The mass of arctic air extended from Texas to the high plains of Canada, stagnant and solid, imposing a record thirty-three days of freezing weather south of the fortieth parallel and pushing thermometers well below zero further north. So cold it was in the Dakotas that an even zero would have provided some relief from the consistent temperatures of twenty to forty below. Exposure to the frigid air took a person’s breath away. After several minutes, one could feel a slight pop as the body attempted to gain some sort of equilibrium. Cattle bunched together, requiring extra alfalfa not only for bedding but to keep a steady metabolism. During this cold spell, natives on the Pine Ridge Reservation burned furniture to keep warm. On their wintercount, they would record these thirty-three days in the dead of winter as the "deep chill" of 1984.
Between Scenic and Sharps Corner, South Dakota, a car ran out of gas on the coldest night of the deep chill, not far from a closed-down gas station. Cattle skulls nailed to the wall were a warning, some said, of the many hazards of the seldom-traveled road into the reservation interior. Never thinking twice about the situation, a young Sioux man slammed the door and began walking, shoulders hunched, head bowed, hands shoved into a worn, quilted vinyl coat. A medicine pouch hung around his neck and a skinning knife encased in a leather sheath slapped against his thigh.
In minutes, the long, coarse black hair pulled together with a leather thong in the back of his head froze stiff, and ice on his eyelashes formed crystal cataracts, permitting vision only through a foggy haze. The stillness of the night accentuated the bitter cold. As he walked the middle of the road, the crunch of the Indian’s footsteps echoed.
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On the same road, twenty miles further north, another car traveled, headlights on high beam because even though her wristwatch read a little after five, the evening had already lost all light, so coal-black it could have been midnight. The driver, a young woman nearing the end of her journey, flipped on the radio to pass the time.
"This is KILI out of Porcupine, South Dakota and you’re in Indian Country!"
Turning the radio louder, Kate Schellenburger let the broken English of the Lakota announcer dispel the demons of the dark road. The familiar lingo of the disc jockey reminded her that after twelve hours of driving, she was almost home.
Earlier in the afternoon, Kate had driven through a chasm few people ever see, and watched the setting sun spread a brilliant pink across arid gullies and pinnacles. She never felt comfortable gazing at this gaping cavity of earth that took on new, irregular shapes each time the wind blew or the rain beat down upon the ochre, gray, and white ribbons of sandstone, limestone, mudstone, volcanic ash and clay. The Badlands repulsed her, as if the earth were stripping in front of her, showing off its entrails, casting out secrets that Kate had no desire to know.
Was she the only one who felt so uncomfortable? In her Lakota class, a required course for mission teachers, she had learned the Sioux thought the Badlands a place of evil spirits. Her teacher, Kenny Brave Heart, had described an ancient memory of a sea bottomed with serpents, snakes, and monsters, unkcegila. Settlers traveled away from the vast hole, shielding their eyes from the barren intensity, believing wild characters lived deep in the chasm’s innards. French trappers described the area as bad lands to travel across, les mauvaises terres a traverser.
Disturbed, Kate drove away, allowing her roommate Mara’s 1968 black Chevy to eat into the January darkness, a wicked gloom where the descending cold would reach a killer forty below sometime before dawn. The Chevy controlled the road, driving through reservation territory no white person with good sense would cross without a passenger, a tract of land often called the dung heap of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
She never would have taken this road if Mara Ketterer had not talked her into driving the Chevy home so Kate’s brother could tune up the engine. Kate had felt compelled to drop her brother off at the university in Minnesota for his efforts.
"A free ride, for a free tune-up," Mara suggested and then demanded. Mara always demanded, and Kate always complied. Her habit of quiet submission fed the split in Kate’s skull, the split of always doing what she should instead of what she wanted.
Danger didn’t register until her headlights showed a man walking down the center line of the road. Skin around the roots of Kate’s shoulder-length red hair goose pimpled, as did the rest of her body under several jackets and a heavy wool coat. Her large green eyes became even wider.
At first her frightened mind recalled the ancient spirits of the Badlands. Then she remembered the reservation ghosts. Students crawled underneath seats of the school bus when she drove them through certain districts after dark. Especially famous was the ghost near the Wounded Knee turnoff, who had acquired a reputation of sitting in the back seat of people’s cars as they passed the cemetery of the 1890 Massacre of Wounded Knee.
