Quiet Until the Thaw

by Alexandra Fuller

  Initially, You Choose was not very successful breaking into the drug-dealing racket in New York State. He talked a big talk, but he was frightened of the city ghettos where his bosses said he should go, certain he’d be knifed by a Puerto Rican or brought to his knees by a sky-walking Mohawk. And he didn’t like the poverty-struck rural routes either with the scary White people. They looked far too thin and jittery and mentally fragile to be the casual owners of so many guns.

  So he played it safe and sold hard drugs to kids in the rotted-out school districts on the edge of old Indian territory. This made You Choose a fairly decent living, but it eventually made the People of the Great Hill angry with him, and then his bosses displayed a loss of humor.

  “At least the kid wasn’t an Indian,” You Choose said. “Or maybe he was just part Indian. And he wasn’t so young. He had facial hair. Show me a Indian kid with facial hair,” You Choose laughed.

  Nobody else did.

  You Choose threw up his hands. “Okay, okay. So you don’t like me working here, I’m gone,” he said. “Watch me go.”

  They watched him go.

  That night in a bar in Niagara Falls, You Choose drank his eight whiskies straight with beer chasers.

  “When they find out who I am, they gonna wish they treated me with more respect,” he told a woman on a stool next to him. He was laboring under a heavy bloom of drunkenness.

  “Yeah?” the woman said.

  “Yeah, I’m You Shoes,” You Choose said, his forefinger diving into the bar counter. “Watch Son.”

  “Oh yeah?” the woman said.

  “I’m going home,” You Choose said. “To the Rez. They’re having a war.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yeah. Wanna come?”

  The woman got up. “No,” she said.

  You Choose hiccupped, then swayed violently. “Is it ’cos I’m Indian?” he shouted at the woman’s disappearing back.

  High Noon on the North American Plains, and Why It Is Better to Meet Some Other Time

  Rick Overlooking Horse did not seem surprised to see You Choose appear in a battered 1963 Ford Falcon station wagon, a dark grey ribbon of exhaust against a sun-bleached sky.

  “Hau,” You Choose said, leaning out the window with a cigarette between his teeth. He turned off the motor. “Long time no see, Ricky boy,” You Choose said.

  He got out of the car and stared at Rick Overlooking Horse’s setup; the teepee, the greenhouse, the vegetable garden, the old bull buffalo and the Indian war ponies grazing in the meadow. “It looks like you got yourself a movie set, man.” He laughed to show he was mocking his Rez cousin. Then he threw his cigarette onto the ground and crushed it out with the heel of his boot, and coughed. “They say Mina finally died,” he said.

  “Han,” Rick Overlooking Horse said, nodding.

  You Choose was moving around an awful lot for a man who wasn’t making any distance at all over ground. He crossed his arms, shifted his heels about, and lit another cigarette. Then he made a gesture toward Rick Overlooking Horse. “Well, they sure messed you up nicely over there.”

  “Han,” Rick Overlooking Horse agreed again.

  After that, neither man said anything for a long time. The dog-day cicadas shrilled from the cottonwoods, ravens lazily trundled across the heavy sky, on the horizon storm clouds banked, a pair of fat robins plopped about on the damp grass, a rabble of pine white butterflies puddled in a shallow rain pool. You Choose fidgeted.

  “They say you’re a medicine man,” You Choose said at last.

  Rick Overlooking Horse shook his head.

  “Are you?”

  “No,” Rick Overlooking Horse said.

  There was another long silence.

  “Or what are you then?”

  Rick Overlooking Horse said, “I’m a janitor.”

  You Choose laughed, but his laugh caught as a cough. He smacked himself on the chest. “Huh, that’s a good one man. Very far out.”

  Rick Overlooking Horse flinched.

  “My brother,” You Choose said. “I was thinking I could use, you know, some wisdom. Some directions from the fucking ancestors.” You Choose coughed again. “Or, what have you. A vision, if you will.”

