LAND OF THE RED GIANTS OF IXTLAN

Chapter 9 - Oklahoma: "The little pup ran out under the truck"

- - - - - [ Illustration: T.C. Cannon painting, on the cover of

' Sweet Medicine' book ] - - - - - - -

"The last time I saw you I didn't see you."

The big handsome Kiowa in a white cowboy hat grinned easily and appreciatively in
the grocery store in Santa Fe. He had a little hand-held basket of food just like I did,
bachelors shopping while surrounded by Muzak and the happy horseshit of shoppers with
their carts of Trix cereal and pasteurized cancer in the glare, "the rockets' red glare"
screeching at us like one of his quasi-phosphorescent paintings of beautiful un-colors,
hung-over, hellraisers in the sexy town. We exchanged pleasantries and then went on
briefly to our mundane chores, the meeting of Genies on the usual errands who'd never
say hello again except like the solitary turn-of-the-century Dandies we were, in his
paintings, pink-haired ghosts like two-gunned Arikaras gestating in Gramma and the
Washita River runs ribbonlike. 1978 was the last time I ever saw T.C. Cannon alive, both
of us 31 or 32 at the peak of our form at least in our wild "early period" of experimental
art, angry ex-vietnamo veterans of different types, escape artists like Houdini or
Geronimo who had the rattlesnake by the tail (or the teeth, as I saw Hopi snake-and-
antelope dancers at Hotevilla when I was a kid). He had just done the fancy poster for the
Santa Fe Opera of two traditonally-clad Kiowas be-bopping to Tosca with fierce rage on
their faces, and I was gestating Sweet Medicine on a war pony busting the Cheyenne
princess out of the Santa Fe city jail for drug-dealing (and his painting "Man, I'd sure like
to have that pinto pony" graced the cover of the paperback of my 1992 novel).
A few days later he was dead in a violent crash in the pinons outside of town, not
unlike the explosion of his two tours in The Nam as a Marine LURP. He was a model for
my anti-hero in the book who once said to me "Let's do something they'll hate."
"Yeah."
"How about if I do a backdrop or something for one of your plays?"
"Cool."
We were drunk and stoned as hell of course, and piping it in faster than a woman can
load the bowl. "If you just buy the paint I'll do it for nothing, Man."
"Right on. Hey, we're bringing in El Teatro Campesino from L.A., they're doing 'El
Fin del Mundo', maybe you can do something for that? Naw, hell, they probably got their
own cats doing the design. I got a new play 'The Prince of Libya' but I can't get any of
these chickenshit actors around here interested in doing it. I lived over there, ya know,
Africa?"
"Libya?"
"Yeah, it was great. We'll have to do that play sometime. Right now we got a tour
going out all over New Mexico and Texas, and one of 'em, in repertory, is a children's
thing we might need a backdrop for. Yeah. That could be just the thing, Bro. 'Androcles
and the Lion', it ain't all that radical, ya know, but ... maybe you could do a lion, and this
kid is pulling a thorn out of his foot. I mean, he's the baddest ass King of the jungle
tearing everybody a new asshole because he's got this fucking thorn in his foot and he
can't get it out. But this kid, he's out playing one day in ancient Greece or Rome or
something, ya know, like kids do, out daydreaming about Star Wars and kung-fu or some
shit, and he stumbles on this huge killer out there alone, crying in pain. Crying in pain,
Brother."
"Far out."
"The kids love it. It's got monsters and action and blood 'n guts, and most of all a kid
they can identify with."
