Music of Pain Ficathon, "Ballad of Ira Hayes" part 4 of 4

Finished!

Certain liberties have been taken with the life experience and persona of a public figure in this story, and I do not claim ownership of his stories, nor songs, nor the places he can fish, dig clams, or pick berries. I claim only the right to admire him in all his unique aspects, and to gain a little pride that I've grown up in a world he's made richer by his struggle.

This part and the entire story is dedicated to the elders of the Nisqually Tribe, and to the endangered farming community of the Nisqually Delta and McAllister Creek drainage.

Continued from here




The rate at which an object looses velocity expressed as a function of coming home


After his long weekend, the days pretty much melted into each other, dawning early with a mist that soon burned off and left each day just a little hotter than the next, the snow line on The Mountain going just a little closer to the top every day and the blue scrawls of rocky ridges getting broader and darker. Xander had to work seven days in a row, and the combination of the hot afternoons and the regular hours made it easier for him to fall asleep in the afternoons and stay asleep for a long time, so that he found himself waking just after sunset, the sky streaked with pink and the mountain glowing like a three-scoop sundae of strawberry-blueberry swirl ice cream. He was pretty much living on ice cream, at that point, nothing else tasted very good. He worked his way through half gallons of strawberry, marionberry, and peach and was starting on the second container of strawberry when the phone rang at ten o’clock one night and when he picked it up, it was Willow again.

“Hey, Wills, what’s the deal? Little late for you, isn’t it? Or early, I guess.”

“I wanted to hear your voice. I miss you, and I’m such a screw-up that nobody here wants to talk to me.”

Xander felt his stomach drop when he heard Willow call herself a “screw-up.” It could mean anything from fooling around on her lover to blowing a test to a spot of world-endage, and he wasn’t sure, right then, which he was less ready to deal with.

“If it’s the end of the world again, you can tell me, for I have a whole twenty-eight ounces of Oregon Strawberry ice cream and am ready for anything.”

“I thought you were in Washington?” Willow’s voice held the note that meant she thought you’d lied to her, a sound that was not Xander’s favorite thing about her.

“ ’Tis merely a brand name, Willow, Tillamook Creamery ice cream. Too bad I can’t get any to you, for it is truly the ice cream of the Gods.” Xander fell back into his old voice, silly and babbling, trying to get Willow over her grumpiness so she would hurry up and tell him what she needed and he could get ready for work.

“Oh. OK, then, just threw me. It’s nice to know where you are, not as nice as having you here would be, but nice.” She stopped a minute and drew a shaky breath. “God, Xander, I’ve really blown it with Buffy. She... I told her that she needed to leave Spike alone now that he’s getting better, not keep trying to fix him, and now she won’t talk to me.”

Xander stopped to consider if there was anything he could say that wouldn’t make the situation worse, and settled for nothing. After a half minute of dead air, Willow finally continued. “She’s just... he’s better, you know, but better means he’s remembering, and remembering is not a good experience for him, I guess, and she keeps trying to cheer him up. And then coming and crying on my shoulder. And I’ve got all this other stuff I’m trying to deal with- I think I’ve got an idea how to find the guy with the cursed fetishes- and she’s all ‘boo-hoo, all my problem, I broke him, I need to fix him.’ God, Xander she’s worse than I used to be.”

What do you mean, used to be? Xander made an indeterminate but encouraging noise and when that didn’t work to make Willow continue, he said “Wait- Spike’s better? What’s better?”

“He’s sort of got his brain back, you know- remembers stuff about everything. For a while he didn’t even know he was a vampire, which? inconvenient at dinner time, let me tell you. He’s been writing it all down, everything that went on after he burned up in the Hellmouth, I mean, and it’s pretty much not a fun story. And he’s grieving, and pissed off at the world, and it hasn’t got a thing to do with Buffy, and she just can’t handle the idea.”

“OK, Wills, I’m going to give you the Xander executive summary, here, because my ice cream is melting and I need to go to work: Buffy should know better than to try to fix him, you should know better than to try to fix Buffy, YAY and applause for you on finding the wizard with the funny statues, and maybe you need to take a vacation after you find him. Come see me, and we can eat ice cream and I’ll show you the best places to get soap and massage oils and magic candles.”

