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[julesdelorme]

WARNING: Violent and explicit language and thoughts.

This is Chapter 4 of faller. You can find the whole thing so far at:

https://www.facebook.com/delormewriting

faller

Chapter 4

Moccasin Face

by Jules F. Delorme

I have floated through time and from body to body for as long as there has been time and the bodies from which to count that time. I have seen and done many things through many different eyes and always I am able to pass for one of them.

I know the exquisite silence of death. 

I have grown fond of death. 

Perhaps because I can never truly know death. Or perhaps because I love the empty and dark silence that always follows death.

I take joy in bringing death to others.

I have lost count of how many deaths that I have brought. 

It has been so many. 

I like to watch the life slipping from behind their eyes and I like to watch their spirits leave the flesh behind to wander lost and suffering for the rest of what it is that they have come to call time.

In this body I have killed over a hundred I think.

Some have said that it is more than one hundred and fifty. Others that it is a little as one hundred. Still others have said that it might be more than one two hundred.

I have lost count. 

The exact number does not matter to me. 

Numbers seem to matter very much to them. But I do not care. 

Though there have been moments where I have tried to count how many lives I have taken in each body so that I know if it is more or less than in the past. I have always grown tired of trying to count.

I do not think that this body has killed over one hundred and fifty.

Most were men. Some were women and children.

I have no particular care about who it is that I kill. One sack of meat is pretty much like the other. It is the exquisite silence of death that I long for and that I kill for and in my opinion they all make too much noise in the coming to the silence. 

His enemies calls this body Two Stick because he wields a war club in each hand during battle.

The people of his village call him Moccasin Face because his face resembles a worn out moccasin that has been stitched together again and again.

They do not call him that to his face. 

But I have heard them say it just the same.

I do not care what any of them call him. Just so long as he is permitted to kill.

That is all that I have ever cared about.

Before there were these two leg creatures I have been here.

There were other creatures then. But the two legs are the best to be and to kill because they are aware of death and afraid of death and their minds are filled with hatred and fear and ridiculous reasons to kill that have nothing to do with any real need to kill at all and they are best to kill because they make so much more noise than any of the other living things and thus the silence is so sweet.

It is fun to be Moccasin Face.

There is so much talk to hear about the side that he belongs to and the ones that he does not belong to, about his tribe against that tribe, about good people and bad people. But in the end it always comes down to yet another reason for the killing and that brings me such pleasure. I do not care about the reasons, but the lies that hide behind them make these two legs so much more interesting and so much more fun than other creatures. 

They are happy to have him use his war clubs on their enemies. 

They are even happy that he brings their enemies great pain. 

They just do not want to know that he enjoys it. 

They do not want to know that I enjoy it.

They just do not want to know or to believe how very much that I enjoy the killing.

They want him to enjoy the fight. They want him to enjoy the battle.

They would not be pleased to realize that we enjoy the killing.

That would shatter their carefully constructed illusions. And there is no greater sin that you can commit among these two legs than to rupture their layers of crusted lies.

They would not even like to know how much pleasure I take in the killing of the Black Robes.

The Black Robes, who stink worse than a bear coming out of its winter sleep, whose skin is so pale that they look sickly even when sun lingers, and who speak a language that is as awful as their smell. The Black Robes who want to force a new God on these people. A God who will not accept any of the other Gods because his ego is so large. Who has rules that the Black Robes speak but do not live. The Black Robes who bring sickness and bad medicine from across the great water on their big boats but who cannot even paddle a canoe in the gentlest parts of the great river. Who want to give that river the name of one of their sainted medicine man from a world they come from, a name that has nothing to do with this river or with this world. Who do not even know the river but think that they can give it a name of their own.

They are delicious, these Black Robes.

They lie to themselves more beautifully than any I have seen before this.

But even these self-righteous creatures I am not supposed to take pleasure in killing.

The Black Robes mostly avoid Moccasin Face. The Black Robes mostly avoid me. Something in them sees what I am and they know without knowing to keep their distance from me though that often does not do them any good in the end.

Most of the women avoid Moccasin Face too. 

His face is too ugly and too frightening and perhaps they too see in his eyes that I would enjoy hurting them if given the chance to do so.

I am happy to be left alone to my own musings, and to my own special pleasures. Though I would love to catch one of these Black Robes alone.

The Wyandot have grown so sick with these Black Robes’ disease that their people are fewer now than Moccasin Face’s, even though they were once a much larger Nation than Moccasin Face’s tribe ever was.

That is the disappointing thing that the Black Robes have done. 

They have killed more Wyandot than even I could ever kill.

But many of his people, particularly the women and children have also taken to the Black Robes’ teachings and have been felled by their bad Medicine. They kneel and pray before this new tortured God even as they die from the Black Robe demons and their wonderfully terrible diseases.

And the Black Robes call the Wyandot, their allies, Huron. An insult. Their insult their own allies.

I would like to kill all the Black Robes if I could, but they are so deliciously murderous and duplicitous in their own right that it seems almost a shame to kill them at all.

I would like to kill all the pale devils who come across the Great Water, but they bring their Bad Medicine and their selfish insecure God with them and I so enjoy watching them destroy even the souls of the people that they claim that they wish to save. I like watching the destruction that they bring. I would like to poke a hole in their guts and slowly pull their entrails out while boiling their lower bodies and their scrotums in scalding water or to hang them upside down over a small slow fire to bake the inside of their heads ever so slowly just to watching them scream and denounce their jealous God. But they do such delicious harm, and the Elders of his Council have spoken, and said that he should not kill them or do things to them until they give him good reason.

The pale two legs’ Algonquin guides call Moccasin Face’s people Man-eaters. The Algonquins themselves have been known to eat parts of men in order to send them into the next world without their best and strongest parts. The Algonquin live in dirt huts like Beavers and run away from his people rather than stand and fight. The Algonquin help the pasty skinned two legs that have crossed great waters to claim the land and banish old Gods and who understand nothing of this world yet think that they can tell those already here how to live and put names on things that they do do know.

Moccasin Face has killed many Algonquin. 

He has eaten parts of their bodies.

I have eaten parts of their bodies.

The Algonquin are far stronger and braver than the Black Robes who look down on even them.

Moccasin Face once caught a white skinned soldier in the woods. The soldier tried to aim his thunder stick at Moccasin Face, but it was raining, and they seem only able to call upon the thunder when the sky is not using it. I could see the fear in the soldier’s eyes even though he was supposed to be one of their warriors. I cut thin strips off of the soles of his feet and he screamed like a frightened rabbit. I cut a hole in his belly and dragged some of his innards out. He screamed and cried and he begged Moccasin Face. I could not understand his words but I knew the begging for what it was. Then Moccasin Face took his knife and dug holes in both sides of the soldier’s mouth, and he pried out his teeth out through the holes in the man’s cheeks one by one. The soldier cried in ways that even children would not cry and I thought if this is what the white skinned warriors are, then the Black Robes, who will not even fight, must be weaker than anyone can even imagine. The soldier soiled himself and vomited and urinated all over the insides of his clothes. The smell was a wonderful thing. Crows came along and I let them have their way with him after cutting out his tongue and feeding it to the crows so that he could not scream out loud anymore. His screams were growing tiresome even for me.

But he broke so very deeply and quivered with so much fear and weakness that it filled me with bliss.

I did not eat any part of him.

I was so deeply thankful for his cowardice and his weakness but I feared having it inside Moccasin Face’s body, for fear that that weakness might enter me. 

I decided then and there that these creatures with skin the colour of the underbelly of a toad and their hairy faces were the very best ones to kill. I hope that many more of them will come over the great water and bring their weakness and their one delusional God with them.

Oh, it would please me so.

I was beginning to despair that these stoic people in Moccasin Face’s world would never give me the kind of pleasure that I most deeply desired.

These creatures walk and move like the other two legs. They resemble the other two legs except for their pale skin and all the hair on their faces and bodies. But they are something much better. They are something far more precious than those that were already here, because they have such great delusions and so little courage. They fill me with happiness with the weak ways that they die and the diseases and destruction that they leave behind them.

Even the Wyandot, even the dirt dwelling Algonquin have showed more strength, more dignity and more courage than these hairy, sickly pale, soft and cowardly creatures.

I have resolved that the next time that Moccasin Face catches one of these creatures I will cut him open little by little, to try to keep him alive for as long as possible so that I can see if their insides work in the same way that other two legs do. 

Perhaps they are not even of the same world. 

Perhaps they do not work in the same way at all.

I do not know if cutting them open will reveal their secrets.

It probably will not.

It can be very tricky to tell the insides of one thing from another sometimes.

But at the very least I will cause the next one as much pain as possible before killing them.

That is one thing that I enjoy even more than the killing.

That is the one thing that I have made Moccasin Face better at even than killing. 

He will cause them such incredible pain.

He will cause them such great and truly terrible pain.

And I will enjoy every delicious moment of it.

I will enjoy that next time the most, I think.

I think that I will enjoy the next one more than any of the others so far.

Especially if the next one is one of the wonderful pale skins.

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[julesdelorme]

Chapter 3 of faller. You can find the whole thing so far at the link at the bottom of this post.... Chapter 3 - the boy

I see him walking across the field, through the patches of dried out tall grass, the rotted out rusted corpses of cars and tractor parts that have been there for as long as I remembered, for what seems like as long as anybody remembered. 

I’m not sure he’s real. 

I’m not sure he’s human. 

He looks like some kind of monster, like some kind of beast from an old TV movie the old people’s stories with the strange shuffling limp and scarred shaved bald head, bare in the hot summer sun, shining in some places and dull in others. Nobody on the Rez walks around with a bare head in the middle of summer. 

Sometimes old Pieface Tim comes wandering over from next door, forgetting where he lives, but he has all his hair except for in one spot on the side of his head where somebody hit him with a rock from a campfire and he always wears a Canadian Tire cap. 

This one’s definitely not old Pieface. Even old Pieface looks like a human being at first look. 

I don’t have any particular feeling about this not stranger or about what he might do. It’s hot and I’m bored and I’m tired. 

I’m always tired. 

The doctors said I would get tired.

I don’t think that he’s going to ease my boredom or make me not tired in any way that matters, even if he’s some kind of real monster.

When I tell the story later on if I live I’ll probably say that I felt his presence as I stood there and knew that he was going to have a profound effect upon on my world. But it won’t be true. It’ll be a Rez truth. Sort of the truth but with a better story. It’ll make the story a little more interesting and more fun to tell, but it won’t be true. I take less notice of him than I might a crow or a mockingbird setting down on one of those rusted skeletons. It’s the nature of my world that people, even if they bring trouble, and they almost bring some kind of trouble on the Rez, are just one more drip in the monotony of exhaustion and pain that makes up my childhood.

The sad truth of it is that even him looking like some kind of monster, that strange limp, the way that he shuffles instead of walks, the wildness and woundedness of his appearance, isn’t remarkable in this place. Bad nutrition and drink leave so many people looking that way. Some were born that way because their mothers or their fathers or both had drunk too much and eaten too little and everything that they did eat was made of sugar or corn or bleached white something. It’s not all that unusual to see people without arms or legs because of diabetes or because they passed out drunk on the train tracks.

Even with the money from casinos most of us don’t take care of ourselves the way white people do. Maybe because we’re still raised by people who got beat down by the kihnarà:ken, by the white people, till they believed their lives didn’t matter.

I pretty much assume that the man’s going to hurt me.

I mean I don’t think he’s a Wendigo or anything like that. Just something about him like he just gave up on being human.

He’s in jail again. My rake'níha. My father. 

I’m all alone except for Goat, and she’s too old to do all that much damage to a stranger. I’m too small and skinny and weak to put up much of a fight. I fight back most of the time anyway. I never seem to have the sense to sit still and just take it the way that other kids on the Rez have figured out to do, to just take it until it comes to a stop. I keep getting up until I can’t get up anymore. I almost always make it worse. 

I know that sooner or later someone’s going to kill me. 

Maybe I hope that sooner or later somebody will kill me.

I don’t know.

I don’t want much to be alive. I don’t want much to be here. 

I just don’t have the energy to kill myself. I’ve thought about all the different ways to do it but it’s too much work.

It’d be so much easier if somebody kills me.

Maybe this strange monster looking limping man will be the one.

Even if he isn’t a Wendigo. He’s probably some kind of monster.

I don’t honestly know any more if I actually want to die or if it’s just not in me to lie down and stay down, that I’m just too stubborn to die. 

The doctors say I’m going to die. 

But that’s going to take a while.

And it’s going to hurt.

A lot.

People keep saying I’m brave. I’m not brave.

My brain doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. Even on the Rez people think I’m strange. Some of the older kids compare me to the character in that old movie Cool Hand Luke because they beat on me and I keep getting back up. I love that movie. I thought maybe it was meant as a kind of compliment. But later, when I watched that movie again, when I saw the sick look on the convicts’ faces when Luke wouldn’t stop getting up, couldn’t stop getting up, even when he knew that he’d been licked by George Kennedy. I knew then it’s not a compliment. I figure I might end up like Luke did at the end of that movie. Lying dead on a dirty floor with a big stupid grin on my face. 

The beatings from him, from my rake'níha, from my father, and my mother when I see her, and strangers when I see them, are just one more tributary of the monotonous suffering that is the stinking river of my childhood. 

This monster looking man will probably hurt me and root through the house, the burned out ruin that passes for our home, my home, in search of something that he can take. He might even kill me. I’m so dulled to pain, so tired, and the possibility of death that I can’t even find a way to care about that.

I’ll miss my Grandmother. 

And my friend, Roger. My only friend. He’s older than me but he takes the time to teach me to fight and hunt. I don’t know why. Probably pity.

I’ll definitely miss Goat. She’s as close to a good friend as I’ve got besides Roger. 

And I guess I’ll miss my cousin Dianne too. She checks in on me and brings me food. Probably because she feels like she has to. She’s nice. She’s pretty too. 

I might miss them if there’s some place you keep being after you die. But I won’t miss my life. I won’t miss waking up every single day weak and sick wondering out what bad thing will happen to me today. If this bad thing will finally be the last bad thing that will ever happen, that wouldn’t be so terrible.

He won’t find anything in the house. 

He sold or traded anything that mattered. My rake'níha. My father. He almost burned down the house and even when they gave him money to rebuild the house he spent it on booze and drugs and just left the house the way it was. They even gave him a trailer and he sold that. What he didn’t sell or trade somebody else came and took. 

I buried some raccoon and squirrels that I caught. Deep down in a plastic bag with salt. Some nuts too. But he won’t find any of it. I learned how to hide things so well that even a coyote or a badger couldn’t find them. And Goat’s a better guard dog than most dogs when it comes to that. If anyone gets too close to the house she’ll raise a racket, even if she can’t stop them.

She’s raising one hell of a racket right now.

