When the party was over, as I got out of the Ford, Angela would jump out of the front seat and either plant a kiss on my cheek or hug me hard. Before Chris had a chance to get out of the car, to sit beside his irresistible sister, I would slam the car door shut.
“Neig-bor! Hey-y-y Thanks! With a capital T!” Luciano would say with a firm hand clasp.
I would go home drunk, staggering through the hybrid-corn fields, feeling good about the twenty-dollar tip next to the perfumed, folded handkerchief that Angela had placed in the back pocket of my blue jeans. There was also assurance that sometime during the week Angela, standing naked in front of me and poised over the red cape, would grind her soft, hairy groin against my dream of copula-tion—in Luciano’s cabin—with a nervous and jealous Chris pacing nearby.
The dream of a standing, hip-grinding Angela, I can now say, was the concoction of Pat “Ditty” Red Hat, the elementary school scholar who imparted to us the purpose of male organs and ambulatory sex.
We—Ted, Horatio, “Kensey,” “Grubby,” and I—knew the details. The vivid moonlight. A skirt hoisted past the belly button and discarded balloons containing pools of “chicken soup.” We were there unnoticed, hanging upside down from the intersecting beams under a bridge. We drooled as an overweight bat, a sa mi-e na kwi ta-bi tta ka ni ne kwe, named Pat gave a play-by-play account of a sexual assignation. His sister’s. The lovers “whirled” over the sand standing up.
“It’s also called rock and roll,” said Luciano. “It’s black slang for screwing”
“Self-explanatory music!” chimed Angela from the side somewhere. She sang out again. “Wake up, Edgar! For Christ’s sake. The subject is mu-u-u-sic and the What’s My Line? mystery guest hasigned in!”
I looked upward at a blurry figure, trying desperately to connect her cheery voice with her fragrant face and body. Finally, after a drink of ice water, my misty head vanished. That was my lesson on binge drinking by the Why Cheer railway crossing. With her demure face and heart-topped mouth, Angela stood before the Wurlitzer jukebox that lit her up in yellow Degas-esque color. Inserting mass amounts of coinage, we made sure no one else was accorded a chance to select the music of the night.
“Hey, T. S. Bearchild, you hear me?” Angela called out. “What do ya wanna hear?”
From the booth behind us a drunk neighbor woman pretended to defend me, crying out, “Yeah, he hears you! Ed wants Johnny Cash! Johnny Cash! Ke te nay-ke bi til I said, plugged butt!”
I quickly snapped out of my drunken stupor, wanting to avoid a confrontation between the women. Not only was Angela an angel, she was mouthy.
“Rock and roll,” I said in an extraloud yawn, hoping to drown out the antagonistic patron. The Zombies in the jukebox were winding down with “She’s Not There.”
“OK, OK, Roger Miller then, ‘King of the Road’” interjected the drunk neighbor woman in a rude tone. “The selection number is FU2!”
“I prefer rock and roll!” I repeated in a half shout as the Zombies lamented someone’s voice being “soft and cool, her eyes were clear and bright . . . but it’s too late to say you’re sorry, how would I know, why should I care?”
At the song’s end, while the jukebox was buzzing and clicking for the next selection, Luciano and Angela howled like a couple of coon hounds. “Ditto! Ditto! Dit-to-o-o-o! Ed-gr-r-r-r. But there’s always room for . . .” With that, they took to the dance floor in a flash, jitterbugging to the Andrews Sisters’ tune “The Bugle Boy of Company B.”
In the booth behind us the neighbor woman whispered slurred aspersions. “What’d Angie bitch s-s-ay? Dildoo? Dil-do? Se-see. That’s what I told ya.”
If it wasn’t the downtown rednecks complaining about the brother and sister gypsies, it was someone from the Sett. There was nothing more sickening than a tribal member doing a redneck routine. Our people, at least those who had renounced Black Eagle Child citizenry, mimicked the whites. Enraptured with their pedantics, they got into I hate-those-devilish-gypsies schtick in a split second.
Through them, we could sense how the evening would progress. Later on, at some desolate roadside of the Sett, our own friends and relatives would echo the Indian redneck’s animosity. “What’s wrong with you guyses?” they’d fume in Black Eagle Child from the safety of their locked, interior-lit cars. “Aren’t you bothered their own people talk about them?”
