The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel Read Free

historic Tom Mix death site. It would be nice to look at a giant cactus close up. Sterling had been trying to emphasize the positive aspects of life and not dwell upon the terrible things that had happened at home between himself and the Tribal Council.
    Since the trouble any thought about anything that had gone wrong or might go wrong left him exhausted. There was nothing he could do now. The bus was approaching Tucson. He might as well sleep while he could.
    In the dreams Sterling is always running or chasing after them—sometimes he rides a bicycle or horse, but usually he is on foot. The Hollywood people—the producer, the director, and the cameraman—are always driving a big four-wheel-drive Chevy Blazer. The convertible top of the Blazer has been removed so they ought to be able to hear Sterling’s shouts. But this is a nightmare, and the director is leaning overthe seat conferring with the cameraman and the producer in the backseat. They take no notice of Sterling racing behind them, yelling as loud as he can.
    The Chevy Blazer is racing toward the restricted area of the tribe’s huge open-pit uranium mine. The gate guards at the mine are armed with .38-caliber police specials because the Tribal Council is fed up with journalists writing scare stories about their uranium mine. The gate guards’ orders are “Shoot to kill. Ask questions later.” Journalists are no better than foreign terrorists as far as the Tribal Council is concerned. Sterling is yelling, “Stop! Stop!” when the old black man in the bus seat beside him gently touches his arm. “Mister, mister, are you okay?” Sterling feels sweaty all over despite the bus air-conditioning and tinted windows. The black man goes back to his newspaper. It is a Phoenix paper with headlines about the Middle East. There is killing everywhere. Jews and Arabs. Sterling doesn’t understand international killing. But he has made it his hobby to learn and keep up with the history of outlaws and famous criminals. Sterling will ask the man if he can just read the headline story. But right now the dream has left him sick to his stomach. He peels open a new roll of Tums. The big SceniCruiser is the fastest bus on the highway. Maybe it is the bus’s swaying as it passes cars that makes him feel sick. He closes and opens his eyes. Up ahead there is a white Arizona Highway Patrol car parked by a skinny tree with no leaves and green skin on its branches. Sterling expects to feel the bus driver brake suddenly to slow to the legal speed limit, but the driver takes no notice, and the big SceniCruiser zooms on to Tucson. Since it had all happened, Sterling couldn’t help thinking about the law, and what the law means. About people who get away with murder because of who they are, and whom they know. Then there were people like him, Sterling, people who got punished for acts they had no part in.
    Sterling had been interested in the law since he was a kid in Indian boarding school. Because everything the white teachers had said and done to the Indian children had been “required by law.” Reading his magazines, Sterling had made a modest study of the law on his own, the way Abraham Lincoln had. The Police Gazette and True Detective magazines gave the most detailed explanations of the law. Sterling had bought subscriptions to both magazines so he would never miss a single new development in the law.
    As near as Sterling could tell, injustice had been going on for a long time. Pretty Boy Floyd had struck back at bankers who were takingsmall farms and leaving Floyd’s people homeless during the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression. When Pretty Boy Floyd came through small Oklahoma towns, even local sheriffs waited until he was on his way again before they phoned state authorities to report his sighting. Sterling had studied photographs of Floyd and he could tell right away that Pretty Boy Floyd had been part Oklahoma Indian. Floyd’s stronghold had been in the brushy oak