and Lincoln sped out of the parking lot in Jeff’s ‘53 step-side Chevy.
“Jesus, Lincoln! What was that all about?” Jeff demanded.
“Nothing!”
“Nothing? You mean to tell me that hustling me out of the parking lot like a madman was nothing? He knew your name! Do you know this guy?”
“No! Well, yeah. I think I know him. I thought he was a guy I owed some money once.”
“How much?”
“Enough to want to run. I don’t remember exactly, but it’s more than I got now. That’s it. Hey man, it’s cool. He’s probably just passing through.”
“That shit was real weird, Link.”
“Let’s go park somewhere and get ripped.”
“Sweet, my pale-skinned brother.”
“Hey! I ain’t that pale! My mother’s cousin’s cousin was full-blooded Pottawattamie.”
“White man speaks with forked tongue.”
The car radio was barely audible, but Jeff recognized the Steve Miller tune “Fly Like an Eagle” and turned it up.
“You’ve heard this tune, haven’t you? It’s great.”
“It’s OK,” Lincoln replied, “I’m a Neil Diamond man.”
Jeff stuck his finger in his mouth as if to puke. “No fucking way!” he said. “But I won’t hold it against you. There’s no accounting for taste.”
In the parking lot, Marina approached Ozay’s shadowy figure moving toward her.
“Who was that man?” she asked.
“From the way he responded, I’m pretty damn sure it was Lincoln. Let’s get some food and sort this out.”
Next morning they called the Eagle Feather office to talk to Michael “Sawtooth” Bragg. Ozay felt that Sawtooth was someone he could trust. What a great name for a radical journalist—a name that sounded like someone who could cut through the morass and get to the heart of things.
“Michael, it’s Ozay Broussard. Can we meet somewhere? I saw Lincoln last night.”
“How about coming here to the office. It’s only five minutes from where you are. I’m working on an article right now. I could take a break when you get here.”
Marina and Ozay finished off their coffee and Danish rolls, picked up a newspaper and walked to the Eagle Feather office.
When they arrived, Sawtooth offered them a seat. “Sit please. I should have mentioned it yesterday. I’ve been watching Lincoln ever since he got here. We think he’s been buying crank and coke at the Café for at least the last six months. Our concern has been the influx of hard drugs into the Indian community—alcohol has been enough to deal with. Lately Lincoln’s been seen with a local Yurok named Jeff Tool. I don’t think Lincoln’s dealing. At least we have no evidence of it, so my only concern is his influence on Jeff, who was probably the guy you saw with him.”
“What did the Yurok look like?” asked Ozay.
“Long black hair, usually wears a hooded sweat shirt, and drives a black Chevy pickup.”
“That’s who we saw last night with the bearded white guy I think was Lincoln Kennedy. Where do we find them?”
Sawtooth looked down at his feet for a moment and said, “Ozay, Marina, I suspect this is the first time up here for both of you?”
Ozay and Marina both nodded.
“Do you know anything about the politics and economy of this area other than what I’ve told you?”
Ozay spoke first. “I know that there’s been a conflict between indigenous Indian rights and corporate interests, land use and the white farmers, lumber industry and ecologists. And I know that the pot growers have carved out a niche here that’s a viable part of the local economy.”
Michael nodded. “You’ve got a partial picture. Maybe you’ve even heard of the arms used to protect the crops. But there’s a more dangerous element—organized crime. The point I’m making is that you don’t know what you might be getting into. I know Jeff and his older brother, Christian Tool. We grew up together. Christian is the more rational of the two. We all grew up on the reservation. The Tool brothers came from a hard-working salmon-fishing family on the Klamath. They were one of the many Yuroks to give up fishing when the water was siphoned off to the White farmers. Jeff and Christian left the reservation to farm pot and made enough to buy some acreage up the Mad River valley. Ever since this Lincoln Kennedy guy and the lawsuit became an issue, they’ve been reclusive. I suspect that this Kennedy guy is up to something.”
The Eagle Feather phone rang for Ozay. Bates called confirming that Lincoln Kennedy did work for the FBI and had avoided time by becoming an informant. Ozay told everyone what he just learned.
“It’s a set-up,” he deduced. “A sting.”
Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” howled out of the pickup radio.
“This shit’s going to kill us. You know that, don’t you?” Lincoln said, scooping coke out of a vial with his extra long little fingernail, while they sat in the pickup overlooking the Eureka Channel.
“Speak for yourself,” Jeff quipped.
“I like pushing the boundaries, taking it to the limit.” Lincoln was trying to be somewhat philosophical and facetious at the same time.
“Shit! I just want to get stoned,” Jeff said, dismissively, lighting up a joint. “But you know, it’s all alchemy. The early shamans and alchemists were the first junkies, man—the first heads. They hooked the nobility on these drugs and were then hired on full time. After a while, what do you get? A dynasty of shamans, healers, and alchemists who became the real power, the new nobility.”
“Jeff!” Lincoln said, sticking his little fingernail into the coke vial for another snort. “You know, I too have noble lineage!”
Jeff turned toward him, laughing. “Noble junkie lineage? Yeah, sure bro! If I snort some more of this shit, I’ll feel like Indian nobility—Sitting Bull, Geronimo, or Crazy Horse.”
“No, seriously, I mean that my family on my mother’s side goes back to 17th- and 18th-century European royalty.”
“You shit’n’ me?”
“No! My grandmother was from the Spanish aristocracy,” Lincoln continued as he shifted his weight and got more comfortable. “She ran away and married a young Italian prince who fought and died in Libya in the Italo-Ottoman war.”
“When the fuck was that war?”
“Just before WWI. My grandmother inherited enough to come to the US and start a new life. She married a Columbia University professor who turned out to be an anarchist. He was a wobbly—Industrial Workers of the World. He felt he had ties with the working class because his parents were poor Irish immigrants.”
“You related to President Kennedy?”
“Nope. Funny, though. The family name was Mottly. I hated it.” Lincoln thought his fabrication was pretty good, but he’d better wind it up. “I changed my name after the ‘Weather’ trial, to put that part of my life behind me.”
“The left-wing politics or the bombing?” Jeff was getting confused. “Aren’t you doing both now?”
“I guess I am doing both.”
“Weird, changing your name, Link.”
“Before I changed my name, I admit, I had hair transplants. Shit, I was going bald. Can you believe I paid for expensive hair transplant treatments to make me look younger? Fifty bucks a hair it cost.”
With