The Spirit

The dog accompanied the Indian up the highway, where they found a small, tattered grocery store with a sign reading THE PICNIC PLACE. As the Indian closed the fly-specked door, a bell tinkled. Fluorescent light reflected off the polished steel-­and-­glass shelves, making him squint.

Behind the iron cash register sat a hefty middle-­aged woman with red cheeks, silver-­gray hair in a tight bun, and small eyes behind silvery steel-­rimmed glasses. She looked at the Indian. Then she lowered her movie maga­zine and put one hand under the counter. The Indian guessed she had a gun there.

“Morning,” she said cordially enough. “Didn’t hear your car.”

“Ain’t got a car,” said the Indian with a rusty, unused voice. He had spoken aloud to no one but the dog in a long time. The dog bristled in the unaccustomedly tight surroundings of the store as the Indian gathered some chocolate bars and a plastic-­wrapped package of salami. “I’d like some of this stuff.”

He poked through the medicine bundle until he found a greasy billfold. Dried corn clattered to the floor as he took it out. The woman stared at him as he counted out change. She kept one hand under the counter and ran the cash register with the other. “One seventy-­five. There we go.”

“Thanks.” The Indian watched her put the food in a small bag and staple it shut, with the register tape around the top.

“You from around here?”

“No, ma’am. Montana.”

She became interested. “You from up around Browning?”

“No, ma’am. Stevensville.”

“Oh yeah. Flathead country. You a Flathead?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Within the woman caution struggled against a human need to break her solitude. Even an Indian was better company than nobody. “Now my husband, Jack, was interested in Indians right up till he died. He collected arrowheads.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The Indian headed for the door.

“He was good with a bow and arrow. You any good with that one?”

“I’m getting better,” he answered. “Thanks, ma’am.”

“Watch out for the Bigfoot. Bunch of kids say they saw one around the Nooksack River.”

The Indian’s hand was on the door when the word detonated in his skull like a bombshell. Big Foot! The legendary chief of the Minneconjou Sioux who died at Wounded Knee with Sitting Bull.

Was that his spirit?

The woman saw his expression change. Her hand went back under the counter. “It’s just a joke. Bunch of kids with more beer in their guts than brains in their heads.”

The Indian searched her whitening face for some clue to her character. Was she lying? Trying to separate him from his spirit? His grandfather’s spirit had been a human, after all. And when he had first seen the giant he had thought it was a man. The mission-­school priests had solemnly warned him about the ways of the devil, who captured human souls and made them lie. He had had a bellyful of religion from them during all those years in school. But maybe they were right; maybe there was some truth to it.

Or maybe she was not lying. Maybe she spoke the truth and was giving him a clue of some kind. It was not the first time that he wondered exactly what his spirit was.

“Yes, ma’am,” the Indian said, relaxing. “Kids are crazy, ain’t they.” He closed the door gently behind him.

Night.

It was ten o’clock by the stars when the Indian crumpled his last candy-­bar wrapper, stuffed it into the sack, and threw the bag away. He watched the lights go off in the trailers. Somewhere a country-­music station played loudly; the sound was punctuated by bursts of laughter.

The dog joined him at the top of the slope. The spirit was awake at last. He had summoned the dog an hour before, to issue instructions. The crickets were quiet, a sure sign that it was walking.

The Indian was still thinking about the encounter with the woman. “I wish he’d just let me close to him sometime,” he murmured to the dog. “Just to see him good. He’s big, you know. Maybe he was a chief or something. Maybe he was a man once after all.”

The dog growled. The Indian was keyed up. Tonight would be the first time in a long while that he had seen the spirit at all.

The moon surged from behind a cloud, flooding thin, cold light over the woods. The dog woofed.

The spirit was already in the trailer park. He was pulling cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, carrots, lettuce heads out of the vegetable garden and shoving them, dripping with dirt, down his mouth, in full view of whoever cared to look out a window.

For a few seconds while the grunting spirit gobbled away, the Indian was paralyzed with shock and disgust. He rose to his feet with a trembling finger, pointing at the trailers. “He’s—he’s—” Words slithered between the interstices of the Indian’s teeth. “Goddamn him! Get him out of there!”

The dog ran down the slope. A watchdog began barking in the trailer park. Lights came on in the trailer adjacent to the garden.