Bud’s telling me about his granddaughter winning some kind of “presti-jicus international prize,” as he calls it, when people start hollerin’ outside. I hold my ground, wary. Bud trots over to the window. He rubs the dirty glass and leans over, resting his old gouty hands on his knees. Just then, Bud’s Cadillac bashes in through the front window of the diner like a deer leaping through your windshield at ninety miles an hour on a dark highway. Glass and metal spray everywhere. There’s a ringing in my ears and after a second I realize it’s Rhonda, the waitress, holding a pitcher of water and bawling her damn fool head off.
Through the new hole in the wall, I watch an ambulance tear by down the middle of the street,
I light out fast through the back. Take me a walk through the woods. During my walk, it’s like nothing happened. The woods feel safe, like always. They aren’t safe for long. But they’re safe long enough for a fifty-five- year-old man in blood-soaked cowboy boots to scramble his way home.
My house is off the turnpike a hitch, headed toward Pawnee. After I step through the front door, I pour me a cup of cold coffee off the stove and set down on the porch. Through my binoculars, I see traffic on the pike is pretty much dried up. Then a convoy flies by. Ten cars driving inches from each other in single file, top speed. Nobody behind the wheel. Just them robots getting from one place to the next, fast as can be.
Past the highway, a grain combine sits in my neighbor’s north forty. Nobody’s in it, but waves of heat are rising from its idling engine.
I can’t raise a soul on my portable cop radio, the house phone ain’t cooperating, and the embers in my woodstove are the only thing keeping the chill out of my living room; the electricity has officially up and vacated the premises. The next-door neighbor is a mile off, and I’m feeling mighty lonesome.
My porch feels about as safe as a chocolate donut on an anthill.
So I don’t tarry. In the kitchen, I pack a sack lunch: bologna sandwich, cold pickle, a thermos of sweet iced tea. Then I head to the garage to see about my son’s dirt bike. It’s a 350 Honda I ain’t touched for two years. Been sittin’ in the garage gathering dust since the kid joined the army. Now, my boy Paul ain’t out there getting shot at. He’s a translator. Flaps his gums instead. Smart kid. Not like his pa.
Things the way they are, I’m feeling glad my boy is gone. This is the first time I ever felt that way. He’s my only blood, see? And it ain’t smart to put all your eggs in one basket. I just hope he has his gun on him, wherever he is. I know he can shoot it, because I taught him to.
It’s a good long minute before I get the motorbike running. Once I do, I almost forfeit my life on account of not paying proper attention to the biggest machine I own.
Yep, that ungrateful old bitch of a police cruiser tries to run me down in the garage, and she damn near does it, too. It’s a blessing that I blew the extra hundred on a solid steel Tradesman toolbox. Mine’s ruint now, with the nose of a 250-horsepower police cruiser buried in it. I find myself standing in the two-foot gap between the wall and a galdarned murderous vehicle.
The cruiser’s tryin’ to put herself into reverse, tires screeching on the concrete like the whinny of a scared horse. I draw my revolver, walk around to the driver’s side window and put a couple rounds into the little old computer inside.
I killed my own patrol car. Ain’t that the damndest thing you ever heard?
I’m the police and I got no way of helping people. It appears to me that the United States government, to whom I pay regular taxes and who in return provides me with a little thing called civilization, has screwed the almighty pooch in my time of need.
Lucky for me, I’m a member of another country, one that don’t ask me to pay no taxes. It’s got a police force, a jail, a hospital, a wind farm, and churches. Plus park rangers, lawyers, engineers, bureaucrats, and one very large casino that I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting. My country—the other one—is called the Osage Nation. And it lives about twenty miles from my house in a place called Gray Horse, the true home of all Osage people.
You want to name your kid, get married, what have you—you go down to Gray Horse, to
The road ain’t even marked. Home don’t have to be.
My dirt bike screams like a hurt cat. I can feel the heat blasting off the bike’s muffler through my blue jeans when I finally jam the brakes and crunch to a stop in the middle of the dirt road.
I’m here.
And I ain’t the only one here, neither. The road’s crowded with folks. Osage. A lot of dark hair and eyes, wide noses. The men are big and built like tanks in blue jeans, cowboy shirts all tucked in. The women, well, they’re built just like the men, only in dresses. The people travel in beat-up, dusty station wagons and old vans. Some folks are on horses. A tribal policeman rides along on a camouflaged four-wheeler. Looks to me like these people all packed up for a big ol’ camping trip that might not end. And that’s wise. Because I have a feeling it won’t.
It’s instinctual, I think. When you get the tar knocked out of you, you beat a trail back home soon as you can. Lick your wounds and regroup. This place is the heart of our people. The elders live here year-round, tending to mostly empty houses. But every June, Gray Horse is home to
There are other Osage cities, of course, but Gray Horse is special. When the tribe arrived in Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, they fulfilled a prophecy been with us for ages: that we’d move to a new land of great wealth. And what with the oil flowing underneath our land, and a nonnegotiable deed to the full mineral rights, that prophecy was right as rain.
This has been native country a long time. Our people tamed wild dogs on these plains. In that misty time before history, dark-haired, dark-eyed folks just like the ones on this road were out here building mounds to rival the Egyptian pyramids. We took care of this land, and after a lot of heartache and tears, she paid us back in spades.
Is it our fault that all this tends to make the Osage tribe a little snooty?
Gray Horse sits on top of a little hill, bounded by steep ravines carved there by Gray Horse Creek. The county road gets you close, but you got to hike a trail to get to the town proper. A wind farm on the plains to the west spits out electricity for our people, with the extra juice going up for sale. Altogether, it ain’t much to look at. Just a buzz cut on a hill, chosen a long time ago to be the place where the Osage dance their most sacred dance. The place is like a platter lifted up to the gods, so they can watch over our ceremonies and make sure we’re doing them right.
They say we been holding the
Them elders who picked out Gray Horse were hard men, veterans of genocide. These men were survivors. They watched the blood of their tribe spill onto the earth and saw their people decimated. Did it just so happen that Gray Horse is in an elevated location with a good field of fire, access to fresh water, and limited approaches? I can’t rightly say. But it’s a dandy of a spot, nestled on a sweet little hill smack-dab in the middle of nowheres.
The clincher is that, at its heart,
The sun is falling fast as I make my way up the steep trail that leads to the town proper. I hike past families lugging their tents and gear and kids. At the plateau, I see the flicker of a bonfire tickling the dusky sky.
The fire pit is in the middle of a rectangular clearing, four sides ringed with benches made of split logs. Embers leap and mingle with the fresh prickles of stars. It’s going to be a cold, clear night. The people, hundreds of
