The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto

by Stephen Graham Jones

  ‘You're Indian,’ he said, touching his own eye instead of mine, and I shrugged, still in disguise.

  ‘Part,’ I lied. ‘Enough, I guess.’

  ‘It's okay,’ he said.

  I looked at him.

  ‘I don't hold it against you, I mean,’ and then he turned back to the window. Maybe I would point this one out to Nickel Eye, I thought, as bait. Or maybe I wouldn't have to.

  ‘Number forty,’ I said, just loud enough.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Nothing. Just Fool's Hip rolling up over the dashboard, a coyote skulking behind the building, black lips pulled back in a satisfied grin.

  ‘What does it mean?’ the American asked the bus in general, me in particular.

  ‘You don't know nostalgia,’ I said.

  ‘The coyote,’ he said. ‘It means something, though.’

  ‘You never should have come back, that's what.’

  ‘But I've got to see,’ he said, ‘Him.’ And then he handed me the feather.

  I was the last one off the bus, but that was in a minute. First I used one of your tricks, Blue Plume: five American dollars in the tip can.

  ‘Him?’ I asked.

  ‘Jesus,’ the driver grunted, his voice modulating, shifting gears, and then swished the doors closed behind me, blowing my synthetic hair over my face. I don't know what ever happened to that feather.

  He was the first one I saw through the glass doors—sitting at the bar in his olive green jacket, the frosted mug glinting through his hair in slender pieces, golden as wheat—and then I didn't look at him for two weeks. It was easy to get lost in Fool's Hip, to lose yourself; to hide. My system adapted to refresco and deer sausage, to smoke and noise, to pins crashing all around, all the time.

  The American I rode in with made it out alive, after he saw Mary Boy's shoulder—Jesus' blue face stained with blood, glistening.

  ‘A miracle,’ he whispered.

  ‘Call the pope,’ I whispered back.

  The girls of lane 15 laughed with me. They were all waiting for their turn with Denim Horse. We were a seething, blonde mass. Eddie Dial was my first friend. The Navajo consultant. He was supposed to know how to run a reservation.

  ‘This isn't a reservation,’ I told him, an introduction.

  ‘Petting zoo,’ he said back quietly, in his clipped way. It was what America called it—us; the Indian Territories. He touched my yellow hair.

  ‘Please,’ I said, pulling away.

  ‘You're…’ he led off, studying my cheekbones.

  ‘Seminole,’ I finished, another lie.

  ‘But so blonde.’

  ‘Today,’ I said, ashing before I really needed to. Eddie Dial smiled, nodded; accepted me. This is how it's done: not with batting eyelashes or dropped names, but veiled hostility, a casual disregard. ‘So who's the Red Indian?’ I asked, angling my cigarette to Mary Boy, crossing the pit for the clan bowlers, pitcher in hand.

  ‘His boss,’ Eddie Dial said, directing me down to lane 2, LP Deal. Out past the foul line, down on fingertips and toes, ear to the hardwood, eyes closed; listening. This is how I'll always remember him: in the silence of no-one bowling, not even Cat Stand. They were all holding their breath, waiting for him.

  Yes, he nodded. Yes yes yes.

  Eddie Dial laughed. ‘They're coming,’ he interpreted for LP, and for a moment I could hear them too: the Councilmen, rolling heavy in their airbrushed El Dorados, Fool's Hip caught in the crosshairs of their hood ornaments, Mary Boy's tattoo large and distorted through the front doors, drawing them in from all four corners.

  ‘How long?’ I asked Eddie Dial, but Eddie Dial was gone. Now he was Denim Horse, but not: Back Iron.

  ‘Few days,’ he said. ‘Maybe a week.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then we won't matter anymore. You mind?’

  I shook my head no and he salvaged my cigarette from the ashtray, breathed it in deep then studied it over his red nails. The filter was milky white.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked him, but he just leaned back, exhaled.

  ‘Don't think you have it,’ he said, watching Denim Horse, his voice lilting away. ‘But I sure do like that dress.’

  Three days later he was wearing it, his elbows on the table, Naitche in his lap.

  ‘Hello,’ I said to him, Naitche, but he just stared. The muscles of his eyes were still twitching from the arcade. His fingers smelled of sinew and electricity. This was the day his mother rolled 233 three times in a row, head to head with Denim Horse eight lanes down. They were so polite about who got to go first.

  ‘Hello,’ I said again, to Naitche.

  ‘Don't bother,’ Back Iron said.

