Dinner with Buddha by Roland Merullo Page B

from which they’d fed themselves for generations. You’d let them buy alcohol and camp in the basement, and then you’d criticize them for not being as disciplined and “productive” as you were.
    Within two-tenths of a mile we passed the Prairie Wind Casino (yes, we let them have slot machines down there in our basement). If Rinpoche noticed it, he said nothing. Another few seconds and I heard him chanting, as quietly as if his daughter were asleep in back and he didn’t want to wake her. It was an eerie sound, one low note held and vibrating, then held again, like a tugboat churning along the Hudson, signaling. I knew what it meant: a prayer for these people.
    To either side we saw well-spaced trailers. With a few exceptions, they were rusted and broken-down, sometimes accompanied by an old car out front, sometimes with rubber tires on the roof to prevent the metal sheets from being carried away on the Dakotas’ notorious winds. There were clothes drying on the lines but no people, no kids in the yards, none of the little signals of prosperity you’d see in suburbia: adults pruning trees, raking leaves, painting trim, building sheds for their lawn mowers. The structures we saw reeked of hopelessness. They were rusted, old, flimsy, sitting back from the road on their patches of useless land, in a part of the country where a winter night could reach 40 below zero, where it was regularly 110 in summer, where the nearest jobs were thirty or sixty or eighty miles away. Here and there fir trees pocked the landscape and you could see odd-shaped white sand outcroppings like miniature strip mines long since abandoned. There were two or three horses in the fields, and patches of sunflowers, and a small herd of black cattle, and then, like one last symbol standing for everything else we’d seen, a doll—naked plastic baby—sprawled on the hot tar road.
    We passed two handmade signs saying WHY DIE? and THINK. And after a moment we saw another one and I realized they marked places where people had been killed in auto accidents, and they were meant to discourage drunk driving. There were other signs, handmade and stuck into the dirt— VOTE NO TO ALCOHOL! For a hundred years it had been illegal, but a newspaper headline in Deadwood had said that, just a few days earlier, the tribe had voted on whether or not to allow alcohol to be sold on the reservation. The yes votes had prevailed by a narrow margin.
    Another minute and we were approaching the Oglala Ridge General Store. Rinpoche asked me to pull in to the gravel parking lot and I did so. We were the only non-native people there. The front door, open at that hour, could be locked with barred metal grates not unlike those you saw on the first floors of townhouses in parts of Manhattan and the boroughs. Inside, it was the usual array of packaged foodstuffs, the counter area presided over by an American Indian woman who reminded me of some of the African American women I’d encountered in my tutoring days. These were people who lived in the harshest of circumstances—in a sea of violence and sorrow that would have drowned lesser souls—and yet they were unfailingly upbeat, positive, fierce spirited. I’d seen it in some of the men, too, of course, and in some of the adolescents I tutored. But it took a different form in the women. It was almost as if the life force I mentioned earlier, that enormous drive to preserve and extend the species, was visible in their eyes and the muscles around the mouth, in their shoulders and hands. You could see it working its stubborn magic. There was no surrender in them, no despair. Somehow, in a swamp of desolation, they held to the long view.
    The other people we encountered in and around the store had no such energy to them. A stooped, haggard woman of thirty years came up to me and asked for “one dollar,” and when I handed over a five she thanked me with a remarkable dignity. Not