Reservation Blues

2. Treaties

LISTEN TO ME, LISTEN to me, listen to me

Somebody breaks a hard promise

Somebody breaks your tired heart

The moon tears the sun in half

Love can tear you apart

chorus:

What do you want from your father?

What do you want from your brother?

What do you want from your sister?

What do you want from your mother?

Treaties never remember

They give and take ’til they fall apart

Treaties never surrender

I’m sure treaties we made are gonna break this Indian’s heart

I don’t know what I want from love

I just know it ain’t easy

I just know how it all feels

It’s just like signing a treaty

(repeat chorus)

I just know it ain’t easy

It’s just like signing a treaty

Thomas, Victor, and Junior rehearsed in Irene’s Grocery Store. Even though the building had been condemned for years, boarded up and dangerous, everybody still called it Irene’s. The band crawled through a hole in the back wall and practiced for hours at a time. Thomas had spent most of his savings on a bass guitar and an amplifier for himself and a drum set for Junior. Victor wore gloves when he played Robert Johnson’s guitar but still suffered little burns and scratches. At first, Thomas had worried that his amplified bass and Junior’s drums would overwhelm the acoustic lead guitar, but Victor could have kicked the guitar around the floor and it would have sounded good enough. Even without an amplifier or microphones, Robert Johnson’s guitar filled the room.

Pretty soon, the band’s practice sessions started to draw a crowd. In the beginning, only Lester FallsApart materialized, like a reservation magician, and usually knocked somebody or something over, like a reservation clown. After a few days, however, a dozen Spokanes showed up and started to dance, even in the heat. Undercover CIA and FBI agents dressed up like Indians and infiltrated the band practices but didn’t fool anybody because they danced like shit. The crowds kept growing and converted the rehearsal into a semi-religious ceremony that made the Assemblies of God, Catholics, and Presbyterians very nervous. United in their outrage, a few of those reservation Indian Christians showed up at rehearsals just to protest the band.

“You’re damned!” shouted an old Catholic Indian woman. “You’re sinners! Rock ’n’ roll is the devil’s music!”

“Damn right it is!” Victor shouted back and hit an open chord that shook the protestors’ fillings out of their teeth. The Indian Health Service dentist spent the next two weeks with his hands deep in Christian mouths.

“No,” the dentist had to say more than once to Catholic patients, “I don’t think there is a saint of orthodontics.”

Father Arnold, priest of the reservation Catholic Church, didn’t care much about the band one way or the other. He thought the whole thing was sort of amusing and nostalgic. He’d been a little boy, maybe five years old, when Elvis appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and threw the entire country into a righteous panic. Arnold would never have thought that Indians would be as judgmental as those white people way back when, but he was discovering exactly how Catholic Spokanes could become.

“Listen,” he said to one of his more rabid parishioners, “I really don’t think God is too concerned about this band. I think hunger and world peace are at the top of His list of things to worry about, and rock music is somewhere down near the bottom.”

Father Arnold had waited tables in a restaurant and sung in a rock band for a few years after he graduated college, before he received his calling into the priesthood. They’d played mostly fifties songs, like “Teen Angel” and “Rock Around the Clock” with Father Arnold on lead vocals. He’d had a good voice, still had a good voice, but now the music he sang was in church and was much more important than the stuff he used to sing at American Legion dances and high school proms.

Arnold was twenty-eight, buying a Big Mac at a McDonald’s, when the call came to him. He’d always been a Catholic, alternating between devotion and laziness, but had never thought of himself as a priest. He had always believed, had always been taught, that priests were extraordinary men, nearly heroic. He had never been anything but ordinary. An ordinarily handsome man, with ordinary intelligence and an ordinary car, he’d graduated college with a 3.1 G.P.A. in English. Surely not the makings of a Catholic priest. Even now, when he talked about his calling in that McDonald’s, he was embarrassed by how ordinary it all seemed.

He had just picked up his order when he heard the voice. At first, he thought the cashier was talking to him, but the cashier was busy with another customer. The voice didn’t say anything exactly. It was just a voice, a series of words, or sounds. He was never quite sure about the voice, but he knew there was no music, no harps, no sudden shaft of light, no shift of the earth.

He found a table, ate his Big Mac, and then walked across the street to the Catholic church.

“Hello,” he had said to the priest there. “My name is Robert Arnold. I want to be a priest. But I’m not a virgin. Can you help me?”

