Key Grip

by Dustin Beall Smith

  I grabbed the pipe, jumped to my feet, and began offering tobacco to the directional beings as fast as I could. In my memory of it I whirled around and around, but that seems too cinematic to be true. In fact, all my self-consciousness had evaporated, so I no longer saw myself from above, as if from a camera crane, and therefore have no idea what I did or said or how I might have appeared. I do know that I trained my eyes on the sky, using only my peripheral vision to look around me, and that I saw no fierce spirit, no man or beast from which that startling sound might have emanated. But in the absence of such a manifestation, I understood immediately that the disturbance, whatever it had been, was inextricably connected to my anticipation of it and that for all practical purposes it had come from within me. With this understanding, my perspective shifted completely. I was suddenly seeing the naked facts of my existence, in a way I never had before, beyond anything learned, beyond any remembering, as if I had dropped in from some parallel universe to witness my place in the continuum of this one. I saw my father, gone on ahead of me, and my son, ahead of him. I saw how my life—all life—was fastened to Time, as if magnetically to an escalator, and that no amount of stalling or hoping or dreaming was going to delay the dying. The dead were lost forever to the living when they went, as the living were to the dead. Unshielded by my usual rational constructs, I felt, for the first time, the ruinous sadness—cosmic and inescapable—of being human.

  The sun reappeared. I licked my dry lips with my dry tongue and looked off to the south, toward the ridge over which Arturo and the dogs had disappeared. Thirst and hunger soon conspired to make a drama of this panorama. From nowhere, and attached to nothing, a gauzy curtain was drawn across my view, obscuring it. In my new frame of mind I understood this to be death’s curtain, and as I continued to watch, it was drawn back again for me to see what lay beyond: nothing more than the same old view to the south. As I watched these theatrics it dawned on me that it was not going to be over when I died. Impossibly—but here it was in front of me—life carried right through death into life again. There was no death, no end, only endless consequences. This was it, here and now, forever. Waiting to die would get me nowhere. And dying wouldn’t get me off the hook. The vision was devastating—and, worse, indelible. I knew instantly that there would be no pulling back from what I had seen, no way to undo it.

  Clusters of dark brown wood nymphs landed on my bare head, hands, and arms, drawn to my salty skin as they might otherwise have been attracted to pinesap. Through sweaty eyes I squinted at the concentric gold and purple circles on their wings. I picked up the pipe and raised it to the six directions. I wanted this hanblecheya to be over.

  Five or six more hours dragged by. The sun dipped beneath the western ridge of the bowl—my false horizon—cooling both the declivity and me, inviting me to consider more deeply what I had seen. Inviting me also to step back into my underwear.

  Arturo came and fetched me just before sunset, around nine o’clock. We didn’t exchange a single word. Riding down from the hill at dusk I could see smoke from the sweat lodge, a lingering swath of gold in the last rays of sunlight. We pulled up near the lodge. The same people who had been there the night before were hanging out around the fire. Mike took my blanket and pipe and told me to get in the lodge and sit on the hot seat. He crawled in behind me and closed the door flap. Just him and me, there in the dark. Only four hot rocks in the pit. He tossed a ladleful of water on the rocks.

  I felt emptied of emotion. Emptied too of the illusion that I knew anything at all anymore. Fear hovered somewhere at the edge of this new void. I told Mike what I had seen while up the hill as best I could—everything except my fight with the dog, of which I felt ashamed. The words tumbled from my mouth, a string of embarrassingly inarticulate observations about how I dropped the pipe and fell asleep, how I got freaked out by something scary, how Time was an unstoppable escalator, how I wouldn’t be able to find my friends and family again, how my son died long before my father did, how Death was just a curtain, and that maybe it isn’t over when we die. Mike said “Aho!” after each observation. When I was done he told me I had gotten it exactly right—that of all the creatures on earth, human beings were the least well adapted, the latest to arrive, and the most inept. He told me a few things about the pipe I had carried—that there was both good and bad in it, just as there was good and bad in every human being.

