I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions

1Hear the Train

American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series Gerald Vizenor, General Editor

Fiction

Wolfsong (Albuquerque, 1991; Norman, 1995; Paris, 1996) The Sharpest Sight (Norman, 1992, 1995; Paris, 1994) Bone Game (Norman, 1994,1996; Paris, 1998) Nightland (New York, 1996,1997; Norman, 2001) Dark River (Norman, 1999) Nonfiction

John Steinbeck's Re-Vision of America (Athens, Ga., 1985) (with Tom Colonnese) American Indian Novelists: An Annotated Critical Bibliography (New York, 1985) The Grapes of Wrath:Trouble in the Promised Lund (New York, 1989) (editor) American Literary Scholarship: An Annual, 1990 (Durham, N.C., 1992) Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman, 1992,1994) Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (Norman, 1998)

I Hear the Train Reflections, Inventions, Refractions

Louis Owens

Some of the pieces included here, though revised for this collection, have previously appeared elsewhere: "Soul-Catcher" as "Nalusachito" in South Dakota Review (1984); "The Dancing Poodle of Arles" in Jeopardy (1985); "Winter Rain" in Asylum (1985); "Shelter" in CUBE Literary Magazine (1988); "Finding Gene" in Weber Studies (fall 1999); "Staging indians" as "The Last Man of the Stone Age" in Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor, ed. A. Robert Lee (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 2000); "Blessed Sunshine" in Nothing But the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature, ed. John Purdy and James Ruppert (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData Owens, Louis. I hear the train: reflections, inventions, refractions / Louis Owens. p. cm. - (American Indian literature and critical studies series; v. 40) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8061-3354-6 (alk. paper) 1.Owens, Louis. 2. Indians of North America-Social life and customs. 3. Novelists, American-20th century-Biography. 4. Indian authors-United States-Biography. 5. Critics-United States-Biography. I. Title. 11. Series.

I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions is Volume 40 in the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources, Inc. Copyright O 2001 by Louis Owens. Published by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University.All rights reserved. Manufactured in the U.S.A.

To Polly Elizabeth, and Alexandra, with love

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments

ONE.REFLECTIONS PART 1. Finding Gene

2. Bracero Summer 3. Mushroom Nights 4. The Hunter's Dance

5. In the Service of Forests 6. Ringtail Moon 7. My Criminal Youth

8. The Syllogistic Mixedblood: How Roland Barthes Saved Me from the indians

9. In a Sense Abroad: Clowns and Indians, Poodles and Drums-Discoveries in France 10. Roman Fervor, or Travels in Hypercarnevale

viii

CONTENTS

PARTTWO. INVENTIONS 11. Coyote Story, or the Birth of a Critic

12. Blessed Sunshine 13. Yazoo Dusk 14. The Dancing Poodle of Arles

15. Winter Rain 16. Shelter 17. Soul-Catcher

18. As If an Indian Were Really an Indian: Native American Voices and Postcolonial Theory

207

19. Staging indiuns:Native Sovenance and Survivance in Gerald Vizenor ' S "Ishi and the Wood Ducks"

227

20. A Story of a Talk, My Own Private India, or Dorris and Erdrich Remap Colurnbus

244

Notes

257

Works Cited

259

Index

263

Illustrations

The mixedblood Cherokee Bailey family, 1913 The author, in a sense abroad, posing in Paris in 1998 Hanging out at the Pensione Ponte Rotto with Polly Rome, 1981, ready to go home Ranger days in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, Darrington, Washington, 1974 At the Fonun, Rome, imagining hypercarnevale, 1980 In the high country, sitting on ice axe, Glacier Peak Wilderness, 1976 Forlorn introspection on being told to give a speech for France Libertk, with Madame Mitterand in Rennes, France, 1998 Winning the crosscut-saw championship with Rich (Joeoihg), Prescott National Forest, Arizona, 1975 With fish on trail crew, Milk Creek, Glacier Peak Wilderness, 1971

"I hear the train." Great-Great Uncle August Edward Bailey between the tracks. Near Muldrow, Oklahoma, 1911. 140

X

ILLUSTRATIONS

Three trail crews, with the Milk Creek Trail Crew flag, Darrington, Washington, 1971

141

"We who, Kimo Sabe?" Masked author, Tijeras, New Mexico, 1994

142

All photos arefrom the author's collection.

Preface

This is a collection of stories, mostly true. Some are stories that arise from memory, stories of working on farms and ranches as a child and adolescent transplanted from Mississippi to California; of fighting fires or ranging a wilderness; or of a long journey to find my brother Gene after almost three decades of shrapnel-likesilence and not-knowing; or of things that simply happened. Some are stories I've told myself in an attempt to fill in the empty places in memory and received history. Some are just stories, inventions, the kinds of fictions we create to make sense of the otherwise uninhabitable world we must, of necessity, inhabit; included in this category is a story called "Soul-Catcher," out of whch my second novel grew long ago. Some are stories about others' stories, the sort of speculations we like to call criticism but know, truly are just wistful readings of those stories given to us by the Creator's grace and our fellows' labor, the kinds of fictions a Nabokovian annotator might contrive in order to find his own beloved image in an otherwise alien text, with footnotes.Some are stories of pique and nostalgia for the unnamed realm glimpsed with our first emergence open eyed into our mother's world. Of course I must apologize for the kind of egocentrism reflected here, but as both Henry David Thoreau and Virginia Woolf said in different circumstances, if I knew anything else as well as I know myself, I would talk of that other.

PREFACE

xi;

In a box of photographs found after my older sister's young death, a box she had inherited from our mother at her own tooearly death, are pictures taken of my mother's mixedblood IrishCherokee family in Oklahoma and, before that, Indian Territory. In a much-faded photo, my great-great uncle, August Edward Bailey, sits on railroad tracks in 1911 Oklahoma, a Cherokee-Irish mixedblood between the rails en route to a hazy vanishing point in which ghosts of trees graze the blurred horizon, the narrowing rails the only defirute demarcations. His railman's cap, with uneven brim, is cocked. His right arm rests nonchalantly upon his right knee. His face is dark and creased against the sun, the angular eyes typical of both my maternal and paternal families shut almost tight and pronounced lines descending from just below each eye to cheek bottom. He is very young, and his expression appears interested, a touch fatalistic, and perhaps a touch defiant as it is directed toward the camera. He wears a heavy glove on his right hand and holds the glove for his bare left hand in the right. Body language suggests a certain amount of satisfaction with his position in life and an equal awareness that others might not recognize his reasons for such satisfaction. Scrawled at the top of the photo is his name, "Augaust, misspelled. On the back of the photo-turned-postcard, in tall, slanting handwriting addressed to his mother, is this message: "this hant no count i will have a nothern one took and i will send you one so by by Augaust E." I know next to nothing about Uncle August Edward Bailey my mother's grandfather's brother. He was born poor in a rough country, worked for the railroad, had little formal education, was halfIndian in Indian Territory and the brand new state of Oklahoma, and has been dead for a very long time. My grandmother, orphaned at age six through means neither she nor we ever understood, could not tell us about this uncle. My mother, product of the worst margins of Uncle August's world and tumbled into a motherless world herself as a child, imbibed no stories that would answer such questions. Irish-American with Cherokee blood, American Indian with Irish blood, transient, infinitely motion-bent, poised ff

PREFACE

...

Xlll

within the tracks of an America determined to hurl all lives and stories toward a receding horizon, Uncle August and all the rest are particles scattered, the chaos of invasion, coloniality, deracination, and removal embedded in their blood and photographs. Like Uncle August, we are all between the tracks, framed by a vanishing point but satisfied and defiant to the end. In another photo Uncle August stands in front of a small, mudchinked log house with his mother, brothers, and sisters, a teenager sullenly confronting the camera. In another, on the back of a postcard photo of main-street Muldrow, Oklahoma, in 1913, also addressed to his mother, he writes, "I her the train so Bee good tell I see you." I, too, hear the train. Unseen, it rushes along shining tracks bracketing Uncle August in memory that arrives out of the dark and disappears at the vanishing point of convergence in a photograph. My inheritance, it leaves in the air a trace out of which I will construct history, mirroring consciousness, an irresolute "nothern one" that has been "took" and incessantly retaken. Though it may indeed be true that it l'hant no good," it is nonetheless the invaluable stuff of story. Like that dollop of sourdough left behind in the bowl to double infinitely into another loaf, it becomes stories that birth others. And, as Vladimir Nabokov knew and showed us so brilliantly in his novel Pale Fire, we make stories in order to find ourselves at home in a chaos made familiar and comforting through the stories we make, searching frantically for patterns in the flux of randomly recorded events, a world in which endings stalk us and we can only keep inventing ways to both explain and forestall closure. Language must be the surest way, as we remain here telling ourselves stories in the dark, spinning webs of language against ever-encroachingmyriad history like Faulkner, or writing ourselves into pages that read themselves out in the endings of our various selves Like Garcia M&rquez,or laying a terrlfylng balm of language over the abyss of history like Cormac McCarthyor writing back toward the center like N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, JamesWelch, Cerald Vizenor, Thomas King, Louise Erdrich, and so many others.

xiv

PREFACE

Another photograph in my sister's box shows a strange, shantylike "houseboat" my mother's mother lived on when she was very yomg, perhaps six or eight years old. I've written about that photograph elsewhere, but I cannot escape it. What story can that picture tell me and my eight brothers and sisters about the labyrinth of memory that should and must be our own? How may we, Kinbotelike, fill in the empty pages of the oral tradition that is all we have from our mother's world? Conscious of my own temerity in such an endeavor, I wrote that story and include it here: "Blessed Sunshine," the name of the shanty-boat. Similarly I have gone back, in a fiction I call "Yazoo Dusk," to reconstruct, or construct for the first time, a story of the Mississippi my father's ChoctawIrish-French family knew. Because I cannot do less, I have made these various stories, call them essay fiction, or criticism. Together, I believe they form a pattern, one turn and twist of the labyrinth leading to another. At the center, of course, is the hybrid monster of self, the ultimate cannibal to which all stories lead.

Acknowledgments

It is impossible to acknowledge all who have provided friendship, encouragement, and invaluable advice, but it is a pleasure to be able to thank at least a few: Gerald Vizenor, Kim Wiar, Karen Wieder, Irene Vernon, David Mogen, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Aaron Carr, Tom King, Evelina Lucero, Tom Colonnese, Elvira Pulitano, Luci Tapahonso, Gretchen Ronnow, Dan Obrien, Marci Rosenthal, Gretchen Batadle, Jesse Peters, Hossein Ordoubadian, Gad Tardine, Lauret Savoy,John Purdy Jim Houston, Jack Hicks, Gealy Hobson, Bemie Smith, the famous Mississippean James McElroy and finally, of course, the Prescott Hotshots and Milk Creek Trail Crew.

This page intentionally left blank

PART ONE

Reflections

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER ONE

Finding Gene

A Black man, a figure of angles and pressed creases, bends to pull a weed, his white hair sharp against the dark, mown grass. Still bent, he looks up from the grave as my brother and I drive past below. The cemetery is on a hillside, worn stones and new-painted wooden crosses appearing to tilt beneath the thin oak and pine forest and the old man on the verge of tumbling head-over-heels down to our road. The waist-high picket fence that surrounds the little graveyard doesn't look sturdy enough to catch a falling body. I've never seen this hill country before, the woods everywhere outside the fence so h c k and dark that they hold permanent shadow. I've never driven this narrow, broken road or breathed the moist Ozark air. Until today I haven't seen my brother for twenty-nine years. "That's the colored graveyard," Gene says. The three-quarterton pickup rattles and sends gravel pinging from mud tires. A red deer, of a color I've never seen in deer, freezes in a pasture on the other side of the road, studies us intently, and then with two strides vanishes into a brushy creek bottom. Deer hunting was something we used to have in common. We'd awaken in the dark and drive out to the low grain-covered Gabilan Mountains east of the Salinas Valley to be ready when the sun rose. Decades later I still smell the sweet, damp odor of oats and oak leaves and see the soft hawk ridges coming into focus at dawn. By midday those hills would be

4

REFLECTIONS

hot and burning with light, the clusters and lines of oaks black on ridges and in dry arroyos.I haven't hunted in nearly three decades, since I left the Gabilan and Santa Lucia mountains for college, but now I wonder if he hunts these red deer and I store the question for later use. "You mean they're segregated?" I glance back and see the old man bent away from us now. He shakes his head. "Nah. Just that they have their place and we have ours." We, I tlunk. In Mississippi and even at first in California, our only or best friends had often been Black or, more rarely Indian. My first memories are of Gene and junglelike woods that grew thick between our cabin and the deep-edged brown water of the Yazoo River. Three, four, five, and six years old, I followed him everywhere, swingmg on muskadine vines and eating the acidsweet purple fruit, climbing pecan trees that we called pee-cans, fishing in the endless, muddy current of the river, jumping in the wiresided cotton trucks filled with white bob. The washtub where I had to bathe in gray water after him, leaning toward the wood cookstove on cold Mississippi mornings. The log shed we'd check each morning to see what skins our father had nailed up during the night. The watermelonswe stole with a gang of Black kids from a cluster of shacks deep in the woods, our grandfather's melons, swinging over a ravine and droppinghalf of the melons with pink explosions as we swung. But the watermelons were later, in Texas. Over the years, though I had written about some of these things, I'd begun to wonder what had actually happened and what my imagination had simply formed into history and truth. Without Gene I had no touchstone to truth, no way of verlfymg memories. I know that we invent what we need to be true, imagining and rewriting until there is some kind of text that gives us back a self.

I was surprised at how comfortable it felt to be riding beside him in the Ford pickup. After a couple of hours together following

FINDING GENE

5

twenty-nine years apart, my brother and I were headed out once again to shoot guns. Guns were something we'd always had in common, somethingwe both still liked to see, touch, talk about. A difference was that for most of the intervening years, I had owned or touched no guns, our mother having sold my rifles and shotguns while I was away at college. Another difference was that I had not used a gun to kill a human being. The first thing I noticed that morning was his smile. I'd forgotten that Gene was the only one in the family who always smiled. We're a serious lot all in all, the nine of us kids, gwen, I'm afraid, to looking for the darker possibilities in life and usually finding them. If any one of us children had a reason not to smile, however, it was Gene. In childhood he had a couple of extra upper teeth, like fangs, that had grown in over his canines, so that his constant smile was peculiarly friendly and ferocious at the same time. I remember thinking as an adolescent that he fought his smile, tried to hide those strange extra teeth, but the smile overcame everything. The navy had fixed his teeth, and at first I'd been perplexed by the difference when he walked out of his house toward my small Toyota pickup that morning. At fifty-one he was still thick and powerful looking through the shoulders and chest, but a noticeable belly pushed at his loose flannel shirt. His light brown hair had receded to the sides and back, leaving his head bald and shining,an inheritance from our mother, whose Irish father had been bald as a hen's egg, and a premonition to me. Gene had been my hero, the toughest and bravest person I'd ever known, and patient and gentle at the same time. The only person to ever run our high-school cross-country track barefoot, he'd forced his short-legged, stocky body to run those long miles, keeping pace with his lanky Osage friend who was the best runner in the county. Gene was almost a quarter Cherokee but didn't show a trace of Indian. Still, people who knew our family sometimes attributed his barefoot nrnning to the fact he was "Indian." The reality was, of course, that he simply couldn't afford crosscountry shoes.The money we made from summer and after-school

6

REFLECTIONS

jobs went for clothes and food, not frivolous h g s like running shoes. "Yeah, I still don't like shoes," he said when he noticed me looking at his bare feet as I got out of my truck.

My brother had meant to say goodbye. In the summer of '68 he'd come back from his third tour of duty in Vietnam and had stopped by the cabin I shared with a friend in Morro Bay, California. There was a noise one night, and my friend looked up to see Gene climbing through a window. Windows were safer than doors, and surprise was safest of all. I was working evenings and wasn't there, so I didn't see him. He left that same night, telling no one where he was going, but I held close to the fact that he'd come to say goodbe at least, for we had grown up together, best friends who learned to hunt together, from slingshots to shotguns and deer rifles and recurve bows, to fish together, to set snares and traps in the hills and dry Salinas River bottom in California, to rebuild engines in the front yard and deal with a complicated family life that had taken us from Mississippi to California and back, and back again. Out of nine children, he was the second oldest, two years younger than our oldest sister and two years older than me. I was grown and living alone before I consciously realized that my older brother and sister had had a different father than the rest of us. In large families children often tend to break off into pairs or groupings. Gene and I grew up side by side, and then he graduated from high school and went to Vietnam, part of the first detachment of Swift Boat crewmen sent over after being told they had a probable survival rate of 10 percent.

I'd arrived just before noon, driving down from Missouri, where I'd left my wife and two daughters with my wife's relatives at their family vacation house. It had taken half a day to penetrate that tangled Ozark country, through Branson with its traffic jam of

FINDING GENE

7

billboards announcing over-the-hill country artists, a Liberace-like Asian violmist and his voluptuous blonde vocalists, and the Cherokee mixedblood, Wayne Newton. Over Lookout Mountain, a name vaguely resonant of the Civil War, and down into this remote part of western Arkansas.

We'd exchanged only a few words, the tenuous language of careful greeting, when he began to show me his guns. I was a university professor who wrote books, and my brother molded inner tubes in a Firestone factory forty miles away from his little town. He'd been the first in the entire history of our families on both parents' sides to graduate from high school; I had been the second and last, and I was still the only one to ever enter college. In different ways Gene and I had vanished into new worlds a long way from home at almost the same time. I had kept in touch with family, calling and occasionally visiting, feeling sometimes like a time traveler beamed into an awkward past, while Gene had simply disappeared.

He unlocked a big closet and began to bring out guns. A pair of 12-gauge pumps; a long-barreled, bolt-action 12-gauge "goosegun" that had belonged to our father; a .410 and two 20-gauges; an ancient 10-gauge; two identical lever-action .30-30s; a couple of .30-ought-6s; a .30-40 Krag like one our father still hunted with in California; a beautiful Browning 20-gauge over-and-under for quail; three black-powder rifles; a .22 magnum; a .222, a .243, a .270. Then he began to bring out the handguns: 9 millimeters, .40 cahbers, a pair of .357s, a .44 magnum, .22-caliber target pistols. He laid out his compound bow, an ugly contrivance that had little to do with the beautiful Bear recurves we'd hunted with as teenagers. I remembered the last time I'd hunted with a bow, when I'd pinned a rabbit to a tree and watched the little thing spin screaming around the arrow shaft. It takes great pain to cause a rabbit or deer

8

REFLECTIONS

to scream, and either is a sound you don't forget. He hunted deer every fall, he said when I asked, stalking one particularly fine buck the last few seasons. For several years in a row he had tracked the large-antlered buck, set his scope on it, and never fired. The time and place or the feeling in the air were never quite right, he explained. Maybe next year, or the one after that, it would feel right. In allof his years in the Ozarks-all the years since VietnamI finally realized, he had never actually killed a deer. It was the hunting that counted, the knowledge that he could ttunk and feel like them, ease into their world, be the deer for a privileged time once each year just before winter set in. I remembered the feeling from that old life we'd shared.

I hefted and aimed down barrels at peep sights and into darkened scopes, lifted and lined up pistols, spoke softly in terms of admiration and awe, conscious even at the time that guns had ~ ~ day in Arkansas, the pefifes madeleines of become, on t h strange our own remembrance of things past, and even hnking of it with that absurd, stuffed-shirt Proustian term.

With a dozen handguns we climbed into i s pickup, heading for the target range a few minutes from his house, passing the cemetery with its old caretaker, and finding upon arrival that we had the range all to ourselves. We hung targets and I went first, hitting a dead-center bullseye at twenty yards on my first shot with the .44 magnum. Immediately,I put the gun down. Gene v e d at me. Neither of us said the obvious, that my bullseye with the .44 was a wild moment straight out of chaos theory that I couldn't do it again in twenty years. As kids we'd had shooting competitions that I'd usually won. But he'd spent three years in Vietnam, patrolling the Mekong Delta and the coast on a Swift Boat, sometimes leaving the water to go on foot into jungle that I could only imagme as a vague and evil dream. Later he explained that

FINDING GENE

9

he'd shot a child, a little grl running toward them with a satchel charge while his CO shouted at him to fire. That was when all the pieces began to separate for him. Nothing fit any longer. I had refused inductionbecause of h, because of h letters home, had been drafted and ultimately kept from prison at the last minute by Richard Nixon. With the war winding down Nixon had canceled the draft for my quarter, sparing all of us who had been or were about to be inducted or imprisoned. My brother had still been in Vietnam at the time. To this day, though I know I did the morally right thing, a tiny, mean abscess of guilt works at me. I should have gone where my brother was. For three hours we shot handguns, changing targets and picking up empty casings. The next day he promised, we were going catfishing His house was small and dark, on the edge of that lost Ozark town of fifteen hundred people. He kept the shades drawn, the windows and doors locked, a .38 pistol in a drawer beside his bed beneath a stack of four novels I had written. Proudly, he showed me the banana trees he grew in front of the house. Each fall he dug them up, wrapped roots in canvas, and put them under his house to survive the winter for spring replanting. Diminutive bananas grew in a bunch on each of the two trees. With undisguised pain he showed me the empty pen where he'd kept his bird dog, an English Setter, until it died that summer. When I told h m that I was now on my third English Setter over a span of twenty-five years, he nodded without surprise, though neither of us had ever even heard of such dogs growing up. The next morning we went fislung on neighbors' farms. For many years I had been a fly-fisherman, tymg bits of feather and strands of hair into miniscule imitations that might trick rainbow trout in clear, fragile-lookingwaters. At the murky farm ponds, we put globs of rancid chicken liver on big hooks and cast with fifteenpound test line and large sinkersjust as we had many years before. Casting far out toward the pond's center, I felt a weight of old and familiar satisfaction as the h c k monofilament sang off my open

10

REFLECTIONS

reel. The plunk at the end was solid and gratifying, and nothing, I knew, could ever break my over-heavy line. When a catfish bit, it was a sudden, determined pull-a direct communicationnothing like the wary rise and tentative strike of a rainbow trout. At the first farm I caught and released a small blue cat on almost every cast, while Gene caught nothing. We moved to a second pond on someone else's property, where we both caught fat twoand three-pound yellow-brown mudcats one after another until we had a good mess of fish. At home he filleted them and his wife fried them in cornmeal. I could tell she was happy to see me. A tough, wiry Arkansas woman who had probably saved my brother, coaxinghim out of the deep woods into town and out of alcohol madness into a semblance of normal life. When she smoked, he made her sit in a small corral made up of four huge air purifiers in a sequestered corner of the living room. Like me, he hated smoking with an intensity my own wife calls neurotic. But his wife Carol laughed about it, just as she laughed when he brought out a box of Vietnam mementos to show me, including photographs of beautiful bar girls sitting on his lap. "I bought that one for a week," he said, pointing to a stunningly lovely and very young-looking girl. As I studied the photo, his wife shook her head in disgust, and there was an edge of wonder in IS own voice, too, as if he were talking about someone else and something that had absolutely nothing to do with a real world where one might be responsible for one's own life. In a matter-of-fact way, his wife interrupted to explain that he'd nearly killed her a few months earlier when she moved during the night unexpectedly. "Gene still has his problems," she said, looking at kum with what struck me as critical love. He shook his head, closing the box. "I used to have a bunch of medals and stuff," he said. "I wonder what happened to them." When I told him I'd come across them recently in our mother's old trunk at the home of one of our younger sisters, he looked surprised. "I guess I'd like to see those," he said, without much conviction.

FINDING GENE

77

I promised to call our sister, thinking of the medals I'd seen tangled in the tin hunk with the residue of our mother's short life. Just before disappearing, he'd discarded the medals and she'd collected them for the future. Now they were in the cheap, much dented trunk with sixty-year-old postcards from our reckless grandmother, a picture frame made out of Camel cigarette packages by our Uncle Bob in prison, ancient silk scarves sent home from the war in the Pacific, currency from the Japanese-occupied Philippinesbrought back somehow by a second uncle who'd been on Bataan. Both of those uncles, our mother's and father's only brothers, had been murdered years after coming home. Neither case had been solved, or perhaps even investigated. I wondered if Gene knew something about our uncles, but I didn't ask. Sitting there after catfish and fried potatoes, I was able, however, to ask the question that had clawed at me for years: Why had he re-upped twice? Why had he stayed three years in what his letters had described as worse than any hell a person could imagine? He looked at me directly when he answered, lus brown eyes locking on mine for the first time since I'd come to his home. "I stayed so that someone wouldn't have to take my place," he said.

I had thought he was dead. I suppose we allhad, though perhaps our older sister had known his secret and kept it. I don't know. She has been diagnosed with terminal cancer at age fdty-three, with very little time left' and our conversations are cautious and precise. We sit and talk of childhood, inventing memories and humorous recollections, but I don't ask her about secrets. Gene had left for the same war I had planned to go to before his w m h g s , and then he'd come back only to vanish. It was as though he'd never come back at all, as though they'd killed him and sent something else home.

That's how I'd come to be in Arkansas, just a few miles from the Oklahoma town where our Cherokee grandmother was born. I'd

72

REFLECTIONS

written a novel about my brother. My second novel, The Sharpest Sight, was born out of Gene's disappearance, out of the paradox of his nonreturn from that war. "The arrows of death fly unseen at noon-day; the sharpest sight can't discern them," the book's epigraph read. It was a book about Mississippi, about my father's Choctaw ancestors, about the mysteries of identity and story, but most of all it was a book about a lost brother and a long pattern of loss into which that one seemed to fit. I'd made a journey to the black wall in Washington, DC., and found the names of friends who'd died in Vietnam, but I'd had no idea where my own brother's name might be found, so I'd made a story out of what I did not know. And then one day, after a quarter of a century of silence, my brother called. He had found a copy of The Sharpest Sight, had seen my name and read the book. This was extraordinary,because Gene does not go into bookstores and does not usually read books. But he had read it and had known at once that it was about him, had read past layers of metaphor and myth, through a complex "mystery" plot, to see that I'd written a novel about the loss of my own brother. He located and called our older sister and got my phone number from her. "Jesus Christ," he'd said to her, "first he put me in a mental hospital and then he killed me. What's he going to do to me next?" Or words to that effect. Then he called me. It took three years to convince him to let me visit. Usually when I'd phone he wouldn't be home. He did not answer letters. He almost came to our mother's funeral, he said, but in the end he couldn't. We'd talk maybe twice a year and I'd say that I might be in the area and would like to drop by. He'd like that, he'd say, but time was short, he was working double shifts at the tire plant, there were problems with his wife's two grown children whom he'd adopted. Finally, he'd said I should come. "You remember the time that panther got on the roof?" he asked as we were sitting in his living room. My mind jumped at the memory, for that long-ago event had made a nightmare that stalked me through childhood into adulthood

FINDING GENE

73

and become an image and theme that haunted my writing. I had thought, dreamed, and written about it so much, and so indirectly, that I'd come to wonder if I'd invented it. Had a black cougar, a "painter," followed our father out of the swamps one night to leap upon the roof of our little cabin and scream its rage? Had we children cowered in the two-room cabin listening to the cat's feet on tin roof and screams like an angry and terrified woman's? Was the black cat that became nalusachito, the soul-eater in my writing and the black thing that turned dream into terror, a real memory? "You remember that?" I asked. "Course. I remember it jumped down and whipped our dog. What was that dog's name? That coon hound." I shook my head, unable to recall the cat's fight with an either very brave or very foolish dog and not even remembering that particular dog because there had been too many back then. "Did it kill our dog?" I asked. He shook his head. "Didn't even hurt him too bad as I recall." So the cat must have wanted to leave. But why had it stalked our father to the cabin and leapt onto the roof, knocking the tin chimney off in its rage? I knew that Choctaws had stories of such panthers. They were female and they were more than animal. They sought a person out for a dark purpose and were more than feared. Maybe that had been the beginning of the change that had sent our father into whatever kind of strange reality he inhabited these many years later, maybe the reason he stared out at the world with the eyes of a curious but disinterested child and merely looked with vague curiosity when he met his grandchildren for the first time. More likely the truck accident and two-week coma he'd been in when I was fifteen had changed him, not nalusachito. But one never knows. "Do you remember stealingwatermelons with those Black kids and s w i n p g over that ravine with them?" He grinned. "I always thought we were getting away with it, but I found out Grampa was just letting us do it." He looked into himself for a moment and grinned again. "You remember when

14

REFLECTIONS

we used to go hunting and not come home till the next day? Just cook a rabbit over a fire and sleep out?" I remembered. I remembered for the first time since the moment itself the day we'd found a squash growing wild in the river bottom and Gene had cut up and eaten the whole thing on the spot, raw. He could eat or drink anything, crouching to lap water from a stream or trough when thirsty. I don't remember him ever having a stomachache, while all the time I was in a constant state of pain, my stomach knotted around barbed wire for the first forty years of my life. I felt almost dizzy with the reality of memory. Old memories had become both more real and changed in the same moment. Did he remember me almost drowning us when I shoved the old shattered rowboat into the Yazoo current with several of us kids in it? Did he remember the time a bear chased Rex, our Border collie, onto the porch? Did he remember stealing hundred-pound sacks of almonds in California?The time our father's deer rifle went off and the bullet went through our mother's hair into the kitchen ceiling? Did he recall all of the things I would not put into words? That night we sat up late, remembering. In the morning I couldn't recall dreaming, and I lay in bed for a time wondering what he really thought of the stories I'd written, using the raw material of our lives for fantastic fictions. I wrote about Indian things, and Gene didn't identify as Indian. His father had been German, not Choctaw, and our mother's Cherokee world was remote from him. He liked my fiction, clearly was proud that I'd written it and he was part of it, but how had he felt seeing himself imagined that way? On the third day we shook hands awkwardly and I got into my pickup to drive back to New Mexico. "Just a second," he said with a jerk of his head. He went back into the house and came out holding one of the lever-action .30-30s in his right hand. "You better take this with you. That way we'll both have one." He smiled. "This too, since you're the fisherman in the family." In his other hand he held a wooden bass lure our father had carved in

FINDING GENE

15

his own youth. Only bare traces of paint remained on the clumsylooking plug with which our father had caught many fish. One day, I thought as I drove away I'd like my daughters to meet their uncle. Maybe then they'd know their father better. Perhaps their memories would become more real. Crossing into Oklahoma, I stopped in Muldrow, where our grandmother had been born, and then went up to Tahlequah, a place she and our mother had often spoken of. My wife and children would return from Missouri in a couple of days, but for now I was alone, driving through Indian country and thinking of Gene, planning to send him the beaded rifle scabbard a Creek friend had made for me, for Gene was the hunter in the family. "Indian Country," my brother had said, was what they'd called enemy territory during the war. Out there, in Indian country anything could happen. A person might never get home.

CHAPTER TWO

Bracero Summer

The summer of '65 was shaping up to be something. Things had been happening all year. The Salinas River had flooded especially high that winter at our end of the Salinas Valley, tearing out garages and barns and anything it could reach and rafting everything up to Monterey. When the river went down, my brother shot a fifteen-pound steelhead with S IS .22 right behind our house and then, with a few friends, went off to a war called Vietnam, leaving me his green metal-flake '57 Chevy with a 283 bored out to 301, twin Holly four-barrel carbs, three-quarter cam, Herst four-on-thefloor, button-and-tuck upholstery, four-eleven rear end, and mag rims. The Beatles and Beach Boys were so popular that buddies of mine wore Nehm jackets and Beatles haircuts or flashed madras shirts and huaraches and drove "woodies" with surfboards sticking out the back. Some guys on the wrestling team in our little school of three hundred small-town kids had pushed the basketball coach's car, a 40-something Dodge, off a fifty-foot cliff into the creek that ran through the school. The coach was a Choctaw Indian and very popular with students. Destroying his car was widely recognized as an act of affection. A guy I played basketball with had worked hard all of one night to paint out a billboard on the highway that ran through the middle of town, replacing the ad with a plea for all of us to vote for him as God. Another acquain-

BRACERO SUMMER

17

tance had stolen an airplane from the next town over and dropped empty bottles from his case of beer on our town's only hamburger stand, and a guy one year behind me in school had dug up his grandmother from the cemetery on the hill to drive around town with her corpse draped across the hood of his pickup. Tommy Outhouse-lus real name-had borrowed and rolled Hobie Joe's Volkswagen van over on the highway to Morro Bay and then got out and lifted it single-handedly back onto its wheels before running away forever. Members of the Atascadero High School Letterman's Club had hijacked a rooter's bus from Paso Robles and held the occupants at gunpoint, threatening to execute all of them over a tough football loss. One of my friends had inscribed his name in the town's history books by pole-vaulting his car over a pickup truck on a country road. He'd been steering the engineless car at an impressive speed when the front end of the wired-up driveshaft had dropped right into a cattle guard. The drive shaft stuck and the car lifted and soared onto the back of the pickup towing it. I was seventeen years old and in good shape from basketball, running in the sandy river bottom every night, parttime work at the mushroom farm, and odd jobs on various ranches around the county. Even before school was out, the sun was bright and hot and the Pacific Ocean just twenty miles away. But I wasn't thinking of the ocean; I was reflecting on the harsh probabilities of another summer shoveling mushroom compost or bucking hay or building fence to buy gas for a car that rocked and growled when it idled and got seven miles per gallon. The southern end of the Salinas Valley was a pressure cooker. People too young to go to Vietnam yet were looking for something to do in the meantime, and most of the time that something was each other. Girls' mascara ran in the sweaty heat and miniskirts stuck to damp thighs. Boys cruised town with our shirts off, arms out '57 Chevy windows and Wolfman Jack on the radio playing loud from KAFY over in Bakersfield. Gary Morales, one of the most gentle souls in town, fell out of the back of a truck and got a two-inch scar on his cheek and became mean, picking fights nearly

78

REFLECTIONS

every day and winning. Out on the chicken and turkey farms the birds were panting in the stagnant air, and on the oat-lull ranches all the whiteface cattle were bunched beneath live oaks for shade. Black people had rioted in American cities the summer before, going absolutely ballistic over things I knew little about. Theyfd burned buildings and looted and scared the hell out of white people and politicians. With another hot summer coming up, important people in Sacramento, the state capital, were worried, and rightfully so as it turned out, for 1965was to be the summer of the notorious Watts Riots. Meanwhile, in 1964 the federal government had abruptly ended the "Bracerof' program that for two decades had brought millions of workers from Mexico to harvest U.S. crops, mostly in California. Almost two hundred thousand Braceros had entered the U.S. in 1963, down from the nearly half-million who had been coming each year during the last half of the '50s and early '60s' but still a lot by some people's count. There was genuine fear that our high standard of culture and civic values might be undermined by so many Mexicans coming in. By 1965, with the program ended, the number of Mexican workers entering was down to twenty thousand, and two years later only seven thousand came. Illegals took care of most of the labor shortage, and at a real savings to corporate farmers, but despite illegals some growers were feeling the pinch. While in our little town of Atascadero at the southern end of the Salinas Valley we were busy stealing planes, digging up our grandmothers, destroying the coach's car, and pointing magnum pistols at occupants of rooters' buses, men in Sacramento were thinking. Two birds with one stone, they thought. Summer was about to open like one of those anticipated blockbusters in a city near everyone. Vietnam was coming to a rapid boil and draft-age boys and their sisters and grlfriends were starting to wake up on college campuses if not yet in Atascadero. Black people with little to lose in California's cities-just like the rest of the country-were mad and ready to cause some serious problems for people who had a lot to lose. At the same time there was a minor shortage of Mexican

BRACERO SUMMER

79

workers for the beet fields and bean fields and strawberry fields and celery fields and tomato fields and orchards. What could be done? Someone in Sacrament0 had an idea. I had worked with Braceros much of my life, starting by hoeing beans at nine years old and graduating to weeding and thinning sugar beets by the time I was thirteen and fourteen. My brother and I had connections because our father did odd jobs for quite a few farmers and ranchers. As a favor to our dad, the ranchers would hire us to build a fence or work cattle or inoculate turkeys, and the farmers would hire us in the fields along with the Braceros, knowing we'd work just as hard and just as long. Side by side, with el cortito, the short-handled hoe with a grip at twelve or fifteen inches that was later made illegal, I had spent several summers every day bent over the sugar-beet rows next to men and women from Mexico. You arrive at the field early when everything is still wet from night irrigation and morning fog; you get out of your vehicle and take out the hoe you sharpened at home and look at the first row for the day. The row lines out toward the horizon, curving away to infinity, and you start chopping weeds or thinning beets, row after row after row after row after row as the day warms and grows hot and becomes a mean flame on your curved back. Crop dusters buzz overhead and sometimes you get nailed when they dust, but you laugh and wipe your eyes. Beside you people sing and talk while bent over. You learn good things to say usually involving the key word tu and often madre. Hijo del puta, you learn, and pendejo and chingate. You learn when such words are funny and when they are absolutely not funny. You learn that the name of your town, Atascadero, means "mud hole" in Spanishnot "place of standing waters" as you'd been told-and everyone laughs. More than anything else, you learn to defer all gratification not just to the end of the row or field or day, but to the end of the summer, maybe the end of years. But all the time you're thinking you won't do this forever. You fantasize about the perfect job. Someday someone will pay you as much money as you can possibly imagine, say $3.50 an hour, to backpack in a

20

REFLECTIONS

mountain wilderness with meadows and streams and snowfields, like the pictures you've seen. But the men and women in the rows beside you don't think like that. They think of their families across the border, babies and kids in school, and they i m a p e working many years in the fields and sending or taking the money back home. One day you forget when fu is not funny and you get in a fight and think you've won, but when you turn your back the other guy swings a ten-pound sugar beet by its stalk and lays you out cold. Many years later it still hurts in frigid weather. The men in Sacrament0 couldn't just say they were taking young Black men out of the cities to put them into the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. Black people had an inherited, not exactly pleasant, collective memory of being put to work in American fields, and provoking that particular memory wasn't likely to relax inner-city tensions. The government men decided to call it an economic opportunity work program. Any lucky person with a sufficiently low income, they announced, could quahfy to work in the fields for minimum wage. They advertised the program heavily and recruited in Los Angeles, Stockton, Compton, East Palo Alto, Oakland-those places where summer jobs for Black teens had never existed and where young Black males with time on their hands posed potential complications for the coming summer. Somehow we heard about it in Atascadero. It sounded like fun. It sounded like fun. That's the kind of town we lived in. About twenty of us signed up to have fun in the tomato fields of the San Joaquin Valley during the summer of 1965. We got on a bus and headed for a former Bracero camp in the Valley, stopping en route for soft drinks at a gas station in the tiny town of Soledad, a hundred yards from the maximum security prison there, and then cruising right on through the golden Gabilan Mountains and over to the Central Valley where temperatures doubled minute by minute all day long. I at least knew what field labor was. My high-school buddies did not. And no one had explained to us that there would be two or three hundred Black guys from the meanest, hardest, nastiest

BRACERO SUMMER

27

inner cities in California already waiting in the camp, guys who, by the time we arrived, were already intensely unhappy about what the white folks had talked them into once again. The Bracero camp was on the outskirts of Merced, an agricultural town whose name, which means "mercy," was very rnisleadmg. The camp consisted of former military barracks from World War LI that had housed thousands of Mexican workers over the years since the war, row upon row of narrow buildings with faint remnants of flaking gray-white paint and roofs of sun-curled asphalt sheeting. Between the barracks was hard-packed dirt, and standing around on the dirt were hundreds of young Black men in knots and clumps and clusters that turned with one motion toward our bus. A newlooking chain-link fence ten feet high surrounded the labor camp, with three rows of barbed wire slanting inward along the top, sirnilar to what we'd seen at Soledad. The gate closed behind us, and those of us not staring at the scene in front of us looked back to see a guard take his position in front of the locked gate. The bus stopped a few yards from one of the barracks and we filed off the bus and through the open doorway quickly trylng to look but not look like we were looking at those already in camp as we slid into the brown-gray light inside. Metal cots, like in those old military and prison movies and in the bedroom I'd shared with my brothers at home a couple of houses back, lined both sides of the long, narrow room. On the cots, mattresses had been flattened to thin, hard layers by decades of bone-tired, sweating workers whose mass must have increased with exponential despair until some mattresses were mere wafers. A pair of grayish, rust-marked cotton sheets and a bristly green wool army blanket were stacked at the foot of each bed, and gloom rose off the stained mattresses and swirled like tule fog through the bad air. Guys who'd never been quiet in their lives, who'd bullied everybody they'd ever met with words and feet and fists, stood and just looked around, duffle bags dropped to the floor beside them. It took a few minutes before the first to flop down on the cots began to notice the bedbugs. None of us had ever seen or been

22

REFLECTIONS

intimate with a bedbug before. Cans of insecticide powder were issued that afternoon, and we sprinkled it liberally under and over our mattresses, into the sheets, between sheets and blankets. It took a couple of days for the lice to surface, but within a week we'd cut each other's hair to quarter-inch stubs with a shared pair of scissors someone dug up. A skinny white man with a tiny mustache, wire-rim sunglasses, a new straw cowboy hat and polished cowboy boots, jeans, and a pearl-snap shirt came in and explained things, standing just inside the open door. We would start work the next day. We would line up for breakfast at 4:30 and be at the fields by 6:30 because the afternoons got hot. Real hot. He luxuriated on the vowels, stretching the words out on his slow tongue the way a snake might uncoil on a warm floor. We would pay a modest fee for room and board, he explained, for transportation to and from the fields, for health and hazard insurance. All would be deducted from our checks in advance to make things easier for everyone. We would remain inside the compound after work. Basketball courts had been constructed for our recreational needs. He showed his teeth. "I bet you all can find a few basketball players among them Black boys," he said, keeping the teeth exposed in a straight, thin line. "I bet them boys'd jest really love to play with you all." "We'll whip their asses. Shit," Shane Turner started to say but when everyone just turned and looked at him, his voice kind of died and he scratched a spot on his forearm. Shane Turner was tougher than anybody any of us knew, but even he wasn't that tough. That's when Doc Dupree stepped out from the back of the group and slapped Shane on the shoulder. "Thas right," DOCsaid, grinning and looking at the cowboy. "We'll whip those Black boys' asses." The cowboy took a step backward. Doc was our one Black guy what we called "colored," from the next town over, Paso Robles. None of us knew Doc very well, but he'd regaled us with stories of his white women all the way over on the bus, and not even Shane

BRACERO SUMMER

23

had scraped together the balls to question Doc's veracity or the right of a Black boy to white girls. Or maybe Shane just enjoyed the stories too much to stop them. Shane liked to be screwed with and to see others screwed with. He probably liked Doc's stories. Tall and skinny, with a huge grin and muscles you could see work whenever he lifted an arm to scratch his belly, Doc looked and smelled like trouble. Fun trouble maybe, but some kind for sure. He explained on the bus that he had about sixteen kinds of black belts in sixteen kinds of judo and karate, the sort of stuff we only knew through James Bond movies. Doc sounded like somebody who'd be at home in James Bond's world of Pussy Galore and Odd Job and all. The cowboy apparently understood Doc the same way we did. His thin smile got thinner. "I bet you will," he nearly whispered. He took another step toward the door. "Supper's at six. Better be quick." He turned and reached the open doorway and looked back over his shoulder. "Or them black boys'll get it all." When the cowboy was gone, Doc spread his large hands and studied his palms. "Sheeit," he said. "Shee double it." He looked up. "You leave these cowboys and niggers to me." Even Shane and Ty Cook, the toughest and meanest Atascadero produced--so tough and mean they'd both end up in Soledad a few years later, where one would kill the other in a fight-were clearly willing to let Doc handle cowboys and niggers. The crowds of black faces that had turned toward the bus and the bedbugs that looked big enough to turn mattresses had together clearly shaken everyone's confidence. No one could eat the food. Foul scraps from bone yards and rotten, discarded fruit from the packing sheds, orange water they called juice, brown water they called coffee, commodity powdered eggs cooked on a twenty-foot grill and chopped into six-inch squares elastic enough to hold aloft by one corner. Lunch was worse. Crowded onto flatbeds, we'd be driven in the dark to fields many miles away. We'd pick green tomatoes in bitter cold until the sun rose and fired flaming howitzers at us. The first day at lunchtime

24

REFLECTIONS

another flatbed truck pulled up with several large, perhaps tengallon, thermoses that we were told contained soup. A Black kid from Los Angeles announced that he was hungry enough to eat something none of the rest of us would even say as he vaulted up onto the truck and pulled the lid off one of the thermoses and immediatelyvomited. The liquid in the container was rotten, whatever it was. Not once did anyone even taste it. Lugs of smashed and rotted peaches and pears sat beside the thermoses. We found out later we were paying a handsome sum for such food. We also learned an important lesson when back in camp we raised the top of the old-fashioned soft-drink dispenser, the kind where you put your money in and slid the bottles along a row until they could be lifted out. When we lifted the cooler lid, we found that the top of each bottle had a neat hole in it precisely the size of a straw. Those running the camp took one look and never refilled the pop dispenser. They took us out on flatbed trucks before daylight and brought us back when the workday was over, locking the gate behind us. We were told not to leave the camp, so we dug a hole under the back fence and took turns sneaking out in small groups and going into Merced to buy food we could eat and shoot pool until it became obvious to even the slowest of us that we were going collectively broke. We called home from the pay phone outside the camp office, asking for money. We pooled resources and bought cans of Spam, bologna, white bread, mustard, Twinkies. Doc reported that the others in the camp were getting angry, but not at us. We made peace on the first day when, on the way back from the first dinner we could not eat, we walked into a wall of black faces with expressions intended to cause worry. A large crowd had assembled to ensure that those who were not Black would regret their genetic inheritance. But all was defused when Doc stepped forward and picked up the largest fellow and tossed him around for a while and dropped him. That's how everyone learned Doc really did have sixteen black belts in sixteen kinds of judo or karate. And, we then suspected but later learned for sure, he also had, as he liked to say, truly "laid more pipe than a plumber."

BRACERO SUMMER

25

So delighted with Doc's exhibition was everyone but the victim, a kind of truce was formed around the icon of Doc Dupree. After that we played basketball in the evening-black, white, and otherand I met a guy from Compton shorter than me at about five-feetsix who could dunk with both hands. The Black guys graciously took a white guy or two on each team-being part Choctaw and Cherokee did not exempt me from whiteness-the way in grade school each team had to accept a g r l or a kid with glasses who couldn't throw a ball. The men contracted to run the work camp made one effort to ensure our happiness. The first Saturday we were all bussed out to a lake where we swam and lay in the sun and drank watery Kool-Aid. It was a recreation lake, and the Mercedites already there recreating when we arrived vacated the sandy beach,posthaste, leaving it to the couple hundred of us. We never went back to the lake, but the next day Sunday the gates were opened and we were allowed to walk into town, where some went to a movie, some shot pool, and most just wandered around staring at those staring at us and then headed back to the labor camp. Men driving by in pickups shouted as we walked along the county road, and a beer bottle spun through the air once to shatter against a fence post. The small group of us who were not Black seemed for some reason to infuriate the locals the most. We'd all heard what they shouted before in movies, but we'd never had those things directed at us. Shane challenged several pickups to stop and fight, but no one stopped. The whole thing lasted less than three weeks. At the end of two weeks we lined up at the camp office to get paid. After expenses deducted for room and board, transportation from home to the camp and from the camp to the fields each day insurance, and the money I'd spent on food from town, I found I had lost twelve dollars in the transaction. Like nearly everyone else, I was broke. Halfway through the third week, the citizens of Merced-not, I'm certain, the most upstanding citizens of Merced--decided to burn the labor camp. As night fell, a mob approached, howling like mobs in movies we'd all seen, as if we were Frankenstein's monster in

26

REFLECTIONS

the camp castle. From our point of view inside the fence and between barracks, the mob was an indistinct dark mass characterized by obscure wavelike motion and a strange guttural and shrill wail. County sheriff's vehicles with blinding spotlights drove between the mob and the front gate. We all waited between the barracks, prepared for the big fight. Steel legs had been twisted off cots, and an arsenal of previously secret knives appeared, even among our group, shadowy objects in fists. Cars were turned over and burned in the vague distance, and I later heard that in the madness outside a woman had been raped and killed, but the mob was stopped beyond the gate. We sat up that night waiting for a second assault that didn't come and listening to the crackle of voices over police radios, and in the morning we all emerged slowly from the barracks. No adults remained in the camp, no county sheriff's vehicles were in sight. The office was deserted, the supervisors gone, the front gate open, no one there but us. People wandered around with questioning eyes, gathered in small groups, discussed possibilities, watched warily the roads and fields outside the fence. Until finally we began to leave. Those who could do so lined up with strange patience and oddly delicate courtesies to call home from the pay phone outside the office, to ask for money or a ride. Those of us who knew such calls were futile began to slowly walk out the front gate, peering into the distance up and down the narrow county road and across fields.A couple hundred of us, mostly Black, began dispersing along the narrow roads in small groups, thin streams of young men walking slowly west and south and north, looking up quickly when a car or truck approached but not bothering to stick out a thumb. It took two days to hitchhike home, maybe three hundred miles, with two friends from Atascadero. We slept in the grass beneath an oak tree near Creston the first night and then caught a ride the rest of the way the next morning with a man delivering sacks of chicken feed. On hearing our story he stopped outside of Paso Robles and bought us all breakfast. How long, I wonder today did

BRACERO SUMMER

27

it take those Black guys from Watts to get home, and did anyone buy them breakfast? What were they thinking as they walked along those Central Valley farm roads, beside the slow, dangerouslooking canals, between the immense rows of vegetables and stacked irrigation pipes, occasionally sticking a thumb out, most likely without even looking up, knowing no one would stop for them. How long did it take for the streams of young Black men to disperse along that alluvial pattern of roads, and what must the scene have looked like from up above? Finally I wonder if they went home and tried to bum Los Angeles, or if they just sat back in astonishment at what those white people had done to them yet again and let other, less worldly men and women do the burning. And where are those fellows today, the ones I picked tomatoes and played basketball and watched a mob with? Do they sit in midlife and wonder, as I do, whether it really happened at all? Whether their memories, like mine, are warped and shadowed far beyond reliability. Whether even trymg to put such a thing into words is an absurd endeavor, as if such things are best left to turn and drift in inarticulate memory like those river pebbles that get worn more and more smooth over time until there are no edges.

