The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto

by Stephen Graham Jones

  He rolls across the poop and springs into action, giving orders before anybody can remember he's not the captain anymore. Soon they're in a kickline singing a sailor song, their elbows locked. Columbus sidles over for a Bacteen-filet, and while he's cutting, says these men don't deserve to lives: he's going to sail them off the edge of the damn world for mutinying against him.

  You smile. ‘Have some more,’ you say, leaning closer.

  Maybe this was the plan all along: Isabella just wanted to get rid of him, them, the trash of Europe.

  ‘What about the bird?’ you ask him, the one everyone saw four days ago.

  ‘It was nothing,’ Columbus says, chewing. ‘Some birds spend their whole lives at sea, you know that?’

  You shake your head no, no.

  ‘What are you really?’ he asks you.

  You look away. ‘Food,’ you say, ready to feed them until the end of the world if you have to-following the bird who never sees land—but later that night the water changes, like at the edge of a bathtub. Like it's hitting up against something. Soon it's a sound, then a surf.

  From the mast you can see the island, the Indians.

  ‘Run,’ you tell them, and then down the beach from them is a pair of headlights. They move out across the water to you, the windshield wipers spraying a salty mist up into the night.

  Nobody sees you pull away from the mast, the ropes. They're all in the bow, not dying, not dead: here.

  You shake your head no, no, not like this, not like this, then run and dive into the water, making a cannonball. Nobody notices.

  Coyote slows down so you can climb in.

  ‘Not just before America,’ you tell him, and he shrugs, flips his eyepatch up.

  ‘When, then?’ he asks.

  ‘Longer ago,’ you say.

  BACK TO THE BLANKET

  The plan you thought of tied to the mast had a horse in it. It was beautiful: when the conquistadors glittered up onto the plains, the nations there would sweep down on their painted Appaloosas and the rest would be history, something to talk about around the fire every winter. ‘The Time the Gold Men Came, Looking for Gold.’ And the children would smile like they didn't believe, then believe anyway.

  And the Spanish horses would mingle with theirs, and the buffalo runners would be the stuff of legend.

  But first you have to get one, bring it over.

  And not by ship this time.

  The first thing you do is fall down. You're wearing muk-luks, the rest of you heavy with seal hide, but the seals are months away. Months to the east.

  You smile, blow white air out your hood.

  It's way before 1492. The lower steppes of the Pastures of Heaven.

  ‘Thank you,’ you say to Coyote, wherever he is. ‘This is more like it.’

  You fold the hood back, hold your ear to the ground, and can feel the horses running. The next day you trace your fingers over their tracks. The third day you find an old campfire, the stones done all wrong, and then on the fourth day there's a scooped-out log with a dead woman inside. The fifth day you stay away from every tree, and then on the sixth day you find them, the live ones, signaling to each other across the foothills with mirrors.

  They're white too, almost. ‘They've already wrapped around the world,’ you think. ‘Like a snake.’

  Because they don't know about Indians over here, it's easy to creep into camp, lead all their horses away. But then when you're almost gone you angle your hood wrong and the sound of a baby crying gets trapped in there.

  You take all of the horses back but one, so the baby won't starve, but the sound is still in your hood, so you let the last one go, too.

  It was supposed to be easier than this. They're just white people. But still.

  That next night the parents of the baby pass it from lodge to lodge, and each time it changes hands, it grows, until it's ten almost. And then it comes out to you at the fringe of the camp.

  ‘You wanted a horse,’ she says.

  You nod.

  She smiles, touches your scissors. ‘You didn't have to come all the way over here, silly,’ she says, then chases a bird into flight. When she's gone you look at your scissors, and walk, and use them to cut bushes out of the way. The leaves of some of them are like horses’ ears, the girl calls out, and she's right. They are. So you cut the rest into a horse head, then a horse body, then cup your hand around the flared nostrils, breathe into them.

  The horse snorts, whinnies, stomps.

  You talk it across Siberia, to the bridge of land and ice, and then across it. Out in the fog the People ghost by in their whalebone boats, their paddles inches from the water.

