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Steal the North: A Novel

Page 5

by Heather B Bergstrom


  I play football at Omak High: wingback on offense and strong safety on defense. As an Indian I’m supposed to like basketball better. But I love knocking white guys on their asses, and even getting leveled by them, the yells from the crowd to get back up, and when I catch that ball, I run like hell—eighty yards for a touchdown last season. I’m not a big buff guy, even though I weight lift at school. I’m five foot ten and fast. Coach Wade would start me every game, he said, if I didn’t miss so many practices. I take care of my little sister, Lena, give her rides and stuff. I also give other relatives rides to wait in line for food distributions, health services, per capita and settlement checks. Seems we Indians are always waiting in lines. I wish Coach Wade yelled at me as much as he does the white boys when they’re late for practice. He knows the names of all their parents.

  Mom is trying hard for me. We moved back to Omak my freshman year of high school. It’s not easy on her or my little sister. Both would rather live deeper on the rez, even though my sister’s half white, and we lived here in Moses Lake for one year of my childhood. When we first moved back to Omak, Mom stocked shelves at Walmart and then blended ice cream at Dairy Queen, where teenagers hang out, which was embarrassing. Now she works at a bar, serving whiskey to men who remind her too much of my dad. Next door to the bar is a Laundromat, where Mom goes on her breaks—my little sister and I meet her there sometimes—because bleach smells better than sour beer and stale smoke. We make the rent each month, but barely.

  Ray begins to snore on the couch, so I head outside for a cigarette. Everyone else is sleeping. It’s eleven. If it were daytime, I’d instantly look west for an outline of the Cascades before remembering I’m a little too far south and east to see the mountains. But on superclear days, you can see Mount Rainier from here. The sprinklers click all day in the potato field across the road from the trailer park, which is a good five miles from downtown and bordered on two sides by poplar trees. It’s dustier here than in Omak, and the wind’s constant. Up north the wind gusts more, but at least there are reprieves. The lake, around which this town is built, is located at the tail end of a giant irrigation project that begins at Grand Coulee Dam. It reeks with farm runoff, and there’s so much algae on the lake’s surface I could walk across like Christ Jesus.

  I wonder if the girl is up next door. Her aunt’s trailer and my sister’s trailer sit exactly parallel to each other, and they both face north, toward the rez. I smoke on the front porch. The back steps face the front porch of the aunt’s trailer. Singlewides have two bedrooms, one on each end. The girl is no doubt staying in the nonmaster bedroom located on the end by the gravel driveway. A strip of burned grass used to separate our driveways, but the aunt planted lavender bushes there. Teresa takes clippings when she’s in an especially good mood.

  I pretend to be grabbing something out of my truck to get a better view of the girl’s window. The main light is off, but some smaller light glows in there. I wonder if she’s bored. I wonder what she’s doing here. The aunt—I forget her name or never knew it—doesn’t have a TV or a radio. Teresa said the aunt attends a Baptist church that forbids watching TV and prohibits pants for women. The girl wears pants, even shorts that I wish were shorter. And I noticed she doesn’t go to church with her aunt and uncle, who go all the time. Why doesn’t she? Maybe she’s an atheist. Not that I know what an atheist looks like, but I picture glasses and a lab coat. Maybe she’s a rebel. In Omak, rebel white girls either dye strips of their already bleached hair pink and wear barely any clothes, or they go Goth by piercing their lips and brows, wearing tons of eyeliner and layers of black clothes. I stay away from both. Their pissed-off, often laid-off dads scare the crap out of me. They blame Indians—the close proximity of the Colville Reservation, just across the Okanogan River—for their woes. And their hoes, as Benji says. We blame whites for the dams that keep the salmon from returning to the rez. It’s still fucking cowboys versus Indians up there in Omak and the other towns around the Colville.

