RavenShadow (18 page)

“I don’t know what I’m going to do for a job.”

“A person never knows. You put your feet on the red road and good things come. You can’t see them before you start walking.”

I squeezed his arm and went to Mom. “Mom, I’m coming back. I’m moving in with Emile.”

“Oh, Bud,” she cried, and gave me a big hug.

“We’ll still be spread out,” I said. “Rapid, Wambli, Pine Ridge, Rosebud.”

“Lot closer than Seattle,” she said.

Angelee and Mayana were cleaning up the kitchen. I told them, and felt surprised to see real gladness in their eyes, pleasure to have their brother back. That made me think what I’d been missing.

“Will you stay with us?” said Angelee.

“Or us?” said Mayana.

Neither one of them had a nickel’s worth of room, and I’d be living in the margins of someone else’s life. “Emile,” I said. Their faces registered what that meant, Rapid City, sort of close but not really. “I have to find a job,” I said.

Suddenly I remembered. I would have some money, whatever I could sell Delphine’s Z car for. Money meant time. I would have a little time to find my place here, my place to live, my place in the family, my place among the people.

“We’d be glad to have you,” said Angelee, kind of singsong. And they would. With Indians there is always room for family. But I couldn’t do that, not anymore.

Senior—Dad—was last. His eyes were on the evening news. I wondered how often he followed the national and international soap operas as presented by Dan Rather. “I’m moving back,” I said.

I waited, and after a moment his eyes focused on me. “Good,” he said. “Good.”

“I’ll stay with Emile at first.”

“You can stay with us.”
You and the woman you never mention, who you didn’t bring to the funeral
.

“With Emile,” I said again, and squeezed his arm. “Good.”

So we men bunked together in the living room, Emile and I on the floor, Senior on the couch, Grandpa right in the recliner. My dreams that night were different—easier, and full of dance music. I woke up early. The room was half dark—first light was afoot outside, the late, weak first light of the Moon of Popping Trees. I looked around at the huddled forms in the living room. Emile, my oldest friend. Grandpa, who’d been a father to me. Senior, my dad, who I’d begun to make friends with last night. It felt good. I needed these men in my life. A life without them …

Then I noticed that there were blankets on the sofa, but nothing giving them shape. Senior was already up. I listened, and heard nothing. Quietly, I got up and looked out the front
window. He was sitting on the front steps, elbows on knees, hands dropped between. He had no coat—wasn’t he cold? I also was an early riser, had always been, even as a white man, I liked to say hello to the sun in a respectful way, early in the morning. I wondered if this was what Senior was doing. I wondered if I should go out and sit on the steps and do it with him, and take us both coats. I watched, held for no reason I knew.

Senior stood up, with some difficulty. Was he getting old and stiff? He was fifty-six. He made motions of fumbling at his pants, and then stood still, doing what I had done at dawn so many mornings. He did it copiously. I grinned. He took a step backward, turned, staggered, and fell into his own piss. His bottle skittered across the frozen ground.

I stared at him.
Pick your own damn self up
, said my heart.

I turned away from the window.

Welcome home, Blue
.

PART FOUR

Going to the Mountain

Falling Between Two Bar Stools

“C
lick your heels three times,” says Glinda, the good witch of the North, “and say, ‘There’s no place like home.’”

In the ancient stories, there’s always a place called home. Maybe a man ventures out away from his village, has his adventure, accomplishes some important mission, and comes back home. The grand conclusion, in my people’s stories, may be that he’s able to help the people in some big way, and he now has a stronger place in the
tiyospaye
, his extended family, and in the tribe. In your stories the grand outcome is that he’s able to make a woman his own and start a family. Or sometimes that he becomes king, or that he gets rich.

In the best stories, you see that it’s coming back to the people you belong to, and being there in a good way, that matters. The people you belong with, where they live, where you grew up, that’s your home, your center.

What I thought I was doing, after Delphine’s death, was coming home. Turned out I wasn’t. I lived without a complete circle of self, family, people. An arc is a fragment. A circle is something whole.

It’s hard for me to think back on it now, and hard for me to tell you. Here it is, in the short version.

After Unchee’s funeral I went back to Seattle and sat in the apartment and thought. I read Delphine’s journals. I am not going to talk about those, except to say that they painted vividly a picture of a person tormented by what she did not talk about, her blackness. I gave the journals to the Ryan family. Poe called back to say they destroyed the journals, so the record is lost.

