Reservation Blues

1. Reservation Blues

DANCING ALL ALONE, FEELING nothing good

It’s been so long since someone understood

All I’ve seen is, is why I weep

And all I had for dinner was some sleep

You know I’m lonely, I’m so lonely

My heart is empty and I’ve been so hungry

All I need for my hunger to ease

Is anything that you can give me please

chorus:

I ain’t got nothing, I heard no good news

I fill my pockets with those reservation blues

Those old, those old rez blues, those old reservation blues

And if you ain’t got choices

What else do you choose?

(repeat chorus twice)

And if you ain’t got choices

Ain’t got much to lose

In the one hundred and eleven years since the creation of the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1881, not one person, Indian or otherwise, had ever arrived there by accident. Wellpinit, the only town on the reservation, did not exist on most maps, so the black stranger surprised the whole tribe when he appeared with nothing more than the suit he wore and the guitar slung over his back. As Simon drove backward into town, he first noticed the black man standing beside the faded WELCOME TO WELLPINIT, POPULATION: VARIABLE sign. Lester FallsApart slept under that sign and dreamed about the stranger before anyone else had a chance. That black man walked past the Assembly of God Church, the Catholic Church and Cemetery, the Presbyterian Church and Cemetery. He strolled to the crossroads near the Softball diamond, with its solitary grave hidden in deep center field. The black man leaned his guitar against a stop sign but stood himself straight and waited.

The entire reservation knew about the black man five minutes after he showed up at the crossroads. All the Spokanes thought up reasons to leave work or home so they could drive down to look the stranger over. A small man with very dark skin and huge hands, he wore a brown suit that looked good from a distance but grew more ragged, frayed at the cuffs, as he came into focus. The black man waved at every Indian that drove by, but nobody had the courage to stop, until Thomas Builds-the-Fire pulled up in his old blue van.

“Ya-hey,” Thomas called out.

“Hey,” the black man said.

“Are you lost?”

“Been lost a while, I suppose.”

“You know where you’re at?”

“At the crossroad,” the black man said, but his words sounded like stones in his mouth and coals in his stomach.

“This is the Spokane Indian Reservation,” Thomas said.

“Indians? I ain’t seen many Indians.”

Thomas parked his van and jumped out. Although the Spokanes were mostly a light-skinned tribe, Thomas tanned to a deep brown, nearly dark as the black man. With his long, black hair pulled into braids, he looked like an old-time salmon fisherman: short, muscular legs for the low center of gravity, long torso and arms for the leverage to throw the spear. Just a few days past thirty-two, he carried a slightly protruding belly that he’d had when he was eight years old and would still have when he was eighty. He wasn’t ugly, though, just marked by loneliness, like some red L was tattooed on his forehead. Indian women had never paid much attention to him, because he didn’t pretend to be some twentieth-century warrior, alternating between blind rage and feigned disinterest. He was neither loud nor aggressive, neither calm nor silent. He walked up to the black man and offered his hand, but the stranger kept his hands at his sides, out of view, hidden.

“I’m careful with my hands,” the black man said. “He might hear me if I use my hands.”

“Who might hear you?”

“The Gentleman.”

Thomas wanted to know more about the Gentleman, but he was too polite and traditional to ask and refused to offend the black man with personal questions that early in the relationship. Traditional Spokanes believe in rules of conduct that aren’t collected into any book and have been forgotten by most of the tribe. For thousands of years, the Spokanes feasted, danced, conducted conversations, and courted each other in certain ways. Most Indians don’t follow those rules anymore, but Thomas made the attempt.

“What’s your name?” the black man asked after a long silence.

“Thomas Builds-the-Fire.”

“That a good name?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“My name’s Johnson,” the black man said. “Robert Johnson.”

“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Johnson. Who’s your traveling partner?”

Johnson picked up his guitar, held it close to his body.

“My best friend,” Johnson said. “But I ain’t gonna tell y’all his name. The Gentleman might hear and come runnin’. He gets into the strings, you hear?”

Thomas saw that Robert Johnson looked scared and tired, in need of a shower, a good night’s rest, and a few stories to fill his stomach.

“How’d you end up here?” Thomas asked. A crowd of Indian kids had gathered, because crowds of Indian kids are always gathering somewhere, to watch Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the misfit storyteller of the Spokane Tribe, talk to a strange black man and his guitar. The whole event required the construction of another historical monument. The reservation had filled with those monuments years ago, but the Tribal Council still looked to build more, because they received government grants to do exactly that.

“Been lookin’ for a woman,” Johnson said. “I dream ’bout her.”

“What woman?”

“Old woman lives on a hill. I think she can fix what’s wrong with me.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Thomas asked.

“Made a bad deal years ago. Caught a sickness I can’t get rid of.”

Thomas knew about sickness. He’d caught some disease in the womb that forced him to tell stories. The weight of those stories bowed his legs and bent his spine a bit. Robert Johnson looked bowed, bent, and more fragile with each word. Those Indian kids were ready to pounce on the black man with questions and requests. The adults wouldn’t be too far behind their kids.

