RavenShadow (22 page)

Pecking and Hunting

I
steered out of Pete’s driveway, if you could call a two-track loop a driveway, bumped down to the highway, trundled to the crossroads, and stopped. Pulled onto the dirt. Turned the engine off, threw my arms on top of the steering wheel, plopped my head on my arms.

I didn’t have any energy to go on. Don’t mean being tired from the sweat, though I was. I mean my life was out of energy. Tank on empty, ergs zero, no more zippedy doodah for Blue Crow.

I
flumphed
out my breath, let my lungs sit a minute, eased air back in.

Maybe it was a hopeless task. I mean the song I sang in the lodge, and the missing lines.
Oh shit
.

Eased air back in again. “You need that song,” Pete said. Know all the words. Maybe know who made it, who sang it, when, and what it was about. That was the road I needed to walk, for now. I asked for a vision, Spirit gave it to me. I didn’t understand it. And it looked like the first big step was finding out about the song.

Maybe I can go on. Don’t know how? That’s why they call it faith
.

Umm-hmm. And how was I gonna do that? Where was I
gonna point the hood ornament of the Lincoln from right here on the side of the road? Just drive up and down the dirt roads of this rez, pick up hitchhikers, and hope? Drive the Cheyenne River rez, where the Big Foot people came from? All the other seven Sioux rezzes, and the highways in between?

I didn’t have the gas in my tank, in my body, or in my spirit.

I got out, opened the trunk, and got into the cooler that was acting as my grocery store. Palmed out two apples, bit into one (you shouldn’t clobber the digestive system after a four-day fast). To the right Chimney Butte jutted up. To the north, out of sight in the bottoms, White River coiled its way through the Badlands, slithering northeastward, gooey with sediment and colored with the clays of the hills. In every other direction the buttes and cliffs jipped and jopped and jumped up. Since the autumn sun was setting, they caught its horizontal light. The natural whites flamed quietly, rose-colored.

My home country, the strange, haunted Badlands. Or once my home country, when I had a home. Not far from here, as rez distances go, lived Grandpa and Aunt Adeline. They would be eating in the squaw cooler about now. To go home, that’s supposed to be the easiest thing, that’s where you can always go. This is more true among my people than yours. But I didn’t feel it, not then. I hadn’t felt it for twenty years. As long as I was falling between two stools, I couldn’t feel it.

Okay, Emile’s, my temporary residence. But I couldn’t face the thought of home-among-the-white-folks tonight. I’d been in that place, from South Dakota to Seattle, for twenty years. I didn’t want to be there now.

So I thought about what I wanted right now. To be around Indian people. Thought where I could do that, be around a bunch of Indians, not just find one family in these lonely hills. I headed north to Scenic, South Dakota, and the Longhorn Saloon. Hey, if it’s a sad decision to hang out with drunks, that’s what my people are right now.

Ha, ha, I caught you. You think I was gonna get drunk.
Actually, I was determined not to drink. Oh, I had the desire. I’m an alcoholic, and an alcoholic always has a hole inside needs filling with booze, and he always feels the hole. But the mountain and the sweat had left me strong in myself. Times like that, the hole don’t feel like much.

I liked the Longhorn for a couple of reasons. One, it had a giant sign on the roof,
NO INDIANS ALLOWED
. Of course, being just off the rez, no problems with the law, it was a hard-core redskin watering hole. On the same roof sign words scrawled big in Lakota said,
INDIANS WELCOME HERE
. Guess the owners didn’t read Lakota. So it was the closest place I might find a few friends. Felt like right then I needed friends.

Who I found was Sallee Walks Straight.

She sat alone on a bar stool, looking sexy in a powder blue tank top. I hauled up next to her and her Virgin Mary.

When she finally noticed me, she said softly, “What are you doing? You tried to kill my cousin.”

“I’m glad to see you,” says I.

“I wouldn’t sit there. You’d be letting yourself in for some adventure.” Her voice was mimicking someone or something, and she showed a corner of a grin.

“I’m sober. Going to AA. Haven’t had a drink since that night.”

“Goody-goody for you.”
Rosaphine—it was Rosaphine she was imitating
. “I think the little woman’s about to get square with the big man.”

At that moment an arm took a choke hold on me from behind,
oomph
ed me backward off the bar stool, and dropped me hard on the floor.

