Authors: James W. Bennett
Donny looked at me for a few moments without saying anything. He didn't look at me the way I've been looked at before, like I was an alien, he just looked at me the way you look at a person when you're really concentrating. After this long silence, he asked me, “Is that your bike?”
Now it was my turn to hesitate. “You might say I'm borrowing it.” Even though I could tell Donny Thunderbird was a guy to trust, there were limits.
“The bike is down,” I added. “I had to push it all the way out here from town.”
“That's more than a mile,” he said.
“Don't I know it.”
He wanted to know what was the matter with it, so I told him. “It's seized up. It was burning oil, but I was only driving at night so I couldn't see. There I was in the middle of Iowa with a seized-up bike. I couldn't drive it and I couldn't just leave it behind. I didn't know what I was going to do.”
“So what happened?”
“I ran into this guy named Carl Hartenbower at a truck stop. He was on his way to Dry Gulch, Wyoming, to start a new job as a professional cowboy. Dry Gulch is a tourist town, and Carl was hired to sit on a chair in front of the general store and trading post all day long, and look like a cowboy of the Old West. Can you believe it, just sit there and get paid for it? He was perfect for it, though, he was a real leathery-looking kind of a guy. Anyway, he said we could tie the bike down on top of his car. It was a big Pontiac Bonneville. So that's what we did.”
“And he brought you the rest of the way.”
“As far as the edge of town. The rest was up to me. Carl was a weird guy. About a hundred miles back, he told me the car was stolen. That made me nervous, because being more or less on the run myself, I didn't like the idea of being in a car the cops were looking for. And it was pretty conspicuous with the bike tied on top. Of course, since the car wasn't his, he didn't care if the roof got scratched or dented.”
“He does sound weird, but I'd say it was pretty lucky you ran into him.”
Then I smiled. “You could call it luck, I guess. But the thing is, once you get in touch with your destiny, you get out of the habit of thinking of things as lucky breaks. Not to get overly philosophical, but that's what a destiny means: It's
supposed to happen.
That's how it's altogether different from lucky breaks or something you wish for.”
Donny offered me a piece of gum, which I accepted. “You keep saying that, but I don't know how to take it. No offense.”
“No problem. You're hearing all of this with an open mind. I appreciate that. What it comes down to is, I had a vision; it came to me in a dream. I'm destined to be a Dakota. I think I was a Dakota a hundred years ago, so it might be just a matter of returning. Sometimes the way to your destiny is through your previous lives.”
Donny was quiet again, hearing it all. I liked the way I could tell him these things and not feel selfconscious. He finally said, “Are you hungry?”
“As a matter of fact I'm starved. The food in my backpack is all dried out.”
“Hop in the truck. We'll go up to the snack bar.”
The snack bar where Donny took me was part of the tourist area near that parking lot where I came in earlier. In addition to ordinary stores like a grocery store and a Laundromat, there were lots of gift shops and souvenir shops and trading posts, loaded with tourists. You could buy almost any kind of Indian merchandise, all of it authentic. With the tourists, the most popular stuff seemed to be items from the Southwest tribes, such as Navajo blankets, turquoise jewelry, and so forth. The best stuff from the Plains tribes were ceremonial pipes and certain weapons, such as shields made from buffalo hide, and very quality bows made out of bone.
I could have looked at the Indian merchandise for the rest of the evening, but I was too hungry. I got two chili dogs with onion and a large Pepsi. Before I knew it, we were back in the truck and driving along some gravel road through the timber, far away from the beaten path. I was wolfing my food and trying to get my bearings, but it was too dark by this time.
We must have gone two miles at least. Our destination turned out to be some maintenance buildings where equipment was kept, such as a tractor, a couple of dump trucks, mowers, et cetera.
Donny was throwing trash in a big Dumpster while I finished my food. We sat in a mechanic's shop where some old Indian men were playing cards, smoking cigarettes, and drinking whiskey. Even though it was just a maintenance shed, I felt privileged being in a place no tourists would ever see.
