Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

He wouldn’t mind living in the Custers’ house– big covered porch, spacious kitchen, buffalo head over the fireplace– a replica (or so they guessed) built by dollar-a-day CCC workers during the Depression. He wonders if there were any Sioux or Cheyenne on the crew.

  There are six of the earth lodges where there used to be close to ninety, looking like giant prairie dog mounds from a distance. Danny can see the Heart River, just about to join the Missouri, through the trees. There’s not a soul on the village plaza, but smoke rises from the center hole of the biggest of the mounds, and he guesses his ex has brought her captives in there.

  “On-a-Slant Village, or Miti-ba-wa-esh,” says Winona, whose pronunciation of Mandan always bit the big one, from inside, “was the southernmost of several villages on the banks of the Missouri River, beginning in the late sixteenth century.”

  Danny has to duck slightly as he steps through the tunnel of tree boles that form the entrance. There is a cook fire crackling low on the center of the floor, scores of elementary school kids and a few teachers sitting on benches facing Winona, who explains from a low wooden platform. Danny is relieved to see she’s not wearing buckskin.

  “By the time the first white trappers and traders arrived, over a thousand people lived here– hunting, fishing, farming, making valuable pottery, curing and decorating animal skins. This was a busy, successful commercial river town, like St. Louis or Cincinnati in later days, set behind a protective moat and palisade and built on a gentle slope leading to the highway of water just to the east.”

  Danny eases behind a support column, back in the shadows beyond the fire and away from the sunlight spilling through the entrance.

  “These lodges were mostly built by the women, placing layers of willow branches, grass and soil on a frame of cottonwood logs, providing protection from the elements in all seasons. Cool in the summer, warm, if you kept the fire blazing”– she indicates the paltry little effort on the floor– “throughout the harsh Dakota winters. In each of the smaller lodges around us perhaps a dozen people lived together, most of them closely related, while a lodge of this size might be used for village meetings or ceremonies.”

  Winona is Upper Yanktonai and not Mandan, something she never let him forget. The passionate nomads of the plains, not some bunch of sell-out river traders who burrowed in the ground. You people, she used to say, when something she didn’t like went down on the rez or with his family. As if Standing Rock, or particularly her hometown of Cannon Ball, was America’s Model Community.

  “It was a happy, productive existence. But in 1871,” says Winona, lowering her voice, “something appeared that destroyed that life and led to the demise of On-a-Slant Village. Does anybody know what it was?”

  “White people?” pipes a little blond girl with Princess Leia braids coiled around her ears.

  Winona smiles. “Well, they had something to do with it, but I’m talking about a deadly disease– smallpox. Who here has had a smallpox vaccination?”

  Several of the little kids look on their shoulders and arms as if to check, and most raise their hands.

  “Well, back in 1871 on the upper Missouri River, smallpox vaccination was virtually unknown. Follow me and I’ll tell you what happened.”

  Danny catches up to her, striding ahead of her flock, halfway to the next lodge.

  “Excuse me, Miss.”

  She is not surprised to see him. He took her call in the car this morning on the way to a domestic, too pressed for time to strategize long distance. Danny isn’t happy to leave his staff to deal with the usual mess, but it’s a rare day that Winona will admit the kids might need a father.

  “I just started this tour.”

  Winona was an RN at Medcenter One until a month ago, when Shaneekwah’s rashes and allergies got so bad that she decided she must be bringing bugs home from the hospital and quit. This can’t pay as much.

  “Give me the short version, then. You’re worried about Tavaughn.”

  “He quit the Rodeo Club.”

  “It was probably pretty lame. Bismarck.”

  “He quit it for Thespians. That’s like–”

  “–a drama club, so what?”

  “He’s almost the only boy in it.”

  “Better odds if you’re a horny adolescent.”

  “The boy who got all the leads last year before he graduated, Jerome? He was like that guy on Hollywood Squares, the one in the middle box with the snarky comments.”

