Summer, 1990.
Lelen,
I thought you were coming back right after graduation. Your aunt and I are getting worried about you. I got a spot waiting running a combine if you’re back by harvest. The Hendersons said they could use an extra hand with their cattle if you want something more permanent. You been gone a long time, son. Come on back to Pine Ridge. Lincoln won’t miss you half as much as we do.
With Love,
Jimmy
Lelen’s uncle didn’t have a phone like a lot of people on the reservation, and he had spent over a week trying to write a reply. It was difficult to find the right way to explain things to Jimmy, but he decided that when he got home after work he would go over it again and mail it out the next day. He hoped Jimmy would understand everything he had to say, but if he didn’t mail it soon he’d beat the letter back to Pine Ridge and it would all be pointless.
Lelen stood up and left the letter on his bed. His long, black hair was still wet from a shower, and he pulled it back into a ponytail. He combed through the last few items of clothing in the dresser and pulled an undershirt onto his thick upper body. He looked in the mirror and studied the lack of definition in his chest, the softening of his jaw line. He'd gained weight in that sort of white slovenly way, and he hated the way it looked.
Had it really been five years since leaving Pine Ridge? He remembered being so excited the day he left that he drove the three hundred miles between Pine Ridge and Lincoln in just over four hours. It was one of the hottest days of that summer. The cab of the U-Haul didn’t have air conditioning, but it hadn’t bothered him a bit. He simply rolled down the windows and floored the truck along I-80 until it shook and felt like it would fly apart. When he finally got to his new apartment in Lincoln, he took off his undershirt and carried the contents of the truck bare chested. After he had finished with everything, he stood looking out his doorway watching a pretty white girl walk up to her apartment a few doors away, her hands full of groceries. She refused to set down the bags and struggled to unlock her front door. Lelen walked up behind her to ask if he could help, and she turned around very surprised to see a shirtless and sweaty Lakota man staring back at her.
She was Suzy from Omaha, and it was obvious the way she looked over his body that she was not afraid of him. He introduced himself, and she asked him if he’d like to come in for a beer. When he went to grab his undershirt, she told him not to put it back on for her account, and he felt his face flush.
He was impressed by her forwardness and her immediate comfort with him. And he found her blond hair and tan skin arousing. He hadn’t known too many Lakota girls who acted like this, and he sure didn’t know any who looked like this. The only time he'd seen a girl like Suzy was in a Playboy.
In the setting red sun of the summer afternoon they drank and talked. Suzy's father was a car salesman and her mother a nurse. She was close to graduating and thinking about taking her long, tan legs into nursing school. Lelen liked that she was sweet and uncomplicated and not at all turned off by the fact that he was Indian and poor. After a few beers, she leaned over and kissed him, and he was so surprised he barely kissed back. He left her apartment a few minutes later shocked by the fact that a white college girl had actually kissed him. If he had a little more experience he probably could have gone further with her, but even so, he spent the rest of the night thinking that if all the girls off the reservation were this horny and nice, he would never want to leave Lincoln.
Even then, Lelen felt guilty. Wanting to have sex with a white girl was something Jimmy would never understand or tolerate. His uncle was a storyteller in the old Indian mold and friends with the medicine men of the tribe. When he had some big problem, his uncle would still use traditional healing ceremonies to cure himself.
Lelen respected this about Jimmy, but he also felt it made his uncle a somewhat limited man. Jimmy treated every embrace of the white world like it was a betrayal of their own people, and now, five years later looking in this mirror Lelen realized how much different he looked from when he first left the reservation for college. He was so lean and muscular then from working farm jobs all the time. No wonder Suzy had found him attractive. He didn’t look old or out of shape now, but all the time he’d spent on school and working to pay off his debts had left him looking like the sort of urban Indian he knew Jimmy hated.
Lelen sighed and looked down at his watch realizing he would be late for his last day of work. Quickly, he went through his clothes and picked out an old, gray t-shirt, a gas station souvenir that Jimmy bought for him. On the front it featured the faces of Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, and Red Cloud as they floated like ghosts over Mount Rushmore. He put it on trying to convince himself that wearing it on his last day in Lincoln would be an appropriate tribute to his uncle. But when he stepped out the apartment door and sat down in his car, he realized the shirt made him feel nothing. Not pride, not hope, not even comfort. All he could feel was a consuming sense of confusion, and he knew that just like every night of the past week he would spend this one wondering why he was going home. Sometimes when he pictured Pine Ridge is his mind, skeletons of old Fords and empty cans of Colt 45 were all he could see.
