The Lovebird

by Natalie Brown

  “I’VE KNOWN LOTS OF PEOPLE WHO TRIED to dull their pain with drinking,” Granma had said, “even Jim. The problem is they end up creating more pain for themselves eventually, and plenty for those around them, too.”

  “But,” I was quick to say, “I know he loved—loves—me.” I couldn’t bear even the slightest hint of criticism to be directed Dad’s way. He was too defenseless in his crumbling house, in his robe, with his sweetly swooping eyelids. He came to my mind so clearly in all his broken beauty, his black hair, his Ivory-soap-and-cigarettes scent, his green eyes. “Maybe you could help him, if he could somehow meet you,” I said. “Do you think you could fix him?”

  “He has to want it,” Granma answered. And then, more seriously, she added, “Don’t romanticize me, honey. I don’t work magic. Anyone can do what I do. I used to be lost, too, and feel disconnected from everyone and everything. I made a choice to live close to the earth. I feel like I have more strength here, hidden away on this patch of land, than I ever did anyplace else. I get it from her. And from my prayers. It’s yours for the getting, too. And you might be able to help your dad someday, if he is ready.”

  WHEN THEY EMERGED FROM THE KITCHEN the sisters were smiling. “Okay,” Granma said, “are we all set?” Cora and Josie came out of the bedroom.

  “… never seen a ring like that before,” Josie was saying.

  “I want to wear it for Crow Fair, but I don’t know if it will be ready in time,” Cora said.

  Josie and Ruby followed us out to the buffalo pasture in the big brown truck. On the drive, I was overwhelmed with dread. Even though Granma explained, “We’ve lived in close relationship with the bi’shee since the beginning. They sustained us for a long, long time. That’s why the tribe keeps its own buffalo on the reservation now, because they’re sacred to us, and they are a traditional food for us,” and even though Cora beside me knocked her pointy knees together in buffalo-excitement, I was pale with misgivings.

  I didn’t know what I would do once we got to the pasture. Possibly I would be like Marilyn in The Misfits when Clark Gable and his gang capture the wild horses, and run far, far away from the hunt, and hurl anguished screams at Jim across the prairie, and call him a murderer. Possibly I would close my eyes, or be sick.

  But I was going along because Granma had beseeched me—had been compelling me to come, in fact, for weeks—and because there was some promise implicit in her asking, some treasure tucked into the mellow timbre of her voice, a treasure that—underneath all my dread—I dared to hope might become mine.

  When we arrived at the pasture, Josie split from us and drove off with Ruby toward her brothers’ truck in the distance.

  There were dozens of buffalo ambling over the grass. They looked like boulders covered in dense, shaggy coats of reddish brown. For a long while, we just drove slowly around them. They were the first buffalo I had seen in the flesh, and I was as awed by their stature as I was by their stillness. They impressed me with their unexpected air of peace, and their confidence and composure, which made each of them seem ages old. If our presence was a disruption to their contentment, they did not show it. They perfectly echoed the placidity of the prairie and seemed an integral part of it. Never before had the marriage between a place and a creature been so plain to me. I thought again, as I had that day in the river, about everything being all of a piece, knitted together, as Granma had said, with a single long strand.

  “How about him?” Granma pointed, and Jim stopped the truck.

  “Beautiful!” Cora exclaimed.

  The buffalo was enormous. He watched us sideways out of his melting chocolate eye and breathed heavily through his nostrils. I was shocked to see a stripe of pink on the underside of his long gray tongue, which he revealed to us when he licked his nose—a line of pink like a wound. It was as pink as Jim’s underskin had been when he’d scraped his knuckles with the grater. He was so rumpled, so large, plodding, and dark. But his tongue with its pink stripe seemed to me to be the symbol of his secret sensitivity. That stripe hinted at his essential nature, and when it appeared, curling carelessly out of his mouth, there was something almost unbearably naked about it. It was the symbol of what was inside of him and, I thought, inside of everybody, inside every alive thing—a crushing softness, a bare beauty, a pure vulnerability beneath fur, skin, and skeleton. It was the most immediate representation I had ever seen of the quality that always made me ache when I perceived it in a person or animal. And when he showed it, my left ovary contracted like a hand closing.

  Far away from us, Josie’s brother fired at a buffalo from inside his truck, but Jim wanted to get out.

