The Jukebox is on Fire

Short short fiction

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When I was eighteen, I was a blur of bells, buckskin, beads, and neon feathers. Yeah, yeah, I was as lean and brown as a mid-winter deer. I know it’s bragging but I was a beautiful Indian boy fancydancer who usually collected third-place money, sometimes second, and once in a while, I was a champion. A lot of Indian girls liked me. They wanted to hustle my bustle. But I was serious with Jana Snake Church, a regal traditional dancer ten years older than me.

She danced in slow motion and I danced in fast-forward. She was a social worker who repaired families. I was an auto mechanic who repaired classic cars. I should’ve known our rhythms and obsessions were fatally different.

During the last powwow of that summer, the good one up in Wellpinit, I caught her making out with this middle-aged Indian dude. He was a ground-pounding forest firefighter with huge keloid burn scars on both arms.

Jana was kissing one of those scars when I opened the RV door. Why do people want to kiss scars? I think pain and passion might be fraternal twins.

“Ah, Jana,” I said. “I thought you loved me.”

“I do love you,” she said. “But I think I’m gonna love Wesley more.”

“Short for Westerson,” he said.

How the hell does an Indian boy compete with a warrior named Westerson the Killer of Wild Fires?

“Well, shit, Wes,” I said. “I think we have to fight now.”

He sighed. I sighed.

I wasn’t a brawler. I was a peacemaker. But even a peacemaker sometimes has to turn his hands into fists and then turn his fists into carnivorous birds.

"All right, kid," the firefighter said. He didn’t want to scrap with me. But we both knew the rules.

“You guys don’t have to throw knuckles,” Jana said. “Everybody gets their heart busted by love. Just glue it back together with forgiveness and go home unscathed.”

I wish I could’ve followed her advice. She was talking truth about mental and emotional well-being, but Wes and I were both thinking about honor.

Some honor dances involve drums and singing. Some honor dances involve wild punches and groin-kicks.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

Wes stepped out of the RV and immediately pulled my T-shirt over my head. I was all knotted up, blinded, and couldn’t use my arms. It was a classic move in a hockey fight. And Wesley was a Canadian Cree who’d been a minor league hockey player in his youth. I didn’t stand a chance. He cracked my rib with one big punch.

I fell to the dirt and curled and cussed with the pain. Wes and Jana tended to me until the powwow paramedics arrived.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” Wes said.

“I’m sorry I hurt you, too,” Jana said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Just name your first boy after me.”

But they never made anything permanent happen. They only dated for a year or so.

Three decades later, my rib still aches in the cold. I've gotten chubby, and so has Jana. She still dances—as regal as ever—but my bad knees have dropped me into powwow retirement.

She’s still a social worker. I still fix cars.

As for Westerson, he was killed in that Colorado mountain inferno a few years back. He was covered with third-degree burns when he carried two of his fellow firefighters out of the flames. Those two youngsters survived their injuries but Wes died in the rescue helicopter halfway to the hospital.

A few weeks after he died, at a hotel ballroom powwow in Spokane, they held a blanket dance for his family. Yeah, yeah, as the Cold Springs Singers drummed and sang, a few of Wes’s friends carried an open blanket around the room and people threw in cash to help his wife and kids.

Jana threw in a twenty. I also threw in twenty. And I cried a little. Yeah, yeah, I grieved for the man who’d cracked my rib over love gone wrong.

I bet you white folks don’t know that every Indian’s life is a sad cowboy song.