Neither Wolf nor Dog (12 page)

“Yeah,” Grover echoed. “That was all people knew — what they saw in Buffalo Bill and what they read in the papers.”

“No, there was another thing,” Dan said. “There was that poem of Hiawatha. ‘By the shores of Gitchi-gumi.' What the hell is Gitchi-gumi, anyway?”

“I think it's Lake Superior — up my way,” I offered.

“Maybe,” continued the old man. “But that's the other idea white people had of us. Moccasin Indians sneaking through the woods and paddling canoes. Buckskin Indians in the forest, while we were the war-paint Indians.

“That's what white people thought Indians were like. Then when movies came, and TV, they just kept making us look the same. Sometimes you'd even have some Indian sneaking through woods in his fringy buckskin shirt in one scene — paddling around in a canoe and stuff — then in the next one he's covered with war paint and wearing some little towel while he's riding a horse across the prairie and shooting arrows at white men. It was so damn dumb I can't even imagine it.”

“There!” interjected Grover. The Italian Indians in buckskin pants were racing along on their pintos shooting arrows and brandishing tomahawks.

“At least they're not wearing those damn little towels,” Dan said. “Think about it, Nerburn. You live up in the woods. You should know how it is. Do people from New York and California ever come up there? I bet if they made a movie about where you live, it would just be a joke, too.”

“They have,” I said. “And it was.”

“Then think about us. We're Indians. We live out here in buffalo country. All we ever see are little tiny planes going over our heads between New York and California. They don't stop here. Those people don't want to stop here.”

“Except that New York woman,” Grover said.

Dan nodded and continued. “That's the way it's always been. All the settlers either stayed in the East or they went straight across to California, and most of us Indians ended up in the middle. We were where no one else wanted to be. That's why they let us be here.

“But all the movies and all the books came from either California or somewhere out East, so they didn't know a damn thing about Indians except what they wanted to know. That woman that came from New York was just another one of them. She was just the new version. She's probably back there right now writing some script where all the Indians talk like wise people. She'll find some scriptwriter who has read some Indian speeches and then she'll have the Indians talk like that. She won't even know that we speak different when we are giving speeches. She won't even care.

“And you know what? When you get right down to it she'll have the hero be a white person. The Indian will offer advice to the white person and that will make the white person better, but it will really be a movie about white people and how they become wiser when they add Indian wisdom to their white lives.

“I don't even know what the hell the movie is, but I'd bet everything that it will be like I say. They all are these days. We
see them on video. We know what they're like. Can't have savages anymore. Now it's the wise Indian — you know, at one with the earth and all — who makes white people get better by teaching them Indian ways, so they add Indian values to their whiteness.”

“Like that ‘Dances with Wolves,'” Grover said.

“Yeah, exactly,” Dan said. “That was at least pretty good. They paid some real Indians and the Indians were pretty good. But the white guy got wise. He was the hero.”

Grover had gone to the refrigerator for a carton of milk. “I wonder what that New York woman's movie will be?” he asked.

“‘Old Indian That Cleared His Throat,'” Dan said.

Grover laughed. “Well, I sure as hell wised her up, I know that. I better start watching for it on TV.”

“That's the trouble,” Dan answered. “Whatever the hell she does, it'll be on TV. Kids will see it. White kids, Indian kids. They'll all see it and think that's what Indians are like. They'll see what some woman who almost peed in her pants thinks Indians are like, and they'll believe it.”

He stuffed the last bite of sandwich in his mouth. The TV was showing a woman spraying a garbage can with some air freshener. He pushed his plate away. “Give me some of that milk,” he said. Grover handed him the carton. He took a gulp directly from the spout.

He handed it across to me. “No, thanks,” I mumbled.

Grover turned toward me. “You better not write some book like that, Nerburn.”

His voice was not threatening, but it left no doubt that he was serious.

I shook my head. “I pee in the toilet,” I said.

Dan raised his hand and wagged his head, as if scolding me. “You got to pee on the earth, Nerburn. You got to pee on the earth.”

I
couldn't get to sleep that night. Something about the afternoon with Dan and Grover had left me unsettled and uneasy. Though I had been treated well and had felt honored that Grover had shared his home and table with me, the sense of the distance between us had somehow grown, not diminished, in the course of the day. Maybe it had been the easy intimacy of the two men; maybe it had been some deeper cultural gulf that I would never be able to cross. All I knew is that I had come back to my hotel room feeling more distant and alien than at any time in any of my visits. For the first time I felt like the dreaded anthropologist — an observer who pretended to participate, an outsider for whom the natives felt compelled to perform.

I lay back against the hard motel pillow and flicked on the television set. The late-night talk shows had just begun, and the various hosts were doing their stand-up routines. I watched them parade and preen — mugging and smirking and rolling their eyes while they told jokes about current events and political figures.

Their humor was hard, their audiences raucous. They thrust their hands in their pockets and rocked back on their heels, like smart-aleck college kids making fun of people dumber than they were.

I turned off the volume and watched them in pantomime. They seemed a million miles away.

Dan's image of the jets flying overhead between the coasts kept haunting me. How often had I been a passenger on one of those jets, peering down into the midnight darkness at a tiny cluster of lights and wondering who had chosen to live there, and what kind of lives they lived.

Now I was one of those lights.

