When Thunder Met Lightning: The Story of How I Met My Brother Denny by Cliff Taylor

Denny was running on the treadmill in the kitchen, his shoes pounding on the track, occasionally you’d hear him talking Lakota into his phone where he was WhatsApping a student who wanted something clarified. Nona, my niece, 14 years old, all glasses and smiles and pure long dark hair that went down past her waist like her dad’s, was over on the futon splitting her attention between her favorite show, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and a book she was reading. I was just waking up, a novel by my side, out of the shower, my hair drying. I used to go visit my brother Denny and his family down in Lawrence, Kansas when he taught at Haskell but now he’d moved home to Standing Rock and I drove the 10 hours from Nebraska to visit him there. It’s all about renewing the connections. You’ve got to make those long drives; you’ve got to make those trips happen. 

       When Nona was real young she really took a shine to me, her dad’s best friend, another book-addict, the brown-haired Indian who was maybe a little softer, more sensitive, stranger, than a lot of the other Natives who came around. It was cool to see how much she drank up all the goofball things I tossed her way; always trying to make her laugh, give her that quality attention that my favorite Uncles gave me growing up, join in the love-showering that her dad always had going on for her and her brother, Pana. But she was on the verge of becoming a teenager now and all sorts of new subtleties were emerging from her person: like she wanted to watch SVU all the time, the endless parade of atrocities in the big city and the justice the lead female investigator pursued and sometimes successfully delivered. Felt like I had to work a little more to be the cool Uncle. Felt like experimenting a little. Felt some other things in the room too. 

       Folks might not believe it but I’ve had about 400 or so dreams over the years with my brother Denny in them; we’ve kind of been in each other’s lives like that ever since we met, if you know what I mean. I can’t say I’ve had the same number or quality of dreams with anyone else; that’s just been how it is. I used to tell him that he should take all those hundreds of dreams that I’ve sent him, print them out, and collect them into a binder/book to give to Nona and Pana for when they graduate and spirit off into the world of adulthood and college. That way, they’d have one of the coolest completely spirit-world talisman books around, just shitloads and shitloads of dreams I’ve had of their dad and me doing things in the Other World, spirits of all kinds giving all sorts of gifts and information, dream poetry pouring out of the most authentic quality, of maximum richness. Exactly the kind of Jedi stuff young Native kids need when they’re setting off on their own. Denny has always laughed when I’ve suggested this. I’ve always laughed too even though I’ve been really serious about it. To this day I do not know if he’s saved all those dreams I’ve sent him over the years. Fingers crossed though, he has. 

       If there’s one thing that both Denny and I know, it’s that we’re here to spend our lives preparing things for the next generations, that specific and larger-scale things will be in place so when all those ones who come after us and our generation begin to mature into their destinies they will have optimum conditions for enacting their dreams. We both really live this mission; it’s casual and it’s dead-serious. So, with that in mind, we kind of share a lot of stories around the kids, for them to soak up, absorb, file away, to assimilate into their library for future use. We kind of have fun with it, like an inside joke. We’ve been there so we kind of know how it’s going to go. And it was in that spirit that I looked over to Nona, her dad still running hard, getting his first of two eight mile runs in that he did every day since he was her age, and asked her, “Did your dad ever tell you the story of how we met?”

       “No,” she said.

       I could tell she was interested though. There were levels of her awareness that could read when certain mythological reverberations were present in what Indians were talking about. Like her dad and I, she knew how to ingest stories like the foodstuffs of Eternity too. 

       It was good to start off like a cornball a lot of times, so I said, “Well, I think it’s about time you learn that origin-story. See the stuff superheroes are made of. See how the spirits make people.”

       She shook her head and smiled, like my yarn had a strange smell to it; but it was all a part of the ritual. “My dad might be a superhero but I don’t know about you.”

       “Ouch!”

       She laughed, getting comfortable on the couch, muting SVU.

       “Okay, I’m only going to tell you this one once so you better make sure you remember it. It’s one of the most important ones I got…”

       I was 24 years old, living in a small apartment a couple of blocks away from the University in Lincoln, Nebraska. I worked overnights stocking shelves with a bunch of self-proclaimed roughnecks and nightfolk, was writing mainly short stories back then, and was about two years into learning about and walking the Red Road, with all of the unbelievably powerful and life-changing experiences that entailed. No longer was I lost and without community, ignorant of my direction in life; I was enfolded in our Indian people, dedicated to Tunkasila and the people. 

