Neither Wolf nor Dog (5 page)

M
orning dawned with a wet and heavy air. Mosquitoes buzzed against the screen and a foggy haze rose from the fields outside the motel window. Somewhere nearby a semi sat idling with its refrigeration unit on. The low diesel rumble pulsed and droned against the motel wall.

The enigmatic nature of the old man's response had set me on edge. It was a long drive and an expensive trip to come out and visit him. I wanted some greater sense of purpose out of these encounters — a thank-you, a level of excitement and anticipation, anything. But all I was getting were nods and grunts and people coming and going with no discernible purpose.

“Stay calm,” I told myself. I remembered what a man I respected, a tribal leader of the local Ojibwe, had said when asked about Indian time. “You know what Indian time means?” he had responded in a session with local college students. “It means, ‘When I'm damn good and ready.'”

The old man was operating on Indian time. I was still operating on a clock and a paycheck.

I showered quickly and pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt. I had driven out in my sandals, but they seemed embarrassingly citified. I took the old pair of workboots out of my duffel bag and slipped them on over some grey cotton socks. I took a quick glance in the mirror. With my blond hair and rapidly greying beard, I guess I could easily be seen as looking like Grizzly Adams to an old Indian. There were worse things they could have called me.

The old man was waiting when I arrived. Once again, his granddaughter was cooking him breakfast. I began to wonder if this was a daily ritual, and where she emerged from every morning. She was frying smoky strips of bacon on an old cast-iron griddle, then pouring the bacon grease into a big pot of oatmeal.

“You hungry, Nerburn?” she asked, stirring the grease into the oatmeal with a large metal spoon. Her familiarity took me aback, almost as much as the breakfast she was concocting.

“A couple of strips of bacon and a cup of coffee would be great,” I said. I remembered her brew; it had at least shown some promise. It was more twigs and less tire than the old man's. And I was willing to endure anything to avoid the mephitic gruel she was brewing up on the stove.

The old man tapped the table with his arthritic finger. “Did you bring the tobacco?”

I nodded. “I had it along last night, but it didn't seem like the right time to give it to you.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. His granddaughter glanced over at me out of the corner of her eye, but turned her gaze away when I saw her looking.

Soon another car came rumbling up the driveway. Fatback raced out from her hollow and started barking.

“Aw, shut the hell up,” came a voice from outside. Three car doors slammed and I heard footsteps clomping up the wooden steps. The screen door opened and the three card players from the previous night came in. They nodded to me, and pulled up chairs. One of them wandered over to the old man's granddaughter and put his arm around her. “You can cook my bacon anytime,” he cackled. Wenonah gave him a playful push. “You got no bacon left to cook, Grover,” she said. The others roared with laughter.

Grover came over and sat down at the table. I had not paid much attention to him the night before, except to notice that he was the one who had seemed to take offense at what I had written. He was probably in his late fifties and had the wiry body of a one-time athlete or street tough. He wore a pair of jeans, cowboy boots, and a sparkling white T-shirt that looked as if it had just come from a laundry. The sleeves had been carefully rolled up to reveal an eagle tattoo on his right bicep. He wore his hair in a crewcut that was the color of cigarette ash. I had the distinct sense that he had been in the Navy once; he had the rolling gait and personal carriage of a sailor.

Wenonah brought me the bacon and a tin cup full of coffee. “Treating this white boy pretty good, Wenonah,” Grover said.

“He's not an old goat like you.”

Grover bleated several times and let out a hearty laugh.

“I suppose you want to eat, too,” she said to the men.

“Nerburn here's got something for you,” the old man interrupted. He glanced at me and gestured with his eyes toward my pocket. I fumbled quickly and pulled out the tobacco.

“Here,” I said, offering it to Grover. “Mr. . . .” I didn't know how to refer to the old man. I knew his name was Dan, but that seemed too intimate. I settled for avoidance. “I was asked to come out here to help with this book. I consider it
a great honor and I want to do it right. I would consider it a great honor if you would help me, too.”