CHAPTER THREE

Mushroom Nights

If Tommy Outhouse hadn't worked at the mushroom farm, things probably would have turned out differently for him. But you never know. It wasn't the name, since Tommy had pretty well come to terms with lus last name long before he arrived at the mushroom farm. Son of an Okinawan mother and a G1 father who had somehow emerged from the American melting pot named for a toilet, Tomrny had come to the U.S. as a skinny little boy whose slanty eyes and hilarious name had instantly made life pure hell. Seeing his son come home from school bloody every day, Torruny's father enrolled him in martial arts classes at a young age and, as soon as he could, Tommy took up weight-lifting and nutrition. By age seventeen, when he transferred into our school for his senior year, he looked like a very handsome Asian Mister World, with muscles on top of muscles, and he had several advanced belts in ways of fighting that were mysterious and awe-inspiring to the rest of us. Tommy was invincible, and aside from the time three drunks tried to mug him in an alley in Santa Barbara and paid dearly for their foolishness, no one was ever self-destructive enough to propose violence to Tornmy. Because Torruny was himself nonviolent, was in fact the nicest human being a person could ever meet, he led a peaceful existence-that is, except for inner demons you could see working at him every minute of the day, things that would flare

MUSHROOM NIGHTS

29

just behind his brown eyes and stretch his constant smile to what looked like a fracture line. We worried about Tornrny some of us, because as self-absorbed as we were in our own teenage torments, we knew that Tommy suffered more and that Tommy was unlucky. Take the case of the three men who attacked him in an alley. All three ended up in the hospital, and Tommy was charged with assault. Three drunks from a bar try to rob a sixteen-year-old boy and he ends up with a criminal record for assault because of his martial-arts training. Growing up as we did, we knew that some people were just born unlucky and that Tommy was one of those, more than most. Hobie Joe owned the mushroom farm, growing mainly fancy creams, though once in a great while he would get a wild hair and briefly experiment with another, darker kind of mushroom. Mushrooms are called "hobies" in the business. Art the Wop was the foreman, and Gordon, who suffered from encephalitis, or sleeping sickness, was the only full-time employee. The regular part-time labor force consisted of myself and Tommy; my childhood friend and fishing companion, Glen, who would grow up to be a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle; Jim, who would later join the radical Weathermen and whose parents bought a cow's head from the slaughter house each month and ate the whole thing; and Joe's worthless son Pat, who in the year 2000 would turn up on national television as the scientist flunky for right-wingers denying the reality of global warming. It surprised none of us when it turned out that Pat, the boss's kid, had betrayed Tommy. We weren't exactly a close-knit group at the mushroom farm, but we shared a portion of camaraderie, doing killingly hard work together with the joy of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in the prime of physical health and confident that greater adventures were on the horizon. Except, that is, for Pat, who did not like manual labor and preferred to sit and smoke and make caustic remarks when his father wasn't around. Pat's life was planned for him, and, seeing his life stretched out before him, he was dreadfully bored. Unlike the rest of us, who were not thought to be

30

REFLECTIONS

college material, he knew he would be successful. His older brother was a gay graduate student at Berkeley author of a brilliant parody of The Graduate titled "The Grad You Ate." Our older brothers and friends were already part of a war in a place called Vietnam, a war that had not become ugly yet for most of us, and we looked forward to our turns at such excitement as soon as we graduated. Spring in the Salinas Valley was warming up with orange poppies, blue lupines, red and white paintbrush, and a vast sea of wild oats on the hillsides. Flocks of blackbirds rose from alfalfa fields to darken the sky and settle again, and mourning doves cooed in the shade all day long. Nearly every morning on my way to school, if I looked just right, I could see a bobcat sitting well back in a clump of poison-oak brush beside the road, waiting for rabbits too slow to evade a speeding car or truck. A dazed black bear had wandered down from Pine Mountain earlier in the spring, when there weren't supposed to be any bears left, and the fact that he'd been promptly shot and killed by Sage Barrow, our part-time deputy sheriff and part-time high-school janitor, had not lessened our amazement at his brief existence. The days were getting long as the solstice drew near, and the nights were already hot and crackling with the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Wolfrnan Jack's raspy howl from Bakersfield. When we came out of the mushroom houses in the evening, we were greeted by bats swooping and dodging all about us, and as we climbed into our souped-up cars and pickups we felt exhausted and happy. It was the best time of year, the best time of life. The three mushroom houses, perhaps a hundred feet long and twenty-five wide, were split-level, thick-walled concrete caves halfburied in a southwestern slope of Pine Mountain on the side opposite the town graveyard and just a couple of miles downriver from the state hospital for the criminally insane. Dark and cold, the houses remained the uniform sixty-two degrees loved by mushrooms. Blazing sunlight slanted down over the green-black Santa Lucia Mountains in the west, over the narrowing southern end of the golden Salinas Valley where our town lay over the bright sand

MUSHROOM NIGHTS

31

of the wide river bed, and over the great white oaks between Joe's house and the mushroom houses to flood the side of Pine Mountain, flaming on the wild oats and erasing the Ponderosa pine shadows higher up the slope, but the sun never penetrated Joe's mushroom caves. Hobie Joewas a retired chemistry professor from the University of Chicago. One day while traversing the shabby neighborhoods surrounding the university Joe had the idea of quitting his job and raising mushrooms, an idea he acted upon at once. He knew and loved mushrooms, and from the day he moved to California and bought his small farm, mushrooms were his life. "Goddamn, let's get a viggle on!" was his unvarying exhortation to his foreman and minuscule labor force. Joe's transition from professor to mushroom farmer made sense to Art, who used to announce with regularity that students were just m e mushrooms: "Keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em shit." Behind the houses, up against the cut-back hillside, Art kept the mushroom compost cooking in enormous piles thirty feet long and ten feet high. Consisting of racehorse manure trucked from the Santa Anita track down south mixed with straw, the cooking compost gave off a rich, steaming air that permeated everything. The idea and reality of compost lay heavy over our lives. Mushrooms grow in compost. Joe's houses were two-story affairs, with two wooden mushroom beds on each level in two long rows, an alley on either side and down the middle between the beds. The upper floor consisted of two-by-ten running boards laid down over two-by-four cross-pieces. To fill the upper mushroom beds with compost, we ran wheelbarrows heaped with the burning-hot, steaming stuff into doors that opened onto the upper level in the back of each house, balancing along the mming boards, trying desperately not to steer the too-heavy loads off the boards and onto the cement floor ten feet below. Each m with a compost-filled wheelbarrow took every bit of teenage strength we had. Each day left our bodies wrung, our clothes and hair and pores dense with the rich feel and smell of horse shit and fermented straw.

32

REFLECTIONS

We pitchforked the compost into the beds, leveled it, broadcast mushroom spawn over it, and then covered that with an inch of sterile dirt. Almost at once, it seemed, mushrooms emerged, and when they were firm, creamy unopened buttons, those of us with the proper skill harvested them. Harvesting took place whenever a crop came on, whether two o'clock in the afternoon or two o'clock in the morning. To harvest, you worked the beds in the dark, carrying a small trouble light with a bare bulb that you hung over the bed where you were working and snipping the mushroom stalks with a little curved knife. The rest of the mushroom house was an unlit, drenched blackness in which, when you were picking alone in the predawn, sounds whispered and rustled. In those solitary hours, of which I spent many, the mushrooms would sometimes begin to dance, to tiptoe back and forth in mushroom chorus lines at the edges of the light and scurry about in the dark. I was one of the only part-timers allowed to harvest alone, a distinction that weighed heavily upon my young shoulders. When a house was harvested and the mushrooms trucked off to markets, we pitchforked all the dirt and compost back into wheelbarrows and wheeled it out of the houses. We scraped the boards of each bed and cleaned and hosed each house spotless, and then Art steamed the house at frantically high temperatures to lulleverything so that no mycogyny would corrupt the next crop. When the house was sterile, we brought new compost in and began the cycle again. Art was a tough, brash, loud, friendly trouble-seeking, short, dark, big-bellied guy in his mid-twenties from Bakersfield, proudly of Italian extraction. At frequent intervals he would pull up his frlthy white T-shirt to show us a knife scar that angled up the width of his prominent hirsute belly. The other guy he'd swear, ended up at the bottom of a Central Valley irrigation canal. He'd laugh, his black eyes twinkling with the memory. "You pussies think you're tough?" he'd shout when Joe wasn't around, looking from one to the other of us, though never at Tornmy. For Art it was as if Tornmy didn't really exist. Only Tomrny was exempt from the teasing and

MUSHROOM NIGHTS

33

endless banter. When someone else spilled a wheelbarrow, Art's outrage knew no bounds and we'd hear about it all day. When Tommy lost control of a load, which often happened, Art looked the other way. Our families and ancestry were fair game for Art's obscene critiques, but not Tommy's. It was as if the foreman and Tommy walked through different dimensions of mushroom-farm time and space. Gordon was a soundless @antin his forties, six-feet-four and broad shouldered, who lived in a separate, slow world from the rest of us. He'd spent time in prison for accidentally killing his brother when he was much younger and had in some mysterious way contracted sleeping sickness, which Art preferred to call "brain fever." Immune to Art's sarcasm and most other stimuli from the outside world, Gordon walked and worked with a focus far away from us, speaking only once in a great while to utter a sudden, shocking obscenity apropos of nothing and then lapse back into himself. If Gordon forgot to take his pills, a frequent occurrence, he would fall asleep in unanticipated places and at odd times. Often, I would arrive at the farm very early to find Gordon asleep in a rickety chair in the tiny office-coffee room, his forehead resting on a coffee mug so that when I leaned and shouted in his ear, "Gordon, wake up and take your pills!" he would jerk upward with a grunt and a deeply indented circle in the middle of his forehead. One day Gordon fell asleep leaning unnoticed in the dark against a mushroom bed and was steamed by Art along with the rest of the house, coming out hours later a deep red but otherwise seemingly unaffected. Art liked to keep things stirred up if he could. After I got into a fight at a high-school dance, the last real fistfight of my life, Art went out of his way to seek out and hire Larry, my antagonist in the brawl. Catching me alone, Art would wlusper, "Larry says you fight like a pussy." Then he'd say the same to Lany. To Art's infinite disgust, he found that Larry and I had already formed one of those manly teenage friendships that grow out of bloodying each other's noses. The fact that we'd both been dragged from the gym

34

REFLECTIONS

and pounded by deputy sheriffs' nightsticks right after pounding each other cemented the new bond. When Art saw his plan fail, he fired Larry since he hadn't needed an additional worker anyway. Tommy and I were friends to a degree. "Bananas," he would solemnly advise me as he studied my skinny frame. Bananas, he promised, would provide bulk. Under his tutelage, I ate bananas and drank concoctions of raw eggs and protein powder and milklaying a cholesterolfoundation to last a lifetirne-and lifted weights obsessively at school. But despite raw eggs and bananas and weights, I couldn't convince my muscles to look like Tommy's, and despite our tenuous friendship, there was a distance between him and the rest of the world that, like everyone else, I couldn't bridge. Tommy didn't trust the big world and he didn't fit into the small world of our town. The harder he tried the more obvious it was. Some of us liked him and worried about him and watched over him as much as we were capable of, shackled by our innate self-interest, but he was a conspicuous fish in the wrong pond. At work, able to lift or carry twice as much as any of us, he would stumble and trip, drop his pitchfork to the floor below, spill his wheelbarrow full of compost, and in the end get less accomplished than anyone except Pat, the boss's son. School was worse. Atascadero was a white and brown town. Hispanic families had been there first, generations before when the whole valley had been stolen from the Churnash Indians and given out as land grants by Spanish rulers. Those families remained, though landless and impoverished now, their descendants blending more or less harmoniously with the whites who had come later. Darker-skinned men and women from Mexico worked in the fields and lived like familiar passing shadows on the verges of our community. But Tommy was neither white nor brown, and we, his peers, had grown up throwing mock bombs while shouting "Bombs over Tokyo!" on the playground. The town had no context for Tommy. And there was an edge to him that people couldn't get around, a tautness behind his constant smile and friendly eyes that made you think of the way a golf ball snaps apart when you cut to its tightly wound center. In a school with a

MUSHROOM NIGHTS

35

graduating class of seventy, our coaches were desperate for anyone who could bounce or carry or throw a ball or pin an opponent. Things were so desperate that the ninety-five-pound state wrestling champ was pressed into service as football quarterback and promptly got smashed by a two-hundred-pound linebacker from Paso Robles. Basketball players were expected to also be wide receivers and third basemen. But the coaches ignored Tommy, the finest physical specimen to ever grace our school. He didn't volunteer and he wasn't invited. He went to classes and to work at the mushroom farm and home, friendly to everyone but friends with almost none. At lunch he sat with one or two of us from the mushroom farm and said nothing. He was never taunted or teased. Once Joe pressed Tommy into service picking mushrooms. No one else was available and the job was too big for just me; a whole house had come on at once and the hobies had to be harvested and shipped between evening and morning. It was to be one of those all-night jobs and Joewas desperate. Harvesting mushrooms is a delicate task. Day or night, you work in the dark, carrying your trouble light with you to hang over the immediate spot where you're picking so that it illuminates a few round feet of shadowy forms. Beyond the small circle of light everything is black. Within that circle you must pick only those mushrooms that are ready: full capped but not yet open, exactly as they're found in the market. You must not touch the cap of the mushroom but rather slide your small, curved knife to the base of the stem and snip it off, lifting the mushroom from below in a single motion and placing it gently in the same little box in which it will travel to the store. If you touch the mushroom cap you bruise it and it's worthless. You must do all this at a frenetic pace. Tommy and I worked opposite each other on different sides of the same mushroom beds, the circles of our lights just intersecting. In that surreal light, Tommy's face took on angular shadows and sharp planes that today make me think of an actor in a Noh play, a comparison I did not have back then. Back then his face was just strange and a bit frightening each time I glanced up, and mine

36

REFLECTIONS

must have been the same to him. We worked for a long time in silence. From his fumbling, I knew that many of Tommy's mushrooms would be bruised and Joe would be furious. Realizing that Tommy was rushing to keep up with me, I slowed my pace, knowing Joe would be livid about that as well. Around one in the morning I paused and looked up to find Tommy staring at me across the silhouetted tops of mushrooms. "You're different," he said. I didn't reply, waiting for him to explain himself. Difference was the ultimate fear of my teen years, of everyone's as far as I could tell. None of us wanted to be different. Difference marked you as a target, neutralized defenses. "Your eyes," he said finally. "They're like mine." It took a moment for me to realize he meant that my eyes were almond shaped like his, not as extreme perhaps but definitely different. We had known each other for seven or eight months, and he had never mentioned it before. I'd been harassed throughout grade school with chants of "Ching chong, Chinaman," but my scl-toolmates had long since stopped noticing or at least commenting. "How come?" he asked. I hesitated and then explained that I was part American Indian, that my eyes came from my father's Choctaw world. Choctaw or Cherokee meant nothing to Tommy,but "Indian" reptered. Tommy hadn't known that about me because, like almost everyone else, he had never been to my house to meet my family, and since no one talked to him at school, he hadn't heard it through the grapevine. We were a rather notoriously poor family of nine kids living on the very edge of the town, next to the river, and of my friends only Glen, who was also part Indian, had ever come to my house. I had suffered for years from a tormented consciousness of my family's "differencef' from everyone else in the town, and had worked hard to erase that difference in the world I lived in each moming when I left our squalid shack of a home. I did not want to hear my difference articulated by the shadowy mask of my friend. Except for the muscles, I realize now, I did not want to be like him.

MUSHROOM NIGHTS

37

"But you're okay" he said. And in his statement I heard more question and wonder than confirmation. He wasn't telling me I was okay; he was asking how I managed to fit in, to live with it, to fend off the kinds of razor-edged doubts that worked beneath his skin. I had no response. I didn't feel "okay," but I also knew that, for reasons I couldn't fathom, Tommy lived in a world infinitely removed from whatever that word implied. In not being okay I was a rank amateur compared to Tommy, and as I saw him lower his gaze and reach awkwardly for another mushroom I felt saved in some strange kind of way. Somehow my being saved seemed connected to Tommy's not being. The last thing he said that night was, "I've screwed up a lot, but I'm not going to screw up any more." I stopped waiting for him after that and was soon cutting mushrooms several yards away seeing his fumbling light in the distance. When one day at the mushroom farm Tommy announced he had a date for the Girl's League Formal, we were ecstatic for him. His date was a year younger and very pretty. I never knew if Tommy had been too shy to ask a girl out or if he'd tried without success, but as far as any of us knew he had not even talked to a girl in our school since transferring in. We thought this was a breakthrough. For the Girl's League Formal, girls asked boys. I was going with Becky Hogue, a cheerleader who had been foolish enough to ask me, and my thoughts were on the old, yellowing dinner jacket my brother had left behind. We were all happy for Tommy on the day of the formal, when he came by to show off his rented tuxedo. Miles behind Tommy in the ways of the world, I was planning on knocking off work in time to shower and put on my brother's toobig jacket and slacks before picking up poor Becky and had just come out of House Number Two when Tommy drove up in the mushroom farm's van. Because he didn't have a car, he had arranged with Pat to borrow the Volkswagen van in which Hobie Joe delivered mushrooms. With several hours to go before the formal, Tommy was obviously enjoying his fine clothes and wheels. Joe

38

REFLECTIONS

was out of town for a couple of days, and what neither Tommy nor the rest of us knew was that Pat had not told his father about the loan of the van. None of us called our boss Hobie Joe to his face. Art, who roared with delight at being called Art the Wop, had originated the owner's name, but even he was careful to keep it sotto voce. None of us would have wanted to hurt Joe's feelings, because despite his bitterly low wages and constant exhortations to work harder and get a wiggle on, he was a wonderful boss. On hot days he would lug out ice-cold six-packs of Brew 102, the cheapest beer on the market but a gft that made us his slaves since none of us was old enough to drink legally And one day he took me aside and offered to pay for my entire college education if I would apply to a major university, an offer that left me fully speechless and stuns me even to this day--one I didn't know how to accept at the time since college wasn't in my plans. But like Art, Joe treated Tommy differently becoming cautious around him in a way everyone could see, as if Tommy might do something unpredictable and therefore dangerous. It was clear that Joedidn't trust Tommy, and perhaps Pat was right in not telling his father about the loan of the van. Maybe Pat deserved credit we never gave him for an act of generosity none of us would have expected or perhaps matched, even a bit of courage in deceiving his father for Tommy's sake. Tommy had not approached any of the rest of us for the loan of a car, probably because he suspected he'd be disappointed. I know that, despite how much I liked Tommy, I would not have handed over to him the '57 Chevy my brother had left in my care even if I had not planned to use it myself that night. Today, many years later, the thought of Tommy in that too-powerful car is frightening. When he came by on the day of the formal, Tommy was more excited and animated than I had ever seen him, and he was careful to keep his distance from our compost aromas while he laughed at our banter. The last vision any of us had of Tommy was of him in his tuxedo laughing and waving through the Volkswagen window as he drove away from the great oak trees surrounding

MUSHROOM NIGHTS

39

the farm, heading in the late afternoon sunlight to pick up his date for dinner. Whereas I was taking Becky to a local chicken restaurant (where I would not have enough money to pay the bill and we would flee in ignominy), Tommy was taking his date to Morro Bay, a dashing seafood town twenty miles away over a pass in the coast range. What happened next is just a story, third-hand and therefore even more unreliable than memory. They say Tommy had bolstered his courage with Southern Comfort before picking up his date, though none of us suspected that when he came by the mushroom farm. On the twisting highway over the coast range, he lost control of the van and rolled it onto its side. With the girl unhurt but screaming hysterically, Tommy clambered out a window and lifted the smashed vehicle back onto its wheels. Leaving the terrified girl in the van, he hitchhiked to Morro Bay and called Pat. Fearing his father's wrath, Pat phoned the police to report the van stolen. A Highway Patrol car had already found the damaged van with the sobbing girl and was taking her home when the report went out. Upon coming home, Joe was properly outraged and justified in all his previous suspicions of Tommy. Pat, to my knowledge, never confessed and left the next year for the University of Chcago. Becky went to Brigham Young University, married a Mormon, and had many children, while I went to work in a can factory in Hayward. We never saw or heard of Tomrny Outhouse again.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Hunter S Dance

I was halfway across the Black River on a perfect, early summer day, thigh deep in the easy current and letting my vision drift thoughtlessly up the grass of the opposite bank. Ponderosa pines laid dark, wavering lines on the canyon slope, and in the bright noon sunlightbetween two oblong shadows my eyes stopped on a doe and a coyote fighting for the life of a new-born fawn. With the breeze in my direction and the utter focus of this life-battle, neither deer nor coyote noticed me a couple hundred feet away h the water. Upright on precarious hind legs, the whitetail doe sparred with the coyote, jabbing spindly forelegs at his retreating face. Behind the deer, a miniscule spotted fawn lay tightly against a big log, pushing itself as far into the crease between log and earth as it could get, doing precisely what its mother had ordered. The coyote feinted and dodged and retreated as the doe advanced in her awkward, fencing stance. And then, when he had lured her sufficiently far from the fawn, he suddenly raced around her and slashed at the baby, ripping a gash along the tiny neck and shoulder before the mother could wheel and drive him away. Once more he teased the doe until she again was too far from her newborn, whereupon he dove and slashed and retreated. I knew I should do nothing, told myself sternly to just turn away. A voyeur, I should not even be watching this casual death,

THE HUNTER'S DANCE

47

should not transform the uncomplicated reality of this thing into a dreadful aesthetic. This was a reality beyond anything I could judge or affect. For more time than I could comprehend, coyotes had taken new fawns from their mothers. The winter and spring had been particularly wet, and forage was rich and thick. Nature had responded to plenty with plenty, and rabbits were everywhere, coveys of quail exploding from every chokecherry and wild-grape thicket, wild turkeys flocking with crowds of scurrying clucks. All over the White Mountain Apache reservation on this trip I'd seen does with late-born fawns, sometimes twins. The abundant coyotes, like the large, dark male on the hillside above, were fat and sleek. The vignette I was witnessing had taken place uncountable times and would, God willing, take place uncountable more times long after I was compost. Maybe it was my anthropocentric conviction that the coyote was grinrung, enjoying the game it surely could not lose as it teased the doe away from the fawn. Maybe it was the fact of the mother's desperate courage in facing the formidable coyote, that complication by a mother's instinct of the clean line between predator and prey. Or perhaps it was just an inexcusable human weakness, blindness, or selfishness that converted everything into personal sigruficance. For whatever reason, I banged my aluminum fly-rod case loudly against a rock in the middle of the stream, leaving a sharp dent in the tube and a crass metallic noise echoing in the otherwise silent canyon. Coyote and deer paused and turned toward me and then in an instant both were gone, vanished over opposite sides of the low ridge. As quickly as I could with a heavy backpack, I waded out of the river and climbed up to the log. Slashed deeply in several places, the fawn, perhaps hours old, was in shock and doomed there in the hot sun. Already, flies buzzed around the hardening blood that covered its spotted sides. Already, the eyes were glazed. I walked away, feeling utterly stupid and impotent. The doe, I knew, would never return, traumatized as she was not only by her battle but perhaps even more by my sudden, awful presence. The

42

REFLECTIONS

coyote, who like all coyotes considered man merely a temporary inconvenience, would return and enjoy the meal he'd earned. I would hike out to my truck and drive to the little town of Alpine, an elk-hunting town two hours away, for the burger I always bought in the same cafe on my way back to Albuquerque after each hip down to the river. The doe, with such fawn loss undoubtedly programmed into her genetic code, would very likely bear again and try again to preserve the small life given to her. More fawns would fall prey to the same coyote, who looked to be in his prime. The day before, my fourth day on the small river, I had fished upstream from my camp, walking, wading, and casting, allthought and energy focused on reading water and catching fish, so that when I finally noticed the sun declining above the deep canyon I was three or four miles from my tent. I turned and began to retrace my steps, casting indifferentlyhere and there just to see my brown and gray fly touch perfect pools and eddies. I'd already kept two rainbow trout for dinner and released many others, and I had no great interest in catching more fish. I'd waked maybe a quarter of a mile when I saw the first lion tracks. Nearly as large as my outstretched hand, they were superimposed over the boot tracks I'd left as I meandered upstream, their softly rounded and surprisingly deep imprints looking precise and quite deliberate.As I tracked myself back toward camp, it became clear that the cougar had tracked me for over two miles, stepping where I'd stepped. Since I'd moved very slowly for those miles, stopping and casting and catching and releasing trout, studying currents and shadowy riffles, the cat must have moved just as slowly, must have stalked and toyed with me from a discreet distance, pausing where I paused, watching me with the same intensity I had watched the dark water, perhaps cocking an ear toward the splashing fish I magically drew from the stream. All cats are curious, including mountain lions, and the cougar might have just found me an interesting anomaly, an entertaining spectacle worth wasting a couple of hours on. It might have been a fairly young cat who had not seen a man before and was intrigued.

THE HUNTER'S DANCE

43

But most likely given the realpolitik of nature, the cougar was contemplating me as dinner. Much evidence has taught us that the great cats have little difficulty placing humans within their spectrum of viable meals. Mountain lions, a naturalist friend had told me, have evolved canine teeth designed to fit precisely into the interstitial spaces between the vertebrae of deer just over the medulla oblongata, bringing a quick and efficient death. Would the same fit work the same inevitable magic upon my neck, I wondered? I felt strangely flattered to imagine myself thus accepted into a cougar's world, to be granted such a place of respect along with the deer and elk. But then, had the lion elected to sample my flavor I undoubtedly would have felt less flattered, and perhaps, I had to admit, I was still walking toward my camp precisely because I was not sufficiently part of that world. Perhaps I had been spared because unlike those other creatures I had lost my rightful place. Or, finally, maybe it was nothing more complicated or subtle than the nine-foot graphite fly rod that saved me, a strange, waving antenna the cat was not predisposed to mess with. Two hours after I left the dying fawn, I was driving back toward New Mexico, up the spine of the White Mountains, pondering what had taken place. What kind of god, I wondered, would decree that coyotes should live by the horrific death of a creature just hours old, by the pain of a mother incapable of protecting her young? What kind of moral universe decreed that countless millions of animals must experience terror and shrieking pain in the beaks and jaws of other animals, every day every hour, everywhere, until the natural state of the earth, it seemed, must be a single unending shriek of pain? The same god that caused the cougar, that magnificent creature of sinewy tendon and killing instincts, to contemplate me as sustenance, potential energy to drive those killing muscles. There's nothing like a sudden awakening to the fact that you are part of the food chain to cast a new light on things. And not a few human beings have had the privilege of actually being eaten by mountain lions.

44

REFLECTIONS

In long retrospect, I ask other questions. What kind of god would decree that on my way back from the river I should stop in Alpine for a hamburger made of the ground flesh of a cow raised for that purpose, hormone fed and fattened in muddy feedlots, crowded into stockyards with eyes gouged out by jostling horns, and finally lined into slaughterhousefactories to be killed with the sounds and smells of myriad other deaths in its ears and nostrils? For five days I had camped on the river, catching trout every day and releasing most, but each day selecting two or three fish to kill and cook for dinner. What god gave those trout lives into my hands? What kind of angry god has put so many lives at the disposal of others, the multitudinous rabbits mere grain for the predators? Is there a code to govern such infinite and necessary deaths, values by which we live and make die? It is in the end the awful beauty of the dance of deer and coyote that I remember best from that summer day. The maphcent, futile courage of the doe, precarious on hind feet and jabbing hooves, and the luring, masterful control of the coyote. A pas de deux of death on one hand and a mere coyote lunch on the other. A pain so great it seems even today to rend the air I breathe, but whose pain? A fearful, perfect symmetry. My own minuet with mountain lion strikes me as a passing grace, a brief moment of near acceptance, a question unanswered. I grew up hunting. We were a poor family of nine children, and the little income our father could make as a ranch hand or truck driver did not go far. The year I entered the University of California, 1968, his total income was three thousand dollars. Before I was old enough to carry a rifle, he made his living and ours hunting in the forests and swamps along the Yazoo River in Mississippi the way his Choctaw ancestors always had. We children would wake up each morning to coon slum tacked to a shed wall to dry, and there would be alligator sandwiches about which no one spoke. Later, in California at eight years old, I killed my first bird with a slingshot, watching as a small, round stone crushed the back of a thrush's head and the bird fell with a soft, dead weight. I had no conscious

THE HUNTER'S DANCE

45

purpose in killing the thrush and could never, to save my childish soul, have explained why I did so, tossing the bird carelessly into the brush afterwards. Hindsight today tells me that my purpose that day was the same purpose that drives a kitten to stalk and tumble a feather or strand of yarn. Like the kitten, I was practicing to be a serious killer when my time came. I had selected my amrnunition carefully and stalked the thrush with all the skill I could muster, making no sound, blending with the surrounding manzanita and scrub oak until I was close. Not long after the thrush, I owned a BB gun and brought death to sparrows, linnets, bluejays, quail, and doves and a sad number of other birds and lizards. We ate the quail and doves, and sometimes the other birds as well, but most of my killing was a terrible, harsh wastefulness for which I am ashamed these years later, practice killing that would enrage me were I to witness it today. Then my brother, two years older, and I both acquired 2 2 rifles, and we hunted rabbits, putting to use the skills we had honed on small birds. We were now real hunters, and every day during the proper season we brought home rabbits, often five each day--shot through the head, gutted and skinned where they died-and our family ate them, often having no other food in the house. After school and on weekends and during summers, we worked the tomato and beet fields and bucked hay and built fences on ranches and with our earnings bought shotguns and deer rifles. Then we hunted quail and doves the right way, and bandtail pigeons, and deer, bringing everythinghome to be eaten. A handful of quail was a snack, a harvest of pigeons a family dinner; a deer, of which there were many, lasted longer even in our hungry house. We stalked and devoured the world around us, hunting and killing and eating, wasting nothing during those more mature years. Not once did I feel the killing I did was wrong; it was as thoughtless and natural as plucking an apple from a tree. Furthermore, my brother and I had crucial roles within the family. We provided sustenance from hillside and brushy river bottom. For a while as a teen I hunted with a bow, a fifty-fiire-pound Bear recurve that constituted my only gesture toward sport hunting. I

46

REFLECTIONS

stopped, however, when one day I pinned a rabbit to a tree and watched the little thing spin in crying circles around the arrow shaft. Rabbits do cry in pain, and deer do scream. If you've heard either, you do not forget, and you never want to hear such a thing again. To shoot and eat a rabbit was proper and necessary. But to inflict unnecessary pain and the horror that came with it was wrong and immoral. I have not hunted, have not shot an animal, since I left home for college and, while I was away my mother sold all my guns. It wasn't malicious or even thoughtless; the family with six children still at home, simply needed money in a hurry as was often the case. But my mother's act changed my life, no doubt. Perhaps I would have stopped hunting anyway given the different world I was entering. In college I knew no one else who hunted, knew no one who did not think hunting was a barbaric act, no one who could understand how a family might not be able to live without killing and eating the wild animals around them. This was the late '60s, early '70s, and we were all supposed to love life in a flowery sort of way to enjoy bean curd and sprouts, to abjure killing and embrace free love, an exchange I was quite willing to make. A small-town kid cast into an alien world, I would not have tried to impress my values upon my new friends even if I had thought success possible. Who was I to defend a way of life I had never questioned or even pondered? Very likely I would have drifted away from hunting anyway but without guns that possible drift became a definite destination. After college I became a wilderness ranger for the U.S. Forest Service in the North Cascades, where, during the fall, I patrolled the high hunt, that anomalous season in which men climbed on horseback into the high country, above timberline, to kill deer and bear and mountain goats. During the high hunt I saw the dark underbelly of killing for sport, killing done by men for no other purpose than the killing itself. I was awakened in my tent one morning by a too-close rifle shot and crawled outside to find a gutshot bear cub squalling heart-breakingly a few yards beyond my

THE HUNTER'S DANCE

47

camp, a Seattle hunter nearby with his expensive scoped rifle. The bear cub was not legal game, but the cub had to be dispatched. The man had wanted a bearskin, and the little cub had looked immense to his urban eyes, the same eyes that had failed to notice my blue tent near his target. In Seattle the man dined on much better fare than bear meat, and the fine he paid for his error did not affect his life-style. On another day I found two hunters at the end of a trail, preparing to climb into their truck with the head, horns, and cape of a mountain goat. The rest of the goat had been left behind, in violation of the law, because the hike out had been difficult and they had no interest in the meat. They wanted the trophy and could easily purchase much better cuisine than stringy goat flesh. Nobody, one of the men explained, really eats that stuff. Eons before, a man might have greatly valued a bearskin or a mountain goat's head and horns and might have honored and even danced with such a signifier-in an act much like love-to demonstrate h~ ability to provide for his family and community, and his gratitude to the animal that had given itself to him so generously. But somewhere along the generations, the thing that signaled a man's ability to provide, and that man's kinship with the natural world, had become merely a trophy, a meaningless signher of destruction. One afternoon during that same season, deep inside that same Cascade wilderness, I had looked up to find a cougar poised on the crest of a snow ridge above me, her soft gold outlined against a deep blue sky. The cat studied me a hundred feet below her, ponderous and awkward with my seventy-pound pack, her face a study in concentration. Obviously she had paused in midstride, having seen me just before I saw her, and it seemed equally obvious that certain questions were playing in her cat mind. Aware of possible problematic answers to such questions and in no mood to be dined upon, I raised my ice axe high above my head to suggest that I was someone of significance, a creature of dimension too great to be toyed with. After holding me in her quiet regard for what seemed minutes but must have been seconds, she turned and vanished with great digruty over the ridgeline. Unlike those city

48

REFLECTIONS

hunters, with their gut-shot bear cub and wasted mountain goat, the cougar had no need for a trophy and understood her world perfectly. She had granted me the consideration due something foreign and potentially valuable or dangerous, and after due regard had gone on with the serious business of life, leaving me standing absurdly alone in the mountains with ice axe aloft. If the encounter had gone differently, she might well have killed and eaten me with only the slightest difficulty, and her action would have been proper and correct from any objective point of view not my own. Unlike that lion, the trophy hunters had no place in the moral world of the Cascade wilderness, or in any moral world. In her regard such killers would have been a mere corruption of the earth.

Today I live in the Manzano Mountains in New Mexico, on an edge of the Cibola National Forest. A dozen yards beyond our kitchen window hangs a bird feeder beneath which cottontail rabbits come to graze on bluejay spillings.Some mornings four or five of the plump cottontails crowd one another beneath the feeder, and I tease my daughters with the possibility that one weekend when I'm alone I'll go into competition with the owls and hawks and coyotes and bobcats and foxes and I'll eat those juicy bunnies. My daughters, who have had pet bunnies playing in their bedrooms, become only mock angry because they know I won't really kill and eat the rabbits. They don't know me as a hunter. That was another life. In all the time they've known me, I've killed nothing, not even a gopher. But the truth is that I simply cannot look at those cottontails without imagining them frymg in butter, lightly floured, delicious. It's hard to shake old habits of thought, old instincts born of necessity. My daughters are right, of course; I won't eat the wild pets that feed and frolic outside our windows. I don't need to. We have chicken in the freezer, ground beef for the burgers we have once a month or so, a round steak to chop up when green chile stew is

THE HUNTER'S DANCE

49

necessary, tofu for those difficult dinners-all from a local grocery. When not backpacking, I fly-fish with barbless hooks in trophy trout waters and release every fish because I'm told I must (not because I think it is a morally superior act), and I buy cod and salmon from the market. But still, I have a running argument with my wife and daughters. If we are not to be vegetarians, I argue, we should raise chickens so that we don't have to buy chickens or eggs from a store. Perhaps I should take up deer hunting again, I suggest, maybe elk or antelope as well. We are irresponsible, I argue, letting others do the killing for us. Worse than irresponsible, immoral, for by subsidizing the meat industry we subsidize the most horrific forms of cruelty. As a child and teen I worked on clucken ranches and I know those places where cluckens are raised a hundred thousand at a time in long, dark buildings, fed hormones and antibiotics, never allowed sunlight, never allowed to know any life except a brief, dank prelude to death. With cattl-reatures I have helped brand, castrate, dehom, and butcher-it is worse. And with the intelligent pig it is worse still on the massive hog farms where they live in squalor and vilely pollute the environment prior to their squealing factory deaths. If we raised chickens the way my family did when I was a child, they could roam and scratch in the dirt, flirt with one another, fight, worry about hawks and bobcats, make love, and live full chicken lives until the day they became food for us. We would grant them dignity and they would feed us, a satisfactory exchange. If I hunted deer, the animals would live their lives in full dimension up to the moment those lives ceased, and I would once again join the ranks of the cougar and coyote, and now, in the Southwest, the reintroduced Mexican gray wolf, as a predator. Together we would ensure our mutual dignity the deep regard of hunter and hunted. Surely my bullet would be quicker than the coyote's slashing canines, and while it would be more human, it would certainly be no more humane, for is it possible to think that nature has not, over countless millennia, prepared the deer to meet its coyote or cougar death, or readied the rabbit for the owl? Such death must be sacramental, a matter of mutual

50

REFLECTIONS

knowledge and profound respect. How else may the owl or bobcat find the rabbit except by way of the most complete knowledge possible, and what is knowledge if not respect? What is such complete knowledge and respect but a kind of love? There is no angry god out among the trees and beside the streams where deer walk and wait for the cougar. The Creator can have no shame even in the face of a futile, heroic struggle of a doe for the life of her fawn. True understanding does not bring a metal fly-rod case down on a rock to shatter the most natural reciprocity between predator and prey. This is my body nature says, this my blood. A necessary agony and resurrection in sinew and leaf. He who loves this world is, in heart, a tracker and hunter, can be nothing else.

CHAPTER FIVE

In the Service ofForests

Moonless midnight on a project fire in the mountains outside of Tucson. Two guys in yellow Nomex shirts and hard hats studying the uphill slope, watching for flaming pineapples; fifteen hotshots with piss-pumps, shovels, and pulaskis spread out up and down the south side of the canyon chasing spots in the dark and pretending to mop up, their headlamps bobbing; three of us with chain saws cutting down burning oaks, flamethrowers, taking turns. The night is utterly black except for the dim, erratic headlamps and the red eyes of glowing hotspots here and there on the canyon sides where the coals of an oak will bum all night. In its fifth day, smoke from the fire has cut off the stars and lies in a heavy blanket just above our heads. The raw, burned-over black mountains are so steep you can't stand except on game trails and in the bowls around trees, each canyon dropping to a dry sand wash. Vietnam vet helicopter pilots, with grinning, sweating faces focused on something far away, have been screaming up the canyons each eveningjust before dark, banking as close as possible to rock faces and the blackened skeletons of trees, to wheel and spin and drop us and vanish, laughing. To them it's just a new kind of war with nobody shooting, and soon the casualty rate will climb so high from crashes that the Forest Service will consider banning vets from the controls of their helicopters and borate bombers. At

52

REFLECTIONS

midnight it's blistering hot and the fire that sprinted through here during daylight still lingers in the scorched air and sizzling, blackened dirt and rocks that bum through gloves. Hot spots flare now and then in intermittent red and yellow flame against the black canyon side when the night breeze licks at them. The live oaks are hollow, and the fire has gotten inside many of them to bum invisibly just waiting for all the hotshot crews and prison crews and smoke jumpers and helattack crews to go home so it can come out secretly and blast the desert mountains yet again. It's our job to probe for such secret fires, expose their bright hearts and subdue them. In a normal world, a world not overrun by proliferating humanity with all its needs, fires would bum through these dry mountains every few years, keeping the brush and small growths down so that such trees as these once lovely oaks were spared. But a century of fire suppression has built up a massive fuel load everywhere, in every forest and brushy desert in America, so that any fire will explode lethally instantly surfeited and monstrous, paradoxically burning everything because there is so much to bum. Fires are greedy and will take what is there unless kept small. Nature's fires, given freely and often by lightning, were meant to be delicate things, just lapping at the fragde growth that had appeared since the previous delicate fire, their tongues too frad to do more than touch an oak or pine trunk before passing on. But man has created forests where delicate fires gorge and grow immense within minutes or hours and then howl like banshees from canyon to ridge, ridge to valley. Desert mountain fires have surprises not found elsewhere. Rattlesnakeshave crawled deep into the earth to survive but climb back to the warm surface once the fire passes. They wait in cool spots under the edges of rocks where the flame hasn't reached, the kinds of places that look good for sitting during breaks and the kinds of places also favored by the small, poisonous amber scorpions of this country. Yuccas bum through, the first explosion of wildfire searing off the leaves, and then, once the fire has moved to a distant ridgeline, the slow moldering bum that remains eating

IN THE SERVICE OF FORESTS

53

steadily through the roots until what is left is the round body of the yucca that, once freed, becomes a rolling, bounding, leaping ball of flame careening down the mountainside. We call them pineapples. The mountains outside of Tucson grow many yuccas, and the night was spectacular with reckless balls of flame. The finest moment that night, the picture you never forget, came when Rich Dent caught fire. When you cut into a hollow oak, letting a rush of oxygen into the burning center, flame explodes into the night, sometimes shooting four-foot tongues of fire into the dark. It was Rich's turn, and Joe and I stood back, our saws on the ground beside us, watching him cut. We called ourselves spotters, watching for an unexpected shift or twist in the tree, for anything surprising and therefore dangerous. In reahty we'd all been cutting so long we didn't need a spotter, but it was better if one cut and two watched. Good enough for government work, we said. The live oaks were small, seldom more than a foot through and twenty feet high. Felling them was a simple affair complicated by only two factors. One was balance and, therefore, trajectory. The twisting branches and the black night made it difficult to calculate which way a tree's weight lay and therefore which way it might want to fall, regardless of where we put the cuts. The other factor was internal fire. Some trees held no fire, while others were flaming bombs waiting to explode. The only way to find out was to cut. Rich cut into fire and for a moment was outlined in flame, holding a chainsaw stitched in flame where the gas and oil had ignited, his wiry body torqued and etched in a brilliant border of flame. For an instant he was made a dazzling star against the utterly black night, and then he threw the saw and stepped out of the fire sign into darkness, unburned and unhurt. The Prescott Hotshots had been on quite a few fires that season, and each one was special. The Tucson fire, for example, was an experiment in optics and heat. Our crew got there late, after the first lines were in, and we were sent out at night to mop up, primarily to fell the burning oaks and watch for line jumps. Because we were hotshots, an initial attack fire crew, we felt we were above

54

REFLECTIONS

mopping up. We'd been pulled off a mesa fire south of Flagstaff and rushed down to Tucson, and we resented being badly used. By night we dodged balls of incandescent fire that leapt down the canyons with trampoline-like skill, and with our chainsaws we turned blackened oaks into flaming candles that scorched the desert sky. Sometime after daylight, one of the small, fast helicopters would swoop in suddenly over a ridge top, invariably scaring the crap out of everyone, and scoop us up a few at a time to go back to the main fire camp, where we would eat breakfast and then try furiously to sleep. The temperature stayed a consistent 110°, scarcely diminishing at night and hammering the desert by day and the mesquite and pal0 verde trees cast a frail shade on the burning sand. A couple of hundred firefighters remained from the army that had rushed in from all over the West when the fire was new and threatening Tucson, and a third of these would be sprawled during the day in myriad impossible shapes on tarps beneath the sparse and spindly bushes. What we called a "convict" crew from an Arizona prison was cooking and serving meals on the Tucson fire. We worked with prison fire crews fairly often, and for the most part liked them. An inmate on such a crew had saved Joe and me from incineration on a big fire below Winslow. Our hotshot crew foreman, whose father was politically connected in the Forest Service, didn't know much about fires and compensated by strutting and bluffing. Joe was the other sawyer, a powerfully built kid of twenty, Golden Gloves champ of Arizona, gentle soul, vastly experienced on fires because his father had been a fire-control officer for the Forest Service. When we arrived in the middle of the night, the Winslow fire was crowning out, racing across ponderosa stands on the high, flat surface of the Mogollon Rim like a dancer just touching the tops of the trees in eighty-foot walls of flame. We'd backed off, waiting for new orders and watching a big Caterpillar close by trying to cut line at least a quarter of a mile from the fire. Even that far back, the fire illuminated everything with a bloody light that flared on sweaty faces and bright, teary eyes. The wind had picked up, and

IN THE SERVICE OF FORESTS

55

flaming cinders were landing everywhere, each one starting a new fire in the stone-dry forest. We all knew we had to do something pretty soon. In front of us was a stand of doghair pine, the kind of stunted, thin trees that grow close together like grass, each stem maybe three to six inches in diameter. When the foreman ordered us to cut a line through the doghair, Joe and I looked at each other. Dried out by the summer heat and the approaching fire, such a stand could go up like gasoline.Anybody who'd fought forest fires in the West very much had seen it happen. The foreman had not. Joe shook his head. "I don't think that's a good idea," he said softly. Behind us the rest of the twenty-man crew stood watching, knowing they'd be expected to follow us through the doghair and knowing they didn't want to do that. "Did I ask you what you thought?" the fat foreman shouted. "Or did I tell you to start cutting?" He looked at me, his face red in the light from my headlamp and distant flames. "You take lead," he said. I was older, not the oldest on the crew, as that honor went to another sawyer who had spent twenty years riding motorcycles and dropping acid before finding his true calling, but older than Joeand the rest of the crew. I had a graduate degree from a university and was supposed to be smart. "I don't think it's a good idea either," I said. "You ever seen what happens in that kind of stuff?" The foreman began to wave his hands. We could hear a helicopter not far away, and the Caterpillar roaring at the earth while fallers from otAer crews were dropping big trees a few hundred yards ahead of the tractor. Each falling tree seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air as it went down with a dreadful muted sound, and the smoke was thickening around us. We were a long way from the vehicles that had brought us in. Trying to decide what to say to my boss, who could easily get me fired, I glanced at the prison crew on one side of the small clearing, leaning on pulaskis and hazel hoes and shovels and alternately watching the bulldozer and our foreman. Some of the prisoners had never been

56

REFLECTIONS

on a big fire before and looked nervously interested in the outcome of the disagreement. Others looked like they were having a very good time. The head of the crew, an imposing fellow with massive chest and arms and a pale, crewcut-topped face, was watching Joe and me and the foreman, his hardhat dangling in one hand and his expression curious. The foreman was opening his mouth to shout when the head of the prison crew stepped forward. He winked at me and Joe and, without looking at the foreman, said, "If this motherfucker gives you another order of any kind, you tell me." He turned to the foreman. "These boys don't go in there, asshole," he said. The foreman gave no more orders. Five minutes after the confrontation, the stand of doghair exploded like a napalm bomb, the fireline was breached, the Caterpillar was abandoned to the flames and everyone evacuated. I was therefore predisposed to like convict crews, and the biggest, most tattooed, shave-headed, undershirted convict of all had stood at the window of the cook trailer throughout the Tucson fire, ladling out very good food with an impassive expression. Project fires were like that: lots of food, steaks and baked potatoes and fresh salads, fruit juices and sodas. After eating we spread tarps under the skeletal trees and saguaro shadows and listened to insects hum and the Infinite sunlight sizzle while trymg to sleep. For most of us that was a hopeless endeavor, but a few could sleep anywhere in any conditions. Joewas one of those. I'd seen him fall asleep while standing in chow line on the Winslow fire and drop like a downed snag. I lay there the second day of the preposterous Tucson fire, cursing night-shift mop-up and wishing I could sleep in preparation for the night work ahead. Exactly overhead, the sun was an enormous circle of white flame taking up most of the sky and insects snapped and buzzed in the pal0 verde above me. I was hnking of scorpions, because a guy on the Flagstaff crew had been stung by one that morning while trying to sleep. And I was thinking of the waves of sweat running down my face onto my neck and bare arm

I N THE SERVICE OF FORESTS

57

where my cheek rested. Absentmindedly I let my eyes roam across the scores of bodies sprawled everywhere in the faint shade. I noticed the giant convict cook standing outside the food trailer, watching us, his eyes focused on Joe, who appeared to be sleeping heavily, his head on his arm and his hard hat tilted against his face to shield his eyes. I glanced lightly at Joe and back to the cook, wondering if Joe was the cook's type. Something about the cook's expression caught me. He was transfixed upon Joe like a hunting hawk, his enormous shaved head glistening with sweat and his pale eyes unblinking. He did not look amorous as he reached a hand down beside the trailer and came up with a pulaski, that halfaxe-half-hoe fireline tool. Pausing for a moment, his eyes still fixed on my fellow sawyer, the giant cook, undoubtedly incarcerated for a crime beyond words and allowed out like tlus by a bookkeeping error, began to walk slowly toward us, aiming directly for Joe. I froze for an instant and then began to rise to shout a warning, but I was too late. The cook took three quick, silent steps and swung the pulaski. Joe woke and leapt back with a shout. Beside where Joe's hard hat lay, a headless diamondback rattler was flipping and writhing. Sometimes I think the Prescott Hotshot crew was the best time of my life. Twenty of us worked out, played horseshoes, drank great quantities of beer, and fought forest fires together. We were supposedly the only technical rock-climbing hotshot crew in the country, and therefore for three days a week, when not on fires, we practiced rock-climbing and rappelling, going to the beautiful rock of the Granite Dells outside of Prescott to climb and slide.A small, isolated tavern sat alongside the road to Jerome not far from the Dells, and at lunchtime we'd coil our ropes and repair to the bar for burgers. At first the foreman imposed rules. One beer maximum with lunch. But the foreman, I'l call him Ralph, was fond of beer. After the first couple of days he relaxed his rule. Two beers with lunch wouldn't hurt anything. And soon it became apparent that severalbeers with lunch were quite harmless. Rock-climbing after lunch began to be more exciting, so much so that most of the crew

58

REFLECTIONS

preferred to remain at the tavern with the foreman while just a few of us went back out with ropes, chocks, bongs, beeners, and climbing shoes. (My shoes had belonged to a guy who died climbing in Chile and were a gift to me from his friends.) We never used our skills on a fire, but if the occasion had arisen we could have been heroes. Firefighting was fun. Today I see yellow-shirted hotshots on the news, always on a big, dramatic wildfire, and I hear the media voices describing the miserable, dangerous work while the camera focuses on a smoke-stained and filthy face, and I laugh. Just off camera are a bunch of men and women having the time of their lives and making good money to boot. In hotshot thinking, a good fire year is one in which all the forests burn. Sure, it's dangerous, and people have died, including some of my friends, but that's not what it's all about. As a sawyer I was up front, cutting the first swath of line while a puller stood behind my shoulder pulling away the cut brush and limbs and tossing them to the side for someone else. Behind the three sawyers came the cutting and scraping squads. We could cut a ten-foot line down to mineral earth in minutes, working in controlled mania. We were efficient, good at what we did, young, excited. I went on to fight fires on a California crew and was even accepted into smoke-jumper's school in Hamilton, Montana, at which time my wife made it clear that I could be a smoke jumper or be married. Prescott, however, was the best. Twenty-five years later, I have my Prescott Hotshots fire shirt hanging in a closet, as if I might one day need it. But being a hotshot in Arizona and California wasn't really the finest experience the Forest Service offered. The finest was in the North Cascades. I came to the Cascades in 1969 to work on a trail crew. I'd been a seasonal ranger for the State Park Service in California, registering campers at San Simeon State Beach a few miles south of Hearst Castle, driving up and down the Big Sur coastline to watch sea otters surf and play, tossing bags of dye into the surf to measure the speed of the tide, and studying wind and berm crests. In the

