City Fishing

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  I could sense it coming, the great harvest. I was scared but could not leave the room.

  Now…the black sky and that silver line. Now I can hear the swish of his great scythe….

  WHEN COYOTE TAKES BACK THE WORLD

  It was two days before the fire wind came that my brother Long Tom, he with the cancer and little time left for talking, he who laughed where I spent most of my days sadly, drew down the serious face over his entire body and said, “Coyote is taking back the world, brother.”

  Then he was silent a time, and would not go to the game hall, or drink beer with me in the old white man’s place down on 43rd Avenue. Nothing I said cheered him, my dying brother, and so we sat together a while thinking about this, letting ourselves return to that childhood where we stalked old washing machines and junked autos in the Oklahoma backwoods, and each day we danced in the dust or swam through seas of blue stem grass. The traffic roar faded into mumblings and the night floated up over our hotel window before my brother spoke again.

  “It is time we told our friends, brother.”

  So I went with my brother down into the city streets, as I had many times before. I did not question how he knew this thing, for my brother has known many things before they happened. And although he has been laughed at by both the whites and our own people, I have kept my speech to myself, and followed him.

  Even as a child, from the first day I jumped down from my mother’s womb, I followed my older brother in everything. I played where he wanted to play; I was angry when he was angry. I remember the day our mother found us playing in one of the ancient dry wallows of the vanished buffalo—my brother liked to think their ghosts still grazed there—she was crying and telling us our grandfather had died and that we were to come home. My brother had been sullen and I tried my best to beat him in sullenness. It was a trait given him by our grandfather, I think; our grandfather was a bitter man. He had lost much to the white man; our family’s rich river bottom land had gone to the mixed blood during the Oklahoma allotment. Over the years he had been reduced to doing seasonal work for the white farmers—strawberries in May, beans in July, cotton in August and September—spending money as fast as he could make it on cars, washing machines and whiskey. For a while he was a fishing guide at one of the lake resorts, a resort built on stolen Indian land.

  My brother Long Tom said Grandfather was a member of the Keetoowah Society, the Nighthawks, the secret club that defied the whites and kept the old ways alive. And I tried to believe this, although I could not remember Grandfather ever leaving the house for any meetings.

  After he died the Indian agent took our land for another resort. He said there was a paper Grandfather had signed, but I never saw it.

  As my brother and I entered the city streets—the poor, run-down ones by the park—I could see there were many people walking. They all seemed to have left their houses, their apartments. Some were gathered around front stoops with radios. The wars in the east had reached a high-pitched madness. There were troubles with the sun. Earthquakes had leveled cities in this country and in other places. Such things had been happening for months, until it seemed everything was falling apart. Everyone seemed to have a favorite theme for the end-of-the-world. With everything collapsing, ending, every doomsayer suddenly seemed prophetic. My brother had Coyote.

  First my brother led us to the City Park, where old Indians sat under the trees and drank cheap wine and talked about many things, many Indian things they knew in their younger days, and for some, many Indian things they had heard about but never seen. Old Hickorytooth was there, his yellowed skin slick with sweat. My brother stood over him a long time before Hickorytooth showed one tobacco-colored eye.

  “Hey, Long Tom,” Hickorytooth whispered, and I noticed new teeth had been broken.

  “Hey, Hickory,” I replied, since my brother wasn’t saying anything.

  Hickorytooth closed his eye and soon I could hear him growling in his sleep. Then the tobacco eye opened again and turned up like a dead fish eye. “Tom?” he said again, and I knew he had decided we were there, and he was scared.

  “Coyote, Hickory,” my brother said, “He’s coming back for it.”

  “Coming back …” Hickory said to his feet.

  “Coming back for the world, Hickory,” my brother said.

  Hickorytooth nodded solemnly. My brother turned, and I followed.

