The Chief

by Robert Lipsyte

  “I thought I’d deal with that later. Those were teasers.”

  “Foreshadowing. Okay. But they better pay off big-time. Now, let’s talk style. First person is okay, I can live with that if it makes you comfortable, but then you’ve got to be more of a character yourself. Since you’re filtering the action through your soul, we better know who you are. And if you’re just playing writer, if you don’t really care and you’re not willing to let it hang out, it’s going to show.

  “Second major point, the present tense. It doesn’t work. False immediacy, like you’re writing one of those I’m-so-tough sports columns. You got to dig in, Witherspoon. Work harder. Maybe I’ll sign your papers, but I want to see a few more chapters. Before I make a decision.”

  6

  I JUMPED ON THE FIRST train back to New York. I was so pissed I was talking to myself out loud. This Professor Marks is a third-rater, an opponent who can’t write the big one. He knows I’ve got a chance to be a contender so he’s getting in my way. He doesn’t want me to make it. And he’s going to judge me.

  Whoever I am. A postliterate rapper?

  The little pink-faced conductor gave me his icy blue glare. No trouble on my train, boy. Who does he think I am, the president of the Crips? Professor thinks I’m not Black enough, the conductor thinks I’m too Black. I slipped on my ghetto stare and eyeballed him right back. It worked, even though my little round glasses slid down my nose.

  I kept my hard face on until New Haven, when a posse of gang-banger wanna-bes pimp-rolled on and the conductor hid in another car. They looked at my clothes and my book bag, and one of them said, “Hungry?” and another said, “Fo’ Oreos,” but then they spied some honeys and forgot about me for the rest of the trip. I tried to read a book of experimental short stories that were written like movie treatments, but I couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking of things I should have said to Professor Marks. The friendliest was Drop dead.

  New York City was hot and it stank, but I caught an air-conditioned subway car, and the ride uptown was icy sweet.

  I stopped off at Donatelli’s Gym on 125th Street in Harlem, my second home in the city. Just walking up those dark, narrow, twisting stairs calmed me down. The smell of sweat and liniment, the late-afternoon sun through the dusty windows, the bells, the scuffling footsteps of shadowboxers and the tom-tom slap of the speed bag cleared Marks out of my head.

  Henry Johnson, who owns the gym, was working with a stiff who called himself the Punching Postman. I climbed up on the apron next to Henry, a formal man who always wears a white shirt and a tie. He’s a good guy, one of Alfred’s oldest friends. Henry has always let Sonny train for free, doesn’t even make him do chores around the gym anymore.

  “Sonny around?” I asked him.

  “They went back to the Reservation. He didn’t even take his equipment. Said I could clean out his locker and give it to some other kid.”

  “You didn’t do that?”

  He shook his head but kept his eyes on the fighters sparring. “I seen this before.”

  “And what happened?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes they come back and sometimes they don’t.”

  “You didn’t try to talk to him?”

  “No point. He’s got to decide for himself. If he wants it bad enough, he’ll come back.”

  “Cold.”

  He looked at me. “Got to be realistic in these situations, Martin. He’s not getting anywhere. Money’s not coming in. You got a fresh thought?”

  “What about Robin Bell’s scam?”

  “Who?”

  “The TV producer. About going to Vegas and challenging Hubbard.”

  “I heard that crazy talk.”

  “It worked for Ali.”

  “He already had big bread behind him. We’re just small fry.”

  The Postman started getting hit, and Henry climbed into the ring to show him a move, which was a waste of time.

  On the way out, I visited Rocky, the humansized punching bag that hung from the ceiling by a thick chain. The dummy’s canvas skin was divided into squares from forehead to waist, each marked with a number. The chin was 1, the right eye 7…left eye 8, the nose 3…middle of the belly 17. You get the idea.

