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carlyinromei belong to the ground now (thunderheart, ray levoi/walter crow horse, nc-17)
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escritoireazul's prompt false pride. title from florence + the machine's mother.The word humiliation comes from a Latin word referring to the ground. The implication is that something is so lowly as to be on the ground, beneath one's feet. To humiliate is to bring one down to earth.
Interestingly, in English humus, a word from the same root, is an element of soil necessary for growth.
***
Ray’s contact at the FBI office in Rapid City is a man called Martin. He has jet black hair slicked back and shiny with pomade, and the smug, grating voice of a morning DJ.
Ray presses a shirt. He brushes a suit jacket. He gets dressed with the shirt still warm from the iron. He drives the hour and a half to the FBI office in Rapid to introduce himself.
Martin gets up from his desk when Ray enters the room. He shakes Ray’s hand when it’s offered, his grip a little tight.
The first thing out of his mouth is, “I heard what you did to Coutelle. He was a good man.”
Ray forces a smile, his heart sinking. Martin sinks back into his chair, propping his feet up on the desk and regarding Ray with a hard stare.
“Indian FBI,” Martin says. “Now I’ve seen everything.”
***
Ray had come back to the rez a few weeks after Coutelle’s depositions were finished. Ray had testified.
Dawes had invited Ray back to his office, praised him for his hard work while simultaneously mourning the loss of Coutelle. Ray had been unable to smile, but had said, “yes, sir” when appropriate. Every time he wanted to scream, he remembered his father’s face when Ray had come home from South Dakota, the news already ahead of him. “There is a chain of command, and what you did to Frank Coutelle is never done. You have caused me the embarrassment of a lifetime, and I expect you to fix it.”
Dawes offered him a cherry job in Virginia. Ray studied Dawes’s forced smile. This was a cover up, too. Ray had already begun contacting Maggie’s media contacts, and they were desperate to plug up this leak before the dyke came tumbling down. Ray could, he knew, ask for anything he wanted.
***
Crow Horse’s cruiser was parked on the side of the road next to where the Bear Creek sign had rusted off its poles. Ray sighed, cursed, pulled over.
Crow Horse left his car at an infuriatingly easy pace, came up to Ray’s window. He knocked on the glass, and Ray lowered it.
“Look what we have here,” he said. He lowered the Ray-Bans down low enough to uncover his eyes; his gaze was serious, but not unkind.
“How did you know I was coming?” Ray asked. “The wind tell you?”
“Saw an owl,” Crow Horse said smoothly. “Think it was harbinging the death of your career.”
Ray frowned. Before he could formulate a reply, Crow Horse was smiling, extending his hand.
“Welcome back,” he said.
***
Ray drives back to the rez drinking cold, bitter coffee out of a paper cup. His shoulders shrug under the starched weight of his suit jacket; in his irritation he wants to rip it off, tear off his freshly pressed shirt, the annoyed restlessness of a bridled mustang.
He was born in the Year of the Horse, in a cycle the Chinese call Wood Horse. The Horse is impetuous, independent, charming. The wood element brings patience, drive. Wood Horses are true work horses, diligent and enduring and the stubbornest goddamn things alive.
Ray crumples the empty coffee cup in his fist, presses his foot down on the gas. Prairie sand stings the car’s undercarriage as it roars up the unpaved roads.
***
The Bear Creek police station is quiet, as usual. Dispatch mostly takes calls about domestic disturbances, drunk and disorderlies, petty theft, criminal mischief.
Anything serious goes to Ray. Major Crimes Act.
Jimmy meets Ray at the door of the station, wagging his tail. “There ain’t no damn police dogs at the sheriff’s office in Bear Creek,” Crow Horse had insisted, but Ray brings the dog in every day, anyway. Sometimes Jimmy rides shotgun on his patrols. Ray cracks the window for him, and Jimmy sticks his nose out and smells for jackrabbits.
“You wouldn’t know what to do with one if you caught it,” Ray says.
Ray scratches Jimmy between the ears, and the dog follows him as he walks back to his office. Ray finds Crow Horse sitting in the chair behind his desk, and frowns. He takes off his coat, finally, and hangs it up.
“Don’t you have your own office?” he asks.
Crow Horse fiddles with one of Ray’s pens. “Just thought I’d get a progress report from you on the situation in Rapid. Did you make some new Fed friends?”
