Thomas opened his eyes and faced the prosecuting attorney.
“Mr. Builds-the-Fire, you do admit, willingly, that you murdered two soldiers in cold blood and with premeditation?”
“Yes, I killed those soldiers, but they were good men. I did it with sad heart and hand. There was no way I could ever smile or laugh again. I’m not sorry we had to fight, but I am sorry those men had to die.”
“Mr. Builds-the-Fire, please answer the question. Did you or did you not murder those two soldiers in cold blood and with premeditation?”
“I did.”
Article from the Spokesman-Review, October 7, 19—.
Builds-the-Fire to Smolder in Prison
WELLPINIT, WASHINGTON—Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the self-proclaimed visionary of the Spokane Tribe, was sentenced today to two concurrent life terms in the Walla Walla State Penitentiary. His many supporters battled with police for over eight hours following the verdict.
U.S. District Judge James Wright asked, “Do you have anything you want to say now, Mr. Builds-the-Fire?” Builds-the-Fire simply shook his head no and was led away by prison officials.
Wright told Builds-the-Fire that the new federal sentencing guidelines “require the imposition of a life sentence for racially motivated murder.” There is no possibility for parole, said U.S. Prosecuting Attorney, Adolph D. Jim, an enrolled member of the Yakima Indian Nation.
“The only appeal I have is for justice,” Builds-the-Fire reportedly said as he was transported away from this story and into the next.
Thomas Builds-the-Fire sat quietly as the bus traveled down the highway toward Walla Walla State Penitentiary. There were six other prisoners: four African men, one Chicano, and a white man from the smallest town in the state.
“I know who you are,” the Chicano said to Thomas. “You’re that Indian guy did all the talking.”
“Yeah,” one of the African men said. “You’re that storyteller. Tell us some stories, chief, give us the scoop.”
Thomas looked at these five men who shared his skin color, at the white man who shared this bus which was going to deliver them into a new kind of reservation, barrio, ghetto, logging-town tin shack. He then looked out the window, through the steel grates on the windows, at the freedom just outside the glass. He saw wheat fields, bodies of water, and bodies of dark-skinned workers pulling fruit from trees and sweat from thin air.
Thomas closed his eyes and told this story.
DISTANCES
All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. Pretty soon in next spring Great Spirit come. He bring back all game of every kind. The game be thick everywhere. All dead Indians come back and live again. Old blind Indian see again and get young and have fine time. When Great Spirit comes this way, then all the Indians go to mountains, high up away from whites. Whites can’t hurt Indians then. Then while Indians way up high big flood comes like water and all white people die, get drowned. After that, water go away and then nobody but Indians everywhere and game all kinds thick. Then medicine man tell Indians to send word to all Indians to keep up dancing and the good time will come. Indians who don’t dance, who don’t believe in this word, will grow little, just about a foot high, and stay that way. Some of them will be turned into wood and hunted in fire.
—Wovoka, the Paiute Ghost Dance Messiah
AFTER THIS HAPPENED, after it began, I decided Custer could have, must have, pressed the button, cut down all the trees, opened up holes in the ozone, flooded the earth. Since most of the white men died and most of the Indians lived, I decided only Custer could have done something that backward. Or maybe it was because the Ghost Dance finally worked.
Last night we burned another house. The Tribal Council has ruled that anything to do with the whites has to be destroyed. Sometimes while we are carrying furniture out of a house to be burned, all of us naked, I have to laugh out loud. I wonder if this is how it looked all those years ago when we savage Indians were slaughtering those helpless settlers. We must have been freezing, buried by cold then, too.
I found a little transistor radio in a closet. It’s one of those yellow waterproof radios that children always used to have. I know that most of the electrical circuitry was destroyed, all the batteries dead, all the wires shorted, all the dams burst, but I wonder if this radio still works. It was hidden away in a closet under a pile of old quilts, so maybe it was protected. I was too scared to turn it on, though. What would I hear? Farm reports, sports scores, silence?
There’s this woman I love, Tremble Dancer, but she’s one of the Urbans. Urbans are the city Indians who survived and made their way out to the reservation after it all fell apart. There must have been over a hundred when they first arrived, but most of them have died since. Now there are only a dozen Urbans left, and they’re all sick. The really sick ones look like they are five hundred years old. They look like they have lived forever; they look like they’ll die soon.
Tremble Dancer isn’t sick yet, but she does have burns and scars all over her legs. When she dances around the fire at night, she shakes from the pain. Once when she fell, I caught her and we looked hard at each other. I thought I could see half of her life, something I could remember, something I could never forget.
The Skins, Indians who lived on the reservation when it happened, can never marry Urbans. The Tribal Council made that rule because of the sickness in the Urbans. One of the original Urbans was pregnant when she arrived on the reservation and gave birth to a monster. The Tribal Council doesn’t want that to happen again.
Sometimes I ride my clumsy horse out to Noah Chirapkin’s tipi. He’s the only Skin I know that has traveled off the reservation since it happened.
