How it happened.
She takes a drag off her cigarette and shakes her head. Rhonda’s response doesn’t come immediately. She spends a few minutes staring past the drum circle and out into the parking lot. Her eyes pass from RV to pick-up truck to RV, and I wonder what sort of internal registry she’s keeping.
Finally, Rhonda says, “They call it a homicide, right? Say she was ‘murdered.'” She laughs, a bitter edge obvious in her voice. “They don’t write about how he did it.” She looks down to her white tennis shoes and smiles. She switched to the shoes after her jingle dress dance was done, explaining to me that the moccasins hurt her feet. As an invited dancer, however, she “tried to keep the moccs on as long as possible.” But “age got the better part of intention.”
Rhonda clicks the toes of her shoes together and scuffs off some mud. “We weren’t shocked she was dead, right? Sad, obviously. But it didn’t come as a surprise. He wasn’t a good man,” she wraps her fancy shawl around her shoulders tightly. “Nah, we were shocked, disgusted by–well, you know, how he killed her.”
For the next few minutes, Rhonda recounts to me the brutality of her cousin’s death. The details are sickening and delivered with an even, quickly paced monotony. I can tell Rhonda has been over this death many times. She didn’t find her cousin’s body, she reminds me: she only saw pictures. “But it was almost as bad,” she sighs. “And you know, [my aunt] was so upset. So I had to tell the family what happened–how it happened.”
I ask her why it was so important to let her family know how it happened. She nods abruptly and assures me that’s an important part of the entire story.
“Because he didn’t just kill her, the piece of shit. He hated her. He killed her in a hateful way.” And this is where Rhonda’s composure nearly drops–her brow cracks with some anger that she quickly shrugs off. “They’re out there,” she gestures at the parking lot and towards the highway, “and they’re not just ‘killing’ us. They’re cutting off our heads and putting out cigarettes on our nipples. That’s different than just killing.”
miskobagizi 