I was held by those watchful eyes.

Tall prairie grass, scratchy streaks, heavy brush lines. Mohawk people moving, one of them peering through a sea of yellow gray.

I turned from the painting, wiped at the edges of my mouth, my .45 heavy in my hand. On a black Chippendale chair sat Cheryl Strangeways, lower lip curled under, dented with teeth marks. Her eyes were murky. Cigarette burns dotted her left arm. 

“Who did this to you? The fellas from the motel?” A camera on a tripod was to my right. Other paintings, along with Colt Peacemakers, Buffalo pelts, Winchesters, dreamcatchers, and bows and arrows filled the walls.

The eyeliner around Cheryl’s lost highway glare was squeezed into bleeding stars and she was reaching for flashing specks that only she could see. “Moth light, moth light,” she murmured.

Dangling from her ears, feathered earrings. 

She wore nothing else.

Neither did the dead fella sprawled on a white shag rug, bled pink, in front of her: Milton K. Krasner, philanthropist, lawyer, collector of American Indian art. He smelled sour and if I didn’t know any better I’d have sworn that fungus was growing beneath him. A tomahawk splintered his face, the right eye wandering from the orbital bone.

Little shadows, pushed by the light behind the fire grate, left a row of small crosses across Krasner’s corpse. 

Cheryl snatched grimly at the ethereal moths, while I dropped my gun in the pocket of my leather jacket. The camera back was flipped open. The film, gone. 

Cheryl had no answers to my questions—her voice, a distant, Morse code bleat.

I stared once again at the brave behind prairie grass, asking him what to do.

He heard every breath I sighed. 

It all started about three hours ago on the worst night of the week to be driving hack—Tuesday. A lot of hackies take Tuesdays off—but I needed the money to pay my rent. The landlord had raised the rates out at Cherokee Village where I live in a trailer home. 

I had just finished dropping a fare at the Empress Hotel and was filling out my call sheet, watching snow fall in thin fishing lines, when Donna Dodginghorse hopped in, gripped the top, open buttons of her red mackinaw, and shouted, “Follow that car, Eddie—”

Donna recognized me. Winsome’s one of those small-town cities, 58,000 people. And if you get your name in the paper and your pan on local television people remember you and your notoriety.

I knew of her too and her rep: a social worker and therapist for the Mohawk people out on the rez, she fought the Winsome City Council to get the necessary funding to build their community center. A recovering alcoholic, Donna ran AA meetings and encouraged youngsters to follow their interests—art, writing, basketball. Say yes to something and no to alcohol. I liked her.

Anyway, she wanted me to track a ’64 or ’65 Catalina with a busted taillight and a smear of mud obscuring part of the license plate. Cheryl—nineteen, manic depressive, two years out of reform school, and Donna’s sponsee in the program—was in the car.  “She’s trying to get the paintings back—”

“Huh?”

Donna’s eyes narrowed and she warmed her hands over the heating vents on the dashboard. “She has a gun—she plans to kill him—”

“Slow down—kill who? What paintings?”

“Can you pick up the speed of this crate—?” 

Donna had high cheekbones and dusky pecan skin. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was pretty.

“And do what exactly?” My army-issued .45 was in the glovebox.

“I don’t know, but the paintings belong to us—and you, you’re always there—for women.” She smiled and recited my rap sheet: how I rescued Rebekah Feddersen and her young daughters from two hit men, shooting them dead in Bingston, upstate New York; and how I saved Irene Sizemore, a past lover of mine, from an ice house where her husband Vic planned to kill her and frame me for it—

Claude Harrison, the artist, had gotten into trouble with the IRS, she said. “He hadn’t paid his taxes in years, because, well, he didn’t want his money to support the white war machine, muscle for the Fortune 500 club—” Claude could get up to seven years in prison and he just couldn’t do the time. “Years ago he was driving a delivery truck along back roads slicked over with mud and he slid into the river, almost drowned. Claustrophobia—”

I understood that kind of shit. I still slept with a gun under my pillow—the painful fallout from Pork Chop Hill in Korea, and a fucked-up family history, beatings at the hands of a series of men Mother called my uncles. One of them broke my nose; another, my left arm. I always felt trapped. Still do. Maybe that’s why I’d taken to helping, hitting back—

Harrison hired the best lawyer in town, Krasner. “Only Claude couldn’t pay Krasner or Kranser didn’t want Claude’s money. Krasner wanted them paintings, the ones Harrison was gifting to the Community Center—”

“Of course that’s what Krasner wanted.” I knew Krasner. A covetous son of a bitch. He always wanted more. He could be found late Saturday nights, in a back booth at Gus’s Diner, a hand on some Indian girl’s upper thigh, murmuring nasty, intimate things for all to hear.

