The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto

by Stephen Graham Jones

  When they ask why I came here, tell them it was to get my gun. And don't say that I fell in love. Tell them instead about Smudge, the medicine man for the Council, standing all that day in the shadow of Red Dawn. He had white feathers at his elbows and the tops of his boots, and his face was painted glossy black. At six o'clock exactly, the glass door still swinging from Mary Boy's slow fade into dusk, a black-lipped coyote padded into Fool's Hip, and I could no longer breathe people air. Nickel Eye wasn't at his place at the bar. Cat Stand's ball slammed into the gutter. Denim Horse's box fan died, his hair falling all around him. I stood but Eddie Dial guided me back down, and the coyote passed, touching everything with its nose, cleansing it, cleansing it, leading Smudge out in a complicated dance that would have taken days to unfold.

  He didn't take my wig off like I thought he would, either. Or my sunglasses. But still I had to check them, in the bathroom where no one could see. Through the open window I could hear Mary Boy's throaty vespers. The beauty magazine was on the sill, too. Where Courtney Peltdowne had been listening. I sat in her place until it was over, watching Mary Boy raise his knees with the words, eyes closed behind his sunglasses, the stray cat dancing behind him, and asked on the metal wall if this is how it all starts, if this is how it was for Enil Anderson and the rest, but then scratched his name out, my nail file moving sometimes in a blur, sometimes not at all.

  Miss America was a ghost by then. Number forty-one. I didn't even look for her.

  The next morning Mary Boy was wearing his pan-indian apron, which meant he was cooking. The hard scent of buffalo drifted over the lanes and down the alleys. Earlier, LP Deal had been singing—I had heard him through the mail slot with Courtney Peltdowne, dawn washing up red behind us—but now he was bent over the markers, rolling the arrowheads up carefully, lining them up for the Councilmen.

  Tonight there was going to be a play.

  It was the stage production of Susannah of the Mounties; the players were professional nomads. The posters called the show a Dramatic Reversion, and in the background of the words was a photograph the first maintenance man at Fool's Hip had taken years ago, looking north. You could still see the tipi rings in the yellow grass. I looked to the ceiling for the first time, my throat pale and vulnerable.

  ‘You speak Lakota?’ a tourist asked Nickel Eye across the pit.

  He looked to her, parted his lips in a dry smile.

  ‘Speak it?’ he said. ‘Hell, Miss, I don't even listen to it.’

  When the tourist sat down with me in the line for Denim Horse she wouldn't say anything.

  ‘Are you dead?’ I asked her, and she turned her head slowly to me.

  Yes.

  Nickel Eye had told her his dad had been so Indian he could hear the deers' antlers mineralizing. It was something about how sound traveled after the first snow. It was why he hunted blindfolded, to be fair.

  ‘Why didn't he wear clothes, though?’ she asked, finishing his joke like it was gospel—serious—and I stepped cleanly out of line, followed Courtney Peltdowne up and down the length of Fool's Hip. It was a sensuous circuit; LP Deal's coveralls were a tent, blown over. Finally he approached with tickets in hand, fawning, talking first into his wrist then remembering, looking up to her (she was taller than him). The tickets were for the play that night. They had been everywhere when Fool's Hip opened—tucked into the screens of the video games, layered into the toilet paper, rolled into the thumbholes of balls. The players had been here last night, drumming up an audience.

  ‘No,’ she said to him, looking to Denim Horse the whole time, ‘sorry.’

  LP Deal tilted his head back to drain the rejection down his throat, and when Courtney Peltdowne was past I touched the tickets still clutched in his hand, became a rustling on his tape of that day, and said I would go with him. I would be honored.

  ‘There's a new piece, tonight,’ he said, showing me the tickets in his palm. It was Make Him Dance. Owen82 had written it, mailed it into the contest months and months and months ago. The ticket billed it as one of the lost episodes, originally left on the cutting room floor. We were all supposed to play along, had been playing along already for years, the real Susannah being replaced show by show, performance by performance. Other lost episodes were The Latterday Coup Machine, There Is No Water, Pale Young Four Toes, The Unphallic Tale of the Woodpecker, Exit the Warrior. They were standard fare in elementary, even—the young Junior from The Unphallic Woodpecker, killing birds for his grandmother because they're drilling holes into her attic, then finally realizing it was his grandmother who moved in on the woodpeckers; that he was the American here. In elementary school his suicide is off-stage, though, in the footnotes. You don't see it as it is until you're old enough and it's too late.

