Icepick Page 11

  The inside of the place was as Spartan as John Horse’s cinderblock castle in the Florida swamp. No pictures on the walls, no bric-a-brac. The living room, if that’s what you called it, had a single ratty armchair and a couple of ladder backs, all facing an ancient blond-wood television set.

  ‘Does that thing work?’ I asked him, pointing at it.

  He nodded. ‘All three channels! I like “M.A.S.H.”’

  I didn’t know what that was, but I nodded like I did. I didn’t own a television. That, plus the fact that I didn’t know the difference between football and pinochle, made it impossible for me to have any sort of small talk with half the population of America.

  Harjo took a seat in the armchair and nodded in the direction of the other chairs in the room.

  I sat. John Horse did not.

  ‘Bear Talmascy is lost,’ Harjo began. ‘He isn’t a human being any more. His spirit is gone from his body, I think. I don’t know what he is now. He was always hanging out in Oklahoma City, trying to get on the inside of Pody Poe’s gambling operation, but he was small potatoes until recently. Suddenly he’s got money and a little bit of reputation. I don’t know why, but I can tell you that the criminals in Oklahoma City don’t like him, and no self-respecting Seminole will speak to him. He pays some of us off, but the rest, we turn away from him.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘You already know,’ he said softly. ‘He brings women here against their will. Seminole women. They’re kept where we never see them, in a couple of houses just outside of Tecumseh.’

  ‘About halfway between here and Oklahoma City,’ John Horse piped in.

  ‘What for?’ I pressed. ‘Why does he bring these women here?’

  Harjo shrugged. But I could see in his eyes he had ideas, and they weren’t very good ones.

  ‘OK, let me venture a wild idea that I’ve been forming for a while now,’ I said. ‘The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma gets federal money based on population, right? I know this because of – well, a previous case.’

  Harjo nodded slowly.

  ‘So, Talmascy figured out a way to make money by counting these extra people, these women, as members of the Oklahoma congregation. Something like that. It’s a variation of a tried and true Social Security scam. Get the extra money based on population, only take the money for yourself. The thing is it looks a lot more legal because they’ve got proof: there actually are more people there – these Florida Seminoles.’

  Harjo sat forward. John Horse was frozen, waiting for me to go on with my raving.

  ‘But once these women are here,’ I went on, ‘you don’t see them, you said. They’re kept apart. And the choices start getting pretty terrible after that.’

  ‘Prostitution,’ John Horse said.

  ‘Judging from the way Sharp and Duck behave,’ I said, ‘does it seem likely that their mother would cotton on to that?’

  John Horse shook his head. ‘Not unless she was drugged. I’ve heard of that.’

  Harjo nodded sagely. ‘I saw that on “Kojack”. Twice.’

  ‘Well,’ I hedged, ‘I don’t know if you’d consider this worse, or not, but a part of the Social Security scam I was talking about includes, like, disposing of certain people in order to collect their checks for a while. I mean, it’s only a couple of hundred bucks per person, but if you have even, say, ten people, two thousand dollars a month buys a guy a lot of nice suits.’

  ‘Talmascy would do that,’ Harjo agreed. ‘I told you: his spirit was gone from his body.’

  ‘Maybe he came up with this idea,’ I concluded, ‘and got Poe to bankroll him – you know, transportation expenses and whatever.’

  ‘With the help of your New York friends?’ John Horse asked.

  ‘Not my friends,’ I told him. ‘But yes. And now Talmascy is in the process of collecting the money and paying Poe off.’

  ‘It’s possible.’ Harjo stood up.

  I stood too. ‘So, let’s go to this place, these houses you just told me about, and get our people. Simple.’

  John Horse didn’t move. ‘I don’t think it will be that simple.’

  I understood what he meant. ‘He’ll have guys. Sure.’

  ‘Maybe even more owl people,’ John Horse said. ‘They’re not so easy to beat.’

  I didn’t want to offend anybody by calling their superstitions ridiculous, but I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘I understand that this “owl people” thing is a story to scare children,’ I began to John Horse.

