We don’t
talk too much, Winona and me. She don’t talk much to anyone, really. Winds blow
through her in other ways. Her black eyes shine what she wants to say, and
today that’s not too much. It’s a good day to close them for a while. Mine,
too, but we’re still pretty prone to watch out for each other.
The stove’s
been working overtime; furnace has broke, and Mika’s been on the phone once, twice
a day to get the Yellow Pages out here to fix it. Times are busy, they say.
Extra miles costs extra time. “Heard the bison population’s on the rise,” one
kidded her, “maybe you can hunt a couple hides.”
“Did you
laugh?”
“He did. Didn’t matter what I done.”
So maybe
that’s a plan—bring my bow out to the snow-whipped coulees and let ’er rip,
first kinda mastodon I see. Claim my off-season prerogative, and if somebody
challenge that, take it to tribal council: fork-tongue furnaceman won’t come.
“Pop, let’s
go,” bids Winona, reading bluster in my eyes. In the next hour or so we
wouldn’t be killing buffalo but tearing off usable planks for firewood from
that jack pine house that burned up on account of (go figure) a furnace
malfunction. Mika, waving us good luck, would hold down the fort and pretend
not to drink. Touchy issue there for Winona—firstborn and only—jealous ’til she
couldn’t be that anymore.
I’m not her
father for real—barely her mom’s paramour—but we get along alright as a family.
Mika loved our mutual best friend growing up, like an older brother he was to
both of us. He went Army Reserve to wait for her to graduate high school and
then even helped pay vo-tech for her to become a beautician. He re-upped to go
to Afghanistan, dying a month before Winona was born. His final letter he asked
me to be there for Mika—Lamaze and all that—like he had a hunch. At the time I
was on the other side of the state, studying pre-med; I guess being a doctor wasn’t
in the stars—or something else was—and Mika pulled me back on her own terms,
seeking him in me for as long as I could do that. Or as long as she could.
The pickup’s
half stacked with mostly fallen joists. Now we’re sifting through the carcasses
of furniture, tee-shirts pulled above our nose against the lacquer toxins.
Windows didn’t break enough to air out this oven, and we don’t need to salvage
everything unburnt. Glancing outside, though, I’ll take that basketball hoop,
hanging for dear life on a backboard of frozen ash. Didn’t come here to loot, but
I could burnish that rim and put it on our own garage, teach Winona how to shoot,
become a Phoenix Sun. Or ‘Mercury’, I guess they’d make her be. Fun fact, I’ll
tell her: Kyrie Irving’s mom was Sioux. Or just ‘fact’—she died when he was
four, the infancy of memory.
Winona was
four when I first took her spearing—just me with the spear, and she pointing at
fish for the job to be done. I didn’t invite her, and her mom had second
thoughts; but the girl threatened not to eat dinner unless she saw how the fish
came out of the water. “Wina, it’s bloody, y’know,” and I showed her in the garage
by baiting a hook with a squiggling worm. She looked intently at what I was
doing and didn’t flinch a bit. Worms don’t bleed much, but, to further the
point, I asked if she’d put out her palm and feel the struggle and slime. She
did that, stoically, knowing from the styrofoam pail a lot of these critters
would die on one outing.
“Papa,” she
said, also knowingly, “the spear never uses a worm.” She must’ve seen me
practice my throws in the back yard, naturally never baiting the trident.
“Yeah?” I
had to agree, but wondered what else she meant. Can’t remember if she said
anything more—just my guess, then, at her calculation that eating a fish
shouldn’t mean killing more than that fish. There’s a passage in Hamlet about a king going through the
guts of a beggar, via the worm that et of the king, etc. Well, I wasn’t going
to bring all Hamlet up to a
four-year-old—she hadn’t even seen Lion
King yet!
So we went
together spearing, every year since, usually down by the culvert spilling out
the grassy side of our reservoir. We ice fish there, too, on the other side of
the road, but early spring was when we could spear the highest yield, pike
heading inland to spawn. It the white man were there, sometimes with a
megaphone and vigilantes, we’d move on to a quieter tributary, or the edge of
the slough if the ice had come off. They knew we could spear before their
opening date, and they hated that we had first picks. “Hey, squaw,” a drunk yelled
back then (these days, he’d call her ‘Pocahontas’), “imagine you bein’ one of
them pikes—you gonna let your daddy spear you like that?”
