The First Dude in His Element

Sports Illustrated
March 11, 2009
Edited by Chris Hunt
© Bill Donahue

Behold Todd Palin’s snow machine, dangling from a truck’s winch in the icy gray murk of an Alaskan winter morning. The machine is gleaming, new, scarcely ridden. It is orange and black and pointy-nosed, with thin, tensile orange steel suspension arms jutting from its sides like the wings on a menacing insect. This is, no doubt, a machine that could inflict a nasty sting, but right now its engine is stilled, and a certain awed quietude prevails on Big Lake, outside Anchorage, at the start of the 2009 Tesoro Iron Dog, a 2,000-mile snow-machine odyssey that crashes through the Alaskan backcountry, northwest to Nome and then east to Fairbanks.

“That an Arctic Cat F600?” one bystander murmurs.

“Yup,” says his bud.

“Ohlins shocks?”

“Yup.”

Racers of lesser means did not arrive here with winches. No, they wrestled their 500-pound machines out of their pickups with the engines snarling, exhaust spewing everywhere as they heaved the things down little makeshift ramps. Palin’s sled settles on the newly fallen snow soundlessly, and then he just stands beside it, buff, grinning and vigorously gnawing on chewing gum.

Yes, we are talking about that Todd Palin — Sarah’s husband, the First Dude — and yes, the Dude is in his element here at the Dog. Forget the campaign trail, the whole black suit and sound-bite thing. Todd Palin grew up in rural Alaska, fishing in slime-spattered rain pants, and for most of the past two decades he’s worked in a British Petroleum plant on the frigid North Slope, monitoring turbines and pumps with a tool belt slung from his hip. Nothing else could have prepared him better for the rigors of the Dog — the -60 degree cold snaps, the darkness, the mechanical breakdowns, the wipeouts at 95 mph. Palin, who has entered 15 of the 25 runnings of this annual race, has won four and placed second three times.

The Iron Dog is an accrued-time partner race, in which teams of two riders, each on his own sled, are clocked only when the rear guard arrives at a designated point. Since 2003 Palin, who’s 44, has paired with another snow-machine celebrity, 49-year-old Scott Davis, who has won the Dog seven times (once with Palin) and run the race every year since its 1984 inception. The impresario of a large concrete business, Davis is, like Palin, a striking physical presence: chiseled and lantern-jawed, with the erect bearing of a resolute middle-aged mensch.

More snow machines roll out of pickups. The air thrums — a high-pitched throttly scream here, a low bassy engine roar over there. Soon a 53-year-old knifemaker, Roger Comar, approaches Palin and Davis reverently. Comar has traveled from his home in Marion, N.C., expressly to give each rider (and Sarah, too) a custom-made jackknife whose blade is crafted from the metal of an Arctic Cat F600 drive chain. Each knife took Comar 20 hours of shop time, and in his moment of glory he tells Todd Palin, “You can skin a moose with this thing.” Then he turns to Sarah and says, “This is a message from western North Carolina that we want you to make a run for president in 2012.”

But then there’s a political resonance to the whole scene. On two race sleds are bumper stickers reading AMERICA. LOVE IT, DEFEND IT, OR GET THE HELL OUT. On another there’s a mock ALASKA TERRORIST HUNTING PERMIT, good through 2050, with the license number 9-11-01. Tina Fey is not here amid the wafting aroma of two-stroke motor oil. Neither is Michelle Obama.

And so Todd Palin is free to be … the Dude. There are no Secret Service types shadowing him, no spin-doctoring publicists. No, he’s just another guy wandering the crowd, slapping old friends on the back, shooting the bull. And Sarah, too, is relaxed. Stylishly coiffed and hatless at 15 degrees, she takes a microphone and makes a few chummy remarks before praying that the snow machine’s enjoy “God’s protection.” The Air Force Honor Guard plays The Star-Spangled Banner in formation on the frozen lake, and one by one 35 teams zoom away, over the ice and into the bush.

*****

The Iron Dog is a marathon punctuated by required rest stops. Long ones. Though the race takes six days (this year, Feb. 8-14), winners typically finish with elapsed time of about 40 hours. This includes “wrench time,” which is critical. The course of the Dog — over tree stumps, rocks and large, heaving berms on the first 1,000 miles, then over smaller, rattling wind drifts on the frozen Bering Sea and various rivers — is so destructive to snow machines that, of the 600 or so teams that have started the race since 1984, only about 40 percent have finished. Most of the other drivers have broken bones or wearied of the cold or watched their engines fry under strain.

When the Dog began, it had a survivalist vibe. Racers would show up at the starting line with doubly reinforced steel sled skis and 50 pounds of spare parts roped to their tool bags. In recent years, though, a nimbler ethic has emerged. Snow machines now have independent front suspension, making them more stable and better able to endure the treacherous terrain, and race organizers allow riders to scare up spare parts at rest stops. Today, Iron Doggers can actually race.

Well, kind of. Davis and Palin are banking on an old-school approach. They’re going around the hellacious berms, saving their sleds. They’re riding with soft suspension — not optimal for the course’s undulating first half, but possibly a lifesaver on the small, sled-wrecking bumps that stretch onward from Nome. Yes, ever since Arctic Cat sent them their sleds — at a deep discount — in November, Team 22 has tried to exercise hoary wisdom.

But brash youth is out on the trail as well, embodied most by two top pairs of twentysomethings who’ve cut their teeth on the hurly-burly, crash-heavy Alaskan sprint circuit, in races like the Klondike 150. Team 8 and Team 16 are friendly with Palin and Davis. Indeed, Todd Minnick, 25, the sturdy, no-nonsense leader of Team 16, spent two summers on Palin’s commercial fishing boat a decade ago; his teammate, builder Nick Olstad, also 25, trimmed out the Palin manse in Wasilla.

The young guys don’t have the lean, gym-sculpted physiques of Davis and Palin, who trained off-sled for the race, running and lifting to build quad and core strength. But it’s unclear that this is significant. On last year’s winning team was a self-described “fat guy,” Marc McKenna, who at this year’s Dog was witnessed savoring a second helping of chicken-fried steak — for breakfast.

As they take their first layover — beyond Ptarmigan Pass in the Alaska Range, in the village of Unalakleet — on Feb. 10, Palin and Davis are in sixth place. The kids are beating them, and Tyler Aklestad, a smirking, baby-faced 23-year-old on Team 8, is having a blast. Just before the village of Koyukuk, he flew along on the banks of the Yukon at 10 p.m. It was so cold, the snow dust was blue, and suddenly — out of nowhere, in the darkness — he saw a man sitting on his snow machine by the side of the trail, broken down and battling hypothermia. “I missed him by inches,” says Aklestad, “and I just kept going at, like, 90 miles an hour.”

*****

Snow machine marathons are not spectator-friendly. Basically, you watch each racer rocket by for, say, four seconds before he roars out of sight, swallowed by the wilderness, for hundreds of miles. All you can do after leaving Big Lake is fly to the halfway point, Nome, and kill time hanging out at Wilderness Skidoo, a shop that in Nome (pop. 3,500) has an almost holy aura.

The snow machine season in northwest Alaska lasts about seven months, and it begins, according to Wilderness Skidoo owner John Vahnke, in late September when the year’s models arrive. “We fire ‘em up,” Vahnke says, “and then a lot of guys, they just stand around, just to get the smell of the oil burning.” Vahnke’s parts guy, Andy Peterson, adds, “I’ve had friends tell me that if there was a cologne that had that smell, they’d wear it. It’s … well, words cannot describe that smell.”

“No,” Vahnke corrects him, his eyes going dreamy. “It’s like a woman wearing Chanel No. 5.”

The race is a battle of brethren. All but two of the teams this year are Alaskan, and if you read the race program, nearly every rider is a hardworking fellow who, on weekends, enjoys fishing and hunting and riding snow machines through powder (a whole different sport). But not all racers are equal.

Some Iron Doggers have spent upwards of $30,000 to finance a once-in-a-lifetime run into the wild heart of Alaska. Tapping their credit cards, they’ve shelled out $10,000 each for a 2009 snow machine, $10,000 more for an identical training sled, $2,500 for the race entry fee and a few thousand more for trailing airplane support. Palin and Davis, in contrast, have spent almost nothing. They are prodigiously sponsored, with their names monogrammed in script on their matching Arctic Cat jackets. (Palin even has the names of his five kids and his wife, SARAH, THE GOV, appliquéd on his snow machine hood.) They give inspirational speeches at trade shows. They are both adored and reviled. They are the New York Yankees of snow machining.

*****

On Feb. 12 Palin and Davis pull into Nome for a 40-hour rest, now in fourth place, a surmountable two hours and eight minutes back. Davis kind of runs the show. Out on the trail he almost always leads, even as other teams switch off riding fore and aft. And here in Nome, where Team 22 has borrowed a king cab Chevy pickup, Davis always drives. When he and Palin go over the dings on their parked sleds, Davis directs.

“What do you think of this leak right here?” Palin asks.

“That one’s going to need an exhaust manifold,” Davis intones as Palin silently nods.

“All right, let’s turn this thing over and check out the track.”

Later, over pizza, Palin is still quiet and stoical, even as the talk turns to the 2008 race, in which he hit a sunken oil drum and spilled 400 miles from the finish. Palin broke an arm then but still finished fourth, running the last 150 miles on a wrecked sled pulled by Davis. Didn’t that hurt?

“Pain was the least of my worries,” says Palin. “You talk to any active Alaskan, and you’ll see that we all end up with a few bumps and bruises.”

What about that Iron Dog a few years back in which his steering column buckled, pitching him onto the snow each time he took he a left turn? “Well, any time your snow machine can’t turn and you’re flying through the air, away from it, it’s not good,” Palin says. “It’s bad.”

There is something masterful about Todd Palin. He is almost invariably calm, and he is handsome and rock-steady in an affable, unobtrusive way. He is the perfect political husband. But he is also a sort of sphinx — you keep trying to crack the enigma and glimpse the gears spinning away in his mind. You watch him.

One afternoon in Nome, Palin comes out of his bedroom in the little apartment that he and Davis are borrowing. Freshly showered, he lumbers toward the TV. “Let’s see what’s on,” he says, twiddling at the remote. Grainy snow blasts onto the screen, so Palin flicks the thing off and just slumps on the couch. Silently, he stares out at the frozen Bering Sea, glittering in the sun, and you have to wonder: Is he thinking of what Herman Melville called the “dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows,” or is he thinking of nothing at all?

Palin’s sangfroid does crack, sometimes. Over drinks in Nome, an Arctic Cat mechanic, Calvin Nolan, tells a story about helping Palin and Davis ready their sleds for the race. “Todd was having rear suspension issues,” Nolan says, “a lot of shock issues, and on bumps he was bottoming out. The studs in the track were puncturing his cooler, so his antifreeze seeped out. He overheated. Several times, he had to get towed back from Cow Lake. He was really frustrated.”

What did Palin say?

Nolan shakes his head, laughing. “You don’t want to print it,” he says.

On the trail to Nome, Davis blew a shock himself, but he and Palin fixed it in the -45 degree splendor of a subarctic night, and they remain hopeful. Last year’s winners — the beefy McKenna and a brainy engineer named Eric Quam — were 90 minutes back at the midpoint. “It’s a war of attrition,” Davis says, noting that both of this year’s leading teams scratched after Nome in 2008 because of mechanical problems. “When I was young,” he says, “I did exactly what they’re doing right now. I broke trail and ruined belts.”

Davis hopes for a blizzard that will force everyone to ride blind, relying on poise and a deep memory of the terrain. “A storm would be great,” he says. “Bad weather is an equalizer.” Minnick, the lead driver of Team 16, says, “I’m hoping it doesn’t snow. We just want to keep on keeping on.” But the next morning, at the restart, leaden skies are dumping cold, dry snow. The racers press east through a swirling whiteout.

*****

Tanana (Pop. 300) is 250 miles from the Iron Dog finish. Like so many stops on the trail, it is a largely Native Alaskan village isolated from the state’s road system. The most beloved Iron Dogger there is a rangy 23-year-old Athabascan, Tyler Huntington, who lives downriver in Galena. Huntington’s granddad and several cousins reside in Tanana. When the principal at Maudrey J. Sommer School lets students out to watch Huntington’s team come in, you expect banners and chants and tense finger-crossing out in the cold.

But the Iron Dog defies such maniacal fanhood. It’s informal — homey, even. Officials often time racers with analog watches lacking second hands, and refueling is a funky proposition. If the village attendant likes the racer, it might go fast. But if he doesn’t — well, there’s the tale about a guy whose gas cap was reattached crosswise, so that it jolted off and hit him in the face as he peeled out of a village.

The Tanana faithful mill quietly by the banks of the Yukon, and when Huntington’s grandfather, Roy Folger, is asked how he might celebrate a family victory, he shrugs. “Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “Have another cup of coffee, I guess.”

Huntington arrives moments later — in fourth, and in an ill temper. The towrope tugging his idle sled broke off just outside of town. He retied it and now, at the checkpoint, says of his machine, “It run out of gas, and it was plumb full in Ruby!”

Davis and Palin pull in 53 minutes later, in sixth, niggled by more suspension hassles and out of the running. The leaders have been there for hours already. They’re holed up in the spacious bed-and-breakfast over the store, padding around in their long johns and gloating a bit. “I dare you guys to say, ‘Hey, Todd, what took you so long?’” Aklestad quips, his voice a giddy whisper.

No one takes up the dare, and later Aklestad is deferential as Davis kvetches. “It’s been an odd race,” Davis says. “Not one of the top 10 teams has broken down.” He blames it on the snow, which, he contends, didn’t cut visibility enough and made the trail east from Nome cushier, less rattling to the stiffly shocked front-runners. “This race isn’t as tough as it used to be,” he says.

Palin sits nearby, silently spitting chewing tobacco into a cup as he watches a TV show about the manufacturing of postage stamps. He sleeps well, and the next morning, over biscuits and gravy, someone notes that he doesn’t seem that fazed by losing.

“What gives you that impression?” he snaps. “Maybe I don’t express myself when I’m pissed off inside, but this race is very important to me. I wouldn’t devote so much time to it — I wouldn’t spend so much time training and wrenching — if it wasn’t so frigging important.” His eyes are electric. For a second you see the fire that has propelled him into the winner’s circle and that flames up whenever, as he puts it, “that kangaroo court down in Juneau tries to ruin my wife’s reputation.” Todd Palin is irked.

But a second later he is the soul of cool bonhomie. “So,” he shouts to his pals at the breakfast table, “we got a pool going on who’s gonna win?”

*****

There is but a minute and 42 seconds separating the lead teams. Minnick and Olstad of Team 16 have been ahead almost from the get-go. But Team 8 — Aklestad, the wisecracker, and his partner, an unassuming sheet-metal worker named Tyson Johnson, have been a close second the whole way. And now, leaving Tanana, they begin narrowing the gap.

Beyond Manley, 180 miles from the finish, Olstad breaks a stud on his track. Aklestad and Johnson pass him as he stoops over his damaged sled with a wrench. They come across his partner, Minnick, driving toward them to aid in repairs.

“It was looking good,” Aklestad will say after the finish, “but about five minutes later I hit a wind drift about four feet tall.” Aklestad launches at 90 mph. “I got like 10 feet of air,” he will remember, “and I kicked the sled away from me.” He lands on his back as his sled slams the ground, nose up. He slides. His head hurts. He can’t get up. His partner runs toward him, to lift him up onto his sled — and right then, he says, “I see Todd Minnick hit the same bump.”

“I landed it,” Minnick will say, “but my head hit the windshield real hard. It didn’t hurt none, though, so I got back on the sled. It was purring like a kitten.”

Both teams scramble forward, battered. Minnick has a cracked windshield. Aklestad’s rear tension bolts are bent, so his track is loose and rattly as it churns over the snow.

