Life at the Speed of Us

by Heather Sappenfield

  The other older Ute straightened with surprise but translated the Spanish into another language. Theirs, no doubt.

  From the trees. So Súmáí had told his people about trees and quantum travel to other universes? I wasn’t sure whether to nod, curtsey, or offer my hand, so I just eased back my shoulders and tried to muster courage.

  The four Utes straightened on their mounts. They inspected me down to my boots, along my arm brace, and back to my light hair and pale skin. So pale. It occurred to me that I was glad I’d smeared on sunscreen before going snowboarding. A rosy sunburn would be hell to explain to Dad. And then, just as I realized I’d have to explain the punctures on my chest, I became aware of the light’s angle.

  I’d been here for hours. In my universe, Dad would be home soon.

  The leader spoke. Súmáí said something in a tone that made me brace. I looked at the defiant set of his shoulders, at the hands that itched to clench into fists. The leader seemed to scold him. Súmáí turned stony.

  “He says we will discuss this at camp,” he said to me. Then, to the translator, “Take the horses. We will go on foot.”

  The translator looked at him oddly, but spoke to the younger guys who took the horses, and they all left. Súmáí stood, mouth cocked slightly open as he watched them go, his body tense as a ready bow.

  I was suddenly so tired. I needed to get somewhere familiar, someplace boring, even. I had a weird longing for school.

  “Súmáí, it’s getting late. Dad will be worried. I have to go home.”

  “Who is Dad ?”

  “My father,” I said.

  “The man who was sick at the tree?” Súmáí’s accented Spanish and the way he used the words sounded exotic.

  “Yes. Who did you think he was?”

  “You are a good daughter.” Relief and tenderness filled Súmáí’s face, but I couldn’t ignore the scalps at his hip.

  “Actually, I’m not.” I blew out a breath, thinking how Dad would flip if he knew what I was doing just then. I could hardly get my head around it. And I’d screwed up again. Broken my promise. I hung on to that thought. Failure, at least, was familiar.

  “My father expects much of me. I try to be a good son.” Súmáí shook his head and lifted his gaze to Phantom Peak, framed by the valley’s V. The face cast there by the late-afternoon sun was far more distinct than in my universe. A face with an unsettling, willful expression. So the rumor was true. What really stood out, though, wasn’t the face: it was the eyes. Somehow the shadows created two eerie dark points that seemed to scrutinize me.

  “Right now, he waits for me to bring you to him,” Súmáí finished.

  “Your father’s the one with the feathers? Is he the chief?”

  Súmáí nodded. “The other was my uncle.” He glanced at the sun. “You can stay here many days, but you will return on the same day you left, and the sun will not have moved in the sky.”

  His words were easy to follow, yet I had to sort them from the novelty of hearing his voice. I blinked to force rational thought. “So I could stay a week?”

  “Week? I do not know this word.”

  “How long have you been coming to my world?”

  “Two moons.”

  Moons equaled months, I guessed. “But when I was five, I saw you.”

  He didn’t speak, yet in his eyes lay many things I needed to know.

  “Did you see my … ” I didn’t have a Spanish word for snowboard. “My crash? When the … ” I didn’t have a word for porcupine or quills either. “The animal shot the needles in my cheek?”

  “El puerco espín? No.”

  The Spanish word sounded so much like porcupine, I decided that must have been its source.“How did you come to my land then?”

  He shrugged. “I was hunting. A mother bear chased me up the tree you traveled with today. A porcupine was in the tree. It defended itself, and I fell, but the mother bear did not attack. Instead, she danced a victory dance and left. My leg was hurt, so I used my hand against the tree to stand, and I entered your world. I saw Dammit.”

  I looked at him, puzzled.

  Súmáí made the track of a snowboard with his hands, the way he had that first day we’d met. I remembered sitting in Shangri-La the second day we’d met, after he’d dragged me from Mom and made me furious. Gage had boarded past, his mouth a zero.

  “Oh, Dammit.” I laughed and rubbed my forehead, soreness slowing my motion. “The first time, you saw him snowboarding?” I used the English word.

