We heard the phone ringing again upstairs. Harold stopped talking and looked up toward the door. I wondered why he was so talkative. Maybe he was trying to develop trust. That was fine with me. For someone who took bets illegally, Harold seemed like a trustworthy guy.
Late in the night when the house was silent and dark, I tapped on Rosemary’s bedroom door. She opened it and put a finger to her lips. I stepped in and she closed it quietly, locking it. Somehow the whole thing felt very mischievous and sexy, but I wasn’t sure what her intentions were.
“I owe you a cigarette,” she said.
We sat by the open window and smoked. Her room was dim, lit only by a lamp next to her bed. Her wall was decorated with drawings of nude figures and a few posters of rock stars, The Cure, Lou Reed in black lipstick and spiked collar from Rock N Roll Animal. A bookshelf on one wall was filled with books.
“I like Human League,” I said. “I like Psychedelic Furs.”
“Human League is old news, but the Furs are good.”
“Did you draw those?” I asked, pointing to the drawings on the wall.
“Yeah. Do you like them?”
“They’re good.”
“I like nudes. I got an art scholarship to a school on the East Coast for next fall.”
“Agnes said something about your interest in painting.”
She drew on her cigarette and rested her head back against the wall. I sensed something was wrong but couldn’t bring myself to ask. I’d only just met her. I looked out the window and saw the house next door with its dark windows. I saw the empty and dark road beyond. The dead trees, frost on the ground.
We heard a dog howling outside. She told me it was a stray that came around only at night.
“That thing drives me crazy,” she said. “Stupid fucking dog.”
The dog was barking and howling.
“You were asking about books,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I have a couple for you.”
She mashed her cigarette in the ashtray and stood. She played a cassette on a stereo beside the bookshelf. I expected music, but instead the tape played a thunderstorm. An ambient noise filled the room, an unidentifiable mixture of wind and rain, followed by the sounds of people crying. Maybe one of the voices was Rosemary on the tape, a recording of her own grief. I imagined her with a group of people, all of them weeping. There’s a strange terror in hearing someone grieving. I was too afraid to look at her or see if she was watching me. I stared at the floor while the tape played. When I looked up she was at the bookshelf, picking out a couple of books.
“Is that you?” I asked. “On the tape?”
“It’s my friends Sarah and Valerie. They made this one for me. We make tapes for each other.”
“But not music.”
“Depends. Sometimes we trade music. Sometimes we trade sounds. Whatever we’re feeling. I like repetitive sounds. Whispers, rain. This one’s sad, but it somehow always makes me feel almost sedated or something.”
“It’s sad.”
“But not really.”
She showed me her drawings. The figures contained a sort of distended sleekness: paintings of a crippled man walking with crutches; a hawk with a snake dangling from its beak; a woman wearing a man’s tuxedo; a young girl sitting in a chair with her head down as if being punished. Rosemary told me when she was a child she slept on a bed of balsam branches with her brothers and sisters in a small room near Rainy Mountain. She spoke of eating the fried testicles of pigs and cattle and making hides from boarskin, pigskin, and deerskin. Then she handed me two books by N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain.
“These,” she said. “They’re the ones for you. He’s from Oklahoma. They’re written just for you. If you hate them, everything I’ve felt about you is wrong and I’ll have to go back and reconsider my witchery.”
I flipped through one, but it was too dim in the room to read. Both books were paperbacks. I held them in my lap and looked up at her. “Thanks,” I said. “You like to read a lot?”
“Drawing and painting are my passions,” she said. “Before that I took photos. For days I went around photographing everything: trees, frogs, landscapes, fields. When those photos were developed, the more I looked at them, the more I thought they were really just boring photos and nothing more. There wasn’t anything interesting about them. But drawing is different. So tell me your story.”
“My story.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything. I don’t know why I asked. I feel a weird connection to you. Do you feel it?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“I felt it when I drove to school. Then again when we were smoking in the bathroom. I can’t explain it. Don’t think it’s like that. I mean it’s not like that kind of connection. I mean like you’re a lost soul from a thousand years ago who’s here to deliver something to me.”
“My mom says I’m a reincarnated traveler or something. When I was little I ran away from her all the time. She had to watch me.”
“Maybe a Russian pilgrim or monk. It’s something like that. Maybe you’ve felt a strong urgency to find out who I am. Am I right? What I’m interested in, what I want to do with my life, that kind of thing. You want to transcend.”
“Hm.”
“Am I right?”
“Tell me about your dream,” I said. “The one with the man who told you I was coming.”
“The dream,” she said. “There was a dead man covered in dirt and twigs. He was really dirty. At first I thought he was a windigo or bad spirit. But as he came closer I felt a sense of ease. He said, ‘A boy is coming who will help you.’ And then he turned and walked away.”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t remember. He was covered in so much dirt from the grave. But his voice was soft.”