  “The way of the pipe is hard,” he said. “You heard the wind speak, you did good.”

  When he was done, the door opened, more hot rocks were added to the pit, and everyone else crawled in.

  We all staggered out an hour later and stood in a circle under the stars, sharing a smoke from the pipe I had taken up the hill. Afterward I took a drink of water and went into the Little Boy house and partook of the feast, which consisted not of bacon and eggs and pancakes and strawberries, but of boiled tripe. I nibbled at the gristly stuff but dumped most of it in the trash when no one was looking. I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  I slept dreamlessly in my tent that night and awoke a little after dawn, sick at heart, as if a loved one had just died. A familiar piece of me seemed to be gone—perhaps my rational certainty that life was bracketed between birth and death, or perhaps just rationality itself. As I lay on my sleeping bag, the strange dread I had felt when first entering the reservation blossomed again. What had I been thinking, getting myself involved in this?

  Arturo was still asleep in the cabin. So was the whole Little Boy household—half-naked teenagers and a few older folks, lying on the muddy linoleum floor. All beds, sofas, and easy chairs were full to capacity, and the television was still on. Young Wambli lay sprawled in his underwear on a blanket near the front door, the broken airplane tucked under his arm. I covered his bare feet.

  As I brushed my teeth in the bathroom I considered folding my tent and driving home. I had finished my hanblecheya, done what I had come for. Besides, I had spent a lot of money already. This wasn’t my world. No one would miss me. I wouldn’t really ever have to come back. If I left right now, I could be in Rapid City in a few hours. I could sit down in a McDonald’s and start writing. Somehow, having the option to leave made staying tolerable.

  I couldn’t find a coffeepot anywhere, so I waited on the front steps for someone to wake up. Underneath me, through the cracks, I could see the German shepherd and the female mutt sleeping together in the shade.

  When I went inside again, Mike was up. He stood shirtless at the stove, dumping Maxwell House coffee from a large can into a pot of boiling water.

  “So that’s how you do it,” I said.

  Together we watched it brew, then dipped our cups into the mix. The stuff tasted like bitter mud. Mike sat down on the one kitchen chair, stiffly, like an old farmer. I moved to the wall and leaned against it, hoping for a heart-to-heart chat with this guy, hoping he might ease the feeling of dread that was nagging me. The TV droned in the living room, something about a rising star in Hollywood.

  “So,” I said.

  Mike sipped his coffee then sat forward uncomfortably, adjusting his back.

  “So, I got through it okay?” I said.

  He nodded. Then he yawned.

  “I’ve got to tell you,” I said, “I still feel a bit spooked by my time up there.”

  “Yep,” he said, “you will.” He stuck out his bare foot and nudged a rotten onion peel across the floor, closer to the wastebasket.

  “So, you’re going to hold the sun dance soon?” I said.

  “Yep,” he said. “We got eighty trees to cut today. Gotta make some shade for the sun dance circle.”

  “That chain saw going to come in handy?” I asked, shamelessly fishing for a thank-you.

  “Yep.”

  “Twenty-four-inch blade,” I said. “You can cut through anything with that.”

  He gulped the last of his coffee, fingered the grounds on the rim of his mug, and stared long and hard at the floor.

  “You think I should try the s
un dance?” I asked. “Think I should get pierced sometime?”

  He stood up slowly, dipped his cup into the pot, sat down again. “Up to you,” he said.

  I stared at him. Would I have made friends with this moody guy at a party in New York? Not likely. But he knew some things, and I had the feeling he knew something about me. I tossed my coffee grounds in the wastebasket, dipped my mug into the brew, and leaned against the wall again.

  “Look at you,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re standing there like a teenager.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, taken aback.

