Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster Page A

be stuffed with objects from her past: photographs and beads, moccasins and rawhide dresses, arrowheads, newspaper clippings, and pressed flowers. One by one, she carried these mementoes over to the bed, sat down beside me, and explained what they meant. It was all true about her having worked forBuffalo Bill, I discovered, and the thing that got me when I looked through her old pictures was how pretty she’d been back then—pert and slim, with a full set of white teeth and two long, lovely braids. She’d been a regular Indian princess, a dream squaw like the girls in the movies, and it was hard to put that cute little package together with the roly-poly gimp who kept house for us, to accept the fact that they were one and the same person. It started when she was sixteen years old, she said, at the height of the Ghost Dance craze that swept through the Indian lands in the late 1880s. Those were the bad times, the years of the end of the world, and the red people believed that magic was the only thing that could save them from extinction. The cavalry was closing in from all sides, crowding them off the prairies onto small reservations, and the Blue-Coats had too many men to make a counterattack feasible. Dancing the Ghost Dance was the last line of resistance: to jiggle and shake yourself into a frenzy, to bounce and bob like the Holy Rollers and the screwballs who babble in tongues. You could fly out of your body then, and the white man’s bullets would no longer touch you, no longer kill you, no longer empty your veins of blood. The Dance caught on everywhere, and eventually Sitting Bull himself threw in his lot with the shakers. The U.S. Army got scared, fearing rebellion was in the works, and ordered Mother Sioux’s great-uncle to stop. But the old boy told them to shove it, he could jitterbug in his own tepee if he wanted to, and who were they to meddle in his private business? So General Blue Coat (I think his name was Miles, or Niles) called in Buffalo Bill to powwow with the chief. They were’ buddies from back when Sitting Bull had worked in the Wild West Show, and Cody was about the only paleface he trusted. So Bill trekked out to the reservation in South Dakota like a good soldier, but once he got there, the general changed his mind and wouldn’t allow him to meet with Sitting Bull. Billwas understandably ticked off. Just as he was about to storm away, however, he caught sight of the young Mother Sioux (whose name back then was She Who Smiles like the Sun) and signed her on as a member of his troupe. At least the journey hadn’t gone entirely for nought. For Mother Sioux, it probably meant the difference between life and death. A few days after her departure into the world of show business, Sitting Bull was murdered in a scuffle with some of the soldiers who were holding him prisoner, and not long after that, three hundred women, children, and old men were mowed down by a cavalry regiment at the so-called Battle of Wounded Knee, which wasn’t a battle so much as a turkey shoot, a wholesale slaughter of the innocent.
    There were tears in Mother Sioux’s eyes when she spoke about this. “Custer’s revenge,” she muttered. “I was two years old when Crazy Horse filled his body with arrows, and by the time I was sixteen, there was nothing left.”
    “Aesop once explained it to me,” I said. “It’s a bit fuzzy now, but I recall him describing how there wouldn’t have been no black slaves from Africa if the white folks had been given a free hand with the Indians. He said they wanted to turn the redskins into slaves, but the Catholic boss man in the old country put the nix on it. So the pirates went to Africa instead and rounded up a lot of darkies and hauled them off in chains. That’s how Aesop told it, and I’ve never known him to lie about nothing. Indians were supposed to be treated good. Like that live-and-let-live stuff the master is always nattering about.”
    “Supposed to,” Mother Sioux