Flight (7 page)

T
HEY NAMED THE BATTLE
all wrong.

They shouldn’t have called it Custer’s Last Stand. Oh, it was his last stand. He died there. Here, I mean. But Custer wasn’t important. He was easily replaced. There were plenty of other soldiers who were smarter and better at killing Indians.

Little Bighorn was the last real battle of the Indian Wars. After that, the Indians gave up. So Custer’s Last Stand was really the Indians’ last stand. But, oh, on that day, this day, the Indians are crazy good. And crazy ready.

I’m not stupid. I don’t want to get shot again. I’m only twelve or thirteen years old, and I’m small. So I stay in camp and listen to the sounds of battle.

I can’t see anything, but I know what’s happening. I read about this fight. I watched a TV show about it on the History Channel.

A few days ago, Custer ignored his superior officer’s orders and force-marched his men toward the Little Bighorn. They were only supposed to march twenty miles a day but Custer made them march seventy miles a day.

He was supposed to take his time and not arrive here ahead of the soldiers who were hauling the huge and heavy Gatling guns. Custer decided he didn’t need the Gatling guns, those old-time machine guns that blasted one hundred bullets a minute.

What an overconfident asshole, huh?

When Custer arrived on the hills above the Little Bighorn, he was supposed to wait for the other army dudes to show up. A couple thousand more soldiers.

But he didn’t wait. He wanted all the glory for himself. So he sent half of his men to attack one side of the Indian camp, and he took the other half and rode toward the opposite end of the camp.

He thought he was going to terrify the Indians and make them run away, but he ran into a few thousand organized Indians—with repeating rifles.

Yep, these particular Indians said, “Fuck bows and arrows. We’re going to get technological!”

After meeting the superior numbers of Indians, Custer ordered the retreat. The cavalry rode back up into the hills with the Indians in hot pursuit. But it was too late. It was going to be Custer’s last day.

It
is
his last day. I stand in the camp and listen to the battle.

It’s all gunfire and screams and Indian singing and silence and more silence and then the sounds of celebration. I swear I hear laughter.

The battle is over. It only takes about an hour. A quick and brutal fight.

So I walk toward the hill where Custer and his soldiers he dead and dying. I walk with hundreds of other Indians. Women, children, old people.

We walk to join the warrior men. And some warrior women. A lot of women put on war paint and rode out into battle against Custer. I never knew Indian women could be warriors, too.

It’s hormonal to say this, but those women warriors are sexy in their war paint.

But there is nothing sexy or beautiful on Custer’s Hill. There are hundreds of dead cavalry soldiers. Bloody corpses everywhere. They look like red and white flowers blooming in the green grass.

I feel sick in my stomach and brain. I feel sick in my soul. I remember that in another life I killed people like this. I left behind a bank lobby filled with dead bodies.

But this is war. The Indians were protecting themselves from the soldiers. Custer had ridden into camp to kill men, women, and children. He had to be stopped.

I understand why he’s dead. I understand why he had to be killed. It was self-defense. Wasn’t it self-defense?

I understand why the soldiers had to be killed, but I don’t understand what is happening to the soldiers now. To their bodies.

All around me, Indian men, women, and children are desecrating the bodies of the dead white soldiers.

Right there, an Indian grandmother is stabbing a soldier with his own bayonet. He’s dead and bloody, but she keeps stabbing him over and over again.

I stand and watch as she strips off his clothes. She wants him to be naked and ashamed in the afterlife.

And now she cuts off his penis and stuffs it into his mouth. She wants the gods to laugh at him when he arrives in the afterlife. “Hey, kid,” the gods will say to him, “do you know you have your own cock stuffed between your teeth?”

All around me, grandmothers are cutting off penises and ears and hands and fingers and feet.

I see a young woman, a girl, maybe ten years old, digging at a dead soldier’s eyes. I run over to her and push her away. She’s trying to take his eyes.

She shouts at me in her tribal language. I don’t know exactly what she’s saying, but she’s cursing. And then I realize that she thinks
I
want his eyes. She thinks
I’m
fighting for his eyes.

She pushes me. I push her back. She pushes me. I punch her in the face.

