Sacred City Read online

  Praise for Sacred City

  “Sacred City is a brilliant powerhouse that hit me like a poetry jam session, some damn fine urban-Indian music; Chicago honor song, love song, protest hymn, and dirge. Smart and smart-ass conversation, showing our slide from one cultural lexicon to another, all woven together in a Chi-Town Native special. Sacred City tells us real stories of people we might not know, but should. It maps layers of a sprawling town’s history and its deep Indigenous roots. A dazzling achievement!”—SUSAN POWER, author of Sacred Wilderness

  “Reading this one, you think Sacred Smokes never went over, but then you look down at this sidewalk Theo Van Alst’s been leading you down and realize you’re standing in Sacred City, and you kind of never want to leave, so long as he’ll keep telling these stories.”—STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES, author of The Only Good Indians

  “Tecumseh said, ‘The Great Spirit above knows no boundaries,’ and neither does Ted Van Alst: the stories in Sacred City are electrifying, propulsive, and light up the land with indignation and fierce compassion. Here are stories about people’s struggles that are as heartbreaking and gritty as they are ingenious. I loved it.”—BRANDON HOBSON, National Book Award finalist and author of The Removed: A Novel

  “Sacred City’s swagger is as sacred as it is profane. Van Alst’s writing is ancient blood screaming through the streets of Chicago. This is more than literature; it’s history, love, violence, ancestral knowledge, and brotherhood thrown on the page with the power of a Molotov cocktail and the precision of a lyricist. I’d say something about transcendence and the universe, but this book taught me not to think so small.”—GABINO IGLESIAS, author of Coyote Songs

  “Van Alst’s writing is riveting and funny as hell; brutal, blunt, and utterly unique YA. Sacred City is a serious ass kicking—a young-adult voice with poetry and violence and a history that feels too present day to call prescient overflowing its pages. I cannot recommend strongly enough, and as with Van Alst’s previous work, I wish I was still teaching high school language arts, because Sacred City certainly belongs on the syllabus.”—KIMBERLY DAVIS BASSO, author of I’m a Little Brain Dead and Birth and Other Surprises

  “In this collection of vivid, visceral, and vital stories, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. reminds us that Native American voices cannot be contained.”—BILL SAVAGE, Northwestern University

  SACRED CITY

  SACRED CITY

  Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

  © 2021 by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

  All rights reserved. Published 2021

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8263-6286-5 (paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8264-6287-2 (electronic)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

  Founded in 1889, the University of New Mexico sits on the traditional homelands of the Pueblo of Sandia. The original peoples of New Mexico—Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache—since time immemorial have deep connections to the land and have made significant contributions to the broader community statewide. We honor the land itself and those who remain stewards of this land throughout the generations and also acknowledge our committed relationship to Indigenous peoples. We gratefully recognize our history.

  Cover illustration: Power of the Tongue. Acrylic. 18 × 24. 2019.

  “As a young kid growing up on Cut Bank Creek, I always enjoyed wild stories, and that of course led to a wild imagination. Especially stories from here, and those stories allowed me to imagine beings. Sort of like Napi and Coyote, free to make their choices. Some were good, some were bad, and some were in-between. Lately I’ve been noticing how often the reservation life is fraught with lateral violence, jealousy, and gossip. Which it’s always been (at least if you were a smart kid and grew up with a different way of looking at things). Which made me think of the power of the tongue, something my grandfather always talked to me about as a boy. It has the power to bring life or death, and there’s a lot of tricksters out there walking around with that power.”—Lauren Monroe Jr.

