Excerpt from “Headlessly Hoping” a project I am currently working on.

Again Blanco spoke to the open, brisk air. The temperature in the tree line felt fifteen degrees colder than in the April sun. His feet were getting wet in his fumbling descent from the snow, and he stood there, unsure if he should finish his journey for water as a hope for a stain remover, or if he should shrug this off and continue his journey towards Buffalo.

“Hello, friend, tših!” a deep voice shouted from the stream bed, and the sound rattled Blanco to his core, he shuttered, and looked down. He tried to move his body quickly in response, but his sudden jolting made him lose his feeble grip in the snow, and he fell down the remainder of the slope, his leather shoes plopping into the rushing stream, his pant seat completely skid-marked with mud, and his suit jacket and pants ripped from branches and stone.

Still conscious, yet annoyed and angry at his muddy fall, Blanco gritted his teeth and shouted, “What the fuck! Who is there?”

“I am, my friend and brother, my agyáde’gë, hello.” This voice came again from seemingly nowhere, as Blanco could not find a body to place with the words. 

Blanco looked around at the deep forest of white hurdling in all directions around him. He stood in the stream, squinting into the forest, his filthy hands up, still clenching his tie.

“Who are you? Where are you? I have to say I am pretty scared, here.” Blanco’s voice was loud as he tried to speak over the noisiness of the rushing stream.

“Look down to your left, tših, I am here, though there may be not much of me for the Great Spirit, nor yourself, to see.” The voice was monotone and deep, but it spoke with eloquence and clearness, with full body. Yet, as Blanco craned his neck to fix his eyes on where the sound was coming from, he saw no body at all. He saw but a head, a loose rolling head, like a bowling ball, sitting half submerged in snow, the neck nestled cozily in the bicep of a thick tree root adjacent to the stream.

“What the―!” irked Blanco, as he slipped backwards and fell again into the cold spring water.

The head only smiled, showing flat, gray teeth. It was the head of a man, the hair was gray and pulled back revealing a large forehead. The cheeks were high and sharp. The eyes black and deep―endless.

“My friend, my tših, you mustn’t fret. It was the will of the Great Spirit that we should meet together this day.’

Blanco said nothing in response, his Manhattan upbringing had taught him not to respond verbally to blatant crazy being spewed upon him. But the head wasn’t saying anything too crazy. In fact, usually Blanco’s defensive mechanisms only shot up when entire humans came up to him with ridiculous conversation starters such as begging for change, or if they spoke in a foreign accent and asked for directions. He would never respond verbally to such crazy conversations as those, but he was always capable of a polite head nod or a “howz-it-going,” to friendly hellos. And though this voice was without a body, it was still kind in its sound and in its acknowledgement of Blanco. Blanco was raised to never be an ableist, and in his heart of hearts he never looked down on disabled people. In fact, he tried not to look at them at all, if anything. He didn’t hate disabled people, he just couldn’t bear to look at them, though saying hello was certainly not out of the realm of real possibility and action.

“Hello,” Blanco said flatly, as he stared at the bodiless head lurking in the arm of the tree root, half frozen in snow. He started to wonder if that teenager behind the drive thru window had put drugs in his coffee. He convinced himself that surely these upstate hillbillies knew he was some kind of downstater. They hate city people, these damned hicks. He drank some roofied coffee and now he was seeing loose heads in the snow. That had to be the reason he even convinced himself to leave the car in the first place over some spilled coffee.

The head just peered at him, a loose smile on its thin lips.

“You seem a bit frightened,” the head stated, wriggling its lips.

“Frightened? No. No, of course not,” Blanco said, avoiding eye contact.

“Well then, you comfort me. And what is your name, brother, friend, tših?”

“Oh, I am Blanco.” Blanco eagerly washed his hands in the spring water, his eyes fixated on the cold water as it froze his hands pale.

The head stared at Blanco’s hands, watching him nervously move and sit in the cold snow, the young man’s feet still resting in the streambed. The junior salesman tried with all his might to feign indifference.

“Your moccasins, Blanco, look a bit water-logged. Is this the reason you came down to my spring, my gëhödaje’? To wash your galoshes? Or perhaps you meant to rescue me?”

“Rescue you? I don’t even know who you are.”

“Ah, yes, friend. You have never asked.”

At first, Blanco replied with nothing. He moved his head and started counting the branches that were above his head, yet the bodiless head forced a cough as well as Blanco’s response. 

“Oh, yes. Well, who are you?” Blanco’s lips hardly moved as a thin toothy smile peered out from his jowls.

“I have many names,” the head started, its black eyes moving around in thought. “Otetiani, is one. Or Sagoyewatha is another. But to the white man, like you, I have often been called Red Jacket. Perhaps this is easiest for you to say, white man?”

“I, uh. Sure. Well look, this has been great and I am glad I got to… wash my shoes. But I should probably get going now.” Blanco stood, his feet freezing in the cold water, however, he was nervous to step out of the stony bank and to march up the slope he had fallen down.

“I assume, Blanco, that much time has passed since my name was well known. You seem not to know me. But I noticed too, that were we in my time, when one man said he needed rescuing, another man might ask, ‘from what’ at the very least.”

“Um, you don’t look like you need rescuing. You look as capable as anyone I know,” Blanco said, in a weak effort not to offend the clearly disabled Red Jacket, thinking the head would be offended in the same way a quadropolegic person might be if insulted. 

