by Anthology
"Oui, oui, oui, oui," says Pierre agreeably. The little piggie. He indicates me and raises his eyebrows one at a time. "Avec le sauvage we can, how you say? Meek a deal."
"Votre mere," I tell him. He gives me a good kick in the ribs and he's wearing those pointy-toed kind of cowboy boots, so I feel it, all right. Finally I hear the sound I've been waiting for, a hoot owl over in the trees behind Ms. Cooper, and then he rides up. He hasn't even gotten his gun out yet. "Don't move," he tells Pierre, "or I'll be forced to draw," but he hasn't finished the sentence when Russell Wilcox has his arm around my neck and the point of his knife jabbing into my back.
"We give you the Injun," he says. "Or we give you the girl. You ain't taking both. You comprendez, pardner?"
Now, if he'd asked me I'd have said, Hey, don't worry about me, rescue the woman. And if he'd hesitated, I would have insisted. But he didn't ask and he didn't hesitate. He just hoisted Ms. Cooper up onto the saddle in front of him and pulled the bottom of her skirt down so her legs didn't show, "There's a little girl in Springfield who's going to be mighty happy to see you, Ms. Cooper," I hear him saying, and I've got a suspicion from the look on her face that they're not going straight to Springfield anyway. And that's it. Not one word for me.
Of course, he comes back, but by this time the Wilcoxes and Pierre have fallen asleep around the cold campfire and I've had to inch my way through the dust on my side like a snake over to Russell Wilcox's knife, which fell out of his hand when he nodded off, whittling. I've had to cut my own bonds, and my hands are behind me so I carve up my thumb a little too. The whole time I'm right there beneath Russell, and he's snorting and snuffling and shifting around like he's waking up so my heart nearly stops. It's a wonder my hands don't have to be amputated, they've been without blood for so long. And then there's a big shoot-out and I provide a lot of cover. A couple of days pass before I feel like talking to him about it.
"You rescued Ms. Cooper first," I remind him. "And that was the right thing to do, I'm not saying it wasn't; don't misunderstand me. But it seemed to me that you made up your mind kind of quickly. It didn't seem like a hard decision."
He reaches across the saddle and puts a hand on my hand. Behind the black mask the blue eyes are sensitive and caring. "Of course I wanted to rescue you, old friend," he says. "If I'd made the decision based solely on my own desires, that's what I would have done. But it seemed to me I had a higher responsibility to the more innocent party. It was a hard choice. It may have felt quick to you, but, believe me, I struggled with it." He withdraws his hand and kicks his horse a little ahead of us because the trail is narrowing. I duck under the branch of a prairie spruce. "Besides," he says, back over his shoulder, "I couldn't leave a woman with a bunch of animals like Pierre Cardeaux and the Wilcoxes. A pretty woman like that. Alone. Defenseless."
I start to tell him what a bunch of racists like Pierre Cardeaux and the Wilcoxes might do to a lonely and defenseless Indian. Arnold Wilcox wanted my scalp. "I remember the Alamo," he kept saying, and maybe he meant Little Big Horn; I didn't feel like exploring this. Pierre kept assuring him there would be plenty of time for trophies later. And Andrew trotted out that old chestnut about the only good Indian being a dead Indian. None of which were pleasant to lie there listening to. But I never said it. Because by then the gap between us was so great I would have had to shout, and anyway the ethnic issue has always made us both a little touchy. I wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard him say that some of his best friends are Indians. And I know there are bad Indians; I don't deny it and I don't mind fighting them. I just always thought I should get to decide which ones were the bad ones.
I sat in that car until sunset.
But the next day he calls. "Have you ever noticed how close the holy word 'om' is to our Western word 'home'?" he asks. That's his opening. No hi, how are you? He never asks how I am. If he did, I'd tell him I was fine, just the way you're supposed to. I wouldn't burden him with my problems. I'd just like to be asked, you know?
But he's got a point to make, and it has something to do with Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. How she clicks her heels together and says, over and over like a mantra, "There's no place like home, there's no place like home" and she's actually able to travel through space. "Not in the book," I tell him.
