The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Trans-Annie was the stage name of Enil Anderson's wife. It was like that in a clipping in the hall of their house. I don't know what her act was; the part of the article with specifics was shiny black with flies, as if the words had bulged, crowded into each other. LP would write like that if he could. I was already calling him LP by then, I guess.

  I didn't say anything to Trans-Annie, either. Not that she would have listened. I did sit with her for three hours, though, until Back Iron appeared in the doorway, my full-length skirt whipping around his knees. I didn't know he'd brought that one; he was drunk, suddenly sober.

  ‘Not your fault,’ he said, about Trans-Annie, little Enil, but it was.

  If I'd still had that feather, I would have left it there, with them, but all I could do was ride back to the Territories with Back Iron, pour champagne over the image of her at the end of Enil Anderson's driveway, on the other side of the front door, arranged on the couch to receive visitors, the cushions around her black with blood, her blood. And little Enil: he was the white child with his hands tied under the desk at Broken Arrow.

  Her real name was Trudy, Trudy Anderson. The clipping in the hall said she was the opposite of Virginia Dare, whatever that meant. Enil Anderson knew: he had underlined it, his pen slashing the bottom off the g it was all balanced on.

  He had never planned on coming home.

  Back Iron left a bundle of sage burning in the dry aquarium, rescued the turtle from it, and then led me away, the fire alarm already keening. We drove faster than any Indians ever have. Dusk came; I could almost hear Mary Boy singing it up, his voice plaintive, earnest, but then it was night for miles and miles, until Yaqui Buoy. The attendant in his monochromatic coveralls was out in the road, in the dawn, all fingertips and toes, his ear to the asphalt, listening to us approach. I made Back Iron circle back through the weeds of No Man's Land but it wasn't him, LP Deal. But it was.

  We stopped at the first motel and bought all the cedar and sage they had, and when we told the clerk we needed more he asked us to leave and I showed him my badge Back Iron said I really shouldn't be carrying and the clerk put everything on the counter into a parfleche cut from some great plastic cow and we hunched over it to the car, and because I couldn't anymore, Back Iron cried for me and we burned it all at once, the sage, the cedar, and it was sweet. The back glass exploded soundlessly.

  We drove on, faster. Finally I screamed and put the black wig on over my blonde one, then took them both off, cut my real hair off in mourning, like I was supposed to. For Trans-Annie, Trudy Anderson. Her son.

  The hair slipped out the window into birdnests and history and I fumbled the radio on, tuned in KORL, Oral Radio 93.7, ‘keeping the tradition alive.’ This morning it was a Bacteen story, some elder alone in the studio, afraid to touch the mic with his lips and die but talking anyway, talking. I closed my eyes and let his voice carry me.

  INDIAN BURN

  This was a long time ago. Well, seven years, maybe eight. It was the Moon of the Popping Bud. So maybe January or February or April or September or October or December or November or March or May or August, June or July. The sound a can makes when it opens, right? Anyway, Bacteen wasn't even drinking this day, which made him notice how hungry he was. He was wearing his Big Chief war shirt with all the bullet holes in it and chewing some White Man. He could hardly talk around it even, and finally took it out and rolled it into the arms and legs and hump of a buffalo, then buried it and made a fire over it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Raven asked when he saw Bacteen.

  ‘Cooking,’ Bacteen said, and smiled.

  Raven shook his head and flew away, saying he was glad to be a bird. At least he wouldn't get burned when Bacteen's fire got out of control again.

  Bacteen stood over his fire.

  Raven was right. Last time Bacteen had tried to cook he had burned down everything. But then Bacteen remembered what to do: he just had to offer some tobacco in the right directions. The tobacco was under the fire, though.

  ‘I'll just take a little,’ Bacteen said, and laid on his belly, dug under as far as his arm could reach, and cut off a little for the West.

  ‘There,’ he said, but then the world tilted to the West, so Bacteen reached under the fire again, cut off some tobacco for the East.

  ‘Now,’ he said, and squatted down over his fire. Just then Fox slid into his back, almost knocking him into the fire.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Bacteen asked him.

