Yellow Earth Read online

  “I don’t know a soul in this town.”

  The tall one, the one he’s positioned his chair to watch, comes over to them.

  “Fellas, you see we’ve got people stacked up, you’re gonna have to order something else or free up the table.”

  She’s even taller up close, a single braid over the shoulder, skin like new snow that nobody has stepped on yet.

  “Sorry,” says Wayne Lee, reading that she is TINA on the little nametag over her left breast. High school still? “Brent here said we should leave, but I bugged him to hang so I could look at you some more.”

  And she blushes. Can’t have had this job for long if a strange guy can nail her like that.

  “No, really. Brent’s been trying to convince me to stay in town a while, and he wasn’t doing too good till I saw you.”

  Tina fights back a smile. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “No, thanks, we’ll clear out.” Wayne Lee stands. They can tell if you’re lying, just tossing grenades into the pond to see what floats to the surface. But look them in the eye and drop an honest compliment–

  “You full-time here, Tina?”

  “I fill in a couple hours after school.” She is already removing their cups.

  “I’m gonna have to develop a taste for the bean, then. My name’s Wayne Lee Hickey, the muscle-bound guy here is Brent, and it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  He starts out then, don’t push it, leave em laughing.

  Brent mutters at the door. “Still thinking with your dick.”

  “You know those sticks the water-well guys used to carry around?”

  “Divining rods.”

  “Mine was starting to wiggle.”

  “Yours was threatening to bust through the zipper. I’m betting sixteen, and you’d better check the age of consent law up here.”

  They step out into the wind and the truck exhaust and he gets a last look through the window. Coltish– that’s the word.

  Brent steps to block his way, spreading those iron-pumping arms out wide.

  “So what do you say?”

  The answer is pretty much his personal motto, tattooed on his left shoulder in what the inkster called Blackletter Font.

  “What the fuck,” says Wayne Lee.

  IT’S ALWAYS A BIT of a chess game with the Chairman. First off, there’s maintaining your physical space, not that he’s ever actually made a move, but it feels like if she ever gave him the slightest hint she was open to it–

  “So I thought this was settled with the boat, Ruby,” he says. “Our gaming compact specifically states–”

  “The Tribe is furthermore authorized to conduct gaming on navigable waters within the exterior boundaries of the Reservation, limited to excursion boats offering food service, where passengers may board and unboard only from the Tribe’s marina co-located with said casino… ’”

  “Cut and dried.”

  “Though ‘unboard’ isn’t really a word. And ‘co-located.’”

  “What’s the hold-up?”

  “That’s only your agreement with the state. It still has to be approved by the IGRA.”

  “Why would they have a problem?”

  “They have go through the whole deal. Minimum Internal Control Standards.”

  “Can’t we just tell them that nobody not approved to work in the regular casino will be used to–”

  “I’ve filed all the details with them. It just takes time.”

  If you don’t hold the fort, Harleigh will have you post-dating documents, jumping the gun left and right. Some of her job here is to save the Chairman from himself.

  “I got some good friends over there,” he says. “I’ll make a couple phone calls.”

  “That might help. Now about this lease situation– “

  “It’s a rat’s nest.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  Ruby lays a land-title map of the reservation on the desk between them. The whole western half is a jumble of blue, yellow, and red rectangles with no discernible pattern.

  “Tribal land, allotments, fee-simple land, government trust land,” she says, waving her fingers over the rectangles.

  “I know, I know, and the kicker is that any oil outfit wants a certain amount of elbow room to drill. The people who hold these little three- and four-acre plots–”

  “Swat Gilchrist’s bunch are buying them up.”

  The Chairman stops to consider this. It isn’t often Ruby knows something cooking on the rez before he does.

  “Swat has a bunch?”

  Swat is their top man at the casino, who was a good enough hitter to get pretty far in the minor leagues before he came home. He can run percentages for you without ever looking at a calculator.

