Indian Country Noir Read online

  Wish a lot of things I can never have.

  So here I was again in dream time, feeling Grandpa trying to steer me away again, but this time I wasn't having it. I wasn't letting life go through me again. And I wasn't going to wait for that blood-cursed monster to hunt me down somewhere down the road. It was here, and so was I. I was going after it.

  You're going after it, aren't you.

  I still didn t say anything. Didn t ask about responsibility either. I knew I'd get a load of tradition and spirit talk. Grandpa came down on all fours with a thump that almost woke me up and stared at me through one eye, up close, so that it seemed I was peering through a furry porthole at a wooded landscape of rolling hills and bright streams under a golden full moon. I wanted to hump the moon.

  What's wrong with that?

  You can't have her.

  Why? Because I'm not Indian enough?

  Nobody gets her. She's from the other world.

  Same place as the monster?

  Yes.

  So the ones from the other world get us but we can't get them?

  That getting is a transgression. That's why the ones who get us are monsters. If one of us caught her, that one would become a monster.

  I held her.

  That's sweet. But it wasn't getting. Do you need a talk about the difference?

  I didn't bother answering. Instead, I climbed up on to Grandpa's back and rode while he walked through the woods, grabbing a beehive full of honey and gurgling up fish by dipping his jaws into a stream and snapping them closed when they swam over his tongue. Didn't mind the fishing, but the pissed-off bees were a pain.

  She likes me.

  She likes everyone who's brave and strong and full of medicine.

  She ever like you?

  Never saw her in my life.

  Then you're just jealous.

  She's going to be the death of you. Or the life. Either way, it'll be the hardest thing you've done with your life yet.

  Why?

  This time it was Grandpa who didn't answer. He shrugged me off on a hilltop and left me sitting on a rock. Waiting for a vision.

  You ever fight the monster? I asked Grandpa.

  But he didn't answer that question either.

  I woke up too late to get to work on time and thought I deserved a sick day to recover and said so when I called in. Showered, dressed in the nice jeans and shirt, the clean boots, just in case I found her. Put the 1911 .45 under my shirt, just in case I found the monster too. I call it a memento from the service, but of course they don't issue .45s anymore.

  I went out into the busy city day looking for my heartbeat woman.

  I started at the train station where I'd made my jump. Scene of the crime. Works in old movies.

  The train was pulling out just as I went through the turnstile. After rush hour and a train, the platform was empty, except for the requisite homeless guy on a seat with a bag between his legs, head down, asleep.

  I walked yesterday's walk. Saw her running through again, and the thing. Felt her bump. Smelled her smell. Retraced the path I'd taken to the edge. Went back down, slow and easy this time. Looked for clues. A scarf. A shoe. A tiny stone from a piece of jewelry. A purse with ID. The kinds of things left behind in old movies to get the hero to the woman who was going to be the death of him.

  No train was coming, but the minute I spent down there was sad and crazy and made me feel as vulnerable as a blasted bleeding body in a combat zone. I struggled to get back up on the deck, searching for the Homeland Security camera and thinking I'd better use the other exit, when the homeless man hooked me under the armpit and helped me up.

  A sign of life. Maybe this station was home. He could've seen something. The clue.

  I brushed myself off. "Thanks, guy. I know this looks weird, but I was here yesterday, the guy who jumped down there, maybe you saw me? I'm trying to find the girl," I explained, reaching into my pocket to pull out a fiver, whether he knew anything or not. "She fell down first, but nobody believed me-"

  "So am I."

  Yeah. It was that kind of movie.

  The homeless man looked like a braided rope of sinewy, dried meat nearly lost inside a soiled overcoat, face hidden under a massive beard, smelling like an open sewer. He picked a crisp, fresh shirt and pants out of the shopping bag next to him, slipped out of the coat, started changing.