The two teams meet again in the next town, Nenana, the last stop before Fairbanks. Minnick and Olstad get there first, but there isn’t even a gas pump in Nenana. There’s just a fuel truck waiting for racers down by the Tanana River, with a single nozzle. Minnick uses it as his father, a former racer, helps Olstad gas up from three five-gallon gas cans that he’s brought (a perfectly legal maneuver). Meanwhile, the owner of the Fairbanks Skidoo shop, a sponsor of Aklestad and Johnson, begins funneling fuel into his riders’ tanks. “But the jugs weren’t filling our tanks good,” Aklestad will lament. “We were in a hurry. Gas was spilling all over the place, and they were getting away from us.”

But in the end the fumbling doesn’t matter. Aklestad can go no faster than 80 mph with his wrecked track. Minnick and Olstad win by three minutes, with a time of 37:19:08, eclipsing Palin and Davis’ course record by 49 minutes. They celebrate quietly. There is no champagne, no cigars.

Governor Palin is there, though, in her own monogrammed Arctic Cat jacket, and when Todd’s team arrives, still in sixth, she is thrilled. “These guys are amazing!” she says, effervescent. Back in high school, she confides, her dream was to sit in the broadcast booth with Howard Cosell and do the play-by-play as her boyfriend, Todd, burned it up on the basketball court. “But this is better!” she adds. “These are my friends. This is my world.” One of her earliest dates with Todd was snowmobiling in the hills of Eureka, Alaska, in the bright sun, in shirtsleeves, in the middle of May.

The TV reporters are circling by now, and someone hands Todd his infant son, Trig. Todd smiles as he pats the boy’s head. A photographer leans in for the shot.

And then, a few hours later, Alaska’s First Couple flies home to Wasilla, to resume normal life. Todd goes to his daughter Willow’s basketball game. He tinkers with the boiler down in the basement, changes a water filter, and then gets together with Calvin Nolan, the Arctic Cat mechanic, to nail down what, exactly, went wrong.

A week after the race, on a clear, cold morning in Wasilla, Todd is pensive. “Scott and I just ran out of time this year because of our suspension setup,” he says over the phone, “and we definitely wouldn’t want a race like that one to be our last one. I’m ready to roll next year. I have to see how Trig’s doing, and [grandson] Trip, and what Sarah’s up to. But unless there’s some kind of catastrophe … ”

“You don’t think you’re too old?” he is asked.

“Hell, no,” says Todd Palin. “Hell, no.”

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Strange Paradise
The Atlantic
January 2009
Edited by Amy Meeker
© Bill Donahue

The birds, I learned later, were toucans. But as I made my way through the Panamanian jungle, their dry, echoing call—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—sounded almost mechanical, which seemed fitting. Before me, on an open plain in the Galeta Island Protected Landscape, was a mesh of 100-foot-high wires used by the United States during the Cold War to monitor Soviet submarines.

“They used to have a phone that connected straight to the White House,” my guide, a Panamanian student, remarked somberly. “And there was an underground tunnel soldiers could use to escape right out into the ocean.”

Of course, neither the tunnel nor the phone ever existed. But they were lovely details, embodying the mystique of Panama today. As the nation vaults toward prosperity, with an 8 percent average annual GDP growth rate, it is still haunted by its past—by the seven-year rule of Manuel Noriega, and by nearly 100 years of American soldiers guarding the canal. Noriega and the GIs left behind mementos that collectively have the dark, exotic ambiance of a Graham Greene novel. They also left behind pristine jungles—the U.S. allowed no logging in the rainforest surrounding the canal, because the trees afforded cover from potential attacks—and a serious ecotourism industry is sprouting up. So I went south for a few days, bringing my flip-flops and snorkeling gear.

Thirty minutes outside Panama City is a former radar tower that the U.S. once used to monitor the canal. Lavishly renovated, the three-story cylinder is now the Canopy Tower hotel, a mecca for serious birders. From the roof, you can see parrots and parakeets swooping through the mist and the trees. Birdwatching’s high Brahmins—Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Buffett, Martha Stewart—have all stayed here.

When I visited, there was a group, eight strong, from a Texas-based tour company. I joined them in the open-air “Rainfomobile” for three hours of hushed observation. For 20 minutes, we stood by a swampy pond, trying to home in on a small fluttering piratic flycatcher in the brambles. “If you look up at that branch there,” the guide whispered, “and follow it to that little knob— ”

“I got it!” one man cried. “I got some butt!”

I found myself yearning for a grittier encounter with the country’s past, and thought I might find it on Coiba Island, 15 miles off Panama’s Pacific coast. A penitentiary since 1919, Coiba is now the centerpiece of a bounteous national park, Galápagos-like, with more than 20 endemic bird species. It is also still a prison, though with only a handful of inmates.

In Santiago, four hours south of Panama City, I met up with a guide taking 17 others—Panamanians on holiday, mostly—to the island. We rode in a minivan for two hours, walked a couple of miles along a dirt road, and then piled into an aluminum outboard. “Paraíso!” our guide declared when at last we drew near. “Es como Hawaii!”

Maybe—with a little Guantánamo thrown in. On the beach, we were greeted by a jaunty, 60-something man with a gun—a prison guard. Around us were some 3,000 cows. The guard explained that they were there thanks to a bureaucratic snag: “The prisoners used to butcher the herd, but now the Ministry of Justice doesn’t allow it, and the cows can’t leave—they’d die of shock on the boat.”

We meandered past a grove of trees, and in the branches was a small, skittish bird that I loved as much for its name in Spanish as for its appearance. Sangre de toro is a tanager with a breast and throat carpeted, it seemed, with crimson velvet. Nearby, a sleek jackrabbit-­like mammal, a neque, fidgeted on the ground, its back hunched, its eyes bulging. Howler monkeys, smaller than their mainland cousins, bounded in the branches above.

After a while, we met a man chopping vegetables who is serving a 16-year sentence for murder. He asked me to sit down beside him, and quietly extolled the joys of Coiba. “The fresh air!” he said. “The peace!”

I asked what he did with his time.

“Cook,” he said, “and take care of the cows—make sure they don’t die. Like, if the little ones get caught in the sand, we help them out.”

He was so placid that I found our conversation disorienting. What kind of murderer was this guy? And what kind of country would let tour groups hang out with murderers? On Coiba, I often felt somewhat disoriented. I like to swim long distances, and every time I strapped on my goggles, a young Panamanian raised his hand and warned, “Los tiburones!” The sharks! I couldn’t tell if he was joking. For all I knew, Coiba is home to sharks that feast on gringos. But still I swam with abandon: over coral reefs, and scuttling crabs, and twisting schools of electric-blue fish.

One time, I misunderstood our guide and jumped in while everyone else stayed on the boat. I was alone in the water when a giant black manta ray came billowing along, headed shoreward. Its body was boneless; it moved like a flopping prehistoric bird in slow motion. As it passed by I just watched it, savoring another strange delight in a strange land.

My Grandson, The Writer

The Smart Set
August 8, 2008
© Bill Donahue

The summer I turned 18, my parents went away to Europe and I lived with my grandmother in our family’s rambling summer home in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. It was an unusual housing scenario. My grandmother was the grande dame of an elite summer colony that had begun hosting cocktail parties and picking blueberries in the New Hampshire hills even before her own grandparents had bought the house in 1905.

Meanwhile, I was there in the house expressly to escape the confines of the upper-crust world. A bony, scowling, and acne-pocked iconoclast, I’d never fit in at my prep school back in Connecticut. But there in New Hampshire, hanging out with my friends, year-round residents all, I’d been able to flourish — to recast myself as a wry comedian and a sort of visiting scholar capable of leading beery colloquiums on, say, the writings of Nietzsche and what The Door’s Jim Morrison really meant as he writhed his way through his 12-minute epic, “Celebration of the Lizard,” on the “Absolutely Live” album.

I lived in my own sphere that summer, independent of my grandmother. I bagged groceries at the IGA. I trained for cross-country, running a few miles each day on the winding back roads, and I spent long hours burrowed in my upstairs bedroom, trying to impress myself with how profound and subversive I was. I used all the stage props at hand, so that when the show was in full swing I was sprawled on my bed wearing a red bandanna around my head, a pair of rust-colored corduroy cutoffs, and a white T-shirt from the Madison Cafe back in Hartford, where I’d already savored the 25-cent happy hour drafts, thanks to a home-doctored fake I.D. that would cut no ice in today’s more litigious times. I had my earphones plugged into my Walkman, and by the bedside was a small blue plastic cup half-filled with a slimy brown fluid. Every few minutes I would spit into it. I had a penchant back then for Red Man chewing tobacco.

The most critical part of the equation, though, was the spiral notebook in my lap. I was keeping a journal that summer — stowing it in my sock drawer and filling it with my most private and deepest thoughts: my meditations on world peace and on certain girls I admired, along with notes on the classic rock I was still listening to, even in 1982, and on the various parties I attended in town that summer. These were not polite gatherings. At one, a fellow nicknamed Hinckley, after Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin John Hinckley, arrived late. He drove his van right up onto the lawn, crushing the host’s flimsy patio furniture, and then proceeded inside with his posse. There, he pried the cover off the back of the television set and, laughing, poured Old Milwaukee onto the filaments within.

Anyway, Granny knew about the journal, and when I was ensconced in my secret writing, she mostly gave me my space. Between songs, I’d hear her downstairs, rustling around in the small pantry, perhaps, or slamming a cast iron skillet onto the stove, so as to cook supper for herself and my step-grandfather, Ebby, a deaf and retiring Southern gentleman who was serving as her third husband. Her movements always seemed muscular and proprietary.

The house had existed as a physical structure before her birth in 1904, but if it had any story that predated my grandmother, I was unaware of it. The spirit of the place was her spirit. The house was a blithe and magical place, structurally crumbling and aesthetically akilter, with ancient, peeling wallpaper and a slapdash array of four-leaf clovers, all serendipitously found, Scotch-taped to the window in the entryway. She was a wildly impulsive and impractical person.

Born a society girl, she had never really shed the starry-eyed thrill and the dramatic flirtatiousness of a debutante. She was forever in search of a party. At her winter home, in Washington, D.C., she harbored an apolitical thrill for protests and social movements. In 1968, as police were teargassing civil rights protesters outside her townhouse in Georgetown one morning, she wandered out into the toxic mist, barefoot, in her nightgown, merely to be one with the action. Later, when she was in her 80s and a massive pro-choice rally hit town, she found a van crammed with slumbering male demonstrators and left a note on the windshield inviting them all in for breakfast. “They were such lovely people,” she reported after the visit, “and so handsome.”

Coming from someone else, the whole act might have seemed batty or vapid. But my grandmother had endured hardships and challenges: the early, sudden death of her father; a precipitous decline in her family’s fortune; a varied career as a publicist, retail saleswoman, and interior decorator; two divorces; and a prolonged ’30s-era court battle that saw her name splashed about in the newspapers as she lost primary custody of her only child, my mother. She was a survivor. Her bright presence at a gathering of summer people was a million times more inspiring than any motivational speaker ever could be.

But she was terrifying, too. She had pushed past tragedy by bending the world. Everything around her was marvelous — utterly charming. She did not brook exceptions to this rule. And so if she gazed at you across a crowded room, subtly nodding, to signal that it was your turn to pass the hors d’oeuvres, you did not dare disobey. If you did, you were toast.

My upstairs writing sessions were both a marvel and an affright to my grandmother. I was “developing a wonderful mind,” she’d tell me at the breakfast table, “just like your mother.” But I was a brooding kid writing — well, she didn’t know what, exactly, I was writing as I stood on the cusp of a shadowed adult world so different from the one she’d been born into. I scared her a little, I think, and I certainly did not live up to her standards of genteel decorum. The journals were a topic that at first she discussed nervously, with a game cheer. “Do you think when you’re older,” she asked once, “you might write about tennis? Or the opera, perhaps?”

As the summer wore on, remarkably, she learned to appreciate my life as an adventure. Indeed, she began to ask questions that struck me as very astute. “What’s the name of that band you listen to all the time,” she asked, “the one with the drummer named Moon? Isn’t it The Whos?”

“Bill,” she said, “you have the keenest eye for observing human nature. Has anyone ever told you that?”

Finally — unbelievably, and out of the blue — she asked me if I’d like to host my own party, in the airy barn we had behind the house. “We’re going away for the weekend,” she said. “Just a few people, just a small gathering.”

“Really?” I said. My grandmother had a knack for reading other people, for discerning what, precisely, they needed to make their lives the sunny gala that hers already was. But this? This was like a miracle. I activated the phone tree and the word got out — “Donahue’s having a rager.”

But then just a few hours before the party’s scheduled start, Ebby decreed that they were not going away at all. They were staying in the house.

“You’re staying where?” I said. This was totally uncool.

“Oh, don’t worry,” said my grandmother. “We wouldn’t dream of getting in your way.”

Ebby spent the early evening tacking up small signs inside the barn: “Absolutely no smoking,” “Please, no alcohol.” And then the first guests began trickling in, bearing full cases of Michelob Light on their backs. By 10 p.m., the barn was packed and crowds were spilling outside, onto the terrace and the darkened croquet course below. There must have been 70 people there. Ebby had removed his hearing aid and trundled off to bed hours before, and Granny, apparently in deference to the torrents of youth, was leaving us alone, staying inside the house. She was reading a novel in the lounge. The party was unfettered. It was huge, and it was my party, and as I stood there on the sloping wood floor of the barn, the roar of voices all around me, I felt something close to omnipotence.

At around 11, however, Hinckley showed up. His attack this time was clean and quick. He simply snipped our garden hose in half, used the severed end to siphon gas out of a VW Bug belonging to a guy named Art Jones, and then left.

Once the theft was discovered, Art needed to go inside the house to use the telephone. As he was waiting for his brother or whoever to pick him up, he talked to Granny. He was a large and genial kid, red-haired and poised to ship out, in a few weeks, to North Carolina, where he’d begin basic training with the Army. He was sloppy drunk. I don’t know what he and Granny talked about, but when he returned to the barn, he said, “Your grandmother, your grandmother, your grandmother, man — she’s amazing.”

Soon, the party seeped into the house. I went in there myself eventually and found five or six people circled around Granny. She was telling stories as though she were Sarah Bernhardt called back out on stage for an encore. For her it was old hat. What made the act work, though, was a certain tenderness. She heard the lilt in the young people’s voices and she joined, perfect pitch, in their revelry. It was almost as if somehow she already knew them.

How did she pull it off? How was it that every time people came over she had full social command? I always wanted to ask her, but it was the sort of question she was sure to meet with a steely, implacable smile. We both had our secrets.

•

Or so I thought, until that fall when one afternoon (I was in college by then) a packet arrived in the mail, sent by my mom. Photocopies. Of my own handwriting — of a few inflammatory excerpts from my personal journal. In one regrettable passage, I’d carped about my grandmother’s domineering and meddlesome ways. Beside my words was my grandmother’s own marginal comment: “Look what he said! How ungrateful! How hurtful!”

My grandmother had apparently rushed to the Kinko’s in Concord after clandestinely reading my slurs. Then she’d written my mother, in tears. My mother is a writer herself, a historian. She believes in handwritten documents — believes that they have an integrity and that they should never be raided. She’d put off writing me for a few weeks. But what else could she do? My grandmother had kept after her. She wanted my mom to exact an apology out of her cretinous son.

I did not apologize. Today, I kind of wish that I had called Granny to enunciate the obvious — that I only despised her for about 15 minutes, in my journal, and that I understood her desperate need to understand me. I also wish that I had asked her a question. That party in the barn — was that inspired by her reading? Did she settle down with an iced tea one afternoon while I was at work and immerse herself in my scrawled tales of Hinckley, et al? Did she think, “Oh, this all sounds so colorful” and then decide that what I needed most — what would make me most delighted — was a rager in the barn?

