by Jodi Picoult
My own weapon has been specially made by Concise. Having pulled the metal tip off a number two pencil, he's inserted a sharpened staple to the eraser end, and placed a fan of cigarette batting in the other side. The dart, jammed into the hollow tube of a Bic pen, can be blown into the eye of an enemy at close range.
It is amazing to me, as we line up for rec, that the DOs do not realize what is going on. Everyone has a weapon packed somewhere under their stripes. Once we get to the yard, we congregate in larger groups than normal--no one wants to be separated from his allies. No one touches the basketball.
"Stay cool," Concise whispers to me. My heart is as thick as a sponge, and sweat breaks out behind my ears, in the cool crevice where my hair once was.
I do not see it coming, the sap that sings like a hummingbird and whacks me on my left temple. As I fall I am vaguely aware of the rush of bodies that push past me, the overgrown jungle of their feet. The officer's voice is high as a child's. Multiple inmates involved in a fight on the rec yard. Backup needed immediately.
The window of the multipurpose room, which overlooks the rec yard, is suddenly full of faces pressed to the glass. Guards stream through the adjacent door, trying to pull apart the blacks and browns and whites whose limbs are knotted together. Violence up close has a smell, like coppered blood and charcoal burning. I inch backward, shaking fiercely.
An opening in the wall of flesh spits a body into the space beside me. Sticks lifts his face and his eyes light up.
The strangest details register: the locker-room smell of the pavement underneath me; the cut on Sticks's shoulder that is shaped like Florida; the way he has lost one shoe. My legs tremble as I back away from him. My hand curls around the blow dart.
When he smiles at me, his teeth are covered in blood. "Nigger-lover," he says, and he holds up a zip gun in his left hand.
I know what it is, because Concise had wanted to make one, but couldn't get a bullet smuggled in in time. You grind off the top and bottom of an asthma inhaler, and then tear the thin metal open. Flatten it; roll it around a pencil to make a tube that fits a .22-caliber shell like a sheath. Wrap it in cloth, and enclose it in one hand; in your other, hold the firing pin--anything that can hit the rim of the bullet's casing when you smack one hand against the other. It is deadly accurate at a five-foot range.
I watch Sticks take a bent piece of metal--a handcuff key, I realize--and position it in his right hand. He spreads his fists apart.
In slow motion I lift the tube of the Bic pen and seal my mouth over one end. The blow dart flies at Sticks, the staple embedding deep in his right eye.
He rolls away, screaming; and with trembling hands I stuff the Bic pen tube down a drainage gate. The DOs begin to loose pepper spray that blinds me. When I hear something skitter by my ear, I try to look at it, but my eyes are the raw red of grief. I learn it by feel, the cool metal point of a miniature missile. Without hesitation, I grab the bullet Sticks has dropped.
"Easy, now," a voice says behind me. A detention officer helps me to my feet. "I saw you field the first blow. You all right?"
Somewhere between the moment I entered this rec yard, and the moment I will leave it, I have turned myself into a person I vaguely recognize. Somebody desperate. Somebody capable of acts I never imagined, until driven to commit them. Somebody I was twenty-eight years ago.
Another life in the day of a man.
I nod at the officer and bring my hand to my mouth, pretending to wipe off saliva. Then, untucking the bullet from the pouch of my cheek, I swallow.
V
The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Fire of Drift-wood"
Delia
Ruthann tells Sophie that when she was a child, Hopi girls would wear their hair in whorls, intricately twisted buns above each ear. She parts Sophie's hair, ropes each side, and coils it tight. "There," she announces. "You look just like a kuwanyauma."
"What's that?" Sophie asks.
"A butterfly, showing beautiful wings." She wraps a shawl over Sophie's shoulders, and winds two Ace bandages up her legs: makeshift moccasins. "Excellent," she says. "You're ready."
Today she is taking us to the Heard Museum in Phoenix, where a festival is taking place. She has packed the car full of old board games and broken watches, pens that need refills, vases with chips and cracks. If you have nothing to do, she told us, I could use some staff.
