The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto
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Denim Horse just held his ball at thigh-level, the fan behind him, the phone across the pit ringing and ringing, Fool's Hip finally getting uncomfortable enough with it that LP swept over, nudged it off the hook, made eye contact with Denim Horse, who looked away, back to Mary Boy. ‘I am home,’ he told Mary Boy, hours after Fool's Hip had closed, the afterimage of Naitche intense at one of the video games, one eye milky blue, like Denim Horse's is without the contact.
BACK IRON, called Deerboy by some of the clan bowlers, for obvious reasons. When Denim Horse wouldn't lend his profile to the arcade tokens Mary Boy was minting up one summer, Back Iron offered his, held his chin up as high and vain and noble as his twin brother, let Mary Boy set it in alloy and add the braids later. Aside from them—the braids—the only difference between Denim Horse and Back Iron is that Back Iron wears women's clothes and eyeliner, lets Courtney paint his nails, lies to her that he's descended from Roman Nose and American Horse and Nana.
‘Some orgy,’ Courtney says, never looking up from her file.
‘Nineteenth damn century,’ Back Iron says back, watching his brother sling the ball down the lane. ‘Back when they knew how to do it, girl.’
The nails Courtney shapes are false, though, glue-ons. Like the dress and the make-up and the walk, it's part of the disguise, just who Back Iron is in the daylight hours. At night he takes the wig off and runs his palm over his slick-bald head, all he has left of the leukemia that irradiated his early twenties. He's thirty-two now, and the treatments are just a dim glow, what he uses to find his way over electrical fences, across manicured lawns, through impossible skylights and down onto pressure-sensitive floors, into a grid of infrared light.
When he looks back up to where he came from, it's like the old stories, like he uprooted a turnip and there was this skylight, a hole into another world. All he had to do was drop a rope, follow it down into the past, the skulls and drums and beaded warshirts welling up around him, pressed behind humidity-controlled glass, making him rich. More than Denim Horse pulls in, anyway. Not bad for a bald, sterile transvestite.
He tells himself it doesn't matter that he likes the dresses, how sheer his hairless legs look in nylon, standing in line with the rest of the Nation for an assistance check at the first of the month then fanning himself with it at Fool's Hip. Pretending that's all he has, that he doesn't make that much in a single night sometimes, then lose it running from dogs or headlights or the sound of closing doors. Or tribal cops at Fool's Hip in the daytime.
The day they walked in, blinking, shades in hand, Back Iron's mascara almost ran down his face all at once. Did he leave evidence at the museum, an afterglow or something? Had they followed him here with a geiger-counter? Was this some fucking cartoon? Shit shit shit. For the first time ever, he took his wig off in Fool's Hip, stood to his full height, plus whatever the stiletto heels gave him. He walked out of them and indirectly to his neoprene duffle bag, the turtle shell rattles and sandstone pipes and wintercounts rolled up in rubber bands, indicting him, the rattle trembling already with the law so near.
If the cops heard, it was all over. Even if they suspected. Possession of sacred items not local to your tribe was treason, and treason meant exile, a long vanride to the edge of the Territories, to America, the anthropologists massed at the border with their binoculars and their listening devices and their Scalpel-brand pencils, each of them wanting you to confirm their pet theory: if population density belied ancient migratory routes or if they were the leftovers of band solidarity; what postcards looked like these days on the Inside; how the term ‘apple’ wasn't used for white Indians anymore; whether it was true that the traditionals now—the pullbacks—were the old people clinging to their microwaves and satellite dishes, while the progressives were out in the grassland with their travois and dogs and their Old Ones, refusing even the horses that followed them around. And a hundred other things Back Iron didn't even know or want to know.
He would kill himself first, in the van. There was always a way—the guards always left you a way, because they were people too, knew that exile was worse than hanging yourself with a seatbelt, throwing yourself from an open door, swallowing your tongue.
