Late in the Standoff Page 5

  Finally, one of the Kiowa leaders requested Harry as a mediator. Harry didn’t know anyone in Delaware County so he didn’t understand why he was called, but the situation was urgent, said the governor’s staff.

  Before my fight with him about Vietnam, I’d been eager to come along. As a boy, I’d accompanied him many times to Indian powwows in Sultan Park, north of Walters, his hometown. I remembered drums thundering beside the park’s little stream. Dogwood blossoms fell all around us. The dancers, in robes of white feathers and long blue beads, moved in solemn circles beneath quivering willows. I loved the dancers’ thick, straight hair, their long cheekbones. They looked much more down-to-earth than the actors I’d seen on TV shoot-’em-ups wearing moccasins and buckskin pants. They didn’t grunt or eat raw animals. They broiled deer meat over open fires in the park, cut it into strips, mixed it with vegetable oil and fresh berries. They laughed and sang. Their ceremonies were full of movement, lines, and grace. I sketched them so fast, so intently, I ran out of breath.

  But now Harry and I were bristling at each other, and I wished I’d stayed in Walters at my grandma’s house.

  The day before, my parents and I had driven up from Texas to spend Christmas with Harry and Zorah. She loved the holidays, and her tree was the finest of the season, decorated with strings of long thin lights filled with colored water. When you plugged them in they bubbled.

  Zorah doted on me. When I was little, she’d leave dollar bills in pink plastic eggs for me at Easter or slip coins into my coat pockets. The morning Harry and I left for Jay, she caught me at the door. “In case you stop for a treat,” she said, slipping me a buck.

  She also gave us two freshly baked gingerbread cookies. Harry had smuggled his into the Dairy Queen to eat with his coffee. I’d saved mine: a reward, later, for surviving this day with a man I no longer knew.

  The trouble between us had started when my folks asked me to explain to him why I’d been suspended from school for a week, right before break. I’d drawn a poster of screaming Vietnamese children, from pictures I’d seen in Life magazine, and scrawled at the top in psychedelic lettering, “Stop the Bombing!” Late one afternoon, I’d mimeographed dozens of these and taped them to the classroom doors of my junior high.

  Everyone knew who did it. Each month, I’d made posters for dances and other school events. My style was distinctive, the vice principal told me dryly as he pronounced my sentence.

  Of all the members of my family, Harry would appreciate my convictions, I thought. After all, he was a former socialist, a man who’d opposed the draft as a kid, a man who called me Pancho because my infant face had recalled, for him, smudgy photos he’d seen in history books of the great revolutionary, Pancho Villa.

  Instead, after I’d laid out my story, he told me, “If you don’t like your government’s policies, you work within the system to change them. This maverick stuff, Pancho, it’s useless and dangerous.”

  “What maverick stuff?” I asked.

  “The protests. The campus riots. The troubles in the cities. You’re what, fourteen, fifteen?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Old enough to have more sense.”

  What had happened to the Boy Orator, I wondered, humiliated and confused. What had happened to the guy who’d scorned the nation’s “industrial giants and munitions makers”? I looked at his sagging cheeks. He wasn’t a boy anymore, not even in spirit. He was seventy now. But could a person change that much?

  I carried a petition with me denouncing America’s bombing of North Vietnam. My Catholic “Youth for Peace” group was sponsoring a drive for signatures to mail to the president. Harry wouldn’t touch it. “These radical young priests in the church now, playing politics—they don’t know the first thing,” he said. “Ought to stick to pouring wine and chanting to themselves.”

  “I can’t believe you,” I said. “You’re talking about the church!”

  “Well, I expect you to straighten up.”

  That night, helping Zorah trim the tree, I asked her if I’d done something to tick Harry off. It didn’t seem possible that my misadventures were enough to upset him so.

  “Nope. He’s become cautious, that’s all.” She sprinkled tinsel on the tree.

  “I’ve always seen him as a fighter,” I said. He had a promotional photo of Jack Dempsey, acquired somewhere on his travels. Besides the Pogo books, it was my favorite thing in his house. “Boxing’s not so different from running for office,” he’d told me once when he caught me admiring the picture. “The winner’s the one who can take the most blows.”

