Growing Up Native American (36 page)

So I don't leave with a wave to the stands. The first toss is warm-up, practice. I grab the rope, throw my arms around her neck and swing aboard. She stiffens, fuses her joints. The broad muscles of her shoulders turn steel under my gripping legs.

And bang! We're off again. This time instead of up and down she bolts straight ahead. The wind whips my braid, blows dust into my eyes till I have to squint them shut. She runs one fast circle around the pen, her body in a low crouch. She's thinking.

When you don't know what to expect, you hang on in every
way you can. I clasp the rope in one hand, her mane in the other. I dig my heels into the hollows behind the place where her forelegs join her ribs. I lean into her neck, and watch the ground rush by on either side of her ears.

Without warning she slows, moves close to the rough plank fence where the Brahmas are milling, and shifts her weight. She stops on a dime and, still clutching her with every part of me, I roll to the left. I'm pinned between Babe and the boards, with my back against the wall. My breath is squeezed out and there's no way I can protect my head, lolling above the pen. Then, without once lightening on the weight she presses against me, Babe walks forward as if to clean herself of me, as if I'm mud on the bottom of a boot.

It works. The next thing I know I'm on the ground again, Foxy's jean jacket ripped and torn across the shoulder seam, the air rushing back into my lungs, tears smeared on my cheeks. My ribs hurt, and behind me the bulls knock on the fence with their horns.

And before me is Babe, her lips drawn over her yellow teeth, her head low and swinging back and forth, her legs planted far apart. She looks astonished, at herself or me I can't tell.

As I stand she begins to retreat, one foot at a time. For an instant, I hear the crowd again, but I can't bother with them. I have Babe in my bead, our eyes in a blinding fix. Our brains lock, and she stops while I grab her mane and hook a leg over her back. Before I'm balanced, she rears. Her front legs climb the air, and I dangle along her back, suspended. When at last she drops, I'm low on her flank, our hips one on top of the other, my body fitted into her length. She rears again, and again there is air between us, yet I hang on. I smell her sweat, feel the warmth of her skin beneath my face and hands. There is nothing in the world but her and I think I can stay up forever.

When she kicks out with her hind legs, though, I slide over her neck, down her long head, and slam into the ground. I concede for the second time today. I'm so winded I can't move, stupid as I must look, my face in the dirt, my ass in the air, and my legs folded beneath me. When my ears stop ringing I hear the loudspeaker again.

“…give this kid a hand, folks. He may not be much of a
rider but he ain't no quitter! Looks like he damn well wore out that wild mare too, even if he didn't bust her.”

There's real clapping this time, a few whistles, but I get strength more from my curiosity about the last thing he said. I open one eye and the world is upside down, but that isn't the strangest thing. Not ten feet from me, sitting like a big dog and nodding her head, slumps Babe. She looks as bad as I feel, and as it turns out, we both need a hand from the clowns in getting out of the ring.

 

Some of Mom's navy boyfriends in Seattle used to talk about their sea legs and I never knew what they meant. They tried to explain how once you became used to the roll of waves, walking on dry land was never the same again. It felt lifeless.

Now I catch on. I'm back from throwing up behind the pens. I've rinsed the dirt from my face and dusted off my pants and jacket and the black hat someone handed to me as I limped out of the corral. Wild horse riding is the next-to-last event in the rodeo. As I lean back against the announcer's stand, I keep shifting my legs and waiting for something to happen under my feet. My muscles haven't yet set into the hard, stiff ache that lies ahead, but all through me I feel a ticking that hasn't run down.

There's a part of me that wants to submerge and disappear. Everybody that passes has to say something they think is funny about my ride, and I have to laugh at myself with them or be a bad sport. But there's another part of me that would climb back on Babe in a flash, no waiting, if that horse would appear in front of me. People tell me how lucky I am that I didn't break my neck or my back, or at least bust a shoulder, I fell so hard, but when I was riding I was mindless and beyond hurt. I was connected to a power I never knew existed, and without it I'm unplugged. On Babe, I would have burned out my circuits rather than choose safety. Up there, my only worry was gravity.

But on earth, my troubles haven't gone away. I stand, puzzling out what to do next, while the MC reads out the list of winners: Best bull ride. Longest saddle bronc. Fastest hogtie. I can't return to Bearpaw Lake with Sky and Evelyn. At the end
of the season, when I would have no choice but to move along, I wouldn't be any closer to knowing what to do than I am now. Already Ellen and Andy and John, even Dave, are as removed and strange, as ancient history, as kids at my schools in Seattle. The ride on Babe is a boundary I can't recross, and I'm stuck on this side for better or worse.

Evelyn and Sky are different because they're here, because they brought me, because even though she doesn't know it, Evelyn got me on that horse and kept putting me back, because Sky closed the Conoco and gave up his Christmas money without asking any questions. But I can't live in the trailer with them any longer. My parents have returned from Switzerland.