  ‘They believe it,’ he interrupted.

  ‘They drink human blood,’ Harjo chimed in. ‘And they eat human organs. I’ve seen them do it.’

  I started to try again. ‘Look …’

  But John Horse held up a single finger.

  ‘Even if they do it just to scare other people,’ he said to me, ‘is that really the sort of person you want to walk up to and say, “Give me the women, I’m taking them back to Florida”?’

  ‘You make a point,’ I admitted. ‘At the very least, they’ll have guns.’

  ‘You don’t have a gun?’ Harjo asked me.

  ‘He doesn’t like them,’ John Horse explained.

  ‘That’s not what all Jews think,’ Harjo said. ‘The guys I fought with in the war—’

  ‘In my experience,’ I interrupted, ‘there is no such thing as “what all Jews think”. If you get three Jews together in a locked room, they’ll come out with four different opinions on any subject. I just don’t like guns. They go off. And when they do, somebody’s liable to get hurt, and sometimes it might be me.’

  ‘He’s used guns before,’ John Horse went on. ‘And he’s pretty good at it. He probably even has one on him right now. He just doesn’t like them.’

  Harjo shrugged. ‘I have a shotgun.’

  I bit my lip. ‘Against my entire upbringing, I am forced to ask: should we call the cops?’

  They didn’t like that idea any more than I did.

  ‘No telling which cops are a part of it,’ John Horse said. ‘Like the ones in Fry’s Bay.’

  I nodded.

  ‘So Talmascy’s got guys there at these houses,’ I ventured. ‘Should we have guys? Do you have any idea where we might get guys of our own?’

  ‘Oh.’ Harjo looked out one of the windows. ‘Sure. When I tell the neighbors what’s going on, we’ll probably only get a couple hundred volunteers.’

  FIFTEEN

  Tecumseh, Oklahoma, was named after a leader of the Shawnee. He had a war named after him, against the United States, aligning him and the Shawnee with the British in the War of 1812. The Shawnee were originally from around the Ohio River, but sometime in the early 1800s, a lot of them came to what was called the ‘Indian Territory’ now referred to as Oklahoma.

  One of Tecumseh’s main beefs with the government, as I had heard it, was that he considered all so-called ‘Indian’ land to be owned in common by all tribes. But he also had a brother known as The Prophet. His given name was Lalawethika, which means ‘He Makes a Loud Noise’. His noise was that white people were all children of the Evil Spirit and all the tribes in the Midwest ought to fight them, but that went to hell when Tecumseh was killed.

  The town itself wasn’t very noisy at all. It had been a cotton town until the Depression. After that, the population dropped and it was a pretty sleepy burg, under five thousand people. And the outskirts were a lot of flat land; dry dust.

  The group of houses where Harjo thought the women were kept would have given the word shack a bad name. Three of them, each one worse than the other. That crappy asbestos shingling, pale green, all falling down and rotting wood. About eight hundred square feet apiece. Windows boarded up. The front doors had padlocks on them.

  And there were men with guns wandering around, looking mean and hot and hungry. About ten of them.

  The sky was high and pale blue, no clouds, too much sun, when my black T-Bird pulled up a little too close to the first house. Behind me there was a caravan of at l
east thirty other vehicles, mostly pickups. Every one of them had at least two guys inside. And I use the term ‘guys’ generically, as nearly half were women. Pissed-off, steely-eyed Seminole women. With very big guns.

  As they drew closer, these cars and trucks gathered by Eddie Harjo, they formed a circle around the three houses, pointed in, headlights on, engines roaring.

  The guards, the Caucasian men who were supposed to be guarding the three houses, turned even whiter than they ordinarily were. Guns up, hands shaking, eyes wide and bloodshot.

  I stepped out of the car, along with John Horse, and smiled at one of the guards.

  ‘I don’t like your chances here,’ I said to him. ‘Just put your guns down and walk away.’

  ‘You–you’re trespassing,’ he managed to say. ‘Private property.’

  He aimed his gun at me.

  ‘You don’t really have much of a choice,’ I told him sympathetically. ‘You’re, like, surrounded.’