Willow laughed and he missed her like hell, right at that second, missed the laugh and the familiarity. And she told him she’d always love him and “Answer your email, dammit” and that it had really, really helped to talk to him, and she rang off in plenty of time for Xander to take a shower and get dressed and go to work.


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For some reason, things got better with the people around him after Willow’s call. He ran into the kid with the auburn dreads a couple more times and found out his name was Crow and he lived with his parents in one of the Victorian houses up on the hill above the bridge, had lived in the neighborhood all his life, and was studying wildlife biology out at the college. He found out that the reason Mary was such a bitch to work with was that she had an elderly mother who lived with her, and she was pretty much going on no sleep most days. The guy with the braid didn’t come back into the restaurant, though, and while Kenny did, he was usually with a middle-aged guy with a “Nisqually Tribal Resources Management” jacket and they spent breakfast with their heads together over a thick book of maps and aerial photos and talking in voices too low to be overheard.

When the other night manager came back from Oregon, Xander got two nights off, but by then he was too tired to go anywhere and needed to wash every piece of clothing he owned, anyway; had to stop by Wal-mart and buy a pair of jeans and a shirt, so he had something to do laundry in. He ended up getting to know a couple of his neighbors who had also gone too long without doing laundry, and they set up a rotation on the washers and driers so nobody interrupted the loads and dumped their stuff, wet and soapy, on the floor. One of the neighbors was a cute woman, a few years older than Xander, who had a job at the courthouse and multiple ear piercings that reminded him of Buffy. She had interesting things to say about the Sheriff and warned Xander against driving anywhere near the courthouse at shift-change, when the deputies had a habit of stopping people for minor infractions just to get their arrest count up, like shooting fish in a barrel.

The other neighbor turned out to be another refugee from Southern California, from Ventura, actually, and when Xander said he was from Sunnydale the guy was silent and watchful for a long time and then said “I went to UC Sunnydale. That was one weird town, man.” and Xander nodded and agreed with him and they made an unspoken pact not to talk about it (then or ever) and went on to talk about the comic book store instead. Comic book stores, it turned out: there was another one out closer to work, and Xander decided to stop by the next time he had a minute.

And then one afternoon in early August, right before his two days off, the phone rang, and it was his lawyer. The papers were ready to sign, the Hummer driver had finally settled out of court, and Xander could come in any time he wanted. It was over. He could leave, if he wanted to.



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His lawyer took him out to this strange yuppie bar with garage doors on the front and an old Armstrong Tires sign over the entry, and they drank martinis and ate little thingies that were something like tapas and something like dim sum and a bit like antipasto but weren’t quite any of them, and then she went home and Xander walked down the block and treated himself to Northern India food for dinner, and had a IPA or two with that. And then he decided to try out the brew pub over by the, well, not the library, but, you know, like, sort of over that way, and found out that there were microbrews he liked (a couple of them) so he had a few pints and then he went over to a place with pool tables and a laundromat and drank a pitcher of cheap draft and watched some bikers play eight-ball between wash cycles, and subsequently threw up in the restroom. He decided he needed to have something besides beer, and went to a Chinese place up toward the transit station and had a couple of bloody marys and an order of garlic dry-fried ribs, and then it was time to take the last bus home and drink a bunch of water and take a long hot shower before he went to sleep.

He’d had worse hangovers, but this one was something special in its total inconvenience. He could look out the window and see The Mountain shining out, more blue than white now, and the bright sunlight made him feel as if there were needles pressing into his eye, and his ears rang any time he tried to move his head. He had to go out to get more ginger chews but he was too wasted to walk and didn’t want to keep his eye open long enough to drive, so he had to wait for the first bus in the morning and then the swaying and the constant stops and starts made him sicker than he’d been to begin with.

The second day he decided that a lot of his problem was that he was starving, and he ended up at the Vietnamese place closest to his apartment eating Pho Tai and spring rolls, and went home and put his running clothes on and joined the constant throng of people running around the lake. And then he went home again, and fell asleep, and woke up feeling better than he had since the accident, not worried about anything for the first time in a long time, and decided that this was the day to drive to The Mountain.



