Original Fire

  He was not really much of a connoisseur, the old man. He just knew what he liked when he saw it. The three stones were light brown in color, delicately veined, and so smooth that they almost looked slippery. Old Man Potchikoo began to wonder if they really were slippery, and then he thought of touching them.

  They were in the middle of the soft slough mud, so the old man took his boots and socks off. Then he thought of his wife Josette and what she would say if he came home with mud on his clothes. He took off his shirt and pants. He never wore undershorts. Wading toward those stones, he was as naked as them.

  He had to kneel in the mud to touch the stones, and when he did this he sank to his thighs. But oh, when he touched the stones, he found that they were bigger than they looked from the shore and so shiny, so slippery. His hands polished them, and polished them some more, and before he knew it, that Potchikoo was making love to the slough.

  Years passed by. The Potchikoos got older and more frail. One day Josette went into town, and as he always did as soon as she was out of sight, Potchikoo sat down on his front steps to do nothing.

  As he sat there, he saw three women walk very slowly out of the woods. They walked across the field and then walked slowly toward him. As they drew near, Potchikoo saw that they were just his kind of women. They were large, their hair was black and very long, and because they wore low-cut blouses, he could see that their breasts were beautiful—light brown, delicately veined, and so smooth they looked slippery.

  “We are your daughters,” they said, standing before him. “We are from the slough.”

  A faint memory stirred in Potchikoo as he looked at their breasts, and he smiled.

  “Oh my daughters,” he said to them. “Yes I remember you. Come sit on your daddy’s lap and get acquainted.”

  The daughters moved slowly toward Potchikoo. As he saw their skin up close, he marveled at how fine it was, smooth as polished stone. The first daughter sank upon his knee and clasped her arms around him. She was so heavy that the old man couldn’t move. Then the others sank upon him, blocking away the sun with their massive bodies. The old man’s head began to swim and yellow stars turned in his skull. He hardly knew it when all three daughters laid their heads dreamily against his chest. They were cold, and so heavy that his ribs snapped apart like little dry twigs.

  Potchikoo’s Life After Death

  How They Don’t Let Potchikoo into Heaven

  After Old Man Potchikoo died, the people had a funeral for his poor, crushed body, and everyone felt sorry for the things they had said while he was alive. Josette went home and set some bread by the door for him to take on his journey to the next world. Then she began to can a bucket of plums she’d bought cheap, because they were overripe.

  As she canned, she thought how it was. Now she’d have to give away these sweet plums since they had been her husband’s favorites. She didn’t like plums. Her tastes ran sour. Everything about her did. As she worked, she cried vinegar tears into the jars before she sealed them. People would later remark on her ingenuity. No one else on the reservation pickled plums.

  Now, as night fell, Potchikoo got out of his body, and climbed up through the dirt. He took the frybread Josette had left in a towel, his provisions. He looked in the window, saw she was sleeping alone, and he was satisfied. Of course, since he never could hold himself back, he immediately ate the bread as he walked the long road, a mistake. Two days later, he was terribly hungry, and there was no end in sight. He came to the huge luscious berry he knew he shouldn’t eat if he wanted to enter the heaven all the priests and nuns described. He took a little bite, and told himself he’d not touch the rest. But it tasted so good tears came to his eyes. It took a minute, hardly that, for him to stuff the whole berry by handfuls into his mouth.

  He didn’t know what would happen now, but the road was still there. He kept walking, but he’d become so fat from his greed that when he came to the log bridge, a test for good souls, he couldn’t balance to cross it, fell in repeatedly, and went on cold and shivering. But he was dry again, and warmer, by the time he reached the pearly gates.

  Saint Peter was standing there, dressed in a long, brown robe, just as the nuns and priests had always said he would be. He examined Potchikoo back and front for berry stains, but they had luckily washed away when Potchikoo fell off the bridge.

  “What’s your name?” Saint Peter asked.

