The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto Read online

  In her cup is a silver bullet. She spits it into her palm.

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  She looks to Tonto.

  ‘it's real,’ he says, ‘that part.’

  ‘Hi-ho Si—’ the Lone Ranger starts, but Tonto slaps the ground with his palm, stopping him mid-sentence, his arm on the way up.

  The rowels of one of his spurs is left spinning.

  Tonto pinches the bridge of his nose hard.

  The girl closes her hand around the bullet, holds it close to her chest.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, then looks up to the Lone Ranger, standing over her. Behind him one of the horses drums its hoof on the ground and the Lone Ranger moves the arm by his side, straightening it out behind him.

  Again; again.

  The girl smiles, sweeping her eyes across the dark prairie to see who might be watching.

  Tonto shakes his head, leans back against his bedroll.

  ‘What is it already?’ he says, not quite grinning around his cup, and, her voice small like a question, she says it, and the night pares itself back down again, to a campfire, a domino mask, two white eyes looking out of it in terror.

  BLUE MOONS

  cortez (my father's armor)

  Picture a boy and he's running. Everything washed out like a memory: grass the color of beer; his house stained with it

  He swings onto the porch and lets the blind dog smell him.

  In the living room the horizontal hold on the television is shot, and the picture rolls up and up like smoke and he watches it breathing hard.

  Behind him the blind dog has its nose to the screen door, its marbled eyes dry, unblinking.

  He closes the door on them but it won't: the hinges have been Kicked in. There's rawhide there now, tied to something deep in the modular wall and then to the screws in the door, backed out halfway, just far enough to tie to.

  Is this how the old Indians did it?

  He lifts the door into its rectangle of light lines the deadbolt up.

  The house is quiet; wrong.

  He won't ever forget this.

  In the thick amber curtains, backlit by the sun, is a shape, a form, a man.

  Neither of them moves.

  Neither of them says anything.

  From the back of the house-his mother's room-the floor creaks; a footstep.

  He turns to it, opens his mouth, then turns back to the shape.

  Father.

  He's home.

  Using the leg of the kitchen table that comes off, he lifts the curtain gauze away, falls back into the couch swinging.

  It's a suit of armor; a husk.

  He narrows his eyes at it, doesn't say Dad. Hasn't ever seen him really, just heard him when he comes through. Seen the silver cans when he's gone, accepted the gifts he leaves on the coffee table, the kitchen counter. Behind the curtains.

  The commercial on the television is a milk commercial, that girl. He turns it off after touching her face with his finger-a kiss-then stands before the armor, looking up.

  It's golden, powerful. The gift this time.

  He smiles, looks down the hall.

  Thank you. It's exactly.

  Touching it with his fingertips, he's Incan.

  Holding it around the waist, the side of his face pressed to its stomach, he doesn't know what he is.

  He lowers it to the carpet gently, as if it could shatter Imagines his father dragging it across three states for him, day and night. No, wearing it. Looking down at his poker cards and then up at the conquistadors sitting around the table with him, taking them for everything they have.

  He opens the face part and it's empty.

  He rolls it over and the back opens up.

  He puts in one leg, then the next, and it comes apart at the waist. Leaving just the breastplate part.

  He crawls in anyway, into the fetal position, and closes his eyes, wakes hours later, the metal the same temperature as his body.

  People are screaming around him.

  His mother and father, spilled out of the bedroom. Larger than the bedroom.

  They haven't seen him.

  Glass crashes; the rest of the legs come off the Kitchen table.

  Eyes closed or open it doesn't matter.

  And the words are all the same.

  He feels the armored legs get Kicked away, into the halfwall between the Kitchen and the living room.

  They still haven't seen him.

  Are still screaming.

  Mother; Father, Dad.

  If he cries it doesn't matter. As long as he's quiet. He pulls his ears down into his shoulders when they talk about him. Is running again.

  Out the opposite armhole he can see the refrigerator open finally, the beer pour out.

