Reservation Blues

  “Makes sense, enit?” Checkers asked.

  “Damn right,” Victor said.

  “Okay,” Thomas said. “Count it off, Junior.”

  The horses screamed.

  “One, two, one, two, three, four.”

  Coyote Springs dropped into a familiar rhythm together. Thomas, Chess, and Checkers sang well. Thomas strummed note by note on the bass; Chess and Checkers both played keyboards. Junior flailed away at the drums, lost a few beats here and there, but mostly kept up. But Coyote Springs needed Victor to rise, needed his lead guitar to define them. Victor knew how important he was. He closed his eyes and let the chords come to him.

  At first, the music flowed as usual, like a stream of fire through his fingers and the strings. Victor remembered how much the music had hurt him before. That guitar had scarred his hands, yet he had mastered the pain. He thought he could have placed his calloused hands into any fire and never felt the burning. But then, as the song moved forward, bar by bar, his fingers slipped off the strings and frets. The guitar bucked in his hands, twisted away from his body. He felt a razor slice across his palms.

  “Shit, shit!” Victor shouted.

  “What’s the problem?” asked the engineer.

  “Could we start over?” Victor asked.

  Sheridan and Wright exchanged a worried look. Mr. Armstrong cleared his throat loudly.

  “Whenever you want,” said the engineer. “Tape’s still rolling.”

  “What’s wrong?” Thomas asked Victor.

  “Nothing,” Victor said, wiped his hands on his pants, and left blood stains. The rest of Coyote Springs studied those blood stains as Junior counted off again.

  “One, two, one, two, three, four.”

  Checkers could not remember what she was supposed to play. She looked to her sister for help, but Chess’s hands stayed motionless a few inches above the keyboard. Thomas sang half of the first verse before he noticed he was singing alone.

  “Hold up a sec,” said the engineer. “Where are the keyboards and vocals, ladies?”

  “Are you okay?” Thomas asked the sisters.

  Chess and Checkers shook their heads. Junior continued to pound the snare drum. Victor’s guitar kept writhing in his hands until it broke the straps and fell to the floor in a flurry of feedback.

  The engineer let that feedback whine until Sheridan jumped to the intercom.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Sheridan asked Coyote Springs.

  Coyote Springs all stared down at Victor’s guitar.

  “What the hell’s happening?” Sheridan asked everybody in the control booth.

  “I don’t know,” said the engineer. “I think they’re just nervous. Give them another chance.”

  Mr. Armstrong rose from his seat, adjusted his tie and jacket.

  “They don’t have it,” Armstrong said.

  “Don’t you think you’re being a little hasty, sir?” Wright asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Armstrong said and left.

  Coyote Springs was still staring at the guitar on the floor when the engineer spoke.

  “Hey, that’s it, I guess.”

  Coyote Springs looked up at the engineer, who looked pained behind the glass. Wright and Sheridan were arguing violently, silently. Coyote Springs watched the two Cavalry officers gesture wildly, argue for a few more minutes, and then storm out of the control booth.

  “What the hell happened?” Chess asked after a long time.

  “I don’t know,” the engineer said over the intercom. “I thought you were pretty good.”

  “What the hell happened?” Chess asked Thomas. “I don’t know,” Thomas said.

  From The Wellpinit Rawhide Press:

  Local Skins May Lose Their Shirts

  Our local rock band, Coyote Springs, left yesterday for a meeting with Cavalry Records in New York City. Although they’ve been the center of much controversy on the Spokane Indian Reservation, it seems that white people are still interested in the band.

  “We’re going to be rock stars,” Victor Joseph said before the band left. “And we won’t have to come back to this reservation ever again. We’ll just leave all of you [jerks] to your [awful] lives.”

  Lead singer Thomas Builds-the-Fire, however, was a little more guarded about the purpose of the meeting.

  “It’s an audition,” he said. “They haven’t promised us anything. You tell everybody that. We ain’t been promised anything.”

  Tribal Chairman David WalksAlong was even more pessimistic about the future of Coyote Springs.

