After mass I went to the cemetery out back and left new drawings on the graves of my father’s victims. I realized, maybe for the first time, that his victims weren’t really dead. It’s impossible to kill someone for good. As long as the people left behind remember you with fondness, they can resurrect you at any moment. You’re with them at the breakfast table. You’re with them when they lose their house keys and they remember the way you used to chastise them, gentle but incredulous.
It was cold that night, biting, but the warmth of the community provided more than enough respite. Sky and Annie and Aubrey and I climbed into the cupola above the church after the service was over. Zeke joined us. The dark pines rustled and shivered next to the open wall slats, a stark rice moon looming beside us. Sky waved a sprig of mistletoe at each of us in turn, but only Annie deigned to kiss him on the cheek.
“Does alcohol make your pubes grow?” Zeke asked the air.
Aubrey looked flabbergasted. “I hope not.”
“Why’s that?” Annie asked, eyebrows raised. “You don’t drink, do you?”
“Ack! No, no,” Aubrey said quickly. “Just, my mother does—”
“Ew!” Zeke complained loudly. “I don’t wanna know about your mom’s pubes!”
“Would you guys leave Aubrey alone?” I said harshly. “You know he’s softer than you are.”
Sky leaned over and left a noisy kiss on Aubrey’s cheek. Aubrey patted Sky on the shoulder, flustered. I grumbled, arms folded. I hated when people stole Sky’s kisses from me. Sky smiled at me deviously. He reached inside his jacket’s inner pockets, procuring wrapped Christmas candies.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” Aubrey said.
Sky handed them out anyway. Aubrey got orange candies. Annie got Red Hots. Sky dropped a plasticky square on my lap and I picked it up, reading the label, grateful that tonight’s moon was so bright. Cosmic Brownie, the label said.
Try it! Sky said.
I ripped open the plastic and a block of chocolate fell out, doused in blue sprinkles. I bit into it. It tasted like stellar explosions, like roller derbies and truck demolitions and all my favorite guitar riffs in one.
I didn’t think I’d told Sky that brownies were my mom’s favorite food. I peered at him, but he didn’t notice. He tipped a bag of Skittles into Zeke’s hand. Zeke cheered like a child, with the result that the candy spilled everywhere.
“A new year,” Annie said happily. “The Bear goes back to sleep.”
“Wasn’t Y2K supposed to kill us or something?” Zeke asked angrily.
“Why do you sound disappointed that it didn’t?” Annie asked.
“Aw, no! It’s just I knew that they were lying! You can’t trust anything you see on TV, you know why? It’s because TV’s funded by advertisements!”
“Zeke,” Annie said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know it doesn’t!”
Sky picked up the loose pine needles on the cupola floor. Sky decorated Zeke’s hair with them.
“Well, no, actually,” Aubrey said fairly, “I do think much of what we hear on the radio or see on the television is fabricated. But then,” he said in a hushed voice, apologetic, “sometimes I rather think this whole world is fabricated.”
“You’ve been watching too much Keanu!” Zeke accused.
“What’s Keanu?” I asked dully.
“No, no!” Aubrey said. “At this very moment there are physicists who believe the universe is a simulation of some sort! You see, there’s something called the Anthropic Principle—in order for this world to sustain life too many coincidences have to line up; so many that physicists have decided the universe only looks the way it does because we’re looking at it. I heard they’ve even begun testing certain numerical patterns in nature to determine whether they show signs of being generated!”
Annie and Zeke stared blankly at him. For a moment nobody said anything, and I started to feel bad for Aubrey. It wasn’t his fault he was smart and we were dumb. Sky broke the tension by raising his eyes to the cupola roof, shaking his fist at our invisible computer programmer. Everybody laughed.
“I’ve always known that,” I said, when the laughter died.
Aubrey gave me a polite look. “Known what?”
“That stuff looks the way it does because of the way we look at it,” I said. “Even you guys. If we didn’t see ourselves as separate from one other, we wouldn’t be.”
Aubrey didn’t get what I was saying. It wasn’t important, though. We decided to head home before our parents freaked out about where we’d gone. One by one we climbed down the cupola ladder, into the church. The lingering parishioners looked confused when we stepped out from behind the apse wall. Zeke was so entertained by their reactions, he laughed for five minutes straight. Annie said good night and took her siblings’ hands and jogged outside to catch up with her grandfather.