IN THE SERVICE O F FORESTS

59

evening a couple of the other seasonal rangers and I would alter consciousnesses and swim in the outdoor pool up at the so-called Castle, gliding underwater to stare at the marble sculptures and exotic tiles and then filling my '49 Buick with illicit oranges on the way down the hill. No one was permitted to pick the fruit, by orders of William Randolph Hearst's ghost. We stole it. My college roommate had worked on a trail crew for the Forest Service in the Glacier Peak Wilderness and suggested that I join him the summer of my junior year. Joined by another friend with whom I'd grown up and gone to junior college and the University of California, I took a Greyhound bus north from Santa Barbara in late spring of '69 to work trail eighty miles or so south of the Canadian border. We carefully cut off our long hair before heading north into logging country. My father had logged in the redwoods of Northern California many years before, right after coming out from Mississippi, but I still didn't trust loggers. We'd heard stories designed to cause apprehension. I'd been in the Northwest only once before, when the same friend and I had hitched to British Columbia right out of high school on an excellent adventure. This would be different, though, because Larry my roommate, had told us stories of meadows and glaciers, bears and eagles, waterfalls and rivers so fast they rolled boulders all night. He'd shown photographs of the Cascade high country, photos in which the sun always shone on lupine meadows and glaciated peaks and sparkling alpine lakes. I'd never been in such country, the kind of world I'd seen in illustrations for Heidi, and that I'd dreamed about as a kid. The bus pulled off the highway an hour north of Seattle, and the driver opened the doors. Darrington was still thirty-five miles away up the Stillaguamish River, but no buses went any closer to the town. It had been raining steadily since we'd crossed the Oregon border the night before, and with every mile northward the rain doubled and tripled in intensity until it was pounding on the Greyhound and turning the windows into aquarium glass. We got off the bus and retrieved our duffle bags from the belly of the

60

REFLECTIONS

machine and stood rather forlornly watching the bus pull away toward Canada, flipping the corduroy collars of our Lee Storm Rider jean jackets up against the waves of rain sweeping across the valley. A hamburger stand and a gas station crouched on opposite sides of the road near the freeway ramps, and the clouds appeared to be resting like indigent whales right on the two roofs and spewing rain with casual vehemence straight at us. Above the roofs we could see only soggy clouds. The floor of the world surrounding us appeared to be a sodden green-black rising along the river to the trunks of trees eaten by clouds. I had decided on the hamburger stand when Glen stuck out his thumb and flagged down an empty log truck that came humping down off the highway. The driver was motioning to us even before the truck stopped, and when Glen climbed up and pulled the passenger door open with me on his heels, the driver grinned widely and said, "Crazier'n Catch-22, ain't it?" We'd met our first logger, Tom, who would become a good and close friend. I watched the valley narrow through the truck's windows. The clouds seemed to ride the rising slopes of mountains on either side as we moved closer to the river and climbed. Soon the trunks of big trees lined both sides of the road, the tops of the trees appearing to tear the clouds into tatters that hung in rags. Darrington was at the end of the paved road, a town of seven hundred lost souls hidden as far back as roads went in the North Cascades, a minuscule logging town hunched at the foot of Whitehorse Peak between two wild rivers, the Sauk and the Stillaguamish. More than pavement ended in Darrington. Our new friend dropped us off where he turned toward the mdl a half-mile from the ranger station. We'd shouldered our duffles and begun to walk when almost at once a pickup truck stopped and two giant human beings got out and, without a pause, asked us if we would prefer to have our hair burned off with white gas or cut with a chainsaw. The bigger one lifted a saw with a four-foot bar out of the back of the truck and jerked it to howling life for emphasis.It would be nice to say we responded with clever and biting repartee, but

IN THE SERVICE OF FORESTS

61

the truth is that we just picked up our duffles and ran toward the ranger station, thankful that the loggers chose not to pursue. Such scenes were common in Darrington, a town whose majority population shared two surnames and where outsiders, usually called "flatlanders," were an endangered species. We learned to live by stealth while in town, but since our job was to spend ten days out of every two weeks camped miles back in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, we saw little of Darrington and therefore little of the kinds of trouble possible. What we saw a great deal of was the most extravagant beauty the natural world has to offer. We lived in the attic of the district ranger station bunkhouse on days off, and the rest of the time we headed into the wilderness as part of a four-man trail crew. A string of highly intelligent and sensitive mules carried our tent, tools, and provisions, and a highly intelligent and vastly more sensitive mule skinner guided the pack string. Anyone seeing Chuck, the skinner, knew at once what was expected. No foolish talk, foolish behavior, or thoughtless expressions of any values not embraced within Chuck's philosophy. A person did his work, whatever that might be, and ate pancakes for breakfast. Diamond htches were used to lash pack boxes to mules, and diamond hitches were always tied correctly. College education might not condemn a person to hell, but such corruption required a great deal of overcoming. A trail crew member walked lightly, spoke rarely, and did what was expected without unnecessary expenditure of spoken words. When Chuck was around. Chuck, however, with his Lurnrni wife Wilrna, packed us into wherever we were going and left us there, returning with the mules-Kansas City, Rosco, Kitty and the rest-ten days later to pack us out. Within the ten days we were on our own, in a world more marvelous than any I could have imagined or invented. The rain stopped and stayed away for four months. The high country was at first an infinite space of snow-covered ridges and meadows rising up to icy black granite and glacier-bound peaks, all beneath a blue, blue sky. When the snow melted, the same country was glacier lilies and lupines and heather and then, later,

62

REFLECTIONS

huckleberries and blueberries unending. Blue lakes hid in every meadowed crease and granite fold. Marmots whistled and golden eagles rode updrafts out of the converging drainages. We worked hard, cutting windfalls with a two-man crosscut and double-bit axe, grading trail and chopping roots with pulaskies, building cedar bridges over small and large streams out of red and yellow cedar logs that might have been lying on the forest floor for fifty years. When we scraped the moss off and cut rounds with the crosscut and split the rounds with mallets and wedges, we found beauty each time. Bridges of the fresh-split cedar emitted a sacred aroma and shone like gold. We worked all day and climbed nearby peaks after our eight hours were over. Black bears grazed on blueberries near our camps and never once touched the steak and chicken and fruit we kept in snowbanks close to our tent. They were wild bears, satisfied with our presence if we behaved properly, happy to ignore and be ignored. Grouse humphed in every stand of alpine fir and mountain hemlock, and white-splashed ptarmigan raced from heather to heather. Never having heard of giardia, we drank from every stream and spring. We ate vast breakfasts, lunches, and dinners and grew into the greatest physical condition any of us would ever experience in our lifetimes. We all returned a second summer. I was working on a masters degree in English. Glen, who quickly came to be called Whistle Pig due to habits shared with the sedentary marmot, was completinga B.A in English. Digby already had his M.A. in English, and Mick had a graduate degree in biology. The other two crews contained a Ph.D. in political philosophy, a masters in urban planning, a degree in journalism, and an artist of great talent with a college degree testifymg to his talent. We were a highly educated lot who drank Jack Daniels around a fire at night and read aloud Gary Snyder'S poems about grubbing trail and logging in and near the very same wilderness. We exulted in the life we had chosen, even momentarily. After two seasons on trail crew I wanted more. I wanted to be able to keep my eyes elevated and not have to focus on the log I

IN THE SERVICE OF FORESTS

63

was cutting, the bridge I was building, the trail I was grading. I became a wilderness' ranger in my third season with the Forest Service. I had passed through one perfect world into another. I put on a uniform and a badge and a pack and began to walk through the Glacier Peak Wilderness, on trail and off trail, for days and weeks and, it turned out, years. Out five days and in two, out ten days and in four-I patrolled the river drainages and the high country,going where I chose and camping wherever I found myself. Sometimes for days on end I saw no one, walking the high ridges above the clouds, watctung a hundred Cascade peaks north into Canada and south to Mount Rainer dodge in and out of sight, camping each night by a different alpine lake. A child with eight brothers and sisters, I was utterly alone for the first time in my life for day after day and night after night in the backcountry. Solitude and silence became nonnegotiablecommodities, essential ingredients in the life I expected. I climbed glaciated peaks to radio back reports of frozen lakes to the district station forty or fifty miles away, and I sat high above the surrounding world, watching and breathing. And then one day I was ready for a different life. I got married and moved to Arizona to fight fires. After the wedding my wife's well-positioned relatives bent their heads and asked, solemnly, what I planned to dooo? In my J. C. Penney's wedding suit and my work boots, I solemnly replied that I thought I would fight forest fires for the rest of my life. And all these many years later, in a different life, I find myself dreaming of dark forests that crown out in racing flames, of small oak trees that explode like comets into the night sky, and of alpine ridges a million miles from the world. In my dreams I seek out wildfire and search for eagles that soar over granite and glacier. In my next life I will do it all over again, every single thing.

CHAPTER SIX

Ringtail Moon

I'd arrived at the Grand Canyon just at sunset, in those ancient days when you could drive along the south rim all the way to the Hermit Trail and park your '64 VW Beetle before starting down. Folks up in the park headquarters would have preferred a registered backpacker to an unregistered one like me, but it was late and I was anxious to be on my way. I'd just gotten back from a project fire on the Mogollan Rim below Winslow, the kind of summer fire that crowns out in a ponderosa forest and streaks across the night sky in eighty-foot flames, the kind that draws fire crews from all over the West and thrives on adrenalin from every quarter. The Prescott Hotshots, for whom I ran a chainsaw, had arrived at that fire around midnight and driven right into the middle of the whole damned fire carnival. I'd been vividly aware of driving into the middle of the thing because I was the one who drove. Five days of endless fireline slufts, exploding doghair-pine clusters, a lost helicopter, an abandoned and burned-over Caterpillar tractor, paper sleeping bags in camp and a few hours' sleep on black and smoking slopes, and I was ready for the quiet isolation of the Canyon. Those night walls of flame were still dancing on the backs of my retinas, the roar of chainsaws still mixed with howling and whipping of fire fed by huge winds. I needed a soundless world, a space in which walls were stable and secure, air a dependable

RINGTAIL MOON

65

source. With four days off, I headed for the Canyon, getting a late start after a day of postfire cleanup and saw-tuning around the hotshot station, but wanting to be inside the Canyon and well away from chainsaws and the smell of gas by the next sunrise. I'd parked my car, thrown my pack on, and gotten a mile down the trail by the time the sun was gone. At two miles I was stumbling in the thinning dark, more exhausted than I'd expected, with a near-vertical drop of uncertain depth to my immediate left and sheer rock an arm's length to my right. I decided to camp for the night at a three-sided stone shelter built into the rock wall beside the trail, its open face looking out into the black air above Hermit Creek a long, long way below. I could still taste the Winslow fire in my throat and smell it in my skin, and my eyes felt scorched the way they always did after a big fire. As I lay in my open mummy bag, feeling the day's heat fading into the surrounding rock, a great disc of moon began to rise over the canyon. I watched it climb until it hung there, brilliant in the cloudless sky bloated and heavy just beneath the roof edge of the shelter as if it had elbowed its way directly out of Hermit Creek. Shadows unfurled around me, and each line and crease was abruptly present, hard edged and clear. I studied the growing light with astonishment. And then a black and hairy hand appeared, groping at the end of a sinewy arm slowly down from the shelter roof, enormous, spidery fingers given full, terrifymg dimension in the great moon. For what seemed a very long time the sooty hand probed, monstrous fingers flexing toward me, and then it was gone. I lay still for a moment, listening to my heartbeat, feeling what Emily Dickinson once called "zero at the bone," and then I squirmed out of the sleepingbag and tiptoed from the shelter two steps to the trail's edge, peering up and down, fortified by pure fear. An animal scattered in the moon's shadows and I jumped. A small, wiry form with a large tail scurried away from me up the trail, and at once I understood: a ringtail, whose delicate, prehensile hand had been made abruptly monstrous by the framing moon and infinitude of canyon.

66

REFLECTIONS

A curious ringtail, a rising moon, and an exhausted warp of space and time had converged to alter the way 1 saw my world. For an instant, reality had fractured and the impossible-a grasping black hand as big as the moon-had been conceivable, full of meaning and significance and capable of reshaping a lifetime of knowledge of how the world works into something utterly new and transforming. The next morning the July heat lashed the Canyon by seven A.M., and I continued partway down the Hermit Trail, scattering a small herd of bighorn sheep who seemed to step blithely off into space at my approach, and then I left the Hermit and cut over to the Boucher Trail. Under an already pernicious sun, I squirmed down through a break in the canyon strata, where for frfty vertical feet the trail became a climber's chimney and eventually descended all the way to the side-canyon camp beside Louie Boucher Creek. The camp was a paradise where a handful of stunted trees cast shade beside the stream, and on the cliff face a few hundred feet above, a hanging waterfall dripped down whatever kind of greenery lived up high in so deep a place. As I made camp where the wise prospector had made his a long time before, bitterly regretting that in my fire-scorched state I had forgotten to bring shorts for the summer trip, a mutant deer, with antlers jutting in scores of crazy directions and angles, wandered up the creek to graze beside me, friendly and soft eyed, and an inner voice of some kind drew me to a large boulder beside the creek a dozen feet from the deer. The voice told me to turn over the rock, which I did. Underneath the big rock, carefully wrapped in a plastic bag, were a new pair of gym shorts and a copy of Colin Fletcher's book The Man Who Walked Through Time, his account of a journey on foot the length of the inner Canyon. Such a Canyon gift is not to be taken lightly, and certainly not refused. For the remainder of my trip I wore the red shorts and, in odd moments, read the book, leaving both, a bit more frayed, beneath a different rock miles away where a different voice would entice someone else to whom the moon's great hand had beckoned. Whether we come as refugees from fire or merely unexpecting innocents, the Grand Canyon speaks to us and alters our vision of

RINGTAIL MOON

67

the world, provides surprising gifts and distorts suddenly our sense of proportion and possibility. To see it once is to never be free of it; to step into it even once is to live that step the remainder of one's days. To grasp the immensity of the canyon requires an act of imagination for which our everyday world does not prepare us. To enter the air of the Grand Canyon is to breathe differently measure one's world by new degrees, see past the earth's skin to neither flesh nor bone but something other, an inner form or spirit that requires radical adjustments. To describe the canyon requires the impossible, as writers have been discovering for half a millennium now, since the first Spanish invaders looked into the chasm and attempted to measure and claim the New World in words. American writer John C. Van Dyke, cranky and impatient before attempts at the impossible, despaired in 1919 of artistsf endeavors at realistic renderings of the Canyon. Product of the cultural convergence that delivered the twentieth century into the realities of Einstein, Freud, a relativity of inner and outer perceptions, and new, shimmering subjectivities, where fragments were being shored against everyone's ruin in the Western world and a phenomenon called World War I had just permanently altered our sense of measurable reality, Van Dyke declares, "Impressionism, in its rightful meaning of giving the realistic or objective impression of the fact, is possibly the better method of procedure." Possibly indeed. Writers, Van Dyke insists, fare no better than painters. The poet comes to the Canyon, he complains, "with a fine frenzy in his eye and a thick feeling in his throat," but by the time he transfers his emotion to paper "it has proved to be merely a disjointed rhapsody." Not just poets find the Canyon impossible to describe: "Even the people who write prose, and are not popularly supposed to be bothered with fine frenzies, have their troubles in describing the Canyon. They have not enough adjectives to go around or to reach up and over. Language fails them" (216-17). Van Dyke, like everyone, surrenders, declaring final15 "The Canyon is impossible." Signhcation fails; language did not come into being in the presence of such phenomena and remains utterly insufficient before it. No sipfier within a footstep of the sudden plunge of the Canyon is answerable

68

REFLECTIONS

to any s i g h e d whatsoever. The center does not hold, the blooddimmed tide floods at sunset, and all ceremonies of innocence are reimagined and revivified. Any falcon swooping those endless and endlessly changing shadows could not possibly hear a falconer. An anarchy of impressions is loosed upon every perception. Only the Native holds the measure of the place, because the Native, the Indian, has had many, many generations in which to learn resistance to the jealousy of measure and voice, the futile desire for words to reach up and over. Van Dyke, forlornly conscious of the impossibility of his task, set out nonetheless with admirable determinationto find words for the wordlessness of the Canyon in his 1919 book, The Grand Canyon of the Colorado:Recurrent Studies in Impressions and Appearances. In the first paragraphs on the first page of his book, he grows eloquent, warming up: "The great abyss, without hint or warning, opens before your feet. For the moment the earth seems cleft in twain and you are left standing at the brink. . . . The depth yawns to engulf you." In a charmingly staged ecstasy of horror, Van Dyke exclaims, "Ah! the terror of it!" The problem, he suggests, is dimension: "The mind keeps groping for a scale of proportion-something whereby we can mentally measure. Standards of comparison break down and common experience helps us not at all" (11).The Canyon reaches great, hairy hands out of its bloated moon to grasp your soul, wrenching it out of common experience. Van Dyke nonetheless tries with a kind of shotgun approach, piling verbs and modifiers as if the right ones might spill out by accident, hyphenating his prose into new, almost frantic shapes, desperately hying rhyme, alliteration, anything to keep things from falling apart, to keep the Canyon's anarchy at bay: The rock forms are florid, fantastic, flamboyant, and yet planned on so vast a scale that they are impressive and commanding through sheer mass. The colors are hectic, sky-flushed, firefused, perhaps leached and bleached by rain or flmg off in vivid tones by blazing sunlight. Sometimes a vermilion-red glows

RINGTAIL M O O N

69

beside a fire-green, while at other times, so subtle is the blend that you cannot draw a line between gold and orange or purple and mauve. The light shiftsalmost like the footlights in a ballet, showing a silver, a saffron, a pink, a heliotrope. (6) Van Dyke finds the Master Planner at work, moving on a vast scale, but the human line cannot hold in his perception. The problems of proportion and description presented by the Grand Canyon were discovered, of course, long before 1919. In 1540 the first European to record himself doing so teetered on the canyon's rim, much chagrined as he confronted yet another impossibility in an impossible New World that was supposed to deliver up not an immeasurable reality but measurable wealth, not distortions of time and space but infinite youth, Cibola and more. Sent by Coronado to find the great river that Native people had spoken of, Garcia L6pez de C6rdenas found instead a great, gaping crack in the earth at the bottom of which could be seen a brown ribbon of water. Cardenas estimated the distant trickle to be about six feet wide. Three men sent scrambling down toward the river were soon horrified at the shape-shifting obstacles of the canyon. Returning to the rim, C6rdenasfs men explained in dismay that rocks that from above appeared as tall as a man were in reality much higher than the great tower of Seville, over three hundred feet. Two centuries after Csrdenas, while Americans to the east were declaring themselves free of the Enghsh crown and solely in charge of despoiling their own portion of the continent, a Spanish priest named Francisco Tom* Gmes became, in 1776, the second-recorded European to set eyes on the Canyon and tell about the encounter. Wasting no words in any attempt to fix the grandeur of what he called "Puerto de Bucareli," Garces got right to the point, angrily denouncing this wonder of the world as "that prison [calabozo] of cliffs and canyons." Undoubtedly still in a pique, Father Garces would be bludgeoned to death by Natives near the river in 1781. Half a century later, an American trapper named JamesOhio Pattiepassing with his small party across New Mexico and Arizona whde

70

REFLECTIONS

rescuing fair damsels from Comanches, eating ravens and buzzards and the party's unlucky dogs, and frequently shooting and killing the Native inhabitants of the invaded region like a lethal Monty Python-shunbled upon the Grand Canyon. Like Garces, Pattie was not notably impressed by the beauty of the landscape. Having just found three of his trapping party "cut in pieces and spitted before a great fire" (149) by unknown Natives of the region, Pattie was not predisposed to enjoy dramatic scenery when he stumbled upon the snow-covered Canyon rim. "A march more gloomy and heartwearing, to people hungry, poorly clad, and mourning the loss of their companions cannot be imagined," he wrote before observing: "We arrived where the river emerges from these horrid mountains, which so cage it up, as to deprive all human beings of the ability to descend to its banks, and make use of its waters" (150-51). To the early explorers the Grand Canyon where I sought refuge from fire and fire signs was often just a bad joke, a terrible turn of terrain, an obstacle even worse than those irritating people called Indians who were spread inopportunely across the continent, including, irritatingly, along and even in the great Canyon. Once the West was, as euphemists like to put it, "opened up," the Natives, when not still bitterly resisting the inexorable invasion at places like the Little Bighorn, became romantic subjects; at the same time, radical geography became picturesque scenery rather than obstacle. Attitudes changed in respect to the "prison of cliffs and canyons." In 1857 an artist with an early unsuccessful Canyon expedition, F. W. von Egloffstein, wrote, "We paused in wondering delight, surveyingthis stupendous formation." The intrepid von Egloffstein, after tumbling into the depths of Havasu Canyon with the aid of a broken ladder, took the opportunity to pay a visit to the Havasupai Indian community. Unlike most others, the failed expedition's leader, Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives, had little trouble finding words for his reaction to the canyon, declaring succinctly, "The region is, of course, altogether valueless. It can be approached only from the south, and after entering it there is nothing to do but leave. Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of

RINGTAIL MOON

71

whites to visit this profitless locahty. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado river, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed" (Krutch, 14). Ives's prophecy was not quite accurate. In 1869 the Grand Canyon's great explorer, Major JohnWesley Powell, would descend the length of the chasm by boat and become the first to officially travel through the depths from end to end. Powell's expedition began at Green River, Wyoming, and lost one of its four boats, a twenty-one-foot craft wisely called No-Name, before even coming close to the Grand Canyon. Once in the bowels of the canyon proper, in the midst of hourly terrors, Powell wrote: We are three-quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pygmies, running up and down the sands, or lost among the boulders. We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. (83) All of the world is known, of course, except to the newly arrived, invasive eye. Powell's great unknown distance, river, falls, rocks, and soaring walls were well known to the Native Americans who had long lived and hunted and prayed within the canyon, as Powell himself noted. The Eurarnerican eye had simply not yet perceived this world, nor possessed it by mapping through word and measured line in the Western tradition. The great unknown resided at the center of Powell's soul, and with his maps and charts he would lay an Ariadne thread down to the heart of the labyrinth, slaying the monster of infirute imaginative possibility and returning alive from the depths. In the Canyon, Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran, came closer than any other invader to finding words for the impossible.Almost out of provisions, trapped between known terrors behind and unimaginable terrors ahead, Powell wrote in his journal:

REFLECTIONS

The walls, now, are more than a mile in height. A thousand feet of this is up through granite crags, then steep slopes and perpendicular cliffs rise, one above another, to the summit. The gorge is black and narrow below, red and gray and flaring above, with crags and angular projections on the walls, which, cut in many places by side canons [sic], seem to be a vast wilderness of rocks. Down in these grand, gloomy depths we glide, ever listening, for the mad waters keep up their roar; ever watching, ever peering ahead, for the narrow canon is winding, and the river is closed in so that we can see but a few hundred yards, and what there may be ahead we know not; but we listen for falls, and watch for rocks, or stop now and then, in the bay of a recess, to admire the gigantic scenery. (86) In the midst of his own dark night of the soul, Powell came to echo the earlier Spanish priest, calling the cztnyon "our granite prison." Powell opened up the Grand Canyon to waves of humanity that rolled across the continent like a crowned-out forest fire. He made it possible for European-Americans, plunged into a kind of permanent colonial crisis of strangers in strange lands, to imagine the canyon if not to describe it. But a world cannot be appropriated fully into the imagination until it is plumbed, measured, diagramed, and, above all, mapped with the invaders' names superimposed over the indigenous landscape. In 1880 a geologist named Clarence Edward Dutton led a United States Geological Survey expedition into the Grand Canyon and gave us the first of those many odd names that flavor the canyon with a residue borrowed from European empire and metanarrative: Brahrna Temple, Vishnu Temple, Shiva Temple, the Tower of Babel, the Hindu Amphitheater. Two decades later, Van Dyke would grumble that "years ago, when this country was young and defenseless, some people more or less broke in on the Canyon and exhausted the pantheon of gods in gving names to the buttes and promontories." Van Dyke concludes, "The buttes and isolated points that have been looming heavenward in majestic isolation for thousands of years before the coming of the Pale Face, are not made more grand or comprehensible by

RINGTAIL MOON

73

likening them by name to the squat temples of Bhudda [sic] or Shiva or Zoroaster" (13-14). With the Canyon made more human and comprehensible-in European terms-by Powell, settlers began to drift in toward the rim and side canyons, perhaps the most famous of whom was Captain John Hance. A storyteller of the first order, Hance became well known for the many yarns he spun for passersby and guests at his Grandview Point cabin. One of his favorite stories told of the time he tried to leap the canyon on horseback to escape from Indians. His horse naturally failing to make the other side and plummeting toward the rocks below, Hance saved himself only by dismounting at the last moment. He also liked to describe the time the canyon filled so completely with clouds that he was able to walk across by snowshoe, endangered only briefly by a clearing trend. As the nineteenth century revolved into the twentieth, and romancing the West became safer and thus more popular and necessary as a means of obscuring any less pleasant realities out there-such as what happened to the prototypes for those cartoon Indians chasing H a n c e t h e Grand Canyon began to attain celebrity status in the American imagination as a kind of hyperreal N'ature. The great environmentalist John Muir paid a visit in 1898. After observing how approachable the Canyon now was, so much so that children and what he nicely called "tender, pulpy people" might access it in comfort, Muir was, as usual, overcome to the point of Van Dyke's "fine frenzy" when it came time to capture the canyon: It seems a gigantic statement for even nature to make, all in one mighty stone word, apprehended at once like a burst of light, celestial color its natural vesture, coming in glory to mind and heart as to a home prepared for it from the very beginning. Wildness so godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth's beauty and size. Not even from high mountains does the world seem so wide, so like a star in glory of light on its way through the heavens. (100)

74

REFLECTIONS

Teddy Roosevelt followed Muir to the "godful" Canyon in 1901, in a hiatus from slaughtering big-game animals and Cuban Spaniards, and made an eloquent plea for conservation of the Canyon. Roosevelt put his federal money where his mouth was by creating the Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908. Writers have consistently approached the Canyon with a "thick feeling" in the throat. Joseph Wood Krutch, one of the last American men of letters with a fine eye for both landscape and the American appetite for landscape destruction, tried his hand in Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays, writing, "Seen only from the rim and thought of only as spectacle, the 'view' has some of the insubstantiality of a cloudscape changing color and form almost from moment to moment" (20). Zane Grey, poet laureate of the western novel, gave the Canyon his best shot, too, in a swash-andspur-buckling novel titled The Call of the Canyon, burbling, "What a stupendous chasm, gorgeous in sunset color on the heights, purpling into mystic shadows in the depths! There was a wonderful brightness of all the millions of red and yellow and gray surfaces. . ..Deep dark-blue shadows, like purple sails of immense ships, in wonderful contrast with the bright sunlit slopes, grew and rose toward the east" (252-53). As Van Dyke told us, it isn't just the writer who has difficulty with the Canyon. Baron von Egloffstein, he of the broken ladder, was the first to try capturing the Grand Canyon in sketch or painting,with results described by Krutch as "more like something out of Dante's Inferno than like Arizona." California novelist Wallace Stegner also complained about von Egloffstein's attempts: "Nothing here is realistic: stratification is ignored, forms are wildly exaggerated, the rocks might as well be of the texture of clouds." In the baron's wake came Thomas Moran, who accompanied Powell and prepared the engravings for PoweN's Exploration of the Colorado River of the West in 1875. Moran's paintings and engravings aroused wide interest in the Grand Canyon, so much so that Congress purchased Moran's greatest Canyon painting, The Grand Chasm of the Colorado, for the dizzying sum of ten thousand dollars. Van

RINGTAIL MOON

75

Dyke puts Grand Canyon painting into perspective for us: "You cannot turn the Canyon into a tone of color, or arrange it as a merely graceful pattern of form, without distorting truth and falling into insipidity. Indeed, there are many difficulties in the way of the individual who would put the Canyon on canvas. More than one painter has come to grief over it" (216). And it becomes no easier with time, as nature writer Colin Fletcher demonstrated in the book I found beneath a rock, The Man Who Walked Through Time, his 1967account of backpacking the twohundred-mile length of the canyon. Fletcher wisely demurred from attempts at word-painting, going only so far as to write, "We came to the lip of the Rim. And there, defeating my senses, was the depth. The depth and the distances. . . . In the first moment of shock, with my mind already explodingbeyond old boundaries, I knew that something had happened to the way I looked at things" (M). That's what the Grand Canyon does. It alters forever the way we look at things, the way we see our world. Even when that world is someone else's and, like Father Garces, we stumble upon it in all ignorance if not innocence. What we can say of the canyon is this: Between 7 million and 10 million years ago a dome pushed up in the path of a river not yet named Colorado, and the river, left with no choice, began cutting its way through this obstacle. Today the canyon is more than 200 miles long, from four to eighteen miles wide, and up to 6,000 feet deep. Of the rock it has exposed, the youngest is 200 million years old, the oldest more than 1.7 billion, and upon that rock Native people lived and worshipped long before the first European despaired of perspective and proportion there, and upon that rock Native people still live and pray. The river is young and tough, draining an area of 242,000 square miles and composed for the most part of water you can cut with a knife. Though dammed unforgivably just above the Canyon, the river is not stopped, for a water of such desire that it could cut through millions of years and a mile of rock will not be stopped by a mere twentieth-century work of steel and concrete. We must know that, in the twenty-first

76

REFLECTIONS

century, the Colorado will finish silting up the artificial lake sacrilegiously named for Powell; it will push, strain, erode, crush, collapse, and wear away through sheer will the thin human-made wall. It will never stop wanting the sea with all its power, for it cannot. Ringtails, small catlike creatures of surpassing beauty and curiosity, related to the raccoon, live along the Grand Canyon of the Colorado and at night may investigate a campsite, reaching down from an ascending moon to probe the air. Such creatures attain proper dimension only in the Canyon, where the world speaks to us in its real form, undisguised, sincere, forever. "We opened our eyes upon the world with awe," Van Dyke concludes in the final lines of his long paean to the Canyon, "and we close them at the last groping our way in starry spaces."

CHAPTER SEVEN

My Criminal Youth

In Mississippi I was no criminal. With my brother I wandered a humid, immaterialparadise, innocent, naming a dark, damp world of wonders, owning nothing and desiring little. In California, after age seven, I learned criminality, to invade and violate others' lives, to bear away others' possessions, to lie, prevaricate, hide. I became predacious, understood the world as made of removable objects and obdurate enemies. In Mississippi the Indian and Black people around us possessed little to be desired unto oneself: a new cotton sack for picking, a head scarf, a broken-bladed pocketknife, a hound pup. Things that anyone might possess and no one would dispute, at least seen from childish eyes. California, I saw at once, was made of desirable objects and those who possessed such objects. New bicycles leaned on kickstands on front porches of nice houses with picture windows through which television sets flickered. The owners of such bicycles came and went with one brother or sister and two parents in long, sharp-fendered and shiny automobiles and wore mohair sweaters and Boy and Girl Scout uniforms. Basketball hoops edged concrete driveways, and the bicycle riders were to be seen afoot on Saturday afternoons shooting a basketball with their fathers and older brothers. Sprinklers made perfect halos of sparkling drops

on lawns, and television antennas stood straight and imposing on roofs as we passed rattling by in a car spillingwith children on our way to a different kind of home, our father spitting tobacco juice indiscriminately out the window as he drove. I have to be fair and exact: my older brother did not steal. Gene was honest, lived by a code he himself invented, trod a straight and narrow path through impossibilities clear eyed and truthful. Many years later Gene would take the same straight path from high school to Vietnam and then, with the same clear-eyed honesty tell me not to follow. Unlike my brother, I stole and lied, and not from want or even envy. I was not driven to have what I could not have or to right intuited ancient wrongs stemming from the removal of Choctaw and Cherokee peoples or the oppression of my ancestors, or any such truck. The truth is I didn't think much about being Indian, one way or another. Perhaps I unconsciously wanted to dispossess the privileged class of their bourgeois materials, to level the playing field a bit in my eight-year-old imagination. More likely my motivation was the pure pleasure of the act itself, the stealth and secrecy, the cunning, the risk and the perverse triumph. And the comradeship of common larceny. It happened in San Leandro, California, in third grade. My father had gotten a job as a truck driver not long after we'd moved permanently out from Mississippi, and we abruptly found ourselves living for a short while near San Francisco, on the periphery of a quasi-middle-classcornrnunity on the edge of a great city. We were the bottom rung, of course, in our little shingle-sided house on a steep hillside surrounded by more affluent residences. Used to roaming the woods along the Yazoo River in Mississippi, with no rules or restrictions, we took to the hills of the Bay Area enthusiastically. It was an oddly rural place, with a creek running down out of the green and lush hills into deep pools that held big carp. The hills, unfortunately, were off limits because from them came drinking water for the city.A great, beautiful reservoir lay up there, the birthplace of the wonderful carp stream, and high barbed-wiretopped fences stood between us and the reservoir.

M Y CRIMINAL YOUTH

79

I might never have become a criminal, certainly not a successful criminal, had our older cousin not come to live with us at that time. Darrell was fifteen and right out of the worst part of Kansas City. Black hair in a shining ducktail, a neat curl to one side of his upper lip reminiscent of Ricky Nelson, white T-shirts with sleeves rolled up, dark jeans with bottoms rolled, and loafers with a dime in each one-Darrell understood and was equipped for life. His father was Uncle Bob, my mother's bad brother who had several wives in different places at the same time, children here and there, a lengthy criminal record and intimate knowledge of various penal systems, and great charm. Darrell's mother was a Cherokee from Arkansas. His mother, Aunt Fern, stayed with us for a year also, and she was always telling Darrell stories about Quanah Parker and Purty Boy Floyd, insisting Purty Boy Floyd was an Indian also and sometimes mixing the two up as far as I could tell. Her method was to sort of talk at him while she was cooking or ironing and he was racing past not even listening, as if she thought that maybe she could hit him in flight with enough stray words over time that eventually a whole story would stick. I'd stop and listen when I wasn't afraid of being left behind, which wasn't often. Darrell was even more Indian than we were, but you couldn't tell. He didn't want to be an Indian; he wanted to be Dillinger, and he looked like a dangerous, darker version of Ricky Nelson who was on television a lot at that time. Though he would have a complete set of false teeth by the time he was twenty-two, at fifteen Darrell still had most of his front teeth and liked to flash a wolfish smile at the world. Uncle Bob had dropped Darrell and Aunt Fern off one day and vanished. We kids were delighted. There were six of us (three more yet to be born), but none as old and wise as Darrell, and we could see interesting things written all over our cousin. So could my parents, apparently, for they did not act pleased by the way Uncle Bob's brief visit had turned out. Darrell seemed to take the turn of events with equanimity He was used to making the best of k g s and settled right in.

80

REFLECTIONS

Darrell had been in a gang in Kansas City, a gang that arranged street fights for recreational purposes and, if one could believe his stories, used sawed-off shotguns and such in their pursuit of happiness. He looked around and was disappointed at the prospects. "We need a gang," he said to my brother and me. Gene, being older and significantly more mature in fifth grade than I was in third, just looked at Darrell curiously and shook his head. A gang seemed reasonable to me, but I didn't know anyone beyond fifth grade, and the two or three guys I knew were even afraid of my older sister. Darrell put his plans for a gang aside for the time being and settled for teaching us how to make zip guns and various explosive devices. For a while we destroyed inanimate objects while our parents were at work. Johnnie, the boy next door whose father was in the military, joined our gang happily, and we stole ammunition from his father-mostly vast belts of machine gun ammo that magically turned up in the family garage-to take apart for the gunpowder inside, listening to "Purple People Eater" and "Tequila" and the Everly Brothers on a transistor radio Darrell had acquired as we pliered the casings apart. Because Darrell had advanced in sophistication well beyond the requirements of common education, while we spent days in school he stayed home and studied his surroundings. Darrell got bored blowing up mailboxes and such and began to consider his options. There were a lot of bicycles to be had. Every porch had a bike or two or three. Bicycles were valued property and to all appearances were a staple commodity of the world Darrell had been dropped into. They provided mobility and excitement in our hilly world. He decided we would steal bicycles. Gene would have nothing to do with it, but his private code forbade tattling. I thought it sounded interesting.Johnnieliked the idea, although he already had an expensive Schwinn and therefore no personal need, and did require that we agree not to steal bike. Darrell enlisted another neighbor, an older guy in eighth grade, who had no bike. For a few months we stole bicycles. We went out at night, slipping invisibly through alleys and along neighborhood sidewalks

M Y CRIMINAL YOUTH

87

until we spotted a bicycle on a porch. No one, it seemed, had thought of locking bikes in the mid-1950s. Wally and Beaver Cleaver didn't lock their bikes; not even Eddie Haskell locked his bike. Timrny always coasted his bike to a stop and leaned it against a porch railing, taking Lassie with him, unconcerned about bicycle thieves. There was a niche to be filled, the times were ripe for our gang, and we plundered San Leandro of its bicycles. I recall one moment in particular. Eight years old, I crept up to a nice house on a nice street, while my gang of three waited behind in the shadows. A very nice three-speed leaned on its kickstand in front of a big window. Behind the bike, through the window, I saw Mom and Dad and Sis sitting on a light-colored couch and a boy about my brother's age in a comfortable-lookingchair. They were laughmg together at something on the big television. I remember standing on the porch, plainly illuminated by the porch light, watching the family watch television. We did not yet have a TV in our house, and the eight of us could never have watched at the same time if we had owned one. There was a wholeness about the scene, a kind of completeness that I had never imagined in a family before. In my experience families were in constant flux, coming and going, messy and uncontained. Strange cousins could appear one day and stay for several years with no evident disruption even as additional cousins showed up and vanished. Never had I imagined a family holding a single image in mind or sight even for a moment. The scene inside the picture window opened onto a world I had never considered, one I knew instinctively did not desire my company. I tore myself away with great difficulty and stole the bicycle, unthinkingly kicking the kickstand up and rolling the bike down the porch steps with no concern for clatter. In the driveway I paused and looked back, and no one had moved. To this very day that family lives in perfect time, balanced in the flickering gray light of a black-and-white television set, forever, as I steal their bicycle. And I still feel the awfulness of the moment in which I broke into that perfect order, violated whatever it was inside the

82

REFLECTIONS

house that I could not understand, and bore an objective portion away into the night. At the time I knew it marked a point of departure, like a ticket bought and punched for a journey to a place I didnft even suspect existed. While our father was busy driving trucks across America, a line diver, and our mother was desperately trying to keep up with, feed, and clothe six children, we took bicycles apart and put bicycles together. We ran a bike chop shop in the front yard of our rental home, with piles of rims and handlebars and goosenecks and tires and frames that adults didn't seem to notice. Darrell sold bicycle parts for a quarter, fifty cents, or a dollar to kids who wandered by. We rode hybrid bikes until bored, and then we reconfigured them into new bikes. We gave bicycle parts to friends. And still we were obscenely rich in stolen bicycles, surfeited with bikes, glutted with spokes and rims and brake cables. Our bikestealing days finally waned due to limited storage and wholesale marketing capacity. Darrell had not counted on difficulties arising from the fact that he could not safely sell stolen bicycles or parts to someone whose bicycle we had recently stolen. Since virtually everyone in need of a bicycle in our region fit that description, he was stymied. Something had to be done. A half-mile beyond our house a minute creek emerged from the hills. It came down out of the reform-school property in a concrete pipe about two feet in diameter. Once outside the reformatory fence, it spilled out of that pipe into something like a small settling pool, and then about fifty feet farther down it entered another conduit, a concrete pipe so big that even Darrell could walk upright through its entrance. Tlus concrete pipe, technically now an underground stream, ran down and down beneath the city, growing smaller and smaller until a person had to crawl on hands and knees and then wriggle on his belly to plop out a small opening into a fetid pool far down in an urban world. We had made the journey downpipe several times, and we had gazed at the fold in the hills above the reform school from a high road outside the fence, imagining where the creek must be a real stream tumbling from the mountains.

MY CRIMINAL YOUTH

83

Walking and crawling and wriggling through slimy water in the smelly dark until you could slip like an eel into a worse-smelling pool was great fun, but Darrell had come up with a better use for the drain pipe about the same time we became bicycle entrepreneurs. His idea was to acquire, somehow and without expense, many burlap bags, or gunny sacks as we called them, and fill the bags with sand from the sides of the creek in front of the culvert opening. In this way we enlarged the pool adjacent to the pipe and also filled sandbags that could be used to plug the orifice of the drain. We dammed the culvert, leaving a spillway near the top, and created a rapidly filled pool twenty feet across and perhaps six feet down at its deepest point. It was to be our swimming pool the following summer when the days grew hot. Darrell realized the days were already growing hot for our gang, so he decided the pool was a perfect place to dump our disturbing mountain of bicycle parts. By night we hauled frames and rims and seats and handlebars and gears and brakes and cables and dumped the whole load into our incipient swimming pool. Everything sank, and our yard was clean and our good names restored. We felt clean and virtuous until men with badges showed up at our door. Someone had noticed the dammed culvert and spreading pool. Someone had alerted the officials as to the identities of the dam builders. The police had come to offer us an option: dam deconstruction or reform school. They stood by while we dismantled the dam and emptied the sandbags and carried wet gunnysacks away. They watched with astonishment as a graveyard of dismembered bicycles rose above the falling brown water. They turned inquiring eyes upon us, and we, in turn, studied the dense foliage upstream. Strangely they allowed us to go home unquestioned that day but we began to hear rumors about missing bicycles being matched with newly surfaced bicycle parts. Darrell said we had nothing to worry about as long as nobody finked. He made it obvious that finking was not a viable option for anyone.

84

REFLECTIONS

Even before the heat from the bicycle caper had dissipated, Darrell was looking around. Burglary was always a possibility, and we became a small gang of burglars. I was the smallest, and because of that fact I was the one boosted through windows with the task of tiptoeing to open locked doors. In this way we engaged in what television shows like to call breaking and entering, and I learned an intense measure of fear as I crept through darkened houses alone, navigating strange hallways and negotiating ominous furniture and alien fragrances. Always there was the sharp-edged fear that I would never get out again, that I'd be locked forever in whatever empty, strange-smelling, shadowy home I had penetrated. Today I recogruze certain metaphorical dimensions of those black hours in alien rooms, feeling in the dark from dim recesses toward a locked door, but in third grade I knew only the melding of excitement and terror. In those moments after squeezing through an open window, I was alone in a way I've never felt since. I took nothing material from those foreign homes. I believe, however, that my city cousin did take things. Darrell became easy with money and made frequent trips down the hill to town on his bike. I didn't know the word "fence" back then except as that obstacle between us and the reservoir or the reformatory. And it was about this time that the boys' school, the reformatory for juvenile delinquents, appealed to Darrell's best interests. He announced one evening that it would be worthwhile to break into the "juvie." "Think of it," he said, the curl in his lip intensifymg. We thought of it. Even Gene was attracted. Apparently, breaking into a place everyone else was trying to break out of did not violate his private code. In retrospect, I believe that he found something oddly noble in the endeavor. I thought the idea was crazy, as did Johnnie, who resolutely said "No way." Because my brother and cousin were going, I had no choice, no matter how much I longed to stay home with Johnnie and make more bombs. We scaled the chain link fence outside the reform-school garden. Darrell showed us how to lay our coats over the slanting barbed wire at the top of the fence and then, once over the top with coats

M Y CRIMINAL YOUTH

85

left in place for the return trip, lower ourselves enough to drop the hundred feet or so to the ploughed earth. It hardly hurt and as soon as each of us could breathe again, we scurried for the shadows of trees along the creek that ran through the school. In the shadows we made our first logistical decisions. Darrell wanted to find an open window in one of the buildings, urging us to consider the neat things that would undoubtedly be inside, such as guns and billy clubs. Gene shook his head. He had breached the barrier, but he would not steal no matter how much lus bigger cousin muttered and ridiculed as I sat to one side feeling very small. Finally Darrell gave in. "All right," I could tell he was about to say "chickenshit," but nobody ever said such a thing to Gene, not ever, not even when they were fifteen and experienced in gang warfare and he was only twelve. "All right," Darrell finally whispered. "They've got those bee boxes on the hill. Let's get some honey. Stupid bees'll be asleep." Darrell just couldn't leave without taking something, apparently anything, and Gene saw no real crime in stealinghoney from bees. Bees made more than enough for themselves and would just make more if we took some. Bees were fair game, so we sidled around the trees and brush and waded the shallow little creek and climbed the hillside above the reform-school buildings where we had seen the bee boxes from the high road outside the juvie. The boxes were exactly where they were supposed to be, six or eight of them lined up on the hillside, small white ghosts in the dark. Darrell, every gesture manifesting his disgust at his lack of a real gang, approached a box and casually lifted the lid off. The bees were apparently having a party, for they were not only up late and wide awake, but immediately irritated. Darrell stood for a moment in apparent shock, and the next instant he was running and slapping at himself and screaming, not shouting but screaming. Gene and I started to run ahead of Darrell just as the lights came on. Big spotlights like we'd seen in cartoons began to sweep back and forth across the hillside. A siren went off.

86

REFLECTIONS

We began to run back and forth, in and out of the blinding lights just like cartoon characters, Darrell still squealing with stinging bees. It was Gene who grabbed my arm and said, "Come on." Gene ran straight down the hill toward the creek just above the juvie buildings, and I followed as fast as I could. As soon as he saw what we were doing, Darrell passed me in a real beeline for the creek. Gene was already in the water and heading downstream, with Darrell right behind him when I got there. I jumped in and ran splashing after them, the siren palpable at my back, and almost immediately I saw what Gene was up to. A few yards in front of him, the stream vanished into the black maw of a culvert pipe. I was thinking that nobody could fit into that hole when Gene fell to his knees, collapsed to his belly, and disappeared.Darrell hesitated just a few seconds and slithered after him. I followed, imagining the deep pool that used to block the other end of that very pipe, happy I was no longer wearing a coat and intensely thankful for the police who made us take our dam apart. That night we burglarized our own house, slipping through a bedroom window after silently hosing each other down outside. It was only a couple of weeks later that we decided to build a coaster for the deadly hills that defined our neighborhood. I had agitated for such an undertaking for months, only to be ridiculed, but now suddenly Darrell was excited about the idea. We'd make a real coaster, he said, sneering, not one of those soapbox pieces of shit other boys in the neighborhood had built. First we needed wheels, real ones. Something in Darrell's tone made Gene opt out of the search for wheels, though I could see the idea of a real, serious coaster pulled at him strongly. A hospital was three or four miles away, an easy walk. We knew it well because we had regularly raided the orange trees of the retirement community attached to the hospital. I followed Darrell, who had a pair of vice grips in his back pocket, to the hospital and through shrubbery to the back of the hospital. There, beside a loading ramp, was his target: a large hand truck, or dolly, with huge, hard rubber wheels.