  ‘I'm bringing you the horse,’ you call out to one of them.

  ‘What does it taste like?’ he whispers back.

  Your voice has already calved a block of ice into the water. It floes by. The whalebone boat rocks back and forth.

  ‘It's not for eating,’ you tell him, and pull the horse away from his harpoon, already testing the flesh. You follow the shore south, always south; determined.

  The second person you see is squatted over a stream, his spear cocked, waiting for a fish.

  His eyes are the only part of him that moves.

  ‘Big dog you got there,’ he says.

  ‘It's not a dog,’ you say. ‘It's a horse.’

  The man laughs without moving his lips. ‘What are you supposed to do with it?’ he asks.

  ‘Ride it,’ you say, stepping on.

  ‘Where?’ the man asks.

  All around is trees, trees. Nowhere to run. You do anyway, kick the horse south, out of the trees, into the desert where the third man is. He's braiding some grass outside his lodge.

  ‘It's not a dog,’ you tell him before he can ask.

  ‘Why is it looking at me like that?’ the man asks.

  ‘Like what?’

  You get down, but the horse is just looking.

  ‘How much water does it drink?’ the man asks.

  You shrug, let the horse nose into a clay jug in the shade. It drinks it all. The man stands, looks at the horse, the sun.

  ‘That was all my water for the rest of the year,’ he says.

  You look down, then to the west, where the sky's blue with rain. ‘I'm sorry,’ you mumble, and ride to the storm. The grass there rubs the horse's belly and the bottom of your feet.

  The fourth man is at the edge of another camp. He stumbles outside when he hears the horse's hooves, and his wife follows, carrying their baby.

  ‘Why is he so skinny?’ you ask—the baby.

  ‘Because we don't have any food,’ the man says.

  You pat the horse. ‘With this you can catch all the buffalo you want.’

  The man smiles at the horse.

  ‘What does it taste like?’ he asks, and you look to his wile, his baby, his baby, his baby, and tell him you don't know, and then hand him the reins.

  ‘We don't have anything to give you,’ he says, tying the horse to a rock. ‘Wait till the morning, though.’

  That night you sit outside their lodge and watch the shadows of them on the thin skin of the lodge. The air around them is their fire; they're eating the horse. You smile, almost, then watch as they pass the baby from lodgepole to lodgepole. It grows up into a little boy already, but then hunches over on the ground, its nose getting longer.

  Coyote.

  In the morning he's leaning against his truck, cupping a cigarette from the wind.

  ‘So?’ he says.

  ‘I couldn't let them starve,’ you say.

  ‘What about the rest of them, then?’ he asks.

  Already you can see the conquistadors’ helmets glittering to the south, their armor too hard for flint.

  Coyote shrugs, climbs into the cab, unlocks the door for you. While the truck's warming you unroll your BDU jacket from behind the seat, put it on like you're going to hide in America some more. Again. When you lean back, though, your head hits a gun in the gunrack.

&
nbsp; You laugh four times, all for yourself.

  ‘What?’ Coyote asks, shifting gears, the grass rushing along the floorboard, and you tell him to wait, you'll be right back, then roll out the passenger side door, into 1845.

  NO SOUVENIRS

  This time would be different. What they needed was this, the gun: the repeating rifle. Fuck Remington; this was a Savage.

  The first thing you do is fall down. The next thing is stay there, and stay there, holding your hip where it took the butt of the rifle. Like you can cover the pain. The barrel is full of dirt. The truck is a brown plume, already blowing away.

  This is still the grassland, at least. Home.

  There are eight shells in the gun.

  Two of them you use on one rabbit, and eat alone that night. Another you fumble into a prairie-dog hole. The fourth you keep in the chamber. The rest go in a pouch around your neck.

  The rabbit is greasy and perfect. In the morning you stuff the skin full of grass, stand it up in the coals of the fire. It jumps out. You smile.

  Home.

  From a ridge you can see teepee rings to the north, so you go the other way, to meet whichever band it is that makes this circuit every year.

  Three days out, there they are.

