Coyote Blue (9 page)

"I am very good with women."

"Like you're good with cats and couches?"

"Great heroes have great horniness. You should feel what it is like to pleasure a falcon. You lock talons with her in the sky and do it while you both are falling like meteors. You would like it; they never complain if you come too fast."

"Get out of here."

"I will go, but I will be with you." Coyote rose and walked to the door. As he opened it he said, "Don't be afraid." He stepped out of his office and closed the door. Suddenly, Sam leapt to his feet and headed after him. "Stay off my secretary!" he shouted. He ripped open the door and looked into the outer office where Gabriella, her composure regained, was typing up a claim form. Coyote was gone.

Gabriella looked up and raised a disapproving eyebrow. "Is there a problem, Mr. Hunter?"

"No," Sam said. "No problem."

"You sounded frightened."

"I'm not frightened, goddammit!" Sam slammed the door and went to the desk for a cigarette. His cigarettes and lighter were gone. He stood there for a moment, feeling a flush of anger rise in him until he thought he would scream, then he fell back into his chair and smiled as he remembered something Pokey Medicine Wing had once told him: "Anger is the spirits telling you that you are alive."

Chapter 12 – Cruelly Turn the

Steel-Belted Radials of Desire Crow

Country – 1973

In the six years since his vision quest Samson had endured almost daily interpretations of the vision by Pokey Medicine Wing. Again and again Samson insisted that it wasn't important, and again and again Pokey forced the boy to recall his experience on the mountain in detail. It was Pokey's responsibility as a self-proclaimed medicine man to bring meaning to the symbols in the vision. Over the years, as Pokey read new meanings, he tried to change his and Samson's lives to fit the message of the medicine dream.

"Maybe Old Man Coyote was trying to tell us that we should turn our dreams into money," Pokey said.

With this interpretation, Pokey dragged Samson into a series of entrepreneurial ventures that ultimately served no purpose except to confirm to the people of Crow Country that Pokey had finally gone full-bore batshit.

The first foray into the world of business was a worm ranch. Pokey presented the idea to Samson with the same blind faith with which he told Old Man Coyote stories, and Samson, like so many before him, was captivated with the idea of turning religion into money.

Pokey's eyes were lit up with liquor and firelight as he spoke. "They are building that dam up on the Bighorn River. They tell us that we will prosper from all the people who will come to the reservation to fish and water-ski on the new lake. That's what they told us when they put the Custer Monument here, but whites opened stores and took all the money. This time we will get our share. We'll grow worms and sell them for fishing."

They had no lumber to build the worm beds, so Pokey and Samson went to the Rosebud Mountains and cut lodgepole pines, which they brought down by the pickup load. Through a whole summer they hauled and built until the Hunts Alones' five acres was nearly covered with empty worm beds. Pokey, convinced that their success depended on getting a jump on other prospective worm ranchers, instructed Samson to tell everyone who asked that they were building corrals to hold tiny horses that they were raising for the Little People that lived in the mountains. "It's easier to keep a secret if people think you're crazy," Pokey said.

With the beds finished, they were faced with the problem of filling them. "Worms like cow shit," Pokey said. "We can get that for free." Indeed, had Pokey asked any of the ranchers in the area, they would have let him haul away all the manure he needed, but because most of the ranchers were white and Pokey did not trust them, he decided, instead, that he and Samson would steal the cow pies in the dead of night.

So it began: sunset, Samson and Pokey driving the old pickup into a pasture, Pokey driving slowly along while Samson followed on foot with a shovel, scooping piles into the bed of the truck, then the two of them stealing away with their reeking load to dump it in the worm beds, then out again. "The Crow have always been the best horse thieves, Samson," Pokey said. "Old Man Coyote would be proud of the trick we have played on the ranchers."

Pokey's enthusiasm mystified Samson, who couldn't muster the same self-satisfaction at stealing something that nobody wanted. Nevertheless, after a month of pasture raids the beds were full and they drove to the bait store in Hardin to buy their breeding stock: night crawlers and red worms, five hundred each.

Pokey burnt sage and sweet grass and prayed over the beds and they released the worms into the beds of manure. Then they waited.

