavalry rose from their graves in Montana, Edgar Smith slept in his bed in Washington, D.C., and dreamed for the first time about the death of George Armstrong Custer.

Inside the dream, it was June 1876 all over again, and Custer was the last survivor of his own foolish ambitions. On a grassy hill overlooking the Little Big Horn River, Custer crawled over the bodies of many dead soldiers and a few dead Indians. Seriously wounded, but strong enough to stand and stagger, then walk on broken legs, Custer was followed by a dozen quiet warriors, any one of them prestigious enough to be given the honor of killing this famous Indian Killer, this Long Hair, this Son of the Morning Star. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull walked behind Custer, as did Gall, Crow King, Red Horse, Low Dog, Foolish Elk, and others close and far. But it was a quiet Cheyenne woman, a warrior whose name has never been spoken aloud since that day, who stepped forward with an arrow in her hand and stabbed it through Custer’s heart. After Custer fell and died, the Cheyenne woman stood over his body and sang for two hours. She sang while her baby son slept in the cradleboard on her back. She sang an honor song for the brave Custer, for the great white warrior, and when she ended her song, she kneeled and kissed the general. But Custer was no longer Custer. The quiet Cheyenne woman kissed Edgar Smith lying dead in the greasy grass of his dream.

A ringing telephone pulled Edgar from sleep. Reflexively and professionally, he answered, heard the details of his mission, grabbed a bag that was always packed, and hurried for the airport. Brown-eyed, brown-haired, pale of skin, and just over six feet tall, he was completely unremarkable in appearance, a blank Caucasian slate. Measured by his surface, Edgar could have been a shortstop for the New York Yankees, a dentist from Sacramento, or the night shift manager at a supermarket. This mutability made him the ideal FBI agent.

Two hours after the phone call, after his Custer dream, Edgar sat in a window seat of the FBI jet flying toward the massacre site in Montana. All around him, other anonymous field agents busied themselves with police reports and history texts, with biographies and data on Native American radicals, white separatists, domestic terrorists, religious cultists, and the other assorted crazies who lived within a five-hundred-mile radius of the Custer Memorial Battlefield.

“Can you imagine the number of men it took to pull this off?” asked one agent. “Over two hundred graves looted and sacked. How big a truck do you need to haul off two hundred bodies? You’d need a well-trained army. I’m thinking militia.”

“But it’s two hundred dead bodies buried for a hundred years, so that’s about two million pieces of dead bodies,” said another agent. “Hell, you’d be hauling loose teeth, ribs, some hair, a fingernail or two, and just plain dust. You’d need a vacuum for all this. It’s not the size of the job; it’s the ritual nature of it. You have to be crazy to do this, and you have to be even crazier to convince a bunch of other people to do it with you. We’re looking for the King of the Crazy People.”

“You want my opinion?” asked the third agent. “I’m thinking these two dead Indians, along with a bunch of other radical Indians, were desecrating these