by LeAnne Howe
“We shall see.”
Anoleta realizes she’s said too much. Bienville must not even suspect that within a few hours she will keep her promise to Shakbatina.
At last, Haya breaks the silence. Her final attempt at small talk with Bienville. “The reason we still love Red Shoes is because he doesn’t know that he has become corrupted. He’ll never believe that, even if someday he causes us all to die.”
Bienville looks warmly at Haya. He seems to examine her feature by feature, as though he is memorizing her. Trying to understand what she is made of. Then he reaches out and touches her lightly on the cheek.
“Why did you look at her like that?” asks Anoleta.
Bienville searches for a word. He can’t find it, the word escapes him, and that’s what he finally says to Anoleta as he walks out of their lives. That the word must not exist in her language.
9 | Borrowed Time
DURANT, OKLAHOMA
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1991
Ano ma Chahta sia hoke oke. Call me Shakbatina. For six generations I have waited, marking time, daughter by daughter, before splitting my spirit in half, as the great warrior Tuscalusa did before me.
While I waited, bustle-skirted ladies blossomed into flappers. Flappers grew into hippies, with the symbols of American Indians sewn on their jeans. I have witnessed the panic of 1907, the second confiscation of Choctaw lands. Statehood for Oklahoma. The giddy 20s. The desperate dustbowl years. The crash of ‘29, and two World Wars. But I am skipping parts and jumping ahead. I do not want to do this, because gradually we become indivisible from our memories. I want to remember it all.
In 1831, throngs of ragged children, my descendants’ children, were forced out of Mississippi. Walking west with their stomachs in their hands, they were compelled to beg for food and water. I endured the songs they sang for the dead. There was no one left who could tell them the stories of how their grandmothers had once turned themselves into beautiful birds in order to fly to safety. There was no one who could conduct a proper funeral. No one to pick their bones, afterward. Imagine my agony.
But their sweet remains, their flesh and blood, seared stories into the land that kept account of such things. Mother Earth would exact a price. Twenty-nine years later, the white people who pushed my children out of their homelands were driven insane. Witness the destruction of their Civil War and the decades of waste and ruin that ensued. Plantation children were turned into homeless beggars who would one day birth the Ku Klux Klan. Today, their descendants drive by the Nanih Waiya, our beloved Mother Mound, with their car windows rolled up for asylum trying to drown out the ghostly screams of Choctaw children who were walked to death on the road to the new promised land. But they cannot. Now they have seen what happens when Earth and spirit and story are reunited, and we pull stars down from the sky and cause a fifty-mile prairie fire.
Hah, I wonder who will recognize me?
Carl Tonica groans and doubles over his desk at the Casino of the Sun. He has a glass stomach. It breaks every so often. He pops a chewable tablet in his mouth and waits for the pain to subside. He thinks the doctors at the Choctaw Health Clinic purposefully ignore his stomach complaints. They tell him it’s his bad diet. Too much pork and cheap beer. But he argues with them. Tells them that he’s a slight man of only 165 pounds. That he does not eat pork or drink beer to excess. But the doctors don’t listen and he knows why. Like so many other Choctaws, they’re against him. Next week though, after he’s found the money and put things in order, Tonica vows he’s going to make an appointment with a white doctor in Oklahoma City. Someone unconnected with the tribe, who he can trust.
After the pain in his stomach eases, Carl Tonica picks up the telephone and calls Washington D.C. He checks his watch. 3:45 P.M.; 4:45, Washington time. He should be able to catch the FBI agent who’s in charge of McAlester’s murder investigation before he goes home for the day. Those nine-to-five-boys in D.C. really have it made, what with paid federal holidays, health care benefits, and juicy retirement funds. He wishes he’d applied for a government job years ago. It would have saved him about a million stomachaches.
Tonica waits while the secretary tries to locate the agent; he figures the guy is probably on the can reading a magazine. When the agent picks up the phone, he makes a lot of excuses about why the investigation into McAlester’s murder is going so slowly. Tonica listens and finally loses his temper.
