Bumble checked the hand-drawn map he’d received from his mother. “I think we’re getting closer,” he said, consulting the digital compass he had strapped to his wrist. “Yep. This is it.” He turned onto an unmarked dirt road, which we followed until it ended at a humble house that looked as much like a child’s drawing as an actual abode—perfectly square and symmetrical, with curtained windows, a peaked roof with a black stovepipe poking through, and a spotted dog lounging near its front door. The dog lifted its head at our approaching car, then lowered it again, unimpressed.
Bumble parked alongside an old tan-colored Cutlass with a raised hood. Its engine parts were all on the grass but arranged neatly into groups, categorized according to characteristics and purposes unknown to me. I took a curious comfort in their orderliness. There were also dozens of oily black tools, but these, too, were tucked tidily away, stationed in a splintered shelf that appeared to be a fragment from an old row of elementary school cubbies. A forgotten name, “Ruteger,” was carved in callow cursive inside one of the compartments.
“Well,” Bumble said. He shut off the engine.
“Well.”
“Guess we should go say hello.”
But no one came to the door, though we knocked at a grandmother-friendly volume. And we could see through the parted gingham curtains that no one sat in the small kitchen, where bright blue dishcloths hung from nails in the wall above the sink, or in the living room, where white lacy ovals covered the armrests of a pair of faded recliners.
“Maybe they don’t even live here anymore,” I said, summoning a halfhearted hope. “Maybe they just moved away, and we’ll have to go back home.”
“I’m sure they still live here,” Bumble finally said. “Look at this dog. She’s not even hungry. We’ll just wait.”
I remembered the tiny flashing tongue of the green snake who had lived under Jack Dolce’s bed in Little Italy—Little Italy of the lemon light and the luminous oyster shells. The snake had used his tongue to test the air. Now I tested the air. I perched on our car’s hood, lay back against the windshield, closed my eyes, and breathed in. The prairie was sunwarmed, and it exuded a rich, lively smell, similar to the way skin becomes more fragrant when the hidden workings of the body heat it. There was a smell like baking bread in the blond grass, and also a dark, secretive smell like mushrooms, and, from further below, the fresh vegetal smell of the slick tangles of pale roots that formed subterranean nests. Throughout my life I had smelled the swoon-inducing saps of flowers and the salty tang of beaches, but never had I known such a strong smell of earth.
I sat up and opened my eyes to look around, wondering how such a colorless place could say so much to my nose. The only trees nearby were three gnarled sentinels at the front of the house. No birds rested in their branches, but in the trees’ rippling whispers there was a salve for scared hearts, a secret lullaby. I leaned back and closed my eyes again. And then I caught hold of something that had eluded me for weeks: sleep.
I DREAMT OF A BUTTERFLY, THE ONE drawn by Annette Mellinkoff that I had hung above my bed in Middletown. It fluttered away at the sound of a truck driving onto the grass beside me.
MY HEART POUNDED. I had forgotten where I was and, once I remembered, could not believe I had fallen asleep in that strange setting, and on the hood of the car, too. The truck was big and noisy. I slid onto my feet, shaking with shyness. Bumble appeared beside me and we faced the driver, a big-boned, black-eyed lady with blunt bangs across her forehead and breasts that brushed up against her steering wheel. A young girl sat beside her. For what felt like five hundred years, they looked at us and we looked back. The truck rumbled and vibrated. Bumble smiled.
“You the animal rights kook?” the woman yelled. My cheeks flamed. I nodded affirmatively.
“Welcome!” she shouted. “Here’s Cora!”
The girl emerged. The truck bore her with a creak and swing of its door, and her long narrow feet, encased in purple sandals, fell upon the grass. She regarded us through a pair of cat-eye spectacles. The thick lenses seemed hefty for such a slight child.
“Granma should be back soon,” the woman told us, “and Jim’s usually home by seven or so.” The girl slammed the door of the truck shut with one spindly brown arm and stepped wordlessly into the house.
Like Bumble, I offered an awkward smile. “Okay, thanks!” I said to the woman. My arm rose with the beginnings of a bashful wave, but the truck had already spun around and stirred up a cloud of dust.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But the girl, Cora, she’s the one I told you about. She lives here.”
