Rabbit Boss

by Thomas Sanchez

  “Who’s next, you men?” Elliot hopped down again.

  “I got a dog’s half wolf,” a man walked out to the center. “Timber wolf is what he is,” the man grinned and pushed the sweatstained hat further back on his head.

  Elliot looked at the dog standing calmly at its master’s side, the razor slice of nose, the powerful legs pushing up from the ground. “No,” he shook his head. “That dog’ll kill em off to fast. This here badger’s got some more fight left in him fore we cut em off so quick.”

  “That’s right,” a man shouted from the fence. “Let some other hounds have a go first.”

  “Yah,” cried another, “Hold your wolf on back. We got lots of time. Don’t want to settle that beast’s hash too easy.”

  “We’ll go er,” a fat man fingering a moustache lumbered out next to the man with the wolf dog, a yellow mongrel with half a tail trotting behind.

  “Your show pardner,” Elliot waved him on.

  The men spoke lowly making individual bets as the yellow dog cautiously approached the badger who was plopped down in the thick dust, coiled in a steel gray ball. The yellow dog stopped, sniffed at the air and scratched the dry earth. The fat man waddled up, kicking his boot into the dog’s rear, “Get on up there you lazy coyote.” The dog jumped to one side of the badger, then hopped to the other side. The badger did not move, its belly flat to the ground like a snake, its wary eye fixed on the dog’s every action. The dog growled with his nose pointed at the badger and circled, poking tentatively at the coiled tail. “Come on you lousy cur!” A shout came from the square of spectators, “Fight em! Fight em you yellow dog coward!” The dog moved to the badger’s front, sniffing closer, almost touching the furry head with the slash of white above the eyes, the badge. He stamped his paw in front of the animal; the badger’s head darted up, the flash of teeth exposed for a moment in the sun. The mouth clamped beneath the chin, sinking into the throat with one hard twist. The yellow dog gave a short whine, staggered to its knees and fell on its side, his throat gashed open.

  “That’s it! That’s it!” A man screamed. “Bring on out that there gent with the wild wolf dog! Give us a show for the money!”

  The man with the wolf dog released it. Straight across the clearing it advanced to the badger. The prey sprung up, its back hunched high, lips snarled over the gums, two rows of needleteeth ready. The dog came on fast, the massive jaws wide, saliva dripping from the corners of the mouth, the tail up rigid, a sharp spoke of rudder; smooth white scars from previous battles crossed the ribstretched hide. He headed into the badger, feinted with his head as if to strike, then moving quickly, seeking the opening where the needleteeth would not be. One paw whipped, catching the badger on the side of the head, flipping him. The attacker dashed in for the kill, but the badger was ready, waiting for the strike and hit with his own paw, a quick fierce bite sinking into one side of the dog’s mouth, ripping into the lip. Both animals locked together. The battlers rolled over, thrashing in the dust. The men jumped from the fence, closing together on the fight, eyes burning as they stared into the dirty pulsating cloud and heard the gnash of teeth against bone, the tear of flesh.

  “Waahoo! There he goes!”

  A form leaped from the dust.

  “It ain’t the badger. It’s the wolf dog!”

  The dust thinned. The men huddled silent, hoping, until the dust cleared. The badger was reared back, swiping the air around him at the men, his panting mouth full of hair, tongue bleeding, his small face caked with dust and blood, a gash down his side.

  “That damn beast ain’t never goin to die!”

  “Bring in all them dogs! Let em go it again, all of em!”

  “No! Make it fair! Stand back and give him breathing space first!”

  “I’m for bashin his brains out with a club!”

  “Give it a drink! It’s thirsty!”

  “Kill him is what I say. Kill him now!”

  “Gents!” the Bummer held up his gloved hand as he poked his cane playfully at the badger, the animal slashing futilely at the gold tip. “Rules is rules. We abide by the law. Let all the dogs have at him at once in even match. Then, if they don’t whip him,” he raised his gloved hand in front of thin lips, “then gents, then you can kill him.”

