As You Were Page 2

  Dad drives up to the cabin, points out a field where Indian tobacco grows. But Grandma will have lunch ready, and she’d be upset if it got cold, so you can never stop.

  He’s never attended ceremony or a single powwow.

  He’s never smudged nor seen the inside of a sweat lodge.

  He’s never tied on a single piece of regalia or beadwork.

  He’s never even worn a ribbon shirt.

  He always wears a pair of heavy leather cowboy boots and Wranglers, along with a collared plaid shirt. No one is sure if he does it ironically—dresses like a cowboy—or because he continually listens to country and western songs crooning about sorrow and loss and loneliness.

  He never wears a hat, though. He wears everything but the hat. You wear a cowboy hat. It’s one of the few things they bought new for you. There’s a picture of you sitting on a loveseat with a box of Nilla Wafers and your sister. Your feet are as leathery as his boots, and on your head sits a crushed cowboy hat. Debbie says you never took it off. You even wore it to bed.

  Dad takes a deer every fall with a recurve bow—not a compound bow or a rifle, but a recurve bow—the way the real Indians on the television do. He tans the hides himself and hangs them on the wall. After a while, the hides disappear. Whether they get moldy and tossed into the trash or he sells them is anyone’s guess.

  One afternoon when you come home from school, Grandma Audrey’s house looks like a murder scene. The corpse is splayed across the kitchen table with only a blue tarp to catch the blood. Debbie helps him get rid of the body. You help make sausage once you’re old enough. He can process a deer all by himself in a single afternoon. He must have taught himself, seeing as how he says Grandpa Gene didn’t speak to him until he got old enough to take to a bar and then died five years later.

  The first time Dad teaches you anything about being Indian is when he lets you help him under the hood of his car. This time you’re not just holding the flashlight for him while he gets upset at something other than you. You’re actually helping him hook up his new battery.

  He points out the two different posts—positive and negative—and how they each have a corresponding cable. They’re impossible to confuse—one barely has enough slack to get to where it needs to, and the other almost falls into place.

  Before he hands you the wrench, the battery has to be facing the right direction.

  “What’s that look like?” he asks.

  “A plus sign.”

  “Mmmhhh, that’s the positive. Now, what color is it?”

  “Red.”

  “And the other one?”

  “Black.”

  “What’s the little symbol there?” he asks, pointing the handle of the wrench up and down the cable.

  “The little line?” you ask. “A takeaway sign?”

  “Yeah, it’s the negative. Now, does it match up?”

  “No,” you say, ducking.

  “Well, spin the battery around then,” he says, stepping back far enough out of the way for you to come out of his shadow.

  It’s heavier than you imagined, so you take a step closer and press up against the fender, get up on tippy-toes to lift the battery and spin it.

  “Don’t scratch the paint!” he says. His yelling causes you to duck and stumble and drop the battery. But it lands in place. He pulls the black plastic top off the lead post, shakes it, and asks, “What’s this again?”

  “The negative.”

  “That’s right, the negative. What’s negative mean?”

  “Negative’s bad.”

  “That’s right. It’s black, right? Like a nigger. And they ain’t no good either. That’s how you remember this and don’t fuck up my battery,” he says, almost tapping the handle of the wrench against your forehead. “It’ll come in handy one day, I promise you.”

  “Yessir,” you say, knowing better than to argue with him regarding how he talks about Black people, knowing it’s best to keep quiet and let him say what he will. History has taught you speaking up will only earn you two black eyes.

  Then he pulls the red plastic cap off and says, “This is the positive, right? Positive’s good. It’s red, like us,” bringing the cap up to his flushed cheek to illustrate his point.

  “Now, put the positive cable on first,” he says, handing you the wrench. “You know how you remember that? That the positive goes on first?”

  You shake your head from side to side.

  “We were here first—and then them cotton-pickers got brought over.”

