Counting coup, p.15
Counting Coup, page 15
“I already know the story … Sam told me. But you can’t blame everything on the woman—Violet. There’s too much passing the buck going on, and everybody’s blaming every human thing on medicine. It’s not good, not good at all.”
“Well, you’re the medicine man. Maybe you can help.”
“I’m no medicine man any more,” John said.
“Well, if that isn’t the biggest piece of bullshit I ever heard,” the woman said. “And there’s something going on. You can call it whatever you like, but it all comes down to the same thing, as far as I’m concerned. I think that woman’s a witch.”
Charlie felt awkward standing there, privy to the conversation. “Let’s just go!” he said angrily. “I’ve had enough of all this bad medicine and voodoo crap. Excuse me, ma’am, I didn’t mean any disrespect,” he said to the woman.
“Don’t pay Charlie any mind,” John said. “He says he doesn’t believe in medicine, but he’s been shitting his pants ever since he was in the sweat-lodge.” After a pause he said, “Lorena, I’d like you to meet my good friend Charlie. Charlie, Lorena. Everybody seems to go to Lorena’s when they need some taking care of.” He looked up at Lorena, beaming at her, and said, “You might as well become an Indian, for all the trouble you go to for us.”
“We talked about that,” Lorena said.
“Yeah, Whiteshirt, that stupid bastard, wanted to give her a pipe to carry. It’s not time for white people to carry pipes,” he said to Lorena. “Even people as good and kindhearted as you. It would have been wrong.”
“I still don’t understand it,” Lorena said, “but I’ve always trusted what you’ve told me. Still … you taught Joe Whiteshirt…”
“And I taught Sam, too,” John said in a disgusted tone. “And look how that turned out.” Then he began to slip back into being heyoka. “Maybe you should carry a pipe, who the hell knows. Maybe all Indians should go to church and stop sweating and vision-questing and—”
“Stop it, John,” Lorena said, looking upset. “You’re a crazy-ass drunk, and you’re going to say things you’ll regret. We have enough trouble already.”
“Her husband’s a engineer,” John said to Charlie. “That’s how they can afford to live like Indians.” John started laughing, his heyoka laugh, and Charlie felt embarrassed for the woman.
“I’ll bring you two out some towels and soap,” Lorena said, almost in a whisper. “In the meantime, you can go up to the creek and start getting undressed.”
“For what?” John asked.
“You know goddamn well for what, John Stone. You’re filthy and you stink. You need some cleaning up and sobering-up … both of you, I think.”
“It’s too cold to wash,” John said.
“That never bothered you before,” Lorena said. “You used to brag that you were part Eskimo, remember? And neither one of you are coming into my house like that. You two are a mess! You should be ashamed of yourselves. Now you are going to get washed up and clean.” With that, Lorena walked away toward the house.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to jump into your goddamn creek,” John shouted. “I’m an Indian. It’s white folks who need to get themselves cleaned up.”
“You’re a real sonovabitch,” Charlie said to John.
“Lorena’s a good woman,” John said, as if he had missed Charlie’s point. “And she’s done a lot for Indian people. But she’s trying to be an Indian, and she’s not. But she’d do anything in the world for anybody. I like her—I’m crazy about her—but I can’t stand some of the people she takes in, all those nice middle-class kids looking for gurus, and the weekend Indians trying to be gurus. There’s always groupies hanging around … Wannabees. You’ll see.”
“You use people,” Charlie said.
“You’re right, I did wrong. Lorena,” John called, “I’m sorry. I’ll be a good boy. We’ll take our baths.”
Charlie helped John to his feet—although Charlie wasn’t in any better shape than John—and they stumbled up the grassy stone and dirt driveway. John led the way past the well-lit house and into the back yard, which looked like it was part of a natural clearing in the woods. Charlie could hear the soft gurgling and splashing of the stream, but he couldn’t see it. He breathed in a wonderfully damp, woody aroma: the smells of moss and soil and trees. Widely spaced birch and pine trees looked silvery in the moonlight.