"And his pet lion, yeah, Bro. So he pulls out the thorn?"
"Yeah. The lion wants to tear off his head, but Androcles says, 'Hey, be cool. This'll
only hurt for a second and then it's over'."
"No shit?"
"Yeah, Androcles is very sharp."
"No shit?"
"Man, we could have a big fucking backdrop, you know what I mean? You paint big
fucking oils anyway, as big as a wall, right? A whole tapestry or whatever you call it. A
frescoe, or some shit."
"Yeah, I hear ya."
"Didn't Picasso do that, or something, for the Russian ballet?"
"Yeah. A whole -- "
"Like a whole Guernica story or something, telling a story?"
"I did that in a Seattle Indian Center, the whole creation."
"Yeah."
"So he pulls out the thorn?"
"Yeah."
"That's maybe ... I work slow, though, ya know? I can't blast out one in ten minutes
like Fritz Scholder. I can take months sometimes on one piece." He was already a big
time star in town with oil colors going for $8,000 each at a ritzy Madison Avenue gallery
in New York, and I was just a local jack-off still scraping along hand to mouth with a
little touring company, and working with some other film wierdos who were doing a
Hopi thing about life out of balance titled 'Koyannisqatsi', but we liked each other's work.
"I'll just give you the canvas," he said generously, knowing I was broker 'n hell and we'd
have to hide the deal from his big new york agent or broker or dealer or druglord or
whatever he was, knowing such an original, huge Cannon would be worth $100,000.
"Fuck it."
"Right on," I exclaimed, shaking hands. We were wasted, but we both knew we'd be
sober tomorrow and would get back to work. We weren't fucking around, even though we
were both drunks and hellraisers and loved to party. We were rotating the axis of Santa
Fe power toward the no-bullshit edge where non-conformity lived, where we lived in our
adobe like the red mud smoking to cedar logs in the Escalante Sierra, mestizo pendejos,
gringo fuckers of another stripe who were, and were not, "Minorities" like the Anglos in
New Mexico. It was a red land on the fringes of the black sky.
Irene and I went to Anadarko Oklahoma to pay our respects to his family after the
funeral, after the memorial at the outdoor Paolo Soleri amphitheatre on the back lot of the
Institute of American Indian Arts on Cerrillos Road, on a warm May afternoon, where we
met his father Walter. He was a nice old guy like a lot of the former generations' short-
haired WW2 and Korean Vets but he wasn't too sure about Irene, because she had been
the one trapped all night with his dead son upside-down in his pickup truck, out there in
that lonely sky, and some women in town blamed her for being the last one with him. I
knew she'd endured a whole night of bloody horror trapped in the wreck and it wasn't her
fault the stupid bastard sped 80 m.p.h. on those back roads where I'd followed him home
several times. I wouldn't ride with him. I couldn't have kept up with him even in the clear
sober daylight, let alone on the winding mountain road back to his pleasant place with
viga beams and a ramada view of the pinon forests. I couldn't keep up with his
refrigerator full of (only) tall Coors beer cans and nothing else, no food, not even a quart
of milk. I couldn't drink like that. The last time we'd partied - where we ran into him at
his usual barstool in the fancy LaPosada Inn, and which happened to be my birthday - I
got so fucked up on his killer artist's marijuana and booze at his cosy hacienda I
remember wandering around dizzy in the kitchen trying to keep my bearings, and the top
of my head, on; while he and Irene talked seriously about some shit in the living room
