Quiet Until the Thaw

by Alexandra Fuller

  He cleared his throat into the microphone to ensure he had people’s attention. There’s nothing like an old Indian with something to say first in Lakota, then translated by himself into English, but at last taps were played for all the Indian servicemen and women who wouldn’t be coming home, and their names were read aloud, one by one.

  There were a lot of them.

  In fact, it felt to Le-a that there must be more war-dead Lakota than could be statistically possible, and the weight of all those cut-short lives mixed with the humidity and heat to cast a feeling of absolute melancholy over the arbor. But then Chief Red Cloud gave the signal and a shout went through the ranks massing at the entrance to the arbor.

  Le-a sat up.

  There were still a handful of soldiers from the Second World War, a lot of them a bit doddery now, their guns wavering. The ranks swelled when Vietnam and Korea came up. But those men too looked like their best years were behind them. Even the legendary Evelyn “Eddie” Two Eagles, who had flown a hundred and ten combat missions over Vietnam and been awarded eight Air Medals and two Crosses of Gallantry, was looking shrunken in his uniform.

  Le-a sighed and crossed her arms. And then she saw him, Squanto, three men deep in the Desert Storm contingent. He looked lost, or put another way, like a man needing to be found. He certainly didn’t look as if he’d tried anything too horribly, violently heroic in his life.

  “Ah, there you are,” Le-a said. “I’ve found you.”

  Le-a’s Other Men, and One Woman

  Before Squanto, there were four men she did not choose: A youth minister from Minnesota, a couple of so-called Rez uncles, and a drunk outside the public toilets one night at the Powwow. And there were six men that she did choose, more or less: A Cowboy from Chadron, a half-blood Cherokee basketball player from Georgia, an aging Lakota AIMster, a German tourist, an Asian American ponytailed University of Texas anthropologist, and an unemployed White carpenter from Kansas.

  The year she turned fifteen and was off the Rez for a while, there had also been an Indian girl in Scottsbluff fresh off a week of ICU suicide watch, cartwheeling drunk on a humid September night. Le-a was half wrecked herself, tumbling earthward and skyward on a creaking swing in a school playground, when the girl’s mouth connected briefly to hers, teeth bringing a salty shot of blood to Le-a’s tongue.

  “You’re tall for a Lakota,” Le-a said.

  “Yeah, they say there was also some Karankawa blood way back.”

  “Some who?”

  “Stretched-out Texas Indians. What about you?”

  “I don’t know,” Le-a said. “Mostly Lakota, I guess.”

  Later that night, camped out behind a gas station west of the Nebraska/Wyoming line, Mona straddled Le-a and declared, like war, “I want to eat you alive.” Le-a believed her, the way Mona’s breath was fuel scented with unmet need. So she pulled her knees up and said, “Get off of me.”

  But Mona was dug all the way into Le-a, and breathing heavily. “You’re the only person who’s ever wanted me,” she said. The girls made love then, or something like it, until finally Mona slept. Just before dawn, Le-a gathered her belongings, snuck into the gas station bathroom, and washed herself in the sink. Then she stood by a gas pump until a farmer on his way back to Nebraska agreed he’d give her a lift to the Rez border.

  “I’m part Indian myself, you know,” he said.

  Le-a pulled herself into the cab, weary beyond imagining. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Which part?”

  The last Le-a saw of her, Mona Respects Nothing was a crumpled bundle on the grass behind the gas station. From a distance, Mona looked discarded, like something pulled from the rotting piles of secondhand clothes that were sent out to Pine Ridge every summer. Then the sun spilled light around the edge of the flat, beige, cinder-block buildings; bail bond shops, nail salons, fast food outlets. And Mona was gone. Le-a closed her eyes and slumped back into the passenger seat.

  “Done,” she said.

  “Say again?” the farmer said.

  But Le-a didn’t repeat herself. She was done repeating herself and she was done repeating the sorrow of too many generations. Done, done, done.