It was strange that Angela and her brother were classified by Indians as whites and not as gypsies. Nevertheless, they were perceived as an incestuous dragonfly duo: a major negativity with arms and legs—and wings. “Remember what the whites said,” we were advised at the onset, “everywhere they fly, they fornicate.”
“The fact of the matter is,” Luciano would respond an hour later, once we were far away from everyone, “we don’t give a skunk shit what they say in town.” He’d adjust the rearview mirror of the Ford Fairlane, looking for me. “Is that right? Edgar. Edgar!” I’d nod in agreement, knowing he’d spot the reflection of my glasses. “Else how could I tell you about the tantalizing softness of a female’s palm? Angela here will verify it is a softness greater than a raccoon’s paw.”
“Ah, why don’t you shove it, clown!” Angela would snap without fail.
The analogies between his successful fur-trapping business and his love life amused me—to a point. Otherwise, this is where the traditional prodigy stumbled and fell from his naive corniness. In the tribal domain where animism and supernaturalism prevailed, he was not off kilter. He knew the appropriate “shadow-releasing” words to recite if someone suddenly passed away. Critical, spontaneous wording. With women, and in particular, Angela, he clamored like a three-year-old orphaned child seeking unadulterated affection.
“No, thanks, ma’am,” he’d say right on cue, “this clown shove nothing.”
From the front seat Angela would interrupt his philosophical discourse. Every weekend. “Ed-gr-r-r-r, man, tell your pal here to cease and desist with the wildlife metaphors. It’s so uncouth!” Raising her palm in defiance to Luciano’s impassive face, she would say, “Luji, look for yourself. It’s me. Not a goddamned creature of the forest, OK? Impale that with a nail to your cranium, too.”
Luciano Bearchild, exhibiting a rarely revealed side of his character, would look hurt. Raccoon analogies were good for a chuckle, and that was it. For as much as he knew of the invisible machinations of another, nonworldly dimension, something we could never fathom, this separation of knowledge, of cultures, gnawed at him. It would eventually topple him. On our trapping excursions, if he saw a monolithic maple tree beside a river whose roots were exposed in the air and underwater, providing refuge for winged and finned creatures, he’d walk up to it proudly in his squeaky rubber hip boots and say, “That’s me, helping everyone.”
When he related this story to Angela for the first time, she was unimpressed and sarcastic. “Big deal. If you’re so helpful, Luji, make the whites and Indians quit being so hostile to us.”
“I might be able to,” Luciano replied, before he leapt onto another encounter story with nature. “In my dreams a family of beavers approached me.” We awaited the remedy to society’s illness that never came.
“What do beavers have to do with hostility?” queried Angela.
“Maybe nothing, but listen,” he said. “They visited with me several times and they spoke normally as you and I are doing. My vocal cords were paralyzed but I spoke to them with my thoughts. I know it’s not right, I pleaded, killing them and their families sometimes. But without them I’d starve. I told them that.” For Angela the dreams of the beaver family were annoying; for me they symbolized the unmerciful toppling of a monolithic maple tree, the one that Luciano most admired.
Around the winsome Angela Holiday, either you had to be a lover of music or you had to act as if you were at least aware who the major recording artists were. Luciano, aside from his flawless looks and pockets that were brimming with green wonder, qualified as a soul music aficionado. Her penchant for all kinds
of jukebox music grew on me, a simple groupie. Country and western music became, as she described it, “tolerable and even admirable.” Around closing time, with the bar and the ever-present jukebox to ourselves, she’d sing along note for note with Patsy Cline or Fontella Bass.
It was no different in Luciano’s car.
From the second she was in the front seat of the Ford Fairlane, the radio was baring on to Hiring proportions. Tapping her long dark purple fingernails on the dashboard, her zestful I-want-to-be-a-nightclub-singer-in-Chicago energy elevated our merriment to astronomical heights.
