The Lovebird

by Natalie Brown

  We climbed out of the river and sat warming ourselves and grinning without obvious cause. Granma broke from her knitting to walk along the muddy bank and pull the shoots off the cattails. “These will make a good salad for us tonight,” she said.

  “What about the wild plums?” Cora called to her. “Are they ready?” Granma squeezed one purple globe hanging from a gnarled shrub. She said they were not.

  “It’s been so hot,” Cora said. “They should be ready by now.”

  “You forgot, Granddaughter, it’s the moon that ripens these. The moon is watery, and it makes water in the plums.”

  What is this place? I thought, walking back into the river and diving down into it. What is this place where everything is all of a piece, where tobacco seeds and stars are linked, and the moon ripens plums? What is this place and who are these people, I wondered, touching the silt at the river’s bottom—until a child, a mischievous muskrat, swam close to tickle my ribs and sent bubbles out of her laughing mouth.

  We drank cold wild mint tea from jelly jars and ate the sandwiches we had packed. Then we lay, spent from swimming, with our backs on the earth. Cora, aloof again, put her glasses back on and plopped her head in Granma’s lap. Granma talked about the importance of avoiding otters while swimming in the river. “We Crows have always known never to let an otter brush alongside you. It would be very bad if that happened,” she explained in her soft voice. Cora closed her eyes. “Very bad for your future.” Jim nodded in assent.

  I imagined the sudden slinky feeling of being brushed by an otter, and I believed that such an encounter would be ominous. In this place, where all aspects of creation seemed tied together, every living thing had its own significance within the system of symbols and stories through which people had once understood their lives. And some people, like Granma, still understood. The Crow world was a complex one. It wasn’t that otters were inherently bad—no animals were—but that brushing alongside one in a river could be.

  We heard a drumming on the leaves of the trees, one that started slow and gentle and then grew stronger, and soon drops reached our heads and shoulders. “Rain!” Cora cried.

  “Ah, thank you, Iichihkbaalia,* we need this.” Granma tilted her head back and let her face get wet.

  “Let’s pack up,” Jim said. “It’s really going to come down.” We gathered all that we had brought, and we were happy rushing around the bank, laughing like children being chased. By the time we reached the truck, with towels and jelly jars and cattail shoots in our arms, we were soaked. We were a sticky, shivering foursome on the drive back. Big, bluish veins of lightning ripped through the sky, and we kept the radio off to hear the thunder. This is what I know, I thought. I know this place and these people. What had that other life been?

  It was very confusing, the way my thoughts tipped so steeply in one direction and then another. I remembered the old-fashioned scale I’d noticed during my last visit to Dad. He had pulled it from the attic and placed it on top of the television set. He’d dropped the keys to the Skylark in one of the brass pans, and I’d absently transferred them to the other and watched the scale tip. My thoughts and feelings were similarly vacillating. One minute I envisioned my departure from the reservation; the next, Crow Country’s charms captured me in a velvety embrace (the velvet of river water and cattail) from which I didn’t want to escape. But I was fatigued, I supposed, from all the heat and the swimming.

  THAT NIGHT, JIM AND I COOKED AGAIN. I had chosen a recipe for Pot Pie with Peas from Three Hundred Thrifty Thirty-Minute Meals!, and we’d decided to make two, filling one with some of the buffalo meat that was stored in the freezer and another with only vegetables. With Granma’s guidance, we would make the crusts using wild turnip flour.

  After the thunderstorm, the prairie was fragrant, and the innumerable droplets that lingered on everything (the yellow truck, the Pronghorn and her parts, Belly’s fur, each blade of grass) refracted the rays of the reemerging sun. I stood, dried and dressed, in front of the open kitchen window, waiting for Jim and watching the curtain blow in and out like something breathing.

  “Did I get all the right ingredients?” he asked. He looked scrubbed and shiny and wore a fresh white T-shirt.

  “Yes, it’s all here,” I answered.

