Yabba-Dabba-Done
Pop culture references are, of course, nothing new in the world of fiction and they have only grown in stature ever since Stephen King made them not just acceptable, but almost a necessity. That said, there are some occasions when the reference is given a tweak that allows it make the leap from allusion to imagery. And that is not something you come across every day:
“`Just the hindquarters today, Super Indian,’ he said with a smile, a big brown leg Fred-Flintstoned over his shoulder, the black hoof cupped in his hand, blood dripping down the back of his jacket.”
Basketball on the Reservation
A lot of white society remains unaware that basketball—not football or baseball—is the number one sport in America among Native Americans living on reservations. Anyone paying the slightest attention to pop culture like movies or books about reservation life over the past three decades or so, at least, could tell you this is so without ever getting within a thousand miles of an actual reservation. That would explain the imagery here which references 1980’s NBA stars, but it still doesn’t account for the dissing of Stockton, regardless of his curious opinions about vaccines:
“Curtis, the baller, this naturally gifted farm kid who was born for the court. He didn’t see it all with his eyes, he felt the game through his feet like radar, and didn’t even have to think to know which way to cut. And he had that basketball on a string, one hundred percent. Only thing kept him from going college was his height, and that he insisted he was a power forward, not a stop-and-pop sharpshooter…he had some jumps, too, could rise up and flush it—only in pregame, with a lot of setup, but still. In the end, though, he wasn’t built like Karl Malone, but like John Stockton. Just, he couldn’t accept that, had the idea he could go inside at the next level, bang his way through the bigs, not be a pinball bouncing off them.”
Second Person Perspective
For the most part the novel is narrated in the third-person. Occasionally, however, the point-of-view briefly slips into the rare second-person perspective in which “you” is really a first-person reference. The author has explained that this distortion in narrative voice is intended as a sort of literary equivalent of the primary evolution in the horror film genre wrought by the arrival of the slasher film: the POV shot which situates the viewer into place not of the victim as was the tradition, but into the feet of the killer. When the shift from third- to second-person occurs, the story’s hunters become the hunted:
“The two you want are just right there, in the lodge three steps away, naked and helpless. Gabriel Cross Guns, Cassidy Sees Elk. The only two left from that day in the snow. But you don’t want to get shot in the back again, either. You can still feel the pain from last time, don’t need this dad to blow that hole open all over again before you’re finished. When he walks around the side of the camper, you follow, right in the scent- path still swirling in the air so clear you could close your eyes and not lose him. You know to stay far from the camper, though, so he can’t pin you there in a sudden pool of yellow. A camper isn’t a train screaming past, trapping you, but it might as well be.”
On the Property of Arrows
A short lecture on the property of arrows is directly related to the wider concept of substance abuse treatment, but when spoken in the slow, measured, profoundly philosophical tones of a wise and noble Indian from the movies, it becomes a contemplation of the direction of life during youth:
“`Arrows are straight, but they have to bend, too,’ Gabe says…there was even a series of posters all along one wall of the substance abuse office, an arrow looking all bowed out at the moment of the string’s release, like it’s going to crack, shatter, blow up. But it doesn’t. It’s bent out to the side in the first poster, it snaps back a foot or two from the riser of the bow in the second poster, and then in the rest it’s snapping back and following through, bending the arrow the other way now, and until the last possible instant before the bull’s-eye, it’s flopping back and forth through the air like that, trying to fine true.”