Cuss words were slapping me upside the head. Rosaphine’s voice.

I could take the words but not the kick. I rolled.

Rosaphine’s foot sailed into the air like a punter’s. She fell backward, but from the bar stool Sallee caught her with both
hands. I noticed Rosaphine’s vocabulary of cussing was quite creative, combining
mother
, the
f
word,
bitch, bastard, asshole
, and other epithets in ways I hadn’t heard before.

Came the kick again. I crabbed sidewise, moving good for a big man. Rosaphine’s foot slammed a chair into a table and cracked the back.

Her second round of cussing descended from creativity to chaos. I heard
mother-bitching
and
son of an asshole
, among others.

People were clearing out of the way. Out of the corner of one eye I saw the barkeep heading for the corner of the bar with a baseball bat.

Rosaphine stepped closer and wound up the third kick, which was meant to score from a hundred yards.

I was pinned between chairs.

The barkeep appeared behind her, cocking the bat.

“Behind you!” I yelled.

She grinned maliciously, and I thought,
That’s how our women used to look when they tortured prisoners
.

When the bat was at full cock in back of Rosaphine’s head, Sallee grabbed it and held on.

Here came the roundhouse kick.

I rolled under the table.

Crash!

The heel of Rosaphine’s cowboy boot caught the edge of the table.

The table teetered away from me.

Then it tottered back my way. I was crabbing out from under, belly up.

A full pitcher of beer cruised sweetly off the edge, pivoted in midair, and dumped its full load, right on my crotch.

I fell back.

Rosaphine howled.

Sallee did a cat screech. The barkeep hee-hawed. The rest of the crowd made up for Sallee with a handsome roar.

The beer was trickling through my crevices, you know where.

After forty days in the wilderness of abstinence, my cock finally gets a drink
.

Rosaphine grabbed a glass in each hand off the next table and dumped them where the pitcher went.

Matter of fact, it got plastered
.

The roars got louder. The barkeep was crying and choking on his own laughter. He’d dropped the bat.

“Done put that fire
out!
” declared Rosaphine. She paraded around, her fists raised in triumph.

“Rosaphine, I’m sorry,” I called loudly. “What I did was dumb beyond dumb.” She just kept on parading.

I stood up next to Sallee, who was covering her giggles with a hand.

“Can we talk?” says I.

She caught the bartender’s eye, said, “I think we’d better go.”

I’ve never liked baseball bats.

Outside she said, “You sure don’t smell clean and sober.”

I rubbed my hands flat down the front of my jeans. No way to get wetter. I looked around at the starry night. “Thirty-eight days,” I said.

“Not thirty-eight days dry, that’s for sure.”

“I want to see you.”

Something dark ran through her eyes.

“I want apologize to you,” says I.

She shrugged.

“It was dumb. It was the worst day of my life. No, that’s wrong, it was the best. Because it made me start climbing out.”

I took a couple of breaths. Like a blast, I remembered. Fourth step: Take a serious moral inventory of myself. Eighth step: Make amends to all I’ve hurt, where doing so would not damage them or others. I hadn’t gotten as far as these steps yet,
but I knew I owed Sallee. “I deserve for you to be angry. I deserve it.”

She looked into my face, probably hunting for signs of a con job. Finally she said, “Rosaphine more.”

“Absolutely, amends. I don’t think she’s listening.”

Sallee burst out with high laughter.

Rosaphine honked the horn, and Sallee held up a hand at her.

Yeah, that’s what they say about the eighth step. You can make amends, but you can’t control how the person responds
.

“I’d like to tell you my story,” I said. I realized with some surprise that I was telling the simple truth, not selling something.

“Why me?” said Sallee.

“Just do,” I said.

The horn honked again. Sallee turned and hollered, “Cool it!” I was pleased to hear how the ladylike young woman had been with her sisters.

“I know things about you,” she said. “Uncle Chup has your phone number on the refrigerator with the other man he sponsors. He hasn’t broken your confidentiality, but I hear you guys talk long times on the phone. I know you’re taking your recovery seriously. I like that.”

The horn honked again, and Sallee ignored it. “I don’t think there’s time for a story right now. And I’m involved in something big, take a couple of months. You know about the Big Foot Memorial Rides?”

I shook my head no.

