He looked at her without speaking for a moment, his eyes impenetrable. “On the other hand, maybe it was all a dream.” His flat features shifted in the failing light, almost as if they were changing shape. “The trouble with dreams is that sometimes they are as real as life, and you cannot tell the two apart. Do you have dreams, little bird’s Nest?”
“Sometimes,” she replied, fascinated by the way his voice rose and fell as he talked, rough and silky, soft and bold. “Are you really an Indian, Two Bears?”
He glanced down then for a moment, shifting his hard gaze away from her, placing the palms of his big hands flat against the top of the picnic table. “Why should I tell you?”
He kept his eyes lowered, not looking at her. Nest did not know what to say.
“I will tell you because we are friends,” he offered. “And because there is no reason not to tell you.” His eyes lifted again to find hers. “I am an Indian, little bird’s Nest, but I am something more as well. I am something no one should ever be. I am the last of my kind.”
He brought the index finger of his right hand to his nose. “I am Sinnissippi, the only one left, the only one in all the world. My grandparents died before I went to Nam. My father died of drink. My mother died of grief. My brother died of a fall from the steel towers he helped to build in New York City. My sister died of drugs and alcohol on the streets in Chicago. We were all that remained, and now there is only me. Of all those who were once Sinnissippi, who filled this valley for miles in all directions, who went out into the world to found other tribes, there is only me. Can you imagine what that is like?” Nest shook her head, transfixed.
“Do you know anything of the Sinnissippi?” he asked her. “Do you study them in school? Do your parents speak of them? The answer is no, isn’t it? Did you even know that we existed?”
“No,” she said softly.
His smile was flat and tight. “Think on this a moment, little bird’s Nest. We were a people, like you. We had traditions and a culture. We were hunters and fishermen for the most part, but some among us were farmers as well. We had homes; we were the keepers of this park and all the land that surrounds it. All of that is gone, and no record of us remains. Even our burial mounds are believed to belong to another tribe. It is as if we never were. We are a rumor. We are a myth. How is that possible? Nothing remains of us but a name. Sinnissippi. We are a park, a street, an apartment building. Our name is there, preserved after we are gone, and yet our name means nothing, says nothing, tells nothing of us. Even the historians do not know what our name means. I have studied on this, long ago. Some think the name is Sauk, and that it refers to the land. Some think the name is Fox, and that it refers to the river that runs through the land. But no one thinks it is the name of our people. No one believes that.”
“Have you ever tried to tell them?” Nest asked when he fell silent.
He shook his head. “Why should I? Maybe they are right. Maybe we didn’t exist. Maybe there were no Sinnissippi, and I am a crazy man. What difference does it make? The Sinnissippi, if they ever were, are gone now. There is only me, and I am fading, too.”
His words trailed away in the growing silence of the park. The light was almost gone, the sun settled below the horizon so that its brilliant orange glare was only a faint smudge against the darkening skyline west. The buzzing of the locusts had begun, rising and falling in rough cadence to the distant sounds of cars and voices as the last of the ballplayers and spectators emptied out of the park.
“What happened to your people?” Nest asked finally. “Why don’t we know anything about them?”