Jeremy rolled over, gasping for breath, gazing down at his hands as the world came into focus. The asphalt was cool under his palms. He heard the roar of a semi-truck, and the air pushed him sideways into his pack as it barreled past. Had he fallen asleep on the shoulder of the highway? It wouldn’t be the first time. He pushed himself up and took a deep breath. The rising sun cast soft light on the golden prairie all around him. Looking left and right, the blacktop highway stretched out as far as he could see, abandoned and lonely. Even the outline of the semi was long gone. Had there been one, or was it his imagination, part of a dream that woke him? He lifted his gaze to the gray-blue sky and yawned. The familiar scent of grass and highway comforted him, a mix of fresh air and tire remnants ground into asphalt from millions of passing cars. He was on the road, where he belonged. But where was he?
His dreams had been turbulent. A storm and then he was back in his house with his family. Dreaming about his family was common enough. But the woman with the green striped hair in his childhood bedroom had been new. Her brown eyes had nearly glowed. He was awake now, though, and dry, with no storm in sight and no father to fear. Maybe dehydration brought on the intensity of his dream and confusion now. He remembered searching for his water bottle but not finding it, then hoping for a gas station as he walked. It was rare for him to lose anything. He was very meticulous about his gear. Pulling out his compass, he saw he was still heading west, toward the black hills. From there, he’d move south. If he caught a couple of rides, he should be able to make it south enough before the cold set in. Why had he wanted to see the north? From now on, he would stick to the southern climate. It was much easier to survive without worrying about a deadly winter. Even now, the nights were brisk.
He shook his dusty brown hair, took out a strip of beef jerky, and shouldered his pack. With the rising sun to his back, he walked along the shoulder of the highway. He chewed the jerky and tried not to think about water or gas stations. After a few hours, the rhythm of his boots lulled him into a thoughtless state of appreciation. He marveled at the sweeping grassland and tried to imagine the black hills rising before him. But before this, he knew, he would run into the badlands. That was why he came north this summer, to see the badlands and the black hills. Pictures didn’t do it justice, and if he was going to live on the road, he wanted to see everything he could. But he left too late and traveling was harder up here, for some reason, and he didn’t catch as many rides. Now winter was bearing down on him.
He thought of the pictures in the badland pamphlets he’d seen and the road made a sudden crunching noise under his boots. Looking down, he discovered that the blacktop had degraded into gravel. But that couldn’t be right. Glancing back up to what a split second ago had been an endless highway, he saw miles of gravel road. Looking back, he saw that the blacktop highway still stretched out behind him, but now it ended abruptly in a jagged line of dusty rock. How did he not notice the highway’s end as he approached? And what happened to that semi-truck? Maybe it had been part of his dream after all.
He thought about digging his map out, but he was here now, so it didn’t really matter. If the highway ended like this, maybe he was on the wrong one, and without a point of reference, he was lost so a map wouldn’t help. Go on or turn back, that was the choice now. He took a few more crunching steps into the gravel and was about to turn around when he saw a flash of light. He squinted and realized that it was sunlight reflecting off metal, or a window. He hurried forward and in a few moments saw a building in the distance. It was a squat gray structure with a sign in front of it that read, “Welcome to the Badlands.”
Large windows stretched across the face of the antique building and a blacktop parking lot stretched out in front of it, weeds and grass poking up through cracks and holes. Another gravel road branched off beside the parking lot, leading to a gate with a splintered yellow arm. The broken piece lay beside a dilapidated shack. It must be a long-abandoned entrance and a visitor’s center. Faint overhead light inside the building gave Jeremy hope. Maybe it was still staffed for some reason and maybe they would have water. Or at least an outside faucet would work.
He stepped off the gravel road and into the parking lot. Faded yellow lines hid below dirt and weeds. How long has this been here? There weren’t any cars, but maybe a caretaker parked in the back. Or rangers used it for a break room or something. Reaching the front of the building, he pushed on the grimy glass door, and to his surprise, it swung freely open. Soft music and yellow light greeted him and he took a tentative step in.
It was a gift shop. Shelves of merchandise were arranged in a circular pattern, surrounding a desk, which did indeed have a person sitting at it. He wondered if he had any money in his pack. There was usually a little. The only time he earned it was when he desperately needed supplies or food he couldn’t forage. Dishwashing, cleaning, the type of work people didn’t mind paying for under the table without paperwork or records. Stashing a few bills in his pack came in handy when he needed supplies quickly.
