by Tim Marquitz
The feathers had been her idea. She’d seen the powerful images of Amanda Polchies, a Mi’kmaq woman whose picture—her kneeling and holding up an eagle feather in front of a line of RCMP at a Canadian fracking protest, seemingly keeping them at bay—had gone viral and drawn international attention to the cause. Bree hoped for the same thing here, though the media presence, like that of law enforcement, was small and mostly local. And mostly bored.
Gabe didn’t blame them. There wasn’t much for the tribal cops to do, really—the protesters were outside the railroad right-of-way, not on the tracks, so they weren’t doing anything illegal. And the anti-frackers weren’t into that kind of thing, anyway—they were sixties throwbacks, all love and peace and save the planet, minus the psychedelic drugs and music. Gabe had been to a couple of protests now with Bree, and the most violent thing he’d seen had been a dark-haired white girl with glasses stomping on a spider, yelling, “Die! Die!” as she did.
This was the first one they’d done with the Sierra Club, though, and that changed the dynamic. Gabe wasn’t exactly pleased with the way Michael had been regaling Bree with tales of his many arrests in the name of saving the environment. Michael wasn’t native—not by blood quantum, anyway—despite his Metis name, and he didn’t understand the fragile relationship a reservation Indian had with the law, both on and off the rez. Encouraging Bree to bend or even skirt those laws was as good as asking her to give up any hope of a future outside of Fort Berthold, because once an Indian entered the system, there was no getting out of it.
Bree was smart enough to know that.
At least, Gabe thought as he watched her lean closer to Michael to catch some whispered phrase and then laugh delightedly in response, I hope she is.
Even the protesters were starting to get antsy by the time the train appeared on the track, little more than a black dot on the horizon, its warning whistle echoing mournfully across the wasted landscape. The engineer had been warned in advance of the protest, and the whistle was his notice that he was applying the brakes—neither he nor the railroad wanted to be liable for clipping anyone who got too close. Even so, it could take a mile or more to bring the engine to a complete stop.
Bree—encouraged by Michael—had concocted a plan to run onto the tracks after the train had stopped, kneeling with feathers raised in front of it to make it look like their simple act of defiance had brought the metal behemoth to a halt. The photos, Michael said, would go viral in minutes, dwarfing the response Polchies had gotten.
Gabe wasn’t so sure, but he was willing to go along with it—reluctantly—as long as there was no chance of anyone getting hurt. Especially Bree.
He felt adrenaline course through him as the train neared, its whistle sounding again and again. The other protesters and the bystanders seemed to sense his mood and reflect it, muttering and milling in anticipation, though they couldn’t know of what. He and Michael and Bree had agreed to keep the train stunt to themselves so it would be more effective. He knew neither he nor Bree had blabbed, and as much as he disliked Michael—mostly, Gabe was willing to admit, because Bree seemed charmed by him—he didn’t think the Canadian would have talked. If only because doing so would deprive him of the drama he seemed to crave.
But the train was still only halfway to their location, still coming fast, when Bree and Michael jumped up. Confused, Gabe hastily stood to join them.
“Wha—?” he began, but they were heading toward the tracks and he had to swallow his question in a quick gulp and hurry to catch up to them.
Bree knelt in the center of the tracks, facing the oncoming train. Michael knelt on her left side and they both looked expectantly at Gabe.
“This wasn’t part of the plan,” he said, balking.
Bree’s gaze intensified, her dark eyes boring into his soul. In the sunlight, her hair shone black and her skin looked like polished bronze. She took his breath away, and she knew it.
“Do you want to make a difference or not?” she asked him, and because he’d never been able to refuse her anything, he silently took his place at her right hand and raised his feather in concert with hers, looking death in the eye as it approached in the form of hurtling steel tanks of crude.
The tribal police finally took notice and moved forward to remove them, but the other protesters formed a line of linked arms and signs to stop them. The local media were fumbling to get their cameras rolling, and cell phones appeared out of pockets en masse, each one recording what Gabe feared would be their last moments in gory detail.
“What are you thinking, Bree?” He had to force the words through teeth that were clenched to keep them from chattering in fear. “You’re going to get us all killed!”
He was entirely too smitten with her—some of his crasser friends called him “whipped”—but that didn’t mean he was ready to die for her, or her cause.
“I did the calculations,” she replied, seemingly unperturbed. “The train will stop a foot in front of us. We’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, chill, man,” Michael said, laughing. “We’re gonna be famous.”
But as Gabe watched the train coming closer and closer, the screech of its stressed brakes louder now than even the whistle, he could see the engineer’s horrified face.
Yeah, he thought, famous and dead.
“It’s not stopping fast enough, Bree,” he said, lowering his feather and turning to her, not caring about the image of discord it presented to the world of YouTube and Instagram. “This is insane. Come on. We’ve got to move!”
He had to shout the last words over the high-pitched squeal of metal on metal, and even Michael looked uncertain.
“I think he’s right, Bree,” the other man said, his smile and easy attitude gone. “We should go.”
“No!” she shouted, not looking at either of them; she only had eyes for the train. “I did the calculations. It will stop.”
Gabe looked over her head at Michael. The Sierra Clubber nodded. As one, they both stood and dropped their feathers, each grabbing one of Bree’s arms. She screamed in wordless rage as they pulled her off the tracks, kicking and struggling, feather still clutched in one hand, held up against the oncoming train like a talisman against evil.
The cops had broken through the line of protesters and headed toward them, guns and Tasers drawn.
“Drop it!” one of them shouted, and Gabe instinctively let go, hands rising.
Bree didn’t hesitate. She wrenched her other arm out of Michaels’ grip and ran back toward the tracks.
The world slowed as Gabe turned to try and catch her, just missed, fingers closing on air. As she took two steps toward the train that was not, in fact, stopping, despite her meticulous calculations. As the engine, overhanging the tracks by several feet on either side, clipped her head. As her body flew backward in a shower of blood and glowing sparks.
As her feather, released at last, danced wildly in the train’s draft for a moment before floating down to settle softly on her chest—a chest that did not rise or fall.
As electricity coursed through Gabe, one of the officers having taken exception to his movement, and the world sped up again in a rush of pain and disbelief and horrible, mind-numbing, soul-crushing grief.
Bree had a private room at Trinity Hospital, at least for the moment. Minot had the nearest Level II trauma center, so she’d been airlifted here from the protest site. Gabe had raced over in his dented, patched, primered, and duct-taped 1980 Volkswagen pickup, covering the seventy miles in just under an hour. When he’d arrived, she was already in surgery, and he’d had an agonizing wait in an uncomfortable chair, surrounded by people who were either nervous or placid or too clueless to be either. A hospital volunteer kept a coffee pot constantly full, and Gabe had single-handedly emptied it a couple of times.
Finally, she was back in the room. Her head was swathed in bandages, hiding most of her left eye and the patch of scalp that had been shaved so her skull could be cut open to relieve the swelling in her brain. Her eye
s were closed, her chapped lips barely touching, her chest rising and falling with each breath. A bandage covered most of an ugly red gash that blazed across her right cheek. Other scrapes and cuts were uncovered but slick with some kind of antibacterial ointment. They’d dressed her in a blue hospital gown and put a couple of blankets over her. Tubes and cables connected her to various machines, most of them beeping or whirring, their display screens showing numbers or patterns Gabe couldn’t begin to make out.
He sat in the visitor’s chair, which he had pulled up close to the bed. Amped up on caffeine, his booted left foot, crossed over his right ankle, kept up a steady rat-a-tat-tat tapping against his right foot. Mounted on a wall across the room, a TV glowed, the volume turned down almost to silence. He glanced at it from time to time, but couldn’t remember what was on from one moment to the next.
Bree was in a coma, the doctor had said, induced to ease the pressure on her brain. Until she awakened—if she did—they wouldn’t know what her condition would be, or her physical and mental capabilities. Maybe she would be fine, the doctor had told him. But he had to steel himself against the possibility that she might not be.
