by B. B. Wurge
“And don’t be smart,” she added.
I wasn’t trying to be smart; just polite. But I let it go, because there was no point in arguing. I turned and started to look through the museum. It seemed to fill up the four or five rooms of the downstairs part of the house. The first room didn’t look promising. It was mainly full of brick-brack stuck with price tags, jewelry and shiny rocks and bits of carved wood that didn’t have much to do with Native Americans. Also Shirley was standing behind the counter glaring at me, and she made me nervous. I sidled out to the next room. I had only got there when the bell on the door tinkled and I heard Shirley yelp, “Goodness! What is it!”
I had a pretty good idea what it was. I looked back into the first room and saw my dad stepping into the museum.
“Hello,” he said cheerfully, bounding across the room to the counter. “I’d like to look around.”
“You’d what?” she said faintly, hanging onto the counter.
“Look through the exhibits. I think I just saw my son come in. Yes, there he is.” He waved at me, and I waved back.
She looked him up and down and tried to speak a few times. Then she took a breath to steady herself and said, her voice a little more shrill than before, “It’s ten dollars for an adult. But it’ll be twenty for you. You’re about the size of two adults. I don’t suppose a thing like you has any money?”
Of course he did, and he put a twenty-dollar bill onto the counter. She picked it up and looked it over suspiciously. “All right,” she said. “You have half an hour. Don’t touch anything if it has a sign on it that says don’t touch.”
By that time five or six faces were peering into the front window of the house, looking at Dad. I recognized the man next door who had come down from his roof. He was still holding his broom. There were other people too; we seemed to have brought out most of the town. Shirley strode over to the door and snarled, “What do you all want? You plan on paying the fee, or are you just going to block my door?”
“Shirley,” one man said, “what is that?”
“Don’t point at my customers!” she snapped. “If the Sasquach wants to come down out of a snow storm and look at my collection, he’s welcome to, so long as he pays. If none of you want to pay the ten dollars to get in, you better clear off.”
Of course, none of them wanted to pay, so they left the window.
“Now,” Shirley said to us, “I’ ll give you thirty-one minutes, as a bonus, because those people were rude to you and I don’t tolerate any rudeness. You better get cracking, though, because in thirty-one minutes you’ll have to pay up a second time.”
Dad and I thanked her politely. When we stepped into the next room, Dad slid up to me and said in a low voice, “Man, what a bat! Look at the crazy junk she’s put together. I hope there’s something useful buried in here.”
The stuffed eagle looked like it would rather be someplace else.
9
The first thing I saw was a skull. A human skull, yellowed and covered in dust and with a card taped to its forehead that said, “Do not touch!” I couldn’t help it. I looked around to make sure nobody was watching, and I tapped on it with my fingernail. It made a plastic sound. When I looked closely, I could see the seams where the plastic pieces had been stuck together in the factory. It looked so real that it gave me the creeps anyway.
Next to the skull was a stuffed eagle hanging from the ceiling on wires, its wings spread out about five feet across. It was wider than I was tall. I knew it was real, because it was moldy and frayed and falling apart, and had bald patches on its wings and back, in addition to the natural bald patch on its head. Its mouth was turned down at the corners and its glassy eyes stared at me as if it were saying, “Ugh! Get me out of here!” But I couldn’t do anything for it.
Next I came across an old fashioned, square piano that was broken and had about half its keys left. I could see that a skull might be related to Indians, since they presumably had skulls the same as any other people, and I could see how an eagle might have lived in the same general area as the Indians, but I didn’t understand how the piano fit into the equation. A tag on the instrument said, “Pianos were sometimes used by settlers who lived near the Indians.” That seemed like a stretch to me. It seemed like the museum was a collection of broken junk that had somehow accumulated over the years and was nine-tenths fraud.
