by Chuck Redman
“I’ll tell you what, Reeves,” and Cosetti flourishes his half-mowed sparerib in the air like Exhibit A before a jury, “and Kelly. I will make a point of being in Cottonwood at least once a month, and I would love to have dinner with you and the Chamber at this very table and enjoy this beautiful ambiance with you good people.”
“You’d have to be a platinum member for that, Steve,” and Reeves Palmer winks over at his pretty executive director. “What do you think, Kelly? Is there room in the chamber for Steve here?”
“Oh, I think I could probably pull some strings and get him in.” I’m thinkin there must be dimples on both sides of Kelly’s family.
“So where do I sign?” says Cosetti’s grin.
“What sign? You’re in! Right, Kelly?”
“Done deal, Reeves.”
Steve keeps from chuckling too hard and busting one of them stitches in his side but he is pretty tickled by all this, and by the time his intern gets back from the ladies’ room and starts in on her scalloped potatoes which has had plenty of time to congeal, he’s chatting with Mrs. Palmer about what keeps her busy while her husband takes care of his real estate business and chamber activities. Well, besides grandkids of course, turns out she wears two hats, with a florist shop and also a seat on the city council. “So,” says Ann Palmer, “between the two, you know—”
“Two hats, huh?” says Steve. I don’t know how the conversation gets around to politics eventually, but Steve’s a well-spoken guy and he seems to know a lot about lots of different subjects. Chooses his words so well. Makes sure that all this Chamber of Commerce and corporate expansion talk don’t exclude Mrs. Palmer so that she would feel left out in the least. Which is thoughtful. There’s only a minute or so where Ann Palmer starts to fidget and flush and take big drinks of iced tea. Just around the time when Cosetti goes into a little too much detail about the coincidence of his other hat. Maybe she shoulda done like the interns done: keep a pink sparkly cell phone on the edge of her chair by her thigh and thumb for stray messages with a shy downward gaze.
Well Cosetti don’t mind fiddling with his cell phone right out in the open. He can converse perfectly smooth, drink his coffee, and check off name number three all at the same dang time.
She heard tell plenty of times about the Pawnee earth lodges but, a course, seeing how Pawnee and Sioux is mortal foes she ain’t never seen one. Til now. And not just one. Pert’ner three dozen in a settlement as lasting and citified as anything on the plains. Each lodge a marvel of wood, grass and, a course, yours truly, fashioned into a spherical redoubt roomy enough for thirty, forty souls to call home.
Dusk and dinnertime and Lark Laying Eggs with her fleetfoot escorts all arrive and pert’ner in unison, to boot. The village is tickled to see all them scouts come back on two feet and with their hairline properly welded. Kids, women, some of the braves come up to ogle. They look more curious than cordial but, forgettin the shaved heads of most of the fellas, not no different, really, than people back in Lark’s village. Anyways, once she’s over the shock of them earth lodges looming all about and more faces than she’s seen in one spot not countin the all-Sioux Sun Dances she been to once’t or twice, Lark don’t waste no time making her pitch to the chiefly-looking gent who is foremost in the delegation.
But Eagle Chief, with hair like the ashes of a council fire in braids upon his chest, has a sad face made even sadder by Lark’s mangled Pawnee. So that hombre what calls hisself Left Hand slides in real close blowing pipe smoke and offering the friendly advice to relax, little Evening Star. “Little Sister, that is.” Lefty casts a pasted smile around the throng of his people and sees this odd fella who is hobbling along preoccupied with chewing a stalk of rhubarb and lookin at his moccasins like he just tried em on and he’s thinking of taking em on approval. Left Hand grabs the hefty muncher and stands him upright before the Sioux maiden. “You talk to Red Moon about your troubles,” says he with one or two nervous eye twitches. “He’ll find your little brother.”
“No is brother. Sister Pawnee she. Family, she family must be find.” But Left Hand has went away and took Eagle Chief by the arm. Red Moon can’t speak right at the present. He stares at Lark while he chews, chews some more, and holds a bulky hand over that swollened cheekbone of his. Finally the rhubard goes down in one hard gulp which makes Lark’s eyes get big. She looks at the slouchy dude with his purple cheek and long loose hair. “You Pawnee is?”
