Ghost Dancer

Logan was glad he was at the back of the bar, tucked into a corner of the Copper Crow where it was easier to feel alone. It was supposed to be happy hour, but business was so slow the bartender was taking bottles down one by one and wiping them off. There must’ve been a hundred standing in neat rows in front of a mirror the size of a small dance floor. A flourish of leaf patterning dressed up the top corners of the mirror’s antique frame, formed the centerpiece of a fluted mantel. A scribble of neon, an illegible signature below the mantel, was the pale, pale red of iron just before it burns white. A basement bar, the Copper Crow had probably built when ships still needed sails.

Logan’s playing was off. No matter how many knobs he adjusted, he couldn’t get the edge he wanted. Every time he finished a song, he had to bend down and blow the keyboard clean of the rust flaking off his hands like dried blood. Month after month he hadn't played. Hardly thought about music. Twenty-four years old and already he was a tin man in need of an oil can. Or maybe a revival meeting to renew belief. Not in Jesus but in himself. Of the dozen or so people in the bar, only two had bothered to clap after the last song. And that’s all an audience was—a little reassurance you weren’t the only one who thought you belonged up there.

Hopi on his father’s side, he was Anglo on his mother’s. She was the one who’d started him on the piano before he was out of kindergarten. She’d watched over his shoulder until, by the time he was 11 or 12, she had nothing left to teach him. He’d played keyboards in high school bands and seemed precocious putting out an album on an independent label at 19.

That was five years ago, and he hadn’t done anything since. Some of his friends back in Kansas had bought it out of courtesy. No doubt his record had come to rest in an unremembered corner of the room, an oddity, a once-in-a-while conversation piece. Nice cover ain't it? I went t’ high school with him.

Then for a whole year he hadn’t played. Nothing at all. A shrink might say he’d had a breakdown of some kind. A football coach might say he’d quit on himself. If you asked him, he’d say he’d quit on music, hadn’t believed anymore the notes were his to juggle. For a year he’d been unable to see the point of brushing his teeth, showering, getting out of bed. Some days he never left his room. He wasn’t sure whose explanation was right, but he had just enough spark left in him to turn the engine over, rev it up, maybe work up a little speed.

He swiveled on his stool and reached over to adjust the drum machine. He tried not to look up, a little embarrassed at what he’d come to—all these synthetic sounds and these watery versions of pop tunes. Realigning himself with the two-decker keyboard (a Roland on bottom connected by a couple of sagging cords to a Yamaha), he caught sight of the owner watching him. Cheeks pitted by acne, hair that could have been pressed out of black vinyl, Dave didn’t look too pleased (no, it was not a happy hour). If his heavily lidded eyes communicated anything it was an ultimatum: Pick it up or find a new job.

What the hell was he going to play?

The Doors. The sixties were two decades gone, but the songs were mostly Ray Manzarek on his keyboard. The one-beat drum machine would have to take John Densmore’s place. For Robby Krieger’s guitar he had no fill-in. He himself was going to have to be both Manzarek and Morrison.

The drinkers, elbows resting on square tables, kept up their conversations as Logan’s fingers slid comfortably into the song’s carnival-ride grooves, its downsweeps and sudden swells. He lingered over the beginning, spliced and shuffled bars as if the song were a bit of spacetime turned to taffy between the fingers of a mischievous god.

Closing his eyes, he strained to keep his voice at the depth he wanted. So what if it had the second-hand timbre of an echo chafed by craggy slopes? What did they expect from a piano man in a basement bar drawing pocket money?

A woman’s near-hysterical laugh startled his eyes open, almost threw off his concentration.  

Putting everything he had into the last line—

“Try to set the night on … FIIIIIIIII-YUUUUUUURRRR..."

—he wound the song down on the keyboard.

Eyes stung by sweat, he wiped at his brow with the back of his hand. Not bad, he thought, not bad. The trickle of applause, more than he’d gotten since he began the set, put a little extra octane in his tank.

Dave flicked his hand in a way Logan knew meant he should go on break.

