by Callan Wink
“I did know that. In fact I have a PhD in Custer studies, and my dissertation was a theoretical projection of the scope of American politics had Custer survived the battle and gone on to be elected president.” Perry thought this to be sufficiently lofty to discourage further conversation.
“Oh, how interesting! Did you know that Custer had size-twelve feet and was married to Elizabeth Bacon?”
Perry was developing a headache. There was a shimmer of heat out over Last Stand ridge, and he could feel hot rivulets of sweat roll from his underarms.
“I did know that,” he said, “now I have one for you ladies. Did you know that when a reinforcement cavalry regiment finally arrived on the scene of the battle, they found Custer had received over thirty-two assorted stab wounds, arrow punctures, and rifle shots, was scalped, and had his penis and scrotum cut off and stuffed in his mouth?”
—
That night after dinner, they walked together on a path along the bank of the Little Bighorn River. They slapped mosquitoes off each other’s necks, and Perry threw pebbles in the air to make the bats dive to the ground in pursuit.
“It’s because they can’t see,” he said, “that’s why they chase a pebble. They emit noises too high for the human ear to hear and it’s like sonar. The sound bounces back to the bat, and that’s why they think any small thing flying in the air is probably a bug.”
“Bats have eyes don’t they?”
“I think so.”
“Well, they must be able to see a little then. I’m nearsighted too; I know what that’s like. It’s not the same as blind. General?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think you could catch a bat that way, if you wanted to? Like have a net ready and when one swooped down for the pebble you could snag it?”
“Maybe. But, I guess this begs the question, what would you do with a bat after you caught it?”
“I don’t know, keep it for a pet. Let it hang upside down from a hanger in my closet. Nice and dark in there. They are kind of cute, especially when they are babies.”
“Bats? Cute? I don’t see it.”
“Pretty much anything that is a baby is cute. I read somewhere that’s Mother Nature’s way of helping something defenseless survive. Like, when I was a kid and we had cats that lived out in the barn. My dad always hated those cats, and bitched at the way they kept producing litters left and right up in the haymow. But, I remember one time I came out to the barn to get him for supper. He was sitting on a hay bale playing with a little calico kitten that was barely half the size of one of his boots. The rest of the litter mewled and rolled over each other in a pile of hay, and my dad had a gunnysack and a piece of twine in one hand and that little calico licking the other. I was young, maybe seven or eight, but even then I knew what he was going to do. He looked at me standing there in my barn boots, I was probably crying, I don’t remember. Anyway, he didn’t say anything, just pitched the calico back in the pile with its brothers and sisters. He threw the gunnysack and twine in the trash on the way out of the barn, and he carried me on his shoulders all the way up to the house. I don’t remember him doing that very much.”
They had been holding hands but Kat pulled away and walked on a few steps ahead.
“Let’s head back. These bats suck at what they do. The damn mosquitoes are eating me alive.”
—
In Perry’s room at the War Bonnet, she stopped him when he went to put on the uniform.
“Let’s just do it like normal people tonight. If you don’t mind.”
“Normal people? I thought you liked what we do.”
“General, you know I do. It’s just tonight, I don’t want to be your Indian tonight. How about we do something different. How about you pretend I’m your wife. How about we do it like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Please, what does she wear to bed? How does she like it?”
“I don’t know, Kat. It feels like a wrong thing. Dishonest.”
“Just once, General. Then we can go back to the old way until you leave. You said yourself that you were unsure what was the affair, what was the marriage.”
She had her arms around him, and was rubbing her fingers in tight circles down his back. Looking down on her he could see where she had missed some white face paint behind her ear.
“Okay. Fine. She wears one of my T-shirts and a pair of my boxer shorts. I usually work late and she likes to read. Most of the time she’s asleep with her book by the time I get to bed.”
“Sometimes do you wake her up?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sha, I bet you do. Okay. Go into the bathroom and come out in five minutes.”
