The docent ignored them.
“And now, children,” she said, working a remote that caused smoked-glass doors to swing open, “we go to meet water.”
They followed her through.
* * *
Creepy, man. Are you kidding? What is this, Halloween? Billy’s mind was racing. It was dark in there. Crazy bug noises everywhere—he wasn’t used to bugs. He didn’t like it. Bouncy little lights among the trees with awful gray beards hanging down.
“What’s that?” he asked Mom.
“Fireflies,” she said. She was happy. “Isn’t it awesome?”
Mom trying out her kid-speak again.
“Awesome,” Billy said.
He pointed.
“And what’s that?”
“Spanish moss.”
“Has it got spiders?”
“It’s fake,” said Higgins. “Dumbass.”
Splashes in dark water. He squinted. Water. They were walking on a spit of fake ground in a big dark pool of water at night and there were freaky things croaking. Water was beneath them, looking poisonous in the gloom. Anything could be beneath it.
“What’s that?” Billy asked the docent.
“What, hon?”
“That sound.”
“Frogs.”
One of the girls let out a tiny scream and the rest laughed.
“It jumped on me!” she cried.
“What is this place?” Billy asked.
“This would be a swamp,” the docent explained. “This was the Atchafalaya basin in Louisiana before the coast deteriorated and the wetlands were destroyed. This is what you’d see.”
“Are there alligators?” Mom asked.
“In the tanks, yes.”
“Gators!” cried Billy. He moved closer to Mom. She put her hand on his back. It was hot and clammy. He pulled away.
Higgins snapped a girl’s bra strap.
Billy heard Sammy’s voice.
“Miss?” she said in the gloom. “What’s wrong with the air?”
“Wrong, dear?”
“Yes, ma’am. The air feels, um, heavy or something.”
“That’s humidity. That’s what humidity feels like.”
Silence.
“I’m glad we’re in a drought!” Charlie offered.
They moved on through a beaver dam room and an African watering hole with wack plaster elephants and a Walden Pond diorama. “Who’s that dude?” Billy said, pointing to a bearded figure in front of a tiny cabin.
Little dragonflies hung from wires and bobbed among cattails. They stared at catfish in murky tanks. The catfish stared back. It was creepy as hell.
But the worst thing of all was The Rain Parlor.
It was a round room with concentric rings of benches with a small octagonal dais in the middle. The docent climbed up three steps and smiled down at them. “It’s best if you move to the center,” she said, but Billy hung back and took a bench on the outer ring. He was shaky. He felt like he had ice in his stomach. He didn’t want to hear any more crap from his boys. He didn’t want Mom pawing at him. He couldn’t understand why she was all jazzed. He didn’t like this room with its fake blue sky and its painted green fields and far little trees and its stupid little white clouds looking like sheep on the horizon. To his astonishment, Sammy Remember came and sat beside him.
They looked at each other. She smiled a little, but her face was flushed and she looked like her dog had died. She had bright pink splotches on her alabaster cheeks.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Oh, Billy!” she said and took his hand and put her head on his shoulder.
Whoa. Fortunately, the lights dimmed. And she started to cry—he could feel her tears soaking into his T-shirt. When it was dark enough, he put his arm around her. Then she kissed the side of his face. Followed by the horror of the rain.
* * *
Dark. Crickets. Then stars started to appear above them. And—what the hell was that? It looked like a scary movie. The docent’s voice in the darkness: “The clouds obscure the moon.” And they did—these projected huge beasts rose up and blotted out the stars and the moon, settled like a threat upon them. The clouds started flickering. “And the lightning begins.”
Billy heard Mom say, “Oh!”
Bolts of light shot across the sky—much vaster and more horrifying than their little dust flashes at the farm. A bolt plunged to earth and blasted a tree apart and kicked up flames. Little speakers broadcast its crackling.
“Oh my God!” somebody yelled.
Billy heard sobbing.
When the first thunder crack boomed, they all jumped. It was so loud. It was as if God’s violence had come upon them in deepest rage, dropping temples and crushing idols to the ground. Crash. And crash again. They covered their ears.
