The Infancy of Memory

            We don’t talk too much, Winona and me. She don’t talk much to anyone, really. Winds blow through her in other ways. Her black eyes shine what she wants to say, and today that’s not too much. It’s a good day to close them for a while. Mine, too, but we’re still pretty prone to watch out for each other.

            The stove’s been working overtime; furnace has broke, and Mika’s been on the phone once, twice a day to get the Yellow Pages out here to fix it. Times are busy, they say. Extra miles costs extra time. “Heard the bison population’s on the rise,” one kidded her, “maybe you can hunt a couple hides.”

            “Did you laugh?”

            “He did. Didn’t matter what I done.”

            So maybe that’s a plan—bring my bow out to the snow-whipped coulees and let ’er rip, first kinda mastodon I see. Claim my off-season prerogative, and if somebody challenge that, take it to tribal council: fork-tongue furnaceman won’t come.

            “Pop, let’s go,” bids Winona, reading bluster in my eyes. In the next hour or so we wouldn’t be killing buffalo but tearing off usable planks for firewood from that jack pine house that burned up on account of (go figure) a furnace malfunction. Mika, waving us good luck, would hold down the fort and pretend not to drink. Touchy issue there for Winona—firstborn and only—jealous ’til she couldn’t be that anymore.

            I’m not her father for real—barely her mom’s paramour—but we get along alright as a family. Mika loved our mutual best friend growing up, like an older brother he was to both of us. He went Army Reserve to wait for her to graduate high school and then even helped pay vo-tech for her to become a beautician. He re-upped to go to Afghanistan, dying a month before Winona was born. His final letter he asked me to be there for Mika—Lamaze and all that—like he had a hunch. At the time I was on the other side of the state, studying pre-med; I guess being a doctor wasn’t in the stars—or something else was—and Mika pulled me back on her own terms, seeking him in me for as long as I could do that. Or as long as she could.

            The pickup’s half stacked with mostly fallen joists. Now we’re sifting through the carcasses of furniture, tee-shirts pulled above our nose against the lacquer toxins. Windows didn’t break enough to air out this oven, and we don’t need to salvage everything unburnt. Glancing outside, though, I’ll take that basketball hoop, hanging for dear life on a backboard of frozen ash. Didn’t come here to loot, but I could burnish that rim and put it on our own garage, teach Winona how to shoot, become a Phoenix Sun. Or ‘Mercury’, I guess they’d make her be. Fun fact, I’ll tell her: Kyrie Irving’s mom was Sioux. Or just ‘fact’—she died when he was four, the infancy of memory.

            Winona was four when I first took her spearing—just me with the spear, and she pointing at fish for the job to be done. I didn’t invite her, and her mom had second thoughts; but the girl threatened not to eat dinner unless she saw how the fish came out of the water. “Wina, it’s bloody, y’know,” and I showed her in the garage by baiting a hook with a squiggling worm. She looked intently at what I was doing and didn’t flinch a bit. Worms don’t bleed much, but, to further the point, I asked if she’d put out her palm and feel the struggle and slime. She did that, stoically, knowing from the styrofoam pail a lot of these critters would die on one outing.

            “Papa,” she said, also knowingly, “the spear never uses a worm.” She must’ve seen me practice my throws in the back yard, naturally never baiting the trident.

            “Yeah?” I had to agree, but wondered what else she meant. Can’t remember if she said anything more—just my guess, then, at her calculation that eating a fish shouldn’t mean killing more than that fish. There’s a passage in Hamlet about a king going through the guts of a beggar, via the worm that et of the king, etc. Well, I wasn’t going to bring all Hamlet up to a four-year-old—she hadn’t even seen Lion King yet!

            So we went together spearing, every year since, usually down by the culvert spilling out the grassy side of our reservoir. We ice fish there, too, on the other side of the road, but early spring was when we could spear the highest yield, pike heading inland to spawn. If the white man were there, sometimes with a megaphone and vigilantes, we’d move on to a quieter tributary, or the edge of the slough if the ice had come off. They knew we could spear before their opening date, and they hated that we had first picks. “Hey, squaw,” a drunk yelled back then (these days, he’d call her ‘Pocahontas’), “imagine you bein’ one of them pikes—you gonna let your daddy spear you like that?”

