The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto

by Stephen Graham Jones

  calling the pope

  ‘like that and the whole way there rusting in the ditches and up on blocks where theyd been stripped and turned over in the fields were the cars and the trucks and the recreation vehicles still sitting where theyd rolled some end over end some the traditional way some in ways only indians could have ever thought of like having a coathanger for an antenna only the part that used to hook over the rod or pole or whatever it is in the closets is bent off to the side for better reception which isnt just an accident waiting to happen but a tight little visual of the day of the parade the whole thing in miniature and it all comes down to a carload of people officially whooping it up at ninety miles per hour the driver lying about this time he got so close to a telephone pole that it took the passengerside mirror off or at least folded it in or shattered the glass out the screaming reflection of the passenger but the thing is that was how close he got only this guys been drinking ever since they heard the announcement on the grocery store radio about conservation and just left their baskets of dry goods cocked in the aisles their middle fingers cocked at the security cameras their car cocked in the parking lot waiting for the driver to misremember conservation as conversation miles down the road and start lying about this telephone pole thing until one of the backseat crowd calls him on it which is bad news because what they say is that indians all they had left then after their land had all been taken was their pride which is the thing that makes the driver ease over into the ditch at ninety miles per hour the territories or what will be the territories almost in sight but he just wants to ding the mirror a bit on a fence post or a reflector just to show the asshole in the backseat who just found them in the parking lot anyway but its taking miles to prove his point now to prove that he can that he did that he wasnt lying and the fence posts wont stay still for him and might be too short anyway so he sets his sights on the telephone pole again and when hes almost there just when that one in the backseat is thinking shit shit shit hes gonna do it he wasnt lying that hooked finger part of the coathanger antenna catches the guidewire of the telephone pole like its the rod in gods closet in heaven and even though in the past this car has had doors fall off just from shutting them and headliners drape down over everyone just when the sirens flashed and wheels fall in the night when no one was looking leaving the car high centered on its own muffler a seesaw for kids still the broken base of this antenna is planted deep like its coiled around the frame the very being of this car and the part of the coat hanger tied around the chrome stump and squeezed there with vice grips doesnt snap off either like it really really should but lifts the front of the car off the ground at the same incline as the wire only it completes what the wire doesnt by flying off into the sky for a few twisting moments crushing everyone inside when it lands even the guy going shit shit shit and back then fourteen years ago it must have flared up into a bonfire too because the grass is still greener around it maybe from the nitrogen that follows a burn maybe from the human flesh turned again into dirt maybe from other people stopping to close their eyes and pee behind it but there are mounds of these rusting cars on the way into the territories like the beaches of florida all the contraptions the Cubans use to get across the indians were just like that during the parade sometimes even cannibalizing the wrecked cars for alternators and linkages and tape decks before the national guard could clean the dead people out and deliver them to their families with no ceremony but they the indians never took anything before tying something to the car in trade maybe dusting an arm or a hand or whatever was crushed out the window with cornmeal or leaving a wedge of liver or the best bite of a ritual hamburger there but they probably didnt have time to sing because they were going there too just on the road and right side up and with their organs on the inside of their bodies but still they sang it in their head trying to get those people home or back and for a while if the news didnt lie (i wasnt there) for a while the radio stations even sang some of the old songs live not recorded and the people in their cars held their wheels with both hands and the hooked parts of their coathanger antennas picked the voices out of the air and then they were bursting through andrews point and yaqui buoy before it was yaqui buoy and bends twice and dont look back and bright eyes and then having to huddle in the makeshift booths filling out the applications to be indian and proving it with old turtle rattles and scars and dances they knew and stories they didnt and the television crews were there from america like buzzards youd want to say only we werent dead so they left but thirteen years later when we crossed there was still the smell only now it was from the hotels strung out like beads along no mans land and not even one hotel had windows on the east side of the building anymore but still there was glass from sill to sill which was anthropologists and ethnologists and enthusiasts stacked belly to back watching through binoculars their saliva coating the bricks for stories and stories and naitche counted them all in a disinterested glance and added them and subtracted them down to nothing and didnt tell me how many were watching just looked away to the anasazi at the tollbooth (yaqui buoy) down on fingertips and toes listening to us or pretending to and naitche leaned forward smiling and the car didnt hit the anasazi like it could have and really he wasnt even the anasazi then was just some guy in a brown jumpsuit that was supposed to look like buckskin probably only the brass zipper down the middle was a giveaway and this is what im telling you that while i was filling in the application he clowned around outside for naitche and even got him to smile which caught in my throat for some reason and made me stand from the table where i wasnt writing where id been (television comatose unconscious poisoned raped pregnant america) not for anybody or changing my name either and thats when deep in the territories a glint rose off a windshield or a chrome bumper and the anasazi saw it too and made a show of seeing it for naitche and later when naitche would ask me about him about the anasazi hed said he was i would say that there were no anasazi anymore which probably wasnt good because he needs lies to believe in maybe we all do like that he could have risen from the asphalt after but he did too to fools hip ahead of us somehow after he scanned my application and told me his joke about immaculate reconception and calling the pope but by then that chrome bumper from the territories was a sound only it hadnt been a bumper at all but a whistle polished and repolished by the man driving with his hands clenched around the wheel his head straight ahead and the thing was he stopped which you dont have to do just to leave but he did because the anasazi was down on his fingertips and toes again horsing around for naitche but then having to follow through some to make it look official approach the window and all that and because the door of the booth was still open the drivers voice came across that he was learning algonquin could he please just pass which slowed the anasazi for a moment because it didnt make sense and there was something wrong with his voice anyway the drivers and then the anasazi just kept standing there and standing there looking into the car until something had to happen like first us pulling away slow and unauthorized and then him the anasazi stepping back from the car and waving it on waving it away like he didnt care whatever just go go go then turning for us still down the road already and holding his hand up like we can still fix this its not too late it was nothing and all for naitche just for how it would look just to make him smile he put his ear to the ground again only he was looking the wrong way and never saw