“Take a long one,” he said as Logan went past him.

Praying he still had a job, Logan went up the short flight of stairs and wandered down Sullivan Street.

A few blocks later he was standing in front of Washington Square Park. An archway cutting through an enormous slab of marble marked the entrance. Full-length likenesses of George Washington flanked the arch, his carved faces cracked as finely as skin wrinkles, the jagged lines dark with grime.

Dusk settled.

The marble span was thick and wide, columnar, though it had nothing to hold up but darkening sky.

Among the trees and benches, spread on the lawns and along the paved paths was a mix of people who looked as if they’d arrived in an ark that had run aground here: a heavily made-up Filipina absorbed in a novel; a guy with a bush of hair—like a dandelion gone to seed—and a goatee swinging his arms as he strutted past; a blond Asian balanced on a unicycle while he talked to a middle-aged woman, her arm straightened out by a little dog straining at its leash.

Washington Square Park was a kind of oasis—grassy, tree-studded, free of traffic that didn’t travel on bike or foot or skateboard. Those who had staked a claim clustered around music (he heard bongos and a radio), drank out of bottles sacked in brown paper. A strange tension held it all together.

He glided over it like a water strider moving with its own reflection.

Two guys about his age, heads shaved except for a narrow swath down the middle,  were fighting over a quart of beer. One wore a t-shirt that said Buy punk—erase the sixties.

The last of the Mohicans were white.

Another punk, his razored mane dyed orange, eyed a man with long graying hair who sat cross-legged on the grass with a guitar. The punk’s shoulder, exposed by a sleeveless shirt, was tattooed with the circumscribed A that signified anarchy. The guitar-player held up two fingers: peace.

The kid put up his middle finger as he strode past.

“Hey …"

Logan turned.

An index finger pointed at him, bounced up and down. "Don't I know you?"

Eyes the blue of a northern evening looked at him expectantly. The weathered face was handsome in a rough way. Logan was almost six feet; the guy standing in front of him was a little taller, and maybe a decade older but not old enough for the way his crown had gone smooth. Looking at the blond hair that was left, curling above a thick neck, Logan couldn’t help thinking that, had he lived about a millennium earlier, he could have been a Viking.

“Almost didn’t recognize you with that buzz-cut,” the Viking said. “Last time I saw you, you had a pony tail.”

Logan eyed the wrinkled flesh of a scar snaking along his jaw, oddly familiar. “Bruce.”

“Right.” Bruce’s smile pushed a golden biker’s mustache a little higher. He put out his hand. “What was that? Two, three years ago?”

Logan took hold of a hand as rough as tree bark. “Two, I think.”  

Logan had been hitchhiking outside Phoenix on his way north to the Hopi reservation.

He’d been born in Phoenix, but part of him was still stuck on one of those mesas, in a pit dug straight into the cool dark. Bruce, driving a battered van, had taken him as far as Flagstaff, Credence Clearwater Revival playing on a dusty 8-track player most of the way. They’d spent the night in a national park, seared hot dogs in a fire, and sloshed down beers Bruce kept in a cooler.

Bruce put his forehead into his open palm, pressed it there. “I know you got an Indian last name ...” He looked up with his finger pointing and a smile on his face. “Logan. Logan Blackfeather.”

Logan smiled. “Yeah.”

“How long you been in New York?”

“Few months.” He’d been lucky to land a job as a piano man at the Copper Crow and just as lucky to find work during the day as a laborer doing pick-up on construction site. The music scene in Phoenix—forget about Kansas—didn’t compare to New York.

“Whaddya think?” Bruce asked.

“A lot packed into a little space. I think I might've liked it better ten years ago.”

“Yeeaaaaaaah.” Long and low from Bruce. “Gettin’ hard to operate around here. Even the park ain't the same. Used to be, people were just waitin’ t’be friendly and talk to you. Now they're waitin’ for you to make a mistake. Doin’ the wrong kindsa drugs for the wrong reasons.” He dug three fingers into the front pocket of a denim vest that had been a jacket until someone had cut the sleeves off. It looked too small to button over his hairy chest. His fingers came up empty.

