Up into the pointed hills, gumbo roads slippery as snot when wet, his landscape of crooked rocks. The antelope sentinel’s snoring warning to the herd in the draw, the herd bounding through a strew of flowers close to the earth like rainbow grass. The antelope step over fossil tree trunks, broken stone stumps with the rings still visible, the stone bark encrusted with orange lichens.
The worn sandstone layers hollowed and rippled by ancient water in this waterless land, this lake bottom heaved into yellow cones still booms with the hoofbeats of the horses of Red Horse, Red Cloud and Low Dog, the great and mysterious Crazy Horse, Crow King and Rain in the Face, kicking up fragments of fossil teeth. They come tearing out of ravines, rise up with killing smiles in the astounded faces of Fetterman, Crook, Custer, Benteen, Reno. He hears the slipping twinned voices canted at each other in fifths, the Stamping Dance of the Oglala, the voices whirling away and dropping, together, apart, locked in each other’s trembling throats. The fast war dance, hypnotic and maddening, has irradiated the sandstone. He has only to hold a mass of stone in each hand and bring them together again and again, faster and faster, twice the speed of the beating heart.
Maddening. On the counter of a general store in Streaky Bacon, Montana, a box of discarded patient cards from an asylum in Fargo. He looks through them. Everyone looks through them. The corners are broken and greasy. Photographs: a description of the subject’s mania, revivalism, melancholia, masturbation, dementia. The Indian’s face balanced between his fingers. The smooth combed hair, but the jacket askew and stained. The still face, the black eyes, and the tapering fingers locked around an accountant’s ledger. Although it seems to be the Indian, laconic script says ‘Walter Hairy Chin.’ Nothing of blue skies nor hundred-dollar bills.