For four or five days I pondered what she wrote and our life together. I wrote my own journal about my realizations. I wrote that Delphine and I were soul-connected, as she said. We were drawn to each other because we both lived in dark shadows, and perversely tended the darkness, and kept the light out.

Do not ask me why I did not ask whether I might take my own life one day.

Do not ask me why I did not ask whether my people were dancing with death.

Remembering Grandpa’s injunction to pray with my great-grandfather’s Pipe, I tried it. I speculated dimly that it might lift the Raven’s wing and dispel my interior darkness. I told myself I didn’t expect any miracles. Therefore I did not receive any. Instead I felt self-conscious, and quit. Promised myself I’d do it back home, where it would feel more natural. Sorry to tell you, I didn’t follow through.

So, stuck with myself, I settled things up in a determined way. I quit my job at the station, sold the furniture, and sold the Z car. Called the Ryans to say goodbye—Michael seemed regretful, and Poe brushed me off. Courtesy of Continental Trail-ways I went back to the rez. Note that I said back to the rez, not back to the blanket.

I had a good chunk of cash. Do you know what happens to money on the rez? You owe your relatives, they’re like yourself. If they need something and you have some money, you help them. You pay for your niece’s new dance outfit. After all, she needs to look good. And a dance outfit can cost a thousand bucks—all that expensive brain-tanned deer hide, those feathers and bells, the ermine skin she wraps her hair in. And you got a
dozen nieces and nephews. Some brothers, sisters, two parents, three or four grandparents, maybe four or five great-grandparents, and more cousins than you can count. Remember, this is big stuff. The people you call cousins, we think of as brothers and sisters. So with us a very, very big family is tight.

You know why most rez people don’t have a phone? ’Cause you let your relatives use it when they need to, long-distance included. You say “Fine,” and you don’t ask for anything in return. Pretty soon you can’t pay the bill and it’s disconnected. A year or two later you start wanting a phone again, you put it in, and go through the same stuff all over again. But, hey, your relatives are more important than a phone.

Emile and I got off to a good start. He was working at that big trading post in Rapid City, Prairie Edge, selling Indian arts and crafts. Emile was an asset there because of his gentleness and his beauty (which is funny, ’cause he’s not interested in women). He doesn’t talk much—Emile walks on eggshells around words, all words. But his looks and his knowledge of Indian arts made him a hit at Prairie Edge.

Right off, with my bucks, we looked for a good place to live. Emile wanted a studio, and a place where he eventually could have a gallery. That’s how we came to the house in Keystone where he still lives and sells. With the first and last months’ rent and cleaning deposit, plus buying a used Pinto (the Ford car, not the horse), I put a good dent in my money.

Right off also I went home to see Grandpa and Aunt Adeline, and to Mom over at Wambli. Took a couple of big boxes of groceries to each place, knowing that would help them out a lot. We had some good talks, but the truth was, I was a different person from the boy who left twelve years before. They sent me to learn to be a white man, and I did. Same with Angelee and Mayana, living in Pine Ridge. I didn’t try to see Senior. He wasn’t in Mission but was wandering around somewhere, drunk, which is a place unto itself.

It was with Angelee and Mayana that I got a glimpse of it.
Nothing much to talk about. Angelee’s husband was working at Big Bat’s, and Mayana’s was gone to L.A., presumably to get work and send money home, but she hadn’t heard from him. Their talk was of unemployment checks, AFDC, food stamps, and their friends’ pregnancies. Already, at twenty and twenty-two, they were getting fat the way so many Indian women do. It was depressing.

I skiddooed back to Rapid. Hey, I’d realized my family was important, but that didn’t change my lifestyle. I didn’t intend to be down and out. I meant to be a different kind of Indian, to make good, to show an Indian can be a success.

So I had a lot to prove, and damn, it started out easy. Long John Silver hired me right off—why shouldn’t he? I was a good jock, I was young and willing to work cheap, and with me Long John could show he was doing affirmative action. I got my own afternoon spot, and things were hunky dory. I was gonna be an Indian that proved red folks can do it.