The monster man’s head is down and his shoulders are hunched forward in a way that reminds me of the boxers that I saw when Roger took me to his gym. 

He doesn’t look up. Not even once. No sign that he sees me, or even notices Goat, except that he’s walking straight towards us. Every few steps he stops like he’s lost and mutters to himself. Then he kind of sways, like he’s struggling to get going again, and he keeps coming. 

I just stand here leaning against the old fence post watching him. 

I’m too tired to try getting away.

I could probably outrun him, slow as he is. But trying to get away just isn’t worth the effort. Besides, running would only put off this particular bad thing. If he doesn’t do something bad to me someone else will probably give me a beating today. Or tomorrow. 

Maybe I just want it all to come to an end. 

I don’t know. 

Maybe I’m hoping this stranger, this strange scarred up hollow of a man, might be the one that finally finishes it. 

He’s close now. I can make out all the scars. There’s a lot of them. All over his head and all over his face too. He mostly keeps his head down. I can see his hands and knuckles are all scarred up too, and I’m thinking maybe I was right about him being an old fighter. Or maybe just someone who’s as stupid and as stubborn as I am. If I lived long enough I’d probably end up looking an awful lot like him.

I won’t live that long.

Either way this stranger is probably dangerous. Maybe he will be the one to finally end it.

He stops when he’s about twenty feet away and looks at me, blinks, and then looks past me as if he doesn’t actually see me. 

I’m used to that look. Lots of people look past me like that. 

Mostly just before they hurt me.

He looks around at the yard, at all the garbage and dirt and dried up patches of grass and then up at the sky and then down at the ground. Then he looks at Goat, which gets her raising even more of a racket. If she wasn’t tied up she’d probably go after him. 

She and I have got that in common. It doesn’t make much of a difference to either of us that we can’t win the fight.

He just stands there for the longest time.

And I just stand there too. 

Waiting.

Neither one of us looking at each other. 

People don’t look right at each other on the Rez anyway. That’s asking for a fight.

We stand there, watching what we can out of the corners of our eyes. Even Goat gets quiet and just stands there.Waiting.

I’m used to waiting. 

I’m pretty good at waiting.

Waiting is one more thing you get used to on the Rez.

The stranger’s face is all scars and lumps. One eye’s so scarred over that it’s barely open and both his ears are like raw cauliflower. He doesn’t look like an Indian. 

But then again, neither do I. 

Not really. 

I’ve got dark hair and dark skin. It gets real dark in the summer and never burns. But there’s enough of my mother in my features that those kids on the Rez who do look Indian, even though a lot of them have got less of the blood than I do, beat on me for not being Indian enough. And the kids in the city beat on me because I’m not white enough. 

This guy’s skin is pale. Not the kind of pale that looks natural. The kind of pale that comes from spending too much time inside. 

Prison. 

He gets that look when he’s been in for a while. My rake'níha. My father.

The man doesn’t have all the tattoos that most men who spend time in prison have got. 

Men like him. My father. My rake'níha.

This guy looks like he can’t remember what it’s like to have freedom. He looks like he’s used to being in a cage. 

He has high cheekbones the kind of shape to his face that might make you think that he had Indian blood, but you would have to look closely to see it, or to see that he seems to know this place in a deep way, in the way that comes from growing up in a place like this.

We’re not supposed to call it Indian. 

I can’t remember what we’re supposed to call it now.

Kanien'keha:ka for our tribe.

But I can’t remember for the rest of them.

-Much chance you got any water around, I suppose. - He doesn’t say it like a question. More like a fact that he’s already figured on.

His voice sounds tired. Dry and full of gravel. The tips of two of his fingers are nicotine stained. Like he smokes rolled up cigarettes instead of store bought. 

-No. - I say.  -I emptied the jug last night.

That’s true. I would have said it to him even it wasn’t, but I used up the last of the water and didn’t get around to filling the jug back up yet.

The man stands there staring at the ground. He keeps his thumbs straight on the outside of his hands the way old boxers do. 

I’m starting to wish he’d get it over with. I also hope that he’s not one of those that like little boys. I’ve had that tried on me a few times. They always start by telling me how pretty I am for a boy. Up until now I always managed to put up enough of a fight to make them decide that I wasn’t worth all the trouble. I’m not expecting to get away with that forever. But I’m not looking forward to what happens when I don’t.

-Didn’t see no pump. - The man says -Guessing that place of yours got no running water anymore.

Again it was more like he’s stating what he’s pretty sure is a fact than like he’s asking a question.

I think for a moment about lying about where he is. Where my rake'níha is. But it doesn’t seem worth all the effort. He won’t take long to find out that I’m all alone if that’s what he wants.

-There’s a creek back in the woods. - I say -I usually get my water from there.

I don’t know why I said that. I know better than to give anything to a stranger. Even information. Giving anything away that you don’t have to never works out for anything but bad on the Rez.

-It ain’t too clean. - I say.

We stand there for a little while. 

I’m already getting bored.

Mostly people hurting each other is just one more way of not being bored in this place.I figure he’s coming due to hurt me soon though.

He just stands there though. Looks around. Looks up at the sky. Then back down at the ground.

It seems to me like he does that a lot.

-I don’t have money. - He says -Don’t... Don’t have too much of nothin.

He shuffles his feet. Something in the way he’s standing there gives me the feeling that he isn’t going to hurt me. But I know better than to trust anything in this place.Or maybe I just hope that he’s going to turn out to be a lot worse than he’s looking right now.

-Don’t suppose you could point me to the creek. - He says -I can’t give you anything for it.

Despite all the scars and the look of somebody who spent a lot of time in prison, there’s something about him that feels kind of gentle. Not kind maybe. And not towards everybody. But towards me and those like me. And he doesn’t talk like most of the people on the Rez or any of the bad ones who spend most of their time in jail. 

He isn’t going to hurt me.

Because I’m just a boy.

Maybe because I can’t hurt him.

-I could bring you there I suppose. – I’m as surprised at having said it as he seems to be at my having said it.

He looks straight at me for just a brief moment, as if he was seeing me for the first time and then looks back down at the ground.

We stand there for a while just not looking at each other.

I can tell he isn’t going to hurt me. There’s violence in him. A whole lot of rage and violence. He still seems very dangerous. Even with all the damage I can see that’s been done to him, he still seems like someone who can take care of himself in a pinch. That violence is probably not going to be turned on me. He would probably never use it on someone like me. 

I still don’t trust him. 

I don’t trust anybody. 

That part of me that won’t and can’t believe that even the people who have been good to me, won’t hurt me sooner or later. Maybe he would never hurt someone like me. I still can only see being hurt as something not very important, and not being hurt as a kind of disappointment. 

Maybe I’m a little bit sorry that it’s not going to end for me today.

He licks his lips, and the sound that his lips and his mouth make when he does that tells me that he has gone without water and been in the hot sun for way too long. 

-If you don’t want me to take you. - I say. -That’s fine too. 

I want him to know that I don’t care one way or the other. 

I don’t care one way or the other. 

But I want him to know that I don’t.

He licks his lips again. They’re dry and chapped, and the inside of his mouth sounds dry and chapped. I can hear it from where I am. 

-If it won’t be too much trouble. - He says -I guess I’m pretty thirsty and I could use some water. If that won’t be too much trouble.

I shrug my shoulders. Then I turn and start to head towards the creek. I stop when I realize that he isn’t following. 

He’s just standing there with this lost look on his face, like he’s confused or just can’t figure out if he wants the water after all.

-Mister. - I say -This is the way if you want some water.He gives me a kind of startled look and then looks back down at the ground and nods his head. The gesture’s so small and so slight that I barely see it. 

-Don’t you want to grab your jug? - He asks me. This time a real question.

I stare at him. Then I go into the house and get my jug.

Goat looks at me when I come back out.I go over and untie her.

-She won’t hurt you. - I say to the man. 

Just in case he’s scared of goats. Some people are. 

-She needs water too.

I lead them down to the creek.

The monster man follows me with that strange shuffling limp of his.

I’m not all that sure he’ll be able to make it to the creek.

And I’m not all that sure, if he doesn’t make it, if I’ll try to help him make it or not.

I’m not sure if I care one way or the other.

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[julesdelorme]

So this is the second Chapter of faller. I'll post the whole thing so far and pin it to the top of my writing page linked at the bottom for those of you who want to read it together....

faller

Chapter 2

silence

there is the story.the telling of the story.

there is the listening.

and there is the silence. when no story is being told.

there is the making of music.

there is the dancing and the singing and the listening.

and there is the silence. The silence that lies beyond the reach of any music or any voice.this thing, this third thing is not known to many. it is forgotten by even more. and that is what gives it its power.sometimes it lives in the light.

sometimes it lives in the darkness.

some are born with the darkness of this thing, this shadowed silence, swimming with them inside the womb. and when they are born their spines do not straighten up as easily as others and they find it harder to walk and when they do walk they fall down again and again. if they find the strength to stand then this thing, this thing that even they cannot see or know that it is there, but they suspect is there, has always been there, they have some hidden thought that perhaps this is the way that the world must be, that this thing would knock them down or drag them down and if they crawl back up then it will do the same thing again and again.and again. and again.

this dark silence.

for some of these people if they open up their mouths to speak then they will find that the words have been strangled. smothered. buried. deep deep down inside of them even before these words could be given birth. and so they, these people, most of them, fall silent, remain silent, for this hint of a feeling inside of them tells them that it is useless and fruitless to even try, because the words will never be able to leave their mouths fully alive or alive in any way that matters.

when the black robes came they had with them a book that said that the word was the beginning. and yet this book also said that their god was too large, too vast and unknowable for mere words to encompass.there are some things that are too large for the minds and mouths of mere human beings to grasp.

the black robes had that much right.

but it is not just their god or anyone else’s gods that live beyond the words. it is other things too.

it is those things that make us silent. not in awe or in reverence, but because the silence is so much larger than we can understand and because the words and the music have been taken away, strangled stillborn inside of us, and we fall silent because we have no other choice, because we have nothing at all to offer the world that has not already been offered in a better and more truthful and more substantial way.that emptiness also is too large for words or understanding or meaning.we stay silent. we fall down or we do not even ever rise up, not because we feel the power of things moving through us but because we feel nothing at all, because our throats and our legs and our hearts and our stomachs are numb and frozen and horribly unspeakably empty. 

i know.

i know.

i can feel it just out of reach, too large for any words. and my thoughts can form but they will not survive. they desperately seek some kind of shape, but the shapes that will not hold in fullness or declination, mere ghosts of the stories that desire so very much to be told. i know.i cannot speak these things.

but i know.i try to stand and i fall down again and again because my body and my brain have been beaten down by men. but also because i was born to fall down. i was born with part of me already long ago dead and i can wrestle down these dead words, but they will never be enough.they will never be the story.

not the whole story.

i know.those others see only the mangled form, the scarred and wordless form that is called the body today, a body that stumbles and stutters and falls down on the ground frothing at the mouth. but they cannot see the rest.they cannot see me and they cannot hear me.

they cannot hear the hidden me or see the hidden me because he was strangled mute and contorted in the womb and so he lurks so deep down inside of this scarred, stumbling and stammering shell. 

this is not the telling of my story.

this is not the music, the song or the drumming of my song.

this is what is left of me when everything else, all the stories and all the music have gone silent, have been taken away from me.this is the dark silence.

this is the voice of a dying animal in its cage.

strangled.

numb.

too small and starved and desiccated to be anything like the real thing. 

this is not the telling of my story.

it is dead words on a dead page, perhaps on dying leaves of paper, just dying dead bits of shadows, with the stink of death still upon them.

this is all that there is left to my story.

there may be no one out there to listen.

there may be nothing left inside me to be worth the hearing of it.

but i will tell what i can.

i will stumble and i will fall and i may never escape the confines of this nothing, these fragments of a trapped and bitter mind. this black silence, but i will tell it.

i will try to tell it.

i will try again and again and fail and fall again and again, hurl my body against the walls of this cage that i am trapped in, until this dead or dying thing has been told.

it may signify nothing at all.

in the end, after all the sound and the fury, it will almost certainly signify nothing.

but i will tell it. 

i will try to tell it.

it is not the telling of my story.

but it will be something.it will be something like the telling of a story.

and that, even that, will be better than the silence.

anything, anything at all, will be better than the silence. https://www.facebook.com/delormewriting

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[julesdelorme]

So I finally feel ready to rewrite this and make it work. It has been the white whale of my imagination for many years now. Some of it will not change very much and some will change a lot. I'll be posting it chapter by chapter. And I will also try to find a way to post the whole thing as it goes for those of you who want to read it that way. I am definitely looking for feedback. And any feedback, any kind at all, will be appreciated....

faller

Chapter 1

Ohkwá:ri - The Bear

by

Jules F. Delorme There was this bear. 

This ohkwá:ri

A long time ago. 

Way back. Before there was too much of everything.

This bear. 

Not a good bear or a bad bear. 

Just a bear.

For most of her life this ohkwá:ri had it alright. She was the only bear around. I don’t know if she was the only bear in the whole world or anything, but she was the only one around in those parts. Nothing messed with her. She just went around doing her thing. Being a bear.

But then one day people started to show up. 

Everybody knows how that goes. Just a few many at first. Then a few more. And then more and more until there are so many you can’t even keep count. The way it always goes with people. 

At first the people just did their own thing. Hunted and fished. Planted some corn. 

Stayed away from the bear. 

But then, when there was enough of them to do something they started to talk about the bear. 

She was dangerous they said. 

She was stealing their food. 

They said all kinds of things because they were scared of her. She never did anything to them but she was an ohkwá:ri and they were just people. Ohkwá:ri don’t exactly have to put up with a lot of crap.

The people got together and made their plans and then they went after the bear. They went out into the woods and tried to kill her but she fought and she was a bear. 

The ones that survived ran away. 

Now the people had a good reason to be scared of the bear. 

They made more plans. 

New plans. 

They dug a pit and managed to trap her in it. 

She put up a hell of a fight. Dragged some of them down into that hole with her. But in the end once the bear fell down in that hole it was over.

People came from miles around to look at her. Stare down at her. She put up a big fuss at first. Kept trying to get out of that hole and fight. But after a while she just gave up. 

Whatever it was that made her an ohkwá:ri went away and all she could do was wait down there in that pit to die. 

They threw down food but she wouldn’t eat. They threw rocks at her and she wouldn’t move. After a while the people stopped coming to look at her. 

Everything about her that was ohkwá:ri everything that used to scare them was gone. 

So they just left her in the pit to die.

It took a long time. 

Even bears that don’t remember how to be bears don’t die too easy. She rotted there in that pit for a real long time. When she finally did die the people barely noticed. She was so skinny by then they couldn’t even get any meat off her so they just piled dirt to fill in the hole to cover over the smell and got on with their lives. 

