Quiet Until the Thaw Read online

  “What the hell!” Staff Sergeant Urbaniak stood up, wiped the mud off his face, and scrambled back into the clearing. “Oh, fuck, now you’ve got it comin’.” He turned to face the rest of his rifle squad, grinning. “Diesel’s gone dinky cow, boys.” Then he shook his finger into the thicket where Rick Overlooking Horse lay out of sight, curled up like a punctuation mark between what was happening now, and what would happen next. “Get your yeller-bellied, dumb, fucking, red-wop ass up and outta there, and explain your conduct, or you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of . . .”

  Dog Tags Are Forever

  But no one ever found out what Rick Overlooking Horse was about to be on the receiving end of.

  When they got to him, they found the Indian’s dog tags had seared into his chest, soldered there by the force of the fire that had hit his squad, exploding the trees around them and scattering their clothes and flesh and bones. But the words and number were still visible, barely. “Overlooking Horse. Rick. 720939846. Mina Overlooking Horse. Manderson Pine Ridge, South Dakota.”

  They say hearing is the last sense to go, that it’s important to keep speaking to the dying. But it is not possible to hear a human voice over a helicopter, or a cargo plane, or a W200 Dodge Power Wagon ambulance. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, it was clear the Indian was soon to be a corpse. It might be that the paramedics—if they were thinking at all—were of the opinion that if Rick Overlooking Horse could hear anything from this world, it wouldn’t be too long before he couldn’t.

  Unless There’s Extreme, Unforeseen Heat

  The last anyone saw of Staff Sergeant Lucas “Lucky Luke” Urbaniak, he was a pink mist drifting down from the sky. His dog tags were never recovered. They too were vaporized. No one saw that coming. Not Staff Sergeant Urbaniak, not the dog-whistling four-star generals in the U.S. Army, not even the Battle Creek Dog Tag Company out of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  But then, who could have predicted friendly fire in such an unfriendly space? Who could have anticipated the U.S. brown-water navy deploying an ignited napalm mixture from a riverboat-mounted flamethrower toward a confirmed target, without realizing, oh, dear God, surely without realizing exactly what they were doing? Who could come up with a dog tag that could withstand a temperature of 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit?

  They say when Country Joe and the Fish played the “Fixin’ to Die Rag” at Woodstock, Joe had his old schoolmate on his mind, but who knows for sure? “There’s about three hundred thousand of you fuckers out there,” Country Joe yelled at the soggy crowd. “I want you to start singin’. Come on!”

  Who knows for sure who was the more deluded? The hawkish, something-to-prove Polack Staff Sergeant Urbaniak who thought he’d be unscathed and home by Christmas, or the angry-as-hell peacenik leader of a psychedelic rock band who thought he could stop a war if enough people sang along with him.

  Thanatopsis

  You’ll hear people from the Bureau of Indian Affairs say Indians sleep all day. Show up any time, even during so-called working hours, they’ll tell you, and you’ll find all the kids running wild in the hills with a pack of Rez dogs, and all the adults passed out. It’s never occurred to anyone to suppose the kids and the dogs are running for their lives and the adults are not asleep so much as playing possum. Tonic immobility, the scientists would say. Thanatopsis.

  So when the White Men in U.S. Army uniforms arrived at the earthen-floored, tar-paper lean-to in Manderson village and knocked on the door and peered this way and that at the ancient-household-appliance-strewn yard for signs of human life, Mina Overlooking Horse stayed catatonic seeming beneath her quilts. She heard them head over to the neighbor’s place, but they were playing dead too. She waited until she heard the White Men leave and then she got up and lit a fire. She burned enough sage to choke a horse.

  Mina Overlooking Horse never did open the telegram the White Men had left on her door. She didn’t need to. Ill fate was a crafty hunter. You couldn’t outwit, outrun, or outdownwind it. “Ayeee,” Mina said. She lit a fire and burned the unopened envelope. Then she looked up and saw her old Winter Counts behind the woodstove, the little figures of the early years worn away to smudges. She took a piece of charcoal from the woodstove and scrubbed over the writing.

