The Lovebird

by Natalie Brown

  “What is that hat?” she asked. “And why are your sunglasses on? Does the light in here bother your eyes?”

  At the checkout counter, I dipped into my small stash of cash to pay for the cap. “That’s a lot plainer than the stuff you usually wear,” Cora noted. To pay for Cora’s supplies, Granma pulled a few bills out of an envelope she carried in her tote bag, which was embroidered with the flag of the Crow Nation. “Your dad has been setting this money aside especially for this,” she explained to Cora, whose eyes closed with gratitude behind her glasses.

  For fear of offending me, I knew, Josie and Cora walked far ahead of us back to the truck to discuss the deer that Josie had killed the previous year. They would use its skin to make the new leggings.

  Granma held on to my arm as we strolled and talked about the money in the envelope. “It’s true, we don’t have much. Jim’s wages are low, and most of them go into Cora’s college fund. I want Cora to go to college so she can be a master of both worlds—the Crow world and the outside one. I want her to thrive in both,” Granma said. “We live on the reservation by choice, because it’s what is best for our family. Jim is a member of the Tobacco Society, like his father was. They’re in charge of keeping the tobacco garden on the reservation, because that plant is sacred to us. Cora gets to learn the language and culture and history of her tribe, and to know her many relatives. And I get to be on the land that I love.”

  In the truck, Josie asked, “Should we stop by the press and say hello to Jim?” Granma said that it “would be nice,” and Cora asserted that we should “bring him something,” so we stopped at a convenience store. Josie, Granma, and I waited while Cora darted in, hands in flight, to buy a candy bar and a newfangled drink comprised of nothing found in nature, which fairly fluoresced from within its bottle. “I bet Dad’s never had this one before,” she said, exhaling one long excited breath. “He’ll love it.”

  I supposed Cora was probably right. Observing Jim’s eating habits had been a revelation of sorts for me, especially after Dad’s diet of Dorals and Maker’s Mark with a splash of water, and Simon’s strict and skimpy vegan regimen, and Jack Dolce’s decadent but streamlined steamed oyster habit. Jim’s tastes were comprehensive. He accepted and consumed all. Nothing was off limits, and not all of it was nutritious. He ate everything, from store-bought cold cuts to homemade pemmican, from fiberless loaves of airy white bread to Granma’s wholesome deer-and-prairie-turnip stew, from tepid TV dinners to the thirty-minute meals he and I prepared together, from sugary sodas to tea made with wild mint plucked from the prairie, from black coffee to buttermilk by the glassful, from sunflower seeds out of Josie’s garden to potato chips shining with grease. And still he embodied absolute health from the ends of his short black hair to the tips of his toes. Though he wasn’t plump, he seemed stuffed with vitality. He had a health radiance, I thought, as the buildings passing outside the truck windows ushered us closer to the press. Of course, I kept my observations of Jim, his vertical furrow, his hands, and his radiance all to myself. It was like what the nuns in CCD always told us about Mary, how she treasured things away in her heart, and pondered them. I pondered.

  “WHOA, WHAT’S THIS?” JIM BOOMED, holding his beverage up for examination. Behind him, an enormous black printing press—so huge that it filled an entire warehouse—spat out pile after pile of colorful pages. I smelled metal, ink, sweat, and trees. Jim’s coworker that day was an obvious neophyte who seemed barely out of high school, and who navigated the churning machinery of the press with the lost, gangling air of recently foaled livestock. He stared at us from a distance with the same sort of gaze I had seen on so many startled animals.

  “Better put these in!” Jim said. He reached into a bucket for four small boxes of earplugs and handed one to each of us. When he gave me mine he added, “I like your hat.” Granma had trouble manipulating the squishy plugs, so Josie inserted them for her. She cupped Granma’s wrinkly chin delicately in her palm. Jim hugged Cora, and when she stepped away the resultant ink spots on her clothes exactly mirrored the ones on his. “Thanks for the drink!” he said. “I’m thirsty. This looks exotic.”

