by Burton Hersh
I took the money, somewhere beyond floored. “Look, I didn’t mean for you to, you know, impoverish yourself—“
“It’s my share. Part of my share. My brother, Sonny, came through in the morning from Lawton. Where the rez is, Oklahoma. He is on leave from the Army. We get the trust fund payout twice every year. It was OK this time. I was surprised.”
“If you’re sure this won’t—“
“Alice don’t come back. Doesn’t. Besides, I think I have something at the Walmart. At the checkout.”
“Great news. You should celebrate.”
“I was thinking about that. What would you think about a little pool? I played that a lot on the road. Charlie was stone bonkers about pool. Especially if I let him slurp down a little firewater every time he scratched. There is a nice place right up MLK, nine or ten blocks north of Central. Penelope needs a walk. I’ll get her collar.”
* * *
It was still light by the time we got to the Flamingo Bar. An extremely old yellow dog of no definable breed lay sprawled across the entrance. Penelope barked at it in hopes of fellowship but it wouldn’t move. There was a badly faded portrait of Jack Kerouac in a frame screwed onto the front façade.
A few men and a mountainous middle-aged woman sat drinking at the big horseshoe bar itself. Pool tables surrounded the bar, one in use. We both ordered Heinekens, which the voluptuous bartender skated across to us in heavy frosted glasses.
I had played quite a lot of pool, eight-ball mostly, at Amherst in the Deke House. Linda was out of my class. Her black hair fantailing across her back, she hit the long shots with the kind of power and brio that almost always made them sure things. She chalked a lot, especially when she wanted enough sideways English to tap the close ones into the middle pockets. At one point she came close to running the table while I went after another beer and passed the time of day with the owner, who had been badly damaged by Agent Orange in Viet Nam and came home and bought the bar and helped Jack Kerouac drink himself into an early grave. Penelope sat by and watched the yellow dog with great concern and lapped water repeatedly out of its dish.
Around seven o’clock or so I paid up and Linda racked her cue. I was feeling the Heinekens. “Could Charlie keep up with you at that game?” I wanted to know.
“Oh, no,” Linda said, somehow a little sadly. “But Charlie was, you know, a canoe Indian. My people are horse Indians.”
“That explains everything.”
She hit me lightly on the shoulder. “Also, Charlie had to have – you know – the firewater….”
I looked around. “It’s getting dark,” I said. “Lots of people on the street. Let’s get a cab.” I had already spotted a dusty scarlet Crown Victoria with P.J.’s Cabs painted above a rear fender. We walked up the street. A very tall, portly man with a heavy white brush mustache, smelling defiantly of garlic, was seated at the wheel.
“You going to give us a ride?” I asked him.
“If I feel like it,” the driver said.
We got in.
* * *
“Why don’t I buy you dinner?” I said while I was paying off the cabbie.
“No, no. You spent enough already. I can fix us something.”
Upstairs in Muldavey Court the dog flopped down in a corner and yawned hugely and lapped one paw over her muzzle. I took my chair and Linda crouched in front of me. “Does something hurt you?” she asked me after a moment.
“I’m –look, maybe I’m like you. My marriage broke up and I guess I’ve forgotten the generational moves. Also – I’m a little buzzed.”
“Will you try something?”
“Whatcha got? Not too outlandish, preferably.”
“Traditional.” Linda rummaged in a drawer and brought out perhaps a dozen rough puckered greenish quarter-size blobs and dropped them on the table. “These are very important for the Native American Church. Sonny left them for me this morning.”
“Peyote buttons! I never saw any before. What the hell, they probably go great with too much beer.”
Linda was regarding me through half-closed ink-black eyes. I had said something wrong.
“No,” I said. “I mean, why not?” Flip obviously wasn’t working. “You are my hostess. Fuck! How are you supposed to ingest these things?” I was at once exhilarated, still somewhat fried, and full of foreboding.
“You have to cook them a little first.” Linda said. She scooped the buttons up and diced them and fed them into a tiny sauce pan in an inch of water and squeezed some lemon juice on them and put the pan on a burner. Everything boiled almost immediately. “Now we have to wait,” Linda said.
