Ragged Company (37 page)

“S
O YOU’RE GOING TO TELL ME
that a story walked up and introduced itself, aren’t you?” Mac asked.

I grinned. He always came right to the point. When he walked into the Palms to join Margo and me for supper, he moved right past the formalities and started in on the point of the meeting while easing into his chair.

“Hi, Mac. Good to see you too,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said with small waves of a hand. “That’s all well and nice, Gran, but when you don’t call an old friend for months at a time and then suddenly ask for a meeting, you don’t get banter. But before we get to it, there’s one thing I want to know.”

“What’s that?”

“Who’s the squeeze?” he asked with a grin.

I introduced him to Margo and she got him back to his charming self in seconds. I knew I wasn’t forgiven for my absence; it had just become less important. They chatted briefly and I watched him, amazed at how time has no effect on some people, at how it passes without a wake for some and nothing is left behind.

“So fill me in,” he said after the waiter left to get our drinks. “I know you were a big part of the street people winning that
lottery, and I got some scuttlebutt from the coast about you getting an exclusive on the update, and I have to say I found that intriguing. But what do you have? What do you want to do with it? And most importantly, do I get it?”

The intuitive sense of the journalist. Mac Maude had always had it and he knew our meeting was about a story, not some small reconnection between friends, not some jovial evening spent recounting memories and tall tales, but about a story, my story, the one that had walked up and introduced itself just like he said it would a few short years ago.

“You get it all right,” I began. “I just don’t know exactly what it is I have. I mean, I’ve been there for all of it. I watched it all happen. But we don’t have denouement. We have no closure. We have no ending.”

“Do you need one?” he asked.

“Don’t I?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes stories are better when left hanging in the wind. The flapping is what makes them memorable. Why don’t you tell me what you have? We’ll eat. I’ll listen. We’ll talk.”

So while we ordered and ate, I talked about the journey I’d been on with the ragged people who’d become my friends. Margo held my hand while I talked, squeezing it now and then when I got emotional. Mac sat and listened, scribbling notes to himself, and it felt good to sit in a story with an editor again, to see details punctuated by a raised eyebrow, a nod, a squint of comprehension, a stare. When I finished, we sat in silence, sipping at our drinks.

“Wow,” he said finally. “That’s a ripping good yarn you’ve got there, Gran.”

“Yes,” I said. “But what to do with it?”

“Well, you definitely have to write it. But I can’t use it.”

“Why the hell not? You just said it’s a ripping good yarn.”

“Yes, I did. And it is. But it’s not for me. Not for the paper.”

“Why not?”

“Because you have too much story. We can’t contain all that and do it any justice. I mean, sure, you could come back on board
and do a serial piece, tell it in segments, but even that’s doing an injustice to the story. What you have is a book.”

“A book? I don’t know how to write a book. I’m an eight-hundred-word guy, tops. Maybe twice that for a feature, but I’m not a book writer.”

“Well, pardon me, Gran, but you aren’t any kind of writer if you’re not writing, and you haven’t been for years now.”

“Granted. But a book?”

“It’s a great idea,” Margo said. “I agree with Mac. It’s too big for a paper, and you tell it so well.”

“It tells itself, really,” Mac said.

“Except for the ending,” I said.

“No biggie. You wait for it. Write what you have. It’s journalism, Gran. You do that better than most people. It’s in your blood. You’re a natural. Write what you have and chances are, while you’re doing that, the ending will present itself.”

“It’s true,” Margo said. “Some stories tell themselves like Mac said. I think you should just write it.”

“I don’t know if I can. It’s been a while. I may even have forgotten how to type.”

“Then go longhand,” Mac said. “This story is not going to go away, Gran. It chose you. Now, that might sound all metaphysical but I mean it. You spend enough time thinking about it and you’ll see what I mean. Just from the elements you gave me I can see how it makes you the only one who could really tell this story.”

“How so?”

“Because you’re just as homeless as they were,” he said.

