The Collector's Tale
When it was over I sat down last night,
shaken, and quite afraid I’d lost my mind.
The objects I have loved surrounded me
like friends in such composed society
they almost rid the atmosphere of fright.
I collected them, perhaps, as one inclined
to suffer other people stoically.
That’s why, when I found Foley at my door—
not my shop, but here at my private home,
the smell of bourbon for his calling card—
I sighed and let him in without a word.
I’d only met the man two months before
and found his taste as tacky as they come,
his Indian ethic perfectly absurd.
The auction house in St. Paul where we met
was full that day of cherry furniture.
I still can’t tell you why he’d chosen me
to lecture all about his Cherokee
obsessions, but I listened—that I regret.
My patience with a stranger’s geniture
compelled him to describe his family tree.
He told me of his youth in Oklahoma,
his white father who steered clear of the Rez,
a grandma native healer who knew herbs
for every illness. Nothing like the ‘burbs,
I guess. He learned to tell a real toma-
hawk from a handsaw, or lift his half-mad gaze
and “entertain” you with some acid barbs.
So he collected Indian artifacts,
the sort that sell for thousands in New York.
Beadwork, war shirts, arrowheads, shards of clay
beloved by dealers down in Santa Fe.
He lived to corner strangers, read them tracts
of his invention on the careful work
he would preserve and pridefully display.
Foley roamed the Great Plains in his van,
his thin hair tied back in a ponytail,
and people learned that he was smart enough
to deal. He made a living off this stuff,
became a more authenticated man.
But when he drank he would begin to rail
against the white world’s trivializing fluff.
Last night when he came in, reeking of smoke
and liquor, gesticulating madly
as if we’d both returned from the same bar,
I heard him out a while, the drunken bore,
endured his leaning up against my oak
credenza there, until at last I gladly
offered him a drink and a kitchen chair.
I still see him, round as a medicine ball
with a three-day beard, wearing his ripped jeans
and ratty, unlaced Nikes without socks.
I see him searching through two empty packs
and casting them aside despite my scowl,
opening a third, lighting up—he careens
into my kitchen, leaving boozy tracks.
I offered brandy. He didn’t mind the brand
or that I served it in a water glass.
He drank with simple greed, making no show
of thanks, and I could see he wouldn’t go.
He told me nothing happened as he planned,
how he left Rasher’s tiny shop a mess.
I killed him, Foley said. You got to know.
*
You know the place. Grand Avenue. The Great
White Way they built over my people’s bones
after the western forts made stealing safe.
Safe for that fucking moneyed generation
F. Scott Fitzgerald tried to write about—
and here was Rasher, selling off such crap
no self-respecting dealer’d waste his time.
I heard he had good beadwork, Chippewa,
but when I went in all I saw was junk.
I’m thinking, Christ, the neighbors here must love him,
the one dusty-shuttered place on the block
and inside, counters filled with silver plate
so tarnished Mother wouldn’t touch it, irons
with fraying cords and heaps of magazines.
He had the jawbone of a buffalo
from South Dakota, an old Enfield rifle,
a horn chair (or a cut-rate replica),
German Bible, a blue-eyed Jesus framed
in bottlecaps—I mean he had everything
but paint-by-number sunsets, so much junk
I bet he hadn’t made a sale in years.
You got to know this guy—skinny bald head
and both his hands twisted from arthritis.
I wouldn’t give his place a second look
except I heard so much about this beadwork.
He leads me to a case in the back room.
I take a look. The stuff is fucking new,
pure Disneyland, not even off the Rez.
Foley’s glass was empty; I poured him more
to buy time while I thought of some excuse
to get him out of here. If homicide
indeed were his odd tale’s conclusion, I’d
rather let him pass out on my floor,
then dash upstairs and telephone the police.
I wouldn’t mind if “fucking” Foley fried.
It’s crap, he said. I tell this slimy coot
he doesn’t know an Indian from a dog.
I can’t believe I drove five hundred miles
to handle sentimental tourist crap.
He rolled himself upright in my kitchen chair
and looked at me with such complete disdain
that I imagined Mr. Rasher’s stare.
I knew the man. We dealers somehow sense
who we trust and who the characters are.
I looked at my inebriated guest
and saw the fool-as-warrior on a quest
for the authentic, final recompense
that would rub out, in endless, private war,
all but his own image of the best.
Pretty quick I see I hurt his feelings.