Perry went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet seat. It was a small bathroom and his bent knees hit the shower door. He realized he had forgotten to call Andy. He waited as long as he could, and when he emerged, the lights were off in the room except for the small bedside lamp. Kat had let her hair down. She was on her back on top of the comforter and her black hair spilled across the pillow. She had the hotel Bible split open facedown on her stomach. She was wearing one of his white T-shirts, a pair of his white-and-red-striped boxer shorts. Her skin was very dark against the white cotton, her nipples erect and visible through the thin material. She had her eyes closed and her arms lay out by her sides.
“Oh, hi,” she said drowsily, “I was asleep. I must have just nodded off while reading.”
—
On the final day of the reenactment, clouds came down across the Bighorn Mountains and the sky opened up. It was a mud bath. Between acts everyone stood under the pavilion at the visitor’s center. The warriors’ painted faces streaked. Their feathers soddened. Soldiers drank coffee, miserable in wet wool tunics and pants. During a short break in the rain, Perry found Kat retouching her paint, using the side mirror of a Winnebago in the overflow parking lot.
“Can you believe this,” he said. “I checked the weather and there was no mention of rain.”
“Imagine that, the weatherman being wrong.” She was using two fingers to rub the white paint over her cheek and the side of her jaw.
“In the last show I got killed in a puddle and had to lay there for fifteen minutes while the crowd cleared the grandstands.”
“Poor General.” She flashed him a quick smile.
“Kat?”
“Yeah?”
“My wife has breast cancer.”
She turned to him slowly. She put her arms around him and her painted face left a dull smear on the rough wool of his tunic.
“But it’s going to be okay. I think we’re going to be all right.”
—
After the last show everyone went down to the War Bonnet Lounge and got drunk. It was an annual tradition on the final day of the reenactment. All the reenactors piled into the dim bar, most still in full dress. The place was hazy with cigarette smoke and the stink of slow-drying wool. A gray-haired man in a full eagle-feather headdress played the jukebox. Grimy cavalry soldiers played pool with shirtless warriors. Perry ordered a beer and when the bartender—the same goateed guy from the other night—extended the bottle, he didn’t release his grip when Perry tried to take it from his hand.
“Don’t think people don’t know about you, man.”
“What?” Perry said, unsure he’d heard correctly in the noisy bar.
“Don’t what me, man. You come to get you some red pussy? Is that your deal? John Realbird is my cousin, man. You think you can come here and do whatever the fuck you want?”
Perry felt the blood coming to his face. He looked to see if anyone else was hearing the conversation. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, pal. I’m just here for the reenactment like everyone else. They pay me to come. I’ve been coming here for years.” Perry backed away from the bar and the bartender said something but Perry couldn’t hear over the jukebox and raised voices. Someone clapped Perry on the shoulder and pressed a drink in his hand. When Kat came in he nodded at her and
left out the back door. After a while she followed.
—
They were both a little drunk, and in the room they got drunker. Kat perched precariously on the shaky foldout ironing board and Perry sat on the end of the bed. They passed a pint of J&B.
“My paint is different this year,” she said.
“I know. I asked before, what does it mean?”
“I’ve been wanting to tell you. I just didn’t know how.”
She touched her cheek, the red circle. “This is a part of me, a piece of my heart that is gone forever.” She touched the other cheek, the chalky white paint. “This is my soul, blank as a field of snow, white like a ghost wandering the world.” Perry nodded solemnly. Kat gave a snort and shook her head. “You white people are suckers for that Indian shit. Hand me that bottle.” She drank deeply and laughed like none of it was true.
—
He nearly forgot to call Andy, and when he remembered, it was late. Kat was slid up against him on the bed, maybe asleep, maybe just being quiet. He dialed with one hand to not disturb her.
“Hello?” Andy’s voice was groggy with sleep.
“Hi, it’s me. Sorry it’s late.”
“Jesus, it’s late.”
“I know, I just got caught up with everything here and forgot to call you yesterday and I just wanted to see how you were doing and so I’m sorry but I called you anyway.”
“You sound kind of drunk.”
“I am kind of drunk. End-of-reenactment party. Drinking firewater with the locals. That kind of thing.”
“Sounds fun. I’m kind of jealous. Tonight I tried to make a tofu stir-fry. I’m not sure what happened but the tofu ended up scorched and the vegetables were still raw.”
“Tofu can be tricky.”
