FETTERMAN

James High Eagle, Ed Best, and Jim Fishes From Above were an odd trio, the one young and bold, with sharp eyes, broad shoulders and a sweet heart, but a terrible temper; the other a middle-aged, non-stop drinker who liquor never got the better of, because he grew silent instead of boisterous; and the last one, a hard worker with nothing to say unless it could make you laugh, who was inseparable from his baseball cap (which had a football logo) and his hand-rolled cigarettes. But one thing they shared in common was that they were all Oglala Sioux, which is how they ended up together in the parking lot of Brewster’s in Rapid City, getting out of Jim Fish’s beat-up Chief Cherokee. (Everything Jim used had some tie-in with Indians, whether it was the Chief Cherokee he drove, the Washington Redskins cap he wore, the "Homeland Security" T-shirt with the picture of Geronimo and his Apaches which he donned underneath his blue-jean vest, or the Sacagawea dollar coins which his wife had sewed into his belt, alternately exposing the side with the beautiful Shoshone guide and the eagle.)

"Back in the 60s, Dad said, this joint had a sign up that said ‘No Indians Allowed’," Ed reminded them. "This is where Upright Bear got shot."

"The sign says ‘Beer’," Jim Fish said. "Isn’t that what you want?"

"Come on," said High Eagle, waving them on good-naturedly. "No one can tell us no, just because we’re skins." It wasn’t that he was naïve, he only had a sense of justice that didn’t bend.

"There’s another place, about two miles from here," said Ed, too late, as Jim followed High Eagle into the bar.

All three of them sat down together, right there, in the front, while white men at the tables behind them stopped talking. The pool players in the back also stopped, and the faces of the men at the stools in front of the bartender, who the three Lakota sat down next to, grew strained.

"Three beers," Ed said. "Off the tap."

After a while, the bartender asked: "Which beer?"

"Budweiser will do just fine," Ed said.

From the tables, an interrupted conversation started up again, and someone sitting at the bar, beside them, went back to complaining to the bartender about the GPS chips auto manufacturers were putting into cars and trucks now.

"Emergency tracking systems," the bartender said. "Do you know that guy who got stuck in the snow and died in his van cause no one could find him? The old guy with the eight grandkids? They could’ve saved him."

"The government’s going to use the chips to keep tabs on us, that’s what they’re going to do. Won’t be no privacy or freedom anymore, the government is growing like a monster, bigger and bigger every day. Tax us to death, spy on us. When will it stop? The spirit that built this land is on the way out."

The three Oglala men received their beers. It looked like everything was going to be all right. It was just like a day in the forest, different kinds of animals going about their business, birds flying around in the tops of the trees, bears scratching their backs on the trunks. Nobody getting in anybody’s way. But then, someone had to say something. They just had to.

"From my cold dead hand," someone was saying at a table.

"Easy, the Supreme Court’s on our side," another voice reassured him.

"No, but now they want to limit assault weapons. It’s nobody’s damned business how many rounds I can fire and how fast! You got all kinds of creeps around these days, crazy kids on drugs come around to the farm in a stolen car and shoot folks up or steal money for a high. Prairie-land junkies and drifters from the East. You heard about that little girl they found? What a damned shame! Flames of Hell ain’t hot enough for the son-of-a-bitch who did that! And then you got that crazy alcoholic lot of Indians out there, on the res, who are always on the verge of snapping. For them, every white man is Custer all over again. Never know when they’re going to show up to pick a fight, or steal your car, or shoot holes through your window. Politicians don’t know! From my cold, dead hand, pal, from my cold, dead hand!"

"Don’t pay it any mind," Ed told High Eagle, who he could see was flustered by the man’s comments. "He’s ignorant, that’s all."

But somebody happened to overhear Ed calming down High Eagle, and suddenly, the loud voice behind them was saying, "Who called me ignorant? The Injun over there? Which one? That one? They both got blue jean tops. Which one? That one?"

Jim Fish, since he had nothing funny to say, just stared ahead with the kind of inexpressive face which used to infuriate treaty-makers from Washington whenever they came to swindle Native peoples with offers which any reasonable man was supposed to fall for.

They felt a presence looming behind them, as other voices were calling out: "Easy, Bruce, don’t start nothing! Let it slide! They’re just a bunch of stupid Indians!"

The three Lakota turned around.

"Someone here call me ignorant?" Bruce demanded. Two friends got up to support him.

For a moment no one spoke. The silence seemed like giving in.