They forgot what it was like to have an ohkwá:ri around. 

To be scared. 

To be in awe.

To have something be bigger and stronger than them.  

The people didn’t know it but they lost something when they dug that hole and trapped the bear in it. 

They never even knew what it was they lost or why they lost it. 

They never knew anything got lost. 

Just some dead skinny bear stinking up a hole in the ground. 

Far as they could see the world was a safer place a lot easier place without that ohkwá:ri lurking out there in the woods. 

They slept better at night. 

They didn’t have any more nightmares. 

They didn’t jump at every sound. 

They felt safe. 

That’s all that mattered they thought.

It’s not like their lives fell to pieces or anything. The sky and the sun and the stars stayed right up there where they always were. The world kept right on moving. 

But they lost something. The people. 

Something that was supposed to be a part their lives. 

Their dreams. 

Their nightmares. 

When the people trapped that bear they lost that thing whatever it is that makes stories worth telling. 

Maybe stories don’t seem too important. 

Maybe dreams don’t seem important either. 

Not as important as being safe or maybe living a little bit longer. Not things you can hold in your hands or trade or sell. Add up in some book. Figure out on some computer. 

But that ohkwá:ri belonged. 

She was supposed to be there. 

When she was gone everything was different. 

Cleaner maybe. 

Brighter. 

Safer. 

But not nearly as…

Not nearly so…

What?

I don’t know.

I can’t remember that part.

I can’t remember it. 

The ending. How it ends. 

I can never remember the whole story. 

It happened a long time ago. Just some story that happened a long time ago.

I still remember bits of it though. 

I don’t know why. 

But I remember little bits of that story all the time. 

I can’t tell it all the way to the end not the way that I heard it.

But I remember pieces of it.

I forget a whole lot of things but I’ve still got pieces of that story stuck inside me. 

I don’t know why.

I don’t remember why.

Just those pieces stuck inside of me.

It means something. 

I used to know it all the way to the end but I can’t remember enough of it to put into words anymore. I used to know all the stories and now I don’t know any of them all the way to the end anymore.

I remember them being told. 

The way that people told it. 

But chunks of them keep rotting away. 

Decomposing.

That bear though.

Something about that ohkwá:ri.

I never forget about that bear…   

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[julesdelorme]

bacon pete

bacon pete sits up on the old rock on top of big stink hill and argues with the sky. 

-what the fuck? bacon pete asks the emptiness -what exactly what fuckin exactly was i supposed to say? huh? in that situation? in that particular fuckin situation?

the sky just stares back at pete. not a real big talker, the sky.

-there I am. bacon pete goes on -there I am and that shit comes down comes down like wham. what exactly did they expect me to do? that's what I'd like to know.

bacon pete gets up off the rock and walks around a bit. stops. sits back down. looks back up at the sky.

-am I wrong? he asks the passing cloud -is that what it is? is there something wrong with me? with the way I'm lookin at this?

pete looks down at the houses below. quiet now. not much moving around cept for some skinny old dogs searching through the garbage dump.

-i could be a whole lotta things. bacon pete says to the quiet -i coulda ended up a whole lotta bad ways. been a drunk or a junkie jumpin off the new bridge and splittin myself in two just outta boredom. gulpin down unleaded to get high od’in fuckin doin myself 

off cuz i'm too stupid to be alive. i coulda fucked up big time in so many ways but no i hang on to what i'm s'posed to be what i'm s'posed to do and that ain't good enough?

the quiet don't say nothin. it never does.

-fuck that. fuck them. pete says -i been the only responsible one around here and you're gonna tell me i gotta step up? i ain't never fuckin stepped down. fuck you.

bacon pete gets up again. walks up some of that nervous energy. kicks the old rock with his scarred up worn out steel toed boot.

-i got a job. he hollers at the rock -i got a job how many people round here got jobs? huh? real ones not fuckin collectin pop bottles waitin on the welfare check to show up whinin how the white man's got me down. a real job. real hard workin paycheck fuckin job. i'm 

pretty much the only fucker on the entire rez got a fuckin real job and I'm getting told i gotta step up? i ain't never stepped fuckin fuckin down. fuck that fuck you all of youse i ain't never once stepped fuckin down. fuck that fuck all of youse.

bacon pete kicks the rock again. he stands there for a while just thinking. scratches his head. looks up at the sky. at the cloud already far away. down at the rock. at the old rock. at the houses.

-fuck. Pete says -i know what i gotta do. i know exactly what i gotta do.

an old bent back dog yips in the garbage dump. not so much at pete as just at the world in general. the dog yips again and the limps off behind a pile of garbage bags. 

quiet again.

-you think I don't know what I gotta do but I do. Pete says -i do know. i just... fuck.

pete goes quiet. nothing much left to say. said his piece to the sky and the cloud and the rock and the quiet. 

he looks down at the rock. at where he kicked it.

-sorry. Pete says to the old rock -sorry rock. i just. the.. just. sorry.

bacon pete stands still for a while. then he takes a big ragged breath and starts walking back down the hill.

it's still pretty quiet down there.

for now.

yeah.

it's quiet for now.

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[julesdelorme]

faller

Chapter 14

How Crow Made Human Beings

This is a story about Crow.

This is a story about Tsó:ka’we.

She’s never up to no good that Crow.

Always stealing things. Sitting up in a tree laughing at people and all the other animals that can’t fly.

She might sneak right out of this story and make trouble when you’re not looking. 

She might sneak right out of this story and steal your socks or your watch or your favourite pen.

She’s sneaky that Crow.

She’s what you call a Trickster.

You gotta keep your eyes open and count all your fingers and toes when that Tsó:ka’we’s around and especially when she’s being talked about because that opens a door or a window for her to sneak in and peck away at you.

It was Crow that made human beings. Mostly because she was bored and when Tsó:ka’we gets bored that’s when she makes the worst kind of trouble.

And that Crow never made worse trouble than human beings.

She’s still laughing about that one.

That one might be the best trick that Tsó:ka’we ever pulled.

That trick started one day when Crow was bored like I said and she was flying around Turtle pecking at him and making fun of him for carrying the world around on his back. 

What a stupid thing to do Tsó:ka’we said. 

Why would you carry anything if you don’t have to. 

Why would you carry the whole world on your back if you didn’t have to.

Turtle wasn’t arguing with Crow and just pretty much ignoring all the pecking and cawing.

Turtle’s like that.

Not too much gets to him.

Not even carrying around the whole world.

Turtle isn’t much fun as far as Tsó:ka’we is concerned.

And he sure didn’t help with Crow’s boredom.

So Crow’s crazy trickster brain went to work coming up with things she could do. Things that might make Crow happy. Things that might make Tsó:ka’we laugh. 

No good things.

Trickster things.

Crazy Crow things.

Crow started out playing in the mud on Turtle’s back. The mud and the clay on Turtle’s back.

Crow doesn’t like getting dirty. She spends a lot of time cleaning and preening. She likes to keep her feathers glossy black. But she loves getting other things dirty. She loves making things as dirty as they can get.

So there Tsó:ka’we was playing around in the mud and the clay looking to get something good and dirty.

That’s how it all started.

That’s how human beings got started.

In the dirt and the mud.

There Crow was throwing mud and clay and sticks and dirt around when something started to take shape. 

The first human.

When Crow saw that, when she saw what she had made, at the new kind of trouble that she had made, she thought I should make another one so that it can trouble the first one. And then another so that they could gang up on each other. And then she made them into different sexes so that they could really misunderstand each other and then different tribes with different languages so that they would have good reason to hate each other and fight each other and she made the different skin colours too so that they would think that they had even more reasons to fight and hate and trouble each other.

By the time Tsó:ka’we was done there were so many different kinds of humans and so many different kinds of trouble that they could get into.

This time I’ve really outdone myself Crow cawed. This is the best most troublesome thing that I’ve ever made.

She flew up into a tree and laughed and laughed.

Those human beings were so much trouble they even got on Turtle’s nerves. They did all these things that they thought were good and important but were really just trouble and mischief.

The difference between human beings and Crow and Coyote and Rabbit is that Tricksters know that they’re Tricksters, they know that they’re making trouble. 

But human beings make all kinds of trouble, so much trouble that they even get on Turtle’s nerves, and think that they’re doing things that are important and good and helpful.

Those human beings are way crazier than Coyote or Rabbit or even Crow. 

Those human beings are so funny that Crow never stopped laughing since she made them.

Human beings been nothing but trouble for Turtle since the day they got made.

They’re so funny and so much trouble that Tsó:ka’we’s still laughing today.

She laughs about human beings every single day.

That Crow she sure likes to laugh.

That Tsó:ka’we she sure knows how to make trouble.

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[julesdelorme]

faller

Chapter 13 - Gun

In all the years I’ve been wearing this uniform I’ve never once pointed a gun at another human being. That’s a cliché I know. The cop who never pulled his gun before. But even when I was in country with my military unit I never once had to fire off a round at another human being or even take aim at another human being. I never even liked hunting. I just went along to be one of the boys, but I never really wanted to kill anything when I could just go buy meat at the grocery store.

Part of it was me avoiding action and, more importantly, danger, whenever I could. But part of it too was just that I never ended up in a situation where any of that was required of me. I walked away with a Distinguished Service medal and the word veteran on my license plate, but I never once pointed a gun with live ammunition at another human being before that moment.

This time I came close to pulling the trigger. 

This time I came way too close to pulling the trigger and shooting another human being. 

Don’t even want to imagine the shitload of paperwork that would have meant.

Shitload.

Definitely one more for the jar.

Just for the briefest moment my finger was sliding down toward the trigger and I was actually going to shoot. 

When he ran. That was the moment. When he got up and ran and I realized that he was running I almost dropped the girl so I could shoot him. I guess I just didn’t want to have to explain why or how I let a guy just run away like that and even though I know that is the wrong reason to shoot another human being I came so close, for just a moment to doing it.

I didn’t do it. 

Don’t know how I ended up with the girl in my arms. Not sure how she got there. Trying to calm her down I guess. To quiet her down. All that screaming was just making the situation worse and I guess I figured if I could get her to calm down I could get control and calm everyone and everything else down too. I guess that’s what I was trying to do and it did work, kind of, but don’t know if she came to me or I went to her. Just that she did stop screaming. She was shaking like a little frightened bird but at least she wasn’t screaming.

But in doing all that I lost sight of the guy and he started to run off. 

That was going to mean a lot of paperwork and a lot of  fucking explaining to do.

Another one for the jar.

I almost shot him just because I didn’t want to have to write it out or explain to anybody him getting away like that. You’d figure once you become Chief of Police, you get to stop answering to people. But there’s the council and the Grand Chief and all the other people who are looking for a reason to justify my salary. 

I thought about shooting him. I never even thought about shooting anyone before that moment in my entire life. I really wanted to shoot the guy.

I didn’t.

I don’t know why exactly I wanted to shoot him so bad, other than looking to avoid the paperwork. It was more than the paperwork and the explaining. I mean, it’s not like I never got a runner before and it’s not like things never got tense before. It’s the Rez. Shit happens. But I never once pointed my gun and I never once wanted to shoot somebody as much as I wanted to shoot this guy. 

Maybe it was the kid. Maybe that the kid could get hurt by this guy or that people were going to get worked up about me not properly protecting a kid. Maybe I was just pissed at the guy for running and making my life more complicated.

I don’t know.

Despite being a cop and being ex military and growing up on the Rez I don’t think that I’ve ever been a violent guy. I’ve been in some fights. I can take care of myself better than most. But I never really wanted to hurt anybody before, not even when I was a kid.

So I’ve got this woman, this girl really, shivering in my arms and the kid disappeared into the woods and the guy seeming to follow the kid and my gun’s still in my hand and I can’t believe how badly I wanted to use it. I mean in a very unhealthy way. I never met this guy before in my life and I barely knew the kid but there I am wanting to go Dirty Harry on some stranger.

She’s shivering like a baby bird. She felt as light as one too.

If we had a kid, if we could have a kid, she’d probably be about this age. Hopefully a little tougher and not so easy to freak out.

Near as I could tell she was freaking out about nothing much at all. Maybe the guy was a perv and maybe not. For all either one of us could have told he was completely harmless. He didn’t exactly look harmless. He looked like somebody who’d been walking on the hard side pretty much his whole life. But he also looked about as run down and beat down as you could get way more than he looked like any kind of danger. I mean I only got a quick look but from what I could tell.

I held her and I holstered my gun real slow. I never even took the safety off, but what was in my head gave me plenty of reason to be cautious and, like I always tell my deputies, always better slow and easy than sorry. So I eased that thing back into its holster and held her with both hands, let her cry it out. Said some comforting shit that I can’t even remember.

Shit.

Two more for the jar.

The boy’s going to be just fine and everything will be alright and some shit like that.

Another one for the jar.

She cried all over me and then she started to fight me, trying to work loose to go after the boy. I held her tighter and kept saying comforting shit trying to quiet her down. No! No no no! she screamed into my chest. No! Please! I need to... Let me go please!

I eased up my grip on her and then she changed her mind and started trying to push me towards the woods. You have to go! she yelled at me. You have to go after them now! Don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? He’s in danger and you have to save him! You have to go after them now!

I tried to explain that running into the woods, even if I was in any kind of shape to go running after anybody, with a loaded gun at that, was just going to make things worse if anything and the best I could do was round up a search party. But she kept pushing at me and screaming about how I had to save the kid and I couldn’t make her understand that chasing them wasn’t going to get anybody anywhere.

If the guy was going to hurt the kid it was going to happen with or without my fat ass chasing after them. Truth be told I was very worried that I might end up shooting the guy or missing him and hitting the kid. And maybe me being on his ass would make the guy do something way worse than he had any ideas about doing.

I didn’t say that part of course. Scaring her even more wasn’t going to help anything.

Instead I held her kicking and screaming with one hand and, after a whole lot of wrestling, managed to call in with the other. Told Delores at dispatching to call in anyone she could think of to form a search party. Delores kept asking if I meant a posse for some reason but I assured her that I meant search party. We didn’t know yet that the guy did anything that would call for a posse if things like that still existed. But Delores, being Delores, kept calling it a posse.

I just hoped the girl wasn’t one for the nuances of language.

She started to calm down then enough so that I could let her go and start gathering up her groceries, getting some order in all that chaos. I explained to her as I gathered up what I could how we were better off waiting and forming a group to find them instead of inflaming the situation. I could see in her eyes she didn’t buy that but I could also see that she was calming down enough to realize that she didn’t have much choice.

To tell you the truth I wasn’t so sure I was right.

I just knew that I didn’t want to go into those woods with my itchy trigger finger. And I didn’t want to get caught up in that thick forest. Maybe I also didn’t want go running after a guy all on my own. Maybe I knew that I was too old and fat and lazy to be pulling off that shit.

