Sacred City

by Theodore C. Van Alst

  “Wait,” he says. “What’s going on with you two?”

  “Nothing,” we reply.

  He takes a sip of his beer, laughs a little.

  “I don’t believe that for a minute,” he says.

  “For real, homes,” I say. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well,” he says, “You guys are—”

  “Are what?” the GL asks.

  “Yeah, what?” I add.

  “Do you guys know each other?” he says.

  “Yeah, we do,” I say. “Kinda.”

  “But not in a good way,” the Crow says.

  “Yeah,” says the GL.

  “So are you guys . . . enemies, or something?” the Crow asks.

  “Nah,” we say. “Well, yeah,” we each go, almost in sync.

  “So are you two gonna fight or something?”

  I look at him, the anticipation on his face, its voyeuristic flavor starting to piss me off.

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  The Gaylord looks me up and down.

  I give him the one-eyebrow raise.

  “Nah,” he says, to both of us.

  “But you would. You could?” the Crow throws in.

  “We could,” I say, looking at the GL, returning the up-and-down.

  “We could,” he echoes back, tryna stare me down, now.

  “But we probably won’t,” I say, staring back.

  The Crow offers, “But if we were in Chicago—”

  “But we ain’t,” I cut him off, all these buts making me uncomfortable.

  The uncle jumps in. “Knock it off, alla ya’s.”

  “No problem,” his nephew says.

  “Yeah, no problem,” I say. “We’re cool.” The guitar riff from “I Heard the Owl Call My Name” plays in my head, and I try to imagine explaining a humbug with some out-of-town GL to my department head out on the East Coast from the pay phone in a Minneapolis jail. “We’re cool,” I repeat.

  But we’re not. The more we drink, the more we talk about our old neighborhoods and tell old stories, the tenser it gets.

  I bring up Spy. I can’t help it.

  “You guys should be ashamed of yourselves. That wasn’t right,” the GL says. “A sword? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Hey. Necessity is the mother of invention.”

  He looks me up and down, squints, pretty drunk right about now.

  “That don’t make it right, Royal,” he says.

  “It is what it is, Folks,” I say, pretty drunk my damn self.

  It’s what boys do and men shouldn’t do, this cockfight drama born of pressure and impulse. We grow out of it as long as the night is dry, but if you’re a gangbanger, well, that presents a different set of rules that apply themselves at usually inopportune moments, even if you’re two cities from home. And if you’re in a city anywhere, you’re never far enough from home.

  As I sit here wondering what necessity might need me to invent and I feel that ability slip out of my increasingly drunk grasp, my Crow buddy slides into my field of vision, teeth at the lead.

  “What now?” he whispers.

  “Hunh?” I manage back.

  “Are you guys going to fight, or what?” he continues with the low talk. I think, man, this guy needs to clean his glasses.

  “Dude. I think that’s his auntie there too, having a beer. What’s wrong with you?” I say.

  “I don’t know. Well, you know–”

  “Yeah. You don’t know. So you should drop it.” His shit is really starting to bug me.

  “I just think it’s crazy you guys would fight about . . . whatever it is you would fight about,” he says.

  “Me too,” I say, “but that’s how it is.”

  He wants to know more. He’s a scholar after all, and that’s how it works. My mind races, preps up a five-minute minimum diatribe on turf and blood feud and revenge and how gangbanging replaces a lost sense of family, how it provides coming-of-age ceremony, particularly for those whose tribal customs have been largely erased through urban relocation, how it’s a form of hunka, of relative making, of belonging and neo-tribalization, but I don’t.

  Because I’m so

  tired.

  And I want to say that it’s because he looks like Goof, who’s rotting away in a prison somewhere, life wasted, or that I have some kind of blood memory of the Anishinaabe relocation program forced on my Lakota ancestors in some kind of twisted way that forgets my own Ojibwe ancestry, or that I’m losing myself somehow to another government program designed to assimilate us, this time into academia, a state apparatus, my colonized self out here professing to know a thing or two in the world.

