Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  That I will ‘eventually speak of, go over, but first I want to tell you what else came to me: There were other people present that night when the assault was unleashed. They did nothing, but they watched as the person was being surrounded. These people believe they cannot say anything, for fear of criminal implication. They are correct. What they don’t know is that within four years of the time of our friend’s departure, the cavernous Window into the Earth will reveal two of them ending themselves. One will use the railroad tracks for a pillow; the second will shoot himself in the temple. The third, a woman, will set fire to her car and open the door to insanity; and the fourth will drink himself into a wheelchair and a heart attack. This is what happens when one harbors a terrible secret. What they could have prevented has returned, causing them to lose control.

  As for the three deranged men, their own families will experience difficulties. This will happen because the relatives have corroborated the stories of their whereabouts and innocence. The grief they have caused to others makes a complete unforgiving circle. A baby will die in its crib; a girlfriend will be stricken with a pernicious disease; a sober brother will drive inexplicably into a stone bridge; a father will attempt suicide and later succeed; an alcoholic sister will be found frozen and unidentified in a faraway city; and a host of other maladies will ensue, all in the name and memory of. . .

  As soon as the circle of grief has made its rounds among the three brothers families, the sharp-pointed instruments and the blood-splattered female apparel they used and wore will be found in a baseball diamond near the tribal fairgrounds. Along with an assortment of animal bones that the brothers thought possessed power, the weapons and the masks will be stored in an antique tin suitcase wrapped in a star quilt and plastic.

  These items should not be feared. More important, they should not be turned over right away to the local white-skinned authorities, for they bear nothing but contempt for Indians. Proving them wrong with this case, which they considered “an unfortunate accident,” should make others in your community suspect that far more crimes may yet be uncovered. The greater authorities should not be trusted either, for they— by virtue of the fact they are white—are in agreement with the locals. Before they expunge everything you have investigated and submitted to date, make sure the items are safe, untouched, and hidden. Eventually a situation will make itself available for you to relinquish the evidence to the proper people.

  Only then, at the end of the four years aforementioned, will the non-ending darkness the three brothers encountered seek another host or hosts. The three cackling owls will launch themselves from the ledge of their spent lives. Only then will the three brothers’ minds be uncluttered and vulnerable to retribution. In its own way an impermeable vengeance is already sculpting itself from the shadows of their own relatives.

  This I leave in your thoughts: Be assured that your friend and relative will soon find solace that will enable his tormented shadow to fly as he has already dreamed, propelling himself from the glass doors in the form of a majestic bird whose color is that of the red dawn.

  Be assured also that what we have wanted for him, what we have prayed for, will thus occur.

  This song, upon the discovery and retrieval of the tin suitcase, should he sung.

  From the place where there is Fire

  from the place where there is Ice

  together have we gathered

  wanting to know what it was

  that held the night’s attention

  From the place there is Smoke

  from the place where a Hand signals

  together we have dreamed

  wanting to know what it was

  that held the night’s attention

  Only then will his journey to the After life begin. For him, within the Grandfather World, it will take four short days. For us, here on earth, it will take four long years. Only then will this journey he whole. For him, for everyone.

  Part Four

  The Lonesomest Valley

  Luciano Bearchild, my first cousin who wore black pinstriped, hand-tailored suits, white silk scaves, Italian shoes, and perforated fingerless gloves, used to say, “Ah, bo-shit, neigh-bor” to our futures. He would acquiesce to change by tightening his bow tie and shuffling across the concrete floor like James Brown. In addition to dancing like the famous black entertainer, he was addicted to “soul” music. He made uncultivated Indians like me cultivated.

  Luciano Bearchild was unlike any other Indian I had met in my lifetime. Even now, near the year 2000, there’s no one who can compare to the futuristic genius he was. Attired in an ironed white shirt and black slacks, he was spellbinding. His tribal language skills approached archaic perfection. In order to say some words they had to be enunciated or sung within a certain story. That took, extraordinary memory, as well as agile tongue-to-palate collaboration!

