“Where are we going?” I asked after another swig of Jack Daniel’s.
Alo leaned toward me and wrapped his hand around my neck, half petting, half caressing my hair in a way that was supposed to be reassuring but had the opposite effect.
“I think Moira is very happy. She has never seen someone from France.”
“Italy,” I corrected him with a low tone of voice. “Who’s Moira?”
“My car.” He smiled and patted the dashboard of the pickup with the palm of his hand like a proud father. My eyes fell on the vagrant bottles of whiskey on the floor and the ashtray brimming with cigarette butts.
“Where are we going?” I asked again, sniffing the stale carpets.
The moon crept up higher into the sky, obscured by a row of thick pine trees that curved in toward one another, forming a natural tunnel for our crossing. When we reached a plateau in the forest, Alo turned off the engine and the headlights and let the truck roll down the other side into the darkness.
I tensed up, but he said not to worry. He did this all the time. He knew the road so well he could drive with his eyes closed. And that’s what he did. He shut his eyes and let the truck go. I grabbed the steering wheel but could not see. The truck coasted downhill, picking up speed through the black sea of trees. There were no sounds except for the thumping tires on the loose gravel, repeating their cycle at a faster and faster pace.
“Stop!” I screamed. “Turn the lights on.”
We zoomed down until the pine trees became sparser and the moonlight began to trickle back in. Moira shot us at full speed out of the dark tunnel into an iridescent wide-open prairie below.
We had landed.
Alo stopped the truck and let out a long laugh, releasing adrenaline. I got out of the truck and started walking as far away from it as I could, into the light of the field.
“Oh, don’t be mad. I told you I had it under control,” he called after me.
The grass glowed under the moon. It was then I realized we were back at the Wounded Knee burial ground. Alo caught up with me and handed me a blanket and his bottle of whiskey. We treaded through the field. A drumming sound came from the hills.
“Lakota.” Alo signaled for me to hush up. “It’s their purification ritual to bless the land. They come here on horses every winter from different parts of America as a spiritual journey to heal their ancestors’ souls.”
I felt a pang in my heart. My poor mother, with her ragged white lingerie and cyclamen bulbs, was right then. She was in tune with the Lakota people who flocked in from all over the country, migrating on horses in arctic weather.
We walked toward the drumming sound, hiding in the long-stemmed grass.
“They asked me to join them the first year, ’cause my dad is Lakota, but you’re supposed to spend months preparing with sweat lodges, meditations, and vision quests. I couldn’t swing it. You basically starve yourself, then walk aimlessly in the wilderness for days until some kind of spirit guide or animal appears to you and shows you what the purpose of your life is. Not something you can do in Los Angeles, unless you want to go into the ocean and get eaten by sharks. Plus I like whiskey too much.”
We walked further and found a large group of men, women, and horses gathered around a cottonwood tree, close to the burial site. We tried to stay hidden in the shadier parts of the field. Alo unfolded the blanket and sat down. It was freezing.
The tribal drumming intensified and a stout man with face paint started speaking Sioux to the other members.
“Enjoy the show,” Alo said while he loaded a pipe. He took a long hit, then passed it to me.
“I feel like we shouldn’t be spying on them.”
“It’s okay.” He cuddled me, trying to be romantic or reassuring, succeeding in neither attempt. “They know we’re here. They’ll let us hang out as long as we don’t bother them.”
He passed me the incandescent pipe again.
I inhaled deeply, the way Henry taught me back at the vintage store. I kept the smoke in my lungs as long as I could, then spat out with a cough. Alo offered a sip of whiskey to warm up. I downed a quarter of the bottle and almost choked. The alcohol flushed through my throat. An unfamiliar burning began in my stomach. I was suddenly aware of the exact consistency of the liquid. I felt the thick malt condense inside me, and all the way down. I began to see the precise molecule formations that made up whiskey drift into the air. They slid into my esophagus, burning my insides.
I got up in a panic screaming about fire. Everything was burning.
Alo took my hand and sat me back down.