  It's almost over.

  All that's left is his mother, thrown against the back door, then his father's legs leaving by the back door, closing it on his mother's hair Her arms won't reach the Knob, either

  They never see him. That's the thing.

  An hour later the front door crashes in again, the rawhide hinges giving because the deadbolt won't.

  Dad.

  His mother looks up at him, and they stare, and then she stands with a tearing sound, scalping herself, her hair locked in the back door, blood trailing down her face, and his father Kneels breathing by the breastplate, unhooks the helmet, watching her all the time, and puts it on, says something from its confines, then crashes into the thin wall of the living room four times headfirst, exploding out into the night.

  His mother is unconscious by the time he calls the ambulance, his father three states away.

  They never see him.

  vd (my mother's name)

  Picture a boy and he's running. All the cars of the parking lot nosed up to the community center like horses, hunched away from the cold; still steaming.

  Inside is a pandance.

  He stands at the door, breathing hard.

  In front of him is an old man in a red bandanna and a folding chair. Ninety-two years of sunlight folded into the skin of his face, eyes cloudy from it.

  ‘Yeah?’ the old man says, then stamps the boy's hand Indian, ushers him in. His mother is here. That's what he heard, why he was running in the heavy armor

  He doesn't say her name, though. Knows better.

  And no one can see his armor

  Mother

  He looks for her through slits in the visor, his eyes narrowed, but she's every woman walking by with a drink held near her collarbone, a black wig; a certain sadness.

  Six times he sees her, and six times he follows, trying hard to bend his knees like everyone else, to not look mechanical. But that only makes it worse.

  The drum circles he stumbles into pause until he leaves, then match his footsteps, making them larger.

  A bundle of spent fancydancers hears him coming, starts pointing to him with their chins, smiling through their feathers.

  He locks his arms and elbows when they touch him, so they carry him through the crowd at shoulder-level, passing him from dancer to dancer, bird to bird, and at their cooler they tilt him back, pour beer into his helmet; laugh.

  Their names are jokes, looted from fashion magazines and movie reviews.

  He remembers every one of them.

  Up in the metal rafters ten year olds are smoking, their ash settling on the people below, coloring them grey and immaterial.

  The boy smiles.

  Staggers from the dancers. First just away, then against the bleachers: up, up. As high as he can get.

  The children in the rafters are drawn to his armor

  They pass him a cigarette, point with their eyes to the next target, the tall dancer in dyed blue feathers.

  Insert here one cigarette, one finger, one tap; a breath of ash.

  Minutes later the dancer looks up into the darkness and the children all become rusted iron, just part of the structure. Still though, an arrow sails up between them, punctures the roof. Fiberglass spins down, all the s
moke in the place rushing past it at once.

  The bow clatters to the ground, the dancer walking striding away from it. Towards the wooden stands on the opposite side. Towards a woman. Her

  She's made of brown paper

  Everytime he stands in line at a grocery store now he thinks of that. Brown paper and black silk.

  VD.

  He rolls his helmet off his head to see her better To warn her All the children turn to watch her. It's like watching birds watch a cat.

  One of them stands as the dancer parts the cluster of people just below her

  The boy is breathing hard now.

  He tries to run down the bleachers, but will never make it. Instead he steps out of the leg armor, takes the hands the children are offering him, but the breastplate is too heavy for them.

  ‘C'mon,’ they say, biting cigarettes in half; coughing black.

  And so he takes the breastplate off, swings arm over arm four times, as much as he's got. After that he just hangs naked from an I-beam.

  Miles below, everyone is singing at once together, the Love Song of Nathaniel Hybird, a favorite this year

  His mother is tapping her foot with it, too. Looking at him like it means something.

  The song?

  Her foot?

  Mom. Mother.

  Even if he had a voice.

  Even if he could swing across the rafters to her

  Even if she was really looking at him. Saying goodbye.

