“No such thing,” said Whiskey Jack. “Never any such thing. We’ll go to my place. You want a beer?”
He guessed he would like a beer, at that. “Sure.”
“Get me one too. There’s a cooler outside the door,” said Whiskey Jack, and he pointed. They were in his shack.
Shadow opened the door to the shack with hands it seemed to him he had not possessed moments before. There was a plastic cooler filled with chunks of river-ice out there, and, in the ice, a dozen cans of Budweiser. He pulled out a couple of cans of beer and then sat in the doorway and looked out over the valley.
They were at the top of a hill, near a waterfall, swollen with melting snow and runoff. It fell, in stages, maybe seventy feet below them, maybe a hundred. The sun reflected from the ice which sheathed the trees that overhung the waterfall basin. The churning noise as the water crashed and fell filled the air.
“Where are we?” asked Shadow.
“Where you were last time,” said Whiskey Jack. “My place. You planning on holding on to my Bud till it warms up? They aren’t good like that.”
Shadow stood up and passed him the can of beer. “You didn’t have a waterfall outside your place last time I was here,” he said.
Whiskey Jack said nothing. He popped the top of the Bud, and drank half the can in one long slow swallow. Then he said, “You remember my nephew? Harry Bluejay? The poet? He traded his Buick for your Winnebago. Remember?”
“Sure. I didn’t know he was a poet.”
Whiskey Jack raised his chin and looked proud. “Best damn poet in America,” he said.
He drained the rest of his can of beer, belched, and got another can, while Shadow popped open his own can of beer, and the two men sat outside on a rock, by the pale green ferns, in the morning sun, and they watched the falling water and they drank their beer. There was still snow on the ground, in the places where the shadows never lifted.
The earth was muddy and wet.
“Harry was diabetic,” continued Whiskey Jack. “It happens. Too much. You people came to America, you take our sugar cane, potatoes and corn, then you sell us potato chips and caramel popcorn, and we’re the ones who get sick.” He sipped his beer, reflecting. “He’d won a couple of prizes for his poetry. There were people in Minnesota who wanted to put his poems into a book. He was driving to Minnesota in a sports car to talk to them. He had traded your ’Bago for a yellow Miata. The doctors said they think he went into a coma while he was driving, went off the road, ran the car into one of your road signs. Too lazy to look at where you are, to read the mountains and the clouds, you people need road signs everywhere. And so Harry Bluejay went away forever, went to live with brother Wolf. So I said, nothing keeping me there any longer. I came north. Good fishing up here.”
“I’m sorry about your nephew.”
“Me too. So now I’m living here in the north. Long way from white man’s diseases. White man’s roads. White man’s road signs. White man’s yellow Miatas. White man’s caramel popcorn.”
“White man’s beer?”
Whiskey Jack looked at the can. “When you people finally give up and go home, you can leave us the Budweiser breweries,” he said.
“Where are we?” asked Shadow. “Am I on the tree? Am I dead? Am I here? I thought everything was finished. What’s real?”
“Yes,” said Whiskey Jack.
“Yes? What kind of an answer is Yes?”
“It’s a good answer. True answer, too.”
Shadow said, “Are you a god as well?”
Whiskey Jack shook his head. “I’m a culture hero,” he said. “We do the same shit gods do, we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They tell stories about us, but they tell the ones which make us look bad along with the ones where we came out fairly okay.”
“I see,” said Shadow. And he did see, more or less.
“Look,” said Whiskey Jack. “This is not a good country for gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found the earth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: who’s going to worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through with more needles than a pincushion. He’d argue with rocks and the rocks would win.
“So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there’s something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it’s always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn’t need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it. It gave us salmon and corn and buffalo and passenger pigeons. It gave us wild rice and walleye. It gave us melon and squash and turkey. And we were the children of the land, just like the porcupine and the skunk and the blue jay.”
He finished his second beer and gestured toward the river at the bottom of the waterfall. “You follow that river for a way, you’ll get to the lakes where the wild rice grows. In wild rice time, you go out in your canoe with a friend, and you knock the wild rice into your canoe, and cook it, and store it, and it will keep you for a long time. Different places grow different foods. Go far enough south there are orange trees, lemon trees, and those squashy green guys, look like pears—”
“Avocados.”
“Avocados,” agreed Whiskey Jack. “That’s them. They don’t grow up this way. This is wild rice country. Moose country. What I’m trying to say is that America is like that. It’s not good growing country for gods. They don’t grow well here. They’re like avocados trying to grow in wild rice country.”
“They may not grow well,” said Shadow, remembering, “but they’re going to war.”
That was the only time he ever saw Whiskey Jack laugh. It was almost a bark, and it had little humor in it. “Hey, Shadow,” said Whiskey Jack. “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?”
“Maybe.” Shadow felt good. He didn’t think it was just the beer. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so alive, and so together.
“It’s not going to be a war.”
“Then what is it?”
Whiskey Jack crushed the beer can between his hands, pressing it until it was flat. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the waterfall. The sun was high enough that it caught the waterfall spray: a rainbow nimbus hung in the air. Shadow thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
“It’s going to be a bloodbath,” said Whiskey Jack, flatly.
Shadow saw it then. He saw it all, stark in its simplicity. He shook his head, then he began to chuckle, and he shook his head some more, and the chuckle became a full-throated laugh.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine,” said Shadow. “I just saw the hidden Indians. Not all of them. But I saw them anyhow.”
“Probably Ho Chunk, then. Those guys never could hide worth a damn.” He looked up at the sun. “Time to go back,” he said. He stood up.
“It’s a two-man con,” said Shadow. “It’s not a war at all, is it?”
Whiskey Jack patted Shadow’s arm. “You’re not so dumb,” he said.