It starts with spirits. Strong spirits. Many years ago, we captured lightning in a jar and relabeled it homemade sauce. And from this jar we drank sips of lightning together every New Year’s Eve like it was our own ancient religion to do it. Like the ancestors demanded we burn the hair out of our nostrils, scald our insides clean, sear ourselves of all dirt as propitiation before ever we spoke their stories.
The world is made of stories.
Butch does not make the lightning, but we know that Butch drinks lightning on days when he shouldn’t, and more than he should. Frankie makes the lightning and gives it to Butch, even though Pinkie and I tell him he shouldn’t. Pinkie and I don’t live nearby anymore, so we have no way of stopping him. Frankie says he can’t stop Butch any more than we can. This is also a story. It bothers me not just that Butch drinks too much, but that he drinks the same lightning year-round, transgressing our tradition-that-is-not-really-a-tradition. And then I wonder what a tradition is other than a story more than two people agree on repeating over and over.
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Coyote circles, snarls, smiles. Resplendent is he, Coyote. Magnificent. Magnanimous. He takes her empty chair. He lounges with a predator’s ease. Coyote stares across the fire, the flames glinting in his eyes—his yellow eyes, his golden eyes made for firelight or from it.
Coyote speaks, he says:
“They were living there at Yuxtuyrup, two youths. Nobody saw those youths much. Behold they saw them every year when they went stepping around with flint blades in front of the deerskin dancers. They were just raised that way. They were steppers around. That is the way they were raised. It was then those youths were seen.”
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It is Butch, Frankie, Pinkie, and I seated around the fire, and this is how the stories always begin, once we are cleansed with strong spirits, with Ikxaréeyavs, the spirits who were here before we Karuks came to be.
No tale-telling is complete without Coyote, and we Karuks are clear on this point, too. We usually start with a swig of lightning and a dose of Coyote, of how Coyote stole fire. Usually we go around all night like that, telling our best-remembered versions of the best pikva, but not really because none of us are really pikváhaan and none of us speak Karuk like we should, like the old-time Indians, like our grandparents. Each year we tell our favorite stories until the stars fade, the fire shrinks, and we feel the cold setting in again, the cold that is the New Year, the cold that is the past shriveling up and dying while we sit here drinking white lightning from a jar and pretending we’re not part of the death.
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Coyote knows I am not like the old-time Indians. But he is not disgusted by this fact, for Coyote knows better than anyone what it is to adapt. He draws his lips back, and I see his teeth, that they are sharp, and he takes a swig of white lightning and snaps his jaws together. Clack.
Coyote speaks:
“Then behold both died, the youths, the steppers around. And they both had girl sweethearts. They thought: ‘We are dying, too.’ All they did was cry, the girl sweethearts. Every morning they sat down by the graveyard, the water coming out of their eyes.”
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We have all taken a sip from the jar. Butch obviously had more. No one speaks. None of us started this gathering, and none of us knows how to start this gathering so we sit, staring at the fire, and I begin wishing for another pass at the jar.
Usually, we are five here. Five cousins with homemade sauce, back for New Year’s in a sacred ritual all our own behind Butch’s house on the north fork. It is Joy who’s missing. It is only Joy who all four of us would miss. She’s the one who used to start with her tale about Coyote, with her strong voice and frequent pauses like music. For a minute we would believe we were transported back to that time, that Coyote was real and started this fire here for us to keep warm. Today it’s one day since Joy has passed. And I thought she could last longer to see this.
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Coyote’s ears are large. Large enough to hear even the words I can’t speak. He hears the memories that are not stories yet, repeating into the space between my ears like an echo in a cave. Coyote tilts his head side to side to pick up all the sounds.
He speaks:
“Then after a while all at once a person sat down by them there, the crying girl sweethearts, as they were crying there by the graveyard. Behold it was A’ikren, the Duck Hawk. Then A’ikren said: ‘Ye would better quit crying. I know where your sweethearts are. I will take you there. Ye make ten maple bast dresses. It is a long way where we are going to travel through. And ye must take with you deer cannon bone marrow. They will be your bones, when ye rub it on yourselves.’”
