Number Nine: Chapter 2

JAKE JONES


FADE IN:

EXT. AGRONOMICAL NOWHERE – ARIEL VIEW – NEARING SUNSET

ZOOM to Ruby in a red convertible, hair died seven shades of green, flying in the wind.

The Beatles’ REVOLUTION 9 fades to WHY DON’T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD? (White Album).

ZOOM out to ARIEL VIEW and back in to a man in khakis and plaid work shirt, reclining on a log under a lonely oak alongside the road, face covered by a straw hat and an open book on his chest.

This is JAKE JONES, early thirties, a mixed breed (Navaho-Irish) with distinctive native features, long hair tied in a single braid. He is reading Leonard Peltier’s Prison Writings.

The Beatles’ YER BLUES (White Album) is heard (“Yes, I’m lonely…”) as flies and gnats buzz around his head.

Yes I’m lonely wanna die
Yes I’m lonely wanna die
If I ain’t dead already
Girl you know the reason why…

Jake stirs, swiping the bugs away with his book, stands, stretches and strikes the hitchhikers pose.

YER BLUES fades as DON’T PASS ME BY (White Album) begins playing.

Don’t pass me by don’t make me cry don’t make me blue
‘Cause you know darling I love only you…

In the distance, a red convertible kicks up dust, speeding toward Jake’s hitching post.

Ruby in a red convertible waves as she passes him by but fishtails to a stop well down the road. Jake remains where he is as Ruby slowly backs up to meet him.



Back on the Rez he was known as Grey Hawk but the rest of the world knew him as Jake Jones. Like many Indians, he had two names: one for the native community and another for the world at large. He considered Grey Hawk his true name, the name that would welcome him to the Overworld, while Jake Jones was a concession to the white European society that killed, tortured and enslaved his people in the name of destiny. It made it easier to walk among them. Not that he held a grudge but he never for a moment forgot who he was and the world was teeming with reminders. The world was changing. As he traveled he met more and more white people who claimed Indian bloodlines – mostly Cherokee. He would endeavor gently to remind these people that if you had not walked the red road you could not claim its heritage.

He left Third Mesa, where he had studied the ways of the ancestors with a gifted medicine man, nine months prior. He was a pilgrim, a seeker in search of destiny and adventure. Like so many of his people – and, as he would learn, so many of all Americans – he was lost in a world dominated by mass media imagery and technology. He felt isolated and disillusioned in the modern world but he was determined not to return to the safe refuge of the Rez, the relative comfort of the ancient rituals, until he had discovered some secret knowledge or wisdom that would illuminate a new path for himself if not for his people.

His journey had taken him on a circular route, beginning at the site of the Sand Creek Massacre in southeastern Colorado, where the spirits of the dead still cried out for justice. He moved on to the sacred Chiricahua Mountains of the Apache, where the face of Cochise, gazing at the heavens, marks his unknown grave. He traveled on to Indian Territory, where he paid tribute at the grave of the Apache spirit guide, warrior and healer, Geronimo. He visited the National Indian Museum in Anadarko and witnessed the success of the modern Cherokee Nation. From Oklahoma, he had gone north to smoke and sweat with the political prisoner of the modern day siege at Wounded Knee, Leonard Peltier. Peltier was strong, steady and hopeful but Jake sensed that he understood: He would remain in prison is a testament to the white man’s unending spirit of revenge even against those he victimized. He laid eyes on the White Buffalo in northern Minnesota, original land of the Lakota nation, and felt the closeness of the spirit world. From Minnesota, he went west to the Little Big Horn, where he felt the spirits of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, as well as the glorified butcher of the Indian peoples: General George Armstrong Custer.

The final destination of his pilgrimage completing a great circle on the North American continent was the Wounded Knee Memorial. Against a backdrop of corruption, infighting and extreme poverty at Pine Ridge and Rosebud, the memorial itself all but broke his spirit. Only fifty paces from Wounded Knee Hill, where the remains of Big Foot and the Ghost Dancers lay, stood the eternal symbol of the white man’s conquest of native lands: The Sacred Heart Church. He learned that the Holy Rosary Catholic Church was the owner of the most sacred land in Native American history. It stirred a rage in him that was not easily conquered or forgotten but it eventually gave way to a profound sorrow.