  What Happened Next

  The belief that we can be done with our past is a myth. The past is nudging at us constantly. Not only our own pasts, of course, but also the pasts of our ancestors. And the pasts of people we’ve never even heard of, and to whom we are not related at all. The energies of their great passions hang in the air forever, and possess a forever half-life, and all of that is awash in the universe.

  To believe in the doneness of time, and in the doneness of acts committed in that time, is wishful thinking. The truth is, no one is ever done with the past, any more than it is possible for anyone to be done with the future. Months, years, decades, centuries—the sins of the fathers, the mothers, the others, the selves—they wash into now, and into the future, and there is no stopping them.

  In this way, it is best to think of time more as the sea, washing out, and in; out and in; out and in. Yes, you can throw your garbage into the sea, but eventually the used toothbrushes and bottles and plastic lighters and spent condoms will wash up on the beach. Not your beach, maybe, but someone’s beach.

  So imagine that the only escape from this torture is the same as saying that from this point on, the whole world must agree never to throw anything into the sea again, ever. We’d still have generations having to clean up the beaches. Even if we stopped everything right now, all the war and abuse and hurt and injury, and treated one another with nothing but love.

  We’d still have generations to go before we settled into real peace, but it would be real peace.

  The question isn’t “Why bother?”

  It’s “Why not?”

  Perhaps the answer is that most people don’t believe in themselves enough to imagine one or two or seven generations down the line, the way the Lakota are trained to think. Perhaps they refuse to entrust the possibility of peace to some as yet unborn descendants because their own ancestors showed no such respect for their possibility of peace, and so on. An eye for an eye in ever-increasing cycles of violence going all the way around to where this all ends, and all begins.

  Mona Respects Nothing Comes to Whiteclay

  The middle-aged man from Florida with sour blue eyes and the thin grey ponytail liked to claim Seminole somewhere down the line. But the Indians called him the Small Nosebleed Indian, because they said a mild hemorrhage from a single nostril would be all it would take to get rid of every last drop of his native blood.

  And because they were Indian, and fond of nicknames, they also called him Tío Sopa Vómito because he grew a thick black mustache like a Mexican drug lord, and ran a makeshift soup kitchen for drunks in Whiteclay. It was a gloomy, dingy place. It smelled of rancid animal fat and stale urine. But the Small Nosebleed Indian acted like he’d founded the equivalent of Mother Teresa’s Kalighat Home for the Dying Destitutes.

  “Be safe with me,” he implored the drunk Indians.

  The Indians didn’t much like getting hauled indoors by Tío Sopa. For one thing, he liked to pray over them, his voice rising like a red tide, and just as suffocating. For another thing, as long as they were under his watch, the Indians felt it was only polite to leave their liquor and each other alone, and that was an abrupt and unpleasant way to come around. So a lot of times the Indians insisted they were okay—“No man, we’re just fine like we are”—and waved Tío Sopa away.

  “I hate these people more and more each day,” Tío Sopa muttered. “How can you help people who refuse to help themselves?”

  But as she blew unsteadily into Whiteclay on that frozen afternoon at the onset of the storm of 1994, Mona Respects Nothing was a vision of need; her lips blue, her eyes glazed, icicles across her cheeks. Tío Sopa swept up against her, arms around her shoulders. “You must come in out of this cold. You
’ll die out here. Come with me.” And then he noticed that the woman was not only very drunk, she was also vastly pregnant, and moaning to herself. “Oh, Christ’s work on the cross!” he said. “How did you get like this?”

  “Help me!” the woman pleaded.

  He said, “What did you think would happen?” But he supported Mona to the soup kitchen where he kept an old sedan, battered and rusted. He pushed the woman into the backseat, and cursed at the engine to start.

  “Stay alive!” Tío Sopa shouted, which was perhaps the right thing to do, because Mona’s lungs shocked full of air. “Don’t die on my watch,” he said. Then he drove eight miles to the Lakota Oglala Sioux Tribal Hospital faster than you would think a former cocaine addict from the Sunshine State with one drop of Seminole Indian blood and bald tires should drive on blowing-sideways snow and black ice.