  “Listen,” he said over lunch at the Tribal Cafe. “Those Skins ain’t got a chance in New York City. I’ve been to New York City, and I know what it’s like. My grandfather always told me you can take a boy off the reservation, but you can’t take the reservation off the boy. Coyote Springs is done for. I’m happy about that.”

  But the other members of Coyote Springs seemed to take all the controversy in stride.

  “I just want to be good at something,” Junior Polatkin said. “I messed up at everything else. I’m not mad at anybody who talked bad about us. I just want them to like us.”

  Chess and Checkers Warm Water simply gave the thumbs-up as they left the reservation, although some Spokanes thought it was a different finger they raised.

  “Listen,” Polatkin added, “if we make it big, it just means we won’t have to eat commodity food anymore.”

  Coyote Springs was still standing in the dark studio when Sheridan and Wright came back. The engineer had already left, so the two record company executives fiddled with the knobs and dials until they found the lights and power.

  “Listen,” Sheridan said over the intercom. “I don’t know what happened to you. But Mr. Armstrong doesn’t want to have anything to do with you right now.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Victor asked.

  “Now, you listen closely,” Sheridan said. “My ass is on the line here, too. I brought you little shits here. You screwed me over. Now, I’m going to try and fix this. Mr. Armstrong can be a little bit emotional. Maybe he didn’t get his coffee or something this morning. Why don’t you just head over to your hotel and wait this out. We’ll fly you back to the reservation in the morning.”

  “No fucking way!” Victor shouted. “We can’t go back there. Not like this.”

  “Calm your ass down,” Sheridan said. “We’ll give Mr. Armstrong a couple months, and then we’ll try it again.”

  “We don’t have a couple months,” Thomas whispered.

  Wright slumped into a chair and wiped his face with a handkerchief just as Victor picked up his guitar and threw it across the studio. Chess and Checkers ducked. Junior continued to beat a quiet rhythm on the drum.

  “Goddamn it,” Sheridan shouted over the intercom. “That’s fucking studio equipment.”

  “Fuck you,” Victor shouted. “You’re studio equipment.

  “Hey,” Sheridan said. “I’m trying to help you. I didn’t screw this up. I’m not the goddamn guitar player. Maybe you just aren’t ready. Maybe next time. But if you don’t calm down, I’ll call security.”

  Victor kicked a music stand over, picked up a studio saxophone and threw it at Sheridan. Sheridan ducked behind the control panel, but the sax just rebounded off the glass and fell to the floor. Angry, Sheridan and Wright stormed into the studio.

  “That’s it,” Sheridan said to Wright. “I’m out of here. I tried to help these goddamn Indians. But they don’t want help. They don’t want anything.”

  “I think they want the same things we do,” Wright said.

  Victor went after Sheridan and Wright then and might have strangled them, but Thomas and Junior tackled him. They pinned Victor to the floor as Sheridan looked down.

  “Jesus,” Sheridan said. “It isn’t that bad. You got a free trip to New York. You aren’t leaving until tomorrow. You’ve got a whole night in Manhattan to yourselves. I’ll even treat you to a nice evening. Some dinner, dancing, the
sights.”

  Sheridan pulled out his wallet and dropped a few bills on the floor near Victor. Chess and Checkers quickly picked up the money and threw it in Sheridan’s face.

  “That’s it,” Sheridan said. “You’re out of here.”

  “Wait,” Wright said, but the security guards arrived quickly and roughly escorted Coyote Springs out of the building. Coyote Springs cried, but no crowd gathered to watch them. Coyote Springs stood in the middle of the sidewalk, and hundreds of people just flowed impassively around them.

  “What are we supposed to do?” Chess asked.

  “Let’s just go home,” Thomas said. It was all he knew to say. “Big Mom will know what to do.”

  “She’s just an old woman,” Victor shouted. “She ain’t magic. And even if she was, she’s a million miles away. What the fuck can she do? Everything is a million miles away. It’s all lies, lies, lies. All the whites ever done was tell us lies.”

