[5 of 5] There There, by Tommy Orange (2018), Part IV, pages 261-297

Author: Tommy Orange

Orange, Tommy. There There, Part IV. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY, 2018, pp. 261-297

Thomas Frank

“YOU GOOD?” Bobby Big Medicine says after the song is over. Thomas had been looking off, or not off but down and like he could see through the ground and like he could see something specific there.

“I think. Getting somewhere,” Thomas says.

“Still drinking?” Bobby says.

“Doing better,” Thomas says.

“Get all that junk out for this one,” Bobby says, and rotates his drumstick in a circle.

“I feel good,” Thomas savs.

“It’s not enough to feel good. You gotta drum good for them,” he says, and points with his drumstick out at the field.

“Do I know all the songs we’re gonna sing today?”

“Most. You’ll catch up,” he says.

“Thanks, brother,” Thomas says.

“Put your thanks in there.” Bobby says, and points to the middle of the drum.

“I just mean for asking me to come out here,” Thomas says, but Bobby doesn’t hear. He’s talking to one of the other drummers. Bobby’s like that. With you all the way and then gone. He doesn’t think of it like doing a personal favor. He wanted a drummer. He likes the way Thomas drums and sings. Thomas stands up to stretch. He really does feel good. Singing and drumming had done that thing, that all-the-way-there thing he needs to feel that full, that complete feeling, like you’re right where vou’re supposed to be right now–in the song and about what the song’s about.

Thomas walks around to various vendors, jewelry and blanket booths. He’s keeping an eye out for anyone from the Indian Center. He should just find Blue and apologize. It would make drumming the rest of the day better. It would make his drumming better, more true. He sees her. But there’s someone yelling. Thomas can’t tell from where.

Loother and Lony

THE SUN BEAT DOWN on Loother and Lony up in the stands. They’d run out of things to complain about to each other, and lost patience for the silence slowly growing between them. Without having to say it, they stand up and walk down to look for Orvil. Lony had said he wanted to get closer to the drum, see what it sounds like up close.

“It’s just hella loud,” Loother had said.

“Yeah, but I wanna see.”

“You wanna hear,” Loother said.

“You know what I mean.”

They make their way toward the drum-Loother’s head on a swivel looking for Orvil. He told Lony they could go listen if they could stop to get a lemonade first. Lony hadn’t shown interest in any of the powwow stuff Orvil had gotten into until this moment. Something about the drum, he’d said. He hadn’t realized it’d be so loud, and that the singers sounded like that in real life.

“It’s the singing, vou hear that?” he’d said to Loother before they went down.

“Yeah, I hear it, and it sounds just like we heard a hundred times coming from Orvil’s earphones.”

Loother said.

They pass dancers and look up and almost flinch. People don’t notice them, which makes them have to dodge the dancers coming their way. Lony keeps drifting toward the drum. And Loother keeps grabbing him by the shirt to pull him toward the lemonade. They’re almost to the lemonade stand when they both turn around at what they think is the sound of people screaming.

Daniel Gonzales

DANIEL HAS HIS VR goggles on. They weigh his head down a little. But that’s the same angle the drone flies–top heavy. In that way he feels as if he’s flying as he flies toward the coliseum.

Daniel is waiting before flying the drone over. He’s waiting because of the battery life. He doesn’t want to miss anything. He wants it to go right. He wants them to pull it off, but more so he doesn’t want the guns to get used. He’d been waking up in the middle of the night the week leading up to the powwow. Dreams of people running in the streets and gunfire all around. He’d thought they were the usual zom-bie-apocalypse-type dreams he’d always had, until he noticed the people were Indian. Not dressed like Indians, but he just knew like you just know stuff in dreams. The dreams all ended the same. Bodies on the ground. The silence of death, the hot stillness of all the bullets lodged in the bodies.

The day is bright, and as he comes over the top of the coliseum, he hears his mom coming down the stairs. This doesn’t make any sense as she hadn’t come down those stairs since Manny died.

“Not right now, Mom,” he says. Then feels bad and adds, “Hold on a second.” Daniel lands the drone in the upper deck, which is empty if seagulls don’t count. He doesn’t want her to see the goggles because he knows she’ll think they look expensive.