  But I’m not.

  “Let me by you a drink, Peoples,” I say.

  I’m saying goodbye to my youth.

  “Sure, Folks,” he says.

  Just not forever.

  15.COYOTE DRINKS

  We drink long and deep in the heart of Blackfeet territory. Well maybe, maybe not their territory, but still territory they liked to claim they at least walked through. On their way to do some dark shit to a tribe we just won’t name. But they know who it is.

  It’s me and the Poet Laureate of Baa’oogeedí. I’m not the anything of anywhere, just the chronicler of this shit right here. But if I had to be something, it might be the Scribus Bacchus of any place around the corner in your neighborhood.

  We don’t have any of our Blackfeet guides with us, and we’re on our own out here in some shitbird town west of the world. Fuck. We don’t even have our Kootenai guide with us, the one who would get puffy when his white friends were around. It’s dark and still warm outside. We find our way to the Gold Doubloon, or the Wooden Nickel, or the something or other. It’s been a good night. A good night to get out of the bougie bar where we had been getting those stares earlier. Usually it’s not a big deal. But some nights, well, fuck that.

  The poet grabs a couple of seats in the back, by the jukebox. We talk about how we’re gonna stuff that motherfucker, play six hours of Prince and just get fucked up. But we don’t. Okay. Maybe five bucks worth only. But still. All Prince.

  I decide we need some drinks, and quick. I head up to the bar. The scary bartender, the bullet in a T-shirt, hair skinned right off down to the eyebrows, he remembers me from some time before, says, Hey, what’s up. Scary-faced tattoos wink at me under the too-close neon. I’m like cider, man, with a big glass of ice and a gin and tonic. You laugh, but cider is good, and one of my bros, he tells me the Irish say if you drink it, your feet won’t stink. Well, yeah. Ain’t nobody wants stinky feet.

  The Bullet, he grabs up a pint glass from under the bar. It’s a frosty bastard, and I’m thinking alright. This’ll be a good drink. But it ain’t for me. Shit. He fills it full of ice and almost to the top with gin. Waves the tonic gun at it. Hahahaha, fuck. Gonna be some poetic blackout tonight. I get my kinda dumpy definitely unfuckingmajestic glass of ice, no frost, but maybe a ash or a fruit fly in there, fill it up, chug what’s left in the bottle, and leave the empty on the bar, low and slow fiction writer headed back to our table, weak enough to be a designated driver for someone who gives slightly less of a shit than I do.

  Me and the poet, we talk. ’Bout all kinds of shit. This good night had been a good day, had been that one day in the fall when the leaves change just right and you look down the long street and that light looks like it’s coming from below instead of above, the golds and the reds rising up from the road and floating up into the dark green of the trees, the canopy close but the light pushing you up with it as far as you can imagine, and you don’t feel hemmed in, you don’t feel like someone else’s weight is on your neck, and you can see and feel and breathe all at the same time, and that light that washes over your eyes and into your heart, the light that flicks along the edges of your soul and fills all the tears and the gouges? That’s the light you don’t get to see too often so you fucking say hello to it the day it shows up.

  We’re saying our h
ellos to those kinds of days and talking about nights we missed, nights we’d never know here, but nights we knew from certain places in Arizona and South Dakota. We’re maudlin in our love for those places and thirsty for those stories, and we drink and drink, and that certain light, that one kind of light is with us, light that could be seen in other spaces and by other faces. We know that as we lift those words and stories into the air and we can see them hanging there. Then the moment comes when we know we can’t take them back, their lights ringing in the loud but lonely space around the table where we sit.

  He sees us before we see him. We knew but didn’t know he would come, dared a conjure we thought we couldn’t, knew we shouldn’t, but like reckless teenagers we do it anyway, a double-dog dare.

  And now he’s here.

  “Wait. Hey, man. You guys are . . . skins!”

  Shit.

  Guess who.

  “What?” we struggle to come back from the world we just wove, the world that held us warm and safe, the strands dissipating in the harshness of his breath, his words.

