“Do you think Tommy would like it if I gave him this painting when it’s done?” she said.
Maisie shrugged. “It’s hard to say. When I said he likes pictures, it’s mostly stuff from magazines. He has me cut out the people in the pictures and then he uses them as dolls to make up little stories. He’s never had a painting before, so I don’t know what he’d do with it.”
Jilly decided that she would give Tommy a painting, except it would be one of him and his sister and their dogs. She had a good enough memory that she knew she’d be able to do it back in her studio without their needing to sit for it. ! “That was an odd story,” Maisie said.
“What there was of it,” Jilly said.
Her companion gave her a considering look. “If I didn’t know better,” she said, “I’d think that Angel had set this up—sort of a morality play, you know?”
Jilly shook her head.
“Well, she’s always telling me I’ve got to get a life for myself—meet people, maybe get a boyfriend, that kind of thing. I can’t seem to get her to understand that being with Tommy and the dogs is what I want to do.”
“But she’s got a point.”
“And that is?”
“If you lose sight of yourself, then what’ve you got to offer Tommy and the dogs? You’ll be as bad as my ghost, giving of yourself until there’s nothing left to give and you simply fade away. You’ll end up stuck in the same limbo.” J. “You don’t get it either. I want to be with them.”
Jilly sighed. “I do get it. But maybe it’d be good for them to have some other input as well. I’m not saying Tommy can be self-sufficient—I don’t know him well enough, what his limitations might be. But if you’re always there doing things for him, how’s he supposed to learn to do anything for himself?”
“But that’s how I found him. He was like that. He’s not my brother, I just kind of adopted him. He got dumped on the streets because nobody else wanted him and let me tell you, without me, he wouldn’t have survived.”
“I believe you. But maybe whoever he was with before wasn’t giving him any slack either.” Jilly held up her hand to forestall Maisie’s protest. “Look, I’m not saying you’re right or wrong, just that you might want to think about it—for Tommy, if not for yourself. Maybe you need Tommy as much as he needs you. I don’t know. It’s not for me to say, is it?”
“That’s right. It’s not for you to say.”
Jilly sighed. “Now you think I’m trying to tell you how to take care of Tommy.”
“Aren’t you? You’re beginning to sound the same as everyone else I meet—you all know better.”
“No, I don’t,” Jilly said. “The only thing I know about Tommy is that I intend to treat him like anybody else know. I don’t have some hidden agenda; I was talking about you. Maybe you know how to take care of Tommy and the dogs, but do you know how to take care of yourself? I’m no talking about making a living or going back to school, on any of that. I’m talking about what goes on in here—” she touched a hand between her breasts “—in your heart.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s like my painting,” Jilly said. “I’m out here on the streets with this pochade box because I was overloading my work with detail—so much so that while all the various part of a painting would be good, the excessive details made the final painting way too busy. I was losing sight of what I was trying to say with each painting in the first place.”
“So?”
“I’ve done the same thing with my life. Concentrated so much on the details, that I would lose sight of the overall direction of where I was going—of the fact that I even wanted to go somewhere in the first place. I’ve got friend who work with people with special needs. I’ve even done some volunteer work myself. The thing is, it’s so easy to wrap your whole life around the details of theirs, that you become invisible in the process. People like Tommy can’t help needing so much from us. But we’ve got to have some thing to give them, and if we spend all our time wrapped up in what we see as our responsibility, our relationships with them end up becoming burdens instead of gifts.”
At first Maisie looked angry, and Jilly thought she’d gone too far. She didn’t know anything about either Maisie or Tommy beyond what she’d picked up in the past hour, so who was she to be blithely handing our advice the way she was? But then Maisie’s features softened and she gave an other one of her sighs.
“Am I that transparent?” Maisie asked.
Jilly shook her head. “Only if you know what to look for. You seem really tired, almost worn out.”
“I am. But what I said was true. I don’t resent the time I spend with Tommy. I like being with him, but sometimes it gets to be too much, trying to juggle school and work and time with him–-” Her gaze met Jilly’s. “But I can’t not do it. And I don’t want to just foist Tommy off somewhere so that I can have some time to myself.”
“Because you think Tommy would feel hurt?”
“Partly. But I also get scared that if it looks like I can’t take care of him properly, somebody’ll try to take him away from me.”
Jilly nodded understandingly. “Maybe you’re looking at this from the wrong angle, losing the overall picture for the details. Instead of thinking of it as foisting Tommy off on other people, you should think of it as allowing Tommy to enrich their lives and for Tommy to get some different takes on the world than the way he sees it when he’s only with you.”
Maisie looked down the pavement to where Tommy was talking excitedly with the vendor as he waited for his pretzel.
“People don’t think of time with Tommy as being enriching,” she said. “I mean, even my landlady—she looks after him when I’m working or at school, and she’s crazy about him—even she doesn’t give me the impression that she gets anything out of the relationship.”
“Have you ever asked her?”
Maisie shook her head.