  “Yes. The first time. You were there. Following. You are skilled.”

  I laughed a little, trying to remember when we’d last boarded down Always. “And then?”

  “I saw him speak angry words with his father.”

  “Where?”

  “On the stones leading to his dwelling.”

  It took me a second to figure out he meant Gage’s cobblestone driveway, shaped in a lollipop with a fountain in the middle. That meant there was a spruce tree near Gage’s driveway. I could easily picture their argument. I’d only ever heard them argue. Súmáí may not have spoken English, yet he understood their relationship.

  “Next, I saw Dammit with you.”

  “When he found me at the tree?”

  “No. Before.” He looked away. “You were … together.”

  “Oh.” I thought of the countless times Gage and I had paused to make out in the shadows, felt the way his smoky kisses had blotted out the pain of Mom. And that’s how Súmáí had found me? Through Gage? My mind reeled through possibilities, through probabilities, through symmetries, and through concepts like fate. That elusive pattern whispered against my brain.

  “You used to breathe many fire sticks.” He crinkled his nose. “I don’t like fire sticks.”

  I decided to change the subject. “How’d you learn to speak Spanish?”

  “Traders come this way. They speak Spanish. And many times I traveled with my uncle to Santa Fe to trade. We would stay for a moon. How do you speak Spanish?”

  “School.” One good thing from that prison, I thought.

  “I have seen a white man’s school. It was like a cage.”

  A photo came back to me from Lindholm’s class: Ute children at a school in Grand Junction. Girls dressed like whites and boys dressed in military uniforms with their hair hacked short. I bit my lip.

  “My father will be angry if you go. You will stay?”

  I could relate to angry fathers, so I said, teasing, “At the tree, you wanted me to leave.”

  He cocked his head and smiled wryly. “You will stay?”

  “For now.”

  31

  We entered the village of tepees filling the meadow at the creek’s edge. Five children sprinted to us, shouting “Súmáí!” They ushered us in, with a spotted white dog trotting behind. A yellow and a black dog romped up too. I forced myself not to cover my nose at the reek of horse, human sweat, raw meat, and smoke.

  To our right, two women hung strips of meat on tiered pole racks. They stopped to watch us pass. A woman and girl rose from scraping a hide staked flat in the dirt. Other women paused from their work over a fire. All of them seemed a foot shorter than me and most wore fringed deerskin dresses, belted at the waist. I felt Súmáí’s pants hugging my legs. Necklaces must have been a big deal, because everybody wore one—men, women, children. Most men wore earrings. A bunch of the women and men wore slippers. The sheepskin kind from the Platinum Club.

  Súmáí’s father sat on a flat waist-high boulder at the creek’s edge with a striped cotton blanket draped across his legs. The other three guys sat, legs crossed, on the ground at his sides. As we approached, they watched how my feet intersected the dirt, how my arms arced the air, how my chin and neck made a firm right angle. My cheeks flamed.

  Just before we’d reached the camp, Súmáí had
stopped so quickly I’d almost run into him. “My father can be … ” He’d eyed the horizon. He’d blown out his breath and scratched the back of his head. “You are strong,” he’d said. Now, from the chief’s expression, I understood what Súmáí meant. More Utes emerged from tepees and from the forest at the meadow’s edge.

  When we stood before his father, Súmáí said something that ended with the word “español.” The Ute on his father’s right, his uncle, nodded to him. Súmáí stood like a challenge.

  Súmáí’s father spoke, and his uncle translated what he said into Spanish. “I am Chief Úwápaa. You are from the lands of the trees?”

  I glanced at Súmáí. “Yes.”

  “Why have you come?”

  I glanced at Súmáí again. He stared straight ahead, but I sensed from the shift in his body that he was waiting to hear my answer too.

  “To find Súmáí.”

  Out the corner of my eye, Súmáí’s jaw muscle twitched.

  His father’s eyes narrowed. “What do you seek from my son?”

  Answers, I thought, but before I could speak, Súmáí said, “I sought her first.” The cocked-gun way he stood as he faced his father was weirdly familiar. “I drew her here.”

  “She is white,” his father said.