“You okay?” Daniel says to her from the bottom of the stairs. She’s halfway down.

“What are you doing down there?”

“Same thing I’m always doing, Mom, nothing,” Daniel says.

“Come up here and eat with me. I’ll make you something.”

“Can you wait?” Daniel says, and knows he says it impatiently. He wants to get back to the drone, which is sitting by itself on the third deck of the coliseum wasting its battery.

“Okay, Daniel,” his mom says. And it’s almost sad enough, the sound in her voice, to make him want to leave the drone up there, leave it all alone and just go eat with her.

“I’ll be up pretty soon, Mom. Okay?”

She doesn’t respond.

Blue

BLUE DIDN’T KNOW WHY she became so aware of the safe. Or she did know why, but she didn’t want to know why she began to think of the sate. The money. All morning it hadn’t come up. And leading up to the powwow it hadn’t been a thing either. There were gift cards, and a heavy safe, and who would rob a powwow? There were other things to think about. She’d just seen her mom. Maybe. There are a few thuggish-looking guys standing nearby. Blue is bothered that she is bothered by their presence.

Edwin is next to her chewing and swallowing sunflower seeds. This almost bothers her more than anything else because you’re supposed to do the work of splitting the shells and reaping the seed ben-efit, and he’s just shoving handfuls in his mouth and chewing them up until he can swallow them shell and all.

These guys keep getting closer to the table. Kind of creeping up. She asks herself again: Who would rob a powwow? Who would even know to rob a powwow? Blue lets go of the whole idea but looks under the table to make sure the safe is still covered with the little red, yellow, and turquoise Pendleton blanket. Edwin looks over at her and smiles a rare proud-toothed smile. His teeth are covered in sunflower-seed shells. She hates and loves him for it.

Dene Oxendene

DENE IS IN his booth when he hears the first shots. A bullet whizzes through the booth. He moves to the corner and puts his back to the wooden pole there. He feels something hit his back, then the black curtain walls of the booth collapse around him.

The whole shoddily built booth is on top of him. He doesn’t move. Can he? He doesn’t try. He knows or thinks he knows he won’t die from whatever hit him. He reaches back and feels the piece of wood, one of four thicker poles that held the thing up. As he pushes the piece of wood away, he feels something hot lodged in it. A bullet. It’d gone all the way through and almost all the way out, almost into him. But it stopped. The pole saved him. The booth he built is all that came between him and that bullet. The shots keep coming. He crawls out through the black curtains. For a second the brightness of the day blinds him. He rubs his eyes and sees across from him something that doesn’t make any sense for more than one reason. Calvin Johnson, from the powwow committee, is firing a white gun at a guy on the ground, and two other guys are shooting on his left and right. One of them is in regalia. Dene gets on his stomach. He should have stayed under his collapsed booth.

Orvil Red Feather

ORVIL IS WALKING BACK out onto the field when he hears the shots. He thinks of his brothers. His grandma would kill him if he survived and they didn’t. Orvil breaks out into a run when he hears a boom that fills his body with a sound so low it pulls him to the ground. He smells the grass inches from his nose and he knows. He doesn’t want to know what he knows but he knows. He feels the blood-warm wetness with his fingers when they reach for his stomach. He can’t move. He coughs and isn’t sure if what comes out of his mouth is blood or spit. He wants to hear the drum one more time. He wants to stand up, to fly away in all his bloodied feathers. He wants to take back everything he’s ever done. He wants to believe he knows how to dance a prayer and pray for a new world. He wants to keep breathing. He needs to keep breathing. He needs to remember that he needs to keep breathing.

Calvin Johnson

CALVIN IS STANDING, head bent to his phone, but his eyes keep looking up from it. His hat is pulled low, and he’s standing behind where Blue and Edwin are sitting so they won’t see him. He looks over to Tony, who’s bouncing a little- he’s light on his feet like he’s ready to dance. Tony’s supposed to do the actual robbing. The rest of them are there in case anything goes wrong. Octavio never explained why he wants Tony in regalia, and why he should be the one to take the money. Calvin assumes it’s because someone in regalia would be harder to identify, and ultimately harder to investigate.