My guess is that this is what happened, more or less. It’s funny to think about, but still even now I can’t write off my grandmother’s snooping as pure lark. What she did was wrong. She invaded my privacy, and she did this at a time in my life when privacy shined as a new and exquisite thing. I was silly and juvenile that summer, sure, but I was making a splendid discovery — that one could have a secret, intricate life of the mind, and that maybe thinking and writing could be the focus of your existence.

My grandmother harbored a romance for the sort of person I was trying to become. She adored dreamy-eyed artistes, and she always raved about how she was there in Paris in the ’20s, staying just down the street from Sylvia Beach as she published the first-ever edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But at bottom she didn’t really get the whole fragile introvert thing. She just barged right in on me. It was a mark: an unfortunate part of our history. We never once talked about what had happened.

Still, we both knew, and as I went on to become a journalist, a freelance writer for magazines, the secret loomed larger. It bonded us, even. She was my first critic and my first fan. She’d read my earliest work. She had seen the best and the worst of me, exposed right there on the page, and in a sense I’d seen the best and the worst of her, too. I’d seen both her generosity and her thirst for control. And so it was no surprise what happened a decade ago when she summoned me to her deathbed. She whispered, “Bill, get a pen. You’re writing my obituary.” Then, in careful, stentorian tones, she began to dictate the lede.

I revised the write-up, of course, once she was dead. But as I remember that summer now, what I realize is how thoroughly my grandmother owned it. She read me. She knew me. She invented me, even, and forced upon me her own infinite hope.

I think of this one evening in August. She had a couple of codgers over for cocktails and came to the foot of the stairs and called up for me. “Bill,” she chimed, “Bill, dear, won’t you come down and be charming?”

I took off the headphones. I spat out my chaw. I lumbered downstairs and then stood there, my hands on my hips, and scowled at the codgers as they squinted back and then looked over at Granny, begging for some explanation.

She swept her arms along through the air, toward me with a great ta da flourish. My grandson,” she said, “the writer.” • 8 August 2008

Wonder Boy

Runner’s World
August, 2008
Edited by Peter Flax
© Bill Donahue

If you stand long enough by the temple complex, you will see them–the pilgrims–weaving on bare feet through the choked, filthy side streets, past bone-thin wandering cows and past amputee beggars and street children and mangy dogs sprawled on their backs on the cobblestone.

Patiently, the pilgrims pick their way through the mayhem of Puri, India, until they catch sight of the terraced white spires of Jagannath, a labyrinth of some 120 temples. Then they drop to their knees and pray–and, watching, you see how the gritty physical world and the shimmering spiritual realm are deeply intertwined in India, sometimes in strange ways.

On the morning of May 2, 2006, a little boy stepped into the streets of Puri, in running shoes. Budhia Singh was 4 years, 3 months old. A slum kid from a nearby city, Bhubaneswar, he wore bright red socks and a collared white tennis shirt that drooped to midthigh. His task that morning, as prescribed by his coach Biranchi Das, a one-time all-India judo champ, was to run home: 43 miles back to Bhubaneswar, the largest city in the state of Orissa, through the rising heat of Northeast India’s most sweltering season.

If all this sounds stranger than a fairy tale, consider that Budhia is now, at age 6, a celebrity in India. He’s starred in a popular music video in which he runs, does judo, and unleashes a hip-hop chant, “I am Budhia, son of Orissa.” Indian newspapers regularly hail him as a “wonder boy” bound for the Olympics.

As he stood in Puri, Budhia was said to have run six half-marathons and train 120-plus miles a week. Sometimes he ran barefoot on asphalt. Almost always, he ran without hydrating. “If he drinks while running,” reasoned Das, “he will go weak.”

This run wasn’t a race; it was a test with a spiritual resonance. Budhia was traveling a route that millions of pilgrims had ridden in busses: running north from Puri, with its 900-year-old holy shrine, and past the Sun Temple, a World Heritage site boasting exquisite stone carvings. Das had alerted the media and worked his connections with the Central Reserve police force. A squadron of officers and cadets in khaki shorts was ready to run with the boy. Budhia stood hip high among them. He looked little and fragile.

In time, Das would be pilloried by critics arguing that no 4-year-old should be forced to endure the ardors of long-distance running. Three days after Budhia’s Puri run, Orissa’s Minister for Women and Child Development would sweep in to arrest Das, who was also the boy’s foster father, on charges of child cruelty. Later, newspapers would air lurid accusations. Budhia’s mother alleged last summer that Das hung her son upside down from a ceiling fan, splashed him with hot water, and branded his skin with the words “Biranchi Sir.” Budhia himself told reporters, “He locked me in a room for two days without food.” Sukanti Singh took her son back from the coach.

All very damning, except that a medical report, conducted by a neutral forensics specialist, Sarbeswar Acharya, revealed that the scars on Budhia’s body were three to six months old. They were not caused by scalding water, Acharya opined, and not corroborative of Sukanti’s claims. And a newsbreak this spring only deepened the mystery.

On April 13, Biranchi Das, 41, was murdered–shot dead outside his judo hall. The prime suspect, a gangster named Raja Acharya, who faces some 30 unrelated counts of extortion, murder, and kidnapping, is now in jail, awaiting trial. He was infatuated with a lovely Indian actress, Leslie Tripathy. Police speculate that Das irked the gangster by cautioning him to stop harassing Tripathy. If they’re right, perhaps Das died for honor. Then again, you could ask why he was hanging out with a violent thug like Acharya in the first place. And was he himself the sort of tough who might thrash a child?

No one (except Budhia himself) will ever know for sure, and there’s an outside chance that the boy’s scars could have accrued without anyone striking him: In Bhubaneswar’s slums, open cook fires are always burning, and rusty nails and broken glass are heaped by the roadside. All that’s clear is that nearly every adult in Budhia’s life has caused the boy harm.

There is something about kids–their magic innocence, maybe–that can make adults go crazy. Anyone who has ever endured a child-custody battle knows how covetous grown-ups can get. And this is a story about adults going crazy–and about a child trying to remain whole amid the chaos. It’s a story about a sort of custody battle, one lacking moral clarity. Biranchi Das wasn’t a pure villain; in some ways he shined as devoted.

Back in Puri, he bent to the ground and tied Budhia’s shoes. Budhia started to run, at roughly 10 minutes a mile, up a long, slight incline, past roadside shops where vendors sold milky chai for 10 cents a cup and past bald patches of land where long-tailed monkeys crouched by the road, watchful and still.

The police officers surrounded Budhia, their boots scuffing the pavement with a militarized rhythm, and TV cameras craned in at the boy, shooting footage that would later verify that this run was no hoax. Thousands stood at the roadside. Later, everyone in Orissa would speak of how the crowds felicitated Budhia, and that the word, carrying hints of fervor and ecstasy, seemes to fit. Several times, spectators rushed toward the boy, attempting to garland him with a necklace of orange and red marigolds–the flowers that abound in Indian temples.

Budhia kept going. He crossed a bridge over the River Kushabhadra and passed the fishing village of Chandrabagha. With temperatures climbing into the 90s, Budhia drank only a touch of lemony water. He tired. Then, three miles short of his goal–seven hours, two minutes into his run–Budhia collapsed from exhaustion. He began vomiting and convulsing. Over and over, he bit at the arms of Jyotsna Nayak, the doctor tending to him.

Nayak later told a British filmmaker, “Brain irritation was there. Had I not been there, he certainly would have died.” And large questions seemed to hang in the air: Do coaches and parents have the right to conscript children to chase after glory? Who sets the rules? And why are we so transfixed by the bizarre achievements of a 4-year-old boy? Sitting here in the world’s most affluent nation, fretting over what type of soy milk our kids are drinking, are we entitled to dictate how the talent of a desperate Indian slum kid ought to be nurtured?

Budhia was thirsty. Nayak gave him water. And before long, the boy bounced back. After all, he’d seen hardship before.

Budhia Singh was born in Bhubaneswar’s Guatam Nagar slum, in a shanty that has since been razed to make way for the railroad. His mother worked, in Indian parlance, as a peon. She did domestic chores, earning $6 a month. Budhia’s father, meanwhile, was an alcoholic addicted to ginger–dirt-flecked firewater that women sell from battered metal bowls by the roadside in India. He was unemployed, a beggar who contributed nothing to his family’s welfare.

Budhia’s parents knew Biranchi Das, who was the president of their slum in Bhubaneswar, the owner of a hotel, and a partner in his family’s taxi business. For more than a decade, Das had run an esteemed judo hall, handpicking athletically promising boys and girls from the slums and subjecting them to an almost paramilitary training regimen and twice-daily workouts, strict dietary rules, and classes on combat theory. Seven of his students have become national champions, and more than 1,200 have launched careers with the Central Reserve police force.

I met Das four months before he was killed. He was stout and bearded, rippling with muscles despite a little potbelly, and he exuded the dark, burly benificence of a Mafia don.

In 2003, he said, Sukanti asked if 1-year-old Budhia could bunk at the judo hall. “She had three daughters, all older than Budhia,” Das said, “and already she’d sold the two oldest into servitude as maids. She told me, ‘I can’t afford this boy. I can’t feed him. Take him.’”

Das said no–Budhia was too young for judo. But about six months later, according to Das, the boy suffered an accident. Riding the crossbar of a neighbor’s bicycle, he crashed, fracturing his ankle and shredding the skin on his leg. Untended, the wound festered and got infected. When Sukanti at last took her son to the hospital, doctors advised amputation. Terrified, she returned to Das. This time he said he’d care for the boy. Budhia lived with Das and his wife for six months, until his leg healed.

Then the boy went back to his mother, only to be hit by tragedy. Inside a month, Budhia’s father died. Soon after, Das asserted, Sukanti sold her son to a bangle vendor, a man who sold peanuts and gum from his bicycle, with the expectation that, in time, Budhia would work as his assistant. “The vendor didn’t take care of Budhia,” Das said. “When Budhia visited me after one month, his skin was pale, his clothes were dirty, and he had sores on his body.” Das said he bought the boy back for $20. Then one day when Budhia was just 3, the boy cussed. Das punished him, forcing him to run around a dirt oval “until I get back.”

Five hours later, Budhia was still running. Soon Das decided that Budhia would become the first Indian runner to win an Olympic medal. He began training the boy, riding on his bicycle as Budhia ran–four miles a day at first, then six, then 10. In time, cowds of adoring fans joined the runs, trotting behind the boy or rolling beside him on bikes.

In October 2005, Das took Budhia, then 3, to his first race–a half-marathon in Delhi. Race officials forbade Budhia to start, but no matter. He was the darling of the 6-K fun run, and the It Boy of a postrace gala. British decathelete Daley Thompson tried to score a kiss from Budhia, but Tim Hutchins, international administrator for the London Marathon, fulminated, “For a child of 3 to be training hard is verging on criminal.”

By now, a British filmmaker was tracking Budhia’s story, making a half-hour TV documentary, and Das was hatching intricate plans. He decreed that, after the Puri run, Budhia would run a marathon in Nayagarh. “After that,” he said, “he’ll go to Madras, and then there’s a race in Cochin, and onto Guwahati. After this we will take him to some events abroad.”

He never completed in these races. After his Puri run, Orissa’s child welfare department issued a medical report finding him “undernourished, anemic, and under cardiological stress.” The agency banned all children from entering distance races before the age of 14. In India, the ruling was largely seen as ridiculous. “How self-indulgent and naive can our liberalism be?” railed Khaleej Times columnist Barkha Dutt. “This is a chance for a poor slum child to break down the class divide and travel on the same superhighway to success as everyone else.”

Snubbing officials, a public poll named Budhia the second most popular person in Orissa. A steel company hired the boy as a spokesmascot, and a Dubai businessman flew Budhia and his coach to the Emirates for a splashy getaway at an amusement park. Then came the video that nearly deified Budhia. “We hoped the song would clear many misconceptions about the child,” said producer Rajesh Kumar Mohanty. “We have tried to compare him with the mythological Lord Krishna.”

Over the following year, Budhia’s prospects seemed to brighten. With his mother’s permission, in September 2006, he’d moved to a state-run sports hostel, where he lived and trained with more than 100 other sports hopefuls, most of them teens. He had a new coach named Arun Das (no relation to Biranchi Das), who promised further glory. Then, on scholarship, he entrolled at the D.A.V. Public School, arguably Bhubaneswar’s most prestigious academy. He was treated like a celebrity on his first day. After his classmates, all dressed in uniform plaid pinafore shorts, clambered to kiss him on the cheek, he addressed the entire student body, from a stage, chirping, “I am Budhia Singh. You will all be my friends. I will help you to learn running.”

I arrived in Bhubaneswar on a warm day last winter. The city is loud 24/7, teeming with a vitality that is both joyful and desperate. From my hotel room, I heard hundreds of garbage-eating crows cawing in a tree, the low throttle of auto rickshaws, and a nightclub downstairs where middle-aged men paid teenage girls to sing for them.

I later moved to a quieter hotel. I also began counting dead dogs I saw smooshed on the roads. In one week, I saw eight. Once, when I was riding with an interpreter, he ran over a puppy and never let the conversation falter. “So your brother,” he said, “he is staying in New York?”

Crossing the street was life threatening. There were few public bathrooms, so men peed by the roadside; the stink of urine was everywhere. Orissa had the worst child mortality rate in India, and several times, young mothers trailed me, tugging at my shirt and begging me to buy food for their infants.

Biranchi Das’s judo hall was an oasis, secreted behind high concrete walls on the spacious grounds of the state museum. One day in the coolness just after dawn, recorded chant music echoed over the grounds. Das stood outside the hall, fresh from a six-mile run, dancing in place like a boxer, then vaulting into a handstand. He plucked a little branch of the ground and began using it, as many Indians do, as an improvised toothbrush.

“How’s Budhia,” he asked. “What did Budhia say?” I hadn’t yet met the boy, but Das continued. “Budhia is a good child,” he said. “I miss him. He and I had a dream. It was not fulfilled. That is agony for me. In Japan and Korea, they start training athletes at age 3. If you don’t take risks, you don’t get results. I am the person who took risks with Budhia, and I got results.”

As he spoke, a friend of his stood nearby, radiating his own athletic vigor. Ashwini Das, 55, is a devout yogi and an Art of Living instructor with the regal bearing and prominent clavicle that comes from a lifetime of Ashtanga and belly breaths. A few years ago, he told me, “I became interested in how Biranchi is growing up this Budhia. This child has an inner facility, and Biranchi just explored it.”

Biranchi drifted off, and Ashwini and I wandered through the deserted museum grounds. “When Budhia came to me,” Ashwini said, “the child had a physical problem, and Biranchi worked for Budhia as no parent can. Look, there are hundreds of millions of kids like Budhia in India–starving, without even a meal–and among all these children, Budhia alone became an inspiration.”

He halted abruptly and asked: “What is the nature of the mind?” I had no earthly idea, so I let him answer his own question. “Whatever you resist,” he said, “that persists. If you say, ‘I want to sleep,’ you can’t sleep. Medication means deconcentration–and Budhia achieved this, as few people can. He had an inner quality.”

“You mean he was wise?” I asked.

Ashwini looked at me like I was a total idiot. “No,” he said. “Budhia is a small child. He knows nothing of the world. I believe that he had a gift inculcated from a past life–a gift beyond imagination. He can run, and Biranchi brought that talent to life. He is the one who put the petrol in the Budhia vehicle.”

Sukanti Singh felt otherwise. I met with her one afternoon in a lawyer’s office. Budhia’s mother looks about 40. Slender and fine featured, she wore a Bindi (a red dot traditionally worn by married women on their foreheads). Her bony brow jutted out of her yello sari. She was quiet, keeping her eyes downcast as men yelled around her.

