The Lovebird

by Natalie Brown

  He had not said so much as one word to me since he’d handed me the Operation, but he had thought of me and, I now knew, watched for me. He had watched for me, just as he had once watched from his bench on the busy campus quad before class, while I passed before him with my yellow bicycle and a litany of Latin vocab words running through my brain. I wanted to write to him, even if I wrote a letter that I would never mail. I wanted to tell him everything, how I was living with a family that was not my own on an Indian reservation in the middle of nowhere, could summarize the latest happenings on TV’s most popular daytime soap, was digging roots out of the ground, had prairie earth tucked under each of my fingernails, and wore a pair of old-lady sneakers, all because I had once been his armful of warm girl.

  I pulled a pencil and notepad from his other girl’s suitcase, lay belly down on my bed, and wrote, with the soft tones of Cora and Granma’s conversation humming in the background. “Don’t bother her,” I heard Granma say, “she needs time to herself.” I wrote while the light turned dusky and dim, and I wrote through the grumblings in my stomach when I heard dishes clanging in the kitchen. I am lonely, I wrote. I am living with the Crows. I am hiding. I will never understand you or what happened. I wrote and wrote, and I only stopped for a few moments when I heard Jim come home.

  I paused to consider how after just one week I had unwittingly memorized the hallmarks of Jim’s presence. I recognized the sounds of his homecoming like a dog does those of his two-legged companion—the rhythm of his footfalls on the grass outside, the gentleness with which he opened and closed the screen door, the metallic scrape of his lunch pail when it met the tabletop. I heard him say my name with a question mark at the end. “She’s resting,” Granma answered. Even hidden away as I was in a distant room, I detected his rich dark odor of blue and black and purple inks, and the odor of his body’s efforts at work. And I thought of all my yearning to be among the animals and a part of their world. Maybe, when we shared one shelter and grew familiar enough with each other, like the imagined families in the hill houses whose closeness I coveted, we were already much more like the animals than most of us ever realized.

  But why had that animal familiarity never suffused my time in Simon’s shadowy home? What had been missing from that place and from us, the people who had shared it? I wrote more, to try and find out. I wrote until long after dinner was done and Cora went to sleep below me and the house was silent, the prairie black. And there was something, I realized, about writing in the dark that mirrored my life as it felt to me then: I couldn’t see the letters I was shaping, but I wanted to go on writing anyway.

  4 PRONGHORN (Antilocapra americana)

  THE NEXT MORNING, A SATURDAY, I woke to the sounds of Jim working on the old Cutlass, just as I had on the Saturday before. I heard him humming through the window beside my bunk.

  I burrowed down into the bed and slid my hands under my pillow, where they found the crumpled-up newspaper article from Bumble, and the folded pages of my long letter to Simon. I struggled to reconcile them with the sound of Jim’s wordless melody. I felt in between places and in between lives, the way sometimes it is possible to feel in between sleeping and waking, poised on a threshold. After a few minutes of lying with my eyes closed tight against the strong prairie light, listening to Jim’s air (a mournful tune I remembered, though I didn’t know from where), I climbed down the ladder.

  From her bunk Cora regarded me with the blank, inscrutable gaze of a still-sleepy child. Daphne watched from behind the woven wires of her cage and I thought about feeding her but decided not to risk arousing Cora’s annoyance. When I reached the bottom rung, Cora let her stuffed fawn roll away and sat up. She yawned hugely, and her bangs poked up at crazy angles.

  “How was your sleep?” I asked.

  “Mmmumph,” she replied, reaching her arms toward the ceiling and shaking rather violently with the stretch.

  Outside, I found Granma on the porch with her knitting. “Good morning, honey,” she said.

  “Good morning, Granma.” I peered at the mass of yarn in her lap. “What are you working on today?”

  “Oh, it’s a little cap. For one of my young relatives over in Lodge Grass. He’s not born yet, but he’ll be here any day now.” She held it up, and it resembled a fuzzy blue bell without a clapper.

  “Have you always been a knitter?”