  “Are you sure, Dad?”

  “Yes, it’ll be okay. Just stay behind me.” We all stood on the grass. The grasshoppers jumped over our shoes.

  I watched Jim. He blinked at the sight of the buffalo’s striped tongue as if suddenly struck by its beauty. I thought he might lower his rifle, but he kept it raised, and then Jim’s belly burst outward with a big breath. I sucked in my own, and held it.

  AMONG HIS REAL ESTATE LISTINGS, Dad had once counted an ostentatious Spanish-style house with a black-bottomed swimming pool in its backyard. In one of his rare but characteristically romantic flashes of inspiration, he suggested we go swim in it one Saturday (the owners had already moved away) when he was done mowing our front lawn. And so, in the manner of two trespassing teenagers, we climbed, snickering sneakily, over the side gate—a needless maneuver, since Dad had a key to the front door. He lounged poolside in a plush chaise and sipped his usual beverage, iced, from a thermos while I showed him my dives and, when I tired of that, practiced holding my breath. “Time me, time me,” I asked him again and again. I took in all the oxygen I could and swam down to sit on the pool’s bottom, staring straight ahead with my cheeks puffed out. After my fifth effort, I resurfaced to find Dad snoring lightly, his cheeks burning in the sun. I got out of the pool and stood, dripping, in front of him to shade his face while he slept, and still I practiced holding my breath until the puddle of water that had gathered at my feet completely evaporated and he awoke. That was what I remembered when I breathlessly watched Jim and the buffalo. I waited for the buffalo to become aware, to wake up, to somehow save himself.

  HE NOSED THE GRASS, LOOKING FOR appealing pieces. I wondered why he didn’t move away to be separate from us, far from our strange two-legged figures and our unusual smells, which must have seemed dissonant against the odor he knew best, the dusty green fragrance of the prairie. But he seemed undisturbed, his inscrutable lashy eyes calmly blinking while he chewed.

  Cora’s hands hovered like hummingbirds at her sides. Granma prayed in Crow.

  Then the buffalo stopped blinking, stopped tearing at the grass with his square yellow teeth, stopped licking. He turned his head so that he faced Jim and his rifle. The buffalo stood still, and he stared, as if waiting. Granma prayed, Jim fired, and Cora started at the sound. The buffalo pitched forward. His front legs, so slender compared to the rest of him, buckled and folded beneath his body when he fell. He made a low sighing groan, like a big man snuggling into a soft bed.

  I LOOKED AT JIM’S FACE and saw tears leaving fat tracks down each of his cheeks. “Thank you, baaláax,”‡ he said.

  “Come, Margie,” Granma beckoned. We crouched around the buffalo. They all put their hands on him and at Granma’s request, I did, too, tentatively. At first I put only one near his throat, but then, feeling the warmth of him, and the secret pink stripe of his nature, I put down the other, too. I wanted to feel as much of him as I could, to catch his life.

  Josie, Ruby, and the brothers drove over to us. “He’s a beauty,” Ruby said. Granma cut his belly open and pulled out his kidney. She tasted it, and they all did, one after another. And then it was my turn. I couldn’t refuse him. I had seen him fall down for us. I just grazed the kidney with my lips. It was still hot.

  I touched him again and tears splashed my hands, but I scarcely took notice of them in all my wonder.
Here he was, transferring himself to us. He had stood and waited and watched as if to give himself to us. Whether he had actually meant to give himself, I couldn’t know. But Granma, Jim, Cora, and the others seemed to believe so. And he would dissolve into us, when we ate him. His strength and placidity, his sensitivity and sturdiness, his thoughts, his grass delights and prairie dreams—all would be a little bit ours now.

  It was a kind of communion, like the ones in which Father Murphy had always led us back home at Holy Rosary. He would be resurrected in us. And that was my treasure.

  ON THE DRIVE BACK TO THE HOUSE, Jim said, “I’m grateful for him, but that was hard. I felt different this time. I almost feel like a drink.”

  • • •

  IT TOOK DAYS TO BUTCHER, prepare, and preserve all the parts of the buffalo. Granma made a big stew with his meat, and she made pemmican with some of the chokecherries we had picked, and sausages, too, and I ate those creations and many others that he had made possible. Later, Granma gave me his furry hide to lay on my bed.