       I had my first year of Sundance under my belt and sweat almost weekly but I was still sadly and painstakingly pulling out all the poisonous thorns of trauma and grief that riddled me by the thousands, working on my anger, wishing I wasn’t so lonely, looking for love. I rambled and stumbled around. I danced through whole CDs in my apartment by myself. I read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies, found ways to occupy my time, had my routines. One of those routines was to walk over to the college Union and check out the various bulletin boards, to see if there were any fliers up for cool cultural or art-related events that I’d like to go to, like some Tibetans making a sand mandala or a Native person giving a talk on something. This was before Facebook, my analog way of catching wind of what was happening in our cool college-town. I did it more than I probably needed to but that’s how I was back then: holding my shit together through rituals and routines, really just doing the same things over and over again, trying like hell to shake off my trauma and not succumb to it. I was in survival-mode. I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth and wanted to live-

       So one weekday night I wandered over to the Union and guided my silent, lonesome, long-haired self through the warm, cozy halls, seeing so many bright college kids doing their thing, studying, laughing, and I scanned the packed bulletin boards, seeing all sorts of stuff but nothing standing out like the kind of event that I was perpetually hungry for. I made it to the backside of the Union, admired the fountains geysering outside there, and then began heading back to the front doors to make my exit and continue my wandering, my business of keeping myself company. I walked through all the same kids and then, going through the first of two sets of doors that would lead me back outside, standing there looking at the first bulletin board, as surprising to me as a splash of cold coffee in the face, was another Indian. He was dressed well, in slacks and an academic soldier’s slick, black, long coat, two long black braids hanging down past his butt. He was a few inches taller than me and I was six two. My spirit read him: he wasn’t really looking at the bulletin board, he was doing something that was sensible to his environment, a sensitive outsider blending in, but really he was deep inside himself, elsewhere, feeling out his next move from that vastness he handled as his own. I read him very clearly in that second and never stopped walking, so goddamned nervous in my own skin was I when it came to other Indians, who all seemed so much more real than me; pushed open the door, releasing myself back into the night, leaving that other twentysomething Indian peer safely behind me. 

       The moment I began walking down the stone steps outside I both started feeling all of these classic uneasy butterflies in my stomach and I felt bad because I’d caved to this fear so many times in my life; in fact, I’d actually fled because of it in another situation almost identical to this one maybe about two years prior, which I suddenly found myself remembering with shame and embarrassment.

       Putting the Union behind me, I remembered the time I’d seen this other tall, short-haired, obviously new Native kid literally standing still in the middle of the Union’s main artery, looking achingly lost with the river of other non-Natives coursing in all directions around him. I saw him and remembered how many other Native kids didn’t finish college because of their having no support-system, of their being so far away from home, for so many tough reasons really, dropping out, disappearing, not seeing that experience through that really could’ve been so much help to them and their own in the long run. I also saw him and remembered myself, how isolated and alone I was while going to college on that very campus, how I’d left, never making a single friend in my year and a half there. I knew that I should introduce myself and go say Hey but I was just paralyzed by the legion of fears that had had their grip on me since the wars and hellacious abuse of my childhood. I wanted to reach out to this brother and dissolve that aloneness I saw him struggling with but, like I was doing now, I just kept walking, too fucking afraid to go and talk to this other Indian. And then I never saw this young Native around again, meaning he probably did wash out, go home, ditch whatever his college plans were and embark on a different path. This haunted me as I walked away, my failure to give some simple kindness, welcome, warmth to another Native who’d found himself in the city that I secretly kind of loved and had found so much joy and tribal community in. I had dropped the sacred buffalo-hide ball and I was doing it again. 

       I crossed the street and kept walking, towards Wendy’s and the two-dollar theater, feeling my paralyzing fears, my shame over how I couldn’t talk to that other brother those years previous, feeling those butterflies rioting and herding in my stomach, ratcheting up their signal’s intensity with every step I kept taking away from that Native back at the Union. I walked without any change in my pace, well-practiced at maintaining the consistency of my exterior even as I experienced worlds within, getting almost a block away, and then I heard a voice. The voice said, “If you don’t go back and talk to him you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life.” I heard it clearly and kept walking.  