Bruce jerked his thumb at the punk with orange hair (he’d joined the two slugging beer). “They hate us because we let ’em down. The Establishment won. But at least we believed in something. Not them. No code. Just a bunch a half-assed little nihilists with starched heads.”

“The Establishment, huh?”

Bruce grinned and smoothed his bald pate with a hand. “Yeah, when I had hair it was long. Beard, too. Almost wound up in Vietnam.” He grinned mischievously. “Burned my draft card instead.”  

A refugee from the Age of Aquarius. When they’d believed that by gathering with a purpose and singing in a collective voice they could bend the ear of Universal Mind. That by mouthing a mantra they could bring peace to Southeast Asia, as if it were a simple thing, like rain. That holding hands had something to do with brother- and sisterhood. Logan tried picturing Bruce with long hair, a beard, his fist in the air as he marched with a crowd of hippies. On their shirts, shiny peace signs, hearts the wrong red for spilling blood, flowers that gave off the scent of enlightenment, ankhs glittering with Egyptian wisdom, Tibetan mandalas, Christian crosses. As if they'd fallen into trances and come back with nothing else.

“Didn’t believe in the war?” Logan asked.

“Are you kiddin’ me? That war ruined everything America stood for.”

Logan supposed he didn’t look surprised because Bruce shook his head.

“You’re pretty young—twenny-five? Twenny-six?”

“Twenty-two.”

“See, your generation can’t really understand. You grew up expecting the government to lie to you. Wasn’t like that 20 years ago. This was the greatest country on Earth. We were the good guys.” Bruce patted his chest.

Logan nodded politely.

“Kennedy was assassinated in ’63, right?”

The year Logan had been born. “Right.”

“Four days later Johnson signs a memo calling for a secret war in Vietnam. After setting up his secret war, Johnson runs against Goldwater as the peace candidate. He gets on national tv and says flat out, ‘I will not send American boys to do what Asian boys should be doing for themselves.’ But a year after he takes office again, he lands marines at Da Nang.”

“I think I used to know this,” Logan offered. “Some of it.”

“Ah, hell. I’m not gonna bore you with old news. But I tell you this, man, if anyone close to me had died in that war, I’d’ve firebombed the White House.” Bruce glanced in the direction of the punk trio, turned back to Logan. “You were headed up to the rez when I left you, right?”

“Yeah. My grandfather used to live on First Mesa.”

Bruce threw a slow punch at Logan's shoulder, pushed at him with his knuckles. “Whaddaya say we roast a bone?”

The bit about the bone took a second to click.

“Come on, meet somma my friends. You were the best damn hitcher I ever picked up. I was sorry t'see you go." He put an arm over Logan's shoulders and began walking him.

The arm was bare except for the hair that tickled Logan’s neck.      

They followed a path paved with brick-colored stones.

"Bruce …" She sat on a bench set in a kind of half circle constructed of red brick, raised enough that he and Bruce had to go up four steps.

"You brought company."

"This is Logan.” He jerked his thumb at Logan. “Met ’im on my travels.” He held a hand out toward her. “Sybil."

Her hair, sprouting from beneath the red skullcap of a bandanna, fell in dark curls. Bracelets hung with charms jangled as she took his hand. Worn denim shorts exposed thighs thick with muscle.

"And Batman." Bruce pointed. "He only comes out at night."

Batman was on his back on a bench overhung by a low branch, the foliage dense enough to hold off a light rain. He lowered a newspaper to his chest, raised an arm without bothering to get up, his hand nearly touching leaves. He was wearing fingerless gloves and enough chains to sink a body in the Hudson.

“Sybil's an interior decorator.” The stubble on Bruce’s face glistened like wire bristles.

Her skin was dark, but there was a creamy quality to it. She might have been Puerto Rican. Maybe a mixed-blood like him.

"What’re you readin’ over there?” Bruce asked.