“There was no sound,” he told me once. “I rode for days and days but there were no cars moving, no planes, no bulldozers, no trees. I walked through a city that was empty, walked from one side to the other, and it took me a second. I just blinked my eyes and the city was gone, behind me. I found a single plant, a black flower, in the shadow of Little Falls Dam. It was forty years before I found another one, growing between the walls of an old house on the coast.”
Last night I dreamed about television. I woke up crying.
The weather is changed, changing, becoming new. At night it is cold, so cold that fingers can freeze into a face that is touched. During the day, our sun holds us tight against the ground. All the old people die, choosing to drown in their own water rather than die of thirst. All their bodies are evil, the Tribal Council decided. We burn the bodies on the football field, on the fifty-yard line one week, in an end zone the next. I hear rumors that relatives of the dead might be killed and burned, too. The Tribal Council decided it’s a white man’s disease in their blood. It’s a wristwatch that has fallen between their ribs, slowing, stopping. I’m happy my grandparents and parents died before all of this happened. I’m happy I’m an orphan.
Sometimes Tremble Dancer waits for me at the tree, all we have left. We take off our clothes, loincloth, box dress. We climb the branches of the tree and hold each other, watching for the Tribal Council. Sometimes her skin will flake, fall off, float to the ground. Sometimes I taste parts of her breaking off into my mouth. It is the taste of blood, dust, sap, sun.
“My legs are leaving me,” Tremble Dancer told me once. “Then it will be my arms, my eyes, my fingers, the small of my back.
“I am jealous of what you have,” she told me, pointing at the parts of my body and telling me what they do.
Last night we burned another house. I saw a painting of Jesus Christ lying on the floor.
He’s white. Jesus is white.
While the house was burning, I could see flames, colors, every color but white. I don’t know what it means, don’t understand fire, the burns on Tremble Dancer’s legs, the ash left to cool after the house has been reduced.
I want to know why Jesus isn’t a flame.
Last night I dreamed about television. I woke up crying.
While I lie in my tipi p
retending to be asleep under the half-blankets of dog and cat skin, I hear the horses exploding. I hear the screams of children who are taken.
The Others have come from a thousand years ago, their braids gray and broken with age. They have come with arrow, bow, stone ax, large hands.
“Do you remember me?” they sing above the noise, our noise.
“Do you still fear me?” they shout above the singing, our singing.
I run from my tipi across the ground toward the tree, climb the branches to watch the Others. There is one, taller than the clouds, who doesn’t ride a pony, who runs across the dust, faster than my memory.
Sometimes they come back. The Others, carrying salmon, water. Once, they took Noah Chirapkin, tied him down to the ground, poured water down his throat until he drowned.
The tallest Other, the giant, took Tremble Dancer away, brought her back with a big belly. She smelled of salt, old blood. She gave birth, salmon flopped from her, salmon growing larger.
When she died, her hands bled seawater from the palms.
At the Tribal Council meeting last night, Judas WildShoe gave a watch he found to the tribal chairman.
“A white man artifact, a sin,” the chairman said, put the watch in his pouch.
I remember watches. They measured time in seconds, minutes, hours. They measured time exactly, coldly. I measure time with my breath, the sound of my hands across my own skin.
I make mistakes.
Last night I held my transistor radio in my hands, gently, as if it were alive. I examined it closely, searching for some flaw, some obvious damage. But there was nothing, no imperfection I could see. If there was something wrong, it was not evident by the smooth, hard plastic of the outside. All the mistakes would be on the inside, where you couldn’t see, couldn’t reach.
I held that radio and turned it on, turned the volume to maximum, until all I could hear was the in and out, in again, of my breath.
JESUS CHRIST’S HALF-BROTHER IS ALIVE AND WELL ON THE SPOKANE INDIAN RESERVATION
1966
ROSEMARY MORNINGDOVE GAVE BIRTH to a boy today and seeing as how it was nearly Christmas and she kept telling everyone she was still a virgin even though Frank Many Horses said it was his we all just figured it was an accident. Anyhow she gave birth to him but he came out all blue and they couldn’t get him to breathe for a long time but he finally did and Rosemary MorningDove named him —— which is unpronounceable in Indian and English but it means: He Who Crawls Silently Through the Grass with a Small Bow and One Bad Arrow Hunting for Enough Deer to Feed the Whole Tribe.
We just call him James.
1967
Frank Many Horses and Lester FallsApart and I were drinking beers in the Breakaway Bar playing pool and talking stories when we heard the sirens. Indians get all excited when we hear sirens because it means fires and it means they need firefighters to put out the fires and it means we get to be firefighters and it means we get paid to be firefighters. Hell somebody always starts a fire down at the Indian burial grounds and it was about time for the Thirteenth Annual All-Indian Burial Grounds Fire so Frank and Lester and I ran down to the fire station expecting to get hired but we see smoke coming from Commodity Village where all the really poor Indians live so we run down there instead and it was Rosemary MorningDove’s house that was on fire. Indians got buckets of water but this fire was way too big and we could hear a baby crying and Frank Many Horses gets all excited even though it’s Lillian Many’s baby right next to us. But Frank knows James is in the house so he goes running in before any of us can stop him and pretty soon I see Frank leaning out the upstairs window holding James and they’re both a little on fire and Frank throws James out the window and I’m running my ass over to catch him before he hits the ground making like a high school football hero again but I miss him just barely slipping through my fingers and James hits the ground hard and I pick him up right away and slap the flames out with my hands all the while expecting James to be dead but he’s just looking at me almost normal except the top of his head looks all dented in like a beer can.
