by LeAnne Howe
Gore seems puzzled. “I just admire them, that’s all. They represent a generation of Oklahoma Indians who became trick riders, screenwriters, Hollywood actors, newspaper reporters, dancers on Broadway, and famous poets. They proved to us—our generation—that we could still be tribal people, and make it in the white world.”
“I don’t agree,” she says, feeling her muscles tense.
“Why not?”
“Somebody’s got to stay home. Maintain the land, maintain the community. If we all move away and do our own thing, who is left to be the tribe?”
“Are you’re saying that if Indians learn to play the piano, they can’t be tribal any longer?” he asks. “I thought that kind of colonial attitude only belonged to white historians and anthropologists.”
Now Gore’s beginning to sound a little like McAlester, who used to say, “Tribes can do anything they can get away with.” It was his justification for everything. When he saw the effect his words had on her, he used them like a stick to beat her.
She stands up to face her lawyer. “You’re misinterpreting my words. Individual Indians can do whatever they want, but not without a price. We, the Choctaw people, are the assets of our tribe—not the buildings, not the HUD houses, not our tribal bank accounts. Chances are, though, if all the Indians are off doing their own thing, tribalism will die.”
“We’re damned if we’re progressive, and damned if we’re not, is that it?” he asks, suddenly sounding irritated.
“I don’t have all the answers,” she says, “but I’ve seen what happens when a tribal leader is accountable to the Feds, and to a large corporation, but not to his own people. What’s worse is that I know I’m responsible for what has happened here.”
“Not entirely,” he says.
Auda waits for Gore to say more, but he doesn’t. It occurs to her that most Indians in Oklahoma, including him, don’t consider the details of their tribal history as she and Red did. Though there was a difference. She wrote about Choctaw history as a way to correct the misinformation about the tribe, Red saw their history as a means to an end. Perhaps it was the disease that finally consumed them both.
She continues, trying to control her emotions. “Red’s excuse for everything he did was based on America’s treatment of Indians. ‘America,’ he would say, ‘has grown out of the mouths of ravenous white people ... our lands, our foods, our bodies have been the hosts the whites fed on, until we’re nearly all dead, so we should be able to get even.”
“So we’re absolved by history?” he says, flatly.
“That’s what he meant.” She then speaks very slowly. “Don’t misunderstand, I’m proud of both my sisters—an actress and a Wall Street broker. I’m proud of all the Indians who are musicians, filmmakers, lawyers, and scientists. I want Indians to do whatever they are capable of. But it’s foolish to believe that tribes, and tribalism, don’t suffer as a result.”
“I see your point,” says Gore, shifting his weight, looking uncomfortable. “It sounds as if you and McAlester always disagreed about tribal politics.”
“No, not always. Especially in the beginning when we shared so many common goals. Red was a very complex man. He always had money for drunks and anyone down on their luck. Every time we went to D.C., he’d listen to the sob stories of street people sleeping on the heating vents. You know the ones I mean?”
“Yes.”
“He’d reach into his pocket and give away all the cash he had on him, which infuriated me, ‘cause he could turn down his own people, but give to strangers. Did you know that he picked stray dogs off the streets and took them to the house-up, the cabin we shared outside of Talihina? He must have a dozen dogs living out there.” Auda gasps, “Oh my God! His dogs, they haven’t been fed since ...” She suddenly puts her hands over her face and weeps uncontrollably. For so long she’d wept without letting anyone see her tears. Wept without letting her mother, or Uncle Isaac, know how tormented she was. And now she breaks down in front of her lawyer.
Gore sits her down on the bed and holds her while she cries herself out. Finally he says, “We’ll get someone to feed the dogs. Probably some of McAlester’s friends have taken care of them.”
“I don’t know if anyone knows about his dogs... or maybe Hector does,” she says, pulling a tissue out of her robe pocket. “You know, Red and Hector had been friends since Dartmouth. That’s how he got his connections with their organization. Hector and Vico are related to the Genoveses. When I found out, I accused Red of all kinds of horrible things. We never spoke again, until last Saturday, when he ordered me into his office and...” Auda stops, then takes a deep breath and steadies herself.