The men sat silent, impassive. No one said anything for what seemed like minutes. The whole mood in the room had changed. Finally, Grover took the packet of Prince Albert. “If Dan wants my help I will give it.” The others nodded too. Wenonah kept her back to us and said nothing.

Grover had taken on a look of seriousness. He stared at the floor as if in contemplation. Then he got up and went out the front door.

The old man mopped at the dregs of his oatmeal with a piece of limp toast. The other two men sat on a torn floral couch against the wall. The silence seemed to bother no one but me.

Grover said something through the screen door that I did not understand. The old man answered him in the same language, then got up and went outdoors. Wenonah dropped two pieces of toast onto my plate. “You'd better eat,” she said quietly.

One of the men on the couch got up and turned on the television. An insistent announcer's voice was describing the benefits of some dishwashing detergent. Outside the screen door I could hear Grover and the old man talking in Lakota. I could tell nothing about the nature of the conversation from the tone of their voices.

The screen door slammed abruptly behind me. The old man came over to the table and gestured me outside with a turn of his head.

“Grover thinks it's too white,” he said. “The way you wrote it.”

I looked at him, puzzled. “They're your words. I just scrubbed them up a little.”

He gestured me forward with that strange pawing motion I had noticed before. “Come on out.”

Grover was sitting on the stoop with his elbows on his knees. His hands were cupped around a cigarette to keep it from burning too fast in the wind. He was staring straight ahead, away from me.

“Something ain't right,” he said, still looking straight ahead.

My cheeks flushed a bit. “You mean it sounds wrong?”

“Naw, not exactly. It sounds alright. But it just don't sound real. It sounds too much like movie Indians.”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

Grover shifted on the stoop. He looked over at the old man. “You remember that New York woman?”

Dan broke into a loud laugh. “I sure as hell do. You damn near scared her to death with all that coughing of yours.”

“Tell Nerburn the story.” Again, their presumed familiarity with me took me aback.

Dan sat down on an old car seat that was propped up next to the stoop.

“There was a woman that came out from New York one time. She was writing a movie about some white man who did something good for the Indians — I don't remember his name. She wanted to talk to Indians so she could see how we talked.

“She was all dressed up in new jeans and cowboy boots and had a bandana around her neck. She looked like she was going on a safari. I think her clothes cost more than my car. It was just funny to see her. She had to look at everything before she sat down or walked or anything. She was more worried about getting dirty than any-thing else.

“A couple of us said we'd talk to her. I guess we thought maybe we might make a few bucks or something. Besides, we wanted to know what she was all about. You know, there's a lot of people coming looking for Indians since that ‘Dances with Wolves' movie.

“Anyway, I had some books with me. I had one of your ‘Red
Road' books and some other books that tribes have done where people tell stories. I thought maybe they would help her.

“She tried to ask us questions, but I could see that the other fellows didn't like her. So they didn't say anything. They just sat there and watched her get nervous. It was pretty funny.

“I let her read those books I had. She looked at them real quick. Then she said that they weren't any help because the people sounded ‘flat and uninteresting.' That's what she said. I remember those words. She said that they sounded ‘flat and uninteresting.'

“Those were real people's voices written down. But they weren't good enough for her. They didn't sound like how she wanted Indians to sound. She didn't give a damn how Indians really sound. She just wanted to have us sound the way she thought we should sound.

“I told her maybe there were some Indians in Greenwich Village who sounded better. She didn't know if I was serious or not, so I kept on telling her how maybe New York Indians sounded better because they had been part of that Iroquois Confederation and had been a lot more used to giving speeches.

“She wrote it all down and went away. I think she was really glad to go. Grover here kept clearing his throat all the time and she kept thinking maybe he was going to spit or something. The more nervous she got the more he cleared his throat. Got so rattly in there I thought he was going to drown. I damn near split in half trying to keep from laughing.”

Grover was nodding his head silently. His cigarette ash was almost an inch long. “That's the way it is, Nerburn,” he said. “White people don't want real Indians, they want storybook Indians.”

I was embarrassed and hurt. “I hope I didn't make . . .” I paused again, confronted by the need to use his name.

