Sacred City

by Theodore C. Van Alst

  They stare at her. Try to get her attention. Get bolder. Threaten her with their grimy white faces. Look over at us, but we just chill.

  She gets up from the bench, walks over to the other side of the platform, looks down the tracks for the train, the one that goes to the airport. A white light comes screaming through the tunnel.

  It stinks here. Like piss and alienation.

  They walk around the maintenance room in the middle of the platform, come out the other side, make directly for Misty.

  “BoyJoe” I say. This lank-haired fuck.

  He turns, looks.

  And just as the train comes in, she pushes back.

  20.CEDAR

  Again: I fear for the outcome of the Indian nations. Our people in their native state were not avaricious. They were on a common level; and, like the osprey that divides her last fish with her young, so they acted toward each other. But I find, to my sorrow, that, when you associate them with squaw men, and place them in power, they develop the wolfish greed of civilization, disregarding the rights of their less fortunate brothers.

  —SIMON POKAGON, “THE FUTURE OF THE RED MAN”

  “Teddy. Tell me a story but make it about me.”

  “JD, all the stories are about you.”

  “Not really. They’re about you, man.”

  “They’re about us.”

  “Fine. Gimme one. About me.”

  “I’ll make you the star of one. How ’bout that?”

  “Okay, fine den. But don’t make me a cowboy, Injun. Or make me die like in that other one.”

  “Fine den.”

  Here we go.

  The Montana blizzard was a standard. The rolling, cartwheeling prison bus was not.

  Edgar had been drinking coffee and drifting through the whiteout storm, lulled into that autopilot mode by the hyperspeeding streaks on all sides in the deep blackness, their high-contrast rushing around his view, creating a soft and silent world of inevitability.

  Two brake lights winked way ahead of him, lost red eyes in the monochrome chaos that fluttered, stayed on strong, then suddenly whipped up eight feet in the air and leered at him as they sank over the side of the embankment, tracers in the open space between the road and the blue-white field of snow thirty-five feet below.

  Even through the storm-dampened dark, he could hear screams and cries split the night wide open in ways that would never let it close for him the same again.

  They had been bouncing through the late afternoon magic light and now night for what seemed like hours, even though they were in a bus, and on the road, and there were windows. Still, it was a prison transport.

  And every second

  was an hour

  and every minute

  was a day.

  Tight, and cold, he passed the time blowing smoke rings with the vapor left in his cramped lungs. They pushed back, like the rest of his organs and everything else crammed down into the lowest profile possible, from his soul and his too-young face on down.

  At least Montana was a little more casual, not like a transport in Chicago. They didn’t have leg irons here. Shit, they weren’t even chained to the seats. But they jammed everyone in there, some dudes three to a seat. The cuffs were on a little too tight, though. That, he supposed, was to make up for the rest of the small freedoms. He looked through the unbarred windows, past his fellow inmates. Out there were fading buttes, valley floors crusted in ice and shining crystal, cows, trains, and the smell of snow he couldn’t quite catch in here.

  Guys hacked and coughed, made small chitchat, talked shit. Scrounged through their bag lunches for scraps. Got up to take leaks, with permission, of course. A driver, three guards, and forty-four inmates including himself. He had joined them because of outstanding warrants from some bullshit case in Chicago. Did a burglary on some bro-house by Loyola University on the North Side. The judge gave him time served and he walked, but then the other three roommates pressed separate charges later on and warrants got issued. One crib—one felony he figured, so fuck that. But the law didn’t see it that way. He heard about the warrants from Cesar, this one cop they used to get coke from every now and again. Ever buy blow off a cop? Some of the best shit you’ll ever do.