  But Make Him Dance. That was going to be Denim Horse after that last game. It had to be. Peeling his jersey, stepping into the feathered boots.

  What LP Deal wanted from it was answers. To walk up on Owen82 dead in the ditch and know who did it. I think even then Mary Boy thought it might have been him, LP Deal. Standing over Owen82 with the smoking gun. Maybe he hired him that day just to keep him there. Or maybe he did it himself.

  But that's his investigation.

  Mine is Nickel Eye.

  I keep having to say it, though.

  The night before Special Agent Chassis Jones sat in the front row of Susannah of the Mounties with a custodian half her age, she had that dream again about Nickel Eye—standing kneedeep in the field of Indian hair, him holding her hand. I had been awake, though, out at the crumbling edge of the parking lot of Broken Arrow (again), so maybe it doesn't count. Naitche had led me out there. Well. His dim form had walked past my window, and I had followed.

  He was talking to somebody out there. I could smell them.

  Miss America?

  Back Iron?

  Gauche?

  And we didn't need tickets for Susannah after all. Mary Boy paid for the show with food, and they performed it down at the end of the lanes, innertubes wrapped around their feet so they wouldn't slip on the waxed lanes. We all helped unfold the chairs that afternoon, line them up, and when the bus came from America that afternoon, we turned the lights off and pretended to be closed. Because this was an Indian thing; flashbulbs would frighten the players up into the ball returns of Fool's Hip, leave us all sitting there, unsure whether it was part of the show or not. And I fully expected Back Iron to lower himself hand over hand into the game Make Him Dance was going to be. He would be wearing the same wig as in the postcard; he would be playing Denim Horse.

  I was wrong.

  The players entered through the open bathroom window two hours before the show, each dipping his tongue in the butter bowl of water we left there. One of them I remembered from high school; his name had been OD. The short muscles of his eyes still twitched with it, but he had an appetite now, they all did. And Miss America was with them, the newest, most temporary member.

  ‘Thar she blows,’ Nickel Eye said, winking at me.

  ‘Who?’ I said, lowering my sunglasses; pretending.

  Nickel Eye laughed.

  Miss America was wearing a string bikini, stars and stripes. Her thick braids sloped down over her thick breasts. Her makeup was all worn off, too. I didn't ask.

  ‘Guess she found her niche,’ Nickel Eye was saying behind me, talking slow.

  ‘…along with everybody else,’ Eddie Dial said back, coughing into his hand, his smile crackling the scabs of his face.

  Miss America. Not number forty-one. Not the same, at least. She touched my hair as she passed, her hand slow, rising from a dream.

  Beside me Nickel Eye rotated his shoulders around his beer, lowered his head into his shoulders, and adjusted his olive green jacket so that he disappeared, even though he was the only olive green thing in the place.

  Where he had been standing was Cat Stand. I nodded yes to her, though I didn't know the question. Last night I hadn't had my wig on at the laundromat. I was trying to t
ell her that I was the same person anyway, maybe. She had her arm draped over Naitche. He was staring at Miss America, at OD, at Eberhard and the one calling himself Longfellow, and probably seeing in the way they stood the shape of the whole play, even though it was improvised everytime.

  I was scared of him and I wanted to hold him in my lap both, stroke his glossy hair under the hot lights. In the Bacteen story on KORL coming back from America, I had kept wanting to tell Bacteen that he was never leaving the truck, that Coyote was just changing the backdrop outside the window, that the rear wheels of the truck were on rollers, and the rollers were connected to gears, and the gears were rolling all that history past. But then he hunched his head into his shoulders and stepped into it.