The whole house was dim, because so many shelves and cabinets blocked the windows and the unblocked parts of the windows were covered in dust. A glass case loomed out of the shadows, and I saw a stuffed lamb in it. I stared at the lamb for a few seconds, wondering what it had done, but I couldn’t see anything remarkable about it. Next to the lamb, a bookshelf contained neat rows of stones that had been picked up around the area. Some of them were round and polished and sparkling with minerals, and some of them were regular gray blobs, and all of them were dusty. Next to the rocks, hung up on the wall, was a tomahawk. It was a hatchet with a stone axe head and a carved wooden handle and feathers hanging from the end of the handle. It was so old and gray and so delicately carved that for the first time I was convinced I was seeing a real Indian artifact. I stared at that tomahawk for a while and wondered if it had been used to kill anybody. It made the shivers go down my spine.
Next to the tomahawk, a rake and a shovel leaned against the wall, along with a dried up wooden fence post with some twists of rusty barbed wire stapled to it. I suppose the farm implements represented the settlers again; but the shovel looked like it might have been bought at Sears.
As I was studying a table with old Dutch coins displayed under the glass top, my dad called me to the other side of the room. I had to walk carefully around the tables and chairs and claptrap everywhere. I almost tripped over a wooden crate of old fashioned soda bottles. My dad was staring at a map that was framed and hung on the wall. I could hardly see it in the dimness.
“Look,” he said eagerly, pointing with his gigantic finger. “It’s just what we need. A map of the tribal territories. Leo made land around Connecticut or Rhode Island and that would have put him right in with the Mahican tribe. That’s the big yellow patch here, you see. They’d have taken him inland to their capital village, next to the Hudson River. Only it wasn’t called that of course. It’s labeled ‘Mahicanituck. ’ Much nicer name for a river!”
I touched the map gently with my finger. “Look Dad, their capital city’s called. . . .” I had to pause and think about it; “Pempotowwuthut-Muhhecannewuw. Wow. That’s a name.”
“He must have gone there,” my dad said. “That’s the most likely place. It’s right around Albany, so we’re going in exactly the correct direction. Right up the Hudson Valley. Let’s take a look at those books.”
About a dozen giant old hard covers were stacked on top of each other in a dark corner of the room. My dad was too big to fit into the corner, so I had to crouch down and scan the titles. One of them was, “The Gambler” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I didn’t think that had anything to do with Indians. About halfway down I found a book called “Tribes of the North East,” which looked promising. My dad stood guard in case Shirley came snooping around, and I pulled the book out of the stack. We took it to a window and leafed through it.
“Listen to this, Jem,” Dad said, half reading and half paraphrasing. “The Mahicans were a democratic nation of about forty villages. The leader or sachem lived in Albany, New York. I mean, in Pempotowwuthut-Muhhecannewuw. Then, in 1609, Jem, think about it, only about 90 years after Leonardo, Henry Hudson came swaggering in with a band of Dutch settlers. Then it’s the same old story. It’s horrible. Fighting, disease, relocation, and the Mahicans were mostly gone from the area. Well. It’ll be hard to find any lore from before Henry Hudson, since he mostly stamped it out.”
“Keep reading Dad,” I said. “Maybe something will turn up.”
“Here’s the Legend of the Geshoch. The sun, it says. No, that’s not it.”
“What about,” I said, pointing to the next page, “the Le
gend of the Mahkwa. That looks like a bear.”
“Right,” he said. “But it doesn’t seem informative for us.”
“Then what about the Legend of the Cave?” I said. The book had only one short paragraph on the legend of the cave. As Dad began to read it to himself I could hear his breath sucking in sharply. I read it over his arm, and this is what it said:
“According to legend, long before the Dutch came, an old white man built a pair of wings that allowed him to fly. Every day he flew up to a cave high on a cliff in the Catskill Mountains. Nobody else could reach the cave, and in solitude he communed with his magic. The cave was considered to be a holy place and is said to be near Ipskunk, New York, South of Albany and twenty miles west of the Grand Skid Cinema Complex, a must-see for cinema lovers.”
I could see the book trembling in Dad’s hands. “Jem,” he said, in a hoarse whisper.
“I see it Dad,” I whispered back. I was just as excited as he was. “That’s it. Now we know where to go.”
A voice barked out from behind us and startled us so much that we jumped and turned around. When my dad landed again on the floor, the whole room shook, and the shelves rattled, and items clattered on the floor all around us. The eagle swung on its wires and looked like it was trying to fly away.
