Inhaltsangabe
A key grip, Dustin Beall Smith explains in this award-winning memoir, is the person on a film set who supervises the rigging of lights, set wall construction, dolly shots, stunt preparation, and more. Smith worked in the film industry throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. For him, “fame by association”—with iconic stars including Sly Stallone, Susan Sarandon, and Robert De Niro—was just one of the seductive drugs fueling his high-octane days on the set.
The intertwined stories in Key Grip resurrect memories of how his father’s impossibly ordered life became a goad for Smith’s own reckless journey to manhood. Its trajectory includes a stint as a pioneering sport-parachuting instructor in the late 1950s—a young man’s dream job that taught Smith how to hide sheer animal fear behind male bravado. Much later, as a committed writer and unredeemed seeker in his fifties, Smith lights out cross-country for what turns out to be a brave, existentially failed—and very funny—attempt at a Lakota vision quest.
Beautifully told, reminiscent of both Robert Bly and Ian Frazier, Key Grip is a fascinating record of the fault lines of one man’s life.
Dustin Beall Smith’s Key Grip won the 2007 Bakeless Prize for nonfiction, awarded by the Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and judged by Terry Tempest Williams. Smith has lived in New York City for over forty years and teaches writing at Gettysburg College.
Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.
Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Dustin Beall Smith's Key Grip won the 2007 Bakeless Prize for nonfiction, awarded by the Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and judged by Terry Tempest Williams. Smith teaches at Gettysburg College and lives in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and New York City.
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1
Starting at the Bottom Again
In 1996, as I neared the end of my time in the film business, I began to notice
an unusual preponderance of twenty-somethings running around movie sets,
barking "Quiet!" and "Rolling!" and "Freeze!" the way prison guards yell at
convicts during a lockdown. As they positioned themselves for a scramble up
what they obviously had been taught was some kind of industry pyramid, I
could detect nothing in their expressions that admitted to ignorance or
suggested curiosity. This made me, at age fifty-six, with experience to share
and things to teach, feel invisible.
I was ready for something new.
One day, on the set of a movie called Cop Land, I encountered a
fellow whom I will call here "Arturo Has No Past." Arturo's features and skin
color suggested he might be Filipino; he wore his shiny black hair in two
shoulder-length braids. He worked as a loader in the camera department. I
had noticed him scurrying on and off the set, lugging lens cases, and
delivering fresh film magazines as needed. He was a union member in his
midthirties, but he behaved like an intern — moving too fast in tight spaces
and garnering more attention with his overly earnest behavior than his
position on the pyramid warranted.
I first spoke to Arturo outside the sheriff's office set, where we had
spent the whole of that August morning filming a heated scene between
Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone. I was feeling a little deranged, having
been caged for six hours in a ten-by-ten-foot office with two megastars who
were consciously cultivating their rhinoceros-like personas. The stars'
combined coterie of makeup artists, hairdressers, wardrobe specialists,
bodyguards, and sycophantic studio executives had been sucking up most of
the available oxygen. I had been fantasizing about shotgunning Sly Stallone
and simply running out the door into some new future. The last thing I wanted
to see, when I stepped outside for a bottle of water, was Arturo sitting on the
plastic ice chest, chatting up a pretty extra.
"Get up," I said, jerking my thumb at him. Arturo leapt to his feet,
opened the cooler, and grabbed an Evian. He uncapped it and offered me the
bottle.
"Hoka hey," he said.
Having recently read about the famous Sioux warrior Crazy Horse,
I recognized this to be a Native American greeting.
"Hoka hey," I said to Arturo, raising the bottle of Evian in
salutation.
It is perhaps proof of my hunger for something new that I stood
there in the shade, contentedly drinking water with pigtailed Arturo, whom I
figured I had misjudged and now took to be a Lakota Indian (which would
explain, I thought, his undisguised earnestness, if not his Filipino features
and his Italian first name). I listened while Arturo entertained the pretty extra
with stories of skydiving. By his own account he had made about 150 free-fall
jumps. After describing the exhilaration of a long free fall, he turned to me
and suggested, somewhat patronizingly, that maybe I would like to try
jumping. I told him that I had already made well over six hundred jumps back
in the early 1960s, before going to college. "I used to teach the sport, back in
the day," I said, winking at the pretty extra.
Arturo had pretended not to be impressed. But over the course of
a few days, my skydiving credentials kept us talking and eventually gave me
an opening to pump him for information about his people.
On days when I gave Arturo a ride from our New Jersey location
back into the city, where we both lived, I would bug him to tell me about
Lakota rituals and life on the reservation. Arturo's answers, always slightly
mysterious and tinged with an inexplicable reticence, intrigued the hell out of
me. He was not entirely forthcoming about his Native identity, as if somehow
the information he held so close to his chest was meant only for privileged
ears. I was a sucker for such innuendo — anything to relieve the stifling
boredom of a movie set. But I also had a genuine curiosity about the Lakota
people, and I soon learned that Arturo's father was a medicine man on the
Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and his grandmother was a
medicine woman.
I began to see an opening into a new world, but I did not yet know
what kind of opening and what kind of new world.
One evening, as we approached the inbound tollbooths on the
George Washington Bridge, Arturo showed me the still-raw-looking scars on
his pectoral muscles, where his pierced flesh had ripped as he broke free
from the tree of life during a ceremonial sun dance presided over by his
father. He talked of completing a prayer ritual called hanblecheya, which
translates as "crying for a dream" and is popularly known as a vision quest.
The ritual, he explained, involved being taken "up the hill" by his medicine
man father and being made to sit alone on a blanket in the wilderness for four
days and nights, without food or water. I had read about that practice in
Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neihardt, years ago. But that was back in the
mid-1970s, when I was dabbling in spiritual things like pyramids, pendulums,
crystals, and the writings of Carlos Castaneda and Emanuel Swedenborg. I
had forgotten all about hanblecheya, but the ritual snapped back at me now
with a new meaning. Suddenly it seemed quite compelling, even within reach.
"That's what I want to do," I told Arturo. "I want to go on a
hanblecheya."
"Then you will," he said.
"I want to meet your father," I said. "I want him to take me up the
hill."
"That can be arranged," said Arturo.
"When?" I asked.
"When it's time." Arturo folded his arms across his chest and shut
his eyes, managing to mimic the iconic stubbornness of a cigar-store Indian
and avoid paying the bridge toll at the same time.
Cop Land wrapped in October. Although Arturo and I lived two blocks from
each other in Manhattan and had figured out we even frequented the same
corner restaurant on Broadway, I did not see or talk to him again for months.
The new year came. I took work on a morose TV series called New York
Undercover. During location filming in back alleys, jail cells, and dingy piano
bars, I kept fantasizing about being led up the hill by Arturo's wise old
medicine-man father. I envisioned him saying prayers over me and leaving me
to sit on a blanket in a treeless area that looked like the high desert in
California. I pictured visitations by coyotes, mountain lions, and snakes, and
wondered if they would speak to me, as I had heard that animal spirits speak
to seekers of wisdom. While it all seemed slightly ridiculous, I found myself
returning to the imagined scene again and again, the way other people might
daydream about a vacation at the golf course in Augusta. I felt drawn to it
magnetically, as if I were putting myself in the way of a fast-approaching
event that was meant to be.
By March, however, the fantasy had begun to fade from repeated
exposure.
In early April, I ran into Arturo at the post office on 83rd
Street. "Hoka hey," I said. "When am I going up the hill?"
"Never ask me that again," he said. "Never. If it's meant to be, it
will be." He made a sign with his right hand that seemed ridiculously imitative
of the "How!" gesture in old Hollywood westerns. Then he turned and walked
away. Even as a child I had found that gesture off-putting and wooden. I
began to wonder about Arturo.
When the month of May went by without a word from him, I wrote
him off as a charlatan and made tentative plans to take a July vacation in
Mexico with Angie, my new live-in girlfriend who was twenty-three years my
junior.
One Friday evening in late June, having dragged myself home after
a killer week on New York Undercover, I checked my messages. There was
only one: "Hoka hey. Get ready. We leave in four days. No sex, starting
tomorrow."
After persuading Angie to postpone our vacation, I bought a three-
hundred-dollar Pendleton blanket from Camps and Trails and began preparing
my tobacco ties in the manner Arturo had prescribed over the phone. I was to
string together seven hundred two-inch squares of folded broadcloth (seven
colors in all), each square containing a few fingers full of tobacco. The
resulting 150-foot string of ties was to be wrapped around a piece of
cardboard, so it wouldn't tangle as it was being unwrapped when I was up the
hill.
"Tangles," Arturo had warned, "portend catastrophe."
On the drive to South Dakota, Arturo slept and meditated in the front seat of
my 1987 Honda Accord. Miffed by my insistence that he wear a seat belt, he
hardly spoke to me. Occasionally I would ask him questions.
"What if coyotes surround you when you're up the hill?"
"Pray."
"Do people ever die on hanblecheya?"
"Yes."
"What about lightning?"
"You'll see."
The first night we pulled into a rest stop in western Ohio. Arturo
slept in the car; I slept on the ground under a tree. In the morning I
discovered him walking backward around my Honda, holding a metal plate
filled with burning prairie sage. Mumbling incantations, he wafted smoke at
the tires. A small old-fashioned leather suitcase lay open on the hood of the
car. Inside I could see what looked like medicine man paraphernalia,
including a colorful ceremonial pipe. When Arturo finished smudging the
Honda, I asked him why he had been walking backward around the car. In
my reading about the Lakota I had learned of the heyokas, the so-called
contraries, who conducted sun dance ceremonies in which they did
everything backward. They were said to have visions and dreams of lightning
and could immerse their hands in boiling water without harm. They were
known to read minds and see right through people. Their ceremonial function
was to expose social and spiritual hypocrisy and to poke fun at traditional
ceremony. Even in everyday life heyoka medicine men were thought to be
eerily powerful and, because of their unpredictable behavior, terrifying.
I could not have articulated, then, why I found it so unsettling to
watch Arturo walking backward around my car, smudging it, and mumbling
prayers. Perhaps it was the seemingly nonsensical combination of the
bizarre and the intentional. Watching him, I remembered many years earlier
having seen a magician in Central Park, a young fellow dressed all in black
and wearing white face makeup, who was performing in front of a sizable
audience. In one continuous gesture he had rolled up both sleeves and
produced out of thin air a full deck of cards. Those were my drinking and drug-
taking days, when I was accustomed to altered states and felt capable of
staring almost anything in the face. But when this magician turned his blank
gaze toward me, I felt caught in his snare. He fanned open the deck of cards,
closed it, and fanned it open again. Each time he repeated this gesture, the
size of the deck got smaller, until eventually it seemed no larger than the
wing of a moth. Suddenly he opened his hand, and the deck was gone. My
whole body shuddered; the blood drained from my head.