  ‘Just riding,’ Fox said, and took off running again, then jumped into a cannonball shape, kept sliding. Bacteen stood to see him better but almost fell forward. The world was tilted again, to the South.

  He needed to offer more tobacco.

  ‘But I won't have enough,’ Bacteen thought, then reached under a third time anyway, used his scissors to cut off another piece of tobacco.

  ‘I wonder what my buffalo looks like now,’ he said, offering to the North. It knocked him backwards, though—to the North. Bacteen was almost crying now.

  ‘Well,’ he said, laying on his belly again, reaching under the fire, ‘one bite of buffalo will at least be better than no buffalo at all.’

  And he offered the last piece to the South and the world leveled out again, and he squatted over his fire again singing the cooking song until the buffalo should be done. But he couldn't reach it anymore. He had cut too much off.

  He called Raven to help, but Raven just laughed.

  He called Fox to help, but when Fox said yes without asking for a bite, Bacteen knew Fox would eat it, so he said thanks, but no.

  Soon Coyote came nosing up.

  ‘What you got there?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Bacteen said.

  Coyote smiled. ‘You need someone who can dig,’ he said, ‘someone used to digging in holes.’

  Bacteen stood. ‘You're right,’ he said, then grabbed him—Coyote—and pushed his tail in, smudged his eyes around, and made him into a mole. ‘Now you can get it,’ he said, and the mole growled, but did it, dived into the earth for the buffalo, only when he came up his mouth was Coyote again. Bacteen hadn't pushed the nose in far enough. Coyote was a badger now, not a mole. And he had taken a fifth bite out of the tobacco, and it wasn't a buffalo anymore.

  ‘What is it?’ Bacteen asked, and the badger just stared at him.

  ‘You can eat it,’ Bacteen said—because Badgers eat anything—but the badger shook his wide head no and scampered away, looking back four times, twice over each shoulder.

  ‘I'll eat it then,’ Bacteen said, and brushed the dirt off. The tobacco still had four limbs, but it was different. It was a man now. And white. It reached up with a stick it had and poked Bacteen in the eye, and Bacteen dropped it.

  They stared at each other, Bacteen rubbing his eye.

  ‘What are you?’ Bacteen asked, but the thing just looked around.

  ‘Thank you,’ it said, and then dived back into the hole under the fire to cook some more.

  Bacteen called Raven again and this time Raven landed and they looked in the hole together.

  ‘What is it?’ Bacteen asked, but Raven shrugged.

  ‘Not a buffalo,’ he said.

  So they called Fox again. Fox smelled the air where the thing had been and shook his head.

  ‘What'd you make it of, anyway?’ he asked Bacteen, and Bacteen told him a plug of White Man, and Fox did that thing where he walks back and forth, his head and tail trading places, whipping back and forth.

  ‘You shouldn't have done that,’ he said.

  Now they called Coyote.

  Coyote padded up, stopping to smell this or that.

  ‘Yes?’ he said. He still had a poolstick in his hand from wherever he'd been.

  ‘I cooked something wrong,’ Bacteen said.

  ‘No shit,’ Coyote said. ‘And it's loud, too.’

  From the hole under the fire the thing was yelling. They couldn't understand it, though.

  ‘What should we do with it?’ Fox
asked.

  ‘Kill it,’ Bacteen said, so they poured hot coals down there, but it wouldn't come up. They tried water, too, but the water just made steam. Raven said maybe they could bury it, but it still kept yelling under all the dirt.

  ‘You need something that can dig,’ Coyote said, and then turned back into a badger, dug the thing up, only this time he didn't eat any of it.

  He sat it down in the middle of them all.

  Fox tried to catch it in his mouth, but it was still too fast.

  Bacteen tried to step on it, but it got away too, so he tried eight times with his scissors, then eight more, but only got it at the edges of its legs and arms, making fingers and toes.

  ‘This is worse than the fire,’ Fox said.

  ‘What do we do?’ Bacteen asked Coyote. ‘We can't kill it and we can't hide it and I can't cook it anymore.’

  ‘I can catch it,’ Coyote said, ‘I catch mice all winter long.’

  ‘Then do it,’ Raven said.

