Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American Writers

by Bob Blaisdell

“You bet. She’s my brood mother, pure malamute. I’ve got the best team on the river. Hey, you know Manuska built me a dog-sled all spruce, not a nail, bound with walrus hide. Laid it around the joints wet, and it dried like iron.”

  “How much you pay him?”

  “Couple sawbucks.”

  “Worth it. You take care of your team there at the station?”

  “Yeah. Got a pot outside to boil their fish. I got three males, two females, out of Beauty. Bought my breeder, Moose, from old man Patsy, set me back fifty but he’s worth every cent. Saved my bacon more’n once on the trail. He knows everything, even in the worst storms.”

  Willy chuckled. “Like you got money in the bank. Uncle Sam has to pay every time you use that team for Army business, yah?”

  “Paid for itself a hundred times over.” Clem pulled out a package of salmon strip and biscuit. The rich smoke made his taste buds water. He lay back and eased his shoulder muscles into the sun-warm padding of dry reeds. He looked up at the willows. They leaned nearly horizontal over the water. Fallen trees had been bleached to ivory skeletons, and lay crushed and scattered. Small waves slapped the sides of Willy’s dory. The watery sounds soothed Clem to sleep.

  “You got it made better’n three-quarters downriver to home now.” The voice was just loud enough. Guess Willy figured I’d snooze too long, Clem thought. Time to get on. The voice continued, “You going to Nulato?” Willy’s dense eyebrows almost grazed his straight soot-colored lashes.

  “That’s where I’m heading. Two, maybe three hours?”

  “Three hours do it, I guess,” Willy said, hauling net. He tossed another pair of whitefish into the tub, piled the net with great care into the dory. His teeth gleamed with good humor.

  “Your camp downriver a ways?” Clem asked. He stretched and yawned. He thought, I’m rested now, maybe I can make it before dark.

  “Yeah, we use the same old camp. Had that camp many years. Good run on kings this summer. Usually I come up here, get whitefish, let my boys handle the wheel.”

  Clem looked south. Away, faint in the clear air, the purple crest of the Kaiyuh range rested on the horizon. “Willy!” He pointed. “You think there’s a Woodsman in Kaiyuh?”

  Willy’s face crinkled around the grin in tiny rolls of brown, velvety skin. “Oh, sure. Lotsa Woodsman over there.”

  “You ever see one?” Clem wasn’t sure Willy was on the level. Probably joshing him.

  “Yep. Mad like bear, bad like bear. Steal babies.” Willy’s crinkles deepened and formed fans. They laughed.

  “So long, Willy.”

  “See you.”

  Clem stepped into his boat and pulled the starter cord. The engine barked and on the next yank snapped to life. Almost at once, the boat kept trying to get out of his hands and pull out into the heavy rip. He needed all his wits just keeping her steady outside the churning middle river. A red horde of dog salmon thrashed upriver. They leaped against the edges of the riptide, fell back. He steered away, the tiller held hard against his body. It’s a stampede out there, he thought, looking over his shoulder at the line of furious red dog salmon action. There’s something besides fish alive, out in that river.

  He had a sudden sense of repeated time, of some old and half forgotten grief.

  He was carrying Lidwynne along a village path, and her frosty breaths puffed out on the windless air. Mary Joe’s boots padded behind him as his heavy steps angrily crunched the snow. He held the swinging lantern; its light bobbed in yellow winkings. His mind babbled. We will go on through the night snow and we will never come back. We will go to the hills, Mary Joe. They will never part us. She caught up with him. There was no sound as Mary Joe looked into the baby’s face. The moon reflected roundly silver in her pupils. Snow drifted down out of the spruces. The silence was broken by a sighing sound, descending from an immense distance. His anger left him. Only weariness remained. He turned with Mary Joe and they went back. Inside the cabin, he laid the baby in bed and kissed the corner of her sleeping mouth.

  At his shoulder, Mary Joe said, “You can’t have her. She must go somewhere else.” His breath was heavy; he heard the muffled beating of his heart. Her face was deep in the shadows. “Clem, I have a new baby in here.” She laid his hand on her belly and they rested on the lynx-fur blankets. His mind played a small wandering melody; they drifted to sleep.

