Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig
Herman glanced at me, I endorsed what he was about to say with a sickly smile, and he spoke the momentous words that would either save my skin or not.
“Dress up Donny like fancy-dancer. Long enough to get him out from here.”
“Whoa, no way.” Louie Slewfoot backed away a lame step, laughing in disbelief. “These costumes are sort of sacred to Indian people, you can’t just wear them for Halloween.” He gave me a sympathetic wink. “Nothing personal, cowboy, but them freckles of yours are a long way from Indian.”
“Hey, that’s not fair,” I bridled. “I have an Indian name even, Red Chief. Nickname, I mean.”
“Sure you do,” he rolled his eyes, “and I’m Tonto.”
“And look at my moccasins, don’t they count? They’re Blackfoot, like you.” His heavy dark eyebrows drew down as he took a good look, but that was the extent of it. “And I went to school some at Heart Butte with Indian kids,” I persisted insistently, “and—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he butted in, “all of that gives you full standing in the Whooptydoo tribe, chiefie, but I can’t go around duding up a white kid in—”
“How about this, then,” I butted right back, reaching the arrowhead out of my pocket and peeling back enough of its condom sheath to flash the slick black obsidian to him in my palm.
“Wah.” Silent now, he put a hand toward the shiny black stone, but didn’t touch it. “That’s big medicine. Where’d you git it?”
“It’s, uh, been in the family.”
“Tell him all, Donny,” Herman warned before wisely hustlng off toward the front of the camper to keep a lookout.
I spilled the whole tale of arrowhead and Sparrowhead, Louie Slewfoot listening without ever taking his gaze off the obsidian gleam of it.
When I was done, he laughed over the Tuffies as Herman had, saying, “Pretty smart, but the problem with them things is they can spring a leak and you end up with something you wasn’t expecting.” That explained it! Why the arrowhead sometimes worked like a charm and sometimes didn’t, if its luck could leak out like that. Louie had the way to fix the matter, reaching onto his table of leather goods and tossing me a small leather sack on a buckskin thong. “Let’s git it out of its cock socks and into a medicine pouch, hokay? Hang it around your neck and treat it right if you don’t want to lose the big medicine.”
At the end of that, he growled deep in his throat. “That wampus cat, Williamson. He runs the Gobble Gobble You like the whole earth is his. We have to chase its goddamn cattle off the rez land all the time. The rich sonofabitch sure to hell don’t need any big medicine like that.” With something like an animal grin, he sized me up in a new way. “Dearie dearie goddamn,” he expressed, which went straight into my cussing collection. “How did I git myself into this, fixing you up as a fancy-dancer? Gonna take some doing.” He laughed so low it barely came out. “But it’d be a helluva good joke on these Crows, wouldn’t it. They was on Custer’s side, you know. Bastard scouts for Yellow Hair.”
“Po-leece is com-ing.” Herman’s soft singsong reached us from his sentry post up front.
I just about dissolved at that, but it galvanized Louie Slewfoot. “Git in,” he half helped, half shoved me into the back of the camper, with him clambering after. In there, in the semi-dark, everything was a flurry as I undressed and was dressed all over again by the grunting Louie slipping a long apronlike skin shirt and a beaded harness that hung way down and woolly leggings—“Them other kids can have their plain old goatskin, this here is pure angora”—and jingle bell anklets and a bunch more onto me. As he draped a sort of harness made up of shiny disks bigger than a silver dollar around my neck, I wondered, “Are these real silver?”
“Naw, snuff box lids. Stand up straight, can’t you.”
I was starting to feel as weighted down as a deep-sea diver, but he kept on digging out items and fastening me into them, until we both froze in position at the sound of a voice with the flat cadence of the Crows asking Herman where the custodian of the booth was.
“Hungry, he is. Gone for the frying bread. I am minding for him,” said Heman, as if glad to be of help.
“When he comes back, tell him to keep an eye out for a redheaded punk kid in a purple shirt and give us a shout if he spots him. Some kind of sneak thief we need to turn in to the sheriff,” the Crow cop finished his business and could be heard moving on. Sheriff! The memory of the mean little Glasgow lawman who arrested his own brother gripped me like a seizure, the vision of what all sheriffs must be like.