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“I took her and her kids and her white husband out eeling two years back. Up ishipishi falls.”
I find it strange that Butch is the first one to speak. I might have expected Frankie to do it, him being the oldest, except Frankie has been silent since he pulled up—uncharacteristically late—and sat down and took his hit of homemade sauce without preamble before passing it left, passing it to Butch, from Butch to me, from me to Pinkie. Coyote is passed over.
“It was midnight when we met up. July. Full moon. I was in my truck and she was riding shotgun in the car behind, and that husband of hers was sweating bullets and kept dabbing his forehead, like—you know.” He mimes dabbing his forehead.
Coyote grins at me from Joy’s chair, and I look back down at the flames, trying to put him from my mind, to concentrate on Butch’s voice and not on what Coyote knows—the memory he’s heard in my head, the one he wants me to give them, my cousins, the memory he wants for himself.
“Think he was worried about driving,” Butch is saying. “Never seen a guy ride the brakes so hard. I was only doing thirty and I still almost lost him. The kids were in the back seat of their station wagon, all three of ‘em—girl and two boys, she has. Or had, I guess. Late night for kids. They looked tired, three sheets to the wind.”
I think that this is exactly how I feel right now. Three sheets to the wind. A tearing wind. A knock-you-down-if-you-don’t-lean-into-it kind of wind that makes it hard to breathe, and I can see those three sheets clinging tight to the clothesline. Coyote knows I am tired. Coyote is waiting for me to sleep, waiting for me to cry in the night as the images I must not remember sweep me away in a flood. Butch talks on.
“I was driving across the bridge when I saw a raccoon just walking on the railing like, I don’t know, like a cat or something. So I slam the brakes on. And I get out and pick it up by the tail, you know, to show the kids, and the damn thing turns on me and bites my hand—clean through between the thumb and pointer—and I drop it off the bridge.” Butch’s face is creased with something like pain, but like a pain he can’t locate in any one place, one he is desperate to find. “And I hear it screaming on the way down.”
There’s silence. Coyote looks up at the stars and I think he might howl. I think the howl might open my mouth too, so I clap a hand over it.
“So what?” Frankie grabs the jar from Pinkie and takes the lid off for a swig. Others aren’t supposed to speak during another person’s story. Such are our rules. We also aren’t supposed to take another swig until the first story is over, but I don’t say anything. It’s weird without Joy here. Joy knew the rules. Butch stares across the fire at Frankie, his look like a knife point. I can almost see the fire glinting off the blade.
“Bet he didn’t let Joy see that hand,” says Pinkie quietly, his own hands shoved down deep in his pockets, his body shoved down deeper in his chair. The shrinking violet, Joy used to call him.
“Damn straight, I didn’t,” says Butch, looking away from Frankie and putting on a tight smile.
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Coyote is standing now, holding forth in dramatic fashion. His voice is the voice of the breeze at the top of a drainpipe. His mouth is pink inside, and soft.
He says:
“Then they said to A’ikren, the sweethearts: ‘We are through, let’s go.’ Then they all went, the sweethearts and A’ikren. And the strands of their dresses got all pulled out by the brush; it was so brushy where they were traveling through. Every once in a while, they put on another dress, and again it all pulled out. And all that they were painting themselves with was that deer cannon bone marrow.”
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I ignore Coyote, his mocking snarl. I don’t want the memory. I don’t want to remember the hospital. So instead I tell myself another story to drown out the first. I say it so loudly in my head that Coyote puts his paws over his large pink ears. The story is a different piece of Joy. A happy piece of Joy. I break into a full grin over it because I haven’t thought about it in a long time. The scar has faded enough that I can’t see it now, in the firelight, but I can feel the slight ridge if I concentrate, on my right pointer finger next to the middle knuckle. A mark of my own stupidity.
It happened in summer. In kid-boy fashion I had been playing with a hatchet. I was supposed to be chopping kindling there at the family gold mine across the gorge but started thinking I could be an axe-throwing Indian warrior. Cut my finger to the bone.
