Routes

by John Okas

  Refusing to take off his modern shaman mask, Hot Springs remains the devil’s advocate, and stubbornly maintains that native craft should be essentially true to the tales of the heroic era, the age when Indigenous gods and men collaborated, and ought not to get involved with the current problem of the Indigen’s alienation in a paleface society and the destruction to the natural environment. “As sure as shooting, Kid, you’re going to shock the shit out of white women who are on the lookout for patterns and colors in fabrics that will coordinate well with their furniture and carpets. Please, try to cater to the palates of the customer just a bit.”

  Whitman completely disagrees. “An innovation whose time has come is invented in several places simultaneously. We’ve all noticed how when we first learn a new word it seems to come cropping up again soon afterwards. What Cornie is creating from within himself, unaware of the world around him, agrees in both style and content with the work of Pizarro Pio.”

  The sorcerer knows unsalable craft when he sees it but doesn’t know a Pio from a hole in the wall. “Pizarro who?” asks Hot Springs. Sucking on his peace pipe like a wise guy, blowing smoke rings.

  “That shows you how little you know, Partner. Pio is an absolute creative genius and he’s currently making histoire over in the City of Lights with something called abstract art. And his work is already worth a fortune. In this case a rose is not a rose. When these Corn Dogs go to market they must be billed as fine art rather than native craft. These are ‘pieces’ not products. You should be proud. Our boy is an artiste.”

  The partners are back at it. Hot Spings, because he promised in his apology, tries to find a calm voice to express his argument, and Whitman tries not to cry.

  “You’re killing the competitive edge this boy needs to survive.” Hot Springs moans. “How’s he going to earn a living?”

  “He doesn’t need to earn a living. He can stay with us and create and talk to the animals. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “‘King of the jungle’ is fine as far as it goes, but you know as well as I that by the time the Kid’s our age there’s not going to be much woods or many wild animals left. He’s going to need an apartment. And he does like girls. Maybe he’d like to be able to support a wife and some children. Life on the Freeway can be tough, and it also can be paradise, but the good life costs money. Material is king, and this craft business has been good to me, and you too, and it can be good for him.”

  Whitman produces an imported magazine which has photographs of the young master Pio’s work. “Here, Partner, put this in your peace pipe and smoke it.”

  Hot Springs studies a picture of a canvas showing three nude women with nine breasts among them. He holds it up to a Corn Dog cloth where there is a fractured sun and a chicken with six beaks. He whistles when he reads that such things are selling for thousands of dollars. “All right, I admit that this Pio and the Kid jibe. But the City of Lights is a Titanic Ocean away from the Home of the Brave. Customers will take things from a white man they never will from a red. They want the graphics in their native art to correspond to their ideas of quote authentic unquote. Prejudice, Whitman, that’s what you don’t understand. It’s much easier for us to sell our naivete than our sophistication. When the biased eye looks at these weird weavings it will see them as poorly made. The theme of paradise lost won’t sell. If we’re lucky someone will take them for novelty items. Ten bucks tops.”

  “Just because a product is rarified,” says Whitman, “that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. On the contrary, the rarer something is the more value it has. And Corn Dog’s weaving is unique.”

  Hot Springs still won’t buy it, and doesn’t think the public will either. “A blanket with a pretty pattern you can see on the wall in your den will sell whether it’s well made or not, but this art from what I see, from what anyone sees, it’s all in the mind. People won’t buy what they can’t see.”

  “Do you want to make a bet on it, Partner?”

  The following year all three of them go west with the spring line. When Hot Springs sees Virgil he doesn’t let bygones be bygones without a shot. “You can go to hell in a handbasket, Virg,” he squints his eyes and hoots. “But first, the least you can do for fucking up my Kid is to buy me some spaghetti and meatballs.”

  To prove his point and because he thinks it might be fun, Whitman has plans to expand the business to include the wider world of art. Using the Old Post Trading Post as collateral he borrows money from a bank, puts a post on the hill and calls it the New Post Gallery. In the fall the partners open their new branch with an exhibition of the work of seven young artists, all front runners out to buck the way the establishment sees things. The work is all metaphysical, background and fore, though none so brazen as the half-breed who weaves spaces through the signs of tradition using wool as his co-pilot.

