Lost Children Archive: A Novel
Page 21
TONGUE TIES
That night, I dreamed that I killed a cat and that afterward, I walked out into the desert all by myself and buried its parts: tail, feet, eyes, and some whiskers. Then a voice was asking me if the parts of the cat were the cat. But of course I didn’t actually do any of this, I only dreamed it, which was lucky and relieving, but which I only realized when I woke up and remembered that we were in a town, which was called Truth or Consequences.
PROCEDURES
The next day, we woke early and went out to play on a patio while Pa and Ma were still asleep, and the patio was full of cats sleeping on benches and chairs and under tables, which made me feel a little guilty, as if I had really killed one of them, and not just dreamed it. So I made up a game about rescuing cats, and we played for a while, but you never got the rules right, so we ended up fighting.
In the car we didn’t fight so much, but sometimes we got bored for real and sometimes we pretended to be bored. I knew they didn’t know the answer, but still I asked Ma and Pa, maybe just to annoy them:
How much longer?
And then you asked:
When will we get there?
To distract us, and keep us quiet, Pa and Ma would sometimes play news on the radio or play audiobooks. The news was usually bad. The audiobooks were either boring or too adult for us, and at first Pa and Ma kept on changing their minds about which one to listen to, jumping from one to another, until one day they found the Lord of the Flies audiobook and stuck with it. You said you hated it and complained you didn’t understand a word, but I noticed that you tried to pay attention to it anyway, whenever it played, and so I forced myself to pay attention, too, and pretended to understand everything, even though at times it was difficult to understand.
JOINT FILING
If we got lucky, they would turn the car’s sound system off and tell us stories and histories. Mama’s stories were always about lost children, like the news on the radio. We liked them, but they also made you feel strange or worried. Papa’s histories were about the old American southwest, back when it used to be part of Mexico. All of this was once Mexico, Ma always used to say when he started speaking about that, and moved her one arm across the entire space around the car. Pa told us about bluecoats, about Saint Patrick’s Battalion and Pancho Villa. Our favorite histories, though, were the ones he told about Geronimo, the Apache. And even though I knew his histories were all just a trick he did to distract us while we were in the car, whenever he started speaking about Geronimo, every time, I fell for it, and so did you, and we both forgot all about being in the car, and having to pee, and about time and how much time was left in front of us. And when we forgot about time, time passed much quicker, and we also felt happier, though this can’t be explained.
You’d always fall asleep listening to those histories. I usually didn’t, but I was able at least to close my eyes and pretend to sleep. And when they thought we were both sleeping, they’d sometimes fight, or keep silent, or else Pa would play bits of his inventories, which he’d been recording along the way and wanted to discuss with Ma. He was making inventories for something he called his inventory of echoes. And if you’re wondering what inventories of echoes are, this is what they are. Inventories of echoes are things made of sounds, sounds that got lost but were found by someone, or that would get lost unless they were trapped by someone, someone like Pa, who would make an inventory with them. So they were like a collection, or like a museum of sounds that did not exist anymore but that people would still be able to hear thanks to people like Papa who made them into inventories.
Sometimes his inventories were just wind blowing and rain falling and cars passing, and those were the most boring of all. Other times they were conversations with people, interviews, stories, histories, or just voices. Once he even recorded our voices talking in the backseat of the car, and then played them for Ma when they thought we were both sleeping and not listening. And it was strange to listen to our own voices around us, like we were there but also not there. I felt like we’d disappeared, thought, what if we are not actually sitting back here but only being remembered by them?
ALONE TOGETHER
We would ask Papa for more Apache stories. My favorite story, even though it was also the one that made me saddest and angriest, was the one about the surrender of the last Chiricahuas. For days, they walked, Pa told us: men, women, girls, boys, one behind another, sad faces, no bags, no words, no nothing. They walked in a single line, held as prisoners, like the lost children we saw in Roswell.
The last Apaches walked from Skeleton Canyon toward the mountains to the north. There was a white-eye general and his men. They were head-counting the prisoners of war all the time to make sure none escaped. They counted one Geronimo plus twenty-seven more. They advanced slowly through the canyon under the terrible sun, he said. And he didn’t say it but I was thinking all the time that in their minds, those prisoners were probably scared and full of angry words, though in their mouths there was silence only.
Ma kept silent most of the time when Pa was telling his histories, maybe thinking about her own lost children story and picturing them in her head being put on that airplane in Roswell, or maybe just listening to what Pa said and thinking nothing.
Pa told us about how Geronimo and his band were the last people on the entire continent to surrender to the white-eyes. Fifteen men, nine women, three children, and Geronimo. Those were the last Indians who were free, he said, and told us we had to always remember that. Before they surrendered, they’d wandered the big mountains called Sierra Madre, broken out of reservations, raided settlements, killed many evil bluecoats and many evil Mexican soldiers.