He tilts his head. “Which?”
“Find to help?”
“Sorry?”
“Man say you is help.”
“In what sense?”
“Sense no understand.”
“Understand what? I don’t understand.”
“You no is Pawnee?”
“You don’t speak the human language?” He throws her some sign language to try to make heads or tails but his thick hands and fingers stutter something awful.
“Sister she Pawnee!” A big breath was involved in getting that there deposition out in halfway passable grammar.
Red Moon starts pulling at one ear and saying ow and wanting to know if the gal’d ever been stung by a baldface hornet in her life and if so was it in the ear. Yeah he didn’t think so, since Doc told him it’s very rare. And very painful and that’s why he slammed into the nearest tree. “That one.” He lets go of his cheek and points. “Did you say your sister is a human being?” he says with a kinda abstracted crunch of rhubard.
“Sister she Pawnee, yes, sister baby stole. Oglala is stole. My people is. Please.” She seems as surprised as anybody by the wordiness of that outpouring.
Human being, Pawnee, same thing, that seems to be the opinion of this Red guy thinkin aloud. “Okay. I’m starting to get the drift. You’re an Oglala. You can’t help that, it wasn’t your fault.” Lark lays her hand upon her breast and nods hopefully when she hears Oglala. Then Red submits the following: her sister was a Pawnee kid who got stole and become her little sister.
“Is yes!”
“You want to find the family that your sister was snatched from.”
“Is yes! Very!”
“I can’t help you. I don’t know why Left Hand made such a ridiculous promise.” And away he limps, leaving Lark speechless in two languages, until a old woman comes up and pulls her astonished elbow in the direction of one of them earth lodges, only pint-sized. To be quite honest, the old woman could stand a few more teeth and hairs, but her tiny lodge is festooned with every feather, shell and garland known to the plains. She’s smiling cavernously up at the black smoke uncoiling from the hole in her roof where a light breeze scuttles through. The little lady gestures and jabbers away comfortably to the Sioux maiden in tow. I guess when I weren’t lookin maybe some of that wily smoke musta blew itself around and got into Lark’s big backward-gazing eyes.
Quite a dandy sunset up the river. Warm western breeze rippling through the glossy treetops. Head rested against Old Grateful’s lovely trunk and hand patting her gnarled roots while music pulses through one of them little pod thingajigs and Black Elk Speaks gets more dog-eared by the page. If I could take a picture I’d—
“Dad!” She sits bolt upright, her bare knees bent, and her red hair sticking up in the back hosting a lost ant or two of the same color. Brent Portillo don’t seem nearly as surprised as his daughter.
“Hi, sweetheart.” Over his reading glasses he glances down at his young scholar while he draws some sketches and numbers on a clipboard. “How’d it go today?”
Tanya throws her headphones on her lap. “Dad, why are you here?”
Dad ain’t a bad sketcher and there’s a optimism and calmness about him as he scans the woodsy riverbank. “Planning to bid on a contract, sweetheart. Drainage, grease disposal, general disposal systems.”
“Don’t you know what that runoff will do to this river?”
“Don’t you know what this contract would mean to my business? To your future?”
“It’s not worth it, Dad. You don’t know
how toxic this whole plan will turn out to be.”
“Then do you want a shoddy job done on it, or somebody who knows what they’re doing?” Dad’s tone has took on a kinda beveled edge all of a sudden.
For answers, Tanya looks straight upward. O.G. looks downward. Brent Portillo looks riverward, and beyond.
The hump’s the best part. Well I wouldn’t know, but that’s what they say. They being the folks on the plains when they serve roast buffalo for dinner. Like-minded dogs from all across the village has gathered outside the tiny lodge having whiffed those savory smoke fumes spiraling through the roof, which is the best free advertising in the world. Lark’s the honored guest at the flickering lodge fire, and she don’t quite know what to make of that. Her stomach, though, had run on empty and it knowed exactly what to make of such a spread.
“You have such lovely thick hair, my daughter,” says Many Clouds, carefully sponging a small chunk of cornbread around the inside of her bowl.
