by Win Blevins
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RavenShadow
Win Blevins
This novel is dedicated to
Sitanka Wokiksuye,
the Big Foot Memorial Riders
Contents
PART ONE: Blue Is Lost
Blue Introduces Himself
Hating Your Life
An Offense
Get-Back Time
And How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy Now, Mr. Death?
PART TWO: Where Blue Came From
The Voices in Blue
Crow’s Raising
The Earthquake
Bird Without a Nest
School Days
Jumping Ju
Juto the White World
PART THREE: Red Road, Black Road, White Road
Delphine
Venturing Forth
How Delphine Was Seeing Things
Gulls
Delphine
An Ending
Wild, Strange Winds
PART FOUR: Going to the Mountain
Falling Between Two Bar Stools
Blue Crow Stumbles Toward the Mountain
Into the Sweat Lodge
I Am Powerless over Alcohol
Chup Tails
What Blue Crow Saw on the Mountain
PART FIVE: Toward Wounded Knee
What Does It Mean?
Pecking and Hunting
The Big Foot Memorial Riders
An Experience at Wounded Knee
The Past Bites My Ass
PART SIX: The Big Foot Memorial Ride
Pleasant Sunday
They Ride
The Camp in the Straw
The Second Day, Christmas Eve
The First Journey
Blue’s Past Leans on His Present
The Second Journey
The Third Journey
To Wounded Knee
PART SEVEN: Death and Resurrection
The Storm
A Search for Miracles
Sitanka Wokiksuye
The Quest for Unchee
Sign-off
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PART ONE
Blue Is Lost
Blue Introduces Himself
Mitakuye oyasin—We are all related, we are all one. Mitakuye oyasin—those are the words we use to end all our prayers, we Lakota, the ones you call Sioux. I’m telling you this story to teach it to myself.
You can call me Blue.
My full name is Joseph Blue Crow. It is one of my names. I am the man of many names. I am the man of more than one voice, more than one language, more than one culture. I am the man you do not know, do not want to know, cannot permit yourself to know. To see me is to feel the cold beneath the shadow of the Raven’s wing.
Look at me. Here I stand before you, a buffalo bull of a Lakota Indian, six and a half feet tall and up toward three hundred pounds. My skin is dark, my hair blue-black, and I wear it in one long braid. I look like I belong in another world, any other world, not yours.
Will you listen to my story? You must listen very carefully.
I set out on a journey to save my soul.
Maybe I will save it.
And maybe, as my witness, you can save yours.
Hating Your Life
How you find your way in this life is, you get lost, you figure out you’re lost, and you hate it.
That’s where I was last August, year nineteen and ninety. Hating it.
I still had a good job. I was a jock at KKAT, an AM station in Rapid City, strong in that market. My job was spinning those groovy tunes. Went off to college and learned radio, whooptee-doo, got the skills to do that upbeat patter, segue from the tunes to the news and from the other stuff into a feel-good day. Hey, any year-round job is a good job for an Indian here in South Dakota. The white part of the state is enemy territory for Indians. The rez is a black hole for jobs, and lives.
I was in an emotional black hole. The winter before, my marriage ended after five years invested. One day Marietta went to court, the judge granted our divorce, and everything was swept away, wife, children, family, all swept away, just like a gullywasher come down the coulee.
Let me be blunt about whose fault this no-fault divorce was. Demon rum. Marietta and I were both drinking big-time. We met when we were drunk as skunks and screwed. Whenever we saw each other in bars we’d get drunk as skunks and screw. So we got married and stayed drunk as skunks and screwed, until the booze got more interesting than the screwing. By the end it had been more interesting for a long time.
I don’t want to tell you all the things we did while we were drinking. The worst was, we used to leave the kids in the car while we went into the bar. Go out and check on them every couple of hours. Beery conversations, basketball on behind-the-bar TV, life-long friends we’d never met before and would never see again, the world-weary talk of bartenders—all these were more interesting than our children. Who huddled in the car in wet diapers, hungry, crying, nothing to do. Cold too, in the winter. Wonder we didn’t freeze them to death. Actually, we did freeze them to death, except not physically.
We did other things, which you might think even more rotten. Leaving them in the car by themselves is just the one that sticks in my craw the worst.
That’s the way it was. After the divorce I boozed even worse (though I never used—being a traditional Indian, I go for firewater). I’d get drunk and drive down the rez roads at eighty, hundred miles an hour. Rolled my car, crushed the top. After that got a convertible—cut the top off with a blowtorch. High style on the rez, baby.
Actually, that car was a 1967 Lincoln Continental. Bought it for nothing, thinking I’d fix it up and have a classic, live in the proper style of a radio jock. Tore it up instead, but never mind. It had one feature came in very handy, cruise control. You could set that and not have to use the accelerator. This seemed sweet when I was drunk and felt like cruising. I’d stand up on the bench seat, steer with one foot, and weave down the highway like a running back dodging phantom tacklers. Oh crazy Jesus!
