by Multiple
The two young missionaries nodded their heads and smiled—their body heat rising and carrying the scents of the faux Calvin Klein and Irish Spring.
My grandmother frowned: “Then they were our tablets! They were Indian tablets and he stole them!”
After that we never had a Mormon show up at our home until cousin Maggie married a Navajo man who had converted to Mormonism and attended Brigham Young University for a year. He refused to come to the Winter Dancing but he was polite about it. We all appreciated that. Virgo stayed with Maggie and her husband for a few months. Later we found that’s where she learned to drink. Maggie’s husband was what some called a “Jack Mormon.” I was never quite clear where the term came from, but it meant that he drank and smoked. He was the one driving years later with Virgo in the front seat when he flipped his truck over. I don’t think Virgo converted to Mormonism after she died, no matter what Maggie said.
Chapter Eight
My grandmother—in our language, our Kussa— was thrown from a horse in her early 70’s, and never walked well after that, relying on a beaded cane of cherry wood thick enough to dent the top of a Ford (as she proved more than once). It was a mean horse that was given to us by a neighbor as an animal no one could ride. She tamed it—but again, found that some things are too costly to win. Her hair only became streaked with gray when she also reached her 70’s. We are a long-lived folk, tending to live well into our 100’s provided someone doesn’t murder us or we don’t flip cars or fall off cliffs (or have cliffs fall on us.) Kussa had a long history of racing horses—she once told us that while girls were allowed to ride, they weren’t permitted to race them—this was not part of our tradition, but was introduced when the Bushtins came (Bushtin is our understanding of what they called themselves—these people from Boston). She knew she was better than any of the boys, as did her father, until one day my great-grandfather’s jockey was too sick to compete, and she was told to put on his clothes and win the race—which is what she did.
Several months later she was out and saw an older couple on a cart pulled by matched brown horses, and the cart was heaped high with various objects. She ran back to tell her grandmother who was horrified. “Go to your room and shut the door,” my Kussa was told, “and do not come out until I bid you.”
But she listened through the door. The couple had come to buy her—well, this doesn’t exactly translate—in those days, our marriages among the Chiefly class were all arranged to keep the bloodlines straight and support political alliances. What one did for love was another thing—apparently this is what European royalty do as well. Anyway, they had come to arrange a marriage and brought many things to add to her dowry price. When they had announced their purpose, my great-grandmother told them, “Oh, you don’t want that girl—she’s lazy and doesn’t even know how to tan hides.” Which, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. They were from across the Wanapum River and my great-grandmother didn’t want her married there—but they were too high-class to simply dismiss.
“Well,” they said, “We really don’t care. We came for her because she rides so well. We want her to be able to race for us.”
“Oh, that is the worst of it,” my great-grandmother lied, “we have to beat her to even get her on a horse. You take your gifts and return home. If we accepted them you’d only be pounding at our door a little later wanting them all back.”
Kussa was told never to race again—that apparently some things are too costly to win.
I have seen photographs of her when she was in her late teens. Among Indians, our earliest photos came from the postcards that Bushtin photographers took to sell to tourists, most of whom would never cross the Mississippi River to see what the tiny pieces of cardboard showed. In the photos she is smiling (which is rare among these old postcards—their expressions are almost always distant and wary, perhaps wondering about all the Bushtins who were yet to come).
In the photos she wears a basketry hat of our tradition, woven with black fern forming a design in the shape of the topknot of quails. The basketry hat has the same meaning as the crown of a princess, but is far more practical, and as I found, more comfortable. Once I wore such a foreign thing—pretty it was, and crusted with jewels and about as inflexible as the royal who placed it on me. It smelled oily and felt cold. I will always prefer the feel of eagle feathers fluttering in my hair instead.
A single eagle feather was tied with a white weasel skin to the top of the hat Kussa wore in the photos. She was beautiful in a strong way. No woman in our family has ever been weak, although not all were beautiful. As for the men, many were weak, although all were beautiful. Her braids were thick as broomsticks and tied with abalone shells.
In her later years she was no less beautiful and strong, although her braids thinned a little and faded to an ashy gray rather than silver. I always remember her smelling of the crispy vanilla of Sweetgrass, a wonderful fragrance. She kept braids of it among her clothes and made some concoction of Ivy root and Sweetgrass that she claimed helped her hair grow long.
When she was 13 she carved her first doll of yellow cedar, with large painted eyes and hair of shredded cedar bark darker than its face. She was very good at carving, my Kussa was. Her first dolls were done with Bushtin knives of gray metal but the ones she later made were done with obsidian blades that seemed to carve sharpness and light into the softness of the wood. Once she made a doll of ironwood, but it was evil and had to be destroyed. That doll was the only one that made any type of sound. It screamed as it burned.
Chapter Nine
A few weeks before my birthday, a new student was introduced to us by the principal. “Nathan’s father is the new Doctor at the Indian Clinic. Please make him feel welcome. It isn’t easy to transfer to a new school so late in the year.” Nathan was so blond and pale he seemed to glow around the rest of us, who tended to be some shade of Native dark, or Mexican brown. Over the years, the number of migrant workers from south of the border had continued to grow, and you could sometimes watch the White teachers and staff start to realize they had become the minority.
He had filled out in a muscular way, beefy rather than stocky. His eyes were narrow with a slight slant that I would come to associate with the Ukrainians from Canada I would later work with while modeling. They were the color of a blue sheet that had been washed too many times. I looked openly at him, curious about someone new, and who looked so different than the rest of us. Valentino, from Italy, was the same color of some of the Mexican students. Nathan was not.
I knew where he lived. The new Doctor’s family would be assigned housing that was near the tribal store. I watched him and saw he appeared withdrawn in his interactions with others. I suspected having to move to satisfy your father and Indian Health Service decisions around relocation was difficult. Our grandfather used to tell us as Indians we had roots, but White people had wheels. I looked at his crotch and wondered what this White boy’s root was like.
Through the day he shied away from others, keeping to himself. I had finished my assignments and I was bored. We’re told our history involved Medicine People—what we call the Twatee, who used to fight among themselves. “They were like young rams,” one of my aunts explained. “They were testing each other’s strengths. They looked for each other’s weaknesses, like rams hitting each other head on.”
“But they were careless,” another aunt took up the story. “In their bouts with each other, sometimes theirTamanawis (their Power) would miss and injure innocent people. Many were hurt.”
“The bare area near the lava beds we see when we go to dig roots—that’s where they fought. It’s why nothing grows there anymore. Even now there’s a residual energy in the ground. That kills off anything that tries to grow. It can be dangerous to be there at night.”
I tapped my pencil against my teeth, still bored. I wrote Nathan’s name on a piece of paper and stared at it instead of him for a change. At home I had a little privacy, and decided to do something with it. I
wrote a note to Nathan. I thought of a sad time, when my favorite horse caught a disease from the White people’s horses when we had ours at the Portland Rose Parade. Sable had to be put down, along with the others who had been ridden in the Parade.
A single burning tear slid down my cheek. I began to softly sing my Song, and I gathered my little drop of liquid sadness—a tiny bit of me—on the tip of my index finger and touched it to the note’s paper, watching it soak in. I continued to sing, and licked the corner on the opposite side of the paper. It tasted odd—some sort of metallic overlay.
I received my first Song when I had just turned eleven and it was a gift from the Eagle. Jokiyah was impressed because I was so young—most others received their Song when they went on their Vision Quest at the time of Puberty. There had been some discussion as to whether or not I should go on a formal Quest when my regular time came and my nipples turned outwards. My Aunt Pork told me it had been decided the experience would be a good discipline for me, so I found myself on a mountain top in the chilly evening air, sitting on a blanket and bored. The Eagle Song had come in a dream. All I had to do was receive it. The actual Vision Quest seemed like work.
It was one of the most boring times of my life. I could only take a drink of water—as much as I could hold in my mouth. Uncle Sly would come once a day with the water and check on me. He would renew the red paint that protected me. We’d sing a prayer song and then he’d leave me alone. Again. A small double headed twig of yew wood hung on a deerskin thong around my neck. You’re not allowed to touch yourself during the Vision Quest. If you itch, you had to use the yew twig to scratch yourself.. You’d be amazed how aware of your body you become when you’re not allowed to touch it.
All around me the birds sang. A rabbit went by but noticed me sitting there quietly. It came closer, its flat nose twitching. By the time it was close enough to touch I guess it decided I didn’t smell very good and it took off running. On the second night I dozed off but was awakened by a small herd of rez horses rushing by. I had thought a Vision Quest would be a lot of work. It was just tedious. Boring.
Right before the dawn of the fourth day, I heard a sound in the distance and turned to see what was coming. It was an enormous stag made of white light. It was larger than an elk, and had too many points on the antlers for me to count. It ran past me and I felt myself pulled in its wake, dragged from my blanket. The pounding of its hooves took on a different rhythm and within the sound I began to hear a new Song. The Eagle Song had words that were not of our language, but the Deer Song had no words at all. I closed my eyes and Sang as I flew behind this great creature, and when I opened my eyes I was back on my blanket and still singing.
“The Eagle is for strength and courage,” my Aunt Pork told me when I returned home, “and The Deer is for love and nourishment. The Deer Song will help you feed the people in those times when they need more than food to survive.” I nodded respectfully, having no idea what she meant.
I imagined what Nathan would look like once I had taken off his clothes. In my mind, he was covered in the finest hair spun of yellow gold that was soft to my touch. I continued to sing, my pants off, giving me access to pleasure myself. I played with him in my version of the moment, pleased I was getting hard. When I was hard enough, I began joyskinning myself, keeping up my Deer Song. In a few more moments, I had produced a glistening hint of pre-cum. I rubbed it into the third corner of the note. To the naked eye, the note appeared exactly the way a note should. But it was starting to feel differently. It felt larger than it looked.