It wouldn't come to that, though. Back Iron wouldn't let it. Not for just one bag of contraband. Without turning around, he rented every locker available, put one relic in each, and then, keeping his back to the cops, to the whole bar, all watching him in bare feet and naked head, he padded into the men's bathroom, denying them all the eye contact they had to be wanting, and flushed every last key, even the one that floated back up. Now the lockers were locked forever. Back Iron leaned against the wall uncaught, nodded to himself in the mirror, and was on his way out again to trade wits with the police when he heard it: a scratching in the far stall.
He stood there for maybe two minutes, trying to think a way out, an excuse for the plastic clatter the keys had made in the bowl, for his sigh that had turned into a laugh when he flushed. It was a groan, now. He opened the door. There on the toilet was the arcade kid, pants around his ankles, and beside him waiting was his mother, toilet paper in hand, John Wayne warholled on every square.
She didn't say anything with her mouth, the mom, but her eyes were full of something, and slowly Back Iron got it: she thought he was Denim Horse. She thought Denim Horse had flushed all the keys. He smiled his best tourist-killing smile and nodded out of the doorway, the air full of apology, mistake, all that.
Back in Fool's Hip the tribal cops were questioning the regulars at the bar, Nickel Eye giving them the run-around it looked like. Back Iron collected his wig and his heels and leaned back in his chair to watch the show, wait for his turn, which never came, just LP Deal, appearing for a moment with a styrofoam cup swimming with rose petals.
‘For me?’ Back Iron said, touching his chest with his fingertips, but Long Play was already sweeping his way back to the kitchen. And they weren't rose petals, but the false nails that broke off everytime Back Iron straightened his hose or reached into his purse for change. Like he just had, to rent the lockers.
Back Iron laughed out his nose a little, leaned back, studied the ceiling to keep the mascara pooled in his eyes from brimming over. Maybe everybody knew, shit, even Denim Horse, with all his hair and trophies and women.
‘You alright, hun?’ Courtney asked from her side of the table, girl to girl, and after a few moments Back Iron managed a smile, pointed with the styrofoam cup to the tribal cops.
‘I want the tall one,’ he whispered, then held his wrists together for him, waited.
CAT STAND, former banner-child for the ‘Indian Problem’—lactose intolerance. It was a sham, though: her manager fed her digestive aids by the handful. Some days she would have to drink from seventy-five glasses before the shot was just right, and those nights even the chalky tablets didn't help. She'd fetal up in her trailer and hold her stomach and mumble the few Creek words she remembered from Eufala: close the door, don't, look. And the word for milk.
In the commercials she started out as a bright fleck surrounded by grassland, which resolved to a white buffalo calf for a moment before applying the brakes, pulling in too close to the calf's coat, backing off to show the coat was a robe now, one Cat was walking out of on her way to the breakfast table, with seventy-five glasses of milk balanced on it, one at a time. Never any cereal, never any straws, just Dairyland's Indian Princess and pure homogenized goodness. In the last few weeks before Arizona, she'd even had to bind her new breasts in bandages to look wholesome, like the cartoon pictures on the cartons. Her face and torso were on fourteen million gallons across America when she let Denim Horse lead her out into the darkness. They all expired that night. Denim Horse had been her first and last. She hadn't meant to ever see him again.
The way she wrote it to the scab at the toll booth a year ago, Naitche didn't even have a father. It was a lie, though; she just didn't have enough paper to tell him the full story—waking from her yearslong Arizona coma to a vision of
dyed feathers, mistaking herself for a bird for an instant, except birds don't mate belly to belly, but running along highwires, eyes fixed miles away, their feet clenching thousands of ohms for as long as I love you lasts. Cat tried to run too but her heels didn't reach the bedframe, and then the mattress spasmed and there was a vision of a fancydancer standing up from her, still in regalia and face paint. She could taste the paint on her lips. He even had an entry number on still. Thomas, Cat said, repeated, her only word, but none of the nurses believed her until she started showing, and then they just whispered and crossed themselves.
