Kathy Little Bird (25 page)

Jim’s other thought was to make the date May Day. South Dakota weather scotched that. We settled for June. From the various points of the globe performers would assemble, along with Indians, journalists, and we hoped a large audience.

“W
HEN
you make plans, the devil laughs,” is the way whites phrase it. But for the Indian, Loki the Trickster hides in the shadows.

Trimble picked up the phone and handed it to me. “One of the band.”

I took it carelessly. Rono Hart said in a voice without tone or inflection, “It’s Gentle. I’m calling from the hospital…”

I remember a sort of gasping sound. I didn’t know it came from me. The next thing I remember was asking for his room. He didn’t have a room. He hadn’t been admitted. They told me they were working on him in emergency—an overdose.

A nurse with a stripe on her cap showed me to the waiting room. “We’ll call you,” she said.

“He’s going to make it,” I replied. If this was a question, no one answered. If aphorism, it was ignored.

I sat down. There was a goldfish swimming aimlessly in an aerated tank with dyed shells and colored seaweed. It came to the surface and gulped air. I picked up a magazine, well worn. Somebody had torn something out. What could it have been? Something that in some way applied to their life? Or was it simply a recipe? But a recipe might not be simple. It might be profound, a recipe for life.

You don’t get off drugs, that’s what my father said. It was what I’d always been told. It’s stronger than willpower, stronger than the person. Vietnam had done this to him. He’d seen inhuman things, taken part in them. No amount of expiation eradicated them. Only drugs could drive the scene back into hidden recesses of his brain.

I’d known this a year ago. I knew it when I started up with him again. I hadn’t known he might end up dead.

If Gentle died I couldn’t bring myself to face the waste. A guy so loving, so full of ideas for helping, improving, making better. I couldn’t think of him except as reaching out…teaching through music, me for instance.

I thought of the 911 call, and further back to the foolish grin. “Snowbird, come fly with me.” I had the feeling then, and I had it now, that he was rushing to meet death, anxious to shake hands with it.

…And here was I, sitting on a vinyl couch in a sterile waiting room with a small, trapped fish and a pile of magazines
whose pages were sized with the imprint of dread and fear. The nurse with the stripe on her cap was coming back. Had he been brought in too late? Had they given up?

I got to my feet. I wanted to be on my feet when she told me. I tried to ask, but no sound came.

The nurse smiled. “He’s going to be okay. You can go in now, but only for a minute.”

I turned away from her, away from the ER, away from Gentle. Outside I took a deep breath of rain. How odd it felt to be crying from outside myself.

I
WOULDN’T
see Jim, or take his calls. This time I made it clear to Trimble he was at the top of the “No” list.

But I did work like a dog to save his reputation. If the benefit was allowed to collapse, that would be the end of him in the business. I spent hours on the phone soothing everyone down. I saw to it that no hint of drugs ever came up. Gentle’s hospitalization was attributed to a flare-up of last winter’s bronchitis, coupled with the pressure and the threats he had been receiving. This was the first I heard of threats. Apparently, Rono Hart told me, he was a target for every skinhead in Tennessee. Which made me all the more determined that the benefit take place.

It was less than a week to countdown. The work was essentially done, the P.R. released, the fees paid, reservations made. So I worked the phones, reassuring everyone that the concert was on track. Rono Hart, whom I had hardly spoken to, turned out to be a pillar of strength.

Gentle’s sense of drama in choosing the large, flat valley floor, was unerring. It was, he had told me, the ancestral home of the Lakota.

My part in all this was to sing, to release the ethnic songs that had been bottled up in me so long. My mum’s people would hear them. Indians know no border; they slip back and forth between Canada and the States, and many would be in attendance at the concert. As for the rest, it was the kind of audience I had always imagined. “Young,” Gentle had said, “idealistic. They live in alternative worlds. They stopped the killing in Vietnam with flowers—make love not war.”

Mac was horrified by the whole affair. He was horrified that I had taken up with Jim Gentle again, and doubly horrified to see me swept up in something as stupid as Indian causes. He skulked about and would barely speak to me. I don’t know how he found out about the drugs. Maybe it was a guess, but he exploded in a series of grunts and stomped out. Was I a crazy woman, as he maintained? I didn’t have time to think about it.

The moment I met up with the little group of musicians at the airport, I felt I had done the right thing and that we would make it through. I asked Rono to phone the hospital and tell Gentle we were on our way to Wounded Knee. That, I knew, would help him in his fight back. “And oh, Rono, tell him this time it’s final. He’ll understand.”

I’d booked a commercial flight with an extra seat for the bass fiddle. Those of us coming from Nashville all sat together and went over entrance cues and tempo. Mostly we joked
around, Willie did card tricks, and we got into Chicago, which was the hub, and out again without any mishaps.

The last leg of the flight I slept. It was a little one-horse town with a single motel, whose sign had a letter missing. All evening they kept pouring in, arriving by taxi, by motorcycle, by limo, by bus. There were hugs and kissses and people who had only heard about each other, meeting, and going off to pick a little guitar.

I was up early to look the place over. I rented a truck and drove to the location, passing a used auto lot filled with rusting skeletons.

