The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto

by Stephen Graham Jones

  THE BIRD IS GONE

  A Manifesto

  STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

  Normal/Tallahassee

  Copyright 2003 by Stephen Graham Jones

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  First Printing 2003

  Published by FC2 with support provided by Florida State University, the Unit for Contemporary Literature of the Department of English at Illinois State University, the Illinois Arts Council, die Florida Arts Council of the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts

  Address all inquiries to: Fiction Collective Two, Florida State University, c/o English Department, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580

  ISBN: Paper, 1-57366-109-0

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jones, Stephen Graham, 1972-

  The bird is gone : a manifesto / Stephen Graham Jones.-- 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-57366-109-0

  1. Indians of North America--Government relations--Fiction. 2. Restoration ecology--Fiction. 3. Bowling alleys--Fiction. 4. Great Plains--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.O5395B57 2003

  813'.6--dc21

  2003002752

  Cover Design: Victor Mingovits

  Book Design: Laine Morreau and Tara Reeser

  Produced and printed in the United States of America

  Printed on recycled paper with soy ink

  ISBN: 978-1-57366-834-7 (electronic)

  for Rebecca, mi madre

  and for Pidgin

  without Brenda Mills to edit it, and get lost in it, and find me in there, pull me out, Bird would have never been anywhere, much less gone, and I may never have even finished starting it if Kate Garrick—agent, shield, translator—hadn't said something about how ‘this could be good.’ and it never would have looked like it looks if Tara Reeser hadn't traded parts of herself in for it. thanks too to Joe Ferrer, for the pointing, the clicking, and to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Writers League, for money, and faith, and to Nancy, still my girlfriend, for listening to me write all night for too many nights in a row.

  we only become what we are by the radical and deep seated refusal of that which others have made of us

  JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

  we have taken a new home, and we must exhaust the past before we can finish with the present

  SAMUEL DELANY

  pink eye was all the rage.

  TEN LITTLE INDIANS

  LP DEAL, five-ten in boots, but then he can't wear boots at work, either, as part of his job is traipsing down the alleys to retrieve busted pins, motionless balls, the occasional beer bottle. Once, a prosthetic arm. Fool's Hip gives mercy strikes if your arm falls off mid-bowl, but the limit is three per game; some of the veterans were taking advantage. LP tried wearing a pair of the house moccasins when he first signed on, hand-sewn the old way, from the soft leather interiors of thousands of abandoned golf bags, but found he couldn't stand up on the waxed lanes. It was funny for a while, but then he had work to do. Now he wears simple canvas basketball shoes—standard Indian issue—dingy grey at the toes from mopping afterhours, and monochromatic coveralls, once brown but long since gone tan, from washing them every night in the dishwasher with the last load of the night, steam filling the room, scouring his lungs. Sometimes, standing there naked and blurry, he sings, his voice resounding off the stainless steel kitchen, over the polished counter, spilling out into the hardwood lanes, but then other times he just stares at his indistinct reflection, the roadburn all down his left side expanding in the heat.

  On his application for employment, under Tribal Affiliation, he checked Anasazi—a box he had to draw himself—and under the story and circumstances of his name, he recounted what he could remember of the Skin Parade fourteen years ago, when he was twelve. He and his mom had been hunting and gathering at the supermart in Hoopa, California when the wall of television sets said it, that the Dakotas were Indian again, look out, and three weeks and two and a half cars later, LP and his mom rolled across the Little Missouri at Camp Crook with nearly four million other Indians. It wasn't the little Missouri anymore, though, but something hard to pronounce, in Lakota. The grass was still black then, from the fires1. When LP and his mom ran out of gas they just coasted through town, and when they finally rolled to a stop, it was in front of a record store, fluorescent letters splashed onto the plate glass. For a moment LP could have been either LP Deal or Vinyl Daze, but then in a rush of nostalgia his mom took the second name. Within a week the guys at the bar were calling her VD. LP didn't get it until years later, months after he'd lost track of her at a pandance, and by then he was old enough to pretend not to care.