"Good," said Bruce, a bear-like man with a rough beard and huge, agitated arms. "Glad you know your place. We won," he said, beginning to head back to his table.

Ed didn’t speak because he was prudent; Jim kept his mouth shut because he was disciplined and knew that, after a certain point, he might not be able to control himself: being taciturn is the best defense against passion which burns too hot. High Eagle said nothing because when he was furious, he couldn’t speak, only stare with eyes that were like hot coals. But as the lumbering white man headed back towards his table, thinking his race superior, High Eagle had to do something to rescue his spirit. "I said: You are ignorant," he lied.

As the white man turned around in disbelief, Ed corrected his friend. "No, he’s not the one who said it. I did."

"Well, I’m saying it now," High Eagle said.

Now, five white men in the bar were standing. The Lakota were also standing.

"No one calls me ignorant," the white man said. "Not in my own country. Do you understand? You lost. We won. Wounded Knee mean anything to you?"

"The law says this country belongs to us as much as you," said Ed. "We come here to drink, just like you do, we pay our money, just like you do, and we have our constitutional right to think what we want, just like you do; and I just exercised my freedom of speech by saying that what you said was ignorant. Now you can keep right on saying it, if you want to, but that’s my view."

High Eagle found Ed’s rebuttal far too tame. "First of all," High-Eagle said, "this isn’t your country, it’s ours. So don’t go around acting like you own it. Secondly, don’t start up about crazy Indians, fact is, you bring more hell to these parts than we do."

"Fact is," growled Bruce, savage and hateful, "you’re all a bunch of drunks and slackers. Rob, drink, do drugs, f**k, sleep, and wait on government handouts. Cry about being poor, about what we stole from you; fact is, you couldn’t use it, couldn’t do nothing with what God gave you except to ride around naked on horses, so he gave it to us instead; you’re all a bunch of bitter losers, that’s what you are. You don’t need to come to this bar." And he added, looking at the coins on Jim Fish’s belt: "Pretty little Indian ho. They really bend over backwards to make you feel good about yourselves in Washington, don’t they?"

"What, you want a piece of me?" Bruce demanded. "You want a piece of me? Let him go, let Chief Dumb Ass try me!"

Everybody was excited now, as High Eagle shouted, "White trash! You’re just the kind who would have murdered women and children at Wounded Knee!"

"And raped them, too, if your bitches weren’t so ugly," he said. "Didn’t Columbus say they had the faces of dogs?"

"Hey, Bruce," one of his friends told him, "show him the post card! Show him the post card!"

By now, Jim and Ed could barely keep a hold on High Eagle. He was thrashing around like a fish in the claws of a bear, his eyes like raging fire. "White trash!" he shouted again. "Let me go, let me kill him!" He would have said more, but his anger was burning all his words into nothing, they were turning to steam before anyone could hear them.

"Calm down!" Ed was shouting, while Jim was torn two ways, a part of him wanting to let High Eagle go.

Bruce’s friend came back with the post card from the rack of post cards and souvenirs which they kept in a corner, just in case one of the thousands of tourists who swarmed all over Rapid City like black flies wandered in. It was a post card from Wounded Knee, featuring the crumpled up, frozen figure of Chief Big Foot lying in the snow, after they came back for his body after the blizzard which followed the massacre. The friend of Bruce held it up to High Eagle’s face, as High Eagle’s friends held him back.

"Yeah, there’s your history lesson for the day," Bruce said. "Now get the hell out of here. Find some other place to get your firewater. Now be a good little Indian boy, and go back to Pocahontas; oh, that’s right, she ran off with John Smith. Smart girl. Moving up." All the white men were laughing now, but suddenly, one of them exclaimed: "Look out, he has a knife!" And they all drew back in fear.

High Eagle, in fact, had a small knife, and had managed to pull it out.

"Stop! Stop!" Ed was yelling.

"Cool it, buck!" Jim was shouting.

Tables were overturned, and chairs and bottles were seized as weapons. A white man ran out, to get a rifle from the back of his pick-up. But the bartender already had a shotgun out from behind the bar and was pointing it at the wild, writhing pile of Lakota men, shouting: "Get the hell out of here right now! Right now! Get out, now, or you’re all going to end up in the pen, god damn it! And you can spend the rest of your lives with Leonard Peltier!"

"You’re taking their side?" High Eagle raged, whirling around in the direction of the bartender. "They start with us, and you’re going to blame us, just because they’re white like you? You don’t have any sense of right and wrong, not even in your own bar?"

