RavenShadow Read online

  The next-to-last week before Labor Day (taking my time, enjoying my last paychecks!) I got started seriously on the setup. Found an old release on letterhead stationery from Oglala Lakota College out on the rez, Office of the President, Dr. Frank Brown Bull. Typed out a letter from Prez to Long John and printed it on some plain paper. Cut the logo off the letterhead and taped that onto the new letter. Ran the taped-up letter through the fax-copier machine. Presto, a fax from the President of OLC to Long John, asking to give Long John and the station a plaque recognizing their many services to OLC. (This really meant announcing dates and times of powwows, graduations, and such like.) AND … Dr. Brown Bull would be in Rapid City this Friday and wanted to present the plaque in person and ON THE AIR. The president was available from nine-thirty to ten, which coincidentally was the last hour of my show, and the way I was planning things, the last hour of my tenure at KKAT.

  I read it over about five times looking for errors. Not until the last time did I notice I’d put into the president’s mouth the greeting, “Dear Long John.” I felt an ice-cold drop weave all the way down my spine. The next time I got it right.

  After my show the next morning, a Monday, I walked into Long John’s office, gave him the letter, and watched him read it slowly. (Contrary to rumor, his lips didn’t actually move.) I asked casually if 9:50 on Friday, would work for him. I listened to my insides scrape in fear. He gave a smile that kept widening for a full minute. I thought he’d seen through me.

  “Kind of neat,” says I.

  He handed the letter back to me. “Guess I can make it,” he said, and wrote it down in his daytimer.

  Hot damn! Labor Day I’ll be celebrating unemployment!

  I continued with the setup. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I promoed the award, emphasizing LIVE and repeating the time, so there would be no backing out. I also prepared the next fax on the letterhead of the Prez, a long one. Dr. Brown Bull was obliged at the last minute to make an unexpected trip to Pierre, the state capital, it said, to testify before a legislative committee. Regrets were expressed. Since a Lakota was the disc jockey for the chosen time, however, would Mr. Blue Crow stand in for the president? The president’s speech was enclosed. Would Mr. Blue Crow please read it on the air?

  Now just one step left. I had to make sure it got faxed to the station, marked URGENT and to my attention, while I was on the air that morning.

  I drove the seven miles from the house in Rockerville, once my happy home, to Keystone to see my best friend, Emile Gray Feather. “I’ll fax it,” he said. Collectors from all over the world buy Emile’s work. He has a fancy fax machine and copier right in his studio.

  “It’s important,” says I. “See, I’m gonna con Long John …”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll send it.” He lifted his brush hand from the shield he was painting, waved me away, and concentrated on the black he was laying on the shield.

  “Near nine o’clock,” I said again.

  “Yes, yes.” Emile is very slight, kind of feminine in his figure, and very elegant. It was a crow he was creating. I wasn’t sure I had his attention.

  “Real close to nine o’clock.”

  He flicked his eyes up at me and back down. With a half smile showing his childlike teeth, he said, “Never fear, I will help you spread your chaos.”

  Emile talks like that. He’s strange. He likes boys instead of girls. He’s been my best friend for over twenty years.

  I took a last look at the emerging crow and left. Crows give me the shivers, though my own name is Crow. There’s a lot to say about why. For now, let me point out that to us Lakota crow and raven are the same bird. Our word for them, kangi, doesn’t mean crow or raven, just big, black bird, which covers both. So my name, Blue Crow, could as well be translated into English as Blue Raven. The stories native people tell about Raven are also stories about Crow, and vice versa. When I speak of one, I am as well speaking of the other. I feel close to ravens and crows, close and queasy both. The story I’m telling you is called ravenShadow.

  I didn’t sleep that night. Around eleven o’clock I killed a six pack watching MTV, but I still couldn’t sleep. I laid there until twenty to five, turned out before the alarm went off, shuffled into my clothes, and headed to KKAT for the last time.