  “Nah, man. Well, yeah, what? We’re just hanging out.”

  “Here, hold my cue.”

  What the fuck.

  I knew better. The poet, maybe not.

  See, that right there? The “hold my cue?” The poet took that cue, and all the others that would follow, and dang. You know what that means. Sonofabitch.

  “Wanna play pool?”

  He doesn’t really want us to play, morelike wants us to watch him play. We kind of oblige him, but really we’re trying to shake off that dust he just laid on us. I manage pretty good, but the poet and his pints of gin and tonics, well, he’s pure fucked. He looks over to him and says, “You have a beautiful face.”

  Ah, shit.

  So the him. Maybe forty, maybe sixty years old. Of course, you couldn’t tell. Medium color skin. Hair he might’ve cut himself. Or maybe Iktomi did it for him after they wrestled for the scissors and he lost. Most, but not all, of his teeth. I look him deep in that beautiful face, and all the teeth he was missing were the same ones I was missing. Big brown eyes. Eyes that never really leave your face. Parts of a mustache. Six, maybe seven chin hairs. A T-shirt older than either of my kids, and my youngest is in high school. Draggy jeans, the color of salt in the desert. The bottoms of his pants just sort of end, fade into the floor. Not an ounce of fat on him. He grabs his cue back from the poet and then stalks the pool table like a twist of coat hanger wrapped around a stick. He drinks his beer one glass at a time. It’ll be full, he’ll drain it all at once, and then it will be full again, right after he sets it down. He never leaves the pool table, but I register zero surprise every time I watch him empty a glass down his ever-jumping, seemingly endless throat. I kinda wish we had our Blackfeet guides around as I watch him devour beer after beer. His drinking is so clean, so fierce it inspires the shit out of me. I knock back about four ciders in an hour, and I’m like damn. He is of course about five ahead of me, but no shame. You do what you can when you drink with him. Prince urges me to go crazy in what I feel are real sincere ways, and you know you gotta listen to Prince, regardless. The poet must’ve been looking at him too, because I hear him say,

  “You have a beautiful face.”

  Shit. The poet was a goner. I’m on my own for this one.

  I drop my drinking into low gear. Not like “can I have an ice water” or some bullshit like that, but I throttle it back.

  He beats the ass off all the whites at the pool tables, runs game on two or three at the same time. Now they owe him money, so they slink away just like all their ancestors, suddenly uncomfortable with the whole back part of this bar and acting like he doesn’t exist. He looks around, surveys the billiardian destruction he’s wrought. Smiles to himself. Smiles deeper to himself, satisfaction in a shoving match with confidence for smile of the month.

  “So hey.” He slaps his hand on our table. “I’m Lakota and Diné. How about you guys? Where you guys from?”

  “Uh (something in Diné).”

  “Where?”

  “White Cone. It’s in Arizo—”

  “Oh. You’re Navajo?”

  “Yeah. Holy shit . . . You know, you have a beautiful face.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m Sihasapa. Born and raised in Chicago.”

  “Yeah? Yeah. That’s cool. We’re gonna party.”

  Fuck.

  “Yup. Diné and Lakota. We. Are. Gonna. Party.”

  The poet, he’s about this shit. I feel the claws sinking in, trying to grab me around the wrist. I pull back. I say,

  “I need to take a piss.”

  I head to the bathroom. It’s like taking a leak in a trough behind the half-pushed-in folding door of a cheap closet, with a clinkety fan next to your head, while you hope no one busts in and hits you in the face with the broken brass barrel lock that hasn’t been painted in twenty years, the one you’re staring at while you try to hurry and breathe through your nose.

  I zip up, walk out, remember I finished my drink before I went in (because, yeah, that’s what you do in certain places, with certain people), and get ready to head up to the bar for another one. I stop back at the table, where the boys are partying like it’s 1999.

  “Anyone need a drink?” This is really directed at the poet, since magic pants over there, well, his glass is full, of course.