  I hear a couple coyotes yipyapping. The girl must’ve heard them also because she flips on the main light for a few minutes. She doesn’t peek through the blinds after shutting the light back off. I wonder what she sleeps in? God, what am I—thirteen? Getting hard just thinking about a girl in bed. I go inside, take a shower. Another goal: not to get a girl pregnant. Both Mom and Teresa had babies before eighteen. I won’t do that to a girl. Or me. It’s simple, really, or it should be. Wear a damn condom even if a chick says she’s on the pill. I went through boxes of condoms with Danielle, the rodeo queen, not that I’m complaining. She had a lot of responsibilities that her parents never let her shirk, mostly riding her horse in parades and roundups and speaking at camps and youth meetings and every 4-H and FFA club in Washington State, it seemed. She liked “to let her hair down” with me, or so she said. I think she meant “take her shirt off.” Maybe Danielle was just slumming it with me to mess with her parents, as Benji insisted, the asshole.

  Tomorrow is my sister’s day off. I told her I’d go to the Laundromat because her washer is broken and her back sore from lifting patients. She can veg in front of the TV, watch Home Shopping Network or reruns of her favorite mystery shows. Besides, I barely have any clean clothes myself. I couldn’t get her washer to spin. If Ray could fix it, Teresa might actually let him kiss her on the cheek or at least hang out with her at the Fourth of July Pow Wow next month. Instead, before he fell asleep, he offered to move the washer outside. She told him we weren’t on the rez. The manager doesn’t allow appliances on the front porch, even if it is only a trailer park. He then offered to haul it to the rez and dump it. “Jesus,” she said.

  * * *

  Sunday morning. I’ve been waiting. The aunt and uncle leave for church. The girl immediately opens the blinds that the aunt keeps closed all day. Next time I check, she’s outside. I have to at least go introduce myself and find out her name. She must be so bored. I am. And I have a TV and a truck. Tomorrow I’m going to start running three miles a day—and stop smoking—to get in shape for football. I’ve been doing push-ups, sit-ups, squats, but I need a field for sprints and monkey bars for pull-ups. The girl wears a hippie-looking sun hat, Hollywood shades, and she reads a book on the little stone bench in her aunt’s garden. Precious. Ray would splooge his pants. Maybe I shouldn’t disturb her. She’s not really concentrating—keeps looking at the poplars, whose leaves rustle in the wind, and playing with her necklace. I go out the back door, or attempt to. It sticks, since it’s totally off-limits for the kids and never used. The girl looks up. I jump off the last two steps and go over to her.

  “Hey,” I say. She stands up with the book in her hands, then turns and puts it cover down on the bench, as if to hide the title. She takes off her hat before turning back around. “How’s it going? I’m Reuben.” She blushes deep red. Wow. I haven’t seen a girl blush like that since sixth grade. “You didn’t have to get up.”

  “It’s not very good—the book, I mean.” She’s prettier up close than I expected. “I’m Emmy.”

  “You from California?”

  “Yeah.” She touches her ponytail, which is low and off to one side. “And you?”

  “Here. I’m from here.”

  “Of course.” She smiles. “Sorry.” Definitely pretty. Those teeth. What do they put in the milk down there?

  “Sorry for what?” Now I feel nervous. Keep it cool. “You from L.A.?”

  “Never even been there,” she admits. “Lame, huh?”

  “I’ve never been there either.”

  “I’m from Sacramento.”

  “The capital, right?” She nods. “Palm trees?”

  “And sycamores.”

  The diamonds in her heart necklace look real. Cheap imitations can be bought at Walmart for under ten bucks or on HSN for under twenty plus shipping. A cowboy at the bar bought one for Mom. She exchanged it for a new toilet brush, a can of Folgers, and three two liters of Coca-Co
la. A married white man once bought my sister a cross necklace with a real diamond in it. Are this girl’s teeth real? They’re distracting.

  “Visiting your aunt and uncle?” I ask. ”How long’s it been?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “That long, huh?”

  “I mean, I don’t remember them at all.” Her voice gets shaky, or it’s been that way. “My aunt thought I would, but I was just a baby. They’re so nice to me. I wish I did.”

  “You okay?” She’s scared shitless so far from home.

