In the City of Shy Hunters

by Tom Spanbauer

  Get the fuck out of here, I said. That was Charlie’s pipe.

  It was, True Shot said. That was Charlie’s pipe.

  How did you get it? I said.

  I need your help, Will, True Shot said.

  Who are you? I said.

  We’ve got something to steal, True Shot said, As soon as we’ve got it in our hands, I’ll tell you all about me, True Shot said. And Ruby, and Sebastian Cooke.

  And Charlie, True Shot said. I promise.

  AT THE CORNER of Central Park West was the Sabrett guy selling hot dogs. I saw True Shot’s face when he smelled the hot dogs, and I knew underneath True Shot’s mirrors his eyes were quivering like light through sycamores for a hot dog, but I didn’t buy him one.

  True Shot—red bandanna, New Age mirrors, crew cut, sweatshirt, black sweatpants over pink bikini underwear, combat boots—never seen him look so beautiful.

  Up the stairs of the Museum of Unnatural History, past the statue of Theodore Roosevelt, past the bronze horse testicles, past the terrible things done to the world by the father, into the big hall with dinosaurs, past ALL DARING AND COURAGE, ALL IRON ENDURANCE OF MISFORTUNE, MAKE FOR A FINER, NOBLER TYPE OF MANHOOD.

  True Shot walked by where you had to pay and I walked by too, and this time the woman didn’t stop me.

  Once more I followed True Shot through Eastern Woodlands and Plains, Asian Peoples, past Mecca upstairs, to the Primates of the Eastern Woodlands, and then to the tipi.

  The image of a tipi.

  Behind the thick glass was the tipi scene, Native American Art Family: two women and two men, all wearing buckskin and beadwork on their buckskins.

  In the museum, to the right of us, there was a man and a woman with a child in a blue stroller, a tall African American woman with her hair in a French twist, wearing a long black leather coat and carrying a leather purse, and a white guy with a mustache wearing green coveralls. That was all. I didn’t see any other people. No guards.

  True Shot was standing in front of the glass in front of the Native American Art Family. He spread his arms out wide and looked at the ceiling, then he looked straight into the glass.

  It is this way, True Shot said, real loud and wavy, like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I’ve Got a Dream speech.

  I don’t think you know me, True Shot said. My name is Peter Morales. I was born in Puerto Rico and came here to the United States with my mother and father. My mother was a Mexican woman. She loved me very much. She called me Gordito because I eat too much. My father was from the upper classes, and he wanted me to get a good education and become a dentist like him, but that path was not for me.

  True Shot still stood, arms stretched out, his gray FUCK THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS sweatshirt hanging over the black sweatpants. The man and woman pushing the blue baby stroller walked into the next room. The woman with the French twist hair was walking closer and closer to us. I tried to get True Shot’s attention so he’d see her, but True Shot was too busy standing with his arms out wide, talking talking.

  It is this way, True Shot said. In my time, I have lied about many things, even lied about who I am. I have stolen. For many years I was a professional pickpocket. I’ve sold drugs, taken drugs, been a stupid drunk, been a pimp, whored myself my whole life. I’ve never been in love. I killed a man once—a white man on the subway. And I have to say there’s a man out there in this city right now, a cop, who given the chance I’d drive a wooden stake through his heart.

  The African American woman with the French twist was walking closer and closer to us. She bent closer to a window, shielding her eyes from the glare.

  I am not especially generous, True Shot said, Or kind, or smart. I think the best thing about me is that I found Ruby Prestigiacomo, found Fred, and found this one here next to me, my true friend William of Heaven.

  Forgive me, True Shot said. I don’t know a lot about spiritual matters. Only from books, the real True Shot, and Fred. Only recently did I get sober and find out about my own sacred Taino and Aztec roots.

  The woman with the French twist walked right up to the Native American Art Family, stood almost right in front of True Shot, and looked in, looking especially hard at the woman braiding the other woman’s hair.