“Thank by you, auntie.” Lark’s lookin at the old lady’s scant gray locks. “You—. Stew of you. Best taste ever I see. What little green thing there in stew?” She points at the large clay pot over the fire.
“Beans. That one is beans. That one with the little white seeds is squash, my dear. The little yellow pieces are pumpkin. These are from last autumn, dried and stored. All grown right here in our own garden, my daughter.” Tomorrow she’ll take her for a spin, says Many Clouds quite tickled at the idea.
Across the fire sits Wolf Chief, crosslegged, full and content, smiling over with teeth as straight and white as the hair avalanching from his wintered head. All at once the old gent’s mouth and eyes form circles, and he puts up a deep-rutted index finger. Managing, without a word, to get his legs unkinked and upright, he toddles off to a dark corner of the lodge.
“Where are you going, Old Man?” Many Clouds, you can tell, ain’t expecting no answer, and she has plenty of time to explain to Lark that her husband can’t hear worth a darn but he’s a good old boy and they been blessed for more winters together than the fingers of five men.
“Now here’s something, my child,” says Wolf Chief dropping beside her short of breath, “you’ve never seen in your part of the world. Phew.” He opens a sturdy pouch and gives Lark a generous look and smell of its contents, which is dried leaves and roots and the like in a pulverized state.
“What she?”
“She, I mean it, is the Golden Flower of our land.” The old guy seems to hear every word Lark says, which is curious. “A little of this rubbed on your tummy and your worst stomach cramp is gone like a crazed antelope. Comes in handy,” he says with a wry old glance at his wife, who’s heard that joke before. After givin him one of them looks that wives give husbands who think they’re so smart, she stands to her full four and a half foot of loft, straightens her shoulders back rather imperial and kinda fetching, somehow, in the dwindling firelight. Then she patters over to the small woodpile in the long earthen entryway, and Wolf Chief engages their young guest in a pretty passable conversation regarding the exact layout of each and every earth lodge and its function as a sacred observatory of celestial bodies that ordain much of Pawnee life. Many Clouds has just plenished the fire back to respectable height with bandy sticks and a few big buffalo chips throwed in when comes a sudden loudish thunk at the doorpost. When that fella Red Moon clumps in two seconds later rubbin his forehead, Lark’s the only one that seems to think the phenomenon deserves even the least bit of interest.
Somethin about the way Red Moon says hello auntie and uncle and makes hisself at home in their lodge gets you thinkin that maybe these old folks really are his auntie and uncle. Stranger things have happened.
Ain’t long before Many Clouds has served everybody with tea and Red has contrived a way to avoid the question marks and searchlights in Lark’s eyes. But her tea’s gettin cold and his don’t seem to wanta go down without a hard swallow, and finally the young feller turns his head to Lark but leaves his eyes on the fire. “Granny might know something. I doubt it though.”
“What is?”
Aunt Many Clouds knows a doomed conversation when she sees one, and she don’t hesitate but to jump in and get Lark to semi-understand by means of simple words and quite a lot of pointing that her husband’s dead brother’s widow is Red’s Granny, and Granny might or might not know something. About what it is that their guest wants to know about. Their guest don’t seem to have a real clear grasp of what’s being proposed. But she sure has perked up at whatever glimmer of hope seems to be reflected in the sparks that shoot and fade from this here friendly lodgefire.
First thing Granny asks, when they find her sweeping her and Red’s little corner of the big lodge they share with the Blue Fox, Dance in Snow, and Hunting Dog families, is why her grandson’s limping. Again.
“Nobody’s limping,” says Red as he turns and walks away, mouth twisted but legs steadied, with the excuse that he has watchdogs to feed at the farm. Granny brushes off her long beaded buckskin dress and pulls her platinum braids back. Then she bewails the manifest fact that her grandson’s turning klutzier and klutzier with each new day. She confides to her visitor her personal theory of it: it’s because of what happened that time and how the young feller’s never been able to face it or talk about it. “He’s haunted,” says Granny Bright Eyes as she sits the Sioux maiden down on some soft skins before she starts to explain a lot of things. Patient and simple so’s Lark can follow. “I’m so worried about that boy,” she says. “The way he punishes himself.”
