The Powwow Highway: A Novel

© 1979 by David Seals

All rights reserved.

First University of New Mexico Press edition published 2014 by arrangement with the author.

Printed in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Seals, David.

The Powwow highway : a novel / David Seals. — University of New Mexico Press edition.

pages ; cm

ISBN 978-0-8263-5489-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8263-5490-7 (electronic)

1. Indians of North America—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.E1725P69 2014

813’.54—dc23

2014001754

Cover illustration: Aquí Cantamos, courtesy of Leopoldo Romero

To my family

Preface

The Origins of the Sacred Pony

This is the story of a machine and of the people who made a story of its movements and of what happened to the machine and its people. For the Indians who passed along the endless wanderings of the Powwow Highway had felt themselves to be a trickle on an ancient river. They were something of a raiding party in the old dilapidated automobile, not unlike a hunting party of the Old Ones. They came upon the immigrants in a black belching chaos of fear and gasoline and passed along their way like jackrabbits darting past startled drivers on a lonely night. Their eyes flashed like sorcerers’ in the headlights and then disappeared behind metal and rubber.

Lame Deer, the agency village of the Northern Cheyenne in Montana, knew the old heap well. But not at first. Rarely had a new vehicle entered upon the traditional lands of the Morning Star People, and this Buick was no exception.

It had been the proud new steed of a vice president of the Billings Bank & Trust for the first two years of its life. It knew the joys of every rambunctious youth, flush with good health, an integral part of the brand-new and very traditional suburb in Billings. The extravagant cream-colored Buick frolicked alongside the other healthy children of that booming blond-headed city, a proud emblem among emblems of its prosperous neighborhood. If a machine were alive and could be happy—things of which mechanics and inventors were convinced—then this 1964 Buick LeSabre had found its destiny.

Alas, time is no less cruel unto man-made joys than it is unto the creator’s own fragile framework. Illusions do not dissipate very quickly, at first. A piece of rubber insulation fell off the driver’s door. It was glued back on. The soap ran out of the automatic window washer. It was easily replaced. But then a tire picked up an imperfection out at the rodeo grounds and blew. As the twelve-month guarantee ran out, so did the water pump. The seats began to show wear. The industrious banker cared less to keep the carpets cleaned of Coca-Cola and the dog’s muddy footprints. Crayons melted on the dashboard. The front bumper showed suspicious signs of rust.

The old dreams found replacements. The banker was promoted to senior vice president. He had a larger office now, he was picky about his carpeting, his lovely wife had another baby girl. It was time to discover new realms, new possibilities, a new car. Two new cars. The Buick was left on the A-OK lot and its family drove off into new frontiers—a 1966 Buick LeSabre and a Mustang convertible. Mobility had fertilized. Independence had offered its outlet unto whiteman once again, as a young girl might have offered herself to the wind.

Red Siskiewicz, a lonely bachelor from Butte, picked up the ’64 buggy on a real deal. New prospects presented themselves to him. Freedom was again a possible route to happiness. Within a week he rolled it down Turner Hill, killing himself and the bleached-blond schoolteacher he had just picked up at the Eldorado Lounge.

The Buick sat for seven months in DeBaca’s Wrecking Yard. After a body shop banged it roughly back into shape, it was stripped of every part it possessed, inside and out, by Fidel DeBaca. It sat naked, a lumpy frame, a body only. Fidel sold the parts to his best customers, mechanics from the garages around town.

Wayne and Reed Garrison took it off Fidel’s hands one warm day in June, when school was out for the summer. They lifted the ’55 Chevy engine from their recently burned-out ’47 Ford coupe; put in straight pipes, solid lifters, Naugahyde seats, racing slicks in the rear, mag hubcaps; painted it bright red; and raked the chassis so that it looked to be perpetually rolling downhill. By August they had dubbed it the Cherry Showboat.

By September, the wiring caught fire and Wayne and Reed barely escaped with their lives.

It sat in DeBaca’s for three years after that. No one wanted it. The engine and the body were burned shit-brown. A family of skunks made a nest in the backseat. It seemed to be the end of a country-western hard-luck story. It was one down-and-out machine that nobody could love.

