Quiet Until the Thaw

by Alexandra Fuller

  “Crow begged and pleaded with Wakan Tanka to make her a new place to roost,” Rick Overlooking Horse says. “So Wakan Tanka decided to make a new earth out of the mud of the old world.” Rick Overlooking Horse stops talking. Then he says, “Are you still awake, good-hearted boys?”

  “Yes,” Jerusalem says.

  “Yes,” Daniel says.

  Rick Overlooking Horse relights his pipe and smokes a little more, then he prods the fire and continues, “From his pipe bag, Wakan Tanka chose four animals known for their excellent diving skills; the loon, the otter, the beaver, and the turtle. He asked each, in turn, to dive deep beneath the floodwaters to fetch up some clay with which to make a new world.”

  The wind picks up, and the teepee shudders against the tug. Rick Overlooking Horse talks about how the loon and the otter and the beaver fail to dive deep enough; how they return to the surface breathless and without mud. Then Rick Overlooking Horse says, “Are you still awake, good-hearted boys?”

  “Mm,” the boys say.

  Rick Overlooking Horse says, “So I will tell you the end of the story.”

  He pulls up the old buffalo hide across the boys’ shoulders and continues, “When it was turtle’s turn to dive deep into the floodwaters, she was gone so long everyone thought she must have drowned. They thought her lungs must have burst. They thought her shell must have been crushed. But just as they were about to give up, she came back to the surface of the floodwater with mud in her beak, mud in her feet, mud in her shell.”

  Rick Overlooking Horse says, “Wakan Tanka thanked little Turtle. He thanked her and took the mud, and made it into the shape of land, just big enough for him and Crow. Then he shook two eagle feathers over the mud until it spread and spread, far and wide. And he named the new land Turtle Island in honor of the brave little turtle.”

  Rick Overlooking Horse puts fresh logs on the fire. He can hear from their breathing that the boys are now asleep; so are Le-a and Squanto. Rick Overlooking Horse lights his pipe and smokes a little more until he too grows sleepy. Then he says his prayers silently, curls his body against the base of the teepee to catch wind from reaching the boys, and sleeps.

  You Choose What Son, Out of the Second Rez

  Just when You Choose was getting thoroughly inured to his unpleasant predicament, stupefied into submission by the monotonous brutality of prison life—the perpetual stench, the absence of women, the lack of privacy—he suddenly learned that he’d been granted ten years, minus a few months, off his forty-year sentence for good behavior.

  Or maybe he got ten years off, minus a few months, because of U.S. government budget cuts. Or maybe his release was the result of a rare clerical error in favor of the Red Man. Or maybe someone finally felt guilty for the extra thirty that had been tacked onto the original sentence, and decided to put things right.

  Or righter.

  Let’s face it, things could never really be put all the way right at this point.

  Which in any case made no difference to You Choose What Son, who never really knew why he was suddenly free to walk out of the gates of the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution thirty miles west of Oklahoma City, a windowless building like a munitions factory, out in the flat middle of western Oklahoma.

  From the yard, as far as an inmate could see on a clear day, there was nothing but torn, broken, sterilized, leached land. Where there was vegetation, it was more rubble and weeds than grasses and sedges. There was nothing left at all of any truly wild land.

  For as far as the eye could see, the ruins of so much imprisonment.

  You Choose What Son’s First Days of Freedom

  You Choose hopped the Greyhound straight up north, through Kansas to Grand Island, Nebraska. Then he tacked together journeys west on buses and rides. He bought some weed and a nice pinch of cocaine. By the time he reached Scottsbluff, he had just enough money left for the essentials.

  At a dive bar not a block from the Greyhound station, he managed to get very quickly drunk on four beers, and exceedingly drunk on six. After seven beers on an empty stomach, he tried to talk a number of women into sleeping with him.