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One of the things that convinced Xander that if there was ever a good time to get hit by a Humvee going 70 mph, he’d picked it, was what he’d learned about getting to Mt. Rainier since then. Before the trip that had ended with the accident, he’d signed on to Mapquest and gotten instructions that kept him on the freeway too long, and missed all of the better scenery, according to his lawyer and the lady who made soup at work. They both told him: take 510, go up past the Indian Casino and through Yelm and over the Nisqually (stop at Stewart’s first, they both said, get some pepperoni and the special beef jerky, have something to eat in the car, save some for me). Then take Route 7 across to the Mountain Highway and follow the signs to the Longmire Entrance. See some new country, stay away from the strip malls.

So he took off in the morning early enough to miss the worst of the traffic and headed out, the cooler full of bottled water and ice and assorted pop and a pound of blueberries and some chocolate, and then got some gourmet cured meat products at the funky little white stucco butcher shop next to what he thought was the river (but turned out to be the power canal), gassed up at a station right where route 7 turned off, and headed out. The Mountain was straight ahead of him all the way out 7, getting bigger and bigger every mile. That was the other thing he’d learned since the wreck; Rainier was a big, serious mountain, the kind of place where people went when they were training for an Everest Climb, and his idea of just going up and climbing in running shoes was the kind of thing that got people hurt, and sometimes dead, every year.

He’d been studying the maps for weeks, now, and knew that there were plenty of trails for him to walk and find out more about what it was like; found out the place he wanted most to go to (to stand on the west face of the cone and look back at his point of departure) was a long, dusty hike and not something to do in one hot afternoon before going to work. But there were other places to go, and when he moused around online it looked as if he’d been told nothing but the simple truth: Paradise was close, and he could be there and back in a day.

As things usually work, after he turned on to the Mountain Highway he only got to see The Mountain in brief and unexpected glimpses. The road went through a canyon, he knew from studying the maps, and at the steepest spot was La Grande Dam. Then there was Alder Dam, and Alder Lake, which was really part of the Nisqually and then he was at a dinky little place called Elbe with a tiny white church not much bigger than its historical marker, and a tiny white building with green trim and a big sign that said “Scale Burgers” that his lawyer had told him had the best burgers and milkshakes on that road.

Too early to eat, though, the place wasn’t even open, and he looked down at the map and saw that he was pretty much all the way to the National Park boundary, so he just kept driving until he had to stop at the park gate- a huge log frame over tiny log ticket booths- and pay for admission.

The first part of the drive was through the kind of thick evergreen forest he’d been expecting to see all over when he first came to the state, and had mostly seen from a distance or in patches between subdivisions until now. The road curved back on itself between camp sites and trail heads, gaining elevation slowly enough that he kept forgetting he was in the mountains- until his ears popped and he had to swallow hard to be able to hear again.

He’d been listening to KMPS all the way up from sea level, but finally he couldn’t get a signal and he hit the function button to change to CDs and started listening to the first disk in the stack. It was a Merle Haggard album, and wrong for the situation, and he ended up listening to the copy of “Old and In the Way” that Giles had bought him for Christmas once.

After the next big hairpin turn he found himself going over the Nisqually again, and slowed down to look up the boulder-strewn gorge and saw the milky blue-white ice of the glacier hanging there like a ball of pale blue light. And that was cool (not to make terrible puns) because he’d figured out, standing on his balcony with a map for all those weeks, which white line on the blue and white cone was THIS glacier, and now he could see it close, and next time he got home and the sun was out he’d see it and think I know what that is like when you look at it from the start of the river.

Then the road started climbing quickly and there was the sign for Narada Falls, that even the lady in the Visitor Information Center (who said she hated the mountains and went out to the ocean when she wanted to get away) had told him he had to see. He stopped and watched the water cascade over the smooth grey rock and drank a Coke and listened to birds singing- he thought in the underbrush, and then saw a tiny brown bird fly out of the water, holy hell, I’m in the Discovery Channel! and he leaned against the car and chewed on the freaking amazing pepperoni and listened to the water and the little bird and felt the sun get warmer by the minute.

More up and up and back and forth on hairpin curves and suddenly he was at the tree line and the forest had shrunk to what looked like the very most expensive kind of Christmas trees, and there was a huge parking lot (full of rental cars and motor homes and Japanese tourists with big honking cameras) and a path leading out of it straight up toward the summit through fields of flowers.