“She’s illiterate,” said the lawyer, Suresh Routray, dismissively waving a hand toward Singh. “She knows nothing.”

Singh’s boyfriend also spoke over her. “Biranchi Das is a goon,” said Pranakrushna Khatua, a convicted bank robber, according the Bhubaneswar police records. “He threatened to kill Sukanti and her three daughters. He told her if she said anything about the money, she would die.”

We were there to discuss the donations and endorsement money that Budhia had received during the 18 or so months he trained under Das. This past December, Singh told police that Das had embezzled more than 60 million rupees, about $1.4 million, from the Budhia Singh Trust. Routray, a corpulent man, about 40, with drowsy eyes and a broad mustache, prepared the legal papers. He did so because he’s the president of Salia Sahi (the slum Sukanti Singh now lives in) and also a prominent member of Orissa’s Communist Party.

Twice, I’d meet Routray in my hotel lobby, to probe him for details on how he arrived at 60 million rupees. His air was breezy and jocular. “Ah, Meester Bill,” he said, hailing me with bearish effusion, “Meester Bill! You want the papers? I will get you the papers.” He never got me any documents. Biranchi Das said that Routray was showboating to garner publicity for the Communist Party.

Now, in his office, I asked him, “What companies gave Budhia money?”

“Ah, there were so many companies, so many companies,” he responded. He named three, each of which, he reckoned, gave $500 or so. Then he repeated himself: “So many companies.”

I wanted to hear what Singh thought, and she bitterly lambasted Das. “When they stopped Budhia from competing,” she said, speaking to my interpreter, “he couldn’t make any more money for Biranchi. So Biranchi started torturing Budhia. There is no other reason.”

Singh argued that Das had bullied her into lying to the media. “That story about me selling Budhia,” she said, “it wasn’t true. I never sold my son. Biranchi just made me say stupid things. I said them because I was depressed.”

Singh talked of her husband’s death. “He left me without one pie,” she said. “My neighbors had to pay for the cremation. When they demolished my house to make way for the railroad, I asked Biranchi for money. I said, ‘You have taken all the money that my son earned. You should give me money to rent a house.’ He said, ‘There is no money left. We spent it on Budhia’s training.’ He is a liar.”

Suddenly Khatua’s cell phone rang. Budhia was calling from school. He’d just won a 100-meter race for kindergartners. I could hear his joyous voice coming out of the phone–and it seemed that he’d called to talk to his mother. They were still in touch, after all. Press photos have captured her cradling her slender boy in her own slender arms. She visits Budhia once a week, scraping together 10 rupees for the rickshaw ride.

But this was a big meeting for Sukanti Singh. An unfathomable pile of money was at stake, as she saw it, so she did not get on the phone to say hi. She just sat there stooped over the desk, staring dully ahead as she stewed in distain for Biranchi Das.

Two years after his 40-mile Puri run, Budhia is still famous in Bhubaneswar. On the streets, he is a one-name hero. “Ah, Budhia!” people will say. “Marathon boy!” “Ah, Budhia, he is a miracle!” Once, when I went to meet him at a D.A.V Public School picnic, he wasn’t present. His minders at the sports hostel forbid him to go out in public without a security guard, and on that day, the guard had a holiday.

I finally met Budhia in his classroom. He sat at a desk in his plaid pinafore and brown V-neck sweater. Budhia was watchful, with the whittled, ropy look of a runner, and he fidgeted–overwhelmed, perhaps, by my looming, pale presence. “This man has come all the way from America to see you,” the teacher proclaimed in the singsong universal to kindergarten instructors.

Budhia said nothing; he just looked up at me, skeptically. I’d bought a present for him–a book about children of the world. I’d tried to make the gift speak to his worldview: Pasted to the wrapping paper were pictures of Budhia himself, running. He picked open the paper as the teacher translated my questions. “Do you like running?” she asked, vigorously nodding her head. “Yes, you like running. It is very fun, isn’t it?”

I looked at Budhia and rolled my eyes. Tentatively, he smiled–and for a while, he seemed amused by me. We went back to the sports hostel, where he sleeps in a large concrete room, and he played cricket with me, waving a mop handle as I bowled him a yello ping-pong ball. At one point, he sprinted into the kitchen and came sprinting back, giddy as he pressed his fist toward my hip. “Want apple?” he said in faltering English, his voice tiny and high as he skittered away.

Soon, though, I was no longer a novelty. Budhia sat down in the corner. I thought that maybe he’d read the book that I’d given him, but no, carefully he plucked a piece of paper from out of his pinafore and stared at it, delighted. It was a picture of Budhia himself, running and waving to fans.

“You talked to Budhia? What did he say?” I’d expected that Biranchi Das, facing the torture accusations, would shun all my calls and refuse to be interviewed. But in fact he was the most media-friendly person I met in Bhubaneswar. He was polished and genial, and it seemed that impoverished slum dwellers considered his office a small fount of hope. One afternoon I found him meeting with a man who needed money for his sister’s wedding dowry. Without the money, his sister couldn’t marry; her future would be cast into doubt. “Five minutes,” Das told me.

The meeting lasted for half an hour, and when the man emerged, he was smiling. Das had promised he would help, personally, in a couple of weeks. “Right now,” Das explained to me, “I only have about 700 rupees [about $16] in my bank account. I am a poor man. I didn’t get rich from Budhia. All the money we got came to 1.32 lakh rupees [about $3,100], and we spent it on Budhia’s training.”

Yet on another occasion Das hinted that he had profited from Budhia. “I adopted him,” he said. “If he makes some money, I deserve some of it, don’t I?” Later, Das fed me what seemed an outright lie. “This judo hall,” he said, “is the production center for Budhias. Right now I am training four new Budhia runners. They are all between 3 and 5 years old. They are training every day. They are practicing. I have videotapes, but I cannot show you. It is all very secret right now, but when the day comes–when it is time for them to perform–I will tell everybody.”

I asked at least five children at the judo hall if they’d seen any preschoolers besides Budhia Singh training as runners. They all looked at me with blank stares. No, they had not seen the new Budhias.

Even when he was joking, Das oozed swagger and bravado. One morning, he smugly summoned me to lie on the judo mat. Then he sicced one of his young behemoths on me as I struggled to break free of the boy’s hold. When the farce was over and I lay there, whipped, Das chuckled and tossed me a little tip–a two-rupee coin.

Das’s police record was not pretty. After the Child Welfare Committee for Orissa’s Khurda District took Budhi out of Das’s house, the judo couch allegedly organized a mob of 200 protesters to rally outside the home of Rabi Shankar Misra, the agency’s chairman. Misra contends that some protesters burned his effigy, climbed a wall into his property, and surrounded his house for several hours. Misra also accused Das of using Budhia. “He got a free trip to Dubai out of him,” Misra told me. “Would he be able to go to Dubai otherwise?” (It was a valid critique, but a few days later Misra himself tried to milk the Budhia story for a free trip. In answering Runner’s World’s request that he e-mail some legal documents, Misra demurred. “I can give you a presentation on the complex issues,” he wrote, “in your office in USA, if invited for this presentation.”)

Later, in August 2007, after a street accident that saw Das’s 7-year-old son get harmlessly clipped by a motorcyclist named Sabeer Ekram, Das allegedly burst into the man’s home with 30-odd henchmen. Ekram’s mother, M.D. Manju, told police that Das beat her son up. “He pelted us with filthy expletives and threatened to set our house on fire,” she told the police.

Still, Das had close ties to the police. One afternoon, he brought me across town to visit his top contact at the Central Reserve police force–deputy inpsector G.P. Mastana.

Mastana’s building was guarded by several machine-gun-toting officers who wore full khaki uniforms topped by brilliant indigo tricorner hats. Scores of young recruits were training as we arrived, running along in lockstep on a sandy dirt road. We went inside. Mastana’s office was grand, with a large desk bearing four black telephones and, above that, a plaque honoring men who’d preceded him as deputies. Mastana, who’s a Sikh, was sitting there in a turban, very erect–a bristling, fit 60-year-old.

The mood was a bit stiff, so I tried to break the ice. “Jeez,” I said to Mastana, “I wouldn’t want to wrestle you.” He did not laugh, but after a few minutes he spoke warmly of Budhia. “I admire the boy,” he said, “and one time I advised him. I told him he could be a supreme athlete, and I said, ‘After that, then you can do something good. You can bring glory to the nation–you can become an officer with us and set an example for all the others.’”

Das was leaning forward in his chair now, listening with rapt attention. The troops scuffed by on the roadway outside, and it seemed almost forgotten that we were talking about a little boy who was still learning to read. “What did Budhia say?” I asked.

Mastana stared me down, somber and earnest. “Budhia said he was willing.”

Two days later, I saw Budhia on the track at Kalinga Stadium, but he didn’t seem particularly focused on athletic supremacy or national service. He was dribbling a soccer ball as some teenage girls in full soccer regailia made pretend futile attempts to steal the ball. He was laughing.

“Budhia is doing his training,” his new coach, Arun Das, told me before detailing the boy’s current regimen: seven or eight miles a week, a little stretching, a little hopping and bounding, a little horseplay with the soccer ball and the discus.

Arun Das is a genial and wrinkled man, about 60 and a tad flabby, dressed in a blue nylon track suit. As his older runners muscled their way through a speed workout, he sat on the grass, canted back in a lawn chair, savoring the mild winter sun as he spoke fondly of Budhia. “He’s like a son to me,” he said before adding with a warm, self-derisive chuckle, “Well, more like a grandson.”

I asked if he saw Budhia becoming a champion. He laughed. “Now is not the right time to say. Come back in 12 years and I’ll tell you.”

“But what kind of times is he running?”

The coach looked skyward for a moment, searching for the numbers. “For the 400,” he said, “about two minutes.”

Two-flat is good for a little kid; it would put Budhia in about the 85th percentile among 6-year old American boys. Still, I was surprised. The stories I’d read suggested that, like Biranchi, Arun was driving Budhia toward world-class glory. (One headline read: “Budhia gets new coach, dreams for Olympics.”) But now I got an inkling that Arun Das was like no other Budhia caretaker I’d met in all the days I’d spent rattling around Bhubaneswar in auto rickshaws. It seemed he might be playing a gentle trick on the Indian people–administering workouts, proffering photo-ops, and gamely sustaining the illusion that Budhia was on the brink of greatness while simultaneously protecting the boy. He was, it struck me, letting Budhia be a kid in a society where a leisurely childhood is a luxury.

After a few minutes, Budhia trotted toward us, to high-five a sprinter standing nearby. I tried to ask him a question, but by the time my words had been translated, he was already running off toward the steeplechase pit for a game of tag with the soccer players. These girls lived with him, and it looked as though they cherished him as a mascot.

“I am playing,” he squealed as I stepped toward him with a question. “Just let me play.”

I saw Budhia just one last time, at his school, on a day his class was doing “magic painting.” Again, the teacher came over to interpret. “Was it hard,” I asked, “doing all that running for Biranchi?”

“No, I just did what I was asked.”

“Was it stressful?” He shook his head: no.

“Was Biranchi nice to you?”

Now there was an awkward silence and I could hear the high, happy din of the other students larking about, unsupervised. Budhia stared at the floor, biting his lip. The question seemed to put him under enormous pressure.

Biranchi Das had helped deliver him to a new and wonderful place in his life. A peon’s son destined to caste-bound misery, he was now standing in a cool, pleasant room filled with the nation’s elite. He’d transcended social barriers in a way that few Americans can fathom, and he’d performed his own kid-magic. He had survived all the craven adults fighting to control him.

There was something elegant and beautiful about this lean little kid whose smile, at times, bordered on beatific. Maybe, in time, this magic would prevail. Maybe Budhia would turn out all right. But maybe, too, he was scarred. He seemed brooding and insular now. He kept staring down. He said nothing.

“He is not able to express himself,” said the teacher. “The question is difficult.”

I stopped my interview. Budhia finished his painting (of a Christmas tree), and then the class streamed outside to do calisthenics in the red, dusty schoolyard. There were two parallel lines of kids, and the exercises were supposed to be done in unison. But of course they weren’t. Every kid, including Budhia, flubbed the performance. The lines were a melee of children idly scuffing their feet and wiping their noses and scratching their legs. I stood there and thought about how all of these kids would carry their own quirks–and the history and traumas of their earliest childhoods–forward from here, all alone, ultimately, against the challenge of growing up in a world filled with tough questions.

Eventually, the teacher told the kids to sprint back to the playground. I watched for Budhia to stand out–to lope ahead like a sad, lone gazelle. But by now every single kid in the crowd was screaming with glee and sputtering and swerving along over the dirt, and I lost him in a swirl of dust.

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Ways and Means

The Washington Post Magazine
June 29, 2008
Edited by David Rowell
© Bill Donahue

The voice was booming and imperious as it came out of the bathroom, wafting over the blandly hip decor of the Dupont Circle hotel room. “If you excuse me a moment,” said Russell Means, “I’m going to braid my hair.”

I knew that Means was not talking about some quick twist-and-tie ponytail job, but rather the painstaking culmination of a resplendent costume. Means is 6-foot-1, with a powerful broad-boned physique. He is the actor who played the last Mohican in the 1992 film “The Last of the Mohicans,” and he is the onetime leader of the revolutionary American Indian Movement, or AIM. Arguably the most famous living Indian activist, he performs his role with panache. Already on this bright, cold morning in February, he was wearing dangling turquoise earrings, a crimson wool Navajo vest and black silver-tipped cowboy boots. His broad, truculent brow was creased with wear.

Means’s life has been something like a Johnny Cash song. He has done prison time for inciting a riot, and has been stabbed, accused of murder, hit by two bullets and divorced four times. Long ago, he was a fancy dance champion and a rodeo star. Even now, at age 68, he remains a forceful presence — a warrior.

On this visit to the nation’s capital, Means was, per usual, fighting the United States of America. Along with three other Lakota Indians, he had recently severed his ties with the United States and declared himself a founding member of a new, autonomous nation — the Republic of Lakotah. Unsanctioned by their tribal government, and speaking only for themselves, the dissidents claimed dominion over more than 93,000 square miles of traditional Lakota territory — a continuous chunk of sparsely populated dry land that includes parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

Means was here in Washington seeking diplomatic recognition from the world community so that he could ultimately finagle a seat at the United Nations, whether the U.S. of A. likes it or not. His motto, borrowed from Gandhi, is, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

The plan was to barnstorm Embassy Row. He hoped to visit ambassadors from several U.S. adversaries (Venezuela and Serbia, for instance) as well as from a few other countries he deemed likely allies — for instance, Bolivia, which has an indigenous president in Evo Morales, and Finland, which, in Means’s view, “appreciates freedom because it’s always been an independent ally of Russia.”

It would be a four-day mission, and Means was traveling with an attache, Lakotah’s volunteer attorney general, Jerry Collette. A Libertarian activist and a paralegal who recently emigrated to Lakotah from his longtime home in North Carolina, Collette is most renowned for the intricate, loopholing legal work he did last winter to enable the supporters of presidential candidate Ron Paul to fly a campaign blimp up and down the East Coast. Ethnically French-Canadian, Collette is 56 years old, with long gray hair and a shaggy gray beard. In contrast to Means, he is a meager physical presence — slender and only 5-foot-4. On this road trip, as Means luxuriated on the hotel’s single queen bed, Collette was sleeping on the floor. “I’m a guerrilla,” he explained, “and if you’re a guerrilla, you just don’t grumble about little discomforts.”

At the moment, Collette was standing outside the bathroom, valet-like, reporting on the progress he’d made that morning, canvassing embassies on his cellphone. “I called Iceland,” he said, “and they can’t meet with us. They’re busy. They said to just drop off a petition.”

“They’re busy?” Means asked. “What does Iceland have to be busy about?”

Collette paused a moment, and then, without answering, he said, “But can we just drop off the petition?”