  “Oh, not always. They made us learn knitting at the boarding school I was sent to as a girl.” Her face darkened for a moment in a way I’d never seen, but she was quick to offer me a grin and add, “I made dozens of caps like these for Jim before and after he was born, more than he could ever wear. Can you believe his head was once this tiny?” She giggled.

  I looked at Jim as he bent over the Cutlass. It was true that his head wasn’t small, but then no part of him seemed to be. His face was broad and benevolent. His plum-colored lips were full. His smile was wide and generous when he bestowed it in his vague way. And I almost could not look at his hands. I had been studying them surreptitiously for days as they accomplished the most ordinary of acts—wrapping around a doorknob, pulling out a chair, turning on the faucet in the kitchen sink. They, too, were big, and beautifully formed, with expansive palms and long fingers. And they seemed even more attractive because they were always stained with ink, the same ink that, on paper, told thousands of true stories to readers of the newspapers and magazines that wound their way through the press every day. I thought it fitting that his job ensured his hands would be marked, always marked, and, that way, always set apart. Even while he tinkered with inanimate engine parts, they looked like such caring hands, as if they might make right whatever—or whomever—they touched.

  Cora, I noticed, always had the pleased, eyes-at-half-mast look of a drowsy cat after he rumpled her hair. And Granma always fell asleep as soon as he began to rub the joints of her fingers after she’d spent a long time at her knitting. The chickens always went silent out of sheer contentment when he held them, which he did on occasion, and for no reason other than it seemed to give him satisfaction. And Belly, fittingly, always flopped down to display her stomach in absolute deference and delight when he scratched her ears. I could see Jim’s heart in his hands, and, just once, I had caught myself wondering what it would be like if he ever put them on me.

  That had been a daydream, I told myself, born of my abject homesickness and basic yearning for comfort. I was certain Jim did not have even the most fleeting thoughts of touching me. He didn’t even look at me. He was the opposite of Simon, who had watched me so intently. When Jim spoke to me, his eyes were always drawn to the side, as if he were addressing some ethereal companion hovering a few feet in front of his left or right shoulder, an invisible angel.

  Then, possibly because he felt me studying him, Jim looked up from the Cutlass and waved. “Morning, Margie,” he called. “How’s everything?” He frowned in the glare of the morning sun, and the line between his eyes was perfectly perpendicular to the horizontal line of his smile. I thought of Cora’s World of Math and what little I recalled of geometry, and wondered about the intersection of those two lines—what was buried beneath the point where they met?

  “Everything is great!” I replied, with far too much eager-to-please enthusiasm straining my voice. Why, I wondered, couldn’t I sound soft and breathy like Marilyn, or sweet and vaguely continental like Audrey, or deep and thrilling like Granma? Why must I be so wispy, so nervous, so girlish? I remembered the night of the Little Italy party when I had sprawled, sans clothes, on Jack Dolce’s couch to pose for his camera, my throat husky from shouting over the music, my eyes snoozy from wine, my neck adorned with the green snake, how relaxed I’d felt at that moment (the rosemary moment I swore I would never forget), like something juicy, something ripe for the picking. Jack Dolce had given me a green-snake glimpse of the red thread of joy that wove through me and all of life, that had even stitched us together as siblings for a spell. And just how right about everything had he been? I supposed he had b
een right about the foolhardiness of my fire fixation. All I knew for sure was that, looking at Jim, standing on a porch of packed dirt in my bathrobe, I felt about as far from that night as I ever could, too tightly wound with my tentative smile.

  “Ready for another day of root digging?” Granma asked. We had gone twice more since the first time. “I want to make sure Cora joins me at least once this year before the wild turnips are out of season, so she is definitely going to come. But if you’d rather stay home today, I understand. Jim will be here, working on the Pronghorn. That’s what he calls this car—after those antelope who can run so fast across the prairie.”

  I looked at him ministering to the Cutlass. His hands had disappeared into her hood, and his shirt was sticky from sweat. I had not yet been alone with Jim. Jim and his invisible angel.

