The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Your name was even on the note, Blue Plume.

  I leaned back against the chair, the pistol cold against the small of my back.

  Double Clutch slammed his twenty-pound ball into the pins. They exploded like birds. In the silence they left, Cat Stand and Denim Horse locked eyes across ten alleys.

  Competition.

  Double Clutch's ball was illegal, but he could throw it. And he was a Councilman anyway. Later he would pick up a spare with a bow and arrow he just had to hold his hand out for; Mary Boy brought a pitcher of beer himself. Double Clutch drained it down his throat without ever looking up, wiped his mouth with the back of his forearm, and smiled.

  It was Cat Stand's turn.

  He had heard about her.

  She waited for his ball to come back, curled it up to her sternum with both hands, rested her chin on it.

  Naitche was sitting at her scoring table. She looked back to him while she was lining up, and his head moved. You could hardly see it, but I was a regular by then; I could have heard the air rustle his hair if I'd needed to.

  Even Nickel Eye turned to see what Cat Stand would do.

  Mary Boy stepped out, his apron balled in his hand.

  Courtney Peltdowne stood next to him, close.

  Naitche smiled.

  His mother's ball slammed into the back wall so hard the lights flickered. The clan bowlers rose as one, clapping their solemn claps. And Denim Horse. He nodded to her, smiled. Cat Stand turned away, closed her eyes. Her hand opening and closing.

  I stood with Eddie Dial and the handcuffs rattled to the table.

  There was a bobby pin in the keyhole.

  I turned to the rafters in thanks.

  This was the AllSkin tournament. This is the best way I know to describe it: fry bread, venison; molded plastic and golden beer; wooden pins with their necks ringed with color like ducks. The main prize was a white calf robe. It was supposed to be real, not bleached. Gooseneck made a show of unpinning one of the locker keys from LP Deal's coveralls, opening the locker, stuffing the robe in. Placing the key on the scoring table between Double Clutch and Cat Stand, then backing away. Maybe it was the same white robe she'd worn in the old commercials, handed down from person to person.

  She didn't feed Naitche all day, either.

  Maybe that was why LP Deal did it.

  Second prize at the AllSkin Tournament was an all-paid weekend in the honeymoon suite of the Mayflower, courtesy of the Navajo. Eddie Dial said you didn't have to marry anybody, though, really—just an idea, a slogan, what every reservation needs if it wants to sell itself to America.

  Nobody took us seriously.

  It was supposed to be twelve words or less.

  We're not savage anymore. Come see.

  It's been nice, but now you have to leave.

  We were taking care of it long before you, don't worry.

  Yeah, it's a dirty mean place, but we like it.

  Eddie Dial read them, pushed my napkin back at me. Looked away, blowing a thin stream of smoke. LP Deal was supposed to take it anyway. He'd probably make it into a haiku or something.

  Eddie Dial shook his head no, though.

  When his smoke cleared, LP Deal was sitting down at a table with Gooseneck and Venetia and Nickel Eye. Venetia was fanning a deck of cards from hand to hand.

  ‘He hasn't been out of this place for…I don't know,’ Eddie Dial said, ‘ever.’

  He was right.

  I thought of the chink in the wall, somebody stepping through. Not him.

  Now Mary Boy was sitting down with them.

  In LP Deal's notebook, this would show up as the Great Indian Poker Game in the Sky.

  Naitche took all their cards in with a glance, then looked away, his lip trembling.

  ‘What?’ I started to say, but never got it out: Big Hair was leaning through the door.

  She stood with a smile, her lipstick perfect.

  Now I was shaking—my hand, my insides.

  I took my cigarette back from Eddie Dial, hid behind it.

  Her lipstick. She had been touching it up in her car, in the parking lot. When I had leaned back for the eyedrops.

  She smiled at me.

  The Great Indian Poker Game in the Sky was going on before her, LP Deal and Mary Boy and Venetia and Gooseneck and Nickel Eye sitting at all four corners of the table with cards stuck to the grease of their foreheads.

  ‘Deal me in?’ she said—Big Hair—and Venetia slid her a card off the top of the deck. Big Hair closed her eyes and lowered her forehead for it, and when she came up the card was a jewel under her column of hair and she was a queen, both hands flat on the table.

