Neither Wolf nor Dog (23 page)

“That's a fine sentiment . . .” I began. Dan cut in before I could say more.

“It's more than a sentiment. It's the way it should be. That's the way Indian people thought it was going to be when you first came to our land. We were going to share with you. Trade ideas, knowledge. The gifts of our people for the gifts of yours.

“We listened to you. But you never listened to us. All you did is steal from us.”

The old men at the other table had dropped their pretense of disinterest. Dan's voice had risen to the point where you could hear him throughout the whole cafe.

“Hey, old man, calm down,” Grover whispered. “You're as loud as those drunks.”

“The hell with them. I'm old. Let them think I'm crazy.”

“They might be right,” Grover said.

Dan forged ahead. “If we never would have listened, we wouldn't have had drunks. We wouldn't have had alcohol or half the problems we have now. We didn't have those before the white man came. Made us a bunch of damn blanket Indians hanging around the trading post looking for a handout. That's when it all started. Now we're hanging around government offices looking for food stamps.”

The waitress had turned on her stool and was leaning against the wall with a bemused smirk on her face. The men at the other table had set down their coffee cups and were staring at Dan with undisguised interest. Two dramas in one day were too much to hope for. This would give them almost a whole winter's worth of conversation.

Dan was not to be deterred. His mind was racing and his tongue was not far behind. “Do you know why we listened to the early missionaries? Because they were strong. They slept on the ground with us. They didn't make beds off the floor and try to shut out the world. You may not believe it, but they understood our life and they liked it. They knew we were living
close to the earth. From our standpoint the best of them just made their religion fit with ours, like a hand fits into a glove.

“It was when the other ones came that the real trouble began. The ones who were drunk with their own vision of truth and couldn't see ours. The ones who needed houses with floors and then lifted their beds off the floors and then put a mattress on the bed so they could be as far away from the earth as possible. These people never knew who we were.

“Now a hundred years later you've got us to lift our floors off the ground and our beds off the floors and to shut out nature and to get our food in cellophane wrappings. You tell us that we are victims if we don't have all of those things. Then you go out and go camping and sleep on the ground and say you are living like the Indians did. It is just another way of taking our culture from us. You try to make us feel sad about what we don't have while you try to claim what we do have for yourselves.”

“Eat your damn pie or I will,” Grover said. There was a humorous gleam in his eye, but his voice betrayed a strained nervousness. He did not like to let things out around white people. Dan would have none of it. He brushed the comment away like a gnat.

“Think of that Thoreau fellow. I've read some of his books. He went out and lived in a shack and looked at a pond. Now he's one of your heroes. If I go out and live in a shack and look at a pond, pretty soon I'll have so many damn social workers beating on my door that I won't be able to sleep.

“They'll start scribbling in some damn notebook: ‘No initiative. No self-esteem.' They'll write reports, get grants, start some government program with a bunch of forms. Say it's to help us.

“That's what happened with allotment. They said they were trying to help us. They cut up our reservations into chunks and told us we had to be farmers. When we didn't farm, they said
we were lazy. I don't remember anything about Thoreau being a farmer. He mostly talked about how great it was to do nothing, then he went and ate dinner at his friend's house. He didn't want to farm and he's a hero. We don't want to farm and we're lazy. Send us to a social worker.”

The waitress was tiring of the scene. Two bellowing Indians in one day were quite enough. She ripped the check off her order pad and walked over to the table. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. I want some more coffee,” Dan said.

Grover's eyes widened in shock. “Let's just get the hell out of here.”

“I need some coffee to wash down my pie,” Dan commented. It was no longer possible to tell whether he was serious or joking. The waitress made an odd face to no one in particular and went to get the coffee pot.

Dan turned his attention directly to me. “See, Nerburn, I want you to understand this. White people don't know what they want. They want these big houses and all kinds of things, then they want to be close to the earth, too. They get cabins, they go hunting, they go camping, they say it makes them close to the earth. But they really think it's okay only because they have all these other things. We Indians, we live in cabins and hunt, but it's not okay because we don't turn around and go back to big houses and big jobs. We don't need two lives like white people. The only reason that Thoreau fellow is a hero is because he lived two lives. Otherwise he just would have been a bum. They would have sent social workers to his house.”

Dan's logic had reached a Byzantine state. I no longer knew whether or not he was making sense. I just nodded and stared at the iridescent sheen on my soup. Grover was hunching his head into his shoulders and the old men across the way were conferring amongst themselves about the wisdom of what the crazy Indian was saying. The waitress stood at a distance holding the
coffee pot while Tammy Wynette was belting out some big-lunged song from the boom box.

Suddenly Dan's voice got very quiet, like a man sharing a secret. “This is what you've got to remember.” I could see the men at the table craning their necks to hear his words over Tammy's sorrowful wails. “For white people there are only two types of Indians. Drunken bums and noble Indians. In the old days, we used to be savages, but that's gone. Now it's drunks and noble Indians. I like the white men better who think we are all drunks. At least they're looking at us as people. They're saying what they see, not what they want to see. Then when they meet one of us who's not a drunk, they have to deal with us.

“The ones who see us all as wise men don't care about Indians at all. They just care about the idea of Indians. It's just another way of stealing our humanity and making us into a fantasy that fits the needs of white people.