            She didn’t say nothing.

~~~

            There’s land enough on the reservation to almost disappear, months on end. Lack of internet means the WASPish world can also almost disappear. Some memories, though, are hardwired.

            Mika’s brother, Chayton, was a Division-I recruit for basketball, probably headed to Laramie to suit up for the Cowboys. It was in a summer camp for All-American prospects that we saw him on TV—satellite, so we had to go to the tavern to get the feed. First time ever he wasn’t a starter, and so we saw him just seconds here and there sitting on the bench, wrenching his hands to keep them warm and limber. Coach put him in the second half, the other team up by twenty, and Chayton made a three right away, dished out four assists, another couple mid-range shots and suddenly his team’s down by only two buckets. Other team calls a time-out, draws up a play and, wouldn’t you know, Chay picks off their pass and races down the court, defender with him stride for stride; Chay jams the ball and hangs on to the rim, hinged to take even twice that force. Instead, the backboard shatters, Darryl Dawkins’ style. Camera’s gone crazy, trying to get the grittiest angle, and the one they keep replaying was of the hoop coming down to collar Chayton, along with a shower of fiberglass shards. It was like the rim and him were intertwined, the net a wedding veil. Some trucker at the tavern burst out laughing—“he’s fucked the poor thing”—and soon after, the color commentator did the same. Chay was evidently okay, rubbing some blood from his scalp, and was about to get the hoop off by himself, but the coach had something to say that stopped him. The commentators took liberty reading his lips—‘you didn’t listen!’, it was judged—while the referees huddled to declare the game forfeit, winner being who was ahead. Chay got credit for a technical foul—‘unnecessary hanging on the rim’—and a call-out by the coach in a post-game interview: “we had ’em on the ropes, if Chief Bromden there coulda just slowed down.” Commentator asked him to clarify. “Well, he does his job okay but needs to listen—I said on their time-out that we had one left, too, and we need to call it on a rebound or turnover. I’m not saying he’s dumb, but maybe playin’ deaf.”

            Chayton didn’t go to Laramie, but he’s since turned into a decent coach for urban youth programs, another galaxy away. Maybe this netless hoop I found will lure him back a week or two, give his niece and me advice—even get his sister out to play.

~~~

            Sure, I can get despondent like anybody out there. You gotta feel something for that albino deer that crops up every so often, probably a token one for every stretch of national forest. It may know itself as special—sacred even, depending on the tribe. It was born white in a tawny world, and, wouldn’t you figure: it’s off limits for hunters. That’s not to say hunters follow a collective conscience, let alone the DNR’s rules. But the creature’s so beautiful alive. And sure, so is any northern pike.

            A kind of deer I’m talking about was Smokin’ Joe, a minister of a couple spread out chapels on our reservation. He’d come by every blue moon at least, but we’d more likely see him down at the tavern, at high school games, lobby at the clinic, wherever the wind blew him. He was actually tawny for the sake of this analogy, but albino unique, too. Well liked, he didn’t mind being lonesome—told me as much, last time we spoke. My uncle Mato was having a hell of a time with hidden problems come to light—gambling, mistress, meth, you name it—and found himself lost to humanity, a loser of a human being. “Stick with the former,” Joe told him, “and be lost—the lost will be found, eventually. But dump that latter—the loser determined by others just as lost, or more.” I wondered if that was enough for Mato to wake up to, and asked Joe if he’d check in on Mato once in a while. He said, “sure, and”, tapping ash from his Muriel air tip, “his spirit, too, can check up on mine. That’s one way to define what prayer can do.”