  Then John Horse called out a single word, and every car and truck door opened. Out came Seminole men and women, guns pointed, glaring. Silent as the grave.

  ‘I’ve never really been a part of anything like this,’ I said a little louder. ‘And I have to tell you, it feels pretty cool.’

  ‘Trespassing!’ the guard repeated in a very shaky voice.

  ‘Look,’ I went on. ‘I don’t want to tell you your business, but you’re Custer, and this guy with me is Crazy Horse.’

  John Horse waved at them amiably.

  It was immediately clear that the guard didn’t know what I meant, so that told me how stupid he was.

  ‘This land is protected by Bear Talmascy,’ he said, trying to sound a little bolder, ‘and he’s a big deal in these parts.’

  John Horse stared at the guy and called out another word, a single syllable.

  Every Seminole gun made a cocking noise. I started sweating from the sound of it, and the guns weren’t even aimed at me.

  About half the guards lowered their guns right away. One of them even put his rifle down on the ground.

  ‘You can walk away from here now, like Foggy said,’ John Horse said softly. ‘Or you can die in the dirt. I don’t really care which. But one or the other is going to happen in the next sixty seconds. One …’

  Most of the guards ditched their guns then. Two held out, including the main one we’d been talking to. He was about twenty, crew-cut jumper, dirty jeans. He was wearing a work shirt that said Steve.

  ‘Seriously,’ I said, taking a step toward him. ‘Steve. Considering that you’re guarding Seminole women, the people in these trucks that have you outgunned, they would rather kill you. Do you want to die? Or do you want to go into town and have a beer?’

  He squinted. ‘I know you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How you know my name?’

  That made John Horse laugh.

  I called out to the rest of the white guys, ‘If you’ve already set your guns down, cop a walk, it’s OK. Just take off and no hard feelings.’

  All but Steve and one other guy split. Jumped into pickups of their own, and evaporated like the sweat on Steve’s forehead was trying to do.

  Steve kept his rifle pointed at me. It was a hunting rifle, well-used, and he had the look in his eye, the one that said he’d killed more than animals with it.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t shoot me, Steve,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got a mother and an aunt in Brooklyn, and two little kids in Florida counting on me. And it won’t accomplish anything. The second you fire, you’ll be a whole lot dead.’

  ‘Mr Talmascy already paid me a lot of money.’ But I could tell his resolve was weakening.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Then why don’t you go and spend some of it instead of getting dead?’

  That made him think.

  ‘Bear Talmascy is already dead,’ John Horse said calmly. ‘His body just doesn’t know it yet.’

  That scared Steve – you could tell by his eyes.

  ‘Go on, Steve,’ I encouraged him. ‘Walk away. Live to do something stupid another day, right?’

  Steve surveyed the fifty or sixty people surrounding him with guns. He was slow; it apparently took a lot of his brain power to think it all out but, in the end, he lowered his rifle.

  ‘Come on, little brother,’ he said to the only other remaining idiot. ‘Let’s go get us a damn Arby’s.’

  With that, they both turned and got into the last truck, a cherry-red Ford, jacked up, with oversized tires. They made a show of roaring off, spewing dust.

  Everything was quiet for a minute, and then Eddie Harjo called out a couple of words I didn’t know, and most of the people got back in their trucks and split.

  A few pulled up near us while John Horse and I went to the closest house.

  John Horse had a small crowbar that Harjo had given him. He snapped the padlock off the door in three seconds.

  I opened it up, but nothing happened. He said a couple of other words I’d never heard, and a dozen women swept toward him from the darkened rooms.

  ‘Echu Matta?’ I called out. ‘I’ve come here because your children are looking for you.’

  Nothing.

  John Horse asked a few of the women about the kids’ mother as they went past him out into the sunlight and the waiting arms of caring strangers.

  No one knew a thing.

  ‘One of the other houses,’ John Horse said to me.