Although her rational mind attempted to dislodge these thoughts, telling herself she was still an hour away from Wounded Knee, Kate recalled the stories of natives, desperate for a drink, stopping cars in the most remote areas of the rez. They stripped vehicles and robbed their occupants, leaving them stranded. The awful word rape entered her mind. Rape. She would rather be dead.
Who else could the man be, except an Indian so desperate for cash and alcohol that the cold wouldn’t bother him? She couldn’t drive around him. The road was too narrow.
Coming to a complete stop, Kate could make out a full-blood moving toward her, waving his arms, shielding his face from the
bright headlights. Throwing his body on the hood, the Indian peered through the frosty glass of the windshield as if he were assessing the situation. Then he began to pound on the glass.
Kate screamed. His intentions clearly were to harm her.
Flooring the Chevy and forcing the man to roll off, she sped into the dark. Her head throbbed from fright and from not knowing what to do.
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If the light a half mile from where Kate had left the man stranded had proven to be a place of habitation, little damage would have been done. But the shack lay empty and the mercury light was only a remnant of previous ownership. The Sioux didn’t return to the main road, but continued walking the car tracks across the frozen grass and sage toward yet another light set back against an extended finger of the Badlands.
Hoar frost had developed on his upper lip. Tonight the hairless face of a full-blood Sioux carried a curse; he had no beard to keep out the tingle of freezing skin. A whine rose from high within the fullblood’s throat, "Ieeeeeeyah, Ieeeeeeyah." He let it sound in his ears like the prairie wind, pulling his mind away from panic. By the time he reached the small ranch, his gait was unsteady and his fingers couldn’t form a fist. If the rancher hadn’t been out for the last wood haul of the night, the Indian might have been found frozen against the door.
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The surprised rancher allowed him in. A half-dead Indian posed no threat; explaining his frozen carcass to authorities might prove otherwise. Beau Hodges surveyed the Indian through serious blue eyes. Too many years of stolen property and ripped fences had whittled away a once accepting attitude. Now he avoided any connections and labeled his wife’s people lazy, worthless no-good sons of bitches.
"Pitiful sight," the rancher muttered. A little border collie ran into the room and stood two feet from the Indian, bristling and growling.
The Indian hovered near the door, smelling of alcohol, smelling that certain dirty smell of weathered poverty. He hunkered over, eyes downcast, not knowing how to act when at the mercy of a white man and his menacing dog.
"You’ve got company," Beau shouted to his wife. The frozen man slumped to the floor, unconscious.
It took Winnie, a Sioux herself, a few seconds to register the scene in front of her; Beau dragging a tattered, long haired fullblood by the armpits to the fireplace, and his yelping collie running circles around them.
"Bastard’s in sorry shape." Beau shook his head in disbelief. He would never understand these people. Who in their right mind would walk in this weather? Was it the alcohol that crazed them or just stupidity?
"Eeeeez, he must be pure frozen." Drifters were common on the reservation, but not this far off the main road, not in this cold. An eerie premonition, a sense of urgency, prodded Winnie’s heart. A guilt-ridden heart that reminded her of the stray Indian bodies often found during the lawless seventies. Hit and run victims, victims of exposure, victims of unsolved murders because of political and spiritual beliefs. Stray bodies treated worse than cattle.
Winnie began pulling off the Indian’s boots. "Crazy, crazy man," she crooned.
"Ought to know better." Beau turned his back. "He’s out of here in the morning. I don’t trust the lowlife."
Winnie ignored Beau. His caustic remarks had ceased to scorch. Nothing about him bothered her anymore.
Beau grabbed the collar of his excited collie. "You’re going to the basement, old boy. I won’t put up with your barking all night." He retired for the evening, leaving his wife to do a woman’s work.
Recognizing frostbite, Winnie quickly warmed water on the stove, preparing to bathe the man’s hard, white, leather-like skin. She sponged slowly and strained her memory to remember why he seemed so vaguely familiar.
"His hands, his feet. They’re in mean shape." Careful not to rub the burnt skin, the woman pulled up her blouse to press his hands, like frozen rocks, against her warm abdomen. A leather string around his neck caught her eye, and she slipped her fingers under the cord, gently tugging a pouch from his neck. "A lakotachi. A real Indian. A full blood with medicine."
Her own pulse quickened as she searched his blue jeans and coat pockets for some identification, some information, all the while pressing his fingers, toes, and face. Because his breathing sounded raspy, Winnie sang the way her grandmother used to sing. She sang for comfort, praying that the spirit of the drifter’s medicine bag would listen because the man’s breathing rattled so ... so like a coiled diamondback ... so like the rattle of death.