But the old man came to my rescue. “Hell, call me whatever
you want. My name's Dan, but lots of people just call me the old man, or grandpa. I don't care.”

“Okay,” I continued, turning to him. “I hope I didn't make you sound like a storybook Indian. But you told me to make you sound like you went to Haskell.”

The old man smiled. He wanted me to know that what I had done was fine. But Grover still had something on his mind.

“Here's the problem,” Grover said, directing his attention toward me. “That thing you wrote was okay. . .”

“I think it's pretty damn good,” Dan interrupted.

“Yeah, it is,” Grover said. “It's too damn good. You should send it to that New York woman.”

I was watching the old man closely. Even with my own minimal involvement I was feeling attacked and wanted to defend what I thought was a beautiful passage. But the old man just sat back with a bemused look on his face and drew heavily on his cigarette.

“Here's what I think,” Grover continued. “That speech is good. But it's dangerous as hell.”

“Dangerous?” I said.

“Yeah. Let me ask you something. What am I doing?”

“You mean, what are you trying to tell me?”

He shook his head like a frustrated school teacher. “No, no. I mean, what am I doing? What am I doing right now?” He held his cigarette toward me, a clue for the slow-witted.

“You're smoking a cigarette.”

“Right. Now, what's this cigarette made out of?”

“Tobacco.”

“Okay. You know how we talk about tobacco being sacred, right? You just gave me tobacco, right? So, is this cigarette sacred?”

Dan was grinning. He sensed where Grover was going. I was completely confused.

“I don't know,” I said.

Grover took the short white butt from his mouth and crushed it theatrically on the stoop. “Nope. It's just a casual smoke.” He reached into his breast pocket and took out the packet of Prince Albert I had given him. “Now, this is sacred, because you gave it to me sacred. Do you follow me?”

I smiled weakly. He continued. “Sometimes things are sacred and sometimes they're not. It's not sacred when the guy at the store hands me a pack of cigarettes because he's just handing me a pack of cigarettes. Do you see? But when you hand me that tobacco, you're making it sacred because you're offering it to me.”

“Okay,” I said. The purpose of the discussion still eluded me.

“But it's still tobacco, am I right?”

“Yes,” I said, thankful for a question to which I knew the answer.

“It's the same with Indians,” Grover stated, as if the connection were obvious. “Sometimes we're sacred, sometimes we're not. But we're always Indians. If you write only the sacred stuff, it's like that New York woman. Just write it all. The old man will try to trick you, but you've got to be smart.”

Dan was enjoying himself immensely. He puffed on his cigarette and emitted a series of little “heh, heh's” as Grover talked.

“So what are you saying?” I asked, truly confused.

“Look over here,” Grover directed. “Look at old Fatback there. Watch her close.”

Fatback was snuffling in the brown fieldgrass. She sneezed several times, yawned, scratched herself, urinated on a bush, dug violently on a patch of dirt, then turned around several times and laid down.

“What did you see?” Grover asked.

I told him.

“Did it all make sense?”

“It was all dog stuff.”

“But if you were writing a story about dogs, you'd put all that in.”

“Sure. As much as was necessary.”

“Well, you're writing a story about Indians. But you're writing like a white guy. You want everything all neat. Put it all in. Just write it the way it is.”

I turned to Dan. He was digging at the ground with a stick. Grover spoke again. He wanted to emphasize his point. “This old man's seen a lot. You ought to write everything, not just like speeches.”

I had a sense of what he was driving at. But I was beginning to get angry and frustrated. I had done what the old man had asked, and I had done it well. I had done it with no promise of reward and not even a thank-you. Dan had seemed satisfied. But now he was sitting silent, letting Grover tell me it was all wrong. I was beginning to feel like I had felt so many times before working with Indians. Nothing you ever did was enough. Nothing was ever acknowledged. You just worked and worked until someone perceived some slight or some wrong in what you did, then you were shown the door. A burr of indignation rose up inside me. This time I was not going to be shown the door. If the time came, I was going to walk through it myself.