  You don’t blink or flinch or dare do anything to make him call you some kind of nigger lover. Dad’s already mad. You don’t dare antagonize him, so you take hold of the cable but let out a whimper and jump back when it crackles and sparks, which makes him laugh and yank the wrench out of your hand.

  “Give me that. I’ll do it.”

  You stand back, watch his beet-red face while he ratchets the cables onto the battery.

  First the red, then the black.

  His lesson in mechanics is what’s called a mnemonic device, one of the few he’ll ever offer—warped as it is.

  Grandma Audrey and Grandpa Gene never taught Dad anything about being Indian because they knew nothing, so he figured out what he could for himself. It’s how he became the caricature he is, and how your earliest memory came about: a pack of wolves swarming around you in the living room of a single-wide trailer. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but to your toddler mind, that’s how it felt.

  Perhaps a pack of wolves is the wrong way to word it, seeing as how it was a litter of wolf pups. You can keep a wolf as a pet if you live in the city as long as you fence in the yard and you have another fence set up at least thirty-six inches away from the first fence. But you don’t live anywhere near the city. The cities on the rez aren’t even called towns or townships. They’re called villages—at least in Minnesota, on Fond du Lac.

  Dad knows of a guy who traps animals and breeds them and sells the offspring to anyone looking for the sort of a pet you can’t pick up at the pound. He has bobcats, bear cubs, skunks, and timber wolf pups for sale. His place isn’t marked with a road sign cataloging his wares or business hours. Instead, there are a slew of claims about Christ and Commies.

  That’s where Dad got Brutus.

  Brutus isn’t entirely weaned, so Mom feeds him from a bottle. One of your bottles. The two of you are only weeks old. He sleeps in your crib, and, later, in the bottom half of the bunk bed with you. You share your home with ferrets and a skunk, too. In the winter, or maybe the early months of spring, Mom keeps chicks and ducklings in the laundry room with a warming light and lines the floor with newspaper. The ducklings and chicks all huddle together around the gravity feeder for warmth. Once, you let a few of the ducklings swim in the toilet bowl until they all drowned from exhaustion. You couldn’t have been more than two at the time. Mom giggles when she tells the story about how hard you cried.

  Goats and horses are kept out back behind the trailer. Goats for their milk, and horses—because it’s what Indians do, right? They kill deer with a bow and arrow and ride horses.

  When Mom is pregnant with the two of you, a horse named Regret walks beneath a low-hanging branch to brush her off. Dad gets perturbed and grabs hold of the horse by the bottom jaw, plants his fist between its eyes the way Conan did with a camel. He loves that story. Mom just casts her eyes to the floor and shakes her head, when she confirms the story.

  He may have bought Brutus thinking that’s how an Indian gets a spirit animal, but Brutus isn’t his dog. You’re Brutus’s human. That’s how it works with wolves. Later he brings home Spicy. She isn’t his dog either. She’s Brutus’s mate. They have a litter of pups, which stay in the house until they’re weaned. They have the run of the trailer and shadow your every move in hopes you’ll lead them to their next meal, as if you’re their alpha. But that’s not really how being an alpha works. Alphas follow and protect against anything that might threaten the group from the rear. You learn
this later, when the Army makes you a sergeant.

  Mom is outside hanging clothes on the line when you hear her calling your name, so you grab socks from the dresser drawer and pull a pair of shoes from the depths of the toy box. You know to keep them away from the wolf pups, or else you’ll be running around with bare feet.

  A few of them tug at your pant legs when you make your way down the hall to the living room, forcing you to high-step to the couch. Still, some of them nip at your toes and the tender bit at the back of the ankle. After climbing up to the relative safety of the couch cushions and slipping on your socks and shoes, you work the laces into rabbit ears. But not fast enough. The tallest of the pups latches onto the loose ends of the laces and tugs on your shoes. The rest of them jump toward you but fall back to the floor, piling on top of one another in a mound of fur and teeth. Before long, they’re all taking turns tugging at the toes of the shoes. You yell for Mom, but she’s busy or can’t hear, so you watch while they pull both shoes off and shred them in a game of tug-of-war. They rip the socks off your feet, too, and you tuck your feet up under your butt, between the couch cushions, while you watch them shred the last pair of matching socks and swallow them on down, elastic and all.

