by Christopher Green

I park the Saab behind Dan’s pickup to find that winter has taken advantage of his absence. It has thrown itself in steep banks against the windward side of his vehicle; frosted his windows and layered the tailgate with ice. Snow hides all but a few of the bumper stickers he’s plastered across the back of the vehicle. “Custer was Sioux’d” and “Indians discovered Columbus” and “Caught you whitehanded”. A tangle of feathers hangs from the rearview mirror.

I press the door open against the swirl of the snow, then pull my jacket around me and crunch up the drive. I trail my fingers along the cold metal of his truck with one hand and hold Dan’s dog tags in the other. They are somehow also cold, and far too thin to hold him.

Something snorts in the distance, a deep and mighty rumble of great lungs clearing. I stop and scan the purple hills that backdrop farmhouse, the fallow fields and the empty stables. The sky is so low I could reach up and touch it.

Dad’s front door is open. His eyes glitter at me from behind the mesh. I take my time, and when I reach the porch, the doorway is empty.

I enter the frigid house and close the door behind me.

He is in the kitchen. I can hear him, and the smell of the thick coffee he brews on the stovetop is everywhere. I have never known my father without that smell. It clings to him, mixes with the cloy of rubbing alcohol.

“Dad?”

He is a big man made narrow by time. His back is to me. His hunting jacket hanging from his bony shoulder blades like a limp banner. The bonehandled knife at his belt was made for the man he used to be. It makes a caricature of him. My father has let what remains of his hair grow long, and the tight, gray braid hangs to the middle of his back.

“Dad.”

He grunts and ladles coffee into a metal thermos on the counter. “Is Dan here?”

“No. Dan’s not coming this year, Dad. That’s why I’m here.”

He reaches for another thermos, this one with a name that isn’t mine etched across its surface. He turns the letters from me and I thrust my hands into my pockets. The dog tags roll against each other obscenely, like loose change. More etched letters. He pauses, ears still sharp after so much else has faded from him, and then fills the second thermos.

“How do you like your coffee?”

He is already screwing the caps on, and so I shrug. “Just like that’s fine, thanks.”

“Did you bring your rifle?”

“No. I haven’t owned a gun for ten years, Dad.”

He turns and hands me Dan’s thermos. “You can borrow one of mine.”

“I’m not here for that. We need to talk.”

“We can talk outside. Today’s the day. Been a long time coming, but today’s the day.”

“For what?”

“He waits, with the snow. Wants me to bring you to him.”

“Who does?”

He frowns. The lines of his face grow deep. “The Buffalo.”

“We can’t go out in this storm, Dad. There’s a blizzard on the way. We’d freeze to death out there.”

He taps the lid of his thermos, as if it alone is cure enough for the storm front rolling toward the Reservation. “We will trust to the Buffalo to provide. Let me get you a rifle.”

“This is nonsense.”

“No. Driving a shiny Saab away from the red road, as far and as fast as you can, that’s nonsense.”

I shake my head and smile. “When did you start believing in any of that?”

“When you stopped.”

“Dan believed enough for both of us. It never did him any good.”

He turns and squared his shoulders to me, and for a moment he looms large enough to fill the space I have of him in my memories. “Wasichu,” he says. “That’s what they used to call me. White man. A White man with borrowed red sons. You sound like I used to. Like a damn fool. When your mother died, I kept us here. So you and your brother could stay with your people. For what? So you could scrape us from your boots like something you’d stepped in, cut your hair, and forget us.”

“It isn’t like that.”

“Then come with me. Let’s turn our faces to the wind, out there, and see if Buffalo has brought us what we need.”

I nod. God help me, I nod. Maybe for Dan, maybe for me, but I nod all the same, and it’s what my Dad’s been waiting for.

He leaves the kitchen and I watch him go slowly up the staircase. Stairs that Dan and I once took three at a time. I am alone in the kitchen, surrounded by linoleum and unstuck corners. The colors have grown familiar with each other, whites gone yellow and yellows gone cream. I turn off the burner beneath the coffee.

Eventually he comes back down, a rifle case held gingerly in his grasp.

“Dad, did Dan ever tell you he’d changed his army info? Next of kin, things like that?”

He ignores me and I clear my throat. “Well, he did. Change his info, I mean.”

Dad smiles and sets the rifle bag on the table. “Here.” He pulls the weapon free.

The rifle is a seductive thing. The oiled barrel gleams, the wooden stock glossy and brown, like the skin of baked apples. “Dad, I wouldn’t dare use this. It’s an heirloom; more than a hundred years old.”

He grinned and rubbed his hands together, and I have visions of all my Christmas mornings. “You boys used to beg me to let you shoot this. Do you know why I wouldn’t let you?”

“Because it’s a priceless antique? Seriously, this is scaring me now, and-”

“You weren’t ready.” He sets the rifle in my hands, heavy as sin. “Maybe you are now. It is my wish, and may it be the Buffalo’s as well. We’ll see.”

