by Will Weaver
“Indians are on the warpath, I guess,” the driver said, rolling a toothpick in his mouth as he watched Guy and the brothers push the heavy wheelbarrows of concrete.
“Fuck ’em,” one brother said for both.
“Wetten it up a little,” the other brother said of the concrete. “It’s too stiff.”
“That’s what my wife says,” the first brother added.
“Once a year she says that?” the second brother grunted, dumping a load.
“Once an hour. All night,” the first brother said.
“My ass,” the second brother said.
Guy grinned and kept trotting back and forth with his wheelbarrow.
By sundown the sidewalk concrete was troweled, brushed sandpaper rough with a stiff-bristled barn broom, and the black-haired carpenters were driving fast toward Doc’s.
Martin finished chores and came across the yard. “Who the hell is paying for all this?” he said, surveying the construction.
“California,” Guy replied, turning on the water hose.
“By the way, that Silver woman called,” Martin said.
Guy nodded and sprayed water on the wheelbarrow.
Martin watched him for a minute. “’Spose that means you’ll be heading in to the Lumberjack for the night.”
“Maybe I ought to send you,” Guy said.
Martin thought for a moment. “Nah—she might not ever call you again.”
Guy turned the cold spray on Martin, who whooped and cursed. Then he chased his father, laughing, as far as the hose would reach.
At ten o’clock the next morning Guy dressed Helmer in a plaid wool jacket and cap, put the earflaps down, though the temperature was fifty-five degrees, and wheeled him through the front door onto the ramp. In the sunlight, Helmer squinted. He stared for a long time down at the wood, its lag bolts and beams, then beyond at the ribbon of concrete that stretched to the barn.
“What do you think, Gramps?” Guy said happily.
“Who pays for all this?” Helmer rumbled.
“Me,” Guy said. “Hang on.” He rolled Helmer down the ramp onto the ground. Suddenly Helmer canted his neck to look up at the sky. He tipped back his face. The sunlight fell full into the deep sockets of his eyes, the crevices around his mouth. He sat that way for long minutes, as if he had fallen asleep. Then he looked back to the sidewalk.
“Try it out,” Guy said, nodding to the concrete path ahead.
Helmer squinted back to his house, then ahead. Slowly his right hand moved the lever that powered the batteries. The wheelchair whirred; its wheels turned slowly toward the barn. Guy walked behind. Soon he was trotting, then jogging to keep up.
“Hey,” he called, laughing. But Helmer kept his lever to the metal.
***
Helmer spent the rest of the day parked in the center alley of the barn. He refused to go in for lunch. Guy brought some sandwiches and coffee, two bales of straw for a table, and ate with Helmer in the empty barn. At three o’clock Martin came to put down grain. When each stall was fronted by a small dusty pyramid of ground oats and corn, Guy and Martin prepared to let in the Holsteins, who, having heard the scrape of the grain shovel on concrete, milled and thumped and hooted just outside the door. Guy wheeled Helmer backward and parked him out of the cows’ path, by the front door. Then Martin swung open the rear door, cursed at, whacked at the cows with his auctioneer’s cane as they thundered past him toward their grain. Guy started to lock the stanchions when Martin cursed louder. The cows’ rush had stalled, backed up. Martin was sandwiched against the wall. “Get going, you sonsabitches—what the hell’s the matter with you!” he shouted.
Guy saw the trouble. Helmer had wheeled his chair back into the center of the alley, mid-barn. The tide of cows balked at the sight of his wheelchair. Then, from the weight of cows still pressing in from behind, the dam broke. The cows surged past Helmer on both sides. Helmer was a boulder. The cows were floodwater in a stream. Helmer held out his right hand. His fingers traced the sides of the cows’ necks, sketched their big shoulder bones, vibrated along the washboard plains of their ribs as they flowed past.
Guy held his breath. For a long minute he lost sight of Helmer among the surging cows. The flood diminished. The last of the cows, in clumsy, king-salmon leaps, cleared the gutter, slammed forward into their stanchions, and buried their noses in the grain.
Helmer sat alone in his wheelchair.
“Jesus Christ, Dad!” Martin began. Martin’s face was bone white.
