by Tommy Orange
When you got to work the next day you were fine. A little dizzy, still drunk, but the day felt normal enough. You went into the conference room. The powwow committee meeting was happening. You ate what they were calling breakfast enchiladas when they offered them. You met a new member of the committee. Then your supervisor, Jim, called you into his office, called on the two-way you kept on your belt.
When you got to his office he was on the phone. He covered it with one hand.
“There’s a bat,” he said, and pointed out to the hallway. “Get it out. We can’t have bats. This is a medical facility.” He said it like you’d brought the bat in yourself.
Out in the hallway, you looked up and around you. You saw the thing on the ceiling in the corner near the conference room at the end of the hall. You went and got a plastic bag and a broom. You approached the bat carefully, slowly, but when you got close it flew into the conference room. Everyone, the whole powwow committee, their heads spinning, watched as you went in there and chased it out.
When you were back out in the hallway, the bat circled around you. It was behind you, and then it was on the back of your neck. It had its teeth or claws dug in. You freaked out and reached back and got the bat by a wing and instead of doing what you should have done—put it in the trash bag you’d been carrying with you—you brought your hands together and with all your strength, everything you had in you, you squeezed. You crushed the bat in your hands. Blood and thin bones and teeth in a pile in your hands. You threw it down. You would mop it up quick. Wipe clean the whole day. Start over again. But no. The whole powwow committee was there. They’d come out to watch you catch the bat after you’d chased the thing into their meeting. Every one of them looked at you with disgust. You felt it too. It was on your hands. On the floor. That creature.
* * *
—
Back in your supervisor’s office after you’d cleaned up the mess, Jim gestured for you to sit down.
“I don’t know what that was,” Jim said. Both hands were on top of his head. “But it’s not something we can tolerate in a medical facility.”
“The thing fucking…Sorry, but the thing fucking bit me. I was reacting—”
“And that would have been okay, Thomas. Only co-workers saw. But you smell like alcohol. And coming to work drunk, I’m sorry, but that’s a fireable offense. You know we have a zero-tolerance policy here.” He didn’t look mad anymore. He looked disappointed. You almost told him that it was just from the night before, but that maybe wouldn’t have made a difference, because you could have still blown an over-the-limit blood alcohol level. The alcohol was still in you, in your blood.
“I did not drink this morning,” you said. You almost crossed your heart. You’d never even done that when you were a kid. It was something about Jim. He was like a big kid. He didn’t want to have to punish you. Crossing your heart seemed like a reasonable way to convince Jim you were telling the truth.
“I’m sorry,” Jim said.
“So that’s it? I’m being fired?”
“There’s nothing I can do for you,” Jim said. He stood up and walked out of his own office. “Go home, Thomas,” he said.
* * *
—
You get down to the train platform and enjoy the cool wind or breeze or whatever you call the rush of air the train brings before it arrives, before you even see it or its lights, when you hear it and feel that cool rush of air you especially appreciate because of how much it cools your sweaty head.
You find a seat at the front of the train. The robot voice announces the next stop, by saying, or not saying exactly, but whatever it’s called when robots speak, Next stop Twelfth Street Station. You remember your first powwow. Your dad took you and your sisters—after the divorce—to a Berkeley high-school gym where your old family friend Paul danced over the basketball lines with that crazy-light step, that grace, even though Paul was pretty big, and you’d never thought of him as graceful before. But that day you saw what a powwow was and you saw that Paul was perfectly capable of grace and even some kind of Indian-specific cool, with footwork not unlike break dancing, and that effortlessness that cool requires.
The train moves and you think of your dad and how he took you to that powwow after the divorce, how he had never taken you before when you were younger, and you wonder if it was your mom and Christianity, the reason why you didn’t go to powwows and do more Indian things.
The train emerges, rises out of the underground tube in the Fruitvale district, over by that Burger King and the terrible pho place, where East Twelfth and International almost merge, where the graffitied apartment walls and abandoned houses, warehouses, and auto body shops appear, loom in the train window, stubbornly resist like deadweight all of Oakland’s new development. Just before the Fruitvale Station, you see that old brick church you always notice because of how run-down and abandoned it looks.
You feel a rush of sadness for your mom and her failed Christianity, for your failed family. How everyone lives in different states now. How you never see them. How you spend so much time alone. You want to cry and feel you might but know you can’t, that you shouldn’t. Crying ruins you. You gave it up long ago. But the thoughts keep coming about your mom and your family at a certain time when the magical over- and underworld of your Oakland-spun Christian evangelical end-of-the-world spirituality seemed to be coming to life to take you, all of you. You remember it so clearly, that time. It never moved far from you no matter how much time had carried you away from it. Before anyone was awake, your mom was crying into her prayer book. You knew this because teardrops stain, and you remember tearstains in her prayer book. You looked into that book more than once because you wanted to know what questions, what private conversations, she might have had with God, she who spoke that mad-angel language of tongues in church, she who fell to her knees, she who fell in love with your dad in Indian ceremonies she ended up calling demonic.
