Given World

by Marian Palaia

  Mom adds her letters to an existing word, making “funhouse” for thirty-four points. She’s kicking our asses. She’s always been good at this game.

  “Nice one, Rosie,” Dad says. Her expression softens as she looks up at him. I wonder when he started calling her Rosie, and not just plain Rose. I wonder if it was when she started going away. Or maybe he always called her that when me and Mick weren’t around. Maybe it was part of a dialect they spoke only with each other. I feel an intense and alien longing, somewhere in the vicinity of my stutter-stepping heart, and it takes me completely by surprise. I know I once had, at least with that long-haired boy out at Cherry Gulch, the slightest taste of a similar, if less evolved, kind of love. I have been invited in but had no idea what to do about it, save for leave it in the rearview as quickly as possible. Do I regret that? Something fierce I do.

  I watch them when I think they won’t notice. Signs of age—the usual—overlay faces that were once a full half of my entire solar system, two of the three planets that would always be visible in the night sky. Then, of course, I thought it would be that way forever, and even if the third planet’s orbit sometimes kept him out of sight a bit too long for my liking, he would still keep coming around. That’s what planets are supposed to do. They are not supposed to jump the track, fly off into an alternate universe, leave a gaping black hole in space. We don’t talk about my flight path. Not here we don’t. Except to say I think I was not meant to be that fourth planet necessarily. I think I was meant to be a moon, or a satellite. Gravity was meant to be my friend. I don’t know how any of this happened.

  Dad’s thick, dark hair is only now beginning to turn gray. Absently, he runs his fingers through it, clutches it in his bony fist, as if making certain he is really still here. The backs of his hands, and his forearms, are darkly bruised. Sarcomas. A constellation of blazing black stars. I ask if they are painful.

  “Only to look at,” he says, tugging the sleeves of his flannel shirt down as far as they will go. He smiles. I see exactly now what they mean when they say “ruefully.”

  I have the letters to spell most of it, hunt down an opening and spell “rufely.” To make my mother laugh. She cuts her eyes at me, sly.

  “What did you study out there, Riley?”

  “Boys,” I say. I don’t mention the other things I studied, or my frequent sightings of nothingness. Though I know the evidence is visible, and not only to me.

  She turns her head, tilts her chin down, and looks into my eyes. “Books?” she says, and I nod. She knows. There is no point in pretending, about train wrecks, holding patterns, or reconstruction. My mother is no dummy, even when the synapses misfire, and throw sparks.

  A few minutes later: “Remember that time I fell off the roof?”

  “Roof?” my mother says. “What?” Meaning, I suspect, Don’t be an idiot, Riley. Of course I do. Or could it be that she really doesn’t remember? I don’t believe it. How effortless, though, for me to be clueless and seven, nine, ten again. As if I could take us all back to that picture-perfect existence. And by “all,” I do mean all four of us. This is a trick I have been working on since I was a teenager, a poster child for the seventies. It’s amazing I remember anything. But I did, goddamn it, have a brother. He was not one of my frequent hallucinations or one of the flashbacks I was promised. And, no, I don’t have those anymore. They too have passed their expiration date.

  My feet reach for Cash under the table, but of course he is not here. I feel an imprint though. An outline. Some residual dog warmth. “Roof roof,” I say. My parents look at me. My mother nods. I see the corners of her mouth think about smiling. Dad just goes ahead and does it. Rufely.

  Mom’s hair is straight and long and pure white. It is lovely, as she is. She bites the ends sometimes; it is a signal that she is flighty, as in liable to fly. I see just the smallest, moon-sliver curve of ear peeking out. I reach over slowly and touch it. I can’t help it. She stays perfectly still, a bit taken aback, frightened even, at having been snuck up on like that; then relieved, or released, when I pull my hand away.

  They have already restarted my father’s heart once, brought him back to the land of the living, so he can play Scrabble with us in the kitchen. One night after a game he pulls letters from the board, and on the red-faded-to-pink Formica table spells, “D-o n-o-t r-e-s-u-” and then hesitates, his long, battered fingers spidering between an s and a c. Mom helps him finish it, and with letters of her own, and a few she steals from Dad, spells “gone so gone.” I try not to wonder what it means, and do not enter into this braille-like conversation, as I have clearly not been invited in. It is almost as if I am not here.

