A/N: This is a vignette. Wrote a similar poem a little while ago...I think I only showed it to June. Sorry, this is a little long, and I was thinking about seperating it, but I couldn't find a suitable place to do so. Also, the Happy Camp in this story has nothing to do with Happy Camp, California.
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the prairies – untrod, spreading on and on forever, until the cloudless horizon swallows them up. you are leaning forward into the wind, horse moving so fast that there is no jarring in the gallop – skimming across the heads of the tallgrass, shuffling and parting, sighing aside, like dancers cutting in. the sky blue and overturned with only a few crumpled clouds. the cast-off breath, the thumping nausea of fresh, cold, cold air, never breathed before, unrecycled. widowed trees, the goshawks and fieldbirds plowing the sky and a daytime moon cradling above the horizon, white and looking nowhere in particular, like a mother nursing. grass whipping shins, bare skin mumping, tingling, and the rhythm and heartbeat of the horse beneath you, calm and steady, a sound that has always been there, a sound that does not originate in the horse, but from the ground, the tempo and time kept by the centuries, by the stones, moving slowly and restlessly, ground like teeth. there will be rain – you can smell it. there will be rain in the night and the fires on the hilltops will waver and hunker and the buffalo will groan by in their westward procession, black and sopping against the horizon, hulls in the night, and their breath in the night, in the cold. sweat candles from the horses mouth and where your legs press against it, and you sweat as well and the world hushes for a moment, like a dayblossom closing and your fingers are tangled in the mane of the horse and they will be difficult to uproot.
We would drive in dad's old, red, oxidized pickup every late June to the Indian reservation, two hours south of Tolima, to buy fireworks for the Fourth of July. On the way there, we would pass the grand, sprawling casino resort that the Sioux tribe ran, with its parliaments of neon lights and flashbulbs that lit up the night for miles around and with its chapels of gambling, its cathedrals of brothels, the conclaves of wild, stumbling people milling around, the constant jazz and flicker, and the prayers riding on the roulette wheels. I never liked the Indians. At least the ones around Tolima County, on the Happy Camp reservation. They were either drunks or gamblers. They lived in little blue trailer homes that grew up among the weeds like strange mushrooms, sun-washed and corrugated. Old broken down cars and machinery flourished. The scenery was rusty, the people were rusty, the earth crumbled red and staining in your hands and smelled of iron. The old pines in the area groaned and agonized in their forlorn parentage. The Indian children were naked and dirty and the Indian women were hard creatures with suspicious faces. The men sloshed when they walked and skinny dogs melted fluidly between the legs of the citizens and in mercurial packs that disappeared in the winter. It was said that the average life expectation in Happy Camp was 47 for men and a little higher for women. I looked out the window at a totem pole and tepee set-up along the side of the road for tourists – the totem pole with its stacked, smashed faces, and the tepee sagging and bladdered.
The trees were so thick in some places on the road to the reservation that all you could see was a hallway of blue sky above you, the rest of the view hedged up by pines and firs. Dad had the radio turned on – it fuzzed and hopped, and I rolled down the window and the air was clean and very high and pushy, and felt at my face, the rims of my eyes, the bridge of my nose, the corners of my mouth, like a blind, milkeyed woman with the tenderest, probing fingers. The pines, hunched and whittling sat alongside the road and stood in their mute senates, thrumming but powerless, like old gods.
We pulled onto the dirt road that led up the reservation. Dad was telling a story about when he was a sheriff for Tolima County and how on the Fourth of July he would take the night shift and go watch people shoot off the fireworks they got in Happy Camp. Most of them were illegal, but they hadn't had a forest fire in Tolima County for twenty years.