  The men backed up, spreading out their arena. Those with dogs ran and got them, holding them tight on their leashes in a circle about the badger.

  “Release them!” the Bummer called out.

  The dogs broke from their ropes as they smashed in against the animal, the men laughing, shouting into the rising dust, clapping their hands together until the last dog trotted off from the humped rag of a body.

  4

  I CAN smell the Antelope in the Sky.

  Treading on soft tongues of snow plant. Moving many times through the trees. Always the trees. It is the way of my people. Close to their animal skin, the hide tight on their bodies; I can smell. Can smell wet wood. Underneath a cut pile, after snows are melted, rains are gone, the bottom pieces with faces pressed in damp Earth. Faces covered with mildew. That is their smell. The smell of gray fibres growing softly. Thickly into a mask. Masks moving in the Sky. Brown bodies turning. Watching peacefully as I stalk. I am sly. I am swift. I am the one to apprehend them. Waiting to allow me passage. Slipping my knife into their Spirits. Cutting the meat from their sides. I am the boss of them that allow me to feast, to grow. I am strong boss of my people. Not a leader. A boss of Antelope hunts. I am the Antelope Boss. The one to point the way. To direct a finger at the Sky. Announce—there, that is where I smelled them, tasted their scent, heard their hooves beat beneath my eyes, that is the place they moved through my dreams the night before this one, now it is time, we must go, go before fifteen days have passed, you must follow me who will follow them, lead you to where they await us, where they are still, where the wind caresses the shortness of their fur, holds the thin legs straight to Earth, that is where I shall lead, North, over five mountains, to the spot where hunger ends. Hunger does not end. I know it is not true. It is true that the Antelope wait us there. Only a few. Numbers as small as our people. People who would laugh to me if I were to tell them of the dreams. Tell them where to hunt. The people who would say—we can no longer hunt, they forbid it, forbid us to stalk our own meat, what good are your dreams now, as good as dust, we no longer need the Antelope Boss, you dream in the wrong time. They would laugh saying this to me. For I can see into them. Hear the plant of sadness growing within. Roots filling all space of the body. I know they still have dreams come to them in the black water of night. So I do not go and speak of the Antelope. I must leave the Antelope to rot in the Sky. Grow rancid stiff and soft with worms. This is what does not allow for me to quit my dreams. This scent of death breathing steady as a spear through my thoughts. These masks that stalk me into days. All of this pierces the time of trees I move through. Pulses in the air that touches me. Can be seen escaping from my eyes. From the eyes of us. It is the scent of walking on a dead land. A land sunk to the heart. Guarded over only by memory. Defended in battle of dreams. So I do not go now and speak of Antelope. The meat is rotten. Fouled from falling years of disuse. It is the stench in the circle of my people. A reminder. I must forget. Lie my dreams. Seek into another dream. Slip unnoticed through the years falling quickly upon my body. Avoid detection on the land crushed flat from waste. I must never raise my head. To crawl is to survive. In the end it is I who shall stand straight. Covered in a new blanket woven from fresh dreams. Dreams that shape hard and sharp in the virgin Sky. Cutting away the dead skin of a wasted land. Along the lakes I shall walk in my new robes. Released. Sparkling my image on the quiet waters. Again the forests shall grow thick and free. The Birds return. The fences fall. And in their shadow the openness will find its home once more. These things shall pass in my time. For I have cut the face of their time with my father’s stone knife. I have dreamed. It is true. I have seen time rush like a strong river into the hole of a Mouse. Disappear. Disappear on wa
tery wings into the bowels of the Earth. Beating furiously to meet with the dead. The place where fires have grown cold. Where the graves shudder in the echo of dead songs and dances have failed. I have cut with my knife into that place where everything is gone. Vanished. I am young now. My hair grows long and gray like a baby’s. I have nothing to eat. I am preparing for my journey. I wait beneath the waiting Sky. Patient. I am dying of thirst. For I am close to the source of all water. I have been to the place where dances fail. I live my days in that land. I know that land. Know it like the creases scarred in my hand. Creases my eyes have journeyed over, back and through many times. Like the long slender valleys of the high mountains where in twilight the Birds blaze