  “You’re saying our son is going to grow up to be Paul Lynde.”

  Winona looks back to be sure the fourth graders and their minders are not too close. “You know what I’m saying. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.”

  This is typical Winona. With her half-German and his half-Irish the kids came out light enough that she decided to give them names belonging to inner-city hoop stars with a chance at the pros if they avoid getting shot in a drive-by, ‘just to be sure people don’t think they’re white,’ and then moves to fucking Bismarck, where she can barely make the rent even with what he sends above the court mandate, so Tavaughn can go to the best high school in the state. Who tells white people they’re condescending, while correcting the grammar of everybody, especially his family members, on the rez. And he’s supposed to be psychic about which way she’s going to break on every issue, like that’s the way anybody but an idiot would feel.

  “If there’s nothing wrong with it, what’s the problem?”

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  He doesn’t especially like the idea. Some of the behavior, not the sex part, which he really doesn’t want to think about, but the acting out in public, all that phony behavior–

  “Okay, if he wasn’t a celebrity,” he says as they stop by the next earth lodge, “Paul Lynde would have had his nose busted on a regular basis.”

  “He’s home by three– Thespians doesn’t meet on Mondays.”

  He’s never actually been in the house when Winona was present, just dropping in when allowed in her absence or waiting in the car outside to pick them up.

  “Okay– I’ll check it out.”

  “Smallpox,” Winona intones, turning to face the muddle of children as they catch up to her, “sometimes known as the Red Plague, is a communicable disease that can cause blindness, scarring, deformity, and death.”

  He has to go back up to Mandan and cross the river on the Interstate to get over to Bismarck. It is a capital city without a skyline, much easier to drive through than Yellow Earth these days, and he only gets lost once before finding the little house. Tavaughn is on the floor watching a video with lots of screeching cars when Danny steps in without knocking.

  “Surprise,” he says, smiling more than he feels like so it doesn’t seem like a bust. Tavaughn puts the road warriors on mute and sits up.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Naw. I was just, you know– in town.”

  “Cool.”

  Danny sits on the couch, which feels uneven, and looks at the screen.

  “Is this Two or Three?”

  “It’s the fourth one they’ve made but it’s the sequel to the first one.”

  “So– faster and furiouser.”

  “They just whacked Letty.”

  “The Latino girl.”

  “Yeah.”

  Danny nods. He doesn’t follow movies much, but hears the plots to the mainstream stuff from Jimmy his deputy who keeps saying ‘and then– and then–’ like an eight-year-old, continuing even when Danny pretends to be looking at paperwork.

  “School going okay?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Where’s Neek?”

  “Girl Scouts.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since forever. Keep up.”

  “She’s what– making lanyards?”

  “Who knows what they do over there. Not my world.”

  “So she wears the uniform and all that.”

  “Mostly just T-shirts now. They do good deeds and build their leadersh
ip skills.”

  Shaneekwah was born only a little before Danny and Winona split up for the final time, and has always been shy with him. He should have fought more at the custody thing, but Winona cornered him outside.

  “Think really hard,” she said, “about how you’d get through a day on your own with a four-year-old and an infant to keep alive.”

  He wasn’t seeing anybody then, not that any of the women he was vaguely interested in would want to take on child care as part of a relationship, and couldn’t imagine the day she was proposing. Neek gives him shy, yes-and-no answers on the phone once a week.

  “How’s her skin?”

  “Pretty good. She’s on meds.”

  He reads the names of the medications on the doctor’s bills, looks them up online. Some of it is pretty scary.

  “You still roping and riding?”

  “Uh– no, I quit that.”

  “Oh. So a sport–?”

  “Nope. Season’s already half over.”

  “So you got time on your hands.”

  The bald-headed guy is holding somebody out the window by their feet, threatening to drop him.

  “I’m doing drama.”

  “You mean like plays?”