Suddenly John broke away from Charlie and started singing and dancing and throwing his clothes all over the ground. Buck naked, he ran toward a grove of hemlocks and jumped down the bank and into the stream below. Charlie heard him belly flop into the water. “Come on,” John shouted.
Charlie followed. The stream was about six feet wide and curved into the woods; it looked dark and cold and misty. Charlie remained on the bank, and John stood in the fast-moving water, his hands on his hips, legs apart, as the moonlight turned him to pale stone and shadow. “We’re gonna need soap if we’re gonna smell good,” he shouted loudly enough to be heard at the house. “Now get your goddamn ass in here, Charlie,” he commanded. “It’s not so bad once you’re in.”
That was a lie. The water was icy cold, exhilarating, and sobering. Charlie stepped in cautiously, gasped; and for a few luminous seconds, he was overwhelmed with sensation: the sharp bite of cold water, the shivering night shadows, the shattered mirror surface of the stream reflecting silvery-gray moonlight, John’s face slipping in and out of darkness, changing each time, as if caught by a strobe light … and for those few seconds, Charlie was heyoka. He experienced only the moment. The past had sloughed away like old skin. The future was … nothing and
Charlie was simultaneously an eagle, wings outstretched. A fish. A bull. The light on the water. The chill in the air. The splashing. He was all that until a callow-looking boy of about nineteen appeared with two bars of soap, which he threw to John and Charlie.
After he left, John said, “See what I mean about groupies? He should be in college smoking pot or something, instead of doing errands for Lorena.” John rubbed the large, coarse bar of soap all over himself.
After much splashing and shouting and sobering up, John said, “Damn, that kid didn’t leave us any towels.” Then in a loud voice: “If Lorena doesn’t come right along with some towels, I’m going to walk into the house naked.”
“Oh, no, you’re not,” Lorena said.
“Why you sly old fox,” John said. “I think you’ve been standing around here all this time watching us. I’m going to tell your old man you’re a Peeping Tom.”
“You can tell him whatever you like,” Lorena said. “I’m leaving these clean clothes and towels for both of you. When you’re ready, there’s fresh, hot coffee inside…”
* * *
It was warm and bright and cozy inside the huge kitchen, which had a wood-burning stove side by side with a gas stove. There was an old oak dining table on the far side of the room and a doorway that opened into a living room. In the middle of the living room was a swing for the children; it hung from the high-ceilinged rafters.
Three young people were sitting at the table—two women and the boy who had brought the towels to John and Charlie. They were drinking Lorena’s strong, bitter coffee and eating the remains of a large chocolate cake. They looked wired, as if they were too excited to sleep. Although they were all wearing flannel shirts and faded dungarees, Charlie was certain that the women came from wealthy families. Both of them had almost perfect, even teeth, which Charlie equated as a sure sign of money. The boy, on the other hand, had wide spaces between his teeth. His parents probably worked for a living, Charlie surmised.
Lorena made the introductions: The boy’s name was Carl; the tall, lanky, chestnut-haired woman was Sharry; and the intense, nervous-looking woman was Heather. She had short-cropped black hair, and her name, which made Charlie think of freedom and wildness and open country, didn’t fit her at all. Then Lorena ordered John and Charlie to sit down, and she served them coffee and cut them some cake. The coffee was just what Charlie needed, but the thought of swallowing that cake made him gag—he wasn’t ready for that yet.
John made small talk, and the kids seemed to hang on every word he said—they had obviously been told about what had happened at Sam’s vision-quest. Carl and Sharry kept trying to swing the conversation around to religion. They especially wanted John to talk about yuwipi’s and about how it was in “the old days”. They wanted to hear about vision-quests where medicine men would either hang from the sides of cliffs for days on end, or would be buried alive. John usually persisted, though, in sliding back into small talk, into that smooth and easy, chiding tone of voice that Charlie had heard him use with women before. But John was more animated tonight. He was after something …
Although Charlie still felt chilled from the stream, he was sober and comfortable. He was a bit shaky and had that tickle in his throat, but he could breathe and he wasn’t nauseated. He was tired, dragged-out-exhausted, and he knew he was going to suffer for the beating he was giving his body—he would pay dues for this eventually! I should go to bed, Charlie told himself, but he was wide awake and so nerved-up that everything looked dark and shadowy to him. If he went to bed, he would just lie awake and stare at the ceiling—but if he didn’t get some sleep, he would get the shakes so bad he wouldn’t be able to hold a spoon.
