First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  As I say, sometimes you can walk away from it. Afterwards, I always felt it was a sign of how sick our country, our culture had become that a man could be killed on the streets and, because he did not have a piece of paper or powerful friends, the incident would close like that. It did not even make the front section of the paper, which was a miracle in a small tourist town like Monterey, and no one ever followed up with my parents.

  A man had been stomped like a cockroach and the stomper had driven home the same night. It was to happen a lot in the closing years of the last century.

  But Sensei Kan wasn’t part of that century. He was straight out of sixteenth-century Japan or wherever they practiced bushido, chivalry, honor. When I was healed enough to return to the dojo, he called me up in front of the whole class, stood me at attention, and took off my brown belt. Then he tied on a white one with his own hands.

  “You may think that to kill a man in battle makes you a warrior,” he said in a way that bounced off the oak floor and echoed in corners of the room. Anyone could tell he was furious.

  “If you have so little control of yourself, of your art, that you kill your opponent when you should disable and discourage him, then you must start over at the beginning.”

  “But,” I blustered, “there were five of them!” The note of injured protest in my voice was mixed with pride.

  “Then it is very lucky that your clumsiness did not kill more!”

  “But—”

  “Please be silent. Take your place at the back of the class.”

  No one met my eyes as I walked past the rows of students, not even Allie. She dropped out a few days later, unable to bear my humiliation. To her, I was a hero who had been wounded defending her.

  I thought about dropping out, too. But the next day, Sensei had cooled off and treated me just as before. So I decided to stay. What with the ripped muscles, the stitches, and the loss of body tone with being laid up, it took me six months to work back to brown belt. By the time I graduated from high school and left for college, I’d earned a first-degree black belt and learned twelve of the thirteen katas in our style.

  Sensei Kan always said the belt didn’t matter, but just then it was the most important thing in my life.

  Chapter 3

  Billy Birdsong: Sand

  [Library of Congress Transcript, Catalog No. 679-8851-03-2037F, N$49.95]

  It was sand that stopped us. Sand and a Sun like hate that never left the sky to gentler lights, except for the cold and watchful Moon or a gritty scattering of stars.

  Twenty-five thousand years ago my people had come out of the lava fields, the thunder mountains and the Big Rainy. They passed down California’s flat Central Valley, which was hot and dry and not good for much. Not until the white man dug his wells, built dams and canals, and made chemicals to help the white crops grow. And those grow in straight lines.

  The great wetlands where Two Rivers came together were a paradise of hunting and fishing. There my people might have stayed forever, except the tule fogs discouraged them and rumor of the grizzly, the shaggy man-thing standing taller than a young tree, frightened them.

  So they picked up their skins, their fishing baskets, and throwing sticks and moved south, into the drylands again. As more and more sand mixed with the black soil under their feet, some of my people probably thought about turning back to the wetlands in spite of the fogs and the grizzlies. But the greater number of them were hard and stubborn: They would as soon try their luck with a place they had never seen as go back to what they had known and rejected.

  At the end of the valley, the only thing to do was climb the Barren Mountains, the Tehachapis. Today those hills are good only to fly over and look down into, dreaming what it would be like to crash and have to walk out of them. Beyond the mountains, my people crossed the rolling sandy desert, the Mojave, with its dry lakes and praying cactus plants. The desert was worse than the mountains. Finally, they came to the Big Red, now the Colorado, the river of swelling, muddy waters which so blinded the fish that they leapt into our baskets.

  There my people camped and, unlike any of the bands before them, they sent out scouts, pathfinders. They were smart redskins.

  Six months, a year later these young men came back and said that all beyond was the stony deserts of Sonora. The news just about broke the spirit of the squaws and boy children, but the older men conferred solemnly among themselves. Then the traveling chiefs put aside their skins and laces and went off to fish. The camp chiefs sat down to meditate their circles in correct proportion with the Sun and the Earth, and they sent the women to see what grew nearby and was good to eat.

  So, my people, the Mohave, settled beside the river. They were still there twenty-five thousand years later when I was born. Except they were on different land, a poorer piece that was mostly sand, granted to them by the white man for no reason they could understand.