  ‘But I'm so sad,’ Coyote said, dragging his tail.

  ‘Why?’ Fox asked. ‘You're fast and can eat anything.’

  ‘And I already give you free haircuts…,’ Bacteen said, because he knew Coyote. But it was too late.

  ‘Yeah,’ Coyote said, kicking a rock into the fire. ‘Everybody thinks I'm just a little wolf, though.’

  ‘Do you want to be bigger than Wolf?’ Bacteen asked, ready to stretch Coyote up.

  Coyote shook his head no, though. ‘Then I wouldn't fit in my den,’ he said, ‘and I'd have to eat more, work harder… No. Can you kill Wolf, though, maybe? Then I wouldn't be ‘little wolf’ anymore…’

  Bacteen thought about it and thought about it—because it would take him so long to kill all the wolves, and he wasn't sure he could, anyway—and then Raven whispered in Fox's ear and Fox whispered in Bacteen's ear and Bacteen whispered in Coyote's ear that he would do it, just not right away. But soon, if Coyote waited, all the wolves would be gone, and the land would be full of Coyotes, which is the way it already is now.

  Coyote said yes to this, then pounced on the thing, gave it to Bacteen, who tied him back into the White Man package and told Raven to deliver it as far away as he could, all the way across the water.

  But it came back.

  Bacteen sat on the side of the road, still hungry.

  This was all his fault, he knew. He cut all his hair off with his scissors, but it grew back, so he cut it and cut and cut it, but he had more grief than he did hair.

  ‘I'll just leave,’ he said, and stuck his thumb out. Nobody was stopping for him, though. Finally, he just laid his hand out in the road, let a carload of tourists run over his thumb. It swelled up nearly as long as his forearm and got red as a stop sign. Now he had to hold it up, because it throbbed if he didn't.

  ‘Wonder what I'll pull over with this,’ he said, adjusting his vest, and when he looked up, six American cars were stopped for him. The first one was blue, the next red, and then white and yellow and black and black again, with a red stripe down the middle.

  ‘More like a kite than a thumb,’ the sixth driver said to Bacteen, looking at his thumb, and in trade for whatever food was in the glove compartment, Bacteen told them his secret, that white people were just buffalo without any skin. His proof was that as the white people appeared, the buffalo disappeared, right? But it had only looked like that. What had really happened was they'd stepped out of their skins and built cities, but then got lonely for their skins, had to start wearing them again, as robes.

  The sixth driver held both hands on the wheel and lowed like a buffalo bull.

  They drove on in silence after that.

  Bacteen didn't tell that one to the fifth driver, either. Or the fourth or the third or even the second, and then to the first he told the truths that the white people were buffalo he'd cut all the good parts off of. His proof was that they were white like bones, like a skeleton, right?

  The first driver held both hands on the wheel and laughed, and his jaw came unhinged, fell down to his chest.

  They drove on in silence after that.

  Bacteen said to himself he was going to get out at the fourth intersection, but then stepped out at the first one while the car was still going, rolled in the ditch until nightfall.

  ‘That's it,’ he said, making the cut-off sign, ‘no more,’ but his thumb was still throbbing. As soon as he held it up, a bird landed on it and a carload of Americans stopped to take a picture, only Bacteen changed fingers at the last instant, even though it hurt. The bird flew away. He never knew what kind it was. It didn't matter.

  Bacteen walked on, imagining his middle finger coming into focus in the watery pan of some darkroom in America. He practiced the move some more, without the bird—going thumb-finger, thumb-finger—but on the fourth time through, brake lights flared in front of him. It was an Indian pick-up truck, red on white.

  Bacteen tried to wave it on but the truck followed him, even when he left the road. Finally he gave up after a few miles, waited for the truck to pull alongside.

  Coyote was driving, his cowboy hat bent down nearly to the tip of his nose, his forearm on the top of the wheel, fingertips drumming the dash.

  ‘So it's you,’ Bacteen said, spitting on his thumb to cool it down.

  ‘Where to, pilgrim?’ Coyote asked, and Bacteen leaned back into the seat, looked all around at America.

