‘Oh, man, that’s a genuine pain,’ E.C. Dude protested.
‘Of course it is,’ said Papago Joe, impassively. ‘That’s why I employ you to do it’
‘I didn’t hear anybody call,’ I told Papago Joe, as E.C. Dude roared off in a huge plume of ochre-coloured dust.
Papago Joe said, ‘No, of course not But you and me have to do some serious talking.’
‘About what?’
‘About what’s happening, about how we’re going to stop it’
‘From what you were saying about white people, I wouldn’t have thought you wanted to stop it Wouldn’t it suit you better, a land without palefaces, where the buffalo roam free?’
Papago Joe stared at me as if I had spoken complete gibberish.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ he wanted to know. ‘Do you think I want to live like a nomad, scratching my living wherever I can find it? Do you think I want to live in a tepee, or a pueblo, cooking some greasy concoction over a stinking fire? Do you think I want to ride around like an idiot, chasing some tough, unsavoury animal, when I can drive into Mesa in an air-conditioned Buick and buy the best prime-beef cuts, all ready prepared in a little paper tray, and a bottle of whisky to wash it down with?’
He closed the trailer door.
‘I think I must’ve misunderstood you,’ I said.
‘No,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘You didn’t misunderstand me. What happened to the Indians was appalling. But we can’t turn the clock back, and I think that Misquamacus is infinitely evil to want to try. Whether we forgive, whether we forget, those days are long gone, and I don’t want to see them come back.
‘They were bloody days, superstitious days — days of hunger and misery and terrible hardship. Believe me, Mr Erskine, there was never anything romantic about being a native American.
‘That didn’t give you the right to destroy us, no way. But it’s over now, it’s past, and anybody who wants to go back to those days is even more mindless and destructive than the palefaces were.’
I swallowed more whisky, and ate some dry-roasted peanuts. In spite of the chilly fierceness of Papago Joe’s air-conditioning system, I was beginning to feel slightly queasy. ‘So what are you suggesting?’ I said. ‘Most importantly, I came here to find Karen. As far as I’m concerned, Karen is my number one priority. I don’t have even the first idea how to deal with Misquamacus.’
Papago Joe said, ‘There’s something in Indian life which we call “dreaming after death.” That’s when somebody who dies with part of their life’s destiny still unfulfilled can appear in the dreams of somebody who is still living and ask them to fulfil that destiny for them.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
He smoothed his hand over his pewter-grey hair, and tugged at his pony-tail. ‘Your old friend Singing Rock committed himself to destroying Misquamacus. He defeated him once; but when he tried again, Misquamacus beheaded him. Now, however, he has one more opportunity to fulfil his commitment — through me.’
‘Did he actually ask you?’
Papago Joe nodded. ‘He appeared in my dream in a cloak of silver eagle feathers and when he spoke, smoke came out of his mouth. His eyes were like lamps and his hands were like eagle’s claws. He was dead, he was wrapped in all the trappings of death. But he spoke to me and asked me to finish what he had begun.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said that I would do it gladly. Singing Rock was one of the last traditional medicine-men, one of the great Sioux shamans. How could I possibly refuse?’
‘I see,’ I said. If he hadn’t already known so much about me, I don’t know whether I would have believed him.
Papago Joe leaned forward and laid his hand on top of mine. ‘There is a great war occurring in this country, Mr Erskine, between its present and its past. We have to take sides, all of us, or else we will be plunged back into ignorance and darkness and sudden death.’
I looked at him for a long time — into those dark and glittering eyes.
‘You’re a complicated man, Papago Joe.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘What do we do first?’ I asked him.
‘We finish this bottle of Chivas Regal.’
‘Then what?’
‘Tomorrow we will enter the Great Outside and search for Misquamacus.’
‘The Great Outside? How can we enter the Great Outside?’
He pointed towards the workshop building. ‘We go through the place where those seven people were killed … in just the same way that Karen went through the place where Hope and Danetree were killed in New York. Every place where an Indian’s blood was innocently spilled is a way through to the Great Outside.’
‘I see,’ I told him. I remembered what Dr Snow had told us about Apache Junction and Wounded Knee and all of those hundreds of other places all across America where Indians had died. ‘Have you, unh — have you ever visited the Great Outside before?’
