Watershed, page 16
*
Bunchy Cooke was shot in the back of the head twice by .38 caliber slugs fired from two different police service revolvers. The projectiles passed through the occipital bone into the occipital lobe, across the parieto-occipital fissure, through the parietal lobe, and lodged in the limbic lobe above the corpus callosum. The second one traveled just a bit farther and came to rest in the calloso-marginal fissure. Bunchy Cooke died on some street in Atlanta while an ambulance was detained at the police blockade. My grandfather no longer practiced medicine. Bunchy Cooke no longer walked among the living.
In regard to the Black Hills, I look upon it as very important to the Indians to make some treaty by which, if gold is discovered in large quantities, the white people will be allowed to go there, and they receive a full equivalent for all that is rendered.
If gold is not found there in large quantities, of course the white people won’t for the present want to go there, and their country will be left as it is now.
To say the least, fucking Karen again was a bad idea. To say the most, it was perhaps the stupidest thing any single individual had ever done in the history of human interaction. She screamed and claimed her orgasm was the most intense she had ever had and lay there with her eyes closed saying that she was sure that it was an omen that we were back together for good, that her father would live, and she would thank him for being the cause of our profound happiness. I sat on the edge of the bed pulling on my trousers, shaking my head, wanting to cry, wanting to leap through the window. But instead I said, “We’ve got to get back to the hospital. Your mother needs you.”
Dressed, we made the drive back to the hospital and Karen asked, while I parked in the lot beside a huge mound of snow, “Why do you think my father is so unhappy?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know what he expects from life. I never have known. I think he hates me. Isn’t that terribly sad? Do you think my father hates me?”
I opened my door to get out, but I answered, “Yes.”
“Why?”
I was out now and my door was closed. Karen got out and walked around the truck to catch up with me as I walked toward the entrance of the hospital. She took my arm as we entered.
“Why do you think he hates me?” she asked, sounding distraught, but then she always sounded distraught, and when I looked at her I saw that her blue eyes were welling up.
My grandfather and I were driving home after a day out searching for wild pigs that didn’t want to be found. We drove through the dark countryside quietly; my grandfather was humming while I looked out my window at the silhouettes of trees. I saw the lights as the car began to slow and all of a sudden we were in the middle of it. Two men cloaked in flowing white and wearing conical white hoods directed the slowing traffic while off in the field behind them similarly dressed men made an impressive crowd around a burning cross. I could tell my grandfather wanted to step on the gas and speed past, but there were cars immediately ahead of us and the opposite lane was filled with traffic, which made it impossible to turn about. The klansmen were peering into the cars ahead of us as they rolled by, but all of those drivers and passengers were white. I was shaking, but I wanted to shout, wanted to shout that they were walking assholes, that they were ignorant cowards, that they were pigs, but I didn’t. I sank into the seat of my grandfather’s Oldsmobile and tried to breathe normally. The hooded white face leaned close to my grandfather’s window and the man called for the attention of his partner who looked in, too. They started to shout “nigger” at us and kick at the car. That’s when I noticed the pistol in my grandfather’s lap. It was the .22 target pistol he had once let me fire at tin cans at a man’s farm in Hopper. He had it full in his hand now, his finger on the trigger. Then the car in front of us accelerated to speed on down the highway and my grandfather bolted after him. Just as quickly as the pistol had appeared in his lap, it was gone. He smiled at me, sweat on his aging brow. He resumed his humming and I peered out the window at the silhouettes of trees.
This time when I went up the mountain I took my camera. The ambient temperature that morning was considerably lower than it had been earlier, a warning of the bad weather coming. I had my tent and my stove with me, since I thought I might have to wait out the blizzard. The snow was just beginning to fall as I reached the dam on Dog Creek. I took pictures of the dam and the pipeline.
I continued on along the Dog, and noticed that the creek looked more normal above the dam. The snow fell more heavily as the temperature plummeted. Ice formed in my mustache and I cinched the hood of my parka more tightly about my head. I knew it was cold but I couldn’t feel it; I was too excited and scared. Finally, though, I couldn’t see the stream bed for the snow coming down, nor could I see very far in front of me. The blizzard was full on and it was everything it had promised it would be. I set up my tent, crawled in, got off my wet clothes, put on dry ones, lit my pocket hand-warmers, and slid into my sleeping bag.
Two adjacent streams might drain to the same base level and form on the mountain front on the alluvial fan above the adjacent inter-fan stream that heads at the front. It is the case, however, that the low-gradient inter-fan stream cannot carry the coarse alluvium, and when it is arrested by an adjacent stream, an active aggradational phase begins.
Edith Reskin was beside herself, pacing and saying things like, “Where is his god now?” and “I hope he doesn’t have a vision or a revelation or something like that.” Karen and I stood near her for nearly half a minute before she noticed us. She looked at me. “Can you imagine having to listen to him if he has a near-death experience?” Edith Reskin cried.
“What is it, Mother?” Karen asked. “What’s wrong? Mother?”
“He’s dying.” Edith Reskin sniffed and tried to catch her breath. She was patting her hair absently as if getting ready for a picture.
“The doctors said he’s going to be all right,” Karen said, starting to cry now with her mother.
