The Removed

by Brandon Hobson

  His son was a boy of seven or eight named Luka. I learned this one afternoon as I watched Vin and Luka play from the library steps. “Luka, Luka!” Vin would say. Luka flapped his arms like a bird. He ran across the lawn and fell down. He jumped and pointed to the sky. I watched from afar and clapped for him. Overhead, clouds darkened from an approaching storm. When it started raining, Vin and Luka went inside, but I stood under the awning of the library, waiting for the rain to let up, thinking they might come back. I pulled out my sack lunch and ate cold pasta from a plastic container. I stomped on the ants with my old black boots. The people who came in and out of the library must’ve thought I was homeless.

  For months I watched them and never saw the boy’s mother. Vin and Luka came and went frequently. When they weren’t home, I sat on the steps playing on my phone or reading the novels of Colette, which I had checked out from the library. With every passing week I grew more comfortable with what I was doing, sitting on the steps and reading and watching this younger man and his son.

  The first time I was close to Vin was when he took Luka for a walk and I followed them a few blocks to a diner on Main Street. Inside the diner I stood behind them in line, so close I could see the creases on the back of Vin’s neck. Luka wore a red T-shirt and blue jeans. His arms were well-tanned, his hands small. He had light-brown hair trimmed short on the sides. Had I actually reached out and touched him that day, tapped him on the back with a finger or nudged him on the shoulder, had I met them in that moment, I wonder if things would’ve been different. As it was, though, the waitress seated them at a small table near the window, and I didn’t have any money, so I left.

  Another time I rode my bicycle to the liquor store, and by coincidence, Vin was there. He was buying a bottle of wine. He paid with cash and said something that made the girl at the register laugh. Did he know her, I wondered, and what exactly did he say to her? I turned away so he couldn’t see my face. After he left, I asked the girl at the counter what he had said, and she looked confused. “Do you know him?” I asked.

  “A little,” she said. “He comes in every now and then. I think his name is Vin.”

  “I know his name,” I said, and left. But the truth was that I didn’t know his name, and now I did, so I was quite happy.

  WHEN I WAS YOUNG, Papa told me to watch out for boys. They’re like snakes, he said. They will creep up on you and trick you when you’re vulnerable. My mother laughed at Papa anytime he said things like this, and I didn’t believe him. Once there was a boy I liked in school who didn’t like me back. His name was Thomas and we were in sixth grade. I sat behind him and stared at the back of his head. I liked something about the way his hair was unkempt, the way he slouched in his desk, the sneakers he wore. His blue jeans, his collared shirts. His small, delicate hands. I remember thinking I wanted to go swimming with him, envisioning us playing in a pool somewhere, splashing around. We would wrestle and I would dunk him and hold him underwater. He would spring up out of the water and kiss me. It was a fantasy I enjoyed. At school, some of the boys liked to say that Thomas had once peed in the bed during a sleepover. One day they were laughing about it. Thomas was trying not to cry, but I could see his eyes fill with tears. He was so cute it didn’t matter to me whether he cried at school or peed the bed in sixth grade. But he never paid any attention to me. One day I approached him on the playground, grabbed his finger, and twisted his hand. I felt sure that if I could just get him to talk to me, he would like me. Thomas pulled his hand away and yelled at me to stop. He looked at me with this sad look, and I started laughing, happy I got his attention. Then he walked away and never talked to me again.

  * * *

  On my day off, I rode my bicycle to the library. Even when I wasn’t working, I would often come in to use the computer, since I didn’t have one at home and mainly used my phone online. At the computer I watched a video of a tiny coconut octopus underwater, enclosing itself in a clamshell. The tiny octopus moved slowly across the floor of the ocean, unraveling its tentacles around the clam and climbing into it before closing it.

  “The shells serve as a shelter for these octopuses off the coast of Indonesia,” the narrator said.