  Designed by Felicia Cedillos

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  As always, for Amie, Emily, and Max

  Contents

  Credits

  1. THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN

  2. SIMON CITY

  3. UNSETTLING

  4. THE BEACH

  5. WHERE’S THE SUNSHINE?

  6. TECUMSEH AT THE TOWER

  7. THE LAMB

  8. BY THE SLICE

  9. ORACLE

  10. WHEN TWO TRIBES GO TO WAR

  11. THE PROPHET AT THE WOODEN NICKEL

  12. POP-OFF

  13. GYROS AND GAYLORDS

  14. FOREVER YOUNG

  15. COYOTE DRINKS

  16. BLACK HAWK GOES TO THE ZOO

  17. INDIAN WARS

  18. GOLD COIN

  19. BOY JOE

  20. CEDAR

  21. UP YOURS, TOM WOLFE

  22. WE STILL CALL IT MAIZE

  23. TEST PATTERN

  Afterworlds

  Acknowledgments

  To all of the Indians who will not be ghosts.

  Credits

  “Ooh Child.” Words and music by Stan Vincent. © 1970 (renewed) by Kama Sutra Music, Inc. and Frantino Music. All rights controlled and administered by Emi Unart Catalog Inc. (publishing) and Alfred Music (print). All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

  Some of the stories published here originally appeared in the following publications:

  The Journal of Working-Class Studies: “By the Slice”

  Literary Orphans: “Boy Joe”

  Mad Scientist Journal: “Afterworlds” (published as “Guts”)

  Massachusetts Review: “The Boys are Back in Town”

  Open: Journal of Arts & Letters: “Test Pattern”

  Red Earth Review: “Where’s the Sunshine?” (published as “Sunshine”)

  Red Ink: International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art &

  Humanities: “Coyote Drinks”

  Unnerving Magazine: “The Lamb” (published as “Sacrifices”)

  Yellow Medicine Review: “Cedar” and “Up Yours, Tom Wolfe”

  (published as “A Man Not Full, or Fuck You, Tom Wolfe”)

  Support literary journals and magazines!

  Sihasapas Blackfeet. Haunts and homes same as the Unkpapas; number, 165 lodges. These two bands have very little respect for the power of the whites. Many of the depredations along the Platte are committed by the Unkpapas and Sihasapas, whose homes are farther from it than those of any other of the Titonwans.

  —GEN. G. K. WARREN, 1856

  Distinctly against the spirit of their treaties, the council turned to consider intertribal relations. Since their brief truce with the Crows had broken down in 1853, Hunkpapa and Sihasapa war parties had infested the lower Yellowstone valley, waging open war on the River Crows, which they categorically refused to give up.

  —KINGSLEY M. BRAY, CRAZY HORSE: A LAKOTA LIFE

  “Indian Trails and Villages of Chicago and of Cook, Dupage, and Will Counties, Ills. (1804) as shown by weapons and implements of the stone age.” Albert F. Scharf / Public domain.

  We lived in apartments on Birchwood and then on Chase. I spent a big chunk of my life as a kid in the Indian Boundary lands north of the old treaty line that made it illegal for Native folks to be anywhere inside most of Chicago back in the day. The boundary line is from the first angled line above Devon all the way down to Lake Calumet, and you know I crossed over every chance I got, e
ven if I didn’t think about it each time. Well, not every single time, I suppose, but just about; Rogers Avenue ran right through the middle of my every day. This map shows the terrain of the people below the city—Chicago is an overlay on Native land and stories that seep and burn through all the cracks every chance they get.

  As many have known and Dorene Wiese has said, “Chicago has always been Indian Country.”

  The whites have books, many books. And in those books they tell of the Indians—and what the white man writes, the white man reads and believes. I have read many stories of the fight in Chicago, and they all speak of the deviltry and the treachery of the Indians. I am writing a book that will tell of the treachery of the white man. I will tell the truth as my father told it to me when he was middle-aged and when he was old and dying, and all the time the tale was unchanged in the telling. Some men and a woman—whites, all of them—have written stories of the fight between the soldiers and the Potawatomi. Now let an Indian tell it.

  —SIMON POKAGON

  O-o-h child

  Things are gonna get easier

  O-o-h child

  Things’ll get brighter

  —THE FIVE STAIRSTEPS

  1.THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN

  This land is our land, and not yours.

  —CONFEDERATED TRIBES, 1752

  After a brief sojourn to sunny California and the sunnier southwest, I return to my homelands.