  I felt nostalgic about old Rocky. Three years ago, while I was in high school, my dad made me work out at the gym. I hated it. I felt out of place, and I was lousy at jumping rope and hitting the speed bag. I hated being there because I knew my dad, who once was a light heavyweight contender, thought I was a fat wimp wasting his life writing poems and short stories. I hated it even more when Henry paired me off with this wild-looking half-Indian kid Alfred had dumped on Henry after the kid got out of jail. We didn’t get along at all. Each of us was supposed to take turns calling out the numbers while the other one hit Rocky. I did it in a flat monotone to show him I didn’t care. And he wasn’t trying too hard either.

  And then one day, while we were at the bag, I heard a voice say, “Got to concentrate, Sonny. When a Running Brave chops wood, he thinks about the tree and the axe, not the fire he’s gonna make.”

  It was Jake Stump, down from the Res to check on his grandnephew. He told Sonny to think about what he was hitting before he hit it, that a jaw was hard, a belly was soft. Then Jake whirled on me and fired a bony finger into my face. He said, “When you call a number, you gotta think, Why? Number nine, eye, so he can’t see what’s coming next. Number twenty-five, arm, deaden his muscle so he can’t hit you so hard.” Then he walked away.

  After that, everything changed between Sonny and me, between me and my dad and even me and the world.

  I took a few sentimental swings at Rocky. One thing hadn’t changed. My best shot hardly budged the bag, and the pain in my knuckles shot up to my shoulder.

  7

  THE SUBWAY HOME was as hot and stinky and crowded as the streets. The apartment felt the same way. I guess I was depressed.

  My kid sister, Denise, said, “Jake called.”

  I started for the phone, but she stopped me. “He said he’ll call back. I don’t think he wants Sonny to know he’s talking to you.”

  Mom said, “It doesn’t sound good.”

  “Sonny told Henry to clean out his locker and give his stuff away.”

  “Got to do something,” said Denise.

  “We offered some money,” said Mom, “but we don’t have enough to finance another year of this.”

  “It’s not just money,” I said. “Sonny’s down. No publicity, no decent fights. He used the word futile.”

  Dad came in—you could hear his footsteps out in the hall. He’s a super heavyweight now. I started to tell him about Sonny but he waved it away. “What did your professor say?”

  “Maybe that can wait for dinner,” said Mom. She’ll let you tell your story your own way.

  Not Dad. “I like my news on an empty stomach. Well?”

  “He wants some rewrites.”

  Dad nodded. “Well, writing is rewriting. You know that.” Push comes to shove. Mom and Dad will always side with teachers against students, being teachers.

  “It’s not that—he wants something different. This white guy is telling me the book isn’t Black enough.”

  Denise rolled her eyes and said, “Well, shut ma-uh mouth, if that cracker want some low-down niggerish licorish we’ll…”

  “Stop that,” snapped Mom.

  “Martin is a writer,” said Denise. “He has to find his own voice. In his own time. In his own way.”

  Sometimes I can almost understand why most other people like that girl.

  “Martin is a college student,” said Dad. “He has to get his degree. Then he can go looking for his voice.”

  “You just don’t get it,” I said. “Some Hymie writer…”

  “I don’t want to hear that…” said Mom.

  “…who can’t get his own stuff published…”

  “…garbage in my house….”

  “…wants me to write some jigaboo rap fantasy.”

/>   WHAP! My dad’s big hand shivered the table. “Stop this, Martin, right now. Some reality therapy. You are a student. Your job is to finish college. Then you can…”

  “Maybe there’s better uses for my tuition money.”

  That slowed the action. It’s a sore point. My mother’s mother, who owned a beauty products company, left me the money for college. It was in my name for tax purposes. I could get at it for anything I wanted, but I never have.

  No telling where the conversation would have gone this time if the phone hadn’t rung. Saved by the bell. Hey, Professor Marks, this is a boxing book, after all.

  It was Jake. He wanted me to come up to the Res. Sonny was getting ready to leave.

  8

  THE RES LOOKED DIFFERENT to me every time. At first it was like a foreign country, every sight and sound exotic. I still have my notes from those first days, two years ago.

