by Heather Abel
six
Ishi, Last of His Tribe
On the fourteenth day of Rebecca’s tenure as a counselor, she did something unforgivable. When her girls found out, they placed their hands on their small hips. Their gaping mouths shimmered with lip balm. “No way,” Tanaya said, and six other fourteen-year-olds echoed: “No way.” “Oh god,” she said. “Oh god,” they said.
They were sitting around one of the green-painted picnic tables on the eating platform, a cement outcropping behind the kitchen door. Nobody carved initials into the picnic tables. Nobody drew cocks in black ink. They loved it here too much. All around them, kids were smearing peanut butter and jelly onto brown bread, preparing to spend the morning hiking with their counselors to a beach along the Utefork River or the smaller Marcellena Creek, where they would stay until dinner. This was Llamalo’s routine every Sunday. It was a time to be removed from the social intricacies of the camp, and counselors, discouraged from encountering other groups, signed up for the coveted and the undesirable spots. That is, if they knew the difference. Rebecca had chosen at random: the evocatively named Salamander Spit.
“What’s wrong with Salamander Spit?” she asked vaguely while scanning the honeycomb of tables for David. There he was, ass on a table, feet on the bench, laughing at something a girl had said. Over the past two weeks, she’d begun to feel like her unhappiness was his fault. It seemed there was a fixed amount of happiness allotted to the two of them. At home, a disproportionate share went to her—in proper payment for how hard she worked to please teachers and parents. But here at Llamalo, the scales of happiness tilted heavily toward him. She watched as he leaned down, cupping his hands around the girl’s ear, whispering showily, making the kids nearby lean close. All those years Rebecca had thought him unable to speak, when it seemed he’d just been choosing not to speak to her.
“Don’t you know?” Nicole asked.
Looking away from David, she noticed her camper’s peeved stance. “Don’t I know what?”
“What’s wrong with Salamander Spit. God, don’t you know?”
Well, no, she didn’t. “It’ll be fine. Why would Salamander Spit even be an option if it wasn’t fine?”
Tanaya rolled her eyes, muttered something. “Freaker,” Rebecca heard. Those nearest clasped their mouths, astonished smiles behind their hands.
Rebecca felt her eyes brimming, the rising tide of childhood come back to get her. Unlike in her actual childhood, she knew enough not to cry in front of her tormentors. “Wait here—all of you.” Walking away, she stopped in front of David, ignoring the girl gazing up at him. “Do you have a second?”
But once she led him to the Overlook, to the precise spot where Caleb had crouchingly reprimanded her, this seemed like a bad idea. She and David had hardly spoken at Llamalo, ignoring each other like at school. “Actually, never mind.” She turned.
“Hold up, Rebecca. You look—what is it?”
“It’s really nothing.”
Nat marched past them singing, followed by a line of seven-year-olds clutching lunches, hearts full of a von Trapp family crush on their leader.
“Okay, fine then,” she said, as if he’d pressured her. “Although it’s not like you can do anything about it. If you really need to know, it’s that they hate me.”
“No! Nobody hates you.” His tone was faux-incredulous, his smile wide. “That’s the thing about Rebecca. Everyone likes Rebecca.”
“They don’t.”
“Who’s they?”
When she told him—they, those girls, especially darling Tanaya—he laughed, “Oh! Oh!” He took a few steps back, as if shot, but by a revelation instead of a bullet. “I get it. It’s your first time! Your cherry popped.”
She blushed at the insinuation. “First time at what?”
“First time being hated. Disliked. Disappointing people. I can’t imagine it’s happened to you before. That’s what you’re upset about, right? That’s why you’re looking like that. Do you know how many people hate me? Do you know how many people laugh at me?”
“Here they don’t.”
David raised his hands. “And I’m here what? Seven weeks of the year. Round it up to two months. You look surprised. David can round up? I thought he failed math.”