Edith Reskin was shaking her head. “That’s not what they’re saying now. He’s conscious, but everything is slowing down.”
“What are they saying?”
“He’s dying and they don’t know why. They say they don’t understand.”
Karen and her mother went into the room to see Reskin. I sat on the square sofa in the waiting area and read a couple of magazines. Before long Karen and her mother were standing in front of me and one of them was saying, “He wants to talk to you.”
I just looked at them.
“He wants you,” Karen said.
“Well, I’m not going in there.” I crossed my legs and looked out the window.
“Please,” Edith Reskin said. “Please.”
I got up and Edith Reskin embraced me and I felt just how small a woman she was. I placed my hand flat against her back and gave her a pat. She was so fragile there, so unlike the woman who had always stood up to the monster Reskin. I wondered about her grief at that moment, wondered just where was the man with whom she had fallen in love. Certainly, the difficult, born-again, self-righteous, self-centered man lying on the bed in the other room was not that man, but she still loved him, or loved what he had been. Maybe it wasn’t love at all, but some sick clinging to the past, an avoidance of the realization of a loss that had already happened.
I walked into the room and saw Reskin lying in the bed; the rhythm of his body was being monitored by the machine at his bedside. I had expected to find him intubated, but his face was free of apparatus. He raised a weak hand when I got to his bed, but I didn’t take it and so it fell idle beside his body.
“They tell me you’re dying,” I said.
He nodded.
“I guess that’s what you want, though.”
“It is,” he whispered.
Neither of us spoke for a long couple of minutes. I was looking out the window at the clouds and wondering how long protocol would have me stay.
“Find it for me,” he said.
“Find what?”
“Find a reason,” he said.
I wasn’t interested in what he had to say to me. I was just there, but as I stood looking at his crazy eyes, I knew why he was dying. It was so simple and I knew that there was no cure. He was dying because he wanted to. Not because he had resigned, not because he had given up, but because he wanted to die: he had willed it and was mean enough to carry it through.
I said to him, “So, nobody pays enough attention to you. Is that it?”
“Don’t be afraid,” he said.
“Afraid of what?”
“Just don’t be afraid. That’s why you’re with my daughter who isn’t good enough for you. You’re afraid. Don’t be scared, Robert.”
“I’m not afraid.”
He smiled. Then he stopped smiling and closed his eyes, and he died right there in front of me, with a tiny pathetic, high-pitched gasp. The line of the machine went flat and caused an alarm to sound.
*
The snow stopped at some point during the night. I pushed out of my tent through the drift and looked at the blanketed landscape. The white was like a whisper across the mountain; everything was so hushed, so motionless. I cooked some dehydrated eggs on my stove and felt my body warm up as I ate. I tried to get my bearings when I realized I could see the top of the mountain. What I also saw was an unnatural clearing some hundred yards away. It was near the tree line, so I knew immediately why I hadn’t detected it in the aerial photographs. I left my camp intact and walked to the clearing. Aspens were downed and pushed to the sides in an area that must have been thirty yards square. I tripped over something under the snow, then, kneeling and brushing through, I found a dead elk. It was a big bull and its face, the glassy eyes hollow and still alive-looking, startled me a little and disturbed me greatly. I fell back a couple of steps, then turned away from the sight. I observed the middle of the clearing and saw that the snow was thinning there, melting evenly across the surface; the center was already crusting over, just like snow looks over a septic tank. I took out my camera and snapped pictures of the clearing and of the dead elk, then marked the spot on my map.
My heart is glad that some of my people who have died have been so well taken care of and buried on scaffolds. When I get back to my people I will tell them what you have done. I would like to have some things to take back to them. There are three things that I have always been against. Last fall, when I was here, I spoke about it. I want to be sure that the goods you are giving us are presents and not annuity goods. We do not want any treaty goods from you at all. These whites that you have put in my buffalo country I despise and I want to see them away. I suppose your great father sent you here to tell me that I am going to live. What you are talking about—signing the treaty—I do not want to do. I cannot do anything here by myself. You know very well that if the treaty is signed by only a portion of our people it is not likely to stand. When Red Cloud and Man Afraid of His Horses come in, whatever they do I am willing to do the same.
When I tried to get some sleep upon returning home, I was troubled by a dream. In it, a rust-brown bull elk staggered across a pristine mountain meadow surrounded by graceful aspens, with knot eyes all gazing outward. The meadow was striking, covered with penstemon and mariposa tulips sticking their yellow faces toward the sun, and with spurred lupines. The hooves of the elk fell heavily among the flowers and I walked toward it, but it didn’t notice me, it couldn’t notice me. I recognized the glassy empty eyes and I realized that the eyes stuck into the bark of the aspens seemed more alive than the elk’s eyes. I was crying in the dream, following the zig-zagging path of the elk. I looked at the clear blue sky and thought what a beautiful day it was, how warm and glorious, and I found my feet falling effortlessly into the tracks of the elk. I staggered with him, my shoulders slumping, my breathing beginning to race. I felt my heart hot in my chest. And then I was outside of myself and looking into my own big, glassy elk eyes.