  They welcome me with that incomparable Chicago humidity, wet saran wrap clinging to your face wrapped in a smoke-soaked pillowcase. Breathing, like sliding out of trouble, is laborious. But it’s my reservation, and there’s no place I’d rather be, even in the summer.

  Cause summertime in this here city means the balls on Sheridan’s horse will be painted bright-cherry red, we’ll be selling bags of lukewarm Old Style tallboys at ChicagoFest to tourists from the burbs while we show them the frosty ones in our Styrofoam cooler of ice, means the alley vomit dries quicker even if it stinks worse while it does, and how except for flies, we don’t really have bugs, unless you’re hanging in the woods by the Northwestern tracks or out in the forest preserves, home of powwows and sick aluminum bat fights with Gaylords at ten thousand baseball diamonds. Oh yeah.

  Summer.

  Mars lights blue and red popping piss everywhere gunshots screams wind and ozone weak warm rain that never washes anything away tavern smells liquor cigarettes pizza baking everywhere ting ting ting of helado man running from the cops laughing drinking browner by the day.

  SpanishEnglishPolishSerbianCreoleMandarinJamaican GermanArabicArmenianJapaneseRussianIrishSwedishBengali TobaganYiddishIndianHillbillyHindiBajanNorwegianCroat FrenchUkranianAlbanianItalianUrduAssyrianBlackWhite YellowRedBrownsparklingmidnightbrightdayrainorshinethese wordseverywherethisisRogersFuckingPark, y’all.

  It feels real. Like when this one time . . .

  I’m feeling poppin’ fresh my damn self, cause my girlfriend just hickied me a three-pointed cross that runs from the middle of my chest down to the top of my belly button. We’re drinking in the middle of the day, cause we can. We’re sitting on the farthest bench in Pottawattomie Park, the one at the north end, just off Fargo, across from the community garden and looking out on the athletic fields. The sky is burnt silver and it smells like it wants to rain, but we know it won’t. We’ll just sweat here and wait for something to happen. We’ve got about forty icy-ass-but-warming-fast Old Style brown glass keg bottles in paper bags in the bushes and a brick of Richard’s Wild Irish Rose, fresh batteries in the boombox, and all the girls are there, which means we’re stuck listening to whatever they like, Commodores or Diana Ross or Kool and the Gang or some shit. We’ll see how long that lasts once we start getting drunk.

  So we’re just chilling in the park. Nothing much going on, we talk shit, make fun of each other, the usual. Everyone’s hanging out: JD (run that J and that D together, say it “jayyyde”) sits on the top slats on the bench next to me, trots his leg like he just did something bad or is thinking about something worse; all the Jimmys; everyone’s girlfriends. Even Freckles is there, the ginger hillbilly fuck. Dude never really looked quite right, you know? I mean, shit, his skin was Band-Aid colored. What the hell is that? I relax, read a little. When it comes to books I want to be buried with one open over my face, like I fell asleep reading and it just plopped there. Got this new one from Jackie Collins, probably Chances. It had that fine-ass Lucky Santangelo in it, anyway. I study the dialogue. I love that shit, and Jackie is the best. I need to take my mind off stuff. Late yesterday sucked. Dark fuckin night, man. I was feeling desperate. I tried to sell my soul to the devil, and he just leaned in close and laughed. Put his Lucky Strike out on the back of my hand and walked through my bedroom door. Fuck that guy.

  I look up and see Montell heading our way from Rogers Ave. His nickname is Bubba. He doesn’t like that, but it is what it is. Anyways, as you can imagine from the name, he doesn’t move too fast. I chug the rest of my beer as I watch him make his way across the baseball diamond and then the grass. I open another and light a smoke. He’s still coming when I finish the bottle and reach for a replacement. I’m halfway through that one when finally

  “What up, Teddy?”

  “You see it, brother.”

  “Cool, cool. What’s up Folks?” he makes the rounds with everyone, shakes hands sideways, dropping the crown, teaching them all the different ways to shake hands like Royals.