“Listen,” Thomas said, “we should get out of the sun. I’ll take you up to my house.”

Johnson considered his options. Old and tired, he had walked from crossroads to crossroads in search of the woman in his dreams. That woman might save him. A big woman, she arrived in shadows, riding a horse. She rode into his dreams as a shadow on a shadowy horse, with songs that he loved but could not sing because the Gentleman might hear. The Gentleman held the majority of stock in Robert Johnson’s soul and had chased Robert Johnson for decades. Since 1938, the year he faked his death by poisoning and made his escape, Johnson had been running from the Gentleman, who narrowly missed him at every stop.

“Come on,” Thomas said. “Hop in the van. You can crash at my place. Maybe you can play some songs.

“I can’t play nothin’,” Johnson said. “Not ever.”

Robert Johnson raised his hands, palms open, to Thomas. Burned, scarred, those hands frightened Thomas.

“This is what happens,” Johnson said. “This is how it happens sometimes. Things work like this. They really do.”

Thomas wanted to take Johnson to the Indian Health Service Clinic, for a checkup and the exact diagnosis of his illness, but he knew that wouldn’t work. Indian Health only gave out dental floss and condoms, and Thomas spent his whole life trying to figure out the connection between the two. More than anything, he wanted a story to heal the wounds, but he knew that his stories never healed anything.

“I know somebody who might be able to help you,” Thomas said.

“Who?”

“Big Mom. She lives on top of Wellpinit Mountain.”

Thomas pointed up through the clouds. Robert Johnson looked toward the peak of Wellpinit Mountain, where Big Mom kept her home. Pine trees blanketed the mountain and the rest of the reservation. The town of Wellpinit sat in a little clearing below the mountain. Cougars strolled through the middle of town; a bear once staggered out of hibernation too early, climbed onto the roof of the Catholic Church, and fell back asleep. A few older Indians still lived out in the deep woods in tipis and shacks, venturing into town for funerals and powwows. Those elders told stories about the gentle Bigfoot and the Stick Indians, banished from the tribe generations ago, who had turned into evil spirits that haunted the forests now.

“This is a beautiful place,” Johnson said.

“But you haven’t seen everything,” Thomas said.

“What else is there?”

Thomas thought about all the dreams that were murdered here, and the bones buried quickly just inches below the surface, all waiting to break through the foundations of those government houses built by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Thomas still lived in the government HUD house where he had grown up. It was a huge house by reservation standards, with two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and living room and two more bedrooms and a bathroom in the basement. However, the house had never really been finished because the Bureau of Indian Affairs cut off the building money halfway through construction. The water pipes froze every winter, and windows warped in the hot summer heat. During his childhood, Thomas had slept in the half-finished basement, with two blankets for walls and one blanket for his bed.

“There’s a whole lot you haven’t seen,” Thomas said. “Things you don’t want to see, you know? Big Mom could tell you all about it. She’s been around a long time.”

“Take me to Big Mom,” Robert Johnson said. “Maybe she’s the woman I been dreamin’ about.”

“Ain’t nobody goes up the mountain to see her,” Thomas said. “We always wait for her to come down. Only special visitors get to go up the mountain. Nobody has ever seen one of them. We just hear them late at night, sneaking through town. We don’t ever get to see them.”

“She has to be the one,” Johnson said. “She has to be. Don’t you see? I’m one of those special visitors. I’m supposed to see her. I just come too early.”

Robert Johnson climbed into the driver’s seat of the blue van. Thomas pushed him out of the way and shut the door. A few dozen members of the Spokane Tribe had gathered at the crossroads. Some trembled with fear, most laughed. Only Thomas Builds-the-Fire would let this stranger any further into his van and his life.

“Take me there,” Johnson said. “Take me to Big Mom.”

“Tell me everything,” Thomas said, “and I’ll take you.”

“Mr. Builds-the-Fire, I sold my soul to the Gentleman so I could play this damn guitar better than anybody ever played guitar. I’m hopin’ Big Mom can get it back.

Thomas put the van in gear and drove Robert Johnson to the base of Wellpinit Mountain. He wanted to go farther, to deliver Johnson to the front door of Big Mom’s house, but the van shuddered and died in the middle of the road.

“This is as far as I can go,” Thomas said. “You have to walk from here.”

Johnson stepped out of the van, looked toward the summit.

“It’s a long walk, ain’t it?” Johnson asked.

Thomas watched Johnson walk up the mountain until he was out of vision and beyond any story. Then Thomas saw the guitar, Robert Johnson’s guitar, lying on the floor of the van. Thomas picked it up, strummed the strings, felt a small pain in the palms of his hands, and heard the first sad note of the reservation blues.

One hundred and thirty-four years before Robert Johnson walked onto the Spokane Reservation, the Indian horses screamed. At first, Big Mom thought the horses were singing a familiar song. She had taught all of her horses to sing many generations before, but she soon realized this was not a song of her teaching. The song sounded so pained and tortured that Big Mom could never have imagined it before the white men came, and never understood it later, even at the edge of the twenty-first century. She listened carefully to the horses’ song, until she had memorized it, and harmonized. She wanted to ask many questions about the new song when she visited the horses next.