Wind started then, cold wind. The speakers made small howlings, as if electric coyotes were stalking their feet. Ghosts, perhaps. More thunder. Some kids cried as the mothers laughed and clapped.
Then came what must have been…rain.
Not real rain, of course. But the sound of it. The sizzle and the whisper and the hiss and the splash of it. The blue light along the faux horizon of the room. The projected banners and veils of rain all around them. Rain like lace curtains, rain like smoke, rain like spiderwebs and flags and wind you could see. Rain that sang to their bones, that ached inside their bellies and their hands, rain that made them thirst and cower and hide. Rain they had never felt yet knew as intimately as they knew their own skins. It was dreadful. Sammy clutched Billy as hard as anyone could, and he wept into her red hair and didn’t care if she knew it or not.
Higgins cried out, “Stop it, miss! Oh, stop the rain!”
But it went on and on and on, the fake electric fields filling again with the lie of freshness, springtime, life.
* * *
They were quiet on the way home. Billy didn’t let Mom turn on the radio. The Windstar hummed along in the heat. The thermometer on the dash read 80. It was long after sunset, and the western sky had a band of red and violet spread along the edges.
Both of them had their little color picture buttons on their lapels—the docent’s last ghastly blessing. Mom had a picture of an icicle. His was a moose standing in an alpine bog. She had bought a CD of frogs croaking. Billy stopped her from putting it in the CD player.
“Billy?” She said.
He turned and stared out the window.
“Mom,” he finally said. “Is that really the way the world used to be?”
She glanced at him.
“Crickets,” he said. “Frogs. Clouds. Like that?”
She sighed.
“Yes, honey. Just like that.”
Five more miles.
“All that color.” He shuddered a little. “All that noise.”
“Son?”
“So cold, Mom.”
He shook his head, watching his own reflection in the window.
“But wasn’t the museum wonderful?” she said.
Sammy. That word kept turning in his head. The scent of coconut red hair. The dry lip-pop on his cheek that in future years would remind him of a pigeon pecking at a grain of bread, but which now contained all hope and fear and desire and a vivid dreamed future expanding forever inside his body. He almost told her he loved her. The way her eyes lit up under the lightning.
“Mom?” he said.
“Billy?”
“How do you ask a girl for a kiss?”
She stifled a small laugh.
“Oh, my,” she said. “Well, I think you know when the time is right. Then you just do it.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s like the rain. You just know it’s coming.”
They drove on.
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Please,” he said. “Please. Don’t ever take me to that place again.”
“Why, Billy?”
/> He bent over and put his arms over his head and did not look up.
Mom drove on in silence, remembering how, when she was a girl, she had run along the banks of the Missouri River. It surged and sang as if water could never run out. It was summer vacation. She kissed her first boy there. The water, the water, she felt it running through her body still. She could hear it. And she rode that beautiful tide, wind lifting her hair, trying to tell him about the copper sea.
Thirteen
Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses
The Indians weren’t talking to me. At Gabe’s food store, they looked away when I bought a soda. There were three of them in there, plus Gabe’s wife. Just to tweak them, I popped the lid right there and chugged it. Obviously, word had gotten around the res. They knew why I’d come, but they didn’t know what to think of it. I felt bad enough. Their anger only made it worse.
Out in the light, I felt eyes watching me. The perfect smell of South Dakota was all over the street—I could fly in that air, fat with miles of prairie and storm clouds rushing from Nebraska to Iowa. I hunched up my shoulders. White boys visiting Pine Ridge can’t help but remember all those cowboy movies. You listen for a whistling arrow, prepare for the mortal thwack when the shaft nails you between the shoulder blades. Well, at least this white boy does. I probably had it coming.
I’d married one of the local girls. Her family didn’t want her to marry me. They didn’t want her to marry a white guy, but we were wild for each other. We ran off to Deadwood, to a small chapel near the casinos. The minister was a Brulé Sioux. She was Oglala. We took our honeymoon in the Black Hills—Paha Sapa, she told me, the center of the world. We stayed in a small hotel below Mount Rushmore. We bought those T-shirts that show four huge bare asses and say: Rear View Mt. Rushmore. We laughed. Everything was funny.