“Yankees lost again.” Batman’s voice sounded like a yawn. “The Pentagon is worried about a new missile the Russians are developing. And the highest rate of suicide in the country is on a reservation in Oregon."

“Highest rate of suicide, highest rate of alcoholism, highest rate of poverty,” Logan added. “Leave it to the Innians to bring home the gold medals nobody else wants.”

“Sorry, I didn’t—”

“Don’t pay any mind to Batman.” Bruce tried another pocket of his vest. “He’s a professional bum."  

"Bruce is just an amateur.” Batman’s voice softened. “I wasn’t trying to make light of it.”

Logan waved a hand. Forget it. He wasn’t doing much better than his cousins. Just covering songs with a tinny drum machine for back-up. The words he sang were never his no matter the spin he managed put on them with his own voice. He wasn’t telling anybody anything they hadn’t already heard.

Batman took out a stiletto-thin lighter. Flame shot past his mouth. When the lighter clicked off, Logan could see the glowing tip of a joint. Batman brought the roasting bone over to Sybil. After taking a deep drag, she lifted it (jangle, jangle) to him. Logan passed it without taking a hit.

Bruce took the joint with a shrug. His face twisting into a demon’s grimace, he cauterized his lungs.

Logan could still hear bongos. From somewhere closer to the middle of the park.

The lit end of the joint gave Sybil’s face a ruddy cast. She could have been a model: high cheekbones, straight nose, angular jaw. Logan reached down for the smoldering bone and gave it to Bruce. What he hated about pot, he had to scurry around looking for words when he wanted to talk, couldn’t figure out the right order, then forgot what he was trying to say.

"Logan …” Sybil tossed his name out as if plinking a stone in a pond. “Logan what?"

"Blackfeather.”

“Logan Blackfeather."

She had a voice that reminded him of wind finding its way under a door.

"We're gonna have to change Batman's name to something more accurate,” Bruce taunted.  “Johnny Jobless maybe."

"You can be Herman Homeless." Batman, who’d joined Sibyl on her bench, was sitting up now.

Bruce laughed and leaned heavily on Logan's shoulder, his blue eyes shining like fired glass.

Smoke curled from Sybil's half-open mouth. Her dangling earrings were as elaborate as the headdress of an Incan deity. "So you're Indian, huh babe?" she asked.

“Hopi. On my father’s side.”

“So you’re half here and half there, half in and half out, half looking back and half looking ahead.”

The Hopi mesas were a lost world, islands barely large enough to mark on a map of the country. 

Sybil let go a plume of white smoke.

Bending over, Logan pointed at Bruce’s boots. "You wanna be a cowboy, huh?"

“The Stoned Ranger.” Bruce laughed at his own joke.

“Only we were here first.” Logan’s tone bordered on belligerent. Maybe it had been the way Batman had yawned over the newspaper headlines.

The playfulness drained from Bruce's face, and the expression that remained hovered somewhere between wariness and confusion. "Who was where first?"

"Indians." Logan pointed at the bricks under his feet. “Here." He felt his face arranged itself in a cocky half smile, as if he knew hundreds of things they didn't.

"Oh." Bruce scratched his chin. "There's plenty a room."

Logan shook his head. “Not even on two continents.” He laughed without knowing why. “Two ripped-off continents." He laughed again, out of place. "There’s your gold medal."

Logan stopped talking because he'd put Bruce in a bad place. Bruce had given him a ride, had cooked dinner for him, had shared his beer and pot.

Logan heard Sybil’s breathy voice.

"So where’re you from Logan Blackfeather?"

What she really wanted to ask was why Indians were poor suicidal drunks. A good question, how entire peoples could break apart and burn up like a plummeting meteor, without trailing the pretty fireworks. One of the hundreds of things he knew that they didn’t. Maybe it wasn’t coincidence that punks shaved their heads like they belonged to a tribe.

From a psychiatric hospital, he wanted to say, my real name's Crazy Horse. “Wounded Knee Creek.” He loved the power of his lie. “I'm a ghost dancer."             