Papago Joe shook his head. ‘I didn’t expect to go there until I died. But your friend Singing Rock will guide us.’
I was beginning to think that Singing Rock was proving to be more of a liability than a friend. I had flown here to Phoenix to look for Karen — not to take side-trips into the Great Outside or the Happy Hunting Ground or whatever you care to call it. Like Papago Joe, I hadn’t expected to visit the land of the dead until I was dead, and even then I hadn’t expected to go to the Indian quarter.
If I hadn’t seen Chicago falling and Las Vegas being swallowed up then I might have dismissed the whole idea as a joke. But for the past few days the whole of the United States had been fraught with tension and suppressed panic and a feeling of terrible weirdness, and in that atmosphere I was ready to believe almost anything. Besides, Papago Joe knew too much. He knew all about me and all about Karen and all about Singing Rock; and all about Misquamacus, too. He spoke in the same dry, informed way that Singing Rock had spoken, when he was alive. He gave me the leaden feeling that I was doomed to visit the Great Outside whether I wanted to or not: that my destiny lay beneath the soles of my feet, in what Dr Snow had described as ‘a dark reflection in a shadowy lake.’
Papago Joe said, ‘I need some things. Deer tails, eagles’ claws, dried fingers, rattles and medicine herbs.’
I didn’t mock. All those years ago, Singing Rock had worked his medicine against Misquamacus at the Sisters of Jerusalem with coloured sand and dry knocking bones, and I knew that Indian magic had convincing protective powers. Not as strong as the powers that Misquamacus could summon up, maybe. Not as strong as Aktunowihio, the living darkness. But I reasoned with myself that we were modern-minded and technological, Papago Joe and me, and what we lacked in shamanism we could make up for in experience, and general coolness, and nous.
Papago Joe peered at his ritzy gold Rolex. ‘Why don’t you meet me here at six o’clock tomorrow morning. I should have everything I need by then.’
‘Should I bring an overnight bag?’ I ventured.
Papago Joe levelled those coal-glitter eyes at me, and this time he looked seriously serious.
‘Mr Erskine, you and I are going to journey to the land of the dead. Just bring hope, and imagination, and a great deal of madness.’
We finished the bottle of Chivas Regal and then I left the Airstream without any ceremony at all and banged the door shut behind me. I had a sinus headache from the air-conditioned cold in Papago Joe’s trailer; and a brain-membrane headache from the whisky; and a stress headache from worrying about the Great Outside.
Then the sun hit me, naked and hot and totally uncompromising, and gave me an instant migraine.
I crossed the blinding-white lot to my rented Lincoln. While I was fumbling for the keys, Stanley appeared, dragging a dusty dead gopher behind him on a knotted string.
‘Hi, Stanley,’ I said. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Oh, fine,’ he said. Then, ‘You don’t look so hot’
‘Oh, yeah? Well, neither does your gopher.’
Stanley said, very gravely, ‘My gopher’s sick.’
I peered at it ‘You’re right. It looks pretty sick. What’s the matter with it?’
‘I don’t know. One minute it was okay and running around and then it kind of opted out’
Do you know something, I really liked that. ‘Opted out’ That was exactly what I was going to be doing tomorrow with Papago Joe, ‘opting out.’ Out of the world of the living, into the dead. Hallelujah!
I opened the car door and climbed inside. The leather seats were roasting and I had to lift my backside about an inch above them, and start the motor in that famous ‘cheeks-off-the-upholstery’ posture known all across the Sunbelt
‘Your friend was looking for you,’ said Stanley.
‘Is that right?’
‘She said she’d try to catch you later.’
I let the engine rev for a moment, and then I switched it off. I looked at Stanley closely. Stanley looked back at me. You had to give that kid something, he never blinked.
‘My friend was a woman?’ I asked him.
He snudged up his nose, nodded. ‘Sure. She said she’d try to catch you later.’
‘What did she look like, this woman?’
‘I don’t know. She was just a woman.’
‘How about her clothes? How was she dressed?’
‘Yellow, I guess. She liked my gopher.’