He went through his back-country routine as if he were alone in a hostile country instead of in a paved parking lot full of vacationers, at a place that looked and smelled like its name was just what was due. He put two liters of water and a Coke and a Vernor’s in the insulated bag and put them in the bottom of his daypack, and added a foot of the pepperoni and a piece of beef jerky the size of his hand and two good Cadbury’s bars from the tea shop downtown. His camera and satellite phone, batteries freshly charged, went into the outside pockets of his pack, and his wallet and car keys in his money belt. He checked everything three times, and then locked the car and pushed the strip of engraved agate that powered the ward in through the weather strip. Checking his watch and setting the alarm, so he’d turn around in plenty of time to get back to work, Xander set off up the path that looked as if it would take him closest to the peak.

He’d forgotten what it was like to walk at altitude, and the first time he had to stop and rest he could still see the big log building that the brochure that came with his day permit identified as Paradise Lodge. There was a nice bench right under a sign warning people to stay on the trails because the meadows were fragile, and he sat and had some water and got his camera out to take photos of the flowers that rolled on and on, pink and blue and yellow and white, smelling of honey and vanilla and licorice and other sweetnesses he couldn’t name. And then just as he was rested enough to stand up and go, a bunch of middle aged and elderly women with tanned legs and practical shorts came marching up the trail like it was dead flat and at sea level and he waited until they had passed and were around the next bend so he wouldn’t have to watch them and feel like a complete sag.

It made him remember how long it had been since he’d been at this high an altitude, and then that made him think about Ethiopia, and that made him think about what came after Ethiopia, and he slammed down all thoughts about it and kept walking up the mountain, looking at the flowers everywhere and taking photos and wishing he had the girls with him to tell him what the names were for all the sweet scents, and wondering how this wild place could look so much like a very expensive and well tended garden. Then he looked up and there was a bear crossing the trail ahead of him, and the alarm on his watch went off right at that moment; the bear took off like it had heard a gun, and it was time to start back down towards the car. There were patches of snow in the shaded places, now, and he sprinted up to a place just ahead where he could touch the snow without leaving the path, and then, he decided, he’d done what he’d come up here to do.

Walking down was different than walking up: walking up his vision was filled with the flowers and the summit far ahead; walking down he looked out into the hazy distance and could see other mountains and smoke in the sky from a forest fire, and the birds and butterflies above the meadows became more visible than when they were against the multicolored background.

He went into the lodge to find a restroom and ended up in the gift shop, buying little snow globes with models of The Mountain, one for himself and one for everyone in London including Andrew and Spike; he started to put them on the Council’s plastic and then smiled and used his debit card and felt munificent and rich to be able to do so.

And then he got into his car and drove down the mountain, drinking wonderful gingery Vernor’s and munching on blueberries, and when he stopped at The Scale and got a burger and fries and a Mountain Blackberry Milkshake he decided he had enough time to sit and look across the street at the little white church and the train cars. When he heard an “All right if I share your table?” he said yes before he looked away from the trains, and somehow it wasn’t that surprising to see the old dude with his long braid slung over one shoulder and a tray with fried zucchini and a milkshake.


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“So, you finally made it up to The Mountain, I see. Going up or coming down?” The old dude stirred his milkshake vigorously and took a sip with a look of concentrated pleasure on his face.

“Coming down; I’ve got a shift to work tonight.” Xander concentrated on his burger (as good as his lawyer said it would be) and tried to think of a good way to ask the guy what he wanted to ask.

“So, what’s brought you up here today?” he asked instead, again a cheesy line if he ever said one.

“Another damned meeting. All I do anymore, one meeting after another. Had to come talk to the Park Superintendent about this year’s Nisqually River Trust float trip. He wants to start it in the park and then portage past La Grande. Idiot politicians, they’re all alike, want to get a chance to have pictures on their own ground.” The old guy took a slice of the zucchini and crunched it with the same air of concentration he’d had for his milkshake, “Needs salt, dammit. My wife’d kill me if I used as much salt as I wanted, do it a lot sooner than my blood pressure would, too.”

“I saw the picture of you with a politician in your wife’s office. She’s my lawyer.” Xander spoke without thinking and then blushed, sure he’d been offensive somehow.

