In those dreams, Victor and his parents would be sitting in Mother’s Kitchen restaurant in Spokane, waiting out a storm. Rain and lightning. Unemployment and poverty. Commodity food. Flash floods.
“Soup,” Victor’s father would always say. “I want a bowl of soup.”
Mother’s Kitchen was always warm in those dreams. There was always a good song on the jukebox, a song that Victor didn’t really know but he knew it was good. And he knew it was a song from his parents’ youth. In those dreams, all was good.
Sometimes, though, the dream became a nightmare and Mother’s Kitchen was out of soup, the jukebox only played country music, and the roof leaked. Rain fell like drums into buckets and pots and pans set out to catch whatever they could. In those nightmares, Victor sat in his chair as rain fell, drop by drop, onto his head.
In those nightmares, Victor felt his stomach ache with hunger. In fact, he felt his whole interior sway, nearly buckle, then fall. Gravity. Nothing for dinner except sleep. Gale and unsteady barometer.
In other nightmares, in his everyday reality, Victor watched his father take a drink of vodka on a completely empty stomach. Victor could hear that near-poison fall, then hit, flesh and blood, nerve and vein. Maybe it was like lightning tearing an old tree into halves. Maybe it was like a wall of water, a reservation tsunami, crashing onto a small beach. Maybe it was like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Maybe it was like all that. Maybe. But after he drank, Victor’s father would breathe in deep and close his eyes, stretch, and straighten his neck and back. During those long drinks, Victor’s father wasn’t shaped like a question mark. He looked more like an exclamation point.
Some people liked the rain. But Victor hated it. Really hated it. The damp. Humidity. Low clouds and lies. Weathermen. When it was raining, Victor would apologize to everyone he talked to.
“Sorry about the weather,” he would say.
Once, Victor’s cousins made him climb a tall tree during a rainstorm. The bark was slick, nearly impossible to hold on to, but Victor kept climbing. The branches kept most of the rain off him, but there were always sudden funnels of water that broke through, startling enough to nearly make Victor lose his grip. Sudden rain like promises, like treaties. But Victor held on.
There was so much that Victor feared, so much his intense imagination created. For years, Victor feared that he was going to drown while it was raining, so that even when he thrashed through the lake and opened his mouth to scream, he would taste even more water falling from the sky. Sometimes he was sure that he would fall from the top of the slide or from a swing and a whirlpool would suddenly appear beneath him and carry him down into the earth, drown him at the core.
And of course, Victor dreamed of whiskey, vodka, tequila, those fluids swallowing him just as easily as he swallowed them. When he was five years old, an old Indian man drowned in a mud puddle at the powwow. Just passed out and fell facedown into the water collected in a tire track. Even at five, Victor understood what that meant, how it defined nearly everything. Fronts. Highs and lows. Thermals and undercurrents. Tragedy.
When the hurricane descended on the reservation in 1976, Victor was there to record it. If the video camera had been available then, Victor might have filmed it, but his memory was much more dependable.
His uncles, Arnold and Adolph, gave up the fight and walked back into the house, into the New Year’s Eve party, arms linked, forgiving each other. But the storm that had caused their momentary anger had not died. Instead, it moved from Indian to Indian at the party, giving each a specific, painful memory.
Victor’s father remembered the time his own father was spit on as they waited for a bus in Spokane.
Victor’s mother remembered how the Indian Health Service doctor sterilized her moments after Victor was born.
Adolph and Arnold were touched by memories of previous battles, storms that continually haunted their lives. When children grow up together in poverty, a bond is formed that is stronger than most anything. It’s this same bond that causes so much pain. Adolph and Arnold reminded each other of their childhood, how they hid crackers in their shared bedroom so they would have something to eat.
“Did you hide the crackers?” Adolph asked his brother so many times that he still whispered that question in his sleep.