An hour later, Sophie and I stand in the grassy bowl outside the museum, surrounded by a collection of Ruthann's junk while she wanders through the crowd in her Barbie trench coat, flashing potential customers. People sit in folding chairs and on blankets, drinking bottled water and eating fry bread that costs four dollars. At the bottom of the outdoor pavilion is a circle, where a small canopy shades a phalanx of men bent over an enormous drum. Their voices vine together and climb into the sky.
Many of the onlookers are white, but more are Native American. They wear everything from traditional costumes to jeans and American flag T-shirts. Some of the men wear their hair in braids and ponytails, and everyone seems to be smiling. Several other girls have hair wound to the sides like Sophie.
Suddenly a dancer steps into the center of the circle. "Ladies and gentlemen," the emcee announces, "let's welcome Derek Deer, from Sipaulovi in Hopiland."
The boy cannot be more than sixteen. When he walks, the bells on his costume jingle. He has a rainbow of fringe across his shoulder blades and down his arms, and he has tied a leather band around his forehead with a matching rainbow disk in the center. He wears biking shorts under his loincloth.
The boy sets five hoops on the ground, each about two feet wide. As the drummers start throbbing out their song, he begins to move. He taps forward twice with his right foot, then his left, and in the instant it takes to blink he kicks up the first hoop and holds it in his hand.
He does the same with the other five hoops, and then begins to make them extensions of his body. He steps through two and lines the remaining three up in a vertical line, then snaps the top ones open and shut in a massive jaw. Still moving his feet, he dances out of the hoops and fans all five across the breadth of his shoulders to turn himself into an eagle. He morphs from a rodeo horse to a serpent to a butterfly. Then he twists the hoops together, an Atlas building his burden, and spins this three-dimensional sphere out into the center of the performance ring. As the drummers cry, he dances a final circle and falls down to one knee.
It is like nothing I have ever seen. "Ruthann," I say, as she steps up beside me, clapping, "that was amazing. That was--"
"Let's go see him." She pecks her way between the people on the grass, until we are standing behind the drummer's pavilion. The boy is sweating profusely and eating a PowerBar. Up close I can see that the rainbow colors of his costume are hand-sewn ribbons. Ruthann boldly picks at the boy's sleeve. "Look at these; one thread away from falling off," she tsks. "Your mother ought to learn how to sew."
The boy looks up over his shoulder and grins. "My aunt could probably fix them," he says, "but she's too busy being a business-woman to pay attention to the likes of me." He enfolds Ruthann in an embrace. "Or maybe you brought your needle and thread?"
I wonder why she hasn't mentioned that the dancer is her nephew. Ruthann holds him at arm's length. "You are turning into your father's double," she pronounces, and this makes a smile split the boy's face. "Derek, this is Sophie and Delia, ikwaatsi."
I shake his hand. "You were awfully good."
Sophie bends down toward the hoop and tries to kick at it with her foot. It jumps a few inches, and Derek laughs. "Wow, look, a groupie."
"You could do worse," Ruthann says.
"So, how are you doing, Auntie?" he asks. "Mom said ... she told me that you went to the Indian Health Service."
Something shutters across Ruthann's face that is gone almost as quickly as I notice it. "Why are we talking about me? Tell me whether I should bet
on you winning."
"I don't even know if I'll place this year," Derek replies. "I didn't have a lot of time to practice, what with everything that happened."
Ruthann nudges his shoulder, and then points to the sky. In an otherwise perfectly clear blue day, a stunted rain cloud hovers. "I think your father's come to make sure you finish well."
Derek looks up at the cloud. "Maybe so."
He bends down to give Sophie a lesson on how to lift up a hoop with one's foot, while Ruthann explains that her brother-in-law, Derek's father, was one of the first casualties in the war with Iraq. In keeping with Hopi tradition, his body was to be sent back for burial by the fourth day. But the helicopter carrying his remains was shot down, and so he didn't arrive until six days after his death. The family did their best--yucca soap was used to wash his hair, his mouth was filled with food to keep him satisfied, his possessions were placed in the grave--but it was done two days too late, and they worried that he might not make it to his destination.