in the bursting glory of falling Sun. Sparkle in the dying day. The Sun I have traveled under on the hot lands. Thick and choking on sagebrush that rides the swell of blurred hills beaten down from the face of the Sun. Smothered in heat. I have kept up my journey into the snow that burns on my face. Relentless. The white that cannot be stopped. That stops all things. Freezes time. But from under grows a new birth which finds me still moving on the flat lands. Like a Bug in search of a Bird. In no outward hurry to reach the place where both shall meet. But boiling inside the dream of how the meeting shall be. I was not lost on the sage plain. I was a man growing young in my search. This gave me warmth. Made me move. I no longer needed my feet. They had turned to ice like the ground itself. So it was not they who moved me. I needed no feet to take me where I was going. In the night. In the distance. Large clumps of sagebrush covered with snow grew up from the desert floor. They looked like winter houses in which lived people. A fire around which they gathered. And maybe him. I continued. Making my way to each sagebrush clump. Stopping, and asking—Yao, are you in there? Maybe they were. Maybe it was not sagebrush heaped over high with a white cone of snow. Maybe people were sleeping. I waited. Asked once more. Then never again. Moved on in the spread of distance. Came to another piled high mound of snow and asked—Yao, are you in there? No voices. No sound. Again I gathered my search about me, pulling the Rabbit blanket close under my chin. All into the white night I asked. My voice blowing in the silence. The words scattering in the white drift falling lightly out of the Sky. Then the Sky herself was empty. The Moon jumped in the heavens. A brilliant young bull. Sucking all stars out of black. Prancing. It had become almost like the day. Now my eyes saw. Sparks splashing in the air. My search closed me in its fist. As I drew closer flames raced up. Around them sat three men. Hunched over. Bent into the fire. Their faces aflame with the light. They made no move as I approached. But they knew of my existence. It was if they had been watching me forever in the search. Had been staring into the fire twelve days and watching my every move. Charted my course. When I came behind them I stood and waited. I began to feel my feet again, now that I stopped moving. The flesh within the boots planted near the fiire on the solid splotch of ground bare of snow growing warm. Coming alive. One of the men stood. Moved around me. Came back with a fresh pile of cut sagebrush and threw it in the fire. The cold sticks hissing in the blaze as new sparks cracked and danced from their bark. “You are the Antelope Walker?” The words came from the man in front of me. They came from his body. Through the heavy back bent powerfully into the fire. Through the black coat that fit thickly on his back. “You are the Washo?” “Yao.” My answer went into the back. Was lost there. For no one knew of my coming. My being lost on the plain for twelve days and one more night. I was far from my people high in the mountains. I stopped the once at the village of his home. To seek him. But he himself was not there. It was told he himself was on the hotlands now grown cold. Far off. Had been gone since even the snows began. Without food. Some said he was never to return. Others spoke of his going to the place where trees of thorn grow higher than the man. “Yao, I am the Washo.” “Sit with us then, Washo, you the one the Whites call Hallelujah Bob.” I moved to the open space on the other side of the fire. To the place across from the man with the black coat. I sat. I could not see into the face. The head was hooked down by a black hat. A hat such as never before I’ve seen. The brim wide. Cut sharply round. A flat circle. Flat stillness of a desert lake. The crown mounted taller than two heads. A bold mountain cone of dead fire that pushes up from the desert floor and through the seasons is whipped and lashed and caressed by the fingers of the wind, until it is narrow and smooth, like the slender pinenut baskets the women weave. A tight hammered band of silver spun around the broad base of the crown, anchored to the flaring brim. The high crown seems to have toppled the head forward in a landslide and buried it beneath the brim. The image of the flames caught on the black felt, flickering violently. The hat and man himself a blaze. Even though his eyes are buried deep I know he watches me through the flames. Now he sees the hulking Rabbit blanket hung heavy on my shoulders, draped over any body in a tent of fur. Now he traces my face. Can feel the gaze move over my skin worn like the stone itself. Can feel the gaze penetrate the slashes of scar that have long since closed the deep wounds running down my cheeks. Can feel it blow through the hair