Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  Perhaps the television was a necessary distraction to make people more amenable to the drastic switching of dimensions. “Even here there was seduction” I would record in my journal. “A painful hut calculated nip to the metaphorical newcomer ear hy the master of paranormal wizardry. And who could deny the tangibility of surreal cereal ads and the prospect of a long-lost friendship renewed?”

  Through past experiences with hallucinogenic mushrooms, including encounters with ghosts, UFOs, and sorcerers, I was fascinated with theories of how these nightmarish, reality-altering states might have worked. One theory dealt with the vulnerability of the human mind and character. Essentially, without preparation or understanding of powerful, unseen influences, a person was exposed— becoming a “target,” if you will. Ignorance made vulnerable people legitimate “targets” within a clan system. If a clan leader, for example, had an impenetrable defense, it was alright to disable or eliminate his or her innocent relatives. It made no difference who, infant or elder. No sexual discrimination for sorcerers. The trick, of course, depended upon the skills of the “shooter.”

  “When something wrong starts, don’t pay it any attention,” my grandmother once noted. There was no word for a supernatural manifestation, but I understood what she meant. As the sunlight came through the west window of her small, yellow house, she spoke into the silver grille of the Sony tape recorder: “In order to counteract it, don’t dwell upon it. Any thought relinquished weakens the self.” During her discourse on the protective quality of trees, a few strands of her ninety-year-old hair loosened, emitting a white, treelike effect against the shadows of the hallway. As the Sony whirred, capturing her words, I thought she stood like the trees that smothered the hillside clear down to the sandy edges of the nearby creek. Overwhelmed, I felt she was the earth herself—Grandmother Earth, that is—because her words of insight encompassed everything.

  Ada Principal Bear, my maternal grandmother, believed the small, spring-fed creek that ran beside her yellow house reflected the importance of water for all humankind. There was a tenuousness, first and foremost, in our relationship to the water we drank and the air we breathed. But there was more. Using the base of an empty but hot iron skillet, she said the sparks that crisscrossed the surface symbolized global warfares taking plaice at that very moment somewhere. Without radio, newspapers, or the English language, she knew flag wars were integral to being alive. If the sparks were many in a day, we sat on the porch and waited for nightfall. The Northern Lights would appear as she had predicted, a distant war gone out of control. Below the glittering stars, the deities would show themselves briefly before mouthing the urgent details about the wars origins and its casualties in numbers. With this tenuousness in mind, there was never assumption in our meager existence, for most had been predetermined. What mattered the most was spirituality and a lifelong undertaking for acceptance to the Black Eagle Child Hereafter.

  The geography around her home was an ever-shrinking microcosm of a greater Black Eagle Child world steeped in mythological and spiritual interdependence. Sparse green grass surrounded this disarming site. Embedded along the hillsides were moss-covered boulders that served as messengers to the lesser and greater deities. Under the tin roof of the cookshack was the sacred fire, another messenger. From hanging chains or atop iron grills, food was prepared in blackened kettles for family, the dead, soldiers, humankind, and the Creator alike. Inside, old coon dogs sometimes warmed themselves beside the sleeping embers. Even the dogs were spoken to and did as instructed: to detect unusual things in the night and alarm others, like chicken, geese, or people. Beside the whiskey-soaked ashes and the half-smoked cigarettes—for deceased grandparents who once partook of the same—was an overturned skillet that covered portions of sweets, meats, and fruits from the family table. These portions—if the coon dogs didn’t get them—were invisibly sent. The cleansing smoke of the fire, like Grandmother’s shroud of words, swirled over the garden, forest, rivers, insects, birds, fish, clouds, rain, stars, and all life-forms, including the deities contained therein.

  The trees and the dogs watched her and she watched them in return. Imbued with compassion, she had the same effect on others. I knew that. Essentially, protective elements protected her—in more ways than one. When I was a child who insisted on walking to Why Cheer, she made branches furiously whip about on windless nights, erasing my movie plans. On another occasion, at sundown, we walked into the thickets and came upon a small clearing where the skeletal structure of a miniature lodge unraveled its leather ties and stood up as an oblong formation of willow saplings. I knew that whatever she said was true, for everything under her care and tutelage responded accordingly to her love and kindness.