“We’re too busy,” Means said, his voice laced with a larksome, sardonic swagger, and Collette went back to his phone, squaring away the logistics for a full afternoon of visiting embassies.

After a few minutes, Means emerged. His braids were done, and now he reached for his sunglasses — Dolce & Gabbanas.

“Well, then,” said Russell Means, “are we ready?”

The first embassy of the day was East Timor, which is actually not on Embassy Row but rather in a nondescript office building near the Van Ness-UDC Metro station. Means and Collette took the elevator to the fifth floor. The Timorese suite was dimly lit and sparsely appointed, new-smelling. East Timor is a fledgling Southeast Asian nation that is still adjusting to independence after having been occupied, from 1975 to 1999, by neighboring Indonesia, whose military caused the death of more than 100,000 Timorese people, or roughly 10 percent of the population. The ambassador, Constancio Pinto, 45, spent much of his adolescence running from bombs, sleeping in caves and subsisting on leaves. A small, dapper man in a black business suit, he greeted the Lakotans genially. “Welcome,” he said. “You are our first visitors.” From Lakotah, he meant.

They went into the conference room, and then Means spoke dryly, without referring to notes, telling Pinto that the United States is now occupying Lakota country illegally, in violation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which granted the Lakota control of the Black Hills in western South Dakota. The treaty was repealed by Congress in 1877, and the Lakota have struggled ever since. “We are the poorest people in America,” Means said, “and we have the shortest life span in America, too. The life expectancy for Lakota women is 47; for a man, it’s 44. After 155 years of genocide, our way of life is on the brink of extinction. We have finally decided to withdraw from the United States and save our people and our lands. Here is our petition.”

Means handed Pinto a slim portfolio that consisted of a two-sentence cover letter followed by many pages of excerpts from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, among other documents. For a moment, Pinto read silently. Means sat with his legs crossed, his chin canted back. His air was not disrespectful, but it was vaguely proprietary. On the wall behind him was a framed photo of U.S. soldiers happily drinking beer in East Timor. This was surprising because, as Means had reminded me earlier, the United States had generously supported the Indonesians during the war.

“I know that the U.S. facilitated the genocide of East Timor,” Means said now. “I do understand the complexities of the world, and I understand the imperialist monster that is the United States of America.” He paused; there was an awkward silence. “But they can’t bomb Lakotah,” Means said. “We have too many white people living among us.”

Pinto looked up. “Um, as you know,” he began, “we are trying to put the war behind us. It was a very painful process. So many people died. Eighty-nine percent of our infrastructure was destroyed. Our whole country was leveled, and now we are trying to rebuild. The U.S. has been very supportive. Over the past five years, they have been our biggest donors of aid.”

“Really?” said Means. He was shocked.

“Yes, they have given us up to $25 million a year. I will give this petition to the capitol, in Dili, but” — Pinto laughed, a bit nervously — “I can assure you that my government will not take a position.”

There was a minute or two of closing niceties. Outside on the sidewalk, Means said, “I loved his straightforwardness.”

I said it was shocking how many people East Timor lost in the war.

Means sneered at me. “On the continental United States in 1492,” he said, “there was 12 to 14 million people — Indians. And according to the 2000 census, there were just 250,000 full bloods left. We’ve lost 99.6 percent of our population.”

His math was a little shaky. For one thing, Census statistics indicate that in 2000 there were 2.5 million U.S. citizens who claimed no ancestry other than “American Indian” or “Alaskan Native.” But I said nothing.

We kept walking, and, as Means descended the stairs into the Metro station, wearing the Dolce & Gabbanas again, a woman passing by did a double take.

Russell Means became an American icon in 1973. As a telegenic and quotable front man for AIM, he starred on TV as 250 Native Americans took over the sole church in tiny Wounded Knee, S.D., and seized control of the town, which sits amid the desolate brown hills of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. For 71 days, even as the National Guard’s armored tanks lurked in the pine trees and federal helicopters whirred overhead, spraying sniper fire, Means and his fellow Indians held their ground, bearing but a few old shotguns and hunting rifles as they burned down Wounded Knee’s grocery store and flew the American flag upside down.

The conflict was a reprise of an earlier, symbolically potent battle — an 1890 massacre that saw the U.S. Cavalry kill more than 150 Lakota men, women, and children. Wounded Knee II was a feud over what it means to be an American Indian. For much of the preceding century, the nation’s indigenous people had been forcibly assimilated. They’d been legally denied the right to practice their religious rituals — the sun dance, for instance — and shepherded into government-run boarding schools where white administrators cut the students’ long hair and forbade them to speak their native languages.

For some Indians in the early 1970s, the indignities were manageable: They harbored hope that in time the U.S. system could accommodate them — that tribal governments, which answer to the Department of the Interior, could incrementally improve life for Native Americans.

Other Indians saw no such hope. Taking cues from the Black Panthers, they decreed that it was time to get radical, to proudly and violently assert their racial identity. These radicals saw their assimilationist counterparts as sellouts — or “half-breeds,” as Means puts it — and in 1972 they found a target for their ire: Dick Wilson, the newly elected Pine Ridge tribal chair. A crew-cut Lakota prone to frothing with hatred for communists, Wilson bore a special animus for Means. At one point, he threatened, “I, Dick Wilson, will personally cut his braids off.”

In AIM’s view, Wilson was a puppet of the U.S. government. In the early days of his administration, he gave the Feds a large chunk of the Pine Ridge reservation, Sheep Mountain, that was coveted for its uranium and molybdenum deposits. In turn, the attorney general’s office sent 65 U.S. marshals to keep the peace on Pine Ridge, by surrounding the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building there at gunpoint.

Wounded Knee II was a retort — a fiery demonstration calling for Wilson’s removal. The U.S. government was there to defend Wilson as legitimate. Means played a valiant David to the Fed’s Goliath. At one point, he announced to the surrounding forces: “You’re going to have to kill us. I’m going to die for my treaty rights.” The press reveled — and lingered long on Means’s hairy past.

Raised near San Francisco, the oldest child of a physically abusive Lakota mother and a Lakota father who struggled with alcoholism, Means burglarized stores and stole wallets from bar patrons before discovering AIM in 1969. Then, he resolved, as he put it in his 1995 autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, “never again would I seek personal approval from white society on white terms. Instead I would get in the white man’s face until he gave me and my people our just due. With that decision, my whole existence suddenly came into focus.”

In 1972, in Washington, Means helped lead 300 AIM affiliates in a six-day occupation of the BIA building — a gambit that saw the Indians smashing the bathrooms and offices, toppling file cabinets and “repossessing” Indian paintings, pottery and rugs. Soon after that, he protested the killing of a fellow Lakota by leading hundreds of Indians to a demonstration at the county courthouse in Custer, S.D. There, he gouged a police officer in the eye. A nearby chamber of commerce building burned to the ground.

After the Custer riot, he was out of jail the following day — “just in time,” as he gloats, “to see national television coverage.”

The 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee failed to deliver clear-cut glory, however. Means fled the battle zone under the cover of night, and the last of his followers soon surrendered to authorities.

To some Native Americans, the whole campaign was little more than misguided theater. This February, Tim Giago, founder of the Lakota Times, a newspaper, wrote that “an entire village was pillaged and destroyed” without AIM ever spending “a single dollar” to repair the wreckage.

But Wounded Knee had a ripple effect. It brought anti-Indian racism into the newspapers and prompted a measure of social change. Sixty-six-year-old Lorraine White Face, who lives on Pine Ridge, says: “Before Russell Means took over Wounded Knee, the stores in [nearby] Nebraska would have signs on them saying, ‘No Indians Allowed.’ You couldn’t go to the movies or a cafe. After Wounded Knee, all that changed.”

America’s romance with Indians surged, and, in his defiance, Means seemed like a reincarnation of such Lakota legends as Sitting Bull, Rain in the Face, Gall and Crazy Horse. When Means went to court in the wake of the Wounded Knee mayhem, Marlon Brando and Harry Belafonte showed up, voicing support. (Means was found not guilty of burglary and larceny charges.)

Then, in 1976, Andy Warhol invited Means to New York to sit for a portrait. In Warhol’s silk-screen, Means is fierce, staring straight out of the frame. He wears a white bone neck choker and what looks like a brown leather rawhide robe. An imaginative viewer can almost hear buffalo thundering away out on the Plains. But still in Warhol’s silk-screen there is something fake and disquieting about Means’s face. It’s a mask-like splash of tan paint. The image is reminiscent of the cheap coloration in long-ago Sunday comics pages. The caption, Warhol seems to be telling us with a wink, could read, “Wild Indian, Authentic.”

At our first interview, over breakfast, Means was surly from the get-go. Within five minutes of shaking my hand, he accosted me for my “[expletive] white racist arrogance. There’s only one reason you people came to this continent,” he said. “Greed! We Indians have our spirituality. We have our land, but Americans have no culture except greed.”

I changed the subject, asking Means how many Lakota backed his independence claim. “That’s not germane,” he barked. “In all my years of international relations, not once has anybody ever questioned my sovereignty. Even if I am only speaking for myself and my brother, and I’m not, my sovereignty exists. It’s spelled out in the treaties.”

Eventually, I’d learn that Means has only six or eight active Lakota supporters scattered throughout North and South Dakota. Many other Lakota quietly share his contempt for the U.S. government; some even long for a return to the hallowed days of Lakota independence. And, while Means won 46 percent of the vote when he ran unsuccessfully for Pine Ridge tribal chair in 2004, he has not endeared himself with his desperado-style secession.

“I’m a little frustrated that he just went ahead and went to Washington,” says Alex White Plume, a bison rancher who serves on the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council, which fights for Indians’ land rights. “It’s not like he came up with a brand-new idea. We’ve talked about separating from the U.S. at treaty council meetings. No traditional Lakota wants to be colonized, and actually I wanted to bring a group to Washington myself. But I wanted to bring thousands. Russell didn’t build that kind of consensus. He never even sat down with our traditional elders.”

“Russell didn’t do the protocol,” echoes Floyd Hand, also on the treaty council. “What I do is, I make people welcome at a meeting. I buy everybody some meat and vegetables and fry bread. Russell went solo.”

AIM is more severe in its critique of Means. In a press release, it has called him “clownish” and has taken pains to note that Means has “resigned from the American Indian Movement at least six (6) times, the latest on January 8, 1988.” No one from AIM would comment for this article.

But, for Means, the burned bridges behind him simply show that he’s nobody’s lackey. He’s free, and freedom is his foremost priority. He calls his republic the “epitome of liberty,” promising that, once it’s up and running (and that could take decades, he says), it would issue its own licenses and passports as it allowed its citizens a tax-free existence. There would be no police and no jails. The economy would be based on wind power.

“We get enough wind in our country to power the entire United States 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he told me. “We’ve formed an LLC, legal under U.S. law, and we’re going to join with large coal companies. We’ll go to individual landowners, both Lakota and non-Lakota, and lease their land and put windmills on them. We have a business plan.”

Means refused to share it, though. He was more interested in talking about Lakotah’s government, which, he said, would be matriarchal. “A lot of people think that just means that women run everything, but that isn’t right,” said Means, who is, technically speaking, the chief facilitator for Lakotah’s provisional government. “Matriarchy is where you celebrate the strengths of each sex. Both men and women know their roles. People get along.”

Lakotah would not be a democracy but rather a consensus-based system. “Individual liberty through community control,” is how Means described it. “Everybody has a right to be racist, but their behavior is regulated by the posse comitatus.”

Means argued that American Indians flourished for centuries in matriarchal societies. “I quote,” he said, holding a single index finger aloft, “the great Indian scholar Vine Deloria Jr.: ‘The disagreement between Indian nations was largely without the spilling of much blood. It was about as dangerous as a professional football game.’ We lived, from the top of the Arctic down to Tierra del Fuego, in harmony, without any disease. It was Heaven on Earth. Then you guys ruined it.”

There was a bit of the thespian about Means, and I kept thinking of perhaps his most cerebral Indian foe — Chippewa novelist and critic Gerald Vizenor, who has written: “We’re all invented as Indians. We’re invented from traditional static standards, and we are stuck in coins and words like artifacts.” Vizenor holds that, even as they live in contemporary society, playing bingo and using computers, Indians find their identity shaped (and limited) by what white Americans think Indians should be — that is, savage, and appointed with cool moccasins and colorful headdresses.

There’s a timeworn tradition of Indians capitalizing on the white man’s fascination — Sitting Bull and Gall signed on as part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s traveling “Wild West” show in the late 19th century. Vizenor sees Means as the new standard-bearer for this sort of hokum. Means, he says, is “the media man, a master of simulations, a comical spectacle.”

A large question seemed to hang over Means’s visit to Washington. Was this jaunt down Embassy Row in earnest? Or was it just a little performance art — a trick to kick up a rhetorical dust storm?

Means didn’t answer the question, but he relished it. “What did Shakespeare say?” he asked, his face alight with a grin as he spread his arms wide. “All the world’s a stage.”

The meeting with Venezuela was promising. I was not allowed to attend, but afterward Collette emerged burbling: “They’re ready to invest. They just want to see a business plan so they can arrange something with Citgo to start developing alternative energy out in Lakotah.”

Bolivia was, by the Lakotans’ lights, a smashing success. Ambassador Gustavo Guzman, who is suave and lean, with his long hair pulled back into a ponytail, wore bluejeans and greeted Means as an old friend. Alone among nations, the Bolivians had sent a delegation to support Means when he and fellow secessionists announced their declaration of independence in Washington last December. (Bolivian President Evo Morales is Indian, as is roughly 55 percent of the Bolivian population.) “We respect the rights of Indians everywhere,” Guzman told me, “even though we cannot take an official position on the Republic of Lakotah.”

Uruguay’s ambassador to the United States, Carlos Gianelli, was a regal older gentleman with a crocodilian smile; his office was finely appointed with burgundy leather chairs and a mahogany desk. When Means proffered him the petition, he said: “Fine, then, we’ll study this and send it to Montevideo. We don’t have many indigenous people in Uruguay, as you know, but we are hopeful for cultural exchanges.”

Means was elated. “Now that’s what I call sophisticated,” he said in the elevator.

But the visit to the Finnish Embassy was doomed from the moment Means entered the building, a glass, steel and concrete minimalist masterpiece known as the “Jewelry Box” of Embassy Row. It was early morning. A cold gray light bore down through the bounteous windowpanes. The ambassador was out. Means met instead with the second secretary of political affairs, a young woman named Soile Kauranen. Perhaps because it was early, Means was in particularly testy form. “I could care less who recognizes us,” he told Kauranen. “Whether Finland recognizes us or not, we’re already free.”

Kauranen, who wore a light charcoal pantsuit and modish, clear-framed eyeglasses, spent much of the time assiduously scribbling notes on a legal pad. Her posture was erect, and her questions shimmered as small, pointillist pricks at Means’s reeling monologue. “And, uh, how many people in your country?” she asked. “And how many hectares is it?”

When Means and Collette had answered to Kauranen’s satisfaction, she said, “Thank you, gentlemen,” and ushered them out. They began moving down Massachusetts Avenue on foot, eventually coming upon a grand plaster-faced building adorned with a blue cupola. This was once the Iranian Embassy, but now it was vacant and dilapidated, with cracks in the walkway and weeds everywhere in the yard.

“Look at that,” Colette thrilled. “We could discover it — you know, the doctrine of discovery!”

Means stood on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets as he surveyed the property. “It could use a front lawn,” he said.

They pressed on, and a few moments later Means shouted at Collette: “Will you stop walking right in front of me? God!”

Collette moved to the side — and then, as we continued toward Dupont Circle, he delivered portfolios to various embassies while Means waited at the curb. They hit Brazil, South Africa and Lithuania.

I wondered what, beyond mere recognition, Means wanted from this odd and sundry collection of countries. Was it aid?