"I know," he says. "In the movie."
"I thought it was the shoes," I say.
And his voice lowers; he's that excited. "What if it was the words?" he asks. "I've got a mantra."
Of course, I'm aware of this. It always used to bug me that he wouldn't tell me what it was. Your mantra, he says, loses its power if it's spoken aloud. So by now I'm beginning to guess what his mantra might be. "A bunch of people I know," I tell him, "all had the same guru. And one day they decided to share the mantras he'd given them. They each wrote their mantra on a piece of paper and passed it around. And you know what? They all had the same mantra. So much for personalization."
"They lacked faith," he points out.
"Rightfully so."
"I gotta go," he tells me. We're reaching the crescendo in the background music, and it cuts off with a click. Silence. He doesn't say good-bye. I refuse to call him back.
The truth is, I'm tired of always being there for him.
So I don't hear from him again until this morning when he calls with the great Displacement Theory. By now I've been forty almost ten days, if you believe the birth certificate the reservation drew up; I find a lot of inaccuracies surfaced when they translated moons into months, so that I've never been too sure what my rising sign is. Not that it matters to me, but it's important to him all of a sudden; apparently you can't analyze personality effectively without it. He thinks I'm a Pisces rising; he'd love to be proved right.
"We can go back, old buddy," he says. "I've found the way back."
"Why would we want to?" I ask. The sun is shining and it's cold out. I was thinking of going for a run.
Does he hear me? About like always. "I figured it out," he says. "It's a combination of biofeedback and the mantra 'home.' I've been working and working on it. I could always leave, you know; that was never the problem; but I could never arrive. Something outside me stopped me and forced me back." He pauses here, and I think I'm supposed to say something, but I'm too pissed. He goes on. "Am I getting too theoretical for you? Because I'm about to get more so. Try to stay with me. The key word is displacement." He says this like he's shivering. "I couldn't get back because there was no room for me there. The only way back is through an exchange. Someone else has to come forward."
He pauses again, and this pause goes on and on. Finally I grunt. A redskin sound. Noncommittal.
His voice is severe. "This is too important for you to miss just because you're sulking about God knows what, pilgrim," he says. "This is travel through space and time."
"This is baloney," I tell him. I'm uncharacteristically blunt, blunter than I ever was during the primal-scream-return-to-the-womb period. If nobody's listening, what does it matter?
"Displacement," he repeats, and his voice is all still and important. "Ask yourself, buddy, what happened to the buffalo?" I don't believe I've heard him correctly. "Say what?" "Return with me," he says, and then he's gone for good and this time he hasn't hung up the phone; this time I can still hear the William Tell Overture repeating the hoofbeat part. There's a noise out front so I go to the door, and damned if I don't have a buffalo, shuffling around on my ornamental strawberries, looking surprised. "You call this grass?" it asks me. It looks up and down the street, more and more alarmed. "Where's the plains, man? Where's the railroad?"
So I'm happy for him. Really I am.
But I'm not going with him. Let him roam it alone this time. He'll be fine. Like Rambo.
Only then another buffalo appears. And another. Pretty soon I've got a whole herd of them out front, trying to eat my yard and gagging. And whining. "The water tastes funny. You got any water with locusts in it?" I don't suppose it's an accident that I've got th
e same number of buffalo here as there are men in the Cavendish gang. Plus one. I keep waiting to see if any more appear; maybe someone else will go back and help him. But they don't. This is it.
You remember the theories of history I told you about, back in the beginning? Well, maybe somewhere between the great men and the masses, there's a third kind of person. Someone who listens. Someone who tries to help. You don't hear about these people much, so there probably aren't many of them. Oh, you hear about the failures, all right, the shams: Brutus, John Alden, Rasputin. And maybe you think there aren't any at all, that nobody could love someone else more than he loves himself. Just because you can't. Hey, I don't really care what you think. Because I'm here and the heels of my moccasins are clicking together and I couldn't stop them even if I tried. And it's okay. Really. It's who I am. It's what I do.
I'm going to leave you with a bit of theory to think about. It's a sort of riddle. There are good Indians, there are bad Indians, and there are dead Indians. Which am I?
