Tapping the Dream Tree (32 page)

“They're not my friends,” I told her.

The alpha male growled with frustration until one of the pack touched his arm.

“That's it,” the pack member said. “It's over.”

The alpha male shook off the hand, but he turned away and the pack trooped down the stairs. When I heard the front door close, I let out a breath I hadn't been aware I was holding.

“You were amazing,” I told Mona.

She gave me a small smile. “I guess I have my moments.”

“I'll say. I don't know how you knew to do it, but you gave them exactly the right answer.”

“I wasn't doing it for them,” she told me. “I was doing it for us.”

I shook my head again. “It's been a weird night, but I'm glad I got to meet you all the same.”

I started for the stairs.

“Where are you going?” she asked. “They could be waiting out there for you.”

I turned back to look at her. “They won't. It's an honor thing.Maybe if I run into them some other time there'll be trouble, but there won't be any more tonight.”

“We never finished our date,” she said.

“You still want to go out somewhere with me?”

She shook her head. “But we could have a drink in here and talk awhile.”

I waited a heartbeat, but when she stepped aside and ushered me inside, I didn't hesitate any longer.

“I was so scared,” she said as she closed the door behind us.

“Me, too.”

“Really?”

“There were six of them,” I said. “They could have torn me apart at any time.”

“Why didn't they?”

“I told them you were my girlfriend—that we'd just had a fight in the Café. That way, in their eyes, I had a claim on you. The honor thing again. If you were under my protection, they couldn't hurt you.”

“So that's what you meant about my giving them the exact right answer.”

I nodded.

“And if I hadn't?” she asked.

“Let's not go there,” I said. But I knew she could see the answer in my eyes.

“You'd do that even after what I said to you on the phone?”

“You had every right to feel the way you did.”

“Are you for real?”

“I hope so.” I thought about all she'd experienced tonight. “So are you going to put this in one of your strips?”

She laughed. “Maybe. But who'd believe it?”

It's funny how things work. When I was leaving the Café earlier, I could have happily given him a good bang on the ear. Later, when I thought he was stalking me, I was ready to have him put in jail. When the pack was outside my window and he joined them, I was so terrified I couldn't move or think straight.

And now I'm thinking of asking him to stay the night.

I'm driving up from the city
when I spot a flock of crows near the chained gates of the old gravel pit that sits on the left side of the highway, about halfway to the rez. It's that time of the morning when the night's mostly a memory, but the sun's still blinking the sleep from its eyes as it gets ready to shine us into another day.

Me, I'm on my way to bed. I'm wearing gloves and have a takeout coffee in my free hand, a cigarette burning between the tobacco-stained gloved fingers of the one holding the wheel. A plastic bag full of aerosol paint cans, half of them empty, rattles on the floor on the passenger's side every time I hit a bump. Behind me I've left freight cars painted with thunderbirds and buffalo heads and whatever other icons I could think up tonight to tell the world that the Indians have counted another coup, hi-ya-ya-ya. I draw the line at dream-catchers, though I suppose some people might mistake my spider webs for them.

My favorite tonight has become sort of a personal trademark: a big crow, its wings spread wide like the traditional thunderbird and running the whole length of the boxcar, but it's got that crow beak you can't mistake and a sly, kind of laughing look in its eyes. Tonight I painted that bird fire engine red with black markings. On its belly I made the old Kickaha sign for
Bín-ji-gú-sán,
the sacred medicine bag: a snake, with luck lines radiating from its head and back.

I've been doing that crow ever since I woke one morning from a dream where I was painting graffiti on a 747 at the airport, smiling because this time my bird was really going to fly. I opened my eyes to hear the crows outside my window, squawking and gossiping, and there were three black feathers on the pillow beside me.

Out on the highway now, I ease up on the gas and try to see what's got these birds up so early.

Crows are sacred on the rez—at least with the Aunts and the other elders. Most of my generation's just happy to make it through the day, never mind getting mystical about it. But I've always liked them. Crows and coyotes. Like the Aunts say, they're the smart ones. They never had anything for the white men to take away and they sure do hold their own against them. Shoot them, poison them, do your best. You manage to kill one and a couple more'll show up to take its place. If we'd been as wily, we'd never have lost our lands.

It's a cold morning. My hands are still stinging from when I was painting those boxcars, all night long. Though some of that time was spent hiding from the railroad rent-a-cops and warming up outside the freight yard where some hobo skins had them a fire burning in a big metal drum. Half the time the paints just clogged up in the cans. If I'd been in the wind, I doubt they'd have worked at all.

