Just North of Nowhere by Lawrence Santoro Page A

wouldn’t say what he was looking for or where he was trying to get. And you'd be there feeling your flannel, cotton, or whatever.
    Feather Proud was already there when Old Ken was just a little shit climbing Morning Bluff every sun-up to bag snake for bounty on the Amish lands. That was near the turn of the old century.
    Feather could see Old Ken just fine.
    Ken saw him, too, until he went blind, but that’s something else again.
    Man-With-Box-That-Looks saw him and tried putting Feather in his box. Feather made a horrible face at Man-With-Box, who only laughed, and took the picture anyway.
    Some people said the great photographer succeeded and that somewhere was a glass plate with a picture of an Indian with a broken feather; swore the image was plain as day and night. Some claimed to have seen it years before when photographer Burroughs was still around, making his pictures and having his parties.
    Those people are mostly dead now up in the Lutheran churchyard or the Catholic cemetery across the way, or lying in graves in far off lands. Other folks, just as dead, had looked and seen only a pretty silvertone picture of the place where the rivers join, down at the place some old German had starting calling “Engine Warm.”
    That’s the way it was with Eagle Feather Proud: sometimes there, mostly not. It depended.
    Years and years ago, when Bluffton was a sawmill and a few crappy sheds on a muddy place in the river, back when there were 24 white men, a handful of whores and about three wives in the whole valley, Feather Proud used to come running, running, running through the settlement every morning at dawn, ignoring everything.
    Only two could see him back then. One was a Scandahoovian chippy that washed her dirty parts in private every morning by the river. One day, Feather Proud came running past and the chippy stood to see him fly by naked and wonderful, trailing sun and flapping manhood.
    “Oh, my,” she said in Scandahoovian. “Isn’t he a man of great promise?”
    Rhetorical, maybe, but the view ruined her for being a chippy and she soon moved on and became a wife in Mankato. Until she saved enough to leave whoring, though, she made sure she saw Feather Proud every morning. “He inspires me. I will aim high,” she said.
    The other one could see him was a little boy. He saw the naked native man run along the riverbank and off around the bend. Every morning, after, he was at that spot, and there’d be the naked Injun. Injun’s was scarce, his daddy’d said. Injun’s ain’t for years and years been around. Killed each other all, warring with each other. Then the white men came...
    “White men's us, huh?” the boy said.
    “'Course it's us. What'd you think?” his dad said.
    “Injuns warring,” the kid said. “Warring with each other?”
    “Yep, killing each other. Injuns are like that. Savage.”
    “Injun warrin'“ the kid repeated.
    “'Course some sickened and died, some went away, just. So, nope,” daddy said, “Hardly ain't nobody Injun no more ‘round here. Just as well, too! Savage folk, they are.”
    Of course they said that in what was left of their German.
    One morning, daddy and the boy were fishing the river when Feather splashed past. The boy laughed, pointed, said “there he is, there’s the Injun. Hello Injun!”
    The father smacked the back of his son's head and told him not to ever again fib.
    “Wasn’t fibbing,” the kid said, rubbing his head.
    His father smacked him again. “What’d I tell you?”
    After, the boy made sure he didn’t talk about the Injun to anyone. He continued saying hello to Feather Proud every morning he saw him – when he was alone.
    Eventually, Feather Proud answered; told the boy to not speak to him. “Don't speak to me,” he said, “I'm not here.”
    The kid didn’t believe that and laughed. Then he remembered the smack the Father had given him for fibbing and realized big people didn't lie. So the Injun really wasn’t there.