There can be more than one right answer.
CASSANDRA’S PHOTOGRAPH’S
Lisa Goldstein
The best car to smuggle reptiles in is a Subaru station wagon,” Aurora said at the wheel of the car. “Because it’s got four-wheel drive, and great brights so you can see them on the road at night, and because the panels come out easy. So you can hide the snakes and stuff behind them. I’m gonna get one when I can afford it.”
I was sitting in the back seat of the car (which was, unfortunately for Aurora, only an old VW squareback) wondering how things had progressed this far. We had been on our way to get burgers when Aurora decided that, since it was such a nice summer day and everything, we should go down to Mexico and see if we could find some snakes to round out Aurora’s collection. After all, she said, it was only a few hundred miles away. So we made a stop at the corner J.C. Penney’s to buy pillowcases to put the snakes in, and headed out on Highway 5 to Baja California.
Cassie, Aurora’s sister, was sitting up front next to Aurora. Cassie was the reason I was on this trip in the first place. I had noticed her the minute she walked into my class in beginning calculus at the college. Everyone says you shouldn’t date your students, and everyone is probably right, but within a month we were going out two or three times a week. And since I was just the teaching assistant, and not responsible for grades, we had nothing to quarrel about at the end of the semester when Cassie got a C in the class. She didn’t even seem to mind all that much.
I sat still and looked at Cassie’s orange-red hair flying out the window and tried to figure out if there was something I needed to do in the next few days. School was over, so I didn’t have classes. I badly wanted to take out my small pocket diary and flip through it, but I knew what Cassie would say if I did. “Stop being so responsible all the time,” she’d say. “We’re on vacation. Put that book away ”
Lately all our arguments had been about how obsessive (her word) I was, and how childish (my word) she was. She was constantly late, not just once or twice but every single time. I hadn’t seen the beginning of a movie since I started going out with her. So I didn’t say anything when Aurora suggested going to Mexico. I wanted to prove that I could be as open to adventure as the rest of Cassie’s crazy family. It occurred to me that Cassie had to go in to work tomorrow (she cleaned up at a day care center), but I said nothing and looked at her hair, brilliant in the sun. The sight of her hair made it all worthwhile.
“Did you bring the book?” Chris said. Chris was in Aurora’s grade in high school and, like half the class (if the phone ringing day and night was any indication), found it impossible to resist Aurora’s manic energy, her wild schemes. If Aurora was going to collect and trade illegal reptiles then she, Chris, was going to collect and trade illegal reptiles too. The book, The Field Guide to North American Reptiles and Amphibians, had become Chris’s bible.
“No, it’s at home,” Aurora said. “But don’t worry. I know the ones we want.”
On the other side of Chris sat Alan. Alan had said nothing for the past ten miles. Later it turned out that he was deathly afraid of snakes. But he was in love with Aurora, so what could he do? Poor boy. I knew exactly how he felt.
We stopped just this side of the Mexican border for our last hamburger and fries. It was 7:30. “We’re making good time,” Aurora said when we sat down to eat. “We should be at this place I know in a few hours. And we can spend the night driving up and down, and be back by tomorrow afternoon.”
“What about sleep?” I said. Immediately I cursed myself. Someone setting out on the grand adventure wouldn’t think of sleep.
“Who needs sleep?” Cassie said. I thought she looked a little disappointed in me.
“Certainly not you,” I said, trying to make a joke of the whole thing. “Or the rest of your crazy family.”
“What makes you think we’re crazy?” Cassie said.
I thought she was being reasonable. That was my first mistake. I looked across the table at her red hair and brown eyes, both tinted with the same shade of gold, and I started to relax and enjoy the trip for the first time. If I could be with her it didn’t matter where we were going. Anyway her eccentricities were only part of her charm. “Well, you know,” I said. “Your great-uncle, what’s-his-name, the one who thinks he’s an Egyptian.”
“He doesn’t think he’s an Egyptian,” Cassie said. Alan was watching us glumly. Chris drew pictures of snakes on her napkin. “He’s an Osirian. The cult of Osiris. He explained it all to you when you were over at the house.”