“No, I—”
“No worries. Anyway, that leaves ten months not here. Out of twelve. So five-sixths of my life, people are laughing at me. Ignoring me, at best. My dad sitting me down, saying I’m ruining his life, because he can’t figure out what he did wrong with me. The problem is—the problem is, Rebecca—you’re so good you’ve never had the wild fortune of experiencing this before. Honestly, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
No examples rose to the still surface of her do-gooder’s brain.
David grinned. “We both know, right? When you took those rubber bands off your teeth. That was your grand transgression. Your life’s single misdemeanor.”
“David, we’re heading off,” Scott called. “You ready?”
“Indeed! Just a sec!” Turning to her: “Rebecca. It’ll be fine. I promise. The world doesn’t end when someone hates you. You can trust me on that.” David started walking away backward. He was joyful, flamboyant with his limbs.
Caught off guard by his gentleness and that he’d referenced their shared past—she hadn’t known he remembered any of it—she found herself calling, “But wait. What should I do?”
“Take them to the river. Have fun! Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em if they don’t like you. Think of your people, Rebecca. All those heroes of yours you put all over your room. Your Emma Goldman. Your Rosa Whatever-Her-Name. What about Ira? Your own dad? Isn’t that what you like about all of them? That they don’t give a flying fuck?”
As she watched him leave, with his gangly stroll that had once seemed so embarrassing and now seemed simply relaxed, Rebecca became gripped by an appalling thought. What if she’d been doing it all wrong?
Like the prow of a boat, Nicole, Tanaya, and Shauna led the way down the steep path toward the river, the other girls and Rebecca in their wake. They were descending a red canyon, passing the gnarled shapes of sagebrush. The air was thin and hot. A single bald-headed mountain towered above them. But did the girls notice any of this? Shauna stepped on a lupine. Jenny P. picked a columbine and then dropped it.
As the trail turned to follow the river, Rebecca could see, all along the shoreline, first one group from camp and then another already spread out under the shade of tamarisk or floating in the green water. But Salamander Spit turned out to be, unsurprisingly, neither shaded nor sandy. Just a length of sun-blasted shore with small cement-colored rocks and the occasional rusted, crushed can. Even the river seemed stale here, brown and shallow. Just downstream, the river narrowed and bucked dangerously, pushing between boulders that balanced atop each other, as if frozen midtumble. Upstream, two strands of barbed wire were hung with a BB-pimpled sign: keep out. property of the tucker ranch.
Rebecca caught up to the girls assessing their bad luck and dropped her pack. The back of her shirt was soaked with sweat. “It’s going to be fine,” she said, holding her shirt from her skin. “I brought cards, you know.”
“Cards?” Tanaya said.
“I might already have heatstroke,” Shauna said.
“How about we just go back to camp?” Tanaya said.
Rebecca removed a gray plastic canteen from her backpack and told the girls to drink. She saw that upstream, beyond the barbed wire, beauty resumed. A single cottonwood cast its leafy umbrella over the beach. Large flat stones, perfect for lying on, jutted from the water like resting seals. There, the river was deep and dark, the rocks causing it to pool into flat eddies.
“Let’s go,” Rebecca said.
“Thank god,” said Shauna.
“I mean, this way.” Rebecca walked toward the barbed wire. At the fence, she pushed down the lower wire with her foot and held the upper cord high, forming a diamond for them to crawl through. “Come on.”
/> “No way.”
“I’m not going through there.”
“We’re not allowed,” Tanaya said. “That’s someone’s property.”
And so Rebecca told them, standing with her boot on the wire, about a man named Ira Silver who walked wherever he wanted, a man who spit when he said the phrase “private property,” who bounded over no trespassing signs, proclaiming that the land belonged to everyone, this land was your land, this land was mine. She didn’t mention her scraped palm, her tincture of pride and shame—proud of him, ashamed of her own fears—as he’d pushed her through the barbed wire on Catalina Island just to have a picnic on some greener pasture beyond.
Soon they were sitting on the roots of a tree on the Tucker Ranch, enjoying its shade, eating flattened sandwiches. The girls asked her to tell them more about Ira. She described the wiretappings, the FBI file, the time he’d taken her to trespass at the Nevada Test Site, passing around her cloth diapers as a nuclear bomb exploded underground and contaminated soil hummed into the eyes and mouths of the protesters.