  If an honorary doctorate had been given to Luciano for simply being an exemplary, circumspect Indian, it would have shared wall space with Elizabeth Taylor and World War II German military memorabilia. He lived alone among these cherished collections. The most prominent—once the heavy log cabin door was closed—was a huge color poster of Rommel, the Desert Fox.

  North Africa:3 I would ask, and later be sorry for the question.

  Where is this place?

  He explained at length, using charts and photographs, to no avail.

  What else was there?

  Nailed to the door, above the German commander, was a hand-carved book rack. Books behind glass were imposing for us illiterates. Luciano, man, he opened the dustfree pages and read from them! At twenty-five he knew about the Outside World—Plato, Michelangelo, Degas, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. There were cameras, new and antique, encased in illuminated curio cabinets; copies of Life and the Saturday Evening Post were scattered everywhere within the museumlike labyrinth of his log cabin.

  Raised by the wisest Bearchild elders of the Settlement, Luciano knew more than most Indians twice his age. The immediate family saw this as a blessing, but other people saw intellect as a curse.

  Luciano swam to fearful and unexpected places: he could sing you to the Black Eagle Child Afterlife, where questions on religious faith are asked. Unassisted, he’d do this for you, and the next day he’d attend a Navaho Indian anthropology lecture at Grinnell College, a twenty-minute drive south to a foreign country.

  He dazzled the denizens of Tama County—white and Indian alike—from high atop the trapeze, hanging under the big-top tent, unafraid of gravity. His accomplishments would have made any Bohemian farmer envious, but among them he was feared for different, turtle-snapping reasons. Among Indians he was despised for being too cunning and prosperous.

  And why is that? you ask.

  Keep this in mind: To have every facet of life work to one’s advantage was seen not as the glorious result of unbounded determination but as the workings of evil. This was—and even today is—the tribal community’s mind-set. Illiteracy was shared. Poverty was blood-ingrained, and like the harmony that held the clans together, having little was inherited. Anything that tore through the delicate netting was regrettable, like suicidal Indians or those who chose urban relocation, coming home for their own funerals. What a pity! was whispered through cupped hands to respectful, listening ears. A life misled was lamented over sweet rolls and coffee, but Luciano’s success with money and white women was deemed unnatural.

  Suffering and bad luck were shared. Equally—like commodity surplus foods. Luciano’s fortune benefited his immediate family and himself. Movies, picnics, fishing trips, and long-distance travel—stuff we were aware of—just didn’t happen in our lives. That’s when a rumor circulated that the new dark green Ford Fairlane in his yard came from flesh-taking secrets, the kind only sorcerers coveted. Witchcraft.

  The family scoffed. “Since your critics cannot have money or white girlfriends, they now want your automobile. Wealth, in any shape, can have that dopey effect. The more yo
u make them chatter, the greater their envy is. Believe us.” Jealousy was thus perceived as admiration that had transmogrified, gone astray. Underneath acrimonious innuendo there was praise.

  Although I struggled to understand how this reversal could work, the wild rumors continued. For seven years the dark green Ford remained the newest car on the Settlement. Those who were baffled by Luciano’s success became obsessed with theories he was not of this earth. How and why else? they were heard muttering among themselves.

  “O, I don’t know about this not-of-this-earth-boshit,” Luciano would say to messages I was asked to personally deliver. With a gentle tug on his goatee and a sharp, upward smile that made him squint as if the sun had hit his eyes, he wondered why he was the subject of so much attention. But when these messages became “paper bullets”— a sorcerer’s seemingly innocuous method of sending a spell—the smile was replaced by an intense look of worry. And I was the barrel through which adoration spun out of control, tumbling end over end, chipping away at the scaled sleekness of a fish who was unlike any other I was to meet in my lifetime.

  Since then I haven’t delivered messages to anyone. . . . I do not speak for anyone other than myself and the Six Grandfathers.