  I recognize that they are trying to make a place for me, for my actual body, but there will be times it will not seem worth the effort, and my role will be to witness. Whatever comes next. I do realize I’ve had my chances.

  If I had been listening, and reading her letters more carefully, I might have at least sensed something coming. One letter told about waves crashing against the front door. In another, she was trying out names for all the itinerant ground squirrels and gophers, voles, mice, and wood rats: Smokey, Clarence, Ophelia, Sparky (Smokey’s evil twin), George. And on the phone, when the conversation faltered, or strayed into dangerous territory (disappearing acts, family), she would tell me who was at the bird feeder, or in the horse trough turned birdbath.

  “Magpie,” she would say. “Drowning feathers.” “Baptismal finch.” Lone geese worry her, up there honking like sonar, waiting for that twin sound, that echo in another’s voice, to return to them. They worry me too. I remember daily the source of my echo, in every cell. And I remember, as if I had actually been there, Leonard on a wild-goose rescue, going through the river ice. The current grabbing his boots and pulling him in, where he skimmed the undersurface like a shadow. Like a big sturgeon, Darrell said, even though he had never seen one of those.

  I asked him, not right away, but later: a recalcitrant challenge. I was like that then.

  “How do you know?” I demanded.

  “I can imagine,” he said, not wanting to argue, obviously, but knowing I did. I often wonder what he could have loved about me, or wonder if maybe, after all, he only wanted to take care of me, a mission I would not have wished on anyone at the time. I wonder how we would find each other now. If our boy has been given a real name. I really ought to know. No one needs to tell me that.

  Mick’s motorcycle is in the barn. Exactly where he left it, up on blocks, though the canvas tarp looks suspiciously new. I wonder how many of those my father has replaced, laid over the bike and pinned down with the same water-smoothed, calf-skull-size stones my brother chose so carefully and hauled back from the river in 1966. The wheels still hang on the walls, the tires completely dried out, brittle as shed snakeskin.

  I remember enough about motors to get it started, take the wheels to town for new rubber. Mick taught me to ride a long time ago, so long now that I stall her once or twice before we are out on the road, and then it is all I can do not to twist the throttle full on and just wait for the road to turn. But I know I have to baby her, or she’ll die, and my brother’s reincarnation, in whatever form, will have my ass if that happens.

  When I get back after the first ride, I see that my mother has fastened a helmet to the porch rail. I undo its strap, hold it up to inspect it, thinking for a second it might be my old one, but then remember mine was red, and smaller. This one is black, with an American flag decal, upside down, on the back. Clearly Mick’s. I am not putting it on my head. I will get a new one. I forgot I had promised him to never ride without one.

  I had also promised to never drink more than I could handle, not to do drugs other than smoke pot, never sleep with anyone I didn’t at least think I was in love with. Since I was too young at the time to even be able to imagine doing any of those things, it was easy to say yes. I promise. Swear on the moon. The helmet, at least, I can do something about.

  Every night after my
parents have gone to bed, I get a beer and go outside, stretch out on my back in the prickly grass, and wait for full dark. It takes a long time, but it is worth it. Even with the new houses, there is almost no ambient light here, and I can clearly distinguish so many individual stars it makes my head spin. The Milky Way appears painted on. It is as sharp, as delineated, as the stripe on a skunk. It is harder to pick out the constellations, with so many minor players swarming the stage. But I do at least still remember where to look for a lot of them, as I had two authorities to teach me: first Mick and then Darrell. Between the two of them, I got several versions each of the same arrangements. My eyes stray habitually to where the Pleiades will appear when they come back around in the fall. Darrell called this group the Seven Sisters, or Dancing Girls, but he told me, too, that in tribal legend they are orphan boys, abandoned at birth. Blue stars—there are thousands of them in just the one cluster, but only six are clearly distinguishable to the naked eye from this little planet. One of the sisters is missing, and there are various theories as to her whereabouts. These stars might also, as far as some ancient Greek poet was concerned, be a flock of doves. This, according to Mick. There is another group nearby, the Hyades, meaning “piglets.” I love that. But I keep thinking about those boys and hating that word, “abandoned.” It seems so judgmental, as if someone did it on purpose. As if she had a real choice.

