by Tom Deitz
“I am,” Kirk countered instantly. “Money’s the most P.C. thing there is. I mean, do you s’pose old S.D.J.’d have got rich if he’d been a two-hundred-pound white Baptist?”
“Search me…but—”
“That’s not why you came.”
In reply, Calvin slumped down on the split-log steps, leaning against a porch post. Kirk sat opposite. For a while they busied themselves with biscuits and coffee. The ’coon found its way from the rafters and nuzzled Kirk’s greasier hand. He passed it half a biscuit. It trilled.
Eventually Kirk cleared his throat. Calvin saw him watching and cleared his throat in turn. “I want some advice.”
“First time in your life!” Kirk snorted.
“Possibly. But I really do need some. I mean, I know I’ve been kinda distant the last couple of years—preoccupied, and all. But you’ve gotta remember that I was hangin’ out up here while you were off at college, so it’s not like you’ve exactly been available either.”
“So which me do you need?” Kirk asked seriously. “Your cousin, your Cherokee cousin, your mechanic cousin, or your anthropologist cousin?”
“I need my shaman cousin, ’cept I don’t have one.”
Kirk gnawed his lip. “That stuff, huh?”
An eyebrow lifted. “You’ve read Mooney?”
“Does the pope shit in the woods?”
Calvin grimaced and exhaled slowly. “What would you say if I told you that a shitload of the stuff in there’s true?”
Kirk puffed his cheeks. “I’d say…well, first I’d say you were crazy—if you’re talkin’ about what I think you are. But then I’d remember that my flaky young cousin’s always been a straight shooter, so he must have good reason to believe it’s true, whether or not it actually is.”
“That’s as much as I could hope for, I guess.”
“There’s more, I take it?”
Calvin nodded. “How ’bout uktena scales, an ulun-suti, and Spearfinger, for starters? Mix in shapechangin’ and ghostly visitations. Spice with over-rash promises.”
Kirk whistled. “Sounds like heavy stuff.”
“You could say that.”
“Sooo,” Kirk wondered, leaning back, “how long a tale is this, anyway? I ask because, unlikely as it may seem, I’ve actually gotta do something this mornin’—and I’ve gotta run on white man’s time.”
Calvin looked crestfallen. “It’s a…long ’un, actually, to tell it right—couple hours, at least.”
“Well,” Kirk announced, “the way I see it is that you’re freaked out over something and dead on your feet on top of it. So I tell you what: you grab some Zs now, and tonight we can burn the midnight lamp as long as we have to.”
“And until then?”
“Like I said, you crash here this morning, I’ll feed you tonight…and this afternoon…”
“Yeah?”
Kirkwood Thunderbird O’Connor smiled fiendishly. “That’s when I exact my consultant’s fee.”
Calvin regarded him warily from over the rim of his cup.
“You remember how to play stickball, don’t you?”
Calvin’s eyes narrowed. “You mean anetsa?”
Kirk rolled his eyes in turn. “God, cuz, you’re a worse purist than I am!”
“You know I hate that game!”
“I know you hate rollin’ around on the ground and gettin’ hurt, which is not the same thing. I also know you’re damned good—or used to be,” he added with a challenging sneer.
“You got sticks?”
“I always got sticks.”
“Got a ball?”
“I don’t need a ball. I’m the driver. You’re the one who needs a ball—balls, too, if you got ’em.”
“I meant to practice with.” Then: “Driver? What happened to Lloyd Arneach?”
“More money elsewhere.”
Calvin merely grunted.
Kirk’s face softened. “Hey, if it’s that big a deal, I’ll get somebody else.”
“No.” Calvin sighed. “It can wait.”
“Good man!”
“So who’s playin’?”
“Bunch of the guys up here.”
“Pow-wow practice?” Calvin asked, thinking of the big yearly festival on the Fourth of July.
A shrug. “Kinda. Wolftown boys—of whom you, by clan, are one, if I recall—are playin’ a bunch of white guys from the University of Georgia.”
“White guys can’t play stickball!”
“These can—well enough to make the Choctaw world champs sweat—and they play regularly. As, I might add, do the Na Hollos.”