  You carry the rifle first by your leg, then on your back, then behind your neck like a stick—any way but like a soldier. They don't take it from you, just feed you instead, wait for you to talk.

  It takes a while, though; you want to stay here, silent, just moving along. But then on the second night one of the children pulls the trigger of the rifle and the fourth shell makes a hole in the lodge. The darkness seeps in, the smoke rising to meet it.

  ‘So,’ you say, fingering your pouch, the one on your neck.

  They're all looking at you, even The Half—the impossibly tall one who wears his face and chest painted like they say his father's was when they found him: with black paint across the eyes like sunglasses, a stripe down the chest for a tie. Black leggings, black war shirt. His hair parted not in the middle but the side.

  You hold the rifle out in your fist. ‘You want to keep this land?’ you ask.

  They shrug as one : of course.

  ‘This, then,’ you say, the rifle. ‘This is what you need.’

  ‘How much?’ one asks.

  You tell him it's a gift.

  ‘It's a gun,’ another says, sighting down it at an imaginary buffalo.

  You nod, tell him it's better, though. Show him the lever action.

  Now they're nodding too.

  ‘And we just need one?’ a third asks.

  The Half is looking at you. You look at the gun for an answer, and there it is: ‘You just have to build more like this,’ you say.

  The Half smiles, looks away, and you break the rifle down into receiver, barrel, trigger shroud; firing pin, bolt, lever; stock, tube. The pieces are everywhere. It takes you six days to get them back together, and then it's not even you, but The Half. He does it without looking.

  ‘How do you know?’ you ask. ‘This isn't even invented yet…’

  He shrugs, adjusts the painted-on sunglasses. ‘My father, I guess,’ he says.

  He's married to an Indian woman, the tallest of the band. Their children will be tall too, and their children's children, and on and on until now.

  ‘Who was he?’ you ask, though, ‘your father.’

  ‘Q'uan-the-kho,’ he says, like it's nothing, then spits the rests: ‘A white man.’

  With the rifle together he sights out into the distance, on an imaginary white man. But they're not imaginary anymore, by then.

  ‘Does it work now?’ one of the old men asks, and you finger the last four shells in, and they follow you out into the grasslands. Two of the young men are buffalo callers. They spread their robes, flap them, sing, and in two days a herd darkens the land.

  ‘Thank you,’ you say.

  ‘Which one?’ you ask the old man, and he selects a cow at the edge of the herd. You sight in on it, push a round into its side, then, before it can even fall, lever two more out there. And a strange thing happens: the whole herd shudders, looks at you as one, their eyes rimmed red.

  ‘I'm sorry,’ you say, but the old man has the rifle now, is lining up on another tender cow.

  ‘No,’ you say, but he does, knocks her down.

  That was the last shell, the formula for gunpowder. The shot goes around the world.

  ‘Fuck Remington,’ you say, quietly, ducking from the slug, still circling, and The Half looks down at you from his great, shaggy height.

  ‘It wouldn't have mattered,’ he says. ‘Did you want us to stand on an assembly line, making them?’

  He doesn't understand, though: this is all your fault. You have to fix it.

  The next day in a sweat, the rifle bundled up in otter pelt with buffalo stones and feathers and sage, a chert point already tied over the sights, you try to breathe it all in, get all the way clean, but when the stones are cold you're alone.

  The rabbit you built noses into the short lodge, its nose twitching, and it comes to you: you should build a man like that, fill him full of vaccine and foreknowledge, hide him in the back of Coyote's truck then push him out…

  This time you don't eat the rabbit, just stand knee-deep in the grass of the past and wait for the headlights, but when they come, pushing through four days of buffalo, you shake your head no, no.

  ‘Not yet,’ you say, and turn hard, run east in great loping strides, to Philadelphia, twenty years later.

  It's not too late.

  I SAW A BUFFALO ROAM

  And you're not going to have to build a straw man. You make enough people on accident already, right?

  It's not cold yet in Philadelphia, either, which is good : your plan isn't to save the Indians anymore, but the buffalo.

