The Last of the Winnebagos

“She’s old enough to have a license,” I said, looking at Katie. She was rumbling in her purse for her driver’s license. “She’s old enough to have been on the roads.” Katie found her license and gave it to me. It was so new it was still shiny. Katherine Powell. She had turned sixteen two weeks ago.

’This won’t bring him back,” the vet had said, and taken the license out of my hand and given it back to her. “You go on home now.”

“I need her name for the records,” the vet’s assistant had said.

She had stepped forward. “Katie Powell,” she had said.

“We’ll do the paperwork later,” the vet had said firmly.

They never did do the paperwork, though. The next week the third wave hit, and I suppose there hadn’t seemed any point.

I slowed down at the zoo entrance and looked up into the parking lot as I went past. The Amblers were doing a booming business. There were at least five cars and twice as many kids clustered around the Winnebago.

“Where the hell are you?” Ramirez said. “And where the hell are your pictures? I talked the Republic into a trade, but they insisted on scoop rights. I need your stills now!”

“I’ll send them in as soon as I get home,” I said. “I’m on a story.”

“The hell you are! You’re on your way out to see your old girlfriend. Well, not on the paper’s credits, you’re not.”

“Did you get the stuff on the Winnebago Indians?” I asked her.

“Yes. They were in Wisconsin, but they’re not anymore. In the mid-seventies there were sixteen hundred of them on the reservation and about forty-five hundred altogether, but by 1990, the number was down to five hundred, and now they don’t think there are any left, and nobody knows what happened to them.”

I’ll tell you what happened to them, I thought. Almost all of them were killed in the first wave, and people blamed the government and the Japanese and the ozone layer, and after the second wave hit, the Society passed all kinds of laws to protect the survivors, but it was too late, they were already below the minimum survival population limit, and then the third wave polished off the rest of them, and the last of the Winnebagos sat in a cage somewhere, and if I had been there I would probably have taken his picture.

“I called the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” Ramirez said, “and they’re supposed to call me back, and you don’t give a damn about the Winnebagos. You just wanted to get me off the subject. What’s this story you’re on?” I looked around the dashboard for an exclusion button. “What the hell is going on, David? First you ditch two big stories, now you can’t even get your pictures in. Jesus, if something’s wrong, you can tell me. I want to help. It has something to do with Colorado, doesn’t it?” I found the button and cut her off. Van Buren got crowded as the afternoon rush spilled over off the divideds. Out past the curve, where Van Buren turns into Apache Boulevard, they were putting in new lanes. The cement forms were already up on the eastbound side, and they were building the wooden forms up in two of the six lanes on my side.

The Amblers must have just beaten the workmen, though at the rate the men were working right now, leaning on their shovels in the hot afternoon sun and smoking stew, it had probably taken them six weeks to do this stretch.

Mesa was still open multiway, but as soon as I was through downtown, the construction started again, and this stretch was nearly done—forms up on both sides and most of the cement poured. The Amblers couldn’t have come in from Globe on this road. The lanes were barely wide enough for the Hitori, and the tanker lanes were gated. Superstition is full-divided, and the old highway down from Roosevelt is, too, which meant they hadn’t come in from Globe at all. I wondered how they had come in—probably in some tanker lane on a multiway.

“Oh, my, the things we’ve seen,” Mrs. Ambler had said. I wondered how much they’d been able to see skittering across the dark desert like a couple of kangaroo mice, trying to beat the cameras.

The roadworkers didn’t have the new exit signs up yet, and I missed the exit for Apache Junction and had to go halfway to Superior, trapped in my narrow, cement-sided lane, till I hit a change-lanes and could get turned around.

Katie’s address was in Superstition Estates, a development pushed up as close to the base of Superstition Mountain as it could get. I thought about what I would say to Katie when I got there. I had said maybe ten sentences altogether to her, most of them shouted directions, in the two hours we had been together. In the jeep on the way to the vet’s I had talked to Aberfan, and after we got there, sitting in the waiting room, we hadn’t talked at all.