I cannot tell you what a weird life it was. Have you ever been walking a trail and suddenly there’s water running down the middle? So you walk one foot on each side? If the water’s wide, there’s nothing awkwarder than that. It’s about the way I felt, and it went on for a dozen years.

Nine to five working for Long John Silver. Nights dating white girls, nobody steady at first, quite a few women. Weekends dating or going to see my family. Medicine Root Creek, or Pine Ridge, or Wambli. Got a honey over at Pine Ridge, went there pretty much every weekend, stayed with her. Monday morning back at work. Weekday evenings out dancing or in the bars.

I did see quite a bit of my family, I did spend a lot of time around Indian people. But I wasn’t walking that path. I didn’t go to Sun Dance, didn’t go into the sweat lodge, didn’t involve myself in tribal matters. The Pipe Unchee gave me was just a piece of decoration. I was just a well-meaning visitor to the rez, not part of the people.

Lots of reasons—I had a white-man job, I lived in the white-man
town. Most of all, I
thought
white-man, I was a Great White Doubter. I thought the white way was
the
way, and the red way should get left behind.

After half a dozen years I got a steady white girlfriend. Marietta came to Rapid with a film crew, two little kids, and a husband back in L.A. We found ourselves eager to have a good time, which meant drinking. We took up country dancing, which kept us high in the bars. We took up studying wines, which kept us high in the kitchen. We took up every kind of drinking there was. I drank with her every night from quitting time until I passed out at her place or mine, or sometimes another woman’s. Didn’t see much of my roommate, though sometimes he found me where I’d collapsed. My drinking got so impressive it scared Emile. During the years I was gone, he’d gone to AA and quit drinking. But I wouldn’t touch AA. I was having too good a time. I had a high, handsome piece of the good life.

Emile tried, I give him credit for that. He told me two or three times to go to AA or find another place to live—I was putting his sobriety at hazard, he said. Finally, when he was beginning to sell his paintings and had quit Prairie Edge, he handed me my share of the deposit and last month’s rent and told me to find my own place to live.

I got mad as a grizzly bear, and I’m sorry to say I spoke harsh words. But he was firm. No drinking or drunkenness in the house—I could come back when I was sober.

Hah! I said. I’ll show you. I went and married Marietta. How that story came out, you already know.

I never went back to Emile’s house until he picked me up from those railroad tracks, all those years later.

Oh, please, do not ask me why I was drinking. Don’t ask me why I loved booze more than my best friend, more than my wife, more than my life. You have been paying attention, haven’t you?

So that’s the story—I spent from ’79 until last September spinning tunes, making a good living, marrying Marietta and taking
care of her two little kids, staying sotted, and being a white man. And dabbling at being a red man on weekends, occasionally. When Long John needed to brag about having a minority working at the station.

In truth, though, I didn’t have two skins, or two minds, or two hearts. I couldn’t split my heart between red and white, couldn’t split my mind. So I put all of me in the bottle, and pickled my soul.

I got to where Emile found me laying on the C&NW tracks, drunk, battered, and most of the way to hell. That’s when he said, “You got to go on the mountain.”

Blue Crow Stumbles Toward the Mountain

A
t the end of my first day in Emile’s bed, he brought me some herbal tea. I opened one gummed-up eyelid and took it. I half wanted to hug him, but nothing on my body would move.

“I can’t do it,” I said.

“Can’t do what?”

“Go on the mountain.”

“And you can’t stop drinking. And you can’t keep trying to kill yourself. And you can’t keep living the way you are.”

That was a lot of words in a row for Emile.

“I am the Great White Doubter,” I moaned. Making the effort to talk hurt, but I needed to talk, O I needed to talk.

So I told him about those long-ago college days, about Bradley Dornan and Ron Sternberg and the thoughts that led to my Great White Doubts. I even told him about the day I slam-dunked all the old ways into the trash can.

Emile shrugged without shrugging. He nodded without nodding. Finally he said, “What this got you is nothing.”

I looked sharp at him. Maybe I was looking for a philosophical argument that would prove my Great White Doubts wrong,
or whatever. Instead Emile had given me an observation about me, not the doubts.

“I can’t go on the mountain. I can’t.”

Emile just looked at me. He said, “Because of your doubts.”

“Because of my doubts, because I’ve shit all over myself and my people, because I threw our ways in the road and ran over them with a truck, because I’m a drunk, because I hate myself, because,
BECAUSE
.”