The Catalina barreled along the brick streets of Parkhill, a rich exurb with hexagonal street lamps and two one way streets divided by a median you ought to be putting golf balls on. Behind and below the rich neighborhood was a reserve, a hiking trail, full of birch trees, deer, and the occasional black bear. 

“You can imagine what people said. The white community called Harrison an Indian Giver. His own people called him a traitor.” She paused, bit her upper lip. “They found him face down in a mud puddle. They called it suicide, said he was drunk, but he was in AA with me—was six months sober—”

“So what happened? He was murdered—?”

She shrugged. “He’s an Indian. The police found what they expected to find—Damn, that car’s moving—” 

She was right: sixty in a thirty. “Why didn’t Harrison just paint other paintings for the Community Center or Krasner—?”

“You make it sound so easy.” She shook her head gently, chin barely moving. “Those paintings represented his life’s work—some took up to twenty-five years to get right—”

Suddenly a pop pop, like Black Cat firecrackers, and the Catalina swerving randomly before bumping its driver’s side wheel against the edge of a curb. The car launched, three, four feet in the air, turned sideways, then righted itself, the front end lifting before dropping and hitting the ground first, wheels busting, the front axle snapping and bits of chrome and glass filling the night with metal fireflies. The car pushed up divots of grass, before stopping short of a buzz of hedges.

The two of them scrambled from the crumpled car. He hit her with the .32 in his left hand. She dropped to her knees, blood dripping from her open mouth like small coins.

Cheryl. I’d seen her before. At Gus’s. Back booth, Krasner muttering, “you’re the best piece of ass I’ve ever had—”

I reached for the .45 in my glovebox and shouted at him to drop the fucking gun, now.

The .32  fell by his Italian shoes.

Just then the porch light of the high square box of a Victorian home lit up the yard and several people, a family and their guests, filled the spaces around us.

“Look at my car—” Krasner screamed. “Goddamn it. Look at it—”

Donna called for Cheryl, desperately searching all around. In the commotion of gunplay, and the harsh glow of the porch lights, Cheryl had run down the hill behind the home, losing herself in the dotted dominoes of birch trees.

The cops arrived within seconds.

That’s what they do for the rich. 

I smoked three or four Luckies while Officer Mooney, a red head with a marine cut, chastised me for playing cowboy. He also gave Donna a hard time. A social worker, you know better. “Why didn’t you call us, instead of sending a cab on a wild goose chase—”

“Because I was there.” I smiled, my lopsided grin. Donna knew exactly what I meant: you cops wouldn’t have been there in seconds, not for her, not for a case involving people from the rez.

Afterward, I drove Donna back to the rez’s Community Center. She wanted to walk and think. Her gray eyes held a generous light. “That cop was an asshole—”

“Yeah—”

“Thanks, for trying—”

“Yeah—”

The silt lines of snow were now falling like a beaded curtain. Donna wasn’t wearing a knit cap and I wanted to offer her mine, the one in the glovebox near my gun, but I was afraid of appearing patronizing or some damn thing.

She reached for the door handle. “What do I owe you for all your time? I know you shut off the meter—”

“Make it five—”

“That doesn’t seem fair—”

“Tuesdays are slow. Real slow.”

Donna handed me a Lincoln and two ones, and climbed out, buttoning up her mackinaw. All of the homes around the Center were small boxes with tar paper roofs. Smoke from their chimneys filled the black sky with spots of bleach.

“You want to get a coffee or something?”  I don’t know why I said it, but I just did. 

“I don’t drink coffee—”

“Oh—”

“How about egg creams at Regehr’s—”

“Sure. I’d like that,” I said. “Orange?”

“Orange.” She smiled. “You can reach me at the Center—”

The next ninety minutes were interminable: long silences between rinky-dink two dollar fares. I had some French fries from Gus’s all-night diner, a maple donut, and a pint of milk. I ate in my cab and watched the snow gently falling. I was next up on the board, and I couldn’t afford to miss a call.

Maybe I drove Claude Harrison at one time or another. I couldn’t really place him. I read about his death in the Winsome Mercury, but—

Compositional tension. This one fella went on and on about it in my hack. It was like last summer, maybe two summers ago, and he wore a Woody Guthrie T-shirt and faded jeans. 

“People to the left or right of the frame, none of that classic Renaissance T shit. And the horizon line, high or low. Never in the middle—”

He smoked skinny black cigars and had me drive him to the IGA for tomato juice, dry mustard, worcestershire sauce, and cayenne pepper. “Part of the cure—” He laughed. I didn’t get it.

Maybe, now, I did get it: that concoction was an alcohol substitute, maybe that was Claude Harrison.

I don’t know.

After driving a young woman back to Polis College from a Bible study group, I got a request call. Daws motel, a white cinder block affair with black shutters.

