Kathy Little Bird by Nancy Freedman, Benedict Freedman

father, and got me to tell him all I knew of him.
    “He grew up at his grandmother’s place, a beautiful old home on the Bodensee.”
    “A beautiful old home,” he repeated musingly. “Could it be a castle?”
    “Could be,” I said, remembering my childhood fantasies.
    “But don’t you want to know? Aren’t you curious?”
    “Why should I be? He deserted my Mum and me, why should I care about him?”
    “He may be rich.”
    “So what if he’s rich. I don’t want anything from him.”
    “But if your parents were legally married…”
    “Oh, they were. I have the license.”
    Jack pulled over, stopped the car, and made me dig it out then and there. He read it carefully, word for word. When he looked up it was with a triumphant expression. “Don’t you see, you could be entitled to something. We could have hit on a sweet grubstake.”
    “You’re dreaming, Jack,” I said sharply. That’s one thingI disliked about him; he was always looking out for number one.
    Of course there were things I liked about him. If we passed a sign, even a hand-lettered one, advertising a rodeo, barn dance, outdoor concert, or county fair, he’d immediately scrap our plans to be somewhere or other by dinner, turn off, and drive a hundred miles out of our way. That’s what made it an adventure being married to him.
    I saw it first and exclaimed, “Look, a fair!”
    “How many miles?” he asked, but he really didn’t care; he turned off.
    It was a lovely fair, tents and a band with plenty of brass. There were rides and sideshows, a two-headed cow and the body of an alien in a large jar. The body was green and reminded me of the bloated carcass of a pig. We rode the water chute and slid to a splash landing. We flew an airplane in circles. We lay on a wheel that turned upside down and whirled around until sparks flew. We felt our way through the house of mirrors, flattening our grotesque faces as we bumped into ourselves. We laughed the whole time and I got a stitch in my side. “I have to catch my breath,” I said, and felt in my purse for Kleenex.
    That’s when I discovered our money was gone. All of it.
    “Pickpockets!” Jack wailed. “They work every crowd. I should have kept the money. I don’t know what we’ll do.”
    I knew. I undid my shoelace, tied it across my forehead and started to sing. Instead of
moon, toon, spoon
…a wild Indian railing preceded the first note. It was the chance I’d been looking for.
    It caught their attention all right. But when I launched into the body of the song, the crowds walked past us, sometimes dropping a dime into my open guitar case.
    “What the hell’s come over you? Give them what they want.”
    But I continued the dissonant Cree invocation. After an hour there was enough change for gas, so I stopped and looked around for Jack. He’d gone off to a corner bench to sulk.
    During the drive back he lectured me about sticking to what I did well and forgetting that weird Indian business. The longer he talked, the more determined I became. That’s when he guessed. “Have you got Indian blood, or what?”
    “My mum.”
    “Damn,” he said, “that’s just like you, Austrian royalty on one side and a redskin on the other.” Then after a pause, “Well, all the more reason not to sing those outlandish, heathen songs. Do you want the whole world to know you’re an Indian?”
    “Yes.”
    We weren’t close after that.

    T HEN came an evening when I started to actively dislike my husband. It was closing time at one of those honkytonks, and the crowd spilled outside but were milling around, still talking, when an argument broke out. It was over a debt that one guy owed another. Before anyone knew what was happening, a knife was palmed and the next minute stuck in this fellow’s ribs. He crumpled up on the sidewalk.
    There was a lot of blood. Someone said he was dead. An old tramp who was shuffling by was the only one to get down on his knees and try to help. The old man put