***
Madison squatted down in a corner of the kitchen studying a hole in the wall. There were a few cockroaches scurrying in and out. He stood up and tried to crush one with his foot, but when he lifted up his shoe it managed to scramble back into the hole. His face was amusingly distraught, and his curly red hair fell over his scrunched up forehead. “God damn they’re resilient.”
Lelen stopped peeling the skins of the onions and walked over next to Madison. He patted him on the shoulder and laughed. “It’s all right, man. They’re stronger than us. And anyways, they’re everywhere.”
Madison looked alertly at him. “Everywhere? Naw, don’t tell me these things, man.”
“Yeah, ‘fraid so. Last week I’m saucing a pizza, and I see a big clump in the sauce. I thought it was just some unmixed oregano, so I take the spatula to it and try to break it up, and gradually unearth this inch long cockroach. It’s dead, naturally, suffocated by the sauce. Almost popped it right into the oven.”
Madison thought about it for a while putting his finger to his lips and staring off into space. “Not a bad way to go, I suppose.”
They laughed, and then Madison said seriously, “You know we’re really going to miss you, man. I’m really going to miss you. You’ve worked here a long time.”
It was true. They had been friends pretty much since Madison started working at Dave's three years ago, and part of Lelen was very sad to be leaving such a good friend.
“What’s Pine Ridge got anyway that Lincoln doesn’t have?” Madison asked as he moved away from the cockroach infested corner and started scrubbing the metallic counters with a rag.
“My uncle’s farm for one thing,” Lelen said. “Well, actually he doesn’t own it. but he’s worked there a long time and he’s on good terms with the owner. He said he can get me a couple different jobs when I go back.” Madison gave him sort of a funny look, and Lelen wondered if his explanation sounded as unconvincing as it felt.
“Yeah, but I bet you guys don’t have hot, blond co-eds walking all over the prairie, do you? I hope you remember when you’re sitting there in your shit-stained overalls, milking cows or whatever, that you could be here with me enjoying the beautiful breasts and long, tan legs of corn-fed girls.”
Lelen laughed. “We grow wheat out there and rustle cattle, asshole. Won’t be milking a fucking thing. Or don’t you know the difference? I guess it’s all the same to you people. You don’t have a clue what it’s like to be out there on the prairie doing actual work. You don’t have the ability to imagine the dust and the wind and the dirt of the day opening up to a night sky of a million stars. There are a lot of things out there you guys will never understand. Just things you can’t feel when you’re surrounded by college girls and McDonald’s.”
Madison tried to look mock offended, and he paused while searching for a proper response. “You know you’re absolutely right. What I really need is a guide to take me on a great spiritual quest. To fast until I have visions and find myself out there in the fields howling like a coyote and talking to my dead pet goldfish. Maybe you can be my guide. Busy this weekend?”
Lelen laughed. He knew Madision was joking, and they had both agreed long ago that sometimes the only worse fate for an Indian than being hated by white people was being admired by them.
Madison continued on scrubbing old pizza sauce off the counter tops. “You think if you were my spirit guide you could assign me a spirit animal?” His voice became excited and he spoke quickly. “Maybe like a cockroach. Could a cockroach be a spirit animal? I mean nothing kills them and it seems like they must be everywhere. You guys got them on the reservation? Somehow I can’t imagine cockroaches in nature.”
Lelen had finished cutting the onions and stared at his friend. “Yeah, of course we got them. You guys gave them to us back in the Red Moon Treaty of 1864. You told us they were magic bugs that would cure sickness, and we were so stupid back then we believed you and traded them for about three million acres of land.”
Madison pointed at Lelen’s shirt. “Is that how we got the land to build Rushmore?”
Lelen had forgotten he was wearing the shirt for a second, and he paused. “Well...yeah. You guys traded us magic bugs for sacred rocks and then dynamited the faces of your presidents into them. Still haven’t gotten over that one.”