What man had made was rather depressing, but what God had made was magnificent. I saw immediately how wise Gentle had been to turn down theaters and hold out for this spot. An oval meadow against a backdrop of hills cutting patterns in the sky made an acoustically favorable setting. Intuitively Gentle knew an open-air spot was right for open-air music. There’d be light breezes, and puffs of clouds…nature speaking. And my songs answering back in a kind of dialogue. Tomorrow there would be blankets and beach chairs and cushions strewn colorfully and haphazardly, as people listened to a sound they had never heard before. Of course there were a plethora of other groups and individual performers to balance what I did, but I concentrated on me.

A stage had been erected, and a truck stood by with our electrical grid. I tested the mikes, and the curve of the hillsides reverberated. It couldn’t be better; the place was alive to sound. Any worries I had about an al fresco performance being risky were put to rest.

I’d been too busy to notice the old car that rattled up, but when I turned around—there was Gentle.

I was shocked. Shocked that he was here, but shocked equally at his appearance. He looked as though he’d been buried, left in the ground for a week, and dug up. His long frame was skeletal, his eyes recessed, hooded over by a drooping lid.

“Hi, Little Bird,” he said, letting me know by his avoidance of “Kathy” that he abided by my rules. “Now,” turning to the others, “let’s get the show on the road.”

We had a good rehearsal without too many glitches. This did not reassure me, for stage lore has it that a good rehearsal means trouble during the show.

During the run-through Gentle had not uttered a private word to me. For my part, I was relieved. I didn’t want to fight with him. He looked as though he could barely stand on his feet as it was. But now he came up to me. I shaded my eyes and looked up, way up, as you have to with Gentle.

“I wanted to say thanks for seeing the concert through, for not letting it fold. It means a lot to me, as you know. And I believe it will mean a great deal to you too. I think it will bring you the audience you’ve been looking for. I think tomorrow your Cree songs will have found a home.”

I held out my hand. “We almost made it, Jim. We almost did.”

“About tomorrow, there may be trouble. That’s why I’m here. A bunch of Lakota are acting as lookouts. They should be able to spot any local gangs and keep them at a distance. Should a few rednecks slip in, they’ll be handled. So don’t
worry about it. If there is a disturbance, it will be throwing some guy out on his ear. Keep right on singing. Leave the rest to me.”

I looked into the eyes that I had so often kissed, and the thick hair I had so often caressed, and the two sides of my nature sparred, the left-handed and the right-handed. It was an intense battle, but short. “Have you notified the police? Maybe they should be on hand.”

“Oh Little Bird, Little Bird.” He smiled and crossed himself. “The police are the last people we want here tomorrow.”

“I understand you had that kind of trouble back in Nashville.”

“You never leave it behind. It’s a war, and it’s on-going.”

We all went back to town and Gentle bought ice cream cones, which he handed around, for a job well done.

I went to the motel to rest. Having my lover of only a few days before turn up as an impersonal director was unsettling. The two Gentles kept overlapping. I kept seeing the sweetness and the laughter, while keeping my mind stony against him.

And what was all this about trouble, security, lookouts? Had he thrown me to the wolves? Growing up in Alberta, I knew about wolves. You hear them howl in the night; in the day you see their tracks and their scat. Sometimes you come across a carcass they’ve left. Wolves aren’t kind. They rip their prey apart. Would the audience do that to me? To my songs? To the message we sent?

I tried to analyze the various possibilities separately. The
message of the benefit quite simply asked that a wrong be righted, that what had been taken be given back. I couldn’t see the harm in that. Yet this was the source of the threats against Jim, the potential violence.

The rest of what I felt was pure nerves. But putting a name to it didn’t seem to help. It didn’t change the fact that I’d be experimenting before thousands of people with a strange, atavistic kind of music. I remembered how it had struck the band when they first heard it. It was a rocky start. The intonation, the beat of the Cree threw them. Timing was off, entrances missed…a debacle. I remember Gentle holding up his hand, calling for quiet. Then he asked if I would start the Wind Song a capella.

Somehow I got it together—a few bars and the drum fell into sync, the slap bass followed, the guitar was with me. We were making music. The question was, would this audience here in South Dakota, lying, sitting, sprawled on blankets in a high valley, surrounded by the Black Hills, which at the noon concert would be starkly white…would they get it?

I laughed ruefully; in the old days I would have gone on stage withut turning a hair and sung my songs. Now I worry about everything. I think it’s finally being grown up.

Gentle joined us for dinner at a sort of refrito-tortilla cafe, where there was plenty of beer and red wine. The performers crowded in with the electrical crew and some of our local sponsors. The upcoming performance was heady for everyone, but it meant different things to each of us.

The day was perfect, not a cloud in the sky. The word was, a large audience was assembling.

I did a couple of runs and then a trill in the bathroom to limber my instrument and psych myself up. I looked in the mirror and tied a wind-band across my forehead. Remembering Mac’s mantra, I repeated, “Start high and go higher.”

Kissing my reflection, I told myself, “You’re great, Kathy Little Bird, and you’re going to wow them.” I went out determined to give the performance of my life. After all, I was singing for Mum and her people…my people.

The crew, working since before dawn, had rigged a backstage area that was very nicely curtained off. The first set was up. I stood listening to the spirit of the music that would enfold me when the moment came and lead me onstage. Just before this happened, Gentle caught me in his arms. His kiss seared my mouth, fierce and loving at the same time. It brought back the turmoil, the love, the passion that had been between us.