            Smokin’ Joe tried to kick the cigar habit several times—once when his buddy Calvin gave him a springer spaniel pup to make him walk it. He named him ‘Homer’ to be a reminder—you gotta be home pretty regular to walk your dog, or take him with wherever you go. Joe would do that sometimes in his Plymouth Reliant—bring him somewhere to run wild—but Homer needed his namesake and preferred the gravel road in front of his house. Someone else—not Calvin—gave Joe a kitten, promptly named ‘Jethro’ to keep Homer company indoors; that lasted a week—Homer played Jethro to exhaustion before extinction. Then the farmer next door came to ask Joe about some disappeared chickens, and maybe Homer had some knowledge of that. “No, no” Joe assured, retelling at the tavern, “a springer spaniel only soft mouths ducks, by instinct, and chickens—even if he got into the coop—would be the same.” On cue, Homer wobbled from behind the house and seemed to want to say something, barfing up white features and gristle to maybe get it off his chest. Farmer gave dog a small chiding and Joe a free cigarette, chuckling not to sweat an apology.

            Animals, in the end, didn’t stop Joe from smoking but got him to appreciate the breeze they shared. He died of pneumonia after setting two days in a sweat lodge, partly to honor my uncle’s invite to do so. Could’ve made him sad, Mato, to lose such a friend. But “he aint lost,” Mato said, “he’s the white deer we are lucky to sometimes find.”

~~~

            Winona likes to color, even that albino in a fog—not to change it into something else, but entertain its aura. Mika thinks she’d make a great tattoo artist, something she’s not licensed for but does for extra cash. Winona’s just fourteen—too old for coloring books, too young for Mika’s clientele. “Never too young for spearing,” I hear Mika say, and I say back, “but I don’t take her to E.R.”, where I work, driving ambulance. It’s not an argument—more an indication we don’t know what guides the way the wind blows, and how to worry about nothing.

            Her teacher called me in some time ago—called Mika first, but she got scared—and so I come in thinking they don’t like Winona’s way of keeping to herself, doodling, what-you-will. Or maybe smoking, sneaking out, something even social. Teacher’s done this all her life—you see it on her forehead, which bobs down as she pages through a notebook. “Do you know,” she starts, barely having greeted me, “what’s in my hands?”

            A test, I thought—for me. Instead of yes or no, I simulate her posture—sitting, opening my hands book-like, and read.

            She lets me do that, silence for the both of us to kind of let the afternoon have its presence felt. One of Wina’s notebooks, true, my upper eyelids reach and start to flutter. I think of her dad waking up in an Afghan valley, wondering if they’d have rain to keep the desert plans at bay. I’ve talked of him to her, of course—hours of angling lends to that. She once said “I remember”—must have been a thing I told before—I can’t keep track of all I said. “Mom, too,” she decided to reveal, grace that tends to mystify.

            “Your daughter,” teacher measures out her words like that, “Winona,” flipping to a drawing of a box turtle, “writes,” of course—we know she’s good at cursive—“what to me she does not say.” I want to burst out neither laughing nor crying, just something—and I know I’ll hide it badly. “Don’t fret,” she follows, “what she writes is,” turning to a page she’d dog-eared, “memorable.” She slides the open page toward me to take, and I read in liquid blur:

These crayons, they make them

sound like something playing

on a lonely dream. Color ‘manatee’

in ‘tumbleweed’, and see if any

body sees. I could use the paper

holding ‘indian red’—it’s more

honest than the wax that’s meant

to be my skin. Give it ‘blush’, or

maybe take that to my mom,

who beauties people as they bid

‘maroon’. Tell my dad I won’t trade

‘sunset orange’ for ‘outer space’—

next year they’ll try ‘inner space’

but fail to dream the crayon I crave

to make: ‘daybreak’—maybe in

a dozen shades, depending on the

weather, what designates a day,

and how a thing might break.

I would love that color constantly,

and share it with the sharpener.

            I forgot what else the meeting was about. Just that Winona had a voice, beyond what anyone had imagined.

~~~

            Coming back from the jack pine house, pickup starts to stall. Gas still at three-quarters, not so cold to clog the fuel line—just gotta chalk it up as an ageing vehicle. Hauling all those planks couldn’t help, and it would do no harm to jettison them, lighten the truck’s spirits. That’s at least what I propose to Wina, who doesn’t seem to have an opinion on the matter.

            Instead, we hoof it towards the tavern, knowing there’d be a phone there at least, and warmth. Wouldn’t you know, Mato’s sitting on a stool when we come in nursing a Mountain Dew and chatting with Pezi, who runs the place. “Hey,” he says when he sees us come in, shivering for effect.