  Zorah laughed. “He used to be a fighter. These days, it’s ’Agitation’s a luxury I sure as hell can’t afford.’” She reached to perch a little drummer boy on a limb.

  “What’s he mean?”

  “He’s an insider. A political veteran now, with a reputation to protect. He can’t be reckless.”

  “Do you think my posters were reckless?”

  “At your age, your granddaddy would have done the same thing.”

  This didn’t comfort me. Did she mean I’d soften, too?

  As I stretched to fit a snowy angel on the tree, I felt dizzy, short of breath: the pine needles had provoked an allergic reaction in my lungs. Colors swirled through my head. Reds, purples, pinks. Now, as I gazed at the tree, all the figures seemed to shift. The wise men, the Virgin.

  Zorah plugged in the lights. I focused on the bubbles; their pulse steadied my chest.

  “Anyhow, don’t worry about your granddad. He thinks the world of you. You know he docs. What is it—History Man? His name for you?”

  “History’s Keeper.”

  “Right.” She rubbed my head.

  “Come on, it’s serious, Grandma. ‘History Man’ sounds like a comic book.”

  “I thought you liked comics? All right, all right, I’m sorry. All I’m saying is, this tempest’ll pass. And it’s not like this is anything new, is it? He’s been in the House longer than old Methuselah. Don’t let the old goat get to you, okay?”

  “You remember coming up here, couple of years ago?” Harry asked me now in the car. We were nearing Jay, climbing through red and yellow hills.

  “The Civil War field?”

  “Exactly,” he said. One of his pet projects was preserving historic sites, talking landowners into donating significant property back to the state. Sometimes he took me with him, as a prop. “We want our children, like this young man here, to have a clear sense of their heritage, don’t we?” he’d ask some farmer whose pastures had been the scene of a nearly forgotten bloody skirmish a century ago. Folks rarely refused him.

  “You had your tape recorder then,” he reminded me. “History’s Keeper. Didn’t we come back through the city that time and stop at Adair’s?”

  “I think so.”

  “We wrap up this Jay business pronto, we might do that again. What do you say?”

  I shrugged, feigning indifference. He knew I loved the place—Adair’s Tropical Cafeteria in downtown Oklahoma City. He used to take me there after House votes. It’s where he’d turned me into his personal storyteller.

  He lit another Chesterfield. Coughed. The smoke irritated me. I remembered Adair’s the way it looked the first time I saw it. It was in a drab shopping center, but the neon palm tree just inside the door promised an exotic experience. To a seven-year-old, the bamboo partitions and jungle wallpaper were thrillingly strange. Usually, Harry was in a fine mood at these meals, having just won a floor fight. Over beets, baked halibut, macaroni and cheese, he’d tell me stories of his early days when he traveled the state as the Boy Orator, speaking for the poor. Eventually I knew these tales by heart.

  All my life I’d seen his name—my name—on posters, match-book covers, emery boards: “Vote for Harry Shaughnessy—He Has Always Been Your Friend!” I believed it. We were one and the same, Harry and me.

  One day at Adair’s, flipping through my sketchpad, he asked me if I liked to write as well as draw.


  I hadn’t thought about it. “Sure,” I said.

  “Good. I hope you’ll practice hard, Pancho. Pictures and words. A powerful combination. A right cross followed by a swift left hook.” He leaned forward, over his pumpkin pie. “Every family, like every culture, needs a chronicler,” he said. “History’s our teacher, right?”

  “Right.” What was I going to say? He’d told me so, many times.

  “You can be History’s Keeper.”

  “I can?” I dribbled strawberry ice cream onto the table.

  “You bet. I’ve been watching you, and I think you’ve got the skills.”

  He winked at me, the kind of comradely signal he’d sent around the House floor. I felt the sway of his charm: my cheeks burned.

  Instead of getting me started with stamps, a rare coin collection, or an ant farm, he made his life my project.

  I think now he had a sense of himself as a unique individual in a particular place and time, in a way that few of us do, and he shrewdly thought ahead. If I didn’t pan out as his Boswell, at least I’d have the stories to pass along to someone else someday.

