36

  THE GROUND BEGAN to thaw out in late April. The crocuses that Vivianne and Rudy had planted years before began to push up from the feral flower bed along the chain-link fence in his front yard. The Mogie-man had been buried almost three months. Rudy was slowly recovering. At least that was what he told himself every morning he awoke.

  He was slowly but surely getting himself back to normal, whatever normal was for him. He did his police work with efficiency. He had no real problems and was blessed with the deepening love that had developed between Stella and him. Some days Iktomi’s gift of the hard-on was taken back, but that just opened up other avenues of pleasure between Stella and him. Iktomi was an Indian giver. For the most part, the scheming trickster seemed to be out of his life, ever since Rudy had Little Eagle hold the ceremony for him.

  Rudy had cut down to five cigarettes a day and he’d drastically cut back on his drinking. With Stella’s help, he’d even been able to stick to a salt-free diet for his high blood pressure. The doctors at the PHS told him that if he could reduce his intake of medication, then his hard-on might reappear permanently. Just what the rez needed, Rudy mused.

  He had to admit a large part of him was relieved that he no longer had a teenager’s lust. Rudy’s own penis had been nothing but a small, medium smallish, tubular shark hellbent on a feeding frenzy most of his life. He didn’t miss its occasional agonies, its desperate yearnings, or its ephemeral glories. Something else was missing in his life.

  The circle was not complete. What was missing was the unful-filled promise to Mogie. Rudy had promised him that he’d do a red paint job on Mt. Rushmore, with or without him. It used to be that an Indian’s word was sacred. When he grew up, Indians did agreements on a handshake. They lived the old white cliché that “a man was only as good as his word.”

  More than three months had passed since he’d given Mogie that promise. And in the interim an Indian man named Scott Black Lodge had been arrested for the murder of Wally Trudeau. Black Lodge had been one of Trudeau’s in-laws, and he had confessed to doing it after a drinking party. He’d left Trudeau’s house and sniped Wally in the head as Wally was getting ready to drive to White Clay to get more beer. When Rudy heard that, he felt like getting on his knees and thanking the Creator. But he didn’t. He just remembered the promise he had made to Mogie.

  So one warm and fragrant Sunday night in the last week of April, Rudy headed north in his Blazer. He took Dewey and Louie and a five-gallon bucket of oil-based red paint and he was stone-cold sober. Rudy didn’t bring Mogie’s air-pressure fire extinguishers. His plan, if he had one, was simply to climb up the back trail of the monuments, get atop them, and splash the red paint all over George Washington’s nose.

  When he hit Rapid City, he got a room in a stinkbug, dirty linoleum motel near Kmart that catered to welfare Indians and hookers in winter and poor tourists and hookers in summer. It was cheap, anonymous, and despite its filthiness, it gave him a sense of security. Rudy hadn’t been in Rapid since he’d raped Vivianne in the Hilton. He shuddered at that memory and quickly put his ex-wife out of his mind. Stella and he had set their wedding date. May seventh and Herbie would be his best man.

  He put his two aging Alaskan artichokes in the room and left them with a bowlful of soft, dry food. Dewey had started moving slowly these days, and Rudy expected him to hit the canine canku wakan any day. He turned on the tube and switched it to CNN for them. The well-modulated, know-it-all talking head named Larry King irritated the dogs. Rudy switched to the Weather Channel. Then he flushed the toilet twice before he left to remove any traces of cleansing chemicals. The dogs were used to drinking from toilets.

  Before he drove up to Mt. Rushmore and the dead presidents, Rudy stopped at the Oasis, a wild Indian bar, and had two shots of Jack Daniels and two draft beers. The bar was nearly empty, and he didn’t know any of the urban skins glued to the seats. Rudy bought a fresh pack of Marlboros and got a six-pack of bottled Budweiser to go. He didn’t feel comfortable doing something so fucking crazy while his mind was straight. If he got caught, he could always blame it on the booze. Old Indian trick, he thought.

  Rudy drove through the dark, warm blanket of night, and in twenty minutes he stopped his Blazer about a mile and a half from the entrance to the Mt. Rushmore Visitors Center. He eased his vehicle into a stand of iron-deficient scrub pine and aspen that was just starting to bud. He wasn’t nervous or excited, but he automatically lit a cigarette.

  Rudy felt like was he was having some weird, out-of-body experience. He was there and yet, he wasn’t. But his decision was firm. He knew he was resolute and wanted to get Mogie’s death wish done and behind him. He knew what he had to do and everything else seemed superfluous. As the true hunter knows, the hunt is everything and the killing is nothing, but then Rudy was no longer a hunter of animals.

  His mind was racing, so he tried to concentrate on hunting, more to take his mind off his crazed mission than anything else. To Rudy Yellow Shirt, the killing of any poor and misfed creature who lurked in the shadows of mankind was a tragedy. As he tried to calm down, he vowed never to eat deer flesh again.

  Rudy forced his mind into overdrive, thinking of anything except painting the face of George Washington. Now, he considered the actual hunting of any creature nothing but a sad and boring macho game. When he was a young stud, Rudy knew he had hunted for women.

  Once, on R and R in the Phillippines, he’d met a Paiute Army nurse named Theda Joe from Winnemucca, Nevada. Theda was tall, dark, and good-looking, and she was incredibly happy to be with another skin. She made Rudy talk Sioux and then she talked Paiute. It was an oddball conversation for a while, and she reasoned their meeting was “spiritual” because of the Wovoka-Ghost Dance-Wounded Knee connection.