  My grandmother also elaborated on how to evade a supernatural manifestation: “Keep on as you have been doing, and there’s a chance it will disappear. When it retreats, speak to it in a spiteful, scolding manner. ‘Whoever and whatever you are,’ you will say, 1 pray your own wrongdoing turns itself upon you, for you are not wanted here tonight. There is no need for you here; go home and let illness impale itself upon you and fester. . . .”

  It was easy to envision willpower, the evil persuasion, mixed with ancient secrets and medicines, transforming into a luminescent protoplasmic state that floated four to five feet off the ground. Upon command this compact mass acted like a trespasser within the frail, unsuspecting minds that were either awake or asleep. Paranoia, paralysis, and wicked intent, acting as one, disabled the rational mind in the surrealistic huff of a nocturnal Bearlike breath. Information like this was taught indirectly; itwas never addressed to me. The Sony tape recorder in this regard was truly priceless.

  In the blue-gray, flickering haze of the RCA, we sat utterly still and listened to eerie sounds that were coming through the walls of the Ramada Inn. We thought we heard what sounded like small children playing in the street below. Suddenly, we could hear an adult, a female, sobbing in some kind of marital fear. Raised amid theories on supernaturalism and having witnessed a few events myself, I had yet to meet a person, a human—a former acquaintance at that—who could conjure unfathomable, nonphysical occurrences. I was impressed by this formidable display of reality-altering.

  From Pipestar’s callused fingers the bulky cigarette emitted long swirling rolls of bluish smoke. His gray eyes squinted coyly at first and then closed as he puffed three to four times in a row with a sense of urgency. He looked discerningly into the blue swirls and began talking in a near whisper. “Therms three of them. They’re the main ones and—”

  Before he could finish, the teenage girl physically interjected with an extended arm, “Mr. Pipestar, you should flick the ashes.”

  The ashes were then flicked into her cupped palms. The teenager sat back in the chair and transferred the precious ashes into a small leather pouch wrapped around her muscular neck.

  My parents stared at the rings of smoke made by Pipestar’s expertly controlled exhales of breath,

  “Hypnotic donuts, magic ones,” I noted in the journal. “Junior, Jesus Christ, was that you?”

  The cigarette glowed and it crackled loudly through the thick leaves of the Dutch Friesland tobacco. Its blue smoke rings remained stationary and then swirled, stopping midpoint only to pick up in the same speed, encompassing the small tan room.

  We saw embedded in the mist what looked like a montage of images and we found ourselves engaged in a game we did as children, looking for faces in clouds. There wasn’t much to spring from, but the smoke, moving and constantly being divided by differing air currents, suspended itself in four-to-six-inch interval layers. Upon inhaling it, we smelled the comforting redolence of cedar rather than harsh tobacco. Which was disconcerting.

  Here, in the divided fog, we began to experience what Junior Pipestar was noted for. The way the RCA simulated the flashes of a strobe light juxtaposed the objects and people within, their pain, induced a realm that had already been there, an imbrication—a fish scale, the superimposing of previo
us occurrences, the unseen doors we unknowingly open and pass through each day, night.

  We saw how the entire earth, below and above ground, was very much like a graveyard, with the invisible shells of former human existence reacting like massive sails in the wind, and for some reason we stumble into them.

  When we could no longer see Pipestar s face and upper torso, his hand, embodying what seemed its own consciousness, levitated from his left knee. This manifestation, a disconnecting human limb, was eons beyond the art of Japanese puppetry.

  Either the smoke is thick enough to make the hand appear detached, I whimsically thought, or ... it has actually been sliced in order to orchestrate this extraordinary trip backward with the ne a bi a, a person who can see, to the exact moment of death.