that grows from my upper hp, thinly, but each piece sharp and brittle, the gaze blows through the hair a careful wind moving in trees. I sat as his gaze clouded around me and the Sky opened into gold, the prancing Moon quiet and dim in the new light, slipping back into hiding, ignoring the gold light as he passes away and disappears. Behind his gaze was the flat of the land. Flaring out farther than the distance of the eye. His figure blocked a hole on the horizon, the silhouette cut its dark space at the place where the rolling snow met the gold Sky. In front of him the flames were sleeping. Puffs of white smoke streaming from the shallow charred pit that had been scooped out in the night’s heat. “Stand up Washo.” I stood. “Take the Rabbit blanket from your body.” The fur slipped silently from my flesh, falling in a soft heap on the bare ground behind me. His hat tilted back, the face swelling up beneath. The skin hung heavy in the shadow beneath the brim. The gray eyes held wide apart and sunk in large holes tied with sharp wrinkles caught in laughter or frozen in the final squint of pain. The deep eyes moved over all skin of my body. Patiently seeking out each rip in the brown hide. Easing into the string of swellings whipped about my legs. “Turn Washo.” The gaze burned hot on my flesh. Stinging the scabs that cake over my shoulders and shower jaggedly down the slope of my back. With the thick of each moment I can feel the eyes lift a scab. Linger in the jagged tear. Then move on. “Cover your body and sit Washo.” With my legs crossed beneath me I stare into the place where the flames once were. The three men in front of me a hard wall against the mounting dawn. All is darkness on this side of the wall. I am with him. “When the Sun died.” He speaks to me in my darkness. The words falling quiet dust on the soft hide of my trembling. “He fell from the heart of the Sky herself. A lance through his golden body. He dropped away from Earth and gave up to the night. There was the stillness of sleep. Sleep before birth. I was taken up through sleep. The journey was long and without direction. I existed in the fear between two worlds. Belonging to none. My face the face of a cloud. When I once more touched the Earth it was not Earth. Waters were running beneath my feet. I was afraid. I would sink. Sink like a stone to the heart of death. But I could walk. And I walked not alone. All about me bodies were moving. Bodies of the dead. Bodies of Birds and Animals I had hunted. All were alive. All were covered with flesh. All greeted me. All gave of me the flesh of Ghost. I feasted. One day was all days. All days were one day. I cried with the happiness of the child. All the People and Animals were together. All were one. Living one in the other. The waters had washed clean the Earth forever. All Whites were drowned. All White things dead. Only Indians. Indians way up high. Indians in high places everywhere. Indians on water. Game growing thick in the air. Indians in their young flesh across the lands. My pockets were filled with wild mountain plums. My lips stained purple from a thousand kisses. The Ghost Pony was sent. Its hooves beating across water. Behind as it came the water disappeared. The land was given up to us a baby once more.
Mountains grew. The people sang. The mountains grew higher. The people sang up all the trees. The Ghost Pony turned paler the closer it came. Each hoof print left behind filled with a lake. The people sang the Fish up. The tears of all new things washed down their faces. The people danced their birth. Danced the Pony into their midst. The pale flanks glistening with the strain of giving all new things. The broad forehead slashed with the red pattern of sacred paint. The people all touched this holy sign where the Pony had nudged the shoulder of the Big Man himself. They touched their fingertips to the firm flesh of their own bodies. Tracing the blazing crimson across their faces. Anointing their chest and legs. Anointing with the blood of all things. Of the Spirit. Their dance erupted anew. They danced their joy. Joy of being touched by the Spirit. And I was lifted high. Onto the heaving back of the Ghost Pony. We plunged from the newborn Earth into darkness. The Ghost Pony ate into the belly of night. For a thousand falls the eternal dark tried to wrestle the life from the Ghost Pony. The pounding of the hoofbeats shouted the killer down. The Sun himself was back in the Sky. The lance wound through his body grown over golden and solid. The Sun lived. I felt myself grow out of the heaving stillness of sleep. I awoke on the dark side of the mountain …” His words stopped. The shadow of his face was hung in silence. I was saddened the flow was broken. The echo of his words all covered with wings. Beating into the vanishing air. One of the men at his side moved to his