I got out of town as fast as I could and headed straight north on a country blacktop. It didn’t take long for my eyes to get used to the dark. The cornfields whizzed by.
I could have been uptight about a lot of things, if I wanted to. The bike wasn’t reliable, I was driving with no license, there was no headlight, I might run into a county lawman, and so on. The Pine Ridge Reservation was 800 miles away and I only had forty dollars in my pocket.
But I wasn’t uptight at all; in fact, I was the opposite, which I guess would be ecstatic. I was free, like a bird, with the current carrying me. I was Charly Black Crow, and destiny was just ahead.
CHAPTER NINE
The fourth day of my hanblecheya was amazing. I went into a completely new mental zone, where all my emotions were numb; I didn’t care what happened to me, but I didn’t not care, either. I was awake, but I wasn’t thinking; my mind was like a receiver.
Maybe it was from being so hungry and so tired. Maybe that was the idea of the hanblecheya, to break you down, so you were ready to receive your vision. Anyway, I just sat there like a stone, more or less. I saw pictures without thinking; my brain was like a screen for somebody’s slide show. This was not a head I tried to get into; trying had nothing to do with it.
I crawled out of the cave and up on top of the mound, where I just eased down into the pine-needle carpet. It was almost like I wasn’t there, I was just part of what was already there. I don’t think words can really describe it.
I saw the Stone Boy legend complete. The pictures just came into my brain, real slow, one after another. I couldn’t tell if I was watching him or if I was inside of him.
Stone Boy tracked his ancestors to the savage hunting ground of Iya, the Evil One. The Evil One sent showers of boulders, but Stone Boy dodged them all. Then the thundering herds of the Buffalo People came, but Stone Boy ran them into the sea, where they drowned.
Then Iya took the form of the ferocious serpent tree. Every limb was a huge serpent. Stone Boy hacked away serpents with his spear, but new ones grew in their place. Bigger ones, and more of them.
Stone Boy limped back to the hovel of Old Woman, who gave him food and shelter. She gave him a small, broken mirror and told him to take it with him to fight Iya. But Stone Boy laughed; he had a strong shield and a sharp spear. What good would it do to have a mirror?
The next day he cut away more serpents, but again they grew back. And the day after, the same. Stone Boy realized that destroying the serpent tree meant more than destroying something Iya sent; it meant destroying the Evil One himself. Understanding this made him very discouraged. He couldn’t deal with defeat because he was used to the successes that come to a hero.
That night, Old Woman said again, take the mirror. So he did. He went the next morning to the serpent tree, carrying the mirror. He held it up to the tree and one of the serpents devoured itself; it shriveled down into a small, dead twig. Then another, and another. Stone Boy danced around the huge tree, holding up the mirror; he watched one serpent after another devour itself until the whole tree was only a small, dead stump.
It was amazing. Stone Boy laughed. With Iya destroyed, all the ancestors returned to life. They rose from the dead, and there was a huge celebration.
The same pictures of the Stone Boy legend kept passing across my brain, in the same order. The pictures were clear and consistent.
After that, I guess I went to sleep. Or half asleep, maybe dozing in and out. I kept having these dreams about the Stone Boy sequence, only everything was distorted. The serpent tree was now The System, and the serpent faces were replaced by the faces of Mrs. Grice, Mrs. Bluefish, Mr. Saberhagen, Mrs. Greene, and Mr. Wagner.
I kept rolling over, awake and asleep. I wanted to wake up for good, but I didn’t have the strength. The dream was nasty, and I didn’t want it. Stone Boy hacked away the serpent head of Mrs. Lacey, but Mrs. Greene grew in its place. All their faces and you couldn’t cut them out, no matter how hard you tried. I had this terrible headache and I wanted to wake up because the dream was bad; but I couldn’t stay awake and I couldn’t sleep in peace.
