“Sure I like you, Burl.”
“Would you like to work for me? I sure like you, Mae June. I’d like to put you in a nice little apartment on the top story of a real tall building with an elevator in it.” As tit-talked, he kneaded at me like a kitten. “An express elevator. It would only stop at your floor and the basement. We could lock it from the inside. We could ride it. Up Down. Up. Down. Hell, we could put a double bed in it You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Mae June?”
“Yes, Burl.” When would my mammaries make their move?
He bent his head forward to pull down his own zipper, and they conked him. “Wha?” he said as he recoiled and collapsed gracefully to the floor. “How the heck did you do that, Mae June?”
I decided Burl had a harder head than Maxwell.
“Your hands are all snarled up in your dress. You been taking aikido or something?”
“No, Burl.”
“Jeepers, if you didn’t like me, you shoulda said something. I woulda left you alone.”
“But I do like you. Burl. It’s my breasts. They make their own decisions.”
He lay on the floor and looked up at me. “That’s the dumbest-assed thing I ever heard,” he said. He rolled over and got to his feet. Then he came over, leaned toward me, and glared at my breasts. The left one flexed. He jumped back just in time. “Mae June, are you possessed?”
“Yes!” That must be it. The devil was in my breasts. I wondered what I had done to deserve such a fate. I wasn’t even religious.
Burl made the sign of the cross over my breasts. Nothing happened. “That’s not it,” he said. “Maybe it’s your subconscious. You hate men. Something like that. So how come this didn’t happen last time, huh?” He began pacing.
“They were waiting to get strong enough. Oh, Burl, what am I going to do?”
“Get dressed. I think you better see a doctor, Mae June. Maybe we can get ‘em tranquilized or something. I don’t like the way they’re sitting there, watching me.”
I managed to hook my bra without too much trouble. Burl zipped me up and turned the elevator operational again. “Do you hate me?” I asked him on the way down.
“Course I don’t hate you,” he said, shifting a step further away from me. “You’re real pretty, Mae June. Just as soon as you get yourself under control, you’re gonna make somebody a real nice little something. I just don’t want to take too many chances. Suppose what you’ve got is contagious? Suppose some of my body parts decide they don’t like women? Let’s be rational about this, huh?”
“I mean you won’t drop the contract with IPP, will you?”
“Shoot no. You worried about job security? I like that in a woman. You got sense. I won’t complain. But I hope you got Blue Cross. You may have to get those knockers psychoanalyzed or something.”
He offered to drive me to a doctor or the hospital. I told him I’d take the bus. He tried to get me to change my mind He failed. I watched him drive away. Then I went home.
I picked up the powder-pink exerciser and took it to the window. My apartment was on the tenth floor. I was just going to drop the exerciser out the window when I looked down and saw Gladys’s red coat wrapped around Gladys My doorbell rang. I buzzed her into the building.
By the time she arrived at my front door I had collapsed on the couch, still holding the exerciser. “It’s open,” I called when she knocked. My arms were pumping the exerciser as I lay there. I thought about trying to stop exercising, but decided it was too much effort. “How’d you know I’d be home?” I asked Gladys as she came in and took off her coat.
“Burl stopped by the office.”
“Did he say what happened?”
“No. He said he was worried about you. What did happen?”
“They punched him.” I pumped the exerciser harder “What am I going to do? I can’t type, and now I can’t even do lunch.” I glared at my breasts. “You want us to starve?”
They were doing push-ups and didn’t answer.
Gladys sat on a chair across from me and leaned forward, her gaze fixed on my new features. Her mouth was open.
My arms stopped pumping without me having anything to say about it. My left arm handed the exerciser to her. Her gaze still locked on my breasts, Gladys gripped the powder-pink exerciser and went to work.
“Don’t,” I said, sitting up. Startled, she fell against the chairback. “Do you want this to happen to you?”
“I I ” She gulped and dropped the exerciser.
“I don’t know what they want!” I stared at them with loathing. “It won’t be long before the boss realizes I’m not an asset. Then what am I going to do?”