Joy wasn’t the oldest, but she was the smartest. Pinkie took me to her, and Joy took me inside, sent Frankie and Butch out, and sat me at the table. She explained that if we dealt with it ourselves and made like it was no big deal then the parents couldn’t get mad. She told Pinkie to get the whiskey. I thought that whiskey was for me, for the disinfecting or a swig to dull the pain. Joy held the needle to a match, then threaded the needle, then poured a shot glass. She threw back that shot like she was a real drinker, like a lady in a western, like Calamity Jane. Calamity Joy. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen. She did not pour another shot.
I screamed so loud Frankie and Butch came in—a rare show of worry—and from then on we were all a little scared of telling Joy if we got hurt.
I couldn’t stop laughing over her wanting to become a nurse after she moved to the flatlands. Or when she got kicked out of school for showing what the administration called “too much leadership.” Or when she just up and enrolled in another program and got her degree anyway, leadership traits and all.
◆
Coyote is cleverer than me. He knows all about my tricks and my loud mind talking. He grins, he grimaces, he growls low and long. He tells his story louder too.
He says:
“Then, when a long way along, A’ikren said: ‘We are about to get there. Ye will see what they used to do, those steppers around; they do the same yet, they have the same fun yet, stepping around before the deerskin dancers, they have the same fun yet.’”
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Butch continues with his story, and I try to picture my cousin’s face and hear her voice through him. But all I can see is Coyote’s grin flickering in the firelight.
“So anyway,” he says, “I go to her car and she rolls down her window and just goes, ‘Butch, what the hell?’ and I say I wanted to show the kids a raccoon and she says, ‘Let me see your hand,’ to which I says, ‘It’s all fine, it’ll feel better when it stops hurting.’ She looked at me like she knew everything, like I was on thin ice. You know how she could look.”
“Yeah,” says Pinkie in an almost-whisper. He drove the furthest to be here, all the way from Portland. He must be tired. Tireder than me, even. But he doesn’t know what I know. He hasn’t seen what I’ve seen. He has sunk further into his chair and his coat is big around his shoulders. A turtle borne shell-ward.
“Is this just a story about how stupid you are?” asks Frankie, in a voice harsher than I’ve heard it in a long while.
Butch was always bigger than Frankie by a head and a shoulder. Frankie and Pinkie were half-siblings by the same mother, and Butch had come to live with them when his mom died, so he was like a brother to them in some ways. Only he and Frankie were really related, though, through Frankie’s dad. I thought of him as my cousin too, but technically we weren’t blood either—I was related to Frankie and Pinkie’s mom. When we were children, Frankie and Butch fought constantly, only united when they set their sights on us little ones, as we were known by the adults, Pinkie and me. Joy was the one who brought us together. Joy was the one who started this gathering. Joy would have told Frankie to shut it. I want to tell him myself, but I am afraid of the story welling up in me, of the memory painting my insides. The smell of alcohol. Her insistent eyes.
Butch ignores Frankie’s remark, but Pinkie and I exchange a glance, the meaningful look of soldiers stepping soft on a minefield. We have not trod this minefield together recently, though once we did often.
Frankie and Butch both went to war, and they both came back different. Frankie stored his different up inside and tamped it down so hard it became like rock, impregnable and cool. Butch’s different was hot and volatile, sparking like lightning, fed by spirits. Pinkie’s eyes are too numb for me to tell if he’s worried. Our distance over the past years has muddled his face. I’m illiterate in its expressions now. Across the fire, Coyote wriggles around in Joy’s chair, trying to get comfortable. He rises and inspects it minutely, inch by inch, while I watch, inert.
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Coyote produces two sticks and clicks them together. He sharpens their ends to frightful points. He yawns and blinks and licks his chops and spins a circle seven times. Coyote knows I am tired. Coyote knows what it is to tire, how useless to resist. He props his eyelids open; he pierces his eyelids closed—the gruesome fate of those who sleep.
Then he goes on:
“Then they got there, A’ikren and the girl sweethearts. It was getting dark. Behold, the deerskin dance row. Then after a while behold the whistle sounded. The youths were sitting at both ends, at both ends of the deerskin dance. Then they, the girls, tried to touch them, their sweethearts. They disappeared there. Whenever they were just about to touch them, they disappeared.”