And then somebody grabs me. I am being dragged across the grass, up the hill, toward the summit. My father drags me.

I look back and watch that girl cut out the dead soldier’s eyes. He’ll be blind in the afterlife and he won’t be able to find Heaven. Lost and alone, his ghost will wander this battlefield forever.

My father drags me to the summit.

There I see a hundred Indian warriors have surrounded six white soldiers, the only survivors. They are being tortured.

The warriors slap and kick and punch the white soldiers. They toss them to the ground. Then they pick them up and throw them down again. They cut them with arrowheads and knives and hatchets. A thousand little cuts.

This is war.

My father drags me into the circle. The other Indian warriors stop to watch this. Something important is happening. I am somebody important.

My father grabs one of the white soldiers. He’s just a kid, like me. I didn’t know they let kids join the cavalry.

My father tosses the kid to the ground and steps on him. Holds him down. Then my father takes the long knife out of his belt and hands it to me.

I see the knife is the broken end of a cavalry bayonet. The handle is a thick wrap of beaded buckskin.

My father says something to me in his language. I don’t understand.

He says the same thing again. I still don’t understand.

He points at me, at my throat. I reach up and touch the huge scar on my neck.

And then I remember: A white soldier cut my throat. In another camp on a different river, a white soldier grabbed my hair, lifted my chin, and slashed my throat with a bayonet. And now my father wants revenge. He wants me to want revenge.

I remember, back when I was Zits, back when I was eight years old, and I was living in this foster home on a mountain near Seattle. A rich white family. I thought their money made me rich, too. They bought me new shoes. It was the first time I ever wore new shoes.

I remember I’d been living there for a week, with my new brother and new sister and new mother, when my new father took me into the basement to show me his model trains. He had miles and miles of railroad track down there. Thousands of miles and hundreds of trains. He had built cities and towns and mountains and forests.

I remember I played with those trains for hours and hours. Played until I could barely keep my eyes open. Then my new father took me into another dark room in the basement, one without any trains, and did evil things to me. Things that hurt. Things that made me bleed.

I stare at the white kid, the soldier, lying on the ground of Little Bighorn. I stare at the bayonet in my hand.

I stare at my Indian father. I notice that he has little hands war-painted on his chest, children’s hands. I wonder if he paints himself that way to remember the Indian children who have been destroyed by white soldiers.

I stare at the white soldier again.

I wonder what I would do now if that model-train man were lying on the grass here at Little Bighorn. Would I kill him? Would I take revenge on him for what he did to me in the dark basement room?

I don’t know.

All around me, Indian men, women, and children watch me. They all want revenge. They all want me to want revenge.

The other white soldiers, bloody and broken, watch me. They know they are going to die and they weep. They want to live.

Yes, they are soldiers. They are killers. And they want to live.

We all want to live. I don’t know what to do.

I feel the anger building inside of me. I feel the need for revenge. Maybe I’m only feeling the old-time Indian kid’s need for revenge. Or maybe I’m only feeling
my
need for revenge. Maybe I’m feeling both needs for revenge.

And then I wonder if that’s the reason I killed all the people in the bank.

Did I want revenge? Did I blame those strangers for my loneliness? Did they deserve to die because of my loneliness?

Does this little white soldier deserve to die because one of his fellow soldiers slashed my throat?

If I kill him, do I deserve to be killed by this white soldier’s family and friends?

Is revenge a circle inside of a circle inside of a circle?

I look away from the white kid’s eyes. I look across the distance and see Crazy Horse astride a pony on another hill. He’s alone. He’s always alone.

He watches us. He is not participating. Yes, he killed dozens of soldiers during this fight. And he killed Custer. But then he rode away to watch the rest of it. Alone.

I remember that he always camped alone. That he often left his people and traveled into the wilderness. I remember that he went missing for weeks and months at a time. Nobody knew where he went.

And now I watch him ride over the hill and disappear.

Soon, he will be killed. Not by a bullet. According to legend, Crazy Horse was bulletproof. Crazy Horse will be murdered by one of his old friends: by Little Big Man.