“Time’s up!” Shirley said. “And you’re touching the exhibit! That book’s an exhibit! Didn’t I tell you not to touch anything?”
“It doesn’t have a sign on it,” I said, “so we thought it was okay.”
She slapped her hand on the book with a bang, and when her hand came away, underneath was a post-it note that said, “Do not touch!” She glared at us and said, “It’s got a sign now, and you’re still touching it.”
I held it out to her, and she snatched it away.
“I didn’t know Sasquach could read,” she said, peering at Dad through her glasses.
“Not only can I read,” Dad said, “but I’d like to buy that book.”
She stared at him, and then glared at the book in her hands. “That’ll be thirty dollars,” she said. “That’s a fine old book. You have thirty dollars?”
Dad had a wad of cash tucked into his boot, and he took it out and paid for the book. As we were leaving the museum, Shirley snarled at us, “You have a good day.” Then she grumbled, “I suppose a Sasquach has to go to school and learn to read, same as anybody. I wonder what he does for a living, though. Rescues snowmobilers, maybe. Seems to make a good income.” I don’t think she was really a mean person inside. I think it was just the way her voice came out. A lot of people in New York City are that way too.
Noma.
10
When we left the town that afternoon, a crowd of about thirty people came out to watch. They talked to each other but they didn’t say anything directly to us. One of them took pictures, and I suspect the pictures ended up framed in the Amazing Indian History Museum. Even the dog came back and wagged its tail and seemed happy about the town party, and ate a sandwich out of somebody’s hand, when the person was looking at us instead of at his sandwich. I sat on top of our wagon, way up where I could look around and see the entire town. Dad pulled us through the slush onto the main road, and then we continued on our way.
We didn’t make very good speed. Dad said it was hard to pull through the slush. Later in the day the temperature began to drop, the slush turned to ice, and the wagon moved even slower and jerked around quite a bit. I didn’t sit on top anymore. I didn’t want to add to Dad’s load, and also I didn’t want to pitch off in a skid. Sometimes a car would go past, driving slowly because of the bad road conditions. It would come up behind us, slow down and open a window, and we would see a person’s head sticking out to ask if we needed help. Then the person would spot Dad. If the person was wearing a hat, the hat would fly off the top of his head. If the person was drinking coffee from a paper cup, the cup would fly out of the window and the coffee would spill all over the snow. If the person had eyeballs, which most of them did, the eyeballs would shoot out about sixteen inches and then rebound back into the person’s head with the optic nerves twisted around. Then the window would roll shut and the car would shoot past, dangerously above the speed limit. I was afraid we’d cause an accident on that icy road and hurt somebody. But mostly I wished that one of those drivers would be nice enough to stop and help us. I was no good pulling the wagon, and I thought my dad could use a break. We were about fifty miles from Ipskunk and the road was beginning to slant uphill.
“Dad,” I said after a while, “I have an idea. Let’s write out a sign, and I can flash it at the cars as they go by. Then somebody might stop and help.”
“Oh brilliant,” Dad said. He was becoming grumpy from the exercise. “Absolutely. We’re obviously not noticeable enough as it is.”
“I thought I could write, ‘Indian Shaman in Bear Costume, Needs Ride.’ Then people wouldn’t be as scared off.”
“What!” my dad said. “Jem! That’s a lie!”
“It’s almost true,” I said. “But if you want to pull that thing for another fifty miles, we can forget the sign.”
He groaned and said, “Oh, go ahead then.”
I took some blank paper and a pen and drew our sign in big block letters. Then we parked the wagon on the roadside and both sat on top of it, side by side, me holding up the sign, Dad leafing through the Tribes book. For a long time nobody drove by. The road was probably never frequently used, and now it was sheeted in ice. The people who lived along it were most likely at home already. The wind blew my dad’s hair around. I didn’t mind if the wind went from me to him. But sometimes it switched around and blew his long wispy orange hair into my face and right up my nose.
“Achoo!” I said. “Dad. When we find that cave, can we live in it? I always wanted to be a cave man.”