The woman at the counter had her head down over a book, dark eyes scanning lines of text, long black hair swept to the side. Her chestnut skin looked almost yellow in the fluorescent light. She didn’t notice him. Looking around, he didn’t see any refrigerators or vending machines with water. What he saw was mass-produced merchandise that appeared to be leftover from the 1950s. On the shelves, tourist books with hand-drawn cover illustrations leaned against plastic statues of cowboys and Indians, and cheap bows and arrows hung from hooks beside t-shirts and imitation American Indian garb. He stepped toward the counter and his head started to pound in a painful rhythm with his heart. And suddenly, the buzz of the yellow fluorescent lights sounded like thunder.
“Excuse me,” he whispered as he reached the counter, dropping his pack. It bumped into a shelf of old-fashioned packages of gum. Maybe this was a period novelty shop. The woman turned a page with delicate brown fingers but didn’t look up. Jeremy put a hand to his head and tried to steady his vision, which was starting to blur. He put his other hand to his tightening chest and felt the medallion warming under his shirt.
“Excuse me,” he whispered again.
The woman finally cocked her head toward him.
“I see you,” she said with the hint of a question as if she doubted what she was seeing. Her phrase tickled something in his memory. Someone else had said that to him recently, but he couldn’t remember who. He hadn’t talked to another person for weeks.
“Thanks,” he said. “Do you have any water?” He took his hand from his chest and put it on the counter to steady himself. Tunnel vision was setting in and her face was a light at the end.
“Do you see me?” she asked, tilting her head as if to tune him in better.
“Yes.” He nodded slightly and a wave of nausea washed through him, the pain making the edges of his vision dim to black.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She leaned over, taking her hand from the book, and placed her fingers on Jeremy’s chest, over the medallion. There was a moment of intense heat before his vision sharpened. He sucked in a deep breath. The pain in his head seeped away like a tap had been opened, water streaming over a rock bed. The ache was still there, but it was dull and manageable now.
“I—”
“You carry the bear and the snake,” she said, moving her hand back slowly. She closed her book. It was an antique National Park guidebook with a brown, blue, and green illustration on the cover. He could smell the paper and glue in the binding as if it were new. A yellow pencil rested beside it, on top of what looked like a sheet of music paper. Had she been writing music? Did Native Americans write that sort of music?
“Frank knew about the medallion, too, without seeing it. It must be an Indian thing,” he said. Frank! His mind screamed, and a mental wave of memories slammed into him. Adelia. Ardmore. Abe and the cemetery. How could he forget? His knees nearly buckled, but he caught himself on the counter.
“I am from the Yankton Dakota tribe,” she said in a carefully neutral tone. “Maybe it’s a Dakota or Sioux tribe thing and if your Frank is from around here, he would be from one of those tribes. It’s hard to have an Indian thing, when we are all different, white man.” Her dark eyes bore into him for a moment.
“Sorry,” he said, still reeling from the memories invading his mind. “How did I get here?”
“You walked,” she said.
“The hanging tree… and, um, I woke up on the side of the highway.”
“What is your name?” she said.
“I’m…” He closed his eyes for a moment, pushing back thoughts of Adelia and Frank. And for some reason, his dream. The images were vivid. It wasn’t just a dream he’d had, it was a dream about something that had happened. His father beside the creek. The fear in the boy’s face as his dad hauled him away. Maybe Adelia had somehow made it more intense with her magic when she looked inside his head.
“Jeremy,” he finally said. “My name is Jeremy.”
“I see your given name but you’re not really comfortable with it, are you?”
Frank’s words came back to him. Names had power. They were ideas that helped form identities. “I’ve always been Jeremy, it’s fine. I’m trying to find Frank’s real name, not mine.” He looked around the gift shop.
She tilted her head, studying him, and the hardness in her eyes melted away. “I’m called Zitkala-Sa.”
“Am I dreaming this?” Jeremy asked.
“Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”
“Are we really here?” He didn’t think he could imagine someone like Zitkala-Sa unless he read about her somewhere. “Are you real?”
“I was, but I think that was a long time ago. Now, I am here sometimes, and then in the capital, and other times I’m in the plains with my people. But I never see anyone in the giftshop, though. I’ve heard them walking about, but I can never see them. I think the sounds are more like a memory than what’s happening now. You’re different, I think.”
“What capital?”
“The federal capital. I lived there for a time when I was alive.” She looked around the store and her eyes grew sad. “But I never worked in this gift shop and I’m not sure why I end up here from time to time. Maybe a lesson to be learned about my people or yours.”
“You’re a ghost?”
“Well,” she said, pausing to collect her thoughts. Her voice was soothing, not a song like Adelia’s, but melodic in a melancholy way. “I am not alive like you.”