At first, they hadn’t wanted to let him into the waiting room. He wasn’t immediate family, the volunteer had said. Gabe had argued that he was as close as it got. She had a grandfather, but he was at a powwow in Montana. Gabe had called him from the road, and again after he got the doctor’s report. But other than that, Gabe was the nearest thing she had. He called himself a boyfriend, and then a fiancé, and that word had gained him entry, even without a ring to back it up. Maybe it was a good thing she was in a coma, so she couldn’t flip out about the deception. He wanted to be her fiancé, if that counted. He hadn’t been sure, until now, but looking at her, damaged but seemingly at peace, he realized there was nothing he wanted more.
He had taken her eagle feather off her chest before the paramedics reached her—his clothes were still spotted with her blood, dry all these hours later—and he held it still. He looked at it, almost forlorn in its age and dishevelment. His own feather had been lost in the rush, and he didn’t care. This one had some kind of power, he decided. It had saved her life, if not her health. That train had been coming too fast, and her calculations had been off.
He leaned forward, tapped her motionless arm with the feather. “Should have let an accounting major look over your figures,” he chided.
Bree didn’t speak, but in his head, Gabe could hear her words from when he’d first told her of his decision. “Accounting?” she’d said. “How much white blood is in you, anyway? It’s got to be that.”
When he tilted back into the chair, the arrowhead he wore on a leather thong around his neck tapped his chest, giving him an idea. He untied the thong, slid the arrowhead off, and shoved it into a jeans pocket. Then he held the feather in the center, where the arrowhead had been, and tied a careful knot around the quill. When he was finished, he tugged on the feather to make sure it was secure. Rising out of the chair, he gingerly threaded the thong behind Bree’s neck, cautious about interrupting any of the machinery or setting off any alarms. He tied it loosely, on the left side of her neck, facing the chair, and positioned the feather on her breastbone, under the gown.
“Let it bring you healing,” he said softly. “Let it bring you luck.” He leaned closer, kissed her once on the cheek, gently, careful to avoid any bandages or visible cuts, then settled back into his chair. Soon, he drifted into an uneasy sleep.
At first he thought it was Bree that woke him. She was the first thing he saw when his eyes opened, and her head was whipping right and left, threatening to dislodge the oxygen tube looped under her nose. Her mouth opened and closed almost silently, making just a dry clicking noise. Her arms and legs twitched.
After a moment, he realized that hadn’t been it at all. He wasn’t touching the bed, and despite the motion, she wasn’t making much noise. No, the floor was moving under his chair and the wheeled medical equipment was rattling, as was the TV on the wall. Earthquake.
He was almost used to them, since the fracking had begun. They’d become commonplace, where once they’d been so unusual that when one came around every five or six years, it was a topic of conversation for weeks. This one was different, somehow. Stronger, maybe, or perhaps with a shallower epicenter than most. Geology student Bree would have been able to tell.
That thought brought him back into the moment. Which button had the nurse said could be pushed to summon help? There, the red one, looped around the railing on the right side of Bree’s bed, as if she would be able to reach up out of her coma and push it. Gabe leaned across her body and jammed it with his thumb, over and over. He heard a distant bonging sound and realized that ten pushes of the button wouldn’t do any more than one. He released it but didn’t sit.
A moment later, the door flew open and a nurse rushed it, rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor. “What is it?” she demanded. She seemed harried; maybe the quake had disturbed a lot of people.
Gabe jerked a thumb toward Bree. “She’s not supposed to be doing that, is she?”
The nurse’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. “I’ll be right back,” she said quickly. As she dashed from the room, she added, “Don’t touch her!” As her shoes squeaked away, Gabe heard her shouting something he couldn’t make out.
