Watershed, page 7
“I didn’t even see that at the highway,” I said.
“No, I try to hide it up there. I’ve got some brush wired to the ground so that nobody will see it. Only a few people know about it, so keep it to yourself.”
“Why?”
“So the tribal council won’t come and maintain it. You see what they did to this road.”
What he said sounded reasonable. I observed the admirable flatness of his private driveway and said, “Big Junior said you wanted to see me tonight. But I was over here now and thought I’d stop by.”
“Come in.”
I followed him through the door. “Have you seen Louise Yellow Calf lately?” I asked.
He gestured for me to sit in one of two rockers in front of his stoked and doorless potbellied stove. He sat in the other. The house was dim: the only light came from a single bulb suspended on a cord from the ceiling. The floor was of tired and cracked planks, gray and black in places. There was a photo of a man in uniform on the wall over a sofa that was covered with laundry. Hiram watched me without speaking for a full minute, then looked at his fire.
“Louise Yellow Calf is a little woman,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How do you know her?”
“I gave her a ride one day. I helped her take her mother to the hospital.”
He nodded.
“You know about the FBIs who were killed,” I said.
He nodded again.
I looked up at the photo over the sofa.
“That’s my son,” Hiram said. “He was killed by Korea.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He was a brave warrior. He died in,” Hiram looked at the ceiling, “1966.”
“Hiram, the Korean War was over by then. In ’66 it was Vietnam.”
“I know,” he said.
“So, your son died in Vietnam?”
“No, he died in Rivertown.”
“You said he was killed in Korea.”
Hiram looked me in the eyes. “I said he was killed by Korea. The white army and killing those people.” He shook his head. “They look like us, you know. My son, Bertram, was never the same. He came back and got drunk every night. His nose got big and red and he begged for rides into town. He froze to death one night. It was 1966. He was thirty-eight.” He let my eyes go and looked back at the fire.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “About the FBI men.” I was trying to bring him back to the subject.
“I heard they got shot by the lake,” he said.
“Louise showed up at my house that night, came in soaking wet and scared.” I told him.
“I see.” He rocked.
“I lied when I was asked if I knew Louise. I don’t know why. I thought I was protecting her.”
“It’s a good thing, to protect people. We Indians are sick with the business of protecting people.”
“I’m afraid I’ve implicated myself somehow.”
Hiram nodded. Then he said, “I wanted to see you because I want to invite you into a meeting.”
“What kind of meeting?”
“A meeting of the Native American Church.”
“I’m not much on religion,” I said.
“You don’t have to be. I just wanted to invite you. The meeting is tonight. It’s a peyote ceremony. But if you come you’ll have to stay up until morning.”
“I don’t know. I mean, I feel honored. But why? You don’t even know me.”
“You drove Big Junior to the hospital and you didn’t know him.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“You lied to protect Louise and you didn’t know her.”
“Maybe I’ll come. Will it be here?”
“No, behind the Yellow Calf house.”
“Okay. What time?”
“Eight. Nine.”
“Okay.” I looked at the flames of the fire. “Where is Louise?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I think she left the reservation. I don’t know where she went.”
I stood up and, with my hand, stopped the rocker from moving. “Well, maybe I’ll see you later.”
We stepped outside and looked at the flow of the Plata through his front yard. The water seemed higher than it should have been for that time of year, almost covering the boulders in the flow. “You must get flooded out every year,” I said.
“Never have been.”
“But I heard that last year the little store had water in it.” I looked across the flat at the ugly little building some five hundred yards away and scratched my head. “Didn’t it flood up there?”
“It did, but I was dry as a bone.”
I studied the lay of the ground and scratched my head. “Hiram, your house is lower than the store. You’re not more than fifteen feet higher than the river here.” I didn’t believe what he was telling me, but I wasn’t going to argue the matter. I realized that even if it wasn’t true, he either understood flooding to be something other than I did or was trying to tell me something. I looked at the nearby cottonwoods and I couldn’t see any signs of high-water marking—no lines, no wrinkled bark, nor did the ground around his house show any sign.
