Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  It was nice here on this new corner of the reservation. This was one way casino money had been put to good use. Buying up surrounding property that had previously been part of their land before it was stolen in the generation of their great-great-grandparents—when an Indian signature could be coerced onto a land transfer with the strategic use of a few flagons of rum. Or, failing that, forged onto legal papers that held up in white courts despite all native protests to the contrary.

  What had this acreage been before it was bought back last year and this little Indian trailer park put into place? Harley wasn’t sure. It had been over two centuries since it had been in Kwasuck hands. Out of sight, if not out of mind, as far as us aboriginal inhabitants went. No dogs or Indians allowed. Like a lot of places near the rez, Indians had been persona non grata before they started being the biggest employers in the county. More whites than Indians got paychecks from the casino. And that wasn’t just because, what with the monthly payouts, tribal members didn’t really have to work. The available jobs far outnumbered the Indians. Only 523 people were on their entire tribal roll, even after the tribe had decided to let anyone with a minimum of 25% Kwasuck blood quantum enrol and mixed bloods had started coming out of the woodwork, doubling their numbers in less than two years.

  Harley himself was a 50/50. Half Kwasuck, half Kiowa. Nothing unusual in Ind’in country these days thanks to 20th century Indian Boarding School unplanned match-making. Native boys and girls from distant native nations meeting in the classrooms of Carlisle and Riverside and Chilloco and making their own little tribal alliances. Like his pal Abraham Little Finger, whose Tlingit mom from Alaska and Cheyenne dad from Oklahoma met at Haskell Indian School in Kansas.

  Although, Harley thought, in that 50-50 there are also various other 18th and 19th century percentages of French and Dutch, German and English, probably Mohegan here in the east, Comanche in the west, mebbe a Mexican adopted in four generations ago. Skins always been equal opportunity when it comes to adoption and marriage. What counts for us is the depth of heart the flow of spirit, not wading in a shallow gene pool. Hell, I am a walking United Nations.

  Completely sober now. Stay that way all day if you can, Harley. Ready for tonight. Decorated Native Veteran of Gulf and Iraq Wars speaks out at Tribal Council. Thunderous applause. Acclamation. New Direction Forged for Tribe.

  Hah! As if.

  Harley began to reach for the bottle on the other side of the divider counter. His elbow leaned on the remote for the TV as he did so and the screen came to life.

  “Dances-With-Wolves, I will always be your friend!” the noble figure on the cliff top shouted, raising his arm in salute.

  Oh crap. Just jump off, why don’t you?

  But he didn’t turn off the TV. He stepped back a bit to see the picture better and pulled up the chair from behind him. Ind’in hypnotized by talking box. Must watch. Harley couldn’t help it. Like the mathematical figures that always marched through his mind, the division and subtraction and percentages that symbolized the Native experience for the last 500 years, he was umbilicaled to the media or maybe caught in it like a fly in a spider’s web. TV, movies, the internet—God help him if he turned on his laptop and started checking YouTube. He’d be there till midnight. Talk about addiction.

  Sadly, the movie was ending. He’d missed the best parts—the parts that Indians who know a little about the Lakota language always love the best. Those times when Kevin Costner speaks Lakota. Dances With Wolves, the white guy who saves the Indians, who finds the buffalo when the dumb redskins can’t, who becomes a better skin than any of the tribe after a brief immersion in their culture that is so much purer than that of the evil whites. (Gimme a break, Kevie. You ever been to a tribal council meeting?) Out west the joke is that B.C. always meant something different to Indians. It used to mean “Before Custer.” Now it means “Before Costner.”

  Oh Kevin, talk Ind’in for me. Twelve Indians all doing the limp-wrist thing in response to Kevin’s manly speeches in the authentic tribal language. Because the person who was his Lakota teacher was a Lakota woman—the one he brought on stage when he got his Oscars. (Ever notice how that naked statue doesn’t have any genitalia?) Because there is a male form and a female form of the language. So Kevin talked Ind’in like a girl.