  It’s good to have the TV on, somewhere for their eyes to go. His old man would take him fishing and tell him stuff, the two of them watching the lines on the water, now and then reeling in and recasting–

  “We do one full-length play and one musical.”

  Danny tries not to frown. Tavaughn is as off-key a croaker as he is, which leaves dancing in the chorus–

  “So you’re into that?”

  Tavaughn turns to look at him. “I know it’s weird, but I like the idea of– like–being other people.”

  “In the traditions,” says Danny, hoping to reassure him, “when you take on the spirit of an animal for a ceremony–”

  “It’s not like hopping around inside a dead buffalo– not that that’s not cool for, you know, when you’re doing like a roots thing and all. In a play you’re playing a person who’s not you, even though you’ve figured out where he’s coming from, and the audience gets to watch that person in action.”

  “No car crashes in it though.”

  “Not this one.”

  You don’t just come out and ask this shit. He’d leave it where it is, only Winona will call him later and expect a detailed analysis.

  “How things back home?”

  He loves it that Tavaughn still thinks of the reservation as home. He’s spent more years here than he did up there–

  ”Oh, pretty bad. The usual.”

  “People making money on that drilling?”

  “A few that made the right deal or got lucky, sure. Not that it’s made them any smarter about how to spend it. And the money that trickles down to everybody else– well, we’ve got our hands full.”

  A couple of the boys Tavaughn would be hanging with if he’d stayed are in real trouble. Dickyboy Burdette is still showing up at school but his grandmother says he almost never comes home, the Menke brothers are heading for prison and none too soon–

  “I play a guy named John Proctor.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He’s a farmer back in pilgrim days and people start accusing him and his wife of being like Satan-worshipers and witches.”

  “Wow.”

  “It’s the lead character.”

  “Hey, congratulations. So, witch hunt, I take it this is not the musical.”

  “Later in the year. We’re doing Legally Blonde.”

  “You won’t be getting the lead in that.”

  Tavaughn at least got the raven hair, which he still wears down to his shoulders.

  “I might just do tech. Lighting and props.”

  Danny makes a snipping gesture. “You gonna cut it?”

  Tavaughn shrugs. “Probably. I’ll wait till the performances though. There’s hardly any other Indian guys at Century, and the hair is like a chick magnet.”

  Danny has to smile. Love to catch Winona so far off base once in a while. Chick magnet.

  “You got anybody special?”

  “Not this week.”

  Cocky son of a bitch.

  “You go to the football games?”

  “Sure, everybody does.”

  The Century Patriots have a quarterback, Wentz, who can throw it all over the lot. “I might come down for a game.”

  “Great.”

  “And your show– you’ll send me the dates and all?”

  “I’ll forward you the stuff from our website.”

  Danny is fully online now, Marjorie Looks for Water coming over to the office and getting everybody up to speed once Harleigh got the rez wired.

  “Terrific.” Danny stands up. “I better push off now, get back to the crime wave.”

  “Good to see you.”

  “Gimme five.”

  They slap hands, Tavaughn not getting up from the floor.

  “And say hi to your sister.”

  “Will do.”

  He’s halfway down the steps when the mayhem resumes inside, gunfire and screeching brakes. He’ll have to tell Ruby that his son got the lead in the school play.

  USUALLY WITH A LAUNCHING you want the boat to be in the water, but who can wait?

  Rick has told Harleigh a dozen times that there would be a hell of a lot more people coming if it wasn’t so cold, but Harleigh got so jazzed when he came down and saw the thing put back together there was no holding him back. So it’s maybe three hundred bundled up around the presentation space, the mammoth yacht and the near-frozen lake beyond it as a backdrop. Noreen Birdbear is doing her celebrated hoop dance– she’s won competitions– and no matter how many times he’s seen it the mechanics of the thing are too quick for him to follow. Rick loses track at a dozen of the bright red plastic hoops, spinning, flying, rolling, Noreen flicking them with her feet up from the ground and into the ever-shifting combinations, a horse and rider now shape-shifting into a sea creature then spreading into a butterfly that becomes an eagle, the drum and chant steady while Noreen crow-hops around the circle the tribe members have left open. He recognizes the reporter from Bismarck, one from the Yellow Earth giveaway and the woman from Indian Country Today in the crowd. Harleigh will try to spin this all to the positive and Rick will try to back him up, but if they talk to some of the downers here– like his mother, standing with arms crossed and frowning past the swirling hoops like her gaze could set the Savage Princess on fire– it’s going to be another controversy.

