Give Me Some Truth

by Eric Gansworth

  “It was pretty intense,” I said, not knowing what else I should add. They were only drawings, not like naked photos, but they didn’t leave a lot to the imagination. Marie flipped through it with me, and she thought they were explicit enough that we should keep them hidden—who knows what would happen if Dark Deanna came upon a magazine with drawings showing John and Yoko having sex. I was really glad I hadn’t shown Marie the Polaroid.

  “Did you like it?” he asked, hopeful.

  “I did. Lots of interesting things in that whole magazine.”

  “They’re kind of in-your-face, and they’re John’s and not Yoko’s, but I thought you’d be mature enough to enjoy them for what they were. If you want to be an artist now …”

  “I get it. I’m no prude. It’s just …” They gave me that freaky electric-blue feeling I’d started having more and more around Jim. I felt like I wouldn’t be able to look at them in front of him. That made no sense, considering the centerfolds at the garage. But those were just photos of naked people trying to act sexy for the camera.

  These drawings were—I don’t know. Somehow more intimate. And the drawings of Yoko were vague, loose enough, that they could almost be of me, and I’d never struck any of those kinds of poses, in my whole life. Not even alone, in the mirror, where I sometimes tried out what I thought were sexy faces and gestures. Even though they were drawings, somehow they were erotic. But the thought of saying that to anyone, especially to Jim, here, alone together, gave me those sharp blue shocks again.

  “Thanks, Jim, for everything,” I said, hoping that would encompass the magazine without needing to say anything more, outright. I leaned in to kiss his cheek. As my lips touched his skin, he turned. I didn’t move away, and our lips found each other’s.

  I was surprised, at so many things. That he did it. That his lips were coarse like his cheek. That his mustache was bristly. It looked like it’d be soft to touch.

  But I was most surprised that when he opened his mouth, I opened mine too. I’d been so sure he’d taste like a cigar that I braced myself to pull back. But he didn’t, so I didn’t. He tasted like toothpaste, or something sharply minty. He reached his hand to my head and pulled me closer. At first, I thought he was going to mash my teeth against my lips, but he didn’t. He just turned me a little, and his tongue entered my mouth softly but steadily. I felt my breath come in sharply through my nose. The air was so cold, it hurt, but I was being kissed by a man who knew what he was doing. It wasn’t like those clumsy Goodbye Embraces Carson gave every now and then. Those had been intriguing; this was different. I didn’t want to stop.

  A car squealed through the distant intersection, and I pulled away. I was standing in the middle of the road. “You got some gloss on your mustache,” I said, reaching up to wipe it off.

  “It’s okay. Leave it,” he said.

  “It’s Bonne Bell Strawberry Lip Smackers!”

  “I like the taste,” he said, and laughed. He ran his tongue along his mustache.

  “Goof,” I said, laughing too. “I’ll get you some if you want.” He smiled a heart-melting smile I could stare at for hours. It gave me a shiver. “Listen, I gotta—”

  “I know. I hear it. See you tomorrow.” I stepped back and was about to hide in the bush line, when I saw that captivating look in his eyes. I got close again and raised my arms around his neck. They barely reached, and my face rubbed against the chest hair poking out though his open collar as he pulled me in and hugged me just as tight. I felt his whole body pressing up against me, and a growing firmness at my belly. No one had ever hugged me like that before, not even that time in the garage entry. I wasn’t sure I liked it, but maybe I just didn’t like it standing in the middle of Snakeline Road with a car barreling down on us in the distance.

  “Thanks, Jim,” I said, and he leaned down so we could kiss again. It would have gone on longer, but the oncoming car lights were beginning to spot the trees. I gently pulled away. He breathed out heavily and climbed into his Trans Am, and cruised off into the night.

  The noisy car in the distance got closer, so I jumped into the woods to hide, until I recognized the farty exhaust, and then the weirdo headlights. I ran out and crossed the road, my shadow on the road like a giant spider. The Trabant stopped, my sister climbed out of the passenger’s side, and Ben-Yaw-Mean peeled out.

