Flying Home (11 page)

“We almost had ’em flyin’,” said Riley. “We almost …”

From
New World Writing
, 1956

T
hey had a small, loud-playing band and as we moved through the trees I could hear the notes of the horns bursting like bright metallic bubbles against the sky. It was a faraway and sparklike sound, shooting through the late afternoon quiet of the hill; very clear now and definitely music, band music. I was relieved. I had been hearing it for several minutes as we moved through the woods, but the pain down there had made all my senses so deceptively sharp that I had decided that the sound was simply a musical ringing in my ears. But now I was doubly sure, for Buster stopped and looked at me, squinching up his eyes with his head cocked to one side. He was wearing a blue
cloth headband with a turkey feather stuck over his ear, and I could see it flutter in the breeze.

“You hear what I hear, man?” he said.

“I
been
hearing it,” I said.

“Damn! We better haul it outa these woods so we can see something. Why didn’t you say something to a man?”

We moved again, hurrying along until suddenly we were out of the woods, standing at a point of the hill where the path dropped down to the town, our eyes searching. It was close to sundown and below me I could see the red clay of the path cutting through the woods and moving past a white lightning-blasted tree to join the river road, and the narrow road shifting past Aunt Mackie’s old shack, and on, beyond the road and the shack, I could see the dull mysterious movement of the river. The horns were blasting brighter now, though still far away, sounding like somebody flipping bright handfuls of new small change against the sky. I listened and followed the river swiftly with my eyes as it wound through the trees and on past the buildings and houses of the town—until there, there at the farther edge of the town, past the tall smokestack and the great silver sphere of the gas storage tower, floated the tent, spread white and cloudlike with its bright ropes of fluttering flags.

That’s when we started running. It was a dogtrotting Indian run, because we were both wearing packs and were tired from the tests we had been taking in the woods and in Indian Lake. But now the bright blare of the horns made us forget our tiredness and pain and we bounded down the path like young goats in the twilight; our army-surplus mess kits and canteens rattling against us.

“We late, man,” Buster said. “I told you we was gon fool
around and be late. But naw, you had to cook that damn sage hen with mud on him just like it says in the book. We coulda barbecued a damn elephant while we was waiting for a tough sucker like that to get done.…”

His voice grumbled on like a trombone with a big, fat pot-shaped mute stuck in it and I ran on without answering. We had tried to take the cooking test by using a sage hen instead of a chicken because Buster said Indians didn’t eat chicken. So we’d taken time to flush a sage hen and kill him with a slingshot. Besides, he was the one who insisted that we try the running endurance test, the swimming test,
and
the cooking test all in one day. Sure it had taken time. I knew it would take time, especially with our having no scoutmaster. We didn’t even have a troop, only the
Boy Scout’s Handbook
that Buster had found, and—as we’d figured—our hardest problem had been working out the tests for ourselves. He had no right to argue anyway, since he’d beaten me in all the tests—although I’d passed them too. And he was the one who insisted that we start taking them today, even though we were both still sore and wearing our bandages, and I was still carrying some of the catgut stitches around in me. I had wanted to wait a few days until I was healed, but Mister Know-it-all Buster challenged me by saying that a real stud Indian could take the tests even right after the doctor had just finished sewing on him. So, since we were more interested in being
Indian
scouts than simply
Boy
Scouts, here I was running toward the spring carnival instead of being already there. I wondered how Buster knew so much about what an Indian would do, anyway. We certainly hadn’t read anything about what the doctor had done to us. He’d probably made it up, and I had let
him urge me into going to the woods even though I had to slip out of the house. The doctor had told Miss Janey (she’s the lady who takes care of me) to keep me quiet for a few days and she dead-aimed to do it. You would’ve thought from the way she carried on that she was the one who had the operation—only that’s one kind of operation no woman ever gets to brag about.

Anyway, Buster and me had been in the woods and now we were plunging down the hill through the fast-falling dark to the carnival. I had begun to throb and the bandage was chafing, but as we rounded a curve I could see the tent and the flares and the gathering crowd. There was a breeze coming up the hill against us now and I could almost smell that cotton candy, the hamburgers, and the kerosene smell of the flares. We stopped to rest and Buster stood very straight and pointed down below, making a big sweep with his arm like an Indian chief in the movies when he’s up on a hill telling his braves and the Great Spirit that he’s getting ready to attack a wagon train.