You listened and looked out the window. I listened and held on to the back of Pa’s pilot seat and sometimes pulled myself closer to him. He held on to the steering wheel with his two hands, and he was always looking straight at the highway. Before he fell off his horse and died, Pa said, Geronimo’s last words were: “I should have never surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.” That’s what Pa told us. And I think it’s probably true that Geronimo said that, though Pa also said no one could really ever know because there was no recording or anything to prove it. He said that after Geronimo’s surrender, the general and his men set forth on the godless desert in Skeleton Canyon and herded Geronimo’s band like they were herding sheep aboard death ships. And he said that after two days, they reached Bowie and there they were crammed into a train car and sent east, far from everything and everyone. I asked him what happened later, and I was thinking about Geronimo’s band, but also I was thinking about Mama’s lost children, who had also been riding on trains, not knowing where or why or what was going to happen to them.
While Pa spoke, I was sometimes drawing a map of his history with my finger on the back of his driver’s seat, a map mostly full of arrows, arrows pointing everywhere, arrows shot, whoosh, from horseback, arrows crossing rivers, half arrows disappearing like ghosts, arrows shot from dark mountain caves, and some arrows dipped into rattlesnake poison pointing at the sky, and no one could see any of my finger-maps, except me and you.
Finger-maps were something I’d invented and perfected way before our trip. In second grade, when I was sitting at my desk, working on number bonds or cursive letter practice, I liked to imagine where Ma and Pa were, maybe because I felt alone and missed them, but I’m not actually sure why. When I finished a section of number bonds or a line of a’s or h’s, I sometimes slid the tip of my pencil from the edge of the sheet of paper and drew with it on the desk. It was completely prohibited to draw on the desks. But I closed my eyes and imagined Ma and Pa getting on the subway, moving in a straight line for five stops uptown, then walking out, and walking three blocks east. And while I imagined all that, the tip of my pencil followed, five up, three to the right. I drew those imagined maps for weeks, and after a while, my desk was all full of beautiful routes that I knew exactly how to refollow, or kind of. Until one day the teacher t
old the principal I was drawing doodles all day on my desk instead of getting my work done, and then the principal told Ma and Pa that I had damaged school property. In the end, we had to pay a fine of fifty dollars, which Pa said I had to pay back with chores. After that, I still drew maps on my desk anyway, but I changed to using only my fingertip, so no one would see them now except me. And that is called finger-mapping.
I knew you could see my finger-maps perfectly, because when I drew them on the back of Papa’s seat, you’d stare at them with your long, long way of looking at things when you were trying to understand them. And in understanding finger-maps, like in many other things, we were alone together.
What happened a few years after, Papa told us, was that the Apaches were crammed back into a train car and sent to a place called Fort Sill, where most of them ended up dying, and were buried in the cemetery. I listened to that part of the story but didn’t draw it ’cause that part was undrawable. You won’t remember, Memphis, but we all went to that cemetery together, and I took pictures of Apache graves: Chief Loco, Chief Nana, Chief Chihuahua, Mangas Coloradas, Naiche, Juh, and of course Geronimo and Chief Cochise.
Later, when I looked at the pictures again, I noticed that the names on the tombstones hadn’t come out at all. So when I showed Ma and Pa the photos, Pa said they were perfect because I’d documented the cemetery the way that it exists in recorded history, and at first I didn’t understand him, but then I did. He meant, I think, that my camera had erased the names of Apache chiefs the way they are also erased in history, which is something Pa was always reminding us of, and that’s why it was so important that we memorize all those names, because otherwise we would forget, like everyone else had already forgotten, that the Chiricahuas were the greatest warriors there were on the continent, and not some weird species that lived in the Museum of Natural History next to the petrified animals, and in cemeteries like that one, also alone together, as prisoners of war.
ITEMIZATION & BOXES
During the trip, Ma’s job was mostly to study the map and plan our route for the day, though a few times she also would drive. Pa’s job was to drive, and to record sounds for his inventory. Your job was easy, you had to help Pa make sandwiches or help Ma clean all our boots, or help anyone do whatever. My jobs were harder. For example, I had to make sure the trunk of the car was neat and tidy before we started driving, every time, after any stop. The hardest part was making sure the boxes were in place. There were seven boxes in the trunk. One was yours and was empty, another was mine and was also empty. Then, Pa had four boxes and Ma had one box. I had to make sure they were all in place, together with the rest of our stuff in the trunk. It was like having to solve a puzzle, every time.
We were not allowed to dig around in the boxes at all, but I earned permission to open one box, Mama’s box, which was labeled Box V. I had earned permission to open Ma’s box, I think, because when I started taking Polaroid pictures with my camera, Ma discovered we had to use a book to store the photographs in while they were developing, otherwise they’d burn and would come out all white, though it’s difficult to explain why this happens. The point is that before I took a picture, I’d be allowed to take a book out of her box, the book that was at the very top, which was the little red book about lost children. I was allowed to use it to store my pictures in, to tuck them between pages. And each time I opened the box to take the book out, I’d shuffle the things inside it around, to get a quick look. In her box there were some books, all with dozens of little Post-its that flagged the special pages. Mama kept those especially far from your reach, I think because when we still lived back home, you were always stealing the Post-its from her books to make drawings and then sticking them on the walls all over the apartment. So she made sure you didn’t even get near her box.