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“We made it to the river,” says Butch. He speaks softly, eyes reflecting the flames. With Coyote out of the chair, I stare across the fire and imagine Joy there, with her wry smile and quiet cut-you-to-the-quick wit that could leave you doubled over laughing or sliced down your center line. “I thought I’d give the kids a little scare, really wake ‘em up, you know, give them a memory of their wild Karuk cousins. So what I did was I tied the rope to my waist and quick, without saying a word, I just up and jumped over the bank under the falls, as we always do. Almost thought I made a mistake too, for a minute, just a split second after I hit the water. Joy hadn’t been eeling up here in a long time, you know. It occurred to me she might not be as quick as she always was. I shouldn’t have doubted. The rope pulled taut and I knew she was on the other end, butt planted, using all her little body to hold me. Remember how she used to look? Face all tight, lips rolled in. Calm, but aware of the situation.”
I pictured her round boyish face, baggy pants, flannel shirt, usually some dirt on her cheeks. I didn’t meet Joy until I was five. Her father was only half Karuk. He went to Indian school in Salem young, then left the rez in search of better work up in Klamath when he was a man. When Joy was eight, her father moved his family down to Tennant, California, and that was close enough for them to visit often. To five-year-old me she was perfect. Gorgeous. Enchanting. She didn’t take guff from anyone. She could shoot rifles better than Butch or Frankie. She listened when I had a problem. Usually she just nodded quietly, but it made me feel better.
She saved my life a few times after our parents “invested” in the old gold mine across the river. Killed three rattlesnakes on various trips with various things—guns, rakes, what-have-you. We kids usually slept out on the porch, and one morning a large black bear came upon us. Frankie and Joy realized it before anyone, and before I knew what was happening, they were standing on either side of me, firing off shotguns toward the bear, who scampered away quick. I couldn’t hear right for a week. Joy always felt bad about that.
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Coyote has a point to all his palaver. Lessons to pass on to us new-time Indians here around the fire, the children of children of children of children of the ones who got away, the ones who were taken away. Something about stories. About how they are told. He snorts, he growls, he howls, to make sure we’re paying him mind.
Coyote speaks:
Then A’ikren said: ‘It is well. I am going home. I will come back for ye.’ Then they said: ‘It is well.’ Then he went home.”
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“So you catch eels or what?” asks Frankie in that same tone like jagged shale, and that would normally have had Butch up and at him. But not on this night. Butch looks up. I can see tears in his eyes. I wish he would scream and yell and fight Frankie. He sniffs once and presses on. Coyote sits and snorts, knows why I yearn for an explosion.
“Enough to fill the back of my truck. Joy was smiling wide. Happy to be out there again. I remember her looking at me and saying, ‘I missed you, Butch.’ That made me glad. I wanted it to be a good night for she and those tykes. The plan was I’d take the eels and get ‘em cleaned up and split the haul in the morning.”
Butch falls silent. He pokes at the fire with one of the sticks. Coyote makes a face at him, a mocking face, and suddenly the memory is right there in my mind, the hospital machines whirring, the sterile smell of the floors. Alcohol. I want another swig of the lightning. I stare at the jar sitting next to Pinkie. I feel the weight of his continued descent into his chair, and the earth below pulling me down too.
“I couldn’t stop myself. Even for that one fucking night,” Butch goes on. “By the time I came to the next day, yellow jackets were feasting. I just stood by my truck, head pounding. Couldn’t work up the nerve to call her. All I could think of was how she grabbed that rope and didn’t let go of me, and how this was what I did back. I told her that evening. She didn’t get mad. I disappointed her, though. That was worse.”
No one speaks. No one moves. Even Frankie. Even Coyote. Butch is crying now. Really crying like I haven’t seen him cry. A hollow forms where my tears should be, and inside it a sharp feeling of hurt, like a grain of sand. I press down the hurt. I can see it there in the center of me. I wrap the hurt up so I don’t have to feel it rubbing my insides raw.