On Friday and Saturday night, at one of the Why Cheer taverns, Angela gained more insight into the future through a beer-stained jukebox than she had from life all week. Highly influenced by “little signposts”—like a bluejay feather landing near her laced high-heeled boots or a drunk speaking to her in midsentence as if she were a close relative—she changed her mood largely in accordance with whatever “forces” were present. She believed in and understood “the unseen world,” but hot Luciano’s lifestyle. For our own selfish reasons, we kept babbling drunks out of hearing range and made careful jukebox selections.
“Glenn Miller and the Andrew Sisters make me think of old film footage of the war,” she once commented when old farmer couples overtook the jukebox when we weren’t looking. All night thereafter and right up until daybreak, we had to share or compose “war stories.” Luciano, being a genuine World War II buff and souvenir collector, lectured tirelessly on history-swaying battles. He also spoke about Glenn Miller, the big-band leader from Clarinda, Iowa, who disappeared mysteriously in flight over Europe in 1942. If we left a tavern playing country and western songs, like Marty Robbins or Jim Reeves, the night had a cowboyish undertone. If the lyrics had a hint of sadness, we’d eventually reach point zero of morbidity, dredging the necro-pits for skeletons and victims of murder. Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” for example, would set this off.
Knowing how Angela tended to overreact in her “signpost” readings, Luciano made me feed the jukeboxes mass coinage as if they were hungry sharks. “As long as our influence is there,” Luciano would say, “we’ll make things smooth for Angie.”
Racing over the desolate flatlands toward the quickening dawn, the Ford Fairlane rumbled like an experimental rocket car, leaving behind a large cloud of dust that settled as chalky film over the corn tassels and leaves beside the gravel road. Red-tailed hawks and crows didn’t even have time to take flight from their posts; they hopped and flexed their startled wings. Inside the windswept vehicle we peered out of the open windows with twisted eyelashes. Hearing nothing but the radio and the incessant pinging of rocks under the front and rear fender, we saw the pastures and livestock passing by in blurs.
As monotonous as the southern roads were, we’d cruise over them, trying to get lost and making a game out of it. We got drunk instead, and we always knew where we were. There were miles and miles of track for the experimental rocket car; we’d reach speeds of ninety miles per hour on loose gravel.
Once the car engine and KIOA radio station were finally turned off on the ridge leading into the Lonesomest Valley, we’d sit still until the skin on our stretched faces relaxed back into shape, until the gritty taste of dust from our lips blended into our mouths. Like tuning forks our bodies would patiently calm down as we waited for the morning haze to set over the valley.
Angela Holiday looked sensational at six o’clock in the morning with puffy eyelids and smeared eyeliner. She would stumble out and head for the highest dirt bluff. “Spirits who live here, please forgive this womanly intrusion!” she’d cry out. The only ones who responded were the chickadee birds who trotted up the few shade trees like tiny windup toys, chirping loudly.
Situated on a massive humpback hill on the south side of the Black Eagle Child Settlement and hidden among taller hills, the deadend road had natural acoustics suitable to Angela’s a capella free-verse style of singing. There was just enough echoing for her to subtly change voice pitches and pause, making the land respond like an instrument. Many mornings were spent sleeping, sobering up, or closing the festive cruise with Angela’s music.
This is what I recall from our last night together before Luciano Bearchild’s disappearance on the hills above Liquid Lake:
Luciano, behind his World War II pilot’s sunglasses, studied Angela closely as she went through the preparatory motions for the Lonesomest Valley amphitheater—in the front seat. After gulping down Schlitz beer, Luciano pursed his lips and hissed, “It has-s-s to do with becoming s-s-some kind of nightclub s-s-singer.” Angela began stomping her hoots slowly on the car floor in percussion syncopation with a song that only she heard. She then pantomimed holding an imaginary microphone. Holding it steady between her pale hands, she clutched the mike over her small but erect breasts. To the left and then right her head would weave, keeping in time with these rhythms that only she heard. With her glacier green, watery eyes quivering and her faint red lips poised to go on stage, she pretended to reach backward, groping for more microphone cord and tugging. I could almost see the entangled cord on the floor; I swiftly moved my feet out of the way. With her right arm extended, holding the microphone, her upper torso trembled. And then she let loose the song from the Zombies, in a strong voice, articulating the words:
Well no one told me about her
the way she lied
Well no one told me about her
how many people cried ...
