Neither Wolf nor Dog (32 page)

When we reached the top of the rise, Grover honked twice. I twisted in my seat to get one last look at the cabin. Everyone was in the yard, watching, with their hands at their sides. The wind blew their clothes hard against their bodies. Grover honked once more, and we drove off over the hill, out of their view, out of their world, out of their lives.

T
he miles passed quickly on the empty highway. The landscape on either side of us was beginning to change. Rock outcroppings began to jut like broken bones through the grasslands. It was as if the earth's skeleton were being revealed, and the thin skin of soil that had so recently been a grassland sea was now no more than a fragile layer of protection from the prehistoric geological forces that groaned beneath our feet. Buttes and mesas rose up through the earth and towered in the distance. Table rocks and flat-topped cones like extinct volcanoes dotted the horizon. This was the true “west river,” as the locals called it — the western side of the Missouri — where the monster Rockies started to break and rise like a slumbering giant through the extinct seabed of the Dakota high plains.

The heat was stifling. We rode with the windows down, silenced by the roar of the wind rushing past. The sky had gotten heavy and pregnant with meaning. Clouds massed and raced on the horizon. A flush of birds rose from the roadside like leaves in a windgust. There was a storm in the air.

I stared idly out the window at the looming clouds. The little blond boy and his family had filled my mind with thoughts of home. I felt alien, disconnected, alone. Delvin's and Dannie's revelations about Dan's past had made me feel distant. These were things he could have told me.

Dan seemed to be reading my mind. “You liked the little blond kid, huh?” he shouted over the rush of the passing air.

“Reminded me of my boy,” I answered absently. “I miss him.”

“You talked different to him than to the others.”

The observation irritated me. I didn't feel like having my actions scrutinized by someone who had hidden the motivations behind so many of his own. And besides, I wanted to stay inside my own thoughts. “He reminded me of my own kid,” I answered sharply. “I told you.”

“It's good to be reminded of your kid,” he answered cryptically. Everything he said now echoed with a double meaning. “But I don't think that was it.”

“Dan,” I said testily, “He was standing in the front. He was the only one who talked. I just did the natural thing.”

“I don't think so,” he persisted. “The other kids noticed it. They always do.” He rolled up his window. He wanted to talk.

I gave in. There was no sense denying him when the urge to speak overtook him. I rolled up my window, too. “Okay, what are you driving at?”

“He wasn't an Indian to you. That's why you talked to him more.”

“Jeez!” I said. This was not a subject I wanted to pursue. “He wasn't anything. He was a kid. His dad was white.” I almost added, “like your wife.” But that would have been petulant, and would have opened up a conversation I didn't feel like having. “That's what he told me.”

“So he wasn't an Indian.”

“He was half Indian and half white.”

“A half-breed, then?”

“What do you want me to say?” I answered. The heat had given me a headache and my shirt was sticking to the back seat of the car.

“He was a half-breed, right?”

“If you say so.”

Dan was getting excited. He had an idea he was stalking. “You didn't call him that, maybe. But that's what he's called. He's a ‘breed.' The other kids — the older kids — they lived in Denver around white people for two years. The little guy, Eugene, he's never been as far as Rapid City. He speaks Lakota. He's never even seen his white dad. But to you the other kids are more Indian.”

I thought of their silent mahogany faces and their straight, shining hair. “Racially, I guess they are.”

“And that's what matters to make them an Indian to you?”

“I guess. I don't know.” This conversation was far too loaded. I wanted out of it. But Dan was anxious for more. He was obviously pleased with my admissions.

“See, that's the way it is with you white people. It's like race is the biggest thing.”

“Well, you sure as hell want it to be.”

“No, it's not me,” he said. “But this is something I think about a lot. Seeing you with Eugene reminded me.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It's something you should think about. Here, let me tell you something. It wasn't forty years ago they still divided kids in school into groups. Full-bloods, half-bloods, and quarter-bloods. Made them hold up signs. Then took pictures. Those were just kids, and they were divided up like they were some kind of damn recipe or something.”

“That was forty years ago, Dan,” I said.

“So you think it isn't going on anymore? Look at you, the way you talked to Eugene.”

“I told you, he was the one who talked to me.”

Dan was not to be deterred. “Yeah. We see it all the time. It's one of the things that surprises white people when they first
come to a reservation. A lot of the kids don't look like Indians. Some of them are blond, like Eugene, or redhead. Some have blue eyes. That bothers white people. We can see it. You talk different to those kids. They aren't real Indians to you.

“Every Indian notices this. Those kids are Indians to us, but not to you. Since your people first came over here we have been taking white people and letting them live with us. They have become Indians and we think that's fine. But it drives you crazy.

“In the old days, during all the fighting, people would be captured, or we'd find someone without a home — you know, there were a lot of kids without parents — their parents were killed in accidents or maybe in the Civil War.”

“Maybe by Indians,” I said. I was getting irritable.

“Yeah. Maybe by Indians,” Dan answered. He would not take the bait. “We took those kids and those other people and let them live with us. We made them Indians. When they had children with one of our people, the children were Indians. Nowadays it's more like some woman having a kid with a white man . . .”

I couldn't resist. “Or a man having a kid with a white woman.”

“Right,” he glared, “or a kid having a white grandparent.” We were jousting now. “But they're still our people. They're still Indians to us.”