She didn’t
say nothing.
~~~
There’s
land enough on the reservation to almost disappear, months on end. Lack of
internet means the WASPish world can also almost disappear. Some memories, though,
are hardwired.
Mika’s
brother, Chayton, was a Division-I recruit for basketball, probably headed to
Laramie to suit up for the Cowboys. It was in a summer camp for All-American prospects
that we saw him on TV—satellite, so we had to go to the tavern to get the feed.
First time ever he wasn’t a starter, and so we saw him just seconds here and
there sitting on the bench, wrenching his hands to keep them warm and limber.
Coach put him in the second half, the other team up by twenty, and Chayton made
a three right away, dished out four assists, another couple mid-range shots and
suddenly his team’s down by only two buckets. Other team calls a time-out,
draws up a play and, wouldn’t you know, Chay picks off their pass and races
down the court, defender with him stride for stride; Chay jams the ball and
hangs on to the rim, hinged to take even twice that force. Instead, the
backboard shatters, Darryl Dawkins’ style. Camera’s gone crazy, trying to get
the grittiest angle, and the one they keep replaying was of the hoop coming
down to collar Chayton, along with a shower of fiberglass shards. It was like
the rim and him were intertwined, the net a wedding veil. Some trucker at the
tavern burst out laughing—“he’s fucked the poor thing”—and soon after, the color
commentator did the same. Chay was evidently okay, rubbing some blood from his
scalp, and was about to get the hoop off by himself, but the coach had
something to say that stopped him. The commentators took liberty reading his
lips—‘you didn’t listen!’, it was
judged—while the referees huddled to declare the game forfeit, winner being who
was ahead. Chay got credit for a technical foul—‘unnecessary hanging on the rim’—and
a call-out by the coach in a post-game interview: “we had ’em on the ropes, if
Chief Bromden there coulda just slowed down.” Commentator asked him to clarify.
“Well, he does his job okay but needs to listen—I said on their time-out that
we had one left, too, and we need to call it on a rebound or turnover. I’m not
saying he’s dumb, but maybe playin’ deaf.”
Chayton
didn’t go to Laramie, but he’s since turned into a decent coach for urban youth
programs, another galaxy away. Maybe this netless hoop I found will lure him
back a week or two, give his niece and me advice—even get his sister out to
play.
~~~
Sure, I can
get despondent like anybody out there. You gotta feel something for that albino
deer that crops up every so often, probably a token one for every stretch of
national forest. It may know itself as special—sacred even, depending on the
tribe. It was born white in a tawny world, and, wouldn’t you figure: it’s off
limits for hunters. That’s not to say hunters follow a collective conscience,
let alone the DNR’s rules. But the creature’s so beautiful alive. And sure, so is any northern pike.
A kind of
deer I’m talking about was Smokin’ Joe, a minister of a couple spread out
chapels on our reservation. He’d come by every blue moon at least, but we’d
more likely see him down at the tavern, at high school games, lobby at the
clinic, wherever the wind blew him. He was actually tawny for the sake of this
analogy, but albino unique, too. Well liked, he didn’t mind being lonesome—told
me as much, last time we spoke. My uncle Mato was having a hell of a time with
hidden problems come to light—gambling, mistress, meth, you name it—and found
himself lost to humanity, a loser of a human being. “Stick with the former,”
Joe told him, “and be lost—the lost will be found, eventually. But dump that
latter—the loser determined by others just as lost, or more.” I wondered if
that was enough for Mato to wake up to, and asked Joe if he’d check in on Mato
once in a while. He said, “sure, and”, tapping ash from his Muriel air tip,
“his spirit, too, can check up on mine. That’s one way to define what prayer
can do.”