Other Indians at the party remembered their own pain. This pain grew, expanded. One person lost her temper when she accidentally brushed the skin of another. The forecast was not good. Indians continued to drink, harder and harder, as if anticipating. There’s a fifty percent chance of torrential rain, blizzardlike conditions, seismic activity. Then there’s a sixty percent chance, then seventy, eighty.
Victor was back in his bed, lying flat and still, watching the ceiling lower with each step above. The ceiling lowered with the weight of each Indian’s pain, until it was just inches from Victor’s nose. He wanted to scream, wanted to pretend it was just a nightmare or a game invented by his parents to help him sleep.
The voices upstairs continued to grow, take shape and fill space until Victor’s room, the entire house, was consumed by the party. Until Victor crawled from his bed and went to find his parents.
“Ya-hey, little nephew,” Adolph said as Victor stood alone in a corner.
“Hello, Uncle,” Victor said and gave Adolph a hug, gagged at his smell. Alcohol and sweat. Cigarettes and failure.
“Where’s my dad?” Victor asked.
“Over there,” Adolph said and waved his arm in the general direction of the kitchen. The house was not very large, but there were so many people and so much emotion filling the spaces between people that it was like a maze for little Victor. No matter which way he turned, he could not find his father or mother.
“Where are they?” he asked his aunt Nezzy.
“Who?” she asked.
“Mom and Dad,” Victor said, and Nezzy pointed toward the bedroom. Victor made his way through the crowd, hated his tears. He didn’t hate the fear and pain that caused them. He expected that. What he hated was the way they felt against his cheeks, his chin, his skin as they made their way down his face. Victor cried until he found his parents, alone, passed out on their bed in the back bedroom.
Victor climbed up on the bed and lay down between them. His mother and father breathed deep, nearly choking alcoholic snores. They were sweating although the room was cold, and Victor thought the alcohol seeping through their skin might get him drunk, might help him sleep. He kissed his mother’s neck, tasted the salt and whiskey. He kissed his father’s forearm, tasted the cheap beer and smoke.
Victor closed his eyes tightly. He said his prayers just in case his parents had been wrong about God all those years. He listened for hours to every little hurricane spun from the larger hurricane that battered the reservation.
During that night, his aunt Nezzy broke her arm when an unidentified Indian woman pushed her down the stairs. Eugene Boyd broke a door playing indoor basketball. Lester FallsApart passed out on top of the stove and somebody turned the burners on high. James Many Horses sat in the corner and told so many bad jokes that three or four Indians threw him out the door into the snow.
“How do you get one hundred Indians to yell Oh, shit?” James Many Horses asked as he sat in a drift on the front lawn.
“Say Bingo,” James Many Horses answered himself when nobody from the party would.
James didn’t spend very much time alone in the snow. Soon Seymour and Lester were there, too. Seymour was thrown out because he kept flirting with all the women. Lester was there to cool off his burns. Soon everybody from the party was out on the lawn, dancing in the snow, fucking in the snow, fighting in the snow.
Victor lay between his parents, his alcoholic and dreamless parents, his mother and father. Victor licked his index finger and raised it into the air to test the wind. Velocity. Direction. Sleep approaching. The people outside seemed so far away, so strange and imaginary. There was a downshift of emotion, tension seemed to wane. Victor put one hand on his mother’s stoma
ch and placed the other on his father’s. There was enough hunger in both, enough movement, enough geography and history, enough of everything to destroy the reservation and leave only random debris and broken furniture.
But it was over. Victor closed his eyes, fell asleep. It was over. The hurricane that fell out of the sky in 1976 left before sunrise, and all the Indians, the eternal survivors, gathered to count their losses.
A DRUG CALLED TRADITION
“GODDAMN IT, THOMAS,” JUNIOR yelled. “How come your fridge is always fucking empty?”
Thomas walked over to the refrigerator, saw it was empty, and then sat down inside.
“There,” Thomas said. “It ain’t empty no more.”