  He did cut his hair off when he got home that night, though, part of the Code, and hasn't let it grow back yet, wears it blocked off at the collar instead, muskrat-slick on top. His right hand is forever greasy from smoothing it back, out of his eyes. Mary Boy, LP's boss, offered him a hairnet in passing once, but LP declined: by then he'd grown accustomed to the ducking motion necessary to smooth it down. Had come to depend on it, even, as cover for leaning down to the inside of his left wrist, speaking into the microphone carefully band-aided there, its delicate lead snaking up his arm, embracing his shattered ribcage, plugging into the wafer-thin recording unit tucked into the inner pocket of his overalls.

  At night, in his cot in the supply closet by the arcade, the cuticles of his toes still burning from the ammonia and bleach and creekwater of mopping, LP unwinds himself from the mic, jacks an earphone into the recorder, and transcribes his notes feverishly. That's how manifestos are written: with fever. Anything less would be trivial, not worth slogging through concessions and lane duty by day, guarding the place at night. Mary Boy offered him the security gig when he noticed LP had taken up residence at Fool's Hip. LP is pale from it, sunless; he hasn't stepped outside Fool's Hip for seven months—moons, they're called now. It's all the same. Another part of his job is scraping graffiti off the bathroom stalls, both men's and women's.

  On one of the stalls in the men's bathroom, like clockwork, there are always suggestions to LP, likely from Mary Boy, adopting some indirect managerial tactic or another. He copies them all into his manifesto. One of them was why don't you grow your hair like a real Indian? The time LP found that, he stayed up all night answering it in his notebook, then erased it all before morning, even recarved the question into the stall, to pretend he hadn't seen it. Maybe it wasn't for him. Maybe it wasn't even Mary Boy.

  The manifesto is margin to margin, front and back, no spaces between the words, like one long, strained utterance. LP would write on the sides of the paper if he could get his pencil sharp enough. Part of his salary is in notebooks smuggled over from the gift shop. The rest is the cot, thirty free frames a week, and whatever he eats, drinks, and displaces, which isn't supposed to include the video games he plays the old way—with a holy quarter and some braided sinew. What Mary Boy doesn't know he doesn't have to ride his employees about, though. Just let him go on thinking the sweat beaded on LP's forehead in the mornings is from work, from a stubborn piece of gum under one of the bucket seats or something. The lie that works best for LP is that he was just realigning the adhesive arrowheads that point down each lane, sir, which both gets Mary Boy waving the sir off and appreciating the arrowheads—how they're all just a little off-center, just pointing in the general direction of the pins, which will skew the regulars' shots off enough to get them compensating with beer, three dentalia a pitcher. By this time in the conversation the sweat beaded along LP's hairline is a dim memory for Mary Boy, ticking mental shells off three at a time.

  Sometimes, too, LP doesn't
have to lie about the sweat, if it's hot and dry and the Councilmen are making their rounds from band to band. Then the suggestion LP gets from the bathroom stall is why not get all the arrows back to factory specs, so the Councilmen can break 230? For the good of the Nation. LP's been part of it for fourteen years now. He knows how to dig ritual cornmeal from the gutters of the ball return, what songs to mumble while doing it. He knows how to look away respectfully when his people pour the tops of their beers off, for the dead. They're thirsty too, everyone is, even LP.

  He doesn't let himself drink, though: his work is too important. Part of writing a manifesto in small, angry letters is being able to read what you've written, at least focus on the print. Another part, apparently, is celibacy. Or, one way to deal with celibacy is to write a manifesto in small, angry letters.

  It doesn't matter to LP anymore. He hammers at the buttons of the video games in the predawn hours and no one's there to hear him sing down the lanes, vault from tabletop to tabletop and into the carpeted wall, his reflection still caught in the stainless-steel kitchen.

  He keeps his stack of notebooks in one of the lockers and never goes near it during work. The best security is pretending you don't have anything to hide, that you're just a broompusher with a skin condition, a roadburn LP has yet to wholly account for in his manifesto.