  I headed back the way I'd come, figuring the token booth clerk had already called the cops about the terrorist on the tracks who he'd spotted in his monitors. But the booth was closed. Could have sworn it was open when I came down. I went for the exit, but the gate was locked into place. Darkness flooded the stairs leading to the street. The lights went out on the MetroCard machines, then in the overhead fixtures. Something pushed my chest and I fell back into the monster, fully dressed and itself again: overlapping out-of-synch images of a blond slab of muscle and a thatch of shadows grinning teeth and blazing laser-painting eyes.

  What was I thinking? These are the moments I need Grandpa, I said to myself. What good is not being afraid if you can't figure out what needs to be done.

  I pulled the gun out-what I should have done in the first place-and stuck the muzzle in the vague borderland between the monster's neck and head. "Where is she?" I demanded, keeping the question as simple as the threat of a released safety.

  "I don't know."

  I lowered the gun and put a round in its kneecap. The explosion was muffled, the kick subdued. The monster didn't fall, but its blond mask hair ruffled. I put one in the hip. Nothing. Elbow. Shoulder. Sternum. I finished the clip into its head out of sheer defiance. When I was done, I dropped the gun. It felt like I'd been firing a .38.

  "You didn't die, so she didn't," the monster said.

  "Is that important?"

  "Yes."

  The strong arm ending in a big bruiser hand grabbed me by the material at the back of my neck like a kitten, lifted, and carried me off. Except the fingers felt like claws scratching the bones of my spine.

  We went off into the subway tunnel gloom, monster feet splashing through puddles and kicking refuse. My head got knocked into a few caged lights along the way.

  As a warning gust of air blew at our backs, a side tunnel opened up. The tracks ended, the lighting dimmed. The monster's footsteps were drowned by the screech and grind of a train turning out of the station.

  Someone cried out from a niche and scuttled away as we passed.

  We entered another station, the mix of raw rock face, rusted wrought-iron gates, and bare sculptured sconces and pendants telling the sad story of abandoned visions of grandeur. Faded graffiti peppered tiled walls curving into the arched ceiling decorated with an incomplete mosaic. Something mythological. Modern banks of lamps set high on the wall at each tunnel mouth defined the boundaries of the excavated cave. The monster threw me onto the steel and rotten wood platform and hopped up after me, making the floor tremble.

  It was the laser-pointer eyes pricking the back of my eyeballs with burning needles that made me blink and flinch. Not fear.

  Looking back on the situation, the smart move would have been picking up right away on the monster not knowing where Medicine Snake Woman was and blowing its eyes out to buy time to get away. But I wanted her. And this thing was my only connection to her. The way to my Medicine Woman was through it. Plus, it tried to kill her. And I never got an actual clean shot at the monster.

  And here was my true warrior moment. The one that came after the last ass kicking. And the best I could do was say, "What do you want?"

  "Her."

  "Can't help you there, big fella."

  "Yes."

  "How?"

  "Because she'll come for you."

  See, in the movies and books, this works the other way around-she's supposed to be the bad guy's prisoner and I'm the one who's supposed to do the rescuing. Of course, that's when I stumble into the setup and maybe I die but for sure I lose the woman and the bad guy puts a hurt on everybody.

>   I remembered that look she gave the bunch of us in the station when she was running, and wondered if she'd been searching for a chump. I like to think it was a warrior she'd been after.

  But right then I felt like my long-lost cousins and distant great-uncles walking high iron without nets or cables. Only on this job, I'd run out of bolts and there was no way off the beams, and that iron was shaking and it was 1907 and the Quebec Bridge was falling into the St. Lawrence River all over again. Grandpa told me everything he could about living through that terrible day, losing his father, mourning with the rest of the Kahnawake Mohawks, but this was the first time I'd connected with the words he'd whispered in my head.

  This time, the past was sticking to me, and it weighed more than all the steel that fell into the river that day. That past, it was as heavy as the spirits of the men who died under the steel, and the sorrow of their families, and the strength it took for those left to keep living another day.

  The monster, it watched me like it couldn't decide if it was time for me to die yet. So I did the only thing there was left to do.

