“That’s right. He’s there, watching the land now like he did for the others before there was a park. It’s his mission. It’s his duty. ”
“A duty?”
“A duty. He’s tied to that place as surely as if he signed a lease. Or that’s what some people like to say, anyhow. ”
Pete wished he’d clarify, but he wasn’t sure how to ask him to without giving up too much information. Fortunately, Orin didn’t need much prompting. “There was the Trail of Tears, you know?”
Pete nodded, because everyone knew about how thousands of Indians had left the south along the Trail. “But Green Eyes didn’t leave when my people did. He stayed, tied to the place. And do you know why?”
“I don’t,” Pete confessed. “I’ve heard he made some sort of bargain, but I don’t know what kind. ”
Bringing up the bargain Green Eyes had mentioned took some of the narrative wind out of Orin’s sails. “Oh. You know about that, then. ”
“Only sort of. I mean, I know there was one, but I don’t know anything about it. ”
“You mean you heard there was one. No one knows anything for sure. There’s no one left alive from back then, so it’s all passed into the realm of myth. ”
Orin sounded like he was trying to do the voiceover for a film.
“So then…” Pete had stalled, trying to recover the threads of his questioning. “He’s staying around because he made a deal. With who?”
“With, well, with the park founders, at least. All of that happened some years after the war, but they were already having troubles with grave robbing and whatnot. The old guys who preserved the place, they were the ones who asked Green Eyes if he’d stick around and help keep the riffraff out. ”
“Now how would they wrangle him into something like that?”
Orin hunched his shoulders and tipped the neck of his beer bottle to his mouth. “You tell me. But supposedly that’s how it happened. ”
Pete was not perfectly credulous. “But that’s…well…I mean, what if he wants to leave? When does he get to go—or is he stuck here forever?”
“Naw, not forever. The way I heard it from my great-grandmother White Crow, it was more like Green Eyes would stay and watch the land until the last descendant of the generals had died or moved awa
y from the valley. And then he was free to leave. ”
Pete did a miraculous job of not rolling his eyes at the likelihood of Orin having a grandmother named White Crow. Instead, he took the new snippet at face value and thought on it while he sipped at the beer. Behind him, a television monitor detailed a football game that neither man had any interest in, and behind the bar the tender asked if they’d like another. Both said yes.
“That is something else,” Pete observed in a nonspecific sort of way. “It almost makes you feel sorry for Old Green Eyes,” he lied.
“Oh, I wouldn’t feel too sorry for him. I think if he really wanted to leave, he could. And for that matter, I doubt there are too many kin left around here anyway. The one guy, his family went back up north. And the other one…what was his name? Started with a ‘B. ’”
“Boynton,” Pete said a bit too readily.
“Boynton, yeah. That’s not a name you hear around here much, is it? Not like the other old families, what’ve got their names on every other building downtown. I bet they died out years ago. ”
“I bet they didn’t,” Pete said under his breath, but then he wished he hadn’t.
“What’re you getting at?” Orin suddenly demanded, his curiosity stoked. “What’re you wondering about, that you’d come all the way out here to hear it from me?”
Pete thought hard before he answered, and since thinking hard wasn’t his area of expertise, it took him longer than might have been considered mannerly. Maybe an accomplice wasn’t the worst of all possible ideas. Maybe it was too ambitious to try to do everything himself. “Two heads are better than one,” his mother’d always said. And in the case of the Bufords, that second head usually needed to belong to an outsider.
He didn’t know Orin very well, but he knew he was a local boy who was partly full of shit, but partly knew his shit too. Orin wasn’t entitled to anything, not like Pete was. But having all of nothing wasn’t doing Pete any good. Maybe he ought to aim more modestly, for something like half of a whole lot.
So Pete set his beer down and leaned his body against the bar. “It’s like this,” he said, looking the other man straight in the eye. “I could use a hand with something big. ”
“This is a bad idea,” Pete said aloud.
“It’s the only idea,” Orin corrected him. “I thought you wanted this. ”
“I do. ”