  I watched the video over and over. I don’t know why I was so captivated. It might’ve been the gracefulness with which the octopus enclosed itself, the way it moved so slowly, so certain of its goal. In a way I found it soothing, almost meditative. I wanted to believe that my goals were as important and necessary as this task seemed for the octopus. Why did it need shelter at that moment? Was there a predator lurking nearby, or did it simply feel the need for privacy and isolation, the way we humans need our privacy?

  When I got off the computer, I headed downstairs to the basement and saw an old Native man, probably in his seventies or so. He wore a sleeveless shirt and baggy pants and had a cane with him. His hair was mostly gray and hung down to his waist. He was filling up his thermos at the water fountain. Something about him caused me to stop; perhaps it was that he looked a little like my grandfather, but this man had scars on his cheek, and I found myself staring at them.

  “A bear cub scratched me a few weeks back,” he said, noticing me. “I was in the Rockies when I saw the bear. It looked peaceful, harmless, calling for me to reach out for it, to help it. But when I bent over to pick it up, it slashed me across the face. I didn’t get angry. What good is anger? What good is vengeance?”

  “You look like my grandpa,” I said. “He lived to be one hundred and three.”

  His gaze was intense. “My brother always wanted to live to be one hundred. The other day I visited him at the cemetery on the hill.”

  “I have a brother there, too.”

  “Buried?”

  “Yes.”

  He finished filling his thermos and turned to me. “I saw a young man walking around by himself. Maybe it was your brother’s ghost.”

  He laughed at himself, took a drink from his thermos. But his face held a sadness, somewhere between longing and pain.

  “I’m Sonja,” I said.

  “Wado, Sonja,” he said. He nodded and wished me a good day, limping away with his cane.

  I watched him disappear among the shelves of books, thinking how odd the encounter was, but that was always happening to me. My whole life I’ve felt I had strange encounters with people, so much so that in school I once made a list of strangers who came up and talked to me or asked me random questions. Maybe there was something important this man possessed in his spirit, manifested for me, but what message was he bringing?

  I went outside and sat and waited for Vin to come out. They almost always came outside around this time. I wanted to finally meet him, and I considered, in a moment of excitement, crossing the street and going right up to the door and ringing the bell. Soon enough, though, Vin and Luka came out. They started walking down the block, so I followed them down Main Street to the fall art festival downtown. The festival was on a blocked-off street full of tents and booths, crowds of people, a stage with some teenage girl playing an acoustic guitar and singing a country-and-western song. Poor girl, she wasn’t a very good singer, and not many were paying attention to her. Vin and Luka walked ahead of me, stopping to buy snow cones. They walked from tent to tent, Vin holding Luka’s hand. I trailed far enough behind that I wouldn’t be conspicuous, but close enough that I could see them when they stopped at a craft table. I walked past them, shielding my face behind others, then stopped at the next tent and browsed watercolor prints from a local Cherokee artist, an older man wearing a bandanna. I ran my hand over bracelets and necklaces and saw him glance at me. I bought a threaded turquoise bracelet and stepped away. At the craft table, Vin was looking at his phone while a woman helped Luka make something with colored paper. I wanted to be that woman, to kneel down and help Luka make crafts and color on paper. After a few minutes I left and went home.

  I lived in a small house down the road from my parents. I was glad I lived close to them, since Papa was seventy-four
and in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. For weeks he had been paranoid about someone watching their house. One night he sat on the deck for three hours, keeping a lookout for a burglar, until he finally fell asleep. I hated seeing him this way.

  He never said much to me, even before the Alzheimer’s. Truthfully, we hardly ever talked at all. I wouldn’t say he ignored me, but he was more interested in Edgar, especially after Ray-Ray died. With me, he liked to just sit on his deck in silence and look out at the lake, the moonlight reflecting in the water. He always told me to pay attention to nature because it was usually crying out to us. We watched squirrels run across the grass. We listened to cicadas. Leaves fell from the trees and played in the wind like pale birds.

  I DECIDED TO INTRODUCE MYSELF to Vin that night. I was at the Branch, where I had seen him perform several times. This night I felt bolder for some reason.