  Sat down. Not so hard, carrying that weight. Waved a hand at the space in front of me. All I needed was a pipe to share a smoke with a monster.

  "Why her?" I asked, like I had something to trade of equal value.

  The monster grumbled and clicked. Tree trunks snapped somewhere inside it. I think it was laughing. "Medicine."

  "Yeah, everybody wants medicine."

  "Yes."

  "She doesn't know me, doesn't even like me. You've got a long wait coming."

  "No."

  The thing became its stubborn resolve, standing by the rusting iron gate to a shadowy set of stairs, arms by its sides, blond hair and coal-fire eyes fading, until it was just a part of the background-another ruined, incomplete part of the city's foundation. Trains rumbled in the distance. Traffic sounds from the street above filtered through air vents. I watched a water bug dart in spurts around me.

  Then she was there. Standing next to me. Out of nowhere.

  "Get out of here!" I yelled, and then I cursed, because if the monster had been sleeping, he was awake now.

  Of course, it had always been awake.

  It rolled great shoulders and shifted forward like a landslide, its porcelain mask of skin breaking, shattering the illusion of humanity. The brooding muscle man became a mountain of broken stone, an avalanche of pebbles that might have been the calcified souls of the dead, on which floated a thatch of pale wood that, if alive, would have been a badge of life in a cold and forbidding world, but since the wood was bare and brittle, could only be a sign of death.

  And I waited for her to fold its out of there, or produce a magic gun, or call on some other kind of moving monstrosity to do her dirty work, but no, she just stood by my side and the monster took her in both its great paws and lifted her high overhead until she screamed.

  Her voice cut into me, clean and fast, a saber slice through the heart, and my blood ran ghost cold and my muscles stiffened hard as roadside dead and my brain sizzled like a ball of dough in burning oil.

  And I saw, as clearly as the city spread out under me from the high steel, that Medicine Spirit Woman wasn't there to save me. No. She'd come to see if I could save her.

  And I wanted to. With that need, I was alive, more than I'd ever been. Everyone I'd ever known and left behind-from my quiet and steady foster parents to my scarred, bony mom to that asshole whose ass I kicked in junior high and even that Taliban bastard whose head I opened up real wide with four from the 9mm when he came at me through a window-was alive, inside, welcoming me back to my own life with arms spread.

  Where are you, Grandpa?

  No answer. No words of wisdom. Again. But I thought I understood. Fighting was for the living, and that's what I had to do for her. No gun, but I was a warrior. Maybe I should have brought a knife.

  Jump in. Just do it. That's what warriors do.

  I tackled the thing low and from the side, wrapping arms around hips in a solid tackle. Figured Medicine could take the fall. But I grabbed a crumbling pile of debris and landed flat on my face. It stomped on my back once before I rolled and kicked, ducked a sweeping arm that managed to clip my knee.

  The good news when I got myself standing was that Medicine was free. But she wasn't running away. No, she was standing there, watching. Waiting for me to be all I could be.

  The monster's first punch sent my flying into solid rock wall. The second broke a couple of ribs. The third spun me into a heap that fell through rotten boards and left me hanging ass high halfway down a pit, a horn screaming in my ears and an earthquake rocking my head. That one brought me back to the war.

  The thing dragged me out and whipped me into tile work hard enough to chip teeth and ceramic.

  This was when I found out it wasn't only the past that could stick to me. Fear could too.

  Things weren't going right. Not such a big deal. Didn't know what to do. No news there. Pain. I'd had plenty of that before.

  Too much white man, not enough Indian, Grandpa might have said if he'd been talking. If you say so. None of that was what was making dread creep out my gut to squeeze my heart.

  I was scared because I was losing her. My Medicine Snake Woman. She was the future, a hope, the breath of life. I didn't care what she really was or where she came from, I just needed her.

  Suddenly, I felt bad for my real mom. She'd come to need what was the death of her, just like me. Medicine was all inside my head, sticking hard, making me think, holding me back. I lost that space of doing something when you're ahead of fear, when it just can't catch you. Couldn't walk the heights no more.