Finally, the horses stopped screaming their song, and Big Mom listened to the silence that followed. Then she went back to her work, to her buckskin and beads, to CNN. The horses’ silence lasted for minutes, maybe centuries, and made her curious. She understood that silence created its own music but never knew the horses to remain that quiet. After a while, she stood and started the walk down her mountain to the clearing where the horses gathered. Of course, she wanted to ask about the silence that followed their new song.

As she stepped out of her front door, Big Mom heard the first gunshot, which reverberated in her DNA. She pulled her dress up around her waist and ran for the clearing, heard a gunshot with each of her footfalls. All she heard were the gunshots, singular at first, and then in rapid plural bursts that she could not count.

Big Mom ran to the rise above the clearing where the horses gathered. There, she saw the future and the past, the white soldiers in blue uniforms with black rifles and pistols. She saw the Indian horses shot and fallen like tattered sheets. Big Mom stood on the rise and watched the horses fall, until only one remained.

Big Mom watched the Indian colt circled by soldiers. The colt darted from side to side, looked for escape. One soldier, an officer, stepped down from his pony, walked over to the colt, gently touched its face, and whispered in its ear. The colt shivered as the officer put his pistol between its eyes and pulled the trigger. That colt fell to the grass of the clearing, to the sidewalk outside a reservation tavern, to the cold, hard coroner’s table in a Veterans Hospital.

Big Mom wept as the soldiers rode away on their own pale ponies and heard their trumpets long after. She walked to the clearing where the horses had fallen, walked from corpse to corpse, and searched for any sign of life. After she counted the dead, she sang a mourning song for forty days and nights, then wiped the tears away, and buried the bodies. But she saved the bones of the most beautiful horse she found and built a flute from its ribs. Big Mom played a new flute song every morning to remind everybody that music created and recreated the world daily.

In 1992, Big Mom still watched for the return of those slaughtered horses and listened to their songs. With each successive generation, the horses arrived in different forms and with different songs, called themselves Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, and so many other names. Those horses rose from everywhere and turned to Big Mom for rescue, but they all fell back into the earth again.

For seven generations, Big Mom had received those horses and held them in her arms. Now on a bright summer day, she watched a black man walk onto the Spokane Indian Reservation. She heard that black man talk to Thomas Builds-the-Fire. She watched Thomas give that black man a ride to the base of her mountain and smiled as the blue van shuddered to a stop. Big Mom sat in her rocking chair and waited to greet her latest visitor.

“The end of the world is near!” shouted the crazy old Indian man in front of the Spokane Tribal Trading Post. He wasn’t a Spokane Indian, but nobody knew what tribe he was. Some said Lakota Sioux because he had cheekbones so big that he knocked people over when he moved his head from side to side. The old man was tall, taller than any of the Spokanes, even though age had shrunk him a bit. People figured he was close to seven feet tall in his youth. He’d come to play in an all-Indian basketball tournament in Wellpinit thirty years ago and had never left. None of the Spokanes paid him much mind because they already knew the end was just around the corner, a few miles west, down by Turtle Lake.

Thomas was the only Spokane who talked much to the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota. But then, most of the Spokanes thought Thomas was pretty goofy, especially after he gave Robert Johnson that ride up to Big Mom’s place. Thomas had carried Johnson’s guitar around with him ever since then. He so strongly identified with that guitar that he wrapped it in a beautiful quilt and gave it a place of honor in his living room. When he went out for his daily walks, Thomas cradled the guitar like a baby, oblivious to the laughter all around him. But the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota didn’t laugh at Thomas.

“Ya-hey,” Thomas called out.

“Ya-hey, Thomas,” the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota said. “The end of the world is near.”

“I know it is,” Thomas said and dropped a few coins into the old man’s hat, which already contained some change and a check from Father Arnold, priest of the Catholic Church. Although the Spokanes ignored the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota, they weren’t going to let him starve, and Father Arnold constantly recruited lost souls.

“That’s a good-looking guitar,” the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota said. “I hear you got it from the black man.”

“That I did,” Thomas said.

“You be careful with that music, enit? Music is a dangerous thing.”

Thomas smiled and walked into the Trading Post, one of the few lucrative businesses on the reservation. Its shelves were stocked with reservation staples: Diet Pepsi, Spam, Wonder bread, and a cornucopia of various carbohydrates, none of them complex. One corner of the Trading Post was devoted to the gambling machines that had become mandatory on every reservation. The Tribe had installed a few new slot machines earlier that day, and the Spokanes lined up to play. Dreams of the jackpot. Some Indian won a few hundred dollars every afternoon and fell down broke by the next morning. Thomas didn’t gamble with his money, but he did gamble with his stomach when he heated up a microwave burrito. He paid for the burrito and a Pepsi and, carrying his food and guitar, walked back outside to eat.