Not that I was about to shudder or grow faint in front of Arturo. But
I did ask, trying to conceal my anxiety, "You're not heyoka, are you, Arturo?"
He didn't answer me. I asked if his father lugged medicine around in a bag
like that.
"He doesn't have to. People come to him," said Arturo.
"How old is your dad?" I asked.
"Forty-three," said Arturo.
I did the calculations. "He had you when he was eight?"
Arturo said nothing. Annoyed, I stopped asking questions.
The second night, we stopped at a rundown motel near the
Nebraska border. In the morning, I sat outside my room and composed a
letter to my daughter, Trellan, using a portable Smith Corona typewriter. It felt
oddly comforting to pound away on the same machine I had used when she
was a baby, as if by doing so I could restore the relatively short-lived sense of
family that had existed at the time. I told her where I was and where I was
going, and then I wrote "I love you" and signed it "Dad."
I also practiced pronouncing the Lakota words mitakuye oyasin,
which I had been told would be essential to utter when entering the sweat
lodge. Arturo had warned me the night before that if I was to go up the hill the
following day, we must rise with the sun and arrive at his father's place "six
hands before sunset."
He emerged from his motel room, perfumed and pigtailed, at ten
o'clock in the morning.
We drove to a Wal-Mart, where we bought four cans of Bugler
tobacco, six cartons of Marlboros, ten shopping bags filled with food, four
gallons of milk, boxes and boxes of Kool-Aid, gifts for the family — one for
each of Arturo's seven brothers and sisters, ranging in age from three to
twenty — and a twenty-four-inch chain saw for his father, to help prepare for
the sun dance. Arturo perused the western-style shirts while I paid for
everything with my credit card. He arrived back at the car just in time to
watch me lash the last of the stuff to the roof rack.
"First thing you do," Arturo said, jumping in the front seat, "is give
my father the chain saw. Then, the next chance you get, offer him a fistful of
tobacco, with your hand turned down like this. If he takes it, tell him you want
to go up the hill."
"And if he doesn't?" I asked.
"Then you'll have to turn around and drive home. Alone. Got it?"
"Got it," I said.
The option of turning around and heading home was beginning to
appeal to me. I missed Angie. I had met her and asked her to move in with
me during the nearly yearlong hiatus that followed my first contact with
Arturo. And my relationship with her had begun to represent the new start I
had been seeking after Cop Land. It would have taken little effort on my part
to decide that this trip to visit Arturo's father was nothing but an errant and
risky detour. That I didn't suggests I may have had less choice in the matter
than I thought.
The speed limit in South Dakota is seventy-five miles per hour. I kept the
needle at ninety. Hot air whipped at the open windows, pulsed in my
eardrums. My left elbow cooked in the sun. My pen burst, bleeding black ink
onto the dashboard. The oppressive heat, the broken air conditioner, the
monotonous highway — it all seemed to conspire with Arturo's moody
silence. Every time I glanced at him his eyes were closed. I envied him,
really.
We had traveled entirely on interstates through Pennsylvania,
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and seen the same American inanity all the way.
The topography had long since given way to the replica world — replica
restaurants, replica gas stations, replica malls. I had hitchhiked through here
in the mid-1950s, before the interstate system existed, when each state
differed radically in character from the next. No boundaries anymore, or so it
seemed.
Arturo sat up and looked around. "Turn here," he said, pointing to
an exit sign.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"Turn here," he demanded.
I cut close in front of a tandem semi and hit the exit ramp at
seventy. We came to a halt at an intersection off U.S. 83. It was two o'clock.
It felt good to be off the highway, but I realized with some dismay that I
wasn't quite ready to leave the tedious security of the interstate. I felt relieved
to see a McDonald's a few hundred yards to the right. I could call home from
there, check my messages one last time before entering Indian country, grab
a predictable meal. I had eaten nothing since early morning.
A mockingbird landed on a section of busted snow fence. Arturo
studied the bird and thanked it for giving him directions. Then he pointed to
the left.
"We're late," he said.
"I'm hungry," I said. But I turned left anyway and headed south,
away from the replica world.
The Lakota Sioux live on seven large reservations, located mainly in South
Dakota. Arturo and I had planned to take I-90 all the way west to Rapid City
and cut south through the Badlands into the Pine Ridge Reservation. This
sudden change of plan, which now took us through the Rosebud Reservation,
was oddly unnerving. I hadn't said any final goodbyes. I had packed a cell
phone deep in my luggage, but it didn't feel appropriate using such
technology on a trip whose theme was essentially spiritual. What if
something happened to me out here? Who would ever know how far I had
gotten or what my state of mind had been? What would the crew and cast of
the film I was scheduled to work on in August make of my disappearance?
Huge thunderheads gathered in the west. The gently undulating
terrain on either side of the two-lane highway gave off an electric glow in the
filtered sunlight. Things did grow here — prairie grass and sage — but they
grew tenuously. An inexplicable dread began to take hold of me. This
wavelike landscape felt claustrophobic compared to the flat route described
by the interstate. I could no longer make out where we were headed or see
beyond the next rise. I wanted wings and visibility.
The highway had no guardrails, even where the land fell away from
the road. Aside from some dilapidated cattle fencing, the only hint of
civilization was the occasional diamond-shaped road sign that asked, why
die? Arturo explained to me that one of the preferred methods of suicide on
the reservations was to get shit-faced and head-on another car.
"Oh, good," I said.
Arturo laughed. "No seat belts on the rez," he said, unbuckling
his. He took out his Nikon and snapped my picture. I shot him back with my
Olympus, which I kept handy in the glove compartment. Apparently
energized by this spontaneous interaction, he donned his headband and a
pair of goggle-like shades, then slithered out the passenger-side window to
sit on the window ledge, his legs the only part of him still in the car. I slowed
down, but he hollered at me to go faster.
"Okay, asshole," I yelled.
The needle hit seventy, and I held it there as we crested the next
knoll and dipped into a shallow valley. I imagined him hanging on to the roof
rack, defying the wind. It reminded me of the times I had ridden the wings of
biplanes when I was a skydiver — hanging on for dear life, my jump suit
whipping in the wind, my heart pounding. The sheer exhilaration of it came
back to me in a rush of memories.
Arturo started to crawl out onto the hood, camera in hand. Holding
on to one of the wipers, he lay down on his right side and shot some weird
angles of me through the windshield. I returned the favor, half expecting to
see him blow off the hood like a leaf or butterfly. Watching him out there, his
cheeks buffeted by the wind, his pigtails flapping, his maniacal war-whooping
self grinning at me, I began to buy into this foolishness and started swerving
the car from one side of the road to the other. Twenty years ago it would have
been me out there on the hood — drunk, perhaps — egging the driver on.
The clowning around didn't last long though. Now that I was older,
I knew better. Macho behavior had long since ceased to produce enough
adrenaline to sustain itself for very long.
I motioned for Arturo to get back inside. He crawled up over the
windshield to the roof rack and stayed out of sight for a while. I held our
speed. As I waited for him to slither back through the window, I realized that
in a few hours I would be standing in front of his medicine-man father, who, if
he really was forty-three, couldn't possibly be Arturo's father, but would be
fourteen years my junior. At age fifty-seven, I would be begging the man's
permission to participate in a ritual that was originally intended to turn boys
into men.
I questioned whether it was an eagle or a turkey buzzard, but when Arturo
said that the bird soaring high above us was a good omen, I played along. I
gave him the good old thumbs-up, punched in a tape of Eric Clapton's
Unplugged, and turned up the volume on "Layla."
"Getting close?" I asked.
Apparently we were. Arturo was now communicating with any
raptor in sight — and there were many, both in the air and perched on utility
poles. I contented myself with reading the occasional road sign. We had left
the Rosebud Reservation, driving west on U.S. 18, and had passed through
prosperous farm country — white owned, probably. It wasn't lost on me that I
breathed easier when I saw silos and farmhouses; all I had seen in Rosebud
were cinder-block huts, rundown shanties, and rusted trailer homes.
"White farms," said Arturo.
The thunderheads in the west had vanished, easing my anxiety. I
felt slightly wiggy from all the driving and anticipation, and I barely noticed
when we entered the Pine Ridge Reservation.
The land looked fertile. An old Buick, filled with Indians, flew by us
in the opposite direction. The driver waved.
"My father will probably ask you why you've come," said Arturo.
"You haven't told him about me?"
"Not about you. He expects me to arrive next week, for the sun
dance."
"You mean we're just showing up here with no warning?"
"He'll ask you why you want to go up the hill. Be ready for that."
"Jesus fucking Christ, Arturo, you mean you haven't even told him
about me?"
"That's for you to do."
I wanted to grab Arturo's braids and smash his head into the
dashboard. What a pitiful generation! I thought. But I drove on into the sun,
trying to think of a clever answer for his father. I figured I would need to say
something with special import, or I would be sent packing. "I have come to
your land to pray" might do, but I couldn't say such a thing with a straight
face; I knew nothing about prayer. "I have journeyed here from afar, these
many days, to find myself." Nope. "Life is long, but time is short . . . How,
brother medicine man! . . . Hoka hey! I have come to your reservation to seek
a vision!"
It was hopeless. Why had I come? Because the film business had
proved to be an empty, soulless detour from what I considered my higher
purpose? Yes. I remembered a dream I had had decades earlier, a puzzling
dream in which I hit an exhilarating home run on some ancient playing field
but failed to touch first base on my way home. A psychotherapist had
suggested that the dream perfectly described my intuitive nature: I had no
trouble reaching a conclusion, he said, but struggled constantly to know how
I got there. Quick to see the ending of any given project, I rarely felt the need
to finish it. For a writer, he cautioned, this spelled trouble. True, but how
could I explain that to a medicine man? It was too long a story. And what
could a medicine man know about writing anyway?
I decided to say, simply, "I've come here because I've always
known I would." That had a certain ring of truth, and it seemed to shed a little
light on the inexplicable nature of this trip — admitting to a degree of
powerlessness on my part. Yet it also maintained a modicum of authority
appropriate to a man of my age and experience. This answer had a certain
dignity I could live with.