Your train leaves the Fruitvale Station, which makes you think of the Dimond district, which makes you think of Vista Street. That’s where it all happened, where your family lived and died. Your older sister, DeLonna, was heavily into PCP, angel dust. That was when you found out you don’t need religion to be slain, for the demons to come out with their tongues. One day after school DeLonna smoked too much PCP. She came home and it was clear to you that she was out of her mind. You could see it in her eyes—DeLonna without DeLonna behind them. And then there was her voice, that low, deep, guttural sound. She yelled at your dad and he yelled back and she told him to shut up and he did shut up because of that voice. She told him that he didn’t even know which God he was worshipping, and soon after that DeLonna was on the floor of your sister Christine’s room, foaming at the mouth. Your mom called an emergency prayer circle and they prayed over her and she foamed and writhed and eventually stopped when that part of the high wore off, the drug dimmed, her eyes closed, the thing was done with her. When she woke up they gave her a glass of milk, and when she was back with her normal voice and eyes, she didn’t remember any of it.
Later you remember your mom saying to take drugs was like sneaking into the kingdom of heaven under the gates. It seemed to you more like the kingdom of hell, but maybe the kingdom is bigger and more terrifying than we could ever know. Maybe we’ve all been speaking the broken tongue of angels and demons too long to know that that’s what we are, who we are, what we’re speaking. Maybe we don’t ever die but change, always in the State without hardly ever even knowing that we’re in it.
* * *
—
When you get off at the Coliseum Station, you walk over the pedestrian bridge with butterflies in your stomach. You do and don’t want to be there. You want to drum but also to be heard drumming. Not as yourself but just as the drum. The big drum sound made to make the dancers dance. You don’t want to be seen by anyone from work. The shame of your drinking and showing up to
work with the smell still on you was too much. Getting attacked by the bat and crushing it in front of them was part of it too.
You go through the metal detector at the front and your belt gets you another go-through. You get the beep the second time because of change in your pocket. The security guard is an older black guy who doesn’t seem to care much about anything but avoiding the beeping of the detector.
“Take it out, anything, anything in your pockets, take it out,” he says.
“That’s all I got,” you say. But when you walk through it beeps again.
“You ever have surgery?” the guy asks you.
“What?”
“I don’t know, maybe you have a metal plate in your head or—”
“Nah, man, I got nothing metal on me.”
“Well, I gotta pat you down now,” the guy says, like it’s your fault.
“All right,” you say, and put your arms up.
After he pats you down, he gestures for you to walk through again. This time when it beeps he just waves you through.
About ten feet away you’re looking down as you walk and you realize what it was. Your boots. Steel toe. You started wearing them when you got the job. Jim recommended it. You almost go back to tell the guy, but it doesn’t matter anymore.
* * *
—
You find Bobby Big Medicine under a canopy. He nods up, then tilts his head toward an open seat around the drum. There’s no small talk.
“Grand Entry song,” Bobby says to you because he knows everyone else knows. You pick up your drumstick and wait for the others. You hear the sound but not the words the powwow emcee is saying, and you watch for Bobby’s stick to go up. When it does, your heart feels like it stops. You wait for the first hit. You pray a prayer in your head to no one in particular about nothing in particular. You clear a way for a prayer by thinking nothing. Your prayer will be the hit and the song and the keeping of time. Your prayer will begin and end with the song. Your heart starts to hurt from lack of breath when you see his drumstick go up and you know they’re coming, the dancers, and it’s time.
PART IV
Powwow
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
—JEAN GENET
Orvil Red Feather
INSIDE THE COLISEUM, the field is already packed with people, with dancers, tables, and canopies. Packed to the stands. Camping chairs and lawn chairs are scattered across the field, with and without people sitting in them—saved spots. On top of the tables and hung on the backs and sides of canopy walls are powwow hats and T-shirts with slogans like Native Pride written in capital block letters gripped by eagle talons; there are dream catchers, flutes, tomahawks, and bows and arrows. Indian jewelry of every kind is splayed and hung everywhere, crazy amounts of turquoise and silver. Orvil and his brothers stop for a minute at the table with beaded A’s and Raiders beanies, but they really want to check out the line of food tables in the outfield.
They spend their fountain money and go up to the second deck to eat. The fry bread is wide and the meat and grease are deep.
“Man. That’s goot,” Orvil says.
“Pffft,” Loother says. “Quit trying to talk Indian.”
“Shut up. What am I supposed to sound like, a white boy?” Orvil says.
“Sometimes you sound like you wanna be Mexican,” Lony says. “Like when we’re at school.”
“Shut up,” Orvil says.
Loother elbows Lony and they both crack up at Orvil. Orvil takes off his hat and hits them both on the back of the head with it. Then Orvil takes the taco and steps over the row to sit behind them. After sitting in silence for a while, he hands the taco to Lony.
