I thought for a second about suggesting we offer Marie’s defective ones to Newly Divorced people, hearts with fabric snags, canoes with clumsy finger dents punched in them—Heart Canoe Seconds—but my own sense of self-preservation kicked in. So I just stuck my tongue out at Marie, even though we both knew I’d gotten more work that she was off the hook for. She was the smarter sister.
“Don’t be making faces at your sister either,” our mom said to me. “More important, don’t be getting smart with my customers. Your slutty little mouth almost cost us that sale.” I had only made the one minor change, about the birds and bees, to the sales script she’d written for us years ago. But she refused to take chances on a Memorial Day weekend.
“Slutty, pfft!” Marie said. “Right. You never hear a word we say unless it’s one that didn’t come from your little scripts.” Apparently Marie didn’t want to make it to eighteen. You never pushed our mom’s limits like that, but lately she’d been acting all bold in unexpected ways. I had a little bit of an idea what was behind it but what she said next shocked even me. “I’m serious. I want to move back home. I want to graduate with all my old friends from the Rez.”
“Oh, right,” I said, ditching my own sense of self-preservation. “Come on, if you’re gonna help here, at least don’t come up with nonsense!”
“You stay out this, Slutty Mouth,” our mom said, and then, glaring at Marie, all simmer gone from those eyes. “And you! Those friends? Those ones who named you Stinkpot?” Our mom took no prisoners. If she sensed you questioning her authority, she’d remind you of the caliber weapons she had trained on you. “You’re almost eighteen. Go ahead. Go join your friends who say you stink. You, on the other hand, Miss Magpie,” she said, turning to me. “Think of yourself like Old Man Gray’s Magpie. Only repeat what I’ve taught you. You ain’t even close to eighteen.”
“But I barely know Old Man Gray! You moved us off the Rez when I was so young, I barely know any of those people you talk about.” Old Man Gray had a magpie, and he’d taught it to say various vulgar phrases in Tuscarora, and other things he thought would be funny. On New Year’s Day to celebrate, the magpie would yell, “New Yah!” back at us when we yelled it at their door. We’d been gone from the Rez for so long, Old Man Gray probably didn’t even know who I was or that I shared an ID with the bird he kept in a cage in his living room.
“We’re not talking about your name right now. It’s your mouth that’s the problem. Here!” our mom said, pulling a cheapo pleather-covered book from one of our totes. She bought these crappy diaries at the Dollar Store and used them to keep our records instead of a regular ledger book. “When you feel like going away from my script, write all you want in here. But when you speak, they better be the words I wrote for you.”
Oh, please! Few things were sadder than a fifteen-year-old writing in a diary. I might as well bead myself a T-shirt that says LOSER VIRGIN GIRL HERE! Although I guessed I could use the diary to work on my own designs when I hit emancipation age. Our mom tapped the diary cover. “Long’s you follow the rules,” she added. “White customers don’t want some mouthy Indian girl talking about them jigging. You say those cute things I thought up for you. That’s it.”
“But I was eight when you made me learn those things. I sound like a moron now!”
“Fine, I’ll give you some new lines,” she said (totally ignoring that it’s crazy to force your daughter to say only words you approve). No wonder Marie was suggesting the most ludicrous thing (giving up twentieth-century luxuries like running water and the accompanying toilet for the three-room shack we’d left our dad to seven years ago). I’d been spoiled living in the First World instead of the Third World (in ninth-grade social studies, I realized that the shacks in the 16mm classroom movies about Poverty in War-Torn Countries were a step up from the one I’d spent my first eight years in).
(Yes, I know I use a lot of parentheses, but that is life on the reservation—a parenthetical aside. In this analogy, the larger world is where running water and flush toilets and cable TV and pizza delivery and Chinese food were the norm. The reservation is where “the facilities” were an outhouse, and where a coat hanger was duct-taped to TV rabbit ears like some modern sculpture to negotiate five TV channels in good weather, and where parents tried to claim that a lettuce-and-mayonnaise sandwich was a legitimate meal.)
(Yes, I also know that, even for me, that parenthetical statement was excessive.)
“Stick to the scripts, and if you feel a need to be chatty,” our mom said, tapping a finger on the diary’s pleather cover. “Write your sassy notes to yourself instead of bothering customers.” I flipped through its blank pages, imagining the possibilities, pretending it wasn’t totally humiliating. Then she added: “That diary’s coming out of your pay.”