  The valley that had been ours was now crowded with casinos, condominiums, trailer parks, and snowbird nests. Flashing neon by night and glaring aluminum siding by day. All straight lines, hard edges, fast words, and brassy music. Money. Dams and power stations and taco stands and gas stations. The white man’s world hurts the eyes and nose and ears.

  The river was still there, too, but it was a poorer river. Instead of rolling on to the ocean, the Big Red was so throttled by the white man’s dams that it wandered off and died in Mexican sand before it could reach the Sea of Cortez. So it lost its true purpose as a river.

  I was not born in a sagebrush wickiup covered with skins and standing as part of a circle, which is the proper birthing place for any native American child. I came forth into a frame house, with no paint on its splintering boards, standing in a white man’s straight line along the road. My mother told me all this, as I was too busy at the time to notice and understand.

  It was being born in a straight line, like the whites, that caused all the trouble. I have lived sixty years too long. When Quetzalcoatl the Serpent came for me in the Bay of Campeche, even though he had to fly a hundred miles across the waters, I resisted like the white man. Now I am lost and have no true place to go.

  Of course, it does not help that my father was not an Indian. He was a Hell’s Angel on a run. His tribe had turned up one day on the reservation, half drunk and looking for peyote buttons, which we did not have. His name was Red, so he must have been Irish. All he owned was a chrome and steel Harley-Davidson with a turquoise-blue teardrop gas tank. That and his greasy denims. He and his companions lived like Apaches: just a horse for travel, a pair of leggings for the brush, and an attitude. My father was a white Indian.

  He may have come from Las Vegas or Los Angeles; I never found out which. When I was tall enough for my thumb to be seen above the roadway and smart enough to figure that staying on the reservation was no good unless I could learn to farm sand and eat it, I went to both places. But I never saw or heard about a Hell’s Angel named Red.

  You might think that all tribes are rich now that coal and oil and other precious things have been found under the sad scrublands the White Father deeded to us in perpetuity. The Navaho are rich, yes, if they can sell their mineral rights at a good price or finance the machinery to dig the coal themselves—and not get taken by the white lawyers and moneymen.

  The Chinook are not so rich, having exclusive rights to the salmon on the Columbia—so long as they take the fish themselves with techniques that are more picturesque than profitable.

  The white law is sometimes clumsy. Here and there, it lets a native American make off with something of value, just as here and there a crack in the pavement lets a tough weed, a thistle, grow up to the sunlight. But it is still the white law.

  What I learned in Las Vegas, and improved on later in Los Angeles, was how to find things that people wanted. Cigarettes, loose change, tape decks, contraband—there was usually a way. The most valuable lesson for a twelve-year-old scrounger was the margin: The more people wanted something, the greater is the risk of obtai
ning it, so the higher the price must be. Hubcaps are easy to get, but nobody wants them.

  The first corollary to the rule of margin is: dodging and hiding. You never tell anyone, no matter how strong or mean he is, what you have in your pockets. You never tell precisely where you got anything. You never tell your real name.

  What else did I learn between Las Vegas and Los Angeles? How to pick anything that grows, fast enough so that I could afford to eat. How to walk a horse slow enough to keep from crippling him—that was as stable boy at the racetrack. How to bus dishes fast enough to keep the Mexican mamas who owned those storefront eateries from taking a nick out of my ear.

  I learned that a native American, whose people have been buried in this land twenty-five thousand years, has the same economic value as a guy with squishy sneakers who is still shitting jalapeno seeds that grew in Chihuahua.

  That does not mean I wanted to keep America for the tribes. Nothing is funnier than those intertribal community houses and their unity nights, when everyone sits around drinking 7-Up and pretending that the next brave over did not used to eat human flesh. And those tribal songs, sung high in the nose. Like some kind of Red Rotary ... No, I did not want to keep the Mexicans out, but I wanted everything they were getting and a big slice of what the whites had. And I got it.

  I was bussing tables at Tacqueria Tuya just off Olvera Street when a beanpole of an Anglo with a droopy mustache came in carrying an attaché, a Samsonite with many miles on its gray hide.