Batman lifted his head. "Whatsa ghost dancer?"

"A ghost dancer?” He closed his eyes for a second, a long blink. "Someone caught between two worlds. One that's worn out, better than half way to dead. One that's on its way.” He blinked again. “You dance until you get a vision. Of what the World Coming is going to look like. You dance until it shows up. Or you die of exhaustion." [you dropped acid until you saw what you wanted to see, right?]

The air had gotten colder. Logan folded his arms across his chest, goose-bumps rising on his arm. He closed his eyes to try to see across a wide canyon, across a snow-filled space. The swirling flakes were the grains of an image.

“Wounded Knee,” Bruce said. “There was a battle there, wasn’t there?”

Tell it.

“South Dakota?” Sybil’s voice.

Tell it.

They didn’t really understand what had happened at Wounded Knee. He wanted to tell it so that they got it right this time. Sing it. Historians were always distracted by the obvious, all those bodies in the snow. History was full of massacres; this one was different.

He felt as though something supernatural had hit him with its invisible fist and swelled one of his eyes shut. The space his senses occupied stretched, and he found himself on a windy plain. He moved through a black-and-white landscape where everything was eerily clear.

When he started talking again, they weren’t in the park anymore. It was not summer's end.

It is winter, 1890. The Great Plains are covered with snow. The wind cuts through the rags you are wearing, sings bitter and cold in your ears. And it never stops. Can you feel it?

The goose-bumps on his arms got harder in the wake of a spasm that snaked through him.

You have to eat horsemeat because there are so few buffalo left. But there's not even enough horsemeat to go around.

Your mother died two weeks ago because she couldn’t take the cold.

Your father is dead, too. He died when the Blue Coats attacked the village. He wasn’t able to save your sister. You wouldn’t let your mother see the body of your sister because of what the Blue Coats had done to her. Your mother had to wail and keen without seeing her daughter for the last time.

Last winter your wife did not survive the white-scabs disease. You leaned over her while she lay stretched on the ground. Your baby was curled and frozen in the round hill of her belly. Your son, your daughter—you will never know which—never came into the world.

You are what is left of your family, and you too will soon die.

If you look up, the sky is empty. The clouds are still there, but the voices that sometimes spoke to you are quiet. Once you saw the eagle circling above the Earth and knew that the wind carrying him was your own breath. You don’t hear the voices of the eagles anymore. The four-legged animals have nothing to say either. The music between the stars has been stilled. There are no more signs to follow, and you haven't seen the Sun for days.

What's left of your band is called the No Clothes People by the tribe you joined. Your village was burned. Your tepee and the buffalo robes that would have kept you warm were also burned. In dreams you hear the thunder of the soldiers’ guns while you run away. All is gray above you, as if the sky were filled with the smoke of all the villages ever burned, and it will be gray forever.

The Lakota chief, Red Cloud, has said there is no hope on Earth, and you believe him.  Other chiefs have whispered that the powers that protected the tribes have abandoned them. Why else do the Blue Coats win so many battles?

You send a prayer as you walk through the snow, but you have heard of tribes that have been completely wiped out by soldiers, by starvation, by the white-scabs disease. Their languages, their ceremonies, their lives are gone, and there will be no more children. The No Clothes People are almost gone, too. The people around you are not your own. Even the great Lakota war chief Tashunke Witko, whom the whites call Crazy Horse, is dead. So are your parents and your wife and your unborn child and the warriors of your tribe. Custer's ghost is laughing at you. In-Mut-To-Ya-Lat-Lat, Thunder-Traveling-Over-The Mountains, has said that he will fight no more forever. And you believe him.

You have nothing left but the emptiness in your stomach, the cold in your body, the bitter wind singing in your ears. This is what makes you Indian like all the rest although you don't speak the same language—your numb fingers, your frostbitten toes, your skinny legs, your weak arms.