“The real killer is free again on the streets of Durant,” he shouts into the phone. “I don’t care if the U.S. Attorney isn’t interested in this case. Hell man, her mother didn’t do it, it was Auda Billy. The FBI’s gotta place her in their protective custody until a trial can be set. For Christ’s sake, Auda Billy assassinated the Chief of the Choctaw Nation!”
Tonica has learned to do his bullying over the phone. He’s never had McAlester’s balls. He has trouble presenting a poker face. In the past two television interviews he can practically see his own mouth twitching as he lies for the camera. He secretly curses McAlester every time he has to speak to reporters.
He half-listens as the bureaucrat tells his story. “There are problems in Washington.” “Budget restraints.” “Congressional hearings on tribal misuse of funds.” “Congressional hearings on BIA misuse of funds.”
Tonica cleans his fingernails while the man continues a litany of complaints about Indians. Anytime he’s on the phone to Washington he tries to catch up on personal hygiene, knowing the government’s list of excuses can take a long time. He replies with the appropriate “Uh-huhs,” and wishes this were over. For months before McAlester was murdered, he tried to warn the chief that the Mafia was closing in. That McAlester was fucking around with people who carried guns and calculators in the same briefcase.
From the time construction began on the Casino of the Sun, McAlester was going drastically over budget. The tribe had awarded construction bids to some of Southeastern Oklahoma’s wisest good ol’ boys. Concerning the cost overruns, they’d agreed to split the kickbacks equally: Indians fifty percent, white boys fifty percent. Tonica smiles to himself. Some Indian men play golf, some Indian men—such as himself—run around on their wives, but not Red. To him, making deals was the big orgasm. In the case of the building project, McAlester just connected the construction foot bone to the casino backbone and wound up siphoning money from Shamrock Resorts right from the get-go.
At first, Vico D’Amato had tried to groom McAlester for bigger things in their organization, they’d grown to be such close friends. But D’Amato didn’t understand who was conning who. Maybe he did toward the end. Perhaps that was why he sent for his younger brother Hector, to help him corral McAlester; but the chief had an instinct about people. When he felt the Italians squeezing him, he switched alliances to the Irish. Brought in James Joyce.
Tonica remembers the day tribal members were invited to Ireland to commemorate the “Long Walk” made during the Irish Potato Famine of 1847. McAlester was ecstatic. He said he could now solve all his problems. “It’s too poetic for words—at last I’ll be able to keep the money, and my promise to Auda,” he had said.
Tonica questioned McAlester about what he’d had meant that day, but he never got a straight answer. The chief liked to talk in riddles, especially in front of Joyce, an Irishman who loved to fracture the English language with his thick Irish brogue.
McAlester’s whole life was an enigma. Every Tuesday and Wednesday, he would go on the road lobbying other Oklahoma tribes to support the casino compacts. He said the 1990s would be remembered as the heyday of the gaming business. “Huge fortunes can be made. Many strands of history and international commerce are coming together in Southeastern Oklahoma, but only for a short while, and only for those who act now.” But then on Sundays, McAlester would be in church telling the minister and the congregation that he was against gambling—that it was the tribal council who had voted for the casino.
Crimony, the man was a shameless hustler, sighs Tonica, as he puts away his f
ingernail clippers. He tried to tell McAlester that the Italians could smell embezzlement. But the chief had called him a “Sissy Mary.” Told him to put a wet towel on his face and help him “skim the cream off the top of the milk.” Sometimes he’d just laugh. “Carl, it’s small potatoes to them. Quit worrying; you’re getting your cut.”
McAlester doesn’t have to worry anymore, thinks Tonica. His troubles were over the minute that Auda Billy put a bullet in his brain. He’d told Red she was stealing the tribe’s bank documents. McAlester said not to worry, that he could prove he was still in control. Even made a bet with Hector. McAlester should have realized long ago that Auda Billy was the one deal he’d made that went sour.
At last, Tonica’s ready to get off the telephone, and interrupts the federal government. “What if one of these redneck Indians takes the law into his hands and kills Auda Billy?” he asks. “Remember what happened to Lee Harvey Oswald?”