  “Sure.” She takes a moment to get control. I give it to her. She’s way more fragile than I expected, except those teeth. I want to run my tongue over them. “I was born here.”

  “No shit.”

  “That’s the first swearword I’ve heard all week.”

  “My apologies.”

  “No. It’s refreshing.” She takes off her sunglasses. Her eyes are blue. No, gray. She squints them in the sun. I can’t tell. I like brown-eyed, dark-haired Indian girls, obviously, but white chicks—give them to me straight: blond hair, blue eyes.

  “What book are you reading?” I ask. “It looks pretty thick.”

  “Um—” She looks back at the book on the bench. “It’s boring.”

  “Can I see it?” She hands it to me. Her fingernails are painted a funky turquoise, but she doesn’t wear a lot of makeup. I read the title. “Sister Carrie. Is it about a nun?”

  “No.” She smiles.

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s boring.”

  “You said that already.” I can hear the kids thumping around in the trailer. They were entranced in cartoons when I snuck out.

  “My mom’s a college English teacher. She makes me read old literature.”

  “Ouch. So, what’s the book about?”

  “A girl.”

  “Named Carrie.”

  We both laugh.

  “She moves to Chicago during the Industrial Revolution. She compromises herself.”

  “That part’s not boring, I’m sure.”

  She blushes again and puts her sunglasses back on. I almost fucking blush. I’m standing in a garden discussing literature with a professor’s kid. What the fuck?

  “It’s about railroad strikes and stuff,” she says. “Carrie becomes an actress.”

  “And lives happily ever after?”

  The thumping gets louder in my sister’s trailer. The kids must be hungry.

  “Not at all. Dreiser is no Jane Austen.”

  “Who?”

  “No one,” she backtracks. “Never mind. Sorry.”

  “Sounds like you’ve read the book already.” I examine its bulk. “Can I borrow it?”

  “For real?”

  “Indians read books, on occasion.” Hell, some even memorize the Bible.

  “I didn’t know you were Indian.” She sounds excited. “I thought Hispanic. I have a friend, Harpreet. She’s Punjabi.”

  I start laughing. She’s refreshing. “I’m American Indian.”

  “Oh, my God. I feel like an idiot.”

  “I’ll call you Columbus.” My nephews and nieces start appearing at the windows, pointing and giggling.

  “Please, don’t.”

  “So, can I borrow Mr. Dreiser’s”—I flip to the back cover— “‘great American novel of insight into appetite and innocence’?”

  “Sure.”

  “You want to hang out sometime?”

  “I have a boyfriend—in California.” She touches her necklace.

  Of course she does. “I said hang out, not make out.”

  I hope the third blush is a charm. It takes her a moment to respond. “It will have to be when my aunt and uncle are at church.”

  “This evening then?” I suggest. “Same place? I’ll bring a lawn chair.”

  “Yeah. The bench is kind of small—pathetic.”

  “Solid, though.”

  “A solitary stone.”

  She’s—what do you call it?—witty. Or maybe just goofy. She’s cool.

  “It looks lonely,” I observe.

  “But not too homely.”

  “In need of a friend,” I say.

  “I am.” She smiles wide.

  Damn. What was that?

  * * *

  I’m out of breath by the time I make it back inside my sister’s trailer, and not just because the kids locked the back door and then the front door and then the back door again. Little shits. Even the older boy, Kevin, who usually sides with me because I call him bro. That girl, Emmy, her name should be Emily. She reads books in gardens, for Christ’s sake, but, then again, not romances or books about prairie girls, but a revolution and a compromised girl. Has she been compromised? California girls. They do take your breath away. But no, she was born here. She blushes but tells me my cuss words are refreshing. I need a sweat lodge. Virgil built one in his garage in Omak. He’s an elder but doesn’t preach or ask questions or try to talk to me about my dad. As soon as my sister comes home for lunch, I’ll go for a hard run, but she’ll probably bring cheap tacos from the taco van, which are almost as good as “Indian tacos” made with fry bread. Hispanic? That’s what most white people around here think, with my short hair, or prefer to think. It’s easier for them to dislike immigrants than be the immigrants. An Indian from India? Oh, shit, that would bust my dad’s gut.

