Routes

by John Okas

  Slim puts a jewelry laden arm on Hot Springs’s shoulder and the brave takes the peace pipe out of his mouth and gives his white brother a great bear hug. “Good to see you again too, partner.”

  “And whom have we here?” asks the white man, sinking to his knees, marvelling at the bright and strong little bronze boy.

  “His name is Corn Dog and he’s the reason why I’m so late. I wanted to make sure he got a good look at the way things used to be before iron horses started growing on trees. Anyway I didn’t think it would be too jake to try to pass for this kid’s father on the train. I know how jumpy white folks can be when it comes to conclusions, they’d probably think I stole him.”

  “And did you?” asks the white man, now on all fours playing dog pack with Corn Dog and Yahoo.

  “I sure did, Whitman. Some dumb half-potted medicine man sold him to me for about twenty-four bucks worth of trinkets.”

  Partners

  Hot Springs’s white brother is Whitman Post. The two are partners in a cottage industry scheme. They are wholesale producers of authentic and semi-authentic native craft, weavings, leather work, jewelry, and other naiveties for paleface consumption. The partners go about their business casually, free from the pressing need of dough. They live back up in the woods of the Home of the Brave, they bake their own bread, stalk wild mushrooms together, and discuss philosophy. When it’s time for the show, it’s one for the road, west to the coast, back through the Land of Enchantment. Usually Hot Springs goes on the summer circuit of crafts fairs, and Whitman takes the art galleries and up-scale trading posts for the fall season.

  Corn Dog’s formative years are spent in the spruce woods. The babe, wholly innocent, makes himself at home among the evergreens, and in the surrounding canyons where steam heat rises from the thermal baths. He likes to climb into the purple hills, rock-ridged, iced with snow, where space is aglow with lights on the long cold winter nights, and time takes a holiday on summer afternoons, when the slopes abound with long green blades of grass and gay wildflowers. Lupines with blue and white spikes, painted daisies, speckled phlox, and freckle-faced foxglove wave their blooms in the warm wind. His natural instincts go unchecked, he can tell which plants are good to eat, which are poisonous, which put you to sleep and which make you feel happy. Out on the trail he’s way out ahead of Hot Springs and Whitman on wild asparagus hunts. He’s equally wild about the animals, climbs up the trees to play with the squirrels, swims in the river with the shiny otters. They are the friends he grows up with, the family he never had.

  The sorcerer’s apprentice is his own boy, the strong silent type, savage and noble, serious, intense, a stranger to the domestic and business arrangements as well as the philosophical arguments of his guardians. He learns to speak from listening to the men, who speak only in the white brother’s tongue. But he is not big on words, as they are. He is independant, near feral at times. Nippled in his bud by the coyote, although he will eat what meat Hot Springs traps and Whitman prepares, he is naturally shy of killing his animal friends. He often feeds himself on the lilies of the field; the oniony bulbs repeat on him and he curls up at night out on the porch sick with Yahoo.

  Corn Dog needs no lessons in how to act naturally. But Hot Springs gives him a few anyway. When he is not on the road posing as a wily old man, or in his armchair by the stove, or on the porch, smoking his peace pipe and arguing about religion, history, evolution, and economics with Whitman, Hot Springs can indeed be a clever hunter. He knows how to trap small game, wing birds, and catch fish as easily as tying his shoelaces.

  He talks to Corn Dog as he shows him how to rig up some nooses to catch a rabbit’s foot. “There’s nothing wrong with killing your friends and family, Kid, provided you understand why you’re doing it. You do it out of need and for yourself only, never for profit. And you’ve got to be neat, respectful and conserving about it, never kill wastefully. Whenever I kill for food or skin I tell the animal’s spirit we are in the same family. You see, everything’s kin, the same as we are. The rocks and trees are our grandparents, the wolf, the bear, and the eagle are our brothers and sisters. And so are the rabbits and the ducks, and those wild lilies you eat. The family of life lives by death. Try not to forget it. Especially when it’s your turn to die. For now we wait.”

  They sit on the grass in the field, long strings with snares on the ends of them go out in every direction where the grass is tender and invites grazing. They pass an hour watching the world unfold, then an unsuspecting bunny who just happens to be hopping by stops for a nibble, steps in one of the nooses and snap! Quick! Hot Springs pulls the trick, springs the trap on him.

