Islumped morosely next to Fatback in the back seat of Grover’s big green Buick as we made our way up over a ridge toward the main highway. I should have been happy at the good fortune of getting to go on “a little trip” with Grover and the old man. But all I could think of was my meticulously engineered little truck sitting in the darkness of Jumbo’s garage. Images of those piles of greasy wrenches alternated with thoughts of hospital-clean Japanese factories full of intense, fastidious men in white coats, adjusting micrometers and making marks on clipboards.
Jumbo’s laconic comment — “Can fix it” — kept echoing in my head. That’s probably what those plier-wielding dentists at the boarding school had said before ripping into the kids’ mouths and extracting the nearest available tooth.
I slumped even lower. There was no doubt in my mind that I had seen the last of my beloved truck. It was all too clear: I was staring at twenty-six hours on a Greyhound full of squalling babies and pathetic old women in head scarves. My truck was destined to become a forlorn monument in the dusty field behind Jumbo’s garage, while happy Indians rode around on its new hundred-dollar tires and listened to powwow tapes on its recently purchased two-hundred-dollar tape deck. I was lost in a sea of private despair.
Dan and Grover were laughing in the front seat. My plight — if indeed they even saw it as a plight — had not dampened their enthusiasm. I knew I should just give myself over to the moment, but I needed a little more reassurance.
“Grover?” I asked. “Do you know Jumbo?”
“Known him since he was a kid.”
“Do you think he can fix my truck?”
“Fix it or kill it,” Grover answered. Dan laughed.
Grover turned his head and looked at me slumped morosely against the rear passenger door. “Nah. Jumbo’s a good guy. He’ll get it fixed or else he’ll tell you,” he said.
“’Course, if he fixes it he won’t have to tell you,” Dan chimed in. The two men broke out in laughter again.
I didn’t have the faintest idea what they were talking about. If it was humor, it eluded me. If it was information, it was unimportant to me. I just wanted to go back to the motel and sleep until this whole thing was over.
“Come on, Nerburn.” It was Grover again. “Forget about it. Nothing you can do, anyway. This little trip will be good for you. You worry too much, anyway.”
I realized he was right, but I couldn’t shake my sense of depression. An hour ago I was on my way home in my mind. Suddenly I was aiming in the opposite direction, toward an unknown destination, while a great hulk of a man who ate grease-covered sandwiches tore apart my computer-designed car with a set of pipe wrenches.
Still, the constant use of the phrase “little trip” was beginning to pique my fancy. It was as if this were some kind of ritual exercise that had a significance for Grover and the old man. Perhaps there was more to be learned here than I expected. I did my best to put my truck out of my mind. Grover was right: there was nothing I could do, anyway.
Grover slowed to a stop, then wheeled the car onto a major highway. He was what one would charitably call a “leisurely” driver, seldom exceeding forty-five miles per hour. Eighteen-wheelers shot past us with horns blaring. Grover paid them no mind. Other Indians with out-of-state plates surged past us in conversion vans and station wagons. Some had God’s-eyes in their back windows. Others had old bumper stickers that read, “Pow Wow Power” or “Custer had it coming.” One banged-up Econoline had a cow skull wired to its roof and a garish version of Frederick Remington’s The End of the Trail air-brushed across its side.
Grover and Dan lapsed into Lakota. The old tires of the Buick thumped rhythmically against the seams in the pavement. I had nothing to do, nothing to contribute to the conversation, and nothing good to think about, so I soon fell into a deep sleep.
How long it lasted was uncertain, but by the time I awoke the shadows had lengthened and the hills were tinted with a deep, burnished gold. “About time you woke up, Nerburn,” Grover said. “Time for supper.”
He gestured to a sign advertising a truck stop at the next turnoff. “We’ll stop there.”
He wheeled the lumbering Buick into the truck stop parking area. Ten or fifteen semis were parked in a row at the back of the lot with their engines running. The seismic rumble from their throbbing motors echoed against the golden hills.
Grover pulled up next to an old green school bus with Idaho plates. The windows were covered with heavy red curtains, and a stovepipe stuck out of the roof a few feet in front of the rear door. A heavy platform, like a balcony on an old politician’s train car, had been welded out from the rear of the bus. It was piled high with old bicycles and coolers and canvas tarps. A dream catcher hung from the center of the rear window.
“Trouble,” Dan said.
“Not for me,” Grover laughed. “Just you. It’s that damn ponytail,” he said. He rubbed his hand once across his ashen crewcut. “You should shave her down, like me.”
Dan just grunted.