  The last time I looked, his eyes were blue, but they told me all babies’ eyes are blue at first, and that if they are going to change color, they do it over time. Aside from his eyes, whatever color they turned or stayed, he did not really resemble a white person—certainly not me—very much at all. He was a burnt-umber baby, with a little Where the Wild Things Are nose, and his hair was amazing: thick and black when he came to us, six weeks early and small enough to hold, like a drink of cold creek water, in two cupped hands. Darrell was gone by then, of course, so I couldn’t introduce them.

  There are no farm animals anymore, save a whole new generation of frenetic and mangy barn cats. I want to remember to ask if they still call the cats Slick and Slim, interchangeably, just for the hell of it. I have to believe that calling the baby Slim started with me, although it could very well have been my dad, clumsily and chivalrously trying to take some of the pressure off. Even for the few weeks I tried to convince myself I could keep and raise him, I was afraid to give him a real name, afraid of what that would mean. Or afraid I would give him the wrong one. I knew that Darrell should be the one to do it, but I couldn’t even tell him. I probably wrote the letter six or seven times, but it didn’t seem right. It seemed cruel, where he was going, and it also seemed like he might ask me to at least try. I couldn’t chance it. I think I must have known all along.

  I find my old helmet, and it still fits; the bike, after a bit of tinkering, runs fine, smooth, strong. I don’t usually stay gone more than an hour or two, and Dad mostly sleeps now anyway. For a while, he tried to do things the living do, like go out to the mailbox for the paper, rehang a picture that has fallen off the wall, cook eggs, play a whole Scrabble game. But it is all too much, too hard, and only deepens the lines in his face, exaggerates the curve in his back.

  His frustration—with himself, with his lungs—shows in every movement, but he never says a word about it. He gets up in the morning for coffee and cornflakes and then goes back to bed. We, or I, if Mom is off wandering, generally see him again for supper, but except for rare occasions, that’s the extent of it. Unless I go and watch him sleep, which sometimes I do just to make sure he’s still breathing. It’s not always easy to tell. I catch myself trying to do it for him.

  Mom has carved out a trail of sorts: a circuit that sometimes does lead to her lying on the railroad tracks, but the train stopped running on our spur before I was even born, and I hardly think that’s the point anyway.

  There is an almost infinite number of back roads I can travel around here, to places where humans almost never go. The land is much flatter than it is west of here, but not as flat as people imagine when they think of the plains, and the roads do turn, and they do rise, and they do fall. There are mountains, even, scattered ranges disconnected from each other, and massive buttes like altars.

  Sometimes I drive through the towns—deliberately, slowly, to see the people, maybe to feel some connection to them. It is summer, so there is no school, and small cadres of young men, both Indian and white, roam the streets, maybe in search of—like I once was—something to keep them here. I tell myself I am not looking for a certain face, for the father or the son, but of course I am, and sometimes I will circle a block two or three times to make sure. The white boys eye me suspiciously, but the other ones don’t give anything away. Nothing at all. In the towns, I do not find what I am not looking for.

  I haven’t yet had the nerve to go onto the rez, so I get as close as I can, circling it on the boundary roads, seeing ghosts and real evidence of all the too-slow or terminally indecisive animals flattened on this stretch of highway. Fence posts that once cast a fairly regular pattern of shadow across the road are mostly down now, or lean into each other at crazy angles. I hear there has been some kind of economic upswing in this country over the past few years. The news does not seem to have reached this place yet.

  One night, while I am outside lying in the grass, Mom comes with her own beer to join me. She sits cross-legged, making moustaches with her hair as her head bobbles like one of those baseball dolls, like it’s on a spring. She’s humming something that sounds like “I’m an Old Cowhand,” the shaking of her head adding a just-perceptible vibrato.