  He lets go with his fingers, pads into the bleachers, taking the fall at all four points, the wooden seat rushing up at his face; trembling. With sound.

  He smiles, lowers his head to it, his ear, to listen to the code she's tapping out with her foot. To pick her footstep out from all the rest

  When he stands, though, she's gone. Everyone is.

  All that's left is the breastplate.

  He walks down to it, and instead of lifting it over his head, crawls into it like a turtle and pokes his head out the neckhole, wearing it backwards; looking both ways slowly. He crawls like that out the door, each step testing the ground, taking him that much farther away.

  On the back of his hand in red ink is in dio–in god.

  It's a message from her

  He retraces it every night for months.

  naitche (my inner papoose)

  Picture a boy and he's running. The Territories set up around him like dominoes, a house of cards; a labyrinth.

  Over the years his copper shell has weathered down to faded tan coveralls.

  His left side is on fire, too. He clutches it, slows to a walk, picks through Broken Leg sober It's the worse way. One of the prairie dogs rises from its hole with a shiny pistol, motioning the boy who's not anymore on.

  Keep it moving, Keep it moving.

  He does, one foot after the other, one shoe then the next, and that night he understands why you mate campfires when you don't really need them: to have something in the center, a focus. Without it you're looking out into the darkness all the time. Over your shoulder

  He talks to himself out loud in two voices, to fool anybody listening, and then in the morning almost forgets which he is, was, whatever.

  By late afternoon he sees it, sitting squat and rectangular on the horizon. All bricks and paint and bad ideas.

  It's like the booth he's been in for two years, just bigger, and on its side.

  He approaches on the road.

  A coyote pads away grinning.

  He opens his mouth to yell to it, say something, but his voice is gone.

  There by the road is a man.

  The boy who isn't approaches walking sideways, never looking directly in the ditch, but then he does, and has to stand over him; it.

  The man's eyes are marbled grey, the skin around them pale from wearing sunglasses.

  On his shirt is a whistle.

  Under the whistle is a strip of paper.

  The boy shakes his head no, no, then looks fast to the fast road behind him, but it's empty. But he watches it, breathing hard.

  The first thing he picks up is the gun. So the prairie dogs won't get it, make an army: steal the Territories back.

  The second thing is the note.

  The third is the whistle.

  The whistle he puts in his mouth and breathes through; blows through. It's shrill and loud and no birds answer, no Warriors rise from the ground to run bleachers. Except him, dancing from foot to foot in the cold, staring at the sun, trying to fold it all into his face too, his eyes, so he won't have to see this; be here.

  The note is decayed by the wind already.

  On the front side it says

  had life rotten

  nod at the rifle.

  It's Algonquin for goodbye.

  He eats it, swallows just as the door of the place opens, the pins crashing over the grass to him.

  The last thing he does is throw the gun back down.

  But it's too late for that.

  He doesn't look up, instead stands in place and backs into himself, until he's staring out of the pit at his mother again. But she has her back to him. Her hair like black silk, her form perfect, advancing for him in stages, in frames, until her release. She holds it, holds it, and then the whole place comes crashing down when her ball reaches the end of the alley, opening up a hole. Somebody stepping through.

  RED DAWN

  PINK EYE was all the rage. All the Councilmen had it for the tournament. They were so Indian the anthropologists launched themselves past with catapults, shutters clicking. It was like a plague of locusts. They didn't even look up, though, didn't even smile. The way they held their shoulders said they'd seen it all before, but they hadn't. Not Fool's Hip anyway.

  Nickel Eye was standing beside me, nursing a toothpick.

  He named them as they pulled in: Double Clutch, the Lumbee mechanic; Gooseneck, the onetime trucker; Big Hair, mother of none; Lead Foot, the occasional smuggler; Sister Venetia, the blind one out of Thermal Illinois; Last Success, the misplaced Yankton; Bat Lashes, the ex-actress.

  ‘Seven,’ I said. Like the sins.