Another one for the jar.

It wasn’t like a stolen purse or catching somebody in the middle of a B & E. It was more complicated than that.

She was calming down.

She looked deep into my eyes.

Will you find him? Will you save him?

I smiled as gently as I could. Didn’t answer. I had been a cop, and a politician for long enough to know better than to make promises I couldn’t keep.

I hoped we would find the boy.

And I hoped that we would find him alive.

I wasn’t sure we would.

And I wasn’t sure enough to say.

I definitely was not fucking sure enough at all.

Shit.

That’s two more for the jar.

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[julesdelorme]

faller

Chapter 12 truth

Some stories are more true than the truth.

Maybe all stories are more true than the truth.

We list off facts and call it the truth. But those are just facts. The truth is so much larger than facts.

Stories are dreams put into words.

And dreams are more true than we can ever put into words.

We spend a third of our lives dreaming. How can a third of our lives not be true?

We tell stories to share that truth which goes beyond words.

We have forgotten how to hear the truths that go beyond words, the truths that fill our stories and our dreams. We have forgotten that there even are truths that can only live in stories and dreams, truths that live in the spaces between words and well beyond the reach of things we can measure or hold in our hands.

Maybe all stories are truer than the truth.

We tell stories to explore the mysteries of life, to explore the great mystery of life. We tell stories to move just a little bit closer to that thing that some of us call God. Stories, real stories, never get where they’re going. We journey when we tell stories, but we never arrive. 

That is part of the truth of stories.

That is part of the truth of dreams.

We walk in stories. We walk in dreams. 

We never arrive.

We never join the beginning to the end.

We live our lives as if we can arrive, as if there is an ending to the story, as if happily ever after is some kind of ending, some kind of conclusion, not just a leaving off without absolutes or knowing, at best with a kind of acceptance that we can never arrive.

We can only abide.

That is the truth of dreams and that is the truth of stories.

That we can abide with that thing that some would call God but we can never possess it or know it or own it. That we can arrive close to the truth but never live inside of it.

God is truth.

Gandhi said that.

If God is truth then the reverse must be true, that truth is God or something like God, and if that is true then we can never fully know the truth in the same way that we can never fully know God. And dreams and stories, with their blurred edges may also come closer the truth, come closer to God than trying to nail the truth down with facts and certainty, than sacrificing the truth to our need and desire to know, to be certain.

We talk about the truth as if it is something that we can measure and fit in some kind of box of knowing but it is much larger and wilder than that. Real truth doesn’t fit in a box or a cage or some hole that we dig for it. 

Stories and dreams are truth living free and wild.

There is the story.

There are the stories. 

Stories are dreams put into words.

Stories are are more true than the truth.

Stories are more real than what we call real.

That’s why we tell stories. That’s why we listen to stories and read stories. Because a story is much larger and more fleet of foot than a collection of facts and calculations.

Because truth cannot be contained or civilized or trapped.

Because stories help us brush up against the truth. Because a good story can help us brush up against God.

Some stories are more true than the truth.

Maybe all stories are more true than the truth.

Maybe.

Maybe that’s why we tell so many stories.

Maybe that’s why we need to tell stories.

Maybe that’s why.

I don’t know.

I just don’t know.

There must be a reason.

I guess that’s as good a reason as any.

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[julesdelorme]

faller

Chapter 11

the man

i saw the cop and the woman screaming and i saw him draw his gun and i fell to my knees and laced my hands behind my head. all i could think about was that i was thirstier than i had ever been in my entire life and i didn’t want to die thirsty.

i never cared much about living.  i just didn’t want to die thirsty.

not that thirsty.

the cop yelled at me to lie down on the ground and i did that. the woman kept on screaming.

as far as i knew i didn’t do nothing wrong but that never stopped anyone before and i didn’t think for a minute that it was going to stop him from killing me. i locked my fingers behind my head and waited for the bullet.

i thought about what it would feel like.

been stabbed. been punched and kicked and none of it ever felt like your thought they should. sometimes no pain at all. sometimes just some kind of dull thud and ache inside or this feeling like you’re feeling pain from somebody else’s body.

like it doesn’t belong to you.

sometimes a lot worse than you expect but mostly the pain comes after. sometimes a little bit after and sometimes a little more after and sometimes not for hours and sometimes not for days.

been shot at but i never actually been shot.

that probably hurts different.

i kept waiting for the cop to shoot but he didn’t shoot right away.

i heard him tell the boy to come to him.

i told the boy to go to the cop.

i was pretty sure the cop would shoot me anyways especially if that woman kept screaming. i would of shot her but the cop would probably shoot me. but if the kid moved at least he could get clear. most people don’t exactly shoot straight when there’s a lot of commotion.

the cop might know how to shoot.

he probably didn’t.

at least the kid could get out of the way.

cop shot my uncle charlie when he was stabbing his wife. uncle charlie was stabbing the wife. i hated that bitch. charlie’s wife. cop emptied his whole clip into charlie. everybody wanted to sue except me. i saw charlie when he was off his rocker and all the way over to crazy.

i never blamed the cop. i would empty my gun too.

i didn’t feel nothing bad about this cop either. he just knew what he saw and with all the shit going down all the screaming and the kid i probably would shoot me too.

i told the boy to go to the cop but he just stood there.

he stood there for a long time.

i had my face deep in the dirt. I could taste some kind of animal shit and there was bugs biting at my legs but i kept still and i told the boy to go to the cop again.

don’t know if the kid heard me or understood what i was saying.

somebody was going to get shot.

better me than the kid.

i just wanted him out of the way so when the cop started shooting he didn’t get hit with a bullet meant for me.

i don’t know how the woman kept on screaming. I don’t know don’t how she didn’t lose her voice.

then the kid turned and started running the other way.

i could see him out of the corner of my eyes and i could hear him running.

i didn’t say nothing.

i just waited to get shot.

i didn’t blame the kid neither. he was just a kid and kid’s do stupid things and most often they don’t mean no harm.

i just laid there in that dirt with the bugs biting at me and waited to get shot.

that’s all i did.

there was a long time or at least it seemed like a long time where nothing else happened. i stayed down there with my face in the shit and dirt and the woman kept on screaming. maybe there was some words in there but i couldn’t tell what they were if there were any words. maybe she called out the kid’s name. i can’t remember it or i didn’t understand it if she did but it seems like she might of called out the kid’s name somewhere in there.

that went on for a while and i didn’t feel nothing towards nobody except by then i was starting to wish the cop’d just get it over with so i could stop breathing in all that shit and dirt so i could could stop feeling so bone shaking thirsty.

then he started talking to the woman. the cop. he tried to calm her down and i started thinking that if his attention was on calming her down then maybe he wasn’t going to get around to shooting me after all.

eating all that dirt and shit was making me a whole lot more thirsty.

more thirsty than i could ever tell anyone about.

i don’t think i was ever that thirsty in my whole life.

i can’t remember ever being more thirsty than that.

i don’t think i was ever once as thirsty as i was right then.

but i didn’t move. i knew better than to move when a uniform was involved. now way of telling what was gonna set them off. for all i knew the cop might be alright. but put a uniform on a guy and he’s gonna have to show you why he’s got the uniform.

i got nothing against the police.

they framed me up more than once and i took more than my share of beatings from cops and prison guards. black bag over the head so you can’t say for sure who it was. even got the phone book treatment case you thought that was just a joke. banging on me with their clubs through a phone book. maybe now they use something else. with phone books getting rare.

but i always chalked that up to people being people. given a chance to get away with it most of us would do the wrong things.

cops.

jail guards and prison guards.

criminals.

all the same when you come down to it so i never held anything in particular against the police.

i get nervous when i see a cop.

but i don’t hate them.

not even rez cops who can be the biggest pricks or the most understanding depending on who you run into. this cop could shoot me flat out and get away with it if he really wanted especially when i got up and started walking and then started running the cop might be a prick in some ways and a pretty good guy in others. he coulda shot me just out of panic.

but he didn’t.

i got to the woods and i don’t know why but i started following the kid’s tracks. not hard to track a kid and a goat running through the woods and i still could remember for some reason how to read sign even though i can’t remember the last time i tried or the last time i hunted. i stopped hunting soon as i didn’t need to kill to eat but i don’t remember when that was but i remember i kept tracking even after i stopped hunting for at least a while but i don’t remember how long. people are the easiest animal to track unless they don’t want to be and this kid and the goat didn’t seem to be thinking about throwing off any trackers and i could hear them every now and then.

i guess maybe i was worried the kid would hurt himself somehow. why i followed him. that he could fall somewhere some way or run into a tree or a boulder or something. truth is most indians are no better in the bush than most people and i didn’t know nothing about this kid other than that he was going to get me some water and he ran away when everybody started yelling and he was mighty scrawny making me think maybe he could break bones easier than most.

or maybe i was just thirsty maybe i just didn’t know what else to do so i started following the kid and the goat.

i don’t know.

i don’t know why i do half the shit i do truth be told.

at some point the woman stopped screaming and the cop didn’t come right after us. i was pretty sure i’d hear a cop that size following us in his cop boots and cops mostly can’t do anything without barking orders and yelling at people particularly when they get to chasing them. my guess is that he was smart enough at least to realize that chasing people blind into the woods with a gun is just not the smartest thing to do. a city cop or state or provincial might be stupid enough to try that kind of thing but a rez cop probably would know better.

i figured this rez cop was a lot of things but probably not stupid.

i broke from a kind of lope to a fast walk. can’t do much faster than a lope nowadays. i couldn’t hear the kid anymore but i could still see sign. pretty recent. he wasn’t running into things or over things and it looked like he slowed down from an all out run to a jog or a fast walk. i wasn’t going to catch up to him unless he stopped but he wasn’t too far ahead.

i still didn’t know what i was gonna do if i caught up to the kid. i still didn’t know why i was following him exactly. maybe to make sure he wasn’t hurt or wasn’t gonna get hurt. maybe just because i didn’t know what else to do or maybe i was hoping the kid’d take me to something to drink.

i could hear crows up ahead. lots of times crows’ll follow people in the woods in case they leave any food behind because crows know people drop shit and just throw shit away. the old woman would say that crows like to laugh at people count of we walk on two legs but can’t fly and we’re always dropping stuff or throwing it away. crows don’t throw nothing away and that’s the real reason they follow us.

they must get a real kick out of me. falling down again and again and getting up my face full of dirt.

i swear once upon a time a long time ago i could move through the bush without making a sound or falling down even once.

maybe that’s just a dream or some shit i made up in my head. they say every time you remember something you change it just a little. and my memory is sketchy on my best day. so even what i remember how i remember it is probably not how it happened.

i just kept following the kid and the goat. falling down and getting back up to follow some more. maybe it didn’t make sense but nothing makes sense to me anymore.

maybe it never did.

one point i fell into a pretty big hollow face first. didn’t break anything but i could feel blood and burning across my face from scraping it when i fell and a pretty good lump over my one eye where i hit a rock or something hard.

i got back up and kept following. i just kept getting up and following.

then the kid stopped.

felt him stop more than hearing or any other way.

i used to feel things that way all the time. i could feel the other fighter ready to attack. getting ready to give up. mostly they give up long time before the fight is finished. in their body and in their heart and maybe i see something or hear something about the breathing or how they move. but felt it before i knew about hearing or seeing.

i lost all that when i started throwing fights. it didn’t matter no more so i stopped feeling it out and i just fell down. took the count or tapped out. i used to be able to feel weather and other things like what kind of day it was gonna be for me. things i didn’t understand but i knew.

the more i fell down the less it mattered.

i got way lost in selling myself too many ways.

but right then at that moment i felt the kid stop and it was almost like i never sold it all away.

just for that moment.

then i was me again. the sold off sold out worn out washed out me and i broke into a walk because i was so tired. knew he was close and i didn’t know why i was even falling him or what i was gonna do when i caught up to the kid.

i wondered if he knew.

wondered if the kid felt things the way i used to because he was too young to have sold off most of his being alive.

i walked and caught up to my breath and wiped the sweat off my face with the back of my hand.

felt the kid and the goat just waiting.

nothing ever waited for me.

not that i knew of anyways.

it sure felt like nothing and nobody ever waited for me.

i slowed down real slow.

i knew they were going to wait. i didn’t necessarily want to keep them waiting but i didn’t want to rush them neither. it seemed like they deserved for me not to rush so i slowed down.

maybe for the first time in my life. on purpose for the first time not because i couldn’t move any faster or because i didn’t want to move any faster but because it felt like i should take the time.

i don’t remember ever feeling like that.

not in my entire life.

i just slowed down and kept walking and knew that they would wait.

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[julesdelorme]

faller

Chapter 10

the boy

We never did make it to the creek.

I never really thought we were going to make it there anyway. 

I never thought that the broken man would make it all the way without falling down. 

In the end him falling down had nothing to do with it.

We were almost halfway across the field. He was stumbling along and looking like every step was going to be his last one upright, but he kept on walking. 

We were near the plastic wading pool with the cartoon whales on it. 

I remember that. 

I never knew where that pool came from. It was there for as long as I can remember. Since the beginning of time. Like that stupid pool filled up with dirt and old dog shit and skeletons of dead animals and the flies always buzzing around it just belonged exactly right where it was. During the winter there’d be ice and dead field mice stuck in the ice. It was all cracked and covered in dirt but you could still see the cartoon whales even though they were faded and you could tell the pool used to be blue, but it wasn’t the blue that you could see now or the blue that it was supposed to be. 

The broken man stopped and was looking down at the pool like he wished it was full of water instead of dirt and shit and dead animals.

He was still kind of swaying back and forth and staring down at the pool.

You could hear the river making lapping sounds at the rocks from there. You couldn’t hear the creek but you could hear the river.

I could almost feel how thirsty the broken man was. I could almost taste his thirst every time he tried to lick his lips, so dry, and his tongue fat and bloated with thirst. I didn’t think he was going to be able to take another step. I was sure he was going to fall down right then just from the thought of the water and I still wasn’t sure if I was going to do anything about it. 

He was skinny, but still too big for me to carry or drag. 

I could go to the creek myself and bring him some water, but I wasn’t so sure if I would. 

That’d be a lot of work. 

I didn’t know him. I didn’t owe him anything. And I didn’t know if he wouldn’t do something bad once he had some water in his belly. I wasn’t sure if I cared what he did, but it seemed like a lot of trouble to bring him water just so he could do me bad. It seemed like a lot of work for something and somebody I didn’t care about one way or another.

He stood there for a while swaying back and forth, looking at that dirty plastic pool and probably listening the river, maybe thinking about the water he couldn’t make it to or drink even if he could make it there. 

Nobody in their right mind would ever drink from that river no matter how clean it looked. Factories still dumping chemicals in there. Just not the chemicals that makes the river stink and change colour

And then the broken man took one little step.