When I missed a curve one night, I personally went cartwheeling out through the sagebrush, while the car coolly coasted to a halt, engine idling. I ka-thumped across the dirt and came to a sudden stop. I regarded the stars until they slowed to cruising speed. I wiggled to see if my bones worked. I creaked myself up and fingered sticks, stones, and dirt out of my eyes, mouth, ears, collar, waist, shirt sleeves, and out of my other nooks and crannies, and chucked them into the darkness of the high plains. Then I jumped back in the car and tried for instant replay.
It is God’s grace I am alive. (More about God’s grace later.)
That August, the time I said I’d got all the way lost, I was still living in the house in Rockerville, the one I used to share with Marietta and the kids, who were gone back to her first husband, the kids’ dad. She was white—Jewish, actually—and her ex made beaucoup bucks shooting TV commercials. Her promise was, You’ll never see me or the kids again. When the Rockerville house sold, she would get half the money, and I would be on the street.
Lost, no one has ever been more lost. I didn’t know diddly about anything, including myself. Took a crazy juke to let me figure out even one thing. I had to get even with Long John Silver.
An Offense
Long John Silver wasn’t his name, but that is what I called him, after his mane of hair, thick, sleek, and silver. John Karnopoulos also had a slender body, a fine Greek nose, an easy smile, elegant manners, a tanning salon complexion, and a radio actor’s voice, soft and plush as
a down comforter. You never saw a guy look so good approaching seventy. You never saw a guy with so much on his head and so little on his mind.
He was the owner of my radio station, sort of. He was married to the real owner, Patty Karnopoulos. He was handsome, she was homely. She had money, and he liked money. In this way, and presumably in the sack, they made yin yang.
It was apparently true that he’d been an actor, some soap opera in the sixties. I’m sure he hoped to become America’s heartthrob. Then he spent a couple of decades on the edges of the scene in Hollywood, always the hail fellow, always the perfect guest, the poised escort. Late in life he had graduated to radio station owner, which allowed him to imply that where he once was hired help, he now was kingpin.
For sure he had power, and he behaved in the American way—he abused it. There are a thousand and one tricks to milk a radio station if you have no ethics, and Long John used every one. He’d promise non-profits to match their schedules, meaning give a free spot for every paid spot, and never air the free spots. Or double-sell inventory if the client wasn’t savvy enough to ask for an affidavit. Or dummy bills. Everyone in the office knew his tricks, except Patty, who thought the station was earning an honest profit.
So by various means Long John Silver lined his pockets. And somehow, at the same time, he seemed through affability to extend his influence, make people envy and fear and even admire him. All this he did amiably, happily, without a second thought. His notion was, This is what everybody with power does—else what’s it for?
He abused his power with women too. I don’t just mean he screwed them, because we all want to do that. I mean he bamboozled them with bullshit and entranced them with coke and took his pleasure and left them empty-handed and empty-hearted. He dangled the promise of a raise, a better station job, better air time. (He even dangled the prospect of my spot, six A.M. to ten A.M., the best air time a station has.) If these were not enough lure, Long John brought up the possibility of a mention on the air. Once he got them out, usually to a dinner at an advertising restaurant, so he could get a freebie, he romanced them with stories of his leading ladies, until it sounded like by laying down they would actually be rising into honored company. When he was done with them, he dropped them cold, and let others know with a wink and a shrug that he’d had his fun but …
His latest playmate was Amy the receptionist, who had been warned but was too thick to grasp the fate of her predecessors. Since Amy had the build of a tank and the spirit of a drill sergeant, no one much cared. We did joke about Long John getting lost between her twin turret guns.
All the hired help but Amy the Tank hated John—the jocks especially did. He never caught onto one simple thing. You don’t walk into a studio and berate a jock during a show. Yes, he’s playing music, or she is, and your complaints won’t go out over the air. But think about the jock. He has to slip into an oldie smoothly (say, the Righteous Brothers), listen to you cuss him for three minutes, hold up a finger to indicate he’s going back on the air, and prance in lightly with something like, “Wow oh wow, doesn’t that bring back the memories? Bright and sunny sixty degrees in Rapid City this fine autumn morning, how could life get better?” And he has to sound like he believes it.
I guess, though, Long John did what a station head really has to do. He was sociable. He made himself an affable member of every group, from Rotary to the Elk’s, where potential advertisers saw him. He was affable with the United Way chairman, the head of Special Olympics. He was smooth as single-malt scotch at the country club. He was flashy and gleaming and silver, like the hood ornament on my old Lincoln.
None of this seemed ultra-personal to me until one transgression made me want to smash his head with the hood ornament on my Lincoln.
Sybil, the woman who manages our traffic, said as I wheeled out of the studio, “Take me to lunch.” Something in her tone made me say yes. Sybil was a friend.
We went to the Firehouse because the margaritas are good. I knocked back the first one, made small talk, and enjoyed Sybil’s bird-titter laugh. Somehow her laugh always sounded like a flock of birds chirping. Today there was an odd note in it.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Sybil was Long John’s playmate before Amy the Tank. When he dropped Sybil a couple of months ago, I took her out for drinks to cheer her up. I congratulated her. I sang the “Michigan Fight Song” to her. Hell, in twenty minutes she was rejoicing in her good luck.