with Jerry Jeff Walker blasting from the expensive stereo, and other manic Skins showing
up with heroin chiba, cocaine, pills, and good whisky. Kevin Red Star was a good
example, a lanky Crow getting rich on his colorful warriors in oil and wearing black
leather suits, screaming up on the dirt driveway in his black Corvette.
"Hey, Tee, Man," he'd mumble, oblivious to the rest of us.
"Yeah."
"Tee?"
"Yeah?"
We'd laugh our asses off, since this kind of partying was the sure-firedest way to
prove to ourselves we were having fun and that life was good, it was at its very best and
most fullest of meaning, while he'd play some of his country songs twanging on the
guitar with hip un-country lyrics, and Irene would jabber non-stop about her great loves
of theatre and wild creative men, but it got dizzy as shit for me that last night.
"It felt like death," I said outside, like I was outside the story anymore, getting some
air. "It feels like death in there," I remember thinking. I could feel his death coming, and I
had to go home.
I didn't like the high of the mighty, the rich scene that I could only sample. It was only
a little taste, but I didn't like it - and I'd been around it in AIM in other States of semi-
consciousness - the drugs the edges of which I only saw in Leonard Crow Dog's peyote
church or Kevin Red Star's dazed incoherence, the fixity of addiction. It was too close for
me, the needle in the rebellion (the "chiba" Arlo Looking Cloud talked about, of his own
heroin habit, in the Rapid City jail where he'd been convicted in 2004 of killing Anna
Mae Aquash), only a semblance of what we were trying to do like the diamond needle on
his stereo grooving to Bonnie Raitt and Willie Nelson. I couldn't bring myself to sniff
more than a curious snort or two; and T.C. never had time to paint the Backdrop either.
We met his Dad in Gracemont at the gas station, a few miles from the big Agency
headquarters in Anadarko crawling with pickups and plenty of smiling kids and grammas
piled in the backdrops with groceries and black braids flying in the wind.
"Oklahoma's got more Indins than New Mexico," Walter joked, observing my
observations of the countryside, dry and flat like his son's sardonic humor, stolen from
him. Like a warrior's raid, I felt like I was walking on broken glass, like I had felt the
night he died stealing out of his house to go home alone and ashamed to feel death so
close in our stupefaction, smeared with pleasure and animal reflexes. It wasn't about guilt
or "Innocence" or greed but the thrill, the challenge of theft in the raid on enemy horses,
women, gold, weapons, or even art work. His Dad told me the family didn't have one
painting of their son's works, which had already doubled in value. "That gallery in New
York has it all. Everything." The sweep across the Pecos and the Sweetwater and the
Washita where custer also massacred some more, John Steinbeck trampled out the
vintage of his Okies from Muscogee. "This was the 'Indian Territory', you know?"
"Yeah. 'Cheyenne Autumn'."
He frowned at that because it was a famous war and another massacre that ended way
up at Ft. Robinson Nebraska, but also because he was Kiowa, and T's mother was Caddo.
It was also a Comanche Spring around there. In Santa Fe we wiseacres had started to
think we knew everything, we were the coolest of the cool, dudes with Zuni scarves and
Picuris headbands and turquoise bracelets, but in OK I knew I was back in the belly of
the real beast. I knew Santa Feans were prima donnas transplanted from somewhere else,
whereas Texican Okies worked for John D.:

