Indian Country Noir (Akashic Noir) (27 page)

"I don't drink anymore."

"That so? Well, good for you, chief."

"You want the gate loaded?"

"I'll think about it. I have some things to get inside. I'm
leaving my truck here, okay?"

"Sure. It'll be here when you come out."

The man's steely blue eyes met Lame Elk's and held his
gaze.

Five minutes later, the guy reappeared followed by someone else Lame Elk knew, Jesse Harpole, the feed store supervisor. Harpole was a man Lame Elk usually tried to avoid. The
manager had taken a dislike to him for some reason.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Harpole asked,
his cheeks flushed in anger.

Confusion covered Lame Elk's face. "What?"

"Customer says you were rude to him, wouldn't help him
find what he was looking for. And when he did find what he
wanted, he said you wouldn't help him load it."

Lame Elk shook his head. "That's not true. I told him I'd
be happy to load the gate for him, but he said he wanted to do
some more shopping."

"Go inside and wait for me at the back register. I'll give
you your severance pay when I come in. You're fired."

Lame Elk, unable to comprehend what had just happened,
kept turning his head to look at the two men as he walked toward the store's rear entrance.

"Every time I hire a goddamn Indian, I get burned," he
heard Harpole telling the man.

Lame Elk waited at the register, as Harpole had instructed
him. He reached into his pocket and fingered his father's medicine pouch. He pulled it out, sniffed it, and laid it next to the
register. He unzipped the Carhartt jacket he'd picked out with
Hugh Johnson and dropped it on the floor. Then he unbuttoned his flannel shirt, pulled it off, and let it fall on top of
the coat. He bent down and yanked off the boots he'd bought,
and unzipped his new Wranglers and stepped out of them. He
stood in the emptiness of the back room, his braid a straight
black line thick against his spine.

Lame Elk opened the cash register and counted out his
wages for the week and scattered the money like dried leaves
on the pile of clothing.

He walked out the door, oblivious to the cold and to the
first large snowflakes coming down. He walked past the hardware store and looked up at the second-floor windows of Hugh Johnson's office. Lame Elk clutched Bear Hunter's medicine
bundle in his bare hand and headed home.

Los Angeles, California

t wasn't Harry Garson's fault he didn't speak a word of
Navajo or Apache or Ute or Hopi or whatever the fuck
kind of Indian he was. He didn't know and he didn't give
a shit. Never had and he wasn't about to start caring now. Not
that he was barking about his genetics, mind you. His classic Indian looks-the rich bronze skin, dark and distant eyes,
high cheekbones, proudly bent nose, granite jaw, downturned
mouth-had landed him over a hundred and fifty roles, large
and small, in A, B, and C oaters dating back to 1938's Forked
River, Forked Tongue. As he advanced in years, his classic features, once those of the stereotypical proud brave-"Makeup
and Costume, c'mon, get over here and get some fucking war
paint and feathers on Harry. He's got a wagon train to ambush.
We're losing the light, goddammit! "-had morphed into those
of the sage chief. The distant eyes were now achingly sad, the
brow above them knitted and furrowed. His cheeks had gone
hollow and his angular jaw was now crooked thanks to a bar
fight with Lock Martin-Klaatu barada nickto. Yes, that Lock
Martin, all 71" of the guy who played Gort in The Day the
Earth Stood Still-at Musso and Frank's in'53. Word was that
Harry was getting the better of it until the normally gentle giant introduced the leg of a bar stool to Harry's chops.

"Harry, you're turning my kishkas inside out," said movie
agent Irv Rothenberg when he visited his client in the hospi tal. "Who picks a fight with a guy bigger than Mount Shasta,
for chrissakes? Lock is a sweetheart. What did you say to him
to set him off like that?"

"I said Patricia Neal told me he had a small shwantz,"
Harry replied, waving his right pinky at his agent. "Big man,
little pecker." Harry even managed a laugh, though his mouth
was wired shut.

"Oy gevalt, you're killing me, Harry!"

Harry was blessed-Irv would say cursed-with the genuine gift of gab, which he could use for good-like talking his
way into a part or into a starlet's bed-or for bad, a la Lock
Martin. He also had a facility for doing impersonations. When
he was on the set with John Ford, Duke Wayne used to pay
Harry to call up the second unit director and give him all manner of insane orders in Ford's voice. It got so bad that Ford had
to start giving special code words to his staff so that they could
recognize him and not the schmuck pretending to be him. The
irony for Harry was that he didn't get his first speaking part until
1956's Red Scout, and then his only line was, "Blue horse soldier
with yellow hair like waves, across running river." Not exactly
the stuff of Shakespeare, but the speaking parts came more frequently after that and by the mid-'60s, Harry Garson had landed
a regular role as Smells Like Bearstein, Chief of the Sosoomee
Tribe, on the short-lived series Crazy Cavalry. By the late '60s,
as Westerns fell out of favor and parts for aging chief types with
a flare for the spoken word grew scarce, Harry settled into an
angry semiretirement. The few big roles Harry auditioned for
in the late '60s and '70s, he lost to Chief Dan George. That
really got him going, especially when reruns of Little Big Man
and The Outlaw Josey Wales played on the movie channels.