Octavio, Charles, and Carlos are near the table looking antsy. Calvin gets a group text from Octavio that just says We all good Tony? Calvin can’t help but start walking toward the table when he sees Tony doing it too. But Tony stops. Octavio, Charles, and Carlos watch him stop, watch him stand there, bouncing a little. Calvin’s gut spins. Tony backs off, still facing them, then he turns around and walks the other way.

It doesn’t take Octavio long to make the next move. Calvin’s never held a gun before this. There’s a gravity to it. A weight pulling him closer to Octavio, who’s now pointing his gun at Edwin and Blue. He’s pointing at the safe with the gun. He’s calm about it. Calvin has his hand on his gun through his shirt. Edwin crouches down to open the safe.

Octavio looks to his right then left, bag of gift cards in his hand, when stupid-ass Carlos turns his gun on Octavio. Calvin sees it before Octavio does. Charles points his gun at Octavio too. Charles is yelling for Octavio to put down his gun and give him the bag. Carlos is yelling the same thing behind him. Fucking Charlos.

Octavio throws the bag of gift cards at Charles, and as he does he fires a few shots at him. Charles stumbles back and starts firing. Octavio gets hit and fires a few more back at Charles. Calvin sees a kid in regalia go down ten or so feet behind Charles. This is fucked up, but Calvin doesn’t have time to think of it that way because Carlos puts three or four into Octavio’s back. He might’ve fired more, but Daniel’s drone plane comes crashing down on his head and Carlos goes down. Calvin has his gun pointed at no one, finger on the trigger, ready, when he feels the first bullet hit him in his hip, the bone. Down on one knee, Calvin gets another one in the gut, and he feels a sick weight there like he’d swallowed too much water at once. How could a hole make him feel more full? As he goes down, Calvin sees Carlos get hit with bullets coming from Tony’s direction.

From the ground Calvin sees his brother firing bullets at Tony. He feels each tiny blade point of grass pushing into his face. It’s all he can feel, those blades of grass. And then he doesn’t hear any more firing. He doesn’t hear anything.

Thomas Frank

HE DOESN’T THINK of the shots being fired as shots being fired. He waits for it to be anything else. But then he sees people run and stumble and drop and scream and generally lose their shit because soon, very soon, after what he at first thought must have been something else and not gunfire became in his mind and before his eyes definite gunfire. Thomas ducks incomprehensibly. Squats down and watches dumbly. He can’t find the shooter, or shooters. So stupid is he that he stands up to see better what’s happening. He hears a sharp whiz nearby, and as soon as he realizes that it’s the sound of bullets missing him, one hits him in the throat. He should have been keeping as low as possible, he should have dropped to the ground, played dead, but he didn’t and now he’s on the ground anyway, holding his neck where the bullet went in. He can’t figure out where the bullet came from, and it doesn’t matter because he’s bleeding badly into the hand that holds his burst neck.

All he knows is that the bullets are still flying and people are screaming and someone is behind him, his head is in their lap but he can’t open his eyes and it burns like hell where he knows or feels he knows the bullet exited. The person whose lap he is in is maybe wrapping something around his neck and tightening it, maybe it’s a shirt or a shawl, they are trying to stop the bleeding. He doesn’t know if his eyes are closed or if all of this has suddenly blinded him. He knows he can’t see anything and that sleep feels like the best idea he’s ever had, like no matter what that sleep could mean, even if it means only sleep, dreamless sleep from here on out. But a hand is slapping his face and his eyes open and he’s never believed in God until this moment, he feels God is in the feeling of his face being slapped. Someone or something is trying to make him stay. Thomas tries to lift his whole body up, but he can’t. Sleep floats beneath him somewhere, seeps into his skin, and he’s losing the rhythm in his breath, breathing fewer breaths, his heart, it’d been beating for him all this time, his whole life, without even trying, but now he can’t, he just can’t do anything but wait for the next breath to come–hope that it will. He’s never in his life felt as heavy as he feels now, and it burns, the back of his neck, like no burn he’s ever felt. Thomas’s childhood fear of eternity in hell comes back to him and it’s right there in the burn and the cool of the hole in his neck. But just as that fear comes it goes, and he arrives. In the State. It doesn’t matter how he got here. Or why he’s here. And it doesn’t matter how long he stays. The State is perfect and is all he could ever ask for, for a second or a minute or a moment, to belong like this is to die and live forever. So he’s not reaching up, and he’s not sinking down, and he’s not worried about what’s coming. He’s here, and he’s dying, and it’s okay.

