Solar Storms

by Linda Hogan

  The young men carried pieces of pipe and dark gray stones. With Auntie’s truck, Tulik pushed a rusted-out old truck to the site, me sitting inside on its cracked seat, steering, making sure it didn’t go off the road. On the way, I noticed that the asphalt road was already bending and cracking.

  The barricade, full of clutter and old oil barrels which the men had filled with sand and dirt, grew quickly.

  And then we waited. As the first train approached our barricade, I was nervous, my hands sweating. When the train stopped, a cheer went up. I remember the joy of it, seeing the train, honking and impatient, come to a chugging halt, waiting for us to open the way.

  But our victory proved to be a small one. Soon, in order to protect our blockade, we were forced to arm ourselves and stand guard. How quickly things turned. Our hearts fell as we realized the men were willing to shoot us for these dams. Bush now carried, inside the pocket of her cardigan, the small handgun that had been a gift from Husk. I didn’t like the feel of how things were going, nor did Tulik, but we knew there was no going back. We had few options. We could open the railroad, which would be admitting defeat. We could lose the land without a fight, but then what would be left for the people? In any case, it seemed there was nothing to lose from fighting.

  It wasn’t long before a number of police cars drove into the territory and a good number of men emerged slowly from the cars, afraid of us, ready to fire, their eyes alert, their movements careful.

  I studied them with a kind of objectivity new to me. They were young. Some were my age, and when they faced us, I saw that they had bony-looking throats and adolescent faces. They were dressed in uniforms that were too warm for day, not warm enough for night, and they were uncomfortable with the few lingering mosquitoes.

  But mostly, I remember thinking that there was so much distance between them and this world of my people I had entered; they were boys from the city who had probably, until now, believed we no longer existed. They had long admired the photos and stories of our dead, only to find us alive and threatening. Their worries in life, too, were years and miles away from ours. And they were too young to see beyond their own skin, let alone to care about other skins, darker and older, skins that knew land, animals, and water.

  As I stood there on the road that became the front line, looking at them, a light wind blew their scent toward me, carrying the odors of shaving lotion, coffee, suntan cream, and tobacco smoke.

  MISS NETT loved our young men. They were warriors, she said, although they would never have called themselves that, at least not the locals, who said that only city Indians came up with names and labels for themselves, that the rest lived their way and didn’t talk about it. But still they were standing up for the people, all of them, and even if we lost, they would have self-respect.

  Miss Nett’s eyes shone when she saw the young men, and she liked to tease them and make them blush. At the post one day, in her strong accent, she said she was going to glue their AIM buttons above the toilet seat. They laughed and looked down and loved her back for all that, because a laugh was what they needed and they knew she was in this war with them and she, like Dora-Rouge, had nothing to lose. So she could squeeze their arm muscles all she wanted, and she did.

  Miss Nett and Dora-Rouge became an awe-inspiring pair. Short, dark, white-haired, bent over, tight-muscled Miss Nett pushed Dora-Rouge’s chair from place to place, keeping her out of the sun, or putting her in it when Dora-Rouge wanted “real” light and energy and power. Dora-Rouge merely had to point a crooked finger and Miss Nett, as we had done in our canoes, would take her that direction. At the house, they told stories I couldn’t understand, but I knew they were more than a little seamy, judging from the way they laughed. And they gave speeches to us and to the police: Dora-Rouge said to the workers one day, “We were happy before you came here. We treated the land well. We treated the animals well. Our children wanted to live.”

  And Miss Nett said, “The earth loves our people. Even in a hard place. The water loves us. We live in the place of its birth. This is where rivers are born and we’re going to protect them.”

  Sometimes, too, the two women were harsh with the young men, such as the day two young men arrived at the protest. They had been drinking, and violence was always a seed the women did not want planted. As older women, Miss Nett and Dora-Rouge were able to do what the rest of us couldn’t; they frisked the two men. “Let me feel that strong arm,” said Miss Nett, a blue scarf around her neck. The young man had known her since he was a child. He let her. She found a knife on one of the boys, put it in her pocket, and threw their liquor out, emptying their cups on the ground. One of them cried and wanted to stop her. But she herself was crying. “No,” she said. “No more.”