  The monster wasn't done with me, but its priorities were clear. Medicine Snake Woman came first. Blood curse-carrying duty-bound man later. It went back after her.

  And Medicine didn't move. Didn't look to the monster for mercy or to me for help. She stood her ground, full of her life, her strength, standing or falling to whatever came, whether it was musket fire, cavalry charge, flood, or fire. Or a monster. Leaving it all to me to do what had to be done. But I had nothing.

  Maybe she loved so much she was setting me free by dying.

  No.

  How much do you love her?

  His voice shocked me. I hoped I was in a dream, but my body told me otherwise.

  Grandpa, help me.

  Do you love her more than anything?

  Do something.

  More than yourself?

  Yes.

  The monster picked her up. Twisted an arm. She cried out. It liked the sound, shuddering and rattling as if laughing. If there'd been a fire, it might have stuck Medicine on a spit and watched her roast. It slapped her with a finger. Poked her. She sagged, shuddered, a doll in a fighting pit. She was already dead, but her death hadn't caught up to her yet.

  And even on the precipice, half-broken but still breathing and peering out at the world through eyes that didn't seem able to close, she was larger than anything I'd ever known, full of promise and beauty, a treasure fallen from the sky, a thing no man, not even all living men put together, could wrap their arms around and hold.

  Then the questions hit. Not as hard as the monster, but they hit. They'd both warned me. Loving the moon was one thing, but wanting to possess something that wasn't mine, that was bigger than me and the monster and the whole damn city, country, world-that was a problem. A transgression. It wasn't her, and it wasn't my own life sticking to me, slowing me down to a stop. It was my need for her, for all that love I thought was missing, that was keeping me down.

  Well, that and a royal ass kicking.

  I had to get back to having no fear. I had to put all of that crap about wanting and losing out of my mind. Be strong. Be alive. Now. Not in the past or in the future. Just alive walking on high steel like I was on solid ground getting the job done. A part of everything, holding on to nothing.

  I would have to kill her, in my heart.

  I slipped past the smiling fac
es of the welcoming committee to my life, headed for the back room where the mother who gave me up hides out, along with the father who couldn't keep himself alive for me. There was a blackboard back there full of rules. Along the walls stood a police lineup of white, black, brown people, Indians, Asians, a motley mess of mutts like me, all proud and pissed. There was that hard-ass DI who smelled Indian on me and didn't like it. Shadows in the mountains lobbing mortar shells and setting off IEDs. And there was her.

  I dove into my life. Went deep. Drowned in all the pain and hurt I'd been through, the bugfuck craziness of talking to a ghost in my head and being blown up and falling in love with the moon.

  Went quiet. Silent. Dark. Closed the door to that back room, and when I did another opened with stairs moving tip to a light.

  Went up high, walking on girders across the sky, not afraid. Doing what I had to do. Walking in the steps of my ancestors.

  I had to kill Medicine Snake Woman in my human heart to keep her in my spirit's heart. To walk without fear in the sky. To perform my duty to all my people.

  I stood. Rattled, creaked, and bled. Walked the broken bits of my body step by step to the monster, staring hard at its back, not listening to Medicine's panting, her small cries, the rustle of her blouse, the sounds her bones made.

  She didn't belong to me. She was everybody's.

  Easy as stepping through clouds, I reached the monster while it played with its catch and slid my hand through the gravel pit of its back, sank my arm deep, to the shoulder, until I touched what I knew I'd find. Everything alive has one. Even the ones who've transgressed, just like the ones who stay pure and true.

  It was small and wet, but it beat hard and fast, like mine had when I'd held Medicine in my arms. The monster stiffened, squeezing Medicine to screaming and locking my elbow to the breaking point. Another moment and my arm would have been dead, and so would I.

  But I'd already closed my hand, crushing the monster's heart until it was mud dripping through my fingers. The avalanche of calcified souls collapsed, sending me flying back to keep from being buried and crushed. I landed bad and took another knock on the head. Decided to lay for a while and dream.