  “Badlands Petro. He brought some New York investment firm in to back it, and the company has been tying up leases left and right.”

  “It’s an oil company?”

  “If flipping documents makes you one.”

  Harleigh chews on this for a minute. He’s sitting under her wall photos of Wilma Mankiller and Shirley Chisholm, looking a lot less sure of himself than they do.

  “We can’t really step in, can we? If the land is individually held.”

  “No matter how it’s held, if it’s within the reservation boundaries the BIA and the BLM have to okay the contract.”

  The Chairman has his parody versions of the acronyms– Busting Indian Asses and the Bureau of Looting and Mugging– but looks pleased at this information.

  “So we’re off the hook. It’s up to the Feds.”

  “Who’ve got way too much to deal with on their teeny budget, even without Congress threatening to shut the country down again–”

  Harleigh grins. “People think Indian politics is bad, they just got to look at Washington.”

  “So you’re not worried about Swat?”

  Harleigh looks out at the few cars creeping along the New Center main street, tilting his head the way he does when he’s strategizing.

  “Swat’s uncle Les had my job before you come here. Les was doing some skimming, getting federal money for jobs that didn’t really exist, giving people a title and two-thousand dollars a month while he kept the other six that had been mandated. Got his nuts caught in the wringer, of course, and he tried to get his nephew to claim some transactions, explain away all these checks kicking money back to his personal account. But Swat sat there on the witness stand and told the truth.”

  “Convicted?”

  “Embezzling, misapplying and converting tribal funds, knowingly and willfully making false material claims– guilty on all counts.”

  “Pretty heavy for the nephew to be the one to–”

  “Swat’s a good boy.”

  “With a head for numbers.”

  “That’s why we put him at the casino.”

  “But his involvement with Badlands–”

  “If he didn’t have an important job on the reservation to wave around, sitting on all our casino money, the New York investment people wouldn’t have listened to him. And if he wasn’t a popular young fella around here who can impress folks with his contacts in the white people’s world, they wouldn’t be sending their leases his way. That’s capitalism, Ruby. Hell, in Washington–”

  “In Washington people get indicted.”

  “But rarely convicted, not if they’ve got smart lawyers.”

  “Not if they got smart lawyers and listen to their advice.”

  “What are you advising me, Ruby?” An edge to his tone.

  The job pays really well and there’s never a shortage of things to do. Lots of good people here, with less of a defeatist attitude than many of the places she’s worked, plus she’s not related to a soul on the reservation, no barefoot cousins coming to her for redress or advantage. She’d like to hold on here at least another couple years.

  “I’m just reminding you that I am principle counsel for the Nations, not for you or any other individual, elected official or not.”
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  “I understand that.”

  “So when we’re discussing the oil resources here, I represent the interests of the enrollment, and not–”

  Harleigh holds up his hand and begins to quote, “‘WHEREAS, The Constitution of the Three Nations generally authorizes and empowers the Tribal Business Council to engage in activities on behalf of and in the best interest of the welfare and benefit of the Tribe and the enrolled members thereof– ‘ We’re on the same side, darlin.”

  On the other hand, there comes a point where you’ve got to cut bait and paddle away. Ruby grew up in a hut with a dirt floor. She didn’t live with indoor plumbing till she went to college, tended bar to make ends meet during law school, clerked for a federal district judge in California. She won’t have trouble finding another position if she puts the word out.

  “There’s a lot of money at stake here, Mr. Chairman. Crazy money. People do crazy things.”

  “You know the Wounded Knee story?”

  “Teresa Crow’s Ghost told me.”

  “I mean the first Wounded Knee, the massacre in the snow.”

  He must have been a good teacher, good school principal, way back when. The energy, the sense of conviction–

  “I know the history,” she says. “I’ve seen the photographs.”

  “There’s a part of it doesn’t get told too often.” Harleigh sits back in his chair, full storyteller mode.