  Claude Dujour is the art critic of the Bay City Times. He carries a cane although he does not limp. His face is fixed in a smirk that makes sure you know that his high brow and his patrician beak come from a snotty old blueblood line and not just any old genetic soup stock of the day. He needs to go no further than the pair of Corn Dogs set up to be seen when one first enters the gallery, titled Unstill Life and Buck with Seal and Bill and see a photograph of the artist, all bronze and muscular in his fleecy wrapper and his buckskin, to know he’s seen enough. The representation of parts of the great seal mixed in with fractured wild life is enough to uncurl the critic’s well waxed mustache.

  Dujour puts it in writing in the morning edition. Hot headlines on the arts and leisure page blast Corn Dog and Whitman: KIDS’ STUFF: UNLIKABLE BEASTS AT THE NEW POST GALLERY. It goes on from there.

  What modern art needs, what it so desperately lacks, are values against which to test itself. What one would gather from this exhibition at the newly opened Post Gallery is that, not only paint on canvas, but wood, metal, rags and ultimately anything from the garbage pail can get into the act. However this does not mean that they are throwing the stuff away. If Whitman Post, the gallery’s owner, means to shock with price as much as his artists do with product, he has succeeded.

  One young artist, evidently of Indigenous background, named, of all things, Corn Dog, thinks he has the right to question the breakdown of order in the modern world. His woolen wall hangings are revolting rather than revolutionary. A mish-mash of color and form is no substitute for an answer. Apparently, young man, you do not understand that the grid which our civilization has put over the barbarity of existence is long and hard fought for. Better our values and standards be too rigid than too relaxed, as they are becoming in this present day when uncultured savages, kings of the jumble, take themselves seriously as artists, and yet create no better than a potty trained two year old.

  Corn Dog reads what Dujour has to say. He’s as strong and a silent as he was the day he heard George Moose’s sobbing story about the grim work of the paleface headhunters. He remembers what his Uncle Virgil said about prizing his failures, but it still hurts to be misunderstood.

  Now it’s Hot Springs’s turn to say “I told you so” to Whitman, but he doesn’t say it, instead he gives the boy’s chin a chuck that boosts his spirit, “Kid, this Dujour is full of soup, and so am I. Whitman and Virgil are right, what matters is not the matter but the mind behind it. Stay true to your inner vision. If critics had any they wouldn’t be critics. Whether a person is young or old, black or white or red, a man or a woman, a heterosexual or not, should not be subject to review. A good critic is blind to what’s behind the picture. Anyway, a good student teaches his teacher. I was all wet behind the ears when I told you that youth was no asset in the craft trade, and that you had to sell to be worthwhile. To get along in this or any world it doesn’t pay to be too set in your ways. You’ve done a lot to remind me that freshness of expression counts more than money, but do me a favor and keep at least one of your feet on the ground.”

  So while the review brings unanimity to the partnership of Whitman Post and H
ot Springs it does not bring an avalanche of collectors down on the gallery. The partners lose money every day, and life in the City by the Bay is expensive. The money for the small house they rent must come out of Whitman’s savings.

  “I guess I lost the bet, Partner,” he says.

  While Whitman is indifferent to the city, and Hot Springs is hot for it, a great fan of disguising himself as a paleface, eating out and going through the markets and the busy, crowded streets, Corn Dog is ill at ease there, restless and moody. He does not like to go out to the busy parts of town but spends his time in the small, shady, rented backyard, going further afield in his weaving. He works in strips and scraps of any material he comes across, some old shirts Virgil gives him, bits of shingle, coal, acorns, empty food tins, a canary cage, whatever.

  The partners try to cut their losses and sell the gallery but with the bank breathing down their necks and the Old Trading Post easier to sell, they sacrifice it rather than lose everything. Virgil, forced into unemployment, is not at all upset, but rather pleasantly surprised. A minor shareholder in the business, he gets a piece of the sale. He comes by and talks about his homestead up the coast in a place called Cape Delfino. “I’ll be perfectly happy to go there and try my hand at raising sheep.”