Then, one cold and arctic afternoon, a glacial wind blew Manny Bono against the shack of Fidel DeBaca. Manny was on his way to the Purple Orchid, one of many Indian bars huddling among warehouses and wrecking yards and the refuse of every city that no one but Indians and other foolish people who do not understand the twentieth century could want. It was the Indian section of town. Manny ducked into the shack on the sidewalk, even though Fidel was only a goddamn Mexican. Fidel sat by a leaky gas stove, staring unbelievingly at a Playboy centerfold.

Fidel, this wind has frozen my asshole shut. I want to buy one of your fine ponies.

Shit, Fidel pronounced in his odd Castilian accent, look around.

Manny did not want to look around. It was too goddamn cold. He looked out the window to see a shit-brown old Buick sticking out among the demolished pickups and Chryslers. It seemed to call to him. It was as if an eagle had shown him the light of this beautiful thing.

That is a nice one. Does it run?

That? Shit.

It has no engine?

It has an engine.

No tires?

Tires.

I will go start it up.

Miracle of the valley that shivering day as Manny walked bowlegged among the junk, his crew-cut black hair sweating under his brown straw cowboy hat, his pointed boots ignoring the frozen mud holes. He looked at the huge racing slicks in the rear and the bald blackwalls in the front. They had air. He sat on the Naugahyde seats. They were only a little torn. He found the key in the ignition, turned it to on, pumped it twice, and it purred gratefully back to life. He drove past Fidel’s shack, very slowly so as not to be seen or heard. Why should he pay a brown whiteman, after all he had done to him? Fidel did not even look out the grimy window, never expecting to see an Indian with a shit-eating grin drive by, or a frantic family of skunks peering out the scent-blackened back window.

And that is how that Buick, like so many American dreams resurrected back unto reality, came to the Cheyenne reservation.

It ran without fault for nine years, until Manny traded it to his cousin Philbert in 1978 for two ounces of marijuana and a worthless horse saddle.

Chapter 1

How Protector and Philbert and Buddy Came to Share Friendship, and How They Left on Their Sacred Quest

Everyone in Lame Deer knew that old shit-brown Buick. It had become an integral part of the tribe. Perhaps not as timeless as the four sacred arrows bequeathed to the Maxkeometaneo by the ancestral hero Sweet Medicine, it was nevertheless essential to the daily image of the Cheyenne. That Buick was the talisman of the whiteman, the medicine to explain modern spirits that ailed and healed the redman of his technological woes, the sacred bundle to protect the superstitious Morning Star People from the whiteman’s evils.

Philbert nicknamed the Buick Protector. He then eased his three hundred pounds behind the steering wheel, grunting carefully. It was a stoic maneuver, for he had not quite recovered from his celebration with Manny over the new acquisition, and his head hurt. The steering wheel touched his great fat belly, but only a little. It made him confident. He reached out for the door, panting to complete the steel-enclosed security. He rested from his efforts, lighting a roach he found in the ashtray. He let the memory of the epic events of the past three days wash over him in a cannabis smoke of pleasure.

It was a great thing to have such a war pony. It had been important how he had earned this fine honor. His grandfather had often spoken of raids against the Shoshone for animals of much less quality than Protector. Herds of ponies were a thing of honor to a Cheyenne. It was not a game, this steel-enforced bone he sat upon, this thing that now made him, Philbert Bono—Indian name Whirlwind—a warrior. He put the roach on the cigarette lighter and skillfully snuffed the last medicine of the weed.

He and Manny had gone to pray over this beautiful thing that had happened to them. They drove to the top of a hill overlooking the Custer Battlefield, twenty-five miles from Cheyenne land, on the huge Crow reservation. They sat on the hood of the Protector and terrified the tourists. It was not difficult, for Philbert was a great giant of an Indian, six-foot-four, with long black hair down to his waist tied in a single greasy braid. Two beaded barrettes of green and white added the only color to his uniform, which of course was cowboy jeans, top to bottom. They both had down vests on as well, to keep out the December winds. No, it was not difficult to scare the whiteman in this simple way; indeed, it was fun.

They sat on the hood of the Protector with a case of beer and stared. They finished off one of the ounces of grass with which Philbert had solemnly acquired Protector. One ounce of grass is a lot of dope in twenty-four hours, even for two Indians. So it could be excused if their minds might have wandered.

