Mystic Cowboy(29)
Her fingers cut small waves in the never-ending river. “Are you a powerful man too? A medicine man?”
“Yes. I’m not trying to steal your patients, you know. We just believe in trying the traditional ways first—although I’m not about to set any bones. If it came down to a life-and-death situation that only antibiotics could fix, then bring on the drugs.”
He could actually feel her weighing that statement. “Do you keep souls?”
He chuckled again. “Karen is...reliable in her gossip. But yes, I do. I hold onto a person’s soul for a year after they die, and then I release it so it can make the final journey to be judged by Owl Woman. Like Saint Peter at the Gate,” he added. Everyone knew about Saint Peter.
She thought on that for a moment, which was a change of pace. She was trying to understand, really trying. His respect for her grew. “And this is connected to your name? Albert gave you your name, you said.”
“He did. When I was born, he saw that I had one foot in a moccasin, and one in what he called ‘those shoes people wear when they want to walk on their money’.”
“Penny loafers?” She giggled, and he felt her head move up. She was looking at him. “He had a vision of you in penny loafers?”
He waited for the water to carry her disbelief away. “Crazy, I know. He said people tried to get me to wear the moccasins, but I was not happy. Then people tried to get me to wear the loafers, but I wasn’t any happier. I was unhappy until I chose for myself. And then I was happy. And that was the vision. He said I would rebel in both worlds until I found my place. Hence Rebel.”
“And?” She wasn’t sure she was going to believe it, but at least she wasn’t dismissing him outright. Which was a pleasant thing—that and the way her fingers were lying flat against his neck, digging in with just enough pressure to make sure he wouldn’t forget she was there.
As if that were a risk. “And that’s what happened. People recognized my talent early on. Walter White Mouse taught me to tan leather. Irma taught me how to string the beads on sinew. Burt taught me to carve. Everyone taught me something.”
“What did Albert teach you?”
“Everything.” Everything he was, everything he would ever be was because Albert had raised him right. “He taught me how to be Lakota.”
“What about your parents?”
Old memories, memories he’d long ago tried to make peace with, ran free again. “My father left to find work and never came back. Mom—well, after she had Jesse, she got more and more gone. She died of alcohol poisoning.” But after all these years, the memories didn’t run far. He managed to get himself back under control again.
She made a pained little noise. “I...I didn’t realize...”
Desperate to avoid pity, he forged ahead. “That’s just how it is on the rez. That’s why I wanted out.” Out of the crushing poverty, out of the way of life that wasn’t living at all. He hadn’t wanted to be an Indian, not if that was what being an Indian was. He remembered opening the acceptance letter to the university, and knowing for sure that it was the best day of his life, because he could leave and never come back.
“So you put on penny loafers?”
He found himself hugging her, making sure she stayed close. Making sure he could feel all of her against his chest. And she didn’t protest. Not even a thread of steel tightened her body. “Not literally. Someone knew someone, who pulled a few strings, and I got to New Mexico. And it didn’t take long to figure out that no one wanted anything by a dirt-poor red man. When people buy Indian art, they want a little piece of the Indian. And the Indian they want a part of is this...this...this thing that only exists in the imaginations of Hollywood directors and romance writers.” It still got his hackles up. No one—not a single damn person—had ever seen just him. They’d only seen what they wanted to see. “So if you want to be a serious Indian artist, you have to be this Indian that you never were and never will be.”
She was silent, but then she looped her arms back around his neck and held him even tighter than he’d been holding her. “That was surprisingly cynical.”
“That is life in the art circuit. I just had to figure out which pieces of myself I could give away with each painting, with each sculpture, with every single thing I made—and which pieces I could keep.”
“And you got married.” There wasn’t a single note of pity in her voice, not a single tone of poor-little-you. Neither was there any recriminations, no accusations of betraying his people, his family.