She was staring at me, and I looked away. I knew she was looking at my face, and sure enough, she brought it up. It almost felt inevitable that it would come up. “What happened?” she asked.
“It was an accident,” I said. “Hot grease.”
She looked sad and leaned in close. I told her the story, emphasizing that it was an accident, and she touched my arm. In that moment I wanted to be close to her, saintly, versed in books. I wanted to immerse myself and be preoccupied with nothing. If I could have any other face, it would be hers. It was very strange like that in the beginning. We shared no physical attraction but something else, something deeper. I saw myself in her. Soon I fell asleep for a while and when I woke she was asleep in her bed. I got up and let myself out, closing her door quietly. When I got to my room, George was asleep in his bed. He turned his back to me as I entered.
There was a note on my bed in George’s handwriting: Goodnight to my new friend. I settled back on my bed and stared up at the pale light and thought about dying. George was making explosion noises with his mouth. The room was colorless and spectral, a space where nothing happened. If I died in bed, I would lie there with cold skin until someone found me. I thought the room was dreaming and I was the subject of the room’s dream. I thought of myself being devoured by my bed. I was the bed’s baby. I was the offspring, about to be eaten, killed by the bed.
I drifted in and out of sleep. At some point in the night I looked at the doorway and saw a figure in the shape of my mother.
I never had many friends. In Cherokee County, I knew a boy named Monfiori who lived in the neighborhood. He was pale-skinned and thin with wiry hair. Everyone at school hated him, but for a while he was my only companion. He ate cockroaches for a dollar and huffed paint behind the woodshop building. He smoked cigarettes in my bedroom despite my weak lungs and my coughing. My mother was worried people would think I was a troublemaker for being friends with him.
“We’re like hemophiliac brothers,” Monfiori said. “They
tell us don’t bleed, don’t bleed, but we’re dying anyway. They don’t know anything.”
“I’m not a hemophiliac,” I told him.
Somehow he didn’t believe me. He’d made comments about the burn marks on my face, that I needed to watch out in case they ever bled me to death.
“That’ll never happen,” I told him. “They’re scars.”
He refused to believe me. He played jazz on a toy trumpet. “Variations on Monk in C,” his own creation, this arrangement—or so he claimed. “Psychedelic funk,” he called it. We drank cheap vodka in his basement, and I played drums on upside down buckets. I liked being at his house because I could drink and smoke over there without anyone knowing.
“My mom has jazz records,” I told him. “She listens to them on nights she wants to be left alone.”
“She’ll be alone soon enough when you die,” he said.
Monfiori said we were both dying. “Might as well poison ourselves,” he said. “At least that way we’ll die in our sleep.” He’d already gotten two blood transfusions. He had bruises and moles all over his body. I saw the moles on his cheek and neck. His hair hung in his eyes and always looked unkempt, but I liked it. He was probably the ugliest boy in our school, and maybe the meanest.
One time in his basement we smoked a joint and he told me he was going to set the school on fire. “We’ll watch the whole place go up in flames,” he said. “I’ll send smoke signals to the Indians. Fuck the police and everyone else.”
Monfiori and I had to do twenty hours of community service for stealing guitar strings from the music store downtown. We were going to use them to tie the spokes and chain of his brother’s bicycle so that he would crash. Monfiori’s mom and aunt caught us later in his backyard as we were tying the strings to the spokes. They made us return the packages of guitar strings to the music store. The owner wanted to press charges and we had to go to juvenile court.
“My son’s not a bad kid,” my mother kept telling everyone.
That same winter I fell ill with a stomach virus and my asthma flared up. The breathing machine they had me use was loud enough to hear throughout the house. At night the dogs next door kept me awake with their barking. They belonged to our neighbors, who were an old couple, immigrants from Poland. Their names were Milosz and Gertrude. They brought me soup and crackers and a dessert called faworki, which they said was known as angel wings.
“They’re for good luck,” Gertrude told me. “It’s a Polish specialty.”
My mother and Gertrude became close. They talked about bread and sausages and red wine. Milosz made paper airplanes for me. From my bed, in my sickness, I watched him pull up a chair. He folded a piece of paper into an airplane and tossed it across the room.
“I had a son once,” Milosz told me. “My wife and I lost him. He was about your age.”
He stared into the floor. He seemed to be searching for the right words. We could hear my mother and Gertrude laughing in the next room.
“His name was Aleksander,” he said. “He liked to play the piano.”
I could see the lines in his forehead, the loose skin of his jowls.
“My son, my son,” he said.
He folded another piece of paper. I watched his fingers move, all bone and skin. He concentrated on each fold, creasing it, holding it up to the light to make sure he got it right. He folded the paper into a bird and handed it to me.
“You can name it anything you want,” he said.
“Aleksander,” I said.
I held the paper bird. I noticed Milosz’s hands were trembling.
“Aleksander it is,” he said. He stared into the floor.