  When my cigarette went out, though—inattention, a slip—Naitche held it to his lips, ground the lighter, turned his head to exhale.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, taking it between my first and second finger. ‘Thank you.’ The whole time saying I'm not her; I'm not her, his mother, Cat Stand. It's easy to lose yourself at Fool's Hip, though. To forget and breathe in once, twice, after meals, pack after pack.

  ‘You should slow down,’ Back Iron said once, but Nickel Eye was talking to a tourist at the bar about Mary Boy's bleeding tattoo, and I couldn't. My filters that day were black with nerves.

  The night before Special Agent Chassis Jones officially disappeared, she had a dream. Nickel Eye was in it with her. It was whatever season it is when the grass in the cemetery is yellow and loud enough to make you feel like an intruder. Not yellow, though, but golden, for him; barley.

  We were both wearing Indian band-aids over our eyebrows. Nickel Eye's rose together in the middle just slightly. They made him look sad.

  ‘Don't,’ I said, but he did anyway, led me deeper into the Plains, the grass folding in behind us. I don't know what emotion my eyebrows were locked in: fear, pity, respect. My hand was small in his. I was an agent of the law; he was the first documented Indian serial-killer. It was a dance, a spotlight dance, and I closed my eyes in it, for it, opened them to the sun, not harsh but nurturing. A Pueblo kind of heat, from my childhood. And there was that same wonder: we were standing in a field of hair—Indian hair. Growing in clumps from the ground like the grass they plant in fallow fields; recovery grass.

  I could feel my band-aids now. They were trying to close my eyes, deny all this. How the wind lifted the blue-black hair, how it rustled.

  Are there…people under there?' I asked, my hand over my mouth, and Nickel Eye just said America, America, in a way that drove me from my sheets night after night, from my room at The Broken Arrow (219b), a weekly place of neon and moths and vending machines. Fool's Hip squatted dark in the distance, blotting out the lowest stars.

  ‘No,’ I said, coughing tar, pushing whatever button was brightest, promising to eat whatever dropped. When I went back in the morning—in daylight—the brightest button was either potato chips or licorice, but I remembered neither. All that remained was the walk back, past the TV lounge, Cat Stand there in the pale glow, her back to the world, the vanilla ice cream collected at the corners of her mouth, her right arm shivering cold, even under all that flannel.

  ‘I know you,’ I said, and she just looked away, and I ate whatever was in my hand, and, before I left, touched my eyebrows. But my fingertips were numb. Maybe it was chocolate—the machine had given me chocolate. It kept me up all night, anyway. She was my first interview.

  The American didn't make it out alive, either, like I thought. Number forty. It must have happened when I was with Denim Horse those two days, saying his name over and over. Here's how I picture it: the American gets off the bus for the second time, back for Mary Boy's tattoo. It has something he needs. He's lighter now, drawn up around the ribs, no longer eating right. This time he dabs Jesus' face with a cocktail napkin, pockets the dark blood, then shuffles around Fool's Hip until Nickel Eye settles on him—his sandy, receding hair, his citizen dress. The crisp bills he's been trading for beer.

  He do
esn't get any drunker, though, the American—any easier—and that's when I lose him to the exit doors, rattling as the bus pulls away. He walks out after it just for the gesture, so he can tell his wife and kids that this is the way it happened. Maybe this is the way it's always been happening.

  When he turns back to Fool's Hip, the coyote is there, ears back, lips flat. They lock eyes, one of them grins, and then they're moving, the coyote padding out into the grassland, looking back to make sure the American is following, that he wants it this way too. His name was Enil Anderson, remember? This was when I called the station from the payphone at Broken Arrow, traded my badge number for an address. Enil's address. His old one. His house with the garage.

  It was still there, in a row with the rest. There were two families living in and around it, but I told them to leave. They did. I walked through the house as he might have, then, cataloging furniture positions, hearing children's voices from walls; holding onto the banister a little too long. Number forty. All the names rose in the back of my throat—Janie, Luis, Kathleen; Philip, Mark, Amy. And now Enil. Maybe even forty-one: back at Fool's Hip, through a haze of smoke, I looked down the alley and asked Back Iron about Owen82.

  He settled his outlined eyes on me. Today he was wearing the wide, black frames of a pair of glasses, the lenses somewhere else. ‘You part of the task force?’ he asked, and his voice stayed there at the top of the question, time dilating around the two of us; blooming. A custom-ball rolled end over end down the lane, exhaling smoke from its thumbhole with every individual revolution. Like a little train, an iron horse leaving curlicues of ash, perfect little whorls, identification, God.

  When I looked from the ball back to Back Iron I didn't say anything, couldn't. And he was smiling. ‘His investigation,’ he finished, directing me to LP Deal, the heel of his hand against his upper lip, shiny with saliva.