  TGIF and humming along—hummm, baby, hmmm. Each week I came up with an idea for thanking God it’s Friday. This morning I was playing the bad boys, the Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison, the Dead, and Kiss, sending out dark energy and an unstated dark message to the folks. The station’s hottest times were 7:50 A.M. and 8:50 A.M.—most folks on their way to work, revving up on caffeine and the sound of my show. At 9:05 Amy the Tank marched in with the fax from Emile. Hot damn, he’s right on the dot. I read it trying not to smile. “Amy, would you tell Long John to come in here a minute?”

  Appearance! Long John Silver, sacrificial lamb, unknowing but not innocent. He walked in while I was doing the local news, never yet having learned to observe the ON AIR light when it’s on. I held one finger up to him, asking for silence. This was perfect for my purposes, no discussion. I handed him the fax from the Prez. He read it, and I saw the lines on either side of his mouth deepen. I pointed to the script and shook my fist like it was the ultimate accolade. Sounding out the last of the news, I scribbled him a note. “Great stuff! 9:50 sharp!”

  He nodded, gaining confidence.

  I did a rat-a-tat-rolling segue into community announcements, rolled my eyes at him, grinned, and started hyping local events. He left with enough courage to give me thumbs up.

  The bait was swallowed whole.

  Long John actually put on his suit coat and snugged up his tie to look good on the radio.

  I stood and shook his hand. “Congratulations,” I said, with just the right air, trying to imply that an honor from OLC—well, to me, Joseph Blue Crow, that was something really special. I motioned to the chair on the far side of the counter from me and moved a mike into position for him. “You may want to say a few words when I’ve read the president’s script.”

  I sat back in my chair with my jock, in-charge, up-energy attitude on. I cocked my head like I was listening to the music, and pretended to hit buttons on the CD player to fade the tune. Actually, I was doing absolutely nothing, since I’d set three cuts to play back to back. Having no headset, though, Long John had no idea what was or wasn’t going out over the air. I set my coffee cup in front of the on-air switch, so he wouldn’t be able to see whether it was on or off, not that Long John had ever learned how a studio works. He was gonna think we were on.

  I took one very deep breath, gave myself a big inward grin, and launched into …

  That was the question, wasn’t it? What was I launching myself into, really?

  “Dr. Frank Brown Bull,” I began, “President of Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, planned to be here today to recognize KKAT and its president, John Karnopoulos, for their contributions. The recognition is a handsome plaque—can you see it on the radio? Anyone will be able to see it starting this afternoon because it will be displayed proudly in our reception area.”

  I held my hands out and pantomimed displaying the plaque to a crowd. Long John may have experienced his first doubts right about now, because instead of a plaque I was holding up a poof of empty air.

  I barged on.

  “However, Dr. Brown Bull had to go to Pierre today, legislative business. In his stead I will read the letter of commendation.”

  I set down the imaginary plaque and picked up the phony fax.

  “Know one, know all by these contents, it is proclaimed by the board of directors of Oglala Lakota College: We appreciate deeply the contributions of radio KKAT and especially of its president, John Karnopoulos, to the College and to the Lakota people. Among many deeds worthy of remembrance and gratitude, we cite the following:

  “One. John promised to be a media sponsor of our White Feather powwow, getting us to put the station logo on all our stationery, T-shirts, and other promotional materi
als, and then without telling us replaced the announcements of the powwow with paid commercials. No station could have snookered us slicker, and attendance at the powwow went D-O-w-w-w-n.”

  The look on John’s face was simply blank. I’ve never seen a rock that blank.

  “Two. He seduced a veritable treasure trove of KKAT female employees over the years, using promises or implications of promotions or raises as a lure. This was a deed worthy of the tradition of American small business owners. He has enough women’s underwear in his office closet to start catalog sales!”

  John’s face was beginning to mobilize, and his mouth. “Liar! Fake! This is bullshit!”

  He’d forgotten to speak to the mike, not that it mattered.

  “We want also to tell some special people secrets about John’s exemplary deeds they may not know: Patty, Mrs. Karnopoulos, the employee your husband John is screwing now is Amy the receptionist. They party at the Alex Johnson Hotel every Thursday evening, when he’s supposed to be at his AA meeting. Amy’s predecessor, Sybil, was dropped when she committed the indiscretion of getting pregnant.”

  John picked up the mike and started shouting into it. May God forgive what he would have done to our listeners’ eardrums if we’d been live.

  “You bastard, you Injun, you red nigger, you’re fired!” And more on that order, spewed out loud but not creative.

  “Amy likes John because he’s a bottomless well of the lady cocaine. For anyone who might be interested, he keeps his stash in a ZipLock bag taped to the back of the mini refrigerator in the wet bar. In fact, I now have it right here!”

  I held up the ZipLock bag I had snitched. John ought to have known that if every woman in the office knows where your stash is, it won’t stay a secret.

  Long John abandoned rhetoric for violence. He swung at me, but the counter was wide, I dodged backward, and he missed.

  He crawled onto the counter. Then THE look came over him. It meant he had just remembered that he is a skinny fellow, along in years, and I am one very big Indian.

  I rose into his face.

  He launched himself at me.

  I grabbed his forearms, both of them, forced him to his knees on the counter, and held him fast.

  “John,” I said to him levelly, “we’re not live!”

  He head-butted me.

  I hurled him backward. He went ker-splat on the floor.

  I rubbed my forehead. “John, we’re not live! We’re not on the air! We’re not broadcasting.”

  He flew around the counter and threw himself at me again. I grabbed his shoulders, lifted him off the ground, and shoved him toward the wall. He collapsed in a heap.

  “John, we’re not live! None of this has gone out over the air!”

  A light came dimly into his face. He stood up. Rage made him move jerkily, like a puppet. He staggered sideways. “Not live?”

  “Look at the on-air switch!” I moved the coffee cup so he could see it. “None of that was broadcast!”

  His eyes focused weirdly on me, and his mouth took a cunning shape. “You bastard! You did this on purpose. You set me up. You’re fired!”

  He opened the studio door and called down the hall. “Amy!”

  Just as I heard Miss Turret Gun’s metal track click-clacking on the linoleum floor, the third cut ended and we were back to me, live.

  Live! I gotta do something.

  “That was the Righteous Brothers, and my personal favorite recording of one of a great songs of all time, ‘Unchained Melody.’”

  Amy rumbled into the doorway. Pointing at me, John bellowed, “This red nigger is fired!”

  Christ, this WAS going out over the air.

  My training took over, and I tried to keep it smooth. “We seem to be having some technical difficulties here folks, we’ll get them fixed as soon as—”

  “You bastard! You bastard! You dirty Injun! I’ll have your red ass …”

  Amy took position in the middle of the room and rotated her turret guns in my direction.

  I continued smoothly, “The ten o’clock national news is up next, followed by local news, and be sure to stay tuned ten to two for the latest, gr-r-reatest hits brought to you by …”—I couldn’t even remember the name!—“whoever the next disc jockey is!”

  On that high note I punched the button, the cart took over with a commercial, and I had closed out my time at KKAT. Rapid City would not hear the likes of my final minute again for a long, long time.

  Long John shifted to controlled hostility now. “Amy, Joseph Blue Crow is fired, effective immediately. Escort him out of the building. Get his keys. Clean out his desk and send him whatever’s in it. Tell him to forget his severance pay.”

  Did he think I would surrender to her guns? I held his eye. I walked over to the cassette player, popped out a cassette, put it in my pocket. Then I walked straight at Long John, staring at him like a worm. I reached out and grabbed his shirt front. I shook him. Fabric tore.

  Amy tracked to my direction and started to move. I turned and shoved Long John into her. They dominoed onto the floor, John between her legs but facing me.

  “Now hear the rest. I have a list of all the double selling you did on my show the last two and half years. That’s fraud. I know who all your sweeties have been. Patty will see that as cause for divorce. And every employee you got knows where you stash your coke in that ZipLock bag—the sheriff will love that.”

  He got up, but I pushed him back into the wall. “The best of all is what you just gave me. You called me racial epithets on the air. Live. I’ve got a tape. The station has tapes. If need be, the FCC and the Civil Rights Commission will have tapes.” I thumped him against the plasterboard. “They can take your license away! They will take you license away!” I was bellowing so loud it hurt my throat.

