“What’d we win?” Dylan asked her. “You said this was all about maintaining the purity of the land. That we couldn’t let them spoil what nature had wrought—your words, Ela. You said this was about the survival of your people. That’s a quote, from when you got me to leave school.”
She pushed him down, atop the blanket on the uneven floor, straddling his torso, her butt pressed against his crotch. “We were never going to win everything. We won enough.”
“You never win with these kinds of people,” Dylan insisted. “They only let you think you have. Believe me, I know.”
Ela started pressing down on him. Dylan felt his insides flutter. “We’re the ones letting them think that they’ve won,” she said.
“What happened to my medal, the one that used to belong to my mother?”
Ela moved her toned butt back and forth. “You’re wearing it.”
Dylan pulled his shirt back to reveal a pair of chains, but not that one. “It was found near that dead guy’s body. How’d it get there?”
He took the tea she’d laid near him and spilled it onto the ground, its pungent aroma and black tar coloring telling him it was even stronger than the last batch of peyote tincture. “I was wearing it when we tripped, Ela.”
“We didn’t trip.”
“No? What would you call it then?”
“Opening our minds to a deeper, higher plane, where our emotions could communicate directly.”
“My mother was wearing that medal when she was murdered. My father gave it to me, said she’d want me to have it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“How’d it get out there?”
“How should I know?”
“Because I was wearing it when we reached that deeper, higher plane. Maybe our emotions communicating directly wasn’t such a good idea.”
Ela stopped rubbing against him. “You think I did this?”
“There’s not a lot of other options.”
“You don’t remember us being together all night?”
“I don’t remember much of anything.”
“Both of us ended up passed out. You were still passed out when I woke up—early, like I always do.”
“With the sun.”
“Close enough,” Ela said.
Dylan looked up at her, straddling him. He believed her because he wanted to. In that moment, he realized he’d been a fool for walking away from school to accompany Ela on this crusade, which had ended when the oil company agreed to fund a whole bunch of scholarships, provide job training, and, in the meantime, put every unemployed Comanche on the reservation to work laying the pipeline.
“You knew this protest shit wasn’t going to work,” Dylan said to her. “You knew you and your Lost Boys weren’t going to stick it out, from the beginning.”
“But we got more than I ever figured out of the deal.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Tell you what?”
“That was the plan all along.”
“Because it wasn’t.”
“So you’re telling me you weren’t working with the tribal elders on this the whole time?”
Ela swung her legs off Dylan and sat up next to him. She took his hands in hers.
“I’m going to forget you said that. It was my grandfather who told me to back off. After that man was killed,” she added. An afterthought.
“With his blood ending up on my medal.”
“Back to that again?”
“We never left it.”
Ela let go of Dylan’s hands. “My grandfather said there could be no more death. He said the spirits were angry, just like back in 1874, and if we didn’t make peace, the same thing would happen now that happened then.”
“What happened then?”
She looked away, the spill of the kerosene lantern light catching only one side of her face. “Ask your Texas Ranger.”
“I could be arrested, you know. I could end up getting charged.”
Ela smiled. “You have friends in high places, boy.”
“Caitlin’s not going to obstruct justice to protect me forever. Sooner or later, I’ll be called to the table.” Dylan hesitated. “Maybe you’ll be called, too.”
“Me?”
“As a witness. My alibi.”
“Even though we both passed out.” She took his hands again. “Are you sure you were wearing the medal that night? Can you really remember?”
“I wear it all the time, girl.”
“But you could have lost it earlier in the day, even the day before. If you wear it all the time, you might think it’s still there even when it isn’t, right? Doesn’t that make more sense than your girlfriend setting you up as a suspect?”
Dylan could feel his insides melting at the way she had referred to herself as his girlfriend.
“Because that would mean I had something to do with the murder,” Ela continued. “An accomplice, accessory, or something. Is that what you think?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You might as well have.”
Dylan pulled Ela in close and kissed her, as hard and as deep as he’d ever kissed anyone.
“That’s better,” she said, brushing the hair from her face when they finally separated.
“I don’t know why I did that.”
“Because I was about to, and you sensed it.”