  The little king of the woods knows the beasts on a first name basis. “That’s Fuzzy you caught there, Pop.”

  “You don’t say,” says Hot Springs, squinting his eyes and giving the boy a crooked smile as he goes to retrieve his catch. He says something soothing to the rabbit in his native Indigen language and crick, snaps its neck. “Now you try.”

  When it comes to nature Corn is a natural. He sets one noose where there is some sweet purple clover he knows bunnies love. In twenty minutes he has a brother rabbit of his own. Following Hot Springs, he says a few words of kinship and affection and breaks the bunny’s neck.

  They bring the meat home to Whitman who adds turnips, mushrooms and carrots, and stews it. The two men and the boy have barely sat down to eat when Yahoo cries “yahoo!,” the hoot that lets them know there is an intruder nearby. While Whitman puts the stew back on the stove Corn Dog and Hot Springs go out to see. George, a big bull moose with a full head of horns and a very large penis, has bounded out of the woods and is now pacing around the backyard of the cottage with Yahoo chasing him. “Enough, Yahoo!” George Moose comes straight to Corn Dog and bursts into moose tears. The boy puts his arms around his friend’s neck and listens to his heart beat.

  Holocaust! Cruelty that doesn’t seem part of the natural order! White devils who call themselves Freewayfarers kill without thinking, for enjoyment, and for profit. It has become fashionable among them to buy a moose head to mount on their wall. This morning George saw several of his brothers and sisters decapitated.

  “Only I got away,” George cries. “It should have been me!”

  It’s a sad thing to see a grown moose cry. Poor George!

  Even the philosophical Hot Springs feels choked up and strokes the animal sympathetically.

  Then Whitman waltzes out with a bucket of bean sprouts for George to nibble on. The moose’s huge nose flares, his heart beats faster, “White devil! Paleface! Freewayfarer!” Running scared, he bolts back, behind a blue spruce.

  The incident voids Corn Dog’s happy thoughts. In the state of innocence a boy can be full of love for the soul of the rabbit meat in his stomach, but the thoughts of murdered moose are foul ones, and ghost heads hang dark in his doorway and cast a pall over what would be otherwise pleasant dreams of bunnies now gone off to the green green grass of home, the happy nibbling grounds. He reaches over and lights the lamp by his bed and looks at himself in the silver bracelet Whitman gave him. He is no white devil, no paleface, but he is no Indigen either. What is he?

  The light draws his teacher from upstairs.

  “Pop, is Whitman a paleface?” Corn Dog asks.

  “Pretty much, Kid,” says Hot Springs. “But you know he’s not the type to go on wild moose chases.”

  “Am I?”

  “Part paleface, yes, by the looks of you. A moose chaser, I doubt that! You’ve got good part Indigen inside you. Not all Freewayfarers are bad, but Kid, you’ve got to watch out for those who are. And I don’t want to give you the impression that too many of them are square and honest. It’s the majority you’ve got to watch out for. Like cows, they travel in herds but they’re a real pain right where it hurts.” Hot Springs sighs, gives the boy a crooked smile and his first lesson in history and current events. “Kid, we’ve been protecting you from it, but the palefaces are messing up the Home of the Brave some
thing awful, worse than Roxie Raccoon does when she sneaks into our old Sprucewood Lodge here and starts poking around. Once upon a time all the land was as it is here, open as the sky, free as the air. The Great Spirit gave us everything, food, clothing, shelter, rivers to run on. Now the Freewayfarers feel free to drive in anywhere and map themselves out on top of the Home of the Brave.” Hot Springs does not spare the boy the gory details of the freewheeling way that the white man rolls over brave nations and wild animals. Where the buffalo roamed now is fenced-in cow pasture. “Kid, I believe it’s just a matter of time before there’s no place free left to roam in the Home of the Brave.”

  The good student sits tight, brave-style, with his legs crossed, and his hands in his lap. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair. Anyway, with the Great Spirit on your side how can you lose? The wholly innocent feels confident the cowboys will be defeated. “In the end, though, Pop, the Indigens are going to beat them, right? The land will be free again.”