  I felt more connected to him than to any other animal I had ever, in my pre–Operation H.E.A.R.T. days, eaten. And (excepting my Charlotte) I felt more connected to him than to any of the creatures I had, as a member of the Operation, saved.

  Sometimes, lying supine on the floor of my Middletown studio, when Charlotte had perched on my chest and licked my face as she often did, I had felt that in even her simplest gestures she was giving me a glimpse into a realm I would be better for entering, if only I could. Rescuing lab mice and protesting pony rides weren’t drawing me any closer to it. We weren’t in relationship with the animals when we did those things; we were still imposing our will. It was still, always, us in our realm and them in theirs.

  Now, I felt that realm was not so closed off to me—not because of anything I had done, not any campaign, but because of a centuries-old understanding, one in which I’d been invited to share. It was because I had come to this other place, an invisible kind of place, a seemingly bleak place in what felt like the middle of nowhere, a place pulsing with the richness of its own life. Maybe that was what I had unknowingly sensed on the day I first arrived, when I’d fallen fast asleep on the hood of Bumble’s blue rental car. I had been cradled in its arms, though I had not known. And what was coming from those mountains they all cherished so much, the Bighorns? What was in the roots, the wild fruits, the moon’s white light, and the sidelong glance of the buffalo’s brown eyes? What was it there, so loving? So lovely? It was her, it was her, she was woven through it all.

  “Are you glad you came to the hunt?” Granma asked, and I told her the truth—I was.

  * big sister

  † runaway … young woman … fragile … bright … bird

  ‡ brother

  12 HORSE (Equus ferus caballus)

  CORA STIRRED ME OUT OF SLEEP with her rustlings. It was barely past dark face time when I heard her scoop up her glasses, pour food into Daphne’s dish, brush her hair, and put on her clothes. She accomplished the last task with unusual effort. She wasn’t, by the sound of it, simply slipping into her summer uniform of shorts and a T-shirt. Her breaths bespoke a particular kind of concentration. She shimmied and strained, and shook the bunks when she plopped down to pause from her exertions.

  I dropped my head over the edge of my bed, one woozy eye open, and saw her. She was partway into her dancing regalia. When she looked up to see me spying, she quickly crossed her arms over her bare top half, then covered herself more completely with the stuffed fawn. “How dare you!” she whispered. And then, “Get ready.”

  “Hmm?” I rubbed my other eye open.

  “Get ready!” she exclaimed.

  Crow Fair was beginning. There would be, as Cora had explained to me again the night before, a powwow every day for four days, a rodeo, and horse racing, too. (“But you’re probly against that, right?” she’d added.) We would go today and we would go again tomorrow. And today had not come fast enough for Cora. “Come on! Get up!”

  She’d hoped to take the Pronghorn, but Jim said she wasn’t quite ready to be driven yet. So, a few hours after Cora woke, and subsequent to a big, long breakfast (during which she jumped out of her seat several times), we rode in the yellow truck to Crow Agency, the site of the fair.

  On the way, I saw that some of the prairie’s verdant juiciness had disappeared. Though it was still a month away, a hint of September hovered in the air, bronzing the grass here and there, and I wondered where I would be at summer’s end, when I would turn twenty.

  Crow Agency bustled with a rough kind of beauty. A pony carried a boy down the sidewalk past the Crow Mercantile, and her hooves sounded hard on the cement. The tangly cottonwoods were capricious in the breeze and gave away big and small bits of shade before snatching them back again. And many of the cars that crowded the streets were dented and rusty, but each in its own way, like inadvertent works of art. Jim, Granma, and Cora traded waves with countless people as we drove through town. I only waved to one person—a speck of a girl no older than two riding in the bed of her parents’ truck with a pair of teeny friends. She, after staring at me with inexplicable and intense fascination, had waved first.

  Suddenly, an unwelcome tide of dread flooded my chest. I was going to be around people, lots of them, and if the wrong person saw me, someone, perhaps, who recognized my face from the wanted poster I often imagined … I pulled down my sunglasses and chewed on a fingernail.

  “Don’t be nervous, Margie,” Granma whispered. “This will be so much fun. I almost forgot, I have something for you.” She reached into her tote bag and pulled out my long-lost navy blue baseball cap. “I know you’ll feel more comfortable wearing this.” The fabric above the bill had been intricately beaded, and the beads formed a gorgeous buffalo. I gulped, remembering Rasha’s buffalo belt buckle, and opened my mouth, but Granma said, “Shush, I know you like it.”

