Thomas Builds-the-Fire told his stories to all those who would stop and listen. He kept telling them long after people had stopped listening.
Victor and Thomas made it back to the reservation just as the sun was rising. It was the beginning of a new day on earth, but the same old shit on the reservation.
“Good morning,” Thomas said.
“Good morning.”
The tribe was waking up, ready for work, eating breakfast, reading the newspaper, just like everybody else does. Willene LeBret was out in her garden wearing a bathrobe. She waved when Thomas and Victor drove by.
“Crazy Indians made it,” she said to herself and went back to her roses.
Victor stopped the pickup in front of Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s HUD house. They both yawned, stretched a little, shook dust from their bodies.
“I’m tired,” Victor said.
“Of everything,” Thomas added.
They both searched for words to end the journey. Victor needed to thank Thomas for his help, for the money, and make the promise to pay it all back.
“Don’t worry about the money,” Thomas said. “It don’t make any difference anyhow.”
“Probably not, enit?”
“Nope.”
Victor knew that Thomas would remain the crazy storyteller who talked to dogs and cars, who listened to the wind and pine trees. Victor knew that he couldn’t really be friends with Thomas, even after all that had happened. It was cruel but it was real. As real as the ashes, as Victor’s father, sitting behind the seats.
“I know how it is,” Thomas said. “I know you ain’t going to treat me any better than you did before. I know your friends would give you too much shit about it.”
Victor was ashamed of himself. Whatever happened to the tribal ties, the sense of community? The only real thing he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams. He owed Thomas something, anything.
“Listen,” Victor said and handed Thomas the cardboard box which contained half of his father. “I want you to have this.”
Thomas took the ashes and smiled, closed his eyes, and told this story: “I’m going to travel to Spokane Falls one last time and toss these ashes into the water. And your father will rise like a salmon, leap over the bridge, over me, and find his way home. It will be beautiful. His teeth will shine like silver, like a rainbow. He will rise, Victor, he will rise.”
Victor smiled.
“I was planning on doing the same thing with my half,” Victor said. “But I didn’t imagine my father looking anything like a salmon. I thought it’d be like cleaning the attic or something. Like letting things go after they’ve stopped having any use.”
“Nothing stops, cousin,” Thomas said. “Nothing stops.”
Thomas Builds-the-Fire got out of the pickup and walked up his driveway. Victor started the pickup and began the drive home.
“Wait,” Thomas yelled suddenly from his porch. “I just got to ask one favor.”
Victor stopped the pickup, leaned out the window, and shouted back. “What do you want?”
“Just one time when I’m telling a story somewhere, why don’t you stop and listen?” Thomas asked.
“Just once?”
“Just once.”
Victor waved his arms to let Thomas know that the deal was good. It was a fair trade, and that was all Victor had ever wanted from his whole life. So Victor drove his father’s pickup toward home while Thomas went into his house, closed the door behind him, and heard a new story come to him in the silence afterwards.
THE FUN HOUSE
IN THE TRAILER BY Tshimikain Creek where my cousins and I used to go crazy in the mud, my aunt waited. She sewed to pass the time, made beautiful buckskin outfits that no one could afford, and once she made a full-length beaded dress that was too heavy for anyone to wear.
“It’s just like the sword in the stone,” she said. “When a woman comes along who can carry the weight of this dress on her back, then we’ll have found the one who will save us all.”
One morning she sewed while her son and husband watched television. It was so quiet that when her son released a tremendous fart, a mouse, startled from his hiding place beneath my aunt’s sewing chair, ran straight up her pant leg.
She pulled her body into the air, reached down her pants, unbuttoned them, tried to pull them off, but they stuck around the hips.
“Jesus, Jesus,” she cried while her husband and son rolled with laughter on the floor.
“Get it out, get it out,” she yelled some more while her husband ran over and smacked her legs in an effort to smash the mouse dead.
“Not that way,” she cried again and again.
All the noise and laughter and tears frightened the mouse even more, and he ran down my aunt’s pant leg, out the door and into the fields.
In the aftermath, my aunt hiked her pants back up and cursed her son and husband.
“Why didn’t you help me?” she asked.
Her son couldn’t stop laughing.
“I bet when that mouse ran up your pant leg, he was thinking, What in the hell kind of mousetraps do they got now?” her husband said.
“Yeah,” her son agreed. “When he got up there, he probably said to himself, That’s the ugliest mousetrap I’ve ever seen!”
“Stop it, you two,” she yelled. “Haven’t you got any sense left?”
“Calm down,” my uncle said. “We’re only teasing you.”
“You’re just a couple of ungrateful shits,” my aunt said. “Where would you be if I didn’t cook, if my fry bread didn’t fill your stomachs every damn night?”
“Momma,” her son said. “I didn’t mean it.”
“Yeah,” she said. “And I didn’t mean to give birth to you. Look at you. Thirty years old and no job except getting drunk. What good are you?”
“That’s enough,” her husband yelled.