  JD thought about his current bullshit situation. How he got locked up. Some Montana Class A felony crap according to the Tribal cops. Him and Petey just fucking around, then Petey drunk as he’d ever get in his miserable life, deciding to hold up some shit liquor store in Billings. How he went along and then after how they boogied over to the Crow rez and promptly got ratted out by some asshole goody two shoes, probably a fancydancer, this bitch who lived on his girlfriend’s couch. Tribal cops showed up at this chick’s house on that grey and rainy afternoon, teardrops from the otherwise impassive iron sky the closest JD figured anyone would ever get to giving a shit about him. He smiled at the chick whose house it was as the cops dragged him to the squad car and she top-toothed it back to him. Now he was just pissed since the last female look he got came from a Crow girl, and well what the fuck. That and the outstanding warrants fucked him. Now here he was, because even though he wasn’t Indian enough for enrollment he was too NDN for state prison, and more than enough Lakota for these Crow cops, so now he was on a bus. Getting transferred from the Tribal jail in Crow Agency to Crossroads in Shelby and then to some federal shithole lord knows where. Fuck.

  He had finally resigned himself to do the time. Or so he thought. Cause now, looking back, he knew he wasn’t ready. Shit, when all you own is time, you’re never ready to part with it. He wondered if he got lucky, even as he tumbled through the air in this bus full of flying inmates and metal edges and screaming and blood and now some puke. Maybe being not ready was a way of praying, of letting Creator know that it wasn’t going to work for you, that you needed help out of this situation, and that Creator Humor said, well I can’t do that exactly, but I’ll give you this.

  And that’s what he had to work with now. A flailing shitshow of howling guards and inmates, glass and viscera flying around him, time slowed to about twenty-four hundred frames per second and him fully aware of how much of it they had left, all while he moved at regular speed and worked to get his ass out of here, this single opportunity he figured for the once-in-a-lifetime shot he was going to get.

  The Blackfeet guy that had given him tons of shit died when his big face pushed up into the ceiling as they flew through space. He could see his nose drive up into his brain, and he knew that was the end. The bus rolled in the air, and that dude came down grey. JD saw his chance. He twisted and dove for the guy’s neck, got a hand on that and one under his chin, and then used his giant bucket-of-nickels head like a rock against the window, smashing it into the pane over and over again even as the bus lurched in flight, one of its back wheels catching the edge of a boulder on the side of the embankment as it arced over once more. The heavy glass diamonded and split, webbing finer and finer, catching light from somewhere up on the road, and then it began to drop away. He felt kind of bad using the guy’s skull and whatnot to break the glass, but not that bad. Shiiiiit. Who was the asshole talking about Sioux this and Sioux that and making jokes about old-days captures and singing those weird White Dog songs? Not me, he thought. I’m just tryna eat a fucking sandwich and keep warm. This bitch had it coming. JD gave a final shove of that big Blackfeet cranium and out popped most of the window. Time slowed even more.

  The ice-crystalled air rushed to fill his lungs, slamming into his teeth and nose as he worked to throw the Blackfeet down between the seats even as his feet pumped over his crumpling body to get to the gaping hole of light inside the dying bus. The screams rose and pressed in on his eardrums. He grabbed the sides of the broken window frame, glass shards digging unnoticed into his frantic palms as he launched himself into the blue and white quiet of the night, his body arching into the gravity-free space birthed by a sudden drop in the bus’s roll, its front end catching the last rocky outcrop before the canyon floor rushed up to silence t
he men inside. JD twisted through space, landing prone on his back in a twelve-foot flat cedar, its fragrance embracing him as it broke his streak toward a rock pile five feet behind its moonlit shadow.

  He breathed heavy, felt his chest and stomach for impalements, wiggled his fingers and toes and stretched his limbs, checking for breaks. Feeling nothing but the frozen air on his face, he reached deep in his left pocket, shackled hands digging for his cigarettes and lighter. He felt the branches under him, leaned his head way back, laughed, and lit a smoke.

  “Ha, man. Nice.”

  “Does that work?”

  “Yeah.”

  JD smiled, stared two thousand miles away, the safest place he could be.

  21.UP YOURS, TOM WOLFE

  I am now such and such years old. I have twenty-seven teeth. That’s pretty good. My parents at this age, my stupefyingly terrible parents, they might’ve had sixteen teeth between them, and those were mostly molars, so I’m doing okay. This is not to say that they were bad people because they didn’t have many teeth, but that they might not’ve had quite so many teeth as they could have because they weren’t as nice of people as they could be, if that makes sense. Or if you subscribe to some sort of karmic dental charting.

