Heartsong (31 page)

A wave of fear swept through his body, threatening to reverse
the bouillabaisse and the torte, as he remembered that night, his last night of freedom before the stone room in the iron house. He remembered the procession with the holy men and the statue of the woman in blue. He remembered the torches bobbing as the people climbed the steps up to the high church. And he remembered the voice in the darkness behind him: “
Pardon, monsieur.”

The warm summer night came clear and vivid with memories of the sickhouse, his escape, his search for the Buffalo Bill show, which ended with him staring at the empty train tracks at the Gare du Prado. The small room with the single bright light, the
akecita
and Brown Suit, and finally his cold stone room. And then he heard himself singing, not singing really, just a low rumbling as he mouthed the words to his death song.

He had wanted to die then. He had sung his death song for two, three, four sleeps, and he had fully expected Wakan Tanka to call him home. But he had also been fearful, afraid that his
nagi
would not know the way home, that it would wander here in this country of strangers. Now he felt a wave of shame creep over his face like crawling ants as he remembered his pathetic attempt at a ceremony, using one of the cigarettes that Yellow Breast had given him. He was no
wicasa wakan
and he had no right, other than to sing his death song and make his prayers, to pretend to be a holy one of such power.

Charging Elk was overwhelmed by his memories of those early times in Marseille. For the most part, especially after he came to live with the Soulas family, he had learned not to think of those days. When he did, he became fearful and ashamed and was haunted by nightmares that left him exhausted in the morning. So it was out of self-preservation—because he had to get up early each morning to accompany René down to the Quai des Belges—that he had put such thoughts out of his mind.

Now he swallowed against the threat of the meal coming up and
turned back, toward the people and the lights. But he didn't stop at Le Royal, as he usually did when he came down to the Old Port. He walked by and climbed the several stone steps up to Le Panier and kept walking until he reached his building. Once inside his room, he tore off his sweat-drenched clothes and sat on the bench before the window. He sat there for a long time in a shaft of moonlight until his mind finally became a blank, erased of the kaleidoscopic images of loneliness and despair. Only then did he creep over to his narrow bed in the alcove. His legs were heavy and his back had stiffened up, as it always did at night from the hours of shoveling coal into the fires beneath the vats, and he vaguely remembered wondering if he would be able to sleep, or if the images would come back in his sleep, but when he laid his head tentatively on the bolster and closed his eyes against the moonlight, he was gone into a dark world of blessed nothingness.

T
he next Saturday, after another insufferably hot week of work and eat and sleep, Charging Elk put his pay, which again totaled twenty-eight francs, thirty centimes, into the purse and tucked it into the bottom of the duffel bag.

He walked down to the end of the hall and filled his pitcher from the faucet, scarcely noticing the foul stench from the squatter across the way. He had become used to the smells of sewage, of rotting meat and fruit, of garbage piled at the curb. The Old Port had a particularly bad smell from all the sewage pipes that emptied into it. At first, such smells had offended his nose—he was used to the clean air of the plains—but now he was almost used to it. He was used to the garbage scows, gathered on one side of the Old Port, that would be filled with offal and dead rats and dogs and other rotting things to be towed out to sea and dumped. It took an unusual smell to make him take notice—like the dead baby his nose had
scouted out in the alley earlier in the summer. The smell attracted his notice because it was an overpoweringly sweet, yet sour smell. And when he investigated, he almost cried out in horror. But as he made a prayer for the small bloated infant, he noticed a curious thing: The pale baby lay with its arms and legs in the air, and he recognized it. It was the same baby as the one in the windows and in the markets at Noël. It was the baby Jesus. René and his family had such a baby, along with its parents, who weren't really its parents, and some shepherds and animals and men in turbans. Every Noël they set up the small immovable figures beside the fireplace. The season was an honoring time for the infant.

Back in his room, Charging Elk put the image of the dead baby out of his mind as he washed his body with a cloth he dipped in the soapy water. There was a bathhouse on the street around the corner, but the only time he had gone there, all the other men had stared at him as though he were a giant, so he cleaned himself in his flat. It took three or four basins of water to get all of the coal dust out of his pores and his hair, but he had become adept at making a little water go a long way.

He was already sweating by the time he got his clean white shirt buttoned. In spite of his fearful episode the week before, he was going down to the Old Port, but this time he would eat in the cheap brasserie on the Quai du Port beside the Café Royal. It was a big place and most of the customers were sailors and the kind of people who hung around a port, who wore rumpled suits and tatty dresses but had enough money to eat out. He had studied the posted menu one night after his anisette at Le Royal and he recognized pork and lamb.

