One String Guitar

by Mona de Vessel

  I remembered Billy Joe telling me how in Nam they’d used gook against gook, he called it. He said that’s how they were able to get most people. If you tap a tree at its center, the core will rot and pretty soon, the whole thing will come tumblin’ down.

  In the end, I found out that we Oglalas at Wounded Knee were better off than some of the others. Yeah, we’d been robbed of our language, our history, our women, and our children, but many of us still had pieces of ourselves hanging on. Many tribes had been wiped out completely like the Schaticoke in Connecticut, related to the Pequot-Mohican tribes who were raped and murdered in the late 1600s and none of them had anything to remember or recover. They were like ghosts without a ghost keeping ceremony. Wandering souls without a place to go. This was the story of goons. And in the end, we could all go that end if we didn’t build the sacred hoop again.

  **

  Chicanos came to help us. They came from all over the country wanting to be part of la lucha para todos, they said. The fight for all. A medic named Carlos came to work in the clinic with Felicia. He was a young guy like myself. Wore his hair long made him look traditional except for these black framed glasses that made him look smarter than me. I guess he was like the rest of us. I guess he wanted a piece of freedom, but the thought of him staying with my girl all alone at night when I was out in the front line made me want to scream. I didn’t say nothing. Not at first. Couldn’t come down on a brother who was fighting the good fight like the rest of us. Besides, I had no reason to be jealous.

  Sometimes Felicia would talk about Carlos. She’d tell me about how he had cured a boil on Grandma Wasiyun’s leg or how he was able to help out the two Crow dog’s children who were coughing like hell. He was becoming her hero leaving me out in the cold.

  I guess I just feared I was losing Felicia. A girl like that is not made for fools like me. Felicia was prettier than I’d ever seen her. It was as if being here on this free land had turned her into a powerful medicine woman. She wore her hair differently now. Braided on either side of her face, and when she walked she married the earth with her feet.

  The night when Carlos started his shift, she came to see me at the Lil’ California Bunker, she was wearing a long silver ring on her finger in the shape of a buffalo. My heart sank and I thought that Carlos must have given it to her.

  “The pregnant girl Flores gave it to me,” She brought the ring closer to me so I could see it clearly and when I looked again, I noticed that the animal only had one leg.

  “Does it only have…”

  “Yes.” She cut me off.

  “The one-legged buffalo symbolizes renewal. When the buffalo only has one leg left and it is bald and its back is almost bare the world as we know it will come to an end.”

  Something ached inside of me when she said this, a feeling that looked like love and loss all mixed together.

  “No, this is a good thing. When the world reaches its end, a new world is waiting to appear.” Felicia said as if she had read my mind.

  When she talked about the new world in the making I pictured her alone with Carlos curing the world of diseases. The world was free again and Indians were free to be Indians all over the world. She’d be traveling with Carlos and they’d have many children.

  “What are you thinking about baby?”

  “Huh?” She startled me.

  “Nothing.”

  Carlos wasn’t a bad guy. Things got a lot better for me when I found out about his past. The night after the firing started again, we turned out all of the lights at the clinic. Sammy was covering for me at Lil’ California, helping Grey out with the heavy fire the bastards were shooting at us. I’d decided to man the clinic with Carlos, Flores and Felicia, in case anybody got hurt. There was something crazy and good about sitting in the dark in this tiny clinic we’d made our own. This was our free land. The independent Oglala Nation. I was a free man and a warrior living in ION now, and it was my job to make sure we’d stay that way.

  Carlos and Flores had spent the evening cleaning up the clinic as good as they could. Felicia updated the inventory of supplies from the brand new load that came from the Chippewa plane that had landed a couple of days earlier. After a few days on the land, I noticed that Carlos had grown a mustache. He was a strange one this Carlos. His bookworm glasses, his traditional hair and now his Chicano mustache.

  Carlos came from Oregon where he worked as a migrant worker. He spoke in a Mexican accent, rolling his Rs and tossing in a few Spanish words when he couldn’t find the right ones in English.