Even with Cora in the house, Bumble and I weren’t sure if we should enter or continue to wait outside. We shuffled, biting nails and clearing throats, until another person appeared in our midst without a sound. She was scarcely taller than the girl but considerably rounder and slightly stooped, with a sharp-ended stick in one hand and a flour sack hanging over her shoulder. Her silver hair was wound into a knot at the nape of her neck. Her skirt was so long it tickled the ground, and she wore a man’s western-style shirt with pearlescent snaps. She, I realized, was the person I had seen digging on the prairie. She, I supposed, was the grandmother.
“I’m Granma,” she said. Her voice was low and womanly. The dog rose and nipped at her skirt hem with adoring whimpers. “You must be our guest,” she said to me. She gave Bumble a slow nod, her eyes dancing over his unusual hairdo. “Welcome. This is Belly, our dog. She’s an old gal like me.” She hoisted her sack up higher on her shoulder and, as she made her way toward the house, I saw why we hadn’t heard her approach. Her gentle steps were rendered nearly silent by the thick soles of the bulbous orthopedic sneakers peeking out from under her skirt. They had Velcro closures. She used her back to hold the screen door open for us. “Please come in,” she said.
“Would you mind if I turned on the television?” Granma asked. “I have a show I try not to miss.” She clicked the remote until she arrived at what was unmistakably a soap opera. That day’s episode had already commenced, and a woman wearing too much eye makeup insisted weepily, “But Slade, I swear, the child is yours!” Granma shook her head at the screen, whistling through her teeth in disbelief.
Bumble and I sat in the twin recliners. Granma stood and emptied the contents of her sack onto a glitter-flecked Formica table that wobbled on its metal legs. Dozens of roots rolled out of the bag, and a lush, loamy odor filled the room. She rolled the roots under her tanned hands, freeing them of the dirt that clung to their surfaces.
Bumble ventured a question. “What are those for?” Granma didn’t reply. Her eyes were fixed on the TV. A white-coated doctor stepped into a hospital waiting room. “Charmaigne is alive!” he said.
“Is she deaf?” Bumble mouthed to me. I shrugged.
Granma began to peel the bark-like skins off the roots. When that was done, she deposited the roots into a collection of old coffee cans she pulled from the kitchen. After a long while she said, “Jim will be home any minute.”
TWILIGHT DARKENED THE SKY TO PURPLE. Granma fed Belly, and Bumble and I ate the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches she prepared for us after we, the virtuous vegans, politely refused everything else she had offered. She disappeared down the hall with a plate of food for Cora, who had been hiding since our arrival. Finally a truck—smaller and kinder sounding than the growling monster of the afternoon—pulled up outside. A door closed, footfalls crunched the grass, Granma emerged from Cora’s room, and the screen door opened.
I detected the fragrance of orange blossoms, a familiar solar sweetness, creamy, bright, and inexplicable on that unblooming prairie. I wondered if my homesickness was so severe as to cause an olfactory hallucination, a neroli memory.
Then I saw stained fingertips, stained hands, speckled and splattered all colors of the rainbow.
“Hello!” the painted man said, smiling. He looked toward me, then turned to Bumble. “You must be Bumble.” He extended a hand. “I
’m Jim.” He seemed so quiet, but not because he spoke softly. In fact, his voice was rather sonorous. Still, he reminded me of a church with no one in it, the way Dad and I had found Holy Rosary on the rare occasions that we’d arrived early for Mass—glossy wood pews empty, votive candles glowing, streaks of sunlight through the stained-glass windows making visible the millions of motes that hung in the air—more complete and inviting than it ever was when bustling with activity. “And you must be Margie.” He directed his gaze away from mine and toward my left shoulder. I noticed a deep furrow between his eyes. “Welcome. I hope you’ll feel comfortable here and know you can stay for as long as you need.”
“Oh, thank you.”
My hand, for the quick second that he shook it, disappeared in his. “Sorry about the ink,” he said. He dropped a kiss atop Granma’s head. “Hi, Mom.” He set down a lunch pail and thermos and washed his hands in the kitchen sink until only a few persistent flecks of violet and orange remained. I tried not to look too long at the vertical crease between his eyes. It lent a wounded quality to his friendly smile that made my left ovary flame.
