Watershed, page 18
Louise stepped nearer along with a couple of the others to listen more closely.
“What, you think you’re going to step out there and hitch a ride with a guardsman or something?” Bisset said.
“I know this mountain. I know this mountain better than anybody. They can’t keep up with me.”
Bisset shook his head. “You’ve got to get to it first.”
“I can do that. When Dicky and I were crawling down the hill, we crossed an irrigation ditch.”
“He’s right,” Dicky said.
“If I stay in the ditch, they’ll never see me.”
Bisset scratched his head. “Dicky, do you think you can make it like he says?”
“No,” I said. “Dicky will only slow me down. He doesn’t know the way and I can’t spend time looking back for him. I have to do this alone. Sorry, Dicky.”
Louise stepped around me to stand next to Bisset. “Why are you doing this?”
I laughed, more to myself than for them. “What else am I supposed to do?”
“I had you read all wrong,” Louise said.
“No, you didn’t,” I said. I picked up a can of film, put it into the pocket of my vest, and zipped it shut. “I’ll need the lights off so I can get out the back door.”
“We can make a diversion for you,” Dicky said.
“No,” said Bisset. “That will only make the bastards more nervous and get them moving around.”
I looked beyond Bisset and Louise out the window and saw snow falling through the darkness. “Good,” I said. “The snow will help, give me a little more cover.”
Bisset looked at my eyes. “I guess, I don’t know what to say.”
“Yeah, well, say it later,” I told him. “Give me an Indian name or something like that when all this shit is over.”
“You got it,” Bisset said.
“But I don’t want Dicky naming me.”
Dicky laughed.
“Blow out the lanterns,” Bisset said and the lights were put out. We stood around in the dark for a few minutes. Dicky asked me if I wanted a flashlight and I shoved it into my pocket, although I probably wouldn’t be using it, since I planned to feel my way through the ditch to the Silly Man and up the mountain.
Bisset stood with me at the back door. “Thanks,” he said and I nodded. He opened the door about eighteen inches and I crawled out into the snow.
The sky was deep gray and black and the snow was falling heavily now. I was too afraid to feel the cold. My gloved hands were searching the ground in front of me for the ditch. I was imagining crawling into the knees of one of the militia when I found the channel. I fell into it and made my way through it like a snake. Trying to think positively, I did acknowledge that to my good fortune there would be no snakes this time of year, but that sense of good fortune was quickly erased by the feeling of moisture seeping through the fabric of my gloves at my wrists and through the knees of my trousers. I wondered how long it would be before the symptoms of anthrax began to appear.
I stopped when I thought I heard footsteps. I waited until there was no sound. I didn’t dare raise my head out of the ditch to look down the slope or up. I crawled again, my hands and knees now soaked, and then I was at the dirt-blocked source of the ditch and Silly Man Creek. I stayed low and made my way about a hundred yards up the creek along the bank, and then looked back to see that the church and all those stationed in front of it looked very far away. I took off my gloves and shoved them into a pocket. My hands were freezing and I put them under my coat to get them warm. I marched up the creek a couple of miles and finally felt safe enough to use the light Dicky had given me, but when I shone the beam into the darkness and falling snow I found it useless.
Article 4. To aid the said nations of Indians in their subsistence while removing to and making their settlement upon the said reservation, the United States will furnish them, free of charge, with two thousand five hundred head of beef-cattle average in weight five hundred pounds, three hundred and fifty sacks of flour of one hundred pounds each, within the term of two years from the date of this treaty.
I was stumbling by the time I knew I was near my cabin and the snow had stopped falling. I approached the house slowly, my hands aching, knowing I needed to thaw and dry before frostbite set in. It was late morning when I walked in through the front door, and there was Special Agent Davies, kneeling in front of the stove, just getting ready to light a fire. I thought of running, but I didn’t. She looked at me and then lit the paper she had balled up under the logs. I walked over to the stove and started peeling off my wet clothes.
“So, here we are,” she said.
“Here we are.” I had my parka, vest, and shirt off and I was loosening the laces of my boots. “So, what’s the story? Are you going to arrest me?” I asked.
“What did you do?”
“I must have done something.” I kicked my boots off and removed my trousers.
“We never have been shy with each other,” Davies said. She sat in the big chair and stared at me.
I got close to the stove and tried to soak up the heat. “No Indians killed Begay and what’s-his-name,” I said. I grabbed my vest from the floor and took the canister of film out of the pocket.
“What’s that?”
“Proof of bad shit.” Finally the fire was going strong and heating up the area around it. I began feel my fingers again. “I’m going to get dressed and then I’m driving to Denver.”
“Proof of what?”
“You’ll see.”
“Where were you?” she asked.
I realized that no one could prove where I had or had not been. “I was out hiking.”
“Rough hike, I’d say from looking at you.”
“Uphill both ways,” I said, glancing at her. “Listen, I’m going to get dressed now.”
“I’m not stopping you.”
“You’re not?” I asked.
She shook her head.
I studied her for a couple of seconds. “What are you saying? You mean, you’re just going to let me drive out of here?”
“Is there some reason I should stop you?” She held me fast with her eyes and I could see that for the first time I was seeing her cold sober. She stood up and walked to the door, stopped and looked at me, but didn’t say anything else before leaving.
The road was slick down to the junction, but there was little traffic. There were some men standing outside in front of Clara’s store and they seemed anxious, agitated, and gave me hard stares as I rolled by. I had the heater blowing full, the hot air was cooking my legs, and the radio was switched to the all-news station, but all I heard were ball-game scores. I put my hand into the pocket of my jacket and felt the canister of film, which I rolled between my fingers. The sun came out and started melting the ice and snow on the highway.
I looked north at the mountain, jacketed in an overlay of snow. It looked so peaceful, so clean, so inert.
Acknowledgments
The Plata Reservation and the Plata Nation presented in this work are fictitious and are meant to bear no direct or indirect resemblance to any existing place or people. None of the characters are real, nor are they based in any way on existing individuals. The landscape of Plata Mountain is also complete fiction, including, and especially, the hydrologic data presented.
The excerpts from treaties between the United States government and various Indian nations used in this novel are a matter of public record, but I would like to acknowledge as a valuable source Indian Treaties 1778-1883, compiled and edited by Charles Kappler (Amereon House, Mattituck, NY, 1972). I would also like to thank Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, authors of Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (South End Press, Boston, MA, 1988) for sending me to some documents I found helpful.
WATERSHED
Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including James, Dr No, The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and Erasure, which was adapted into the major Oscar-winning film American Fiction. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Also by Percival Everett
FICTION
James
Dr. No
The Trees
Telephone
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
Assumption
I Am Not Sidney Poitier
The Water Cure
Wounded
American Desert
A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid
Damned If I Do
Erasure
Grand Canyon, Inc.
Glyph
Frenzy
The Body of Martin Aguilera
Big Picture
God’s Country
For Her Dark Skin
Zulus
The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair
Cutting Lisa
Walk Me to the Distance
Suder
POETRY
The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843: Annotated From the Library of John C. Calhoun
Trout’s Lie
Swimming Swimmers Swimming
Abstraktion und Einfühlung
re: (f) gesture
First published by Graywolf Press 1996
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Percival Everett, Watershed
