SKIN DEEP
PINK EYE was all the rage. You could get it in the community center swimming pools, from eye-liner pencils, at the right taco stands, supposedly from buffalo. It was the STD of choice, even. Denim Horse's eyes bled with it. He even gave it to a tourist who didn't know she was Indian until him, came to Fool's Hip that next morning with her sandy hair in braids. Courtney Peltdowne stood in the fan of the ball return, ashing calmly into the thumbholes. She didn't smile back at the Indian tourist, or at the knowledge of me in Denim Horse's trailer, saying his name in every language I knew—English—trying to get around the vaccine the department required. It was never enough, though. The vaccine was the only thing IHS had ever done right. But there are ways. There are always ways.
When I could feel the cowdrops drying my contacts out, I followed my fingertips along the carpet of the back wall until the pit yawned before me. LP Deal and Naitche were crowded at the console of Red Dawn, their eyes straining, teeth set, leaning into it. The backside of my face spread into a smile; I placed my quarters on the glass, in line. LP Deal and Naitche never looked up.
That first day I learned the controls over their shoulders. By the second day my fingertips were blistered from the cue ball set into the deck of the game; your initials were all over it, Blue Plume. By the third day I was stepping up out of the pit like LP Deal did, like Naitche did, as a deer would, ready to flit away with the least sound. I was insubstantial; my eyes were so bloodshot. Twice Back Iron stood on the lip of the pit, watching me; twice he walked away. Once I lowered my head to talk down my sleeve but caught myself at the last instant, looked up at LP Deal.
‘It's okay,’ he said, but it wasn't, I couldn't, so he offered me his wrist. I took his hand in both of mine, my thumbs on either side of his upturned palm, and five hundred years fell away, two thousand, more.
LP Deal was touching my hair now.
‘Who are you?’ I asked.
‘He doesn't know.’
I turned, caught. It was Mary Boy. Behind his permanent sunglasses his eyes were any color. He stared LP Deal back to his broom, let Naitche fade back into the hum and glow of the arcade. Behind me was Red Dawn, and from its quarter slot there was a braided line of sinew, nervous like the tail of a mouse.
‘You're looking for her, right?’ he asked.
Special Agent Chassis Jones.
I managed a half-smile. ‘Maybe.’
‘All by yourself?’
I nodded.
‘And you think she's down here?’ he asked, rolling a plug of tobacco across his stubby tongue, mocking me, leaning over to look under a pinball machine, giving me his left side, his left shoulder. It was intentional; I braced myself for his partial Jesus like I'd learned to, the way you brace yourself for a ruler across the back of your hand, but then Mary Boy's shoulder was bare, clean. All the water in my body rushed hot to the back of my eyes. It was a miracle: there was no ink, no face, no Oklahoma; no christ. Behind me the mouse tail of sinew twitched and whipped inward, disappearing into the slot, the quarter scurrying deeper, nosing into the pool of change, hiding.
Mary Boy came back from the pinball machine with a coyote grin. Or whoever he was. ‘What?’ he asked, massaging his naked shoulder, your initials scrolling down all around us.
I shook my head no, nothing, it was nothing, but then he was stepping closer, removing his glasses one lens at a time.
Nickel Eye.
His lips were black and dry and sharp at the corners. He tipped the faded bowler he wasn't wearing and my eyes brimmed with tears I didn't have and I closed them—accepting his gesture—and then he drew closer still, cradling the base of my skull between the wide thumb and forefinger of his left hand and pushing the thumb and forefinger of his other hand past my lips, around my teeth like a mouthpiece, back to where my tongue started. Where Courtney Peltdowne had lined the cowdrops for me in the bathroom three days ago. He scraped them out one by one and gave them to me like pearls, closing my hand around them. He was wearing his BDU jacket again, like a veteran. The back was threadbare from leaning over his beer. Already Fool's Hip was coming together again into hard edges and angles, the milk leaving my eyes, draining down the back of my throat.
I would be sick from it later, but now, now: Nickel Eye.
He was waiting for me to say thank you.
Instead I pushed him away, my thumbnails clicking together on the follow-through.
‘Where did you put him?’ I asked.
He caught himself on the lip of the pinball machine, winked. ‘I thought it was a her…?’
‘Enil Anderson.’
‘Oh,’ Nickel Eye said, feigning a hundred different things in the space of a shrug, the pinball paddles applauding his retreat, ‘him,’ then said maybe he just went home, yeah?
No.
But still.
I got Eddie Dial to call for me that afternoon. It was all real casual, very Navajo. While we were waiting for the callback, I told him I knew what Indian Corn tasted like.
‘More like American cheese,’ he said back—LP Deal's manifesto—and then the phone was a white ringing thing and I was lounging in its general direction, trading Special Agent Chassis Jones' badge number for an address again, this one in America. I wrote it on a napkin and stared at it until the numbers swam. I was crying.
Eddie Dial led me back to the table.