Arturo ejected my Eric Clapton tape, tuned in the local FM
station, KILI, and turned up the volume. The speakers exploded with the high-
pitched warble of powwow singers accompanied by a thundering drum. A
chilly spike of fear shot up my spine. Arturo told me to turn north on BIA 27
rather than continue into the town of Pine Ridge. I didn't protest, but I wanted
to. Perhaps it was just my hunger — I don't know — but the dread had
returned in full force. I suddenly felt completely powerless. Or maybe "beyond
help" is a better way to put it. Arturo had made it clear we were now out of
cell phone range. My presumably lofty decision to come here had quickly
morphed into the hard reality of actually being here. An approaching four-
wheel-drive police car slowed down to check us out. Two uniformed Indians
eyed us from behind their sunglasses as they passed. No one lived along
this road. The shrill music evoked visions of the scalp-taking warriors in the
western movies of my youth. As a child I had always sided with the war-
whooping Indians who ambushed the cavalry. But westerns weren't about the
Indians in those days. It was the life of the cavalryman you got to know —
the blue uniform and the gold scarf and the romance and the danger of it all.
And it was the seduction of belonging to the winning side that won out in the
end. Now, that treble war whoop made the roots of my hair sting. I thought of
the heyoka again.
"Your dad's not heyoka, is he?" I asked, turning down the volume.
Getting no answer, I assumed the answer was no.
"Tell me his name, at least," I said.
"Little Boy," said Arturo. "Mike Little Boy."
"But your last name is — "
"I earned that name," said Arturo, curtly. "It's a warrior's name."
I had no idea what that meant but decided not to pursue the
subject for fear of encouraging Arturo's annoying grandiosity. "Do I call your
father Mike?" I asked.
"That's his name," said Arturo.
"You're a nasty fuck," I said.
Arturo laughed. We came to an intersection marked by a small
sign that read wounded knee.
"Pull over here," Arturo said. "I'm gonna pray." I pulled off the road
and negotiated a rutted car path that traversed an overgrown hillside, atop
which sat Wounded Knee Cemetery. It looked pretty much like any
overgrown graveyard, which, given its history, made the place particularly
chilling.
Arturo grabbed a fistful of tobacco from the Bugler can between
his legs. "Wait here," he said.
I got out of the car but kept a respectful distance while Arturo
stepped inside a gated chainlink fence at the monument's perimeter. He held
the tobacco up to the four directions, mumbling some Lakota words.
In this place, on December 29, 1890, approximately 250 Lakota
men, women, and children were senselessly slaughtered by the U.S.
Seventh Cavalry. I remembered reading the shocking fact that ten soldiers
had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for their cowardly deeds
that day. The massacre coincided with the beginning of reservation life for the
Lakota people. Black Elk, who had witnessed the aftermath, called it "the
end of a beautiful dream."
From where I stood I could see hundreds of faded tobacco ties
hanging from the low chainlink fence. I could make out some of the names
etched on the south side of a small granite obelisk: Chief Big Foot, High
Hawk, Ghost Horse, Wounded Hand, Scatters Them, He Crow . . .
I looked around. Down by the road a lone Indian was snoozing
behind the counter of a makeshift arts-and-crafts concession, sound asleep
in the shade of a cottonwood tree. I tried to imagine the massacre — the
frozen ground, the bodies dismembered and ripped to shreds by Hotchkiss
cannon fire — but I couldn't. In the stillness of the midsummer air I felt
overwhelmed, not by the heightened resonance of this historic site, but by
the full force of its anonymity. It could have been a modest cemetery
anywhere in America. Its seeming lack of grandeur mirrored my own feelings
of insignificance. Suddenly I missed New York City. I leaned against my
Honda and took a leak.
Arturo returned to the car. "If I die on hanblecheya, that's where
my father will bury me."
"And if I die on hanblecheya?" I asked.
"It depends," he said. "They'd probably just toss your body in a
field, like a dog."
Mike Little Boy lived three miles east of the Porcupine Trading Post, a
general store with a single gas pump that constitutes the entire commercial
center of Porcupine, South Dakota. Porcupines have a way of warding off the
curious, and the town appeared true to its name. The windows of the little
store were boarded up to prevent theft. The young woman behind the counter
seemed remarkably hostile. I paid for a tank of unleaded and looked around
at the selection of edibles — potato chips, candy bars, canned Spam,
ketchup. "Have a good day," I said to the girl. She responded with a sneer.
"She expected you to ask if you could use her father's phone,"
explained Arturo, when we stepped outside. "White people do that. They
butter her up then bum the phone."
I shrugged and nodded. But I wasn't happy that we had landed in
this place. The sun was now just over four hands above the horizon, which
my wristwatch confirmed as half past five.
"Let's get there," I said. "I want to go up the hill tomorrow." We
drove east from the store until we came to a hand-lettered sign that read end
of the road. We turned left and bounced along a narrow, heavily rutted
driveway, past some skinny palominos and two slapped-together houses. At
a clump of cottonwoods the ruts deepened. I had to drive up a steep
embankment, then accelerate downhill, gunning the poor Honda through a
section of thick mud that would have challenged a tank.
Then suddenly we were there.
We stopped in front of a brown house with aluminum siding — one
of those wide-load prefabs you see taking up too much of the highway on a
flatbed semi. Just to the left of the house sat a pine cabin, Depression era,
probably. Next to the newer house it looked sadly askew on its cinder-block
footing. A brood of puppies appeared from beneath the cabin, their bodies
wagging ambitiously toward us before they changed their minds and retreated
into the shade.
"The whole family was raised in that cabin," said Arturo.
I killed the engine. What had I imagined? Not a tepee, but not this
either. The front yard was strewn with junk that looked as if it had been lying
there for years, half buried in the mud and overgrown with weeds. A ragged
upholstered sofa and a single metal folding chair sat directly beneath the
gutterless eaves, just to the left of the front door. Broken tricycles, bicycles,
plastic toys, rusted chain saws, useless carburetors, plastic bottles,
aluminum cans, dented tire rims, busted wrenches, scattered drill bits, a
crosscut saw, old sweatpants caked with dirt, soiled Pampers, a Yankees
cap stuffed into the spout of a dented five-gallon gas can, a beat-up Toro lawn
mower missing a rear wheel. Between the house and cabin, more trash, and
beyond that — to the west — a clothesline weighed down with bright laundry.
Curtains hung limp in the windows of the house; the front door lacked a knob.
A dust-covered Buick with a broken windshield sat baking in the sun.
"That's my dad's car," said Arturo. "Good old rez car." He told me
to back my vehicle away from the house so his mother would have room to
park her Pinto. I let the Honda roll back down the driveway until it stopped.
We got out.
Arturo pointed toward a domed heap of sun-faded blankets
surrounded by tall weeds. "That's the sweat lodge," he said. "You're gonna
sweat tonight."
A dilapidated blue trailer sat on cinder blocks in a field across
from the house. The sun dance grounds were partially visible on a knoll
several hundred yards to the east. From where we stood they looked like a
small-scale version of Stonehenge — a circular affair constructed of vertical
pine poles and partially roofed with pine boughs.
The rest was wide-open plains, spreading out in all directions —
undulating and resonant but, to my eye, not particularly hospitable.
Arturo started removing his personal stuff from the back seat. I
began unlashing the carton containing the new chain saw, which had made
the trip on the roof of my car. I had just freed it and hoisted it off the rack
when I noticed someone walking toward us — a wiry guy, about five feet ten,
wearing beat-up cowboy boots, oily jeans, and a greasy brown T-shirt with a
cigarette pack rolled up in the sleeve. He sported dark glasses and a
Chicago Bulls visor cap. A lit cigarette dangled from his mouth. What I could
see of his face looked dark and leathery and deeply lined. He shuffled along
the stony driveway like an old man who had just got out of bed. But he wasn't
old. If I had seen him coming on a New York sidewalk, I'd have crossed to
the other side of the street.
"Hey!" he said, still thirty feet away. The word issued from his
mouth like a growl, and I felt sure we had stopped at the wrong house.
I tapped Arturo on the shoulder.
"That's my dad," he said.
Immediately, I set the carton back on the roof, ducked into the
car, and grabbed the can of Bugler from the passenger's seat. I stuffed
tobacco into my left pants pocket as fast as I could and stood up in time to
see Arturo shaking hands with the man.
"What you come here for so early?" said his father.
"We're gonna help you get ready for the sun dance," Arturo said,
taking a step back.
"I was wondering what those two red hawks meant," said his
father. "I seen 'em earlier. You see 'em on your way in?" Arturo seemed
inordinately nervous and signaled for me to give his father the chain saw.
Obediently I took the box off the roof again and held it out. Arturo's father
stared at the Sears brand name, letting me hold the box out to him just a few
seconds longer than necessary. For a split second I felt like one of the three
Magi bringing an offering to the manger. It wasn't a comfortable sensation.
Finally he took the box and passed it to Arturo. "Put this in the
house," he said, "and go tell Mike Junior to gas it up. We gotta go for wood.
We're gonna sweat tonight."
And off ran Arturo, as eagerly as a little boy, in the same
exaggerated way he went about his work on a movie set, ducking low as he
ran, as if under fire. His father chuckled at the sight, the sound erupting from
deep in his throat. Then he called to Arturo, "Hey, Dances With Wolves!
Bring me and your friend here a soda pop too."
"Mister Little Boy?" I asked.
"Yep," he growled, working his lower jaw and pouting his lips. I
realized he was toothless. "Mike Little Boy." "I'm Dusty, from New York City."
He held out his hand. As we shook, I dug into my left pocket, came up with a
huge fistful of tobacco, and offered it to him, with my hand turned down.
Again he hesitated just a touch too long, staring at me from behind his
glasses, still holding my right hand in a loose grip.
When finally he accepted the tobacco, I blurted out, "I want to go
up the hill, on hanblecheya."
He nodded, took off his sunglasses, and hung them from the neck
of his T-shirt. I saw now that his eyes looked mean, maybe even cruel. No
kind old medicine man, this guy.
"Why?" he said, putting the clump of tobacco on the car hood.
"Why what?" I asked. Suddenly I had forgotten how I was going to
answer the all-important question.
"Why do you want to go up the hill?" he asked, gesturing that I
should feel free to just spit it out, but looking at me with undisguised
impatience, perhaps even contempt. My well-rehearsed, meaningful, urbane
answer had deserted me entirely. This toothless, weather-beaten Indian —
this junk yard dog, I thought — had completely unnerved me. Would he even
be able to understand a sophisticated answer? Probably not. In any case he
was waiting for a response of some kind. I could see by his no-nonsense
expression that everything hinged on it. Yet I couldn't come up with a thing.
"I don't know," I said.
The sun bore relentlessly into my neck.
"How long you thinking of going on hanblecheya?" he asked.
