-} 2.1.0 {-
 
     Shade had agreed to pick up Jock at ten, but got up early
for breakfast while he did his laundry.  Lyle's laundromat was
directly across the street and, being Saturday, Shade even at
that early hour was lucky to find an open washer.  He had stuffed
a few shirts, pants, underwear and socks into his pillow case and
winced that he was wasting two bucks on such a small load
(including fifty cents for a handful of Tide in a box from a
crude mechanical dispenser).  He paused at the bulletin board to
get a feel for what was going on in the underside of town.  The
most frequent topic of the tacked-up notices was a request for a
cabin up in the woods for three to four hundred a month -- would-
be artists and writers washed up from the Bay Area.  This was
followed by offers of gardening and handyman work.  A fact that
Shade had stored in Pistol was that Navion was the northern
terminus of the Greyhound bus run up the coast from San Francisco
and hence was the end of the line for the many running on
unemployment and disability checks trying to escape the
exorbitant cost of being poor in a major city.  The bus depot was
across the street from 'Midnight Hour,' one of the raunchiest
bars on the North Coast.  Those who had tacked up these notices
were at least one step up from that.
     While his clothes churned he walked the few blocks to
Chapala's for breakfast to-go.  He'd had another bad dream and
found cramps in his shoulders and thighs from the strain.
     Waiting for his order of scrambled eggs, melted cheese and
diced ham in a roll, he listened to a bouncy rendition by
Vincente Fernandez of Puro Michoacan from the jukebox.  He even
danced in time to it, working out the stiffness.
     Back at Lyle's, he was also lucky there was one empty dryer
when he needed it.  He was momentarily surprised at how many
fellow single men were doing their own wash (over half), but then
again these were changed times.  In San Francisco he had been
able to afford take-out laundry for his few clothes.  Through
Transitions Management Group he had learned that Mr. Pepper sent
his shirts to Paris to be starched and pressed.  Mrs. Sam had
proffered her luncheon invitation because she believed in small
personal pleasures.  Perhaps, beneath the differences between the
poor, the normal, and the rich lay the shared areas of unique,
individual predilections.
     At one of three card tables, which he shared with a bleached
young woman and her dirty daughter (who looked like she could
have used the laundromat's services), under the beam of a
Saturday Morning wrestling match in L.A. from the TV riveted to
the ceiling, he ate his breakfast sandwich.  He unclipped the
Walkman from his belt and fast-forwarded randomly to a poem by
Robert Pack named 'A Bird in Search of a Cage.'
 
     Said the bird in search of a cage,
     This world is even large for wings;
     The mindless seasons drive me down
     Tormenting me with changing things.
 
     A cage is not escaped, but need,
     And though once in, all travel's done,
     I'll sing so every bird will know
     My wanderings in moon and sun.
 
     And all the crickets shall be stilled,
     And stilled the summer air and grass,
     And hushed the secrets of the wind
     For when my final callings pass.
 
     And if a friend should stop to talk,
     Reminding me of what is past,
     And ask the meaning of my song,
     I'll say that only cages last.
 
