RavenShadow (3 page)

“John, we’re not live! None of this has gone out over the air!”

A light came dimly into his face. He stood up. Rage made him move jerkily, like a puppet. He staggered sideways. “Not live?”

“Look at the on-air switch!” I moved the coffee cup so he could see it. “None of that was broadcast!”

His eyes focused weirdly on me, and his mouth took a cunning shape. “You bastard! You did this on purpose. You set me up. You’re fired!”

He opened the studio door and called down the hall. “Amy!”

Just as I heard Miss Turret Gun’s metal track click-clacking on the linoleum floor, the third cut ended and we were back to me, live.

Live! I gotta do something
.

“That was the Righteous Brothers, and my personal favorite recording of one of a great songs of all time, ‘Unchained Melody.’”

Amy rumbled into the doorway. Pointing at me, John bellowed, “This red nigger is fired!”

Christ, this
WAS
going out over the air.

My training took over, and I tried to keep it smooth. “We seem to be having some technical difficulties here folks, we’ll get them fixed as soon as—”

“You bastard! You bastard! You dirty Injun! I’ll have your red ass …”

Amy took position in the middle of the room and rotated her turret guns in my direction.

I continued smoothly, “The ten o’clock national news is up next, followed by local news, and be sure to stay tuned ten to two for the latest, gr-r-reatest hits brought to you by …”—I couldn’t even remember the name!—“whoever the next disc jockey is!”

On that high note I punched the button, the cart took over with a commercial, and I had closed out my time at KKAT.
Rapid City would not hear the likes of my final minute again for a long, long time.

Long John shifted to controlled hostility now. “Amy, Joseph Blue Crow is fired, effective immediately. Escort him out of the building. Get his keys. Clean out his desk and send him whatever’s in it. Tell him to forget his severance pay.”

Did he think I would surrender to her guns? I held his eye. I walked over to the cassette player, popped out a cassette, put it in my pocket. Then I walked straight at Long John, staring at him like a worm. I reached out and grabbed his shirt front. I shook him. Fabric tore.

Amy tracked to my direction and started to move. I turned and shoved Long John into her. They dominoed onto the floor, John between her legs but facing me.

“Now hear the rest. I have a list of all the double selling you did on my show the last two and half years. That’s fraud. I know who all your sweeties have been. Patty will see that as cause for divorce. And every employee you got knows where you stash your coke in that ZipLock bag—the sheriff will love that.”

He got up, but I pushed him back into the wall. “The best of all is what you just gave me. You called me racial epithets on the air. Live. I’ve got a tape. The station has tapes. If need be, the FCC and the Civil Rights Commission will have tapes.” I thumped him against the plasterboard. “They can take your license away! They
will
take you license away!” I was bellowing so loud it hurt my throat.

“So here’s a tip. If my severance pay comes through real smooth, and there’s no trouble about my unemployment, I’ll keep my mouth shut. If not, I’ll scalp your scrotum! I’m on the goddamn warpath!”

I slammed him against the wall and dropped him. I reached to the counter, seized the ZipLock bag of coke, unZipped the Lock, and dumped a thousand bucks worth of the white lady
right on Long John, from the part in his hair to his eyebrows and nose to his necktie to his lap.

He sputtered, mewled, and howled all at once.

I strode down the hall and straight out of the building.

It scared me, how violent I felt, how angry I was. I was shaking.

I sat in the Lincoln for a few minutes to calm down. I breathed deep in, deep out, deep in, deep out.

The sun was glaring off the hood of the Lincoln, and it shone in my eyes. I felt something odd, like I was sleepy, but I was too agitated to be sleepy. The sun slashed at my eyes and made them want to close. It shone on the hood of the car until it became a mirage light, hallucinatory.

And I saw … broken pictures. Magpies. Flowers. American flags upside down. Half-moons. Flowers. Pictures like that, all in fragments, and they were all moving, swaying, swooping up and down, like flotsam swelling upward and dropping downward on pitching seas. They were all in a swirl that made no sense
….

Behind the pictures quavered a song in the old style and in the Lakota language. It was different from the songs I heard as a youngster, not a single male voice, nor a group of men around a drum, but the voices of hundreds of people, men, women, and children together. No drum. Or if there was a drum, it was the sound of moccasined feet on the Earth. The people sang. From the style, I half recognized one phrase, a kind of chorus, but I could not catch the words
.

There in the car, but not in the car, I strained my ears to hear the words of the song that came from …

A-a-w-wk! A-a-w-wk!

This was Raven, perched on the hood ornament, black and menacing, huge and apocalyptic in the blinding glare
.

A-a-w-wk! A-a-w-wk!

I jerked with fear, and moved somehow toward ordinary consciousness. Raven still perched on the hood.