He wasn’t crying.
1967
I went down to the reservation hospital to see how James and Frank and Rosemary were doing and I got drunk just before I went so I wouldn’t be scared of all the white walls and the sound of arms and legs getting sawed off down in the basement. But I heard the screams anyway and they were Indian screams and those can travel forever like all around the world and sometimes from a hundred years ago so I close my ears and hide my eyes and just look down at the clean clean floors. Oh Jesus I’m so drunk I want to pray but I don’t and before I can change my mind about coming here Moses MorningDove pulls me aside to tell me Frank and Rosemary have died and since I saved James’s life I should be the one who raises him. Moses says it’s Indian tradition but somehow since Moses is going on about two hundred years old and still drinking and screwing like he was twenty I figure he’s just trying to get out of his grandfatherly duties. I don’t really want any of it and I’m sick and the hospital is making me sicker and my heart is shaking and confused like when the nurse wakes you up in the middle of the night to give you a sleeping pill but I know James will end up some Indian kid at a welfare house making baskets and wearing itchy clothes and I’m only twenty myself but I take one look at James all lumpy and potato looking and I look in the mirror and see myself holding him and I take him home.
Tonight the mirror will forgive my face.
1967
All dark tonight and James couldn’t sleep and just kept looking at the ceiling so I walk on down to the football field carrying James so we can both watch the stars looking down at the reservation. I put James down on the fifty-yard line and I run and run across the frozen grass wishing there was snow enough to make a trail and let the world know I was there in the morning. Thinking I could spell out my name or James’s name or every name I could think of until I stepped on every piece of snow on the field like it was every piece of the world or at least every piece of this reservation that has so many pieces it might just be the world. I want to walk circles around James getting closer and closer to him in a new dance and a better kind of healing which could make James talk and walk before he learns to cry. But he’s not crying and he’s not walking and he’s not talking and I see him sometimes like an old man passed out in the back of a reservation van with shit in his pants and a battered watch in his pocket that always shows the same damn time. So I pick James up from the cold and the grass that waits for spring and the sun to change its world but I can only walk home through the cold with another future on my back and James’s future tucked in my pocket like an empty wallet or a newspaper that feeds the fire and never gets read.
Sometimes all of this is home.
1968
The world changing the world changing the world. I don’t watch the TV anymore since it exploded and left a hole in the wall. The woodpile don’t dream of me no more. It sits there by the ax and they talk about the cold that waits in corners and surprises you on a warm almost spring day. Today I stood at the window for hours and then I took the basketball from inside the wood stove and shot baskets at the hoop nailed to a pine tree in the yard. I shot and shot until the cold meant I was protected because my skin was too warm to feel any of it. I shot and shot until my fingertips bled and my feet ached and my hair stuck to the skin of my bare back. James waited by the porch with his hands in the dirt and his feet stuck into leather shoes I found in the dump under a washing machine. I can’t believe the details I am forced to remember with each day that James comes closer to talking. I change his clothes and his dirty pants and I wash his face and the crevices of his little body until he shines like a new check.
This is my religion.
1968
Seems like the cold would never go away and winter would be like the bottom of my feet but then it is gone in one night and in its place comes the sun so large and laughable. James sitting up in his chair so young and he won’t talk and
the doctors at the Indian clinic say it’s way too early for him to be talking anyhow but I see in his eyes something and I see in his eyes a voice and I see in his eyes a whole new set of words. It ain’t Indian or English and it ain’t cash register and it ain’t traffic light or speed bump and it ain’t window or door. Late one day James and I watch the sun fly across the sky like a basketball on fire until it falls down completely and lands in Benjamin Lake with a splash and shakes the ground and even wakes up Lester FallsApart who thought it was his father come back to slap his face again.
Summer coming like a car from down the highway.
1968
James must know how to cry because he hasn’t cried yet and I know he’s waiting for that one moment to cry like it was five hundred years of tears. He ain’t walked anywhere and there are no blisters on his soles but there are dreams worn clean into his rib cage and it shakes and shakes with each breath and I see he’s trying to talk when he grabs at the air behind his head or stares up at the sky so hard. All of this temperature rising hot and I set James down in the shade by the basketball court and I play and I play until the sweat of my body makes it rain everywhere on the reservation. I play and I play until the music of my shoes against pavement sounds like every drum. Then I’m home alone and I watch the cockroaches live their complicated lives.