I kept hearing Delvin's words that Dan's son had “had a tough time” because of his mixed race background. I wondered what that had meant — if the trouble had been with other Indians, or with the whites, or about self-identity.

Dan seemed to anticipate my question. “But if one of those children went back with your people, they're not white either. You don't see the white half and claim them. Then you see the Indian half and call them a half-breed. They get teased in
school. Called ‘Tonto' or ‘Pocahontas.' We know. The kids come back and tell us.”

I imagined Dan's son returning to the reservation after trying to live back East with his mother.

“Think of that!” Dan said. “All we cared about was the way they were raised and the people they became. You looked at the color of their skin and the color of their hair and you started dividing them up to see how much white they had in them! You called them half-breeds. Wouldn't let them be white and wouldn't let them be Indians.”

Even in the heat, and filled as I was with a foul mood, I couldn't help but feel the pain of the old man's private memories. I kept seeing the picture of that solemn young man in the mortarboard hanging on his living room wall. The serious expression, the sense of purpose: the face of a youth who was going to “build a bridge” to his mother.

“That's just the way it is, Nerburn,” Dan continued. “Race is the biggest thing to white people. You can see it yourself. All you have to do is watch white people talk to people who aren't white. Sooner or later they're going to bring up race.

“Wenonah's one little girl, she's like Eugene. She doesn't look like an Indian, so no one ever talks about it, except maybe to say, ‘Oh, you don't look like an Indian.' But me or Wenonah or even old Grover, we look like Indians. Pretty soon after we start talking with a white person, that white person will bring up Indians, sure as anything.”

“It's true, Nerburn,” Grover chimed in.

Dan kept on. “They might talk about some other Indian they knew or they might talk about some movie or something to do with Indians. Probably it's to show us how much they claim to like Indians. But you sure know that they're going to bring up Indians. It's like that's the biggest thing when they meet me. I could be the president or have a cure for cancer, but
before anyone could talk about it, they'd have to say something about Indians.

“Black people have told me it's the same for them, too. You white people just seem to see race first, no matter what.

“Then the really funny thing is that you pretend you don't see race. Like the other night, I was sitting with Grover. We were watching a boxing match on TV.”

He turned toward Grover for confirmation. “You remember that?”

“Sure do. Lousy fight.”

“Anyway, the announcer kept talking about the one guy in black trunks with a white stripe and the other guy in black trunks with a gold stripe. Hell, I couldn't even see the difference. But that was how he kept talking about them. And you know what? One guy was white and the other guy was black! But the announcer couldn't say, ‘the white guy' and ‘the black guy' because you're not supposed to see that. It was the damndest thing I ever saw.

“It's all part of a big lie you live. It's like race is the biggest thing you see, but it's the hardest thing for you to talk about.”

“I guess I kind of touched a nerve, eh?” I said. I was still hoping he might mention his son.

“It's not my nerve,” he said. “It's the white people's nerve. I'll tell you what's really going on. White people are afraid of everyone who isn't white. Look at how you define black people. If a person had one black ancestor back somewhere, and you can see it, you tell them they are black. Everybody for the last thousand years might have been white, but one grandparent was black, then you tell that person they are black. You don't do that with Italians or Irish. You don't say they're Italian if they have one old grandma somewhere who came over on a boat a hundred years ago. But one black grandma? Bingo, you're black. Think about it, Nerburn. If your wife was black,
and you had a kid, you'd lose that kid. He'd be black. But the thing is, you're not really saying they are black. You're saying they're not white.

“See, white is a weak color. Think of paint. You add one drop of something else and it's not white. You can add white and white and white and white and you're never going to overcome that one drop of the different color. That paint will never be white again. That's what you're afraid of.

“But at least with blacks, you let them alone once you decided they weren't white. You just threw them all in a barrel — black, brown, tan, whatever — and called them black. But us Indians, you couldn't even leave us alone to be Indians once you decided we weren't white. You start dividing us up, calling us half-breeds, full bloods. Try calling a black person with some white blood a halfbreed. See how that goes over.”

He steepled his hands up like a preacher making a point. “See, we do it the other way. One Indian, and you're an Indian if you want to be. For white people, you've got to have all white people to be white. One person who's not white, and that kid is an outsider forever. We only need one Indian to be an Indian. Do you see what I mean?”

“Yeah, I see what you mean.”

“Then think about it. You've got all sorts of rules that you don't even know. Like, it's okay for white people to adopt Chinese kids, but it's not okay for Chinese people to adopt white kids. Or when different races go out together, the men are always supposed to be white.”

He looked to me for confirmation. I said nothing.

“It's true,” he continued. “If a white man is with a black woman, then he's liberal. But if a black man is with a white woman, he must be a pimp. It's the same with Indians. If a white man is with an Indian woman, it might be okay. That's the way they like to do it in the movies. But if an Indian man
is with a white woman, there's something wrong with her that she would choose to be with one of ‘those people.'

“I think it has to do with conquering. The white man has to be in control. If there is a man of a different color who is in control of a white woman, either there has to be something wrong with her or there is something bad about him. She's a captive or a renegade. I mean, why would a decent white woman ever want to be with an Indian man? Right?”

I couldn't help but smile. He was right on target.