RavenShadow Read online

  It got to be a good game. Every day I would slip away, and every day they would let the truant officer know. Sometimes he would come after me, sometimes not—he didn’t like me getting the best of him. Folks in town would give him leads about where I went (or sometimes misdirect him). He knew pretty well that I liked to hang out at the pond north of town, which they called a lake, or a couple of places down Medicine Root Creek. I developed skills to hide from him. Learned to build a brush shelter that looked natural, like part of the landscape, and sit inside while he went by. Learned to sit so still among the rocks he wouldn’t see me. Once in November I built a snow cave and slipped inside. It was a good game.

  I hardly ever played with the other boys. Sometimes I did stand by the schoolyard and watch them play basketball. But they thought I was strange—a bush boy—and I thought they were snobs.

  One place I never ran off to was home to Grandpa and Unchee. Every half-moon Grandpa came to me.

  The half-moon around the white-people holiday Thanksgiving he came, and like always he took me down to the store for a dreamsicle—I loved those babies. He got a pop. When we sat down outside, he looked at me and said, “I hear you been running away.”

  I nodded yes.

  “You haven’t been in class learning.”

  “I have learned some,” I said. I started to follow with the English words I’d gotten good at, Goddamn, holy shit, and such, but thought better of it. I hadn’t turned white enough to act disrespectful to Grandpa. “I haven’t been in their classes much,” I admitted.

  He looked at me for a long time. Finally he said in a certain way, not harsh, but unmistakable, “You won’t run away any more.”

  I didn’t. I wasn’t worried about Mr. Banks, or Mr. King, or the truant officer. I was worried about Grandpa.

  Jumping Ju

  I went through one month of hell, from Thanksgiving to Christmas vacation. I didn’t run away even once, and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I sat and listened to Mr. Banks and pretended to memorize his English words. I tried to memorize his numbers, and get the idea of how to figure with them, addition and subtraction. I learned to repeat back whatever he said to me, like a dummy. Every sentence I learned was like swallowing a thistle. I hated it. I wanted to puke it back up. But I had made up my mind to do what Grandpa said, and I was going to do it or die.

  The day before Christmas break, Gordon True Bull came and found me in my room. His three sons, who all went to Kyle School, stood behind him in the hall, looking embarrassed. This family lived down the Medicine Root Creek road, less than halfway to Grandpa and Unchee’s place. We’d never had much to do with them, because they were the sort of Indians I was supposed to steer clear of. They lived a lot further into the twentieth century than we did. Had a truck. Used propane instead of a wood stove. Even had a TV on an antenna. Gordon drove that truck to Kyle every day and worked on people’s cars. He had magic hands, they said, could fix any kind of car or truck or any machinery at all and make it run. His sons rode in and out with him, every day.

  Gordon says to me in Lakota, “Your grandpa asked us to give you a ride home tomorrow afternoon. You come over to the station right after school, bring your stuff.”

  I looked at the True Bulls and my heart sank. Gordon was a big man with a big belly, and his older two sons were taller than he was. They looked intimidating, standing there. Besides, though the sons were schoolmates, they were just the sort I didn’t hang out with. They didn’t board at the school. They did real good in class, spoke good English, and were proud of it. And the older two were on the basketball team. In another year there would be three True Bulls on the team. Over all, I plain felt stupid around them. I was the tallest—I’d grown that autumn, and the school nurse measured me at six foot two. But they were in the junior high and high school grades, and I was in first grade.

  Keeping my eyes down respectfully, I nodded and murmured “Washtay” to Gordon True Bull.

  I walked away with my heart down. Grandpa and Unchee weren’t gonna come and take me home. I understood it—the trip took all day in the wagon, and more if the weather turned. But I wanted them to come. Emile’s parents were driving over from Porcupine, he didn’t have to ride with strangers. I wanted to be with him, my only friend in the world. I felt abandoned.

  I sat on my bed and futzed. I didn’t think things over, ’cause there was nothing left to think over. I didn’t want to come back to school, but Grandpa would have no truck with that. There wasn’t any rodeo circuit or powwow circuit or farm or ranch work in the winter, so I couldn’t run off and make a living. Senior was with my mother and sisters up at Wambli, no job but plenty of booze—I’d be damned if I’d go there. I was at the end of my rope.

  Mr. Banks had read us a story with the English phrase “end of my rope” in it. I asked what it meant. I was speaking enough English now to understand stories, and they were the only part of school I liked. Mr. Banks said it meant, like, when he was looking for fossils in the Badlands and saw a spot maybe fifty feet down that looked likely, a place he couldn’t get his Jeep to. So he tied a rope to the bumper and lowered himself hand over hand. Turned out, though, the spot was more than fifty feet down, and the rope didn’t reach. Mr. Banks was fifty feet down and twenty feet of nothing below. That was being at the end of your rope. If you weren’t strong enough to climb up, you’d be shit out of luck, another phrase I liked.

  I didn’t feel strong enough to climb out of the hole I was in, and didn’t have the desire.

  I got my coat on and went out into the road. I wanted to go to the store and get a pop or a fudgesicle, but I didn’t have any money. So I walked the east-west road a ways out and back, then walked the Allen highway out and back, and the Medicine Root Creek road. I stood around and shivered. Mr. Banks had told us tomorrow was the shortest day of the year. Clouds covered the southwestern horizon like dirty gray blankets, though, and I couldn’t even tell if the sun was all the way down.

  I stomped my feet to warm them up. I rubbed my ears. At the end of my rope. Slowly, I walked each way again, east, south, west, north, automatically taking the directions sunwise.

  At the furthest northern point, where I was turning back, I noticed some dark shapes moving out in the field. They were hopping around, and sometimes lifting off the ground head-high, and going back to the same spot.

  Ravens. Something’s dead.

  I walked over there. The snow was blown off, except a ring left around the bottom of each sagebrush root. I wondered what the carcass was. Road kill, maybe, something that had got hit and run off to die.

  The ravens squawked at me as I got close. Most days I would have been scared, but today I didn’t give a damn about anything. The birds skittered away, then jumped and flapped around and awked. After a minute they got quiet, but they stayed close, mostly on the ground within a few steps. They didn’t mean to give me long.

  It was a deer, a doe. She hadn’t been dead long, just today or last night, probably hit by a car. Probably a drunk.

  I looked at her close as I could but didn’t touch. She had no eyes anymore. Big rips opened her skin, and great chunks of flesh were missing. Maybe some dogs or coyotes had been at her first, and got their fill. Now the ravens were getting theirs. Bugs would finish the job.

  Suddenly a raven flapped into the air and flew straight toward me. It hovered over the deer, and I felt like it was looking me in the eye, and its eye was …

  Raven’s eyes bugged out. They stood in air at the sides of his head, impossibly, turned straight toward me. They gleamed at me. Then they turned red hot and glowed, and I fell topsy-turvy into them.

  Hitting the hard, cold ground snapped me out of it. Panicky, I scrambled to my knees, then to my feet. Will the ravens eat me?

  Then I saw. Six or eight birds, perhaps following the boldest, pecked at the carcass. I wondered which one was Raven, who had entered my mind. None of the birds paid me any heed.

  I ran back to the road, and to the school.
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  Raven stayed with me through supper, at the edges of my consciousness.

  I was last. Emile was already gone. I ate alone, in a corner. I still had the shakes from Raven jumping at my mind. Somehow it kept striking me that everything I was eating had been alive and was dead. Green beans. Potatoes. Spam. Alive once, now dead, about to cycle dead through me. Earth was a place of death. Things got born, and I’d seen that sometimes, but I saw death every day. Death was big, death just kept eating, and eating, and eating.

  After supper I made a quick trip to my room, looked under the socks in my one drawer, got my turtle pouch, and hung it around my neck. Then I walked down the road to the west, pretending to myself. Didn’t want to admit what I was thinking. As I walked, I stuck my hand between my coat buttons and fingered the pouch beneath my shirt.

  You must understand, this was the first time Raven came to me, my first knowledge of him.