“Chill out or they’ll send us away. It’s okay, breathe. I just sprinkled a bit of peyote with the weed. Relax. You won’t even feel it, I promise,” he said as an insidious red dragon made its way out of his throat. I opened my mouth hoping to extinguish the fire burning inside me with the cold air outside, but it got worse.
I was high.
A woman’s voice inside my head—the Virgin Mary’s—told me to keep breathing and not move.
“Still fires eventually extinguish themselves,” she said.
“As long as the wind doesn’t blow them elsewhere,” replied another voice inside.
I stayed paralyzed.
The Lakota in the circle began to throw things in the fire as part of their ritual. I kept my gaze on their flames. The closer I looked, the more appalled I was: the objects tossed in the pit were, I was sure of it now, turkey nuggets from the casino’s Thanksgiving lunch. The Indians were throwing streams of them into the fire: fat, crispy nuggets. It was, of course, their way of rejecting the hypocritical American festivity with its false display of brotherly love between Pilgrims and Native Americans. They were punishing my family for celebrating Thanksgiving and eating McDonald’s-style fast food on their reservation. In my mind we had wronged them terribly and there was no turning back. This was it.
I felt a sharp pain in my lower back as if a dog snout made of steel was sniffing me out, pushing away my panties. I pulled Alo’s arm to get his attention and only then noticed the dog snout was actually his hand. He had unbuttoned my pants and gotten past my underwear. His fingers were inside my ass.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Don’t you see they are burning the turkey nuggets?”
He laughed. “I know…damn turkey nuggets.”
I tried to thrust him away, but he stumbled on his side and pushed me further down on the ground.
“Just relax.”
“My family is so fucked up! I can’t believe we ate those nuggets!”
“We all ate the nuggets. We’re all fucked up,” Alo said, trying to reason with me.
He was on top of me now. I began to cry, not so much because of his fingers in my ass but because I suddenly remembered reading that McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets were a puree of chopped chicken beaks and bones mixed with a pinkish coloring substance, deep-fried in grease. We had sinned against the tribe with our imperialist appetite for fried turkey. What would my Roman schoolmates think?
“It was so wrong to eat those nuggets. On Thanksgiving! On an Indian reservation!” I finally cried. The panic was getting worse. Alo pushed farther inside me and told me to stop thinking about the nuggets and to think about the moon instead. It was so beautiful, just like me. He started kissing my neck.
“Surrender,” the voice inside my head said. “Surrender or it will be worse.”
“You’re so hot,” Alo whispered sloppily.
I closed my eyes and let myself go on the grass. The sound of drums reverberated in my ears and the fire inside me started to die down. Alo unzipped his pants, keeping his fingers in my ass, and took out his penis. Even though it was freezing cold, his penis stood boldly in the prairie wind. He pulled down my jeans and pushed his way inside me. Surrender or it will be worse, I kept thinking. And we started to fuck.
“Are you a virgin?” he asked, frustrated by my dryness and the friction between our cold bodies. I was. He said I was a lot of work and then pushed
harder. I felt the lower part of my body spring from the ground. It undulated over the Lakota fire in the field and hinged there, warming up over the flames. The drumming created a soothing spongelike protection that guarded my insides. Everything turned into a rubbery, senseless composite of two people making love. I was full of him. His flesh expanded inside my crevices, but it was okay because I didn’t feel anything. My body wasn’t with him. It danced in the field under the full moon. I could see my bare feet touch the ground and bounce on the dirt. My legs moved to the right rhythm, my hips swayed into the fire. The flames made everything numb.
A fastidious tremor pulsed somewhere beneath me as the drugs started to fade. It was my ass. It had been rammed. I heard my grandmother’s voice repeating her words of wisdom, “Watch out for hemorrhoids. They can creep up on you if you let the jets in your anus.”
And then I passed out.
In a dream I saw escalators descending toward an underground train. They were long and steep and covered in packaged turkey. Yellow turkey breasts, red beaks, and fluffy body parts scattered about. It was a turkey-filled descent into the underworld. The passengers were being asked to be courageous.