And then another step.

I was surprised at that.

Even Goat looked surprised that he took another step. 

I was sure he was done. I was sure he was going down. I was sure he was going to fall down right there and never be able to get back up.

But he didn’t.

He took a couple of steps and then he took a couple of more, and I followed him and then got out ahead of him again.

That was when the racket back at the house started.

At first it was just people showing up. A car pulling up and then things falling down. I heard it but I just figured it was Dianne and I was keeping my eyes on the man to see if he was going to fall down. She was probably just leaving food again, in the place that I showed her. Maybe some clothes. And maybe she dropped some things. It was better if I didn’t have to talk to her anyway. She did her best but there was always those questions in her eyes, and the worry too. It was always better if I didn’t have to talk to her. That’s why I showed her the hiding place. Sometimes I would see her coming and I would go off just so I wouldn’t have to see all the questions and worry in her eyes.

Reminding me who I was. Reminding me what I was.

Goat started to call out. She knew Dianne always brought food. I’m guessing Goat would have preferred if we went back to the food.

Then I heard another car pull up. I wanted to look then, but I was sure the broken man was about to fall down and I didn’t want to miss that.

There was a little pause and then the screaming started. 

The broken man turned around.

He turned in this slow strange way, where he moved his body instead of turning his head, and I thought he was going to fall, but then I wanted to look too.

I saw the cop.

The one that was in charge of the other cops.

We didn’t call him Chief because the Island already had a Chief, so most people called him Captain. He didn’t seem like a Captain to me, so I didn’t call him anything at all. Not to his face. He was just a cop and him showing up was never good for anybody. He always acted like that badge and uniform made him the big cheese but he was just one more bad guy on the Rez looking to take whatever people have left. He looked more like an Indian than most, even though he was only about a quarter Indian, if even that. But it was on his mother’s side so he got to say he was an Indian and looking like an Indian sure helped him get that badge. He was always smiling like he was your best friend but I’d seen enough of him to know he wasn’t anybody’s friend but his own. He was usually after my father or my uncles but sometimes he just showed up because he got it in his head again about sticking me in some home. 

There usually wasn’t enough in it for him to bother for long though.

So far. 

And he was a little scared of Goat. 

Goat head butted him right in the nuts one time. He walked right past Goat without greeting her.

Everybody knew you had to say hello to Goat if you didn’t want her to go after you. It was just good manners, even for a goat. But he went charging by and she caught coming back out. 

He went down like a sack of bricks.

That was a funny day.

That made me smile.

Goat had a way of making me smile more than most things or most people did.

The cop was standing there holding Dianne by the shoulders and she was screaming and pointing at us. 

I couldn’t figure out what she was so upset about. 

I know she tried real hard but she did get upset pretty easy an awful lot. That’s how anyone could tell she wasn’t from the Rez.

I stood there and the broken man stood there and the two of them kept looking over at us like someone had died or somebody had robbed a bank. 

A bank in the city. Not on the Rez.

The cop let go of Dianne’s shoulders with one hand and kind of reached for his gun. 

I felt more than saw the broken man’s body sag like he knew exactly what was coming.

I just stood there.

I didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t figure out why everyone was acting the way they were acting. Sometimes people are nothing like anything I can understand. Most times people are a mystery to me.

Most times I’m a mystery to me.

That’s why I like having Goat around. Goat makes more sense than most people.

The cop pulled out his gun.

The broken man fell to his knees and put his hands behind his head without being told.

Dianne kept on screaming.

Goat was screaming now too.

The cop looked confused at first, like he couldn’t figure how whether to stay with Dianne and try to calm her down with the gun still in his hand, or come after us. But I still couldn’t figure out why he would want to do that, or why he had his gun out. 

I’m not stupid.

I knew that they thought that the broken man was dangerous. 

It was just so obvious to me that he wasn’t, and it seemed stupid to me that they thought he was. I could never figure out how people talked themselves into so many stupid things.

The cop lifted his gun up a little like he was going to point it, and then stopped, still looking like he couldn’t figure out what was going on. He told the broken man to lie down on his stomach and keep his hands behind his head, and the broken man did that. The cop didn’t yell. But his voice was shaking a little.

He told me to walk towards him but I just stood there. 

He seemed more dangerous with that gun to me than the broken man ever was. 

He said it again and the broken man told me to do it. His face was in the dirt and his voice sounded funny coming through the dirt.

I still didn’t move.

Goat was screaming and Dianne was screaming and the cop was pointing his gun.

There was too much stuff coming at me all at once. 

I was all filled up with the stupidity and the nonsense of what was happening. 

When I get filled up like that all I want is to get away from people so that’s what I did.

I turned and ran back into the woods. I needed to leave all that screaming and all that craziness behind me. Trees don’t yell at you and birds don’t tell you what to do. Even bears make more sense than people. The woods were always the safest place that I knew.

I could hear all the screaming and the shouting and then a gun shot and all I knew was that it didn’t make any sense and it was all too much of nothing, so I just kept right on running.

My Grandmother told me that in the old days the People would outrun the British and the French. They would run for miles without getting tired. White men called them Indian Runners. The People called them the Dog Runners because they would walk and run and walk and run without stopping the way a dog or a wolf or a coyote would do.

I wondered how far I could run without rest or sleep or food before I would fall down dead.

I wondered how far I could run before I would never have to turn around and come back.

I wondered how far I could run before all the noise in my head would just stop.

I wondered if Goat was following me.

I wondered if the broken man was still thirsty.

And I just kept on running. 

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[julesdelorme]

faller

Chapter 8

Suckers

There’s a sucker born every minute.

Every single fucking minute.

The wife doesn’t like it when I swear. She keeps a swear jar at home.

I put money in it every day even though we’re never going to have kids to give the money to.

She’s a good woman.

She’s entitled to her delusions after all I put her through. I never mention that the jar doesn’t really have a point. Every day I put money in and it just stays there. It just sits there. There’s a bunch of them now and they don’t do anything but sit there full of money. I don’t touch them. She doesn’t touch them. We go to church every Sunday and she holds my hand, and I’m just glad that she stayed with me all these years.

She knows who I am. She knows the kinds of things that I do. She knows all about me. I never lie to her. I don’t talk about the things that I do and she never asks, but I never lie to her. She knows. And still she stays. Still she loves me.

So let her have her swear jar that gets so full of money that neither one of us will ever touch, that gets so full of money that I keep having to buy bigger and bigger swear jars, and we laugh about that.

She’s a good woman.

I guess she’s a sucker for loving me, but she’s my sucker.

All those other suckers though. All those other suckers with their stupid vacant grins and their pathetic excuses for why their lives have gone to shit or why their lives have always been shit.

Two more for the swear jar.

You’re either the sucker or the guy taking the sucker. And I decided a long time ago that I was going to be the guy taking the sucker.

I’m definitely going to find a way to take this particular sucker. Even if he is in jail again. His kid is still there. Just the kid and that dirty goat. I can find a way to leverage that situation. Give a man a lever and he can move the world. Not quite sure how just yet, but I’ll figure something out when I get there. I always do.

This way to the Egress, folks.

All those suckers lying to themselves all the time, telling themselves some story about god or the way the world is supposed to work, but in the end the world works the way it works whether they like it or not. Predator or prey. The one that eats or the one that gets eaten. That’s the world. That’s the real world.

You don’t need to grow up on this piece of shit Rez to know that.

Another one for the jar.

I tried arguing once with her once that shit shouldn’t be considered a swear word. It’s just describing a normal bodily function that we all have to do pretty much every single day. We don’t think of sweat or scratch as swear words. They’re just things that we do but don’t like to talk about. Lots of things like that. More that we don’t want to talk about than we do. But I guess that a swear word is whatever we say it is, because we’re the ones that get to decide what offends us or doesn’t. No matter if it’s all phoney and the words people get offended by are the things that they do every day or think about every day but just don’t want to talk about.

Let her have that. Sometimes you’ve got to play by the rules of the game, even if they don’t make any sense. And sometimes you just make up the rules as you go. Sometimes you find a way to use the rules or bend the rules a little, and you’re a fool if you don’t, because someone else will, and you’ll end up being the sucker. Someone else will get to feed on the broken corpses of your stupid rules.

My job, in theory, is to make sure that those rules don’t get broken or bent too far. But my job in the real world is to figure out how far those rules can be bent and to make use of this badge that they were fool enough to pin on me so that me and mine get the most out of this life, and that we’re not the suckers, we’re not the prey.

Not like this drunk and his messed up kid.

All that council money now. All the casino money. And these suckers got themselves some free land, a nice house, a boat, and then they go to blowing all the money they got and the money they get every year. It doesn’t take a genius to talk them out of that land and that house.

They can keep their boats. But that land is worth something to people who know how to take advantage, and it doesn’t matter that those are the people who aren’t even allowed to own this land. There’s always someone who is. There’s always someone who is willing to take the money just to have their name on a piece of paper, and that someone is me. It it wasn’t me, it would be someone else.

It was good enough for Joseph Brant, it’s sure good enough for me.

This idiot doesn’t even have the boat and he burned most of his house down, almost killed that creepy kid. Himself. And even that dirty goat. He doesn’t deserve that land. He never earned it.

All these idiots would just sit there in their new houses, the same people that they were when there was no council money and casino money, and do nothing with all that land, with all this valuable border land. They don’t know what they’ve got. They don’t know what they’ve been given. They just know how to lose it.

Suckers.

They see a badge and a uniform, that most of them didn’t even bother to vote to give me and they believe anything that I tell them, or they’re too scared of the uniform to say no. Either way.

Suckers.

Somebody’s going to take their money. Somebody’s going to take their land. Might as well be me as anybody else. Suckers are born to be suckered. Prey is born to be eaten. It’s not the wolf’s fault that the pigs didn’t know how to build a house.

I watched my old man drink and piss away everything he ever got. Blamed it all on the white man. Blamed it all on the system. Blamed it all on my mother. Never once looked in the mirror and saw that he was the sucker and it wasn’t anyone’s fault that he didn’t have the backbone or the brains to make something out of himself. It wasn’t the Residential Schools or the Church or the Government’s fault that he stood there and took it and did nothing but feel sorry for himself.

Wasn’t anybody’s fault that he was a waste of space. That was on him. He was the sucker. And my mother was the sucker for staying and taking all his shit.

Not me.

Not me.

No, I joined the army just to get off this shitty reserve, off this shitty island. Came back and made something out of myself. Got myself a degree and when they wanted to put me on the council, I took it. When they wanted to put the badge on me I took that too. I’ll take more than that the first chance I get. I keep the peace. I can’t stop every single asshole from being an asshole, but I do what I can.

Another two for the jar.

Three.

Four.

Keep the laws that matter and bend other ones any way that I can bend them. Law of the jungle.

Stupid people shouldn’t be alive anyway. They’re out there having babies by the bushel with no money that they earned, and no brains and their kids end up as stupid as them, like cows that don’t even know that they’re being fattened up for slaughter.

Fuck them.

One more for the jar.

Fuck them twice.

Two for the jar.

They talk about fairness and how the world was a paradise before the white man showed up, but half us were killing the other half, and half of us are still killing the other half. Booze and drugs and shooting each other when they’re drunk or wasted. Running each other down on the road or the river. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the wrecks. I’ve seen the bodies. The suicides. Some people are just too stupid to be alive, or too weak to be alive, and back in the old days if that was you, you were the one that ended up dead. Now you get to to do stupid things to hurt other people. Kill other people.

We had wars. Our ancestors killed other people’s ancestors. Ate some of them. Parts of them. That’s what our own stories say. When the priests came here we did the same thing to them. They chose the wrong side so we killed them and we tortured them and cut their skin off and ate their hearts. Cut off Brebeuf’s lips and stuck a burning stick down his throat.

Paradise my ass.

Wasn’t one then and it sure as hell isn’t one now. Maybe a paradise for the winners. Maybe a paradise for the hunters and the killers. Paradise is what you make. Paradise is what you can take. Paradise is for the ones strong enough and smart enough not to be the prey.

Cain killed Abel because Abel was too stupid and too weak to be alive.

Survival of the fittest. Sucker born every minute.

Fuck them.

One for the jar.

If we had a kid he’d be one rich motherfucker.

Fuck.

Two.

Better off than this poor kid. His father would sign anything you put in front of him once you get him drunk. Sooner or later he’s just going to kill himself and that kid. Too stupid to be alive. Dumb motherfucker.

Fuck.

Two more.

Just another mean drunk. Just another sucker. And that kid. That kid gives me the creeps. Hardly ever talks. Stands there staring off into space like he’s in some kind of trance. Talking to that kid’s like talking to that stupid goat of his. Just stares at you and stares like he sees you but like he sees past you too. You just can’t tell what the hell is going on inside that kid’s head. Gives me the creeps.

Hell is not a swear word.

Not anymore.

I’ve seen hell. I know what it looks like.

Definitely not a swear word.

Kid gives me the creeps. Damn goat gives me the creeps too.

Damn’s not a swear work either. They say it on TV all the time. They say all kinds of shit on TV nowadays.

Fuck.

Two more.

Best thing that ever happened to that kid if I took him in, put him in the system. Living in that burned out house all alone. Not my fault his father’s an asshole. That prick sober and locked up is meaner than any rattlesnake and more disagreeable too. But maybe the boy could give me some leverage. Maybe that kid could be useful for something at least.

Prick.

That’s a swear word.

Yeah.

It’s a swear word.

Fuck.

That jar’s going to be full. Our kid would be a billionaire, if we could have one.

Going to have to buy another jar. Put it beside all the other ones.

Kid really gives me the creeps. Probably retarded or something. Be better off in the system.

Car in the driveway. There’s a fucking car in their driveway.

Probably that girl. Pretty one. Seen her here before. Heard she’s trying to take care of the kid. Not sure why. What her angle is. Don’t think she’s a social worker or a teacher. Kind of looks like she could be part Indian or maybe Oriental. Hard to tell sometimes. Could be related to the kid somehow. Except she doesn’t look like she’s from this place. Not sure what her angle is and I don’t like people who are up to things I can’t figure out.

Going to have to dig into that. Find out who the hell she is and if she’s going to be a problem.

What the hell is she doing?

She’s just standing in the driveway. Staring at something. Behind the house. Maybe the field. She’s just standing there. Bag of groceries spilled out all over the driveway. Can’t see what she’s looking at.  Must be something that matters. She should have heard my car. She hasn’t looked back even once, and she’s not taking notice of all that mess in the driveway.

What the hell is she doing?

I don’t like complications. I fucking hate complications.

One more for the jar.

Two more. Losing count.

I can’t see the boy. I can’t see anything behind that burned up house. Maybe something happened to the kid. Out here all alone, something bad was bound to happen. Not sure how that breaks down for me. Might be hard to reason with that prick after something like that. Or if maybe something like this’d leave him open to be manipulated.