“If you two didn’t speak, how did you handle tribal business?”
“Through typed memos. Hector called our memos the paper wars.”
Gore nods slowly to himself. “So there’s a substantial paper trail between you two?”
She says yes.
He looks at her very intensely. “I need to know the truth about the documents you had stashed here.”
“You don’t believe I ever had any evidence?” she asks.
He hedges, glances around the room, but finally admits that he doesn’t.
“I made copies.”
“Where are they?”
“I mailed duplicates to Tema’s agent in New York. Call and ask her to open the package marked ‘Hold until Christmas.’ Times, dates, bank routing numbers, it’s all there.”
Now it’s his turn to be embarrassed, and he stands up. “Isaac told me the BIA boys were here, probably they took whatever you had collected. I’m sorry, I do want to believe you... it’s just that criminal lawyers are used to being lied to.”
“Why are you helping me, especially now that you know what I’ve done?” she asks.
He doesn’t hesitate. “Last year, Oklahoma reported that the total revenues of the wagering facilities in the state—that’s casinos, bingo, and horse racing—were three-quarters of a billion dollars. It was only a matter of time until international gangs, or the corporate Mafia, found their way onto Indian land by loaning start-up money for casinos. These are the new Indian wars, Auda. Redford McAlester was the first casualty. It’s time Indian lawyers weigh in on the side of Indian people, not just their tribal governments.”
“I’m as guilty as Red.”
“Hardly,” he says. “I’m not absolving you of his murder—but you tried to stop him from going into business with Shamrock Resorts. You tried to stop him from selling tribal sovereignty to the highest bidder. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve become a warrior for your own people.” Gore looks at her thoughtfully. “We’ve all been on the side of someone who has reduced us to desperation.”
As she listens, she feels he might be talking about himself, too. Then again, it might be wishful thinking on her part to imagine that someone else in the world could empathize with what she’s done: killed the man she once loved.
“What do I do now?”
“Tell the story, see what happens.”
“Tonight at Blue Creek Grounds,” she replies. “I will tell everyone what happened to me, to Red, and to the tribal government.”
“It’s a beginning,” he says, softly.
A half hour later Auda comes downstairs wearing a blue denim dress. Gore is still awake, sitting in the library making notes on a yellow legal pad.
“I’ll be leaving soon for the clinic. Anything you need?”
He puts his pen down. “Having a doctor’s report on you will be good for our case, no matter what your plea is,” he says, returning to his notepad.
“I thought you were going to nap.” She leans over to see what he’s writing. The word “quirky” appears at the top of the page.
“I drank another gallon of coffee, so I thought I’d jot down some notes on the Billys. Never know when they will come in handy. At trial. A sensational bestseller.”
“You’re punchy. There’s nothing unusual about the Billys.”
“
Besides the obvious?”
She blushes. “Except for me, a confessed murderer, we’re a normal, happy-go-lucky Indian family.”
“Your sisters hear voices. They both swear that spirits are chasing them all over the country. Tema claims she was attacked onstage the other night in Dallas. Do you know where Adair is right now?”
Auda shakes her head no.
“She’s in the kitchen cutting up the local paper. Adair collects two things. Money and newspaper clippings of the macabre. She’s very excited, she just found a report of a jogger in Canada who’d been torn, limb from limb, by a bear.”
“Like I said, a normal Indian family.”
“There’s more.”
“Tell me.”
“Hoppy says he and Isaac visited Sarah Bernhardt last night. You know, the French actress who’s been dead since 1923. Apparently, Sarah Bernhardt has been living at the Choctaw nursing home in Talihina. She’s not really a human being, but a porcupine spirit who claims she’s fighting an evil war chief named Red Shoes, come back in the form of Redford McAlester. A spirit killed him, not you.”
“Red Shoes was assassinated in 1748, and lately, I’ve had weird dreams about him.”
