An Old Fashioned War

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He was going to die. If he stayed in Chicago one more day, he knew he would go to the top of one of the taller buildings and throw himself off; or maybe look into the barrel of the .45-caliber pistol his brother had brought home from Vietnam and test-fire it into his own forehead. He thought of trains, but trains might leave him only mangled. Trains weren't a sure thing. Trains were fickle as fate, and Bill Buffalo knew many poems about fate. He thought of fate as a person, a god, a muse, a force personified in cadences as strange to the English language as his native Ojupa language, now officially declared a dead tongue of historical interest alone. He was an Ojupa brave. He was born to hunt. To run. To dance around fires at night, and look into his own soul through the animals of the American plains.

The only animals in his tenement flat were mice, possibly rats, and of course roaches. And the only thing he wanted to dance about was death, his own.

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