As he sat at the table, finished now with his coffee (and he had even taken a mouthful of cake), he found himself watching Sharry. Charlie began to think that she was pretty in her way, even sexy. She wore a cloth headband, as did Carl, who was sitting beside her—maybe he was her boyfriend. She had such a young, delicate face, and her eyes had a way of narrowing and looking crinkly. Charlie liked that, and he liked the way her mouth would purse. For such a thin girl, she had unusually full, sensual lips. Charlie thought of her as a flower in bloom. She looked so fresh and new. Joline had had that kind of freshness about her, too, but she lost it … and just now Charlie realized how precious it had been.
“You know,” John said, looking intently at Sharry, “when a man’s heyoka, he can do anything he wants. He can be perverted and filthy and just plain bad, and yet he’s holy all the time.”
Sharry looked at Carl and then turned back to John, giving him her full attention. Carl moved slightly closer to her.
“And you never can believe anything a heyoka says,” John continued, “because they lie about everything. Isn’t that right, Lorena?”
“I think all of you would be better off going to bed and not listening to this broken-down old drunk of a medicine man,” Lorena said, carrying a large bowl of berry soup to the table. “You want some of this?” she asked John.
“I want some dog first,” John said.
“You want what?” Charlie asked.
“It’s probably going to make you sick,” Lorena said.
“That’s what I want, is there any left?”
“I’ll get you a piece from the pot, but…”
“Did you eat a piece of dog?” John asked Sharry.
“Yeah, she ate it,” said Carl. “We all did … one of the harder things we had to swallow.”
“Dog meat’s not hard,” Charlie said, laughing, mocking.
“Well, we did it for the ceremony,” Heather said. She was chain-smoking cigarettes, which she kept in a bead-worked pouch. Charlie smoked one of her cigarettes and started coughing again. He embarrassed himself by having to spit up in the sink. No one said a word while he was coughing and spitting, which made it even worse. When Charlie finished and sat back down, Heather said, “Sam didn’t tell us at the time that we could have made an offering of the meat to the spirits and wouldn’t’ve had to eat it at all.”
John laughed at that and said, “Dog soup is good for you, part of the ceremony.”
Charlie couldn’t help but stare at Sharry. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and he could see the outlines of her small breasts right through her shirt. Charlie usually preferred women with large breasts, but he felt a sudden flush of desire for her, for her youth and innocence. It was overpowering. It was like being sixteen again, when his urges were so strong that he had to masturbate several times a day. Uncomfortable, he pressed his legs together. He thought about Stephie, his oldest daughter. Sharry’s probably the same age as Stephie, Charlie told himself. It would be like fucking my own daughter, for Chrissakes. She’s a baby … Those thoughts brought on the guilt again, and more embarrassment, as if everyone in the room could see just what he was thinking.
But Sharry wasn’t even looking at Charlie. She was too taken up with John. She had a look that said if he would’ve asked her to eat shit, she would have happily done it. Sonovabitch …
Just then Janet, Whiteshirt’s wife, made her appearance. She walked into the room with a piece of grayish meat in a soup bowl. The meat was in a dirty-looking broth. There was skin on that meat and even some hair, and it made Charlie sick to look at it. He was glad to see Janet; but Jesus, he thought, not dog, for Chrissakes. “You’re not going to eat that in front of me,” Charlie told John.
“I sure as hell am,” John said. “It’s part of my religion. Don’t you have any respect for a man’s religion?” Then he looked at Janet, as if nothing had happened at Sam’s vision-quest, as if nothing had come between Joe Whiteshirt and himself in the sweat-lodge, and said, “Isn’t that right, hon?”
