Neither Wolf nor Dog (27 page)

“Some of our people trying to be white. Some hating everything about the white man. Some Indians trying to be both. Some even trying to go back to the old ways, like none of this ever happened.

“We are all struggling, and there are never any answers. Every generation has to struggle. Maybe we just have to leave it in the hands of the Great Spirit.”

“But that's what's been done,” I said. “And look where it's gotten you.”

“The Great Spirit's time is not our time,” he said. “The well is poisoned now. It is poisoned with anger and despair. Maybe we have to wait until the water is fresh again.”

I tried to interrupt. But he stopped me.

“Hell, Nerburn, I don't know,” he said sharply. “I'm old. I only know what I see. The young ones have to decide how to fight. If they want to fight.”

I didn't want to leave it like this. “This is what we're writing for, though,” I persisted. “I thought you wanted to say what you knew.”

“I'm tired right now. My spirit is bad. They should learn the language and respect the elders. Try to be Indians. That's all. I have said enough.”

He returned to his cigarette. His exhalations rattled from his chest like the sound of death.

A dark form hared across the road in front of us.

“What was that?” I said to Grover.

“Rabbit,” he answered. “Or fox. Didn't notice.”

Dan spoke up again. “
Wasichu
should listen to the rabbit. He knows how to be quiet. He is humble.
Wasichu
never learned how to be humble.”

I was becoming more and more uncomfortable. Dan's dark mood filled the car. The silver land outside was preternatural. I was willing to listen to anything. I just didn't want to ride in silence.

“Talk to me, Dan,” I said.

“Unnh,” he responded. His mind was full of demons.

“You never stop pushing,” he said. “You don't know how much you push.” The distant tone in his voice made me unsure if he was talking to me or pursuing some abstract idea. His words were absent, hollow, without emotion.

“Before the white man, we were free in our hearts and our bodies. We went where we wanted. We thought what we wanted. The land was ours to use. But from the moment you set foot upon our shores, we were being pushed. We have been pushed ever since.”

I approached carefully. I wanted him to keep talking. “I know,” I said. “I want to hear.”

“I don't know,” he sighed. “It has made us cautious and wary. We don't have the force to resist you. We never did. Our wise men knew this from the beginning and our young men soon found this out. We could not stand up against your force. We needed to find another way to survive.”

His voice trailed off into Lakota, then reemerged in English.

“The way we found was cleverness. Cleverness wrapped in silence. We would watch you and listen to you until we knew what you really wanted. Then we would back up even further. If we could see a way to strike back, we would do so. If we couldn't, we would just back up again and again.”

He stared out into the night. “Trouble is, when it came to land, there wasn't far enough to back up. Wherever we went, you chased us. We heard you coming and we smelled you coming. Even before you even knew we were there, we knew
you were coming. The animals told us. We saw it in their eyes and heard it in their voices. We knew it by their change in numbers, their change in habits.”

Again, he fell to silence. He took another cigarette from the pack on the dashboard and tamped it against the back of his hand.

“You see, we could always read the signs. We still can today. You may not be coming with guns and diseases, but you are coming. Instead of alcohol and tobacco, you are bringing money. You don't want our land. You want what is under our land and on our land. You want our minerals. You want our forests. You want to bury nuclear waste and chemicals.

“Ha!” he burst out suddenly, as if his words were only the tip of his thoughts. “But we have learned to be clever. We know that the only thing you really fear is lawyers, because lawyers are the ones who can twist your law. Once, long ago, we believed in the power of your law. But then we saw that you didn't believe in it. It was only for you and it really was only to help you get what you want or to keep others from getting what you have. It never applied to people like us.

“We signed treaty after treaty. We got promises after promises. What did it get us? Nothing. It just lulled us to sleep because it made us trust you. And while we were sleeping you were finding ways to twist that law to get what you wanted.

“Now we don't trust your laws, but we use your lawyers. For money they will twist your laws to work for us, just like they have twisted them to work for you. We have money. So we will use them.”

His momentary optimism dropped back to brooding darkness. He was carrying on an argument with himself.

“But if we get too good at what we do, you will find a way to stop us. You always do. You are always pushing.”

His voice rose again. He spoke as if he were addressing me; as if, somehow, by understanding, I could do something.

“I wish your people would stop pushing for a while and see what you are doing. You don't even know why you push. You just do.

“You push to be richer. You push to own more things. Columbus pushed against the whole world just to see what would happen.

“I used to think you did it because you are greedy. I don't think that anymore. Now I think it is just part of who you are and what you do, like listening to the land is part of what we are and what we do.

“I feel sorry for your people. You can't be very happy. But I can't trust you, because you will always push on us.”

He turned toward me. “My people have done well. You have tried to take everything away from us, but we have survived. We have lived with you pushing against us for five hundred years. We will live with you pushing against us for five hundred more.

“We will do what we have to. But it will hurt us. You have made us careful and suspicious and we never wanted to be this way. Maybe someday things will change. But I don't think so.

“No,” he repeated, as if examining his conclusion, “I don't think so.”

My discomfort had become acute. He had made the identification I had most feared — me as all white people; him as all Indian people. The brush was too broad, and I knew that he knew it. But his mind was clouded by exhaustion, anger, and hurt. His thoughts had become dangerous — to himself and to me. I wanted to escape from this trap. We needed light.