On Monday night, Marie and I were lying in the dark with the oscillator on, sending out evenly divided breezes back and forth between our beds. Our mom came in and gave us our envelopes from the Vendor Table. We left them on the nightstand, knowing better than to count money in front of her. Mine was probably really going to be a dollar shorter for the stupid diary.
She stood in the doorway of our dark room for a minute, smoking a cigarette, the hallway light silhouetting her. She looked like Freddie Mercury in the “Bohemian Rhapsody” video.
“You girls really want to move back to the Rez?” she asked. She never took us seriously, so I didn’t know what to say. Where was the stupid script Dark Deanna made for this scene? (Dark Deanna was what we’d named the vein of evil clouds running through our mom’s head that sometimes took her regular brain hostage, and Dark Deanna thought we were expendable.) I shrugged.
“I can move back in with Dad,” Marie said. “If you wanna stay. I can get another job to—”
“No other job for you,” our mom said immediately. “I made some calls and got us steady rides back and forth. Just means we lose a little off the top every week. I moved here for you in the first place,” she said. “Those boys are still gonna call you what they used to. Things like that don’t change on the Rez.” Our mom never showed a warm side. In all my life, I couldn’t remember even one instance, and I couldn’t imagine why Marie was the beneficiary now.
“I know,” Marie said, so quiet I could barely hear her over the oscillator. “But it’ll be different. I’ll make them see a different me. I never wanted to be a City Indian. I miss the Rez.”
“Once I give up this unit, no turning back. They have waiting lists for these places.”
“Don’t I get a say in anything?” I asked. “I don’t wanna go back. I barely remember living there, and last I checked, there was no bathroom or shower at the Dad Shack. If I’m stuck at a hot, sweaty Vendor Table all day, I at least want to be able to have a shower at home after.”
“No one’s tying you to the Table,” our mom said. “You gotta still keep beading, but your mouth is starting to cause more trouble than you’re worth there. If you can find another job, go ahead. But you’re not lying around all summer on the Rez with no one keeping an eye on you.”
A way out! She was forgetting that my Social songs and drumming attracted customers, but I sure wasn’t reminding her. Only problem: seemed like jobs close to our dad’s Rez Shack were scarcer than the anthropologist tourists who were guaranteed to drop a couple hundred bucks every Table visit. This felt like a trick.
“If you girls are serious, I gotta make the one-month-notice call on this unit tomorrow. You’ll finish out your school year here, and then as usual, we go to full-time Vendor Table in the day, and start packing at night.”
“Wait,” I said. “Where are we going to fit? This is a stupid idea. What does Marvin think?” Marvin was the Quiet Twin. “Marvin? An opinion, please?” I went to the living room and explained what was going on.
“Can’t be that different from here,” he said, shrugging. “Poor in the city and poor on the Rez gotta be pretty similar, and the Shack is smaller, so cleaning’ll be easier.” He probably didn�
��t care since he didn’t even have his own space here, just the living room pullout couch. While we worked the summer Table, he cleaned, did wash, and took the bus to the grocery store. In between, he made corn-husk dolls and basswood sculptures for the Table, like our dad. He’d recently gotten ahold of some soapstone and his new carvings were beautiful, amazing, and better proportioned than other people’s. I hoped he’d someday teach me his secrets.
“I called your dad,” our mom said. “He’s working on arrangements. He’s glad we’re coming home.” I heard something foreign in my mom’s voice. Not romance exactly, but for a minute, it seemed like she had a heart that wasn’t made of velvet and beads and cotton batting, pinched tight with waxed thread. She turned and went to her room, closing the door.
“What the hell, Marvin? What kind of Twin Support was that?”
“Like I said, how much worse could it be? At least there, we got other Skins to hang out with. Maybe I’ll have a social life, finally.”
“You could have a social life here, if you weren’t glued to that stupid TV. Lost in Space? Land of the Giants? The Monkees? Those aren’t even shows from this decade. Get out there and live a little. You could have friends at school if you tried.” I didn’t have a ton myself, but still, a few.
“White guys think I’m too dark, and black guys think I’m too white. I don’t fit anywhere in their color chart attitudes about each other, except as None of the Above.”