“Apparently. You know what else I did?”
“Hm?”
“I bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked almost half of them.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“What kind?”
“Virginia Slims. Long skinny girly ones.”
“I’ve never seen you smoke before. I’m having a hard time picturing it.”
“I’m new to it, so I’m not very good at it yet, but maybe I’ll do it for you when you get back.”
“Wearing something sexy, holding a glass of wine?”
“If you’d like.”
Kat had reached one arm across Perry’s chest and pushed her face down against his neck. The raven feather in her hair brushed his cheek. Her hand found his, the one that wasn’t holding the phone.
“Okay. I look forward to it. Have you tried blowing smoke rings yet?”
“No.”
“Well, practice.”
“I will. I was going to leave it as a surprise. You know, you come home from your reenactment and all of a sudden you have a smoking wife. A wife that smokes. That is something you’d probably never expect.”
“Well, it’s still a surprise, this way. I almost don’t believe it.”
“Yeah, you know why I started?”
“It is a question I had considered asking. Why?”
“Because what’s the point of not smoking? I’ve been not smoking for thirty-three years. Look at where it has gotten me. Now I’m going to be smoking. Make sense?”
“Perfectly.”
“Okay, I’m going to let you go, very tired.”
“Okay.”
“Love.”
“Love.”
“Love.”
Kat’s lips brushed his ear in her whisper. He hung up the phone. He was a scalped and bloody mess.
—
Before dawn Perry woke to find Kat’s side of the bed empty. He turned and saw her standing over him in the dark, fully clothed in jeans and T-shirt. She brought her fingers to his face and smoothed his mustache. When she moved her head down to him her hair folded like black wings around them.
—
In the morning Perry crammed the uniform, now smelly and stained, into his suitcase and gave a final look around the room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He put the empty bottle of J&B in the trash can. When he went out to the parking lot, he found a fluorescent orange aluminum arrow shaft protruding from the rear passenger tire of his Camry. Perry considered the arrow for a moment and then pulled it, with some difficulty, from the tire. The fletches were glued-on pieces of hot pink vinyl. The shaft had the word WHACKMASTER printed down the sides, and black squiggly lines, which, coupled with the orange, were supposed to give the appearance of tiger stripes. The edges of the broadhead were chipped and rusty. Perry got the donut tire from the trunk and switched out the flat. He put the arrow in the backseat and left the War Bonnet driving slowly on the small spare.
The only repair shop in Crow Agency was Robidoux’s Fix-it, a lean-to built off the back of a double-wide trailer. Perry pulled in and Ted Robidoux came down the trailer steps in his bathrobe running his hand through his short black hair. Ted occasionally rode in the reenactment. Three years ago he had taken care of a clogged fuel line in Perry’s car.
“Morning, Ted. It’s Perry. Remember me, the General?”
“Hey, Perry. Of course. I didn’t make the reenactment this year. How did it go?”
“Well, it was a spectacle, as always.”
“Good. Good. Looks like you got a bum wheel there. This country’s hard on tires.”
“And other things.”
“Ha, well, I should be able to handle the tire at least. Let me go put my pants on.”
He went into the trailer and reemerged clothed, with a mug of coffee that he handed to Perry. “Take a seat,” he said. “This could take a few.”
Perry sat on the porch and sipped at the hot coffee. It was still early and cool and the land seemed refreshed from yesterday’s rain. There was a stack of freshly cut lodgepoles leaning up against the trailer wall, and after he had finished his coffee, Perry went over to take a closer look. He was running his hand over their smooth, peeled surfaces when Ted came from the lean-to.
“Hey,” he said, “you like my new poles? I just finished peeling those yesterday. Last time we went to the mountains and put up the good ol’ lodge I had two poles break in the middle of the night. You should have seen how pissed my old lady was when the whole thing came down on us and we had to sleep in the cab of the truck.”
“Well, you did a good job with these,” Perry said. “They’re smooth. I can’t imagine doing it myself. I can’t even peel a potato.”
“The secret’s a sharp drawknife. And a light hand. And practice.” Ted patted one of the lodgepoles and laughed. “Ah yes,” he said. “The good ol’ tipi.” Then he patted the side of his trailer and laughed again. “And here’s the new tipi. I got a leaky roof. Fuck me. Well, anyway, we got her patched—the tire. A good-sized hole.”