"Four days and four nights," I said, trying to infuse my response
with warriorlike resolve. But I didn't put enough breath behind the words, and
my assertion lingered in the air like a pop fly. I felt completely weakened.
"One day," said Mike. "Maybe."
"What?" I said.
"I'll let you go up the hill for one day — maybe. We'll have to ask
the spirits in the sweat lodge tonight."
"Hey," I said, pointing at my license plate, "I came a long way for
this. I've got to go up for four days."
Nope," he said.
"What?"
Arturo returned with two cold cans of Coke. I declined. Mike
snapped open one of the cans. "Get a knife," he said to Arturo. "Go cut five
chokecherry stakes for your friend here. He's going up tomorrow morning,
coming down tomorrow night." Arturo went running off again before I could
ask him to intervene for me.
I had told Angie that I would be going up the hill for four days and
four nights. I had made it sound — hinting at the substantial physical risk
and inflating the spiritual dimensions — if not exactly heroic, at least exotic. I
had done the same with my daughter, my brother, my sister, and anyone
else who would listen.
When I was in my thirties and living alone, I used to leave cryptic
notes on my kitchen counter before taking any kind of road trip: a stanza of
poetry, say, that would hint — in case I failed to return — that I had foreseen
my death. Not a suicide note by any means, but a hedge against fate.
Something that would allow my death to draw attention to my otherwise
unremarkable life. It had always felt strange to return home, alive and
unscathed, and then have to read those cryptic notes. I felt a similar letdown
now. I would have to tell everyone that my hanblecheya had been like a
picnic on a hill — that I had been turned down for the real ordeal.
"Listen, Mike," I said, "I come from New York City, but I've spent a
lot of time in the wilderness by myself. I've spent weeks alone camping out. I
can handle it."
"You don't understand," he said. "It's different here at my place.
You see up there?" He pointed in the direction of a sparsely wooded hilltop,
about half a mile to the north. I hadn't really noticed the hill before, which
seemed odd now because it looked quite ominous from here, where the low
angle of the sun highlighted some scraggly hilltop pines, accentuating their
shadowed side.
"I see it," I said.
"That's a sacred hill," he said.
I stared at Mike. Nothing in this man's face indicated to me that
he knew what sacred meant; in fact, he seemed all too acquainted with the
profane. Clearly life had bitten him; you could read it in his eyes, and in the
fight scars on his face. I had seen pictures of famous medicine men — Black
Elk, Lame Deer, Fools Crow — and they were always old men with
weathered faces and wise, sardonic eyes. They were men you could trust.
Sacred hill because you say so, I thought. Sacred because it's on your
property.
"It's different than what you read in books," said Mike. "A lotta
guys can't even stay up that hill for two hours — even Indians. They start to
see things. When you come to me, it's not like up in Bear Butte where they
tell any white guy who comes along, 'Okay, do four days, take water with
you, whatever you want, you wanna be Black Elk, we'll make you Black Elk.'
That's not the way I do things."
"I can go four days," I said.
"Maybe," said Mike, nodding. "But what if you can't?"
It had never occurred to me that I couldn't, just that I might die
trying. But I didn't want to tell him that. Suddenly it seemed pathetically naive
that I hadn't even acknowledged the possibility that I might fail to go the
distance.
"It's like this," said Mike. "Maybe I say, 'Okay, do four days and
four nights,' and then in the middle of the first night you change your mind
because some coyote comes up behind you and says, 'Yip!,' or the lightning
gets real bad, or a rattlesnake wants to curl up and have sex with you, and
then you come running down the hill, screaming, and bang on my door,
waking up my wife and kids. 'What happened, Mister Little Boy! Help me!
Help me!' " Mike was whining in falsetto now, and distorting his toothless
mouth, like Popeye. " 'What the hell happened to me up there? Why didn't
you tell me that was going to happen?' You see? And then the word gets
around and people start to talk about you because you said you were gonna
do something, and you didn't do it. It's no good when people start talking
about you like that. You see what I mean?"
I said I did. It was like when I was teaching skydiving and a
student would go up in an airplane with me and then decide not to jump after
all. I knew what Mike meant. I didn't want to be seen as some failed wannabe
around here, or when I got home.
Then, as if he had read my mind, he said, "I don't mean people
around here," he said, "or your friends back home. I mean the old ones, up
there." He pointed to the hill. "The spirits know who you are."
"Spirits?" I said
"They come to you," said Mike. "You'll see."
I had always assumed that the notion of spirits — humans taking
animal form, or animals taking human form — was meant metaphorically. But
as I looked at Mike, I didn't see any evidence that he was using a figure of
speech, or that he was even capable of such a thing. I backed off a little and
signaled my acquiescence — and my disappointment — with a shrug.
Whatever, I thought.
A slight breeze kicked up, bringing with it a rotten odor — garbage
or rattlesnakes, I couldn't tell which. A naked child appeared on the front
steps of the house, turned sideways to us, and peed into the dirt. I could see
Arturo, down by a little creek, bent over and hacking away at a chokecherry
sapling. The drone of a television set emanated from behind the front door; a
police scanner crackled behind a curtained window.
I had driven eighteen hundred miles in just over two days. My
body was still buzzing from the long drive, and already I wanted to head
back.
I glanced at the so-called sacred hill and started to unlock the
trunk of my car. "We brought some food," I said to Mike. Two hundred fucking
dollars' worth of food, I thought. Just then Mike touched my arm. His
knuckles were black with grease, a mechanic's hand. I pulled my arm away.
"There's something you need to know," he said.
"Shoot," I said. I was still pissed off.
"When you come down from the hill tomorrow night, everything will
be different for you."
Yeah, I thought, I'll be on my way out of here.
"You'll be changed," he said.
Yeah, right, I thought. I remembered a time when I was nineteen.
The actor Kirk Douglas flew into the airport in Orange, Massachusetts, where
I taught skydiving. He had one of his young sons in tow. I ran up to him and
excitedly tried to get him to make a parachute jump, telling him at great
length what a kick skydiving was. He listened patiently and then said, "Are
you telling me about kicks, kid?"
Was Mike really telling me, a sophisticated urban man who had
been living a fast-paced, cutting-edge life in the film business, about change?
"The spirits are gonna come, and they're gonna want to talk to
you," said Mike, "but you can't step off the blanket when they do. The
tobacco ties are there to protect you. You just gotta hold your pipe and pray
real hard."
"I don't have a pipe," I said.
"I'll give you one of mine. But you gotta hold on to it all the time
you're up there."
This drivel was making me impatient. Was Mike really trying to
convince me that spending a single day on a blanket was going to be a big
spiritual deal? I toed the dirt with my sneaker, unearthed a small stone,
kicked it away. When I looked up I saw that Mike's expression had softened,
and I realized that all this while he had been speaking to me quite warmly,
albeit with a warning tone. I recognized in his eyes the same concern I used
to project while speaking to student jumpers just before they left the airplane,
or to apprentice grips before they performed their first dolly shot on a film set.
I urged the beginners to get the most out of the experience, but was careful
to remind them of the difficulties and warn them of any inherent dangers.
Suddenly I felt grateful that Arturo's father wasn't just rubber-stamping my
request to go up the hill for four days and four nights without food or water (a
life-threatening proposition, at best), grateful that he had cut me down to
size. Stripped of my heroic conceit, I thought, Hey, I know what kind of guy
this is. He's not so bad. I see what he's doing. I've been this way with
apprentices myself. We stand on equal footing. Thus deluded — blinded by
the illusion that I already knew what he had to teach me — I conceded the
role of teacher to him.
"Okay," I said, "tell me. How will I change?"
"When you come down from your hanblecheya," he
said, "everything will seem strange. You won't know how to think about it
right away. You might even be scared. When you go back to New York your
life there won't make sense anymore. You'll go back to work, and you'll think
about us here when the sun goes down, and you'll remember what happened
to you when you were here. You'll still have your family and your job and your
people, but it won't be the same. This will be your home." He indicated the
surrounding plains.
"But that will still be my real home," I said, pointing east toward
New York. The words tumbled out like those of a little boy whose mother is
dragging him away from his playmates. The sun dipped below the roofline of
the Little Boy house, casting a shadow over us. Mike told me that unless the
spirits in the sweat lodge said otherwise, I would go up the hill for one day
this year, one day and one night next year, two days and one night the third
year, and two days and two nights the fourth, in the year 2000.
"Four years?" I asked, unable to conceal my dismay. But Mike
had apparently told me all I needed to know for now. Gone was the kindly
expression on his face. Once again I was looking at the hard-bitten mug of a
man whom I never would have picked out of a lineup as a medicine man.
That's when it hit me.
"Are you heyoka, Mike?" I asked.
"You bring any cigarettes?" he said.
I pointed at the car trunk, where I had packed the cartons of
Marlboros.
"Good," he said, with a throaty chuckle. He jerked his thumb in
the direction of his Buick. "I'll need some gas money too."
The front door of Mike's house opened into the living room, which was
separated from the kitchen by a counter. I began lugging the gifts and
groceries into the house, two bags at a time. Four young Lakota men sat on
a sofa, watching TV, while a fifth sat on the edge of an old easy chair,
swatting away the hand of the boy I had seen on the porch. The child, named
Wambli (meaning "eagle"), was trying persistently to touch the new chain
saw.
As I went back and forth between kitchen and car, I attempted to
make eye contact with the young men, even saying hello once. But they
avoided looking at me, preferring, it seemed, to scope out the contents of the
shopping bags. On my third run, one of them stood up and grabbed a bunch
of bananas from a bag and passed them to his friends. The fellow next to him
began rubbing his thumb across the six-inch blade of his bowie knife. He
stared at my midsection as if planning to gut me.
I made four or five more trips until all the grocery bags were
heaped on the muddy kitchen floor. A half-eaten hamburger bun, pinned
beneath the leg of a chair, reminded me that I had eaten nothing but a
blueberry muffin all day. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich came to mind,
but as I looked around, the idea faded. Flies worked every available kitchen
surface. Dishes lay in the sink, stacked higher than the faucet. The stovetop
was encrusted with ketchup, mustard, and burnt coffee. The refrigerator door,
held ajar by a huge mound of frost, lacked a handle. Packaged meat,
crammed into the freezer section, appeared gray and speckled. The
refrigerator shelves overflowed with inedible leftovers. I left the kitchen and
went back outside to put my car trunk in order and tidy up my personal
belongings.
After about ten minutes I heard Mike call my name from the
porch. I rolled up the car windows, took a deep breath, and reentered the
house. Arturo and Mike were standing in the center of the living room. The
sullen guy with the bowie knife stood up to give Mike a seat on the sofa, then
he left the room, eyeing me coldly as he went out the door. Arturo put the five
chokecherry stakes in a corner and started to unwrap a toy airplane for
Wambli.