“You could try. I have.”
“It’s easier for girls,” he said. “You don’t even have to be all that interesting if you’re willing to flirt. If you’re willing to flirt with homely guys, you could be as popular as you want.”
I couldn’t believe my own twin was suggesting I had Sluttish Tendencies. Where was this coming from anyway? Marie was the one who was getting busy and no one even noticed. I went back to our room and flopped on my bed.
“Why do you really want to go back?” I asked Marie when we’d let a few minutes pass.
“Just do.” She didn’t even bother with a story. “You’ll understand once we get there.”
“It’s him.” She said nothing. “Your Mystery Man. Don’t even think I haven’t noticed.”
The guy was maybe in his thirties and had been hanging around lately when we worked, always dressed a little too formal for the park. Touristy guys did not wear sport jackets (not that the tourist guys didn’t look like doofuses themselves). I preferred watching the ones who cut the grass and emptied the trash in their Work Blues.
Our mom (too busy rating potential customers) hadn’t noticed what I noticed the last few months at the Table. Marie’s Mystery Man would show up all tweedy in the distance, catch my sister’s eye, and then head to the concessions. A minute later, Marie would go on her break, and an hour later, she would return filled with sudden good cheer and smudged lipstick, like today.
“Look,” Marie said. “If you want a different job, I know how to get you one. Then you won’t have to bitch at the Table, playing your stupid drum. You can even do your own Weirdo Beadwork monstrosities. Wouldn’t it be nice to sing and drum only when you really want to?”
“Are you serious?”
“A real job. With steady pay. Not pay when Mom decides you’ve earned it. One condition.”
“I know, I know. I don’t get to ask about the Mystery Man.”
“For your own good,” she said. (Anytime someone says this to you, it’s really for their own good.) “You’ll understand when you’re a little bit older.”
“If you wanna live to be a little older, you better get stealthier,” I said. “Mom’s distracted ’cause the season’s just started, but she’s gonna notice how every time a tall, skinny man with a sport jacket and a Man Bag comes sniffing around our territory, you take your break time. She’s self-absorbed but not that self-absorbed. What’s the deal?”
“Your own good,” she said, blowing the smoke from a Kool through the oscillator and out the window. After she sent her first plume through, I held my hand out, the first two fingers extended like a peace sign. She shook her head, refusing me a drag. I don’t know why my sister thought I was a kid when she was the one who couldn’t sneak around if her life depended on it. Still, if it got me away from the Vendor Table, I could pretend a while longer.
Derek had lain low throughout that first day after being shot, but him missing supper was like a dog ignoring pork chop bones on the floor. He hobbled downstairs that night and made a plate while our dad checked his lottery tickets against winners announced on local news. I don’t know how my dad did with those, but this was not a super-lucky day for Derek.
The helmet-hair newsman’s Top Story: an attempted robbery at a drive-in restaurant in Lockport, fifteen minutes east of the Rez. A ton of Indians worked in Lockport, but no one chowed down at that drive-in, not with a name like Custard’s Last Stand. Besides soft-serve ice cream, their menu was mostly Little Bighorn–themed combos, including the Big Bighorn: a triple Angus beef burger and a bacon-wrapped hot dog, surrounded by sweet potato fries.
Did non-Indians even get the references? I only knew a little about General Custer because of a goof my mom made one Christmas, one that Derek never let me live down. She always got us coordinated gifts so that we were forced to play together. The year I was seven, she gave us some twelve-inch plastic Cowboys and Indians from the Best of the West, light on the Indians. Derek won the luck of that draw. He got Geronimo, with all the accessories, including a Tepee. Sheila got stuck with Jane West, a blond Cowgirl, Johnny West’s wife. I got it the worst without even knowing.
That Christmas morning, my shoe-box-sized present revealed a bandanna-wearing, lanky blond plastic Cavalry General: George Armstrong Custer. I was bummed. There were two other Indians in the Best of the West—Chief Cherokee and Fighting Eagle—but living in this house, you didn’t want to complain about your presents. So the three of us played for a while, until our mom and dad crashed for a nap. As soon as they were out, Derek charged over to the bookshelf filled mostly with our dad’s skin mags.