If the Indians die out, the Earth will surely follow. The ceremonies will not be performed. The Sun will stop rising. The Earth will no longer be fertile. The fur that once covered the sacred buffalo holding up the Earth, fur that used to roll across his back in dark brown waves, is almost gone. Three of his legs have dropped off. The end of the world is just over the next ridge.

Then you hear about the coming of Christ to Earth as an Indian. His name is Wovoka and he has promised that everything will be renewed. The Earth will roll up like a blanket and take with it the fences and the railroads, the forts and the telegraph poles. Underneath will be the old Indian Earth. The white man will be swept from the land. Only the Indians will be saved. The world will end, but a new one will be underneath. The buffalo will return. The ghosts of your ancestors—all the dead—will live again. The horses will be numerous, and there will be plenty of grass for them to eat. This is what the Indian messiah has said, and you want to believe him.

A new world is coming,
The eagle has said so.

But you must dance.

A new world is coming,
The eagle has sent word.

Dance the dance of the ghosts, and you will see your mother again and speak with your father. Your sister will come laughing to you, and you will sleep in your wife’s arms again and watch your child grow. The white man will be extinct, and your tribe will live as it lived before the coming of the white man.

Only you must dance the Ghost Dance.

You dance to renew the earth, to be free of the white man, to see your family and your tribe live again. You fall into a trance on the frigid earth, your face against grass pounded flat, but you do not feel it. You are in the spirit world, and when you awake, the other dancers tell you to paint what you saw on a shirt.

This will be your Ghost Shirt. You have seen some of these shirts hung with feathers and strips of rawhide, even thin tails of human hair. They are painted with eagles and hawks and crows whose wings are spread, with colorful two-headed birds and buffalo-horned beings, with five-pointed stars like those on the flag the Blue Coats wave or a red daybreak star. Others are decorated with constellations, crescent moons, circles divided into four parts, streaks of red lightning, feverish spots, winding symbols you don't recognize. Wovoka has said that not even the bullets of the soldiers can harm you when you wear your Ghost Shirt.

You dance to show you believe, and you hear the voice of the eagle again. The Earth sends dreams of the land as it used to be. There is music between the stars. The old ways have returned.

The whites see that your backs are not bent, and your heads are not hung. You are dancing and they are afraid. They want you to stop.

The Blue Coats come to take away the leader of the band you have joined. They take away the last of your guns even though most of the warriors have died, and there are twice as many women and children as men. Even though the guns are used to hunt the last of the buffalo.

One man among a hundred refuses to give up his gun. A new, many-shots rifle that cost him most of his wealth in horses and hides. It is all he has left to show that he is still a man.

And they fire.

They fire on tepees where women and children are huddled against the cold. They fire not only with their rifles and pistols, but with their new guns that echo like thunder and flash like lightning. These new guns that leave great holes in the Earth are turned on the tepees.

Men who are not armed are shot like deer that forgot to run.

Women carrying children are chased down. They are stabbed with bayonets, and their bodies are left in the snow. They are not worth a bullet. 

Old men who cannot run are beaten to death with the butts of rifles. They are not worth a sharp blade.

You try to run, hoping that you won't be killed, but the bodies of children beside their grandmother tell you you will.

“It is 1890.” Logan circled back. “The Great Plains are covered with snow.” He was dimly aware they were still listening. “A new world is coming, the eagle has said so.”

He walks among the bodies whose limbs are frozen in strange positions, the wind blowing as it always does. 

“The Indian nation will rise again, Wovoka said. It will be like old times. And you believed him.”

The Ghost Shirts did not stop the bullets.

“Your ancestors, your loved ones, all of the dead will be reunited with you, and the white man will perish utterly from the face of the Earth, it was said. You believed that too.”

The Ghost Shirts did not protect them.

“The hunting will be good again. The buffalo will return, and the land will be fertile. You will roam the Earth as you did before the coming of the white man.”

The Ghost Shirts are dark with blood.

Logan looked at Bruce, whose eyes were just shadowy pits, as if he were the only one left. “Now you don't believe anything.”

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