Bill Davis

BILL HEARS MUTED SHOTS fire behind the thick concrete walls that separate everyone else from the coliseum employees. He thinks of Edwin before he can even register what the muted booms might mean. What happens to him right away, though, is that he stands up and moves toward the sounds. He runs through the door that leads out to the concession stands. He smells gunpowder and grass and soil. A mix of dread and long-dormant courage in the face of danger moves over the top of his skin like a nervous sweat. Bill sets off at a run. His heartbeat is in his temples. He’s skipping stairs to get down to the field. As he approaches the infield wall, his phone vibrates in his pocket. He slows. It could be Karen. Maybe Edwin called her. Maybe Edwin is calling him. Bill drops to his knees, crawls between the second and first rows. He looks at his phone. It’s Karen.

“Karen.”

“I’m on my way there now, sweetie,” Karen says.

“No. Karen. Stop. Turn around,” Bill says.

“Why? What’s-“

“There’s a shooting. Call the police. Pull over. Call them,” Bill says.

Bill puts the phone against his stomach and lifts his head up to look. Right away he feels a sting-burn explode on the right side of his head. He puts his hand to his ear. It’s flat. Wet. Hot. Not thinking to put it to his other ear, Bill puts the phone to the place where his ear had been.

“Kare–” Bill starts but can’t finish. Another bullet. This one hits above his right eye–makes a clean hole through. The world tips over.

Bill’s head slams against the concrete. His phone is on the ground in front of him. He watches the numbers count up–the time of their call. Bill’s head throbs, not with pain, just a big throbbing that turns into a full-on swelling. His head is an expanding balloon. The word puncture occurs to him. Everything is ringing. There’s a deep whooshing sound coming from somewhere beneath him, waves or a white noise coming on–a buzz he can feel in his teeth. He watches his blood seep out from under his head in a half circle. He can’t move. He wonders what they’ll use to clean it. Sodium peroxide powder is best for concrete stains. Bill thinks: Please not this. Karen is still there; the seconds are still counting up. He closes his eyes. He sees green, all he can see is a green blur, and he thinks he’s looking out onto the field again. But his eyes are closed. He remembers another time he saw a green blur like this. A grenade had landed nearby. Someone yelled for him to take cover, but he froze. He wound up on the ground then too. Same ringing in his head. Same buzz in his teeth. He wonders if he ever made it out of there. It doesn’t matter. He’s dimming. He’s leaving. Bill is going.

Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield

GUNFIRE BOOMS THROUGHOUT the stadium. Screams fill the air. Opal is already going as fast as she can down the steps to the first level. She’s getting pushed from behind. She shuffles along with everyone else. Opal doesn’t know how she didn’t think to do it, but as soon as she does she gets her phone out. She calls Orvil first but his phone just rings and rings. Next she calls Loother. She gets through but the call breaks up. She can only hear parts of words. A broken sound. She hears him say, Grandma. She puts her hand over her mouth and nose, sobs into her hand. She keeps listening to see if it will clear up. She wonders, she has the thought, Did someone really come to get us here? Now? She doesn’t know what she means.

As soon as she gets outside the front entrance, Opal sees the boys. But it’s just Loother and Lony. She runs to them. Loother’s still holding his phone. He’s pointing to it. She can’t hear him but she sees him mouthing, We been trying to call him.

Jacque Red Feather

HARVEY’S HAND IS on Jacquie’s shoulder, pushing down. He’s trying to get Jacquie to go down with him. Jacque looks at him. His eyebrows are furrowed intensely to indicate how serious he is about this push down. Jacquie walks toward the sound and his hand slips off of her.

“Jacquie,” she hears him whisper-scream behind her. She can hear the bullets, the boom and the whizzing. It’s close. She hunches a little but keeps walking. There’s a whole bunch of people on the ground. They look dead. She’s thinking about Orvil. She’d just watched him go by for the Grand Entry.