Ray glares at him, but says nothing. Crow Horse’s mouth twists, and he gets out of Ray’s chair. Jimmy trots happily to greet Crow Horse as he walks toward Ray; Crow Horse frowns at him, bats away his attempts to cuddle.
“They give you some trouble?” Crow Horse asks, and his tone is gentle.
“They hate me,” Ray says.
“They don’t even know you.”
“Well, they don’t want to.”
Ray is sure Crow Horse will tell him to stop pouting, but instead he just claps his hand on Ray’s shoulder, and says, “Got somethin’ for you.”
Crow Horse pulls something from his back pocket, holds it just out of reach. Ray rolls his eyes, and holds out his hand. Crow Horse slaps the little leather wallet into it; Ray opens the wallet and finds a shining star. His deputy’s badge.
“Finally got it back from the engravers,” Crow Horse says.
Ray studies the face of the badge, runs his fingers around its edges, over its engraved face. His FBI badge is a shield; this is a star, like the sheriffs in the old west wore.
He smiles. “Thanks.”
***
Jimmy curls up on the foot of the bed, his head resting on his paws. Ray pets him with his socked foot as he reads over the information packet from the Bureau of Indian Affairs: tribal enrollment. If he wants anything—healthcare, housing—there are blood quorums to meet, and lineage to prove.
In the third grade, Ray’s teacher had given the class a take home assignment: create a poster of your family tree. Ray’s mother had helped him cut out tree shapes out of construction paper, glue them onto a piece of poster board.
His father had been dead six months, and they left his side of the tree blank.
Ray huffs out a sigh, and Jimmy looks at him, head cocked to one side. Ray puts the packet on the bedside table, and turns off the light.
***
Five a.m., Ray and Jimmy leave the hotel. Ray calls in to dispatch on the radio between bites of his bagel. Rosie sends him to a shots fired in Red Crow.
The disturbance turns out to be an eighty-year-old great grandfather firing an ancient shotgun at squirrels on his roof.
Ray leaves Jimmy in the car as he approaches the house. He has his new badge in his hand, announces himself as the police. They haven’t begun a conversation before Ray is raising his hands to show he has no weapon, the old man’s shotgun trained on his chest. The man shouts in Lakota; Ray catches one word, and it’s Wasi’chu.
***
Ray’s U-Haul is parked in front of his hotel room. It’s only costing him a million dollars a day, but he has nowhere to unload. Ray opens the back and climbs in, carefully navigates the boxes containing all his worldly possessions until he finds his color television. It’s barely three years old, and even in his house in DC, it was just collecting dust.
Ray delivers the television to Grampa Reaches’s trailer, taking the stairs up slowly. The damn thing weighs a ton. Grampa opens the door for him as he reaches the porch, before he can knock.
Ray installs the television. It’s a gift, not a trade. They watch Little House on the Prairie on Grampa’s little couch. Grampa talks to him in Lakota, and Ray listens.
***
Crow Horse invites him to dinner at his house one day after work. Walter shows him how to make frybread in a skillet, offers Ray a beer he declines. He’s never had a sip of alcohol in his life, but the frybread is the right amount of salty and crisp. The taste of the frybread and the smell of the alcohol awaken a dusty memory, and Ray winces.
Crow Horse watches him flinch without comment.
“I made dessert,” he says.
Crow Horse produces a pie. Ray frowns over it. The crust is shiny, the edges intricately crimped.
“You made that?” Ray says.
Crow Horse grins sheepishly. “Okay. I bought it.”
It’s good, though, the right balance of tart and sweet that Ray has always responded well to. They clean up together, Crow Horse washing and Ray rinsing, stacking up the clean dishes in the dish drainer. Crow Horse’s house is small but lovingly cared for, and Ray remembers the handful of tiny, poor apartments he and his mother lived in after his father died and before she married the colonel. They had been this poor when his father was alive, but Ray had never felt safe there. Everything was chaos or seconds from it; the only peace was the eye of the storm, and you could never really relax there, could you?
Ray’s hands still beneath the faucet. He is frozen too long, long enough for Crow Horse to notice. Crow Horse places his hand on Ray’s shoulder, and Ray bows his head. He is about to pull away when Crow Horse’s fingers move hesitantly over the back of Ray’s neck. Ray waits a moment, processing. Crow Horse’s fingertips run through the hair at Ray’s nape, and something in Ray breaks, and he squeezes his eyes shut and leans into the touch.