No rejoicing now. I knew she hadn’t dated anyone else for a long time. “What did he say?”
“That I can’t prove it’s his child. That he won’t pay for an abortion. And would I not tell Amy.”
What do you do at a time like that? I couldn’t think of anything but to look grim.
“Then, after he thought about it for a day, he fired me. I’m gone a week from tomorrow.”
Bile lurched up my gut. At the same time Sybil started sobbing, long and hard, sobs that had real sorrow in them, and real regret, and real self-dislike.
I held her. (Sorry to say, with the other hand I used the second margarita to douse the bile.)
I held her and held her and finally said, “Maybe I should talk to him.”
That did it. She hooted, not chirping birds now but honking geese. That free and real laugh was my favorite thing about Sybil.
Suddenly, violently, while every instrument in her orchestra was laughing or crying at full volume, I wanted to kill Long John for what he did to her.
Finally she pulled out of my arm and slugged down some of her own margarita.
I started with, “They don’t put you in jail for being an asshole, do they?”
“When I’m first woman president of the United States, they will.”
My emotional pots and pans wouldn’t stop clanging. I ordered another margarita to silence them.
“What are you going to do?”
“Go home. That’s first. Right to my parents.” I knew she came from Chicago. “Then I’ll decide whether to have the baby.”
Anger sloshed around inside me. “You can get severance pay. You can get unemployment. You can sue him for wrongful termination.”
She looked at me sadly. “That’s the last thing on my mind.” She sipped her drink. “Believe me, the last.”
We drank in silence.
“So he gets away with it.”
One corner of her mouth curled up. “What else is new?”
I pondered.
“For once in my life I’d like to do something.”
We drank across another silence.
“Maybe,” said Sybil finally, “you could do something to embarrass him on the air.”
A dim light went on in my brain. “Yeah.”
Her eyes got big. “He’ll fire you.”
“Or if he thinks it’s on the air,” I said. The light got brighter.
I blinked, trying not to think what I was thinking. If he thinks it’s on the air.
I called for the check. We left without even one more drink. On the sidewalk I gave Sybil a squeeze on the shoulders. Our walk had a little bounce. My brain was teeming, and my teeth were smiling.
Get-Back Time
I passed the coming week in a tizzy. I was so nervous I screwed up the simplest things. Soon I realized that I might as well go ahead. Sybil had lost her job—she was already gone—I was gonna lose mine.
Oh yeah, I have cause a-plenty, but I’m gonna get canned. Better yet, canned the Friday before Labor Day, the big foofuraw in honor of the hired help of America.
And then where was I going to get a job? Going back to the rez did not feel like an option. There Indians with jobs are an endangered species, and unemployment runs eighty, ninety percent. Indians with forty-grand-a-year jobs like mine are scarce as manure in a shopping mall. We got radio stations, but the pay is zilch.
The problem was even bigger than that. Indian people who make it off the rez, who go to college, who find a niche in the white-world econ
omy, these Indians do not go back, for a lot of reasons. Not if you’re lucky enough to get out.
No radio station would hire me after Long John passed the word about what I did to him, not in the Black Hills region. So what the hell was I gonna do for a job?
All I knew was, I meant to get Long John Silver.
Fortunately, my idea took hold right away and knocked my mind off being scared. I was looking at a news release from the United Way when my plan began to form. The local chapter was honoring our station for a wonderful job helping raise money. These sorts of verbal bouquets came along week in week out, payback for giving the charities free air time. At Long John’s request (read Long John’s order) I slipped such honors into our community news spots.
Now, my program is a little bit of everything: national news, local news, music, commercials, announcements, promos, and interviews. The trick is, some of it is canned and some live—national news on tape, local news read by me, music on CD, announcements live, commercials tape, and so on etcetabravo. Wonderfully, in the studio I have complete control over all this. On one side of me are CD and cassette players, so I can get cuts ready and play them when the time comes. On the other side is a commercial cart. In it go stacks of tapes recorded earlier. They look like eight-tracks, and they’re numbered. I check the paper log, push a button, and lo and behold, the cart hypes the right product.
This next bit will become important. I wear a headset and hear everything that’s on the air. Anyone else in the studio is without headset. If they go on the air, they use a standing mike. In summary: When I’m doing live, anyone else in the studio hears what we’re broadcasting. When a cart is playing, there’s silence, to everyone’s ears but mine.
With the United Way news release in hand, I sat and puzzled it out. It would work. Maybe. Yeah, it was bingo on the button. The method wasn’t so tricky—I was surprised no one, as far I as knew, had done it before. The result would be simple and delectable. And with luck it wouldn’t cost me my severance pay, or my unemployment checks. Which was only right. He’d got out of paying Sybil, but he wasn’t going to get out of paying me, who had paid unemployment taxes to the state of South Dakota for eleven years. I’d put up with Long John Silver for a very long time, and I wanted something for it.