            “Hokahey,” Wina hushes, somewhat to my surprise. To think that the Crazy Horse call to fight at Big Horn—hokahey, today is a good day to die—might be the utterance of a teenage girl in the twenty-first century, especially in light of yesterday… Ho! It can have no good response.

            “Amen,” Mato honors just the same. I mumble through an explanation why we’re panhandling here this time of day, giving Pezi reason to smile. He had hot chocolate brewing for us anyway—roadways in the winter have their strange predictability. I barely have to ask to use the phone.

            “Hey, Mika,” I call—she’s been worried, by the tone of her hello—“we’re just a little bit stranded. Haven’t asked yet, but Mato will give us a lift… maybe’ll run by the pickup to grab what we can… No word from furnaceman?... No, that’s okay. We don’t need his hokey sense of humor…. You okay?... That’s… yeah, Winona’s sippin’ cocoa, seems a lady Mato’s with is ordering the same…. Yeah, I’ll do that. See you in a little while.” The phone fits nicely in its brace upon the wall.

            The lady friend is Zonta—I should have picked that up from hints my uncle gave the last and last encounters at this bar. Her name in Sioux is trustworthy, and I concoct a plan to have her stay with Wina, while Mato and me try to get the pickup going, maybe tow it to the house. Why can’t Wina go as well? Well, I tell myself, I think she’s had enough. Zonta’s eyes say she would love to babysit, or teach Winona how to do the same.

            It allows my need for Mato—an hour ago I only faced the snow—to be my babysitter, ’cause I’m about to burst.

~~~

            Yesterday, as we were on the reservoir—after daybreak, it so happened, drilling through the ice of holes we’d set the day before—a group of vigilantes trudged our way. “Keep a low profile,” I told Winona, and by body language, they implied the same. We were well enough away from anything of relevance, but somehow this became their equation: they were hunting deer—as was the end of season and their right—and we were in their way, deerpaths on occasion making use of ice. Yet, the reservoir had open water not too far away—deer would know this better’n us—and so I compassed with my arm the area we would stay.

            They retreated; we reviewed our flags—one falling for a pike not big enough to keep, and two others indicating strikes. Daybreak turned to sepia, and I had names of crayons in my head, begging Wina read my mind if not sure how she’d do so. Flags fell with regularity—I’d be pulling out a perch and she’d be handling a muskie; we were well ahead of forecasts for an Alberta clipper coming through. By afternoon, we’d be home, packing these filets and celebrating graces from the lake.

            But first we had to find its mercy. Turns out a herd of deer had designs to cross, coming out a glade directly east and nosing a route halfway between us and the southern shore. In their middle, muskox style, two fawns—including an albino—picked up their pace, as nature told them not to dawdle on the ice. Winona was enamored; we both stood still to make the moment stay. It would be the memory of a lovely day.

            Until the hunters tumbled from their blind upon the shore. They couldn’t shoot from their present angle, unless they wouldn’t care to hit us in a miss. Because they made a stir, the herd halted in their tracks and froze, staring full that way and allowing Win and me to see their napes, all eight—all completely trusting we were not their fight.

            The hunters were. And they were pissed—we were screwing up their site. You could see their calculation, how to shift this way or that to have an open shot; like wolves, they slowly split to buy the time they needed—the herd would break in unison one side or the other, but which side was the question. Winona and I could only be the audience.

            Time is a product of heartbeats, even when that organ stops and is somewhat recalled in a funeral drum. I tried to think all the beings thinking right now—on the lake and under our feet, considering bait and ways to partake, or strategies how to escape. Three hunters made for their smiley face, the herd still a nose, Wina and me serving eyes below a forehead of balding ice. An eagle would see us this way.

            All broke in an instant—the face sprinting Pennywise, the deer doing basketball J-stops in efforts to get open or confuse, and us now aware that we were surrounded, one with the herd. Winona made way toward the water, just to make space, and warily I followed. A shot rang out from the eastern-most hunter, and the middle man charged to force the hunt west, but the deer scattered east, anyway—familiar more with the glade. The little albino ran toward us, causing Winona to stop it from going away from the herd. Its mama responded and charged us further to the edge of the ice, skidding when she saw it cracking and Wina going down, the fawn finally knowing it shouldn’t join us. I quickened to where Wina elbowed the unbroken ice, yelling inside for her to stay calm. She heard that, it seems, and though I also cracked in, reaching for her, we both managed to belly to safety, like seals. Maybe manatees.

            Hunters stopped to look at us, distantly, guessing what the story of the day would be. When they saw us out of water, crawling back to the flags we didn’t need to keep, they bolted back to their blind, gathered up their gear and disappeared. That left Wina and me alone—memories of deer notwithstanding—with a half-shelf life to get home and, crucially, dry.

            Mika drew the bath—water heater working fine—and Winona stayed in there an hour it seemed to get her back to lukewarm. I resorted to our stock of blankets—bison hides from IKEA. Later, I’d go back to fetch our fish and flags and use up all our wood to get the calories in us—units of heat, they taught us in school, and great with peppercorn and wild rice, we knew by instinct.  

