Flight: A Novel Page 5

  But, wait, no, I suddenly burst through the bright light, which is really the opening of a buffalo-skin tepee, and I run outside and stop.

  I am standing in the middle of a gigantic Indian camp. And I don’t mean some Disneyland, Nickelodeon, roller-coaster, stuffed-animal, cotton-candy Indian camp.

  Nope.

  I am standing in the middle of a real Indian camp, complete with thousands of real Indian tepees and tens of thousands of real old-time Indians.

  The tepees go on forever. They’re grouped in little circles inside bigger circles inside the biggest circles. This camp sits beside a small river. Small dusty hills rise above the water. Thin dry trees cover the hills.

  I breathe dust; it makes mud in my mouth.

  And there are so many Indians.

  Yep, a bunch of real old-time Indians. I’m not exactly sure what year it is. It’s tough to tell the difference between seventeenth-and eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Indians.

  These are how Indians used to be, how Indians are supposed to be. Justice always talked with admiration about Indians like this.

  These old-time Indians have dark skin. There aren’t any half-breed pale-beige green-eyed Indians here. Nope, unlike me, these Indians are the real deal.

  I don’t hear any of them speaking English. I don’t know what Indian language they are speaking. I can’t understand it, but all of them are speaking it. In fact, as I listen more closely, I realize these Indians—men, women, children, and old people—are speaking a bunch of different languages. So there are a lot of different tribes here.

  Even the dogs seem to be barking in Indian. And there are a lot of dogs, hundreds of dogs.

  And it stinks something fierce.

  There are tens of thousands of human beings living in close quarters in the summer heat. And yes, it has to be summer because the sun is huge in the blue sky and it must be about 120 degrees.

  So imagine a camp filled with tens of thousands of sweating Indians, dogs, and horses, along with what appears to be the rotting and drying corpses of hundreds of buffalo, deer, porcupines, badgers, squirrels, rats, and who-knows-what other animals, hanging on racks everywhere I look.

  These Indians eat a lot of meat.

  And deodorant has not been invented yet.

  And it’s hotter than the pizza cheese that gets stuck to the roof of your mouth and burns you so bad you can have one of those skin flaps hanging down.

  Imagine what this smells like.

  Justice never said anything about the smell of old-time Indians. I never read anything about this smell. I never saw a television show that mentioned it.

  I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but it smells like the Devil dropped a shit right here in the middle of this camp.

  But you know what’s really crazy? I seem to be the only one bothered by the stench. Everybody else is smiling and gossiping and singing and laughing and living their way-cool old-time Indian lives. None of them are gagging and covering their noses like me.

  And then I remember how some people’s houses just smell funny. They don’t stink. Not really. But they smell different. A few times in my life, I walked into new foster homes and knew I’d never be able to live there because of the strange smell.

  Everybody’s house smells different. Some of them smell good, most of them just smell different, and a few of them stink.

  So this huge village is like one of those stink houses. And the people who live here don’t notice the stink.

  People smell different, too. Sometimes you meet people and you think they’re nice and decent, and it seems like you might be friends. But you get closer to them and they stink. They smell like rotten fish or dead raccoons or something. And you just have to run away.

  Later, you mention the bad smell to your other friends and they say they didn’t smell anything different. That stink is reserved especially for you.

  But, hey, it works the other way, too. Sometimes you meet a person, and you catch the scent and it’s like you’ve smelled a garden in Heaven, because all you want to do is follow that person around and breathe in for the rest of your life.

  And later you mention this great scent to your other friends, and they say they didn’t smell anything different.

  I remember this one time, when I was taking a video class at a special program for homeless kids in Seattle. I was learning how to use a computer to edit movies. And the teacher—her name was Sue—she smelled exactly like Campbell’s vegetable soup.

  Now I never thought the smell of Campbell’s vegetable soup was sexy. I always liked it, but it didn’t get me all hormonal or anything. But when I smelled Sue, I began to think that Campbell’s vegetable soup might be the sexiest thing in the world.