  Amazingly, after Luciano’s mysterious disappearance, many spoke of him in respectful terms. Those who had been jealous enough to become enemies recanted statements he had been an extraterrestrial all along and took part in the search for him. There was a sudden realization among the disbelievers and hypocrites that Luciano, because of his precociousness, suffered the same tragedy as the Lesser-Known Twin Brother, the one who was double-crossed by his own relative in order so that a spark, the essence of life, might flicker occasionally in the murky cosmic earthlodge. ...

  Before he vanished on an errand for earthlodge elders, taking prayers, tobacco, and offerings of food and gifts to the silver metallic UFO that had crash-landed above Liquid Lake, Luciano was blessed manyfold. In fishing he excelled, catching and releasing prehistoric-looking fish we didn’t know existed. In addition to being the fastest sharpshooter of a .22 caliber bolt-action rifle, he was inventive at hunting. With the shoulder stock shortened to rest across the top of his chest, he cradled the rifle with one inward-bent arm that was wrapped in a triangular-shaped braided leather sling. In this contorted sharpshooting configuration, where the rifle acted like a natural appendage, his free hand chambered the rounds while the thumb squeezed off the shots in blinding succession.

  Fox squirrels that scattered in all directions rarely escaped his deadly accuracy. Ditto for his trapping skills: muskrats, mink, fox, and beaver saw his steel traps as the doors to their underground homes.

  Some disbelieving people circulated rumors he possessed a medicine, a charm that mesmerized the animals.

  “Ki wi te me-ma wi na ta a bye ya ni? Would you like to go with me on a trap run?” Luciano would ask from the porch-lit doorstep in his rubber hipboots.

  “Wi tte we no. Na bi ma i ni-ki o tto ni ya e me. Go along. At least you will have money,” Clotelde and Tony, my parents, pretended to encourage.

  The money was good for half a night of lugging bags of dead animals. It was disarmingly simple: With flashlights strapped to our heads we sloshed through the swamps and undamped the strangled fur-bearing bodies. They never put up a fight, but they became very heavy. That was it, we collected them. Like gifts.

  After the rivers and swamps froze over, he switched to hunting and spearfishing. Both farmers and Indians placed prepaid orders for illegal white-tailed deer and catfish meat. This is how he supported himself—with mythical animal-attracting charms. In one season of lugging I had enough money for a small typewriter from Ben Franklins, my first. I typed until my eyes hurt. I didn’t mind the large kindergarten-looking print, but the low-watt lightbulb in my room was the fuel for future neurologic ailments caused by the literary profession.

  On any weekend night at the Why Cheer Pool Hall, Luciano Bearchild arrived by cab. What we saw in movies and could only fantasize about, he radiated in living, breathing color. He made the doldrums of midwestern Americana bearable. Tolerable.

  With cue sticks in their hands still, city folk and Indians would edge to the large picture windows and take visual pleasure as Luciano’s door was opened by Joe Cadger, the taxi driver. Luciano would come out and take a big stretch, shaking his long legs and getting the pressed creases of his slacks back. Physically, he was slim and tall with a bronzelike complexion, high cheekbones, slanted eyes, a wide muscular back, and pouting lips. Spectacular handsomeness.

  If he arrived during a furious snowstorm, he wasn’t bothered. In fact, he made a big production of putting on his black topcoat with assistance from Joe. Luciano was the only person who “tipped” in Tama County. A five-dollar bill on top of the dollar-and-a-half ride into town and back was incredible for the sixties. When my parents first said he “tipped,” I took it to mean he fell over.

  The pool games and the barroom chatter ceased.

  From behind the dingy picture window, we observed a “one-take scene.” As the taxi pulled away from view, Luciano would jump-start our collective fantasies by adjusting the frayed ends of the silk scarf and walking forward through the icy sludge in long strides.

  “Just look at the dapper guy,” said the farmers with specks of beer foam still drying on their face stubble. “He is one helluva dresser!”

  “Yeah, and for an Indian at that!” the farmers’ wives responded, straightening their hair.

