The Complete Short Fiction by Dan Simmons

Author:Dan Simmons [Simmons, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

First, I must tell you why I am telling this story after so many years of not telling it.

Last month, my grandson—not the grandson in jail in Rapid City but my dead third wife’s daughter’s son—invited me to his trailer over near Deadwood to see a movie on videotape. It was a big deal. Several of his daughters and his half-sister and five of my other relatives were there. All of them wanted to see how their old tunkashila reacted to the movie. It was like they were giving me a big present for still being alive when I should be dead.

The movie we watched that night was called Dances with Wolves. It had come out sometime earlier and there had been a big premiere over in Rapid City to which many people had driven from the res, but I was in the hospital then with pneumonia and missed all the fuss. So my grandson Leonard Sweetwater had thrown this Dances with Wolves party so that I would not die without seeing this wonderful thing that had been done for our people.

Well, I left halfway through the videotape. Leonard and the others thought I was just going out to urinate in the bushes—which I still prefer to using outhouses and closed-in toilets—but actually I was walking toward my home some forty miles away.

The movie made me want to throw up. I did throw up, although that may have been from the rotten burritos that Leonard had served before putting in the tape.

My grandchildren had made a big deal out of much of the dialogue in the movie being in actual Lakota, although when I heard them speak it was terrible—exactly the way English sounds so stupid when someone from a foreign country has memorized the words without knowing the meaning of them or understanding when to emphasize one syllable over another. It reminded me of Bela Lugosi speaking English by rote in the old Dracula movie. Only Lugosi was supposed to be a foreigner; these people were supposed to be Lakota speaking their own language!

But it was not the language idiocy that made me leave. It was the contempt.

After throwing up, I wept that evening during my long walk before Leonard and the others realized that I was going home and came to find me in their pickups. I wept because my own descendants would think that such a movie showed our people as they were. I think that anyone who would make such a movie is a weasel and that the movie should be called Dances with Weasels. The movie star who made it and directed it and starred in it is a weasel. I think that he acted slow and stupid and weasel-like in the movie and rather than fawning over him and giving him a home and a good name such as Dances with Wolves and a woman, even a captured Wasicun woman, my ancestors would have ignored him. Or, if he had persisted in coming around, they would have cut his balls off.

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