But Helmer didn’t look up. He lifted his right hand to his face. He closed around his nose the fingers that had touched the cows.
Outside, Guy walked behind the wheelchair as Helmer rolled home. The sun was full in their faces. Midway from the barn to the house the chair slowed, then veered to the right. Guy grabbed the handles to keep it from tipping. He leaned forward to check on Helmer. His grandfather’s face was streaming with tears.
30
Guy returned Cassandra’s car that evening. He found her in her pink room at the Lumberjack. She was on the phone. She motioned him through the doorway and shifted the phone to her other shoulder as she kept writing on a yellow pad. On the pink bedspread lay her brown leather briefcase and assorted papers. Cassandra murmured, “Yes, yes . . . yes,” into the receiver. Guy sat and looked across the bed.
One of the papers caught his eye, a grainy, narrow-script, finger-thick, stapled photocopy: “Report in the Matter of the Investigation of the White Earth Reservation, 62nd Congress, with Transcript and Testimony Taken and Exhibits Offered from July 25, 1911, to March 28, 1912.”
“Yes, Senator,” Cassandra said. “Everything is set.”
Guy looked up.
“That’s tomorrow. I’ll meet you at the airport, then we’ll drive into Flatwater. The meeting is at 1:00 PM,” she continued.
She was silent for a moment.
“Yes, Senator, the local and state media.”
Stanbrook’s voice said something.
“The Minneapolis Tribune, Fargo Forum, WCCO, KSTP,” Cassandra began. She continued with a list of newspapers, radio and television stations.
“Good-bye to you too,” Cassandra said, holding the receiver at arm’s length a moment and making a face.
“The Big Chief,” Guy said.
“Yes,” she said.
“So what’s cooking?” Guy said. He leaned forward to pick up the photocopy of the old congressional report.
Cassandra intercepted his reach, swept the papers into her briefcase, and snapped it shut.
“You didn’t hear?” she said.
Guy waited.
“Your friend Ma’iingaans has created what we in the business of politics call a media event. One o’clock tomorrow, your old gym,” Cassandra said, “a town meeting.”
“At which the senator appears. On live TV.”
“Something like that,” Cassandra said.
“What about the Indians?”
“They’ll be there. Tom LittleWolf said he’d come, though later some woman called and said he’d come only on the condition that I guarantee security, crowd control.”
“Who was the woman?” Guy said quickly.
“She wouldn’t say. She did say that there’s some sort of men’s club called the Township Defense League, headquartered at”—Cassandra glanced at her notepad—“a place called Doc’s on No Medicine Lake. She said this defense league would be there and should be watched.”
“She’s right,” Guy said.
“You know this group?” Cassandra said.
“I met some of them once at Doc’s,” Guy said. He thought of the Mercedes’ mirror exploding in glass and sunlight. “Security. What have you done about that?”
“I called the sheriff, who said his chief deputy, a fellow nam
ed Bradley Wicks, would take care of crowd control. I talked to Wicks. ‘No problem,’ Wicks said.”
Guy fell silent.
“And you?” Cassandra said.
“I’ll be there,” Guy murmured.
“Good,” she said. She thought a moment. “So my work is done, today anyway.” She turned to face Guy. She stared down at him for long moments. With a faint smile, she said, “Anything you’d like to do between now and tomorrow?”
Guy stared up at her. She had on tight new blue jeans, a pale red fishnet sweater. He could see the shadows of her nipples through its weave.
“I gotta go,” he said suddenly.
He drove fast to White Earth. It was dusty-blue dark, nine o’clock. Far out from the rutted roads of the reservation, big tractors plowed by their yellow and blue running lights. The tractors looked like neon tetras drifting in the dark tank of the fields. Along the black coral reefs of the potato irrigators, often three or four tractors moved side by side.
At No Medicine Town, the Humphrey Center was dark. Guy circled to the rear, where light came from Tom’s office. Tom sat at a desk, typing, with his broad back to the window. His record player was unlit. Guy pounded on the glass.
“Guy,” Tom said, squinting at him as he unlocked the front door. “What’s going on?”
“First, you need some goddamn window shades,” Guy said.