“You don’t have to be a virgin,” the priest had said. “You just have to be celibate from now on.”

“Well, okay,” Arnold said. “But I really hope you’re right about this celibacy thing, you know?”

He had quickly gone through seminary, assisted at a few churches, and then was shipped to the Spokane Indian Reservation when the residing priest died.

“Father,” the bishop had said to him just before he left for the reservation. “We need you out there. You have youth, a robust faith that is needed to reach these Indians. We have tried discipline. We have tried strength. But they need something different. Someone like you.”

Father Arnold had never been too concerned about the vagueness of his assignment. He was never sure how faith could be robust and often worried that his prayers were too thin, stretched to the point of breaking. Still, he knew he was a good priest and could deliver a homily with the best of them. Sometimes it was almost like being a lead singer again, onstage, with the audience hanging on his every word. As a lead singer, as a priest, he could change the shape of the world just by changing the shape of a phrase.

“A-men,” Father Arnold often whispered to himself, practicing different pronunciations of the word. “Ah-men. Ay-yyyy-men. Uh-man.”

Arnold came to the reservation in his yellow VW van, expecting tipis and buffalo, since he had never been told otherwise. He was genuinely shocked when the Indians in his congregation spoke English.

“Buffalo?” asked Bessie, the oldest Catholic on the reservation. “What do you mean, buffalo? You really thought there were going to be buffalo here?”

“Yes,” he said, “I was looking forward to it.”

“Oh, Father,” Bessie said and laughed. “There weren’t any buffalo here to begin with. We’re a salmon tribe. At least, we were a salmon tribe before they put those dams on the river.”

“What about the buffalo? I mean, Indians were always hunting buffalo on television.”

“It was those dang Sioux Indians. Those Sioux always get to be on television. They get everything.”

Arnold’s Indian education was quick and brutal. He heard much laughter.

“Father Arnold, we’re not laughing with you, we’re laughing at you.”

He was impressed by the Spokanes’ ability to laugh. He’d never thought of Indians as being funny. What did they have to laugh about? Poverty, suicide, alcoholism? Father Arnold learned to laugh at most everything, which strangely made him feel closer to God.

However, he was most impressed by the Spokanes’ physical beauty. Perhaps it was because he had spent most of his life surrounded by white people and had grown used to their features. The Spokanes were exotic. Perhaps it was because of the Indians’ tremendous faith. But Father Arnold thought the Spokanes were uniformly beautiful. When members of other Indian tribes visited the Spokane Reservation, he began to believe that every Indian in the country was beautiful.

It’s their eyes, he finally decided. Those Indians have the most amazing eyes. Truly amazing.

David WalksAlong, the Spokane Tribal Council Chairman, showed up at the band’s rehearsal a few times. He was a tall, light-skinned Indian with brown eyes and a round face. He’d been a great basketball player in his youth, a slashing, brutal point guard who looked almost like an old-time Indian warrior. But he spent most of his time playing golf now and had grown fat in the belly and thighs. WalksAlong had long, dark, beautiful hair twenty years ago but had cut it shorter and shorter as it grew more gray.

“Kind of loud, enit?” WalksAlong asked Thomas after a particularly intense set.

“What’d you say?” asked Thomas. His ears were ringing.

“I said you’re disturbing the peace!”

“Yeah,” Thomas shouted. “We’re a three-piece band!”

“No, I said you’re too loud!”

“Yeah,” Thomas agreed. “It is a pretty good crowd!

WalksAlong was visibly angry.

“Listen,” the Chairman said, “you better quit fucking with me! You’re just like your asshole father!”

“Really?” Thomas asked. “You really think we’re rocking? You think my father will like us, too?”

WalksAlong jabbed Thomas’s chest with a thick finger.

“You might think you’re funny!” he shouted loud enough for Thomas to understand him, “but I can shut you down anytime I want to! I just have to give the word!” He stormed off, but Thomas just shrugged his shoulders. David WalksAlong had never cared much about the Builds-the-Fire family. He always thought the Builds-the-Fires talked too much. And Thomas’s father, Samuel, had been a better basketball player than WalksAlong. Not a lot better but enough to make all the Indian women chase him after the games, while WalksAlong walked home alone.

“What was that all about?” Junior asked Thomas.

“I don’t know,” Thomas shouted. “I don’t think he likes us.”

