Nothing moves — not the high grass, not the prairie dog, not the shriveled pods of yucca. All is the color of sand and dust. Rusted cans are strewn on the landscape.
Wood ages quickly here, worn by wind and rain. He looks out over the reservation and then further off at all he has lost. He sees a row of wooden boxes bleached gray. These tiny houses are like the coffins of white men: there’s no air. He sends a petition to the Great Spirit. “We can’t breathe in here. We lie down in here and die.”
It is the end. He walks into the kitchen, turns on the faucet: sound of metal, sound of dark water. He opens the refrigerator, closes it. “The young ones tell me I’ve got to forget the way it was,” and a smirk comes to his face. “When we forget, then surely we die. Once there were buffalo and elk and clear water. Once we roamed freely on the land.
“Give me back,” he rasps, “what you have taken.”
He walks into the other room. He turns on the television.
Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble flip brontosaurus burgers on the grill in Bedrock in brilliant technicolor and plot how to sneak away to the Water Buffalo meeting without the girls finding out.
Lucy and Ethel have just begun work at a chocolate factory. They stand in front of the conveyor belt. The foreman tells them if one candy passes them and gets down to the packing room unwrapped, they’re finished.
A game-show host in heavy makeup smiles madly. “What is behind that curtain?” he asks a squealing audience.
“Come on down,” he calls out. “Mrs. Betty Loomis from Nashville, Tennessee, come on down! Let’s make a deal.”
Switch to a commerciaclass="underline" a woman in a nurse’s uniform breathes her mouthwash breath on a young doctor.
A man offers a woman a cup of coffee by a fire. Demurely she refuses. “It’s the caffeine,” she says, wrinkling her brow with puppy-dog sincerity. “But it’s decaf,” he says. “No, it can’t be. This rich?” she says in amazement, in adoration.
His voice quivers. “Give me back,” he says into the false smiles, “give me back,” he says into the antiseptic grins, into all the lies, “give me back what you have taken.”
Now as the orange and yellow and lime-green walls start to close in on him and he is beginning to have difficulty breathing, he closes his eyes and calls up the sacred land of the grandfathers. Slowly the walls recede and disappear.
Tears fall; tears have fallen for hundreds of years. The sun drops; the clouds turn pink and purple. Once he could call rain from the sky. “You must never forget,” he says.
He looks out the tiny window and sees his grandchildren reaching for the red medicine ball.
Lucy and Ricky, roses in their mouths, do the tango for the PTA at Little Ricky’s school.
In this fragile light which seems to change even as he observes it, the figures of the children dissolving, as he holds them, into a dusty background — in this light he calls up Butte Mountain where he can still go whenever he has to, in his mind. He reaches for it now.
“I dream of you,” he smiles,
“I dream of you jumping.
Rabbit,
Jackrabbit,
Quail.”
“We are killing people. There is no other way to see this,” Fletcher said in sorrow, standing paralyzed in his realization. “We fill the earth with the bones of those who beg simply to live out an average life: seventy years and the chance to work, but for many even that is not possible. This must change,” Fletcher burned, looking at Bill whose lungs had filled with asbestos.
Timmy Skofield was filled with questions.
Clifford kept saying, “I quit. I quit for good.” The deal he and Fletcher had made now seemed stupid. He had made the promise earlier that week that he would not quit at all for ten days and Fletcher in turn would take him out alone to any movie he wanted and afterwards for ice cream. It was the fifth day but now he kept saying, “I quit, I quit,” over and over. Fletcher was leaving. What Clifford had always known was still true: there was no one who would take him seriously, no one who could be trusted, relied upon, though life in the house with the other residents and Fletcher had seemed different somehow.
Amanda began neighing like a horse the way she always did when she was upset.
And in the bathroom Debbie unrolled roll after roll of toilet paper and stuffed it into the toilet.
The whole house was in chaos, my brother having to leave the job, unexpectedly, without notice.
The first postcard came from Maine. On it a fisherman stands on a wharf holding up two lobsters. The sky is a brilliant blue, like his eyes, which shine out from a haggard face.
“Eli Lilly,” Fletcher scrawls on the back, “manufacturers of the drug DES. Wrongfully marketed for use in preventing miscarriage. No preliminary lab tests done on pregnant mice. Consequences: all plaintiff’s reproductive organs and more than half her vagina removed. 1953 prenatal exposure to DES, which was ingested by the mother while pregnant with plaintiff, is proximate cause of cancer that developed seventeen years after her birth.”
Sarah Stafford, age twenty-two, having become accustomed to the movement of the boat, felt dizzy stepping onto the earth. It seemed to her years since she had left England; with the boat’s first motion forward, the land’s first tilt, she had left behind the idea of the world, and it had been oddly comforting to her. She had grown to love the oceans of blue and lavender and pewter.
Now, landing here, she could scarcely believe that this was the dream that had propelled the tiny ship forward: paradise. How the idea of paradise must have varied among the one hundred and fifty tossed through the water on the courageous Godspeed. Now they were here. So this was paradise: a land you could not stand on, a tangle of trees. All right, then, she thought. But it was not all right. It seemed far, far away from anything she had conjured. Her children clung to her skirt. Some of the men shouted. Others laughed with delight at their first sight of the New World. Some sighed as if with a lover. Her children began to cry. A dark shape rose in her.
My mother moves her feet across the polished floor — one, two, cha-cha-cha.
“Miami Beach,” Grandpa Sarkis sighs, wiping sweat from his forehead. “There are those pink birds that stand on one foot,” Lucy says, pointing to the picture on soiled newsprint. “Flamingos,” her mother says to her.
“And blue dolphins,” Christine whispers.
“I’ve heard that at the hotels in Miami Beach,” the father says, “men dressed in w hite bring cushions out for you so that you can sit by the pool. And just for signing a paper they will bring you banana and strawberry drinks with parasols in them.”
“Really? Parasols!” my mother says.
“Oh, yes,” her father nods solemnly. “That’s what I’ve heard.”
The next time I heard from my brother, he was in Fall River, Massachusetts, where he continued to name names. “Johns-Manville,” he wrote on the back of a postcard picturing the house of the famous ax-murderess, Lizzie Borden, “was fully aware of the hazards of asbestos in the 1930s but actively suppressed the information, making ‘a conscious, cold-blooded business decision, in utter flagrant disregard of the rights of others, to take no protective or remedial action.’”
This is the part of the story Grandpa hated to telclass="underline" It was a cold night. Ice was already thick on the creek called Wounded Knee. The crystalline trees seemed to bend further and further into the earth. It was 1890 and winter was coming on.
A white flag hoisted at the center of the Indian camp promised to the white man that there would be peace, harmony, safety. But the men with faces like snow moved into the camps anyway, hundreds of them, in great drifts like sorrow.