Calvin scowled uncertainly. “Na Hollos?”
“Choctaw for ‘White Thing.’”
“Oh.”
“I assume you’ve been abstaining from the company of women like you’re supposed to?”
“No more than you’ve been fasting!”
Kirk smiled lopsidedly. “Well, coffee’s close to black drink.”
Calvin polished his off and levered himself to his feet, suddenly all weariness. “And if I play, you’ll hear me out with an open mind?”
“Promise, cuz. Promise!”
“Promise,” Calvin muttered to himself as he slumped back inside the cabin. “That’s the whole damned trouble!”
Chapter VII: Hard Falls and Close Calls
(early afternoon)
The big July Fourth pow-wow was still two weeks off, Calvin knew, as he surveyed the mixed-culture crowd ambling about the Qualla Ceremonial Grounds, but you sure couldn’t prove it by him. Part of the present press was simply the economics of tourist season, of course: one more opportunity to twist a few extra bucks out of flatlanders who might otherwise have driven straight through to max out their plastic up in Gatlinburg or the Smokys. But with what was at least apparently an event taking place—well, folks were just naturally more inclined to stop. He didn’t blame the locals for profiting from illusion. Qualla wasn’t exactly the richest square mile on earth, even if it didn’t look as bad as some other reservations—like Rosebud, South Dakota. Or at least not as bad as it had looked in Thunderheart.
But be that as it may, what mattered now was satisfying his cousin’s perverse sense of fair trade so that he could, in turn, pick that cousin’s mind. Calvin was good at anetsa—almost a natural, some said. But he didn’t like to play—he supposed because he was at heart a more peaceful soul than the aptly named Little Brother of War required. To be really good at stickball, you had to abandon your higher brain functions and rely on reflex, adrenaline—and killer instinct—at least as much as skill. A high pain threshold helped, too. But Calvin, more so than most, had good reason to fear what might happen if he gave raw emotion free rein.
On the other hand, Kirkwood knew a bloody lot about Native American cosmology, religion, and folklore. And in spite of the fact that Calvin had more “hands-on” experience than any Cherokee had acquired in a couple of centuries, his cousin was more likely to have squirreled away the sort of esoterica Calvin had glossed over in his own wide but less disciplined reading. Kirk also had a solid background in logic and ethics, both Native American and import. And he knew Calvin as well as anyone.
Trouble was, while Kirk had been around enough to be open-minded, he was also educated enough to be skeptical; and though Calvin knew he would try to accept what he had to say nonjudgmentally, it was a lot to ask anyone to swallow.
It also assumed he survived the next two hours.
He checked his watch. It was nigh onto 1:45 P.M., and the game was supposed to start at 2:00. Scowling, he gave the crowd one final scan, noting that a number of local artisans were attracting good business—folks like Eva Bigwitch, Davy Arch, and Eddie Bushyhead, in particular. Good for them. A quick check on tiptoes to locate Kirk found him conferring with a clump of event coordinators. Pausing only to untie the red bandana that bound his tihlskahlti—his ballsticks—Calvin trotted that way, which was also toward the ball ground.
It was roughly the size of a foot
ball field, but with far less clearly defined boundaries. Indeed, there was no out-of-bounds, and more than once Calvin had seen players tumble into the spectators with little regard for life or limb on either side. Near each end of the long axis a pair of man-high saplings had been thrust into the ground an armspan apart. These were the goals—at least they were in the Cherokee version of the game. The Mississipi Choctaw—the only tribe that still maintained official teams and codified rules—used twelve-foot-high poles stuck in the earth, and other Southeastern tribes had similar variations.
Just like they used different sticks. Calvin’s borrowed pair were Cherokee-style: yard-long splints of hickory planed thin with a draw knife, then folded in half and flared to make a hand-sized loop at the bent end, the remainder doweled and lashed together, with leather woven through the loop to form a basket.
