One String Guitar
Page 23
As I listened, I liked to let my fingers fumble in search of her face and touch the rapid eye movement of her eyelids, as she talked or dreamt or both. That night, Felicia told me about the evil spirit Inyan, and his son, Gnaski, on the same night she told me about Raymond Yellow Thunder’s murder.
“Raymond Yellow Thunder was an old ranch hand living in Gordon, Nebraska the day he decided to have a few too many beers at the American Legion bar. Two white brothers got a hold of him and forced him to take his clothes off. They beat him in front of everyone and threw him in the trunk of their car and drove around Gordon for hours. A kid found Raymond Yellow Thunder’s body a week later in the bed of a pickup truck on a used car lot.”
Everyone knew about the murder that’d taken place a few weeks earlier. I’d heard about all of the pain in our land. I’d known about it, the way I knew about the poverty on the res the way I knew the color of my skin or the texture of my own hair. But Felicia, she had the gift of bringing light to old ways and making them shine all over again.
“See, in our ancient ways, we know about the devil. His name is Gnaski. And while Tate, the wind, was busy breathing life into the first people of the universe, demon Gnaski was running around the world creating diseases, poisonous plants and the ways of darkness. That murder is the work of Gnaski.” Felicia told me about the ancient stories of our people.
“Gnaski and his father Inyan were there on the night Yellow Thunder was murdered.”
Felicia spoke to me in a murmur and the images of her stories pushed into my imagination like bruises on an infant’s skin.
“He didn’t cry,” she whispered. “Raymond Yellow Thunder didn’t cry when they threw him in the American Legion Hall. Some say he was already dead when his naked body landed on the rough cement floor, but others say that he was still breathing.”
I listened to Felicia with a knot in my throat, a ball of tears that I later swallowed when she told me about the way he died.
“No one in the hall showed any sign of compassion.”
She later told me that compassion was the spirit named Woope, a beautiful daughter created by Skan, the great spirit of action.
“No one raised a hand against the two men who’d just tossed the body of a naked man in the hall. Some people laughed, women giggled under their breath. No one moved.”
I placed my hand on Felicia’s heart, right on the curve of her breast and guided my way by the beat of her pulse.
“After they’d tossed him in the American Legion Hall, they dragged him by the legs and threw him in the back of their trunk where they left him to die.” Felicia’s pulse quickened like a whip, like the sound of a twig breaking.
I could feel myself waking somehow. It reminded me of the waters of our rivers thawing in the spring. Transformation is always slow, deliberate and slow. Felicia turned to me. She had opened her eyes again. I knew this somehow because I felt her eyes on me in the darkness. She wanted an answer. She wanted everything from me in that moment: she wanted to see if I could love her, if I could love myself and my people, if I could love Raymond—this man I’d never met. But I had nothing to give her. I had been silenced, long ago, and now she wanted me to speak.
I wanted to find words to offer Felicia. The way we make offerings to the spirit world. I thought of the trickster, Iktomi, the spider, and the way he’d been deceived by Gnaski, the devil son of Inyan. Iktomi had once been Ksa, pure wisdom. But now he was reduced to being a trickster. How do we know the difference between folly and wisdom?
I felt my sex harden against the fabric of my pants. I knew Felicia wanted me to speak, but I had nothing but silence and desire as I listened to her story of death. I placed her hand on my sex. I wanted to remind her that we were alive, that our bodies were breathing. We were living. Felicia’s fingers rested there briefly and then twitched and moved away quickly as if she had burned herself on me.
“Do you even care about your people?” “Do you even fucking care?!”
I became flooded with shame; she was forcing my mouth open and filling me with mud. And in that moment, I thought of my mother, of the way she had looked at me as a child when she found out that I that had soiled myself while playing. Strange how I could remember that moment crisply, like an imprinted leaf on the melting spring ice. Every detail of that day was intact: my desire to relieve myself, wanting to play and knowing that the pleasure of play would weighed more than the embarrassment of wetting myself. This had been a choice on my part. But how could I explain this to my mother in my three-year-old language? Felicia’s voice startled me.
