Quiet Until the Thaw Read online

  You Choose Watson and the Sugar Debacle of 1962

  It’s never been so easy for a Lakota boy to worm his way out of his military responsibilities. For a start, most Indians are in boarding school, already roped, as it were, when their enlistment papers come. And for another thing, it’s not as if an Indian boy has a hope of getting a legal deferment to complete his education at Yale or a family-friend doctor who can declare the boy flat-footed or cross-eyed or afflicted with bone spurs and therefore unfit for military service. In fact, you might say the United States Army has its fingers on an Indian boy’s shoulders before the ink on his U.S. government-issued Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood is even dry.

  But when his notice came to report for a physical as a preliminary to being drafted into the U.S. armed forces, You Choose consumed so much sugar—three stolen one-pound bags—that he felt drunk for two days and light-headed for a week. It was sheer genius, honestly.

  “You Choose Watson,” the recruitment officer said. “Is that a real name?”

  You Choose was having a hard time with his vision. He put a hand over one eye, and that seemed to help narrow the recruitment officer down to a single figure.

  “Is that a real name?” the recruitment officer asked again.

  “Yeah,” You Choose Watson said, swallowing. Nausea and mild sweats were also part of his current infliction.

  The recruitment officer said, “Stand up straight, boy.”

  You Choose Watson hiccupped, and then burped.

  But he didn’t get shipped out to Southeast Asia.

  Mina Overlooking Horse stared at the piece of paper from the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, Rapid City, South Dakota. She could not read well, but she could read well enough to see that it declared You Choose Watson unfit for military service on account of his diabetes.

  “Your what?” she said.

  Then she looked at the birch bark wall in which she had made her Winter Count every year for eighteen years until, this year, she had been finally able to write the number 0 and she said, “I didn’t know him well, but I believe your father would have been real proud of you.”

  The Etymology of the Name “You Choose Watson”

  Back then, winters were something to endure. A person had to be deliberate, watch her step, remember that a view can shrink into the white tunnel in front of your nose. Life-snatching winds, entombing ice, snow amassing like a sudden land feature, hands made raw with cold.

  But when spring arrived, the memory of winter faded like a woman’s memory of childbirth. Whatever had just happened, life was in front of her now, bursting and fresh and relentless and hungry, and she couldn’t stay holed up remembering that only a month earlier, the weather had seemed intent on murder.

  Even so, no one who lived through it would ever forget the winter of 1944.

  All anyone could think about was the cold, and how to get out of it. The wind drove snow into the roads and sheared everything to ice. For months there appeared to be no difference between earth and sky, everything looked the same silver-grey. Inside the lean-tos and teepees across the Rez, Indians bent over fires, inhaling so much smoke their lungs filled with fluid and their feet and hands swelled from lack of motion. Dogs froze solid to the edges of the road, becoming more white mounds in a landscape of other white mounds.

  Among the Indians sheltering on the Rez from the hungry wind that winter was a Cowboy who went under the name of Elijah Watson. Well, I say Cowboy, but he wasn’t much of that. All hat and no cattle, as they say. Not afraid to stand at stud though, if you know what I mean. In fact, he’d run himself out of six states already on that account. Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, and North Dakota. Now he was just waiting for the weather to lighten up, and he’d be adding South Dakota to the list.

  In this way, You Choose Watson was born half Cowboy, half Indian, and—as Mina liked to say afterward—the missing half of each. Which is to say the boy was born with an itinerant Cowboy as a father and a sore-hearted Indian girl as a mother.

  The sore-hearted Indian girl stared down at the baby offered up for her inspection by Mina Overlooking Horse, who was for much of her life the unofficial, not to say unwilling, midwife of the Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation.

  Mina said, “Well?”

  The Indian looked at Mina, generations of defeat in her eyes.

  “Well?” Mina said again.

  The Indian looked at the Cowboy. “What should we call him?” she asked.

  Elijah Watson had been trying, with mixed results, to absent himself mentally from the scene for some time and, having finally succeeded to some degree, he was not about to get pulled back into the room by the presence of a squalling kid. He shrugged. “I don’t know. You choose,” he said.

  “You Choose,” the sore-hearted Indian whispered, and sank against the greasy towel beneath her head. She gave a filleted smile and nodded. “You Choose,” she said again. “Yeah, that’s a good name for this child.”

  A Month After You Choose Watson Was Born

  They say trouble gets lonely pretty easily, and that is why it always comes in threes, or pairs at least. So it was no surprise when a month after finding herself the unwilling recipient of the infant You Choose Watson—“Such a rotten baby,” she used to say—Mina’s own recently widowed daughter-in-law gave birth to a son.

  February 4, 1944. You can’t say the winter had let up any. Still, birth doesn’t wait for the conditions to improve, so here was Rick Overlooking Horse quietly slipping into the world, as if hoping the world wouldn’t notice, which it didn’t, incidentally. Even his own mother turned her face to the wall when Mina presented the baby to her. “He looks quiet, at least,” Mina said, in what she hoped were encouraging tones.

  The mother wept silently.