Louie Slewfoot had his own pronounced reaction. “You would have red hair.” He pawed through his stock of costumery, and the next thing I knew, I was top-heavy in a turban-like feathered headdress that covered my hair and came halfway down to my eyes. “That’s better. Now we paint you up good.” Working fast, he smeared my face and hands with some oily tan stuff. “The half-breed kids use this, it makes them look more Indian to the dance judges.”
Along with a knock on the back door came Herman’s urging, “Coast is clear, better hurry.”
“Yeah, yeah. We’re about done. Turn around a half mo, Red Chief.” When I did so, Louie strapped something large and feathered on my back, patted me on a shoulder epaulet the size of a softball, and told me, “There you go, chiefie. The rest of this is up to you.”
“Donny, is that you?” Herman met me with astonishment when I hopped out of the camper. Overcome with curiosity myself, I stretched my neck around to glimpse the thing on my back, and blinked at the unmistakable mottled black-and-white feathers arrayed almost to the ground, fanned out as if in full flight.
“Holy wow! The bald eagle wing thinger!”
“You been to Heart Butte basketball games, sure enough,” Louie Slewfoot granted. The Heart Butte Warriors had cheerleaders in swirly skirts like any other high school, but also—famously or notoriously, depending on your point of view—a boy dancer, rigged up pretty much as I was and stationed at the top of the stands every game, who at crucial points would whirl around and around, letting out the hair-raising staccato eagle screech, Nyih-nyih-nyih. Before a player on the other team was about to shoot a free throw, preferably.
“Never been able to sell the bald eagle getup to these cheapskates down here,” Louie was saying philosophically, “so you might as well give it a little use. See if you can git its medicine going for you.” Turning to Herman, he rubbed his thumb and forefingers together. “Speaking of medicine, where’s that twenty?”
• • •
HERMAN PAID UP, but we weren’t done with Louie Slewfoot yet, nor he with us.
“Hokay, now we need to git Fancy Dan here past the rodeo chief,” he instructed as he set off toward the bucking chutes, motioning us on behind. “Remember now, you’re not Donny the wanted kid, you’re my nephew Marvin.” He cautioned Herman, “Leave the rodeo chief to me. Henry Swift Pony. He’s not a real chief, but he’s a bossy SOB even for a Crow and somebody has to run the show.”
With my outfit jingling and jangling and Herman fretting that he hoped nothing happened to the moccasins in this, we trailed after Louie’s slewfooted gait, both of us unsure how this was going, especially when he did not turn aside at all as the biggest Crow policeman imaginable, black braids down to his shiny badge, appeared from the back of the chutes and beside him, complaining loudly about the lack of arrest of a certain thieving runt of a kid, Wendell Williamson.
The shaking of my feathers and ankle bells had nothing to do with dance steps. I was convinced my life was going to end then and there, amid horse manure and moccasin tracks. In that big word incarceration, one way or another.
“Th-that’s Sparrowhead,” I quavered to Herman, wanting to turn and run.
“I guessed so,” he grunted back, keeping right on toward Louie and the oncoming lethal pair. “Don’t be horrorfied,” he bucked me up, as if being scared to death was that easy to be rid of. “This is where
Still, as Louie barreled along on his collision course with Sparrowhead and the Crow version of a harness bull, I said tremulously out the side of my mouth, “Is he gonna turn us in?”
“We find out. Keep walking like you got no business but dancing fancy, Red Chief.”
Of all things, Louie planted himself in the path of the oncoming two men. Hunched like a bear spotting prey, he gave the Crow policeman a wicked grin and said:
“Howdy, Constable. Glad to see you keeping the peace. No ghosts of Custer around or anything.”
The big Crow cop glared, snapped, “I don’t have time for fool talk,” and stepped around him. Giving the Indians an exasperated look, Wendell Williamson sidestepped along with the cop while Herman and I swept past, unnoticed.
