Neither Wolf Nor Dog. Kent Nerburn

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СКАЧАТЬ no rings, no watch. “Good,” he said wryly.

      He picked up his train of thought. “Or else they think we need some kind of white social worker telling us what to do. Some of them come here because they can’t find a job anywhere else and end up out on the reservation. We got them here, all of them.”

      I nodded my head.

      He leaned over as if to tell me a secret. “You aren’t like that, are you?” he asked.

      There was a kind of conspiratorial hush in his voice. I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a joke.

      “I try not to be. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like Indian people.”

      “That’s okay. It’s good that you like Indian people. I like them too. But how much do you like white people?”

      The question seemed strange.

      “I’m not much thrilled with the culture we’ve created.”

      “Yeah, okay. But how about white people?”

      I didn’t know what he was driving at.

      “I like white people just fine,” I said. “I mean, after all, I am one.”

      “That’s what I mean,” he chuckled. “That’s good. That’s good. If you hate your own people you can’t be a very good person. You have to love your own people even if you hate what they do.” He gestured toward the mug on the table. “Here. Drink your coffee.”

      I took a gulp to placate him. It tasted like something brewed from twigs and rubber tires. “No, I don’t hate white people,” I said. “Sometimes I’m embarrassed by us. But white people are okay.”

      He waved his gnarled hand for silence. He was done toying with me. He fixed me with a solid stare.

      I was suddenly intensely aware of my whiteness and my relative youth. I wanted to know what this was all about, but I had learned through hard experience that Indians make their own choices and take their own time. The old man would come to the point when he wanted to.

      He pointed to a picture on the wall. “That’s my grandson,” he said. “When he graduated from Haskell.”

      Haskell is an Indian junior college in Kansas. The people I knew who had gone there looked upon it with a great sense of pride.

      “Did he like it?”

      “He’s dead now,” the old man answered. “Got killed.”

      “He was a good-looking boy,” I offered, unsure of what else to say.

      “Yes. He drank too much. Would have been about your age.” He fixed me again with that hard stare. “I want you to help me write a book.”

      The abruptness of the request left me speechless.

      “I’m seventy-eight,” he continued. “This is a hard life. I want to get all this down.”

      “All what?” I asked.

      “What I have in my mind.”

      I thought he wanted me to write his memoirs. “You mean, like your memories?”

      “No. What I have in my mind. I watch people. Indian people and white people. I see things. I want you to help me write it down right.”

      He got up and went into his bedroom. When he came out he had a sheaf of loose-leaf papers in his hand.

      “I’ve been writing some things down. My granddaughter said I should do something with them.”

      I was shocked and excited and nervous. I didn’t know whether I wanted to see the pages or not. The old man might be a crackpot full of wild religious theories. But there was always the chance that he was one of those rare chroniclers of life who had managed to catch the living, breathing sense of the times he had lived through.

      He handed me the pile of papers. “Read them,” he said.

      After two pages I knew that I was in the presence of someone extraordinary. The old man was neither the crackpot I had feared nor the chronicler I had hoped. He was a thinker, pure and simple, who had looked long and hard at the world around him.

      His work wasn’t polished. It wasn’t even finished. Pages were filled with disconnected observations and long unpunctuated paragraphs. Thoughts were scrawled on hunks of napkins and the backs of envelopes.

      But beneath the fragmentary disorder lay a level of insight that was as deep and as clear as a mountain lake.

      “I’d be honored to help you with this,” I said.

      “Good. I want it all fixed. I want things to sound right.”

      “It sounds good now,” I told him.

      “No, not the way I want. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. There are things you white people need to hear. I want them to sound good so people don’t say, ‘Oh, that’s just an old Indian talking.’”

      “Well,” I laughed, “You are an old Indian talking.”

      Instantly I could feel I had made a mistake. He turned and looked away from me. Without looking back at me he spoke very slowly. “White people have always tried to make us into animals. They want us to be like animals in a zoo. If I don’t sound good, like a white person thinks sounds good, you just make me into another animal in the zoo.” He got up and walked to the sink. He kept his back toward me. “I’m tired now. I’m going to bed.”

      My cheeks burned. I knew I had offended him.

      Once more I had been a white person who had talked before I had thought. But I had seen enough of his writing to believe that it was more important than my feelings, or even his.

      I tried one more time.

      “I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope I didn’t offend you.”

      “I’m going to bed,” he said without turning around. He padded into the bedroom and shut the door.

      I sat there in silence, listening to the erratic buzzing of the fluorescent light over my head. I didn’t know what to do. I thought of writing him a note, but that seemed stupid. I got up and turned off some of the lights. Then I put the tattered pages of the old man’s writing under my arm, and went out the door.

      I got almost no sleep that night. The motel bed was lumpy and the trucks roaring by on the highway outside shook the walls. But it was my own anguish that kept me awake.

      I had never before done anything like taking those pages. The old man hadn’t offered them to me. It was a gift for him to even show them to me. Then I had gone and stolen them. I felt like the worst white man who had ever lived, gaining the trust of an Indian then using it to my advantage.

      But I kept telling myself there was more to my action than that. I wanted to show the old СКАЧАТЬ