 
     -} 2.1.1 {-
 
     Before driving to the reservation he dropped off the book of
tapes of In Evil Hour at the post office, which was located four
blocks down Main Street next to the unemployment office.  He
provided his apartment in San Francisco as the return address,
which gave him something long-range to look forward to.
     He got two six-packs of Coors for Chief George.  Other than
that he'd brought only a light all-weather jacket made of a thin
film of synthetic metal that crackled in the light like silver,
and Pistol, which was snug under the driver's seat.  He was
wearing blue jeans, a white tee shirt, and old-fashioned black
Spaulding tennis shoes without socks.
     Jock was squatting on the front stoop waiting for him with a
small woven duffel bag next to him.  It was nine-thirty.
     Shade handed him the six packs.  "These are for the Chief."
     "He's out fishing.  He usually doesn't get back until about
four.  He leaves before dawn.  Wait while I put these in the
fridge.  He knows your offering."
     "Do you want to pull off a couple for us?"
     "No, thanks.  I'm in the middle of a DUI.  I can't have
liquor in a car."
     He went into the house.  Shade waited in the bright sun. 
The coastal overcast had burned off earlier than usual.  It would
be a brilliant day.
     DUI.  Driving Under the Influence.  Since in California the
borderline blood alcohol percentage was a precise .008, Shade had
felt that they should call it the DUI Decimal System.
     "Where does he fish?"  Shade asked, as he handed Jock the
car key and got in the passenger side.  He'd left the engine
running so Jock slid in with his cotton bag with profiles of
multi-colored birds on it, turned the car around on the lawn and
pulled out onto Highway One headed south.
     "Katakal.  Do you know the area?  There's a river off-shoot
of the Pomo that empties into the sea just north of town.  He
uses our old nets and catches mostly bullhead."
     They had crossed Pomo Bridge, which spanned the Pomo River,
which itself was an offshoot of the Viper.  The Viper gathered
its waters in the coastal range above Navion, wound along the
eastern foothills and didn't dump most of it into the ocean until
nearly sixty miles south, at New Avion.
     "Katakal.  It is that an old place name?"
     "Yes.  It means 'hollow mussel.' We don't have many words
left.  We get to use nets because of our treaty rights.  He dries
the fish and sells it to the local markets, as cod.  Even the
Safeway.  Through our rights we don't have to go through health
inspectors."
     "So there are advantages."
     Jock also was in blue jeans and a tee shirt printed with a
world tour schedule of a major heavy metal rock group, The Clash,
which he stripped off with one hand while the other held the
wheel.  Under the shirt was a gold crucifix under a gold chain
around his neck.  As on the morning of their meeting on the
beach, Shade admired his young physique and handsome features. 
He must have been about twenty-two.
     "Yeah.  Dad fishes all day, then comes home and drinks beer
in front of TV sports.  What a life."
     Jock turned off onto a side road toward the mountains before
a sign with an arrow pointing toward Navion Airport."
     "Where are we going?"
     "First, Shade, you've got a shimmy in your suspension.  I
have a friend up here who can fix it.  It'll only take a half
hour, an hour.  You've got a nice car.  You should keep it tip-
top."
     "I only have forty bucks in cash with me."
     "That's all right, I have a twenty.  We have plenty.
Besides, Black Tooth owes me a favor."
     "Black Tooth?"
     "I mean Jimmy Riverton.  He's our white ass gringo mechanic.

He calls himself 'Black Tooth' because of a Bob Dylan line, 'I
got for good luck my black tooth.' I can't remember the song."
     Shade thought a minute.  "Neither can I."
     The road to the airport, after passing sedentary homes with
large, arbored lawns, then cattle ranches with even larger
grazing grounds, ended with an expanse of open brush land just
before the oaks of the foothills leading up into the pines.  In
Navion, if it only took a block walk away from the tourism of
Main Street to find yourself in Mean Town, it also only took a
few minutes drive to find yourself in rural America.
     Black Tooth's house and mechanic's garage were located
behind the airport next to the hanger.  Besides the corrugated
tin hanger, the airport consisted of a small office with a
windsock limp in the air on a pole above it and a fairly