  And this was Junior Pipestar’s ancient gift, conjuring the past. This was the gift of navigation that kept his traditional healing services in high demand. He possessed knowledge of which plants and trees grew from the earth and their curing traits, and they became his supernatural allies.

  I remembered earlier how Pipestar had met us over coffee and apple pie a la mode to explain what was to take place, “the process.” “We are like minute pieces of dust afloat inside this dark earthlodge where daylight enters invisibly and slices the blackness,” he said, while demonstrating manually with the blinds. He closed and opened them, controlling the entry of sunlight before taking a fork to the ice cream.

  “While that which is us is largely unseen as well, it is the meeting, this joining of unseen light and our tumbling life that reflects, revealing a defined presence in the murky subterranean air.”

  Pipestar’s ghost-hand provided the port into this reality-altering dimension; it could travel freely within and make the past relive itself. The hand, as we had been told, literally wore the suit of Pipestar’s hand. A limb with bpne structure and living tissue is borrowed, like a garment for a few minutes as it reaches out from an intangible world.

  As the suited hand gestured, it reminded me in a comical but troublesome manner of a ventriloquism act, the kind supernatural deities—I could only imagine—would perform for one another. It was vaudevillian in essence, but the distortion of dimension actually began there, in humor. A mental cushion was first established for the newcomer. Regardless of how incredible the events appeared, it served as a self-administered anesthetic to the subconscious. Strangely, mine dealt with television personalities.

  As my own surreal retrospection began, I saw how humans and nonhumans entertained one another, whether in life or death or somewhere between. The one aspect that provided a semblance of sanity was the association of Pipestar’s ghost-hand to the detached hand called Thing of the 1960s television show The Addams Family. Novelties that I grew up with became part of the transference to past events, turning an aberration into a comedy. “No wonder Americans are so fucked up,” I wrote. “Think of all the things that could arise from this abnormal fascination with death. Morbid scrutiny turned backward and inside out. No privacy or resolution for a society bound for mass suicide ...”

  Scattered over the landscape were discarded shells of the once-living. Their sails caught the wind for centuries. There were so many ghosts overlapping other ghosts that everything became a retrospection. Drifting without direction over the vast plains in multitudes, we became a reenactment of their stories. Up close they were said to resemble fluffs from a cottonwood tree on a windy day. This was where preplanning for humankind took place. Here nothing was important or unimportant. Amid the floating dust the cottonwood fluff was accidentally struck by a beam of daylight, as Pipestar had said, setting off a faint glimmer inside the Ramada Inn.

  Force-fed to believe there’s a constructive answer to everything, I foolishly adduced that what I had just witnessed was something easily explainable. Throwing false voices to a grotesque wooden puppet wasn’t all that was there, however. Minute bits of rationality had been dissected and left to twist and dry in turbulent provocations. Undeniably, the master voice-thrower spoke the hand’s words. The voice began as a faint fluttering, like a small desperate bird getting caught behind the window curtains, but as it changed into the distant rumbling of an approaching thunderstorm, I envisioned being in a cabin on precarious stilts overlooking a mountainous valley that was about to shake.

  As the storm got closer, reverberating in a low monotonous drone, the normal audiological senses were splintered. The higher the buzzing became, the more spherical the spatial proportions of the hotel room scene—where I was really at.

  The carpet inflated, along with the desk and table lamps. The furniture took the same route as well by forcing air into its wooden lungs. The separate pieces of furniture began to breathe, expanding in the corners like wary, snarling animals. Underneath oiir feet, the earth did the exact opposite: It deflated, became brittle, and cracked into a thousand pieces of iciclelike formations. We slid into a nightmarish vortex of perceptual change.

  All this from airborne cigarette smoke? I questioned, as thick billows of fog seeped through the tiny cracks where the floor merged structurally with the four walls. I attempted again to analyze this methodical destruction of reasoning: “The montage of all those people who had lived, for instance, were in actuality our own mortality, an awkward depiction thereof, theatrical in substance but nonetheless a metamorphosis, a glint of the existential mirror in the woods. We would ferret out tragedy, mete it out randomly, along with the predictable suffering, the beauty, its love, and wonder. We remained answerless in a question-filled iridescent sky. ...