“Don’t tell my dad I was hanging out with you guys, okay?” Zeke said, hair swinging when he turned to me.
Sky tilted his head to one side. Why not?
“Just,” Zeke said, forcing nervous laughter. “Uh.” He looked away and mumbled, “Dad kind of hates your entire family.”
Sky and Aubrey exchanged confused glances, like they seriously couldn’t figure out which of their families Zeke meant. I already knew Zeke meant mine. Every time I crossed paths with Luke Owns Forty I had the feeling he wanted to cut me open, like my dad had cut his daughter open. Maybe he would have been justified. Maybe he wouldn’t have. Mary seemed to think he wouldn’t have.
“Is he alone right now?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Zeke said. “Why?”
” ‘Cause it’s Christmas,” I said. It was a day for loving people you didn’t usually love. “He shouldn’t be alone.”
It was all the urging Zeke needed. He hurried on home, leaving Aubrey and Sky and me behind.
“Well,” Aubrey said. “I’d better head back to the farm myself. Reuben likes to make a big spectacle for Serafine, it’s really quite sweet—”
Sky looked as if he’d like to see that. He patted Aubrey on the back and waved goodbye. Aubrey waved at the both of us, loping out the church doors. He very nearly bowled over Autumn Rose In Winter.
“Your family at the windmill field?” I asked Sky.
He nodded. He grabbed my hand, my favorite part of the evening, and walked me outside with him. He was so gentle with me I felt like he was bigger than me, a magic trick if I’d ever seen one.
“I’m staying with my grandma a few days after Bear River,” I said.
Sky looked up at me, curious.
“You could come if you wanted,” I said, embarrassed. “If you aren’t grounded anymore. Grandma’s always telling me to bring a friend over. I think she used to say that because she knew I didn’t have any friends. Joke’s on her now.”
Sky spent a moment looking appalled. Sky nodded at length, taking me by surprise.
“You’ll come?” I asked.
Sky grinned brightly. I had the strong feeling just then that he wasn’t grounded anymore. When Sky smiled at you, you wanted to give him things. If I couldn’t resist his smile, I didn’t know how his own family was supposed to.
Apparently they couldn’t, ‘cause the next day his dad and grandma gave him permission to take the train with me. Mary had to ask permission, too; from the clinician at the hospital, who cautioned her not to quit her meds cold turkey. I packed my regalia for the pauwau in Nevada. Uncle Gabriel told me to pack a winter coat. I hadn’t stayed on Fort Hall in two years; my old one didn’t fit me anymore. Uncle Gabriel surprised me when he opened my closet door and pointed at a new one hanging in the far back, gray, with thick sleeves.
“You didn’t think I’d send you into that icebox unprotected, did you?” he said.
Even when we were fighting, he still looked out for me.
The morning came when all of Nettlebush piled into their cars—or their neighbors’ cars, anyway—and drove to Nevada for the pauwau with the Paiute.
It was a gloomy affair, because the Paiute were a poor tribe and ours was the only one willing to make the trip this year. It bothered me to see their broken houses, their secondhand regalia. Mary nudged me, and we hauled giant slabs of bear meat and elk meat out of the back of our trunk, and we left them outside the tribal office. That was another reason our being the only visiting tribe bothered me. More visitors would have meant more help for the Paiute.
We passed the pauwau telling stories to one another and singing traditional songs to the children. At night I shared a tent with Autumn Rose and Prairie Rose, who ganged up on me and made me polish their fingernails. I thought it wasn’t fair that they got their nails painted and I didn’t. I knew Paul had stayed behind in Nettlebush, on account of staying on the rez meant the feds couldn’t arrest him for killing Dad. All the same, I spent the night on edge, listening for sounds in the next tent over. I think a part of me was convinced Mary could hurt Paul from a thousand miles away. People aren’t just their bodies, but their feelings and thoughts. We think things, and we think them carelessly, and we leave them behind to linger without us, where they affect people long after we’ve thought them.