Manny was watching the heavy traffic pull in and out of the Visitors’ Center of the National Monument. He watched the people in the machines who watched him. It seemed odd to him that people did not look at the machines when they were inside them. They always looked to find a face inside, behind glass. It made him, Manny Bono, on the hood of his horse, laugh. He began to convulse with laughter at the movements of the heads inside the machines swiveling to see other heads. He was very stoned, so he saw great meaning in these glimpses, as if they were grainy photographs out of the past, of great artistic sensitivity.

Philbert was having a vision. He saw himself in a sweat hut of the old days, naked and sweating. He was losing a lot of weight, he was preparing for battle, he was listening to the Powers of the Sky and the Earth and everything in between. It was making him very hungry.

Hey, man, we need munchies.

But Manny only continued his laughing, a high-pitched whoop that the tourists mistook for a war cry, as he drove off in Protector. Some short-haired Crow who worked at the Monument came outside to stare at them as they left, the care of responsibility a hollow frown on their faces. Their ancestors had also stared at Cheyenne upon a hill, with equal anxiety. They went back inside to their janitor jobs.

Goddamn Cheyenne, they muttered.

Philbert and Manny had many adventures on that whoop, but they would be too many for the telling now and of such profundity as to only make the great red skull of Philbert Bono ache. Enough that it be said Manny found Darla and Letitia Whitehorse in Forsyth and passed out with them in their living room in Busby, on the Res. Philbert had stumbled out to greet the noon sun, shining on his new sign of wealth, and brought himself back to the beginning of this fuzzy recollection. He turned the key to on and the machine gurgled, gasped, and finally spat to life like a horse after a long drink of water. Philbert gingerly put the column lever to D for Drive, avoiding any sudden movements, as the transmission liked to jump back and forth if a careless driver ran the lever over R and P and back to D. It was a delicate instrument, this marvel of the whiteman. Lurching to a painful roll, the man and beast rattled around a broken sewage main in the middle of the unpaved street, trundled carefully past two dogs sleeping in the intersection, and triumphantly eased onto the highway to Lame Deer, sixteen miles away. An arrogant magpie did not move out of the road where it was feasting on a flattened jackrabbit. Protector obligingly skirted the irritable scavenger.

They were on their way, for no particular reason other than they might possibly find a party going on. Lame Deer could be a pretty wild place sometimes.

Just as Philbert was puzzling over his miserable lot, his drive shaft fell out on the road. It was a thunderous metallic crash and the Buick swerved to the side of Highway 212. When he had Protector firmly in hand and had stopped on the shoulder, he looked in the rearview mirror. All he saw was the snowy hillside in front of him, and a concrete REA pumping station. He had forgotten the rearview mirror had been destroyed in a fight with some Sioux from Fort Peck several years ago.

Rolling down the window with difficulty, and then only halfway because it was warped inside the door, he looked out behind him. He saw a long rusty cylinder roll into the weeds on the side of the road. Sure that it must be as necessary to Protector as oats to an animal, Philbert determined he would have to confront the situation. Bracing himself, he opened the door and stood out on his ancestral land. A stiff wintry breeze blew an old Mounds candy wrapper into his face, and then carried it off to new surprises among the piles of modern tumbleweeds lodging along the road. It nestled among a box of Pampers, aluminum foil, and Pepsi pop-tops.

Philbert took a deep breath, stunned at the purity of the air that existed outside his sanctuary. He surveyed the homeland of his people through bloodshot eyes. It made little sense to his brain, but his spirit knew that everything, or anything, of Philbert Bono that was whole was here. He took a leak, just as Bobbie Short went by with his kids in his Ford pickup. They waved out of habit, undisturbed at the activities of the others. It was enough that they were moving.

Philbert remembered the drive shaft. Limping from years of no exercise, he went back to the weeds. He couldn’t pick up the strange aperture that had flown from the bowels of his mysterious possession, so he rolled it back to the beast. Sparks flew furiously as the iron rolled across the asphalt, complaining of the cruelty of man to machine. Able to crawl underneath only through the good luck of a slant on the road’s shoulder that left Protector on a tilt, Philbert saw one hole in the engine up front, and another hole in the rear. Perhaps he could stick the rusty tube in those holes and be on his way.