"Open your eyes. Open your eyes."
Bending his dead white fingers, she worked her hands down his body, wiggling each toe before placing his foot again on her belly. "Who do you belong to?"
The Indian’s breathing became labored. His limbs shook violently. Winnie drew back in alarm. "He’s dying!" she cried, afraid that she evoked a trickster or worse yet an angry spirit. Panicking, she crawled on top of him, her body covering his thin frame. She blew warm breath upon his neck for him to imitate.
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"Hau!" Old Floyd Bull Bear growled his greeting to the family who had asked for a Lowampi ceremony to bring relief from the cold. The medicine man nodded to his assistant. Hokie Star began preparation, unrolling a canvas covered with sage.
"It is cold, Osni yelo," Old Floyd complained as the front door of the cabin opened. Cursing his arthritic knuckles, he placed sticks, each about the size of an arrow shaft, into a board in front of him. Flags of different colors hung from each stick, red representing the sacred path, black indicating the darkness of the rain clouds, yellow for the sun, and white standing for the gathering of all relatives. On the center flag, Old Floyd slowly fastened a medicine wheel and watched as Hokie poured dirt from a leather bag between the bed of sage and the center flag.
Pressing a drum into the pile, Hokie formed a flat circle and brushed the surface smooth with an eagle feather. He wrapped strings of little pouches filled with tobacco around the altar, their number and their colors reflecting the types of spirits Old Floyd would call.
The blank faces of the arrivals reminded Old Floyd of the rutted frozen terrain. No wind blew outside. Trees crackled as the temperature dropped, splitting their trunks. Sitting cross-legged, Old Floyd eyed several gifts sitting in the corner. Even though his tobacco-stained teeth revealed a number of gaps, he longed to chew the fresh tobacco stuffed in a pouch. Age was creeping through him. His crew cut had turned completely white against his wrinkled, brown, skin. Soon he would be too frail to practice his medicine.
He was bothered. When his grandson, Coyote, failed to return from Rapid City, Old Floyd had to rely on a neighbor to take him to the ceremony. "Pitiful," the medicine man muttered. His grandson, like a large number of young people on the reservation, did no more than drink alcohol and smoke bad weed. Although Floyd Bull Bear had grown up and lived in the reservation period, he often talked proudly of his grandfather who fought in the Battle of Little Big Horn, his own father who survived the Wounded Knee massacre and had taught him the medicine, and his AIM activist son, Louis, who died a warrior’s death because he died for the people. Coyote had no pride.
Hokie sang as he filled the pipe, and then Old Floyd took a stick and marked the earth altar with the sign of his spirit. People encircled the altar. They were an older crowd, the women adding bright colors to the ceremony with their swinging prayer shawls. Blankets were drawn across the windows. The spirits descended as the singers chanted. Streams of blue sparks jumped around the Pipe, the offerings, the water, the soup, and throughout the room. Old Floyd’s rattles, quartz stones from piles of ant hills in hardened leather patches, began to sound, knocking on the floor and the ceiling. Talking loud and fast, the spirits answered each person’s petition in a language that only Old Floyd could understand.
"Hau" said Old Floyd over and over. Amidst the fast-talking spirits, something startling happened. Old Floyd bent his entire body over to listen, placing his ear close to the floor. A different type of spirit was attempting to talk. At first the voice sounded like the blowing wind. The wind turned into whispers. He recognized the voices as belonging to the Gray Hair, Pehin San, the old men of the spirits. Respect flowed through Old Floyd, for he had not called the Pehin San. They were seeking him. Their message was swift and deep. For the first time that night, and only for a short while, a strong wind blew outside the cabin.
The wind blew until the singers finished their song and Old Floyd could tell the people the message of the spirits.
"It is good for us to be here. Lel unkunpi kin he waste. The cold stays for awhile. You must be strong."
"Grandfather thank you, Tunkasila Pilamaya" chorused the assembly.
But the meaning of the second message that Old Floyd had heard from the Gray Hairs would come to him later. Only after reflection would he understand the contents. He did learn this much from the whispering voices: he learned his grandson, Coyote, lay in someone’s home, half dead. Old Floyd felt his face pucker and burn.