  Less than a mile out and off the road was the shack of a man I knew a little bit, Plebus, had seen him on the roads and nodded. Plebus was the local shine man, had a still somewhere, made his living on shine. Though it was illegal to sell booze on the rez, it probably was the best living. At maybe fifty Plebus drove a decent truck and was a big-belly.

  I knocked softly on his door and stood well back till he came.

  “Come in, come in, siddown, siddown. You want some coffee?”

  We both knew what I really wanted, but he made the offer and I accepted. Politeness.

  “Some weather,” says he, “freezing one day, damn near hot the next. Hnnn. Damn!”

  A little profanity, show that we are men talking together, old enough to drink like men.

  The coffee had lots of sugar in, the way his mother or grandmother probably served it. I wondered if he spoke Lakota.

  “You gettin’ an education. I see you, up at that school. Gettin’ an education, you real lucky. Wished I had one, wished I did.”

  He went on considerably about the weather, the benefits of an education, and how lucky I was. The message was, You are now a man, cause a big-belly is treating you like a man, talking to you like a grown-up and not a kid. It was the forthcoming whiskey that made me a man. Plebus was not only a shine man but a salesman.

  I knew what he was doing but felt neither angry or embarrassed. I just sipped my coffee, said nothing, and stared at his nose. It was big, bulbous, and pocked deep with holes. I didn’t see thousands of bottles of shine putting those pockmarks there, though that’s what did it. Instead I got pictures of Raven pecking holes in his nose.

  Raven pecks all the holes of death in this world.

  At last he fell silent, worn out by keeping his end up. I said softly, “Whiskey,” and my voice sounded to me like a croak.

  He disappeared behind the kitchen and came forth with a bottle, a fifth. The label was Jim Beam, but that wasn’t the product. I wondered where he’d found the bottle, whether he haunted the trash barrels behind the taverns in the white-man towns or maybe paid kids like me to bring ’em.

  “Ten dollars,” he said with a smile, like we were old comrades.

  “I don’t have any money,” I said, bare, naked truth.

  His smile got bigger, and he winked, but I could see a red flash of irritation in his eyes.

  I reached into my shirt, got out the turtle, and put it on the table. “I wanna trade,” says I.

  His eyes shifted from red to the green of greed. Frogskins, I could hear him thinking.

  The turtle was worth something. It was the fully beaded pouch Unchee made for me when I was born. In the old days every Lakota kid had one, and wore it to the age of five or six. Inside was my umbilical cord. Though I’d never worn my pouch, it was real traditional stuff, our way of recognizing our connection to our mothers. The custom was mostly gone by the 1960s.

  This wasn’t a pouch made up for tourists, this was the real thing. “Lemme see,” says he. I handed it to him, and he felt through the skin for the cord inside.

  He glanced up at me, not letting himself smirk. For a moment I didn’t get what was going on with him. I thought it would just be the lust for frogskins. He could sell this piece to a serious trader for good money, twenty-five dollars at least. But that wasn’t all of it, I could see; not even most of it. He held the pouch in both hands, kind of bent over it. Suddenly he looked at me, full in the eyes. Before I could cast my eyes down, I saw it. He was corrupting me, and he liked that. He was the one delivering the inevitable blow. I was giving up my old world for a new world that was seductive. The bottle. The modern world. Living the white way.

  He jumped down behind the kitchen again, taking the bottle with him. In a snap he came back with another bottle, no label this time, a pint. He extended it to me with one hand, and put the turtle in his pocket with the other hand.

  I took the bottle and left without a word.

  I hardly even felt bad, hardly felt I’d surrendered or betrayed anything. Because I wasn’t, as Plebus thought, giving up my heritage for a drink. I didn’t need my people’s past any more. I wasn’t going to drink this bottle tonight, or become an alcoholic and waste my life. I was going to wait until I said goodbye to Grandpa and Unchee, without them knowing. Then I was going to walk into the Badlands late one afternoon, to the river and then deeper into the Badlands, until I was too exhausted to take another step. Then I was going to find a comfortable place to lay down, contemplate the Star People, leisurely drink the entire bottle, and pass out. The cold would get me. I’d heard it was a good way to go, an easy way.

  After the cold got me, it would be the ravens’ turn.

