Samson and Pokey looked at each other forlornly, the boy's lower lip swelling with disappointment, the man's temples throbbing with pain.
Some people believe that hard work is its own reward and a job well done is a tribute to a man's character; fortunately, none of those people were around or they would have been ducking shovel blows. Pokey and Samson decided to get drunk. Harlan stayed on to coach the boy through his first hangover and run interference with Grandma, who would have skinned the two men had she known they were giving liquor to a twelve-year-old.
It was the end of summer, a summer spent in sulking and speculating, before Pokey brought home the goats. He'd obtained the pair, a male and a female, from a dubious source in a Hardin bar by winning a bet that had something to do with a pineapple, a throwing knife, and a waitress named Debbie. Samson had difficulty putting the story together from Pokey's drunken ravings, but he gathered that because Debbie had survived, and the pineapple had not, Pokey had two goats on his hands.
"We could breed 'em and sell 'em for meat," Pokey said. "But I got a better idea. Them lawyers and doctors are flying into Montana from the city and paying a thousand bucks a head to shoot bighorn sheep. I say we go to the airport in Billings and wait for one of them to get off a plane, then tell 'em they can come to the res and shoot one for two — three hundred. I can be the faithful Indian guide and lead them all over hell and back, and you can take the goats up into the mountains and tie them up where they can shoot 'em."
Despite Samson's objections that even a city lawyer might know the difference between a bighorn sheep and a nanny goat, Pokey insisted that come morning they would be on the road to riches. Come morning, however, when Samson went outside to look at the goats he found them lying on their backs, legs shot stiff to the sky with rigor mortis, dead as stones. In his excitement Pokey had tied the goats next to a patch of hemlock, and the goats, perhaps sensing what was planned for them, munched their last meal and joined the ranks of Socrates.
Not all of Pokey's quests for spiritual capitalism were complete failures. He and Samson made a little money with the «authentic» Indian fry-bread taco stand they set up outside of the Custer Battlefield National Monument, until the health department objected to the presence of marmot and raccoon meat in their all-beef tacos. And they did make forty dollars selling eagle feathers to tourists (actually the feathers of two buzzards that had dined on tainted goat carcass), which they used to buy marijuana seeds that produced a respectable crop of grape-sized casaba melons. (Harlan referred to this as the magic beans incident.) And finally, while Samson was busy with school and basketball and a developing obsession with girls, Pokey turned to prostitution and made five bucks from the owner of the Hardin 7-Eleven who paid the shaman to take his sandwich sign and go stand somewhere else.
Samson was fifteen by the time Pokey decided that perhaps they were not meant to turn their dreams into money. Once again he sat the boy down in the kitchen to recount the vision.
"Pokey, I don't even remember much of the vision, and besides, how important could it be? I was only nine." Samson's friend Billy Two Irons was waiting outside to drive them to a «forty-nine» party at the Yellowtail Dam and Samson was not in the mood to be cross-examined about an event that he was trying desperately to leave behind, along with the rest of the trappings of childhood.
"Do you know why the Crow never fought the white man?" Pokey asked gravely.
"Oh, fuck, Pokey, not now. I've got to get going."
"Do you know why?"
"No. Why?"
"Because of the vision of a nine-year-old boy. That's why." As much as Samson wanted to leave, he had spent too many years listening to the Cheyenne and Lakota call his people cowards to walk out now.
"What boy?" he asked.
"Our last great chief, Plenty Coups. When he was nine he went on his first fast, just like you. He cut pieces from his skin and suffered greatly. Finally, his vision came, and he saw the buffalo gone and then he saw the white man's cattle covering the plains. He saw white men everywhere, but he saw none of our people. The medicine chiefs heard his vision and said that it was a message. The Lakota and the Cheyenne had fought the white men and lost their lands. The vision meant that if we fought the white men we would lose our land and be wiped out. Our chiefs decided not to fight and the Crow survived. We are here because of the vision of a nine-year-old boy."
"That's great, Pokey," Samson said, having gained nothing useful from the story. He was not going to quell any ridicule from non-Crows by telling them that his people had changed their way of life over a mystical vision. It was hard enough trying to live down the reputation of his crazy uncle as it was. "I have to go now."
He grabbed the drum that Pokey had made him and took off through the living room, high-stepping over his eight younger cousins, who were sprawled on the floor watching cartoons on televsion. "'Bye, Grandma," he tossed over his shoulder to his grandmother, who sat in a tattered easy chair among the kids, adding the final touches to a beaded belt she was making for him.
In front of the Hunts Alone house a tall, acne-speckled Billy Two Irons was pouring a jug of water into the radiator of a twenty-year-old Ford Fairlane. Most of the water was draining out of the bottom of the engine onto the ground at his feet.
"That thing going to make it up to Yellowtail?" Samson called.
"No problem, bro," Billy said without looking up. "I got twenty milk jugs of water in the backseat for the trip up. Coming home's downhill most of the way."
"You fix the exhaust leak?"
"Yep, tomato can and a hose clamp. Works fine as long as you keep the window down."
"How about the brakes?" Samson was staring over Billy's shoulder into the greasy cavern of the engine compartment.
Billy capped the radiator and slammed the hood before he answered. "You let it coast down to about ten miles an hour and throw it in reverse it'll stop on a dime."
"Then let's do it." Samson jumped into the car. Billy threw the empty milk jug into the backseat, climbed in, and began cranking the engine. Samson looked back to the house and saw Pokey coming out the front door waving at them.
"Hit it, man," Samson said. "Let's go."
The car finally fired up just as Pokey reached the window. He shouted to be heard over the din of the damaged muffler. "You boys watch out for Enos, now."
"We will, Pokey," Samson said as they pulled away. Then he turned to Billy Two Irons. "Is Anus working nights again?" Anus was the name they used for Enos Windtree, a fat, meanspirited half-breed BIA cop who liked nothing better than to terrorize kids partying at some remote spot on the res. Once, at a forty-nine party near Lodge Grass, Samson and Billy and nearly twenty others were drinking and singing with the drums when Samson heard a distinct, sickening series of mechanical clicks right by his ear: the sound of a twelve-gauge shell being jacked into a riot gun. When he turned to the noise Enos hit him in the chest with the butt of the gun, knocking him to the ground. Then Enos shot the lights and windshields out of two cars before sending everyone on their way. When Samson told the story, people just said he was just lucky Enos hadn't hit him in the face, or shot somebody. There were rumors that it had happened before. And people were dying on the Lakota reservation at Pine Ridge, killed by the tribal police in what amounted to a civil war.
"Enos works whenever he can find someone to fuck with," Billy said. "I'd like to hang that fat fuck's scalp from my lodgepole."
"Oooooo, brave warrior, heap big pissed off," Samson chided in pidgin — speaking Tonto, they called it.
"You telling me you wouldn't want to see Anus's head through a rifle scope?"
"Yeah, if I thought I could get away with it. But a rifle would be too quick."