Guy began with the town meeting. “There’s gonna be a thousand pissed-off white folks waiting for you tomorrow in that gym,” he said.
“So?” Tom said. He stood with his arms folded and drew deeply on a Camel; his long braids lay over a rabbit-bone necklace and were bound with beads of turquoise. There were greenish circles under his eyes. “It’s time they heard the truth,” Tom said.
“You think they’re gonna enjoy hearing you tell them to get the fuck off the reservation?”
“I hadn’t planned on using that phrasing,” Tom said, his lips spreading in a white-toothed grin. “But something like that.”
“Jesus, Turd, sometimes I think you spent too long under the ice that day down at No Medicine,” Guy said. “I mean, I know what you’re doing—the land and all the rest—but you got to watch out for yourself. You’re no good to anyone beaten into a McNugget. Or worse.”
“Or worse?”
“Goddammit!” Guy said, kicking a wastebasket across the room. “You don’t remember getting beaten up at Doc’s? You don’t remember getting shot at in the Mercedes? Jesus! You remind me of something I read once about being drunk. Some guy figured out the ten stages of drunkenness. I forget the first several levels, but stage nine was bulletproof and stage ten was invisible.”
Tom grinned. “Lots of invisible redskins up on White Earth.”
“That’s for sure,” Guy said. “People get real invisible when they’re dead.”
They were both silent for a moment. Tom stubbed out his cigarette. “I don’t worry about that,” he said.
“You dumb redskin! You may not worry, but other people do. Like me. Like my mother!”
Tom turned to stare at Guy.
“Don’t go tomorrow,” Guy said. “Let it be The Howard Stanbrook Traveling Show. You’re doing fine without him.”
“No,” Tom said abruptly.
Guy fell silent.
“Don’t you see, Tex?” Tom said. “Tomorrow there will be Indians as well as whites at that meeting. Most of the Indians support me. There may be a few that don’t,” he said, pausing to look out the black glass of the window. He turned back to Guy. “But what I need, Tex, is consensus. I need a mandate, as Stanbrook would call it. I need the support of every damn red man and woman on the reservation.” Tom’s voice rose, his eyes glittered blackly. “Then the Anishinabe will be on their way—there’ll be no stopping us. We’ll take back the lands. We’ll close the reservation. With our own land, we’ll have our own laws. We’ll tear down the irrigators. We’ll pour concrete down their well pipes. We’ll plant the fields back to pine—thousands of acres of pine. The lakes will return to mahnomen, and the rice will be our main industry, and . . .”
Guy’s mouth slowly fell open as Tom talked. In the glare of the overhead fluorescent lights Tom’s eyes were obsidian black and pupil-less. They were filmy. Dreamy. Tear out the TV dish antennas and their white pornography. Burn down the taverns . . . no liquor allowed on the reservation . . . nobody killing each other . . . no guns . . . someday not even any cars.
“Wicks!” Guy said suddenly, loudly.
Tom shut up. He blinked and looked around.
“Bradley Wicks. He’ll be responsible for crowd control—for your safety—tomorrow,” Guy said. “Wicks and this Township Defense League make James Earl Ray look like a Flatwater Jaycee.”
“Wicks,” Tom said.
Guy nodded.
“Shit,” Tom murmured, turning to look over his shoulder out the dark window.
Tom agreed to be careful, to bring his own security. Then they talked another hour.
They talked about Madeline.
About Cassandra Silver.
About Mary Ann.
About Black Elk and Russell Means and Chief Hole-in-the-Day and wild rice and flax and Hubert Humphrey and Helmer Pehrsson. When Guy talked of Helmer, Tom listened, then stubbed out his cigarette. “Come,” he said.
They walked down the dim hallway to the five-bed rest home. A night nurse sat watching a Bonanza rerun. Beyond her the rooms were dark and empty but for one. Tom stopped at the doorway; he was framed in a soft, red, slowly pulsating light. Inside was a bed cranked half upright, its back to the door. Steel-gray hair flowed down both sides of the sheets, touched the floor. Beyond the bed, the red light came from a Plexiglas box, backlit by a light bulb, of oil and colored water. The box tilted first one way and then another. Its moving colors lapped like slow sundown surf across the walls of the room.