D
ANCES WITH
W
OLVES
. We walked to see that movie, all seven of us, strolling through the late afternoon sunshine in a tangled bunch, talking, giggling like kids and eager for the magic of the movies. Dick didn’t say much. He just grinned his grin and poked along like the shy kid in the bunch, the one forever at the
edges, and I gave his hand a little squeeze of comfort. He smiled. We’d chosen this movie because the preview we’d seen the last time we were at the movies had been stark and eerie: darkened humps of buffalo charging through the mist and darkness. For me, it had been like water after a long walk. For me, it had been like seeing my own story told on the screen. I had seen the ghosts of a way of life charging across the screen and something in me had connected right away to the sweep of drama that small bit of film contained. I was eager for this one.

I sat between Margo and Dick. She nestled closer to Granite on her right and smiled a small-girl smile at me. Dick sat unmoving, slack-jawed, staring at the screen as usual, and when the movie started he didn’t move a muscle. For the three hours it ran, I didn’t see him move more than to sneak a drink. It was glorious. This was a movie that shone from start to finish. I saw the People as they had once lived: free, unencumbered, tribal. I saw the land as it had once been: open, free, pure. I saw a vision of myself that I had never seen before: a tribal me, a tribal woman, strong, resilient, proud, and in harmony with her world. It made me cry. I thought of all the ones who had never got a chance to see a magic like this, all the ones who had gone before who had never been introduced to the world in this way; the departed ones, my family, my Ben, friends, native people for whom the world was never the free and open place it was on the screen that night, whose identities were never so focused, so sharp, their history rolled out like the great carpet of the plains. I cried. When the credits rolled at the end and the hint of the death of that way of life was left hanging in the stillness, I saw shadowed ones in the aisles, as unwilling to leave as I was. Moved beyond life itself.

We walked to a small café in silence. Everyone, even Digger, was touched by that film. The waitress did her job quickly and moved away to let us chat, and for the longest time none of us had anything to say.

“I’m in love again,” Margo said finally. “I’m in love with the movies.”

“Yes,” James said. “I feel somewhat swept off my feet too.”

“Compelling,” Granite said. “A compelling way to tell that story.”

“I don’t know about compelling,” Digger said. “But it rocked, that’s for sure.”

“Touching,” Timber said. “It reached out and touched you.”

“Yes,” I said. “I feel wrapped in buckskin right now. Old buckskin. It let me see how I might have lived a few hundred years ago.”

“I was ashamed,” Margo said.

“Ashamed? Of what?” James asked.

“Of history,” she said. “Of what happened here. Of what people allowed to happen here. How we let a people die right in front of us. How we let a way of being disappear.”

“Progress,” Granite said. “The great locomotive of civilization moving forward at all costs. I felt mournful for the land. It looked so wild, so free, so unspoiled.”

“I felt sorry for the animals,” Dick said, suddenly.

“What’s that, pal?” Digger asked.

“The animals. Those men was mean to the animals.”

“Yes, they were,” I said.“They didn’t know how to respect them.”

“They didn’t know that the animals was always here to help us,” he said.

“No, they didn’t,” I said. “Animals are our teachers.”

“Animal People,” Dick said.

“What?” Digger asked. “Animal People?”

“Yeah,” Dick replied, sneaking a drink from the mickey he held under the table. “Before there was people like us there was just the animals an’ they was like people. They could talk to each other an’ stuff.”

“They could, huh? Is that from one of your movies?”

“No. It’s just somethin’ I know.”

“How do you know that, Dick? That’s a very old teaching in the Indian way,” I said. “I don’t remember telling you about that.”

“You didn’t,” he said, sneaking another drink.

“Then how do you know?” I asked.

“On accounta I’m an Indian too,” he said. “I’m an Indian too.”

W
E WAS POOR
. We was poor like all the rest around there. They called us sawmill savages. The sawmill was the only place anyone could get a job an’ people hung around waitin’ for the chance to get in. My dad was one of the ones what hung around waitin’. But he wasn’t so good at it like the rest of them on accounta he always had to have somethin’ goin’ on. Kinda like Digger. So he made up a still in the woods behind our shack. The brew that come out of there was the best anyone had ever had an’ people liked my dad’s recipe so much they protected him from the cops an’ stuff. The sawmill guys came around all the time for jugs. My first drink was dad’s moose milk. That’s what he called it. Moose milk on accounta he brewed it so it come out kinda foggy lookin’ in the glass. White, kinda, a watery lookin’ white. Moose milk.