  Victor roared against his whole life. If he could have been hooked up to a power line, he would have lit up Times Square. He had enough anger inside to guide every salmon over Grand Coulee Dam. He wanted to steal a New York cop’s horse and go on the warpath. He wanted to scalp stockbrokers and kidnap supermodels. He wanted to shoot flaming arrows into the Museum of Modern Art. He wanted to lay siege to Radio City Music Hall. Victor wanted to win. Victor wanted to get drunk.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Victor said to Junior, and they ran off into the crowd.

  “Come back,” Checkers shouted after them, but they were already gone, swallowed by the river of people.

  “I’m so scared,” Chess said to Thomas and moved into his arms.

  “I am, too,” Checkers said and held onto Thomas and Chess.

  Thomas felt his whole body shake.

  If any New Yorkers had stopped to look, they would have seen three Indians slow dancing, their hair swirling in the wind. The whole scene could have been a postcard, WISH YOU WERE HERE. It could have been on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

  Chess, Checkers, and Thomas stood in the hotel lobby with no idea what to do about Junior and Victor, who were getting drunk somewhere in Manhattan. But there were thousands of bars, taverns, lounges, and dives in New York. Thousands and thousands. Victor and Junior could be anywhere.

  “Jeez,” Checkers said, “what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Thomas, a reservation storyteller without answers or stories.

  “Well,” Chess said, “we have to find those two. It’s dangerous here. Especially for them.”

  Thomas was truly frightened. He felt totally out of control. He could only think about the instruments they left in the studio.

  “Our stuff,” Thomas said.

  “What stuff?” Chess asked.

  “Our guitars and stuff. They’re still in the studio.”

  “Forget them, it’s all over now, anyways. Can’t you feel it?”

  Thomas touched his body and felt the absence, like some unnamed part of him had been cut away.

  “What are we going to do?” Checkers pleaded. She dropped into a chair and held her head between her knees. “I think I’m going to pass out.”

  Chess watched Thomas and Checkers collapse. She knew Victor and Junior had to be found. There was no time for drama. Victor and Junior, two small-town reservation hicks, were out drunk somewhere in New York City. There were only a few ways to the on the reservation but a few thousand new and exciting ways in Manhattan. All of it felt like a three-in-the-morning movie on television. Some punks would kill Victor and Junior for their shoes and dump their bodies in the Hudson River. And Kojak would never find them.

  “Listen,” Chess said, but Thomas and Checkers stared off into space.

  “Listen, goddamn it!” Chess shouted. Thomas and Checkers looked at her. “Thomas and I will grab a phonebook and hit all the bars in this whole town. Checkers, you stay here in case they come back. How does that sound?”

  “That’s crazy,” Thomas said. “There are thousands of bars.”

  “I know it’s crazy,” Chess said. “But what else are we going to do? Who knows what Victor and Junior are going to do? They might get themselves killed.”

  “Where do we start?”

  “With the A’s,” Chess said. “And work our way from there.”

  Chess hugged her sister; Checkers wouldn’t let her go.

  “I’ve got to go,” Chess said.

  “Don’t,” Checkers whispered.

  Chess led her sister across the lobby and into the elevator.

  “Eleventh floor,” Chess said to the elevator man.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The elevator doors slid closed. Chess and Thomas left the hotel with a few dozen pages of the phonebook.

  Victor and Junior sat in a smoky lounge with a half dozen empty glasses in front of them.

  “Fucking assholes,” Victor shouted.

  “Be quiet,” Junior said. “You’ll get us kicked out of here, too.”

  It was the fourth bar that Junior and Victor had been in since they ran away from the rest of Coyote Springs. The bouncers had tossed them out of the first bar for fighting. The second lounge had closed early, and the third established a new dress code fifteen minutes after Junior and Victor sat down. Still, these bars they visited in New York City weren’t all that different from the bars on the reservation. A few tables and chairs, a few stools at the bar, a television, and a pool table. The only difference between bars was the program on the TV.