I rolled onto my side and stared out the window. The great vault of the sky was ablaze with stars. High among them I could barely make out the rhythmic blinking of a passing plane.

I imagined the passengers dozing to the drone of the engines or staring down at the darkened landscape far below. I wanted to wave, or signal them somehow, to let them know we were alive and well, and that this landscape was not empty, but full of life and stories and dreams. But the blinking lights kept moving and soon disappeared over the horizon, leaving only the twinkling silence of the sea of stars. I turned back to my room and my silent TV. The funny men were still strutting around their respective stages, gesticulating and making faces. If I, who had been raised in cities and was a part of their culture, now found myself disconnected from their raucous energy and frantic antics, how far removed was someone like Dan, who had
been born in a land of endless spaces and had been raised to hear the voices in the wind?

Yet it was entirely possible — indeed, very likely — that at that very moment Dan was watching David Letterman read a top-ten list, or staring at some phony crime re-creation full of screeching sirens, jumpy camera work, and hysterical scratchy rebroadcasts of 911 calls.

What did this all mean? And how could I make sense of it?

Gradually, I was coming to wish I had never undertaken this project. There was no way I could do it right. As much as I respected Grover, he was forever watching over me, monitoring my intentions with a ceaseless vigilance that had begun to feel suffocating.

Dan himself wanted so much from me, yet he was unable to articulate just what it was I was supposed to accomplish. “Make it sound like I went to Haskell.” “Don't make it sound too white.” Every instruction was a contradiction. And the only stylistic advice I ever received was to observe the comings and goings of a mangy old dog.

Then, on the other side, I could already hear editors and publishers saying, “The old man is too crusty and ornery. Make him nicer. And couldn't you make him a little less ordinary and a little more wise?”

I was weary of the entire enterprise. I was sick of living in a motel room and listening to screen doors slam and toilets flush in the next unit at two in the morning. I was running short of money and I missed my family. I had no guarantee of a publisher, and no idea how this series of conversations and simple daily occurrences was ever going to take form.

The story of the buffalo carcasses and the junk cars had been the last straw. I wasn't sure if Dan had been toying with me or if he was serious. There had been such a mock theatricality about the way he had leaned over and lowered his voice when he spoke;
he could as easily have been entertaining himself as educating me. The only certainty was that I would be judged on whether or not I had gotten it right.

I had not come out here to be given an endless series of tests in cultural sensitivity, or to become the butt of some deep and private jokes. Even if the old man didn't realize it, I was doing him a favor, and at great cost to myself and my family. I was willing to play his Boswell, but I was not willing to play his patsy. And I surely was not willing to have my every action judged, critiqued, and used as the basis to decide if he was going to let me pursue this any further.

At that moment I made a hard and painful decision. I decided to give up and go home.

Perhaps it had been the stress of the day; perhaps the phantoms of the nighttime imagination just overtook me. But, whatever, the decision eased my mind considerably. I would take what I had written so far and mail it all back to him along with an explanatory note. It wasn't the noblest option, but I wanted to explain myself on my own terms. That was likely to be impossible if I tried to do it in person. I could just see him getting that blank look on his face and turning away from me, or padding off into his bedroom in the middle of one of my sentences, leaving me sitting at his table as if I were some kind of leper or tainted piece of meat.

No, if I wrote a note he might not respect me, but at least he would understand me. He would be unable to resist reading it, so he would hear what I had to say. After all, he had raised a family. He had made hard choices in his life. I wanted him to hear me say my peace.

It was even possible that sometime in the future, when we both had our motives clearer, we could undertake the project again. Or perhaps he could find an Indian to serve as his chronicler, who understood more deeply the shadings of his actions,
and was less likely to be seen as a potential betrayer who had to have his every act judged as a measure of the purity of his character. I even let myself entertain a thought that had been unthinkable up to now: that no one except a few Indians and a few Indianophiles even gave a damn about the old man and what he had to say, and that it wasn't really that important, anyway.

I went to my bag and took out a sheet of paper. The motel room had no desk, so I propped some pillows against the wall behind my bed and made a writing surface out of the Gideon Bible.

“Dear Dan,” I began. “I wish to speak to you honestly and from the heart. You have given me a great honor by asking me to write your thoughts for you. But with each day I am . . .”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Arsenio Hall waving his hand over his head like a lasso and doing some kind of a cakewalk across the stage. I grabbed for the remote and tried to shut him off before I lost the rhythm of my thoughts.

I slammed at the button with my thumb, but only succeeded in changing channels. The Atlanta Braves were playing the L.A. Dodgers or San Diego Padres and something of consequence had just happened. The camera panned the fans and came to rest on three shirtless white men with great fishbellies who were wearing headdresses and waving giant rubber tomahawks. Next to them sat a woman with a little girl about two years old.

The fishbellies gestured wildly to the woman and pointed at the camera. She looked up, excited, then lifted the little girl's sleeping head so the camera could see that her face was painted in red and white stripes. Then the woman stuffed a tiny rubber tomahawk in the little girl's hand and began making chopping motions with her arm. Soon the five of them were facing the camera and making synchronized tomahawk chops, with
the little girl still sleeping, the mother grinning, and the three shirtless men beating their beefy hands over their mouths in an imitation of a war whoop.

I looked down at the paper on my lap. Slowly, methodically, I crumpled it up and tossed the wadded ball off the wall into the wastebasket.