I don’t know how long it went on. When I finally came to, I was back in the cave, right at the mouth; I didn’t remember going in there, though. Donny Thunderbird was holding my arm, and I could smell burning sage. Since Donny was crouching right at the cave’s entrance, he was mostly a silhouette, with bright blue sky behind him.
He was asking me if I was okay and could I sit up. When I finally did sit up, he helped me scoot out into the light. I was so weak, I felt like a baby; I was all plastered with sweat. I could hear Delbert Bear’s chanting voice. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was up on top, burning sage and chanting to Wakan Tanka.
Donny had some soupy mash in a thermos. It was mostly rice, with little scraps of chicken mixed in. I ate six or eight spoonfuls. It tasted delicious, but it gave me a low-level stomachache. Then he gave me a thermos of tea, which was lukewarm, about room temperature.
“I wish it was iced tea,” I said.
“A drink with ice in it would be bad for you. It would give you a headache.” He was rummaging in my backpack. He got out my blue jeans.
“If you feel like you’re up to it,” he said, “I’ll help you put these on.”
I remembered I was naked. “I’m up to it,” I said. Then I had my pants on.
He gave me some more to eat, but slowly. He told me I should be real proud for lasting the whole four days. The food was delicious, but it was giving me this warm, dizzy feeling. I guess it might have been a little like getting drunk, but I’ve never been drunk, so I really wouldn’t know.
I probably had another half pint of the food before Donny took it away. Then I drank some more of the tea. I asked him if we were going back now and he said, “Not yet; you’re not ready.”
“Are we going back to the sweat lodge?”
“Not the sweat lodge. We’ll go back to the tipi in the village.”
“Your sister will be there,” I said.
“Right. She’ll give you some more of this gruel, if you feel up to it.”
“How soon are we going?”
“There’s no hurry. Delbert has a lot more sage to burn.” While Donny was talking to me, he was gazing out across the hills. You could see so far. I wondered what he was thinking about.
After about half an hour, we walked all the way down to the village. It took a long time because being real shaky on my feet, I had to stop and rest every once in a while. Donny helped me walk, but Delbert wasn’t much help at all. Besides being a little drunk, he was mostly interested in doing the chanting and burning the sage.
When we finally made it to the tipi, Donny’s sister gave me some chicken soup. She said to me, “Congratulations.”
I told her thank you, though I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to say. I took a long time eating the soup, and I also drank a lot of water. I was feeling a lot better, but still somewhat shaky.
After that, Donny drove me down the mountain in the pickup truck. He took me on down to that tipi in the campground where I started out the first night. He asked me if I needed anything but I told him no, I would be fine. Exhausted, I fell asleep in the tipi.
It must have been a long nap because the sun was low when I woke up. I walked over to the shower house and scrubbed down under a hot shower, working up about a ton of lather. During my soap-down, I started thinking about the vision quest. It could have bummed me out, though, and the shower was making me feel like a new man; I managed to put the thoughts out of my mind.
After that, I did my laundry in this Laundromat up by the tourist shops. I was real hungry. While my clothes were in the machine, I bought two Kit Kat bars and a Pepsi. I sat on the porch in front of the building, munching and drinking. I was beginning to feel my stomach returning. Even though it was getting dark, lots of tourists were milling around. After being on the hanblecheya for four days, it was sort of nice having people around, but I was glad I didn’t have to talk to any of them.
When all my clothes were done in the dryer, I went back to the tipi and folded them up neatly in my backpack. I sat on the riverbank for a while, watching the stars come out and feeling numb; it was a mystical kind of feeling, which lasted quite a while. It was bittersweet, I guess you might say.
I had a good night’s sleep in the tipi, with no tossing and turning and no dreams.
I got up early the next day. It was a beautiful, clear morning, slightly cooler. I went around for a while picking up litter in the campground, such as Pepsi cans and cigarette packs. Could you believe these slobs who couldn’t even control themselves in a place of such natural beauty?
I threw all the trash in a barrel and went up to the coffee shop, where I bought a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a jelly donut. Then I walked back down to the riverbank. The gooey food tasted great, but I hardly had time to finish it before Donny came by in the pickup. He said the chief wanted to talk to me now. “He wants to interpret your vision,” Donny said.
The interpretation of the hanblecheya led by a tribal elder is the final part of a vision quest. This had to be a moment of high honor: The chief himself was going to act as my interpreter.
Donny asked me, “Are you ready?”
I didn’t feel like I was, not really, but this was the chief calling. “I guess I’d better be,” I said. Then I added, “I need to get my backpack first.”
When we got to the trailer, Chief Bear-in-cave greeted me at the door. He asked me if I was feeling well enough to have a little talk. I said sure.
We would be sitting at the kitchen table again. He got down to search for something in a low cupboard. You could see him wince a little bit. Maybe it was pain from arthritis or some kind of injury, but the thing you knew for sure was, he wouldn’t complain.
It turned out what he was rummaging around for was a leather pouch, which he put on the table. Before he took his own seat, he asked me if I cared for some tea. I told him no thanks. He congratulated me for sticking out the whole hanblecheya. “I think you are a young man of honor,” he said. “I thought so on the first day we talked.”
I felt proud, but I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. Then the chief picked up the pouch and he asked me, “Do you have your Dakota pipe?”
“It’s in my backpack,” I told him.
“We should smoke it now.”
I got out the pipe and handed it over. Chief Bear-in-cave fingered it and eyeballed it from his good side. I guess he approved of it, because he started packing the bowl. He lit it up and puffed a few times to get it going, then passed it over. As he did, he told me if I had a vision, he would like to hear about it.
I took a drag; I don’t know what we were smoking, but it sure wasn’t willow bark. I started by telling him, “I almost quit on the second day. I almost gave up and came back down.”
“Let’s hear about it,” he said.
So I summed up the bad day when I figured out my “destiny” was more or less phony.
“Why do you say phony?”
“Because it’s like a mind game. I’ve been using the destiny to try and make up for several years of getting jerked around.”
The chief didn’t say anything right away. He shook his head, then walked slowly across to the stove to pour himself a cup of tea. When he got back into his seat, he shook his head again and passed me the pipe. “Perhaps there’s nothing wrong at all with your destiny. Perhaps the only wrong is wanting it all at once.”
I asked him to explain.
“Trying to grab a destiny is like trying to grab water from the river with your fist. It doesn’t work. Do you understand?”
“Not completely,” I admitted.
“The grand thing about a destiny is that you learn it bit by bit, the way you learn a river. You love the Dakota and the values of the Dakota. You might say that’s how the destiny begins. That’s what puts you on the river, in your boat. Right now, you understand only part of your destiny. The rest will come to you.”
“But how will I know the rest?”
“By letting it come to you. By not trying to grab it. Four days ago, you quoted Black Elk to me, now I will quote Black Elk to you.” He broke into one of his wide, toothless grins. “Black Elk says, ‘Make your mind clear and open like the big sky.’ You have a set of values, now let your destiny unfold.”
It was plenty to think about. But from us doing so much talking, the pipe was out; the chief was lighting it with a match. He said, “What you’ve just told me about is not a vision. To use your word, it’s a funk.” He was all of a sudden laughing and slapping his knee.
It was altogether funny, just looking and listening to his style. I couldn’t help laughing, too.
He regrouped and said, “I don’t know what a funk is, but I’m sure it’s not a vision.”
When I was done laughing I said, “I think maybe the last few hours was the vision.” I told him about the mental zone I went into and the clear pictures of the Stone Boy legend that came to me.
The chief listened real carefully to the whole thing. When I was finished he said, “Stone Boy defeated Iya by using the mirror given to him by Old Woman.”
“That’s the way it came out,” I said.
“And some day soon you’ll write it all down.” It didn’t sound like a question, but I knew it was.
“Sure I will,” I answered. “It’s what I do best.”