Those days I was sick I would often see a male cardinal appear on the branch outside my window. One morning I opened the window and he flew in. He was such a beautiful bird. He flew wildly around my room. He glided from desk to bedpost, from bookshelf to lampshade. His wings were red like velvet. He was proud but silent. He seemed to be attentive to some inner presence, as if he had a clear point to make as he strutted across the windowsill. Once, he spread his wings proudly for me. This was his own show, a brief abandonment of the natural world, his own strange fantasy. The last time I saw him, that winter day I was ill, he flew in and shook the frost from his body. I let him eat sugar from my hand. In the pale light of my bedroom, in one final, cool gesture of farewell, he cocked his head to look at me, then flew out the window.
For several weeks Milosz continued to bring me paper birds made from colored construction paper. I hung them with string from my ceiling so that they twirled constantly. There were red birds, blue birds, yellow birds, purple birds. Monfiori didn’t like them. “Can we set them on fire?” he asked.
“No.”
“Aren’t you too old for this? Look at this place.”
He challenged my integrity. He dared me to cut myself and bleed. I challenged him back and he laughed it off. One Friday I stayed the night at his house. We drank his mother’s vodka until late. I fell asleep on the floor in his basement and woke up at some point in the middle of the night, feeling sick. I found him sitting in the corner of the room, watching me.
“What is it?” I asked.
He mumbled something.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said.
“We’re both dying,” he said. “We’ll die together.”
I was sick the whole next day. In my room, Milosz sipped wine and told me stories about a boy who kept birds to fend off devils. “The birds protected him,” he said. “They changed colors and held healing powers, like tiny gods or angels. They showed courage. They taught the boy to believe in himself.”
Milosz wheezed and coughed. I coughed, too. His glass of red wine seemed to glow in the dim room. The paper birds twirled above our heads.
One night I woke to something knocking at my window. I sat up in bed, pulled back the curtain but saw nothing. Outside, the wind was blowing. It was a tree branch, I told myself, and went back to sleep.
Later I dreamed of the cardinal at my window. The cardinal spread his wings, glowing red in the night.
Weeks passed and Monfiori left my life as quickly as he’d entered. I saw him for the last time later that winter. We sat in his basement drinking cheap vodka and smoking cigarettes. I watched him wrestle his little brother to the floor and punch him in the chest until the boy started crying and ran out of the room.
“You need to stop being mean,” I told him.
“I’m not,” he said. “We’re dying, so what does it matter?”
He turned on the strobe light. We stayed up late in the night listening to some sort of death metal, all screams and guitar. I remember slamming my body into the wall. I remember lying on the floor and pulling a blanket over myself.
I’m convinced he tried to poison me in my sleep. The next morning they found me unresponsive. I don’t remember being carried out of the house, the ambulance ride, or anything else. I woke up in a hospital bed on the third floor of Southwest Central Hospital, where they watched me for several days. There, my mother kept telling the nurses I wasn’t a bad kid. They fed me tapioca pudding. They helped me out of bed and tried to talk to me, but I wanted to be left alone. I watched cartoons and old movies on TV.
“He’s a quiet kid,” one of the nurses told my mother. “He never talks.”
When I returned home, the first people who came to see me were Milosz and Gertrude. They brought me angel wings. We drank tea and listened to old records on the antique record player.I mostly kept to myself in my bedroom.
My mother said Monfiori had tried to hang himself and they took him away. He wouldn’t be coming back for a while.
“That boy is nothing like my son,” my mother told Milosz and Gertrude. “He was trouble, it’s so sad,” she said.
They all agreed I was nothing like him.
“My son is very happy,” my mother
kept saying.
At the Troutts, we usually ate dinner around six in the evening. Rosemary ate alone in her room and nobody questioned it. I saw it as some sort of healing mechanism for her that required no explanation. Maybe the conversation had been exhausted. Maybe they gave up. Every night around ten, Harold came upstairs from the basement and watched the evening news before he went upstairs to bed. Agnes always sat in the same recliner in the living room, reading the Bible or some book on spirituality.
Since the night Rosemary had given me the books, I became more and more drawn to her. As the only Indians around, we shared a culture and blood unknown to the others. We were like branches intertwined from the same tree, the same root, reaching out toward the sky to the unknown. I felt drawn to her as a brother is to a lost sister, nothing more. Maybe I felt too strongly. I see now that I tended to get attached easily, but at the time I felt it was necessary to be near her, watch her, even protect her if I needed to. I kept all this to myself.
George, however, became unbearable with all his eccentricities. He paced, muttered to himself, continually asked me questions about where I came from. Nights he continued to make explosion noises with his mouth, keeping me awake. He stayed in his room, writing notes in a notebook and memorizing the birthdates of rock stars. One afternoon after school he wanted me to tell him about the Cherokees, so I told him about the Trail of Tears, which he was learning about in his Oklahoma History class. I spoke the words of a song one of my mother’s boyfriends had taught me, written many years ago by some unknown Cherokee man:
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