  LP Deal ran past, stooping over for rocks to sling at the flying anthropologists, and Nickel Eye handed him a metal helmet. LP Deal took it in stride, threw so hard the forehead of his golden helmet nearly kissed the caliche of the parking lot, but it was just a gesture: they had only been within range for as long as it took the Councilmen to wait out their dust cloud, open the doors of their long cars, and walk across the parking lot into Fool's Hip.

  Mary Boy was holding the door open for them, his mirrored shades impervious to the thousand tiny suns of the anthropologists' cameras. Sister Venetia ran her hand over the raised skin of his tattoo, then tasted her fingertips. Double Clutch handed his equipment bag to LP Deal. Lead Foot memorized the parking lot, already mapping a getaway. Gooseneck shook Nickel Eye's hand, then touched my hair like Last Success was elbowing him to. I lifted my chin away, though, watched the anthropologists landing a quarter mile off, the parachutes on the backs of their chairs billowing over Broken Leg.

  ‘Don't let them build anything there,’ Nickel Eye said.

  I might have been holding his hand then, I don't know.

  He kept looking to the roof.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  The anthropologists had been that high, though. Meaning there are pictures of it all somewhere; proof. The anthropologists carried it back to America for us—breaking their chairs down into go-carts and driving fast for the border, leaving one of their kind with his leg in a hole, the prairie-dog people already working on it.

  ‘Your eyes,’ Nickel Eye said then, tapping his own.

  I had my sunglasses off.

  My eyes.

  The anthropologist screamed.

  Nickel Eye raised his hand; mine was around it, attached somehow. Handcuffed. My handcuffs. From the locker at the station.

  He formed my fingers into a pistol, lined up on the khaki shirt, made the
sound with his mouth.

  The anthropologist fell over, shot.

  Nickel Eye blew smoke from under my fingernail.

  Soon I was the only one out there. And both my hands were cuffed together.

  I approached the slumped anthropologist, touched him with the toe of my shoe. He groaned. In his utility belt was a survival kit in molded plastic, like a Halloween costume. I toed it out, lost it down another hole and dived down after it, leading with both hands, the chain between them flashing.

  In the hole were two things: the kit and my pistol.

  I brought them both up.

  Nickel Eye had told me this somehow. That my pistol would be here. That I could go now.

  But I didn't.

  The kit was up-to-date, too. Had the standard issue eye drops that were supposed to allow the stranded anthropologist to walk back to America unmolested. The eye drops were red dye suspended in a saline solution.

  There are ways, I said to myself, face tilted back for the drops. There are always ways.

  I walked into Fool's Hip crying blood. Just another Indian.

  The two photographs LP Deal had left in the seat with his packet of papers were of upper arms. One his, one Naitche's. On each there were bruise-colored fingernail impressions—a line of half moons, curved like the lunar track, even: rising, rising, falling; four stages, eight, a circle. A story in pictures.

  The idea, I think, was that just as VD had grabbed his arm once, Cat Stand was grabbing Naitche's.

  It was a third-party neglect report, form 2299A.

  And he had turned it in to the proper authorities.

  And there was nothing I could do with it.

  LP Deal stopped mopping to mark my entrance. It was like the play was still going on. Like we had all been conscripted as actors.

  I avoided his eyes, walked mechanically past the concession stand, my wrists together in front of me, the chain in my palms.

  On the table where I usually sat with Eddie Dial was a note: you had called again. On the payphone. For Miss Dick.

  I closed my eyes, opened them. Should have known.

  ‘What?’ Eddie Dial asked, sitting down, shaking out one of my cigarettes.

  He was the one person in the place who could tell Denim Horse from Back Iron if they didn't want you to. My folder was full of notes like this: Eddie Dial knows Thomas from Michael; Cat doesn't didn't NH remembers LP; LP remembers himself as NH; Mary Boy was on Owen82's side before he was Owen82; Bacteen never built his straw man.