MY CRIMINAL YOUTH

87

We watched the doors for ten minutes until he was pretty confident, and then Darrell approached the hand truck and removed the wheels in a matter of seconds, beckoning to me with a jerk of his head to come and help. The wheels were too heavy to carry, too heavy for me to even lift, so we rolled them around the hospital and through the bushes and down a long asphalt side road and onto a main road and all the way home with cars rushing past and people staring. The heavy, solid rubber tires would be on the back, like racing slick, Darrell explained. For the front he said we needed lighter balloon tires, precisely the kind found on good-quality wheelbarrows. Then we needed a real automobile steering wheel, which was obtained and attached to a pipe around which we wrapped steel cable that controlled a pivoting front axle. Upon that chassis we built a heavy, indestructible-looking coaster. Johru-tie won the coin toss and got to test drive it down Dead Man's Hill. Dead Man's Hill plunged several hundred yards at a terrifyingly precipitous drop straight into a crossroad.A sharp turn to the left would give the coaster a long, gradual runout, and it was a turn, Darrell decided, that a good driver could easily make. A missed turn, however, would send coaster and driver shooting off a ten-foot drop into someone's house. The someone was an unpleasant man whom I had once brained with a rock while he sat reading his paper in front of a window. I had been trylng to knock out a streetlight, and the rock that went through his window was completely unintentional. Nonetheless, the man bore an intense dislike for the lot of us, and me in particular. Johnnie required repeated reassurance that making the corner on Dead Man's Hill would be a piece of cake for a good driver.Johnniewas about to get a learner's permit, so he seemed to think it imperative to be thought a good driver. He climbed into the coaster as we held it. At the bottom of the hill, Gene was waving frantically, signaling, we thought, that the coast was clear. It became quickly apparent that Gene was signaling the opposite. Only he had accurately remembered our code, and the fact he

88

REFLECTIONS

was trying to communicate was that a large moving van was approachg the intersection. Johnniesaw the h c k in plenty of time. Scarcely halfway down the hill, he had ample leisure to plan his strategy, time his response, and both avoid the truck which had inexplicably stopped right at the bottom of the hill and make the turn. It happened in seconds. We saw Johnnie wait until the right moment to turn, demonstrating his poise and skill as a good driver. Too soon and he'd roll the coaster, too late and it would be worse. He spun the wheel with a cool that even at eight years old I admired and envied. But the coaster curved right instead of left. We had wound the steering cable the wrong way. Johnniebegan to frantically try to pull the steeringwheel in the opposite direction and he succeeded precisely enough to drive it straight into the truck. When we got there, Johnnie lay in a pile of splintered wood and tangled cable, halfway beneath the board of the truck. Blood was flowing, and as I traced it to its origin I discovered that Johnnie's right hand was almost severed just above the knuckles. Otherwise he seemed in good shape. Johnnie went to the hospital where we had gotten our coaster wheels, and doctors sewed his hand back together. The day after he got home from the hospital we had a ceremonial burning of the coaster's remains in a vacant lot. Neighbors came to the edges of their yards to glare, but no one protested. The next day, Darrell knocked on the doors of two nearby houses, explaining that he'd heard they needed wheelbarrow wheels and that he had extras. The owners of wheel-less barrows looked at the familiar objects in Darrell's hands and set their mouths hard, saying nothing as he magnanimously laid the wheels before them. Shortly afterwardsUncle Bob appeared one day and took Darrell and Aunt Fern away. A few days after that our family moved to another town, just ahead of the law according to the rumors my older sister confided years later. With Darrell gone and no further guidance, my criminal youth more or less ended. We moved to a

M Y CRIMINAL YOUTH

89

small white house with peeling paint in a remote canyon near Paso Robles, at the southern end of the Salinas Valley, where there were no houses to burglarize, no hospitals to ravage, no neighbors to scowl. From that time onward, sometimes with Gene but more often alone, I broke and entered upon nature herself, burgled her hills and oaks, ransacked her solitude for days and weeks and months and years on end, feeling my way toward a door that must exist somewhere.And just as it was during my brief burglary days, I have tried my best to take nothing, exulting instead in the thrill of stealth, the craft of cunning, the successful escape, the knowledge that all is never lost. One could do worse.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Syllogistic Mixedblood How Roland Barthes Saved Me from the indians

I'm looking at a photograph of my great-grandfather,Nora Miriam Bailey's father, who would vanish from her life shortly after the moment of this photo. Avery young man with an angular face and intelligent, intent expression, he looks distinctly like some kind of "other," and I have diverse reasons for valuing that discovered otherness in my ancestor. With his extraordinarily narrow, slanted eyes and pronounced cheekbones, in a different context he could be the offspring of a Chinese railroad worker in the American West or anyone from a lean and hungry part of Asia. However, I am seeking quite specifically an indian in thisphoto, a Native American ancestor.' Seated as he is in front of a log home with a blanket nailed over the door, surrounded by a vaguely "otheru-looking family (except for his mother standing behind him and his daughter before him-both of whom look disappointingly "not-other") in what I know to be Oklahoma in 1913, just a few years after it ceased being Indian Territory, I know that he is, in fact, a CherokeeIrish mixedblood from whom I am descended. But this is my ex post facto reading of the images before me, my discovery of what I bring intact to the photograph, ultimately a small part of what I wish to find there. Did I not bring to the photograph a narrative, a complex of stories set in motion by words my mother wrote on the back of the photograph shortly before her death, I could not place

THE SYLLOGISTIC MIXEDBLOOD

9'1

or define these people or this place, though there are indeed clues if, like Nabokov's Kinbote searching for his own pale fire, I bend my implacable detective's gaze closely enough. Like the mad Kinbote, I can read my own image and story into and thus out of the text before me. Says Roland Barthes: "Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of dispersed relatives" (9). I am disappointed, of course, to find no indian in this formal family portrait (taken most likely by an itinerant photographer who had a decent camera, necessary technical knowledge, and no cultural artifacts to secure). This family from whom I am descended wears no recognizably Indian cultural artifacts; nor are they surrounded by any such sigruhers. (Though there is possibility in the blanket nailed across the cabin door: what if my great-grandfather had perversely wrapped the blanket around himself for this picture?) The cabin, alas, could be any homesteader's cabin in Sooner country. The nondescript clothing they wear could be any poor frontier family's best clothing. They could, in fact, be any frontier family. I know I am descended from indigenous peoples on both my mother's and father's sides. I know this because they told me so, as their parents told them, and so on. Mississippi Choctaw on my father's side and Oklahoma Cherokee on my mother's. Only recently did we discover the box of photographs from which I have taken this one of my great-grandfather's family. My mother's grandfather (he was-and remains in the photograph--of mixed indigenous American and European extraction)is even included in the 1910 Indian census for the state of Oklahoma and on the Cherokee tribal rolls. I lay the photograph before me and search for absent origins. Such a search, the Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor has informed us all, must seek "a hyperreal simulation and . . . the ironic enactment of a native presence by an absence in a master narrative" (FugitivePoses 27). Extracted ultimately in the picture, my great-grandfather 'S image takes on the polysemous character Barthes has identified as the essence of such images. To find the Indian in the photographic cupboard, I must narratively

92

REFLECTIONS

construct him out of his missing presence, for my great-grandfather was Indian but not an Indian. Like most mixedbloods, I assume, I am aware of the irony of such a wistful enactment, and I have seen it in my own children and brothers and sisters and friends, the familiar tortured syllogism: Indians have Indian ancestors. I have Indian ancestors. Therefore, I am an Indian. Unfortunately in Indian Territory nothing is so simple. Clue: He looks like me when I was also young, but I am now older than my great-grandfather will ever have been. In a mirror, I have much the same eyes and mouth and perhaps something similar to the vulpine distrust registered in his resistant expression; but Vizenor has warned us that the "indian has never been real in the mirror, or a name of presence in the simulations of history" (Fugitive Poses 28). Nonetheless, I felt a kind of tremor of recognition when I saw the picture for the first time a couple of years ago. We had heard of this man, my eight brothers and sisters and I, throughout our lives. John Bailey the mixedblood Cherokee grandfather who, our aunt told us, guided wagon trains in Indian Territory (this last surely a childishly apocryphal story about the man our aunt never met). But it was not until several years after our mother's death that the box of photographs containing this particular photo surfaced. For the first time we had some kind of hard, objective evidence that John Bailey had existed, as well as a photograph of our long-dead grandmother as a three-year-old standing between her longer-dead father's knees with his probably longerdead-still mother standing behind him and brothers and sisters around him. It was as if a ghost had ceased its rattling and moaning to finally show itself for the first time. He is concrete now in this image, a mixedblood ancestor, for as Barthes insists, "in Photography I can never deny that the thing h s been t h e . . ..Hence it would be better to say that Photography's inimitable feature (its noerne) is that someone has seen the referent . . . in flesh and blood, or again in person" (76,79). Susan Sontag, anticipating Barthes, explains: "A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a gwen thing

THE SYLLOGISTIC MIXEDBLOOD

93

happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture" (5).The key in Sontag's statement, of course, is the "like." Someone "like" my great-grandfather, with his rakishly tilted hat and amused-looking but utterly resistant expression, existed and was seen in flesh and blood and in person by at least those people around him and behind the other aperture. Existed and etched himself into the features of my rogue uncle, my mother's brother, dead now for many years, and into my own face and most likely other portions of my self. Others among the seven adults and three children in the photograph look on with sullen, uncertain, or indeterminate expressions, but my great-grandfather squints with definite amusement and perhaps a touch of contempt mingling with curiosity and a great withholding, his two hands lightly draped upon the shoulders of his toddler daughter, whose small, pale hands in turn look to be firmly holding to each of h knees. They are oddly interlocked in the photograph, the child who would be my wild-drinking, rootless, and reckless grandmother and her cagey-looking father. Oddly, because I know from family stories that he would vanish from her life almost as soon as the photograph was taken, abandoning her for reasons no one ever seemed to know (maybe death, the way his grandson, my uncle Bob, would be murdered young; maybe mere irresponsibility). What I know is that the fact of absence already haunts this photograph as does a greater mystery for me. And greater discovery. My grandmother's mother was said by my mother and aunt to have possibly been named Edith or Emily and to have been a "fullblooded Cherokee." But there is no written record of her, and no one really knows her name or anything beyond the originary simulation of fullbloodedness. Thus our great-grandmotherwould seem to have joined the legion of invisible Cherokee great-grandmothers in American lore, that frontier pageant of ghostly Indian princesses who haunt our metanarrative bloodlines. She vanished, the stories always indicated, as soon as our grandmother was born and bore no other trace in family

94

REFLECTIONS

memory a storied "fact" I have cited hmy own writings. Howeverand I am stunned right now by this recognition-a very young, pretty, Indian-looking woman stands behind my great-grandfather in this recently discovered photograph, her posture straight and dignified and, most significantly her right hand resting possessively and confidently upon John Bailey's shoulder. They are linked thus by hands, my infant grandmother, her father, and this unnamed woman. No one else in the photograph is touching another; all hands are held to the sides or on knees or together in laps. Only my grandmother, her father, and this young woman touch one another as though intuiting that h intimate and crucial connection will too soon be broken. "The eyes and hands of wounded fugtives in photographs are the sources of stories, the traces of native survivance" says Vizenor, "all the rest is ascribed evidence, surveillance, and the interimage simulations of dominance" (Fugitive Poses 158).These hands, forming a sipfymg chain from child through man to woman, are not Indian but human. I think she is m y great-grandmother. She does not look like the other, heavily Irished family members in the photograph. She is an other "other" in t h s grouping. Though no one is alive who can verlfy the possibility, I believe I have discovered my great-grandmother, who has stood invisibly in this photograph for all the months I have perused it, the invisible Native in the tableau vivant of Indianness I have sought to construct, rendered invisible by the narrative I have brought to this photograph. Told that my grandmother's mother did not exist, I could not therefore see her image before me. "Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner," Barthes says, "a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see. . . .The referent adheres" (6). In the case of my ancestral photograph, the fiction has appropriated the referent; looking for traces of an absent origin, I have been blinded to the purely human image here. But I have found her at this moment. Now I believe deeply that this young Cherokee woman had being, inflesh and blood, that she flashed in person across Indian Territory and Oklahoma for brief years and vanished abruptly. Studying the diminutive, very

THE SYLLOGISTIC MIXEDBLOOD

95

attractive young woman, I doubt that she is the fullblood I have been told she was. She doesn't look quite indian enough, though she looks beautifully Native, someone I would like to know. Suddenlythe photograph opens to a new narrative, more poignant, humanly resonant. Off to the side, however, I hear the whispered warning of Barthes, who writes that "essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own" (57). Barthes, scrutinizing a photograph of his mother as a child, tells himself that "she is going to die." "I shudder," he writes, "over a catastrophe which has already occurred." A moment before, contemplating his response to a photograph of Lewis Payne, taken while Payne was waiting to be hanged for the attempted assassination of U.S. Secretary of State W. H. Seward, Barthes has written: "The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake" (96).Examining h s picture of my grandmother as a toddler standing between the knees of her father and surrounded by, I am now certain, her vanishing mother, her aunts, uncles, and grandmother, I feel the encroachment of an old catastrophe as well: here are roots of uncertainty and disequilibrium. Already I see in the set of my infant grandmother's tilted mouth the defiance and dis-ease that will mark her and the disasters that she will fling at everyone within the range of her helter-skelter life. Very shortly after the photograph was taken, the family in the photograph would disappear from my grandmother's life, leaving her to carom between homes until, at the brutally early age of thirteen, she would herself be a mother who would in turn abandon her own children. This incipient, catastrophic absence of my grandmother's parents and family haunts the photograph. All of these people are many years dead, but nonetheless Barthes's catastrophe of the photograph as memento mori is not my catastrophe. Death leaves very little residue, actually, despite Barthes's long pondering upon his vanished mother. ("Natives

96

REFLECTIONS

mourned the presence, not the absence of the dead," Vizenor has written.) For me, the punctum in this photograph of my ancestors is not he is dead, or they are dead, but he is me-or they are me.2 Already in the photograph he and they (and therefore this portion of me) are disturbing absences, pricking, bruising, poignant; and I observe an anterior future in which absence, not death, is the stake. What catastrophe occurred to sever the connections represented in these images, what sent my grandmother at such a fragde age spinning off into a solitary and damaging life and erased all memories of the mother from family stories? Is this simply an aspect of the familiar story of deracination and loss that marks mixedblood history? Heritage, history, and story are the real crucibles of catastrophe. Phenotype is phenomenal. "But more insidious, more penetrating than likeness," writes Barthes, "the Photograph sometimesmakes appear what we never see in a real face (or in a face reflected in a mirror): a generic feature, the fragment of oneself or of a relative which comes from some ancestor. In a certain photograph, I have my father's sister's 'look.' The Photograph gives a little truth, on condition that it parcels out the body. But this truth is not that of the individual, who remains irreducible; it is the truth of lineage" (103). "Lineage," Barthes adds, "reveals an identity stronger, more interesting than legal status-more reassuring as well, for the thought of origins soothesus, whereas that of the future disturbsus, agonizes us" (105).I have much of my great-grandfather 'S look, the angular and rather disturbing face of the photograph that will be passed first to his grandson, my uncle Bob, who would be rabbiting across all our lives, dismpting, stealing,laughnag, t e h g wild tales, being taken away to prison again and again, and dying young and violently. The thought of o r i p does not soothe all of us. For some, the thought of origins can, in fact, be far more agonizing than the future. If, like a Nabokov creation, I can make of the past a necessary fiction, I must also acknowledge that the past's residence within language makes it inescapably mere fiction. However, the future that recedes infinitely before me, beyond language, is helpless

THE SYLLOGISTIC MIXEDBLOOD

97

to challenge my construction of it, to repudiate my reading. Despite my most strenuous efforts within language, I can determine nothing of the inexorably absolute past, of origins; the past, with its endless accretions, renders me inauthentic. As Barthes admonishes, "The Photograph does not call up the past" (82).Who were those people in the photograph? I know that they were mixedbloods in Indian Territory, living in what my family persisted in calling the Cherokee Nation, with Irish and probably other European roots as well-know this because that is the fiction I have memorized, my hstory. But as Barthes also points out, quoting Nietszche, "A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne" (73).Winding into the labyrinth of the Territory, I find no thread of consciousness or knowledge, no Native Ariadne. There are fibers out of which a thread might be woven, bits of family story, old photographs with scribbling on the backs, but no coherent narrative. Despite the elusive promise of my newly found great-grandmother in the photograph, who would make a splendid Ariadne indeed, the remaining fibers prove too fragmentary for weaving, too thin to cohere. In the end is only the maze and the monster of hybrid potential at its center. I remain in the labyrinth, puzzled, hearing the approach of my own footsteps. We know they are mixedbloods. My mother and aunt and uncle and grandmother spoke of these people and of this place. But these people could be any people anywhere. Barthes, captivated by the way subjects in photographs are dressed, including his mother, declares that "clothing is perishable, it makes a second grave for the loved being" (64). Clothing may indeed be perishable, but costumes are not, as nineteenth-century ethnographic photographers understood when they kept "typical" Indian dress on hand for those Indian subjects who might not possess such essential attire.3Costumes stop clocks. Had my ancestors in the Territory been dressed up as Indians, they would have escaped this Barthesian grave-never mind that their Cherokee relatives had for many years alreadybeen dressing and living much as European Americans dressed and lived. Fringed leather, beads, feathers, braids-such

98

REFLECTIONS

signifiers would tell me and anyone else exactly who these people were and are-for these signs of Indianness escape mutability, evade death. These people, however, were Indian but not Indians. I search vainly for signifiers of Indian presence in the photograph: if only this or that could pronounce these people Indians, but the log cabin with blanket nailed over the door, the nondescript poorfolks' clothing, the suspicious posture-none of this says "Indian." I look more closely at the faces. The hair is for the most part dark, a good "Indian" aspect. Some of the faces have the unmistakably "Asian" look to them that people descended from Bering Strait immigrants are supposed to have, most pronouncedly my greatgrandfather's face. The complexions appear to be of varying hues, from light to dark. Distressingly, my young grandmother looks rather white, though her father and aunts appear suitably dark. One of the uncles, August Edward Bailey (I know from my mother 'S writing on the back of the photograph), looks very much like a surly Irishman. Aunt Nora, John Bailey's sister, appears quite Cherokee to me, but perhaps that is wish fulfillment on my part, since Cherokees, too, come in all forms. I do not seek Irish sigrufiers in tlus family, for the stories that have defined me from birth in my own hearing have never been Irish, and of course I enter the labyrinth in search of what I already know to be at the center: the monster of my own hybridization. Were our family stories about Irish clans and leprechauns, rather than lightning-struck trees and little people, perhaps I would study these photographs with different desire and less difficulty. If it is true, as Sontag insists, that "to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed" (4), it is more true that to gaze upon a photograph is to appropriate into our own originary history the object of the photograph. In studying this photograph of my ancestors, I cannot deny that I am attempting to appropriate a kind of "Indianness" into my own life. Writing of Ishi, the famed last survivor of the exterminated Yahi people in California, Vizenor has explained: "The tribes have become the better others, to be sure, and the closer the captured experiences are to the last wild instances in the world, the more

THE SYLLOGISTIC MIXEDBLOOD

99

valuable are the photographs. .. .The last wild man and other tribal people captured in photographs have been resurrected in a nation eager to create a tragic past" (Lippard 66, 71). In exploring my family photo nearly a century old, I cannot avoid the bothersome sense that I, too, am searchingfor a "better other," clues to "the last wild instances in the world," that I desire to force my long-dead relatives to enact a kind of cultural striptease to accommodate my desire for lineal contact with the origmal absent other. But I desire and need somethingthe images in the photograph will not divulge. Though I may have found a great-grandmother, Indianness remains hidden away in the recesses that resist my entrance. These figures repudiate me, and I feel a kind of anger or resentment emanating from their images, as if they anticipate my future larceny. "Nevertheless," Sontag says, "the camera's rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses" (23). Sontag declares furthermore that "in America, the photographer is not simply a person who records the past but the one who invents it" (67). But nothing is invented in this photograph of my great-grandfather's family and nothing remains to be appropriated. Only resistant images are recorded, resisting depth, narrativization, invention, appropriation, assimilation. Faced with this photograph, and others in the family box, I realize that the photographer who supposedly invents the past, like an Edward Curtis photographing "real" Indians, actually invents nothing but rather goes in search of what already exists prior to his subjects, has already been invented by the myth-making consciousness of America, to find, recognize, and verify that prior invention (how otherwise could he bear the signifiers of authenticity with lum as props?). "Indians" are thus invented, but conversely by the same process, mixedbloods are recorded and erased, having no place in the metanarrative of fixed colonial others. The opaqueness rendered toward the camera, the exclusion of the photographer from the implied life, the resistance of the pose, all of this comes from the fact that mixedbloods cannot be known-and they know full well that they cannot be known, that the camera will obscure them

7 00

REFLECTIONS

except within their own vision. Ours, they seem to say is a life undefined and beyond your reach; we invent such a life each day, sui generis. Robert Young has written about history that "the other is neutralized as a means of encompassing it: ontology amounts to a philosophy of power, as egotism in which the relation with the other is accomplished through its assimilation into the self" (13). Young quotes H G n e Cixous, who, remarking upon what she terms an "annihilating dialectical magc," states, "I saw that the great, noble, 'advanced' countries established themselves by expelling what was 'strange'; excluding it but not dismissing it; enslaving itff(1). Mixedbloods were and are exempt from such ontology and from this annihilating dialecticalmagic because they inhabited and still inhabit a boundary zone. This is not the bleeding "open wound" described in Gloria Anzaldca's Borderlands, for no tragic victirnage is embraced or celebrated here; though it is, in fact, very much like Anzald6aJs description of the borderland as "a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary" (3).Cherokee mixedbloods have had a long and honorable place within post-Columbian America beginning with the first influx of Europeans. A paragraph from Grace Steele Woodward's The Cherokees gives us a sense of the early and thorough redity of such miscegenation: John Adair, from Ireland, married Mrs. Ge-ho-ga Foster, a fullblood Cherokee of the Deer Clan. George Lowrey married Nannie of the Holly clan, and their son George (born about 1770)figured prominently in the affairs of the [Cherokee] Nation until his death in 1852. . . . From mixed-blood unions consummated in the Colonial period came future Cherokee leaders, saints, and sinners. (85-86) Today there is an Adair County in Oklahoma, and the h t of prominent Cherokee mixedbloods is unending, including such figures as John Ross, one-eighth Cherokee by blood quantum and highly educated but the most prominent of all Cherokee leaders and the

THE SYLLOGlSTIC MIXEDBLOOD

707

most eloquent opponent of Removal in the early nineteenth century; Sequoyah (George Guess), creator of the Cherokee syllabary; John Rollin Ridge, whose father was educated in New England and who in 1854became the first Native American novelist. Countless mixedbloods made the long and deadly walk to Indian Territory and built their homes and farms there, entering into a new life as resilient and adaptive survivors, the way Native peoples of the Americas always have. No countable cultural artifacts or commodities, these people were simply bent on survival in their place and time. As Vizemr has pointed out, before the twentieth century in America, "Natives had practiced medicine, composed music, published histories, novels, and poetry, won national elections, and traveled around the world" (Fugitive Poses 165).But these Natives were not the Indians sought feverishly by archival imagists on the other side of the aperture and therefore not the ones whose images became, as George Steiner has explained about the "past that rules us," imprinted as "symbolic constructs of the past. . . almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility" (3). The very existence of these heroic pragmatists and syncretic survivors was "obscured by the interirnage simulations of the indian, the antithesis of civilization in photographs and motion pictures" (Fugitive Poses 165).4Mixedbloods or fullbloods, Native Americans who shunned the static props desired and proffered by cultural artificers, and insisted on living and survivingin the dynamic moment, were erased by those who manufacture kitschy history for acquisitive colonial power. Mixedbloods cannot be appropriated because they cannot be defined. By the absoluteness of their irrefutable presence, beyond myth and metaphor, stubbornly obstructing the construction of simulated Indians, they are annoying obstacles to white appropriation. Mixedbloods cannot be neutralized or encompassed or assimilated. In White Mythologies, Robert Young quotes Said: "In occupying two places at once . . . the depersonalized, dislocated colonial subject can become an incalculable object, quite literally difficult to place. The demand of [colonial]authority cannot unify

1 02

REFLECTIONS

its message nor simply identify its subjects" (143). Young also quotes Homi Bhabha to the effect that "in racial stereotyping 'colonial power produces the colonized as a fuced reality which is at once an 'otherf and yet entirely knowable and visible"' (143). Mixedbloods are Said's ultimate "incalculable object" or "dislocated colonial subjects"; neither "knowable" nor "visible" in Bhaba's terms, they resist racial stereotyping and fixed realities as they balance within their two sites of Native and Euramerican selves. "There is a history of darkness in the making of images," the novelist and photographer Wright Morris has pointedly noted. About nineteenth-century photographs of Indians, Morris suggests: "Presented in their full regalia, as if intuiting a final judgement, they faced the photographer as if assembled to be shot" (16). The mixedbloods in our family photographs imitate nothing, nor do they face the camera ready to be shot. They are ambivalent survivors ready to slip away at the first twitch of history's trigger finger. Uncostumed, they defiantly or sullenly or suspiciously regard the camera as a strange diversion to be briefly borne before they get on with their discordant lives, leaving the photographic record of this one moment to flutter on casual winds across generations. They inhabit neither past nor future. They give me nothing. These photographs taken in Indian Territory are records of invisibility, and it is within the invisible that I locate rnixedblood identity. There is no space for mixedbloods within the national fantasy; therefore they remain uninvented. "Thus the air," says Barthes, "is the luminous shadow which accompanies the body; and if the photograph fails to show this air, then the body moves without a shadow, and once this shadow is severed . . . there remains no more than a sterile body" (110). In Choctaw cosmology a person possesses two shadows, the shilup and shilornbish, two souls as it were. In life and death these two shadows have different responsibilities, different paths.5 Though Choctaw and Cherokeebelief systems are quite different from one another, it strikes me that the generic Native mixedblood resembles this Choctaw figure of two shadows, differences cast by the

THE SYLLOGISTIC MIXEDBLOOD

7 03

unitary unnarnable coming between perception and light, without which differences there would indeed be only the sterile body. In the photographs these shadows form something like a palimpsest of soul, paradoxically simultaneous shimmerings over the flat surface. Posing with two shadows, mixedbloods split the history of darkness at the heart of image making, withholding what the colonial contriver would take. lndian but not Indians, Irish but not Irishmen. Few looking at photos of mixedbloods would be likely to say, "But they don't look like Irishmen," but everyone seems obligated to offer an opinion regarding the degree of Indianness represented. Even my wife, who has borne twenty-five years of my personal mixedblood musings and who knows my knotted family history, peruses these ancestral photographs and says, "They don't look very Indian." I hold my tongue, not responding with what I have said at other times to other people: "Do you mean they don't look Navajo or Lakota or Cherokee or Lummi or Yurok or fullblood or halfblood or quarterblood or what?" How, in fact, I want to ask, could anyone in a photograph look like an "Indian," something that never existed. The answer is, of course, that these mixedbloods could look "indian" only by being what Vizenor has labeled "cultural ritualists": by dressing in costume, posing as the absent other, stopping the clock. Had these mixedblood Cherokee ancestors posed in traditional Plains Indian headdresses and beadwork, everyone would immediately know they were Indian. A Navajo-Laguna friend (a "real" fullblooded Indian) looks at a photograph of one of my great-aunts who happens to be very dark complexioned, has a pronouncedly large nose, and stares at the camera with sullen suspicion, and says, "She looks like something." What he means, of course, is that she is dark like his relatives and therefore looks like what he thinks of as Indian. In my experience, my fox-faced greatgrandfather, though not nearly as darkly hued as the aunt, looks more "Indian." How do we combat this essentialist &course when it comes even from those we love and like? How do we teach our own children

1 04

REFLECTIONS

the meaning of "indianness" in their own blood when they can only look to these photographs for signs they will not find? Where is the thread that will take us to the heart of this maze and back out to the ordered world where paths ostensibly do not turn back upon themselves and monsters ostensibly do not lurk? '{How are we to distinguish between the real and the imitation?" asks Wright Morris (4). I see in these mixedblood ancestors the kind of suspicious yet resolute indeterminacy that I feel in my own life and see in my own face, a kind of Native negative capability. The Indian has never been real in the mirror. I tell my children that I am not an Indian in the photographs they preserve.

CHAPTER NINE

In a Sense Abroad Clowns and Indians, Poodles and DrumsDiscoveries in France

The four boys from the Northern Ute and Blackfeet reservations had their drum set up on the right side of the stage, and the Blackfeet girls and one Ute grass dancer were lined up ready to dance on the left side. Amid the bright lights, I could see the cameraman trying to get the best angle or light on the three extraordinarily beautiful young girls in the jingle dress, fancy shawl dress, and women's traditional outfit, and the handsome warrior in the grass dance regalia. Before coming into the studio, Logan, the powerfully built grass dancer, had discovered he'd left his roach headdress on the train from Paris. Calls had been made, but of course the porcupine-quill roach was gone, now the possession of some incredulous Frenchman, and Logan couldn't dance without it. He was silently disconsolate. Luckily, however, one of our French hosts had offered the loan of his own porcupine-quill roach, a nineteenth-century Crow roach he wore when he did traditional Northern Plains dances in France and which he happened to have with other dance paraphernalia in the back of his car at that very moment. Now Logan stood on stage complete, imposing and digrufied with his borrowed roach. Of the group, he was the oldest at twenty, a pillar of maturity and responsibility part of the time and obviously saddened by his own human weaknesses the rest of the time. Like all of us.

7 06

REFLECTIONS

In the monitor, I watched as the camera panned across the stage and back again, strafing me and the beautiful and urbane hostess on our stools in the middle of the stage. The guy behind the camera looked to be salivating at the exotic vision of les indiennes in the TV studio. It was Mexican Pete's Wild West show all over again, the toast of Paree or, in this case, Nancy in eastern France. I regretted not having my Iron Eyes Cody wig, turkey feathers, and bone choker. I knew I looked too much like a professor and not enough like an extra from Dances with Wolves to suit French television audiences. The Blackfeet kids looked tr2s indienne; fourteen to seventeen years old, they had never been out of Montana before. The three Ute guys had traveled a bit on the powwow circuit back home and though the oldest was not yet twenty-one, they had powwow scuff marks all over them and were men of the Indian world. Of the four at the drum, only the two from the Northern Ute reservation were experienced singers.The two younger Blackfeet boys, fifteen and sixteen, hadn't really sung before, not with a drum and not on French television. But that was okay since they looked Indian as hell, were beaucoup handsome, and could keep the beat at the drum and lipsynch while the two Ute guys carried the songs. Back home people would have seen what was up irnme diately and had a whole lot of fun at the boys' expense, but here in France it didn't matter. Here in France these 50-percent lipsynching kids would get a standing ovation from twelve hundred delerious indianistes in a town called Belfort three days after this television show. For singing a forty-nine with the refrain of "Indian girls, Indian girlshow I love them Indian girls." They could have sung a Lawrence Welk tune for all the French audience would have known. On previous trips I'd experimented with French gullibility, making up wild "Indian" stories to see what they'd buy. Every male Choctaw infant is left alone in the woods for two weeks at six months of age, I'd explained. Not all survive, but the ones who do are forever close to nature and can speak with animals. I was a survivor. Finally unable to bear the unceasing demand for cliched romance any

IN A SENSE ABROAD

7 07

longer, I'd told a group at a wine-cellar bookstore reading in Bordeaux that I wasn't Indian at all but was actually descended from Soviet spies parachuted into Mississippi in order to foment revolution among Indians and Blacks. When the attempt failed, my parents had been forced to go underground, posing as mixedblood Choctaw and Cherokee farm workers and having nine children as a cover. My editor grimaced and chalked up yet another reason not to invite me back to France. Tom King, the noted Cherokee writer who'd been sharing the reading in Bordeaux with me, leaned over and said, "I think it's time we got outta here, Kimo Sabe." Under the onslaught of essentialist, romantic, unshakably confident French pronouncements upon les indiennes, I had grown passive aggressive. While they mocked my crude sorties upon the French language, I graciously taught them expressions in Choctaw such as Halito, chem achukma ishkitini, which might translate as something like, "Hello, how are you great homed owl?" I was jaded by France by the time of the dancing poodle television event. None of the kids had been to Europe before. The youngest girl, who was fourteen years old and so lovely with her flashing brown eyes, high cheekbones, bright smile, and long, shiny hair that people tended to stop and stare wherever they encountered her, had never been as far as Missoula or even been on a plane before. She had missed the flight out of Great Falls with the others and caught a later flight by herself, changing planes a couple of times before arriving at Charles de Gaulle Airport alone and taking the train into Paris without a word of French. She arrived grinning and happy as a new songbird about this strange foreign world, chattering at once with the other girls about the weird human beings and cute boys served up by France. All of the Blackfeet kids had flown to Paris alone, since the two adult chaperones who were supposed to accompany them had somehow ended up somewhere else when it came time to fly out of Great Falls. The Ute boys were far too sophisticated to have contemplated chaperones in the first place. They had already taken the metro from Vincennes, where we had been staying in the burbs of Paris, to the Eiffel Tower,

7 08

REFLECTIONS

luring two of the Blackfeet youngsters along with them. In Paris they had discovered the liberal disposition of French bars to the extent that the metro had shut down by the time when, in the very wee hours, they were ready to return to the hotel. Their response had been to walk miles through Paris, with no map, no French language, only their internal global positioning senses, and arrive back at the hotel sometime after daylight. They were definitely ready for a Gallic vision quest. I'd been in France a few times, the first time fifteen years earlier when I had a Fulbright Fellowship in Italy. In the spring of that year, 1981, my wife and I had spent two weeks luxuriating anonymously in Paris and living on bread and bottled water. Signora Cipriana Scelba, "La Scelba" as they called her in Rome, head of the Italian Fulbright commission, had made sure I was pven a generous stipend of $300 a month for my stay in Italy and so when we decided to head to Paris after eight months of teaching in Pisa, we were already penniless. We thought that would be okay since the Italians had convinced us all Parisians were dogs and would treat us like dogs, making a short visit of perhaps two days to see the Louvre the best plan. Of course the Parisians had been delightfully friendly on that trip and Paris had been Paris, so we'd stayed two weeks, starving and having a very fine time. The later trips, all in the '90s, had been to plug my novels published in France. On this particular trip with the kids, I was supposed to promote a book called Bone Game, or Le joueur de te'n2bres in French. I'd warned my French editor not to team me up again with anyone like the wellknown Native activist I'd gone through hell and gendarmes with on the first trip, the trip with a real Plains Indian leaning halfway out a cab window at two A.M. screaming extraordinarily creative expletives at surprised tourists on the Left Bank. After dinner and much wine-for the French find it trop gauche to not insist everyone drink wine, even when one valiantly attempts to demure-she had very logically come to the conclusion that these European and American tourists were responsible for all the really bad things back home, for five hundred years of genocide and ethnocide and

IN A SENSE ABROAD

7 09

ugly racism, and she wanted them to know it. Like the cartoon light bulb, the unpleasant realization had flashed for her that we had been brought to France for their amusement, that she in particular was there for exotic color. Crushed into my corner of the taxi, with our communal French editor-fresh off the powwow circuitbetween us, I was in no mood to disabuse her of her sudden enlightenment. Another time, the editor, Francis, had teamed me up with a Native American poet and rap artist on a nightmare tour from Brittany on the north coast to Marseilles on the south. The poet and would-be rap star wore tawny makeup and ultra-black hair dye that kept running awkwardly as he sweated and shouted his Indian anger at loving French audiences. On one occasion he cursed and stomped out of a performance when four young "goddamned Lakotas" as he called them showed up unexpectedly with a drum, intent on singing with us. "Traditional enemies" I had explained to the bemused audience in the huge FNAC superstore performance center in Rennes while the Lakota guys set up their drum and began to sing, oblivious to my presence. "I cannot feel your pain," one very indianized French lady replete with ultrablack braids, bones and feathers and turquoise, had shouted at us during that trip. "I want to share your pain," she exclaimed as the management dragged her away. "Lady you ain't heard a word I said," the poet-rap artist replied, black dye streaking down his face to blur with makeup. I really should have known what to expect, given the carnival of madness I'd already experienced on previous trips. Indians are so popular in France that anything can happen when you are exposed to the public. It's impossible to be prepared, especiallysince my publisher makes a point of never telling me beforehand what is expected. Francis tried to anticipate and avoid all problems or codusions by answering all questions about Indian things before any of the indigenous Americans with him could speak. Time and again, I sat with Francis and other Native writers at a book festival or writers' conference or "debate" while a French audience asked

170

REFLECTIONS

questions and Francis replied in French with thirty- or forty-minutelong lectures. To the French audience that was apparently just fine. It became clear to all of us that the French liked to talk to each other while we sat silently looking stoic and oppressed and noble and such. I had been on national television, on Canal Plus in Paris, with Shirley MacLaine, men in drag, and life-sized puppets. That had been during a previous trip to promote my second novel, The Sharpest Sight, when the publicity department of my wealthy publisher, Albin Michel, had used their considerable clout to get me on prime time with a big Hollywood name. It was a coup of such magnitude that folks at the giant glass publishing offices couldn't believe it. A nobody like me on national television with a great American actress?Comment?How had it been accomplished, they asked one another. It was like being on a version of the Tonight Show in which no one spoke English. For me it was stardom qualified by the fact that the night before the show I had to wash my kvi's and best shirt out in the hotel shower and semidryboth with intense applicationsof a hair dryer. Real celebrities didn't do such h g s , I was certain. As I was being rushed to the television studio in Paris, I kept smelling the mildew aroma of my still-damp clothing while Christine, my publisher's manic, thin, chain-smoking public relations woman, was chanting in the taxi, "Open your eyes, Louee. Smile beeg." Being slanty-and-slitty eyed and naturally dour, when I tried to follow her advice I looked like I had been deflowered only moments before and wasn't sure what to make of the experience. Smiles don't come all that easily to anyone in my family. It's a traditional Indian thing, I explained to Christine. Traditionally, she had to understand, Choctaws did not smile for fear of offending various spirits who might become jealous of such happiness. The fear arose, perhaps, from those weeks alone in the woods as an infant. My shilup and shilombish, inside and outside shadows, might just quarrel right in front of the television cameras, resulting in permanent schizophrenia should I appear too jolly. But I tried.

IN A SENSE ABROAD

777

I am confident that Shirley MacLaine, who looked fresh and lovely-and I'm certain smelled the same-did not wash her clothes in her hotel shower before the show. I am also confident that I should have known the tall, massive, deep-voiced blonde in the make-up chair next to me as we both got ready for television was not a woman, a fact I did not determine untd the cameras were on both of us and Shirley. It was only later, after Shirley had explained to the cameras apropos of a fact neither the distinguished host nor I could ascertain that she had dearly loved the "black mammy" who raised her, and after I was already out of the studio, that I learned my voice had been translated for the national viewing audience across all of France by a young Vietnamese-French woman. What had I looked like, I wondered later, speaking in the voice of a young Vietnamese-French woman? Coyote would have relished the moment, would have continued speaking in the voice of a young Vietnamese-French woman for the remainder of the trip. Qu'est-ce que c'est, Coyote? the French would say. After one reading in Marseilles, Francis and I dined in what appeared to be an actual restaurant set up on long wooden tables backstage in a theater-warehousenear the waterfront. Actors and actresses rushed franticallyback and forth, sitting down to eat with makeup that, in the "restaurant" lights, made them all look insanely manic-depressive as they chattered madly and then vanished. Somehow my editor and I ended up being driven back to our posh hotel by two young actresses, both very beautiful and excited and bent on convincing us that skinny-dipping in the marvelously polluted Bay of Marseilles would be a killer thing to do. "Louee," my editor confided when both of the actresses had rushed from the car for a moment to make a mysterious phone call, "These can be very dangerous." I concurred. Then there was the incident in Rennes with Danielle Mitterand, widow of the late president of France. I had attended a large demonstration in support of Leonard Peltier, expecting to hear Madame Mitterand, president of France Liberti, give a stirring speech only to be informed precisely at the last moment, as I stood

l 12

REFLECTIONS

convivially next to her, that it was not the famous Madame Mitterand who would gtve the speech but rather I, the Indian author. With absolutely no forewarning, I had been pushed onto a stage in front of five hundred people waiting to be educated, challenged, and stirred to action. I glared down at the widow of the late French president, and she smiled back supportively as I tried to summon forth a stirring speech. And the unfortunate events involving the plastic teepees in a small town near the French Alps where I later stood for an hour watching rainbow trout hover in the beautifully clear waters of the river running behind the town hall. Or the trouble with the fascist journalists at a dinner north of Strasbourg. Or the near-riot at the International Writers Parliament, when in typical American fashion I mistook street theater for an assassination attempt. Francis and I had mutually good reasons to distrust one another. De hop. I really should not have been surprised on television that day with the Ute and Blackfeet kids in Nancy but the clowns and poodle were still a healthy shock since Francis had assured me that this time I would not be accompanied on my promotion tour. "Ah well, Louees," he explained after the fact, "you see I knew you should be very happy to be weeth these wonderful kids. They are very wonderful, don't you think?" They were very wonderful, indeed. The boys at the drum had their baseball caps on backwards and fingers covering one ear while they mouthed songs to themselves silently and practiced drum strokes without making contact. I was supposed to talk literature with the suave hostess who, seconds before coming onto the stage, had been smoking furiously out in a hallway as her makeup was checked. She was, I had decided as I watched her in the hallway terrified of Indians and what might happen on her show. It was clear she had bigger career plans than a regional variety show, and wild Indians could have a deleterious effect on such plans, or perhaps the contrary. Que sera sera. On the stool beside me she looked radiant, beautiful to a point of unreality, and stank unmercifully of cigarette smoke, perfume, and fear-sweat, a tragic combination. My French

IN A SENSE ABROAD

7 73

editor sat on a stool to my right, ready to translate. In my mind I could hear Christine, the publisher's p.r. woman, saying, "Open your eyes, Louie. Smile beeg." I deliberately narrowed my eyes and looked dour, an angry, stoic half-Indianjust across the ice bridge. The show began, and the hostess turned to ask me a question about literature. As I opened my mouth to respond with wit and profound intellect, a clown came walking across the stage in front of me, on his hands, an upside-down, tall, lanky clown. Before I could recall what profundity I had been prepared to utter, a second, smaller clown came from the other side of the stage, bulbous nose, white bald pate, red side hair, and all the usual clown stuff, and began to play a clarinet as a small blue poodle started to spin and dance and bark to the music. The hostess smiled at the cute dog, and I watched myself on the monitor as backdrop for two clowns and a dancing poodle. Then at a prearranged signal I must have missed, the boys began to drum and sing, and the four dancers began to dance. Had someone cued the kids in advance that when the clowns and dancing dog appeared they were to go into action? Or had the kids just recognized the perfect time to push chaos to the brink? I heard the singers go into a forty-nine, with the beautifully nasal refrain, "Indian girls, Indian girls. How I love them Indian girls." Logan, the grass dancer, shuffle-steppedpowerfully toward center stage, his head down, roach waving, and immense calf muscles flexing. The tall clown, still balancing impressively on his hands, tried to run away from the grass dancer and collapsed noisily, sending the poodle yapping into the arms of the small clown with the clarinet. Logan kept dancing as the hostess shrank toward me, tilting dangerously on her stool, and I shrank toward Francis to escape the hostess's beautiful smell. The tall clown had slithered off the stage and was now watching from below as the girls danced forward and Logan retreated, at which time I looked up to notice that the television monitor was showing a commercial for cosmetics. As the commercial ran and the singers really got into their shrill forty-ninesong and the poodle barked monotonously, the dancers

7 14

REFLECTIONS

continued, unaware that they had been preempted. At that point a Frenchman in a disheveled black sport coat and wrinkled slacks and blue shirt, with the wild thinning gray hair of a set-piece scientist, came out of a door and stepped up onto the stage. The commercial ended and the dancers realized that something else was going on and they were apparently not expected to dance any longer. The dancers moved slowly back to the edge of the stage, the drum quieted, the dog was silenced in the clown's lap offcamera, and with supreme grace the beautiful, fragrant hostess began to interview the man in the sport coat about a marvelous discovery he had made, something along the lines of time travel or antigravity. I stood up and walked off the stage and out of the studio, my sudden departure fazing no one as far as I could tell. This was, indeed, not the first time my ir2s earnest editor had tricked me into devilishly bizarre touring arrangements and circus shows. I really should have learned long before encountering the clowns and poodle. My first novel to be translated into French, a book called The Sharpest Sight, had just come out in Paris in 1995 when my editor, whom I had at that time never met, called to tell me the publisher wanted me to come over for a promotional tour. I had been invited, he added, to attend the International Writers Parliament in Strasbourg as well. As exciting as a trip to Paris and around France was, I politely explained that I didn't think I could afford it. When he replied that they would pay all of my expenses, I was suspicious. Many writers, I knew, experienced such things, but I was not a writer used to being mollycoddled, or even much noticed. I wrote odd fiction with little commercial panache. Had I known that, in fact, I was not to be mollycoddled in France and had I suspected in the least what lay ahead, I would have fled to the Superstition Wilderness of Arizona before venturing to Paris. But Paris is seductive, and I went. Having traveled the French nation in four cardinal directions a number of times during the past few years, having loitered sensitively in Paris cafes with the notorious writer Thomas King, and having washed living oysters down with better wine than I am

IN A SENSE ABROAD

l 15

accustomed to drinking at book fairs on the French coast, I have leamed some tlungs. I have learned that I absolutely do not speak French, not a word of French despite my at one time erroneous belief to the contrary a lesson others should heed. I have learned that while life in France can occasionally be very good for someone posing as a famous writer, life would be much better for me in France if I looked more appropriately like a Plains warrior, preferably Lakota. I have leamed that as an Indian in France one should have a real "Indian" name and be angry as much as possible about things done to one's people, that the average citizen in France knows a great deal more about American Indians and U.S. history than I do, and that one out of two Frenchmen and women have been given Indian names, been adopted into one or more tribes, been to Crow Fair, and been on vision quests, often in the Bois de Boulogne. I have learned that while a surprising number of the French intelligentsia have impressive knowledge about the Leonard Peltier case and are properly outraged over America's brutally racist politics exemplified by the case, they are not at all amenable to discussing the darker aspects of French minority politics. I have also learned that one should never eat duck that smells strange, even in an expensive restaurant even in Paris, and that the French do not take "No Smoking" signs with any degree of seriousness whatsoever. As we all know, the French do take art very seriously, however. The French read Proust and they have produced Robbe-Grillet. I felt rather vain, therefore, when my second novel, The Sharpest Sight, received the Roman Noir prize as the best noir novel pubhshed in France in 1995. Though I still do not know what a noir novel is, I was deeply honored upon learning of the award and even more deeply honored when my literary prize arrived. But I must step back to my editor's phone call informing me of the award. "You have won an award, Louees," he said in his always-happy-butsuspecting-trouble-aheadvoice. "The Roman Noir prize." Francis, whose name must be pronounced Frahncees, speaks excellent French, having lived nearly every year of his life within spitting

7 76

REFL ECTlONS

distance of the Eiffel Tower. Roman noir sounded very French when he said it, and very important. "But," he added, "zere ees a problehm." Francis's English only begins to sound like an American movie when zere ees a problehrn. I waited. "They have gven me your prize but I do not know how to get it to you." Assuming the best, I said, "Why not just mail it? I'm sure I can cash it over here." Francis was silent for a proper moment before replying, "I am afraid it is not money." After another silence, he said, "Eet ees a gun, a peestol." The roman noir prize, it turned out, was a 9-millimeter Beretta pistol, despite the fact that the prize-givers call it the "Calibre 38" award. It turned out I had written a book that had something significant in common with Rayrnond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett's work, which is well beloved in France. Without realizing it, I had written a noir Indian novel. The .38-caliber award was a 9-millimeter Beretta. I studied the situation for a moment and finally explained to Francis that I was honored to have a Beretta pistol and would consult with a gun-collector friend who would surely know how to ship such a thing from Paris to Albuquerque; I was sure many guns were shipped from Paris to Albuquerque every day. I consulted with my friend, a Hemingway specialist, who carefully explained all the proper channels and paperwork and the long, long time involved in such a delicate international transaction. I decided to call Francis and convey the complex information. Before I could do so, however, a delivery man knocked at the door bearing a box from my editor inscribed, in large black letters, LIVRES. Books. Inside was a very attractive Beretta pistol which I now have framed in a kind of shadow box in my office.That is the moral of this story.

CHAPTER TEN

Roman Fervor, or Tmvels in Hypercarnevale

"Pianos Anders met Nella Vesco at Mario's in the Trastevere. It was raining in Rome." That was the beginning of a story I wrote in Italy a story titled "Roman Fervor." Pianos Anders was the Devil and cruised around Rome on a Moto Guzzi motorcyle. Nella was a nayve American. Rome was seductive. The Coliseum got involved in the plot, with moonlight visits to its malarial environs. Mario's restaurant figured heavily. The names had come to me one day as I was sitting in a tiny and fairly dingy hotel room on the Left Bank in Paris, the first room I'd ever seen with a bidet in it which I mistook, of course, for a different piece of plumbing. I was alternately scanning a newspaper and glancing out the rainstreaked window, feeling like young Hemingway or maybe D'Arcy McNickle direct from the Flathead Reservation of Montana to Paris. I'd been killing time, laboring in my weak French through a short piece in Le Monde about a woman named Nella Vesco. I cannot remember why Nella Vesco was newsworthy, but I remember looking up from the article and seeing a store across the street with "Pianos Anders" in gold paint on the window. The names in conjunction on a rainy Paris day struck a chord, and I carried them away with me when my wife and I returned to Rome. I threw the story away in 1987, on a day of despair in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico, filling a thirty-gallon garbage bag with paper out in my

118

REFLECTIONS

converted tack-room office in the barn. Into the bag went everything I'd ever written up to that point except a novel manuscript that I'd forgotten my agent had safely in New York. The manuscripts were all precomputer constructions, and so were gone forever with, of course, no great loss. I was never going to write again. Today I regret only that one story, the only portion of which I retain in memory being the first two lines. Those first lines are a souvenir of a wonderful year my wife, Polly, and I spent in Italy, first in Rome and then up north where I held a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Pisa. During that year we glided around Italy, from Rome to Pisa, Pisa to Florence, the hill country of Tuscany and Umbria, Siena, San Gimignano, Perugra, Bologna, Aosta, Milan, down to Bari, Brindisi, and back up the coast to Venice and Bolzano, over to Rapallo and the Italian Riviera. We had no money for the Italian Fulbright Commission did not believe in money but we had plentiful time because Italians believe in time. Italians know how to luxuriate in time, to dwell in it and bathe in it and wear it like rare perfume. We were often desperately poor, but sinfully rich in hours and days and weeks and months, for my job was to teach in an Italian university, and Italian academics long ago deciphered the key to a good life, and the key involves abundant disposable time. From Pisa we went to Paris, to Amsterdam, to Copenhagen, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Berne, up the Jungfrau, down to Barcelona and back to Geneva and Zermatt and over the Simplon and to the Matterhorn from two nations. We went to Greece. We ate bread and drank bottled water and I diminished rapidly throughout the year, eventually leaving twenty-five pounds of my meager one hundred and sixty-five behind when we returned home to America. I was taken for Basque crossing the Spanish border and thoroughly searched and interrogated by the formidable Guardia Civil; for Hungarian crossing the Austrian border and searched for illicit canned goods; for a suspicious character everywhere, while Polly provided respectable ballast in difficult waters. In 1986 the Italian man of extreme letters, Umberto Eco, published Travels in Hypmreality, essays recounting in part his journey

ROMAN FERVOR

7 79

across America in search of what makes this country tick. "The 'completely real"' in America, he concluded, "becomes identified with the 'completely fake"' (7). Looking, oddly enough, in Hollywood, Disneyland, San Franciso's Fisherman's Wharf, Hearst Castle, and various wax museums, Eco found, not very surprisinglyexactly what he had come in search of, what he calls "an America of furious hyperreality," "horror vacui," the "creche-ification of the bourgeois universe." Eco's recorded journey shows clearly that all travel is inner travel, and that, as Emerson understood, our giants go with us. The America Eco found and illuminated is Eco's inner America, not a world anyone else inhabits, a wilderness of signs decoded by an Italian intellect according to a magic semiotic ring forged and brought along for the quest. The Italy I found in 1980 was and remains similarly my own Italy, a fresh Old World encountered with new and untrained eyes that naively embraced signs and wonders. My wife and I found an Italy of furious subtextuality, where signs were indeed signs and sometimes did not lie but rather fell away into ludic abyss or carnevale.