Then the usual tough years. We went to California, both of us trying college. She tried writing to her family, but they were fighting mad. Our few visits back to the reservation were grim. I thought I was lonesome, but what happened to her heart out in California was a terror to see. I’d catch her staring up at the rattling palm trees sometimes, this look of sorrow on her face that almost seemed like rapture.
And she couldn’t get out of the bottle. They blamed me. I started to believe it, too. I’d fooled her away from people, her world. Empty bottles, hidden at first beneath the sink, behind the apartment, clanked in the trash basket. She was quiet, as old-time Indian women are, and she wore a long braid in the old way. When she crashed the car, they say the braid was caught in the glass of the window. I don’t know—I couldn’t bear to look at the body. I sent her home on a train. It took me two days to drive out after her, and now I was burying my wife in the little graveyard near Our Lady of the Sioux. The headstone was already made. It said: JONI HER MANY HORSES. DAUGHTER, SISTER. WE WILL MISS YOU. 1960–1990. They left my name off entirely.
* * *
Don Her Many Horses was Joni’s oldest brother. Back in high school, when our teams played the Indians from Red Cloud, Don was a monster on the basketball courts. The way things were in those days, though, Indian boys didn’t get too many victories. Even when they won. It was easy—the refs called them foul, or ejected them from the games for the least infraction. If they did win, they’d get their asses kicked after the game if we could find them … if there were more of us than them.
I made the mistake once of cracking wise to Don on the court. After one spectacular drive to the basket—when Don seemed to be floating over our heads for an impossible distance, then drove the ball down through the hoop so it caught no net, just streaked and hit the floor like a rock—I sidled up to him. I did what all us whites did in those days, dreaming of ourselves in Technicolor cowboy hats, our ideas as fixed as Mount Rushmore, made sick in our hearts whenever we saw an Indian smile, certain somehow his smile took something away from our own souls.
“Hey, Chief,” I said. “You got-um heap good medicine, huh? Y—”
Bang.
I was gone from the world.
When I came to in the shower room, it was like drifting out of deep purple water flecked with chips of fire. They brushed my skin as I surfaced. A million sweaty and hysterical dudes were glaring down at me. “Bobby!” they were shouting. “Bobby!” Don Her Many Horses was in jail, charged with aggravated assault. There had been trouble with the Indian kids, both teams slugging it out on the court. Cops had come in, sticks swinging. I listened to them babbling all about it as I stood in the shower, letting the water claw into my back and scalp. My left eye was tender as cube steak, and I could tell it was turning black.
“Shit,” I said to no one in particular, “that brave sure can pack a punch!”
We all laughed and said the standard anti-Indian things you say. But I knew I was wrong. Here Don had made a spectacular play and I had gone and opened my big ignorant mouth. I don’t know that it changed my life. Maybe a little bit. I didn’t turn all religious or anything over it.
* * *
Don Her Many Horses wasn’t much interested in me at that point. He was slumped on the cot in his cell, nursing a collection of welts and eggs coming up all over his forehead. He had a rusty-bloody old rag soaked from the tin sink and held over one eye. I watched the water drops fall and hit the knee of his jeans. They shone bright for a second, then sank in, spreading a color like grape juice as the denim darkened.
“Hi,” I said.
“Fuck you, Bobby.”
I ducked my head.
“Listen,” I said. “I want to apologize for what happened.”
He looked up at me. That eye was about swollen shut.
“Apologize, huh?” he said. He smiled a little. “All right. Go ahead.”
“Sorry.”
He stared at me with his one black eye. He didn’t talk. That’s one thing that drives you crazy with the Indians. Sometimes they just don’t say anything. You don’t know if they are thinking or laughing at you or what.
“I’m …,” I said, “sorry. You know. About that wisecrack. And now you’re in jail.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” he said.