  ‘He's the one that found him,’ I repeated, from the report. My voice though, it was hardly me anymore. All the pins in the place crashed into each other at once.

  ‘No shit he found him,’ Back Iron said, winking. ‘Gutshot, you know?’

  I nodded, drew my pistol-finger casual against my side. Back Iron moved it around to the front, a difficult angle.

  ‘And it was cold,’ he said, and then explained the stainless-steel thumb joint Owen82 had inherited from his grandmother, who had gotten it from her father. He held the large joint of his thumb up to show, and I became aware of my own in a new way—trying to hold a pistol perpendicular to my navel, the metal and plastic stiff in my hand from the weather, my breath visible, measured.

  ‘How long did it take him?’

  ‘To die?’

  ‘Like that.’ My gun-hand was still there.

  Now Back Iron shrugged, pushed his hair out of his face, in sync with LP, halfway across Fool's Hip, and seemed to look over his shoulder at the bathrooms, across the lockers, to the bar. To Nickel Eye. ‘Hour,’ he said, suddenly sick with it. ‘Maybe two.’ And then he looked directly at me through the frames of his glasses: ‘You should know, though,’ he said, just low enough for me to doubt. But I couldn't.

  Back Iron was already laughing with his eyes, leaning back; letting me off. I ran to Denim Horse that night, pulled his hair to be sure it was him, and then said his name over and over, trying to drown out the sound of Back Iron somewhere past the bedroom window, dribbling his basketball evenly into a pad of concrete, my dress whipping around his knees.

  RED DAWN. It was the name of the video game Naitche and LP went back and forth on, trading high-scores. The first stage was ‘Gunfight at the Mediocre Corral.’ The last was ‘Red Rover, Red Rover.’ The status-panel was North America, going red from Mexico on up. Either there was no sound or LP had turned it off somehow. They concentrated so hard on it I could hear the blood pulsing in their temples, washing up out of the pit the arcade was, into Fool's Hip proper. It was beautiful. They were like father and son but not, more like brothers, like LP was just an older version of Naitche. An older, flawed version. When they were hunched over the game together, though—or even when it was just Naitche, LP on mop-duty—the rest of the video games were mute, their heads down in respect, or fear. The clan bowlers were the same way with his mother—standing back, unsure—but Cat Stand didn't care.

  ‘She doesn't know,’ Eddie Dial said, watching her bowl.

  I waited for more.

  ‘That she's supposed to lose when they come.’

  The Councilmen. The AllSkin tournament. Courtney Peltdowne had been taping flyers up on the glass doors all morning. Her lips had been lined with cowdrops, her hands moving in slow motion with the clear tape, but Mary Boy wouldn't take it away from her. I didn't realize she was taller than me until I stood beside her, reading her handiwork.

  ‘Deersoft Bird,’ she was saying, ‘Plumy Deer Bird,’ and more.

  I shook my head no, and she laughed a little.

  ‘Not you, girl,’ her grandmother, she was trying to reconstruct her grandmother's name from her own—Peltdowne. The corruption. ‘I can feel it,’ she said, the name, her name. When she smiled there was a cowdrop halogen white between her teeth.

  ‘So are you really Indian?’ she asked, and then—her eyes on Denim Horse the whole time—leaned forward and kissed me on the lips, the pill passing between us. It was already warm, slick.

  Yes, I nodded, her hand in my synthetic hair. Yes yes yes.

  In the bathroom with her that afternoon, our reflections smearing from stall to stall, she led me to the corner. It was decaying, cracking. She rolled her sleeve up, closed her eyes to make her fingers work better, and eased her arm through the cinderblock, birthed a stack of notebooks.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Thirty-two B,’ she said.

  That was the first time I saw LP's manifesto—his tight, cramped hand, the uneven lines; the fever.

  ‘Read it to me,’ I said, and for a while she did.

