This is the seventh story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. You can read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.
You won’t understand this. Me and my cousin were trying to learn the language, but there were . . . issues. Some people were with us, and some were against us. The former said anyone who wanted to learn should learn, we didn’t have time to waste, our mother tongue was dying. The others, they said we had too much white blood, we were not dark enough, we acted like we were too good for them! Man. Indian Country. The old guy said that long ago the people were pitiful and it was the wolves that showed us how to live with one another. The vision was one of compassion and order and beauty so fierce I could not grasp it. He told us the word for wolf. Mako’iyii. The old people, the ones who spoke the language, they had an interesting way of saying things. Even though they talked English, you could tell some other part of them was talking another language at the same time, one I should know, but don’t. I guess that’s just how things worked out, isn’t it.
The guy we were talking to, he was one of those old people who always wore a hat. My gram used to wear this bright-yellow broad-brimmed affair of woven straw. You could see her from way off, walking with her cane, and, if you went up to her, no matter how long it had been, she would demand a hug, and she was much stronger than you expected. It was like this. One old guy, he wore these glasses. I don’t know where he got them, they might have been the only pair of their kind on earth. This one time I saw him without them. For a second, I had no idea who he was. It’s not a hat, but you know what I’m saying. Those old people, they’re all gone now. I felt a freedom then, when I was at home and the mountains were there and the indescribable plains were there and the sunsets cast a light so serene over the land—you could think for a moment that everything was O.K. Sometimes, though, at night, I would wake in a proverbial cold sweat, and it seemed I had heard this howling sound, like the way wind sounds as it runs down and through a narrow canyon.
The old guy wore a black cowboy hat, and his face was dark brown and narrow with a long nose and heavy eyelids, and his lips were so dark they took on a purple hue, and he wore black sunglasses even indoors. You had this sense of import when you were around him, he was a line of dark energy running through a room. That’s how the truth feels. But there was this eagle feather in the hat band, and it was too big, it was obscene somehow, but seeing it made you smile. He might have been a cartoon, but then you talked to him and you understood why there was no in-between with him, people loved him or hated him. His hands were big and heavy-seeming and scarred, and he was always clasping them on the table in front of him. You could not look away. Like a lot of men his age, he had been a street fighter when he was young and even when he smiled there was a threat in it. The three of us usually talked at the casino, and the ones who were against us would see us, and they hated it because there was nothing they could say with him around. They didn’t know the language at all, or what they did know they mutilated like someone standing at a butcher’s block holding a cleaver for the first time. He was generous to their faces and laughed at them when they were gone.
Me and my cousin, we spent a lot of time with him, and learned about the old ways and how you might think about things now. There was a lot of talk, how things could be if only x and y. In the end, what I learned is that a language is a way of seeing, and there is almost no way to see in the old way now. Because of the feather, his appearance from a distance was jaunty, a word that has never been used to describe people where I am from. One time we asked him about this idea of indian blood and how we might talk about it in the language, and he thought for a while. He ran the pointer and middle fingers of one hand down the inside of the other forearm—strange how soft the inside of an arm is, you could cut a person wide open—and he said this phrase in the language. I can’t remember it anymore. He told us it meant the government was watching our blood. I felt again the colossal thing looming over us all. I guess you might call it history, but that’s not quite the word, is it. I wanted to throttle the thing with my bare hands, but the past is immune to even our most desperate aggressions and, anyway, I am not the type. The old guy’s last name was Wolf Striker. Or that’s how you say it in English. Sometimes when I was alone at night I would say it in the language—Mako’iyawakkii—and imagine myself in the same place but a very different time.
Listen to me for once. Here is how it works. You look at a thing, and then you look at something else, and when you look back the first thing is different somehow. A value makes its shape known only to the corner of your eye. One day I looked away from the old guy, and when I looked back it was his funeral. I got a call from my uncle. I had gone back to school, I was in a study carrel, reading a text on Indigenous plant medicines written by a professor from Sweden. I was broke, but my auntie gave me gas money to go home. The funeral was one of those things you may not see again. The priest had tried to come in, and there was a fight in front of the building where the bodies are put out, because the old guy had said there should be no priest. I knew why he said it, and I knew that I would say the same whenever my time was near. The church has had us in a choke hold for a long time now. Someone had one-punched Father Allen and laid him out flat on the sidewalk, and then another guy stepped in and really put the boots to him. You knew it was a story that would never go away, that cocksucker on the ground with his broken glasses, crying out, Please God! Inside, the old guy’s body was in the casket, and his arms were crossed over his chest, and his best boots, the black ones with the embroidered flowers, were on his feet, and the black cowboy hat was off to one side but the feather was missing. Some of the people who were against us were at the funeral, and they said how sorry they were he was gone they were so sorry they had never been this sorry. He was the last great speaker of our language, etc. I watched them go one by one to the mike near the casket, and while they spoke I invited my most murderous thoughts to join me. Then I dropped out of college. Phone calls, e-mails, letters came, even a text. (Hi K____! Your absence from Twentieth-Century U.S. History is noticeable. . . .) I ignored them all. There was nothing left in me. I told family and relatives the things he had taught me and my cousin. This idea of indian blood, I said, half this and a quarter that. It’s just more white-man bullshit. This isn’t our way! But no one cared. One of my cousins listened for a while and then bummed a twenty spot. When I went back to school the next year, I don’t know. There was this white girl in my tribal-sovereignty course. I tried to talk indian law with her, but she just wanted to talk traditional foods. One night she offered profound and considered commentary on the situation. You look white to me, she said. After that I thought often about taking her back to the reservation. We would go to Big Bear Alley, where everyone who lives on the street sleeps in the summer. I would say, This one here and that one there and this one over here who looks sorta like me—these are my relatives. Is that authentic enough, I would say. Does that meet your criteria, you fucking bitch.
The dreams came back for a while. I dropped out for good. Things really do end. Sometimes, when there is no moon and the soft starry arc of the mako’iyo”so’koi is cast across the sky like a mother’s arms and I cannot sleep, I drive to a spot on the flats where you can hear the wolves. I roll down my window and listen. They come sleek and systematic and regal down from the mountains and through the canyons, and some of them howl while the others assert themselves over the coyotes and ranch dogs who yelp and cry out in the dark. You would not believe the sound. In my head I can still hear his voice. Out on the flats it is an absolute slaughter. 
“Wolves,” by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain
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