Neither Wolf nor Dog (22 page)

“Like it, Nerburn?” Grover asked.

“It feels like a perpetual Sunday afternoon,” I said.

“It's got a phone, though.”

Grover made his way slowly down the wide, empty main street and pulled in on a diagonal in front of a run-down corner building. At first I thought it might have been abandoned, despite the three or four vehicles parked outside. But then an old man in a cowboy hat pushed open the metal storm door and stepped out. He squinted toward the sky, like a man emerging from darkness, and made his way down the street.

“Nice place, Grover,” I said.

“Got a phone,” he answered.

The building at which we had stopped had almost no identifying marks. The original display windows had been covered over with whitewashed plywood, leaving only two small apertures the size of bathroom windows to face the main street. A yellow plastic mold-injected sign with raised black letters hung over the metal storm door. It read, simply, “Cafe. Homemade pies.” I wondered if someone had thought long about that description, or had just ordered a generic sign from some restaurant supply company hundreds of miles away.

I looked again at the characterless block lettering. The lack of any personal touch just added to the sense of decay. Surely someone could have come up with a name like “Ma's” or “Emma's” or anything else. It was as if there had not been enough energy or hope to strive for any personal expression. Even the sign over Jumbo's garage, with its dripping letters and indecipherable message, spoke of more personal interest and initiative.

Grover got out and headed for the door. Now that we were traveling, he had assumed the role of leader. Dan walked slowly behind, craning his neck in an idle curiosity that was quite different from the attentive vigilance he lavished on the draws and hillsides. It was as if he were a tourist here, taking in the unfamiliar with an unabashed awe, while on the hills he was a silent observer, aware of everything around him, picking and choosing
from the sights and sounds and smells until he could establish a pattern of meaning.

I consoled Fatback, who had slumped morosely back into her seat, and promised her a bounty of leftovers if she would wait patiently while we ate our people meal. She made a flubbering sound and closed her eyes.

The exiting cowboy had been squinting for a reason. The inside of the restaurant was as dark as a cheap bar. Directly inside the door three pedestal tables had been pushed together to form a long banquet-style seating area. Six old white men sat along it, wearing feed caps and smoking cigarettes. On the wall above them was a xeroxed sheet of white paper that read, “Cows may come and cows may go, but the bull in this place goes on forever.”

The waitress was somewhere in her late twenties, white, disinterested. She sat on a bar stool near the kitchen door listening to country-western songs on a small boom box. She was absently twirling a strand of her bleach-blond hair while blowing streams of cigarette smoke out through her nostrils.

Grover gestured us to the opposite side of the restaurant. We took a place at a square brown table with four yellow vinyl chairs.

The woman put down her cigarette and came over to us. She had that trailer-court look of someone who had had too many beers, too many kids, and too many men; who had missed her chance to get in the car with that one stranger years ago, and now accepted her life with a world-weary cynicism that contained no trace of self-pity. She stood above us with one hand on her hip, chewing gum in time to the music. “Coffee?” she asked.

“Black,” said Grover.

Dan nodded.

“Me too,” I added. “But I'd like mine with milk.”

“Cream?” she corrected.

“No, I'd rather have milk,” I said. She gave an indifferent shrug and stabbed something on her notepad, turned, and walked over to a hotplate containing two glass pots. She grabbed one, then whisked up three white restaurant cups from a phalanx that were sitting upside down on a dishtowel.

She banged the cups down on our table and poured uneven amounts of coffee into each. Drips tracked along the table as she moved from one cup to the next.

“Milk?” I reminded.

She turned away without answering.

“You better turn on the charm, Nerburn,” Dan said.

“If she comes out with a rolling pin, I'm taking off,” Grover said.

“Why don't you try some of those hot lines you use on Wenonah?” I suggested to Grover.

“Nope. This is a frying-pan woman. Whack you on the side of the head.”

“Wouldn't be the first time for you,” Dan said. The two men chuckled and sipped at their coffee.

