The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto Read online

  COURTNEY PELTDOWNE, the one they made the word svelte up for. And lithe. And lissom. All Indian black hair and painted-on jeans, pacing Fool's Hip in her cfm shoes, ashing in the thumbhole of whatever ball's handy, knowing her dad won't call her on it, because then she could rebuild William and Sherman around the holy Tecumsah he claims to remember from his vision, tell the skittish clan-bowlers that that's where he is every dusk—trying to sing the old general up, conjure the Indian Wars all over again. Which is worse than just being a carryover Catholic.

  Not that she ever would. Not that she'd ever let Mary Boy know she wouldn't. Fool's Hip is about the last place she has left. Outside its cinderblock walls she's ordinary, one of five million other Indian women. Used to, she could walk into any dancehall in the Dakotas and pretty much shut the place down just by weaving her way to the bar. She was everything exotic; white men held their breath in her presence, passed out at her feet, and she walked over them. Now the closest thing she has to a white man is LP—Scab Boy, she calls him, because of how he looked when he hired on, half his body raw and inflamed, still gauzed under his coveralls.

  All these Indians.

  God.

  Everything that used to set Courtney apart is standard now—skin, hair, mannerisms; history. She goes to the exchange and sees herself behind the counter, in line, in the parking lot, and sometimes has to run away. To Fool's Hip, to Scab Boy. To talk to him in sultrysad tones and mouth her cigarette until his coveralls become a tent, the sign for her to spill her drink, watch him try to clean it up without swinging his hard-on into the side of the table. It's the small amusements, she tells herself, but knows it's more: the first night after Mary Boy took her key away, she found herself standing at the entry door, cupping her hands against the glass, the arcade darkened, Scab Boy's closet a rectangle of light, thicker at the bottom because there wasn't carpet anymore, but tile.

  She didn't ring the buzzer, just watched, let her hands relax until she could see herself in the dark glass—thirty-four and fiercely beautiful, standing out in the cold to monitor the nocturnal activities of a broompusher who doesn't even have a second change of clothes, who talks down his sleeve and then writes deep into the morning on notebooks he's obviously keeping in locker 32b. Everybody knows. Until the dishes of lunchtime, the downside of his right hand will be smudged so heavy with pencil lead, it'll rub off on the video games, like he's leaving his shadow behind. For Mary Boy to find. But Mary Boy never does. It's always gone before he gets there—on the same napkin as Courtney's lipstick. Because Scab Boy can't get caught: he might be writing about her, Courtney. Which is why she supplies him with notebooks pilfered from the dock of the exchange, why she corners him throughout the day, supplying him with details about herself. How Peltdowne is just what her great-grandmother's name translated out as on the 1907 rolls. How she was a vegetarian until Indian Days started fourteen years ago, and salad was suddenly Anglo, not on any of the menus.

  For two weeks she starved, living on beer and frybread with everybody else, but finally, alone after Mary Boy had left the trailer for the morning, she pinched the edges off of the deer sausage he'd left on the counter until there was nothing left, and then she was defrosting everything in the freezer, slabs of new buffalo dissolving in her mouth, grease running down her chin like the bow and arrow days.

  God.

  Sometimes she has to tell herself not to laugh. To take all this seriously. But sometimes it's better to just pretend, too. That this really is all Mary Boy's dream. But then she's there again, at the locked door of Fool's Hip, her hands cupped to the glass, and next she's walking away, the box of notebooks behind her, fluttering in the wind. And at night the Territories are so empty. She understands why Scab Boy never goes outside. She walks along the fence all the way back to the trailer, holding on so she won't disappear, and when the fence is gone she runs from mile marker to mile marker, telling herself not to look to either side, not to believe the stories—that the Old Ones are out there on their unshod horses, with their lances and their scalps and their downturned mouths. Watching. Waiting. Not saying anything yet.

  But they know, can see Courtney in that Havre bar when the radio said it, about the Conservation Act, can see how she instinctively cast around for another Indian, to share this with, found herself alone. Made do eventually with the German roughneck, whose fingers were still showing blue on her side five days later, but at the moment she didn't know what he was capable of, just draped herself over him, paying her own quarters for the songs, the bartender angling the floodlight onto them, this one last dance.

  It was worth it.

