Republics of the Mind

by James Robertson

  They all got out. The procession turned into the field and the pick-up pulled over. Now MacTaggart was revving his tractor, urging the people on across the drills towards the shed. Some of them stumbled and the women cried louder. Malky said, ‘Aye, ye can greet noo, ye thievin hoors,’ and he sounded bolder than he was looking and Christie laughed. Auld Sammy must have heard them because he turned to say something and one of the armed men beside him prodded him in the side with his rifle and he fell to the wet earth. The man kicked him to make him stand up and Christie wanted Sammy to get to his feet and he wanted him to stay where he was. Sammy’s dog was running round in small circles trailing its lead, barking and snapping at the legs of the man standing over Sammy. The man pointed his rifle at it and Sammy raised his head and called to the dog and it came and sat beside him. The man pointed his rifle back at Sammy.

  There seemed to be a moment when everything might be different. Everybody – the men with guns, their prisoners, MacTaggart in his tractor – stopped and watched Sammy. Even the two men in leather jackets and dark glasses hesitated. It was as if somebody, with some brave, simple gesture, could change whatever was going to happen. And Christie thought, I can dae something here, I can really dae something.

  Then Sammy caught sight of Christie and seemed to recognise him for the first time. His eyes flickered with uncertainty. He looked at Christie’s face and then he looked at Christie’s shotgun. There was a long streak of mud down Sammy’s clothes where he had fallen on the ground. It made him look even more of a minker than usual. Christie kept his eye on the streak of mud. That way he thought he could do what he was going to do.

  ‘Wait!’ he shouted. He was calling to the man pointing his rifle at Sammy’s chest. Christie walked over with the shotgun cradled in his arm, right past the man with the rifle, and helped Sammy to his feet. He felt big and powerful, like a man in a film.

  ‘It’s awright, Sammy,’ he said.

  He took the end of the lead and together Sammy and he started walking towards the shed with the dog between them, and everybody else started moving too. Sammy started to hum again. Up close it was a completely tuneless sound, more of a moan or a whine than a hum. Christie hated it, he wanted Sammy to shut up so he could concentrate. Something big was coming, something so big you needed to focus all your thoughts on it and not be distracted. Christie felt as though by being there some great mystery was about to be revealed to him. It was like a Bible story from when you were a bairn, a story that you believed but didn’t understand, and now suddenly, years later, you were about to understand it. And these people, these miserable people moaning and girning the way they always did, they were the key to the mystery. And the mystery was in MacTaggart’s shed.

  But when they got to the shed Christie didn’t go in. MacTaggart stopped his tractor and got down and pulled open the sliding door with a blank expression on his face, as if he might be going to fetch a couple of sacks of fertiliser or something but didn’t really care one way or the other if there was none there. They ushered the prisoners towards the door. Auld Sammy looked at Christie and he started to shout, he was shouting, ‘Help us! Help us! Why are ye just standin there? Help us!’ The man with the earring was watching intently. He didn’t seem to see Sammy anymore: he was staring at Christie to see what he would do. To see if he would fuck up.

  Christie was still holding the dog’s lead. He said, ‘I’ll tak care o yer dog.’ Sammy shook his head. Christie said, ‘Sit!’ and the dog sat down beside him. Then they pushed Sammy and the rest of them inside the shed and the other men, including Malky and MacTaggart, went in too. The only ones who were left outside were Christie and the man with the earring.

  There was a sudden clatter of gunfire from inside the shed, and then nothing.

  The man with the earring said, ‘Nice work, Christie. But ye canna keep the dog.’

  ‘How no?’ Christie said. He searched for the man’s eyes behind the glasses, but he couldn’t see them.

  Malky came out of the shed. His clothes were spotted with blood and so were his hands. His face was very white.

  ‘He canna keep the dog,’ the man with the earring said. ‘Tell him.’

  ‘But I said I would,’ Christie began, and Malky’s face flushed up red and he bore down on him so close he could smell the blood on his shirt. ‘Ye canna keep the fuckin dog!’ Malky said. He flicked his eyes indicating the shed behind him. Christie could hear teeth grind. Auld Sammy’s dog was sitting patiently waiting for Auld Sammy to come out. Christie realised that what they were saying was right. He couldn’t keep the dog. He pushed the barrels of the shotgun gently against the back of its head, shut his eyes and pulled both triggers.

