When I was done, he laughed over the Tuffies as Herman had, saying, “Pretty smart, but the problem with them things is they can spring a leak and you end up with something you wasn’t expecting.” That explained it! Why the arrowhead sometimes worked like a charm and sometimes didn’t, if its luck could leak out like that. Louie had the way to fix the matter, reaching onto his table of leather goods and tossing me a small leather sack on a buckskin thong. “Let’s git it out of its cock socks and into a medicine pouch, hokay? Hang it around your neck and treat it right if you don’t want to lose the big medicine.”
At the end of that, he growled deep in his throat. “That wampus cat, Williamson. He runs the Gobble Gobble You like the whole earth is his. We have to chase its goddamn cattle off the rez land all the time. The rich sonofabitch sure to hell don’t need any big medicine like that.” With something like an animal grin, he sized me up in a new way. “Dearie dearie goddamn,” he expressed, which went straight into my cussing collection. “How did I git myself into this, fixing you up as a fancy-dancer? Gonna take some doing.” He laughed so low it barely came out. “But it’d be a helluva good joke on these Crows, wouldn’t it. They was on Custer’s side, you know. Bastard scouts for Yellow Hair.”
“Po-leece is com-ing.” Herman’s soft singsong reached us from his sentry post up front.
I just about dissolved at that, but it galvanized Louie Slewfoot. “Git in,” he half helped, half shoved me into the back of the camper, with him clambering after. In there, in the semi-dark, everything was a flurry as I undressed and was dressed all over again by the grunting Louie slipping a long apronlike skin shirt and a beaded harness that hung way down and woolly leggings—“Them other kids can have their plain old goatskin, this here is pure angora”—and jingle bell anklets and a bunch more onto me. As he draped a sort of harness made up of shiny disks bigger than a silver dollar around my neck, I wondered, “Are these real silver?”
“Naw, snuff box lids. Stand up straight, can’t you.”
I was starting to feel as weighted down as a deep-sea diver, but he kept on digging out items and fastening me into them, until we both froze in position at the sound of a voice with the flat cadence of the Crows asking Herman where the custodian of the booth was.
“Hungry, he is. Gone for the frying bread. I am minding for him,” said Heman, as if glad to be of help.
“When he comes back, tell him to keep an eye out for a redheaded punk kid in a purple shirt and give us a shout if he spots him. Some kind of sneak thief we need to turn in to the sheriff,” the Crow cop finished his business and could be heard moving on. Sheriff! The memory of the mean little Glasgow lawman who arrested his own brother gripped me like a seizure, the vision of what all sheriffs must be like.
Louie Slewfoot had his own pronounced reaction. “You would have red hair.” He pawed through his stock of costumery, and the next thing I knew, I was top-heavy in a turban-like feathered headdress that covered my hair and came halfway down to my eyes. “That’s better. Now we paint you up good.” Working fast, he smeared my face and hands with some oily tan stuff. “The half-breed kids use this, it makes them look more Indian to the dance judges.”
Along with a knock on the back door came Herman’s urging, “Coast is clear, better hurry.”
“Yeah, yeah. We’re about done. Turn around a half mo, Red Chief.” When I did so, Louie strapped something large and feathered on my back, patted me on a shoulder epaulet the size of a softball, and told me, “There you go, chiefie. The rest of this is up to you.”
“Donny, is that you?” Herman met me with astonishment when I hopped out of the camper. Overcome with curiosity myself, I stretched my neck around to glimpse the thing on my back, and blinked at the unmistakable mottled black-and-white feathers arrayed almost to the ground, fanned out as if in full flight.
“Holy wow! The bald eagle wing thinger!”
“You been to Heart Butte basketball games, sure enough,” Louie Slewfoot granted. The Heart Butte Warriors had cheerleaders in swirly skirts like any other high school, but also—famously or notoriously, depending on your point of view—a boy dancer, rigged up pretty much as I was and stationed at the top of the stands every game, who at crucial points would whirl around and around, letting out the hair-raising staccato eagle screech, Nyih-nyih-nyih. Before a player on the other team was about to shoot a free throw, preferably.
“Never been able to sell the bald eagle getup to these cheapskates down here,” Louie was saying philosophically, “so you might as well give it a little use. See if you can git its medicine going for you.” Turning to Herman, he rubbed his thumb and forefingers together. “Speaking of medicine, where’s that twenty?”
? ? ?
HERMAN PAID UP, but we weren’t done with Louie Slewfoot yet, nor he with us.