  ‘Back to before all this,’ he said, and Coyote dropped the truck into gear.

  SHIP OF fOOLS

  The first thing you do is fall down. This isn't Coyote's pick-up anymore. This is the ocean. It's 1492.

  ‘Not this far back,’ you say.

  You've got blue lines all over you, too, like tattoos but not. More like where to cut. On your back there are even two Cs, one for Christopher, one for Columbus. This is what it means when they used to say ‘C to shining C’: the prime cut, the backstrap. Standing all around are men in bad haircuts and clown pants. You don't know whether to wait for the elephants or get out your scissors. Instead you just laugh three times, once for yourself.

  You're going west.

  The things you cooked on accident are coming back across the water. And now you can stop them.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’ they ask you, and you just spit on your hands and rub the blue lines off your body.

  ‘Nothing,’ you say, then dive for the mast, climb up to the crow's nest to hatch a plan.

  To the left and right behind are the Nina and the Pinta. There aren't any birds, either, because there's not any land. Yet.

  Your plan is to foment something, a mutiny.

  The white men are bigger than last time, though. You have to factor that in, that they won't fit in a tobacco pouch anymore. But they don't remember, either, which is good.

  ‘Are you an Indian?’ they call up.

  ‘Yes,’ you say, almost screaming with fear. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Do you have any spices?’ they ask.

  ‘What are you going to put them on?’ you ask back without looking over, but they don't answer. Which means you.

  ‘I'm a barber,’ you call back finally. ‘Let me cut your hair and I can tie flies from it, and we can catch fish, and we can make keratin soup.’

  After six days they agree, and come to you one at a time. Now you're in the bow of the ship, ahead of all of them. When you look behind you there are thousands of ships, and you tremble, cut half a sailor's ear off. He eats it.

  You don't have long.

  ‘You're hungry,’ you tell him.

  This is something you can use.

  The hair you were cutting off him blows out to sea and you forget to pretend you were wanting it.

  ‘Not going too well, is it?’ you ask the next sailor. He shrugs.

  ‘Where are you going, anyway?’

  This is the third sailor, now.

  ‘The edge of the world…,’ you whisper, suggest, then, for the fourth sailor, teeter on the bow like you're about to fall off.


  ‘It won't happen like that,’ he says, eating the lice off the cut hair of the third sailor, but looks back once, too, unsure. You click the scissors at him.

  The fifth sailor settles into the chair. You waft the old sail over him, tie it at the neck so he looks like he's in a canvas sack. He's bald but you snip anyway, lean down once or twice and ask him why he's here, starving? Just to prove Isabella wrong?

  ‘Who?’ he says.

  ‘Done,’ you say.

  As the sixth approaches the chair you notice that now the sailors are gathering around the mast, talking in hushed tones.

  Is this all it takes? Words?

  You laugh again.

  ‘What?’ the sixth sailor asks.

  ‘Just thinking of your…er, captain,’ you say, and the two of you look at him together, trying to tape the four corners of his map together so that it looks like a ball.

  At the last moment you spin the chair around so Columbus won't see the sixth sailor laugh. Not yet. He walks away bald, chewing on the tip of one of your fingers you forgot to get out of the way.

  It grows back like it always does.

  Six days later it happens: the men rise up with their good haircuts and tie Columbus to the mast. His eyes are wild.

  You're the captain now.

  ‘So you want to go to India…,’ you say, the compass spinning in your palm.

  The men nod, and for a moment you see a canine snout in the crowd, but then it's gone and you're steering: India; wherever.

  Four days later they tie you to the mast with Columbus.

  ‘But we were going there,’ you say, and Columbus smiles through his beard.

  ‘They won't listen,’ he says.

  The next morning you see the first bird in months. The men cheer, slice meat off your thighs and sides, cook it with boards pulled up from the deck. The other two ships are still following you, and the rest, too. Their wake is so deep that the sun's getting to bake the floor of the ocean, and they're pushing up a tidal wave big enough to crash across a continent.

  Your thighs and sides grow back, and for the next four days the men eat more and more of you, until it doesn't hurt, until one of their knives slips and cuts Columbus free.