  “No,” I said, “I’d like to come with you.”

  “Good girl.” Granma reached out and squeezed my hand. “There’s lots to learn if you stick with me. Though Jim could tell you plenty, too.”

  Cora pushed through the screen door and stood barefoot and bleary-eyed on the other side of Granma. She munched on an apple. “How were your dreams, Grandchild?” Granma asked.

  “Good.” Always verbose with her grandmother, Cora continued, “I had a lot of dreams about seahorses. Did you know seahorses are raised by their fathers?”

  “I did know that,” I said.

  “It’s true.” Cora squinted straight ahead at her dad. She was not wearing her glasses, and she looked touchingly tiny and fragile without them, as if they served as some sort of sixties-style armor. “Seahorses. I had a lot of dreams about those. One of them was a baby. She flew out of the water. She had the sweetest breath.” She paused to crunch into her apple and went on. “I finally found that shoe of mine that Belly ran away with last week”—Belly, hearing her name, cocked her head—“in Dad’s room, under his bed. It is utterly destroyed. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want my leggins to look at Crow Fair this year …”

  Jim approached, wiping his hands. He ruffled Cora’s bedhead. I watched his face while he listened to his girl describe her dream “leggins,” and looked for a sign of distraction in his eyes, and listened for a false note to slip into one of his encouraging “mmm-hmms,” and waited for a bit of boredom to sneak into the shape of his smile when he bobbed his head up and down, but all I sensed was interest—a degree of interest that would have made me suspicious, so strange would it have seemed had I ever perceived it in my own sad dad. Dad, as the green photo album had shown, could sometimes summon the strength to grasp at fragments of life as they passed and tuck them away for preservation, for resurrection in some distant future, but it wasn’t as easy for him to engage with such moments as they were happening.

  At the end of Cora’s monologue, Jim asked her a couple of follow-up questions: “Did you give Belly your other shoe?” (“Not yet, but I may as well.”) “How much will the supplies for your new leggins cost, about?” (“I don’t know … not too much?”) Then he turned to Granma, who answered his query about her plans for the day half in English, half in Crow, so the only parts I understood were my own name and Cora’s, along with “walk” and “turnip.” She also said “stars,” and I wondered if she was telling him about some predawn celestial happening she had observed when she ventured outside before sunup, as was—I had come to understand—her habit.

  Then it was my turn. Jim tilted his face toward me. “Do you like going out and digging roots, Margie?” His eyes fell somewhere to the right of my body, and I wondered why he had even asked me the question if he was already so disinterested in the prospect of an answer.

  “Oh, yes, very much,” I said. I absently drew an X in the dirt between us with my toe. “I feel like I can forget myself and my troubles when I’m doing it.” He just nodded and was silent, and soon I went back inside.

  WE WALKED TOWARD A NEW ROOT-DIGGING PLACE that Granma had in mind. “The world is greening up,” she said. She was right. The prairie was no longer a bland expanse of beige. It was alive with emerald grasses and all kinds of plants I had never seen.

  She pointed to the soft, rounded mountains I had first noticed when Bumble and I drove across the reservation. They had an unostentatious beauty, as if they knew they were pretty enough without having to show off a lot of sharp crags or cloud-piercing peaks. There was something comforting in their easy slopes. “Those,” Granma said, “are our Bighorns. We Crows are so lucky to have those mountains here with us. Cora, why don’t you tell Margie about the Bighorns?”

  “Mrrrr.” Cora gave a resistant little groan.

  “Go on,” Granma persisted. “I want to hear you tell about them.” Granma seemed to be giving Cora a kind of test.

  “Basawaxaawúua—” Cora began to speak in a ringing, authoritative voice that vibrated with her bouncy steps.

  “In English, Grandchild,” Granma said. “So Margie can understand.”