Brahma riding. Bareback bronc. The fear comes back.

Annabelle pushes through the crowd and walks to face me. She carries two red paper Coke cups and hands one over. Her dark-rimmed eyes are excited.

“I wouldn't have believed it. I don't believe it,” she says. “You're out of your mind. You're a maniac.”

This is a compliment from Annabelle. I take a long pull on my Coke and discover it's beer.

“Do they know you're a girl?” Annabelle whispers. “You're insane.”

The MC is about to announce the All-Around, the award for the cowboy who has done the best at the most events. It's what everybody waits to hear, and the crowd noise simmers down.

“Before the last prize,” he says, “the judges have voted an unscheduled citation, one that's only given on rare occasions.”

He holds up something shiny and silver that gathers light from the late afternoon sun and reflects it back in a bright beam.

“It's engraved special,” he goes on. “I wish you folks could see it. This buckle shows a bronc and a rider throwed in the air, with genuine coral and jet inlay. One hundred percent nickel silver plate.”

I see Evelyn and Sky in the bleachers, straining to hear. Their hands shade their eyes against the afternoon glare, but I'm standing under the judges' box and have my borrowed hat pulled low in front of my face.

“So come on, folks, and give a real Havre hand for the roughest, toughest,
clumsiest
cowboy we've seen around here in many
a moon. It gives me genuine pleasure to award the hard-luck buckle, for the amazing feat of being bucked off the same horse three times in less than a minute, to a home-grown Indian boy, number thirty-seven, Kennedy ‘Foxy' Cree!”

Some people let out yells and war whoops, and everybody starts pounding me on the back and shoving me forward. Kennedy Cree is Foxy's real name, and this minute it's mine too. Annabelle gives a sharp piercing whistle through her fingers and stomps her blue boot in the sawdust. I fill my lungs with stockyard air. There's no escape.

So I run the steps and reach to shake the MC's hand. He looks close at me this time, then closer. He realizes I'm no cowboy. I pry the buckle from him anyway and hold it to my right and left for the stands to see. Behind me there are surprised voices talking to each other and when I look down at the other winners assembled nearest to the grandstand I see their eyes are wide too. It's no use pretending. I knock off my hat, undo the rubber band, comb with my fingers, and shake out my braid. With my free hand I unsnap the ruined jacket and shrug it from my shoulders. I thrust out my chest.

At first there's silence. Everyone gapes at me and then at each other and then at me again. The quiet hangs like a Seattle fog as we stand there, facing off in the long afternoon light. And finally from far away, clear and proud, Evelyn shouts: “Rayona!” Annabelle whistles again, loud as a siren. And when I raise the silver buckle high above my head, the rest of the crowd joins in.

W
hen you're four years old, the world seems to be a place of infinite possibilities. And death is something that happens only to flickering people within the make-believe edges of a movie screen
.

In this chapter from a novel in progress, Eric Gansworth tells the story of how one young Native American boy learned about death on a summer afternoon. Told with great humor and subtlety, “The Ballad of Plastic Fred” works to explode the stereotype of the wooden—or in this case plastic—Indian, devoid of human feelings. Gansworth shows the effect that stereotypes still have on the lives of Native American people today
.

Eric L. Gansworth (Onondaga) was born in 1965 and raised on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in western New York. He holds a bachelor's degree and master's degree from the State University College at Buffalo. He currently teaches at Niagara County Community College and the State University College at Buffalo. He is an artist as well as a writer, and several of his paintings have been exhibited in a Native American Art Exhibition at Niagara County Community College Gallery
.

 

W
E WERE GOING DOWN TO THE CORNER STORE ON THE DAY I
learned about death. My sister had just recently gotten her license. Or maybe she hadn't yet. I can't remember. You didn't need a license to drive on the reservation, and the only store on the res was the one we were going to. It would've been just as easy to walk there, since it was only on the end of our road.
But Kay was just beginning to drive, and that made everything exciting. I was only four, and excitement was pretty cheap in those days.

It was summertime, June or July, I think. I knew that I was going to be heading off to school for the first time very shortly. My cousin Innis, who was two years older than me, had already been to school for a while. A lot of new kids had been playing with him since he started school. They would come over and visit, and he would be gone for long periods of time, presumably visiting with them. He lived next door. We used to play together all the time, but not so much anymore. I was left hanging around with his brother Horace, but nobody called him Horace, except for his mom when she was mad. Everyone else called him Ace. Ace was prone to random bursts of violence, and though he was younger than me, he was much larger. I didn't hang around with him without some big person to protect me. Cowardly, but safe.

