Dakota Dream (10 page)

“When does this league start?” I asked.

“The second week of June. What do you say? You ever play the game?” I wondered why she was putting on the baseball cap.

I shrugged. “I'm not a jock or anything, but I've played a little baseball in my time. This will be wholesome, right? This will be good for me.”

“Don't be negative. I can vouch for Nolan, and I think you might enjoy it.”

“I'm not being negative. I'll think about it.”

“Good. That's the spirit. Here, put this on and we'll see what you've got.” She was handing me the fielder's glove.

“We're going to play baseball? Now?”

“And why not? Didn't I put my own son through six years of organized baseball?”

The next thing I knew, Barb and I were about fifty feet apart in her backyard, with her in front of a toolshed and me beside a birdbath. She was telling me to “burn 'em in,” as she put it.

I threw her a few, but I almost started laughing, it was so wholesale comical. She had the baseball cap on backward, the way catchers do, and her catcher's mitt, which looked like a model from about 1900, had about as much shape as a throw pillow. It didn't have any pocket in it at all.

That wasn't even half as funny as this steady stream of lingo coming out of her mouth: “Whatta ya say, you 'n' me, babe, rock 'n' fire, whatta ya say.” I burned 'em in for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. I don't think she caught a single pitch I threw; every ball bounced off her pillow mitt the way it would if you threw it against a mattress.

At least none of the pitches hit her in the head, and I had to give her one thing: She was a good sport. When we were done, she said I had potential.

One day not too long after that, Mrs. Bluefish asked me to stay after class. I knew she had to okay your outline before you could go ahead and write your actual book report, so I figured it had something to do with that.

My report was on the Stone Boy legend. The Stone Boy legend, which is one of the most important Dakota myths, goes basically like this: A young woman was living with her brothers, who kept going out to hunt, but not returning. Before long, the young woman found herself living alone.

One day when the young woman was fetching water, she accidently swallowed a pebble, which made her pregnant. Of course this was a miracle. She gave birth at last to a boy whose flesh was made of stone. She knew he was destined to be a great hero, but she didn't know how or when.

When Stone Boy became a young man, he went on a long hunting trip. He came to this grim valley ruled by
Iya
, the Evil One. Stone Boy realized that
Iya
was holding his uncles and ancestors captive in semideath.

To free his ancestors, he had to escape a shower of boulders that
Iya
poured on him, and he had to fight the thundering herds of the Buffalo People that
Iya
sent. The Evil One even took the form of a gigantic tree, whose limbs were all serpents. Stone Boy used a shield and spear to hack away on the serpents, but there were too many, and they kept regenerating.

Each time he fought with the serpent tree, he ended up limping back to the tipi of Old Woman, who nursed his wounds and tried to advise him.

Anyway, Mrs. Bluefish was looking over my outline. She asked, “Did the Stone Boy figure free his ancestors?”

“He freed them all,” I told her. “That was his heroic mission.”

“How did he accomplish it?”

“That's the part I'm not sure about. The legend is told in different ways, and some of the tellings aren't complete. That's what I wanted to do in the book report—sort of combine the different versions and see if I can come up with a common denominator.”

“That's what I need to discuss with you,” said Mrs. Bluefish. She was twirling her glasses, which she could do because they were held around her neck by a small chain. “Your assignment is to report on one book, not on portions of five or six different books.”

I figured this was going to be the point where she disqualified my report, but she said, “I think I might let you go ahead with this project. Strictly speaking, it doesn't fulfill the assignment I gave you, but I think you deserve some credit for the work you've put in on this.”

I suppose I would have felt a little relief, but I didn't get the chance. The next thing I knew, Mrs. Bluefish had shifted into this real stern mode. She clamped her glasses down on her nose and stood up. “There is one thing I will not tolerate, however, and that is a troublemaker. What does this mean at the bottom?” she asked.

Since I couldn't see the paper, I didn't know what she was talking about.

