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No, the way I’d recognized him the night before, when he was walking from the kitchen doorway back to the utility room, it was his silhouette. There were spikes coming out from his lower back, and the tops of his calves bulged out in an unnatural way, and his head was top-heavy and kind of undulating, so he was going to have to duck to make it into the utility room.
But—for all he was wearing, he was absolutely silent. Zero rustling, like you can usually hear with a
fancydancer, when they’re all set to go, or have just finished. Thing was? ...
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He didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the stories, and didn’t care that he didn’t.
But in the year or two after he either drowned or was drowned—there’s stories both ways, and they each make sense—
The bustles, the armbands, the beadwork, the cool knee-high moccasins—and the facepaint. It makes you look like the assassin-aliens in space movies. With your face black and white like that, you automatically slit your eyes like a gunfighter, like you’re staring America down across the centuries. I can see my dad slitting his eyes in the bleachers like that all those years ago. What he’s doing, it’s pretending. What he’s doing, it’s waiting. “He was going to be the best dancer of us all, once he
straightened back up again,” one of his sisters had told me.
That’s how you talk about dead people, though, especially dead Indians. It’s all about squandered potential, not actual accomplishments.
And that’s how I recognized him that first night, crossing from the living room through the kitchen. His boots, his bustle. His fancydancer outline. In death, he had become what he never could in life. And now he was back. Or, he had been for a few steps.
I read once that a baby elephant doesn’t have the digestive enzymes it needs to live, but it can get them—and does—by eating its mother’s dung. That’s an old Indian story, right there.
He was back watching us, I knew.
When he died, they didn’t find him right off. The tribal cops, I mean. But everybody knew where he was.
Was it because a truck he was driving had thrown a rod he couldn’t afford to pay for, or was it because he was drinking and stumbled, and couldn’t get back up? There were stories both ways, and Mom told us that either being true wouldn’t make him alive again, and that—she only said this when she was down—we were maybe better off anyway. We never would have left otherwise.