feet. His arms spread out. Caught in the light behind them. “Christ,” he whispered into the space before him. “Could I ask to know if now I should return to my family and give to them the food that hasn’t been there since I have been gone with you?” The Christ raised a hand. His body sinking deeper in his black clothes. The one standing moved quietly away. Walking into the Sun. We sat alone. The three. The Christ not speaking as the day marched over us. In the pit scooped out by the fire a yellowbacked Spider moved simply and swiftly over the bones of dead wood. I could feel the eyes of the Christ on the yellowback as it bore its burden of casting out a web in the place now charred barren. Sending up a great sail of fibers from its body. The wind moving trembling fingers through the glassy sheet arched in preparation. The spider clung to its essence. Lacing its net with one-eyed determination. The determination of the woman weaving the globe of basket. Thin willows trembling in her darting fingers. Anchored for once in their place in the shape. The hard yellowstone of her ring flashing the trace of pattern. I had asked her where such a stone would come from. She told me how she was young and still living on the shores of the Big Lake in the Sky. How she would always clean her body in the stream running small into the lake. One morning a White from the camp on the opposite shore came to her and smiled. He said he would like to make his new camp where she stood, and he would be no harm to her. He took the yellowstone ring from his end finger and placed it in her hand. Forever they would be friends he said. He thanked her for allowing him the use of the small stream. When she next returned to the stream she saw the man with many others. Already they had made many trees fall. She watched them across the fence that had been built. She watched them along the stream that ran small into the Big Lake. She felt the ring on her finger. Looked at the gray speckles dancing in the yellow stone as the sun touched it. As she talked the wind poked tiny mouths of cold air through the chinks in the branches bowed above our heads protecting us from the snows that had been falling for nineteen days. She had almost completed the basket. It was large. Like her. And sat rooted in her lap. Waiting the completion that would come. Six others sat on the hard earth of the floor. I had watched them all come from the neat stacks of stripped willows at her side. I was silent with her. Listening to the movement of her fingers. The rustle and scrape of willows as they moulded beneath her light flesh. Each movement was mine. I sat like her. With my thin boy shoulders high like a rider on a Horse. My head intently bent down to the task before me. Sometimes my hands would move. The willow weightless between my fingers as I would stab it through the binding and lock it in its place. And I would catch myself. Catch myself weaving baskets in the air. She herself would say nothing. Her eyes only looking on her work. But I knew she saw those hands of mine building. I was embarrassed. And I would hold them still. Keep them steady and slip them beneath my skinbone legs out of sight. But the blood kept moving. Waiting to guide the gliding willow. Kept building the basket with her warm brown hands and calloused fingertips. So I would talk to her and ask her still again where such a yellow stone like that could come from. And always she would tell me. Tell me through to her watching the gray speckles dancing in the stone as the Sun touched it. And I watched closely again to see if the speckles were still dancing as the stone on her finger flashed from the light of the fire. But the fire was low. Few coals were glowing. Soon it would go out. I brought to it a new stick which I placed in the black bowl of earth that gave us our warmth. I got down on my knees and leaned my face close to the coals which glowed bright from the breath of my mouth and soon the new stick was blazing. I liked to feed the fire. It gave me something to do with my hands. The blood forgot the building of the basket and they were calm. And whenever I started a new stick she would look up to me with the broad lips spreading across her face as the acorn color of her eyes brightened a quick smile. I kept the sticks going for her and I was always sad as she lowered her head again to the building. I could hear her building as I slept and often in the dark hours I would wake to the music of her fingers to feed the fire and never could I stop hearing her as she guided the design. Once when I woke the dark hours were gone, the sticks were cold and she was dead. Her large body was folded over her work, the willows still ready in her fingers. The yellowstone ring was like a bright Bird against her pale flesh and I slipped it onto my own hand, then pulled the basket gently