“Of course you have, and that’s why ‘quirky’ is scrawled on the top of this pad,” he says, gesturing with his pen. “Did I mention that Sarah Bernhardt, the porcupine, claims she stole Durant’s Big Peanut?”
“And what is the government doing about it,” she says, playing along. Privately though, she wonders if the porcupine spirit, or whoever Hoppy and her uncle talked to, is telling the truth.
“Then there’s your mother and uncle who are completely off the Indian Richter scale.”
“You said it, I didn’t.” She grins.
At that moment, Isaac walks in and announces that the Check-off Sisters have finally arrived. He looks at his watch. “Typical! Two-thirty in the afternoon, what took them so long?”
Gore turns to Auda, mouths “quirky,” and the three of them head out the door to welcome the Love Sisters.
A 1963 red Ford convertible is parked next to the oak tree in the middle of the back yard, about four feet left of the Billys’ driveway.
“Sorry,” shouts Dovie Love from behind the wheel, as she pulls off her glasses. “I’m not used to these new-fangled pedals.”
The white cloth top of the Ford has been duct-taped in so many places it looks like a star quilt. Ambling from the car are Auda’s two elderly aunts in stylish black dresses. Clearly they’ve come for a funeral. Gore dutifully runs to help them. He picks up their suitcases, and hands the large plastic bottle of green liquid to Isaac who reluctantly takes it, but mutters under his breath.
For as long as Auda can remember, her uncle has called Delores and Dovie Love by a variety of names: Loveless Sisters, Unlovable Sisters, and, when he’s in a bad mood, The Check-off Sisters. The latter, he claims, is because of their tiresome habit of listing all the bad things that have happened to them. Their father killed by a stray bullet in a hunting accident. The unexpected death of their mother. A brother murdered, and a younger sister who drank herself to death.
Auda has always ignored her uncle’s remarks. Delores and Dovie Love are hardly maudlin. Just the opposite. She senses there’s always been some kind of weird thing between Isaac and Delores, but no one will say what it is. Not even her mother.
She watches as her aunts float toward her like a pair of avenging eagles protecting their nest. Although fragile and in their eighties, they’ve maintained graceful figures. “Not too round, not too thin” is Dovie’s motto. Auda thinks they could easily pass for women fifteen years younger. Delores is beautiful, even at her age. She has soulful brown eyes and wears tiny granny glasses. She threads her long gray hair into a single braid and pins it up at the back of her head. She has radiant brown skin, with only a few wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. In many ways, Dovie is the opposite. She’s a bit wiry, with large hazel eyes, and she never wears her glasses in public. Too vain. Since her Hollywood years, Dovie’s worn her hair cut short, and dyes it soft black. Delores occasionally uses a cane in winter when her arthritis is acting up. But Dovie is still pretty spry, claiming that her agility is because she’s Poteau’s yoga master, although Delores disputes this.
Auda can just imagine how they looked when they were billing themselves as “The Love Maidens of The Five Civilized Tribes.” How their long black hair must have whipped in the wind as they rode bareback on Paint ponies, parading their history in skimpy loincloths. At their ranch house in Poteau is a large poster-sized print of them with Will Rogers on the set of Life Begins at Forty. Delores had a small speaking part in the movie. In the photograph, all three Oklahoma Indians are wearing cowboy get-ups with shiny new boots and cowboy hats; they look as though they’ve attained the most American of ideals—wealth and fame. But, as they all would learn in the coming years, it came at a high price.
Her mother rushes out of the house toward her aunts. “Mr. Battiste, if you’ll put their suitcases in the downstairs bedroom, the one with the two beds, I’d be so grateful.”
Susan Billy takes the large plastic bottle of green liquid from Isaac and lifts it high in the air. “Maybe we all ought to start drinking this stuff, right away!” Isaac just shakes his head and enters the house alone.
Delores and Dovie never travel without a supply of their homemade herbal teas, which they insist cure everything from cellulite to cancer. Her mother hugs Delores for the longest time, then Dovie, then fairly shouts toward the heavens, “I’m so glad you made it!” She is genuinely exhilarated and keeps repeating “so glad,” “so happy,” “thought you’d never get here.”