After a while Butch laughs at himself for crying and wipes the tears away and says, “Give me the goddamn jar,” and Pinkie says, “Language,” in exactly the way Joy would have, and we all laugh, a sad laugh because it feels right to have said it and wrong all at the same time. Even Coyote laughs, but I can tell he doesn’t get the joke. Frankie takes the jar from by Pinkie’s feet and passes it. Coyote guides it to Butch.
“I was going to visit her last summer,” says Frankie.
Joy took over the gold mine once the parents didn’t want it anymore. In order to keep the claim active, she would come out for six weeks each summer with her three kids and her white husband. No one ever turned up gold there. I wonder what will happen to it now.
I asked Joy once why she kept coming back to a dirt heap like that mine. She said it was because just like the Indians had old ways collectively, we each have old ways individually, and she wanted to keep those old ways going. She liked to keep telling the stories. Nothing dies if it’s a story, she’d told me.
Coyote nods, for this is his testament, this is his lifeblood, and he knows he is eternal because he is a story, an incomplete story, a never-dead one.
“I never did make it across to them,” Frankie continues. His tone is softer, closer to the Frankie’s voice that I know. Steady. Matter-of-fact. “There’s always a shit excuse to go with that. Like I was busy or drunk—” he looks pointedly at Butch, “—or something, but I wasn’t. Joy and I had a signal worked out. If I was driving down the road on this side of the river, I’d fire three shots in the air. And if she was around, she’d fire three shots back.” He shifts in his chair a little, like all his limbs are falling asleep. “I’ll miss that,” he says and clears his throat, looking down at his hands.
We pass the white lightning again. I forget not to inhale before taking a swig and the paint thinner smell singes my nose hairs off.
“Thanks for sharing that, Frankie,” says Butch—sincerely, for all I can tell—but Frankie kicks at him.
“Fuck off,” he says.
“Language,” says Pinkie, but it doesn’t have the same impact this time.
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Coyote is committed to finishing. Because stories must be told to stay alive, repeated. Every part just so. Coyote is a story too, and that’s why he gets it. Coyote sits on the chair, still, like he would if he were stalking prey. Quietly, Coyote speaks.
He says:
“Then behold he came back again, A’ikren. They felt like they had only stayed one night, the girl sweethearts, so it seemed to them. Behold, they had been there one year. They did not want to leave. Then the people told them: ‘Ye must go back. It is not time yet for ye to come here. Ye did not die yet.’”
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“I didn’t make it,” says Pinkie after a long silence.
Coyote is cloying and ploying, making faces. He is trying to get me to slip, to open my mouth and spill everything, everywhere. Everyone looks at Pinkie.
“Where?” asks Butch.
“The hospital. Husband wasn’t even there anymore. I went into her room and it wasn’t her.” He looks up at us from his pile of jacket, his face floating and bodiless in the dim glimmers.
Coyote eggs me on to speak, to interrupt. At the word “hospital” I feel that hurt deep inside that I have covered, growing and pressing against its restraints, trying to burst out of my chest. I am back in the white-washed halls. I am back in the tainted air. I am back.
“I spent the night in the waiting room,” says Pinkie. “Just couldn’t go. Couldn’t leave…”
I avoided seeing Joy. Longer than I should have. But I had made it in time. The memory is churning inside me. Pinkie is talking like he’s sad, but I know why he shouldn’t be. I know what he missed. Bile rises in my throat. I puke over the side of the chair and Coyote smiles across the fire, ready for me to expel more. Butch holds out a water bottle. But I reach for the white lightning. I remember the smell of her vomit. I remember the stain on her gown.
“Two men sat beside me. One after the other. And they told me two stories, one after the other.”
“What men?” says Frankie, a scoff in his voice.
“I don’t know,” says Pinkie. “Maybe I dreamed it. It all felt like a dream. Like a vision. Two stories.”
I swig the white lightning, praying it will force the memory back down, so I can swallow it, keep it there, away from my waking mind, but I look into Coyote’s eyes and I know it’s too late for me. It is here, it is here, I think. But it’s Pinkie’s turn to talk, and I somehow keep my mouth shut between sips. I bite the insides of my cheeks and taste blood.