  Close-up of Costner’s sensitive face. He would go away and lead the Army from his chosen people. Good old self-sacrificing DWW—or is it DWI? Go away to attempt to found a casino of his own on stolen Indian land in Deadwood where a museum over a bar would display all of the clothing he wore in such visionary films as Waterworld and Dirtworld (The Postman, actually).

  Am I being too cruel? Harley thought, staring closer at the face that filled the screen. The old Indian curse of being sympathetic to our enemies. Trying to understand why they are acting this way. Being forgiving. Hey, you destroyed my crops and burned down my house and killed my dog. So I tracked you for years to deliver this message to you. “Better watch that stuff.”

  And what’s wrong with the focus? I thought this was hi-def.

  Kevin Costner was blurring, wavering, changing. The background of the Black Hills becoming starker, darker, hallucinatory. And there it was, staring right at him from the set, actually sort of bulging protoplasmically out of the set. The hairless, red-eyed head of a white, snow-white to be precise, white guy. His teeth sharp as wolf fangs and dripping blood.

  GET OUT OF THE HOUSE! GET OUT! GET OUT!

  Dire words echoing through the unfurnished trailer, heard as much inside Harley’s head as by his ears.

  Harley raised one eyebrow.

  “Get real,” he said. Then he pressed the Off button.

  The face looked shocked in the millisecond before it vanished.

  “This,” Harley said. “is not the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  Food, the one great solace in times of stress. Go back into kitchen. Open fridge. Take out organic eggs, wheat bread, butter. Plate with a knife and fork on it for the eggs and toast. Glass and OJ.

  Moving now with the precise efficiency of the short-order cook he had been in one of his many previous lives in the world off-rez—careers shortened by substance abuse issues—Harley opened the door of the lower cupboard and took out the new toaster, the one frying pan, a bread knife and a board. He plugged in the toaster and then slid the uncut loaf of wheat bread out of the paper bag. No plastic wrappers for Harold. Precisely sliced two pieces, put them next to the toaster.

  Remove the plate from the fridge, turn on the stove. Put a pat of organic butter onto the frying pan. Not Teflon-coated, of course. Harold knew all about the evils of Teflon. He slipped two eggs out of the cardboard egg carton, juggled them with one hand and then, still without using his other hand, cracked each of them into the frying pan where the butter was beginning to sizzle, and tossed the shells over his shoulder into the composting bin. Count to 20, then drop the two slices of bread into the toaster.

  As he sat eating his second breakfast of perfectly cooked sunny-side up eggs and lightly buttered toast, sipping organic orange juice, Harley kept his back to the television.

  Ghosts. Or at least one ghost so far. Something told him that Harold’s use of the plural was no accident. Despite his disregard for grammar, his twin never wasted or misused a word.

  Only one night in this place. Haven’t even unpacked my bag yet.

  He’d come in after midnight, might not even have made it inside at all if he hadn’t gotten lucky with the key. The night had been warm enough for him to sleep outside if he’d been too drunk to manage to solve the riddle of fitting a slender key into a lock that kept moving to the side every time he just about had it. But on the fourth try he had cursed in Kwasuck, told the door, which was obviously the diseased offspring of feces-eating dog, to stop moving and allow him in. And just like that, the door had stopped shimmying like a dance and he’d slid in the key and opened the door.

  Harley pulled the door key out of his pocket and studied it.

/>   Now that he thought back on it, the door had seemed stunned by his words. Was it possible for an inanimate object to be shocked? Not only had it stopped moving, but also the deep growling sound he’d been hearing—how had he forgotten that?—had stopped, too. It hadn’t been his drunken imagination. The door had been moving, trying to keep him from getting in. And the trailer—or something in it—had been growling at him. But a drunk will accept any shelter in a storm, any semi-flat surface to sleep it off on, be it a bed or the middle of the railroad tracks with your head pillowed by the rail. So he had ended up conked out and oblivious in a friggin’ haunted trailer?

  Then again, he’d found himself in strange places before. Like the time when he had scaled a fence in the city into what he thought was somebody’s private park and then woke up on the grass with two adolescent gorillas poking his chest and their 400 pound mama gazing back at him over her shoulder with what he realized was a deeply disappointed expression.