  quetzalcoatl

  the plumy god the feathered serpent who wasnt the pope but might have been good enough that day with his quills and his green light and his eyes and i even said his name once (thomas cortes) when i was famous on all the television sets across america and in return he lifted me up with him into the sky and flew across the rodeo grounds on bare feet across all of arizona into a line at a supermarket that took all day because of the abandoned baskets in the aisles and the rotting food in the baskets and our car was cocked out in the parking lot and naitche had the inventory of the whole store of the whole town of the whole country in his head by now already when the cash
ier poured the change into my hand only one of the coins was false was a token was him at fools hip and naitche rolled it across the tiny backs of his knuckles as we drove so that it blurred into motion and we still hadnt reached yaqui buoy yet were still just picking through the boneyard they call it the rolling boneyard all the abandoned cars people still sneak back over the border at night to scavenge and you can see them from the road sometimes but not because theyre careless but because theyre running and god naitche was in love with them always just outside the anthropologists spotlights always just ahead of the four wheel drive trucks fishtailing behind them always screaming and shooting those wooden arrows back at the trucks not because they could bring the trucks down but because they could slow them because no anthropologist can resist easing off the pedal to pick through the mud for an arrow especially if it has some clan crest (they think we have crests) or is sheathed in say a bumpersticker which they can take back to the lab and peel with forceps and preserve under glass with the appropriate number so that anybody who wants to know if the raiders as theyre called if the raiders of whatever year supported republicans or were gone fishin or would rather be smoking kinnikinnick or whatever bumpersticker was easiest to steal from the store that season and once the second night closer to the territories one of them stood up into our headlights in an elaborate headdress and stared at us until he saw we were indian and then at the last second jumped straight up plucking our hood ornament off on the way to pin it to the stars and it was too dark to see if he ever landed or not with his water pumps and compressors and tie rods slung in a seatcover over his shoulder but naitche watched out the back window until he fell asleep like that and i want it not to be like this for him sitting in the car in the daytime rolling the token across the tiny backs of his knuckles until it blurs into the image of a father for him maybe quetzalcoatl the plumy god the feathered serpent coiled and jumping up into the night with automotive loot and coming down with me at the rodeo grounds careful to take all the shock of reentry himself which shakes blood from his nose onto my chest this is what he does his blood can bring you back to life it can fall on old bones in a neat line like the finger holes of a flute and the night will fill with syrupy rich music not screaming not sirens not ambulances not chanting and drums and one cow deep in the showbarn lowing in unnatural birth because there is no unnatural birth are you listening there is no unnatural birth theres only miracles one god man running headlong from his last name to his first down the milky white sterile halls of the hospital youve guessed by now dont lie and then taking the first empty bed there is for us because when the plumy god the feathered serpent when he turns everything around backwards so that instead of making the woman the swan he changes into one and you love him for that but you hate him too for jumping over the car that night instead of leaning into the window either side for his son or his

  milk maid

  or mary to the red catholics or lady or madonna or a creamy white homogenized statue standing above an almond brown city the blue veins in her pale breast poisoning her fatherless child the anasazis immaculate reconception the little girl on the television set her insides full of powdery tablets to absorb the dairy only they were too good they absorbed everything until she was like the black beetles her and thomas used to touch with twigs in what used to be oklahoma so that their hard backs would cave in and flake away like ashes and there collected at the bottom of their abdomens would be this white powder like condensed milk only they thought it was poison (it was) and sometimes it made him throw up just looking at how wrong it was to be dry like that inside a body and they never could eat the powdered sugar tart candy michael stole from the convenience store because it reminded them too much of touching the bugs of seeing into the bugs how the bugs didnt care if their backs flaked off and after enough shoots and enough cups of milk the girl started feeling like the beetles like she was full of poison of white powder and didnt care either was just crawling across the green grass on the back side of the television screen and smiling somehow the whole time maybe because the morning star was always rising in those commercials no matter the season the director said it was authentic it was tribal it was necessary and she knew who it was or what (a hood ornament) and she would just watch it and pull the bleached white robe tighter around her shoulders and she never knew it was real all that grass all that grassland until her and naitche turned away from yaqui buoy the tragedy there the car wedged over him thirty yards into america the ihs ambulance careening there trying to beat the american ambulance because in no mans land its first come first serve finders keepers all that a race every time but she never knew there was so much grass until she turned the car off at the top of the hill and pulled her son to her so he wouldnt try to count each individual blade so a part of him wouldnt be there forever but it was maybe too late already maybe he was already a part of it always had been and after that they drove only at night to protect him and she let him read the pamphlets the anasazi had given them about the boneyard the junkyard the salvage yard the remains of the parade the legend that from all these leftover rusting parts one truck was going to come together one red one white truck america wanted but it was too fast for america too uncatchable and that was what the raiders were looking for and he looked at me like he was going to ask me about it about something maybe the token maybe the anasazi hearing the car from america seconds too late and i held my breath for miles looking straight ahead and when i opened my mouth powdered milk coughed down onto the sloped front of my shirt and he touched it like it was still rising from a broken can that had rolled off the top shelf of the grocery store and then he put it to his tongue and i looked away’