  “Everybody’s a liar,” Victor whispered. He laughed drunkenly and looked around the bar. The bartender stared at Victor and mentally cut him off.

  “Man,” Victor said. “Look at all the beautiful white women in here.”

  Junior looked around the room. He saw beautiful white women in the bar, had seen beautiful white women in all four bars that night, and Victor had made sure to shout about it. There were beautiful women of all colors in those bars and some plain white ones, but Victor and Junior never seemed to notice the plain ones.

  “This city’s filled up with beautiful white women,” Victor said and laughed his drunk laugh. Phlegm rattled in his throat and spit fell from his mouth.

  “Victor,” Junior said. “Why you like white women so much?”

  “Don’t you know? Bucks prefer white tail.”

  Junior didn’t feel like laughing. He just ate a handful of peanuts and stared at the television. Victor babbled on about nothing. The bartender cleared the glasses away from Junior’s and Victor’s area. Victor ordered another beer, but Junior gave the bartender a look that said He don’t need no more. The bartender gave Junior a look back that said I wasn’t going to give him one anyway.

  Junior knew that white women were trophies for Indian boys. He always figured getting a white woman was like counting coup or stealing horses, like the best kind of revenge against white men.

  Hey, Indian men said to white men. You may have kicked our ass in the Indian wars, but we got your women.

  But that was too easy an explanation, and Junior knew it. He knew he loved to walk around with Betty and Veronica. Especially on the reservation. He loved to have something that other Indians didn’t have. He’d had his first white woman back when he was in college in Oregon.

  Junior had met Lynn when he had spent a Christmas break in the dorms; neither of them could afford to go home. All during the break, Junior read books and stared out the window into the snow. He watched cars pass by and wondered if white people were happier than Indians.

  They met each other while checking their mail the day after Christmas.

  “So,” Lynn had asked, “what’s it like being the only Indian here?”

  “It gets pretty lonely, I guess.”

  “Do you drink much?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I see you at parties. You seem to drink a lot.”

  “Yeah, maybe I do.”

  Lynn studied Junior’s face.
br />   “You know,” she said, “you’re very pretty.”

  “You’re pretty, too.”

  They walked around campus for hours, talking and laughing. Then Lynn suddenly stopped and stared at Junior.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Listen,” she said and kissed him. Just like that. Junior had never kissed a white woman before, so he used his tongue a lot, and tried to find out if she tasted different than an Indian woman.

  “Irish,” said Lynn as she broke the kiss. “I’m Irish.”

  “Who’s Irish?” Victor asked Junior and pulled him from his memories.

  “What?” Junior asked.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said you were Irish.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yeah, you did,” Victor said. “Where the hell were you? On another planet?”

  “Yeah,” Junior said. “On another planet.”

  From the night report, 34th precinct, Manhattan:

  12:53 A.M. Two Native Americans, Thomas Builds-the-Fire and Chess Warm Water, reported disappearance of two friends, Victor Joseph and Junior Polatkin. All are from Wellpinit, Washington, and are in a rock band called Coyote Springs, along with a Checkers Warm Water, who is waiting at the band’s hotel. The disappeared supposedly took off on drinking binge after confrontation at record company. Took down stats on the missing but informed others that we couldn’t do much unless there was some evidence of foul play. Joseph and Polatkin will probably stagger into hotel at dawn. Builds-the-Fire was lead singer of the band.

  Checkers waited in the hotel room and stared out the window, at the clock, at the door. She was afraid for the rest of Coyote Springs, because she knew that Indians always disappeared. She knew about Sam Bone, that Indian who waved to a few friends, turned a corner, and was never seen again.

  “Please,” Checkers said, her only prayer. She lay on the bed, closed her eyes, and prayed. She prayed until she fell asleep, and then she dreamed.

  Checkers? asked the voice, like a knock on the door.

  Chess, Checkers whispered as she rushed to the door and opened it.

  Hello, said Phil Sheridan as he pushed his way into the room.