“You want to know how to be like Indians? Live close to the earth. Get rid of some of your things. Help each other. Talk to the Creator. Be quiet more. Listen to the earth instead of building things on it all the time.

“Don't blame other people for your troubles and don't try to make people into something they're not.”

He sat back in his chair with an air of finality. “There. I'm done,” he said.

“About time,” Grover grumbled.

I just nodded in a half-hearted gesture of assent. The internal logic, or lack of it, in Dan's rant had left me reeling. The table of men, aware that their interest might be noticed, made a great show of being involved in a private conversation.

“Like the soup?” the waitress asked caustically as she whisked away my untouched bowl.

“Shiny,” I answered. For the first time, she cracked a tiny smile. She took the bills I had laid out and went off to the cash
register. She returned shortly and dropped a big brown bag on the table.

I looked quizzically at her. “For the dog,” she said. Then she winked and walked back to her stool without ever looking at us again.

I
made Grover stop at the convenience store so I could make my call; the phone in the cafe had hung on the wall only about two feet away from where the six men in feed caps were sitting. I figured they had enough stories without hearing me try to explain to my wife how I wasn't coming home because my truck was being dismantled by a giant while I drove across fields in an old Buick with two Indians and an arthritic dog.

When I returned to the car, Grover and Dan were engaged in an animated conversation that had Dan laughing in his old good-hearted cackle.

“You talked more than a white man,” Grover was saying.

“Gives those old bastards something to talk about.”

“Yeah, it gave them another old bastard to talk about.”

Dan cackled his approval.

“Straighten things out?” Grover said as I pulled the door shut behind me.

“I guess so,” I answered. It had been a sad conversation, full of unspoken angers and longings and sadnesses. My boy had gotten on the line and begun pouring out stories of his little friends and toys he had gotten and birthday parties he was going to attend. My wife had tried to be supportive, but there was a hard distance in her voice. She was carrying too much on her own. She needed me home.

“You've got to just let it go, Nerburn,” Grover said.

His flip attitude angered me. I wanted to recede into my own private hurt. Dan said nothing.

We wheeled back onto the main highway. For reasons that I did not understand, Grover headed east again. The route seemed completely haphazard and without purpose. But I didn't care. My cares were in my mind; what Grover chose to do did not interest me. The Buick settled into its eight-cylinder throb and the three of us lapsed into silence. Fatback was gnawing furiously on one of the bones that the waitress had given us.

We rode without speaking for almost an hour. I gave myself over once more to the rising hills and distant vistas. My child's voice haunted me.

The “little trip” had developed into a routine. Grover determined the route. Dan determined when we would stop and for how long. I rode along in the back with my canine companion, taking notes, observing, and staring out at the plains.

Gradually the pain of my distant family eased. The subtle power of the landscape washed over me once more. The ebbs and swells of the land, and the lure of the distant horizon had a soporific effect on me. I nestled down into my corner of Grover's commodious back seat and let the great sweep of the land hypnotize me.

The waning afternoon passed in this fashion, with no discernible rhythm or moments of individual consequence. Perhaps I had dozed, or merely drifted into deep reverie. But when Dan blurted out, “Go in there,” I jumped in my seat like a man jolted from sleep.

Grover slowed the car so quickly that my stomach churned. We had been descending a long, gradual hill, and the car had to fight to come to a halt. We were on a winding drop into a river valley. Far ahead I could see the landscape on the other side of the river stretching out in unrelenting flatness.

The cause of Dan's outburst was a buff-colored, handpainted billboard with a geometric border of blue, yellow, green, and white diamonds. On it was written, “Sitting Bull Burial Site Monument.”

“Go in there,” Dan repeated.

Grover obliged, and the old Buick dipped and heaved as it made the right angle turn into a winding roadway that snaked back into the hills.

“I want you to see this,” Dan said with authority. He stiffened in his seat like a man coming to attention. “Sitting Bull was the Great One, Nerburn. He only gave up because his people were hungry. He was the greatest one, along with Crazy Horse.”

I didn't know much about Sitting Bull. In my white education he had been but another of a parade of chiefs with noble visages and exotic names who had appeared as a test question in some historical gallop through the American frontier period. I did remember that he had somehow been involved in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and that had seemed to me a demeaning experience for a man who had once been a leader of a free people.

“He was a great leader,” I said vaguely.

“The treaties were a bunch of crap,” Dan spat, as if that were a logical response to my comment.

“They were supposed to give us land. But how can you give someone something they already own? All the treaties did was bind the Indian people to the white man's laws. Sitting Bull figured that out. He wasn't going to sign anything that claimed to give him something he already owned. He knew that all he was signing was a paper that made him give up something. So he wouldn't sign them.”

In the distance a solitary figure was walking along the road.

“Looks like an Indian,” Grover observed.

“Should pick him up,” Dan said.

As we got closer the man came into sharper focus. He was young and angular; a full-blood, maybe thirty, with the sharp, chiseled features of an athlete. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and had a black vinyl or leather jacket slung over his right shoulder. He walked with the agile lope of one who covered great distances on foot as a matter of course.

Grover slowed down as we drove up beside him. Dan gestured him toward the back seat. The man bent down and looked in the car, then grabbed the door handle in an easy, practiced swing.