“Why don’t you ask Uncle Chup?” I looked at her, wondering. “Really, do it. And we’ll talk sometime.”

She turned away from me, and I watched her glide to the car. Rosaphine cranked the engine and ground across the gravel. Sallee didn’t look back.

The Big Foot Memorial Riders

M
aybe I heard vaguely about them, some rides honoring Big Foot’s people who got killed at Wounded Knee. Emile’s father, who was a full-blood, dismissed it as something the half-breeds were doing. I guess I did too.

“Sallee’s made a commitment to ride this year.” Chup looked at me, and I could see the questions in his eyes.

Some people consult their advisors in the confessional. I have coffee with mine at Lucky’s.

“Tell me.” I had a feeling beginning to rise inside. I didn’t know what all it was, but it was sizable, and it was eager, maybe too eager.

Chup took a sip of his coffee, which was so unusual I wondered what to expect. Probably he was feeling like he oughta protect his niece against a drunk and depressive who had attempted suicide.

But this is what he said. “I see your heart is good.” He started rolling another smoke. He could spend a lot of time at that. “Okay. 1986, some of us started doing rides to Wounded Knee, to remember. Started from Big Foot’s camp, followed his route to Wounded Knee. Arrived in time to be there, where it happened, on December twenty-nine.”

The day the Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s old outfit, attacked a whole village of Mniconjou on the way to Pine Ridge to make peace. Killed three hundred men, women, and children, almost all unarmed.

I’d avoided that place my whole life, except the day Unchee’s funeral was there.

“Four rides so far. Last one coming up this December, one hundred years since the massacre. Seven generations. Ceremonies on the big day, Wiping Away the Tears ceremony, and Feeding of the Spirits ceremony. Big doings.

“I tell you, in the winter those rides haven’t been easy. Cold.”

The feeling was singing in me. On the mountain I’d seen Big Foot’s people, that’s what Pete said. On the mountain … but I didn’t want the feelings. Something in me didn’t want to hear the song.

“I need to ride,” I said.

He nodded slowly, and I could see pain and doubt behind his eyes. “Only you can know.” He sighed, I didn’t know why. I thought he might ask me if I was wanting to be around Sallee. He sighed again. “I have a feeling about this, about hard things. Sometimes hard things, they’re what we need.” He eyed me while he thought on it. “Only you know.” He blew smoke out. My nose was getting raw from all the smoke, and I thought how different cigarette fumes are from the smoke of the sacred Pipe.

Finally he went on. “You better go see a man, Tyler Red Crow. From Yellow Bear Canyon, works at Allen, alcoholism counselor.” He scribbled something on a scrap of paper. “Here’s his office phone number.”

How strange. What am I—a detective? What are my clues—scraps of paper, wisps of smoke?

“Can you tell me anything else?”

He stared at his own hands for a minute. “I can tell you why I’m riding,” he said. “My great-grandfather was killed at
Wounded Knee.” He didn’t say any more for a minute. “How well you know the story?”

I shrugged. “Not much.”

“Maybe you better find out,” he said. “You told me you had relatives there?”

“I guess. My grandmother’s family, Big Foot people. Her father was killed at Wounded Knee.”

At the mention of Unchee his thick eyebrows went up. “Your grandmother’s … ?” he said in an odd voice. He took the time to finish rolling one. “That’s all you know?”

I nodded.

“You’re not a member of the Wounded Knee Survivors’ Association?”

“Never heard of it.”

He looked up into the cigarette haze. “Friend,” he said, “I suggest you find out what your ancestors did at Wounded Knee, and what was done to them.” His lips got hard, and I thought he was done. “I mean it,” he said. “I got a feeling of bad things.”

He brought his eyes back to me. “And you better go see Tyler.” He got up, dropped a buck for coffee, buck for a tip, plus one fat, hand-rolled cigarette.

I felt antsy. Didn’t wanna go home to Emile. Didn’t want to be anywhere, really. So in a couple of hours I was back in Kyle, old stomping grounds. Old haunting grounds.

Still antsy. Didn’t wanna go see Grandpa and Aunt Adeline (it was too late anyway). Didn’t wanna do anything.

Too damn late for anything, I told myself.