The head of Red Jacket stared back at Blanco. He wriggled his jaw and then forced a laugh, a hardy chuckle. Blanco awkwardly joined the laugh, as the sounds rang out in the hollow, snowy wood, the only other sound the distant traffic up and over the hillside.

“This is great humor, ha:nyö’öh, white man. I know you mean better than this. Now come, you may scoop me, friend, tših. ”

“I suppose that’s true, and I wish I could,” Blanco said, finally lifting his feet out of the water and cautiously putting them on the muddy rocks of the slope. “But I really must be going. I have to get to Buffalo, you see, and I think someone put acid in my McDonald’s coffee.” Blanco’s eyes continued to stare at the clear, rushing water that glided over the rocks. Anything but to stare at that bodiless face.

“Ah, Buffalo, you say. The American name for it, though no odegiyá’göh―no buffalo live there. We Seneca, as you white men say, had a different name for our lands and our people, the Onödowa’ga:’. And the French also had another name. I have once heard of a place the French once called, beau fleuve.”

“That’s cool.” Blanco said emptily. “Do you have any headless friends?”

Red Jacket stared back up at Blanco blankly. “Ha:nyö’öh,” Red Jacket said with a calm sense of annoyance and impatience.

“What’s that mean?” Blanco said, wiping muck from his forehead.

“White man,” Red Jacket replied, rolling his eyes.

Blanco was not just seeing the remnants of a headless Red Jacket, but was in fact, in the actual presence of the great historical figure who fought on American soil for the British Redcoats and the preservation of the Seneca Tribe during the American Revolution. This concept, Blanco could not fully understand. In fact, this concept you yourself may not fully understand, as Red Jacket is a name all but forgotten to modern American culture. 

“When the Great War consumed this land and my people,” Red Jacket continued as Blanco’s back was to the head, the junior salesman was eyeing a way back up the steep slope. “I was left in the ashes of the earth. This beau fleuve is where I was, laid to rest, as you say. Or as you Americans call it, Buffalo. I died many years ago, back in 1830.”

“That’s nice,” Blanco said with rude politeness.

“Great Spirit, save me,” Red Jacket said, his eyes crooning back up towards the blue sky.

Blanco continued to try to find a way up the slope, but his soaking wet leather shoes interrupted his ability to actively hike, in addition to his lack of an ability to actually hike.

Red Jacket, seeing the boy’s dull attention to detail, gawkiness in the terrain, and hesitance to help him felt suddenly flustered. He felt the phantom limbs of his legs and arms wrestle impatiently. The remnants of the bodiless head had waited over a century for a passerby to find him and this little stream, and he felt now was the time to act. With a metaphysical push for strength, Red Jacket took a deep breath of the cold April air, and forced his brow forward out of the tree root. The head rolled over itself, down the bark of the tree and kerplunked into the stream.

“Blurble, blurb, Dasgyenöwö’s! Help me! glugle” Red Jacket’s head splashed around in the brook, and as his head spun in the water, his lips bubbled out a call for help.

Blanco, almost halfway to the top of the hillside, looked back at the sound of the splash and watched as the head rolled and bobbed down the brook.

“Fuck!” Blanco said, and as he adjusted his feet, he slipped and fell back down the slope into the little stream. He mustered up his strength, though he had bashed his knee against a rock, and his eyes had a big bump on it, and began to follow the head downstream. His slacks were ripped, soaked, and filthy as he waded through the water and finally scooped up Red Jacket’s head.

“Oh, my dear,  ha:nyö’öh tših, my white man friend. You have done me a great honor. I owe you very much.”

“It’s really okay,” Blanco said, inspecting the head. He noticed that Red Jacket’s head was mostly intact. It felt warm, and heavier than he had expected. A bit of the neck still remained at the stump of the head, and his fingers touched a hard bone at its bottom. “I should put you down though, Mr. Jacket.”

“I ask, good Blanco, that if you do put me down, you leave me at the top of the hill. For if you will not rescue me, I can understand, but help me to find one that will.” For effect, Red Jacket began to chatter his teeth. The bodiless being tried to get to Blanco’s frozen, indifferent core.

“I…I guess I can do that,” Blanco said, looking back up the slope hopelessly. “I don’t think I will ever get back to my car at this rate. I’m probably dead already,” he said, looking down at the heavy Indian head resting in his palms, though he held the head as far from his body as possible.

“Onö’ë:’ deyökiyë’nyadö’, or, my head protector, there is a less steep slope over to the left,” Red Jacket said pointing with his eyes and blowing his wet gray hair out of his eyes as water still drizzled from his skull.

“Oh, okay,” Blanco said, still holding Red Jacket in a way that a new father might hold his child’s first dirty diaper. “So… Mr. Jacket. How do you speak English so good?” Blanco said, either in an attempt to fight this hallucination with logic, or out of curiosity for this ancient head.

“I was allied with the British, Blanco. They gave me a red jacket in my life, too, which is how I got this English name.”

“What name?”

“Red Jacket, Blanco. What I told you before, Red Jacket is my name.”

“Um. Oh yeah.” Blanco began eyeing his footing on the snowy, muddy ground. “Okay.”

“I was a great speaker in my day,” Red Jacket began again with a furrowed brow, his face adjusting to the clammy hands of his carrier. “A proud Onödowa’ga:’ orator from the west of these great lands. I was an Onödowa’ga:’ chief, I fought the invading Americans, and tried to find peace with them. It was a confusing time, a time when the Haudenosaunee were giants of this land, ground down into but an acorn. This is a fate that all nations must live through.”