Just as he gets a rise out of the FBI agent, he hears a voice calling his name.
Carl Tonica, do you hear? Do you understand? I am a descendent of Grandmother of Birds. Time flows out of my beak with a sound that can pierce the most foolish plan.
At first, the voice seems to be coming from inside his office, but then he looks outside and sees a feeble old woman walking up and down the sidewalk in front of the Casino of the Sun. The enormous golden disk revolving atop the casino puts her in the shade, and he can’t tell who she is. Then the old woman raises a homemade sign high in the air that horrifies him. It reads: I know where McAlester hid the ten million.
Tonica stares at the sign, then the old woman. He’s sure he’s seen her before, but can’t quite remember where. She has bushy gray hair that blends into the nappy shawl wrapped around her shoulders. The large sign she carries might as well be a rifle in his belly.
There’s an expectant pause on the other end of the phone and Tonica realizes he’s lost track of what he’s saying. “Listen, you’re in D.C. while I’m here in the trenches in Durant, Oklahoma. It’s all our tribal police can do to keep the peace. I’m telling you, the Choctaw people are out for blood. They might kill Auda Billy if you don’t act quickly. We’re in a state of war.”
The agent reminds him that the wheels of justice take a long time. “Uh-huh,” says Tonica, breaking into a sweat. By now several women from the Choctaw Daycare Center have come outside to read the sign. The old woman’s voice thunders across the parking lot as if she’s speaking into a microphone. She says Chief McAlester stole millions from the Mafia and gave it to the Irish Republican Army to kill Englishmen for crimes they committed against the Choctaw two hundred and fifty years ago. She says McAlester’s shame is a disgrace Tonica must publicly acknowledge.
Carl Tonica, do you hear? Do you understand? I did not come back to be Grandmother to a tribe of entertainers at the Casino of the Sun. I am here to stop you from offending anyone else with your face or your tongue.
Another busload of tourists from Dallas arrives at the casino. Most people push past the old woman and ignore her sign. Tonica isn’t worried about the white people who frequent the casino. He knows they would rather eat their children than miss an opportunity to gamble. Besides, whites want to believe that Indians get rich off casinos. It relieves their guilt for stealing all the Indians’ land.
Tonica realizes he’s out of “Uh-huhs” and takes the offensive. “If something happens to Auda Billy before she reaches trial, I’m holding the FBI responsible,” he says, slamming the phone down. He paces back and forth in his office. The next call he makes to Washington, he can say, “I warned you... Auda Billy has been murdered.” He claps his hands together. “One problem solved, one to go.” Tonica expels stomach gas running down the hall to Vic D’Amato’s office. Both D’Amato brothers have telephones stuck in their ears, and he’s grateful they haven’t seen the woman outside.
“Is it the old man in New York?” he asks, steadying himself, so as not to raise their suspicions.
Vico nods his head.
Tonica goes stoic. He’s not about to let the Italian know he’s scared shitless, and he interrupts him again.
“Have you heard whether she’s dead yet?”
“She, who?” says the elder D’Amato, covering the phone with his hand.
He knows he’s being taunted. D’Amato just wants to hear him speak her name aloud. To see if there’s a twinge of guilt that will someday grow into a fully-developed memory with a voice. He’s heard the Italian’s theory on “free speech” at some of their late-night conferences. “Who knows what a voice can do? Sing? Tell stories? Implicate us in past wrongs? Why wait for such a talent to develop?”
“Auda Billy, is she dead yet?” he deadpans.
“Shouldn’t be too long,” says Hector. “Your girlfriend, Nancy Reagan, or whatever the hell her name is, said she was going to load her up with enough insulin to kill ten little Indians.” Hector mumbles something in Italian and hangs up the phone. “You’ve got two more days, Tonica. Find the money McAlester stole from us, or we start leaking your own little investment schemes to the FBI. We know all about the cash Red had been putting in your greedy little fists. Do we understand one another?”