The poppies along the side of the road reached out, withdrew, indecisive, like children touching fragile, breakable things.
the buffalo – in their monasteries and strict conveyances. under the doubt of the evening sky, brushfire of a set sun, murmuring across the plain. blue in the night, they move along the fields, drooping pilgramage, elders of the tallgrass, black and blue in the shadows as uninterpreted dreams. they are the last. they are the last darkeyed embassy from an old and unwritten time and you watch them from the hilltop and they watch you and you can hear them lowing like the strangest, alien cattle. the constellations hang in their boneless collections, like solar fossils, barely described in the sandstone night and absurdly misinterpreted. you walk toward them. they do not move. you can see them breathing and their eyes glistening and wet. you walk and walk and they do not move. the moon, capped and cornered like a dunce. you are completely silent, the world is silent, and a great bull buffalo stands like a dark schooner against the weak and fingerless moonlight. you can feel, even from your distance, the blood pulsing under his hide, the snuff of his nostrils, the musk of sweat and mating and plainlife. the stars above you swarm like unshelled electrons. you reach out to touch him. your fingers move up the bridge of his face. he does not allow you to stroke or pet him, as if he were some domestic animal, nor do you attempt. this is a sacred communion, your are touching the hem of a robe, kissing a royal hand. he snuffs. the rest of the herd stands and watches and steam and breath rise heavenward, like prayers to a patron saint in the cold.
We stop the car, gears snubbing, crunching, in a parking lot near Harry's little fireworks outpost in the center of town. Red, martian dust rises behind us and when I step out of the car, I squint and the little collaged bars and grocery shops and dented tin houses fall into place in the heat, distorted, as if I were viewing things through depression glass. I could see a group of Indian children playing in a lot across the street with a baseball and a two-by-four. Their bodies were skinny and their heads were overlarge, like unopened poppy buds. None of them wore shoes. They talked in English. They stopped for a moment when we stepped out of our car and looked at us and none of them smiled. Old men squatted on streetcorners like crows, their arms skinny and rustling stalks, toothless, gumming their words into a digestible mash before they talked between each other. In the old men, I could see the history of the Sioux Happy Camp tribe described. Their faces withered, hard, the wrinkles and ditches of their skin, hanging off of them like the boiled skins of canned peaches, and the hardness of the land was in their eyes.
I kept my head down. Or up. I looked at the sky as dad and I walked to Harry's. Not a cloud in the sky. I was starting to think that maybe the clouds completely avoided Happy Camp, this rainless, danceless land. The wind clocked in my ears. A screen door slammed. Our boots crunched on the gravel and we kicked up red dust that bloomed in wishless djinn behind us.
Harry was a corpulent, aging Indian whose family had been selling fireworks since the casino had been built. He wore an embroidered vest with brass snaps and a pair of jeans which were worn in the places he kept his wallet and his pocketknife. He wore his hair long and he squinted when he talked to people. He smelled of sulfur. The fireworks were colorful and sagging and Japanese. Crumpled, their fuses wicked and bent, ragtag and regimented. The more complex and expensive ones were delicate and displayed on a top shelf, antique and paper and promising more than they probably delivered. He smiled at us when we walked up to his booth.
Hello boys, he said. My favorite customers! Right on time!
Aw, Harry, Dad said, you don't mean that.
Sure, I do. You come here every June 28th without fail and you always buy my fireworks, homemade, I might add.
Homemade, huh?
Sure.
Sure.
Harry smiled. He looked at me. One of his eyes was damaged, blue and milky, like a moon viewed through a telescope. He lit up a cigarette, and it bounced on his lower lip as he talked to us, fretful with ash.
Well, he said, what can I do for you?