He sat on a curb outside the Trading Post, hungry and ready to eat, just as Victor Joseph and Junior Polatkin walked up. Victor was the reservation John Travolta because he still wore clothes from the disco era. He had won a few thousand dollars in Reno way back in 1979, just after he graduated from high school. He bought a closet full of silk shirts and polyester pants and had never had any money since then to buy anything new. He hadn’t gained any weight in thirteen years, but the clothes were tattered and barely held to his body. His wardrobe made him an angry man.

“Ya-hey, Builds-the-Shithouse,” Victor said.

“Ya-hey,” Thomas said.

“Is that your guitar?” Junior Polatkin asked.

“That’s his woman,” Victor said.

Junior Polatkin was Victor’s sidekick, but nobody could figure out why, since Junior was supposed to be smart. A tall, good-looking buck with hair like Indians in the movies, long, purple-black, and straight, Junior was president of the Native American Hair Club. If there had been a hair bank, like a blood bank or sperm bank, Junior could have donated yards of the stuff and made a fortune. He drove a water truck for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and had even attended college for a semester or two. There were rumors he had fathered a white baby or two at school.

A job was hard to come by on the reservation, even harder to keep, and most figured that Victor used Junior for his regular income, but nobody ever knew what Junior saw in Victor. Still, Junior could be an asshole, too, because Victor was extremely contagious.

“This isn’t my guitar,” Thomas said. “But I’m going to change the world with it.”

Victor and Junior sat beside Thomas, one on either side. The three Spokane Indians sat together on the sidewalk in front of the Trading Post. Everybody likes to have a place to think, to meditate, to eat a burrito, and that particular piece of accidental sidewalk mostly belonged to Thomas. He usually sat there alone but now shared it with Victor and Junior, two of the most accomplished bullies of recent Native American history.

A few years earlier, after the parking lot for the Trading Post was built, the BIA contractor had a little bit of cement left over. So he decided to build a sidewalk rather than lug the cement all the way back to the warehouse and fill out complicated, unnecessary, and official government papers. Thomas was watching the BIA workers pour the cement and never saw Victor and Junior sneak up on him. Victor and Junior knocked Thomas over, pressed his face into the wet cement, and left a permanent impression in the sidewalk. The doctors at Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane removed the cement from his skin, but the scars remained on his face. The sidewalk belonged to Thomas because of that pain.

“You named that guitar?” Junior asked.

“It’s a secret name,” Thomas said. “I ain’t ever going to tell anybody.”

Victor pulled Thomas into a quick headlock.

“Tell me,” Victor said and cut off Thomas’s air for a second.

“Come on,” Junior said. “Take it easy.”

“I ain’t letting you go until you tell me,” Victor said.

Thomas was not surprised by Victor’s sudden violence. These little wars were intimate affairs for those who dreamed in childhood of fishing for salmon but woke up as adults to shop at the Trading Post and stand in line for U.S.D.A. commodity food instead. They savagely, repeatedly, opened up cans of commodities and wept over the rancid meat, forced to eat what stray dogs ignored. Indian men like Victor roared from place to place, set fires, broke windows, and picked on the weaker members of the Tribe. Thomas had been the weakest Indian boy on the whole reservation, so small and skinny, with bigger wrists than arms, a head too large for its body, and ugly government glasses. When he grew older and stronger, grew into an Indian man, he was the smallest Indian man on the reservation.

“Tell me the name of your goddamned guitar,” Victor said and squeezed Thomas a little harder.

Thomas didn’t say a word, didn’t struggle, but thought It’s a good day to die. It’s a good day to get my ass kicked.

“Come on, Victor,” Junior said. “Let him go. He ain’t going to tell us nothing.”

“I ain’t leaving until he tells us,” Victor said, but then had a brainstorm. “Or until he plays us a song.”

“No way,” Junior said. “I don’t want to hear that.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” Thomas said. “If I can play your favorite Patsy Cline song, will you leave me alone?”

“What happens if you can’t play the song?” Victor asked.

“Then you can kick my ass some more.”

“We’ll kick your ass anyway,” Victor said. “If you can’t play the song, we get the guitar.”

“That’s a pretty good deal, enit?” Junior asked.

“Enit,” Victor said. “It’s better than hearing another one of his goddamn stories.”

Thomas repeated stories constantly. All the other Indians on the reservation heard those stories so often that the words crept into dreams. An Indian telling his friends about a dream he had was halfway through the telling before everyone realized it was actually one of Thomas’s stealth stories. Even the white people on the reservation grew tired of Thomas’s stories, but they were more polite when they ran away.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s stories climbed into your clothes like sand, gave you itches that could not be scratched. If you repeated even a sentence from one of those stories, your throat was never the same again. Those stories hung in your clothes and hair like smoke, and no amount of laundry soap or shampoo washed them out. Victor and Junior often tried to beat those stories out of Thomas, tied him down and taped his mouth shut. They pretended to be friendly and tried to sweet-talk Thomas into temporary silences, made promises about beautiful Indian women and cases of Diet Pepsi. But none of that stopped Thomas, who talked and talked.

