Free Killing Custer by Margaret Coel Page B

people and many beautiful women. He gave the women to his men for whores. The warriors scouted him after that. They vowed to kill him. I would have told him that, and he would have known to leave.”
    â€œI understand,” Father John said. “But Edward Garrett was not Custer.”
    â€œHe thought Custer was brave and honorable.” Elena swallowed hard and looked down at her hands wrapped around the coffee mug. “Now he’s dead. More killings will come. Just like after Bighorn, soldiers dropped out of the sky and flooded our lands and killed the ancestors. Cops are gonna flood the rez, and the tribal cops will help them, just like they helped kill Crazy Horse. I should’ve found the white man and told him.”
    â€œListen to me, Elena.” Father John had let go of her hand, but now he took it again between his own. “I’m a white man. I’m telling you that the chances are very small, probably nonexistent, that Garrett would have given your dream vision any thought at all. His own daughter had a vision. She pleaded with him not to ride in the parade, and he rode anyway.”
    â€œNo good will come of this.” She sat back against her chair and stared past him a long moment. “I wish I could go to the ancestors.”
    â€œWhat about the people who need you here? What about the mission? What would we do without you?”
    â€œI don’t have good feelings.”
    â€œYes, I know.”
    â€œYou’d starve to death.”
    That was true, he told her.
    * * *
    IT WAS ALMOST noon before the phones stopped ringing. What will happen to the warriors? Will they all be arrested? Charged with murder? He had tried to convince people not to worry too much. The investigation had just started. The voice of the bishop saying much the same floated from the back office. After a fifteen-minute lull, he’d walked down the hallway and told the bishop he was going out for a short while. The old man had looked up from the book open on his desk, given him a little wave, and said what he usually said. He would hold down the fort.
    Traffic was light on Seventeen-Mile Road, a few old pickups and sedans, sun glinting on the windshields. The brown humpbacked foothills rose into the sky ahead. An odd silence hung over the plains around him. Wind rippled the wild grasses and knocked against the pickup. In the distance, he could see horses grazing in a pasture. It reminded him of a still-life painting, everything stopped and waiting.
    He swung right and fifteen minutes later pulled into the dirt lot behind a convenience store in Ethete. Light traffic moving through town, people pumping gas in front of the store, others going in and out. Almost normal, he thought, and yet a heaviness in the air, as if a storm were gathering. He parked and walked through the shade dropping from the building toward the entrance, waved to Ernest Featherstone, about to jam a gas nozzle into the tank of his truck, then held the door for a woman and two toddlers. Inside, cool air washed over him from the air conditioner that buzzed overhead. A small crowd bunched around the food counter on the left.
    â€œHow you doing, Father?” Mike Longshot stood behind the counter, crooking his neck to peer past a heavyset woman with a thick, black braid that curled down the back of her white tee shirt. Father John waited while Mike poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup, straightened out the wrinkled bills the woman handed him, and swung toward the cash register. He was thin, with ropey arms and a blue vein that pulsed in the middle of his forehead. He wore a light blue shirt buttoned down the front with a nametag clipped to his chest that said, Mike. About five foot eight, Father John guessed, but he loomed taller from the platform behind the counter, absorbed in counting change into the woman’s outstretched hand, as if the rest of the store, the people sipping coffee and Cokes and eating hot dogs in the