Dalva (28 page)

A fair morning with many cups of tea & cold water. Back in my large hole before breakfast as a penitent. I laugh to think the buffalo would have forced Saint Paul into more than a little wine. I remember I should search for my missing horse but they will not go far from their own company. The hole is too muddy to dig well and as I begin to clamber out I smell leather and the copperish smell of blood. There are three warriors, a boy, and a garishly painted old man who stoops before my drying plant specimens dressed in animal skins. I am startled to breathlessness but say in Sioux “Welcome to my camp. I am pleased to see you.” The boy shys backwards but the warriors move forward staring at me closely. Their arms are covered with dried blood and I suppose they have been hunting. Two of the warriors are large & muscular and have rifles though they are not pointed at me. The third has a large belly and is unarmed except for a hatchet & club at his waist. I say to him in Sioux “It is good to see you on this lovely day. I have been digging in the earth to look at the roots of trees. I'm afraid I'm a little muddy. May I make you a cup of tea?” The painted old man approached & I take him to be a medicine man. Now the warrior with the large belly and no rifle smiled at me. “The boy said there was a white man who ate earth and burrowed as a badger in the ground. He took little trees from a blanket and planted them in the ground.” Then he gestured to one of the warriors. “Last night he saw you smoking a pipe and singing songs. We are very angry with white men now. I am wondering now if I should kill you. What have you to say to that?” I said that
the Holy Spirit told me to come here several years ago but first I had to fight in the Civil War where I was captured. Now that I am here, if the Holy Spirit wishes me dead that is His affair. Big Belly answered that he had seen and heard of missionaries and that they were all liars and cowards. I said that if I were a coward why would I be here alone? I am a different sort of missionary. I rapidly named the wild fruits and berries his people ate and said that I was planting new fruits, not white men's fruits, but fruits from the whole world. The medicine man stared in my left eye and said to Big Belly that he had never heard of a missionary covered with mud. He led me over and we discussed my drying herbs & specimens, and also looked at my root stock I had hilled up. At this time we walked back over to my large hole near the cottonwood. I jumped in and explained quickly the nature of the tree's root system. The three warriors stepped off out of earshot and discussed the situation. I put on a pot of water to boil for tea & then showed the medicine man some dried apples, pears, and peaches, putting a handful of each in another pot with water to cook. I got out a pound of good tobacco as a gift and looked over to read Big Belly's face as he approached. “You are a confusing man and we don't know what to do with you. Why haven't you asked about your stolen horse?” I offered a silent prayer as I knew I was teetering between life and death as if I were walking a narrow beam way up in a barn. I said that I wished to give my extra horse to the boy who had brought us together on this fine day. The boy heard this and jumped in the air. Now Big Belly took a private consultation with the medicine man, and when they returned to the fire where I was stirring the pot of tea & the pot of fruit, Big Belly said “You are too strange to kill. The old man says it would be bad luck to kill you.” They all laughed at this so I joined them though a bit weakly. Contrary to popular opinion, I'm told, Indians are full of wit, jokes & laughter. We sat down for tea, and stewed fruit, which they pronounced delicious. The boy was sent up the creek bed to fetch something & returned quickly with a bloody buffalo heart which was cut in chunks & roasted over the fire. The heart was very good indeed. . . .

I turned to see Naomi driving in the yard. It was five in the afternoon and typical of her to wait until she thought my workday was at an end. By the time I reached her, she was
holding up a dead cock pheasant, and looking very sad. The pheasant had flushed from a ditch and had run into the side of her car, breaking its neck. Cars haven't been around long enough for creatures to have made a genetic adaptation, she said. She handed me the bird and told me to cook it for my dinner. I cringed a bit at the warmth I still felt in its breast. Most of us successfully ignore the fact that what we eat was once as alive as we are. She was quick to note my queasiness, took the bird back, and began to pluck it as we spoke.

“Karen called me and said you were going to help her become a model. Is this so?”

I glanced up at an imaginary cloud for a moment. “She's beautiful, so I simply called Ted to check it out. He offered to help.”

“I'm not being critical, I simply want you to be careful. Girls here are very matter-of-fact and gullible. She's willful and doesn't quite have both oars in the water. She's also been teasing men around here since she was thirteen. I don't want you to complicate your life with an errant suggestion.”

“I need a drink,” I said, walking toward the house. It was as if my mother had caught me red-handed toying with my noodle.