  Then she wiped her hands on her knees and put the kettle on to boil. There was a scald mark on the roof, oily grey smoke in the air, and a fist-sized hole in the kettle before Mina realized there had been no water in it to start with, and now her kettle was soldered to the stove.

  You Choose on Turtle Island

  Meantime, You Choose Watson headed north of the border, if you are the kind of person who believes in borders, which You Choose Watson claimed not to do. “There are no borders on Turtle Island,” he proclaimed. “That never was the way of our people.” Sometimes he told of being chased through the forests by dogs and men on horses, which was mostly a drama of his imagination. Make that, entirely a drama of his imagination, although it’s true that once he woke up in an alleyway in Vancouver with a hangover. And another time he had an accident while attempting to shower in the sink in a men’s washroom in a train station. So, it hadn’t all been smooth sailing.

  In a village in northern British Columbia, You Choose hired on with a crew, cleaning fishing rigs. Which was work, obviously. And smelly, difficult, unlovely work while it was at it. So when he heard about an Indian encampment in unceded territory, free for all natives interested in a traditional way of life, off the reserves, off the grid, off the beaten track, he was there like an arrow. “At home we have a saying,” he said. “One man is a person, but many men are a people.”

  For a full summer, he grew out his hair, attended ceremonies, and avoided having to do much in the way of anything. He loved the company. “Brother,” those northwestern Indians called him. He loved the damp, mild summer, nothing torrid and violent about that weather, not like the Rez. And he loved being the exotic Indian. He made up stories about getting into brawls with Cowboys, and oh, the Wild, Wild Western ways of sheriffs and buffaloes and Indian war ponies. And when he was called upon to do something he did not feel like doing, he came up with an easy out. “We have a saying back home,” he said. “Water and wind wear away rock better than picks and axes.”

  He liked too the way those northwestern people spoke like they had until tomorrow to get the words out of their mouths. Also, they used inflection at the end of their sentences that made everything sound like a question. “Wat-son?” So that it wasn’t too much of a stretch for You Choose to come up with the idea of altering the spelling of his name, perhaps the way it always should have been. “What Son,” he said.

  You Choose What Son.

  There was a holy, mysterious ring to the name now that You Choose liked. Spelled this new way, there was nothing jokey and cavalier about it, nothing careless and shameful. It was more like an invitation to bend your head in respectful wonder. And you didn’t have to have Catholicism drummed into you by some damp-palmed, pedophilic priest at an Indian boarding school to extrapolate a messiah figure out of You Choose What Son. “We have a saying back home,” he said. “You have to live yourself into a name, not name yourself into a life.”

  It should be noted here that a couple of women rolled their eyes. “Never heard so much treaty talk in my life,” one muttered. “Hope he doesn’t get too comfortable here.”

  Candlefish Forever

  You Choose had never been so happy. Except for the food, which was an incessant diet of fatty candlefish, augmented with the odd tart berry. Holy buffalo, what those people wouldn’t do with a candlefish couldn’t be done. They smoked them, boiled them, baked them, poached them, charred them, and worst of all they ate them raw. Sometimes You Choose had dreams in which he was eating seared red meat; so vivid he woke up with the greasy-salty taste of stew in his mouth.

  At the Northern Waters Café in a coastal village near the encampment, You Choose What Son found he could t
rade out five hours of kitchen work for a full meal and kitchen leftovers to take home. He preferred to work the Sunday morning shift, five until ten, before the after-church crowd came in. Then he’d linger over coffee, steak, eggs, and a fry-up of potatoes until he was fit to burst. “Good thing you came north, brother,” the café’s cook said one morning, throwing the Sunday paper down for You Choose What Son to see the headline: “US CASUALTIES IN VIETNAM RISE TO 1,387.”

