Tribes

by Arthur Slade

  "First, sir, it was not a fight so much as an insightful interaction. Second, it was my fault. I transgressed the cultural boundaries between tribes, and this provoked him."

  The principal's right caterpillar wiggled. "I don't understand. Did you start the fight?"

  "It was not a fight. But take comfort: All is aright now. I know better. I knew all along—I just 'slipped up,' as they say. There will be no future altercations. Guaranteed."

  Principal Michaels frowned. The caterpillars clung in place, then inched toward each other. "You're saying there won't be any more fights?"

  "I will be mindful of the protocol. I won't trespass again."

  Michaels examined me solemnly. "I'll be honest, Percy. I don't know if you're joking or serious. Neither pleases me. Your teachers have told me you've drifted away from your fellow students. And to be frank, some of your behavior is rather odd. Mr. Nicol said he caught you hiding in the dressing room, spying on the boys' soccer team at halftime."

  "That incident was misinterpreted. I wasn't spying. I was curious about motivational speeches during athletic competitions. I attempt to be cordial to my peers, sir, but I must not influence their rituals. That's why I was hiding."

  "Rituals?"

  "Yes." I stopped. How to explain my whole project? "Their rituals," I repeated. "Their lingo, haircuts, special signals, all of that, sir."

  His frown remained. "I want you to see Mr. Verplaz. You understand why, don't you?"

  The school therapist. Again. He was a singularly valuable hominid. "Of course, sir. I will visit the shaman—I mean Mr. Verplaz."

  "I get the feeling you're stressed, Percy. Are you worried about graduation?"

  "No. Why?"

  "It can be a tough time. Mr. Verplaz will help with coping strategies. I'll also talk to your parents."

  I sucked air in sharply.

  He had forgotten Dad was dead. Principal Michaels had mixed me up with one of the hundreds under his authority, but in that instant I believed he would call my father, somehow communicate through the misty nebular spirals of the Netherworld and get a message to Dad.

  Tell him...Tell him...

  Tell him I'm trying. I'm trying very, very hard.

  "Percy? What's wrong?"

  Relief: He paused. I covered my eyes with my hands but quickly pulled them away. Wet palms. Salt stung my cut face. This was not to happen. Another error.

  "Is there something...?"Principal Michaels stood and took a hesitant step. "Did I...are you...all right?"

  I stared at my hands. Tears. The universal symptom of emotional distress. "No," I said. "Yes. All right. Everything's all right." I rose, then turned and departed the sanctum.

  The bathroom was empty. I must not display emotions to analysands.

  I examined my hominid face in the mirror. Long and thin, with bulging chin muscles—a result of nightly tooth-grinding? Beneath short brown hair, a slanted forehead gleaming with a thin sheen. Sweat.

  I look sad, lost, concluded the part of my brain that examined. Poor little Australo-Percy-ithecus...can't find happiness. Can't control the physical manifestations of grief.

  The voice steeled me. I had made errors in the field. I needed to concentrate on my task. It was time to perform my ritual. I retreated into a cubicle and closed the door.

  I undid the top four buttons on my shirt, exposing a nearly hairless chest. I pushed my hand into my pocket for my container, opened it carefully and extracted a sharpened implement.

  There was once a tribe in Newfoundland called the Beothuks. They were skilled canoeists who painted themselves and most everything they owned with red ochre. Don't bother looking for them. They're extinct. They were squeezed to death by Micmacs on one side and fish-hungry Europeans on the other. No longer able to fish their own waters, the shy Beothuks moved inland and starved. The last to be seen by outsiders was Nancy Shanawdithit, who died of TB in 1829. The rest disappeared. Few details of their customs are known.

  But I imagined them. Before the final Beothuk died, he had grief to expel, so he traded a bone pendant with the Naskapi for three porcupine quills. He poked his flesh and his sadness leaked out.

  I forced the pin through the pale skin around my left nipple. I felt a joyous pain and then...release.

  I withdrew the pin and repeated the procedure.

  I imagined I was the last abandoned, lonely, out-of-luck Beothuk, far away on my island, staring at the sea, longing for my tribe. My people. All gone. Forever. Dead.