Karen, I thought I felt a sudden thrill of excitement and at the same time, an extremely unpleasant thrill of fear. The last time I had seen Karen, she had been dragged into a hole that wasn’t even a hole, on the second floor of the Belford Hotel, in New York. Of course I had glimpsed her on television, but somehow it was possible to believe that whatever you saw on television was an optical illusion, a trick of the cameras, a mirage. Now Stanley was standing in front of me in the blinding white sunlight of Apache Junction and telling me that Karen was really here, and that she was looking for me, and that she would ‘catch me later.’
I took out my billfold and gave Stanley two matching portraits of Abraham Lincoln. ‘Here, Stanley, go buy yourself something living. You know, like a kitten, or a puppy.’
‘E.C. Dude has a Gila monster.’
‘Well, buy yourself a Gila monster.’
He waited, frowned, blinked.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him.
‘Gila monsters cost twelve seventy-five.’
I spent the rest of the afternoon at the Phoenix Public Library on McDowell, trying to eat a very messy hamburger without the lady librarians catching me at it (a quick duck of the head, a huge bite, mouth-wipe, chew) and at the same time reading up everything I could find on Custer’s Last Stand and the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
Like just about everything else that goes wrong in life, Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn had been brought about by his own disobedience, his own hotheadedness and his own chronic underestimation of what he was up against. On a June afternoon in 1876, he had attacked a Sioux encampment on the western banks of what the Indians called the Greasy Grass River. Custer had commanded four hundred and eighty cavalry troopers, split into three contingents. But he had failed to realize that the Indian encampment was protected by well over two thousand warriors, including Gall and Crazy Horse.
While two of his contingents attacked the Indians head-on at the south of the encampment, Custer and two hundred and fifteen of his men had raced recklessly up the eastern banks of the river, trying to outflank the Indians from the north. But Gall and Crazy Horse had repulsed the attack from the south, and then crossed the river and caught the bluecoats when they were all strung out on a ridge, and halfway down a ravine.
The cavalry had scattered, and the rout that followed had been short, bloody and complete. As they retreated, the troopers were brought down by spears, war-clubs, rifle-fire and showers of arrows. Some of them, realizing they couldn’t escape, had shot themselves in the head.
Most of the history books that I found in the Phoenix library told much the same story — even the accounts given by the Indians themselves. But as the sky outside the library began to thicken into that thick gaudy mixture of mauve and orange that characterizes a Phoenix sunset, I discovered the first clue that something different may have happened at the Little Big Horn. I came across a book of pictographs, showing the course of the massacre from beginning to end. They had been drawn by Chief Red Horse of the Sioux — who had played a prominent part in the battle — with the encouragement of a US Army surgeon called Charles McChesney.
McChesney had also taken down Red Horse’s narrative account of the Little Big Horn, and the words were printed beneath the pictographs.
The soldiers came on the trail made by the Sioux and attacked the lodges of the Unkpapas. And there they were, in childishly drawn and coloured pictures, Mayor Marcus Reno and his contingent, on their way to fight with the Sioux head-on.
All the Sioux now charged the soldiers and drove them in confusion across the river and up into the hills. Red Horse had drawn them riding back over their own hoofprints, to indicate that they were in full retreat.
With Major Reno and his men driven back, this was the moment when the Sioux had turned their attention to the other soldiers — Custer and his men, riding up the eastern ridges of the river valley.
But as I turned the page of Chief Red Horse’s book, I came across an extraordinary pictograph which made me literally shiver — and it wasn’t the air-conditioning in the library, either, even though the lady librarians had set it to Visible Breath.
The shadow rose out of the ravine and moved across the ridge to the Deep Coulee. The soldiers were crying out and confused. The shadow swallowed them up. Then Crazy Horse blew his eagle-wing-bone whistle, and the Sioux charged into the shadow and killed those soldiers who were not yet dead.
Chief Red Horse had drawn a turmoil of horses of different colours (black, red, brown, blue and even lilac), and up above their heads a huge black cloud. McChesney’s comment was,
‘The limitations of sign-language made it difficult for me to discover exactly what Chief Red Horse had been attempting to draw. I asked him if it were the smoke from the soldiers’ guns and the dry adobe earth kicked up by the horses. In particular the dust must have been choking, because although there was some vegetation on the ridge — sagebrush and Spanish dagger plants and prairie pea vines — it was too sparse to cover the soil, and most of the draws in this part of the river were nothing but barren washes.
