Future Home of the Living God(75)

“Humans have always been superfluous troublemakers,” he says. “But at least we’ve got good songs.”

“Not everybody had good songs,” I say.

Eddy looks thoughtful and then nods.

“You’re right. Custer had no song.”

“Mother—you know that Mother—has no song.”

“People sick for power have no song. But your baby is going to have a song.”

“Really?” I’m so pleased that I give a little jump, and my baby jumps too. “You’re thinking it up?”

“I had a dream about a little baby,” says Eddy. “He said, ‘Where’s my song?’”

“You’re a good grandpa,” I say.

I’m incredibly happy, and sit by the stove stroking my belly, wondering what the song will be like. In public now, Eddy gives speeches and makes pronouncements like he’s always been an extrovert. At home, he hums and sings. When he finishes singing, he sits at the kitchen table with stacks of papers, old land deeds. He plots strategies. Thinks of survival measures, ways to draft our young people into working for a higher purpose. Where to get seeds. Pigs. Cows. Flocks of chickens. He wants to make the reservation one huge, intensively worked, highly productive farm. He’s got gangsters growing seedlings in the grow-lighted aisles of casinos. He’s got them raising free pot for everyone ever since a friendly Kiowa came north via Colorado and picked up the entire spectrum of medicinal varietals. Weed’s our friend, Eddy says. Given to us by the Creator not only for trading to the chimookomaanag, but for medicating all sorts of pain and for soothing the freaked-out brain.

The chimookomaanag are the Big Knives, the white people, and so far they really haven’t bothered us because we seized the National Guard arsenal up at Camp Ripley, which is on our original treaty grounds. Ours. They had an amazing array of snooping equipment, slightly out-of-date U.S. military stuff, which Eddy says we use to spy on the people who are spying on us.

“We’re gonna be self-sufficient, like the old days,” he says.

The gas pumps at the Superpumper are still being resupplied. The oil company could care less who’s in charge. The casino was, of course, rich in cash. They still have reserves they have not touched, as does the tribal bank. Some places still run on cash, old U.S. government currency, because nobody has been organized enough yet to replace it. Eddy is also war chief, with a pack of elite soldiers at his command. As with every tribe, our nation has veterans—lots of veterans—and they are friends with lots of non-Indian veterans, and together they have organized and trained our people.

Our people. My people. Your people. I could never say that before. Eddy has decolonized the uniforms of the militia.

“We’ve got almost two full regiments. One of them is into the flowing hair, Last of the Mohicans. They tan hides, sew their own buckskins, drill with bows and arrows and M16s and . . . you don’t want to know. I never knew I had it in me, Cedar. I’m surprised. I think about seventy percent of my depression was my seventeenth-century warrior trying to get out.”

Eddy’s been working out—he looks tougher. He looks straight on at people now. Sometimes, Eddy eyes me over the cup he puts to his lips, then lowers it without drinking. His stare, when it focuses on a person, is long-seeing. Unnerving. He sets his cup down.

“Just so you know. We are not giving up our pregnant tribal members. Our women are sacred to us. I’m afraid we will eventually get raided, though,” Eddy says. “Whichever military entity comes out on top will probably remember about us. We don’t know what direction it will come from, who will lead it, what they’ll have for power. But you could get picked up anywhere. So you are as safe here as anywhere. I guess. Only—” He whirls around, kills the lights, pulls me through the back door onto the deck. Out there, he relaxes.

Together on the porch we gaze into the bare gray trunks of the thick woods just behind the house. A man and a woman in camouflage and buckskins, holding automatic weapons, lean against Eddy’s car in the driveway to the left of the house. I can smell the rich tobacco smoke of their rolled cigarettes. There’s woodsmoke in the air, too, and a welcome sharp bright cold. Wolves? Coyotes? Dogs? They begin howling just beyond the riffle of woods.

“I’ve never heard wolves before.” I breathe, enchanted.

“Not wolves. That’s us,” says Eddy. “Our new unbreakable code.”

He heard them while we were in the kitchen, and dragged me out because he needed to decipher their language.

“What are they saying?”

“Drones earlier, at the casino. We should go inside.”



Once we’re in the house, Eddy opens a padlocked army trunk that is pushed up against the wall. He takes a rifle from the trunk and hands it to me, with a box of bullets.

“I don’t want this.”

“It’s yours,” he says.

I look down at the thing in my hands—the Custer rifle.

“Phil give you this?”

“Yes.”

“So he’s been here.”

My throat shuts. My chest clenches up. I try to give the rifle back to Eddy.

“Where is he?”

“Gone again. I’m sorry.”

Eddy brings me into the garage and shows me how to load the rifle. I’m not an enthusiastic learner, but he says that he will teach me how to shoot.