Everybody in the kitchen laughed their asses off. It was the second-largest party in reservation history and Thomas Builds-the-Fire was the host. He was the host because he was the one buying all the beer. And he was buying all the beer because he had just got a ton of money from Washington Water Power. And he just got a ton of money from Washington Water Power because they had to pay for the lease to have ten power poles running across some land that Thomas had inherited.
When Indians make lots of money from corporations that way, we can all hear our ancestors laughing in the trees. But we never can tell whether they’re laughing at the Indians or the whites. I think they’re laughing at pretty much everybody.
“Hey, Victor,” Junior said. “I hear you got some magic mushrooms.”
“No way,” I said. “Just Green Giant mushrooms. I’m making salad later.”
But I did have this brand new drug and had planned on inviting Junior along. Maybe a couple Indian princesses, too. But only if they were full-blood. Well, maybe if they were at least half-Spokane.
“Listen,” I whispered to Junior to keep it secret. “I’ve got some good stuff, a new drug, but just enough for me and you and maybe a couple others. Keep it under your warbonnet.”
“Cool,” Junior said. “I’ve got my new car outside. Let’s go.”
We ditched the party, decided to save the new drug for ourselves, and jumped into Junior’s Camaro. The engine was completely shot but the exterior was good. You see, the car looked mean. Mostly we just parked it in front of the Trading Post and tried to look like horsepowered warriors. Driving it was a whole other matter, though. It belched and farted its way down the road like an old man. That definitely wasn’t cool.
“Where do you want to go?” Junior asked.
“Benjamin Lake,” I said, and we took off in a cloud of oil and exhaust. We drove down the road a little toward Benjamin Lake when we saw Thomas Builds-the-Fire standing by the side of the road. Junior stopped the car and I leaned out the window.
“Hey, Thomas,” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be at your own party?”
“You guys know it ain’t my party anyway,” Thomas said. “I just paid for it.”
We laughed. I looked at Junior and he nodded his head.
“Hey,” I said. “Jump in with us. We’re going out to Benjamin Lake to do this new drug I got. It’ll be very fucking Indian. Spiritual shit, you know?”
Thomas climbed in back and was just about ready to tell another one of his goddamn stories when I stopped him.
“Now, listen,” I said. “You can only come with us if you don’t tell any of your stories until after you’ve taken the drug.”
Thomas thought that over awhile. He nodded his head in the affirmative and we drove on. He looked so happy to be spending the time with us that I gave him the new drug.
“Eat up, Thomas,” I said. “The party’s on me now.”
Thomas downed it and smiled.
“Tell us what you see, Mr. Builds-the-Fire,” Junior said.
Thomas looked around the car. Hell, he looked around our world and then poked his head through some hole in the wall into another world. A better world.
“Victor,” Thomas said. “I can see you. God, you’re beautiful. You’ve got braids and you’re stealing a horse. Wait, no. It’s not a horse. It’s a cow.”
Junior almost wrecked because he laughed so hard.
“Why the fuck would I be stealing a cow?” I asked.
“I’m just giving you shit,” Thomas said. “No, really, you’re stealing a horse and you’re riding by moonlight. Van Gogh should’ve painted this one, Victor. Van Gogh should’ve painted you.”
It was a cold, cold night. I had crawled through the brush for hours, moved by inches so the Others would not hear me. I wanted one of their ponies. I needed one of their ponies. I needed to be a hero and earn my name.
I crawl close enough to their camp to hear voices, to hear an old man sucking the last bit of meat off a bone. I can see the pony I want. He is black, twenty hands high. I can feel him shiver because he knows I have come for him in the middle of this cold night.
Crawling more quickly now, I make my way to the corral, right between the legs of a young boy asleep on his feet. He was supposed to keep watch for men like me. I barely touch his bare leg and he swipes at it, thinking it is a mosquito. If I stood and kissed the young boy full on the mouth, he would only think he was dreaming of the girl who smiled at him earlier in the day.
When I finally come close to the beautiful black pony, I stand up straight and touch his nose, his mane.
