A Beautiful Game

“Watch those boys dance on frozen dirt with a flat ball warmed by a clothes dryer. When when the old river hums approval, you know trouble and triumph are both just around the bend. Take notes, World, listen to the drum. The future’s got jump shots and ghosts, and some don’t know fair from fowl.” ~ The Clown

The dense November air slithered down the hills to the Elbowoods bottomland like a bad snake. But a little cold couldn’t stop Johnny Antelope Ears and his relatives from their game. They’d been at it for most of the afternoon making uncanny no look passes and dribbling exhibitions inspired by antelope, prairie chickens, and war parties. No player stood around waiting. It was a game of constant motion. Everyone knew where everyone was always on the dirt court. The precise location of the weathered plywood backboard and its rusted rim was no mystery even when the ball handler was five players deep in elbows and kneecaps. Playing together since the age of three and four had its rewards. This wasn’t just magic, it was earned art.

“No reebies,” Johnny yelled as he heaved up a jump shot. The deflated ball flew like a duck peppered with buckshot toward the rusted goal forty feet away. It found the perfect center of the rim and continued downward landing with a thud in the dirt below. It’d been a long time since the cotton net had been whole. The coming darkness had plunged the temperatures to ten below, kicking the last of the air almost out of the basketball. But flat basketballs didn’t mean flat art.

“What I do! You boys could learn a lot from me,” he laughed. The other boys rolled their eyes, some with pride, some with envy. Everyone knew Johnny had his gifts. He might be the best baller ever produced in Elbowoods, maybe not. Basketball was only fifty-years old in 1941; a punk age compared to the river. A hundred yards away, the river was multitasking, rapidly forming winter ice while keeping a tight rhythm, listening to the beat of the bouncing basketball. The clown thought the scene to be awesome.

Other towns also had boys who could shoot. But Elbowoods took it further. One could find reservation had boys who could dance on the dirt, wood courts, and even black ice in any corner of Fort Berthold. And they flew when they danced. They were fearless. Other teams from bigger, white towns like Garrison, Stanton, and Bismarck relied on the both-feet-on-the-floor two handed set shot their sole offensive weapon. The cousins were more daring. They believe that they invented the jump shot. Whether they were first or not, they upended their competition with speed, finesse, and shooting in the middle of the air. 

“Let’s warm it up in the clothes dryer up at the church school and get right back at it,” Johnny suggested. “Skoden!” one of his cousins said, “Those Holy Rollers have been spinning their white prayers for us, so let’s see what their dryer can do for our dead duck!” Giggling, the cousins galloped up the icy path to the school—ducking their heads against the wind, the ball tucked like a small, shivering rabbit under Johnny’s arm. The ghosts of the old Hidatsa town murmured approval with a faint song. The Clown joined in. These boys had some of it figured out, a White man’s invention put to more imaginative use. 

Elbowoods

“When gods argue over riverbanks and mortals count beaver pelts, my right eye falls on the surveyor’s stakes and the other on the cookie jar. Let them build bridges and dams—memory leaks faster than water, but a good joke leaves a path to the Gods even the Missouri can’t wash away.” ~ The Clown

Toweling off after their rumble and talking in measured cadence, Old Man began, “Listen, you fool. Since the beginning of time our people—Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara—have thrived on these muddy banks. We’ve loved this spot and all ancestors who went before. This river nourishes our crops, feeds our fish, and carries our prayers.”

Odin’s spat snus from his bruised lips, barely missing one of his dangling blond braids, “It’s living? This River? Living like a mortal? Or even a god? Ha! It’s a vessel of water surrounded by dirt. It’s only a highway for profit and European beaver hats and buffalo coats. Worth every penny to those hard working White boys who poled those boats up here from Saint Louis. Many of them were Scandinavian, ja sure.  By the way, dirt breath, why do you think this river belongs to you and yours? Weren’t the Vikings I sent here first? Followed by the French? Doncha know?” Clown thought to himself, If only I’d been there I could have sold a bunch of cookies to them Scandahoos and every one of them those Froggies.

“We were here first and you’re too thick headed to admit it. At least the early explorers were respectful enough to not give it bad names. Lewis and Clark also liked the place. But, your fur traders smelling worse than the beaver and buffalo they skinned called it Old Muddy, Old Misery, Mosquito Alley. We lived with all of it and all of them. They were only visitors and plunderers.” 

“Then came the steamboats. Speedy little bastards. We sent you blankets laced with smallpox hoping you’d die off quick like so you wouldn’t be in the way, protesting treaties and what not.”  Clown thought, steam and smallpox. That sounds like a grunge band.

Only man spat back, “You carved out this place for us. Reservation lands you called them. Seven pounds of beef, flour, bacon twice a year. A downriver bribe for upriver people. You almost won by starving us and infecting us but we were too tough for you.” 

“Oh for nice! Cry me a river, if you’ll pardon the pun,” Odin snorted and continued, “You dubbed this bend ‘Elbowoods.’ I sure see a lot of assholes but no elbows!” Odin laughed at his own wit. “But, what do you have to complain about, you got a bridge for cars. White towns full of my followers sprung up around you. Your people have the best of all possible lives.”

Clown thought, where’s this conversation going? Ticktock, ticktock—can’t they hear the cosmic gong? Second-tier gods can’t anticipate much he sighed. Soon the water will be up to Odin’s kneecaps heading straight up his leg, heading for his own elbows and those greasy braids.  

“Once whooping cranes circled these trees and this fertile soil. Now they’re almost ghosts, hunted the same way our people were hunted.” Only Man began to weep.

“Grow up. You weren’t just hunted, your women fell in love with my Vikings. How else do you explain the blonde hair and blue eyes sported by the luckiest of your tribe,” Odin raised his voice in indignation. “They look like they’d be right at home on the streets of Oslo.”

Clown thought ahead to the dam made of earth and mendacity that would soon choke the river’s ancient course. It would erase Elbowoods from the face of the earth. Erased. He liked that word. Maybe he would erase the surveyor’s stakes to slow them down. He sighed and smiled. Before that could happen, though, those cousins on the basketball court would see to it that the town would never be forgotten.