“Be strong!” the engineer screamed from his perch in the locomotive. “Be strong in the face of packaged turkey!”
The challenge, I realized, was to not interact with turkeys. No matter how many pieces of meat I found along the way, I knew my mission was to get on the train. I stayed focused. Didn’t even look at the dead birds until I reached the cars. I leaped through the closing doors and squeezed in just in time. I did it. I had been strong in the face of packaged turkey and when I looked back at the red beaks and fluffy parts amassed on the moving escalators, I knew I was safe.
—
I woke up in a damp bed in a house with plastic walls and linoleum floors to the smell of fried bacon. I had no clothes on. I slid into a T-shirt and pretended not to notice. I told myself it was normal. I always slept naked. When I went downstairs a woman in Daisy Dukes was frying sausages and pancakes on a stove. On a stool next to her was a greasy plate piled with layers of bacon. She looked up at me and smiled.
“Ah, the French girl!”
“I’m Italian.”
“Oh, I love Italy. I’ve never been but I love the food.”
I wanted to make small talk, but words would not come out. Never mind, I thought. I had other priorities.
“Where am I?”
Alo came into the kitchen wearing a pair of dirty overalls. He’d been out chopping wood. I smiled at him because he looked familiar. The woman in the Daisy Dukes wiggled her butt at him, teasingly. He walked behind her and gave her a hug. They kissed on the lips.
I shuddered thinking about my underground train. Where did it take me? I tried to remember the woman’s face. Was she with us on the field? Did I lose my virginity to two people at once? I forced my mind to stop asking questions.
“Good morning, Ma, smells good,” Alo said.
He smacked the woman’s behind jokingly as she pulled away from him with an excited shrill.
“Watch it, I’m frying!”
I glared at them.
“You’re…Alo’s…”
The woman turned toward me, rolling her eyes to the sky.
“Yeah, I had him when I was fifteen,” she replied, not realizing it wasn’t the narrow age difference I found perplexing but the fact they’d just kissed on the lips for a long enough amount of time to be awkward. A pot of coffee rested on the kitchen table next to the fried bacon.
“Have a seat! You guys probably need some coffee…you were up late.” She giggled, eyeing us.
She grabbed the bacon and made plates for us. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat on her son’s lap. Her tank top rode up, revealing her butt crack and two dimples on her lower back. She had a Tasmanian devil tattooed over her right hip. I sat on the other side of the table, looking at them, not knowing what to say, where to start. Alo did not glance at me. I could not eat, but I needed a way out, so I stared out the window: pine trees and great boulders. We were in a parking lot in the middle of some kind of rock formation. Outside, children with dirty mouths played with broken tractors in front of prefabricated trailer homes. How could I get out of there?
The mother sipped on, staring at me inquisitively with blinking eyes.
Silence.
She turned to Alo with a worried pout and pushed his hair back to examine his face, the bags under his eyes, the cracks that grooved his dehydrated skin. She scratched his stubble and stretched out his cheeks with her fingers. The way she was sitting on top of him made it so that when she turned to him, her breasts came right up to his face. They were solid, rubbery balloons. Her nipples poked through the white tank top. Alo nuzzled his head between them and shook it in mock despair.
“I’m soooo tired, Mom! Put me to bed! Please!” He laughed, then lit a Marlboro Red.
She took the cigarette from his mouth and put it in hers.
“Alo has throat cancer,” she declared with nonchalance. “He shouldn’t smoke.”
I understood now why his voice was so raspy.
“Shouldn’t you not smoke at all?” I asked, but Alo said he’d rather die than not smoke.
His mother rolled her broken watery eyes at me.
“It’s a lost cause,” she said, then got up and waddled to the pantry where the washer and dryer were, suddenly uninterested in our company.
“Do you remember last night at the sacred grounds?” Alo finally lifted his eyes. He got up from his chair and came close to me, warm and intimate. “You were so tight. I didn’t want to break you.”