  Together they did a clever and lengthy seduction of each other, and when they finally got to a hotel room, Rudy decided not to make love to her. He didn’t exactly know why, but he just had lost his mood. The more he looked at Theda Joe, the more she talked, and the more she reminded him of his mom. Rudy didn’t know if he was homesick or what. He didn’t know why he fixated on his mother’s face. But he just couldn’t do it to Theda. She got pissed, dressed, and left.

  “Thanks for nothing,” she had said and spit on the floor and slammed the door.

  Rudy was never a chess player, but even back then he sensed that life was designed to be a large version of chess. The Paiute girl had been insulted by his rejection and probably assumed he was some kind of pervert. She said she didn’t have to go all the way to the Phillippines to be dumped on by some yahoo reservation Indian. She could have stayed home and got that. Rudy thought she was incredibly beautiful in her anger.

  He ran into Theda on the base PX the following day. And he told her he was sorry, very sorry. He begged and scraped and made another date with her. They ended up in the same hotel room and they slammed their brown bodies against each other for an hour and a half. It was perfunctory, brutally mechanical, and he did it only to answer the remnant voices of immaturity in his loins.

  Rudy did it to prove to her that he could do it. He did it because she was an Indian woman and he was an Indian man. It was a blood thing. He did it because they were tribal people, halfway across the world from their home soil, fighting other tribal people for the white man. After he did it, he didn’t feel any better. All the time he was screwing her, Rudy kept having the horrible vision of his Mom’s face. . .

  And now the whole retarded idea of painting the face of George Washington struck him as ridiculous. What he really needed was a grenade launcher, or an M-67 90mm recoilless rifle or even one of the ancient Hotchkiss cannons that had been used at the Wounded Knee Massacre. Rudy would have given anything for an M-79 grenade launcher. Anything but paint. Paint was a kid’s prank.

  If he really wanted to send a message, he’d be better off using dynamite, a cannon, something. With paint, he concluded, all he was really doing was applying his own graffiti on top of the massive graffiti of the wasicu.

  Rudy got out of his Blazer and did a brief recon hike towards the looming heads, illuminated to awkward brightness by spotlights. He guessed the U.S. Park Service figured tourists liked that kind of thing. He came to a high chain-link fence, but it looked like he could climb it. Rudy went back to the Blazer and got ready for his assault. He took the five-gallon bucket out and made sure he had a screwdriver in his pocket so that he could open it. He lit another cigarette and decided to have a final bottle of beer before he attacked Mt. Rushmore.

  Mogie had not led him to this brink of silliness. Iktomi had. He doubted if this act would do anything positive for his people. It would do nothing for him, except get the promise off his back. Nobody would even connect the act of vandalism to Indians or to anyone else for that matter. This juvenile act would not focus worldwide or even statewide attention upon the dismal state of American Indians. For Christ’s sake, he wasn’t a radical, he thought. He had a steady job as a cop, a soon-to-be-wife, two dogs, two sisters, and one brother to worry about. Get real, he told himself. Get fucking real!

  “Sorry, Mogie-man,” he said aloud into the night air. “I just can’t do it. Please forgive me.”

  The dead white presidents seemed to leer down at him with spidery eyes. He tossed the five-gallon bucket of red paint into a thicket of bushes. Then Rudy took a deep breath and felt a sense of peace. Along with the paint, he thought he had tossed away his guilt over Mogie. He thought he had also discarded Iktomi’s hold on him. And, finally, he hoped he had thrown away his alter ego, “The Avenging Warrior.” Rudy Yellow Shirt felt a huge flood of spiritual relief. For once, he felt almost complete. Almost, but not quite. Something was still missing.

  He did an about face and retrieved the five-gallon bucket of red paint. He took a short length of rope and made a crude carrying halter. With the bucket strapped to his back, he climbed the chain-link fence and then began to make his ascent toward the stone carvings.

  The climb up the slopes, over the granite tailings was backbreaking. He found a narrow service road winding up behind the faces. It was blocked by a gate and guard shack, but Rudy crept past it and finally stood atop the stone head of the first president. George Washington, the slave owner who white people called the “father” of this country.

  Rudy bent down and opened the bucket with his screwdriver. He took a blue bandanna and rubbed down the entire can, removing any of his fingerprints. Then he glanced up into the night sky and saw a bright star twinkling. Maybe the star was Mogie. At least he hoped that it was Mogie watching. He said a brief prayer and stared down into the can of the brilliant red, oil-based paint. It looked so much like blood.

  When Rudy got back in his Blazer, he sped back to the fartsack motel and fed Dewey and Louie. He flopped down on the bed and instantly fell asleep. At five in the morning he woke up and loaded the dogs. The sun was just beginning to rise. He drove up Mt. Rushmore road until he could see the granite carvings in the far distance. A wide path of red paint stretched down Washington’s face, from his forehead to his chin. Rudy gasped and turned his Blazer around. Then he headed south towards the Pine Ridge Reservation. All the way there, he dreamed about Stella, and when he hit the reservation line, his groin began to enlarge.

  “Stella, Stella, sweet darling Stella. Ready or not, here I come,” he hooted so loudly that his dogs started howling.

  “Ahrrrooooooo!” his two dogs said.

  “Ahrrooooooooooooo!” Rudy Yellow Shirt answered.

  About the Author

  ADRIEN C. LOUIS (1946–2018) was a mixed-race member of the Lovelock Paiute Tribe. He published over a dozen collections of poetry, including Ancient Acid Flashes Back and Ceremonies of the Damned, as well as a collection of short stories, Wild Indians and Other Creatures, and another novel, Ghost Dancers. His work has been translated into French, Hungarian, and other languages. Louis is remembered for his aggressive refusal to romanticize life on or off the reservation.

 

 

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