So I’m sitting there, bored, a little impatient more than anything else, and suddenly I see all this art going by. Huge murals painted on the sides of the boxcars and all I can do is stare, thinking, where’s all that coming from? Who did these amazing paintings?
And then just like that, there’s this collision of the synchronicity at seeing those painted cars and this feeling I’ve had of wanting to do something different with the iconology I grew up with on the rez—you know, like the bead patterns my mom sews on her powwow dresses. I turn my car back around and drive for the freight yards, stopping off at a hardware store along the way.
I felt a kinship to whoever it was that was painting those boxcars, a complete understanding of what they’d done and why they’d done it. And I wanted to send them a message back. I wanted to tell them, I’ve seen your work and here’s my side of the conversation.
That was the day Crow was born and my first thunderbird joined that ongoing hobo gallery that the freights take from city to city, across the country.
It’s a long ride down to the city. I leave the crows behind, but the winter comes with me, wind blowing snow down the highway behind my car, howling like the cries of dying buffalo. It’s full night by the time I’m in the downtown core. It’s so cold, there’s nobody out, not even the hookers. I drive until I reach the precinct house where Turk works and park across the street from it. And then I sit there, my hand in my pocket, fingers wrapped around the handle of the gun.
Comes to me, I can’t kill a man, not even a man like Turk. Maybe if he was standing right in front of me and we were fighting. Maybe if he was threatening my mom. Maybe I could do it in the heat of the moment. But not like this, waiting to ambush him like in some Hollywood western.
But I know I’ve got to do something.
My gaze travels from the precinct house to the stores alongside the street where I’m parked. I don’t even hesitate. I reach in the back for a plastic bag full of unused spray cans and I get out of the car to meet that cold wind head on.
I don’t know how long I’ve got so I work even faster than usual. It’s not a boxcar, but the paint goes on the bricks and glass as easy as it does on wooden slats. It doesn’t even clog up in the nozzle— maybe the Grandfather Thunders are giving me a helping hand. I do the crow first, thunderbird style, a yellow one to make the black and red words stand out when I write them along the spread of its wings.
TOM MCGURK KILLS INDIANS.
I add a roughly-rendered brave with the daubed clay of a ghostdancer masking his features. He’s lying face-up to the sky, power lines flowing up out of his head as his spirit leaves his body, a row of crosses behind him—not Christian crosses, but ours, the ones that stand for the four quarters of the world.
HE HAULS THEM OUT OF TOWN, I write in big sloppy letters, ANDLEAVES THEM TO DIE IN THE COLD.
I’m starting a monster, a cannibal windigo all white fur and blood, raging in the middle of a winter storm, when a couple of cops stop their squad car abreast of where I parked my own. They’re on their way back to the precinct, I guess, ending their shift and look what they’ve found. I keep spraying the paint, my fingers frozen into a locked position from the cold.
“Okay, Tonto,” one of them says. “Drop the can and assume the position.”
I couldn’t drop the can if I wanted to. I can barely move my fingers. So I keep spraying on the paint until one of them gives me a sucker punch in the kidneys, knocks me down, kicks me as I’m falling. I lose the spray can and it goes rattling across the sidewalk. I lose the gun, too, which I forgot I was carrying.
There’s a long moment of silence as we’re all three staring at that gun lying there on the pavement.
They really work me over then.
So as I sit here in county, waiting for my trial, I think back on all of this and find I’m not sorry that I didn’t try to shoot Turk. I’m not sorry that I got busted in the middle of vandalizing a building right across the street from the precinct house, either. But I do regret not getting rid of the gun first.
The charges against me are vandalism, possession of an unlicensed weapon, carrying a concealed weapon, and resisting arrest. I’ll be doing some time, heading up to the pen, but I won’t be alone in there. Like Leonard Peltier says on that song he does with Robbie Robertson, “It’s the fastest growing rez in the country,” and he should know, they’ve kept him locked up long enough.
But something good came out of all of this. The police didn’t have time to get rid of my graffiti before the press showed up. I guess it was a slow news day because pictures of those paintings showed up on the front page of all three of the daily papers, and made the news on every channel. You might think, what’s good about that? It’s like prime evidence against me. But I’m not denying I painted those images and words, and the good thing is, people started coming forward, talking about how the same thing had happened to them. Cops would pick them up when the bars closed and would dump them, ten, twenty miles out of town. They identified Turk and a half-dozen others by name.
So I’m sitting in county, and I don’t know where Turk is, but he’s been suspended without pay while the investigation goes on, and it looks like they’ve got to deal with this fair and square because everybody’s on their case now, right across the city—whites, blacks, skins, everybody. They’re all watching what the authorities do, writing editorials, writing letters to the editor, holding protest demonstrations.
This isn’t going away.
So if I’ve got to do some jail time, I’m thinking the sacrifice is worth it.
My cousin Tommy drives my mom down from the rez on a regular basis to visit me. The first time she comes, she stands there looking at me and I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I wait for the blast I’m sure’s coming my way. But all she says is, “Couldn’t you have stuck with the boxcars?” Then she holds me a long while, tells me I’m stupid, but how she’s so proud of me. Go figure.