  It’s the first time in a long time I’ve wanted to tell him something.

  Most of the time I’m glad he’s not around anymore. He died when I was thirteen. I spent my whole childhood waiting for that man to come home or to sober up. Sometimes I see my dad’s ghost sitting next to me when I’m driving alone in his old truck: only on the rez, those long miles between towns and usually where the land opens up, and most often at dusk when everything’s gray. Of course that’s also the time of day most people in the area see Sasquatch. Dad used to claim, when he’d come home smelling, that he had a Sasquatch lover. My dad’s ghost likes to rummage through the glove box. Sorry, old man, no whiskey. I put my football picture in the glove box once, nothing else, so he’d have to look at it. He did. He even put it in his shirt pocket. The next day it was back in the glove box. If there’s a girl with me in his—my—truck, he doesn’t appear. “Give the boy some space,” he used to tell Mom.

  * * *

  “I picked up your dad the other day,” an elder said to me a year ago, when I was staying far out on the rez for a few nights with my aunt. “By Coulee Dam.”

  “You don’t say?” How did he want me to respond? My dad’s restlessness had caused enough pain. And he wasn’t the first elder—and certainly not the first Indian—to have seen my dad’s ghost and stopped to tell me. I almost suggested he and the other elders start a column in the tribal newspaper for sightings of my old man, put it right next to the column for neighborhood bear sightings.

  “You’re a good kid, Reuben. He would’ve been proud.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “You coming to the meeting tonight at the longhouse?”

  It had been the first weekend of summer break, but I said, “I got homework.”

  He asked after my mom and sisters, then warned me not to get too caught up in the world of the white man.

  “You want me to go my dad’s route instead?”

  I didn’t mean to sound rude. He had known my grandfather. I should’ve just let him put his old hand on my shoulder, invite me to drum or to go pray by the creek with him and his wife for the salmon to return.

  * * *

  I’m back from my run and sweaty as hell. “Hit the shower, kid,” Teresa says, meeting me on the front porch. “I’ve got to leave in five.”

  “Go,” I tell her. “I need to cool down first.”

  “You’re supposed to jump into a cold river right away.”

 
“What river around here?” The reservation is bordered on three sides by rivers, and the Sanpoil flows just east of the center. “You must mean an irrigation canal. And no, thanks. I’m no farm kid.” Not only do the farm kids here swim in the ditches all summer, but they fish the spillways and canals in the fall for trout. My sister, for some reason, likes how both this town and the lake are named after Chief Moses. Or at least she’s not bothered by it. I think it’s a kind of insult. But Teresa can be surprisingly chill about certain things, like giving enemas to old dudes at work or feeding fruit cocktail to crazies or the fact that none of her kids’ dads pays child support. Sure, the dad of my older niece, Grace, leaves a cooler of salmon on Teresa’s porch a few times a year, but that’s not quite enough. Teresa is the complete opposite of chill with me about girls. She’s nosy and bossy as shit. She and I are both part Moses-Columbia on Mom’s side. Dad’s a mix of Sanpoil and Okanogan—hence our last name, Tonasket, who was a famous Okanogan chief. I’m a Colville Confederated Tribes mutt, and proud of it.

  “There’s tacos on the counter,” she says. “Kevin insisted we leave you three.”

  “He’s my bro.”

  She lights a cigarette and offers me one, which I take. She wears scrubs with cartoon character prints. Not very attractive. But maybe a good thing. Teresa used to be kind of pretty, and still is, I guess, though she’s chubbier now than ever—but hell, she’s had four kids. I think guys like her, and they do, for two reasons, one of which a brother shouldn’t mention, but to quote Ray, “Sesame Street is brought to you today by the letters Double D.” The other reason is she’s kind of fun and open and cool, though far from hip in her Minnie Mouse scrubs.

 

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