• • •
“THAT WAS SORT of close,” Louie Slewfoot remarked when he caught up with us at the bucking chutes. “Hokay, next act. Git in back of the green elephant there and stay out of sight until I tell you.” He pointed me to a big trash bin, and as for Herman, “You can make yourself useful by standing at one end and sort of blocking the view. Pretend like you’re watching the rodeo and you don’t know him or me from Sitting Bull.”
We took our places, and Louie clomped around to face the platform above the bucking chutes, cupping his hands to his mouth. “See you about something, Henry?” he hollered up to the man in charge. “Won’t take time at all.”
Peeking past the edge of the trash bin, I could see the rodeo chief turn to him, stone-faced behind the dark sunglasses, his braids more than ever like whips of authority down over his shoulders. “You again, is it, Slewfoot. I gave you the booth spot you pestered the crap out of me for. What’s eating you now? If you weren’t so frigging good at the squaw work, I wouldn’t let your blanket-ass butt in here.”
“Big frigging if, Henry, and you know it,” Louie gave no ground. “Don’t be giving me a bad time when I’m trying to perk up your rodeo with something special, huh? My nephew, Marvin here. Brung him to show you spazzes how dancing’s done at Heart Butte.”
Henry Swift Pony laughed without any humor whatsoever. “Pull my other one, Louie. Nothing doing, we have all the entrants we need.” Herman, nearly toppling over in their direction to hear this, looked as anguished as I felt.
Louie ignored the turndown and called out to me, “Marvin! Come show Mr. Swift Pony what a fancy-dancer looks like.”
I stepped out from behind the green elephant.
From his platform perch, the head Crow looked me over for half a minute, whipping off his dark glasses to see if the feathered rig on my back was truly the bald eagle wing outfit, and stopping at my moccasins. My heart thumping a mighty rhythm, I jigged enough to make the eagle feathers shimmer and the anklet bells ring-a-ling-ling. Helpfully or not, Herman abandoned his fixed casualness of staring into the arena to turn around and exclaim, “Some outfit!”
With a dip of his head, Henry Swift Pony had to agree, conceding to Louie: “He’s got it all on, for sure. Fine, chuck him in with the other kids. But at the tail end.”
• • •
THE GAGGLE of fancy-dancers that had been at the refreshment stand was now bunched at the passageway gate beyond the chutes, where the rodeo clown and anyone else who needed access to the arena could come and go. Wishing me luck—“Git out there and show ’em how the cow ate the cabbage,” said the one; “Let Manitou be in moccasins with you, hah?” said the other—Louie and Herman left me to it, and so, ankles tinkling and snuff lids clattering, I shuffled down the passageway to join the gaudily outfitted assemblage.
Not that the group of them, waiting for their time of glory in the arena, could particularly hear me coming. They jigged and jangled and jiggled and jingled—maybe other jittery j words, too, but I don’t know what those would be. These were some wound-up kids. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but be noticed as I tucked myself in with them. The biggest one of the bunch, an ornery-looking high school kid with a jackknife face, spotted me at once, my black-and-white wing outfit standing out amid their feathers of the mere golden eagle, dime a dozen out there on the plains. Enviously he looked down that long blade of nose at me, his eyes narrow as the rest of his unwelcoming mug. “Who’re you? Little Beaver?”
Ordinarily those were fighting words, but these were not ordinary circumstances. Trying to make nice, I started to respond, “Donny Cam—” and just in time managed a coughing fit. “Sorry, frog in my throat,” I barely rescued the name situation. “Anyway, Donny, but my dancing name is Slewfoot.”
“Tanglefoot is probably more like it.” The ornery kid, head and shoulders taller than me, suspiciously eyed what he could see of me under all the costume. “So, Donny Frog in the Throat, where’d you dig up the bald eagle rig?”
There comes a point, in something like this, where you just do not want to take any more crap. “That’s for me to know and you to whistle through the hole in your head to find out,” I retorted to Jackknife Face.
“Gotcha there, Ferdie,” the other rigged-up kids hooted, more curious about me than hostile. Giving me a good looking-over, they concluded: “You’re not from here.”