  The café’s cook was from the Yukon with an attitude that You Choose didn’t quite like and which he attributed to the matrilineal society from which she had come. She gave the impression of being impenetrable and unwavering, like she’d distilled all the parts of herself you might ordinarily consider personality into internal granite. She also spoke extra slowly, even for these people. So slowly it could be hard for a person to stay on track until the end of what she had to say, which, luckily for her listeners, was usually not more than a handful of words.

  You Choose What Son shook his head and wiped his mouth. “Yeah,” he said, “it was my warrior act of resistance not to participate in that criminal carnage.”

  “That so?” the cook said.

  You Choose took a big gulp of coffee and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Yeah, the White Man sending the Red Man and the Black Man to kill the Yellow Man. Where’s the sense in that?”

  “Where indeed?” the cook replied.

  You Choose made a casual noise in his throat. In his mind, he was thinking it might be time to move on. Maybe the East Coast this time, he thought, with those New York Mohawks. Maybe that was the next place for him. He’d heard the border was easy to cross there too, if you didn’t mind getting your feet wet.

  And it was a cheap place to live if you didn’t mind the humid winters, the black mold, and the impregnable, stinging undergrowth. Plus, he’d heard the Mohawks were the tough-as-tomahawks, take-no-prisoner kind of Indians, and he was about ready for Indians with whom he could throw around some pent-up macho.

  Thaté: Wind

  Meantime, back in the VA hospital, Rick Overlooking Horse unhinged his mind from the impatience of waiting for anything to change, ever. He attached himself only to the consistency of the present, and to the inevitability of his pain. Pain, like a relentless spring wind, changeable and unremitting, sometimes blustering, sometimes softly pressing, but nonetheless constant.

  He remembered this: When he was a small boy, he and You Choose Watson and Mina had spent a week at an underground Sundance Ceremony way out beyond Rockyford on the edge of the Mako Sica. These were the long decades in which the U.S. government officially outlawed all manifestations of Indian spirituality, so the Rez was thick with agents every summer seeking out anyone who might be preparing to partake in the Sacred Medicine of the talking tree.

  All through Sundance, the heat gathered and gathered, as if harnessing itself for an onslaught. Grasshoppers crackled in the drying grass. Cicadas shrilled. The aspens shimmered lime green. Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose ran barefoot among the Sundance participants. They played with the whelped puppies. They ran between the legs of the Indian war ponies. They watched the women preparing themselves for purification. They spied on the men preparing themselves to hear the messages of the talking tree.

  Then, at noon on the day of the Sundance, the boys crept out from under the walls of the teepee where Mina had left them to sleep through the heat of the afternoon. They crawled on their bellies through the baking grass to the arbor. There they saw the men emerge from the purification lodge, sweating but dry eyed. They heard the elder celebrant chanting, his prayers rising with the heat. The leaves of the great cottonwood shook and trembled; its limbs hung about with bright bundles of tobacco.

  The men offered themselves up to branches of the tree.

  Or, you could say they offered themselves as living sacrifices to God.

  You Choose saw blood, and vomited in the grass.

  A raven that had been tumbling about above the arbor suddenly cried and dived out of the sky, its wings brushing the leaves of the cottonwood tree.

  Rick Overlooking Horse took all this in, then he sank to his young knees and put his hands and forehead on the grass.

  “I’m yours,” he said. “Use me.”

  That night, after the ceremonial meal and after the men’s wounds had been bathed in salt water by the herbalists, and after the leader of the ceremony had prayed, a storm rolled in across the plains. Clouds towered like celestial battleships in the west, lightning bulleted out of the sky, and thunder reverberated. Everyone retreated to shelter.

  You Choose wept and had had to be put under blankets and held fast. But Rick Overlooking Horse felt only exhilaration. The wind crashed, and surged, and crashed, and surged, bowing the canvas of the teepee, and Rick Overlooking Horse smiled and curled himself around Mina’s legs and for once she did not kick him away but instead tolerated his little body against her papery skin. Rick Overlooking Horse felt for You Choose Watson’s hand and found it shaking.