Coyote wants me to tell them what I’ve seen because in the telling the memory becomes story, and the story becomes a part of their story of Joy: the last part, the part that completes her, the part that ends her. And it will color all the rest.
“The first guy sat beside me,” Pinkie says. I struggle to focus on his words with Coyote staring at me. “Guess he knew I was the only Indian there. He just started talking about her right off. Says they worked together at the hospital. Actually, she trained him, he says.”
Butch and Frankie nod in unison. Pinkie rises slightly from the hole he’s sunk into. Perhaps this story can pull him up, up into the world. Perhaps he can pull me up, too, away from my memories and into his.
He goes on, “Says on his first day this guy came in the ER complaining of paralysis in his legs. Joy talks to him for a minute or two and then she pulls this orderly guy aside and she says, ‘He’s faking.’ The orderly guy, he doesn’t know what to say, says the guy looked really paralyzed to him, but Joy is sure, and she tells him to wheel the guy’s bed somewhere for a test.” Butch chuckles under his breath. Pinkie rises another inch. Frankie is still. Pinkie talks quickly, pulling himself up hand over hand with the story.
“So they wheel him down the hall—this orderly guy is thinking they’re going to some sort of machine or something—but they turn into a storage room. Joy tells him to keep watch. He turns toward the door, but keeps looking at her over his shoulder, thinking she’s going to ask the guy some questions or something, but she puts a railing down and shoves the guy hard. When the guy leaps up, she says, ‘Congratulations on your recovery,’ and walks out without another word. The orderly and the guy just stare at each other for a minute and then the guy curses and leaves.”
Coyote returns my glance, his eyes narrow and black now instead of golden brown, cold instead of warm. And then I realize they are not Coyote’s eyes.
They are Joy’s eyes. But not the eyes I knew.
Dead eyes. In a face full of malice.
Her limbs too thin, robbed of their muscle by the cancer in her pancreas. Her teeth too big for her mouth. Her teeth like a coyote’s teeth hanging out. And her husband scurrying away as I arrived—or did he just shrink into a corner and disappear? And did he know what was coming? Did he care?—and me standing there with her claw-like hand grabbing my forearm and her dead eyes scanning my face. I knew it was not her, that woman on the bed. That this was not Joy grasping, clawing, gasping, coughing.
Me, cringing, smiling, crying. Bedside manner-ing. Pretending.
Look at my feet. Look at them, she’d said.
Clenched teeth, jaw muscles still working overtime. My arm burning, branded by the half-moons of her fingernails digging. Her feet, her feet, her feet, wriggling beneath the sheets. Kicking too powerfully for such a wasted, small thing. The sheets, untucked.
Darn amateurs making my bed. Wouldn’t tolerate such sloppy work on my ward.
I’d nodded, staring at her wriggling feet, at the bandages on her wriggling feet, at her fingernails now scrabbling at the bandages. I’d realized I was free: she was no longer holding me, but I could not look away.
Look at my feet, she’d said again.
Covered in blisters, they were, every inch a wound, festering. I’d wretched. Right there. And her lips had pulled back into a snarl, and she’d laughed a howling laugh that roused the nurses nearby, who rushed in to rush me out, to rush around to cover those open wounds, and that was the last time I’d seen Joy.
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Coyote stamps his foot on the ground thrice. He turns a circle about himself. He rages and roars. He says there is a price for omitting details, for keeping memories to myself, away from the others. He says we won’t be the same without this story. He says my not telling will end it, this fire dance of ours, this spirit-drinking of ours.
Coyote goes on:
“Then the people told them, the sweethearts: ‘Ye take along some heavenly salmon backbone meat. Then nobody will die any more, when ye carry it there. When first he dies, before they bury him, ye shall smear about his mouth the backbone meat of salmon.’ Then they brought it into this middle place. Then they did that, smeared it around the mouth, and he resuscitated. For a time, people did not die. There was no death for a time.”
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“She could always spot a bullshitter,” says Frankie, looking at Butch.
“What’s the second story, from the second man?” asks Butch.