  “I came when I heard about la lucha. I wanted to be a part of this, you know.” Carlos was a delicate man. His fingers were slender and long like a woman’s. He told us the story of how he’d traveled to Wounded Knee.

  “It took me two weeks to arrive here. On the way, we found many people who opened their homes to us. Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Dominicans. Everybody helped. Gave us food. Somos la raza unida.” Felicia and I nodded. Outside the bullets were whizzing by. I could hear them like insects buzzing in the air. We were used to this. We were used to being under attack.

  “In Montana, the cops stopped us. Searched the car expecting us to be illegals and when one saw that we had papers he said: ‘Aren’t you tired of being a fucking burden on this country?” They let us go.”

  “In Cuerna Vaca, in my village in Mexico, I was a doctor, but I had to leave because they wouldn’t give me a license to practice medicine.” Carlos rolled his eyes in a girlish way and looked in the other direction like a blushing girl. The night after my first jealousy fit about Carlos, I’d started spending time with him. That’s when I noticed his girlish ways.

  “This is not the only reason why they wouldn’t give me a license. They called me puto, carbron, pendejo. All the words that say the same thing.”

  “You are a wikte,” said Felicia, excitedly. Carlos and I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “A wikte is a sacred he/she. A boy/girl person who names the children of the village. We have had wiktes among our people since the beginning of time. You are a sacred man Carlos.”

  Now, I was jealous again. I’d gone from fearing Carlo’s manliness to envying his girlishness.

  The day before, in the large room of the trading post, Carlos had received his ION citizenship like the many other Chicanos. We were brothers of one land, living under the roots of the same tree. Together we would be buried under this tree.

  “When the conquistadors came to our village in 1654, they raped our women and the people of our village and my people were born. We are not indios or Mexicans. We are not whites or mulattos. We are everything. We are the blood of our history. We are Chicanos.”

  Lou came charging into the clinic holding her bleeding hand.

  “Shit, I’m fine but they made me come in here.” She looked embarrassed, holding her wounded hand with the other while her blood trickled onto the ground.

  “Lou, what happened?” Felicia came running up to her and tried helping her sit down.

  “I’m fine. I tell you, I’m fine. I was fucking sitting there in the church when I almost got dusted I guess.” Lou sat down on the ground next to Carlos. She took one look at him and said:

  “What’s wrong with you? You look all sad and shit. You guys been talkin’ about our history or some’ing?” We all laughed. It was a private joke among us. We all knew that the only thing that could get us down was the story of how our people had been treated.

  Carlos wiped the mist in his eyes; tears that had threatened to come when Lou came in. He examined Lou’s hand. Her finger was badly wounded but she’d be fine. The bullet had flown right into the church, bounced off a wall and hit Lou’s finger, taking a chunk from it on its way out.

  “That sucker almost got me dusted!”

  That night was a night we would all remember. Lou went back to her post at the church, one hand wrapped in bandages, the other holding a gun. Lou didn’t give a shit if bullets were flying or not, she was going back and finishi
ng what she’d started.

  “Those bastards are going to pay for it now!” And she left into the night.

  We got word from Broken Arrow posted over in Hawk Eye’s Bunker that Flores’ water broke. She sent her sister to run over to the bunker from the cluster housing project on the northwest end of the camp where most of the local families lived.

  We asked if she could wait a little before she got some help; at least until the fire let up. We waited for a couple of hours, talking, cleaning and preparing what Felicia and Carlos would need to help with the baby. Felicia wanted to go out to the project but it was straight clear on the other side of the camp. I said, “No way. You stay here or I go.”

  In the end, we all waited. At dawn the firing let up a bit and I radioed Broken Arrow and told him we’d be there in about half an hour. The three of us ran out of the clinic like rabbits. The light was pink and soft from the early morning. There was frost on the ground, on the blades of burnt grass. All around us were patches of smoke where the grass was still burning. I hated running out like this with Felicia. I wished she could stay in the clinic. If I had my way, she would have lived in a cocoon the whole time the war was going on. But Felicia was no kind of woman to live contained inside of anything. She was the kind that threw herself out there with danger.

