TCH

H0

At the little hospital that served Headwater Sheriff Roddy Walker asked if Gabriel saw who it was that messed up him up.

"I don't know, sir. They wore black hoods over their faces."

"Did they tell you why they were doing it?"

"They didn't like me marrying one of 'their' white girls, sir."

"How do you feel, Gabriel?"

"Not any better than the last time it happened, sir."

"The last time? You've been flogged before?"

Gabriel nodded, and stared at Doctor Wahkan, who could confirm.

"It's a Kuwapi thing, Sheriff Walker. The young men of the People camp out on the plains overnight and have at each other to see how much they can stand. But I suppose they grew tired of the game when they found out you were cheating."

"They found a better game they called Peace Pipe."

Three days later Klaus Hansen came to the same hospital. Certainly it was not to visit Gabriel, who had been released the same day he checked in, but instead he came to see Gabriel's attackers. Doctor Wahkan was still muttering about the "animals" who had slowly turned all six of their feet into just so much ruined hamburger, requiring a clean amputation of each one.

Every time the three boys were visited after their operations, first by their parents, then by the sheriff, and later by Klaus, they took to sobbing miserably. It was not so much from the pain they were still suffering but from the memory of the hell they had already suffered. Their tormentors worked day and night, just like Gabriel told them would happen. The perps wore no hoods and used their real names as they went about their bloody business, yet even now their victims refused to identify them at all, other than to say they were "Indians".

"Where's the Golden Gift?"

"Gabriel had it the whole time."

"You searched him, strung him up like a pig, and horsewhipped him, but Gabriel had it on him the entire time? So where did he have it hidden, Johnny, in his asshole?" H1

"I don't know!"

"Did you mention he ought to forget all about the Zinter girl, or did that slip your mind too?"

"I did tell him," Scott Hilling whined, "but I don't think he listened to me! What's the world coming to when you can't even get a little respect?"

Klaus Hansen and Paul Bergin returned to the Temple, but not, as it turned out, with their tail between their legs.

"I agreed to see you fellows again," Kim said to them, "but if you act like a couple of high school students and storm out again when you don't get your own way, it will be the last time we ever meet." And Kim was perfectly able to follow through on that threat. Seeing the future, she could simply avoid going anywhere they went.

"It is you, rather, who have one slim chance to reunite the Church," Hansen said with his trademark insufferable arrogance. "Paul and I must get our old jobs back, or the reunion will never come to be. That point is my nonnegotiable."

Kim sighed and turned to her husband. "Will you, Gabriel, resign the office of Deacon?"

"I will not."

Hansen shrugged, said, "You can't push a rope." He prepared once more to leave the office with Bergin, muttering a string of curses that completely obscured what Dory quietly said.

Kim asked Dory to repeat harself.

"I said, I will resign as Apostle of the Church."

Kim opened the Printer's Manuscript of the Green Book once more and penned the following entry: APOSTLE DORIEL SHYBEAR, RESIGNED, JAN. 20, 1943. Dory signed it, and Kim entered her initials. "It's done," Kim said. "The office of Apostle is vacant. Will you, Klaus Hansen, take har place, or is Paul not getting Deacon still a non-negotiable sticking point?"

Klaus turned to Paul and said, "A temporary setback, Paul, nothing more. It will be remedied soon enough." Paul nodded. Then Klaus faced Kim once more. "Very well, Mrs. Shybear, make the appropriate entry." H2

She wrote KLAUS HANSEN, APOSTLE, JAN. 20, 1943 and turned the book for his inspection and signature. When he was done, Robyn applied her initials.

Looking at all the recently entries she said, "I just had a sudden image of someone in 2043 reading this and wondering what it must have been like, this whole sudden flurry."

Hansen said, "The Reformed Church is gathering this morning to meet down at our own temple. Will you meet with them, Prophet Shybear, and affirm our schism has reached an end?"

"I will."

"And I would have them meet the new Deacon. One of our parishoners passed away. I would have the Deacon perform the Last Rites."

Dory was incredulous. "The Last Rites in that barn?"

"It would do much to bring healing between the Red and White Wings of the Church," Bergin put in.

"Can it not wait a week until Gabriel can perform the Last Rites properly in the actual Temple?" asked Robyn.

"It has already been two weeks," replied Hansen, "and the corpse is beginning to grow . . . unpresentable."