  ‘Put it inside,’ Christie heard the man with the earring say. ‘Ye can clear up later.’ He kept his eyes closed and stood absolutely still, and he heard heavy breathing around him and wondered what would happen next. He knew with absolute certainty that he could not go into the shed. The only way they’d get him in there would be if they carried him.

  A few seconds went by, and each one felt like a minute. Then he heard someone bend down next to him, and give a groan with the effort of lifting something heavy, and when he opened his eyes he saw Malky’s gun on the ground and Malky’s back as he carried the dead dog into the shed.

  Malky came into the house later that day and the first thing he did was punch Christie in the face, sending him crashing into his armchair. Christie sat rubbing his jaw but he didn’t get back up, he knew why Malky had done it. Malky took a new bottle of whisky out of a plastic bag and cracked the top open.

  ‘Ye stupit fuckin eejit,’ Malky said. ‘Ye’re lucky tae be alive. Ye dinna mess aroond wi thae guys. Get us some glesses.’

  So they sat drinking, and Christie rubbed his jaw and started to talk about what had happened, just the way Malky used to talk about his night rides, but Malky interrupted him. ‘Forget it, Christie,’ he said. ‘Forget it all. Forget aboot Sammy and the dog and everything ye fuckin saw. It didna happen. Awright? It didna fuckin happen.’

  And that was the way it had gone on. MacTaggart pulled down the shed and there was nothing inside it and then he planted Brussels sprouts all over the field. Malky would come round and make sure Christie had food and drink, and Christie would try to talk about what had happened and Malky would tell him to forget it. ‘Ye’re imaginin it, Christie. Ye’ve been watchin too much shite on the telly. Aw thae news programmes ye watch, the documentaries and aw that. That aw happens somewhere else. Other countries. No here. Ye’re away wi the fairies.’

  ‘But I seen ye comin oot the shed,’ Christie would say. ‘We took Auld Sammy and them inside and ye came oot wi blood on yer claes. I was there, I’m a witness. And I killt thon dog wi my faither’s shotgun,’ he would say.

  ‘Christie, Christie, ye’re makin it up. Ye’re no right in the heid. That’s why we took the gun aff ye. That stuff’s aw aff the telly, Christie. It’s got inside yer heid fae the telly.’

  ‘Ye didna tak the telly aff me, though, did ye?’ Christie said. He kept quiet about the stash of weapons in the attic. Let them have the shotgun if it made them feel safe. He had another. Plus the other stuff. A whole bloody arsenal.

  ‘Didna need tae,’ Malky said. ‘Ye knackered it wi leavin it on aw the time. But I can get ye another ane if ye want. Ye ken that.’

  ‘Naw,’ Christie said. ‘That ane suits me fine.’

  The truth was, he didn’t need the television. He looked at the stuff Malky had brought, still sitting on the carpet in front of the fire. He didn’t need the bread – the starlings could have it. He didn’t need the eggs or the bacon or the baked beans. He looked at the whisky. He didn’t even need the whisky, but he needed to think, and the whisky would help him to think. He needed to make a plan. He had to get in touch with Gillian somehow. He had to get in touch with the international boys, tell them about what had happened in the shed. He was a witness. All right, he had shot the dog, but only the dog, and he’d had no choice
, they’d have killed him if he hadn’t. He picked up the coal-hod and shoved more coals on the fire. He remembered the houses burning on the hillside. Terrible, terrible things had happened. He felt numb with the thought of all that hurt. He went to the window and looked out. It would be getting dark again soon. He wondered if he would see the ghosts again, and how many there would be. He reached for the first bottle of whisky, and started to plan what he would do in the morning.

  The Future According to Luke

  Luke Stands Alone was the worst prophet in the history of the Lakota people. He went into trances and when he came out of them he would say he’d seen the future. But he hadn’t, because nearly everything he prophesied had taken place days, months or years before. Even the century before the last one. He didn’t so much see the future as forget the past, then remember it again as if it were still to happen. This wasn’t something his friends Dean Liboux and Johnny Little Eagle felt they could really hold against him, but they weren’t filled with a lot of confidence when he made a prediction.