  Potchikoo told him, and then Saint Peter pulled a huge book out from under his robe. As the saint’s finger traveled down the lists, Potchikoo became frightened to think how many awful deeds would be recorded after his name. But as it happened, there was only one word there. The word Indian.

  “Ah,” Saint Peter said. “You’ll have to keep walking.”

  Where Potchikoo Goes Next

  So he kept on. As he walked, the road, which had been nicely paved and lit when it got near heaven, narrowed and dipped. Soon it was only gravel, then dirt, then mud, then just a path beaten in the grass. The land around it got poor too, dry and rocky. And when Potchikoo got to the entrance of the Indian heaven, it was no gate of pearl, just a simple pasture gate of weathered wood. There was no one standing there to guard it, either, so he went right in.

  On the other side of the gate there were no tracks, so Potchikoo walked aimlessly. All along the way, there were chokecherry bushes, not quite ripe. But Potchikoo was so hungry again that he raked them off the stems by the handful and gobbled them down, not even spitting out the pits.

  The dreadful stomachaches he got, very soon, were worse than hunger, and every few steps poor Potchikoo had to relieve himself. On and on he went, day after day, eating berries to keep his strength up and staggering from the pain and shitting until he felt so weak and famished that he had to sit down. Some time went by, and then people came to sit around him. They got to talking. Someone built a fire, and soon they were roasting venison.

  The taste of it made Potchikoo lonesome. Josette always fried her meat with onions.

  “Well,” he said, standing up when he was full, “it’s time to go now.”

  The people didn’t say good-bye though—they just laughed. There were no markers in this land, nothing but extreme and gentle emptiness. It was made to be confusing. There were no landmarks, no lookouts. The wind was strong, and the bushes grew quickly, so that every path made was instantly obscured.

  But not Potchikoo’s path. At regular intervals new chokecherry bushes had sprung up from the seeds that had passed through his body. So he had no trouble finding his way to the gate, out through it, and back on the road.

  Potchikoo’s Detour

  Along the way back, he got curious and wondered what the hell for white people was like.

  As he passed the pearly gates, Saint Peter was busy checking in a busload of Mormons, and so he didn’t even look up and see Potchikoo take the dark fork in the road.

  Walking along, Potchikoo began to think twice about what he was doing. The air felt warm and humid, and he expected it to get worse, much worse. Soon the screams of the damned would ring out and the sky would turn pitch-black. But his curiosity was, as always, stronger than his fear. He kept walking until he came to what looked like a giant warehouse.

  It was a warehouse, and it was hell.

  There was a little sign above the metal door marked ENTRANCE. HELL. Potchikoo got a thrill of terror in his stomach. He carefully laid his ear against the door, expecting his blood to curdle. But all he heard was the sound of rustling pages. And so, gathering his courage, he bent to the keyhole and looked in to see what it was the white race suffered.

  He started back, shook his head, then bent to the keyhole again.

  It was worse than flames.

  They were all chained, hand and foot and even by the neck, to years and years of mail order catalogues. From the old Sears Roebuck to the Sharper Image, they were bound. Around and around the huge warehouse they dragged the heavy paper books, mumbling, collapsing from time to time to flip through the pages. Each perso
n bent low beneath the weight. Potchikoo had always wondered where the millions of old catalogues went, and now he knew the devil gathered them, that they were instruments of torment.

  The words of the damned, thin and drained, rang in his ears all the way home.

  Look at that wall unit. What about this here recliner? We could put up that home gym in the basement….

  Potchikoo Greets Josette

  On his journey through heaven and hell, Potchikoo had been a long time without sex. It was night when he finally got back home, and he could hardly wait to hold Josette in his arms. Therefore, after he had entered the house and crept up to her bed, the first words he uttered to his wife in greeting were, “Let’s pitch whoopee.”

  Josette yelled and grabbed the swatter that she kept next to her bed to kill mosquitoes in the dark. She began to lambaste Potchikoo until she realized who it was, and that this was no awful dream.

  Then they lay down in bed and had no more thoughts.

