Now, a buzzard really can’t think about something for very long except for where his next meal is coming from, and that gave Nanabozho an idea. He transformed himself into a dead deer, which is exactly what a buzzard likes to eat, lying in plain view in a clearing. Soon enough Buzzard took notice of the big, juicy meal laid out below him, and he landed nearby and hurried over, eager to be the first to eat his fill. He picked away at the carcass, eventually making a hole big enough for him to place his entire head inside it, where he could easily feast away on the meat and fat. All at once Nanabozho leaped to his feet and squeezed shut the hole Buzzard had made, trapping his head and neck. “Now I’ve got you, you foul creature,” said Nanabozho. “What are you going to do to me?” said the terrified bird, although his voice, coming from inside the carcass, was muffled. “Not a thing. I’m going to let you try to remove your head from the hole you tore into my body. Go ahead.” So Buzzard pulled and yanked and strained and heaved and finally he freed himself, except that all of his feathers had been stripped from his head and neck, and his neck had been stretched to a ridiculous length, and all of the exposed flesh was red and raw. “There,” said Nanabozho. “Ugly is as ugly does. You and your descendants will live your lives without feathers on your heads, and with ridiculous long necks, and you’ll smell like what you eat.” And that is why to this day a buzzard has a bare head and a long, raw-looking neck, and smells like a carcass that has been left to lie in the sun.
5
WHILE Salteau was telling his story I began to examine the faces of the kids, to figure out which of them might belong to the woman from the parking lot. Compared with her relative exoticism, the kids were uniformly ordinary-looking; bare of the brazen class signifiers I would have read at a glance in New York. While so far I’d been pleased by the egalitarianism I thought I’d found here — nostalgically pleased, I might add, being a native son of the midwest, the child of university professors, raised among the kids of farmers and truckers and small businessmen while eating and wearing and listening to the same things as they did — for the first time I felt an elitist stab of impatience, of dissatisfaction, with the drab equivalency of appearance. As in the case of my flirtation with thrift shop decor, I recognized that my eager disguise amid the natives was contingent and qualified, no more than a complicated private joke I’d be at a loss to have to explain. Rather than try to identify her children, I really wanted to make certain that she didn’t mistake any of these bloodless kids for mine. Of course, then I’d have to explain why I was lurking, alone, in a kids’ reading room, watching a Native American storyteller, but I figured I could cover that later.
She didn’t have that half-preoccupied look that the mothers had, though, dreaming whatever they dreamed while they plied yet another “activity” with their kids. She watched Salteau intently, as if listening carefully, looking down from time to time to write in a spiral-bound notepad. Of course she was a journalist: here to loft a meaningless puff of hot air into the world, the finery of her professional indignation on display in the parking lot. Pissed at being made to schlep out into the snow to cover the garden party beat. Jot jot jot. When Salteau had finished I expected her to make her way through the scrum of kids and grown-ups to interview him; I even manufactured some trite little thought about how sad, what a loss it was that Salteau’s charming and innocently local sort of fame was about to disappear into the anterior hopper of the celebrity machine, as if it were only contaminated individuals like me who warranted money, comfort, the ego-kneading blandishments of renown. But she flipped her notebook closed and turned to leave, and Salteau, busy speaking to a little girl and her mother, didn’t seem to register her presence. I followed her out.
She was standing outside the front entrance, jabbing at her phone. I moved close, so that I was standing at her side. She looked up from the phone.
“Yes?”
“How’s the hip?”
“Oh. Sore enough. I’ll find out around four in the morning, no doubt, when I wake up in the throes.”
“Ice it.”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Just long experience with a messed-up back. You writing about Salteau?”
“What makes you think that?”
“I saw you taking notes. No kid with you.”
“Good. Very astute.”
“I’m sharp that way. What paper?”
“The Chicago Mirror.” She said this with a slightly embarrassed air, as if I’d pried a shameful secret from her. “And where’s your own snotty little bequest to the future?”
“Bequests, actually. I have two. They’re back in Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn, Michigan?”
“Is there one?”
“Just outside Detroit. The original, then. You do seem a little out of place.”
“Well, back in place, really. I’m from the midwest originally.”
“Lucky you.” She turned her attention once more to the phone in her hand.
“I guess it was only a matter of time before someone found him,” I said.
“Before what?” She glanced up sharply.
“Before someone wrote him up, sent him to the big time.”
She laughed suddenly, a harsh bark. “Oh. You have very funny ideas about what’s in demand out there in celebrityland.”
“Oh, not so. I watched a TV show the other night all about a competition among a bunch of women to see who could most artfully rearrange the closets of family members, friends, and neighbors. The judges’ panel was made up of the most preeminent bed and bath specialists in the nation. The play-by-play was delivered breathlessly by two retired home-storage greats. I watched another show about the quest to find America’s Greatest Hamburger. This is how they put it. The Greatest, obscurely sizzling away in some forgotten hollow. Both shows had subplots, intrigues and crises — Kohl’s is out of shelf paper. The bakery truck blew a tire on the interstate and today’s sesame seed buns are strewn across three lanes of traffic. I’m not the one with funny ideas.”
She was laughing genuinely now and I began, for the first time in months, to feel the saner satisfactions of my own rusty allure, to feel neither off the air sexually nor out of control. She had the habit of reaching across herself with her right hand to sweep away the hair that fell over the left side of her face and she was doing it now, exposing with each unselfconscious swipe a smile that beckoned like a door opening into a sunny room. It was a good moment; the kind you take away from an otherwise dull party: an unambiguous glimpse of the ability to attract and beguile that had helped me to haul myself through eleven years of monogamy, dusk to dawn each day without a single seriously considered thought of infidelity. Until, of course, the streak had ended.