  I stood apart as I so often did, watching. And, because he was so much on my mind, I tried to imagine what Simon Mellinkoff might think of it all—and specifically what he might think of Jim. I pictured them standing side by side, Simon in his sunglasses, his canvas slip-ons and black-and-white-checkered trousers, his silver hair, his frame slim from his meager meatless meals, and Jim in his work clothes of heavy canvas, his richly shining if evasive eyes, his smile, which he flashed between swallows of his daughter’s sweet gift. I wondered what Simon, who had no close male friends, would think about Jim, who had no college education, no cause, and no cares as far as I could see, apart from the trio of dark-eyed females who stood before him with plugs in their ears.

  “So what brings all you ladies to Billings today?” he asked.

  “We came to get the stuff for my leggins!”

  “Great!”

  “They’re going to be so gorgeous, Dad.”

  I approached the press and picked up one of the freshly printed pages, warm and damp as a newborn. It was an advertisement, meant to be tucked into a newspaper. “Be careful,” Jim said into my ear. His voice penetrated the plug. “Don’t stand too close.” He lifted the paper from my hand, let out a groan, and shouted to his partner, who slouched and nodded at the ceiling while dreamily picking at his cheek. “Larry!” Jim yelled. The boy turned lackadaisically at Jim’s voice. “Is this supposed to be navy?”

  “What?”

  “Blue!”

  “No! Red!” Larry, bewildered, shifted his weight from one lanky leg to the other.

  Then Jim, moving more swiftly than I’d ever seen, climbed a ladder to a platform at the top of the press and adjusted an assortment of levers that controlled the distribution of ink. Each time he moved one, a different color seeped onto his hands. I saw that the press was a kind of giantess that bled all over him. And that, I realized, was how he got so stained every day. Every day he tried to manage her, not to dominate her, because he never could, but just to steer her, to draw her hues out with great sensitivity, to lift her levers, to coax her to release her gold, her magenta, her green. And he came home multicolored, with an inevitable spot lodged in the crease between his eyes. From down below, I watched the papers change slowly as the press spat them out. The SALE SALE SALE heading transformed from dark blue to indigo to purple. Then it began to blush.

  “Margie!” Jim yelled to me. “How’s it look?”

  “What?”

  “What color is it now?”

  “Getting rosy.”

  He waited a few moments, tinkered with the levers. “Now?”

  “It’s getting rosier.”

  “Now?”

  “Red … pretty red. It’s red now! Beautiful!” I was stirred by what seemed like a symbolic transformation. There was something magic in it, and Jim had been the magician. And the roses of his mother’s apron, which had shrunk into such tightly closed buds a week before, bloomed open again.

  He descended the ladder. “It’s a good thing you came over here, or I might not have caught that.” He jerked a thumb toward his partner. “And that one sure wouldn’t have.” Larry was robotically throwing stacks of too-blue papers into a waste bin.

  “What happened, Dad?” Cora asked. She took a bite out of the candy bar she had yet to present to him.

  “Margie just helped me out.”

  Cora was silent for a moment, chewing. Then she said, “Yeah, she helped me out at the craft store, too. She picked out some good beads.”

  I bent my head in shyness, hoping my new hat would hide the thrill in my eyes.

  DAYS LATER, GRANMA GUIDED CORA as she practiced decorating scraps of fabric with perfect pink petals of beads. Once she grew adept, they would work together to create the new leggings. “We want you to help,” Granma told me.

  “Me? What can I do? I don’t know ho
w to do this stuff.”

  “Well, how can that be, honey? We know you can sew.”

  “Yeah. We’ve seen all those crazy dresses you’ve made,” said Cora.

  “Have you beaded before?” Granma asked.

  “Beaded? No …” I recalled my courses at the Crafts Complex, where it seemed I had done everything but bead.

  “Cora, go get your amulet to show Margie.”

  Cora appeared with a turtle that fit in the palm of her hand, made with seed beads in deep oceanic shades of green and blue and brown. It was glossy, dappled, pebbly to the touch. “See, this is a good example of the kind of beading we do,” Granma explained. “We sew the beads by hand right onto the material, to make a dense pattern.” With considerable ceremony, Cora placed the turtle into my hand. It was light, yet there was a kind of buzzing energy to it, a mysterious substantiality.

