Sacred City

by Theodore C. Van Alst

  Relax a little, would ya, Grandma?

  I thought.

  Your lips have pulled in on themselves and you look like one of those apple heads we used to bake when we were kids. I think your eyes are even falling in now, yeah?

  Her deeply lined face told me I don’t yet know that we don’t really run away from things so much as we run toward things, their destructive and freeing natures not readily apparent at first but eventually loosing us from the bonds of polite society and other constraints on human desire. This woman has done things. To herself, and to others, but yup. She has done things beyond those bounds. Those things made her say things like,

  “Are you fuckin’ retarded?”

  “What, Grandma?” said the son.

  “I said, ‘are you fuckin’ retarded?’” she goes.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Grandma,” he said.

  “Jesus A Christ on the fuckin’ cross, would you stop putting shit on the conveyor belt? The lady is trying to ring the shit up in the cart, dumbass.”

  “Oh. Sorry, Grandma.”

  “Not as sorry as your poor mother was,” she charmed in reply.

  Jeezus, Grandma,

  I said to myself.

  The cashier rolled her eyes and droned through her job, the dragging of almost out-of-date items across the scanner so tiresome, so draining and fatiguing that she wore a tiny battery-operated fan on a cord around her skin-tagged neck, its sad breeze blowing around her wispy curls and sour-milk sweat smell at the nominally frightened customers, their eyes a little wider at the prospect of that thinning hair getting tangled in the tiny motor and all kinds of hell potentially breaking loose. I went from chewing at my bottom lip to almost biting a hole in it so I don’t sick it up here at the chip and jerky rack. My eyes watered a little, and my nostrils tried to close themselves up. I could only breathe out for so long, so I turned away and gulped air by the cold-pop cooler.

  If vampires are god’s fallen angels, then werewolves are his lapsed best friends. This I know to be true. This does not change. I have a handle on those two kinds of “monsters” for sure. But this Grandma, well, she’s a for real monster, and I have neither a trite nor tight way to classify those. Humans make the worst monsters; they’re rent souls who parlay in the iciest of truths. I want to imagine what’s happened to this woman to make her so hate the tendons that hold the world and its people together, what makes her want to rip and tear the flesh from the webbing of the living, but I can’t. I can only add it to the list of questions I try to remember to ask myself when I’m on the crapper or smoking outside the hayseed bar in the town square, the Ritz, or the Waldorf, or whatever hi-tone rich-people mask it wryly wears.

  I put the chain back on for the twenty-ninth time (tough day) just as I was rounding the corner back to the dump I called home, a “Bless This Mess” sampler picked from the alley waiting to mock my arrival and remind me to work harder or something. I set my very warm ham and cheese loaf (luxury purchase, but I refused to eat bologna), liquefying mayo, and generic white bread down on the hot-as-fuck sidewalk and fixed my goddamn bike, deciding to walk the last couple hundred feet rather than make it thirty.

  I freed a hand to grab the knob and push open the unlocked door (why bother?), then threw the bag, the bike, and myself at the gold plaid couch just inside the entryway to Satan’s personal shitter. Sweat rolled. Beams creaked. Nails popped. Flies buzzed.

  I passed out.

  When I finally woke, I rolled over and away from the cushion full of a thousand dead farts and felt the fine alligator lines of the itchy nylon couch threads pressed into my face. My shorts were jacked up my ass; my sleeveless T-shirt was twisted around my neck and under my sleep-induced dead right arm that sort of flopped at my side like a frog with a fresh pin in it. I shook off the buzz of awakening nerves and walked into the kitchen with my purchases straining against the cheap plastic bag that had recently held my sleeping foot.

  I made a sandwich (two meats, one bread; folded up with a blob of mayo). Drank some water from the tap. Ate six OTC liquid pain pills, brushed my teeth with my finger (because colder water after, not because hygiene), and put on a fresh T-shirt. Went back to my finely furnished living/dining/bedroom and read a shit ton of Patricia Highsmith.