Smokin’ Joe
tried to kick the cigar habit several times—once when his buddy Calvin gave him
a springer spaniel pup to make him walk it. He named him ‘Homer’ to be a
reminder—you gotta be home pretty regular to walk your dog, or take him with
wherever you go. Joe would do that sometimes in his Plymouth Reliant—bring him
somewhere to run wild—but Homer needed his namesake and preferred the gravel
road in front of his house. Someone else—not Calvin—gave Joe a kitten, promptly
named ‘Jethro’ to keep Homer company indoors; that lasted a week—Homer played Jethro to exhaustion before
extinction. Then the farmer next door came to ask Joe about some disappeared
chickens, and maybe Homer had some knowledge of that. “No, no” Joe assured,
retelling at the tavern, “a springer spaniel only soft mouths ducks, by instinct, and chickens—even if he got into
the coop—would be the same.” On cue, Homer wobbled from behind the house and
seemed to want to say something, barfing up white features and gristle to maybe
get it off his chest. Farmer gave dog a small chiding and Joe a free cigarette,
chuckling not to sweat an apology.
Animals, in
the end, didn’t stop Joe from smoking but got him to appreciate the breeze they
shared. He died of pneumonia after setting two days in a sweat lodge, partly to
honor my uncle’s invite to do so. Could’ve made him sad, Mato, to lose such a
friend. But “he aint lost,” Mato said, “he’s the white deer we are lucky to
sometimes find.”
~~~
Winona likes
to color, even that albino in a fog—not to change it into something else, but
entertain its aura. Mika thinks she’d make a great tattoo artist, something
she’s not licensed for but does for extra cash. Winona’s just fourteen—too old
for coloring books, too young for Mika’s clientele. “Never too young for
spearing,” I hear Mika say, and I say back, “but I don’t take her to E.R.”, where I work, driving ambulance. It’s not an argument—more an indication we
don’t know what guides the way the wind blows, and how to worry about nothing.
Her teacher
called me in some time ago—called Mika first, but she got scared—and so I come
in thinking they don’t like Winona’s way of keeping to herself, doodling,
what-you-will. Or maybe smoking, sneaking out, something even social. Teacher’s
done this all her life—you see it on her forehead, which bobs down as she pages
through a notebook. “Do you know,” she starts, barely having greeted me,
“what’s in my hands?”
A test, I
thought—for me. Instead of yes or no, I simulate her posture—sitting, opening
my hands book-like, and read.
She lets me
do that, silence for the both of us to kind of let the afternoon have its
presence felt. One of Wina’s notebooks, true, my upper eyelids reach and start
to flutter. I think of her dad waking up in an Afghan valley, wondering if
they’d have rain to keep the desert plans at bay. I’ve talked of him to her, of
course—hours of angling lends to that. She once said “I remember”—must have
been a thing I told before—I can’t keep track of all I said. “Mom, too,” she
decided to reveal, grace that tends to mystify.
“Your
daughter,” teacher measures out her words like that, “Winona,” flipping to a
drawing of a box turtle, “writes,” of course—we know she’s good at cursive—“what
to me she does not say.” I want to burst out neither laughing nor crying, just
something—and I know I’ll hide it badly. “Don’t fret,” she follows, “what she
writes is,” turning to a page she’d dog-eared, “memorable.” She slides the open
page toward me to take, and I read in liquid blur:
These crayons, they make them
sound like something playing
on a lonely dream. Color
‘manatee’
in ‘tumbleweed’, and see if any
body sees. I could use the paper
holding ‘indian red’—it’s more
honest than the wax that’s meant
to be my skin. Give it ‘blush’,
or
maybe take that to my mom,
who beauties people as they bid
‘maroon’. Tell my dad I won’t
trade
‘sunset orange’ for ‘outer space’—
next year they’ll try ‘inner
space’
but fail to dream the crayon I
crave
to make: ‘daybreak’—maybe in
a dozen shades, depending on the
weather, what designates a day,
and how a thing might break.
I would love that color
constantly,
and share it with the sharpener.
I forgot
what else the meeting was about. Just that Winona had a voice, beyond what
anyone had imagined.
~~~
Coming back
from the jack pine house, pickup starts to stall. Gas still at three-quarters,
not so cold to clog the fuel line—just gotta chalk it up as an ageing vehicle.
Hauling all those planks couldn’t help, and it would do no harm to jettison
them, lighten the truck’s spirits. That’s at least what I propose to Wina, who
doesn’t seem to have an opinion on the matter.
Instead, we
hoof it towards the tavern, knowing there’d be a phone there at least, and
warmth. Wouldn’t you know, Mato’s sitting on a stool when we come in nursing a
Mountain Dew and chatting with Pezi, who runs the place. “Hey,” he says when he
sees us come in, shivering for effect.