impressive long strip of well-maintained asphalt runway.  Outside
the hanger, on both sides of the runway, were two single-engine
and one twin-engine Cessnas, and two single-engine Pipers.
     Jock pointed out to him that "Even in bad winds there is a
calm slip along here at the base of the foothills.  You can
always get in and out, unless it's socked in with fog."
     "Do you fly?"
     "No.  Not yet."
     Black Tooth's house was of single-story rancho style, made
of mottled stucco with a red curved-tile roof that overhung a
long porch that ran the length of the front.  A broken white
picket fence around it had lost its purpose through disregard,
except to separate the domestic grounds -- the child's monkey
bars and sandbox, the truck garden, and the umbrella-like spokes
of the clothes line -- from the surrounding broken automobiles
and parts that appeared to have spilled out of the garage.
     Black Tooth was sitting in a frumpy easy chair in the sun of
his porch (the house, as was common, had been designed so that
the shade hit it in the afternoon) holding a can of Miller beer. 
He was tall and wiry, with a beard that would never fully grow
out.  He had watched Shade's blue MG drive into his domain.
     Jock approached him with his duffel bag, from which he
offered him two zip-loc plastic bags, both containing fish.  One
was dried, one was frozen.
     "Lucille!"  Black Tooth called into the house.
     Shade had followed Jock up the steps of the porch.
     "This is Shade.  He needs an adjustment to his front end. 
I'm taking him up into Tcalamkiamali.  I want to make sure we can
handle the road in."
     Lucille was preceded through the squeeky front screen door
by a naked young boy, about six or seven, with a Nintendo Game
Boy in his hand who screeched his way out to the monkey bars next
to the clothes line.  Lucille was a strikingly pretty young
mother, short in stature, with a pert face and tiny black eyes
under cropped black hair, in a beige muslin dress and dirty bare
feet.
     "Put these in the fridge.  We get fish again for a while," 
Black Tooth instructed, handing the packets to her which she took
back inside.
     Jock and Jim, ignoring Shade, walked down to his car and
drove it into the garage for the work.  That left Shade on the
porch, with the boy perched on the top rung of the monkey bars
pounding the keys of his computer game and flailing his arms in
the air.
     The three hawks were circling in the sky again, between
Shade and the mountains.
     Through the screen door he heard a Southern folk song, sung
plaintively by a young woman, with a banjo behind it.  It drew
him into the house and into the kitchen where Lucille was seated
at the table with what looked like dark brown turds in front of
her, which she was shaping from a porcelain bowl.  The folk song
was emanating from a cassette player on a shelf next to the sink.
     "Want a beer?"
     "Sure."
     As she opened the refrigerator, he pointed to the objects on
the table and asked, "What are these?"
     She put a can of Miller in front of him.  "Sweet shit,"  she
smiled.  "They're actually chocolate brownies, but we sell them
like this as jokes on the Fourth of July.  It's kind of a local
tradition.  The money goes into a local day care center that I
work part-time for.  Wanna help me roll a few?"
     "Sure.  What kind of animal are they supposed to come from?"
     "Skunks."
     It was a fairly simple country kitchen and showed the
disarray of a Saturday morning after a Friday night with a few
friends over.  There were empty beer cans on the counter and
dirty plates that were stuck with hardened spaghetti strands
piled next to the sink.  The song on the cassette player ended
and another began.
     "Is that you singing on the tape?"
     "Yeah.  I've got three of them now.  I'm from the hills of
Arkansas.  My first tape is from Heavy Hand Productions in Little
Rock.  My second one is handled by Fret Inc. in Austin.  The one
you're listening to is out of San Francisco, out of Bill Graham's
group.  It's small potatoes, but I have a few thousand of my
tapes out there somewhere.  Black Tooth lets me sing at a few of
the clubs along the coast when I feel like it.  I'm just a
country girl, but I do have my tone."
     As Shade was engaged in trying to roll the perfect skunk
turd, he asked Lucille to rewind the current tune to its
beginning so he could hear it all the way through.  She was glad
to.  He knew that he that she had turned it on in the first place
to draw him into her kitchen.
 
