Dalva (12 page)

I reached Route 12, then drove west until I arrived at Valentine at daylight where I stopped for breakfast, but my butterflies were so bad I couldn't eat the meal. The waitress, who reminded me of a spindlier version of Lena, expressed concern. I said I was worried about my grandmother who was quite sick in Rapid City. The waitress sat down with a cup of coffee and chatted for a while. She admired my sheepskin coat and Paul Bond boots. She said, “Don't talk to no cowboys. They just want to get in your pants.” She said this rather loudly, glancing at a table of cowboys eating their eggs. I felt my face redden and stared out the window at a stock semi full of steers probably headed to the feedlots of Sioux City and eventual slaughter.
I paid my bill, thanked her for the advice, and left. What is so wrong with loving a half-brother? I thought.

I took Route 83 north toward Murdo, turning off on 18 in the Rosebud Indian Reservation on the road to Parmelee. I didn't have much hope that Duane would be there as if waiting for me but I hoped to at least cold-track him as the local hunters called it. White people have a hard time understanding why Indians live the way they do, identifying it with the manner our own peculiar “white trash” live; I mean the bare-ground lawns, broken fences, discarded, picked-over cars, ramshackle houses. Grandfather said you don't want to understand someone if you are stealing, or have stolen, all their property. It might make you feel bad about what you did if you understood them.

Parmelee was indeed a sorry-looking place. Indian summer had suddenly disappeared and a cold wind out of the north blew icy dust in my eyes as I knocked on doors which quickly closed in my face. Some kids and barking dogs began to follow me at a polite distance. The kids laughed and shrieked when I spoke to them in a few words of rudimentary Sioux. I did see an old man working under the upraised hood of a junk car. He poked out, smiled, and said, “May I help you, daughter,” in Sioux. When questioned, he said that he had heard that both Duane and his mother were down in Pine Ridge.

Pine Ridge was another hundred miles down the road but my heart was light as I drove with the wild and blustery north wind rocking the car. I even sang along to the country songs on the radio from a Rapid City station—thinking that Duane might be listening to the same station. It was easiest to sing with Patsy Cline because that was how I felt.

Pine Ridge was terribly unfriendly but again my rather clumsy attempts at the Sioux language got me the unpleasant information. Duane had been drunk and had beaten up a cop down in Chadron a month or so before and was in jail there. If he wasn't in jail he had left the area because you were a dead duck if you beat up a cop. This was told me by a tall, skinny young man in tattered clothes who coughed so hard he wobbled. He added that Duane's mother was supported by a rich man up in Buffalo Gap.

On the way to Chadron I lost my confidence and began weeping. It was now midafternoon and the world seemed a cold and violent place. I was ashamed and began to despise my fancy car which looked so garish in Indian territory. A few weeks before, in our county, a Norwegian farmer had died from general exhaustion. He was in his late forties, his parents had lost their farm in the Depression, and he was afraid of losing the farm he had secured through marriage. I knew his children at school, a half-dozen of them, and they were always exhausted, sunburned, wind-chaffed, and gaunt. If their corn picker broke down they picked by hand until well after dark. The newspaper quoted the bank as saying the man was paid up but was working for a -down payment for more land.

I lost all my courage when I drove past the jail in Chadron. I circled the jail three times without stopping. It somehow seemed unimaginable that Duane was in there, or that, if he was, the authorities would let me see him. I started shaking so hard I pulled off near a park and looked at my map. I decided to drive the twenty miles out to Fort Robinson to regather my composure. Duane said his mother had taken him to Fort Robinson when he was a little boy because it was the location of the murder of Crazy Horse. That afternoon with the clear cold wind and empty parking lot the cavalry barns were ghostly and the fort and officer quarters didn't look like they belonged in the beauty of the rolling, sparsely forested landscape. Across the road at the location of the stockade, where the actual murder took place, a ranger said I had to leave because it was five and they were closing for the day. The ranger was obnoxious and wondered why a “pretty girl” like myself cared about Crazy Horse in the first place. For some reason I said I was an extremely distant relative and was trying to get the guts to kill some white folks. The ranger snorted and laughed and told me to get on my way.