Another Indian warrior will betray Crazy Horse. Little Big Man will hold Crazy Horse’s arms as a white soldier punches a bayonet into the strange one’s belly.

A bayonet will kill Crazy Horse. Like the bayonet in my hand.

My father yells at me in his language. He wants me to be a warrior.

I’m only twelve or thirteen. This body is only twelve or thirteen. I am only a child.

I stare at the white soldier in front of me. He’s probably eighteen. Or younger. He’s seventeen or sixteen or fifteen. He’s a child and I’m a child and I’m supposed to slash his throat.

What do I do?

I close my eyes.

I
OPEN MY EYES
to reveille. Somebody blares away on his trumpet. No, a bugle. The military uses a bugle. What is the difference between a trumpet and a bugle? I try to picture a bugle in my mind. And a trumpet.

The bugle doesn’t have valves or keys. The bugle is a naked trumpet. I wonder who plays that bugle.

I get out of bed. No, it’s a cot. And I realize I’m in a tent, with maybe ten or twelve other cots. But they’re all empty. I’m alone here.

I can hear people running and yelling outside the tent.

Oh, yeah, that’s reveille. That means it’s morning. Everybody must be up getting breakfast or getting ready to fight. I guess I must be a soldier now. I wonder which war I’m going to be fighting.

I wonder who I might have to kill now. I want this to stop. But what can I do? There must be some way to escape. I have to make something happen. So I walk outside the tent.

One hundred U.S. Cavalry soldiers are rushing around. These are old-time soldiers, nineteenth or eighteenth century, like the soldiers at the Little Bighorn, I think. Jesus, I hope this isn’t Custer’s Seventh Cavalry.

I need a mirror. I want to look at my reflection to see who I am this time. But then I notice that the other soldiers are looking at me. Some are laughing and pointing. Then all of them are laughing and pointing.

There’s something wrong. With me.

I look at myself: I am naked as a bugle.

I guess this guy likes to sleep naked.

I’m embarrassed but also relieved. I am not that kid soldier. Nope. I am an old man, skinny and wrinkly. That’s bad enough, but you know what’s worse? My pubic hair is gray.

So, okay, I suddenly realize I’ve been staring at my nakedness for way too long. I look up to see the soldiers laughing even harder at me. So I dash back into my tent. Well, I go as fast as I can. I limp, really. But I limp fast, damn it. I notice that my body is not too responsive to my commands. My legs hurt, especially my knees. I bet I have arthritis; old people get that disease, and I’m old.

So I limp to my cot and look for clothes, my uniform. I find it. I guess it’s my uniform. It seems to be my size. I sniff it. It smells like the old man I am now. I try to put the thing on, but it has snaps and buttons and suspenders and belts I don’t understand. And my fingers don’t work too well. I have to concentrate on making them work right. And they hurt. It’s like little knives stabbing my knuckles.

Then I remember that God is really, really old. So maybe God has God arthritis. And maybe that’s why the world sucks. Maybe God’s hands and fingers don’t work as well as they used to.

Maybe God looks down on earth and sees the bad guys and tries to pick them up. Maybe he wants to squish them like bugs. But God’s arthritis is so bad he can’t make his fingers work.

Maybe God saw me pull out my guns in the bank and tried to reach down and squish me before I could kill anybody. But God’s hands were too slow. He got me, but only after I shot a bunch of people.

I’m ashamed of myself. Who was I? Well, I was me. I don’t have any excuses. I shot people. That’s all I can say. I deserve whatever punishment comes my way.

But no punishment will be big enough. My punishment will not bring back the dead. It doesn’t work that way.

I will be punished and the dead will stay dead. And the world will keep going on like that.

Frustrated, I keep losing my grip as I try to button my uniform. I am late for reveille. And I’m sure it’s bad to be late for reveille.

So, okay, now I’m dressed and I limp out of the tent to join the other soldiers. Everybody else is already lined up in neat rows—or semi-neat rows, I guess. All of these soldiers are young and hungry. I wonder how long they’ve been on the march. They’re not starving to death, but they look hollow-eyed and barren, like they’ve been fed just enough food but never enough happiness.