Another Man's Moccasins

I studied the scaly and cupped surface of the interior door, which had spent at least a winter in the high plains exterior. “I think if we breathe on it, it’ll collapse.” Testing the theory, I grasped the knob and pressed. The door popped open, taking a little of the jamb with it.

We shrugged at each other. The television was a tiny thirteen-inch sitting on a beanbag chair, and clothes were scattered across the dirty yellow linoleum-tiled floor and exploded from a large backpack that rested on a built-in bunk. Unlike Tuyen’s room, it didn’t look like anybody had been killed here, anybody besides Mister Clean.

The Bear walked past me, watched Suzanne Rico anchor the news out of Channel 13 in Casper, and then clicked off the TV. There was an open paperback lying on the bed, along with what looked like an old horsehide motorcycle jacket and a number of empty Budweiser bottles, and a full ashtray with a few joints mixed in with the butts. There was another collection of bottles beside the only chair.

Henry crossed back and flipped over the book. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

“Appropriate.”

He showed me the cover as proof and then gestured toward the bottles by the chair. “It would appear that Phillip has been entertaining.”

I kneeled down and looked at the empties, plucked a pen from my shirt pocket, and tipped one over enough to lift it by the neck. Something rattled at the base, and I saw it was the cap, which had been bent in half. I set the bottle back down and looked up at the Cheyenne Nation. “I guess I’ll go check with the owner.”

Gladys Dietz had rented her swank chicken shed to Phillip Maynard for the lofty sum of a hundred dollars a month, including utilities, but she was beginning to have second thoughts. I was having second thoughts as she smoked a cigarette with the oxygen tube attached just under her nose, expecting any moment to be blown off the porch.

“The TV is going all the time, and that damn motorcycle makes such a racket.” She leaned on her walker one-handed and held the screen door back with the other.

I knew Gladys. She and her husband had owned a commercial fishing lake that my father and I had frequented, and she had gladly told anybody then that she was intent on dying soon.

I had passed more than a half century and was the chief law enforcer in the land, but she still addressed me as if I were eight. I held my hat in my hands. “Mrs. Dietz...”

“Your shirt needs ironing, Walter.”

I self-consciously smoothed the pockets of my uniform and desperately tried to remember her husband’s name. “Yes, ma’am. How’s George?”

“Dead.”

That’s what you got for asking about old people. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

She shrugged her silver head and studied my unpolished boots. “I’m not. He was getting pretty cranky toward the end.”

I decided to try to keep on track. “Mrs. Dietz, have you seen Phillip Maynard today?”

She glanced toward the shack, where Henry was standing by the gate. “What’s that Indian doing out near my chicken shed? ”

“He’s with me.”

She looked up through lenses as thick as the windshield on my truck. “I heard your wife died?”

“Yes, ma’am, a number of years back.”

“Was she cranky? ”

“No, ma’am.”

She nodded her head. “They get like that, you know.”

“Yes, ma’am, so they tell me. Now, about Phillip Maynard?”

“Is he in trouble? ”

“We just need to talk to him. Have you seen him?”

She continued watching Henry. “I usually don’t rent to those motorcycle types.”

I sighed and hung my hat on the grip of my sidearm and held the screen door for her. “It’s pretty important.”

“What is?”

“Phillip Maynard.”

“What about him?”

I took that extra second that usually keeps me from strangling my constituency, always important in an election year. “Have you seen him today?”

“No.”

I glanced back at Henry. “Well, his motorcycle isn’t here.”

“He keeps it in the barn.”

I turned and looked at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“That fancy new one that he doesn’t want to get rained on.” She glanced past me and at the cloudless sky, the smoldering cigarette still frighteningly close to the oxygen nozzle under her nose. “Not that it’s ever going to do that again.”

She watched us as we turned the corner and walked past a corral toward the Dietz barn with a Dutch-style hip roof. “She thinks you’re going to steal her chickens.”

“There are no chickens.”

“See?”

It was a standard structure, with the roof supported by a number of big, rough-cut eight-by-eights, which had been sided with raw lumber that had long faded to gray. There was a metal handle with a wooden latch on the door, which I pulled, and we stepped back as the big door swung toward us. Up in the loft there was a flutter of barn swallows, sounding like angel’s wings might. The Harley sat parked on its side stand, swathed with the same cover that I had seen at the bar. Henry lifted the vinyl shroud and whistled. “What?”

“FLHRS Road King, custom job.”

I vaguely remembered Henry having a bike, but he had rarely ridden it. “What’s that mean? ”