  This Anglo had been in the shop a couple of times before, doing some kind of deal with Eduardo, the other busboy in the place. But today he had called in sick and there was just me, doing the job for both of us. Before Beanpole found either Eduardo or a table, he found me and his eyes lit up. “Hey, you’re a friend of the Rico kid, ain’tcha? I seen you around with him. He said you’re an okay guy, you know?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look, I have to get this out to Topanga Canyon Drive right away.” He shoved the case at me, exposing a length of dirty wrist.

  “Try the mail,” I shrugged.

  “No, I need someone to take it.”

  “Long way. It will cost you.”

  “I’ll pay a hundred.”

  “Unnh.” I looked at the wrist again.

  “One twenty-five.”

  “Okay.”

  “Paid at the end ...”

  “Well.” Pause, two, three. “Okay.” A fool’s errand with only disappointment at the other end, right? But, remember the margin. Nobody pays a stranger that much, first offer, for a simple put-and-take job even if the guy receiving is a bet to dicker or welsh. So the case was either valuable or dangerous. It was also locked.

  I took the case, grabbed my coat, and went straight to the airport. Out of the money in my pocket, $132 as this was the day after payday, I bought a one-way ticket to the farthest place that money would buy. Turned out to be Seattle, with nine dollars’ change.

  The nine dollars bought me an inland bus ticket, fifty miles to a place called Skykomish. From where I walked to the edge of town, uphill into the woods, and behind a tree. Then I broke the locks off the case with a rock. Messed it up badly.

  If there was nothing inside but some papers, I was going to be out my good suit, a change of skivvies, and a good pair of boots that I had left back in my room in Los Angeles.

  There were three plastic lunch bags, each hefting about four pounds. Pure white powder. The side of me that pushed brooms said Beanpole might just be sending confectioner’s sugar to his aged mom. The side of me that hated pushing brooms said that, at current rates, twelve pounds of pure Colombian snoot music was worth more than half a megabuck. Of course, cocaine is shipped a lot purer now than it was then. And, if the bags contained heroin, then grade and cut were even bigger question marks, but the street value was still in the tens or hundreds of kilobucks.

  I did not go back to Los Angeles for fifteen years. The money—the powder turned out to be almost 100 percent cocaine—I used to set myself up in a service industry. Teenage prostitution. That may shock you but, hell, I was a teenager myself. Invested wisely in girls and contacts, the money was sure to take me on a long ride. If I avoided conspicuous consumption and the notice it would bring. And if I kept out of the risky front lines of the business.

  The money took me right up to the day the draft started breathing heavily on me. As I was young and tough, evading or buying my way out did not appeal. This drunken Indian enlisted.

  I told them I wanted to fly. Somewhere in the back of my head was the idea that, as a pilot, I could do small-parcel runs to deserted airstrips and double or triple what had been in the Samsonite case. A big piece of that half meg was still buried and one day that would buy a plane. But I goofed and enlisted in the Army. How was I to know the ground pounders of that time—although the rules changed later—were not permitted to fly fixed-wing aircraft? They flew helicopters, and the training for them is not even an introduction to airplanes.

  You may never have stood in a field as a Bell HU-1 Iroquois, or any other chopper for that matter, flies over. The thud-thud of the rotors is like a direction-finder: When the noise is at its loudest, the helicopter is coming right at you. It took the Pentagon thirty years to figure that this makes the helicopter a bad carrier for sneaking up on ground troops. It took me thirty seconds to figure it would be useless for smuggling. But by that time, the papers were signed and my butt belonged to the government for three years. I spent two of them in Nicaragua.

  If, twenty-five thousand years ago, the Mohave had not stopped beside the river to fish, then I might have been on the other side, a Chorotega fighting with the Sandinistas. But the fishing was good that day, so I wore jungle green and flew the whip in a four-bird vee formation dropping Rangers and beer all over that country.

  Did I ever see the famous Escuadra de Muerte in action? No, few outside the Squad itself ever did—and lived. So were the stories about them all wrong? Well, did all the Sioux take coup on Custer? Only the first three hundred!