  NICKEL EYE, Salishan, primary suspect in the disappearance of thirty-nine Anglo tourists, one at a time, three a year since he showed up in the Territories. Fool's Hip is his running alibi, though—the permanent slump in his back from sitting at the bar day in day out, how the tips of his unbraided hair have taken on the citrus-smell of whatever LP uses to wipe the counter down. His acquired ability to tell how many pins a bowler's knocked down, going solely by the sound they make, crashing up the alley, into the kitchen, over the counter, washing over him.

  He doesn't pay for his draft with dentalia or blankets or hides, either, like the rest of the Skins, but with crisp Anglo bills. Which is why the tribal police questioned him about the missing tourists. It was a Thursday; one of them had a crackling radio squelched into some pocket, and they both had big, obvious sidearms.

  ‘So,’ Detective Blue Plume led off, doing something official with his chrome-tipped boots, leaning over Nickel Eye's section of the bar, ‘between us, where you keeping them?’

  Nickel Eye shrugged, pretended not to notice Special Agent Chassis Jones at his drinking arm. They had him surrounded. ‘Them?’

  Chassis Jones' face creaked when she smiled. ‘Full sentences, please, Nikolai.’

  ‘It's Nickel Eye.’

  ‘Nikolai,’ she repeated, staring him down in the mirror.

  Nickel Eye shook his head. ‘Didn't quite get that,’ he said, moving his mouth more than he had to. ‘Could you rephrase it in a full sentence maybe?’ The curved rim of his mug almost fit his smile. Blue Plume's boot rotated his stool away from Chassis Jones.

  ‘Whatever,’ Blue Plume said about the name. ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘About ‘them.’’

  Blue Plume nodded.

  ‘With a longer sentence, too,’ Chassis Jones added.

  Nickel Eye winked at Mary Boy, said ‘nyet.’ But Mary Boy didn't smile back, just directed Nickel Eye back into the interrogation. Chassis Jones was waiting, ‘Listen Nickel Eye,’ she said. ‘We can do this the easy way or—’

  ‘You mean you can still even use that line?’ Nickel Eye asked, and when Blue Plume stood to his full height he waved him back down, spoke to him instead of Chassis Jones. ‘Between us,’ he said in his best stage whisper, ‘where am I keeping who?’

  ‘Whom,’ Blue Plume corrected, ‘it's where are you keeping whom.’

  Nickel Eye leaned back, crossed his ankles. ‘That's pretty much what I want to know, Detective.’

  ‘You're going to pull an eyebrow muscle like that,’ Chassis Jones said.

  ‘Those thirty-three American tourists,’ Blue Plume said. ‘That's who.’

  ‘Whom,’ Nickel Eye tried, but Chassis Jones told him not to get cute. He told her it was too late, and maybe he was a trickster anyway, right?

  ‘Like we don't hear that one every Saturday night.’

  Blue Plume rolled his eyes.

  ‘But really,’ Nickel Eye said. ‘How many seventh cavalrymen does it take to screw in a lightbulb?’

  ‘We're not that easy,’ Chassis Jones said back.

  ‘And it's not late enough in the afternoon for me to say thirty-nine, Chassis.’

  ‘Special Agent Jones, thank you. For giving yourself away too.’

  Nickel Eye made a show of looking at his watch: 4:48. ‘Oops,’ he slurred, then tried to make the cut-off sign to Blue Plume, where
Chassis Jones wouldn't see, meaning it takes no seventh cavalrymen to screw a lightbulb into place. After some official eye contact with Chassis Jones, Blue Plume nodded back to Nickel Eye that he got it, yes. But he wasn't laughing.

  ‘Only the kidnapper would know it was thirty-nine,’ Chassis Jones said. ‘Textbook.’

  ‘Kidnapper?’

  ‘You used the present tense. ‘Where am I keeping them.‘‘

  ‘Shit,’ Nickel Eye said, ruminating his beer. ‘I thought I was just a damn serial killer. Man. What do you feed Americans anyway? Hypothetically, I mean. Wait, wait. Land, right? An acre for breakfast, two for lunch…?’

  ‘I don't expect you to tell me where they are,’ Chassis Jones said, packing up.

  ‘But you'll be watching me,’ Nickel Eye said, wagging a finger between her and Blue Plume. ‘You two ace detec—…’

  ‘No,’ Blue Plume said, ‘just go about your daily business.’