from the hollow fold of her body. My fingers continued to weave the willows, filling the pattern that her own fingers had shaped. When the basket was complete in its perfection I ran my hands over the tight smoothness and up the slick sides. I traced the hard rounded rim that locked all the single pieces into one, then again slipped my hands down the deep bowl that grew into exact flatness at the bottom, feeling the hardness of knots that secured all strands into one. I untied the knots I had tied for her. The tension of the pattern snapped. The firm bowl loosening as the willows flared away from each other, seeking their original shape, released from the mold. Then I would begin again the building. Until once more the shape would be as intended before I would undo the completeness. The sticks stopped burning when the snow stopped and I no longer fed the fire. I kept at my work. Sometimes I would put down the basket and take from the folded leaves a piece of seed mush. This would taste good and I would chew slowly. When I was finished and again took up my basket I sucked at the seeds stuck in my teeth. Sometimes I could not get all the seeds and they would stay between my teeth while I slept in the dark hours and there was a great noise all around, hard feet struck the ground again, and harder again. The blanket that kept the dark outside moved and from its place two white men towered into the shelter, bright red handkerchiefs held tight over their noses and mouth. I could see them clearly, the whites of their eyes twisting as they searched in the dark, trying to see what the black shapes were. One of them put out a hand and it touched my face, the stiff fingers moving over my flesh. The hand went around my neck and closed. It yanked me up off the mat. My whole weight went into the air and came down on a wide back. The man turned, his one arm strapping me against his body as he moved through the blanket, I heard the other man shout and jump toward us. I twisted my head and could see in the corner my father’s mother, bent over, the basket at her side, and I was out in the night, stars showering over my head, streaking like rivers of fresh milk in the clean Sky. I was thrown up behind a man on a Horse. I held onto his coat. All around silent men on Horses waited in the night. Then it was bright, brighter than the stars, I could see all the flat white faces watching from beneath the hats, long shooting sticks resting across the saddles of Horses flaming from the quick fire o
f the shelter. The blazing dome of the branches grew smaller and the hard crack of burning wood became more distant as the Horses rode across the land and into the night. When the Horses stopped rolling over the land and became still I was lowered and pulled across the ground and pushed through the open small door of a wood board shelter. The door was closed and I could hear the clang of metal as the bolt was thrown into its lock. In the morning I opened my eyes. Slivers of wood stuck in the skin of my back where I had slept on the wood floor. Tongues of Sun sliced through the long cracks between the boards of the wall, making the little space of the room hot, hotter than I had been since the long days of the pinenut harvest in the fall, long before my mother and her husband had sent me into the flat of the big valley’s heart to feed my father’s mother fire with sticks during the short white days. I could feel the small seeds of grain beneath my bare feet. Scattered across the floor were tiny golden seeds and in the corner was a brown sack, its top open and I ran my hands into the cool seeds that bulged the sack out at its bottom. I pulled out fistfuls of seed and stuffed them into my mouth. They were hard and sweet. I feasted. Soon the sack was empty and my belly puffed smooth and firm. I rested from my eating, sitting in front of a chink in the wood and looking out. The white was gone from the ground. The Earth was bare and turned up a thick mud where Horses and men had been in front of the house taller than a pine tree and the color of snow. A wire fence went in a square around the house. A Whiteman was walking along the fence. His steps beat the ground like a hammer and I could hear them in my shack. I watched as he walked, moving my head to see him better, through the crack. He came to a gate and opened it, walking toward me, growing bigger and closer. Then he stopped. His head turned and I could see the eyes beneath the hat. He started again. Coming toward me. His black boots slapping in the mud. Behind him the door of the house opened and through it came a woman, the bottom of her long gray dress almost touching the mud as she followed across the yard in the man’s footsteps. They were very close and I could feel their power. I moved away from the crack and hid my body in the dark of the corner. My body shook through