Robyn nodded her head. "We should do it, Gabe. Everything leads up to a blank wall for me. But the Lord showed us that we always need to trust God with the faith of a little child and when it is necessary we should take that leap into the dark."

"I'm glad I don't have to see it," said Dory.

"You wouldn't be much welcome down there anyway," said Paul.

"I have to retrieve the Golden Gift," Gabriel said, "and I would not have our former Deacon Paul Bergin know where I keep it, as he is no longer an officer of the Church."

Paul said, "This is not a problem. I can drive the Prophet to our own temple, and Apostle Hansen can bring you along in his own truck after you fetch the Relic."

To this Robyn and Gabriel agreed, and they shared a farewell kiss before they parted, knowing that it was indeed farewell. H3

As Hansen drove Gabriel down off the mountain he said, "The sight of you kissing that girl was disgusting, do you know that? You're not cousins. Hell, you're not even the same species!"

"Sir," replied Gabriel who concealing his own disgust over Hansen, "the Bible and the Book of Green Dome acknowledge only ethnicities. We read only of peoples and kindreds and tongues, not Whites and Blacks and Red Men. Races are artificial things."

"What the hell do you mean artificial? Are you asking me to doubt what I can see with my own two God-given eyes?"

"Sir, consider the aborigines in Australia. They have Caucasian and Mongoloid genes, but they are as dark as Negroids. Even our Lord Yeshua is a lovely coffee-with-cream brown."

Hansen grew angry at that last remark and pulled the truck over to the side of the road. "Get out. I can't stand to be anywhere near a blasphemer, let alone one who entices our women to become traitors to their own race."

"I still need to round up the Golden Gift," Gabriel objected. "What about the Last Rites?"

"Fuck the Last Rites. What would be the point of sanctifying a body if the minister of the Rite is a blasphemer? The Lord is brown like coffee? Get out."

Gabriel did as he was commanded, and Klaus Hansen peeled out in the snow, leaving Gabriel stranded on the side of the road halfway down the mountain. Che decided to hoof it back up to the Temple where Dory was waiting. Still, the move was entirely expected. It wasn't like Klaus was going to let Gabriel be witness to what came next.

What came next was murder.

A short distance northwest of Green Dome was a place where the borders of the states of Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska all came together in a little fenced-off lot. When Hansen arrived he saw that only Paul Bergin's truck was parked there, and only Bergin could be seen standing in the little corral. '

A bloody lump of dead and naked girlflesh lay at his feet, covered with much blood that was nearly cool enough to freeze. Paul stood there staring at Robyn's body, not quite believing that he actually did it. He kept repeating to himself, "I'm going to hell!" H4

"Shut up, Paul," Hansen told him when he drew near. "You'd only go to hell if you didn't do it. Is that the knife?"

Paul nodded. He had entirely forgotten about the murder weapon, but it was still grasped in his gloved hand.

"We can't afford to be caught anywhere near that thing. Throw it away right now. Anywhere, but throw it as far as you can."

Paul hurled the blade on the snowy wastelands lying off to the west somewhere in Wyoming. The blade flashed once in the morning sunlight and disappeared from view.

"Now help me lift her on this."

There was a short post and a little sign about chest high that marked the exact place where the three states came together. The sign was canted at a forty-five degree angle. They draped Kim's body across the sign, letting her head and arms bend backwards and her legs droop down. It looked positively New Testament.

After that, Hansen circled the area a few times to make sure Paul hadn't dropped anything. Good. Even the snow splattered with the girl's blood was clear.

"Walk with me to my truck."

Hansen dropped the tailgate. In the bed of the truck were two sets of coats, clothing and boots laid out beside a cardboard box. Hansen took off the boots he was wearing and threw them in the box, along with his blood-stained coat, shirt and trousers. In the cold of high plains January he quickly put on new outer garments, then sat on the tailgate to put on new boots.

"Throw your gloves in the box, Paul. Then do exactly what you just saw me do."

"How are you going to get rid of the box?"

"Trust me, I'll have it done in such a way that nothing, absolutely nothing will remain to tie this back to us, as long as you don't forget to dispose of the set that knife came from when you get back home. Cheer up, Paul, we just saved the Church, you and I. Shybear couldn't see it, but if that girl had children it would have meant the end of both the White Wing and the Red Wing. There wouldn't be anymore wings, just an unholy hodge-podge growing like a cancer until it ate everything." H5

Huge swaths of the high plains still lay under  snow that first fell in November of ’42, but it was a dry  cold and the roads were clear. From the air Headwater looked like  an abstract map drawn in fine black ink on paper bleached an unearthly white.