  The American name you give at the hat shop is Sweeney Todd, like always. The hat is a bowler. It looks good with your jacket. You tip the hatmaker a used lambskin you had in your pocket, but tell him it's a baby muskrat.

  He stands holding it to his face in front of the mirror and you walk out into the bustle of the city.

  The first thing you do is fall down.

  This is the year that the Anti-trickster Buffalo Bill is supposed to kill nearly four thousand head. You don't tell him he's shooting his own kind, that it's suicide, but you do, too, he just doesn't hear over the sound of his gun.

  It doesn't matter. If you can make nobody want to wear them, then people will just shoot them for railroad meat, and maybe one night soon Buffalo Bill will rest the octagonal barrel of his long rifle against the roof of his mouth, pull the trigger with the toe of his show boot, paint the world Red again.

  With your head against the brick street you can hear all this happening, see it almost. And then someone steps on your hand, and someone else, so you follow them, hold them between your knees like sheep, give them a haircut they won't ever forget, or remember, or tell anybody about.

  The papers talk about their smiling necks but it's not you. You're here just because Philadelphia is the fashion capital of the Hew World, the Old Northwest. You walk through the streets in clothes so crisp they crackle, and you're whistling, just so you won't have to smell the filth and decay. It'll be worse if they shoot all the buffalo again, though.

  You keep telling yourself this.

  The barber in the city of brotherly love. That's what they're calling you. At night in your bed you snip your scissors in the lamplight, long for the Declaration, the Constitution, the Indian Removal Act. Or just the men themselves.

  But you're not here for that.

  The buffalo.

  Your clothes are waiting outside your room in the morning and you step into them, approach the bar where the fashionable huddle in fear that if they can't see each other, one of them might get ahead, be the first to wear the new thing.

  Call it Trendsetters, the bar, but it isn't.

  You can still hear that baby crying. And the buffalo are
still looking at you and their eyes are the eyes of the Arawak of San Salvador, before it was San Salvador.

  You are the exact opposite of civilization.

  ‘Hide your daughters,’ you mumble liplessly, then push the doors of the bar open, stride in.

  You're just what they've been waiting for. They all turn into fawns that afternoon, and as the day turns into a week they mature into timid does, then they go in heat and will believe anything you say.

  Sweeney Todd educates them on the vulgarity of wearing the skin of animals—the lice, the disease.

  ‘Are you Indian or are you white?’ you ask them.

  They're white. But still, they look down their arms, step out of their shoes, drop them into the fire. The polished leather hisses.

  ‘That's more like it,’ you say, and then, for emphasis, pull a barbarian off the street. He's fresh from the west, a real mountain man.

  ‘What's that he's wearing?’ one of the women asks.

  ‘Buffalo,’ you say, curling your lip.

  ‘Lower,’ another says. On his belt.

  Scalps. Black hair with flecks of face paint balled in the forked ends.

  ‘Exactly,’ you say, swallowing. ‘Would you wear the skin of another person?’

  ‘Person?’ they say.

  You smile.

  ‘Indian,’ you correct.

  They shake their heads no, but it's because the Indians live off the buffalo, have the same lice, the same disease.

  You tell yourself it doesn't matter, but it does.

  That night the mountain man's too far in his glass to see you coming, either. One more for the papers.

  ‘You're right,’ the people at the bar murmur, about the animal skins, that they're not barbarians. It's a lie you can live with.

  You rent a chair in the warehouse district just to pass the time, watch it all come down. And it does: with winter comes wool coats for the wind, not buffalo robes. When Kansas sends its first load of stiff hides to the train station, nobody's there to pick them up, and they attract flies, spread disease. It's perfect. You stand at the edge of the rotting mass and say thank you, for their sacrifice.

  By the end of the day the flies have blotted out the sun, and then they drift into Philadelphia proper, and the next day in the paper, between flies mashed in the huge rollers, is an article about uncleanliness, distance from their bearded God. Punishment. Just reading the paper gets people violently ill. Four die, with assistance, and the rest stumble through the streets, retching from the flies they've inhaled. The gutters run white with maggots, and in the wake of all this a soap salesman peddles into town, cleans up. The money comes to him hand over fist.