She read it to me: “It says, ‘Charly Black Crow, AKA Floyd Rayfield.' What's the meaning of this?”

“Charly Black Crow is my chosen Sioux name,” I said.

“Why do you have a chosen Sioux name? I want to know what kind of game is going on here.”

“It's not a game. I know that it's my destiny to become an Indian, so I chose an appropriate name.”

“What did you say?”

I repeated it: “I like to use my new name because I know it's my destiny to become an Indian. I had a vision that made it clear to me.”

This got Mrs. Bluefish very uptight. She put the outline down on her desk. She clapped her hands together one time, then walked over to me in this real brisk way. She said, “You can't
become
an Indian, Floyd, you have to be
born
an Indian. If this is your idea of a joke, I suggest you think again, because I simply will not tolerate a troublemaker.”

I'm used to being put down because of my belief in my destiny, but I was a little bit amazed at how excited she got. I didn't want to cause her any cardiac arrest. I was about to point out to her that I didn't fit the profile of a troublemaker, but I didn't have the energy. I asked her if I could go now so I wouldn't be late to P.E.

I guess she was all sputtered out. She said go ahead.

It didn't take long for Nicky to turn into your basic clinging vine. He started following me around like a puppy. He figured since we did time together, and since we were roommates and all, we should be friends.

We were on our way home from school one day and he said to me, “Look at this, Charly Black Crow.” He started calling me Charly Black Crow after I explained to him that it was my Indian name, and my preferred name.

What he was showing me was this book on baseball lore he'd checked out of the library. He opened the book to a chapter on tricks pitchers have used throughout history to doctor the baseball. It showed all these devices used by pitchers to cut the ball, or gouge it, or scrape it, such as nails, nail files, razor blades, cheese graters, sandpaper, thumbtacks, and so forth. You couldn't use a whole cheese grater, of course, you had to use just a piece of one, something small enough that you could hide it in your mitt. The idea of cutting the ball was to make it sink when you threw it. The book had a lot of photographs of these items and how they could be hidden in a baseball glove.

Nicky showed me all of these photographs and the idiotic grin spread across his face. He said, “This is what gives you the extra edge.”

What he knew was, I had agreed to play in the baseball league. I'd even given it a little thought and decided I would be a pitcher. The way baseball is played, the pitcher is the hub of the game, and everything revolves around him. The rest of the players mostly stand around bored, and get real hot in the sun, and talk to their friends, who are maybe in the game, and maybe not. Also, I happened to know that two of baseball's greatest pitchers, Chief Bender and Allie Reynolds, were Indians. That's in addition to the great Jim Thorpe, who played professional baseball but was better known for being the greatest all-around athlete in history.

I gave Nicky back his baseball book. It was just another case of his trying to make an impression by sucking up. I told him I was not all that interested in getting the extra edge, and furthermore it was not the Indian way to use illegal deception.

It didn't faze him. He just shifted gears. He said, “Do me a favor, Charly Black Crow. Come over to my mother's place, I've got something to show you that's really prime.”

I didn't know what he had in mind, and I didn't really want to go to his house, but he kept pestering me about it until I agreed. Besides, I was in no particular hurry to get back to Gates House.

The truth is, going to his place really funked me out. His mother's apartment was in this run-down brick building in the sleazy part of downtown. There was an old hotel across the street, and a bar, and on another corner was a cut-rate twenty-four-hour gas station.

We had to climb a lot of stairs, because the apartment was on the third floor. The hallways were dark, there wasn't any carpeting, and the wallpaper was all peeling and water-stained.

Nicky's brother Earl was passed out in the living room on a bed that folded down out of the wall. Earl was wearing a T-shirt and Jockey underpants.

“This is usually my bed when I'm at home,” said Nicky. “Earl is just home for a little while. He works for the carnival.”