“It could have been you. It could have been me!”
Felicia got dressed in the dark. My sex had fallen.
On the way home, we drove quietly. Felicia did not offer for me to drive and I did not ask. The roads were deserted at this time of night. Now I remember the moon. It was full and round, its glow guiding us home.
Chapter 19 – Owl
Summer is strange in our corner of the world. Everything turns soft and white and you can hear the meadowlark in the highest branches. Wild violets blossomed. And on the day I had a shitting contest with Crazy Jimmy behind Gerber’s Barber Shop, I remember thinking that these flowers had never existed before that summer. I’d never seen them before. In the middle of the broken down cars on the side of the road, cars that had been there for as long as I could remember, wild prairie roses grew out of the ground.That was the first hot day of the summer after I met Felicia. It was so hot, we felt like we’d died and gone straight to hell. It was the kind of day when we’d play behind Miss Ellie’s shack, spitting on the ground with nothing to do. Crazy Jimmy was my buddy back in those days before he became all busted and dangerous. Jimmy liked to be the best at everything.
“I betcha I can take the biggest crap in this whole wide world,” he said in what sounded more like a threat than a promise.
“Yeah, right. Like you’re the king of shit all of a sudden,” I laughed.
I squatted first; Jimmy liked it that way so he could see what he was up against and then he went. He took watch to make sure no one was coming while I took a big dump. Nobody was out there on account of the heat. And then it was his turn. Jimmy took one look at my crap.
“Oh, that’s nothing, watch this,” he squatted and took the largest crap I’d even seen. It was a monster dump, huge and steamy and firm and that day I knew Jimmy was crazier than fuck.
We sat around spitting on the ground until Jimmy thought up a plan where we’d try to break into the jail and free up some prisoners.
“My cousin Marty is locked up in there. Let’s go get ‘im,” he said. And just like that, he was off running in the heat in the direction of the jail.
Now, nobody ever tried to get into a jail, people were always trying to get out, but not Jimmy. He wanted in.
Jimmy was proud of knowing an inmate inside the jail. I think it made him feel alive like something was finally happening around him. Like life was worth living. After we took a shit behind Gerber’s we walked and ran to the other side of town. We walked and kicked some cans around.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here and go to Billy Malls Hall,” Jimmy said. Jimmy always had a plan and he liked to keep things rolling.
When we got to the hall, we saw that it was closed. We spent the rest of the afternoon squatting again in the dirt, only this time we weren’t shitting but drawing circles on the ground.
“This is where we’ll get in.” He said drawing an X on the ground with a broken branch.
“We? I ain’t going in there,” I said.
“Oh Jesus, Owl, you’re such a fucking pussy. Aren’t you tired of being a pussy all the time?” He looked at me with such hatred, I remember feeling scared.
I stayed quiet for a long time and secretly swore I’d make Jimmy believe that I would follow his plan. After what seemed like hours of planning. Jimmy and I ran to the jail right when the sun was getting low in the sky. It took forever to get dark in the summer and I was plenty
hungry by then but I said nothing. We ran like weasels, like field rats in the shade until we got to the main jail. The building was surrounded by a big wall, a huge, unscalable, massive mountain of concrete. The wall was old and chipped and fucked up in places and Jimmy said he could use those imperfections to get to the other side. All of a sudden, I saw a beam of light, scanning the premises. We’d wait for the projectors to be pointing in the other direction for Jimmy to start climbing.
“Give me a hand, will ya?” he said, telling me to interlace my fingers so he could climb. Something told me that we were safe from getting caught. How many people were trying to get into the jail? The guards would be watching for people trying to get out.
Jimmy thrust his body up into the air, bracing himself up against the wall. I heard him gasp and then he winced as I looked up to see that he had scratched his face on the way up. He was standing there with one foot in my hand, and the other in a tiny crevasse, trying to reach up and place his fingers in an opening in the wall. The hole was too far up and I could feel his body dangling and moving unsteadily in my hands that were beginning to hurt. I said nothing. I knew enough to say nothing and bear the pain in silence.