“Bullshit,” Victor shouted. “He just doesn’t like you. He ain’t never liked you.”

WalksAlong walked back to the Spokane Tribal Headquarters, cussing to himself all the way. He stormed through the front door, ignored his secretary’s attempts at conversation, and used his whole body to push open his office door. The contractor had used cheap, warped wood for the door, and it was nearly impassable on warm days.

“H’llo, Uncle,” said Michael White Hawk.

“Shit,” WalksAlong said, surprised. “What the hell are you doing here? Why didn’t you call me?”

“Jus’ got out,” White Hawk said. “Walked here.”

Michael White Hawk had been in Walla Walla State Penitentiary for two years. He was a huge man before he went to jail, but hours of weightlifting had turned him into a monster.

“Jeez, Nephew,” WalksAlong said. “You been shooting up steroids or what?”

“Pumped iron, you know?”

White Hawk had been in the same class as Victor and Junior but didn’t graduate from high school. He dropped out in eighth grade, unable to read and write. He could sign his name, but he did that purely by rote.

“Man,” WalksAlong said and hugged his nephew. “It’s good to have you back. It’s really good.”

WalksAlong had raised his nephew since he was a toddler. Michael’s mother had died of cirrhosis when he was just two years old, and he’d never even known his father. Michael was conceived during some anonymous three-in-the-morning powwow encounter in South Dakota. His mother’s drinking had done obvious damage to Michael in the womb. He had those vaguely Asian eyes and the flat face that alcohol babies always had on reservations. But he’d grown large and muscular despite the alcohol’s effects. Even in grade school, he’d been as big as most men and terrorized his classmates. He bullied even older kids past the point of reason. He once shoved a pencil up a seventh grader’s nose. That kid was in the hospital for a month and then moved to another reservation to live with some cousins. They’d sent White Hawk to a boys’ school near Spokane. But he beat the crap out of a few delinquent white boys, so they sent him back to the reservation.

“Uncle,” White Hawk said and hugged WalksAlong too hard.

“Oh,” WalksAlong said. “Take it easy. You’re going to bust my ribs.”

White Hawk did not ease up, however, hugging his uncle with all he had. WalksAlong was about to pass out when White Hawk finally let him go.

“Uncle, Uncle! Look what I fuckin’ got in prison!”

White Hawk took off his t-shirt to show his uncle the dozen tattoos he had received in prison. There were dragons, bears, feathers, and naked women. There was a naked Indian woman with braids on his back and a naked Indian woman with un-braided hair on his stomach. The tattoos were incredibly crude, little more than scars with ink imbedded in them. WalksAlong was amazed by how much pain his nephew must have gone through.

“How was it in there?” WalksAlong asked.

“Okay,” White Hawk said. “How come you di’nt come ’n see me?”

WalksAlong had driven to Walla Walla many times in the two years his nephew had been in prison, but he never once went inside. He sat in his car in the prison parking lot and smoked cigarettes.

“I didn’t want to see you in there,” WalksAlong said. “You didn’t belong in there.”

“Uncle, it hurt in here.”

White Hawk pointed to his chest, pressed his finger against a horse tattoo. WalksAlong had not seen his nephew cry in years, although White Hawk had screamed his way through childhood. But White Hawk didn’t cry. He just pointed to his chest.

“Jeez,” WalksAlong said, “we have to celebrate. Let me call the other Councilmen.”

Old Jerry, Buck, and Paula, the other Councilmen, hastily declined the offer when they heard that Michael White Hawk was home. David WalksAlong’s secretary, Kim, had already been on the phone with her sister, Arlene, and the gossip soon spread all over the reservation. Michael White Hawk was home. The news made it to Irene’s Grocery.

“White Hawk is home,” whispered one Indian to another.

“No shit? White Hawk is home?”

Lester FallsApart staggered up to Thomas after a song.

“Thomas!” Lester shouted. “White Hawk is home!”

Thomas looked back at Junior and Victor. Junior cleared his throat loudly. Victor shrugged his shoulders but felt something drop in his stomach. They barely made it through the next song and then went home, disappointing the crowd.

White strangers had begun to arrive on the Spokane Indian Reservation to listen to this all-Indian rock and blues band. A lot of those New Agers showed up with their crystals, expecting to hear-some ancient Indian wisdom and got a good dose of Sex Pistols covers instead. In emulation of all their rock heroes, who destroyed hotel rooms with style and wit, Victor and Junior trashed their own HUD house. Both lived together in a tiny HUD house with faulty wiring and no indoor plumbing. They slept in the house only when there was no other alternative.