They were both laughing. Sometimes it really did seem like the only thing most people knew about Natives they learned from watching John Wayne movies. A year ago Lelen had met a drunk girl in a bar who put it in perspective when she refused to believe he was Native. She explained to him, “You can’t be Indian because Indians are all gone.” He spent the rest of the night getting drunk and trying to convince the girl to have sex with the “only Native American left alive.” Part of him could understand why she’d said what she said, and part of him just wanted to blot out her ignorant white face. But in the end, he went home alone, neither her perfect breasts nor his horniness could overcome such frightening stupidity.
The memory depressed Lelen, and he turned away from Madison. “I’m gonna go grab a beer and take a break before we start closing everything down. I’ll be outside if you need me.”
***
Lelen leaned against a car in the parking lot and studied the cracked facade of the building. The streetlights and the half-obscured moon dimly illuminated the restaurant’s sign: DAVE’S PIZZERIA. It made him feel old to look at the weather beaten letters. When he’d started working here, they had been crisp and freshly painted.
There was a light rain falling, and Lelen lifted his face upwards to let it cool his flushed cheeks. Nights like these reminded him of the reservation. By this time next week he would be back in Pine Ridge, and although he wanted to see his aunt and uncle, he also felt a bitter depression. At times, going home felt like nothing more than a senseless obligation, a retreat into a past that no longer seemed usable. It was true that at some point in his childhood there had been something out there in the fields, in working with the cattle, in sitting out under the sheets of fireflies and thunder, but somewhere between Pine Ridge and Lincoln he had changed, and he was no longer his uncle’s kind of Indian. He realized his old identity had been cultivated by Jimmy, by a close-mindedness so steadfast that it could let nothing in from the outside. Only since he’d left Lincoln had Lelen pieced together something for himself, a new perspective where an Indian could sleep with white girls and a get a college degree without feeling like he was betraying anyone.
Lelen sipped from a Styrofoam cup he was holding and licked his lips. The beer inside was cool and bitter. It was starting to warm the inside of his stomach and make his head feel heavy. He took a bigger gulp and spilled a few drops. They dribbled down his chin and mixed with the sweat and grime on his t-shirt. He wished he hadn’t been in such a rush when he left home. Even though the faces of the Indian chiefs were printed on a cheap souvenir, even if he didn’t know what to feel about Jimmy anymore, he wasn't ready to spit in the face of tradition. As bitter as he felt at that moment towards his home, he would not douse his forefathers in Budweiser. In one swift movement, Lelen pulled his shirt off over his shoulders and felt the air hit his sweat covered chest. To Hell with it. He would work in his undershirt. He felt so angry all of a sudden and it only got worse when he realized he had nothing and no one to direct this feeling towards. He looked at the faces on the shirt and thought about saying sorry to them, but he really didn’t know what good that would do.
Lelen sighed and pushed open the side door of the restaurant. It squeaked and then slammed loudly behind him. Inside, the waitresses were busy bussing tables and cleaning glasses. He walked silently over to the beer taps and poured himself another drink. Lelen hoped no one would see him do it, but then he realized it probably didn’t matter since it was his last day. He looked down at his feet and saw one of the drains under the bar had backed up and was flooding water onto the floor. He turned away from the taps and walked swiftly through the murky puddle. Things like this happened all the time at Dave’s, but the smell that followed was something he could never get used to. It was like a mixture of sour milk and decomposing rodents, and it reminded him of the outhouse he had to use as a kid. Lelen smiled when he thought about how proud his Mom was the day they finally got indoor plumbing. She used to tell him to take extra good care to wipe himself while he was in the outhouse because out under the sky and the stars God was watching him. As a child, he imagined having to watch people take shits in outhouses must have been at least one of the many negative aspects of being God. And he wondered why anyone would ever be so interested in a poor boy’s hygiene.