“Damn, this is bad!” I choked. There was a greasy film floating on the top of the brown liquid.

“Suppose you drink that yuppie Capustrino stuff?” Grover said.

“Used to be my favorite,” I said. “Then I tasted yours.” The thought of Grover's coffee reminded me of how far we had come in a single day. I had no sense of the miles we had traveled, but the cross-country bumping and lack of any traceable route made it seem as if we were in a different country.

The waitress slammed a half-filled plastic cup of milk down on the table beside me. “Ready to order?” she asked.

Dan and Grover both ordered pie. I opted for soup. Then I remembered Fatback.

“You don't have any bones back there, do you?” I asked.

“Bones?” she repeated, as if it were the stupidest question she had ever heard.

“Bones, like from the soup. We've got a hungry dog out in the car.”

“Comes from a can,” was all she answered.

“You're striking out, Nerburn,” Grover laughed.

The door creaked behind us and a long shaft of sunlight cut into the room. A loud laugh broke the quiet gloom of the cafe, followed by the heavy thumping of feet and the slam of the storm door. More clumping, and an Indian couple stood in the door. The man was in his early thirties. He had a long mane of shiny black hair that reached below his shoulders. He was lurching and stumbling. The woman was as skinny as a reed and wore skin-tight jeans that seemed ready to burst. They were both drunk.

Grover and Dan paid them no mind. Their thoughts were on pie, and this was not an unfamiliar scene to them.

The couple continued their loud conversation; it made no difference that they were in a dark, quiet cafe. The man dragged a chair across the floor in front of Dan.

“Hey, brother,” he oozed.

Dan nodded. The waitress was standing in the entryway to the kitchen with her hands on her hips. The six men hunched over the long table began murmuring.

The woman flopped down in the chair and hollered out to her partner, “Get me some goddamn coffee.” The man had already made his way over to a cigarette machine and was reading loudly, “Minors are forbidden by law. . .”

“I want a cup of coffee.”

He punched his hand down in irritation on top of the machine. “Just a goddamn minute. I'm getting some goddamn cigarettes.”

He fumbled violently in his pockets.

“Hey, bro,” he said to me, bypassing Grover and Dan, “you got any quarters?”

I looked quickly from Dan to Grover. For some reason it seemed to be their decision. Grover shook his head slightly.

“No, man, sorry.”

“Oh,” he said, and stumbled back to his table as if he had forgotten why he was there.

The waitress had decided to intervene. She snuffed her cigarette out with authority and stalked over to the table where the couple was sprawled on their seats.

She minced no words. “You got any money?”

“Yeah, we got money,” said the man.

“Let's see it.”

“He said we got money,” the woman cut in. “Get us some goddamn coffee.”

The waitress turned on her with an angry eye. “Listen, honey. If you got money, you get coffee. But until I see it, I don't think you got it.”

“Aw, the hell with her,” the man muttered. He swung his arm clumsily across the table, sending a plastic squeeze bottle of ketchup tumbling onto the floor. “Let's get out of here.”

The two of them stood up and lurched their way toward the door. The shaft of daylight appeared, followed by a slam, and the noisy conversation disappeared into the street.

I sat glumly looking into my cup. I was embarrassed, but I wasn't sure for whom. I felt like I had witnessed a racial flaw that I had wanted to avoid. Though it made no logical sense, it was as if Dan and Grover were darkened by the same stain that had reduced that couple to a slobbering caricature, and I was witness to their common weakness.

The table of white men obviously felt the same. They had turned their collective attention to our table, and here and there a snippet of conversation about drunks or Indians rose up loud
enough for us to hear. At one time I distinctly heard the phrase “prairie niggers.” I looked at Dan for his response. He seemed oblivious.

“Alcohol has been bad for us,” Dan said at last. “I think it was the worst thing the white man brought. It made our people crazy.”