  Sweat rolled. Beams creaked. Nails popped. Flies buzzed.

  Shortly after Ripley forged some more paintings, I decided to look out the front window, hoping I’d see Florence, or Capri, or at least fucking Naples.

  No such luck. But it did look a lot like Haddonfield in magic light, so there was that. The piano riff played in my head as I headed into the kitchen, its rear wall full of dusty glass and cracked wood window frames, the ghosts of curtain rods framed in dirt and little nail holes, some spectral prairie marm weeping from the other side at the thought of moldy red and blue gingham.

  I looked out the back window, expecting to see nothing, a reflection of this town and what my life had become lately. Even so, railroad tracks and corn rose up into my view.

  Corn.

  And corn.

  Still and brooding.

  It finally got dark. I headed up town, sweating less, cussing more.

  Guess I’ll bounce a check at the pizza place,

  I thought.

  I took the small cheese pizza that I overwrote a fifty-dollar check for, brought it to the bar, and handed it out to the farmers gathered around the TV in the back, pouring salt into their pilsner glasses of Old Milwaukee.

  Then I’d play them Jeopardy for money.

  And never lose.

  There was no need to hustle. These guys would get so pissed at me, they were happy to double or nothing again and again. They were nothing like the morning crew, the guys I’d bet I could do the NYT crossword in fifteen minutes or less, the ones who were crabby, less drunk, and a whole lot cheaper than these dudes on the night crew, who were happy to be out of the ten-thousand-degree fields.

  “What is Aroostook County, Maine?” I boomed across the bar, seeing the “The site of a bloodless 1838–1839 war between Britain and the US” flash across the screen. When the contestants had all fucked it up, I even got to mock always-pedantic Frenchy Trebeck’s shitty mispronunciation of “Aroostook.”

  Everyone laughed. Well, except for the waitress (who hated my guts) and two cats playing pool in the side room, but they probably didn’t hear, seemed pretty drunk anyway.

  I managed to get two or three five-dollar bets that I could run the table. Business was slow tonight. I couldn’t believe it with the way the heat was. Well

  let’s go, rednecks,

  I said, under my breath.

  I knocked out the first round no problem, collected my money, and even bought back sixty-cent drafts for each of these cornpone cracker fucks. Drank two Jim Beams and three drafts of my own. Life was okay. But it was time for Double Jeopardy. A couple of the now-drunk farmers went for ten-dollar bets, and the two pool sharks ambled over, asked to get in.

  I thought,

  What the hell?

  They sat a ways away, held their highball glasses close.

  “Films of the ’80s for four hundred, Alex.”

  “This 1981 John Landis film featured an English pub named ‘The Slaughtered Lamb.’”

  “What is . . .”

  I laughed.

  Seriously?

  For fuck’s sake.

  The round dragged on. “The Ottoman Empire.” “Who is Attaturk?” “What is ‘The Old Man of Europe?’” blahblahblah.

  “Medieval Murderers for one thousand, Alex.” My ears pricked up.

  I made a quick side bet with the bartender for twenty bucks that I could answer before the clue came up. The big man took the bait.

  “Who is Gilles de Rais?” I quickly said.

  The bartender looked over at the screen—

  “This fifteenth-century French nobleman ultimately confessed to the killing of dozens of children . . .”

  —and balled up the twenty in his hand, threw it o
ver the bar at me.

  Who’s next, I thought.

  Vlad Tepes?

  Jesus Christ. This is weak, but weird.

  I didn’t like where this was going, looked at the two dudes at the end of the bar. Seriously? I laughed. Probably too loud. But you know. There’s no way. Besides, they both had tans.

  WhowWhowWhow!

  “The Daily Double.”

  “I’ll take ‘Sixties Shows’ for two thousand dollars, Alex.”

  The answer flashed as I hopped off my barstool.