He went into the Black Hills as Crazy Horse had to cry for a vision in the Lakota way. He fasted seven days for an understanding of how it had come to be and what could be done to restore the balance of forces. Amidst visions of darkness, massacre and betrayal, the answer came to him in the form of the crow and the coyote, who would become his spirit animals: They told him nothing could be done to correct the great wrongs of the past. It fell to him to seek his own path, to find peace with the many as well as the one that dwelled within his self. He understood their message but it brought him no solace. It rather fed his restless spirit, his since of homelessness and alienation.

Since then, he had wandered through the land as a beggar would with no greater needs or thoughts than his hunger and thirst, his need to survive in a land that was neither caring nor indifferent. He took odd jobs – fixing cars, washing dishes, menial labor – while working his way from town to town, down the coast from the Great Northwest to Southern California, where now he sat by the side of the road, waiting for destiny to play its hand.

He was somewhere near Weed Patch outside of Bakersfield, where he had finished his day’s labor gathering grapes from a corporate vineyard. Having already sold his car for traveling money (a good deal at $250), he was down to his last fifty bucks, hot, tired and hungry. He passed on a ride to town. It somehow felt better being out in the middle of agronomical nowhere where he could breathe. At least, he could eat some grapes and bathe in a nearby irrigation canal. If he had to sleep outdoors, he preferred the open skies to the concrete wasteland of Bakersfield. If ever there was a land the gods forgot the city of Bakersfield was at its center.

Jake looked around and laughed. Was this what the Great Spirit had in mind for Grey Hawk? Was this where he needed to be in order to find the answers he sought? He glared into a bright unforgiving sky and felt his stomach churn. Grapes as a source of sustenance were getting old and his bowels were experiencing an uprising. He needed a cheeseburger so bad he was daydreaming of Dairy Queens with waitresses on roller skates, serving imitation ice cream, root beer floats, banana splits and sundaes thick with fudge, nuts and sprinkles, with a ruby red cherry on top.

He lifted his nose to the air and breathed deeply, sifting through dust and dry heat for a taste of fresh air beyond the sweat that clung to his skin like a coat of dry wax. He had no idea where he was going. All roads seemed to run in the wrong directions. He sat on a log, opened his book and waited, waited, waited.

“It’s time,” he said aloud to no one but the wisp of white clouds drifting high above, “for the world to take a turn.”

A crow cawed in the blue highways of his mind. A dog with the eyes of a coyote stared at him from the back of a pickup. The microcosmic world of gnats and subatomic creatures began to take on third and fourth dimensions. A face emerged from the oak tree under which he sat. The hot, dry air came to life: Patterns and fields of energy and particles of light leaving visible traces in the ectoplasm.

Suddenly, he sensed what Einstein must have seen. Suddenly, he saw what Crazy Horse called the real life beyond this life. Drifting in and out of conscious mind, stolen glimpses of the gods’ eye view, he saw the possibility of a modern day Prometheus bringing fire to the land of darkness.

When he came out of it, it was approaching sunset. He scanned the horizon, ate some grapes and laid back down for a nap. Brushing away some gnats and wiping the layers of greasy sweat from his eyes, a car suddenly appeared in the distance, kicking up dust, blaring music and traveling twice the speed of sound.

He stood to assume the hitchhiker’s pose. It was a classic red convertible driven by a mad woman with wild green hair flowing in the wind. She smiled and waved as she blew past him like a shooting star or a desert mirage.

Jake took it well, shaking his head and sitting back down to his book, as the car abruptly skidded and grinded to a halt well down the road. He watched it edge backward to where he sat, half expecting her to dust him again.

“How long have you been here?” she asked.

He pulled out a pocket watch.

“Nine hours,” he answered.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

“Leonard Peltier’s Prison Writings,” he replied.

“What page?”

He glanced down at the book, open in his hand. “Page 27.”

“Damn,” she replied with an expression between a smile and resigned. “Get the fuck in.”

He did not have to be asked twice.

Number nine, number nine…