  “Wrong,” says Hot Springs, “As bad as this sounds, if we want to survive, we’re going to have to join them, and that in itself is not easy because the majority of Freewayfarers wants to do away with Indigenous life entirely.”

  “You mean we kill ourselves?”

  “Partly, yes. If we want to keep what’s ours, we’re going to have to change. The sad truth is that what we Indigens need to keep the country open is the legal tender to buy back our own land. Whitman and I own this land, five thousand acres. They can’t touch us. The money came from the craft business. You know, we make things and sell them. It’s been good to us. We’re more than surviving.”

  Thus far young Corn Dog has paid little attention to the comforts of home. But now that Hot Springs mentions it, he has to admit the beds and chairs in the lodge are soft and there is always plenty of food and firewood. Whitman has a horse and buggy and often goes over to some nearby settlement and comes back with home furnishings, pineapples, clothing and so forth for them all.

  “Yes, everything contains its opposite. The white man can be a deadly bug, but he can also be an avenue to an easy life. I consider it a blessing that we can live by packaging our native craft and culture and selling it, don’t you? Tell me this, Kid, where do you think you’re going to find a raccoon who’ll give you fifteen bucks for a blanket?”

  The sheltered little island has no idea, but he has heard Hot Springs and Whitman talking. “Maybe out on the west coast, Pop?” The uninformed apprentice takes a wild guess.

  “No, not even there.”

  Corn Dog has heard the men talking about paleface bucks before. They say, “This blanket is worth five bucks,” “This bracelet is worth eight bucks,” but he never knew what they meant. Now Hot Springs says, “It’s high time you learned about the Almighty Buck, Kid. It’s the white brother’s real God and it’s a God and a half. It’s the staff of life nowadays.”

  Corn Dog’s observant eyes have seen many a staff of life, between a buck’s hind legs. He’s seen how it rises after they butt heads to see who gets on Jane Doe when her behind gets red and puffy. While listening to Hot Springs go on about how the Almighty Buck commands so much respect and attention, how when money talks it makes one hundred percent sense to just about everyone, a picture of a big horny animal, a warrior, racked and hung generously with genitals that make George Moose’s own privates look like a peashooter and a couple of peas in a pod, comes to his mind. When he asks Hot Springs if this is what he means the sorcerer has to chuckle. “You don’t get it, Kid.”

  A good teacher, it’s his nature to feed the vacuum in the mind of his student. He fills him in about money by showing him a single dollar bill. Corn receives it, face up, in the lamplight. Front and center is an engraving of the great white father, an old man who doesn’t seem as if he could be much of a stud. Big deal! Some God! The Almighty Buck is only a piece of paper.

  “This?” the boy says, crushing the bill and throwing it into the fire.

  Hot Springs shakes his head. “If ever there was a tricky business to understand, it’s the white brother’s symbols.” He reaches for the pad on the table, draws an X, and shows it to the boy. “First of all, the same sign can mean different things to different people. In the Home of the Brave, the cross is a symbol of the quartering of the universe into active and passive, light and dark, principles, while the white brother sees it as representative of the Light of his World, his savior Emanual X. They count time with this X in the middle, things happen either before or after his birth. This year, they say, it’s one thousand nine hundred and twenty three years since he was born.”

  Next to the cross Hot Springs draws some stars and stripes. “Where I grew up these were the symbols of cosmic integrity, the Freewayfarers see them as their banner of national pride, their flag. Now it’s not just substance that gives meaning to a symbol, the degree of reverence and the kind of rituals that go with it are important too. The white brother tends to take his symbols very seriously. He can get mighty quarrelsome if someone burns his Freewayfarer flag. He takes it as a sign of disrespect to the land that he loves. But the same who wouldn’t burn the stars and stripes if his life depended on it, might go out and meet with his buddies and burn a cross on somebody’s lawn as a symbol for white racial superiority. Although the law of the land has it the other way around, there’s plenty of Freewayfarers who think it’s more un-Freewayfaring to burn a flag than a cross. The white brother is sly and preaches the opposite of what he really believes. Just as he calls his system the Freeway while he steals the land, kills the animals, chops them all up, fences them in and puts them up for sale, he says that the cross is mightier than the Buck, that the only truly happy hunting grounds are in the afterlife, when he means the opposite, that all that matters is the here and now, and who has more land and money when he dies wins. And if he sells moose heads, it might be our scalps next.” He pauses. “Now this,” he says, after some deliberation, drawing a big S with a straight line through it and showing it to Corn Dog, “is a dollar sign. It stands for the bill you just burned. Rare is the one who burns it, at any rate. You have to understand that the Almighty Buck is a symbol in a class by itself, it’s a symbol of a symbol that is really no symbol at all. It goes further than merely representing unity among white people, and the power and the glory of the Freeway, it’s the actual means of exchange for the necessities of life. I know this is hard for a kid like you to understand but burning money is the same as killing rabbits for no reason.