A very old Indian named Delbert Bear, who was one of Donny's distant great-uncles, was doing most of the talking. He smoked his pipe and told numerous stories of the glorious past when the warrior Dakota were the feared enemy of the white man's army. I asked Donny how old Delbert Bear actually was, and he said, “Nobody knows, including him.”
Anyway, Delbert told of all the famous battles in great detail, such as when Crazy Horse defeated General Crook in the Battle of the Rosebud, and the terrible Dakota defeat at the hands of the Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee. I know for a fact that the defeat at Wounded Knee happened in 1890, so I asked Donny if Delbert Bear could really remember it.
Donny smiled and said, “Nobody knows, including him.”
I had my journal with me, and I was making a point of writing down most of what came out of Delbert Bear's mouth. Donny asked me if I did a lot of writing and I told him I did. “I like to write stories,” I said. “Sometimes I just write down notes and ideas for stories later on. I've been making notes on the Stone Boy legend for a long time.”
“You probably know more about the Stone Boy legend than I do,” he said.
I needed to be humble. I said, “There are different versions of the legend. I've sort of been working on a version which combines all the similar parts. You know, the essential stuff. There are gaps and missing pieces, stuff that's gotten lost over time. What I'd really like to do is fill in the gaps and still be authentic to the basic meaning of the legend. It's not easy.”
Donny took a look at me before he answered. “A writer can do a lot of good for Indians.”
I asked him how.
“I know a guy by the name of Chips,” said Donny. “He's a Dakota on another reservation, but I've met him a couple of times. He publishes a newsletter twice a month on Indian civil rights and legal rights. People from all over the country subscribe to it, and I don't mean just Indians.”
“Can you think of any more?”
“There's a guy in Minnesota I've never met. He writes columns on Indian history and traditions. His column is published in newspapers all over. There are also publications on Indian education and agriculture. That's what I'm interested in.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I just got done with my freshman year in junior college. I'm going to finish college and major in ag economics.”
I said, “But aren't you happy now, doing what you're doing?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well,” I said, “you've got your home, and your people, and your family. You have a job. You have your place.”
Donny smiled. “A reservation is a place from the past. The Indian way of life is mostly history. It's good that there are people like Delbert, and reservations, so we don't forget the old ways. But Indians need help to live in the modern world.”
That was a letdown for me, hearing him talk like that. Being on the reservation had me so mellowed out that I couldn't imagine finding anything wrong with it. As far as it being something out of the past, that was the best thing about it as far as I could see.
Donny Thunderbird went on. “I've got lots of other relatives up in the hills. They live the old ways. They still hoe the corn with elk antlers and they make arrows by rubbing sticks between two stones; the arrows get sold in the souvenir shops. But my people can't improve themselves by living the old ways, because the rest of the world doesn't live the old ways. One way that Indians need to become modern in is agriculture, and I've always been interested in crops and farming.”
I was still a little uneasy about what he was saying, I guess because of my background of no home and no family and knowing what my destiny was. It didn't seem right somehow to take reservation life for granted. Maybe living on the reservation all your life, you didn't appreciate it quite as much. I wasn't about to argue with him, though, because you could tell he'd put a lot of thought into it. Besides that, he could have been treating me like I was wholesale weird, but he wasn't.
We changed the subject to my situation and what to do about it. “I'm not sure what advice to give you,” Donny said.
“I understand your hesitation,” I said. Which was true.
“It's just that no one ever came to me before and said he wanted to become a Dakota,” he went on. “What we get here are tourists.”
“It's not just that I
want
to become a Dakota,” I reminded him. “It's my destiny.”
“Right.” he said. “I'm not forgetting. I'm probably going to have to talk it over with my uncle. He's the chief. Maybe he'll have some advice.”
“Chief Bear-in-cave is your uncle?”
“How do you know his name?” Donny wanted to know.
“Didn't I tell you I've done research?”