The restaurant did not look inspiring. It was a typical nondescript highway truck stop with a restaurant on one side and a gas station that catered to truckers on the other. We wandered in through the gas station door. Dan went to fill a coffee can with water for Fatback while Grover and I proceeded into the restaurant.
A row of booths with orange vinyl tuck-and-roll upholstery lined the window wall and looked out over the parking lot. The center area was filled with a row of square tables covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths that hung like skirts around their shiny chrome pedestals. A counter faced the cooking area, which was visible through an open area where the cooks slid the plates of hot beef sandwiches and red plastic baskets of burgers and fries when they were ready.
A few truckers sat slumped at the counter drinking coffee and eating pie. Most of the booths were full of men in faded T-shirts and baseball caps. It was clearly a roadhouse that catered to the over-the-road driver; there was hardly a local to be seen.
“Where are we?” I asked. So much truck traffic indicated we must have been on a major cross-country route.
Grover just shrugged. “We’ve gone a few miles,” was all he volunteered.
In the booth nearest the door sat a family that was immediately apparent as the owner of the bus. The man had a gaunt, hollow face and a long braided ponytail held in place by a bead-work-and-porcupine-quill barrette. The woman was wearing a T-shirt and a floor-length tie-dyed skirt. She had three turquoise rings on her right hand. Across the table sat three blond-haired kids ranging in age from about three to twelve. They were patiently sucking on ketchup-covered french fries and drawing designs on placemats. As we passed them the sweet, pungent odor of patchouli oil rose from their booth and mingled with the heavy restaurant air of sweat and fried onions.
Grover and I took a seat in one of the empty booths. No one paid us any mind. Soon Dan came through the entryway and into the restaurant. He squinted a bit against the bright golden light that was filtering in through the windows, and finally spotted the two of us across the room. He cast a sideways glance at the couple and shuffled his way over to us.
He was shaking his head and hissing through his teeth as he slid in next to Grover. “See those people?” he said, nodding toward the family.
“The old hippies?” I asked.
“Yeah. What do you think of them?”
It was clearly another test, and I was in no mood for tests. “If I had made a few more left turns in my life, that might have been me,” I said.
The old man just sat. He wanted me to say more. I considered the wisdom of matching his silence with a silence of my own, but thought better of it. There was nothing to be gained by making an issue out of anything at this point.
“They seem decent enough,” I continued. “They’re a couple. They seem to care about each other. Their kids are well behaved. In the larger scheme of things they seem harmless enough — not throwing grannies out on the street in the name of corporate progress, or anything like that. They’re probably just sixties dreamers who got caught up in a time warp, and still hold to some vision of a better world. Probably moved out into the woods of Idaho, built a house, grow some vegetables and dope, and want to be left alone.”
Grover nodded his head and chuckled. “You’re pretty good, Nerburn. You should try writing.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Dan wasn’t quite so light-hearted. He kept looking down at the table, as if trying not to be seen. He was clearly agitated about something.
I didn’t feel it was my place to say anything, but I was curious as to what was bothering him. I looked over at Grover, but he, too, was sitting impassively. Finally I asked.
“What’s wrong?” I said. I knew it was a “white” question: no Indian I knew would violate the inner feelings of another by demanding to be let in on them. But I was a captive audience and I had nothing more to lose. This uneasy consternation was something I had never seen before from the old man.
“I don’t want to talk to those hippies,” Dan said.
“Why should you have to?” I asked.
“Because they always want to.”
“Want to talk to you?”
“Yeah. They’re wannabe’s. Trying to be Indians.”
“Why do you think that?” I probed.
He nodded his head toward the couple. “Look at the jewelry. That quill thing in his ponytail. They’re wannabe’s. Probably following the powwow trail. Damn!”
“You don’t like white people at the powwow?” I said. The amount of out-of-state Indian traffic on the highway had convinced me that there was a powwow somewhere, and I had automatically assumed that was our destination. I was suddenly concerned that my presence would cause offense to the other participants. I didn’t want to be seen in the same light as the school-bus people.
“Naw, that’s fine. I like it when white people come to the powwow. But the wannabe’s are different. They try to be Indians.”
The man in the ponytail shifted in his seat. He seemed to be ready to stand up. Dan hunched over even further, as if by hiding his eyes he could become invisible.
“How come you’re not so bothered?” I said to Grover.
“They don’t ever talk to me,” he answered.
“But they talk to Dan?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I’m a burr Indian,” Grover grinned, running his hand over his crewcut. “They don’t want to talk to me.”
The old man picked up the conversation.