Tonica holds his head as high as possible. He can’t let Hector or Vico think he’s hiding anything. “McAlester didn’t cram ten million up his ass. It’s around here somewhere. What about his cabin outside of Talihina where he and Auda used to shack up? Why don’t you look for the money, instead of making threats to me? I want to find it as badly as you do, and I never stole money from the mob!”
Vico bores a hole into him with his stare. “I liked Red,” he says quietly. “I never trusted him, but I liked him. He had a kind of style that inspired us to think beyond the Choctaw’s casino.” Almost absent-mindedly the elder D’Amato drags an index finger across his gray shirt collar. “But you,” he adds, “I don’t like. You’re a pretender. And not even a good opportunist. If I thought for one infinitesimal moment that you had our money, your wife would be finding pieces of you nailed all over this building. You understand?”
Tonica smiles with his mouth only, as if he’s just been told a bad joke. “There’s an old lady waiting for me outside who says she knows where McAlester hid the money. When I come back I’ll have your ten million.”
He walks confidently out of the room. Tonica believes he has shown them who’s in charge.
The wind outside is warm at first, full of voices. A strange tickling sensation makes Tonica feel helpless. As he draws near the old woman he realizes he hasn’t the slightest notion of what to do. What he feels, he can no longer translate into words. The face, which he doesn’t recognize, yawns as it turns on him. It is then he believes she could make Hashtali open if she wanted. He sees her loose hair hanging like silk around her head. Her body, though very old, is straight and still. At last she stretches out both hands to greet him.
“I am Shakbatina. I know when it is time to return to the earth that I have lived to protect. Come with me.”
Carl Tonica says good-bye to the Casino of the Sun, and to the flock of birds waving to him from the sky. He steps into the street and is only vaguely aware that he is already dead.
Many hours later, a janitor at the Casino of the Sun, who just happened to be outside around 4:30 P.M., tearfully told the Choctaw police and the D’Amato brothers that there wasn’t no old lady waiting around to talk to Tonica. That Tonica must not have seen the eighteen-wheeler pulling into the parking lot; he didn’t even look surprised when it hit him.
10 | Funerals By Delores
DURANT, OKLAHOMA
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1991
Delores’ hands are like two shovels kneading bread dough into mounds of stone. As she stands at the kitchen table, she scoops and re-scoops the white clumps of flour in the bowl. She’s oblivious to what she’s doing. With her mind she tells Isaac that they should have been together this past half-century. If only she had understood his stubborn nature earlier. She could have gone to
him when he returned home from World War II. Today he looked tired. More fragile. As always he acknowledged her, but then he walked away without speaking.
Absentmindedly, she wipes her sticky hands across her black organdy dress, then she plunges them back into the flour mixture. He wants to speak with her alone, she knows it. The night he called on the phone to tell her what had happened, they spoke only in Choctaw. As he related the details of McAlester’s murder, Auda’s jailing, and Susan’s confession, his tone grew softer and more serene. Finally he said, his voice choked with intimacy, “Ohoyo aiyala.” Woman, come at last.
“Oke,” she had answered.
“Chekusi fehna.” Hurry.
“Ia lish.” I will.
She could just see him turning the small gray stone he carried over and over in his hand. There was a long silence. Neither knew how to continue so she whispered, Wi hi yo ha-na-we, wi hi yo ha-na-we, words from an old song of communal encouragement that the Choctaws sang on the Trail of Tears. They both cried, but he was the first one to hang up. In that gesture she saw everything. He loved her as before, but was still unable to forgive her for sending him away nearly fifty years ago.
When she and Dovie had arrived at the Billy house, she understood that he could not show the feelings that he’d kept hidden for long, so Susan had expressed them for him. “So glad,” “so happy,” “thought you’d never get here.” They were Susan’s words, but Isaac’s feelings.
“Hah!” says Delores aloud. “You have to understand a lot of codes to be Choctaw.” She looks down at herself, amazed that her black dress is completely wet with nervous sweat and clumps of sticky dough.
“What Auntie?” asks Tema, scooping more Crisco into a frying pan.
Delores wipes her dress with a wet cup towel. “We’re all Code Talkers.”
“Yummak osh alhpesa,” says Dovie, nodding in agreement.