  “Ever since you pulled in with Arturo, you been standing around, looking at the walls and the ceiling, thinking, How am I gonna fit in around here? You been wandering around outside, staring at the shapes of clouds and saying, ‘Send me a sign. Who am I?’“ He laughed. ”You don’t watch out, you’ll end up like a guy come here last year, thought he was Crazy Horse in another life. Thought he’d come back to save the whole tribe and lead us into battle. It’s pretty simple here with us Indians, you know. Look around you. Look at what needs to be done around here.”

  I felt a sudden surge of shame. I had no clout at all with this man. Obviously he saw me not as an educated city dweller, a man whose career in the film industry bespoke a certain acquaintance with power, but as a dense, naive wannabe, no more savvy than some starry-eyed kid barking orders on a film set.

  My face grew hot. I remembered how—in the days before film schools supplied “interns” to the film business—I used to winnow the true apprentices from the herd of production assistants who aspired to work on movie sets. Whenever I spotted a new PA dreamily hanging around the camera, I would borrow a push broom from the prop department and begin sweeping the floor. I would start small and move out in an ever-widening arc, gathering cigarette butts, paper cups, gum wrappers, and such, until I got to where the PA was standing. “Excuse me,” I might say, or “Don’t mind me, I’ll work around you,” or “I hope I’m not raising too much dust for you.” On occasion one of these candidates would ask if there was something he or she could do to help. Only rarely did one of them just take the broom from my hands and finish the job. But that did happen, and when it did I knew I had landed an apprentice.

  “You want eggs,” said Mike, “there’s some in there. Bacon too, you guys brought.”

  “No,” I said, “that’s okay.”

  I set down my coffee cup.

  I went outside and stood on the porch steps. The chain saw’s carton was lying empty in the middle of the driveway. I poked around and found a busted lawn-mower cord under an empty gas can. I threw a box hitch around the middle of the carton and stood it on its end. Failing to find a rake anywhere, I got a pitchfork from the sweat lodge and began scraping into a pile all the aluminum cans, plastic bottles, rotted clothing, and Pampers. I dumped the detritus into the carton. When I had separated and set aside the salvageable tools—open-end wrenches, speed bits, a tire iron—and stacked all the plastic toys in one spot, I knelt down and secured the bottom of the carton with a seven-foot length of bailing wire.

  When I looked up, I saw Wambli standing in the doorway, the broken airplane in his outstretched hand.

  2. Just Pears

  MY FATHER DIED in the dining room in the autumn of 1995, sixteen months before my hanblecheya on the Pine Ridge Reservation. When it became clear that he could no longer negotiate the stairs to his bedroom, he chose the setting for his final stand: the dining room, the smallest of the downstairs rooms. It was closest to the kitchen and not too far from a toilet. My younger brother and I dismantled and removed the oval mahogany table, around which our family had gathered for meals for as long as any of us could remember, and in its place we installed a hospital bed. We left the armoire where it stood, shifted the highboy to the left, and rearranged my father’s oil paintings on the wall. My sister rented a standby oxygen system and set up a makeshift nursing station consisting of a large box of Kleenex, a mercury thermometer, a tiny blue bottle of morphine, and a crystal vase filled with fresh dahlias. My mother, who was struggling with dementia, gazed in wonderment and confusion at the transformation. “Oh, my!” she said. When my father got into bed that first night, dressed in a bright red sweatsuit (hood and all), I turned to my sister and whispered, “Here we go.”

  To die at home, at age eighty-six, with your family around you, is storybook stuff. Timing is key, as my father was aware. He did not want to exhaust everyone with anticipation. “You have your own lives to worry about,” he said. He and my mother lived in Cross River, New York. My younger sister, Leslie, lived three hours away, in Boston; my brother, Lochlin, five hours north, in Vermont; and I, two hours east, in Connecticut. I also still had my apartment in New York City, an hour away. The three of us were free to leave our work at a moment’s notice, and we wouldn’t have missed his dying for all the world, but Dad got it right: we didn’t want to be repeatedly gearing up for the big event.