  INDIAN CORN

  1852

  1854

  They were probably Sioux. It was the right area, at least: South Dakota, before there was a South Dakota. Fourteen of them, splintered off from their tiospaye, sulking through the grasslands after meat. Of the four horses, two were lashed to travois. The other two ranged ahead, one to the north, one the south, their riders sweated to their backs; content. ¶ Three nights ago they'd come across a covered wagon. They used it to patch their lodges. The patches were harsh white against the smoke-blackened leather, curling up at the edges like the scabs they knew. It was medicine of some kind, anyway. The dogs could tell, and that was enough. ¶ Five days from the wagon they found half a copper breastplate dull in the sun, and Horns In Back looked at it only once and told them a long story about a turtle shell, his hands moving over each syllable until his words were shiny and worn and sacred. The next morning Maddy Bride cooked two rabbits in the breastplate, and all that day Runs To The Tree and Billy made circles around camp, dragging wood in. It burned hot enough and long enough to make arrow points from the breastplate, and Horns In Back was singing anyway, so it had to work. ¶ This was the winter marked with the yellow arrow. No children were born, but no one died either They were fourteen strong. Their horses had the man from the wagon's buttons braided into their bridles. When the man had seen Billy with his two carbines, the stocks decorated with tacks, he had let the traces go, then clubbed his wife to death. Billy had smiled; for two weeks he wore strips of the wife's dress around his calves, but then the fabric got stiff and loud. ¶ The man he had killed the same way he killed the rabbits for stew. ¶ Two weeks from the turtle shell, the sky to the north was black with birds, and they knew what it meant: raw, skinless humps of buffalo, no good to eat. Horns In Back made them ride until the smell was gone. The next day he started the ceremony for the Freak Pipe. It took four days to completely unwrap and four more days to light. He sang careful songs. Runs To The Tree and Billy had to ride out farther and farther each day for meat, but each day they found it. Maddy Bride said
this was good: it meant the Freak Pipe wanted them to stay here for the ceremony. Her two sons had never seen it either, hadn't been born the last time. It was only done every few years. Only Horns In Back knew it anymore. That night he told them the story of it, the pink stone the pipe was carved from, the generations that had put their lips to it, looked down along its length and back to themselves. Billy made drum noises with his mouth because they didn't have one, and his voice filled the night until his main wife Gauche screamed and Runs To The Tree tilted his bow straight up, slung one of their yellow-tipped arrows against the blackness, trying to pierce it. ¶ It came back down into the flank of one of their decorated horses, but the horse didn't run. In the morning Maddy Bride's youngest son would point to an out-of-place bird balanced on the worn nock, picking at the fletching, and after that they would call the boy Bird. No one would ever ride that horse again, though. ¶ But first there was the ceremony. Horns In Back rubbed paint onto his face with a rag, then painted his fingertips from his cheeks, because everything had to be backwards. So night was morning, in was out, the smoke flaps were closed until everyone's eyes bled, even the children, unable to blink. ¶ ‘Look away,’ Horns In Back said, however you say it in Sioux, and nobody did.

  1855

  The year marked with striped grass, purple lines of it feeling out across the prairie like blood poisoning. Because Horns In Back wouldn't let them cross any of them, the lines–and the horses wouldn't anyway–they rode west to go north, and brushed the grass in place behind them because they weren't alone. There were balls of light in the distance some nights, the small voices of a camp. ¶ Horns In Back stood long one night trying to pick it out from the low-lying stars, but the stars were even wrong, and he told Billy and Maddy Bride and Runs To The Tree and Stands Twice to watch his hands until morning, see if he was still holding the Freak Pipe. All of them forgot except Bird, though, and he was hiding behind a rack of drying meat, watching the canvas patches on the lodge. They framed Horns In Back like eyes, looking deeper than he could. ¶ A dog barked and soon they all were, and the horse with the arrow shaft healed into its flank trotted behind the dogs, one of them now. The short robe who had followed them with his two sticks (‘†’) had named it Judas for the way it held its head, but when the name hadn't stuck, Stands Twice took it for himself. It was power: Judas Horse. ¶ They waved to the short robe when he left walking, and smiled like he would live forever, even though they knew he was riding into Crow land. Let them steal his wooden beads. What Horns In Back's band needed was greased bullets for their guns. This was the winter Maddy Bride's oldest son died coughing, and she left her hair on top of the grass for the birds, but then Bird took it because it was his brother-it had been his brother He braided it with tail hair from the dog horse, for medicine, and wore it around his neck, tight as a choker. ¶ Later that night they all saw it, and knew it was a sign: a yellow square flashing two hills over-once, twice, smaller and smaller until it was gone. Bird held his choker between his thumb and index finger and hummed, and Maddy Bride pulled him close, looked out there for Runs To The Tree and Judas Horse and Billy. They all looked at each other, then to Horns In Back, who nodded. ¶ They were gone until dawn, and when they came back wouldn't talk, just started collecting the slender branches of a sweat. Before they ducked in, though, Billy stood for a long time at the entrance to Maddy Bride's lodge. He was watching Bird. ‘I'm not him,’ Bird said, finally, and Billy nodded, and Maddy Bride looked eight days behind them, where her oldest son was buried, and nodded too.