"Listen, you god damned Indians all stick together," the bartender said. "Get out of here, and don’t come back."

"But this wasichu dog, except that dogs are better than him, started this!" High Eagle exclaimed.

The bartender said: "Everyone here saw you start it. Understand? Now get out, this is your last chance." His arms were shaking, and the shotgun was pointed right at High Eagle’s head. High Eagle smiled like Lakota warriors used to when they looked death in the eyes.

"Go on," he said. "Shoot me. I won’t get lost on this path. Many have traveled it before me."

The white man who’d run out returned with a loaded assault rifle, a semi-automatic with high-caliber shells that wouldn’t leave much of a man at this range.

"Let them out!" the bartender ordered. "Move away from the door, and let them out. I don’t want a killing, I don’t want police! Not here or in the parking lot! I just want them out!" Then, turning to the Indians again, he said, once more: "Get out, and don’t come back! You’re not welcome here! Ever!"

"Yeah, get your red asses out of my bar!" Bruce thundered, as Jim and Ed dragged the scowling High Eagle, whose madness cooled only one or two degrees at the sight of the weapons, out of harm’s way.

"Shut up!" barked the bartender to Bruce. "I don’t want police reports! I don’t want blood on my floor!"

Out in the parking lot, the white man with the assault rifle who came out after them stood by as they got into their Chief Cherokee, and backed up, hastily, over the gravel.

"Racist sons-of-bitches!" Ed snarled, as they swerved, backwards, off of the gravel and onto the road.

Jim said nothing, but the windshield wipers didn’t work the next day, and Ed thought that maybe it was because of the way he was looking out of the vehicle at the white men as they left.

For a moment, High Eagle sat there impassively, haughty, you could even say, worn out by his struggle and choosing, at the very least, to disdain his enemies if he could not kill them. But suddenly, an irresistible fury rose up in his breast. "Let me out," he said.

"What?" Ed demanded.

"I have to take a leak."

Jim slowed down.

"Real bad."

They were a few miles from the bar now, so that Jim thought it was safe. He stopped. The stretch of road they were on was pretty empty.

"What are you going in the back for?" Ed demanded, alarmed.

"I need the light you got there."

"What for?"

"In case there’s snakes in the grass."

Ed was fooled for a minute, but Jim guessed what was happening, and said, "Don’t."

"Son of a bitch!" exclaimed Ed. "No, kola, don’t!"

But High Eagle had Jim’s hunting rifle and the paper sack with the shells in it, and a blanket in which to wrap the rifle until he got back to the bar. He slashed one of his friend’s tires so that they’d lose time putting on the spare, and started walking in the darkness, along the side of the road.

"No, stop!" Jim shouted, driving his wounded car off the side of the road.

He and Jim jumped out to restrain High Eagle, but by now High Eagle was running away from them so that they could not catch him.

"No, for God’s sakes, stop!" Ed cried. "Don’t kola, they’re not worth it! They’re stupid, ignorant white men! You’ll spend the rest of your life in jail, for nothing! Think of your friends, your relatives! What about Sarah Hears Voices? You haven’t noticed the way she looks at you? I can tell she’d be a good wife."

"The sacred tree will never bloom again if all the people are in jail!" Jim Fishes From Above cried after him. "The people will dry up, like an old woman’s womb!"

"Sorry about the tire," High Eagle shouted back to them. "I have some money in an envelope in my trailer. It’s yours."

"Come back!" Jim shouted. "Don’t be a fool! Don’t throw your life away just because white trash has a big mouth!"

"These are the people who took away our land, and killed our people!" High Eagle said. "Thanks to them, I’ve never really known what it is to be a Lakota. Now, I’ll finally know."

"No! Not this way!" Ed shouted. "You won’t know nothing except what it’s like to be a piece of meat in a white man’s jail! Or else a dead fool lying in a parking lot, who didn’t change a thing. Crazy Horse died as a warrior, not as a punk!"

"Come back!" said Jim, again.

But High Eagle, his mind made up, turned his back on them and started running.

Ed and Jim, unable to match him, ran back to the Cherokee, pulled it back onto the road and tried to drive after him, in spite of the flat, but another tire was also low, and High Eagle was too fast and elusive for them, and also picked a shortcut which took him off the road. So, once more, they pulled over to the side of the road. Though Ed had a phone, it had no more minutes on it, and they didn’t have a CB on board, so it all came down to how fast they could get the Cherokee up and running.