“I knew you’d be coming around,” Janet said. She looked as if she’d just awakened from a deep sleep, but her high cheekbones and deep-set eyes could easily give that impression. She had the kind of strong, implacable face that could look mean, yet could also radiate serenity. Charlie liked this woman, had liked her from the first time they met when he was coughing and she gave him sage. She was the only stranger at the vision-quest who had paid any real attention to him. He felt sympathetic toward her, even though he didn’t know her from beans. She had a darkness in her, a certain wildness that was at odds with her domesticity; and that attracted him. He felt as if she were family … a dark sister. He sensed that the darkness inside her was the same as the stuff inside him, the stuff that made him so angry and depressed that he’d chew up his own family and spit them out screaming.
“… I sort of expected you to make the yuwipi,” Janet said to John. “I kept looking for you, figuring you’d show up. I been waiting for you all night—in between cat naps. How’s that for faith?”
“You have no business being here,” John said.
“I knew you’d say that,” Janet replied. “But it’s not what you think.”
“Don’t matter,” John said, as he started to eat the meat off the bone, pulling it away with his teeth.
“I can’t watch this,” Charlie said, getting up. He felt queasy. It disturbed him—the notion that John was almost a cannibal. “You shouldn’t be eating something like that,” he continued. “It’s wrong. I don’t care what your religion says, it’s just not right. I can abide a lot of things, but not that. Eating a dog is like eating something that’s human.”
“Charlie,” Janet said, walking over to him and taking his arm. She pulled him back down into his seat and then rested her hands on his shoulders, calming him. “Give us a few minutes, and I’ll tell you about the dog. I love dogs almost more than people, sometimes.” Then she said to John, “You are a real bastard, aren’t you. Couldn’t you tell him what’s going on? I thought he’s supposed to be your friend?”
“He is,” John said. “But fuck him.”
“I should’ve expected as much from you,” Janet said. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down, pulling a chair between John and Sharry. “I couldn’t stay up there. Joe was going crazy, and he scares me. I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. I care about him, and I’d do anything for him, but he’s into something bad, something dangerous. I’m sure he’s been doing medicine. Maybe it’s the woman he’s living with now, I don’t know. But he’s doing something. What happened in the purification sweat … that wasn’t Joe Whiteshirt. It was like another man.”
“Dog tastes good,” John said. “Charlie, you want a piece?”
“Stop acting like an asshole,” Janet said. “We’re in trouble.”
“Who was your yuwipi man?” John asked, pushing away his bowl of dog and dunking a piece of bread into the sweet berry soup. “I don’t know of any around here, except maybe Joe and that skinny Crow guy who dresses up like a goddamn stockbroker.”
“Sam did it,” Janet said.
“Why didn’t you just have Joe do it, or maybe Lorena could’ve done it. What the hell, maybe women’s lib should take its shot at traditional Indian religion.” Then after a pause he said, “You’re fucking wrong to do that!” There was hate in his face suddenly, burning, just as it had been when he’d paced around in his furnished room.
Charlie could in that instant see his strength, could see him as a leader, as a medicine man, but Jesus Lord the bastard was crazy. “Sam should have been up on the hill, not baby-sitting you and the rest of the honky-Indians,” John continued. “He had no business doing a yuwipi tonight. It’s a wonder that the spirits didn’t kill him dead … and the rest of you, too.”
“Sam did get hurt,” Janet said. “His chest and legs are all black and blue.”
John started laughing. “So the spirits did kick the shit out of him.”
“The spirits were there,” Sharry said, tentatively, as if she knew she shouldn’t be speaking, that she shouldn’t even be there at all. But she went on. “Everybody could feel them … and see them as lights.”
“I felt something move behind me,” Carl said, “and I felt something against my skin. And then I realized that I was sitting against the wall, and there couldn’t be anything behind me but spirits…”
“What’d they tell you?” John asked Janet.
“They were just angry, that’s all.”
Then John started laughing, and he said, “None of them really saw or felt anything, did they, Charlie? It’s all bullshit, isn’t it, Charlie?”
