Tapping the Dream Tree (34 page)

“That's why they've got to be held accountable,” I say.

“You got some special sight that'll tell you which cop's decent and which isn't?”

I know there are good cops. Hell, Chief Morningstar's brother is a detective with the NPD. But we only ever seem to get to deal with the ones that have a hard-on for us.

I shake my head. “But I know Turk hasn't got any redeeming qualities.”

He sighs. “Wish I could have one of those cigarettes of yours.”

I shake one out of the pack and light it for him, surprised that he can hold it, that he can suck in the smoke and blow it out again, just like a living man. I wonder if this is like offering tobacco to the man-itou.

“How come you're trying to talk me out of this?” I ask him. “You're the one who told me to be a warrior for you.”

He blows out another lungful of smoke. “You think killing's what makes a warrior?”

“Now you sound like Whiteduck.”

He laughs. “I've been compared to a lot of things, but never a shaman.”

“So what is it you want from me?” I ask. “Why'd you ask me to be a warrior for you?”

“You look like a good kid,” he says. “I didn't want to see you turn out like me. I want you to be a good man, somebody to make your parents proud. Make yourself proud.”

I've no idea what would make my father proud. But my mom,all she wants is for me to get a decent job and stay out of trouble. I can't seem to manage the first and here I am, walking straight into the second. But he's annoying me all the same. Funny how fast you can go from feeling awed to being fed up.

“You don't think I have any pride?” I ask.

“I don't know the first damn thing about you,” he says, “except you were decent enough to stop for a dying man.”

He takes a last drag and drops his butt in the snow. Studies something behind me, over my shoulder, but I don't turn. He's got a look I recognize—his gaze is turned inward.

“See, someone told me that once,” he goes on, his gaze coming back to me, “except I didn't listen. I worked hard, figured I'd earned the right to play hard, too. Trouble is I played too hard. Lost my job. Lost my family. Lost my pride. It's funny how quick you can lose everything and never see it coming.”

I think about my uncle Frank, but I don't say anything.

“I guess it was my grandma told me,” the dead man says, “how there's no use in bringing hurt into the world. We do that well enough on our own. You meet someone, you try to give them a little life instead. Let them take something positive away from whatever time they spend with you. Makes the world a better place in the short and the long haul.”

I nod. “Putting Beauty in the world.”

“That's a warrior's way, too. Stand up for what's right. Ya-ha-hey. Make a noise. I can remember powwow dancing, there'd be so many of us out there, following the drumbeat and the singing, you'd swear you could feel the ground tremble and shake underfoot. But these last few years, I've been too drunk to dance and the only noise I make is when I'm puking.”

I know what he means about the powwows, that feeling you can't get anywhere else except maybe a sweat and that's a more contemplative kind of a thing. In a powwow it's all rhythm and dancing, everybody individual, but we're all part of something bigger than us at the same time. There's nothing like it in the world.

“Yeah,” the dead man says. “We used to be a proud people for good reason. We can still be a proud people, but sometimes our reasons aren't so good anymore. Sometimes it's not for how we stand tall and honor the ancestors and the spirits with grace and beauty. Sometimes it's for how we beat the enemy at their own game.”

“You're starting to sound pretty old school for a drunk,” I tell him.

He shakes his head. “I'm just repeating things I was told when I was growing up. Things I didn't feel were important enough to pay attention to.”

“I pay attention,” I say. “At least I try to.”

He gives me a considering look. “I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but what part of what you were taught has to do with that gun in your pocket?”

“The part about standing up for ourselves. The part about defending our people.”

“I suppose.”

“I hear what you're saying,” I tell him. “But I still have to go down to the city.”

He gives me a nod.

“Sure you do,” he says. “Why would you listen to a dead drunk like me?” He chuckles. “And I mean dead in the strictest sense of the word.” He pushes away from the gates. “Time I was going. Whiteduck's doing a hell of a job with his singing. I can feel the pull of that someplace else getting stronger and stronger.”

I don't know what to say. Good luck? Good-bye?

“Spare another of those smokes?” he asks.

“Sure.”

I shake another one free and light it for him. He pats my cheek. The touch of his hand is still cold, but there's movement in all the fingers. It's not like the block of ice that tried to grab my sleeve this morning.

“You're a good kid,” he says.

And then he fades away.

I stand there for a long time, looking at the gate, at the crows, feeling the wind on my face, bitter and cold. Then I walk back to my car.

Before I first started train-painting, I thought graffiti was just vandalism, a crime that might include a little creativity, but a crime nonetheless. Then one day I was driving back to the rez and I had to wait at a crossing for a freight train to go by. It was the one near Brendon Road, where the tracks go uphill and the freights tend to slow down because of the incline.

So I'm sitting there, bored, a little impatient more than anything else, and suddenly I see all this art going by. Huge murals painted on the sides of the boxcars and all I can do is stare, thinking, where's all that coming from? Who did these amazing paintings?

And then just like that, there's this collision of the synchronicity at seeing those painted cars and this feeling I've had of wanting to do something different with the iconology I grew up with on the rez—you know, like the bead patterns my mom sews on her powwow dresses. I turn my car back around and drive for the freight yards, stopping off at a hardware store along the way.

I felt a kinship to whoever it was that was painting those boxcars, a complete understanding of what they'd done and why they'd done it. And I wanted to send them a message back. I wanted to tell them, I've seen your work and here's my side of the conversation.

That was the day Crow was born and my first thunderbird joined that ongoing hobo gallery that the freights take from city to city, across the country.

It's a long ride down to the city. I leave the crows behind, but the winter comes with me, wind blowing snow down the highway behind my car, howling like the cries of dying buffalo. It's full night by the time I'm in the downtown core. It's so cold, there's nobody out, not even the hookers. I drive until I reach the precinct house where Turk works and park across the street from it. And then I sit there, my hand in my pocket, fingers wrapped around the handle of the gun.