That morning Innis had actually been home. We had been playing in the mountain. The mountain was this mound of dirt that had been dug out for my aunt's patio, which had never actually gotten built beyond the cinder block foundation. The mountain was on the patch of land between our two houses. It was small, I guess, but to us it seemed like another whole world. We had dug a hole into one of the interior folds of the mountain for later use as a cave for the six-inch plastic Indian figures we all played with. We could never quite figure out who those Indians were. They were all peach-colored and they didn't really look like anyone from our reservation. There was some speculation from my older cousins, those in the fourth or fifth grade, that one of those figures might be of Gary Lou's older brother, who had gone to Hollywood to be a star. We had seen him in some movies on TV, but I could never recognize him. He was killed by the cavalry before he ever got any close-ups. I don't really think anyone else recognized him either, but they all wanted him to be a star so bad that they made themselves see him in “that wild horde of savages.”

So one of the figure's names was always Fred, as that was our star's name. It was always the one who was in a running position, crouched with one leg up. His mouth was open wide, in
either a war cry or a really big yawn. In the hand that was in front of him, he carried a hatchet, a tomahawk, and he had two feathers sticking out of his hair in the back. All he wore was a loincloth, but when we looked underneath, to the area that wasn't covered, there was nothing there. He was a warrior without any balls. It didn't make sense to us, because we knew Fred had balls. After all, he went to Hollywood to become a star.

But it wasn't really him up there, anyway. Even in the ending credits, we couldn't find his name in the “Indian savages” list. We found out from his mother that he had changed his name. She had married a white man, who had a distinctly white last name. For Hollywood, Fred Howkowski had become Frederick Eagle Cry. Frederick Eagle Cry died daily on some TV somewhere, but Fred Howkowski lived on in California, occasionally sending his mother picture postcards of palm trees and big houses that described to her his most recent death so she could tell us and we'd all go to the movies so we could play Spot the Savage on bargain night.

Plastic Fred was getting a little beat. This was the figure everyone always wanted, and he usually died the most dramatic deaths of all the figures we had. He had to be rejuvenated every so often, and the old Fred would be retired to our version of the ancient burial ground. We would give the Freds to one of Innis's older brothers, Ely, who either used them for target practice, or tied them to firecrackers, or put lighter fluid to them, or in some other way creatively mutilated them. When he was done with them, he would give us back the twisted and blackened plastic which hardly resembled a figure anymore, and we would give them to Ace. It was his job to set them strategically around the mountain for their best dramatic potential. He had quite a knack with that sort of arrangement.

This Fred's days with us were numbered. He was covered with pockmarks from our discovery that we could throw darts at him and that if we were lucky, the darts would stick as he toppled from his ledge and remain stuck as he landed, which was a really cool-looking death. This Fred also had a large hardened glob of Testors model glue on the back of his head with a little sharp spine poking out. We had found a feather that
had fallen off of this sparrow that one of our cats had killed and we decided to put it on Fred. Innis stole one of his dad's saws and we hacked the plastic feathers off of the back of Fred's head and glued on the real one with the model glue. The feather lasted about four or five days and then it finally broke off and all we were left with was the mound of glue and the feather's spine. How do birds keep them so long, anyhow?

So it was still pretty early in the morning, probably around eight-thirty or nine, though I hadn't been able to tell time all that well yet. The sun was hot, but not unpleasantly so. We had shoved all the finely sifted dirt we had dug out for the cave. We had shoved it all together to create a small very soft hill in the inner valley of the mountain, and now that the sun had reached over the mountain's edge, the hill was warm. I took my sandals off and patted my toes in the dirt, leaving small circular prints. Innis did the same, but he hadn't had to take his shoes off. He never wore any in the summer. We wrestled toes with each other in the heated earth, stirring up small clouds of dust, which swirled in the sunlight.

We did this for a while. I asked him if Ace were up yet. Just as I asked it, I heard their screen door slam. I waited and listened for the splash that meant it had just been their mother throwing out some dirty wash water, but the sound never came. Ace was coming. He jumped down next to me and stuck his feet in with ours, sneakers and all. Ace had no aversion to shoes in the summertime.

Ace asked me where the Indians were. I told him that they were in the house. He was a little irate over this; he wanted to play right then. Innis said that he'd pee on him if he didn't behave, and this calmed the younger brother down instantly. I guessed that Innis had made good on this threat at some time in the past, though I had nothing to substantiate this. I also told him that we didn't want the dogs to get them and chew them up, which is what would happen if we left them unattended. To pass time, we planned for our impending departure from the mountain.

We were waiting for my sister to get up. She had said the night before that if Mom would give her the keys she would drive us down to Jugg's store to get a new Plastic Fred. Maybe
we'd get a bottle of pop too. There was always pop in the fridge, but it wasn't the same as drinking pop while sitting on one of Jugg's high stools that surrounded his lunch counter. People in high school seem to really love sleeping in late.