  …back roads become green tunnels boring through forest into sudden clearing of dazzling sunlight…the Longhouse where the elders meet…the Stump, where any Moscondaga can call out the Nation…tangy smell of cooking sausage…woodsmoke curling out of chimneys…sun winks off hundreds of windshields in Jake’s auto junkyard…sacred mountain Stonebird jabs into cloudless pale-blue sky…buffalo grazing…fad bangs lacrosse ball against family trailer…Alice Benton, Stump Clan Mother, ancient queen of wisdom….

  I filled three audio cassettes with Jake’s stories about how the Moscondaga fought in every American war since the French and Indian, how they were cheated out of their lands and squashed into what was left of their reservation as the city of Sparta grew around them, and how the Nation lost its spirit.

  Of all his stories, I liked best the ones about the Running Braves, a secret society of warrior-diplomats, always on call, always in training. A Running Brave could run a hundred miles, negotiate a hundred hours, fight to the finish, and speak with wisdom. The best of them could smell the breath of their prey a mile away and slow the beating of their hearts so an enemy would mistake them for dead. That was the “little death.”

  Jake’s grandfather, Sonny’s great-great-grandfather, was the last of the Braves. Supposedly he’d been killed by a hit-and-run driver while he was out on his daily run. But Jake said he was murdered by government agents who were afraid the Braves would liberate the Moscondaga from the corrupt chiefs who had sold them out. According to Jake, the government thought that they had finished off the Running Braves when they killed Jake’s grandfather.

  But Jake knew the secrets of the Running Braves, their training techniques and the way of the Hawk, the spirit that can lead a Brave to his destiny. He had taught Sonny. In the beginning, the stories sent chills up my spine.

  But by the third and fourth trips, the stories got old and the Res looked like a raggedy slum of sagging cabins and rusted trailers. Jake’s house was a shabby yellow box in a sea of rust and chrome. The Clan Mothers started to sound like nagging grandmas.

  I decided that the Running Braves were just a redskin gang. Great-great-grandpa was probably a drunk run over by another drunk.

  By then, I was noting all the empty beer cans and whiskey bottles along the shoulders of the rutted, dusty roads, and the scrawny dogs that never stopped yapping at the pickup trucks burning rubber. I couldn’t stand the smell of those greasy sausages.

  It was a while before I began to see the Res as a community, a poor neighborhood where the people were lighter-skinned than in my neighborhood and with a different accent.

  Indians are just people. What a revelation, Professor Marks!

  Jake picked me up at the bus station in Sparta. He didn’t look good; since the Viera fight, his face had gotten puffy and his eyes were almost shut. When his diabetes and heart trouble kicked in together, he swelled up and lost the lightness in his step. He was glad to see me, but we didn’t talk much on the drive in. You have to shout with the windows open in his noisy old pickup truck, and he didn’t have the energy.

  I noticed that some of the cabins had been painted and there were more TV satellite receivers around, and a few new cars I hadn’t seen before. We passed a backhoe and cement mixer on the road.

  “What you seeing?” On the Res, Jake was always teaching, testing.

  There was a brand-new Mercedes Benz outside the log cabin of one of the subchiefs, Joe Decker, whose grandfather had been one of the chiefs who took the government side when it banned the Braves. Now Decker was smuggling cigarettes from Canada and selling them in Sparta. Jake and Decker had words one time, and the next day Decker drove past Jake’s place a couple of times in an open jeep with an Uzi on his lap as a warning. I fired my finger at the Benz.

  “I see that Decker and the cigarette gang got themselves a lucky strike.”

  Jake shook his head. “Bingo money.”

  “That’s nickels and dimes.”

  “Not if you lease your land for a bingo hall.”

  “I don’t understand. I thought the Nation voted against bingo.”

  “Council of Chiefs said no bingo on the Res, but some folks said it was their land, not the Nation’s, they could do what they wanted.” He jabbed a bony old finger down a road. I heard a bulldozer snarling. Dust drifted up over the trees. “Clearing land for a casino. Be poker, maybe slot machines.”

  “Can’t the chiefs stop it?”

  “Not without people get hurt. Decker and his crowd think they gonna get rich.” He spat out the window. It was one way he punctuated sentences.