Another pause.
“You got any chew?” he said.
I dug my tin of Copenhagen out of my back pocket and tossed it to him. Those boys, when they’re not smoking, they’re chewing. The women, too. Joni always had a little plug of peppermint tobacco pinched into her lip. I gave it up after high school. Don does it to this day.
I was thinking about leaving when he spoke. “You know what?” he said. “Next time I see you, I might have to take me a scalp. I might skin you, too. Brain-tan your hide and have me a new pelt to paint my winter count on. Hang your balls from my war lance. ’Course, everybody’d have to get up real close to see ’em.”
There was nothing to say to that, so I left. I could hear his back-of-the-throat little laugh skittering around behind me as I walked down the hall. Damned Indians.
* * *
The reservation medical examiner was taking care of Joni. I couldn’t even look at the building as I drove by. I hooked south, out of Pine Ridge village, heading toward White Clay, Nebraska. A couple of the guys driving around recognized me. Yellowhorse waved, one of the Red Clouds nodded imperiously at me, raising one hand as he coasted by in his old Ford pickup. They were burning a small pile of tires outside of town; the smoke rose like a mourning veil torn by wind. It angled away, fading to a haze that reached all the way out to the edge of the Badlands. The grass looked like Marilyn Monroe’s hair. Horses swept through it like combs.
I was listening to KILI, “The Voice of the Lakota Nation.” They were playing a twenty-megaton dirge by Metallica. It was followed by some Sioux music—The Porcupine Singers. If I listened long enough, they’d probably toss in some jazz and three Johnny Cash songs. There were supposed to be announcements of Joni’s burial on there, but I never did hear any. I pulled up at the gate of the Her Many Horses spread. Don was walking a mottled gray horse in slow circles in front of th
eir house. He ran his hand along the horse’s flank; its skin jumped at his touch. It was limping. He glanced up at me and turned back to the horse.
I dropped the section of barbed wire fence that served as a gate and drove through.
“Close the gate!” Don hollered.
“I know, I know,” I muttered to myself. Six dogs and four young horses headed for the opening, but I beat them to it. The horses veered away, suddenly innocent and fascinated by the sage plants beside the drive. The dogs charged me, then collapsed in the dirt, wagging their tails.
I drove up to Don, shut off the engine, and got out.
“She’s sick,” he said.
The old horse looked like rain clouds. I recognized her. They called her Stormy. “That’s Joni’s old horse,” I said.
Stormy put her giant old face next to Don’s. He rubbed her long white upper lip. “That’s okay,” he murmured. “That’s okay now.”
“I’m sorry, Don,” I said. “I did my best.”
“Stormy’s dyin’,” he said. He had this disconcerting way of ignoring what I said. “I’ve been feeding her this medicine they give me down in Rapid. But them vets don’t know shit about horses. You know it? She’s got these tumors.”
He stroked Stormy’s side. I saw that she was bloated, her abdomen distended like a barrel behind her ribs. “Now we got to kill her.”
Stormy snorted.
“Go on now,” he said to her. “Go ahead.” She limped away.
“Them mother-effers.”
“Don?” I said. “I’m sorry about Joni. I mean, I’m sorry about Stormy, too. But what I mean…”
One of the dogs nosed my crotch.
“Stop it,” said Don. “I got a trailer pulled around back. You sleep there. Got food if you’re hungry.”
He lit a cigarette and walked away.
* * *
Night on the reservation is like night nowhere else. They say flying saucers visit the Sioux lands. Flying saucers and ghosts. When you’re out there, there’s a blackness that’s deeper than black. The stars look like spilled sugar. You can hear the grass sometimes like water. Like somebody whispering. And the weird sounds of the night animals. Anything could happen. You get scared, and it’s for a reason that hides behind the other reasons—behind the silence, and the coyotes, and the dogs barking, and the eerie voice of the owl. It’s that this is not your land. This is their land. And you don’t belong. A thousand slaughtered warriors ride around your camp, and you think it’s the breeze. And they wonder why you’re there.