  Hot Springs too takes the failure like a man. He puts on a paleface jacket and tie and takes them all out for veal and peppers at Al Dante’s to celebrate the loss.

  Virgil, Whitman and Hot Springs make all sorts of salutes, but Corn Dog is reserved. There is a young lady at another table who is so pretty she makes him sick. For beauty to exist and him not to hold it and have it hold him, the way it was when he was a child of mother nature living in the spruce woods, gives him a sinking, lonely feeling. As he gets older, he understands that there are things he doesn’t understand about himself. There are parts of his body beyond his mind, and almost every waking and most sleeping minutes he is subject to the quirks of his sex. It is to keep his mind off the matter between his legs that he makes art, and unmakes it, weaving and unweaving not for profit but for relief. He takes ten dollars and a tip from Hot Springs to put on a jacket and tie, and tries Kane’s again. This time he is not bothered by the bouncers at the door. But inside is the same as outside. He sits there alone at the bar, drinking ginger ale, listening to the music, musing over what he’s going to do with his life, looking at all the different girls, and feeling sick down to his buck balls. His sense of smell is acute where they are concerned. When he closes his eyes and thinks of the source of the bouquet, he sees stars. He is not attracted to any of them specifically, his shyness and his native-ity make it out of the question for him to approach one, but what mysteries they represent overpower him. How’s he going to go back to the woods now that he’s seen girls in fringy dresses and eye makeup? Is there one for him that makes him feel comfortable? He is drawn to the siren he hears within more than he is to the rivers and streams, the forests and deserts, the mountains and valleys, the ocean and sky.

  In the summer of nineteen twenty-eight, after a couple of years in the art business, treading water to keep the bank from repossessing the gallery, the partners receive an offer from an investment group back east to buy the gallery for a figure that would square them with the bank. Whitman and Hot Springs do not hesitate to take the deal. At the same time, through an agent, they find a buyer for the Sprucewood Lodge, and with all concerned knowing they can’t go home again, they sell the old place, the home they all loved so much.

  “I’ve finally gotten your Pop reconciled to getting away from it altogether.” says Whitman when they tell Corn Dog about their plans. “The Aloha Islands beckon in the Deep Blue South Seas.” They invite the brazen boy, now a perfect nineteen, to come along. “Kid,” says Hot Springs, “you know that as long as we live you always have a place with us. Now that the spruce wood hill place is gone, you’re welcome to come with us to where it’s summer all year long.” He paints a picture of living barefoot, spending the days fishing and shellhunting, sleeping in a cabin on the beach. “I the face of a girl. “I’m going back there to find out what it is. There’s got to be more to this world than only a front and a back.”

  Whitman and Hot Springs wink at one another. Whitman gives Corn Dog a hug. “Then it’s true love you’re after, after all.”

  Realistic Hot Springs gives him a piece of fatherly advice, “Kid, if that’s the case, you better make sure you pack a good lunch.”

  The Peach of Zion Beehive

  Unlike the way-out, wiggly, unchartered path that comes and goes after Corn Dog, our grandmother’s family has its routes all mapped out for them by the Book of the Prophet, the holy written instrument of the Lord. They do not live in just anytown but in Zion, the queen of settlements in the Beehive State, the dream of the Lord come true. And Sarah Blanche is not just anybody, but the daughter of the Reverend Jeremiah Blanche, an ordained Shibbolite minister and the present day keeper of that very Book.

