Counting Coup

There was a lot of death

and   dying up there,

and if I   remember correctly,

it gave me a bit of a thrill.

Of course there were the good guys

   and   the bad.

Both of which were in that process

   of dying unto death.

And I knew I was supposed to be

cheering for one side to

prevail over the other

but in truth,

I was somewhat indifferent.

It was the death; the dying.

Yea, and okay, the living as well.

That flux   in between.

We had yet to progress to post mortem

but that’s not to say that

the exact instant of death

can’t have a stench unto itself.

From where I was standing,

the expected smell of death

was mostly non-existent.

Rather, this death

smelled more like stale beer.

Fifty plus years of spilt pilsner

which had saturated those

rotting floorboards upon which I stood.

My father was awfully fond

   of that pool-hall.

Perhaps fonder still of the bar in the back.

Fond of those men

who shared his fondness.

There across from this bar and

upon the not too distant wall

   hung a painting.

A crude hunk of art which was

taller than I was at that age

and three times that measure wide.

And I stood on that barroom floor,

yet also stood within that painting.

But if you asked whether

I stood with the good guys or the bad,

I’m not sure I could tell you.

There were Americans in that painting

and I figure they had to be the good guys,

but then, isn’t that always the case?

There were Injuns… Indians.

   Native Americans.

Yes, Americans in that painting.

“The only good Injun      is a dead Injun.”

Now who was the American

who first came up with

that    delightful phrase?

Very likely the same asshole who

stands dead center of that painting.

Dead center.

                      Dead center.

Right where he was supposed to be.

American.

Canadian.

Back in the Fall of 1967,

Canadian actor Wayne Maunder

was hired to portray

a character of infamy

in a prime time television show

   called        “Custer”.

And I as a child was mesmerized.

And I as an adult remain    mesmerized.

You see,

because George Armstrong Custer

   was portrayed as a hero.

Long-haired hippy Custer circa late Sixties

had his finger on all the issues of the day.

“Let’s sit around the camp-fire,

pass a well-packed peace pipe.

Yo Yo Yo, lite that thing up.

George.        Yellow Hair.

Whassup wit dat bogart, dude?”

So you had actor Fess Parker

   as Daniel Boone

and Wayne Maunder

   as Custer.

Both upstanding righteous guys.

Righteous.      Righteous Hell.

In that TV show,

Custer was friends with Crazy Horse.

They hung out.

Smoke a bowl or two.

Passed that bottle of Mad Dog

   without wiping off the lip.

Yea, a TV show’s rewrite of history

that surely brought

   a rancid rise of vomit

      to the entire Lakota Nation.

But there as a child,

standing beneath Custer’s Last Stand

   at the Little Big Horn,

I didn’t see the racism.

Held no comprehension

of the decades of genocide

that led those Lakota braves

to their final moment of payback.

And where that painting was

supposed to project the final moments

of one of America’s greatest heros,

for me it was no more than a still frame

   from a damn good snuff film.

Well… snuff painting perhaps.

Indeed, I as a child got to re-enact

Custer’s brutal death over and over again.

And my memory of this     pleases me.

As a youth, I suppose I

took the side of the Native American

   a little too often.

The “Noble   Savage.”

And just what   does that   mean?

Are we to assume that the Lakota,

or the Cherokee,

or the Mohawk, the Apache,

or any of the other

original indigenous nations

ever considered the term “Noble Savage”

   as endearing?

Osama Bin Ladin dies

and a nation of Americans

bust out their doors,

look up to the sky and

do a little victory dance.

George Armstrong Custer dies

and a nation of other Americans

   do exactly the same.

Noble Americans.

Mobile Americans.

Third-World Americans

force marched and

sequestered away in their

Third-World isolation.

As that same child,

a trip with my father

once took us in proximity

to an Indian reservation.

Descendents of those same warriors

who counted coup on Custer.

Those noble Indians

standing proud beneath their

regal war bonnets.

That.

I wanted to see that.

I expressed so to my father,

and with a glint in his eye,

he agreed to take me to them.

Diverging from our course,

my father steered us

towards that reservation,

and as we traveled into the past,

I scanned the crests

of each and every adjacent hill

in search of feathered silhouette.

And yet we never actually

made it to the reservation.

Instead, my father drove us to a town

   there on the edge.

And there he pulled up in front of a bar.

And there father and son

pass from blazing sunlight

into the dim inky darkness

   of the bar’s interior.

And as eyes strain to adjust,

my father makes a

small flourish with his hand

and says,

“There.

There are your Indians.”

And I turn from the

whiteness of his gleaming smile

to the squalor of that saloon.

Before me I see

my precious Indians

collapsed upon the bar,

sprawled about

the assorted tables.

Passed out and

bodily strewn across the floor.

“There.   

There     are your Indians.”

And I hear my father chuckle.

He finding mirth

in the destruction of

my naïve illusion.

Would that I might have gathered up

those assorted Native Americans

and taken them in mass

to a certain bar that prides itself

   of Custer’s Last Stand.

To usher them all down to the lone man

sitting drunk at the end of the bar.

“There,” I’d say.

“There’s my father.

There’s your White Man.

There’s your Custer.

He in his own

dying unto death

   Last Stand.

Do with him

what you will.”

c 2011 Jack Hubbell