  I sat at the bar and had a few glasses of Tempranillo while his band played their set. Vin sang only a couple of songs and mostly played electric guitar in the band. I would say they were of average talent, though the college kids enjoyed them. When they finished their set, I felt an urge to assert my presence, to make myself visible to him. I am a woman with shrewd eyes and a slender chin, and I felt confident that Vin would like me once he met me. I didn’t mind being older than guys I dated. The French writer Colette was in her forties when she was rumored to have had a sexual affair with her sixteen-year-old stepson. How magnificent she was, a woman who wrote so beautifully about sexual energy and desire, a woman I very much wanted to be like. I wished I could be like her without worry of being judged.

  Vin sat at the bar with another young guy who was maybe in his early twenties. Sitting at the other end of the bar, I stared at Vin until he noticed. I waited for him to respond to my smile, to see whether he would react. Sure enough, he smiled and said something to the guy sitting beside him. His friend glanced at me and then quickly looked into his glass and took a drink. Vin kept looking over at me every so often. I can say now that if our attraction began anywhere, it was right then.

  For a moment I studied Vin, my throat dry and my body taut with anxiety among all the smoke and people around me. I couldn’t say exactly how I was feeling, though I knew I felt a strange combination of confidence and slight airlessness. This is how you attract a stranger. This is how you show you’re interested, how you smile and look him intensely in the eyes. How many times had this worked in the past? My instinctive response to his smile was to mouth Hi, but instead I turned to the bartender and cupped my mouth like I was sharing a secret. I wanted it to look like I was whispering something, but I really just ordered another glass of wine. I knew Vin was watching, and when I glanced back at him, he was still looking at me.

  He began talking to a girl with red-blond hair, clearly someone he didn’t know. How many twentysomething girls approached him after his sets onstage, how many introduced themselves, introduced their friends, pretended they had met him before? I glared at him again, this time with a more serious expression, until he caught my eye and took a drink. The girl was talking to her friend, and they both laughed like schoolgirls. I thought of them texting each other in their anatomy class while their homely professor groaned on about skeletal and reproductive systems. I got a pen from my purse and began writing on a cocktail napkin: Vin likes to be stared at. He requires a lot of attention, like a little boy.

  When I finished writing, I looked up and there he was. I turned on my barstool to face him and met his eyes. “Hi,” he said. Or maybe he said, “Who are you?” Or maybe, “My name is Vin.” Well, whatever he said, the music was pulsating around us, and I felt as if we were enveloped in silence. It happens like that, the gravity of the moment. He had this sad presence about him that reminded me of Elliott Smith, such a brooding, youthful soul, and I thought how strange it was that he could remind me of so many different famous people. I thought of how Colette described the men in her books in such ardent, sexual detail, so full of passion. How she focused on her own pleasure. Oh, to be so selfish! I desired Vin in the same way.

  I handed him the napkin, and as he read it he smiled, or maybe he smirked, so I said I liked his set and told him he was really handsome, and he glanced away for a moment, looking embarrassed.

  “I’m Colette,” I told him.

  “Colette,” he said. “I like that.”

  “You like my name?”

  He held this really intense gaze. I don’t know if he was trying to be sexy, but he didn’t need to try hard with me.

  “Colette,” he said.

  It was simple, really.

  Outside, he put my bicycle in the trunk of his car and drove me home with the car radio off and the windows down. We saw smoke in the distance from a fire on the other side of the lake, and to tease him I leaned in close to him and whispered: “Listen to the fire. What do you hear? It’s telling you something. Do you hear it?”

  The fire excited me. Yes, all that smoke and heat rising to the dark sky. Once we arrived at my house, we entered through the back door. I turned on the light, pulled off my boots, and Vin followed me into the kitchen for wine. As I reached for the glasses in the cabinet, I felt his hands on my waist. I let him feel me as I bent forward against the kitchen counter so that my hair fell in front of me. He moved in, kissed my neck. I turned and he kissed me. I bit his lip, pulled away. I kissed him again and put my hand against his jeans. I knelt down, unfastened his belt. Then his hands were in my hair, and I thought about the wildfires outside and all the smoke billowing into the dark night.