“That’s for sure,” I verified, and let drop: “Heart Butte.”
“Blackfoot,” Jackknife Face snickered. “That explains a lot.”
The others, though, were as impressed as I’d hoped. “Whoa, the war whoop hoopsters, like in the papers! Neat! You play basketball?”
“Damn betcha.” I may have fluffed my feathers some in composing the brag. “We shoot baskets for an hour after school every day. Everybody does, even Shorty the janitor.”
“Bunch of crazy gunners,” my skeptic tried to dismiss Heart Butte’s famous basketball proficiency. The others hooted again. “Yeah, they shot the living crap out of you, Ferd. What was that score the last game, about 100 to 20?”
The jackknife-faced one was back at me. “So, baldy. What are you, an apple in reverse?”
Not up on that in Indian talk, I dodged. “Ever hear of speaking English?”
“Come on, pizzlehead, you know—white on the outside and red on the inside?”
“Oh, that. Sure, why didn’t you say so.” That fit fine. Maybe he was going to acknowledge me as an honorary Indian after all, and that would be that.
“I still don’t go for this,” Jackknife Face took a turn for the worse, though. “We’ve practiced our butts off together and you just show up to do the eagle dance, big as you please? Why should we let you horn in?”
Uh oh. That didn’t sound good. If I got kicked out, I was right back to being searched for all over the rodeo grounds by every Indian policeman. In a fit of desperation, I started to protest that the rodeo chief himself had let me into the fancy-dancing, but Jackknife Face was not about to give that a hearing. Pointing to me, he called out to the dance leader waiting at the gate, a tribal elder with a skin drum, “Hey, Yellowtail, how come he gets to—”
He was drowned out by a shout from Henry Swift Pony, up on the platform. “You there, bird boy! I thought I told you to stay at the back.”
“See you at the dancing,” I told Jackknife Face as I scooted to the rear of the bunch.
“And now, a special treat, courtesy of Crow Fair,” the announcer’s voice crackled in the nick of time, “for your entertainment, the fancy-dancers of the Crow nation, junior division!”
“Here we go, boys, do yourselves proud,” the dance leader intoned, simultaneously starting up a rhythm
• • •
DID I HAVE any idea of dance steps to do, fancy or otherwise, there in front of thousands in the packed grandstand and the eyes of the Crow nation and the world-beating bronc rider Rags Rasmussen? No, yes, and maybe. For although I was merely a make-believe Indian in pounds of costume, I did remember the whirling and twirling of the Heart Butte mascot while he scared the neck hair off opponents at basketball games with the high-pitched eagle screech, and may have invented swoops and swirls of my own as I swept rambunctiously around in jigging circles with my arms out like wings and the array on my back aquiver in every beautiful black-and-white feather. Caught up in the drum music and the hey-ya-ya-ya, but most of all in the moment where imagination became real, I danced as if my flashing beaded moccasins were on fire. I danced as if the medicine pouch with my arrowhead in it was a second heart. I danced for Gram in her hospital bed and wheelchair, danced for Herman the German and his monumental little thinks, danced for shrewd Louie Slewfoot, danced for the threesome of soldiers fated to Korea and for Leticia the roving waitress and for Harvey the romantic jailbreaker and for the other traveling souls met on the dog bus and inscribed in the memory book, all of us who were hunched up and taking it while serving time in this life.
So, I suppose I was me, nerved up to the highest degree, but in the moment I was also Red Chief, and who knows, maybe some kind of ghost of Manitou bursting out of wherever a spirit walks through time. Possessed as I was, my moccasined feet knowing no boundaries and my high-pitched eagle shrieks of Nyih-nyih-nyih puncturing their chant, I spooked the other fancy-dancing kids away from me as I plain and simple outcrazied them.
By now I could hear as if in a dream the announcer singling me out, calling, “How about young Woolly Leggings there, part angora and part bald eagle, quite the combination! Look at him go! He’s got more moves than a Scotchman trying to sneak under the door of a pay toilet. Folks, what you’re seeing here today holds special meaning. These dances go back a long way—”