I snap back into the firelight. I shake myself loose from Coyote’s gaze and look up at the clear white stars. Cold and dead. Transmitting old stories to us still. Stories that are older than we Karuks, that will go on after we Karuks cease to be. Stories as old as Coyote. Pinkie takes a breath. My heart pounds. When his story ends there will be nothing between me and my own moment of telling. Nothing between me and that last moment.
“Well, and so this second guy came to see her,” says Pinkie in his rhythm again, too fast, too fast. “This one was a cop. Worked graveyard alongside Joy for five years. He said she was the best backup any of the cops there had. Said once he brought in this dude who was tripping on something. PCP or like that. And this was a bad dude, dealer and everything. Thought he was the coolest, baddest guy around. But this guy, he made a big mistake though.” Pinkie pauses. “He called her ‘bitch.’”
Butch smiles wide because he knows what’s coming. We all remember the day. And I try to grab onto our shared memory, the story we have all told of it, but it slips away with the sparks flying high quick and disappearing, and Coyote grins again. But he doesn’t know. He hasn’t heard yet what’s in my head.
“And?” says Butch.
“Well,” says Pinkie. “The officers just so happened to be looking in a different direction at the time so they can’t be sure how his nose got broke, but when they turned back his face had been rearranged and his manners were altered in a favorable way. And then another guy on a different night, he wouldn’t hold still. And so what Joy does is she sews his ear to the mattress. And that got him to settle right down.”
We chuckle, none of us feeling too jovial. Coyote slaps his knee and laughs at this story. Emptiness rises in me and I gag. I swig the lightning, then pass it to Pinkie.
“I should have been there,” he says, throwing a drink back. “When she went. Like you were.” He looks at me, cueing me to speak. Coyote keeps laughing, howling now.
“What could you have done for pancreas cancer?” Frankie snaps. “Or any of us?” He snatches the lightning and takes a drawn-out drink. “Not like you’re a doctor. Useless to go.”
“Stop talking to him like that,” says Butch. “Just ‘cause you were too lazy to cross the gorge.”
Coyote rubs his paws together as he looks at me, and everything else goes still. He points to Frankie. He points to Butch. His eyebrows and grin rise. Coyote holds his paws suspended, everyone else too, giving me one last chance to speak, to say what I am hiding, to save this gathering of ours. The hairs on my neck stand on end. This gathering without Joy.
“Pass that back here,” I say, and this is my answer.
Coyote shakes his head, disappointed but not surprised, then claps his paws together. The effect is immediate.
Frankie shoves the lightning toward Butch, but Coyote intercepts it. For a moment all three of them are holding on, suspended over the flames, Butch grabbing hard, staring at the jar, and Frankie grasping it harder and staring at Butch, and Coyote just looking right at me. And I know what he’s going to do—want him to do it, even, to get on with it—and then just like that he shoves forward and throws the jar into the fire, shattering the glass, spilling our sacrament, and breaking the bond. Released, the lightning explodes in a flash that singes my eyebrows off. Butch and Frankie scream at each other and lock in battle, rolling and flailing on the ground as if they were boys. Pinkie has risen, breaking free from his abyss, and runs around the fire, yelling at Butch and Frankie as they roll on the ground, chasing or chased by Coyote, who grins each time he passes me, stepping around the fire like the boys in the story.
I sit still. I look at her chair. Words form inside me. The story she would tell.
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Coyote went upriver long ago, she told us, each year the same, to bring back fire. They had stolen fire, the upriver people. And people were all just freezing when it was gone, the fire. And Coyote said, “Let me bring it back,” the fire, “I know how I can retrieve it.”
Here she would pause with pursed lips and look around at us like a teacher with unruly pupils. But she didn’t have to worry because we were all listening. Even Butch. And so then he arranged them, the people, he arranged all the swiftest people. And he told them: “You sit a little bit upriver, and the next one a bit farther upriver again.” And to the first, Frog, he said, “Sit on the riverbank.” And uphill—on the mountain-top,he said, “Turtle, sit here.” Finally, they arrived at the upriver peoples’ country.
Joy always told the story in this fashion, the old-time Indian fashion, in which things were repeated. This was how she learned the story. And it would not be the story if it was not told just so, she said. Just as she heard it.