“He didn’t explain anything,” I said. “He asked me questions. ‘Knowest thou the name of this door, and canst thou tell it?’ And then the lintel, and the doorpost, and the threshold—”
“You weren’t listening,” Cassie said. She still sounded reasonable. “If you know all the names you can get past the door into the land of the dead. And if you don’t you’re stuck. He’s got to keep all that in his head. It’s a long list.”
“And you don’t think that’s a little strange,” I said. “That he believes all this.”
“Well, what if he’s right?” Cassie said. “I mean, millions of people used to believe in it. Maybe they knew something.”
“Well, what about your grandmother?” I said. “She stays in her room for weeks on end and then she comes out and makes these cryptic utterances—”
“Look, Robert,” Cassie said. Something passed between the two sisters then, something I was too much of an outsider to understand, and Aurora turned to Chris and started talking rapidly. The gold seemed to leave Cassie’s eyes; they became flat, muddy. “Just because you came from a boring home doesn’t give you the right to pass judgment on other people’s families. Okay? I mean, I know your parents belonged to the right kind of religion and had the right kind of jobs and never said anything unusual or anything that would make you think, but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s family is like that. Some of us wouldn’t want to be like that, okay? So you can just keep your stupid opinions to yourself.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean—I was just joking around. I’m sorry.”
Cassie turned away from me to talk to Aurora and Chris. Alan looked at me sympathetically, but I refused to catch his eye.
The rest of the trip was a nightmare. To my surprise we made it past the border guards with no problems. Sometime in the middle of the night we reached the place Aurora had heard about with two snakes we had picked up along the way. Aurora and Chris were ecstatic, I didn’t know why. I’m afraid one snake looks like another to me. Alan, rigid and wild-eyed, was starting to look like a speed freak. We found one more snake, put it in a pillowcase, put the pillowcases in the trunk and headed back. Then Aurora fell asleep at the wheel.
The car swerved, bounced over a few rocks and stalled. Aurora hadn’t woken up. “Aurora?” Cassie said, shaking her. “Aurora?”
“Hmm. Mf,” Aurora said.
We pulled her out and set her in Cassie’s s
eat. I was hoping she didn’t have a concussion. Naturally no one in the car was wearing a seat belt. Cassie drove a few more miles and then said, “God, I’m sleepy,” and came to a dead stop in the middle of the one lane road.
“I’ll drive!” Alan said, a bright note of desperation in his voice. Then he looked over Cassie’s shoulder and leaned back, but not too far back. Ever since we put the snakes in the trunk his body hadn’t made contact with the back of the seat. “Oh. Stick shift. I can’t do it.”
“Look,” I said. “There was a big city just a few miles back. We’ll find a hotel or a motel or something and get some sleep. All right?”
No one said anything. “Do you want me to drive?” I asked Cassie. “Or can you handle it? It’s only a few more miles, I think.”
“Sure, I can do it,” Cassie said. She never stayed angry at anything for long. This always confused me; I come from a long line of grudge-holders.
The city was more than a few miles away, but we made it. Aurora, wide awake now, cheerfully told us about a man who had been bitten by a cobra and was immobilized just as he picked up the phone and started to dial the hospital. In the street outside a seedy one-story hotel we counted our money and discovered that between us we had eleven dollars and ninety-two cents. Wearily I went inside and found to my absolute amazement that they would take my charge card. I motioned Alan inside. We had already decided that the two men would rent the room and we would sneak the three women in later. I wanted as little trouble as possible. As I was stretching out on the floor, prepared to offer someone else the sagging double bed, I noticed Cassie and Aurora come in. Cassie lay on the floor next to me. In my sleep-fogged mind I thought the sacks Aurora was carrying were her luggage.
Cassie and I were the last ones up. We went outside and found the others at a restaurant down the street. None of them, it turned out, knew Spanish, and they had ordered in gestures and pidgin English. Despite all the warnings and jokes, each of them was drinking a glass of Mexican water. I wondered how they thought they were going to pay for the meal.