  And Bush told them gently to come back sober. “Tomorrow,” she said. “We need you. We really do.”

  The next day they were there.

  SOMEHOW WE KEPT the young police and workers from clearing the railroad track. Dora- Rouge placed her chair right in front of them. Now and then she tried to stare one of them down, as if she could transmit into them her knowledge, the sum of human emotions, as if she could speak her life to them through her eyes or send them away and show them her anger and determination. They were uneasy about her. She was old. She was in a wheelchair. And her eyes said she was willing to die. What they didn’t know was that she had a pact with water and that it was signed with something deeper than pen and ink, deeper even than blood. In her, they saw only fierceness and determination; their youthful eyes missed such things as duty and obligation.

  One evening, as we sat outside listening to the roaring of machines at the dam site, Bush said to me in an intimate voice, “I always wanted a chicken farm. I wanted to raise tomatoes. I wanted a kitchen painted yellow. Never did I think I’d fight soldiers and police. And look at those boys. They are so young. They don’t even know history. They thought this place was barren. Now they are here. They will do as they are told. They don’t have the courage not to. They are afraid and dangerous.”

  It was true, what she said. One wrong move, a word misspoken, and there would be war. Even now I think of this when I see young men, that they are unshaped and dangerous. And these were in terrain they didn’t know, one with forces and powers and beliefs beyond their understanding.

  EARLY ONE EVENING, Bush left in the rattling old truck to drive Miss Nett home. We were surprised when she returned a few hours later, with Miss Nett still in the car seat, weeping, her old hands over her face.

  They walked into the house together, Bush’s arm about the old woman.

  Nett’s territory had already been partly flooded, and now it was all gone: land, human dwellings, the river they lived by. Bush had it on film. When the pictures were developed, they were sad and tragic documents; they showed Miss Nett crying and trying to get the men to stop, her arms held out wide as if she could keep the men from passing through them. She still wore her white apron, tied at the back. An old woman with a rounded back. These were the photographs that would appear in magazines and papers, pictures that would show the world what was happening to the people. Bush had taken one picture of Miss Nett collapsed on the ground, holding it as if to protect it. That night Miss Nett cried, “My children were born there. I was born there.”

  Tulik and Bush helped her into a chair. Dora-Rouge held her hand, sitting beside her. Luce wept in sympathy. Tulik boiled a bundle of bitter-smelling herbs and gave the tea to Miss Nett, who looked so pitiful I could hardly bear to look at her, and before long, the tea quieted her.

  Bush seemed always to be in the thick of things when trouble started, camera in hand. She had a knack for determining where a conflict would arise. She became something of a truth teller, a journalist, and she was certain she could get the photographs to The Nation or The New York Times.

  I looked at the photo of Miss Nett on the ground, the man turned away from her and looking toward the camera. He was gesturing with his hand for Bush to stop, his sharp, wor
ld-eating teeth visible, a pitiful old woman in the foreground.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER one of Bush’s stories and photographs were smuggled out by a man who left in a canoe, a number of Indian men arrived. They’d come through waters and forests to help us, having heard about our grassroots organizing, “swamp roots,” as we called it. We needed them. They were experienced at handling these situations. Their confidence was rock-hard.

  We felt more secure right away—at least I did. The leader was Arlie Caso House, a short, strong Ojibwa man who had been a political prisoner several times, once in Lompoc Prison, and had escaped from every jail that held him. Houdini, he was called. Always his arrests were for political action, never for violence; even so, he frightened people. The wardens feared him because they didn’t know how he managed to pass through narrow spaces and get away. Once he’d escaped through a narrow heat duct. Some of the Indian people thought he possessed magic, that he could become invisible and vanish into sky, distance, even time, that he had the power to control matter, even his own atoms. Like the ancient people, he could cease being matter.