  My ma might still be alive. I don’t know. We haven’t talked in a lot of years, but no one’s called me yet. She liked pills, smokes, whatnot, and since that catches up with you, who knows. My old man, though, he drank himself to death. There’s really no other way to talk about it. His eyeballs, or maybe just the retinas, I think, were taken at his passing, put in some container somewhere to be used at a later date. That, I suppose, is one use of alcohol as a preservation tool. As the grandson of converted Catholics, he would give up beer during Lent and switch to vodka until the two-for-one filet o’ fish went away. Said he “liked beer, so, yeah.” That was his other sacrifice.

  That was his commitment.

  We used to talk when he was still around, when he moved out of the city, leaving Chicago for the land of his birth. We’d get together every couple weeks or so. On the phone. Which meant I would call him up at what used to be Grandma and Grandpa’s place in Michigan (though he did call a couple of times in five or so years):

  “How you doing, Pop?”

  “Oh, pretty good.”

  Silence.

  Silence.

  Silence.

  Silence.

  “So Pop, had any good heart attacks lately?”

  “Ha.”

  Silence.

  Repeat.

  But eventually we would talk about stuff. Slowly. Stuff not too deep. It became much easier for him after I had kids. That way he could ask about them, and that seemed to work for us.

  One month I didn’t hear from him. He didn’t pick up when I called. I waited a couple months. Didn’t know why in either instance. Then one Saturday:

  “Hello?”

  “Pop.”

  “Hey.”

  “Whatcha doin’?”

  “Smoking a fuck ing cigarette.”

  “Where you been?”

  “Jail.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Silence.

  Repeat.

  I mean really. Who the fuck goes to jail at sixty years of age?

  My ma loved my pop. Pretty desperately, I thought. He loved her right back. I mean sure, when they got divorced, I was all, “Great! These assholes need to be apart,” but they never shut up about each other after the divorce; would ask me questions about each other all the time.

  Jesus. Just fucking call him, I would think, but say,

  “I don’t know” to her hillbilly face, already down a handful of teeth.

  Pop never really talked unless he was shitfaced, so pretty much every night:

  “Ah, Speedy. Your mother. Jesus. What a bitch. You know I loved her though, right?” he would whistle through his two missing bottom teeth, the second half of “Jesus” animated like a tired bird’s sigh in the world.

  “Right, Pop.”

  “I did, son.”

  “I know. I’m going to sleep.”

  “Okay . . . That bitch.”

  Jesus. Just fucking call her.

  I think it was best he never did, though. Not just because he only could’ve when he was drunk and would have talked such corrosive shit, but because if he stayed sober, and they stayed together, he would’ve ruined her, ground her down, the way water does stone, his liquid existence laving away those edges, those angles and bends he first fell in love with.

  This is another use of alcohol as a preservation tool.

  On the other hand, he would usually come home so drunk that he would just pass out. Thus, in those good old days, I never saw him punch her in the face.

  This, too, is another use of alcohol as a preservation tool.

  We drank together one night, and he told me things. Man. His childhood was destroyed by that one “friend of the family.” So much pain. So much that could have been passed down.

  And wasn’t.

  We drank a lot that night. Confessional drinking. Jesus probably leaned in at some point, called upon Creator, and said, “Pfffft. These two need’a go to bed.” But he told me one thing I remember clear as a church bell.

  He told me,

  “I was a bad father. I’m sorry.”

  This might be the best use of alcohol as a preservation tool.