I have come for you, I tell the horse, and he moves against me, knows it is true. I mount him and ride silently through the camp, right in front of a blind man who smells us pass by and thinks we are just a pleasant memory. When he finds out the next day who we really were, he will remain haunted and crowded the rest of his life.
I am riding that pony across the open plain, in moonlight that makes everything a shadow.
What’s your name? I ask the horse, and he rears back on his hind legs. He pulls air deep into his lungs and rises above the ground.
Flight, he tells me, my name is Flight.
“That’s what I see,” Thomas said. “I see you on that horse.”
Junior looked at Thomas in the rearview mirror, looked at me, looked at the road in front of him.
“Victor,” Junior said. “Give me some of that stuff.”
“But you’re driving,” I said.
“That’ll make it even better,” he said, and I had to agree with him.
“Tell us what you see,” Thomas said and leaned forward.
“Nothing yet,” Junior said.
“Am I still on that horse?” I asked Thomas.
“Oh, yeah.”
We came up on the turnoff to Benjamin Lake, and Junior made it into a screaming corner. Just another Indian boy engaged in some rough play.
“Oh, shit,” Junior said. “I can see Thomas dancing.”
“I don’t dance,” Thomas said.
“You’re dancing and you ain’t wearing nothing. You’re dancing naked around a fire.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Shit, you’re not. I can see you, you’re tall and dark and fucking huge, cousin.”
They’re all gone, my tribe is gone. Those blankets they gave us, infected with smallpox, have killed us. I’m the last, the very last, and I’m sick, too. So very sick. Hot. My fever burning so hot.
I have to take off my clothes, feel the cold air, splash the water across my bare skin. And dance. I’ll dance a Ghost Dance. I’ll bring them back. Can you hear the drums? I can hear them, and it’s my grandfather and my grandmother singing. Can you hear them?
I dance one step and my sister rises from the ash. I dance another and a buffalo crashes down from the sky onto a log cabin in Nebraska. With every step, an Indian rises. With every other step, a buffalo falls.
I’m growing, too. My blisters heal, my muscles stretch, expand. My tribe dances behind me. At first they are no bigger than children. Then they begin to grow, larger than me, larger than the trees around us. The buffalo come to join us and their hooves shake the earth, knock all the white people from their beds, send their plates crashing to the floor.
We dance in circles growing larg
er and larger until we are standing on the shore, watching all the ships returning to Europe. All the white hands are waving good-bye and we continue to dance, dance until the ships fall off the horizon, dance until we are so tall and strong that the sun is nearly jealous. We dance that way.
“Junior,” I yelled. “Slow down, slow down.” Junior had the car spinning in circles, doing donuts across empty fields, coming too close to fences and lonely trees.
“Thomas,” Junior yelled. “You’re dancing, dancing hard.”
I leaned over and slammed on the brakes. Junior jumped out of the car and ran across the field. I turned the car off and followed him. We’d gotten about a mile down the road toward Benjamin Lake when Thomas came driving by.
“Stop the car,” I yelled, and Thomas did just that.
“Where were you going?” I asked him.
“I was chasing you and your horse, cousin.”
“Jesus, this shit is powerful,” I said and swallowed some. Instantly I saw and heard Junior singing. He stood on a stage in a ribbon shirt and blue jeans. Singing. With a guitar.
Indians make the best cowboys. I can tell you that. I’ve been singing at the Plantation since I was ten years old and have always drawn big crowds. All the white folks come to hear my songs, my little pieces of Indian wisdom, although they have to sit in the back of the theater because all the Indians get the best tickets for my shows. It’s not racism. The Indians just camp out all night to buy tickets. Even the President of the United States, Mr. Edgar Crazy Horse himself, came to hear me once. I played a song I wrote for his great-grandfather, the famous Lakota warrior who helped us win the war against the whites:
Crazy Horse, what have you done?
Crazy Horse, what have you done?
It took four hundred years
and four hundred thousand guns
but the Indians finally won.
Ya-hey, the Indians finally won.
Crazy Horse, are you still singing?
Crazy Horse, are you still singing?