“The river goes where it wants to go,” Hiram said. “So far, it hasn’t wanted to come into my house.”
The right to divert the unappropriated waters of any natural stream to beneficial uses shall never be denied. Priority of appropriation shall give the better right as between those using the water for the same purpose; but when the waters of any natural stream are not sufficient for the service of all those desiring the use of the same, those using the water for the domestic purposes shall have the preference over those claiming for any other purpose, and those using the water for agricultural purposes shall have preference over those using the same for manufacturing purposes.
While standing there talking to the old man I drifted to times with my grandfather, how he would tell me that trust was a thing best exercised sparingly. He didn’t dislike white people, but he didn’t trust them either. He told me about having seen a man lynched when he was thirteen, lynched by white men who talked about their god as if he were a neighbor, white men who made burnt offerings to him on cold Virginia nights. He didn’t dislike Christians, but he didn’t trust them either. He held firmly that his true beliefs were lost someplace inside him and inside his daughter and son and inside me, his only grandchild, and that the Christians had locked the door on those beliefs. He didn’t dislike his wife for being a Christian, but he didn’t trust her. For the same reason, he distrusted his daughter, even when she was a child. He left his wife, calling her a “tool” on his way out. His daughter and my grandmother accused him of thinking he was god. His daughter never called him when she grew up.
He took me hunting when I was ten and told me that if I ever started to be deceived by that “Jesus crap” that he would kick my ass. “That man I saw hanged,” he said, “those Christians had cut off his testicles and stuck them in his mouth.” He studied the reeds for signs or movement. “It’s not their color, it’s their god.” Then he said, “And don’t marry a Christian.” He had deep-set, dark brown eyes and he said, as he reloaded, “They’re sick. They believe in one way, their way.” He fired at a duck and missed. “Your grandmother was a decent enough woman, but she was a sucker. Don’t be a sucker, Robert.” Years later my grandfather put the barrel of his over-and-under shotgun in his mouth and pushed the trigger with the tip of his cane.
5
Have you killed anyone?
How many have you murdered?
Have you eaten the flesh of man?
Have you eaten peyote?
The hidden, private drive of Hiram’s was beautifully, remarkably smooth and a straight shot to the highway. Of course I wondered why Hiram had invited me into the ceremony and, of course, I kept coming back to the notion that somehow he wanted something from me. That thought made me nervous, but I was flattered as well as intrigued by the offer. I also felt at the time that, given my possible predicament with the FBI, I was not insistent enough when it came to answers about the whereabouts of little Louise Yellow Calf.
I drove back up the mountain. It was just after noon and the day was bright; the snow was throwing blinding refractions, twisting the light, torturing it. I wanted to understand its angles. When I walked into Clara’s store I discovered Karen standing there helping her sort the jelly beans.
“Hello, Ugly,” Clara said.
“Clara,” I said and I walked past the two of them over to the refrigerator where I opened the door and grabbed a quart of milk. I felt sick and more than a little lost; the whole atmosphere of the place was transformed by Karen’s presence. I walked back to the counter and put down my carton of milk.
“I’m sorry,” Karen said.
“Yeah, well.” I handed money over to Clara.
“I didn’t know,” Karen said.
“You never know.”
Clara gave me my change.
“Please,” Karen said. “How was I supposed to know she was an FBI agent?”
Clara was listening closely. She ate a red jelly bean, sliding it into her mouth as if watching a movie, cracking the outer surface of it with her teeth exposed.
“You weren’t, Karen. You weren’t supposed to know. You weren’t supposed to be there. I’m not with you. I can fuck anybody I damn well please.”
Karen was well rehearsed in point-missing and so she said, “So you were sleeping with her.” Her body began that all-too-familiar trembling and she tapped her thigh through her thick coat.
