“That song is yours.” Maggie smoothed and refolded her napkin. “Claudia is going to help me. You never got your Indian name. We could bring out the song.”
“Since when do we speak Makah?”
Maggie nodded at Dave. “You’ll be there, won’t you? I need an emcee.”
Dave put down his spoon. “On one condition.”
“What’s that?” Maggie scowled.
Claudia held her breath.
“That we quit talking. Let’s have a good time. Roberta’s going to stop by after she puts the girls to bed.”
“I want nothing to do with this.” Peter pushed back from the table.
“Listen, we’ll do a warm up party at my house,” Dave said. “See how it goes. All you have to do is show up.”
The front door shook in its hinges.
“That’ll be Roberta.” Peter, Beans and Dave were out of their seats so fast the table swayed. She and Maggie were left blinking at each other.
Claudia reached over and took Maggie’s hand, not knowing why, only wanting to erase this old mourning from that crumpled face, its wide cheeks fallen in folds. “I’ll speak to him.”
The first happy greetings sounded from the group at the door. “Merry Christmas Eve!”
“Sorry I’m late. I had to get creative with the hiding spots this year. Randall’s home with the girls. They’ll be up before the crack of dawn to check under the tree.”
In the small lull that followed, Claudia cued in on Maggie, who had drawn Peter close as Dave paced their periphery. “You’re going to wear out your tires.”
“I have to get back to work. Besides, you used to travel.”
“When?”
“Come on! You and Dad drove all over for bone game tourneys.”
“That’s a great idea!” Dave clapped his hands. “Let’s play.” He took Peter by the shoulder. “Help an old man carry his drums?”
Beans looked at his phone. “Marissa and I were supposed to hang out.”
“You’ll be wanting my car.”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll win quick. Help me scare up the sticks.”
Claudia excused herself to go to the bathroom. How would the university react if she called off her research? A meeting with her department chair. Questions upon questions. Institutional review boards. She would lose standing. Would she also lose her funding? There was no way out but through.
When she crossed back over the border to study recorridos for her dissertation, it felt like everything was possible. She would make sense of the society that spurned her and come to some sort of peace. The country people she met were impressed—one of their own made good—hosting meals and song circles for her benefit, eyes shining as they introduced their children with exhortations to follow her example and study hard.
Maybe she could find that feeling again. She just had to make this work.
By the time she walked into the living room, the men were back, smelling of wet ashtrays. Beans carried a folding chair. Claudia wanted a cigarette more than she ever wanted anything.
“Maggie, you and Peter and Claudia are a team.” Dave rubbed his hands. “Me, Beans and Roberta will play against you.”
“What are we playing for?” Peter took a drum from a canvas bag.
“Let’s see.” Dave turned out his pockets. “Got cash?”
“For an old codger like you? Maybe.” Peter opened his wallet and thumbed through a thick line of bills.
“Wow!” Dave grinned. “Let me hold that.”
“If you run, I’ll have no choice but to take you down.” Peter cracked his knuckles. “I might like it.”
Dave flapped his face with a fan of ones, fives and twenties.
“We’ve got a newcomer. Let’s stay on budget.” Peter plucked two twenties and two fives from Dave’s hands.
“Don’t let Dave hold your cash for too long.” Maggie folded the bills into a bandanna she deposited into her apron. “He’ll make it disappear right quick.”
“Cash? What cash?” Dave twirled his deerskin drum by the twisted rawhide crisscrossing its back. Holding a beaded drumstick in his other hand, he opened his fingers to show no bills hidden there.
“Check the drum.” Maggie pointed. Sure enough, once Peter managed to pry the drum from Dave, there it was, a neat roll of money wedged behind the wavy lip of hide.
“It makes the drum happy!” Dave touched his heart. “You want it to sound right, dontcha?”
“Just for that, I’m going to trade you Claudia for Roberta.”
“One pretty lady for another—how could I go wrong?” Dave motioned to Claudia. “Come on over to the winning side. We’ll show you how it’s done.”