‘You know that Fifth Skin's a joke,’ he said, ‘right?’ then showed me, licked the edges of my address napkin and tore them away from the miniature shape of a cured elk hide. I could almost smell the urine and brains rising from it. He held his finger up for me to wait, though, wait, then massaged a pencil from his shirt pocket, drew it all out for me like a wintercount: the yellow arrow, the Judas horse. Gauche scurrying off into the grass.
‘He's just translating,’ Eddie Dial said, boring a period into the napkin after 186x.
‘Are you sure?’
He nodded.
‘Then what? He's translating what?’
‘You know.’
And I did: nestled under my tongue in the abscess burned by the cowdrops was a soapstone figurine of Courtney Peltdowne in a shawl that wasn't a shawl, was an old wintercount she'd pulled from the hand dryer somehow, where it backed up to the wall the lockers were on. She spread her arms like a moth, rising, rising.
I threw up in the ashtray.
‘It's not easy, those things,’ Eddie Dial said. They were still in my hand. I could start it all over if I wanted. Nickel Eye was watching me through the glass bottom of his mug, though. LP Deal too, through the dreadlock strands of his mop, Back Iron through his reckless mascara, Denim Horse through his unbraided hair, Mary Boy from his crouched place behind the pins, his opera glasses glinting, Cat Stand's sixteen-pound ball hurtling down the lane at him, each revolution leaving a fine pawprint of ash.
I opened my hand and the cowdrops were flat white, like milk, like beads of milk. I poured all but one of them into LP Deal's mop bucket. They hissed in the grey water. The last one I took to the bathroom because it was evidence, but then had it back in my mouth by the time the door closed.
The capillaries in the white part of my eyes bloomed, aching with pleasure. It was like the game—the redness washing up me, over me.
‘You alright?’ a voice asked—female, not mine—and I didn't open my eyes, just nodded, said that sometimes blood gets in my eyes, that's all. It was funny; she laughed, came into focus: the Indian tourist, sitting on the sink, braiding her hair by touch, her back to the mirror, lip bitten with effort. The braid was perfect. I smiled around Nickel Eye's thick fingers still in my mouth, and then flinched from Cat Stand's ball, crashing into the pins of Lane 8, spreading them all over Fool's Hip.
On the stall someone had written roses are red, only scratched out the roses-part.
‘My new name is Miss America,’ the Indian tourist said, looking down, peeking up. Fresh Exhausted from whatever naming ceremony Denim Horse had made up. ‘Is that good…Indian?’
/> ‘What was your old one?’ I asked, crossing to the hand dryer.
‘Dorita,’ she said. ‘Like the chip. Dorita Dawes.’
‘Dorita,’ I repeated, staring hard at the hand dryer, at nothing else but the dryer, ‘watch this,’ and pushed my arm as deep into the wall as I could.
That night at the Broken Arrow, Cat Stand looked up at me from the television set. From Dairyland; America. For thirty seconds she was twelve years old again, and I smiled at her, but she didn't smile back, just turned her head off-screen. I moved to the door to get a better angle into the set, to see what she was seeing, and it was me, standing at the edge of the parking lot, looking out. And I was. The gravel and shattered glass crunched under my bare feet, and then didn't stop when I did.
Something was out there with me; someone.
I breathed, breathed, and for a moment she was there, hunched over, scurrying: Gauche.
‘Hello,’ I said.
Behind me a horse snorted and I turned to it, followed it to what Broken Arrow used to be: a one-room schoolhouse built the same distance away from all the bands. Where Gauche had to have been scurrying to. It was maybe 1907. Cat Stand was already there, still twelve. Courtney Peltdowne too, staring holes in me, and Back Iron and Denim Horse and LP Deal. LP Deal was Naitche, though. And he was wearing my contacts. I sat down beside him, and together we watched the Great Plains Fire guttering out across the prairie, trailing a plume of ash miles deep. It was serene, all of us as children, our hair in swept piles on the floor, our canvas shoes sizes too large, the annotated Code open on our desks, Gauche at the front of the classroom, explaining Bacteen in academic terms, how in all emergence tales—whether ex nihlo or ex-America—the supernatural is facilitated by a comical social misfit with extraordinary abilities, a trickster figure who reinforces current social mores, and on and on until Bacteen became Nickel Eye for me and the blood thrushing in my ears ordered itself into discrete blocks of sound, into a hesitant knock on the door, my door; 219b.
I stood before it for long moments, sure it was Gauche, sure it wasn't, but when I finally opened it, it was Naitche, only I called him LP and he ran away, breathing through his nose.
The sound missing from the night was a basketball.
I closed the door gendy, with both hands—one on the knob, pulling, the other just above it, pushing—then watched the late movie first with no sound, then with no color, then with no electricity, by memory. The last cowdrop was hours old already. When it was gone my stomach clutched after it. In the bathroom mirror I held my pistol finger to each of my eyes in turn, left my contacts on the edge of the sink; blinked.
The bathroom was so white without them. I could hear the pipes now, too. They all led to the toilet. I shook my head no, no: in that desperate part at the back of the bowl, just above the throat where you have to stare, was a set of numbers. A phone number. The Aborigine Hotline. I said no out loud, held my hair out of the water, turned myself inside out.