  I have done a terrible thing, True Shot said. I was given a medicine bag, a pipe, from a very wise old man named Fred, who told me to always use the pipe in a good way. Fred told me that when I held the pipe I was taking part in the universe and was, in fact, the universe myself. Fred told me always to follow the red road and live in a good way. But I have lied. In front of the pipe, I claimed to be someone I am not. Consequently the pipe was taken from me, a pipe much cherished by me and also, as it turns out, by William of Heaven.

  The woman with the French twist knelt down; leather sounds when she knelt. She reached out and touched the glass.

  Three or four years ago, True Shot said, I pissed on this glass and marked this spot for my own. And now I have come to take this medicine bundle—this pipe held by an image of an Indian man inside this glass in this Museum of Unnatural History. I have not come to do harm or be disrespectful in any way. I have come to take the pipe back home to its people. I feel this is my task. This is why I was bom, to take this prodigal pipe back to its people.

  Here is the truth, True Shot said. I don’t know the red road, I don’t know if I’m traveling it or not. I don’t know the rituals of the pipe, even though I was shown once by Fred.

  I know about Crossover, and about fools and pharisees. I know the story of Wolf Swamp. I know the Jewish story. And I know about the iron horse.

  So I figure this is enough, True Shot said, This truth that I speak. And that this path my heart has chosen is the correct path.

  True Shot stood there, his arms out wide. You could hear people in other rooms walking. Still no guards. I figured True Shot had a skeleton key or a pry bar or something to get one of the doors open, but he just stood there, arms sticking out.

  The African American woman stood up.

  The moment that after you’re different.

  Everything is there all along and you just don’t realize it. Just like that, I was the still point in the turning world, inside me and outside me was the mystery.

  The one Art Family guy inside the window—not the one holding the pipe and the pipe bag, the other guy—just like that, all at once—abracadabra!—this guy walked behind the guy holding the pipe and opened the door on our right.

  Ho! he said. Welcome! O mitakuye oyasin. Come on in. Make yourself comfortable.

  True Shot walked past the woman with the French twist and I followed. She looked at me when I passed her. I smiled. Stopped smiling.

  Shit happens.

  She turned her face away real quick.

  True Shot stepped inside the door and I stepped inside and the Native American guy closed the door behind us.

  Just us injuns relaxing here in our tipi, the Native American guy said. Just me and my family. The women are playing dice and my name’s Gray Wolf and I’m just standing here and my friend Yellow Wolf here is holding a medicine pipe and a pipe bag and a stone bowl.

  What took you guys so long? Gray Wolf said. We been waiting here forever.

  When Gray Wolf said We’ve been waiting here forever, everybody started laughing big and hard—even the baby in the cradle. The women and Gray Wolf and Yellow Wolf were laughing so hard, tears were rolling down over their high cheekbones.

  That kind of laughing is like puking. Once somebody starts it, you can’t help but get in on it too.

  Then True Shot was talking in Indian to Gray Wolf and Yellow Wolf and the women. True Shot was saying a lot more than Où est la bibliothèque. It was pretty cold in the tipi—too much air-conditioning, I figured—but the fire was warm, and it was smoky in there and the smoke smelled wood-fire good. Other smells too: buckskin and horse shit.

  A gust of wind hit the tipi and the hides moved in and out. I looked down at the fire and the fire was a real fire, an
d the smoke was real smoke. Then I took a good look at the Indian people and they were as real as True Shot or me. I looked out to where the glass was and there was no glass—no African American woman with French-twist hair staring in on us.

  My body felt like the first day I did the Hippodrome Stand on Chub. Like it was natural to be flying, except I was standing in one place, on the earth. I bent down and picked up some dirt and felt the dirt between my fingers, smelled the dirt—it was the kind that was dust when it’s dry and sticky mud when it rains, Kind of like the dirt we buried Ruby in, the dirt like in the rectangle of earth where I’d plant the cherry tree, and the more I looked at the dirt, the more it was Idaho dirt, sandy.

  The baby in the cradle board started fussing a bit, and his mother—the woman whose hair was being braided—crawled to him and said some words in her language.

  All of a sudden I had to pee something fierce.

  I walked clockwise, like you’re supposed to in a tipi, toward the tipi flap. When I opened the tipi flap, I had the thought that the glass window used to be where the flap was, but I told myself not to think about it.

