Another Man's Moccasins

Real soul music.

“Rise and shine, buttercup.”

I raised my hat from the side of my head, just far enough to see two handcrafted Paul Bond boots and two knees, one real, the other artificial. I lowered my hat, effectively blocking the view. “Go away.”

He kicked the underside of my bunk. “Get up, we got work to do.”

Lucian Connally had been sheriff of Absaroka County the twenty-four years previous to my administration; he was a rough old cob who had lost his leg to Basque bootleggers back in the fifties, the prosthetic of which I was preparing to twist off and use to beat him to death. “I worked all night, old man, now go away.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t do too good of a job ’cause yer Indian’s over at Durant Memorial, takin’ the place apart.”

I raised my hat again. “What?”

“He come to, and he’s over there payin’ ’em back for Sand Creek.”

I hustled off the bunk. “He’s Crow, not Cheyenne.”

“He’s one pissed-off Indian, is what he is.”

It was a disaster.

The ER staff, assuming that the EMTs had given the wounded man a sedative, had rolled him into an examination area and left him until an overworked internist could get to him. A child with an ear infection, an elderly man with chest pains, and a woman going into premature labor had distracted the doctor.

In the meantime, the slumbering giant had awakened.

Luckily, Double Tough and two of the HPs were still at the hospital when the excitement began. He had thrown the gurney and then began yanking very expensive machinery to throw next. They had charged him en masse, only to be plucked off one by one like the gurney and the pricey machinery. The tide shifted when Frymyer joined the fray, and the four men were able to get the Indian down long enough for the internist to pump enough Thorazine into him to knock out a buffalo.

The two HPs who had participated in the newest melee were sitting on the hood of one of their cruisers—Ben Helton’s nose was still bleeding, and Jim Thomas was nursing a hand that was wrapped up to the elbow.

Lucian nudged me as we stood there; he couldn’t help but give them the needle. “How you doin’, girls?”

Ben, the older of the two and the one with the broken nose, spoke through the assembled cotton and gauze with a muffled, nasal voice; he was going to have two black-eye beauties. “Piss on you, old man. Where the hell have you two been?”

Lucian said it like it was manifestly obvious: “Why, safely out of harm’s way.”

Jim, the other wounded trooper, nodded. “He wakes up again, you call game and fish and tell ’em to bring a dart gun.”

We continued into the emergency room, where Frymyer was seated on the floor of the hallway. His hands were bloody, his uniform was torn, and one ripped sleeve draped down over his elbow, which was in a sling, showing a more than prodigious bicep. The entire side of his face was bruised, from the eye socket to the jawline, and the eye that looked up at us was almost closed shut.

“You all right? ”

He nodded and then gently touched the swelling at his face. “But Double Tough’s arm is dislocated.”

Lucian glanced at me. “Maybe he ain’t as double tough as we thought.”

Frymyer started to stand, but I lowered myself down to his level instead. I pulled the remainder of his sleeve back up his arm. It was a shame that it was ruined since he’d just gotten his Absaroka County patch set and had sewn them on himself. “I asked how you are?”

“I guess I’m okay.” He probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue. “Except I think I’ve got some teeth loose.”

I took a closer look at him and his ruined shirt, noticing the name bar on his chest, which read FRYMIRE. “You spell your name with an ‘I’ and not a ’Y’?”

He stretched his jaw. “Yeah, like yours.” He tried to smile but quickly regretted it. “It’s okay, they still cash the checks.” He paused and looked down the hallway to where the Durant Memorial Massacre had taken place. “The internist says they can’t handle anything like this guy, and as soon as they get him patched up, we have to take him.”

3

I wandered back to the holding cells and watched the big Indian sleep.

They had carted him over from the hospital, and he seemed to be, as the nurses would say, resting comfortably. The term barrel-chested did not apply to him—he was more like refrigerator-chested. He cleared his throat and swallowed a few times; I watched as the muscles bunched and relaxed under the bandages.

The report from Durant Memorial indicated hemorrhaging of the short strap muscles of the neck surrounding the thyroid gland in front of the larynx, with a slight fracture of the hyoid bone and possible damage to the esophagus and trachea.

I thought about the Vietnamese woman. If he had been anywhere near normal, I would have killed him but, for now, I was glad that I hadn’t.