Kay finally came out of the door. We were pretending not to notice but had been watching the door all morning. She leaned against the porch railing for a minute, adjusting her sandals to conform against her heels. She went to the car and hopped in. I grabbed my sandals as the others ran to line up at the edge of the driveway. After some moments of adjusting the various settings of the car, Kay started it and jerkily drove to the place my cousins were standing, just as I joined them. We all piled in, Innis getting to sit in the front seat since he was older. He turned on the radio and began spinning the dial to find a good song. He found “Daydream Believer” by The Monkees and we were all happy with that, so that was what we listened to as we pulled out of the driveway.

Ace and I couldn't see too much as we were small and the seat backs were high. We entertained ourselves by pretending we were members of The Monkees. The song ended, and we all listened to find out what the next song was going to be. The announcer said that it was going to be something new from The Jefferson Airplane. This was some new group and one of Kay's favorites. I knew that we would be listening to the new song through speakers that vibrated because the volume was turned up so high.

We never did get to hear the new song that day. In her excitement, Kay was more interested in the volume control than the steering wheel. We promptly crashed into Ardra's mailbox just down the road. We hadn't been going very fast, but we did enough damage that we had to stop. We all got out of the car and looked at the uprooted mailbox and the dent in the front end of the car.

Ardra came out of her house, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She watched as Kay picked up the mailbox and tried to stick its post back into the hole we had rammed it out of. It went back in, and actually wasn't damaged. But the hole had been widened by our hit and the mailbox sat lazily at an angle. Ardra looked closely at it, and seeing that neither the box nor
its post were any worse for the wear, told us to go along, that Enoch, her husband, would put some rocks in the hole to steady it when he got home. We went.

When we got to the store, Kay told us to stay in the car while she ran in. We started to whine, but not for long. Her mood had changed substantially since our encounter with the mailbox. She was back out in a few seconds. She threw the bag in the backseat, just barely missing me. She slammed the car into reverse and we stirred up a dust cloud in the small gravel parking lot.

We flew down to the picnic grove, just below the hill upon which the store sat. We pulled in, bouncing around in the back-seat as she drove over the pitted and rutted path into the grove. She got out and left the door open as she sat down hard on the concrete bandstand. The three of us got out and walked over to where she was sitting. I opened the bag to see what she bought.

I reached in and pulled out some bottles of Pepsi and passed them around. I pulled the plastic Indian from the bag. It wasn't Fred. It was a chief with a headdress and a bow and arrow. How could she mistake this guy for Fred? I mentioned this to my sister; she told me to shut up and snatched the bag away from me. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from the bag and ripped them open. She lit one. I didn't even know she smoked.

We left the grove a couple of minutes later. We were all looking out the windows, studying hard the road and the ditches that bordered the road. We were looking for a dead cat, any dead cat would do. We just needed one. There was a high mortality rate for reservation cats and there were usually some dead ones lying around the sides of one road or another.

Innis had gotten the idea. We had to find some way to explain the new dent in the car. It wasn't as if the car were new or anything, or that it didn't already have some dents in it. This dent, however, would not go unnoticed. It wasn't just the fender that was dented. The mailbox had impacted with the hood and had left its own noticeable mark. We knew that we could get away with this if we had some really good reason for the dent. We also knew that if we said it happened because of the radio, we'd be walking to the store for quite some time to come. We were in this together.

My mother loved cats. We had eight of them. When our cat had kittens, my mother just couldn't bear to give them up. The survivors from the second litter were already grown up, and the mother was pregnant again. It appeared we were going to have more. Virtually the entire population of the res knew of my mother's love for cats. Innis thought if we told my mother that we had hit the mailbox while trying to avoid running over a cat, that would be a good enough excuse. We agreed.

He thought he had seen a dead cat along the side of the road as we had headed to the store, but he couldn't remember exactly where. He did say that it was after Ardra's house. He was quite sure of that. He thought if we brought the dead cat home with us, it would be even more convincing. Kay thought this was really gross, but she was a desperate woman. We had to hurry, too. We were only supposed to have gone down the road.

Kay warmed to the idea the closer we got to the house, and the closer she got to not being able to drive for a while. She even told us that she hoped it was a fresh one, and not stiff and loaded with maggots. It was, after all, the middle of summer. A rotting cat would not be too convincing. My mother would probably insist on a burial, and she would most certainly notice the odor of a high-summer dead cat. We hoped along with Kay. None of us really wanted to handle the cat. The anonymous plastic Indian sat casually on the backseat.

I spotted the cat. Innis was right. It was beyond the spot of our collision, but not much. It was in front of the field next to Spicy's house. On the other side of the field was Ardra and Enoch's. As we got out of the car, we could see the lounging mailbox. Enoch apparently hadn't gotten home yet. We walked over to the cat. It was an orange one, the color of Creamsicles, my mother's favorite cat color. It was still alive.