  I slowly closed the container and with keen deliberation refastened the four buttons.

  I took control. I exited the cubicle and left the bathroom.

  three

  HOME IS A HABITAT

  Mom expects the apocalypse daily. She watches for the grand event from Ninth Street, venturing out of our house only when the karma is right and there is no omen that the fabric of the universe will suddenly rip and suck humanity as a vacuum would dust. She admits to hoping doomsday will show the courtesy to wait until after my graduation.

  I approached our house at 3:32 p.m., the same time I arrive home every day from school. I, like all humans, am a creature of habit.

  I stood in the sun porch, collecting my surging, far-flung thoughts. With the door closed, the outside world was...outside. My muscles relaxed. I had survived another day of surveying. A night of cataloging awaited.

  Our house hadn't changed since Dad went to the Congo. Its previous owners worshipped at the altar of the Beatles, and had splashed bright orange and red paints on each wall except those in the den, which they painted black. The resourceful decorators then tossed speckled stars into the paint to achieve the semblance of the starlit sky. Mom and Dad loved the house at first sight and changed nothing.

  Except: the entranceway. Three years ago Mom installed stained-glass windows in the sun porch. They came from the Cypress Hills. She and Gray Eyes, her shaman, had sneaked out of their sweat lodge, stolen across the prairie grass, and liberated the windows from an abandoned Anglican church that had been converted into a grain bin. The stained glass lends an eerie kaleidoscopic effect to the porch. The light reveals a collection of seven impressionistic phallic paintings on the wall and twelve phallic statues lining the hardwood floor. Interspersed are various clay representations of the naked mother goddess, She-of-the-Mountainous-Bosom.

  Even in the old days man was fixated on the size of mammae. We evolve, but some things never change.

  I am convinced this exhibit offends the postman. I caught him peering like a priggish pontiff through the mail slot one morning. Mom hopes he peeks more, because the images will rouse his sleeping inner goddess.

  She should know. Karmina, my mother, is a psychic. She does life readings (forty-five dollars), palms and tea leaves too (thirty dollars). She comforts worried clients, telling them existence continues after their carbon-based bodies expire. She prospers; everyone frets over the future.

  Mother is also a body work specialist for a menagerie of clients. Even the mayor of Saskatoon, who asks for predictions midmassage, partakes of her services. The largest portion of her patrons are New Age Homo sapiens, bright-eyed and eternally optimistic. Their spiritual afterimages seem to float around the massage room.

  Karmina is my mother's full name. When I was young, she was Karmen Kristjanna Montmount, but she changed her name after the news about Dad. Karmina is in the Yellow Pages under Psychic—right before a world-famous Texan, Psychic to the Stars. She also appears under Massage: Karmina, Massage Process, Body Work, Yoga and Colonics.

  "Is that you, Perk?" my mom called from the living room. It's the nickname my father gave me.

  "The one and only," I answered, surprised at my peppiness.

  "Can we talk?"

  "Evolution gave us tongues—we might as well use them."

  I pushed through the curtain, the plastic beads kissing and smacking behind me, faintly electrical. Pine and cedar incense fogged the room with forest scent, but a glazed window high in the far wall i
lluminated the haze. Before me was a jungle of lush green plants hanging from the ceiling.

  Mom sat on her white hemp meditation pillow. It was stuffed with old rags because she refused to cushion herself on the plumage of deceased winged vertebrates. She also cringed whenever near a fried chicken restaurant. Her hair was unbound; her black-and-gray tresses flowed across her back. Her sallow skin was evidence that she suspected the ozone layer would no longer shield her from the feared ultraviolet.

  I assumed the lotus position on a nearby pillow.

  "What shall our topic be today?" I asked playfully. "Qi Gong breathing? Stocks and bonds? My report card?"

  "Your principal phoned me," she said, her voice soft, calm.

  "I expected that." Actually, I had forgotten his promise to call. "I'm sorry he interrupted your day."

  "He's worried about you....I'm worried." Silence. Mom stared out of clear blue eyes. "Were you in a fight?" she asked.