  He finished eating, washed the dishes—dish, actually—put everything away in its proper place, wiped down the counter top, the table, the stove, still carefully avoiding the TV and its remote. Folded the dish rag. Sighed.

  No way around it. He was going to have to talk to Uncle Big Nose.

  When he stepped outside, he was struck by the quiet. Just the birds and the wind. The nearest road—apart from the lane that led in here—was half a mile away over the hill. And although there were four other new trailers—he scanned each of them in turn—his seemed to be the only occupied one. No cars, no kids’ bikes, no laundry hung out to dry, no…

  WHAM! The trailer door slammed shut behind him and the lock clicked. The thin echo of a reedy voice came to him on the wind.

  Go Away!

  He’d left the key to the door on the kitchen table. Even heavier sigh. As well as the half-empty bottle of booze. He could break a window. But as he thought of that the image came to him of a smashed window distorting itself into a mouth, teeth made of broken glass gnashing together. Or maybe not.

  He felt the back pocket of his Levis. One small victory. The key to his motorcycle. He hopped on, kicked it over, spun out, the back wheel of the old Triumph Bonneville shooting up a rooster plume of gravel.

  Up the hill and round the corner on the lane leaving the haunted trailer park in its quiet little valley, turn right onto the country road to go rolling down the highway. Headed for redemption. Or at least the house of his favorite uncle.

  As usual, Harley’s uncle, Fred Big Nose, was making tea. At least he called it that. Heaven only knows what sort of herbs and other ingredients were in that pot. But, again as usual, good altar boy that he’d been in the Church of St. Ann, Harley took the cup that was offered unto him.

  “Good for what ails you, nephew.”

  I hope.

  Harley sipped the steaming brew. Sort of minty, but something else, too. Whoa! He felt his sinuses open with a loud pop and then, with an equally audible psssshhhing sound, the mists that had congealed about his brain after a night of drinking were swept away as if a broom had just been pushed through his cerebral cortex.

  “Eee-Yow!”

  Fred Big Nose nodded. “Good tea.”

  “Uncle,” Harley said.

  Then he shut up. Asking questions right now would just get in the way of the answers he had a feeling his uncle was about to give him.

  “Look at them clouds, nephew.”

  Unh-hunh.

  Harley watched the shape of the biggest cumulonimbus in the sky change gradually from that of a horse to the sinuous coils of a snake to something remarkably like the profile of the old Elizabethan playwright Shakespeare.

  “I guess old Will knew about ghosts.”

  Harley turned to look at his uncle. He had to ask now.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Read Hamlet in high school. Like every other kid in the tribe. No Kwasuck ever got out of school without a heavy dose of the Bard of Avon.”

  “Please quit teasing me. You know what I mean.”

  Uncle Fred raised both eyebrows. “Oh, you mean them ghosts?” He chuckled. “Common knowledge here on the rez, nephew. But then you been away for a while. Tribal chairman bulldozed it through, even though there was objections about putting trailers in there. Seeing as how it was a graveyard.”

  Harley had to ask questions now.

  “A graveyard? But what about…zoning or something? What about the people whose relatives were buried there?”

  “You been away too long, nephew. Remember, we got no zoning on the reservation. And as far as who was put in the ground there, it was all white folks.”

  “What?” This was getting crazier every minute. Indians putting trailers in a white man’s graveyard. But defiling Indian graves was the job of Europeans. Who turned the world upside down while he was sleeping?

  Uncle Fred poured himself some more tea. “Thing is,” he explained, “that graveyard was an old one. So old that nobody remembered who’d been buried there. It was a private cemetery. All their descendants had moved away or died off, I guess. Wasn’t even any grave stones left. Seems that the last time they cut the pines off the hills back there, the lumberjacks took the stones to fill in the mud holes along their log road. But there’s still folks buried there—as you well know, you being the only person dumb enough to be staying there right now. And you know why, don’t you?”

  Harley nodded. It made sense now. No wonder he’d been issued tribal housing with such ease. Put him in a place that would freak him out, get him to move back off the rez again and not be a potential thorn in the chairman’s side. Or maybe just get him to drown himself in the bottom of a bottle again. Like he did last night.