"It was a mighty creation, this Standard Oil Trust of 1885,

and would soon become far more powerful, complex, and
far-reaching still. It was to be vehemently denounced throughout
most of the next generation, and in part with good cause. To
have been ultra-moral however would have invited catastrophe.
The great inventions in business organizations have, of course,
proceeded from the freer countries. The organization of the
great business of taking petroleum out of the earth, piping the
oil over great distances, distilling and refining it, and distributing
it in tank steamers, tank wagons, and cans all over the earth,
was an American invention of John D. Rockefeller. For the
power of that huge creation impartial observers had come to
feel admiration."
- 'The Heroic Age of American Enterprise'

We stopped at "Tommy's" grave outside of town for a minute, on the hot semi-desert
oilfields so beloved of fossils that they fueled the heroic betrayal of the 1867 Medicine
Lodge Treaty, signed just across the street at Fort Cobb, and that was as obsolete and
irrelevant to everybody (except old blanket-skins living in the past) as last year's gas
prices. The Arkansas River border of the 1851 Ft. Laramie Treaty (where my grandfather
homesteaded in 1888) had already gone north, as the saying does not go, of us down there
on the Canadian and Red Rivers john wayne made famous on the Chisholm Trail
chiseling Abilene. Old buffalo grounds and pale blue, hair-thin rivers on road-maps
meant less than nothing to curio seekers and Chisholm chiselers compared to the big
broad trucking bypasses and airline routes plastered large in bold neo-rococo colors that
Tommy Wayne Cannon never used in his paintings. "Art Deco" stratoliners named
Cadillac and Boeing levelled the playing fields with Jeep Kwahadi Cherokees and
Wichitas with air-conditioning as curio-relics tapping into the mythological market;
Texas Rangers and Kansas City Chiefs were the mid-continental equivalents of legendary
logos like the goddesses of the Statue of Liberty and Columbia Pictures from sea to
shining sea, and gravestones on the one big happy Reservation of the entire State were
only property markers, stakes where landrushers stuck their "claims", mileposts on
Interstate 40.
We followed his Dad home and a yellow puppy ran out from the big trees on the side
of the dirt and we saw, to our horror, it roll helplessly under the lifelessly unconcerned
wheels to death. Playfully, like all pups yearning to be dogs, it had charged at the pickup,
barking, and been devoured in five seconds, flipping and flopping pathetically under the
iron in front of our eyes, soft flesh sliced and crushed instantly. We both slammed on the
brakes just as fast. He got out quickly to see what had happened, but Irene and I got out
slowly because we knew what had happened.
"Oh no," he said.
"I couldn't believe it."
We looked at death as certainly. I felt bad for Irene and Walter because it felt like an
ominous sacrifice had been forced on them again, as a reminder of their loss they didn't
need. It was like a law of nature was making sure, emphasizing, something was present it
wanted us to learn and that they were both being punished; for their part in the ritual. He
was upset because he knew the pup and because he was the one who had inadvertently
killed it - while also, I thought with the kind of artist's perception T.C. and I exercised
often, the truck and its mechanical infrastructure were the advertent result of centuries
and not at all "accidental" or innocent. He picked up the poor limp thing and gently put it
in the back of the truckbed, almost embarrassed in front of us strangers witnessing the
awe-full, ordinary scene of country life, trying to accept its natural exigencies with the
careful equanimity of an animal used to the soft vulnerability of reality; down on the
farm, outside, like the fallacy of the treaties in which trade goods, beef-issues at Fort Sill,
a box of trinkets, were promised by Bluecoats in imitation of biological processes that
decay and shed their skins like copperheads and lizards.
"Progress comes and goes," somebody once said.
"So do babies," a woman replied.
We drove up to the plain white house at the end of the long tree-lined lane, and he said
to a woman, with the tiny yellow creature in his arms, "The little pup ran out under the
truck."
"Oh," she remarked sternly, like a woman used to dead chickens and pigs all her life.
She was the short squat Caddo fullblood I saw in many of her son's best paintings, in a
plain muslin dress and brown work-shoes, her dark red face implacable and impenetrable.
She gave us a slight nod in greeting and a limp handshake while the sad fool she was
married to took another handful of meat away. The woman next to me offered to be a
slight reference of curiosity to her, whereas I obviously held no importance at all out
there in the sunlight, on the front porch; but Irene was very nearly in hysterics, inside, in
a quiet way. Mrs. Cannon appreciated that and they went off to talk quietly for hours, in
the kitchen, bringing us fools in the living room coffee and donuts. We talked importantly
about politics and war with some more chiefs who came over to visit, joking there
weren't enough indians, and looked at Tommy's photographs on the wall with his G.I.
burr-cut; men who don't understand a goddamn thing. We had dinner and spent the night
in a household and a tribe in mourning that was so used to mourning by morning it didn't
seem unusual to be there. It was much cleaner and richer than Pine Ridge, but just about
every concentration camp in the gulag archipelago was better off, more organized, more
circumspect, than Pine Ridge. The Sioux were considered to be the biggest loudmouth
show-offs in all of Indian Country, and if AIM had any aim outside of Michael Taylor's
caution or Russell Means' megalomania, to them, it should have been the annihilation of
the enemy. And nothing less. In Santa Fe and nearby Los Alamos we might have talked
of that annihilation in terms so far away from the idealogical analyses of denver and
minneapolis that Mrs. Cannon would have chopped off the subject matter with a meat
cleaver, in comparison; that is, she would have gutted amerika like a pig until it was
reduced to the nonexistence of a meddlesome skunk or an inconsequential boll weevil. If
she had been a nuclear scientist she would have described our aim in terms of a
phenomenon in which a particle and an antiparticle meet and are converted to energy
approximately equivalent to the sum of their masses. I could see that she thought Tommy
and T.C. were two-men who amounted to one fuck-up, for getting his head torn off in a
sorry ass drunken wreck like that stupid fucking puppy; and that Walter and I, and a few
other oldtimers poking holes in the air with their fingers, were a bunch of chickenshits if
we didn't get out there and get the crooks first thing tomorrow morning.