the bones and it grew cold, the hard pins of bumps crawled over my flesh. I wanted to cry out in the room. To shout my voice for a weapon to beat off these Whites coming for me. Coming to eat me. To tear my young boy flesh from its bones and chew it between their teeth. That is what all Whites want. To eat the flesh of others. That is true. It is told to me by my uncle, the Captain, and he knows of everything, has seen of everything, through his own eyes and the eyes of others. I could hear the sound coming from my mouth. The moan slipping between my lips. I pressed them together and the sound in the air ended. But in me the sound grew like a wind and blew through my bones and I looked across the room and my grandmother was not there, no baskets at her side, no one could hear my cry for help, my grandmother was burned to the ground in her winter house that sat in the heart of the snowcovered valley. I heard the bolt in the lock slip loose and the door was open. Sun poured in and washed over my huddled body, its brightness laid over my shivering skin like a bright blanket. Then it was gone, torn off. The door banged into the opening. I was again alone, hung in the dark corner. Outside the heavy sucking sound of boots pulling out of mud moved off. Slowly my hands moved away from my eyes and I could see I was again alone and safe. The Whites had gone and in front of the door were two thick rounded potatoes. I crawled across the floor and put my face close to the brown lumps. The skins were dry and split. I scooped them up in my hands and they were warm, like stones that have baked in the day’s Sun. I raised one to my mouth and felt its heat close to my face. But my lips would not part to receive the food. The potato grew heavy in my hand and its stone weight sank to the floor and rolled from my grasp. It was filled with evil. Both were filled with evil. They were the food from the stomach of death. The Whites had tried to trick me. Had tried to put the food of death in my stomach. So that they could come and take my lifeless body and tear from it the flesh. I moved away from the evil and hid in the dark of any corner. I did not take my eyes from the power that sat lumped in front of the door. The Sun shot through the cracks of the shed and slashed across the two brown split skins. As I watched the power I knew that I must die. That was the only escape from the boards that squared in a prison around my small body. The Whites would get the body but not the Ghost. My Ghost would go free. It would not have the poison from their food of death in its Spirit. I closed my eyes in the darkness of the corner and prepared to die. My hands rested on the empty grain sack beneath me, I could feel the coarseness of the burred material pricking into my palms, each prick like each seed that I had swallowed. My hands closed into fists. I beat at the rumpled sack beneath me. Beating and beating and beating the skin from my knuckles. The blood of my hands blotting into the grain dusty burlap. They had won. Their triumph was complete. Like the Captain had always told it to be. The brown lumps of potatoes in front of the door in the knifelight Sun meant nothing. That they had the poison of death in them meant nothing. I had already made meal of the food from the stomach of the dead. They had tricked me. I felt the puffed flesh of my belly. Beneath my fingers were the seeds I had swallowed that morning. Seeds of evil sprouting roots in my blood. The plant of death growing in my Spirit. The Whites had used their power on me. Like the Captain had always told it to be. The Whites had trapped me into one room with one sack of poison grain. And I ate of it. Now they would capture the flesh of my body and the flesh of my Spirit. Now I would die without honor. Without escape. They would take me in excess. The darkness of the corner folded me in its blackness. I was solid with the wood my bare back pressed against. I waited for the life to run from me like water. To spill out on the rough planked floor like a lake on the sands in the desert Sun. A lake that exists only in the eye. A mirage that is clearer and deeper than the blue high mountain waters. I watched as the life flowed from me into the lake on the planked floor that ran further into the distance than the eye can see. My life existed outside of my small boy body huddled in the corner. My life existed outside of the coarse flesh and bones the Whites had stolen from the winter valley floor and trapped in this small room. My life existed only as mirage, clearer and deeper than the blue high mountain waters. Outside my body, in the dark, I sought no more than the moment. All the moments since my beginning through eight bright seasons of Sun past pulled like a string and knotted into this one hollow time that grew about my young flesh a hard shell. “He’s alive.” The