“They see my ponytail and think I’m their soul brother or something. Grover’s old burr cut just makes him look like any other old guy.”
“Hmm,” I said. “So the long hair gives you trouble?”
“Always has. More trouble than anything else. Long hair was the way of my people before the white man. We grew it long because it is part of nature and because it shows our pride. If something bad happened in our lives, or if we disgraced ourselves, we cut it off. We grew it back when we wanted to show our pride again. A lot of our people still keep to this old way.
“In the beginning the white people wanted us to cut our hair. When they sent us to boarding school, that was the first thing they did to us. A lot of us learned to wear it short, like Grover here, and just kept it that way. But some of us wanted to keep to the old way, so we grew it back.”
He leaned over and spoke in a low whisper, as if the gaunt man in the ponytail might overhear. “But, you know, that hippie thing came along with the white people, and all the young people were growing their hair long. They would tie it back or put bandanas in it. I guess they were just trying to show that they had some freedom. We could understand that.
“But it wasn’t the same as us, and all the hippies saw us with long hair and figured we were hippies, too. We would have these hippies coming to our reservation and giving us hippie handshakes. Damn, I hate those hippie handshakes. They would talk about peyote and drugs and want to be part of us, like maybe we were the same as they were.
“They were like lost little children to us. We felt sorry for how lost they were in their own country. But we never thought they were like us.
“The trouble was, they thought they were like us. They saw the long hair and the pipes. They started wearing Indian clothes and jewelry. Then they started reading about Indian religions. Pretty soon they wanted to go to peyote ceremonies and sweat lodges and the Sun Dance.
“Now, that guy over there, he’s one of them. I can just see it. If he comes over here he’ll give me one of those damn hippie handshakes and want to talk, talk, talk. He won’t even give a look to Grover.”
“I told you to cut that ponytail,” Grover laughed.
“I’m not cutting my hair for any damn hippies,” the old man grumbled. “I’ll bet you anything he follows the powwows all summer. You should see our powwows, Nerburn. Sometimes some white boy on drugs or some girl in a long dress will jump right out and start dancing right in the middle of a grand entry and not even know what they’re doing.”
“Sometimes they even wear eagle feathers,” Grover cut in. “You’re not supposed to wear an eagle feather unless you earned it in battle or a veteran gives it to you. Some of the wannabe’s have more eagle feathers than Geronimo.”
“Hell,” Dan countered, “I even saw a wannabe with a whole stuffed eagle head on his bustle. A whole eagle head!”
“Why doesn’t someone tell these people that you don’t want them to dance in the powwow?” I asked.
“It’s not our way,” Dan said. “Everyone is responsible for his own heart. And if a person is doing it with a right heart, then I think it’s okay if white people want to dance.”
“But then there’s the other thing,” Grover cut in.
“The other thing?” I said.
“Cherokee grandmother,” Grover said, and the two men chuckled together.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see the man with the ponytail get up and go to the register to pay his bill. The woman and children followed. Soon we heard the roar of their bus starting up. Dan relaxed visibly.
“I guess he wasn’t that interested in you after all,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess I was wrong,” the old man said. “He’s probably a social worker on his way out to Grover’s house.”
The twinkle was back in his voice and eyes.
“Now that you got me talking about this, let me finish,” he said. “There’s that other bunch, too, that I don’t like. It’s those rich people who come in big campers and foreign cars looking to buy Indian stuff. Like in Santa Fe, they have this market once a year and those rich white people come and spend more money than we’ve got on our whole reservation. Fill up their trunks with everything. Dream catchers. Shields. Paintings. Anything Indian. The richer they are, the more they want Indian stuff. You should see it. Guys in Mercedes with tons of turquoise jewelry all over them. Women with silver jewelry hanging off everything.”
“Ah, it’s not that big a thing,” Grover cut in. “I don’t mind those people coming around and buying dream catchers and God’s-eyes. It gives our people a chance to earn some money. And there’s power in those images. Maybe it’ll do those white people some good.”
“Just so long as we don’t start giving them sacred things,” Dan said.
Grover agreed. “That’s the real problem,” he said. “Selling the sacred things.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
Dan looked away and shook his head. “Not now. It hurts me to talk about it. Let me finish about the hippies and the rich people. What do they call those rich people, Nerburn?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, rich people that like to still think they’re hippies and radicals but really just want to have a lot of money.”
“You mean, ‘Yuppies’?” I suggested.
“Yeah, yeah. That’s it. The yuppies. That’s better to talk about while we’re eating. Maybe later I’ll make a little talk about the Indians who sell our sacred things.”
