I started having these weird dreams about Indians when I was in grade school. Whether chasing wild chickens or getting drunk with white men, it seems as if I had some previous life in this neighborhood. The land our house occupies was stolen from the Pottawatami Indians in 1832 by a guy named Pierce Downer. He scrambled out here when the frontier was opened by the U.S. government’s success in the Black Hawk War. There was enough gruesome slaughter on both sides to make an awesome miniseries, but nobody really gives a shit about Illinois in Hollywood.
After an all-nighter at Fort Dearborn, the Indians were coerced to trade the land on this side of the Mississippi River for the land on the other side of the Mississippi. The Indians shook hands with their new friends, packed their bags, and spread out into the Black Hills, only to find General Custer creeping through their territory a few hours later. My guess is that the senior curse is directly linked to something that happened a long time ago and that the spirits we’re dealing with carry a nasty grudge.
My grade school was called Indian Boundary because the land it occupies was once a place that marked a neutral zone of commerce between the two nations. Indian Boundary Road has a notorious curve with three oak trees lining the bend. It’s become the local dead man’s curve. There’s at least one every summer, and the corpses are usually young and almost always intoxicated.
Our family has been living here since forever. My grandma once owned a tavern on the corner of Sixty-first and Dunham. She had a television before there was programming. Locals came from miles around for Friday night wrestling and ten-cent beers. There’s a scrapbook in Grandma’s pantry with a zillion black-and-white photographs. People sat outside on picnic tables and ate corn on the cob, waiting for the sun to go down. It was so folksy even Norman Rockwell would puke.
The place deteriorated in the fifties when happy hour became the home of unhappy social outcasts. One night someone got stabbed in the bathroom, and a few weeks later a fire finished off what was left of that sagging beer-soaked timber.
Grandma’s mom’s mom was the wife of a German blacksmith who never came back from the Civil War. She took up with a local Indian trader and had a second litter. I’m a descendant of that batch. I’m not quite a half-breed, but I’m just as much an Indian as Cher.
The porch light went out. I crossed the yard and slipped back into the house. The astronaut’s spaceship was still parked in the driveway. I went upstairs, pulled the covers over my head, and curled up into a ball, hoping tonight never happened and tomorrow would never come.