I raised a fist. “Semper Fi.” I lowered my hand and eased back in my chair. “Kind of odd, retiring in the place he patrolled for all those years.”
Jim nodded and smiled, his face looking even more like that poster child. “We all thought it was pretty odd. I asked him about it at the little party we had for him the beginning of February, and you know what he said?” The big captain shook his head, the close-cropped hair not moving a bit. “‘Nobody ever gets out of that canyon, so I’m not even going to try.’”
We sat there for a while, listening to the radio chatter from all over the state. “What do you think it is, Jim?”
“I wish I knew. Rosey’s a sterling officer—that’s why I invited her over when I got the command—but this thing’s got me licked. I don’t know what to make of it. I sat with her down there in that car, and we never heard a thing; three nights I did it. Nothing.”
“She says it doesn’t happen every night.”
He spread his hands, truly at a loss. “And what am I supposed to do with that, Walt? I’ve got a wife and two daughters. I can’t just go down there and sit in the canyon with one of my troopers. That’s why I have them, to do the jobs that I can’t.”
“Still, you’ve heard the stories.”
He looked at the rack of mugs on the wall. “Yeah, I’ve heard ’em. We’ve all heard ’em, haven’t we?”
“Yes.”
The trooper turned his head, surprised that the Bear had been the first to speak. “All the way up on the Cheyenne reservation?”
“The moccasin telegraph never sleeps.”
Thomas stood and walked over to the mugs on the wall, including one with his own name. “You see these? There’s one for every trooper in G, past and present.” He pulled his own from its cubby and twirled it on his finger like a six-shooter. “When a trooper dies, we turn his mug toward the wall, solid white.”
I studied the rack. “Which is Bobby Womack’s?”
He touched one at the upper left-hand corner. “This one right here.”
“Can I see it?”
“No.”
I glanced at Henry. “Do you mind if I ask why?”
He filled himself a cup from the urn and leaned against the counter. “When I first got here, every once in a while . . . not every day, but every once in a while, I’d come in and that mug, Bobby’s mug, would be turned back around to where you could read his name.”
“So why can’t I look at it now?”
“I superglued it down.” He turned and rinsed his mug in the adjacent sink and then carefully dried it and put it in its cubby just below Womack’s. “You know what they call him?”
“Heeci’ecihit.” The Bear leaned back and laced his long fingers in his lap. “That is what the Arapaho have always called him. Heeci’ecihit—the Highwayman.”
2
“His mother liked the R & B singer. She had one of those console record players, and she used to play Sam Cooke and Bobby Womack albums all the time, so she named her only son Bobby.” The dreadfully obese Arapaho man shook his head. “Since the singer’s name was Womack, she thought they must’ve been related somehow. Couldn’t ever convince her otherwise, especially after he did a country album.”
“Is she still alive?”
“Oh no, long dead. I think sometime back in the eighties.”
“Are there any Womacks still around?”
“There’s an aunt, I think, over in Fort Washakie, but I’m not sure exactly where. She’d probably be in her nineties by now.” Sam Little Soldier smiled. “Hey, I heard you had lunch with Kimama—how’d that go?”
I shrugged. “She’s calling me Bucket.”
He studied me. “You are kind of beyond the pale.”
“So, Bobby was the first Arapaho trooper?”
“The very first of the people to become a flat-hat, yes. It was quite a stir for a while—he was about as famous as Sacajawea around these parts. There were a lot of people who were offended by it, though, said he’d gone over to the other side, but Bobby, he was just like that—always helping people.”
“So, you knew him pretty well?”
He nodded. “We went to school together.”
“Where?”
Sam gestured to the area around his office. “Right here. They started Central Wyoming College up in 1966, and Bobby and I got in in ’68 when they were still having classes in the basement of a bank downtown. We both played basketball for the Shaman and then transferred down to Laramie.”
Henry raised an eyebrow. “The Shaman?”
Sam nodded. “That was the name of the sports teams before they changed it to the Rustlers.”
“I think I like ‘Shaman’ better.”
Sam laughed. “Yeah, me too, but we got too many First Nations/Indigenous Peoples/Aboriginal Americans/Natives around here to go for that.”