She delivered Naitche alone one night in December, her monitor leads dangling, and knew from the way he didn't cry that the hospital would take him away if she let them. So she didn't. She held him to her chest and they walked down the sterile halls and out the front door together, into the snow, into the cab of a plow crawling out of town.
‘You sure?’ the driver asked. He didn't see Naitche until the door was closed, either, but when he did he just nodded, turned up the heater, found a Christmas station on the radio.
‘I won't look,’ he said, nodding down to Naitche, and Cat followed his eyes. Naitche was gumming for her breast in his mute way. It was like a nature show Cat had seen once with pups or cubs. And dugs. The driver laughed awkwardly, politely, and something inside Cat dropped, physically fell, and she held him close, Naitche, too close to nurse, and—without looking somehow, like he said—the driver downshifted and passed over handful after handful of tiny, sealed buckets of non-dairy creamer. It was Naitche's first meal. After that it was formula, Cat massaging the milk from her breasts into toilets, showers, wherever they were, until the gutters of America ran white and her breasts were so tender flannel was the only thing she could wear. At night in the same bed with Naitche she still remembered saying it—close the door, don't look—only now it was in English: don't look, go away.
The snowplow driver's name was Nathaniel Hybird, Nathaniel H., Nate-H, Naitche. Not Thomas or Denim Horse, just Naitche. When Cat's milk was gone, the flannel remained. It was warm, four layers deep in places, deep enough that she can do her laundry in shifts and never have to be completely naked, like Arizona, the abandoned rodeo grounds smearing past, the night air rushing over her bare skin, drawing the heat from her.
The enamel of her teeth is thin, almost translucent, but the rest of her is a calcium deposit—robust build, thick braid; attitude. There are moments, though. Sometimes at the laundromat with her cupful of colorsafe bleach she'll hesitate, and Naitche will tune into her stillness from his station by the vending machine, and she won't say anything, will just drop the quarter, start the wash again.
‘Guess we better call the pope,’ the scab at the toll booth had told her a year ago, about Naitche not having a father, but Cat didn't smile with him, because she didn't plan on ever seeing him again—on ever having to see him again—even with short hair and a new job, a broom to lean on: LP. Long Play Deal. He doesn't remember her though, or Naitche, the immaculate conception and the phonecall to the Great White Stepfather, just brings her burger after burger, a cow a week probably, on the house, no cheese. Naitche remembers him, of course. He remembers everything.
What happened to your hair? she asked LP once on one of the bathroom stalls, waiting for Naitche to finish, and then changed it to why didn't he grow it like a real Indian? The last time she'd seen him he'd been outside the tollbooth for a busload of tourists, his ear to the asphalt, listening for traffic.
The two letters of his name were all over the arcade until Naitche took over. Now all the high scores are CAT, CAT, CAT burning themselves into the screen, whispering to her that no one's forgotten, that eating ice cream in the dark is still eating ice cream, even if it hurts your teeth in a good and necessary way.
OWEN 82, as in no wins, eighty-two losses. Basketball. He was the first one to call Back Iron Back Iron. It was the season they quit calling him coach in the tribal papers, started the whole ‘Owen82’-thing. During the first few weeks of the Skin Parade—when everyone was still drinking and IHS wasn't set up yet—he tried to get people to call him Second Raise, but it didn't stick. He had lost eighty-two games in one season, even with the Twin Towers on his side, Back Iron and Denim Horse—Thomas and the Prairie Fairy, then. Numbers 45 and 54. Owen82's offense was breaking down man-to-man defenses with likeness, Back Iron stumbling over his feet like Denim Horse then rising in his liquid-phoenix way, melting across half-court for the ball, laying it up soft instead of dunking, like everybody knew he could, like everybody wanted.
The gyms they played in thundered, until the third quarters at least, when some scrappy point guard would take the intentional foul and claw Thomas or his brother's face, marking them for the rest of the game, breaking Owen82's offense down. It never broke down in practice, though, the imaginary crowds streaming down onto the floor after the last buzzer, draping the net over Owen82's neck and carrying him off into oral history.