  They all looked to her and waited.

  Within ten minutes she'd ordered a sandwich for me. I peeled the extra tomatoes off and Eddie Dial ate them with salt.

  I shook my head no to her—Big Hair—but it was too late. I'd been made. It didn't matter as what.

  This would be my last day at Fool's Hip.

  The third prize at the AllSkin tournament was local: Mary Boy and Nickel Eye and Longfellow had rigged it after the show the night before. It was a tape recording of a tribal elder (‘Nikolai Sashmoon’) recounting a Bacteen tale. The one the IHS had worked into circulation years ago, about vaccination.

  I had watched them make it—Mary Boy holding LP Deal's wrist up to Nickel Eye like a microphone, Nickel Eye smoothing his hair down and trying to funnel all his gestures into verbs and nouns. LP Deal pretending none of this was happening, that nobody knew about his recording unit. Courtney Peltdowne whispering in his ear, her breath smoky like a bar.

  All you had to do to win the tape was guess how many postcards had been mailed to DC in protest.

  One, at least.

  I knew about one.

  I had signed it Miss Dick.

  You were probably driving through Broken Leg about then. I had missed your call, but knew you were coming anyway: the postcards, the truck, the looted reliquary in Pine Ridge. A courtesy to the American government. An even trade for my Hotline-name.

  I thought it would be different, though. That you would be professional.

  Double Clutch's ball slammed into the back wall and I flinched.

  We could all feel it rolling underground, back to Cat Stand.

  Neither of them had missed a pin yet. The twenty-pound ball was weighing on Cat Stand, though. Her face was shiny with sweat. With each frame she was taking off another layer of flannel.

  Later, Double Clutch would say she smelled like ice cream.

  Later, Special Agent Chassis Jones would be gone.

  You don't want to know where I'm writing this from. Who my roommate is.

  There was no fourth prize.

  Miss America was still in the bathroom, sitting on the sink, braiding a ribbon into her hair. Double Clutch's ball slammed into his sixth frame and Fool's Hip shuddered. Miss America closed her eyes, her fingers still moving, and white powder sifted down over us, balancing on every ceramic ledge, coating all the stainless steel.

  ‘It's coming down,’ she said, not really interested.

  Already there were shafts of sunlight in the air, reflecting off the windshields of the Councilmen's cars into the side of Fool's Hip, into Fool's Hip. It was an egg, cracking open.

  ‘You were good,’ I told her.

  She looked to me.

  ‘Last night, I mean,’ I said. ‘With Tonto.’

  She shrugged.

  The main door was propped open, wouldn't close anymore. Through it we could hear Nickel Eye bidding, driving the pot up.

  Miss America looked to him somehow.

  ‘His father used to hunt deer with tennis balls,’ I told her, repeating. ‘His mother was Navajo, his father Diné.’

  Miss America smiled.

  ‘Is he…Him?’ she asked.

  I looked to the stall. After the Roses are red line, someone had carved violence is blue, and I didn't want to see the rest of the poem.

  ‘I don't know
what he is,’ I told her.

  My main suspect. A serial killer.

  But after what Enil Anderson had done.

  We won't hurt you, really, I told Eddie Dial in my head. For the honeymoon suite. It was just five words, though. I could do better.

  Cat Stand's ball slammed into Fool's Hip.

  Through the snow or ash or whatever it was Miss America said that she didn't know she was supposed to lose, did she—Cat Stand?

  No, she didn't: Denim Horse was watching.

  When I went out, she was down to her undershirt, and it was wet.

  The twin glass doors opened behind me, all the dust in the air feinting towards them, and I didn't have to turn around to know it was you. Standing there framed by the light, taking your sunglasses off.

  Courtney Peltdowne was sitting in front of me with a cigarette, her back to the game.

  She narrowed her eyes against the sunlight. Had been there with Back Iron the first time we came, knew what to do: hold her wrists up, together, for the cuffs; smile. Say she'd been a bad, bad girl and arch her back away from the bench to show how much worse she could be, too.

  I didn't have to turn around to know it was you, Blue Plume.

  But I thought you would know it was me, too.

  You know what happened next: we were ten little pins, standing in formation with our arms by our sides, chins up, eyes shut. Naked to the ball rolling end over end at us, its thumbhole spewing ash.