Ray isn’t sure how time skips, but five seconds later, Crow Horse is slamming Ray against the wall by his shoulders. The breath is knocked from his chest, and when Crow Horse starts kissing him, Ray is so lightheaded that his vision blacks out for a moment. Ray is stunned, but at the same time takes naturally to it, like a child tossed into the deep end of the swimming pool. Sink or swim, and he finds his body just knows what to do.
They are kissing, and Crow Horse’s body is pinning him to the wall. Ray struggles, but Crow Horse’s hold is competent, and Ray splits the difference by pulling himself up on Crow Horse’s leg, rutting against him.
“Jesus Christ,” Crow Horse breathes, and Ray flushes, thinking Crow Horse wants him to stop, but then Crow Horse’s arms are around him, fingers digging into his back, and Crow Horse is drawing Ray to him. Crow Horse bites Ray’s neck, and Ray hears himself moan and hears himself say fuck, and Ray wraps Crow Horse’s hair around his wrist and pulls. Crow Horse growls, and Ray lets go of his hair as Crow Horse spins him around, forces him face first into the wall. Crow Horse has undone Ray’s fly and dropped his pants and shorts before Ray’s head has stopped spinning. Ray wants to push back—he can’t stand being at a disadvantage—but then Crow Horse starts thrusting his cock against the cleft of Ray’s ass, palming Ray’s cock and massaging him rhythmically. The tension in Ray’s body is incredible; he pushes against Walter’s hand, strains against the wall so hard that the wallpaper leaves a woven pattern against his skin. He comes suddenly and hard, going limp against the wall, only the architecture of the house and Crow Horse’s steady hands keeping him upright.
Ray feels Crow Horse buck against him, and then his weight fall against Ray’s shoulders, pressing him to the wall. Warmth spreads across the skin of Ray’s back, and he struggles to catch his breath.
***
Sometime in the middle of the night, Jimmy sneaks up onto Crow Horse’s bed, settling between their legs. Ray turns over and presses his face against the pulse point in Crow Horse’s neck.
Ray closes his eyes. He feels, for the first time in a long time, grounded.
Interestingly, in English humus, a word from the same root, is an element of soil necessary for growth.
***
Ray’s contact at the FBI office in Rapid City is a man called Martin. He has jet black hair slicked back and shiny with pomade, and the smug, grating voice of a morning DJ.
Ray presses a shirt. He brushes a suit jacket. He gets dressed with the shirt still warm from the iron. He drives the hour and a half to the FBI office in Rapid to introduce himself.
Martin gets up from his desk when Ray enters the room. He shakes Ray’s hand when it’s offered, his grip a little tight.
The first thing out of his mouth is, “I heard what you did to Coutelle. He was a good man.”
Ray forces a smile, his heart sinking. Martin sinks back into his chair, propping his feet up on the desk and regarding Ray with a hard stare.
“Indian FBI,” Martin says. “Now I’ve seen everything.”
***
Ray had come back to the rez a few weeks after Coutelle’s depositions were finished. Ray had testified.
Dawes had invited Ray back to his office, praised him for his hard work while simultaneously mourning the loss of Coutelle. Ray had been unable to smile, but had said, “yes, sir” when appropriate. Every time he wanted to scream, he remembered his father’s face when Ray had come home from South Dakota, the news already ahead of him. “There is a chain of command, and what you did to Frank Coutelle is never done. You have caused me the embarrassment of a lifetime, and I expect you to fix it.”
Dawes offered him a cherry job in Virginia. Ray studied Dawes’s forced smile. This was a cover up, too. Ray had already begun contacting Maggie’s media contacts, and they were desperate to plug up this leak before the dyke came tumbling down. Ray could, he knew, ask for anything he wanted.
***
Crow Horse’s cruiser was parked on the side of the road next to where the Bear Creek sign had rusted off its poles. Ray sighed, cursed, pulled over.
Crow Horse left his car at an infuriatingly easy pace, came up to Ray’s window. He knocked on the glass, and Ray lowered it.