       I walked and thought about it. I would ‘regret it for the rest of my life.’ What did it mean to regret something for the rest of your life? I felt my way through it, feeling how at that point in my life I had no regrets of that kind or stature, and then I tried to imagine what it would be like to have such a regret like that that I carried with me to my last day, a bleeding, black, crying, iron artifact permanently calling out in the background of my psyche, irresolvable and of my own making. I travelled into what the voice said and then, clear that as of yet I had no lifelong regrets and didn’t want to willingly incur one then, I stopped and turned around, looked at the Union down the street and began walking back. 

       There had been so many times where the moment to say the thing presented itself in my life, with a girl, my family, others, and this fear had me watching that moment come so close and then passing and vanishing away, leaving me with what I most definitely didn’t want, my heart trembling, like a kid punched, the thing he wanted trailing off away from him, not to be his, not in this lifetime. This fear with so many masks, limbs, walls, tactical moves, I tried to ignore it as I followed the same sidewalk back to the Union, walking through its spongy, cloud-like material, determined to make right on my last fuck-up, nervous, butterflies now firing out of my head and face, trained on getting back to that bulletin board while not even knowing if the dude was still there. I cut across the street, went up the steps, flowed forward in this busy, swarming zone, got to the door I’d exited from and saw him still standing there, still pseudo-looking at the bulletin board. Not stopping for a second, I walked in. 

       “Hey,” I said, standing behind him. He turned around. He looked full-blood, had a sad, serious, old face, acne, was probably about my age. A silence that I recognized from my own consciousness seemed to permeate him. 

       “Hey,” he said back, friendly enough, returning from the depths of the cosmos that he had inside of that snazzy jacket of his. 

       “Are you Indian?” I asked, direct, not smooth, going to the room some part of me probably knew we were both already kicking it in. 

       “I’m Lakota,” he said.

       “I’m Ponca.”

       “Cool.”

       I stuck my hand out and we shook hands.

       “I’m Cliff.”

       “My name is Denny.”

       “Are you new here?”

       “I just moved here for grad school.”

       “What’re you studying?”

       “Astronomy.”

       He made me think of an old book you’d always come across at like the library or the laundromat and sometimes when you’d open it up it’d be just hundreds of strange blank pages or written in a completely foreign language, but then other times it’d be stuffed with maybe the most unique and original and potent shit you’d ever encountered as a rabid, hungering, lifelong book-freak. 

       “What’re you up to now?” I asked, our connection pretty easy, both of us dialing into each other more than we were consciously aware of.

       “There’s a dinner pretty soon at the Culture Center that I was thinking of going to.” He looked outside. “You want to go sit outside?”

       We went outside and found ourselves a seat out-of-the-way on the steps, facing the Centennial Mall corridor and the towering, famously phallic Capitol building beyond it, and then we slowly got to talking, like in the far back of our spirits we knew we were building something good and important with each sentence, each question, each exchange; the foundation of a friendship that could support the long-term projects of the spirits and the meteoric impacts of unforeseen hardships still ahead; a dreamworld village site, half pre-Columbian and half present-day, where a piece of each of us would always be living, conferring, collaborating, praying, remembering, checking in, and doing the sacred business of what our connection was fated for; a never-ending crystal heart where everything from our favorite Stephen King books to our childhood visions to our relationships with different women over the years would come to live and run wild like so many painted horses enjoying the Plains of God’s Creation. He asked if I knew a certain local medicine man, said he was the only person in town that he knew; I told him that I did, that the old man was the first Indian I met when I moved to Lincoln, at a Village Inn, where we were both sitting alone in our own booths. And we kept going from there. A half hour slipped by and then another half hour after that. He was the first Indian I’d ever talked to who could follow all the different sides of me, my lone wolf from Columbus side, the emotional Sundancer, the self-comforting artist, the ecstatic in a brown body who dreamed of writing books and making horror movies; he rolled with a similar depth and versatility, relating to all of my experiences, and then he expanded the realm with his detailed stories from back home as a reservation kid who spoke Lakota and grew up around ceremony; the tales that issued forth from him were riveting, vibrating with the unseen, cavernous, well-articulated, not to be forgotten. Night fell over the campus and I’m sure there were many relatives peeking down at us from the luminous rim up in their world, blowing on our fires, watching the beginnings of this long-anticipated friendship unlock and add a profound new light to the epic story where we were all making a go of it. 