“No,” he said. “You saw that guy from East Timor. He can’t say a word because the U.S. is greasing him. We don’t want aid. Does the United States get aid? Does Germany or Japan? No. The U.S. has been throwing Indians aid for over a century, and it’s killing us. What we need is investments. We want to open things up, so that companies from all over the world can do business with us, without having to comply with the onerous laws of the United States of America.”

For many observers, Russell Means’s current rhetoric calls to mind another aging warrior — King Lear. Means’s harshest critics hold that he’s now just fulminating delusionally — and that in fact he’s been an ineffectual figure for more than 30 years now. “Ever since Wounded Knee, Russell has seemed more and more like a blind man with a Rubik’s Cube,” Laura Waterman Wittstock, a Seneca Indian and Minneapolis-based journalist, has said. “The older he’s gotten, the less coherent his career seems. He’s been frantically hunting around for a new identity and saying, ‘Is this it? Is this it? How about this?’ ”

Means has wandered most in the realm of politics. In 1984, when Hustler publisher Larry Flynt attempted to run for president on the Republican ticket, Means joined him as the vice presidential candidate. That same year, he traveled to Libya to cultivate an alliance with Moammar Gaddafi. He befriended Louis Farrakhan, eventually, and became so enamored of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and its evasion of the IRS that he did a lecture tour on the church’s behalf. In 1988, he ran for president himself, as a Libertarian, narrowly losing the party’s nomination to Ron Paul. Meanwhile, he built his cinematic r{Zcaron}sum{Zcaron}.

After appearing with Daniel Day-Lewis in “The Last of the Mohicans,” Means played a Navajo medicine man in Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers.” Then he provided the voice of a sage elder, Powhatan, in the Disney animated film “Pocahontas.” He kept his hand in Lakota issues. He helped found a community-funded health clinic on the Pine Ridge reservation. Twice, he tried, unsuccessfully, to get himself elected tribal chair.

But then in 2006, he says, his life attained focus as he was driving near his home on Pine Ridge. On a whim, he collared five young pedestrians — 20-somethings — and asked them to define the word “freedom.”

“I sat down on the ground, and I listened to them,” Means said. “And none of them — not one — could define freedom. And the only thing they knew about me was from the movies. That absolutely scared the hell out of me. When I came to the reservation in 1972, everyone spoke Lakota. They knew about their ancestors. In 36 years, we’ve gone from a Lakota way of life to a poverty way of life. I started to wonder: ‘How do we save ourselves? How can I leave behind a meaningful legacy?’ ”

Means retreated to the mountain home of his fifth (and current) wife, Pearl, in New Mexico, to meditate on the “state of Indian affairs” with four friends. And there he kept circling back to what his great-uncle — Matthew King, or Noble Red Man to the Lakota — had told him decades before: “We must never forget that we were once a free people.” Means began talking about taking Lakota country back to its roots as a free nation.

“But what are we going to do about all the white people?” one friend asked.

“We’ll figure it out,” said Means.

On the third morning in Washington, Means was brooding and silent when we met. “I’ve become convinced,” he said finally, “that what you’re writing is a hatchet job. I’m so fed up with white people and their broken promises. When you go home and write your hatchet job, make sure you say how angry I am.”

All militants are angry, of course, but Means’s temper tantrums have been so baroque they seem fresh — dazzling, even.

In 1974, as he was standing trial for the 1972 Custer courthouse riot, Means refused to stand up for the judge. Riot police swarmed the courtroom. A melee broke out, and, Means wrote: “a cop came at me with a raised club. Rather than getting hit, I smashed his face mask and watched his nose twist and flatten against the plastic.” The outburst put Means behind bars for a year.

Later, in 1991, Means’s rage crested. Amid the tumult of his fourth marriage, which saw his wife, Gloria Grant, file charges of spousal abuse, Means began to wonder “if my life meant anything at all.”

“I began,” he writes in his autobiography, “to edge across the hazy line between reason and madness.” He decided to become an assassin, and he composed a list of more than 100 people he wanted to kill. “In one column were white people,” he told me. “In the other column, Indians. And you know what the difference was? The Indian list was longer. I wanted to rub out as many sellouts as I could. I was insane. I had a lot of anger, which I used to cover up my low self-esteem.”

Means underwent therapy, but in 1997, while living on Navajo land, he got into a scuffle with his wife’s father. Leon Grant was in his 70s; he had a prosthetic arm. Navajo police alleged that Means battered him, but Means fought the charge vociferously, arguing that, under the terms of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the Navajo had no right to prosecute an Indian who did not belong to their nation. Ultimately, even after Leon Grant withdrew his accusation, Means persisted with his sovereignty case against the Navajo Nation, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court, which two years ago refused to hear it.

In Washington, I wondered how Collette handled working with Means. He’d just spent two months living at Means’s house, squeezed amid building supplies and crashing on the floor in a spare bedroom under remodeling. “There are times when Russell can be a little insistent,” he told me, choosing his words carefully. “But I’ve done a lot of healing work around my issues with insistent people, and this experience is enabling me to do a little more healing.”

Besides being a paralegal, Collette is a registered minister, training with the Heartland Aramaic Mission, based in Missouri, but he does not preach. Rather, he specializes in counseling spiritual seekers online. He is the mastermind behind an interactive self-help Web site, Innerpeace.org. He also promotes the use of rice hulls, an agricultural byproduct, as an eco-friendly building material.

Always inclined toward Libertarian views, Collette became an activist after watching the Berlin Wall fall in 1989. Suddenly, he felt that “maybe individuals can make a difference.” Since then, he has let “guidance” dictate how he puts his talent to work for the cause. “Basically,” explained Collette, who’s spent much of the past 20 years moving about the United States, “I’m here until I’m guided to go be somewhere else.”

Last Christmas Day, Collette found himself direly in need of guidance. He was camped in Washington, under the Ron Paul blimp in his Astro van, and he was at a crossroads in his life. “I had three choices,” he recalls. “I could have gone south with the blimp. I could have stayed still, or I could have gone north to help Ron Paul in the New Hampshire primary.”

That morning, another option presented itself: Collette read a short news piece about Lakotah’s declaration of independence. “All these years I’d been living in the United States because I couldn’t imagine any place having more freedom,” he said. “And now here was a country that actually had the potential to be freer.”

Within two days, Collette was driving cross-country to start his new life in Lakotah.

At a deli on P Street NW, Means and Collette happened upon an Eritrean cabdriver named Woldeab Kelati, and Means told him of his quest for Lakota liberty.

“This is not an easy thing,” said Kelati, nibbling his sandwich.

“Gaining freedom is never easy,” said Means. “Eritrea knows that.”

“But you don’t have a boundary,” said Kelati. “You are in the center of the United States.”

Means explained the Lakota’s treaty claims. Kelati shook his head. “You have a difficult task,” he pronounced. “Good luck.”

Means and Collette walked down Connecticut Avenue and came upon some petitioners for Greenpeace, two 20-ish women standing outside the Starbucks near Dupont Circle, crying, “Save the whales!” When they saw Means, one canvasser changed her tune, chanting, “Help Mother Earth!”

Means sidled toward them obligingly. “I can’t sign,” he said. “I’m not a citizen of this country.”

“But we’re international!”

Means signed but refused to give money. “You think indigenous people are a danger to the environment,” he explained.

“No, no, I think we’re all on this Earth together!”

“You have tried to stop the traditional whale hunts of the Makah Indians in the Puget Sound of the Pacific Northwest,” Means said. “That is why I cannot become a member.”

“Okay! Thanks for talking to us!”

Soon, Means and Collette took a cab to the Watergate, to visit the headquarters of the Libertarian Party. Means has high standing there. Executive director Shane Cory, 33, listened attentively to Means’s pitch and said: “What you’ve done is very bold. I’m afraid of bold action by our government. But I respect what you’re doing. I’m Potawatomi.”

The Potawatomi are an Indian nation with branches in Oklahoma and the upper Midwest, and, when Means heard the word, he all but leapt from his seat, delighted. “You are?” he exclaimed. Earlier, in a dark mood, he’d soliloquized on the truth of a slogan he’d seen once, on the butt of a gun owned by an indigenous freedom fighter in Nicaragua: “Only Indians help Indians.”

Cory is from Oklahoma, where the chairman of Citizen Potawatomi Nation, John Barrett, has spent the past three decades wildly growing the Potawatomi economy. Once headquartered in a beat-up trailer, with only $550 in assets, by 2006 the tribe had $350 million in assets. “We have our own power grid,” Cory said. “We have the largest geothermally heated building in the state of Oklahoma. We have the largest tribal bank in the country, and I don’t have to pay capital gains taxes.”

These details were all news to Means, so Cory gave him a starter kit for launching an international bank. “Have you talked to Bernard von NotHaus?” he asked, referring to the father of the Liberty Dollar, a legal, alternative currency now circulating in the United States. “What about the Cato Institute?”

It was the only time I saw anyone offer the Lakotans such detailed advice, and afterward, out in the hallway, Means shouted, “Yes!” Then he leapt toward Collette and hugged him.

Weeks passed. Collette, I learned, was arranging to mint two coins for a gold-and silver-based Lakotah currency system — the dollar-like tonka and also another coin worth roughly two cents, the mato. Means was readying to make one more bid, this November, to become tribal chair on Pine Ridge. “I’m going to run on the freedom ticket,” he said, describing an ultra-Libertarian scheme. “If I win, I will not have a job. I’ll do nothing. But I think the U.S. government will see that we have a constituency, and they’ll listen to us.”

Means hadn’t done a whit of campaigning, though, and he depicted the whole endeavor of wooing Pine Ridge voters as almost absurd. People are poor on the reservation, he told me. “They don’t have phones. And do you think I’m going to just walk around this whole goddamned reservation and get unanimous support?”

I asked him if he’d done any follow-up on his Washington visit. “No,” he said flatly. Later, Bolivia would call to discuss a possible Washington visit between Means and Evo Morales. Beyond that, though, the whole journey down Embassy Row seemed almost like vanished history. Not a single other nation got back to Means on his petition.

To make matters worse, Means’s young nation was already riven with conflict. The tension focused on a Lakota activist named Duane Martin Sr., who’d come to Washington with Means in December for the declaration of independence.

Martin, 42, is heavyset, with thick, powerful forearms and long black hair drawn back in a ponytail. He is the leader of a sort of paramilitary force, the Strongheart Warrior Society, which, he said, responds to crime problems on or near Pine Ridge, “day or night. It don’t matter. Me and my 27 warriors, we’re there because the tribal police, they do nothing. Nothing.” In recent years, he’s joined Means in protesting the flow of alcohol onto Pine Ridge from liquor stores in neighboring Whiteclay, Neb., and also coordinated meetings on gang violence. He has appeared as a guest on a talk-radio show Means used to host on Pine Ridge and helped Means in his campaigns for tribal chair. He came to Washington with a longtime ally — a white activist named Naomi Archer, who describes Martin in spiritual terms, as her “brother.”

Archer, who lives in North Carolina, is a male-to-female transsexual. She’d created the Republic of Lakotah’s Web site and was here to help the Lakota garner media coverage. But she and Means locked horns. Archer insisted that the Lakotans needed to pray before each meeting they held. Means wrote her off as a meddlesome white person — and soon he stripped Archer’s ability to update the site. That act so angered Martin that he stopped working with Means and launched his own breakaway nation — Lakota, it’s called, sans the “h.” Never mind that it is the same territory as Lakotah.

All this was on the table when Means and I were in Washington, and he discussed it calmly, saying: “Duane’s a free person. He’s free to start his own country.” But the situation was more tense than Means cared to get into. For soon a banner headline appeared on the Web site. “Duane Martin, Sr.,” it read, “represents ONLY himself and is known for soliciting funds for himself. He is not affiliated with Republic of Lakotah.”

This spring, Duane Martin met me by the roadside on the Pine Ridge reservation. It was cold outside, but he was wearing an immense pair of gray shorts and a droopy red T-shirt. His voice was a raspy, bellowing yell, and, as he sucked at the chewing tobacco lumped in his lower lip, he vowed to show me the “real reservation. I’ll let you see things that Russell Means don’t even know about,” he said.

We climbed into my rental car — and then, when I buckled my seat belt, Martin erupted in protest. “Leave that buckle alone!” he said. “Stop acting like a white man! All these constraints, all these rules. Be free, be free!”

We drove, unbelted, and Martin complained that Means is a “movie star. He doesn’t know what life is like for everyday Indians.”

The gripe may be rooted in jealousy. Means is a local celebrity, recognized wherever he goes on Pine Ridge. But, then again, Martin’s revolutionary propaganda is more populist than Means’s. The very name of his Web site — lakotaoyate.net — invokes an Indian word meaning “people.” As designed by Archer, it announces itself as “a place for all the oyate — Elders, mothers, fathers, and children.”

Martin is already issuing Lakota ID cards, and he claims to have given out more than 150. He showed me his own. The front bore a menacing photo of Martin wearing dark sunglasses. On the back, it gave the cardholder a sense of omnipotence, bearing a disjointed list of privileges. It read, “a. Diplomat; b. Passport; c. Driving; d. Hunting; e. Fishing; f. All of the Above.”

As I wrote these words down, Martin cackled with glee, rejoicing over how his card gave Indians a free pass to ignore white society’s niggling rules.

“See,” he said. “I’m not [expletive] around, am I?”

We drove on, through a public housing community, Evergreen, in Means’s own town of Porcupine, S.D. The 100 or so houses there, built in the ’70s, were spattered with graffiti, their barren yards awash in old beer cans and vodka bottles — all contraband on the dry reservation.

“There are 13 bootleggers in here,” Martin said, “and seven dope dealers. And see all them kids there?” He pointed to a pack of boys roughly 10 years old. “That’s who they sell it to. Them’s the kids who are running around breaking windows. We asked Russell Means to come to a community meeting here, and he said, ‘I’ve got no time for that.’?” (Means denies saying this, and says that Martin never invited him to the meeting.)

Martin had spent months trying to organize Evergreen residents against the thugs in their midst. This afternoon, he was getting crime reports from locals. He stopped to chat with a woman named Rose Never Missed a Shot, and she complained of a neighbor who was selling vodka to her 17-year-old son. “He got real drunk,” she said. “Then, the people who was selling him the alcohol, they beat my son up, broke his jaw. When they’re drunk like that, I stay up all night.”

We went into her small house to look at an X-ray of the fractured jaw. Sixteen family members lived inside. The interior walls were pocked with holes. The furnace did not work. The sole source of heat was the stove, and there was a bucket in the living room to catch the water that came in through the roof when it rained. A 19-year-old woman named Tammy Iron Shell was playing with her baby. I asked her if she supported Means’s claim of independence. “Russell Means is just an old guy who’s been in a bunch of movies,” she said. “He’s never done nothing for us.”

“Tell him to put us on ‘Oprah,’ ” said her sister, Wendy Wallowing Bull. “Tell him to put us on ‘Extreme Makeover.’ ”

Russell Means lives at a remove from the squalor afflicting most of Pine Ridge. He owns a large wood-frame house that sits on his own 140-acre horse ranch. The place was built, he says, in 1917 for the white BIA agent charged with overseeing Pine Ridge. But it’s more dilapidated than palatial. The paint is sun-worn, and there’s a wealth of construction material lying around amid a decade-long remodeling project.

Still, it is the headquarters of the Republic of Lakotah. I drove up the long driveway, past the sign warning of video surveillance.

When I arrived, Pearl Means was on the phone. She is a 48-year-old Navajo who works as a real estate broker. I heard her saying, “Russ thinks it’s going to be a hatchet job.”

Means himself was at the kitchen table, glowering. Though Pine Ridge is larger than Delaware, it functions more like a small town. Means had received detailed reports on my movements, and he did not like it that I’d tapped Duane Martin as a tour guide.