“You’re not supposed to be digging around in there,” I said. “Dad’ll kick your butt if he finds your drool on his centerfolds.” I didn’t quite know what that meant, then, but I’d heard grown-ups teasing Derek about our dad’s mag stash.
“See this?” Derek said, pulling a paperback book from the shelf. It was Custer Died for Your Sins, by someone named Vine Deloria, Jr. The cover showed a cartoon eagle holding a beaded tomahawk in its beak. Derek and Sheila laughed Dirty Rez Laughs at the title. I didn’t get the joke right then, but I could tell immediately that Custer and Indians were not a good mix. On top of that, Derek quickly let me know there was a real, historical Custer, and that he billed himself as an Ultimate Indian-Killer Cavalry Cowboy.
My mom sure didn’t know that either. She’d just gotten us figures that would fight each other. Being a lacrosse-stick-making and beadworking Indian woman, she would have never spent cash on General Custer if she’d been aware, even if he was in the liquidation bin at Twin Fair. I ditched Custer to the toybox graveyard as soon as I could. Even now, I still hadn’t read that book Derek showed me, but I knew enough about the original Custer to know this burger-joint-owning ass face on TV was an I-Don’t-Care-What-You-Think Indian Hater.
In the news report, Lockport’s General Custard didn’t look much like the plastic General Custer. He was a stubby, round rascal, with his hair in a freaky long blond pageboy. He had a tiny Brillo-pad chin beard with a big mustache hiding his mouth, like fringed curtains. A fake Cavalry outfit capped the look, the kind you might find in Theater Club racks. He stomped around in a blue bib shirt with giant white cuffs, and the big brimmed hat with a star on the forehead. Did he look like General George Armstrong Custer? Maybe, if Custer had lived to retire from the Cavalry and develop bad eating habits. Who knew if the guns in this guy’s costume holster were real?
Well, we all did, now, as he was boasting to the Reporter in the Field on our TV.
“Indian guy with long hair,” he said, dragging the “long.” “Waltzed in ’round closing time. I was alone, sweeping up. Always send the wife with the night deposit.” He nodded like a bobblehead. “Guy was trouble.” Asked why, he said the guy wore a trucker cap, a hooded sweatshirt, dark sunglasses, and he’d pulled his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose. The reporter nodded seriously. “Had his hand in the sweatshirt pocket, you know, here.” Custard slapped his pumpkin gut. “Said he had a gun, and he wanted—get this—a to-go bag filled with cash and burgers.” He waited and then that stupid mustache parted in a giant grin. He was loving this.
“ ‘Heavy on the cash,’ he said. I told him, ‘Son, you don’t need to go off the reservation in my place of business.’ ” He nudged the news guy and added, “You see what I’m saying here?” The news guy asked why he thought the robber was an Indian. “Attempted robber,” General Custard said. “His trucker cap, perfectly clear. Had those beads all over it on the brim, like the Indians wear. You’ve seen ’em at the gas stations buying beer by the case, I know you have. Well, I shot him in the a—”
The news cut back to the studio, saying the suspect was still at large. They showed a police sketch, which looked like half the Rez Men under fifty. They added that the suspect had been wearing a Led Zep shirt. The newsman wished a speedy capture of “the Hamburglar,” and the sports and weather guys yukked it up as they went to commercials.
Normally, my dad would rage about how we got the shaft in the news and we’d stay out of his way, but he’d watched Derek limp into the kitchen, knowing when he’d been out the night before, and noting that he hadn’t left his room much since he got back. He also knew Derek had a beadwork cap, because he had been its first owner.
And so began a period of sustained harassment like I had never seen before. The Butt Cheek Incident seemed like yesterday, but it was a month ago, and though the story faded from the news, it didn’t at our house. First we had hamburgers for five days straight, which our dad cooked, frying up all noisy in the kitchen, like he was doing construction. At the end of the week, I heard him grumbling and slamming pans again and we all sat at the table for the sixth time as he yelled, “Get your asses down here to eat!” He walked in with one serving plate for us, and an additional one, stacked high. He set it in front of Derek and gripped his neck from behind, telling him to “eat up.” Derek got through nine before he could leave the table. Our dad let him go only when it was clear my brother was gonna blow chunks all over us. Eventually, he just started calling Derek Hamburglar.
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