  That’s who we were. Unskilled pilots through an unplanned existence. We were hopelessly imprisoned, the progeny of lost shadows. We were also in dire need of federal-funded psychologists who specialized in tribal-related despondency and dysfunction.

  Prisoners of earth. POEs . . .”

  When Pipestar’s ghost-hand began indicating places where each participant stood on that 1989 night when the Hyena brothers celebrated Mardi Gras, Howdy Dowdy, Morticia, and Gomez dissipated in the predawn fog. The silhouettes of trees on the tribal fairgrounds came into view, replacing the hotel room walls. The hand was careful not to point directly to the people present. Through him, with the crooked cigarette as our guide, we were verbally transported to the actual scene of the crime. The words were painful at the slightest mention of Ted, the vivid descriptions of the fight he had put up and lost to the attackers who were attired ... in women’s clothing.

  A cool and nearly imperceptible breeze entered the room and touched our skin. An affirmation.

  “Others were there but they had little or no part,” spoke Pipestar in a matter-of-fact tone. “They’re all afraid of being implicated for being there. Their secret is akin to having an alcoholic’s urge to use a railtrack for a pillow. But these three were the instigators, and they were also the most vulnerable—being hopped up on drugs, smoke, and alcohol.”

  Along with my parents I anchored myself to each word transmitted and held on tenaciously, for this meeting could be reported only once. Reality and nonreality, for our own psychological safety, was switched to on and off sequences like a rare electrical implement. An internal mechanism could shut it off as soon as imbalance was attained. Japanese puppetry brought it back. In these places I saw how it might be possible to formulate human figures and their actions through the fluctuating airborne smoke.

  “But there’s also a fourth,” continued Pipestar. “While this one didn’t actually touch Facepaint, he was responsible in leading him out to the tribal fairgrounds and setting him up with the other three. Which is just as bad . . . There’s something wrong here, though. Something frightening, the potential for harm . . . because he is mentally unstable, yet he interacts with people. Normally. That makes him dangerous—being wounded and exposed. He is not an Indian among you, he is mixed. In not being what he could have been, he lashes out at those who are. Like he did to Facepaint. In any case, the three young men were indeed ‘used, a wa te ni,’ by both human and nonhuman source
s. Messages were implanted during their drug and alcohol-weakened states of consciousness. When talons of this caliber interlock, no one has a chance. But there’s more to this and 111 explain. Do you have any questions?”

  My parents, perhaps wishing to slow down the emotionally charged meeting, inquired about the three owls who appeared in our yards at dusk to casually stroll across the lawn. They also inquired about the owl that divided itself into three golf ball-sized lights. These lights then chased them before shooting upward and freezing in a stars place.

  “These three are night-enemies. They saw how drunk these three young men were and took over their minds, instructing them in their hour of weakness on what they should do, which was to inflict intense bodily harm or commit murder. But there was a precedent; we know it was delivered in the guise of another event. It gave the appearance of revenge, but it was basically evil taking advantage of evil. Twicefold. But it took lots of serious planning, for the opportunity was seen years ago.”

  One Bucket of Twenty Moons

  JUNIOR PIPESTAR:

  Near the tenth winter of my early existence—”120 moons exactly,” as my grandmother had calculated and translated—I found myself stripped down to my underwear beside the rocky bank of the Cedar River. In the cold subzero weather I shivered uncontrollably as my body parts seemed to contract into the skeletal hollow of rib cage and chapped hips. My elbows melted to my skin and became stumpy arms, and I stood contorted.

  (Today when I envision this scene, I see myself as a hieroglyph of a eunuch in attendance of some maniacal but enchanting Egyptian queen who desires entertainment. Someone named Nefertiti or Cleopatra, whom I saw depicted and read about in encyclopedias— the masterpiece portrait bust of “Nef” and, of course, “Cleo,” whore to Julius C.)