Mario's was a solid little restaurant in the Trastevere repon of Rome where students often lived, that bohemian quarter across the Tiber River from the more respectable parts of the city. At Mario's one could dine on half a roast chicken, an excellent salad, rice, and the unassuming yet confident house wine for three dollars and fifty cents. True, the confident wine was piped in each morning through a two-inch hose from a tanker truck-a disconcerting event I witnessed more than once-but nonetheless it was a notch above the Red Mountain I'd drunk as a student in Santa Barbara. We would walk the ten minutes from our pensione, the Ponte Rotto, run by an order of nuns, to Mario's almost every night for the couple of months we lived in Rome, strolling on those fine September evenings through alleys carpeted with discarded hypodermic needles where the methadone population shot up, we supposed. Sometimes,we crossed the river on the unbroken other

120

REFLECTIONS

bridge and dined cheaply in other parts of the city, meandering up toward the Caste1Sant'Angelo, of Benvenuto Cellini fame, and the Vatican to watch the lights on the river, or taking a bus through the monoxide-shrouded streets to the Piazza di Spagna to get a tourist sandwich and wander yet again through Keats's little apartment at the foot of the Spanish Steps, la scalinata, where he wrote and languished to lus youthful end. On first looking into Keats's home, seeing fragments of manuscripts in that little room, the bare fumiture, and the feeling of intense life outside, I easily imagined the young genius there, felt his sense of isolation in the face of mortality, the thoughts that he would soon indeed cease to be. Being young and melodramatic myself, a country boy with a college exposure to great poetry but no sophisticationat all and thus none of the necessary cymcism that protects us, I felt Keats in that room to the very marrow of my bones, and convinced Polly to go with me to the Protestant cemetery to see the great poet's grave along with Shelley's, standing over the stones and musing upon a hidden morrow in midnight, a triple sight in blindness keen, and what great leagues I'd traveled since boyhood in Mississippi. Facing those dead poets in Rome, I truly felt that I'd gotten somewhere, even if I was already older than poor JohnnyKeats would ever be. Somewhere I have a photograph of the graves, in a box with other images. (Years later I would similarly seek out the graves of T. S. Eliot and Byron in Westminster Abbey and stand awe-stricken once more.) We were waiting in Rome for the proper time to go north to Pisa, the way countless legions must have waited in Rome over the many centuries for orders to go north, so I could assume teaching duties at the university. Though I had tried, I'd been unable to get information in advance that would tell me when classes began for the year in Pisa. When I fretted aloud about this state of uncertainty the Romans would assure me repeatedly that the situation was quite normal and that in any case it would be a dire mistake to go to Pisa too soon. "A very little city," they would say. "Provincial. Nothing to do at all-and those Pisani." They would shake

ROMAN FERVOR

72 l

their heads and sometimes sigh, leaving the sordid truths about the Pisani unsaid but deeply inferred. Occasionally someone would look at me closely and ask if all American Indians looked like me. Upon finding that we had lived in Arizona, where I had been a fire fighter, they would look even more closely and ask if the Apaches in Arizona were still dangerous. Only those Indians blended of Choctaw, Cherokee, Irish, and French look like me, I would answer, and yes, the Apaches were still very dangerous, especially if you ended up in the wrong bar at the wrong time. Once in a while I would attempt to call the university in Pisa to discover when I could expect classes to begin, but I never succeeded in reaching anyone other than an elderly sounding secretary who would shout Pronto and Non c'e' and then hang up. We were not having such a bad time in Rome, meanwhile, and weren't terribly unhappy about not being called north to Pisa. In Rome our responsibilities included having breakfasts of astonishingly good coffee and very hard, very bad rolls with chocolate paste each morning in the pensione, brought to our tables by the sorelle who whisked silently and disapprovingly about the beau tifully tiled, twelfth-century breakfast room. Each morning I would outrage the sisters by asking if I might just have one more cup of the superb coffee, per favore. Mi piace, I would say, flexing my new Italian, molto delizioso. The sorella would frown, mumble indecipherable Italian deprecationsvery likely calling upon the Deity or at least a Vatican power to witness this American abomination, and shuffle away to bring the second coffee. Caffe American0 it was, heavy and rich and thick with milk and sugar. Years later when I found I had been lactose intolerant all my life, I understood why my stomach was in even more dire pain than usual throughout our stay in Italy, but at the time I didn't put the clues together and probably would have continued to drink that coffee come hell or gastrointestinal revolt even had I known. After breakfast our tasks in Rome took on a different complexion, for then we felt that duties called for us to venture out into the city, sticking our hands bravely into the Bocca della Verita each day

122

REFLECTIONS

as we passed, knowing full well that if we were dishonest people our hands would be left in the stony mouth of the sculpture. We learned to cross terrifying Roman streets by burying ourselves inside coveys of scurrying nuns, for not even Roman drivers will run over the sorelle. We learned to board the always impossibly crowded busses by wedgmg ourselves behind the massive, blackclad sisters and following their torpedo phalanxes into the vehicles. The Church was endlessly valuable to us and, like the famed Osage Doctor Revard, I discovered and claimed it in the name of my nation. I also discovered that one out of two Italian women looks like Sophia Loren and the other one out of two looks like her more beautiful sister. Polly thought Italian men were equally beautiful, but I believe she irnaped that. Even the bus drivers, however, were obviously dressed by Milanesi fashion designers. Everything was beautiful and all was shrouded in fumes-people, cars, buses, mopeds, and scooters all smoking all the time. It wasn't all fun or easy. Sometimes we had to pass through underground pedestrian tunnels where signs warned in English of "Bad Atmospheric Conditions," even passing the spot where Caesar had been killed in one pedestrian underpass, or so the sign said. Et tu, Brute, I would say each time in passing, to the disgust of my spouse. And sometimes we had to brave the elements in the Medici Gardens, where the sun could be unmercifully hot and sprinkles of rain would occasionally nip us dashing into the Villa Borghese or out of an arbor or museum. We went to a theater and saw L'lmpero Colpisce Ancora and Urban Cowboy, delighting at the sounds of Ciao cowboy from the screen. On a television set across the alley from our Ponte Rotto room the theme music from Bonanza played every night. We grew restless and nostalgic and needed to force the moment to its crisis. I was, after all, supposed to be in Italy to teach American literature at a university in Pisa, a very little city hours away by train and full of indescribable Pisani. One day we boarded a train and went north to find the truth. 11Magrufico Dottore Professore Rolando Anzilotti, the extraordinarily distinguished professor of American literature at the University

ROMAN FERVOR

123

of Pisa, internationally renowned scholar, hero of the Italian resistance in World War II, member of Parliament,and creator of Pinoccluo Village outside of Pisa, met us at the train station. With the authoritative zest for life I would come to associate with Professor Anzilotti, he quickly bundled the two of us plus bags into an automobile the size of a microwave oven and accelerated from zero to sixty (kilometers) in five seconds on the medieval streets of Pisa. Seated in front and bitterly envying Polly the relative safety of the back seat, I stared at the ancient buildings and youthful people blurring past on one side, vibrating with the cobblestones and afraid to look ahead. When I did turn frontward, I noticed a sign indicating that we were in an extremely narrow one-way alley and not going in the direction prescribed. "Professor Anzilotti," I murmured, "isn't this a one-way street?" There wasn't even enough room for a bicycle on either side of the car. He downshifted and accelerated even more, the tiny motor screaming. "Yes, I know," he shouted above the motor and cobblestones, "that is why I must go fast." And so it went. In the hotel later, we discovered a disconcertingodor rising from bathroom fixtures and dissipating throughout our room. "There is a problem," I explained to the young man reading a paper at the desk. "A very strong odor." Before I could finish, the young man looked up from his soccer news and said, "Non c'e' problema" and looked back down. He was correct, as I was to discover. There was no problem. Every plumbing fixture in Pisa gave off the same fragrance as a normal occurrence, the influence of the beautiful Arno River-and stunningly beautiful it was with the beige and orange city reflected at sunset-that flowed through town and could be recognized by its unique odor several miles away. This, we learned, was one of the many paradoxes of Italy. One of the most beautiful places in the world simply stank to high heaven in particular places at particular times, including much of the time. Tanneries. The next morning I made my pilgrimage to Professor Anzilotti's office on the second level of a building undoubtedly familiar to

124

REFLECTIONS

Dante, right next to the Hunger Tower. Being American, I got to the point, asking when classes would begin, when I should expect to start teaching. "Well," Professor Anzilotti replied, "I am not sure." I hesitated for a moment, assuming I had asked the question incorrectly. "When, I mean, does the term begut?" I repeated deferentially. "Well," he said, "you see. I am not sure. Perhaps you should ask Professor Coltelli." Professor Laura Coltelli was in charge of another university institute in which I would also be teaching. I decided to try once more before seeking Professor Coltelli. "Can you perhaps give me a ball-park figure?" I said, knowing Professor Anzilotti's good grasp of American slang. "Just an approximate date, like perhaps November fifteenth?" It was already well into October, and our residence was still Rome. "Well." Professor Anzilotti closed his eyes and slowly nodded his great, silver-maned head. "Perhaps it is possible. See what Professor Coltelli has to say." I left in search of the other institute, wandering about the medieval part of the city through buildings that constituted a university but looked no different from all the other ancient buildings in the city. I found Professor Coltelli in a smaller version of the office I had left twenty minutes earlier and promptly asked if she could tell me when I would be expected to start teaching. "Well," she said. "I am not sure." We looked at each other, taking measure it seemed. "What," she said at last, "did Professor Anzilotti say?" I decided on the truth. "He said November 15sounded possible." La Professor6ssa Coltelli closed her eyes and considered. "That is a good date," she said finally. Back at Professor Anzilotti's office I found him in the same position I'd left him in. "What," he inquired, "did Professor Coltelli say?" I closed my eyes for a moment. "Well," I responded. "Professor Coltelli said November fifteenth sounded good."

ROMAN FERVOR

7 25

"Well, let us say classes will begin on November 15." And, of course, my classes began on November fifteenth, which I discovered much later was close to the official date for the opening of Italian universities. I professori had been making pleasant with me, making uno scherzo.And my students were allowed an extra ten days. But still there was the matter of textbooks. I had agreed to teach a graduate seminar on the works of John Steinbeck, very popular in Italy, an "American seminar" as ProfessorAnzilotti insisted, meaning I was expected to force Italian students to actually speak in a class and, even more extraordinarily,to write papers. For Professor Coltelli's institute I would teach an undergraduate survey of American literature. I had corresponded with Professor Anzilotti at some length about the texts to be required for each class. I was earnest, serious, careful, and after much worry and scrutiny I had decided upon a particular anthology for the undergraduate survey and a proper selection of Steinbeck's fiction and nonfiction for the seminar. Where, I asked Professor Anzilotti, should the students purchase the textbooks? He raised his great head and looked at me beneath heavy lids. "Well," he said. "You see, the studentscannot purchase the textbooks." I hesitated before asking why, intuiting that the answer would not clarify my situation greatly. He kept his patient expression fixed upon me, showing that he was willing to go to great lengths for a perhaps dull-witted American. "Well," he replied finally. "The students cannot purchase the textbooks because we did not order the textbooks." I squinted slightly. "But," I said, "I thought we had agreed that you would order textbooks." "Well." He smiled gently, obviously showing enormous patience with his slow visitor. "You see, we did not order the textbooks because the students would not have purchased the textbooks." Classes began on November fifteenth,without textbooks. Earnest to a fault, I put on my gray tweed jacket, blue shirt and tie, and charcoal slacks and, carrying an umbrella like allgood Pisani, bussed my way to the university district. At first, for my undergraduates,

726

REFLECTIONS

of whom there might be one hundred or twenty students present on any gven day depending upon uncertain forces I knew nothing about, I would type ditto masters on the little portable typewriter I had brought with me, spending hours typing "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "The Open Boat," stories by Jewett and Freeman, Eliot's "Prufrock" and even-it still hurts to think of this-"The Waste Land." I'd rush into the American literature offices, throw off my jacket and roll up my sleeves, and, watched inscrutably by the thousand-year-old librarian, run dittoes off on the great handcranked machine, staining my hands and arms a brilliant purple. For the first month I diligently dittoed and handed out copies of poems and stories to the undergraduates, a small crowd or a great sea of disturbingly beautiful people, mostly female and mostly improved versions of Sophia Loren. The students would be very polite and grateful for the poems and stories I gave them, and they would take them away. By the end of the fourth week, however, I realized with a dawning certainty that no one had read anything I had spent so many hours typing and spilling purple ink over. They simply were politely and smilingly accepting the papers and taking them to some mysterious destination where they remained eternally unread. I came to my senses and became a performance artist and storyteller. Because most of the lovely young students spoke or comprehended only very limited English, I read poems and passages to them slowly and carefully and told stories in my limited Italian. I told them the story of the boy and the runaway slave on the Mississippi River, reading aloud the wonderful descriptions of daybreak and lightning storms and Huck's passionate decision to go to hell for Jim. I told them what errant critics thought and said about the boy and the slave on the river, and together we condemned those critics as too dense to understand the true genius of the novel's ending as well as I, and now my students, did. I recounted the adventures of Humphrey Van Weyden and Wolf Larson, reading Wolf's wonderful philosophy so forcefully that the students became one and all violent materialists for a day. We all decided we, too,

ROMAN FERVOR

7 27

would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. For part of one day we worked excruciatingly together to translate the lobster and squid at the b e p i n g of The Financier into a common language. We made our way through a much-abridged oral version of MobyDick and through Wharton's sad story of Lily Bart doomed by a cruel society, a tale the students understood quickly. Attendance improved dramatically after the first three weeks until the room was packed with students who now had a heightened appreciation for the American system of education. I indicated to them that there were poems and stories and novels written and published by Native Americans, or "Red Indians" as indigenous Americans are often called in Europe. Trickster tales had enormous appeal, and the pathos of House Made of Dawn, in my thirty-minute oral version, enraptured them. I recited "Sunday Morning," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and "The Red Wheelbarrow." Students listened to everything politely, barely breathing, coming away from my class with significant knowledge of and admiration for a very peculiar version of American literature, a kind of knowledge that must have fascinated the Italian professors who directed the students' oral examinations. There were no papers to read and no homework assignments to grade, nothing to do but perform for three hours each week. My profession would never again seem so delightful to me For the students in the graduate seminar I scoured Tuscany and Umbria and even more distant places. Bookstores in towns like Perugia and Siena, Florence and Rapallo, all had copies of various Steinbeck novels. I found one here and two there, and I made gfts of the novels to the six students. "Communisti," as they called themselves, and to a person great admirers of Ronald Reagan, they sat in my seminar in fine suits and fur coats and very slowly, painfully, internalized the foreign concept of verbalizing personal feelings about a novel. "So," I would ask brightly, "what do you think of this novel? Was it truly necessary for George to shoot poor Lenny? And what about the fact that it was a German pistol?"

728

REFLECTIONS

The students, all of whom spoke nearly perfect English, would look at me politely, and after a few minutes I would try a different tack, a different question with the same results. Finally I explained that we were supposed to discuss the books, that such was the nature of a seminar. They were supposed to tell me what they found in the books, how they felt about them, and we would discuss those things. It was their class, truly, and I was there to guide them perhaps but not to lecture. On the third day of silence, one young man took pity on me. "Professore," he said, obviously struggling for a proper explanation. "Well, you see, although we are communisti we have been produced by a Catholic system. In such a system you are supposed to gve us, maybe you would call it the catechism." He smiled, relieved at having found the right concept. "And then, you see, we write it down and tell it to you." "I give you the truth and you write it down?" We had a good time. I met the timeless crone who had shouted "Non c'i!" at me and hung up during my calls from Rome. Reminiscent of the Sybil hangvlg in her wicker basket in The Waste Land, she was older even than the thirteenth-centuryuniversity, bent and wizened and untouchable in the enormity of her remoteness. She could neither hear nor see with any certainty, and in her keeping rested the great, massive, invaluable cast-iron key to the university's minuscule library. Such an undertaking was it to persuade her to rise from her mountainous desk and climb, bent and twisted, over a period of what seemed painful hours, the precipitous flight of marble stairs to the little library and insert the key into the glass doors covering whatever segment of literature one desired, that one seldom summoned the courage to do so. Consequently, we read alphabetically, having grabbed an armload of books from whichever library case she had opened. Winter was a season of J's: Helen Hunt Jackson; James, both Henry and William; Randall Jarrell;Jeffers and Jefferson;Jewett and Joyce. Pisa was a communist stronghold in a conservative region. The train station in Bologna had been bombed the year before, and we

ROMAN FERVOR

129

all lived in fear of thefascisti, the ultra-right-wing terrorists whose practice was to strike randomly, blowing up public places to intimidate the population.The Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigades, on the left, in contrast, selected their targets carefully,preferring assassination to indiscriminate terror. In the very center of Pisa, the national government had, in a display of exceptional insight and miscalculation, placed the training center and barracks for a formidable military division, the feared paracadutisti, or paratroopers, the Italian Green Berets. Friction at times developed between the communist students of the university and the right-wing paratroopers, especially when the lonely soldiers were drawn toward the young women who lounged on scooters in the plaza, as happened one April afternoon. The boyfriend took exception and beat up the paratrooper. The paratrooper rushed to the paracadutisti barracks and returned with a hundred friends who came marching through the streets in a menacing phalanx giving fascist salutes. The students responded by beating up all of the paratroopers, who then fled in a wild panic back to the barracks. The next day mothers began arriving from all over Italy, and by the following morning furious and concerned mothers lined the street in front of the entrance to the paracadutisti center, protesting the federal government's failure to protect their sons. Italy was different, I decided. When Polly's purse was stolen, the lesson of difference was driven home. We had been traveling north of the Alps, guarding our meager resources with extreme care, but we had returned to Pisa and felt at home there after several months. She let her guard down, and a deft boy on a scooter snatched the purse right from under her arm as she boarded a bus. Passport, credit cards, a small amount of cash, and a treasured little pocketknife were in the purse, and we were upset. We reported the theft to a beautifully dressed poliziotto standing on the edge of the plaza. He informed us that we must report the theft not to the polizia but rather to the carabinieri and gave us directions to the proper location.The carabinieri dwelt inside a courtyard

130

REFLECTIONS

with an imposing gate guarded by impeccably uniformed men with machine guns. We inquired nervously at a small office as to the correct procedure for reporting a stolen purse and were greeted with muted outrage. One did not report stolen purses to the carabinieri. The carabinieriwere involved in a war against terrorism, not purse snatchers. Stolen purses belonging to foreigners were correctly reported to the Ufficio per Stranieri. We were given directions and set off again. It was getting late in the afternoon, and we worried that the office for foreign victims of crime might be closed. The office was very small, a cubicle up two flights of stairs, dimly lit but open. Behind a desk sat a disheveled balding man in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up and wrinkled suitcoat on the back of his oak chair. He needed a shave and looked cross but perhaps patient. The room reeked of great quantities of smoke over long duration. He motioned us to sit and said, "Yes." "Well," I said. "You see, my wife's purse has been stolen. We were told to report it here." "By whom were you told to do this?" His English was perfect, even to the tired accent that would have fit on the Barney Miller show. "The polizt'a and the carabinieri, both." He nodded. "Well, yes, that is correct." We waited. He considered his cluttered desk top very sadly before finally saying, "But I am afraid you cannot report the stolen purse at this time." "Well," I said. "We were told to do this." "Dunque." His sadness at the impermeable ignorance of foreigners had caused him to slip back into Italian. "You see, you cannot report this because you do not have the correct form." "Form?" Polly said very politely. "You must purchase the correct form, the carta bollata." He seemed resigned to the impossibility of anyone purchasing such a form. "And do you have such forms?" Polly continued, her voice now hopeful.

ROMAN FERVOR

137

He shook his head. "You must go to the tabacchino to purchase the form." He explained to us how to find the tabacchino, which was not far away. When we returned with the form, the detective smiled broadly. No longer despairing of the impenetrable ignorance of all stranieri, he set to work quickly and efficiently to help us fill the form out properly at the end of which time he sat back in his swivel chair and took a deep breath, seemingly sad once more. "Do you think there is any chance of finding the purse?" Polly's voice indicated that she, like me, held no such hope. He tapped his long fingers on the desk, sighed, and examined the form before him as if it might provide an answer. "Well, you see," he said, "we will find the purse." My wife and I looked at one another. /'And the purse will contain your passport and credit cards." He sighed. "But we will not recover the money or the little knife." We left the office shrouded in mystery. Four days later, two nattily attired officers of the commissariato di polizia rang the doorbell of our apartment in the postmodern apartment building where we lived amidst vineyards outside of town. Very politely they presented my wife's purse and wished us a fine day. "The little knife," one of them said sadly. "Well, I am afraid it is not there." "And the money" the other officer shrugged and offered a commiserating smile as they departed. The Scottish woman in the apartment below scurried up the stairs to ask why the coppers had been there. Her Algerian husband was outside, so she could leave her apartment. It was safe because, as she indicated through our fourth-floor window, her husband was at that moment ascending the scaffolding of another apartment building under construction. He was, she explained, upset because some of the workmen had whistled at her as she'd walked by just a few minutes before. We watched him climb to the level of the half-dozen undershirted workmen. I opened the window. Her husband was waving his arms in front of the men who were watching him with what

7 32

REFLECTIONS

appeared friendly curiosity. Then the men all began to wave their arms. The husband pushed one of the men, who pushed him back, both almost losing their balance. "You should understand," he shouted in Italian. "Because you, too, are Algerian.'' All the men grew calm, contemplative. The husband turned and descended the scaffolding, and the neighbor rushed back down the stairs to her apartment. On the morning after their wedding in his place of birth, she had confided to my wife, her husband's family had paraded the red-stained sheets of the nuptial bed through the streets of their little town.

For exercise I ran miles through the countryside, two and sometimes three hours at a time, passing through several little villages, a tourist in m i n g shoes. One day eight miles into my run I found a pair of enormous antique, hand-forged pliers. I ran the eight miles home holding the beautiful pliers, and nearly every car that passed me stopped to ask if I required help repairing my automobile. I bought an Italian racing bike, a Legnano da corsa, and rode it often up into the mountains outside of Pisa. We had tried to buy such a bike for Polly also, but the stout gentleman who owned the bicycle shop, and had in his time been a great racer, refused to sell such a bike to a woman. It was not proper and he would not commit such a sacrilege even for a handsome profit. I admired his sense of ethics, though Polly did not. We left Pisa in the spring to travel in Europe before going home, staying one last day, however, for Pisa's grand camevale celebration. Festivities were to begin in a plaza beside the beautiful, fragrant Amo. The newspaper had promised that four marching bands from neighboring towns would wind their way through Pisa from four directions, converpg upon the plaza. Furthermore, the newspaper hinted, there was to be a grand surprise. We arrived early to get view-seats on the high wall along the river. Music blared from a PA system. A tiered wedding cake that appeared to be made of beautifully painted and figreed cardboard,

ROMAN FERVOR

733

twenty feet in diameter and at least fifteen feet high, dominated the center of the plaza. An anxious crowd milled around the cake, some dancing to the loudspeaker music. In the distance we could hear the strains of four marching bands already approaching, each band playing a quite different tune from the others and the four blending with an interesting effect as they drew closer. When the marching bands sounded as if they were each just around a corner, the crowd began to cheer. Suddenly the top of the wedding cake flew off, the sides of the top tier fell down, and seven or eight men in pink tutus, tights, and full ballet regalia appeared. It was the famous Trocadero dance troupe from Monaco, ballerinos in drag. The crowd went wild as the Trocs began pirouetting and the four bands pushed suddenly into sight from the four opposing streets, their disparate tunes now an earsplitting cacophony drowning out the local music. The crowd, caught between four advancing pincers of the musical phalanxes, grew apprehensive, and then, as the bands converged, the crowd began to panic, spilling against the great cake with its dancing ballerinas. The bands had been told to march but not to stop, and they crashed into one another in a massive collisior, crushing and engulfing the crowd of carnival goers, pushing against the cardboard cake, which began to topple. Men in tutus scrambled as everyone shouted at once and the trombones and tubas and French horns and drums played on in a mad tidal swirl. High and safe on our river balustrade, we watched, travelers in a hypercamevale, not Eco's furious hyperreality but rather a kind of furious reality, manic and rich and real to its unbelievable end. Pianos Anders appeared on his Moto Guzzi, Nella Vesco perched behind, as he revved the powerful engine and blared his powerful horn and grinned, waving to us from the maelstrom.

The rnixedblood Cherokee Bailey family in front of their log home near Muldrow, Oklahoma, 1913. The author's maternal grandmother is standing between the knees of her father, JohnBailey.

The author, in a sense abroad, posing in Paris in 1998. Photo by Thomas King.

Hanging out at the Pensione Ponte Rotto with Polly Rome, 1981, ready to go home. Photo by Pearl Jones.

Ranger days in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, Darrington, Washington, 1974. Photo by Be-rnie Smith.

At the Forum, Rome, imagininghypeymrnevale,1980. Photo by Polly Owens.

In the high country, sitting on ice axe, Glacier Peak Wilderness, 1976. Photo by Bernie Smith.

Forlorn introspection on being told to give a speech for France Libert6, with Madame Mitterand in Rennes, France, 1998.

Winning the crosscut-saw championship with Rich (Joeoiling), Prescott National Forest, Arizona, 1975. Photo by Dan Fagre.

With fish on trail crew, Milk Creek, Glacier Peak Wilderness,1971.

"I hear the train." Great-GreatUncle August Edward Bailey, between the tracks. Near Muldrow, Oklahoma, 1911.

Three trail crews, with the Milk Creek Trail Crew flag, Darrington, Washington, 1971. Clockwisefiom right, squatting: Whistle Pig Martin, G. I. Joe, Owens with whipsaw, Digby, Captain P. G. Fox, Bogmire with chainsaw, Dago, Ralph, and Whitey.

"Wewho, Kirno Sabe?"Masked author, Tijeras, New Mexico, 1994. Photo by Thomas King.

PART TWO

Inventions

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Coyote Story, or the Birth of a Critic

Coyote was going along, maybe forty miles north of Pietown. About half an hour before sunset on the southwestern edge of the Acoma reservation, the cliffs had deepened to a cabernet red. Bluebirds sat on and fluttered upward from fence posts, pronghorn antelope twitched their tails and stared at the distance, and the flat washes on either side of the road held vanishing monsoon pools, clumps of chamisa and sage, sparse grama, white poppies, and orange paintbrush. Coyote carried a jackrabbit in his mouth, the head and ass end flopping as Coyote dogtrotted toward the distant mesas. If asked why he seemed to be in a hurry, Coyote would undoubtedly have said, in that patient-but-condescending way "I got shit to do." What caught my eye this day however, was the raven that flapped down right in front of Coyote and began to dance, jumping a few inches off the rain-pocked dirt and fluttering his wings like shiny black shawl fringes and bopping his head like a Beat poet. I stopped the pickup and rolled down the passenger-sidewindow to see and hear better, since I was driving north and the show was on the east side of the empty two-lane road. Raven dipped and dodged and then opened his beak and squawked a high-pitched laugh at Coyote, and that was when I saw the second raven, just off to the side, about the same time that Coyote saw it.

746

INVENTIONS

Coyote stopped in his tracks and eyed the raven in front of him, and I could see the anger slide down over his face along with another expression that must have had something to do with the possibility of a raven side dish. Coyote dropped the rabbit and stood with mouth open, tongue hanging out, eyeing the raven in front of him. He took a step toward the bird, and the bird jumped up and fluttered its wings and cawed another mocking laugh, giving no ground. Coyote took a second step and a third, and the rabbit was behind his back feet now. That was when the other raven ran in with back-folded wings and grabbed at a hind rabbit foot, but Coyote was too quick and spun almost in time for a raven snack. Raven number two leaped and fluttered back between chamisa bushes a healthy distance away, shaking her feathers until she looked sleek again, while raven number one began his irritating dance once more. Coyote sat down to consider the situation, turning to study raven number two for a long moment with an expression that looked like a cross between amusement and irritation, and then turning back to watch the raven dancer in front of him. Meanwhile, the dancer had dipped and bopped a foot or two closer and stretched out his scrawny neck to caw a definite insult at Coyote, very likely having to do with Coyote's relations. That's when I got out of the pickup and went to lean on the government fence, the kind with reinforced steel corners and tight barbed wire made by people who don't care how much money they spend, not the kind most people make with gnarly juniper posts held off the ground by loose swirls of rusting wire.

"Tight spot, enit?" I said, looking carefully over Coyote's head at the wine-colored cliffs where a Spaniard had carved graffiti hundreds of years earlier. Paso por aqui, the conquistador had written in the rock. And pass he had, leaving behind a few hundred thousand heirs. The very top of one of the cliff towers had eroded into an exact image of a giant, stylized eagle looking down at the road.

COYOTE STORY

147

Coyote looked at both ravens, one after another, and then turned his head toward me. "Yatahey, wasichu," he said. I nodded. "How come you can talk to me? Only Indians are supposed to talk with Coyote." "I am an Indian," I replied. Coyote glanced at the watching ravens, placing a forefoot on the dead rabbit. "Give me a break," he said. "Cut me some slack. No way. Get outta here." "You've been hanging out around those truckers at Sky City," I said, "to talk like that." "No way, fugidaboudit. Those truckers are poets. They use metaphors. Califuckinfornia.Minnefuckinsota. Get this, 'We truckers are a funny bunch.' Want to hear the rest?" I shook my head, having read that one myself in a bathroom in Arizona. "Read that in a stall over there at the casino. I know my feminine self should be offended, but I find the sexual bravado rather charming. What part of you is Indian? Must be below the belt. Drop your pants and let's see." I shook my head. This was a long, long time ago, when twoleggeds and four-leggeds could still talk to one another. Late summer of 1989. I was driving back from a fishing trip on the White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona. "Ef tu, Brute. You ever hear of the trick I played on Vulva Woman?" Coyote grinned, his tongue hanging out. The ravens shuffled closer, one in front and one on the east side, making no sound. "What kind of juice you run in that thing?" Coyote nodded toward my 1980 Datsun pickup. "Anybody ever tell you that you suffer from attention deficit disorder?" I asked. "I'm Choctaw and Cherokee, somewhere between a quarter and three-eighths." "Oh, Cherokee, enit? Ain't we all? About half those white men and buffalo soldiers that got rubbed out with Custer were Cherokee,

7 48

INVENTIONS

or so they kept trying to say near the end there. Even some of those Crow scouts started saying they were Cherokee. Didn't help. You ever eat buffalo? Must be tough having only a quarter or a threeeighths. Girls don't like it. Oh them indun girls, indun girls. How I love them indun girls." He hummed to himself and looked dubiously down at the rabbit. "Stock four-cylinder with a Ford carb and distributor," I said, glancing fondly back toward my high-rise 4-W-d camper-shelled pickup. I'd bought the thing from a private at Kirtland Air Force Base who'd stripped all the emissions control stuff off of it, jacked the body up to put a second gas tank in, put in a lift kit, added big tires, and made it totally illegal to operate in most parts of the U.S. I wasn't surprised Coyote admired it. I noticed that the first raven had inched to within a couple feet of the rabbit. Coyote looked at the bird and grinned. Both birds jumped backwards simultaneously. "Simultaneously?" Coyote grinned. "Want to hear some truckdriver poetry? It can be offensive. I go over there and read the bathroom writing. Trucker oral tradition." I shook my head and Coyote watched me with narrowing expression. Abruptly the north raven ran in and pecked, coming away with a rabbit eyeball. "Damn!" Coyote yelled. "You let him abruptly get the best part." "That's disgusting," I said. Coyote laughed and picked up the rabbit. Both ravens danced up and down angrily, hopping from foot to foot. "I abruptly got shit to do," Coyote said around the rabbit in his mouth as he turned and started loping back the direction he'd come from.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Blessed Sunshine

Prologue: Among photos in a cardboard box left behind when my mother died is one of a most strange kind of raft-boat. What follows here is the story I have told myself to explain my childgrandmother's extraordinary,imageless presence in this photograph. Though a fiction leavened with the yeast of memory and inherited story, it seems to me truly no greater fiction than everything I know to be "true" about Nora Miriam Bailey, the harddrinlurtg, wild, destructive, selfish, tormented, inexhaustiblewoman I was told to call Grandmother and about whom I learned fragments of story more rare and unbelievable than any fiction I or my brothers and sisters might have invented. Those "true" stories left us with ghost-afflicted images of a woman who gave away her three children, our mother and aunt and uncle, to different farrners at a country barn dance near Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Gave them away and left with a stranger, a bottle in her waving hand being my mother's last image of the mother who bore her at age thirteen. The last image until a year later when three little people came in a dream to tell my mother she would be freed from the sharecropper who abused her, through his death, and her mother appeared from nowhere to reclaim her. The "true" stories tell us that, after our grandmother had reclaimed all three children, the four of them walked for a whole winter across west Texas, hiding

150

INVENTIONS

in the woods, stealing food, living any way they could, barefoot on frozen ground. Each of those splinters of story leaving a festering sore that in some way must be dealt with. What made Nora Miriam Bailey that mother and grandmother? Can we doubt that a raft called Blessed S u n s h e played its part in carving that tormented adult? The photograph exists. BLESSED SUNSHINE Nora Miriam Bailey, six years old, woke in darkness, lost and terrified until she felt the thick river shift beneath her. The raft sighed and settled, and she heard the brittle kree of a kingfisher pass by in the night. She remembered then. In her brief life, she'd known differentbrown waters, but n o h g like this Texas river or this raft with its load of death. On the other side of the cold barrel stove and tin chimney in a wooden box of a bed, the man breathed so hard she could feel the rancid air moving in the tiny room. The small woman in the bed with him made no sound at all, and Nora thought how the woman had looked like a white-breasted bird in the gray daylight. River dampness rose through wood floor and corn-shuck mattress and pasted the flour-sack nightgown to her skinny thighs. She hugged the patchwork comforter closer to her chin, hoping to hear the kingfisher again in the night but hearing only the man's breathing now and the quiet slap of water. The heavy air, which bore the weight of fried fish, well-used lard, the extinguished kerosene lantern, fleshed animal hides, unwashed human bodies, and the rotting river below them, pressed her to the limp mattress and floor. She understood that her life had been given over to unknown forces and strangenessyet unnamed, and she determined with all the cunning of her years to live through this, too. "Wuddo," the man had said to Mr. Timmons, "Thank you" in Indian. She was a thing given, and thus was sown the seed of her own giving scant years later. Atop the raft-house, beyond her sight even had she been able to penetrate that darkness, were coon skins scraped and stretched

BLESSED SUNSHINE

757

on stick frames like death's wings, and the bloated body of a wildcat laid casually on the roof's edge. This had been her first vision when she'd arrived the day before, and it remained with her in the complete darkness of the little room. If a wind came up, she knew the skin sails would carry the raft down that black river of ghosts where her mother and granma waited. This was her terror and her consolation. They'd traveled a week to get there in the wagon, Mr. Timmons with his thin,serious face coaxing and threatening the mules every step of the way. "This here country's Texas," he'd said on the second afternoon. "Yeller rose." He'd smiled at her with his crooked teeth. "How'd you like to be the yeller rose, little Nora Myrum, the yeller rose ofTexas?" On the splintery seat beside him, she looked away toward the big horseflies swirling about the poor mules. She'd seen a yellow rose in Nakey Waters's yard the week Nakey died of fever. Mr. Timmons began to mutter a song about the "yeller rose o' Texas" that was the only gal for him. She heard "diamunts" and something like "Roserlee." His sudden voice after so much silence was frightening, like a ghost or an owl call at night. "A owl called that night Granma died," she said, looking at the backs of the mules' heads. "A screech owl." Mr. Timmons stopped his song and nodded his long head once, acknowledging the gravity of what she'd said. Then they were both quiet for a long time, watching the horseflies and the ragged country they were passing through. Blackjack oaks ranged the low hills on either side of the road, and ravens kept darting shadows over the wagon so she had to close her eyes not to see. Sometimes, when she opened her eyes and brushed her thin hair back, she saw squirrels moving in the woods, and she thought of her granma's biscuits and squirrel gravy. In the lard pail, behind the seat with the bedrolls, were still half a dozen of Mrs. Timmons's hard biscuits. The Timmonses were neighbors, their plank-walled cabin just a few miles from the Bailey home. Minnie Timmons was the one that found her and brought her home.

152

INVENTIONS

After what seemed like days of silence, when they had left the noisy roads and all towns behind, when only jays called from the brush and hawks and those black buzzards circled the pale sky with motionless wings, he had begun to talk. "They's Cherokees down this way, too, passe1 of 'em." His dark eyes looked out over the mules toward the dry hills ahead of them, and he lifted and dropped the leather straps gently across the animals' backs. "Old settlers that ain't never moved. You got relatives among this here Trinity River bunch. Don't you worry, little girl, these folks'll keer for you." Still, except that one time he never looked at her and never smiled, and even at six years old she understood the mix of relief and guilt in his voice, tones she'd heard plenty of times. Whoever was there, in that place he was taking her, might not care for her at all. Maybe just like the Timmonses they'd have too many children of their own to take in another one. Or maybe they'd all died or just gone away, the way people did. A ploughed section of reddish-brown earth edged up beside the dirt road, and she watched the furrows sway out of sight toward the woods and wondered what this kind of people planted in the earth, and did such people have children too, and then abruptly they were in a region without ploughed earth or any sign at all of people like them. They had come suddenly into a country like nothing she'd seen before, forests of stumps and splintered brush going away from the road on both sides as far as she could see, all gray and dead, the earth gouged and pocked. No animals moved in the blasted woods, and the sun shone only dimly through the thickened air. The river, when it rose into view, was starved and brown, its water seeming not to move at all, the broken forest reflected in its surface. Tied to a sliver of stump, in the middle of nothing, the raft with its wood shack looked lost and crazy, and she had to focus on it for a long time to know it was really there. Close to the raft and river, the earth was scraped like a sore, and beyond the scraped place stood dark, splintered trees and heaped brush, like a world that had been smashed and bruised by powerful lightning. Here

BLESSED SUNSHINE

7 53

the air seemed burned, a gray haze that hung like smoke over everything, tangling in the fragments of trees. She knew they had found a place never touched by sun, that they had arrived in the Darkening Land, the place of nightwalkers and death that her granma had told her of. Then she understood the black ravens that had shadowed the wagon for two days, the dark figures that had peopled her nightmares for so long. This was the Nightland described in stories, where the nightwalkers were. Mr. Timmons had stopped the wagon atop the long slant to the river, set the brake, and stared with her at the scene. She could hear him suck air between his teeth as they sat together, neither moving at all. On the side of the raft-house was a picture of a fish, large and evil, and someone had painted letters and numbers above the picture. Even she could see that some of the letters were backwards. "It's a ignorant people," she said to herself so he couldn't hear. Her granma had taught her letters because ignorance was of the devil. When Mr. Timmons spoke, his voice was forced. "Blessed sunshine. You see them words painted, Nora Myrum?It's your daddy's uncle owns that boat." She could feel him taking in the horror of the place, feel even fear emanating from the grown man beside her. She knew that to evoke the sacred Sunland in such a place was what her granma would call blasphemy. The fish painted on the boat would devour sunshine like that whale that ate somebody in the Bible. "Blessed sunshine. Must be good people would paint that on their house," Mr. Timmons said, and she knew he was talking not to her. She'd sat stock still on the wagon seat, eyeing the lightningburned world and seared earth, in the middle of which was the death raft. The big fish on the side of the raft-house scared her. The tall man standing in front of the raft with his moustache, chin whiskers, and fur hat scared her even more, and the little woman stared at her with cocked head, wordless like a bird. Mr. Timmons had stayed for a supper of fried catfish and corn bread but had begged leave to start back home before dark. She'd

154

INVENTIONS

gone out with them, down the wood ramp to stand on the shore and watch the wagon go away, his skinny back curved toward home, wanting to call after him but holding to the silence that had mainly kept her all those days. She knew Minnie Timmons would have let her stay. She'd been her mother's friend, and she was Cherokee, too. He wasn't Cherokee. And she'd heard them argue. "Cain't hardly fill the bellies of these six we already got," he'd said. "Them folks down there is her own flesh and blood." It was like the place after the big flood where all the bones danced. Like everything she had feared since first her mother and then her granma died and for a week she stayed in their cabin alone, eating the corn bread someone had left after they buried Granma Storms. She had no illusions regarding what lay ahead of her.

At twelve years, she was a scrawny sliver of bone and muscle, small for her age and covered over with taut flesh and flour-sack dress and looked at the world with eyes unchanged since her first vision of the raft. At twelve years she knew the river and the world it creased on both banks, knew the man she called Uncle and the woman she called Aunt Telitha who lay now like wrought iron in the bed. She knew to listen and watch the slightest movements or inclinations of man and animal, air and water, to anticipate and move herself without sound or motion, to act before words. Knew the infinite meaning of Blessed Sunshine. She watched with the eyes of a fishing bird, poised at the cusp of the raft as her father's uncle spoke. "You got to imagine it, little Nora, got to jest wrap your mind around all that water. Jest water and air and nary a thing beyond. Brown water like this yere, and nothin' but a whole world of it. Look out there." He raised one arm from the pole that pushed the raft upstream and pointed at the sluggish brown river. "The Lord giveth and taketh away. He giveth this world like black woods a night when they ain't no moon nor stars and jest splinters o'

BLESSED SUNSHINE

755

lightnin' to see and nary a trail and them branches whippin' a body's face and He takes those we love, before all others. Before all others." She knew the river like her own breath. Could read it like the Bible he had taught her to parse. She knew when the hue of the current shifted that therefdbeen a gully washer somewhere far off and it was coming to them, knew when a bar was forming that no one might ever see or when a submerged tree was making a bad reversal that could jamb the raft tight. Knew the dark places under a cutbank where the huge catfish would lay up and could be grappled out, which undercarved bank would likely deposit a big cottonwood in their path soon, knew which tongues of deep woods held the raccoons he needed to hunt for their corn meal and coffee and lard. Knew when this old man who cared for her would come back from the shore world drunk on whiskey and crazy. Those days and nights she would sometimes hide on shore with Aunt Telitha, rolled in a tarp and blankets to keep the cold and chiggers off, hearing him shouting Bible words and Indian words all mixed up that skipped off the river like flat stones. It was one of those nights from which Aunt Telitha had taken sick. Uncle Jyker pulled the long pole out of the muddy water, leaving a putrid swirl that she followed with her eyes, and then plunged it down again, pushing the raft against the slow current next to the bank. Rains had spilled the river and gathered trees and brush into its current so that the raft moved next to a floating forest. Abloated newborn calf rocked in tangled branches so close she could have reached out to touch its matted hide, flies rising and settling on the red fur and whitened eyes. She'd seen many dead things along the river, mostly fish like useless gar and an occasional drum, but also dogs and stray livestock. Inside the cabin the old lady Aunt Telitha, lay sick in bed for the tenth day saying nothing but only looking at them the way Nora had seen animals sicken and die. Nora thought she would make tea when the raft was still again. "And Jehovah saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and he said it repenteth me that I have made them." He

156

INVENTIONS

turned his brown eyes on her, and she looked away toward a big cottonwood that hung over the river, its roots like snakes exposed by the current. Building midday clouds made bulbous shadows like toads' heads on the water, and flies and gnats swarmed in the still air so she had to wave them away. /'.And the earth was filled with violence and corrupted flesh, and God said unto Noah this here is the end of all flesh and I will destroy them all with the earth." He turned and spat tobacco juice into the water and then drove the pole back into the river. The raft edged upstream and she studied the new batch of skins stretched to dry on the roof. "And the waters prevailed and all flesh died that moved on the earth, both birds and cattle and things that creepeth. And Noah only was left. Imagine that. All alone on that water on a boat like this here. And they must've been trash floatin' evenvhere since Jehovah drowned all the towns and farms and woods. All them dead people and livestock and wild creatures floatin' and rottin' on the wide corrupt face of the water like this here river. And the Bible says Noah sent forth a raven, old Raven hisself, and he went forth to and fro and dried up all the waters." He poled the raft into a deep eddy and held it in place for a moment. "And then Old Buzzard come out and flew over the earth, making all these mountains and valleys and rivers ever time his wings touched before Noah went out. Now take the rope and tie it on that tree yonder." He nodded toward an oak ten feet above the waterline and continued as she jumped ashore. /'.And Jehovah said I ain't going to smite the earth no more for man's sake, for that the imagination of man is evil from his youth. And the fear of you and the dread of you all shall be upon ever beast of the earth and upon ever bird of the heavens. Ever livin' thing shall be food for you, ever livin' thing, and surely your blood, the blood of your lives, I will require; at the hand of ever beast will I require it: and at the hand of man, even at the hand of ever man's brother, wlll I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by

BLESSED SUNSHINE

157

man shall his blood be shed.And be fruitful and multiply. Jehovah said all that and a pile more." As she wrapped the rope around the trunk with a half hitch, she considered Jehovah and imagined Old Buzzard touching mountains into being with the delicate tips of his wings. It was after the flood that someone heard all the bones of the drowned people dancing. She heard the rattle of bones inside the cabin and imagined Aunt Telitha dancing a dance of bones. "Five hundred years, is how old Noah was." He flipped the plank from the raft to shore and walked onto land, immediately testing the knot she had tied and nodding with satisfaction. "Five hundred years." He stopped and cocked his head like a raven. "I ain't but fifty,and my bones hurt like thunder most momins. Jest imagine how that old ringworm must of felt.'' He smiled at her through the beard and reached out to ruffle her short hair. "Ever livid thing, little Nora. We ain't no more'n a speck of a firefly." She saw his eyes glistening with moisture, and the sight frightened her more than anything ever had. "I been a preacher and a doctor and a drunk," he said to the river. "And a coon hunter ain't no difference. Skinnin' somebody or somethin' one way or t'other. Your Aunt Telitha is going to die, little Nora." He sat down suddenly under the oak she'd tied the raft to, and his head fell onto his arms over his ovcralled knees. She saw the bony body creak and shiver like a snag in a hard current. His voice, when it came, was muffled. "This here is the end of all flesh, little Nora. For out of it thou wast taken. And the eyes of both them was opened." "You could go for a doctor," Nora said, looking down at him. "A doctor could make her well." He pushed the fur hat back from his eyes and raised his head and studied the scarred knuckles of both hands, shaking his head. "I been a doctor, little Nora. I seen death come like a thief in the night plenty times. He drove us out from that tree of life, you see, lest we et of it and never died. Me and your aunt been together twenty-three years this summer."

1 58

INVENTIONS

"Maybe a doctor could help Aunt Telitha." He looked at her, seeming to wake up. "Don't say her name now, little Nora. You can't say that name no more now." His eyes widened. "Ain't you heard it last night? I seen it fly past when I was in the woods comin' down toward the boat, a fiery creature leavin' sparks and soundin' all the world like a raven, but no bird ever made a mark in the air like that thing. I run, but when that comes for a body they ain't nothin' to do. He done took her from this corrupt earth. Like a thief in the night." Thunder sounded far off above the riparian forest, and she noticed for the first time that black clouds had piled up over the river, casting no reflections at all in the dark water. When she went into the cabin, her father's aunt lay on the floor as though she had been hurled from the bed, her body as hard and twisted as a piece of knotted stove wood, her face toward the wall. Nora stopped halfway across the tiny room and stared for a moment before she went back outside. He still sat beneath the oak and watched her. "They move acrost water without no noise nor a ripple, and they get awful lonely." She stood on the edge of the raft, listening to him and hearing a hawk keening somewhere downriver. Nearby a fish jumped heavily the sound caught up by a new roll of thunder. She became aware of the lap of water between raft and shore, and she felt the raised, splintery grain of the wood against her bare feet. The forest leaned over the river, darkening the cove they lay in, and a light wind had begun to carry the smell of mud in dank ribbons along the shore. For the thousandth time since she had seen the raft of skin sails six years before, she thought of her granma and then, helplessly, her mother, feeling as though she must be able to see their faces. She had been loved, by a mother whose hair was black and whose brown eyes smiled over her, whose words now were strange, like words spoken under water. By a grandmother who had held her when they buried a mother and daughter at once and whose thin face never smiled. She had been gifted with a childhood of love

BLESSED SUNSHINE

159

that was abruptly gone, and now with a childhood as quickly bereft. When she looked back at the great fish and the strange sails quivering in a growing breeze, she knew she would not set foot on the raft again where, for half her life, she had floated above the immeasurable river. She would be a traveler by land now for all the days of her life.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Yazoo Dusk

1.COLUMBUS BAILEY

"You got to fish ever goddamn day." That walker hound started up again outside, probably smelling last night's coon tracks by the chickens. The old man rubbed two or three white chin hairs and looked up at me under the bill of that Redskins cap. My brain started running like a scared rabbit, heading out toward the river and then doubling back to the woods and thinking about climbing one of those big oaks. But it wasn't any use, just like it hadn't ever been any use, and I let those black eyes catch me. "It ain't a lot I know," he said. I studied the mason jar of shine he had surrounded by those big, bony hands. "But one thing I can tell you is you got to fish ever goddamned day." One of his knuckles was busted open and raw looking. Uncle Col Bailey had come as close to doing it as anybody I ever heard of, though these days he only fished in his own head, ever since he'd started hearing fish scream. I'd heard stories about him as a boy being out there on the river when the sun came up and out there when the sun went down. Columbus Bailey was a famous fisherman all over the Yazoo country, up to Yazoo City and down as far as Vicksburg. Everybody said it was because he could think like a fish. He used to talk to them, too, I heard. Once over in

YAZOO DUSK

767

Louisiana, in Catahoula Parish where my grandma was born and where those big Catahoula hounds come from, I had a man ask me if I knew Col Bailey the fisherman. I don't know why I told that man no, I hadn't never heard of him, though I was more or less named for him, if you believe one story. Cole Bailey's my name, and my dad told me he come as close to Uncle Col's name as he could without spelling out the whole name of that Italian Spanish burglar, but truth is my dad likes a good story. Uncle Col is my great uncle on the Choctaw and Cajun and Irish side, you see, and I'd made the mistake this summer day of coming all the way to Mississippi to ask Uncle Col's advice on love. If I'd thought about it at all, I'd have remembered that with Uncle Col it's best to ask a little question, because the old man's answers was always a hundred times bigger than any question, maybe a thousand. I'd started junior college out in California a year before, because my cousin, second cousin sort of, whose name is Cole also, Cole McCurtain, talked me into it, said go on out to California and work at that mushroom farm he used to work at before he became a professor and then go to junior college. I could've gone to junior college right here in Mississippi of course, but Cole McCurtain thought itfdbe good for me to see something else, and he'd liked California pretty well, I guess. The first thing that happened, naturally, was I fell in love and suffered more than I ever thought a person could. Cole McCurtain didn't help a bit when I called him to tell him how bad it was, just grinned over the phone. Adela Camacho was as beautiful as a winter sunrise on the river, when all that new light comes down through the black bones of trees and lays gold on the slow water and you don't hear nothing except maybe a lone dog out there deep in the woods and the air is that kind of sweet cold that makes you dizzy. Skin as smooth and brown as maple syrup, eyes black as the old man's but big and deep and a smile you couldn't forget in a million years. And that way of looking back just when you think she's gone. "So my nephew come all the way from California to ask me about love." The old man got up slow, unfolding his long body

162

INVENTIONS

carefully the way you open a new-sharpened jackknife. Lifting his cap off, he ran a hand through what was left of his white hair so I could see brown fingers right against the same brown skin on his head. He settled the cap back, adjusting the thing two or three times to get it just right the way he always did, while going over to the stove. Being summer and well after daylight, it was already getting warm in his little cabin, but Uncle Col was always cold, always had been, so he opened up the stove and began shoving some more sticks in and stirring the coals around. "How old is this girl?" He'd closed the stove door and spun around so fast I'd half jumped. "Sit down, boy." He jerked his head toward the other chair, a high-backed wooden thing he'd got from a white woman across the river. Twenty years old and I was still "boy." "Not so young," I said, thinking if he knew she was eighteen he'd start lauglung and not stop like he did sometimes. He pulled a frying pan off a shelf and set it on the stove, and I realized why he'd poked the fire up. When he reached for the slab of bacon on the same shelf and started cutting, I felt a jab of hunger. I could already smell bacon cooking even before it was in the pan. "You could make some coffee." With his back to me, he nodded sideways toward the crate shelf with the coffeepot and can of Folgers in it. "Love." He sliced the bacon thick with a filleting knife and laid eight slices delicately in the iron skillet. As I reached for the door pull to go outside, I heard him mutter the same word, and then a brittle kind of chuckling followed me out the door. That hound pup came up wriggling and slappingmy legs with his bony tail, and I saw a couple of yellow chicken feathers on his snout. I knew he hadn't killed any chickens,because Uncle Col would have known a chicken-killingdog before the first thought of chicken dinner ever crossed the animal's mind. The pup must have been snuffling coon scent by the pen and snuffled the feathers onto his jowls. I pumped a few times to get the rust taste out and then filled the pot and headed back inside. It was true that I'd driven four days in a '57 Chevy to talk to the old man. I was desperate, crazy in love

YAZOO DUSK

7 63

and ignorant. I'd been stupid enough to propose marriage the fourth time we were together, sitting out in the Pismo dunes with a bottle of wine and a box of fried chicken. When she laughed, I felt like my heart had one of those cracks you get in a windshield, the kind that start out small but unless something's done just keeps going right across until the whole thing comes apart in your face. Six months later, I knew I had to do something. I couldn't live without her, I knew that. One day she'd say she might love me, she didn't know, and then the next she'd act like she hardly knew me. And when she took me to her parents' house I felt like a spaceman setting there with everybody talking Spanish and her sisters gigglmg behind their hands at me. But that's another story. Back inside, the old man was turning the bacon with a fork and scratchinghis flat belly under the overalls with the other hand. I set the pot on the stove and dumped in two fistfuls of coffee, standing so close I could smell smoke and lye soap and age on him.By the time I'd woke up, he'd already been to the river and took a bath like he did every day. Most of his life, he'd check his trot line and reset it before his bath, but he didn't do that any more. "Ever day." He forked the bacon onto a tin plate and broke six eggs into the deep grease so that they became brown and lacey the second they hit. Over the years, I'd noticed that Uncle Col was different from most Indians I knew, even mixedbloods like him. For one thing, most Indian elders didn't swear so much. But the old man had a hard time getting a sentence out without at least a damn in it. For another thing, he was kind of a loner. I'd never known him to go down to Philadelphia where a lot of the Choctaws were, and he didn't even cross the river to where some of his own family was scattered. When Cole McCurtain was back here that time, I never even knew it because Cole was down there with Luther Cole, and him and Uncle Col hadn't talked in years. All these names kind of run together. Indian names is like that sometimes. Columbus Bailey didn't go nowhere to see people, but people come to see him. He had things they wanted. The old man was

164

INVENTIONS

alikchi. He knew the kinds of medicines people needed. Right now I needed for him to tell me how to make Adela Camacho fall head over heels all the way to the bottom in love with me and marry me. I know she didn't tlunk much of me working at the mushroom farm, but why do you tlunk I'm going to junior college, I told her. He didn't talk again until we were setting at the bare wood plank table with bacon and eggs and boiling hot black coffee. He'd put the moonshine up on the shelf next to the bacon and with some kind of magic produced a skillet of corn bread not more than a day old. He was sopping corn bread in egg and bacon grease and looking doubtfully at his coffee. "Luther Cole was my friend," he said finally, still not looking up. I got interested immediately hooked by the fact the old man hadn't added any swear words to the statement. Luther Cole had lived down the river about five miles in a little cabin. I'd only seen the old Choctaw man a couple of times, and each time I'd been scared to death. There was an old woman with him both times, tall and beautiful with hair silver as a new dollar, shiny dark skin, and a big smile. The old couple had seemed like ghosts to me. Uncle Col never just answered a question, you see. 2. LUTHER COLE

Dusk lay close in the woods along the river, the way it does toward the end of summer just before the sun goes down and the trees lift night up like an old blanket until everything's black. When there ain't any stars and maybe only a new moon, night in those coon woods gets so thick a man can walk right into himself in the dark. Luther Cole lay under a muscadine thicket, the heavy vines drooping all around him and over him heavy as hanging ropes and the big purple fruit kind of sweet and rotten smelling, sixteen years old and watching the girl on the front porch. Slivers of gray edging toward black in the pecan tree and darker still where the woods sloped down to the river in vine and brush, tree thickened and rancid with August. Luther Cole saw the owl

YAZOO DUSK

7 65

swoop up from the woods to land in the tree, near-white belly and broad, pale wings so soft he felt smothered by the sound where he lay beneath them vines. Damp summer rose hot in leaves and rotten earth through the sleevelessflannel shirt and spread across flat boystomach and chest, itching and creepinginside his shirt and overalls. Start of crickets and frogs down toward the water and a poorwill beginning, too, its double voice out over the water the way it had been all of the boy's life. But the boy's eyes were on the owl, ishkitini, again. He realized he'd stopped breathing only when he began once more, sucking the thick Yazoo air in like he was drowning, tlunking about moccasins and copperheads, too, and stranger violence. When the owl disappeared through the high gable window of the big house, Luther Cole lay for a few moments and then unbent from the ground, brushing leaves out of the straight black hair that hung past his shoulders. Damn the girl, he thought, and that old grandmother who wouldn't stay dead like she ought to. Fourteen years old and he knew he'd already been in love all his whole life and more, with the Yazoo just a hundred yards down the hill telling him violence would indeed lay hold of every goddamned thing the moment he moved. Hadn't it already taken hold of everybody he came from all the way back to Red Shirt and more? Running a hand down overalled stomach and muddy knees, he moved out of the woods, pushing aside the muscadines, and angled cautiously across to the pecan tree, watching the darkened window. At the tree he embraced the straight trunkand climbed like an inchworm to the first heavy limb, where he pulled himself up with thin, hard arms to stand and reach his scrawny body upward again and climb until he was at the big branch near the window and he began edging outward, gripping higher limbs with his hands and balancing like a circus clown, bare toes grabbing smooth bark. A few feet from the open window he stopped and peered inward, determinationstronger than fear of the old woman. The alikchihad been sending dreams all over the damned place. He'd found himself tumbling down at the bottom of the river, head over heels in a strong current, knowing he was supposed to understand but

166

INVENTIONS

failing and angry when he couldn't. And the girl wouldn't help because the alikchi was her grandmother. A foot began to itch, and he lifted the other foot to scratch just as the owl appeared in the window, cream-white and big, the yellow eyes locked on him so that he dizzied and fell.

