Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"New Year’s I know about. What do they do on New Year’s?"

"They used to strangle a white dog and hang it on a pole."

"The usual."

"And then they’d have the guessing of dreams."

"That sounds like fun. Did you just have a dream?"

"Yes."

"Can I guess it?"

"No."

As they walked through the cool night air toward the low building, the music seemed to grow louder. The doors, one on each end of the building, kept opening to let more people inside, and each time a light would shine out into the darkness and the sound of the singing would rise. The beat of the drums and the squash-shell rattles were amplified by the thumping of hundreds of feet.

When they reached the edge of the light shining from the doorway, Felker stood still and listened. "Getting shy?" Jane asked.

"A little." The music changed. It slowed down, and this time a lone male voice that reminded Felker of a zydeco singer, with breaks and falls in his clear baritone, sang, "Ya ha we ya ha!" and the two or three hundred voices, men and women and children, chanted, "Ha ha." "I’ve got to wonder what they’re going to think of me."

She reached out and touched him. She put her arm through his and gently tugged him toward the building. "Think of it as a Polish wedding. Everybody is welcome and everybody is here."

He started to walk along with her again. "That I can understand. Just like in St. Louis."

"Not like St. Louis," she said. "This is Poland."

The door swung open and they were inside. The room was a big public meeting hall, with benches along one wall but bare otherwise. The people were in four giant moving circles, one inside the other. As the outer circle passed by them, here and there a brown face would grin at Jane or a head would toss its long black hair to reveal glittering almond eyes that focused on her and only passed shyly across Felker. But there were other faces he would not have expected to see here— people with white skin and light hair who didn’t look any more like Indians than he did. He started to feel less conspicuous.

Jane tugged his arm again to pull his head closer and said into his ear, "Remember, Polish wedding. Join the fun and you’re a guest. Stand around and you’re a stranger."

Felker took a deep breath and stepped forward to enter the outer circle, but once again Jane held his arm. "Boys in front, girls in back." She pushed him into the line in the middle of a string of men. Three little girls who had seen him try to step in among them giggled, careful not to look at him. He saw Jane slip into an inner line between Mattie Wilson and a woman in her late twenties, who looked over her shoulder to clasp Jane’s hand and then release it. They danced until people were hot and winded, and then the leader stopped singing.

Suddenly, Felker heard an unearthly noise, like a dozen men growling and bellowing. The drums started again, and people grinned and backed off the floor. A strong hand gripped his arm. He turned to see an old man with skin like the brown leather on Jane’s bag. He was grinning so his black eyes narrowed. "Come on," the old man said. "You’ll get trampled."

Felker walked with the old man to the bench by the wall. "I’m Basil Henrick," said the old man.

"John Felker." He shook the old man’s hand.

The door on the east end of the building flew open and ten men danced into the room wearing dark blue carved wooden masks with pointed leather ears and tufts of fur on top, huge eyes, and big teeth. They grumbled and grunted, bent over and glared at the people gathered around the walls. As he watched, he saw one of them pass Jane, who was on the other side of the building with about five young women. Some of the women wore Indian skirts with elaborate embroidered pictures on them and a loose red tunic above, dangling earrings, and big silver brooches like plates. Others were dressed like Midwestern farm girls after church, in modest dresses, skirts, and sweaters. They all seemed amused by the men in the masks, who were now roaring and grunting as they danced.

"This is the Buffalo Dance," said Basil Henrick.

"Buffalo Dance?" said Felker. "I didn’t know there were buffalo around here."

This seemed to please Basil Henrick. "There weren’t. War parties ran into herds of buffalo around the Kentucky salt lick." He stared at the dancers and nodded his head to the beat of the drums. "They said, ’What in the hell are those?’ Couldn’t get over it."

Felker found himself smiling. "What were they doing way down there?"

"Fighting Cherokees. They fought pretty regularly everywhere from Maine to South Carolina, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. Any place farther than that, I figure they just went once in a while to steal women." The old man looked at Felker. "You know Janie from college?"

"No," said Felker. "I met her through a mutual friend."

"Yeah," said Basil. "You look over there at Janie, the first thing you notice ain’t her mind. You don’t say, ’Now, there’s a scholar.’ " He gave a hoot, then said, "Her daddy used to bring her up here when she was little. They’d go up to Toronto and see a show or something and then come down here and put on the blanket and be Indians again. Fine man. When he fell, must have been five or six hundred people went to the mourning council down in Tonawanda."

"Fell? What do you mean?"

"He was working a construction job. Big bridge out west somewhere. A cable snapped and down he went."

"Terrible," said Felker.

"It’s good money, and the Iroquois crews have always been able to get work because we’re not afraid of heights, but people die."

"You’re really not afraid of heights?"

Basil shrugged. "I sure as hell am. I was a railroad man myself. I got to see plenty, but I saw it from ground level. I think the part about not being afraid is bullshit. An Iroquois just trains himself to tolerate it. They used to say a warrior needed a skin seven thumbs thick." He pinched his arm. "Mine is maybe five thumbs thick."

The buffalo dancers danced out the door to cheers from the crowd.

"She putting you up at Jimmy’s?"

"Yes," said Felker.

"I figured. Mattie loves to have young people around."

"Has she brought other people for visits? I mean, strangers?"

Basil looked at him slyly. "Can’t say."

The drums grew louder, there were rattles and clicking sticks, and the door flew open again. This time it was twenty-five men, all in breechcloths and paint, wearing feathers and bells on their knees, ankles, and arms. The dance was quick with sharp, violent movements, and the music was different now.

"What’s this one?" asked Felker.

"War Dance. The Wa-sa-seh, that’s the real name. It means Sioux dance. I figure when Great-Great-Grandpa had fought his way past the Mississippi, that’s who he ran into in the open country. It made an impression."

"They lost?"

"My guess is that’s an understatement. A war party that far out was probably no more than thirty fellows. On the average day out there, it wouldn’t have been too hard to run into a couple hundred Sioux warriors out for their morning pony ride, and those guys weren’t about to take any shit from us. Grandpa probably beat it back to the woods as quick as he could."

"You sound like you wish you’d seen it."

"With binoculars," said Basil. "Not up close. In the good old days, sometime around 1650, they took a census. They put one kernel of corn in a big basket for each person. That would have been maybe seventeen or eighteen thousand people. Throw in the rest of the Iroquois tribes, it was maybe fifty thousand. That’s not a lot to fight the whole world."

When the warriors disappeared, Felker looked for Jane, but he couldn’t pick her out in the crowd. Two men walked to the middle of the floor and sat down face to face, with a drum and a pair of rattles. They sat quietly talking to each other for a few seconds, and nobody paid much attention to them beyond not stepping on them. Finally, the drum and the rattles started, the two men nodding their heads together to keep time, and at an invisible signal they began to sing.