Victor was being as logical as a white man.
“You can’t go to New York if you don’t get on that plane,” Chess said.
“Please,” Checkers said.
Victor stared out the terminal window at the plane. That plane just looked too damn big to fly.
“All right, all right,” Victor finally said. “I’ll get on that goddamn plane, but I’m going to get wasted. And you’re all going to buy me drinks.
“Okay, okay,” said all the rest of Coyote Springs, happy for once to be codependents.
“Listen,” Thomas said, “you can still have my eagle feather.”
“I told you to get that thing away from me,” Victor said. “I don’t believe in that shit.”
Coyote Springs boarded the plane, waved to Wright and Sheridan as they walked back to the coach section. Victor started drinking immediately. He put down shot after shot, closed his eyes as the plane took off.
“Shit,” Victor said after the plane reached cruising altitude, “that was easy.”
Victor was drunk enough to forget about flying for a while, until the plane hit some nasty turbulence.
“Sorry, folks,” the captain said over the intercom. “We’ve run into some choppy air, and we’re going to have to ask you to return to your seats and buckle yourselves in. This is going to be a bumpy ride.”
The plane bounced up and down like crazy, and Victor went pale. The whole band turned white.
“Hey, Thomas,” Victor slurred, “do you still got that eagle feather?”
“Sure,” Thomas said and handed it to Victor, who held it tightly in his hand and whispered some inexpert prayer.
The rest of Coyote Springs looked to Thomas for help, so he produced an eagle feather for each of them.
“Jeez, Thomas,” Chess said, “I love you so much.”
Thomas just smiled and held tightly to his eagle feather. Chess and Checkers held hands, held their feathers. Junior put his feather in his mouth and bit down to prevent himself from calling out. Coyote Springs was flying to a place they had never been. They didn’t know what would happen or how they would come back.
Meanwhile, the reservation remained behind. It never exactly longed for any Indian who left, for all those whose bodies were dragged quickly and quietly into the twentieth century while their souls were left behind somewhere in the nineteenth. But the reservation was there, had always been there, and would still be there, waiting for Coyote Springs’s return from New York City. Every Indian, every leaf of grass, and every animal and insect waited collectively.
The old Indian women dipped wooden spoons into stews and stirred and stirred. The stews made of random vegetables and commodity food, of failed dreams and predictable tears. That was the only way to measure time, to wait. Those spoons moved in slow circles. Stir, stir. The reservation waited for Coyote Springs to fall into pieces, so they could be dropped into the old women’s stews.
It waited for the end of the stickgame, one chance to choose the hand holding the colored bone. Those old women always hid the colored bone in one hand and a plain bone in the other. Those old women smelled of stew and pine. If an Indian chose the correct hand, he won everything, he won all the sticks. If an Indian chose wrong, he never got to play again. Coyote Springs had only one dream, one chance to choose the correct hand.
8. Urban Indian Blues
I’VE BEEN RELOCATED AND given a room
In a downtown hotel called The Tomb
And they gave me a job and cut my hair
I trip on rats when I climb the stairs
I get letters from my cousins on the rez
They wonder when they’ll see me next
But I’ve got a job and a landlady
She calls me chief, she calls me crazy
chorus:
I’m walking sidewalks miles from home, I’m walking streets alone
I’m walking in cheap old shoes, I’ve got the Urban Indian blues
I’m working for minimum, I’m working the maximum
I’m working in cheap old shoes, I’ve got the Urban Indian blues
I paint the ceilings, I paint the walls
I paint the floors and I paint the halls
That’s my job and that’s my boss there
He gave me the clothes that I wear
We drink a few in his favorite bar
We drink a few more in his car
He’s a friend of the Indian, he says
He’s been to the rez, he’s been to the rez
(repeat chorus)
I’m saving money for the Greyhound
’Cause I want to be homeward bound
But the landlady raises the rent
The boss don’t know where my check went
And the neighbors are lonely
And the neighbors are ghostly
And I watch my television
And I dream of the reservation
Inside the recording studio at Cavalry Records in New York City, Coyote Springs nervously re-tuned their already tuned instruments. Chess and Checkers sang scales. Junior tapped his foot to some rhythm he heard in his head. Victor stroked his guitar gently; the guitar purred.
“Are you folks ready yet?” asked a disembodied voice from the control booth.
“Who are you?” Victor asked.
“Just the engineer,” said the voice.
“Where are you?”
“Right here,” said a young white woman in pressed denim shirt and blue jeans. She waved at Coyote Springs and grinned.
Phil Sheridan and George Wright sat behind the engineer. They were just as nervous as Coyote Springs.
“What if Mr. Armstrong doesn’t like them,” Sheridan asked Wright. Thomas watched Sheridan and Wright talk, although he couldn’t hear them through the glass.
“He’ll like them,” Wright said. “He signed that duo from Seattle on just our word, right? He’s got to like these guys. Indians are big these days. Way popular, right? Besides, these Indians are good. They’re just plain good. They’re artists. When was the last time we signed artists?”
“Shit, as if being good meant anything in this business. They don’t need to be good. They just need to make money. I don’t give a fuck if they’re artists. Where are all the executives who signed artists? They’re working at radio stations now, right?”
The engineer studied her soundboard. She flipped switches in patterns that would make the music sound exactly like she wanted it to sound.
“I’m just going to tell Armstrong this was your idea,” Sheridan said and laughed.
“Fuck you, too,” Wright said.
Sheridan and Wright continued to reassure each other until Mr. Armstrong, the president and CEO of Cavalry Records, arrived.
“Mr. Armstrong,” Sheridan and Wright said and stood.
“Where are the Indians?” Armstrong asked.
“Right there,” Sheridan said and pointed at the band.
“They look Indian,” Armstrong said.
“Of course, sir.”
Mr. Armstrong was a small man, barely over five feet, but he weighed three hundred pounds. The weight looked unnatural on him, though, like he had been padded to play a fat guy in a movie. His blond hair was pulled into a ponytail that hung down past his waist. He spoke in short sentences.
“Can they play?” Armstrong asked Sheridan and Wright.