  Here Nickel Eye held his beer up to the light, toasted them out the door, whistled for Mary Boy and wiped his forehead. Behind him, Denim Horse knocked down a spare—6910, from catching the headpin at too steep an angle it sounded like, hooking too sharp to the left, hanging it all out over the gutter, showing off: Denim Horse's weakness. Courtney must be in the pit.

  Nickel Eye knows them all so well, Mary Boy included. Their game is for Nickel Eye to order a beer on the house, for Mary Boy to shake his head no, then for Nickel Eye to straighten his BDU jacket at the collar, threaten to pack up his dolls and go home. It's not like he doesn't have the money, though, which finally pulled the tribal dicks—as he was already calling them—back up for part 2 of interrogation 1. They caught him just after lunch, so it was all much more casual; he called them Dick and Miss Dick, and they called him Killer, let him sit up front, shoulder to shoulder.

  ‘Where to?’ he asked, looking side to side at each of them, and then they were there, Broken Leg, a prairie-dog town that drifted for miles.

  ‘Target practice,’ Blue Plume said, then fastdrew on one just as it peeked out of its hole, blew it six feet in the air, the highest it had ever been, probably.

  ‘Miss Dick…?’ Nickel Eye asked, voice betraying him, but Chassis Jones was already lining up on one over the hood. Nickel Eye leaned on the trunk just as she was breathing out, pulled the shot high. A brown fan rose behind the prairie dog.

  ‘I could do this all day,’ he said to her, then quit smiling all at once: the butt of Blue Plume's pistol was suddenly and undeniably in his hand. It weighed as much as his whole arm.

  ‘Your turn,’ he said, but Nickel Eye shook his head no.

  Chassis Jones lifted his gun arm for him when he couldn't, from the elbow. ‘Just the same as with the tourists, Killer,’ she said, ‘go on. It's easy.’

  She pushed him out, towards them.

  ‘No,’ he was still saying.

  ‘So it's not like the tourists?’ Blue Plume prompted, and Nickel Eye shook his head no, no, even said it: that these prairie dogs hadn't done anything wrong, see?

  Blue Plume's recording unit clicked off, satisfied, and the sound pushed Nickel Eye around, the pistol still at arm-level. He was holding it loosely, unsure what he was going to do. What he could do: anything. Chassis Jones wavered in the peep sight, the bead resting heavy on her sternum, but Nickel Eye couldn't do it finally, couldn't pull the trigger, was suddenly afraid of the pistol kicking up through the heel of his hand and into his ulna, his own sternum. ‘No,’ he said again, then started backing away, stumbling into hole after hole, finally turning to run. When the Dick car was a speck, he dropped Blue Plume's pistol into a hole, scaring an owl awake, and by the time he sidled back up to the bar at Fool's Hip he was shiny with sweat, holding his stomach, shaking.

  He looked to Mary Boy and Mary Boy looked back, topped off a mug, knocked on the bar for the first time ever, but Nickel Eye had the stomach of his shirt too full with blind prairie-dog pups to raise the beer. And he was yelling, anyway—the end of the joke, that it didn't take any seventh cavalrymen to screw in a lightbulb, because they don't need any goddamn lightbulbs in hell.

  Two weeks later, Special Agent Chassis Jones went missing.

  DENIM HORSE, the kind of Lakota that would have been kidnapped for the movies twenty years ago, just on principle, just because his black braids and chiseled face fit with the shirtless Indians of romance-book covers. Now, instead of being a movie star, he's a bowling pro. He does stand by the box fan sometimes, though, down by lane 15, arms crossed, eyes fixed on some middle distance, as if he was born too late, shouldn't really be here. The tourists can't get enough of him. He hasn't bought his own lunch in ten months, since before LP started working at Fool's Hip, and then it was just to prove to Courtney that he could, yes. He wasn't just some pow-wow circuit reject. She pretended not to notice; Denim Horse pretended not to care. The anthropologist on the Aborigine Hotline said it was a courting ritual of the Plain Indian.

  ‘Plains,’ Denim Horse corrected at three American dollars a minute, fed into the payphone one quarter at a time, and then for free the anthropologist shook his head audibly, no: plain. Denim Horse was still flipping off the mouthpiece of the receiver when Cat Stand walked through the double doors in slow motion, trailing Naitche, her whipthin son, five years old, six maybe, his big eyes cataloging everything in an autistic glance.