“Don’t worry, you can’t mess this up.” Peter tickled the roll of cash from its hiding place. “It’s fifty-fifty every time.”
“Unless you got mad skills.” Beans put on a pair of sunglasses.
“Ever played?” Dave tucked his drumstick into the rawhide handle.
“No.”
“It’s real simple. We got two sets of bones.” He opened a carved wooden box at his feet and held out four short lengths of barrel-shaped bones. Two were inlaid with a thick dark stripe at their center. Reaching into the box, he lifted out a carved killer whale with matching rows of sticks bristling from its back. “We divide these ten sticks even steven between us. I brought my old yew wood set—I know you’re into that kind of thing—but these aren’t the ones I bring to tourneys. Those I got made special, with fancy beading and whatnot.”
Dave pulled a longer stick with a figure clinging to its top from the blowhole—“this is the kick stick”—lingering as he laid it in Maggie’s palm. “I’m giving you home court advantage because that chowder was so good.”
Maggie looked pleased, and for a moment, a small glow lit her and Dave. Claudia wondered whether she could ever show so much grace. Anyone who wanted a family must forgive. Just the thought of her sister made her sick.
“Okay, so when we’re playing, one team will have both sets of bones at a time. A set is an unmarked bone and a marked bone. We got six people, so both teams will have a drummer. The other two will each be holding a set. They’ll mix ’em around behind their back or under the scarves—that’s Maggie’s favorite way. Keep a good eye on her. They’ll be singing and kind of dancing in their seats, if they’re feeling lively. Taunting, you know. Don’t let it get to you. The pointer decides which hands the unmarked bones are in. Guess right, get the bones. Guess wrong, give up a stick. It goes on like that. The game will end when we have all the sticks. Maggie’s holding on to the kick stick, so I’m guessing she’s the pointer for them. Kick stick’s the last one to go.”
“Who’s the pointer for us?” Claudia hoped against hope it wasn’t her.
Beans slipped his phone into his big untied sneaker. “Me.”
“Do you ask us where we think the bones are?” She smiled, watching her teeth flash in his sunglasses.
“He’ll take all the help he can get.” Dave nudged his grandson. “Sit between us, Claudia.”
Once she was ensconced next to Beans, Claudia drew close to his glossy ear and whispered, “If I see which hand it’s in, I’ll tap that foot, left for left, etc. One tap for the person on the left, two taps for the person on the right.”
Behind his shades, Beans arched an eyebrow.
Peter positioned the chairs so his team’s back was to the kitchen. The lights shimmered around them. He conferred with Roberta, her long hair swaying against his arm as she angled her head to take in what he was saying. The other drum twirled in his hand. From where Claudia sat, his face was in shadows. He had never been so attractive. Jealousy compelled her like gravity.
She cradled her set of bones, stroking the slight ridges at the edge of the inlay, holding the pair up to the light to study the hollows eroded by sweat and time. Beans cleared his throat. She hid her hands behind her back, using her fingerpads to ensure the marked bone was in her right hand. Dave started drumm
ing, his voice deepening as he sang out a series of vowels she was pretty sure didn’t add up to words. When she brought the bones back out again, she clutched her right hand for all it was worth. The veins and tendons rose along her forearm. She glanced to her right once or twice.
Maggie guessed wrong. The unmarked bone showed in Claudia’s left hand, which bumped up against her partner’s open right palm, also holding an unmarked bone.
“An inside job.” Roberta’s mouth twisted as she handed over a stick.
When their turn came, Peter drummed, a deafening monotony of strike after strike, Maggie and Roberta dividing the bones between them, laps covered in scarves, wailing, “Hay yay yay yay ya-ayyyyyy! Hay yay yay yay ya-ohhhhhh! Hay yay yay yay yaaaaaa! Hay yay yay yay yohhhhhh!”