The victim was found by a man in his eighties named Tashunka. He was older than the town of Headwater, a mere  boy of the People when the Golden Gift  came to  Wanica in  that final  hunt. The biggest animal he ever killed was a coyote baited with a rabbit he caught in  another trap. Tashunka almost didn’t see  the girl. Her body was dangling  at a roadside attraction  that had always bored him. On a map somewhere  one line  terminated on another. Three states came together at this place, but even when there was no snow Tashunka had never seen any lines.

What caught his eye was not so much that the dead girl was naked but how her  head  and  arms drooped  back,  and  how her  feet didn’t touch the  ground, as  though  she were  nailed to  an invisible cross. So he backed up his  truck and parked  in the little tri-state corral. There were two other set of tire tracks in the snow and two sets  of footprints which became  a tangled net near the body.

Tashunka tried to be careful in his approach to  leave the site clean for the sheriff. He could see no movement of the girl’s chest and no condensation from her mouth. The dead girl was too pale to be one of the People. Of a certainty she had part of the White Wing of the Church of Green Dome. Her ponytail gave that away. And Tashunka wept with  frustration that he could  not do the simple kindness of closing  her frozen eyes staring out upon eternity.

Tashunka recognized the dead girl at last: Kimberly Zinter. Then he wept more deeply, knowing why she was  murdered and guessing who the killer must be. Of a certainty the unhappy union of the Red Wing and White Wing of the Church was finished. He retraced his steps to the truck.

An hour later Tashunka returned with Sheriff Roddy Walker to the little fenced-off area nigh to  the road. The tri-state marker was a wooden beam embedded in the ground, one foot square with a sloping top, and Kimberly’s back rested on this, held fast by frozen blood. The sheriff told deputy  Bill to  start snapping pictures while deputy Bob followed Roddy around  with a notepad and took down a running commentary.

“I need to  steal your  sole with  my camera,  Chief,” Bill “said, so lay it out there.” H6

Tashunka smiled weakly at the joke and lifted one leg as best he could. Bill got a photo of the bottom of both the old Indian’s boots to make sure they could differentiate his footprints from that of  the perps. Then Tashunka  was  left behind  as  Bill methodically photographed his way to the girl’s body..

When the  sheriff  and  his deputies  completely  surveyed  and documented the murder scene they all pitched in, lifted Kimberly free of the survey marker,  and laid  her gently on  a foldaway stretcher that sheriff Walker had brought with him. Tashunka was surprised to hear the sheriff shout an oath. Roddy has read the plaque that Kim’s body was covering and realized they were at the exact place some surveyor  decided the corners of two states ran flush against the border of a third. At a stroke that made the case Federal.

Then they walked the body  out of  there, pausing a  moment for Tashunka to get another close look at it.

“This was Kimberly Zinter,”  he told them,  and he  put his fingers on her face just long enough to melt  the eyelids so he could close them. “I’ve seen her at Temple.”

The sheriff dug around in the  glove box of his  truck and came back with a manila folder containing a photo, which he compared to the dead girl’s blood-streaked face.

“The gentleman is right, boys. This was the local girl the FBI was looking for. One of the two, anyway.”

He noted how the girl wore a headdress that  was similar to one that some of the Kuwapi townspeople often wore. It was a lattice of beads adorning two sharp white horns.

After the deputies carefully loaded the body of the girl in the canopy of the department’s  green 1940 Dodge  half-ton truck, Bob said, “So this wasn’t gonna be our case from the gitgo, even if she wasn’t lying  dead spread out over  three states. What do we do now, sheriff?”

Tashunka said, “I remember when you were just a boy, sheriff, and I  remember  when  you  left  us. None of  your  men  are Greendomites. You might not be  up on Church politics  and they can’t help you. I don’t know who did this terrible thing to the girl but I can tell you why.”

But inactivity had cooled the sweat under Roddy’s coat and he shivered in  the face of  a stiff  wind from the  frozen plains. H7

“This is not the  place, Tashunka,”  he said,  “This body must go to  our little  hospital. But if you meet  me at  the station in an hour I will listen to what you  have to say about this.”

After that Sheriff Roddy drove deputy Bill and  the body around the large hill near the crime scene which was named Green Dome. It was almost five thousand feet above sea level, but only eight hundred feet above the town of Headwater, and it was never green at all in January.

