beneath the white cloth. One of the helpers, a fat one, was breathing hard and grumbling in the French tongue. The other one was tall and thin and bent over the platform, pushing it slowly and quietly, indifferent to the fat one’s complaints.
As Charging Elk watched the strange procession make its way to the yellow-lit room, he felt his whole body shiver, as though he had once again pulled himself out of the icy river in his country. For the past two sleeps, he had again harbored a desperate hope that someone from the show would come and get him; or that the two men, the American and the Frenchman, would take him home across the big water. But now, seeing the dead body spooked him and he thought that he would get sick again, that this healing house was really a deathhouse, and the only way he would leave it would be on a rolling platform covered with a white cloth.
He thought of poor wretched Featherman. To die here alone! What would happen to his nagi, his spirit? How would it find its way to the other side, to the real world beyond this one? And what about himself? His own nagi would run restless over the land here, far from his people, far from the real world. He could not stay here, waiting to die. He would not wait. With the help of Wakan Tanka, he would find his own way home.
As Charging Elk threw on his robe and slipped his feet into the fuzzy shoes, the thought struck him that the Wild West show was still on this side of the big water. They were going to tour all winter and summer, even until next winter—that’s what the white bosses told him when he drew his name on the paper back at Pine Ridge. Maybe they weren’t so far away. Maybe they would come back for him. If he left this sickhouse, how would they find him?
He sat down on the edge of the bed. His ribs didn’t hurt so much now. He took a deep breath, then sighed, caught somewhere between hope and despair. He thought of his mother and father and their little shack; he thought of his dear friend Strikes Plenty, and their wanderings in Paha Sapa; and he thought of the old wiccua wakan at the Stronghold, who had prepared him so well for his han-blechia. He trembled to think that he had lost possession of his badger-claw necklace, his war medicine. He had no power. But that wasn’t true—he had his death song. If he sang it well at the proper time, there was a chance that his spirit would make it to the other side, even if he didn’t.
Charging Elk stood and looked down toward the room with the yellow light. He had made his decision. He wouldn’t stay in this deathhouse one more sleep. As he walked silently between the rows of beds in the other direction, he felt alert and expectant.
He crept down the dim hall to the room with the clothes, flattening himself into doorways, looking, listening, but he saw and heard nothing. He began to feel lucky, just as he had that night he and Strikes Plenty had sneaked into the gold miners’ tent while they slept and stolen their rifles, a box of bullets, and their work boots. Charging Elk smiled in the dim light, and it was his first smile in many sleeps. He smiled to remember that several miles away they had thrown the boots into a ravine. They had laughed to think of the miners waking up and trying to find those boots. Then discovering that their rifles were also missing.
Charging Elk wished that Strikes Plenty were with him now. Together, they would know how to get back to their country. Strikes Plenty was good at finding his way home to the Stronghold.
The door to the clothes room was closed, and Charging Elk’s heart fell down for a moment. He knew that the white people liked to keep things locked up, that they stole from each other whether they were enemies or not. He was almost resigned to returning to his bed but he grasped the knob and turned it and his luck held. The door swung open with a soft creak. Charging Elk quickly slipped inside the room and fastened the door behind him. The click sounded very loud to him.
The room was pitch-black and Charging Elk stood for a moment, not breathing but listening. The shoes these wasichus wore made loud noises and you could hear them from a long way off. But he heard nothing and as he stared into the darkness, he wondered how the white men made the yellow wires glow. He felt to one side of him and grabbed a heavy cloth object. It was hanging from one of the sloped wires that they used for coats. It was a coat. Charging Elk shrugged out of his robe and put the coat on. But the shoulders were too small and his arms stuck out of the sleeves.
Charging Elk was a big man, one or two inches over six feet. He and the other Oglalas had towered over the small people of this city. The people here were shorter than the ones in Paris—and darker. Rocky Bear, who had toured much with Buffalo Bill and considered himself plenty savvy, said these people came from a jungle in another land. The people in Paris and New York and another city he had been to, London, were the true wasicuns.
Charging Elk finally found a coat that would almost fit him—roomy enough in the shoulders and the sleeves only a little short. It was a heavy coat, and he was grateful as he remembered how cold it had been that night in the arena when he had gotten sick.
He moved deeper into the room but now he couldn’t see a thing. He walked back to the door and, after listening for a moment, opened it a crack and let the dull glow from the hall in. Then he moved back, brushing his fingers along the coats, until he found a series of shelves. And here he found the other things he was looking for. He tried on four of the white men’s trousers until he found a pair that again almost fit him. They were a little loose, so he took the cord from the robe and tied it around his middle. He searched for the other things that the wasicuns wore—the shirts and shoes—but all he found was a round brimless hat. He was grateful for it, because he had been thinking that his long hair, which was now loose, would attract attention when he got outside. Now he tucked his hair as best as he could under the soft hat until it bloomed like a black bladder on his head.
He was ready. He had no shirt, but the striped gown, tucked into the pants, looked almost presentable. He would have to make do with the fuzzy slippers on his bare feet.
Charging Elk’s escape was surprisingly easy. At that hour, the big room was empty, save for one couple and a woman. The couple were staring out the window at the dark street and the woman had her head down, asleep. A basket lay on the soft seat beside her, and she held two needles. Charging Elk had seen women in Paris making thick cloth with the two needles as they sat in cafés or parks.
There was only one head behind the tall platform and it was bent over. A light came from somewhere behind the platform. Charging Elk crouched and sneaked close beneath the lip of the platform. He could tell that the head was that of a woman by the smell. Once past the platform, he turned a corner, stood tall, and walked quickly out of the deathhouse into the cold night.
As he gulped in the sharp air, he looked up and down the street and, for the first time in a long time, he wanted a smoke.
CHAPTER TWO
Charging Elk spent his first night of freedom in a narrow alley behind a bread bakery that fronted on the street two blocks from the sickhouse. The smell of the baking bread made him hungry, and he remembered those times in Paris when he and some of his friends would go to such a house to buy the puffy things filled with fruit or chocolate. Boulangerie. It was one of the words he recognized. And charcuterie, where they would buy sticks of greasy meat. Brasserie and café. The interpreters always named things.
He had found a place near the building where the warm air came out to the alley through a wooden grate. He had to be careful because there was a small door that was open, in spite of the December cold. Once he saw a cigarette arc out of the doorway and land, a small orange glow, on the rough cobblestones. By the time he thought it was safe to retrieve it, the fire was gone. It was still night, but Charging Elk could sense,