     In the streets that are
     So civilized
     When will the people realize
     The call of the wild
     Coming through loud and clear
 
     It's the call of the wild
     This side of primitive
     Ah ooh ah ooh
     Show you how to really live
 
     Unleash the beast
     Let your spirit go
     Unleash the beast
     Let your spirit show
     Unleash the beast
     Let it out of its cage
     Unleash the beast
     Let it come of age
 
     Ah ooh listen to
     The call of the wild
     This side of primitive reminds
     Me how I need to live.
 
     While Shade listened, after she had leaned forward enough so
that he could see her breasts, Lucille dumped some leftover
spaghetti onto a cracked porcelain plate into a microwave oven
next to an old toaster and served it to him.
     Lunch.
     Jock and Jim came in as Shade was finishing his meal.  Their
son followed them.  All three gathered chairs around the kitchen
table.  Lucille shoved some more left-over spaghetti into the
microwave.
     "Fixed,"  Jock assured Shade, as he accepted a Miller from
Lucille.
     "Your English car is in very good shape.  I could get you
four, five thousand for it up here.  It's a beautiful old
machine,"  said Black Tooth.
     "So it will handle the rough road up into Tcala...?"  Shade
asked Jock.
     "Tcalamkiamali.  Yes,"  replied Jock.
     "Then let's go,"  Shade suggested.
     The boy squirmed in his chair and shouted, "Let's go! Let's
go!"
     As Lucille reached to calm the kid, Shade asked, "What's his
name?"
     "Damian."
     It was time to go.  Black Tooth came back from a bedroom
with a ziploc bag of local marijuana, which he handed to Jock,
who was ignoring the food before him.  Black Tooth settled
himself before his plate of warmed-over pasta.  Damian had
transferred his sense of playfulness from his Nintendo to his
apparently bloody strands of worms which he started killing with
a fork.  Some of it actually ended up in his mouth.  Lucille gave
Shade a copy of her latest tape.  He thanked her it and for lunch
and paid her with a ten dollar bill.
     Shade ate a sweet skunk turd as dessert.
 