After the pauwau was the annual Bear River memorial, another affair I found dismal, because nobody really wants to stand in a chilly valley talking about how their family got massacred a couple generations ago. But that’s exactly what we did. As a kid I never understood why it was important for us to visit Bear River every year. In a way I understood now. The past and the present were cause and effect. The world around us hardly sprang out of a vacuum, accidental and haphazard. It was shaped that way: by the hands of the people who touched it before us. And we were going to shape it for the people to come after us.
“My great-grandmother was called Pretty Eyes,” Catherine Looks Over spoke above the throng. She addressed a crowd of six or seven hundred, standing beside an obelisk-shaped monument. Shoshone from Utah and Idaho and California and Wyoming had come together for the occasion. In fact, I spotted my grandmother sitting on a folding chair at the place where the hard river met the cold creek.
If you’ve ever heard those rural myths about ornery old houses that must be haunted, children crossing the road lest they get sucked into the evil radii of their crumbling front porches, I’m pretty certain my grandmother inspired at least half of them. For starters, the Fort Hall kids didn’t call her Mrs. Gives Light at all, but Kee Kuhma Kantun; which in Shoshone more or less means Old Witch. I guess she looked something like a witch. Uncut, unbrushed gray hair fell flyaway around her shoulders and waist, tangled, streaked with strands of black. Her eyes were giant wilderness eyes; you didn’t dare look too long or they sucked you in, boiled you alive, and fed you to her pet familiar. The dramatic slope of her nose was the nook of an ancient redwood, perfect for hiding tiny fauna and will-o’-the-wisps. All she was missing was a pointed, crooked hat.
“Mother, hello,” Uncle Gabriel said.
Uncle Gabriel and Mary and Rosa and I approached Grandma Gives Light after the memorial speech. I hovered behind Mary. Grandma Gives Light didn’t stand up. Her eyes went straight to Rosa and settled there blankly. Her ancient brown aura jumped to life around its edges, calculating, alert.
“This is not one of mine,” Grandma Gives Light said. She only spoke Shoshone.
“No,” Uncle Gabriel said cheerfully, “I’m afraid she’s mine. Mother, this is Rosa. We’re seeing one another.”
It was so silent in that valley I heard the wind licking the water behind us. The longer Grandma went without speaking, the redder Rosa’s brown face turned. It got so bad that Mary of all people kneaded her shoulders in comfort.
“Foolish, foolish children!” Grandma burst out suddenly. “Everything backwards! Marry first, date later!”
“You tell ‘em, Grandma,” Mary said.
Heads turned our way at the sound of Grandma’s reedy shouts. Sky inched over to us in his fuzzy fleece jacket, looking alarmed. Grandma stopped yelling long enough to zero in on him. Her face went blank again.
“You’re always telling the kids to bring friends, aren’t you?” Uncle Gabriel said pleasantly. “This is Skylar. That won’t be a problem, Mother, will it?”
“He looks white,” Grandma said.
Sky didn’t speak a whole lot of Shoshone, but the word for “white,” Dosabite, was pretty distinct. He palmed the back of his neck with the cradle of his hand. He smiled sheepishly.
“No white man in my house,” Grandma said.
“Grandma,” I snarled, “stop being racist.”
Grandma’s eyes snapped onto me. I shrank back, feeling seven years old all over again. Me and my big mouth.
“You,” Grandma said to me. “You have not visited me in two years!”
I tucked my head into my chest. I dug my heels against the cold, hard ground. Grandma looked at Sky again. Grandma looked at me with slow dawning.
“This boy is yours,” Grandma said.
It wasn’t a question.
“Alright!” Uncle Gabriel said, clapping his hands. “Let’s head into town for lunch, and then the four of you can take the train to Fort Hall. Tell Caleb I said hi, won’t you?”
The six of us visited a tiny town called Whitney, and we stopped in a cafe with brown walls and frosted windows. Uncle Gabriel, Rosa, and Mary sat down at a corner table. Sky and me sat across from them. Grandma Gives Light sat apart from us, refusing to order from the menu, but dipped her fingers into her pocket and pulled out a handful of peanuts. She crunched with her mouth open and left shells all over the floor. I ordered eggs for Sky and hash browns for me and made Sky try the hash browns anyway. He looked at me from underneath his eyebrows in such a way that I couldn’t tell whether he was exasperated or endeared.
