Neither Wolf nor Dog (39 page)

“There are spirits to help you. There are spirits to help us all. If only your people would learn to listen to them, to go into the sunlight and give thanks for the day, they would find them. Then they would not be so quick to do harm, or so able to rest at night when they spent the day working only for themselves.

“The earth is deep, Nerburn, and its knowledge is great. Listen to the stones, and listen to the wind. Do what you must do to find the voices that will speak to you. They are there. They are calling. Do what you must do to find them, and share their words.

“I will pray now.”

He let go of my wrist. I felt an unbearable weariness come over me. My eyelids drooped.

“Sleep,” he said. “But watch.”

I barely heard him. I was receding from his words like the clouds in the sky.

I cannot remember much about that night. I fell into a fitful sleep full of howlings and hauntings. Images fractured and shattered and rose reconfigured. I would pop to the surface, open my eyes, panic for a moment until I remembered where I was, then drop again, even deeper, even further, to places where fears combined with memories, and presentiments of future dangers loomed like the ghostly brick pillars standing sentinel outside the gate.

I remember the cold of the concrete beneath me, and how I kept pushing myself back onto it, as if the earth itself were a darkened sea that lapped, dangerous and unfathomable, at my feet.

Once I awoke and sat bolt upright. Dan was outside the enclosure. He was standing with his arms out, facing over the hills. The moon had withdrawn far into the sky — a distant empty orb that cast neither light nor warmth.

I watched him for a moment. He did not move. I thought he might be chanting, but I heard nothing. I wanted to go to him, like a child to a father, but my limbs were too heavy. I fell again into the abyss of fitful dreams.

I remember tumbling. It was a palpable sense, head over heels, dizzying in its descent.

Far down somewhere I came upon a place. It was not a real place, but it somehow seemed real, because when I arrived there the whole world became completely still, as if before a storm, and the twisting images and turbulent memories suddenly disappeared.

I was standing in a valley. I had never been there before, but I knew I was supposed to wait. I was to wait for a burning orange hawk that would come flying over the hill behind me.

I stood in silence surveying the sky overhead until the brilliant orange bird flashed across my vision at a heavenly speed.
It swooped down upon another brown-and-white hawk that I had not seen before.

I shielded my eyes from the sight, and when I looked up again I saw a majestic multi-colored bird with feathers of many hues. I cannot remember all the colors — I see yellow and red and orange and gold — but its presence was radiant. He dominated the sky and the light shone through his outstretched wings like sunset through stained glass. He seemed oblivious to the other hawks, who were off to the left, toward the hill. They became insignificant dots in the sky while he floated, magnificent, suspended directly above me, between me and the sun.

The dream stayed on, unaffected by time. It was a space I inhabited, like a memory of infinite breadth. But more than that, it didn't seem like my dream. It was as if it were already there, and I had just come upon it, as one comes upon a valley when cresting a hill.

When at last I emerged, I was like a man emerging not from a sleep, but from a trance. I opened my eyes with total clarity and consciousness.

The morning had broken. Thin wisps of purple clouds were fingering across the eastern sky. The dawn birds had begun their chorus and the hills were basking in the growing sun.

Dan was standing at the edge of the graves facing east. An old weathered shack with several junk cars stood off in the distance. Written on it in white paint was, “Wounded Knee is not for sale.”

In the daylight I could see the graves with their crosses and headstones and plastic flowers. Some were covered with small stones that seemed to have been arranged with a purpose. The pit area bordered by the concrete was trampled and worn, no different from the miles of grasslands that spread out around us.

I stood up to get my bearings. Dan was facing into the
morning sun. Fatback was lying by his side with her head on her paws. About a foot from her was the large hide bag Dan had brought up the night before.

The morning breeze was fresh. It hinted of heat. I shielded my eyes from the growing sun and looked again at Dan. He was wearing the same clothes as the night before. It was impossible to know if he had slept or if he had stayed up all night.

He did not turn to face me, but he must have sensed my movement. “Did you watch?” he said, as if no other thought had intervened from the time I had fallen asleep.

I did not feel right speaking loudly from within the fenced enclosure. I pushed open the gate and crossed to where he was standing.

“Yes,” I said. “I think I did.”

“What did you see?”

I told him about the strange quiet hillside and the translucent multi-hued bird. He sucked his lips and mulled it over for a minute. “I think you are ready to write,” he said. He picked up his bag and started walking. I thought perhaps he was beginning some private ritual. But he walked directly through the pillars and started down the hill.

I ran back to the monument and grabbed my bag. Dan was already navigating the rutted gumbo trail that led to the parking area. On the road below traffic had begun to pick up. The sweet smell of morning was everywhere.

I hurried to catch up to him.

“What does it mean, Dan?” I asked.

“It was a good night,” he said.

“I mean, the dream. What does it mean?”

He gave me a wicked grin. “Hell, I don't know. I can't interpret dreams. You've got to find a
wichasha wakan
for that kind of stuff. They don't work cheap. Probably have to trade in your truck.”

T
he wind was blowing warm and dry by the time we got to the bottom of the hill. It was going to be a hot day.

