"They lacked faith," he points out.
"Rightfully so."
"I gotta go," he tells me. We're reaching the crescendo in the background music, and it cuts off with a click. Silence. He doesn't say good-bye. I refuse to call him back.
The truth is, I'm tired of always being there for him.
So I don't hear from him again until this morning when he calls with the great Displacement Theory. By now I've been forty almost ten days, if you believe the birth certificate the reservation drew up; I find a lot of inaccuracies surfaced when they translated moons into months, so that I've never been too sure what my rising sign is. Not that it matters to me, but it's important to him all of a sudden; apparently you can't analyze personality effectively without it. He thinks I'm a Pisces rising; he'd love to be proved right.
"We can go back, old buddy," he says. "I've found the way back."
"Why would we want to?" I ask. The sun is shining and it's cold out. I was thinking of going for a run.
Does he hear me? About like always. "I figured it out," he says. "It's a combination of biofeedback and the mantra 'home.' I've been working and working on it. I could always leave, you know; that was never the problem; but I could never arrive. Something outside me stopped me and forced me back." He pauses here, and I think I'm supposed to say something, but I'm too pissed. He goes on. "Am I getting too theoretical for you? Because I'm about to get more so. Try to stay with me. The key word is displacement." He says this like he's shivering. "I couldn't get back because there was no room for me there. The only way back is through an exchange. Someone else has to come forward."
He pauses again, and this pause goes on and on. Finally I grunt. A redskin sound. Noncommittal.
His voice is severe. "This is too important for you to miss just because you're sulking about God knows what, pilgrim," he says. "This is travel through space and time."
"This is baloney," I tell him. I'm uncharacteristically blunt, blunter than I ever was during the primal-scream-return-to-the-womb period. If nobody's listening, what does it matter?
"Displacement," he repeats, and his voice is all still and important. "Ask yourself, buddy, what happened to the buffalo?" I don't believe I've heard him correctly. "Say what?" "Return with me," he says, and then he's gone for good and this time he hasn't hung up the phone; this time I can still hear the William Tell Overture repeating the hoofbeat part. There's a noise out front so I go to the door, and damned if I don't have a buffalo, shuffling around on my ornamental strawberries, looking surprised. "You call this grass?" it asks me. It looks up and down the street, more and more alarmed. "Where's the plains, man? Where's the railroad?"
So I'm happy for him. Really I am.
But I'm not going with him. Let him roam it alone this time. He'll be fine. Like Rambo.
Only then another buffalo appears. And another. Pretty soon I've got a whole herd of them out front, trying to eat my yard and gagging. And whining. "The water tastes funny. You got any water with locusts in it?" I don't suppose it's an accident that I've got the same number of buffalo here as there are men in the Cavendish gang. Plus one. I keep waiting to see if any more appear; maybe someone else will go back and help him. But they don't. This is it.
You remember the theories of history I told you about, back in the beginning? Well, maybe somewhere between the great men and the masses, there's a third kind of person. Someone who listens. Someone who tries to help. You don't hear about these people much, so there probably aren't many of them. Oh, you hear about the failures, all right, the shams: Brutus, John Alden, Rasputin. And maybe you think there aren't any at all, that nobody could love someone else more than he loves himself. Just because you can't. Hey, I don't really care what you think. Because I'm here and the heels of my moccasins are clicking together and I couldn't stop them even if I tried. And it's okay. Really. It's who I am. It's what I do.
I'm going to leave you with a bit of theory to think about. It's a sort of riddle. There are good Indians, there are bad Indians, and there are dead Indians. Which am I?
There can be more than one right answer.