"We shouldn't disturb them until spring," Pokey said, but many nights Samson spotted him sneaking out to one of the beds with a trowel, turning over a patch, then skulking away. One night Samson was sneaking out with his own trowel when he saw Pokey on his knees with his face pressed to a bed. He stood up when he sensed the boy behind him.

"You know what I was doing?" Pokey asked.

"No," Samson said, hiding his trowel behind his back.

"I was listening to the sound of money."

"You have shit on your ear, Pokey."

From that time forward they were both more careful about their nocturnal progress checks, but neither found worm one. They waited through the cold Montana winter, sure that come spring they would be waist deep in worms and money. Never mind the fact that Yellowtail Dam wouldn't be completed for two more years.

After the thaw they marched to the beds together, shovels in hand, to turn over their squirming horn of plenty, but shovel after shovel turned up empty. Into the third bed they began to panic and were wildly slinging shit in the air when Harlan pulled up.

"Digging for horses?" he asked.

"Worms," Pokey shouted, lifting the veil of secrecy with a single word.

"Where did you get the manure?"

"Around," Pokey said.

"Around where?"

"The ranches on the res."

Harlan began to laugh and Samson was afraid for a moment that Pokey would brain him with the shovel. "You were trying to grow worms?"

"Old Man Coyote told us to," Samson said defensively.

"We let go a thousand worms in here to breed so we could sell 'em to fishermen."

"I guess Old Man Coyote didn't tell you that cattle ranchers put a wormer in their cattle feed, huh?"

"Wormer?" Pokey said.

"That manure was poison to your worms. They were probably dead ten minutes after you put them in there."

Samson and Pokey looked at each other forlornly, the boy's lower lip swelling with disappointment, the man's temples throbbing with pain.

Some people believe that hard work is its own reward and a job well done is a tribute to a man's character; fortunately, none of those people were around or they would have been ducking shovel blows. Pokey and Samson decided to get drunk. Harlan stayed on to coach the boy through his first hangover and run interference with Grandma, who would have skinned the two men had she known they were giving liquor to a twelve-year-old.

It was the end of summer, a summer spent in sulking and speculating, before Pokey brought home the goats. He'd obtained the pair, a male and a female, from a dubious source in a Hardin bar by winning a bet that had something to do with a pineapple, a throwing knife, and a waitress named Debbie. Samson had difficulty putting the story together from Pokey's drunken ravings, but he gathered that because Debbie had survived, and the pineapple had not, Pokey had two goats on his hands.

"We could breed 'em and sell 'em for meat," Pokey said. "But I got a better idea. Them lawyers and doctors are flying into Montana from the city and paying a thousand bucks a head to shoot bighorn sheep. I say we go to the airport in Billings and wait for one of them to get off a plane, then tell 'em they can come to the res and shoot one for two – three hundred. I can be the faithful Indian guide and lead them all over hell and back, and you can take the goats up into the mountains and tie them up where they can shoot 'em."

Despite Samson's objections that even a city lawyer might know the difference between a bighorn sheep and a nanny goat, Pokey insisted that come morning they would be on the road to riches. Come morning, however, when Samson went outside to look at the goats he found them lying on their backs, legs shot stiff to the sky with rigor mortis, dead as stones. In his excitement Pokey had tied the goats next to a patch of hemlock, and the goats, perhaps sensing what was planned for them, munched their last meal and joined the ranks of Socrates.

Not all of Pokey's quests for spiritual capitalism were complete failures. He and Samson made a little money with the "authentic" Indian fry-bread taco stand they set up outside of the Custer Battlefield National Monument, until the health department objected to the presence of marmot and raccoon meat in their
all-beef
tacos. And they did make forty dollars selling eagle feathers to tourists (actually the feathers of two buzzards that had dined on tainted goat carcass), which they used to buy marijuana seeds that produced a respectable crop of grape-sized casaba melons. (Harlan referred to this as the magic beans incident.) And finally, while Samson was busy with school and basketball and a developing obsession with girls, Pokey turned to prostitution and made five bucks from the owner of the Hardin 7-Eleven who paid the shaman to take his sandwich sign and go stand somewhere else.