“Heap big … teepee … down yonder,” he said in Indian talk. “Smoke signal say … Blackfeet … make … heap much … stink, buck-dancing in tennis shoes!”

“Ugh,” I said, bowing my suddenly war-bonneted head. “Ugh!”

Buster swept his arm from east to west, his face impassive. “Smoke medicine say … heap … 
big
stink! Hot toe jam!” He struck his palm with his fist, and I looked at his puffed-out cheeks and giggled.

“Smoke medicine say you tell heap big lie,” I said. “Let’s get on down there.”

We ran past some trees, Buster’s canteen jangling. Around us it was quiet except for the roosting birds.

“Man,” I said, “you making as much noise as a team of mules in full harness. Don’t no Indian scout make all that racket when he runs.”

“No scout-um now,” he said. “Me go make heap much pow-wow at stinky-dog carnival!”

“Yeah, but you’ll get yourself scalped, making all that noise in the woods,” I said. “Those other Indians don’t give a damn ’bout no carnival—what does a carnival mean to them? They’ll scalp the hell outa you!”

“Scalp?” he said, talking colored now. “Hell, man—that damn doctor scalped me last week. Damn near took my whole head off!”

I almost fell with laughing. “Have mercy, Lord,” I laughed. “We’re just a couple poor scalped Indians!”

Buster stumbled about, grabbing a tree for support. The doctor had said that it would make us men and Buster had said, hell, he was a man already—what he wanted was to be an Indian. We hadn’t thought about it making us scalped ones.

“You right, man,” Buster said. “Since he done scalped so much of my head away, I must be crazy as a fool. That’s why I’m in such a hurry to get down yonder with the other crazy folks. I want to be right in the middle of ’em when they really start raising hell.”

“Oh, you’ll be there, Chief Baldhead,” I said.

He looked at me blankly. “What you think ole Doc done with our scalps?”

“Made him a tripe stew, man.”

“You nuts,” Buster said. “He probably used ’em for fish bait.”

“He did, I’m going to sue him for one trillion, zillion dollars, cash,” I said.

“Maybe he gave ’em to ole Aunt Mackie, man. I bet with them she could work up some out
rageous
spells!”

“Man,” I said, suddenly shivering, “don’t talk about that old woman, she’s evil.”

“Hell, everybody’s so scared of her. I just wish she’d mess with me or my daddy, I’d fix her.”

I said nothing—I was afraid. For though I had seen the old woman about town all my life, she remained to me like the moon, mysterious in her very familiarity; and in the sound of her name there was terror:

Ho’ Aunt Mackie, talker-with-spirits, prophetess-of-disaster, odd-dweller-alone in a riverside shack surrounded by sunflowers, morning-glories, and strange magical weeds
(Yao, as Buster, during our Indian phase, would have put it, Yao!);
Old Aunt Mackie, wizen-faced walker-with-a-stick, shrill-voiced ranter in the night, round-eyed malicious one, given to dramatic trances and fiery flights of rage; Aunt Mackie, preacher of wild sermons on the busy streets of the town, hot-voiced chaser of children, snuff-dipper, visionary; wearer of greasy headrags, wrinkled gingham aprons, and old men’s shoes; Aunt Mackie, nobody’s sister but still Aunt Mackie to us all
(Ho, Yao!);
teller of fortunes, concocter of powerful, body-rending spells
(Yah, Yao!);
Aunt Mackie, the remote one though always seen about us; night-consulted adviser to farmers on crops and cattle
(Yao!);
herb-healer, root-doctor, and town-confounding oracle to wildcat drillers seeking oil in the earth
—(Yaaaah-Ho!). It was all there in her name and before her name I shivered. Once uttered, for me the palaver was finished; I resigned it to Buster, the tough one.

Even some of the grown folks, both black and white, were afraid of Aunt Mackie, and all the kids except Buster. Buster
lived on the outskirts of the town and was as unimpressed by Aunt Mackie as by the truant officer and others whom the rest of us regarded with awe. And because I was his buddy I was ashamed of my fear.