As the girls reconsidered their counselor, she could feel herself changing—her hair glossening and flattening, her splotchy cheeks paling, her features taking prettier form. There was, she felt, a cheapness to the transformation this time, but how would she live without it?
After they finished eating, they shucked off their halter tops and plaid shorts, exposing small fluorescent bikinis and examining each other. Oh, I love yours. No, I love yours. Rebecca realized she wasn’t wearing a suit and shoveled through her backpack, knowing already that she hadn’t remembered to pack it. Here was the always-lurking embarrassment, of doing it wrong, not knowing, forgetting the essentials. The girls began racing to the water. “Wait!” she shouted.
She didn’t know what she would say, but as they turned toward her, their ponytails bobbing, their small faces expectant, she understood that she could, right now at least, make them do anything. “We’re not wearing suits here.”
They tittered.
“No, really. It’s a Llamalo rule. At the Tucker Ranch, suits are completely forbidden.”
They looked around as if she might have read a sign they’d missed.
“I’m serious about this.”
She bent down to unlace the double knots of her boots. She pulled off her shirt and unfastened her bra. She tugged down her shorts and underwear simultaneously and stepped out of them. All the while they stared, arms folded in front of their bodies, and in their silence, she heard the rapids, the roar of pride, the roar of shame.
Finally, Tanaya shrugged. “What are you all waiting for?” She untied the small nylon strings and there she was, a branch-like little girl, her breasts like small mounds of salt. The other girls looked carefully downward as they, too, undressed, but Rebecca couldn’t help but glance at everything they worked so hard to.
The water was colder on a naked body, greener and slippery. They hollered as they emerged, gasping for air. They were kids now, splashing each other, diving under, becoming sea creatures. The sun sloughed off a cloud, and its light hit the water, turning algae into glitter. After a while, Rebecca climbed out of the water and onto a rock. There was bird shit on it, along with brittle dried grasses, but she lay down. They climbed up after her and stretched out on rocks near her, panting with the effort, pressing their wet hair against the white-streaked shit and sand. She sat up and saw, against so much skin, little hillocks of fur like hidden animals.
“Tell us more,” they said. “Did you really never see TV? Not even The Facts of Life?”
“What’s that?” She said this just to please them.
They asked her for more stories, but she was, perhaps for the first time, bored of her own history and aware of how at turns strident and coyly naïve she would become in the telling of it. Her limbs were suddenly weighty, as if she’d been swimming against rapids, and she wanted nothing but the press of her chilled skin against the heat of this rock.
“Imagine the Indians who lived here first,” Rebecca finally said.
They were quiet, and she realized they might start laughing at her, but Jenny L. asked, “Where’d they go?”
She told them the story of Ishi: Last of His Tribe, which was one of the books she’d brought, although, since she hadn’t read it for nearly a decade she worried she might be confusing it with Island of the Blue Dolphins. Ishi, she explained, had been wholly insulated from the white world until the rest of his tribe died one by one from something. He only knew the Indian language and the Indian way of cooking with manzanita branches, but he’d heard that there was a world out there, and he understood he couldn’t live alone. He walked over mountains and across rivers, eating his manzanita berries.
Here she paused, still expecting their derision, but Jenny P. said, “So? What happened to him?”
Ishi, Rebecca ad libbed, having forgotten this part entirely, made it to Redding, California, where he saw buses and electricity and sandwiches. In the end, though, a professor brought him to a museum, and he spent his days on a Navajo rug, under a sign that said last living indian.
Rebecca’s girls wanted to hear another story, to stay all night, to sleep on the boulders, to never return to camp or put on clothes again, but she wouldn’t defy all the rules. When they had dressed and become teenagers again, sexier with short shorts on than without, she said, testing them, “How about we pretend we’re Ishi while we’re walking back. We’re Ishi, walking to find the people who we think will rescue us but who will imprison us instead.”