  Of course, being young and stupid and in love, I told Sue that she smelled exactly like Campbell’s vegetable soup. She just laughed at me.

  But, wait, why am I talking about soup? Maybe it’s just safer and funnier to think about soup and sexy women named Sue than it is to find yourself transported to an old-time Indian camp.

  And then I look down at myself and realize that I’m an old-time Indian kid, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. I’m thin and muscular, and the only thing I’m wearing is a loincloth.

  I get shy for a second because I’m almost naked. But then I realize that every boy and man in the camp is wearing only a loincloth. And a few of the women and girls are pretty much naked, too.

  Then I solve a mystery: I look under my loincloth.

  Okay. I know for sure now that Indians didn’t have underwear beneath their loincloths.

  Then I see this huge Indian guy, like the Arnold Schwarzenegger of Indian warriors, walking toward me. He gets closer and closer. He’s fierce. His face and body are war-painted in ten different colors, he’s carrying this epic tomahawk, and I get scared. I wonder if he’s magic. Maybe he knows I’m not really this old-time Indian boy. Maybe he can feel that I’m just borrowing this body.

  I want to run but I’m frozen. Where would I run to anyway? When you’re trying to escape from Indians, it’s probably best if you don’t start your escape from inside their huge camp.

  But just when I think the warrior guy is going to chop off my head, he leans over, picks me up, and hugs me tightly. And I realize this is my father.

  My father.

  Well, okay, he’s the father of the kid whose body I’m inside at the moment. But as long as I’m this kid, this man is my father. And since I never knew my real Indian father, I feel like I’m going to explode.

  I want to hug this guy forever and forever.

  I scream out Daddy! But nothing comes out of my mouth. Huh. What happened? I try to scream Daddy! again. Nothing.

  My father sets me down and then takes my hand and leads me through the camp. I keep trying to scream Daddy! but nothing happens.

  I reach up, touch my throat, and feel a huge fleshy knot. It’s on my voice box. I don’t know if I was attacked by a person or by a disease, but my voice has been taken away.

  Damn.

  But I feel okay. This guy loves me. He’s singing to me. Who knew that old-time Indian braves serenaded their sons? It’s beautiful. I’m in love.

  I wonder if this is Heaven. Maybe God sent me to Hell first. Maybe he made me watch Art kill Junior because I needed to learn from my mistakes.

  Maybe I learned something.

  Maybe God forgave me and sent me to Heaven.

  Maybe this Indian camp is Heaven—a stinky Heaven.

  And, okay, maybe God didn’t forgive me completely, so he put me in the body of a kid without a voice. But that’s okay. I can live without a voice as long as this man, my new father, keeps loving me like he does.

  And then I am hit with more love lightning. I bet my new father is carrying me to our family tepee, where my new mother and my new brothers and sisters are waiting for me. I have a family. A real family. A true family.

  I am happy for the first time in my life.

  Eight

  HAPPINE
SS NEVER LASTS LONG, does it?

  As my new father leads me through camp, I realize this cannot be Heaven.

  All these old-time Indians are doomed. They’re going to die of disease. And they’ll be slaughtered by U.S. Cavalry soldiers. They’ll be packed into train cars and shipped off to reservations. And they’ll starve in winter camps near iced-over rivers.

  The children are going to be kidnapped and sent off to boarding schools. Their hair will be cut short and they will be beaten for speaking their tribal languages. They’ll be beaten for dancing and singing the old-time Indian songs.

  All of them are going to start drinking booze. And their children will drink booze. And their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will drink booze. And one of those great-grandchildren will grow up to be my real father, the one who decided that drinking booze was more important than being my father. The one who abandoned my mother and me.

  That’s what is going to happen to all these old-time Indians. That’s what’s going to happen to me. This is what Justice was always talking about. Old-time Indians were so beautiful, and they were destroyed.

  It makes me angry. I want to spit and kick and punch and slap. I want to cry and sing, but I cannot use my voice.

  And then my father stops to talk to a funny-looking Indian guy. I listen to them talk Indian. I don’t know exactly what they’re saying, but I do know they’re arguing.

  This new Indian guy is short, barely taller than I am. And he’s very pale, almost white-skinned. In fact, he’s got patches of skin peeling off his back, chest, and arms. This Indian is so white he gets sunburned.

  His hair isn’t black at all. Nope, it’s light brown, and some strands of it are almost blond. He’s got a single eagle feather tied into his braid and white lightning bolts painted on his body.

  Oh, my God! This pale little dude is Crazy Horse, the strange man of the Oglalas!

  Yes, this is the famous mystical Indian warrior who killed hundreds of white people. This guy was the greatest warrior ever.

  I am looking at Crazy Horse, the magical one. Bullets couldn’t hit him. He could never be photographed. He was a holy ghost, the Sioux Jesus. Well, sort of like Jesus. I mean, Jesus didn’t kill anybody, you know? So Crazy Horse was like Jesus, if Jesus had been a warrior.

  I am standing right next to him. And his eyes are gold-colored.

  I think the greatest warrior in Sioux history is a half-breed mystery. I think this legendary killer of white men is half white, like me.

  I look around again at the Indian camp. Thousands of tepees. Tens of thousands of Indians. Hot summer day. Dusty hills surrounding us. The skinny river close by.

  Crazy Horse is here. And that older Indian dude standing over there by the horses? He sure looks like Sitting Bull does in the history-book pictorials.

  I realize this skinny river is the Little Bighorn, and I have been transported back to June 1876.

  I grab my father’s leg and shake him.

  I scream, Daddy! Daddy! This is the camp at the Little Bighorn! Custer is coming! Custer is coming! He’s bringing the Seventh Cavalry and they’re coming to kill us! But of course I cannot actually say anything because I don’t have a working voice box.

  My father stares at me. I don’t need to speak his language to know he wants me to shut up, even if I’m not really making any noise.

  And then I remember that the Indians at Little Bighorn already know that Custer is—was—coming. In fact, they set up this camp so that Custer would come for them. It’s a trap.

  George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry are marching here. There are only about seven hundred white soldiers riding with Custer. And waiting here in the camp for him are three or four or five thousand Indian warriors. Custer is marching toward his slaughter.

  Custer is a crazy egomaniac who thinks he is going to be president of the United States. Custer is one of the top two or three dumb asses in American history.

  I can’t believe I’m here. This is the Battle of the Little Bighorn. This is Custer’s Last Stand. I wonder when it’s going to start.

  And then I hear gunfire in the distance. We all hear that gunfire. The Indian warriors race for their weapons and their horses.

  Thousands of hot and angry Indian dudes ride out to meet Custer and his doomed soldiers.

  Nine

  THEY NAMED THE BATTLE all wrong.

  They shouldn’t have called it Custer’s Last Stand. Oh, it was his last stand. He died there. Here, I mean. But Custer wasn’t important. He was easily replaced. There were plenty of other soldiers who were smarter and better at killing Indians.

  Little Bighorn was the last real battle of the Indian Wars. After that, the Indians gave up. So Custer’s Last Stand was really the Indians’ last stand. But, oh, on that day, this day, the Indians are crazy good. And crazy ready.

  I’m not stupid. I don’t want to get shot again. I’m only twelve or thirteen years old, and I’m small. So I stay in camp and listen to the sounds of battle.

  I can’t see anything, but I know what’s happening. I read about this fight. I watched a TV show about it on the History Channel.

  A few days ago, Custer ignored his superior officer’s orders and force-marched his men toward the Little Bighorn. They were only supposed to march twenty miles a day but Custer made them march seventy miles a day.

  He was supposed to take his time and not arrive here ahead of the soldiers who were hauling the huge and heavy Gatling guns. Custer decided he didn’t need the Gatling guns, those old-time machine guns that blasted one hundred bullets a minute.

