RavenShadow Read Online Free Page B

taking a nap—you might call it an involuntary nap—in the state park named after the bastard along the way. The whole time I watched for Raven in the corner of my vision, but I never saw him. He was there, but I never saw him.
    At twilight, one way or another, I was whooping it up in Hot Springs with Sallee, who unfortunately was flanked, or chaperoned, or something like that, by her cousin Rosaphine.
    Sallee never drank, in fact maybe wasn’t old enough to drink. She didn’t say why and I didn’t ask, knowing that any young, eligible red woman with good sense would rather find a red man who’s both sober and straight, which is near impossible. Nobody loves a drunken Indian, and I wondered whether that might be why I hadn’t gotten lucky with Sallee, but I didn’t care. Getting laid was dicey, getting drunk a sure thing.
    Trouble was, she had me a little entranced. She was tall, slender, willowy, quiet, mysterious. From the first look she seemed to me somehow mythic, bearing a spirit larger than life. Later I realized what she reminded me of. Emile did a painting, back when he was doing canvases and not just hides, of White Buffalo Woman. She is, well, you would call her one of our great mythological heroes. She first appeared to two young men, walking in a sacred manner. One of them lusted after her. She held her arms out, he embraced her, and a cloud enveloped them. When the cloud disappeared, the lustful young man had turned into a pile of bones. To the other young man she said, “Take me to your village.” He did, and the gift she bore proved to be the greatest of all boons to the Lakota people, the sacred Pipe.
    In painting her, Emile was once more performing the sacred deed, taking White Buffalo Woman to the people. The figure was slender, pure-looking, sheathed in a beautifully quilled buckskin dress, walking in a modest way but bearing invisibly the gift of the sacred.
    Sallee reminded me of Emile’s White Buffalo Woman. Later I found out why—she’d been the model. Her face wasn’t shown, but it was her carriage I responded to, and her aura of being special.
    Like the ill-advised young man, I lusted after her. I told myself I wanted to … get lucky with her.
    I knew Sallee wanted much more from life. She wasn’t likelyto find it in a bar in Hot Springs, but if you live with your uncle near the hamlet of Oglala on the Pine Ridge rez, a bar in Hot Springs is only five bucks of gas round trip, and a date with an alcoholic red man with a forty-grand-a-year job, hey, that’s a step up.
    “ Hoka hey! ” says I, and lifted my glass. Sallee gave me her special smile and slid onto the bar stool. Rosaphine the bulldog barked “ Hoka hey! ” and slid right onto my lap. Her talk always sounded like barking, and she had a jutting lower jaw, which is what reminded me of the dog. Rosaphine wasn’t pretty, but she was a party girl, and sexy. This time the play in her eyes said she’d knocked back a six-pack on the drive over, which was par for the course with Rosaphine. Just like me.
    I slid from underneath Rosaphine and stationed myself between them, touching on both sides. I needed the stability of touching, and the illusion it lent. I motioned to the bartender to give them whatever they wanted. “A Virgin Mary,” says Sallee. It was all she ever drank, and she acted interested mostly in the celery. “Bud Light!” roars Rosaphine, like it was the answer to a quiz-show question. She waggled her ass like she just won a case of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups—it wasn’t in Rosaphine’s fantasy world to win the sixty-four thousand dollars. The waggle made me want to lean against her more. Yeah, she was started toward blimpdom, which Lakota women seem to achieve early, but she was warm and pliant.
    “You get it done?” I says to Sallee.
    She scrunched her shoulders up and shook her head no. “Frustrating. I’m ruining my third piece of the silk.”
    Sallee was working on a big fabric painting—that was