For a second Jacque thinks it might be some kind of performance-art piece. All these people in regalia on the ground like it’s a massacre. She remembers what her mom told her and Opal about Alcatraz, how a small group of Indians first took over Alcatraz, just five or six of them, took it over as a piece of performance art five years before it really happened. It had always fascinated her. That it started that way.

She sees the shooters, then scans the field of bodies to find the colors of Orvil’s regalia on the ground. His colors stand out because there’s a bright orange in it, a particular almost pink orange you don’t normally see in regalia. She doesn’t like the color, which makes it easier for her to spot.

Before she acknowledges to herself that it’s him, before she can feel or think or decide anything, she’s already moving toward her grandson. She knows the risk of walking out there. She’s walking toward the gunfire. It doesn’t matter. She keeps an even pace. She keeps her eyes locked on Orvil

His eyes are closed when she gets to him. She puts two fingers to his neck. There’s a pulse. She screams out for help. The sound she makes is not a word. The sound she makes comes from below her feet, from the ground, and with the sound Jacque lifts Orvil’s body. She can hear the shots behind her as she carries her grandson’s body through the crowd toward the exit. “Excuse me,” she says as she moves through the crowd. “Please,” she says.

“Someone!” she hears herself cry out as she comes out through the entrance. Then she sees them there. Just outside the entrance. Loother and Lony.

“Where’s Opal?” she says to them. Lony is crying. He points out toward the parking lot. Jacquie looks down at Orvil. Her arms are shaking. Loother comes over and puts an arm around Jacquie, looks down at his brother.

“He’s white,” Loother says.

When Opal pulls up, Jacquie sees Harvey come running out toward them. She doesn’t know why he should come, or why she calls out his name, waves him over. They all get into the back of Opal’s Ford Bronco and Opal puts her foot on the gas.

Blue

BLUE AND EDWIN MANAGE to get out to Blue’s car without having to stop. Edwin is out of breath and starting to look pretty pale. Blue puts Edwin’s seat belt on, starts the car, and heads for the hospital. She leaves because she hasn’t even heard sirens vet. She leaves because Edwin is officially slumped in his seat, his eyelids half-closed. She leaves because she knows the way and can get there sooner than someone not even here yet.

After the shooting stopped, Blue could barely make out what Edwin was yelling at her from the ground.

“We gotta go,” Edwin said. He was talking about the hospital. He wanted her to take him. He was right. They wouldn’t get enough ambulances there in time. Who knows how many people had been shot. For Edwin, it was just one shot in the stomach.

“Okay,” Blue said. She tried to help him up, wrapped his arm over her shoulder and pulled. He winced a little but for the most part was pretty unfazed.

“Hold it with pressure so it doesn’t bleed too much,” Blue said. He was holding three or four Big Oakland Powwow T-shirts against his stomach. He reached behind his back and the color went out of his face.

“It went through,” Edwin said. “Out the back.”

“Fuck,” Blue said. “Or good? Shit. I don’t know.” Blue put an arm around him and let his arm hold on to her. They hobbled out of the coliseum like that, all the way out to Blue’s car.

When Blue pulls into Highland, Edwin is passed out. She’d been telling him, yelling at him, screaming at him to stay awake. There was probably a closer hospital, but she knew Highland. She keeps her hand on the horn, to try to wake Edwin up and to get someone to come out to help. She reaches her hand over and slaps Edwin a few times on the cheek. Edwin shakes his head a little.

“You gotta wake up, Ed,” Blue says. “We’re here.”

He doesn’t respond.

Blue runs inside to get someone with a stretcher to come out and help.

When she comes out through the emergency room automatic double doors, she sees a Ford Bronco pull up. All the doors open at once. She sees Harvey. And Jacquie. Jacquie’s holding a boy, a teenager in regalia. As Jacquie passes Blue, two nurses come out with a stretcher for Edwin. Blue knows right away there will be confusion. Should she allow Jacquie and the boy to go in Edwin’s place?It doesn’t matter what Blue has or hasn’t decided. She watches the nurses load the bov and take him away on the stretcher. Harvey walks up to Blue and looks at Edwin in the car. He nods his head sideways at Edwin like: Let’s pick him up.

Harvey slaps Edwin a few times on the cheek and he rustles a little but can’t pick his head up. Harvey yells some incomprehensible thing about getting someone out here to help, then gets Edwin halfway out of the car and puts Edwin’s arm around him. Blue squeezes between the car and Edwin and takes his other arm and puts it around her shoulder.

Two orderlies settle Edwin on the gurney. Blue and Harvey run alongside as they roll him through the halls, and then he’s through the swinging doors.

Blue sits next to Jacquie, who’s looking down at that angle, at the ground, elbows to knees in that position you take when you’re waiting for death to leave the building, for your loved one to come out in a wheelchair with a broken smile, for a doctor with a sure step to come for you with good news. Blue wants to say something to Jacquie. But what? Blue looks at Harvey. He really does look like Edwin. And if Harvey and Jacquie are together, then does that mean…? No. Blue doesn’t allow that thought to fin-ish. She looks across from her. There are two younger boys and a woman who looks a little like Jacquie, but bigger. The woman looks at Blue and Blue averts her eyes. She wants to ask the woman why she’s here. She knows it has to do with the powwow, the shooting. But there’s nothing to say. There’s nothing to do but wait.

Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield

OPAL KNOWS Orvil’s gonna make it. She’s telling herself that in her head. She would scream the thought if you could scream thoughts. Maybe you can. Maybe that’s what she’s doing to make herself believe there’s reason to hope despite there maybe being no reason to hope. Opal wants Jacquie and the boys to see it on her face too, this belief despite everything, which is maybe what faith is. Jacquie doesn’t look okay. She looks like if Orvil doesn’t make it, she won’t either. Opal thinks she’s right. None of them will make it back from this if he doesn’t. Nothing will be okay.

Opal looks around the room and sees that everyone in the waiting room, everyone’s head is down. Loother and Lony aren’t even on their phones. This makes Opal sad. She almost wants them to be on their phones.

But Opal knows this is the time, if there ever was one, to believe, to pray, to ask for help, even though she’d abandoned all hope for outside help on a prison island back when she was eleven. She tries her best to keep quiet and close her eyes. She hears something coming from a place she thought she’d closed off forever a long time ago. The place where her old teddy bear, Two Shoes, used to speak from. The place she used to think and imagine from when she was too young to think she shouldn’t. The voice was hers and not hers. But hers, finally. It can’t come from anywhere else. There is only Opal. Opal has to ask. Before she can even think to pray, she has to believe she can believe. She’s making it come but also letting it come. The voice pushes through and she thinks: Please. Get up, she says, this time out loud. She’s talking to Orvil. She’s trying to get her thoughts, her voice, into that room with him. Stay, Opal says. Please. She says it all out loud. Stay. She recognizes that there is power in saying the prayer out loud. She cries with her eyes shut tight. Don’t go, she says. You can’t.

A doctor comes out. Just one doctor. Opal thinks that might be good, they probably report death in pairs, for moral support. But she doesn’t want to look up at the doctor’s face. She does and doesn’t want to know. She wants to stop time, have more time to pray, to prepare. But all time has ever done is to keep going. No matter what. Before she can think to do it, Opal is counting the swings of the double doors. Every swing in counts as one. The doctor is saying something. But she can’t look up yet, or listen. She has to wait and see what the number of swings will say. The doors come to a rest on the number eight, and Opal breathes in deep, then lets out a sigh and looks up to see what the doctor has to say.

Tony Loneman

TONY TURNS AROUND at the sound of gunfire, thinking they might be shooting at him. He sees a kid in regalia get shot behind Charles, sees him go down. Tony lifts his gun and moves toward them-unsure of who to aim at. Tony watches Carlos shoot Octavio in the back, then a drone lands on Carlos’s head. Tony’s gun works long enough for him to hit Carlos two or three times, enough times that he stops moving. Tony knows Charles is firing at him, but he hasn’t felt anything yet. The trigger’s stuck. The gun is too hot to hold, so Tony drops it. As he does the first bullet hits him. The bullet feels fast and hot in his leg even though he knows the bullet can’t be moving anymore. Charles keeps shooting at him and missing. Tony knows this means he might be hitting other people behind him, and his face gets hot. A kind of hardening is happening all over his body. Tony knows this feeling. He sees black in his periphery. Some part of him is trying to leave, into the dark cloud he’s only ever emerged from later. But Tony means to stay, and he does. His vision brightens. He builds up to a run. Charles is about thirty feet away. Tony can feel all his fringes and ties flapping behind him. He knows what he’s running into, without a gun, but he feels harder than anything that might come at him, speed, heat, metal, distance, even time.

When the second bullet hits him in his leg, he stumbles but doesn’t lose speed. He’s twenty feet away, then ten. Another hits his arm. A couple get him in his stomach. He feels them and he doesn’t. Tony charges, ducks his head into it. The hot heavy weight and speed of the bullets do their best to push him back, pull him down, but he can’t be stopped, not now.

When he’s a few feet away from Charles, Tony notices something so quiet and still inside him it feels like it’s emanating out into the world, quieting everything down to nothing-molten silence.Tony means to sink through anything that gets in his way. He’s making a sound. It starts in his stomach, then comes out through his nose and mouth. A roar and rumble of blood. Tony drops a little lower just before he reaches Charles, then dives into him.

Tony lands hard on top of Charles with the last of his strength. Charles reaches up for Tony’s throat. He grips it. Tony sees darkness creeping in around his vision again. He’s pushing up against Charles’s face. He gets a thumb in his eye and pushes. He sees Charles’s gun on the ground next to his head. With all he has left in him, Tony shifts his weight and falls sideways, then grabs the gun. Before Charles can look over, or reach back out toward Tony’s neck, Tony fires a shot into the side of Charles’s head, then watches it drop and his body go lifeless.

Tony rolls onto his back and right away he’s sinking. Quicksand slow. The sky darkens, or his vision darkens, or he’s just sinking deeper and deeper in, headed for the center of the earth, where he might join the magma or water or metal or whatever is there to stop him, hold him, keep him down there forever.

But the sinking stops. He can’t see. He hears something that sounds like waves, then he hears Maxine’s voice somewhere in the distance. Her voice is echoey, like it used to sound when she was in the kitchen and he was nearby, under the table or slapping magnets on the fridge. Tony wonders if he’s dead. If Maxine’s kitchen is where he’d end up after. But Maxine’s not even dead. It’s definitely her voice. She’s singing an old Cheyenne hymn she used to sing when she did the dishes.

Tony realizes he can open his eyes again, but he keeps them closed. He knows he’s full of holes. He can feel each one of those bullets trying to pull him down. He watches himself go up, out of himself, then he watches himself from above, looks at his body and remembers that it was never actually really him. He was never Tony just like he was never the Drome. Both were masks.

Tony hears Maxine singing in the kitchen again and then he’s there. He’s there and he’s four years old, the summer before going into kindergarten. He’s in the kitchen with Maxine. He’s not twenty-one-year-old Tony thinking about his four-year-old self-remembering. He’s just there again, all the way back to being four-year-old Tony. He’s on a chair helping her wash dishes. He’s dipping his hand into the sink and blowing bubbles at her out of the palm of his hand. She doesn’t think it’s funny but she doesn’t stop him. She keeps wiping the bubbles on the top of his head. He keeps asking her: What are we? Grandma, what are we? She doesn’t answer.

Tony dips his hand back into the sink of bubbles and dishes and blows them at her again. She has some on the side of her face and she doesn’t wipe them off, just keeps a straight face and keeps on washing. Tony thinks this is the funniest thing he’s ever seen. And he doesn’t know if she knows this is happening, or if they’re really not there. He doesn’t know that he’s not there, because he’s right there, in that moment which he can’t remember as having happened because it’s happening to him now. He’s there with her in the kitchen blowing sink bubbles.

Finally, after catching his breath and containing his laughter, Tony says, “Grandma, you know. You know they’re there.”

“What’s that?” Maxine says.

“Grandma, you’re playing,” Tony says.

“Playing what?” Maxine says.

“They’re right there, Grandma, I see them with my own eyes.’

“You go play now and let me finish these in peace,” Maxine says, and smiles a smile that tells him she knows about the bubbles.

Tony plays with his Transformers on the floor of his bedroom. He makes them fight in slow motion. He gets lost in the story he works out for them. It’s always the same. There is a battle, then a betrayal, then a sacrifice. The good guys end up winning, but one of them dies, like Optimus Prime had to in Transformers, which Maxine let him watch on that old VHS machine, even though she said she thought he was too young. When they watched it together, at the moment they realized Optimus had died, they looked over to each other and saw they were both crying, which then made them laugh for a few seconds, for just that singular moment, both of them together in the dark of Maxine’s bedroom, laughing and crying at the exact same time.

As Tony has them walk away from the battle, they talk about how they wish it didn’t have to be that way. They wish they could all have made it. Tony has Optimus Prime say, “We’re made of metal, made hard, able to take it. We were made to transform. So if you get a chance to die, to save someone else, you take it. Every time. That’s what Autobots were put here for.”

Tony is back on the field. Every hole is a burn and a pull. Now he feels as if he might not float up but instead fall inside of something underneath him. There is an anchor, something he’s been rooted to all this time, as if in each hole there is a hook attached to a line pulling him down. A wind from the bay sweeps through the stadium, moves through him. Tony hears a bird. Not outside. From where he’s anchored, to the bottom of the bottom, the middle of the middle of him. The center’s center. There is a bird for every hole in him. Singing. Keeping him up. Keeping him from going. Tony remembers something his grandma said to him when she was teaching him how to dance. “You have to dance like birds sing in the morning,” she’d said, and showed him how light she could be on her feet. She bounced and her toes pointed in just the right way. Dancer’s feet. Dancer’s gravity. Tony needs to be light now. Let the wind sing through the holes in him, listen to the birds singing. Tony isn’t going anywhere. And somewhere in there, inside him, where he is, where he’ll always be, even now it is morning, and the birds, the birds are singing.

Acknowledgments

To my wife, Kateri, my first (best) reader/listener, who believed in me and the book from the very beginning, and to my son, Felix, for all the ways he helps and inspires me to be a better human and writer; to them both, for whom I’d give my own heart’s blood. I couldn’t have done it without them.

There were many people and organizations that helped get this book out into the world. I’d like to thank from the innermost reaches of my heart all of the following: The MacDowell Colony, for supporting my work long before it came to be what it is now. Denise Pate at the Oakland Cultural Arts Fund, for funding a storytelling project that never came to fruition except for in fiction-i.e., in a chapter of this novel. Pam Houston, for all she’s taught me, and for being the first person to believe in this book enough to send it out herself. Jon Davis, for all the ways he’s supported me and the MA (Institute of American Indian Arts) program I graduated from in 2016, for all the copediting help, and for believing in me from the get-go. Sherman Alexie, for how he helped this become a better novel, and for all the unbelievable support he’s given me once the book was bought. Terese Mailhot, for all she’s done to make it so our lives as writers have paralleled each other, and for all the support and encouragement she’s always given me, for being the unbelievably amazing writer she is. The Yaddo Corporation, for the time and space to finish this book before it got sent out. Writing By Writers and the fellowship they gave me in 2016. Claire Vaye Watkins, for hearing me read and believing in the book enough to send it to her agent. Derek Palacio, for helping guide the manuscript, and for all the advice and support he gave me post-graduation. All the many writers and teachers at IAIA, who taught me a tremendous amount. My brother, Mario, and his wife, Jenny, for letting me sleep on their couch whenever I came into town, and for their love and support. My mom and dad for always believing in me no matter what I tried to do. Carrie and Ladonna. Christina. For all that we’ve been through and how we’ve always helped each other along the way. Mamie and Lou, Teresa, Bella, and Sequoia, for helping to make our family what it is. For helping to give me the time I needed to write. For being sweet, caring, and loving to my son during those times when I was away to write. My uncle Tom and aunt Barb, for all the ways they help and love everyone in our family. Soob and Casey. My uncle Jonathan. Martha, Geri, and Jeffrey, for being there for my family when we needed them most. My editor Jordan, for loving and believing in the book, and helping me to make it as good as it could possibly be. My agent Nicole Aragi, for reading the manuscript too late one night, or too early one morning, when it seemed the world was falling apart, for everything she’s done for me and the book since. Everyone at Knopf for all their undying support. The Native community in Oakland. My living Cheyenne relatives, and my ancestors who made it through unimaginable hardship, who prayed hard for us next ones here now, doing our best to pray and work hard for those to come.

DMU Timestamp: March 17, 2023 08:51