15
The next few days went by slowly at my cabin. Although I’d had no visitors, I was anxious. The road, and especially the snow-packed lane to my house, no doubt discouraged travel to my place, but the constant sun since the last storm was cleaning things up. I expected the authoritative or drunken knocking of Davies or the frantic clawing of Karen at my door at any second. My appetite was off and so I could make it through a couple more days without a trip down to Clara’s. A knock did finally come, but it was tentative and didn’t sound urgent.
When I opened the door I found Hiram and Dicky Kills Enemy standing there. I let them in.
“It’s nice and warm in here, Robert,” Hiram said, sitting by the stove.
Dicky remained standing, like a sentry by the door.
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” I asked, sitting on a stool at the counter. “Would you like some tea?”
Hiram shook his head. He looked around the room. “You don’t have a television.”
“Nope.”
“Radio?” Hiram asked.
I shook my head, laughing. “Why?”
“So, you haven’t heard.”
I sat up straight and looked at him. “Heard what?”
“Tyrone, Louise, the Hat boys, and a bunch of others are holed up in the Saint Luke compound.”
“What do you mean, ‘holed up’?” I asked.
Hiram looked over at Dicky. “How would you describe it, Grandson?”
“They’re locked in. The Feds are locked out. Everybody’s got guns. Everybody’s shooting.” Dicky’s face showed no emotion, but he looked directly at me while he spoke.
“What happened?”
Hiram looked tired and suddenly old. “We found out about their mess up on the mountain. We don’t know where it is, but we know it’s there and we know what they’re trying to do to us.”
I didn’t say anything.
“That Indian FBI and that other black one tried to tell us, but they killed them,” Hiram said.
“Anthrax?” I asked. “That’s what Bisset said.”
Hiram shrugged.
“I know where it is,” I said. “I found it.”
Hiram and Dicky just stared at me.
“I think I found it. I took pictures of it, a couple of rolls. I found a dam. If there was a leak, it would normally drain into Dog Creek. What they’ve done is divert the flow of the Dog to the Silly Man and right onto the reservation.” I grabbed my topographical map from the counter, unfolded it, and walked over to Hiram. “It’s right here. Up high, almost to the tree line.”
“It’s bad over there,” Dicky said. “They need food and the roads are all blocked.”
Hiram said, “They’re going to stay there until the government admits what they’re doing.”
The question of who cared if Indians were sleeping in a church on the reservation must have been obvious on my face, because Dicky said, “They’ve got two hostages. Two FBIs.”
“Oh my god.”
“Yes, indeed,” Hiram said.
“I need you to get me across the mountain,” Dicky said. “It’s the only way to get supplies through to them. You know the way. You can get me in behind the Feds.”
I rubbed a hand over my face and looked at the two men. Hiram was staring at me, but he wasn’t begging.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
Dicky shook his head. “They’ve got soldiers and a tank and it’s a mess, a real mess.”
I walked over to the counter and spread open the map. “Okay, Dicky, come show me where the church is.”
It took a while for me to understand James Reskin’s last words, and whether he was making sense or not was unimportant, as the sense I found was mine. I stayed with Karen after her father’s death because I was afraid to hurt her at a time like that, at least that was the lie I told myself. I had a brief feeling of being unneeded. It was sick and quiet and insidious, and once I’d isolated and identified it, it was undeniable and then embarrassing. Karen was, without question, crazy, but no more to blame, even less so, than I. She was a lunatic with whom I had to deal, but I was the problem. Months after her father’s death, I understood. I wasn’t afraid anymore.
“Why?!” she screamed, her voice much louder than her size. “Because you need to get away from me? Am I that awful?”
“No, I’m going up there because I want to go fishing. I like fishing. It relaxes me.”
“And I don’t relax you?!”
“Karen,” I said. “Sit down, please.” I waited until she was seated and looked at her eyes from across the room. “Karen, I keep telling you that I care about you and in some way I guess that’s true. But it’s also not quite true. We’re in this sick thing together and I want out. Let me change that—I’m getting out.” She was stunned, sitting there, playing with her fingers in her lap. “We don’t have a relationship, Karen. I don’t love you. I have never loved you. I will never love you. I’m sorry. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going fishing.”
I got her to her feet and nudged her to the door, where she said, just as I was closing it, “Okay, darling, I’ll talk to you later.”
Article 13. The tribe herein named, by their representatives, parties to this treaty, agree to make the reservation herein described their permanent home, and they will not as a tribe make any settlement elsewhere, reserving the right to hunt the lands adjoining the said reservation formerly called theirs, subject to the modifications named in this treaty and the orders of the commander of the department in which said reservation may be for the time being; and it is further agreed and understood by the parties to this treaty, that if any Indian or Indians shall leave the reservation herein to settle elsewhere, he or they shall forfeit all the rights, privileges, and annuities conferred by the terms of this treaty; and it is further agreed by the parties to this treaty, that they will do all they can to induce Indians now away from reservations set apart for the exclusive use and occupation of the Indians, leading a nomadic life, or engaged in war against the people of the United States, to abandon such a life and settle permanently in one of the territorial reservations set apart for the exclusive use and occupation of the Indians.