One evening, after a long rehearsal, Victor decided he was the Beatles.

“I’m McCartney and Lennon all rolled up into one,” Victor said. “Thomas is George. And Junior, you get to be Ringo.”

“Shit,” Junior said, “how come I have to be Ringo?”

“If the Ringo fits,” Victor said, “then wear it.”

Thomas knew it was just the beginning but was already frightened by how much Victor and Junior had improved. Victor, especially. He played that guitar like a crazy man, and chords and riffs and notes jumped out of that thing like fancydancers. If you looked close enough, you saw the music rising off the strings and frets.

Two white women, Betty and Veronica, had somehow found their way to the reservation and showed up at every rehearsal. They even parked their car outside Irene’s Grocery and set up camp. Betty slept in the front seat and Veronica slept in the back. Both had long blonde hair and wore too much Indian jewelry. Turquoise rings, silver feather earrings, beaded necklaces. They always appeared in sundresses with matching Birkenstocks.

“Jeez,” said one Spokane woman to another, “those New Age princesses like Indian men, enit?”

“Enit, but they don’t know what they’re getting into, do they?”

Betty and Veronica always stood in the front row and sang along with the band. They had great voices, which could be heard even through the noise that the band created. After the band had quit for the night, Betty and Veronica often entertained the stragglers by playing a few songs themselves. Both played guitar, and they sang duet on their own songs:

Indian boy, don’t go away

Indian boy, what did you say?

Indian boy, I’ll turn on the light

Indian boy, come home tonight

Most of the Spokane Indian women wanted to kick Betty and Veronica off the reservation, but the Indian men lined up every night to listen to the white women’s songs. David WalksAlong had even invited them to his home for dinner. WalksAlong was nearly a gourmet cook and could do wondrous things with commodity food. But Betty and Veronica were scared of Michael White Hawk.

They did go home with Junior and Victor one night, and everybody on the reservation knew about it. Little Indian boys crept around the house and tried to peek in the windows. All of them swore they saw the white women naked, then bragged it wasn’t the first time they’d seen a naked white woman. None of them had seen a naked Indian woman, let alone a white woman. But the numbers of naked white women who had visited the Spokane Indian Reservation rapidly grew in the boys’ imaginations, as if the size of their lies proved they were warriors.

Betty and Veronica did not take off their clothes that night, although Betty shared a bed with Junior and Veronica with Victor.

“Am I your first Indian man?” Junior asked Betty.

“No.”

“How many?”

“A few.”

“How many is a few?”

“About five or six, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Well, some were only part Indian,” Betty said.

“Jeez, which part?” asked Junior. Betty kissed him then to shut him up. Both fell asleep with their shoes on.

In the other bedroom, Victor had his hand down Veronica’s pants within a few seconds. She kept pushing it away, but Victor was persistent.

“Stop,” Veronica said. “I don’t want you to do that.”

“Why you come in here, then?” Victor asked.

“Because I like you.”

“How much do you like me?”

“You’re the best. I mean, you’re an Indian and a guitar player. How much better could you be?”

Victor pushed his hand down her pants again.

“Please stop,” she said. “I just want to kiss. I’m not ready to do that.”

Victor removed his hand but pushed Veronica’s head down near his crotch.

“Do that,” he said.

“No, I don’t do that. I don’t like it.”

“Come on.”

“No. But I’ll do it with my hand.”

Victor unbuttoned his pants and closed his eyes. Afterwards, Veronica curled up next to him as he snored. She was cold and wanted to get under the blankets but didn’t want to wake him up.

Betty and Veronica left the next morning, before Junior and Victor even woke, but they left a note. Junior read it to Victor.

“Shit,” Victor said. “They live where?”

“Seattle,” Junior said. “They have to go back to work.”

“Work? Where do they work?”

“At some bookstore, I guess. But it says here they own the bookstore.”

“Own the bookstore? Man, they must be rich, enit?” I guess.

Betty and Veronica were co-owners of a New Age bookstore in the Capitol Hill section of Seattle. They had temporarily closed it down when rumors of the all-Indian rock band hit the store. They had driven to Wellpinit, three hundred and six miles away, in six hours.