  “Maybe they will,” I said. “People got rich in Atlantic City and Vegas.”

  “Crooked white people. They’ll come in here make Grandfather’s Reservation into Godfather’s Reservation.”

  I laughed. “Great line, mind if I use it?” I jotted it down.

  “Joke for you, maybe.” He clamped his mouth shut the rest of the way. When we pulled into his yard, his dogs scampered out, mean junkyard dogs, but once they recognized me they started whining to be rubbed. Especially the big white one called Custer. I always got a laugh out of his name.

  Jake jabbed his thumb at the yellow house. “Up to you now. He won’t talk to me. He’s flyin’ out in the morning.”

  9

  SONNY WAS SPRAWLED in a reclining chair Jake had made from the bucket seat of a Volvo. There were empty beer cans around his boots. He didn’t say anything when I walked in, didn’t even look up, but that’s the way he gets sometimes. I sat down near him. He was staring at two ESPN commentators blabbing about the heavyweight division. They said that everything was up for grabs, there hadn’t been this much excitement since the days of Muhammad Ali.

  “Got to get a piece of that action,” I said.

  Sonny didn’t twitch. But I knew there was still a chance to get to him. He was waiting to be convinced, he hadn’t made up his mind yet. The Indian part of him was going to listen to everything before he made a decision. That’s how Indians are—they can sit in a Longhouse for days, listen to everyone, examine every possibility. Which doesn’t mean they always make the right decision. But there was a chance. Jake knew that when he asked me to come up.

  One of the ESPN commentators said, “The pot of gold at the end of the heavyweight rainbow has even drawn an old champion out of retirement. John L. Solomon, who admits to being thirty-nine years old, thinks he has a chance against Elston Hubbard, Junior, the twenty-one-year-old favorite in the big-boy sweepstakes. Here the great John L. trains with sparring partner Sludge Wilson.”

  John L. Solomon looked pretty good for his age. He shuffled around the enormous gray-brown Sludge, popping punches at a shaved skull that resembled a mud bowling ball.

  The picture dissolved into Solomon looking right into the camera and saying, “Sometimes kids need a zetz in the tuchis, as my Yiddishe momma used to say. That’s why I’m coming back, first to spank Elston, then Floyd (The Wall) Hall, who is not worthy to wear the crown.”

  Elston Hubbard’s father came on the screen. “Old John was a worthy champion in his time but his time ain’t this ti
me, which is the fine time of my boy, Elston, Junior.”

  Junior started sparring on the screen.

  I said, “Alfred says Junior’s dumb as a rock.”

  Sonny finally looked at me. “You came all the way to tell me that?”

  “Yeah.” The champion, Floyd (The Wall) Hall, appeared on screen and said something boring. “Floyd’s not too swift either. He’s the world’s least colorful man of color.”

  “If it was brains, you could be champ,” Sonny growled. I felt encouraged.

  “You could whip any of these clowns.”

  “So get the match.”

  “You got to get it. You can’t just sit here.”

  “Not gonna just sit here.” He dug around the chair and brought up a fat envelope. He threw it to me.

  The return address was for “Sweet Bear’s Kiva,” so I knew right away it was from his mom. I took my time poking through the twenty-dollar bills and the one-way ticket to Phoenix and a newspaper clipping about the opening of Sweet Bear’s third Indian crafts boutique. They were all in the lobbies of fancy hotels managed by her new husband, Roger Russo. I’d never met either of them, but in the pictures they were a flashy couple. They’d made a ton of money with Indian crafts that Sonny’s mom designed and then had manufactured in Singapore and Korea.

  “You don’t like Roger,” I said.

  “Don’t have to live with them.”

  “Gonna work for them? Sell blankets?”

  He sat up. “Don’t want to talk about it.” After a while, he said, “What are you gonna do?”

  “Go back to school.”

  “What about your book?”

  “You just knocked it out.”

  “Sorry.” He actually sounded sorry, which made me feel bad, as if I’d purposely guilt-tripped him. Well, not all that bad.

  “Doesn’t matter. My professor doesn’t like it anyway. Says I write like a white man.”