Back into the kitchen, Lelen started cleaning the make line in silence. Madison had disappeared. Lelen looked around at all the stains on the walls and holes in the floorboards, the black sludge under the make line and the old cheese smeared on the metallic tables, and he felt oddly sad. It was disgusting, but he had memories attached to the place. Working in a kitchen reminded him in a lot of ways of the hard work he had to do on the farm, the heat, the tiring manual labor. Plus, all the money he had made working had helped put him through college. In some ways, he had come to relish the atmosphere of dirtiness. He closed his eyes, and took in the various ambient smells of the kitchen. He took a sip of beer and kept his eyes closed. Maybe this smell would remind him of Lincoln when he was back in Pine Ridge. Lelen opened his eyes and sighed. He pulled a couple of dirty metal containers from the make line and walked back towards the dish room.
The new dishwasher was bent over the sink in the tiny, filthy room. He was slowly scrubbing plates with a cloth and muttering to himself. Rainwater from the storm was dripping steadily through a large leak in the ceiling and landing on the back of his neck. The neckline of his shirt was soaked through, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Lelen tapped him on the shoulder. “Can you wash these and bring them back up front for me.” The disher didn’t respond. He was knew and Lelen wasn’t entirely sure of his name.. “Uh…Carlos? can you wash these for me?”
Startled, the disher finally turned around and smiled idiotically. “Hehehe, no problem, boss. Yeah. I wash it.” He continued laughing awkwardly and looking at the space back beyond Lelen’s head.
Lelen set down the containers and walked through the back door of the dish room that led onto the patio. He stared out into the darkness and thought about Carlos. He’d seen this sort of thing before. Old vets or junkies occasionally stumbled by looking for work, and the owner of the place treated them like charity cases. As long as they could sign their names, they could have a job. He felt bad for these guys. He wondered if his Dad had ever come back from the war, if he might have ended up like one of them. He knew a kitchen wasn’t a good place for these guys, but oftentimes it was the only job left for them. Lelen scanned the tables on the patio looking for Madison. They’d closed the porch to customers and turned off the lights because of the rain, but in the back he could see the red glow of a cigarette, and he walked towards it.
“Hope you don’t mind me taking a break, too,” Madison said.
Lelen couldn’t see his face very well, and it felt like an invisible person smoking a cigarette was talking to him. “Naw, it’s fine. I’m just about done closing the front. The only other thing I’ve gotta do now is finish the books. You want to stick around and have a beer after we’re done? “
“Sure. I’m always down for free drinks on the Dave’s tab.”
Lelen turned to go back into the kitchen, and then realized he’d come outside to ask Madison something else. “Hey, where’d Dave find this Carlos guy?”
He heard Madison puff on his cigarette and breathe out. “Oh, you mean Robotrip?”
“Who?”
“I guess you haven’t had too many shifts with him, huh? The other guys started calling him Robotrip because he told some of them he drinks Robitussin to get high. I heard he’s pretty much fried himself on acid too, but I don’t know what I believe. Seems like the street vets and bums always have some crazy problem, but there’s no way to know what they’ve done to themselves since they can’t even remember.”
Lelen stared into the darkness. There were a lot of people on the reservation like this. Some of them had pretty good reasons to do what they did, but he was always struck by how many people just ended up gone because they didn’t have the will to do anything else. Still, Lelen was always interested by these people, by their personal histories. Especially when they men of his father’s generation, men who instead of disappearing in Vietnam like his own Dad, had come back to their homes and were now slowly disintegrating. He wanted to know more about Carlos. “Is he a vet, do you think?”
Madison was silent for a few moments before answering. “I’m not sure. I think he’s actually Honduran.”
***
Lelen and Madison stood by the cash register behind the bar talking. They each had a Styrofoam cup full of beer. All the customers had been gone for a while, and the last waitress had just left. Lelen was finishing the books and Madison was done cleaning when Carlos wandered out from the kitchen. His dark skin was beaded with sweat and water. He took off a wet ball cap he was wearing and slicked back his thin black hair.
Carlos picked up the clipboard with all the employee time cards and flipped to the one with his name. He held it out to Lelen, and stared at him. His eyes looked tired, but they also seemed clearer since Lelen had last talked to him.
“Sign me out, boss?” Carlos asked.
Lelen took the clipboard and signed. Carlos had ridden his bicycle to work, and he turned to go get it from the patio.
“Carlos,” Lelen called. He was surprised by the loudness of his own voice. “Were you ever in Vietnam?”