  Rick Overlooking Horse looked at the ground for a long time with distracted concentration, as if listening carefully for a very faint sound. Then he turned, ducked into his teepee, and reemerged with a bowl of water, a bag of Wahupta, a pipe, and a box of matches. He handed these to You Choose.

  He didn’t tell You Choose What Son to sit in the meadow until he could see himself in a blade of grass, or in the great Tatatanka, or in a wisp of wind. He didn’t tell him to surrender.

  Instead he said, “There is nowhere you can go to reach the Great Spirit or to leave the Great Spirit. Stay where you are.”

  The Transmission

  You Choose What Son had not sat hamblechya since he and Rick Overlooking Horse were fifteen. That summer they were sent up to the bluffs on the edge of the Mako Sica by a grumpy elder with about a dozen other boys, all of them scattered about that place like discarded baggage.

  That had been bad enough.

  Why, You Choose What Son asked himself a couple of hours into his present vision quest, was he doing it again? He remembered from last time that it had been a terrible experience. Hot, of course, and thirsty but also lonely and baffling. And, honestly, he hadn’t received any vision. Although he pretended he had. And he suspected everyone else of pretending too. The pretending became a little bit real after that.

  And not everything was pretending. After all, You Choose reasoned, he may not have had a vision, but he’d cried for one, and suffered for it, and that was enough evidence for You Choose to wield his hamblechya around like a weapon.

  And if you were Indian, it was what you did. The way the White Man—even the all-sinning, God-denying White Man—was forced to submit to God.

  Now You Choose What Son’s lips cracked. The sun sang in his ears. At night, the temperatures dropped like a stone, and he shivered and would have sobbed with self-pity if there had been anyone around to tend his tears. He wanted more than anything to leave this place, and stretch his limbs. He wanted food, fried preferably and with salt. But then he thought of how he’d be mocked in the village if he came back before his time, looking too pale and unmarked. What was needed, he felt, were blisters and sunburn. His eyes welled at the thought of the hero’s welcome he’d get at Big Bat’s when he came back all hamblechya-bruised. People would congratulate him, and respect him. They’d ask him if he received his vision.

  You Choose sat and he sat. He nodded off a few times, jerked awake by the hard ground. Sometimes, he felt he was flying over the land, and others that he was being slowly baked into it. Then finally, two days later, in the hot early afternoon, the transmission from the Great Mystery came to You Choose What Son in exactly these words:

  Peace, y’all.

  By this somewhat surprising opening gambit, You Choose What Son knew it was the Great Mystery talking, and not his own imagination.

  The Great Mystery wishes to let it be known that They are infinite and expansive.

  Ha ha.

  The laughter took You Choose aback.

  The Great Mystery is all things and the Great Mystery is the center of all things.

  In a terrible, sudden moment, You Choose saw everything that has happened and would ever happen in a great pulsing ball of energy. He saw the beginning of the world as we know it, and its end. And then he saw its beginning again. He saw these in slight interruptions of light in an otherwise somewhat steady pulse. He saw the entire duration of human existence as little more than a tiny pop of pale yellow somewhere on the edge of the ball.

  You Choose said, “That’s all?”

  It was all.

  And it was all too much.

  But They would
like it to be remembered—the Great Mystery continued—there is always only infinity.

  Ha ha.

  Written like this, it makes it sound as if the transmission from the Great Mystery happened swiftly, in fluid downloads. But it didn’t. It came to You Choose What Son in threads, like smoke curling from a fire, gradually solidifying into words, then sentences, then a phrase. And then it settled into place, and You Choose knew that he’d heard all he could stand to hear.

  That is all.

  You know the rest.

  Ha ha ha ha ha.

  Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

  The laughter was the worst thing of all. It was joyful. It rang. It pealed. It was everywhere. You Choose What Son gave a shriek and ran blindly from Rick Overlooking Horse’s meadow covering his ears. He fled, wobbling, staggering, all the way down the muddy road from the teepee and into the blond, bleached, sandy lands along the edge of Rick Overlooking Horse’s land.