Claudia was distracted by Peter’s determined look, how he picked up the drum like he never put it down. Was belonging like riding a bike? It wasn’t until Beans leaned forward to glance at her feet that she remembered she was supposed to be doing something. Maggie and Roberta were zeroed in on her face. They know I fucked Peter, she thought. Alarm bloomed in her stomach. She concentrated on the drums, allowing the din to drown her thoughts.
Beans took his time to make the call. Maggie and Roberta held their closed fists out, fingers turned toward their own faces, moving back and forth in rapid bicep curls that kept beat with the drum.
Before she could stop herself, Claudia tapped her left foot once and her right foot twice. Without acknowledging her, Beans made a V with his thumb and forefinger, the rest of his fingers curled into his palm. Roberta and Maggie shrugged and showed their hands—she was right!
Bones and sticks passed from one team to the other, a steady stream of handoffs that ebbed and flowed for hours, Maggie rallying with a few good calls. Like birds, the flashy piece was male and the unmarked piece, female. They flew from hand to hand in secret courtship. Everyone pursued the women.
In the end, it was a drubbing. Beans hugged her when they got the kick stick. Dave’s cheek, when he kissed her, was wet with sweat. “We can play together any time.”
“Here I am, the boy who slept under folding chairs, the powwow broke kid,” Peter shook his head, “and along comes a white woman to sweep the game.”
His admiring gaze—he wasn’t looking at Roberta now—almost covered the slight. A white woman. Soy mexicana, she thought, but that wasn’t really true anymore. She’d become American, like them, whether anyone liked it or not. She blushed.
“Broke is right.” Dave laughed. “Another? I’ll throw our winnings in.”
“No thank you.” Peter stood. “Consider that my Christmas gift.”
It was nearly Christmas when she left, begging off from more food, waving away Peter’s offer to follow her home to make sure she got there safe. Her weariness went down to her bedrock, but it almost felt good, almost made her nostalgic for Christmas in Mexico, where women exhausted from working all the time went into hyperdrive on the holidays, bustling through big meals on weekends and evenings, anything to enliven time with family.
By the time Nochebuena rolled around, everyone had already spent the last eight nights out and about, following around the lucky pair who got to dress up like María and José, knocking on doors like they had been forced to do in Bethlehem, looking for a place to sleep, the name of the ritual—Las Posadas—referring to the shelter that was repeatedly denied, a failure of hospitality that, millennia later, looked like a bunch of dressed up children carrying candles, careful not to spill wax on their Sunday shoes, singing songs back and forth with whomever opened the door, the call and response akin to the negotiations that must have happened before the birth of Jesus.
Or so Claudia had been told, but she had stopped believing so long ago it was hard to remember what faith felt like, a forfeiture that led her farther and farther afield, seeking authenticity in the rituals of others. Maybe it didn’t matter if Peter believed in the song or what the potlatch represented. It seemed to Claudia that believing culture was important had replaced actual cultural belief among most of the peoples who still claimed to have a culture of their own. Among the Makah tribe, there were grave reasons for that—among them, persecution and genocide—but the only way she could understand it was through the lens of her own lost Catholicism. The wafer never became flesh in her mouth. Though she took communion for social purposes and a shot at redemption, she didn’t believe. But she missed the tamales, the pozole, the buñuelos, the whole charade of Las Posadas. She missed feeling like part of something. Nothing awaited those who fled the church, that’s what her mother always said, and Claudia supposed she was right, even if the hereafter was a hustle to colonize people right down to their very souls.
Christmas had begun by the time she got to her cabin. What was she to do with the rest of this accursed day? Work was the answer, the only solace she knew for sadness, though she’d been glad to ward off professional duties with a “vacation” message.
I am on research leave until summer quarter. If you have pressing concerns related to the university, please contact the Department of Anthropology at . . .
The emails loaded in a trickle that widened to a cascade, the list scrolling so long that Claudia almost closed her laptop. Instead, she browsed, letting the names wash over her without stopping to satisfy them with responses. They would pity her for attending to emails on Christmas.
