Cassie

Cassie


         Cassie Redbutt (Red Buck) was born on an Indian reservation in the middle of Oklahoma on a bright November day.  His parents were your everyday tribal this and that, in other words, just some other fly-by-night ½ this and ½ that, reservation park trash living in a home they had fashioned out of corrugated steel, rubber tires, and discarded lumber.  You can’t afford too much when you’re poor, uneducated, shunned, and haven’t gotten around to inventing gambling casinos.  And when you have nothing better to do than screw around, well, sooner rather than later, before you’re out of your teens even, you’re likely to have a baby.


So Cassie, like every other accidental birth in this village was a throwaway child, equipped with Velcro hands, Velcro feet, a siphonous mouth, bottomless gullet, and a wail heard around the world.  In other words, his parents adored the little piece of snot.


         Growing up poor with parents exhibiting unparalled, but nonetheless necessary pride in their heritage and his, and cordoned off from the world, Cassie imaginatively had the strangest idea he was some type of gift.  He might have gone on thinking that way with his brain the size of a gnat, but then, he went off to school.


At home, he was reminded just how delightfully red-brown he was, and that was cute, but in school, he was reminded just how “Non-White” he was, and that wasn’t so cute.


For some unclear reason, or reasons known only to them, his parents sent Cassie further off the reservation than most kids, strapped in on the back of a broken down flat bed truck that had seen better days, better tires, and by the time the first snow came, more than one slide off the side of a mountain.  The inordinate smell of liquor on the driver’s breath had little to do with the sweetness of the ride, or the breeze of the slide, but we all knew that in a slide, slow reflexes were what were needed.  So since no fatal harm no fatal foul, we kept old Jacob on point. Maybe next time he’d have more success killing himself.  Luckily for Cassie, and in spite of our wishes, flying off the back of the truck did nothing to quell his thirst for outsider knowledge.


By the time the little Indian reached high school, all could see where he was going, either to jail, murdered, or off to something better than dirt farming or trafficking in peyote.  This papoose had potential.  He also had a head the size of a small lop-sided watermelon and just as filled with red-tinged arrogance as any we’d seen.  We’d all been the victim of his acid comments at one time or another, or his unfunny pranks, so no one was particularly non-plussed when he got a scholarship out of here.  We even got together and bought him a bus ticket out of town.  He thought it was for him, but really, it was for us. 


We didn’t even bother to consider dissecting his degree of redness by pointing out some discrepancies.  If his father didn’t have the sense of a snow pea and know to ask who the daddy was, who were we to tell him?  Besides, we were getting rid of the constant reminder of our past indiscretions that he called “son.”  There weren’t many three-lettered words we called him, so saving up our little secret for a later date just filled our little hearts with something akin to joy. 


You would have thought the stress of the little secret grown adult before us would have caused his mama some grief, but swear to God, I bet she just forgot.  Passing out repeatedly on a cot in the back of a bar will do that for you. 


You have to hand it to a couple that think you’re just being neighborly when you buy them drinks.  Any of those greedy hogs would drink everything in the bar, just as long as somebody else was buying.  So if it worked for them, why blame some old chief if he decides to get a little change back on his dollar.  At least, we took it out on the wife most of the time.  Besides, they shouldn’t complain.  Not knowing if one of us was the daddy is the only reason that little flea turd left our tent-village walking and not riding in the back of a hearse.


After he finally cleared out, we set back to doing what we did best, drink a little, sleep a little, and fight a little.  Life was just getting comfy when we noted the change in the color of the sky, the taste of the wind, and knew trouble was coming.


Wouldn’t you know it, that little snot didn’t last two semesters at college?  We never quite knew the specifics, but he probably mouthed-off to somebody who wasn’t particularly concerned that he might be a relative of theirs and kicked his little broken behind.  I just wished I’d been there to see it.  As it was, we’d have to cold comfort ourselves with all of his relentless wallowing-in-self-pity.

 
It didn’t take him long to recover from his wounds, and he walks pretty well now, though his left foot still points off to the west more than it should.  And the ass whooping he got didn’t manage to slow down that brain of his.  If anything, college just speeded him up, discomfortingly so for the rest of us average mortals.


One night, during some particularly weak moment, somebody invited him to our cave for our seasonal ritual of smoking a little cactus.  It would have been great if he had just accepted his out of body experience and left it at that, but no, he complained for the whole next week that he didn’t ascend high enough to meet God.  He had no idea how anxiously we wanted to help him ascend, but we resisted.

 
Then, he just seemed to disappear, not that anyone looked for him.  We all assumed he’d met his match and they buried him out in the desert.  We were heartbroken when he came back six weeks later.  And he looked like he literally returned from the dead.  Even by our standards, he needed a bath, a shave, and an appointment with someone who could pull those matted knots out of the back of his head.  It was as though somebody tried to give him a Toni home perm and left it in a little too long.


As interested as we were in what happened, he could care less.  He didn’t even want to discuss it.  He wanted to discuss something much more serious.  We were all ears, but not really.  There was something about a little worm at the bottom of a bottle that had our undivided attention.  Cassie would just have to wait.  Not that he knew how, but as it was, we didn’t really care either.

                                                 To be continued…