  Smoke rose from the ground giving the place an eerie feeling. Everything was quiet now. I could hear the magpie singing in the distance, taunting me. The good thing about smoke is that it gave us cover from the pigs across the way. Sure is hard to shoot rabbits in the fog. But this was no fog and we were no rabbits so we ran as fast as we could. No matter how you sliced it, you had to run straight into the open fields. We had two choices, both involved risk. We could have run along the ditch on Manderson road to try to protect ourselves from possible bullets, but the ditch ended before arriving at the bunker and we’d be exposed the last one hundred feet or so. This was the shortest way, and I think it was the safest but instead we cut across the massacre site where we thought we had a better chance of being hidden the whole way. It was Carlos’ idea and this fact gave me a little comfort when I later remembered that night.

  “This way!” I heard Carlos say. He was up front, running like the fastest rabbit I’d ever seen. Felicia and I could barely keep up; I kept her between us. I thought if she was ahead of me but behind Carlos it’d give her a better chance of survival.

  “Not that way,” I yelled. “No! Its too long that way. Too long.” I wanted to explain to Carlos that there was no shelter from the bullets in that direction but he didn’t want to hear a word. He was too far and too fast for us to stop him. I heard him in the distance saying something about the smoke from the fields and how this would shield us somehow. Maybe he was right. We’d run past security into the open clearing of the massacre site. I hated every second running through the site. I remembered the pictures from the museum and the piles of bodies lying like bags of sand. Some people in the camp had said they’d heard a woman and child wailing. I remembered how my father used to hear them on the nights he was drunk and I prayed I’d never have that burden.

  The nearest cover was the Whitetail Deer Bunker ahead of us, I was confident we’d make it there, shielded from the smoke of the fire until we reached the building. The load of supplies I was carrying was beginning to cut into my shoulder. I put the load down and changed sides. Carlos was out of sight. I watched Felicia reached the bunker and hide in one of the bushes. She was resting, waiting for me.

  “Where is Carlos?” She asked when I got there.

  “I don’t know, but we should not waste any time and go on.” I told her.

  As she was about to step out of the bunker, a series of shots were fired Felicia and I both gasped at the same time. We thought about Carlos out in the open in the most vulnerable part of the path to Hawk Eye’s Bunker. It was at least another half a mile until we reached the other bunker.

  “We should go get him.” Felicia said visibly alarmed. She was getting ready to run out.

  “We can’t!” I pulled her back into the ditch. “If you go out there, you’ll get killed.”

  “But Carlos needs us!” she cried.

  “What do you want us to do with fucking .22 caliber rifles when they’re going at it with rounds of .30 and .50. We’re no match for them Felicia. We’re no fucking match!”

  I’d never spoken to Felicia like this before. I’d never raised my voice to her. I was still holding her tightly by the wrist. She pulled her hand away and when she did I saw the marks of my fingers still imprinted on her skin. We were like rabbits again, only now we were caged, turning against one another, ready to draw blood. We waited in the dark until the shots had calmed down.

  We ran past the Catholic church into the open space between the Hawk Eye Bunker. The sun was rising now and I hoped that this would discourage the Feds from shooting at us in broad daylight. Their patterns had been to let up by daybreak and take up again by nightfall. I looked into the distance and couldn’t see Carlos anywhere. Maybe he’d make it to the bunker already. Felicia and I kept close to each other. I wanted to be by her side in case we got hit. I could see the Little Big Horn Bunker on our right. I kept on running. My arms were beginning to hurt under the weight of the supplies we were carrying for the delivery.

  Suddenly out of the corner of my eye, I saw him there. Carlos had been shot. He was lying on his side absolutely still. A thin trail of blood flowed onto the grass around him.

  “Carlos! Carlos!” Felicia was crying.

  He was still alive, his breathing labored. He’d been shot in the side, like an elk being hunted. I knelt by his side and wiped his sweaty brow. His body was fighting to stay alive.

