? ? ?
DID I HAVE any idea of dance steps to do, fancy or otherwise, there in front of thousands in the packed grandstand and the eyes of the Crow nation and the world-beating bronc rider Rags Rasmussen? No, yes, and maybe. For although I was merely a make-believe Indian in pounds of costume, I did remember the whirling and twirling of the Heart Butte mascot while he scared the neck hair off opponents at basketball games with the high-pitched eagle screech, and may have invented swoops and swirls of my own as I swept rambunctiously around in jigging circles with my arms out like wings and the array on my back aquiver in every beautiful black-and-white feather. Caught up in the drum music and the hey-ya-ya-ya, but most of all in the moment where imagination became real, I danced as if my flashing beaded moccasins were on fire. I danced as if the medicine pouch with my arrowhead in it was a second heart. I danced for Gram in her hospital bed and wheelchair, danced for Herman the German and his monumental little thinks, danced for shrewd Louie Slewfoot, danced for the threesome of soldiers fated to Korea and for Leticia the roving waitress and for Harvey the romantic jailbreaker and for the other traveling souls met on the dog bus and inscribed in the memory book, all of us who were hunched up and taking it while serving time in this life.
So, I suppose I was me, nerved up to the highest degree, but in the moment I was also Red Chief, and who knows, maybe some kind of ghost of Manitou bursting out of wherever a spirit walks through time. Possessed as I was, my moccasined feet knowing no boundaries and my high-pitched eagle shrieks of Nyih-nyih-nyih puncturing their chant, I spooked the other fancy-dancing kids away from me as I plain and simple outcrazied them.
By now I could hear as if in a dream the announcer singling me out, calling, “How about young Woolly Leggings there, part angora and part bald eagle, quite the combination! Look at him go! He’s got more moves than a Scotchman trying to sneak under the door of a pay toilet. Folks, what you’re seeing here today holds special meaning. These dances go back a long way—”
On the dust cloud raised by the pack of dancing kids, my moment of fame forever with me, I jigged my way from the arena as the exhibition ended and on out the gate of the rodeo grounds, still hopping and writhing, past the stern-faced Indian police watching for a purple shirt and red hair.
? ? ?
HERMAN WAS WAITING a little way beyond the gate, and immediately gathered me in front of him, herding me to the parking lot near the tepees. “Quick fast. Louie has camper out, you can change there.”
Sweat running off me in streams, as tired as I had ever been, I stood there slack like a horse being unharnessed as Louie took the costume off me piece by piece.
“You did pretty good for a redhead,” he allowed. As I slowly dressed in my own clothes, he excused himself, saying he had to try to wangle the same booth spot out of the Crows for the next day, it was a sort of lucky location.
That left Herman, sitting on the narrow bunk at the front of the camper cabin with his arms folded across his chest, saying nothing as he watched me button my rodeo shirt and settle my Stetson on my head. The last thing I did was to make sure the freed arrowhead hung straight in the medicine pouch under my shirt, where it felt like it belonged. My watcher still had said nothing. Timidly I broke the silence.
“Are—are we gonna keep on?”
Herman took off his glasses, breathed on one lens and then the other and cleaned both with deliberation, using the tail of one of Louie’s costume garments lying there. Settling the eyeglasses back in place, he gazed at me as if newly clear-sighted. “On with what, Donny?”
“On with our trip?” My voice was uncertain. “On the bus?”
Deliberately or not, he kept me in suspense a while more. Finally he said, “More to see out west here, there is. Dog bus is how to git”—natural as breathing, he had absorbed the word from Louie— “there, ja?”
Overcome with relief, I still had to make sure. “You’re not too mad at me for getting us in that fix? By taking the arrowhead, I mean?”
He shifted on the bunk, his glasses catching what light there was in the cabin. “I am giving it a think, sitting here while you was putting clothes on. You know what, Donny? Not for me to decide, how right or wrong you taking the arrowhead comes to. You are some good boy where it counts, by sticking with me. I must do same by you, hah?”
I just about cried with—what, gratitude, happiness? Some feeling beyond that, inexpressible elation that he and I would hit the road together again? In any case, it was the kind of situation where you duck your head because there is no way to say thanks enough, and move on.
“Yeah, well, gee, Herman—what do you want to see next?”
“Something without police breathing on us,” he thought. “Notcheral wonders, how about.”
19.