  My father had been diagnosed with prostate cancer at age seventy. Sixteen years later, in the summer of 1995, the cancer spread to the bone. Complications set in about a month later, just before he died. At the beginning of that final month, October, I was on brief leave from my film work and was finishing up a writing fellowship in Virginia. Leslie called and said she’d just taken Dad to the hospital with congestive heart failure. I told her to put him on the phone.

  “What the hell is congestive heart failure?” I asked him.

  He explained, between gasps for air, that it had something to do with water in the lungs. “If it isn’t one thing it’s another,” he said. “Stay where you are, I’ll wait till you get back.”

  When I arrived at the hospital three nights later, his young doctor, a family friend, was massaging his feet. He responded to her gentle strokes with appreciative oooohs and aaahs. Clearly, he was still having trouble breathing.

  I leaned over him, kissed his bald pate, and took hold of his gnarly hand.

  “Well, it looks like we’re coming to the end here,” he said.

  “Really?” I said. The old man’s grip seemed pretty strong. I glanced at the doctor. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  “Yep,” said my father, “looks like the time has come.”

  “How does that feel to you—coming to the end?” I asked.

  “To tell you the truth,” he said, pausing to catch his breath, “I’m kind of looking forward to it.”

  Looking forward to it? Probably no one had looked forward to death less than Lawrence Beall Smith. He always talked about his dying easily enough, but in fact “being in the world” was the only perspective he’d ever allowed himself. His own father, an ardent Midwestern Methodist, had ruined him for religion and thus for the promise (and perspective) of an afterlife. “Life lives on in art,” my father would say, “and in the memory of others.” With this conviction, he managed, until the last month of his life, to forestall the deeper considerations: How would he know if his art lived on? And, how, exactly, might he be remembered? Even I, at age fifty-five and with no artistic track record, had been seized with fear by such considerations. So I kept a sharp eye on my father for any fissures that might develop in his veneer of stoicism.

  His propensity to ignore or delay the serious stuff permeated his being and presented to those around him the portrait of an upbeat, singular man who had carved out for himself a nearly picture-perfect artist’s life: working at home, raising a family, being his own boss. For me, as a teenager during the 1950s, his carefully crafted world had felt claustrophobic—the antithesis of being “on the road.” His stoic refusal (out of step with the Zeitgeist of the time) to give vent to misery, anger, or complaint, or to respond directly to my own venting, seemed to me like weakness, not strength. He was of a mind to let unpleasant things blow over, which meant that his response to emotional outbursts was often silent and thus open to interpretation.

  Rather than try to parse my father’s unsaid wo
rds, I gravitated toward my more forthcoming mother, Winn. A visual artist herself, and a big fan of Carl Jung, she appreciated metaphor and provided psychological context to complex emotions. She saw shadows where my father saw light. Predictably, the silent tension between my father and me had ballooned quite early, and it carried well into my adult life. It mellowed only after I quit drinking and married for the second time and bought a house and land, as he had done. And by the time I got around to investigating my own inadequacies as a father, I’d long since forgiven—and perhaps had even grown to admire—his stoicism.

  When it came time for my father to die, however, it seemed critical not just to honor his life and his art, but also to discover what he had meant by his life and art.

  With the help of potassium pills, the water left his lungs, and after a few days I drove my father home from the hospital. Instead of stopping at the house, where the dining room was all set up for him, I pulled the car up to his painting studio, a converted barn that stood several hundred feet from the main house. “You probably want to get back to work,” I said.

  I helped him out of the car, steadied him across a patch of gravel, and eased him through the studio door. Once inside, he just stood there, stock-still. He looked at the cavernous space where for fifty years he’d painted book illustrations and portraits, and churned out lithographs and etchings. A cold northern light washed over the easel, on which rested an upside-down painting of a single daffodil. The west wall was covered with thumbtacked photos of his children and grandchildren, all of whom he’d painted or sculpted at one time or another. One of these, a faded black-and-white eight-by-ten of my daughter and me, had been on that wall for twenty years. The place smelled of turpentine, linseed oil, and, though my father hadn’t smoked a pipe since the 1970s, tobacco.