I don’t like complications.

Just stop the car. Sit here for a moment. Try to figure out the situation before I go jumping in.

Fuck. She’s looking back at me now. She sees me.

The look on her face. What is that look on her face? Fear? Relief?

Guess I’m going to have to find out.

If I wasn’t married I’d fuck the hell out of her.

Shit.

Going to need a whole new swear jar.

Okay.

Hate complications. I really fucking hate complications.

Don’t like not knowing what I’m walking into. Only one way to find out, I guess. One way to find out who the sucker’s going to be.

This way to the Egress, folks. This way to the fucking Egress.

Going to need a whole new jar.

Going to need some way bigger fucking jars.

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[julesdelorme]

faller

Chapter 7

the River

The River used to be a mighty thing.

The River used to be a killer of man and beast.

Coming down from the icy north with its brutal cold and deadly current.

This River broke ships.

This Rive once tore canoes and men to pieces.

It left men shattered and crushed upon the rocks of its mighty rapids.

It was a River to be feared.

It was a River to be respected.

It was a River to be thought of with awe.

Then they came in with bulldozers and blueprints and they turned the River into something that they could manage.

They turned this River into something that they could use and they could feel safe around.

Just like they did with the bear, they trapped the River’s spirit.

They made its waters filthy with chemicals and sewage from passing ships from all over the world, and its waters stank and turned black and got clogged with seaweed and garbage.

They caged the River.

They put the River in a hole.

They dug holes and they filled them with concrete and put the River in those holes like they did with the bear, and they left the River to die.

And before long they had no more use for the river.

There were fewer ships. 

People and things were moved faster and easier by planes and cheaper by trains and the thing that they had made and called a river was no longer necessary.

Just this caged and filthy thing that they still called a river.

But this time some people got together and they cleaned up the river.

Not all people are the same.

Not all people are bad.

Most of them want what’s good and right, but far too many of them settle for what’s easy.

Some of the people, the ones who weren’t willing to settle, got together and they cleaned up as much of the sewage and the filth as they could because it was making so many of them sick. Because they could not bury the stink of the river the way that they had buried the dead bear.

These people, they brought the river back to something like life.

They did not give it back its Power, its Ka'shatsténhshera.

The river still could kill men, but only in the way that all rivers and all water can kill men, by drowning them.

It could no longer break them.

It could no longer break ships or even canoes.

It could not long shatter the things that men have made upon its rocks.

But they did make it beautiful again.

Now the river glitters like a painting in the sunlight and it flows as softly and as gently as a painter’s brush.

But that is all that people can see.

That is only the river’s surface.

That is only the perfect face of what they now call the river.

It is a tame thing now.

And, like all tame things it no longer inspires the supernatural awe that it did when it was wild.

And, like all tame things, it is polluted, just not in the obvious ways.

The river is still sick.

Just not in a way that you have to look at.

Just not in a way that you have to smell.

The river is not wild and it does not cause nightmares anymore.

The rot is all beneath its surface now.

The poison is not where you can see it or smell it or take any notice of.

But nothing that has been caged is healthy.

No thing that has been locked up can fully breathe.

And no thing that has been caged can be truly alive.

No matter how much we pretend that it is so.

No matter how pretty that we make it look.

The river is not truly alive.

Underneath its pretty face...

It is a dead thing.

It is a dead thing that is rotting.

Slowly surely rotting.

Yet now it’s so pretty.

Now it’s so very pretty.

Not mighty.

Not to be feared.

Not a River.

But so very pretty.

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[julesdelorme]

faller

chapter 6

the man

call me faller.

what they called me.

what they call me now.

what i call myself most of the time.

i call myself faller and they call me faller because that’s what I am. that’s who i am.

the worst insult you can hear if you’re a fighter. the worst insult you you can ever hear. worse than bastard or sonofabitch or coward or cocksucker. 

mostly they don’t say it to my face. 

mostly.

not at first but they said it and i heard it. and i didn’t say nothing. and i say it myself now. because it’s what i am. 

i could fight.

i still can fight.

mostly. 

i could win most of those fights. i can’t remember when exactly i stopped knowing i could win. i can’t remember anything exactly right no more. but the first time that somebody offered me money and i took it. and then i kept taking it because taking it was easy. the money. a lot easier than not knowing how the fight was going to turn out. a lot easier after a while than saying i didn’t want to take the money no more. the thing is after a while i didn’t even need to fake it. after a while i started to fall down for real. even though i used to be able to take any punch or kick and stay stay on my feet. all of a sudden i couldn’t. and even the maybe. even the maybe of being a halfway good fighter was gone.

they used to call it punchy.

when your brain gets all scrambled from too many hits. punchy. hands started to shake. the world started to look like broken television. i couldn’t remember things even simple things. people started to sound like they were talking from another room even when they were right there.

and i started falling down all on my own.

i would be walking along. the next thing i knew somebody was looking down at me. i was looking up at them. or at the ceiling. or up at the sky. the doctors even the bad ones even the very worst ones wouldn’t pass me to fight. not even in the dive bars no more. i was washed up. the booze and the drugs that were always part of it. then that’s all there was. wasn’t even the the fighting. i wasn’t even anything like a real fighter. not even the maybe of being a real fighter. i started to steal and rob. acting crazy.. even crazier than i ever was. all the time in the joint. like i was in more than i was out. the doctors in the joint telling me about scar tissue on my brain. making me fall down. all the tests. more tests that i couldn’t even say the name of. my brain didn’t work right. maybe it it never did work right. but now it was really fucked up. all i wanted to do was get out. just get out. get wasted and drunk to forget the pain. forget i was a useless drunk. useless drugged up fuck. washed up. all washed up.

then i started to think about going back.

started to think all the time about going back to the river. 

nothing but the river. no plans. no ideas except the river and going back.

every time i got out i would do something crazy end up back in the joint. get back on the booze. get back on the drugs. crack mostly. any kind of drugs i could get my hands on. anything to make the darkness not so heavy. make the darkness not so smothering for a little while. i would need more money. so i would do something stupid. get caught. end right back in the joint again. i never was no criminal genius. just some idiot that wanted something to push the darkness back just a little bit.

sometimes i would still get a fight for money. even then. it wouldn’t take more than one good shot before i was falling down again. the money got less. even less every single time. the fights got uglier. i got uglier. uglier meaner places. i got meaner. got easier to rob some place or or break into some place. i was never smart enough to get that right. end up back inside. all i could think about was needing to get get back to the river. only way the story could end. all i wanted. the fucking story to end.

i didn’t have no more feeling about dying than i did about living. just needed to get to the river. 

to the end. it needed to fit somehow. the beginning to the end. i was born dead. the actual dying was just some word. a word that was way past the time to say it. 

just needed to stay out for even a minute. so i could make it back to the river.

but i needed money. every time i tried to get my hands on cash. just ended up back inside. social workers. bible thumpers. telling me they could get me money from the government. on account of my head being so so messed up. but i didn’t want the government’s money. just wanted my own money. all i needed some halfway decent score where i didn’t get caught. except i was never smart enough not to get caught. not even before all the head damage.

the one social worker. fat and pasty. like a slug. lizard eyes. got real pissed at me because i didn’t want the government’s money.  that i would steal it from some store owner who never did nothing to me. that fat lizard eye slob couldn’t figure that. stealing wasn’t begging or taking handouts. didn’t even bother trying to tell it to him. it would never make no sense to someone like him. taking money from the government to go around like he gave a shit. 

i got out and saw him on the street one day and and kicked his fat slug lizard face in.

kicked it in so bad he died.

the lawyer brings up my head damage. said some shit about the guy diddling prisoners. i get seven for manslaughter.

when i got out this time i just started walking. kept on walking. no money. nothing to sleep in. just clothes and shoes. shoes worn through with holes. i got to the river. to the place where the river got started. or ended. i can never remember which one. i just kept on walking. i didn’t know where exactly. to the island. to the rez. didn’t know where the house where i grew up even was. where it used to be. just hoped that if i kept on walking i might come to the place. if there was a real place that i remembered. i would know it. i would know that place. then it could all be just end. i didn’t give a shit about them coming after me anymore. i just wanted to get to get to the river. get all the fucked up shit to end. all the falling down and and all the other shit to end finally. just get to the river. to the island. where it started so i could get it to end.

i never did find the place. maybe because it was all twisted. maybe because i was all changed. maybe because i couldn’t find the memories no more. with all the getting hit in the head and the falling down. i kept walking thinking maybe i would run into some place i would know. even without remembering it. but the rez was changed. not the dead filthy stinking thing i remembered. something cleaner. almost pretty and soft. nothing i knew belonged there. i didn’t belong there. they cleaned up all the memories. scrubbed them clean. so clean they didn’t even belong to me no more. this wasn’t my world no more. i could walk forever and nothing was going to be my remembering of it. 

it was that knowing. that the island wasn’t the place from my memories. it left me all of a sudden worn out. tired. hot. dry in my mouth so i couldn’t even swallow or make spit. long time ago i would go off into the woods without food or water. i would walk without sleeping or stopping. old woman told everybody i was doing some kind of spirit walk. all i was doing was walking. getting away from the world. getting away from the old man’s fists. sometimes i think maybe i was doing some kind of spirit walk. i just didn’t know it. like the old lady was telling the truth without me knowing it was the truth. 

mostly i was just walking.

i was feeling like i couldn’t couldn’t walk no more. then i see the boy. this skinny kid standing there watching me. arms wrapped around burned out old fence post. half burned down house. old goat tied up with a rope. he felt to me like i knew him. the kid i mean. like he was something or somebody. that half burned down house and the goat. like i knew it. like i remembered  it.

i felt like i knew the kid. and like maybe he would know me.

crazy.

so i started walking to them.

i didn’t even don’t even know why i was walking. 

i didn’t even know right away i was walking. 

somehow my feet changed direction without my knowing it. i was walking to this boy that i didn’t know. his old goat i didn’t know. but i was sure i knew them.

the kid didn’t move.

just stood there.

the goat was raising a racket. but then even the goat got quiet. like it knew me.

crazy. batshit crazy.

in that place. probably still even behind all the nice houses and the shiny boats. for a kid to just stand there when a grown up especially a fucked up grown up was coming towards him wasn’t normal. i remembered that. i knew that. people in that place were dangerous. even with more money in pockets they were probably still dangerous. people in every place are dangerous. but in a different way than than in places like that. in other places you don’t know the kind of hurt they’re going to to do. they don’t mean no harm at first. but in in places like the island the rez doing bad things is all there is. always there underneath the clean and shiny outside. pretty much anybody in that place still meant hurt. normal thing to do is get out of the way or do something ugly before before they do something ugly to you.

the kid just stood there.

the goat just stood there.

he didn’t look like there was nothing wrong with him. the kid i mean. he didn’t look like a retard. like he was off his head. at least on the outside on the outside he looked normal. but it wasn’t normal in that place to to just stand there. it was not normal when you saw somebody fucked up like me. scarred up and twitchy like me. all the scars and the the gimped up walk coming towards you. but the kid just stood there and the goat just stood there. 

they just stood there. 

i kept on walking.

that’s what happened.

just that.

just that.

them standing there and and me walking to them.

that was the start.

not the end.

not the end yet.

almost maybe.

wherever i was going this was the start

i didn’t even know where i was but that was the start.

i was done walking.

for now.

for now i was done walking. 

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[julesdelorme]

faller

Chapter 5

Dianne

Her name was Eliza.

Eliza Darquisse Dumont.

But everyone called her Dianne, and nobody knew why. 

Nobody, including Dianne, could remember why.

She was a pretty young woman, Dianne. And, while she had many suiters, she had no intention of becoming anyone’s wife or anyone’s mother. Not if she could help it. Olive coloured skin dabbed here and there with soft freckles and high cheekbones and shimmering black hair with copper streaks that reflected the sunlight on clear days. Her eyes were ever so slightly almond shaped and the colour of almonds too, which led some to speculate that she might have Oriental blood in her. 

Oriental.

That’s what they called it then.

It was an obliquely musical and distant word for something that the people in that place could only understand within a very uncertain frame. There was only one Chinese family and their take out food place, some half remembered thoughts of Marco Polo or Genghis Khan or Bruce Lee.

It raised her in their eyes above the Indian heritage about which she would never tell them. 

For the people in that place knew Indians, that’s what they called them then, all too well. They knew about the people who lived on the Island, who were not even good enough to be white trash. People who they feared and resented because they were as close to the absolute and despised Other as anyone in that place could know. There was no black family there then. Italians to them were not white and Jews almost certainly ate babies and had killed Jesus. 

Dianne was kind and gentle. She was pretty and she was decent. She couldn’t possibly be Indian.

Being kind and decent was an unusual thing then in that place. While our memories haze and soften our past into the “good old days”, there never truly was such a thing. At least not where Dianne grew up. Her goodness was most unusual coming from the family that she did, the one she would never tell anyone about.

She had been raised away from her brothers and sisters and her parents, part of the government scoop that took children away from Native families and placed them with white families for their own good. 

That’s what the government said. 

That’s what the government called it then. 

A kindness. 

As the youngest girl, she could not be sent into the woods to hide the way her other siblings had, and she had been found and taken. She had been taken in by good and decent white parents, and afforded a kind of luxury living away from that Island, of having and being able to keep her gentler instincts. It seemed then like a good bargain for giving up her past and her culture, especially since the church told her again and again that Indians were heathen Satan worshippers who had murdered and tortured priests. 

Dianne tried to be kind to the boy.

She knew that the boy lived an especially hard life, that he had suffered untold and unknown abuses that he would never speak of. Not to her and not to anyone else. She felt deep in her soul that he was meant to be a good boy and she believed that his cold and brittle distance from her and all the rest of humanity was a kind of armour, a kind of shield wall that the boy had created to protect himself from the ugly world of the Reserve, which was the only world that he had never known.

Dianne knew these things to be true without the words ever having to be spoken.

Some things have a truth to them that runs far deeper than the shallow surface skimmed by spoken words.

She had thought of perhaps adopting the boy, of taking him away from the Island, of taking him away from that world the way that she had been taken, but she feared the boy’s father. She knew the boy’s father. She had seen the look in his eyes when he was drunk and angry. And he was always drunk and angry. Dianne knew that the father was capable of terrible things. And she knew that the boy’s father was not the only threat to him on that Island.

That was another truth that ran far deeper than words that could be spoken.

Dianne was not at all certain that the boy would even be willing to go.

She did not pretend, even to herself, to understand the boy.

She could only do her best to love him.

She brought the boy food and clothing when she could, to that half burned down house. But she was always careful that none of her friends or anyone from her life could see her crossing the river. Most of them did not know Dianne/Eliza Darquisse Dumont’s connection to that Island. And she was not ready for them to know about that connection. She did not know if she would ever be ready for that.