“You … you have a lot of career choices,” said Gladys. “Like have you ever considered mud wrestling?”
“What?”
“Exotic dancing?” She blinked. She licked her upper lip. “You could join the FBI, I bet. ‘My breasts punched out spies for God and country.’ You could sell your story to the Enquirer. ‘Double-breasted Death.’ Sounds like a slick detective movie from the Thirties. You could ”
“Stop,” I said, “I don’t want to hear any more.”
“I’m sorry,” she said after a minute. She got up and made tea.
We were sitting there sipping it when she had another brainstorm. “What do they want? You’ve been asking that yourself. What are breasts for, anyway?”
“Sex and babies,” I said.
We looked at each other. We looked away. All those lunches and we had never talked about it. I bet she only knew what she read in books too.
She stared at the braided rug on the floor. “Were you … protected?”
I stared at the floor too. “I don’t think so.”
“They have tests you can do at home now.”
I thought it was Burl’s, so my breasts and I went to visit him. “You talk to them,” I said. “If they think you’re the father, maybe they won’t beat you up anymore. Maybe they’re just fending off all other comers.”
Between the three of them they reached an arrangement. I moved into that penthouse apartment.
I shudder to think what they’ll do when the baby comes.
All right, I can sec you out there: sitting in your easy chairs, or in bed, or on the couch with the sound on the TV muted. Giggling and smiling, chuckling and wondering what’s coming next. You’re getting entirely too comfortable, you are. Not that I can hit you with a Lenny Bruce fantasy fable, because to the best of my knowledge, he never wrote one.
It’s just not good to get too comfortable. I can’t get violent with you, or nasty. This is, after all, an anthology of funny fantasy. So the best I can do is bring you another smile, another bit of humor.
Of course there are all kinds of smiles, and not all humor is light.
Or the Grasses Grow
AVRAM DAVIDSON
About halfway along the narrow and ill-paved county road between Crosby and Spanish Flats (all dips and hollows shimmering falsely like water in the heat till you get right up close to them), the road to Tickisall Agency branches off. No pretense of concrete or macadam-or even grading-deceives the chance or rarely purposeful traveler. Federal, state, and county governments have better things to do with their money: Tickisall pays no taxes, its handful of residents have only recently been accorded the vote, and that grudgingly: an out-of-state judge unexpectedly on the circuit. Man had no idea of the problem involved. Courts going to hell anyway.
The sun-baked earth is cracked and riven. A few dirty sheep and a handful of scrub cows share its scanty herbage with an occasional sway-backed horse or stunted burro.
Here and there a gaunt automobile rests in the thin shadow of a board shack and a child, startled doubtless by the smooth sound of a strange motor, runs like a lizard through the dusty wastes to hide, and then to peer. Melon vines dried past all hope of fruit lie in patches next to whispery, tindery cornstalks.
And in the midst of all this, next to the only spring which never goes dry, are the only painted bui
ldings, the only decent buildings, in the area. In the middle of the green lawn is a pole with the flag, and right behind the pole, over the front door, the sign:
U. S. BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS.
TICKISALL AGENCY.
OFFICE OF THE SUPERINTENDENT.
Before Uncle FoxHead sat a basket with four different kinds of clay, and next to the basket was a medicine gourd full of water. The old man rolled the clay between his moistened palms, singing in a low voice. Then he washed his hands and sprinkled them with pollen. Then he took up the prayer sticks, made of juniper (once there had been juniper trees on the Reservation, once there had been many trees) and painted with the signs of Thunder, Sun, Moon, Rain, Lightning; with the feathers tied to them-once there bad been birds, too …
Oh, people-of-the-Hidden-Places,
Oh, take our message to the Hidden Places,
Swiftly, swiftly, now,
the old man chanted, shaking the medicine sticks.
Oh, you Swift Ones, People-with-no-legs,
Take our message to the People-with-nobodies,
Swiftly, swiftly, now …
The old man’s skin was like a cracked, worn moccasin. With his turkey-claw hand he took up the gourd rattle, shook it: west~ south, up, down, east north.