  Mina Overlooking Horse sighed and sat down on the backseat of the 1935 Ford coupe and thought about how much she would like someone to bring her a cigarette or a cup of coffee, or both. She stared at the freshly delivered infant in the basket at her feet. In another basket by the fire, You Choose Watson was beginning to whimper. In a few minutes, he’d have wound himself up into a state and he’d be hollering.

  She said, “Well, I guess someone’s got to do it.”

  She sighed again, heaved herself to her feet, hands on knees, and fetched up You Choose Watson. She put him to her withered breast.

  “This one sucks like a bicycle pump,” she complained. “The White ones always do.” She closed her eyes and sank back against the wall. Then she said, “For the love of mercy, I’ll take a cigarette now. Does anyone have a cigarette?”

  She was forty years old and she had given suck to at least one child—only three of them her own—every year for the last twenty-four years.

  All Are Related, Related to All

  Mitakuye Oyasin. Meaning, All My Relations.

  Or, Everything is related to the existence of all my Lakota relatives.

  Meaning, this counts out the White Man; or, to be more precise, White Man thinking.

  Meaning, everything is connected in a web so complicated and invisible, it takes being born Indian to understand the intricacies of kinship.

  Skinship, the youth say.

  Every Immediate and Distant Relation freaked out about the possibility of incest, especially since everyone has been rounded up like cattle, corralled on reservations, and given Certificates of Degree of Indian Blood.

  Under the laws and bylaws of the U. S Department of the Interior, there is no choice for Indians: They must either watch themselves disappear drop of blood by drop of blood, or they must marry their cousins, which is the same as driving a stake through the heart of a Lakota.

  The English and White Settler Americans, on the other hand, appear to have no taboo against incest. Even among the so-called leaders of the White Man, cousins regularly marry one another, generation after generation, more or less ope
nly fucking their daughters, nieces, and granddaughters, eventually creating a class of chinless, insecure, wig-wearing golfers.

  It takes an Indian amount of knowing to understand that rocks are grandfathers, plants are nations.

  It takes an Indian amount of holiness to understand that thunderclouds are not only beings, but Higher Beings.

  You’ve got to lose all fear of loss to know the world like an Indian, All My Relations.

  You’ve got to be tuned in like a bat to know what messages the Great Spirit brings, and to trust your knowing enough to act on that knowledge.

  The (Other) Red Scare(s)

  Rick Overlooking Horse was born under a waxing gibbous moon.

  He was born during the Month of Wolves.

  He was born in the Season of Hunger.

  He was born when Trees Crack from the Cold.

  He was born under the sign of Aquarius.

  He was born during the Second Red Scare, and on the same day as the formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in Los Angeles, California, of which Walt Disney was a founding member.

  Is it the stars under which we are born that will affect the course of our lives? Or is it everything else that was in the process of being born on the day of our births that will affect the course of our lives?

  If we believe it to be the former, we risk sounding untethered.

  If we believe it to be the latter, we risk sounding unhinged.

  If we understand it at all, we are struck speechless with terror, and wonder.

  But a lot of people are likely to believe nothing, and understand little.

  For example, all people with their minds set on power must forget how everything repeats and repeats and repeats itself. They must forget how empires rise and fall; civilizations flourish and collapse.

  It has always been this way, and yet people with their minds set on power act as if they are not part of an undeniable, inevitable, inescapable cycle. They deny the infinite ways in which they are connected to everything else.

  People with their minds set on power act as if it can’t happen again, whatever it was.

  The Lakota act in the knowledge that certainly it will happen again, whatever it is.

  Meantime, Names for a Red Man, and Why He Doesn’t Care

  Diesel,” the other soldiers in Rick Overlooking Horse’s unit called him, short for “Diesel Engine,” long for Injun. Or “Hatch,” short for Hatchet Packer. Or “Feather Nigger,” “Red Nigger,” “Hey, Wagon Burner,” they said. “All good-natured josh,” they swore. “No offence,” they insisted. Although the Red Man’s silence was a bit disturbing, like maybe he knew something they didn’t.

  Which it turned out, of course, he did.

  Because before Indian boarding school swallowed them up, Mina Overlooking Horse taught the boys this way: Some nights, when she’d smoked Wahupta, and was feeling tender with them as they lay on blankets at the foot of her bed in the tar-paper lean-to, she told them the story of the Battle of the Greasy Grass, speaking softly into the wind-blown dark. Usually, there would be a candle casting jumping, spooky shadows against the yellow wall and the world seemed very small then, and mysterious.

  “The morning of the battle was cool, because it was June and summer was still warming itself up,” she would always start this way. “The warriors awoke early and rode far from the village, away from the women and children. They took only the bravest horses into battle.” And so Mina Overlooking Horse talked on and on into the night, pausing only to smoke more Wahupta. “And they brought with them only what they would be prepared to lose. In other words, prairie chickens, they brought their lives. Because they knew they were fighting for everything that they were, everything that they had been, and for everything that you are.”