  Cora started again. “The Bighorn Mountains”—she paused to suck in a great gulp of air—“are sacred to the Crows, who are more accurately known as the Apsáalooke—that means ‘children of the large-beaked bird.’ Belly, c’mon!” Belly was interested in gobbling one of the prairie dogs who periscoped their heads out of innumerable holes in the ground, but she obediently trotted up behind Cora. “No Intestines,” Cora continued, “was the first leader of the Crows after we broke apart from our old friends, the Hidatsa. That was a long time ago.” Granma, closing her eyes, smiled to herself. “No Intestines was just a teenager then, but he knew we needed to find a new place to live, and he led us on a long journey in search of it. He knew when he saw tobacco seeds, that would be the sign that we had come to the right place. Good girl, Belly.” She reached down to stroke the top of Belly’s freckled head. “No Intestines was 117 years old by the time he found these Bighorn Mountains. He climbed the highest one, Extended Peak. When he was up there, he had a vision. He saw that the tobacco seeds he had been searching for were lying right at the base of that peak. He saw them shining like stars. He knew then that he had brought his people to the place where they belonged. That’s why the Crows are here today, and that’s why the Bighorn Mountains are the heart of our world.”

  Granma looked as though she might explode with happiness. Cora, too, was deeply pleased. “That’s a fantastic story,” I said.

  “But it really happened,” Cora said. She turned toward me and her eyes had a dreamy look behind her spectacles. “The tobacco seeds were shining like stars.” I could tell that was her favorite part. It reminded me of my orange blossoms, which had also always shone like stars for me—white scented stars at the heart of what had once been my world.

  “And that’s why,” Granma said, “if you really want your prayer to be heard, it helps to burn some tobacco and let the smoke rise up to the stars. Tobacco and stars are very connected.”

  “I don’t have any tobacco!” Cora said.

  We came to a rocky spot similar to the one where Granma and I had dug. Cora had her own root-digging stick, which was much like Granma’s. She set about digging straight away, and we followed her lead.

  I thought about the man named No Intestines. I imagined him on the mountaintop when he had his vision. His expression must have been one of absolute enchantment, and of relief, because the long journey was finally over. Maybe he had even wept and smiled at the same time. I could see his face. He had a vertical line between his ecstatic eyes—the mark of all the hardships he and his people had endured before finding the Bighorns. Yes, he had a vertical line between his eyes, just like Jim. And I realized I was imagining him as Jim, with Jim’s hands and Jim’s sideways gaze. Then I accidentally snapped off the entire bottom half of a root with my spade. “Ohhh,” I moaned.

  “What is it, honey?” Granma plopped down on the dirt and rested with a freshly dug root in her lap. She stretched her legs out in front of her and winced. I heard her knees pop. Cora was digging in a distant patch, and I could barely hear her flutey voice
trilling “A-ho, a-ho.” I sat close to Granma with the broken root in my hand.

  “Granma.”

  “Yes, Margie, what’s the matter? Getting tuckered out?”

  “No, I’m fine. It’s just, something’s on my mind.”

  “Yes, I can see that, honey. Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “I—it’s hard for me to say—I don’t know what to say, really. It’s just—” Granma laid her digging stick on the dirt. She looked as if she had all day and night to listen to me ramble, and that made me feel guilty for being so hesitant. “It’s just Jim,” I blurted. “I worry. I worry that I’m an intruder here in your home and that—that he doesn’t like me.” I glanced at Cora, who was, thankfully, immersed in her work. I would have been embarrassed had she seen my tears.

  Granma shook her head. “Margie! Honey, how could you say that now? We are all enjoying you so much here. Of course Jim likes you. It’s possible that, at first, he may have thought having you come here was another one of my funny ideas—it was my idea, did you know? I’m the matriarch after all, and what I say goes.” She winked. “So, Jim was probably surprised—why would we hide somebody in trouble with the law? But when I learned just why you were in trouble, I was intrigued. I wanted to meet the person who had those kinds of feelings about animals, even if her actions were a bit … unusual. It was the feelings behind the actions that captured my interest. But,” she patted my leg, “that’s all beside the point. I know Jim likes you. What’s not to like?”

  “But,” I brushed my cheek with the back of my hand and caught a salty drop, “he never looks at me.”