crouching by the fireside, the smell of unwashed hair and skinned animals and woodsmoke in the air. the setting sun turned red from the harvest smoke in the air, red and plush as a blood cell, and the dogs moving in and out of the firelight, unsure and otherworldly, as if their docility hovered on the kick and snatch of the flames of the bonfire, as if something old and vital was calling to them. you can see it in their eyes, in their distraction, in the way they looked west. the tepees and mudhuts appear at the edges of the shadows, the tepees white and spread like x-ray patients and the whole evening feeling electric, pulsing. the papery old men and women crouching alongside you around the fire. their youth dried away, their hands cupped, palms describing the many paths of the universe. it is in these moment, in these moments before the celebrations that the elders are most alive – reanimated, spindly things, who rustle and clock in their manuscripts of time and bone. rising moon, bone-faced owl. you are brought to a woman shuddering and cascading with beads, turning in the light like blood dew and her expression barely legible, like pencilmarks made a generation ago. she has paints set before her. she smears fingers of paint across your face. white, cold, drying fast, and on your chest as well. the night pitches and rolls, the trees standing mute and observing. her fingers are warm, eyes turned downward. sidesaddle clouds in the red and dying horizon, and the autumn leaves offered like a dowry. the drums start up. it is less like a beginning of the drums as a continuation, a listening in, an eavesdrop. a doctor leaning over the chest of a patient, listening, listening. the shadows play, dancing, fluttering, loose and dark as the flames ache heavenward and the elders stare at each other with black and mirthless eyes.
We got a good crop of fireworks. Ellen and mom would be pleased. My hands were yellow and smelled like sulfur from carrying the cases of squashed, rattling paperthings – bottle rockets, mortars, screaming willies. I felt like if I dropped the case that the whole world would cease to exist, swallowed by a technicolor orgasm of sparks and great blooms of smoke, green and sick, like upset stomachs, and a neverending catcall of whistles. We put the cases of fireworks in the back of the truck and pulled a tarp over the top and the sun made everything sharp and tin in the unobstructed afternoon light. The indian children who had been playing baseball were gone, and a few men in t-shirts loitered on the streets, their images warbling in the mirrors of heat. Dad and I got in the car and I punched the AC and the radio was playing Johnny Cash. The truck jolted and pumped down the hill to the main road.
Hey, see if you can't find the waterbottles I brought, will you? Dad asked.
Okay.
I reached behind the seats, pulled back a length of canvas, and swore and dropped the lip of the canvas as I saw what was under it. An Indian kid lay scrunched up in the back under the canvas and between the jumper cables and the tire chains, hiding. He looked up at me blankly, his body tiny and condensed – I could see his ribs poking up through his skin like sprouts poking up through the hard ground in april.
Godssakes, Dad, stop the car. We've got a stowaway.
What?
What's your name, kid?
The kid just looked at me.
A stowaway, Dad. One of the kids from the reservation. Decided to hitch a ride.
Dad shook his head and muttered and signaled off the road He parked the car and got out and spat and pulled back the seat. The kid looked at him.
Git, Dad said and pointed up the road.
The Indian scrambled out of the back of the truck. He was barefoot. He ran until we couldn't see him anymore, his sad, spidery figure caught in the sunlight and in the veils of red dust. Johnny Cash was still singing. I turned him off. Clusters of wildflowers along the side of the road lay in sheets, pale and loose jawed, like the childless in nursing homes Dad got back in the car. Eveningbirds were gathering outside and the sun caught their muted, rusty songs and Dad turned Johnny Cash back on.
dried up streams tracing through the prairies, like fingers tracing a scar, and the red tables of rock sealing off the horizon. it is raining and the grayness makes everything look old, viewed through a picture, with dabs of red and the shadows brushstroked and the grassland is new and washed and the hills of tallgrass are matted like bedheads. the horse is beside you. quiet, snuffling, smelling not as a horse does, but as a horse should – smelling of smoke and plains and grass, unshod, with knots in its mane. looking to the hills, the veins in its neck scribbling. the field poppies choke in the rain, with their mouths turned upward. down the plain and into the thin, dry winter sheets of rain, you can see the railroad, gray and stapled and a coughing, wheezing train with black hoopskirts of smoke. the rain turns into snow. you can hear it falling. you stand on the burial grounds with the humps of mud and the cold tuggings of the dead. they whisper to you, your ancestors, in your ears, and the ghosts of old crow indians with their sharp, immovable expressions and the feathers in their hair are not quiet discernible in the snow. the snow sticks and covers the burial mounds, white and neat, like hospital beds. you walk around them with deference, reverence, and your horse walks with you and there is silence, except for the train in the distance, calling low and lonely and never stopping, never stopping.