“Thanks. It was the damnedest thing. I had an arrow sticking out of it this morning.”
“An arrow? Like a good ol’ Indian arrow?”
“Not exactly.”
Perry got the arrow and handed it to Ted, who held it between two fingers as if it were something particularly distasteful.
“Whackmaster?” he said.
“I have no idea.”
“Well, you know what we need to do, Perry?”
“What?”
“Back in the old days, if a warrior got hit by an arrow he had to break the shaft to make sure the guy who shot him didn’t still have power over him. So his wound would heal.” Ted handed the arrow back to Perry.
“Really?”
“Sure. I’m an Indian. I know what I’m talking about when it comes to situations like this.”
“Okay. How should I do it? Is there, like, a certain way it should be done?”
“I think just over the knee, like a piece of kindling for the fire.”
Perry brought the shaft down over his knee. The aluminum didn’t break, but bent sharply. He looked up at Ted, who s
hrugged. Perry bent it back and forth a few times and eventually the shaft broke cleanly, like a paper clip.
“There,” said Ted. “Now you keep that forever.”
BREATHARIANS
There were cats in the barn. Litters begetting litters begetting litters—some thin and misshapen with the afflictions of blood too many times remixed.
“Get rid of the damn things,” August’s father said. “The haymow smells like piss. Take a tire iron or a shovel or whatever tool suits you. You’ve been after me for school money? I’ll give you a dollar a tail. You have your jackknife? You have it sharp? You take their tails and pound them to a board and then after a few days, we’ll have a settling up. Small tails worth as much as large tails, it’s all the same.”
The cats—calicos, tabbies, dirty white, gray, jet black, and tawny—sat among the hay bales scratching and yawning like indolent apes inhabiting the remains of a ruined temple. August had never actually killed a cat before, but—like most farm boys—he had engaged in plenty of casual acts of torture. Cats, as a species, retained a feral edge, and as a result were not subject to the same rules of husbandry as those that governed man’s relation with horses or cows or dogs. August figured that somewhere along the line cats had struck a bargain—they knew they could expect to feel a man’s boot if they came too close, in return they kept their freedom and nothing much was expected of them.
A dollar a tail. August thought of the severed appendages, pressed and dried, stacking up like currency in the teller drawer of some strange martian bank. Fifty dollars at least, maybe even seventy-five, possibly even a hundred if he was able to track down the newborn litters.
He went to the equipment shed to look for weapons. It was a massive structure, large enough to fit a full-sized diesel combine, made of metal posts skinned with corrugated sheet metal. August liked to go there when it rained. He thought it was like being a small creature deep in the bowels of a percussion instrument. The fat drops of rain would hit the thin metal skin in an infinite drumroll punctuated by the clash of lightning cymbals and the hollow booming of space.
In the pole barn there was a long, low workbench covered in the tangled intestine of machinery. Looping coils of compressor hoses, hydraulic arms leaking viscous fluid, batteries squat and heavy, baling twine like ligaments stitching the whole crazy mess together, tongue-and-ball trailer knobs, mason jars of rusting bolts and nuts and screws, a medieval looking welder’s mask, and, interspersed amongst the other wreckage like crumpled birds, soiled leather gloves in varying degrees of decomposition. August picked up a short length of rusted, heavy-linked logging chain and swung it a few times experimentally before discarding it. He put on a pair of too-large gloves and hefted a broadsword-sized mower blade, slicing slow patterns in the air, before discarding it. Then he uncovered a four-foot-long spanner wrench, a slim stainless steel handle that swelled at the end into a glistening and deadly crescent head. He brought the head down into his glove several times to hear the satisfying whack. He practiced a few horrendous death-dealing swing techniques—the sidearm full-swing golf follow-through, the overhead back-crushing axe strike, the short, quick, line-drive baseball check swing—the wrench head making ragged divots in the hard-packed dirt floor. He worked up a light sweat, and then shouldered his weapon, put the pair of gloves in his back pocket, and went to see his mother.
