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A Tight Spot
If you’ve murdered someone, you don’t want them to come back.
Northwest of Wambli on the Oglala Lakota Indian Reservation is a good place to dump a body.
Jonas Ironshell stands at a big drop on the Pine Ridge Escarpment near the spot where
a fossil turtle was found two weeks earlier. The turtle find worries Jonas. Someone
was digging around the cliff. It’s pouring rain, March, cold, some sleet banging
in the ponderosa pines as Jonas looks down the escarpment into the holes and chutes
of the Ghost Canyon formation.
He’s twenty eight, just a rez guy, quiet, dropped out of school at sixteen, has some nice quarter horses
he’s raised. Always a wiz at math, he still sneaks books out of the Kadoka Library on quantum physics,
superstring theory, cosmology, dark matter, time. It’s his secret. Lakota have a gift for math sometimes,
but nobody admits it. Now he’s thinking about Calabi Yau manifolds. This isn’t something he would talk
about with his buddies when they go over to Potato Creek and raise hell or when they party all night
in the village, so quiet, so quiet the waisechu, the whites, couldn’t imagine they were even having
a good time. Sometimes they really aren’t having a good time. Too much is too much. He knows it.
Too much has done things to him he wishes it hadn’t. But now he’s thinking about Calabi Yau
manifolds and M theory, superstrings and worst of all, worst of all, events that should be over and done.
What are Calabi Yau manifolds? Not something he’d try to explain to his friends. Take space and fold it
and curl it and twist it into tiny shapes and add other dimensions of time and there you have it, neat
little beauties of mathematics that fold worlds and time into tight spots. He’s in a tight spot right
now. If the new cosmology is right, he may be in a really tight spot. Maybe the past can loop around, come back.
If you toss a body off a cliff it should, even if it gets washed out of a thousand holes in the badlands
wall, it should keep itself down at the bottom of the escarpment. It should not reappear driving a truck
down the gravel road to the dump. For certain, Lester Quiver should not reappear.
He did. Ten minutes ago.
Now Jonas thinks maybe it’s too much celebrating with his friends or too much raising hell in Rapid City.
Too much something. Einstein said time is relative, but even with that, Lester Quiver should not be driving
his battered Ford truck west toward Interior, South Dakota. Lester Quiver should be gone. For good.
Time has a shape. Just like space. Jonas understands that perfectly. Time goes forward, is not exactly linear
but goes from past to future. Time has an arrow. The arrow shot right through Jonas ten minutes ago when Lester
drove past in the truck, hit the horn, waved.
Katerina Bjorklund is the reason, of course. Two men, one woman, Jonas needed to simplify the equation.
One man, one woman. Jonas always liked the elegance of simple mathematical formulae. Katerina struck
him like a thunderbolt, and Jonas took measures, shot Lester, tossed him off the cliff. The drop
was two hundred feet. No body was found. No one looked very hard. Lester was a bad guy, not much
use to the Quiver clan, no friend of the local police, the local FBI. Besides, bodies down in the
tunnels and holes and chutes of the rez badlands just have to take their chances. Nobody’s going
to kill himself going in there.
The rain is pouring down. Jonas has spotted a pile of bones two hundred feet below, some from cattle,
some from something else. He can’t get down the mudstone cliff to check if it’s Lester. The cliff’s
lethal, slick as grease.
So he’s sitting on top, waiting, thinking about Calabi Yau manifolds and the twists and turns of
spacetime, thinking about the elegant formulae he knows, his brilliant mind wasted in so many ways.
Thinking about how cold the rain is and how wet he is getting and how his imagination may be playing
tricks on him. Looking at the cliff edge of Ghost Canyon. Wondering.
Janet Shell Anderson is currently nominated for both the Micro Prize and the Pushcart Prize.
She has been published by Vestal Review, Grey Sparrow Press, Gemini Magazine, Convergence, Four Cornered
Universe, Pindeldyboz, LITSNACk, The Citron Review and others. She often writes about the Oglala Lakota Pine
Ridge Indian Reservation, knows the "real" Wambli, loves science fiction, has taught language and literature
at the University of Maryland and Doane College as a visiting professor and is an attorney. The area
described in this piece really exists and local legend has it more than one person has disappeared down
that cliff. Probably not, she says, but it's fun to speculate.
Email: Janet Shell Anderson
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