Riverside Louis Is Malled
Riverside Louis Is Malled
Riverside Louis took a small boy’s hand
as they walked into Sawridge Mall.
Happens, there was some strangers there
selling goods and wares with beautiful Indians
on velvet, and polished paper, and fresh
Chinese clay pieces, with fake turquoise
and dyed duck down and white turkey
feathers painted with dots. It looked too good.
“Wow, Uncle” said the boy, eyes all starry,
tugging on one-day sober shaking hand,
“Look at those real Indians!”
Now Riverside Louis doesn’t say much
but he had much he could have.
See, Louis remembers with accurate knowledge
that his old-time life was not exotic or quaint,
in fact, it was not even mythological.
He looked down at his rubberized feet,
knew that they had forgotten
their talks with Mother Earth.
He’d never even slept in a tipi
like the one that was made of paper and lit up
if you plugged the cord in so a fire
could pretend to crackle by a rotating tuna-can
type lid with holes in it that spun from the heat
beneath the light bulb. “Tourists must like this,” he thought,
“makes my old log and paper stuffed chink house
where you woke up with a snowdrift on your blankets,
look good.” He wished he were a boy
so he could believe this tourist approach
to “Real” Indians snuggled up to next to a fire.
He picked up a pretend pipe with pretend bobbles
and an axe made out of good bendable rubber.
He pretended to konk the boy on the head.
And, they laughed at the silliness.
The boy suddenly saw some miniatures,
something like the G.I. Joe pieces Louis remembered
playing with at school in their pretend Indian village,
diorama, they’d made out of paper with bits of twigs
that gave it all authenticity.
“Look, Uncle,” that painting has a wolf,
an owl, and a wolf cub”, he jittered his feet
to stand on one foot and then the other.
Louis was thinking it was a like a dance.
This kid knew the steps, he was sure,
If someone took the time to teach him
the meaning of each step.
Oh, Louis knew, and it saddened him greatly,
that being Cree and pretending Cree
didn’t always make you Indian.
Yes, some, like him, could be real savage
if they drank the wrong kind of booze,
and too much of it, too long. That’s what others said.
He didn’t always remember going on that warpath.
My that picture of this real good looking woman
and the guy who looked like Guido from the Pizza
place, stirred Louis some. He didn’t know
how they fabricated that one. He decided
it was simply someone’s wet dream after watching
Sacajawea or Walks Far Woman movies he watched
where you knew the Mexican guy was wearing wig braids.
He’d never seen something that looked like that
up in the fishing camp or the meat drying camp.
His sisters never looked like that
after a day of washing clothes
in some stream or cooking bannock over a fire.
And, they weren’t ugly. They just had a hard life.
Their eyebrows knit together with suffering,
not like this finely plucked, exactly arched
brow of this one in the painting. No,
these weren’t real Indians whose cheeks
wore the flush of too much grease
in good eating times nor the hollow ones
from when they were hungry until the Indian Agent
okay’d their next purchase of flour, baking powder
and lard. Always lard. Bread and lard. Dry meat and lard.
When he looked really closely, he noticed
the picture was too pretty. This women
never cleaned a jack fish for supper in her life.
He touched the picture and felt its deadness,
was frozen in time, for that moment, wondering.
His finger slide to the owl.
“Whoooeee,” Louis jumped back. He knew owls
and if one was headed straight for you, someone
was gunna die. No, this wasn’t a real Indian woman.
He turned quickly and grabbed a blasphemous plastic
bow and arrow and hard cardboard Chieftain’s’s headdress
from his nephew’s hand. “But, I wanted to be a real Indian,”
cried the boy. Quite sure he wasn’t even though Louis knew
the kids was more Indian than him.
Louis took the child to his own home, under the bridge,
showed him the fish swimming around the chip and dip
containers and floating belly-up between the beer bottles
and told him what it was like when they lived the old way.
The picture he drew in words in no way could be painted.
It was way too sacred. And the stars in the boy’s eyes
that night, reflected those in his Uncle’s. One real tear
ran down Louis’ cheek. He needed a beer.