Too Close to the Falls Read Online Free PDF

I always wore my cowboy suit for any show like
Roy Rogers
or
The Cisco Kid
. Now that I had the RCA Victor window on the world I began to realize that Indians were really dangerous, and that the Tuscaroras, whose reservation was near Lewiston, must have secret meetings and scalp people in the dead of night, because you never heard about their chief, Black Cloud (it said “Elton Greene” on his prescriptions), the way you heard about Cochise. I assumed the reason Cochise from out west was so visible was because he attacked in the daytime when it was too hard to hide on open plains. The Tuscaroras, on the other hand, could walk through the woods near Devil’s Hole and probably through the entire town without making a sound. In fact, I never heard the Indians myfather said were outside of cigar shops in every city. I felt sorry for the westerners in covered wagons who wore those long skirts and bonnets; they always sent scouts ahead to look for Indian war parties. If only they had RCA Victor, they would know that whenever they travelled over the plains they had to look
up
for Indians who waited to ambush them in those craggy mountain rocks. If you lived on a cattle ranch like the Schmidts’ cousins you must be very brave and stand watch and make sure you’re not surrounded, and a flaming arrow is not thrown into your ranch house by a war party.
    Now that I saw what went on the world, I began to understand why my mother didn’t want me to go to Shim-Shacks tavern with Roy on the edge of the Tuscarora reservation when we were on delivery. While I’d previously found her trepidation inexplicable, I now realized that the Indians could kidnap me and raise me as one of them and then twenty years later someone would find me and know from my blond hair that I’d been abducted. By the time I was found on the reservation it would be too late to return home because I would have adopted Indian ways.
    Not only were there scenes of wagon trains being ambushed, but the
Senator Joe McCarthy Show
was on our RCA Victor. My mother said she didn’t like cowboy programs or RCA Victor in general, but she really liked the Joe McCarthy program. Senator McCarthy told me, and a roomful of other people, that nearly everywhere there were communists amongst us; they were people who looked like you and me; they were in local government right up to Washington. His lawyer, Roy Cohn, yelled at communist sympathizers and said things like “I bet” or “This is your
last
chance to tell the truth” when he interrogated traitors. My mothersaid that Roy Cohn was rude and that McCarthy needed more information. My father, who usually agreed with her, said that this was “no tea party” and that by the time they got hard evidence it might be too late. The communists had taken over Russia and China and now they were giving the Koreans weapons. They might let off the atomic bomb while we were looking for evidence. Who would have thought to look in a pumpkin for Alger Hiss’s spy information? If communists had infiltrated the army and the government, as McCarthy said, then we couldn’t be soft on them or we’d all be living on collective farms getting our prescriptions from the state and not allowed to go to mass.
    This really terrified me. I remembered Sister Timothy, my kindergarten teacher telling us at nap time, as we lay curled up on our rugs, that the reason the Chinese used chopsticks was so the communists could perforate the ear drums of little Catholic children if they ever heard them pray. I’d never seen a Chinese person, but I pictured them with blood dripping from their earlobes. My friend Donna Ormsby’s father was stationed in Formosa with the U.S. Army, and she went to visit him for Christmas. I told her to wear earmuffs. She, like the rest of Lewiston, didn’t have RCA Victor to tell her what was really happening.
    I began to worry about communists. If my father was right,