     -} 2.1.2 {-
 
     Behind the airport Jock turned left onto a dirt road.  He
handed Shade the plastic packet of marijuana, some rolling papers
from his back pocket and one of two cans of beer that Black Tooth
had given him.
     "It's not bud, but it's not bad."
     "Bud Lite.  I thought you didn't drink in a car."
     "The cops don't patrol up in here."
     As Shade struggled  rolling a decent joint (it had been a
long time), the dirt road started getting a rougher as it passed
up into a valley where oak was turning into pine.
     "Don't worry about this road,"  Jock assured.  "It's a
little rough with gullies from the spring rains but it's
passible.  Black Tooth will adjust your suspension again when we
come back if it needs it.  All your gaskets are tight so the dust
won't get in."
     Shade licked together a half-way decent one, lit and inhaled
it before passing it over to the driver.
     "Thanks.  Now roll yourself one."
     Shade decided he might as well roll three or four while he
was at it.  It was a challenge in the jolting, rocking motion of
his little car navigating the dry rapids.
     "You better watch Lucille.  She's a wild one,"  Jock
advised.
     "She did seem to present herself."
     "That's how I got to be friends with Black Tooth.  One
Friday night she stole a car he'd finished working on, a black
Jaguar.  I was drunk in town and ended up driving her to all the
bars up and down the coast over the weekend.  We slept in
cemeteries.  Well, when I brought her back to him intact, and the
car, he appreciated it."
     As Shade lit his own, the left-over ache in his shoulder was
jarred by a sharp bump.  Auto body massage.  He put the rolling
papers in the bag with three joints and put the bag in his glove
compartment, then settled back in relaxation.  Jock knew this
road and was driving well, despite the bumps.  A cloud of dust
plumed behind them.
     "What's Tacala...?  How do you say it?  How do you spell
it?"
     "Calamamcamali.  It's another of our reservations.  We have
eight of them in these valleys.  Father rules them, but all he
does is settle disputes.  Family fights, marriages, burials.  He
doesn't like to get involved.  The clan comes to him.  He sits in
the best spot, on the edge overlooking the sea where our dead
priests are buried, that's why the treaties entitle us to it.  He
fishes and sits and drinks.  Isn't that all we're supposed to be
good for?"
     "What does Calamacamali mean?"
     Jock took a particularly deep toke on his joint.  "The place
you can walk around both sides of twice without being noticed."
     "No wonder it has so many syllables."
     Jock, fired by driving a white man's sports car over a road
through his old territory, and by the gage, the marijuana, became
verbally animated.
     "My ancestors spoke Hokan.  Only a little of this has come
down to me.  The tribes here were related more by language than
by custom or families.  Other clans who spoke Hokan were, let's
see, the Shastan, the Yana, the Washo, -- even the Esselen and
Salinan down the south coast.  When the white man came, he
overwhelmed not only our family patterns, our ways with nature,
our groupings, but he broke up our language.  Calamancamali is
one word, a for place, but in English it would be a sentence,
many sentences, depending on the accent, the emphasis on, what do
you call them?"
     "Syllables."
     "Calamancamali means the place you can walk around. 
Calamancamali means that you better not try to walk around it
more than twice.  It all depends on how you say it."
     "Doesn't it always?"
     "But I know little of this.  I am being helped ... by
Seady."
     "Seedy?"
     "She's the woman I was telling you about.  She lives in the
trailer at the end of Tabatewi.  My father doesn't trust you yet.

He barely trusts her.  She is helping me with my background, with
her computers.  She is amazing.  You will meet her in
Calmancamali tonight.  I'm sorry, but I can't talk about certain
things in front of my father.  In many ways he is in our way."
     "What does Tabatewi mean?"
     "'The little beach that would be a big beach.' It also means
'Around a tree.'"
     Shade recalled that there were three or four Mariposa pines
fairly close to Chief George's house.  He wondered how many
priests had left their bones in the ground under the shade.
     "Underneath your seat is a computer, a powerful one."
     "I know, Shade.  Let's talk about all that later."
     They were in full pine territory now and as Shade toked the
last of his little white stick he semi-closed his eyes and let
the play of light and shadow from the profiles of trees play on
his lids.
     "Okay."
     So he listened with idle attention, as Jock became animated
again and told him a story.
     "Shade, I know so little.  Let me tell you a story about our
food.  Our flour, our bread, always came from acorns.  It took
weeks, months, of gathering to fill our granaries.  But this has
been replaced by White Man's flour.  Few of us, a few old women
bother to gather it any more.  Nobody knows how to make the
bread.  The acorns sit there waiting for us.  Anyway, here's a
story.
     "Three years ago I went to a peyote ceremony at Mono Lake,
that's east of Yosemite on the edge of the great desert.  Miwoks
have always been friends to the Pomo.  I went because of the
honor of being invited to a serious ceremony for men, but mainly
I went for the peyote.  It's great to get really stoned among a
crowd of your own kind.  The ceremony was interesting but it was,
to me, phony.  It was a bunch of silver long-haired old men
trumped up in beaded costumes and feathers, faking the old ways. 
A gang of your Odd Fellows or Elks could have put on a better
show.
     "But what I'm talking about is the food.  It was three days
and there were three meals each day.  They put forward the best
food they could for the event.  The breakfasts were canned
peaches, cold white rice and canned beef stew.  Lunch was canned
sardines from Norway, fried potatoes, canned peaches and
pineapples, frosted chocolate cake and coffee with canned milk,
and acorn 'biscuits.' Dinner was the beef stew again, potatoes
boiled this time with onions, and fresh cantaloupe, followed by
coffee.
     "Nobody ate the acorn biscuits.  They were just tokens. 
Nobody knows what a real token is now.  They all went crazy over
the chocolate cake.  Ooh!  Aah!  It had a red eagle iced on the
top.
     "What's left?"
     Shade had only been listening to his story distantly.  He
was thinking of Lucille, and was afraid of how much he'd desired
her.  It had been a long time.  Two years.  He couldn't help but
fantasize about the quiet cemeteries where Jock had slept with
her in that wild dark weekend in the black Jaguar.  He remembered
that she was a Southern backwoods girl, and had a tone.
     "I wonder how good acorn pasta would taste,"  he muttered.
     Jock glanced at him slumped in his seat, first with concern
then a smile.
     "Ha! You're loaded."  He abruptly stopped the car in middle
of the road, deftly, so that the right front wheel was dangling
over a gully.  The road dust that had followed them now swarmed
and surrounded them.  "We need a swim."
 
