Neither Wolf nor Dog (35 page)

I was terrified like a child. This storm had a malevolence that seemed almost personal. It tore at the car as if it wanted to get in.

Fatback started whimpering. She pawed, agitated, driven by something unseen. Dan was rocking back and forth, much like Annie with her rosary. His singsong chants were lost in the wind. Grover smoked harder. The air was stultifying.

I imagined us inside some high plains tornado, about to be torn apart and scattered, bone from flesh, across miles of Dakota plain. Wild images of my son, of Eugene, of the legless man inside his room, blended and bled in my mind. “There are
powers, Nerburn . . .” A thousand Indian voices admonished me. The storm raged in Lakota, I was convinced of it. Dan's chant was consonant with it, drowning in it, rising to meet it.

A wall of water came from the north and pummeled the car. We bounced and shook like men shipwrecked on an angry sea.

“
Wiyopeyate Wichasha
,” Dan said clearly. I looked up. He was holding his hands in the air, beside his face. “The Man from the West. He is here.”

I looked at Grover. He was staring intently at Dan. Dan's voice rose higher. He was speaking half in English. “
Yata
, I am your friend.” Then something about
Wakinyan.
His eyes were still closed and he was rocking. I glanced at Grover.

“The Winged One,” he whispered. The car shook and rattled; water streamed down all the windows.

A great swoop of wind almost tore the roof off the car, then all was still. A few sheets of rain blasted against us. The car shuddered once or twice, then settled. It was over.

The light returned dimly. The shapes of the hills emerged through the streaming water on the windshield. We could see the dark sky receding, moving toward the south. Light filtered through the clouds, catching the running rivulets and glistening in droplets on the grasses.

A shaft of sunlight cut through and raced across the hillsides. The sun peered around the corner of the retreating blackness. The earth was born again.

Grover began speaking to Dan in Lakota. The conversation was low, serious. There was much back and forth discussion, with some apparent disagreement.

I rose up in my seat, drained and exhausted. I wanted to talk about the storm, but I sensed that the discussion going on in front of me was something I should not interrupt. The two men had never talked so much between themselves in Lakota around me. Either they did not wish me to hear what they
were saying, or this was a conversation which could not easily be carried on in English. I listened intently in the faint hope that I could understand a word or two.

Abruptly Dan turned and spoke to me in English. “There should not have been wind from the north,” he said. “This troubles me.”

I didn't know if this was a meteorological concern or something else. I suspected it had to do with larger issues.

“Why?” I said.

“I think it was all the west,” Grover interjected. “Hell, you knew it, too,” he said, using Dan's Lakota name. He and Dan began discussing again in Lakota.

After a moment Dan turned to me and asked, “Where was the wind, Nerburn?”

During the storm I had been huddling in my corner against a generalized fury. It had never occurred to me to consider the direction from which the wind had come. “I don't know,” I said.

“Think,” said Dan.

“I wasn't paying attention.”

Dan grew angry. “You've always got to pay attention. It's important. What do you think I'm trying to teach you?”

Remembering the moving cloud banks off to our right I said, without conviction, “North, I guess. Though that doesn't make a lot of sense this time of year, so . . .”

“It doesn't matter what makes sense,” Dan snapped. “Did you feel wind from the north or not? I don't mean where did the storm come from. I mean, in the storm, was the wind that beat on the car from the north?”

“Well, yeah, I guess, but . . .”

“Yes or no.”

I checked the position the car was facing. Grover had pulled off the road directly into the brunt of the storm, facing west. I felt the dampness on my right shoulder where the rain had
forced its way through the cracked weather stripping around the car windows.

“Yes.”

“Hnnh,” Dan said. “
Waziya.
There is a message.”

“What do you mean?” I said, slightly disconcerted.

“
Waziya
is not good. He is cold and cruel.”

“
Waziya?
”

“The wind from the north.” Dan was pulling a small pouch from inside his shirt. It had been hung around his neck on a leather thong. “The dead must pass his tepee on the way to the spirit land. They must tell him everything. When he comes, it is to bring messages from the dead.”

I had always been prone to presentiments and belief in unseen forces. But usually I was able to ignore them. Here, in this open land, in my agitation after the storm, it was not so easy. My mind flashed to my wife and children.

“What do you think it means?” I asked.

He ignored my question. “What were you talking to Delvin and Danelle about?” he said. “I saw you talking to them for a long time.”

“They were telling me about your past.”

Dan made a gesture of spitting. “Hah,” he said. Grover pursed his lips.

“Wait here now,” Dan ordered. He opened the door and stepped out. The fresh smell of the drying earth rushed into the car. Fatback squeaked and clamored to get over the seat.

“Let her out,” Dan said curtly. I opened the door on my side. She scrabbled across me and almost fell onto the ground. Dan spoke to her in Lakota. She got up and whimpered. Together they made their way across the steaming grass up over a short rise.

“Should have buried that dog with the kid,” Grover muttered.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing. Just talking.”

“What's going on here?” I said to Grover. “It spooks me when he gets like this.”

“Spooks me, too,” Grover answered, and pulled out another cigarette.

I wanted to get him talking, to reassure myself. “Does he get like this after every storm?” I asked.

“Nah. He didn't like this one, though. Said it had a message.”

“A message?”

“Dan's in touch with a lot of forces,” he said, cryptically.

I felt a shiver on the back of my neck. Grover had lit a match and was holding it up in front of him and idly watching it burn.

“I worry about my family when he talks like that,” I said.

“Don't worry about your family,” he said disinterestedly. The flame was burning down toward his fingers.

“I know. It's just that . . .”

“The old man wasn't talking about your family,” he interjected. His voice was weary and slightly disgusted.

“What was he talking about?”

He pinched out the match. “Don't matter. The wind was from the west.”

P
resently, Dan and Fatback emerged from behind the rise. Dan was still fingering the pouch around his neck. Fatback hobbled behind him with her tongue out.

“We will go now,” he said to me in English when he returned to the car. There was a sense of purpose in his manner that had not been there before.

He and Grover had a short discussion in Lakota; then Grover started the engine. He drove through the streams of
water that were coursing off into the ditches and got back on the glistening highway. Already the water had begun to dry from the pavement. Willowy pillars of steam and heat rose from the asphalt like spirits. The memory of the great storm was etched into every plant and hill and hollow.

I felt like a man on the waking edge of a nightmare — exhilarated, unsure, still shaken; not sure which side of the dream was real. The dark cloud had moved far to the south and was rumbling and spitting over distant hills and mesas. Lightning flickered like snakes' tongues in the retreating forms. In front of us the prairie stretched and breathed deeply and seemed to come alive with birds and sunlight. Every bit of life seemed fresher, more fragile, more precious.

Dan offered no explanation for either his behavior during the storm or his actions afterward. “You must take me there, now,” was all he said. Grover nodded and drove without comment.

A double rainbow arched across the sky. “Ah,” said Dan, with an air of understanding. “That's good.”

Mile after mile we drove in silence, each of us lost in private thoughts. I wanted to ask him about the wind and what he thought it had meant, but I didn't dare. His was a world in which every action, every movement, had meaning. My ignorance of those meanings felt like naivete. I was better served by silence.

The sun, victorious, lowered itself toward the horizon. It illuminated the bellies of the remaining clouds, creating a tapestry of oranges and silvers. With the wind gone, the sky stood triumphant. It became a landscape in itself — a great ethereal garden in the colors of memories — golden, violet, orange — all proceeding from the sun, as if in ritual procession.

“Here,” Dan said, “this way.” Grover veered onto another road. We arched over a freeway and made our way southward. The cars on the freeway beneath us seemed from a different
world, with different missions. In the distance I could see the coarse sandstone spires of the badlands rising like a city of sepulchres.

The runoff from the furious storm had disappeared, leaving only tiny pools among the red clay glistening on the side of the road. We took a turn and bounced onto a gravel roadbed. Grover never varied his speed. The undercarriage of the car pinged from rocks that the tires threw up as we flew toward the unearthly formations in the distance.

All sense of leisure had been cast aside. We moved like men pursued. On either side of us, table rocks a hundred feet high rose like altars awaiting some celestial sacrifice. Their surfaces stretched out high above us, inaccessible, invisible, a landscape of the gods.

We came to an edge. The earth dropped off before us into a prehistoric seabed of stone pillars and crenelated cones of sand. With no more than a momentary hesitation, Grover plunged the car down the winding gravel path into this lunar landscape. Ancient miniature mountains rose around us like dragons' teeth. Spires of sand like Tibetan temples loomed on all sides. Bands of color cut for miles through the desiccated formations, echoing geological time that dwarfed all human considerations.

“Badlands,” Grover said. No one responded. “This is where they came, Nerburn,” he continued.

“Who?” I asked. Dan remained in silence, staring straight ahead.

“Sitting Bull's people.” The ghost of a full moon was becoming visible in the sky above the valley floor. “Trying to get away from the soldiers.”

He looked toward Dan, as if he expected the old man to begin talking. But Dan said nothing.

Grover was forced to continue his explanation. “After he
was killed. You know, by the Indian police. His people were terrified. They joined with Big Foot and came south here. They figured the soldiers wouldn't follow them.”

I looked around at the savage wasteland of sand and dust.

“They were wrong, though.” He gestured out over the waterless terrain. “Look at this! It was December. The Moon of Popping Trees. Do you know what this is like in December?”

“Not very pleasant, I imagine,” I said.

“Wind that will kill you. Freeze off your toes and fingers in minutes. Snow that will blind you,” Grover went on. “Ice on everything. Temperatures so cold the rivers crack and the trees split. It's time to be indoors, telling stories. But they were outside, running from soldiers in the wind and cold. They had children, women. Babies wrapped in blankets. They'd snuck down a path that the soldiers didn't know. Isn't that right, Dan?”

Dan chewed his mouth, like a man adjusting his false teeth. But he did not speak.

“These were families, Nerburn,” Grover said. “With little babies and old people. They had their tepees and cooking pots. They just wanted to live. But they couldn't even build fires to keep their children warm. The soldiers would have found them and killed them. They were starving and freezing.”

The car roared through the desolate moonscape without slowing. The sun was disappearing with one last blaze of orange fury. The sand formations caught its brilliant glint and glowed like fire. In the cracks and crevasses the dark began to grow into new and threatening shapes.

“I am too old,” Dan said suddenly.

I looked at him with alarm. He was still making that strange chewing action with his mouth.

“I should not throw my mind back,” he said, as if to someone unseen. “I should live here in the life I have. I should
think about my grandchildren and my great grandchildren. But my eyes see the tracks of the past. I cannot forget the dead.” He turned toward Grover. “You should not trick me into talking,
Mitakola.
”

Grover gave a faint hint of a smile. “You said you would teach him,
Tunkashila.
Now is the time.”