I didn't know what to do with myself. I wanted to be introduced,
but all eyes were on Wambli, who now threw the balsa wood airplane against
the wall, breaking its right wing in half. Everyone's attention drifted to the
television, which featured a talk show with a bunch of white women gabbing
about relationships. I gazed at the mostly bare walls, embarrassed. I felt
ashamed of the television and the people on it, as if it and they and I had
somehow conspired to create the plight of the people in the room. An old
Pendleton star blanket hung on the wall opposite the sofa, serving as a
backdrop for some curled three-by-five-inch family photographs, each held in
place by a single thumbtack.
"You got them cigarettes?" said Mike.
I went to the kitchen, fished around in the bags, and came back
with a carton of Marlboro Reds.
"Just one pack," said Mike. "Put the rest on the counter."
"May I use your bathroom?" I asked.
Mike jerked his thumb over his shoulder. It was a small house.
"Be right back," I said, though I wanted to crawl out a window and
drive away to the Comfort Inn we'd passed several hundred miles ago. But
instead I walked through the kitchen and down a short hallway, past three
small bedrooms. Clothing was heaped everywhere. Judging by the garments
on the floor, girls slept in the room closest to the kitchen. A rack of barbells,
a slew of hand weights, and a poster of Madonna identified the boys' room. I
assumed that Mike and his wife slept in the room where the police scanner
continued to squawk, though nothing really distinguished the room as adult.
I closed the door to the tiny, windowless bathroom and flipped up
the toilet seat. The whole thing crashed to the floor, lid and all, revealing a
shit-speckled, piss-streaked porcelain bowl. The wet bath mat stank of
mildew. Two muddy bath towels lay draped over a shower door that had slid
off its track. Both the showerhead and the bathtub faucet leaked a steady
stream of hot water. The sink spigot dripped cold. Over the sink four bent
nails marked the space where a mirror had once hung. A banged-up hair
dryer, plugged into an unprotected socket, dangled from an old shelf bracket.
I replaced the toilet seat, rinsed my hands, wiped them on my
pants, and returned to the living room.
Everyone but Mike had left.
"Get out there and help Arturo," he said. "We're gonna sweat in a
couple of hours."
I set up my orange tent on rough ground about fifty feet west of the sweat
lodge. Arturo made camp in the little Depression-era cabin. As I drove the
tent stakes into the hard earth, smoke drifted toward me from the fire pit
located in front of the sweat lodge. Arturo and I had piled fifty-four rocks, per
Mike's instructions, atop a tower of dry pine logs. The crackle and snap of
the fire made me feel as if everything was going to be okay. I secured the fly
over my tent, tossed my inflatable mattress and sleeping bag inside, zipped
the door shut, and walked over to the sweat lodge.
Shaped like an upside-down bowl, about twelve feet in diameter
and four feet high at its apex, the lodge was constructed of tied-together
saplings covered with layers of old blankets and tarps, which are meant to
keep out light and hold in heat. With the door flap open, a dank, musty smell
wafted from its dirt-floor interior.
A raised, earthen altar in front of the sweat lodge consisted of a
circle of small rocks with a weathered buffalo skull in the center. Next to the
skull Arturo had placed Mike's medicine pipe and a large rattle decorated
with feathers. Having grown up in a family in which religion took a back seat
to art, I found most altars strange. This one had all the elements of child's
play, but felt deeply spooky to me.
I changed into shorts and stood alone by the fire. The sun sat less
than one hand above the horizon. The air was cooler now; the fire coals
intense. The heated rocks — most of them about eight inches thick —
glowed like volcanic magma beneath layers of gray ash. I still hadn't eaten
but was neither hungry nor thirsty. For a few moments I indulged in a kind of
reverie, taking in the wide expanse around me: the vast horizon, the
seemingly endless pasture where skinny horses grazed beyond my tent. I let
myself imagine living there. My tent would make a perfectly ample home.
Compared to the parks in New York City, there was some real elbow room
here. And a blessed silence, broken only by a whisper of wind.
Then the Indians came roaring in. Mike's Buick, loaded with the
young men I had seen earlier, skidded to a halt five feet in front of me. Two
more rez cars, filled with men, women, and children, pulled up next to my
tent. Four children piled out of the lead car and ran directly over to my Honda.
After glomming the contents of the change tray and glove compartment, they
began playfully jumping on the hood and roof. I imagined having to hitchhike
home.
Soon the sun touched the horizon and the mosquitoes came out.
Everyone gathered around the fire. I said hi to the kids and nodded hello to
two old women — the only people who seemed willing to acknowledge my
presence. The men made no pretense of welcoming me, nor did the young
woman who stood on the other side of the fire. But I didn't feel shy about
looking at each of their faces, firelit and dark, their skin the color of
bloodwort. For some reason it seemed okay to be staring at them — as if
their reticence invited me to stare and thus become part of the group.
A tall string bean of a man, who looked to be about forty, stood at
the edge of the fire pit next to his wife. He poked at the rocks with a
pitchfork. Neither he nor his wife spoke a word.
Mike showed up, followed closely by Arturo, who was lugging a
plastic five-gallon spackle bucket filled with water. Mike told me to help
Arturo put the red-hot rocks into the sweat lodge, and as we began forking
them into the rock pit, Mike wrapped a beach towel around his waist and
removed his pants and shirt. His hairless chest was covered with raised
scars that resembled exit wounds, evidence of many years of piercing during
sun dances, the annual sacrificial ceremonies that the U.S. government had
outlawed for much of the twentieth century.
When we finished forking the fifty-four rocks into the lodge pit,
Mike said something in Lakota that made everyone laugh. When I looked
around, I saw that everyone was amused by me. The string-bean man said
something in response, and everyone roared again, even harder. Nervously I
looked down at my feet, at my white Reeboks covered with ash. My fly was
wide open. Mike explained, in English, that his brother-in-law, Lanford,
wanted to know if I was planning to feed the mosquitoes a little dick. The kids
doubled over with laughter as I zipped myself up. An old woman told me not
to worry; it was just in fun. The young men shook their heads as if they had
never in all their lives seen such a dumb wasichu.
People started preparing for the sweat — the women wrapping
themselves in ragged sarongs, the men stripping off their shirts and putting
on shorts. Every man present, except me, sported weltlike scars on his
chest and back.
I hung my shirt and eyeglasses on a fence post and stood aside
politely, as if waiting for the host to seat his guests. Mike, already seated
inside the sweat lodge just to the right of the door flap, waved the women in
first. I watched as the four of them crawled inside, moving clockwise around
the hot stones until they sat to the right of Mike. I wanted to be the last one
in so that I too could sit next to the door. But Mike told me to crawl in now —
and to sit all the way in back.
"You get the seat of honor," he chuckled. "The hot seat." I dropped
to my knees and muttered "Mitakuye oyasin," as Arturo had trained me to
do, then I crawled somewhat tremulously around to the back. Mitakuye
oyasin translates variously as "all our relations" or "we are all related"; the we
refers both to all races and to all beings, including the four-legged and
winged, and of course the spirits. I sat cross-legged, directly opposite the
door, fighting off the feeling that I was way too large for the space assigned
me. How would I find my way out of here in the dark? The hot rocks blocked
my path.
A fat spider crawled up my left calf and across my thigh. I folded
my arms to avoid provoking it.
Arturo made his way past my knees and sat to my left. The other
men entered and closed ranks at my right. Lanford sat down at the north side
of the door, a round drum and leather-tipped drumstick on his lap. I was
hemmed in now for the duration.
A fourth car pulled up outside. Its headlights went out, and I heard
two doors slam. I watched through the door flap, incredulous, as more people
undressed outside. I could see a bit of the black horizon and a triangle of
indigo sky, pierced by a single bright star. I focused on that star and pinned
all my hopes on it. Don't let me panic. The intense heat from the rocks was
already cooking my knees. My eyeballs felt dangerously dry.
An overweight woman wearing shorts and a tank top crawled
through the door and sat next to Mike. Three more men crawled past Lanford,
forcing everyone even closer together. I was knee-to-knee now with Arturo —
and with the sullen guy who had been fiddling with the bowie knife earlier.
"Watch the kids," Mike said to a teenage girl outside. "Don't let
them be banging on that New York car."
Suddenly the door flap fell and it was dark. The guy on my right
leaned closer and whispered in my ear, "Hey, Custer, this is your last day on
earth."
I blinked, and then blinked again. I had never been in this kind of
darkness. When the first ladle of water hit the rocks, my whole body
stiffened. Sizzling drops splashed my kneecaps, and steam engulfed my
face. I gasped and cupped my hands over my nose. Another splash, another
surge of steam. I could tell by the spitting sound that buckets of water could
be poured on those rocks before they would even begin to cool down.
I heard Mike say from the other side of the darkness, "We're
gonna do four doors tonight, in honor of our friend here from New York."
I didn't know what "four doors" meant, but I was sure it wasn't
pleasant.
Lanford started banging the drum, and Mike began to sing:
Wahkathaka usimala ye! Wanikta cha echamu yelo . . .
Everyone took up the song with him. Another splash of water, and all the
available oxygen was consumed by steam. My breath fled my lungs, as if
sucked out by a tornado. I squirmed backward, my spine pressed against a
ridgepole. I tried to topple sideways, get down where I could breathe. No
room to move. I sat up straight, seeking air above. It was hopeless. I gasped.
The drum kept an insistent one-two, one-two rhythm, with the
accent on the first beat. When I was a boy, I used to play an album of 78-rpm
records called The Little Indian Boy. Whenever the boy was lost, his father
would drum for him just like this. In the dark now, this childhood memory
collided with thoughts about my own father, who had died sixteen months
earlier, sparking an intense feeling of loss.
It seemed no one knew how to hold a tune. With Mike leading the
way, everyone shouted the song. I started bellowing too, faking the words,
rocking my upper body back and forth in time with the drum, and holding my
hands over my face to shield my eyes from the steam. This song seemed to
last forever. I imagined blisters bubbling on my face, my hair combusting
spontaneously. Forget the dangers of hanblecheya — I was going to die right
here.
When the singing stopped, Mike said something about my going
up the hill the next morning, or at least I assumed that was what he said
because I heard my name mixed in with Lakota, as well as the word
hanblecheya. Everyone said, "Aho!" which I took to be supportive. Then Mike
shouted, "Mitakuye oyasin," and the door opened at last. Steam poured out
into the night.