He was smiling at me. “I guess you did. This gets better and better.” Even though he was getting a grin out of it all, I knew he wasn't being disrespectful. I fully realized how fortunate I was to have him as my reservation contact; he could have been turning me in or calling the cops or something, but he wasn't, he was trying to help me.
“I'll take you back down to the campground,” he said. “We'll find an empty tipi. It'll be on the house, no charge. You could use a night's sleep.”
That was true. We drove on down and found an empty one. When he left, he said he'd see me in the morning.
I was too tired to move the bike, so I just left it stashed in the bushes. I brought my backpack to the tipi, looking at the sky full of stars and feeling mostly mellow. Then I stretched out on the tipi floor.
I felt somewhat bad about Barb, taking off on her like I did, and I felt some guilt about taking Nicky's bike. But he wouldn't miss it much; if it wasn't for me, it never would have been anything but down anyway. What I understood was, real important things, such as fulfilling your destiny, don't happen without a little pain. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. That's just the way the world works, so you have to accept it.
Then I fell sound asleep like a stone.
CHAPTER TWO
The next morning, I woke up real refreshed. After I got showered and brushed my teeth, I washed my dirty clothes right there in the shower house sink.
Shortly after that, Donny Thunderbird came by in the green pickup. He was throwing chunks of firewood on the ground in the campsites. He said Chief Bear-in-cave would be happy to talk to me.
“You mean right now?” I was a little surprised.
“You might as well, if you can. I gave him a little background, and he says he's not busy.”
“Let's go, then.”
I made sure I had my backpack with me when I got in the truck. I had some very unusual emotions on the way over, at least unusual for me. As a rule, I'm pretty good at sloughing off the emotional side of most situations, but to tell the truth, I was a little scared. In fact, more than a little. I wasn't scared of the
chief
, but it seemed like there might be a lot at stake. I've known for at least a year that it was my destiny to become an Indian, but if you got right down to it, it probably couldn't happen without the help of a tribal chief. This visit seemed like the crunch.
The chief lived in this ordinary trailer, around the curve of a foothill, no more than half a mile from the equipment shed and the mechanic shop.
Donny stopped the truck. I was sitting there in the passenger's seat, looking at the trailer but not moving. I guess I must have sat there for a while because Donny told me to go on in.
I got out of the truck. “Just go on in?” I said.
“Well, you know, knock first to be polite. But he's expecting you.”
“Okay, then.” I swallowed once, and Donny took off.
I walked up to the trailer and knocked on the door. The chief hollered to come in, so I went inside. It was dark because some of the curtains were drawn, and the trailer was on the west side of the hill. Chief Bear-in-cave was drinking coffee at the kitchen table. He asked me to sit down, so I sat on the other side of the table and put my backpack on the floor next to me.
I felt very humble being in the chief's presence, so I didn't want to stare; but I was taking in all his details. He was very old. His gray hair was in two long pigtails. His right eye was a cataract; it was milky white, so you could tell it was blind. When he talked or looked at you, he held his head sort of tipped to the side. His dark, leathery, creased skin gave him the look of nobility. He was wearing buckskin moccasinsâjust like mineâand blue jeans, a short-sleeved khaki shirt, and a Western-style belt. His only jewelry was a silver turquoise ring.
He wanted me to tell him about myself, so I told him basically what I had said to Donny Thunderbird the day before, about taking off from home and covering the 800 miles on Nicky's bike. I mentioned about the bike breaking down and getting a ride with Carl Hartenbower, but I didn't go into a lot of detail about that. I told the chief how I held the Indians in high esteem, especially the Dakota. I told him about all my reading of Indian literature, and my collection of Indian books.
He asked me my name, and I said: “Floyd Rayfield is my given name, but my preferred Dakota name is Charly Black Crow.”
He didn't answer right away. That's one thing you learn about him: He never says anything right away. “Charly Black Crow is a good name,” he finally said. Then he asked me about my home. “Who are your people?”