“I got a better idea,” Victor added. “If you can’t play the song, then you have to stop telling all your fucking stories.”

“Okay,” Thomas said, “but you have to let me go first.”

Victor released Thomas from the headlock but picked up the guitar and smashed it against the sidewalk. Then he handed it to Junior, who shrugged his shoulders and gave it back to Thomas. Indians around the Trading Post watched this with indifference or ignored it altogether.

“There,” Victor said. “Now you can play the song.”

“Oh, yeah, enit,” Junior said. “Play it now.”

Thomas looked around at the little country he was trying to save, this reservation hidden away in the corner of the world. He knew that Victor and Junior were fragile as eggs, despite their warrior disguises. He held that cracked guitar tenderly, strummed the first chord, and sang that Patsy Cline song about falling to pieces.

Victor looked at Thomas, looked at Junior, sat on the sidewalk again. Thomas managed to sing that song pretty well, but Victor had been looking forward to the silence. He might have to kick Thomas’s ass anyway. Victor, fresh from thirty-two years of fried chicken lunches, ran his hands along his greasy silk shirt and tried to think.

“Jeez,” Junior said, “that was pretty good, Thomas. Where’d you learn to sing?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Victor said. “I’m thinking.”

The-man-who-was-probably-Lakota watched these events unfold. He walked over to the trio of Spokane Indians on the sidewalk.

“The end of the world is near!”

“When is that going to happen?” Junior asked. “I need to set my alarm clock.

“Don’t mock me,” the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota said. “The end of the world is near!”

“Why don’t all of you shut up?” Victor said.

Junior pretended his feelings were hurt so he could storm off. He needed to drive the water truck down to the West End of the reservation anyway but didn’t want Victor to know how much he cared about his job. The West End ran out of water every summer. Indians and pine trees competed for water down there, and the trees usually won.

“Where you going?” Victor asked Junior.

“To the West End.”

“Wait up, I’ll ride with you,” Victor said and ran after Junior.

Thomas had received a pardon because of Victor’s short attention span. Still, Victor never actually hurt him too seriously. Victor’s natural father had liked Thomas for some reason. Victor remembered that and seemed to pull back at the last second, left bruises and cuts but didn’t break bones. After Victor’s father died, Thomas had flown with Victor to Phoenix to help pick up the ashes. Some people said that Thomas even paid for Victor’s airplane tickets. Thomas just did things that made no sense at all.

“I’ll be back for you!” Victor yelled and climbed into the water truck with Junior.

“The end of the world is near!

“My ass is near your face!” Victor yelled out the window as the truck pulled away.

The-man-who-was-probably-Lakota helped Thomas to his feet. Thomas started to cry. That was the worst thing an Indian man could do if he were sober. A drunk Indian can cry and sing into his beer all night long, and the rest of the drunk Indians will sing backup.

“Listen,” the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota said as he put his arm around Thomas’s shoulders. “Go on home. Glue the guitar back together. Maybe things will be better in the morning.”

“You think so?” Thomas asked.

“Yeah, but don’t tell anybody I said so. It would ruin my reputation.”

“Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Thomas climbed into his blue van with that broken guitar, wondered if he could fix it, and noticed his fingers were cut shallowly, as if the first layers of skin had been delicately sliced by a razor. The-man-who-was-probably-Lakota picked up a hand drum and pounded it in rhythm with his words as Thomas drove away.

“The end of the world is near! It’s near! It’s near! The end is near!”

Junior was a good driver. He kept that water truck firmly on the road, negotiating the reservation obstacle course of potholes and free-range livestock, as he made his way to the West End. He had been driving trucks since a few days after he had returned from college. Victor had been riding with him all that time, falling asleep as soon as his head fell back against the vinyl seat. On that particular day, as the-man-who-was-probably-Lakota comforted Thomas, Victor fell asleep before they passed the city limits. At least, his eyes were closed when the nightmare came to him.

Victor fought against his nightmare, twisted and moaned in his seat, as Junior drove the water truck. Junior, who had always paid close attention to dreams, wondered which particular nightmare was filling Victor’s sleep. He had majored in psychology during his brief time in college and learned a lot about dreams. In Psychology 101, Junior had learned from Freud and Jung that dreams decided everything. He figured that Freud and Jung must have been reservation Indians, because dreams decided everything for Indians, too. Junior based all of his decisions on his dreams and visions, which created a lot of problems. When awake, he could never stomach the peanut butter and onion sandwiches that tasted so great in his dreams, but Junior always expected his visions to come true. Indians were supposed to have visions and receive messages from their dreams. All the Indians on television had visions that told them exactly what to do.

Junior knew how to wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, and go to work. He knew how to drive his water truck, but he didn’t know much beyond that, beyond that and the wanting. He wanted a bigger house, clothes, shoes, and something more. Junior didn’t know what Victor wanted, except money. Victor wanted money so bad that he always spent it too quick, as if the few dollars in his wallet somehow prevented him from getting more. Money. That’s all Victor talked about. Money. Junior didn’t know if Victor wanted anything more, but he knew that Victor was dreaming.