 
     -} 2.1.2.1 {-
 
     The Viper flowed through several valleys that separated it
from the ocean until it emptied itself into it.  Jock had driven
Shade into one such inlet and had parked where its little
riverlet, Bataka, 'Where the water runs through all year,'  was
most accessible to the road.  Jock didn't have too much trouble
getting Shade out of the car.  Shade was trembling but was able
to balance and to make the walk to the sandy spot on the rocks by
the river.  Flat on their backs on the sandy spot they both took
off their clothes.
     Jock tried to urge Shade into the cold water, into the neck-
deep still pool of it next to the rushing rapids against
boulders, but without success.  So Jock went in himself, for a
cool half-hour, while he watched Shade on the bank stretched out
naked with one arm over his eyes.  At least he wasn't shaking.
     When Jock rejoined him, and lay next to him on their 
stretch of sand, Shade handed him a joint.  He'd dragged the
packet from the glove compartment down with him from the car.
     "Jock, tell me something honestly,"  he begged, as he took
the sloppy joint back from Jock.
     "What should I be honest about?"
     "Have you ever brought women up here, to this very spot. 
Have you ever brought beautiful young white women here and laid
them like they wanted to be laid?  Have your ever done that? 
Right here?"
     Jock took the joint back from Shade.
     "Yes.  So what?"
     "So nothing.  I was just curious.  I thought you had.  It's
just that ... can I ask you another question?"
     Jock passed the joint back to Shade.  He felt refreshed by
the waters of the river.  He was glad he would be doing the
driving the rest of the way in.
     "Of course.  What's your other question?"
     "Your people, as you remember them, did they honor certain
animals as having more ...  power ...  than others?  You follow
the coyote and avoid the bear."
     "Yes.  Bears are bad dead Indians.  How do you know this?"
     "Never mind that.  It's in my memory.  Let me honor you with
a story."
     Shade could barely handle the roach.  Jock squeezed it out
between two fingers and said, "Say it, my brother.  I'm
listening."
     "The problem I have is not with the power of real animals,
not lions and jackals and the like, but with the mythical ones
like came out of the Greeks, you know, the tiger with wings, like
the Minotaur.  I have such a monster pursuing me, but it's my
own, my own beast.  Here, give me another toke and I'll show
you."
     "You've got the joints."
     "Yes, you're right.  I do."  There was one left in the
packet he'd drug down from his car.  He fumbled to light it. 
"Okay, My monster will walk out on the banks of this river now. 
Are you with me?  My monster has moved from the cool shade of the
underbrush and is refreshing his ravenous mouth with water from
this cool stream?  Do you see him?"
     Jock took the last of the rolled joints from Shade and
nodded.
     Shade went on.
     "My monster is named 'FUBAR.' That means 'Fucked Up Beyond
All Recognition.' Look at him! He has the head of a rhinoceros. 
The wings of a doo-doo.  The backbone of a computer network
system.  The brain of an elephant.  And look, on his back ... a
beautiful naked young woman, a white young woman.  Look, look,
it's going to roll on top of her! Do you see?"
     Jock did.  He reached for and pulled Shade off the sand. 
Shade was able to get into his own clothes.  As they hobbled back
to the car Shade exclaimed, "Am I paranoid?  Do you see those
three hawks in the sky?  Are they following me?   I've seen them
overhead for three days."
     There were three hawks in the sky, simple sparrow hawks,
circling as they always did, for prey.  As Jock opened the door
for Shade into his car, he replied, "No.  They're leading you."
     Jock climbed in the other side and turned the key in the
ignition.  Behind him the fubar was quietly resting by the
riverside in the afternoon sun.  The ravaged woman had crawled
off into the underbrush.
     "In circles?"
 