Inside the box were also some newspaper cutouts, maps, files, and pieces of paper in all different sizes with notes she had written. I’m not sure why, but I was always curious about all the things in that box. I think maybe because it made me feel the way I felt one day when you and I made up a game while we were playing in the park, making little clay figures that we decided to bury under trees so that some scientist in the future could find them and think they were made by members of an ancient tribe. Except, with Ma’s box, I was not the one who had made the clay figures but the scientist who had found them centuries later.
APACHERIA
The roads toward Apacheria were long, and we were driving there in a straight line, but it was like we were driving in circles. There was that voice in the car speakers from the audiobook that always came back, saying: “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.” Sometimes I pretended to be sleeping behind them, too. I tried. Especially when they were fighting. Not you. When they were fighting, you would come up with jokes or sometimes even say, Papa, you go smoke your cigarette now, and Mama, you focus on your map and on your news.
Sometimes they listened to you. They’d stop fighting, and Ma would play music on shuffle, or else turn on the radio. She always told us to be quiet when news about the lost children came on, and she always got all strange after hearing it. She either got strange and started telling us about that little red book she was reading about lost children, and their crusade, about them walking across deserts or riding trains through empty worlds, all of which we were curious about but could hardly make sense of. It was either that or she got so sad and angry after hearing the radio news that she didn’t want to talk to us anymore, didn’t even want to look at us.
It made me so angry at her. I wanted to remind her that even though those children were lost, we were not lost, we were there, right there next to her. And it made me wonder, what if we got lost, would she then finally pay attention to us? But I knew that thought was immature, and also I never knew what the words were to tell her I was angry, so I kept quiet and you kept quiet and we all listened either to her stories or just to the silence in the car, which was maybe worse.
COSMOLOGY & PRONOUNS
I don’t think you understood any of the news or any of her stories. I think you didn’t even listen. But I listened. I didn’t understand all of it, only parts of it, but whenever the radio voices started talking about the refugee children or Mama started talking about the children’s crusade, I would whisper to you, listen, they’re talking about the lost children again, listen, they’re talking about the Eagle Warriors that Pa told us about, and you would open your eyes and nod and pretend you were understanding everything and agreeing.
I don’t know if you will remember what Pa told us about the Eagle Warriors. He said the Eagle Warriors were a band of Apache children, all warriors, led by an older boy. He said the boy was about my age. The Eagle Warriors ate birds that they hunted in midflight by throwing rocks at them, all with their bare hands. They were invincible, he told us, and they lived all alone in the mountains without parents and even so were never afraid. And they were also a little bit like small gods, because they had learned the power to control the weather, and could either attract rain or push a thunderstorm back. I think they were called the Eagle Warriors because of this sky power they had, but also because if you ever got to see them from far away, running down a mountain or in the desert plains, they ran so swift and fast they looked like eagles floating rather than people stuck to earth. And sometimes while Pa was telling us all this, we would both be looking out the car window at the empty sky, wishing we could see eagles.
You asked, one day in the car, if we were going to live in the car forever. Though I knew the answer, I was so relieved to hear Pa say, no, we’re not. He said we would arrive, in the end, soon, at a beautiful house made of big gray stones, where there was a porch and a garden so big we’d get lost in it. And you said, I don’t want to get lost. And I said, don’t be silly, he just means it’s the biggest garden you’ve ever seen. Though later, I kept wondering if it was possible to really get lost in a garden and wished we we
re back in our old apartment, which was already big enough for the four of us.
The house we were going to, Pa said, was between the Dragoon and Chiricahua Mountains, not far from a place called Skeleton Canyon, in the heart of Apacheria, near where Geronimo and the other twenty-seven members of his band had surrendered. I asked if it was called that because there were real skeletons there, and Pa said maybe yes, and dried his forehead with his hand, and I thought he was going to carry on with the story, but he just got silent and looked into the highway. I think maybe when Geronimo and the other people walked along that canyon, they were also silent all the time, and listening hard and squinting, to make sure that their feet would not step on bones of skeletons of before, and if we ever go to that canyon, you and I will do the same.
PASSING STRANGERS
Soon after the beginning of the trip, aside from keeping the trunk neat and tidy, I knew my duty was to keep track of stuff, take pictures of everything important. The first pictures came out white and I got frustrated. Then I studied the manual and I finally learned. Professionals have to do this kind of thing, and it’s called trial and error. But for a while after learning how to do it, I still didn’t know what my pictures had to be of. I wasn’t sure what was important, what wasn’t, and what I should focus on and photograph. For some time, I took many pictures of whatever, with no plan, no anything.