  In the pit, all the machines were going

  CAT

  CAT

  CAT

  CAT

  CAT

  LPD

  LPD

  LPD

  LPD

  LPD

  LPD

  LPD

  LPD

  lpd

  b.p

  We ate buffalo until our chins were shiny, and sometime before the show, Longfellow put on white feathers like Smudge, stood like a cigar-store Indian by the door until everyone was uncomfortable. Miss America led him away, to the folding chairs he would rise from. Instead of a prologue, LP Deal swept out in the spotlight, nodded to us like what?, then lowered his ear to the hardwood, for the Councilmen, for the AllSkin Tournament.

  He stood nodding, nodding, and we exploded into applause, I don't know why. Even Mary Boy. Even Courtney Peltdowne.

  LP Deal sat back down by me. His coveralls were still heated from the attention.

  The first act was more like a newsreel: some Mister X stealing into the reliquary at Pine Ridge, driving the truck out. No words, no lines, just action. From the rafters someone applauded and it was too dark but it was Back Iron. He was becoming part of it now—his image captured in the hologram, his silhouette on stage. There wasn't enough left of him to sit with us anymore. He was legend.

  I squeezed LP Deal's hand.

  The second episode was a complete replay of the Indian Wars. Miss America carried the tiles across stage: scene 1, scene 1 again, another scene 1, scene one, one scene. The bodies stacked up so high she had to get a running start.

  It all ended here, at Fool's Hip.

  LP Deal squeezed my hand back.

  When the show was over, in his empty seat there would be a folded packet of paper for me. A self-portrait, ‘Blue Moons.’ The things he couldn't say. There would be two grainy photographs rolled in with it too. That was all later, though, fanned out on a bedspread at Broken Arrow. First, the show—the image of LP Deal holding his wrist down the alley, waiting for Owen82. To record him.

  I held my hand out with him, so the players wouldn't know they were being bootlegged, and three chairs down Mary Boy held his arm out too, Jesus sweating blood on his arm, and then everyone in the front row was reaching downlane, for the show, and when I looked over at LP Deal I saw for the first time that half of his ear was gone, scraped off.

  To mark the new episode, Fool's Hip faded to black for a few close moments, then came back. Nothing would ever be the same again.

  MAKE HIM DANCE

  A prairie night, a campfire, a domino mask. Tonto is leaned back on his bedroll, staring over his coffee at the Lone Ranger.

  A horse stamps, blows.

  Tonto stares, drinks.

  ‘So this is how it is,’ he says.

  The Lone Ranger doesn't reply, doesn't even move.

  Tonto's face is streaked black across the cheeks.

  Nobody says kimosabe.

  Their fire is buffalo chips, their camp cloying. An unexplained urgency.

  Suddenly Tonto turns his head to the darkness. It's empty, quiet, and then a girl steps out.

  ‘I didn't hear you,’ he says.

  She shrugs. Her shoes are in her hands.

  ‘Can I?’ she says, looking down at a saddle propped up as a backrest.

  ‘Free country,’ Tonto says. But he's smiling.

  The girl sits down.

  ‘You don't talk the same,’ she says.

  ‘Sit um down’ Tonto tries, handing her his cup.

  She looks off. The horse stamps again, blows.

  ‘Silver?’ she asks.

  ‘More like white.’

  And now the Lone Ranger's gloved hand twitches. Like a wave. The girl waves back, her fingertips drumming the ground too.

  ‘You even wear that at night?’ she asks him—the mask—and reaches across the fire to touch it. Or his cheek. But Tonto shakes his head no.

  ‘A11 these strong, silent types,’ she says.

  Tonto has his cup again.

  ‘I used to listen to you, you know,’ she says. ‘On the radio.’

  Tonto narrows his eyes at her.

  ‘The radio,’ she says, with her whole mouth, then leans over, touching her ear to the ground for listen, looking at him with a question mark.

  He can see down her bodice, now.

  ‘Rad-ee-o,’ he says.

  ‘But it was real, too,’ she says. ‘Like I always thought there was this third horse running behind you—both of you—with like a boom, a mic, tied to its saddle horn…’

  Tonto looks out to the horses, then jerks back when the Lone Ranger's leg spasms. The rowel of the spur digs into the packed dirt.