  Arlie was a master strategist. He studied leaders like Sitting Bull, my hero; Geronimo, and Geronimo’s military planner, a woman named Lozen. It was through Geronimo that Arlie said he’d learned to vanish. The Apaches, he told me, had evaded entire armies and million-dollar searches. They had a manner of vanishing completely. I was fascinated by Lozen. She was a healer, a fighter, and a locator of the enemy. She had sung a prayer: “Upon this earth on which we live, Ussen (God) has power. This power is mine for locating the enemy.” Once, Arlie told me, Lozen swam a strong river upstream to steal a horse from the Mexican army in order to save another woman. She died with Geronimo and the others who carried their lives on their fingernails to prison.

  When the government representatives saw Arlie, they stared, openmouthed. They recognized him. They’d thought he was in jail. And the Junior Police, as we called them, looked even more afraid when they saw these new men, mature and strong; their presence changed the terms of the struggle.

  Twelve men came along with Arlie. Bush called them the Apostles. I thought about those fishers of men, how they’d followed Jesus without question. It now seemed so unlikely. I mentioned this to Bush. She said, “It’s the kind of leadership we need.”

  Arlie was calm and careful, although I saw how he could be pushed into becoming fire, one that might rage over prairies and through forests without limit. But his burning was to change this world. He still saw how a world could be. He had beliefs, and in his living so far, he had given up nothing of himself. Unlike so many of us who were lost to weapons of the American world, their tools of television, of bottled spirits and other cruelties, he still had himself. I admired this about him. He remembered who he was, in the same way our elders still held steadfast and tight.

  A few days after the appearance of Arlie, two new men came to help us out. They wore regulation shoes, even though they were dressed in plain clothes and easy to spot as informers just by their manner. Their carelessness about their shoes and their movements showed how little they knew of us. Even if they’d been meticulous, though, we would have recognized them. They had a certain set of the chin, an awkward way of moving, an invisible shell they wore as if to deflect bullets, and they, unlike us, possessed a belief that there would be bullets. All of that together put a strange and wary glint in their eyes, and made their movements exaggerated and unnatural.

  Arlie knew how to handle them. Like the Pueblo leader Popé, a man who led a successful revolt against the Spanish, he always made two plans of action. One he gave to them, the other he passed on to the rest of us, so the informants were always confused and bumbling about. They would meet at a location where Arlie or one of the disciples said the Indian people would be, but no one else arrived. They would wait and then, confused, come looking for us.

  WE NEEDED to cripple their other routes. Even with the railroad tracks blocked, goods were still getting out to other parts of the country by truck. Their blockades only turned back Indians and supporters, and we needed to keep out loggers, oil explorers, and dam builders. It was decided that since the long road of Holy String Town was the essential passage back and forth between towns, the road should be blocked. It would get more attention, they said, than either our peaceful protests or the blockade of the railroad, since the railroad had drawn little interest from those outside the Two-Town area.

  By then, others had managed to slip past the blockade of the railroad, and some tents were set up; others slept in old cars.

  Once again, we put together our own blockade. All of us together dug around for what we could use—ordinary things like an old Volkswagen and chairs from the church. We stationed ourselves at various places, and now, more sophisticated, we used a walkie-talkie to communicate with each other, to tell if anyone was coming, to see how many of us were at the road, at the railroad, and sometimes at the digging sites.

  Now, however, in response to the blockade, the government sent in a special tactical unit. These “soldiers” were older than the security police and they were quiet and ready, a tension inside their skin. They wore dark clothing and bulletproof vests and, unlike the police, who seemed to be my age, these men were experienced. They had semiautomatics and moved like spiders. A few of our men, antagonistic that this special unit had been sent in, yelled “Go home!” but Tulik put a stop to the crying out. “Don’t bully them,” he said. Even I saw the danger, and how vulnerable we were. And worse, the appearance of these older men made the younger police feel more secure, more bold. And sometimes, when I heard the click-click of Bush’s camera, I thought it was the clicking of their guns.