     -} 2.1.3 {-
 
     Shade woke up in darkness and silence.  After a moment of
not knowing where he was, he spelled it out to himself T C A L A
M K I A M A L I.  He was only going around one side of it for the
first time.  He was a million miles from Cacchus and the FBI and
the CIA.  He was closer to but distant from the Arkansas Pacific
mill and the nasty plot there.  He was a stranger in a hidden
valley of peaceful people.  He could smell the cleanness of the
woven blankets he had slept between.  He was not among friends,
but at least among people who would do him no harm.
     The marijuana had been powerful, but it wasn't that.  He was
aware that he had gone through his first DT's, delirium tremens. 
John Blanda, the bartender, had tried to warn him of it,
observing his shaking hand.  The point was that he had gone
through it, and didn't want to again.  The fubar was his.
     An Indian song from down the hall in the house he was in,
intoned by an old man, got him out of bed.  In rudimentary
English it could be translated as follows:
 
     Do not stand by my grave and weep
     I am not there, I do not sleep
     I am a thousand winds that blow
     I am a diamond glint on snow
     I am the sunlight on ripened grain
     I am the gentle Autumn rain.
 
     Jock had left him in his clothes.  His tennis shoes and
socks were beside the bed.  Opening the door he was glad that the
light at the end of the hall was a candle on a small table,
emitting a soft glow.  It illuminated a wooden front door.  He
walked on a brown carpet in the hall that was encrusted with soil
and could smell the woods like at Tabatewi on the promontory
below the HarborView with Chief George.
     Halfway down the hall was a door into another room.  From
there the song had come.  He stopped in front of it and heard
Jock's voice.
     "No, we can trust him."
     "But when you brought him in here he was even more of an
invalid than I am."  It was a weak, cracked voice, struggling for
breath.
     They were talking about him in his absence so he knocked on
the door.  After a moment, Jock opened it a crack, let his eyes
beam in a young male way that was unique to him, and let him in.
     In the bed that abutted the far corner of the room was an
emaciated man, a man Shade could immediately tell was in the last
stages of dying.  He must have been in his forties.  His head
hair was almost gone and, because the blankets exposed his upper
torso, Shade could see the skeleton of his bones through what was
left of the flesh surrounding his chest.  Jock directed Shade to
a ratty, stuffed chair facing the foot of the bed while he jumped
back to sit on a tacky dresser against the wall opposite.  A
candle affixed to a paper plate on the dresser surface next to
him provided the room's light.  Jock used the dresser mirror as
his backrest.
     "Shade, this is Waga Digger.  Digger, this is Shade."
     "What does 'Shade' mean,"  Waga Digger asked, by way of
introduction.  He had pulled the blankets to his neck, with his
arms crossed defensively on top of them over his abdomen.
     "It means shadows."
     "When I was a student at the New York School of Graphic
Design,"  Digger continued, lifting an arm against his pillow, "I
learned that the difference between ordinary people and artists
is that artists can see colors in shadows, but most people only
see shades of grey.  Are there colors behind your name, Shade?"
     "Yes, but I can't name them.  I deal with computers, which
have come up with over three hundred and fifty million 'shades'
of color.  Even an Indian couldn't name all of them."
     "You should see Shade's computer,"  Jock interjected.  "It's
dynamite."
     "Where is it?"  said Digger.
     "Underneath the driver's seat of his car."
     "Go get it,"  directed Shade.  Jock jumped from the dresser
and quickly left the room, but quietly closed the door.
     "What does 'Waga' mean?"  Shade asked when they were alone.
     "Spirit water."
     "What's the difference between spirit water and ordinary
water."
     "Spirit water naturally flows up.  Ordinary water flows
down."
     "What does 'Digger' mean?"
     "Where have you been, Man.  When the Conquistadores first
came here and saw our women rooting for tubers they named us
'Diggers.' That was the first perception of us.  Pre-
agricultural."
     The talk was agitating Digger, so Shade let his breathing
calm down.  Digger had been a handsome man.  He still had an
impressively emphatic boned face, the dark side of which echoed
one who wouldn't mind large gaps of silence in punctuating
conversations.
     "I'm sorry I arrived in such a mess, Waga Digger.  I haven't
had marijuana for at least a couple of years.  It knocked me flat
on my ass."
     "It's not that.  But are you an agent, are you a spy?  What
are you doing here?"
     "Jock brought me here.  He likes my car.  He said he wanted
me to meet a woman, a 'Seedy' ..."
     The breathing became uncontrolled again.  Shade waited until
it came back into balance.
     "What are you dying of?"
     "Of AIDS, complicated by tuberculosis.  What else?
     "So you've come home to die?"
     "This isn't home.  I'm a Yukok, from north of here.  These
are just distant relatives.  These Pomos bury their dead.  I
don't want my body buried.  I want my bones burned."
     Jock came back in with Pistol.  He put it in Shade's lap and
hopped back up onto the dresser, all ears.  Digger used Jock's
re-entrance to direct the subject of conversation back to his
interests.
     "So that's your tool?  Are you with the United States
Government?"
     Shade hit a few keys on Pistol that would tie it back into
the FBI database.  It would only take about fifteen minutes this
time, since he'd cleared the pathway a couple of times earlier in
the week.
     "I'm harmless to you, Digger.  I'm just here to stop
somebody from blowing up the redwood mill in Navion.  Maybe not
even that.  Jock and I started a casual friendship that's growing
into a real one.  He invited me up here.  It was a rough ride for
me."  He paused for the sake of catching his own breath.  "But,
you've been an activist, haven't you?"
     At that, all three of them waited for Digger's breathing to
calm back down to normal again.  Shade was worried now about
Digger's mention of TB.  He hoped the distance between his chair
and Digger's bed was enough for at least immediate hygiene
protection.
     "Yes.  As a young man I participated in the American Indian
Chicago Conference in 1967 -- it created the first Task Force on
Indian Affairs.  I was the first Yurok to graduate from one of
your Ivy League Colleges.  In 1968 I was part of the North
American Education Advisory Committee, which gave us control over
Indian Land Grant Schools.  But I got dissatisfied working with
your government.  I became part of Red Power.  We took Alcatraz
Island in 1969 and held it for two years.  I know Russell Means. 
I am AIM.  You talk about Wounded Knee.  About the Menominees
..."
     Digger, now near delirium, put in a dig: "But you'll know
all about that, won't you, as soon as your machine starts talking
back to you."
     Instead of responding to this, Shade turned to Jock.  "Are
there any Pomos working at the mill?"
     Jock was taken aback.  He had been comfortably perched
against his mirror absorbing the intellectual exchange between
the white and the red man.
     "Yes.  Terry Bed.  He works there."
     " What does he do for the mill, how long?"
     "I don't know.  He works on the line.  About three months. 
I used to do that, after high school."
     "Three months.  Where does he live?"
     "Up in the canyon.
     "At Redwood Arms?"
     "Yes.  With a couple of white jocks."
     "Is that where you became 'Jock?' In high school?"
     "Yeah.  I was good at football.  I played halfback."
     Pistol indicated with a diamond symbol in its upper-right
corner that it had connected.  Shade was back in the FBI filebase
on left-wing organizations.  He called up Waga Digger.
     "Let's see what you guys have on me, Mr. Investigator," 
Digger prodded.
     Shade punched a couple of keys.  "You graduated from
Dartmouth College in 1966, in political science.  You had been
valedictorian at Millville high school, 'A-' average, halfback on
the football team, played Othello as a sophomore.  I like that,
an Indian playing Othello as a sophomore."
     "Yeah, I was a 'Best-and-Brightest' Indian.  That's ancient
history."
     "You graduated with a 'B+' at Dartmouth.  Let's change that.