  why don't you grow your hair like a real Indian?

  because i'm not.

  A GOOD DAY TO DIE AGAIN

  PINK EYE was all the rage. It started in the backrooms and bathrooms of all the bars, the dirty places IHS had left it, because they know Indians. It was supposed to help us. This was back in the days of the skin test, back when the standard for being Indian was nipple color, because you can't fake that, not with a prosthetic, not with a rub-on pigment. But not everyone wanted to be Indian bad enough to raise their shirt at the door. So IHS gave us pink eye, retroengineered it from the smallpox America was supposed to still have, was supposed to be wafting over the border at us for stealing back the Great Plains then trying to burn them down. Now in their history books they call it a ritual cleansing, the Fire, but it was still just a cigarette arcing forever out a car window.

  And the smallpox never came.

  Instead America made us bargains for bulk razor blades, gave them away with lighters, taught us to carry them in the brittle plastic sheaths of our cigarette packs along with the pictures we could never throw away.

  The year after the parade twenty percent of the population was floating dead in bathtubs. Because the party was winding down. But then the nurses and staff of IHS started showing up in the bars, squinting like moles, leaving tiny glass vials in the ashtrays and tip jars. At first nobody noticed—everybody was already hung over anyway, eyes bloodshot—but then it didn't go away, and only Indians had it. Instead of untucking your shirt at the door, now, you just looked into their eyes, smiled. If you were Indian. If you hadn't been vaccinated. But there are ways. There are always ways.

  I stayed up until dawn transcribing Cat Stand's sentence, then drawing lines from her to Denim Horse, to Back Iron, to LP Deal, and from LP Deal to Mary Boy, and then to Owen82 and Bacteen. And from Bacteen to Nickel Eye.

  My pencil trembled on the paper.

  ‘So how was America?’ Eddie Dial asked, biting his lower lip. We were at the table by lane 15, my eyes Indian red behind the sunglasses. I felt like Mary Boy, watching Fool's Hip under glass, from a distance. But it can all rush up to you so fast—just a phone, ringing, ringing.

  LP Deal answered when no one else would, and it was for a Miss Dick. The name I'd given the hotline. I turned away, blew smoke into the fan of Denim Horse's ball return, but LP
Deal was staring right at me.

  ‘This a real call?’ he asked finally, into the receiver, and then said there was no Dick here, no, and I closed my eyes in appreciation, the smoke coming back at me all at once.

  ‘So?’ Eddie Dial asked, and I just shook my head. His face was scratched on one side, and I wanted to take pictures, see if the pattern matched his nails, or Back Iron's long ones, or Denim Horse, still living that game. Or what.

  ‘Who did that?’ I asked.

  He took my cigarette, inhaled hard. ‘Miss America,’ he said.

  Courtney Peltdowne looked up when he said it. Eddie Dial blew smoke in her general direction. She had one of LP Deal's notebooks open behind her beauty magazine. We all knew it. If Back Iron had been there we could have made a show out of pretending not to notice, but he was nowhere. A postcard now, overnight, flaunting the truck. That day the postal trains were fat with him, too, thirty thousand postcards and more, all addressed Washington DC. They were supposed to overload the system. In the animated section of the six o'clock news, the streets and gutters of DC ran red with it. And when it clotted, God, but that was the night after tomorrow, the next installment.

  My eyes were also red from crying.

  This was the day Cat Stand bowled 287, Naitche sitting at her table backwards, watching the arcade. It was deserted. Even LP Deal was skirting it. It was more than the sunglasses: Fool's Hip was different now. The lines I drew weren't long enough; LP Deal was wearing locker keys pinned to his coveralls. He said the toilet had been spitting them back up. They rattled as he swept and I didn't eat anything all day. Denim Horse had two tourists for lunch. Nickel Eye had beer. It was on the house.

  The person screaming on the inside was me. The one not calling you to swoop in with a tribal helicopter used to be Special Agent Chassis Jones. But she knew you were coming. That Back Iron's postcard would bring you. That you would see her blonde hair and Indian eyes and she would nod a private nod to the locker where this folder is going to be, this report, and if she brushed up against you in the concession line it would be accidental, not a plea, but she won't show anything on her face, and you won't either. Or, she won't if you don't until you do.