Neither Wolf nor Dog (11 page)

“I believe you,” I said. “That's one of the things I admire so
much about your way of life. But what does it have to do with junk cars?”

“I'm trying to tell you,” the old man said. “But you interrupt too much. Let me finish.”

I settled back and concentrated on the road ahead. Dan sat silent for a moment to gather his thoughts. He was still irritable and angry. Then he began again:

“Listen. Look at us now. We have rich Indians that don't even know what to do with their money. They just get more and more and keep it. They will get a new car or a good rifle or something, but they don't go buy a new suit every week or a huge rich house. Look at this reservation. There are people here who have a lot more money than some of the other people. But they still live in a simple way, because the idea of possessions is so strange to them.

“What it is, Nerburn, is that things are important when we need them. If we don't need them, they're not important. You think this is just some old-time philosophy about the way things used to be. But it's not. I've thought about this.”

He pointed toward a brushy hillside we were passing. “Look. Do you see that bike?”

There was a black dirt bike lying on its side in the field. No kids seemed to be around anywhere.

“What does that look like to you?”

“It looks like a bike some kid lost. Or maybe he is off playing somewhere. I don't know.”

“White eyes, Nerburn. You've got white eyes. The boy probably left it there. This is what I mean. Watch our little children. They might get a bike and ride it, then just leave it somewhere, like that. You say they are irresponsible. They are just being like their ancestors who believed that you owned something only so long as you needed it. Then you passed it to someone else.

“Wenonah's little boy comes home from school and the
teachers call and say he left his book somewhere or didn't bring a pencil. I try to tell them that he didn't need the book right then and that he will get another when he needs it, but they don't understand. They would have him get big bags and boxes and fill them with everything and never let anyone touch them. They want him to keep papers when they are finished and graded. They want him to keep everything.

“No wonder white people need such big houses. They aren't to live in, they are to store things in. I have been in some houses where the closets are as big as the rooms because the people want to store so many things. If all the buildings and all the rooms you use to store things were used for people, everyone in the world could have a place to live.”

“Buffalo carcasses and junk cars, Dan,” I prodded.

“You're getting me angry, Nerburn,” he said. “I know what you're up to.” He leaned over close to me and lowered his voice. “Okay. I'm going to tell you a secret. All of this — all these cars and stuff — makes me proud.”

“Proud?”

“Yeah. It means we haven't lost our traditional ways.”

The anger had faded from his face and been replaced with a placid smile. “We have to live in this world. The Europeans killed all the animals and took all our land. We can't live our way anymore. We have to live your way. In our way, everything had its use then it went back into the earth. We had wooden bowls and cups, or things made of clay. We rode horses or walked. We made things out of the things of the earth. Then when we no longer needed it, we let it go back into the earth.

“Now things don't go back into the earth. Our kids leave pop cans around. We leave old cars around. In the old days these would be bone spoons and horn cups, and the old cars would be skeletons of horses or buffalo. We could burn them or leave them and they would go back to the earth. Now we can't.

“We are living the same way, but we are living with different things. We will learn your way, but, you see, you really don't understand any better. All you really care about is keeping things clean. You don't care how they really are, just so long as they are clean. You see a dirt path with a pop can next to it and you think that is worse than a big paved highway that is kept clean. You get madder at a forest with a trash bag in it than at a big shopping center that is all clean and swept.

“It all comes back to possessions. You want to have everything and you think that is fine as long as it is put in piles or in rooms or in boxes with labels. We don't have very much and we leave it when we don't want it or need it.

“If I lived in a big house and had rooms full of different things, if I had big cars and a library full of books, if I had pulled out all the flowers and medicine plants and made a lawn that looked like a rug, people would come to me and ask me about everything because they would say I am a ‘good' Indian. All it would mean is that I am an Indian with lots of possessions, just like a white man. That would make me good and important in your eyes. Admit it.

“Every once in a while I would have to go to a powwow and put on some feathers so you could believe I was a real Indian. But other than that you would think I was smarter and more important if I lived in a big house and owned lots of things. That's just the way white people are. It's the way you are trained.

“Here,” he said abruptly. “Turn here.” A rutted path ran up a little rise toward a beige trailer. “This is Grover's place.”

The trailer sat exposed on a treeless hill. A perfectly ordered woodpile stood in the yard to the left. Each log seemed to have been cut to an identical length, and they were piled in a crisscross fashion, with each layer running perpendicular to the one below and above.

A small patch of earth to the right of his stoop had been
cleared of brush and raked smooth. Two lawn chairs sat evenly spaced against the skirting of the trailer. There were no junk cars, no engine parts, no kids' bicycles — just Grover's old Buick parked in a spot marked off by a frame of fist-sized rocks arranged in a perfect rectangle.

Dan glanced over at me. The twinkle was back in his eye. “Goddamn reservation Indian,” he muttered. “Lost his culture.”

Then he sat back and let out a long rolling laugh that seemed, like prairie thunder, to come from the beginning of time.

G
rover was sitting on an old brown couch in his living room watching a black-and-white cowboy show on his television. He didn't even turn toward us when Dan opened the door.

“Hey, Grover,” Dan shouted. “How come you don't have any junk cars in your yard?”

Grover didn't move a muscle. “Don't have a dog,” he answered. The two men roared with laughter, as if this were part of some longstanding joke between them.