  For a full minute, we stood and stared at the food, which I had spread upon the countertop. A spider, tiny and brown, crawled out of the droopy green carrot tops, paused, and made his way down the cabinet to the floor. We watched him go. The bright label on a can of mushrooms cried “Low Sodium!” at me six or seven times. Jim peered at the recipe and cleared his throat. “Well,” he said. Again, I heard the faint shake in his voice, the same one that was there the night he’d brought the cookbook home and handed it to me. When he picked up a potato for washing, it disappeared for a moment in his hand, just as my own hand had the one and only time he had touched it in greeting. We got started.

  We had prepared six meals together and in recent weeks had agreed upon a kind of unspoken choreography. I had learned to anticipate when he would move right or left, or forward or back, and he, it seemed, had learned to anticipate the same in me. So we no longer collided while we cooked.

  “Did you used to do much cooking?” Jim asked. “Before you came here and we put you to work in the kitchen?” He smiled.

  “Oh, sometimes.” In Simon’s spotless kitchen, the curtains had not breathed. To mention it—the meals, little Annette, the mourning doves—was pointless. “I was pretty busy. With the Operation.”

  “Yeah, I can imagine. What was it called again? The group you were leading?”

  “Operation H.E.A.R.T.” For the first time, I felt self-conscious saying it. “It stands for Humans Enforcing Animal Rights Today.”

  “That makes sense.” Jim nodded. “You know, I think I understand. About the animals and all. My dad—”

  “Ray?”

  “Yeah! I guess Mom’s told you about him. He was the greatest. He used to tell me that animals are our relatives, that they have things to give us and teach us, that we should pay attention to them and respect them. We’re not supposed to hold ourselves above. And I think he was right. Of course, he did hunt sometimes. And so do I.”

  “Oh?” I cut through a carrot. My scale tipped again. Tomorrow, maybe. Maybe tomorrow would be the day to go. Of course, there was the problem of a car.

  “We try, Mom and I, to be respectful. Most of the meat we eat comes from animals we’ve hunted ourselves. Once a year, I take a buffalo. Josie hunts deer. We share what we get with family and friends, and we use it all. The buffalo meat we’re using tonight, it’s from the one I got last summer. I hope it doesn’t bother you too much—”

  “N-no—I mean—I grew up eating meat with my Dad, and it was all straight from the supermarket. You know, the flesh of some poor animal who had led a horrific existence on a factory farm. At least you are sometimes willing to …”

  “Kill it myself?”

  “Well, yeah …” In truth, I hated it, to think of his hands hurting anything.

  “Do you want to come to the buffalo hunt in a couple of weeks? Granma, Cora, and Josie are all going to be there.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I could.”

  Jim and I were quiet for a long time. Then he said, “We’ve been doing it for centuries. It’s part of who we are—”

  “I understand.”

  The air between us was pulled into a taut ribbon. The curtain in the window hung straight and flat. The spider, who had been taking his time traversing the linoleum, froze. What was it? He didn’t like me after all. I didn’t like him. He appeared to radiate care and gentleness, but he killed animals. No, I would not stay much longer. I would leave before that hunt.

  We worked for a long time in silence. I ignored the cubes of blood-red meat thawing in a bowl. Then Jim spoke again, cautiously.

  “So, what did you do, anyway, if you don’t mind my asking? Before you came here, what did you do to upset the feds?” He was wonder
ing just how much trouble I was in, I thought, and how much longer it would take me to conjure the courage to leave. My face grew hot and my eyes welled, just as they had on that root-digging day when I’d told Granma I knew Jim didn’t want me around. He chopped an entire stem of celery before I answered.

  “I got caught,” I said shakily, “talking to a crowd of people at a café called Gelato Amore about how to make an incendiary device—a firebomb. An undercover FBI agent in a newsboy cap”—Jim raised his eyebrows—“was there, and he recorded me on his cell phone.”