"We spent hours waiting," Ruthann tells me. "And then, just before it got dark, it rained. Not all over, but on my sister's house, and on her fields, and in front of the building where my brother-in-law had gone and enlisted. That's how we knew he'd made it to the next world."
I look up at the cloud she believes is her brother-in-law. "What about the ones who don't make it?"
"They stay lost in this world," Ruthann says.
I hold up my palm. I try to convince myself that I feel a drop of rain.
"Ruthann," I ask, as we drive back from the Heard, "how come you live in Mesa?"
"Because the Phoenician just isn't swanky enough for me."
"No, really." I glance in the rearview mirror to make sure Sophie is still sleeping. "I didn't realize you had family in the area."
"Why does anyone move to a place like where we live?" she asks, shrugging. "Because there's nowhere left to go."
"Do you ever go back?"
Ruthann nods. "When I need to remember where I came from, or where I'm headed."
Maybe I should go, I think. "You haven't asked me why I came to Arizona."
"I figured if you wanted to tell me, you would," Ruthann says.
I keep my eyes on the highway. "My father kidnapped me when I was a baby. He told me my mother had died in a car accident, and he took me from Arizona to New Hampshire. He's in jail now, in Phoenix. I didn't know any of this until a week ago. I didn't know my mother's been alive the whole time. I didn't even know my real name."
Ruthann looks over her shoulder, where Sophie is curled up like a mollusk against Greta's back. "How did you come to call her Sophie?"
"I ... I guess I just liked it."
"On the morning of my daughter's naming, it was up to each of her aunties to suggest a name for her. Her father was Povolnyam, Butterfly Clan, so each of the names had something to do with that: There was Polikwaptiwa, which means Butterfly Sitting on Flower. And Tuwahoima, which means Butterflies Hatching. And Talasveniuma, Butterfly Carrying Pollen on Wings. But the one Grandmother picked was Kuwanyauma, Butterfly Showing Beautiful Wings. She waited until dawn, and then took Kuwanyauma and introduced her to the spirits for the first time."
"You have a daughter?" I say, amazed.
"She was named for her father's clan, but she belonged to mine," Ruthann says, and then she shrugs. "When she got initiated, she got a new name. And in school, she was called Louise by the teachers. What I'm saying is that what you're called is hardly ever who you are."
"What does your daughter do?" I ask. "Where does she live?"
"She's been gone a long time. Louise never figured out that Hopi isn't a word to describe a person, but a destination." Ruthann sighs. "I miss her."
I look through the windshield at the clouds, stretched across the horizon. I think about Ruthann's brother-in-law, raining on his family's fortune. "I'm sorry," I say. "I didn't mean to get you upset."
"I'm not upset," she answers. "If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it out loud. But every time, the telling is a little bit different. It's new, even to me."
As I listen to Ruthann, I start to think that maybe the math is not reciprocal; maybe depriving a mother of a child is greater than depriving the child of the mother. Maybe knowing where you belong is not equal to knowing who you are.
"Have you seen your mother since you've been here?" Ruthann asks me.
"It didn't go so well," I say after a moment.
"How come?"
I am not ready to tell her about my mother's drinking. "She's not what I expected her to be."
Ruthann turns her head, looks out the window. "No one ever is," she says.
My favorite museum, as a child, was the New England Aquarium, and my favorite exhibit was the tide pool where you got to play God. There were sea stars, which could spit out their own stomachs and grow back limbs that were damaged. There were anemones, which might spend all their lives in one place. There were hermit crabs and limpets and algae. And there was a red button for me to push, which created a wave in the tank and spun all the sea life like the clothes inside a washing machine, before letting them settle again.
I loved being the agent of change, at the touch of a finger. I'd wait until it seemed the hermit crab had just settled, and then I would push the button again. It was amazing to think of a society where the status quo meant having no status quo at all.