With only a few dozen grunts and a preposterous ease that would have amazed a mechanic, that’s just what happened. He stuck the six-foot drive shaft back in and proceeded to Lame Deer. It took an Indian to understand truly the mysteries of the world, Philbert thought. This … this whiteman, who is he to a people that has known all the tricks of survival in this country for 125,000 years? What is meant to be is meant to be.

Philbert passed his journey with these thoughts, taking Protector to its maximum limit of forty-five miles per hour. An astounding speed, considering it had not had an oil change in twelve years.

The journey proceeded without further incident—if the usual clatters and clangs and scrapes emitting from the agonized bowels of the encrusted machine were taken as ordinary complaints of a whiteman’s tool. Philbert thought it was purring more sweetly than ever.

He was, in fact, happier than he had ever been in his life. He was often like that. It was one of those many absolute moments of purity that only occasionally visit other lesser men.

Philbert had had an ordinary life, for an Indian. He had known happiness, as well as tranquillity and fulfillment. There had been moments of sorrow, of anger, of loss, of hopelessness. But they were only moments. Philbert had conquered failure with doggedness. He plowed through poverty with thoughts of wealth. He overcame depression by simply denying its existence. He had his drugs and his food. He had life to overwhelm the aches and pains of intelligence. Good cheer and comradeship overcame the frustrations of knowledge. Philbert was not a seeker, for he had already found what made him the best possible Philbert.

He was a Cheyenne, and all the shit of the world could not erase that.

He was a Cheyenne, even though it meant misery. There was a unity in misery, and therefore he had more than the whiteman ever had in his wealth. That had given Philbert great comfort as early as he could remember. Perhaps even as a baby he knew his dirty blankets and watery milk were a badge of cultural harmony, his one invincible hope. Driving down into the gloomy late afternoon of the center of the Cheyenne race, he felt the joy of belonging to Lame Deer. Here in these muddy streets and tiny house trailers dwelt the joy of his race. A people with a culture, and not just a powerful society of fed and warm immigrant babies. Ugh! He felt pity for whiter, skinnier men.

He was born fat and he stayed fat throughout his thirty-three years. It was a sign of health, a destiny he could not lightly discard. As a boy at the mission school in Lame Deer, he endured the jeers of the other boys and the repulsion of the girls with magnanimity. He was a Cheyenne. He was a great vegetable. The Powers of the Earth had served him unto his people as a platter of nourishment.

He drove past street corners and front yards that recalled incidents of his life. Here, beside a rotting box elder, he had been beaten up for talking to a Crow cheerleader, in town for a basketball game. The four Crow boys exhausted themselves pounding away at his blubber, while the loafers in front of the recreation center hooted their approval of the fat boy through their toothless old mouths. Philbert had relished the fame that beating had brought him. It inspired a minor war between the two tribes, of great satisfaction to everyone.

Another time he had fallen in love. There, beside Angel Taylor’s front yard, the white fence gray from years of never being painted, there he had stood for many hours on many evenings, afraid to knock on her door. He hid behind the pines as many other boys came for her, until a cowboy came from Sheridan in Wyoming and took her away. Angel Taylor. Philbert got a hard-on just thinking about her. He remembered her in waist-length black hair and ankle-length doeskin dresses she wore to powwows. She could have won a contest for Miss Indian America, if she had tried. But now she was gone, sunk out of sight into the anonymous quicksand of a whiteman’s city.

Past hopes, past excuses, past regrets lay thickly upon his soul, like fat on a side of bacon. Memory was always a thing of the present to an Indian. All he had to do was walk past a piece of dirt and he would be reminded of the sorrows of Little Wolf. The cries of the past could never die in a man who dwelt on the soil where his ancestors were buried. They became the cries of these his children today.

Laughter was there too. So many would like to forget that. But forgetting was impossible in Montana.

Slowly circling the familiar streets, showing off his war pony to the people who pretended indifference, prouder than it was possible for any other man to be proud, Philbert remembered a joke here by a ditch, a drink there by the agency story, a fight—

Philbert, stop! For chrissake!