The colors I use are blacks and reds, greens and yellows, oranges and purples. No blues—the sky's already got them. Maybe some of the Aunts' spirit talk's worn off on me, because when I'm train-painting, I don't want to insult the Grandfather Thunders. Blue's their color, at least among my people.

My tag's “Crow.” I was born James Raven, but Aunt Nancy says I've got too much crow in me. No respect for anything, just like my black-winged brothers. And then there's those feathers I found on my pillow that morning. Maybe that's why I pull over. Because in my head, we're kin. Same clan, anyway.

There's times later when maybe I wished I hadn't. I'm still weighing that on a day-to-day basis. But my life's sure on the road to nowhere I could've planned because of that impulse.

The birds don't leave when I get out of the car, leaving my coffee on the dash. I take a last drag on my cigarette and flick the butt into the snow. Jesus, but it's cold. A
lot
colder here than it was in the freight yards. There I had the cars blocking the wind most of the time. Out here, it comes roaring at me from about as far north as the cold can come. It must be twenty, thirty below out here, factoring in the wind chill.

I start to walk toward where the birds have gathered and I go a little colder still, but this time it's inside, like there's frost on my heart.

They've found themselves a man. A dead skin, just lying here in the snow. I don't know what killed him, but I can make an educated guess considering all he's wearing is a thin, unzipped windbreaker over a T-shirt and chinos. Running shoes on his feet, no socks.

He must've frozen to death.

The crows don't fly off when I approach, which makes me think maybe the dead man's kin, too. That they weren't here to eat him, but to see him on his way, like in the old stories. I crouch down beside him, snow crunching under my knee. I can see now he's been in a fight. I take off my paint-stained gloves and reach for his throat,looking for a pulse, but not expecting to find one. He twitches at my touch. I almost fall over backwards when those frosted eyelashes suddenly crack open and he's looking right at me.

He has pale blue eyes—unusual for a skin. They study me for a moment. I see an alcohol haze just on the other side of their calm, lucid gaze. What strikes me at that moment is that I don't see any pain.

Words creep out of his mouth. “Who … who was it that said, ‘It is a good day to die'?”

“I don't know,” I find myself answering. “Some famous chief, I guess. Sitting Bull, maybe.” Then I realize what I'm doing, having a conversation with a dying man. “We've got to get you to a hospital.”

“It's bullshit,” he says.

I think he's going to lose his hands. They're blue with the cold. I can't see his feet, but in those thin running shoes, they can't be in much better condition.

“No, you'll be okay,” I lie. “The doctors'll have you fixed up in no time.”

But he's not talking about the hospital.

“It's never a good day to die,” he tells me. “You tell Turk that for me.”

My pulse quickens at the name. Everybody on the rez knows Tom McGurk. He's a detective with the NPD that's got this constant hard-on for Indians. He goes out of his way to break our heads, bust the skin hookers, roust the hobo bloods. On the rez they even say he's killed him a few skins, took their scalps like some old Indian hunter, but I know that's bullshit. Something like that, it would've made the papers. Not because it was skins dying, but for the gory details of the story.

“He did this to you?” I ask. “Turk did this?”

Now it doesn't seem so odd, finding this drunk brave dying here in the snow. Cops like to beat on us, and I've heard about this before, how they grab some skin, usually drunk, beat the crap out of him, then drive him twenty miles or so out of town and dump him. Let him walk back to the city if he's up for some more punishment.

But on a night like this …

The dying man tries to grab my arm, but his frozen fingers don't work anymore. It's like all he's got is this lump on the end of his arm, hard as a branch, banging against me. It brings a sour taste up my throat.

“My name,” he says, “is John Walking Elk. My father was an Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge rez and my mother was a Kickaha from just up the road. Don't let me be forgotten.”

“I… I won't.”

“Be a warrior for me.”

I figure he wants his revenge on Turk, the one he can't take for himself, and I find myself nodding. Me, who's never won a fight in his life. By the time I realize we have different definitions for the word “warrior,” my life's completely changed.

I remember the look on my mom's face the first time I got arrested for vandalism. She didn't know whether to be happy or mad. See, she never had to worry about me drinking or doing drugs. And while she knew that train-painting was against the law, she understood that I saw it as bringing Beauty into the world.

“At least you're not a drunk like your father's brother was,” she finally said.