He gets all proud on me and walks around
pointing at this and that,
a World’s Fair pin, a Maris autograph,
and then he takes me to a dark wood cupboard
and spins the combination on the lock
and shows me what’s inside. The old man
shows me his motherfucking pride and joy.
I look inside his cupboard and it’s there
all right—a black man’s head with eyes sewn shut—
I mean this fucker’s real, all dried and stuffed,
a metal ashtray planted in the skull.
I look and it’s like the old man’s nodding,
Yeah, yeah, you prick, now tell me this is nothing.
He’s looking at me looking at this head,
telling me he found it in a house
just up the street. Some dead white guy’s estate
here in the liberal north allowed this coot
whatever his twisted little hands could take,
and then he hoards it away for special guests.
I didn’t say a thing. I just walked out.
Now Foley filled his glass, drinking it down.
His irises caught fire as he lit up.
I sat across from him and wiped my palms
but inside I was setting off alarms
as if I should alert this sleeping town
that murder lived inside it. I could stop
the story now, I thought, but nothing calms
a killer when he knows he must confess,
and Foley’d chosen me to hear the worst.
Weird, he said, looking straight at me beyond
his burning cigarette. I got so mad.
Like all I thought of was a hundred shelves
collecting dust in Rasher’s shop, and how
a dead man’s head lay at the center of it.
I had to get a drink. Some yuppie bar
that charged a fortune for its cheapest bourbon.
I’m in there while the sun sets on the street
and people drop in after leaving work.
I look at all these happy people there—
laughing, anyway; maybe they aren’t happy—
the well-dressed women tossing back their hair,
the men who loosen their designer ties
and sip their single malts—living on bones
of other people, right?
And two blocks down the street, in Rasher’s shop,
a head where someone flicked his ashes once,
because of course a darky can’t be human,
and someone’s family kept that darky’s head.
These genteel people with their decent souls
must have been embarrassed finding it,
and Rasher got it for a fucking song
and even he could never sell the thing.
No, he showed it to me just to get me,
just to prove I hadn’t seen it all.
Well, he was right, I hadn’t seen it all.
I didn’t know the worst that people do
could be collected like a beaded bag,
bad medicine or good, we keep the stuff
and let it molder in our precious cases.
Some fucker cared just how he dried that head
and stitched the skin and cut the hole in the top—
big medicine for a man who liked cigars.
It’s just another piece of history,
human, like a slave yoke or a scalping knife,
and maybe I was drunk on yuppie booze,
but I knew some things had to be destroyed.
Hell, I could hardly walk, but I walked back,
knocked on Rasher’s door until he opened,
pushed him aside like a bag of raked-up leaves.
Maybe I was shouting, I don’t know.
I heard him shouting at my back, and then
he came around between me and the case,
a little twisted guy with yellow teeth
telling me he’d call the fucking cops.
I found the jawbone of that buffalo.
I mean I must have picked it up somewhere,
maybe to break the lock, but I swung hard
and hit that old fucker upside the head
and he went down so easy I was shocked.
He lay there moaning in a spreading pool
I stepped around. I broke that old jawbone
prizing the lock, but it snapped free, and I
snatched out the gruesome head.
I got it to my van all right, and then
went back to check on Rasher. He was dead.
For a while I tried to set his shop in fire
to see the heaps of garbage in it burn,
but you’d need gasoline to get it going
and besides, I couldn’t burn away the thought
of that weird thing I took from there tonight.
It’s out there, Foley said. I’m parked outside
a few blocks down—I couldn’t find your house.
I knew you’d listen to me if I came.
I knew you’d never try to turn me in.
You want to see it? No? I didn’t either,
and now I’ll never lose that goddamned head,
even if I bury it and drive away.
*
By now the bluster’d left his shrinking frame
and I thought he would vomit in my glass,
but Foley had saved strength enough to stand,
while I let go of everything I’d planned—
the telephone, police and bitter fame
that might wash over my quiet life and pass
away at some inaudible command.
I thought of all the dead things in my shop.
No object I put up was poorly made.
Nothing of mine was inhumane, although
I felt death in a kind of undertow
pulling my life away. Make it stop,
I thought, as if poor Foley had betrayed
our best ideals. Of course I let him go.
The truth is, now he’s left I feel relieved.
I locked the door behind him, but his smell
has lingered in my hallway all these hours.
I’ve mopped the floor, washed up, moved pots of flowers
to places that he touched. If I believed,
I would say Foley had emerged from hell.
I ask for help, but the silent house demurs.
c. 2004 by David Mason from Arrivals (Story Line Press, 2004)