The star I had seen earlier had sunk below the horizon. The water
ladle was passed around the lodge, starting with Lanford, and each
participant took a sip. When it came to the fellow on my right, he took a
drink, tossed the remaining water on the rocks, and passed the ladle back
the other way.
"Anyone else want water?" asked Mike.
I kept silent for fear of seeming unmanly.
I glanced at Arturo. In the dim light of the coals I could see that
his eyes were closed, his posture erect, his pigtails hanging on his chest. He
looked every inch the warrior he claimed to be.
The ladle went the other way. The women drank, and the door was
closed again. Again the steam surged, thicker and thicker. A new song
began:
Thukasila Wakhathaka Eya hoyewaye lo . . .
When I heard moans of agony coming from the guy on my right, I began
rocking back and forth in earnest, gasping for air. "Oh, God," I intoned, "help
me breathe." Other people were singing. I tried to join in but kept slipping into
the begging mode. "I want to live!" I said into my cupped hands. "Let me live
through this!" When the singing stopped, more water hit the rocks, and the
place became even more unbearable. I was going to die in a dark sweat
lodge as payment for the sins of my race. The guy with the bowie knife was
right: I probably was General Custer in a former life. I did in fact have Indian-
killer blood running through my veins, and I chose this very moment to
remember the details. My seventh great-grandmother, nine generations back,
had killed and scalped twelve Nipmucks in revenge for the killing of her
newborn child. Hannah Emerson Dustin, my namesake. Her statue, with
bloody scalps hanging from her victorious fist, still stood in Concord, New
Hampshire — right there on Contoocook Island in the Merrimack River, where
she had done the dirty deed back in 1697. This was karmic revenge.
"Forgive me," I mumbled into my hands.
I was about to yell this contrition out loud to the spirits when I
realized that the singing had stopped and someone else was speaking, in
English. I had no idea who — the voice issued from the vicinity of the drum. A
man was saying he wished he hadn't gotten drunk the night before; he had
said things he didn't mean and behaved badly. He prayed for his mother and
his sisters. "Aho!" said the others. "Aho!" I said, happy to recognize a soul as
miserable as me. Then another man spoke, and another, either in English or
Lakota, and the circle of prayer revolved toward me.
The fellow on my right simply said "Mitakuye oyasin" and tapped
my arm. I squeezed my eyes shut — as if it mattered — and started to
speak, addressing Tunkasila (meaning "grandfather") first, as the others had
done. I said nothing about being Custer, and I didn't ask forgiveness for my
race or for my murderous ancestor. Instead I heard myself praying for the
people on the reservation, for the Little Boy family, and for my family and
friends back home. I ended with "Mitakuye oyasin." I couldn't recall ever
having prayed in public before.
Arturo said, "Mitakuye oyasin," thus passing the prayer to the old
women, whose petitions took forever. I wanted to scream. Lanford beat the
drum to give them a little privacy. When the door opened again, everyone
collapsed as low as they could, trying to find breathable air. No one spoke.
During the third door Mike asked the spirits about me. He
concluded that I was to go up the hill for one day — dawn to dusk. He told
me that the spirit of Fools Crow, a famous medicine man who had died a few
years earlier, would accompany me. As he spoke, little sparks blossomed in
the pitch-black air, as if someone were flicking a Zippo lighter, although no
sound accompanied the sparks. I heard a rattle being shaken. Then everyone
sang again. It felt like Hades in there. The bowie knife guy to my right began
to retch. My pores were bleeding sweat. During the fourth door we joined in a
nearly endless song of thanksgiving. It was the hottest door of all.
Dripping wet, we crawled out into the cool night air. At least an
hour had passed, or maybe a lifetime. I staggered to my feet like a newborn
calf. One of the men vomited into the fire pit; another fell onto an outstretched
bath towel. The stars were out in force.
Mike lit his pipe and we stood in an informal circle, sharing a
smoke. I felt completely drained and wanted to laugh. I thought of cold spring
water and pictured the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I was going to
devour in the house.
"Got your tobacco ties together?" asked Mike.
"Yep," I said. "Blanket, tobacco ties, chokecherry stakes."
"Good," he said. "Arturo will give you one of my pipes tomorrow
morning. He's gonna take you up the hill. Now go to your tent, and don't talk
to anyone until you come down tomorrow night. No food, no water."
I stepped into my sneakers, hoping to at least say goodbye to the
people with whom I had just suffered so intensely. But everyone, including
Arturo, deliberately avoided looking at me — knowing, I suppose, what I was
in for.
Everyone, that is, except the guy with the bowie knife. From him I
got a nod.
The next morning, as I waited for Arturo to fetch me from my tent, I tried to
imagine my hanblecheya. Arturo had given me the drill, more or less, during
our drive west: I would be confined to an "altar" the size of my Pendleton
blanket, which in turn would be surrounded by a perimeter of tobacco ties.
Holding a long-stemmed pipe, I was supposed to pray until the sun went
down, after which I would go through a second sweat ceremony and some
kind of debriefing session, conducted by Mike. Even though I had gone
without food or water for about twenty-four hours, I figured I could get through
the hanblecheya well enough.
But what about obtaining a vision? Would I be able to cry for a
dream? Or was I too self-conscious, too cynical? And what kind of dream or
vision could I expect? Might I discover, at last, the true me, and be ready to
take up where the old me had left off? What would it mean if I had no vision at
all? I wasn't sure I wanted to know.
I unzipped my tent flap. A brown-and-white female mutt, the
mother of the puppies I had seen on our arrival, sat outside slapping her tail
in the dirt. Her swollen teats tugged at her loose skin, accentuating her rib
cage. One eye had gone milky white, but with the other she eyed me
affectionately. Another dog, part German shepherd, lay sprawled in the shade
on the west side of the tent. This beast had kept me awake most of the
night, nosing and pawing the nylon walls, sniffing at the mosquito netting,
growling at my every move. He raised his head to look at me.
By the time Arturo finally showed up with my prayer pipe, the sun
had risen two hands above the horizon. He looked both annoyed and guilty
about being late. He put a finger to his lips, silencing me, and signed that he
needed the key to my car. I had just pocketed the key in my sweatpants,
which I planned to wear that day. The rest of my belongings were locked in
the trunk and the glove compartment.
"You can't take any metal up the hill," said Arturo. "And leave your
eyeglasses down here."
The idea of Arturo having access to my car, credit cards, cash,
and eyeglasses was something I hadn't anticipated. How could I cry for a
dream with that kind of worry on my mind? Bad enough that I wasn't allowed
paper and pen. How could I see a spirit clearly without my glasses? But I
turned them over to Arturo, along with the key, and sat in the passenger seat
with my necessities on my lap: one large blanket, one small camping
blanket, one pipe, five chokecherry stakes, and 150 feet of carefully wrapped
tobacco ties. The car was already oppressively hot. I squinted at the
dashboard clock: 8:20 a.m.
Arturo got in behind the wheel and said he would need some
money for the feast his family planned to prepare when I got down from the
hill that night. I took the key from the ignition, unlocked the glove
compartment, and removed my wallet. "Tell me when to stop," said Arturo,
shutting his eyes and bunching his fingers like a monkey.
I opened my wallet and watched as he blindly extracted one bill at
a time. I began to imagine scrambled eggs and bacon, pancakes and fresh
strawberries, a mug of French roast coffee, a tall glass of chilled Evian water.
I pictured feasting victoriously to the cheers and congratulations of admiring
Indians. I didn't flip the wallet shut until he had removed five twenties.
Arturo tucked the money in his shirt pocket and opened his eyes.
I tossed the wallet back in the glove compartment, locked it again, and
handed back the key.
We drove away from my tent, passing an old chicken coop with a
clothesline out front. Maneuvering between two wooden fence posts, we
headed out across the rolling, trackless plains. Arturo didn't say a word. Tall
grass and sage scraped the undercarriage of the car as we bounced for half a
mile over prairie-dog mounds. Nearing our destination, I turned in my seat
and saw the mutt bitch and the German shepherd following us in hot pursuit,
their tongues dangling from their mouths.
I had pictured a normal hilltop, a place from which I would have a
commanding view of the Great Plains — the better to inspire a vision. But
when we arrived at the edge of the sparsely wooded area, it became clear
that the hilltop itself was actually concave, like the apex of a volcano. The
sparse trees I had seen from Mike's house grew out of that declivity,
disguising the hill's true shape.
Weighed down with paraphernalia, I followed Arturo and the two
dogs, who had caught up with us, into the hollow. Scrawny, widely spaced
pines struggled to keep a foothold on the slope. We paused for a moment in
front of one tree, the limbs of which were festooned with discarded tobacco
ties — black, red, white, and yellow — some faded by the sun, some bright.
Strands of spider silk stretched like guy wires between the smaller branches.
We continued down, weaving our way through fallen tree trunks
and low brush. When we reached the bottom of the declivity, Arturo began
pacing with the focused intensity of a dowser looking for water. But instead of
using a dowsing rod, he held out his palm, apparently feeling the aura of the
place. He searched the sky as if seeking avian guidance. Satisfied, he
nodded and told me to spread out my blanket.
How could I ever see the sunset from the bottom of this bowl, this
ungodly swale? No horizon, no majesty. I wouldn't have thought of stopping
here to piss, much less settled here for hanblecheya. But I spread out my
blanket.
"Take off your sandals," said Arturo. "Put them off the blanket,
upside down."
I obeyed, quietly calculating the hours that remained — twelve,
roughly. The ground Arturo had picked was lumpy and uninviting.
"Stand in the center and start to pray," he said. "Don't let go of
that pipe, ever."
I picked up the pipe and cradled it in my arms, in rough imitation
of a loin-clothed medicine man I had seen in an Edward S. Curtis photograph.
I faked the praying, sneaking looks at Arturo, who drove the chokecherry
stakes into the ground, one at each corner of the blanket. When he had sunk
a fifth stake, to indicate west, he attached one end of my string of tobacco
ties and began winding them from stake to stake, around and around, laying
out the colors in reverse order of the way I had tied them in New York City.
He walked backward, moving clockwise around me. The dogs watched.
Done with the ties, Arturo recited something in Lakota, slowly and
with sincerity. Then he simply walked away, in the direction of the car. The
bitch sniffed my sandals and plopped down next to them. The German
shepherd leapt over the ties and joined me on the blanket. I clapped my
hands loudly to get Arturo's attention and signal him to take the dogs back
with him. I clapped again and again, but he ignored me. I tried to whistle, but
all that came out was a hiss. By the time I called his name he was gone.