  I nodded. She watched carefully, decoding my facial movements. A tic indicating unhappiness; a flicker, a lie. Perhaps she was reading the rainbow of colors around my head: my aura.

  "Why?" she asked.

  This was a multilayered question in Mom's world. She was inquiring: What karmic payments was I charged with? What negative energy compelled a situation that would harm my body? A past-life crime? She believed there were no accidents.

  I had to protect her. She lived in a spirit world, easily disturbed.

  "I bumped into this guy and he, like, flew off the handle," I said. Mom was more comfortable if I used teen vernacular. "He's, like, always doing this stuff. He's a bully, you know."

  "And that was it?"

  "He also said something rude about Elissa."

  She nodded, digesting this information. "I know you're friends, but that's no reason to get into a fight. There are no good reasons."

  Mom had listened to "Give Peace a Chance" far too many times.

  "I didn't intend to get involved, Mom. It just happened."

  "Things don't just happen. You know that. Did you respond to his rudeness?"

  I let out my breath. "I may have said something back. But he deserved it."

  "You could have chosen a dignified silence. Remained motionless and nonthreatening. Remember: 'Nonviolence is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction.' "

  I recognized the quote. "Mom! Gandhi never went to Groverly High. I don't think he was ever a teenager."

  "He faced down the British Empire. Your conflict is minor in comparison."

  I sighed. How could I argue with that?

  "I'm worried, Perk." Her voice was barely audible. "Mr. Michaels said you don't get along with your classmates."

  I don't assimilate, was all he meant.

  "I have friends, Mom. There's Elissa, and..."I strained my memory. A familiar plump face popped into my head. "...And Ms. Peters."

  "Who?"

  "The librarian." She was kind to me—at least she ordered the books I asked for—so she could be considered a friend. "Anyway, that's not the point. Principal Michaels expects me to act like all the homin—the keeners. He wants me to join the establishment." Mom grew up in the sixties, and I had long used words like establishment and Woodstock to convince her of the rightness of my argument. I stayed away from free love, though. A concept she didn't believe applied to teenagers.

  She was impassive. "It won't happen again, will it?"

  My jungle vibrated with aggressive tribes. Statistically, the chances of a repeat were amazingly high. "No," I said.

  If it did happen, I'd ask Justin to only hit me in the gut to hide the bruises.

  Mom nodded and closed her eyes, her face serene. I often wondered if she had only one emotion, calm, like an unbroken wave rolling peacefully across the ocean.

  "Meditate with me," she said, reaching out. Blindly, unerringly, she found my hands. "Cold palms. Your energy levels are low. Unblock the Qi channels."

  I closed my eyes. Her hands were hot. I concentrated on my breath, slowing it down, imagining energy coming in through my belly button, up my torso, across my shoulders and down my arms. I'd been doing this special breathing combined with yoga and Tai Chi since I was a child. After a few minutes my hands warmed.

  I found my center. Calm. Still. Not bliss, but close enough. After a time, I slowly withdrew my hands.

  A motorcycle passed the house, muffler growling. Groggy, I looked toward the sound. The trance was broken. I rubbed my burning palms together, massaged my temples.

  Karmina "Gandhi" was at peace. She really did have amazing control over her body and emotions.

  She suddenly lifted her head. Her eyelids snapped open. "I contacted your father about all this and reminded him that graduation is coming up. I don't know if he'll appear or not."

  Typical Mom. She "spoke" to Dad regularly. With a Ouija board? Perhaps a three-way Ouija call, with Principal Michaels in there too.

  Hello, Percival Montmount senior? Sorry to disturb your afterlife; it's about your son.

  A pain grew in my chest, right next to my heart. My nipples ached. "I have to go to my room, okay?"

  Mom examined me with all-seeing eyes. Several moments passed. "Yes, okay," she answered, "it's all okay."

  four

  PROM HOMINID

  Corvus the crow stared as I entered my room. His eyes were two marbles. He was perched on top of the TV, his bone-wings spread as though about to fly. He had held that position for two years. Chessy, my skeletal cat, was curled around a clay human skull on my dresser. Scattered across various shelves were Mickus, a mouse; Boris, a bat; several pinned butterflies; a beetle display (labeled perfectly); a large dragonfly; a jarred calf fetus; three formaldehyded frogs; and five small blocks of petrified wood. I also possessed several wooden masks and two conical tribal dolls of cloth and beads from South Africa.