The boy never seemed to wear the clothes that she brought him, and he would wolf down the food without ever taking the time to taste it or to show any appreciation for what Dianne did for him. She did not know what happened to the clothes. 

Some of them surely, along with much of the food, were eaten by his goat. That boy would give the goat food even when he himself was starving.

He would not tell her about these things if she asked.

She never asked.

But she knew.

Mostly, she knew.

He was a strange and sickly boy. She did not think that this was solely due to his terrible life or even to the living of a cruel and terrible life. He was very smart. His grades were very good despite his sporadic attendance, and she believed him to be a good boy, though he showed little evidence of that, other than that he did not seem to do particularly bad things, the kinds of bad things that Dianne knew that boys and men and women and even girls did on that Reserve, the kinds of bad things that the boy’s family was known to do, because that was all that any of them knew. 

His Grandmother said that the boy could see things that most others could not see, that he could hear things that most others could not hear. The Grandmother said that the boy had Strong Power, Ka'shatsténhshera’kó:wa, she said, the same kind of power as she, his Grandmother was said to have. But Dianne had been raised a good Catholic girl and she did believe in such things.

Not really.

Still she loved the boy.

Still she tried to as kind to him as she felt that she was allowed to be.

She did not like going to that Island.

They had money on the Reserve now, Casino money, and they had cleaned most of the place up, but that Island still felt to Dianne like a terrible savage and cruel thing. She could feel the ghosts of cruelty that still lingered there in that place in her good Catholic bones. It was a place where people like the boy’s Grandmother believed in things that would surely send them all to hell, and where, even now, with all the money and the new houses and new boats, terrible things, things that had been done to people for generations, were still done. She knew that the boy believed in some of the old ways, some of the Wild ways, but he also read the Bible and knew it better than most people who called themselves Christians, even though he was just a boy. And Dianne believed, she wanted dearly to believe that the boy would come to the good Catholic God in his own way and in his own time.

She would not tell him what to believe.

He would not listen if she did tell him.

Dianne knew what it was to be told what to believe and what it meant to people on that Island to be told what to believe and what not to believe, and she knew about the horrible things that were done through the centuries to make the people believe in a thing that they did not want to believe. She was not naive. She was not a fool. She knew what horrible things had been done to people in the name of God and in the name of civilization. She knew what had been done to the boy’s Grandmother and Grandfather and all the Grandparents that were from that place by her own Catholic Church.

Dianne believed nonetheless in the overall goodness of the Church in the same way that she believed the overall goodness of the boy.

But she had also come to believe that a person should arrive at the things that they believed because they chose to believe in that thing, not because someone else had decided for them that they should believe it.

Many at Dianne’s Church would not agree with that idea. Dianne never spoke it out loud.

She did her very best to be a good woman, did Dianne/Eliza Darquisse Dumont, and she succeeded at it better than most.

But still she worried that the things that the things that the boy’s Grandmother believed, and that the boy himself seemed to believe at times, would send the boy to hell. And Dianne did not want that for the boy.

Not for him.

She went out there to the Island when she could. 

On that day she went to bring the boy food.

Dianne knew that the boy had been taught to hunt and trap in the old ways and that he hid food somewhere so that he would have it if she did not come, but he was just a boy and the things that he could hunt and trap could not possibly be enough to sustain him, and nothing grew in the ground on that Island because of the years of chemicals being spilled into the river and the food that he hid could go bad and kill him. He was so sick, so thin and gaunt and fragile looking already. She feared that one day she would come to the Island and find him dead of starvation or poisoning or of the violence that was still so much a part of that unchristian and savage place.

There were churches on the Reserve. There were Christians. And those that weren’t were not all savage and cruel.

Dianne knew this to be true.

But it was a violent world. More violent even than the outside world, the world that Dianne knew. And the violence seemed to hang over the boy like a dark brooding cloud that might strike him down with lightning and thunder and mindless cruelty at any moment. 

Dianne felt deeply the boy’s loss even though it had not yet happened. 

She felt how a gaping emptiness would be left in the world where this boy once was. 

In her heart. 

And in the world itself. 

But she felt that his loss was inevitable, like the falling of the leaves and then the falling of the snow and then the falling of the rains that are separated by a too brief sunlight.

Dianne/Eliza felt an aching for the boy and for the brittle useless armour that this too often cruel world, a world as a whole that was cruel by default, let alone the world  of the island where violence could come so quickly and without warning, as much out of sheer boredom and not knowing of anything else as because it was just easier to pass on the hurt, had forced him to hide behind, the shield wall of not caring and of never being truly there, or in any place at all, so that when this too was taken from him he could tell himself that it had never truly mattered anyway, that he had never truly mattered anyway.

Dianne did not let the boy see, not ever, that she pitied him, that she feared for him or even that she loved the boy. She knew that such things were alien to him and that he would retreat from any sign of emotion further behind his brittle shield wall, perhaps so far behind it that she could never reach him again. 

She brought him food and sometimes clothing that he would never wear, and she let him have his distance. She did not try to reach beyond the wall or beyond his distance.

But she did love the boy.

She did not understand him. 

She did not even really know the boy but she did nonetheless love him.

That day, as she pulled her almost paid for car up the gravel driveway that was blotched and spattered with weeds and garbage in front of the half burned down house that looked like it might fall from rot and neglect at any moment, she did not see the boy. Usually, if he was here he would be standing outside, by the burned post. He stood there most often, eyes far, so far away. as if he was in some kind of trance. 

Just him and the goat.

He spent very little time inside the house.

He spent very little time inside at all.

The cockroaches and the ants and the flies and the rats had the run of the inside of that house which still stank of fire and filth.

It was not unusual for the boy not be be there.

But the goat was not there either.

He often went out to hunt or trap and he sometimes went on long walks that could last for days. Walks that the boy’s Grandmother said was an old sacred practice, a kind of communion with spirits. But Dianne suspected that the boy just walked to get away, to get away from the ugly and unkind thing that was his life.

The first few times he had done it Dianne had feared for the boy’s life. He went with no food or water and days without sleep, often so deep into the woods that no one could have found him, and he was just a boy, so small and frail and sickly. She feared that he would not find his way home or that he had no intention of finding his way home. But he always came back. And she began to learn not to fear for the boy quite so much when he disappeared on those walks.

Dianne got out of the car and grabbed her bags of food.

They had agreed on a place that she could leave food where it wouldn’t be found or stolen to easily, or torn into by the rats or the local dogs or coyotes. Or the goat that ate everything and seemed to hate the world even more than the boy. The food would probably still be there if he had gone on a walk, when he got back.

As she walked towards the house that still stank of fire, Dianne’s thoughts were on the things that would make up the remainder of her day. The drive back and the visits to friends and neighbours that took up so much of her days off.

It was a long moment before she finally too notice of the boy, the goat and a strange man walking away from her across the junk strewn field. She had been looking straight at them, but had been too lost in her own thoughts to see what it was that she was looking at. 

The man. The stranger.

Dianne knew right away that she did not know this man and that he was not someone she had ever seen on the Island or anywhere on the Reserve, though she did not know how exactly it was that she was so certain of that. The way that the man walked, the strange limping shuffling gait and the hunched over way that he carried his body filled Dianne with immediate and terrible dread.

Dianne had, in her nightmares, seen a stranger like this one come for the boy. She had always feared that some stranger, some unknown faceless predator would come for the boy while his father was in prison and while Dianne was away, and the nightmares always ended with the boy’s body in a field very much like the one that he and the man were now walking across, the body mutilated and violated beyond all redemption or human capacity for understanding by some faceless nameless human monster. 

Dianne/Eliza Darquisse Dumont froze where she was, in mid step, and opened her mouth to scream.

But no sound came out.

The faceless hunched over man and the goat and the boy continued to walk away from her in that barren rusted out field and Dianne/Eliza Darquisse Dumont could not move or make any sound.

The bags slipped from her numb hands and cans rolled and food splattered all over the dirty gravelled driveway.

And Dianne screamed without making the slightest sound.

While the boy, the goat and the man moved further and further away.

Dianne/Eliza Darquisse Dumont screamed and screamed and screamed.

And no sound came out.

Not the slightest sound came out her mouth. 

Not the slightest sound.

Still she continued to scream into that terrible silence.

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[julesdelorme]

faller

Chapter 4

Moccasin Face

I have floated through time and from body to body for as long as there has been time and the bodies from which to count that time. I have seen and done many things through many different eyes and always I am able to pass for one of them.

I know the exquisite silence of death. 

I have grown fond of death. Perhaps because I can never truly know death. Or perhaps because I love the empty and dark silence that always follows death.

I take joy in bringing death to others.

I have lost count of how many deaths that I have brought. 

It has been so many. 

I like to watch the life slipping from behind their eyes and I like to watch their spirits leave the flesh behind to wander lost and suffering for the rest of what it is that they have come to call time.

In this body I have killed over a hundred.

I have been told by some that it is one hundred and twenty three. And by others that it is a little as one hundred and nine. Still others have said that it might be more than one hundred and fifty.

I have lost count. 

The exact number does not matter to me. 

Numbers seem to matter very much to them. But I do not care.

Though there have been moments where I have tried to count how many lives I have taken in each body so that I know if it is more or less than in the past. I have always grown tired of trying to count.

I do not think that this body has killed over one hundred and fifty.

Most were men. Some were women and children.

I have no particular care about who it is that I kill. One bag of meat is pretty much like the other. It is the exquisite silence of death that I long for and that I kill for and in my opinion they all make too much noise. 

His enemies calls this body Two Stick because he wields a war club in each hand during battle.

The people of his village call him Moccasin Face because his face resembles a worn out moccasin that has been stitched together again and again.

They do not call him that to his face. 

But I have heard them say it just the same.

I do not care what any of them call him. Just so long as he is permitted to kill.

That is all that I have ever cared about.

Before there were these two leg creatures I have been here.

There were other creatures then. But the two legs are the best to be and to kill because they are aware of death and afraid of death and their minds are filled with hatred and fear and ridiculous reasons to kill that have nothing to do with any real need to kill at all and they are best to kill because they make so much more noise than any of the other living things.

It is fun to be Moccasin Face.

There is so much talk to hear about the side that he belongs to and the ones that he does not belong to, about his tribe against that tribe, about good people and bad people. But in the end it always comes down to yet another reason for the killing and that brings me such pleasure. I do not care about the reasons, but the lies that hide behind them make these two legs so much more interesting and so much more fun than other creatures. 

They are happy to have him use his war clubs on their enemies. 

They are even happy that he brings their enemies great pain. 

They just do not want to know that he enjoys it. 

They do not want to know that I enjoy it.

They just do not want to know or to believe how very much that I enjoy the killing.

They want him to enjoy the fight. They want him to enjoy the battle.

They would not be pleased to realize that we enjoy the killing.

That would shatter their carefully constructed illusions. And there is no greater sin that you can commit among these two legs than to rupture their layers of crusted lies.

They would not even like to know how much pleasure I take in the killing of the Black Robes.

The Black Robes, who stink worse than a bear coming out of its winter sleep, whose skin is so pale that they look sickly even when sun lingers, and who speak a language that is as awful as their smell. The Black Robes who want to force a new God on these people. A God who will not accept any of the other Gods because his ego is so large. Who has rules the the Black Robes speak but do not live. The Black Robes who bring sickness and bad medicine from across the great water on their big boats but who cannot even paddle a canoe in the gentlest parts of the great river. Who want to give that river the name of one of their sainted medicine man from a world they come from, a name that has nothing to do with this river or with this world. Who do not even know the river but think that they can give it a name of their own.

They are delicious, these Black Robes.

They lie to themselves more beautifully than any I have seen before this.

But even these self righteous creatures I am not supposed to take pleasure in killing.

The Black Robes mostly avoid Moccasin Face. The Black Robes mostly avoid me. Something in them sees what I am and they know without knowing to keep their distance from me though that often does not do them no good in the end.

Most of the women avoid Moccasin Face too. 

His face is too ugly and too frightening and perhaps they too see in his eyes that I would enjoy hurting them if given the chance to do so.

I am happy to be left alone to my own musings, and to my own special pleasures.

The Wyandot have grown so sick with the Black Robes’ disease that their people are fewer now than his, even though they were once a much larger Nation than Moccasin Face’s tribe ever was.

That is the disappointing thing that the Black Robes have done. 

They have killed more Wyandot than even I could ever kill.

But many of his people, particularly the women and children have also taken to the Black Robes’ teachings and have been felled by their bad Medicine. They kneel and pray before this new tortured God even as they die from the Black Robe demons and their wonderfully terrible diseases.

And the Black Robes call the Wyandot, their allies, Huron. An insult. Their insult their own allies.

I would like to kill all the Black Robes if I could, but they are so deliciously murderous and duplicitous in their own right that it seems almost a shame to kill them at all.

I would like to kill all the pale devils who come across the Great Water, but they bring their Bad Medicine and their selfish insecure God with them and I so enjoy watching them destroy even the souls of the people that they claim that they wish to save. I like watching the destruction that they bring. I would like to poke a hole in their guts and slowly pull their entrails out while boiling their lower bodies and their scrotums in scalding water or to hang them upside down over a small slow fire to bake the inside of their heads ever so slowly just to watching them scream and denounce their jealous God. But they do such delicious harm, and the Elders of his Council have spoken, and said that he should not kill them or do things to them until they give him good reason.

The pale two legs’ Algonquin guides call Moccasin Face’s people Maneaters. The Algonquins themselves have been known to eat parts of men in order to send them into the next world without their best and strongest parts. The Algonquin live in dirt huts like Beavers and run away from his people rather than stand and fight. The Algonquin help the pasty skinned two legs that have crossed great waters to claim the land and banish old Gods and who understand nothing of this world yet think that they can tell those already here how to live and put names on things that they do do know.

Moccasin Face has killed many Algonquin. 

He has eaten parts of their bodies.

I have eaten parts of their bodies.

The Algonquin are far stronger and braver than the Black Robes who look down on even them.

Moccasin Face once caught a white skinned soldier in the woods. The soldier tried to aim his thunder stick at Moccasin Face, but it was raining, and they seem only able to call upon the thunder when the sky is not using it. I could see the fear in the soldier’s eyes even though he was supposed to be one of their warriors. I cut thin strips off of the soles of his feet and he screamed like a frightened rabbit. I cut a hole in his belly and dragged some of his innards out. He screamed and cried and he begged Moccasin Face. I could not understand his words but I knew the begging for what it was. Then Moccasin Face took his knife and dug holes in both sides of the soldier’s mouth, and he pried out his teeth out through the holes in the man’s cheeks one by one. The soldier cried in ways that even children would not cry and I thought if this is what the white skinned warriors are, then the Black Robes, who will not even fight, must be weaker than anyone can even imagine. The soldier soiled himself and vomited and urinated all over the insides of his clothes. The smell was a wonderful thing. Crows came along and I let them have their way with him after cutting out his tongue and feeding it to the crows so that he could not scream out loud anymore. His screams were growing tiresome even for me.