"Serves you right for spying on me." Onatima Blue Wood stood looking down at him in her yellow nightgown, arms folded across her chest, a thick black braid over each shoulder, and a scowl on her extraordinarily beautiful face and in her green eyes. Dark cusps hung beneath sharp cheekbones and shadowed her fine lips. "She didn't mean to make you fall. We didn't know you were where you shouldn't be, spying on other people's business." She cocked her head and continued to look down at him where he lay folded awkwardly on the grass. "And don't pretend you're hurt when you're not, Luther Cole. I've seen you fall twice as bad as that a hundred times and never get hurt." Unmoving, Luther stared up at her thinking that maybe this time he was truly dead and finally she'd be sorry. The dark had spread out from the woods to cover the sky like a blanket full of holes, and around Onatirna's head a new constellation was spinning;fichik luak, lukoli, shubota. Somethinglike that. Issuba, the ones pointing northward. Tohwikeli. The old language was spinning in his head, too. "Your head is on fire," he said, wishing he knew the old language to speak to her. "Enough hog talk, Luther Cole. Now get up off the ground before my father hears us and runs you off again." She stepped back, never uncrossing her arms from her sixteen-year-old chest, and shook her head. Luther gathered the pieces of himself and stood up carefully, feeling joints coming back into alignment.

YAZOO DUSK

167

"It's a good thing I grabbed them branches on my way down. Else that old lady would've killed me this time." "Nonsense. Grandmother would never hurt one of my friends." A dog began barking in the kennel behind the house, and instantly ten others joined in, all wanting to be out nosing thlngs in the night. They heard an upstairs window open and the old man yell. The dogs stopped, and then Luther was aware of the hounds sulking and the silence that spread over the whole countryside at the sound of the man's voice. The shadow of the big barn reached out at them, and he realized that the moon was there. How long had he lain in the woods watching, he wondered. "You have no reason to watch me and worry about me, Luther Cole. You know I can take care of myself." She reached out to brush debris off his shoulder and her hand continued to his hair, gently raking twigs out. "You should see yourself." "One of your friends?" He shook himself and finished raking twigs and leaves from h tangled hair. "I could've been killed by that witch. Why's she coming around so much all of a sudden?" "You know why. Now go on home before my father comes out here. I wish I'd never ever kissed you, Luther Cole." "But you did. And not just once, neither. You said we'd be married." The girl shook her head and then wrapped her arms around her shoulders. "Child's talk, you know that. You're still a boy Luther Cole." /'And you're growd up all of a sudden. It's because of him, Granger." She shook her head once more. "I told him to go away. It's because of nobody, and you're going to school, too." "I ain't going to no school, especially not way up there." "Any school. Don't say double negatives. You know better." "I'll kill that white man." "I told him to go away and he will. Now you have to go, too. We aren't children any longer, Luther. My father might have you whpped if he finds you out here again. You know he said he would."

168

INVENTIONS

"You think I'm scared of that? You think that Granger'll go away just because you say so? Didn't you say it before?" "My father encourages him. Now go home, Luther." She stepped forward and touched both of his shoulders with her hands and kissed him on the forehead, stepping back again before he could react. "I'm not a child any more, Luther. We can't play in the woods anymore. Everything's different." "Notlung's different. I'll come back tomorrow. You stay home from church. Say you have a gut ache like you used to and stay home when they go. I'll come." She shook her head. "Not tomorrow. I can't. You don't understand at all. You have to go to that school. Goodbye, Luther Cole." "I'll kill that white man." Onatima turned away. "Go home and sleep, Luther. Granrna won't let it happen." The girl went away gliding barefooted through the grass around the back of the house without any sound or motion in the air so that abruptly he found himself alone. 3. ONATIMA BLUE WOOD

If you think it's easy being an Indian girl, you're crazy. People think because my father's rich, or richer than most in these parts anyway that it's all easy. Last night the moon climbed up behind the pecan tree, climbing up out of the woods the way I've seen a coon go up, smooth and slow, until it sat right there on the lughest branches and waited for something. I understood because I've been waiting for somethingallmy life. People always look at me. Like they expect something, something that a girl who wasn't half Indian wouldn't do. And school, that's a real barrel of fun. Ever since I was little if I read "See Dick run" the teachers acted like a prize mule had sat up and recited the Lord's Prayer. Like an Indian wasn't supposed to read, like my mother, who was born in Scotland actually, on the Isle of Skye, and whose name I can't say any longer since she passed on, hadn't taught me to read when I was not even three and a half

YAZOO DUSK

169

years old and I wasn't writing whole sentences by the time I was four, which is more than a lot of grown-up white folks around here can do. As if it was an accomplishment for a half-Indian girl to read about stupid Dick running when I'd read all of the Brothers Grirnm and Ham Christian Andersen by second grade. Those teachers never knew anything about the real stories, the ones my grandmother, my apohi, told me when she came to live with us after Mother's death. And the other things, alikchi medicine. She taught me those words, too, and I listened as hard as I could but still only heard a little bit. Deep woods stories, olden time true stories. Chahta things,fahpo things, what Granma called aiukli. Stories I could not even let my father know I heard, because Father was modern, a fullblood stepping away from Indian stories into this thing called America. Two worlds, two kinds of stories. But those little people in the fairy tales, we knew them, my granma and me. They were bohpuli, senders and throwers, hide behinds. Be sedret, she said, tell no one, even Father-her own son-and especially teachers. The first time she came after they buried her, to keep the teaching alive, I was frightened for only a moment until I understood. I read Moby-Dick at thirteen years of age and understood every ephemeral shadow of that teller's story, Ishmael, outcast like me and Luther Cole, wanderer, friend to Indians. Ha. And Burns's wee cowering timorous beastie from my mother. Having both worlds, I thought, would put me ahead of them all. But that Luther, pulling his head into the Indian world like a snapping turtle into one of those ridged shells, didn't seem to worry about being behind one little bit. Girls mature sooner, Granma said. Those Jobe and Owens girls didn't seem to, however.

I lay there in my whitest nightgown, after mothers and grandmothers had gone away, and let the moonlight bathe me in its radiance. I glowed, a princess, a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Onatima. My skin was made of light, and I felt like I could just float right out the window. Luther had been here,

7 70

INVENTIONS

hiding in the woods and making animal calls that any fool who wasn't deaf and retarded would know wasn't any animal that ever lived. Like an old-time Indian, Luther Cole didn't approve of the ways of white people. "Apple" he called my own father, an Indian who was not just red but red-brown on the outside and white like all rich people on the inside. He would take me away across the river to that life his kind of Chahta lived, not understanding at all the way these two worlds had steel hooks pulling from both sides until I thought I would be left just bloody muscle and broken bone, all the while thinking, remembering, waiting. All those years from when we'd both run and fall and laugh like babies, knowing Luther had marked me for his world against my father's desire but, and this so strange, precisely within the wishes of my mother who told stories of Highland clans and warriors so in keeping with Granma's Choctaw stories. Massacred MacDonalds. Highland ghosts. Pushed toward an Indian world by my red-haired, freckled, indescribablybeautiful mother and denied the same world by my fullblood, dark-as-stone father. Is it any wonder I am a misfit, a castaway a Gypsy an Ishmael?Not ignoring what is good, I, too, am quick to perceive an evil, or something like that. Like him a lover of words. English words, because I don't speak the old language at all. Promised while still a child by my father to Granger with his stable of horses and that school in the North that taught him not a fraction of what I learned from two women in my father's house against his knowing and his will. Which is the way women work nowadays, unlike the olden times when, Granma told me, Choctaw women were the ones to make decisions, the ones at the center. Luther Cole has my heart and will take it away to that raw plank cabin on the other side of the river, but Granger Collins shall have my woman's body alas. All the world ordains as much. And I should be grateful that a white man of standing would marry a halfbreed, they say. Not for Onatima Blue Wood to leave a big white house and barns and stables and cross a brown river to twelve square feet of darkness. They say. Granma says, Wait. She

YAZOO DUSK

171

comes now at night and says the story will be a long and twisted one. She says this is not the real story.All time is one, she says, and I must bide it as well as Luther Cole, who is, she says, the one who will learn. Whom I will teach. Down there by the river, where I walk sometimes, the water is brown and heavy moving so intently that I know there is no end to it. Never, I think, have Chahta people been far from such water, and I know I cannot leave it. Granger talks of other places, Saint Louis, Chicago, New York, but he might as well be talking about the bottom of an ocean I've never even seen. Away from this river I shall die. Luther Cole can go off to school and come back, for he carries the river inside him,but this brown water is not inside me. It surrounds me, gives me breath. I'll stay and outlast them all, Granger, my father, all. I will not change my name nor cut my hair for him or anyone. 4. LUTHER COLE

Luther Cole lay under the muscadine thicket, the heavy vines drooping heavy as hanging ropes, sixteen years old and watching the girl on the front porch the way he'd been watching her for the past hour. Somethingwas up, and it didn't involve the fool sitting on the porch with her. "Chiggers for sure," the boy whispered aloud, thinking how downright stupid it was to be lying in the damp rot of leaves and decayed bark and birdeaten fruit pulp but unable to lift himself from the earth and tell his body to go elsewhere. The same way he'd been unable to ward off the girl all these years. On the wide porch Onatima shone in light from a lamp inside the house, and he could see the fine, taut brown cheeks and smiling lips and smooth forehead and long, long black hair that he knew she refused to wear coiled the way she should but insisted on letting fall straight and shining dark to the seat of the chair. Uncut all these years. The white dress rose in a crimped collar halfway up her neck, with buttons down the front and long sleeves

172

INVENTIONS

that lapped over her hands. He could see her straight shoulders in the wicker chair, the fan in her right hand, and the white man who sat in the other wicker chair facing her. He hated and pitied the man, knowing who he was and why he was and how he was and so much more than he'd ever wanted to know about any man. Rich white folks were like that, living big and wide across everybody's lives, like they owned the full moon and the whole sky of stars and everyone who walked or ran way down below moon and sky. Rich Indians, like the girl's father, were different. They kept their lives quiet, moving slowly, careful to cast no shadows across others' paths or doorways, a way of life both ancient and learned, sometimes painfully. Pitied the man because the man didn't know the truth about the girl and himself, or anyone maybe. Hatak yushpabmma, bewitched. Onatima Blue Wood was the girl's name, and her father was the richest Choctaw on that part of the Yazoo, her mother a white woman who'd come to teach the poor Indians like Luther Cole and married one of them. Like Luther Cole, the girl was a mixedblood, a halfbreed. But she was different because of the big white house that pushed that porch out toward the river, the barns and stables full of blooded horses, the white dress, the old Choctaw man inside the house wearing a suit and vest and, when he wanted to, a fine white hat and driving a buggy and paying Black men and women to do his work. Luther studied the man in the lamplight. Granger Collins, a name that made him want to cut the suit coat off the man with a rusty can lid. At least fifteen years older than the girl who, Luther knew exactly, had turned sixteen just three weeks before. A fool. Lying deep in the moldering leaves and stench of Yazoo mud and all the tangled darkness of the Choctaw people who had lived and died on that land for a thousand years, Luther Cole was not his father and mother, for he had never known either, nor his brothers and sisters whom he had never known, nor lus Choctaw and French blood relations from across the Mississippi in Louisiana, of whom he had heard only whispers and speculations that forked like

YAZOO DUSK

7 73

rabbit trails only to run out in river brush; nor was he the sixteenyear-old boy who had been in love with Onatima since before either had breathed the wet air of the Yazoo Trace or imbibed the old stories. But he was, steeped in blood and bone, much more than he knew or the white man could know or the girl would desire to know. More than the screech owl bothering the newly risen night not far off, causing the small hairs to stand on the boy's neck, or the hounds baying dinner in one of the barns behind the big house, or the slow slap of the river on its mud bank to his back, or all the lives that had graced and perished the land before and after what they called the Removal. The white man was still on the porch, the girl had not run off yet with that gambler, followed by the bitter old shadow of her fullblood father. And Luther Cole had not yet been sent up to Haskell.

5. TELLER Poking around in the woods. Swallowtail coat and plug hat, those black suit pants worn to shine and the white shirt now possum gray, his beard full of moss and twigs, and not finding much at all. I can see the committee, all the way back here from the Territory, looking for Chahta people. Chahta isht atia. Chahta yakni. Chahta okZa. Chuhta hatak. Chahta anumpa. So many words now, throats dry and cracking. And the people staying right back there in the woods, watching the strangers with familiar sounding names, some of them like the bearded one, more white than Choctaw, searching for what they said was relatives. They been gone so long, you see, more than two generations out there in Indian Territory, that we almost forgot them. Some had relatives, but it's a long way out there, and the trail just disappeared. I remember when it happened, all the people herded up like hogs drove out of the woods into pens and put on boats and wagons, coming in from all over, thousands of them, little kids hiding behind those deep brown eyes, scared, lost, hanging on to

folks, men trymg to look like they knew but knowing no more than their own children, and the women really knowing the way women always know when home is gone and what they're standing on isn't the same and keeps shifting and they have to somehow keep touching every thing and body so there's a whole somewhere.There was the rich ones, like Pitchlynn, and some stayed in Mississippi, but most was poor and most started walking westward, going the way the stories told us we'd come from so long ago. People clung to that, they were going back where they started in time immemorial walking with the brothers, Chahta and Chikasa, following the leaning pole to this home. "If you are Choctaw, you are entitled to land out in the Territory, where most of the people are now." That's what the committee said, speaking patiently the way they might of spoke to a child. "You just have to come out there and you'll have land now. It's called allotment. Our land will be given to each one of us, each family, and you are entitled. If you are Choctaw." If they were Choctaw, as if white men from somewhere north could just come and tell people who they were. The people watched, that Yazoo mud on their feet. Those other Choctaws had been taken away seventy and eighty years before by the government, leaving a handful who wouldn't go, or couldn't. Torn away, like a piece of flesh caught on a briar and just ripped from the body, except this time it was the body itself ripped away, leaving that bloody piece behind. There was some that turned back from that awful W&, stragglinghome to tell of dying children and old folks, births in frozen mud beside trail and road, white farmers charging ten times the price for any kind of food. A picture of a daybreak that showed a hundred horses standing dead, frozen in mud up to their withers. A hundred Indian horses coming out of the night like that frozen, all facing back the way they'd come. "I druther die right here, right this minute," the coming-back people said. So the ones left behind knew the truth of what they called Removal.And there was some that come back from the Territory now and then, and some that left Mississippi and went out there, some that slipped

YAZOO DUSK

175

back and forth during the war when so many Indian people fought and got cut to pieces for something that didn't mean a tlung to them. So we knew about the other place where our relatives went, knew they built up a Choctaw Republic out there with schools and all until that war killed everything. But we didn't know our relatives any more until the committees come back to get us. "It's the law," they explained. "We got to offer every Choctaw some of that land. One hundred and sixty acres for head of household . . ." They didn't seem Choctaw no more. We didn't go. That was the year Luther Cole was born across the Yazoo in a cabin, into a Choctaw world of so much magic that it already had possessed Onatima Blue Wood for more than a year in the big white house with Black servants and blooded horses in a stable.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Dancing Poodle of Arles

It began in Barcelona, in the howling tunnel of the North Station, where faces were skulls and no signs told of anything, sooted concrete walls beneath the street and the Spanish trains wailing to a stop and lurching away like the drunks he remembered back home on the reservation, looking for another fix. When the darkfaced man with the briefcase pointed, they leaped aboard the wooden car-he faithless, she stoic before what she knew would be an absurd fate-and found a nun and five schoolgirls with an orange guitar. "La Paloma" the grls sang as the train crawled over the Pyrenees-gray rock and yellow leaf-and into Toulouse, where he foolishly insisted on ordering dinner at six P.M. and was insulted and they boarded a late train for Geneva. In the train compartment she huddled in a corner near the door, eyes closed but mouth too firm for sleep. He stared out at the bulking shadows and quick, jerky lights of small towns, again thinking of home. Each village, he thought, would be the last one and then the magic would be gone. He remembered the other journey. How many years before? When the night walls of Avignon, crenellations outlined in golden light, had appeared outside their window as they raced toward Paris, like a magic trick. Now, between the fragle illuminations of the towns, the dark lay thick and heavy upon the flat surface of southern France. The train hurried across

THE DANCING POODLE OF ARLES

7 77

the land as if it touched nothing, and he thought of another world where old women mouthed timeless stories and grandfathers sat watching stars bend across the sky in the ancient patterns of those same stories. That was a world of order, a different world. How did I get here, he wondered. How have we come so far? In Arles at midnight the train stopped and they, alone, got off and crossed toward the waiting room in a gray wind strung like barbed wire along the cold tracks. He clenched his jaw and noticed her shivering in her beige jacket, stumbling on the crushed granite, her face turned from him.The thought of a wait till morning in the little station made his bones ache. The connecting train for Geneva, a city as cool and logical as a tea tray, would not arrive until six. The small rectangle of the room contained only a blue, oblivious old man reading a newspaper behind the bars of the ticket window. She walked quickly to a brown wooden bench along the wall near the door, and he followed, noting the smooth lines of her gray pants and the swirl of her yellow hair upon the wall when she leaned back and shut her eyes against him. He pushed his own dark ponytail back and sat near her, dropping the two bags beside the bench, feeling that the trip was not working and it was his fault they'd left Toulouse at a ridiculous time since he'd been the one to rage against the French, the one to insist upon the cool, restful logic of Geneva. But then, she'd resisted only slightly, too dissatisfied, he thought, to care very much. Beside her, he felt the sooty darkness hanging like a wave over the station, and again he thought of his grandmother and the others back home. They would have stories to explain all of this. The light dampened the yellow tiles of the walls and soaked into the red floor, and he slid his back down the hard bench in search of less torturous constructions. He tried to burrow inside her mind, the way he'd once imagined he could, but all he found were images of the children, shards of ten years together, what you received finally in exchange for the quick delight, the intake of breath. She would be thinking of the kids at home with her sister,

l 78

INVENTIONS

not of the soaring, lovely confusion of Gaudi's temple of the sacred family in Barcelona, La Sagrada Familia. Gaudi had tried to make sense of it all in that edifice of nonsense, a coyote construction that defied logic and law and climbed skyward in spite of everything. Everything should have collapsed but didn't. And then the red door of the station opened and a young girl entered, followed by a large blue-gray poodle. The girl's black hair was cut straight across her wide forehead and rounded to her neck, and her green eyes flashed at them when she smiled. Her arms hung at her sides and her fingertips curled around the long sleeves of her violet sweater. Behind the gm1the blue poodle walked erect on its hind feet, its forefeet curled neatly in front of its chest and its brown eyes bright with intelligence. The girl made a sign with thumb and forefinger, and the poodle yelped once and began to spin and bark, blurring the yellow walls of the room. The man in the ticket window lowered his newspaper and raised it again. For a moment they watched the blue poodle dance and the young girl smile, and then the girl made a strange nasal sound to the dog in a language they could not understand. The poodle turned to them and then danced back through the open door, followed by the girl in the violet sweater. When the door closed, he saw his wife's blue eyes and knew she was laughing, though she kept the laughter carefully inside. She touched his arm, startling him. "There's somethingfamiliar about this place," she said. "Arles-have we been here before?" He thought about the question. They hadn't been there before, but "I know what you mean," he replied. Something about the place, like a delightful word one could not quite articulate, or a fragment that, if it fell into place, would connect everything the way h s grandmother began each story with pure sound. There was a familiar story here somewhere, but which story? He got up and approached the door and looked through the dingy glass at the lights outside. "Want to take a walk?'' he asked. "There are lights."

THE DANCING POODLE OF ARLES

179

She came to the door and stood beside him, looking doubtfully through the small windows like, he thought, someone looking through the walls of an aquarium. At the thought, the images became watery and strange. She glanced at the two bags by the bench. "They'll be fine here," he said, opening the door.

The streetlights were egg-yolk swirls above the dark paving stones, and here and there lighted windows made yellowish-green rectangles. The blue poplars along the edge of the street wavered smoothly toward the sky, and he saw that the sky itself was a swirl of yellow stars like pinwheels trailing streams of light and nearly obscuring the indigo background. It occurred to him that what he saw was all color, without form-stronger, simpler, more vibrant colors than he'd ever seen, exaggerating the essentials of the street and sky but leaving the obvious town in vague shadow. They stepped cautiously into the street, balancing on the uneven slate-colored stones. Halfway down the block an outdoor caf6 burned with light, the sulfur-yellowwall and awning framing eight white tables with a scattering of dark forms around them. Near three empty tables in the street, he could see the brown outlines of four figures walking. The blazing light of the caf6 was balanced on the opposite side of the street by mauve walls shading into near black broken by orange slashes suggestive of lighted windows. The buildings on both sides rose to a wedge of purple sky and enormous stars like cream-colored flowers in full petal. A frightening sense of d6jh vu swept over him as he stared at the caf6, and clutching his wife's arm he turned from the scene and fled down a side street, turning again at a small avenue called Rue Lamartine. The tap of her shoes on the polished stones matched the audible tap of his pulse. They hurried past a window where yellow light made a thick line between green shutters, and she stopped abruptly and turned back, pulling her arm from his. He watched her approach the

7 80

INVENTIONS

window and he followed, stepping carefully onto the gray curb behind her. Together they peered through the crack between the green shutters at the small room with its pale violet walls and floor of red tile, yellow chairs and lilac door. On a tumbled bed a scarlet coverlet was turned back from sheets and pillows of light greenish lemon, and on the edge of the bed sat a man with an emaciated, luminous head outlined with tangled red hair, the lines of the hair heavy as if laid on in an impulse of thick strokes. The man's high, pale forehead angled down to razor-edged cheekbones, hollow cheeks, and a sharp chin under a sparse confusion of orange beard, and wrapped around the head and under the chin so that it covered one ear with a thick pad was a white rag. He touched his wife's arm. "We can't," he whispered. The face lifted, and the eyes, like dark whirlpools, stared directly at them through the shutters. The tiny room, with its broad lines of furniture, portraits, and wrinkled clothes hung on pegs, expressed a deep, inviolable rest in painful contrast with the man on the bed. They shrank like burglars from the familiar face and window. Overhead, the stars tumbled out of control, madly and they walked quickly back to the station.

An hour after daybreak they sat in the train for Geneva.

Through the broad windows of their compartment, he watched a world of shocking turbulence, a stormy sea of wheat fields, grain like patterned sand tossed with rolling bushes, and the green flames of cypresses quivering upward against blue, knobbed mountains curling in waves upon themselves. Overhead, a swirlingpale-blue sky and thick lines of angular black crows above stubble cornfields and a curving swath of red-green road. As the train sped toward the cool blue of Geneva, he watched southern France explode in light. "A kingdom of light," he thought. He turned from the crows like black, folded staples, and absentmindedly fingering the lobe of one ear, he smiled at his wife. She reached out to touch his shoulder, her hair a sudden chaos of gold

THE DANCING POODLE OF ARLES

181

against the shimmering green pattern of the seat. Ahead of the train, the Alps waited in tumult. "Arles," she said, musing on the sound of the word. "There's something familiar about that town." He knew what she meant, and he remembered the old stories. The strongest colors should be used bravely, he thought, for time will only soften them too much.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Winter Rain

Every day now for six months he'd awakened to the river, rising out of sleep the way the winter river rose from its brushy bed, hearing before anything the throbbing of the current under the sand, his eyes opening to the sun caught like blood in the naked branches of the sycamores and cottonwoods out there in the river. He'd watched the river through its changes, taking to his bed in midsummer when the stream had subsided to a thin trickle in the heart of the wide swath of brush and sand. He'd seen the little stream vanish, leaving pools here and there that he knew from past years would be marked by the tracks of coons around the tails and bones of big fish. And then the pools, too, had disappeared, and the river had become its real self, a subterranean river, the largest and most powerful in the world, a current he could feel beneath his feet when he walked the crusty sand and a throbbing he felt every day now lying in the bed before the windows he'd had specially made for the watching. Through the bigger window he could see the smooth sweep of the sycamore branches rising like cold shadows at the edge of the river, and the islands of brush tangled black and topped by the brittle bones of the cottonwoods out in the middle of the sand. Through the window in the other wall, he could see Pine Mountain, where each evening the sun impaled itself on the black points

WINTER RAIN

183

of the pines and where the old graveyard hung on its flattened bench halfway up, the boy's grave shadowed always by the thick timber of the mountain. Below that must be the black river, Oka lusa hacha, the one the Choctaws said a good man could cross, and hadn't he been that, a good man? Shilup or shilombish, inside or outside shadow?The shilup would cross the river to a good place, they said. The outside shadow would remain behind, an owl or a fox. That world was so far away now back there in Mississippi; sapa iskitini and yulcpa they said of that place, whose words though? For a long time words and strange voices had come to him when he didn't expect them, and dreams of a deep canyon not like this river, a chasm with fast, black water at the bottom roaring so loudly it frightened him. In his dreams he had to cross that river but could find no trail down and was afraid. He could see a log across the deep river, like one of the cottonwoods outside his window but different. The bark was gone from the log and it looked too slippery and dangerous. This morning he watched the early sun flame on the wings of a red-tailed hawk as the bird wheeled and settled onto one of the bare sycamores with a cry that cut through the walls of his room. Below, he knew, the rabbits would huddle in the black brush, made nervous by the scream of the hawk, tensed against the panic that would send them recklessly across the bare sand. With its wings folded the bird turned a deep bronze, and the old man thought of his own thin face and hawklike blade of nose. His vision shifted to the other, smaller window and then curved slowly back to the river. The boy's shadow seemed to stalk the river now, the angle of the cap and thin line of the gun cutting against sand and brush, denying years and distance. Shilombish, that was the word. Outside shadow. The good shilup would have crossed the river long ago. The arms and hands with their bleached brown fingers fluttered against the sheets and a cry rose from the wreck of his body and then the door opened and the woman who cared for him entered the room, her face bright and concerned, the silver hair in a careful bun behind her head.

184

INVENTIONS

"Good morning," she said. "Did we sleep well last night?" Her voice carried a feel of caution, the old man thought, the voice of one conscious of hidden dangers. He tried to focus on the swift rise of the sycamore and the dark bird, to pretend to himself that he had not heard, that she did not exist. All of his life he had been lifted and moved about by such voices, and now he felt that he should be beyond that, should have earned a distance like that of the hawk. Or the boy, the child of his middle age. Instead, he felt himself flushed from hiding and heard himself saying in his dry, wintry voice, "Very well, thank you." But it wasn't true, of course. The dreams had come again, the girl mixed up with the deep, clear pools, the long black stream of her hair flowing, fanning out with the current of the underground river, her brown body and her bright smile with all of its promise turning and hunbhg in the insistent current. Waking, he thought of the boy, and sleeping, he dreamed of the pools, the deep pits cut into the river many years before so that the underground stream was freed and exposed to sun and sky, and the cold, clear water ran out of the sand into a shimmering translucence of rainbowsided fish and shiftingpebbles. Why the girl had come back to him after all these years perplexed him. For a long time he had held her away, had insisted to himself that the life he lived was the life he had chosen, that what he had been was what he had imagined himself to be, not merely what he had had to be. For fifty years now, since trading the dampness of Mississippi for California's light, he had lived beside the river, had matched desire and reflex against the small lives of the dry river, had taken the boy there and taught him the times one must not kill, had learned to let the pulse of the underground current move through and beyond him. But only now, it seemed, was he coming close to the river's meaning. The woman turned a handle and a part of the bed rose, and he found himself sitting almost upright so that the plane of the river Wed at an awkward angle, the skeletons of trees seeming to grope for balance, to sway outside the glass. The hawk's cry cut through the

WINTER RAIN

185

room, and the bird soared on a backward beating of wings and disappeared into the far reaches of the river, out of the frame of his vision. He imagined the glide of the bird's shadow over the sand, recreated the clumps of brush, the pattern of the river that he had known, and saw deep in his mind the kindling of the sun on the red tail. Shilup or shilornbish? Inside or outside shadow? It was important to remember which. The woman began to raise spoonfuls of pale food to his mouth and he felt himself swallowing. Now the sun had risen out of his window, and he shifted his eyes to imagine the splinters of light that fell through the pines of the mountain beyond the other window. He remembered the light on the pine needles and felt the prick of the needles as they lay by the graveyard a lifetime before-before the boy the war, almost everything-her hair like water on his face as she lay over him, his fingers clutching the steep slope to keep from falling away forever. "Everyone in town asks about you," she was saying as she raised the spoon. "Everyone thinks so highly of you, you know." It was true, he knew. Everyone always had. A good boy in that other life, a good man in this, and they'd all been happy when the child came, for he would make a good father. They'd come to the house. To stand with him beside the woodpile and stare out over the river where the silence was like thin winter ice, and to glance with him toward the graveyard on the mountain. To sit in the chairs and tell him about the little town, their words like the dry clay that rattled when you walked the coastal hills. But when they saw that his eyes were on the window and h detachment showed no awareness of their words, they ceased coming. Now they did not come and the old man was relieved. It was not that the town had forgotten him, he knew; it simply relied on him to die the way it had always relied on him to do the right thing. But there was the matter of the dark river and the log he could not identify. He did not think he could get across. "Mrs. Paaske had her appendix removed last week," the woman was saying. "They said it came close to bursting before they got her to the hospital.''

186

INVENTIONS

How, he wondered, had words begun to fail with the boy so many years ago, crumbling between them like the inky shale of the hills to the west. Sometime, he couldn't remember how long before, Earl, his oldest friend, had come to sit in the same chair and look at him, seeing, the old man knew, his own end in the other's. "The band-tails are back," Earl had said, and the old man felt the stir of wing tips brush through, smelled the explosion of pine and oak. Even then he'd been old and Earl's eye too sure when they hunted the pigeons, the boy watching and the old man hating the friend's theft. Perhaps then, that day when frost didn't melt beneath the oak shadows, the boy had begun the slow curve away and toward the war. Perhaps with Earl, and with the smooth gray arc of the 12-gauge and the tumbling birds. Answered with silence, Earl had risen, disappearingbeyond the doorway and the old man's eyes had opened again to the river and the dark mountain. The river was predictable in its own way. In the summer and fall it retreated into its bed and became an underground river, a brush and sand and cottonwood river, leaving only long white fingers exposed, and rabbits broke like dark fists over the red and gold and brown leaves and frost coated the dead grasses and small branches snapped like memories. Then in the winter and early spring the rains came pounding down over the coastal mountains, thrashing the final leaves from the white oaks, flattening the wild oats on the hillsides, smashing against the sand and sending the creeks in brown explosions toward the river. The river would rise out of its bed and rage in a dark wall that carried everything before it. And then as quickly as it rose up it would subside, sinking into the sand until only the stream was left at the heart of the river and then only the pools and finally the sand itself. Almost all of his life he had watched it, and now he felt the tension in the river, the waiting to break out again and sweep everything away. Never had he felt it so powerfully, always that pounding current beneath the smooth sand, that urgency.

WINTER RAIN

187

In his sleep he fought the dreams, refusing the deeper, darker river with its slippery log, and at the same time denying the girl her presence in the beautiful current of this other stream, dodging away from the deep pools cut into this river. Always in those pools it was summer and the sun was hot on the sand and they dove and swam into the heart of the light for a slashing moment. Her black hair soaked up the light until it burned his hand, and her smile promised a life. A different life. "We aren't feeling well today" she said. Outside the window, the light was graying and in the distance he saw clouds gathering. He knew that for weeks now they had lain up there on the crest of the coast range beyond his sight, trying to slip on over into the valley but never quite succeeding. Though he couldn't see them, he knew they had been the thin cirrus that came apart in tatters in the faded air. But now it was time for the real rains, and the clouds he saw were the bigger, heavier cumulus coming together out there, darkening the sun and putting a shadow over the river. The woman followed his gaze to the window, then took away the tray and rose, drifting silently through the doorway. He could hear her moving things around in another room the way she always had. Now she would read, or knit, while she waited for him to sleep. And later she would come, he knew, to find him and talk to him and feed him again and ask if there was something he needed. He closed his eyes against the mountain begruing to gray with cloud, and the girl appeared, laughing, her dark hair streaming with rain, the water flowing over her body. The clouds rushed to seal the sky and immediately he saw the first drops come sweeping in on a new wind to streak his windows so that the sycamores and cottonwoods warped and wavered like old men. Then the real rains came hard and he felt the river responding, felt the current quicken and rise up in its bed until it broke from the white sand in a furious black torrent he knew he could never cross.

7 88

INVENTIONS

The woman who cared for him listened to the rain drumming on the roof and looked down at the old man. She crouched in the chair and reached both hands behind her to free the long silver hair in a sudden flood over her shoulders. She clasped both arms across her chest and began to rock as she remembered so many years before when she had led him to the deepest pools of the river.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

She1ter

Sleet came like broken glass out of the southwest, cutting the tops off the peaks and riming the alpine fir and hemlock. He worked to bum the shelter in the saddle of the pass, the black granite mountains leaning in over h m , their heads in gray cloud obscured further by the blowing ice, a small dark form moving cautiously against the green meadow and gray wind, tearing the cedar shakes from the sides of the shelter as the two women struggled on the trail in the river valley below. Piling the old, dry shakes around the three-sided log structure as they walked the washed-out trail with roots grabbing and holding with each step the way roots always did down there where the ice was rain and the dark forest crowded in upon them and they climbed upward toward the pass at the center point where he worked to bum the shelter, piling and burning and piling as logs fell into logs, raking embers upon embers until the shelter was a pile of glowing coals as big as his mountaineering tent and to the north and south the black mountains moved away in cloud, while east and west the pass fell to timbered river valleys one of which the two women climbed slowly up from, two Indians noting the medicine plants, feeling the familiar rain, singing softly to themselves as he burned the shelter their father had built and they thought they would sleep in that night in spite of the ravens barking from the trees to warn them, their joints cold

7 90

INVENTIONS

and their songs warming, the earth drumming, the river talking clearly down the valley below him up there burning the shelter because he was the ranger.

The day he burned the White Pass shelter, sleet cut like broken glass out of the southwest, slicing the tops off the granite peaks and riming the alpine fir and mountain hemlock, bending him close over the flames. He worked in the saddle of the pass, using the pulaski to tear cedar shakes from the shelter walls and piling them to get the fire started, then burning and piling as the log structure collapsed, raking embers upon embers until what had been a shelter in the snowy pass for eighty years was a small pile of glowing coals no bigger than the orange tent pitched in the trees nearby. It was his job there, so many miles from even the nearest gravel road and so many more from the little logging town where the ranger station stood. A job winter snow had begun by bowing the ancient shelter low until it sagged over the heather meadow now in early summer like a broken bird wing. He'd seen at once when he backpacked in that morning from his camp along the river below that the shelter was done for. Three sides and roof bent close to the earth as if inspecting after these eighty years the mark of hoof and boot, the peaks like a jagged wall all around shredding the clouds.A spot of brown from a mile away on the long meadowed ridge as he approached, the broken shelter had brought the pass and the Cascade peaks r u s h g toward itself, the single point of reference. A job he felt good about, backpacking in to remove this manmade thing.

Rain came, settling on the downswept branches of fir and hemlock, slipping down the shaggy and gleaming needles to. . . . The rain fell onto the downswept branches and collected and fell to the undergrowth with a steady hammering.The two old women

SHELTER

191

climbed steadily upward, out of the thick timber to the switchbacks where the trees were stunted, twisted dwarf things.

A hard climb we had of it, my sister and me, slogging up the Northfork trail seven miles, the red earth washed out of the trail leaving those roots that reach up to throw you down whenever they get a chance, and there along the river the salmonberry and blackberry vines grabbing at you when you went by and the nettles swiping at your face. Plants you can make medicine from if you need to, but you don't want them swatting you in the face, my canvas pack with its little straps cutting into my shoulders and that can of beans stabbing me in the back. The first night we camped seven miles in at Red Creek, just before the trail starts switchbacking up toward the pass. Sarah caught some trout like she always does, like our father taught her when she was a girl all them many years ago and like he tried to teach me, and we put up a tarp between the trees and built a fire and listened to the creek and the river talking where they came together just below our camp while a camp-robber jay came and begged until my sister gave him some bread, which was a mistake. Her sitting against that big cedar at the edge of the tarp, her silver hair in braids and the red bandana on top of her head, the rain and the creek and the river talking about something I almost couldn't understand. Me thinking about how the next night we'd stay in the shelter our father built up there at the pass, where you needed a shelter from the storms that lived up there.

A job he felt good about, removing this man-made thing, backpacking in to erase the intrusion, the unnatural structure. He warmed first his front and then his back against the coals, the shelter now only a glowing circle the size of his internal-frame pack that rested next to the orange tent and the little camp stove he carried. The steaming parka he wore over his down coat telling

1 92

INVENTIONS

him it was time to turn the other side to the fire, his heavy mountaineering boots oblivious to ice and fire, the tent with the sleeping bag inside reassuring him when he looked that way through the ice strung like wire now across the meadow so that he pulled his wool hat lower and tilted the hood of his parka away from the blowing snow. Over his tent the small, stunted trees bent and curled their limbs together thickly. After he finished he would have tea.

It was sleet on the switchbacks and ice like a flint knife on the long, high ridge trail across the meadow toward the shelter, with Sarah bent into the wind so that the ice caught on her bandana and the top of her pack and stayed there, me thinking how small she looked hunched into the mountain that way how like our father when he was alive, before he died, like our father who is in the graveyard on the Stillaguamish who built the shelter we would sleep in that night with the odor of mice and mules and all of the people and animals who had slept there during eighty years. Where when the clouds rose we could look up and see the great mother mountain, Dakobed, that the whites called sometfung else not seeing what the mountain really meant there. Me thinking how far we'd come since the beginning. Not even looking up, Sarah, when the ptarmigan exploded out of that bunch of heather right beside her to fall away down the valley still like a snowball this early in the summer before his feathers changed, feeling maybe how good it was to come out in the mountains again like we used to with our father and feeling maybe how old she was, as old as him when he died. Not seeing either, when I did, the smoke up there in the saddle of the pass like a little feather blowing away with the ice so that you had to be lucky or look hard to see it at all.

"The ice storm swept down from the north," he wrote in his journal as he waited for the tea water to boil, "turning the gnarled trees from black-green to white, riming the hairs of his mustache

SHELTER

1 93

so that each stood out stiff and brittle." The stunted trees, twisted from three centuries in the high country, poked their spiny branches at the orange rain fly of his tent, testing its tautness, scraping a brittle shaft across the fabric with a little tearing sound. The wind picked up, sweeping down the black ice of the peaks with greater acceleration, probing the clusters of curved trees, seekinghim out, plucking the guy lines of the tent to make them sing, experimenting with the fire of the little stove. "Where the shelter stood is now nothing. Tomorrow he will spade up the earth and transplant until there is no evidence."

Close now to the top of the ridge where the heather turned to bare granite carved sharp by wind, the two women bent into the storm and walked toward the pass, the one in front bent more tightly closely to the thin trail, the one in back unfolded slightly so that she could look across the saddle of the pass for the thing she could not find, not even smoke now but instead a bright spot of color in the small trees.

My hands in the mittens cold and hard now, the sharp pains decreasing, a bad sign, and Sarah still looking down so that she does not see the shelter is gone and we are walking toward only a spot of color in the small trees at the edge of the pass. So that she doesn't see the way I do.

The ranger squatting beside his small stove balanced on a rock, the two women climbing steadily and quickly toward the pass, the trees touching the tent fly and the wind plucking at the cords. The mountains leaning, clouded, toward the empty meadow. The crooked hemlock branch hooking the nylon and lifting, the wind working at the cords until fly and tent rip and lift into the iced air. Whirled into dark, into silence, he wonders where he is, might be, should be. Dakobed is hidden in clouds.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Soul-Catcher

The old man held the rifle in one hand and walked bent over under the weight of the gunnysack on his back, as if studying the tangle of roots that was the trail. Behind him three lanky brown and black-and-white hounds crowded close to his thin legs and threw nervous glances at the wet forest all around. The only sound was that of the old man's boots and the occasional whine of one of the dogs. The sliver of moon had set, and the trail was very dark. The light from the carbide lamp on his hat cast a phosphorescent glow around the group, so that the old man, with his long, silver hair, might have been one of the Choctaw shadows on the bright path home. Out of the dark to the old man's right came a scream that cut through the swamp like jagged tin and sent the hounds trembling against his legs. "Hah! Get back, you!" he scolded, turning to shake his head at the cringing dogs. "That cat ain't going to eat you, not yet." The dogs whined and pushed closer so that the old man stumbled and caught himself and the light from the headlamp splashed upon the trail. He shook his head again and chuckled, making shadows dance around them. He knew what it was that stalked him. The black koi hadn't been seen in the swamps during the old man's lifetime, but as a child he'd heard the stories so often that he

SOUL-CATCHER

7 95

knew at once what the koi meant. It was an old and familiar story. He'd felt the black one out there in the swamps for a long time. The bird, falachito, had called from the trees to warn him, and he had listened and gone on because what else was there to do? All of his life he had been prepared to recognize the soul-catcher when it should come. The old man also knew that the screamer was probably the panther that the fool white man, Reeves, had wounded near Satartia a couple of weeks before. He could feel the animal's anger there in the darkness, feel the hatred like grit between his teeth. And he felt great pity for the injured cat. The boar coon in the sack was heavy, and the old man thought that he should have brought the boy along to help, but then the forest opened and he was at the edge of his cabin clearing, seeing the thread of his garden trail between the stubble of the past year's corn and the dried husks of melon and squash vines. Behind him the panther screamed again, this time to his left. The cat had been circling like that for the past hour, never getting any closer or any farther away. He paused at the edge of the clearing and spoke a few words in a low voice, trymg to communicatehis understanding and sympathy to the wounded animal and his knowledge of what was there to the soul-catcher. For a moment he leaned the rifle against his leg and reached up to touch a small pouch that hung inside his shirt. All of his life the old man had balanced two realities, two worlds, a feat that had never struck him as particularly noteworthy or difficult. But as the cat called out once more, he felt a shadow fall over him. The animal's cry rose from the dark waters of the swamp to the stars and then fell away like one of the deep, bottomless places in the river. When the old man pulled the leather thong to open the door, the hounds shot past and went to cower beneath the plank beds. He lowered the bag to the puncheon floor and pushed the door closed. After a moment's thought he dropped the bolt into place before reaching with one hand to hang the twenty-two on nails

196

INVENTIONS

beneath a much larger rifle. Finally, he looked at the teenage boy sitting on the edge of one of the beds with a book in his lap. The lantern beside the boy left half of his upturned face in shadow, as if two faces met in one, but the old man could see one green eye and the fair skin, and he wondered once more how much Choctaw there was in the boy. The boy looked up fully and stared at the old uncle, the distinct epicanthic fold of each eye giving the boy's face an oddly Asian quality. "Koi," the old man said. "A painter. He followed me home." After a moment's silence, the boy said, "You going to keep him?" The old man grinned. The boy was getting better. "Not this one," he replied. "He's no good. A fool shot him, and now he's mad." He studied the air to one side of the boy and seemed to make a decision. "Besides, this black one may be nalusachito, the soul-catcher. He's best left alone, I think." The boy's grin died quickly, and the old man saw fear and curiosity mingle in the pale eyes. "Why do you think it's nalusachito?" The word was awkward on the boy's tongue. "Sometimes you just know these things. He's been out there a while. The bird warned me, and now that fool white man has hurt him." "Nalusachito is just a myth," the boy said. The old man looked at the book in the boy's lap. "You reading that book again?" The boy nodded. "A teacher g v e that book to your dad one time, so's he could learn all about his people, the teacher said. He used to read that book, too, and tell me about us Choctaws." The old man grinned once more. "After he left, I read some of that book." The old man reached a hand toward the boy. "Here, let me read you the part I like best about us people." He lifted a pair of wirerimmed glasses from a shelf above the rifles and slipped the glasses on.

SOUL-CATCHER

7 97

The boy held the book out and the old man took it. Bending so that the lantern light fell across the pages, he thumbed expertly through the volume. "This is a good book, all right. Tells us all about ourselves. This writer was a smart man. Listen to this." He began to read, pronouncing each word with care, as though it were a foreign language. "The Choctaw warrior, as I knew him in his native Mississippi forest, was asjine a specimen of manly pufection as I have ever beheld." He looked up with a wink. "He seemed to be as perfect as the human

form could be. Tall, beautiful in symmetry of form and face, graceful, active, straight, fleet, with lofty and independent bearing, he seemed worthy in saying, as he of Juan Fernandez fame: 'I am monarch of all I survey.' His black piercing eye seemed to penetrate and read the very thoughts of the heart, while his firm step proclaimed a feeling sense of manly independence.Nor did their women fall behind in all that pertains tofemale beauty." The old man looked at the boy. "Now there's a man that hit the nail on the head." He paused for a moment. "You ever heard of this Juan Fernandez?Us Choctaws didn't get along too good with Spanish people in the old days. Remind me to tell you about Tuscalusa some time." The boy shook his head. "Alabama?" The old man nodded. "I read this next part to Old Lady Blue Wood that lives crost the river. She says this is the smartest white man she ever heard of." He adjusted the glasses and read again.