  Later that night, he drove the 1963 Ford Falcon to one of the liquor stores in Whiteclay and bought enough malt liquor to render him literally senseless for three whole days. After that, he nursed a two-day hangover. And after that, he vowed never to seek a vision anywhere again.

  Not everyone chooses to be liberated by liberating messages. Some people choose to be terrorized by them. And in this, you can only be what you are.

  The Somewhat Accidental Early Political Career of You Choose What Son

  All Indians know you can claim shelter with almost any other Indian on the face of Turtle Island almost any time you find yourself in need. But You Choose found he was short on Any Relation at All prepared to take him in.

  They told him it was for his own health. “We have black mold,” one of the More Immediate Relations said, coughing feebly.

  You Choose didn’t know how long he could sleep rough, but he did know wild horses could not drag him back to Rick Overlooking Horse’s horrible hot meadow with that creepy bull buffalo, and that Ugly Red Stud.

  He preferred being close to the big village, where the half-breeds and the city-returned Indians lived. He hated the traditionalists and the full-bloods, with their braids and their Lakota language, and their warrior society tattoos. And above all, he hated Rick Overlooking Horse, out there in the middle of nowhere doing all his bogus medicine man, Big Chief Indian stuff.

  When the weather turned, and it got too cold for him to sleep on the bottomed-out mattress behind the gas station, You Choose moved into a basement in a small, crowded house on the east edge of Pine Ridge with an ex-in-law of an aunt on his mother’s side in exchange for thirty dollars a month in rent. There were twelve children and four adults in the small house, so You Choose spent much of the winter in the café at the gas station drinking weak coffee and complaining in a feeble, violent way about every injustice he could think of.

  What happened next to You Choose proves the point, that a lot of what passes for success in a person’s political career is actually just luck, or weather. Or, a bit of both. It was an unusually windy winter that year and while a body can dress against low temperatures, a howling wind is something against which there is little effective defense. People were driven indoors, into the café, where You Choose—mildly frenzied on a mix of resentment, insomnia, and low-grade caffeine—acquired an audience for his incessant stream of complaints.

  His audience responded at first with nonchalance, and then with increasing interest. Because, when many of them came to think of it, they too shared You Choose’s complaints. It was as if the Misery Olympics were underway in Pine Ridge that winter, and You Choose What Son was the anointed, undisputed champion of a large pack of also-rans.

  The Campaign

  By the beginning of spring, You Choose was so moved, humbled, and inspired by his own popularity, he decided to run for tribal chairman. He thought his odds of winning were excellent. He already had most of Pine Ridge village on his side; all he had to do was make inroads with the more traditional types in the outlying villages and meadows.

  But then it got out, as things do on the Rez, that You Choose What Son’s U.S. government-issued Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood said he was eight-sixteenths Lakota.

  It didn’t take a mathematician to divide that equation into a slur.

  “That there’s Mina Overlooking Horse’s half-breed, ennit?” one of the older Indians said.

  “Ayeee. His name were Watson, weren’t it? Where did he go finding that What Son from?”

  And they laughed, held their stomachs and roared. “Oh, ho-lay, yeah that’s a good one! You Choose Your Own Name.”

  “Big warrior!”

  But You Choose What Son wasn’t in the mood to be mocked. He gave very long, angry speeches at the Pine Ridge Powwow Grounds about the missed economic opportunities on the Rez. Sometimes he said he supported his brothers and sisters out there campaigning for more Indian sovereignty. “Those Alcatraz Indians,” he called them. Other times he seemed to be condemning the occupation of Alcatraz by American Indians.

  Even a lightly dozing Indian spectator, just there for the possibility of a fry-up, could tell You Choose What Son’s stories didn’t line up, exactly. There were holes in his narrative, and much of what he said invited doubt and confusion. But that didn’t jolt any of You Choose’s supporters too badly. After all, it was 1972, and most of the human population of the world now had biographies with bits blown out of it, shredded, or missing. Most of the human population of the world seemed unable to say anymore what they believed, or who they were, or why they were here.