“It’s never enough,” my aunt said and walked outside, stood in the sun, and searched the sky for predators of any variety. She hoped some falcon or owl would find the mouse and she hoped some pterodactyl would grab her husband and son.
Bird feed, she thought. They’d make good bird feed.
In the dark my aunt and her husband were dancing. Thirty years ago and they two-stepped in an Indian cowboy bar. So many Indians in one place and it was beautiful then. All they needed to survive was the drive home after closing time.
“Hey, Nezzy,” a voice cried out to my aunt. “You still stepping on toes?”
My aunt smiled and laughed. She was a beautiful dancer, had given lessons at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio to pay her way through community college. She had also danced topless in a Seattle bar to put food in her child’s stomach.
There are all kinds of dancing.
“Do you love me?” my aunt asked her husband.
He smiled. He held her closer, tighter. They kept dancing.
After closing time, they drove home on the back roads.
“Be careful,” my aunt told her husband. “You drank too much tonight.”
He smiled. He put his foot to the fire wall and the pickup staggered down the dirt road, went on two wheels on a sharp corner, flipped, and slid into the ditch.
My aunt crawled out of the wreck, face full of blood, and sat on the roadside. Her husband had been thrown out of the pickup and lay completely still in the middle of the road.
“Dead? Knocked out? Passed out?” my aunt asked herself.
After a while, another car arrived and stopped. They wrapped an old shirt around my aunt’s head and loaded her husband into the backseat.
“Is he dead?” my aunt asked.
“Nah, he’ll be all right.”
They drove that way to the tribal hospital. My aunt bled into the shirt; her husband slept through his slight concussion. They kept him overnight for observation, and my aunt slept on a cot beside his bed. She left the television on with the volume turned off.
At sunrise my aunt shook her husband awake.
“What?” he asked, completely surprised. “Where am I?”
“In the hospital.”
“Again?”
“Yeah, again.”
Thirty years later and they still hadn’t paid the bill for services rendered.
My aunt walked down her dirt road until she was dizzy. She walked until she stood on the bank of Tshimikain Creek. The water was brown, smelled a little of dead animal and uranium. My cousins and I dove into these waters years ago to pull colored stones from the muddy bottom and collect them in piles beside the creek. My aunt stood beside one of those ordinary monuments to childhood and smiled a little, cried a little.
“One dumb mouse tears apart the whole damn house,” she said. Then she stripped off her clothes, kept her shoes on for safety, and dove naked into the creek. She splashed around, screamed in joy as she waded through. She couldn’t swim but the creek was shallow, only just past her hips. When she sat down the surface rested just below her chin, so whenever she moved she swallowed a mouthful of water.
“I’ll probably get sick,” she said and laughed just as her husband and son arrived at the creek, out of breath.
“What the hell are you doing?” her husband asked.
“Swimming.”
“But you don’t know how to swim.”
“I do now.”
“Get out of there before you drown,” her husband said. “And get some clothes on.”
“I’m not coming out until I want to,” my aunt said, and she floated up on her back for the first time.
“You can’t do that,” her son yelled now. “What if somebody sees you?”
“I don’t care,” my aunt said. “They can all go to hell, and you two can drive the buses that get them there.”
Her husband and son threw their hands up in surrender, walked away.
“And cook your own damn dinner,” my aunt yelled at their backs.
She floated on the water like that for hours, until her skin wrinkled and her ears filled with water. She kept her eyes closed and could barely hear when her husband and son came back every so often to plead with her.
“One dumb mouse tore apart the whole damn house. One dumb mouse tore apart the whole damn house,” she chanted at them, sang it like a nursery rhyme, like a reservation Mother Goose.
The delivery room was a madhouse, a fun house. The Indian Health Service doctor kept shouting at the nurses.
“Goddamn it,” he yelled. “I’ve never done this before. You’ve got to help me.”
My aunt was conscious, too far into delivery for drugs, and she was screaming a little bit louder than the doctor.
“Shit, shit, fuck,” she yelled and grabbed onto the nurses, the doctors, kicked at her stirrups. “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!”
Her son slid out of her then and nearly slipped through the doctor’s hands. The doctor caught him by an ankle and held on tightly.
“It’s a boy,” he said. “Finally.”
A nurse took the baby, held it upside down as she cleared his mouth, wiped his body almost clean. My aunt took her upside-down son with only one question: Will he love to eat potatoes?
While my aunt held her baby close to her chest, the doctor tied her tubes, with the permission slip my aunt signed because the hospital administrator lied and said it proved her Indian status for the BIA.
“What are you going to name it?” a nurse asked my aunt. “Potatoes,” she said. “Or maybe Albert.”
When the sun went down and the night got too cold, my aunt finally surrendered the water of Tshimikain Creek, put clothes on her damp and tired body, and walked up her road toward home. She looked at the bright lights shining in the windows, listened to the dogs bark stupidly, and knew that things had to change.
She walked into the house, didn’t say a word to her stunned husband and son, and pulled that heaviest of beaded dresses over her head. Her knees buckled and she almost fell from the weight; then she did fall.