The room was close, starting to get shadowy. I pulled a handkerchief out and blotted my brow. Linda crossed over to the closet and retrieved a fan from an upper shelf and plugged it in and set it up to blow in my direction. Then she walked over to the futon and divested herself of her shift and stepped rather daintily out of her panties. I stood; she crossed over and gently pressed me back down into my chair. Her tits were everything I had anticipated, and then some. Then she slipped over to the stove to mash and stir the mush in the saucepan.
“You’re like my Dad,” I heard myself saying. “You like to confront your inspirations sans culottes.”
Linda obviously did not understand any of that. “When the spirits come,” she informed me, “they want everything simple.”
I suppose I half understood. After another minute or so I stood up and pulled off my tie and peeled my shirt off and shrugged carefully out of my trousers and – half-hesitatingly – my underwear and sox and shoes. I piled everything neatly behind my chair. By then my prick spoke for me.
At some point Linda went over to what passed for a refrigerator in this woebegone efficiency we rented her and came back with some sort of wheat flatbread and buttered each of us a top-heavy piece. This greenish puree form of the peyote smelt very forbidding, bitter. I ate mine in awkward little bites, sacrificing myself to get it down. I think I sensed that I was being given what might turn out to be my last chance.
In time she presented me with another piece. “You have beautiful shoulders,” she said to me, but she did not allow me to touch her. In the corner, Penelope had started whining.
The light show I’d heard about came over me little by little, juggling against a nausea I fought for what seemed a very long time before I had to stumble over to her tiny john and heave up the Heinekens and whatever remnants of lunch survived and the slimy green residue of the peyote. By then the twilight was deepening into dark. Linda was a moving silhouette, wrapped flirtatiously for a moment in a flowered shawl and executing some kind of dance step. I broke a cold sweat: At that instant an overwhelming conviction of completeness flushed over me, an awareness that I was a cluster of atoms in a universe of atoms where nothing could possibly be a boundary.
It was if I was shedding some kind of crust, a kind of poisonous all-afflicting scab that the many disappointments and frustrations of the last few years had allowed to toxify my emotions. A white, vibrating energy was coming off everything in the room, Linda especially. As I slid out of the chair and onto my back on the Navaho rug I sensed Penelope easing herself onto her feet and starting toward me, her muzzle now expanding until it was bigger than the visage of a lion, with gigantic burning eyes that reprimanded me for all my weaknesses and all the sins of my misguided ancestors.
I lay there in shame, acutely chilled and throbbing with energy while my neglected cock kept stiffening and stiffening and took on a size I would have thought was mythological. It glowed, bluish white, and out of the darkness I felt Linda approach, and stand like a priestess with her legs spread above me. The shawl floated down. I lay there watching her dark aboriginal pussy inflate like a dripping mandala as she lowered it slowly onto my suffering cock and socketed herself, taking me in entirely. Her smell was intoxicating, of succulent healing yeasts. She began to squeeze, quite gently at first, and it could well have been hours before she came finally and so allowed everything
in me to burst.
I was too overstimulated by now to detumesce; I rolled Linda onto her back and made it to my knees and gripped her so that my urgent fingers met at the mouth of her sphincter and I began to probe her from the front to invite her hungriest, most unappeasable cravings. Suddenly I felt something a little chilly and very wet investigating my asshole: Penelope’s nose.
By then it really didn’t matter.
7
In time we needed sleep. Linda pulled the futon open and we both crawled onto it and I spooned her beneath a summer blanket. Within seconds I had fallen into the deepest slumber I can ever remember. I dreamt of a Bucks County steeplechase in which all the mounts were naked women, a freezing lake where I was swimming frantically to avoid dozens of converging bears. I think I slowly came awake around 5:30. The single window off the landing admitted enough gray light to put a shine on Linda’s dusky shoulder-blades. Penelope was asleep across our feet. Beneath the window, next to the door, a long form was wrapped in a blanket. I could make out a head of very black cropped hair and a big, boney hand holding the blanket closed. In the hand I saw the butt of a large knife.