  On Election Day, You Choose got into office by a margin of a hundred and twenty votes. The old-school Indians, the full-breeds, and the Elders were shocked. They had assumed the half-breed was unelectable. They had not noticed how he was appealing to the half-breeds, near-breeds, and wanna-breeds in and around the town of Pine Ridge. They had not seen how a fearful, frustrated person could make himself a leader of other fearful, frustrated people.

  “Oh, but now he won’t be good,” they said. “First thing he’ll do is order his face carved on the moon.”

  Nepotism, Just Between Friends and Family

  You Choose What Son exceeded even the Wise Elders expectations for bad governance. He appropriated tribal funds to buy himself an F-150 hot off the lot in Rapid City, all the trimmings. He appropriated even more tribal funds to build himself a proper sheetrock and siding house in Pine Ridge, with indoor plumbing, forced air, and working lights. He gave tribal support to those who turned a blind eye to his graft, and he withdrew tribal support from anyone who opposed him.

  Threats began to plop onto You Choose What Son’s doorstep. Complaints began to rain into the regional office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. You Choose formed a private militia—Guardians of the Oglala Nation, or GOONs to intimidate anyone who seemed likely to expose him. He fired a handful of people on no grounds other than he felt like it. He hired friends. “There’s nothing in tribal law against nepotism,” he was quoted as saying in the Lakota Country Times.

  In order to avoid restlessness when roads remained in states of disrepair, when schools closed because of striking teachers, and when water ran out in all the villages, You Choose held exciting political events at the Pine Ridge Powwow Grounds. He encouraged his supporters to practice their war cries. He roared when they shot a few rounds in the air. “In-dee-in! In-dee-in!” he chanted, rather pointlessly, but to great effect.

  Merchants in Whiteclay did a brisk trade in guns, knives, malt liquor, and whisky. Full-bloods battled half-bloods openly in the streets of Pine Ridge town. FBIs, they called themselves. Full-blood Indians. Urban-returned Indians, confused by their years in cities across the nation, clashed with each other over which among them had been the most colonized by the White Man’s ways. Colonized Indian Asses, they called each other. CIA, for short. A lot of Indians were very drunk much of the time. Everyone was perplexed.

  As soon as
night fell there was the chattering and popping of gunfire in all the villages, and the murder rate on the Rez exceeded that of Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles. In homes across the Rez, people switched out the lights, blew out candles, and put boards and blankets over their windows as soon as it was dark. Brothers split between sides, one staying out in the windswept south, and the other heading into the village of Pine Ridge. It felt like a mass-murder–suicide pact, which is, if you think about it, the ultimate fulfillment of an attempted genocide.

  A Warning

  Think about it.

  If the people of a nation are violently forced to forget themselves, their sacred traditions, their ways of life, their understanding of the Earth, their respect for other nations, then what follows is almost inevitable: The men will take out their amnesia on the women, the women will take it out on the children, and everyone will take it out on the land.

  This goes for all nations, of course, not just the White Man Nation.

  But some of the Original People believe that if they follow the ways of the White Man Nation, it will save them from this death. They believe it will save their children from death if they slip into White, but of course any time we become something other than ourselves, it is just death by another name.

  Why does the White Man have such a terror of love?

  The things that will eventually happen to all of us have to happen to the White Man first, because everything must go around and around. There is no other way, obviously. In all their fear and killing, they don’t know that it is for their sakes too that we so stubbornly refuse to forget ourselves in all our love and nature. So that when at last exhausted, bloodied, raped and raping they reach us, they’ll find us here.

  Right where they left us.

  Think about it.

  Meantime, on the Moon

  On December 11, 1972, the spaceship Apollo 17 landed on the moon. It was the last time humans left Earth’s low orbit. Which is to say, it was the last time humans sped past 1,243 miles above sea level, through medium Earth orbit and into the vast, tranquil-seeming space known as high Earth orbit, beyond which we know only what scientists and sages can tell us, inferred back to us from their imaginations, calculations, and probing missions.