“It made those two crazy, anyway,” I offered, trying to make the flaw specific to those two.

“It does that to all of us,” he said.

“Why do you think that is?” I asked.

“I don't know. It was a test the Creator gave us.”

“Did you ever drink?”

“Many years ago. Then a pipe carrier brought me back to the sacred circle. Now I don't drink anymore.”

“I drank a lot in the Navy,” Grover said. “I still go to AA.”

The old white men at the other table seemed to have calmed down a bit. The disruption in their day had settled into a story they could tell their cronies, and the two old Indians and the white man at the table across the room no longer held their interest.

“Do drunks like that embarrass you?” I asked.

“It shames me,” Dan said.

“It only bothers me around white people,” Grover added. “I don't like them to see our brothers like that. It makes us look weak.”

“We are weak,” Dan said. “We are weak for alcohol. Just like white people are weak for owning things.” He turned to me. “But those weaknesses are gifts, Nerburn. They are gifts, just like our strengths are gifts. Weaknesses make us strong, because they make us stand up to ourselves.”

The waitress returned with the pie and soup. She slung them on the table like a dealer distributing cards.

Grover tasted his pie gingerly, grunted his approval, and
began sawing into it with the edge of his fork. My soup had an ominous petroleum-like sheen on it that turned blue and green and red depending on the angle from which it was viewed.

“The trouble is not the alcohol,” Dan continued. “The alcohol is a challenge to make us strong. The trouble is the way we have let it make us into victims.”

“Everyone's a victim in America these days,” I said. “It's our new national pastime.”

“It's a bunch of shit,” said Dan with uncharacteristic vehemence. “That's the white man's way. When your life isn't going right, you blame your parents or your work or something else. You talk about being burned out. You spend all kinds of money to have psychiatrists tell you why you aren't responsible for your life.

“We don't need that. It's not our way. We don't need some social worker or government professor to tell us what's wrong. We need to look to the Great Spirit for strength.”

“Great Spirit needs help, sometimes,” Grover said.

“Not by a bunch of damn social workers and counselors. Hell, if it wasn't for us, social workers would be out of business. The whole reservation economy is based on weakness.”

He glanced over at the table of white men. Dan's volume and vehemence had piqued their interest again. They feigned concern with their sweet rolls and coffee, but you could see the bills of their caps turning toward us when Dan's voice rose.

“It really makes me angry when I see how white people have turned us into victims. I see hundreds of my people getting in line every day to be victims, blaming society or the white man for all their troubles.”

“Well, there's some truth in that, isn't there?” I asked.

“Sure there is. But it's a bad truth. Being a victim is weak. I don't want to be weak. I want to be strong, like my grandfathers. My own father used to walk to the river every morning in the
winter and cut a hole in the ice to get water. It didn't matter that it was forty below zero. He just did what he had to. It made him strong.

“Now our people are being taught that we were victims of society because at the same time white people had running water. So what? Before you came here we didn't have running water. We still went to the river at forty below and got water. We never thought of ourselves as victims.

“But then the social workers came and told us if we didn't have everything you did, we were all victims. A lot of Indians believe that now.”

Grover had made his way through the pie in about five bites and was eyeing Dan's untouched piece.

“You can have my soup,” I offered.

“He wants my pie,” Dan said.

Grover reached across toward the old man's plate. “You can't talk and eat,” he said, “and you sure as hell aren't going to stop talking.” Dan seemed unfazed.

“The white man's way is not the Indian way. We don't need to want the same things you do. We have our way. It was given to us by our ancestors. All we have to do is follow that way. To follow your way is to say you are stronger. I don't think you are stronger. I think you are weaker.

“If there are things we can learn from you that will help us follow the way of our ancestors better, then we should learn them. If there are things we can get from you that will help us give our people a better life, we should get them. But we don't need to look at you and say that if we don't have everything that you have, then we are victims. That is giving your way too much power over our way. We should both live the way we think is right and try to help each other as best we can.”