I picked up an obsidian blade of my grandmother’s and ran it across a fingertip. Because obsidian can be flaked to an edge that is sharp on a molecular level, in the old days, eye surgeons would use an obsidian scalpel, rather than a standard one of stainless steel. It was so sharp I didn’t feel it cut me. When I was older, I discovered love could do the same thing. I balanced a single bright red bit of me on my finger and held it close to the paper. As I continued my Song, it looked as if it pushed off, drawn to the paper. I pulled back and a tiny bit of it bloomed onto the surface of the note, the size of a period at the end of a sentence. I stopped singing. I had marked the note in all four directions with a part of me. I was busy making something more than myself.
The next day in class, I promptly dropped it on his desk when I walked past him. When he picked it up, I felt an electric like charge, and I knew I had done everything correctly. He turned to me, obviously not having actually read the note. It was still folded in his hand. It was as if he really saw me for the first time. His pupils dilated and took on a glassy sheen. He reminded me of Val when he first saw the dolls dance. It was as if I was the only thing he was capable of seeing.
Between classes, I saw him with my peripheral vision. In the classes we did not share, I would look up after the bell had rung, and see him peering at me through the door’s small window insert. Great. I had managed to create a stalker. At the end of the day I led him to the Music Room, knowing from my long experience with Valentino it was a safe place. The janitor made it her last stop, so we would have a couple of hours of privacy. Budget cuts had wiped out practice most days of the week.
I stood by the piano, thinking of Val. Nathan came through the door in silence, and I wondered if he had spent the day this way. With some people you can tell the wheel keeps turning but the hamster is dead. He gave off a vibe like a male elk when rutting, although he thankfully wasn’t doing that weird whistling sound they make. It was the first time I realized what I could do might have what I learned in college to call “unintended consequences.”
What can I say? I loved it. I unbuttoned my shirt and enjoyed watching him focus on my every move. He reached out and his fingers brushed my left nipple. “Take off your shirt,” I whispered. He did so without hesitation. I responded by doing the same. I noticed his breathing had become shallow and rapid. “Take off your jeans,” I said. I had never seen anyone strip so quickly. I admired how his thick legs were covered with the golden hair I had imagined. I took my jeans off as well. “You desire me, do you not?” He nodded with heavy slowness. I hesitated. Valentino had never been struck dumb when he was with me. His frozen tongue was due to watching the dolls dance. I had nothing to do with that, other than my being among the many who drummed while my grandmother sang.
Nathan moved towards me as if the air itself was beginning to freeze, the way the water used to harden on my braids. It was a graceful moment, although very creepy. He swept me up as if we were ballroom dancing, crushing me next to his bare chest and holding my arm extended in his grasp. If he were Native, I would have known what to expect. But he was just different enough to be unpredictable. At least I wouldn’t be bored.
By now his attention had turned to tongue raping me and while I tried to catch my breath, I realized this was not how I wanted to start off a relationship. Then he flung his jeans across the room and he stood there only in his socks, his Air Jordans having been thrown off when I wasn’t looking. His nicely shaped cock was standing at attention. He was a bit smaller than Valentino, but I didn’t mind. As a top, I don’t really care about the size of my partner’s dick, other than from an aesthetic perspective—it didn’t exactly impact me.
I felt as if I had some version of a zombie, and I had no clue how to reverse what I had done to him. Not that I cared. Let’s face it—it’s a Native American wet dream to have all White Men become your willing sex slaves.
“Suck my dick, bitch,” I whispered. I had learned early on if you really want to shout you have to whisper. I also had an internal thrill because at that age, I had never said the word “bitch” out loud because I was a “nice boy.” Looking back at my life, I find it interesting that’s what I remember about the moment instead of “Suck my dick.” I can see my priorities even then.
He approached me in slow motion, a hint of pre-cum glistening on his tip. There was a lot of golden body hair. He touched my face gently, and then kissed me at the base of my neck. He ran his fin
gers through my long hair.
At that point I got bored and spun him around, pushing the tip of my own cock against his boy pussy, circling around until I heard him gasp. At that point I shoved myself into him, delighting in the resistance I felt. After a few jabs, that clearly gave away to acceptance and I buried the length of myself inside him.
I enjoyed his screams, just as I had those of Valentino. What I did not appreciate was how he continued to stalk me, both in school and then showing up in our front yard. I led him into my shared bedroom, grateful Capricorn was away at a basketball tournament in Portland, which meant I could actually lock the door. As soon as I heard it click, Nathan was all over me, like a starving man jumping onto a Thanksgivings Day table. I will admit it stroked my ego. However, my reality check was not pointing due truth anymore—or in any direction for that matter. “Nathan,” I started—pushing him away from me and his puppy dog slobber kisses.
He looked up, still obviously seeing only me, but not really seeing me at all. His version of me was playing on a loop inside his head, and the actual me was only tangentially connected to it, like Peter Pan needing to sew his shadow on his feet to keep it attached. Who knew the whole note thing would result in this? It seemed as if his body was operating on automatic, and that any significant part of Nathan was off-line. He was on top of me again and I sighed and flipped him over once more for my convenience. I banged him again and then wondered how long I could keep this up until Nathan got locked up in some apocalyptic cell with a straight jacket on, or until my grandmother found out I had sort of, kind of, violated the whole “consent” thing that was part of keeping Harmony. I looked at the empty eyed sex stud in front of me and realized my grandmother was a higher priority when it came to my survival.