Her mother is not the emotional type, as she’s proven over the past few days, and the outbursts startle Auda. Susan Billy has always been more like a military strategist. After she was told that her husband had suddenly died from a brain aneurysm, probably the result of an old childhood injury, she sat very quietly in the library looking at old photos of him. Later, she walked upstairs and screamed into a feather pillow. The next morning she buried the pillow and all but one photo of him in the backyard, took a job as a grocery clerk, and went on to raise Auda, her two sisters, and many other Choctaw children whose parents were down on their luck, in jail, or dead. For most of Auda’s life, her mother had behaved like a soldier on duty.
Delores hugs Susan tightly. Then she turns to Auda and says in a soothing voice, “Everything is going to be all right...but honey, you look just like a vampire with those two little spikes for front teeth.”
“What took you so long?” asks Auda, putting her hand over her mouth.
“We left Poteau right after we got Isaac’s call,” she says, wiping perspiration from her forehead, “but the car broke down. I told Dovie we needed to get the oil checked, but she wouldn’t stop until we’d burned up the engine. We had to spend two nights in Talihina while the car was being fixed.” Delores pauses, looking around the neighborhood. “Say, this whole town looks like our car engine. Charred.”
“Don’t listen to her. Wasn’t the oil at all,” protests Dovie, waving impatiently at her sister. She faces Auda and stands tall, as if preparing to deliver her lines on a movie set. “My girl, I have some important news for you about Redford McAlester.”
“What is it?” asks Auda, holding her breath.
“We did his chart, and then we looked at his transiting planets. Last Saturday, when all this happened, Pluto was squaring his Pluto.”
Auda doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and she can’t help but notice the bewildered look on Gore’s face. She suspects he’s making a mental note to add her aunts to his list of quirky Indians he’s met at the Billy house.
“Auntie, I have no idea what that means.”
“Listen,” says Dovie, conspiratorially. “McAlester was destined to die—badly. I should have read his chart a long time ago. I guess I’m getting old, ‘cause I never considered it until now. Were you aware that he was born on Hitler’s
birthday when you got involved with him?”
Auda swallows a grin. But then she realizes that this is Dovie’s way of absolving her of any wrongdoing. “No, I didn’t know that.”
Anxiety melts away from Dovie’s face, and she hugs Auda. “There, there, my girl, I was sure you didn’t know. None of this is your fault. I think your lawyer should present my evidence in court. We’ll call it the astrology defense. They do it all the time in Hollywood.”
Gore waits a beat, then reaches out his hand to introduce himself. “Miss Dovie, Miss Delores, my name is Gore Battiste. I’ll be representing Auda. I’ve read so much about you over the years, it’s truly an honor to meet you both.”
Dovie steps close to him so she can get a good look. She eyes him suspiciously, then glances at Susan, as if to ask, have you checked him out. “I don’t imagine you carry around your exact time of birth, do you?” she asks.
“Oh for Pete’s sake, Dovie!” says Delores, shaking his hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Battiste. Please excuse my sister, she’s on a new kick. You’ll just have to ignore her. Are you related to Leota Battiste?”
“She’s his aunt,” says her mother, quickly coming to Gore’s defense. “We’re practically related...you know... Indian-way.”
Everyone nods their heads solemnly.
“I bet we have met before, only you were too little to remember,” says Delores, politely. Then she adds, “Of course...you must be Velma French’s boy! I guess I should say Velma Battiste, after all this time.”
Gore smiles patiently. It’s obvious to Auda that he’s been through this Indian ritual before. Everyone knows that relationships in the Indian world are based on kinship and ardent familiarity, which often results in more kin.
“Susie, did you know that Velma is distantly related to the Choctaw Wesleys at Clayton?”
“Yes,” replies her mother, “and Gore’s father was Henri Battiste, a schoolteacher at Tulsa. Poor thing, Henri was an only child.”
Auda notices that Gore is a little uncomfortable at the mention of his father, but her aunt quickly comes to his rescue.