“I’m looking for a sixteen-foot gate,” he called out.
Lame Elk turned around to encounter a familiar face. The man grinned. “Well, well, look who’s here. You seem a little different than the last time I saw you. You stunk to high heaven then. Almost made me lose my breakfast.”
“I have a sixteen-foot gate,” Lame Elk said. “I’ll get it for you. Want me to load it on your truck?”
“Hey, that’s mighty white of you. That what you’re doing now? Trying to be a white man with good manners?”
“I don’t want no trouble.”
“Trouble? Who’s making trouble, chief? I’m just making small talk. You know, my friend and I didn’t appreciate it that day in the café when you ruined our breakfast. Sitting down next to us, stinking of vomit and piss. My friend, he wanted to go out after you when you left to teach you a lesson. I told him a drunken Indian couldn’t learn shit.”
“I don’t drink anymore.”
“That so? Well, good for you, chief.”
“You want the gate loaded?”
“I’ll think about it. I have some things to get inside. I’m leaving my truck here, okay?”
“Sure. It’ll be here when you come out.”
The man’s steely blue eyes met Lame Elk’s and held his gaze.
Five minutes later, the guy reappeared followed by someone else Lame Elk knew, Jesse Harpole, the feed store supervisor. Harpole was a man Lame Elk usually tried to avoid. The manager had taken a dislike to him for some reason.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Harpole asked, his cheeks flushed in anger.
Confusion covered Lame Elk’s face. “What?”
“Customer says you were rude to him, wouldn’t help him find what he was looking for. And when he did find what he wanted, he said you wouldn’t help him load it.”
Lame Elk shook his head. “That’s not true. I told him I’d be happy to load the gate for him, but he said he wanted to do some more shopping.”
“Go inside and wait for me at the back register. I’ll give you your severance pay when I come in. You’re fired.”
Lame Elk, unable to comprehend what had just happened, kept turning his head to look at the two men as he walked toward the store’s rear entrance.
“Every time I hire a goddamn Indian, I get burned,” he heard Harpole telling the man.
Lame Elk waited at the register, as Harpole had instructed him. He reached into his pocket and fingered his father’s medicine pouch. He pulled it out, sniffed it, and laid it next to the register. He unzipped the Carhartt jacket he’d picked out with Hugh Johnson and dropped it on the floor. Then he unbuttoned his flannel shirt, pulled it off, and let it fall on top of the coat. He bent down and yanked off the boots he’d bought, and unzipped his new Wranglers and stepped out of them. He stood in the emptiness of the back room, his braid a straight black line thick against his spine.
Lame Elk opened the cash register and counted out his wages for the week and scattered the money like dried leaves on the pile of clothing.
He walked out the door, oblivious to the cold and to the first large snowflakes coming down. He walked past the hardware store and looked up at the second-floor windows of Hugh Johnson’s office. Lame Elk clutched Bear Hunter’s medicine bundle in his bare hand and headed home.
Another role
by Reed Farrel Coleman
Los Angeles, California
It wasn’t Harry Garson’s fault he didn’t speak a word of Navajo or Apache or Ute or Hopi or whatever the fuck kind of Indian he was. He didn’t know and he didn’t give a shit. Never had and he wasn’t about to start caring now. Not that he was barking about his genetics, mind you. His classic Indian looks — the rich bronze skin, dark and distant eyes, high cheekbones, proudly bent nose, granite jaw, downturned mouth — had landed him over a hundred and fifty roles, large and small, in A, B, and C oaters dating back to 1938’s Forked River, Forked Tongue. As he advanced in years, his classic features, once those of the stereotypical proud brave — “Makeup and Costume, c’mon, get over here and get some fucking war paint and feathers on Harry. He’s got a wagon train to ambush. We’re losing the light, goddammit!” — had morphed into those of the sage chief. The distant eyes were now achingly sad, the brow above them knitted and furrowed. His cheeks had gone hollow and his angular jaw was now crooked thanks to a bar fight with Lock Martin — Klaatu barada nickto. Yes, that Lock Martin, all 7’1” of the guy who played Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still — at Musso and Frank’s in ’53. Word was that Harry was getting the better of it until the normally gentle giant introduced the leg of a bar stool to Harry’s chops.
“Harry, you’re turning my kishkas inside out,” said movie agent Irv Rothenberg when he visited his client in the hospital. “Who picks a fight with a guy bigger than Mount Shasta, for chrissakes? Lock is a sweetheart. What did you say to him to set him off like that?”
“I said Patricia Neal told me he had a small shwantz,” Harry replied, waving his right pinky at his agent. “Big man, little pecker.” Harry even managed a laugh, though his mouth was wired shut.
“Oy gevalt, you’re killing me, Harry!”
Harry was blessed — Irv would say cursed — with the genuine gift of gab, which he could use for good — like talking his way into a part or into a starlet’s bed — or for bad, à la Lock Martin. He also had a facility for doing impersonations. When he was on the set with John Ford, Duke Wayne used to pay Harry to call up the second unit director and give him all manner of insane orders in Ford’s voice. It got so bad that Ford had to start giving special code words to his staff so that they could recognize him and not the schmuck pretending to be him. The irony for Harry was that he didn’t get his first speaking part until 1956’s Red Scout, and then his only line was, “Blue horse soldier with yellow hair like waves, across running river.” Not exactly the stuff of Shakespeare, but the speaking parts came more frequently after that and by the mid-’60s, Harry Garson had landed a regular role as Smells Like Bearstein, Chief of the Sosoomee Tribe, on the short-lived series Crazy Cavalry. By the late ’60s, as Westerns fell out of favor and parts for aging chief types with a flare for the spoken word grew scarce, Harry settled into an angry semiretirement. The few big roles Harry auditioned for in the late ’60s and ’70s, he lost to Chief Dan George. That really got him going, especially when reruns of Little Big Man and The Outlaw Josey Wales played on the movie channels.
“That fucking Canadian prick!” Harry would bark at the screen and imitate Chief Dan George’s quiet, monotone delivery. “Every eighteen-year-old in this country ran to goddamn Canada to avoid the draft and this is who we got in exchange? I bet they had to write out his lines in pictographs, the senile old bastard.”
He was a charmer, Harry, but he had the bitterness in him too, and it began to overtake him as the years passed and the parts — those in the movies and those on his body — shriveled up. These weren’t the only things shriveling up either. He had never been good with money, especially when it was plentiful. Although he denied it until the day he died, Randy “The Crooning Cowpoke” Butterworth of B-movie and early TV fame, was known to have once told Harry he was “the only redskin who acts like a kike, speaks like Olivier, and spends like a nigger.” By the summer of ’83, Harry Garson was about tapped out. Fourteen years since his last meaningful paying gig, he was living on fast food and five-buck-a-blowjob drug whores in a SRO hotel in downtown L.A. Then the phone rang in the hall outside his room and that all changed.