Back in Chadron I walked directly into the sheriff's office in front of the jail and was just as directly arrested. My car keys were taken and I was seated next to the sheriff's desk as he made some phone calls in a whispery, noncommittal voice. He was a small, kindly man. He brought me a cup of coffee and told me my boyfriend, who was a “mean sucker,” had been
bailed out and was long gone. Soon the local rancher who had sold us Duane's buckskin two years before arrived and picked me up. I spent the night with him and his family. I didn't feel bad by then because I had given up. I helped the rancher's daughter who was my age do chores. Out of earshot of her father she said her dad would whip her ass if she went out with an Indian boy.

Next morning I slept late and Grandfather arrived at breakfast red-faced and jubilant in his old otter-skin coat and a hunting hat. Our doctor had flown him over in his Stearman biplane and the trip had been wonderful if a bit chilly. He was coughing and sipped whiskey as he ate. The rancher took us to the sheriff's office where pleasantries were exchanged. The sheriff looked at me oddly and said that everyone should be in love at least once. This is the kind of inexplicable comment one remembers forever.

When we were alone in my car Grandfather asked me why, knowing what I knew, I had gone to look for Duane. I said I couldn't help myself. He said that was a good answer and directed me north out of Chadron instead of east toward home. Just south of Hot Springs, an hour or so out of Chadron, we turned off toward Buffalo Gap, then off again on a narrow gravel road going into the mountains. We had been talking about nothing in particular but the history of the landscape. He knew the area and its history well because we were on the way to his hunting cabin. Some of the very last buffalo had hidden out in this area. He said General Sherman brought the South to its knees by burning crops and destroying all the livestock. The Indians were starved into submission by the destruction of the buffalo as government policy. The South recovered its crops, cows, and pigs but the buffalo were gone forever except as isolated novelties. He liked in these moments of anger to quote General Philip Sheridan who had said, “To destroy the Indian, you must destroy the Indian's commissary. For the sake of lasting peace let us kill, skin and sell until we have exterminated the buffalo. Then your prairies will be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.”

From what the Sioux boy had told me in Pine Ridge I pretty much expected to see
Duane's mother at Grandfather's hunting cabin. He showed no hesitation in sharing this secret
with me though he waited until the last moment to do so. He'd had her traced to Denver after Duane showed up at the farm, and had settled her in the cabin where he'd first met her along with my father and Uncle Paul.

There were the remains of a well-ordered garden outside a door protected by a not very angry black Labrador. The log cabin was much larger than I had expected with a big screened porch facing down-valley to the south. Out beside a shed and small corral I could see Duane's buckskin staring at us and whinnying. When I turned around she was standing in the open door, tall and thin, almost handsome, but with the somewhat dead eyes I would later recognize as those of a recovered serious alcoholic. She smiled and held her hand out to me. Her hand was strong but had the feeling of a hand that had been crushed and healed improperly. Later Grandfather said she had been run over by a car in Alliance when she fell asleep drunk on a side road. Her name in Sioux meant “kestrel,” or “sparrow hawk.”

Inside the cabin I was drawn naturally to the fireplace, and the startling photographs on the mantel. There was a photo of Paul and my father with Sparrow Hawk between them. Behind me they were talking in Sioux and I picked up little of it except numerous terms of endearment. There was also a photo of me with the Airedales, several of Duane, including a recent one on his buckskin. When I turned back to the room she was right behind me and asked me to call her by her American name which was Rachel. Then she asked me to return the necklace Duane had given me. She said she could see I was as strong as my father and Grandfather but Duane was a lunatic and needed the necklace. She pronounced “lunatic” in three distinct syllables as if there was no doubt that this word was a precise description of Duane's character. I took off the necklace without hesitation and she fondled the unremarkable stone in her palm. She turned and said something mournful to Grandfather, who got up from the sofa and embraced her. Then she wailed, and I rushed from the cabin grabbing Duane's old aviator jacket instead of my own. The jacket had been my father's before Naomi gave it to Duane because she said he never looked warm enough.