“Push me up, for fuck’s sake. Push me up!” He said groaning. I was trying to shove Jimmy’s foot higher but I couldn’t. Something about the laws of physics and the weight of his body too low in my hands made it impossible for me to move him. Suddenly, I felt Jimmy’s body sway off to the right and then his weight was out of my hands. That’s when I heard it. The snap of something brittle as his body hit the ground.
Jimmy grunted involuntarily and then he was up like nothing had happened. We walked back to town. His arm hung real strange by his side.
“Hey, Jimmy, I think you’re arm is broken, man.”
“Shut the fuck up, you idiot!” Jimmy never said nothing to nobody about his arm and he just let it heal on its own, all broken and twisted and strange.
But that summer, the summer after I met Felicia, we were men. We weren’t boys no more. That day we tried to break into the jail was the last time Jimmy and I hung out together.
In the spring of the following year, Jimmy began running around with a pack of broken boys, a wild bunch who drank every afternoon and every night until their visions blurred and their speeches slurred and they couldn’t hold back no more. There was something I envied in the way those boys drank themselves to death, in the way they chased their own tails until they couldn’t run no more. Those were the days before I met Felicia when I envied destruction because I didn’t know I could envy life instead.
I heard about the looting of the Wounded Knee Museum. I’d been roaming the res. most of the day to help my mother fix the door of our shed the day it happened. That night, I was so doggone tired, I lay real low and didn’t hear about what happened until the next day when my mother heard the story from the owners of the trading post. Hard to say if the details are all true on account of who told us the story in the first place. Some say there were hundred of kids that broke into the museum that night, while others say it was only a few dozen. I know Crazy Jimmy was among them because the night after it happened, he came back with a busted hand, all bandaged up and he told anyone willing to hear it that he’d cut himself punching his hand through the window of the museum to break in. Most people say they don’t understand why Indians would destroy the artifacts of their own history. Folks—mostly folks who live off the res—like to say they don’t understand why anyone would do such a thing. Why would anyone get drunk and smash the windows with rocks? Why would anyone steal beadwork from the dead, whose bodies were looted after they were murdered like rabbits? Why would anyone break down the doors with clubs and urinate on the walls of the museum honoring their dead?
Some 200 boys formed a stoned fence and marched right into the museum after having blasted the windows with rocks and the doors with clubs. They went right in and tore up photographs of the massacre, urinated on artifacts and stole some sacred objects. The clothing of those who’d died was left untouched, un-mangled. It was as if touching their clothes brought them too close to the spirits of those who’d come before them. Most people don’t understand why those boys vandalized that museum or pissed on their ancestor’s graves. But I know of those breaking points when the soul cracks and everything changes.
I can imagine Jimmy there that night. I can see him kicking in the doors and breaking some chairs. I can hear him howling to the moon like a caged animal. I can see him laughing even after he must have cut or scratched or injured himself in the violence of his rage.
The next day, the elders said they couldn’t understand how anyone could do such a thing. How anyone could ravage through their own history. But I understood. I’d seen the hatred in Jimmy’s eyes when I looked at his busted arm that summer before the looting. I’d seen it in the way he looked at me, my full-blooded face, my strong features. I’d seen it when he called me faggot touching my hair with disgust like he was touching a piece of himself that made him wanna hurl. I knew that hatred is swallowed and passed on, like a virus. I knew that pissing on your history meant swallowing hatred and throwing it back at the world.
**
Everything changed after that season. Winter returned and the earth waited for harvest. That following spring, the story of Raymond Yellow Thunder’s murder grew and spread like weeds through the res. People began getting together and talking about doing something in the name of justice. To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about Yellow Thunder. Not at first. I just wondered what Felicia would think of me if I didn’t take part in the action.