  Afterward, lying there happily, Potchikoo was surprised to find that he was still passionate. They began to make love again, and still again, and over and over. At first Josette returned as good as Potchikoo gave her, but after a while it seemed that the more he made love, the more need he felt and the more heat he gave off. He was unquenchable fire.

  Finally, Josette fell asleep, and let him go on and on. He was so glad to be alive again that he could never remember, afterward, how many times he had sex that night. Even he lost count. But when he woke up late the next day, Potchikoo felt a little strange, as though there was something missing. And sure enough, there was.

  When Potchikoo looked under the covers, he found that his favorite part of himself was charred black and thin as a burnt twig.

  Potchikoo Restored

  It was terrible to have burnt his pride and joy down to nothing. It was terrible to have to face the world, especially Josette, without it. Potchikoo put his pants on and sat in the shade to think. But not until Josette left for daily Mass, and he was alone, did Potchikoo have a good idea.

  He went inside and found a block of paraffin wax that Josette used to seal her jars of plum pickles. He stirred the coals in Josette’s stove and melted the wax in an old coffee can. Then he dipped in his penis. It hurt the first time, but after that not so much, and then not at all. He kept dipping and dipping. It got back to the normal size, and he should have been pleased with that. But Potchikoo got grandiose ideas.

  He kept dipping and dipping. He melted more wax, more and more, and kept dipping, until he was so large he could hardly stagger out the door. Luckily, the wheelbarrow was sitting in the path. He grabbed the handles and wheeled it before him into town.

  There was only one road in the village then. Potchikoo went there with his wheelbarrow, calling for women. He crossed the village twice. Mothers came out in wonder, saw what was in the wheelbarrow, and whisked their daughters inside. Everybody was disgusted and scolding and indignant, except for one woman. She lived at the end of the road. Her door was always open, and she was large.

  Even now, we can’t use her name, this Mrs. B. No man satisfied her. But that day, Potchikoo wheeled his barrow in, and then, for once, her door was shut.

  Potchikoo and Mrs. B went rolling through the house. The walls shuddered, and people standing around outside thought the whole place might collapse. Potchikoo was shaken from side to side, powerfully, as if he were on a ride at the carnival. But eventually, of course, the heat of their union softened and wilted Potchikoo back to nothing. Mrs. B was disgusted and threw him out back, into the weeds. From there he crept home to Josette, and on the crooked path he took to avoid others, he tried to think of new ways he might please her.

  Potchikoo’s Mean Twin

  To his relief, nature returned manhood to Potchikoo in several weeks. But his troubles weren’t over. One day, the tribal police appeared. They said Potchikoo had been seen stealing fence posts down the road. But they found no stolen fence posts on his property, so they did not arrest him.

  More accusations were heard.

  Potchikoo threw rocks at a nun, howled like a dog, and barked until she chased him off. He got drunk and tossed a pool cue out the window of the Stumble Inn. The pool cue hit the tribal chairman on the shoulder and caused a bruise. Potchikoo ran down the street laughing, flung off his clothes, ran naked through the trading store. He ripped antennas from twenty cars. He broke a portable radio that belonged to a widow, her only comfort. If a friendly dog came up to this bad Potchikoo, he lashed out with his foot. He screamed at children until tears came into their eyes, and then he knocked down the one road sign the government had seen fit to place on the reservation.

  The sign was red, planted in the very middle of town, and said STOP. People were naturally proud of the sign. So, there was finally a decision to lock Potchikoo in jail, though he was dead. When the police came to get him, he went quite willingly because he was so confused.

  But here’s what happened.

  While Potchikoo was locked up, under the eyes of the tribal sheriff, his mean twin went out and caused some mischief near the school by starting a grass fire. So now the people knew the trouble wasn’t caused by Old Man Potchikoo. And next time the bad twin was seen, Josette followed him. He ran very fast, until he reached the chain link fence around the graveyard. Josette saw him jump over the fence and dodge among the stones. Then the twin got to the place where Potchikoo had been buried, lifted the ground like a lid, and wiggled under.