  “When the Ghost Dance started moving up from Nevada, tribe to tribe, there was a young Sioux named Plenty Horses, who’d just come home from the Carlisle School.”

  “I had relatives who were there.”

  “Yeah, they took kids from all over, pretty much every tribe. Anyway, Plenty Horses had been there six years, didn’t much care for it, mostly they sent him out to work on farms. But six years is a long time in a young man’s life, he come back to the new rez they’d just stuck his people on, and he couldn’t fit in no more. His Lakota didn’t sound right, and his old friends and family treated him like an outcast.”

  Ruby knows the treatment. Her first week back in the pueblo, whenever she’d been off at school for a while, it was ‘Oh, look who decided to come pay a visit’ and ‘You haven’t dyed your hair blond yet?’

  “So he’s there when the massacre happens– not in the line of fire, but right in the middle of the whole build-up and the killing. And two days after Big Foot and all those people are murdered, he walks up behind this cavalry lieutenant during a parley and blows his brains out.”

  This part she didn’t know.

  “From behind?”

  “If he’d come head-on carrying a weapon he couldn’t have got so close, could he? Now Plenty Horses thinks he’s made it as a martyr, right, he’ll be hanged by the US Army and the tribe will honor him as a warrior. He’ll be a legend. But those photographs you’ve seen got published back east, and the word come out that it was just some jumpy soldiers overreacting and then getting blood-hungry, killing everybody in sight. So the army got an image problem, people’s jobs are on the line, and they got to go into damage control mode. It wasn’t a misunderstanding or a flare-up of tensions, they say, it was a war. A real short one, granted, but a bonafide war, and as such Plenty Horses is just an enemy combatant, not a murderer, and it’s not long before he’s cut loose again, just another poor broken soul on the rez who speaks better English than most.”

  “I’m struggling to make a connection here, Harleigh,” she says. “The army hasn’t been called in here yet.”

  “What I’m getting at is that if they want to nail you they’ll always find a good excuse. But if you got something they need–”

  “And that would be?”

  “The company I’m mostly dealing with, alla these outfits, got good friends in DC. Why you think the EPA is forbidden to butt in when it’s oil extraction? Cause Mr. Cheney and some other heavy hitters in the Congress got busy for their friends at Halliburton. The big folks want something to happen, a lot of the formalities get pushed aside.”

  “Misuse of influence.”

  “As long as Swat doesn’t go dipping into Three Nations’ money, he’s got the right to operate in the free market.”

  Indian Law, her favorite professor used to say, was to the regular law what Ozzy Osbourne was to Justin Timberlake. Regular law refined itself as it went along, attempting to be clearer, fairer, while Indian Law was eight-tenths Greed and two-tenths Guilt, not evolving so much as jerking desperately this way and that like a hooked fish in a small pond.

  Ruby holds her hands up in surrender. “So we’re not overseeing the lease agreements.”

  “Only on the land the Nations hold in trust. But even there we got TERO regs, we got fragmentation of heredity.”

  “What?”

  “Somebody with an allotment dies and their estate goes to twelve different people.”

  “I think that’s termed ‘heirship.’”

  “Airship?

  “‘Heir’ with the silent ‘h.’”

  “Well it’s a beast to deal with. There’s this hundred-percent-signature requirement, which means a lot of parcels can’t even be considered for drilling because there’s one sorehead.”

  “That’s a federal statute.”

  “Which I want you to get them to modify.”

  The Bureau of Indian Affairs has been everybody’s whipping boy for so long they are almost numb, but there are some sensible people there and they know they no longer hold all the cards.

  “To what?”

  “Say eighty, ninety percent. That would take care of most of the problems we got right now.”

  “I’ll need some strong language from the business council.”

  “You write it, we’ll put our names on it. This is high priority, Ruby, we don’t want to get left behind.”