It didn't help: two hours later I was on the phone with them.
It was like walking into a pawnshop; within four minutes I was bargaining for the cassette I'd pulled from the hand dryer, giving them a sample, a taste.
‘Who is it?’ they asked, my middle finger on the pause button.
‘I don't know,’ I said, and then played the rest, LP Deal mumbling into his wrist about his mother, fading into the noise of a pandance, pulling his ear to the ground to listen for her return.
‘It was like his head was heavy, then,’ the hotline anthropologist said, and then the line went dead, some telegraph pole out in the grassland falling into firewood or travois runner, and in the silence I heard it again, a scurrying, only this time it was in the receiver: someone was listening.
‘Hello?’ I said, barely giving it any voice this time, and a single, frosted breath drifted from the mouthpiece—ice cream—and I was back in the schoolhouse with Cat Stand, only now a white child was there, his wrists under the table tied, his fingernails throbbing blue. He was listening to Gauche with the rest of us; she wasn't talking about a massacre, but the days before the massacre, when her band was being marched away from the fort, how one of the old men told her that as long as she watched the eagle in front of them, nothing bad could happen.
‘Don't look away,’ he said, in Cree, Creek, Crow, something, ‘it matters that he's there, an eagle like that,’ bald or golden, whatever's good, but she did look away, to watch him, the old man, see if he was watching too. He was. And he never looked down, even when the Gatling gun started its whining spin. He was the first to die.
‘But—’ LP Deal started to say, but he was Naitche, mute. Cat Stand clapped a hand over his mouth to remind him, and Denim Horse clapped a hand over her mouth, and Back Iron over Denim Horse, around the whole classroom until Courtney Peltdowne's hand was rushing towards my face, a cowdrop neatly palmed.
I pursed my lips just in time.
It was maybe 1907.
Back Iron took me to America when I asked. He had a skirt wrapped around his hips, just barely; his legs were shaved clean, his black wig on the dash so it wouldn't blow out the window.
I thumbed in the cassette he had in the player and it wasn't Breaking the Skin like I wanted to hear but the transcript of a high-school basketball game. Back Iron thumbed it back out, embarrassed.
In apology or thanks or both, I told him that I understood LP Deal now, why he didn't grow his hair out: because it weighed too much.
Back Iron laughed behind his hand.
‘What do you think, then?’ I asked.
‘That he's the only one who cares what happened to coach,’ he said.
‘Because he found him.’
‘Maybe.’
We drove. All I had heard on his tape so far was an announcer talking around a wad of quality frybread. He didn't know what quarter it was. I didn't ask.
Miles later I caught Back Iron watching me in the vanity mirror. ‘Your eyes,’ he said. My contacts. He was the only person in the world who would have noticed. In another setting I would have blushed, but Back Iron's tube top matched all the bracelets of his left wrist and some of them were mine.
‘Gave them to Naitche,’ I said, about the contacts, almost to myself, a joke, but it wasn't: Back Iron's oversized pump sagged off the pedal, the landscape snapping into focus behind him, catching up.
‘What?’ he asked.
It was his real voice; I had never heard it before.
In trade I mumbled my own name, but he said no, not that: before.
‘I was joking,’ I told him. ‘They're on my sink, I think.’
Again, we drove. Outside what used to be Liberty Kansas Back Iron batted his fake eyelashes—they had to be fake—and told me that it wasn't his fault, Naitche. He had to wear them.
‘The contacts,’ I finished.
He nodded.
‘But he's Indian,’ I tried.
‘Yeah, well,’ Back Iron said, ‘still, you know,’ and then we were on Enil Anderson's road hours too soon, even for Back Iron.
‘Wait here,’ he said, stepping into a liquor store, showing too much thigh for three in the afternoon. His femurs had to go two feet at least. I covered my mouth and looked away, studied the shells in the gravel of the parking lot, all spiraling the same way. Except Naitche, immune, his white eyes cataloging, measuring, remembering.
Back Iron waved at me through the glass. He was at the end of the line, the center of attention. There was no better place to hide: two nights ago someone had spidered down through a museum vent on Old Pine Ridge with a tank of gas strapped to their back. It was for the faded red truck in the display case, one stray bullet hole crossing the bed, leaving a federal hole in each side. You could kneel down on the driverside and look through them both like a telescope, back to the past. Or stick your finger in them.
Back Iron was wearing a black leather glove on his right hand. He called it his driving glove, but it didn't go with anything, and he favored it, and I knew: the hole
had been jagged.
He was buying champagne to celebrate.
I waved back to him then looked up, into the alcoholic haze above the liquor store, the buzzards riding the heat. My regulation issue .45 was miles away, the shiny mantelpiece of some den or living room in Broken Leg. The prairie-dog people probably didn't even sniff it anymore. Didn't even know me. This is what it's like to be undercover: you lean back in the seat of the car and shoot the buzzards one by one with your hand, then the prairie dogs, then you hold the barrel of the gun down to the tape in the tape deck, smile, pull that trigger.
The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto Page 6