“How much you say you could win if you win?” Loother asks Orvil.
“I don’t wanna talk about it. It’s bad luck,” Orvil says.
“Yeah but you said it was like, five thou—” Loother says.
“I said I don’t wanna talk about it,” Orvil says.
“ ’Cuz you think it’ll jinx it, huh?”
“Loother, shut the fuck up.”
“All right,” Loother says.
“All right then,” Orvil says.
“But imagine how much cool shit we could get with that kinda money,” Loother says.
“Yeah,” Lony says, “we could get a PS4, a big TV, some J’s—”
“We would give it all to Grandma,” Orvil says.
“Aw man, that’s weak,” Loother says.
“C’mon, you know she likes to work,” Lony says, still chewing the last of the taco.
“There’s probably other stuff she’d rather do if she could,” Orvil says.
“Yeah, but we could just keep some of it,” Loother says.
“Shit,” Orvil says, looking down at the time on his phone. “I gotta get down to the locker room!”
“What you want us to do?” Loother asks.
“Stay up here,” Orvil says. “I’ll come get you after.”
“What? C’mon,” Lony says.
“I’ll come get you after, it won’t take that long,” Orvil says.
“But we can’t barely see shit from up here,” Loother says.
“Yeah,” Lony says.
Orvil walks away. He knows the more he argues, the more rebellious they’ll get.
* * *
—
The men’s locker room is loud with laughter. At first Orvil thinks they’re laughing at him, but then realizes someone had told a joke just before he got in, because more jokes come as he sits down. Mostly it’s older guys, but there are a few young men in there too. He puts his regalia on slow, carefully, and puts his earphones in, but before he can put a song on he sees a guy across from him gesturing for him to take them out. It’s this huge Indian guy. He stands up, he’s in full regalia, and he picks his feet up one at a time, which makes his feathers shake, which sort of scares Orvil. The guy clears his throat.
“Now you young men in here, listen up. Don’t get too excited out there. That dance is your prayer. So don’t rush it, and don’t dance how you practice. There’s only one way for an Indian man to express himself. It’s that dance that comes from all the way back there. All the way over there. You learn that dance to keep it, to use it. Whatever you got going on in your life, you don’t leave it all in here, like them players do when they go out on that field, you bring it with you, you dance it. Any other way you try to say what you really mean, it’s just gonna make you cry. Don’t act like you don’t cry. That’s what we do. Indian men. We’re crybabies. You know it. But not out there,” he says, and points to the door of the locker room.
A couple of the older guys make this low huh sound, then another couple of guys say aho in unison. Orvil looks around the room, and he see all these men dressed up like him. They all needed to dress up to look Indian too. There’s something like the shaking of feathers he felt somewhere between his heart and his stomach. He knows what the guy said is true. To cry is to waste the feeling. He needs to dance with it. Crying is for when there’s nothing else left to do. This is a good day, this is a good feeling, something he needs, to dance the way he needs to dance to win the prize. But no. Not the money. To dance for the first time like he learned, from the screen but also from practice. From the dancing came the dancing.
There are hundreds of dancers in front of him. Behind him. To his left and right. He’s surrounded by the variegation of color and pattern specific to Indianness, gradients from one color to the next, geometrically sequenced sequined shapes on shiny and leathered fabrics, the quill, bead, ribbon, plume, feathers from magpies, hawks, crows, eagles. There are crowns and gourds and bells and drumsticks, metal cones, sticked and arrowed flickers, shag anklets, and hairpipe bandoliers, barrettes and bracelets, and bustles that fan out in perfect circles. He
watches people point out each other’s regalia. He is an old station wagon at a car show. He is a fraud. He tries to shake off the feeling of feeling like a fraud. He can’t allow himself to feel like a fraud because then he’ll probably act like one. To get to that feeling, to get to that prayer, you have to trick yourself out of thinking altogether. Out of acting. Out of everything. To dance as if time only mattered insofar as you could keep a beat to it, in order to dance in such a way that time itself discontinued, disappeared, ran out, or into the feeling of nothingness under your feet when you jumped, when you dipped your shoulders like you were trying to dodge the very air you were suspended in, your feathers a flutter of echoes centuries old, your whole being a kind of flight. To perform and win you have to dance true. But this is just Grand Entry. No judges. Orvil hops a little and dips his arms. He puts his arms out and tries to keep light on his feet. When he starts to feel embarrassed, he closes his eyes. He tells himself not to think. He thinks the thought Don’t think over and over. He opens his eyes and sees everyone around him. They’re all feathers and movement. They’re all one dance.
When Grand Entry is over, the dancers disperse, moving out in every direction in a ripple of chatter and bells, headed for the vendors, or to find family, or to walk around, giving and accepting compliments, acting normal, like they don’t look like what they look like. Indians dressed up as Indians.