Some people know the sound of their own death. Mine is,
A-a-w-wk! A-a-w-wk!

Raven always comes to me, or at me, black, shiny, and mocking. If he was a character in a carnival, maybe a fortune-teller, he would laugh at you and put his hand on your shoulder and lick your inmost ear with his tongue and whisper, “Death, death, death.” His tongue would be the coldest thing that ever touched you. Not being human, though, he gleams the message at you with the shininess of his feathers and the cold brightness of his eyes. When he flaps his wings and the black feathers catch the sun, somehow they are wild, mocking laughter. It speaks poetic of the body dead and moldering.
I am a-wing, and you are arotting
.

Raven makes me shudder.

This time Raven gave a great flurry of wings on the hood and opened and closed his big beak without a sound. He cocked his head sideways, peered at me through the windshield. He flapped his wings but didn’t lift off. He was so big and ominous that for a moment I thought he was an ordinary raven, instead of Raven.

Then suddenly he was sitting on the steering wheel, beak in my face.

I flung an arm at him, and he backed off. Morphed backward through the windshield and sat on the hood.

Raven was a comfort in a way. Instead of pretending to be afraid of unemployment, poverty, and degradation, I could just go for the big one and be afraid of death.

And How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy Now, Mr. Death?

T
hat afternoon I drank.
If you’re gonna see things, you might as well be drunk
. And I played a game. How do you drink just enough to keep you going? Going from bar to bar, as you drive south through the Black Hills from Rapid to Hot Springs? Going from drink to drink instead of drink to jail? How do you stay sober enough to drive but drunk enough to forget Raven?

This is a white-man game, this management of inebriation. White folks are good at it—teeter but don’t dodder.

I’m not that kind of drinker, and not many Indians are. We don’t want to play around the edges. Maybe this is because of our traditions—we make a place for altered states of mind, whether reached by trance, Father Peyote, firewater, or even seizure. Anyhow, we are binge drinkers. I am a binge drinker. When I tipple, I don’t want to get a pleasant little buzz. I want to get barbarically drunk.

So I had a problem. I was determined to drink until the sun went down and then meet Sallee Walks Straight in Hot Springs, at the south end of the Hills. I had been pursuing Sallee for a month, no luck. Had a hot date tonight to celebrate something special, I told her. Didn’t tell her I hoped to get lucky
in a meadow, pass out with a blanket wrapped around us, and wake up a free man—no white-man job! Free in the center of Black Hills, Paha Sapa, our sacred lands.

You white people don’t understand how special the Black Hills are to us. Since before the memories of the grandfathers of the oldest men, my people have sought their visions in Paha Sapa. Our ancestors, since before the memories of the grandfathers of the oldest men, have been buried there. The Hills give us all things good—poles for our tipis, meat, berries, grass for the ponies, clean water. Most important, and seldom told, is that the Hills mirror the stars, and by traveling in a sacred spirit through the Hills on a certain route, we align ourselves with the heavens themselves. The Hills mirror what we call the Racetrack Constellation, which you call Capella, Pleiades, Rigel, Sirius, Procyon, Castor, and Pollux.

A hundred years ago Yellow Hair, George Armstrong Custer, came along and hollered in print, “Them thar Hills are full of gold.” Prospectors flooded in, followed by miners, followed by bartenders, whores and gamblers, followed by preachers, teachers, and the whole gamut of your so-called civilization, which has about killed us. The final insult was for you to name a town after Custer in our Hills.

But my date with Sallee was for about dark, Indian time, which means any time in the evening. I had all day to tipple and not pass out.

I remember puttering along south through the Hills. I had a few in Rockerville and went over to Keystone to find Emile and thank him for the help, but he wasn’t at home. I checked out the taste of beer in Hill City, and in Custer, where I stood in the parking lot, pretended a handicapped parking sign was Custer’s grave, and pissed up at it. I think I remember taking a nap—you might call it an involuntary nap—in the state park named after the bastard along the way. The whole time I watched for Raven in the corner of my vision, but I never saw him. He was there, but I never saw him.

At twilight, one way or another, I was whooping it up in Hot Springs with Sallee, who unfortunately was flanked, or chaperoned, or something like that, by her cousin Rosaphine.

Sallee never drank, in fact maybe wasn’t old enough to drink. She didn’t say why and I didn’t ask, knowing that any young, eligible red woman with good sense would rather find a red man who’s both sober and straight, which is near impossible. Nobody loves a drunken Indian, and I wondered whether that might be why I hadn’t gotten lucky with Sallee, but I didn’t care. Getting laid was dicey, getting drunk a sure thing.