  ‘Tell me about her,’ the anthropologist said, hungry, but Denim Horse just lowered the phone, reaching for more change, uncounted mounds of it.

  He's not even sure when that was, anymore. A year? A month? The days began smearing together about then. He went what felt like three weeks without saying anything to anybody, anyway—just nodding down the lane for the American women bowlers, correcting stances with the hand signals they thought were authentic, keeping Cat and her blistering white teeth in his peripheral vision, where she'd already been for twenty-odd years. The buses pulled in, left again, and still she remained, not saying anything either, Naitche haunting the arcade, living on refresco and dried elk, straight from the jar. Mary Boy let it go. There was something about her, about them.

  ‘So why doesn't she talk, kimo?’ the anthropologist nudged Denim Horse, and Denim Horse dropped another quarter, watched Cat across the pit and whispered that he'd grown up with her the first six years of his life, down around Eufala. The anthropologist tried to say something about how life-histories weren't really his department, but Denim Horse was already rolling, desperate, detailing how his dad followed work to Arizona, brought the child Denim Horse was with him, brought him to the Indian rodeo in Aztec eight years later where he caught up with her again, Cat, only now they were both grown, fourteen at least, and looking at each other with different eyes after the final go-round.

  She was famous by then, too—the Lactose Tolerant Indian, on all the milk containers, in beaded buckskin—so everybody recognized her. Denim Horse was the only one who knew her well enough to lead her out into the scrub with a blanket, though, talk her shirt off, tell her he'd been thinking about her for eight years now, that it must be true what everybody said about her when she was young, being passed around from relative to relative: that she wasn't like the rest of them. Cat shrugged in a way that her pants fell off, Denim Horse's too. It was second nature now, but then, that was the first time. For both of them. The contract stock snorting and stomping twenty yards away. Denim Horse catching one of his friends' hands reaching in out of the night, to their blanket, then retracting soundlessly.

  It had left a glass. Of white. For the Lactose Tolerant Indian.

  ‘Thomas,’ Cat said, his name back then, and Denim Horse smiled, studied the simple pattern of the blanket they were on, looked back up. Cat had the glass in both hands. Cat for Catherine, he thought. Thomas and Catherine, Catherine and Thomas.

  ‘Shit heads,’ he said, about the milk, his friends, the rodeo, the way her eyes were already wet from this joke she couldn't get away from. ‘You don't have to,’ he told her, but Cat just shrugged, held the glass
up to her face. It took her breath away, the milk, and she looked deeper into it, through the bottom of the glass and into the showbarn, whatever kind of cow could have milk this white. This hot. Her eyes glistened with shame and something else. ‘Wha—?’ Denim Horse started to ask, but now she was panning up over the rim of the glass, into Denim Horse, just like she did in the commercials he knew by heart. Like this was for him, like she wanted him to see.

  ‘No,’ he said, because something was wrong, but before his arm could cross the distance between them she had the glass tilted back. When it was gone she dropped it, wiped the back of her mouth with her forearm, and a single line of watery blood snaked down from her right nostril, around her lip.

  ‘Cat?’ Denim Horse asked, ‘Catherine…?’ and Cat smiled at this, her name, then collapsed backwards, her naked chest already convulsing.

  ‘It wasn't milk,’ the hotline anthropologist figured, putting the quarters in from his end now, and Denim Horse shook his head no, it wasn't: more like bleach. His friends were shit heads, he said again.

  ‘So it's not that she doesn't talk,’ the anthropologist said, ‘it's that she can't,’ and Denim Horse shrugged. She'd known it wasn't milk. That was the thing. And his name—Thomas. It was the last word she'd said, and no matter the number of white women he got to say it too, under him, straddling him, in the living room the bedroom the bathroom, her voice was still there, always there—Thomas, the hiss under his fourteen-pound custom ball as it leans out over the gutter, spinning hard the opposite way, trying to get something back, fine grey ash slinging up evenly from the thumbhole, the pins aware enough in their wooden way to lie down for him. But still he breaks them. The day Cat Stand walked in he splintered twenty-eight in twelve frames, some at the neck, some down the middle, some the old way. It was the closest Fool's Hip had ever been to a perfect game. Lane 15 trembled with anticipation, the whole alley holding its breath for him, but then Denim Horse just stood there on the brink, at the foul line, until finally Mary Boy sidled up beside him, said to take it home maybe, this wasn't how a professional did it.