“Ah,” she said. “We call him Inktomi here. I think it’s the same guy. My grandfather used to tell some pretty good stories about him. Of course, all the best of them were kind of dirty.” They hit a bump in the road, and the woman swore. “You okay back there?”
“Yes ma’am,” said Johnny Chapman. He was holding onto the backseat with both hands.
“Rez roads,” she said. “You get used to them.”
“Are they all like this?” asked Shadow.
“Pretty much,” said the woman. “All the ones around here. And don’t you go asking about all the money from casinos, because who in their right mind wants to come all the way out here to go to a casino? We don’t see none of that money out here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She changed gear with a crash and a groan. “You know the white population all around here is falling? You go out there, you find ghost towns. How you going to keep them down on the farm, after they seen the world on their television screens? And it’s not worth anyone’s while to farm the Badlands anyhow. They took our lands, they settled here, now they’re leaving. They go south. They go west. Maybe if we wait for enough of them to move to New York and Miami and L.A. we can take the whole of the middle back without a fight.”
“Good luck,” said Shadow.
They found Harry Bluejay in the rec hall, at the pool table, doing trick shots to impress a group of several girls. He had a blue jay tattooed on the back of his right hand, and multiple piercings in his right ear.
“Ho hoka, Harry Bluejay,” said John Chapman.
“Fuck off, you crazy barefoot white ghost,” said Harry Bluejay, conversationally. “You give me the creeps.”
>
There were older men at the far end of the room, some of them playing cards, some of them talking. There were other men, younger men of about Harry Bluejay’s age, waiting for their turn at the pool table. It was a full-sized pool table, and a rip in the green baize on one side had been repaired with silver-gray duct tape.
“I got a message from your uncle,” said Chapman, unfazed. “He says you’re to give these two your car.”
There must have been thirty, maybe even forty people in that hall, and now they were every one of them looking intently at their playing cards, or their feet, or their fingernails, and pretending as hard as they could not to be listening.
“He’s not my uncle.”
A cigarette-smoke fug hung over the hall. Chapman smiled widely, displaying the worst set of teeth that Shadow had seen in a human mouth. “You want to tell your uncle that? He says you’re the only reason he stays among the Lakota.”
“Whiskey Jack says a lot of things,” said Harry Bluejay, petulantly. But he did not say Whiskey Jack either. It sounded almost the same, to Shadow’s ear, but not quite: Wisakedjak, he thought. That’s what they’re saying. Not Whiskey Jack at all.
Shadow said, “Yeah. And one of the things he said was that we’re trading our Winnebago for your Buick.”
“I don’t see a Winnebago.”
“He’ll bring you the Winnebago,” said John Chapman. “You know he will.”
Harry Bluejay attempted a trick shot and missed. His hand was not steady enough. “I’m not the old fox’s nephew,” said Harry Bluejay. “I wish he wouldn’t say that to people.”
“Better a live fox than a dead wolf,” said Wednesday, in a voice so deep it was almost a growl. “Now, will you sell us your car?”
Harry Bluejay shivered, visibly and violently. “Sure,” he said. “Sure. I was only kidding. I kid a lot, me.” He put down the pool cue on the pool table, and took a thick jacket, pulling it out from a cluster of similar jackets hanging from pegs by the door. “Let me get my shit out of the car first,” he said.
He kept darting glances at Wednesday, as if he were concerned that the older man were about to explode.
Harry Bluejay’s car was parked a hundred yards away. As they walked toward it, they passed a small whitewashed Catholic church, and a man in a priest’s collar who stared at them from the doorway as they went past. He was sucking on a cigarette as if he did not enjoy smoking it.
“Good day to you, father!” called Johnny Chapman, but the man in the collar made no reply; he crushed his cigarette under his heel, picked up the butt and dropped it into the bin beside the door, and went inside.
Harry Bluejay’s car was missing its wing mirrors, and its tires were the baldest Shadow had ever seen: perfectly smooth black rubber. Harry Bluejay told them the car drank oil, but as long as you kept pouring oil in, it would just keep running forever, unless it stopped.
Harry Bluejay filled a black garbage bag with shit from the car (said shit including several screw-top bottles of cheap beer, unfinished, a small packet of cannabis resin wrapped in silver foil and badly hidden in the car’s ashtray, a skunk tail, two dozen country-and-western cassettes and a battered, yellowing copy of Stranger in a Strange Land). “Sorry I was jerking your chain before,” said Harry Bluejay to Wednesday, passing him the car keys. “You know when I’ll get the Winnebago?”
“Ask your uncle. He’s the fucking used-car dealer,” growled Wednesday.