“Changing Roads”: a story by Jeanette Weaskus
Raven Chronicles Literary Press nominated 6 poems & prose works for the 2019 Pushcart Prize, XLIV Edition. This is one of the nominated pieces:
Changing Roads
He scanned the bar for prey and was thankful for the many party girls to choose from that were always plentiful on Friday nights. The older ones were easy to get although they did not taste as good and were often guarded by younger nieces who watched over their vulnerable aunties with the fierce vigilance found in Native kinship that he did not care to engage. When he could find an older party girl that was alone it was her misfortune to become the nourishment for his body. The older women knew the traditional ways of the drunken dance and had practiced the looks and the easy score for many decades. They knew no other kind of love than the empty bar embrace. First there was the spark that came when the two souls found the appearance of each other acceptable. There wasn’t much more after that because the true love of their lives was the party.
The women in the bars trusted him despite his being a stranger in every community because he had the features of a full blood Native man although he was only half on his mother’s side. His father was the immortal Chief of the Elk Nation which made him half spirit. Since he belonged to the spirit world there were rules that applied to him like he could only come out at night. He had been punished by his father when he broke his only taboo and ate elk meat. The Elk Chief had cursed him with a burning hunger for the putrid flesh of drunks. He used his powers to make himself look very beautiful to women but the rule was that only drunk women could see the amazing beauty that he was able to generate for himself. Sober women saw him for what he was, elk from the waist down, human from the waist up with a terrifying mouth of shark-like teeth that had the rotting meat of his last victim wedged between every tooth. He also smelled of death but all this was invisible to anyone with a buzz.
In cursing his son to hunger for human meat, the Elk Chief forced him to walk an evil road all alone. The first people he consumed were from his mother’s family and they exiled him from their love and companionship. There were no friends for him among the human beings or the vast elk nation although he did have friends among the other spirit beings. He prayed several times a day to the Creator who was the only father he had left until the Elk Chief forgave him. The Creator loved him no matter what and watched over him as he traveled between Indian reservations. He was spirit rule-bound to stay within his mother’s homeland so he traveled the Indian bars and cultural events in a seasonal food cycle. Part of his curse was that he could eat only Native women which was both difficult and easy at the same time. Spring was just now starting so it was time to travel upwards from where he wintered on the Klamath Indian Reservation to the Nez Perce Indian Reservation.
He loved the Oregon high desert at this time of the year. The farmers were not out plowing yet and he could run through the miles of farmland across the deer trails all the way to Wallowa Lake where he would find his cousins, the Bigfoots, and visit there for a while. The Bigfoots are the eldest children of the Creator still alive and they know more than any other beings on the earth. Their name for him was Koo-yeh which meant half elk. That was the name he went by in the human world although the women did not know it was given to him by the sacred Eldest Children. Most Native women recognized his name as indigenous language and sometimes they asked what tribe he was from. If a woman did speak his language, which was very rare in these times, he would tell her the truth, that his name was from another language and it meant “Elk.” It was one of those uncommon women who spoke his mother tongue that he met one night at the Lewiston Airport Bar.
It was a packed Saturday night of exceptional circumstance, both a tribal payday and a basketball tournament weekend which meant there would be strangers from other reservations flooding the Indian bars after the ball game. He felt like it was his lucky night to find someone good. Tournament weekends were when he could get a delicious twenty-something to leave the bar with him and he could feast under the stars until dawn. Koo-yeh slipped into the crowd and took a look around to see what the men looked like who were getting all the female attention. He went into the bathroom to shape-shift himself into an Eddy Spears-looking Rez guy which was always the right choice for tournament weekends and made his way into the center of the dance floor to begin his hunt. It was then that he heard his language being spoken and searched for who was saying the holy words aloud in a bar.
She had already seen Koo-yeh trapped in the middle of the dance floor.
“Look, it’s that fucken hoof monster thing, back on our Rez again,” she said to her companion.
“Where?” the young lady with her asked.
“That ugly one with the stupid western trench coat,” she said.
“That fine-ass Native that looks like Dreamkeeper Eddy Spears?”
“Is that what you see, Cuz?” she replied, “interesting.”
And then she further insulted him by telling him to leave forever in his own language. The young woman watched his face turn sour at these words and then she smiled as if in victory that he understood what was said. He began to make his way towards her. She sat at the bar smoking a cigar. That was appropriate for such an offensive woman; he was thinking about eating her to rid the earth of such insolence.
“You wanna dance, Monster?” she asked and stood up keeping his gaze. She took some kind of battle-ready stance and whipped out a bowie knife from the inside of her jean jacket. Koo-yeh had never seen a woman rise up to challenge him and was snapped out of his righteous anger. A group of large, mean-looking Native men came over and got around them.