~~~

            Mato hears all this with nods of understanding; we’re at my pickup before he’d have a chance to question. Cable now attached, it would be a glacial load for his Ford Bronco, and I would have to steer and brake this rogue tail to keep us safely on the road. Mika meets us with good news—furnace fixer here tomorrow, even an apology for letting the request linger, as nobody should be left out in the cold.

            We got wood enough for tonight, thanks to Mato, but he suggests we camp out otherwise: “You haven’t seen our new place yet—Zonta’s made a little guest room, also got a futon—make yourself at home.”

            The bar’s more abuzz than when we left it—Warriors and Thunder on tv, games of darts and billiards round out the room. Pezi makes his case that Golden State has done a subtle job of representing Indians more or less okay: “their logo is a bridge, not some Chief Wazoo—”

            “You mean Wahoo—let’s call things by their right names,” his rival jokes.

            “Wa-who cares,” Pez goes on, “I don’t want Geronimo there either, or tomahawk chops—”

            “You want a bridge.”

            “I do.”

            “A bridge for warriors to… what?”

            “To pass around and score, defend their side, and bring in customers.”

            “Fair ’nuf. And Thunder—what do you what them to do?”

            “Same. And bless the earth with rain.”

            We watch the game and gauge Winona’s smile and little things she wants to say, playing darts with Zonta and thanking Pez for the chili he had made, with shredded cheese and sage. I leave a twenty on the counter, Pezi takes it, puts it in the tip jar and slides that back to me. “For the furnace,” he deafens to my protest, “at least a dent.”

            The Bronco’s cozy with us five, spacious that it is. Like our country—vast and jealous of its space, best when neighbors sit together. Mato drives deliberately, the clipper’s brought its drifts that he has handled many times, increasingly in ways that counts him wise.

            He’s right—we haven’t seen the new place, though I have seen it old. “This was Smokin’ Joe’s! I knew you took in Homer when he died—”

            “Did that—and he ran back here several times.”

            “Thought I scared him off!” says Zonta.

            “Joe had little in his will—took a couple months for relatives to find it buried in his books and things—and though the house has some mortgage left, he shifted it to me, if I wanted.”

            “Bank agreed?”

            “Got two years, favorable rate—and I’ll retire in four.”

            Winona walks the spaniel before we all need to hit the sack. Mika runs to join her—“she forgot her stocking cap”—and I sit back remembering last I’d been in here, playing Scrabble with Joe, who wasn’t smoking at the time. Mato says the board is over there—a little spirit of the house they’ll surely keep, Zonta being the better wordsmith.

            “Now, Hon, there’s no ‘better’ when a thing needs more than one.”

            “That’s true. We’ll play a round tomorrow.”

            Tomorrow will be hard again—nice to think the furnace might get fixed, but then the pickup’s next, and maybe driving cross the county to drive again an ambulance is more road than I’m made to meet. Maybe take some cues from Mika—we can build a better shop—Winona adding color, if she wants. They come in from the cold laughing at something they had said. Hugs goodnight, and dreams of deer that also snuggle in, tumbleweed and sometimes white.

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2018)