Lark’s a soft-breathing wood figurine with cheekbones raised just enough to squeeze a drop of pity from her eyes. Them eyes see the old gal’s two palms come up with the fingers stretched her way, quavering, in an effort to straighten what nature has bent. It was that many winters ago. For a moment Granny puts the hands tight over her mouth. Then she goes on. The Oglala attacked at dawn. Their village was handsome, up on the South Loup. What can you do, you’re always prepared but you got lives to live. The villagers fought their heart out, and the Pawnee heart is the bravest. But the Oglala is fierce and they was many. Pert’ner half the village got wiped out. Some young women and children was never found, and Lark’s sister could of been among them that was took captive. No way to tell, really.
Granny puts her hand on her chest for a minute and blows air like as if she’s cooling a spoonful of corn mush for a little hungry tot. Lark sits sunken and stares at the floor though ain’t much to see this far from the lodgefire. Then Granny tells about Red Moon. When the Oglala struck, the lad was out hunting, she says. By the time he got back, well. Red’s young wife and their unborn child was caught in the crossfire, and when they found her she bristled Oglala and Pawnee arrows alike, that’s the sad truth. Them that was left alive just scattered. She and Red come here to Eagle Chief’s village, and Red give up on hunting and scouting and warpaths and them pursuits which he wasn’t exactly cut out for in the first place, and took up growing things. Which it turns out he’s a dang champ at and their people admire and accept the strange fellow for the man he is.
“Still he much of sad, he look,” says Lark.
“He blames himself, my child.”
“Blame is?”
“He was out hunting but he got lost. That’s the reason he came late.”
“Lost?”
“The boy has no sense of direction.” With sad diamonds for eyes, Granny wags her tongue and clucks her bowed head. Hold it. Switch em.
When Red comes through the lodge entry tryin his durndest in the firelit gloom not to favor one leg over the other, he’s startled by a low rumble that seems to come from a glowing pipe. “What’s the point, man?” rumbles Crouching Panther Who Speaks With Deep Voice, youngest son of Blue Fox. In the darkness it ain’t too easy to get a precise reading on exactly where and which way this cool scout lurks. You can just make out the direction of his disapproving eyes.
“Who says there has to be a point?” says Red, whose eyes go in the same d
irection. Where he can surely see that Lark has took in the whole saga by now. And it ain’t hard to guess the young gal is twiceover grieved: by what them folks has went through at the hands of her people, and by the reality that her poor sis probly don’t have no close family left anywheres among the Pawnee. Does it help that Granny tells her in a choken voice that Running Water is welcome to come live with her and Red and be a beloved granddaughter to her? And hugs Lark tight and rocking like her own granny always done? Some. Some.
If there’s no vacancy, why the heck don’t they just turn the sign off altogether? Wouldn’t that make more sense in the long run? But Lyle likes his neon, I guess I already dwelt upon that earlier.
Well, the crickets don’t give a hoot about vacancies or no vacancies, they’re havin themselves their usual summer symphony. They only hush up when they feel like it, or when them kids at the motel pool scream above their splashes. So four soft taps on the door don’t hardly make a ripple.
Cosetti, though, has pretty sharp ears. And his tongue, well—he’s just gotta open that door and make some kind of wise crack about gettin paroled early for good behavior. Only it ain’t Laertes standin there in the doorway. And Cosetti don’t know what to do with his battery toothbrush, he just turns it off and sticks it in the faded purple pocket of his gym shorts that say Northwestern. Them bandages bulging up beneath his undershirt, though: nothin much the feller can do to put them out of sight. In fact she’s staring right at them like they’re a smoking gun, so he steps back grinning and lets the news gal in.
He shuts the door, and you’d expect the regular Janet to pepper the cagey dude with about nineteen burning questions before he has a chance to offer her a chair. But this ain’t the regular Janet, and she ain’t been seen or heard from all day. What she says, and she says it shaking, is “I know what happened last night and I know why the cover-up. I want to hear from you how you justify in your own mind that kind of deception.”