  “The ce-ment pond, motherfuckers!” I yelled on his way to the bathroom, thinking,

  Everyone knows where Granny washed the Beverly Hillbillies’ clothes.

  When I came out of the can, they were waiting for me, doing lines off the backs of their hands and leaning next to the door, which stood at the head of the long hallway, near the end of the bar. They blocked my return to that wood-sided, cigarette-burned salvation and slowly edged me out the back door, the bartender’s profile against the TV light already fading from my vision.

  And I knew

  this was it. How fucking ignominious, Alex,

  I thought.

  Bugs whirred. Sodium arc lights buzzed. Car windows sweated. Thunders boomed.

  God’s fallen angel held my arms while god’s lapsed best friend punched me in the sternum. Six times.

  The seventh hit drove a rib through my heart. I fell to the ground, thinking,

  Please don’t let my arms spread out at my sides.

  I fucking hate clichés.

  The corn rustled.

  23.TEST PATTERN

  It was my second call from a dead person in a week, wtf. This one was a Fishman or something, something with an old lady first name . . . Bernice? Or Flatula, Begonia, Garnet. Maybe Hypatia. Fuck. I can’t remember. But just like the other, as soon as I Googled her number, sure enough . . . this one, d. 1989. Shit. I hate talking to dead people. Especially when I’ve been taking a nap. We’re supposed to be the suicide hotline team, fielding calls from prospective customers, but sometimes business gets slow. And once in a while, old clients remember our number. It’s a second gig I’ve had to take since the night job lost its rowdy appeal.

  This is no bullshit you find out at the end I’m a ghost kind of story. I’m fucking dead right now. We can get that out of the way. I sit on your couch and watch you live your life, hope that you pick a good movie, make some goddamn pizza rolls or something. Because I can see, I can hear, I can smell, but I can’t feel—well, okay, I got feelings, but I can’t feel in the physical way, so you better fill up those other senses, John Denver style, or it’s the chains and the moans for you and yours.

  Actually that part is bullshit. They don’t let us do that anymore. Some kind of big meeting a couple years back. God, Luscious Beelzebubba and his crew, the Magdalene, the Nazarene, the Archangel Michael, Iblis, Baby Jesus, Teen Jesus, the djinni, Moses, the rusul, some dusty Pharisees, Peter, Paul, and Thomas—no Mary—basically all those people got together and put the kibosh on the whole fun haunting thing. It’s a total load of crap, if you ask me. Yeah, I’m a royal fuckup, and so it’s the wanagi life for me—just a ghost, still a Lakota (awesome), but not a cool spirit, not moving on, nope, and so we don’t have much out here to do. When you’re a wanagi, you’re always looking for a little something to eat and kinda hanging around. It’s hard to get people’s attention, you know. Before the meeting I could ride a horse, throw rocks, pass gas, booo-oooo-ooo it up, but now, nothing. The order came across the one goddamn TV station we have out here. You remember in the old days when the “Star-Spangled Banner” would play, and then Indian Head, and then good night and ccckkkkraaackkkkcrrrrackkk static and bug races? Ever wonder what happened to that? Yup. It’s us. That’s our TV station now. It’s all that’s on on this side of the veil. The thousand-mile-an-hour pixels flying by are all the cool souls that are moving on, and we have to watch them go. And if they need to get us any info, they loop a crawl across the bottom that looks like the graphics from the first Pong game ever invented.

  That day bhoots, pretas, yurei, nu gui and ba jiao gui, Cho-Nyo-Gwishin, abambo, kehua, muldjewangk, my good buddies wana’ri, nésemoo’o, biitei, nanaikoan, cipay, and sometimes even ch’į́įdii (hah, jokes, my Diné cousins), all looked up in dismay at this total bullshit directive creeping across the bottom of the screen:

  From this day hence [so pompous—who the fuck talks like that?], all manner of haunting shall be limited to shadowing the living in a spirit of love and friendship. There shalt be no wailing, clanking of chains, wringing of skeletal hands, clacking of teeth, wearing of sheets, tossing of furniture, chilling of air, snuffing of candles, nay, nor indeed any other action that might alert the quick to the presence of the dead.

