Various species of mythical headless men were rumoured, in antiquity and later, to inhabit remote parts of the world. They are variously known as akephaloi (Greek ἀκέφαλοι, “headless ones”) or Blemmyes (Latin: Blemmyae; Greek: βλέμμυες) and described as lacking a head, with their facial features on their chest. These were at first described as inhabitants of ancient Libya or the Nile system (Aethiopia). Later traditions confined their habitat to a particular island in the Brisone River,[a] or shifted it to India.

If there is any hope for dear Blanco, it is in his defiance of logic. Those who live outside the bonds of normalcy and common sense seem to go further than others. Perhaps it is due to the world seeing them kindly, just as beings incapable of pulling their heads out of their own asses.

Red Jacket, fitting into the category of brilliant people and well within the bounds of logic and common sense, acknowledged Blanco’s statement with a hardy chuckle that lasted the walk from the side of the highway to the warmth of the Nissan Versa.

Blanco smirked at Red Jacket’s laughter, it was a monotone and pleasing sound, a warm melody that seemed to melt the snow all around them. Blanco opened the passenger seat and placed Red Jacket on the seat beside him, which was still damp from coffee.

“Oh, this is still wet. I am sorry. You see I spilled coffee and…”

“My tših, you found me with snow in my eye sockets. This smell, though stuffy, will do.”

“Yeah,” Blanco said as he shut the door and then flung extra muck from the woods off of his own hands and face. He got into the driver’s side.

“So…” Blanco started, looking over at Red Jacket, who had tipped sideways in the seat away from Blanco. “Oh I should probably…” Blanco got out of the car and took his suit jacket off. He then got back in and wound the damp jacket around the stub of Red Jacket’s head so that the head might sit up straight. The Seneca chief just puffed his cheeks and waited for Blanco to finish helping him.

“Now we go to Buffalo? My tših?”

“What is that word you keep using, that shush word?”

“Tših? It is Onödowa’ga:’ for ‘friend’. As you are helping me, I will help you.” Red Jacket, who was facing forward, his eyes level to the glove compartment, tried to peep through his peripherals to make conversation with Blanco, however, Blanco was holding the steering wheel with white knuckles. His heart was racing, his lips quivering.

‘What the hell am I doing?’ he thought to himself, his mind buzzing on the edge of hysteria. ‘I suck at sales, so my best option to impress Mr. Lucko is this goddamn headless hope?’ 

‘That is a good point, Blanco, but what if this makes the difference up there? Usually, you go on a sales call and you don’t get it. Your pimply reputation precedes you. These goddamn asses at Beads & Trinkets, saying I live in another man’s shadow… Please, as though I worry about my grandfather’s shadow. I have my own damn shadow and it’s got ten thumbs and two left feet. 

‘Goddamnit. What do I do?’ His questions floated in his brain, bubbling like a flat soda. He thought of his grandfather. The great Blanco Slate. The titan of the financial consulting world. Blanco thought of a moment of his early youth: 

His grandfather sat in a colossal leather chair, a large cigar was hanging from his mouth like a smokestack, his clean-shaven, pockmarked face snarled with a look of indifference. Little Blanco was sitting on the floor playing with a toy hatchet.

His grandfather had looked down at him in disgust.

“You know, little Blanco, you and I will never be the same. I don’t know if that’s good or not, but I can tell you I like my life, and that I don’t believe you will ever have what I do. In fact, what kind of Slate has the lowest grades in his third grade class? Not a Slate, that’s who.”

“But Grampa, I am a Washerman, that’s my last name,” the young Blanco had said, his eyes cast down, tapping the tip of the plastic hatchet on the waxed rosewood floor.

“Harumph,” Grandfather Blanco had said, and yes, he had literally said this. 

“What is ‘harumph’ Grandpa?”