  “What the hell are you doing on the road?” she asked, running over to me. “Weren’t you supposed to be home an hour ago? Did that bastard make you walk? If he did, I’ll kill him.”

  “No, nothing like that,” I said, putting my arm around my sister’s shoulder. “Relax. But thanks for caring.” I leaned into her. “You smell kind of funny. What is that?”

  “Binaca,” she said, sliding a little cylinder out of her back jean’s pocket. “Want some?”

  “What is it?”

  “Just open your mouth,” Marie said, popping the cap and pointing a little sprayer at me.

  “And why do you need that?”

  “You’re getting to the age where you’re going to find it useful,” she said. “Open up.” She blasted the atomizer into my open mouth. At first it stung, like my mouth had been splashed with a million little ice cubes, but then came the flavor. It was excruciatingly familiar. I felt that sudden lightning shiver again I got when Jim surprise-kissed me.

  “Where do you get that?” I asked, grinning.

  “Take this one. A gift,” she said, handing it over. “Let’s say it’s, um, a present for your entry to adult—hey, where’d you get those gloves? Nice leather.” She rubbed the soft palms of the gloves Jim had given me. “Did you boost them? Be careful. Kids, excuse me, young ladies as dark as we are always get followed around by store security.”

  “’Kay, thanks. I won’t do anything like that again.” Easy enough. Way easier than telling her I’d called the home of a man in his thirties that I knew sort of secretly, a man who’d come and helped me without question. And definitely easier than telling her that I might have come close to losing my virginity that night. Or at least that I could have, if I’d wanted to. We were silent the rest of the walk to the Shack.

  I didn’t want to trip up, so if she was quiet, I was cool with that. Inside, Marvin was watching The Monkees and our parents were already in bed.

  “How was band practice?” she asked in our room, which she usually didn’t.

  “Okay,” I said. I could handle this. “I kind of feel unnecessary, now that Susan’s a part of it. You know, her synthesizer can play drums. It’s almost like I don’t bring anything.”

  “Hey, don’t kid yourself. You bring vocables, in addition to a drum that doesn’t sound like anything on a little electronic rinky-dink piano.” She put an unfamiliar record on our turntable and lit our Listening to Music candle. This was nice of her, but truthfully, I didn’t think using either of those did much.

  I didn’t like calling them vocables, but that was the accurate term. Some older Social singers taught me those songs. They made sure I knew that after the US government tried to wipe us out, they tried to vacuum our culture right out of us, so we only remembered the sounds. Whenever I’d add a variation sound, the elder would correct me and say that we remember the sounds and keep them, to honor the dead. To honor the memory. Heavy stuff for a twelve-year-old girl, I told them, but they said if I wanted to be a part of this memory, then I had to be more than just that alone.

  Now I was more than a girl, and I remembered the vocables, but I had new sounds to make, new experiences to feel, new words to learn.

  “Carson’s looking for something to make his band unique,” Marie said. “Something to get noticed. You’re that thing. You’re the thing that gives the band its unique flavor.”

  “Like Binaca,” I said in the dark. “What a funny word. Do you know what it means?”

  “What it means?” she asked, laughing. “You’re so weird. It’s just a name. Like McDonald’s or Coke.”

  “Words always mean something,” I said. “McDonald�
��s was the name of the family that invented the fast-food burger place, before some shark named Kroc bought out their name and their recipes and ‘trade secrets,’ and Coke used to have cocaine in it.” I had taken a Social Studies class with an old hippie teacher who taught a very different version of American history.

  “Whatever, Brainiac girl. Try getting a good job with that knowledge.” I looked at the cylinder in the candlelight.

  “Binaca,” I said slowly, luxuriously bleeding the syllables, reading the label.

  “Binaca means ‘Binaca,’ ” Marie said, softer. Sometimes, she just became nicer like this and I could never predict it. She leaned over and cupped the candle flame, blowing it out. “Maybe it means ‘Cover Up Your Breath Secrets.’” We glowed green in the stereo tuner light.