  The white establishment thinks good soldiers do not skin people. Only savages do that, right? Was it not the British and their bounty who taught the native Americans to take scalps? Did not the blond boys of the Seventh Cavalry mutilate red-skinned women and children? Were not ears the favorite souvenir of Vietnam? Please do not talk to me about savages.

  Every time I brought my shudderbucket across the ridges of Cordillera Dariense and the Isabella, I navigated by white cairns of boiled skulls. And we were flying at a thousand feet.

  Once, in Muy-Muy Viejo, a corporal tried to sell me a wallet he claimed was made of human skin. It was a dark brown, darker than me. The proof, he said, was the lumpy knot of a bellybutton on the inside flap. It might have been a pucker scar in cowhide. But I do not know enough about animal anatomy: Does a cow even have a navel? Is a monkey’s navel as big as a man’s ... a child’s? This one seemed fully grown. I did not buy the wallet.

  We got a lot of flying in the final attack on Managua. The lakes north and east of the city blocked our line of advance, so we airlifted everything. You cannot appreciate the power of a CH-54 Skycrane’s dual turbines until you see it pick up an M-60A3 tank like a gull making off with a sweet bun.

  When it was over, the official policy toward the city was as old as Rome. Some of the tools were new, though. They shot every tenth civilian by the numbers, man, woman, or child. They dynamited every structure left standing and sent us—even technicians and warrant officers like me—over the ground with picks and sledge hammers to knock the bricks apart and break up the concrete chunks. “Nothing bigger than your boot” was the order. Later I saw tee-shirts with that motto. We even smashed up the roads. Then they flew some of our helicopters across the city with spraying gear. They never told us what the chemical was, but the pilots had to wear moonsuits. The Apaches—helicopters, that is—flying that mission they burned in a big pile.

  Today, fifty years later, in the stony field where Managua stood, no
t a bush, not a weed, not a blade of grass grows. Birds avoid the area. Lizards and snakes turn around and crawl away. Poisoned sand.

  I do not claim to understand that war. We acted like we really hated the Sandinistas. And we had some reason to, after the radiological dusting they gave the Big Pine Eight maneuvers in Honduras. But the air was thick with hype all during the police action. The officers routinely handed out the most unbelievable atrocity stories about the Sandinistas. They came from loose-leaf binders of computer printout that looked to have been ground out in Arlington.

  The brass repeated the hate phrases so routinely that all the venom was sucked out of the words. How many times can you hear “motherfuckin’ mestizo” and “spittle-lickin’ spic” without suddenly finding them warm and comfortable? The words were too literary, too alliterative, not to have been invented by some general’s press agent. And when half your troopers are already Hispanic-surnamed ...

  All I know is, the mosquitos were enough reason to kill everybody and get out of there.

  After demobilization, I thought of going back for the rest of that half meg. But what was there to do with it, right then, except get myself killed? Teen prostitution had just about been choked off by the Mothers and Others. And the Feds were freelancing pretty heavily in the drug traffic. Nobody protects turf harder than a bureaucrat who has stepped over the fence. The loose side was overpopulated by straight types with a mean streak, so I went over to the straight side. For a time.

  My only marketable skill was piloting choppers, so I decided to sell that. The highest bidder was Petramin Oil. They started me flying the supply circuit to their Mexican rigs in the Bay of Campeche. That was good experience for the war we fought two decades later. But after only six months, Petramin Air Services switched me to Saudi Arabia to haul executive ass.

  The Saudis are racists. And sexists. And about every other ist you can think of, except Communist. They were trying, at the time, to create a pure Sunnite-Wahabi society. Other brands of Arab were welcome to visit the Kingdom, round trip to the sacred mosques of Mecca, drop their cash and go. Other semi-acceptable peoples—Anglos, Orientals, and Mohave Indians—needed a good reason to enter, were required to set up separate accommodations in isolated cantonments, and had their exit visas pre-stamped. The rest of the Third World and certain select peoples—Jews and Iranians—had their mail returned at the border and were rudely ejected from the few consulates the Saudis maintained abroad.