Shadow Prey

sidled over, scratching his thin beard. “You look bad, man,” Bluebird said.
    Yellow Hand nodded. He was wearing a dirty T-shirt with a fading picture of Mick Jagger on the front. His jeans, three sizes too large, were cinched at the waist with a length of clothesline. His elbow joints and arms looked like cornstalks. He was missing two front teeth. “I feel bad, man. I could use a few bucks, you know?”
    “Sorry, man, I got no money,” Bluebird said. He stuck his hands in his pockets and pulled them out empty.
    “That’s okay, then,” Yellow Hand said, disappointed.
    “I seen your mama last week,” Bluebird said. “Out at the res.”
    “How’s she?”
    “She’s fine. She was fishing. Walleyes.”
    Sails’ hysterical screams became audible as somebody opened an outside door to the Indian Center.
    “That’s real good about Mama,” said Yellow Hand.
    “Well, I guess I gotta go,” Bluebird said, easing away.
    “Okay, man,” said Yellow Hand. “See you.”
     
    Bluebird walked, taking his time, his mind in another place. What was her name? It had been years ago. Anna? She was a pretty woman, with deep breasts and warm hazel eyes. She’d liked him, he thought, though they were both married, and nothing ever happened; nothing but a chemistry felt across backyard hedges, deep down in Minneapolis’ Indian Country.
    Anna’s husband, a Chippewa from Nett Lake, had been put in the Hennepin County Jail. Drunk, late at night, he’d seen a Coke machine glowing red-and-white through the window of a gas station. He’d heaved a chunk of concrete through the window, crawled in after it and used the concrete to crack the machine. About a thousand quarters had run out onto the floor, somebody told Bluebird. Anna’s husband had still been picking them up, laboriously, one at a time, when the cops arrived. He’d been on parole and the break-in was a violation. He’d gotten six months on top of the remaining time from the previous conviction.
    Anna and her husband had never had money. He drank up most of it and she probably helped. Food was short. Nobody had clothes. But they did have a son. He was twelve, a stocky, withdrawn child who spent his evenings watching television. One Saturday afternoon, a few weeks after his daddy was taken to jail, the boy walked down to the Lake Street bridge and jumped into the Mississippi. A lot of people saw him go and the cops had him out of the river in fifteen minutes. Dead.
    Bluebird had heard, and he went down to the river. Anna was there, her arms wrapped around the body of her son, and she looked up at him with those deep pain-filled eyes, and . . . what?
    It was all part of being Indian, Bluebird thought. The dying. It was something they did better than the whites. Or more frequently, anyway.
    When Bluebird walked out of the room after slashing Benton’s throat, he’d looked down at the man’s face andthought he seemed familiar. Like a famous person. Now, on the sidewalk, as he left Yellow Hand behind, as he thought about Anna, Benton’s face floated up in his mind’s eye.
    Hitler, he thought. John Lee Benton looked exactly like a young Adolf Hitler.
    A young dead Adolf Hitler.

CHAPTER
2
    Lucas Davenport lounged on a brocaded couch in the back of a used-book store, eating a roast beef sandwich. In his lap was a battered paperback copy of T. Harry Williams’ biography of Huey Long.
    T. Harry had gotten it right, Lucas reflected. The man in the white suit flashing among the Longites as they stood outside the governor’s office. The shot. The Kingfish hit, the screaming, the running. The cops going berserk.
    “Roden and Coleman fired at almost the same time, with Coleman’s bullet probably reaching the man first,” T. Harry wrote. “Several other guards had unholstered their guns and were blazing away. The man crumpled and fell facedownward near the wall of the corridor from which he had come. He lay there with his face resting on one arm and did not move and was obviously dead. But this did not satisfy some of the guards. Crazed with rage or grief, they stood over the body and emptied their guns into it. It was later discovered to have thirty bullet holes in the back and twenty-nine in the front (many of these were caused by the same bullet making an entry and exit) and two in the head. The face was partially shot away, and the white suit was cut to ribbons and drenched with blood.”
    Murder was never as neat as it was on television. Nomatter how