“What’s the name of the bookstore?” Victor asked.

“I don’t know. They left a bookmark though. It says ‘Doppelgangers.’”

“What the hell is a doppelganger?”

“I think it means twins or something. Like a shadow of you.

“White shadows, enit?” Victor asked.

“I guess,” Junior said.

“Do you think they’ll be back?”

“I hope so.”

The gossip about the band spread from reservation to reservation. All kinds of Indians showed up: Yakama, Lummi, Makah, Snohomish, Coeur d’Alene. Thomas and his band had developed a small following before they ever played a gig. If they’d had a phone, it would have been ringing. If they’d had a post office box, it would have been stuffed. Indians talked about the band at powwows and feasts, at softball tournaments and education conferences. But the band still didn’t have a name.

“We need a name for this band,” Thomas said after another well-attended rehearsal.

“How about Bloodthirsty Savages?” Victor asked.

“That’s a cool name, enit?” Junior asked.

“I was thinking about Coyote Springs,” Thomas said.

“That’s too damn Indian,” Junior said. “It’s always Coyote this, Coyote that. I’m sick of Coyote.”

“Fuck Coyote,” Victor said.

Lightning fell on the reservation right then, and a small fire started down near the Midnight Uranium Mine. Coyote stole Junior’s water truck and hid it in the abandoned dance hall at the powwow grounds. The truck was too big for the doors, so nobody was sure how that truck fit in there. Junior lost his job, but he had to take that truck apart piece by piece and reassemble it outside first.

The entire band was unemployed now, and Coyote had proven his strength, so the band accepted the name and became Coyote Springs. But it wasn’t a happy marriage. Coyote Springs argued back and forth all the time. Victor and Junior threatened to quit the band every day, and Thomas brought them back with promises of money and magazine covers. Victor and Junior liked to sit outside the Trading Post in Thomas’s blue van and pose for all the women who happened to walk by.

“Ya-hey,” Victor called out to the full-blood Indian women. He also called out to the white women who worked for the Tribe, especially those nurses from the IHS Clinic. Victor had a thing for white nylons, but the nurses ignored him.

“Ya-hey,” the Indian women shouted back, which was the extent of conversation. Most Indians never needed to say much to each other. Entire reservation romances began, flourished, and died during the hour-long wait to receive commodity food on the first of each month.

At first, Coyote Springs just played covers of other people’s songs. They already knew every Hank Williams song intimately because that’s all their fathers sang when drunk. They learned the entire Buddy Holly catalogue, picked up a few Aerosmith songs, and sang Spokane Indian words in place of the Spanish in Ritchie Valens’s version of “La Bamba.”

“You know,” Thomas said, “I’m going to start writing our own songs.”

“Why?” Junior asked.

“Well,” Thomas said, “because Buddy Holly wasn’t a Spokane Indian.”

“Wait,” Junior said. “Buddy was my cousin.”

“That’s true,” Victor said. “He was quarter-blood, enit?”

“Besides,” Victor said, “how come you get to write the songs?”

“Yeah,” Junior said.

“Because I have the money,” Thomas said. He had forty-two dollars in his pocket and another fifty hidden at home, much more than Junior and Victor had together. Victor understood the economics of the deal, how money equals power, especially on a reservation so poor that a dollar bill once changed the outcome of tribal elections. David WalksAlong was elected Councilman by a single vote because he’d paid Lester FallsApart a dollar to punch the ballot for him.

“Okay, then, asshole,” Victor said, “write the songs. But I’m still the Guitar God.”

So Thomas went home and tried to write their first song. He sat alone in his house with his bass guitar and waited for the song. He waited and waited. It’s nearly impossible to write a song with a bass guitar, but Thomas didn’t know that. He’d never written a song before.

“Please,” Thomas prayed.

But the song would not come, so Thomas closed his eyes, tried to find a story with a soundtrack. He turned on the television and watched The Sound of Music on channel four. Julie Andrews put him to sleep for the seventy-sixth time, and neither story nor song came in his dreams. After he woke up, he paced around the room, stood on his porch, and listened to those faint voices that echoed all over the reservation. Everybody heard those voices, but nobody liked to talk about them. They were loudest at night, when Thomas tried to sleep, and he always thought they sounded like horses.