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At the same time Old Floyd heard the whispers of the Pehin San, the drifter’s violent shaking ceased. Winnie stayed upon him, a human blanket, inhaling the stale alcohol scent of his worn vinyl coat, the reek of dirty clothing, the same earthy odor she had worn as a little girl living in the hills near Manderson with her grandparents. After their death, she acquired the smell of castile soap and lice powder from the mission boarding school. Now she smelt of lilac perfumed laundry soap because her husband made a decent living out of ranching.
When the cadence of his breathing matched hers, she rolled off and trapped his body heat by piling layers of blankets upon him, all the while pressing a hand, then a foot.
"Jesus the Good Shepherd gathers in his flock all his sheep, even the mangy ones," a long ago voice reminded her. The husky voice of the Episcopalian minister had taught them about heaven. "If you embrace Christianity, you can earn heaven. Just like anyone else."
After she was orphaned, at age nine, Winnie went to live in Pine Ridge with relatives. Listening to the minister, they believed in a heaven filled with gold streets, nice cars, and magnificent buildings.
Ten years later, the same minister introduced her to Beau Hodges, son of a rancher and Evangelical clergyman in Pennington County. A beautiful Indian princess with dark eyes and blue-black hair, Winnie True Blood captured Beau’s heart. In 1965, Beau Hodges built a log cabin near the Badlands. For eighteen years of childless union, Beau and Winnie Hodges shared the home, far away from her relatives in Pine Ridge.
Winnie scattered orange coals with a poker before stacking logs on the fire. Too hot a blaze might singe and dry the drifter’s already blistering skin. Firelight threw shadows on the logged walls, revealing a room balanced by a window on the south and a rock fireplace on the north. Stark decor resonated the life of Beau Hodges. No frills, no color, just a walnut desk in one corner, a black leather sofa, matching chairs, and a throw rug. Her husband prided himself on not ever needing help, not from the government, not from his family, not from a hired hand, not from anyone except his Indian wife.
As the flames in the fireplace crackled and leapt, Winnie stared at the Sioux, mystified about his identity. Why had he found this ranch so far from any government housing, so far off the main road, so isolated from the Indian community? Catching a flutter of his eyelid, she watched his eyes flicker open and stare.
Gasping, Winnie drew back. She knew this man. His eyes had revealed his identity. In front of her was Louis Bull Bear, the husband of the woman who had been her best friend. Louie and his wife had died an unseemly death. Winnie wanted to run into the next room, lock the door, and hide. But she remained rooted in fear and shock because confrontations with ghosts caused strokes, wanagikte. Fearfully, she waited for the affliction to touch and cripple her.
"What do you want from me?" she asked, her hands covering her face in horror. For Lakotas believe ghosts wander the earth losing all sense of direction, hiding in the shadows during the day, roaming the countryside at night, unwilling to leave this world. "I wasn’t in no truck, Louie."
" Driven off the road," an Indian had told Winnie ten years earlier in Wanblee, shortly after the killings. "Somebody knew they were AIM and pushed them off the highway over by Porcupine."
"How do you know?" Winnie had asked, grief-stricken because Angelique Bull Bear had been Winnie’s closest connection to her people. Even after Winnie’s marriage, the two of them would meet and talk, until Louie put a stop to it.
"Winnie True Blood married a white man," he had said. "We can’t trust her anymore. She could be an informer for the Feds." Paranoid, Angelique refused to visit Winnie. Three months later, she lay in her son’s arms at the bottom of the creek, her cheekbones, forehead, and chin smashed into tiny pieces.
"Alcohol," decided the BIA. "Too drunk to be on the road."
But the traditionals and AIM knew better. Louis and Angelique Bull Bear had become steadfast members of the American Indian Movement. They organized AIM meetings, purified their bodies in sweats, and refused alcohol.
"Ain’t no way there was booze," Old Floyd had growled.
The left side of Louis’ white truck, the driver’s side, had been scraped with long streaks of red paint. "Very clear evidence," said one AIM brother "they were pushed off the road." Clear evidence because the Bull Bear truck had soared straight down into an embankment, crumbling the hood like an accordion. The back end jutted into the air, untouched except for the deep bashes and long stripes of red paint on its sides.
No investigation took place. Louis and Angelique were written off as a couple more drunks, buried quickly and forgotten, because so many more were killed and terrorized at the same time.
On the day she learned about Angelique’s death, Winnie had walked southwest of the ranch house to the ridge forming the natural boundary between the short-grass prairie and the Badlands. She knelt to cry. Her wails carried, bouncing off the walls of the empty canyon. Taking her shears, she cut her hair, throwing the strands into the wind.