  “What’s inside this?” I asked. “I mean, what gives it dimension? So that it’s not just flat?”

  “It’s my umbilical cord amulet,” Cora said. “My umbilical cord is in it.” My stomach tumbled in surprised delight. “The cord that connected me to my mom when I was born. They saved it and they made it into this. Who made it, Granma?”

  “Me and Josie.”

  “I wear it at certain times. Like when I dance.”

  I wondered about our cord—mine and Rasha’s. What had become of it on that day when I—too small, too well positioned—swam out and she lost all her blood? There had been no magician there to adjust a lever, to slow her outpour. Now I could see more clearly the source of Cora’s disconcerting confidence, which so intimidated me. She was tethered. She came from a place where the line that links a girl to her mother is preserved, and worn when she dances on the earth—a place where she always knows who she is and where she comes from, because they set the information aside for her, they sew it up safely after her birth.

  9 DRAGONFLY (Lestes disjunctus)

  BY MID-JULY THE HEAT ON THE PRAIRIE actually made a sound, a subtle hum, like the electric hum of the streetlamps that stood over the hill houses back home, like the hardworking hum of the ice-cream cooler at Gelato Amore into which Jack Dolce was surely reaching the faceless Virgin Mary of his left arm while I, a thousand miles north, sweltered. It was audible under Jim’s musical hum when he tinkered with the Pronghorn. It was the sound of some invisible burning, some hot internal effort, and it was also the sound of myself, for I lived in an anxious state, always waiting, always wondering about when I might leave.

  I was beginning to think I had hidden for a long enough “while,” though exactly where I would go I did not know. Bumble’s latest missive suggested that I “stand by.” He’d written to say he was in conversation with a friend in New York who might be able to provide me with a part-time job at a bakery and a couch so I could find my footing and start, as Bumble had termed it, “from scratch.” But I wasn’t sure about the Big Apple. And I had yet to pen a letter in response to Simon’s lengthy confession, over which I was still mulling. I sometimes murmured to myself in a confounded tone that drew an inquisitive gaze from Cora.

  Jim’s Pronghorn was slowly becoming complete. There were fewer and fewer parts scattered outside of her with every passing week. Now only ten or twelve pieces lay on the grass, waiting to be tucked into their right places, where they could whirr and purr and pass juices and propel her forward over the hot grass. All summer, Jim had worked on her steadily, most every weekend, humming to himself and marking his shirts with oil. He lay on his back and looked up into her underbelly, or stood and stared into her opened hood with an absorbed expression.

  One steamy Saturday he took a break to visit with Cora and me on the porch where we wilted. My new navy baseball cap had gone mysteriously missing, and even under the metal awning there was no real respite from the sun’s blaze. Granma was flushed and breathless and had decided to lie down after breakfast. “How are you two holding up over here?” Jim asked.

  “Hot.” Cora looked up from The World of Math, which she had opened on her lap. Her glasses were foggy and her face was pink.

  “How’s the Pronghorn?” I asked. Through my sunglasses, I watched him wipe his hands on his pants, on his strong straight legs. Even in the heat his signature health radiance was aglow. He had a persistent succulence. All the nutrients in the meal we had prepared together the night before—Confetti Salad of Pasta and Vegetables—deepened the plum color of his lips and shone out of his clear eyes. Sometimes, looking sneakily at Jim, I recalled the images of snug sleeping babies that had always been part of the fantasies I’d constructed around the hill houses. In truth, I had never felt any specific desire to make babies with anyone. But when I looked at Jim in all his unwavering wholesomeness, which was evident to lesser degrees in both Granma, his progenitor (with her girlishly round cheeks and rich voice), and Cora, his progeny (with her fluttering hands and explosive laugh), I understood the impulse to reproduce. Jim’s body held a beauty in it, one that wanted to be made flesh again and again.

  “Aw, she’s making progress, but there’s still work to be done.”

  “Where did you get this car?” I asked.

  “She belonged to my dad, and he passed her on to me. I drove her for a long time until I got my truck. I decided at winter’s end to rebuild her engine and fix her up. In a few years, I’ll pass her on to Cora. What do you think about that, Cor?”