Grover made an elaborate charade of looking out the window toward the sun. “Must be about lunchtime.”

He gestured me toward a brown wooden chair with green tweed cushions. It was like the chairs in a cheap motel, with a
slanted back and flat, foam rubber cushions. I lowered myself into its sagging seat. Dan was already at the refrigerator.

I stared blankly at the scratchy image on Grover's television. A group of cowboys were riding as fast as they could through some nondescript sagebrush. They were leaning over the fronts of their horses, waving their guns as they shot as if they were throwing the bullets out of the barrels. The sound track of tinny music, thundering hooves, and gunshots echoed off the walls of the trailer. I wanted to reach over and turn the sound down, but knew I didn't dare.

Dan shuffled over with a loaf of white bread, a half-full cellophane pack of baloney, a jar of Miracle Whip, and a bottle of ketchup. Grover laid a butter knife and three light-green melmac plates on the coffee table in front of the television. Dan fumbled with the little red wire tie that held the bread bag closed and finally managed to get the bag open. The two men started rummaging around and constructing their sandwiches.

“Better get on with it, Nerburn,” Grover said. “The old man can really pack them away.”

Dan made a grunt of acknowledgment and piled a third slice of baloney on his bread. Then he hammered the bottom of the ketchup bottle until a large blob splotted onto the meat.

“Damn!” Grover said. “I hope I can eat like you when I'm eighty.” He reached across and turned up the volume on the television.

“Here, watch. Pretty soon they'll go by a rock and an Indian will jump on them.”

The gang of cowboys rumbled across the countryside, dust flying and music blaring. Soon the camera switched to a shot of a rocky cliff. The music changed to some ersatz Indian melody with a heavy tom-tom beat, and a group of suspiciously Italian-looking Indians emerged, like sphinxes, to stand on the
top of the rock outcropping. They were bare-chested except for vests, and had big scarves tied around their heads.

“Too high,” Dan said. “They won't jump from there.”

He was right. The Indians saw the oncoming bustle of cowboys and said something to each other in a guttural approximation of an Indian language. They ran to their horses — all pintos — and vaulted onto their backs from behind, like gymnasts mounting a pommel horse, and rode off yipping and hollering.

The scene shifted back to the cowboys. One of them held up his hand and the others all reined to a stop. “There,” the lead cowboy pointed, “Comanches!” The pack surged off to the left in hot pursuit, hooves pounding and guns blazing.

“My God,” I said. “How can you watch this? Doesn't it make you crazy?”

“Hell,” Grover said. “I used to go to the movies as a kid and root for the cowboys. I probably even saw this one.”

“Yep,” said Dan. “In the old show houses everyone used to cheer and boo at movies. We all booed the Indians; cheered when the cavalry came. I really liked John Wayne.”

I had heard this same story many times from the older Indians. It seemed astonishing to me. But always, the response was the same: we didn't even feel those were Indians like us. We cheered the cowboys and booed the Indians just like the white kids.

“So it doesn't bother you?” I asked.

“A lot of things bother me,” Grover answered. “This isn't worth the effort.”

“It bothers me a lot more now than it did then,” Dan added.

I slipped a rubbery pink piece of baloney onto my white bread. “Why's that?”

“Well,” said Dan, “when we were kids we didn't see a lot of white kids. Those we saw were just like us. Poor as hell and just
kids playing in the dirt. Their folks might have had it better than our folks, but the kids seemed just the same. We never thought of ourselves as any different. Cowboys and Indians was just a game, like cops and robbers. It didn't have anything to do with our real lives.

“I mean, nobody had any cars. We didn't get to any big town except maybe once or twice a year. There wasn't any TV. It wasn't until after the war, when the soldiers came back and told us what it was like out there, that we even knew that anyone lived different from us.”

“Yeah,” Grover said. “That's when it hit me. When I got back from Korea. All the other guys in my unit called me ‘Chief,' and I kind of liked it. But when I got back and lived in the city for a while, I started to hear white people talk about Indians for the first time. The things they said were so damn stupid. That's when I started to get mad about those cowboy movies.

“See, it never bothered me about the way those movies made Indians look. But it bothered me about the way they made us look to white people — like a bunch of savages who just rode around faster than hell on horseback shouting and hollering. Made white people treat us bad.”

Dan swallowed a mouthful of sandwich. The television gunshots were blaring in the background.

“You know where all that stuff came from?” he asked me.

I had done some reading on the subject, but I wanted to hear his thinking.

“Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. You heard of it?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Dan said. “Then you know a little bit. Buffalo Bill had this show that traveled all over, to New York and to Europe and everywhere. He sort of made it up after he had killed all the buffalo and the U.S. had pretty much destroyed us all. He thought he could still make some money on Indians. It was right
after we had taken care of Custer and all the newspapers were writing about Indians as bloodthirsty killers. Buffalo Bill figured people wanted to see real live Indians.”

“Like animals in a circus,” Grover cut in.

“Right,” Dan said. “Only we were the animals. He put together this show. Sitting Bull even was in it for a while, although I'll be damned if I know why he let himself do it. Anyway, it had Indians riding around on horseback hollering and killing people, just like white people wanted.

“People came to see that show from everywhere. I think even the Queen of England saw it. I know some Indians met the President. It was in all the papers. It was really a big thing.”