The Shadow Catcher

He drops his head as if in search of something in himself and then he goes and gently takes his father’s hand in his and I have to close my eyes. Because this is the moment, in the nation where I live, where we’ve become conditioned to expect the unrealistic ending, the Happy one, where, if this were a movie that my nation routinely makes, the father would return to life, respond, squeeze his son’s hand in his, wake up and reconcile their shattered past, but when I open my eyes again the Colonel is still there, his hand around his father’s unresponsive one, his act of touch a one-way communication, like a prayer, or like looking at a photograph, as empty or as full as visiting a grave. There is only ever one answer to the question what did you do with your life, and it’s the same — fleeting and unknowable — for every one of us.

I lived.

the shadow catcher

Before the Train, the grasslands teemed with herds of buffalo so thick and mythic in their numbers it was said that when they ran they ran as thunder raining on the earth. The men who hunted them could hear them coming miles away, could feel the ground around them shake and rumble with their roar as they barreled past, and maybe that’s the sound I think I hear inside a train, the sound of animals, a sound the living earth once made, a plaint, the sound of history’s demand to be remembered.

Or maybe I just love the sound the whistle makes, that twisted chord, rooted in C major or B minor but ranging, concordantly, some nights, to the uncharted note of the undiluted wanderlust that springs from sadness.

This is, singularly, a North American note, a U.S. of A. site-specific sound.

European trains sound like audible Twinkies, air-infused and artificial.

But an American, running like an unchained herd of half-a-ton horned animals across a plain, well, my friend, that’s show biz, rock ’n’ roll and jazz and ska and rap and Beat and MGM all tied into one:

The sound my nation makes.

And I can tell that Lester is trying to keep me from the road because he keeps bringing up new subjects for discussion.

“My daughter’s coming home tomorrow.”

“Lucky you,” I say. “I’d like to meet her.”

I’m already in the driver seat and he’s standing by the passenger side, in the hospital parking lot. He hands me a business card from his daughter’s craft cooperative through the open sunroof.

“I’ll take her to Clarita’s. Catalogue what’s there. She can give Clarita good advice.” He looks off to the horizon, then continues: “I was supposed to go out to the Paiute reservation this afternoon. See some craft people there. But I’ll go see Clarita, too. She’s upset there won’t be any funeral.”

“Colonel’s decision, Lester.”

“I know…”

He hands me another card on which he’s written his mailing address and phone number.

“You should come and visit. Maybe in the spring. At shearing.”

I blush because I realize I’ve never asked him what he does, how he makes a living, I had committed the classic Anglo thing, consigning Lester to the job of being Indian, as if his race were his profession.

“I farm sheep.”

“—of course you do.” What better shepherd do I know? “I’m great with sheep,” I lie.

He sees right through me, I can tell, because next he says, “You’ll have to change the book.”

I’m not sure what he means until he adds, “The truth about your Mr. Curtis.”

“‘Print the legend.’” I recite.

“Truth is better.”

“—whose?”

He nods in recognition and then tells me, “Some things are not open to interpretation.”

“A person’s life, Lester.”

“What were these fellows looking for, do you think?”

By “fellows” I guess he means Curtis and Edwards.

But he may also mean my father.

“I don’t know. Are you going to try to tell me they were searching for the Truth?”

He shakes his head.

“I think it’s impossible to know another person’s motives. Practically impossible to really know our own,” I tell him.

“Maybe,” he concedes. “When you come to my place I’ll take you to see the Lands. And then you’ll make a Vision Quest.”

“That is something that I promise we will do,” I pledge.

He sets a bundle wrapped in newsprint on the seat beside me.

“Medicine smoke. Branches from the land I live on. Find some place on your journey home and stop. And set these leaves on fire. Some place where you can be reminded of your friend. And of our friendship.”

The packet has already perfumed my car with piñon, sage and mesquite, and as I head out for the road I’m enveloped in an incense that evokes a certain kind of West, high desert, the West made famous by the movies — Red Rock, Monument Valley — Navajo Land.