  “That’s my first cousin,” I would say to whoever stood beside me at the picture window, but no one ever acknowledged me. Yet I desperately sought to claim him. Over the grungy floor and amid the stench of beer and cigarette smoke, his angelic presence made everyone realize there was beauty in being human. The filth of our everyday lives, thick and visible, dissipated in the springlike breeze that swirled around him.

  Incapacitated by his bewildering cologne, Man-Sent, the farmers’ wives couldn’t wait for their husbands to overdose on the beer soup special. The instant they did, the women raced to caress a face that came only in fantasy.

  With breasts jutting out from chests of all sizes, the women would brush his back as he sat on a barstool. Luciano referred to them as a “flock of luscious skin-pockets.” Before plopping coins into the jukebox machine, he’d raise one fuzzy eyebrow and smirk sardonically. “They want to entice me—after closing time—with electric nipples.”

  This area of adulthood would have remained indecipherable had he not compared his admirers to luggage. There were “bags,” and there were “purses.” As he danced with these women to the music of Tommy Dorsey, I sat and tried to determine which was which, not knowing what mattered, what didn’t. He described their physical differences. His preferences. I imagined to no avail as he spun them around like Fred Astaire.

  Among Luciano’s flames there was Angela, a wavy-black-haired, unmarried Caucasian beauty. She was bewitching with her flirtatious smiles and touches. Angela and her brother, Chris, came from somewhere in the East. Maybe Pennsylvania or West Virginia.

  In a red, hooded cape and black riding boots, Angela’s entrance was just as dramatic as Luciano’s. “Here comes Little Red Riding Hood and her Wolf brother!” whispered the grubby patrons. They were called “gypsies,” and there was “too much contact between them” for brother and sister. Chris would indeed curl his arm around her thin waist and lead her by the wrist. Like ice-skaters, they were almost inseparable.

  “Did you do that to your sister?” one set of farmers asked.

  “Shi-i-i-it, I don’t think so,” replied a couple of others who became caught up scratching the deepest recesses of their buttocks.

  “If I had a sister that looked like her,” surmised one of the first set, “my hands would be elsewhere. Why, I’d carry her around, spin her, and show her off that way.”

  “Yeah, once you wash your goddamned nugget-digging fingers, you asinine prospectors!” the wives wisecracked.

  Their lewd c
omments flustered me, but I remember how refreshing Angela’s wavy hair smelled as she leaned over to whisper a message for Luciano. The crusty-eyed farmers awoke and salivated. A few loose strands of her perfumed hair would fall and catch on the moisture of my lips and eyes. Holding me, Angela—in her red hood still— would remove each one delicately while crooning over me, a lost, unfortunate puppy. In one dramatic movement she swayed and tossed her long hair out of the hood. Leaning over again she whispered into my ear, “Tell Luciano if he dances any closer to that big-breasted woman, hell suffocate.”

  Without fail I would shut my eyes, and the vibrations of her sweet voice electrified my quivering puberty-ridden face.

  As Luciano walked toward the picture window, we superimposed our reflections over his presence and wondered how we looked to others. Decrepit and pathetic perhaps. We were not fashion-conscious or pretty, and we certainly didn’t carry around a wad of twenty-dollar bills. Most of the patrons, including myself as a high school student, wouldn’t know the sensation of a hand-tailored suit from Neihardt’s Executive Club of Des Moines for a long, long time.

  The very first time I heard him say “hand-tailored” in response to my question about the suit, I thought he said Andy Taylor. You know, Opie Taylor’s dad? Of the Andy Griffith television show? He laughed for an hour until he felt guilty and sent me to the small Italian grocery store for Chesterfield cigarettes and almonds to go with the two Bloody Marys he always started and ended the evening with.

  The Gadger taxi kept its appointment at closing time. We would all pile in—Luciano, with Angela holding his arm, and Chris, her obsessive brother, clinging to her arm, and me following with three twelve-packs of Schlitz beer and potato chips. At the Settlement we’d transfer into the dark green Ford and check out the local party spots. Leaving these, we’d head for the smooth country roads and cruise them till daybreak, talking, laughing, and crying about the vast solitude of geography.,