  MARY BOY, rumored to be acting roadman for the local Red Catholic carryovers. Thus the name. He's never up at Fool's Hip around vespers, anyway, which is suspicious enough. Other than that, he's just an old Winnebego with a greystreaked ponytail and permanent sunglasses, a shady habit he picked up from the FBI, the way he tells it, though he doesn't have any cool federal tattoos to back it up, just a partial one of Jesus' head, high on his right shoulder, signed by a Permanent Inc. studio, OK City, Oklahoma. Back when there was an Oklahoma. The tattoo is proof of that, at least.

  Twelve years ago, though, it also counted as proof of Mary Boy's Red Catholic status, which meant he was bowling alone at Fool's Hip, knocking one or two pins over at a time, mentally preparing himself for the ride the sandy-haired pool players said he was going to take with them sooner or later, if he wanted to woo the clan-bowlers into thinking he was one of them—that he was traditional enough to understand the maniacally strict family lines they observed, traditional enough not to decorate his body with the image of a white messiah. It was the second worst car experience Mary Boy ever had—the pool players holding him out the open door at a screaming ninety miles per hour, letting his right shoulder skim the asphalt, Mary Boy looking anywhere but down, scanning instead the soundless blur the ditch had become, an out of place black Impala whipping past there, four FBI agents idling around it—one for each direction—their ties testing the midday wind, reminding Mary Boy of the worst car experience he ever had.

  It was back when he was LP's age, back when you had to burn a tank of gas down to Whiteclay just to get a 12-pack. Back when the FBI could still park on the side of the road and wave Indians over, on the pretense that some crime had allowed them jurisdiction. Mary Boy watched them and their unmarked Impala from the top of the hill, sucked on a shiny new 1984 penny to get his breath legal. It was now or never. And maybe they were just trading plastic beads or something anyway, right?

  Mary Boy had enough of those already. He turned his lights off, laid down in the seat, and hurtled past the FBI.

  Half a 12-pack later he had to do it again, though.

  This time their Impala was across the road, too, pointing at DC for authority. Mary Boy kept both hands on the wheel, in plain sight, and, in answer to the question they hadn't asked yet, told them he didn't know any Junior, and he wasn't there that night, and the way he remembered it, the BIA office always fertilized with manure anyway, somebody probably just backed that dumptruck up too far. When he smiled, copper rained down from his mouth and pooled in his lap.

  The FBI at Mary Boy's window smiled back, held a single peyote button up between his thumb and forefinger, as if he were focusing through it. At Mary Boy. They were looking for volunteers, see. And Mary Boy fit the profile. It was all part of a government-funded study: for incarceration purposes, DC needed to establish at what point after ingesting peyote religious experience began for a fully-matured male specimen of the Sioux tribe, and how long that experience lasted—when that inmate could rejoin population. Mary Boy didn't correct them about the Sioux-thing; it's always best to be a member of whatever tribe you're visiting, anyway. Less paperwork for all involved. The button didn't look right, though. Mary Boy directed his chin over to the scrotum hanging from his rearview mirror, told them he had his own, thanks, but they shook their heads no, said this was the one.

  Mary Boy swallowed it whole, to delay the effect, fuck with the government.

  Years later a visiting geochemist with a taste for bowling alley fare would detail how A) there's no telling what psychotropic reaction might have occurred between the residual copper in Mary Boy's saliva and the peyote; B) it probably wasn't even peyote in the first place, the government just needed a native guinea pig; and C) if it really was a study, there should have been more participants. There were: driving back to Pine Ridge after the requisite one-hour waiting period the study demanded, still waiting for it to kick in, Mary Boy could just make out the other volunteers' headlights, bouncing through the pastures, stalling out, their cars falling even more apart than they already were, rusting into the ground already, grass growing up through the frames. By now all six cylinders of Mary Boy's car had wet hide stretched over them, a little man in full regalia running between, drumming Mary Boy on, faster, faster.