words cracked the surface of the mirage. “The poor red devil is alive.” The boot raised against my skin nudged into my ribs tumbling my body out of the corner swimming with the Sun pouring through the open door. “I can see for myself he’s alive, Johnny Doc, but does he got the Injun fever?” The voice fell down on my face like rain splashing in a barrel. I could see the gray eyes beneath the brim of the hat staring down as if they were watching a river at the bottom of a canyon. His black boots next to my face were the same I had seen slapping through the mud. It was the one who brought to me the food from the stomach of the dead, the potatoes. “It appears he ain’t got no fever, ’cepting of course he’s two and a half times starved. Damned if this little Injun boy don’t look like a skinned rabbit that’s been rotting in the sun for a month of Sundays, smells like it too. Why hell Frank, why didn’t you at least give the red devil something to put in his miserable belly?” “Now here Johnny Doc, don’t you go a throwing them kinda words on me, you yourself know as fact what I done up at Elephant Head. I risked my own hide burning that town to the ground to kill all that Injun fever. Sides, far as this one is concerned we coulda left him to fry with the old dead squaw we found him with out in the valley. But you know like I know we didn’t haul him all the way in here and risk fever ourselves just to starve what life was left in him out. Rachael herself has been putting two hot potatoes a day in here for him to eat. Look to there, look for yourself.” The one called Johnny Doc looked at the six brown lumps caught in the Sun streaming through the open door. He looked for a long time, scratch
ing at the skin of his face, listening to the steady hum of flies moving slow and sure through the brittle sharp air as they dropped softly onto the dried skins, hooking their hard bodies into the open softness of the white splits running yellow with pus. He scratched some more at the side of his face, the sharp sound of his nails raking across the short hard hair that poked from his chin buried the drone of the flies. “Frank,” the word grew from his lips and filled the room as he took two quick steps and kicked the potatoes out the door into the day with one solid movement of his boot. “You better get Rachael scrub that Injun boy down and get somethin in his stomach. If you don’t it look like you went to a hatful of trouble for nothing.” “But do he have the Injun plague? Do he have the T-burkulur?” The Johnny Doc was already out in the day, but his words came back through the open door and I could hear them mixed with the angry hiss of the flies. “It ain’t no T.B. bugs he’s got to worry about. You just unlock him from that shed.” I listened as the hard hooves of a Horse beat off into the silence of the valley and through the door came a woman, her long gray dress almost scraping the bare boards of the floor. She put her hand in my hair and pulled me from the room into the day. I could see the house taller than a pine tree and the color snow as I tried to make my legs beneath me move, but my feet slipped like Fish in the thick mud as I was drug around the house and dumped in a barrel of rainwater, the woman’s strong hands holding my head down, then yanking it up, then pushing it down, the water slapping white under my chin and coming quickly into my mouth, filling me up until my throat burned from trying to choke it all out. She let me stand on my own legs in the barrel while her hands worked steady and complete over my body with the hard cold soap, her breathing heavy in my face as she grunted from the strain of rubbing my chest and between my legs. She pushed me back under, my knees banging against the rock sides of the barrel. Her fingers dug into the scalp as the soapy water flooded into my open mouth crying out from the pain of her nails tearing into my head. The man with the black boots held a Horse blanket out before him. The woman pulled me dripping from the barrel and the blanket folded coarse and stiff about my body closing off the day. When the blanket was taken from me the clothes of the Whiteman dressed my nakedness and I stood alone in front of the black iron of the stove with the wood burning deep within its stomach. “Do he talk?” I turned my head. A boy the size of me was standing next to the black boots, blond hair growing all over his head. “I don’t think he do,” the black boots answered without taking his eyes from me. “What we goin do with him then?” “I can’t really say.” The black boots took the gray hat from his head and sank into the chair behind him, the air rushing a soft stream between his lips in a slight whistle that could almost not be heard in the hollow warmth of the big room. “I can’t really say what it is we goin do with him. All I know is he’s here. That’s all. He’s just here.”