  “In her land, all men live together,” Súmáí said.

  His words made me picture the immigrant girls on the steps of school and the trailer park down the valley. Thing was, compared to Súmáí’s world, we did live together.

  “And the Utes?”

  “I have found none.”

  Chief Úwápaa said something scolding to Súmáí, and Súmáí responded with one word. I decided Súmáí + his father = battle. The chief’s focus swung to me, and I braced.

  “I live here, in these mountains,” I said, “many years in the future.” I didn’t mention it might be a whole other universe.

  “Father,” Súmáí said, “we know not what we seek, only that we are drawn.”

  My legs turned watery. Yesterday, I’d told myself Súmáí wasn’t real. Now here I stood, woozy with … what exactly was it between us? Slow down! I thought. You’re here for answers.

  Chief Úwápaa grunted.

  “The bear spirit has chosen her,” Súmáí said, and then he switched to his own language and spoke directly to his father.

  Chief Úwápaa’s chin lifted, and his brows lowered. Again, I had this weird déjà vu sensation. The chief spoke, but Súmáí’s uncle did not translate.

  Súmáí turned, scanning his gathered tribe, a movie set come to life before me.

  “Come, Father, I will show you.” Súmáí took my hand. Around us hissed intakes of breath. As he led me through the ring of murmuring bodies, my gaze fell on a girl about my age braced in head-to-toe fury. Her hair was cut shorter than the other women, and if her eyes had been arrows, I’d have been dead. I fought an urge to yank my hand from Súmáí’s, sprint off, and grope the patterns of what was happening.

  Súmáí led me to a tepee. Inside, wool blankets stretching over willow boughs lined the perimeter, along with two tall storage baskets. A fire ring marked the center.

  “Take off your shirt,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Take off your shirt.”

  The chief and Súmáí’s uncle entered. The other two guys followed, but Súmáí stepped before them.

  The chief nodded.

  The guys shot me pissed-off looks but backed out of the tepee, an echo of Gage’s buddies. I took a calming breath. I unstrapped my brace and peeled off my shirt. For the third time that day, I rolled back my aching shoulders, set my jaw, and lifted my chin.

  Chief Úwápaa kept his gaze on my neckline. He stepped close. I willed myself not to move. I tried to hide my wince as he touched the punctures I had yet to see. He traced their arc, following the dip to where the inner claws had been, then up to my other clavicle, and over its scallop to my other shoulder.

  Súmáí said something in Ute, and his father squinted at my cheek. He ran his finger over the faint bumps I thought would never disappear. He pressed his lips and looked at Súmáí. Then he assessed me for a long time.

  We were the same height. Skin hung in bags below his lacerating eyes. His cheeks sagged below that, as if tugged down by years of hardship. Great. Another test. I considered an equation for his face’s symmetry to distract myself.

  When he finally spoke, Súmáí grinned.

  Súmáí’s uncle translated. “Woman of the Trees, Chief Úwápaa says you are chosen. He names you Bear Necklace.”

  32

  It’s hard to explain that naming moment. I mean, I loved the name Mom gave me, but there was something about the way Chief Úwápaa said my new name, the respect in it: Woman of the Trees. Honestly? Bear Necklace. Really? Plus, no one had ever called me a “woman.” Though I’d be nineteen in May, I was still just a Crystal High junior. A screwed-up, rebellious teenager, monitored by the school counselor. Briggs’s brat, babysat by her ski-patrol family. Yet how Chief Úwápaa named me, and not even in my own language, made it easy for me to stand with my shoulders back. I had come from the trees. I did have a necklace of punctures from a bear’s claws. Mom’s claws.

  “Tonight, we dance in your honor,” Súmáí said.

  “What?”

  “We will dance. We have already danced the Bear Dance of the first thunder. This dance will honor the bear’s choice.”

  I was here for answers. Dancing was definitely not on the agenda. “I can’t.”

  He shook his head. “All dance. Do you wish me to dance with another?”

  I thought of how Gage and I had laughed at just the thought of us at the winter formal. Sovern Briggs did not dance. Yet when I considered Súmáí with someone else, I blurted, “No.”