  Samson Shibbola was a cab driver in the little old Big Apple back in the days when ordinary cabs were handsome horse-drawn carriages. He suffered from a fatal condition commonly known as “the galloping consumption” or “hacking cough.” As he sat there in the rain, or heat, or snow, reins in hand, facing the horse’s behind, stuck in traffic, mired in manure, coughing up blood, he prayed to the Lord for guidance and direction in his life. One day there was a sleet storm and Sam was caught in a particularly sticky crosstown traffic situation. His back wheels got caught in one of the city’s many muddy slush-filled ruts. He labored hard pushing the cab from behind, calling to the horse to go, being bespattered by the worst filth the Apple has to offer, but to no avail. Instead of cursing, he prayed. And his prayers were finally answered. An angel named Ezriel appeared to him. The angel lent a wing to his wheels and took him in his cab much further than Avenue E. Ezriel took the man, along with his beast and vehicle, off to heaven. There the angel showed him a vault of golden tablets, and told him that these were an open ended account of God’s plan for the Land of the Free. The angel then commissioned Shibbola as “a warrior of God’s word,” a prophet, and revealed to him an old-time marching saint religion. Ezriel instructed him “to make smooth in the desert a highway for our God,” and sent him, his horse and buggy back to earth. In the seven years which followed, under Ezriel’s wing, Samson chronicled everything from the creation of heaven and earth, which the angel whispered, dictating from the tablets, in his ear at night, to his own long cab ride west, picking up followers as he went. Using the sanction of polygamy as a ploy he brought self-righteous men together with more than one homely woman apiece. Whenever a soul was converted to Shibbolism, or a baby was born to believers, Shibbola would add that newcomer’s name and short story to the book he got from the angel. Hacking away, he delivered a community of the faithful, God’s chosen people, to the sacred wilderness of the Home of the Brave where he saw his destiny manifest and his dreams realized, a smooth stone road laid in the desert leading to a splendid temple built of wood and rawhide, without a single nail. Then, his life’s work complete, he let the consumption, ever a problem, gallop away. Knowing his end was near, to insure the Book of the Prophet would go beyond the life and times of Sam Shibbola, he enjoined the Council of Elders to appoint one of the faithful, the man with the neatest hand, to be the bookkeeper and continue entering into that mighty tome the family trees and short stories of those who had seen the light, the names and records of salvation of all contemporary temple-goers.

  The Reverend Blanche beams with pride when he writes his daughter’s name on a page of sacred text. “Sarah Ruth, born to Jeremiah and Emily Blanche on the eighth day of May, nineteen hundred and eleven, year of Our Lord, received the Grace of Our Lord and was cleansed by His Holy Sight. Amen.” Now she is more than just another person living a life of sin on earth, she is a character in a Book written by the Holy Author, God Himself through his appointed representatives. With her name in such hallowed print she is fit to be brought before the elders. They w
ho believe in one God and many wives bless her thrice, as a daughter, as a wife, as a mother.

  Sarah the daughter is the fairest of any little lamb who ever graced the Lord’s humble flock, platinum blond curls and milk white skin, solemn dark deep eyes, peaches in her cheeks. Her lips, full, fleshy, and firm are sealed as if in silent prayer. Everywhere that Emily goes her daughter is sure to follow, well-behaved, the most angelic of toddlers.

  Jeremiah is made in the image and likeness of a law-giver: he stands six and half feet in his long black coat, and six inches higher than that when he puts on his high black hat. He follows the monogamous trend of modern Shibbolism, he is married to none other than Emily. But insofar as the rest of the straight road to the one true God goes he does not deviate an inch from the path on which the Prophet marched ahead of him. He rules his roost by the book, and Emily as his humble helpmeet woman, serves as the mediator between man and child. Jeremiah says to Emily. “Woman, it is written, ‘As the sapling is bent, so grows the tree. The straight wood is rooted in The Word, the gnarled in iniquitousness.’ You must see to it that my daughter is more than just a little lamb, for lambs go astray. She must be a saint. For it is written, ‘even angels fall whereas saints come marching in.’”

  The Book of the Prophet couldn’t be plainer. It says, “Reading the word is salvation.” A child must be able to read in order to be successful in the war against sin.

  Sarah Blanche certainly appears to be saved. By the time she is seven she is the most advanced reader in the Prophet’s Day School. Her father is proud of her and, for a time, rests assured that she is on the righteous track. But pride goes before the fall. It is not long before Jeremiah’s fear of the Lord feeds his doubts about his daughter’s place in those All-seeing Eyes. He says to Emily, “Woman, there is more to hearing the Lord God’s word than recognizing it on a page. Haven’t you read about oral tradition? Can’t the child hear Him calling her to the mission of helping those less fortunate than ourselves?”