Trouble was, she had me a little entranced. She was tall, slender, willowy, quiet, mysterious. From the first look she seemed to me somehow mythic, bearing a spirit larger than life. Later I realized what she reminded me of. Emile did a painting, back when he was doing canvases and not just hides, of White Buffalo Woman. She is, well, you would call her one of our great mythological heroes. She first appeared to two young men, walking in a sacred manner. One of them lusted after her. She held her arms out, he embraced her, and a cloud enveloped them. When the cloud disappeared, the lustful young man had turned into a pile of bones. To the other young man she said, “Take me to your village.” He did, and the gift she bore proved to be the greatest of all boons to the Lakota people, the sacred Pipe.

In painting her, Emile was once more performing the sacred deed, taking White Buffalo Woman to the people. The figure was slender, pure-looking, sheathed in a beautifully quilled buckskin dress, walking in a modest way but bearing invisibly the gift of the sacred.

Sallee reminded me of Emile’s White Buffalo Woman. Later I found out why—she’d been the model. Her face wasn’t shown, but it was her carriage I responded to, and her aura of being special.

Like the ill-advised young man, I lusted after her. I told myself I wanted to … get lucky with her.

I knew Sallee wanted much more from life. She wasn’t likely
to find it in a bar in Hot Springs, but if you live with your uncle near the hamlet of Oglala on the Pine Ridge rez, a bar in Hot Springs is only five bucks of gas round trip, and a date with an alcoholic red man with a forty-grand-a-year job, hey, that’s a step up.

“
Hoka hey!
” says I, and lifted my glass. Sallee gave me her special smile and slid onto the bar stool. Rosaphine the bulldog barked “
Hoka hey!
” and slid right onto my lap. Her talk always sounded like barking, and she had a jutting lower jaw, which is what reminded me of the dog. Rosaphine wasn’t pretty, but she was a party girl, and sexy. This time the play in her eyes said she’d knocked back a six-pack on the drive over, which was par for the course with Rosaphine. Just like me.

I slid from underneath Rosaphine and stationed myself between them, touching on both sides. I needed the stability of touching, and the illusion it lent. I motioned to the bartender to give them whatever they wanted. “A Virgin Mary,” says Sallee. It was all she ever drank, and she acted interested mostly in the celery. “Bud Light!” roars Rosaphine, like it was the answer to a quiz-show question. She waggled her ass like she just won a case of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups—it wasn’t in Rosaphine’s fantasy world to win the sixty-four thousand dollars. The waggle made me want to lean against her more. Yeah, she was started toward blimpdom, which Lakota women seem to achieve early, but she was warm and pliant.

“You get it done?” I says to Sallee.

She scrunched her shoulders up and shook her head no. “Frustrating. I’m ruining my third piece of the silk.”

Sallee was working on a big fabric painting—that was what she wanted to do, paint on cloth. I met her at Emile’s one day. She was showing him a big piece, a horseback warrior on a periwinkle blue banner shaped like a guidon.

“Good idea,” he said. “Indian warrior, U.S. Army symbol, I like that.”

You can hear what people are not saying, too.

She raised her arms and eyebrows like, That’s all?

He finally grabbed a big sketch pad and re-drew the horseman three or four times on different pages, really fast. The last sketch—it’s hard to find words for this—had a sort of flow in the lines that made the paper almost pulse, like it had electrical energy.

“Mine just lays there,” she said, looking back and forth.

Emile nodded.

She looked like she wanted to cry.

I got her to have coffee with me before she drove home.

Now she was working on a truly big piece, the size of a banner like you hang in front of a store to make a statement. For it she needed white silk, and had no bucks to buy it.

One day at the Sioux Nations Shopping Center, where she clerked for minimum wage, she took me out in the parking lot and showed me what looked like a backpack. “My Eureka,” she said.

She started unstuffing some white cloth out of the pack. Silk. “My uncle’s World War II parachute.”
Silk
.

“Wonderful idea,” I said. I also thought, Typical Indian artist, broke, and creative as hell.

“Donan says he’ll hang it from a pole in front of the gallery for the fall show. If I can get it finished.” Donan was a Hill City gallery owner.

The barman brought the Virgin Mary and the beers.

I said, “You know, I’m celebrating. Here’s my Freed from Labor Day promise. If you ruin all of it, I’ll buy you another parachute.”

She grinned, but her eyes showed this hurt. “If I ruin it all,” she said, “I’ll get another Eureka.”

Sallee had the affliction of artists—they’re unhappy unless they do the one thing that turns them on. I’d learned that real good from Emile.

“What you celebrating?” says Rosaphine.

“My freedom,” says I.

I looked around the bar. I reached down into the lungs of the biggest chest in the room, found my biggest radio voice, and hollered, “Ten—n-n-n
HUT
!”