  When she passed the bar exam Ruby felt like a warrior, with the Law a sophisticated weapon she could use to defend her people. Lately she thinks about how any weapon, left around the house, can just be trouble.

  “We’re talking about a layer of rock that’s a zillion years old, Harleigh,” she says. “The resource isn’t going anywhere.”

  “But the conditions where it makes money sense to drill into it might not last.”

  “Ah.”

  “These things, it’s like a fever comes over the buyer, and it can pass like a fever too. You don’t want all these regulations, these impediments, in the way when the action is hot.”

  “They were put there for a reason.”

  “They were put there so the white people could say, ‘See? We’re not gonna steal anymore.’ After they figure they’ve took everything of value.”

  There is no arguing with that. The same professor used to say that in Indian Law the preliminary statements are always made with rifles and sabers.

  “I’ll get on the phone with Kayla at the BIA today,” she says. “Make it sound like they’ll take the heat for losing our people a truckload of money, tell her to start thinking about how to work an amendment.”

  The Chairman flashes her the full smile. If she was enrolled in this outfit it would be hard to resist him on Election Day.

  “Atta girl, Ruby,” he says. “We’re gonna win this round.”

  HISTORY IS A MINEFIELD. Vet your sources, get your facts as straight as you can, lead your students toward some sort of understanding, some sort of synthesis, and before you’ve taken three steps you’ve trampled on somebody’s worldview or regional pride. Francine wanted to call it American Civilization for that reason, to recognize that ‘history’ was an always contested collection of viewpoints, but it got to the Board of Ed and there was screaming. Really– screaming. Quoting the Am Civ syllabi from a couple Eastern colleges, invoking the scarewords of talk radio conspiracy theorists, she was accused of revisionism, defeatism, advocating “loser studies.”

  Francine goes over her notes as she waits for the Lunch Over bell to ring, hunting for incendiary phrases. The idea, the theme, if you like, of her teaching is to g
et them to understand a mind-set, that essential American belief system that assumes that one should always have more, take more, be more. With God’s blessing.

  Tucker has got it, of course, got it bad. He never tires of telling the story of how his dad, a gangly kid with a box of carpenters’ tools, ‘took a shot’ and founded a successful lumber company, so successful that he sold it to a chain when he was fifty-one years old and went fishing for the rest of his life. How the timing was right, sure, and a natural disaster or two that jacked up the price of two-by-fours didn’t hurt, but mostly it was a question of having the balls to believe in yourself, to plunge in and be ready to accept the consequences.

  Tuck has done more plunging than accepting. And now this romantic idea of being an oil rig worker, excellent short-term money if he can get hired on, but leading to what? There’s a mural of the Lewis and Clark expedition that runs the length of the second-floor hallway, and the one time Tuck passed it he pointed to a figure dragging a canoe near the end of the procession, a rangy explorer wearing what looks like a whole skunk on his head. “That’s me,” he said. “Those were the days.”

  If only he could find something. Like the good-looking geologist who talked to her class, confident, in love with his subject, a man with a mission. Yes, that kind of commitment probably means time away from his family, if he has one, but the time he does spend with them isn’t a constant complaint, a stew of sour grapes and self-recrimination. Even if Tuck had some engaging hobby that would get him out of the house–

  Mondays she avoids the teachers’ lunchroom. Hearing about everybody’s weekend, the who-just-signed-a-lease news. Each week she tries to start her seniors out on a specific quest, a historical thesis to be tested, and it pays to prepare the challenge. This week it will be two teams, one half of the class representing General Crook and his Treaty Commission, and the other representing the Sioux, both the ‘progressive’ American Horse faction and the ‘irreconcilables’ who sided with Sitting Bull. Few of the kids are Native American, or at least few are claiming it, but there are plenty more Indians just down the road to empathize with. She needs to explain how taking half of the remaining Sioux land was vital to the Republicans’ political agenda of the day, allowing them to admit Dakota Territory as two states and add four new senators to their majority–