We joined him at the table under the glow of the star-shaped lamp that dangled from the ceiling, and Jim and Bumble talked. I mostly listened to the conversation between the two men—or, more accurately, between the man and the boy, for even though Jim was, I learned, twenty-nine and only five years older than Bumble, beside him Bumble seemed increasingly puerile, fiddling fondly with his compass watch, gnawing on a dreadlock. “I wish I knew more about Crow culture,” he said. “Is it true that you, like, worship the buffalo?”
I wondered what had happened in Jim’s life to carve that little line of hurt between his eyes. Then I considered how juvenile and ridiculous I must have seemed, a girl in trouble with the law, an animal rights kook, and I sat in self-conscious silence with my chin in my hand. I was just as relieved as I was perturbed that Jim would not look at me on the occasions that he directed a question my way. His eyes, so heavily lashed as to appear half closed, always fell just right or left of my face, but never on it.
“It’s been nice for our moms to reconnect,” Jim told Bumble. “They were friends long ago.” Granma nodded from her recliner. “And I think your mom’s dad was actually married to one of my mom’s cousins, though, you know, in Crow we don’t even have a word for cousin.
“We’re glad we could help out with all this,” Jim continued. “What a mess, huh? The federal government.” He shook his head. “We tribes have had our share of conflicts with it, too. Even though we’re supposed to be a sovereign nation all our own, the feds still have jurisdiction here when it comes to cases like yours. But this is a decent hiding place. And you—” He turned his face once more in my direction. “You can stay with us as long as you need. I know I already said that, but we’re glad to have you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I know I already said that, too. But I am so grateful,” I added, reddening, “for your help. I hope I can be as much of a help to you, and to Granma, and—”
Cora stepped out of the hallway. She wore a nightgown, and her loosened hair streaked down her back in a straight and shining waterfall. She crushed her small body up against Jim’s big one. “Have you met my daughter yet?” he asked.
“Hi, Cora,” I said. “I’m Margie.” With some prodding, she faced me, and slid one of her hands into the other with the quickness of a mouse vanishing into a hole. Standing with her hands thus arranged, she looked both dignified and demure.
“I like your glasses,” I said. She still had on the cat-eyes. They were tortoiseshell, with constellations of rhinestones on both sides. The points of the almond-shaped frames extended beyond the perimeter of Cora’s pixie face, which she promptly turned away from me. The glasses were of the same sort that a certain set of San Diego twentysomethings had been wearing for the last several years. I’d seen them for sale at steep prices in twee vintage clothing shops that specialized in adornments from yesteryear, most of which were meant to be worn with a tongue in one’s cheek. I had a feeling Cora wasn’t wearing the glasses ironically, but I also did not have any idea what to say to her, so impenetrable did she seem, as locked away from me as the mysterious prairie. So I asked, “Are those prescription, or are you just wearing them because they’re cute?”
“They’re subscription,” she mumbled after a long pause and a slight, encouraging jostle from her dad.
“They’re beautiful on you.”
“Thanks.” She frowned and looked at her bare feet, which she curled kittenishly, as if she hoped to hide them.
I watched the way Jim ruffled his broad hand over the top of Cora’s head, the absent, innocent enjoyment he took in the softness of her hair. “Did you eat?” he asked us, and Granma brought him a sandwich stacked with sliced meat of unidentifiable origin, and Cora disappeared back down the hall, and Jim and Bumble talked some more. And Bumble was familiar to me in his grunts and foibles, in his fundamental goodness, and I could sense the vestigial traces of home on him like I could on nothing else in the room: they were folded in his speech, floating in his breath, woven invisibly among the fibers of his high-tech clothes, and I wanted to bottle them up, to keep them under my pillow for all the nights I might spend in that square and snug house among strangers. When he stood up with a stretch and said it was time to go, I fought the urge to cling to him in a way that the unwritten rules of our platonic palship had always prohibited.
“You should just stay the night here,” Jim told him. “It’s awfully soon to get back on the road after the drive you’ve had.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I already made arrangements for a hotel room in Billings. The War Bonnet Inn.” Bumble blushed after saying the name.