  What an overconfident asshole, huh?

  When Custer arrived on the hills above the Little Bighorn, he was supposed to wait for the other army dudes to show up. A couple thousand more soldiers.

  But he didn’t wait. He wanted all the glory for himself. So he sent half of his men to attack one side of the Indian camp, and he took the other half and rode toward the opposite end of the camp.

  He thought he was going to terrify the Indians and make them run away, but he ran into a few thousand organized Indians—with repeating rifles.

  Yep, these particular Indians said, “Fuck bows and arrows. We’re going to get technological!”

  After meeting the superior numbers of Indians, Custer ordered the retreat. The cavalry rode back up into the hills with the Indians in hot pursuit. But it was too late. It was going to be Custer’s last day.

  It is his last day. I stand in the camp and listen to the battle.

  It’s all gunfire and screams and Indian singing and silence and more silence and then the sounds of celebration. I swear I hear laughter.

  The battle is over. It only takes about an hour. A quick and brutal fight.

  So I walk toward the hill where Custer and his soldiers he dead and dying. I walk with hundreds of other Indians. Women, children, old people.

  We walk to join the warrior men. And some warrior women. A lot of women put on war paint and rode out into battle against Custer. I never knew Indian women could be warriors, too.

  It’s hormonal to say this, but those women warriors are sexy in their war paint.

  But there is nothing sexy or beautiful on Custer’s Hill. There are hundreds of dead cavalry soldiers. Bloody corpses everywhere. They look like red and white flowers blooming in the green grass.

  I feel sick in my stomach and brain. I feel sick in my soul. I remember that in another life I killed people like this. I left behind a bank lobby filled with dead bodies.

  But this is war. The Indians were protecting themselves from the soldiers. Custer had ridden into camp to kill men, women, and children. He had to be stopped.

  I understand why he’s dead. I understand why he had to be killed. It was self-defense. Wasn’t it self-defense?

  I understand why the soldiers had to be killed, but I don’t understand what is happening to the soldiers now. To their bodies.

  All around me, Indian men, women, and children are desecrating the bodies of the d
ead white soldiers.

  Right there, an Indian grandmother is stabbing a soldier with his own bayonet. He’s dead and bloody, but she keeps stabbing him over and over again.

  I stand and watch as she strips off his clothes. She wants him to be naked and ashamed in the afterlife.

  And now she cuts off his penis and stuffs it into his mouth. She wants the gods to laugh at him when he arrives in the afterlife. “Hey, kid,” the gods will say to him, “do you know you have your own cock stuffed between your teeth?”

  All around me, grandmothers are cutting off penises and ears and hands and fingers and feet.

  I see a young woman, a girl, maybe ten years old, digging at a dead soldier’s eyes. I run over to her and push her away. She’s trying to take his eyes.

  She shouts at me in her tribal language. I don’t know exactly what she’s saying, but she’s cursing. And then I realize that she thinks I want his eyes. She thinks I’m fighting for his eyes.

  She pushes me. I push her back. She pushes me. I punch her in the face.

  And then somebody grabs me. I am being dragged across the grass, up the hill, toward the summit. My father drags me.

  I look back and watch that girl cut out the dead soldier’s eyes. He’ll be blind in the afterlife and he won’t be able to find Heaven. Lost and alone, his ghost will wander this battlefield forever.

  My father drags me to the summit.

  There I see a hundred Indian warriors have surrounded six white soldiers, the only survivors. They are being tortured.

  The warriors slap and kick and punch the white soldiers. They toss them to the ground. Then they pick them up and throw them down again. They cut them with arrowheads and knives and hatchets. A thousand little cuts.

  This is war.

  My father drags me into the circle. The other Indian warriors stop to watch this. Something important is happening. I am somebody important.

  My father grabs one of the white soldiers. He’s just a kid, like me. I didn’t know they let kids join the cavalry.