“Hokahey,”
Wina hushes, somewhat to my surprise. To think that the Crazy Horse call to
fight at Big Horn—hokahey, today is a good day to die—might be the
utterance of a teenage girl in the twenty-first century, especially in light of
yesterday… Ho! It can have no good response.
“Amen,”
Mato honors just the same. I mumble through an explanation why we’re
panhandling here this time of day, giving Pezi reason to smile. He had hot
chocolate brewing for us anyway—roadways in the winter have their strange
predictability. I barely have to ask to use the phone.
“Hey,
Mika,” I call—she’s been worried, by the tone of her hello—“we’re just a little
bit stranded. Haven’t asked yet, but Mato will give us a lift… maybe’ll run by
the pickup to grab what we can… No word from furnaceman?... No, that’s okay. We
don’t need his hokey sense of humor…. You okay?... That’s… yeah, Winona’s
sippin’ cocoa, seems a lady Mato’s with is ordering the same…. Yeah, I’ll do
that. See you in a little while.” The phone fits nicely in its brace upon the
wall.
The lady
friend is Zonta—I should have picked that up from hints my uncle gave the last
and last encounters at this bar. Her name in Sioux is trustworthy, and I concoct a plan to have her stay with Wina, while
Mato and me try to get the pickup going, maybe tow it to the house. Why can’t
Wina go as well? Well, I tell myself, I think she’s had enough. Zonta’s eyes
say she would love to babysit, or teach Winona how to do the same.
It allows my
need for Mato—an hour ago I only faced the snow—to be my babysitter, ’cause I’m about to burst.
~~~
Yesterday,
as we were on the reservoir—after daybreak, it so happened, drilling through
the ice of holes we’d set the day before—a group of vigilantes trudged our way.
“Keep a low profile,” I told Winona, and by body language, they implied the
same. We were well enough away from anything of relevance, but somehow this
became their equation: they were hunting deer—as was the end of season and
their right—and we were in their way, deerpaths on occasion making use of ice. Yet,
the reservoir had open water not too far away—deer would know this better’n
us—and so I compassed with my arm the area we would stay.
They
retreated; we reviewed our flags—one falling for a pike not big enough to keep,
and two others indicating strikes. Daybreak turned to sepia, and I had names of
crayons in my head, begging Wina read my
mind if not sure how she’d do so. Flags fell with regularity—I’d be pulling
out a perch and she’d be handling a muskie; we were well ahead of forecasts for
an Alberta clipper coming through. By afternoon, we’d be home, packing these
filets and celebrating graces from the lake.
But first
we had to find its mercy. Turns out a herd of deer had designs to cross, coming
out a glade directly east and nosing a route halfway between us and the
southern shore. In their middle, muskox style, two fawns—including an albino—picked
up their pace, as nature told them not to dawdle on the ice. Winona was
enamored; we both stood still to make the moment stay. It would be the memory
of a lovely day.
Until the
hunters tumbled from their blind upon the shore. They couldn’t shoot from their
present angle, unless they wouldn’t care to hit us in a miss. Because they made
a stir, the herd halted in their tracks and froze, staring full that way and
allowing Win and me to see their napes, all eight—all completely trusting we
were not their fight.
The hunters
were. And they were pissed—we were screwing up their site. You could see their
calculation, how to shift this way or that to have an open shot; like wolves,
they slowly split to buy the time they needed—the herd would break in unison
one side or the other, but which side
was the question. Winona and I could only be the audience.
Time is a
product of heartbeats, even when that organ stops and is somewhat recalled in a
funeral drum. I tried to think all the beings thinking right now—on the lake
and under our feet, considering bait and ways to partake, or strategies how to
escape. Three hunters made for their smiley face, the herd still a nose, Wina
and me serving eyes below a forehead of balding ice. An eagle would see us this
way.