  My brother Long Tom looked like I imagined the Old Ones, like the ancient Cherokee warriors Oconoslota, Doublehead, John Watts—straight black hair to his shoulders, high cheeks and wiry build. He used his hands when he talked, laughing at his own jokes in the Indian way. But he laughed little now. Some Indians say cancer is a white man’s disease—I don’t know. But it changed my brother; in his face I could see that the Ravenmockers were plucking at him, sucking away his remaining years, his skin losing its color and growing so thin I thought I might see through it some day, so that to me he began to resemble one of the dreamed-of Nunnehi, the sacred people.

  The park animals, the pigeons and the squirrels, kept to the edges of the paths this day. Squirrel climbed out on a branch and hailed us with his green eyes.

  “They know,” my brother said. “They wait for us to vanish. Coyote’s coming; they prepare a welcome.” Still, my brother did not smile, and I missed the smile of my brother.

  I was frightened. This look of my brother’s made me believe what he said was true. I began to repeat some of my grandfather’s old chants silently to myself. Now! In front of me Uk’ten’ will be going, spewing flames. Now! In front of me the Red Mountain Lion will be going, his alert head reared. Nothing can harm me! I am dressed as well as the Redbird! I am as manly! I can do as much!

  We walked for some time in the park, my brother not speaking to me, I continuing to follow like some dog. I thought he must be seeking Martin, the Old One. But Martin was not to be seen here, I thought. In the old white man’s bar, I thought, but I could not say this to my brother.

  I tried to think about when we were boys in Oklahoma together, taking the park, trees and shrubs and all, back to that time. It made me feel better. Flinty hillsides and narrow back roads; pine, hickory, and cypress woods, pecan trees; the heat of the day so bad and then the cold at night, drought then flood—the seasons fighting their little wars; long snakes of trees marking the riverbeds; bright blue-painted sky, rich cinnamon clay; blue stem grass in the spring so thick and slow-moving, light green with the wind, dark green against it, reddish-brown in summer, purple and copper in Fall. In storms the air so full of sparks the horns of the cattle would glow. Small birds juggled like balls in the roaring wind. Grandfather used to say not to worry if you lost your hat; you could always grab the next one blowing by.

  There would be no more such times. Grandfather was dead with the old stories, the old life. All that was left for me of the tribe, the Lost Cherokees in the stories, had been passed into my brother. Only his tongue could spell for me the right words, the secret names of my people’s dreams. I knew no one else. But Long Tom, oh my only brother, was dying.

  We used to play spaceman and alien, cops and robbers. One day I wanted to be cowboy against his Indian and he cracked my head with a stone. Silly. We Cherokee were cheated, killed, decimated on The Trail Where They Cried, our culture virtually wiped out in courtrooms and legislatures after that. But what does that mean now? Who could continue to be angry about such things, such a long time ago? You complain so much, how terrible it is—A-sga’-si-ti! Mean!—you complain again and again until you begin to sound comical, even to yourself. You begin laughing about yourself, and then crying, for the past cannot be changed. You can hate yourself that way.

  The hatred there—the whites had no right!—it makes you sick. For a long time after my grandfather’s death and we had been forced to leave the farm—my mother drinking herself to death, my father leaving for new work in Denver and never coming back—I had these violent, shameful dreams. The world blew apart because I wished it so. People were d
ying, smoking and burning. The great dragon Uk’ten’ from our Cherokee legends circled the world and made it disappear piece by piece, city by city with his terrible breath. Soon only Uk’ten’ was left, smiling his reptile smile. And I’m ashamed to say I was glad. In my dream I was glad.

  My brother Long Tom had never made any secret of his bitterness. He would never forgive. I used to think he must be pretending, that his imagination had gotten the best of him—how could he feel such bitterness? But my brother was honest; he wore his dreams on his face.

  The wind had come suddenly warm and I was chilled by it.

  My brother stopped and turned into the trees bordering our path. He approached one gnarled, ancient oak and stopped before it. Then he walked around the tree. Martin leaned up against the other side, sleeping.