“Break me?”
I had wanted him to break me. Because now nobody else could. Trying to remember how it happened or what had happened would only make things harder. I did not want to have that conversation. For me what mattered was that I was okay. I had no scars or bruises. I survived the loss of my virginity. I made good my escape. But now I was cold and I wanted to go back.
I imagined my parents going crazy looking for me, blaming each other, incited by my grandmother. I saw police cars piling into the casino’s parking lot, detectives taking notes, a Native American psychic conjuring visions of my alcohol-stashed backpack through her third eye. All of them devastated by my absence, rethinking all their choices.
“Can you take me back now?” I asked.
Alo came closer and kissed my lips.
I wanted to steer away from the chance of having him inside me again so I told him I was sorry he had cancer and hoped he wouldn’t have to put a creepy voice box in his throat.
“I’m not putting any box in my fucking throat,” he said with a glare. And I knew my vagina was safe.
We drove back and on the way Alo gave me a romantic tour of the Badlands, the great rocky expanse of battered buttes that stretches over the southwestern part of South Dakota. He stopped his pickup on a dirt road overlooking miles of dry pinnacles eroded by wind and water. Every cone composition formed clusters of breast-like sculptures emerging out of the earth. They went as far as I could see.
“Infinite tits, man,” said Alo. I smiled and shivered. He removed his leather jacket and placed it over my shoulders, a chivalrous gesture I didn’t know how to take in. He said I could keep it, that he wanted me to have it. It came from Germany. The Suicidal Tendencies patch on the back was very rare. We should exchange numbers. We could see each other in California. He’d like that, he said, and scribbled his phone number on a piece of paper with a violet pen he found floating between the cigarette butts. I told him I didn’t have a phone yet and wrote down my address. I knew I never wanted to see him again.
—
I rolled Alo’s leather jacket under my arm and stumbled toward the Black Elk Imperial Suite, sure I would find a team of detectives huddled around my sobbing family. I told myself I would hug my mother and tell her I was sorry for making fun of her, that packing white clothes and insisting, even crying, so that we would wear them was the ri
ght thing to do. I would reassure her that the Lakota had their ways of taking care of themselves. They had horses and rode across barren, frigid fields to commemorate their ancestors. They fasted and went on vision quests and knew how to do things the correct way. She was right. We were wrong.
When I opened the door my father was leaning against the wall in a sirsasana headstand pose while my mother read to him out loud from a yoga exercise book.
“There you are.” She turned with a radiant, vacant smile. “We were looking for you.”
No detectives. I was not happy about it.
I waited for Serena to scream, for my father to get back on his feet and slap my face savagely.
“I went on a hike. There’s a trail behind the casino,” I said.
“What a great idea.”
My mother got up, came close to me, and stroked my hair.
“Good news. Max got Dad an appointment with a co-producer who is really interested in financing a new project. Robert is out of the psychiatric ward and ready to finish the script. We’re going back to LA today.”
In the bedroom my grandmother sat on my bed while my brother played Tetris on his Game Boy. He didn’t lift his head.
“They didn’t even realize you were gone the whole night.” She shook her head as she folded my clothes into neat piles.
“I didn’t leave,” I said firmly.
Then I sat on the bed, curled up on her lap, and fell asleep.
I stayed asleep through most of the ride back. We drove without stopping because my father didn’t want to waste money on food or lodging since the casino charged us for leaving early. Outside the car window I saw smoke signals and trails infused by the colors of mutating nature: the Black Hills of Wyoming, the iridescent crystals of Utah’s salt flats, waves of neon lights in Las Vegas. We rode through the Strip. Night was not night, but a darker, permanent day, and I felt how small we were compared to all that. In the dawn effulgence we passed the low desert shrubs of Barstow and drove across the suburban Inland Empire of San Bernardino. Then traffic thickened. Freeways began climbing over each other, intersecting, shifting alignments and directions, telling us we were at the end of our trip.
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake Page 6