  Mona Respects Nothing Delivers

  The first baby came in a hurry. The nurse, who had seen enough of everything in her years with the Indian Health Services, recognized immediately that he was a child of a rudderless woman. She sighed when the baby shuddered and began to whimper. “Hau,” she said, turning the child over and wiping mucus from his mouth. “Tanyán yahí,” she said, trying to sound as if she meant it. “It’s good you came.”

  She washed the baby in warm water and sage, wrapped him in a towel, and tried to hand him to his mother. “Hoke she la hay cha,” she told Mona.

  “Jerusalem,” Mona whispered.

  “What did you say?” the nurse said.

  “Jerusalem,” Mona said. “His name.”

  The nurse said, “You’ll have time to think about it. After you’ve had a chance to sober up, maybe.”

  But suddenly Mona started screaming again.

  “Shhh, it’s all over,” the nurse said.

  Mona screamed louder.

  “What’s wrong with you?” the nurse said. “It’s all over. You’re okay.”

  But Mona grabbed the edges of the mattress and rocked back and forth, as if trying to escape the confines of her body. “There’s another one!” she shouted.

  “No, no, there isn’t,” the nurse said firmly. “It’s just the afterbirth.” She bit her lip. She hated the drunk ones forced suddenly dry. Everything about them, she hated: Their smell, their demons, and their terrors, to say nothing of their better-off-dead babies.

  “Help me,” Mona begged.

  “Okay,” the nurse said. “You’re gonna be okay. But you’re withdrawing real fast, and you’re dehydrated. I’ll get you an IV as soon as I can find a vein.”

  But Mona, wracked with another spasm, swiped at the nurse violently. She screamed again. Then she bore down, and suddenly another baby shot into world.

  “Oh, ho-lay!” the nurse said.

  A tiny, blood-streaked creature the color and apparent texture of melted white paraffin candles lay still between Mona’s legs. “Oh,” the nurse said. “No. Oh. No.” But the baby gave a spluttering cough. The nurse grasped the baby’s feet and held him upside down. It was another boy, although this one was so small and such an unlikely waxy shade of white he looked more like a deep underwater creature brought unkindly, and too fast, to air.

  “Did you know you were having twins?” the nurse asked.

  “Daniel,” Mona whispered.

  “We’ll have time for the Naming Ceremony,” the nurse said. “Later.” She stared down at the baby, its ankles thin as pencils in her fingers.

  Afterbirth

  It was dawn before the nurse had a chance to put her feet up and smoke a cigarette on the bed in the back room. She ached from leaning over the babies, and from caring for the various ailments of their embattled mother. The effects on the pelvic floor of a hasty vaginal delivery of twin boys could be dramatic, but in the nurse’s opinion, were the least of Mona’s problems.

  The nurse waved her cigarette at Squanto. “What’s the point of one more unwanted child? Let alone two.”

  “Maybe she wants them,” Squanto said.

  “She doesn’t want them. She doesn’t even want her own self,” the nurse said.

  “I guess everyone’s born for a reason,” Squanto said.

  The nurse shot Squanto a look, dropped the end of her cigarette into an empty Pace Salsa jar, screwed the lid on, and shook it dead. “You can’t really believe that,” she said. “You can’t believe some people were born for any reason other than a very fucked-up one. A lot of fucked-up shit happened, and then a baby or two was born. Then a lot more fucked-up shit happens. That’s how it goes in my experience.”

  Post-Delivery DTs

  While the winter storm raged on outside, Mona lay in bed plummeting into sobriety, alternately boiling and freezing, hallucinating dancing heyokas in all their spidery, scary holiness. Between fevers she put a pillow over her ears, to drown out the sound of the twins. Her milk did not come in. The nurse tried to encourage her to feed her babies, change them, and bath them. But Mona looked stunned, as if this life she was experiencing should have been happening to someone else, in some other place.

  Then on the third day, Mona said she felt better and needed to wash.