I was sitting at the kitchen table with five fingers of vodka when Naomi came in with the plucked pheasant. She patted me on the head and took a sip of my drink.

“Don't get flustered. I'm more worried for you than Karen. The high-school coach was fired over her but Dalva told me on the phone the same man had bothered her thirty years before. But enough of this. Look at the long spur here. It's an older bird, which means you can't simply roast it or it would be too tough.” She showed me the bony spurs on the pheasant's legs, saying that they are used as defense, or in arguments over hen pheasants.

We talked as she browned the pheasant in a small Dutch oven, added chopped leeks, white wine, and a few sprigs of thyme and rosemary from the kitchen window box. I could put it in when I wanted to eat in an hour. She couldn't stay for dinner because a friend belonged to a movie club and had gotten a cassette in the mail of
The Misfits
with Montgomery Clift, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe. It was her favorite
movie, and she and two other widows regularly watched classic movies and had dinner together. I suddenly asked her if Dalva had a gentleman friend in Rapid City. Jealousy rose in my gorge when I thought of Arthur Miller putting up with Marilyn's shenanigans. If you're cuckolded by the president you can scarcely slap his face. Naomi laughed at my question, saying, “You'll never know and neither will I,” and that Dalva had a cabin over in the Black Hills she used as a retreat. An old Sioux woman lived there and took care of the place. Then I asked what she knew about the building of the house. She said Northridge had made the design and brought out a group of Swedish craftsmen from Galesburg, Illinois. Dalva's grandfather would have been five at the time. We went into the den and Naomi, innocently enough, showed me a hidden panel that concealed a half-dozen or so English shotguns that I recognized to be quite valuable. There was also a wall safe that aroused my curiosity. She said that between 1890 and the turn of the century there was a great deal of animosity in Nebraska toward Northridge because he was thought to have harbored Sioux and Cheyenne leaders who were fugitives from the government, in the manner of the earlier Underground Railway. In effect, he had been on the wrong side of the war, though he had enough political power—his property in Chicago had been sold for a large sum—that no one tried to bother him. I asked her why she hadn't read the journals.

“They remind me too much of my husband's voice,” she said, kissing me goodbye.

After she left I stood in the yard altogether too long. I felt a level of anxiety that I had been taught during the period of my treatment to regard as a warning signal. I refuse to flip in this foreign land, I thought, before an audience of geese and horses. I need some noise. The woman's husband was dead in Korea nearly forty years ago, in 1950. There is the question of whether life is long enough to get over anything. I sat down on the ground to avoid tipping over from the enormity of it all. Here comes the pictograph as if I'm in an airplane. I should be in the Mitchell Brothers porn palace in San Francisco watching Jap tourists go crazy over naked girls while drinking seven-dollar weak Scotches. This loneliness at supper hour. I had studied war and reparations. The Japs and Germans did very
well, while the Indians were too incomprehensible. What can you do if the fuckers won't learn to grow potatoes? Sitting down was also vertiginous, so I got up and walked purposefully over to the lilac grove that contained the family cemetery. It was overgrown by design, and the only inexplicable marker was for someone named Duane Stone Horse, who died in 1971. I remembered that he was the one who had read Zane Grey's
Riders of the Purple Sage.
I'd ask Dalva, if she ever returned from her Rapid City lover. To what degree were these people actually dead? Who the fuck were Indians? I made a tight-assed trot out of the graveyard as if pursued. Why am I curious about anything beyond the professional level, or am I? I didn't dare have another drink in this state. I had read the inconclusive information on the possible origins of Indians, all bleached with supposition and speculation. The Bible wisely settles for Adam and Eve. A lovely, frazzled lady in the No Name bar in Sausalito told me the Indians had arrived by spaceship in Peru and made their way north, which was as viable as Lundquist's lost tribe of the Children of Israel. Back home I relied on television news, especially Ted Koppel, to settle this sort of mental indigestion. A twenty-inch screen was the requisite glue. If it weren't for the waiting pheasant I could very well go into the barn (which frightened me), set the barn afire, and go up in smoke along with it. I tried to approach the geese over by the creek, but they were more cynical than the horses. I got in Dalva's Subaru, started it, and turned on the radio, but the smell of her gave me a lump in the throat. I listened carefully to a local county agent talking about grain and livestock prices, which helped. Then he began a dirge about farm foreclosures and I flicked the dial, pausing at a country station with its freight of unendurable sentiment. I settled for PBS and a dose of soporific Brahms, and began to repeat aloud certain things I liked, a nostrum from the psychiatrist: the first year of my marriage, my daughter, certain birds, garlic, Bordeaux, exotic dancers, the ocean when it's not rough, Gary Cooper movies, John Ford movies, John Huston movies, Victoria's Secret catalogs, cassoulet, Stravinsky, ZZ Top videos (where the girl gets out of the old car), New York City on Saturday afternoons, fresh copies of the
American Scholar
and
American History
in the mailbox, the river Liffey at dawn, Patrick Kavanaugh, the
Tate Gallery, Cheyne Walk. . . . There, I went back to work, forgetting dinner for the time being. I want a pet whippoorwill!