We got together, a group of us, at night in my cousin’s house. We called him “Brave,” but his full name was Brave Bull. He lived in a small house, the size of a shack. It was really a shack, but I didn’t really come to know this until many years later when I first left the res to go off to jail. I’m getting ahead of myself here, talking about another kind of confinement. Here we were sittin’ in Brave’s house with Young Bear and Billy Joe. Before that time, we’d all sat around waiting for seasons to change, with nothing to live for. And then we met Grey Stone. He came out of nowhere. It was like one day, he’d just taken form. I remember him that night sittin’ in Brave’s house, on that rickety stool. The one Young Bear later broke over Billy Joe’s head ‘cause they were chasin’ after the same girl. But that night, we were all tight, a brotherhood, feeling the pride we’d been missing all this time.
“I want to show you something,” Grey told us.
We piled up in his Cougar glad to be going somewhere even if it meant staying in the same four corners we all knew. I was in the back with Brave and Young Bear while Billy Joe sat in the front next to Grey as he drove. The sun hadn’t set yet. It was low in the sky the color of strange fruits we’d never eaten.
We were driving when we saw these three little kids playing in the cold, they must have been five or six at the most and they were pulling each other on this rickety red cart. One kid had no coat. The other had a torn boot. I remember because when we saw them, Grey Stone slowed way down and said to us:
“Look at these kids. These are our kids. Soon, they’ll be our men, playing in the void.” The void. Grey Stone liked to talk in strange ways. I wasn’t the only one thinking that either.
“Jesus man! What the fuck are you talking about?!” Billy Joe laughed from the front seat. And just then we saw this sign on the side of the road that said: “Only Jesus can forgive your sins.” Someone had scratched out the word “only” like they were trying to tell us something.
We kept on driving. Grey Stone didn’t talk. Billy Joe was off in his own world making wise cracks, taking sips from his beer. And me and Brave, we were real quiet sittin’ in the back watching everything. I know Brave was getting it like me. I know he could see everything in a new light ‘cause he stayed real quiet for the whole night except when we made the loop back to the entrance of the res and drove by the sign that read: World Famous Indian Village—SEE how they live.
That night, Grey Stone took us to The Crazy Horse Café after we’d driven around in silence absorbing what we’d seen. We drove down the main road in the Pine Ridge Village right at sundown. I had no money for a drink, none of us did, but Grey walked right up to the bar, talked to Toothless Harry, and got us drinks. I watched Grey Stone talk to Toothless for a while and then he came back with drinks. To this day, I’m still not sure if Grey got us the drinks for free or if he paid for them.
The café was one square room with a small bar and a few tables; the room was filled with smoke and men—mostly us boys. Sometimes Helen or Sue would come in there and talk up a good talk about everything that’s wrong in this world. But that night, it was just us boys and a few old men. We sat down with our beers, and I thought of Felicia working at home, taking care of the house, of her parents and her baby sister. What was I doing here?
“Some folks met in Omaha to talk about getting justice for Raymond Yellow Thunder. They took a vote and passed a resolution to drive down to Gordon and talk to the authorities about investigating the murder,” Grey scanned our faces waiting for us to respond. It was Brave who jumped in first.
“Why the fuck for? You know no Fed ever gave a shit about a dead Indian.”
“If we don’t try, we’re never gonna get a thing,” Grey responded. I couldn’t get myself to say a word. I watched Young Bear who hadn’t spoken since we’d left Brave Bull’s house. He listened quietly to Grey’s every word.
Billy jumped in. “The only way to get justice is with the barrel of a gun. That’s...”
“Killing throws off the balance of our land,” interrupted Grey.
Young Bear listened quietly the whole time and for some reason, I watched him watch Grey. Something about Young Bear’s intensity got me thinking about how still I was. So still, I thought about that moment right before a storm, the perfect moment of quiet when the sky turns green and heavy and hailstones the size of hen eggs fall from the sky. Grey always wore a small hat, the color of crushed leaves and muddied ground. He said that the famous guerrilla leader Che Guevara, who led the Cuban revolution wore the same hat when he freed his people from oppression. Something about that moment made me think of these storms. Brave Bull began talking a mile a minute and said we should organize here in Pine Ridge.