Obediently, he stopped. He recognized the voice of Buddy Red Bird but as yet could not make out his lanky form out there in the approaching dusk. The sun had not set, but the valley where the town lay between steep, pinewooded hills was already in shadow. It was dark, while the sunlit blue sky above spoke of an eternal protection to these cold, weather-beaten people huddling against all odds.

The passenger door of Protector shrieked open, resigned to never knowing grease again upon its parched units. Philbert was startled as the cold air outside came quickly in with Buddy Red Bird, who quickly closed the door again, amidst screams of outraged metal bending back into unnatural shapes. The doorjamb held, however. Why or how was beyond human explanation.

What’re ya doin’ with Manny’s junker? Buddy asked without rancor. And, Jesus, doesn’t the heater work?

It’s on. Where to?

I don’t feel anything. Buddy shivered, looking for some sense to the dashboard or the electrical mysteries underneath. All he found for his probing was a box of Kotex Super some friend of Manny’s had forgotten in the glove compartment, which had no door, no tools in it, no registration, and of course no gloves. Perhaps, if only in the imagination of hopeful innocents who believe in Candyland and Santa Claus, perhaps there was a faint breeze from some valiant heater lost to the memory of a man. A wisp of heat. It was a hope that Philbert and Buddy could not let die, and so they soon forgot the cold, confident of warmth. It was to be the modus operandi of their impending adventures.

What’re ya doin’ with Manny’s junker?

Philbert said, We made a trade, as of the days when men possessed nothing. The earth alone knows what we may know. Philbert was not astounded at his new elocutionary honesty. Protector wept.

What the hell … ? Buddy was astounded. Anyway … whatever you said, it’s yours, right?

Right.

Good. Then we have to go to New Mexico. Buddy, it was becoming clear, was in an excitable state of mind. These were the words that had been on his mind for a great while. Perhaps even an hour. Time, it must be understood, is not as comprehensible a mystery to the Indian understanding as it is to the whiteman’s. Buddy had not made a passionate determination, no matter what the temporal programming.

New Mexico? Philbert asked dumbly. He was driving past some schoolgirls and honked casually. They paid no attention since the horn didn’t work. Occasionally it might let out a pitiful belch, but this was only upon a random stroke of fortune.

Yes, Jesus, you know this is a real omen. Buddy talked fast, lighting up a joint. He could talk, smoke, and drink all at once. It was one of the many talents that made him a leader of the tribe. The Tribal Council had long had their eye on him as a future member of their all-powerful body.

I needed wheels immediately, and at that very moment you splashed by. You really got old Lefty Taylor, Angel’s old man, did you know that?

No.

You did.

What omen? Philbert liked to arrive at the point. It was an extension of his logical mind.

Bonnie called about an hour ago. She got busted down in Santa Fe. Pigs pulled her over for no license plates and saw two pounds of Colombian sitting on the seat. Her and some guy named Tony Parelli.

Who’s he?

Some Mexican, I guess. She’s been dealing pretty heavy. Bought a Volvo, you know, doin’ really well.

The smoke from their joint was fogging up the window. Philbert turned on the defroster, but all that came out was a cockroach from the vent on the dashboard. Philbert rubbed the fog off the window with his shirtsleeve. They watched the cockroach wander along the metal of the dashboard. It had been padded, before Manny had torn it all off in an aesthetic rage five years earlier. He said plastic padding made it look cheap.

She’s in jail; we gotta bail her out, Buddy began again, using some of the unused Kotex to clean off his window. I can use the money the Council gave me yesterday to buy those bulls from the government down at Birney. I’m the goddamn agricultural purchasing agent, you know. Goddamn.

Buddy was a vet and a football star. They trusted him.

They’ll be cool about it, Buddy added with his usual confidence.

Philbert kept driving, up and down the dirt trails in the gullies that made up the town. A few houses on either side were puffing out regular streams of smoke from the tin chimneys of the BIA homes. It was cold outside, but Protector was snug and away from all that.

You got gas money, then? Philbert asked as he turned a corner sharply, watching the cockroach slide the width of the car on the unpainted metal of the dashboard. It was like a figure skater losing his balance and sliding across the ice on his butt. Outside, a pack of dogs was