Some of the Creek aunts have connections in the city and they found me a good lawyer, so I’m not stuck with some public defender. I like him. His name’s Marty Caine and I can tell he doesn’t care what color my skin is. He tells me that what I did was “morally correct, if legally indefensible, but we’ll do our damnedest to get you out of this anyway.” But nobody’s fooled. We all know that whatever happens to the cops, they’re still going to make a lesson with me. When it comes to skins, they always do.
I see Walking Elk one more time before the trial. I’m lying on my bunk, staring up at the ceiling, thinking how, when I get out, I’m going on those last two vision quests. I need to be centered. I need to talk to the Creator and find out what my place is in the world, who I’m supposed to be so that my being here in this world makes a difference to what happens to the people in my life, to the ground I walk on and the spirits that share this world with us.
I hear a rustle of cloth and turn my head to see John Walking Elk sitting on the other bunk. He’s still wearing the clothes he died in. I assume he’s still dead. This time he’s got the smokes and he offers me one.
I swing my feet to the floor and take the cigarette, let him light it for me.
“How come you’re still here?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Maybe I’m not,” he says. “Maybe Whiteduck sent my spirit on and you’re just dreaming.”
I smile. “You’d think if I was going to dream, I’d dream myself out of this place.”
“You’d think.”
We smoke our cigarettes for a while.
“I’m in all the papers,” Walking Elk says after a while. “And that’s your doing. They wrote about how Whiteduck sent my body down to the city, how the cops drove me up there and dumped me in the snow. Family I didn’t even know I had anymore came to the funeral. From the rez, from Pine Ridge, hell, from places I never even heard of before.”
I wasn’t there, but I heard about it. Skins came from all over the country to show their solidarity. Mom told me that the Warriors’ Society up on the rez or
ganized it.
“Yeah, I heard it was some turnout,” I say. “Made the cover of Time and everything.”
Walking Elk nods. “You came through for me,” he says. “On both counts.”
I know what he’s talking about. I can hear his voice against the northern winds that were blowing that day without even trying.
Don’t let me be forgotten.
Be a warrior for me.
But I don’t know what to say.
“Even counted some coup for yourself,” he adds.
“Wasn’t about that,” I tell him.
“I know. I just wanted to thank you. I had to come by to tell you that. I lived a lot of years, just looking for something in the bottom of a bottle. There was nothing else left for me. Didn’t think anybody’d ever look at me like I was a man again. But you did. And those people that came to the funeral? They were remembering me as a man, too, not just some drunk who got himself killed by a cop.”
He stands up. I’m curious. Is he going to walk away through the wall, or just fade away like he did before?
“Any plans for when you get out?” he asks.
I think about that for a moment.
“I was thinking of going back to painting boxcars,” I say. “You see where painting buildings got me.”
“There’s worse places to be,” he tells me. “You could be dead.”
I don’t know if I blinked, or woke up, but the next thing I know, he’s gone and I’m alone in my cell. But I hear an echo of laughter and I’ve still got the last of that cigarette he gave me smoldering in my hand.
“Ya-ha-hey,” I say softly and butt it out in the ashtray.
Then I stretch out on the bed again and contemplate the ceiling some more.
I think maybe I was dead, or half dead, anyway, before I found John Walking Elk dying in the snow. I was going through the motions of life, instead of really living, and there’s no excuse for that. It’s not something I’ll let happen to me again.
Freak
1
“Do you understand the charges as they’ve been read to you?”
“Yes sir, I do.”
“How do you plead?”
“Guilty, your honor.”
2
“Get your head outta them comic books,” Daddy’d say. “They’re gonna rot your brain.” And I guess they did.
Or something happened to me that don’t have any kind of an explanation that makes a lick of sense ‘cause there’s a mess inside the bones of my head that’s been giving me a world of grief pretty much ever since I can remember.
I hear voices, see. Sometimes they’re only pictures, or a mix of the two, but mostly it’s them voices. Words. People talking. The voices show up inside my head with no never you mind from me and I can’t shut ‘em out.
They come to me about the same time I learned how playing with my pee-stick could be a whole lot of fun. I never knew it was good for anything but peeing until I woke up one night with it grown all big in my hand and I never felt anything near as good as when out comes this big gush of white, creamy pee. I felt bad after— like I was doing something dirty—but I couldn’t seem to stop.
But when I finally did, the voices didn’t.
For the longest time, I thought I was imagining them. I didn’t have me a whole lot of friends, living out by the junkyard like we did, so it makes sense how maybe I’d get me an imaginary friend. But they was just voices. They didn’t talk to me; they talked at me. Sometimes them voices used words I couldn’t tell what they meant—they’d be too big or in some foreign language. And sometimes the pictures that come to me were of things that I’d never seen before—hell, stuff that I couldn’t even start to imagine on my own—and sometimes they were of things I didn’t want to imagine. People doing things to each other. Mean, terrible things.
I figured maybe the voices were punishment for all that playing I done with my pee-stick. You know, instead of growing hair on my palms, I got all this noise in my head.