The white drinkers, a mix of fifteen or twenty tourists and Hills folks, looked over at the drunken Indian. (One more time, lads and lasses: Nobody loves a drunken Indian.) I laid the words out like thunder. “Today I took my freedom. I told that white employer, that boss, that overseer, I sang in my best Johnny Paycheck imitation, ‘
TAKE THIS JOB AND AND SHOVE IT
!’”

One of the rednecks softly seconded, “Right on!”

“So,
LET’S CELEBRATE
! Bartender, this round’s on me.
SET ’EM UP
!”

I lifted my glass, listening for the roar of approval. Instead there were a lot of funny looks, and from the back came a comment in a redneck accent, “Once in a lifetime! An Injun’s buying!”

The bartender set to work.

I looked happily into Sallee’s eyes and saw hurt. I didn’t get that. Then I thought, Generosity means more when it isn’t boozy. I felt ashamed. I said, “I did quit my job.”

She nodded and noshed on her celery. I found it sexy. She was looking White Buffalo Woman-like again.

The bartender filled our glasses, including more veggie juice and celery for Sallee. I gave him some twenties. Rosaphine and I drained our beers.

Rosaphine slipped an arm around my waist. “So tell us.”

I did, the whole story—Long John Silver’s corruption, his grave offense via Sybil, my setup, the beauty of my deception off the air, and the crowning glory of Long John shouting
RIGHT ON THE AIR
vileness I never dreamed to get out of him.

Rosaphine haw-hawed, slapped her thigh, slapped my thigh, squeezed my thigh, and haw-hawed a lot more. Sallee looked worried.

Suddenly I thought, I could tell her more of the truth. I could say, “Sallee, I wasted a huge piece of my life working at a job that paid the rent but did nothing else for a soul, either
red or white.” I could say, “I got stale spinning the top forty fads of the month, many of which I never bothered to listen to. I became the master of razzmatazz phrases that said nothing,” and similar truths. But all that seemed … I was too drunk, and probably too cowardly.

“Don’t worry!” I cried. “I’ve got money! I could buy rounds from here to Christmas!” I started on about the bucks I would get from the sale of the house, the severance pay, the unemployment checks, but then I saw I’d lost Sallee’s attention.

“Let’s dance!” I said to her, holding out my hand.

She looked at me appraisingly, took the hand, and we walked to the juke box. “Into the Mystic,” she punched, Van Morrison, and off we juked. The dance floor was the size of a bathroom stall.

Rosaphine put some quarters in the juke box. Up comes Bonnie Raitt all fast and funky. Rosaphine hands me another beer, chugalugs her own, and joins us. Sallee is an elegant dancer, using the whole body without emphasizing sex, almost in a virginal way, but very sexy to me. Rosaphine looks like she’d have done well in burlesque—make them tits spin, grind that bottom, bump your partner’s ass, and with a sultry look bump your pelvis.

I am just drunk, only half dancing, half lurching, on the edge of stumbling.

Rosaphine bumps toward me with a provocative look on her face. She spins and backs up to me, her big bottom jutting out. I bump her butt with mine, we sidle around each other, and bump two or three more times.

I whirl away and look at Sallee’s face. She’s dancing, but her eyes look strained. Oh, what the hell, nothing wrong with a little fun. I spin back toward Rosaphine, and she goes into her shimmy.

A shimmy on a roly-poly, five-foot body is hard to describe. Her head tilted slowly from side to side, her smile stayed fixed like a beacon, her eyes gleamed wild, and her tits begun
to move. I mean shake. I mean wiggle and wobble. Flip and flop. Dive and soar. At the same time her belly began to quiver, just quiver. Her hips began to rock. And roll. Sometimes one went up and the other down. Sometimes one went back and the other front. Sometimes both of them humped back and then
BANGED
front. And all at the same time her big thighs quivered. It was somethin’. I mean, it was
SOMETHIN
’. I guess my eyes about jiggle-jangled out of their sockets beholding Rosaphine’s shimmy. Maybe the room was dark, but I was seeing fireworks.

I glimpsed Sallee watching us from the bar. Well, that was good. I wanted to give my own show, the Blue Crow Crawl, or the Blue Crow Sound and Light Show. I prayed,
O God of Booze, flow in me!

Rosaphine was sailing, and I sailed my six-and-a-half-foot body into its performance. I couldn’t rightly say what my body did. I strutted. I pranced. I spun. I did freeze-frame. I stilted. I pretended there were strobe lights and jerked from posture to posture. I did a dizzy, drunken, dizzied, drunken, dizzying, drunken dance.

Near the end I caught Rosaphine’s eyes. We segued into the grand finale. We bopped, we banged butts, we flopped, we flipped, and wrapped it up in an orgy of boozy woozing.

At the end I fell flat on my back. Thinking to save the moment, I raised one leg straight up, and then let it slowly, slowly droop down, like a wilting cock.