       Eventually we left our spot on the stairs and walked back to my apartment, grabbed my car, and went cruising around, continuing to do nothing but talk, laugh, joke, open up, share, tell long stories, unwrap dreams, speculate on the nature of different entities, talk about his grandpa, things on Standing Rock, the strangeness of Columbus and all that happened with my friends, and on and on; time disappearing, the car full of all the characters we recognized as precious in the privacy of our overflowing memories. We went and practically knocked down the door of my salty old grandma mentor friend Char’s place, the elder who introduced me to the little people, and got a raucous multi-hour long conversation going with her and her husband, to the joy and benefit of us all. We went and wandered around Wal-Mart, looking at movies, really just using the place as a haunt and setting to continue launching all of our probes into what was by then clearly the actual passion of both of our souls: the vast reality of our people, our culture, our spirituality, as it extended throughout the Ages, the planes, the wondrous landscapes and human interiors of the Earth. We grubbed at IHOP, good, greasy food that gassed us both up for more; it never occurring to either of us that there were any sort of polite parameters of time that we new friends should heed; we were Indians and we’d been through shit most couldn’t imagine and if some shit was happening, like the best conversation we’d both had all year, then you just bought another pack of smokes and kept rolling with it, ya know?

       We probably talked for about 10 hours straight and then, by the light in the sky, you could tell that morning was coming. He gave me the directions to the University professor’s house where he was staying and I dropped him off there. It all felt pretty cool, pretty natural, seismic but also second-nature. 

       “Give me a call when you’re free for some more chatting,” I said, roasted from the kind of all-nighter my sober coffee-drinking Sundancer self has always preferred. 

       “All right,” he said. “Later, brother.”

       “Later.”

       He walked up to the professor’s house and I drove off. It would be many years before I told him the story of why I turned around and went back to talk to him, of what that voice had told me. Thank God for such voices. Thank God for such instructions. 

       And that’s the story of how I met my brother Denny. 

       Denny was still running hard on the treadmill in the kitchen down the hall. I wish that growing up someone would’ve told me about all the magic we have to share as human beings; instead of maybe putting so much emphasis on getting a respectable job or making sure to buy all the things with the right brand names. It felt kind of magical to share that story with Nona, Netflix automatically playing the next episode of SVU on the flatscreen, my face communicating all of the emotions of the story like some ancient clown who’d volunteered to wear the people’s lives on his whiskery mug long, long ago. Now the story was hers. Everything that was inside of it and more, was hers. Someday it’d grow into something that it never was with me while in my possession and maybe she’d pass it on, its medicine doctoring someone, plugging up a hole in their hull, or just making them believe again. 

       “And then your dad moved into the apartment below mine and we really started hanging out, haha!” I laughed, remembering the five months he lived below me, before he moved back to Kansas to be with his kids. “I’d have a dream, wake up with my eyes buggin’, pound down on my living room floor, your dad’s ceiling, and then he’d pound back up that he was home and I’d go on down and tell him about my dream, about what the spirits were doing and telling me and all that. He ever tell you that?”

       She shook her head, her mood shifting as she recognized that I was getting jokey again, that thing she was supposed to really hear and listen to receding back into those pools where we trusted it’d be safe. 

       “I remember you always coming to visit us down in Lawrence. That one time we got you to run on the track with us. That was funny. You looked like a drunk bear.”

       We both laughed. I looked off into the clouds of the ceiling. “I think I might’ve been a drunk bear in my past life.”

       She shook her head and picked up the remote, un-muted Olivia Benson and Ice-T. In a couple years she’d send me a text asking me if I was going to come to her graduation. She’d tell me that she’d gotten accepted to the college that was at the top of her list. When I’d ask her what her major was going to be then, she’d text me back, “Creative Writing.” I’d text her back, “That’s what I was going to guess.”

       I heard Denny in the kitchen powering down the treadmill and joined Nona in the easy trance of watching SVU.

       “You know who I think did it?”

       “Who?” Denny said, standing between us.

       “The Indian. The Indians are always at the center of it all.”

By Cliff Taylor

Cliff Taylor is a writer, a poet, a speaker, and an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. He has written a non-fiction book about the little people and recently completed a memoir, Special Dogs, about coming-of-age in Nebraska. Contact Cliff @ tayloc00@hotmail.com