"They were of such unnatural beauty that they literally appeared to light up everything around them. Their shoulders were broad and their carriage true to Nature, which has never been excelled by the hand ofart, their long, black tresses hung inflowing waves, extending nearly to the ground; but the beauty of the countenances of many of those Choctaw and Chickasaw girls was so extraordinary that ifsuchfaces were seen today in one of the parlors of thefashionable world, they would be considered as a type of beauty hitherto unknown." He handed the book back to the boy and removed the glasses, grinning all the while. "Now parts of that do sound like Old Lady

7 98

INVENTIONS

Blue Wood. That unnatural part, and that part about broad shoulders. But she ain't never had a carriage that I know of, and she's more likely to light into anybody that's close than to light 'em up." The boy looked down at the moldy book and then grinned weakly back at the old uncle. Beneath the floppy hat, surrounded by the acrid smell of the carbide headlamp, the old man seemed like one of the swamp shadows come into the cabin. He thought about his father, the old man's nephew, who had been only half Choctaw but looked nearly as dark and indestructible as the uncle. Then he looked down at his own hand in the light from the kerosene lantern. The pale skin embarrassed him, gave him away. The old man, his great-uncle, was Indian, and his father had been Indian, but he wasn't. There was a thud on the wood shingles of the cabin's roof. Dust fell from each of the four corners of the cabin and onto the pages of the damp book. "Nalusachito done climbed up on the roof," the old man said, gazing at the ceiling with amusement. "He moves pretty good for a cat that's hurt, don't he?" The boy knew the uncle was watching for his reaction. He steeled himself, and then the panther screamed again and he flinched. The old man nodded. "Only a fool or a crazy man ain't scared when soul-catcher's walking around on his house," he said. "You're not afraid," the boy replied, watching as the old man set the headlamp on a shelf and hung the wide hat on a nail beside the rifles. He pulled a piece of canvas from beneath the table and spread it on the floor. As he dumped the coon out onto the canvas, he looked up with a chuckle. "That book says Choctaw boys always respected their elders. Pm scared all right, but I know about that cat, you see, and that's the difference. That cat ain't got no surprises for me because I'm old, and I done heard all the stories." The boy glanced at the book. "It don't work that way," the old man said. "You can't read them. A white man comes and he pokes around and pays somebody

SOUL-CATCHER

199

or maybe somebody feels sorry for him and tells him stuff and he writes it down. But he don't understand, so he can't put it down right, you see." How do you understand, the boy wanted to ask as he watched the uncle pull a knife from its sheath on his hip and begin to skin the coon, making cuts down each leg and up the belly so delicately that the boy could see no blood at all. The panther shrieked overhead, and the old man seemed not to notice. "Why don't you shoot it?" the boy asked, looking at the big deer rifle on the wall, the -30-40 Krag from the Spanish-American War. The old man looked up in surprise. "You could sell the skin to Mr. Wheeler for a lot of money, couldn't you?" Mr. Wheeler was the Black man who came from across the river to buy the coon skins. The old man squinted and studied the boy's face. "You can't hunt that cat," he said patiently. "Nalusachito's something you got to accept, something that's just there. "You see," he continued, "what folks like that fool Reeves don't understand is that this panther has always been out there. We just ain't noticed him for a long time. He's always there, and that's what people forget. You can't kill him." He tapped his chest with the handle of the knife. "Nalusachito comes from in here." The boy watched the old man in silence. He knew about the soul-catcher from the book in his lap. It was an old superstition, and the book didn't say anything about nalusachitobeing a panther. That was something the old man invented. This panther was very real and dangerous. He looked skepticallyat the old man and then up at the rifle. "No," the old man said. "We'll just let this painter be." He pulled the skin off over the head like a sweater, leaving the naked body of the raccoon shining like a baby in the yellow light. Under the beds the dogs sniffed and whined, and overhead the whispers moved across the roof. The old man held the skin up and admired it and laid it, fur down, on the bench beside him."I sure ain't going outside to nail

200

INVENTIONS

this up right now," he said, the corners of his mouth suggesting a grin. He lifted the bolt and pushed the door open and swung the body of the coon out into the dark. When he closed the door there was a snarl and an impact on the ground. The dogs began to growl and whimper, and the old man said, "You, Yvonne! Hoyo!" and the dogs shivered in silence. The boy watched the old man wash his hands in the bucket and sit on the edge of the other bed to pull off his boots. Each night and morning since he had come it had been the same. The old uncle would go out at night and come back before daylight with something in the bag. Usually the boy would awaken to find the old man in the other plank bed, sleeping like a small child so lightly that the boy could not see or hear him breathe. But this night the boy had awakened in the very early morning, tom from sleep by a sound he wasn't conscious of hearing, and he had sat up with the lantern and book to await the old man's return. He read the book because there was n o h g else to read. The myths reminded lum of fairy tales he'd read as a child, and he tried to imagine his father reading them. The old man was a real Choctaw--Chahta okla-a fullblood. Was the ability to believe the myths diluted with the blood, the boy wondered, so that his father could, when he had been alive, believe half as strongly as the old man and he, his father's son, half as much yet? He thought of the soul-catcher and he shivered, but he knew that he was just scaring himself the way kids always did. His mother had told him how they said that when his father was born the uncle had shown up at the sharecropper's cabin and announced that the boy would be his responsibility. That was the Choctaw way he said, the right way. A man must accept responsibility for and teach his sister's children. Nobody had thought of that custom for a long time, and nobody had seen the uncle for years, and nobody knew how he'd even learned of the boy's birth, but there he was come out of the swamps across the river with his straight black hair hanging to lus shoulders under the floppy hat and his face dark as night so that the mother, lus sister, screamed when she

SOUL-CATCHER

207

saw him. And from that day onward the uncle had come often from the swamps to take the boy's father with him, to teach h. The old man rolled into the bed, pulled the wool blanket to his chin, turned to the wall, and was asleep. The boy watched him and then turned down the lamp until only a dim glow outlined the objects in the room. He thought of Los Angeles, the bone-dry hills and yellow air, the home where he'd lived with his parents before the accident that killed them. It was difficult to be Choctaw, to be Indian there, and he'd seen his father working hard at it, going to urban powwows where the fancy dancers spun like beautiful birds, growing his black hair long. His father had taught him to hunt in the desert hills and to say a few phrases like Chahta isht ia and Chahta yakni in the old language. The words had remained only sounds, the powwow dancers only another Southern California spectacle for a green-eyed, fair-skinned boy. But the hunting had been real, a testing of desire and reflex he had felt all the way through. Indians were hunters. Indians lived close to the land. His father had said those things, often. He thought about the panther. The old man would not hunt the black cat, and had probably made up the story about nalusachito as an excuse. The panther was dangerous. For a month the boy had been at the cabin and had not ventured beyond the edges of the garden except to go out in the small rowboat onto the muddy Yazoo River that flanked one side of the clearing. The swampy forest around the cabin was like the river, a place in which nothing was ever clear: shadows, swirls, dark forms rising and disappearing again, n o k g ever clearly seen. And each night he'd lain in the bed and listened to the booming and cracking of the swamp like something monstrously evil and thought of the old man killing things in the dark, picturing the old man as a solitary light cutting the darkness. The panther might remain, its soft feet whispering maddeningly on the cabin roof each night while the old man hunted in the swamp. Or it might attack the old man who would not shoot it. For the first time the boy realized the advantage in not being really Choctaw. The

202

INVENTIONS

old uncle could not hunt the panther, but he could because he knew the cat for what it really was. It would not be any more difficult than the wild pigs he'd hunted with his father in the coast range in California, and it was no different than the cougars that haunted those same mountains. The black one was only a freak of nature. Moving softly he lifted the heavy rifle from its nails. In a crate on the floor he found the cartridges and, slipping on his red-plaid mackinaw, he dropped the bullets into his pocket. Then he walked carefully to the door, lifted the bolt, stepped through, and pulled the door silently closed. Outside, it was getting close to dawn and the air had the clean, raw smell of that hour tainted by the sharp odor of the river and swamp. The trees were unsure outlines protruding from the wall of black smounding the cabin on three sides. Over the river the fog hovered in a gray somewhat lighter than the air, and a kingfisher called in a shrill kree out across the water. He pushed shells into the rifle's magazine and then stepped along the garden trail toward the trees, listening carefully for the sounds of the woods. Where even he knew there should have been the shouting of crickets, frogs, and a hundred other night creatures, there was only silence beating like the heartbeat drum at one of the powwows. At the edge of the clearing he paused. In the cabin the old man sat up and looked toward the door. The boy had an hour before full daylight, and he would meet nalusachito in that transitional time. He fingered the medicine around his neck and wondered about such a convergence. There was a meaning beyond his understanding, s o m e h g that could not be avoided. The boy brushed aside a muscadine vine and stepped into the woods, feeling his boots sink into the wet floor. It had all been a singular journey toward this, out of the light of California, across the burning earth of the Southwest, and into the darkness of this place. Beyond the garden, in the uncertain light, the trunks of trees, the brush and vines, were like a curtain closing behind him. Then the panther cried in the damp woods somewhere in front of him, the sound insinuating itself into the night like one of the tendrils of fog that clung to the ground. He began to walk on the faint trail

SOUL-CATCHER

203

toward the sound, the air so thick he felt as though he were suspended in fluid, his movements like those of a man walking on the floor of a sea. His breathing became torturous and liquid, and his eyes adjusted to the darkness and strained to isolate the watery forms surrounding him. When he had gone a hundred yards the panther called again, a strange, dreamlike, muted cry different from the earlier screams, and he hesitated a moment and then left the trail to follow the cry. A form slid from the trail beside his boot, and he moved carefully away deeper into the woods beyond the trail. Now the light was graying, and the leaves and bark of the trees became delicately etched as the day broke. The close scream of the panther jerked him into full consciousness, and he saw the cat. Twenty feet away, it crouched in a clutter of vines and brush, its yellow eyes burning at him.In front of the panther was the half-eaten carcass of the coon. He raised the rifle slowly bringing it to his shoulder and slipping the safety off in the same movement. With his action, the panther pushed itself upright until it sat facing him on its haunches, braced by the front feet. It was then he saw that one of the front feet hung limply, a festering wound on the shoulder. He lined the notched sight of the rifle against the cat's head, and he saw the burning go out of the eyes. The panther watched him calmly waiting as he pulled the trigger. The animal toppled backwards and kicked for an instant and was still. He walked to the cat and nudged it with a boot. Nalusachito was dead. He leaned the rifle against a tree and lifted the cat by its four feet and swung it onto his back, surprised at how light it was and feeling the sharp edges of the ribs through the fur. He felt sorrow and pity for the hurt animal he could imagine hunting awkwardly in the swamps, and he knew that what he had done was right. He picked up the rifle and turned back toward the cabin, walking bent under the weight of his burden.

204

INVENTIONS

When he opened the cabin door with the cat on his shoulder, the old man was sitting in the chair facing him. He leaned the rifle against the bench and swung the panther carefully to the floor and looked up at the old man,but the old man's eyes were fixed on the open doorway. Beyond the doorway nalusachito crouched, ready to spring.

PART THREE

Refractions

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

As I f an Indian Were Really an Indian Native Arnerican Voices and Postcolonial Theory It's very convenient, isn't it, that so much of what we perhaps loosely term postcolonial theory today is written by real "Indians"with such names as Chakrabarty, Chakravorty, Gandhi, Bhabha, Mohanty, and so on--so that, in writing or speaking about indigenous Native American literature, we can, if we desire, quote without even changing noun or modifier, as if an Indian were really an Indian. I am myself neither a real Indian like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak or Satya Mohanty, nor a theorist, but merely a teacher who also writes, a writer who also teaches-and my reflections should be taken in that context. I also wish to borrow a caution from the seminal postcolonial writer Frantz Fanon, who declares in Black Skin, White Masks, "Since I was born in the Antilles, my observations and my conclusions are valid only for the Antilles" (14). Following and narrowing Fanon's wise lead, I must say that in sigruhcant measure I am my own Antilles and therefore my observations and conclusionsare valid only for myself. As an American of deeply mixed heritage and somewhat unique upbringing, I speak on behalf of and from the perspective of no one else. Edward Said has written about "strategic location, which [he explains] is a way of describing the author's position in a text with regard to the . . .material he writes about" (Orientalism 20). My own strategic location vis-&vis what we have come to call Native

208

REFRACTIONS

American literature is a complicated and contingent one. Descended from Mississippi Choctaw and Oklahoma Cherokee peoples on both paternal and m a t e d sides, I am also Euramerican, with Irish and Cajun French ancestors. My strategic location, therefore, may be found in what I tlunk of as a kind of frontier zone, which elsewhere I have referred to as "always unstable, multidirectional, hybridized, characterized by heteroglossia, and indeterminate" (Mixedblood Messages 26). In this sense my work, like that of many other writers identified as Native American, might in fact be accurately described as what postcolonial theorists have called "migrant" or "diasporic" writing, for while I spent my earliest years in Choctaw country in Mississippi, I do not write from the heart of a reservation site or community and was not raised within a traditional culture. It would not be incorrect to say, in fact, that today in the U.S., urban centers and academic institutions have come to constitute a kind of diaspora for Native Americans who through many generations of displacement and orchestrated ethnocide are often far from their traditional homelands and cultural communities. Such a frontier/transcultural location is an inherently unstable position, and one from which it is difficult and undoubtedly erroneous to assume any kind of essential stance or strategy, despite many temptations to do so. A comrnonality of issues, shared by all of us who work in the field of Native American literature, marks tlus unsettled zone of frontier, interstitial scholarship. Dipesh Chakrabarty has suggested that non-Western thought is consistently relegated to the status of what Foucault might term a "subjugated knowledge" or what others define as a "minor" or "deterritorialized" knowledge (Gandhi 43). Chakrabarty writes that while Third World lustorians "feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate. . . .We cannot even afford an equality or symmetry of ignorance at this level without taking the risk of appearing 'old fashioned' or 'out-dated"' (Chakrabarty 2). To Chakrabarty's lament, I would add that critics and teachers of Native American literature are in a similar position. We are prop-

AS IF AN INDIAN WERE REALLY AN INDIAN

209

erly expected to have and exhibit a crucial knowledge of canonical European and Euramerican literature; if we fail to be familiar with Shakespeare, Chaucer, Proust, Flaubert, Dickinson, Faullcner, Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Yeats, Keats, Woolf, Tolstoy, Temyson, and so forth-not to mention the latest poststructuralist theory-we are simply not taken seriously and probably will not earn a university degree in the first place. That, it is presumed, is the foundational knowledge, the "grand narrative of legitimation" in our particular field. However, while I have a great fondness for and some knowledge of canonical Western literature, like Chakrabarty I have often noticed that the majority of my colleagues in various "English departments around the U.S. know very little if anything about Native American literature, written or oral; nor do they often exhibit any symptom of feeling it to be incumbent upon them to gain such knowledge. It may be pleasant to believe, as the guest editor of a recent issue of Modern Fiction Studies declared, that "Native American literature has become part of the main~tream,"~ but, despite incremental change over the past couple of decades, it would only take a few minutes in the English departments of most universities, even in the Southwest, the heart of supposed "Indian Country," to be disabused of such wishful thinking. In fact, surprisingly, it would not take much time spent browsing through contemporary critical/theoretical texts-including especially those we call postcolonial-to discover an even more complete erasure of Native American voices. It seems that Chakrabarty's "symmetry of ignorance" applies even less to postcolonial theorists' awareness of Native American voices than it does to mainstream academia. While Native American literature is gradually finding a niche within academia, one discovers, predominantly, an absence of Native American voices in works by major cultural theorists and respected writers. We find, for example, a surprising erasure of Native presence and voice in Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, a highly praised work in which this Nobel-winning African American writer adopts the rhetoric of imperial discovery and cites Hemingway's "Tontos" as well as

Melville's Pequod without ever noting an indigenous Native presence shadowing her figuration of blackness in America. The most extraordinary denigration of Native American voices is found, however, in Said's Culture and Imperialism, where this celebrated father of postcolonial theory dismisses Native American writing in a single phrase as "that sad panorama produced by genocide and cultural amnesia which is beginning to be known as 'native American literature"' (304). We can add to this list Homi Bhabha's total silencing of indigenous Native Americans in his influential study The Location of Culture. Bhabha gives the impression of being acutely aware of a wide panoply of minority voices in this book, referencing Hispanic and Black American writers, for instance, and extensively praising Morrison's Beloved, but nowhere, not even in a whispered aside, does he note the existence of a resistance literature arising from indigenous, colonized inhabitants of the Americas. How, one wonders, can this student of postcoloniality, difference, liminality, and what he terms "culture as a strategy of survival" (172) be utterly ignorant of or indifferent to such writers as N. Scott Momaday Jarnes Welch, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Sirnon Ortiz, or, most incredibly, the Anishinaabe writer and theorist Gerald Vizenor? How, one wonders, can any serious student of the "indigenous or native narrative," the term Bhabha uses to define his subject, not read and deal with the radically indigenous theory of Vizenor? Imagine what lengths Bhabha and other postcolonial theorists would have to go to in order to come to terms with Vizenor 'S "trickster hermeneutics"-wluch effectively subsumes poststructuralist and postmodern theory into a Native American paradigm and discursive system--or the work of poet Luci Tapahonso, who writes in both Navajo and English from a position deeply embedded in her Din6 culture while moving freely within the academic diaspora, liberating and appropriating villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets to a Navajo voice and epistemology. Those of us who moan about the "center's" refusing to hear the i'margm'~"cries of protest, or, worse yet, the metropolitan center's refusing even to acknowledge that there is a voice and a multi-

AS IF AN INDIAN WERE REALLY AN INDIAN

211

tudinous language out here, should face certain truths. Yes, it is very difficult-almost impossible, really-for the truly new written work of protest or resistance or "other" narrative even to be published, let alone acknowledged.But why should that not be the case? The American world of books, which is to say New York, with its half-dozen major commercial publishing houses remaining-actually publishing conglomerates reflecting the "globalization" of industry that is merely an extension of the marketing phalanx of Western corporatism across all boundaries-is a forprofit endea~or.~ Controlled by highly educated persons of European and European American descent, the publishing industry manufactures a product designed primarily for consumers of European and European American origin. It's not simply because, as the noted bank robber said, that's where the money is. As Nabokov's mad reader/editor Kinbote demonstrates so superbly in the novel Pale Fire, we all want to read ourselves into and back out of every text and will go to great extremes to ensure that possibility. Naturally, the primarily white, Eurocentrically educated reader will want to find him- and herself inside the covers of any text. Thus Richard Ford wins a Pulitzer Prize for an uninspired, entirely predictable, white middle-class male angst story such as Indepmdmce Day, or a sophomoric tale of New York such as Bright Lights, Big City is made a best-seller by New York. This is unfortunate for those of us who create and desire to read texts containing "other" stories, but it is not inherently an immoral or unpredictable proposition. A novel by and about a Blackfeet Indian growing up among other Blackfeet Indians and the remnants of an indigenous culture in a far corner of America, or a radically displaced Pueblo Indian suffering deracination in a southwestern world of ceremonial stories and kivas-these things are alien to the book-buying public of America except in the broadest human sense. There is no moral imperative that we can bring to bear to coerce publishers into manufacturingsuch texts or consumers into buying and reading them. Simply put, it is quite natural for a dominant culture to manufacture and consume primarily those artifacts that reflect and

2 12

REFRACTlON S

reinforce its own sense of self, of culture. We can argue all we want that so-called “marginalized”voices must have a place in American publishing because America’s multiculturalityis increasing exponentially. We, too, we feel, deserve books that mirror our worlds, our cultures, our values, our particular forms of struggle and enlightenment. Like Nabokov’s Kinbote, we want to fmd our own Zemblas in the texts we read. We can argue that the world of manufactured cultural artifacts called books is controlled by an elite whose consciousness is in turn manufactured in universities controlled by and for the same elite, and we will be correct. But that is, in hard ways, beside the point. Books that appeal to the metropolitan center’s desire for the exotic, the colorful fringes of itself-such as the new rush of novels by writers from (formerly imperial) India-and that do so without radically disturbing the center’s sense of well-being, will continue to be produced. In America we will continue to have the Native Sons, Invisible Mans, Beloveds, Woman Warriors, and Love Medicines. But the voices that tell stories too disturbing or too alien will be kept silenced or at best on the publishing margins represented by small presses and, more than ever today university presses. In the end we should not be surprised by the fact that the dominant culture will continue to produce consutner gds-and therefore culturalcapital-for itself, even as we rail about justice from the far margins. Therefore we will be forced to continue to find other venues, other paths toward our audiences, outside of New York and the half-dozen remaining publishing houses-a not necessarily unhealthy situation. With that being said, we can turn again to those intellectuals whose announced intention it is to contest the hegemony of cultural totalitarianism always already at the center, those individuals and institutions who make a self-satisfiedprofession of challengingthe orthodoxy and monologic authority of the imperial powers. They cannot be excused for the same ignorance, the same deafness, the same blindness, the same refusal to see or hear the margin’s protests. In these preening intellectuals, such ignorance does indeed represent a moral failure. It is, in fact, difficult if not impossible to take

AS IF AN INDIAN WERE REALLY AN INDIAN

2 73

seriously any cultural/critical theorist who expounds upon "postcoloniality" or liminality and at the same time appears ignorant of the rapidly growing body of Native American literature, or who, if he or she is aware of it, clearly relegates it to a "minor," "subjugated, or "deterritorialized" knowledge worthy of only silence or erasure. Quite ironically, it becomes quickly obvious that these cultural critics are supremely the products of the imperial crucible of the Western university, speaking the languages of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the language of the imperial center. Within this great silence, it comes as more of a surprise than it should to find Trinh Minh-Ha, in Woman,Native, Other,paying careful attention to Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silkofsstorytelling and then at least noting such Native American writers as Silko, Momaday,Joy Harjo, Vizenor, and Linda Hogan in a chapter from her 1991essay collection, When the Moon Waxes Red. As we argue, nonetheless, for the recognition missing from such texts and, concomitantly, a place for the margin on the literary and academic stage, we must be wary of what Rey Chow has called the language of victimization and "self-subalternisation," which, Chow points out, "has become the assured means to authority and power" in the metropolis, a phenomenon Leela Gandhi refers to succinctly as the "professionalisationof the margin" (Gandhi 128) and Vizenor calls "aesthetic vict.unryU(FugitivePoses 12).And we need to examine carefully those Native American texts that do make it somehow from the margin to if not the center at least an orbital relationship with the homogenizing gravity of that center. Citing her own frustrating experience in a white-male-dominated academic conference as an example, Gayatri Spivak warns that "The putative center welcomes selective inhabitants of the margin in order to better exclude the margin." Spivak-a "real" Indian in America--quotes Adrieme Richf who says, "This is the meaning of female tokenism: that power withheld from the vast majority of women is offered to the few, so that it may appear that any truly qualified woman can gain access to leadership, recognition, and reward" (Spivak, In Other Worlds 107).

In mentioning postcolonial theory and Native American literature in the same breath, we should also keep carefully in mind the fact that America does not participate in what is sometimes termed the "colonial aftermath" or postcolonial condition. There is no need in the U.S. for what has been called the "therapeutic retrieval of the colonial past" in postcolonial societies (Gandhi5). In The Wretched ofthe Earth, Fanon wrote, "Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions" (313). Regardless of whether we share Fanonfs harsh critique of the U.S., I think it is crucial for us to remember that the American Revolution was not truly a war to throw off the yoke of colonization as is popularly imagined, but rather a family squabble among the colonizers to determine who would be in charge of the colonization of North America, who would control the land and the lives of the indigenous inhabitants. America never became postcolonial. The indigenousinhabitantsof North America can stand anywhere on the continent and look in every direction at a home usurped and colonized by strangers who, from the very beginning, laid claim not merely to the land and resources but to the very definition of the natives. While it may be true figuratively as Fanon writes, that "it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence" (The Wretched 4 the Earth 36), it is even more true, as Vizenor has argued, that the "Indian" is a colonial invention, a hyperreal construction. "The indians," Vizenor writes, "are the romantic absence of natives. . . . The indian is a simulation and loan word of dominance. . . . The indian is . . .the other in a vast mirror" (Fugitive Poses 14/35/37), In imagining the Indian, America imagines itself, and I know of no text that more brilliantly and efficientlyilluminates America's self-imagining than Walt Whitman's poem, "Facing West from California's Shores." Whitrnan speaks in his poem as and for America, and since it is a brief poem, it is worth quoting in its entirety:

AS IF AN INDIAN WERE REALLY AN INDIAN

2 75

Facing west from California's shores, Inquiring,tireless, seeking what is yet unf ound, I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar, Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled; For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere, From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero, From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands, Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wonder'd, Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous, (But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)

In her introduction to postcolonial theory, drawing upon Heidegger, Gandhi writes that "the all-knowing and self-sufficient Cartesian subject violently negates material and historical alterity/Otherness in its narcissistic desire to always see the world in its own self-image" (39). In tlus extraordinarypoem, Whitman articulates Euramerica's narcissistic desire not merely to negate indigenous Othemess and possess the American continent, but to go far beyond North America to what is implicitly "my" sea, "my" Hindustan, "my" Kashmere, "my" Asia, and so on. In her extraordinarily thorough "Translator's Preface" to Derrida's Of Grammatology, Spivak reminds us of Nietzsche's famous "will to power" and his explanation that "the so-called drive for knowledge can be traced back to a drive to appropriate and conquer" (Of Grammatology xxii). The imperial, "inquiring" American of Whitman calls to mind not only this Nietzschean will to power but also Spivak's point that "the desire to explain might be a symptom of the desire to have a self that can control knowledge and world that can be knownf' and that "the possibility of explanation carried the presupposition of an explainable (even if not fully) universe and an explaining (even if imperfectly) subject. These presuppositions assure our being. Explaining, we exclude the possibility of the heterogeneous."

Spivak concludes that "every explanation must secure and assure a certain kind of being-in-the-world, which might as well be called our politics" (In Other Worlds 104-6). The Euramerican "child of Whitman's remarkable poem claims possession of the womb of humanity in a great universalizing narcissism that subsumes everything in its tireless, inquiring quest after its own image, thereby excludingheterogeneityfrom the very womb, and it is pleased and joyous about the whole endeavor. Gandhi writes that "in order for Europe to emerge as the site of civilisational plenitude, the colonised world had to be emptied of meaning" (15).Whitman brilliantly comprehends this grand gesture in the Americas, and in his final question he even more brilliantly registers the ultimate, haunting emptiness the colonizing consciousness faces at last once it is forced to confront a world emptied of meaning outside of itself. Whitman's question-"(But where is what I started for so long ago? / And why is it yet unfound?)"-resonates not merely through the heart of America's own metanarrative, leaving the Jay Gatsbys of America alone and painfully perplexed, but through the rest of the world marked by European narcissism and expansion. In Whitman's poem America, having completed a stunningly deadly, self-determinedly innocent waltz across the bodies and cultures of Native inhabitants, seeks to claim not just the territory of the world but also the womb of humanity, seeding its own consciousness alone within that embryonic place of origin. This self-willed,brutal child looks to the "house of maternity" beyond "Hindustan," "Kaslunere," and all of Asia to legitimize its claim to primacy and thus legitimacy as the inheritor of all. The large stride of Whitman's American cluld moves across and through hundreds of indigenous cultures.They are the Others who must be both subsumed and erased in a strange dance of repulsion and desire that has given rise to both one of the longest sustained histories of genocide and ethnocide in the world as well as a fascinating drama in which the colonizer attempts to empty out and reoccupy not merely the geographical terrain but the constructed

AS IF AN INDIAN WERE REALLY AN INDIAN

277

space of the indigenous other. And if we doubt the place of the imagined Indian in America's imperial self-construction, we can turn to Scribner's Concise Dictionary of American History, which explains: "The experiences of the Indian agencies with people of a race, color, and culture wholly unlike our own have been of great value to United States officials dealing with similar peoples throughout the world" (Andrews 463). Fanon has written, "Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him." He adds, "In its immediacy, consciousnessof self is simple being-for-itself. In order to win the certainty of oneself, the incorporation of the concept of recogrution is essential" (Black Skin, White Masks 216,217). European America holds a mirror and a mask up to the Native American. The tricky mirror is that Other presence that reflects the Euramerican consciousness back at itself, but the side of the mirror turned toward the Native is transparent, letting the Native see not his or her own reflection but the face of the Euramerican beyond the mirror. For the dominant culture, the Euramerican controlling this surveillance, the reflection provides merely a self-recognition that results in a kind of being-for-itself and, ultimately, as Fanon suggests, an utter absence of certainty of self. The Native, in turn, finds no reflection directed back from the center, no recognition of "being" from that direction. The mask is one realized over centuries through Eurarnerica's construction of the "Indian" Other. In order to be recognized, and to thus have a voice that is heard by those in control of power, the Native must step into that mask and BE the Indian constructed by white America. Paradoxically, of course, like the mirror, the mask merely shows the Euramerican to himself, since the masked Indian arises out of the European consciousness, leaving the Native behind the mask unseen, unrecognized for him/herself. In short, to be seen and heard at all by the center-to not share the fate of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man-the Native must pose as the absolute fake, the fabricated "Indian," like the dancing puppets in Ellison's novel.

If a fear of inauthenticity is the burden of postmodernity, as has been suggested by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity among others, it is particularly the burden not only of the Euramerican seeking merely his self-reflection, but even more so that of the indigenous American in the face of this hyperreal "Indian." In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie's character Saleem Sinai says, "above all things, I fear absurdity." Quoting Rushdie's character and reflecting on Sinai's predicament, Gandlu writes that "the colonial aftermath is also fraught by anxieties and fears of failure which attend the need to satisfy the burden of expectation" (5). America not only contains no "colonial aftermath," it also places no burden of expected achievement on the American Indian. On the contrary, for Native Americans the only burden of expectation is that he or she put on the constructed mask provided by the colonizer, and the mask is not merely a mirror but more crucially a static death mask, fashioned beforehand, to which the living person is expected to conform. He or she who steps behind the mask becomes the Vanishing American, a savage/noble, mystical, pitiable, romantic fabrication of the Euramerican psyche fated to play out the epic role defined by Mikhail Bakhtin: "The epic and tragic hero," Bakhtin writes, "is the hero who by his very nature must perish. . . . Outside his destiny the epic and tragic hero is nothing; he is, therefore, a function of the plot fate assigns him; he cannot become the hero of another destiny or another plot" (The Dialogic Imagination 36). While the "Indian" holds a special and crucial place within the American narrative, the Native who looks beyond his or her immediate community and culture for recognition finds primarily irrelevance and absurdity. Fanon declares that "the town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village . . .the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, not how. . . .The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light" (The Wretched of the Earth 39). Could this not be a description of Pine Ridge, South

AS IF AN INDIAN WERE REALLY AN INDIAN

219

Dakota, today a hungry reservation town and the poorest county in America, home to the very Plains Indians so celebrated in America's fantastic construction of Indianness, the aestheticized subjects of such romantic and insidious films as Dances With Wolves? Fanon writes: "For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, digruty" (The Wretched of the Earth 44). Above all, Native Americans have been deprived of land, and of the dignity that derives from the profound and enduring relationship with homeland. To understand this contemporary colonialism as it affects Native Americans, we need to recognize what Gandhi, a "real Indian" writer and theorist, has called the "relationship of reciprocal antagonism and desire between coloniser and colonised." Gandhi suggests that "the battle lines between native and invader are replicated within native and invader" (4, 11-12). America's desire to control knowledge, to exclude the heterogeneous, and to assure a particular kind of being-in-the-world depends upon a ~~ space, and total appropriation and internalizationof t h colonized to achieve that end, America must make the heterogeneous Native somehow assimilable and concomitantly erasable. What better way to achieve that end than to invent the Indian as an Other that springs whole-formed from the Euramerican psyche? In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon says simply that "what is often called the black soul is the white man's artdact" (14).It can be argued, and has been argued effectively by such Native American writers as Gerald Vizenor and Philip Deloria, that what is called the Indian is the white man's invention and artifact. In his book Playing Indian, Deloria documents exhaustively and persuasively America's obsession with first constructing the Indian as Other and then inhabiting that constructed Indianness as fully as possible. Deloria describes marvelous "Indianation" ceremonies in which white Americans induct one another into Indianness. In one such ceremony a "spirit" voice intones, "The red men are my children. Long ago I saw in the future their destruction, and I was very sad."

According to Deloria, the "spirit tells initiates that the only way to placate the mournful Indian shades is to preserve their memory and customs. The society's sachem then replies that the membership will accept the 'delightful task.' The ceremony concludes by offering the initiate complete redemption and a new life through mystic rebirth as an Indian child. 'Spirit,' prays the sachem, 'receive us as your children. Let us fill too the place of those who are gone"' (78). Deloria comments: "Like all these boundary-crossing movements, however, Indianized quests for authenticity rested upon a contradictory foundation. In order to be authentic, Indians had to be located outside modem American societal boundaries. Because they were outside those boundaries, however, it became more difficult to get at them, to lay claim to the characteristics Indians had come to represent" (115).To extend Deloria's observation, I would also suggest that the artifactual "Indian," unlike the indigenous Native, could be easily gotten at because he or she was a pure product of America. Deloria also examines Natives who step into the Euramerican-constructed mask to play "cultural politics for social and political ends," actual indigenous Native Americans who "found themselves acting Indian, mimicking white mimicking~ of Indianness" (189). "If being a survivor of the pure, primitive old days meant authenticity, and if that in turn meant cultural power that might be translated to social ends, it made sense for a Seneca man to put on a Plains headdress, white America's marker of that archaic brand of authority" (189). In the midst of such extraordinary torsions, where is the Native writer to locate her or himself, and how is that writer to find or have a voice in a world articulated through another language or knowledge system?Raja Rao described the challenge faced by the indigenous artist who writes in a colonizer's language by saying, "One has to convey in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own" (Gandhi 150).Rao also said, "We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians" (Gandhi 151). Native Americans, with few exceptions, such as Navajo writers like Luci Tapahonso and Rex Lee Jim who write in

AS IF AN INDIAN WERE REALLY AN INDIAN

22 1

both Navajo and English, do not have the option of writing and publishing in an indigenous language, and even more than those of whom Rao speaks, Native authors surely cannot "write only as Indians." After five hundred years of war, of colonial infantilization and linguistic erasure, cultural denigration, and more, how and where does the Native writer discover a voice that can be heard at the metropolitan center? Bhabha, borrowing from V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men, writes of "colonial mimicry" which, he declares, "conceals no presence or identity behind its mask" (The Location of Culture 86). Gandhi labels such mimicry the "sly weapon of anti-colonial civility, an ambivalent mixture of deference and disobedience," which "inaugurates the process of anti-colonialself-differentiationthrough the logic of inappropriate appropriation" (149-50). In glossing Bhabha's formulation, Gandhi argues that "the most radical anti-colonial writers are 'mimic men"' and that "the paradigmatic moment of anticolonialcounter-textualityis seen to begin with the first indecorous mixing of Western genres with local content" (150).Gandhi's description of such countertextual mimicry would seem to apply well to such a work as Cherokee writer John Rollin Ridge's 1854 novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, in which Ridge appropriates the genre of westem romance to tell a deeply encoded story of colonial oppression and brutality. Similarly the native Okanagon writer Mourning Dove performed a brilliant and clearly subversive act of appropriation in her 1927 novel, Cogewea, the Hay-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range, a novel that mimics the classic western romance with indigenous mixedbloods in the roles always reserved for European American cowboys. But neither Ridge nor Mourning Dove found acceptance in the centers that contro'l textual production in America. Ridge, grandson of traditional Cherokee leader Major Ridge and founding editor of the Sacramento Bee newspaper in California, promptly vanished from the landscape of American literature to be rediscovered a century later in a kind of ethnographical salvage operation. Mourning Dove

found it took not only collaboration with a white editor, but a dozen years and money earned from her labor in apple orchards and hops fields to get Cogewea published and then forgotten for half a century until its discovery by Native American scholars and feminist critics. Acceptance and recognition by the metropolitan center would not come for a Native American writer until 1969, when the Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday won a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, House Made of Dawn. According to a member of the Pulitzer jury an award to the author of this novel "might be considered as a recognition of the arrival on the American literary scene of a matured, sophisticated literary artist from the original Americans" (Schubnell93). I want to focus briefly upon Momaday's historic accomplishment. And in doing so, while keeping in mind that we are discussing a "colonial" rather than "postcolonial" text, it may be helpful here to borrow from the critic Timothy Brennan, who argues that the "privileged postcolonial text is typically accessible and responsive to the aesthetic and political taste of liberal metropolitan readers. The principal pleasures of this cosmopolitan text accrue from its managed exoticism. It is both 'inside' and 'outside' the West." Such texts provide a "familiar strangeness, a trauma by inches" (quoted in Gandhi 162). Bhabha declares that "the desire to emerge as 'authentic' through mimicry-through a process of writing and repetition-is the final irony of partial representation" (88). How does a colonial or postcolonial author-a collective whom I have earlier identified as "migrant" or diasporic in the postcolonial sense-achieve a text so accessible and responsive to metropolitan readers? Aijaz Ahmad suggests that "among the migrants themselves, only the privileged can live a life of constant mobility and surplus pleasure, between Whitman and Warhol as it were. Most migrants tend to be poor and experience displacement not as cultural plenitude but as torment. . . .Postcolonialityis also, like most things, a matter of class" (Gandhi 164).It is not difficult to extrapolate from Ahmad's statement the fact that most Native Americans live lives fashioned by generations of displacement

AS IF AN INDIAN WERE REALLY AN INDIAN

223

with resulting impoverishment, suffering, and silence. While life for urban Native Americans can be difficult, the poorest and most desperate places in America are Native American reservations, populated by indigenous people who commonly live with as much as 85 percent unemployment, deplorable health care and even worse education, horrifying rates of alcohol and drug addiction, an epidemic of fetal alcohol syndrome, and the highest suicide rates and lowest life expectancy of any ethnic group in the nation-all the effects of profoundly institutionalized racism. It is apparently delightful to caricature Native Americans as sports mascots and in movies, but as long as the real people are hidden from sight on rural lands reserved for their containment, it isn't necessary for the dominant culture even to contemplate the Natives' quality of life. And before everyone protests, let me quote Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote acutely in his preface to Fanon's The Wretched afthe Earth, "Our worthiest souls contain racial prejudice" (21). How else could our worthiest souls live with Washington Redskins, Cleveland Indians, Atlanta Braves, Chief Wahoo, the Tomahawk Chop, and so on, all of which are merely the slightest indices of the far more profound currents that impoverish Native Americans in incalculable ways? Would we live so comfortably today with the New Jersey Jews, Newark Negroes, Cleveland Chicanos, Houston Honkies, Atlanta Asians, and so on? Entering the twenty-first century, would the city of Washington cheer a football team whose mascot scampered around at half time in blackface or wearing a yarmulke and carrying a menorah? Again, Bhabha adds an interestingnote when he writes that "the discriminatory identities constructed across traditional cultural norms and classifications, the Simian Black, the Lying Asiatic-all these are metonymies of presence. They are strategies of desire" (90). America has in large part at least recognized the impropriety of such racial stereotypes as those Bhabha describes-the "Simian Black" and "lying" or "inscrutable" Asian-even if it has perhaps not relinquished them entirely. However, the same operative strategy of desire that for a very long time governed representation of

224

REFRACTIONS

other minority cultures clearly still controls Euramerican discourse representing the Native American Indian. Given the uncomfortable realities of most contemporary Native American lives, as we look around us in academia, I think it is perhaps time to recognize that what we are calling Native American literature is represented largely if not exclusively by the sorts of privileged texts Brennan describes and is created by those migrant or diasporic Natives who live lives of relatively privileged mobility and surplus pleasure. As a group, published Native American authors have an impressively high rate of education, most possessing not merely a university degree but at least some graduate work if not an advanced degree. We may go back to our families and communities periodically or regularly, we may-like N. Scott Momaday-even be initiated into a traditional society within our tribal culture, but we are inescapably both institutionally privileged by access to Euramerican education and distinctly migrant in the sense that we possess a mobility denied to our less privileged relations. The question remains: what must the colonial, or postcolonial, writer-in this case specifically the indigenous Native American, mixedlood, or fullblood-do to be allowed a voice like Shakespeare's cursing Caliban?Let us consider the Pulitzer Prize juror's words regarding Momaday's award for House Made of Dawn.What might such a statement as "the arrival on the American literary scene of a matured, sophisticated literary artist from the original Americans" possibly mean? I would suggest, as I have elsewhere, that these words indicate that an aboriginal writer has finally learned to write like the colonial center that determines legitimate discourse. Momaday so successfully mimicked the aesthetics of the center that he was allowed access. This-the evolution of the colonial subject to something like the level of the colonial masterfulfills the idealized, utopian colonial vision of reconstructing the colonial subject to reflect the colonizing gaze. To be heard at the center-to achieve both authenticity and recognition within the imperial gaze that controls dissemination of discoursethe Native must step into the mask and into Whitman's circle; and the more

AS IF AN INDIAN WERE REALLY AN INDIAN

225

fully we enter that empowering circle, the more successfulwe may be. The most prosperous of such texts are both accessible to the aesthetic and political tastes of the metropolitan center and, perhaps more significantly, present to such readers a carefully managed exoticism that is entertaining but not discomfiting to the nonNative reader. Elsewhere I have called the most extreme versions of this publishing phenomenon "literary tourism." And, as I have also suggested in my book Mixedblood Messages, certainly Momaday's Pulitzer Prize testifies to a Native American author's successful entry into that privileged circle. House Made of Dawn, with its visible and pervasive indebtedness to classic modernist texts, is clearly "accessible and responsive to the aesthetic and political taste of liberal metropolitan readers." Just as clearly, Momadayfs novel offers what Brennan calls a "managed exoticism." The Pueblo world of the protagonist, with its "familiar strangeness" and "trauma by inches," is never threatening or very discomfiting to its Euramerican readership, while it provides a convincing and colorful tour of Indian country, including titillating glimpses of Native ceremony and even witchcraft. Exoticism packaged in familiar and therefore accessible formulas, carefully managed so as to admit the metropolitan reader while never implying that the painful difficulties illuminated within the text are the responsibility of that reader--clearly House Made of Dawn is both "inside" and "outside" the West. To say all of the above is not to deny the aesthetic or artistic achievement or even the important political ramifications of Momaday's novel or many others that might be similarly described. House Made of Dawn is superbly subversive. Seen in this way, Momaday becomes one of the "mimic men," to borrow Naipul's term, who realize a genuinely appropriationist and subversive end by packaging a text in sufficient imperial wrappings to get it past the palace guards into the royal Pulitzer chambers. It is an irnpressive achievement, yet an achievement requiring extensive education of its author-all the way to a doctorate from Stanford Universitywithin the knowledge system of the metropolitan center as well as

careful crafting to conform to that center's expectations.A peripatetic citizen of the U.S. Native American diaspora, a modern "migrant" intellectual and artist, Momaday-like all the rest of us who find ourselves in somewhat similar if less celebrated circumstances-has not only entered the trajectory of Whitrnan's circular journey but has internalized that circle. Momaday's "strategic location" vis-a-vis the Pueblo world he wrote about in his first novel, like the strategic location of most Native American writers, is surpassingly complex, shifting, hybridized, interstitial, and unstable. Those of us working in the field of what we call Native American literature can and undoubtedly will chafe at the ignorance and erasure of Native American voices within the metropolitan center and within what at times appears to be the loyal opposition to that center called postcolonial theory. And we can and undoubtedly will continue to try to make our voices heard-to "give voice to the silent," as a recent academic conference termed the endeavor. However, s~lchnegotiations are never simple or free of cost. It seems that a necessary if difficult, lesson for all of us may well be that in giving voice to the silent we unavoidably give voice to the forces that conspire to effect that silence. Finally, as we approach nearer to literate Euramerica, the circle within us may be almost circled, and like Whitman's America, we may be left asking, "But where is what I started for so long ago?"

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Staging indians Native Sovenance and Survivance in Gerald Vizenor's "Ishi and the Wood Ducks"

"Ishi was never his real name." So begins Gerald Vizenor's "Ishi Obscura," in the anishinaabe author's Manifest Manners (1994). An essay on the last "wild man" of America captured in a museum and photographs, "Ishi Obscura" interrogatesthe invention of Ishi, the reputed last of the Yahi people in California, as museum artifact and photographic "other." In "Ishi and the Wood Ducks," Vizenor's four-act play, the author invites the Yahi survivor into the courtroom of contemporary "indianness" and, through Ishi, deconstructs the deadly desire of Euramerica for the simulated Indian. "The indian," Vizenor writes in Fugitive Poses, "is a misnomer, a simulation with no referent and with the absence of natives; indians are the other, the names of sacrifice and victimry" (2n.l Ishi, the actual man who walked out of California's Sierra Nevada range to die in a museum, offers tragic visionaries the quintessential material for "sacrifice and victimry," what Vizenor also terms "the metaphor of the native at the littoral" and a history of "aesthetic sacrifice" (Fugitive Poses 27). However, Vizenor 'S aim in giving the "last man of the stone age" a storyteller's voice in his play is to contradict the entropic story of the American "indian." Vizenor has had a long and intense fascination with Ishi, the latest fruit of which is "Ishi and the Wood Ducks," a work that deploys compassion, humor, and the ironies of trickster to dissect

Euramerica's invention of Indians at the same time that it pays homage to the man called Ishi. At the heart of the play's deconstruction of Ishi as the invented "other" is what Vizenor defines as "trickster hermeneutics": "the interpretation of simulations in the literature of survivance, the ironies of descent and racialism, transmutation, third gender, and themes of transformation in oral tribal stories and written narratives" (Manifest Manners 15).As a "postindian" survivor, Vizenor's Ishi steps outside the frame of the nostalgic colonial camera, defies the melancholy and terrninal definition called "Indian," and appears on stage as a good-humored signifier of indeterminate human consciousness, a counteragent against the "hyperreal simulation and . . . ironic enactment of a native presence by an absence in a master narrative" (Fugitive Poses 27). In the end, despite Euramerica's desperate attempts to fix Ishi as a phenomenon called a "primitive Indian," Vizenor makes it clear that Ishi exists forever in the moment of his stories, reinventing himself within the oral tradition with each utterance. While the first line in Vizenor's opening "Historical Introduction" to "Ishi and the Wood Ducks" quotes a descriptionof the newly discovered Ishi as "a pathetic figure crouched upon the floor," Ishi's first words in the play are "Have you ever heard the wood duck stories," a telling contradiction. Within his stories Ishi embodies what Vizenor terms "survivance" and "sovenance": "The native stories of survivance are successive and natural estates; survivance is an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry. . . . Native sovenance is that sense of reason in native stories . . . not the romance of an aesthetic absence or victimry" (Fugitive Poses 15). "Ishi and the Wood Ducks" provides Vizenor with yet another opportunity to dissect the pathological impulse that has driven Euramerica for five centuries to discover an aboriginal something commensurate with its own needs, to call that something "Indian," and to obscure the Native in the process. Imagining the Indian as a natural resource to be mined for some kind of catalyst that will make the "American" alloy so much the stronger, the Euramerican metanarrative peels away the man or

STAGING INDIANS

229

woman to find the Indian. Vizenor's art strips the artrfactualveneer of Indianness to find the Native humanity at the center, to liberate the original American from the deadening servitude of Indianness. In the writings of Gerald Vizenor, as his readers know well, "real" life permeates fiction and fiction warps real events and recognizable contemporary and lustorical figures into trickster's endless and endlessly self-reflexive tropes. Those who know Vizenor's work will also be familiar with the utopian impulse that drives often harsh satires, the same utopian desires that lie at the paradoxical heart of trickster stories. The goal is to illuminate hypocrisies and false positions, to challenge all accepted mores or fixed values, to shock and disturb us and cause us to reexamine and readjust moment-by-moment our conceptions of and relationships with both self and environment.The purpose of "holotropic" trickster: with his/her indeterminable shape-shifting, contradictions, and assaults upon our rules and values, is to make the world better. "Ishi and the Wood Ducks" has its inception in Vizenor's "real life" challenge to the University of California, a challenge arising out of his desire to readjust history, force the university and the rest of society to recognize its false positions and culpability, and do honor to an exceptional man we erroneously call Ishi. In the fall of 1985, as a visiting professor in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Gerald Vizenor formally proposed that the north part of the campus's Dwinelle Hall (which housed and still houses the offices of Native American Studies)be renamed Ishi Hall. The student senate at Berkeley voted unanimously to support Vizenor's proposal, praising in their bill Ishi's "intellectual contributions to the University of California in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, and Native American studies."3 When an administrator in the university's splendidly titled Space Assignment and Capital Improvements Group demurred and offered instead to consider narning a proposed addition to Kroeber Hall afterIshi, Vizenor said no: "We're not about to yield to anthropology and a new intellectual colonialism,'' he declared? For seven years-that powerful tribal number-the matter rested there.

Who doesn't know the name of Ishi? "He was the last of his tribe," Mary Ashe Miller, a reporter for the San Francisco Call, wrote on September 6,1911, before going on to declare that "[tlhe man is as aboriginal in his mode of life as though he inhabited the heart of an African jungle; all of his methods are those of primitive peoples" (ManifestManners 128).Miller, suffering pangs of ethnostalgic despair over a vanishing, generic, and thus entirely invented savagery obviously saw through Ishi the man to the aesthetic of absence Vizenor describes. Discovered weak and starving in a slaughterhouse in northern California in August 1911, the prototypical "prirnitive" and ultimate Yahi was immediately placed in jail by the county sheriff because "no one around town could understand his speech or he theirs" (Manifest Manners 131). Not the first or last Native to be imprisoned for possessing lirninal linguistic identity, the man who would be called Ishi was quickly transferred to the proprietorship of the U.C. Berkeley Museum of Anthropology and the care of noted anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, as Theodora Kroeber explained with undoubtedly unconscious irony: "Within a few days the Department of Indian Affairs authorized the sheriff to release the wild man to the custody of Kroeber and the museum staff" (ManifestManners 131).In a statement that doubles delightfully back upon itself trickster-fashion (the "wild" man "released into "custody"), Kroeber's words make it clear that the generic "Indian" was immediately and apparently unselfconsciously recognized as property of a federal agency (the BIA), which could "authorize" his transfer, as property, to the "custody" of another institution. Nowhere in this statement is there room for the possibility of the indigenous person's own individual agency; Ishi was, like all "Indians," a "bankable simulation" (ManifestManners 11). The last known survivor of the Yahis, a division of the Yana Tribe of California, the Native person called Ishi was the perfect Indian for colonial Euramerica, the end result of five hundred years of attempts to create something called "Indian." With his family and entire tribe slaughtered, starved, and decimated by disease like countless thousands of the original inhabitants of California,

STAGING INDIANS

23 7

he became the quintessential last VanishingAmerican, a romantic, artifactual savage who represented neither threat nor obstacle but instead a benign natural resource to be mined for what white America could learn about itself. And when, after living for five years in the anthropology museum at Berkeley, he did perish as scripted, on March 25,1916, of tuberculosis contracted from his white captors and custodians, the Chico Record, a little newspaper in a minuscule northern California town, saw through the staged drama with cynical insight: Ishi, the man primeval, is dead. . . . He furnished amusement and study to the savants at the University of California for a number of years . . . but we do not believe he was the marvel that the professors would have the public believe. He was just a starved-out Indian from the wilds of Deer Creek who, by hiding in its fastnesses, was able to long escape the white man's pursuit. And the white man with his food and clothing and shelter finally killed the Indian just as effectually as he would have killed him with a rifle. ("Ishi and the Wood Ducks" 3) Perhaps most exceptional in this newspaper account is the writer's recognition that the "white man's pursuit" of the Indian is inexorable. Central to the extensive body of Vizenor's writing is his recognition that the white man's pursuit of the Indian is indeed unending, that it represents an unrelenting desire to capture and inhabit the heart of the Native just as surely as Euramerica has appropriated and occupied the Native landscape. Key to this pursuit is language, the struggle for definition and dominance through authoritative discourse. The University of California must have thought, with considerable relief, that the irritating matter of Ishi Hall had ended when Visiting Professor Gerald Vizenor left the campus to teach elsewhere. However, in January 1992, having given up an endowed chair at the University of Oklahoma to return to Berkeley as a senior professor, Vizenor raised the banner of Ishi's cause once more, writing to Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien to say: "This is a

proposal to change the name of the north part of Dwinelle Hall to Ishi Hall in honor of the first Native American Indian who served with distinction the University of California." This time, a full seven years after his first proposal had vanished into the bowels of a university committee, Vizenor cleverly made sure that his proposal coincided with the hullabaloo surrounding the quincentenary of Columbus's "discovery" of America. "This is the right moment," he explained to the chancellor, "the quincentenary is time to honor this tribal man who served with honor and good humor the academic interests of the University of Calif~rnia."~ Vizenor's proposal was forwarded to a committee once again. Two months later, in March, after hearing nothing, he wrote politely to the chancellor: "I understand the administrative burdens at this time, even so, my proposal is urgent because it is tied to an unmistakable historical moment." Three months later, in June 1992, he wrote to the chancellor yet again, this time a bit more heatedly: Consider the sense of resentment and anger that you might feel if your reasonable initiatives to honor a tribal name and emend institutional racism were consigned to the mundane commerce of a campus space subcommittee. Sixty-eight years ago today on ~ u n 2,1924, e Native American Indians became citizens for the first time of the United States. Indeed, these historical ironies, and the national sufferanceof the quincentenary,could be much too acrimonious to resume; the very institutions and the foundational wealth of this state are based on stolen land and the murder of tribal people.