  She was wrong, but I was going to keep silent. Binaca means “The Taste of Jim Morgan,” I thought, and sprayed some more into my mouth, drifting off to sleep with my tongue tingling.

  Canadian Thanksgiving came and went, and my ass was saved. Our bird was so juicy and tender. I owed the band huge for saving me from my screwup, though of course, I was still the one responsible for carrying us. But they’d been great. I started adding new songs to give everyone a fair shake at showing off what they could do. Well, almost everyone.

  That thing Maggi brought to the band? I still didn’t know exactly what to do with it. At first, I couldn’t even remember the word for the Traditional singing she’d started sprinkling in. “It’s like revocable,” she said after one practice, “just with the beginning chopped off. Like if you screw up again, your leadership is revocable.” Vocables. The remembered sounds of forgotten songs. Memory is revocable. Easy to remember when she put it that way.

  So yeah, things were decent with the band, but some ideas outside of that world had itched themselves into my brain, starting with that article Lewis and Maggi didn’t want me to see.

  “Was it all worth it?” I asked Derek when I came home to find him with a new Dad Brand black eye. My family brawls sustained, and Custard’s business was booming. I’d given intervening a shot again recently, which prompted my dad to clench the fingers of my left hand, asking me if I still loved playing the guitar, because it didn’t seem like I did from his vantage point. I was out, on that front.

  “Remember this?” Derek asked, dragging his butt-shot body to the bookshelf housing our dad’s porn stash and some dirty comics. That old Deloria paperback again, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. “But you didn’t read it the first time I showed it to you, isn’t it?”

  “I was, what? Seven?”

  “You’re seventeen now. You read it sometime in the last ten years?” I shook my head, and he tossed it to me. “Read it, and ask me again if I think it was worth it. Deloria says we shouldn’t let anthropologists onto Rez land, because they only come for their own benefit.”

  “Those the guys who get chased around in Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb–type movies?”

  “Just read it. For real this time.” I owed it to Derek to try. “Look, I ain’t asking a lot of you. You’re the golden boy, and no matter what, that’s all Dad’s gonna think. That’s fine. I get to be my own person.”

  I’d never really thought of Derek having these kinds of ideas. Until the butt shot, I thought he’d mostly skated through life, paying it almost no attention.

  “And Carson? Our world is changing. Our world,” he stressed, which I guess meant the World of Indians. “I missed the Longest Walk, and Wounded Knee, but this? Showing how screwed up it was that a restaurant named Custard’s Last Stand is doing fine? That’s something I could do. You and me, we’re different, but if you think you’re gonna coast through life because you don’t look as Indian? You’re wrong. Someone’s always gonna find out, and if it’s the wrong person who finds out, you’re gonna be screwed and not even know it.”

  “Then why’d you have to tie it to a stupid attempted robbery!” I said, something I’d never come right out with before. “That totally screwed up any believability you had.”

  “How do you think we lost this land? Now that was a robbery,” he said. “I was just making the point a little more obvious.” I had to admit, I had not gotten that, because all I could see was my brother’s bad behavior. Some of what he was saying now, though? I got immediately.

  Other parts, I just didn’t understand at all, still! Why would people do bad things to us? I know that sounded ridiculously naive, almost Lewis-level denial. But I’d heard white people talking about their Indian Princess grammas on a pretty regular basis.

  Whenever I demonstrated How to Make a Lacrosse Stick with my mom at public events? You heard fake-out, made-up connections every friggin’ time. It was usually women with giant turquoise earrings or pasty guys with big, flashy triple-row bone chokers around their necks and maybe a quahog shell facing out at the Adam’s apple, to show off the swirly purple underside we used to make wampum beads. You might see those chokers on Powwow-competing dancers, but no Rez guys would wear one as an everyday thing. How could some people be so delighted about their alleged dead gramma as proof of their connection, and then other people who interacted with us daily have such a different take?

  For sure, no one at school was claiming they had secret Indian relatives. Maybe that’s what Derek was warning about, the kinds of shit the more Indian-looking kids got sometimes, if they were alone. I suddenly wondered about the way all the Indians hung out together in school. I just thought it was because we’d grown up together, but now I had to wonder if there was more to it, if it was more a matter of survival.