How about cum laude.  Magna or summa would be suspect."
     "What?"
     "I'm doctoring your record.  Re-touching your picture.  Your
FBI records are going to be your obituary, if anyone is
interested in you as a footnote in history, Waga."
     "Wait a minute.  I see what you're doing.  No, leave my 'B+'
average at Dartmouth.  I was proud of that.  It's a very tough
school.  I don't need that to be 'retouched.' Don't you see,
that's what you guys do, you rewrite everything to make it a
pretty picture."
     "Okay, I won't make any changes you don't want.  After
graduation you were appointed to a Task Force, then to an
Education Advisory Committee.  My God, it actually looks like you
occasionally had the ear of the President.  Let's see, that was
Johnson, then, wasn't it?  Pretty heady stuff for a bright,
scruffy young Yukok from Modoc County, California.  You were born
on Big Sage Reservation.  You were arrested twice in Alturas as a
young teenager, for stealing quarts of bourbon."
     "You have all that?"
     Seeing that Digger was struggling to a seated position, Jock
jumped from his perch and propped a couple of pillows behind him.
     "The FBI opened its file on you for your participation in
the Alcatraz occupation.  I'm scanning what they have on that
now.  There's three of your speeches in front of the Federal
Building in San Francisco spelling out the demands.  Then Wounded
Knee.  They have little on you for the last four years.  Your
file was closed.  The last notations, three medical records,
concern your contracting AIDS.  There is a note, not confirmed,
that you were doing heroin and that you were possibly gay. 
That's the mentality in here, Waga, they no longer considered you
a threat because you were a dying homosexual extinct breed."
     "The terminal assimilation."
     "What interests me is what it was that dropped you out of
the system.  It was a big step from being a member of a Federal
Education Advisory Committee to participating in the illegal
seizure of a closed Federal prison."
     "Doesn't it explain that in there?"
     "There is a notation to the effect that you might have been
influenced by Black Power.  By the Panthers."
     "Is that all there is about that?
     "It's a notation by an anonymous agent.  FBI agents are not
experienced psychologists."
     There was a bustle down the hall, from the front.  Jock
jumped from his perch on the dresser again, and opened the door. 
Shade recognized her shape from having followed her down into the
harbor as she bustled into the room.  She was wearing a tacky Cat
Woman outfit and smelled of an unidentifiable perfume.  She was
short, perhaps five foot two, but buxom, seeming to burst out of
her skin, out of the defenses of the varieties of underwear under
her costume.  She was dark-skinned, but had a face full of
freckles.
     She was, obviously, Seady.
     She sat on the edge of the bed.  Jock went back to his
dresser mirror.
     "What's going on?"  she asked, of anyone in the room.
     It was Shade who came up with an answer.  "I'm reading him
his record.  FBI files."
     "Are you a cop?"
     "Next best thing.  An investigator.  A digger,"  Digger
quipped, crawling back into the depths of his blankets.  Seady
placed her hand on the mound created by one of his legs.
     "Go on then.  Where were you?"
     "I was asking him what it was that led to him to drop out of

and resist the government's efforts."
     "Hah!  Against the Indians, you mean,"  she laughed.
     "Quiet, Seedy.  Let him talk,"  Digger counseled.  He had
placed one hand on top of hers.
     "I'm curious about your experience, Waga, because I'm
walking that line myself.  A few years ago, through what I knew
about computers I embezzled some bank funds.  Not much, just a
couple of million.  But enough to set me up in some tropical
paradise, I thought.  The short end of it is that they caught me
and I've been their tool ever since.  It's either that, or jail
for four or five years.  And I would be an older man when I got
out."
     "So why are they having you track me?"
     "They're not.  Jock offered to take me for a drive today. 
He got me stoned.  I've been sleeping it off.  I woke up and
walked in here when I heard you talking about me.  I only called
up your file for your edification.  That's it.  When I get back
to Navion, I'll print your file out and send it to you.  I assume
Calamamcamali gets mail delivery."
     "No we don't.  We have a PO box in Midville.  PO 239.  Seady
pays for it.  Can you remember that?"
     "Of course.  I'll send you the transcript and you can make
any changes to it you think right, and then send it back to me
and I'll implement them.  Okay?"
     "No you won't.  If your not on my case you'll forget about
all this.  I'll just be another dead Indian in your woods."
     "We'll see.  Meanwhile, one further question.  Were you less
unhappy as a younger man when you were still in the U.S. system
than you have been since you've been fighting it?  I ask that for
personal reasons, should I make that choice."
     Digger lifted his hand from Seady's and draped it over his
forehead.  He was exhausted.
     "No, it never was a question of happiness.  Outside the
system?  There never really was a choice.  Ask your FBI
psychologist.  You'll probably end up like this, if that's what
your real question is."
     Seady terminated the conversation.
     "That's enough.  He needs sleep.  Let's get out of here." 
She slapped Digger on the thighs.  "I'll be back in a few
minutes."
     In the hall, Jock having left through the front door, Seady
put her arms around Shade in a surprise embrace.
     "God, I love that man.  I can't have him because of his
diseases.  But I won't let that stop me."
     Shade still couldn't remember the name of her perfume, but
now he knew what it reminded him of.  Melted crayolas.  Burnt
Amber. 
     As she stripped her body from his, she explained, "Sorry
about my phony get-up.  I just got back from a costume party in
Santa Rosa.  It's an election year, you know.  I raised seven
hundred and fifty dollars!"
     When Shade didn't respond as he walked backward away from
her toward his room, she concluded, "It was good you brought up
his record.  Can I get a lift into Navion tomorrow?  After Jock
shows you around the homestead?"
     "Sure."
      She went back in to console Digger.
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