On August 31,1992, the Director of the Space Management and Capital Programs Committee on campus circulated a memo informing everyone that "The Naming of Buildings Subcommittee did not approve naming a wing of Dwinelle after Ishi. It suggested instead that the central courtyard of Dwinelle Hall be named Ishi Court." On May 7, 1993-almost eight years after Vizenor's initial proposal-Ishi Court was officially dedicated on the Berkeley

STAGING INDIANS

233

campus. In his dedication address, Vizenor said, "There is a wretched silence in the histories of this state and nation: the silence of tribal names. The landscapes are overburdened with untrue discoveries. There are no honorable shadows in the names of dominance. The shadows of tribal names and stories persist, and the shadows are our natural survivance." He concluded his speech by declaring, "Ishi Court, you must remember, is the everlasting center of Almost Ishi Hall." "Ishi was never his real name," Vizenor writes in "Ishi Obscwa." "Ishi is a simulation, the absence of his tribal names. . . . Ishi the obscura is discovered with a bare chest in photographs; the tribal man named in that simulation stared over the camera, into the distance" (ManifestManners 126).AYahi word meaning "one of the people," the name Ishi masked the Native survivor's sacred name, which he never told to anyone. Ishi became the simulation. "The notion of the aboriginal and the primitive combined both racialism and postrnodern speciesism," Vizenor writes in "Ishi Obscwa," "a linear consideration that was based on the absence of monotheism, material evidence of civilization, institutional violence, and written words more than on the presence of imagination, oral stories, the hurnor in trickster stories, and the observationof actual behavior and experience'' (ManifestManners 128). For Euramerica, the Indian is defined by absence, not presence. The determination is to know the "other" as not-European and thus to delineate the European, while paradoxically to find and extract some aboriginal distillation that, like the single drop of black in the white paint of Ralph Ellison's InvisibleMan, will somehow make white America greater. The goal is, as Vizenor stresses, never to know the "other." "The word Indian," Vizenor writes, "is a colonial enactment, not a loan word, and the dominance is sustained by the simulation that has superseded the real tribal names. The Indian was an occidental invention that became a bankable simulation; the word has no referent in tribal languages or cultures. The postindian is the absence of the invention, and the end of representation in literature; the closure of that evasive melancholy of

dominance. Manifest manners are the simulations of bourgeois decadence and melancholy" (Manifst Manners 11). Finally once the Native is fully defined as the "absent other" the aboriginal space has been figuratively (and, of course, often quite literally through concerted programs of genocide) emptied so that it may be reoccupied by the colonizer, realizing the invader's wistful dream of achieving an "original" relationship with the invaded space. For indigenous Americans, the paradox that arises from the ironies of invention is that it seems the Native person must pose as the absent other-the indiun, as Vizenor writes-in order to be seen or heard, must actually become the simulation at the border. Simply put, the central paradox of Indian identity is that Indians must pose as simulations in order to be seen as "real." Vizenor quotes Umberto Eco on this point: "This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake." Vizenor adds that "Indians, in this sense, must be the simulationsof the 'absolute fakes' in the ruins of repre sentation, or the victims in literary annihilation" (ManifestManners 9). "Ishi," he writes, "has become one of the most discoverable tribal names in the world; even so, he has seldom been heard as a real person" (137).In "Ishi and the Wood Ducks," the patient Yahi survivor becomes the "postindian," one of the original people of America freed from the humorless "melancholy of dominance" that requires the invented Indian. Vizenor's play opens with an introduction that sketches the history of Ishi's discovery in northern California and N IS transfer from jail to museum. The introduction quotes a number of statements by those who surrounded Ishi in the museum, including Kroeber's declaration that Ishi "has perceptive powers far keener than those of highly educated white men. He reasons well, grasps an idea quickly has a keen sense of humor, is gentle, thoughtful, and courteous and has a higher type of mentality than most Indians." To Kroeber's dubious praise,Vizenor adds the observation by Thomas Waterman, the museum's linguist, that "this wild

STAGING INDIANS

235

man has a better head on him than a good many college men." Following the introduction, a prologue opens with the characters of Ishi and an "old woman" named Boots Story both waiting on a bench outside a federal courthouse, Ishi dressed in "an oversized suit and tie" and carrying a leather briefcase. Boots, a Gypsy informs Ishi that she must appear in federal court in order to get a "real name." Otherwise she will be deported, or sent "home." The cast is drawn from the same ten characters in each of the play's four acts, but, with the exception of Ishi himself and his choral accomplice Boots, the roles and identities of the characters change in each act, a strategy the author explains: "The actors are the same but the names of characters are repeated in the prologue and four acts of the play. The sense of time, manifest manners, and historical contradictions are redoubled and enhanced by the mutations of identities in the same characters." As noted above, Ishi's first words in the prologue, addressed to Boots, are "Have you ever heard the wood duck stories?" A few lines later he says, "Ishi is my museum name, not my real name." Turning to the audience, he explains with nice irony "Kroeber was an anthropologistand got me out of jail to live in a museum (pause), he was one of my very first friends." He adds: "Kroeber named me (pause), in my own language, he named me the last man of the stone age." This prologue foregrounds the archival contradictions and values of names, museums, and stories: "How about a museum of stories?" Ishi asks Boots, invoking "that trace of creation and natural reason in native stories." When Boots says, "Who can remember stories anyrnore?" Ishi replies, "That's why you need your own museum." "Names without stories are the end," Ishi says with finality. "Ishi and the Wood Ducks" discovers the dead end of the name "Indian," which arises out of a static, monologic story of cultural dominance (and ethnocide) central to the Eurarnerican metanarrative, but which has no story at all within the hundreds of cultures it supposedly comprehends, or as Vizenor explains above, "has no referent in tribal languages or cultures."

The first act of the play takes place in the Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, where Ishi is first seen flaking arrowheads (including one out of a piece of broken glass) in front of a "wickiup." Boots Story, silenced on stage, has mutated into a custodial worker who pushes her duster around the room and offers silent facial responses to the words and events of the act. The act centers on a visit to Ishi by characters associated with the museum and attempts by Ashe Miller, the newspaper reporter, to interview Ishi while Prince Chamber, a photographer accompanying her, tries unsuccessfully to take Ishi's photograph. In the opening lines of the act, Saxton Pope, "the medical doctor," praises Ishi as a natural healer and asks him to "show us your home in the mountains" and to teach Pope's son "how to hunt and fish with a bow and arrow, and how to make arrowheads out of broken bottles." Ishi turns to the audience to say "The mountains are dangerous.'' When pressed by Pope, he explains that the danger comes from the "savages": the gold miners who "have no stories" and "no culture." Informed of the photographer's visit, Ishi says, "Pictures are never me," and "My stories are lost in pictures." Ishi's words here echo Vizenor's insistencein "Ishi Obscura" that "the miners were the real savages; they had no written language, no books, no manners . . .no stories in the blood. They were the agents of civilization," and "the gaze of those behind the camera haunts the unseen margins of time and scene in the photograph; the obscure presence of witnesses at the simulation of savagism could become the last epiphanies of a chemical civilization" (Manifest Manners 127). "Savages land in your pictures," Ishi tells the anthropologist Kroeber. (Roland Barthes wrote that "essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own" [57]). When Ashe Miller says, "Big Chiep [Ishi's nickname for Kroeber] said you come from a 'puny civilization' and that you are 'unspeakably ignorant' (pause). Do you know anything?" Ishi's response is "Too much pina." "Pina," we are quickly told, means "pain," an explanation that embarrasses Kroeber. Act one ends with the photographer's request that Ishi engage in what Vizenor has called

STAGING INDIANS

237

"cultural striptease": "Ishi, bare your chest, the light is good." Ishi, content to remain unseen and unheard as a "primitive" and refusing to simulate Euramerica's fake Indian, whispers to Kroeber, who explains (in an instance drawn from Ishi's "real life" in the museum): "Ishi say he not see any other people go without them, without clothes (pause), and he say he never take them off no more." Ishi repudiates aesthetic absence and victimry refuses to stop the clock. Obsessed with the way his mother is dressed in a photograph, Barthes declares that "clothing is perishable, it makes a second grave for the loved beingf' (64).Costumes are not perishable, however. Early ethnographic photographers clearly understood this when they carted generic "Indian" dress around for those Native subjects who might not possess such essential accoutrement~.~ Ishi perceptively refuses to costume himself in essential savagery for the camera. Act 2 is set in the Mount Olivet Cemetery columbarium, where Zero Larkin, a "native sculptor with a vision," has come seventy years after Ishi's death in order to receive inspiration from Ishi's ashes. He is accompanied by Ashe Miller, the reporter from act 1, and Prince Chamber, the photographer who asked Ishi to bare his chest in that act. Trope Browne, undoubtedly one of the enormous mixedblood Browne dynasty that populates Vizenor 'S 1988 work The Trickster of Liberty (in which Ishi graduates with Tune Browne from the University of California), serves as attendant at the columbariurn. When Zero asks Trope "Are you a brother?" Trope responds that his answer depends on "How much money you want." Observing and commenting upon the scene, unseen by the others, are Ishi and Boots Story. Act 2 targets both invented Indians and those who would pose as experts on such inventions. When Ishi denies to Boots that he was ever a shaman or that he made the pot in which his ashes are held-both of which "facts" are maintained by the manager of the cemetery, Angel Day-Boots says, "Angel lied then." Ishi replies, "Not really she's an expert on Indians. . . . Indians are inventions, so what's there to lie about?"

Zero Larkin, the posturing, scathingly satirized Native sculptor, intones, "Ishi is with me, our spirit is one in his sacred name," before adding, "I'm going to blast his sacred signature . . . at the bottom of my stone sculpture, my tribute to his power as an Indian." When asked if he's finished the sculpture, Zero says, "Not yet, but with the inspiration of his name it won't take long." Ashe Miller, the penetrating journalist from act 1, asks, "Zero does it make a difference to anyone that you are not from the same tribe as Ishi?" and Zero, the Vizenoresque "va~ionative,"~ replies, "We are both tribal artists, and that's our identity." Not aware of the fact that Ishi names not a person but a constructed museum artifact, Zero himself embraces his identity as generic invented Indian, what Vizenor called a "colonial enactment" in "Ishi Obscura." When he touches the false burial urn, Zero chants, "Ishi is with me, his spirit is coming through my fingers." "What does it feel like?" the reporter queries, to which Zero answers, "The greatest power of my life, the spirit of my people." After Ashe asks if Zero means that his "people" are indigenous northern Californians like Ishi's, the dialogue continues to the detriment of the "Native" sculptor: ZERO: We are one as tribal people. Zero trembles, and he smiles as the camera comes closer. Trope moves closer to be sure he does not drop the pot. ASHE: Which one? ANGEL: He means a universal tribal spirit. ASHE (ironically):That explains it. Act 2 ends with Boots chanting, "Zero, zero and the cemetery liars," and Ishi asking, "Do you think they could hear my duck stories?" The third act of "Ishi and the Wood Ducks" features a meeting of the Committee on Names and Spaces in Kroeber Hall at the University of California. We are told, "The faculty is seated at a conference table to consider a proposal to rename the building Ishi Hall." In this act Angel Day has mutated into a professor of anthropology, Trope Browne a history professor, Ashe Miller appropri-

STAGING INDIANS

239

ately a professor in mass communication, and Prince Chamber in visual arts. Professor Alfred Kroeber, the distinguished anthropologist, is present as sponsor of the proposal to rename his own hall in honor of Ishi. "Why would he want to change his own name?" Trope Browne asks just before Kroeber appears on stage. When questioned, Kroeber says simply "Ishi made my name," and adds, "Ishis name is not genuine." Angel Day says, "Several years ago, as you know, we received a proposal from an errant faculty member to change the name of Kroeber Hall to Big Chiep Hall (pause). Naturally and in honor of your distinction as an anthropologist, we chose not to discuss the proposal." Kroeber replies, "I supported that proposal." Kroeber goes on to explain that "The Big Chiep is one of his [Ishi's] name stories. . . . Ishi honored me with a nickname, in the same sense that we gave him his name (pause); the contradiction, of course, is that our name for him is romantic, whde his name for me is a story." Throughout this act, Ishi and Boots stand at the edge of the stage and comment upon the proceedings. "Kroeber said it," Boots tells Ishi, "you are his anthropologist." "Not a chance," Ishi replies, "he's the subject not the object." When Boots says, "Who are you then?" Ishi's answer is "The last object of their stone age." When the committee,just like the "real" committee that buried Vizenor's proposals for Ishi Hall in 1985 and 1992, decides that Kroeber's proposal is a "sad romantic visitation" and denies the request, Ishi and Boots-still invisible-begin to address the faculty members directly, with Ishi saying, "Doctor I s h Hearst proposes that no building on campus would bear the same name for more than two years at a tirne."s The buildings, Ishi suggests, "would be known by their nicknames and stories, and no building would hold even a nickname for more than two years." "Ishi and the Wood Ducks" concludes with act 4 set in the federal courtroom outside of which Ishi and Boots waited in the prologue. Ishi, it turns out, has been brought to court on charges of violating the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, the charge being

that "he sold objects as tribal made, and could not prove that he was in fact a member of a tribe or recognized by a reservation government." In this final act Kroeber is the presiding federal judge, Ashe Miller the prosecutor, Pope the defense attorney. Other characters from the first three acts are court functionaries or witnesses (and a kind of chorus), including Boots Story. The act opens with Ishi placing "several bows, arrows, arrowheads, and fire sticks on the defense table." Ishi, we learn, has been arrested at the Santa Fe Indian Market because "other artists complained that he was not a real Indian." Ishi's dilemma is twofold: on the one hand, like many contemporary Native Americans Ishi belongs to a tribe that is not federally recognized (in his case because his tribe has been ruled extinct, though a number of extant California tribes are not recognized today); at the same time, Ishi cannot be a real Indian because "the indiun is a simulation, the absence of natives; the indiun transposes the real, and the simulation of the real has no referent, memories, or native stories" (Fugztive Poses 15).Clearly other "real" Indian artists saw greater profit for themselves in barring Ishi from the lucrative native arts-and-crafts market and are exploiting the colonial definition of Indian identity to their advantage. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 decrees that it is "unlawful to offer or display for sale any good, with or without a Government trademark, in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian produced, an Indian product, or the product of a particular Indian or Indian tribe or Indian arts and crafts organization, resident witlun the United States." The Act stipulates that "[flor a first criminal offense, an individual is fined not more than $250,000 and/or jailed not more than 5 years; subsequent violations are not more than $1,000,000 and/or 15 year^."^ Clearly as Vizenor has pointed out, the "occidental invention" of Indianness has become a very lucrative "bankable simulation" in essentialist and ethnostalgic America. Were Judge Kroeber to find him guilty of criminal offense, Ishi would be in serious trouble indeed. Not only has Ish violated the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, he is also charged with purchasing a false certificate of

STAGING lNDlANS

24 1

Indianness, an enrollment form from the "Dedicednu Indians of California" based in Laguna Beach, a charge that brings great laughter from the courtroom. Judge Kroeber declares that "Ishi names a very remote tribe with no immediate evidence of his descent and that, clearly, is a burden under the provisions of the new law." In Ishi's defense Saxton Pope argues that "my client is more tribal than anyone in the country" despite the fact that Ishi makes arrowheads out of broken bottles. For support Pope points out the spurious (and romantically racist) evidence that Ishi has wide feet, "would rather not wear shoes," and has leather thongs in his ears, none of which counts for much in court. In desperation Pope then adds, "Ishi never heard of Christmas," but Ashe as prosecutor replies in Vizenoresquelanguage that "The absence is not a presence of character." Finally, Pope introduces Ishi's wood duck stories as the ultimate evidence of his client's tribal identity, arguing "oral stories are none other than a real character, the character of tribal remembrance, the character that heard and remembered the wood duck stories." As Ishi sings "Winotay, winotay, winotay," Pope begins the wood duck stories that (the actual) Ishi liked to tell in his museum home, stories that could take seven hours in the telling and be told only after dark. Clearly Judge Kroeber has a humanitarian and philosophical bent. k Kroeber is not the anthropologist who once labeled Ishi "unspeakably ignorant," but rather the man who, at the time of Ishi's death, wrote, "As to disposal of the body, I must ask you . . . to yield nothing at all under any circumstances. If there is any talk about the interests of science, say for me that science can go to hell. We propose to stand by our friends." This philosophical judge, who bears the name of Ishi's inventor, asks rhetorically, "What is criminal in the imagination of a tribal artist?" before adding, "Colonial inventions are criminal, not tribal survivance." A few lines later, the judge ponders, "Consumer fraud? Or is this a case of cultural romance?" to which the court clerk Prince Chambers replies, "Who knows the differencein Santa Fe?" When the prosecutor says, "The

government protects the true Indian," Kroeber responds with, "Then the Indian, not the buyer, must beware." Forced to make a ruling, Judge Kroeber finds that "clearly the performance of wood duck stories, no matter how great the audience response, does not establish tribal character or identity under the provisions of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990." He then turns directly to the audience to ask, "What would you do under the circumstances?" Act 4 and the play both end with Kroeber ruling that "Ishi is real and the law is not. Therefore, my decision is to declare that the accused is his own tribe. Ishi is his own sovereign tribal nation. . . . Ishi, the man so named, has established a tribal character in a museum and in his endless wood duck stories. . . . Ishi is an artist, he is our remembrance of justice, and that is his natural character." Ishi becomes "a native presence" in the play "not the romance of an aesthetic absence or victirnry" (Fugitive Poses 15). "Ishi and the Wood Ducks" manages in brief compass to suggest nearly all of the major issues found in Vizenor's significant body of published work. Among these are the colonial invention of Indianness; the "word wars" that characterize the five-hundredyear-old Euramerican program to fix the Indian within what, in Bearheart, Vizenor calls a "terminal creed"; the posturing of those "varionatives" who (like Zero Larkin) would pose within the dominant culture's constructed definition of universal Indianness; the "archival" erasure of the Native in photographs of the indian; and the "survivance" of the "postindian" within oral stories. In foregroundingthe issue of Ishi's undarumentable identity, Vizenor illustrates sharply his contention in Manifest Manners that "the Indian is the simulation of the absence, an unreal name; however, the misnomer has a curious sense of legal standing. Some of the definitions are ethnological, racial, literary, and juristic sanctions." Vizenor concludes this discussion of Indian identity in Manifest Manners with the observation, "Clearly the simulations of tribal names, the absence of a presence in a mere tribal misnomer, cannot be sustained by legislation or legal maneuvers" (14).

STAGING INDIANS

243

In Ishi's defense counsel's argument that "oral stories are none other than a real character, the character of tribal remembrance," Vizenor echoes his position in "Ishi Obscura": "The natural development of the oral tradition is not a written language. The notion, in the literature of dominance, that the oral advances to the written, is a colonial reduction of natural sound, heard stories, and the tease of shadows in tribal remembrance" (Manifest Manners 72). In "Ishi and the Wood Ducks," the written advances to the oral and the coconstructive audience-brought immediately onto the stage by both Ishi and Judge Kroeber-become the active jury challenged to deconstruct the indian to find the lonesome survivor who, in good humor, honored his sacred name and presented himself in a museum as "one of the people."

CHAPTER TWENTY

A Story of a Talk, M y Own Private India, or Dorris and Erdrich Remap Columbus

Way back in the twentieth century, during the quincentennial hoopla over Columbus's "discovery" of America, I was invited to be part of a panel discussion of Native American writing at the Postmodern American Literature Association annual conference, or PAL as we in the profession call it. The meeting was in San Francisco, the first city I ever saw as a teen not too far out of Mississippi and right off the chicken farm, and still my favorite city in the world after Rome, and maybe Paris. The San Francisco to which I had come with my high-school journalism class many years before for a conference of sorts in Elu's Basque Restaurant, above which very sophisticated and beautiful women, as I recall, leaned out of windows and beckoned futilely to us confused sixteen-year-old boys. The San Francisco where on the same trip I'd seen my first stage production, something called The Fantastiks that still haunts my mind with ethereal confusion and where I ended up backstage amidst much hilarity and outlandish people in a story different from this one. Because it was San Francisco, I was quick to accept the invitation and fly to what we always called The City and, despite an escalating bout with flu, to prepare for my part in the panel discussion by celebrating the quincentennial extensively with a friend until somewhere well past the midnight hour preceding the morning of

A STORY O F A TALK

245

my talk. When the sun finally rolled all the way across the continent and lodged against our tall hotel, I had been awake all night, first celebrating Columbus with ironic gusto and then more ironically celebrating the fact that my lodgings came with a convenient bathroom as my flu became more apparent in my unfocused state. When I began to make my way to the official hotel PAL site for the panel on Native writing, I did not feel at all well. My friend Hector, who had dutifully honored the discovery of the New World with me in the City by the Bay but was not engaged to speak professionally that day had murmured "vaya con dios" and "buena suerte, ese" sometime around two A.M. as we'd made our way back to the hotel. My head had made the infernally happy sound of trolley cars into an internally persuasive discourse, and my stomach was in no mood for Rice-a-Roni, the authoritative San Francisco Treat. I remember, walking those few blocks, being under the impression that the famous hiUs of San Francisco appeared each and every one to be clones of the famous Lombard Street with its sinuous and sinister curves. I trudged, paper in hand, up the winding and folding streets through romantic fog, or illusions of fog, thinking weakly of McTeague, the monster San Francisco dentist who pulled teeth with his thumb and forefinger and nibbled off his wife's fingers. It was the kind of morning, with its inner and outer fogs, ready-made for a monster dentist, and with the pages of my twenty-minute talk my only weapon, I felt vulnerable, like someone with a low survival quotient in the naturalistic universe where teacup tragedies did not exist. It may not be true that Mark Twain said the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco, but if he said it, even apocryphally,he was prevaricating as usual, for December in San Francisco is colder than July. "You don't want to get your hands froze on Christmas, do you?" kept echoing in my head as I navigated like Christopher C. or idiot Benjy on the day of sarsaparilla toward my own private India. Some time before, in the relative safety of Santa Cruz with its earthquakes and serial killers, I had decided to give a talk on a

quincentennial novel, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich's The Crown of Columbus, a book I had found both extremely entertaining and a clever exploitation and subversion of the whole Columbus schtick.A quincentennial trickster maneuver that had not, I thought, received the respect it was due. I was, to use a favorite expression, somewhat taken aback when I arrived at the place of the panel discussion, however. Like most academics, especially those of us in Native American literature accustomed to seeing our panels situated in the eight A.M. slot of the last day of any conference, I was used to mumbling a paper into a microphone in front of a halfdozen or dozen people who looked like deer in headlights. (Once, at a strange conference in Omaha, no one had shown up at all for a panel I was on, and the other two speakers and I took turns sitting in the audience and applauding wildly.) I wasn't prepared for this Postmodern Literature Association audience. The room overflowed. Every chair was taken, every standing space filled, people sat in the aisles, leaned in the doorway tiptoed to look over other people's heads in the doorway. Eager, curious, earnest, intellectual faces proliferated in the room. Buena suerte, ese, I thought as I probed and excused myself to the front, where on a small stage two tables were divided by a podium. The crowd had come to see and hear some of my more illustrious cospeakers, who would undoubtedly prefer to remain unnamed in this recounting. The distinguished scholar chairing the panel, whom at a different conference I had once accused of being my illegitimate mother and who has never allowed me to forget that gaucherie, gave me a long, concerned, and somewhat illegitimately motherly look and showed me where to sit at one of the tables. She suspected, I knew, only half of my debilitating state, being ignorant of my raging influenza but well trained to recogruze familiar conditions of quincentennial celebrants. On my left was a friend, a beautiful and magnificent Navajo poet of great dignity and presence who turned and smiled at me with intense sympathy and penetrating understanding. On my right was a strange and substantial person of indefinableidentity

A STORY O F A TALK

247

who wore a beaded headband around lus thinning red hair, a bone choker around his ample red neck, and regalia looking vaguely like bits swiped from numerous museums over his more-thanample torso. This, every sigrufier shouted, was an Indian. In my chair sat a person without a single cultural signifier who was just coming to an awareness that cause-and-effect dynamics are actual, that celebrations of the quincentennial in combination with escalating flu symptoms the night before one must fulfil1one's obligations to the profession constitute a cause, and that one's inability to focus, hear, or think clearly might be labeled an effect. The myriad red person to my right appeared to be pulsating, the way an octopus flushes when angry or upset just before releasing a massive ink cloud. I clutched my paper on The Crown of Colurnbus the way Christopher himself must have clutched his maps of ocean routes to the land of plenty.

Anyone identified as a Native American writer was in somewhat of an awkward position during that quincentennial year. We were rather frequently expected to trot or be trotted out as representatives of quintessential quincentennial victimage, to be used like a penitente's flail to provide delicious excoriation for the exquisitely sensitive nerve endings of Euramerica's and the Western world's collective @t. Suffering for this one year was supposed to be such sweet sorrow, and Native Americans were expected to be not people of color but people of choler like my palpitating colleague on the PAL panel. The Native American was expected to pose as romantic, tragic, and epic, and there were plenty of folks around willing to pose; it was out of rebellion against such manufactured angst that arose my quincentennial celebration with a Hispanic friend, heir himself to not only indigenous Sonoran but also Spanish heritage. As Nash Twostar explains in The Crown of Colurnbus, today's Native American is "an improbable exception, a survivor of survivors of survivors" (364). To survive has meant to escape the

absolute past of the romantic victim and to carve out through cunning and sheer endurance another destiny and another plot. That morning, sitting and listening to my colleagues, I felt like a survivor of a survivor of a survivor, all of the roles being my own. He of the red hair, headband, and bone choker seemed, to my unreliable eyes, to be displaying evidence of being indeed a person of choler as he stood at the podium and spoke wailingly of the travails of his people, until I began to fear an exploding cloud of obfuscatingink that would bring panicked flight from the jammed room and resulting disaster. The throbbing in my head had increased exponentially and my stomach was trying to find allies for a glorious revolution.

Earlier that fall I had been asked by the editor of a Third World newspaper, a self-described Marxist editor, to write a piece on Columbus. I agreed because the editor was a friend whose politics I admired, but I did so a little reluctantly because I suspected that what he had in mind was not what I intended to do. I wrote an essay for the Marxist newspaper about the four-thousand-year-old man who had been recently discovered frozen in the Austrian Alps. I called my essay, "Columbus and the Tyrolean Traveler." I wrote about the haunting earnestness of this traveler. He had prepared so well for his interrupted journey-with finely crafted leather clothing, "a sort of wooden backpack, a leather pouch hanging from his belt with a fire-flint, probably a bow, a stone necklace, a knife with a stone blade." A newspaper account showed a photograph with the caption, "The frozen Bronze-Age corpse was well preserved." I imagined this Bronze Age man setting out to walk somewhere that required climbing over a snowy, icy pass, perhaps to visit relatives, bear a communication, maybe sightsee. Clearly a man of stature in whatever community he inhabited, he had given forethought to the journey, sitting up at night to consider distance, difficulty, and need and finally preparing carefully and well. His

A STORY O F A TALK

249

route was a challenging one through Alpine heights, a world even then of rock and ice not to be taken lightly (we're told by experts today that the Alpine glaciers have diminished by half during the last century or so). All must have gone well until an avalanche caught him unawares just as they catch folks today, and four thousand years later he turned up, surprised but silent. I imagined how this man looked out across the mountains he must have known by a different name, how much he may have marveled at the beauty of alpinglow and perhaps a flock of chamois against black rock, the family he had left behind or was climbing toward, the stories he replayed in his mind as he climbed with his staff up the icy chutes, the songs he sang in his solitary journey.

"Imagine he was headed for a literature conference," says Coyote. "Still about as live as most of those professors, enit?"

Ahem. The Tyrolean traveler's story had abruptly become history/ourstory. His remains were said to be of "extraordinary scientific sigruficance." He had been chemically preserved, refrigerated, dissected, and subsumed into a modem metanarrative, where he remains today in his twenty-first-century deep freeze. It struck me that this was to a quite disturbing extent exactly the approach Europeans and European Americans have always had and for the most part continue to have toward all indigenous peoples. Like the Vanishing American so dear to Anglo-America's heart, the four-thousand-year-old time-traveler is of great value precisely because he is so very dead, an artifact frozen in timelike the recently discovered brain of Ishi, the last of the Yahi-to be studied, chemically preserved, dissected, and eventually placed in a museum just like hundreds of thousands of Native American remains and subsumed into modem Euramerican history. As I expected, the editor of the small radical newspaper was not very happy with my essay-was, in fact, quite unhappy with it. It

wasn't what he expected or needed to whet the collective anger or guilt of his readers. As Vivian Twostar says so well in The Crown of Columbus, "He assumed that [I] would pen a vitriolic lament, an excoriation blaming Colurnbus for all the Indians troubles" (51). When I did not do so, he was justifiably disappointed and declined my clever and deftly penned reflection on the Tpolean Traveler.

That morning at the PAL conference, hearing my own voice on something like tape delay I spoke to the overflow crowd about what I thought and still today think is the most impressive accomplishment in Dorris and Erdrich's Columbus novel, an accomplishment worthy of recognition and applause even these years later with much difficult water beneath many bridges. Like Vivian Twostar, these two mixedblood authors chose not to pen a simplistic fiction of outrage. Instead, Dorris and Erdrich defiantly even subversively seized the low ground of American literature with a potboiling adventure story of the discovery of the Discoverer. And within the pages of their page turner, the two authors managed to cleverly encapsulate the political struggle between competing discourses at the heart of five hundred years of America's "discove*' that struggle which began when, as Dorris and Erdrich explain, Columbus "took possession of all that was before him simply by speaking certain formulaic words" (186). Thus was the New World introduced to the authoritative discourse of the Old, a language encountered by New World inhabitants with, as Mikhail Bakhtin says, "its authority already fused to it" (342). Near the beginning of The Crown of Columbus, the authors quote a passage from Las Casas's version of Columbusfsdiary. In this, one of his first diary entries addressed to the Spanish monarchs, Columbus writes of the Lucayan Natives: "Our Lord pleasing, at the time of my departure I will take six of them from here to Your Highnesses in order that they may learn to speak" (6). Half a millennium later, The Crown of Columbus and the rest of the growing canon of literature by Native Americans demonstrate that

A STORY OF A TALK

25 1

Columbus succeeded beyond his most earnest expectations. The people he mistakenly and unrepentingly called "Indians" have indeed learned to speak, and they have appropriated the master discourse, making the invaders' language their language, with a lowercase e, and turning it against the center. Because of such often defiant acts of appropriation, as Robert Young points out in White Mythologies, "the First World is now having to come to terms with the fact that it is no longer always positioned in the first person with regard to the Second or Third Worlds" (125). And, like the four-thousand-year-oldBronze Age Tyrolean backpacker, Native Americans were well-prepared for this long journey, for in oral cultures stories are omnipresent and omnipotent. Through stories, as Vivian Twostar's Navajo grandmother, Angeline, knows in The Crown of Columbus, truth and history form and change, always growing, shifting ground, always dynamic and syncretic. In Las Casas's version of Columbus's diary, it is clear that-in spite of Columbus's monologic certainty of linguistic authoritythe Guanahanis and all of the indigenous peoples Columbus encounters know very well how to use communication as a tool or a weapon. Again and again, Columbus records trickster narratives such as that of the two men who, through signs, "showed the Spaniards that some pieces of flesh were missing from their bodies, and they gave the Spaniards to understand that the cannibals had eaten them by mouthfuls" (237)."The Admiral did not believe it," Las Casas dutifully writes, but it isn't hard to imagine these two tribal tricksters nudging one another and winking as they tell their tale, just as the Natives must have done as again and again they sent gullible Columbus sailing onward toward those promised mountains of gold always somewhere else, anyplace but here. With their revision of Colurnbus-and thus history-Dorris and Erdrich accomplish a similar act of trickery, claiming the iconographic terrain of this nowhere man-who, according to various speculations in this novel might have been Italian, Jewish, Russian, Norwegian, and/or gay or might not have existed at all--claim him as Indian territory, reimagining the image and myth from a

Native American perspective. The paradigm of discovery is cleverly reversed, the course and discourse remapped. The journey of discovery is undertaken by a Native woman whose priggish New England lover tags along. Roger Williamsfthe lover, is a poet-dilettante resembling the absurd would-be poet/ editor Kinbote in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. Roger is penning his own "unrhymed monologue about Colurnbus-a reconstructed voice as in Browning's 'My Last Duchess"' (16)-a poem about a duke's thorough colonization of his young wife. Throughout most of the novel Roger is precisely such a monologist, capable of speaking only in reconstructed voices; about his poem he declares, "Content followed form and I bent the facts to my will" (51). Friends must point out to him that it is he and not Vivian's Navajo grandmother who is foreign. His heteroglot lover, Vivian-"Coeur d'Alene-Navajo-Irish-Hispanic-Sioux-by-marriageff-admits all voices into her conceptualhorizon, identrfylngwith the Columbus who "spoke all languages with a foreign accent" and "was propelled by alienation" (124); the Columbus who "was a nexus of imaginary lives, of stories" (125).Throughout the novel, Roger and Vivian strugglefor control of language to such an extent that at one point Vivian notes that Roger "refused to relinquish command of the language" (223). Rather rapidly, however, Roger is forced to relinquish it, until in the end he is an accessory to Vivian's triumph, described by Nash as "simply tuned in to Mom, as though he had something to learn" (368). The Crown of Columbus begins with a reversal, as "something marvelous" washes up from the sea and is found by an "island girl." At the time of discovery the island girl, Valerie Clock, has come down to rake the sand for flotsam and jetsam, the detritus of Euramerican civilization. The marvelous discovery is an infant, the sea's promise of new life, a new world. Cast up from the sea is Violet, the mixedblood daughter of Vivian and Roger, a symbol of America's heterogeneousfuture, pure potential and a fruitful merger of old and new worlds. As Valerie's island relatives recognize, the infant is like Moses, a promise of redemption.

A STORY OF A TALK

253

The novel is flush with such images of birth and rebirth. Vivian Twostar's search for clues to Columbus's missing diary is paralleled by Violet's preparations for birth. The sea becomes an embryonic space out of which lives-as in Shakespeare's The Tempest-are startlingly delivered. First Violet washes up to begin the story. Later, the dynastic entrepreneur, Cobb--Roger Williams's evil twin-washes ashore, naked, with eyes that "spoke . . . the way a baby's do" (8). Cobb is "cradled . . . like a child" by Racine Seelbinder, the intuitive international man comfortable in every country. Much later in the novel, though not much later in the story Vivian will pilot Cobb's powerful boat to shore, having wrested control of the craft from its owner by kicking Cobb overboard, using a technique learned in Grotz's Academy of Karate. To complete her voyage of discovery,Vivian will descend into the earth-the earth-navel,emergence place, womband join Roger Wi1liam.s. Like another famous figure in Western mythology Roger is entombed for three days within the earth-in his own words, "a dark presence in the lower darknesst'-where he puts computer disk aside and becomes a part of the oral tradition, reciting Columbus's history in his own unfinished poem, telling to himself the story that is history. And finally when he is ready for rebirth, he ascends toward the light accompanied by Vivian, his savior, and by a symbol of much older sacrifice and resurrection. When Roger and Vivian emerge, Nash describes them: "Roger was next out of the ground, Mom's pale twin, a tall, skinny yellow chalk ghost. . . . He was a larva. . . .Both of them were dazed and disoriented, like they had forgotten the world, like they had been buried and returned to life" (358).The implicationseems to be that Roger, deep in his sepulcher-in-the-sea,has cast off his despotic, power-driven Yankee self who seeks to command language and it is that other, darker self which has washed up in the form of the naked, cradled Cobb. In this twinning with Vivian, Roger has seemingly been reborn, part and particle of the new America represented by his mixedblood lover. When Nash asks how he came to be in the cave, Roger responds, "It is the destiny of Adam" (358).In this emergence

Dorris and Erdrich have conflated Christian and Native American myths, those stories that attempt to explain to us who we arewhere we came from and where we are going-just as Vivian's name-Twostar-suggests a twinning of celestial sigruficance. Clearly, Dorris and Erdrich wanted this novel to represent a new beginning. As mixedblood authors, they use their text to celebrate the potential for a merger of worlds made concrete in their own selves and texts, a reconciliation articulated by Roger, who declares, "I am satisfied in our differences" (376) .Rather than only lamenting the centuries of genocide and injustices done to Native peoples, they have seized the opportunity to look ahead. But finally we must come to the illusive crown for which the novel is titled. When Vivian and Roger discover the mysterious crown on its pedestal deep in the earth, it turns out to be a crown of thorns, within a crystal box, encased in bat guano. After reciting a portion of the Navajo Blessing Way, Vivian smashes the priceless container, and Nash comments to the reader: "The world has become a small place, all parts connected, where an Indian using an ancient Asian art can break into an old European box, witnessed by someone who grew up in Australia" (365). "What we have here," Vivian explains, "is Europe's gift to America. . . . What we have here was the promise, the pledge, the undiluted intent, the preconceived ideal before any fact was known. . . .And Colurnbus left it unopened. Never given. Never accepted" (368). When the crown is exposed to air, it remains mysteriously preserved; only the thorns fall off. Now the celebrated symbol of ultimate suffering and sacrifice, that millenarian promise of redemption from earthly pain in a postapocalyptic paradise that propelled the American Myth from Atlantic to Pacific, has been rendered painless. The crown of nature can be worn without suffering, just as Violet, the daughter of a vital future, is rediscovered in "THE CHURCH OF THE LIVING GOD."

The premise of The Crown of Colurnbus is that the great discoverer brought with him a crown to be given to the New World. In her newly discovered Diario, Vivian finds the sentence, "I knelt with

A STORY O F A TALK

255

the Crown and dedicated myselfonce again, Most Serene Princess, to finding the gold which will pay Spain's task" (202).Vivian insists that "h crown business was not mentioned by Las Casas: Nowhere in the biographies or surviving letters had there been any description or reference to a crown. Just in my pages" (203).Vivian, however, is not quite accurate. Las Casas does, in fact, mention several crowns, writing of the "five kings" who come with the great "Guacanagari, all with their crowns displaying their high rank. . . . The king came to receive the Admiral as soon as he reached land," Las Casas writes, "and took him by the arm to the same house as yesterday where he had a dais and chairs in which he seated the Admiral. Next he took off the crown from his own head and put it on the Admiral's" (296-97). Perhaps, contrary to Vivian's speculation, this is the Crown of Columbus. Perhaps the great Guacanagari reached forth to crown the invader with a symbol of his own sacrifice, a portentous gift from the New World to the Old. Entombed in the bat-cave for half a millennium, the resurrected crown might thus describe a new history: Columbus died for your sins. Now you can begin again. And try to do it right. The Crown of Columbus ends with what Walt Whitman would call "the circle almost circled." Valerie Clock, the island girl, sits watching the ocean, and Dorris-Erdrich write, "It was a while before Valerie started to think of the sea as a place to cross, but once she did, she couldn't stop." With this cleverly subversive, potboiling detective story, these two mixedblood authors seemed to be answering that great representative American, Whitman, who asked the one question that cuts to the heart of five hundred years of history: "But where is what I started for so long ago / And why is it yet unfound?" A survivor, I left my audience that morning in San Francisco with Robert Young's profound statement: "Until the lonely hour arrives in which the philosophical proof of the truth of history is produced, then history will inevitably continue as a representation of and interpretation of the past" (22). Like other quincentennial

writings, including those by Native Americans, The Crown of Colurnbus is just such a representation and interpretation, with no lonely hour yet arrived. Frailly human, prepare as we may, each of us sets out uneasily across glaciers and frozen passes, through winding, cold-shrouded streets for his or her own Alpine destination or private India-celebrate however long and how we dare, arrive how and when we may call it what we will. We may get lost along the way may not reach the shores we had in mind, may even discover ourselvesembroiled in someone else's story that we then try to call our own. We may surface from ice millennia later, intact, preserved, the mystery of our own private mission yet to be written. If we're lucky, a Las Casas will interpret for us, an audience will with patience wait.

Notes

CHAPTER 8 1. For this specific use, I have borrowed this form of the word from Gerald Vizenor, who explains that the "indian is the simulationof a logocentric other," without referent. On most occasions I will retain the familiar "Indian." See Vizenor's Fugitive Poses for extensive discussion of the term. 2. "A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)," Barthes explains (CameraLucida 27). 3. See Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, Photographing the Frontier (New York: G. P. Putnarn's Sons,1980) 117. 4. Of his own mixedblood father, Vizenor writes: "My father was not a cultural ritualist; he never surrendered to shamans, base traditions, or absence as the source of a native sense of presence. He and many others of his generation moved from reservations to cities some sixty years ago during a severe economic depression in the country. Their concern, and with a much richer sense of humor at the time, was survivance" (Fugitive Poses 87). 5. This is not a rare belief. Vizenor cites virtually the same belief in doubled spirits among the Anishinaabes (FugitivePoses 94).

CHAPTER 18 1. Nancy J. Peterson, "Introduction: Native American LiteratureFrom the Margins to the Mainstream," Modern Fiction Studies 45: 1,3. 2. James Colbert, in "Past Piff: In the Narrative Garden of Contemporary American Fiction," quotes Cliff Becker, who announced at the

258

NOTES

1998Associated Writing Programs annual conference that the purchase of Random House by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann meant that "there are now ony six commercial publishers remaining in the United States" (48). CHAPTER 19 1. For a definition of "indian" vs. Indian, see Fugitive Poses, esp. 1416. 2. Vizenor defines trickster as a "comic holotrope: the whole figuration; an unbroken interior landscape that beams various points of view in temporal reveries." The Trickster of liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1988)X. 3. The Daily Californian, October 25,1985, p. 1. 4. Ibid. 5. Vizenor to Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, January 9,1992, author's personal papers. 6. See Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, Photographing on the Frontier (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons,1980) 117. And Vizenor, Fugitive Poses 163. 7. "The varionative is an uncertain curve of native antecedence;obscure notions of native sovenance and presence" (Fugitive Poses 15). 8. In "Ishi Obscura," Vizenor describes Phoebe Apperson Hearst as the creator of the Department and Museum of Anthropology at the University of California (ManifestManners 131). 9. U.S. Department of the Interior-Indian Arts and Crafts Board, "Summary and Text of Title I, Public Law 101-644 [l04 Stat. 46621, Act of 11,29/90."

Works Cited

Andrews, Wayne, ed. Concise Dictionary of American Histo y.New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962. Anzaldiia, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco: aunt lute books, 1987. Austin, Mary, and John Muir. Writing the Western Landscape. Ed. Ann H. Zwinger. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: R$ections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981 Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" Representa tions 37 (1992): 1-26. Colbert, James. "Past Piff: In the Narrative Garden of Contemporary American Fiction." Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 39 (1999):47-69. Columbus, Christopher. The Diario of Christopher Colurnbus's First Voyage to America 1492-1493. Abstracted by Fray Bartolome de las Casas. Transcribed and translated into English with notes and a concordance of the Spanish by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley Jr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. Deloria, Philip. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Dorris, Michael, and Louise Erdrich. The Crown of Columbus. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

260

WORKS CITED

. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Presss, 1963. Fletcher, Colin. The Man Who Walked Through Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Garces, Father Francisco. A Record of Travels in Arizona and California, 1775-1776. Tr. John Galvin. San Francisco: John Howell Books, 1965. Grey, Zane. The Call of the Canyon. New York: Black's Readers Service Company 1924. Harvey David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enqui y into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Krutch, Joseph Wood. Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1958. Lippard, Lucy R. Partial Recall. New York: The New Press, 1992. Morris, Wright. Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing, and Memory. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1989. Owens, Louis. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Pattie, James 0. The Personal Narrative of James 0.Pattie of Kentucky. Ed. Timothy Flint. Chicago: The Lakeside Press, 1930. Powell, J. W. The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. New York: Dover Publications, 1961. Rabate, Jean-Michel. Writing the Image after Roland Barthes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. . Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Schubnell, Matthias. N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Sontag, Susan. O n Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988. . "Translator's Preface." Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida. Tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Steiner, George. In Bluebeard's Castle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971. Trinh T. Minh-ha. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. . Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

WORKS CITED

26 7

Van Dyke, John C. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado: Recurrent Studies in impressions and Appearances. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920. Vizenor, Gerald. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. ."Ishi and the Wood Ducks." In Native American Literature: A Brief introduction and Anthology. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.299-336. .Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Womack, Craig S. Red on Red: Native American Litera y Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Woodward, Grace Steele. The Cherokees. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. Young, Robert . White Mythologzes: Writing His t o y and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Note: This index refers only to those chapters with primarily academic interest or focus. Ahrnad, Aijaz, 222 Anzaldua, Gloria, 100 Atlanta Braves, 223 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 218,250 Barthes, Roland, 91/92., 93,94,95, 96,97,102,236,237 Bhabha, Homi, 102,207,210,221, 222,223 BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs), 230 Brennan, Timothy, 222,225 Browning, Robert, 252 Ciirdenas, Garcia L6pez de, 69 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 207,208, 209 Chang-Lin Tien, 231 Chico Record, 231 Chow, Rey, 213 Cixous, Helene Cixous, 100 Cleveland Indians, 223

Colbert, James, 257n.2(chap. 18) Columbus, Christopher, 250,251, 254 Comanche Indians, 70 Curtis, Edward S., 99 Dances wifh Wolves, 219 Deloria, Philip, 219,220 Derrida, Jacques, 215 Dickinson, Emily, 65 Dorris, Michael, 24656 Dutton, Clarence Edward, 72 Eco, Umberto, 234 Ellison, Ralph, 216,233 Erdrich, Louise, 210,246-56 Fanon, Frantz, 207,214,216,218, 219,223 Fletcher, Colin, 66,75 Ford, Richard, 211 Foucault, Michel, 208

264

INDEX

Gandhi, Leela, 207,213,214,216, 218,219,221 Garces, Francisco Tomis, 69,70 Grand Canyon, 64-76 Grand Canyon National Monument, 74 Grey, Zane, 74

Mourning Dove, 221-22 Muir, John, 73,74 Nabokov, Vladirnir, 96,211,212 Naipaul, V.S., 221,225 Nietszche, Friedrich W., 97,215 Ortiz, Sinon, 210

Hance, Captain John, 73 Hajo, Joy, 213 Harvey, David, 218 Heidegger, Martin, 215 Herningway Ernest, 209 Hogan, Linda, 213 Indian Arts and Crafts Act, 239, 240,242 Indian Territory, 90 Ishi, 98,227-43,249 Ives, Lieutenant Joseph Christmas, 70 Jim, Rex Lee, 220 Kroeber, Alfred, 210,234,239 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 74 Las Casas, Fray Bartolome del 250,251,255,256 Major Ridge, 221 Melville, Herman, 210 Miller, Mary Ashe, 230 Modern Fiction Studies, 209 Mohanty, Satya, 207 Momaday, N. Scott, 210,212,213, 222,224-26 Monty Python, 70 Moran, Thomas, 74 Morris, Wright, 102,104 Morrison, Toni, 209,210

Pattie, James Ohio, 69,70 Payne, Lewis, 95 Peterson, Nancy J., 257n.l(chap. 18) Pine Ridge, South Dakota, 218 Powell, Major John Wesley, 71,72, 73,76 Pulitzer Prize, 211,224-25 Rao, Raja, 220 Ridge, John Rollin, 101,221 Roosevelt, Theodore, 74 Ross, John ,100 Rushdie, Salrnan, 218 Said, Edward, 101,102,207,210 San Francisco Call, 230 Santa Fe Indian Market, 240 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 223 Sequoyah (George Guess), 101 Seward, W. H. (U.S. Secretary of State), 95 Shakespeare, William, 253 Silko, Leslie, 210,213 Sontag, Susan, 92,93,99 Spivak, Gayatri, 207,213,215, 216 Stanford University, 225 Steiner, George, 101 Tapahonso, Luci, 210,220 The Crown of Colurnbus, 244-56

INDEX

The Grand Chasm of the Colorado (painting by Thomas Moran), 74 Trinh, T. Minh-ha, 213 Twain, Mark, 245 United States Geological Survey, 72 University of California at Berkeley, 229-31 University of Oklahoma, 231 Van Dyke, John C., 67- 76 Vizenor, Gerald, 91,92,93,96,98, 101,210,212,214,219, 258nn.1,7,8; Bearhearf, 242;

265

"Ishi and the Wood Ducks," 22743; Manifest Manners, 242, 243 Von Egloffstein, F. W., 70,74 Washington Redskins, 223 Watennan, Thomas, 234 Welch, James, 210 Whitman, Walt, 214,215,216,222, 226,255 Woodward, Grace Steele, 100 Yahi Indians, 230 Yana Tribe, 230 Young, Robert, 100,101,251,255