  He bought a Norelco tape recorder, a heavy, square machine small enough to fit into a coat pocket, and saved his thoughts for me on mini-cassettes. On my visits, he’d slip the tapes into my suitcase. “History’s Keeper,” he’d say, smiling, patting my head.

  The next Christmas he gave me my own recorder, “to go with your pencils and paper.” It seemed to me the kind of device I’d seen in James Bond movies. At home, whenever I played Harry’s tapes, I remembered our afternoons in the buzzing light of the neon tree, and my mouth watered with the faint taste of slightly scorched macaroni.

  On the hardscrabble outskirts of Jay, pickups lined the highway: rusting, door-sprung jobs, some in need of paint, some painted three or four shades of the same basic color. Empty gunracks filled their back windows.

  The guns were in the hands of the Cherokees, Kiowas, and Creeks who flanked the main street into town, in front of hot dog stands, neon beer signs on dark bar walls, gas pumps, signs saying JESUS IS COMING. Store windows were shattered. The Indians wore overalls or jeans, leather coats. They cradled rifles or fingered pistols tucked into the tops of their pants. Their hair was long. I didn’t see any women.

  Not far from here, the Joads had scraped and stabbed their sun-cracked acres, but today, with most whites out of sight and Indians in charge of the streets, I’d never seen a less Okie-looking town.

  Harry parked the Olds by a state trooper’s car. He’d gone pale. “If I’d known they were armed, I wouldn’t have brought you,” he said, scared or angry or both.

  He tossed a cigarette out the window, and we sat there wheezing. Something else we shared, besides a name: neither of us could breathe worth a damn. Years of tobacco had taken a toll on him. I was a mass of allergic symptoms. My hands still prickled from touching Zorah’s tree.

  A young white man with short hair and a gray suit waved to us from the side of the road.

  When we left the car, Harry told me to stick close by.

  The young man introduced himself as Michael Van Buren, one of Governor Bartlett’s aides. “We’re so relieved you could make it,” he said.

  “When I spoke to him on the phone, your colleague in the city didn’t prepare me for this,” Harry said. “I was under the impression I’d be talking to two or three representatives of the tribes. This looks like war.”

  “They started coming out of the hills last night. Staking out the streets. No one took them seriously at first. I mean, you know, the Indians here have always been pretty much ignored.”

  “The problem, perhaps.”

  “Right, right. Now we’ve got a scalping party on our hands.” He forced a laugh. Harry didn’t join him. In the young man’s stare I saw a confused quality I’d noticed in many adults. I’d begun to understand—from things Harry had told me—that America’s old rules of civility and order no longer applied to daily life. The Kennedys and Martin Luther King were dead. Cities were on fire. This may have been Jay, Oklahoma, but it hadn’t escaped the nation’s troubles.

  “Why’d they ask for me?” Harry said.

  “Don’t know. Won’t say. But you’re the man they want. Claim they’re through wasting time with the locals.”

  Though the air was getting colder, Harry removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves, a flamboyant gesture of openness to everyone in the street: I’m hiding nothing. “Where am I going?” he asked.

  Van Buren pointed to the courthouse. “The leader’s in there.”

  “Stay put, Pancho. I’ll be back shortly.”

  Despite my tiff with him, I wasn’t going to let him walk by himself through a hostile crowd. When Van Buren turned to confer with his aides, I followed Harry down the road. He was too intent, watching the men with guns, to notice me behind him. When he reached the fortlike courthouse, spun and saw me, he shook his head and whispered, “All right, sit down, Pancho. Don’t move.”

  The Indians hadn’t shifted as we’d passed them in the street. Silent sentries. A man with football-colored skin told us to wait, then slipped inside the courthouse.

  “Got your pencil and paper?” Harry asked me.

  He knew I did. I nodded.

  “May be a good story in this.”

  At that, a faint macaroni taste filled the back of my mouth. My lungs hurt.

  A tall man in black denims and a blue cotton shirt came out of the courthouse. “Representative Shaughnessy. Thank you for coming,” he said.