  He did not know whether it was a dream or a strange, obscure knowledge; now it had come again to him in the fury of the river, the somber weariness of his body; he saw their faces in the aimless, enclosing mists of the Yukon, and he knew it would be so for all of his life.

  He looked at his hands, rigidly white on the tiller. Needles of ice prodded them. The beaver-lined moosehide mittens he had forgotten to bring flashed into his mind. Mary Joe had sewn and beaded them.

  Her face came toward him. The high flush of her flaring cheekbones. The gentle hollows beneath. The eyes he could never describe. The children, their laughter flashing white. Three faces together, wavering in the thin and growing mist.

  Indian. Indianness. The words floated through his thoughts. He jerked his head, trying to flick away the daze. He shouted into the mist, “What difference now, how much the blood is mixed? Our kids are as much Irish or Russian or Scotch as Indian. What difference now?”

  His words were snatched away by the wind.

  CROW’S SUN (1991)

  Duane Niatum

  Duane Niatum was born in 1938 and has lived most of his life in Seattle, Washington. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred magazines and newspapers in the United States and Europe. He has taught grade school, high school, and at several universities in the U.S., most recently at Western Washington University. He has received international acclaim for his poems and stories, has been translated into fourteen languages, and is the recipient of numerous literary awards. He was nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. He was invited to read at the International Poetry Festival in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and The Library of Congress. He is an enrolled member of the Klallam Tribe (Jamestown Band). He has a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Michigan/Ann Arbor.

  Service by Native Americans in the U.S. Armed Forces has a long and complicated history. “Crow’s Sun,” one episode of that history, is about a young soldier sentenced to the brig.

  ALL MORNING THOMAS has tied himself into a rug of knots over the verdict. Since yesterday he has known that he was sentenced to spend time in the brig. The usual bureaucratic red tape has prolonged his transfer until after lunch, much of which he cannot even look at, much less eat.

  From Keyport the ride in the jeep into the Naval Shipyard at Bremerton is completely silent. While still at the mess hall he caught wind of the rumor circulating at the table across from him that his punishment has already started. Since they pulled out of the main gate, the Shore Patrolman has not looked at him or said a word. He thinks his uneasiness is more a result of Raven’s tricks than any act of the SP. The day is the warmest and brightest it has been all spring. As he walked to the jeep he inhaled several deep breaths of air that told him summer would be a very special event. The miles and miles of silence make him feel like they have been driving through a narrow tunnel. It adds to the way the air now suffocates. Thus the challenge awaiting him at the end of this road forms like spiked clouds on a long flight through a storm. In the Navy a year now, he still cannot fathom why sailors 17 to 70 live in some dream of future glory which is the oldest myth of the military. It is the one thing they use to measure their lives and all the meaning they want from their lives. At least this is what every man on the base has shown him in the last year. Each man looks, talks and acts like everyone else on the base. The image that first came to mind was an army of drone ants marching into the corner. He shuddered when this happened. To him, this prison is far worse than thirty days in the marine brig.

  The Navy SP swerves the jeep into one of the designated parking areas, outside the Marine Brig, and orders
Thomas to get out. They step briskly as they reach the door. While waiting for someone to answer the bell, Cook, the SP, forces a smile, and speaks.

  “This hole’ll be your home for thirty days, Thomas. And buddy, you’d better watch your mouth in this joint. Do your time with your trap shut, until you’re running free. Don’t act the wise-guy. I don’t like your face, Thomas, but I don’t think those hicks from the base were right. You’re a punk, but who isn’t at your age? They went too far. I believe burning a man at the stake’s too much like what I left in Alabama.”