  WE BECAME DIVIDED among ourselves after this. The squadron, the tactical unit, took us to a new depth of seriousness, conflict, and danger. There were now those of us who were against this protest. A few even reasoned with themselves now, thinking perhaps the dams would provide work for the Indian people. They thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. They came forward and said they no longer wanted to hunt in order to survive, especially with the game disappearing so quickly. A few even believed they’d profit off the project. Or maybe it was fear; maybe they knew the governments would still war against us, might even kill us. Whatever it was, this was the hardest part, not having the people united. Tulik and Auntie were heartbroken to have to go against any of their own beloved people. And our division provided ammunition for the spokesman of the dam builders. He said, “It’s them against each other.” It was just what they wanted.

  Arguments were only the first act of division. Then there was fear. One day a piece of black cloth had been tacked to Tulik’s door. When I saw it, I stopped dead still and gazed at it. I knew nothing about it, except that it felt ominous. My skin rose up with the bodily memory of danger. I was afraid to open the door and pass through it, as if this door would open to something cold and unholy. I went to the window and spoke with Auntie. “Auntie,” I said, “do you know what this means?”

  She sang to it and took it down, then buried it outside the house. “It’s okay now, Maniki.”

  Another day, there was a dying crow. Someone had captured the large black bird and before they placed it inside the door of Tulik’s house they had painted one claw red, the other black, and sewn its eyes closed. I heard a sound and went toward the door and saw the crow, still alive, still fluttering, wanting to walk away on its enameled claws, but unable to see where it might go. It cried out. It was a horrible sight. I screamed.

  Bush came running. “My God,” she said. She chased it, picked it up. It bit her. She removed the stitches with tiny scissors, and let it fly. But the terror was inside us now, running through our veins, settling in our stomachs and chests. We were in this so deep there was no turning back. I was afraid. I wept.

  Later, shots were fired into the house, a window broken. Dust flew up from where bullets left holes in the wood. Aurora screamed out in terror.

  “They could have killed us!” Aunt
ie yelled.

  Much later, long after Tulik put a piece of cardboard over the broken window, we could still see bits of sky through the holes. Tulik tried to lighten up our mood. “Our air-conditioning,” he called it. But Auntie, afraid she had put us in danger, moved into the post with its thick, bulletproof walls.

  HARDLY ANYONE outside of Two-Town knew what was happening. There was no press, no truth telling, and whenever questioned, the officials denied any wrongdoing. “It’s them against each other,” they’d repeat when anyone got wind of the events, and it was true; we were reduced to that.

  Then one day Lake Tanka to the northeast of us disappeared. The water was cut off, rerouted into a reservoir that had been built to the south of us. As the lake evaporated and sank into earth, we were silent.

  After that, Miss Nett didn’t tease the young men any longer, nor did she play cards. Her back seemed more bent than it had been. But before she’d let herself die of heartache, she said, she was going to take out some of the dam builders with her. And she said she didn’t mind being unable to look up. “I love the ground,” she said. “It’s my God.”

  NINETEEN

  AT TIMES NOW I lie in bed. The room is silver with moonlight, and I think of it—of what might have happened, what could have been won, what was lost. I remember only the strongest of memories: what it felt like to persist that way in the heat and the rain, to be wet and cold, to stand up with my people. We had pride. We were in something together. We no longer allowed others to call us Fat-Eaters. We were again the Beautiful People.

  I don’t remember exactly when I noticed the nights were darker and longer. Time was different in the north. It seemed to happen all at once, the darker nights. But, as with the sleepers on their beautiful island, electricity did not matter so much to us. It had brought only a temporary stay of darkness, a brief light that had passed through on its way up into the black, dense universe. We didn’t miss it.