Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

“Look at the Indian!” someone shouted. “Look at the Indian on the rawhide sled!”

“What Indian? I don’t see no Indian!”

“He’s takin’ a magic-carpet ride!”

“That’s no Indian I’ve ever seen before!”

“He’s a Blackfoot, a genuine Blackfoot!”

“Here comes the Blackfoot!” went the shout up the line of spectators. “Get ready for the Blackfoot!”

John-John waved, unperturbed, and a good number of people waved back, grinning as if he were a fine joke on them as well as on himself. The hi-ya, ho-ya of the tomtomming, dancing Indians behind the travois seemed to him a kind of good-natured complimentary laughter. John-John kept waving.

Periodically he would crane his head around to watch the twitchy hindquarters of Richard Standing Elk’s pony, to study the design on the buffalo-skin shield tied high up on its butt. The ride aboard the sledge was a herky-jerky, stop-and-go business, but he never once thought about jumping off and walking. He was having too much fun.

“The Blackfoot! Here comes the Blackfoot!”

Afterward, when the Griers, the Rivenbarks, and the Monegals had all reunited with both Anna and John-John, Hugo took the boy aside and asked him if he had minded the shouts of the people along the route.

“No.”

“Good. It didn’ mean anythin’, you know.”

“I know.”

“You’re a very wise fellow, Juanito. Sometimes I think you’re six goin’ on sixty.” And he led the boy back to the Griers and the other members of the family.

One afternoon when John-John was seven, he found Pete Grier and his adoptive father in the backyard making plans for a hunting trip. His sister Anna, then twelve, was languidly pumping herself back and forth in the swing that Pete had hung in the maple near a neighbor’s fence. Ignoring her, John-John climbed into the bed of Pete’s pickup truck, a battered red GM with a gun rack across the rear window, to watch Pete struggling with a screwdriver to mount a spotlight on the vehicle’s cab. The enthusiasm of the men’s talk seemed premature, for it was nearly four months until either deer or elk season. Gesturing with the screwdriver, Pete described a stretch of hilly territory not too far from Cheyenne where it would be easy to sight, hypnotize, and drop a pretty little whitetail deer. A hatrack, he emphasized; not a doe.

One helluva hatrack.

“Hypnotize?” Hugo wondered aloud.

Pete patted the spotlight, glanced over his shoulder, and winked at John-John. “You like deer meat, don’t you, Johnny? Missed not havin’ any over the winter, I’ll bet.”

The previous autumn Pete and Hugo had gone on a three-day hunting expedition in the vicinity of Eight Mile Lakes, a trip that Lily had permitted only because straight-arrow Hugo had ridden along as a watchdog. The men had come home bruised, flatulent, and empty-handed, and Pete’s disappointment over their failure still ran deep. An entire winter without venison.

“I want to go too!” shouted Anna from across the yard. She jumped from the swing and came trotting across the dappled grass to the pickup’s tailgate. In jeans, sneakers, and a green University of Wyoming sweatshirt she looked like a fragile ballerina kidnapped from her dance troupe and disguised by her abductors in urban-cowgirl garb. “I want to go too,” she repeated, more sedately.

“Go where?” Hugo demanded.

“Poaching. With you and Pete and John-John.”

Hugo made up some sort of story for Jeannette, and at seven o’clock that evening Pete drove him and the kids out State Highway 211 toward Federal on the way to Horse Creek. Anna and John-John rode in the back, huddled against each other under a musty patchwork quilt. Beneath them was an army blanket that Anna had folded double and anchored in place with a fishing-tackle box and a Styrofoam cooler laden with Pepsi-Cola cans, a jar of mayonnaise, a loaf of bread, and a package of bologna. The sky over this desert of tufted flatness was so big that it seemed to tent the world. Twilight edged over into dusk, and the air slipstreaming around the cab of the truck grew chillier and chillier. When stars began to wink palely in the dusk, pinpoints of sequin dazzle in the Wyoming Big Top, Anna fetched a package of Fritos from under the quilt and shoved it under John-John’s nose.

“Here, have some!” she cried.

John-John stuffed himself. Corn chips bulged his cheeks, poked brittle ends against his tongue and palate. Their saltiness summoned his saliva, and he ground the baked corn meal to a gritty paste on the crowns of his hindmost teeth. Anna, laughing, thrust the package at him again, urged him to take more.

They fed each other. Finally, the truck whirring west-by-north under a milkweed scatter of stars, they began lifting corn chips out of the sack and flinging them into the roar of the back-blasting wind.

Corn chips flew kamikaze missions into the night. They struck the tailgate and scuttled back and forth across the corrugated loadbed like tiny autumn leaves. They sailplaned and loop-de-looped.

Wearying of this game, Anna began brushing Frito crumbs onto her lips, leaning over her brother, and depositing them on his mouth with her tongue. This was so funny that they sputtered in each other’s faces, unable to get serious again. Mock-kiss followed mock-kiss, corn-chip debris granulating on their mouths, sticking to their forgers, transferring like sticky pollen to their clothes. Their hilarity increased, and they rocked from side to side in each other’s arms.

Thump, thump, thump.

Craning their heads, they saw Hugo gesturing angrily at them from the cab of the truck. He was rapping on the window glass and staring apoplectically sidelong, his face grotesque. The truck rumbled onto the shoulder of the highway and ground to a bumpy halt.

A moment later Hugo put his hands on the sideboard and subjected the children to a powerful scolding, the gist of which dealt with the unseemliness of sultry displays of affection between brothers and sisters.

Anna, aggrieved, protested that they were only “messing around,” but Hugo cut short her argument by banging on the side of the truck and resuming his lecture. Pete Grier, after easing himself out of the cab and leaning over the opposite gunwale, observed that kids seemed to be “starting younger every year.”

“Criminy!” Anna exclaimed, outraged. “Boy, do you guys ever have sick minds!”

Before Hugo could lay into Anna for this impertinence, a set of headlights flashed into view behind them and bore steadily up the highway toward Pete’s truck. When this vehicle pulled abreast of them, they could see that it belonged to the state highway patrol. Pete cursed under his breath.

“Everything all right?” called the trooper, leaning toward his passenger window. “Need a lift or a tow truck?”

“No, no,” Hugo replied. “Jus’ had to get my kids settled. We’re doin’ jus’ fine.”

The trooper went on his way, having defused Hugo’s anger by scaring him to death.

To give the patrol car time to draw off toward Chugwater, Anna made sandwiches for Pete and Hugo.

Neither she nor John-John could eat another bite, but they each downed a soft drink and washed off their hands in the ice water in the bottom of the Styrofoam cooler. Eventually, Pete again felt brave enough to put their poaching operation back on Go, and they forsook the highway’s shoulder for the highway itself. John-John watched the corn chips dancing on the loadbed.

The truck bounced over a cattle guard and turned onto a rutted access road blockaded by a barbed-wire gate. Pete opened the gate, Hugo drove the truck through, and Pete returned to the driver’s seat. John-John and Anna felt the metal beneath them vibrating as the pickup, tilting first to one side and then the other, climbed an easy grade through empty pasturage.