  ‘He alright?’ the girl asks.

  ‘Hard day,’ Tonto says.

  ‘Guess so,’ she says, then touches her own face for him, Tonto, like he's got something there.

  ‘Thanks,’ Tonto says, and moves his cup to the other hand, touches his fingertip to his cheek like she is.

  It just makes it worse, though.

  Now his war paint isn't symmetrical.

  He looks at his hand, at her. With a question mark.

  Before she can answer, though, the Lone Ranger speaks: ‘When the chips are down, Tonto, well, sir, now that's when the buffalo's empty.’

  His voice is mechanical.

  ‘Got ya,’ Tonto says, fingershooting him across the fire.

  The girl is looking at both of them now.

  She touches the Lone Ranger's boot with her foot. It rotates without the leg. Tonto closes his eyes, opens them.

  ‘Hard day?’ she says.

  ‘Miners,’ Tonto says. ‘A stagecoach.’

  She's still staring at him.

  He smiles, ‘I can hear them coming from miles away, you know.’

  She nods.

  Tonto rubs his eye, smearing the paint. Staring at nothing, the emptied coffee cup hooked on his finger, his hand on his knee, his leg propped.

  ‘You shouldn't drink so much,’ she says.

  ‘I don't like to sleep out here,’ Tonto says.

  ‘But you're…Indian.’

  Tonto smiles, nods.

  The sky yawns above him.

  ‘When the chips are—’ the Lone Ranger starts to say again, but Tonto stomps his foot on the ground.

  ‘Hi-ho Silver!’ the Lone Ranger says instead, raising one gloved hand above his head.

  ‘That really him?’ the girl asks.

  Tonto nods, watches her.

  ‘Want some more?’ he asks finally, swirling the grounds in the bottom of his cup.

  The girl nods, then flinches when he braces himself to stand.

  ‘it's okay,’ he tells her, but keeps both hands up as he backs into the darkness. A horse whinnies. Supplies touch each other with a tin sound, muffled by leather. This is 1890. Tonto walks back into camp with a bag labeled COFFEE. He tosses it down onto the Lone Ranger's lap. The Lone Ranger stares at him. Tonto stares back.

  ‘it's okay, really,’ the girl says, ‘I can come—’ but Tonto shushes her.

  ‘Coffee,’ he says. To the Lone Ranger.

  But the Lone Ranger just sits there.

  Tonto shakes his head.

  ‘This always happens,’ he says.r />
  The girl doesn't ask what.

  A horse stamps just past the firelight and a boom lowers over them. They both see it.

  ‘Shh,’ Tonto almost says, holding a black finger over his lips.

  ‘So…,’ the girl says, ‘a stagecoach…’ and Tonto nods, rolls his hand in the Indian signal for more, cover him, and as she recounts the episode he creeps over behind the Lone Ranger, opens a panel in the back of the denim shirt.

  The girl catches her breath.

  Tonto stares at her, red and green lights blinking off his face.

  She closes her eyes, continues: ‘…and he was on the rocks like that. Dry gulch! Sam yelled—I think that was his name—but it was too late…’

  Tonto smiles around the knife in his teeth.

  His hands are deep in the Lone Ranger's back.

  The black paint is grease.

  The girl is crying down the back of her throat and talking around it.

  ‘Okay,’ Tonto says to her, holding his palm out.

  She trails off, leaving someone midair.

  Tonto closes the panel, coughs to cover the click.

  ‘Now,’ he says, walking back to the fire, looking down at the Lone Ranger, ‘coffee’.

  The Lone Ranger's face snaps up. The domino mask. All the fringe.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asks, his voice deep and heroic.

  ‘More like it,’ Tonto says.

  He squats down on his haunches.

  ‘I always thought you sat like that,’ the girl says.

  She sits down like him, like a little girl, and before them the Lone Ranger stands, dragging his rotated boot, and goes through the motions of coffee.

  ‘Delicious,’ the girl says when it's done, holding her cup with both hands.

  Tonto nods, blowing steam off his own, never looking away.

  The Lone Ranger tips his crisp white hat to him, says ma'am to the girl.