He stopped and turned around. “Huh...Vietnam. No. Why? Were you?”
Lelen laughed out loud when he heard this. It would have been obvious to most people that he was far too young to have been in the war. “No, man. I’m only twenty-three.”
Carlos stared at him wide-eyed. “Oh.” He paused again as if each statement he made took some great summoning of all his mental faculties. “Why do you ask me?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just want to know where you come from and how you ended up here.”
“Where I come from? Oh. I come from a plantation. My father’s dead now, but when he was alive he owned a giant plantation. We lived in Honduras.” He stopped, looking tired from the effort of talking.
“Were you rich?”
“Um...rich? Yes. We lived in a mansion. We had lots of servants. We owned a lot.”
Carlos turned and walked out to the patio where he grabbed his bike and wheeled it out the side door of the restaurant. He didn’t say good night.
“Why did you ask him that?” Madison asked after Carlos had left.
Lelen sipped from his beer and walked over to one of the empty tables in the dining room. “I don’t know. I guess I was just thinking of a story Jimmy told me once.”
Madison followed and sat down. “He knew someone like Carlos?”
“On the rez, everyone knows someone like him. Do you know where White Clay, Nebraska is?”
Madison thought about it for a second. “Can’t say that I do?”
Lelen took a drink from his cup and smiled at his friend. It occurred to him that Madison hadn’t asked him why he took off his Rushmore t-shirt. Maybe he just sensed he shouldn’t say anything about it. Maybe he just didn’t care. “Well, White Clay has about twenty residents. When you go through it you’ll miss it because the sign is all gnarled and twisted from where drunk Indians have plowed their cars into it. You see, because even though it’s got only twenty residents it’s got four stores that sell liquor. About fifteen thousand cans a day of beer, around four million a year. And almost all of what they sell is bought by Lakota fresh from picking up their welfare checks. Hell, they even got a place in White Clay where the old Indian vets can cash their checks from the V.A. and buy their booze all in the same place.”
Madison looked surprised by this. “Even for us white people that’s pretty fucked up.”
Lelen wasn’t sure he agreed. “Yeah, that’s true in a way. But, you know nobody makes us buy all the booze. I mean there are all kinds of things we could do besides buy beer.”
Madison went quiet for a moment, and Lelen decided not to argue. “Anyways, so when my Dad and uncle were boys they went to a two room school house. They were a grade apart, but they used to lump multiple grades together back then because they didn’t have enough funding to pay for more teachers or classrooms. My Uncle Jimmy told me that he and my Dad used to have to walk to school from their little shack along the main road, and everyday they would pass by one of the two gas stations in Pine Ridge. The guy who ran the place was half-Lakota and half-white, and he’d left town and gotten some business degree, and when he came back he managed to save and borrow his way into buying the gas station.”
Lelen paused for a second and drank. He was starting to feel a little drunk from the beer. He sipped again from his beer and went on. “So the parents of the guy who bought the gas station were dead, and he lived with his grandfather who was a real old drunk son of a bitch. The people in town said the old man had been a boy when Wounded Knee happened, and he could remember the look in General Forsyth’s eyes when he shot this little girl in the face. My uncle didn’t exactly know if this was true because the old man was pretty much crazy and blind from drinking. “
“The old man’s grandson, the owner of the gas station, was something of an asshole. People said he resented his Indian side, and he resented having to come back to the reservation to take care of his grandfather. They said he couldn’t stand coming back just to buy a gas station after he spent all this time at college getting a business degree. And the grandson was angry at the old man for being the way he was. He was scared the old man would hurt himself or get lost if he left him at home, but he also hated having this blind, crazy drunk with him all day. He gave him a chair on the porch of the gas station, and when he’d close it down each night, he’d drive the old man over to White Clay and buy him some beer. It was like a treat if he was well-behaved and stayed quiet during the work day, and so the people in Pine Ridge eventually took to calling the old man Sparky, since it seemed like his grandson treated him like a dog.”