Emile sat and thought a long time. Then he said, “Why do you love your doubts and your becauses and clasp them to your bosom? Look where they got you.”

And he left.

At supper time he brought us cheeseburgers and a big mess of french fries.

“It’s crazy,” I launched in. “The mountain is crazy. Hanging tobacco ties from trees and fasting and going without water and hoping a bird will bring you a message—it’s all wacko.”

Emile said, “What’s sane, repeating what you’ve been doing over and over? How many times you want to go flying through the air above the railroad tracks? How many times you want to try to kill yourself?”

And he went back to painting.

I wasn’t up to thinking that evening. Besides, thinking didn’t make sense. For more than twenty years I’d been spinning that left brain and it hadn’t done a thing for me.

A worthwhile thought came, something from my insides percolating up on its own.
The problem is the Great White Doubts
.

I found the remote and clicked on the bedroom TV. Couldn’t go down the route of thinking about that. Emile came in with a whole cheesecake, which we split. How can a guy a little over five feet and just over a hundred pounds eat as much as me?

“I have too many doubts,” I said.

Emile turned his simple and sincere eyes to mine. You could
always see Emile’s heart, and it wasn’t his way to speak other than simply and directly.

“You want an idea?”

I took a deep breath. “Yeah.”

“Here it is. You committed yourself to reasoning things out. That made you the Great White Doubter. Now you hate your life.

“Try something completely different. Do this as an act of faith,” he said. “Pure faith. Decide it’s
BETTER
that going on the mountain seems crazy. Then do it.”

Finally I had to look away from his face.

“What have you got to lose? Your life? Hey, it’s gone. All your experience says your way isn’t working. So as an act of faith, try the way of the grandfathers.”

This time he touched me on the arm and smiled when he headed into his studio.

He called me to the table for bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, and toast the next morning. He asked me nothing, I volunteered nothing. We ate. He smiled at me with his childlike teeth. I hadn’t been eating too good, but now I chowed down. Emile was making me this gift again. I looked around the house. This was where I’d lived with hardly a day sober. This was where I launched myself into the life of booze. I kicked one foot up and down, and that hurt. I thought,
Things couldn’t possibly get any worse
…. But I said nothing.

When Emile went to work, I laid in bed and replayed my life. A twenty-three-year detour through the white world. The last ten years on the teeter-totter. Going up—I’m feeling good with a couple in me. Going down, drunk enough to feel no pain. Going up—sober enough to work. Going down, drunk enough to feel no pain. “I’m feeling no pain” meant for me,
I’m as good as a white man, got a good job, job is stinking useless and I hate my life, but
…

I tried not to think. I tried not to feel. Feeling hurt like hell.

A voice inside me said clearly, “Go on the mountain.”

I don’t have a spirit to take on the mountain
. Or none I’m acquainted with.

Inner voice: “Stop fussing and feuding. Go on the mountain.”

I rested. I grabbed the remote and used the TV to quiet the voices arguing inside me. I slept and dreamt voices quarreling, getting nowhere. All day I did that, all night I did that.

The next morning I walked with firm steps into the studio. Emile stopped his brush in midair. He was painting a big featherburst on an elk robe. It was going to be beautiful.

“Thanks for what you’re doing for me.”

“You’re welcome. You’re my
hunka
.” He turned back to his elk robe and made a couple of green strokes. Green is the color of Mother Earth.

“My inner voice is telling me to go on the mountain,” I said, half proud and half sheepish.

“If you can hear your inner voice, that’s a good start.”

I shuffled into the kitchen and forced myself to stay on my feet long enough to make pancakes for both of us. Emile came when I called. “What do I do?”

“We’ll go see Pete Standing this afternoon,” he said. Emile had been on the mountain lots of times. The Great White Doubter would need a lot of help, we both knew that. And my doubts might yet get the better of me.

Taking me to see Pete was a way of vouching for me. My credit wasn’t good with a lot of people around the rez, not my dollar credit but the reliability of my word, the trueness of my spirit.

“I’m going to the grocery store.”

He cocked an eye up at me. “We’ll go see Pete if you’re sober,” he said.

I made the short drive in the Lincoln and came back sober with groceries for the household and tobacco to offer to the medicine man.