The Removed(36)

For days a dog howled from the mountain. It was believed that the dog was howling as a signal that rainfall was coming. The dog’s owner could not get the dog to stop howling. He tried feeding the dog, comforting it, but the dog kept howling and howling, pacing back and forth, pacing and howling. The Little People made medicine that changed two men into hawks. Both men flew high into the sky, directly toward the sun, but they became blind and burned and fell to their deaths.

Soon afterward, the Little People said that the sun felt so sad that it went into hiding, and a great rainfall came, and people rejoiced. The sun loved the earth too much to burn it up.

It rained for six days and brought a great flood. Rivers overflowed and destroyed houses, and some people died. The man and his dog disappeared after the flood. Their bodies were never found. It is said that late in the night one can still hear the sad howl of the dog’s spirit.

Beloved: as we packed our clothes and supplies to prepare for the journey, we could hear a sad howl coming from the mountains.

*

The night before the soldiers arrived, while you were sleeping, I reached down and touched your hair, your back, your forehead. You stirred in your sleep. Across the room, your mother was stripping corn. Your beautiful mother, her hair hanging down her body, facing away from me. I moved silently so I could see her face. Back then we grew corn and squash, sunflowers and pumpkins, and we dressed deerskins together. We walked at night together to be alone. Then I began to silently weep. I lay down beside you and wept, for you, for your mother, and for our people, who would soon have to hide in the mountains. I wept for the people who would be beaten. I wept for the people in wagons and the ones who would walk west. I wept for all who would soon be suffering and dying.

My son, that night when the soldiers arrived, you dreamed of their arrival. You woke crying. Your mother consoled you until you were able to describe what you saw in your dream: the people dying all around us, in wagons and in fields and snow. You saw the frostbite on children’s hands. You saw people falling to the ground. I told my people that we would need to protect the land from the threat of the coming winter. I had a very unsettled feeling about it all. While you fell back asleep, I lay awake, worried that your prophecy was worse than you dreamed. I was correct. The soldiers arrived a few hours later.





Edgar


SEPTEMBER 4

IN JACKSON’S ROTTING HOUSE, I watched him whittle a devil’s flute from a piece of wood. He carved out the holes so that when he played it, I heard the songs of past centuries I’d never heard before. He explained that a friend of his had taught the songs to him while they were working on the projections of Indians for the games he was developing.

“I don’t understand the attraction to these games,” I said.

“They’re games, nothing more. People like to play sports games.” He held the knife out and glared at the blade. “The possibilities are endless with gaming.”

He whittled and made sniffing sounds.

“I’m going downtown,” I said.

“Where to?”

“Rusty Spoon Records, to look through music. There’s a guy I like named Venery who works there.”

“Oh, Lyle knows him. He’s bought weed from him. Trying to get him to sell some ammunition, too. Apparently the guy’s got all kinds of ammo for hunting. Ask him about it and let me know.”

I left and walked downtown. On the way I passed trees with low-hanging branches, old cars with busted-out windshields. I walked along the sidewalk at a steady pace. A few kids were riding skateboards up ahead. One of them saw me and pointed. I watched them as I walked. The others got off their skateboards and congregated. They huddled together and talked for a minute, and then they all looked at me. I watched them until they turned and ran off.

When I got to Rusty Spoon Records, Venery was thumbing through a stack of records. He looked up at me, his long silver hair hanging down in his face. He could’ve passed for someone living deep in the woods of the Oklahoma northeast, somewhere outside Quah, and the longer I was in the store, the more I wondered whether he in fact had lived there.

“Jim Thorpe,” he said, laughing.

“Jerry Garcia?”

He wheezed laughter, causing him to cough a couple of times. “I met him many years ago,” he told me. “I was at a party in San Francisco in the seventies, back when I toured with a psychedelic band called Venery and the Voyeurs. We smoked hash, and he gave me an earring I wore for twenty years.”

I looked at him. He wasn’t wearing an earring.

“Lawd knows my ear got infected, and it was never the same,” he said. He told me his band used to play in the Paseo district in Oklahoma City and then down in Deep Ellum and at terminals at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. He drove west to California to stay with a cousin outside of Venice Beach. He was there about six months before he ran out of money and had to move back. “We could never get anything to work out,” he said. “My buddy and I did this thing in LA where we pretended like we didn’t know each other. We would go into bars and clubs. He would sit at the bar, and later I would come in and sit alone at a table. At some point he would pretend he recognized me and start telling people around him that I was the brother of Jerry Garcia. We could eat peyote or score free weed or booze. I met some real weirdos out there. One told me there were narwhals hiding behind dumpsters in Paseo. I existed in the fantasy of pretending I was someone else.”