  After a while she says, “Your brother—” and then she stops. But she has said it in such a way—or I have heard it in such a way—that for a second I think the rest of the sentence is going to create an entirely new reality; that she is going to tell me he really has been holed up in a cave in the mountains all this time—emulating Ho Chi Minh, writing his memoirs, collecting fossils and painting hieroglyphs—and that now he is ready to come home.

  What she says, though, is, “When he was a baby, I could make him stop crying by singing that song. Just that one. He’d watch my mouth like it was some magical animal, making a sound only he could decipher. It worked every time.”

  “What about me?” I say. “Did it make me stop crying too?”

  “You never cried,” she says. “Never.”

  I don’t believe it. No one doesn’t cry.

  Then she tells me it worked on Slim too.

  “Slim,” I say, as if I am trying to place the name. I say, “I did this all wrong, didn’t I? I fucked everything up.”

  She goes back inside. She doesn’t have time for this.

  • • •

  I start a new letter to Darrell, even though I haven’t a clue where to send it.

  They say tourists are flocking to Vietnam now. It is the new Thailand, or Bali; take your pick. Cheap hotel rooms and beer, the utter cachet of it all. Củ Chi has gotten so busy they have had to expand. They’ve opened up and widened tunnels the B-52s caved in. They find bones, dog tags, rotted scraps of green fatigues. DNA. They send letters that read something along the lines of: “We think we may have found someone you knew a long time ago. In another lifetime.” (That part, truthfully, they do not come right out and say.) Our letter is in the kitchen. It moves from table to counter to windowsill, apparently of its own accord. The dog tags will come soon. The bones after. Where are you?

  Both our rooms are pretty much the way we left them. The dust is thick, but not twenty-five years’ thick. My mother has written her name in it, on the bookshelf in Mick’s room. “Rose,” it plainly says, with an arrow through it, but no heart. I pick up an old notebook, from a geology class Mick took in college. In his angled and rambling script, I read, “One section = one square mile = 640 acres. Sections are not always nice and square. Due to the geology and uneven surface of the earth, its curvature and the failure of neighboring sections to ‘butt up’ perfectly, there may be variations.” At the
bottom of the page he has written, “Failure to butt up = Withholding of affections. Refusal to spoon. Spooning leads to forking, etc., etc., etc.”

  No wonder he left. He must have been bored out of his skull. He probably knew more about rocks, and what’s under them, than the teacher did. All those books. All that digging.

  • • •

  It is late afternoon. I have circled the reservation twice. I am blindingly sad but afraid to explore, to even locate, all the precise causes. That is so me. I have always been so good at this.

  A rise comes; I clear it, it flattens out, and there is a boy—no, a young man—standing in the dust and rocks beside the road. He is tall, lanky, and he has a bird. He is not actively hitchhiking but looks instead like he is waiting for a prearranged pickup. I’ll meet you at four, at the corner of nowhere and nowhere else. I slow the bike down, ease her onto the dirt. Take off my helmet. I see that the bird is a falcon, hooded, talons clamped to a piece of leather around the young man’s forearm, which he holds at an angle slightly away from his body, as if it is set in an invisible cast, held by an invisible sling.

  I am afraid to look at his face, but I don’t have to. Something about the way he stands, slouchy but graceful, entirely comfortable in his skin. And his hands are identical to Darrell’s. Once I know, I can look up to see he looks like both our fathers, his and mine. That I did not expect. His eyes did not stay blue, but they are not completely green, either. They are nearly the color of the Flathead River in spring, when the glaciers begin to melt and turn the water turquoise. I wait to see how this is going to feel, and think it will be bad, but it is more a sense of déjà vu, a sense that I am dreaming, or that I am watching myself dream. Here he is. He was born. He survived. He grew up.

  My voice, incredibly, works. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?”

  He nods once, so slowly it is almost a bow, and mumbles something about “grateful,” something about “ma’am.”