The crowd thinned as Calvin approached, and he recognized some people—players on his own team, mostly: the Bauchenbaugh boys and their dad; Casey Cooper, and the inevitable strutting figure of Rifle Runningbear, who’d been in a couple of movies—and was presently flirting with a woman. Most knew Calvin only slightly, and vice versa. He hadn’t grown up in these parts but had spent summers here in the company of his grandfather, who’d been one of the tribal elders, which connection entitled Calvin to a certain amount of respect. Unfortunately, the old guy had lived way back in the hills, and Calvin hadn’t been able to get into town often; thus, he’d had little contact with tribesmen his own age. He was accepted partly because he had a B.I.A. card, but mostly because he had kinfolks thereabouts—and was a good player; though a certain begrudged quality came with it: an ongoing tendency to test him.
But all that was in his head. As far as any of the spectators knew, he was just another Cherokee: taller than some, and maybe a little slimmer than the stocky, neckless, wide-shouldered lads that comprised the bulk of his team. But like the rest he had thick black hair, tending to long. And like most of them, too, he’d be playing in cut-off jeans (a pair of Kirk’s, since he’d brought none).
Speaking of which… He paused by a scatter of similarly abandoned clothing at the eastern edge of the field to shuck out of his shoes and shirt, as the rules required. His watch joined them, but only then did he realize that this really wasn’t a good idea, because it meant exposing his uktena scale necklace, which he wasn’t about to leave in Fortune’s care, seeing as how it still contained an indeterminate number of shape-shifts and only needed to taste blood to stir up trouble. Too, going shirtless revealed the sun-circles Uki and the Red Man had branded into his back. They looked like tattoos, but a sharp eye would realize they were other.
Oh well, there was no help for it—not if he was going to get anything useful out of Churchy.
The Wolftown boys were warming up now: using their sticks to scoop up the ball (like a lopsided golfball made of hand-stitched buckskin around a rock core), then flinging it at each other—sometimes with appalling force. A really good throw made an audible whistle. They were also laughing a great deal—and tossing good-natured insults at their opponents.
The visitors, he observed, as he intercepted a wayward shot and flung it back, showed more variation than the hometown team, ranging in apparent age from late teens to early forties—(that was a mistake!). Most were leaner than the Cherokee norm, some even downright skinny, with a couple of really small lads, but also with a fair number taller than the tallest Wolftowner—at five ten, Calvin was himself a touch above average. A few were blond, a couple red-headed. Some wore ponytails, many sported earrings, and one had a thick, waist-long braid that was bound to tempt someone past endurance. There were even two women: a thin, curly-haired blonde, and a buxom redhead. Calvin wondered if they’d be required to go topless, too. As it was, their whole team wore white T-shirts emblazoned with a pissed-off-looking bat grasping tihlskahlti.
Calvin even recognized a couple of them. One was a middle-sized auburn-haired guy whose intense expression rode raptor-handsome features. Calvin couldn’t remember his name, but knew he’d been dancing pow-wows since he was a kid and had lately started a small Drum. A couple of others danced or sang, too: a ballsy thing to do, for white boys.
“Everybody come on out and line up!” Kirk yelled abruptly. And anetsa was underway.
As the teams began to face off in midfield, Calvin finally got a look at the Na Hollo captain: a short, stocky, strong-looking man in his early thirties. His black hair was caught up in a bun and a tattooed Mayan glyph showed on one shoulder, while two more, in a different style, decorated his burly torso. That which bracketed his right nipple looked like an insignia from the first Star Trek, but was in fact a Southeastern Indian motif. “That’s John Gregory,” Richie Bauchenbaugh confided. “Part Choctaw. Better watch ’im; he’s better’n he looks.”
Calvin only half heard him, though he dutifully laid his sticks on the ground before him as the rest of the Wolftown boys fell in on either side. That tattoo!—it represented the eye markings of a peregrine falcon—which was his totem. What it meant on a member of an opposing team, he had no idea—save that falcons had a habit of impinging on his reality at crucial junctures, often as not in warning. Which was all he needed, seeing how he already had half a dozen crises about to boil.