Grover, ever watchful, had sensed the problem. He pulled to the side of the road and shut off the engine. The darkness swooped in. Dan was now intoning something in Lakota. He
stepped out and walked a few feet from the road. He chanted louder.

“What's he saying?” I asked Grover.

“He does this sometimes, when he feels the Old Ones nearby. It's something he learned when he was young. Something Red Cloud said. It's kind of like this: ‘The shadows are long and dark before me. Soon I will lie down and not rise up again.' Now he's talking about the sun and how he will always be faithful to the sun.”

Dan was walking away from us on unsteady legs. I tried to sound nonchalant. “Why's he doing it? Is it something I did?” My voice came out high and whiny.

“Nothing to worry about. He's old. He's close to the other side. Sometimes he sees across. It's okay.” Grover reached into the bag of groceries on the seat beside him and pulled out a tiny pie. “You want some?”

Dan had stopped on a rise and was standing with his arms outstretched. The moonlight framed him like a ghost.

“No!” I answered. My voice was almost a shout.

Grover shrugged and ripped the edge of the wrapper. “It's apple.” At the sound of tearing paper Fatback rose up like a sphinx.

“Here, you old dog,” Grover said. He tore off a chunk of crust and held it over the seat. Fatback snapped it desperately out of his hand and smacked it around in her mouth.

“See those big hollows out there?” Grover asked. “The Old Ones said they were made by the buffalo dancing.”

Dan was walking farther into the hills.

Fatback started mewling for more pie. Grover flipped a chunk over his shoulder. The old dog grabbed at it but missed. It fell on the floor and bounced under the seat. She lunged after it, scratching me with her hind paws as she scrabbled headfirst onto the floor.

“You know, Nerburn,” Grover said, apropos nothing, “The old man really likes you.”

“Hnn,” I said.

“He's showing you things and telling you things.”

There was no reasonable response. “I know,” I said.

He rubbed his crewcut with the palm of his hand. “Do you think you'll be able to write a book?”

Fatback's head was lodged under the seat.

“Huh? Yes. Uh, I don't know. Yeah, sure.”

“How many pages do you think it will be?”

I was beyond answering. Dan was gone over the hills. Fatback was tearing frantically at the carpet trying to dislodge her head. The sky was ablaze with a fury of stars.

“You know what else the Old Ones said?” Grover asked. “They said there was one star that never moved. All the other stars move around it in a circle. They dance around it. You have to be careful, though. You can't trust the stars because they fear the sun.”

The buffalo hollows were filled with ghost light. Fatback had retrieved the pie chunk and was making her way back onto the seat.

I scanned the landscape wildly. We were alone on an empty sea.

“You don't smoke, do you?” Grover said.

“Me? No.”

“I noticed you didn't take that cigarette from that Indian.”

“No. No, I just never started. Don't like the taste.”

Grover lit a match and held it in the air. “I wish the lighter in this car worked. It broke years ago.” He lit the end of a new cigarette and leaned back. “Only thing wrong with Buicks. I had a Roadmaster after the service — '55, I think. Nothing stopped it. Once I even made a gasket for the carburetor out of
a cardboard box. Drove it for years that way. But the lighter never worked. You ever have a Buick, Nerburn?”

A shooting star coursed across the horizon. The shadows pooled and shifted. “Shit, Grover,” I blurted. “Why are you talking about Buicks? He's eighty years old. He's almost blind!”

“There are many ways to see,” Grover answered lazily. He shifted sideways in his seat and leaned back against the door. “The old man does what he does. Night's the same as day to him. Let him be.” He drew heavily on his cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling.

Over the hills I could hear the roar of another car. Soon the glow of its headlights appeared in the distance. It bore down on us with uncanny speed, then shot past without so much as a wave or a glance. Its dull drone cut the night like a knife.

“What's he doing out there?” I asked.

“Talking to the Ancient Ones,” Grover answered. He was rummaging in the bag for something to drink. “He'll be back soon.”

“What if something happens to him?”

“Better here than some hospital. He's not going to fall, though. That's not why he's out there.”

Something swooped from the sky in the darkness.

“Hawk,” Grover said. “Watching the old man. For Yanpa — the east wind.” He twisted the top off a bottle of iced tea. A hot gust of wind shuddered the car.

“See, I told you,” Grover said. Far out on a hillside I could see the tiny movement of a figure. Grover took a deep slug of the iced tea before shifting back upright in his seat. Step by step the small form advanced toward the car, never wavering, never stopping. “Tough old bugger,” Grover observed.

Dan made his way through the short, dry grasses. He walked with his arms out, palms down, like someone balancing on rocks while crossing a stream. When he was about twenty
feet from the car, he stopped and looked up. His one white eye glinted in the moonlight.

Grover started the engine. The door opened and Dan slid in. Grover shifted into gear and started down the road. No one said a word, but the silence was calm.

“H
ere,” Grover said with authority. A pair of ruts took off from the highway and arched over the moonlit hills. “This is it.”

There was no mailbox, no sign, no marking. We had been driving for hours in the shapeless terrain. There had been no road signs or markers for miles.

He turned onto the ruts and began bouncing toward the hills. The lights shot crazily skyward, then dug into the ground as the front end surged and dipped through the brush.

The undercarriage creaked and clanked. Springs groaned. A mule deer ran in front of us and froze momentarily before bolting off into the darkness. Here and there, half hidden in the grasses, the hulking forms of rusted cars loomed like rhinos.