Beau laughed at her haircut. "You could have gone to a beauty parlor," he said. "We ain’t that hard up." He always laughed at her Indian ways.
Winnie smiled and slicked back her hair. That night after feeding the calves, she noticed, in horror, Beau’s red truck, the right side bent and streaked with white marks. After calming her nerves, she approached her husband.
"What happened to your truck?"
"Had a little accident in Rapid. Damn city drivers." Beau had lit a cigarette, staring at his beautiful wife across the dinner table.
"You using that deer rifle on the front seat for anything?"
"Lordy, you’re an inquisitive one tonight. Just take it out now and then for a little rabbit hunting."
Winnie knew better. Her man was a vigilante rancher working for the Feds, the BIA and their hoodlum security force, the goons, to destroy the Indian way of life. Terrified, she stayed far away from anyone. AIM could easily decide she had helped her husband. She felt much relief when Beau bought a new pickup.
The Indian in front of her stared a death stare. Winnie now understood the ghost’s unwillingness to leave this world.
"Justice will happen, Louie. Go home." Winnie felt foolish trying to reason with a spirit. "I tried to warm you but your body wouldn’t warm. You don’t belong here anymore."
She expected the ghost to simply disappear. But the ghost tried, instead, to sit up on his elbows. His weakened condition caused him to fall backward, leaving delicate nerve endings screaming.
"Don’t hurt me!" Winnie fell against the wall. "My husband killed you! Coyote doesn’t have a father because of...." Staring at the thrashing man, Winnie stopped. Could it be? Coyote?
"Are you Coyote?" Awestruck, she pressed her fingertips upon him again, experiencing little emotional relief, because now she believed Coyote a test.
"Avenge the wrong, Winnie Hodges? How long does it take to avenge the murder of your friends?" The backlash of disapproval shrieked from the spirits. "You sold your soul to a man who killed your own tribal blood."
"I am trying. The guys and I, we gotta move slowly. Otherwise, Beau will figure it out." She argued with the voices inside her head. ‘We need a little more time. Just a little more time and Beau will lose everything."
Coyote Bull Bear, son of Louis and Angelique, slept in front of her, a reminder that Grandfather God allowed no mockery. Winnie dared not leave him alone, lest he catch another chill and end his life.
Tossing wool blankets on the floor, she sank beside the sleeping man, using her heavy body to shield the draft leaking from the front door. Her eyes rarely closed that night, her mind rarely ceased to think, remembering the tall Indian, Galen Many Stars, a leader of the AIM movement at his camp in the Black Hills.
The AIM meeting had taken place five years earlier when she met Galen Many Stars and the conspiracy began. Winnie reported her husband’s every move. Like vultures, the conspirators waited until Beau Hodges left his ranch, and then stole his cattle.
When Beau began to suspect foul play, Winnie responded with a tale of seeing a mountain lion drag off a calf. Beau set poison traps. He even brought his father and his cousin over from Pennington County. With Winnie’s help, they rode the range for several nights and days. They saw nothing.
Caught, Beau Hodges became frustrated. The rancher couldn’t rely on the sheriff’s patrols from the bordering white counties, he lived out of their jurisdiction. He lived too far away from the BIA villages for Indian police protection. When he finally asked the BIA for help, he met prejudice for the first time. No half-breed police officer was eager to help a white man who lived out near the rim of the Badlands.
The conspirator’s plan was meant to take only three years, but had managed to slip into five.
"I can’t handle this much more," Winnie had pleaded at the last gathering.
"Be patient, Winnie," replied her lover, Galen. "We finish this spring. This spring Beau Hodges will be ruined."
But Winnie understood Coyote Bull Bear was a messenger from the spirits to remind her they could waste no more time.
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"We ‘bout ready to bring ’em cattle in?" hollered a wiry Chippewa Indian as he leaped, catlike, over a sagging wooden gate into the shed. "This cold is too much, man." Jimbo’s voice was muted behind a ski mask and a scarf wrapped around his throat. He jumped up and down to keep warm. "Gotta tell Galen that we can’t keep goin’ on like this. I mean, we ain’t got all our life to get this done."
His partner placed a worn boot against a bale and yanked on the twine until the straw fell into a heap around his feet. He kicked the clumps of straw over the cement floor. The Indian’s feet were so cold, after shoveling frozen manure, that he couldn’t feel his toes and the large-knuckled fingers inside his gloves were sore. But he didn’t complain. Willy wasn’t a complainer.
