This is an excerpt from a novella-length narrative poem in blank verse I wrote called I-5.
***
Next to the car holding a drum stood
Samuel Jim in a t-shirt that read
Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation
of Oregon. He tapped at the drum as he
waited by the opened-up trunk of the Olds,
tapping the hoopstretched deer hide, so taut
it was translucent like the high mountain
air, bright high desert air, a lot like
home, in the parking lot of the Holiday Park
Hotel across the Truckee River, Reno, Nevada.
“She-Who-Watches Drum, we need a
flag song, take us all home,” the caller’d
announced, and they had played the powwow
and now it was time to go home. But where in the hell
were the other two? Time to go back to Oregon.
The heat made the gravel revolve at the edge
of the parking lot. Jim had finished up college
that Spring and planned to go back in
when Fall returned to take a Master’s
Degree, which his buddies were completely
baffled by. A little college is fine, whatever,
lots of guys do that, but not to use so much
of the trust money they couldn’t afford
a decent truck and had to putter around
in this ridiculous Oldsmobile. An embarrassment.
Here they came with their gear, now laughing
and shouting, the big Paiute Larry Sequa and
his smart-mouth buddy Lester “Les is More” Smith.
Jim smiled. The three others had come
out in Macy’s camper. They started back
last night. She-Who-Watches was truly inter-tribal.
Jim was Warm Springs and Yakima,
Larry Paiute and Smith Wasco and Paiute.
Macy was Warm Springs and Wasco, Turner Wasco
and Barry was Wasco and Paiute. The drum held
them together like the Deschutes held the Rez
together it, like the tribal chiefs brought the
people into confederation. And they had proven
inter-tribal equals strength. The prizes and
gifts they received at the Reno Powwow
were enough to pay the trip for both the
cars and lost wages too. Jim knew Sequa
and Smith thought his thinking hopelessly
citified, but when they parked their sorry
asses around the drum they knew it was the truth.
For Jim the intermontane was ideal land,
jackpine and fir with madrone, waving grasses and
heat-streaked gravel. Suddenly he felt in himself
a need for home, to cross the Deschutes again.
“What in the hell is with you?” asked Sequa
hearing him hoot and whip a piece of gravel
out across the Truckee. “You methed up?”
“Coffeed up,” said Jim. “and ready to go
an hour ago. You guys take that ‘Indian time’
thing to the extreme, you fucking know that?”
“Boy, you done spent way too long at school,”
said Smith with a grin. “You musta grown a clock
all in your insides. Not natural like that.”
“I want to get back. It’s afternoon all damn ready.”
“Yeah, OK.” They moved together. As sloppy
as the two of them were, Jim thought, they never
took their gear for granted. He watched them wrap
their sticks and feathers up in wool and felt
and set them careful in the swept-out trunk
beside the big hide drum printed with
the Columbian petroglyph of She-Who-Watches.
“You feel that, the last Honor Song
we played?” asked Sequa, as Jim guided the Olds
onto the arterial, arm out the open window
in the desert autumn’s hot but distant sun.
“They felt it, man, I tell you they were one
with the drum. Those Kiowa dancers were one with the drum.”
They curved up the onramp onto the highway
and picked up speed until the highway wind
kicked a Frito bag out the window.
Smith cupped his hand and lit a Marlboro.
They drove northeast on 395, toward
the California border and Hallelujah
Junction south of the Plumas Forest.
They passed the little motel casinos
that sprung up at every wide spot, a sad
attempt to catch the drippings from the newest
Old West gold rush, legal gambling. It made
him think of the ghastly new casino the tribal gov
was tacking together back at Warm Springs.
No amount of expensive redwood sculpture
of jumping, spawning salmon would make it less
pathetic. Might as well be a single-wide trailer.
The tribes made 80 mil a year from timber,
hydro power, manufacturing. Nothing
justified this smirch. In Indian Country Warm
Springs was renowned. Plenty of problems left
but better by a length than most tribes.
Most of all, the money gave it power to
protect its dignity, autonomy and culture.
But he didn’t buy the argument that sovereignty
expanded with the gaming. Too great a price
was paid by the people themselves, he thought.
Plus, this casino would attract the basest
kind of oakie dumbass, fill the sage
with puking tool salesmen from Gresham
and fill the council chambers with trolls from Wynn.
“Hey, know what?” asked Sequa, turning in
his seat and throwing his big arm across
the hot vinyl. “I think I’m gonna ask
that girl if she’d maybe wanna marry me.”
“That girl” was, of course, June Beauty
Sarawiwa, a Hopi, daughter of
the BIA agent assigned to Warm Springs.
When this big Paiute Sequa started courting
her Smith and Jim thought him hopelessly outclassed.
She was beautiful, from an educated family, college-bound,
from an ancient, cultured and far-off tribe.