Sometimes they practiced twice a day.
If he just could have won one, it would have all turned out different. ‘Juan 81’ maybe. Anything but Owen.
The backside of the strip of paper on his chest the day LP walked up to Fool's Hip said that the end of the trail starts here. It was already fluttering in the wind; the whistle holding it down wasn't regulation, either. Owen82'd had to turn his official one in when he retired under suspicion, when he couldn't explain how, the year after his no-win season, he got a second chance, suddenly had all the players, the best of the Territories. Denim Horse and Back Iron were graduated by then, of course—Back Iron undergoing therapy in some American hospital, Denim Horse dancing for the crowds at pow-wows all across the northern hemisphere—but Owen82 didn't need them anymore.
His new offense would be about speed, endurance. Guerilla ball he called it in the paper, two weeks to the day before he was drummed out. Fool's Hip was a natural replacement: the waxed alleys were hardwood. They felt right, sounded the way a floor should sound. And the Twin Towers were there, too, still as lean and hard and indifferent to each other as they'd ever been. Two sides of the same Indian-head coin. It was how Owen82 had found them again—in a handful of silver from the exchange.
The day LP hired on, Owen82 was stationed at the bar as usual, rolling the coin across the back of the knuckles of his right hand, him and Nickel Eye watching Naitche light another cigarette for his mom, pass it up to her, then look down once at her lane of the day—just once—and then up to the pins, telling her with hand motions where Mary Boy had changed the markers last night, where true center was for the day. Nickel Eye nudged Owen82 and all Owen82 could do was laugh, shake his head. If he'd had a kid like Naitche on his side back when, he wouldn't be here now.
That was the day Cat Stand took seven hundred and fifty American dollars from the clan bowlers, her sixteen-pound ball hurtling down the lane, unstoppable and wide. Even Denim Horse had had to watch. It was a clinic almost, until the final frames, when Naitche approached his mom for another token. She turned to him like she didn't recognize him, but then, when she did, took him by the upper arm, led him past the clan bowlers to the bar, sat him on a stool, tiny blue moons already rising from his arm.
‘Sorry, man,’ Owen82 said to him, the kid, Naitche, about the bruises, and Naitche looked up to him, unrolled a piece of gum that appeared on the bar, and said that about the end of the trail, even gave Owen82 the strip of comic paper that had been wrapped around the gum. They couldn't look away from each other; hours later Naitche was still sitting there, chewing, and it took LP Deal to get him away from the bar, lead him to a corner of the arcade with a blue felt-tip marker, make the tiny blue moons in his upper arm into bear claws. By closing time Nickel Eye had the tattoo too, and Mary Boy, and Eddie Dial the Navajo consultant. Naitche was a star.
The end of the trail he'd said, though.
Owen82 wrote it down letter by letter on the back of one of the strips of paper in his pocket. The rest he would give to the wind.
There was a pistol in Owen82's wrong hand and a hole in his stomach.
Because Denim Horse couldn't, Back Iron cried for both of them.
Four hours after his interview with Mary Boy, the words carved in the stall of the men's bathroom were who killed coach? That night LP Deal started his manifesto.
* * *
1 See INDIAN BURN (‘Terms,’ p. 166).
why don't you grow your hair like a real Indian?
not now. she's watching.
THE ONLY GOOD INDIAN
PINK EYE was all the rage. It was the new strain: only Indians could get it. Everyone else was white-eyes, pale face, headlights; not to be trusted. But there are ways. There are always ways.
I bought the contacts in America, at the wig store, then got on the bus before dawn, crossed back over the border into Indian Territory. I was undercover now. The sun was so red that morning, my hair so blonde. The American next to me was rolling the spine of a goose feather back and forth between his index finger and thumb, so that it flashed black-and-white, black-and-white, an old movie cupped in his hands.
‘You're nostalgic,’ I told him, and he nodded, said he used to live here. A house, a garage, a car. The newspaper slapping his front door every morning.