When a few loose strands of Angelas black wavy hair became sunlit, her trancelike facial expressions in the rearview mirror were outlined with small, fiery explosions. Like a brittle, unconscious dragonfly I collapsed onto the rubber mat on the floor.
Still handsome in his white shirt and oiled-down hair, Luciano began his evaluation. “All this, she says, all this yodeling and prancing around is rehearsal. I’m supposed to tell her what I think, what needs improving, et cetera. As if I’m the etiquette director at Motown Records! Shit, what do I know?”
With his fingerless leather gloves he gripped the steering wheel tightly and bitched some more. “She hates my talks on nature. She knows I’m limited to James Brown and German Field Marshal Rommel knowledge-wise . . .”
Something caught his eye near the fence by the pasture. He rolled down the window and pointed at first to the jittery birds and then to Angela as she opened a barbed-wire gate. “. . . And those vertical-walking chickadees, those over there by the trees, are announcing that a Pre-Raphaelite angel within the vicinity is about to reach her monthly cycle. . . Maybe her? Who else?”
Looking at Angela as she teeter-tottered over a mound of dirt curiously brought to mind the menstruation hut my mother used to have beside the small two-room unpainted house. As children, my brother Alan and I would sneak inside the forbidden space whenever Grandmother wasn’t looking. Other times we would cup our hands to our chest like homeless people, asking for a delicious morsel of her fried canned food—Spam and Vienna sausages.
Angela’s extemporized wailing always left me hungry.
Before beginning its test run home, Luciano’s Ford Fairlane rumbled and smoked like a land rocket vehicle. After the Ford got to a proper speed over the expansive salt flats, it made a fiery arc upward to the constellations, using a passing railroad boxcar as a means of propulsion. “Showing off. . .”
The Blackbird Swarms My Loneliness Summoned
In the fall of 1972, while fishing for game fish beneath the swells of the Indian Dam, Ted Facepaint turned to me and said, “Ed, have you ever thought about death?”
“No, not lately,” I answered, wondering if the question was linked to the fall of Jim Morrison of the Doors the year previous. Believing we once met the celebrated rock-and-roll singer/composer in person on a Southern California mountainside, we deified him. Convinced we had unknowingly translated a Star-Medicine song, which was then rearranged and released by the Doors as the haunting Top 40 song “Riders on the Storm,” we felt a mixture of guilt and p
leasure. For a few glorious months, before word reached us Jim Morrison had died in Paris, we bragged about our roles as translators and source of inspiration for the stolen song. Ted took the news badly, just as my younger brother Alan was stunned by the death of Jimi Hendrix. For me, a leather-clad musician/poet hero had fallen.
By habit, and maybe because of our mythical meeting we called “the Night of Jim,” we jokingly spoke of celebrities on a first-name basis. Part of this stemmed from our older relatives who met and had photographs taken with Pancho Villa, Joe Louis, and Bonnie and Clyde. Seriously. Jim Morrison, for us, was the one. The only complication being, he was a song thief. Allegedly—with all due respect. Or could it be one hell of a coincidence!
But did Jim Morrison make me dwell on death? Hardly.
The fact was, death was distant. Ever since the accidental shooting of Skip Water Runner, a cousin, during my childhood, the subject was virtually nonexistent at the family supper table. Losing Luciano Bearchild in the hills directly above us, I contemplated, was in many respects a rehearsal for all the relatives and friends I would eventually be deprived of.
“Other than my grandfather,” I continued on the subject, trying to remember, “no one has really died in my family.” And then several flashbacks blipped on the cerebral screen. Blood seeping through sterile gauze bandages wrapped around lifeless bodies. The cold wintry wind and the hard ice-encrusted ground of O’Ryan’s Cemetery. An absent mother. The smoke from the fire intended to keep the grave diggers warm zipping by. Grandmother pointing each person out, some having just visited us the day previous, and others who died in their sleep while we were there. She whispered their names and what might have happened. Serious vehicular accidents, suicides, or savage beatings. For others, those who were older, there were long, exhausting vigils in kerosene-lit kitchens. Outside was the sound of either winter howling or summertime crickets.
Remnants of the First Earth Page 27