  It should be no surprise then that when he rolled back onto the Rez in early August, You Choose had a black eye, a split lip, and a slice missing from across the top of his left ear. Prison dentistry had not been kind to his teeth. Also, his haircut betrayed him as the victim of an involuntary life.

  It’s a difficult look for anyone to embody: Recent con, possibly tough guy with a jittery side of PTSD.

  That usually got people paying attention.

  You Choose What Son Buys a Way Out

  The Rez had gone downhill since You Choose What Son had been tribal chairman, no question. The old café where he’d got his first political support in that historic 1972 election had been torn down. In its place there was a dented shipping container out of which a fat Mexican who apparently called himself Auntie Sioux sold fry bread and bad coffee. There was an infestation of shoddy HUD units in the old meadows around the Powwow Grounds. And the Rez playground equipment, which had apparently been installed and had time to rust in the time You Choose had been incarcerated, looked dangerous, even to an Indian.

  Also, You Choose found he knew no one. And no one knew him.

  “What Son,” he told the cashier at Big Bat’s. “I was tribal chairman. Do you people know nothing about nothing?”

  The thugs hadn’t changed so much, though.

  They were as easy to spot now as they had been back in You Choose What Son’s time. Instead of baseball caps, plaid shirts, and jeans, the new thugs dressed like kids on television, all tattoos, beanies, baggy camouflage pants, white T-shirts, and chains. But they exhibited the same air of cultivated, aimless, hanging-around-the-fort disaffection and latent menace.

  It took You Choose less than half an hour in the parking lot at Big Bat’s to figure out where he could buy a gun for cheap, and another week to complete the purchase mostly because there was some disagreement among the supposed dealer’s Immediate Relations about who the gun’s more or less rightful owner might have been, to start with.

  Still, by the end of it, for twenty-five dollars and a case of Colt 45 Malt Liquor, You Choose What Son was in possession of a Hi-Point C9 semiautomatic 9mm pistol. It had a cheap kick, a tacky feel, and sticky action. But at the price, it was a beautiful piece of heat.

  The Moons of August

  Ask a human being, any human being, the human standing closest to you: What phase is the moon in right now?

  Ask her: Is it waxing, waning, gibbous, or crescent?

  Ask a prisoner what he misses most about the outside world.

  He’ll say women, probably, and the feel of grass beneath his feet, perhaps. But he will definitely tell you he misses the moon.

  The summer moon on the evening You Choose What Son walked out of the gates of El Reno Correctional Institution was full, and heavy, as if it had been lowered in vats of syrup, or fresh engine oil. It was a moon that looked as if it could succor, or smother.

  Within the month, as measured by the White Man in any case, the moon was full and pregnant again. It went against nature and defied common sense. Two moons in a month was not a month. It was two months.

  People capable of making the rudimentary mistake of marking a recurring full moon in a single month should not be in charge of pretty much anything else. A decoy moon, the White Man calls it, covering for his blunder. Or a blue moon, a betrayer moon.

  This kind of confusion cannot happen in the Lakota calendar. The Lakota follow the moon; they don’t force the moons to follow them.

  Accordingly, the last two moons of the summer are Warm Moons.

  Canpaspapa wi—moon of blackening berries. Wasuten wi—moon of the harvest.

  Everything bakes in the summer heat: Sweet, open, and ripe.

  Recipe for Berry Stew

  Rick
Overlooking Horse showed the boys: To make wojapi, you will need enough chokecherry patties to cover the bottom of a bowl, all the huckleberries and whatever other berries you can find. You will need some prairie turnips, for thickening. You will need water, a pinch of salt, and a pot.

  Le-a made fry bread.

  Squanto cleared a firebreak.

  They sat outside until very late and ate the berry stew together.

  The horses grew curious and trotted down from the bluffs, gangly and giddy. A waxing gibbous moon rose in the northeast. There were distant bleeds of yellow and blue lightning on the horizon. And there was an ever so slight scent of rain, maybe.