It was well past midnight. Two guys were waiting for me, outside room seven. They spoke Spanish and talked about Krasner having a pilot’s license. There were all kinds of rumors that the lawyer flew drugs back and forth to Mexico. Between the burly fellas, held by the elbows, was Cheryl. She wore a short sky blue jacket and a coral-colored knit cap. 

The jacket was unzipped. Underneath she wore a white diaphanous blouse, veiny, like the wings of a dragonfly. 

They crowded in back. 

The fellas had cameras around their necks and the one wearing a navy peacoat with army tiger-stripe pants carried a tripod.

They wanted to go to Krasner’s. I recognized the Parkhill address.

I turned around in my seat and made direct contact with Cheryl’s green eyes. They weren’t murky then. “Do you want to go there—”

“It’s my idea—” 

The fella, who didn’t know which branch of the service he favored, said that wasn’t exactly true. 

“The boss wants to see her and the boss gets what the boss wants—”

Seems the gunshots and totaled Catalina were all forgiven.

“Milton promised me one of the paintings if—” Cheryl’s voice vaguely wandered away. 

When you drive a cab for fifteen years you sure hear a lot of stories, gossip, bits of trivia, and hard-edged opinions. A few years back, a fella from the rez was in my hack, his black-brown eyes blurred by alcohol. “You know I read somewhere that so many white folks think they’re one-eighth Cherokee. It’s a joke, innit? You all have no idea what it means to be me. Shut the fuck up.”

The man had a point.

I waited and waited and waited. Twenty minutes. My deck of Luckies was down to two smokes.

The meter ticked.

Five, ten, fifteen minutes.

A bright splash of light. Another splash.

A bare hip, a breast, pressed into the lattice design of the shimmering window. Cheryl looked bored as Krasner kissed her.

A third splash. It was like walking on the face of the sun.

Five more minutes. I smoked my last Lucky. And then a scream. The girl—I grabbed my .45 and ran toward the columns, the door— 

That’s when I found Krasner spread across a white shag rug, a tomahawk splitting his face. 

The back door was open, the screen flap-flapping.

The men were gone. Cheryl was on some kind of psychedelic elixir, the moths getting bigger and bigger—there was a spot of one on her left hand that she just couldn’t remove the wings from—

Artifacts were everywhere: display cases full of arrowheads, tin stars from Arizona marshals, Colt Peacemakers, and large rocks with single dimples—probably milling stones; walls darkened by tomahawks, Winchester 73’s, pelts, and dream catchers; and those paintings, Harrison’s, mixed in with a batch of Frederic Remingtons.

And that young brave in that yellow-gray sea of grass imploring me—

I moved closer, drawn in by his look and the shadows of little crosses from the fire filling the grass with the hard skull lines of Calvary. 

In the corner, a small tight scrawl: Claude Strangeways. His artist’s name: Strangeways, not Harrison.

Strangeways. Claude and Cheryl were related, maybe father and daughter. “No wonder you want the paintings,” I muttered in her direction. “No wonder—”

She clutched another moth and smothered it in her tight fist.

Last March, The Train with Burt Lancaster played at Winsome’s Bijou Theatre. It centered around a group of resistance fighters whose mission was to seize a Nazi train full of French paintings the Nazi’s had stolen. At the time, I thought the whole cultural capital angle was nuts. All those men dying for some goddamn paintings—

But now—

I removed all of Strangeways’s works from their frames and gently rolled them up. The works of Remingtron I cut in two with a buck knife and threw on the fire. Chunky flames scratched and clawed, filling the air not with the paints’ oils but the heavy smell of the canvases, and every now and then as each painting curled, nearing its end, a sharp afterglow fissured.

That was something. It warmed me, it felt good.

Minutes later we were out at the Community Center. Cheryl was conked in the backseat. She fought me when I tried to put her clothes back on, so I wrapped her in a thick tribal blanket that had been hanging on a bedroom wall. Eddie Sands, fashion consultant.

I felt shaky, cold. I turned on the high beams. Hammered the horn.

Again, again, again.

Eventually people came. I mean it was nearly two, two-thirty in the morning, but they came, skin glowing with waxy snow and yellow moonlight. There. I saw Donna in her red mackinaw and teachers, maybe, tribal leaders, husbands, wives, mothers.

I wished Claude Harrison could have seen all this. What his alter-ego Claude Strangeways might have painted in that moment: his people and me outside my cab, coming up for air, snow softly falling into the collar of my leather jacket, and his paintings rolled in my hand, a gift returned in the spirit of reconciliation for the living and the dead and all the ancestors yet to come.

_______________

In 2015 Grant Tracey turned to writing noir. Before that he had published nearly fifty stories in small literary magazines. The sensibilities of “Artifacts,” in part, re-works the detective landscape explored by Raymond Chandler in The Big Sleep. Tracey’s the author of the Hayden Fuller Mysteries. Find more works by Grant Tracey on his website.