All broke
in an instant—the face sprinting Pennywise, the deer doing basketball J-stops
in efforts to get open or confuse, and us now aware that we were surrounded,
one with the herd. Winona made way toward the water, just to make space, and
warily I followed. A shot rang out from the eastern-most hunter, and the middle
man charged to force the hunt west, but the deer scattered east,
anyway—familiar more with the glade. The little albino ran toward us, causing
Winona to stop it from going away from the herd. Its mama responded and charged
us further to the edge of the ice, skidding when she saw it cracking and Wina
going down, the fawn finally knowing it shouldn’t join us. I quickened to where
Wina elbowed the unbroken ice, yelling inside for her to stay calm. She heard
that, it seems, and though I also cracked in, reaching for her, we both managed
to belly to safety, like seals. Maybe manatees.
Hunters
stopped to look at us, distantly, guessing what the story of the day would be.
When they saw us out of water, crawling back to the flags we didn’t need to
keep, they bolted back to their blind, gathered up their gear and disappeared.
That left Wina and me alone—memories of deer notwithstanding—with a half-shelf
life to get home and, crucially, dry.
Mika drew
the bath—water heater working fine—and Winona stayed in there an hour it seemed
to get her back to lukewarm. I resorted to our stock of blankets—bison hides
from IKEA. Later, I’d go back to fetch our fish and flags and use up all our
wood to get the calories in us—units of heat, they taught us in school, and
great with peppercorn and wild rice, we knew by instinct.
~~~
Mato hears
all this with nods of understanding; we’re at my pickup before he’d have a
chance to question. Cable now attached, it would be a glacial load for his Ford
Bronco, and I would have to steer and brake this rogue tail to keep us safely
on the road. Mika meets us with good news—furnace fixer here tomorrow, even an
apology for letting the request linger, as nobody should be left out in the
cold.
We got wood
enough for tonight, thanks to Mato, but he suggests we camp out otherwise: “You
haven’t seen our new place yet—Zonta’s made a little guest room, also got a
futon—make yourself at home.”
The bar’s
more abuzz than when we left it—Warriors and Thunder on tv, games of darts and
billiards round out the room. Pezi makes his case that Golden State has done a
subtle job of representing Indians more or less okay: “their logo is a bridge,
not some Chief Wazoo—”
“You mean
Wahoo—let’s call things by their
right names,” his rival jokes.
“Wa-who
cares,” Pez goes on, “I don’t want Geronimo there either, or tomahawk chops—”
“You want a
bridge.”
“I do.”
“A bridge
for warriors to… what?”
“To pass
around and score, defend their side, and bring in customers.”
“Fair ’nuf.
And Thunder—what do you what them to do?”
“Same. And
bless the earth with rain.”
We watch
the game and gauge Winona’s smile and little things she wants to say, playing
darts with Zonta and thanking Pez for the chili he had made, with shredded
cheese and sage. I leave a twenty on the counter, Pezi takes it, puts it in the
tip jar and slides that back to me. “For the furnace,” he deafens to my
protest, “at least a dent.”
The
Bronco’s cozy with us five, spacious that it is. Like our country—vast and
jealous of its space, best when neighbors sit together. Mato drives
deliberately, the clipper’s brought its drifts that he has handled many times,
increasingly in ways that counts him wise.
He’s
right—we haven’t seen the new place, though I have seen it old. “This was
Smokin’ Joe’s! I knew you took in Homer when he died—”
“Did
that—and he ran back here several times.”
“Thought I
scared him off!” says Zonta.
“Joe had
little in his will—took a couple months for relatives to find it buried in his
books and things—and though the house has some mortgage left, he shifted it to
me, if I wanted.”
“Bank
agreed?”
“Got two
years, favorable rate—and I’ll retire in four.”
Winona
walks the spaniel before we all need to hit the sack. Mika runs to join
her—“she forgot her stocking cap”—and I sit back remembering last I’d been in
here, playing Scrabble with Joe, who wasn’t smoking at the time. Mato says the
board is over there—a little spirit of the house they’ll surely keep, Zonta
being the better wordsmith.
“Now, Hon,
there’s no ‘better’ when a thing needs more than one.”
“That’s
true. We’ll play a round tomorrow.”
Tomorrow
will be hard again—nice to think the furnace might get fixed, but then the
pickup’s next, and maybe driving cross the county to drive again an ambulance
is more road than I’m made to meet. Maybe take some cues from Mika—we can build
a better shop—Winona adding color, if she wants. They come in from the cold
laughing at something they had said. Hugs goodnight, and dreams of deer that
also snuggle in, tumbleweed and sometimes white.
DMVL