  Tsala

  MY BELOVED SON: time among the dead is mysterious. Time among the dead does not exist the way humans experience it during life. Time may be felt: U-di-tle-gi, u-hyv-dla!

  Look to the sky, and there we are, soaring like hawks, circling in the air. We are the birds appearing like a string of red berries against the clouds. We are all around, the deities to cover every expansive body of land. We are bathed in rainwater, flying together. We are a sparkle of blue light inside rocks, the swift rising of smoke and dust, forming the hazy outlines of bodies.

  We are speakers of the dead, the drifters and messengers, the old and the young, lurking in the shadows of tall trees at night, passing through the walls of abandoned buildings and houses, concrete structures, stone walls and bridges. We are the ones watching from underwater, rising up like mist, spreading like a rainstorm, over fields and gardens and courtyards, flying over towers and rooftops and through the arched doorways of old buildings with spider cracks in their walls. We reveal ourselves to those who will look. It has been said we are illusions, nightmares and dreams, the disturbing and tense apparitions of the mind. We are always restless, carrying the dreams of children and the elderly, the tired and sick, the poor, the wounded. The removed.

  IN 1838, the firing squad killed you before they killed me. Your mother adorned us in gold and jewelry and buried us. You must know that adornment is as important in death as in life, so they made it known that we were beautiful, even absent of our spirits. An elder had once taught me not to be afraid of death because there is no death—there is only a change of worlds.

  I refused to migrate west on the Trail, and that is why we died. I refused because it was not fair treatment, and I was willing to sacrifice my life for you, our family, and our people. Yes, I know an old man has a mouth full of thunder. So does an old spirit.

  Before you were born, I helped Dragging Canoe and his son take the fleshy side of enemy scalps and paint them red and tie them to poles for the scalp dances. We imitated the Europeans who invaded us by dancing a foolish, awkward stomp to show their clumsiness. More importantly, the dance healed us by weakening the other races who were responsible for harm or sickness. It was also used to heal the sick for our own people.

  At one of these dances I met a man named Dasi’giya’gi whose war medicine was an uktena’s shedded skin and burned turtle shell, which he used to smear on his face and body for protection from enemies. He had never
been wounded because of wearing this war medicine, as strong as yellowroot. He warned me of the seventh hell we were living in, and soon I had dreams of the blood and destruction. Dragging Canoe told me, “You will be a visionary with prophetic gifts. You must learn to understand this.” He then told me the story of the young prophet:

  STORY OF THE BOY WITH PROPHETIC VISIONS

  The boy dreamed of words written on the leaves that he could not read. In his dream he stood beside the gristmill his father built for grinding corn and watched the leaves play in the wind. As he followed the leaves, he saw Nun-Yunu-Wi, the Stone Beings, who gave him a reddish-brown rock. They told him to break the rock and use the red color to paint his face to hunt. When he woke, his father was ill and not able to hunt for food that day, so the boy painted his face red and went out into the cold day to hunt.

  The boy shot a doe and ran to it. When he got to the dead doe, he saw leaves covering its body. The leaves were blue, and one of the leaves was fluttering as if from a breeze. He picked up the blue leaf and saw letters that formed a message telling him to warn people of the coming soldiers. This message upset him greatly, and as he dragged the doe by its legs, he grew so angry he slipped and fell, knocking his head on a rock that left him unconscious.

  Visions came to him then. He saw people walking wearily through the snow. On and on they trudged, hunched forward in the wind through a storm. He saw people falling to their knees, dying in the rain. He saw guards with their rifles and the scowls on their faces, and he felt the misery sweep over everyone like a cold wind. He saw the terror and brutality and heard the crying of infants and children.