  So Squanto held the twins in the nurse’s makeshift bedroom while Mona took a shower.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” he told the boys.

  “No, Squanto,” the nurse said. “Everything’s not going to be okay.”

  Dallas, the Soap Opera, and the Rez

  The nurse watched Dallas in endless loops, beginning to end, and then straight back to the beginning again, as if they might have a surprising, hidden answer to all her questions.

  “You see,” the nurse said to Squanto. “Look at her, that one. It’s so obvious,” the nurse waved her cigarette at the screen. “You can tell the moment she shows up, she’s gonna be trouble.”

  “Who?”

  “Kristin,” the nurse said. “Remember? Sue Ellen’s sister.”

  “No,” Squanto said.

  “She’s Sue Ellen’s sister. But she has an affair with J.R. And Sue Ellen is J.R.’s wife. Then Kristin shoots J.R. But you don’t know it’s her. So there’s the whole ‘Who shot J.R.?’ back and forth. But J.R. doesn’t press charges because she says she’s pregnant with his baby.”

  “Huh,” Squanto said.

  “I know,” the nurse said. “And that’s not even the best part. The whole of the ninth season turned out to be a dream of Pam Ewing’s. Imagine all the people who sat through that without knowing. How messed up is that?”

  Everything Is Not Going to Be All Right

  Then Squanto looked at the clock and said it was at least five hours over time for him to be getting home to Le-a because her Great Fertility Crisis meant the longest Squanto could be away from her was about four days, max, and not the wrong four days either.

  It snowed. The babies slept. They watched another episode of Dallas.

  After that, Squanto said it didn’t look like his replacement was coming, but if he didn’t get home soon, Squanto’s life would be over for good and then there would be no LOST Hospital security guard, not one. The nurse and Squanto laughed about that.

  Then the nurse noticed Mona Respects Nothing was missing.

  Squanto thought to look in the parking lot. Swirling white ground blizzards skated on black ice where car tires had recently pressed tracks into the snow.

  “Oh, shit,” Squanto said.

  “Okay, I’ll call the tribal cops,” the nurse said. “We don’t need a bunch of troopers looking into this shit-upon-shit we’re all in right now. Let’s keep this Indians taking care of Indians.”

  Mona Respects Nothing at the Broken Two-Mile Marker

  The tribal cop from the Pine Ridge station assessed the situation—the 1965 Chevy Impala resting on a woman’s neck where she’d been thrown facedown into the snow at the broken two-mile marker northwest of Pine Ridge village�
�and radioed for backup.

  “No hurry,” he said. “We ain’t saving a life here. Nothin’ that won’t keep.”

  Theo Lone Tree couldn’t think how they’d ever separate the woman from the metal. He pulled a pouch from his pocket and sprinkled tobacco around the scene. “Don’t look back,” he told the spirit of the dead woman. “Don’t look what you done.” Theo thought about dusting the snow from Mona’s face to get accident-scene photos, but there are some expressions you never want to see.

  He radioed his little brother, who was manning the till at Big Bat’s. “Anyone there know how long we’re in for this weather? I think I got a long night ahead of me.” But he really just wanted to talk to someone until the backup arrived. “She’s pretty much the deadest thing I ever seen.”

  That’s how news got back to Squanto via the nurse via Tray Tor via Theo Lone Tree’s little brother manning the till at Big Bat’s: The woman who had stolen Le-a’s 1965 Chevrolet Impala from the tribal hospital parking lot wasn’t just missing.

  She’d crossed over.

  The Famous Indian Rescue of Jerusalem and Daniel Respects Nothing

  The nurse threw together a bag of supplies—some formula, diapers, a couple of stained but clean premie gowns—and put it at Squanto’s feet. “You better get yourself out of here before Theo and them show up and start asking questions,” she said.

  “Oh no, I ain’t taking these babies,” Squanto said.

  “Oh yes, you are,” the nurse lit a cigarette. “Jesus, Squanto, this is no time to spazz out.”