Oh, people-of-the-hollow-Earth,
Take our message to the hollow Earth,
Take our song to our Fathers and Mothers,
Take our cry to the Spirit People,
Take and go, take and go,
Swiftly, swiftly, now …
The snakes rippled across the ground and were gone, one by one. The old man’s sister’s son helped him back to his sheepskin, spread in the shade, where he half sat, half lay, panting.
His great-nephews, Billy Cottonwood and Sam Quarter-horse, were talking together in English. “There was a fellow in my outfit,” Cottonwood said; “a fellow from West Virginia, name of Corrothers. Said his grandmother claimed she could charm away warts. So I said my great-uncle claimed be could make snakes. And they all laughed fit to kill and said, ‘Chief, when you try a snow job, it turns into a blizzard!’ … Old Corrothers,” be reflected. “We were pretty good buddies. Maybe I’ll go to West Virginia and look him up. I could bitch, maybe.”
Quarter-horse said, “Yeah, you can go to West Virginia, and I can go to L.A.-but what about the others? Where they going to go, if Washington refuses to act?”
The fond smile of recollection left his cousin’s lean, brown face. “I don’t know,” be said. “I be damned and go hell if I know.” And then the old pickup came rattling and coughing up to the house, and Sam said, “Here’s Newton.”
Newton Quarter-horse, his brother Sam, and Billy Cottonwood were the only three Tickisalls who bad passed the physical and gone into the Army. There weren’t a lot of others who were of conscripting age (or any other age, for that matter), and whom TB didn’t keep out, other ailments active or passive did. Once there had been trees on the Reservation, and birds, and deer, and healthy men.
The wash-faded Army sun tans bad been clean and fresh as always when Newt set out for Crosby, but they were dusty and sweaty now. He took a piece of wet burlap out and removed a few bottles from it. “Open these, Sam, will you, while I wash,” be said. “Cokes for us, strawberry pop for the old people …
How’s Uncle FoxHead?”
Billy grunted. “Playing at making medicine snakes again . Do you suppose, if we believed him-that he could?”
Newt shrugged. “Well, maybe if the telegram don’t do any good, the snakes will. And I’m damned sure they won’t do no worse. That son of a bitch at the Western Union Office,” he said, looking out over the drought-bitten land. ” ‘Sending a smoke signal to the Great White Father again, Sitting Bull?’ he says, smirking and sneering. ‘You just take the money and send the wire,’ I told him … They looked at me like coyotes looking at a sick calf.” Abruptly, he turned away and went to dip his handkerchief in the bucket. Water was hard come by.
The lip of the bottle clicked against one of Uncle Fox-head’s few teeth. He drank noisily, then licked his lips. “Today we drink the white men’s sweet water,” he said. “What will we drink tomorrow?” No one said anything. “I will tell you, then,” he continued. “Unless the white men relent, we will drink the bitter water of the Hollow Places. They are bitter, but they are strong and good.” He waved his withered hand in a semicircle. “All this will go,” he said, “and the Fathers and Mothers of the People will return and lead us to our old home inside the Earth.” His sister’s son, who had never learned English nor gone to school, moaned. “Unless the white men relent,” said the old man.
“They never have,” said Cottonwood, in Tickisall. In English, he said, “What will he do when he sees that nothing happens tomorrow except that we get kicked the hell out of here?”
Newt said, “Die, I suppose … which might not be a bad idea. For all of us.”
His brother turned and looked at him. “If you’re planning Quarter-horse’s Last Stand, forget about it. There aren’t twenty rounds of ammunition on the whole Reservation.”
Billy Cottonwood raised his head. “We could maybe move in with the Apahoya,” he suggested. “They’re just as dirt-poor as we are, but there’s more of them, and I guess they’ll hold on to their land awhile yet.” His cousins shook their heads. “Well, not for us. But the others … Look, I spoke to Joe Feather Cloud that last time I was at Apahoya Agency. If we give him the truck and the sheep, he’ll take care of Uncle FoxHead.”