Jim thought a lot of her father, who liked him back,
telling him to join the BIA, that Indians
needed to take the reins to their own
future, remind him that Warm Springs
had supplied the BIA with its first head
to come straight off the Rez, Les’s uncle,
Ken Smith. Jim thought Sarawiwa
would just as soon it had been him come courting.
Larry Sequa was a rugged man,
good as gold but hardly fancy. A good
worker, he had pulled greenchain at Warm Springs
Forest Products Industries since he was out
of high school seven years before and now,
at 17-an-hour, was a supervisor.
Still, grades of prejudice existed on
the feservation, among the Indian peoples,
no less than in the Anglo world and Sequa
was not at the highest level of desirability.
But June sure dug him, even if her father didn’t,
loved his loyalty, simplicity and fact that he
could lift a small horse, something he had done
two summers previous at the rodeo in Bend.
“Hey!” shouted Smith, worrying the idea
of losing another friend to marriage. “You gonna
move to hell and gone Hopiland?
Don’t they live out in the middle of some fucking
desert on a rock with no water, no movies?”
“You think she’ll say yes?” asked Jim.
“I don’t know. She likes me. I think
her father’s starting to like me. Just a little.
But this is big. This is big stuff.
I wouldn’t blame her she said no or something.
Look.” He struggled to pull something out of his pocket.
He opened up a small, velvet case.
The Oldsmobile hit gravel, skidded, popped
back onto the asphalt. Jim cursed.
The ring was big. I mean the ring was big.
Half-a-carat, anyway, a solitaire,
like the ring from every girlie movie about love
that came out of Hollywood in the 1950s.
“Shit house mouse,” Smith said simply.
“Yeah. It’s pretty, huh? Coulda bought
a fucking snowmobile what I paid for this.”
“Whatever comes to pass, I just wanna say
for God’s sake don’t up and move to Arizona,”
Smith said. “I hope she says yes, though. Good luck.”
I-SHIhapterThree*Page 33.“Yeah, man,” Jim agreed, smiling. “What
could you do to top that? If she says yes
life will be all downhill from there, huh?”
“That’d be a fate I’d be willing
to accept, no complaints,” said Sequa.
They each considered what had passed in silence,
comfortable silence of old friends and time.
The afternoon grew old, the westering sun
slanting out across the eastern hills
from the hidescraper peaks of the Sierra Nevada.
They tumed and headed north on 44
where, outside of Susanville, the dying sun
filled the fields with the golden smoke of sunlit
pollen, floating across the floor of lupine,
green, leafy stems on top of which
the powdered purple glowed like a layer of sweet
smoke across the lodge at sunset back home.
They drove west through jackpine. Little cabins
hid in clusters on the reddish floor of fallen
needles. An ancient Coke machine marked one,
beside the office door two green enameled
butterfly chairs with a wooden box between
that held an ashtray, coffee cups, a paper.
Jim thought the thoughts he always thought while driving.
Every building, every site of human habitation,
had a story as complex as Yakima
creation myths or the white man’s Iliad.
He checked the impulse to pull off and drive
straight up to the door, hop out and bang
on it, refuse to leave until he heard
each thing that passed for Mr. and Mrs. who
oversaw the cabins, every thing
that brought them here and what had passed from that
day on and who they’d met and how their lives
had changed and the ways that they’d changed others’ lives.
He drove on instead, west up the steep
pitch of the mountains, toward the black plug
of Lassen to the south, like a hero
killed a serpent by pouring molten metal
in between its clashing jaws, down its throat,
and in the dreaming centuries that passed
the monster’s flesh had rotted away, revealing
the black, shining plug that killed it.
he drove on instead, dreaming of the easy
asphalt waiting for them on the king of roads,
the mightiest river of cars in any nation, I-5.
The sun sent streaks of purple through the red
haze on the skyline west of Redding as dusk
crept into the groves of trees in the rills of hills
and through the cracks of fences behind stip malls.
Jim guided the Oldsmobile off
Highway 44 and into a gas station.
“I‘ll pump! ” shouted Smith, jumping out
and grabbing the articulated nozzle.
“Gotta pay first,” Jim reminded him.
He and Sequa strolled across the lot
to the glass booth that held a nervous-looking
attendant reading an old Guns & Ammo.
“Lester thinks he’s quite a little pumper,”
Sequa said to Jim, who was wrestling his stubborn
wallet out of his Lees for a 20.
“When’s he gonna find some meaning in
his life, something bigger than his dick?”
Jim handed the attendant the 20 dollar
bill and motioned to Smith to start pumping.
“I don’t know,” Jim replied. “Sooner or later
he’s gonna find religion or a woman.
You see him on the drum. He’s got a spirit.”
They walked back toward the car and Smith.
“Hey, look there,” Smith insisted, pointing
to a Denny’s. “wanna see if they’re
as friendly to us Indians as to blacks?”
They piled in and drove across the street
and parked beside the rack of newspaper boxes.
Inside, seated at a booth at the window,
they ordered from a middle-aged Latin0 lady.