  A year later, you watch them do the same to a tiny goat that wiggles its way out of its enclosure and into theirs. A year later, Brutus attacks Dad when he attacks you during a bender. The only thing that saves him is when he thrusts his arm in front of his face and neck. Brutus would have torn out his throat otherwise.

  After that, he takes Brutus to the zoo. After that, things get really bad, really quick.

  While on a field trip with the pre-K class, you see Brutus behind bars. They keep him and two other timber wolves crammed into a giant aviary where they normally keep owls and eagles that’d lost the gift of flight.

  It’s a depressing display, and the class loses interest within minutes. The student teacher looks as though she’ll shit herself when she urges the class on to the next exhibit and sees you’ve made your way over the barricade and up to the bars. A thundering growl builds louder and louder in Brutus’s chest. Loud enough to keep the other two wolves pinned to the other side of the aviary. You have your arms inside the cage. Your fingers tangle amongst the matted mess of his coat, and you mash your face between the bars while you whisper to him.

  You miss your puppy.

  Brutus snarls when a zookeeper takes hold of your winter coat and pulls you back to safety. You’re still not too talkative and don’t dare speak out of turn to an adult, so you let her tell you how dangerous those dogs are. Mom says eventually they sent Brutus out to San Diego to father a few pups, and one day you’ll stand outside their square-acre enclosure wondering which ones. Passersby will tell their kids to look at the wolves, and you’ll whisper back, “Ma’iingan,” correcting them.

  When you fly home for her funeral, Mom’s brother, Brian, is waiting for you inside his woodshop. He’s been waiting all day. He doesn’t offer a hello. Instead he asks, “Who the hell raises wolves?” before he hugs you, quaking and crying.

  Mom did. She raised wolves. Boys too.

  MEDICINE MAN

  BREAKFAST IS NOTHING SPECIAL. IT’S merely a means of lessening the harshness of the cocktail of pharmaceuticals prescribed to help you make it through the day. You wonder whether they’ll fix your head before they destroy your liver and stomach lining. But, still, you take your medicine, a mouthful of pills meant to stop you from giving your Beretta a blowjob. It’s simple physics: no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time.

  There’s one pill, four times a day, to keep your mood stable. No more explosions. No more manic episodes. No more fight or flight or freeze. When the gelcap explodes, when its contents creep back up your esophagus, its acidity flashes you back to the taste the CLP left on your tonsils—right before you remembered it’s got to come straight up from under the jaw and back behind your eyeballs on its way to the top of the skull, unless you’d like some CNA at the vet’s home to wipe your ass for the rest of your life. And then you lost your nerve, again, and slid the safety back on.

  Or maybe they give you a colostomy bag and a catheter these days.

  There’s another pill for the trip to Africa—a diseased land with diseased water that breeds mosquitoes that’ll kill you as quick as anything. Though the pills they gave you to protect you from their bite cause brain damage mimicking the scars of combat, so they throw more pills your way and cut you a bigger disability check.

  There’s a two-tone brown and beige alpha-blocker you take before bedtime. Your heart is fine, but the pills have a curious side effect of stopping you from dreaming.

  No dreams means no nightmares.

  There is no bent piece of red willow rounded into a hoop held tight by an interwoven, interlaced net of sinew hanging anywhere in the apartment. Still, this two-tone brown and beige blood pressure pill is your dreamcatcher, and the pharmacist is your medicine man.