It was obvious that this was not a subject to be pushed. I made a mental note to bring it up when the circumstances were right. But, for now, I would let the conversation go where the two men wanted to lead it.
The waitress arrived and took our order. Grover insisted that we each order a bacon double cheeseburger and fries. “I’ve been here before,” he announced. “They make them good.” Not wishing to run the risk of offending him, I agreed to the greasy choice and quickly requested coffee with milk to serve as some vague buffer.
Grover and Dan leaned back in their seats and pulled out their cigarettes. Now that the threat of the innocent man in the ponytail was gone, they seemed to take great delight in discussing the idea of white people buying Indian jewelry and crafts. They found the term “yuppies” especially amusing.
“You wouldn’t believe what happens when those yuppies come around, Nerburn,” Dan said. “The hippies aren’t so bad if I don’t have to do that hippie handshake. They mostly have good hearts and really are searching for something. But those yuppie ones, they’re something different. They’d buy my teeth if I’d let them.”
“If you had any,” Grover added.
The two men chortled mightily.
“You know, Nerburn,” Dan continued. “If I don’t quick find a place to hide, they see my long hair and want their picture taken with me. Or else they want to make a video of me with them. Can you imagine someone coming up to you and wanting their picture taken with you because of the way you look? Do they think that’s a compliment?”
He went on without waiting for an answer. “Hell, it’s like being an animal in a zoo. I do it, though, when they ask me, if they’re nice people. Most Indian people do. It doesn’t hurt anything. It’s just another thing about white people wanting deep down inside to be like Indians. They’ve been doing it for years. But it sure is strange.
“Think about it. Suppose Indians came up to you and asked to have their picture taken with you in front of your house? What if they asked you to go inside and put on your most white clothes so you would look more like a white person for the picture?”
“I’d be astounded,” I said.
“Well, that’s what’s happened to us Indians for years. It used to happen to my grandmother all the time. She even made money at it. She would sit on a blanket and people would take pictures of her and give her a nickel. They even made some postcards of her. I’ve got some at home. She never made any money on those, though.
“It still happens all the time. Just go to any Indian fair or powwow where there are white people. Some white person will start talking about how wonderful our culture is and pretty soon they will want their picture taken with us. They don’t even give us a nickel anymore.
“Now they’re doing it in schools. They call it some kind of culture class or something. But it really is the same thing. They pay an Indian to come in and talk about our culture. Then the kids go home and say there was an Indian in school. It’s just like the postcard. It’s just a cardboard cutout of an Indian that white people say they’ve seen.”
Grover was nodding knowingly as Dan talked. He smudged out his cigarette in the ashtray in front of me. The fine plume of acrid smoke rose directly toward my face. “I wish one of those rent-a-Indians would go into the school and talk about how their car didn’t start or how they are having trouble with their kids,” he said. “Everyone would get mad and say, ‘We want to hear about Indian culture. We don’t want to hear that stuff.’”
“That’s right,” the old man said. “All they want to hear about is the Great Spirit and the sacred land, that kind of Indian talk. They already know what they want to hear. They just want an Indian to provide it.
“That’s why it makes me smile to see white people wearing Indian jewelry. Because to most of America, that’s all we are. Just jewelry on the American culture. It’s our job to be bright and colorful.”
“Exotic?” I volunteered.
“Yeah, exotic. That’s a good word. That’s what white people really want from us now. We make them exotic, like jewelry. We’re supposed to be there for you to pick up whenever you need to feel different and special. Have an Indian into class. Put a Navajo blanket on the wall. Read that book about Black Elk. Makes them think they are part Indian in their heart.”
Grover was immersed in the greasy pleasure of his cheeseburger. But he clearly was enjoying Dan’s little lecture. He swallowed hard and interjected himself into the conversation.
“I still think it’s okay, though,” he said. “It makes the little kids happy. It makes our people feel like they are worth something to the white culture. It might even teach the wasichu something to put dream catchers over their beds and to have us into their schools.”
The old man nodded. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “But I just don’t want people thinking that taking a picture of us and having us talk to a school class is the same as knowing us. Or that buying a dream catcher or going to a powwow makes someone an Indian. You can’t buy a culture by giving it a nickel.”
“And you can’t become an Indian by growing a ponytail,” Grover added.
They grunted their approval of each other’s insights, and turned their attention back to their red plastic baskets of burgers and french fries. I tapped a silent rhythm on the rim of my coffee cup and stared out the window. The green school bus was disappearing off into the distance over an amber rise.