Inside, I am greeted by a weary-eyed Mohawk whose nameplate reads: UNCLE BUCK. Behind him a single blackjack table is illuminated in the gloomy cavern. A sluggish set of players take their cards from a big red-lipped blonde who just might be a transvestite.
I step into a small grill for a coffee and some eggs. Real eggs. I devour them and order four more, over easy, sopping up the yolk with buttered whole-wheat toast. I wash it down with the sweetest orange juice I’ve ever tasted. The coffee too is rich and it energizes me from the inside out. I pay with a hundred-dollar bill from 1977. That kind of bill might raise eyebrows, but this is a casino and I leave a tip that’s good, but not crazy enough to draw attention.
I return to the entrance, where Uncle Buck is affable enough and apologetic that the casino has no hotel. He tries to direct me across the border to the Canadian side of the reservation and a Best Western, but I know there will be customs agents at the bridge and, rather than risk it, tell him I want something local.
He shrugs. The only place in town is the Rest Inn Motel.
“People complain sometimes that you can smell the cow pasture,” he says, “but there’s a good gal that runs it.”
“I grew up near cows,” I say with a smile. “Will she mind me showing up at this hour? I’ve been riding all night.”
“No,” he says, his teeth gleaming beneath his regal nose. “She’s used to all kinds of things with the casino here now.”
My pride in the nation to which I am officially a member continues to deflate as I pass by sagging and decrepit one- and two-story homes with yard dogs snapping after me without restraint. The road needs repair and the scent of filth wafts up out of the ditch, reminding me of the prison’s belly.
The motel owner is a stout middle-aged Mohawk woman. I slip her my last hundred and tell her I’d like to pay for two nights. Her small dark eyes look deep into mine before she smiles and gives me a key. I draw the shades and use the bathroom before I lie down on top of the bed and fall into the pit of sleep.
I don’t know what time it is when I wake up, but I know what woke me.
The cold barrel of a revolver is tickling my nose.
28
THERE ARE THREE OF THEM. All Indians. All younger than me. Late twenties, early thirties. Long dark hair, flat angry mouths, and scowling brown eyes.
The smallest one has the gun. The two by the door are goons.
“You came to the wrong place to pass your shit, white man,” the little one says with a low growl, flipping a hundred-dollar bill at me with his free hand. “We’re gonna send you on your way, but we got a little present for you first. Get up.”
I get up off the bed with my hands in the air. The gun is still pressed into my nose. I glance down at the bill on the bed and see that it’s my own 1977 Ben Franklin. I need to use the bathroom and I tell them.
“You can piss your pants you got to go that bad,” the little one says.
The two goons snicker and they shove me out into the bright daylight. Puffy white clouds on a field of blue. The stout motel owner is scowling at me from the shadow of the porch in front of the office. Her hands are on her hips. My stolen motorcycle has already been loaded into the back of a big dark green Chevy with an extended cab.
They drive me down Route 37. Another pickup with a bed full of Indian men follows us. We pull over in a field behind a big billboard that welcomes the rest of the world to the St. Regis Indian Reservation. The biggest goon shoves me out of the truck. The other one dumps the bike out of the back and it crashes to the ground. The other truck pulls up. Everyone piles out and they make a loose circle around me. The little one they all call Bonaparte stuffs the pistol into the waist of his jeans, walks over to the bike, and pisses on it.
“I wasn’t trying to pass anything off on you,” I say for the tenth time, “and I’m not a white man. My mother was a Mohawk.”
“We’re Akwesasne,” the little one, Bonaparte, says, zipping up his fly.
“Her family was from the reservation outside Toronto,” I say, remembering now that the northern Mohawks call themselves by their own name.
Bonaparte narrows his eyes and says, “You got a white nose.”
“My father,” I say. “My mother grew up in the Onondaga Nation.”
“So after George here beats your ass black and blue,” he says, “you can go back down there and rediscover your roots, but no one comes up here and passes bad money to us. Not no white man. Not no half-breed. Not no skin.
“Go ahead, George.”
The biggest Indian steps for me and swings a big fist from out far. I duck and rabbit-punch him just below the rib cage. The air huffs out of George and he staggers, then kicks at me hard with a gilt-toed cowboy boot. He’s quick for a big man, and the metal toe nicks my knee and I tumble. George is on top of me with his fists pummeling. I slip out, twist his arm up and back, and jam his face into the gravel. He roars.
I whip my legs around his abdomen and clamp my arms around his neck. I twist and squeeze at the same time, and after less than ten seconds of struggling, George collapses on his face.
I’m on my feet. Ready.
Bonaparte waves his gun in my direction and says, “Take your goddamn bike and get the fuck off this reservation.”
It’s a ten-mile walk to Massena, but I’m not sitting in this guy’s piss.
“You can keep the bike,” I say, turning to go. “It’s stolen.”
“Hey,” Bonaparte says. “You really a skin?”
“Call down to the Nation,” I say, stopping to look him in the eyes. “My mother was Martha St. Claire. They named me Running Deer.”
One side of Bonaparte’s mouth creeps up as if he’s either skeptical or amused.
“You want a job, Quick Buck?”
“Doing what?”
“What you just did,” he says, angling his face down at George, who is now sitting up and rubbing the back of his neck.
“I need a place to stay,” I say, “and I need to stay away from the white law.”
“The only law here is me,” Bonaparte says. “We’re a sovereign nation.”
He sticks the pistol back in his jeans, turns, and climbs back into the extended cab. I get in on the other side. George gets into the front seat with the other long-haired goon, whose name is Bert. Bert’s big belly is shaking and he’s having a hard time not smiling, even under George’s evil glare.
A grainy picture of Lester and one of me from twenty years ago runs the next day on page five of the Watertown Daily Times. It talks about the attempted escape, how Lester Cole was shot dead, and that they are looking for my body somewhere downstream. Mostly, it’s treated as downstate news, separate and apart from the North Country. Anyway, Bonaparte and his men don’t seem to read much and my hair is much longer now than in the picture. Even so, I take to wearing a Buffalo Bills cap with the brim pulled low.
The Akwesasne let me share a trailer with Bert, the big man with fat round cheeks and eyes squinted in a permanent smile. He has an old streamliner, a silver-skinned melon buried in a nest of high grass and weeds. It’s small but clean, with two tiny bedrooms and its own shower and toilet that drains into a septic tank that has to be pumped once a month. Bert leaves me alone for the most part, except when he’s trying to get me to participate in one of his two favorite pastimes: drinking Molson Golden and thumb wrestling.
One day I am reading a New York Times account about Judge Villay’s ruling for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on same-sex marriages when Bert walks in with a bottle of Molson Golden. He offers me one and I look up from my paper to say that I would. When Bert sees the paper, his face clouds over and he takes a step toward me.