Nicky was shaking Earl by the shoulders, but it was a waste of time, because Earl was out cold. I looked around the living room. There was a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the floor and several empty beer cans. There was a black banana peel with about half the banana still inside it, on the floor under the corner of the bed. Also a half-eaten sandwich right beside it, which was so old it looked like the bread had the texture of an asphalt shingle.

“I guess he's out like a light,” said Nicky. “Sometimes when he gets drunk and passes out, there's no way you can wake him up.”

“Where's your mother?” I said.

“She's got a second job now. She's workin' at Pizza Hut, three-thirty to eight-thirty. Right now she's just washin' dishes, but they're gonna move her up to makin' pizzas.”

That was the first time I ever felt sorry for Nicky. I never did spend any time with my family or relatives in a regular house, but maybe I was better off for it. Looking at this hairball place and realizing Nicky was hung out more or less permanently between it and Gates House, I started feeling sorry for him.

It wasn't something I wanted to dwell on. “What did you want to show me?” I said.

He took me out through the kitchen door, which went out onto the landing of the fire escape. And there it was.

It was an old Kawasaki KZ-400 street bike. It could hardly fit on the landing. “How did you get it up here?” I asked him.

“There's a freight elevator. The manager let me 'n' Earl use it.”

The bike was yellow, but you could hardly tell through all the dirt and grease. The chrome had a lot of rust, and the headlight was busted. The front fender was gone, and there were spokes missing out of both wheels.

“This bike is mine.” said Nicky. “Earl gave it to me to keep. It's all mine.”

I took my finger and wiped some of the smear off the speedometer—42, 498 miles. If it was accurate. The front tire had highway tread, but the back was knobby tread like you'd find on a dirt bike. “What year is it?” I asked.

“It's a '74. What do you think of it?”

“It may have possibilities,” I mumbled. Nicky knew that I had some experience working on engines, so I guess he wanted me to say something encouraging. “Does it run?”

“Not right now, but Earl says all it needs is a little work.”

That was all I needed to hear at the moment. I told Nicky I thought we'd better get back to Gates House. He didn't want to, but then I pointed out Mrs. Grice could put us both on pro if we were later than four-thirty. He said okay, but he wanted me to stay long enough to have a Pepsi.

I sat down at the kitchen table while he scrounged around in the refrigerator. There were dirty dishes stacked all over the table, and dried food was stuck on its surface.

It turned out there wasn't any Pepsi, so he poured me some grape Hi-C. The glass he gave me was filthy. It reminded me of the ones you see the bartenders use in Westerns, where they have to blow the dust out before they pour the whiskey.

“I've been thinking,” said Nicky. “I've got a bike now, right? What if we both had a bike?”

“I don't have a bike, and I don't have any plans to get one.”

“But what if we did? Let's say we both had a bike, and then in the fall, when we're old enough, we get our licenses, and then we hit the road.”

“Why don't you get real?”

“Just the two of us, you and me on the open road. We go all the way to Florida and lay around on sandy beaches, with lots of chicks in bikinis running around. If we needed any money, Earl could help us get a little carnival work.”

I decided I couldn't stand anymore. “I'm going back,” I said. “You can come with me or you can stay.”

Naturally, he came with me. I was walking fast, but he was keeping up. He asked me what I thought the bike needed to get in running condition.

“I don't know, you'd have to get it in a shop somewhere to really check it out.”

“Barb said I could work on it in her garage if I could get it over there.”

“She did?” It gave me a little jolt hearing this, but then I figured, how likely was it that the bike would ever find its way to Barb's garage?

“I'll talk to Earl,” said Nicky. “Maybe he'll help me get it over there.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Then maybe sometime you 'n' me can try and get it to run.”

“Maybe.” This conversation didn't do too much for me because from what I could tell, Nicky didn't have much know-how when it came to engines.

Then he said, “What kind of a social worker would let you use their garage to work on your bike?”

“One that doesn't have a clue,” I said.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“She's only got four clients now, she can do what she wants. It's like a game. Let the system grind her for a while.”