“I’ll tell you this much,” said the chief. “It’s the best Stone Boy tale I’ve ever heard.” Naturally, this remark made me proud.
“I’ve been working on the Stone Boy legend a long time,” I told him.
“And yet you saw it complete when you didn’t work on it at all. When you let it come to you.”
“That’s true,” I said. It wasn’t hard to see what he was getting at.
Apparently the chief felt we needed to smoke another bowl, because he was repacking and relighting. “This sounds like the real thing, doesn’t it?” he said.
“I guess so.”
“You were Stone Boy?”
“I felt like I was. I had a dream about it afterward. It was more like a nightmare because I couldn’t wake up to make it stop. The serpent tree, Iya, was the system of social workers and specialists. Houseparents and psychologists. Their faces were like the serpent branches, and they couldn’t be destroyed.”
“The system is a monster.”
“It’s like a monster, with a life of its own. It just jerks you around and runs your life. You don’t have any control of your own life, the system has it all.”
The chief took a long drag. He said, “Yet Stone Boy did have the power, did he not?”
At this point I looked down. “It’s true. He had the power when he trusted Old Woman.”
The phone rang then. It was a wall phone in the kitchen, so it was on the fourth ring before the chief, still moving slowly, got there. He said “Yes” into the receiver, then he didn’t say anything at all for about sixty seconds. When he said “Yes” the second time, he hung up.
He came back with his index finger raised. “I have this thought,” he said. “Because of his miraculous birth, Stone Boy was half stone, but not all stone. The other half was flesh.”
“In other words, the other half was human.”
“Mmmm. Tell me something. The serpent tree is the system that has troubled your life. But who is Old Woman?”
I didn’t even have to think, I just blurted it out: “Old Woman is Barb. My social worker.”
The chief didn’t say anything, he just nodded his head a few times.
After a pause I said, “You’re saying I need to put my trust in her.”
“Is it what I’m saying, or what you’re saying?”
“I’m the one who had the vision, so I guess I’m the one saying it. When Stone Boy stopped fighting on his own and put his trust in Old Woman, that’s when he finally succeeded.”
After that, we were quiet for a long, long time. In fact, we didn’t say anything for all the tim
e it took to smoke the rest of the pipe. I was real happy about sticking out the hanblecheya, and having an authentic vision, and having Chief Bear-in-cave there to help me interpret. But I had the downside also, because I could see the conclusion we were headed for, though we weren’t saying it out loud.
Finally the chief said, “Would you like to talk to your social worker?”
“Barb? Is she here?”
“She’s not here now. But she’s on the way.”
“She is? When is she coming?”
“I’m not sure. I talked to her on the phone. She said she would come as soon as she could.”
That was a thought. She was driving up herself. She could have just notified the local cops to take me back. “I think I’d like to talk to her,” I said.
“That would be a good thing,” the chief agreed.
When I left the chief’s trailer, I walked to the mechanic shop, hoping to find Donny. I had an idea. I was in luck: I found him sharpening some mower blades.
He asked me how my session with the chief went.
“Good,” I said. “He gave me a lot of food for thought. To tell you the truth, though, I can’t get it out of my head that this was a screwup.”
“How so?”
“Taking off like I did, to become an Indian. Stealing Nicky’s bike, leaving Barb in the lurch. You know what I mean?”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. If somebody put me in the looney bin, I’d probably do the same thing. Or maybe even something worse.”
“It wasn’t just the looney bin. That was what you’d call the last straw. I feel real bad about taking Nicky’s bike. Even though he didn’t take care of it, it’s still his.” Then I wondered when Barb was coming. Chief Bear-in-cave only said she was coming; he hadn’t said when. Without any warning, I found myself anxious to see her.
Donny said, “Don’t forget, you completed the hanblecheya. Something good always comes from that.”
I couldn’t argue with him. I couldn’t be negative about one of the most honored traditions of Dakota life.
Donny changed the subject. “I have to drive to town to get some stuff; would you like to go with me?”
Dakota Dream Page 12