Victor tossed and turned in his sleep, pushed against the door, kicked the dashboard. He spouted random words and phrases that Junior could not understand. Junior glanced over at his best friend, touched his leg, and Victor quieted a little.

Victor slept until Junior pulled up at Simon’s house on the West End. Simon stood on his front porch. His pickup, which he only drove in reverse, was parked on the remains of the lawn.

“Ya-hey, Simon,” Junior called out as he stepped down from his truck.

“Ya-hey,” Simon said. “Bringing me some water?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. I need water. My lawn.”

Junior looked at the dusty ground and the few struggling grass shoots.

“Jeez,” Simon said, “I really need some water.”

Junior nodded his head.

“Where are we?” Victor asked from inside the truck.

“At Simon’s.”

“That crazy backward driving old man?” Victor said. “What are we doing here?”

“Water,” Junior said. “Can you help me?”

Victor climbed out of the truck and helped Junior insert the hose into Simon’s well. They pumped water for a few minutes, then removed the hose and made as if to leave.

“Wait,” Simon said. “Aren’t you thirsty? Don’t you want something to drink?”

He was a good host.

“Yeah,” Victor said. “Do you got a beer?”

“He don’t drink like that,” Junior said.

“I don’t drink like that,” Simon said.

“All he has is Pepsi and coffee,” Junior said.

“All I have is Pepsi and coffee,” Simon said.

“Enit?” Victor asked.

“Enit.”

“Well,” Victor said, “I’m feeling like a beer. What do you think, Junior? Let’s knock off early and head for the tavern.”

Junior ignored him.

“Come on,” Victor said. “Let’s go.”

“I’ve got work to do,” Junior said. “I need to finish. It’s my job.”

Junior climbed into the water truck. Victor sighed deeply and climbed in, too. They’d had this same conversation for years. Simon waved from the front porch and then ran over to the truck. He stood on the running board and leaned into the truck.

“Hey,” Simon said, “did you see that black man the other day?”

Junior nodded.

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s bullshit,” Victor said.

“What do you think?” Simon asked Junior, who just shrugged his shoulders and cleared his throat.

“Yeah,” Simon said, shrugging his shoulders and clearing his throat. “It’s just like that, enit? That’s what I’ve been thinking, too. Just like that. You know, the whole reservation’s been talking. People think that Thomas is goofy.”

“He is goofy,” Victor said. “Now, get down. We’re heading out. Got work to do.”

Simon stepped off the running board.

“See you,” Junior said.

Simon waved again.

“Hey,” Victor said, “how come you don’t walk backwards like you drive?”

“Because I’d bump into things.”

“Oh,” Victor said, “that makes a whole lot of sense. You keep in touch, okay? We’ll do lunch.”

“Can’t,” Simon said. “I’m going out of town. Headed to the coast to visit my relatives. Won’t be back for a while.”

Junior smiled at the thought of Simon hurtling backwards down Interstate 90, passing hundreds of cars, and pulling gracefully into rest stops.

“Send us a postcard,” Victor said.

“You take care,” Junior said.

“Jeez,” Victor said as they pulled away, “that man is crazy.”

“He’s fine. He’s fine.”

“Whatever you say. Aren’t you thirsty?”

Junior looked at his best friend.

“We’ve got five more houses to do. Then we can go to the tavern.”

“Cool. You’re buying, enit?”

“Yeah, I’m buying.”

While Junior and Victor got drunk in the tavern and Thomas slept, Robert Johnson’s guitar fixed itself. He had left it outside by the smokehouse because he planned to burn it as firewood. It had held together long enough for the Patsy Cline song but completely fell apart before he got it home. He planned on smoking some salmon anyway and figured the smoke from the burning guitar would make salmon taste like the blues. But the guitar came together overnight and waited for Thomas, who walked outside with salmon in his hands.

“Thomas,” the guitar said. It sounded almost like Robert Johnson but resonated with a deeper tone, some other kind of music. Thomas wasn’t surprised that the guitar sounded almost like Robert Johnson.

“Good morning,” Thomas said. “How you feeling this morning?”

“Little sore, little tired.”

“I know what you mean, enit?”

Thomas tried to hide the salmon behind his back, but the guitar saw it.

“We’re plannin’ on burnin’ me up?” the guitar asked.

“Yeah,” Thomas said. He could not lie.

The guitar laughed.

“That’s all right,” the guitar said. “You eat your fish. I’ll just play some blues right here.”

The guitar played itself while Thomas smoked the salmon. Before she died, Thomas’s mother, Susan, had draped the salmon across a bare mattress frame, threw the frame over the fire, and smoked it that way. Thomas didn’t have the courage to do that, so he cooked salmon in the old smokehouse that Samuel, his father, had built years ago. Susan died of cancer when Thomas was ten years old; Samuel had been drunk since the day after his wife’s wake.