“Rafael! Rafael!”
Autumn Rose In Winter bounded over to our table. Her long, high ponytail bobbed behind her head. She threw her arms around my neck in an unexpected hug, winding me. Her fingernails gleamed shiny pink.
“What was that for?” I coughed.
Autumn Rose leapt back, giggling and flushed. Poor kid was always flushed. “I’m going to miss you is all!”
“It’s only four days,” I said, hesitant. Since when did people like me this much?
“Hey, Autumn Rose,” Mary said in an oily voice. “Can I get a hug, too?”
Annie caught Mary’s eye two tables over. Annie threw her a fierce warning look. Mary acquiesced.
After lunch Sky waved goodbye to his granny, who nodded curtly, like she had lockjaw. He was her baby, something told me, and parting with him was poison. Grandma Gives Light left the cafe without saying anything and it was all I could do to scurry after her, Sky’s bag and my bag hanging off my shoulder. Despite her elderly bones, her portly shape, Grandma was much faster at walking than I was. So was everybody else. Come on, it takes effort to drag your body around when it’s about the same size as a grizzly bear’s.
Grandma and Sky and Mary and me boarded a little wooden train next to a grimy clam hatchery. Mary grabbed a seat at the front of the train so she could pester the conductor, a skinny guy with big teeth who probably wasn’t paid enough for this shit. Grandma went with Mary. I sat at the far back of the car and listened to the engine humming through the wall behind me. Sky sat beside me on his knees, stashing our bags under our seats. He turned his head and put his hand on the cold glass window, like he was communing with winter or something. The train started moving, the city sliding away.
“Fort Hall’s on the Snake River Plain,” I said. “It’s good medicine out there. Cold, but good.”
Sky righted himself on the cushioned seat, swinging his legs over the side. It was weird that he was so much shorter than me, because his legs were longer. He beamed at me, making me feel shy. He put his head on my shoulder.
The train tracks sprawled across a bed of brown grass and runny brooks. The gray sky burst open with breathy mountains, silver and cloudy with sheets of quartz. A lazy snowdrift tumbled down beside our window, s
tar patterns and spoke patterns sticking damply to the glass before the heat inside the car warmed them, the water sluicing in weak trickles. Sky watched the melting snow with amazement, because he was one of those rare people who was amazed by everything, even the stuff that other people found commonplace or obtrusive. One time we went to this tiny grocery store off the turnpike and he stopped what we were doing just to stare at the soup cans on the shelves. Five-minute cheddar and chives. People really thought of everything.
I spent the two-hour train ride drawing with pencil stubs in my pilot whale sketchbook. Sky leaned over my arm and tried to peek, but I swatted his face away. Dork. Sometimes I drew Sky with a tail like a mermaid’s. Sometimes I put him in an otterskin sash, the kind that only Two-Spirit were allowed to wear in the old days, fished out of the bottoms of saltwater marshes. Even our ancestors had known that Sky was a siren. He nudged me and pointed out the window when the wooden train spiraled around the bottom of a mountainside, a taut bridge hanging high above us. He jostled my arm with excitement when the train chugged to a slow stop. We stood up along with a man in a business suit and two girls in plaid school uniforms. I grabbed our bags, and we made our way down the aisle and out the hissing doors.
Grandma and Mary stood together on the platform outside the train tracks. I took Sky’s hand and walked him over to them, wind slapping his curls, soft snow tickling our faces. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Grandma led the way through the streets of Tyhee, a city so sparse it looked less like a city and more like a heliport. We had a way’s to walk before we reached the Fort Hall outer boundaries.
“She pretends she doesn’t speak English,” I told Sky, staring at Grandma’s lumpy back. “It’s not personal. She’s old enough to remember when it was still legal to hunt us.”
Sky put his head back and smiled at me to show me he didn’t mind. I swear to God, he had only to smile and he made me feel happy. We walked for twenty minutes or so, at which point we came up on the reservation border. A big red sign stood planted in a bed of white rocks. “Welcome to Fort Hall,” the sign read. “NO TRESPASSING.” Because that made sense.
Overlooked (Gives Light Series Book 6) Page 15