  “Then you dance.”

  I wanted to slap the smirk off his face.

  “The women will prepare you.”

  “Prepare?”

  He led me out of the tepee. Two women waited there. I recognized the furious one.

  “This is my mother.” His mother nodded once and I nodded back. Súmáí eyed the furious woman. “And this is Túwámúpǘch, the widow of my brother.”

  “Widow?” I said. “Súmáí, I’m so sorry.”

  He ignored me and eyed that horizon again, but only for a minute. He squinted at Túwámúpǘch and spoke in his language—low, steady—a warning.

  Túwámúpǘch spat words at him, and they glared at one another. I wondered if Túwámúpǘch meant pissed off. He spoke again, and I wished I understood Ute because her glare fell to her feet.

  I did not want to deal with this chick, and all this was using up valuable time when I could be seeking answers from Súmáí. “I don’t—”

  “Go,” he said.

  Down the valley, Phantom Peak seemed to watch me with those eerie eyes. How had I ended up in this situation? Yet this dance was in my honor. How could I not go?

  Two girls of maybe seven walked past carrying colorful cloth dolls, and they giggled and smiled at us. As I followed Súmáí’s mom back into his family’s tepee—Túwámúpǘch trailing through the low flap—I noticed that they both wore sheepskin slippers. Stolen slippers. Dogs barked on the far side of camp. Sounds of movement and excitement came from that direction.

  Súmáí’s mom lifted the hem of my shirt, gesturing for me to take it off. She sniffed at Súmáí’s leggings and pointed at those too. I faced the tepee wall, unclasped my brace, and took off my shirt. I slid off my snow boots and peeled out of the leggings, then the belt with the rectangles. The word “breechcloth” came to me as I turned, wearing only my bra and Tuesday panties. Both women gaped at my punctures.

  I felt pale as snow and just as likely to melt. I looked down at my chest and found purple bloomed around the punctures I could see. Scabs were forming
on the holes, like the centers of flowers. Both women bowed their heads, though Túwámúpǘch did not seem happy about it. Súmáí’s mom spoke—no clue what she said—but it sounded reverent. Her hair was as short as Túwámúpǘch’s, and I remembered Lindholm saying that Ute women cut their hair when they mourned.

  She moved to a pile of belongings between the blankets spread over willow boughs and returned with a sand-colored deerskin dress. Down its front stretched two rows of porcupine quills stitched between red and blue beads. Fringe hung round its short sleeves and hem. She held it out to me.

  “Gracias,” I said.

  She seemed to know this thank you and nodded. “Towéiyak,” she said.

  “Towéiyak? ” I remembered Súmáí as he’d accepted Dad’s hat. “Gracias ? ”

  She smiled and nodded.

  Túwámúpǘch fumed.

  Súmáí’s mom scolded her, and she reluctantly stepped forward, took the dress, and held its hem open to slide it over my head, turning her face aside like I reeked. I stood there, taking in that open dress and that furious girl.

  Túwámúpǘch said something scalding, and I dipped my head into the dress, dove my hands through the arms, and straightened as she tugged it down to knee-length. She roughly slid a wide belt around my waist. I lifted my arms, and she spoke—low and unkind—as she buckled it.

  Keep searching for answers, I reassured myself. I ran my fingers over bear claws stitched along the belt’s leather. Today, that bear’s crescent scar had been no coincidence. That had been Mom. I recalled her claws piercing my chest and rolled my aching shoulders. My thoughts skipped to Súmáí, almost remembering what he’d reminded me of when he’d stood so rebelliously before his father. He’d said he saw Gage first, that I’d been following Gage. He said he’d seen Gage fight with his dad, some time when I wasn’t there.

  Túwámúpǘch set knee-high moccasins before me, I stepped into them, and she laced the fronts.

  Súmáí’s mom, bone-comb in hand, took a lock of my light hair and held it on her fingers, eyeing it. She moved behind me, and I heard her sniff before the comb tugged tangles from this morning’s snowboarding, the bear encounter, the creek’s pool, the scumbag attack, and the breeze as Chief Úwápaa had assessed me.