  In the second house, we found nine women from John Horse’s village. They were all very happy to see him, but not like Caucasian happy – nothing effusive or loud. Still, I noticed that just seeing him immediately erased a whole lot of worry lines in their faces. Their clothes were a little worse for wear, and they were very thirsty. The locals gave them all a good bit of water. I didn’t like what that said about their treatment.

  But still no Echu Matta.

  After a little reassurance from John Horse that I was on the level, one of the women volunteered that she’d worked at the Benton with the kids’ mother.

  ‘Echu Matta,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper, ‘might be dead. She bit a man’s ear off and broke his arm. She was fierce when they put us in the shipping container in Fry’s Bay. They put the rest of us in and locked the door, but they took her away.’

  ‘And since you got here,’ I said, ‘you haven’t heard anything about her?’

  She shook her head. ‘John Horse says you’re helping her children.’

  ‘I’m trying.’

  ‘What are you helping them to do?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, looking around the complex, ‘I’m helping them find their mother.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well. If she’s not dead, Bear Talmascy might know where she is. If she is dead, of course, he wouldn’t know anything about her, because he’s lost his ability to see the afterlife.’

  ‘How do you know that name?’ I asked. ‘He’s from Oklahoma. John Horse always tells me that the Oklahoma Seminoles and the Florida families don’t really know each other. Did you see him in Fry’s Bay? Do you know him?’

  ‘No, I don’t know him,’ she said. ‘I just heard Echu Matta yelling about him as they were taking her away, in the abandoned bakery.’

  ‘How did she know his name?’ I asked her.

  She looked back and forth between me and John Horse a couple of times before she spoke.

  ‘Ehee,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that word?’ I asked John Horse. ‘What does that mean?’

  He sighed, and tried to avoid eye contact with me.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked him. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘It’s one of our words for husband,’ he said. ‘I probably should have told you about that.’

  SIXTEEN

  A couple of hours later, I stood in the Oklahoma City Greyhound bus station with John Horse. He was wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Museum of Osteology: Make no Bones About It!’ The museum, I learned, had more than five thousand animal skeletons from all over the
world. It was the only museum of its kind in the world. And it was located in Oklahoma City. John Horse thought the shirt was funny. He thought it would lighten the mood.

  ‘I hope you understand,’ he told me. ‘I have to go back home with these women. Just like you have to stay here and find Bear Talmascy. And Echu Matta.’

  ‘It’s a long ride.’ I stared at the greyhound on the side of the bus.

  ‘It’ll be nice to stretch out. Your car is very cramped.’ He smiled.

  I looked down. ‘Am I sure I’m doing the right thing?’

  ‘Are you ever?’

  ‘No.’ I shrugged. ‘But I guess I always know when I’m going wrong. And I’m not wrong to be here in Oklahoma. She’s here, I can feel that. The kids’ mother is somewhere in this city.’

  ‘With Bear.’ He nodded.

  We’d already discussed how it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d known that Bear was the kids’ father. He was so estranged that the kids wouldn’t have known who he was. Still, John Horse felt bad about not telling me that particular family secret, especially as Echu Matta had insisted that nobody outside the family should know it.

  The bus was ready to leave, and neither one of us was very good at saying goodbye. He tilted his head. I raised my eyebrows. That was about it. He got on the bus, and the bus pulled out of the station.

  At that moment, I felt more out of place than I ever had in my life. Fish out of water. Oklahoma City seemed so dry and hot, and I was sure I was the only Jew within a hundred miles.

  Maybe it was just because of John Horse’s T-shirt, but it felt like a city of bones, the skeleton’s home place. Dust to dust.

  In that cheery frame of mind, I headed back to the Hook ’N’ Slice to see if I could get a bead on Pody Poe. Who would, in turn, direct me to Bear Talmascy. I knew it was risky, but I really didn’t want to stand around the bus station thinking too much.

  As I parked my car at the putt-putt course, I was weirdly relieved to see that Rita was still at the counter, talking on the phone.

  And when I approached, Rita gave me the eye and said, ‘Sorry, I’ll call you right back. Visiting fireman alert.’

  I got myself into the shade of the booth’s roof and leaned in a little.