“I’d like to see Tommy again,” Jilly said. “I think I could learn a lot from him. And I’m sure if you talked to Angel she could help you work things out so that there’d be other people to lend you a hand without anyone thinking that you’re not fit to be taking care of Tommy anymore.”
“It’s hard,” Maisie said. “Always asking, always standing there with your hand out.”
Jilly nodded. “That’s one way of looking at it. But you know, the best thing I ever learned from Angel is that there’s nothing wrong with asking for help. If we’re not here to look out for each other, then what are we doing here?”
“Living in limbo,” Maisie said.
“Exactly. Just like my ghost.”
“So what do you think I should do?”
“Well, for a start, what’s Tommy doing tomorrow?”
Maisie’s brow furrowed. “Let’s see. I’ve got to work until two, but after that I think—”
“Not you,” Jilly told her. “Just Tommy. Do you think he’d like to come with me and see Geordie while he’s busking?”
Maisie hesitated for a long moment. She looked back at the pretzel vendor to see that Tommy was on his way back, pretzel in hand, dogs running around him, hoping he’d drop a piece of it.
“I don’t know,” she said./’Why don’t we ask him?”
9
—Since you brought up Monet earlier, maybe you should remember what he’s supposed to have told Georges Clem-enceau when Clemenceau was visiting him at Giverny.
—Refresh my memory.
—’Your mistake is to want to reduce the world to your measure, whereas by enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.’
—I see. And where did a woman as young as yourself gain such wisdom?
—From making mistakes.. I make a lot of them. The trick is not making excuses for them, or trying to pretend they never happened, but learning from them.
—You see the world without shades of grey.
—Hardly.
—Then how can you make it sound
so effortless?
—Are you kidding? Life’s like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning. It’s so much easier just to deal with everything in how it relates to yourself. You have to really concentrate to keep an open mind, to pay attention to the broader view, to stay aware of what’s going on outside your own skin.
—And if you don’t?
—Think of all you’ve got to lose.
COYOTE STORIES
Four directions blow the sacred winds
We are standing at the center
Every morning wakes another chance
To make our lives a little better
—Kiya Heartwood, from “Wishing Well”
This day Coyote is feeling pretty thirsty, so he goes into Joey’s Bar, you know, on the corner of Palm and Grasso, across from the Men’s Mission, and he lays a nugget of gold down on the counter, but Joey he won’t serve him.
“So you don’t serve skins no more?” Coyote he asks him.
“Last time you gave me gold, it turned to shit on me,” is what Joey says. He points to the Rolex on Coyote’s wrist. “But I’ll take that. Give you change and everything.”
Coyote scratches his muzzle and pretends he has to think about it. “Cost me twenty-five dollars,” he says. “It looks better than the real thing.”
“I’ll give you fifteen, cash, and a beer.”
“How about a bottle of whiskey?”
So Coyote comes out of Joey’s Bar and he’s missing his Rolex now, but he’s got a bottle of Jack in his hand and that’s when he sees Albert, just around the corner, sitting on the ground with his back against the brick wall and his legs stuck out across the sidewalk so you have to step over them, you want to get by.
“Hey, Albert,” Coyote says. “What’s your problem?”
“Joey won’t serve me no more.”
“That because you’re indigenous?”
“Naw. I got no money.”
So Coyote offers him some of his whiskey. “Have yourself a swallow,” he says, feeling generous, because he only paid two dollars for the Rolex and it never worked anyway.
“Thanks, but I don’t think so,” is what Albert tells him. “Seems to me I’ve been given a sign. Got no money means I should stop drinking.”
Coyote shakes his head and takes a sip of his Jack. “You are one crazy skin,” he says.
That Coyote he likes his whiskey. It goes down smooth and puts a gleam in his eye. Maybe, he drinks enough, he’ll remember some good time and smile, maybe he’ll get mean and pick himself a fight with a lamppost like he’s done before. But one thing he knows, whether he’s got money or not’s got nothing to do with omens. Not for him, anyway.
But a lack of money isn’t really an omen for Albert either; it’s a way of life. Albert, he’s like the rest of us skins. Left the reserve, and we don’t know why. Come to the city, and we don’t know why. Still alive, and we don’t know why. But Albert, he remembers it being different. He used to listen to his grandmother’s stories, soaked them up like the dirt will rain, thirsty after a long drought. And he tells stories himself, too, or pieces of stories, talk to you all night long if you want to listen to him.
It’s always Coyote in Albert’s stories, doesn’t matter if he’s making them up or just passing along gossip. Sometimes Coyote’s himself, sometimes he’s Albert, sometimes he’s somebody else. Like it wasn’t Coyote sold his Rolex and ran into him outside Joey’s Bar that day, it was Billy Yazhie. Maybe ten years ago now, Billy he’s standing under a turquoise sky beside Spider Rock one day, looking up, looking up for a long time, before he turns away and walks to the nearest highway, sticks out his thumb and he doesn’t look back till it’s too late. Wakes up one morning and everything he knew is gone and he can’t find his way back.