  Dean and Johnny had discussed Luke’s prophetic failings often and concluded that the inside of his head was just a trailer full of junk, with a TV in the corner playing a continuous stream of old Westerns, cartoons, commercials and documentaries. Hardly any wonder he got confused. Again, they didn’t blame him for this. The insides of their own heads weren’t so different.

  One time, Luke said he’d seen white soldiers tumbling upside down into an Indian village with their hats falling off. This meant a great victory was coming, he explained.

  ‘You mean an old-time village, with tepees and everything?’ Dean asked.

  ‘I guess,’ Luke said.

  ‘You guess?’ Dean said.

  Johnny said, ‘Didn’t Sitting Bull dream something pretty much like that before Little Big Horn?’

  Luke didn’t even blink. ‘Yeah, you’re right, he did. Man, how about that?’

  Days went by, and weeks, and Luke wasn’t around. Then one day Dean saw him again. ‘So when is the big victory coming off?’ he demanded.

  ‘It already did,’ Luke said. ‘They opened the new casino, didn’t they?’

  ‘The Prairie Wind? What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘The first Saturday it was open, a bunch of Air Force personnel came over from Ellsworth and lost two thousand dollars at blackjack. Ain’t that a victory?’

  ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me they took their hats off when they came inside?’ Dean said.

  ‘I guess,’ Luke said.

  ‘But there ain’t no tepees there. They got a seventy-eight-bed hotel, but no tepees.’

  ‘They got tepees on the website,’ Luke said. ‘Check it out. Just like in my vision.’

  Dean didn’t have a computer. He could hardly think of anyone he knew who did. He could think of quite a few who had electricity and even a landline, but computers were thin on the ground on the reservation. Luke himself didn’t have one, so he must have seen the website some place else. He used to disappear for long periods, and when he showed up again he would make out he’d been living rough in the Badlands, on a quest for visions, but usually somebody would have spotted him in Rapid City or Sioux Falls. Once even in Denver. Maybe he’d looked at the website in Denver.

  There was nothing particularly unusual about the way he took off like that: a lot of folks came and went on the reservation, many of them spent time in the cities, and visions of one kind or another weren’t uncommon either. Johnny and Dean had had visions themselves. But these days Dean was trying to avoid them. He wasn’t smoking weed or eating magic mushrooms, and although he still liked to drink he was sticking to Budweiser. He’d decided drinking vodka or any of those ten per cent malt liquors was the quickest way to death and he didn’t want to go there yet.

  As for Johnny, well, Dean didn’t know what Johnny wanted. He had a girlfriend who had a baby by another man, and he seemed to like her and the kid but he didn’t spend much time with them. He preferred hanging out with his male friends, getting drunk. A lot of guys were like that, whether or not they had girlfriends. Life was difficult and drinking made it easier, at least for a while. Maybe that was what Johnny wanted, just for life to be easier. Maybe that was all anybody could want.

  Johnny and Dean were good drinking buddies because neither of them was into fighting – each other or anybody else. They tried to stay away from guys they knew who got fighting drunk, because it hurt too much being punched by them and it hurt too much having to accept their apologies when they sobered up. They both liked drinking with Luke, even if he was a shit prophet, because he didn’t want to fight either. The three of them would sit around moaning about all the bad things that had already happened to the Lakota, and Luke would foretell all the bad things that were still to come.

  Of course you didn’t have to be a prophet to be able to do that, you just had to walk around with your eyes and ears open. Luke could tell you, for instance, that in the next three months there would be X number of car wrecks involving Y number of Indians, and you knew that, give or take a few, his prophecy would come true. He could give you similar predictions about how many people on the reservation would die of alcohol poisoning, how many overdose, how many be murdered, how many commit suicide, how many be assaulted, how many be arrested, how many get jobs, how many lose them, how many reach the age of fifty, how many not – until at last, maybe around the fifth or sixth beer, you’d say, ‘But Luke, you ain’t saying nothing we don’t already know.’ And Luke would say, ‘Yeah, but wasn’t I right about the Little Big Horn?’ or, ‘Wasn’t I right about the casino?’ And you didn’t argue with him, you just laughed, because what else could you do? And anyway, you weren’t drinking to argue, you were drinking to get drunk.