  He warns they’ll make you lightheaded, so you should take some time getting up in the morning. But when you gotta go, you gotta go, and you’re getting older now, and you gotta go in the middle of the night sometimes, and one time a girlfriend finds you lying on the bathroom floor. Not dead, but dizzy. Cold, yes. But it is Minnesota. And it’s winter. And the basement is not insulated, so it’s safe to say the floor is freezing. The house is better than a hundred years old with next to no updates, meaning: there is no exhaust fan, so it gets humid in there when you shower, and it stays humid. The Visqueen keeps falling from the window, and the breeze from the blizzard is blowing the blackout curtains. When she touches your leg to shake you, you feel icy, and she knows this is how your mother was found, so she lets out a scream, one that startles you awake, and you thump your head on the tub you somehow missed when you fell to the floor—along with the toilet and sink. But you learned to sleep where you can ages ago, and sometimes that means sleeping where you fall.

  LOVE LEAVES SCARS

  TAKING THESE PILLS OR ASKING for the pills or admitting you can’t do it without pills leaves you with the feeling of cottonmouth all on its own. Before the pills, there’s talk therapy with the one and only psychologist the VA employs at the local rural clinic. He mentions how he has the same running shoes as you to build rapport and how he got his PhD down in southern Mississippi, where you were stationed for a good chunk of the time you served. You reminisce about the cuisine you miss—Cajun, Creole, soul food—and talk about how nothing pleases your palate anymore. The flavors are dull, the colors are dim, the volume is muted on everything except for the one thing in front of you at that particular moment in time. His expression changes when he realizes you’re not talking about chicken and dumplings or split pea soup.

  It’s at that moment he asks you to recite the five worst moments of your time in war and conflict. “No particular order, just whatever comes to mind first,” he says. Then he wants to hear the next one, and the next one, until he has five moments he can discuss with you.

  He doesn’t get how if you crack the door, it’ll become a fatal funnel. He doesn’t get how the memories clump together in a Spirograph of a Venn diagram. He has you buy a Walkman with a microphone. Together, you produce a soundtrack your five worst demons can exercise to. They are the moments you haven’t managed to repress all the way or convince yourself never happened in the waking world.

  The doctor’s orders are to go home and listen to the stories you’ve told him once a day until the next week, when he’ll see you again and have you tell the same stories again, like the proverbial resident drunk at the VFW that forgot to go on living after they were handed their discharge papers. The doctor will re-record you and have you listen to the remastered versions of these easy-listening classics. He wants you to build a callus, become numb, have these haunting tales become background noise. So he hears these scattered and abridged tales, the ones that torment you when you dare close your eyes at night. He says the more you discuss, the more that’ll be reme
mbered. But that’s not how revision works.

  The first rule of storytelling is to know the audience. The more of an encore he asks for, the more likely it is that you’ll word it in a way that makes the most sense to someone such as him, who’s only watched a handful of war flicks or studied the aftereffects in a textbook or watched someone else poke and prod some other lab rat from behind a two-way mirror. The story won’t be free-flowing. Words will have to be measured. Still, if you don’t play his game, he can tell them you don’t need or want their help and then they’ll have a reason to take away your benefits, pull the rug out from underneath you so you can slip through the crack and save Uncle Sam some money, leave you to twist in the wind—dance a jig—join the daily twenty-two.

  This becomes Mad Libs with fractured frightening details outlining a day in the life of a man who’s paid to die in the name of God and country and cheap foreign crude oil, yet doesn’t. It’s all one nightmare, whether you’re asleep or no.

  Your eyes fixate on the filigreed piece of parchment he’s tacked to the wall above his desk while you talk about waking to VBIEDs exploding less than a football field away from the tent, sleeping through others, and the accompanying small arms attacks. You tell him about taking fire in a Blackhawk. You talk about being shelled from the MSR while taking a lap around the track. You talk about maneuvering down Enterprise Drive, a car T-boning the Humvee and watching the gunner shatter the windshield and the bones of the overzealous bastard sitting behind the steering wheel, followed by you pouring out the door once you get inside the serpentine and puking into the roasting sand. You talk about when a Kurd locks you in with forty detainees and emotions you still cannot define and how those images come back every time you close your eyes and how every time you open your mouth after that, you have fewer bits of teeth. You talk about waiting month after month for luck to end, but it never does, so you go on waiting to die, and you are still waiting.