“The blues always make us remember,” the guitar said.

“They do, enit?” Thomas said.

“What do the blues make you remember?”

“My mom used to sing,” Thomas said. “Her voice sounded like a flute when she was happy, but more like glass breaking when she was in pain.”

Thomas remembered how she used to hold him late at night, rocking him into sleep with stories and songs. Sometimes she sang traditional Spokane Indian songs. Other times, she sang Broadway show tunes or Catholic hymns, which were quite similar.

“Was she pretty?” the guitar asked.

“Beautiful, I guess.”

Thomas and the guitar sat in silence for a long time, remained quiet until the salmon was cooked. King salmon. Thomas ate it quickly, barely stopping to wipe his face and fingers clean.

“Can you play me a sad song?” Thomas asked.

The guitar played the same song for hours while Thomas sat by the fire. That guitar sounded like Robert Johnson, like a cedar flute, like glass breaking in the distance. Thomas closed his eyes, listened closely, and wondered if Victor and Junior heard the song.

“They hear me,” the guitar said. “Those two hear me good.”

Victor and Junior were passed out in the water truck on an old logging road. After they’d delivered water to the West End, they spent a long night in the Powwow Tavern and ended up here. The guitar’s song drifted through the truck’s open windows, fell down on the two Indians, and worked its way into their skins. They both tried to push the music away from their hangover dreams.

“They be comin’ soon,” the guitar said.

“Why?” Thomas asked.

“Y’all need to play songs for your people. They need you. Those two boys need you.”

“What you talking about?” Thomas asked.

“The music. Y’all need the music.”

Thomas thought he needed more money than music. Music seemed to be a luxury most days. He’d received some life insurance money when his mom died, but that was almost gone, and nobody on the reservation ever hired him to work. Still, Thomas heard music in everything, even in money.

“Maybe you and me should go on the road,” Thomas said.

“On the road, on the road,” the guitar said. “We takin’ those two with us. We startin’ up a band.”

“Those guys ain’t going to play with me,” Thomas said. “They don’t even like me.”

The guitar played on and ignored Thomas’s doubts. Music rose above the reservation, made its way into the clouds, and rained down. The reservation arched its back, opened its mouth, and drank deep because the music tasted so familiar. Thomas felt the movement, the shudder that passed through tree and stone, asphalt and aluminum. The music kept falling down, falling down.

After the tavern had closed, Junior and Victor climbed into the water truck and passed out. They spent many nights asleep in parking lots. During this night, they dreamed of their families.

Junior dreamed of his two brothers, two sisters, mother and father. They all stood at a bus stop in Spokane, the white city just a few miles from the reservation, waiting to go downtown. Pawn shops and secondhand stores. The world was beautiful sometimes.

Junior’s father had owned a couple hundred acres of wheat that he rented out to a white farmer. Every harvest, Junior’s father made enough money for a family vacation in Spokane. They stayed at the Park Lane Motel, ate Kmart submarine sandwiches, and watched bad karate movies at the Trent Drive-In.

Junior dreamed of his parents’ funeral in the Spokane Indian Longhouse. His siblings, who had long since dispersed to other reservations and cities, couldn’t afford to come back for the funeral. None of his siblings had enough money to mourn properly.

Victor dreamed of his stepfather, a short, stocky white man, red-headed and so pale that veins flowed through his skin like rivers on a map. Victor’s mother and stepfather had met in a cowboy bar in Spokane when Victor was nine years old, a few weeks after his real father had moved to Phoenix, Arizona. His mother and stepfather had two-stepped to Hank Williams all night long and fell in love.

“It was the cowboy hat,” Victor’s mother had said more than once.

In Victor’s dream, he could smell the dead body, his real father’s. His real father had died of a heart attack during a heat wave in Phoenix and lay on a couch for a week before a neighbor discovered him. Victor hadn’t seen his real father for years before his death. Victor could still smell that dead body smell. That smell never fully dissipated, had always remained on the edges of Victor’s senses.

In that way, both dreamed of their families.

Then the morning came and brought Robert Johnson’s guitar with it. In Thomas’s yard, the guitar played itself and the music did rise into the clouds. It did rain down on the reservation, which arched its back and drank deeply. It did fall on the roof of the water truck, disturbing Junior’s and Victor’s sleep. The music talked to them in their dreams, talking so loudly that neither could sleep.

“Shit,” Victor said, “what the hell is that noise?”

“It’s music,” Junior said. “I think.”

“Man, I got a hangover.”

“Me, too.”

The music played on, and gradually changed.

“Jeez,” Victor said, “now it sounds like Thomas singing out there. I’m going to kick his ass. As soon as I can lift my head.”

“Thomas,” Junior said, “will you keep it down? I got a headache.”

The music kept playing.

“That’s it,” Victor said. “I’m kicking his ass good this time.”

Victor and Junior staggered out of the truck, but Thomas was nowhere to be found. The music continued.

“What the hell is that?” Victor asked.