  Nothing could have prepared me for what was outside. The sun was setting and the land was rolling rolling green and gold with touches of burnt red to the horizon. There was one big tree, a big old grandmother cottonwood tree, and there were tipis all around, smoke coming out of them.

  All around me, everywhere, I was surrounded by Indians, most of the people in buckskin, some men wearing cowboy hats and wool coats with buttons. I wanted to look real close at them and see how they were dressed, but you don’t do that sort of thing in New York City.

  I walked away from the tipi, over to some brush by a slough where a bunch of mustangs were standing in the water. Even pissing was fun. The yellow of the sunset made my pee look fancy. And my pink penis in the yellow-orange setting-sun light, so lovely.

  There were horses and wagons. Kids running around like a bunch of wild Indians. There was a little hill—not even a hill, really, just a big mound of rolling earth.

  After I buttoned up, I walked up on the mound just as the top of the sun went down and all at once everything glowed gold. I looked down at my body, at my hands and legs, at my feet. My feet on the earth.

  Home sweet home was my feet on dirt, the June grass fancy with wind, the smell of horse shit, wet slough, charcoal, my hair blowing in the wind. Sky above me blue-blue and orange, big white fluffy clouds going on and on forever.

  For a moment, I knew I was dead.

  What I’d died of was love.

  When I pulled the tipi flap aside to walk back in, it wasn’t just a tipi anymore. It was a huge lodge and there were hundreds of Indians sitting around, some of them dancing, four men on a drum singing a Heya-heya-heya song.

  True Shot was sitting between Gray Wolf and Yellow Wolf, and Yellow Wolf was passing the pipe to True Shot. Then, just like that, I was sitting next to True Shot, and when True Shot handed the pipe to me, True Shot’s face was the face of Charlie 2Moons.

  I felt a whole big goodness inside me, a feeling like heaven itself, a finger drawing a circle around my heart, and I smiled at Charlie and Charlie shook the pipe a little so I’d take it.

  Then the pipe was in my hands, the whole universe in my hands, and I was the universe too. The only way out is in. I puffed on the pipe, blew smoke to the four directions, blew smoke to the sky, then to the earth, and when I went to pass the pipe on, the pipe was my lovely erect pink penis.

  And I turned to Charlie to show Charlie my lovely erect pink penis, but Charlie wasn’t Charlie. Charlie was True Shot, and True Shot and I were standing in the Museum of Unnatural History.

  THE AFRICAN AMERICAN woman with the French twist and the long leather coat and leather purse was just getting to her feet in front of the glass.

  For a moment I thought True Shot was on fire, there was so much smoke coming off him. Then I looked down and I was smoking too.

  Charcoal.

  There was a snake, a diamondback rattler, right there in front of us, curled up, shaking its tail.

  True Shot said some Indian words and the snake unwound its long body, rolled off on the shiny floor, and slipped around the comer.

  I went to say some words but it wasn’t any use. It was like the one time after work when I smoked heroin with John the Bartender—I thought I was talking but I was only thinking I was talking.

  The Native American Art Family were back in their places, the two women on the left and the two men on the right, baby on the cradle board. The women were sitting by the game of sticks on the floor and the one woman was braiding the other’s hair. But Yellow Wolf was just staring down at a green plastic Star Wars sword in his hands, as phony as the fire.

  True Shot? I said, Did you get it?

  True Shot lifted up the medicine bundle.

  I got it, he said.

  I could smell the wet slough and the earth and the horses and the fire and the sunset in the buckskin and beads and porcupine quills of the bag.

  The pipe is inside? I said.

  It is this way, True Shot said.

  WE BOUGHT COFFEE and doughnuts at a Dunkin Donuts, and True Shot and I drove down to lower Manhattan, Door of the Dead van winding around stone outcroppings, True Shot shifting down to second through the narrow streets of Wall Street. Every once in a while a single black Mercedes would pass, but there was no other traffic. On the comers, huge unrelenting lights from above; then, beyond, only dark, asphalt, steam rolling out of holes, monoliths. Not a soul in sight.