  Mary Boy eased his foot down, and the night accelerated around him. Two yellow horses with riders pulled alongside the passenger door, two tempera blue on the driver's side, hooves unplanting great clumps of asphalt. In the rearview mirror were twin black horses with chalky white riders, faces bisected with fingerwide lines of red. It was an escort. Before Mary Boy had time to ask escort to where? there was a one-man Civil War reenactment taking place in front of him, some behind-the-lines stuff: an old, thick soldier arcing a delicate line of pee into the tall grass, one hand on his hip, the other clutching the clear neck of a bottle, the rest of him swaying in the headlights.

  The six riders and their six horses had become a spectrum of cartoon decals in Mary Boy's peripheral vision by now. His bumper kissed the soldier's shin, and the soldier relaxed his grip on the bottle. It shattered on its way down. Soon enough Mary Boy was loading the soldier's limp body up onto the hood, hooking his spurs into the grille to keep him in place. So he was cavalry.

  Mary Boy dug out two beers, had to show the soldier—the cavalryman—how to open his. Halfway through it, the cavalryman started crying and trying not to, though, then just slammed the rest of his beer like a modern man, started grubbing for more. When his hat fell over his eyes he brushed it off, and it fell in the lights of the car, and around the crown, still fresh, still bleeding, was some part of a woman.

  The cavalryman laughed self-consciously, as if this was just a social error, then tried to stand, fell facefirst into the grass, his spurs still lodged in the elaborate grill.

  Some part of an Indian woman.

  The headlights dimmed for a moment as Mary Boy started the car, and then he eased into first. The cavalryman was already screaming, enumerating his crimes just to apologize for them more efficiently, not wanting to have this horseless carriage driven up his tight, nineteenth-century ass. But Mary Boy had read about hats decorated like that. Whole columns of them. The cavalryman kept up, hand over hand, for nearly a quarter mile, Mary Boy driving with one wrist over the wheel, his door open, taking long, deliberate steps with his left foot.

  When the cavalryman finally gave up, Mary Boy was slow getting his left foot in and over to the brake. He rolled the cavalryman over and the cavalryman's mouth was packed with prairie dirt—with Indian land.

  Instead of asking him what it tasted like, if he wanted any more, Mary Boy kicked him awake, rested the ste
el shank of his boot over the cavalryman's trachea. The cavalryman was already gagging, patting himself down for something: a sheet of folded cotton parchment, halogen white in the headlights. The only unsoiled thing on him.

  Mary Boy didn't get it, and then he did, tore the paper away and wrote it out himself, with all the clauses and terminology he'd had used against him over the course of two divorces and a string of misdemeanor hearings—that DC was hereby giving back all the Indian land it ever took, would take, or was presently taking.

  He flourished his signature across the bottom of the page, corner to corner, then raised his boot so the cavalryman could sign too. The cavalryman climbed the front of the car, leaned over the hood, and scratched his name in ink below Mary Boy's, and with the final letter (n) something changed. In the ground. A deep rumbling.

  Mary Boy looked away from the cavalryman for a moment and there were headlights, millions of them, streaming towards the Dakotas.

  In their glow he gave the treaty a closer look, but the peyote had stripped his letter-sense. He couldn't even tell what he had written, much less make out the cavalryman's slurred signature. ‘Forget it,’ Mary Boy said to himself finally, reclining his seat to sleep it off, and he did manage to forget it, until it all came true a few years later—the Conservation Act, the Skin Parade, the Red Tide—only Mary Boy had never got around to telling anybody his vision, about waking in a bright field the next morning, an impossibly tall FBI agent taking off his own black shades, passing them down to Mary Boy, whose pupils never recontracted again.

  The only people he ever told, besides his daughter, Courtney, who thought it was convenient to relate visions after the fact, were the sandy-haired pool players, who had no black Impala in their short-term memory, and no other kind of memory to go on. They were having a hard enough time remembering how to get from IHS back to Fool's Hip. Mary Boy shook his head no and crossed himself with his bleeding arm when they asked if he had any more tattoos, then stood in the parking lot surveying these Indian Territories he'd signed into existence one night on the way back from Whiteclay. It didn't matter that nobody believed him. The proof was all around.