  “I love it!” I finally sputtered. “It’s breathtaking. The most beautiful—when did you do this?”

  She delighted in her own sneakiness. “In my bed at night,” she said.

  “But your hands—no wonder they’ve been so achy.”

  She clasped them in her lap and said with conviction, “Everybody needs something special for Baasaxpilue.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Crow Fair, honey. It means ‘to make much noise.’ ”

  Cora studied me thoughtfully when I donned the hat. Tipping her head she said, with the great simplicity of manner she sometimes adopted when deeply satisfied, “Incognito.”

  We drove into a camp crowded with teepees. They were grand and white and supported with tall tree trunks, some of which still had leaves shooting out of them. The camp was crawling with people on horses, kids, dogs, and dancers in clothes that were ribboned, fringed, feathered, and belled.

  “How come you don’t come down here and camp like these people?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” Cora turned to Granma. “How come we don’t?”

  “It’s a lot of setting up,” Granma said. “And I’m not much help to your dad with the teepee. Maybe next year. Our relatives will help us. We used to do it, when your grandpa was alive and your dad was small.” This image—her dad, small—plunged Cora into a dreamy state, and as she stared at cowboy-booted Crow boys of just three and four who straddled ponies and squinted at our passing truck, she seemed to try to reconcile the sight of them with the reality of her father, ink-stained Jim, towering and powerful behind the steering wheel, Jim the rumpler of her hair, the restorer of her future car. She smiled.

  He parked among a hundred other cars. Nearby, there was a big grassy dance arbor and, surrounding it, rows of bleachers filled with expectant faces. A ring of vendors encircled the bleachers, enterprising folk who had come from all over to sell food and souvenirs from lopsided tables, splintery wooden stands, and tiny travel trailers. Hand-painted signs and banners rippled in the wind and announced their offerings: fry bread, Indian tacos, popcorn, snow cones, funnel
cakes, beef and buffalo burgers, pizza, Thai food. There were balloons, feathered headdresses, chintzy tomahawks, drums and dream catchers, stuffed animals, plastic toy machine guns, and plush blankets featuring the faces of the famous, including Marilyn, and also shirts screen-printed with the outline of the Bighorns. It was such a motley mix of stuff, and a scene of such ramshackle charm, that I—after my months of quietude—was dazzled.

  As we strolled, friends and relatives stopped to visit. Some of the women, old schoolmates of Jim’s, looked at him with the same sort of fawning, forlorn gaze I had so often seen directed at Dad. They reached out to him proprietarily with their long-fingered hands and brushed his shoulder, his chest. They flipped their sleek hair back over their brown shoulders, let loose throaty laughs, called him Jimmy, and teased him about his adolescent exploits and endearing quirks (the fastest runner, the best basketball player, the math whiz, the most talented writer of poems, the quietest date) with glints of hope and desire in their carefully made-up eyes. I stood back, tracing crescent shapes, which I knew were really orange slices, in the dirt with the tip of one shoe. Cora glowered at them from behind her glasses and possessed Jim’s hand all the while. She was resplendent in her flared pink skirt, her leather leggings blooming with wild roses, her tall moccasins, her silkily fringed shawl, and her tightly braided hair, and she received many compliments. I got a few, too, on my buffalo hat, along with ten times as many curious glances.

  “Those girls,” Jim said, shaking his head. “I’ve known most of them since I was three years old.”

  Considering myself in contrast to the indigenous beauties, I felt ridiculous in my heart-printed sundress, my lucky red Chinese shoes. “They’re all so pretty,” I offered. An inexpressible jealousy made my face hot. Jim shrugged.

  We spotted Josie at a distance, standing near the Indian taco stand. She shimmered in her silvery Jingle Dance dress, which dripped with the rolled-up lids of countless chewing tobacco tins. Pete Sings Plenty, he of the sparse and silky mustache, stood beside her, his jaw opened in adoration of the big-boned beauty. Cora giggled. Then she and Granma saw Miss Crow Nation and little Fern, who had been deemed Tiny Tot Crow Nation, holding court over by Feast from the East and moved to join the crowd of admirers surrounding them. Cora turned to Jim and me. “You guys want to come?”