Pah! Pah!
There go Buffalo Bill’s gloves, one at a time!
Annie Oakley whips a third pistol from beneath her skirts. Pah! Pah! Pah! She shoots a kettle and a pot from a Styrofoam rock next to the hologram of a campfire, then gallops offstage, firing off her pistols into the air, and hollering.
Buffalo Bill says, “You can’t argue with that!”
The audience laughs.
“In an argument the woman always has the last word. Otherwise it’s a new argument.”
The audience laughs again. A drum rolls.
Buffalo Bill raises his right hand, like he’s making a left turn on a bicycle. He says, “And now from the Great Plains of North America, allow me to introduce the stars of our show. The wise and the courageous, the only true Native Americans, the Indians.” Buffalo Bill pauses. “Medicine Chief Sitting Bull,” he says. “And his warrior braves.”
The Mexican kid from Arizona who was supposed to be Medicine Chief Sitting Bull was found contemplating suicide on top of the roof of Le Carrousel de Lancelot his first night in France. He was sent home early. After that, the program director had to hire a disaffected French kid of Arab extraction from a rough neighborhood on the outskirts of the 18th arrondissement instead, and make him dye his long hair black.
“Welcome to you and your tribe, Medicine Chief Sitting Bull,” Buffalo Bill from Sandpoint, Idaho, tells the disaffected French kid of Arab extraction. And then he says something a real Wyoming Cowboy would be unlikely to say to an actual Red Man, and especially not a French kid of Arab extraction pretending to be a Red Man. “You honor us all with your presence.”
In the background meantime, Jerusalem and Daniel creep up and down and around fake bluffs, like Indian scouts in a 1950s Western. They come into the arena and start to bob about and make whooping noises. Their war bonnets are unwieldy. Only the French kid of Arab extraction and Bob Davies ride horses.
Afterward, the program manager says to the twins, “Please, por favor, s’il vous plait, more energy. More sinister. You need to pop off those rocks. Not this crawling about. You want my opinion? You look like a couple of bored spiders. Wake up a little bit. Maybe, you show me you’re alive, I can put you on a horse. Until then you are, yawn, yawn, yawn.”
Jerusalem, Regained
There are more ways to lose a life than dying.
Daniel swinging from a lamppost, drunk.
He’s kicking cars. His hoodie is bunched up around his shoulders.
He shouts at some gendarmes, “Hey, fuck you!”
“Let’s head home,” Jerusalem says.
Daniel takes a swing at his brother and misses. He staggers. “Fuckin’. Then they’ll . . .” But Daniel is overtaken with the urge to vomit. “Oh, fuck.”
Then he stands under a streetlight and wipes his mouth. His cheeks are hollow; there are blue shadows around his eyes. He’s getting thin. He says, “Let’s find somewhere open.”
“Let’s call it good, and go home,” Jerusalem says.
“We got money, brah! The night is a child.” Daniel laughs and flaps his hands around his face. “Let’s find pussy.”
Jerusalem catches Daniel by the feet and slams him to the ground. He sits on his back and quickly pulls his knife from his belt. He puts his knee across his brother’s cheek and in one swipe of the blade he cuts off his brother’s ponytail. Then he reaches behind his own neck, and makes another cut.
“When they ask you who died, you’ll know what to tell them,” Jerusalem says, standing up and closing the blade of his knife against his thigh. “Let’s go. We’re all done here.”
The two black ponytails lie in the yellow glow cast by the streetlight.
(There Is No Such Thing as) The End
Once, when he was small, walking on a trail in the Black Hills with everyone, Jerusalem had noticed what appeared to be triangular pockets of mist in the branches of sun-bathed shrubs. But up close, the pockets of mist revealed themselves to be tiny tents. And in time those tents resolved into webs, and within those webs, when Jerusalem looked, there was the whirring activity of caterpillars frantically trying to seal themselves off from the world.
Their heads pulsed back and forth and back and forth as they tried to make a wall of silk between themselves and everything that was about to come next. As if they could. It looked so pointless to Jerusalem.
Le-a said, “Yeah. I bet we look pointless to them too. But one day, they’ll fly. Imagine that.”
Greenland
The man in the aisle seat was savaging bags of snacks. “I’m not nervous of flying,” he said. “But I worry about many other things.” He put a napkin over his mouth as he spoke. “The problem is, I like to be in control.”
Daniel had closed his eyes.
“I’d feel better if I was flying this thing, honestly. Then at least, you know, I’m in control.”
Jerusalem turned his face to the window.
For the first few hours, he watched the sun’s glow ripen on the clouds, before they parted to reveal the Atlantic, impassive from this height, and immense.
“The sea, as far as you can see,” Le-a used to tell Jerusalem when he asked what came after Turtle Island.
Which is how southern Greenland came as a surprise. For one thing, it’s bigger than you’d think, and much whiter. Jerusalem wondered what kind of people had learned how to live with all that snow and ice.
They’d be the sorts of people to respect solitude, he supposed. They’d know their precise and difficult place in that entire beautiful white expanse. They’d do everything as if their lives depended on it.
Everything.
The End
Every night when they were small, it was the same, Jerusalem remembered.
Rick Overlooking Horse prodded the fire. Then he lit his pipe and smoked quietly. Usually Le-a was asleep before the stories started. Squanto too. Rick Overlooking Horse said this time of night was for old people and children, the keepers of the wisdom. People in the middle of their years were busier, often doing unwise things, he said. They needed their sleep.
The inside of the old teepee glowed.
Rick Overlooking Horse began his wonderful, terrible tales of how the whole world came to be. And of how the Oglala Lakota Oyate came to be here now. He told the story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, of the great warriors of the past, of the terrible battles to stay on the land.
When the stories grew wild, Jerusalem felt for Daniel’s hand across the soft, tufty hide of the old buffalo bull.
“Tunkashila!” Daniel whispered when his alarm grew too much.
“How does it end?” Jerusalem needed to know. “Does it all end well?”
And then Rick Overlooking Horse’s rough old hands touched the tops of their heads. “Oh yes,” he said. “It ends well. It doesn’t end soon, but it ends well. All of it.”
Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa. She lived in Africa until her midtwenties. In 1994, she moved to Wyoming.
** Translation from The Wishing Bone Cycle, by Howard A. Norman
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Quiet Until the Thaw Page 13