Samson was fifteen by the time Pokey decided that perhaps they were not meant to turn their dreams into money. Once again he sat the boy down in the kitchen to recount the vision.

"Pokey, I don't even remember much of the vision, and besides, how important could it be? I was only nine." Samson's friend Billy Two Irons was waiting outside to drive them to a "forty-nine" party at the Yellowtail Dam and Samson was not in the mood to be cross-examined about an event that he was trying desperately to leave behind, along with the rest of the trappings of childhood.

"Do you know why the Crow never fought the white man?" Pokey asked gravely.

"Oh, fuck, Pokey, not now. I've got to get going."

"Do you know why?"

"No. Why?"

"Because of the vision of a nine-year-old boy. That's why." As much as Samson wanted to leave, he had spent too many years listening to the Cheyenne and Lakota call his people cowards to walk out now.

"What boy?" he asked.

"Our last great chief, Plenty Coups. When he was nine he went on his first fast, just like you. He cut pieces from his skin and suffered greatly. Finally, his vision came, and he saw the buffalo gone and then he saw the white man's cattle covering the plains. He saw white men everywhere, but he saw none of our people. The medicine chiefs heard his vision and said that it was a message. The Lakota and the Cheyenne had fought the white men and lost their lands. The vision meant that if we fought the white men we would lose our land and be wiped out. Our chiefs decided not to fight and the Crow survived. We are here because of the vision of a nine-year-old boy."

"That's great, Pokey," Samson said, having gained nothing useful from the story. He was not going to quell any ridicule from non-Crows by telling them that his people had changed their way of life over a mystical vision. It was hard enough trying to live down the reputation of his crazy uncle as it was. "I have to go now."

He grabbed the drum that Pokey had made him and took off through the living room, high-stepping over his eight younger cousins, who were sprawled on the floor watching cartoons on televsion. " 'Bye, Grandma," he tossed over his shoulder to his grandmother, who sat in a tattered easy chair among the kids, adding the final touches to a beaded belt she was making for him.

In front of the Hunts Alone house a tall, acne-speckled Billy Two Irons was pouring a jug of water into the radiator of a twenty-year-old Ford Fairlane. Most of the water was draining out of the bottom of the engine onto the ground at his feet.

"That thing going to make it up to Yellowtail?" Samson called.

"No problem, bro," Billy said without looking up. "I got twenty milk jugs of water in the backseat for the trip up. Coming home's downhill most of the way."

"You fix the exhaust leak?"

"Yep, tomato can and a hose clamp. Works fine as long as you keep the window down."

"How about the brakes?" Samson was staring over Billy's shoulder into the greasy cavern of the engine compartment.

Billy capped the radiator and slammed the hood before he answered. "You let it coast down to about ten miles an hour and throw it in reverse it'll stop on a dime."

"Then let's do it." Samson jumped into the car. Billy threw the empty milk jug into the backseat, climbed in, and began cranking the engine. Samson looked back to the house and saw Pokey coming out the front door waving at them.

"Hit it, man," Samson said. "Let's go."

The car finally fired up just as Pokey reached the window. He shouted to be heard over the din of the damaged muffler. "You boys watch out for Enos, now."

"We will, Pokey," Samson said as they pulled away. Then he turned to Billy Two Irons. "Is Anus working nights again?"
Anus
was the name they used for Enos Windtree, a fat, meanspirited half-breed BIA cop who liked nothing better than to terrorize kids partying at some remote spot on the res. Once, at a forty-nine party near Lodge Grass, Samson and Billy and nearly twenty others were drinking and singing with the drums when Samson heard a distinct, sickening series of mechanical clicks right by his ear: the sound of a twelve-gauge shell being jacked into a riot gun. When he turned to the noise Enos hit him in the chest with the butt of the gun, knocking him to the ground. Then Enos shot the lights and windshields out of two cars before sending everyone on their way. When Samson told the story, people just said he was just lucky Enos hadn't hit him in the face, or shot somebody. There were rumors that it had happened before. And people
were
dying on the Lakota reservation at Pine Ridge, killed by the tribal police in what amounted to a civil war.