"Come on, help me get a new tire on! Hurry!" Ed urged Jim. Ed seemed to know Jim’s vehicle even better than its owner, maybe from all the times Jim had lent it to him (which was how it had got so many dents).

All the while, as they jacked up the back, and worked on the tire with a wrench, Jim kept his head up, looking at the cars that passed.

"Pay attention, the boy’s life is at stake!" Ed practically wept. "This has got to be like an Indianapolis pit stop, god damn it!"

But Jim had been praying, and when he saw a beat-up pick-up passing by with some tired skins in it, he waved at them, and shouted out to them in Sioux. They slowed down, and waited on the other side of the road. "Need help, kola?" the driver asked him, while a family with blankets wrapped around them, in the open air in the back where cargo is usually carried, looked at him with expressions that revealed nothing except that it had been a long day.

"Yeah, kola, you’ve got to help! This kid I know is going to shoot up a bar, because white trash insulted him, and he’s going to ruin his life forever! You’ve got to drive me there, I’ve got to get there before he does, and maybe I can stop him!"

Suddenly, everybody in the pick-up was wide awake.

The driver, said, "Hop in! What about him?"

"Leave it on the side of the road, we’ll come back for it!" Jim urged Ed, even though the car was still in the air.

Not even bothering to lock up, just leaving the flare there behind the car, and taking Jim’s keys with him, Ed leapt into the back of the truck with the family.

"Hurry!" pleaded Jim. "He must be almost there! He runs like Billy Mills."

The driver stepped on the gas, and they almost had a head-on, as some fool tried to pass someone in the other lane right as they were coming on.

"Careful!" a woman’s voice cried out from the back. "We could’ve rolled over, with all the kids!"

"Well, we didn’t!" the driver said.

For those few moments, as they tore through the night, Jim wondered how he would ever be able to stop the enraged youth from killing the white men in the bar. In some ways Jim was proud of the boy, because High Eagle wasn’t about to kill a man because he, himself, had been insulted, but because his people had been insulted. More than insulted, because they had been ravaged, and these white people were still reveling in the crime. But vain or noble, the end for High Eagle would be the same. "How do you stop a kid like this?" he wondered. "He’s pumped up, his blood is burning, he’s a young buck. In the old days, this righteous rage would have made him great. Nowadays, it will make him the lowest of the low. In the old days, it might have saved his people; nowadays, it will weaken his people, it will deprive them of a warrior, and it will give power to those who despise them." But High Eagle would not listen, he was sure. He was a Lakota brave in a world made for cowards; until he proved himself, he would not be at peace with himself, and could not be at peace with the world. And there was no way to prove himself in a world made for cowards, except by going against it. Jim knew that that was suicide.

"Why is it that the most beautiful ones can never learn their limits from others?" Jim wondered. How could he stop the boy?

And that’s when he remembered the trip. The trip he had made eight years ago with High Eagle’s uncle and aunt, and High Eagle and his brother, and two other Oglala men, who wanted to see the battlefield outside the old site of Fort Phil Kearney in Nebraska, where Red Cloud had won his greatest victory in 1866. In those days, an arrogant cavalry captain, William Fetterman, had declared that with 80 men he could ride through the whole Sioux nation. Red Cloud had given him the chance. Attacking a band of woodcutters outside the fort, he lured Fetterman and a detachment of cavalry out in relief. Fetterman duly rescued the wood cutters, but had orders not to pursue the enemy beyond the line of sight of the fort. At this point, he should have returned to the fort. But as a band of Native decoys, including Crazy Horse, taunted him and insulted him from a distance, slapping their buttocks and waving blankets at him, he could not restrain himself from disobeying his orders and leading his forces after them, until they finally led him into a deadly trap. From all sides, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors raised up a triumphant, furious howl and sprang out of hiding, showering him and his invading army with clouds of arrows which decimated them, before finally closing in to finish off the last of his troops at close quarters with tomahawks and war clubs. It was a bitter cold December day, and not a single white man lived. Jim remembered old One Horn, High Eagle’s uncle, telling the boy, who was very much impressed by the tale: "Fetterman was a fool who couldn’t control his temper. He didn’t respect us. He thought he was more than a match for us, that we were nothing but cannon fodder for his glory. When he saw Indian braves, he didn’t see danger, he only saw a medal around his neck. And that’s why he died, and bore forever the shame of losing all his men." And the old man had told High Eagle: "Fetterman was the perfect enemy, because he did everything we wanted him to, when we wanted him to; we owned him because he was not the master of himself. A warrior must have spirit, but he must also know when and how to use it. There is a time to charge, and a time to hold back; a time to fight, and a time to look. What may be behind that hill? Think! He who throws his life away for nothing betrays his people, because they will surely need him down the road, and then, where will he be? Fetterman, what a fool! He was the perfect enemy!"