  Martin opened his eyes and looked past my brother. He was an old man, his white hair, his pale, disappearing face lined with stories—already half-ghost, already on his way to the Other Side Camp. He spoke like a wind breaking ice in ponds I remembered. I was eight, and had been frightened of the sound. Like bones breaking. The dead ones singing how lonely they are, and wanting your company.

  “Coyote …” my brother said.

  “I know this,” Martin replied. “He is finally coming. He will be with us again.”

  “He will take it all back.”

  “But it is his,” Martin said. “It is his to take. He made it from the bit of mud the grebe gave him. He spread it around over the sea and made the earth. He heard the wolf and the wolf came to be. He made the Indians and spread them around so they would be in many places. He picked up the medicine stones and they became buffalo. It is his right; these things are his to take back.”

  “I know these things,” my brother said, and I heard some anger in his voice. “We must be ready. The animal people are ready. So we must be ready.”

  “And the Strange Ones? The other Old Ones?” Martin asked softly.

  “Coyote will cast them out. He has told me of this.”

  I stared at my brother. For a time I stared as the two men talked, not understanding what they were saying. My brother did not seem simply my brother then.

  We left Martin and started back across the park. I had no idea where we were going, but I was content to follow.

  “The Strangers, the other Old Ones … who are they brother?” I asked him.

  My brother smiled for the first time that day. “Some say they are what are left of the Old Animal People, the giant animal people, who took on the disguise of the human beings a long time ago. Others think they are magicians from some other place.”

  “Aliens? You mean people from other worlds?”

  Long Tom shrugged. “I do not know. It does not matter. They will be unimportant in the end.”

  “But they … change?” I asked, feeling suddenly agitated, watched. I looked back into the woods we had just left.

  “We all change; we are all shape-shifters,” he said, and would not answer any more of my questions.

  But I remembered a time when I was ten. We both were begging in restaurants and bars for food and money; we never seemed to have enough. One day in a bar my brother pointed an old man out to me. The man had very dark eyes, and grayish skin—as if he had been very sick for a long time, as if his guts were all twisted up and infected inside him. “That one …” my brother said, “is Snake.” And I looked again at the man, and I could see the snakeness of him, the reptile. I tried not to think of it. “He’s not a good one,” my brother said. “But maybe he’s closer to Indian than these whites are.” The coldness in my brother’s voice scared me badly. There were beings in the world not human. I wanted to know more, but could not bring myself to ask.

  “Coyote comes …” my brother whispered to some old Indians on their front steps. Most of them laughed and made fun of my brother, but a few nodded quietly.

  The wind was warmer still, and I felt as if my thoughts were smoking. Long Tom walked barefoot on the hot pavement, steadily, with no apparent discomfort.

  My brother walked into the old white man’s bar. And I followed. Looking everywhere for the human beings who were not really human beings, but Strangers, Old Ones, aliens, stumbling over my own feet looking. Yet still I followed him into the bar, wondering what would happen next.

  “Coyote is coming to take back the world,” he said once he reached the center of the room. He said it loudly, for all to hear.

  The white men stared at him. A few of the Indians laughed. The white man who ran the bar continued to wipe off the counter with a heavy scowl burnt into his face. He wore a white apron. His arms were large.

  “Coyote is coming,” my brother said, and one of the young Indians spat. A steelworker. Like many Indians—dancing like foxes on the high perches—a steelworker for the white man. He stood up and walked over to my brother, and looked him in the eyes.

  “You’re drunk, Indian,” he told my brother. “Why do you talk about Coyote? Old women tell of Coyote. Why do you talk about that mangy old dog?”

  “Coyote made this world,” my brother said. “He took mud from the grebe’s beak after all the other ducks had failed. He spread it over the waters with his feet. He discovered wolf there, and buffalo. He found a star person who became tobacco. He created the human beings. This all belongs to him.”