In a nearby pull-off area Indians were setting up open-air stands to sell earrings and dream catchers to the few tourists who might pass this way. In the morning sunlight, the gully where the killings took place seemed benign and full of light. It was almost impossible to imagine that cold winter night with the screams and the slaughter.

Someone over by the earring stands was playing powwow music on a boom box. Dan reached in his bag and fished out a bottle. The sweet whistlings of larksong floated from the rustling grasses. “Want some water?” he said.

I gratefully took a swig and swished it around my mouth. He squatted down and pulled out a cigarette. There was a peace and contentment over the entire land.

I left Dan to his thoughts and walked over to a large wooden sign that described the events of the massacre. It was a long and detailed recounting painted on a large white board and bolted to two utility poles sunk into the earth.

The story seemed sad, but distant. The fleeing Lakota, the winter camp, the soldiers, the attack, the confusion, the dead. It was one more string of words chronicling the tragedy and injustice of American history. People could drive by, read it from their cars, buy a dream catcher, and move on. The Black Hills and Mount Rushmore were only an hour away. There were still narrow-gauge trains and giant water slides to visit — maybe even the re-creation of the shooting of Wild Bill Hickock or the Black Hills Passion Play.

Dan squatted placidly in the middle of the gravel pull-off area. The rising plume of smoke from his cigarette was quickly
grabbed by the morning breeze. Far up on the hill the two pillars with their joining arch stood empty against the sun.

“Seems different in the daylight,” I said, returning to his side.

“Yep,” he answered. “Grass grows over everything.”

In the distance the low sound of a powerful motor cut through the morning heat.

“Right on time,” Dan said as Grover's Buick came nosing over the hill. How they knew what time it was and how they arranged the meeting, I did not know. The rumbling car pulled up beside us and Grover leaned out into the sun. He was freshly washed and cleanshaven. He had on a crisp white T-shirt that looked almost blue in the brilliant morning light. The smell of aftershave wafted across us.

“Want some coffee, Nerburn?” he said. He took a styrofoam convenience store cup off the dashboard. The heat from the coffee had steamed a small circle of fog on the inside of the windshield. “Know you need the stuff.”

I took the cup eagerly and lifted it to my lips. A thick stream of heavy, frothy coffee, dark with flavor, coursed into my mouth.

“Grover!” I said. “This is real. Where did you get it?”

Grover tamped a cigarette on the dashboard and flipped it adroitly up to his lips. “Got connections, Nerburn.”

Dan had wandered over. “Try that stuff, old man,” Grover said, pointing to the styrofoam cup in my hand. Dan took a sip and spit it out in the dirt.

“Tastes like tar,” he said. “Damn hippie junk.”

“That's the stuff Nerburn likes. Capistrano, they call it.”

Dan was still trying to spit the last vestiges out of his mouth. “Where'd you get that crap?” he asked. “They sure as hell don't sell that in Pine Ridge.”

“Made a deal,” Grover answered.

“With the devil?” Dan said.

“No. With the old hippies. Remember the ones in the restaurant?”

“The ones with the green bus?” I asked.

“Yeah. Saw them in Pine Ridge, getting gas.”

Dan was already muttering and shaking his head.

“Smelled some bad shit coming from their bus,” Grover continued. “Thought maybe it was on fire. But when it didn't explode I just figured it was their coffee. So I made a deal with them.”

“You made a deal for that crap?” Dan said. “You're dumber than those Indians that sold Manhattan.”

“I told them you'd tell them about the Great Spirit and give them all handshakes,” Grover answered without cracking a smile. “They should be here any minute.”

Dan snorted in disgust.

“Really, Grover,” I said. “Where'd you get it?”

“That's the truth,” he said. “Would I lie to you?”

He leaned back comfortably into his seat and blew smoke rings toward the rearview mirror. No matter what Dan or I said to him, he would not say another word.

T
he trip back took almost two days. Grover drove steadily but leisurely. He never once left the road or even suggested it; the “little trip” had ended when we got to Wounded Knee and whatever mysterious destination had claimed Grover for the night Dan and I had spent on the hill.

Grover had tried hard to convince Dan that we should go on to Mount Rushmore, but Dan would have none of it. “Those damn heads are the worst thing that the white man ever did,” he snapped. “Blowing up the sacred mountains to put a bunch of white faces on them.” He carried on at some length about how Indians should be allowed to sell tacos on the altars at white churches in exchange for what had been done to the Black Hills,
and threatened to die right in the Mount Rushmore parking lot if we made him go there, so Grover eventually gave up the idea and headed for home.

We managed to shower and wash at a public campground in a little farm town somewhere off the highway. That took some of the edge off the cheap cologne that Grover had splashed all over himself during the mystery night in Pine Ridge. He never volunteered any more information about that night, and Dan never asked.

We drove in contented silence through the late summer heat. Fatback slept most of the way with her head on my lap. The lyrical roll of the landscape reduced me once again to reverie. The time and the miles passed quickly.

Late on the second morning, Grover turned off the main highway onto the road to the reservation. Fatback became more alert and agitated. She sensed she was close to home.