But he broke so very deeply and quivered with so much fear and weakness that it filled me with bliss.

I did not eat any part of him.

I was so deeply thankful for his cowardice and his weakness but I feared having it inside Moccasin Face’s body, for fear that that weakness might enter me. 

I decided then and there that these creatures with skin the colour of the underbelly of a toad and their hairy faces were the very best ones to kill. I hope that many more of them would come over the great water and bring their weakness and their one delusional God with them.

O, it would please me so.

I was beginning to despair that these stoic people in Moccasin Face’s world would never give me the kind of pleasure that I most deeply desired.

These creatures walk and move like the other two legs. They resemble the other two legs except for their pale skin and all the hair on their faces and bodies. But they are something much better. They are something far more precious than those that were already here, because they have such great delusions and so little courage. They fill me with happiness with the weak ways that they die and the diseases and destruction that they leave behind them.

Even the Wyandot, even the dirt dwelling Algonquin have showed more strength, more dignity and more courage than these hairy, sickly pale, soft and cowardly creatures.

I have resolved that the next time that Moccasin Face catches one of these creatures I will cut him open little by little, to try to keep him alive for as long as possible so that I can see if their insides work in the same way that other two legs do. 

Perhaps they are not even of the same world. 

Perhaps they do not work in the same way at all.

I do not know if cutting them open will reveal their secrets.

It probably will not.

It can be very tricky to tell the insides of one thing from another sometimes.

But at the very least I will cause the next one as much pain as possible before killing them.

That is one thing that I enjoy even more than the killing.

That is the one thing that I have made Moccasin Face better at even than killing. 

He will cause them such incredible pain.

He will cause them such great and truly terrible pain.

And I will enjoy every delicious moment of it.

I will enjoy that next time the most, I think.

I think that I will enjoy the next one more than any of the others so far.

Especially if the next one has that wonderful pale skin.

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[julesdelorme]

faller

Chapter 3 - the boy

The first time that I saw him walking across the field, through the  patches of dried out tall grass, the rotted out rusted corpses of cars and tractor parts that had been there for as long as I remembered, for what seemed like as long as anybody remembered, I wasn’t sure  he was human. He looked like some kind of beast, like some kind of monster from an old TV movie with his strange shuffling limp and his scarred shaved bald head, bare in the hot summer sun, shining in some places and dull in others. 

Nobody on the Rez walked around with a bare head in the middle of summer. 

Sometimes old Pieface Tim would come wandering over from next door, forgetting where he lived, but he had all his hair except for in one spot on the side of his head where somebody threw a rock from a campfire at him. 

This was definitely not old Pieface. 

Even old Pieface looked like a human being when you first looked at him. 

I had no particular feeling about this not human man or about what he might do. 

It was hot and I was bored and I was tired. 

I was always tired. The doctors said the sickness would make me tired like that.

I did not even think that he was likely to ease my boredom or make me not tired in any way that mattered, even if he was some kind of something else.

When they tell the story now sometimes they say that I felt his presence as I stood there and knew that he was going to have a profound effect upon on my world. But that isn’t true. It makes the story a little more interesting and more fun to tell, but it isn’t true. I took less notice of him than I might have a crow or a mockingbird setting down on one of those rusted skeletons. It was the nature of my world then, and who I was then, that people, even when they brought trouble, and they almost brought some kind of trouble on the Rez, were just one more drip the monotony of exhaustion and suffering that was my childhood.

The sad truth of it is that even him resembling some kind of something else, that strange limp, the way that he shuffled rather than walked, the wildness and woundedness of his appearance, was not remarkable in that place. Bad nutrition and drink left many people looking that way. Some had been born that way because their mothers or their fathers or both had drunk too much and eaten too little and everything that they had eaten made of sugar or corn or bleached white something. It was not uncommon then to see people without arms or legs because of diabetes or because they had passed out drunk on the train tracks.

I probably assumed that he would hurt me.

I didn’t think he was a Wendigo or anything like that. Just something about him that seemed to have given up on being human.

My father was in jail again then, and I was all alone except for Goat, and she was too old to do all that much damage to a stranger. I was too small and skinny and weak to put up much of a fight. 

I would fight back most of the time anyway. I never did have the sense to sit still and just take it the way that other kids on the Rez had figured out to do, to just take it until it came to a stop. I would keep getting up until I couldn’t get up anymore, almost always making it worse. 

I knew then that sooner or later someone would surely kill me. 

Or maybe I hoped that sooner or later someone would surely kill me.

Maybe this strange not human looking limping man would be the one.

Even if he wasn’t a Wendigo.

I don’t honestly know anymore if I actually wanted to die or if it was just not in me to lie down and stay down, that I was just too stubborn to die. 

I wasn’t braver than any of the other kids. 

My brain just didn’t work in any way way that was considered normal, even in the twisted world of the Reservation. Some of the older kids compared me to the character in the old movie Cool Hand Luke sometimes. And I always thought that it was meant as a kind of compliment. But later, when I thought about that movie, I can see the sick look on the convicts’ faces when Luke wouldn’t stop getting up, couldn’t stop getting up, even when he knew that he’d been licked by George Kennedy. And I knew that it was never meant as a compliment. I still feel a kind of surprise that I did not end up somehow like Luke did at the end of that movie before that. Lying on a dirty floor, dead, with a big stupid grin across my face. 

The beatings and the casual cruelty from my father, and my mother when I saw her, and strangers when I saw them, were just one more tributary of the monotonous suffering that was the river of my childhood then. This not human man would probably hurt me and root through the hut, the wooden shed that passed for our home, my home, in search of something that he could take. He might even kill me. 

I was so inured to pain then, so tired, and the possibility of death then that I couldn’t even find a way to care about that. 

I would miss my Grandmother and my one friend, Roger, an older boy who had taken the time to teach me to fight and hunt more out of pity than of any real caring for me. 

I would miss Goat. She was as close to a good friend as I had then. 

And I guess I would miss my cousin Dianne who sometimes checked in on me and brought me food. 

I would miss them. But I would not miss my life. I would not miss the waking up every single day weak and sick to wonder out what bad thing would happen to me that day. 

If this bad thing would finally be the last bad thing that would ever happen, that would not be so bad. 

The man wouldn’t find anything. 

My father had sold or traded anything that mattered. He had almost burned down the house and even when they gave him money to rebuild the house he spent it on booze and drugs and just left the house the way it was. What he had not sold or traded somebody else had come and taken. I had buried some raccoon and squirrels that I had caught. deep down in a plastic bag with salt that I had taken from the garbage dump. Some nuts too. But he wouldn’t find any of it. I had learned how to hide things so well that even a coyote or a badger could not find them. And Goat was a better guard dog than most dogs when it came to that. If anyone got too close to the house she would raise a racket, even if she couldn’t stop them.

She was raising one hell of a racket with the not man coming towards us.

The not man’s head was down and his shoulders hunched forward in a way that reminded me of boxers that I had seen when Roger had taken me to his gym. He did not look up. There was no sign that he had seen me, or even noticed Goat, except that he was walking straight towards us. Every few steps he would stop and seem to mutter to himself. Then he would struggle to get going again, but he kept coming. 

And I stood there leaning against an old fence post just watching him. 

It never occurred to me to try to get away.

I could almost certainly outrun this one. But trying to get away didn’t cross my mind. Maybe because I knew that running would only put off this particular bad thing. If not this stranger then someone else would probably give me a beating that day. 

Or maybe I just wanted it all to come to an end, and I hoped that this stranger, this strange scarred up hollow of a man, might be the one that did that. 

He was close now. I could see the scars, so many scars all over his head and make out many on his face as well. He mostly kept his head down. I noticed his hands and knuckles were scarred too, and  I thought that maybe I was right about him being an old fighter. 

Or maybe just someone who was as stupid and as stubborn as I was. 

If I lived long enough I would probably end up looking an awful lot like him.

Either way this stranger was almost certainly dangerous. 

Maybe he would be the one to finally end it.

He stopped when he was about twenty feet away and glanced at me, blinked, and then looked past me as if he didn’t actually see me. 

I was used to that look. Lots of people looked past me like that. 

Mostly just before they hurt me.

He looked around the yard, at all the garbage and dirt and dried up patches of grass and then up at the sky and then down at the ground. Then he looked at Goat, which got her to raising even more of a racket. If she wasn’t tied up she probably would have gone after him. 

She and I had that in common. 

It didn’t make much of a difference to either of us that we couldn’t win the fight.

He just stood there for the longest time.

And I just stood there too. 

Waiting.

Neither one of us looked at each other. 

People didn’t look right at each other in that place. That was just the way it was on the Rez. 

We stood there, watching what we could out of the corner of our eyes. 

Even Goat got quiet and just stood there.

Waiting.

I was used to waiting. 

I had become very good at waiting.

Waiting was one more thing you got used to on the Reservation.

The stranger’s face was scarred and lumpy. One eye was so scarred over that it was barely open and both ears were like raw cauliflower. 

He didn’t look like an Indian. I remember thinking that. 

But then again, neither did I. 

Not really. 

I had the dark hair and the dark skin that tanned and never burned, but there was enough of my mother in my features even then that those kids on the Rez who did look Indian, though many of them had less of the blood than I did, would beat on me for not being Indian enough. 

His skin was pale. Not the kind of pale that looked natural. The kind of pale that would come from spending too much time inside. 

Prison. 

He didn’t seem to have all the tattoos that usually marked the men who spent time in prison. 

Men like my father.

But something about this one said that he wasn’t a man who remembered what it was like to have freedom. 

He seemed like he was used to having to being in a cage. 

He had the high cheekbones and a vague shape to his face that might make you think that he had Indian blood, but you would have to look closely to see it, or to see that he seemed to know this place in a deep way, in the way that comes from growing up in a place like that.

We called it Indian then. 

I can’t keep track of what we’re supposed to call it anymore.

-Much chance you got any water around, I suppose. - He didn’t say it like a question. More like a fact that he’d already figured on.

His voice sounded tired. Dry and full of gravel. The tips of two of his fingers were nicotine stained. He was somebody who was used to smoking rolled up cigarettes instead of store bought. 

-No. - I said.  -I emptied the jug last night.

That was true. I would have said it to him even it wasn’t, but I had used up the last of the water and hadn’t gotten around to filling the jug back up yet.

The man stood there staring at the ground. He kept his thumbs straight on the outside of his hands the way old boxers do. I started to wish he’d get it over with. I also hoped that he wasn’t one of those that liked little boys. I was still pretty enough then to have that tried on me a few times. Up until then I always managed to put up enough of a fight to make them decide that I wasn’t worth all the trouble. I wasn’t expecting to get away with that forever.

-Didn’t see no pump. - The man said -Guessing that place of yours has got no running water.

Again it was more like he was stating what he was pretty sure was a fact than like he was asking a question.

I thought for a moment about lying about where my father was. 

But it didn’t seem worth all the effort. He wouldn’t take long to find out that I was all alone if that was what he wanted.

-There’s a creek back in the woods. - I said -I usually get my water from there.

I don’t know why I said that. I knew better than to give anything to a stranger. Even information. Giving anything away that you didn’t have to never worked out for anything but bad on the Rez.

-It ain’t too clean. - I said.

We stood there for a little while. 

I was already getting bored.

Mostly people hurting each other was just one more way of not being bored in that place.

I figured he was coming due to hurt me soon though.

He just stood there for a while. Looked around. Looked up at the sky. Then back down at the ground.

It seemed to me like he did that a lot.

-I don’t have money. - He said -Don’t... Don’t have too much of nothin.

He shuffled his feet. Something in the way he was standing there gave me the feeling that he wasn’t going to hurt me. 

But I knew better than to trust anything in that place.

Or maybe I just hoped that he would turn out to be far worse than he looked.

-Don’t suppose you could point me to the creek. - He said -I can’t give you anything for it.

Despite all the scars and the look of somebody who had spent a lot of time in prison, there was something about him that felt gentle. Not quite kind. And not towards everybody. But towards me and those like me. And he didn’t speak like most of the people on the Rez or any of the bad ones who spent most of their time in jail. He wasn’t going to hurt me.

Because I was just a boy. Perhaps because I could not hurt him.

-I could bring you there I suppose. - I was as surprised at having said it as he seemed to be at my having said it.

He looked straight at me for just a brief moment as if he was seeing me for the first time and then looked back down at the ground.

We stood there for a while just not looking at each other.

I could feel then that he wasn’t going to hurt me. There was violence in him. A massive amount of rage and violence. He still seemed very dangerous. Even with all the damage I could see had been done to him, he still seemed like someone who could take care of himself in a pinch. That violence would probably not be turned on me. It would probably would never be used on someone like me. 

I still didn’t trust him. 

I didn’t trust anybody then. 

That part of me that wouldn’t and couldn’t believe that even the people who had been good to me, would not hurt me sooner or later. Maybe he would never hurt someone like me. I still could only see being hurt as something not very important, not being hurt as a kind of disappointment. 

Maybe I was a little bit sorry that it was not going to end for me today.

He licked his lips, and the sound that his lips and his mouth made when he did that told that he had gone without water and been in the hot sun for way too long. 

-If you don’t want me to take you. - I said. -That’s fine too. 

I wanted him to know that I didn’t care one way or the other. I didn’t think I did care one way or the other. 

But I wanted him to know that I didn’t.

He licked his lips again. They were dry and chapped, and the inside of his mouth sounded dry and chapped. I could hear it from where I was. 

-If it wouldn’t be too much trouble. - He said -I guess I’m pretty thirsty and I could use some water. If that wouldn’t be too much trouble.

I shrugged my shoulders. 

Then I turned and started to head towards the creek. 

I stopped when I realized that he wasn’t following. He was just standing there with this vague look on his face, like he was confused or just couldn’t figure out if he wanted the water at all.

-Mister. - I said -This is the way if you want some water.

He gave me a kind of startled look and then looked back down at the ground and nodded his head, a gesture so small and so slight that I barely saw it. -Don’t you want to grab your jug? - He asked me. This time a real question.

I stared at him. Then I went into the house and got my jug.

Goat looked at me when I came back out.

I went over and untied her.

-She won’t hurt you. - I said to the man. Just in case he got scared of goats. Some people did. -She needs water too.

I led them down to the creek.

The stranger followed me with that strange shuffling limp.

I wasn’t all that sure that he’d be able to make it to the creek.

And I wasn’t all that sure, if he didn’t make it, if I would try to help him make it or not.

I wasn’t sure if I cared one way or the other.

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