“Where are we?” Jeremy asked.
“Who knows? The gods rarely speak to us. They like to show more than tell and let us figure out the rest. For example, you are on a quest for another. That is a place of sorts. It rarely matters where we are in the physical world does it? It’s mostly up here.” She tapped her temple. “Tell me about Frank.” She sat back and adjusted her loose-fitting blue shawl over a faded white embroidered shirt.
“Frank is an Indian, I mean, a Native American, too, that—”
“His tribe?” she asked.
“Um, I didn’t ask, I didn’t know… he’s from South Dakota because he was in Ardmore about a hundred years ago. He’s definitely a ghost.”
“Then Frank is probably Lakota or Dakota Sioux. Your states don’t decide our heritage.” Her eyes were still kind, but her tone was stern. “Go on.”
“Sorry, I just, there is so much I don’t understand.”
“Go on.” She nodded encouragingly.
“They hanged him, a bunch of men, from a hanging tree in a field near Ardmore. He had a lover, I forget her name, but she was white, and in his time that wasn’t good.”
“His time sounds like my time,” she said, looking up at the windows as if searching for something.
“It was horrible. I saw. I felt everything. He took me there.” Jeremy shuddered. “He’s dead, but he can’t move on. They tried to scalp him… the warriors in his tribe didn’t even do that, but they thought all native people did.” She nodded slightly as he spoke. Her eyes were dark pools gently boring into him. The hammer in his head once again started its monotonous pounding. “His lover’s brother started it. She betrayed him and they beat him and…” He was back there for an instant, hanging from the tree, blood dripping to the ground from his exposed skull, gasping for breath. The rope grew tighter and tighter around his throat. “Just let me die…” he whispered.
“Betrayal is common, especially by the Wašíču,” Zitkala-Sa said. “I see Frank’s memory in you. You live it still.” She cocked her head to the side and her tone softened. “You are one who sees. You must be careful what you look at.”
“They call me a seer,” he said, leaning on the counter, letting his head hang low until his forehead touched the cool laminate. The pounding inside his skull sent waves of nausea through him once more. “How do I help Frank?” he asked.
“You must find his name and, with it, his place. Many of us walked his path. Many of us walk it still,” she said.
“I just want to get back on the road,” he whispered. A shiver passed through him, and he knew something in him was changing. It was true, he did crave the open road and solitude that came with it, but he also felt rage and an urge to help his new friends. Were they friends? He had never known anyone outside his family long enough to call them a friend.
“Your sight will show you things inside yourself, too,” she said. Jeremy struggled to lift his head but couldn’t manage. The hammering rhythm grew stronger with each effort. Sweat trickled down his nose before falling into a puddle below his eyes. Again, he saw Frank’s bright red blood dripping down onto the yellow grass.
“I—”
“Rest,” she said, and her delicate brown fingers were under his chin, lifting it. She met his tortured gaze. “You will see whether you want to or not. You are not gifted with the option of denial, you are gifted with sight. Whether you understand what you see is up to you.”
“Gertrude, your given name,” he said. Zitkala-Sa winced but nodded sadly.
“Like Jeremy, for you. You were born into a place you did not belong or want to be,” she said. She drew her hand back, and he managed to hold her gaze, shaking as he struggled to keep his head up. The hammer in his skull pounded in time with his heart.
“A missionary name for you, given at a missionary school,” he said. She nodded again.
“You will not be a housekeeper to white privilege, though. You will find your own way. And you stand in many worlds. Live between them. Sacrifice to change all of them.” The rattle of his breath echoed in his ears.
“See,” Zitkala-Sa said.
“You strive but,” his head dropped toward the counter and he lost eye contact with her. White clouds rolled across his vision until everything disappeared. He could feel saliva running from his mouth and tears pouring out of his eyes. Clouds of thunder and rage barreled through him.
“See,” Zitkala-Sa’s voice was soft, like a beacon through the storm. Her warm hands slid over his cheeks. Brilliant brown eyes and long black hair.
“You make music in the white man’s world, you fight for women’s rights.” His own words were distant to him now as if someone else was speaking through him. He spoke her life from beginning to end, from the Yankton Dakota reservation to the white man’s missionary school, to the country’s capital. And when there were no more words, her face emerged through the calming storm clouds. Her eyes were deep pools of memory. The memory of a people fading from history and the memories of a woman making her mark on the world around her.
“Red Bird,” he said. “Your name means red bird.”
“Now find yourself, seer,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes and felt smooth hands on his cheeks. The amulet around his neck sent warmth radiating through his body and he let the comfort of it carry him away into darkness.