  The Indian smiled. “Crazy Indian,” he said. “Did he make the bombs they’re dropping over in Russia? Did he heat up the sun? Did he shake his ass and make the earthquakes? Crazy Indian … we don’t need Coyote to do these things. We do them ourselves.”

  Long Tom walked to the bar and stood facing the bartender. “The Old Man Above, Yo-he-wah, made Coyote disappear. No one knows where. Coyote killed the evil spirits and the monsters and did many other things, but when he finished the Old Man made him disappear. No one knows where. Then when earthwoman is old, they say, Old Man and Coyote will come back and change things, take back what they have given.” Several men laughed but Long Tom ignored them. “When they come all the dead will walk with them; they will leave the Other Side Camp. Earthwoman will become as she was before.

  “We have waited for Coyote a long time now. But the waiting will soon end.”

  “I don’t serve no drunk Indians,” the old white bartender said. “Get outta my place.”

  Then my brother did a strange thing. He began to laugh.

  I was frightened. After such a long time, to see laughter splitting his face, his face like a hard, sun-dried melon, splitting into smiles, chuckles, horse laughter, my brother slapping his knees and doubling over. The men in the bar stared at him. Then one by one they began to rise.

  Long Tom turned to them and continued to laugh. He slapped them with his laughter; he lashed them. He heated their faces and blisters began to form at their lips and around their eyes.

  The white man’s bar where my brother and I had drunk beer night after night in the city summers fell down, somersaulting into the street, lifting up its arms in pleading to the sun. And all the other old buildings in the street—the boarding house hiding the ghosts of the white miners, the ancient whore house now a drugstore on the corner, the place where the Chinamen were killed—all of them fell to their knees and shook out their hair wailing at the skies.

  And the sky flipped over and dragged its tongue down the street.

  And the trees climbed out of their holes and leaped at the people.

  And I moaned in fear and despair as my brother held me.

  And when my brother and I climbed out of the broken arms of the white man’s bar, we were alone, and earthwoman had pulled up her nightdress to cover the broken faces of the city.

  There were balls of fire in the dark eyes and mouths of the city. There was emptiness in the streets.

  “The white men?” I asked my brother softly.

  “Coyote has covered them with their fancy clothes: their towers and townhouses. He has played a good joke on them, I think. A few are left … he will play with them later.”

>   “The Strange Ones?”

  “You hear them, brother.” I heard a scrabbling and a murmuring beneath the rubble.

  And out of the broken-backed buildings, the crippled houses, came the dark shapes of these others, resembling the giant animal people of the old times, having left their human being suits back in the dust. But who could say what they were—aliens or the old animal people or something else? Who could tell?

  A face like Raven’s, his head dark and slick, his yellow beak snapping, floated by my head and around the corner where two walls cried on each other’s shoulder. I drew cold up through my tattered boots and it curled into a ball inside my belly.

  A tail swung above the ruins across the street, large and broad like Coyote’s canoe paddle, and Beaver thundered by, slapping the street and stirring up the dust.

  A giant yellow eye blinked once above my head, twice over my shoulder, and Crow spread his wings and knocked the crying walls down.

  Fox ate the bricks and mortar from the sidewalks. Deer leaped into the pockets of fire and sang. Squirrel tumbled and played in the piles of broken glass.

  And my brother laughed and laughed and laughed.

  “Are these the animal people?” I asked my brother.

  “Watch.” He pointed down the darkened street, where several of the animals had gathered.

  Indians—some whom I knew, some whom I did not—were crawling out of the ruins and staggering to their feet. And as they walked into the street the animal people were grabbing them, striking them, and leading them to a place where they were bound. The animal people spat on them, called them dirty. They forced many of the Indians to work on a wall built out of rubble and twisted metal.

  “A stockade. A camp,” my brother said beside me.

  I saw Old Martin slapped by Fox, then shoved to the ground. I witnessed Hickorytooth being stabbed several times by Porcupine. He lay bleeding in the street, the animal people trampling him as they began herding their prisoners into the stockade.