  How Josette Takes Care of It

  So the trouble was that Potchikoo had left his old body in the ground, empty, and something had found a place to live.

  The people said the only thing to do was trap the mean twin and then get rid of him. But no one could agree on how to do it. People just talked and planned, no one acted. Finally Josette had to take the matter into her own hands.

  One day she made a big pot of stew, and into it she put a bird. Into the roasted bird, Josette put a bit of blue plaster that had fallen off the Blessed Virgin’s robe while she cleaned the altar. She took the stew and left the whole pot just outside the cemetery fence. From her hiding place deep in a lilac bush, she saw the mean twin creep forth. He took the pot in his hands and gulped down every morsel, then munched the bird up, bones and all. Stuffed full, he lay down to sleep. He snored. After a while, he woke and looked around himself, very quietly. That was when Josette came out of the bush.

  “In the name of the Holy Mother of God!” she cried. “Depart!”

  So the thing stepped out of Potchikoo’s old body, all hairless and smooth and wet and gray. But Josette had no pity. She pointed sternly at the dark stand of pines, where no one went, and slowly, with many a sigh and backward look, the thing walked over there.

  Potchikoo’s old body lay, crumpled like a worn suit of clothes, where the thing had stepped out. Right there, Josette made a fire, a little fire. When the blaze was very hot, she threw in the empty skin. It crackled in the flames, shed sparks, and was finally reduced to a crisp of ashes, which Josette brushed carefully into a little sack, and saved in her purse.

  Saint Potchikoo

  With his old body burnt, Potchikoo existed in his spiritual flesh. Yet having been to the other side of life and back, he wasn’t sure where he belonged. Sometimes he found his heaven with Josette, sometimes he longed for the pasture gate. He became certain that the end of his living days was near, and he felt sorry for himself. He was also very jealous when it came to Josette, and convinced that old men were in love with her, just waiting for him to croak. Therefore, he decided to have himself stuffed and placed in a corner of their bedroom, where he could keep an eye on his widow. He told her of his plan.

  “That way, you’ll never forget me,” he crooned in a pathetic voice.

  “I’ll never forget you anyway,” said Josette. “Who the hell could?”

  Potchikoo sought out a taxidermist in a neighboring town, the sort of person who mounted prize walleyes and the heads of buck deer.

&n
bsp; “What about me?” said Potchikoo.

  “What about you?” said the taxidermist.

  “I’d like to get stuffed,” said Potchikoo.

  “You must be dead first,” said the professional.

  Oh yes, Potchikoo had forgotten this. Dead first. How to accomplish that? He considered this obstacle as he walked back to his house. Death. Potchikoo thought harder. At last, another option presented itself. Potchikoo decided to spend his golden years carving a lifelike statue of Potchikoo from the tall stump of an old oak tree right outside the door. Thus, once he was gone, he would watch over his love and present a forbidding sight to any akiwenzii who came to court her. Delighted with his notion, he began carving the very same day.

  Months passed, a year passed, and Potchikoo’s statue became a legend. His project, begun in jealousy, became through rumor a sign of enormous grace. Divine light had descended on a habitual miscreant. Talk was that the old rascal had converted and was carving the Virgin Mary, or maybe Saint Joseph, or perhaps again the people’s own Blessed Kateri, right in his front yard. Potchikoo put up a canvas screen and worked there every single day. The wrenching sound of his chisel and the tapping of his mallet could be heard at any time, but he allowed no glimpse of his masterwork. He gave no interviews. Just kept working. Not until the statue was finished did he speak, and then it was only a notice of the unveiling. Which would occur on Easter morning.

  At least a hundred people gathered after Mass, and another hundred were there already, waiting for the canvas that surrounded the statue to drop. Potchikoo was very pleased, and made a most glorious speech. The speech was long, and very satisfying to Potchikoo, and at the end of it he suddenly pulled the cord that held the curtain before the statue.