The old guy laughed. “Oh, you’re the kid who got hit by that bitch in the Hummer, hey? Glad that’s over, my wife’s been pissed off about that case for two months now. Yeah, me and that other Bill, standing there shaking hands and not able to talk. He’s quite a guy, hate to have him and Ken at the same place- hey, you talked to Ken and all, and I meant to get back to you about Ira Hayes but my stupid job, one damned meeting after another, and then I had to organize a funeral for one of Kenny’s cousins because he couldn’t do it alone.”

“How many cousins does that guy have, anyway?” It wasn’t the question Xander meant to ask, but it seemed that he wasn’t in control of his mouth any more than he usually was.

“Well, there were twelve in John and Medora’s family, and then there were a bunch up in Tacoma I didn’t know very well, and all of Medora’s nieces and nephews. Nearly as many as me, and my dad lived to be a hundred and married a bunch of times so I’ve got cousins all up and down the Sound.”

“He doesn’t have any brothers or sisters, though?”

“He had one brother, older than him, got stuck in the mud out on the Nisqually flats and couldn’t get loose and drowned when the tide came in. Poor Ken, wasn’t much more than a little kid, went out and tried to get him loose and had to watch his brother drown. His damned father blamed him for it all his life, the asshole. Lived to be nearly as old as my old man, too.” The old guy looked at Xander from under his curly white eyebrows and said, “If you want to talk about a hero, that’s one there. He stayed and tried to help as long as he could, and then lived with the consequences. He’s an irritating bastard to get into a conversation with at times, but he’s living his life and doing his job and doesn’t take anything that he didn’t earn.”

“So if he’s the hero, why are you the one shaking hands with the President?” Xander blushed again; that was rude, he thought, and he took another bite of his burger and chewed it hard.

“Maybe because Ken loaned me bail money at the right time, I don’t know. Maybe because I was on the right side of an ugly fight and was too crazy to stop before the fight was over.” The old guy took another long draw on his milkshake, and looked at Xander. “Probably because when I fell in the river, I pulled myself out; the first time I was just lucky but after that I stayed sober.”

The silence lay heavy between them for a minute, and then the old guy started talking again. “The thing about Ira Hayes, he was a Pima. The Pimas, they’re not like us; we have enough water, for one thing, but we’re also... competitive, that’s what we’re like. I met his cousin at a treaty rights conference a bunch of years ago, and he was... quiet. Modest. Wouldn’t talk about anything he had done to get things straightened out down there, only ‘My tribe... my clan.’ Never said ‘me’, always ‘us.’ Up here, everybody knows exactly where they stand, stronger or weaker than the next guy. Down there they think in terms of... I don’t really understand it, one of my cousin’s kids got a PhD in anthropology and she tries to explain it to me but it’s just too foreign a way of thinking.”

They were both quiet again, chewing their food and savoring the ends of the shakes, and then the old guy continued, “They took this guy and tried to make him be... not an individual, he was that. But they took him away from the groups he was a member of, his tribe and clan and platoon, and he got scared. And they never did treat him like an Indian, they only treated him like a Marine, and then he had to go back to that dried-up inferno down on the Mexican border and watch his people try to make a living where they had no way to keep alive. No wonder he drank.”

The old guy’s milkshake made noisy evidence of being empty, and he stood up and dumped his empty containers in the big green barrel. “Well, nice talking to you. You going back where you came from now that you don’t have to be in court?”

Xander blinked and licked his lips. “I’m from Sunnydale, California, so going back isn’t so much an option.”

“Hell! That’s rough. Well, this is a good place if you want to stay, although I have to tell you that if I had my way I’d have a lot less neighbors. You can stay though, you seem to have a pretty good grip on what’s good about this place.” Then he turned and jogged off toward his jeep, and beeped the horn twice on his way out of the parking lot.

So Xander finished the last of his burger and put a little more salt on the last of his fries just for the hell of it. He closed his eye and smelled, behind the odors of cooking food, the sharp tang of fir sap and the cold clean smell of the glacial river, and after a few minutes he cleaned up his trash and got in the car and drove back down the mountain.


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The next morning when he got home after work, he put on shorts and a wifebeater and went down and danced in the fountain for the first time.



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Julia, taking a few hours off writing now, OK?