Uncle Frank was an alcoholic who died in the city, choking on his own puke after an all-night bender. We've no idea what ever happened to my father, Frank's brother. One day we woke up and he was gone, vanished like the promises in all those treaties the chiefs signed.

“But why can't you paint on canvases like other artists do?” she wanted to know.

I don't know where to begin to explain.

Part of it's got to do with the transitory nature of painting freight cars. Nobody can stand there and criticize it the way you can a painting hanging in a gallery or a museum, or even a mural on the side of some building. By the time you realize you're looking at a painting on the side of a boxcar, the locomotive's already pulled that car out of your sight and farther on down the line. All you're left with is the memory of it; what you saw, and what you have to fill in from your own imagination.

Part of it's got to do with the act itself. Sneaking into the freight yards, taking the chance on getting beat up or arrested by the rent-a-cops, having to work so fast. But if you pull it off, you've put a piece of Beauty back into the world, a piece of art that'll go traveling right across the continent. Most artists are lucky to get a show in one gallery. But train-painters … our work's being shown from New York City to L.A. and every place in between.

And I guess part of it's got to do with the self-image you get to carry around inside you. You're an outlaw, like the chiefs of old, making a stand against the big white machine that just rolls across the country, knocking down anything that gets in its way.

So it fills something in my life, but even with the train-painting, I've always felt like there was something missing, and I don't mean my father. Though train-painting's the only time I feel complete, it's still like I'm doing the right thing, but for the wrong reason. Too much me, not enough everything else that's in the world.

I'm holding John Walking Elk in my arms when he dies. I'm about to pick him up when this rattle goes through his chest and his head sags away from me, hanging at an unnatural angle. I feel something in that moment, like a breath touching the inside of my skin, passing through me. That's when I know for sure he's gone.

I sit there until the cold starts to work its way through my coat, then I get a firmer grip on the dead man and stagger back to my car with him. I don't take him back to the city, report his death to the same authorities that killed him. Instead, I gather my courage and take him to Jack Whiteduck.

I don't know how much I really buy into the mysteries. I mean, I like the idea of them, the way you hear about them in the old stories. Honoring the Creator and the Grandfather Thunders, taking care of this world we've all found ourselves living in, thinking crows can be kin, being respectful to the spirits, that kind of thing. But it's usually an intellectual appreciation, not something I feel in my gut. Like I said, train-painting's about the only time it's real for me. Finding Beauty, creating Beauty, painting her face on the side of a freight car.

But with Jack Whiteduck it's different. He makes you believe. Makes you see with the heart instead of the eye. Everybody feels that way about him, though if you ask most people, they'll just say he makes them nervous. The corporate braves who run the casino, the kids sniffing glue and gasoline under the highway bridge and making fun of the elders, the drunks hitting the bars off the rez … press them hard enough and even they'll admit, yeah, something about the old man puts a hole in their party that all the good times run out of.

He makes you remember, though what you're remembering is hard to put into words. Just that things could be different, I guess. That once our lives were different, and they could be that way again, if we give the old ways a chance. White people, they think of us as either the noble savage, or the drunk in the gutter, puking on their shoes. They'll come to the powwows, take their pictures and buy some souvenirs, sample the frybread, maybe try to dance. They'll walk by us in the city, not able to meet our gaze, either because they're scared we'll try to rob them, or hurt them, or they just don't want to accept our misery, don't want to allow that it exists in the same perfect world they live in.

We're one or the other to them, and they don't see a whole lot of range in between. Trouble is, a lot of us see ourselves the same way. Whiteduck doesn't let you. As a people, we were never perfect—nobody is—but there's something about him that tells us we don't have to be losers either.

Whiteduck's not the oldest of the elders on the rez, but he's the one everybody goes to when they've got a problem nobody else can solve.

So I drive out to his cabin, up past Pineback Road, drive in as far as I can, then I get out and walk the rest of the way, carrying John Walking Elk's body in my arms, following the narrow path that leads through the drifts to Whiteduck's cabin. I don't know where I get the strength.

There's a glow spilling out of the windows—a flickering light of some kind. Oil lamp, I'm guessing, or a candle. Whiteduck doesn't have electricity. Doesn't have a phone or running water either. The door opens before I reach it and Whiteduck stands silhouetted against the yellow light like he's expecting me. I feel a pinprick of nervousness settle in between my shoulder blades as I keep walking forward, boots crunching in the snow.