  Yours truly,

  Father, Son, Holy Ghost, et al

  Like I said. Total bullshit.

  We tried to organize, get together, pull a no-Western-traditions demand to be heard, but it was like trying to get into a literature conference as a unified group. Too threatening, too cutting edge in our haunty ways, we were a threat to the spectral status quo, and so the memos. Since we refused to fragment by area and ethnicity, we were doomed, stuck with these crappy fake-nice directives and these vaguely threatening calls from long dead Naperville housewives and Long Island matrons, Simi Valley Vicodin ODs and deader-than-doornails Orange County closet coke fiends.

  What did we do?

  Well, shit. There’s nothing we can do. Resigned to our fates, we haunt the dreams of indie filmmakers, taking our repressed ideas out on their minds. They become our voices, our vehicles to speak the words of America’s oppressed and forgotten dead.

  And we’ll never let them go.

  See you at the awards shows.

  Afterworlds

  P.S.—Just so you know, the other side is just like this side, but with a couple cool extra things. There’s still gangbanging and all, but here you don’t die and you’re a lot closer to some other sides, so weird stuff can happen, like this time when

  we talked a ton of shit one summer night, when the air outside was soft and the light was so warm you could sleep on the sidewalk just forever. Ten or two or four immortal teenagers with an endless supply of icy beer in sweaty brown bottles we chugged and threw over our shoulders into the street when we were done drinking and had finished burping. We sat along the guardrail on Fargo Ave. at Pottawatomie Park that kept drunks from driving off into the football field / baseball diamond / soccer field because the street was a perfect ninety degrees and the city must’ve figured it was cheaper to put up a long, corrugated piece of metal than to replace the streetlights we kept knocking out and the sign we kept taking down because, well, that shit is funny.

  The dark rippled and rolled under Chicago’s own North Side brand of visible humidity, and our voices pressed back down into our own faces, the night’s fog keeping our noise and our boombox sounds out of the homes of anyone who would’ve called the cops. You know, one of those perfect deep summer nights, yellowy arc light carried on a breeze that’s just enough to keep you from getting too hot but not too much that you have to put your shirt on, cover up that new needle, string, and India ink The Cross is Boss tattoo you did the other night, the one that might be infected but still looks cool. A perfect listless Tuesday that you remember one afternoon cutting through the lines of minivans and tired SUVs in some soul-crushing parking lot on your way to get keys made, or a flat of petunias, or some bullshit like that. A night just damp enough that all the fireflies in the city decided they needed to get laid and came over to dance in that field so currently free of drunks and drivers and any activity but collecting dew. Jimmy and JD talked shit like they usually did, spit the laws of Folks and the six-pointed star, LoveLifeLoyaltyKnowledgeWisdomandUnderstanding, not because they cared but because they needed each other to help them remember all that shit and then remembered how proud they were to be Royals and not BGDs, Ain’t No Pity in Simon City, how brave th
ey were, how much they hated Kings, made fun of each other’s moms, and then slowly noticed the fireflies starring all around their heads, like they had ascended to the heavens with no celestial warning. Jimmy was always smarter, and quicker, and he flung his half-full beer and caught a handful and smashed the lightning bug butts onto the ends of his thumb and pointer and pinky fingers so he could make an upside-down crown in the dark, King Killer, but JD just rubbed them on his teeth and grinned and made us laugh, his always-toxic mouth now appropriately adorned in glowing greeny-yellow.