Just then Linda came to and sat up. She saw the man on the floor and wrapped herself in the summer blanket in one motion. I scrambled for my jockey shorts and had myself halfway into my trousers when the man on the floor rolled over and spoke. “Did I miss the floor show?” the man said. Penelope had jumped off the futon and was hunched above him, eagerly licking his face.
The man rolled up. He was quite tall and extremely spare, late twenties perhaps, with the classical pointed jaw and high-bridged nose of the pure-bred Plains Indian. There was the tattoo of a snake engorging a dragon on his left shoulder. His skin looked burnished. He had been sleeping in his boxers.
“You must be—“
“Sonny,” Linda said. “The brother.”
We shook hands. Sonny had absent-mindedly transferred the knife to his left hand. It was a serious knife.
“Sonny stands for….” I hoped to prompt him: “You must be named after your father—“
“Just Sonny,” he said, and smiled.
“His tribal name is Buffalo Hump,” Linda said, with that sideways smirk. “We only use it on the reservation.”
“And then it’s only on feast days,” Sonny said. “When we are barbequing a paleface or something really special.”
A few minutes later, when everybody had clothes on and Linda was frying up some eggs, Sonny filled in a little of his background. Their father had been chief of police on the reservation, a graduate of the Indian Police Academy in New Mexico. As the children of a dignitary, Linda and Sonny got top-drawer treatment. Linda had emerged in her early teens as a kind of prodigy among the powwow dancers. The parents had separated. Linda remained with the mother and Sonny helped out around the station house off and on and picked up one of the scholarships reserved for teenage boys of Native American blood at Valley Forge Military Academy. After high school Sonny enlisted in the Army and trained as a Calvary scout.
This was a tradition: Indians had been put to use as trackers and guides in the American army since before the Revolution. At home in Lawton Sonny had apprenticed himself to one of his father’s seasoned deputies and helped run down every variety of workaday violation on Indian land all the way to Fort Sill. This came very naturally: One of their grandfathers was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War Two as a scout in the China-Burma-India Theater, a leader among the legendary Codetalkers who radioed back and forth in Indian dialects to flummox the Japanese in the jungles of Mindanao and Leyte.
Sonny had been little more than a recruit when U.S. Forces invaded Afghanistan after 9/11. There had been a perfunctory attempt to trap Osama Bin Laden without committing mainline troops to Bora Bora. Sonny’s years of experience tracking Mexican horse thieves and convenience-store stickup artists persuaded his battalion commander to release him TDY from the 113 Calvalry for long enough to infiltrate the mountains of Bora Bora. Our top brass was after coordinates for a fighter strike on Al Qaeda provisional headquarters. Bin Laden had already decamped, but Sonny had found his way into the cave that sheltered Mullah Omar, and managed to purloin the Taliban elder’s false teeth as he lay sleeping on a cot in battle gear. Sonny still carried them around in his rucksack in a malachite case, for luck. They were his totem.
He showed them to us. They weren’t pretty. The eggs were excellent; I was extremely hungry, with a gathering eagerness that morning to begin my life again. Linda started coffee brewing, and then my cell-phone broke into its idiotic chime: None But The Lonely Heart. I suppose I was trying to chide myself out of my slump.
It was Maximillian, the elderly black caretaker Dad relied on to watch his place whenever he was gone. “Mistah Michael?” Max opened, “You need to jump right on over here.”
“What’s up?”
“We had some visitors, what it is.”
“Somebody came by?”
“Some fool busted in. Tore up your pa’s study pretty good. You tell me what you want to do.” Max, normally placid, sounded angry. “I tell you one thing, I catch that muthuhfuckuh, I intend to go up side his head! You want the police?”
I told Max to wait until I got there and tapped off and explained the situation.
“If you could use some backup,” Sonny offered, “This is the sort of petty crap I got fairly good at around the reservation.”