Usually I had extra courage when I was with him. Like the time two years before when we had gone into the woods with only our slingshots, a piece of fatback, and a skillet and had lived three days on the rabbits we killed and the wild berries we picked and the ears of corn we raided from farmers’ fields. We slept each rolled in his quilt, and in the night Buster had told bright stories of the world we’d find when we were grown-up and gone from hometown and family. I had no family, only Miss Janey, who took me after my mother died (I didn’t know my father), so that getting away always appealed to me, and the coming time of which Buster liked to talk loomed in the darkness around me, rich with pastel promise. And although we heard a bear go lumbering through the woods nearby and the eerie howling of a coyote in the dark, yes, and had been swept by the soft swift flight of an owl, Buster was unafraid and I had grown brave in the grace of his courage.

But to me Aunt Mackie was a threat of a different order, and I paid her the respect of fear.

“Listen to those horns,” Buster said. And now the sound came through the trees like colored marbles glinting in the summer sun.

We ran again. And now keeping pace with Buster I felt good; for I meant to be there too, at the carnival; right in the middle of all that confusion and sweating and laughing and all the strange sights to see.

“Listen to ’em, now, man,” Buster said. “Those fools is
starting to shout ‘Amazing Grace’ on those horns. Let’s step on the gas!”

The scene danced below us as we ran. Suddenly there was a towering Ferris wheel revolving slowly out of the dark, its red and blue lights glowing like drops of dew dazzling a big spider web when you see it in the early morning. And we heard the beckoning blare of the band now shot through with the small, insistent, buckshot voices of the barkers.

“Listen to that trombone, man,” I said.,

“Sounds like he’s playing the dozens with the whole wide world.”

“What’s he saying, Buster?”

“He’s saying. ‘Ya’ll’s mamas don’t wear ’em. Is strictly without ’em. Don’t know nothing ’bout ’em …”

“Don’t know about what, man?”

“Draw’s, fool; he’s talking ’bout draw’s!”

“How you know, man?”

“I hear him talking, don’t I?”

“Sure, but you been scalped, remember? You crazy. How he know about those people’s mamas?” I said.

“Says he saw ’em with his great big ole eye.”

“Damn! He must be a Peeping Tom. How about those other horns?”

“Now that there tuba’s saying:

“Man, you
are
a scalped-headed fool. How about that trumpet?”

“Him? That fool’s a soldier, he’s really signifying. Saying,

“Man, the white folks know what that fool is signifying on that horn they’d run him clear on out the world. Trumpet’s got a real
nasty
mouth.”

“Why you call him a soldier, man?” I said.

“ ’Cause he’s slipping ’em in the twelves and choosing ’em, all at the same time. Talking ’bout they mamas and offering to fight ’em. Now he ain’t like that ole clarinet; clarinet so sweet-talking he just
eases
you in the dozens.”

“Say, Buster,” I said, seriously now. “You know, we gotta stop cussing and playing the dozens if we’re going to be Boy Scouts. Those white boys don’t play that mess.”

“You doggone right they don’t,” he said, the turkey feather vibrating above his ear. “Those guys can’t take it, man. Besides, who wants to be just like them? Me,
I’m
gon be a scout and play the twelves too! You have to, with some of these old jokers we know. You don’t know what to say when they start teasing you, you never have no peace. You have to outtalk ’em, outrun ’em, or outfight ’em and I don’t aim to be running and fighting all the time. N’mind those white boys.”

We moved on through the growing dark. Already I could see a few stars and suddenly there was the moon. It emerged bladelike from behind a thin veil of cloud, just as I
heard a new sound and looked about me with quick uneasiness. Off to our left I heard a dog, a big one. I slowed, seeing the outlines of a picket fence and the odd-shaped shadows that lurked in Aunt Mackie’s yard.

“What’s the matter, man?” Buster said.

“Listen,” I said. “That’s Aunt Mackie’s dog. Last year I was passing here and he sneaked up and bit me through the fence when I wasn’t even thinking about him …”

“Hush, man,” Buster whispered, “I hear the son-of-a-bitch back in there now. You leave him to me.”