  Very few people can remain calm in the eye of such a brewing storm.

  The boys got up and started chasing each other around and around the meadow, which put the wind up the horses and got them snorting and racing too. Rick Overlooking Horse leaned forward and poked the fire.

  “It’s going to rain,” Le-a said.

  “Not this moon,” Rick Overlooking said. “Not yet.”

  You Choose and the Other Full Moon

  Le-a’s mind, trying to put it all together afterward, missed whole pieces.

  She’d been harvesting corn, she remembered that, of course. Feeling tired because of the late night, and angry with herself for sleeping in. And she’d been thinking how small the corn was, stunted in this long, hot summer and no moisture, and now the insult of this virga, the gloomy effect of the sun battling through those curtains of rain that never touch the ground.

  And then a strange figure seemingly solidified out of the singed pasture at the bottom of the meadow. There had been no sound of a vehicle to announce a visitor. Le-a shaded her eyes and looked. Only then did it register that the person at the bottom of the meadow seemed to be aiming a gun.

  Le-a was already moving through the air, counting the shots as they came—seven, in the end—when Rick Overlooking Horse hit the ground. Then she was at Rick Overlooking Horse’s side, on her knees, her mouth seeking his tight-melted lips.

  “Oh, please be breathing. Please be breathing.”

  Her fingers were fumbling for a pulse on his neck. “Oh no, please, please, please.”

  His neck was warm and wet, his eyes still shiny with life, but she knew he was gone.

  It was impossible.

  Le-a was screaming, “No!”

  But there are a lot of reasons a person cannot easily come back from the dead, and seven bullets are seven of them.

  You Choose What Son’s Near-Death Experience

  Le-a Brings Plenty noticed these things: A feather with creamy brown vanes, and a neon orange rachis; rivulets of sweat, silver on Rick Overlooking Horse’s brown neck; a green crayon melting in the sun, its wrapper greasy with paraffin wax.

  There is nothing so normal as all these normal things at the end of the world, surely.

  Le-a leapt to her feet, and turned to You Choose.

  “What have you done?” she screamed.

  You Choose stared at the ground.

  From the cottonwood grove a northern flicker gave a harsh laugh, and drummed.

  Le-a hit You Choose as hard as she could.

  After that, You Choose could see ground from the perspective of having his face mashed into it. Drops of blood landed on its glittering surface like tiny bombs. He could hear Le-a screaming but her voice appeared to be coming from a great distance, as did the blows of her fist on the side of his face. Several of his teeth were in the dirt already, he was pretty sure of that. He could feel others rattling around in his mouth, salty little stones.

  He noticed how dry the grass was, translucent in the sunlight, as if everything might break apart in orange flames.

  RICK OVERLOOKING HORSE, 1944–2004

  Half the population of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation showed up for the funeral. The first three days there was also a Catholic priest from St. Jerome’s Mission clattering about with his rosary and parchment paper. His hands like large, dry moths, blessing everyone. His words like steam.

  Bless, bless, bless.

  But after the Catholic priest left, the whole thing turned very Indian.

  Many people cut and burned their hair. Except for You Choose What Son. He didn’t need to cut his hair. His haircut was already the “Lakota-in-Mourning”–style insisted upon by most U.S. prisons. Also, his scalp was so encrusted with lacerations, swellings, and bruises; it wasn’t really something you wanted to take a razor to.

  After that they carried Rick Overlooking Horse’s body, wrapped in blankets, to the top of the chalky bluffs. Then they tied his body to a scaffold, and lifted the scaffold high off the ground, away from wild animals. Already the coyotes were yipping and singing with the smell of death, and ravens were gargling about in the cottonwood trees.

  You Choose What Son and the Life Sentence

  Anger was the fuel that got Le-a up in the morning, and drove her all day. And she kept You Choose in the crosshair of her fury. “Oh no, I’m sure as shit not turning you in,” Le-a said. “Although you’re gonna wish I did.” She waved the Hi-Point C9 semiautomatic at him. “How does this thing work again?” She flicked the safety on and off.

  You Choose hiccupped miserably.

  Le-a Brings Plenty could think of no better punishment for You Choose What Son than to force him to stay with them, in Rick Overlooking Horse’s meadow. “You didn’t just kill a man,” she told him. “You killed everything they would ever know. You realize that, don’t you? You killed their knowledge. Our knowledge. You killed their best chances. You killed all of us.”

  You Choose flapped his arms up and down a couple of times, as if experimentally, or as if hoping he’d somehow take flight. He was genuinely confused. This was not death row.

  Death row was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

  “Suicide Falls,” the Indians say. “Minnehaha County.”

  Feeling Returns

  For days, You Choose What Son was catatonic.

  Le-a fed him corn porridge every morning. She took him a pipe of Wahupta every afternoon. She figured whatever was wrong with him mostly had to do with a broken spirit, and there was no real shortcut for the repair of a soul.

  Once in a while, she kicked him, to see if he could feel anything yet.

  “No?” she said. “Didn’t feel that? Try this.”

  Grief is an eroding wind.

  After grief has blown through, there is just the bedrock of a person.

  Le-a was worn down to her fury; Squanto was reduced to a state of silent watchfulness; the boys reverted to wild creatures; and You Choose was a pillar of numb.

  Until suddenly he wasn’t; until suddenly he was all feeling.

  It was as if he’d been out in the cold most of his life, and now his capillaries were opening with the full stinging shock of everything he should have felt ever. He lay curled up in front of the teepee fire ring, his hands clutched between his clenched thighs, his mouth wide with agony.

  “How long are you going to carry on like this?” Le-a asked.

  “Ah, this hurts,” he gargled.

  “Well, how did you think it would be?” Le-a said.

  Because in the perennial boot camp of suffering also known as the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, also known as the Rez, also known as Prisoner of War Camp #334, even a certified idiot knows the only pain a person can avoid is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

  Rain

  The last two weeks of August a steady, hot, dry southern wind seared the grass into feathery razors. An infestation of grasshoppers sawed loudly through the crackling drought, shredding Le-a’s already stunted corn. The squash turned black on the stalk, slow-cooked rotten on the baking ground. The creek slowed to a barely moving trickle of sludge.

  Squanto eyed the sky, and considered pushing the horses south to the reservoir, although he’d hea
rd even that was desperate-dry, down to mud they were saying.

  Wildfires roared through Hé Sapa, and turned the sky a poisoned yellow.

  Everything seemed restless with waiting and thirst and grief.

  You Choose still wailed and blubbered. He sniveled and rocked himself. He shook out his limbs, as if his extremities were on fire.

  He was getting on everyone’s nerves.

  Then on the night of the full moon, the hot night wind suddenly stilled. Everything grew hushed. Horses took shelter in the little gullies. Up on the bluffs, coyotes yapped and cried.

  “Fire,” Squanto worried.

  “Rain,” Le-a prayed.

  By dawn, threads of moisture licked the horizon. Then those threads thickened to take the shape of thunderclouds. A steady, insistent wind picked up from the west. By evening the whole sky was battleship grey over the blond meadow.

  When it came, it was a deluge. The rain lashed; the branches of the cottonwoods clattered and groaned. Water rushed in rivulets past the teepee; the little creek roared and tumbled rocks.

  Le-a Brings Plenty Hears the Voice of Rick Overlooking Horse

  Hau,” the voice was unmistakable.

  Le-a opened her eyes. “Tunkashila?”

  “It’s just a life.”

  Le-a sat up. “Tunkashila?”

  But the teepee remained a whispering, golden skin around its sleepers.

  Le-a edged out from her blankets and out of the teepee.

  The earth looked soaked, at once glistening and exhausted, as if recovering from something ecstatic.