“You know of Sitting Bull?” Cyrus said. “That’s how he died. He was living the old ways, ghost-dancing at Standing Rock, and the government agents got the tribal police to arrest him for it. His ownpeople.”
He shook his head. “When he fought back, they started to shoot. Sitting Bull was killed, and most of the Sioux with him were too.”
Cassie turned her face up when Cyrus started to laugh; it was the last sound she’d expected to hear on the heels of his story. Her pick was suspended midswing. “Now, picture this,” Cyrus said. “Everyone’s looking around, trying to make sense of what’s happened, and suddenly a horse shows up and starts weaving around in a circle.”
“Sitting Bull’s?” Cassie asked, transfixed.
Cyrus nodded. “Before he came to the reservation, Sitting Bull traveled with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, and this circus pony had been a parting gift. So when the shots that killed Sitting Bull rang out, this horse comes out of nowhere and goes into his routine. Seems that was the way they had started the show.”
Cassie’s hand had dropped to her side. She found herself listening only to Cyrus, to his story and to the cry of a hawk somewhere in the distance. She slowly stuck her pick inside the belt loop, beginning the ascent out of the bleached valley.
Up top, she sank down beside Cyrus, rubbing her arms, trying to remember even one anecdote her mother might have told her that hinted she came from stronger stock than her own parents. But all she could recall were stories of a southern graciousness that Cassie later learned did not exist, and the wheeze of her mother’s slurred voice falling off in midsentence. “Your grandfather told you this?” Cassie asked.
Cyrus nodded proudly. “Like I’ve told Will. And you.”
Cassie winced at a stitch in her side. Her body was not what it used to be. This child was already making demands. She smiled past the pain and hauled herself to her feet. “We can go now.”
Cyrus peered at her carefully. “Did you find anything?” he said, surveying her empty pockets, the untouched spade.
In the past, for Cassie, anthropology had meant physically taking something away, but now the thought of chipping at the Black Hills made her feel a little sick. She was starting to wonder if the excavation of a culture had to involve laying open the earth. She imagined Cyrus’s great-grandfather spinning in his Ghost Dance shirt; Sitting Bull bleeding on the cold ground while only a circus pony pranced in his honor; Will perched on a pine-board floor learning his history through his grandfather’s voice. There was some phrase the Sioux used as a sort of benediction when they ended a ritual. Dorothea tossed it out the way she herself would casually say “God bless you” to sneeze. Cassie frowned, furrowing her brow, until the words came to her:Mitakuye oyasi´n. “All my relatives.”
Cassie closed her eyes and pulled tight the edges of Cyrus’s tales; she pictured again that dancing horse. “Yes,” she said. “I found exactly what I came for.”
ALEX THOUGHT THE MAN RESEMBLED A FERRET. HE HAD SHINY LITTLE brown eyes and a pointed nose that looked pert on Cassie but rodentlike on Ben Barrett. He was telling theHard Copyreporter that he had never even had a common cold, much less been on his deathbed in some Augusta hospital likethat liar Alex Riverswas saying.
“And what’s more,” Ben Barrett, his father-in-law, sputtered, “I haven’t heard from my little girl at all this year.” Something had been edited here, so that when the camera cut back to Ben he was blearyeyed. He nodded his head. “He’s covering something up, ayuh.”
Alex took a deep breath and settled himself as deeply as possible into Michaela’s office couch. Several feet in front of him Herb paced back and forth, riffling through every tabloid on the supermarket stand, all of which had different suggestions for what had happened to Cassie, ranging from kidnapping to murder at Alex’s hand.
It wouldn’t have been a big deal—Alex had won slander suits before—but Cassiehadbeen gone for two months, and this was her own father. The more the rumors flew, the more the magazines questioned Alex’s calm and Alex’s silence. One of the tabloids had even gotten a statement from the latest private investigator Alex had hired—something noncommittal, but Alex had fired him immediately for talking. Cassie had called him that one time, but Alex hadn’t told anyone.
It had taken the edge off his fear for her safety, yet it had not altered his plan of action. He still had detectives digging for information. Cassie had said she would call again, and maybe she would, but if in the meantime Alex discovered her whereabouts, he’d be on his way. After all, if she had the right to leave, he had just as valid a right to convince her to come back.
Michaela was the one who had initially spread the excuse of Cassie being with her sick father, and at the time, under the pressure of the Oscars, it had seemed like a good story. After the first couple of detectives couldn’t turn up any clue to Cassie’s whereabouts, Alex had even started to believe his own lie.
The videotape of theHard Copyshow fizzled to a series of black and white stripes, and Michaela heaved herself out of her chair and shut off theVCR. “Well,” she said. “The proverbial shit has hit the fan.”
Alex rubbed his finger along his upper lip, trying not to feel as if he was on trial. Herb leaned toward him, so close that when he yelled Alex could see the spittle catch at the ends of his mustache. “Do you know what this could do to you?”
“Herb,” Alex said calmly, “I just won three Oscars. People aren’t going to forget that so fast.”
Herb glared at Alex, shaking his head. “What they remember is the bad, the sensational. Like whether the Best Actor cut his wife up into little pieces and buried her in the basement.”
Alex stiffened. “Give me a break,” he said. But his mind was already racing. Herb and Michaela would stand beside him, but they would demand the truth. They would want to know why they had been kept in the dark.
He was going to have to give a flawless performance in front of the two people he’d trusted enough to see him with his guard down.
Michaela settled into the wing chair across from him as if she had all the time in the world. Overhead, the ceiling fan whistled. “Okay,”
she said, drumming her fingers on her stomach. “What the fuck is going on?”
Alex lowered his eyes, unwilling to give them the whole truth, but using instead the shock value of the statement they would never expect to hear. “Cassie left me,” he murmured, and he let the ache he kept tight under wrap work its way to the surface all over again.
THE BENT-WILLOW FRAMES OF THE SWEAT LODGE REMINDED CASSIE of a woolly mammoth. There was something about the curved bars of wood that made them look like ribs, as if a creature had sloughed its way to the middle of the plain to die. She sat down on the cold ground, opened the notebook she’d bought a month before, and pulled a pencil stub from her coat pocket. Flipping to a blank page, she surveyed the sketches she’d done to pass the time when she had first arrived: skull dimensions, 3-D images of the hand, a multilayered mock-up of an Australopithecine man she wanted to use as a handout in one of her courses. But in the weeks she’d spent on the reservation, her drawings had changed. She wasn’t sketching skeletal figures from her research anymore. Here was a picture she’d done of Dorothea, asleep in the rocker; and one of a buffalo herd that she’d re-created from Cyrus’s stories; and another, a memory left from a dream in which she’d seen the face of her baby.
Maybe it was the stripped-down atmosphere of Pine Ridge that had changed her sketching style. In L.A., there was so much glitter surrounding you that cutting back to the basics was refreshing. But here, where there was little but the Spartan stretch of land and sky, every word you spoke and relationship you wove and picture you drew embellished itself into a thing of substance.
Cassie tucked the pencil behind her ear and critically assessed her mammoth, then glanced at the rough willow frame that had inspired it. How strange it felt to look at things and—instead of reducing them to their skeletal elements, as she’d been trained—to see so much more than what had been laid before her.