  Remember, this was my first time under the sway of Raven. I didn’t know his ways, or know how to keep his awk from becoming my song—not yet, not yet.

  It was the True Bulls that saved me. Seems funny, but it’s true.

  That first evening home I just moped around the house, wondering if I should go soon or wait until after Christmas before doing my bottle trick. I was feeling contrary. Grandpa asked me after supper how my spirits were. I answered in English, “My spirit feels white.” He didn’t understand, of course, and looked miffed. When Unchee translated, softly, he looked more miffed. After that the two of them didn’t have much to say to me, and I had nothing to say to them.

  Bed time, as I was on the way to lay down, Grandpa said, “I been helping Gordon True Bull on the weekends. Why don’t you come?”

  I felt my back stiffen, and I wanted to give him a look, or say I was done taking orders from him, but I wasn’t white enough to be rude to my grandfather, not yet. I nodded.

  In bed I thought, well, what the hell, it would give me a last horseback ride, and that would feel good. I wondered if Grandpa would let me take the zebra dun, my favorite. An hour’s ride up to the True Bulls, an hour back … That horse had a beautiful lope.

  Didn’t matter what we did in between.

  You will guess that I was in the shadow of Raven’s wing sometimes, and sometimes not. As are we all, all our lives. But mostly I was living under it, and that is a choice.

  The next morning it was fine. December is a variable month in the Badlands. In fact, at school Mr. Banks told us the story of Wounded Knee, how Big Foot’s people came from Cheyenne River and down the wall of the Badlands and all the way to Porcupine Butte, trying to get to Pine Ridge, and had a whole year’s weather on the way. Some days were warm and balmy. Some days it blew so hard Waziya must be angry with us, and worse than angry. Then balmy again. Then, right after all the killing, it snowed. That’s what he said.

  Made me think I ought to ask Unchee about that story. She was Mniconjou, from Big Foot’s band. I wondered if any of her ancestors were in that fight. Unchee was born right around that time. But Unchee was forbidding, and if she didn’t bring it up, a kid didn’t dare ask.

  After breakfast I grinned at Grandpa and set the dun to the lope that suited her and eased along. We didn’t need any saddles, and sure didn’t have any.

  At True Bulls’ it turned out we had a ha
rd job, but a perfect day for it. They were making a paved driveway and parking area. I had to bite my tongue, ’cause nothing is rarer on the rez. Today we had to finish getting the forms ready and pour the parking area. As I drove stakes and held plywood and leveled it, I kept wondering why in hell the True Bulls would waste money on such a thing, considering Gordon’s tires had long since made a lane and a bare spot to park. I also kept giving myself the only answer that came to me. Pretension, pretension, pretension. The three boys seemed awful excited, and I thought less of them for it.

  The work was a little tricky. Jamie, Evin, and Lee, the three brothers eldest to youngest, spoke little Lakota beyond the words you use at ceremonies and in prayers. Grandpa spoke no English, and I only half spoke it. So Gordon had to pass messages back and forth. “Hand me that hammer.” “You bet!” But we made good progress, and I learned to use “You bet!”

  We ate a big dinner in the house, lots of fried Spam sandwiches, and then did the actual pour, which was time-consuming and back-breaking work. Then, before the screeding was done, Jamie, the oldest boy, eighteen, he does a little jig and says, “Hot diggety damn.”

  Well, I was disgusted. If that wasn’t the whitest way to act on a day of white foolishness….

  “It’s time!” he went on, and his happiness included even me. “Come on, you ball players. You too, Joseph.” I walked along behind the brothers, my limbs feeling stiff and foolish.

  Behind the house stood a pair of tall, black-painted basketball standards. Plus a backboard, plus a hoop, and even a net, all of it brand new. “Let’s do it, kolas.” I flinched a little at the way he put an s on kola to make it mean more than one. When does ignorance become disrespect?

  Quickly Evin and Lee began to pour into a small hole I hadn’t seen at the edge of the big pour, and I pitched in.

  Now I got it. Gordon True Bull wasn’t building just a parking area—he was making a basketball court for his boys. That made a little more sense. They were big players at school, and now they could practice at home. Washtay! I felt kind of excited.