  Jim shook his head. “Oh, that’s so ridiculous,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was referring to my public talk about how to start a fire or to Agent Fox with his cell phone. I looked at him with big wet eyes. “Oh, no, I mean, that they recorded you. It’s just so tricky. Is this upsetting you? You don’t have to talk—”

  “They—the feds—called it ‘teaching the making or use of an explosive.’ But there’s other stuff, too, that they could charge me with down the road. Before that, I set fire to a restaurant that specialized in wild game. They served peacocks and—”

  “What?” Jim stopped chopping. “Did you do much damage?”

  “It burned to the ground.”

  “Wow, Margie. That’s serious. I can see why they’re eager to cart you off to jail. But I’m glad you’ve managed to stay out, so far. Jail’s not a good place to be. And I can’t picture you there at all.” Could he picture me anywhere, I wondered, if he had never so much as looked directly at me? “My ex is there,” he added.

  “Your ex-wife?”

  “We weren’t married. Well, maybe we were, in the Indian way. For a while. But she had moved on long before she went to prison. Cora’s mom, Isabelle.”

  “Oh. Cora has mentioned her. Once.” I thought of the peach pit stashed in Cora’s jewelry box, watched over by the ballerina. Its surface had grown quite smooth, its inner seed had been removed, and it was starting to resemble a ring. “She came from Georgia?”

  “Yeah. Cherokee. You know, they’re supposed to be the most civilized of all us Indians?” Jim let out a mocking laugh, but the line between his eyes deepened. For the first time all day, I noticed a stubborn speck of red ink tucked in the crease, impervious to our afternoon swim. It gave him an injured look, and my left ovary ached. And where, where was the spot where that vertical line and his horizontal grin met? Cora would likely pinpoint the place exactly, without even offering her textbook. “It is utterly simple,” she would say, peering over her starry spectacles. “Just imagine them as two perpendicular lines and visualize the point where they intersect.” But I couldn’t allow myself to know for sure. “Well,” he went on, “Isabelle was not civilized. Isabelle was wild.”

  “How wild?”

  “Wild enough to keep making and using and selling methamphetamines after she had already been arrested and jailed because of it twice. Wild enough to walk away from Cora without a second thought.”

  I remembered the resignation in Cora’s voice on the day she’d acknowledged that no letter had been waiting for her at the post office. “Why was she so wild?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know her that well, to be honest. When we met, we were just seventeen. We were both drunk, and we stayed that way for the duration of our relationship. But I never got into drugs like she did. I’m grateful for that.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “She came out here one summer for Crow Fair. She was with a bunch of friends, on a road trip. Then she just stayed. We had Cora within a year. Isabelle was my first real sweetheart.”

  “And after her?” I wanted to know how many sweethearts his hands had known, his hands that might have cared but also hurt.

  “After she went to jail the last time, Cora and I moved out here from Crow Agency to be with my mom. We’ve visited her some, though not recently.”

  Either Jim misunderstood or pretended to misunderstand my question about sweethearts. Was it that he’d had so many he was too abashed to discuss them? “What about you?” he asked. “You have any exes in jail?” He grinned. “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “No. I’m the only jail-bound person I know,” I said, thinking of brilliant and brokenhearted Anna, who had wanted to see Simon punished, and who had not even known there would be a me, a lonely bicycle pusher with the flu in a sundress covered in stalks of wheat.

  “She went from She-Bird to jailbird,” Jim intoned in a dramatic TV voice, and we laughed. “Aw, I think you’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m glad you have a safe place here with us. And I hope you don’t feel like you have to be in any kind of hurry to leave,” he added.

  My hand grew damp as I twisted a stiff can opener. Jim hummed and turned a turnip root to fine granules against a grater.

  “I know my mom is very, very glad to have you around,” he said. “And Cora, too.”

  “Cora? I’m not so sure …”

  “She is. Don’t be fooled. It’s just her way to act a little prickly sometimes. She’s really tender. She’d probably be sweeter if she thought you were staying forever.” I nearly lost the can opener. “Wait till you see her do the Fancy Shawl Dance at Crow Fair. It will break your heart, it’s so beautiful.”

  “How come you aren’t going to dance during Crow Fair?” I asked. “Or are you?”

