Another Man's Moccasins

I looked down and saw that my hand was resting on a cemetery headstone. I focused and saw more of them around me; they stretched into the late-night mist, thousands of them, and with the moonlight it was as if they were glowing like teeth. A dog barked in the distance, the sound rolling toward me like the cutting edge of harsh whispers.

When I looked up, Hoang was gone.

Quincy had gone back to work, and I’d made the march across the VA parade ground with my boots on.

It was Ranald Slidell Mackenzie that the fort was named after, and it was his residence to which the Doc had sent Cady. I thought about him and the history of the place as I crossed the foyer and climbed the steps to the upstairs ballroom. Mackenzie graduated West Point in 1862, number one in a class of twenty-eight. He fought in the Civil War and, before it was over, he’d been wounded four times, received seven brevets, and was a major general in charge of an entire division.

In our part of the country, however, his fame arose from the defeat of Dull Knife, the Cheyenne chief, and his village. On a cold November day in 1876, on the Red Forks of the Powder River, a spot just up the creek from where I’d been the day before, Mackenzie and four hundred men of the Fourth Cavalry, along with four hundred Indian scouts, took the Cheyenne chief and his 183 lodges by surprise. He destroyed the village and their supplies and effectively ended the nomadic lifestyle of the Northern Cheyenne nation.

Henry Standing Bear liked to remind anyone who would listen that Mackenzie died in his sister’s home on Staten Island, New York, in 1882, victim to the later stages of syphilis and, as Lucian would say, crazy as a waltzing pissant. It was, Henry also noted, not an unpleasant enough death.

Cady was standing in front of one of the large casement windows and was looking out at the last thin remains of snow that clung to the shadowed crevasses of the rocky heights. She was still barefoot. She turned and the broomstick skirt swayed as the wide-planked oak floor popped and echoed under my approach.

She raised her arms. “Dance with me?”

I smiled and took her hand. “There isn’t any music.”

“Sure there is.” She placed my other arm behind her back and led me in a fanciful waltz, her face tucked against my shoulder. We wheeled around the empty and silent ballroom, and I thought about Virgil White Buffalo and watched my daughter as her head rose and she smiled. After a full sweep of the dance floor, I bent down to kiss the U-shaped scar at her hairline and attempted to keep time to the counting of my blessings.

9

“Forty-two charges of manslaughter? ”

“At the least.” I could picture the California native, born in the high desert up near Edwards Air Force Base, and sheriff of a county that had eighteen times the populace of my entire state. “They brought ’em in through Long Beach, and we got an anonymous tip from down at the municipal pier; container vessel out of Belgrade, Yugoslavia.”

“Why Yugoslavia? ”

“The Vietnamese don’t need a visa to go there. About 40,000 Chinese go through the place every year, and they can blend. Not everybody can tell the difference, like you can.”

I took a breath and played at pulling Dog’s ear, his head resting on my knee. “What happened?”

“The traffickers had told the illegals on board the container ship to not make any noise and had packing crates of fruit pushed against the walls to help insulate any sound. The assholes closed the air vents, gave them four five-gallon buckets of water, and told them they’d be transferred in a matter of hours.”

I’d met Ned at the National Sheriff’s Association meeting in Phoenix, where we’d both avoided the social hour by hiding in the hotel bar and lamenting about our grown daughters.

He liked to fly-fish and had made the trek out to the Bighorns twice in the previous eight years. He was a good man, and I could hear the pain telling the story was causing him, but I needed it all. “Didn’t happen? ”

“No. They loaded the container onto an eighteen-wheeler and headed up to Compton.” I waited. “This jaybird, Paquet, parks the truck in a lot behind his apartment and goes in to have lunch, watch a movie and, while he’s at it, shoot a little smack. He misjudges the product and ODs, leaving forty-two people in an airtight container on an asphalt parking lot in Southern California in July at 103 degrees.”

I slowly exhaled, and Dog looked at me.

“They stripped down to their underwear, tried drinking the juice from the tomatoes, and tried to pry open the vents.” After a moment, he continued. “We figure they started panicking after about six hours and began pulling the cases from the walls and pounding on the doors. I guess there was a lot of screaming and shouting, but nobody came. . . .” There was another pause. “Walt, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

“All of them? ”