“No,” she said to her husband and son as they rose to help her.
She stood, weakly. But she had the strength to take the first step, then another quick one. She heard drums, she heard singing, she danced.
Dancing that way, she knew things were beginning to change.
ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS DANCE
VICTOR WAS DANCING WITH a Lakota woman in a Montana bar. He had no idea why he was there; he couldn’t even remember how he arrived. All he knew was that he was dancing with the one hundredth Indian woman in the one hundred dancing days since the white woman he loved had left him. This dancing was his compensation, his confession, largest sin, and penance.
“You’re beautiful,” he said to the Lakota woman.
“And you’re drunk,” she said. But she was beautiful, with hair and eyes so dark and long. He imagined she was a reservation eclipse. Full. He needed special glasses to look at her; he could barely survive her reflection.
“You’re a constellation,” he said.
“And you’re really drunk,” she said.
Then she was gone and he was laughing, dancing through the bar all by himself. He wanted to sing but he couldn’t think of any lyrics. He was drunk, bruised by whiskey, brutal. His hair was electricity.
“I started World War I,” he shouted. “I shot Lincoln.”
He was underwater drunk, staring up at the faces of his past. He recognized Neil Armstrong and Christopher Columbus, his mother and father, James Dean, Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood. He staggered, fell against other dancers, found himself in the backseat of a Grasshopper as it traveled uneasily down reservation dirt roads.
“Where are we?” he asked the Flathead driver with insane braids.
“Heading back to Arlee, cousin. You said you wanted a ride.”
“Shit, all I wanted to do was dance.”
By the river. She was standing by the river. She was dancing without moving. By the river. She wasn’t beautiful exactly; she was like a shimmer in the distance. She was so white his reservation eyes suffered.
“Hey,” Victor asked. “Haven’t you ever heard of Custer?”
“Have you ever heard of Crazy Horse?” she asked him.
In his memory she was all kinds of colors, but the only one that really mattered was white. Then she was gone, and absence has no color. Sometimes he looked in the mirror, rubbed his face, pulled at his eyelids and skin. He combed his hair into braids and forgave himself. At night his legs ached and he reached down under the covers and touched his thighs, flexed muscles. He opened his eyes but all he could see in the dark was the digital clock on the milk carton beside the bed. It was late, early in the morning. He kept his eyes open until they grew accustomed to the dark, until he could see vague images of the bedroom. Then he looked at the clock again. Fifteen minutes had passed and it was closer to sunrise and he still hadn’t slept at all.
He measured insomnia by minutes. Ten minutes, he told himself. I’ll be asleep in ten minutes. If not, I’ll get up and turn on the light. Read a book maybe.
Ten minutes passed and he made more promises. It’s hopeless. If I’m not asleep in half an hour, I’ll get up and make some breakfast. I’ll watch the sunrise. Vacuum.
When dawn finally arrived, he lay awake for a few minutes, ran his tongue over his teeth. He reached out and touched the other half of his bed. No one was supposed to be there; he just stretched his arms. Then he rose quickly, showered, shaved, and sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and newspaper. He read headlines, a few Help Wanted ads, and circled one with a pencil.
“Good morning,” he said aloud, then louder. “Good morning.”
“People change,” she told Victor. He watched her face as she spoke and watched her hands when she touched his arm.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. Her hands were white and small. He remembered how white and small they looked against his brown skin as they lay together, wrapped in sheets. She fell asleep easily and he watched her, listened to her breathing, until his breath fell into the same rhythm, until he slept.
“I miss watching you sleep,” he said.
“Listen, things are just crazy right now. I went to a party the other night and someone had some cocaine, you know? It was there and I liked it.”
“You mean you snorted it?”
“No, no. I just liked it being there. I danced, too. There was music, and people were dancing out by the pool. So I danced.”
He stared at her then. She smiled and touched her face, brushed hair away from her eyes.
“God,” she said. “I could really get addicted to cocaine, you know? I could really like it.”
Victor sipped his coffee carefully even though it was lukewarm. He stared out over the cup, through the window into the sun rising. He felt dizzy and didn’t stand up for fear of falling. His eyes were heavy, ached.
“Today,” he said to his coffee, “I’m going to run.”
He imagined pulling on a pair of shorts and his tennis shoes, stretching his muscles on the back porch before he set out into the early morning. Two, maybe three miles out and then back to the house. A few sit-ups, push-ups, to cool down and a piece of dry toast to settle his stomach. Instead, he finished his coffee and switched on the television, flipped through a few stations before he found a face he liked. A pretty blond woman was reading the local news, but he turned the volume all the way down, watched her mouth working silently.
Soon she was replaced by other faces, tired reporters with windblown hair, a forest fire, another war. It was all the same. Once, he owned a black-and-white television. He thought everything was much clearer then. Color complicated even the smallest events. A commercial for a new candy bar was so bright, so layered, he ran to the bathroom and threw up.
Still, he drank his coffee straight today. In other yesterdays he poured vodka into his cup before the coffee was finished brewing.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Page 8