"That fucking Canadian prick!" Harry would bark at the
screen and imitate Chief Dan George's quiet, monotone de livery. "Every eighteen-year-old in this country ran to goddamn Canada to avoid the draft and this is who we got in
exchange? I bet they had to write out his lines in pictographs,
the senile old bastard."

He was a charmer, Harry, but he had the bitterness in him
too, and it began to overtake him as the years passed and the
parts-those in the movies and those on his body-shriveled
up. These weren't the only things shriveling up either. He had
never been good with money, especially when it was plentiful. Although he denied it until the day he died, Randy "The
Crooning Cowpoke" Butterworth of B-movie and early TV
fame, was known to have once told Harry he was "the only
redskin who acts like a kike, speaks like Olivier, and spends
like a nigger." By the summer of '83, Harry Garson was about
tapped out. Fourteen years since his last meaningful paying
gig, he was living on fast food and five-buck-a-blowjob drug
whores in a SRO hotel in downtown L.A. Then the phone
rang in the hall outside his room and that all changed.

"Chief, the phone's for y'all!" It was Marissa LaTerre, the
black drag queen from two doors down. "Come on, y'ole redskin, you. Man on the phone got me all wet with that sexy
voice a his."

"Wet!" Harry said. "What, he make you piss your pants?"

Harry, long used to being called "chief," pulled the door
open to behold the slender, 6'4" man with dark coffee skin and
features as delicate as a first kiss. Without her makeup, lame
outfits, and wig, Marissa was just plain old Morris Terry, formerly of Camden, New Jersey and myriad points in between.

"He says it's about a part, chief," Morris cooed like a teenage girl, but it simply didn't work without the feminine accoutrements. Frankly, delicate features notwithstanding, his golf
ball-sized Adam's apple and towering stature made it a tough sell to begin with. "Y'all think if I do him, there'll be a part in
it for Marissa?"

Harry didn't answer, pushing his way past Morris-Marissa
and to the pay phone, its receiver dangling in midair.

"Yeah," he barked. "Who is this?"

"Harry Garson, is that you?"

"Last time I checked. Who is this?"

"Dylan Rothenberg, Irv's kid."

"Irv's kid?" Harry was drawing a blank.

"Your old agent, I'm his youngest boy. Remember me? You
used to come to my birthday parties when I was little. I've got
home movies. You gave me my first cigarette and first sip of
scotch."

"Sure. Sure. I remember you. You were the blond-haired
kid with the blue eyes. You looked like your shiksa-goddess
mother. What was her name . . . Kitt, right? Kitt was her
name. Christ, she was hot."

"And you're still the picture of tact and diplomacy, I see."

"Sorry, kid."

"No worries, Harry. She still speaks fondly of you as well."

Harry wisely shifted gears, remembering he'd once nailed
Kitt Rothenberg after a movie premier Irv was too sick to attend. "So what's this about a part? You following in your old
man's footsteps?"

"God no, I teach physics at Hofstra University on Long
Island. Someone tracked me down because of my dad having
been your agent. I still have some friends and contacts back
home who found you for me."

"So you found me, kid. Now what?"

"You got a pen and a piece of paper?"

He knew he didn't, but Harry unconsciously patted his
pockets.

"Here, honey, you looking for these?" It was Morris, who'd
been watching the whole time, handing Harry a little yellow
note pad and a pencil. "You can thank me later." Morris blew
Harry a kiss.

They made quite the couple, strolling down Sunset: Harry,
stoop-shouldered in his pink Salvation Army leisure suit and
the now 67" Marissa in her heels, khaki miniskirt, fishnets,
and green chiffon blouse. Harry didn't like acknowledging it,
but age and too many Maker's Marks had rendered his once
steel-trap memory rusty and full of holes. Lines, no problem.
He could remember reams of dialogue like when he played
Geronimo in Mission Apache or the rebel brave Eyes Like
Knife in the cult favorite Hunting Ground. He tested himself,
running lines with his ersatz escort before they left for the
audition.

Harry's trouble was with figures and his sense of direction. His navigation system was shot and he couldn't recall
phone numbers for shit, not that he'd been in need of that
facility any time recently. What Harry needed was someone's
help getting him to the address on Sunset, and it wasn't like
he had thousands of eager candidates from which to choose.
He supposed he might've gone stag and taken a taxi, but that
meant he'd have to pay cab fare in both directions. In turn,
that meant he would have to sacrifice a few meals this week.
He'd had to do that a lot lately. When he'd weighed the unlikely prospect of getting the part and a paycheck versus lost
Big Macs, Whoppers, and Potato World cheese fries-his
favorites-Harry decided Marissa's company and help was
worth the four bus fares.

"Will you slow up, goddamnit!" he growled at Marrisa.
"You take longer strides than a fucking giraffe!"

"I didn't know giraffes took long strides when they were
fucking, chief."

"Funny lady."

"Streisand already got that part."

"You're so tall, they could have made a disaster movie
about you in the '70s: Towering Transvestite."