“Well, sometimes Sparky would get a little tired of waiting for the booze and he’d want to take matters into his own hands. Sometimes he’d wander off the gas station porch and walk up to the pumps and he’d huff a little gasoline. More than a few times my father and uncle would be walking home from school along the road, and they’d find Sparky wandering in it. They’d usually take him by the hand or call his grandson and take him back over to the gas station. People thought the grandson ignored it when his grandfather huffed from the pumps because he liked it when the old man got too gone and passed out and left him alone. Most people in the town were pretty good about watching out for Sparky when they traveled the road, and they knew that if it was late in the afternoon they were liable to see the old man wander out in front of them. But, one day there was this white guy from out of town hauling some new farm equipment through Pine Ridge up north to one of the farms outside of town. Well, I guess Sparky had huffed a little too much that day, and the white guy didn’t see him and that was pretty much the end of Sparky. My uncle said that he and my Dad were walking home when they came upon a crowd of people surrounding the old man in the middle of the road. My uncle said Sparky’s eyes were open and staring out at them, but his belly was opened up and all manner of him had spilled out on the road. He was dead in a pool of himself.”
Madison stared wide-eyed at Lelen. His face was horrified looking, but he remained silent.
“So, that night at dinner my grandmother asked my uncle and Dad what happened, and they told her that Sparky had died. She said how terrible it was that Sparky got ran over, and how awful his grandson was for letting it happen. And I guess my father just stared at my grandmother like he didn’t understand what she was talking about. My uncle told me that after a long pause my father finally said to my grandmother, ‘Sparky didn’t get run over, Mom. He got split open by his home.’ My uncle said my grandmother was so angry she spanked my Dad until he had great purple welts on his butt. After that, Jimmy said he and my father didn’t talk about it again until they were nearly grown up.”
They were both silent for a long time before Madison spoke. “You took your Rushmore shirt off.”
“Yeah. I spilled beer on Sitting Bull.”
“You wanted to keep him clean?”
“I guess so. Mostly I just didn’t want to shit all over him while he watched me.”
Madison stood up from the table like he was ready to leave. “So, you think the old man, the grandfather, did it to himself?”
Lelen rested his arms on the table and sighed. “I don’t know. It seems like my Dad thought so. What Carlos said just made me think of it. I mean all I know is there’s just a lot of things acting on you, and how you react is what matters most.”
“Is that why you’re not going to stay in Pine Ridge? Because you’re afraid of how you’ll react?”
“Sort of. I mean mostly I’m not staying because I already know what’s out there, and that it won’t make me happy.”
Lelen stood up and walked with Madison to the front door of the restaurant. Outside on the sidewalk they hugged, and Lelen felt sadder than he had at any point during the night.
“I’ll miss you.”
“Me too.”
“I’ll write you once I get settled there.”
“Do you think you could ask around the reservation when you get back and see what people think of the idea of a cockroach as a spirit animal? I’m telling you I think there’s something there.”
Lelen smiled. “I won’t, but I’ll write you soon. Bye.”
“Bye, Lelen.”
***
Back in his apartment Lelen stepped out of the shower and dried off. He walked into his living room and sat down to finish the reply to his uncle. When it was done, he read it back to himself.
Jimmy,
I’m quitting my job and coming back to Pine Ridge. Today (Sunday) was my last day, and the lease on my apartment will be up at the end of the week. I reserved a U-Haul for Friday morning, so I should be home by late afternoon.
I want you to know that I love you guys and appreciate everything you’ve done for me since Mom died. In a lot of ways, you guys are my parents. I feel like I owe you something, but part of the reason I’m writing you is to let you know that I don’t plan to stay on the reservation past the end of the year. I know. I promised. But there are a lot of things I still want to do. Not just in Lincoln and not just in Pine Ridge. I want to make some money on the reservation, so I can apply to grad school and hopefully get in by the spring. I’m thinking of going to school at KU, so I can get into that writing program they’ve got down there in Lawrence. I want to earn my master’s and teach. I want to travel.
Don’t get me wrong. I love home. I can’t replace it with anything else. I know you might think I’m trying to, and maybe after reading this letter you’ll think me derelict. But I’m not. I know exactly where my home is, and I know it’s possible to make a life out of the reservation if you have the will to. But I don’t think I do, and I don’t really want to spend the time finding out. I hope this letter finds you and auntie well and that there’s still a job waiting for me when I get back.
Love,
Lelen
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