  I was in the back row with Nickel Eye. Holding his hand.

  Naitche and LP Deal were to either side of us, Back Iron and Denim Horse twinned in the second row. Behind them were Cat Stand and Courtney Peltdowne, Mary Boy between them, balancing them. Staring at the ball.

  We weren't complete until you stepped into place, all alone at the front.

  When you fell, I breathed in, waited for the rush of air, the crash.

  First the poker game, though. Red Hat. Gooseneck calling with a sneer, Big Hair and Mary Boy looking up from the napkins they'd been keeping track on, LP Deal still writing, his pencil a nub.

  ‘Hey,’ Mary Boy said to him.

  LP Deal swallowed. Put his pencil down.

  Venetia smiled.

  It's not like we couldn't all see their cards. Like we didn't know it had been a misdeal, a cowboy hand: that there was one black hat among all these white. One bad guy.

  Gooseneck slapped his card down face-up: the seven of hearts.

  He was a red Indian. He breathed out through his nose, looked to Mary Boy, a red Indian too—a king, even—and Venetia, the diamond she'd traced with her fingertips. They didn't win anything, but they didn't lose that much, either.

  Naitche was at the table now, Cat Stand standing with her ball, watching him.

  It was down to Big Hair and Nickel Eye and LP Deal.

  Nickel Eye walked LP Deal's scratch paper over with his fingers, read aloud:

  had life rotten

  nod at the rifle

  I saw myself in the lower panel of a comic book, leaning over, screaming, but there was no sound. It was all inside. I would have reached for him too to stop all this, but Mary Boy already was. The microphone crunched under his grip.

  Denim Horse stood up out of the past, loomed over the table, the tips of his hair brushing the cards, eyes flaring. ‘Who killed Coach?’ he said, just like a movie Indian.

  LP Deal looked up, around. ‘I did,’ he said finally, then to Nickel Eye: ‘The fine old rat, right?’

  Nickel Eye nodded, rearranging the letters on LP Deal's napkin.

  He slid them over to Big Hair.

  She glanced down, back up.

  I was still shaking my head no.

  Now Mary Boy had the napkin.

  He lowered his head, pinching the bridge of his nose, his sunglasses riding up. Denim Horse ready to explode on a word, LP Deal staring up at him, waiting for it; wanting it.

  ‘Shit,’ Mary Boy said, though.

  Gooseneck read the napkin aloud when it got to him:

  end of the trail

  end of the trail

  It was the anagram Naitche had peeled from around his bubble gum months ago, cracked without meaning to, his arm still throbbing. One of the old anthropologist codes. What some part of LP Deal had to have known since seeing Cat Stand the first day she walked in: that Owen82 was what he was, had been doing what he had been doing. And that he had taken Owen82's place in the garden.

  LP Deal reached for the card on his forehead to finish the game, but Naitche was riding his arm.

  ‘No,’ he was saying.

  His voice was perfect.

  Even the air handlers cycled down to hear it. In the new stillness a turnip vine spooled down from the rafters.

  ‘No,’ Naitche said again, looking hard into LP Deal's eyes, imploring, but then he was lifted away by the arm. By Cat Stand.

  There was a lot of money at stake, a pile full of shells. She had a good excuse for it. And maybe his arm wouldn't even bruise this time. Not that it mattered.

  LP Deal rose to her, pulling Naitche away, holding him like the child he was, and they faced off—LP Deal with the two of hearts on his forehead, Cat Stand in her wet undershirt, her breasts pressing through.

  I think now she smelled like ice cream because she never stopped lactating: the sweat was her thin milk.

  She looked at all of us, breathed twice through her teeth, then rolled her shirt off, threw it on the floor, her great brown breasts heaving, staring at us all.

  This was the day she would bowl 300. The day Double Clutch pulled a 7/10 split in the thirteenth frame, and she held that twenty-pound ball between her full breasts, slammed it down the lane so fast the wood of his seven pin splintered, entered the grain of the ten headfirst.

  LP Deal and Naitche.

  Naitche was still shaking his head no, but LP Deal did it anyway, staring at Cat Stand: peeled the card off his head.

  He had won the hand, guessed right: he had been the bad guy here. The white man sitting at the table with all these red Indians.