  True Shot parked Door of the Dead van in a place you weren’t supposed to park. DO NOT ENTER, the sign said. But the big chain across was unhooked, so True Shot drove in over it and parked next to the water. Out in the harbor, Our Lady of the Paintbrush was the same color as my father’s old Dodge pickup.

  I was new-shoe stiff at first, afraid about cops and DO NOT ENTER and the medicine bundle on a blanket in the back of Door of the Dead van. But then True Shot started talking, and I wasn’t afraid anymore.

  True Shot had a rag under his seat, and he pulled out the rag and blew his nose. He sat for a while like you do when you’re trying to get it together. The plastic statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard, the green sequin-framed Brigitte Bardot glued next to the jockey box, Our Lady of the Paintbrush out the windshield.

  True Shot pushed in the Sioux tape, and the song was all wavy for a while; then the Sioux tape was a drum, a heartbeat drum inside Door of the Dead van.

  I didn’t say anything because of the heartbeat drum. I just stared out onto the water.

  As I lit the cigarette, the World Trade Center was in the rearview mirror, and I turned around to look. The World Trade Center buildings were so beyond human they’d disappeared.

  I was born in Jackson Heights, True Shot said. My father was Puerto Rican, a dentist. He considered himself Spanish, not Puerto Rican. He claimed there was no Taino blood in him, but he was a liar. His mother was half Taino. My mother was a Mexican woman, a housewife, and my father considered her lower class.

  There was never a sweeter person to live on God’s green earth than my mother.

  I was the only child, True Shot said. Distant father, overindulgent mother, same old story. In the early sixties, I started reading the beat poets: Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac. In 1964, I bought a Dodge van—not Door of the Dead van, it was a ’58—and after reading Dharma Bums decided I’d make the all-American trek across the country. Taos, New Mexico, is where I was headed. I was going to find me an Indian chief and we were going to go on a vision quest and I’d find the meaning of life.

  I did meet an Indian chief, True Shot said. His name was Hanford Littlejohn. But instead of a vision quest, Hanford and I started dealing marijuana. Lived pretty high for a couple years, till I got busted in Phoenix. Spent six years in prison for selling a controlled substance.

  Prison was one of the best things that ever happened to me, True Shot said. My cell mate was this Sioux guy. H
is name was True Shot.

  The cigarette papers were in my shirt pocket. I reached for them, started rolling cigarettes. True Shot just sat there, the sound of the Sioux drums, the ocean hitting the rampart, seagulls, and one of those bells you hear way out on a buoy in the dark.

  True Shot took a sip of coffee, wiped his lips.

  The real True Shot and I got as close as two men can get without fucking, True Shot said. The real True Shot was at Wounded Knee, True Shot said, But not me.

  For four years, night after night, True Shot and I talked. He taught me Lakota, told me Lakota stories about the sun dance, the sweat lodge, the ghost dance. He told me of the Lakotas’ final humiliation at Wounded Knee.

  My friend True Shot was in for life, True Shot said. He killed a cop, shot him in the forehead because the cop called him a dirty heathen savage son of a bitch.

  One morning I woke up, True Shot said—I slept on the bottom bunk—and my friend True Shot’s legs were hanging right next to my eyeballs. At first I thought he was just sitting on his bed with his legs dangling over. But then I stood up and saw the rope around his neck.

  I think I cried the whole next year, True Shot said.

  Fog drifted in over Our Lady of the Paintbrush, first around the light, then around her head. The lights of the boats on the water below her shone green and red and amber in the fog. The slow monotonous bell. The water against the ramparts.

  I grew my hair long, True Shot said, Wore it braided Indian style, and read every book I could get my hands on about Native American culture—mostly Plains Indians, mostly Sioux, the Indians of the Northwest, and the Hopi and the Navajo.

  When I got out of the pen, True Shot said, I didn’t know what to do. I just thought I didn’t want to be no pendejo Puerto Rican anymore. I hitchhiked back to New York City. My mother was dead and my father had remarried. He was a golfer and lived in Washington Heights. He gave me a hundred bucks and wished me well.

  True Shot zipped up the faux leopardskin coat. His breath was white exhaust coming out his mouth. The light from Our Lady of the Paintbrush made True Shot look like Rose’s Buddha.