I went and stood in front of the boarding school and looked at it. The night was dark and the building poorly lit. I reflected, Twenty-three years since I stood there for the first time with Grandpa and Unchee. That day I knew I had to go in and hated it worse than anything. Twenty-three years since the principal,
Mr. King, told me everything would be fine, meaning it would be fine now that I’d decided to be a white man. Twenty-three years since this biggest lie of my life. Twenty-three years since this place, this institution intended as benevolent, had put my feet on a long and alien road.

Was it, looking back, all the way a black road?
Now I was standing at a crossroads, one road more Indian, one more white. The Indian looked more like a good red road, and I was going to take it. Yet I didn’t feel ready, running my mind over the years, to add them up and say the road that started here was a black, black road.

What I saw, standing there, a man not a boy, was that the building wasn’t the same. Or it didn’t feel the same. To the outer eye it had hardly changed. Big old brick building, tired, shabby. Maybe it was ominous-looking. For sure I could remember the demons, the men or devils who punished me, imprisoned me, who made me do exactly what they said.
Exactly what I say, and do it now
. The moment was defined by their imposing their will on me, and both of us being changed by that.

I hadn’t forgotten a bit. I heard a song recently, even aired it on KKAT when I shouldn’t have, that summed up my experience at the Kyle Boarding School. It’s a take-off on the old Sinatra tune, “My Way.” It’s intended to be all about going to college, but for me it was Kyle. Called “Their Way”—can’t quote it for you, can’t even find it. What it says is, I went there and got along by doing things their way. I remember some of the rhymes: “They gave me grades, not in a fair way.” “I learned to walk the doctrinaire way.” “I learned to climb life’s golden stairway—and do it their way.”

A mockery, but that’s what Kyle School was.

I still felt some of the old dislike of Mr. King and Mr. Banks and the truant officer. Somehow, though, standing in front of the building for the first time the demons didn’t seem properly black. Somehow the building didn’t glower and loom. It looked older and grimmer but not particularly haunted.

And I found that vaguely unsatisfying.

I went to the convenience store (like the two general stores but less satisfying) and was vaguely pleased to find a dreamsicle, my favorite ice cream of my teenage years. Standing outside, leaning against the storefront, I ate through the orange and savored the creamy ice cream inside. (If an apple is an Indian who’s red outside and white inside, what’s a dreamsicle?)

I remembered Mr. Plebus, the bootlegger, and wondered where my beaded turtle pouch went. Couldn’t say I’d missed it much, emotionally, that sign of the physical connection to my mother. Maybe that was too bad, but I didn’t feel the loss, not anymore.

Still, if it was in a museum and we could get a repatriation going, it would be fun to tweak the white tail.

What in hell am I gonna do now?
Not Grandpa and Aunt Adeline, no, but …

I then took thought, and something in me said, Yeah!

I got a blanket out of the trunk of the Lincoln, the Pendleton I always kept there. Then, gingerly, I got out the beaded bag that held my Pipe. I’d taken it on the mountain, and to the sweat, and hadn’t been home to store it away.
Why do I want it now? What am I going to do with it?
Didn’t know, felt the need.

I left the car parked at the convenience store and walked down the Allen highway in the dark. About a quarter mile down I thought I spotted the place and turned into the sagebrush. I walked no more than a hundred yards west, in the dark with no moon to see by, and honestly thought I found the spot. For sure there was no sign of the doe, not after all these years. And it’s true, if sagebrush looks like a sea with no landmarks during the day, it’s worse at night. But the place
felt
the same to me.

The cold shadow of the raven’s wing was here.

I laid the blanket down, laid down, and folded it over me. I held the Pipe in its bag on my chest with one hand and put the other behind my head, elbow cocked, and looked up. I didn’t see the stars, though. My inner eye flicked away the picture of
the dead doe and brought up the ravens, six or eight of them on the doe’s body, hopping and pecking, hopping and pecking.

I played the scene over and over in my mind. Suddenly one raven—Raven—flapped into the air and flew straight toward me. It hovered a foot away, and I felt like it was looking me in the eye, and its eye was …

Raven’s eyes bugged out. They stood in air at the sides of his head. They grew to the size of black suns. They gleamed at me. They made little circles against the dark sky. They turned red-hot and glowed
….

But I clasped the Pipe to my breast and I did not fall topsy-turvy into them. It was different.