I swallow hard and check the breech. He’d already loaded it. The smokeless cartridge gleams.

My father is watching me. “Ready?”

I nod.

The wind howls around the walls outside and that snort comes again, much closer this time. Something huge runs its bulk along the far side of the house. I hear horns drag furrows through old wood.

He stands and clips his thermos to his belt. Dan’s thermos is in my hand and the rifle is in the other. They are both warm to the touch.

We’re almost to the back door when I stop. Neither of us is dressed for the storm, and my father is empty-handed.

“Dad, you forgot your rifle.”

He shakes his head. “This is not my hunt, son.”

The storm throws the back door open and I recoil, but there is no buffalo there, no great beast with wet eyes and broad muzzle. Only the pale light and the storm encroach. Banks of snow shift and roll as I lean into the wind and step outside. My father follows. He does not close the door.

There are deep tracks at the side of the house that lead east. The snow crunches under our feet as I crouch and put my fingers into one of the hoof prints. It is sharp-edged and warm. Dan and I once dug holes like this, two boys who’d been taught to make hollows in the earth and fill them with whispers so the land could hold our secrets.

Dad presses close so that I can hear his voice over the gale. The wind has torn the smell of coffee smell from him. “You and your brother used to hunt together. Do you remember that?”

I nod before I realize he isn’t looking at me. His eyes never leave the tracks. Snowflakes are going to ice on his face. “I do remember.”

“You and he were close, once.”

“We’re still…” I can’t finish the sentence and let the wind tear the rest of it from me.

He moves away from me to follow the tracks, and I stand and hurry to catch up. The white wind blows through us as the snow unravels our warmth like loose threads. We walk for a long time in a silence only he can break. When he does his voice is ragged. “I miss him. I miss you both.”

“I miss him too, Dad.”

“Charlie?”

I stop. I cannot meet his eyes.

“Charlie, is Dan still in Iraq? Will they send him back to us?”

“He’s dead.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“He’ll stay over there, Dad. There was nothing left to send.”

He nods and I see his Adam’s apple dip as he swallows hard. When he points off to the east, we both press into the wind again. The chill has become a weight that pulls at us. It makes our movements less then we mean them to be. I look over my shoulder at a house I cannot see for the snow.

My face and hands go numb. The tracks arrow, unswerving, through deep snow banks, and every so often I look down at my hands to be certain I still hold the rifle.

The hoof prints are no longer sharp and defined. Falling snow has filled them in.

“We should go back, Dad.”

“There’s no going back, Charlie.” He puts a pale hand on my arm. His fingernails are going blue. “Dan and I will stay out here. You don’t have to.”

“I shouldn’t have been gone so long.”

He shrugs. “You’re a good man. This place made you into that. Maybe I did too, a little.”

Something moves behind us, dark against the blizzard. It has circled around to flank us, and it crashes up our tracks, curved horns gracefully framing a wide head, bent low. Muscles ripple beneath the snow-matted hide. Huge clods of earth and ice shatter beneath its hooves.

I drop the rifle, the thermos. The buffalo plows toward us, stride upon stride. He charges between us, splits us, knocks us to the ground. The sharp bite of his sweat fills my nostrils. He charges on beyond us.

I get up and plunge my hand into my pocket and yank the dogtags free. They are dead, in the light, and refuse to reflect it.

The Buffalo slows, turns side on, and watches me. He shakes the snow from his back. When the snow is gone it snorts and tosses aside it’s pelt. Hide and horn falls away, leaving my brother where the Buffalo had been.

My father is shaking me; has been for some time. His tears remind me of my own, and they rush down my face. He has picked up the rifle and he presses it into my hands.

“Dad -”

“Your brother needs you. I’m an old man, Charlie. Wasicu. This is not my hunt.”

Dan looks at me, waiting patiently. He is as I have come to remember him, smiling softly, his weight on the balls of his feet, thumbs tucked into his belt. I line up the shot.

Dan had a thing he said, way back when, on our hunts together. I speak the words and in the distance see his lips moving in synch.

What is life?

It is the flash of a firefly in the night.

It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.

It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

My brother smiles at me, taps his chest, and tucks his hands back into his belt.

My bullet takes him high in the chest, centerline and true. He falls.

I throw the gun from me and run to him. His body lies in a hollow in the snow that is much larger than his body. I kneel beside Dan until my father is beside us.

I take the bonehandled knife from his belt. The storm dies away as I dig a hole, as Dan and I used to. I whisper words into the hole, to keep him company.

When I have finished, the corpse is Buffalo once again. It lies, without breath, on its side. I bury him in the old way, the Wounded Knee way, and cut his heart free. I plant his heart like corn. It fills the hole. Dad takes Dan’s dogtags from me and sets them beside my whispers, and I bury them all in the snow.

More stories like this by topic: American Indian/First Nations authors, American Indians, Australian authors, Authors of color, Characters of color