  “The oneness behind every single buck is what gives it its might. It’s portable, acceptable everywhere and very light. It can give you more security than ten blankets. As a medium of exchange you can put a whole store in your pocket and carry it around without breaking your back.”

  Corn Dog is very respectful to his teacher and guardian. He pays careful attention to every word that comes out of the loquacious mouth of Hot Springs, but still so much of what the man says is lost on the quiet boy.

  “I’ll tell you, nowadays a sorcerer has got to be more than just a glorified boy scout who can snare rabbits and squirrels. What good is being able to play with the deer and the antelope when there are none left? You’ve got to save yourself, use your warrior wits and your hunter wisdom to be on guard in different ways, and since you’re fighting in someone else’s country you’ve got to be extra sneaky. Here are some more tips. To survive alongside the white man just brute strength and resistance to the death are not going to do it. You’ve got to be able to throw the bull like he does, be as crafty as he, and not appear to be subtle, you’ve got to be able to talk yourself up and make yourself worth more alive than dead. And whenever you have to deal with a white man assume the worst. Be a fraud and a lip servant. Agree with everything he says. If he asks if you love Emanual, say ‘amen’ and make the sign of the cross. If he asks you to pledge allegiance to the flag, put your left hand on your heart and raise your right. If he says the land is free, don’t waste your breath arguing, but inside don’t be deceived. Trust your native i
nstincts. Always appreciate your enemy, don’t sell him short. Like the eagle, the wolf and the bear, he is your brother. But to stay even in business you’ve got to win. It’s no disgrace to stab the white man in the back. Greed and stupidity come as naturally to him as guns and organization. Play him for his weakness rather than try to overcome his strength. Cheat all you like, it’s business. But always remember, not every Freewayfarer is your enemy. There’s a good amount of bad in everyone, everyone makes mistakes. Why, I saw the best minds of my father’s generation starve themselves as a matter of stupid national and racial pride.”

  Corn Dog remains sitting tight, interested, doing his best to understand the effusive Hot Springs as he bubbles into the story of where he comes from and how his life stream merged with his partner Whitman. “I was born not too far from here in the village of the Elk People. When I was thirteen our agricultural experts set a fire to clear some land. The spring and summer were drier and more windy than usual and the backfires got out of hand. The Elk People had to spend almost the entire summer in a losing cause down by the river collecting goatskin bags of water to fight the fire off from the village. The plants and animals all around were burned up. In the fall, when the rains finally put the fire out, there was no harvest, no game, and the Elk People’s firefighters had fouled up the salmon’s nest in the river. We were in for a hungry winter.

  “But then an overweight Freewayfarer named Dan Post came to the village. He had heard about our situation and said he could help. He showed us some bucks, the same as the one you just threw into the fire. He said he would give some to us for any piece of native craft we could come up with. The men in the tribe were accomplished mask makers, and were skilled designers of musical instruments and weapons; the women were known for their blankets and their pottery. The Elk braves were big bucks. They had fierce pride which would not allow them to turn their art over to the white man for money. My father, Sitting Duck, was the chief, and a real old stick-in-the-mud Elk brave. He looked at big Dan’s bucks and said what you did, that they were only paper, and that if they had any power, which he doubted, it was sure to be bad medicine. He said that buying and selling native craft, commercializing the Elk People’s ways, was just another way Freewayfarers had of destroying the Elk People. Dan swore that the money could be used for good, that the paleface bucks could talk for food, that the village could keep itself alive by turning its lousiest decoys into corn, its most mediocre masks into meat, but the braves glared at him and put on their fierce war faces. Big Dan knew what was good for him and cleared out quickly.