In dreams begin responsibilities pt. ?

I met Eddie when he was a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. A school, some said, where Indians learn how to be Indians. Eddie was a good student.

He learned fast.

He was older, as many of the students were. He'd been a small-town sportswriter in Oklahoma. He dreamed of something more. He got it.

Schools need stars.

Indians have dreams.

Eddie hit the jackpot. He got a Stegner - at Stanford, which in the writing world is currency. Like Iowa, like the New Yorker. There were faculty connections - as there often are, and he was Indian which didn't hurt either. But he could write. It came together.

I wrote then, too. I knew the writers in town. It was a town for writers. A town for Indians. Eddie and I became friends. The way writers become friends. What they have in common. What sets them apart. The guest sitting alone at the party.

He found an apartment in San Francisco. The Tenderloin. Took the train down to campus. Where the writers were.

The rest I can only imagine. I imagine he felt he was in two worlds. The Tenderloin that seemed more like home. And the California-rich campus he'd been called to. He told me he spent most of his time in the city. He liked riding Bart out to Oakland to the see the A's play. The Giants weren't his kind of team. But he liked having two pro teams so close by.

He completed his first year at Stanford and returned to New Mexico to spend the summer. In that small world he returned a star. IAIA had him back to talk to a writing class - maybe he even taught a class, I don't recall, exactly. But I remember him coming back and hanging out at campus and going to the bars with the writing students. How they listened to him talk. How he liked to talk.

Then one Sunday morning I got a phone call from Eddie. He was at a motel on Cerrillos. He and his friend needed a ride. To Dulce. Dulce is a long way from Santa Fe. It's near the Colorado border. It's not a distance I'd ask someone to give me a ride. I gave them the ride.

When I picked them up they were somewhere between still-drunk and hungover. Eddie's friend climbed in the back and Eddie sat up front with me. Three or four hours later we were on the rez outside of Dulce waiting outside a trailer where dogs were lying about and a little girl stuck her head out the trailer's door to get a look - at me, I guess. Eddie's friend was inside getting money and when he came back out he gave me fifty dollars for the ride and I was on my way.

I don't remember one thing we talked about that day and I never saw Eddie again. Months later, a mutual friend told me Eddie never made it back to Stanford. He'd gotten arrested in Jemez for fighting with a girlfriend. A fight, it was said, where Eddie bit off a piece of her ear. A judge ordered probation as well as anger and alcohol counseling - but instead Eddie took off. Disappeared.

Maybe he went back to Oklahoma - where he was from. When I think of him, I wonder if he still writes - or if that is all over for him. But if he writes, does he ever write about that fight with the girl that cost him so much. I used it in a story once, a version of it. I don't think he'd mind.