The Massaum ceremony, also called the Animal Dance,

Buffalo Dance, Crazy Dance, and Foolish Dance, appears
to be an ancient rite. It is sometimes spoken of as the
ceremony during which people act as if they were crazy
or foolish. Massaum is related to the word massa'ne, foolish
or crazy, and is interpreted as the lodge of the crazy, or
the lodge of the "Contraries". The Massaum ceremony
is said to have been brought to the tribe by one of the two
similarly dressed young men who went into the earth and
brought out food - the one who represented the Tsistsistas.
The Great Power had taken pity on these two men, one
named Mot-si-i-u-iv, a Cheyenne, and the other, Tom-si-v-si,
a Suhtai. The name of the Cheyenne means Sweet Root
Standing, or Sweet Medicine Root, while the Suhtai culture
hero is variously called Rustling Corn Leaf, Listening To
The Ground, or Erect Horns. To his own tribe Sweet Medicine
Root brought the medicine arrows; while to his, Listening
To The Ground brought the buffalo cap. He brought the
Suhtai [Northern Cheyennes of Lame Deer Montana] the
ceremony of the Medicine Lodge. All these mysteries
and ceremonies came to these men from within the earth;
and all they learned about them and afterward taught to
the tribes was the instruction that they had received from
the spirits whom they encountered in the mysterious
underground lodges they had entered.
- 'The Cheyenne Indians', by
George Bird Grinnell, 1904

BUFFALO MEDICINE
__________________

act two

Enter BULL dressed as a Red Wolf. He circles the stage dancing ceremonially, to
a slow beat of a Drum
Enter CALF dressed beautifully as a Cheyenne Woman.

CALF
Piva. Wihio. Maheo of the Maxkeometaneo. In the
beginning the people were camped in a foreign tall
grass country. They were confused, and they were
starving because the animals were withheld from them.
They did not know if this was an age of men or animals,
gods or spirits, before or after time had ended. That
far country was empty and hostile. Two ceremonial
scouts --

Enter WISDOM as the ragged Coyote, and CONFLICT as a Shaman.

-- went out to find a way to heal the people. After

traveling many days they were dying. There was no
hope anywhere on the earth.

CONFLICT
They hate the gods. They don't believe in us.

WISDOM
Look! A blue mountain rising from a body of water.

CONFLICT
I don't see anything. It's all in your imagination,
a mirage.

WISDOM
Let us die together there, brother, friend.

CALF
The first day of Maheonox, the wonderful Massaum Dance,
was at the end of the first moon after the solstice, after
the many spring and summer prayers and tipis and wolf
preparations: and it had four actions: one) bringing the
sacred tree.
{She mimes digging up a Tree and carrying it to the center of the stage}
 Enter the THUNDERBIRD, dressed as a terrible Sea-Snake. She grabs WISDOM
from behind and wraps around him, killing him.

CONFLICT
Help! Ax-Xea, the great horned water serpent is killing
my brother!

WISDOM
Brother, tell the people what has happened to me.

CALF
Two) Raising the lodge, to renew the buffalo nations.

WISDOM
Tell them not to cry for me.

CALF
Three) Smoothing the earth.

WISDOM
Some mysterious power holds me.

CALF
And four) The fireplace. This is the gift of Thunder Nation,
the fire tree and council of prophecy. Upon this firmament
the sacrificial chief will tell us of the past and the far
future. The first day of the five central days is complete,
completing the Wolf Lodge of creation. Ho! Old man
wolf from the pleiades, save our prophet!

[end of Chapter 9]