They bent to crawl through the barbed wire, and as they stood they were each of them Ishi, walking alone and silently, assessing all they were losing. On the trail above the river, they came upon another camp group, but Rebecca’s girls wouldn’t look at them, wouldn’t respond to their calls, couldn’t even understand their language.
Rebecca, too, was Ishi, the last of her tribe, walking up the hill to become an exhibit in a museum. She thought she would always like to feel this loneliness, with her lonely girls following her. Now they saw what they hadn’t seen on the hike down: A clique of black-eyed Susans. Bees humming over a pool of blue lupine. The trembling lips of columbine. And high and gray above them, the single mountain, as lonely as they were.
Of course, once they returned to camp, the spell of the cool river was gone and they were brats again, pushing to be first across the bridge, whispering loudly, “Doesn’t Jenny L. walk like a ballet bitch? Hey, Jenny, why are you walking on your toes?”
They ran up to the platform while Rebecca stayed behind to sign in her charges on a clipboard hung from a nail outside the barn. Turning to leave, she saw Caleb and David approaching, arms around each other, one skinnier, one taller, two heads bowed in some intimate Llamaloian discussion. She didn’t leave.
Caleb hadn’t reprimanded her again. Instead, he’d periodically appear beside her, touching her arm and telling her the name of some nearby plant or thistle or snake, as if a linguistic gap were the source of her suffering. During these moments of focused kindness, which were like feathers falling from the sky, she couldn’t help but share in the camp’s collective crush on Caleb. He was unattainable, charismatic, at the apex of the social hierarchy. And so, whenever he leaned over her, smelling of onion and sweat, she would wonder—as she was sure they all did—if he might be noting her particular charms, if he might take her aside and . . .
But the fantasy never had time to develop, because as suddenly as he appeared, he would turn away from her and focus on someone else.
The only person Caleb singled out for particular attention was David. And David glowed inside it.
She watched them. The afternoon wind swarmed the mesa, bending the sagebrush, shivering through the willows along the ditch, filling her with the world’s longing. She was familiar with the way the world’s longing can choose to inhabit you in the late afternoon. She’d lain in her dorm room, listening to the Weavers, nearly overwhelmed by wanting something undefined, and she was sure that’s what s
he felt now. The sweet pain of being a surrogate for desire.
What held her here? Surely not David. Could Rebecca notice his appeal only now that Nat had said she’d fuck him? Or did Caleb, as he walked around camp with his arm around David, transfer not just attention, but attractiveness as well? An exchange of the pheromones and ease that made Caleb so mesmerizing? Or maybe it was just the muscular beauty of a body wanting to be in exactly the landscape it’s in.
“David,” she called. He pulled away from Caleb, who waved and walked on toward the infirmary teepee. Close by, David touched her hair. “So you swam. In a goddamn river. In Colo-fucking-rado. Don’t tell me it all sucked.” She could see the white islands of callus on his palms, the golden hairs on his arms, the down above his lip.
“Come here,” She walked inside the barn, surprised by the sudden dimness, the sweet smell of hay. He hesitated in the entrance. From where she stood, it looked like he was in a church, within a rectangle of sunlight.
“What?” He began walking toward her.
“Over here.” Along the wall behind her, rakes and hoes and shovels hung over stenciled shadows of rakes and hoes and shovels.
She lost her nerve. “Nothing, never mind. Just wanted to tell you that I didn’t give a fuck, and they loved me. So, actually, maybe I did. Give a fuck that is. If not giving a fuck is in the interest of getting them to love me, then it’s not not giving a fuck, right?”
“No, right, true. Not giving a fuck has no ulterior aim and is a state only attainable by masters of fuck-it-ness. But Rebecca, for your first attempt, we salute you!”
Him and what queen? There was a terrible pause. Surely, he was wondering why she’d led him in the dark to tell him this fascinating report of her day. “Well, okay,” she said, heading back to the daylight. On the way through the door, he brushed against her shoulder, causing within her an electric twinge, like a mosquito in the zapper on the porch, like the smell of burned hair.