But because they wasn’t telling me nothing personal—they wasn’t talking to me, I mean, like telling me I’d been bad or something—I come to realize that maybe I got something broke in my head. It was just something that happened, no accounting for it.Like I’d become a kind of radio, tuned to a station only I could hear, and these voices was just coming to me outta the air.
I can’t remember when I finally worked out that they was other people thinking, but that’s what they are, sure enough.
Funny thing about ‘em is how they come with a smell. Like, take Blind Henry, lives on the street, same as me. His thinking’s like the tobacco juice usta build up in the spit pot in Daddy’s office. It was my job to dump it. I’d take it out to that cinderblock building at the back of the junkyard where we been dumping all manner of things. Oil and dirty gas, yeah, but other stuff, too. You’d go into that building and your eyes’d start to sting something fierce and the taste of puke’d rise up in your throat.
I remember the first time I saw the pirates come—I knew they was pirates because they had the Jolly Roger on the side of the barrels they brought in that big truck of theirs and they come late at night, secret-like. I looked hard but I never saw no one with a peg leg or a parrot, still they had the skull and crossbones, so I knew ‘em for what they was. That first night I snuck outta the trailer and followed Daddy and them pirates to the cinderblock building and stared in at ‘em through the window. But they wasn’t hiding any treasure. Them barrels with the Jolly Roger on ‘em only had some kind of watery goo that Daddy dumped into the pit.
Anywise, I was telling you how every voice’s got its own smell. Daddy’s was sweaty leather, like that old belt of his he used to whup me whenever he got in a mood. Mama’s was like fruit, rotting on the ground. Kinda sweet, but not right.
The best voice is Jenny Winston’s. It smells just like she looks, fresh and kind, like apple blossoms and lilacs when the scent of them comes to you from a few backyards over. Not too strong, but you can’t mistake it.
I learned pretty damn quick to hide the fact I could hear what a body was thinking. People don’t like it. It don’t make no never mind that I can’t stop from hearing it. They just assume you’re a-doing it on purpose.
But I’d give anything to make it stop.
I can’t never make ‘em go away completely, I guess, not unless I went to live on some desert island where there was nobody else to do any thinking, but how would I live in a place like that? I can’t do much for myself ‘cept look for handouts as it is.
But I can tune ‘em down some by listening to music. I don’t know why it works, it just does. That’s why I always had me spare batteries for this little transistor radio of mine—I’d make sure I got batteries afore I saw to getting me enough to eat.
It’s hard in here without that radio. The voices that fill my head are cold and mean and hurting.
But better ‘n the radio was live music.
Sometimes, afore they put me in here, I’d go in back of the Rhatigan, that little jazz club over on Palm Street. I’d sit in the alley by the back door and listen to the house bands play. It was best in the summer when they got the door propped open and them cool, moody sounds come floating out—they don’t just take the voices away; that music makes me feel good, even when the band’s playing a sad song, or the blues.
3
“Bernie—can I call you Bernie?”
“Sure. That’s my name.”
“You know I’m here to help you.”
“Sure.”
“The court may have appointed me to represent you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about winning this case.”
“Sure.”
“I think we need to send you in for psychiatric evaluation.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“Bernie, copping an insanity plea is the only chance we’re going to have to save you from long-term incarceration or worse.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“This state still has a death penalt
y.”
“I know that.”
“If we don’t do something, Bernie, you could end up on death row.”
“Maybe that’s the best place for something like me.”
4
Daddy died first of the cancer. It just started growing in him one day and afore you’d know it, it was spread all through him. He was in a lot of pain by the time it finally took him, which made him real hard to be around. My head was filled with the screaming of his thoughts the whole time. That was an ugly time.
Mama died not long after—cancer took her, too—but she went quietly. Like a long, drawn-out whimper.
Cousin Henry took possession of the junkyard and become my guardian until I turned sixteen. Then he sent me packing with hard words and meaner thoughts.
That’s how I come to be living on the street this past couple of years. I tried to find work, but nobody wants something as ugly as me to look at, day after day.
See, I never had no chance at a normal life. It’s not my hearing the voices—I learned pretty damn quick to keep that to my ownself. It’s that I look like a freak. Got no meat on my bones, but I got a head big and round as a damn pumpkin, and my skin’s all splotchy with big red marks like I got me freckles on steroids. It made the kids laugh afore I dropped out of school, but now people just stare, then look away, like I turn their stomach or something.
I always had that big head and I never did grow into it. There’s times I wish it was even bigger so that I could get a steady gig in a sideshow or something. People’d still make fun of me, but it wouldn’t be the same, would it? It’d be like my job. I’d be getting paid for being a freak.
In them comic books I used to read, I’d’ve been a hero, what with being able to read people’s minds and all. I woulda got myself some fancy clothes and a mask and I’d go out and save people’s lives ‘n’ stuff. It wouldn’t matter if I looked like a freak ‘cause I’d be part of some gang of superheroes, saving the world ‘n’ stuff and people’d admire us and like us, even me. In the comic books, a freak like me can still live a good life. Hell, sometimes they even get them a girl.