"Get out!" I ordered. "Go away!" Unaccustomed to commands in
English, the shepherd leapt playfully at my outstretched hand and got hold of
my shirtsleeve with his teeth. The bitch tried to join us in what she took to be
play, but instead of springing over the tobacco ties, she just barged through
them. I yelled at the shepherd and punched him hard in the side, trying
simultaneously to push the bitch away with my foot. She got the message
and backed out, dragging down the north side of my altar. The shepherd,
however, got serious and started fighting for the space.
"That's enough," I said. "Get out of here, leave me alone!" The dog
came at my left arm again, and again I nailed him with my right fist. His
mood changed, his confidence mounting in direct proportion to my anger and
frustration. He arose and came at me on two legs, his forepaws pushing at
my chest. I grabbed his neck fur and tossed him sideways, but he recovered
and bounded toward me again. There was nothing playful in his demeanor
now; his eyes were beady black. Were we competing? Was this how I was
going to die, fighting for this sacred space, my prayer altar, with a creature
who thought I was after his mate? I remembered how people on hanblecheya
were sometimes visited at night by coyotes, and suddenly this all seemed
much too real — the shepherd's teeth sinking into my wrist, his slobber on
my hands, his hot breath mingling with mine. If he were to drive me from this
altar — push me out, or compel me to run away — my hanblecheya would
be blown. But if I refused to give way, might he not kill me? I had to act, or
this was going to end badly.
In a panic I slugged the dog with an uppercut to the throat and
kicked him hard with the top of my bare foot in the soft space between his
ribs and his genitals. He yelped and jumped off the blanket. He began circling
the altar, teeth bared, clearly thinking of another approach. I heard myself
say, "No, please, go away, I didn't want to hurt you, just go away, please."
But he came at me again, head low, snarling. Alarmed, the bitch jumped up
and ran about ten yards away. As the shepherd grabbed a leg of my
sweatpants, I begged him again to retreat, pleaded with God to stop him.
Desperate, I drove my fist into his jaw, then both fists into his ears. He had
nearly dragged me out of the altar area when, suddenly, he let go, moved off,
and started sniffing around as if I had never been of any interest at all. I
watched as he followed some scent. Watched until he, with the bitch in tow,
disappeared over the ridge.
It was then that I realized I was crying. Crying for a dream had
begun as simply as that.
I pulled the stakes and ties of the altar upright and stood in the center of the
blanket. I raised my pipe to the Thunder Beings who live in the west. I offered
them the pipe, bowl first. If they were paying attention, I must have had them
howling with laughter, since the idea, I learned later, was to offer them a
smoke — stem first. I turned ninety degrees and raised my pipe in similar
fashion to the Buffalo People in the north, then turned to the Black-Tailed
Deer People in the east, then to the spirits in the south. I lifted the bowl to
Grandfather Sky, dipped it to Grandmother Earth, and clutched the pipe to
my chest, indicating that my offer was coming from the heart.
I went through the motions of praying. But my first attempts
resembled a cold motor being awakened by a low battery; not all parts of me
seemed ready yet. Did I believe in spirits? No. In beseeching them I had
succeeded only in seeing myself from their point of view: a fifty-seven-year-
old stoop-shouldered, bare-headed white man wearing green Gap sweatpants
and a blue L. L. Bean work shirt, a key grip from New York City whose doctor
had warned him to watch his cholesterol and wear a hat in the sun.
But by paying attention to the six directions and positioning my
heart at the center of all things, as instructed, I had succeeded at least in
locating myself — my physical self — there in the declivity of that hilltop in
South Dakota, not far from the longitudinal center of America on north parallel
forty-three. And by imagining myself at the center of all things I suddenly felt
perfectly at home, since this position mimicked the way I had lived my whole
self-centered life. The spotlight was on me alone now. And the sun bore
down, but I raised my collar against it.
Not unlike a child kneeling by his bed, I prayed out loud for each
member of my family: for my father; for my son, Chelsey, who had died
twenty-six years earlier at the age of eighteen months; for my mother, who
now lived alone; and for my daughter. I spoke softly, so as not to be
overheard by humans, should any be lurking about. I did the directional
offerings with the pipe again and prayed to be given a vision.
Not bad, I thought. This was going to be easier than I had
expected, and praying, I found, had a calming effect on me. Proud of myself,
I sat down on the hot wool blanket. A few minutes passed before the truth
began to sink in — there was nothing else to do on this hill but pray.
My mind wandered, searching for a constructive idea to write
about later. What about the alcohol problem on the reservation? Now there
was a subject I could address in some authoritative fashion when I got down
from the hill. I had kicked drugs and booze fifteen years before. Who better to
speak to the issue than me? I began composing a speech to a tribal council,
to a powwow of all the Indian nations. I saw myself as a significant and long-
awaited messenger to the Lakota people — to all Native people. So there is a
purpose to my coming here, I thought. The notion produced in me a wild
exhilaration, as if at long last I had found my destiny.
Without pencil and paper to compose it, however, my speech to
the powwow soon fizzled. My destiny evaporated. I grew bored. My freckled
skin seemed awfully pale under the increasingly harsh sunlight. I got a
sudden urge to check my phone messages and e-mail. A lot of people would
be wondering about me. Several times I found myself shifting my position on
the blanket and reaching for . . . what? A cell phone? A thermos of iced tea?
Fruit salad? A cookie? What time was it, anyway? The sun, sitting only one
hand above my new horizon, sliced in on me like a machete.
The desire to write overwhelmed me. Sitting there on the hilltop, I
felt, was clearly a form of procrastination. I should get down from this hill and
start writing in my tent immediately. I stood up, but the tobacco ties
reminded me there was nowhere to run. My first wife, Catherine, leapt into
my mind. She was the mother of my two children, a woman who had actually
believed in me and accompanied me to Spain so I could write a novel — the
novel that never was. Then came my second wife, Lucille. She was the
woman who had supported me while I actually did write a novel — the novel
that never got published — and from whom I was now seeking a divorce.
Then a whole slew of girlfriends — Barbara, Sandra, Betsy, Jennifer, Michou,
Claire, Tabitha, Kiko — clamored to be remembered. I had professed undying
love to them all, failed in love with them all.
The floodgate was open now. People I had wronged when I was
drinking, people I had ignored when they were dying, people I had never
thanked for helping me, people who had tolerated my worst behavior and
suffered betrayal and disappointment at my hands — teachers, mentors,
surrogate parents, partners, employers, employees, neighbors, passersby —
I tried to keep pace with them all, praying for forgiveness from them all in one
long, desperate attempt at absolution. It was like vomiting. Just when I
thought I had brought them all up — thrown light on them and thus absolved
myself — more faces asked to be remembered, more memories played out
before my eyes. I heard a choking sob, then saw my sobbing self as if from
high above.
I needed to do something quickly. I must have prayed for
forgiveness from a hundred people already, and still new ones came to mind.
I never realized I had known so many souls so intimately, and yet I had
forgotten them all in the ongoing rush of my life. Just the people who had
died, for God's sake! Skydiving, combat, car accidents, motorcycles,
horseback riding, gunshots, alcohol, drugs, cancer, old age. Why was I
alive? I had jumped out of airplanes, sped cars, messed around on
motorcycles. I had been thrown from a horse, shot at, knifed. I had drunk
myself to oblivion, snorted coke, smoked dope, dropped acid, eaten too
many eggs . . . Why was I still here? What had I done to deserve being in the
world right now?
I looked around. My eyes had adjusted somewhat to seeing
without glasses. None of my agitation was reflected in my surroundings. A
white butterfly landed gently on a black tobacco tie. Another butterfly, a
monarch, settled on a nearby Scottish thistle. I remembered my grandfather
telling me that I was descended from a Scottish king, and I felt oddly
soothed.
Off to my left a chipmunk rustled in the brush, a crow swooped
onto the limb of a nearby tree, and a bumblebee zoomed through my altar
space, its buzzing the only sound on the still air. So quiet now. I measured
the position of the sun again. No change. It hadn't moved an inch, but it was
searing my skin more deeply with each passing second. I pulled the small
camp blanket over my head, but the effect was oven-like, so I dropped it.
Tucking the pipe under one arm, I stood and removed my sweatpants and
underwear. Knotting the elastic on one side of my Calvin Klein briefs, I
fashioned a cap and slipped it over my head. I put on my sweatpants again
and sat down.
After a while I hit on the notion of measuring time not from the now
useless horizon, but backward, from the straight-up noon position. Extending
my right arm I measured hand widths, from the zenith eastward to the sun. It
was only half past nine! I would cook to death if this heat continued.
Despair settled in. Black Elk had his vision as a youngster. He
knew from the get-go what he was about. What good was a vision at age fifty-
seven? Whom would I tell it to? Who would listen? The world was full of New
Age charlatans, overrun with visionaries. Who needed another one? What
difference could any vision make to the people of New York City in the
ravenous last days of the twentieth century? What was I doing here, waiting
for butterflies to speak? Why had I never asked myself this simple question:
What is wrong with you? Other men my age, friends of mine, had led
purposeful, dignified lives — their accomplishments lined up like ducks in a
row. Me, I was still one big question mark, still looking for the writer in
myself. Well, here he was, with his underpants on his head.
Unable to see what good the prayer pipe was doing me, I put it
down on the blanket and did some push-ups. I folded my small blanket into a
cushion and sat on it cross-legged. A wood nymph landed on my wrist. A
daddy longlegs crawled over my big toe. When my knees began to ache, I
stood up stiffly and checked the sun again. Not quite noon. My lips were
parched. I felt an awful thirst, and my saliva had turned thin and foamy. I
ripped off my "cap" and dropped to my knees. Folding up like an accordion, I
rested my forehead on the blanket. I pushed the pipe aside, pulled up my
skimpy work-shirt collar, and dangled my arms alongside my torso. This
probably wasn't proper hanblecheya behavior, but I didn't care now. The sun
had won this battle. The heat seemed to come from everywhere, even from
beneath the blanket. The air, so utterly motionless, remained unresponsive to
my plight. My forehead, already burned, prickled now against the rough wool.
"I give up," I said.
I could smell dog on the blanket as I faded away.
When I came out of it — woke up, if that's the word — I unfolded my body
slowly into an upright seated position, my buttocks pressing into my heels. A
small cloud now covered the sun, but I could tell by the glow behind the cloud
that it had to be somewhere around 1:30 p.m. The butterflies were gone, the
air still dead. I felt unusually alert, as if I had been wakened from an afternoon
nap by a knock on the door. Some sound had caught my attention — a
sound emanating from something that I now imagined to be poised close
behind me. I held my breath. A chill spread from my spine and traveled
across my shoulder blades and down my arms. Like a frog sensing the
presence of a snake, I was stricken with apprehension. I did not dare look
behind me, afraid that I might see some terrible morphing of man and beast
dressed in hide and wearing war paint. I waited, blood pounding in my
temples, listening for a repeat of the sound I had heard in my sleep. Then,
from behind my right shoulder, came a gentle waft of air, as if someone, just
once, had swiped a fan. A perfectly subtle movement of air that had nothing
in common with a breeze and was not at all sustained like a breeze. Its
touch was abrupt and brief, like an exhalation — a nearly imperceptible
adjustment of molecules, muscled with intent.