“Even if I was, it’s no business of yours. Please, just go back to Denver and drive somebody else crazy.” The words felt good coming out and the hurt on her face didn’t faze me. I could see all that was wrong with her and, more importantly, what was wrong with us. I picked up my carton of milk and walked slowly, deliberately out, not pausing to look back, not pausing to make out what her final, unintelligible sound meant.
I went back to my house and had a much-needed cup of tea. The irony of my stop at Clara’s was that the milk turned out to be sour; it was swirling bad on top of the hot water. I collected a box of nymphs and my waders and marched through the woods to the creek, where I would be able to think, I hoped, more clearly. Really, what fishing did for me was to keep me from thinking. I was hypnotized by the water, the cast after cast into the flow, the riffles, the dips behind boulders where the big fish were supposed to lie in wait for tumbling aquatic insect larvae.
The stream channel of Dog Canyon does not change significantly along its length. The upper trench is extremely rough and rocky and then traverses across bedrock outcrops and flood plain deposits. The direction of the flow alters abruptly numerous times as it comes to geologic formations and the results of differential erosion. These deposits become more congested downstream and evidence of terraces emerges before the flood plain widens.
I tried again as I walked back to my cabin to understand the precipitous impulse that made me lie to protect Louise Yellow Calf. My cheerless answer was not that it was in my nature, but that I had a pathological disposition to know what was going on in all matters, at all times, before I talked to anyone. I peered into myself and there, collecting in the bottom of the container like turpentine or kerosene or some other useful but harmful substance, was my urgent requirement to know. It was not a need to save somebody, but simply a need to know. It was the same misaligned need that had landed me in that relationship with Karen. I hadn’t wanted to help Karen become sane; rather I had wanted to know what it was everyone meant when they said she was crazy. I hadn’t driven Special Agent Davies to my house instead of letting her fend for her unconscious self in the restaurant in Rivertown because I wanted to help (although what else could I have done) but because I had been curious about my own fear and loathing of her as an FBI agent, and I had thought I might find out something. I kicked myself all the way home. I knew that I would continue to ask about Louise and that I wouldn’t tell the FBI the truth. It was not in me to volunteer information to the FBI. I might tell young Hanson, the deputy, but not the FBI.
Karen did not show up at my house, although I would not have been surprised to discover that she had been hiding in the woods watching my movements. At dusk I was getting ready to go down to Plata and into the ceremony with Hiram Kills Enemy. I wondered what it would be like, wondered if I should take the peyote if offered to me, wondered if anyone would tell me anything about Louise Yellow Calf.
It was snowing again.
The listing of peyote as a controlled substance in Schedule I does not apply to the nondrug use of peyote in bona fide religious ceremonies of the Native American Church, and members of the Native American Church so using peyote are exempt from registration. Any person who manufactures peyote for or distributes peyote to the Native American Church, however, is required to obtain registration annually and to comply with all other requirements of the law.
The drive through the snow was scary. The storm had worked itself up into a blizzard, a whiteout, and the road had become a sheet of ice. I thought that all I needed at that moment was to have Davies discover me on the reservation. I stopped at the little store by the flashing light again and bought a carton of generic cigarettes and a couple of cotton hand towels. I put a twenty-dollar bill into the seam of the cigarette box and was planning to offer it to Hiram as a kind of thank-you for the privilege of entering the meeting. I knew all too well the way to the Yellow Calf house, but as I couldn’t see three feet in front of the truck, I drove by the house twice. I found the drive and discovered that my truck was the only vehicle there. I got out and walked around to the back. There was one man there, working beside the erected teepee. He was a tall man with two long braids falling down the back of his bright purple ski jacket. He gave me a weak wave and continued stacking wood beside the tent.
“My name is Robert,” I said.
“Billy,” he said.
“Hiram asked me to come to a meeting tonight,” I said.
He groaned an acknowledgment and continued his task, making a very neat pile and keeping the wood covered with a green-and-blue plastic tarp. The snow was falling in huge flakes that kissed the tarp and disappeared.
“I must be really early,” I said.
“No,” Billy laughed. “You’re on time. Everybody else is on Indian time.”
I chuckled too. “We used to call it BPT, black people’s time.” I watched him for a minute. “Can I help you do that?”
He shook his head.
The wind whipped about like a rope of ice and I found myself ducking into the entry of the teepee to get away from it. “How long will it be?” I asked.
“Are you cold?” Billy asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He looked at me for a long second. “I am, too.”
“Do you know the Yellow Calf family?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you know Louise?”
“Yes.”
“Have you seen Louise?”
“No.”
“Do you know where she is?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Where is she?”
“Louise is in Los Angeles.” He stood up from the tarp, having secured the edge of it to a stake with cord, and looked at me. “I don’t know where in Los Angeles, but that’s where she is.”
“Do you know why she went there?”
“I suppose to do or find something she couldn’t do or find here,” Billy said. “Ain’t that why people go places? You can help me now.”
I followed him into the teepee. The inside was lit by a battery-powered lantern near the opening. There was no snow on the ground inside. Although we were out of the wind, the air was still plenty cold. “What do you want me to do?”
Billy grabbed the light and took it to the middle of the tent where he placed it on the ground. The white light shook our shadows against the walls of the tepee. He got down on his hands and knees and started examining the dirt, picking it up and letting it sift through his fingers. “Come down here,” he said. “Look around and be sure there’s no debris inside this center circle.”
I then saw that a circle had been drawn in the ground with a stick or knife. I joined him in the middle of the teepee. “Debris?”
“Like this,” he said and he held up a staple for me to see. “If it ain’t dirt, it’s debris.”
I nodded and we worked our way from the center out to the edge of the circle. I found three nails, another six staples, a dime, and two pennies. Billy found a marble and a plastic eye from a child’s doll, which he put into his pocket. I didn’t ask him why.
It had been nearly an hour since my arrival. It was now nearly nine o’clock and still no one else had shown up. My feet were starting to feel numb from the cold. I was glad to have the information about Louise, but also dismayed that she had flown the coop on me, left me alone to face the police and the FBI and whatever sour music was going to be played.
Billy started with twigs, dry twigs that cracked in his fingers, then used sticks, then larger sticks as big around as his fleshy thumbs, and then small logs to construct the fire. He lit it deep in the middle, at the twigs, with a wooden match. The action of the flame was small at first, making it a little smoky inside the tent, the blaze low and orange. Then the sticks, in order, began to catch with crackling and shaking light that made me feel warmer although the actual heat had not yet found me. Billy kept the fireplace neat and immediately pulled away any ashes with a small broom, the kind found in the grocery store, straw wrapped with wire and a red handle. Soon the fire was hot, hot enough to push me away from it toward where my shadow found the tent wall. It was at this time that the others, with better sense than me, began to filter into the yard and the teepee.
Billy put his hand out to me. His face was sweating and he had shed his coat. I realized how hard he had been working. I shook his hand and he said, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And thank you for telling me about Louise.”
He nodded.
My grandfather had Parkinson’s disease in his later years; his voice shook, and one day he sat on his testicles and hurt himself badly. He couldn’t hunt so often anymore, the shaking of his hands was pronounced enough to ruin his aim, but he claimed not to feel a sense of loss. Once when he snapped awake from a nap as I was sitting beside him in the den of his house I thought I saw fear in his eyes, and looked at his hand trembling against the leather armrest. But later, when my aunt was visiting and trying to get him to try some soup she had made, telling him how they had lost so much time not talking over the years, she mentioned god and his eyes narrowed. Without batting an eye he said, “Give me hell and a glass of lemonade.” He scared her right out of the house and right then, in that moment, I saw my grandfather as the most profoundly spiritual person I had ever met in my life. My father didn’t care. He was, as I came to be, uncaring, thinking if he didn’t know whether there’s a god, then he simply didn’t know. Why worry? Why care? But my grandfather was a true believer.