  Harry shook his hand. We all shivered in the cold. “Why me?” Harry asked. “I’m not from this district.”

  “You have the reputation, statewide, of being a fair and honest man.”

  This didn’t satisfy Harry—I could tell from the curl of his mouth—but he let it go for now. “All right,” he said. “Fill me in.”

  “My name is John Tasuda, from the Kiowa tribe. As you may know, the Kiowas, Cherokees, and Creeks live and work harmoniously here.”

  Harry nodded.

  “I’ve been elected to be their spokesman.”

  “In this deer hunting matter?”

  “In the illegal arrest by the Department of Wildlife of my Cherokee cousin, Louis Chewie.”

  I wheezed. My ribs felt like straps.

  “The hunting laws are clear. Posted well in advance,” Harry argued.

  “Louis Chewie is a good family man. A farm laborer.” John Tasuda scratched his ear through a tassel of long black hair. “You grew up on a farm, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “Have you forgotten, in your nice, air-conditioned office in the capitol building, how arduous farm life can be?”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Most of us work in the strawberry fields when we can, but much of the year we’re out of work. We do what we can to feed our families.”

  The straps were tightening.

  “Still—”

  “The buck in question was killed on the Kenwood Reserve, in the thickest part of the woods. Do you know the place?” John Tasuda asked.

  “Yes. I did a little homework before coming here,” Harry said. “The government holds it in trust for the Cherokee tribe.”

  “That’s right. So the land belongs to Chewie’s people.”

  “Even so, under federal mandates—”

  “What? Is he to be licensed like a dog, just so he can feed his children?”

  Tightening, squeezing all the air. Harry rubbed his face. “As one elected official to another, I can tell you, you’ll get nowhere with this. I know it doesn’t seem fair—,” Harry said.

  “It’s not a question of fairness.” Tasuda crossed his blocky arms. “It’s a matter of survival. Last September, Chewie’s aunt starved to death in her cabin.”

  “I’m sorry,” Harry said.

  “I heard a long time ago, Mr. Shaughnessy, that you believed in equality for Native folks. That’s why I’ve turned to you.”

  At that moment I com
pletely lost my breath. My worst asthma attack in months. Probably it had been building for a while, prompted by Harry’s cigarette smoke in the car, Zorah’s tree, the stress of our situation on the courthouse steps, but it seemed at the time a rebuke to Harry—I felt it, he felt it—a cynical response to John Tasuda’s faith in him.

  It was as though I’d shouted, “I’ve always been proud to bear your name. But you’re wrong about Vietnam. You’re wrong here. I don’t want to keep your history anymore.” I saw the shock on his face—and it was shock, more than concern—as I stood there gasping.

  A hawk called in the sky.

  “Do you have an inhaler?” Harry asked.

  “Left it … in the car. I’ll be okay. Just let me sit.”

  It took me a while, but I like to believe, now, that I was mature enough to compose myself in a crucial moment.

  I closed my eyes and pictured Zorah’s bubbles.

  “We’ve got to go,” Harry said, worried for me now, even as I was starting to get better.

  “I’d hoped we could work things out,” said John Tasuda.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Really.”

  “Mr. Shaughnessy, I’ve followed your career for many years.”

  Harry looked at him. “Why?”

  “My grandmother used to talk about you. She heard you speak once, somewhere. You wouldn’t have known her. Just a face in a crowd. But she was a great admirer of yours.”

  Harry looked chilled, a slightly bewildered old man—as if trying to recall what he used to say, how he used to feel.

  “I want you to understand, I don’t trust politicians,” Tasuda said. “Never have. I know, to you, we’re all just faces in a crowd—”

  “No no, everyone’s important,” Harry said automatically. “Of course you are.”

  “But I asked to speak to you because I know what’ll happen if shooting breaks out. We may win the day, but eventually we’ll lose the war. We always do. I figured if I could reason with any white man, it might be you. Grandmother always believed you were principled and fair.”

  “He is,” I said, still wheezing. My lungs felt hard and small. Harry watched me closely, probably to see if I was being a smart-ass again. “She was right, wasn’t she?” I asked Harry.