‘However, Chief Red Horse said again and again that this was neither smoke nor dust, but shadow. He further elaborated by covering his face with his hands, and parting his fingers so that I could see only his eyes. I had no idea what he meant by this, and I could find nobody who could explain it to me further.
‘I assumed that he must be mistaken when he said that Crazy Horse had blown his whistle after the shadow had swallowed the soldiers. The dust and smoke would not have risen as thick as Chief Red Horse had drawn it until the battle was well under way. There was no doubt that the river valley was very dark that afternoon. One account says that it “seemed like twilight; under the pall gunflashes winked like fireflies. At times, the blasts of rifles and carbines sounded like the ripping of a giant canvas down the wrinkles of the hills.” But the darkness surely developed because of the fighting and did not precede it.
‘I was also puzzled by Chief Red Horse’s suggestion that the shadow itself had done for a great many of Custer’s men. He insisted that Crazy Horse had done nothing more than follow the shadow and dispatch the wounded, although how a shadow could have killed anybody, he refused (or was unable) to explain.
‘Whenever I pressed him on the matter, he simply repeated the action of covering his face. He said that he was unable to describe the shadow further, in case he incurred the anger of the wonder-workers.’
I examined Red Horse’s shadow-drawing for almost twenty minutes. It couldn’t have been a cloud, because Red Horse hadn’t drawn clouds or sky in any of his other pictogra
phs. Nor had he drawn any dust — even in his illustrations of the most furious fighting. This was the only pictograph in which a shadow appeared and unlike his other drawings, which were light and sketchy, the shadow was drawn thick and black and complicated, as if he had drawn something very detailed but then changed his mind, and tried to obscure it with layer upon layer of heavy pencil-shading.
There was no way of telling what was under all that shading unless I went to the Smithsonian and examined the original pictograph. But all the same, I thought I could make out a mass of coiled or wavy lines, almost like the tentacles of an octopus. At the top of the picture one of these tentacles appeared to have emerged from the shadow and thrust itself into a trooper’s stretched-open mouth.
That chilled me more than ever. It reminded me too closely of Martin Vaizey, when he had been possessed by that buffalo-headed shadow at the Greenbergs’ apartment and thrust his arm down Naomi Greenberg’s throat.
Maybe that same shadow-buffalo had been there, at the Little Big Horn. Maybe the massacre had happened exactly as Chief Red Horse had described it.
I turned over the page, and it was then that I was sure that I was thinking in the right direction. Here was a pictograph of the Indian dead, scattered on the ground in warbonnets, their rifles and their bows lying beside them. The soldiers killed 136 Sioux, but the wonder-worker performed the necessary rituals to make sure that they would live contentedly in the Great Outside until the day came when all white men would be buried, when they would again walk free.
McChesney remarked, ‘I took this as a reference to the cult of the Ghost Dance, which claims that white people and all of their works will one day fall into the ground and be swallowed up, leaving America free for Indians once more. Because he had drawn him so tall, and in such great detail, I asked Chief Red Horse to give me the wonder-worker’s name. Chief Red Horse said there was no sign for the wonder-worker’s name, because any warrior who tried to describe him in sign-language would find that his fingers caught fire. Instead Chief Red Horse scratched in the dust some hieroglyphs which looked like two cups and a curled ear, a lozenge with four horizontal lines on it, and a bowl with two necklaces on either side of it. I had never seen a Sioux write hieroglyphs like these before, and I had no understanding of what they might mean. I made a note of them, however, and some months later in Connecticut I met the French missionary Father Eugene Vetromile, who was something of an expert on Indian writing. He studied the hieroglyphs with great interest and proclaimed them to be Narragansett, in spite of the fact that they had been written by a Sioux. Their meaning was: Darkness, Terror, Eternal, Man — or, He Who Brings The Terror Of Eternal Darkness. The phonetic pronunciation was m — q — m — c, or miskamakus.’
Burial Page 35