  I started reading the book that night, and from the section called “Indian Humor,” I began to grasp Derek’s choices a little better. Was I planning to bust back in to Custard’s Last Stand to pick up where he left off? No, of course not. The major thing I understood clearer from Deloria was something I knew all along, but I’d never seen it written down. We make fun of ourselves and each other, trying to get someone to change the way they act without yelling. When I jabbed Lewis, I wanted him to grow a set of balls. I wanted better for him. When Derek decided to try intimidating someone dressed up as Custer, he partly thought other Indians would find that funny. When everyone from the Rez called Derek the Hamburglar, even our dad, they understood his reasons, but they thought the risks he took were too high. They wanted him to smarten up.

  I read that book cover to cover. Then Derek gave me some more stuff, including a newspaper called Akwesasne Notes. He said it was a real Indian newspaper, put out by one of the Mohawk Rezzes. From there, I found other books on Indian history and what was being called our new awakening. I even found some books dealing with Custer in our school library.

  I’d saved that newspaper story too, and every time I read it, I burned all over again. At first, I didn’t know what to do, but I made sure to get it laminated. If it pissed me off, it should be easy to piss others off too, with it. I didn’t have a plan at first, but the more I read The Notes, as Derek called it, the more ideas started itching against the back of my brain. Almost every issue covered protests at different Rezzes and the ideas behind them, the people who were organizing. Before I did anything, though, I wanted to talk with Albert.

  On Halloween, I headed to Lewis’s after school, when he and his mom would still be working. Albert was stuck giving candy to early trick-or-treaters.

  “Trick or treat!” I yelled, walking in the door.

  “Where’s your costume?” he said, gripping the bowl close. “You’re the Devil, isn’t it?”

  “Wearing it on the inside,” I said, slapping my chest. They had lame bargain-store candy like those nasty Mary Janes. Whoever thought a wad of peanut butter and molasses was a candy anyway?

  Lewis and Albert’s house was like those Historic-White-Settler-Type People attractions. Last year, we’d taken a sad field trip to a dump called Genesee Country Village. It was supposed to show “Settler” life on “the Niagara Frontier.” Tired-looking women were stuck in long dresses and
bonnets that stuck way out in front, hiding their faces in shadow. They sewed quilts and sat at spinning wheels in old wood-framed houses. Outside, men in britches, long socks, and buckle shoes cut wood or chased sheep around. No Indians. No black people. Super-accurate reflection of Settler Life. But no Rez kid needed this particular Immersion Experience. We were already deeply familiar with what our teachers called Authentic Rustic Homes. Our families and friends, like Lewis, lived in them. Minus bonnets and britches.

  “Lewis ain’t here yet. You know that, isn’t it?” Albert said, lifting the Beatles’ White Album to his face. What was he studying? It was a blank white square, with raised letters spelling out “THE BEATLES” in the lower right, with a number printed in the low leading edge. An original copy. They don’t make them like that anymore. Now the letters were printed in dull silver on a flat cover cardboard, with no more numbers.

  “I want you to come with me to Moon Road tonight. I have a plan for dealing with that asshole who runs Custard’s Last Stand.”

  “That’s your business, not mine, isn’t it? What’s it got to do with me? Wasn’t any relative of mine who tried robbing him,” he said, never lowering the album.

  “It’s important to me,” I said. He set the cover down flat on his chest and pinched his lips together, pulling in a drag on the cigarette perched there.

  “I don’t care what’s important to you,” he said, exhaling a coughing cloud. “I know what you’re thinking. You boys ain’t been around that long, but you think you been, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Yeah, but you thought pulling my ass out of that Beer Tent made me owe you one. I knew what I was doing. Eating a little grass never hurt anyone. What they call roughage.”

  “It isn’t like that.”

  “Ain’t it? What’s it like, then?”

  “Well, it’s about Veterans Day. I think we should honor—”