  For the first time, Rick Overlooking Horse understood that fear is what comes of trying to live more than one life at a time.

  Time

  The way Rick Overlooking Horse saw it, he could return to that teepee, to Mina’s dry skin and You Choose Watson’s clammy little hand any time he chose. Time was not stable. Time was like wind, or currents. It did not plod forward; it could flow backward, or spiral inward, or slide around on a plane. All Time was possible, all the time. The only skill needed was an ability to pilot the tides, the troughs and the dips.

  How obvious it all was.

  Rick Overlooking Horse laughed inwardly, sadly, the way you do when you realize how much suffering you have had to endure to know one true, obvious thing. It was as the priests had chanted morning and night in that terrible boarding school in Kansas: “Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum.”

  As it was in the beginning, is now, was always, and ever will be.

  Time, is all time is, and has been, and will be, forever and ever.

  Mni: Water

  A few months later, when it was apparent the Indian was, in fact, not only inexplicably alive but also miraculously awake, a doctor asked, “What’s your name?”

  It was not a complicated question. But the answer was longer than Rick Overlooking Horse was prepared to give.

  “Hau,” he managed. The syllable cost him nearly everything.

  “Your name?” the doctor tried again, louder. “Who are you?”

  His Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood said he was seven-eighths Lakota Oglala. They say the missing eighth belonged to an Irish Pony Express rider back in 1860 or 1861, and accounted for the freckles on Rick Overlooking Horse’s nose and back.

  Mina Overlooking Horse, his grandmother, was a direct descendent of Spotted Elk.

  Nobody Overlooking Horse, his father, was crossed over.

  His mother was also crossed over. Presumably in search of the man she loved.

  “Who are you?” the doctor persisted. “Do you know who you are?”

  Rick Overlooking Horse gestured the air with his hand. It felt shimmering, alive, vibrating with tiny particles like a thin soup, or broth, but drier.

  “Do you understand what has happened?” the doctor said.

  A fly buzzed against a window nearby. Wherever they were, it sounded hot to Rick Overlooking Horse. He wondered whose summer he was having.

  The doctor fired off a list of questions.

  “Who is the president of the United States?”

  “Do you know what year this is?”

  “Where are you?”

  Rick Overlooking Horse thought of a summer storm. He thought of rain falling on the prairie. He pictured Little Wounded Knee Creek in full flood. He visualized the White River tumbling east. He turned himself into the Missouri and he poured himself into the Mississ
ippi. Then he washed out into the Gulf of Mexico.

  He knew no pain lasts forever. Either it will pass, or you will.

  The trick, always, was to surrender.

  Maka: Earth

  When they took the bandages off, Rick Overlooking Horse was unsurprised to discover that his left eyelid had been sewn shut. Through his right eye things appeared gauzy at first, as if he were looking through a lens smeared with Vaseline. Light bulged and pulsed and pained. Rick Overlooking Horse closed his eye and sank back against the pillow. He wondered if he no longer belonged to his body, since the limbs that stretched beneath the sheets were wizened, wrinkled, and atrophied. They belonged to a dead man. They were not his.

  Some days later, the nurse held up a mirror so that Rick Overlooking Horse could behold himself. But the mirror shook, as if he and the nurse were bouncing down a corrugated dirt road on the Rez in the back of a pickup truck. Rick Overlooking Horse saw shuddering fragments of a creature that appeared to belong not here, or there, but between earth, water, and sky, something amphibious, in other words.

  The nurse mistook Rick Overlooking Horse’s silence for something worse. “Oh, bless your ever-loving heart. I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I am so very, very sorry.”

  Phéta: Fire

  The cover of Life magazine, October 30, 1964, showed America’s greatest swimmer, Don Schollander, with four Olympic gold medals on his chest. He looked young and blond, staring with every confidence into the future as if he could already see his medals on display for the public at the Bank of America in downtown Lake Oswego, Oregon.