  It flowed through the alleys like a waterless flood, rose up the sides of broken-brick garages, hissed along bleached yellow-sided sheds, and silently drowned the sumacs and chicory that grip the blacktop like ghost-colored two- and three-leafed urban bonsai. It was the breeze that blew through the midsummer dark, pulled at the veil between the worlds that’s oh-so-thin right now. Balances and harmonies teetered so delicately and sometimes came down just a little bit wrong, their landings bringing the unexpected through the caul into the world on our side. We sensed a shift in the air, cooler than before, but as we blinked through this new fog it wasn’t why we shuddered.

  The now twelve-foot-tall lightning bugs snapped at us; their fuzzy pincers and spiky arms held us at the throat and pulled steadily down with their third and fourth legs until we just popped in their hard, unyielding embrace, and they smeared our blood on their forelegs and draped our intestines between their antennae and chittered, eyes flashing, their abdomens glowing brighter in humor and health, as they skittered through the dew in that cold, green field, the one no drunks will dare for a long time to come, our failing cries sunk into the grass out of sound, and then sight.

  I watched JD’s smile fade in the dark.

  Acknowledgments

  Chicago , my city, my rez. I miss you every day. The almighty mighty North Side. Uptown, BoysTown, Downtown, Rogers Park. Amie, who tried me to get me to write these stories for years. Emily, and Max of course. All the readers of Sacred Smokes, and all the editors at the magazines and lit journals that published early versions of some of the work in this book: Yellow Medicine Review, Red Ink: International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art & Humanities, Unnerving Magazine, Red Earth Review, Mad Scientist Journal, Literary Orphans, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, the Journal of Working-Class Studies, and the Massachusetts Review for popping off with the opening chapter. NALS (Native American Literature Symposium) and all the Clan Mothers and Brothers who got the first taste in a visual way of what this book was going to look and sound like, John Gamber and Fantasia Painter, David Stirrup, David Carlson, Scott Andrews, Brother Billy Stratton. The Working-Class Studies Association, Tillie Olsen, Bill Hillman, Tony Bowers, The Rt. Rev. Martin Billheimer, Rev. Jack and Rexella Van Impe, DBH. Cholera Ranch . Miss Sally Timms, Kenneth Morrison, the many many who supported Sacred Smokes, now in its second printing, and Portland State University for giving me some time to go out and get it there. Rebecca Lush, Anita Comeau at Prairie Edge, Dorene Wiese, JoAnn Maney and all the Uptown folks and the rest of the Native community in Chicago, Mark Turcotte, Boone Sings in the Timber, Book Cellar, City Lit, Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Chicago Public Library and their seven copies of Sacred Smokes along with all the libraries who put the book on their shelves—there’s more than a hundred of you at last count—El Milagro, Chicago diners, theaters, and bookstores, Ray Rice and my alma mater the University of Maine at Presque Isle, Kathleen Rooney at the Chicago Tribune, Bill Savage and his Chicago Reader review, Voices in the North Country, Libra Distinguished Lecture Series, Gabino fuckin’ Iglesias—thanks for the support and for supporting so many. We appreciate you. Kesean Coleman, thanks for all the support and for hooking us up in Portland. Miss you, young brother. Central New Mexico College and Brian K. Hudson, Lee Francis and Red Planet, Montana Book Festival, Portland Book Festival, Susan Bernardin, Oregon State University, Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico, AWP 2019, Janice Lee, Brian Twenter and the students at the University of Minnesota, Morris, the Portland State University Creative Writing Program Reading Series, all the readers and listeners at Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the University of Colorado, Boulder, Utah State University (and the folks at Access Utah / UPR), California State University, San Marcos, California State University, San Bernardino, Multnomah County Central Library. California State University, Northridge. And hey, Los Angeles, second biggest market for Sacred Smokes. I knew you loved me back. Laura Furlan, Toni Jensen, Eddie Generous, Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, Ho-Chunk Nation Chicago Branch Office. Ito Romo, thanks for all your support and your own words and work. Everyone else I’m sure I missed here, sorry about that. Colville Business Council Chair Michael Marchand, who said, “Wherever the Creator put us, we think that’s where we should be.”