Tentatively, I noted that Means seemed to have some detractors.

“There is no employment here,” he thundered, “and no businesses. There is nothing on this reservation. It’s like a prison. And what do you think people in prison start doing? They can’t fight against the authorities oppressing them. The only way they can get out their frustration is by fighting each other. So yes, there’s division here, but look at your own [expletive] country.”

When Means calmed down, he began discussing how, over a lifetime, a traditional Lakota accrues four names, the last coming when he is recognized as an elder. “Your own people decide who you are,” he said. “My first name was Brave Eagle, and I tried to live up to it. I took dares; I wasn’t afraid to fight. Then I was Ci–, which is a male bird out on the Plains, and I was a fancy dance champion. Then, in 1972, I became Works for the People. I tried to live up to that. But my fourth name? I’m still waiting for that, and I’m one of the oldest guys out here. I’ve outlived almost everybody, but my people haven’t accepted me as an elder.”

Eventually, Means wanted to show off one of his proudest achievements — the Porcupine Health Clinic, which he helped start, with no help from the tribal government. We drove into the center of town and met with the clinic’s acting administrator, Floyd White Eyes. Means told him that he could help out over the summer by staffing the ambulance with Lakota supporters — EMTs who’d phoned him from Denver. “You’ll have ambulance service for at least eight weeks,” he said. “I can promise you that.”

“That would be great, Russ,” said White Eyes. “That’d really help us out.”

When we came out of the conference room, there were a few people sitting in the waiting area — a young mother with her baby, an old man, an obese young woman in shorts and a dirty sweatshirt. Means began moving around the room. Without saying a word, he presumed to shake the hand of everyone present.

Was he planting campaign seeds, despite himself, or was he simply exercising a little noblesse oblige? It was unclear, but the moment seemed expertly scripted. It was as though the film had suddenly slowed and the sound had been cut, leaving only an essence: Here was a large man looming unvanquished above the oyate, playing the part of a stormy, unpredictable king. There was nothing warm or neighborly about what he was doing, but the performance dominated the room. Each person there received Means’s hand silently and solemnly. The old man rose to his feet, astonished, as though he was beholding a hurricane.

And then Russell Means said goodbye and walked away into the hills, up Crazy Horse Drive, toward home.

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The Green Bicycle Murder

Bicycling
December 2007
Edited by Bill Strickland
© Bill Donahue

It was a quality bicycle for the year 1919, and an odd one as well: bright green, with an upturned green handlebar, a fancy-for-then coaster brake and a broad, huge-springed leather Brooks saddle. For many of the nine years that 34-year-old Ronald Light had owned the bike, he’d ridden it daily and, now, thinking back on his story, I can imagine Light rolling the bike out of Leicester, England, the booming industrial city where he lived, and into the quiet countryside, the breeze riffling his knit golf cap and necktie as he pedaled through the gentle hills of the British midlands, past small peasant cottages and little stone churches and pubs and green grassy meadows lined with hedgerows of hawthorn, blackthorn and ivy.

Blandly handsome and lean, with short, brown hair, a narrow, beaklike nose and a placid manner, Light was a wealthy one-time Army officer who had returned from World War I shell-shocked and disgraced. He’d been court-martialed for forging telegraphs, and ended up in Leicester unemployed and living with his sickly mother. Cycling was his escape.

But in the 9 p.m. darkness of this cold night in late autumn, Light was not riding but pushing his bike through the still streets of Leicester and, I suspect, desperately hoping no one would hear the low, grinding noise his machine gave off as the loose back wheel scraped the frame.

About five months earlier, in July 1919, a fetching young factory worker, Bella Wright, had been fatally shot in the head while riding a rickety bicycle outside of Leicester. The last person with whom she was seen was a new acquaintance: an unshaven man on a green bicycle. The name of this man was originally a mystery but it is now one of the few facts about the case everyone can agree on: It was Ronald Light who rode with Bella that night. The principle question is what happened that languid summer evening after they began rolling east over the crushed-stone roadways into the village of Gaulby.

Police investigators contended that Light shot the young woman with an Army-issue revolver, and his trial for her murder in early 1920 became a courtroom spectacle that was essentially the O.J. trial of its day. Facing a sentence of hanging if convicted, Light won his freedom by arguing, with refined, public-school poise, that he was an innocent man unjustly tangled in a sordid affair. Had Light ridden with Bella that night? Oh yes, he assured the jury. He had indeed. But had he, to quote his lawyer, Sir Edward Marshall Hall, “shot this unfortunate creature?”

“Certainly not,” proclaimed Ronald Light.

Until taking the stand, though, Light hadn’t acted innocent. In the weeks following Bella’s death, as “wanted” posters describing the still-unidentified suspect went up on telegraph poles throughout Leicester, Light hid his beloved bike in a closet. He said that, though he’d done nothing wrong, he didn’t want to go public as the man on the green bicycle; he was afraid, he would explain in court, of worrying his mother. “She’s been under the doctor for many years,” he said. “She has a bad heart.”

At some point, Light decided to rid himself of the bike altogether, and that’s how he found himself one cold night trudging through serpentine streets laid down almost two millennia earlier by the Romans who founded the city. He passed through the ancient kingdom of King Leir, Shakespeare’s inspiration, and snuck along among crumbling baths, walls and aqueducts. He descended some stairs to the bank of the River Soar.

Soon, a laborer named Samuel Holland, en route to the graveyard shift at a nearby mill, spotted a man beside the Upperton Road bridge, stooped over a bicycle frame and visible in the yellow pool cast from the bike’s lamps. As Holland watched, the man stood up, then strode a few yards down the path and, piece by piece, began throwing the bicycle into the water. The frame, the crank, the wheels, the pedals—everything went down into the murk.

It is now February 2007 and I’m standing by the Upperton Road bridge myself. I’ve traveled here, 6,000 miles from my home in Oregon, because ever since a random Google search coughed the details of the Green Bicycle Murder up onto my screen, it has intrigued me.

It may well be history’s most famous bike-related killing. Six thousand people came to Bella Wright’s funeral, and when Light was tried, newspapers all over England went yellow with thrill. “Who murdered Bella Wright?” blared the Daily Express in a multideck page headline that continued, “Green bicycle clue in lonely lane crime.”

“Grim story of a raven,” quoth the Daily Sketch, electing to focus on a black bird that was mysteriously—and quite gothically— found dead beside Bella’s body.

The affair also appealed to me because of its antique splendor, coming as it did in the last era when a bicycle could sit at the center of a cultural uproar. Bella was killed just as the joys of cycling, which for so long had been reserved for the well-heeled, were trickling down to the masses, who could suddenly afford a decent used ride, replete with mudguards, for a few weeks’ wages. Automobiles were not yet widespread, so on those rough roads, factoryworkers, coal miners and farmers moved as quickly as kings. Society was changing: Peasant families who had clung to their own villages, inbreeding for centuries, now mingled with faraway visitors and expanded the gene pool. To facilitate pedaling, ladies began wearing bloomers, casting off their heavy dresses—and, some historians say, striking the first spark for equal rights.

But what drove me toward Bella and Light, ultimately, was a book. The Green Bicycle Murder, written in 1993 by the British author C. Wendy East, is the most celebrated work on the case and it was, in my view, unsatisfactory. East is coolly reasoned in the book, but her arguments are founded on a dubious premise: “I never doubted Light was guilty,” she told me when she and I spoke briefly.

“But how can you know,” I asked, “unless you have, like, a videotape?”

“There is a way of knowing,” East said cryptically.

Her portrait of Light is peevish, dismissive. In discussing his war experience, for instance, East says, “His company seems not to have come under either long or continuous fire in France,” and notes that Lieutenant Light was likely pampered with frequent food parcels from home. Her book has largely shaped public opinion. Today, most people who know anything at all about Light—who died in 1975 at age 89—regard him as a spoiled brat who got away with murder.

There is no doubt Light grew up privileged. His father was a successful inventor of plumbing devices. The family had servants and, at one point, lived in an elegantly spired Leicester town house replete with a third-story balcony that yielded a view of the horse races at nearby Victoria Park.

There’s also no lack of proof that Light was a troubled character.

In 1902, at age 17, he was expelled from the elite Oakham School for “lifting a little girl’s clothes over her head,” according to a brief filed by prosecutors in the murder trial. In his 30s, he “attempted to make love to a girl 15 years of age,” according to the same brief, and admitted to “improper conduct” with another young girl, this one a mere eight years old. Two girls, ages 12 and 14, even testified in court that early on July 5, 1919, just hours before Bella’s murder, Light had chased after them as they wended their bikes through the countryside.

My initial research led me to imagine Light as slimy and despicable—wearing a trench coat, perhaps, as he hunches nervously over his strange handlebar, his teeth idly gnawing at the air, like a ferret’s, as his face bears a beady-eyed intensity. But all accounts depict him as calm and well-spoken in court, and in extant photos he appears almost blank-faced, as though no turgid thoughts whatsoever churned through his skull. Still, one photo lingers in my mind. Taken just a day or so after he was acquitted, it captures Light in a double-breasted suit and a tie held neatly in place by a pin. He is staring at the camera, his lips slightly pursed, his head tilted a bit, his eyes fixed straight ahead. He seems to be saying, as always, “Everything’s normal here. Nothing is wrong.” But in this picture there’s an undertow of determination in his look—the slightest hint of how hard he is working to conceal the secret that everything is wrong.

Light was an only child. He was smart. He got decent grades and seemed suited to step into the life of privilege presented to him by his father, a self-made man born to working-class parents. But as it turned out, his life was a series of disappointments. He lost his job at the railway in 1914 after he was suspected of setting a fire in a cupboard, and of drawing indecent figures on a lavatory wall. Later, working at a farm, he was accused of burning haystacks and dismissed. By the time Light was axed from his post as an Army second lieutenant in 1916, his father had fallen out of a second-story window in his home early one morning and died—an apparent suicide. Light’s mother told police, “For the past few weeks, he has been worried a good deal about our son.”

Light reenlisted, this time as a gunner, and when he came home after several months amid screaming howitzers on the Western Front in France, he was partially deaf. He’d seen fellow troops die or be wounded almost daily, as England had lost nearly a million soldiers in a conflict that, in the end, brought only despair to the country. “If any question why we died,” wrote the poet Rudyard Kipling, “tell them because our fathers lied.” It’s my sense that Light carried a certain grim nihilism. But did this make him a murderer? I couldn’t say.

I thought if I traveled to the scene of the crime I might attain a definitive verdict. But the Leicester of 1919 is largely buried beneath a new, vibrant city of 285,000. The stone church in which the poet Geoffrey Chaucer was married, in about 1366, is still there, as is the 287-year-old Globe pub, which faithfully serves 13 varieties of Real British Ale. Mostly, though, contemporary Leicester is a multicultural experience. It’s currently poised to become Britain’s first white-minority city, and emigrant Somalis, Ugandans, Pakistanis and Bosnians coexist here in relative peace. One evening I found myself in a launderette eating Indian takeout as I chatted with a pale young hipster intent on making a film about zombies.

Bella Wright seemed quite far away—even as I made my way along the towpath, past a bramble of high, tawny weeds toward St. Mary’s Mill, the looming brick building in which Bella last worked at her job making bicycle tires for W&A Bates. The building is now divided into several smaller business spaces, and the first person I encountered—a sullen young man of 30 or so—worked for a concern that made inflatable castles. He wore a blue tracksuit and his ears were bejeweled with gold earrings as he squatted there, rolling a cigarette. I told him of my mission and then asked if he knew anything of Bella Wright.

“No idea, mate,” he said. “I don’t got the foggiest, and it doesn’t mean fuck all to me.”

On the evening of Saturday, July 5, 1919, Light spun north out of the village of Great Glen, through a region known as the Strettons. He passed fields of stubble turnip and beet, and at about 6:45 he spotted a young girl stopped by the roadside, bent low as she inspected a wheel. Bella Wright was 5-foot-2, with what the police called a “well-nourished figure.” Her hair was auburn, her eyes soft brown, and she looked up at Light from beneath the black felt rim of her hat. There was some play in her freewheel. Did Light have a wrench?

He did not, but he did offer to accompany her. They rode east, down a hill toward the village of Gaulby, where Bella planned to visit her uncle and deliver a gift of some gorse.

While Light would claim in court that Bella was a stranger to him, there is some evidence to the contrary. Bella’s mother, Mary Wright, would testify that, in early 1919, “Bella came home after a ride on her bike and said, ‘What do you think? When I went down Braunstone Lane, I had an officer fall in love with me.’”

It’s safe to assume that Bella did not traffic often with officers. Her father, a cow herder, was illiterate. She was the oldest of seven children, and the family lived 4 miles outside Leicester, in the village of Stoughton, under essentially feudal conditions. Their tiny cottage sported a thatched roof and porous walls that wept profusely during wet weather. The floors sagged, the oak beams were bowed, and the outhouse sat a good distance away, by the animal barn.

Still, Bella was no numbskull serf. Rather, she emerges from the legal papers as a self-possessed, forward-thinking young woman. After she finished school at age 12, she took the standard route for girls of her station and worked as a domestic servant. Soon, she saw that there was better pay—and hence more freedom—in factory work, and began pedaling to her night shift at Bates, alone over the dark, hilly 5-mile route. On weekends, according to the Leicester Mercury, “She was often to be seen riding alone. She was never really happy except when enjoying the pleasures of the country-side.” She fixed her own flats, using tubes she got almost gratis at work, and though she was, in the parlance of the day, “keeping company” with 18-year-old Archie Ward, a stoker away at sea on a Royal Navy steamship, she still lived as she wished. Just one week before her death, on June 28, she’d gone to a party with her workmates and allowed a young blacksmith, William Wood, to escort her home through the night.

Did Bella see in Ronald Light a beguiling and urbane older man? Perhaps. In telling her mother of her encounter with the “officer,” Bella recounted, “He asked me who I was, and I told him I was a labouring man’s daughter. He said what a nice girl I was and said by my nice ways and looks I ought to be in a nicer position than a labourer’s daughter.”

They rode, Bella and Light, down the hill. Then they started up another and hopped off, walking side by side. While Bella stopped in at her uncle George Measure’s cottage, Light waited for her, passing time in the village by, he claimed, attending to a flat tire. Bella’s uncle told her he didn’t like the look of her scraggly cycling partner, who lingered outside, unshaven and wearing a raincoat on a clear night.

But when Bella emerged after an hour inside, she rejoined Light and the two of them rode west out of Gaulby, into the midsummer twilight, at about 8:50 p.m. Thirty minutes later, a farmer would find her on an ancient Roman thoroughfare, the Via Devana, lying dead in a puddle of blood.

I wanted to see the terrain Bella rode on her last night alive, so I rented a bike one cold, sleety morning and rode off toward the Strettons with a man named Philip Draycott.

Draycott, 59, is a college professor and TV film director, and the Falstaffian soul of a leisurely cycling club, the Leicester Spokes, who meet each Wednesday night for a spin of 20 miles or so before ending their ride at a pub.

Draycott is amply built for a cyclist, and as we set out, weaving through traffic, he wore a fluorescent yellow vest and fulminated with brio at motorists. “Indicate,” he yelled at a guy who turned without signaling. “Indicate!”

We turned right onto the Via Devana, and then pedaled by a few World War II bomb shelters crumbling into the farm fields. Soon, we passed a little cottage that was selling for $800,000, and I began to see that these days the Strettons are inhabited not by rustics but by people of means enchanted with the idea of rusticity. At Bella Wright’s former home, rechristened Sandbank Cottage, a Jaguar sat in the drive.

We passed the village of Little Stretton and then came to a gentle uphill, roughly paved, bordered by looming oak and ash trees, and shadowed by their high, spindly branches. The road’s dotted white line climbed into the gray distance. Here was where Bella Wright died.