I grabbed the pipe, jumped to my feet, and began offering tobacco
to the directional beings as fast as I could. In my memory of it I whirled
around and around, but that seems too cinematic to be true. In fact, all my
self-consciousness had evaporated, so I no longer saw myself from above, as
if from a camera crane, and therefore have no idea what I did or said or how I
might have appeared. I do know that I trained my eyes on the sky, using only
my peripheral vision to look around me, and that I saw no fierce spirit, no
man or beast from which that startling sound might have emanated. But in
the absence of such a manifestation, I understood immediately that the
disturbance, whatever it had been, was inextricably connected to my
anticipation of it and that for all practical purposes it had come from within
me. With this understanding, my perspective shifted completely. I was
suddenly seeing the naked facts of my existence, in a way I never had
before, beyond anything learned, beyond any remembering, as if I had
dropped in from some parallel universe to witness my place in the continuum
of this one. I saw my father, gone on ahead of me, and my son, ahead of
him. I saw how my life — all life — was fastened to Time, as if magnetically
to an escalator, and that no amount of stalling or hoping or dreaming was
going to delay the dying. The dead were lost forever to the living when they
went, as the living were to the dead. Unshielded by my usual rational
constructs, I felt, for the first time, the ruinous sadness — cosmic and
inescapable — of being human.
The sun reappeared. I licked my dry lips with my dry tongue and
looked off to the south, toward the ridge over which Arturo and the dogs had
disappeared. Thirst and hunger soon conspired to make a drama of this
panorama. From nowhere, and attached to nothing, a gauzy curtain was
drawn across my view, obscuring it. In my new frame of mind I understood
this to be death's curtain, and as I continued to watch, it was drawn back
again for me to see what lay beyond: nothing more than the same old view to
the south. As I watched these theatrics it dawned on me that it was not
going to be over when I died. Impossibly — but here it was in front of me —
life carried right through death into life again. There was no death, no end,
only endless consequences. This was it, here and now, forever. Waiting to
die would get me nowhere. And dying wouldn't get me off the hook. The
vision was devastating — and, worse, indelible. I knew instantly that there
would be no pulling back from what I had seen, no way to undo it.
Clusters of dark brown wood nymphs landed on my bare head,
hands, and arms, drawn to my salty skin as they might otherwise have been
attracted to pinesap. Through sweaty eyes I squinted at the concentric gold
and purple circles on their wings. I picked up the pipe and raised it to the six
directions. I wanted this hanblecheya to be over.
Five or six more hours dragged by. The sun dipped beneath the
western ridge of the bowl — my false horizon — cooling both the declivity
and me, inviting me to consider more deeply what I had seen. Inviting me
also to step back into my underwear.
Arturo came and fetched me just before sunset, around nine
o'clock. We didn't exchange a single word. Riding down from the hill at dusk
I could see smoke from the sweat lodge, a lingering swath of gold in the last
rays of sunlight. We pulled up near the lodge. The same people who had
been there the night before were hanging out around the fire. Mike took my
blanket and pipe and told me to get in the lodge and sit on the hot seat. He
crawled in behind me and closed the door flap. Just him and me, there in the
dark. Only four hot rocks in the pit. He tossed a ladleful of water on the
rocks.
I felt emptied of emotion. Emptied too of the illusion that I knew
anything at all anymore. Fear hovered somewhere at the edge of this new
void. I told Mike what I had seen while up the hill as best I could — everything
except my fight with the dog, of which I felt ashamed. The words tumbled
from my mouth, a string of embarrassingly inarticulate observations about
how I dropped the pipe and fell asleep, how I got freaked out by something
scary, how Time was an unstoppable escalator, how I wouldn't be able to find
my friends and family again, how my son died long before my father did, how
Death was just a curtain, and that maybe it isn't over when we die. Mike
said "Aho!" after each observation. When I was done he told me I had gotten
it exactly right — that of all the creatures on earth, human beings were the
least well adapted, the latest to arrive, and the most inept. He told me a few
things about the pipe I had carried — that there was both good and bad in it,
just as there was good and bad in every human being.
"The way of the pipe is hard," he said. "You heard the wind speak,
you did good."
When he was done, the door opened, more hot rocks were added
to the pit, and everyone else crawled in.
We all staggered out an hour later and stood in a circle under the
stars, sharing a smoke from the pipe I had taken up the hill. Afterward I took
a drink of water and went into the Little Boy house and partook of the feast,
which consisted not of bacon and eggs and pancakes and strawberries, but
of boiled tripe. I nibbled at the gristly stuff but dumped most of it in the trash
when no one was looking. I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
I slept dreamlessly in my tent that night and awoke a little after dawn, sick at
heart, as if a loved one had just died. A familiar piece of me seemed to be
gone — perhaps my rational certainty that life was bracketed between birth
and death, or perhaps just rationality itself. As I lay on my sleeping bag, the
strange dread I had felt when first entering the reservation blossomed again.
What had I been thinking, getting myself involved in this?
Arturo was still asleep in the cabin. So was the whole Little Boy
household — half-naked teenagers and a few older folks, lying on the muddy
linoleum floor. All beds, sofas, and easy chairs were full to capacity, and the
television was still on. Young Wambli lay sprawled in his underwear on a
blanket near the front door, the broken airplane tucked under his arm. I
covered his bare feet.
As I brushed my teeth in the bathroom I considered folding my
tent and driving home. I had finished my hanblecheya, done what I had come
for. Besides, I had spent a lot of money already. This wasn't my world. No
one would miss me. I wouldn't really ever have to come back. If I left right
now, I could be in Rapid City in a few hours. I could sit down in a McDonald's
and start writing. Somehow, having the option to leave made staying
tolerable.
I couldn't find a coffeepot anywhere, so I waited on the front steps
for someone to wake up. Underneath me, through the cracks, I could see the
German shepherd and the female mutt sleeping together in the shade.
When I went inside again, Mike was up. He stood shirtless at the
stove, dumping Maxwell House coffee from a large can into a pot of boiling
water.
"So that's how you do it," I said.
Together we watched it brew, then dipped our cups into the mix.
The stuff tasted like bitter mud. Mike sat down on the one kitchen chair,
stiffly, like an old farmer. I moved to the wall and leaned against it, hoping for
a heart-to-heart chat with this guy, hoping he might ease the feeling of dread
that was nagging me. The TV droned in the living room, something about a
rising star in Hollywood.
"So," I said. Mike sipped his coffee then sat forward
uncomfortably, adjusting his back.
"So, I got through it okay?" I said.
He nodded. Then he yawned.
"I've got to tell you," I said, "I still feel a bit spooked by my time up
there."
"Yep," he said, "you will." He stuck out his bare foot and nudged a
rotten onion peel across the floor, closer to the wastebasket.
"So, you're going to hold the sun dance soon?" I said.
"Yep," he said. "We got eighty trees to cut today. Gotta make
some shade for the sun dance circle."
"That chain saw going to come in handy?" I asked, shamelessly
fishing for a thank-you.
"Yep."
"Twenty-four-inch blade," I said. "You can cut through anything
with that."
He gulped the last of his coffee, fingered the grounds on the rim of
his mug, and stared long and hard at the floor.
"You think I should try the sun dance?" I asked. "Think I should
get pierced sometime?"
He stood up slowly, dipped his cup into the pot, sat down
again. "Up to you," he said.
I stared at him. Would I have made friends with this moody guy at
a party in New York? Not likely. But he knew some things, and I had the
feeling he knew something about me. I tossed my coffee grounds in the
wastebasket, dipped my mug into the brew, and leaned against the wall
again.
"Look at you," he said.
"What?" I said.
"You're standing there like a teenager."
"What do you mean?" I asked, taken aback.
"Ever since you pulled in with Arturo, you been standing around,
looking at the walls and the ceiling, thinking, How am I gonna fit in around
here? You been wandering around outside, staring at the shapes of clouds
and saying, 'Send me a sign. Who am I?' " He laughed. "You don't watch
out, you'll end up like a guy come here last year, thought he was Crazy
Horse in another life. Thought he'd come back to save the whole tribe and
lead us into battle. It's pretty simple here with us Indians, you know. Look
around you. Look at what needs to be done around here."
I felt a sudden surge of shame. I had no clout at all with this man.
Obviously he saw me not as an educated city dweller, a man whose career in
the film industry bespoke a certain acquaintance with power, but as a dense,
naive wannabe, no more savvy than some starry-eyed kid barking orders on a
film set.
My face grew hot. I remembered how — in the days before film
schools supplied "interns" to the film business — I used to winnow the true
apprentices from the herd of production assistants who aspired to work on
movie sets. Whenever I spotted a new PA dreamily hanging around the
camera, I would borrow a push broom from the prop department and begin
sweeping the floor. I would start small and move out in an ever-widening arc,
gathering cigarette butts, paper cups, gum wrappers, and such, until I got to
where the PA was standing. "Excuse me," I might say, or "Don't mind me, I'll
work around you," or "I hope I'm not raising too much dust for you." On
occasion one of these candidates would ask if there was something he or
she could do to help. Only rarely did one of them just take the broom from
my hands and finish the job. But that did happen, and when it did I knew I
had landed an apprentice.
"You want eggs," said Mike, "there's some in there. Bacon too,
you guys brought."
"No," I said, "that's okay."
I set down my coffee cup.
I went outside and stood on the porch steps. The chain saw's
carton was lying empty in the middle of the driveway. I poked around and
found a busted lawn-mower cord under an empty gas can. I threw a box hitch
around the middle of the carton and stood it on its end. Failing to find a rake
anywhere, I got a pitchfork from the sweat lodge and began scraping into a
pile all the aluminum cans, plastic bottles, rotted clothing, and Pampers. I
dumped the detritus into the carton. When I had separated and set aside the
salvageable tools — open-end wrenches, speed bits, a tire iron — and
stacked all the plastic toys in one spot, I knelt down and secured the bottom
of the carton with a seven-foot length of bailing wire.
When I looked up, I saw Wambli standing in the doorway, the
broken airplane in his outstretched hand.
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