  “They got me,” he whispered his voice garbled with pain.

  “Shut up man, save your speech for the stories you still have to tell us.”

  I heard them firing again in the distance. The shots sounded pretty far away. But we were out in the open with no way for protection. Hawk Eye’s Bunker was still quite a way’s away. I could see it in the distance but it was going to be a trek with Carlos’ body to carry. I handed the supplies to Felicia, who was already carrying a bag of meds and medical instruments.

  “You go! I’ll bring him to Flores’ house.” I said to Felicia. For a moment, she hesitated, like she was thinking about staying with me but then she realized there was nothing she could do and she was on her way. I made a quick prayer for her as she ran ahead and I focused my attention on Carlos.

  What if something happened to her? I had a man who was bleeding in my arms and a woman waiting for me to help her bring her baby into the world. I couldn’t get lost in what ifs.

  “OK, man, here’s the deal: you’re going to have to get up. You think you can do that?” Carlos moaned and groaned as I helped him on his feet. The side of his abdomen was bleeding like crazy.

  “Press on it,” he said. “Press on it hard.” And I remembered what Felicia had written on the wall in the clinic. “Bleeding always stops if you press on it hard enough.” He moaned as I pressed on his wound. Carlos wrapped his arm around my shoulders and leaned most of his weight on me. We inched our way to the Hawk Eye’s Bunker and arrived when the sun had risen completely.

  The Cluster Housing Project was a tricky place to live. It was caught between The Last Stand government roadblock on one side and the Hawk Eye Bunker on the other. The project had been hit heavily by crossfire. I saw bullet holes all over the walls as we made our way in. In the afternoons, children made necklaces out of the empty shells left by the crossfire.

  We got inside and the place was dark. Light streaming from the windows but there weren’t too many of those so it was hard to see as made our way up the stairs. Flores’ little brother Rick was waiting for us at the entrance. Flores lived in on the second floor. Carlos wasn’t looking too good. His face had turned all puffy and grey like someone had pumped him up with air. I didn’t know much about medicine but I knew it wasn’t a good sign.

  “Carl
os, stay with me, OK, buddy. Stay with me, you hear?”

  Rick was no more than 16 years old, but he was a strong kid and he helped me carry Carlos inside. We laid him out on the floor of the apartment. He was the medic, but he couldn’t take care of this one.

  Felicia and the other women were in the other room helping out with the birth. Rick, Grandpa Jim, and I got down on the ground next to Carlos. His eyes were closed and he looked like he’d lost a lot of blood. I didn’t know what to do. We removed his shirt and cleaned out the wound with some fresh water and a clean cloth. I saw that the bullet wound was narrow like a slit, like an eye opening and closing. Each time he moved, the eye opened and more blood came out of Carlos.

  “The bullet is still in there. We got to get it out.”

  Grandpa Jim gathered sweet grass and burned it in the four corners of the room. I knew that sweet grass was burned at burials to keep the spirit from tempting his relatives to come with him. Grandpa had filled his pipe with tobacco. He was smoking it and letting the smoke out from his lungs in a circle of life.

  Carlos’ body was no longer moving. I placed my hand on his throat in search of a pulse and found none. Grandpa Jim and the others had already known that Carlos was dead. Everyone knew except me.

  I saw that Grandpa was carrying a sacred hoop symbol made out of a willow frame in the shape of a circle with a cross representing the four winds. He left and came back carrying his pipe.

  In the other room, I heard Flores screaming in pain. She was pushing life out of her body, the way Carlos had pushed the last breath out of his. One end of the circle to another, we were part of the sacred hoop.

  Grandpa Jim handed me a cloth and told me to wrap Carlos in it.

  “One šicun arrives, another one leaves.” He said raising the pipe to the sky. The šicun was our soul energy given to us at birth and returned to the universe at death.

  Grandpa Jim knelt by Carlos’ side and cut a lock of hair from his head. He wrapped it in a piece of cloth and set it aside.