There was a second exhibit at the aquarium that I liked, too. A strobe, spitting over the flow of an oversized faucet. I knew it was just an optical illusion, but I used to think that in this one corner of the world, water might be able to run backward.
Ruthann puts me to work, creating her butchered dolls. One day when we are sitting around her kitchen table making Divorced Barbie--she comes with Ken's boat, Ken's car, and the deed to Ken's house--she asks, "What did you do in New Hampshire?"
I bend closer with the hot glue gun, trying to attach a button. Instead, I wind up affixing Barbie's purse to her forehead. "Greta and I found people."
Ruthann's brows lift. "Like K-nine stuff?"
"Yeah, except we worked with a whole bunch of police stations."
"So why aren't you doing it here?"
I look up at her. Because my father is in jail. Because I am embarrassed to have done this for a living, without knowing that I was missing. "Greta isn't trained for desert work," I say, the first excuse that comes to mind.
"So train her."
"Ruthann," I say, "it's just not the right time for us."
"You don't get to decide that."
"Oh, really. And who does?"
"The kuskuska. The ones who are lost." She bends down over her work again.
Is there a little girl, somewhere, being driven across a border right now? A man with a razor poised over his wrist? A child with one leg over the fence meant to keep him safe from the rest of the world? The desperate usually succeed because they have nothing to lose. But what if that isn't the case? If someone like me had worked in the Phoenix area twenty-eight years ago, would my father have gotten away with it?
"I suppose I could put out flyers," I tell Ruthann.
She reaches for the hot glue gun. "Good," she says. "Because you suck at dollmaking."
On the way to the desert, Fitz tells me remarkable stories about a heart transplant patient who woke up with a love of the French Riviera, although he'd never left Kansas in his life; of a teetotaling kidney recipient who, postsurgery, began to drink the same martini her donor favored.
"By that logic," I argue, "then the memory of seeing you for the first time gets stored in my eyeballs."
Fitz shrugs. "Maybe it does."
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
"I'm just telling you what I read ..."
"What about the guy in the 1900s who had a steel pike driven through his brain by accident?" I challenge. "He woke up speaking Kyrgyzstani--"
"Well, I highly doubt that," Fitz interrupts, "since Kyrgyzstan wasn't a country until fiv
e years ago."
"You're missing the point," I say. "What if memories get stored in the brain, and they aren't even necessarily ones we've had? What if we're hardwired with a whole iceberg of experiences, and our minds use only a tip of them?"
"That's a pretty cool thought ... that you and I would have the same memories, just because it's how we're made."
"You and I do have the same memories," I point out.
"Yeah, but my seeing-Eric-naked recollection has a whole different causal effect on my system," Fitz laughs.
"Maybe I'm not really remembering that stupid lemon tree. Maybe everyone has a lemon stuck in their mind."
"Yes," Fitz agrees. "Mine, however, is a 'seventy-eight Pacer."
"Very funny--"
"It wasn't, if you were the guy driving it. God, do you remember the time it broke down on the way to the senior prom?"
"I remember the oil on your date's dress. What was her name? Carly ...?"
"Casey Bosworth. And she wasn't my date by the time we got there."
I pull off the road, into a vista of pebbles and red earth, and then hand Fitz a bottle of water and a roll of toilet paper. "You remember the drill, right?"
He will lay a trail for Greta and me to follow, just like he's done for years in New Hampshire. But because this terrain is unfamiliar to me, Fitz will leave bits of toilet paper on trees and cacti as he goes, to let me know that Greta is on the right trail. He gets out of the car and leans down into the window. "I don't think we covered coyote protection in the training manual."
"I wouldn't worry about the coyotes," I say sweetly. "I'd be far more panicked about the snakes."
"Funny," Fitz replies, and he starts walking, a massive redhead who is going to be a hectic shade of sunburned pink in no time at all. "If Greta screws up, drive south. I'll be hanging out with the border patrol drinking tequila."