My throat swelled with stifled tears, and I half-whispered a little “no,” which no one acknowledged having heard. The star-shaped lamp above the table flickered.
“Well, at least Billings isn’t too far,” Jim said, and he told Bumble how to get there using a shortcut, and to beware of the black cows who sometimes ambled onto the reservation roads and were invisible on dark nights when the moon was just a sliver, and Granma rose, her knitting clutched in her gnarled hands, to bid him farewell, while Cora snoozed or, more likely spied, in her hidden chamber. Outside, Bumble clutched my shoulders and leaned close to whisper in my ear things I was too scared to hear, and handed me the Strawberry Shortcake suitcase (but not the dozen bottles of red wine I had bought special for the trip, because Granma said I could not have alcohol in the house). As he drove down the dirt road that had led us to that place so many hours earlier, I watched his taillights wane and dissolve. I tipped my head back to see the stars, and they seemed to swell and contract, swell and contract with every beat of my heart. I stood that way for a long time, listening to a melodious bird send out its short song again and again into the night, and watching the stars throb in time to it. Then my own name came clear to me, and I realized the birdsong was Granma, calling me inside.
2 CHICKEN (Gallus gallus domesticus)
GRANMA SHOWED ME TO CORA’S ROOM. We crept in, careful not to disturb the girl who, I was surprised to see, slept on a bunk bed. “She’s always had it,” Granma whispered. “It will come in handy now.” The top bunk was for me.
I lay there, just beneath a ceiling I could not see, for that night on the prairie was as black as Jim had said. I stayed awake for hours, listening to the occasional chirps of insects through the opened window, to the mellow rustlings of the grass, to Cora’s sleep sounds, and to the squeak of a wheel in constant rotation—presumably the exercise device of a small pet rodent.
I missed Charlotte, who had habitually slept beside me, and I wondered about everything under the slumbering sun: about Agent Fox and all the books I had seen him pretending to read at Gelato Amore, about Bumble snoozing at the War Bonnet Inn, about the handwritten recipe at the bottom of my suitcase and the loveliness of its ingredients, about the houses in the hills and how far away from me they were now, about miscellaneous
Latin words whose meanings I had already forgotten, and about the dark-haired stranger of whom I had so often dreamed, the one who held me in a front-of-him-against-the-back-of-me embrace. My mind spun relentlessly, in tandem with the ceaseless circulations of Cora’s caged creature, until, at what had to have been an hour before dawn, I heard the front door open.
Certain that Agents Fox and Jones had followed the trail of the bright blue car all the way to Montana and simply breezed into the house to retrieve me, I instantly began to sweat, and a cavern opened up in my chest. Then, through the window, I heard the sound of footsteps going out of the house rather than in. I surmised by their near-inaudible softness and by the slowness of their pace that they were Granma’s. Possibly Granma sleepwalked in her orthopedic sneakers, I thought. My chest mended itself partially, and I lifted my head from my pillow—carefully, carefully, so as not to disturb Cora, who, on the bunk below me, seemed to answer my every minute movement (a wiggle of toe, a blink of eye) with an annoyed-sounding sigh—and pulled away the window’s makeshift curtain, a pillowcase printed with daisies. I peered into the night. By the light of one star, I saw Granma walk away from the house and climb a distant hillock. She stood there, wrapped in a blanket, unmoving and silent, for a long time. I decided I would watch to see what she might do, and it was only then, while straining to see her against the charcoal sky now lit by a single streak of gold, that I fell asleep.
I WOKE UP IN THE MIDDLE OF A DREAM in which Bumble, wearing a war bonnet and biting into a doughnut, told me, just as he had when he had first spoken of the reservation, “It’s very isolated where they are.” The room was yellow with sunlight, and I squinted, unsure of where I was. Then I saw the daisy-printed pillowcase curtain, smelled the grassy prairie air, and remembered. And I thought about isolation. Was it merely a consequence of too much open space? Or did it also live in cluttered houses on suburban streets, and in the pages of photo albums where sad eyes had too often looked? Was it the lifeless down on my arms when there was no one beside me to stroke me awake? Or the sound of a strange child breathing?
The Lovebird Page 14