  22.WE STILL CALL IT MAIZE

  It was a crappy tin door, or maybe only an aluminum door, you know how tin foil is now aluminum foil, white and scratched, rusty and off at least one hinge, and it banged in the wind. Funny, I guessed, how that wind that was really the shit-stained endless breath of the citizenry sighing through this tired motherfucking town that hoped to grind me down from the looks in the grocery store to the sighs the old men gave me when they wouldn’t even hire me to detassle their goddamn motherfucking corn. It banged and clanked and made me finally get out of bed, where I had been laying in the humidity and dust-swirled light, trying to make sense of the red-numbered digital clock on the floor next to the pile of dirty clothes with a sheet on top that he slept on, the clock that every time he looked at it, the one number would slip back, from 8:28 to 8:24, as if it was out there in the fire, off its leash, maybe checking out things it shouldn’t be looking at, but this plane kept dragging it back.

  I headed to the kitchen to make myself some breakfast, that door clanking at the edge of my hearing, but still.

  Kinda weird,

  I thought,

  since I didn’t usually eat breakfast.

  Growing up in the city and heading to school having to cross Kings and Latin Eagles and Unknowns territory, it was better to eat something later in the day so you could keep your edge, and I had a hard time shaking that habit. Hanging out here in the sticks until things chilled back in the neighborhood, I thought maybe I could change.

  I pulled the handle on the fridge, and the rubber door seal snapped and cracked like it hadn’t been opened in three or four days. When I looked inside, I confirmed that no one had been in there for at least that long, because it contained a grimy glass bottle with a worn-off label and six drops of hot sauce at the bottom, some questionably dated generic mustard, and a packet of ketchup in the butter drawer. There should’ve been at least a grease-laden cardboard box with one or two curled and dried pieces of crappy non-Chicago midwestern pizza, but even that was out of the picture, so yeah, a few days at least. While this curated minimalism was painful evidence of my impoverished state, bonus, it helped out immensely with the kinda weird since I didn’t usually eat breakfast department, and kept my streak alive, so kinda bonus. However, if I wanted to stay alive, I’d need some food or something, so off I went, hopping on my shitty bike, prepared to hook the chain back on at least twenty-eight times.

  Today, Walmart smelled like farts and cancer. Visually, it wasn’t all that different from other days when it smells like diabetes and piss stains, or cholera and shame, but today the scents were so downright arresting
they clouded my eyesight and seemed to fog my shades. As I went to get my sorry-ass purchases recorded so I could load the receipt into the savings catcher app, I thought I’d found the source. They were at the checkout I just lined up for, but they were so fucking rotten all the other soul-crushed shoppers in this packed-as-shit-day-before-the-fourth-of-July-broken-airconditioned-store44-or-whatever-number-it-is were still going to stand in any line but this one. Lord have mercy.

  The son had two rows of teeth up top, Grandma was chugging a coke tallboy, and first daughter was all talkin’ bout “when I fuckin go to Walmart, this is what it’s gone be about.”

  Bingo.

  The boy seemed just seventeen or so, his Travis Tritt shirt holey and handed down, his move to adulthood as awkward as his ’stache, wispy and wishful—Someday I’ll have pornstar status! it thinks to itself as it looks around at its visibly countable numbers, all forty-five light-brown hairs barely hanging onto his upper lip. He couldn’t see his shoes, but if he had some to begin with, they’ve probably worn away from his staring at them all the time, especially when Grandma yelled at him like she’s doing right now. I watched the boy glance over at a rack with atlases lined up big and yellow, and I hoped this soon-to-be adult was thinking of the imagined terrains in maps; their ability to teleport him anywhere in the world would be his best friend right about now.

  Grandma pulled the big red can away from her face for a second, breathed out heavy through her nose, her little lips lined right out to nothing. She had this hairdo that gave her the silhouette of an aroused harpy eagle; it worked well for her since it matched the constant terrifying look in her eye. Or at least I thought that’s what Lurlene or Ashley or Tonya or whoever works at the closest Kut Above was saying and thinking when she gave it to her, thinking in between worrying that her scissors might slip, or that Grandma might get a chemical burn from the #46 Burgundy Apocalypse dye she insisted on getting, right before she murdered Lurlene or Ashley or Tonya or whoever at the closest Kut Above with a pair of her own shears, or a clipper, or a push broom, maybe.