  “Oh, yeah. That’d be guhreat,” he laughs, that famous laugh of his.

  Hahahaha. He’s fucking hammered.

  Oh shit. He’s fucking hammered.

  Sometimes you drink too much, and St. Christopher takes care of you. I think he got in trouble, though, for hanging out with drunks, isn’t much of a saint anymore. My dad, world-class drunk, always had a St. Christopher medal. And it got him out of most of the shit. For instance, he only went to jail once after he turned sixty. That medallion had some big medicine in it. Shiiiiiit. It was the one thing my uncle asked for when the old man passed. But tonight? The old man’s medallion and a couple more weren’t about to help us here. Fuck.

  “Two more, sir.”

  Bullet, he looks up at me. But just to the side of me. Like he can see what’s looming, who waits. Like there’s someone standing there. I shift my eyes in the mirror behind the bar. Nope. There’s no one there.

  “Coming right up,” he laughs a little.

  I shudder just a bit. Look around. There’re a few hipsters drinking PBRs that’ve been kept warm on purpose. Good for you, assholes, I say, but not too loud. I imagine people don’t like to be called assholes, even if they are. There are beards, and new flannels, and what we called birth-control specs when they were issued to us in boot camp. The guffaws are forced and annoying, but Bullet gives no fucks, gets the drinks. This place has peanuts on the tables and shells on the floors. I look at a paper rectangle of peanuts and then over at the spit-flecked beard of some asshole with a rectangle tattooed on his hand, and I pass on the possibility of being infected with some kind of fatal whiteness, a malaise for which there may never be a cure. I shake my head ever so slightly as I head back to our table.

  He waits.

  “You drinking or what!?”

  “Yeah, man. I’m drinking,” I say. “So is he.”

  “Well drink up. What are you waiting for?!”

  “Nothing, man. We’re drinking.”

  “So where do you work?”

  Fuck. I really don’t want to do this.

  “You have a really beautiful face,” the poet’s eyes wander above the rim of his glass.

  Sonofabitch.

  “So. Huh? Where do you work?”

  “In town, man,” I say. “How about you?”

  “I do construction. Let’s go.”

  “Where to? Where we going?” I don’t know this town much at all.

  “You have a beautiful face. It’s like . . .”

  “My place. We’re gonna party.”

  I look down. At my glass. Take a big drink. Then over at those not-quit
e-white jeans. And where they end. I don’t think he’s wearing any shoes.

  “Well hold on. We got some time. Let’s finish these.”

  “It’s like classic, classical. Like in a Curtis photo. It’s really beautiful.”

  “Well hurry up, man.” His fingers are annoyed, roll triplets on the table.

  Shit. We’re done for. The way he’s looking at me? Fuck.

  You know those moments, those ones that require deep commitment, when you know something is going to happen you don’t want to happen, but there’s no way out of the situation, so you commit to being in that situation, but you commit to making it right, no matter what?

  Yeah. This was definitely one of those moments.

  Son. Of. A. Bitch.

  The poet, he’s drinking, laughing that famous laugh. Doing his thing. But our new friend? Every time I look up, yeah. He’s looking right at me. Even when he’s waltzing around the pool tables, he’s looking me in the face. I catch him once when he’s making a round, and I look down quicklike, and still can’t tell if he has shoes on. What the fuck. I mean he must have shoes, right? It’s a fucking bar. This is a weird town, but who doesn’t wear shoes to a bar? I laugh to myself. They’re old-ass sandals or something, whatever.

  England Dan and John Ford Coley are describing what waits for us. I chug my drink. The poet just straight fucking downs his like it’s an ice water, and I have to sniff the glass when he’s done and ain’t looking, cause, holy shit. Nope. Juniper. Man.

  Our older brother? He’s dumping his beer down that deep throat of his, looking over his glass at me, not blinking, just drinking, and then, bam, the beer is gone and he sets his glass down, hard, still looking at me.

  “You know you have a beautiful face . . .”

  We both look at the poet.