“Sure. If you really want to help. You must have things to do—“
“Nothing you’d want to worry about. We’re supposed to get a couple of years Stateside for every year in the field. I just got back after Christmas from Mogadishu. Division put me through college, on the internet, mostly. Languages come easy. They had a shortage, so now I’m an Arabic speaker. Somebody my color can get by in a pinch in a cesspool like Somalia. The DIA needed somebody on the ground so those coneheads in the Pentagon could start doping out the clans.”
We hurried out to Snell Isle in my aging BMW. With months to kill, it turned out, Sonny was enrolling in September in courses leading to a PHD in environmental sciences at the University of Oklahoma. “You know the drill,” he opened up, “redskins like me worry all the time about what’s happening to the material world. We think it’s alive, like us, and if we abuse it enough it will give up on our species and wipe us off the planet. The Great Spirit, what the Sioux call the Taku Skanskan—the force which moves upon the waters. Our feeling is, it’s reaching the end of its patience with us – especially with the White Man. That’s what we think. Probably some dumb collective neurosis.”
“You ought to talk with my father. He’s ready to join your tribe.”
“Dances-like-Fire – Linda – she gets really upset. Especially after they took her baby. I was surprised to find you two at – you know – close quarters.”
“But wasn’t her husband a Native American too? Some kind of Seminole?”
“Whatever they call themselves. Basically, a spinoff. The way we see it, all these tribes down here are nothing but waterlogged Creeks who hid out in the Swamp and bred with the blacks while our ancestors were fighting Custer. Now they’re getting rich like whites and we’re still licking our wounds from the Trail of Tears. The Long Walk.”
“So you hate us?”
“Don’t judge by me. I’m Regular Army. I’ve been co-opted.”
We were pulling in below the portcullis of Dad’s palazzo. Max was waiting. He always seemed to be wearing clean gray freshly ironed coveralls. Even his bald head looked scrubbed and polished. I introduced Max to Sonny.
“This a genu-ine outrage,” Max said. “I had this place locked up real good. I come by yesterday cause I needed to check the locks, especially in the front. Sometimes your pa get forgetful, you know what I’m drivin’ at. Absent-minded professor. Yesterday everything tight as a snappin’ turtle’s asshole, everything in real good order.
“Then today I thought, Ima get me some of Anastasia’s peach cobbler for breakfast, but befo
re I do that I believe I will swing through and examine the property. Relieve my mind. And when I make my rounds and check that study there I see right away nothing like what it oughta be. Papers all over everyplace. File drawers wide open—“
Sonny had mounted the steps to the big heavy carved front door. There was a bronzed lock and a deadbolt. He ran his hand along the sills. “Nobody forced this,” he said. A path ran alongside the building toward a pergola that overlooked the water; years earlier Mother had directed the construction of a low stacked-stone wall as a kind of running planter for clumps of pinks and impatiens. Halfway along, beneath one of the tall casement windows, Sonny stopped. He grabbed the stone sill of the window, which cropped out, and hoisted himself to examine the space inside. “He got in here,” Sonny decided. “You can see where the pry-bar bit into the casing.”
Now I saw where the plantings had been trampled and not quite recovered. Sonny crouched. “Enough of a footprint to give us a start. Man, probably on the tall side. Big. Size thirteen boot. You can see where he tried to compensate by digging in a little harder with his right foot and dragging his left toe. Won’t let it take any too much weight. Look where he started to jack himself up and squeeze through.”
Inside, there was a smear of dirt in the corridor. Dad’s record storage area had definitely been pulled apart; he relied on a cheap battery-operated motion-sensor alarm he supposedly could hear from their bedroom, where he had concealed a Beretta in his bed-table drawer from Mother. The alarm must have been triggered at about the time the intruder went to work among Dad’s legal papers.
By then whoever it was had succeeded in levering open a number of the locked drawers. No doubt the alarm had panicked the burglar; he could not have known it was not wired into the local station-house. Probably that was why papers and entire files had been pulled out and dumped helter-skelter around this alcove before the intruder had fled. It would be hard later on to tell what he had had in mind. What he was after.