  How exactly it became Rick’s job to get the damn thing here overland is a mystery, you’d think if it’s going to be a casino operation they’d be the ones to do the scutwork. It’s only passed through two states from Lake Superior to here, but each has its own regulations for transport, speed limits, road access limits, insurance requirements, permit schedules and deadlines, tolls and tariffs, generating a rat’s nest of paperwork and a least a dozen phone calls a day, not to mention the emergency drive to Bemidji to argue the extra-wide procession out from the clutches of an overzealous highway patrol lieutenant. Of course the boat was too tall, or whatever the nautical term is, even on the lowest lowboy trailer, to fit beneath many of the overpasses on the route. The people who sold it to the tribe took care of removing the superstructure and the ‘flying bridge’ and radar gear, the stuff that sticks up at the very top, and shipping it on a second crawling, gas-swilling rig, but the crew they sent here to get it shipshape again arrived at the casino hotel two days before the boat and proceeded to act like sailors on shore leave. At least the casino boys were the ones who had to clean up after them.

  Noreen finishes to well-earned applause inside a kind of giant ball she’s woven from the hoops, then somehow she’s got them all hanging from her arms like coils of electrical cable and is skipping out of the circle. Now it’s Storyteller, who coached Rick’s baseball team in junior high, taking the podium.

  The microphone setup is working fine
, and Storyteller can speak in his easy, familiar manner, like he’s home with his feet up on his Barcalounger recliner, a Bud Lite in hand, filling you in on which lures the bass are biting.

  “At one time,” he says, “long, long ago, the People lived underground.”

  It was Rick’s favorite thing as a kid, when his mother would sit by his bed at night and tell him the stories. Stories not just from the local tribes but ones she’d heard all over the country while doing her political work. Most were traditional creation stories or why Coyote sticks his tail beneath his legs or Raven stole the morning, but sometimes there would be battle stories as well, the Indian side of the movies you saw on TV where Charles Bronson played Blue Buffalo of the Sioux or Captain Jack in the Modoc war. The tales didn’t all make sense, totem animals never known for cold calculation, but the lights were out and his mother’s voice was deep and soft and he’d nod off to sleep feeling safe because you can’t ever fall when you live on the back of the Turtle.

  “It was dark underground, but there was just enough to eat, and people wondered about the many vines that hung down from overhead. One day there was a pinpoint of light from above– one of the vines had broken through to the earth-plain and was letting a thread of sun penetrate into their world.”

  Rick sees Harleigh standing to one side of the yacht, hands on hips assessing the crowd, and drifts in his direction.

  “There was much debate among the People, as always”– a laugh of recognition at this– “but one young brave became weary of the talk, and began to climb the vine that was letting the light through, his bow and arrows lashed to his back in case there were monsters to deal with above.”

  It is a truly beautiful thing, the boat, a ninety-six-foot Hargrave, sparkling white double-decker hull, two thick bars of anti-UV-ray-tinted observation glass running fore and aft, the giant craft looking sleek and speedy even up on the chunky wooden blocks.

  “When the young man crawled through the opening to the earth-plain, it took his eyes a long while to adjust to the blinding light– which was only the warm sun above. When he could see well, he discovered that he stood on the bank of a mighty, swift-running river. And then a monster came running toward him, a big-headed shaggy monster, which he brought down with a swift and perfect shot from his bow and arrow.”