Comes to me, I can't kill a man, not even a man like Turk. Maybe if he was standing right in front of me and we were fighting. Maybe if he was threatening my mom. Maybe I could do it in the heat of the moment. But not like this, waiting to ambush him like in some Hollywood western.

But I know I've got to do something.

My gaze travels from the precinct house to the stores alongside the street where I'm parked. I don't even hesitate. I reach in the back for a plastic bag full of unused spray cans and I get out of the car to meet that cold wind head on.

I don't know how long I've got so I work even faster than usual. It's not a boxcar, but the paint goes on the bricks and glass as easy as it does on wooden slats. It doesn't even clog up in the nozzle— maybe the Grandfather Thunders are giving me a helping hand. I do the crow first, thunderbird style, a yellow one to make the black and red words stand out when I write them along the spread of its wings.

TOM MCGURK KILLS INDIANS.

I add a roughly-rendered brave with the daubed clay of a ghostdancer masking his features. He's lying face-up to the sky, power lines flowing up out of his head as his spirit leaves his body, a row of crosses behind him—not Christian crosses, but ours, the ones that stand for the four quarters of the world.

HE HAULS THEM OUT OF TOWN,
I write in big sloppy letters,
ANDLEAVES THEM TO DIE IN THE COLD.

I'm starting a monster, a cannibal windigo all white fur and blood, raging in the middle of a winter storm, when a couple of cops stop their squad car abreast of where I parked my own. They're on their way back to the precinct, I guess, ending their shift and look what they've found. I keep spraying the paint, my fingers frozen into a locked position from the cold.

“Okay, Tonto,” one of them says. “Drop the can and assume the position.”

I couldn't drop the can if I wanted to. I can barely move my fingers. So I keep spraying on the paint until one of them gives me a sucker punch in the kidneys, knocks me down, kicks me as I'm falling. I lose the spray can and it goes rattling across the sidewalk. I lose the gun, too, which I forgot I was carrying.

There's a long moment of silence as we're all three staring at that gun lying there on the pavement.

They really work me over then.

So as I sit here in county, waiting for my trial, I think back on all of this and find I'm not sorry that I didn't try to shoot Turk. I'm not sorry that I got busted in the middle of vandalizing a building right across the street from the precinct house, either. But I do regret not getting rid of the gun first.

The charges against me are vandalism, possession of an unlicensed weapon, carrying a concealed weapon, and resisting arrest. I'll be doing some time, heading up to the pen, but I won't be alone in there. Like Leonard Peltier says on that song he does with Robbie Robertson, “It's the fastest growing rez in the country,” and he should know, they've kept him locked up long enough.

But something good came out of all of this. The police didn't have time to get rid of my graffiti before the press showed up. I guess it was a slow news day because pictures of those paintings showed up on the front page of all three of the daily papers, and made the news on every channel. You might think, what's good about that? It's like prime evidence against me. But I'm not denying I painted those images and words, and the good thing is, people started coming forward, talking about how the same thing had happened to them. Cops would pick them up when the bars closed and would dump them, ten, twenty miles out of town. They identified Turk and a half-dozen others by name.

So I'm sitting in county, and I don't know where Turk is, but he's been suspended without pay while the investigation goes on, and it looks like they've got to deal with this fair and square because everybody's on their case now, right across the city—whites, blacks, skins, everybody. They're all watching what the authorities do, writing editorials, writing letters to the editor, holding protest demonstrations.

This isn't going away.

So if I've got to do some jail time, I'm thinking the sacrifice is worth it.

My cousin Tommy drives my mom down from the rez on a regular basis to visit me. The first time she comes, she stands there looking at me and I don't know what she's thinking, but I wait for the blast I'm sure's coming my way. But all she says is, “Couldn't you have stuck with the boxcars?” Then she holds me a long while, tells me I'm stupid, but how she's so proud of me. Go figure.

Some of the Creek aunts have connections in the city and they found me a good lawyer, so I'm not stuck with some public defender. I like him. His name's Marty Caine and I can tell he doesn't care what color my skin is. He tells me that what I did was “morally correct, if legally indefensible, but we'll do our damnedest to get you out of this anyway.” But nobody's fooled. We all know that whatever happens to the cops, they're still going to make a lesson with me. When it comes to skins, they always do.

I see Walking Elk one more time before the trial. I'm lying on my bunk, staring up at the ceiling, thinking how, when I get out, I'm going on those last two vision quests. I need to be centered. I need to talk to the Creator and find out what my place is in the world, who I'm supposed to be so that my being here in this world makes a difference to what happens to the people in my life, to the ground I walk on and the spirits that share this world with us.

I hear a rustle of cloth and turn my head to see John Walking Elk sitting on the other bunk. He's still wearing the clothes he died in. I assume he's still dead. This time he's got the smokes and he offers me one.

I swing my feet to the floor and take the cigarette, let him light it for me.

“How come you're still here?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Maybe I'm not,” he says. “Maybe Whiteduck sent my spirit on and you're just dreaming.”

I smile. “You'd think if I was going to dream, I'd dream myself out of this place.”

“You'd think.”

We smoke our cigarettes for a while.

“I'm in all the papers,” Walking Elk says after a while. “And that's your doing. They wrote about how Whiteduck sent my body down to the city, how the cops drove me up there and dumped me in the snow. Family I didn't even know I had anymore came to the funeral. From the rez, from Pine Ridge, hell, from places I never even heard of before.”

I wasn't there, but I heard about it. Skins came from all over the country to show their solidarity. Mom told me that the Warriors' Society up on the rez organized it.

“Yeah, I heard it was some turnout,” I say. “Made the cover of
Time
and everything.”