For hours, Thomas waited for the song. Then, hungry and tired, he opened his refrigerator for something to eat and discovered that he didn’t have any food. So he closed the fridge and opened it again, but it was still empty. In a ceremony that he had practiced since his youth, he opened, closed, and opened the fridge again, expecting an immaculate conception of a jar of pickles. Thomas was hungry on a reservation where there are ninety-seven different ways to say fry bread.

Fry bread. Water, flour, salt, rolled and molded into shape, dropped into hot oil. A traditional food. A simple recipe. But Indians could spend their whole lives looking for the perfect piece of fry bread. The tribe held a fry bread cooking contest every year, and most Spokanes had their own recipe. Contestants gossiped about the latest secret ingredient. Even the little kids dropped their basketballs long enough to roll up their own bread, while Lester FallsApart mixed his flour with Thunderbird Wine. Big Mom came down from her mountain annually and won the contest for thirty-seven straight years. The-man-who-was-probably-Lakota had taken second place for the last twenty years.

“Fry bread,” Jana Wind had whispered into the ear of Bobby Running-Jones as they lay down together.

“Well, fry bread to you, too,” Bobby had said to Jana after he came home late from the bar.

“Do you want to do the fry bread?” Indian boys often asked Indian girls at their very first reservation high school dance.

“Shit,” Victor had said once. “I ain’t got much fry bread left. How long before we get to play some real music?”

As his growling stomach provided the rhythm, Thomas sat again with his bass guitar, wrote the first song, and called it “Reservation Blues.” Soon after that, the Federal Express showed up at his door with an overnight package.

“This is for Thomas Builds-the-Fire,” the FedEx guy said. He was nervous and kept scanning the tree line.

“I’m him,” Thomas said.

“Sign here,” the FedEx guy said. “Did you know I was in the war?”

“Which war?”

“All of them,” the FedEx guy said, handed the package over, and ran for his van. Thomas waved. The FedEx guy smiled, saluted, and drove away. Thomas figured that Federal Express sent its bravest and craziest couriers out to the reservation, but that made sense. Thomas opened the package. It was a letter from some Flathead Indian in Arlee, Montana. He said he was the owner of the Tipi Pole Tavern and wanted Coyote Springs to come play that weekend. He would pay.

“He’ll pay,” Thomas whispered, then chanted, then sang.

From Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s journal:

Coyote: A small canid (Canis latrans) native to western North America that is closely related to the American wolf and whose cry has often been compared to that of Sippie Wallace and Janis Joplin, among others.

Coyote: A traditional figure in Native American mythology, alternately responsible for the creation of the earth and for some of the more ignorant acts after the fact.

Coyote: A trickster whose bag of tricks contains permutations of love, hate, weather, chance, laughter, and tears, e.g., Lucille Ball.

Spring: An ultimate source of supply, especially a source of water issuing from the ground.

Spring: To issue with speed and force, as in a raging guitar solo.

Spring: To make a leap or series of leaps, e.g., from stage to waiting arms of Indian and non-Indian fans.

The blue van, tattered and bruised, cruised down an anonymous highway on the Flathead Indian Reservation and searched for the dirt road that led to the Tipi Pole Tavern. Actually, Thomas, Junior, and Victor attempted to drive and navigate. As a result of this partnership, the blue van and its three occupants, along with their musical equipment, were lost.

“Shit, Junior,” Victor said, “there ain’t but two or three roads on this whole reservation, and you’re telling me we’re lost.”

“This goddamn map is useless,” Junior said. “There are all sorts of roads ain’t even on it. This road we’re on now ain’t on the map.”

“Listen,” Thomas said, “maps just give advice anyway.”

The blue van suddenly stopped at a crossroads.

“Which way?” Thomas asked because he was driving.

“I don’t know,” Victor and Junior said because they weren’t driving.

“Let’s decide it the old Indian way,” Thomas said because he tried to be as traditional as the twentieth century allowed.

“What’s that?” Victor and Junior asked because they were as contemporary as cable television.

“We’ll drive straight,” Thomas said and pointed with his lips. “Then we find a house and ask somebody for directions.

The blue van started again, shuddered a little bit, then traveled down the highway for nearly a mile before it came upon a HUD house. Those government houses looked the same from reservation to reservation. The house on the Flathead Reservation looked like Simon’s house on the Spokane Reservation. A Flathead woman and her granddaughter stood outside in their near-yard, hands on hips, waiting.