Charging Elk often wished he could read. Sometimes he bought illustrated magazines to look at the pictures, but when he tried to figure out what was being said of them, he just saw neat black marks, in spite of Mathias and Chloé's patient teaching. Once he
saw a picture of
tatanka
and he did recognize the word “bison” in the writing beneath it. He took the magazine to Mathias, who told him that the magazine said that all the bison were gone, all that was left of them was bones and memories. Mathias was alarmed at this thought, because he had been thinking of going to America with Charging Elk, although he was only fifteen at the time. He had wanted to see the Indians in their homeland and perhaps become one. Charging Elk had assured him that one day he could go to the land of the Oglalas and become a brother by ceremony; furthermore, he assured Mathias that the words beneath the picture were wrong, that he knew where the buffalo had gone. At first he wouldn't tell Mathias how he knew this because it was not good to tell of another's dream, but when the boy grew more and more despondent, he finally told the story of Bird Tail's dream of the buffalo entering the cave in Paha Sapa. He drew a picture of the mountains, the cave, and the buffalo entering. Then he swore the boy to secrecy.

T
he Brasserie Cherbourg was large and full of noise. Charging Elk sat at a rickety table near the open windows that looked out over the Old Port and watched the waiters dart by with trays of food or liters of wine over their heads. He marveled at their agility as they squeezed between tables and swerved to avoid a carelessly flung arm or another waiter or a drunken sailor. Most of the tables were occupied by men, mostly sailors, some with young women, who seemed to enjoy the chaos. But it was the noise that made Charging Elk happy—the constant hum of voices, the barely heard accordion of a roaming musician, the occasional clatter of dishes or the shouted toast. Although he was dining alone, he felt that he was part of the festive crowd.

He ordered the
rôti de pore
because he recognized “roast” and
“pork.” Most of the other items he didn't recognize, although he was sure Madeleine had cooked some of them at one time or another—especially those dishes listed under
poisson
. Now he only ate fish on Sunday with the Soulas family. He had grown to like some of Madeleine's fish dishes, especially those with crisp skin and firm white meat, but he never ate fish on his own. He had a small oil burner but the only time he used it was when he could afford a piece of beef.

When the waiter brought his half-liter of red wine and poured a glassful, Charging Elk looked up and said,
“Très bien, monsieur, merci,”
but the waiter had already turned his back and was threading his way back to the kitchen. The visit had been so brief, Charging Elk couldn't remember what the waiter looked like, beyond the hairy arm and square fingers below the rolled-up sleeve.

As Charging Elk drank his wine and waited for his meal, he studied the people around him. He had come to recognize sailors around the port. Usually there would be three or four of them and they would be dressed in a way that suggested a life on the sea—canvas pants and shoes, striped shirts with no collars, or if they were Arab, long dresses of white. But the more he studied his fellow diners, the more he was aware that they were all
wasichus
. They had turned the color of walnuts from the days in the sun, but they were white men, like the ones in New York and Paris and the miners he had seen in Paha Sapa. Not one of them was dark like him or the Arabs or the
negres
.

Charging Elk began to feel uneasy. He had become so used to the people of this town and his own uniqueness that he had not thought of himself in terms of color. He had no one to identify with, no group that he belonged to, and so he thought of himself as one who had no color, was in fact almost a ghost even though his large dark presence always attracted attention from both light and dark
people. But now he felt that he was in a place where he did not belong. He took a sip of the
mni sha
and stared out the window at a juggler in face paint who was entertaining a crowd down by the ships. He was tempted to just slip out of the eating house—he was only a couple of tables from the door—but he knew if he was caught, they would send him back to the iron house. No, he would stay and eat his roast pork, pay up, and leave quickly.

But halfway through his meal, a young man approached his table and stood, feet planted and arms crossed. Charging Elk had seen him coming—he was aware of everything now—but chose to ignore whatever trouble this young man might bring. He speared a chunk of pork with his fork and sprinkled some salt on it, seemingly engrossed in the act, but his eyes were seeing more than the meat. The man stood so close to the table Charging Elk could see the curve of his penis under the canvas pants. Above a large silver belt buckle, the man wore a blue shirt, which was open halfway down his chest. His forearms were heavy and naked and one of them had a raised welt from a knife wound. A blurred likeness of an eagle decorated the other.

Charging Elk chewed the piece of pork deliberately, and when the sailor said something, he swallowed and took a sip of wine. The man said something else and it seemed to be a question. Then he repeated the words and Charging Elk looked up at him. His face was surprisingly youthful, round and red from the sun, with a wispy blond mustache above his thin red lips. Charging Elk knew that the man was somehow challenging him, but at first he didn't recognize the language. It was not French but there was something familiar about it.

Charging Elk lifted his shoulders and made his face blank and said,
“Je ne comprendd pad votre langue.”

“I said are you a goddamn bloody Indian.”

This time Charging Elk recognized the word “Indian.” The
young man said it the way Brown Suit and other Americans said it.

In spite of the sailor's aggressive stance, Charging Elk was for an instant overcome with a desperate hope. “Indian, yes, him,” he said, pointing to himself with his thumb. “Oglala. American. Buffalo Bill.” He searched his mind for more American words but all he could think of was “Broncho Billy,” which he didn't say.

The sailor turned to his companions, who were seated at a table just behind Charging Elk and toward the interior of the noisy room. “He is a goddamn ignorant blanket-ass. He admits it. Was I right?”

“Ask him to give us a war whoop, Teddy,” shouted one of them.

“Go ahead. Give him a punch. If you've got the balls for it,” said another.