“This very hill!” Draycott intoned with mock tour-guide solemnity. Then he laid out the geography of the case against Light. About a mile west of Gaulby, he said, Bella fled Light and his unwelcome advances. Panicking, she detoured south, setting out for home on a route that was not only longer—4 miles instead of 3—but also obstructed in two places by cattle gates. As Bella labored along, Light whipped down Gaulby Lane, then eventually cut over to intersect Via Devana, where he lay in wait by one of the cattle gates. He shot her, said Draycott, then fled down the gated path before us, escaping through the gathering dusk.

To test Draycott’s theory, I began riding over the path on my own bike, through spitting snow. The mud was ankle-deep, and it sucked so hard at my knobby tires that after 30 feet I shuddered to a stop, then stood gazing into the distance at the spire of the church in Stoughton, where Bella once played the organ on Sundays. But my mind kept turning back to the rusty field gate, which was now quietly piling with snow.

“I found smears of blood on the top bar of the field gate,” police constable Alfred Hall wrote in filing the only on-site account of the Green Bicycle Murder. “I made a diligent search for footprints but could find none [on] either side of the gate.”

Hall searched for hours, driven by his conscience. The doctor who’d come to the scene to examine Bella’s corpse was shockingly cursory. Giving the body a quick once-over, by candlelight, he opined that Bella had simply crashed to her death—an accident.

Spooked by Bella’s blood-spattered body, Hall went home and fretted over this summation until, at 6 the next morning, he rushed back to the crime scene and unearthed a .455 bullet buried in the dust 17 feet from where Bella still lay. He washed the dead girl’s face, and found, he later wrote, “a bullet hole about one inch behind and half an inch below the left eye.”

Hall’s court testimony was no less dramatic. He declared that the blood on the gate had come from a dead raven found at the scene, and that it had died from “gorging itself on blood.” Indeed, Hall claimed, citing footprints, that raven had made six gruesome, bloodthirsty journeys between the gate and the corpse.

There are no ravens in the midlands of England.

When I called Kevin McGowan, a crow specialist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, he was doubtful that a lookalike bird—a crow or a rook—would or could gorge on human blood. “These birds don’t have lips,” he explained. “They can’t get enough suction to suck blood.”

To my mind, the raven—or whatever it was—is evidence only of how the Green Bicycle Murder haunted the imagination back in 1919. It wasn’t just a story about a girl being killed. It was also about a certain hope dying. As David Hughes, a law professor at Leicester’s De Montfort University, wisely told me, “In 1919, with the war just over, people were desperately trying to get back to normal and Bella—she was poised to be married to a sailor. She and Archie Ward were going to be building the nation again, and suddenly she’s killed.”

But the raven was only one of the eerie, powerful images that floated through all the stories being told about the murder. On Febuary 23, 1920, a man named Enoch Whitehouse was hauling a load of coal along the River Soar, on a boat drawn by two horses dutifully plying the towpath. Near the Upperton Road bridge, his towrope went slack, dipping into the brown, filthy water. When it emerged, there was a green bicycle frame tangled up in it.

Soon, several constables lined the banks, wielding lawn rakes and dangling hooks, combing the canal for evidence. Detectives scrutinized the green bicycle. It was mutilated: Someone had filed the brand name, British Small Arms, off the fork and also scraped the serial number off the seat lug. The cops called in a bike mechanic who was able to locate a faintly visible second serial number inside the front fork—103648. Ronald Light had bought a BSA bike with that serial number in the city of Derby on May 18, 1910.

In his largely forgotten 1930 book, The Green Bicycle Case, H.R. Wakefield exudes a chummy Old Boy’s regard for Light and suggests that his clandestine manner was not guilt-induced, but rather the “very human” behavior of an innocent man under stress. As he rolled his bike toward the canal, Wakefield reckons, “Light may have said to himself: ‘I am doing no harm, there is nothing I can say which could contribute toward the solution of the mystery. But to come forward and face the frightful blaze of publicity, probably to be arrested, and have to stand my trial. Cui bono?‘”

The policemen of Leicester were not inclined toward such florid Latin. On March 4, they yanked Light out of Dean Close School, a boy’s academy where he’d just begun teaching math. “I never had a green bicycle,” he swore.

The cops tossed him into the jail in Leicester. Fifteen days later, a police sergeant dredged an Army gun holster and 12 live .455 caliber bullets out of the canal. The bullets precisely matched the one that Alfred Hall had found. Sequestered in his cell, Light hissed to himself in a fury: “Damn and blast that canal.”

Before I really learned about him, I assumed that the polished, privileged Light was a villain as hated by the general public as, say, the suave serial killer Ted Bundy. I guessed that England’s long-ago proletariat rejoiced in Light’s arrest and hankered to see him swing from the gallows. What I didn’t realize was that the Brits’ enchantment with aristocracy—evidenced even now by the widespread working-class love of the royals—was even thicker just after World War I. The glorious British empire was fast fading, and upper-class youths who’d risked their lives to defend it by fighting in World War I were seen as consummate noblemen.

Though the press coverage was sensational, Light’s despicable past never made it into print, and the stories about him were nearly all sympathetic. In one front-page headline, for instance, the Leicester Mercury fretted over “Ronald Light’s Ordeal.” The subheads read, “Why he did not come forward. Feared ‘unpleasant publicity.’ Didn’t want to worry his mother.” As Bella was reduced to a mere “factory girl,” Light was honored in print as an “engineer, teacher and ex-Army officer.”

Light’s trial, which drew an overflow crowd of friendly gawkers, was set in Leicester Castle, a grand, turreted complex built in the 1060s by the Normans, with Sir Thomas Horridge presiding as judge in a white-powdered wig. The star of the drama was not Light but his barrister—Sir Edward Marshall Hall, who was the Johnny Cochran of his day. Then 61, Hall had made a career of helping wealthy suspects triumph over formidable and sordid murder charges—the killing of a prostitute or of a young mistress. Glib, handsome and 6-foot-3, he was a master of oratory— and restraint. He did not cross-examine Bella’s mother or uncle, or even stop Light from admitting that he once had a revolver and that the holster dredged up from the canal was his. Hall saved his haughty disdain for the prosecution’s ballistics expert, a Leicester gunsmith named Henry Clarke.

In a prolonged browbeating, Hall got Clarke to concede that there were scratch marks on the bullet found near Bella’s body. “This bullet could be from a rifle as well as a revolver?” Hall asked meaningfully.

“Yes,” admitted Clarke.

Hall then posited that maybe the fatal shot had been accidentally fired from “some distance away.” If Bella had been shot at close range, as would be necessary with Light’s revolver, Hall continued, wouldn’t it almost “blow the side of the head off?”

“It depends on the velocity, sir,” said Clarke.

“Of course it does,” intoned Hall, as if he’d proven the case’s key point.

Listening, Light canted forward in his seat, clutching the bench before him with stiff, clawlike hands. He looks boylike in the newspaper photos—almost fragile in his neat white shirt and tie. When, after three hours of deliberation, the jury declared him “Not guilty,” he collapsed for a moment. A joyous horde closed in on him, crying, “Well done, Light!” and “Good old Light!” Then the free man slipped out of the castle and took the tram home across town, alone and unnoticed.

In the years after his trial, Light all but vanished. While researching her book, East established that by 1928 he’d moved to the village of Leysdown, on Island of Sheppey, in Kent—a seaside holiday spot for Londoners. Visitors go there in droves, making it easy for a person to hide in the ever-changing crowd. Light lived for a time under an assumed name, Leonard Estelle. He married an older woman with a daughter, but fathered no children himself, and it seems that East could not even ascertain if he ever worked. Over the phone, East told me, “When he died, his stepdaughter had never even heard of his trial.” In Leysdown, he was remembered, she writes, “as an elderly balding man… who was often seen leaning on the gate of his cottage smoking a cigarette and watching the world go by.”

I wanted more details, so I made calls to Kent—to newspapers, to the police and to the public archives. I found nothing, not even an obit. The lawyers who helped Hall prep a defense destroyed their papers right after the trial. Most of the police records for 1919 are missing. The bullets and holsters dredged up from the canal are in the hands of an anonymous collector who bought them for $6,000 at Christie’s in 1987. Even the green bicycle itself, which for several decades hung on the wall of a local bike shop, has been lost. Little remains but speculation.

One morning, I met with Ben Beazley, a retired police officer who has written several books on the history of Leicester. He hypothesized that Bella was killed not by Light but by a love interest in her own social circle. The evidence, he suggested, lay in a rather unfortunate line from the prosecution brief: Though Bella had not been raped or forcibly molested, the document said, “The girl was not a virgin.”

“Maybe she was the local nail,” Beazley mused vaguely. ” Maybe everybody was shagging her. There’s your motive—maybe someone got jealous.”

A retired clerical worker named Alison Keay had her own theory. A soft-spoken and painfully shy criminology buff who loves the TV program “CSI: Las Vegas,” Keay fixated on the bullet entry wound in Bella’s cheek, which, according to court records, was just large enough to “admit an ordinary pencil.” To Keay, such a hole seemed small for the dusty .455 bullet found near the corpse. After she found a self-appointed ballistics expert on the Internet, a retired American police officer named Dave, and Dave confirmed her hunch. Then Keay self-published a 60-page treatise, “The Green Bicycle Murder and New Evidence.” It posits that Light was innocent and that the dusty bullet and the look-alike bullets the cops found in the canal were “complete red herrings.” She may be right on this point. But her book lacks a theory as to who did kill Bella, and why.

Keay says she’s still mulling over those questions. “It was definitely a cover-up,” she told me. “The police knew more than they let on. Bella might have seen something she shouldn’t have seen, like maybe some military exercises, some enemy training.” I pointed out that by 1919 World War I had ended, but Keay persisted. “Say like a German plane came over,” she said. “They practice on random targets, don’t they? And there was a raven, wasn’t there—a black bird? The bird has something to do with it. I’m just not exactly sure what yet.”

Eventually I found my way to law professor David Hughes. Sixtyish and rotund, with a grand thespian air, Hughes is arguably the premier expert on the Green Bicycle Murder. He recently directed a mock trial of Light, and he possesses a keen radar for the case’s nuanced class ramifications; the grandson of domestic servants, he is also a graduate of Cambridge University.

I met him on a snowy morning in his office, which was absurdly cluttered with books and appointed with throw rugs. Hughes was wearing a cream-colored waistcoat, a green Cambridge country tie, and a large copper coin, a George IV farthing, on a long watch chain. “Do come in,” he beckoned. He quickly dismissed one theory I’d heard—that the Freemasons orchestrated Light’s acquittal—calling it “that old canard,” before dismantling it.

For Hughes, the soul of the case lies in a philosophical question. “Why does crime happen?” he thundered. “To quote the great Cambridge criminologist Sir Leon Radzinowicz: opportunity. Let’s say that Light had a fantasy about young women—and clearly I think he did. On that night, along came Bella. At some point, she saw his hunger. She fled.”

Slowly and rhythmically, Hughes began spinning his hands above his prodigious belly to imitate a spinning bicycle crank. “And now,” Hughes said, “Bella’s coming along, down the Via Devana, on a rattly old bicycle with a defective wheel. She’s weaving along—and suddenly out from behind the hedge steps the very man she’s been trying to avoid. She tries to turn 180 degrees, to get away from him—”

Hughes was now madly spinning his hands, and we were both watching them spin, transfixed. “And she panics,” he said. “She turns the bicycle over! She’s on the floor, and Ronald Light—suddenly he’s standing above her, dominant. He has attained his fantasy. He holds the ultimate power, which is not about sex but about destroying. He can kill her!”

Hughes’ hands were dead still. He looked at me, somber and wide-eyed. “And that is what Ronald Light did,” he said. “He murdered the girl.”

When I returned home from England, I believed that Hughes’s story was as close to the truth as anything I’d ever find. Then one afternoon I received a final batch of legal papers from Leicestershire County Records. I sat out on my porch, reading through legal boilerplates, nothing surprising—until one document stunned me. Drafted by Levi Bowley, the superintendent of the Leicester Police, three days after Light’s acquittal, it described how Light had come back to retrieve the personal items that had been seized from him upon his arrest. Bowley said that, because he’d treated Light well in prison, they were on good terms; they talked in his office and Light said: “Well, you are a good sport, if I tell you something can I depend on you keeping it to yourself?”

Bowley said yes, then Light responded “Well, I’ll tell you, but mind it must be strictly confidential, no other person knows about it and if you divulge it I shall, of course, say I never told you anything of the kind.” Then, Bowley wrote, Light volunteered this confession:

“I did shoot the girl but it was completely accidental, we were riding quietly along, I was telling her about the War and my experience in France, I had my revolver in my raincoat pocket and we dismounted for her to look at it. I had fired off some shots in the afternoon for practice and I had no idea there was a loaded cartridge in it. We were both standing up by the sides of our bicycles…. I took the revolver from my coat pocket and was in the act of handing it to her, I am not sure whether she actually took hold of it or not, but her hand was out to take it when it went off. She fell and never stirred, I was horror struck, I did not know what to do, I knew she was dead, I did not touch her, I was frightened and altogether unnerved and I got on my bicycle and rode away.”

Not one of the hundreds of news stories I’d read mentioned this confession and, instantly, I doubted its authenticity. While all the other documents in the file bore murky, dark type, this one was faint, with even type strokes. Was it a planted fraud intended to put the mystery to rest? Or someone’s idea of a practical joke—a hoax?

Robin Jenkins, the keeper of the Leicestershire Archives, guessed that the document was legitimate. Bowley’s report, he told me, “was secret until the Leicester Police deposited it with us just eight or 10 years ago.”

I tracked down Philip Bouffard, an Ohio-based forensic document specialist who is arguably the expert on historic typography. In 2004, The New York Times turned to him as it analyzed 1970s-era papers relating to George W. Bush’s National Guard stint. Bouffard was suspicious about the type. “This document is typed at 12 characters per inch,” he said. “It’s monotone elite, and in the 1920s most things were pica elite—10 characters per inch. And I can’t get over how crisp and sharp the letters are. The alignment is very good. On a 1920 typewriter, you’d typically have a lot of letters off to the left or right a bit, or off up and down. Something’s not right here.”

I consulted another typography expert, Harry C. Pears, who lives in Australia and graciously agreed to scrutinize a host of ’20s-era typefaces for me. He wrote back to say, “I can find very little evidence that the report wasn’t created in the 1920s.” He speculated that it was made on an Underwood typewriter.

But of course, neither of these assessments proved much at all. I knew that Bowley himself could have drafted a bogus report, just for kicks. For that matter, if I really wanted to spend the dough, I could go out and buy an ancient Underwood typewriter then type up my own confession on yellowing paper and slip that into the files. In the end, I kept circling back to something Wendy East had told me when I asked for her take on Light’s confession: “I think you must make of it what you will.”

History demands that of us—a little interpretation, I mean, a little bit of connecting the dots. It’s a matter of taking the still, dusty past and reinventing it so that it becomes, suddenly, a story, a cinematic drama that we can believe in. And the more the dust settles on the past—the more the old documents get lost and the principals wither away and die—the more the whole enterprise of writing history becomes conjectural.

It’s easy now for me to see Ronald Light swooping around the corner onto the Via Devana at dusk, his revolver tucked in his trousers, jolting heavily against the bone of his hip as he rattles over the rocks on the road. It’s easy to imagine the sick, hot hunger that frothed in his breast as he lay in the grass, watching Bella emerge through the hedgerow. She’s panicked and flushed— enchanting in the soft evening light…

And then the film flickers out. The house lights click on, and all we have in the end is Ronald Light stooped by the gate of his home with a cigarette. All we know is what we can see: that Light is old, and his face has become wrinkled and ancient—eaten away by time, and by whatever worries and self-reproach he harbored deep in his conscience.

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