  Thomas wonders why Cook bothers to tell him this. Since they first met they have never liked one another. Cook, a career man with four hashmarks, is a spit and polish sailor married to the idea that blind obedience to orders is the only law. Thomas realized almost immediately after his enlistment that he had made a mistake when he had let his parents talk him into joining up. Because he was under-age, they both had to sign papers before the Navy would accept him. Very confused about what to do with himself at his age, he let his mother and step-father talk him into enlisting. His step-father and mother had already ordered him to move out of the house, when he had stopped his step-father from beating up his mother in a drunken brawl. When he had thrown his stepfather to the ground and held him down that way after saying he better not ever try hitting him again if he wanted to stay in one piece, he knew his life was headed in another direction.

  “You’re not exactly what I would call a friend, Cook, but you’ve never proven an enemy either. So what’s your news?”

  “Well, a few of the guys you tangled with on the base called the brig warden and painted an ugly picture of you. I know for a fact that they told the brig warden he ought to break both your legs. If you got any sense in that thick skull of yours, you’ll be careful. With eyes in the back of your head.”

  “Thanks for the tip, Cook. It’s good to see you haven’t given everything to that tin badge and 45. I may be Indian at heart, but I can appreciate a brother with a tiny bit of soul.”

  Cook laughs and the tension evaporates like water in July.

  “Sure, arrowhead, black’s beautiful—all that jazz—but remember, you better be on your toes with these marines. They don’t play and most are mad-dogs from hell. Being a high-yellow redskin isn’t going to help your ass in the brig. It could even add to the danger. You understand what I’m telling you? Don’t be a goddamn hot-head!”

  Thomas assures him that he knows what they are like in the brig. He has heard a few men tell their own stories of the situation. After a grunt or two, a marine private opens the huge steel door, and the two men enter. Everything glistens in the dim light like an anesthetized tomb. In a room at the end of the brassy corridor, a man with a handlebar mustache sits at a desk. He looks to be checking a record or report and ignores or does not hear the men approach. Cook motions Thomas to stand at attention inside the door as he walks up to talk with the sergeant at the desk: the Brig Warden.

  “Got another one for you, Sergeant. Name’s Young Thomas.” The Sergeant glances at Thomas a moment, without looking at Cook.

  “Yes, we’ve been expecting him, bosun. You can head back to the base; we’ll take care of him real good for you. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  “Right, Sergeant.” Cook turns smartly. In passing Thomas, he slaps Thomas’s arm lightly with his club, and goes out the door. With a quick nod, Thomas acknowledges Cook’s way of saying good luck, but he can’t help wondering if a Black Panther or a Muslim will ever challenge the older man before the State cancels him in retirement. He shrugs his shoulders when he remembers he has never believed in miracles or gods.

  The sergeant glares indifferently at Thomas for several minutes and then returns to the papers on his desk. He grasps a pencil and rolls it back and forth rhythmically between his hands, ignoring the stranger standing like a statue at the door. The sounds Thomas hears are the sergeant’s slow breathing and the pencil striking the different bulky rings on his fingers. From the corner of his eye, Thomas notices the other man swing back in his chair and look directly into his eyes. Thomas almost flinches. Realizing it is the first time the Sergeant has said a word to him, he breathes more evenly.

  “You see that yellow line in front of my desk, boy?” The younger man looks down at the yellow line that the Sergeant is pointing at. “Well, get your ass in front of that line, boy. When I look down again, I sure as hell better not see your shoes touching it. Now move!”

  Looking triumphant, the Sergeant bends forward, flings his pencil on the desk, and begins thumbing through the papers stacked in front of him. He mutters about the fucking rat race he has chosen for himself and how many years he has to count like little sticks of memory before he can retire to his home in Mississippi across that magic Mason-Dixon Line. He mumbles on of the endless duplication of junk and faces, the routine eating away at him like lice. How he would prefer to be any place in the world rather than in this hole.

  Still standing at attention inside the pit, before the Sergeant’s desk and yellow line, Thomas looks straight ahead. His friends have warned him of the prison; the men who run it. He focuses his eyes on a notice tacked to the wall behind the Sergeant’s desk. It reads in bold-face type:

  A Marine has no friends.

  A Marine wants no friends.

  Casually, as if just waking up, the Sergeant lets his eyes drift down to Thomas’s shoes and the yellow line.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Young Thomas.”