This was Redding, therefor, it was hot,
even in September, even at sunset.
“This has got to be the hottest place
on earth,” Sequa said wiping his forehead.
“You just wait,” said Smith. “Around the mountains,
couple hours, it’ll be a damn sight
cooler. Shasta’s like a huge icecube.”
Lester Smith loved music, didn’t
matter which or where it came from, who
played it, all of it was liturgy to him.
His record collection was the biggest on
the Rez. The director of the tribal radio
station was always leaning on him for him
to lend them records or for him to learn to DJ.
“Sammy boy, you ever get to know a black?”
“A black? Sure, a couple. At the university.”
“What were they like?” he asked, leaning back
in his seat so the waitress could pour them all coffee.
“What kind of people make a Howling Wolf?”
‘They’re as different from each other as we are,”
said Jim. Look how different Paiute are
from Warm Springs people and from Wasco too.“
“From any and all civilized nations,” joked Smith.
“And what about how different all of us
are from Lakota, Cheyenne or the Cree up north.
Still, maybe there’s some things they share in general,
just like we do, share some ways of seeing.
If I had to generalize, I would say
they’re more at ease than whites, more relaxed,
but when they turn their thoughts within, they think
like hunters hunt, there’s nothing for them
but that hunt. That turning inward after thought,
perhaps that makes the blues reveal itself.
It’s really hard to say, the line between
generalities and prejudice is thin.”
“You know,” said Smith, “that down there in the South,
the Seminoles and Cherokee and so on,
they married with the blacks, married with
the slaves that ran away. How cool is that?”
They nodded silently and then pulled back when
the waitress came to set down patty melt
for Jim, biscuits and gravy for Sequa and
a cheese omelet with English muffin for Smith.
They talked quietly as she refilled all their coffees.
“We better think of leaving soon,” Sequa said.
“It’s gonna be pitch black before we reach
the Oregon border. ‘Any fruit to declare?“’
“Just one red apple, sir,” said Smith.
“This boy is looking to get Custered,” Jim replied.
The turning road ran under them in darkness,
churning like black water. Passing Weed,
Sequa’s prophecy became reality.
Long before the border, all was dark
except the moon that skidded off of Shasta’s
icy shelf to hang in the sky like a lantern.
Smith began to hum the Flag Song, rushing
chirp and flutter of antique syllables.
There was no such thing as Time or Death
until he slid straight into Ain’t Nobody’s
Business If I Do, then out again
into an Honor Song, while road and rock,
while tree and stream and field of grass floated
by beneath the glassy waters of
the night, that broke across their grill like the sea
across the sharp bow of a war canoe.
America was still a land locked
together by its rivers, thought Samuel Jim,
his hands resting confidently on
the hard, red steering wheel of the Olds.
The Indian, when successful, was like the Japanese.
Take from whites whatever best suits your needs
and change it til it fits, a synthesis.
We have harmony, thought Jim, and they
have four-wheel drive. A match made in Heaven.
Along the broken tableland north
of Yreka at the California-Oregon
border, the moon whistled like a coyote
through the draws and valleys. No, that was air
through the sleeping noses of Smith
and Sequa. Too distant now for radio reception,
Jim just listened to the rushing air.
Not just in the noses of his sleeping
friends. Everywhere, rushing up
alongside the car like wolves, through the boughs
of trees like eagles in their feathers. Wind
was everywhere. Jim made note to ask
an elder for stories about the wind.
He drove through the vegetable checkpoint without
waking his friends, over the crest of the Siskiyous,
cold as metal but still too early for the snows.
He floated down the Bear Creek Valley, Ashland
suspended by the river like a cloud
of fireflies, the valley walls like running
deer, and out the other side, past drear
and dusty Medford. North of Medford it
began to rain. This is what he hated
about that part of Oregon west of the
Cascades. It pissed down rain without
cessation. Hills rose steep around Grants Pass,
blocking out the sky, to funnel rain
down even more insistently. The wipers
doing double-duty woke up Sequa,
blinking like an owl against the door.
“Want me to drive?” he asked, attempting to focus.
“No, man. Take it easy. I’m in the slot.”
The house-sized neon of the Indian casino
north of Canyonville ran in the rain,
green dye of feathers, red hoop, glowing
and running off into the brush-choked ditches
by the huge parking lot, full of grounded RVs.
The Rogue and Calapuya must have been
tough inside before they all but died
if they could put up with this pissing rain without
cracking up and running headlong into
the ocean, Jim thought, hearing Smith stir.
Mile after wet and windy mile
they wended northward. An hour passed
before Smith stirred again and spoke up.
“I gotta piss like a race horse, Sammy boy.”
“Shit!” said Smith suddenly, looking down.
“No, just pee. Though I’m sure I‘ll have to shit
soon enough at that,” Smith replied.
“We’re burning fumes,” said Jim, knocking the gauge.
“The sign said ‘gas next exit,“’ Sequa said.
He pointed at the offramp straight ahead.
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