  “So here’s a tip. If my severance pay comes through real smooth, and there’s no trouble about my unemployment, I’ll keep my mouth shut. If not, I’ll scalp your scrotum! I’m on the goddamn warpath!”

  I slammed him against the wall and dropped him. I reached to the counter, seized the ZipLock bag of coke, unZipped the Lock, and dumped a thousand bucks worth of the white lady right on Long John, from the part in his hair to his eyebrows and nose to his necktie to his lap.

  He sputtered, mewled, and howled all at once.

  I strode down the hall and straight out of the building.

  It scared me, how violent I felt, how angry I was. I was shaking.

  I sat in the Lincoln for a few minutes to calm down. I breathed deep in, deep out, deep in, deep out.

  The sun was glaring off the hood of the Lincoln, and it shone in my eyes. I felt something odd, like I was sleepy, but I was too agitated to be sleepy. The sun slashed at my eyes and made them want to close. It shone on the hood of the car until it became a mirage light, hallucinatory.

  And I saw … broken pictures. Magpies. Flowers. American flags upside down. Half-moons. Flowers. Pictures like that, all in fragments, and they were all moving, swaying, swooping up and down, like flotsam swelling upward and dropping downward on pitching seas. They were all in a swirl that made no sense….

  Behind the pictures quavered a song in the old style and in the Lakota language. It was different from the songs I heard as a youngster, not a single male voice, nor a group of men around a drum, but the voices of hundreds of people, men, women, and children together. No drum. Or if there was a drum, it was the sound of moccasined feet on the Earth. The people sang. From the style, I half recognized one phrase, a kind of chorus, but I could not catch the words.

  There in the car, but not in the car, I strained my ears to hear the words of the song that came from …

  A-a-w-wk! A-a-w-wk!

  This was Raven, perched on the hood ornament, black and menacing, huge and apocalyptic in the blinding glare.

  A-a-w-wk! A-a-w-wk!

  I jerked with fear, and moved somehow toward ordinary consciousness. Raven still perched on the hood.

  Some people know
the sound of their own death. Mine is, A-a-w-wk! A-a-w-wk!

  Raven always comes to me, or at me, black, shiny, and mocking. If he was a character in a carnival, maybe a fortune-teller, he would laugh at you and put his hand on your shoulder and lick your inmost ear with his tongue and whisper, “Death, death, death.” His tongue would be the coldest thing that ever touched you. Not being human, though, he gleams the message at you with the shininess of his feathers and the cold brightness of his eyes. When he flaps his wings and the black feathers catch the sun, somehow they are wild, mocking laughter. It speaks poetic of the body dead and moldering. I am a-wing, and you are arotting.

  Raven makes me shudder.

  This time Raven gave a great flurry of wings on the hood and opened and closed his big beak without a sound. He cocked his head sideways, peered at me through the windshield. He flapped his wings but didn’t lift off. He was so big and ominous that for a moment I thought he was an ordinary raven, instead of Raven.

  Then suddenly he was sitting on the steering wheel, beak in my face.

  I flung an arm at him, and he backed off. Morphed backward through the windshield and sat on the hood.

  Raven was a comfort in a way. Instead of pretending to be afraid of unemployment, poverty, and degradation, I could just go for the big one and be afraid of death.

  And How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy Now, Mr. Death?

  That afternoon I drank. If you’re gonna see things, you might as well be drunk. And I played a game. How do you drink just enough to keep you going? Going from bar to bar, as you drive south through the Black Hills from Rapid to Hot Springs? Going from drink to drink instead of drink to jail? How do you stay sober enough to drive but drunk enough to forget Raven?

  This is a white-man game, this management of inebriation. White folks are good at it—teeter but don’t dodder.

  I’m not that kind of drinker, and not many Indians are. We don’t want to play around the edges. Maybe this is because of our traditions—we make a place for altered states of mind, whether reached by trance, Father Peyote, firewater, or even seizure. Anyhow, we are binge drinkers. I am a binge drinker. When I tipple, I don’t want to get a pleasant little buzz. I want to get barbarically drunk.