Sam Quarter-horse said be supposed that was the best thing. “For the old man, I mean. I made up my mind. I’m going to L.A. and pass for Colored.” He stopped.
They waited till the now shiny automobile had gone by toward the Agency in a cloud of dust. His brother said, “The buzzards are gathering.” Then he asked,
“How come, Sam?”
“Because I’m tired of being an Indian. It has no present and no future. I can’t be a white, they won’t have me-the best I could hope for would be that they laugh: ‘How, Big Chief’-‘Hi, Blanket-bottom.’ Yeah, I could pass for a Mexican as far as my looks go, only the Mexes won’t have me, either. But the Colored will. And there’s millions and millions of them-whatever price they pay for it, they never have to feel lonely. And they’ve got a fine, bitter contempt for the whites that I can use a lot of. ‘Pecks,’ they call them. I don’t know where they got the name from, but damn, it sure fits them. They’ve been pecking away at us for a hundred years.”
They talked on some more, and all the while the dust never settled in the road. The whole tribe, what there was of it, went by toward the Agency-in old trucks, in buckboards, on horses, on foot. And after some time, they loaded up the pickup and followed.
The Indians sat all over the grass in front of the Agency, and for once no one bothered to chase them off. They just sat, silent waiting. A group of men from Crosby and Spanish Flats were talking to the Superintendent; there were maps in their bands. The cousins went up to them, and the white men looked out of the corners of their eyes, confidence still tempered-but only a bit-by wariness.
“Mr. Jenkins,” Newt said to one, “most of this is your doing and you know how I feel about it—”
“You’d better not make any trouble, Quarter-horse,” said another townsman.
Jenkins said, “Let the boy have his say.”
“-but I know you’ll give me a straight answer. What’s going to be done here?”
Jenkins was a leathery little man, burnt almost as dark as an Indian. He looked at him, not unkindly, through the spectacles which magnified his blue eyes. “Why, you know, son, there’s nothing personal in all this. The land belongs to them that can hold it and use it. It was made to be used. You people’ve had your chance, Lord knows-well. No speeches. You see, here on the map, where this here dotted line is? The county is putting through a new road to connect with a new highway the state’s going to construct. There’ll be a lot of traffic through here and this Agency ought to
make a fine motel.”
“And right along here-” his blunt finger traced, “there’s going to be the main irrigation canal. There’ll be branches all through the Reservation. I reckon we can raise some mighty fine alfalfa. Fatten some mighty fine cattle … I always thought, son, you’d be good with stock if you bad some good stock to work with. Not these worthless scrubs. If you want a job _”
One of the men cleared his sinus cavities with an ugly sound and spat. “Are you out of your mind, Jenk? Here we been workin for years ta git these Indyins outa here, and you trayin ta make urn stay …”
The Superintendent was a tall, fat, soft man with a loose smile. He said now, ingratiatingly, “Mr. Jenkins realizes, as I’m sure you do, too, Mr. Waldo, that the policy of the United States Government is, and always has been-except for the unfortunate period when John Collier was in charge of the Bureau of Indian Affairs - man may have meant well, but Lordi hopeless sentimentalist-well, our policy has always been: prepare the Indian to join the general community. Get him off the Reservation. Turn the tribal lands over to the Individual. And it’s been done with other tribes and now, finally, it’s being done with this one.” He beamed.
Newt gritted his teeth. Then he said, “And the result was always the same-as soon as the tribal lands were given to the individual red man they damn quick passed into the hands of the individual white man. That’s what’s happened with other tribes, and now, finally, it’s being done with this one … Don’t you know, Mr. Scott, that we just can’t adapt ourselves to the system of individual landownership? That we just aren’t strong enough by ourselves to hold onto real estate? That-“
“Root, bog, er die,” said Mr. Waldo.
“Are men hogs?” Newt cried.
Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves Page 31