“It’s you, Little Blanco, it’s you and your no-good father. Harumph. They don’t make good men anymore. All the good men died in The Second World War and VietNam. I served, don’t you know? I joined the Coast Guard as a captain in nineteen-seventy-four. Your father certainly didn’t.”

“I think he was born that year, Grampa.”

“Harumph. You and your father both. Excuses. Make something out of nothing, Blanco. That is the Slate way.”

“Blanco, Onö’ë:’ deyökiyë’nyadö’, are you okay?” The head interjected Blanco’s memory, and the young man’s white knuckles began to redden again. He wiped a tear from his eye.

“Ah…Yes. Thank you. Buffalo?”

“Yes. Buffalo, friend. Take me home, and I can help you with your speeches.”

“Yes… I need to stop and get a new suit though, I only brought this one. We can stop in Albany, we are just a short drive away.”

“I have never been in a carriage like this before. I preferred to run, usually. But, tših, that may be difficult for me now, ay?” Again, the head tried to see Blanco from his peripheral and exhaled loudly with  a chuckle.

“It’s not a carriage, it’s a car. No horses.”

“This is a good joke, tših. A joke of the white man.”

“It is no joke, it is a real thing. You’ve never seen a car before?”

“I have seen, only partially. I could only see so much of the road from where I was left, Blanco.”

Blanco put his blinker on and then revved the engine to merge onto highway 87. “What do you mean?”

“Come now, tših. Do you think that I popped off my own head and threw it down into the creekbed?” At this, Red Jacket began to snarl, his black eyes meditating on an old memory.

“Oh, right. How did you end up down there anyhow?” Blanco asked, realizing that though he had accepted the realism of this bodiless head, that he had not heard the story, nor accepted how the head of the Seneca Chief may have ended up in a creek in Ulster County New York, so far from where Red Jacket said his home was.

“Did you die around here, or something?” Blanco asked, his eyes fixated on the exits that directed him towards Albany.

Red Jacket tisked Blanco audibly, “Ha:nyö’öh, white man, I told you I was buried in Buffalo in the lands of my people.”

“Then how did you end up down here? How am I supposed to know? I never heard of you before,” Blanco shrugged his shoulders and spoke defensively.

“I am still mostly unsure. But what I have gathered, as I have thought of it for many years, is that there was some show in New York City, some festival, some great ceremony. And the white men, the ha:nyö’öh, wanted the heads of some of the Indian Chiefs, for a spectacle. A “sideshow” my graverobbers called it. They had gone to the burial places of great Haudenosaunee chiefs and taken their heads. I don’t know why the Great Spirit let this happen, but when my head was separated from my body, I could not see, I could not move nor smell. I could only hear.”

“I know exactly what you mean. I feel headless all the time. I totally understand.”

“I am not headless, the head is all I have.” 

“Yeah, but still I know what you’re feeling.”

“You know, white man, what it feels like to be dead, then awoken after decades of death and decay, to be beheaded and then brought far away from your homeland?” Red Jacket rolled his eyes so deeply that Blanco Washerman was almost certain he could hear them.

“I think I do, yeah,” he said, doubling down on his attempt at empathy.

Red Jacket said nothing in response. He listened to the hum of the car from his place on the passenger seat. The sun shone hot on his forehead through the window. This white man was unlike any he had ever met, too stupid to be mischevious, yet too self-centered to be kind. It was outlandish. Red Jacket had almost responded by saying, ‘I am bodiless, but you are brainless.’ Yet, an innate feeling of control overwhelmed him as his head stood erect in the bindings of this Blanco’s wet coat. 

When he had a body, he had the intensity to back up his heavy words with body language and action, but here he became only his oration, a mouthpiece for his thoughts, and more importantly his want; and very badly did this humble Sachem wish to return to his resting place and to be done with this cruel world which had stolen away his oneness with the Great Spirit and left him restless, a floating head along the northern roads of upstate New York, windswept and forgotten in the crippling aging of a nation that stood like a hobgoblin over his deceased one.