CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY bozeischeap 1 inMontana By Steve Wallin It was early Monday. The temperature already in the low eighties. I was headed north on highway eightyseven. Actually, I was thumbing south toward Wyola, naked, except for my cut off Levi’s and a pair of Nebraska Converse. My Ford had been trouble since crossing the Mississippi. She’d cut out in the mountains or over forty on flat land. So I drove slow until I reached Montana, where she died on the Crow Reservation. The guy who picked me up was Indian. His car, faded red, was ragged — rust on the bumpers, a crack in the windshield. Inside, St. Christopher sat on the dash, his hands snapped off at the wrists. From the way my ride dressed, from the collapsing stature of his Fury, from the careless way he spoke, I guessed he was a man of simple means. “ Going far?” he asked. “ Far as the first gas station.” “ About five miles, then. I’m on my way to a couple of cool ones.” “ Good day for it.” “ Any day, my friend, any day.” As he drove, an empty can of Coors rolled back and forth between my legs. 1watched it from my toes to my heels, back to my toes, wishing we were both at a bar, already through the first round. He laughed when he saw me staring. “ Booze is cheap in Montana,” he said, “ but just like in New York or Paris, time passes and you don’t get bored.” Jim Loney, James Welch’s protagonist in his newest novel, The Death O f Jim Loney, sits at his kitchen table, bored, drunk on wine, staring out into the gray space he calls home. The only motion for miles is his neighbor’s laundry waving in wind. Loney lives in Harlem. Not New York but Montana. It could be any town, but as a symbol, Harlem works well. The reader gets the feeling quickly in Welch’s novel that if you’re from Harlem you’re destined for failure, no matter how talented you are or how hard you try. Loney doesn’t try, hasn’t tried since high school when he was a basketball star. Loney is in his middle thirties, the son of an Indian mother he can’t remember and a white father who’s rejected him. His mother left him and his sister, Kate, when he was a year old. I don’t know what tribe she’s from and perhaps Loney doesn’t either. To know her tribe would mean he knew something of his tradition — for Loney, there is no tradition. His father left when Loney was ten. For the past fourteen years he’s lived in the same town as Loney without once recognizing his son. It’s difficult not to equate Loney’s father with the white nationstate Loney has been forced to live in. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, however. The Death O f Jim Loney is first and foremost a story, and a good story at that. In many respects, Loney isn’t much different from the rest of the folks in Harlem — people who live In many respects, Loney isn't much different from the rest o f the folks in Harlem — people who live on a land they can't defeat and so, in time, become the defeated. on a land they can’t defeat and so, in time, become the defeated. The whites are typically Western — cowboys with cowboy mentalities (both men and women) who buck their way through forty years to end up broken themselves, on a bar stool, drunk, trying to break what’s left of each other. Their Indian counterparts sit beside them. They live on a land that once had meaning to their ancestors but is now stripped from them and meaningless. They buck less often because for them there is less chance for success. In the parts of Montana I drove, I saw a beautiful, lush, country — lots of trees, plenty of fresh water streams. In Welch’s novel I saw a different country — a spectrum of grays, flat plains and distant peaks both dark and rigid; or a cold, snowy, country, ice-white for miles. It’s not a land that invites communion but it’s Loney’s home. Although it’s destroying him, he can’t leave. Whatever past he has is here and until he can discover what it is, he can’t be freed. Few people give a damn about him but the two who do, his sister and his woman-friend, Rhea, a white high school teacher, try to save him from himself. Kate wants him to come to Washington D.C. with her, where she works and lives. At first glance, Kate seems an exception to others in Harlem. She’s educated, she lives comfortably, she travels. She has succeeded. There have been costs, however. Rather than confront her past, she chooses to shut it off. In order to succeed, she counts on no one but herself. Both decisions leave her seeming aloof and unemotional. I’m not even sure she’s happy. Of course, neither are those who remain in Harlem. She, at least, is involved with her life. Loney doesn’t go with her. The personality adjustments he’d have to make to survive in her world would be impossible. His needs lie behind him, not in his future. Rhea wants Loney to leave Harlem and move to Seattle with her. Poor Rhea. She’s one of the lucky lost, she’s rich. She comes from Texas, the daughter of a wealthy Dallas family. She got bored with her life there so came to Harlem to become like the rest of the town —/deeply depressed. Through the whole book I never doubt that she loves Loney or that ( their relationship is tenuous at best. Rhea doesn’t know what she wants from her life. She thinks she might find out in Seattle with Loney. But if she falls, there’s always Dallas. The city waits with open arms. Not for Loney. It’s not his past and he wouldn’t be welcome there. He can’t live Rhea’s past and he can’t find his own. He does not go to Seattle. Jim Loney sits at his kitchen table, bored, drunk on wine, staring out into the gray space he calls home. His past is lost, his present grows vague. The names of aquaintances, of Rhea, disappear, return. His only constant companion, his dog Swipesy, dies on Thanksgiving. A month passes, drunk in his kitchen. It’s close to Christmas when things begin to happen. There are no surprises in this novel. The title tells us the outcome. Whether or not James Welch is a fatalist only future books will tell but in The Death O f Jim Loney, he writes from that stance. It would be difficult to be an American Indian without at least once approaching the fatalist’s perspective. Their lives have been and continue to be ordained by the bureaucracy of impersonal government and the racist attitudes of their white neighbors. At the same time, although Loney can’t prevent his inevitable death, he can and does control the circumstances surrounding it. Loney is asked on a hunting trip by an old friend, Pretty Weasel. Pretty Weasel is a full blooded Indian who knows his family’s ancestry and has become a moderate success in the community. While out hunting bear, Loney shoots and kills Pretty Weasel. Whether the shooting is an accident or premeditated is unclear. Loney, himself, is uncertain. James Welch is a marvelous writer, a superb stylist. In this scene, as in most of the book, the reader’s view of the world is transformed into Loney’s view. To the reader and to Loney it is never quite clear how much of a role fate plays or how much of a role Loney plays in the destruction of his life. Pretty Weasel is dead. Loney is scared. For the first time in years, he must make a real decision — to give himself up and go to trial or to take a stand against the whole insane situation that has become his life. He goes to see his father in one last hope of discovering his past. His father gives him nothing but lies and booze. In what I’ve come to fondly think of as the ritual killing of this country’s sins, outside his father’s trailer, with his father’s own rifle, he turns and fills the window with buckshot and the old man with bits of glass. Loney takes off for the Indian reservation, for a place called Mission Canyon. It’s an appropriate place for an Indian raised by a minister and a minister’s wife to die. In the end, Loney stands on a bluff and is shot to death by a cop. True to Welch’s complex vision, it’s not just any cop, it’s an Indian cop. By the time the bullet comes, however, Loney is already numb — frozen in the strange season of our Western world. It would be easy to blame Loney’s death on the fact that he was part Indian — a man severed from his history. That can’t be denied. But Welch, author of another novel, Winter In The Blood, and a fine book of poetry, Riding The Earthboy 40, is a writer with a universal vision. Ultimately, Loney can be blamed for his own death. “ Somewhere along the line he had started questioning his life and he had lost forever the secret of survival.” Speak quietly and question nothing seems to have become the key to survival in this country, whether Indian or otherwise. But as James Welch is well aware, survival without dignity is empty. 28 Illustration by Kim Honer
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz