PART II

Reclaim

A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

—GERTRUDE STEIN

Bill Davis

BILL MOVES THROUGH the bleachers with the slow thoroughness of one who’s had a job too long. He slogs along, plods, but not without pride. He immerses himself in his job. He likes to have something to do, to feel useful, even if that work, that job, is currently in maintenance. He is picking up garbage missed by the initial postgame crew. It’s a job for the old guy they can’t fire because he’s been there so long. He knows. But he also knows he means more than that to them. Because don’t they count on him to cover their shifts? Wasn’t he available any day of the week for any shift? Didn’t he know the ins and outs of that coliseum better than anyone? Hadn’t he done almost every single available job over all the years he’d worked there? From security, where he started, all the way to peanut vendor—a job he’d only done once and hated. He tells himself he means more. He tells himself he can tell himself and believe it. But it’s not true. There’s no room here for old people like Bill anymore. Anywhere.

Bill makes an arc like the bill of a hat with his hand and puts it on his forehead to block the sun. He wears light blue latex gloves, holds his trash grabber in one hand and a clearish-gray garbage bag in the other.

He stops what he’s doing. He thinks he sees something come over the top rim of the stadium. A small thing. An unnatural movement. Definitely not a seagull.

Bill shakes his head, spits on the ground, then steps on the spit, pivots, then squints to try to see what it is up there. His phone vibrates in his pocket. He pulls it out and sees that it’s his girlfriend, Karen; no doubt it’s about her manboy son, Edwin.

Lately she’s been calling all the time about him. Mostly about him needing rides to and from work. Bill can’t stand the way she babies him. Can’t stand the thirty-odd-year-old baby he is. Can’t stand what the youth are allowed to become these days. Coddled babies, all of them, with no trace of skin, no toughness left. There’s something wrong about all of it. Something about the ever-present phone glow on their faces, or the too-fast way they tap their phones, their gender-fluid fashion choices, their hyper-PC gentle way of being while lacking all social graces and old-world manners and politeness. Edwin’s this way too. Tech-savvy, sure, but when it comes to the real cold hard gritty world outside, beyond the screen, without the screen, he’s a baby.

Yes, things look bad these days. Everyone talks like it’s getting better and that just makes it all the worse that it’s still so bad. It’s the same with his own life. Karen tells him to stay positive. But you have to achieve positivity in order to maintain it. He loves her though. All the way. And he tries, he really tries to see it as being okay. It just seems like young people have taken over the place. Even the old people in charge, they’re acting like kids. There’s no more scope, no vision, no depth. We want it now and we want it new. This world is a mean curveball thrown by an overly excited, steroid-fueled kid pitcher, who no more cares about the integrity of the game than he does about the Costa Ricans who painstakingly stitch the balls together by hand.

The field is set up for baseball. The grass is so short it doesn’t move. It is the oak-cork stillness of the center of a baseball. The grass is chalked with straight lines that separate foul and fair, that reach out to the stands and back toward the infield, where the players play the game, where they pitch and swing and steal and tag, where they signal and hit and strike and ball, score runs, where they sweat and wait in the shade of the dugout, just chewing and spitting until all the innings run out. Bill’s phone rings again. This time he answers.

“Karen, what is it, I’m working.”

“I’m so sorry to bother you at work, honey, but Edwin needs to be picked up later. He just can’t. You know. After what happened to him on the bus—”

“You know how I feel about—”

“Bill, please, just do it this time. I’ll have a talk with him later. I’ll let him know he can’t count on you anymore,” Karen says. Count on you anymore. Bill hates the way she can turn it on him with just a few choice words.

“Don’t put it like that. Put it on him. He needs to be able to make it on his own now, he’s—”

“At least he’s got a job now. He’s working. Every day.

That’s a lot. For him.Please. I don’t want to discourage him. The goal is to get him out there on his own, remember. And then we can talk about you being able to move in finally,” Karen says, her voice sweet now.

“Okay.”

“Really? Thanks, hon. And if you could pick up a box of Franzia on the way home, the pink one, we’re out.”

“You owe me tonight,” Bill says, and hangs up before she can respond.

Bill looks around the empty stadium, appreciating the stillness. He needs this kind of stillness—clean of movement. He thinks about the incident on the bus. Edwin. It could still make Bill laugh just to think of it. He smiles a smile he can’t contain. On his first day of work, Edwin got into it with a vet on the bus.

Bill doesn’t know how it started, but whatever happened, the bus driver ended up kicking both of them off the bus. Then the guy chased Edwin all the way down International in his wheelchair. Luckily he chased him in the right direction and Edwin made it to work on time despite getting kicked off the bus—probably because he got chased. Bill laughs out loud thinking about Edwin running for his life down International. Making it on time to work a sweaty mess. Well, that part wasn’t funny, actually. That part made it sad.

Bill walks by a metal surface on the east wall. He sees himself reflected there. He steadies his unstable, distorted reflection in the dented metal paneling, straightens his shoulders, picks up his chin. That guy in the black windbreaker, whose hair is fully grayed and receding, and whose stomach comes out a little more each year, whose feet and knees hurt when he stands or walks too long, he’s okay, he’s making it. He could easily not be making it. He’s almost always not been making it.

This coliseum, the team, the Oakland Athletics, had once been the most important thing in the world for Bill, during that magical time for Oakland, 1972 to 1974, when the A’s won three World Series in a row. You don’t see that happen anymore. It’s too much of a business now, they would never allow that. Those were strange years for Bill, bad, awful years. He’d gotten back from Vietnam after going AWOL in ’71, dishonorably discharged. He hated the country and the country hated him. There were so many drugs coursing through him then it was hard to believe he could still remember any of it. Most of all he remembers the games. The games were all he had then. He had his teams, and they were winning, three years in row, right when he needed it, after what felt to Bill like a lifetime of losing. Those were the years of Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, the bastard Charlie Finley. And then when the Raiders won in ’76, two championships that San Francisco teams hadn’t won yet, it was a really good time to be from Oakland, to feel that you were from that thing, that winning.

He got hired at the coliseum in 1989, after doing five years at San Quentin for stabbing a guy outside a biker bar on Fruitvale down by the railroad tracks.

It wasn’t even Bill’s knife. The stabbing was coincidental, it was self-defense. He didn’t know how the knife ended up in his hand. Sometimes you just did things, you acted or reacted the way you needed to. The problem had been that Bill couldn’t get his own story straight. The other guy had been less drunk. Had a more consistent story. So Bill took the fall. It was his knife somehow in the end. He was the one with a history of violence. The crazy AWOL Vietnam vet.

But jail had been good to Bill. He read almost the whole time he was in. He read all the Hunter S. Thompson he could get his hands on. He read Hunter’s lawyer, Oscar Zeta Acosta. He loved The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People. He read Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Carver and Faulkner. All the drunks. He read Ken Kesey. He loved One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He was pissed when they made the movie and the Native guy, who was the narrator of the whole book, just played the crazy silent stoic Indian who threw the sink through the window at the end. He read Richard Brautigan. Jack London. He read history books, biographies, books about the prison system. Books about baseball, football. California Native history. He read Stephen King and Elmore Leonard. He read and kept his head down. Let the years dissolve the way they could when you were somewhere else inside them, in a book, on the block, in a dream.

Another good year that came out of bad times for Bill was 1989, when the A’s swept the San Francisco Giants. When, in the middle of the World Series, just before the start of Game 3, the earth slipped. Dropped. Quaked. The Loma Prieta earthquake killed sixty-three people, or sixty-three people died because of it. The Cypress freeway collapsed, and someone drove right off the Bay Bridge, where a section had collapsed in the middle. That was the day baseball saved lives in Oakland and in the greater Bay Area. If more people hadn’t been at home, sitting around the TV, watching the game, they would have been on freeways, they would have been out in the world, where it was collapsing, just falling apart.

—

Bill looks back to the outfield. And right in front of him, floating down to his eye level, out there in the bleachers with him, is a tiny plane. Or hadn’t Bill seen one before? He has, it’s a drone. A drone plane like they’d been flying into terrorist hideouts and caves in the Middle East. Bill swats at the drone with his trash-grabber.

The thing floats back, then turns around and floats down to where he can’t see it. “Hey!” Bill finds he’s yelling at the drone. And then he turns to walk up the stairs, up to the corridor that’ll get him to the stairs that lead down to the field.

When he gets to the top of the stairs at the first deck, plaza infield, he pulls out his binoculars, scans the field for the drone, and finds it. He walks down the stairs, tries to keep it in his scope, but it’s hard while walking, the binoculars shake, and the thing keeps moving. Bill sees that it’s headed for home plate. He skips down the stairs. He hasn’t gotten moving this fast in years. Maybe decades.

Bill can see it with his eyes now. He’s running, trash-grabber in hand. He’ll destroy the thing. Bill still has fight, grit, hot blood running—he can still move. He steps onto the brown-red dirt. The drone is at home base, it’s turning toward Bill as he runs toward it. He readies his trash-grabber, raises it in the air behind him. But the drone sees him just as he gets in range. It flies back. Bill gets a hit in and sets the thing wobbly for a moment. He lifts his trash-grabber again, comes down hard, and misses entirely. The drone flies straight up, quick, ten and twenty, fifty feet in seconds. Bill gets his binoculars back out, watches the drone fly out over the rim of the coliseum.

Calvin Johnson

WHEN I GOT HOME from work I found Sonny and Maggie waiting for me at the kitchen table with dinner made and set. Maggie’s my sister. I’m just living here until I can save enough. But I like being around her and her daughter. It’s like being back at home. Home like we can’t have it anymore. Since our dad left, just disappeared. Really he hadn’t been there all along. But our mom acted like he had. Like him leaving was the end. It wasn’t really about him or any of us. She’d been undiagnosed for too long. That’s what Maggie said.

Being bipolar is like having an ax to grind with an ax you need to split the wood to keep you warm in a cold dark forest you only might eventually realize you’ll never make your way out of. That’s the way Maggie put it. She got it like me and my brother didn’t. But she’s medicated. Managed. Maggie, she’s like the key to the history of our lives. Me and my brother, Charles, we hate and love her like you end up feeling about anyone nearest to you who’s got it.

Maggie made meatloaf and mashed potatoes, broccoli—the usual.

We ate in silence for a while, then Sonny kicked me in the shin under the table, hard, then played it straight, kept eating her dinner. I played it straight too.

“This is good, Maggie, tastes like Mom’s. Isn’t this good, Sonny?” I said, then smiled at Sonny. Sonny didn’t smile back. I leaned into a bite, held it over my plate, then tapped Sonny in the shin with my foot.

Sonny broke a smile, then laughed because she’d broken a smile. She kicked me again.

“Okay, Sonny,” Maggie said. “Go get us all some napkins? I got that lemonade you like,” Maggie said to me.

“Thanks, I’m’a get a beer though. We still got some, right?” I said.

I got up and opened the fridge, thought better about the beer, then got out the lemonade. Maggie didn’t see that I didn’t get a beer.

“You can get that lemonade I got for us though,” she said.

“You gonna tell me what I can and can’t do now?” I said—and wanted not to have said it right away. Sonny got up and ran out of the kitchen. Next thing I heard was the screen door opening and closing. I got up with Maggie and went to the front room, thinking Sonny had maybe run out the front door.

Instead, there was our brother, right there in the living room, with his homie Carlos—his shadow, his twin. At the sight of them, Maggie turned around and went to Sonny’s room, where I should have followed her.

They both had forties in their hands. They sat down in the living room with the cool and cruel indifference of guys who know you owe them something. I knew he’d show up eventually. I’d called him a few weeks before to let him know I would get him the money I owed, but that I needed more time. Maggie let me stay with her on the condition that I stayed away from our brother, Charles. But here he was.

—

Charles cut a mean figure at six foot four, two forty, with broad shoulders and big-ass hands. Charles’s Chucks went up on the coffee table. Carlos put his feet up too, turned the TV on.

“Have a seat, Calvin,” Charles said to me.

“I’m good,” I said.

“Are you though?” Carlos said, clicking through channels.

“It’s been a while,” Charles said. “It’s been a long fucking while I would say. Where you been? Vacation? Must be nice. Hiding out like this. Home-cooked meals, kid running around. Playing house. With our fucking sister. What the fuck is that? I have to say, I can’t help but wonder where all that money you’re saving goes, with you being up in here rent-free. Right?”

“You know you’re not paying rent,” Carlos said.

“But you got a job,” Charles said.

“You’re making money. That money should be in my fucking pocket yesterday. In Octavio’s. You’re lucky you’re my little brother, you know that? You’re lucky I haven’t told no one I know where the fuck you run off to. But I can only take so much of that shit.”

“I told you I’d have it. Why you gotta come unannounced and shit. And keep acting like you didn’t have something to do with that shit at the powwow.” I’d gotten robbed in the parking lot before I could even go in. I shouldn’t have brought the shit with me. The pound I had then. But then I wasn’t sure if I did bring it. Or did Charles put it in my glove box? I was smoking too much then.My memory was a fucking slide shit that happened to me went down and didn’t come back up from.

“Okay. You got me. You hit the nail on the fucking head. I should never have left. You’re right. I should hustle, and pay Octavio back for some shit I got stolen from me by his homies. So thank you. You’re really helping me out here, brother,” I said. “But I can’t help but wonder why you told me I should go check out that powwow at Laney. See about our Native heritage and shit. You said Mom would have wanted us to go. You said you would meet me there. And I can’t help but wonder if you didn’t know what the fuck was coming for me in that parking lot. What I can’t get my head around is why. What’s your interest? Is it to keep me around? ’Cuz I was talking about giving that shit up? Or did your stupid ass smoke all your shit up and need mine to not come up short?”

Charles stood and took a step toward me, then stopped and made his hands into fists. I opened my hands and raised them in a take-it-easy gesture, then took two steps back. Charles took another step toward me, then looked over to Carlos. “Let’s go for a drive,” he said to Carlos, who stood and turned off the TV. I watched them walk out in front of me. I looked back down the hall toward Sonny’s room. My right eye twitched involuntarily. “Let’s go,” I heard Charles say from out front.

—

Charles drove a dark blue custom-made four-door Chevy El Camino. The thing was clean like he just washed it that afternoon, which he probably did. Guys like Charles were always washing their cars, keeping their shoes and hats clean as new.

Before Charles started the car, he fired up a blunt and passed it to Carlos,w ho took two hits off it then passed it back to me. I took one long hit and passed it back up. We drove down San Leandro Boulevard deep into Deep East Oakland. I didn’t recognize the beat that was playing, something slow and bassy, something that came mostly from beneath the backseat, from the subwoofer.

I noticed Charles and Carlos were just barely nodding their heads to the music. Neither of them would ever admit that they were dancing, bobbing their heads like that, but they were kind of dancing, dancing in the smallest possible way,but dancing, and I thought it was hella funny, and I almost laughed, but then realized a few minutes later that I was doing it with them, and it wasn’t funny, and I realized how high I was. This was some other shit, what they smoked, could have been fucking angel dust sprinkled on, they called that KJ. Shit, knowing them that’s exactly why I couldn’t stop my head from bobbing, and why the streetlights were so fucking bright, and mean seeming, and, like, too red. I was glad I only hit it once.

—

We wound up in the kitchen of someone’s house. The walls were all bright yellow. Muffled mariachi music boomed through the room from the backyard. Charles gestured for me to sit down at a table I had to slide behind, like a booth, with Carlos to my left, tapping his fingers to some other beat he was hearing in his own head. Charles was across from me, staring straight at me.

“You know where we’re at?”

“I’m guessing somewhere Octavio might end up being at, but I don’t know why the fuck you would think that was a good idea.”

Charles laughed a fake laugh. “You remember the time we went over to Dimond Park, and we went through that long sewer tube? We ran through it, and at some point there was no light, just the sound of the rushing water and we didn’t know where the fuck it came from or where it was going. We had to jump over it. You remember we heard a voice, and then you thought someone grabbed your leg, and you squealed like a little fucking baby pig, and you almost fell in but I pulled you back and we jumped and ran out of there together?” Charles said, sliding a bottle of tequila on the table in front of him back and forth. “I’m trying to get you into the position of being grabbed,” Charles said, and stopped sliding the bottle. He gripped it, held it still. “When Octavio sees your face, it’s gonna be like that, and I’m’a pull you back, save you from being taken down that long tube to nowhere. You ain’t getting outta this shit alone, you feel me?”

Carlos put his arm around me and I tried to shrug it off. Charles leaned back and let his big arms fall to his sides.

Right on cue, Octavio walked into the kitchen. His eyes turned into bullets— he shot them around the room. “What the fuck is this, Charlos?”

That’s what Octavio called Charles and Carlos because they were always together and they looked alike. It was a way to put them in their place, make them know they were both equally less important than him, Octavio, who stood six foot six, with a barrel chest and muscular arms you could see even through the triple-extra-large black T-shirt he always wore.

“Octavio,” Charles said, “take it easy, I’m just trying to remind him what’s what. Don’t trip. He’s gonna pay. He’s my little brother, Octavio, no disrespect, man. I just want him to know.”

“Know what? No disrespect? What is that, Charlos? I don’t think you even know.”

Octavio pulled out an all-white magnum from the front of his belt and pointed it at my face while looking at Charles.

“What the fuck kinda games you think we’re playing here,” Octavio said, looking at Charles, but talking to me. “You take, then you owe. You don’t pay, you lose the shit, I don’t give a fuck how you lost it, it’s gone, then you disappear and show up in my uncle’s fucking kitchen. You’re fucking crazy, Charlos. I came here to have a good time. But because you got my shit stolen, and because your brother smoked all his shit up, you both owe me, and I got into some shit with who I get the shit from, and now I owe, and we’re all fucked if we don’t make some real money, real soon.”

Octavio kept the gun pointed at me. Smoked all his shit up? What the fuck? I stared down the barrel of the gun. I went into it. Straight into the tunnel of it. I saw the way it had to go down. Octavio was gonna turn around to the countertop behind him to get a drink, then Charles would shoot up out of his chair and put Octavio in a chokehold from behind.

The gun would drop to the ground in the struggle, and Charles, he’d hold him there, turn them both around, and trying to suddenly be a good big brother, he’d yell at me, “Get the fuck out of here!” But I wouldn’t leave. I’d know just what to do. I’d grab the gun on the floor. I’d pick up the gun and point it at Octavio’s head and look at Charles.

“Give me the gun, Calvin. Get the fuck out of here,” Charles would say.

“I’m not leaving,” I’d tell him.

“Shoot him then,” Charles would say.

Then me and Octavio would catch eyes. I’d notice for the first time that Octavio’s eyes were green. I’d look into those eyes so long it’d make Octavio mad, and he’d slam Charles back into the cupboards. Then I’d tell them all how they’re gonna make Octavio drink, that he was gonna drink until he couldn’t stand up anymore. I’d tell them that if they made him drink enough he wouldn’t remember shit. We’d make the blackout so bad it would go forward and backward in time, swallow the night.

My eyes were closed. For a second I wondered if I might still be in the car, dreaming the scene from the backseat. It was a night like so many others I’d had before. Maybe I’d wake up in the backseat, we’d go home, and I’d get back to the life I was trying to make that didn’t include any of this shit.

I opened my eyes. Octavio was still holding the gun, but he was laughing. Charles started to laugh too. Octavio set the gun on the table and they hugged, the two of them, Charles and Octavio. Then Carlos got up and shook hands with Octavio.

“These are the pieces you had made?” Charles said to Octavio, picking up the white gun.

“Nah, this one’s special. You remember David? Manny’s little brother. He made them in his fucking basement. The rest just look like nines. Go on, tell him,” Octavio said to Charles, looking at me.

“You remember when I told you about that Laney powwow, you said you wanted to go because there was that big one coming up at the Oakland Coliseum, and you were on the powwow committee for work. You remember that?” Charles said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You remember what else you told me?”

“No,” I said.

“About the money,” Charles said.

“Money?” I said.

“You said there would be something like fifty thousand dollars in cash prizes there that day,” Charles said. “And how easy it would be to steal.”

“I was fucking joking, Charles. You think I would fucking rob the people Iwork with and then think I could get away with it? It was a fucking joke.”

“That’s funny,” Octavio said.

Charles lifted his head toward Octavio like: Whats up?

“That anyone would think you would rob the people you work with and think you could get away with it. That shit’s funny to me,” Octavio said.

“This is how we make it right,” Charles said.

“You’ll get a cut too, then we’ll be good, right, Octavio?”

Octavio nodded his head. Then he picked up the tequila bottle. “Let’s drink,” he said.

So we drank. We went through half the bottle, shot after shot. Before the last shot there was a pause, and Octavio looked up at me, then lifted his shot glass toward me and gestured for me to get up. We took the shot, just me and him,then he gave me a hug I forgot to return. While he hugged me, I saw Charleslook at Carlos like he didn’t like what was happening. After Octavio let me go he turned around and got another bottle of tequila from the top cupboard, then he sort of laughed at who knows what and stumbled across then left the kitchen.

Charles lifted his head up to me like: Let’s go. On the way to the car we saw a kid on his bike watching everyone from far off. I could tell Charles was almost gonna say something to him. Then Carlos tried to punk him by acting like he was gonna hit him. The kid didn’t flinch. Just kept staring at the house. His eyes were hella droopy but not just like he was high or drunk. I thought about Sloth from The Goonies. And then I thought about a movie I saw one Saturday morning when I was, like, five or six. It was about a kid who woke up blind oneday. Before, I’d never thought about the idea that you could just wake up to some terrible shit, some fucked-up shift in what you thought life was. And that’s what it felt like then. Taking those shots. Octavio’s embrace. Agreeing to somedoomed-ass plan. I wanted to say something to the kid on his bike. I don’t know why. There was nothing to say. We got in the car and rode home in silence, the low sound of the engine and road leading us toward some shit we’d never make our way back from.

Jacquie Red Feather

JACQUIE RED FEATHER FLEW to Phoenix from Albuquerque the evening before the conference started, landing after the hour-long flight in a smog-filled gradient between green and pink. When the plane slowed to a roll, she shut the window shade and stared at the back of the seat in front of her. “Keeping Them from Harm.” That was this year’s conference theme. She guessed they meant self-harm. But was the problem really suicide itself? She’d recently read an article that called the number of suicides in Native communities staggering. For how many years had there been federally funded programs trying to prevent suicide with billboards and hotlines? It was no wonder it was getting worse. You can’t sell life is okay when it’s not. This was yet another Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration conference her position as substance abuse counselor was grant-required to attend.

The woman who checked her in at the hotel had Florencia on her name tag. She smelled like beer, cigarettes, and perfume. That she was drinking on the job, or that she’d come to work drunk, made Jacquie like her. Jacquie was ten days sober. Florencia complimented Jacquie’s hair, which she’d recently dyed black to hide the gray and cut into a bob. Jacquie had never known what to do with a compliment.

“So red,” she said of the poinsettias behind Florencia, which Jacquie didn’t even like because of how even the real ones look fake.

“We call them flores de noche beuna, flowers of the holy night, because they bloom around Christmas.”

“But it’s March,” Jacquie said to her.

“I think they’re the most beautiful flowers,” Florencia said.

Jacquie’s latest relapse had not left burn holes in her life. She didn’t lose her job, and she hadn’t wrecked her car. She was sober again, and ten days is the same as a year when you want to drink all the time.

Florencia told Jacquie, who was noticeably sweating, that the pool was open until ten. The sun had gone down, but it was still ninety degrees. On the way to her room Jacquie saw that no one was in the pool.

Long after Jacquie’s mom had left her dad for good, during one of the many times her mom had left her sister’s dad, when Opal was just a baby and Jacquie was six, they’d stayed in a hotel near the Oakland airport. Their mom told them stories about moving away for good. About getting back home to Oklahoma. But home for Jacquie and her sister was a locked station wagon in an empty parking lot. Home was a long ride on a bus. Home was the three of them anywhere safe for the night. And that night in the hotel, with the possibility of taking a trip, of getting away from the life her mom had been running down with her daughters in tow, that night was one of the best nights of Jacquie’s life. Her mom had fallen asleep. Earlier she’d seen the pool—a bright blue glowing rectangle—on the way to their room. It was cold out, but she’d seen a sign that read Heated Pool. Jacquie watched TV and waited for her mom to fall asleep with Opal, then she snuck down to the pool. There was no one around. Jacquie took her shoes and socks off and dipped a toe in, then looked back up at the door of their room. She looked at all the doors and windows of the rooms that faced the pool. The night air was cool but didn’t move. With all but her shoes and socks on she walked down the pool stairs. It was her first time in a pool. She didn’t know how to swim. Mostly she just wanted to be in the water. To go under and open her eyes, look at her hands, watch the bubbles rise in that bluest light.

—

In her room she threw her bags down, took off her shoes, and laid on the bed. She turned the TV on, muted it, then rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling for a while, appreciating the blank white coolness of the room. She thought about Opal. The boys. What they might be doing. Over the past few months, after years of silence, they’d been texting. Opal took care of Jacquie’s three grandsons—whom she’d never even met.

What r u doing? Jacquie texted Opal. She put her phone on the bed and went to her suitcase to get her swimsuit. It was a black-and-white-striped one-piece. She put it on in front of the mirror. Scars and tattoos spanned and bent around her neck, stomach, arms, and ankles. There were feather tattoos on her forearms, one for her mom and one for her sister, and stars on the backs of her hands—those were just stars.

The webs she had on the tops of her feet had hurt the worst.

Jacquie walked to the window to see if the pool was still empty. Her phone vibrated on the bed.

Orvil found spider legs in his leg, the text said.

WTF!? Jacquie texted back. But the sentence did not really take. What could that even mean? She would look this up on her phone later, “Spiders legs found in leg,” but find nothing.

Yeah idk. the boys think it means something ndn.

Jacquie smiled. She’d never seen Indian abbreviated as ndn before.

Maybe he’ll get powers like spider-man, Jacquie texted.

Anything like that ever happen to you?

What? no. i’m gonna go for a swim.

Jacquie kneeled in front of the mini-fridge. In her head she heard her mom say, “The spider’s web is a home and a trap.” And even though she never really knew what her mom meant by it, she’d been making it make sense over the years, giving it more meaning than her mom probably ever intended. In this case Jacquie was the spider, and the mini-fridge was the web. Home was to drink. To drink was the trap. Or something like that. The point was Do not open the fridge. And she didn’t.

—

Jacquie stood at the pool’s edge, watching the light on the water wobble and shimmer. Her arms, crossed over her stomach, looked green and cracked. She inched down the pool stairs, then pushed lightly off and swam underwater all the way across and back. She came back up for air, watched the surface of the water move for a while, then went back under and watched the bubbles gather, rise, and disappear.

While she smoked a cigarette by the pool, she thought about the taxi from the airport and the liquor store she’d seen just a block away from the hotel. She could walk down there. What she really wanted was that cigarette after six beers. She wanted sleep to come easy like it could when she drank. On the way back to her room she got a Pepsi and trail mix from the vending machine. On her bed, she flipped through channels, landing here and there, changing the channel at every commercial break, devouring the trail mix and Pepsi, and only then, her appetite awakened by the trail mix, did she realize that she hadn’t eaten dinner. She stayed awake with her eyes closed in bed for an hour, then put a pillow over her face and fell asleep. When she woke up at four in the morning, she didn’t know what was on top of her face. She threw the pillow across the room, then got up and peed and spent the next two hours trying to convince herself she was asleep, or sometimes actually sleeping but having the dream of not being able to sleep.

—

Jacquie found a seat in the back of the main ballroom. There was an old Indian guy in a baseball cap who had one hand up like he was praying, while the other flicked water out of a water bottle at the crowd. She’d never seen anything like it before.

Jacquie’s eyes wandered the room. She studied the Native decor. The room was big, with high ceilings and massive chandeliers, each one of which consisted of a grouping of eight flame-shaped light bulbs surrounded by a giant band of corrugated metal with cutouts of tribal patterns, creating tribal patterned shadows on the walls—multiple Kokopellis, zigzag lines and spirals, all up there at the top of the room, where the paint was the brownish red of dried blood. The carpets were crowded with winding lines and variegated geometric shapes—like every casino or movie-theater carpet.

She looked around at the crowd. There were probably two hundred or so people, all of them sitting at circular tables with glasses of water and little paper plates stacked with fruit and Danishes. Jacquie recognized the conference types. Most of them were old Indian women. Next came old white women. Then old Indian men. There were no young people to be seen. Everyone she saw seemed either too serious or not serious enough. These were career people, more driven by concern about keeping their jobs, about the funders and grant requirements, than by the need to help Indian families. Jacquie was no different. She knew it and hated this fact.

The first speaker, a man who looked like he might be more comfortable on a street corner than at a conference, approached the podium. You didn’t often see men like him standing on a stage. He wore Jordans and an Adidas tracksuit. He had an unrecognizable faded tattoo above his left ear that went up to the crown of his bald head—it could have been cracks, or webs, or a half-crown of thorns. Every few seconds he opened his mouth in an oval shape and wiped the outside of it with his thumb and forefinger, as if there was excess saliva there, or as if, in the wiping, he was assuring himself he wouldn’t spit and look sloppy.

He stepped up to the mic. He spent a long, uncomfortable minute surveying the crowd. “I see a lotta Indian people out there. That makes me feel good. About twenty years ago I went to a conference like this, and it was just a sea of white faces. I came as a youth. It was my first time on a plane and the first time I was away from Phoenix for more than a few days. I’d been forced into a program as part of a plea bargain I took to stay outta juvie. That program ended up being featured at a conference in D.C.—a national highlight. They chose me and a few other youth not based on our leadership skills or because of our commitment to the cause, or because of our participation, but because we were the most at-risk. Of course all we had to do was sit on the stage, listen to youth success stories and to our youth services staff talk about how great our programming was. But while I was on that trip my little brother, Harold, found a gun I kept in my closet. He shot himself between the eyes with that gun. He was fourteen,” the guy said and coughed off-mic. Jacquie shifted in her chair.

“What I’m here to talk about is how our whole approach since day one has been like this: Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths, just like I did with my brother, or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up. I’m in suicide prevention now. I’ve had fifteen relatives commit suicide over the course of my life, not counting my brother. I had one community I was working with recently in South Dakota tell me they were grieved out.

That was after experiencing seventeen suicides in their community in just eight months. But how do we instill in our children the will to live? At these conferences. And in the offices. In the emails and at the community events, there has to be an urgency, a do-whatever-at-any-cost sort of spirit behind what we do. Or fuck the programs, maybe we should send the money to the families themselves, who need it and know what to do with it, since we all know what that money goes toward, salaries and conferences like this one. I’m sorry. I get paid outta that shit too, and actually, shit, I’m not sorry, this issue shouldn’t be met with politeness or formality. We can’t get lost in the career advancements and grant objectives, the day-to-day grind, as if we have to do what we do. We choose what we do, and in that choice comes the community. We are choosing for them. All the time. That’s what these kids are feeling. They have no control. Guess what kinda control they do have? We need to be about what we’re always saying we’re about. And if we can’t, and we’re really just about ourselves, we need to step aside, let somebody else from the community who really cares, who’ll really do something, let them come in and help. Fuck all the rest.”

Jacquie was out of the room before the audience even started its hesitant, obligatory clapping. As she ran, her name badge jangled around her neck, sliced at her chin. When she got to her room, she closed the door with her back and slid down, collapsed and sobbed against it. She pressed her eyes into her knees and bursts of purple, black, green, and pink splotches bloomed there, behind her eyes, then slowly formed into images, then memories. She saw the big hole first. Then her daughter’s emaciated body. There were little red and pink holes up and down both her arms. Her skin was white, blue, and yellow, with green veins. Jacquie was there to identify the body. The body was her daughter’s body, had been the little body she carried for just six months. She’d watched the doctors put needles in her arm then, there in the incubator, back when all she’d wanted in a way she’d never wanted anything before was for her new baby girl to live. The coroner looked at Jacquie, pen and clipboard in hand. She spent a long time staring somewhere between the body and the clipboard trying not to scream, trying not to scan up to see her daughter’s face. The big hole. The shot between the eyes. Like a third eye, or an empty third-eye socket. The trickster spider, Veho, her mom used to tell her and Opal about, he was always stealing eyes to see better. Veho was the white man who came and made the old orldwatch with his eyes. Look. See here, the way it’s gonna be is, first you’re gonna give me all your land, then your attention, until you forget how to give it. Until your eyes are drained and you can’t see behind you and there’s nothing ahead, and the needle, the bottle, or the pipe is the only thing in sight that makes any sense. In her car, Jacquie slammed the bottoms of her fists into the steering wheel until she couldn’t anymore. She broke her pinkie on the wheel.

That was thirteen years ago. She’d been sober six months then. The longest since she’d started drinking. But after that she drove straight to the liquor store, spent the next six years stomaching a fifth of whiskey a night.

She drove an AC Transit bus, the 57 line, in and out of Oakland six days a week. Drank herself into a manageable oblivion every night. Woke up every day to work. One day she fell asleep at the wheel and crashed her bus into a telephone pole. After a month in residential treatment, she left Oakland. She still doesn’t know, doesn’t remember how she got to Albuquerque. At some point she got a job as a receptionist at an Indian Health Clinic funded by Indian Health Service, then eventually, without ever achieving any significant sobriety, became a certified substance abuse counselor through an online course her work paid for.

There in her hotel room, down against the hotel-room door, she remembered all the pictures Opal had emailed her over the years of the boys, which she’d refused to look at. She stood up and walked to her laptop on the desk. In her Gmail account she searched Opal’s name. She opened each email with the paper-clip icon. She followed them through the years. Birthdays and first bikes and pictures they’d drawn. There were little video clips of them fighting in the kitchen and sleeping in their bunk beds, all in one room. The three of them crowded around a computer screen, that screen glow on their faces. There was one picture that broke her heart. The three of them lined up in front of Opal. Opal with her static, sober, stoic stare. She looked at Jacquie through all the years and all that they’d been through. Come get them, they’re yours, Opal’s face said. The youngest one was half smiling like one of his brothers had just punched him in the arm but Opal had told them all they better smile for the picture. The middle one looked like he was either pretending to or actually was holding up what looked like a gang sign with his fingers across his chest, smiling a big smile. He looked the most like Jacquie’s daughter Jamie. The oldest one didn’t smile. He looked like Opal. He looked like Jacquie and Opal’s mom, Vicky.

Jacquie wanted to go to them. She wanted a drink. She wanted to drink. She needed a meeting. Earlier she’d seen that the AA meeting for the conference would be on the second floor at seven-thirty every night. There were always meetings at conferences, it being a mental-health/substance-abuse-prevention based conference, full of people like her, who had gotten into the field because they’d been through it and hoped to find meaning in their careers helping other people not make the same mistakes they had. When she went to wipe sweat from her face with her sleeve, she realized the air conditioner had been turned off. She went to the AC unit and turned the cold air on high. She fell asleep waiting to cool down.

—

Jacquie walked into the room in a hurry, thinking she was late. Three men sat in a small circle made of eight folding chairs. Behind them were snacks that nobody had touched yet. The room was a mess of fluorescent buzzing, a smallish conference room with a whiteboard on the wall in front, off-whitish light, which encased them all in its flatness—which made everything feel like it was happening a decade ago on TV.

Jacquie went to the back table and looked at the food spread—a pot of coffee in a very old-looking auto-drip coffee maker, cheese, crackers, meat, and mini–celery sticks fanned out in a circle around various dips. Jacquie picked up a single stick of celery, poured herself a cup of coffee, and walked over to join the group.

All of them were older Native guys with long hair—two wore baseball caps, and the one who seemed like he was probably the leader of the group wore a cowboy hat. The guy in the cowboy hat introduced himself to the group as Harvey.

Jacquie turned her head away, but the face embedded in an orb of fat, the eyes and nose and mouth, they were his. Jacquie wondered if Harvey recognized her, because he excused himself, said he had to go to the bathroom.

Jacquie texted Opal. Guess who im in a meeting with rt now?

Opal responded immediately. Who?

Harvey from alcatraz.

Who?

Harvey, as in: father of the daughter I gave up.

No.

Yes.

You sure?

Yes.

What you gonna do?

Idk.

Ydk?

He just got back.

Opal sent a picture of the boys in their room, all of them lying the same way, with headphones on, looking up at the ceiling. This was the first picture she’d sent via text message since Jacquie told her not to, that she was only allowed to email pictures of them because of how it could mess with her day. Jacquiere verse pinched then pinched and repeated to see each of their faces.

Will talk to him after meeting, Jacquie texted, then switched her phone to silent and put it away.

Harvey sat down without looking at Jacquie. With a simple hand gesture, a palm facing up, he pointed to her. Jacquie wasn’t sure if this not looking at her, plus the trip to the bathroom, meant that he knew. Either way, it was her turn to tell her story or share whatever she felt like, and he would know as soon as she said her name. Jacquie rested her elbows on her knees, leaned into the group.

“My name is Jacquie Red Feather. I don’t say the I’m an alcoholic thing. Isay: I don’t drink anymore. I used to drink and now I don’t. I currently have eleven days sobriety. I’m grateful to be here, and for your time. Thank you all for listening. I appreciate all of you being here.” Jacquie coughed, her throat suddenly rough. She put a cough drop into her mouth so casually that you could tell she probably ate a lot of cough drops and smoked a lot of cigarettes, and never quite beat the cough, but beat it enough while she was sucking on a cough drop, and so ate them constantly. “The problem that became a drinking problem started for me way before the drinking was even related to it, though it was when I first started drinking. Not that I blame my past, or don’t accept it. We’d been on Alcatraz, me and my family, back during the occupation, in 1970. It all started for me there. This piece-of-shit kid,” Jacquie made sure to look right at Harvey after she said this. He squirmed in his chair a little, but otherwise just stared off toward the ground in a listening pose. “Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing, but then again maybe he went on to fuck over a whole line of women, used force to stretch a no into a yes, assholes like him, I know now, are a dime a dozen, but I suspect, from what little time I spent with him on that island, that he went on to do it again and again. After my mom died, we lived in a house with a stranger. A distant relative. Which I’m grateful for. We had food on the table, a roof over our heads. But I gave up a daughter to adoption at that time. The girl I birthed came from that island.

From what happened there. When I gave her up, I was seventeen. I was stupid. I wouldn’t know how to find her now even if I wanted to. It was a closed adoption. And since then I have had another daughter. But I fucked that up too in my addiction—fifth a night of anything ten dollars or less. Then it got so bad they told me I had to quit if I wanted to keep my job. And then, as it goes, to keep being able to drink I quit my job. My daughter Jamie was out of the house by then, so it was easier for me to fall completely apart. Insert endless succession of drinking horror stories here. Today I’m trying to make my way back. My daughter died, left her three sons behind, but I left them too. I’m trying to make my way back, but like I said, eleven days. It’s just, it’s that you get stuck, and then the more stuck you get, the more stuck you get.” Jacquie coughed and cleared her throat, then went silent. She looked up at Harvey, at the others in the group, but their heads were all down. She didn’t want to end on that kind of note, but she didn’t feel like going on. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’m done.”

The circle was silent. Harvey cleared his throat.

“Thank you,” Harvey said. He gestured for the next guy to speak.

He was an old guy, Navajo, Jacquie guessed. He took his hat off like you see some Indian men do when they pray.

“It all changed for me in a meeting,” he said. “Not one of these. These have been what’s made all the difference since. I’d been drinking and drugging for most of my adult life, off and on. Started a few different families up, let them fall by the wayside to my addictions. And then a brother of mine put up a meeting for me. Native American Church.”

Jacquie stopped listening. She thought it would help to say what she said about Harvey in front of him. But looking at him, listening to people’s stories, she figured he’d probably had a hard time. Jacquie remembered the way he’d talked about his dad on the island. How he hadn’t even seen his dad since they got on the island. Then, thinking about the island, Jacquie remembered seeing Harvey the day they left. She’d just gotten on the boat, and she saw him in the water. Hardly anyone ever got in that water. It was freezing. And—everyone had been convinced—shark-infested.

Then Jacquie saw Harvey’s little brother, Rocky, running down the hill, yelling Harvey’s name. The boat started up. Everyone had sat down, but Jacquie was standing. Jacquie’s mom put her hand on Jacquie’s shoulder. She must have thought Jacquie was sad, because she let her stay standing for a few minutes. Harvey wasn’t swimming. He seemed to be hiding in the water. And then he was yelling for his brother. Rocky heard him and he jumped in with all his clothes on. The boat started to move.

“Okay, we’re going, sit down now, Jacquie,” Vicky said.

Jacquie sat down, but kept looking. She saw the boys’ dad stumble down the hill. He had something in his hand, a stick or a bat. Everything got smaller and smaller as they made their way slowly across the bay.

“We all been through a lot we don’t understand in a world made to either break us or make us so hard we can’t break even when it’s what we need most to do.” It was Harvey talking.

Jacquie realized she hadn’t been listening.

“Getting fucked up seems like the only thing left to do,” Harvey went on.“ It’s not the alcohol. There’s not some special relationship between Indians and alcohol. It’s just what’s cheap, available, legal. It’s what we have to go to when it seems like we have nothing else left. I did it too. For a long time. But I stopped telling the story I’d been telling myself, about how that was the only way, because of how hard I had it, and how hard I was, that story about self-medicating against the disease that was my life, my bad lot, history. When we see that the story is the way we live our lives, only then can we start to change, a day at a time. We try to help people like us, try to make the world around us a little better. It’s then that the story begins. I want to say here that I’m sorry for who I was.” Harvey looked up at Jacquie, who turned away from his gaze. “I get that shame too. The kind that’s made of more years than you know you have left to live. That shame that makes you wanna say fuck it and just go back to drinking as a means to an end. I’m sorry to all the people I hurt all that time I was too fucked up to see what I was doing. There’s no excuse. Apologies don’t even mean as much as just… just acknowledging that you fucked up, hurt people, and that you don’t wanna do that anymore. Not to yourself either. That’s sometimes the hardest part. So let’s close out tonight like we always do, but let’s be sure to listen to the prayer, and say it like we mean it. God, grant me the serenity…”

They were all saying it in unison. Jacquie wasn’t going to at first, but suddenly found that she was saying it with them. “And wisdom to know the difference,” she finished.

The room cleared out. Everyone but the two of them, Jacquie and Harvey.

Jacquie sat with her hands in a pile in her lap. She couldn’t move.

“Long time,” Harvey said.

“Yeah.”

“You know, I’m going back to Oakland this summer. In a couple months, actually, for the powwow, but also—”

“Is this supposed to go like we’re normal, fine, like old friends?”

“Did you not stay to talk?”

“I don’t know why I stayed yet.”

“I know you said what we did, what I did on Alcatraz, how you put her up for adoption. And I’m sorry for all that. I couldn’t have known. I just found out I have a son too. He got ahold of me through Facebook. He lives in—”

“What are you talking about?” Jacquie said, then stood up to leave.

“Can we start over?”

“I don’t give a shit about your son, or your life.”

“Is there any way to find out?”

“Find out what?”

“Our daughter.”

“Don’t call her that.”

“She might want to know.”

“It’ll be better for everyone if she doesn’t.”

“What about your grandsons?”

“Don’t.”

“We don’t have to keep doing this,” Harvey said, and took off his hat. He was bald on top. He stood up and put his hat on his chair.

“What are you gonna say to him?” Jacquie said.

“About what?”

“About where you been.”

“I didn’t know. Listen, Jacquie, I think you should think about coming back with me. To Oakland.”

“We don’t even know each other.”

“It’s a free ride. We’ll drive all day and then through the night ’til we get there.”

“You got all the answers then?”

“I wanna do something to help. There’s no way to take back what I done to you. But I gotta try.”

“How long you been sober?” Jacquie said.

“Since 1982.”

“Well shit.”

“Those boys need their grandma.”

“I don’t know. And you sure as hell don’t know a goddamned thing about my life.”

“We might be able to find her.”

“No.”

“There are ways of—”

“God, shut the fuck up. Stop acting like you know me, like we even have anything to say to each other, like we wanted to find each other, like we didn’t just—” Jacquie stopped herself, then stood up and walked out of the room.

Harvey caught up with her at the elevator.

“Jacquie, I’m sorry, please,” he said.

“Please what? I’m going now,” she said, and pushed the already lit call button.

“You don’t wanna be sorry about this later,” Harvey said. “You don’t want to keep going that same way you been going.”

“You can’t really think you’re gonna be the one who finally turns it all around for me. I would fucking kill myself if you were the one to finally help. Do youunderstand that?” The elevator came and Jacquie got on.

“There’s gotta be some reason for all this. That we would meet like this,” Harvey said, holding the elevator by putting his arm across the threshold.

“The reason is we’re both fuckups and the Indian world is small.”

“Don’t come with me then, that’s fine. Don’t even listen to me. But you said it in the circle. You know what you want. You said it. You wanna go back.”

“Okay,” Jacquie said.

“Okay,” Harvey said. “Okay you’ll come back?”

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

Harvey let go of the elevator doors.

—

Back in her room, Jacquie lay down on the bed. She put a pillow over her face. Then, without even thinking about it, she got up and went to the mini-fridge. She opened it. It was full of shots, beer, little bottles of wine. At first this made her happy. The idea of feeling good and comfortable, safe, and all the first few, the first six could do, and then the inevitable home stretch to twelve, sixteen, because the web stuck to you everywhere you reached once you were trapped, once you started. Jacquie closed the fridge, then reached behind it and unplugged it. She slid the fridge out from under the TV, then using all of her strength, she walked the thing to the door. The bottles clanged as if in protest. Slowly, corner to corner, she made her way. She left the mini-fridge outside in the hallway, then came back in and called the front desk to tell them to come get it. She was sweating. She still wanted a drink. There was still time before they’d be up to get it. She needed to leave. She put on her swimsuit.

—

Jacquie stepped around the mini-fridge, walked down the hall, realized she forgot her cigarettes, then turned around and went back for them. When she came back out of her room, the fridge caught her shin.

“Fuck,” she said, looking down at the fridge, “you.” She looked to see if anyone was coming, then opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle. Then another. She rolled six of them into her towel. Then ten. In the elevator she held the bundle of bottles with both arms.

She walked back to the empty pool, climbed in, and stayed under until it hurt. Every time she came up, she checked on the towel bundle. There’s an ache when you keep yourself from breathing. A relief when you come up for air. It was the same when you drank after telling yourself you wouldn’t. Both broke at a point. Both gave and took. Jacquie went under and swam back and forth taking breaths when she needed them. She thought about her grandsons. That picture of them with Opal, Opal’s face, her eyes saying to Jacquie, Come get them.

Jacquie got out of the pool and went to the towel. She heaved the bundle back, then threw it high into the air, into the water. She watched the white towel slowly float down to the water, then lay flat. She watched the bottles sink to the bottom. She turned around, went out the gate and back up to her room.

The text she sent Opal was just this: If i come to oakland can i stay?

Orvil Red Feather

ORVIL STANDS in front of Opal’s bedroom mirror with his regalia on all wrong. It isn’t backward, and actually he doesn’t know what he did wrong, but it’s off. He moves in front of the mirror and his feathers shake. He catches the hesitation, the worry in his eyes, there in the mirror. He worries suddenly that Opal might come into her room, where Orvil is doing…what? There would be too much to explain. He wonders what she would do if she caught him. Ever since they were in her care, Opal had been openly against any of them doing anything Indian. She treated it all like it was something they could decide for themselves when they were old enough. Like drinking or driving or smoking or voting. Indianing.

“Too many risks,” she’d said. “Especially around powwows. Boys like you? No.”

Orvil couldn’t fathom what she meant by risks. He’d found the regalia by accident in her closet many years ago while searching for Christmas presents. He’d asked her why she didn’t teach them anything about being Indian.

“Cheyenne way, we let you learn for yourself, then teach you when you’re ready.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Orvil had said. “If we learn for ourselves, we don’t need to be taught. It’s ’cuz you’re always working.”

He saw his grandma’s head turn from the pot she was stirring. He quickly pulled out a chair and sat down.

“Don’t make me say it, Orvil,” she said. “I get so tired of hearing myself say it. You know how much I work. How late I come home. I got my route and the mail doesn’t stop coming just like the bills don’t. Your phones, the internet, electricity, food. There’s rent and clothes and bus and train money. Listen, baby, it makes me happy you want to know, but learning about your heritage isa privilege. A privilege we don’t have. And anyway, anything you hear from me about your heritage does not make you more or less Indian. More or less a real Indian. Don’t ever let anyone tell you what being Indian means. Too many of us died to get just a little bit of us here, right now, right in this kitchen. You, me.Every part of our people that made it is precious. You’re Indian because you’re Indian because you’re Indian,” she said, ending the conversation by turning back around to stir.

“So if we had more money, if you didn’t have to work so much, things would be different?” Orvil said.

“You didn’t hear a thing I said to you, did you,” she said.

Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield. A big old name for a big old lady. She’s not technically their grandma. Indian way she is. That’s what she told them when she explained why she was a Bear Shield and they were Red Feathers. She is actually their great-aunt. Their real grandma, Jacquie Red Feather, lives in New Mexico. Opal is Jacquie’s half-sister, but they grew up together, with the same mom. Jacquie’s daughter Jamie is the boys’ mom. But all Jamie ever did was push them out. Didn’t even quit using when they were in her. The three of them had all begun life in withdrawal. Heroin babies. Jamie shot herself between the eyes when Orvil was six, his brothers four and two. Opal officially adopted them after their mom died, but she’d had them plenty before that. Orvil only has a handful of memories of his mom. He’d overheard these details when his grandma was talking to a friend on the kitchen phone late one night.

“Tell us something about her,” Orvil would say whenever he got the chance, moments when Opal was in a good mood and it seemed like she’d answer.

“She’s how you all got those lousy spellings of your names,” Opal told the boys over dinner one night after Lony told them the kids were calling him Lonythe Pony at school.

“Nobody says it right,” Lony said.

“She did that?” Orvil said.

“Of course she did. Who else? Not that she was stupid. She knew how to spell. She just wanted you all to be different. I don’t blame her. Our names should look different.”

“She was fucking stupid,” Loot her said. “That shit’s weak.” He stood up, pushed his chair back, and walked out of the room. He’d always complained the most about the spelling of his name, even though people still pronounced it right. No one had ever even noticed that Orvil was supposed to be spelled Orville—with that useless extra l and e. As for Lony, it was only because Opal knew their mom, knew how she said it, that anyone anywhere knew it wasn’t supposed to be Lony as in pony.

—

Orvil manages to get the regalia on and steps in front of the full-length mirror on Opal’s closet door. Mirrors have always been a problem for him. The word stupid often sounds in his head when he looks at himself in the mirror. He doesn’t know why, but it seems important. And true. The regalia is itchy and faded in color. It’s way too small. He doesn’t look the way he hoped he would. He doesn’t know what he expected to find. Being Indian didn’t fit either. And virtually everything Orvil learned about being Indian he’d learned virtually. From watching hours and hours of powwow footage, documentaries on YouTube, by reading all that there was to read on sites like Wikipedia,PowWows.com, and Indian Country Today. Googling stuff like “What does it mean to be a real Indian,” which led him several clicks through some pretty fucked-up, judgmental forums, and finally to an Urbandictionary.com word he’d never heard before: Pretendian.

Orvil knew he wanted to dance the first time he saw a dancer on TV. He was twelve. It was November, so it was easy to find Indians on TV. Everyone else had gone to bed. He was flipping through channels when he found him. Thereon the screen, in full regalia, the dancer moved like gravity meant something different for him. It was like break dancing in a way, Orvil thought, but both new—even cool—and ancient-seeming. There was so much he’d missed, hadn’t been given. Hadn’t been told. In that moment, in front of the TV, he knew. He was a part of something. Something you could dance to.

And so what Orvil is, according to himself, standing in front of the mirror with his too-small-for-him stolen regalia, is dressed up like an Indian. In hides and ties, ribbons and feathers, boned breastplate, and hunched shoulders, he stands, weak in the knees, a fake, a copy, a boy playing dress-up. And yet there’s something there, behind that stupid, glazed-over stare, the one he so often gives his brothers, that critical, cruel look, behind that, he can almost see it, which is why he keeps looking, keeps standing in front of the mirror. He’s waiting for something true to appear before him—about him. It’s important that he dress like an Indian, dance like an Indian, even if it is an act, even if he feels like a fraud the whole time, because the only way to be Indian in this world is to look and act like an Indian. To be or not to be Indian depends on it.

—

Today the Red Feather brothers are going to get Lony a new bike. On the way they stop at the Indian Center. Orvil’s supposed to be getting two hundred dollars to tell a story for a storytelling project he read about on Facebook.

Loother and Lony sit outside in the hall while Orvil is led into a room by a guy who introduced himself as Dene Oxendene.

Dene sits Orvil down in front of a camera. He sits behind the camera, crosses his legs, leans in toward Orvil.

“Can you tell me your name, your age, and where you’re from?” Dene says. “Okay. Orvil Red Feather. Fourteen. Oakland.” “What about your tribe, do you know what tribe you are?” “Cheyenne. From our mom’s side.” “And how’d you find out about this project?” “Facebook. Said it paid two hundred dollars?” “That’s right. I’m here to collect stories in order to have them available online

for people from our community and communities like ours to hear and see. When you hear stories from people like you, you feel less alone. When you feel less alone, and like you have a community of people behind you, alongside you, I believe you can live a better life. Does that make sense?”

“Sure.”

“What does it mean to you when I say ‘story’?”

“I don’t know,” Orvil says. Without thinking about it, he crosses his legs like Dene.

“Try.”

“It’s just telling other people something that happened to you.”

“Good. That’s basically it. Now tell me something that happened to you.”

“Like what?”

“That’s up to you. It’s just like you said. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. Tell me something that’s happened to you that stands out, that you thought of right away.”

“Me and my brothers. How we ended up with our grandma, who we live with now. It was after the first time we thought our mom overdosed.”

“Would you mind talking about that day?”

“I barely remember anything from when I was younger, but I remember that day perfectly. It was a Saturday, so me and my brothers had been watching cartoons all morning. I went to the kitchen to make us sandwiches, and I found her face down on the kitchen floor. Her nose was all smashed into the floor and bleeding, and I knew it was bad because her arms were curled up at her stomach like she’d fallen down on top of them, which meant she nodded out walking. First thing I did was send my brothers to the front yard. We were living off of Thirty-Eighth then, in a little blue house with this tiny gated patch of grass that we were still small and young enough to like playing on. I got out Mom’s makeup mirror and put it under her nose. I’d seen that on a show, and when I saw that it barely fogged up, I called 9-1-1. When they came, because I told the operator about how it was just me and my brothers besides our mom, they came with two cop cars and a CPS worker. He was this old Indian guy I never saw again except for that one time. It was the first time I heard that we were Indian. He recognized that we were Indian just by looking at us. They carried our mom out on a stretcher while the social worker showed my little brothers a magic trick with a book of matches, or he was just lighting matches and it felt like magic, I don’t know. He’s the reason they called our grandma and why we ended up getting adopted by her.

He took us to his office and asked who else there was besides our mom. After talking to our grandma Opal, we left and met her at the hospital.”

“And then?”

“Then we went home with her.”

“Home with your grandma?”

“Yeah.”

“And your mom?”

“She’d already left the hospital by the time we got there. Turned out she just got knocked out from the fall. She didn’t overdose.”

“That’s a good story. Thank you. I mean, not good, but thank you for telling it.”

“I get two hundred dollars now?”

Orvil and his brothers leave the Indian Center and go straight to Target in West Oakland to get Lony’s bike. Lony rides on the back of Loother’s bike—on pegs. Even though the story had been sad to remember, Orvil feels okay about having told it. He feels even better about the two-hundred-dollar gift card in his back pocket. He can’t stop smiling. But his leg. The lump that’s been in his leg for as long as he can remember, as of late it’s been itching. He hasn’t been able to stop scratching it. — “Some shit just went down in the bathroom,” Orvil tells Loother when he gets outside Target. “Isn’t that what it’s supposed to do?” Loother says.

“Shut the fuck up, Loother, I’m serious,” Orvil says. “What, you didn’t make it in time?” Loother says. “I was sitting there in the stall, picking at that thing. You remember that lump I got? I felt something poking out of it. So I pulled, like, I just pulled one out, put it on some folded-up toilet paper, then went back in and got another one. Then one more after that. I’m pretty sure they’re spider legs,” Orvil says.

“Pfffffft,” Loother says and laughs. At which point Orvil shows him a neat pile of folds of toilet paper.

“Let me see,” Loother says.

Orvil opens up the folds of toilet paper and shows Loother.

“What the fuck?” Loother says.

“Right outta my leg,” Orvil says.

“Are you sure it’s not, like, splinters?”

“Nah, look where the leg bends. There’s a joint. And a tip. Like the end of the leg where it gets skinnier, look.”

“That’s fucked up,” Loother says. “But what about the other five? I mean, if they are spider legs, there should be eight, right?”

Before Orvil can say anything else or put away the spider legs, Loother’s on his phone.

“You looking it up?” Orvil asks him.

But Loother doesn’t answer. He just taps. Scrolls. Waits.

“You find anything?” Orvil says.

“Nah. Not even a little bit,” Loother says.

When Lony comes out with his bike, Orvil and Loother look down at it and nod. Lony smiles at their nods.

“Let’s go,” Orvil says, then puts his earphones in. He looks back and sees his brothers put theirs in too. They ride back toward Wood Street. As they pass the Target sign, Orvil remembers last year when they all got phones at Target on the same day as an early Christmas present. They were the cheapest phones they had, but at least they weren’t flip phones. They were smart. They do all they need them to do: make calls, text, play music, and get them on the internet.

They ride together in a line, and listen to what comes out of their phones.

Orvil mainly listens to powwow music. There’s something in the energy of that big booming drum, in the intensity of the singing, like an urgency that feels specifically Indian. He likes the power the sound of a chorus of voices makes too, those high-pitched wailed harmonies, how you can’t tell how many singers there are, and how sometimes it sounds like ten singers, sometimes like a hundred. There was even one time, when he was dancing in Opal’s room with his eyes closed, when he felt like it was all his ancestors who made it so he could be there dancing and listening to that sound, singing right there in his ears through all those hard years they made it through. But that moment was also the first time his brothers saw him in regalia, dancing like that, they walked in on him in the middle of it, and they thought it was hilarious, they laughed and laughed but promised not to tell Opal.

As for Loother, not counting himself, he listens exclusively to three rappers: Chance the Rapper, Eminem, and Earl Sweatshirt. Loother writes and records his own raps to instrumentals he finds on YouTube and makes Orvil and Lony listen to them and agree with him about how good he is. As for Lony, they’d recently discovered what he’s into.

“You hear that?” Loother had asked one night in their room.

“Yeah. It’s, like, some kind of chorus or choir, right?” Orvil said.

“Yeah, like angels or some shit,” Loother said.

“Angels?” Orvil said.

“Yeah, like what they have them sound like.”

“What they have them sound like?”

“I mean like movies and shit,” Loother said. “Shut up. It’s still going. Listen.”

They sat for the next couple of minutes and listened to the distant sound of the symphony, of the choir coming through an inch of speaker, muted byLony’s ears—ready to believe it was anything, anything better than the sound they had the angels make. It hit Orvil first what the sound was, and he started to say Lony’s name, but Loother got up, put a finger to his lips, then went over and gently pulled Lony’s earphones out. He put one of them close to his ear and smiled. He looked at Lony’s phone and smiled bigger and showed it to Orvil.

“Beethoven?” Orvil said.

They ride up Fourteenth toward downtown. Fourteenth takes them through downtown to East Twelfth, which gets them to the Fruitvale without a bike lane, but on a street big enough, so that even though cars get comfortable, swerve a little, and go faster on East Twelfth, it’s better than riding the gutter-edge of International Boulevard.

When they get to Fruitvale and International, they stop in the Wendy’s parking lot. Orvil and Loother take out their phones.

“Guys. Seriously? Orvil had spider legs in his leg? What the fuck?” Lony asks.

Orvil and Loother look at each other and laugh hard. Lony hardly ever curses, so when he does it’s always both super serious and funny to hear.

“C’mon,” Lony says.

“It’s real, Lony,” Orvil says.

“What does that mean, it’s real?” Lony says.

“We don’t know,” Orvil says.

“Call Grandma,” Lony says.

“And say what?” Loother says.

“Tell her,” Lony says.

“She’ll make it a big deal,” Orvil says.

“What’d the internet say?” Lony asks.

Loother just shakes his head.

“Seems Indian,” Orvil says.

“What?” Loother says.

“Spiders and shit,” Orvil says.

“Definitely Indian,” Lony says.

“Maybe you should call,” Loother says.

“Fuck,” Orvil says. “But the powwow’s tomorrow.”

“What does that have to do with it?” Loother says.

“You’re right,” Orvil says. “It’s not like she knows we’re going.”

Orvil leaves a message for his grandma when she doesn’t pick up. He tells her they got Lony’s bike, and then about the spider legs. While he leaves the message he watches Loother and Lony look at the legs together. They poke at the legs, and move the toilet paper so that the legs bend. Orvil feels a pulse in his stomach, and like something falls out of him. After he hangs up, he takes the legs, folds up the toilet paper, and stuffs it in his pocket. —

The day of the powwow Orvil wakes up hot. He covers his face with the cold bottom of his pillow. He thinks about the powwow, then lifts the pillow and tilts his head to listen to what he thinks he hears from out in the kitchen. He wants to minimize their time with Opal before they go. He wakes his brothers up by hitting them with his pillow. They both moan and roll over, so he hits them again.

“We gotta get out without having to talk to her, she might have made us breakfast. We’ll tell her we’re not hungry.”

“But I am hungry,” Lony says.

“Don’t we wanna hear what she thinks about the spider legs?” Loother says.

“No,” Orvil says. “We don’t. Not now.”

“I really don’t think she’ll care we’re going to the powwow,” Loother says.

“Maybe,” Orvil says.

“But what if she does?”

—

Orvil and his brothers ride their bikes down San Leandro Boulevard on the sidewalk in a line. At the Coliseum BART Station, they lift their bikes and carry them on their shoulders, then ride across the pedestrian bridge that gets them to the coliseum. They slow to a roll. Orvil looks through the chain-link fence and sees the morning fog clearing to blue.

Orvil leads his brothers clockwise around the outer edge of the parking lot. He stands and pedals hard, then takes off his plain black hat and stuffs it into his hoodie’s front pocket. After gaining some speed, he stops pedaling, takes his hands off the handlebars, then grabs hold of his hair. It’s gotten long. Down to the middle of his back long. He ties his hair back with the beaded hair clip that he’d found with the regalia in his grandma’s closet. He pulls his ponytail through the half-circle on the back of his hat, which latches with the snaps of six small black plastic buttons in a line. He likes the sound, the feel of it when he can get them to snap down perfectly in a row. He picks up speed again, then coasts and looks back. Lony’s in the back with his tongue sticking out from how hard he’s pedaling. Loother’s taking pictures of the coliseum with his phone. The coliseum looks massive. Bigger than it looks when you see it from BARTor driving by on the freeway. Orvil’s gonna dance on the same field that the A’s and the Raiders play on. He’ll compete as a dancer. He’ll dance the dance he learned by watching powwow footage on YouTube. It’s his first powwow.

“Can we stop?” Lony says, out of breath.

They stop halfway around the parking lot.

“I gotta ask you guys something,” Lony says.

“Just ask then, homie,” Loother says.

“Shut up, Loother. Whatsup, Lony?” Orvil says, looking at Loother.

“I been meaning to ask,” Lony says, “like, what’s a powwow?”

Loother laughs, takes off his hat and hits it against his bike.

“Lony, we’ve seen hella powwows, what do you mean what’s a powwow?” Orvil says.

“Yeah, but I never asked nobody,” Lony says. “I didn’t know what we were looking at.” Lony tugs at the bill of his black-and-yellow A’s cap to pull his head down.

Orvil looks up at the sound of a plane passing overhead.

“I mean, why does everyone dress up, dance, and sing Indian?” Lony says.

“Lony,” Loother says in that way an older brother can take you down by just

saying your name.

“Never mind,” Lony says.

“No,” Orvil says.

“Every time I ask questions you guys make me feel stupid for asking,” Lony says.

“Yeah, but, Lony, you ask hella stupid questions,” Loother says. “Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say.”

“Then say it’s hard to know what to say,” Lony says, squeezing his handbrake. He swallows hard, watching his hand grip the hand brake, then leans down to watch the brakes grip the front tire.

“They’re just old ways, Lony.

Dancing, singing Indian. We gotta carry it on,”

Orvil says.

“Why?” Lony says.

“If we don’t they might disappear,” Orvil says.

“Disappear? Where they gonna go?”

“I mean, like, people will forget.”

“Why can’t we just make up our own ways?” Lony says.

Orvil puts his hand across his forehead the same way their grandma does when she’s frustrated.

“Lony, you like the taste of Indian tacos, right?” Orvil says.

“Yeah,” Lony says.

“Would you just make some food up of your own and eat it?” Orvil says.

“That actually sounds pretty fun,” Lony says, still looking down but smiling a little now, which makes Orvil laugh, and say the word stupid in the middle of his laugh.

Loother laughs too, but he’s already looking at his phone.

They get back on their bikes, then look up and see lines of cars streaming in, hundreds of people getting out of their cars. The boys stop. Orvil gets off his bike. These are other Indians. Getting out of their cars. Some of them already in full regalia. Real Indians like they’d never seen before if you didn’t count their grandma, who they probably should count, except that it was too hard for them to tell what was specifically Indian about her. She was all they knew besides their mom, who’s too hard to think about or remember. Opal worked for the post office. Delivered mail. She liked to watch TV when she was home. Cook for them. They didn’t know much else about her. She did make fry bread for them on special occasions.

—

Orvil pulls at the nylon straps of his backpack to tighten it and lets go of the handlebars, lets the front wheel wobble, but balances by leaning back. In the backpack is the regalia that barely fits, his XXL black hoodie, which was too big for him on purpose, and three now squished peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in ziplock plastic baggies he hopes they won’t have to eat, but he knows they might have to if the Indian tacos are too expensive—if food prices are anything like the food at A’s games when it’s not dollar night. They only knew about Indian tacos because their grandma made them for their birthdays. It was one of the few Indian things she did. And she was always sure to remind them that it’s not traditional, and that it comes from lacking resources and wanting comfort food.

To be sure they’d at least be able to afford an Indian taco each, they rode their bikes up to the fountain behind the Mormon temple. Loother had just been there for a field trip to Joaquin Miller Park, and he said people threw coins in for wishes. They made Lony roll up his pants and gather all the coins he could see, while Orvil and Loother threw rocks at the community building at the top of the stairs above the fountain—a distraction they didn’t see at the time might have been worse than the fountain scraping itself. Going down LincolnAvenue after that was one of the best and stupidest things they’d ever done together. You could get going so fast down a hill there was nothing else happening in the whole world but the feeling of the speed moving through you and the wind in your eyes. They went to Bayfair Center in San Leandro and scraped out what they could from that fountain before being chased off by a security guard. They took the bus up to the Lawrence Hall of Science in the Berkeley Hills, where there was a double fountain, which they knew would be practically untouched because only rich people or monitored kids on field trips went to that place. After rolling up all the coins and turning them in at the bank, they came away with a total of fourteen dollars and ninety-one cents.

— When they get to the entrance at the coliseum, Orvil looks back at Loother and asks if he has the lock.

“You always bring it,” Loother says.

“I asked you to get it before we left the house. I said, Loother, can you get the lock, I don’t want it messing up my regalia.

You seriously didn’t bring it? Fuck. What are we gonna do? I asked you right before we left the house, you said, yeah I got it. Loother, you said, yeah I got it.”

“I must have been talking about something else,” Loother says.

Orvil breathes out the word okay and signals for them to follow him. They

hide their bikes in some bushes on the other side of the coliseum.

“Grandma’ll kill us if we lose our bikes,” Lony says.

“Well, there’s no not going,” Orvil says. “So we’re going.”

Interlude

What strange phenomena we find in a great city,
all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open.
Life swarms with innocent monsters.

—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Powwows

For powwows we come from all over the country. From reservations and cities, from rancherias, forts, pueblos, lagoons, and off-reservation trust lands. We come from towns on the sides of highways in northern Nevada with names like Winnemucca. Some of us come all the way out from Oklahoma, South Dakota, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Minnesota; we come from Phoenix, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, New York City, Pine Ridge, Fort Apache, GilaRiver, Pit River, the Osage Reservation, Rosebud, Flathead, Red Lake, SanCarlos, Turtle Mountain, the Navajo Reservation. To get to powwows we drive alone and in pairs on road trips; we caravan as families, piled in station wagons, vans, and in the backs of Ford Broncos. Some of us smoke two packs a day if we’re driving, or drink beer continually to keep ourselves occupied. Some of us, who gave up that tired life, on that long red road of sobriety, we drink coffee, we sing, pray, and tell stories until we run out. We lie, cheat, and steal our stories, sweat and bleed them out along the highway, until that long white line makes us quiet, makes us pull over to sleep. When we get tired we stop at motels and hotels; we sleep in our cars on the side of the road, at rest stops and truck stops, in Walmart parking lots. We are young people and old, every kind of Indian in between.

We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Somethingintertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum. We keep powwowing because there aren’t very many places where we get to all be together, where we get to see and hear each other.

We all came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling strands of our lives got pulled into a braid—tied to the back of everything we’d been doing all along to get us here. We’ve been coming from miles. And we’ve been coming for years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and handwoven regalia, beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided, blessed, and cursed.

Big Oakland Powwow

In the Oakland Coliseum parking lot, for the Big Oakland Powwow, there isone thing that makes many of our cars the same. Our bumpers and rear windows are covered with Indian stickers like We’re Still Here and My Other Vehicle Is a War Pony and Sure You Can Trust the Government, Just Ask an Indian!; Custer Had It Coming; We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors, We Borrow It from Our Children; Fighting Terrorism Since 1492; and My Child Didn’t Make the Honor List, but She Sure Can Sing an Honor Song. There are Schimmel Sister stickers, and Navajo Nation stickers, Cherokee Nation stickers, Idle No More, and AIM flags duct-taped to antennas. There are dream catchers and tiny moccasins, feathers and beaded miscellany hanging from rearview mirrors.

We are Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNs and Ind’ins, Status Indians and Non-Status Indians, First Nations Indians and Indians so Indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all. We are Urban Indians and Indigenous Indians, Rez Indians and Indians from Mexico and Central and South America. We are Alaskan Native Indians, Native Hawaiians, and European expatriate Indians, Indians from eight different tribes with quarter-blood quantum requirements and so not federally recognized Indian kinds of Indians. We are enrolled members of tribes and disenrolled members, ineligible members and tribal council members. We are full-blood, half-breed, quadroon, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. Undoable math. Insignificant remainders.

Blood

Blood is messy when it comes out. Inside it runs clean and looks blue in tubes that line our bodies, that split and branch like earth’s river systems. Blood is ninety percent water. And like water it must move.

Blood must flow, never stray or split or clot or divide—lose any essential amount of itself while it distributes evenly through our bodies. But blood is messy when it comes out. It dries, divides, and cracks in the air.

Native blood quantum was introduced in 1705 at the Virginia Colony. If you were at least half Native, you didn’t have the same rights as white people. Blood quantum and tribal membership qualifications have since been turned over to individual tribes to decide.

In the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein commissioned a Quran to be written in his own blood. Now Muslim leaders aren’t sure what to do with it. To have written the Quran in blood was a sin, but to destroy it would also be a sin.

The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. Not that we’re broken. And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. call an attempted murder victim resilient?

When we go to tell our stories, people think we want it to have gone different. People want to say things like “sore losers” and “move on already,” “quit playing the blame game.” But is it a game? Only those who have lost as much as we have see the particularly nasty slice of smile on someone who thinks they’re winning when they say “Get over it.” This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff. Then someone from up on the yacht says, “It’s too bad those people down there are lazy, and not as smart and able as we are up here, we who have built these strong, large, stylish boats ourselves, we who float the seven seas like kings.” And then someone else on board says something like, “But your father gave you this yacht, and these are his servants who brought the hors d’oeuvres.” At which point that person gets tossed overboard by a group of hired thugs who’d been hired by the father who owned the yacht, hired for the express purpose of removing any and all agitators on the yacht to keep them from making unnecessary waves, or even referencing the father or the yacht itself. Meanwhile, the man thrown overboard begs for his life, and the people on the small inflatable rafts can’t get to him soon enough, or they don’t even try, and the yacht’s speed and weight cause an undertow. Then in whispers, while the agitator gets sucked under the yacht, private agreements are made, precautions are measured out, and everyone quietly agrees to keep on quietly agreeing to the implied rule of law and to not think about what just happened. Soon, the father, who put these things in place, is only spoken of in the form of lore, stories told to children at night, under the stars, at which point there are suddenly several fathers, noble, wise forefathers. And the boat sails on unfettered.

If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.

Last Names

We didn’t have last names before they came. When they decided they needed to keep track of us, last names were given to us, just like the name Indian itself was given to us. These were attempted translations and botched Indian names, random surnames, and names passed down from white American generals, admirals, and colonels, and sometimes troop names, which were sometimes just colors. That’s how we are Blacks and Browns, Greens, Whites, and Oranges. We are Smiths, Lees, Scotts, MacArthurs, Shermans, Johnsons, Jacksons. Our names are poems, descriptions of animals, images that make perfect sense and no sense at all. We are Little Cloud, Littleman, Loneman, Bull Coming, Madbull, Bad Heart Bull, Jumping Bull, Bird, Birdshead, Kingbird, Magpie, Eagle, Turtle, Crow, Beaver, Youngblood, Tallman, Eastman, Hoffman, FlyingOut, Has No Horse, Broken Leg, Fingernail, Left Hand, Elk Shoulder, WhiteEagle, Black Horse, Two Rivers, Goldtooth, Goodblanket, Goodbear, BearShield, Yellow Man, Blindman, Roanhorse, Bellymule, Ballard, Begay, Yazzie.We are Dixon, Livingston, Tsosie, Nelson, Oxendene, Harjo, Armstrong, Mills, Tallchief, Banks, Rogers, Bitsilly, Bellecourt, Means, Good Feather, BadFeather, Little Feather, Red Feather.

Apparent Death

We won’t have come expecting gunfire. A shooter. As many times as it happens, as we see it happen on our screens, we still walk around in our lives thinking: No, not us, that happens to them, the people on the other side of the screen, the victims, their families, we don’t know those people, we don’t even know people who know those people, we’re once and twice removed from most of what we see on the other side of the screen, especially that awful man, always a man, we watch and feel the horror, the unbelievable act, for a day, for two whole days, for a week, we post and click links and like and don’t like and repost and then, and then it’s like it didn’t happen, we move on, the next thing comes. We get used to everything to the point that we even get used to getting used to everything. Or we only think we’re used to it until the shooter, until we meet him in real life, when he’s there with us, the shots will come from everywhere, inside, outside, past, future, now, and we won’t know right away where the shooter is, the bodies will drop, the depths of the booms will make our hearts skip beats, the rush of panic and spark and sweat on our skin, nothing will be more real than the moment we know in our bones the end is near.

There will be less screaming than we expect. It’ll be that prey-silence of hiding, the silence of trying to disappear, to not be out there, we’ll close our eyes and go deep inside, hope that it’s a dream or a nightmare, hope that inclosing our eyes we might wake up to that other life, back on the other side of the screen, where we can watch from the safety of our couches and bedrooms, from bus and train seats, from our offices, anyplace that is not there, on the ground, playing like we’re dead so not playing at all, we’ll run like ghosts from our own dead bodies in hopes of getting away from the shots and the loud quiet of waiting for the next shot to fire, waiting for another sharp hot line to cut across a life, cut off breath, bring too quickly the heat and then cooling of too soon death.

We’ve expected the shooter to appear in our lives in the same way we know death is and always has been coming for us, with its decisive scythe, its permanent cut. We half expect to feel the boom of shots firing nearby. To fall to the ground and cover our heads. To feel like an animal, prey in a pile on the ground. We’ve known the shooter could show up anywhere, anywhere people gathered, we’ve expected to see him in our periphery, a masked shadow moving through the crowd, picking people off at random, semiautomatic booms putting bodies down, sending them flailing through the broken air.

A bullet is a thing so fast it’s hot and so hot it’s mean and so straight it moves clean through a body, makes a hole, tears, burns, exits, goes on, hungry, or it remains, cools, lodges, poisons. When a bullet opens you up, blood pours like out of a mouth too full. A stray bullet, like a stray dog, might up and bite anyone anywhere, just because its teeth were made to bite, made to soften, tear through meat, a bullet is made to eat through as much as it can.

Something about it will make sense. The bullets have been coming from miles. Years. Their sound will break the water in our bodies, tear sound itself, rip our lives in half. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.

Tony Loneman

THE BULLETS WILL COME from the Black Hills Ammunition plant in Black Hills, South Dakota. They will be packed in boxes of sixteen, driven across the country, and stored in a warehouse in Hayward, California, for seven years, then stocked and shelved and bought in Oakland at a Walmart off of HegenbergerRoad by a young man by the name of Tony Loneman. The two boxes of bullets will go into his backpack. He’ll take them out again for security to check against the receipt at the exit. Tony will ride his bike down Hegenberger, across the overpass and on the sidewalk past the gas stations and fast-food chains. He’ll feel the weight and hear the jangle of the bullets at every bump and crack.

At the coliseum entrance he’ll take each of the boxes of bullets out and empty them into a pair of socks. He’ll swing and throw the socks one at a time against the wall behind the bushes past the metal detectors. When he’s done he’ll look back up at the moon, watch the fog of his breath rise between himand everything. His heart will be in his ears thinking about the bullets in the bushes, the powwow. And wondering how he had wound up here under the moon, under the looming coliseum walls, hiding bullets in bushes.

Calvin Johnson

WHEN CALVIN GETS THERE, people are doing what they always do the first hour of every powwow committee meeting he’s ever been to: making small talk and dishing up paper plates of catered Mexican food. There’s a new guy there. He’s big, and the only one without a plate. Calvin can tell he doesn’t have a plate because he’s one of those big guys who doesn’t know how to carry his weight. How to own it. Calvin’s on the bigger end of the spectrum himself, but he’s tall and wears baggy clothes, so he comes off as big but not necessarily fat.

Calvin sits down next to the big guy and gives him a slight, general what subtype head nod. The guy lifts his hand and waves, then seems to immediately regret the wave because he puts his hand back down as fast as it went up and gets out his phone like everyone does now when they want to leave without leaving.

Blue is writing or doodling at the top of a yellow legal pad. Calvin likes Blue. Her and Maggie used to work together in youth services. She’s who got Calvin the job even though he had no experience working with youth. She probably thought Calvin was a youth. Or looks like one. With his Raiders shit and sad goatee. Blue’s the head of the powwow committee. She’d asked Calvin to join the committee shortly after he got the job.

Blue said they wanted fresh new perspectives. They’d gotten this pretty big event-based grant and wanted to make this powwow big, compete with other big powwows out there. Calvin had stupidly said “Call it the Big Oakland Powwow” in one of the meetings and everyone loved it. He tried to tell them he was just joking, but they kept it anyway.

Thomas, the custodian, comes in talking to himself. Calvin smells it right away. Alcohol fumes. Then, as if Thomas knows Calvin smells him, he walks right past him to the big guy.

“Thomas Frank,” he says, and sticks his hand out.

“Edwin Black,” he says.

“I’ll let you folks get to work,” Thomas says as he takes the trash out. “Let me know if you need help cleaning up the leftovers,” he says with a tone like: Save a plate for me. Dude is weird. Awkward as fuck like he had to make you feel as uncomfortable as he always appeared to be, like he couldn’t contain it.

Blue knocks on the table twice and clears her throat. “Okay, you guys,” she says, knocking on the table two more times. “Let’s start. We have a lot to talk about. It’s already January. We have less than five months. We’ll start with the two new people, one of whom isn’t here yet, so that means you’ll start, Edwin. Go ahead and tell everyone a little bit about yourself and what your role’s gonna be here at the center.”

“Hi, everyone,” Edwin says, and puts his hand up and waves that same wave he’d waved at Calvin. “I’m Edwin Black, and well obviously I work here now, I mean, I guess not obviously, sorry.” Edwin shifts in his chair.

“Just tell them where you’re from, what’s your tribe, and your role here,” Blue says.

“Okay, so I grew up here in Oakland, and I’m, um, I’m Cheyenne, well I’m not enrolled yet, but, like, I will be, with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, my dad told me we’re Cheyenne and not Arapaho, and, sorry, I’m gonna be interning for the next few months leading up to the powwow, I’m here to help with the powwow,” Edwin says.

“We’re just waiting on one more,” Blue is saying when another guy walks into the meeting. “Speak of the devil,” Blue says.

He’s a young guy in a baseball cap with an indistinct tribal pattern on it. If he didn’t have that hat, Calvin doesn’t know if he’d have guessed he’s Native.

“Everyone, this is Dene Oxendene. Dene Oxendene, this is the powwow committee. Dene’s gonna set up a storytelling booth kinda like StoryCorps. Have y’all heard of StoryCorps?”

They all murmur various noncommittal answers.

“Dene,” Blue says, “why don’t you go ahead and say a few things about yourself before we start.”

Dene starts to say something about storytelling, some real heady shit, so Calvin tunes out. He doesn’t know what he’s gonna say when it comes around to him. He’d been put in charge of finding younger vendors, to support young native artists and entrepreneurs. But he hadn’t done shit.

“Calvin?” he hears Blue say.

Dene Oxendene

DENE CONVINCED BLUE to let Calvin do his interview for the storytelling project during work hours. Calvin keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs and pulling at his hat by the bill.

Dene thinks Calvin is nervous, but then Dene is nervous, he is always nervous, so maybe it’s projection. But projection as a concept is a slippery slope because everything could be projection. He is regularly subject to solipsism’s recursive, drowning affect.

He set up the camera and mic in Blue’s office beforehand. Blue’s on her lunch hour. Calvin is sitting still now, staring at Dene mess with the recording equipment. Dene figures out what was wrong and hits Record on the camera and on the recording device, then adjusts the mic one last time. Dene learned early on to record everything before and after, as those moments can sometimes be even better than when the interviewee knows they’re being recorded.

“Sorry, I thought we were good to go before you came in,” Dene says, and sits down to the right of the camera.

“It’s cool,” Calvin says. “What is this again?”

“You’re gonna say your name and tribe. Talk about the place or places you’ve lived in Oakland, and then if you can think of a story to tell, like something that’s happened to you in Oakland that might, like, give a picture of what its been like for you specifically, growing up in Oakland, as a Native person, what it’s been like.”

“My dad never talked about being Native and shit to the point that we don even know what tribe we are on his side. Our mom has Native blood on her Mexican side too, but she doesn’t know too much about that either. Yeah and my dad wasn’t home hardly ever, then one day he was really gone. He left us. So I don’t know, I feel bad sometimes even saying I’m Native. Mostly I just feel like I’m from Oakland.”

“Oh,” Dene says.

“I got robbed in the parking lot about to go to a powwow at Laney College. It’s not really a good story, I just got fucking robbed in a parking lot and then I left. I never made it to the powwow. So this one coming up will be my first one.”

Dene isn’t sure how to help him get to a story, and he doesn’t want to force it.

He’s glad he’s already been recording. Sometimes not having a story is the story.

“It’s like having him as a dad and not knowing, and how he fucked us up as a dad, I don’t wanna come off like I think that’s what being Native means. I know there’s a lot of Natives living in Oakland and in the Bay Area with similar stories. But it’s like we can’t talk about it because it’s not really a Native story,

but then it is at the same time. It’s fucked up.”

“Yeah.”

“When are you gonna start recording for me to say, like, whatever I’m gonna try to say?”

“Oh, I’ve already been recording.”

“What?”

“Sorry, I should’ve told you.”

“Does that mean you’re gonna use anything I already said?”

“Can I?”

“I mean, I guess. Is this shit, like, your job?”

“Kind of. I don’t have another job. But I’m trying to pay all the participants out of the grant money I got from the city of Oakland. I think I’ll make enough to get by,” Dene says. And then there’s a lull, a silence neither one of them knows how to recover from. Dene clears his throat.

“How’d you end up working here?” Dene says.

“My sister. She’s friends with Blue.”

“So you don’t feel, like, any kind of Native pride or whatever?”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“I just don’t feel right trying to say something that doesn’t feel true.”

“That’s what I’m trying to get out of this whole thing. All put together, all our stories. Because all we got right now are reservation stories, and shitty versions from outdated history textbooks. A lot of us live in cities now. This is just supposed to be like a way to start telling this other story.”

“I just don’t think it’s right for me to claim being Native if I don’t know anything about it.”

“So you think being Native is about knowing something?”

“No, but it’s about a culture, and a history.”

“My dad wasn’t around either. I don’t even know who he is. My mom’s Native too, though, and she taught me what she could when she wasn’t too busy working or just not in the mood. The way she said it, our ancestors all fought to stay alive, so some parts of their blood went together with another Nation’sblood and they made children, so forget them, forget them even as they live on in us?”

“Man, I feel you. But then again I don’t know. I just don’t know about this blood shit.”

Jacquie Red Feather

JACQUIE AND HARVEY RIDE in Harvey’s Ford pickup through a moon-purple desert on that stretch between Phoenix and Blythe on I-10. The drive so far has been full of long silences Jacquie maintains by ignoring Harvey’s questions. Harvey is not the kind of man comfortable with silence. He’s a powwow emcee. It’s his job to keep his mouth running. But Jacquie is used to silence. She has no problem with it. She’d actually made Harvey promise she wouldn’t have to talk. That didn’t mean Harvey wouldn’t.

“You know, one time I got stuck out here in the desert,” Harvey says, keeping his eyes fixed on the road in front of them. “I’d been out drinking with some friends, and we wanted to go for a drive. A night like this would have been perfect. It’s not even dark. That full moon on the sand like that?” Harvey says, and looks over at Jacquie, then rolls down his window and sticks a hand out to feel the air.

“Smoke?” Jacquie says.

Harvey pulls out a smoke for himself and makes a vague grunting sound Jacquie has heard other Indian men use before and knows means yes. “I used to drink with these twins, Navajo guys. One of the twins didn’t want the truck to smell like smoke, it was his girlfriend’s truck, so we pulled over on the side of the highway. We’d brought a handle of tequila along. We drank too much of that, talked nonsense for a couple hours, then decided we needed to distance ourselves from the vehicle. We stumbled out into the desert, ended up getting so far out we couldn’t see the truck,” Harvey says.

Jacquie isn’t listening anymore. She always finds it funny, or not funny but annoying actually, how much people in recovery like to tell old drinking stories. Jacquie didn’t have a single drinking story she’d want to share with anyone. Drinking had never been fun. It was a kind of solemn duty. It took the edge off, and it allowed her to say and do whatever she wanted without feeling bad about it. Something she always notices is how much confidence and lack of self-doubt people have.

Take Harvey here. Telling this terrible story like it’s captivating. There are so many people she comes across who seem born with confidence and self-esteem. Jacquie can’t remember a day going by when at some point she hadn’t wished she could burn her life down. Today actually, she hadn’t had that thought today. That was something. That was not nothing.

“And then even though I can’t remember having passed out on the desert floor,” Harvey says, “I woke up and the twins were gone. The moon hadn’t moved too far, so not too much time had passed, but they were gone, so I walked toward where I thought we’d parked. It was all of a sudden real cold, like I’d never felt before. Like it’s cold when you’re near the ocean, like it’s cold in San Francisco, that moist cold that gets to the bone.”

“It wasn’t cold before you passed out?” Jacquie says.

“This is where it gets weird. I must have been walking for twenty minutes or so, the wrong way of course, farther into the desert, that’s when I saw them.”

“The twins?” Jacquie says, and rolls up her window. Harvey does the same.

“No, not the twins,” he says. “I know this is gonna sound crazy, but it was two very tall, very white guys with white hair, but they weren’t old, and they weren’t so tall that it was freakish, just maybe like a foot and a half taller than me.”

“This is the part where you tell me you woke up to the twins lying on top of you or something,” Jacquie says.

“I thought maybe the twins had slipped me something. I knew they were native American Church guys, but I’d done peyote before and this was not that. I got maybe ten or so feet away from them and stopped. Their eyes were big. Not in that alien way, just noticeably big,” Harvey says.

“Bullshit,” Jacquie says. “This story goes: Harvey got drunk in the desert and had a weird dream, the end.”

“I’m not joking. These two tall white guys with white hair and big eyes, hunch-shouldered, just staring off, not even at me. I got the hell out of there. And if that was a dream, then so is this, because I never woke up from it.”

“You act like when you’re drinking your memory is, what, reliable?”

“True enough, but get this, when the internet came out, or when I started using it I guess is a better way to put it, I looked up tall white guys in the desert in Arizona, and it’s a thing. They’re called the Tall Whites. Aliens. No joke. You can look it up,” Harvey says.

Jacquie’s phone vibrates in her pocket. She gets it out knowing Harvey will think it’s to look up these Tall Whites. It’s an unusually long text message fromOpal.

I already assumed you would have told me if you found spider legs in your leg, either when we were younger or when I told you about

Orvil’s, but that assumption doesn’t make sense because I found spider legs in my leg right before everything happened with Ronald. And I never told you I found those legs, I mean until right now. I need to know if it happened to you. I feel like it has something to do with Mom.

“I read one website that said the Tall Whites are controlling America now, d’you see that?” Harvey says.

And Jacquie feels sad for Harvey. And for Opal. And about these spider legs. If she’d ever found spider legs in her leg, she probably would have ended it right there and then. She suddenly feels so overwhelmed by all of it that she gets tired. This sometimes happens to Jacquie, and she feels grateful when it does, because most of the time her thoughts keep her up.

“I’m gonna get some sleep,” Jacquie says.

“Oh. Okay,” Harvey says.

Jacquie leans her head against the window. She watches the white highway line stream and waver. She watches the lines of telephone wires rise and fall in waves. Her thoughts wander, loosen, reach out aimlessly. She thinks about her back teeth, her molars, how they hurt every time she bites into something too cold or hot. She thinks about how long it’s been since she’s been to the dentist. She wonders about her mom’s teeth. She thinks about genetics and blood and veins and why a heart keeps beating. She looks at her head leaned against her head’s dark reflection in the window. She blinks an erratic pattern of blinks, which ends with her eyes closed. She falls asleep to the low drone of the road and the engine’s steady hum.