  Selling, buying or drinking alcohol was illegal on the reservation. So what Dean and Johnny would do was drive over the boundary to Jubal Schele’s place, the Buffalo Saloon, and drink there. This one day they had scraped together a few dollars – enough to put some gas in Johnny’s beat-up old car – and had set off up the road, and after a few miles they passed Luke Stands Alone walking, so they pulled over and gave him a ride.

  It was a cold, clear afternoon in November. When they arrived at the Buffalo Saloon and got out of the car, Dean saw snow on the distant Black Hills. He drew this to the attention of the others. ‘Yeah, I dreamed about that,’ Luke said. ‘I saw it on the weather report,’ Johnny said.

  The bar was situated on a rough old back route between Bombing Range Road and the highway to Custer, and the only reason for it being there was to serve liquor to Indians. The big old sign on the roof said INDIANS ALLOWED, which kind of proved the point, but the story was that back in the fifties the words NO DOGS OR had also been up there. Dean asked Jubal if this was true. He asked it in a friendly enough way, but Jubal looked at him suspiciously, like he was trying to start some trouble, even though they were the only customers.

  ‘What if it did?’ Jubal said. ‘That’s an artefact, that sign, a piece of the old days.’

  ‘Them old days,’ Johnny said sourly. ‘Ain’t they over, Jubal?’

  ‘They sure are,’ Jubal grumbled, in a way that made you understand he missed them. ‘Genuine goddamn piece of Old West memorabilia, that sign.’

  ‘Maybe you should try selling it on eBay,’ Johnny said.

  ‘Why would I do that?’ Jubal said. ‘Might want to sell the whole place some day, and that sign’s a part of it. Integral, you know? So I think I’ll leave it where it is. You boys wanting some more beers now?’

  While Jubal was away Johnny said there could be no greater irony than three Lakota men of warrior age drinking liquor in a white man’s bar located midway between a town called Custer and a US Air Force bombing range, and Dean said, oh yes there could, those same three Indians could be laughing about it. So they laughed about it and then Jubal came back with the beers and took the money from the pile of dirty dollar bills and quarters in the middle of the table. Jubal was happy fo
r them to drink as much as they liked, but he didn’t keep a tab, not for Indians here in the back room. If there were ever any white customers in the front room, maybe tourists headed for Mount Rushmore, he’d have kept a tab for them, but there never were.

  Dean went to the men’s room to take a leak. The walls were painted a deep brick red that was almost brown, and there were darker, menacing stains in several places. There had been an infamous fight at the Buffalo Saloon once, many years ago, before Dean was even born, between some reservation Indians and some outsiders, city Indians. Skins versus breeds. The fight had been in the bar and then somebody had followed somebody else out to the men’s room, and a gun had been pulled, and a man had been shot and killed. Just thinking about it spooked Dean a little. He seemed to recall that the man hadn’t died right there, but later, in the hospital. For a while after that the Buffalo Saloon had had a bad reputation and was always busy. That was when Jubal should have sold the joint. These days it was mostly quiet. There were other places just off the reservation that you could walk to, and where you could get drunk for less – liquor stores, not bars. They were the places most people went to now.

  For all that he didn’t want to fight, Dean kind of wished he’d been at Jubal’s back then. He wished something would happen. It wouldn’t matter if it was good or bad. Just if something would happen. He felt like he wasn’t fully alive, like somebody had reached in and taken some vital organ out of his body while he was sleeping. It was weird: he couldn’t remember ever not feeling like that, but he’d only recognised it in the last year. Somebody had stolen something from him, his ability to get angry or even just active. Maybe it was to do with drinking too much. Or maybe, now that he was cutting down, it was to do with not drinking enough. Hell, he was only twenty-five, maybe he’d stop altogether. If he did, would the feeling be there all the time, or would it go away forever?