Oct. 21, 1890

They painted us white & we danced day and night until we could no longer move & then we rested, got up and danced again though the day turned dark with high winds and sleet . . . . “

Not what I need now: Northridge during the decline of the Ghost Dance movement. I will save this for a bright, clear morning, not a lonely evening. I put away the journals and read in two supplementary texts—Carlson's
Indians, Bureaucrats, and Land
and D. S. Otis's
The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands.

At nine, when it began to get dark, I went back in the house and put the pheasant in the oven. I thought it was safe to have a drink, though the first sip made me wonder whether or not Karen was going to show up. The girl was a toss-up—they say a hard dick has no conscience, but a scholar's dick is a shy item full of question marks, guilt, ironies. My attempts to keep a distance from my material were losing ground. There is a reason why scholars work in libraries. A number of studies of the Holocaust have clearly illustrated that it constituted the most repellent series of events in human history. I doubt, though, if any of the writers and scholars of the studies had set up shop in Buchenwald, Belsen, or Treblinka to compose. Here, I was too much in the thick of it. I envisioned an apartment above a friendly pub in Dublin, the two trunks of journals safely under the bed, or, barring that, two trunks of Xeroxes of the material, if that were permissible. Of course, the problem was, what I had read so far made me timid; it was too stark and poignant and I could foresee how the bad parts were going to scan. If the Nazis had won the war the Holocaust, finally, would have been set to music, just as our victorious and bloody trek west is accompanied on film by thousands of violins and kettle drums.

I had just begun some interior pissing and moaning about the locked up Bordeaux in the cellar when Karen's car swerved in under the yard light. I went to the pump-shed door
with a flock of butterflies and a thumping heart. From the shadows she said she didn't want to come in, but could we go to the bunkhouse? She seemed flitty and skittish, and I couldn't quite keep her pace across the barnyard. As I opened the door I could smell schnapps and the singed furze of marijuana. Under the light she was wet, and wore a skirt over a leotard-type bathing suit. She somehow looked taller, her eyes glittering, her speech a little slurred. She handed me an envelope with a pealing giggle.

“My friend Carla took these with her dad's Polaroid camera. We had to have some drinks first, and now we're swimming, so I have to hurry, because my boyfriend's going to meet me and I don't want him to think I'm off in a car with someone else . . . .”

The photos were a cattle prod to the nape nerve, a masturbative fantasia, candid candy: clumsy but explosive pics of Karen in bra and panties, in several bathing suits, also three total nudes. She was looking over my shoulder and continuing the prattle: “. . . so I hope these are OK though they aren't too professional.” I flipped them on the desk and turned to her. “Actually, this is a bathing suit . . . .” She dropped the skirt and adjusted the wet suit around her crotch and bottom. She paused, then smiled a bit crudely at my hopeless look. “I almost thought you were going to go down on me today in the den. Jeez, I thought, this guy is serious. I'm straight with my boyfriend but maybe it wouldn't hurt to do the other thing.” She pulled the straps down her shoulders and peeled out of the wet suit. “Don't try to put it in, buster.” She came nakedly into my arms, dropping a hand and unzipping my fly. I undid my belt and button and my trousers dropped. “Boy are you ever ready!” I stumbled with her toward the bed, where she sat on the edge and engulfed as much of me as she could with a wide-open mouth. I collapsed beside her, and she threw a leg and thigh over my face, smacking her parts with energy directly into my face. I did my best in the short time allotted me, noting the way the cooling effect left by the wet bathing suit quickly dissipated. Then I was a violent goner. She quickly jumped up and daintily wiped her mouth and chin with my pillow, putting the pillow back down on my wobbling red wiener. “You guys always look silly,” she said, as she hastily
dressed. “Sorry I can't stay. See you later. Let me know.” And she was gone.