  Montell is a Farwell and Clark Royal. I’m originally from Touhy and Ridge, the branch that had members who would eventually make up the core of his branch. I’m a few years older than him. I’ve been a warlord, a vice-president, and a president of the Pee Wee set. Most sets of Simon City Royals back then had Futures, Pee-Wees, Juniors, then Seniors. I still hold it down for T/R, my original set, cause that’s what you fuckin do, at least the way I was taught.

  “When you gonna go F/C, Teddy?”

  “Never, Montell. You know that,” I laugh.

  “C’mon man. Stop fucking around.” His eyebrows tense.

  “We’ll see, Folks,” I say.

  “What about these motherfuckers?” he says, hands thrown wide, face relaxed.

  “Cain’t say, homes,” I say. “They needa get initiated in.”

  “Well let’s do it,” he smiles.

  “They’re chickenshits,” I say.

  “Fuck that,” Freckles pops off. “I was a Pope. I was jumped in at—”

  “Man, be quiet,” me and Montell both say.

  I have one of those times where you decide to do something, you know, the ones where you’re out of your body watching and going what the fuck is coming out of my mouth right now.

  I say, “Let’s do this, Montell. Let’s show ’em how it’s done.”

  While experiencing my astral projection moment it occurs to me that this is actually a really bad idea. Two or three days ago I got into it with Chupe down by the Howard Street El. We go to school together, and since there’s me and all the other Royals have dropped out it’s really just me (but see that story I told you about Lord Black and the CVLs from before; no serious worries) so I sometimes have to listen to his shit because there’s an assload of Kings from multiple branches there, but now it’s summer and all bets are off so fuck him. We humbugged for a bit. I tagged him in the face a couple of times but he got a nice shot in on my ribs and I heard a little crack so score for Chupe but man that shit hurts and I’m aware that this could be a problem but I’m a little bit drunk with a whole lot to prove, who knew? I decide to demonstrate a simple initiation.

  It goes like this nowadays. You face one guy, bend forward, and he leans down, full nelsons you, wraps up your arms and whatnot, and everybody else pounds the living shit out of you, feet, fists, elbows, whatever, until the first guy calls it, tells them to stop. Usually if your face isn’t buried in his gut enough blood runs out onto the ground under you and they can see it’s probably time to stop. Make sure you don’t yell or holler too much, cause that’ll
just make them mad. It gets a little Jack and Piggy sometimes.

  Montell handles the initiation. I’m trying to teach these guys something. Remember, my girlfriend had just hickied that three-pointed cross on me and I gotta represent. They give it to me good, but not that good, cause none of them have been initiated before, got no real sense of vengeance or pain. When I got jumped in as a Future it was in Kid’s basement. I was eleven turning twelve and walked into a blacked-out room where Twat promptly roundhoused me in the face. That was his signature move. I knew it was coming, but, pitch-black room, so I never saw it. About ten juniors were beating the shit out of me so bad Kid had to fall on me, tell me to protect my nuts and took three or four shots to his own head that were meant for my face. I got a little break in the nose, lots of blood, one hell of a shiner, the title of Warlord over the protests of Kid’s own brother and a walk home with the hottest girl in the set. Sometimes it pays to just shut up and take it.

  This time ain’t shit compared to that. Except someone found those ribs. Fuck, man. Bubba. Tie this shirt around my chest. It’s a dago tee, so there’s not much material. Shit. I step on the bottom edge and pull up on the straps, stretch it out. I hand it to him. Cicadas drone and I think I see twists of steam above the grass out in the soccer field. Someone cuts off the third-in-a-row play of Paul Revere’s Ride and I pull the shirt sideways across my chest, give Montell the two loose ends.

  “Not too—”

  He yanks the leads together, his knee in the middle of my back.

  “hard,” I say.

  He pulls a little tighter

  and I hear bone ends grind.

  My left eye waters, the line of nerve and muscle just below the skin of my face pulling diagonally down my body to my right side. I feel a click as he ties the ends together. Damnit. Half my cross is covered up now. It’s kinda funny, but does it hurt? Only when I breathe. Forget about laughing for a month.