“We heard you coming from a long ways off,” the Flathead woman said as the blue van pulled into her almost-driveway and stopped.

“Where’s the Tipi Pole Tavern?” Junior asked.

“Over there,” the woman answered and waved her arm in a random sort of way.

“Can you be more specific?” Victor asked, irritated.

The woman looked at her granddaughter, who was about five years old with her hair already gray in places. Wise old kid. The grandmother and granddaughter actually looked like sisters, except the granddaughter was forty years younger and two feet shorter.

“It’s over there, not too far,” the granddaughter answered and waved her arm in a general sort of direction.

“Jeez,” Victor said. “How do we get there?”

“Why you want to know?” the woman and granddaughter asked.

“Because we’re playing over there tonight,” Junior said.

“Playing what?” the granddaughter asked.

“Music,” Victor said. “We’re a band.”

“What’s your name?” the grandmother asked.

“Coyote Springs,” Thomas said.

The grandmother walked close to the blue van, picked up her granddaughter so she could see inside, and looked the band over closely.

“Who’s the lead singer?” the granddaughter asked.

“I am,” Thomas said.

“Well, then,” the granddaughter said directly to Thomas. “Just go back down the way you came, take a left at the first intersection after a big tree stump painted red. Drive down that road for a while and then take the first right you see. About three mailboxes down that way is the Tipi Pole Tavern.”

“Thanks, cousin,” Thomas said, and the blue van pulled back onto the highway and made its way to the tavern.

“Jesus,” Junior said. “Ain’t that the way it always is? They only want to talk to the lead singer. All they want to know is the lead singer. Lead singer this. Lead singer that.”

“Enit,” Victor said. “Where the fuck would Mick Jagger be without Keith Richards?”

“He’d be at the Tipi Pole Tavern,” Thomas said, “already done with the sound check.”

The blue van pulled up to the tavern only two hours later than scheduled. A little old Flathead man sat alone by the front door. The tavern was closed, but that old man wanted to be the first customer when it opened.

“Ya-hey,” the old Indian man called out.

“Ya-hey,” the blue van called back.

“Are you the band?”

“Yeah, we’re Coyote Springs.”

“Little bit early, enit?”

“We thought we was two hours late by real time. At least an hour late by Indian time.”

“Shit, people out here work on double Indian time. You could’ve showed up tomorrow and been okay. What kind of music you play, anyway?”

“Little bit of everything. Whole bunch of the blues.”

“Reservation blues, huh?”

“That’s it, uncle.”

Coyote Springs climbed out of the blue van and sat with the old man. They offered him cigarettes, candy, dirty jokes. Then it was dark.

“About time,” the Flathead said.

“Time for what?”

The old man pointed down the road and smiled as dozens of headlights appeared.

“Shit,” Victor said. “It’s either your whole damn tribe or the cavalry.”

“Well,” the old man said, “we heard you was an all-Indian band, and we wanted to hear you play. I guess even some of the sober ones are coming. Hope the bar has enough Diet Pepsi.”

The owner of the bar pulled up. He took a minute getting out of his pickup because of his enormous cowboy hat and dinner-plate belt buckle engraved with the name JIMMY. The cowboy hat and belt buckle walked up to Coyote Springs and the old man.

“You must be Coyote Springs,” he said.

“Yeah, we are. You must be Jimmy.”

“Nah,” the man said and looked down at his belt buckle. “I ain’t Jimmy. Not really.”

“Well,” Thomas said, confused. “We really are Coyote Springs.”

“The one and only,” Victor said.

“So,” the bar owner asked, “who’s the lead singer?”

Thomas raised his hand.

“Let’s go, then.”

The tavern soon filled with Indians of all sizes, shapes, and colors. They all waited to hear Coyote Springs for the first time.

“Look at all those Skins,” Victor said. “They must think it’s Bingo night.”

“Are you ready?” Thomas asked.

“Ready to he fucking immortal,” Victor said. His fifteen-year-old green silk shirt and matching polyester pants glowed in the spotlight.

Coyote Springs counted one, two, three, then fell into their first paid chord together, off rhythm. They stopped, counted again, rose into that first chord again, then the second, third, and in a move that stunned the crowd and instantly propelled them past nearly every rock band in history, played a fourth chord and nearly a fifth. Four and a half chords, and then Thomas Builds-the-Fire stepped up to the microphone to sing.