  “No, I’m not. I don’t dance anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “I gave it up after my dad died twelve years ago. I gave it up as a way to honor him, because it was something I really loved. But that’s also when I started drinking. I traded a good habit for a bad one.”

  “Was it bad? The drinking?”

  Jim nodded. “Oh yeah. I drank to drown my grief.”

  “I know somebody like that,” I said. I missed him. I missed him so much, and I had left him alone in a house turned upside down with nothing but photo albums for company—one containing some baby teeth and a miniature gold ring. “How did you stop?”

  “With my mom’s help. She never talks about it, but she knows a lot about healing. And after a certain point it really had become a physical illness more than anything else. I wanted to stop because of Cora.” Had Dad ever wanted to stop because of me, I wondered? Was that why he had cried during our dance?

  “What kind of dancing did you do?”

  “Oh, Grass Dance. I was just about to start Fancy Dancing when he passed. Ah!” Jim stopped grating. He balled up one hand and covered it with the other. “Mom and I made all my regalia,” he added.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s nothing. Little scrape.”

  I could almost picture him dancing, dancing in the same way he swam, big and splashy, but precise, too. If he danced now, I would be able to anticipate his movements, the way I had learned to predict them beside the stove, before the sink. “Did you love it?” I asked, but Jim misheard me.

  “Yeah, I really loved him.” He moved his hands apart, and I saw the smear of blood.

  “Oh! What happened?”

  “I shredded my knuckle on that grater. It’s all right.”

  “Here.” I reached my hand out, touched his. “Sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  I held his hand under the faucet. The blood ran off of him and spiraled down the drain. Several short strips of skin hung off the knuckle. Underneath them, I could see, he was pink, glossy, like the interior of an oyster shell.

  “What is that song you’re always humming?” I asked. “I feel like I recognize it.”

  “I’m always humming?”

  “When you work on the Pronghorn. And other times … just a few minutes ago …”

  “Oh, I guess it must be that old song by Karen Dalton, a Cherokee singer from the sixties.”

  “Yes! I used to know someone who liked her.”

  “That song—‘in the evening, in the evening, darling, it’s so hard to tell who’s going to love you the best’—it’s always in my head.” Jim’s voice, usually so deep and strong, was quavering
and uncertain when he sang.

  “It’s a nice song.” I wondered if Jack Dolce really had been the hinge between one life and another. There was so much he had predicted, without knowing it.

  I laid Jim’s loosened skin back over the exposed places. “Ouch,” I said. “You need a bandage.”

  “I don’t think we have any.” He looked intently down the drain, as if searching for a wayward spoon, a stray bean.

  “You don’t?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Well.” I pulled three paper towels off the roll on the counter. I twisted them and wrapped them around his hand, tying the two ends together in a knot. A few rosy blots bloomed through, then stopped. They stopped the way Rasha’s poppies never had.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “It was nothing.”

  We stood for a few minutes looking out the window. The sun began to sink, and the curtain fluttered up again, and the air moved.

  * God

  10 BUTTERFLY (Anthocharis stella)

  GRANMA WANTED TO GO OUT and gather chokecherries. “It’s been hot, and the baáchuutaale are ripening. I saw some the other day, like pretty round rubies.” She took up her flour sack. “This will be much easier than getting turnip roots,” she said. “We just pick.” We left Cora and Josie at the table, surrounded by beads and deerskin, hard at work on the leggings and red-cheeked in the heat.

  “Get extra,” Josie said. “My birthday’s coming, and I want chokecherry cake!” And I understood the reason for her leonine carriage and proud, pretty ways, for she had, like Rasha, been born in the Leo time of late July.

  We weren’t far past the chickens when Granma began pointing out all kinds of plants we could eat, growing right under our feet. “There’s burdock,” she said. “And over here is some Indian lettuce—those thunderstorms and all this heat have made everything so lush for us—here, try a dandelion.” Granma broke the spiky yellow flower from its stem and handed it to me. “Go ahead. It’s good, I promise.” It tasted like its color—bright and sweetly tart.