I ran the scene back and forth in my head like a video tape. I elaborated it. I made it more horrific. But it was different, I was different. Yes, I felt the shadow again, and, yes, it was dark and cold. But not as dark. Not as cold. Not as frightening. It didn’t paralyze me anymore.

Great-grandfather, what was your name?

Suddenly my outer eye brought me the stars. They nearly flashed at me, they were such a shock. I saw millions and millions of them. Here in a high country with little electric light, there were many times what you see in a city, or at the seashore. Seattle was deprived of stars, compared to this. They peopled a vast darkness, a greater darkness than I or anyone could imagine. But they were light. And in their light I could rest a little. Later the moon would rise, the light would be more, I would be able to see this earth better, much better. But for now I had the light of the infinite stars. It was not enough to bask in, but it was comforting. For my people the stars are a mirror for life on Earth, and a guide to the sacred walk.

After a while, as though to test myself, I deliberately entered the dramatic scene with the raven again. I replayed the scene a dozen times or more. I created terrifying pictures. Sometimes I frightened myself. And I thought a couple of times,
Oh, yes, this is my home, I belong here, this is my natural place, in the shadow of the raven’s wing
.

My outer eye rescued me once more, which outer eyes seldom do. It brought me a shooting star. This was a brilliant one, with a long fall from the upper left center of my vision to the lower left corner. Instead of just blinking out, as they do, it seemed to pulse brighter at the last instant and then douse utterly. It felt good, that shooting star.

I stretched my outer eyes all over the sky then, watching for more, and saw a half dozen, then a dozen, a score, and then what seemed like hundreds. It must have been a night of meteor showers, but I don’t read the newspapers. I watched them, and I watched the streaks of light against the infinite blackness, and in some way my heart was at ease.

I don’t remember falling asleep, never intended to. I woke when the Morning Star rose, and there were no more meteors.

The sky lightened gradually, in the smallest gestures. It was pearly. Tiny clouds dotted the crests of the western hills like beads of my favorite color, Cheyenne rose. I saw the overhead sky was gentling into blue, a very, very pale blue. To the east, beyond the vast plains, the horizon grew yellow and orange. I had seen this so many times that I thought, Who cares? At that moment I blinked, and the horizon glowed in rainbow colors. I blinked again, and the rainbow disappeared, but now the sunrise had a touch of magic.

As the time approached, I got the Pipe out and loaded it with tobacco. I sat up in my blanket, arranged it around my shoulders, and turned my face to Wi, the sun. The low hills were black, and their shoulders radiated yellow-gold, like breath easing out.

Soon Father Sun made his entrance, a fiery glob. He was simple, declarative, and all-powerful. I lit the Pipe.

I rose to my feet in one movement. As I raised my arms, the blanket fell away. I held the Pipe high, then puffed and began my prayer. “I offer this smoke, my breath and my prayers, to the Powers of the East, home of the Sun, powers of beginning things, of initiation. O powers, run strong in my blood.”

As tears started down my face, I turned clockwise, sunwise, Pipe held high. Then I put it to my lips, drew the smoke into my mouth, and blew it out. “O powers of the South, home of the flowing waters, source of growing things, father and mother of coming to fruition, may your waters flow in me.”

I raised prayers of smoke to the other directions, to the West and the Thunderbirds and the powers of fecundity, to the North and its cleansing winds.

I prayed to Father Sun, bringer of light, to Earth, and to the seventh grandfather, the mysterious one, the center of self and of the universe.

I asked the strength of the powers in my new venture, the Big Foot Memorial Rides, the journey back to Wounded Knee, where Unchee’s father and three hundred other Mniconjou died. I asked to be shown the path one step at a time. I asked for faith to follow that path one step each day, without knowing the future, or asking. And last I prayed the most difficult prayer of all for me. “Tunkashila,” I cried, “bring me what I need for my growth into a good human being. Bring it whether I feel ready for it or not, whether I want it not. I declare that I want to change. I give myself to your power.”

I sat in silence a while, and smoked until all the tobacco was turned to ash.

Then I said the final words of all Lakota prayers, “
Mitakuye oyasin
”—We are all one—and felt that oneness bountifully. That blessing, the deep sense of oneness with all things, a sense that seemed like the longest lost of all my blessings, brought me the deepest gratitude I can remember, and brought once more the tears.