“I don’t know.”

“That fucking Thomas has to be doing this. It’s his voice. He’s doing this. I say we go find him and kick his ass.”

“It’s getting louder.

“That’s it,” Victor said as he slowly climbed back into the truck. “Let’s go get him.”

Junior found his way into the driver’s seat, started the truck, and made his way toward Thomas’s house. He was a good driver.

“I smell water,” the guitar said.

“It’s the pond,” Thomas said and pointed. “Down there.”

Benjamin Pond used to be called Benjamin Lake, but then a white man named Benjamin Lake moved to the reservation to teach biology at the Tribal High School. All the Indians liked the teacher so much that they turned the lake into a pond to avoid confusion.

“They’re comin’ now,” the guitar said. “I feel ’em.”

Thomas walked into the house to get some food ready. He had to offer food to his guest, no matter how little he had, even if Junior and Victor were the guests. The cupboards were nearly bare, but Thomas managed to find a jar of peanut butter and some saltine crackers.

“Tell me a story ’fore they get here,” the guitar said when Thomas came back outside with a plate of reservation appetizers.

Thomas sat, closed his eyes, and told this story:

“Benjamin Pond has been on the reservation longer than anything. Jesus sipped water from the pond. But Turtle Lake, on the other side of the reservation, has been here a long time, too. Genghis Khan swam there and was nearly eaten by the giant turtles. He decided not to conquer the Americas because even its turtles were dangerous.

“The tribal elders say that Benjamin Pond and Turtle Lake are connected by a tunnel. Those turtles swim from pond to lake; they live in great caverns beneath the reservation and feed on failed dreams.

“The elders tell the story of the horse that fell into Benjamin Pond, drowned in those waters, but washed up on the shore of Turtle Lake. Children swim in both places, but their grandmothers burn sage and pray for their safety.

sweet smoke, save us, bless us now

“Indian teenagers build fires and camp at the water. They sometimes hear a woman crying but can never find the source of the sound. Victor, Junior, and I saw Big Mom, the old woman who lives on the hill, walk across Benjamin Pond. Victor and Junior pretend they don’t know about Big Mom, but we heard her sing all the way.

sweet smoke, save us, bless us now

“I am in love with water; I am frightened by water. I never learned to swim. Indians have drowned in both Benjamin Pond and Turtle Lake, and I wonder if we can taste them when we drink the water.

sweet smoke, save us, bless us now

“I watched Victor learn to swim when he was ten years old. His stepfather threw him in Turtle Lake, which doesn’t have a bottom, which used to be a volcano. Victor’s screams rose like ash, drifted on the wind, and blanketed the reservation. Junior watched his oldest brother James slip on the dock at Benjamin Pond. James fractured his skull and woke up as somebody different.”

Thomas opened his eyes. The guitar was silent.

“Ya-hey,” Thomas whispered, but the guitar didn’t respond. The sun was almost directly overhead when Junior and Victor pulled up in the water truck. They stepped out of the rig at the same time and walked toward Thomas.

“They’re here,” Thomas whispered to the guitar, which remained silent. He picked it up and strummed a few chords, thinking how nobody believed in anything on this reservation. All the Indians just dropped their quarters into the jukebox, punched the same old buttons, and called that music. Thomas shared his stories with pine trees because people didn’t listen. He was grateful for the trees when the guitar left him.

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on,” Victor said to Thomas. “But I can’t get your voice out of my head.”

“What’s he saying to you?” Junior asked Victor.

“Something about being on the cover of Rolling Stone.”

“Yeah,” Junior said. “Me, too.”

“I was wondering if you guys wanted to be in my band,” Thomas said. “I need a lead guitarist and drummer.”

“I’ll do it,” Junior said, already convinced. Two peanut butter and onion sandwiches waited in his lunch box.

“What’s in it for me?” Victor asked.

“This,” Thomas said and handed Robert Johnson’s guitar to him. Victor picked at the strings and flinched.

“Damn,” Victor said. “This thing is hot. How long it been in the sun?”

“I thought we broke that thing,” Junior said.

“Nothing’s broken yet,” Thomas said.

“Why the hell you want us in your band anyway?” Victor asked. “Who’s to say I won’t break this guitar over your head every damn day?”

“Nothing I can say about that,” Thomas said.

But Victor held on to that guitar too tenderly to ever break it again. He already gave it a name and heard it whisper. Thomas couldn’t hear the guitar at all anymore but saw it snuggle closer to Victor’s body.

“Play that thing a little,” Thomas said. “Then tell me you don’t want to be in my band.”

“No problem,” Victor said.

“He don’t even play the guitar,” Junior said.

“He does now,” Thomas said.

Victor’s fingers moved toward the chord: index finger on first two strings, first fret; middle finger on third string, second fret; ring finger on fourth string, third fret. He strummed the strings, hit the chord, and smiled.

“I’ll be your lead guitarist,” Victor said. “But what are you going to do?”

“I’m the bass player,” Thomas said. “And the lead singer.”