But there, nested among the endless words crowding her screen, a blank subject line, and beside it, her sister’s name, the letters burrowing into Claudia’s eyes. She clicked.
I did the unspeakable. I know that. It’s not fair to want you in my life, but I do. Sisters are para siempre. That’s what Mamá told us. Please be my family. I miss you.
Fuck her. It was beyond forgiveness, what she did, and Maria hadn’t even asked for absolution. How dare she? Out to swallow whole lives. To take everything, right down to the marrow. Not if it were her last day on earth would Claudia welcome her sister back into her life.
What awaited her in Seattle? Proximity to a person she would no longer claim as blood, the chance of stepping off a city sidewalk and seeing the husband who had chosen wrong and made a correction.
Maybe Claudia could just stay. Sell everything and call it good. Claim immersion as an anthropological practice. Remain involved.
Who was she kidding. There was no future here for her, no job she could do without remorse. Not only had she bedded a community member, but she was now accessory to an old murder. Her only defense, if it came to light, would be to deny everything, which wouldn’t have been hard—Maggie had dementia—except for Peter, who could ruin her. It would come out.
She had just torched her career, the one thing she truly cared about, the prospect of mattering a bright star she had followed since she came to this country. And for what. A lover who lived in a trailer with his mother and didn’t own enough stuff to fill the bed of his truck. Tenure had brightened her future like a beacon, a steady job teaching students she could scarcely bring herself to consider, but also the platform to publish her own theories to mild acclaim and the occasional invitation to join a panel, and then to annihilate the sorry soul inside her intellect with enough wine to choke a pig.
There was no salvaging her life. If she wanted to disappear, she could park at the Shi Shi Beach trailhead and hike the steep headlands on the way to Cape Alava, where few braved bracing themselves with knotted ropes that dangled down the trail. All she would have to do is let go. The rocks would do the rest. The sea would take her, before long.
Stunned by her own certainty, she went straight for the shower, trying and failing to avoid the mirror, where she saw a petrified woman with hair plastered across her forehead, a double who was not her, an impostor—don’t look at her, she’s staring back at you, don’t get closer, she’ll hurt you—but already her fingers were on the mirror, and now they were touching, soft as glass, their hands streaking down the reflected world, where the towels and the tile were all the same, but she was not me
, and never would be again.
Chapter Eighteen
A STORM WAITED off the coast. From the first overlook on Cape Flattery, Peter watched the rain. Fall streaks grayed the sky over the mouth of the strait.
The sea surged to shore. Dark water broke over mussels and rocks, draining white foam, rising through green curls of kelp. Waves boomed through sea caves that riddled the sandstone cliffs, shuddering the earth beneath their feet. An eagle wheeled overhead, keeping watch. Otherwise, they were alone.
When he showed up at her cabin this morning, Claudia acted like it was just another day. Which it was, he supposed. At least he had something for her. Whiskey and cigarettes, the last of his stash. She was not as cheerful as he’d hoped, but he tried to rally. “It’s a joke. You know. Get your own?”
“Shouldn’t you be with your mom?”
“She’s at Roberta’s. The girls are opening presents.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“I thought we’d go on a walk.”
“Peter, what do you think we are doing?”
“No one will be on the trail. It’s Christmas.”
Claudia ignored the view and studied the carvings on the overlook’s fenced deck, her fingers caressing gouged hearts that spread like spores across the damp wood. Squared initials and cupid’s arrows repeated on the handrail and bench. Peter was fairly certain that the only place his name would appear would be his tombstone, if someone went to the trouble. He tried to imagine Claudia as a teenager whose boyfriends sawed tributes into trees and tables.
She dawdled at unexpected intervals on the trail, wearing a listening look. Runoff from the morning rain gurgled through culverts. She brought her ear real close to a tree, face awash in wonder. Urban women.
He didn’t worry until she stopped where a sudden creek had washed out the trail. She didn’t respond to her name. He hopped over, picked her up and carried her across. “You’re not made of sugar.”
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