Jimbo kicked at a straw bale in frustration. "So far, Galen has us all sticking together. But I dunno man. Another year of this. I dunno. Too much pressure."
Willy shrugged and looked at Jimbo with his strange sad eyes. "You’d be headed for the pen if it weren’t for Galen," he reminded Jimbo. "You were a nobody, a drunken vet. Galen has us learning what it means to be Indian." Willy towered over Jimbo, a giant. A six-foot-seven gangly, double jointed, odd-looking giant with the characteristic beak nose, strong jawline, and high cheekbones of a fullblood Sioux.
"But he promised us, man. He promised us we’d have us a ranch in three years. We’re going on five, man."
Willy didn’t answer, knowing Jimbo’s mood reflected the cold. But he thought the little Chippewa was right. A person’s nerves could barely take the constant scheming and extra work, even when the weather did cooperate.
Jimbo unwired the wooden gate. Worn hinges screeched as he shoved the panel back against the wall. The two men strode out in the cold dark night, into a makeshift corral built in front of the barn. Using the yard light and the headlights of their truck, they counted the cattle eating hay in front of the barn.
"Watcha count?"
"I got twenty, here." Jimbo hollered. "Let’s move ‘em inside." He began slapping the rears of lethargic cattle. When the forecast promised the coldest night yet, a minus forty, and reported a stockman’s warning for the nineteenth day in a row, Willy and Jimbo had made yet another trip from the Cheyenne River Reservation to a rented piece of land in the foothills of the Black Hills near Piedmont, South Dakota.
"The honkies will think we’re moving in," Willy joked in return, though he understood the importance of keeping a low profile. The local ranchers knew just enough to keep their curiosity satiated. Willy had overheard their talk. ‘Yeah, those two Injuns are working for some California oilman who’s dabbling in cattle.’ As long as Willy and Jimbo worked for a white rancher, as long as they stayed away from their town and away from their bars, the locals asked no questions.
"Eeeeez man, you know it’s cold when ice keeps creeping up on this heated watering tank. That rich actor know what we’re up against? This is starting to get hard, man. I keep thinking that some day one of them white ranchers at the sale barn is going to nail us. I keep thinking they might figure out we’re branding over Hodges’ sideways H and’ll throw us in the pen for cattle rustling." Jimbo had taken an axe and chiseled away at chunks of ice forming on the side of the tank.
"That’s why we sell the Herefords as fast as we get ‘em. Buy our own brand." Willy spoke thoughtfully, as if to console Jimbo. He was proud that over the past five years they had built a small herd and deposited enough cash in a savings account to start their own ranch. He was just waiting for the final blow that would drive Beaumont Hodges of Shannon County out of business.
"Tell me bro, what we doing here?" Jimbo shouted.
Willy chuckled. He and Jimbo talked like this when one of them was in a low mood or when they both needed to be reminded why they kept believing in a dream.
"Cause we got tired of reading NO INDIANS ALLOWED when we was growin’ up," Willy shouted as he stumbled across the frozen sod to the other end of the barn.
"I’m putting up with this freeze for what reason?" Jimbo followed his giant partner much like a dog would a master.
"Cause we’re getting us our own ranch. Indians don’t need to be owned by no white government."
"I hear them skins, they don’t do so well on the rez. I hear it’s because they ain’t willing to obey them BIA officials." The louder Jimbo shouted the more he could forget the cold.
"Keep ‘em starved. Keep ‘em passive. Keep ‘em confused. That’s what the honkies use to keep control." Willy hollered back, repeating the exact words of Galen Many Stars. The large man took a flashlight out of his coat pocket and stuck it under his arm as he unlocked a padlock and pushed back a door on rusty rollers. He glanced inside, quickly throwing the meager beam across two trucks with hoods chained shut in case somebody found them and thought about stealing their batteries. Nothing looked amiss.
Jumping into their pickup, the men drove away from the lonely shed. They had spent no more than thirty minutes in the cold, but their bodies were nearly frozen.
"Gonna be a long day tomorrow." Willie tried to make conversation. "Gotta get up at five to warm the school for the kids."
"Not me, bro. I ain’t no BIA broom pusher. I got nothin’ waiting for me except a ranch over near them Badlands."
Willy laughed. A person had to understand Jimbo. Vietnam had made him a bit crazy. He roved from one small job to the next. He attended AA meetings to keep sober. He was good fun. But most of all, Willy and Jimbo, they shared a dream.
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