“This fool botherin’ you, Sister?” one of them asked.
She put her knife away and said, “Kut-see (thanks) but naw, I’m just being crazy Native chick status.” She embraced Koo-yeh, kissed him on the cheek and said, “Stop lookin’ at bitches you fucker.”
The men smiled and melted back into the crowd. She had just saved him from a terrible beating. Even though he was part spirit, men could still hurt him. He had been caught and beaten several times over the last two centuries. Koo-yeh could die and he could feel the pain of being beaten, but unlike humans, he would come back to life and walk away after dying.
“Why?” he asked. She ordered a couple of beers and set one before him.
“Have a beer with me,” she held his hand for a minute, “tell me if the stories are true, are you really the son of Hall-Paw-Win-My (Dawn Woman)? She is my ancestor and if you are her son that makes us related,” she said.
Koo-yeh caved at hearing his mother’s name. He hung his head and let the tears come free after two hundred years. She put her arm around him and he rested his head on her shoulder and just wept and shook until the episode ended. Koo-yeh gulped down his beer and she pushed hers over in front of him. He gulped this one too and she took out a pack of cigarettes and put one into his mouth and lit it. They both smoked and he finally calmed down enough to ask her name.
“Ruby,” she said, “and my Indian name is Tom-mom-min.”
“Cake?” he asked and couldn’t stop laughing for a minute.
Crying and laughing were human acts that he hadn’t done since the 1700s when his people still loved him. It was bringing him to another place in the landscape of his heart and mind. She fed him another cigarette and studied his face. “I wonder how different your life would have been with elk for the top half and human for the bottom half?”
They laughed while imagining Koo-yeh with a huge rack of antlers and stout neck supported by a man’s lower half. Falling over all the time from being top heavy and relieved to shed his antlers in the early spring. The night went on like that with Koo-yeh answering a myriad of historical questions that Ruby had always wanted to know about language and mythology. And Ruby making them both laugh and smoke cigarettes until they were sick. She told him many wonderful things she learned from other Indians like the Maidu storytellers who told her there were “Wup-toe-lee” which were half human and half fish that lived in the rivers of Northern California. Since Koo-yeh wintered on the Klamath Indian Reservation, he could venture southeast until he found the Feather River where the Wup-toe-lee live.
“You could marry a Wup-toe-lee,” she said, “you’re both half human on top, animal on the bottom and spirit beings.”
Koo-yeh loved this idea, “I can’t go past the Klamath Indian Reservation, though,” he said.
“Your father could fix that, let’s get you a Wup-toe-lee,” Ruby said.
The first thing they had to do was get his curse lifted. Ruby was a scholar of legends and knew the stories about the Elk Chief and his half human son, Koo-yeh. She was also brave enough to try things like bugling for the Elk Chief at the only time he could come to the human world which was under an orange moon. Crazy ass Ruby also sprinkled elk urine to lure him to the creek that he was known to favor. They hid and waited. Ruby kept bugling but he did not come to them on that orange moon. She did not give up. The time came when they did see his father and Ruby came out and placed a fine gift of tobacco and berries before the great Elk Chief. She prayed to him. Ruby asked that the curse afflicting his son be lifted so that Koo-yeh can get himself a Wup-toe-lee wife from the Feather River. She prayed for the great Elk Chief to forgive his son and start to enjoy the grandkids they would have. She prayed for love to return to the family and that they all be blessed by the Creator.
Koo-yeh now walked a new road. He did not go to the bars or eat Native women anymore. With his father’s help he was now able to transcend the boundary limitations and travel southeast of the Klamath Indian Reservation to the north and middle forks of the Feather River where the Wup-toe-lee were said to live. Ruby told him to bring pearls and cowrie shells for the Wup-toe-lee. She strung dozens of shell necklaces as gifts for them. Koo-yeh felt the weight of the pearls in his backpack and thought it would be a good time to set them down and have a smoke. He began to sing his favorite song, “Don’t Stop Believin’, ” by Journey.
–Jeanette Weaskus
Published in Raven Chronicles Last Call, Vol. 26, 2018.
Jeanette Weaskus (Nez Perce) has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho, and her work has been published in Yellow Medicine Review, Borne On Air: Essays of Idaho Writers, and Sovereign Bones: New Native American Writing. She lives in Pullman, Washington, and works for the Nez Perce Tribe as a radio personality for KIYE tribal radio station (88.7 and 105.5). Her on-air personality is “Doctor Jaye.” The main focus of her job is oral preservation with the emphasis being on folklore.