“Look what we have here,” he said. He lowered the Ray-Bans down low enough to uncover his eyes; his gaze was serious, but not unkind.
“How did you know I was coming?” Ray asked. “The wind tell you?”
“Saw an owl,” Crow Horse said smoothly. “Think it was harbinging the death of your career.”
Ray frowned. Before he could formulate a reply, Crow Horse was smiling, extending his hand.
“Welcome back,” he said.
***
Ray drives back to the rez drinking cold, bitter coffee out of a paper cup. His shoulders shrug under the starched weight of his suit jacket; in his irritation he wants to rip it off, tear off his freshly pressed shirt, the annoyed restlessness of a bridled mustang.
He was born in the Year of the Horse, in a cycle the Chinese call Wood Horse. The Horse is impetuous, independent, charming. The wood element brings patience, drive. Wood Horses are true work horses, diligent and enduring and the stubbornest goddamn things alive.
Ray crumples the empty coffee cup in his fist, presses his foot down on the gas. Prairie sand stings the car’s undercarriage as it roars up the unpaved roads.
***
The Bear Creek police station is quiet, as usual. Dispatch mostly takes calls about domestic disturbances, drunk and disorderlies, petty theft, criminal mischief.
Anything serious goes to Ray. Major Crimes Act.
Jimmy meets Ray at the door of the station, wagging his tail. “There ain’t no damn police dogs at the sheriff’s office in Bear Creek,” Crow Horse had insisted, but Ray brings the dog in every day, anyway. Sometimes Jimmy rides shotgun on his patrols. Ray cracks the window for him, and Jimmy sticks his nose out and smells for jackrabbits.
“You wouldn’t know what to do with one if you caught it,” Ray says.
Ray scratches Jimmy between the ears, and the dog follows him as he walks back to his office. Ray finds Crow Horse sitting in the chair behind his desk, and frowns. He takes off his coat, finally, and hangs it up.
“Don’t you have your own office?” he asks.
Crow Horse fiddles with one of Ray’s pens. “Just thought I’d get a progress report from you on the situation in Rapid. Did you make some new Fed friends?”
Ray glares at him, but says nothing. Crow Horse’s mouth twists, and he gets out of Ray’s chair. Jimmy trots happily to greet Crow Horse as he walks toward Ray; Crow Horse frowns at him, bats away his attempts to cuddle.
“They give you some trouble?” Crow Horse asks, and his tone is gentle.
“They hate me,” Ray says.
“They don’t even know you.”
“Well, they don’t want to.”
Ray is sure Crow Horse will tell him to stop pouting, but instead he just claps his hand on Ray’s shoulder, and says, “Got somethin’ for you.”
Crow Horse pulls something from his back pocket, holds it just out of reach. Ray rolls his eyes, and holds out his hand. Crow Horse slaps the little leather wallet into it; Ray opens the wallet and finds a shining star. His deputy’s badge.
“Finally got it back from the engravers,” Crow Horse says.
Ray studies the face of the badge, runs his fingers around its edges, over its engraved face. His FBI badge is a shield; this is a star, like the sheriffs in the old west wore.
He smiles. “Thanks.”
***
Jimmy curls up on the foot of the bed, his head resting on his paws. Ray pets him with his socked foot as he reads over the information packet from the Bureau of Indian Affairs: tribal enrollment. If he wants anything—healthcare, housing—there are blood quorums to meet, and lineage to prove.
In the third grade, Ray’s teacher had given the class a take home assignment: create a poster of your family tree. Ray’s mother had helped him cut out tree shapes out of construction paper, glue them onto a piece of poster board.
His father had been dead six months, and they left his side of the tree blank.
Ray huffs out a sigh, and Jimmy looks at him, head cocked to one side. Ray puts the packet on the bedside table, and turns off the light.
***
Five a.m., Ray and Jimmy leave the hotel. Ray calls in to dispatch on the radio between bites of his bagel. Rosie sends him to a shots fired in Red Crow.
The disturbance turns out to be an eighty-year-old great grandfather firing an ancient shotgun at squirrels on his roof.
Ray leaves Jimmy in the car as he approaches the house. He has his new badge in his hand, announces himself as the police. They haven’t begun a conversation before Ray is raising his hands to show he has no weapon, the old man’s shotgun trained on his chest. The man shouts in Lakota; Ray catches one word, and it’s Wasi’chu.