  He thought again about the sadness that had come over him when he drove his bike down into that little valley, a sadness made up of too many bad memories. Despite all the vows of sobriety he’d taken, it had made him turn around and head back to the Kwasuck Casino with its bar that was open all night. Where he’d had his rendezvous with the sharp end of a broken bottle, followed by a trip to the emergency room.

  And then he’d found that handy case of Wild Turkey on his porch and had been too stupid to wonder how it got there. Talk about a set-up with the end result being Harley driven crazy or back onto the street as a hopeless alcoholic or maybe, even better, dead. But now there was something else he didn’t understand.

  “If nobody else is going to live there, then why? What good is having an empty trailer park going to do for the Tribal Chairman? That’s crazy.”

  Uncle Fred nodded. “Crazy like a fox. Tribe wanted more housing. Chairman, with his MBA from Arkham College, knew he could get funds from the government first to set up new housing. So he keeps it there for a year or so and then goes back to the tribal council saying it didn’t work out and now they can put in there what he’d had planned all along but couldn’t get approved first time out. Namely a big resort hotel and another casino. And them white graves long forgotten will be dug up in the night and those bones tossed off somewhere nobody ever finds ’em before the backhoes and bulldozers ever start.”

  It’d work, Harley thought.

  “Which would explain the bad attitude of the spirits there. Ghosts don’t just see things in the now but also in the what was and what’s maybe about t’ happen,” Uncle Fred tapped his chin with his finger and then pointed up toward the sky. “But it’s not just that bothering you, is it?”

  Harley nodded.

  “Harold come to see you?” Uncle Fred said.

  It wasn’t really a question, but Harley nodded again anyhow.

  “Ought to listen to him.”

  “I know.”

  Fred Big Nose got up and gestured to Harley. The two of them went into the house. It wasn’t neat in there and hadn’t been since Aunt Philomene had passed ten years ago. But there was a sense of logic in the disorder, the stacked boxes, the shelves crowded with books and bottles, things wrapped in red cloth or rolls of birch bark. And there was a clean healthy
sweetgrass scent in the air. That never changed. Harley felt for a moment as if he was a four year old kid again, him and Harold holding hands with their uncle as he walked them through the room toward the kitchen where Aunt Philomene was waiting with an apple pie.

  As always, just as he had first done a quarter century ago, Harley found himself stopping to stare at the display of a dozen military medals inside a neatly kept case, the Medal of Honor in the exact center.

  “As you well know, nephew, mine was Vietnam,” Uncle Fred said, looking over his shoulder as he pulled a wooden box from a chest-high shelf. “I was just as mixed up as you were when you got back from Baghdad.”

  He opened the box to remove a deer antler and a bundle of sage. “But my grampa took me into the sweat and that started cleaning it out of me.”

  Continuing on across the room he reached into the bathroom and pulled out two big towels, tossed one to Harley and put the other over his shoulder as he opened the door to his fenced-in back yard. Harley immediately smelled the warm scent of the fire and red-hot lava rocks.

  “Timmy Jackson and the Sore Eyes boy got the lodge all set. You bring Harold on in there with us, too, okay?”

  “Okay,” Harley said, nodding.

  Before he could raise his head, his uncle’s hand was on top of his crown, pushing it down further.

  “What you got there, boy? Somebody try to install a zipper to make it easier to remove your brain before you go out drinking?”

  The long fingers of Fred Big Nose’s right hand explored the edges of the gash in Harley’s scalp as his left hand pulled Harley by the shoulder over to the sink.

  “Let’s irrigate this sucker.”

  Warm soapy water running down his neck around his face and into his eyes. But Harley stood there, bent over, taking it. It was always like that when his uncle started doctoring. It might hurt right now, but he knew all he had to do was be patient because it was going to hurt even more real soon. He couldn’t lift his head up to watch what was coming next, but in his mind’s eye he could see Uncle Fred reaching for the green bottle on the second shelf, uncorking it with his teeth as he spread the open wound with the fingers of his right hand.