Anyhow, we hadta leave the reserve on accounta there was no work an’ there was a big buncha us that set up shacks on land no one wanted near the sawmill. Swampy kinda land. Or land where there was a lotta rocks. No one said nothin’ as long as we Indians behaved ourselves, an’ when the moose milk got known around no one said nothin’ to any of us no more. We didn’t go to school on accounta that was somethin’ the reserve took care of an’ only the white kids got to go for schoolin’ around that sawmill town. Me, I worked with my dad. When I was small, I went with him to the still all the time an’ he told me stories. Stories about the Animal People. Stories about how we got to be the kinda people we was. My dad wasn’t like a real Indian. He wasn’t even half, he said. But he looked like it. Me, I don’t, but Dad did. Anyhow, he knew all them stories an’ he told them to me while I was buildin’ a fire or juggin’ the brew. That’s when I got my first drink. I think I was six, seven maybe, an’ Dad told me to test the batch. I didn’t know what I was doin’ but I took a big belt of that moose milk anyhow. It burned all the way down but when it got there it was real nice. I felt all warm an’ I was standing in the snow but I felt all warm anyhow. I liked it. After that, Dad let me drink as much as I wanted on accounta I didn’t go all stupid in the head like some other kids.

I was the only one Dad trusted that much. I don’t know how come, but it was just me he took with him an’ when I got a friend he let me take him too. Tom Bruce. That was my friend’s name. Tom Bruce. Me ’n Tom got to haul the sled around when it was winter, an’ the wagon around when it wasn’t. That was how the moose milk got around. Me ’n Tom Bruce went wherever Dad told us with that wagon. We got a free jug now an’ then, too, an’ we’d sit up in the woods an’ make a fire and drink it. Just me ’n Tom on accounta we didn’t wanna have to let other kids in on our deal. We was drinkin’ regular by the time we was nine an’ when the men would get together to play cards or just visit, we was the only ones allowed to be around on accounta they knew us better. We was like little men. If we got drunk an’ started to fall around they’d just laugh like they laughed at the other men who got all fucked up. No one said nothin’.

But we didn’t live like in the movie. I guess we wasn’t that kind of Indian. We lived on moose milk. There was some who told stories an’ stuff. Others went to hunt an’ got meat. But it wasn’t like them Indians in the movie. We was moose milk Indians. That’s all. Moose milk Indians.

I
WATCH
T
IMBER
working on this big piece of wood in the back of my store. It’s huge. Like a log that he stands on its end and starts to shaping with all kinds of strange-looking blades. Seems like he’s cutting off way too much if he wants to make anything come out of it, but what do I know. To me, it looks like he’s lost it. He moves around that wood like a crazy person, whittling, slicing, chopping for a couple of fucking hours until finally he sets the tools down, fires up a smoke, swallows a little beer, looks at the wood and the slivers and chunks laying all over the tarp he’s thrown down, smiles at me and goes, “So what do you think?”

Jesus. I look at that log and see a whole bunch of scrapes and cuts. Even when I scrunch my eyes and walk around the friggin’

thing I don’t see nothing. “What am I supposed to be looking at?” I go.

He smiles and reaches into his pocket. “Sorry,” he goes. “I forget that no one knows where it’s all going when I start. Must look like a mess, huh?”

“It looks like a pissed-off beaver, that’s what it looks like.”

“It’s supposed to look like this when it’s done,” he goes, and hands me a small piece of wood that fits in my palm.

I look at it. It don’t weigh nothing but it sure does say a whole lot. It’s a man. A man sitting in a chair all huddled up in a blanket, looking down like he’s studying something near his feet.

“Fuck me,” I go. “It’s D.”

“Yeah,” he goes. “I saw him on the porch a couple days ago and he looked like this. I wanted to make it for him.”

“This little guy?”

“No. A big one.”

“You’re gonna make one outta this huge fucking log?”

“Yeah. The small one’s the model. If I work small and get it right it’s easier to go bigger. It gets my hands ready. Helps them remember.”

“Your hands remember?”

“Yeah. You know the feeling, if you think about it.”