"Nothing will make him stop!" Ed was lamenting, as the pick-up driven by their new friends rumbled onto the gravel in front of Brewster’s, just as High Eagle was coming in with the folded blanket concealing the rifle in his arms. "He’s got it in his head that he has to do this to be a man! He’s a young buck!"

The driver wildly honked his horn and Ed and Jim jumped out, and also one of the women from the back cried out, begging the boy, "Brave one, don’t be foolish, don’t let us down – tomorrow we’ll be alone!"

"Stop! Stop!" the people were crying.

High Eagle’s face was hard, Ed and Jim froze in their tracks, the kid was beside himself with rage, mad in his intention, he had swung the rifle towards them, to keep his way to the door open.

"We’re your own!" a woman cried. "Because they insulted you, you’re going to shoot us? You’ve lost it!"

Furious, High Eagle turned away from them and made ready to crash through the door. That’s when Jim Fish yelled: "Fetterman! Go get ‘em, Fetterman!" He could see High Eagle stop, stunned, he could see his whole body flinch. High Eagle tried to shake it off, he began to barrel forward again, but again Jim yelled: "Go on Fetterman, you can do it! You can ride through the whole Sioux nation! Fetterman! Yes, FETTERMAN, that’s you! That’s what I’m going to write on your gravestone! FETTERMAN!"

You couldn’t have told High Eagle not to do what he was going to do in any other way, because he would have thought you were trying to override the Indian in him. To steal away his loyalty to his people and himself, to eclipse the identity which he knew he had to hold onto. But by comparing him to a crazy white man…

While High Eagle stood there, amazed and confused, Ed ran up and grabbed him, and then Jim came up and took away the gun, and the brave woman was also there, saying, "Don’t deprive us of a good young man, we need every one we’ve got!"

And High Eagle stood there, tears in his eyes, as Jim, passing the gun back to the woman, put his arm around his friend, and said: "That’s not how a warrior fights, kola. That’s not the world we live in. If you are fighting only for yourself, selfishly for yourself, well, go on, then, turn that god-damned bar upside down. But if you’re fighting for your people, there’s other ways to fight, and other times to fight. Your people are living in poverty, in degradation. You can’t help them from a jail. Killing a racist won’t do a thing. It will only make more racists. Do you want to help us, or only to die?"

High Eagle looked distraught. By now, they had him packed in the back of the pick-up, and were pulling out of the parking lot as a band of white people began to emerge from the bar, attracted by the racket and expecting some kind of trouble. They already had a gun with them.

Jim was in the back sitting with High Eagle. "Stay calm, kola. Stay calm." Not quickly enough, the bar disappeared into the night.

"They got the better of us," High Eagle said, at last.

"No, they didn’t. They lost the spirit that makes a man a man a long time ago. They’ve got guns, they’ve got that stupid bar, where they drink and hate; and I guess you could say they’ve got the world, too; but they have nothing wakan inside them. They are like empty shells, without life. We have souls, High Eagle. Their world is dying. It is from our souls that the world will be reborn, if it is its fate to live. That’s our battle, now, High Eagle. To stay alive, and to remain men as we do so. To be brave in a holy way. Not as drunkards who fight in a bar, but as men who hold the world in our hands."

The friends in the pick-up came up to Jim’s car, still propped up on the jack. No one had messed with it in the time they were gone. "The Great Spirit has stood by our Cherokee!" Ed said, really meaning it.

Everyone stayed around until the tire was back on. High Eagle is the one who made the final turns of the wrench, and unwound the jack so that the wheel touched the road again.

"Sorry," he told Jim, another time. "I’ll pay you for the tire I slashed. I’ll pay you twice its worth."

"We’re doing an inipi this weekend, out in the hills," Jim told High Eagle. "Sweating is a great way to start over."

High Eagle nodded.

"You’ve got to fly higher, Eagle," Jim told him. "Will you join us?"

"Good-bye!" they said again.

The world rarely notices the things that don’t happen. But sometimes, they are more powerful than a whole newspaper full of things that did.

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