When she came back a couple of minutes later—the quake had ended in the interim—she carried a full IV bag and was accompanied by another female nurse, older and calmer, and a tall man in short-sleeved green scrubs that showed off strong arms covered in fine blond hairs that almost glowed against his tan. None of them looked at Gabe. The women took up positions on either side of Bree, and the man moved close to her, pushed up a shoulder of her gown, and plunged a needle into her upper arm.
Almost immediately, Bree became still. The man looked at the IV bag that the first nurse still held and nodded once, crisply. She hung it from a free hook next to an existing bag and connected the tubes. The man and the second nurse left while she did. Not a word had been spoken the whole time.
“What was all that?” Gabe asked.
“We gave her a sedative,” the nurse said. “This will help her stay under and keep her from becoming agitated.”
“I thought she was in a coma.”
“She is, but…” The sentence trailed off. The nurse shrugged and left the room.
Gabe dropped heavily back into the chair. A hospital was like a foreign country, where nobody spoke English. Not that he’d ever been to one. He’d been off the rez, which was like entering a foreign country in a lot of ways, but not in language. And he’d been to Canada a couple of times, but that was basically the same. In both places, he understood what people said when they talked. Not here.
Suddenly overcome by exhaustion, he scooted his chair closer to Bree’s bed, held her hand gently in his, and laid his head on her pillow.
When he woke again, Michael was standing in the doorway, arms folded over his chest. Gabe looked up at him through bleary eyes. “You spend the night here?” Michael asked.
“Of course. What are you doing here?”
“Came to check on Bree, what else?”
“She doesn’t need you checking on her.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Michael said.
Gabe knew he was losing it, and he didn’t care. “You’re the reason she’s in here!”
“The hell are you talking about?”
“The whole thing was your idea! ‘Let’s kneel on the tracks! It’ll be dramatic!’”
“Look, dude. Maybe you’re hot for her, I don’t know, but you obviously don’t—Bree?”
Gabe turned to the bed. She was moving again, writhing, this time. Her eyes had narrowed, her jaw tightened, and under the blanket she was doing a pretty fair imitation of a sidewinder. “Shit!” Gabe said, reaching for the call button.
A nurse charged in before he even pushed it. This time it was a Hispanic woman, short and stock
y. “Excuse me,” she said, heading straight to the IV drips. “Maybe you guys could wait outside?”
“He can,” Gabe said, shooting Michael a venomous glare.
As he did, he caught a glimpse of the TV screen, a red BREAKING NEWS banner across the bottom with the words “Massive explosion in Parshall, ND” scrolling beneath it. Behind that was video of a hole in the ground, with what little remained of the building that had stood there engulfed in flames. Thick black smoke roiled skyward.
The remote was on a stand beside the head of Bree’s bed. Gabe snatched it up, punched the volume button until he could hear the talking head off-screen. “…plosion of as yet undetermined origin shattered the quiet of the little town of Parshall just minutes ago. This is live footage of the scene, the Paul Broste Rock Museum. The explosion, as you can see, more than leveled the museum, which has been there for almost fifty years. Firefighters say—”
“Damn it!” Gabe pushed the mute button. “I hope you’re happy. That was Bree’s favorite place.”
“Dude, I’m with the Sierra Club, not Earth First! or the ELF. We don’t condone that crap, much less do it.”
“Somebody did. Seems like you just want revenge for your cousin, and you don’t care who’s hurt in the bargain.”
Michael was about to say something else, but he stopped, mouth half-open. Gabe turned to see what he was looking at, and saw Bree’s nurse staring at the TV with a wide-eyed, horrorstruck expression. He unmuted the set and heard a female reporter’s voice, just this side of panicked.
“…moving around inside that rubble, but there can’t…no. No! Jim, can you…?”
“We see it, Maggie. Just stay safe.”
The shot turned shaky as the camera operator stepped back, on legs that had no doubt gone rubbery. Still, the image was clear enough to see a form emerge from the hole in the ground. First, a huge, stony hand appeared, then another. Its head slowly came into view as it pulled itself up. Once its arms and torso were clear, it rolled on one elbow and brought up a leg. The other one.