Butch and Frankie are rolling on the ground, on the precipice of rolling into the flames, and Pinkie is running about frantic, unhinged, but I just stare and listen to Joy’s voice echoing out of the past. I try to remember the story precisely, just as she would have told it. I begin to whisper the words aloud.
And so that’s how they went upriver.And Coyote arrived upriver. And he saw it was deserted. And he saw there were fires. And uphill, behold, there were forest fires, up in the mountains. And he went in a house and he saw only children were there. And he said: “Where are they? Where are the men?” And the children said, “They’re hunting in the mountains.” And he said, “I’m lying down right here. I’m tired.”
Then he said to the children, “Let me paint your faces! You’ll look pretty that way!” And the children said, “Maybe he’s Coyote.” They were saying that to each other. And they said to Coyote, “Maybe you’re Coyote. Your ears are pink.” He said to them, “No. I don’t even know where that Coyote is.” And he said: “Let me paint your faces!” And he painted their faces. And when he painted all the children’s faceshe said, “See, I’ve set water down, see! Take a look in it out there to see your painted faces. But I’m lying down right here because I’m tired.” In fact, he had stuck fir bark in his toes. And then he stuck his foot in the fire. And then he finally caught the fire, and it became a coal.
And he jumped back up. And he jumped back outdoors. And he ran downriver. And when he got tired, then he gave the fire to the next person. And that one too began to run. And up in the mountains, where there had been fires, they all went out. And then the upriver people said, “Why, they’ve taken it back, our fire!” So the upriver people ran downhill, and Coyote’s people ran down from upriver; one gave it to another; he gave it to the next.
Whenever a person got tired, he gave it to another one. Finally, they ran back down here from upriver. And they ran back down here behind them, the upriver people did. And so Turtle, where he sat at the end on a hilltop, they gave it to him, the fire. And so he began to roll, and he rolled down to the river. He rolled to a stop on the riverbank. And there sat Frog. Then he gave it to her, the fire. So they ran downhill just above her, the upriver people. And then… where did she go? Frog was nowhere to be seen. Where had she run to? In fact, she had dived into the river. And suddenly, across the river, there was smoke. Suddenly the dogs bark.
There, humans had come into existence; dogs were howling.
By the end of the story I realize I am standing now, and I’ve been speaking aloud the words in unison with Joy, with the Joy in my mind. As I come to the moment when the dogs are howling Coyote stops and he howls too. Then they are howling, Butch and Frankie; they have rolled at last into the fire and are set alight. And I knew it would happen, for I saw it in Coyote’s eyes. I know this will be our last time at the fire.
I know it has to be. Pinkie and I throw dirt at Butch and Frankie, then we grab them and make them go to the river as they howl and scream and burn and squirm and—
Coyote howls and circles the fire, the fire he brought for the humans. He finishes his story, Coyote does. Coyote speaks:
“Then after a while it gave out. Behold when there got to be no more salmon backbone meat again, then again at intervals they were dying, when there was no more of the salmon backbone meat. They, the two girl sweethearts, are the ones that said it: ‘I do not care how bad one feels over his dead one; he will never die for that. When he gets sick, then he will die.’ It is talk of long ago: ‘One will not die, I do not care how bad he feels for his dead one, he will think that he is going to die but he will not die.’”
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Acknowledgement: the two primary Karuk stories in this piece were derived and adapted from archives of traditional Karuk legends transcribed in the original Karuk language by native speakers, then translated into English. Both are in the public domain.
“Two Katimin Maidens Visit the Indian Heaven” was transcribed and translated by John P. Harrington in 1932 for his volume Karuk Indian Myths. It is based on the tellings of Phoebe Maddux, Ímkyánván, Wild Sunflower Greens Gatherer. It is publicly accessible through the Smithsonian Institute.
“Coyote Steals Fire” was recorded by William Bright, as told by Julie Starrit in Orleans, CA in 1950. The recording was transcribed and translated into an interlinear document with Karuk and English, and prepared for a lecture at Free University, Berlin in 1999. It was made publicly accessible by the Northern California Indian Development Council, or NCIDC.