“He doesn’t sleep without it,” Tom whispered. They stepped to the side of the bed.
“Zhingwaak!” Guy said.
Zhingwaak, staring at the light box, turned toward the voice. His eyes, whitish and slick with fluid, searched for Guy. “He can’t see you,” Tom whispered. Zhingwaak spoke in Ojibwe, a long flow of words that whispered and hummed like wind in the pines. Tom leaned down and spoke Ojibwe into his ear.
Zhingwaak’s hand came up from the bed like a dry leaf floating up from the ground. “Ningos,” he said.
Guy took his hand. The skin was thin, nearly translucent, cool. Zhingwaak spoke more Ojibwe.
“‘You’re the swimmer. I thank you,’” Tom said. Then Zhingwaak’s hand slackened, and he turned his face again to the light.
Guy watched Zhingwaak’s eyes. As they followed the red light, his pupils moved across the night sky of his face like two moons rising.
They stepped from the room. “How old is he now?” Guy said softly.
“At least a hundred and five. Maybe more. He speaks only Ojibwe now. Some of his words even the oldest men don’t know.”
Guy looked back into the red glow of the room. “Does he still have his drum?”
“No,” Tom said. “He gave it to me. It’s mine now.”
Guy arrived an hour early at Flatwater High School, but still parked three blocks away. Muddy pickups and cars lined the streets, filled the dirt softball field in a gridlock of Chevrolets and Fords that flowed toward the wide doors of the gymnasium. Guy wound his way around the cars and trucks. On their dashboards the pickups carried broken bolts, dusty shotgun shells, and crushed cans of Hamm’s; in the rear beds the trucks carried fifty-gallon fuel tanks, plastic canisters half full of hydraulic oil, broken chain-saw paddles and chains, flat iron plow lays, curved plow moldboards, torn paper bags of bolts and nuts, hay chaff or sawdust.
The cars carried tattered infant seats, dented cans of Mountain Dew and Pepsi
on the dashboard, torn “Masters of the Universe” comic books, empty Tootsie Roll wrappers. The cars’ bumper stickers and drivers’ doors read, “Mary Kay Cosmetics,” “Aloe Vera,” “Tupperware for Modern Living,” “Herbalife for Longer Life,” many with phone numbers in reflector letters. One dusty old Buick, jacked up in the rear and with furry dice hanging from the mirror, blue shag carpet in the back seat, and draw drapes all around, had painted on its side “If this buggy’s rockin,’ don’t bother knockin’.”
“A man of taste and style,” Guy murmured.
He joined the flow of people, some Indians, mostly whites, converging on the school. He felt like he was going to a basketball game. By the door two smiling Indians in tribal dress—long braids, leather vests, leather pants, plus enough drilled bone and turquoise to start a beadwork boutique in Berkeley—handed out fliers explaining the Anishinabe position on the White Earth land claims. The few whites who accepted the fliers glanced briefly at them, then crumpled them and threw them on the auditorium steps.
“Stanbrook—he’ll put the sonsabitches in their place,” someone said loudly.
The Indians did not stop smiling or stop handing out the leaflets.
Guy stepped through the doors into the foyer. He waited to hear the thud of basketballs and the blare of the school band, but there was only the drone of voices from inside the gym. He thought of a great gray mushroom hive of hornets that he and Tom once threw a stick into; how the humming inside suddenly rose in pitch like the sound of a motor pushed to high rpms.
He stepped into the gym. Its air was a close, warm wall, barnlike and humid. The bleachers were two steep hillsides, one of brown faces, one of white faces already shiny from the heat. The basketball floor was a yellow valley between them. In the middle of the shiny floor stood a raised platform, two metal chairs, and a microphone.
Just inside the gym door was Bradley Wicks. His badge and pistol chain gleamed brass and silver; his brown pants and tan shirt were pressed with military-sharp creases. He stood holster-side to the crowd, his face fixed in a half smile, as if he were waiting for someone to take his photograph. Closer, Guy read the bullet-shaped tattoo on his right forearm: “’Nam, ’69.” Guy stared closer at Wicks’s lopsided face, the skin under his chin, around his neck and ears. Tiny, intersecting mouse trails of stitching covered the flesh.