***
Ray’s U-Haul is parked in front of his hotel room. It’s only costing him a million dollars a day, but he has nowhere to unload. Ray opens the back and climbs in, carefully navigates the boxes containing all his worldly possessions until he finds his color television. It’s barely three years old, and even in his house in DC, it was just collecting dust.
Ray delivers the television to Grampa Reaches’s trailer, taking the stairs up slowly. The damn thing weighs a ton. Grampa opens the door for him as he reaches the porch, before he can knock.
Ray installs the television. It’s a gift, not a trade. They watch Little House on the Prairie on Grampa’s little couch. Grampa talks to him in Lakota, and Ray listens.
***
Crow Horse invites him to dinner at his house one day after work. Walter shows him how to make frybread in a skillet, offers Ray a beer he declines. He’s never had a sip of alcohol in his life, but the frybread is the right amount of salty and crisp. The taste of the frybread and the smell of the alcohol awaken a dusty memory, and Ray winces.
Crow Horse watches him flinch without comment.
“I made dessert,” he says.
Crow Horse produces a pie. Ray frowns over it. The crust is shiny, the edges intricately crimped.
“You made that?” Ray says.
Crow Horse grins sheepishly. “Okay. I bought it.”
It’s good, though, the right balance of tart and sweet that Ray has always responded well to. They clean up together, Crow Horse washing and Ray rinsing, stacking up the clean dishes in the dish drainer. Crow Horse’s house is small but lovingly cared for, and Ray remembers the handful of tiny, poor apartments he and his mother lived in after his father died and before she married the colonel. They had been this poor when his father was alive, but Ray had never felt safe there. Everything was chaos or seconds from it; the only peace was the eye of the storm, and you could never really relax there, could you?
Ray’s hands still beneath the faucet. He is frozen too long, long enough for Crow Horse to notice. Crow Horse places his hand on Ray’s shoulder, and Ray bows his head. He is about to pull away when Crow Horse’s fingers move hesitantly over the back of Ray’s neck. Ray waits a moment, processing. Crow Horse’s fingertips run through the hair at Ray’s nape, and something in Ray breaks, and he squeezes his eyes shut and leans into the touch.
Ray isn’t sure how time skips, but five seconds later, Crow Horse is slamming Ray against the wall by his shoulders. The breath is knocked from his chest, and when Crow Horse starts kissing him, Ray is so lightheaded that his vision blacks out for a moment. Ray is stunned, but at the same time takes naturally to it, like a child tossed into the deep end of the swimming pool. Sink or swim, and he finds his body just knows what to do.
They are kissing, and Crow Horse’s body is pinning him to the wall. Ray struggles, but Crow Horse’s hold is competent, and Ray splits the difference by pulling himself up on Crow Horse’s leg, rutting against him.
“Jesus Christ,” Crow Horse breathes, and Ray flushes, thinking Crow Horse wants him to stop, but then Crow Horse’s arms are around him, fingers digging into his back, and Crow Horse is drawing Ray to him. Crow Horse bites Ray’s neck, and Ray hears himself moan and hears himself say fuck, and Ray wraps Crow Horse’s hair around his wrist and pulls. Crow Horse growls, and Ray lets go of his hair as Crow Horse spins him around, forces him face first into the wall. Crow Horse has undone Ray’s fly and dropped his pants and shorts before Ray’s head has stopped spinning. Ray wants to push back—he can’t stand being at a disadvantage—but then Crow Horse starts thrusting his cock against the cleft of Ray’s ass, palming Ray’s cock and massaging him rhythmically. The tension in Ray’s body is incredible; he pushes against Walter’s hand, strains against the wall so hard that the wallpaper leaves a woven pattern against his skin. He comes suddenly and hard, going limp against the wall, only the architecture of the house and Crow Horse’s steady hands keeping him upright.
Ray feels Crow Horse buck against him, and then his weight fall against Ray’s shoulders, pressing him to the wall. Warmth spreads across the skin of Ray’s back, and he struggles to catch his breath.
***
Sometime in the middle of the night, Jimmy sneaks up onto Crow Horse’s bed, settling between their legs. Ray turns over and presses his face against the pulse point in Crow Horse’s neck.
Ray closes his eyes. He feels, for the first time in a long time, grounded.