  Segregated to one side was my collection of plastic Star Trek figurines (including my favorite, Dr. McCoy, a.k.a. Bones). They have no anthropological value but deserve a place of honor on my dresser. I spent many hours pretending to be on the U.S.S. Enterprise during my youth. I was the ship's anthropologist, a specialist in aliens.

  Corvus was my first great taxidermy success. I had discovered his body in the backyard—no apparent cause of death. I brought him into my room and placed him in my aquarium (sans water), along with my dermestid beetle colony (I'd ordered the beetle kit from a company in Montana). These voracious chewers of decaying matter cleaned the flesh from Corvus within a few weeks. I then painstakingly reassembled him, all the time trying to picture his genetic connection to the dinosaurs.

  I ran my finger across his furculum, the bone that absorbs the shock of flight. Without it, ol' Corvus would be cracking his hollow bones with every swoosh of his wings (when he was alive, that is). It's also called the wishbone because humans, after consuming a bird, like to take the furculum and pull it apart. Whoever gets the larger piece makes a wish to the heavens. This pagan Etruscan ritual survives to this day—they taught it to the Romans, the Romans brought it to Britain, the Brits brought it here. The past is always with us.

  I sat at my desk, surrounded by shelves packed with anthropology books, including several editions of The Origin of Species, Darwin's little ditty about natural selection, which set the scientific world buzzing. I had nearly memorized it. Surrounding that were all the latest books on evolution, including one that presented the theory that evolution was the result of aliens fiddling with our DNA. It's a hilarious read.

  In the very center of the desk was my field journal, a large scrapbook-sized tome with many hundreds of pages. It bore the title The Origin of Species Revisited by Percival Montmount, Jr. In it was every observation I had made about my environment for the past three years.

  Normally, I would record the day's events immediately after school, but today I couldn't open it. There was too much to write down. I had to finish digesting the material. Instead, I opened a biography of Darwin.

  About an hour later, I we
nt to the kitchen and prepared a large wooden bowl of sprouts, seaweed, black olives, carrot sticks, butter lettuce and feta cheese. We had no specific mealtime. Mom believed you ate when your body informed you it was hungry.

  I sat at our table. A second later Mom appeared, chewing on an apple, her reading glasses halfway down her nose. A massive historical novel was clutched in one hand—her only addiction, not counting yogurt-covered almonds.

  "You getting enough to eat?" she asked. "There are rice cakes in the cupboard."

  "I..." I swallowed a rather large chunk of seaweed. "I'm fine. You fruiting it today?"

  She dropped the apple core into the compost pail. "Yep. Trying to cleanse myself. Having some intestinal discomfort."

  "Oh." Thankfully, she spared me the details. "Hope it goes away."

  "It will. You're looking thin. I should get some more beans. And goat's cheese. Would you like that?"

  "Sure," I said, straining to sound enthusiastic. What I really wanted was a triple-patty burger. After my day, I needed animal protein. But Mom was haunted by the fearful clucks, bellows and gurgles of the animals she had consumed during her carnivorous years.

  Herbivorousness is odd. Plants have the same two goals as all species: survival and propagation. They can't vocalize, but perhaps they feel pain on a cellular level. When we pull them from the ground we strangle them. And where are the mite activists? Why don't we fret about the daily destruction of the two mite species that live on our faces, shuffling through hair follicles and sebaceous glands, munching dead skin cells? What about the masses of dust mites scuttling across our pillows? Crushed when we lay down our heads.

  It's important to remember we are all ecosystems—never truly alone.

  "What's on your mind, Perk?" Mom asked. "You're gazing into nothingness again."

  I smiled. "I was just thinking that two bugs in the hand are better than one in the bush."

  "You lost me."

  "Well, I was reading about good ol' Charlie again—"

  "Charles Darwin, you mean," she interjected.