Ronald came to the door as I stepped from the car. He was a large man, his black hair cut short and heavily streaked with silver. He wore tight-fitting jeans, and a checked shirt hung loosely over his belt. Around his neck hung a leather pouch.
‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘Big medicine?’
‘Nope, I keep my small change in there.’
His hand, tanned and corded with muscle and veins, gripped mine and swallowed it, like a gnarly old catfish consuming a minnow.
‘You’re the only Native American I know,’ I said, ‘and you don’t do any of that proper Native American stuff.’
‘You disappointed?’
‘Some. It just feels like you’re not making the effort.’
‘I don’t even want to be called a Native American. Indian does just fine.’
‘See? I bet I could have arrived here dressed as a cowboy and you wouldn’t even have blinked an eye.’
‘Nope. I might’ve shot you, but I wouldn’t have blinked an eye.’
We sat at a table in his yard, and Ronald pulled a couple of sodas from a cooler. Music played softly from a boombox in the kitchen, a mix of Native American blues, folk, and Americana: Slidin’ Clyde Roulette, Keith Secola, Butch Mudbone.
‘Social call?’ he asked.
‘Sociable,’ I replied. ‘You remember a kid named Damien Patchett: local boy, served in Iraq with the infantry?’
Ronald nodded. ‘I went to his funeral.’
I should have known. Whenever he could, Ronald attended the local funerals of veterans. His argument was that, in honoring one, he honored all. It was part of his ongoing personal duty to the fallen.
‘Did you know him?’
‘No, never met him.’
‘I hear that he may have taken his own life.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘His father.’
Ronald touched a small silver cross that hung from a leather strap around his wrist, a small gesture toward Bennett Patchett’s grief. ‘It’s happening again,’ he said. ‘You hope the brass and the politicians will learn, but they never do. War changes men and women, and some of them change so much that they don’t know themselves anymore, and they hate what they’ve become. You ask me, we’re just getting better at collating suicide figures, that’s all. More Vietnam veterans have died by their own hands since the war than were killed in country, and more Iraq veterans will die by their own hands this year than will be killed in Iraq, judging by the way the figures are heading. The same dictum applies to both wars: poor treatment over there, poor treatment back home.’
‘What was the talk about Damien?’
‘That he’d become isolated, that he was having trouble sleeping. A lot of guys have trouble sleeping when they get back. They have trouble doing a lot of stuff, but when you can’t sleep, you know, your head gets messed up, and you start getting moody and depressed. Maybe you drink more than you should, or you take something to bring you down and then you start needing a little more of it every time. He’d been on Trazodone, but then he stopped.’
‘Why?’
‘You’d have to ask someone who knew him better than I did. Some guys don’t like taking sleep meds: they find they get a drug hangover from it when they wake up, and it screws up their REM sleep, but all I got was secondhand news about Damien. Did his father hire you to look into his death?’
‘In a way.’
‘I didn’t think that there was any doubt about how he died.’
‘There isn’t, at least not about his final moments. It’s what led him to do it that his father is curious to understand.’
‘So you’re looking into post-traumatic stress disorder now?’
‘In a way.’
‘I see that you’re still having trouble answering straight questions.’
‘I like to think of it as circling.’
‘Yeah, like before a raid. Maybe you should have worn that cowboy hat after all.’
He sipped his soda and looked away. It wasn’t quite a huff, just the dignified Native American equivalent of one.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I surrender. I’ll give you a name: Joel Tobias.’
Ronald had a good poker face. There was only the slightest flicker of his eyelids at the mention of Tobias’s name, but it was enough to indicate that Ronald didn’t care much for him.
‘He was at the funeral too,’ he said. ‘A bunch of guys who served with Damien came to pay their respects, some from away. There was trouble at the cemetery, although they managed to keep the Patchetts from seeing any of it.’
‘Trouble?’
‘A photographer was hanging around from a small newspaper, the Sentinel-Eagle. He was taking some shots, part of a photo essay he was putting together and hoping to sell to The New York Times: you know, the funeral of a fallen warrior, the grief, the release. Someone in the family – must have been Bennett – had told him that it would be okay. Well, it wasn’t, not with everyone. A couple of Damien’s old buddies had a word with him, and he went away. One of them was Tobias. He was introduced to me later, at a bar. By that time, we were down to the stragglers.’
‘Has Tobias come up on your radar?’
‘Why would he?’
‘There might be people who suspect he’s smuggling.’
‘If he is, it’s not pot. I’d know. You talk to Jimmy Jewel?’
‘He doesn’t know either.’
‘If Jimmy doesn’t know, then I got no chance. You spend a dollar, that man hears the change hit the counter.’
‘But you’re aware of Tobias?’
Ronald shifted in his seat. ‘Whispers, that’s all.’
‘What kind?’
‘That Tobias is working an angle. He’s that kind of guy.’
‘Was he one of those who didn’t want his picture taken?’