“You rescued Ms. Cooper first,” I remind him. “And that was the right thing to do, I’m not saying it wasn’t; don’t misunderstand me. But it seemed to me that you made up your mind kind of quickly. It didn’t seem like a hard decision.”
He reaches across the saddle and puts a hand on my hand. Behind the black mask the blue eyes are sensitive and caring. “Of course I wanted to rescue you, old friend,” he says. “If I’d made the decision based solely on my own desires, that’s what I would have done. But it seemed to me I had a higher responsibility to the more innocent party. It was a hard choice. It may have felt quick to you, but, believe me, I struggled with it.” He withdraws his hand and kicks his horse a little ahead of us because the trail is narrowing. I duck under the branch of a prairie spruce. “Besides,” he says, back over his shoulder, “I couldn’t leave a woman with a bunch of animals like Pierre Cardeaux and the Wilcoxes. A pretty woman like that. Alone. Defenseless.”
I start to tell him what a bunch of racists like Pierre Cardeaux and the Wilcoxes might do to a lonely and defenseless Indian. Arnold Wilcox wanted my scalp. “I remember the Alamo,” he kept saying, and maybe he meant Little Big Horn; I didn’t feel like exploring this. Pierre kept assuring him there would be plenty of time for trophies later. And Andrew trotted out that old chestnut about the only good Indian being a dead Indian. None of which were pleasant to lie there listening to. But I never said it. Because by then the gap between us was so great I would have had to shout, and anyway the ethnic issue has always made us both a little touchy. I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard him say that some of his best friends are Indians. And I know there are bad Indians; I don’t deny it and I don’t mind fighting them. I just always thought I should get to decide which ones were the bad ones.
I sat in that car until sunset.
But the next day he calls. “Have you ever noticed how close the holy word ‘om’ is to our Western word ‘home’?” he asks. That’s his opening. No hi, how are you? He never asks how I am. If he did, I’d tell him I was fine, just the way you’re supposed to. I wouldn’t burden him with my problems. I’d just like to be asked, you know?
But he’s got a point to make, and it has something to do with Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. How she clicks her heels together and says, over and over like a mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home” and she’s actually able to travel through space. “Not in the book,” I tell him.
“I know,” he says. “In the movie.”
“I thought it was the shoes,” I say.
And his voice lowers; he’s that excited. “What if it was the words?” he asks. “I’ve got a mantra.”
Of course, I’m aware of this. It always used to bug me that he wouldn’t tell me what it was. Your mantra, he says, loses its power if it’s spoken aloud. So by now I’m beginning to guess what his mantra might be. “A bunch of people I know,” I tell him, “all had the same guru. And one day they decided to share the mantras he’d given them. They each wrote their mantra on a piece of paper and passed it around. And you know what? They all had the same mantra. So much for personalization.”
“They lacked faith,” he points out.
“Rightfully so.”
“I gotta go,” he tells me. We’re reaching the crescendo in the background music, and it cuts off with a click. Silence. He doesn’t say good-bye. I refuse to call him back.
The truth is, I’m tired of always being there for him.
So I don’t hear from him again until this morning when he calls with the great Displacement Theory. By now I’ve been forty almost ten days, if you believe the birth certificate the reservation drew up; I find a lot of inaccuracies surfaced when they translated moons into months, so that I’ve never been too sure what my rising sign is. Not that it matters to me, but it’s important to him all of a sudden; apparently you can’t analyze personality effectively without it. He thinks I’m a Pisces rising; he’d love to be proved right.
“We can go back, old buddy,” he says. “I’ve found the way back.”
“Why would we want to?” I ask. The sun is shining and it’s cold out. I was thinking of going for a run.
Does he hear me? About like always. “I figured it out,” he says. “It’s a combination of biofeedback and the mantra ‘home.’ I’ve been working and working on it. I could always leave, you know; that was never the problem; but I could never arrive. Something outside me stopped me and forced me back.” He pauses here, and I think I’m supposed to say something, but I’m too pissed. He goes on. “Am I getting too theoretical for you? Because I’m about to get more so. Try to stay with me. The key word is displacement.” He says this like he’s shivering. “I couldn’t get back because there was no room for me there. The only way back is through an exchange. Someone else has to come forward.”
He pauses again, and this pause goes on and on. Finally I grunt. A redskin sound. Noncommittal.
His voice is severe. “This is too important for you to miss just because you’re sulking about God knows what, pilgrim,” he says. “This is travel through space and time.”
“This is baloney,” I tell him. I’m uncharacteristically blunt, blunter than I ever was during the primal-scream-return-to-the-womb period. If nobody’s listening, what does it matter?
“Displacement,” he repeats, and his voice is all still and important. “Ask yourself, buddy, what happened to the buffalo?”
I don’t believe I’ve heard him correctly. “Say what?”
“Return with me,” he says, and then he’s gone for good and this time he hasn’t hung up the phone; this time I can still hear the William Tell Overture repeating the hoofbeat part. There’s a noise out front so I go to the door, and damned if I don’t have a buffalo, shuffling around on my ornamental strawberries, looking surprised. “You call this grass?” it asks me. It looks up and down the street, more and more alarmed. “Where’s the plains, man? Where’s the railroad?”
So I’m happy for him. Really I am.
But I’m not going with him. Let him roam it alone this time. He’ll be fine. Like Rambo.
Only then another buffalo appears. And another. Pretty soon I’ve got a whole herd of them out front, trying to eat my yard and gagging. And whining. “The water tastes funny. You got any water with locusts in it?” I don’t suppose it’s an accident that I’ve got the same number of buffalo here as there are men in the Cavendish gang. Plus one. I keep waiting to see if any more appear; maybe someone else will go back and help him. But they don’t. This is it.
You remember the theories of history I told you about, back in the beginning? Well, maybe somewhere between the great men and the masses, there’s a third kind of person. Someone who listens. Someone who tries to help. You don’t hear about these people much, so there probably aren’t many of them. Oh, you hear about the failures, all right, the shams: Brutus, John Alden, Rasputin. And maybe you think there aren’t any at all, that nobody could love someone else more than he loves himself. Just because you can’t. Hey, I don’t really care what you think. Because I’m here and the heels of my moccasins are clicking together and I couldn’t stop them even if I tried. And it’s okay. Really. It’s who I am. It’s what I do.