  The Sergeant’s jaws flush; grow puffy. He lurches from his chair almost knocking it over. The muscles in Thomas’s face tighten; his eyes thicken; narrow into tiny moons peering from behind a shield of fern. He sways slightly; stiffens his whole body, not sure what to expect from the man closing in. Grandson to Cedar Crow, Thomas feels his fingers change to claws, to a wing of thrashing spirit flying wildly inside his ear. (Be calm and steady now. This man could be your enemy. Know his every move. Break him like a twig if he tries to harm you. Be the Thunderbird of our song. I am Crow, your father.)

  Suddenly, the Sergeant’s short grunts of breath beat his face. Thomas searches for the owl spirit in the eye of the man looming toward him; they are gray and crystalline. Death is not flying in those crystals. He relaxes as the blood returns from his eyes to his feet; watches the Sergeant’s mustache twitch around pock-marks. Words spit into his face, yet the cell remains whole. Owl has not chosen this life.

  “What did you say, boy?”

  “I said, Young Thomas, Sergeant.”

  Nearly uncaged now, the Sergeant pants in a faster rhythm. His well-creased shirt is saturated with large sweat-patches, the wrinkles spread down his chest and arms. He grabs the younger man by the neck, drags him to the wall. Thomas does not resist. A river bird builds a nest at the center of the storm in his heart; his thoughts run for the longhouse of Old Tillicum at Salmon Bay Village.

  Mechanically, the Sergeant slams Thomas’s head against the wall; kicks his shoes together. Reluctantly, he releases the young man’s neck. He shoves him as he steps back. He straightens his tie and wipes his brow to regain his composure; authority.

  “Listen, punk. And listen hard. Down here, morning, noon or night, when a marine asks you to open that idiotic mouth of yours, you remember to say, sir. Sir! SIR! And you little bastard, you’d better not forget it!”

  Carried away by this impulse, the Sergeant grabs Thomas’s head and slams it against the wall again. Apparently satisfied, he returns to his desk and hollers.

  “Did you get that, boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Thomas hears his most pessimistic teachers and friends claim there is nothing but ashes in the forests of the Klallam people. Or nothing of value. Since his grandfather, his first teacher and friend, had dropped among the cedars and pines to become another dead root, he had nearly succumbed to this belief himself, he heard it so much all during his childhood. Although his grandfather, the guardian of his zig-zag path, had died a year earlier,
the quiet man of family, sea and forest had counseled him well. Young was convinced it was his grandfather who made the sunrise and sunset real and at anchor in his heart. Because of this man the seasons would show some promise. Although the ancestral longhouse and fishing village was destroyed long ago by hordes of white settlers streaming into every inch of the land of the Seven Brothers, he had made a covenant in blood to the old ones in his family to wear his grandfather’s feather and path to the grave.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, get your ass in front of that line.”

  The Sergeant leans back in his chair, leaving two hand prints on the glass desktop. The chair squeaks.

  “Who the hell are you, boy? What’d you say your name was?”

  “Young Thomas, sir!”

  “That’s more like it. How old are you, boy?”

  “Eighteen, sir.”

  “Just a goddamn punk, aren’t ya’?”

  (Keep close to the winter fire and winter songs, your family circle; join in the sing, little Crow. Hear the drum and your family songs lessen the weight of the dark.)

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let me hear you say, ‘I’m a fucking idiot, sir.’ ”

  (Little crow, life’ll feel a waste sometime, a flood of wrong paths, an earthquake of mistakes. When this happens, grandson, seek the friendship of your elder brother Courage. Listen for his song. Stay alert for when grandmother red cedar becomes a branch of your shadow. It’s like dying, little crow. It’s like being reborn too. So it was with my grandfather’s life, so it’ll be with your life and your son’s son. Pain’s the father of life but the river’s your mother and night your chosen guardian. Listen to their stories show the way out of the storm.)

  “You’re a . . . I mean, I’m a fucking idiot, sir!”

  The sergeant smiles and chuckles to himself. He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and systematically wipes his forehead and hands, and then continues.

  “Know just what you are, don’t ya’, boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”