Dad looked up from the book, his fingernail pressed down where he had left off reading. “Hm?” he said. “Oh, it’ll be a while before we find it, I expect. Might be in the spring. Or next year. Who knows. There’s probably hundreds of caves we’ll have to explore. But we’ll find it in the end.”
“I wonder,” I said, “if he carved his initials on the wall? You know, ‘LDV wuz here’. Otherwise it’ll be hard to know if we found the right place.”
“That’s a good point,” Dad said. “What exactly did he leave behind? I’m hoping we’ll find the remains of his ornithopter. That was the flying machine he invented. It had leather wings that flapped like a bird’s, and you worked it by pulling on metal handles. The plans are in his notebooks.”
“Maybe we’ll find his skeleton,” I said. “That would be creepy. I don’t know if I’d live in a cave that had a skeleton in it.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you,” Dad said. “Skeletons mainly mind their own business. But Jem, quick, get your sign ready, someone’s coming.”
We watched an old rusty station wagon crawling up the road. When it came near us I held out our sign and waved it around. I thought the car would accelerate as soon as the driver saw Dad, but it didn’t. It stopped next to us and an old lady rolled down the window and looked out. She had to crane her head up to see us, because we were sitting ten feet above the road. At first I thought she might be so old and blind that she hadn’t properly seen Dad. Then I thought that if she was so blind, we might not want her to drive us.
“Hello Indians,” she said cheerfully. She couldn’t have been too blind to read my sign. “My, you look cold out there.” Her face was creased and swirled like a pool of mud that had gotten stirred around with a stick. Under the wrinkles I could see she had wide cheekbones and a high forehead, and her hair, which had gone gray but was still streaked with black, was pulled back behind her head. Her eyes sparkled at us, and all at once I had the thought that she was an Indian, a real one, a Native American, and not fake like we were. She was a tiny woman who could barely see over the steering wheel. She looked about ninety years old. “I don’t think you can fit your wagon in my car,” she said in her cheerful but britt
le old-lady’s voice. “ You can tie it behind, if you like. I think,” she added, looking Dad up and down, “that the boy had better sit in the front seat next to me, and the man in the bear suit had better lie down in back. I don’t suppose you’ll fit otherwise. I do like a big man with a hairy chest.”
Dad winked at me and grinned. He tied our wagon handle to the back bumper with rope, and then crawled into the back seat of the station wagon. He could just fit, his head up against one door and his big feet up against the opposite door. I sat in the front seat and the little old lady drove down the road, very slowly because of the ice everywhere and the wagon in tow.
“What tribe are you from?” she asked politely, looking at my dad in the rear view mirror.
“Well, . . .” Dad said. His voice was muffled because his face was pressed into the door and the padded handle had gone partly into his mouth. “It’s this way. See, we’re . . . what I mean is . . . you could say we’re Mahicans.”
“Oh wonderful!” she said, smiling, her eyes sparkling, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that she knew perfectly well we were not. “You have a wonderful bear suit. It fits you very well. I’m not familiar with the bear species. When I first saw you, I thought you might be a Sumatran orangutan. But I’m sure that you know best.”
“Good God,” Dad said. “Jem! Did you hear that? The lady knows what she’s talking about.”
“Sometimes she does,” the lady said, with a light, tinkling laugh. “Sometimes she doesn’t. What is your Mahican name?”
“Uh,” Dad said. “Carl. Carl Martin. And my son is Jem.”
“Carl Martin,” she repeated in her precise, old lady’s voice. “Jem Martin. Very glad to meet you. Most people call me Noma. It’s short for Nomasis, which means ‘little grandmother’ in Mahican.” She laughed again. “I decided you were probably not a Native America shaman when I saw that you were studying the subject in a book. It seemed most unlikely.”
“Well, okay,” I said, jumping in because my dad had trouble talking around the upholstery. “It’s a little embarrassing, but see, we couldn’t think of any other way to get people to stop for us. Everyone gets scared of my dad and drives away. We thought that if he was an Indian shaman, maybe they’d be less scared, or more curious. And we really wanted to get a ride to Ipskunk.”