Oh, well…
Kirk, who was Driver, a.k.a. referee, stood at the far end of the facing ranks, a willow withe held whiplike in his hand. He studied the teams for a moment (there were roughly twenty on either side), and frowned. Then, striding down the line, he made adjustments, matching each person against someone of similar bulk or build. When play began, everyone would be charged with keeping his opposite number out of commission. The guy currently facing Calvin was a wiry fellow in his mid-twenties, a few inches shorter than he, with slightly receding brown hair and wire-framed glasses that would last about five seconds: not a good match. Kirk noted that as well and substituted the red-haired dancer. Calvin probably had him by a pound or two; on the other hand, Red-hair was taller and might have reach.
“Okay, you guys know the rules,” Kirk was saying, probably for the Na Hollos’ benefit. “You have to use the sticks to get the ball off the ground, but after it’s knee high, hands are okay. You have to take it through your opponent’s goal, and you—or someone from your team—has to bring it around the goal and onto the field again. Remember, stay with your man. You can take him out at any time, but I don’t want to see any unnecessary roughness. That clear, Rifle? I’m gonna give you guys one minute to get your heads straight and look pretty for the cameras, and then it’s war—until one team scores twelve points.”
“How many breaks?” someone asked.
“None—’cept the ones in your bones!”
A general nervous chuckle.
Calvin took a deep breath and reclaimed his sticks, looking past the Na Hollos to survey the crowd at large. Most were typical tourists: white folks in bright colors, shades, and baseball caps. There were also a fair number of locals, most clumped together to one side. One was not, however, and Calvin found his attention drawn to him like a moth to a flame.
If not clearly Cherokee, the man was nevertheless so determinedly Native American as to be almost a caricature. Likely in his early thirties, he stood half a head taller than the surrounding crowd: easily six three or four. His jet black hair hung in thick braids like twisted tar, and he wore tight jeans, western boots, and a skintight black T-shirt emblazoned with a cobra’s head affronte picked out in scarlet, save for poison green eyes. Even at this distance Calvin could see that he was leanly, if powerfully, built.
And his eyes…
Calvin shouldn’t be able to discern any detail at this distance, yet somehow he knew that man’s eyes were…wrong. In spite of the glare, they were wide open, not squinted to slits; and they had a cold quality to them, like a reptile’s. He felt a sudden chill and wondered, half seriously, if the lids might not flick in from the side or bottom.
Nor could he resist following that troubling gaze, for the man w
as glaring at someone in the encircling crowd—and glaring hard.
It was then that Calvin saw the girl.
Though reasonably tall, she was slim and lithe. Native American, too—probably—but with her inky hair growing to a point on her forehead and cut short enough on the neck and sides to show her ears. She had a small, pointed chin and enormous dark eyes that, together with wide cheekbones, gave her a feral cast. She too wore black—jeans and riding boots—but a green T-shirt depicted a grinning Indian boy: Nathan Chasing-His-Horse from Dances with Wolves, if Calvin could trust his memory.
And then, cat-quick, the woman’s head snapped around. Her eyes darted about, then stabilized—fixed, Calvin was certain, on him. The tall man’s face swiveled his way, too—and his eyes narrowed, his lips curved in an odd, surprised smile. The hair on Calvin’s neck prickled.
“Hweeee!” a voice cried.
Calvin jerked himself back to the business at hand just in time to see Kirk fling the ball high in the air. The sky was slashed by upraised sticks, by arms fair and bronzed, as the teams surged together. He was jostled from the right as he forced himself toward the huddle of legs and backsides that were vainly trying to recover the ball from the ground. A hard impact from the left was Red-hair checking him—and not doing badly. The air filled with grunts and half-heard curses. He was already sweating.
All at once the seething mass of bodies broke asunder. Part of it boiled his way. The ball exploded from between dark hairy legs, caromed off a foot—and bounced toward him. He snapped his sticks toward it, simultaneously bracing for the impact old Red-hair ought to deliver—assuming he knew that much.
Closer… One stick brushed the ball. He flipped it upward, even as he dropped his other stick to grab it.
And felt all the breath burst out of him as someone slammed hard into his ribcage. The ground scooted out from under him; strong hard arms clamped around him; and he was borne to earth. The ball shot into the sky—he saw it there, along with his other stick and a flash of dark red hair.
And couldn’t move!