  Cora could only offer a parched “Hmp.”

  Jim looked sympathetic. “What do you say,” he said. “Should we go for a swim?”

  Cora slammed shut her book and rose. “I don’t have a bathing suit,” I said. Jim averted his face completely.

  “We’ll find you something,” Cora said. “Come on.” She tugged at my hand. “It’s the most fun.”

  WE WOKE GRANMA AND DROVE to a place on the Little Bighorn River. The hum was inaudible there. The only sounds were the hurried whispers of the water, the wind ruffling the leaves of the cottonwood trees that stood all along the bank, and the papery rustling of the cattails, whose slender stalks were capped in brown, furry cylinders that broke apart to release soft tufts into the air as if surrendering to the heat.

  Cora immersed herself and moved through the water sleek and straight as a muskrat, with just her head poking up above its greenish surface. Her movements made only the faintest of ripples, and they radiated away from her in rhythmic rings.

  Jim laughed when he entered the river. His splashy swimming reminded me of a cacophonous and tuneless band. Still, he managed to stay afloat. Then he dove down and disappeared. He was gone for so long I began to feel worried, and to stare unseeing into the opaque depths. When he finally surfaced, his eyes had a sleepy look, and his smile was enormous. “Brrrufff,” he said, shaking his head like a delighted dog.

  I slid in shyly, wearing one of Jim’s black T-shirts. Once wet, it hung almost to my knees. The river had a fertile smell of mud, moss, fish, ducks, and the slick green plants on the banks. A rash of gooseflesh spread over my arms and, grimacing, I slowly sank down until the water reached my chin. I stood still for a few moments and savored the blood-stirring sensation of the chill. Soon I wasn’t cold anymore and began an aimless half hop, half swim. When my feet no longer reached the bottom, I quickly moved back to a place where they did. Once, a blue dragonfly paused on my shoulder and sipped the droplets there. I tipped my head back and felt the water climb, slow and delicious, up the back of my scalp, soaking my hair, and I sucked in my breath at the sweetness of it.

  Granma sat on the bank beneath a cottonwood. She pulled back the Velcro straps of her sneakers and slipped her feet out. Then she peeled off her socks and laid them side by side on the grass like a pair of freshly caught fish. From my place in the water, I saw that the soles of her feet were a pale brown color that darkened to deep rose at the balls and heels. Her left sole bore a small, leaf-shaped birthmark, and it seemed fitting for the part of her body that came in frequent contact with the earth to be thus embellished. She wiggled and sprea
d out her toes girlishly before reaching for a ball of yarn (“Booties,” she had told me in the truck, “for a friend’s baby in Lodge Grass”) and her needles. The needles (aquamarine metal ones from the American flag pencil box) glinted in the sun.

  All was quiet for a long time. Then Jim snuck up alongside Cora, who was absorbed in swimming, and scooped her swiftly into his arms so she was cradled. “Dad!” She pretended to protest but her face was aglow. She curled her hands into tiny fists and hammered Jim all over his chest.

  “Oh, you want to be free?” he asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Okay!” Jim tossed her high into the air above the water. She screeched with delight before landing with a splash. Then, thrilled, she swam immediately back to her father and piggybacked him, encircling his throat with her arms.

  “Dad!”

  I turned my face away from their display. Something in it hurt me even as I smiled.

  Cora shouted in the magisterial manner of a river queen, “Get her! Get her!”

  “Oh no,” I said, shrinking backward toward the bank. Jim approached with a devilish “Mwa-ha-ha-ha,” and Cora, clinging to his back, cried, “Yes! Yes!” I made a quick dart to the left but was no match for Jim, who appeared so clumsy in the water yet moved with a secret kind of stealth. At the prospect of being touched by him I panicked and made a dash to the right, but in a moment he had both hands curled around my waist and I screamed. Cora cheered when he lifted me out of the river, and I felt prettier than I ever had under the rambunctious gazes of that daughter and dad in my long saggy shirt, my soaked hair and wet, shining face, and she cheered louder still when he dropped me back in. And so the afternoon passed.