My ears were ringing from Rachel's wail so I saddled up
the buckskin. I swore long and loudly to block out the wail. The black Labrador barked with excitement which helped. It was my first hard ride in over a year and I rode like a crazy woman. The buckskin was rank and willful so I put it through figure eights until it lathered, then took off up the valley with the dog laboring to keep up. I rode the horse as hard as I dared, then cooled him off with a long walk. I could still see the cabin a half-dozen miles down-valley and imagined the wails coming up through the chimney. I found a stock tank and let the horse drink, then tethered it and lifted the dog over the edge and watched it swim in happy circles. I got pretty wet lifting the dog out of the tank but didn't care—there is something about doing a favor for a dog that calms you down. I stood there as if a statue, my hand against the buckskin's neck feeling his slowing pulse. I had a feeling of dreamlike clarity and perhaps undeserved strength when I remembered something Grandfather had said when he found me after my walk in the hills on the far side of the Niobrara: how each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness that is inescapable, and we must not destroy ourselves with our passion to escape this aloneness. Leaning against that stock tank in the high neck of the valley I could hear the wind and the breathing of the dog and horse. Everyone I had ever known drifted through my mind and out into the air along with the sense that the resonance of their voices resembled the voices of birds and animals. I was somewhat surprised finally to look up and see the sun.

When I reached the cabin I found I had been gone three hours. Rachel warmed up my dinner while Grandfather slept on the couch. His breathing was coarse and his face looked feverish. She said she had hoped we would spend the night but he felt sick and wanted to go home.

A fine May morning on the balcony: my dawn walk was a bit melancholy, the heat I could feel coming signaling the advent of the beach season and its crowds. I took the phone out on the balcony and talked to Mother. We arranged to meet with Ruth in San Francisco the day after Naomi's country school finished its season which was only a few days off. It would be the first
time, she said, that she would miss the Memorial Day service at the country cemetery for the war dead in thirty-seven years, but she knew her daughters needed her and it was certain her husband didn't. Then Andrew called somewhat anxiously to say that the authorities had lost track of Guillermo Sandoval in McAllen, Texas, and that Ted had insisted a man be put on my track full-time for protection. I explained my schedule and the fact I'd probably move back to Nebraska in June. He said it was safer if I didn't know who this guard was since the psychopath in question was devious. Ted came on the phone and insisted on lunch. I rejected his elegant choices, picking instead a café a few blocks away from my apartment that was favored by all the Australians in Santa Monica. He agreed with his patented sigh.

The hour or so on the phone helped make me decide to accept Naomi's teaching offer: barely a month out of work and I felt less than useful, though I had done a great deal of reading and writing. Perhaps it's because the phone is a close tie to the government as the greatest source of enervation in our time. Actually teaching youngsters to read and write would be a wonderful tonic to the phone and California. Out of kindness, though, I quickly called Michael and told him I was leaning in his direction, and would probably see him on Tuesday. His voice quavered and he began speaking as fast as possible short of incoherence. I cut him off by saying I missed him and goodbye.

When I showered and dressed for lunch I felt a tremor of loneliness that I recognized as mostly sexual. This passed and was displaced by the vertiginous notion that another section, a largish piece of my life was coming to an end. The professor's convoluted notions of time were not all that inaccurate though they owned too many sharp corners. Maybe that
is
an essential difference between male and female—I see my life abstractly in terms of interlocking spirals, circles, gyres, while the professor is more linear and geometric. I intended to talk to him about this again after I exhausted him in bed which, to be frank, didn't take that long.