  In this way, the story of the Battle of the Greasy Grass, commonly known as Custer’s Last Stand, also known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn, became the tapestry of Rick Overlooking Horse’s young imagination. He hugged himself under his blanket and made pictures out of Mina Overlooking Horse’s words. He knew exactly how dew would be bowing the heads of the grass, he knew the way the horses would smell salty and warm, he thought of how everything must have been sharp and clear in the minds of the warriors. “The first day, the battle continued until dark,” Mina Overlooking Horse would say, “and it began again at first light.”

  And although Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson knew word for word how the story would end, they always made sure that they stayed awake to hear it because the end was their favorite part. “During his Sundance, Sitting Bull had had a vision of soldiers falling into his camp like grasshoppers from the sky, and so it came to be. And they say one day it will be again. They say one day the lights will go out, and the White Man will succumb to the dark, but that we will remain since we are not afraid when the sun sets. Like fox, raven, wolf, and vulture, we are masters of the night. That is what they say.”

  A Quick Note on the Word “Indian”

  In the English dictionary, the most oft-cited authority is the Holy Bible, and the most oft-cited author is Shakespeare. It’s a good start, but it’s a very narrow perspective, if you think about it, and it also explains some stuff. For example, some people say Christopher Columbus described the first Indians he encountered in the so-called New World as “una gente in Dios.”

  Meaning, a People in God.

  There’s no actual proof Christopher Columbus had God or God’s People in mind when he bumped into Haiti on December 4, 1492, and accidentally introduced what happened next to two continents.

  Maybe, like some people say, he thought he’d blundered into India instead of Hispaniola. And it is possible that as far as he was concerned, brown people = Indian. Although it’s nicer to imagine he meant the other thing.

  In Dios.

  Except doesn’t it then make what happens next worse? A people in God, gone.

  Because whatever else you can say about the man, Christopher Columbus’s visit did not leave the Antilles better than when he found it, the most beautiful land he’d ever seen, he wrote in his diary, of present day Haiti.

  Crumpled mountains in the clouds, dense with towering hardwood forests and cut through with tumbling, crystal-clear rivers. Fertile plains surrounded by water on all sides, the sea blue and green as jewels in a perpetual spring, replete with fish, guarded by coral reefs. And all the creatures of the fertile valleys—the solendons and shrews and hutias—dappled and blending among the grasses, sheltering beneath the buttressed roots of the great Ceiba tree, feasting off the flesh of one another so that nothing lived too long, but most things didn’t live too short either.

  All that, plundered and lost.

  Although time being what it is, the playground of monsters and madmen is also the residence of lovers and poets.

  The light is always equal to the dark.

  Time being what it is, it always was.

  Victor Charlie and the Indian

  There had been signs, warnings, and portents, and eventually Rick Overlooking Horse pointed them out: The smell of fresh human urine in the grass beside the path; the way birds half a mile ahead were clattering into the sky and circling above the jungle, visible through the occasional chink in the foliage; crimped branches and bruised leaves.

  To say nothing of the fact, there was no one around or at least no one anyone could see. This many days into the patrol they should have seen villagers, some kids, a couple of farmers, somebody, anybody, by now. But there wasn’t even fresh spoor to go with the smell of fresh urine.

  It is true that ghosts don’t leave footprints, but neither do they digest.

  And while it is easy enough to cover your tracks, it is nearly impossible to cover up the scent of urine, especially urine that is vinegary with stress and dehydration.

  A flexible, wild mind will register the misconnecti
ons.

  It was clear.

  Or at least it was clear to Rick Overlooking Horse. Victor Charlie was using an old Indian technique. Lure the enemy deep into unfamiliar territory, days away from backup, and then unleash the full force of your unconventional, unexpected fury on them. A disorientated, overladen, homesick nine-man rifle squad didn’t stand a chance against even one deft, well-adapted gook.

  Rick Overlooking Horse said, “It ain’t natural.”

  “It ain’t natural, sir,” Staff Sergeant Urbaniak said. Then he said, “What ain’t natural?”

  Rick Overlooking Horse said, “None of it.”

  “Shee-it,” Staff Sergeant Urbaniak said, employing the Redneck accent that in no way, could it be accused, came easily to him. “None of it, sir. What do you mean, ‘None of it’?”

  But Rick Overlooking Horse had never seen the point of saying most things once, let alone anything twice. Also he understood that Staff Sergeant Urbaniak wasn’t in a hearing kind of mood. He was a doughy Polack from the Bay Area with something to prove, even if it was just the fact that not every male in his graduating class was a draft-dodging, pot-smoking beatnik.

  Staff Sergeant Urbaniak said, “You know something, Diesel? You’re just jittery. You’ve got to stay calm and cool. I thought you people were supposed to be good at that.”

  The two men stood in a small, sunlit clearing, the exchange of their words hanging between them. Suddenly Rick Overlooking Horse made a grunt like a horse getting the wind kicked out of it. He hauled back and with all his strength he knocked Staff Sergeant Urbaniak as far as he could in the direction of the jungle. Then he threw his pack twelve feet into the jungle in the other direction and dove after it.