“I just can’t win, Bill,” Roddy lamented. “Half the male population of Headwater between 18  and 45 is off  killing Japs and Krauts and  Eye- talians. Things were getting real  quiet around here. Then the FBI sets up shop and stay all summer. Now I got my first homicide.”

They passed the stretch where  the Bureau parked  their trailer but there were no lights on and no smoke from a wood stove.

Bill said, “The FBI was here  last summer but now  people are saying they saw some G-men  back in  town, staking out  the bus station and  ask-  ing  people of  they’ve  seen  our  victim and another  girl  named  Sofie Krause. Those girls  were  in federal custody somewhere for half  of last year, but apparently they’ve escaped and  made the  FBI  look …  hell, they  are incompetent.”

“But they wouldn’t kill  the girl for  doing that,  if your thoughts are trending on those lines, Bill.”

Roddy drove  around  the  northern slopes  of  Green  Dome  and Headwater came into  view. With a  thousand souls  it was  the biggest town for a hundred miles around.

Bill asked, “What do you want me to do after we give the body to Dr. Wahkan?”

“Develop the film  and  file it,’  Roddy  told his  deputy. “Then get back to the scene and help Bob  look for the murder weapon. I didn’t see prints leading away from the marker so I figure the perpetrator either tossed it away or kept it. To know what he chose would be a good thing for me to know.”

The town’s sole doctor was known as Wahkan to the People, but the whites called  him Plenty  Practice. No one had  ever died under his knife, but even a local legend such  as Doctor Wahkan could not call back the dead. H8

"Kim Zinter," the doctor  said when he  saw the  bloody corpse. "Heartbreaking. And her  father died  only last  year. I  can't "imagine how Clara is going to take this."

The sheriff looked inward and frowned deeply, knowing he must be the one to tell her.

Dr. Wahkan donned a pair of rubber gloves. "I have never carried out this protocol for you before, Sheriff, and for your father I only had to do so three times. That alone tells you how, in the main, Headwater really is a good place."

"How did you know her name, Doctor?"

"I saw this girl last spring when her mother brought her in. And I also saw another girl  who is the  same age, one  named Sofie Krause. They both had the same symptoms."

"Symptoms?"

Dr. Wahkan pulled Kim's headdress away, but the two white horns remained in place. Removing the jewelry and  holding out  the jewelry, he said, "No doubt you have seen  something similar to this before."

Roddy nodded. "I know it is a Kuwapi thing.  My first guess was Kim was wearing it because it was  starting to catch on as a fad among  the white  kids in  town.  Sort of  like their  so-called music."

Wahkan reached down to grabbed  one on the horns  on Kimberly's head and shook it. This caused her whole head to shake as well. "Actually, they wear the jewelry to cover up the fact that these horns are real."

"I'll be damned," Roddy said. "I never guessed!"

Dr, Wahkan lifted Kim's hair so the sheriff could  see the skin of her scalp where the horns emerged from her skull. There was a smooth transition. The skin simply hardened and merged with the horns, yet the horns themselves were not mere a  feature of the skin, like calluses. They were rooted to the bone.

"We call this the Change," the doctor told him. "Naturally both girls and  particularly  their  parents were  alarmed  when  it started to  happen to them,  but they were actually  quite safe. The  Change is  known among  the  Kuwapi people.  It spreads  by sexual contact." H9

"You seem to know a lot about it, Dr. Wahkan."

"I know that among the Changed are the Begotten and the Made. I know both  the Begotten and  the Made  can Make the  Change, but only the Begotten can beget the Change. I told Kim and Sofie the Change had been present among some members of the Red Wing for a human lifetime  and more, and if  you believe the Green  Book it goes back  much, much  further than  that. But  when I  tried to explain all this to their mothers they wouldn't believe me. They took  the girls  somewhere  to  get a  second  opinion, and  now Headwater is infested with outsiders."

"Headwater is a good place, Doctor, just like you said, but the killer deliberately  draped her  body across three  states. That forces my hand.  I must report this crime to  the very outsiders who have made things less good here over the last few month. But I  can't  believe she  was  killed  just  for wearing  Red  Wing jewelry."

"A flirtation with the Red Wing might run deeper than a penchant for hair accessories," the doctor suggested. And with that, in the full view  of the sheriff, he  began to run the  body of the girl through the necessary indignity of an autopsy.