Oh that Billy he’s a dark skin, he’s like leather. You shake his hand and it’s like you took hold of a cowboy boot. He knows some of the old songs and he’s got himself a good voice, strong, ask anyone. He used to drum for the dancers back home, but his hands shake too much now, he says. He doesn’t sing much anymore, either. He’s got to be like the rest of us, hanging out in Fitzhenry Park, walking the streets, sleeping in an alleyway because the Men’s Mission it’s out of beds. We’ve got the stoic faces down real good, but you look in our eyes, maybe catch us off guard, you’ll see we don’t forget anything. It’s just most times we don’t want to remember.
This Coyote he’s not too smart sometimes. One day he gets into a fight with a biker, says he going to count coup like his plains brothers, knock that biker all over the street, only the biker’s got himself a big hickory-handled hunting knife and he cuts Coyote’s head right off. Puts a quick end to that fight, I’ll tell you. Coyote he spends the rest of the afternoon running around, trying to find somebody to sew his head back on again.
“That Coyote,” Jimmy Coldwater says, “he’s always losing his head over one thing or another.”
I tell you we laughed.
But Albert he takes that omen seriously. You see him drinking still, but he’s drinking coffee now, black as a raven’s wing, or some kind of tea he brews for himself in a tin can, makes it from weeds he picks in the empty lots and dries in the sun. He’s living in an abandoned factory these days, and he’s got this one wall, he’s gluing feathers and bones to it, nothing fancy, no eagle’s wings, no bear’s jaw, wolf skull, just what he can find lying around, pigeon feathers and crow’s, rat bones, bird bones, a necklace of mouse skulls strung on a wire. Twigs and bundles of weeds, rattles he makes from tin cans and bottles and jars. He paints figures on the wall, in between all the junk. Thunderbird. Bear. Turtle. Raven.
Everybody’s starting to agree, that Albert he’s one crazy skin.
Now when he’s got money, he buys food with it and shares it out. Sometimes he walks over to Palm Street where the skin girls are working the trade and he gives them money, asks them to take a night off. Sometimes they take the money and just laugh, getting into the next car that pulls up. But sometimes they take the money and they sit in a coffee shop, sit there by the window, drinking their coffee and look out at where they don’t have to be for one night.
And he never stops telling stories.
“That’s what we are,” he tells me one time. Albert he’s smiling, his lips are smiling, his eyes are smiling, but I know he’s not joking when he tells me that. “Just stories. You and me, everybody, we’re a set of stories, and what those stories are is what makes us what we are. Same thing for whites as skins. Same thing for a tribe and a city and a nation and the world. It’s all these stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are.
“We got to stop forgetting and get back to remembering. We got to stop asking for things, stop waiting for people to give us the things we think we need. All we really need is the stories. We have the stories and they’ll give us the one thing nobody else can, the thing we can only take for ourselves, because there’s nobody can give you back your pride. You’ve got to take it back yourself.
“You lose your pride and you lose everything. We don’t want to know the stories, because we don’t want to remember. But we’ve got to take the good with the bad and make ourselves whole again, be proud again. A proud people can never be defeated. They lose battles, but they’ll never lose the war, because for them to lose the war you’ve got to go out and kill each and every one of them, everybody with even a drop of the blood. And even then, the stories will go on. There just won’t be any skins left to hear them.”
This Coyote he’s always getting in trouble. One day he’s sitting at a park bench, reading a newspaper, and this cop starts to talk big to one of the skin girls, starts talking mean, starts pushing her around. Coyote’s feeling chivalrous that day, like he’s in a white man’s movie, and he gets into a fight with the cop. He gets beat up bad and then more cops come and they take him away, put him in jail.
The judge he turns Coyote into a mouse for a year so that there’s Coyote, got that sam
e lopsided grin, got that sharp muzzle and those long ears and the big bushy tail, but he’s so small now you can hold him in the palm of your hand.
“Doesn’t matter how small you make me,” Coyote he says to the judge. “I’m still Coyote.”
Albert he’s so serious now. He gets out of jail and he goes back to living in the factory. Kids’ve torn down that wall of his, so he gets back to fixing it right, gets back to sharing food and brewing tea and helping the skin girls out when he can, gets back to telling stories. Some people they start thinking of him as a shaman and call him by an old Kickaha name.
Dan Whiteduck he translates the name for Billy Yazhie, but Billy he’s not quite sure what he’s heard. Know-more-truth, or No-more-truth?
“You spell that with a ‘K’ or what?” Billy he asks Albert.
“You take your pick how you want to spell it,” Albert he says.
Billy he learns how to pronounce that old name and that’s what he uses when he’s talking about Albert. Lots of people do. But most of us we just keep on calling him Albert.
One day this Coyote decides he wants to have a powwow, so he clears the trash from this empty lot, makes the circle, makes the fire. The people come but no one knows the songs anymore, no one knows the drumming that the dancers need, no one knows the steps. Everybody they’re just standing around, looking at each other, feeling sort of stupid, until Coyote he starts singing, Ya-ha-hey, ya-ha-hey, and he’s stomping around the circle, kicking up dirt and dust.
People they start to laugh, then, seeing Coyote playing the fool.
The Ivory and the Horn Page 33