  Gooseneck stood before you could react, Blue Plume. Because you weren't here for a tomato who'd been recording all of us down his sleeve, but for a thief, a truck.

  Two sets of handcuffs flashed: Gooseneck's and yours.

  LP Deal shrank back before Gooseneck, and then Back Iron slid gracefully down the turnip vine in full and spectacular drag: stiletto pumps, hairless legs, feather boa slung over his shoulder.

  He padded to the floor in front of Gooseneck.

  The only sound was Denim Horse breathing in, Gooseneck rolling his sleeves up his forearms, Back Iron smiling with his teeth together. All his old radiation had risen to the halogen whites of his eyes. He flared them, and the only thing that kept Gooseneck from doing whatever it was he could do was the boa. The white feathers. Like Smudge. Like this was all a trick, a game.

  He looked to Denim Horse and then to Back Iron again, handcuffed Denim Horse just on principle, Back Iron singling you out, raising his wrists together, and I can tell you this now because it doesn't matter: when you pushed both of them up to the wall to see who matched the postcard, Mary Boy smiled. Because he could still redeem Owen82. He could still switch the Twin Towers out. It was the only time he ever took his sunglasses off—to squint at Back Iron and Denim Horse, give them the one who had the hair, the clothes, the look. The one you wanted.

  And Eddie Dial didn't say anything, and when Denim Horse could have said no, explained it all away, he looked instead to Back Iron, wearing a dress maybe just because his brother liked women, his brother who was perfect—had everything, didn't have to steal it—then he looked to Cat Stand undressed, her breasts bare for the first time since Arizona probably, and it all felt right. Like it was his turn. He nodded with Mary Boy, that he was guilty. That he hadn't been able to run fast enough with her through the rodeo. That he had never had leukemia.

  I said his name and knew you would never hold him. Not like I had, anyway.

  After the line-u
p was over, Eddie Dial was standing there still, touching the scratches on his own face.

  It sucks being Indian sometimes, okay, but sometimes, too

  I couldn't finish it, didn't have enough words.

  Instead I just wrote I'm losing myse

  LP Deal didn't collect the money, drag it with him to the bathroom. But they hadn't forgotten about him, just didn't know how to get him out.

  And the whole time, Cat Stand kept bowling.

  We were all watching, frame by frame.

  This is where I brush up against you in line. It's when you've got Denim Horse cuffed in front of you. Because he wanted a drink. Because this wasn't America—he had rights. You had caught your man, done in twenty minutes what I hadn't in twenty days. And Courtney Peltdowne was right behind you, and I grabbed your arm and you looked at my blonde hair and my red eyes and didn't know me, shrugged me away, and she laughed too long, and you turned to her, smiling yourself.

  And I'm glad for you and her. Really (lie). Have a bunch of kids. Name them after me: Tie Rod, Drive Shaft, Rear End; Spindle Boy, Spindle Girl.

  A third set of cuffs caught the light, then: mine.

  You must have known me then, when I joined you and her at the wrist, Denim Horse smiling, the wind catching his hair, like he was already running.

  But it doesn't matter.

  I didn't look back.

  Gooseneck knew I was undercover now, let me walk into the bathroom first. Because it was the women's. Because I knew him, LP Deal.

  I think I was supposed to give him a way out, too. Let him run, feel it, then shoot him right then. It was going to be mercy.

  But I knew him.

  Or thought I did.

  I just wanted to rearrange the pins, I think, put all the sound back in them, stand them up very still and walk away. But this was Fool's Hip. The walls of the bathroom were crumbling, Cat Stand and Double Clutch hammering the AllSkin tournament into history.

  In the middle of it all were LP Deal and Naitche.

  In the toilets and smoking in the trashcan were all of LP Deal's notebooks. To keep them from the anthropologists. The only one I'd be able to salvage would be his unfinished manifesto, the terms he was dictating to America—transcriptions of clippings from newspapers and history books, done up in alphabetical order, like entries in a dictionary. It was written on the back of an aborted series of profiles he'd written on Mary Boy and Back Iron and Denim Horse and Cat Stand and Nickel Eye and Owen82 and himself. Written back when they were all suspects. And he was first, had been the one standing over the body with the gun.