[3 of 5] There There by Tommy Orange (2018), Part III. pages 157-226

Author: Tommy Orange

Orange, Tommy. There There, Part III. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY, 2018, pp. 157-226.

PART III

Return

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

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Anneliese S

Mar 14

Anneliese S

Anneliese S

Anneliese S (Mar 14 2023 1:20PM) : no escaping

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JAMES BALDWN

Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield

EVERY TIME she gets into her mail truck Opal does the same thing. She looks into the rearview and finds her gaze looking back at her through the years. She doesn’t like to think of the number of years she’s been working as a mail carrier for the USPS. Not that she doesn’t like the work. It’s that it’s hard to see the years on her face, the lines and wrinkles that surround her eyes, branch out like cracks in the concrete. But even though she hates to see her face, she’s never been able to stop the habit of looking at it when she finds a mirror there in front of her. where she catches one of the only versions of her face she’ll ever see–on top of glass.

---

Opal thinks as she drives of the first time she took the Red Feather boys in for a weekend at the beginning of the adoption process. They were at a Mervyn’s in Alameda tor new clothes. Opal looked at Orvil in the mirror, at an outfit she’d picked out for him.

“You like it?” she said.

“What about them?” Orvil said, pointing at himself and Opal’s reflection in the mirror. “How do we know it’s not one of them doing it and not us copying?”

Because look I’m deciding to wave my hand in front of it right now.” Opal said, and waved. It was a three-panel mirror outside the dressing room. Loother and Lony were hiding inside a clothes rack nearby.

“She could have waved first, then you couldn’t help but copy. But look at this,” he said. and then he broke out into a wild dance. Arms flailing, he jumped and spun. It looked to Onal like he was powwow dancing. But he couldn’t have been. He was just trying to act crazy in front of the mirror to prove no one else was in control but him, the Orvil on this side of the mirror

Opal is on her route. Same old same old one. But she’s paying attention to where she stews. Opal doesn’t stew on cracks when she walks. She walks carefully because she’s always had the sense that there are holes everywhere, cracks you can slip between–the world, after all, is porous. She lives by a superstition she would never admit to. It’s a secret she holds so tight to her chest she never notices it. She lives by it, like breathing. Opal drops mail in slots and in boxes trying to remember which spoon she’d eaten with earlier. She has luck and unluck spoons. In order for the lucky ones to work. you have to keep the unlucky ones with them, and you can’t look to see what you’re getting when you pull one out of the drawer. Her luckiest spoon is one with a floral pattern that runs un the handle to the neck.

She knocks on wood to cancel out something she’s said she wants or doesn’t want to happen, or even if she just thinks it, she’ll find wood and Knock on it twice. Opal likes numbers. Numbers are consistent. You can count on them. But for Opal, certain numbers are good and others are bad. Even numbers are generally better than odd ones, and numbers that have some kind of mathematical relationship are good too. She reduces addresses to a single number by adding them together, then judges the neighbors based on their reduced number. Numbers don’t lie. Four and eight are her favorites. Three and six are no good. She delivers mail on the odd side first, always having believed it’s best to get the bad out or the way before setting to the good.

Bad luck or just bad shit happening to you in life can make you secretly superstitious, can make you want to take son le control or take hack some sense of control. Opal buys scratchers and lottery tickets when the jackpot gets high enough. Her superstition is one she would never call superstition for fear it would lose its power.

(combined in the next paragraph)

Opal is done with the odd side of the street. When she crosses, a car stops for her the woman inside impatiently waves Opal across like she’s doing all of humanity a favor. Opal wants to lift her arm, lift asingle finger as she crosses, but instead she slow jogs across in answer to the woman’s impatience and feigned generosity. Opal hates herself for the log. For the smile that came to her face before she could stop it, turn it upside down, straighten it out before it was too late.

Opal is full of regrets, but not about things she’s done. That damn island, her mom, Ronald, and then the shuffling, stifling rooms and faces in foster care, in group homes after that. She regrets that they happened. It doesn’t matter that she didn’t cause them to happen. She figures she must deserve it in some way. But she couldn’t figure it out. So she bore those years, their weight, and the years bored a hole through the middle of her, where she tried to keep believing there was some reason to keep her love intact. Opal is stone solid, but there is troubled water that lives in her, that sometimes threatens to flood, to drown her–rise up to her eyes. Sometimes she can’t move. Sometimes it feels impossible to do anything. But that’s okay because she’s become quite good at getting lost in the doing of things. More than one thing at a time preferably. Like delivering mail and listening to an audiobook or music. The trick is to stay busy, distract then distract the distraction. Get twice removed. It’s about layers. It’s about disappearing in the whir of noise and doing.

Opal takes out her earphones when she hears a sound up above somewhere. A nasty buzz slicing through the air. Sne looks up and sees a drone, then looks around to see who might be flying it. When she doesn’t see anyone, she puts her earphones back in. She’s listening to Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” It’s her least-favorite Otis Redding song because it gets played too much. She shuffles her music and it lands on Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears.” This song gives her that strange mix of sad and happy. Plus it’s upbeat. That’s what she loves about Motown, the way it asks you to carry sadness and heartbreak but dance while doing so.

---

Opal was on her route yesterday when her adopted grandson Orvil left her a message telling her he’d pulled three spider legs out of a bump on his leg. He’d scratched it open and out came those spider legs like splinters. Opal covered her mouth as she listened to the message, but she wasn’t surprised, not as much as she would have been had this not happened to her when she was around the same age Orvil is now.

Opal and Jacquie’s mom never let them kill a spider if they found one in the house. or anywhere for that matter. Her mom said spiders carry miles of web in their bodies, miles of story, miles of potential home and trap. She said that’s what we are. Home and trap.

When the spider legs didn’t come up at dinner last night, Opal figured Orvil was afraid to bring it up because of the powwow–even though the two things had nothing to do with each other.

A few weeks back she found a video of Orvil powwow dancing in his room. Opal regularly checks their phones while they sleep. She looks at what pictures and videos they take, their text messages, and their browser histories. None of them have shown signs of especially worrisome depravity vet. But it’s only a matter of time. Opal believes there is a dark curiosity alive in each of us. She believes we all do precisely what we think we can get away with. The way Opal sees it. privacy is for adults. You keep a close eye on your kids, you keep them in line.

In the video. Orvil was powwow dancing like he knew exactIy what he was doing, which she couldn’t understand. He was dancing in the regalia she kept in her closet. ‘I’he regalia was given to her by an old friend.

There were all kinds of programs and events for Native youth growing up in Oakland. Opal first met Lucas at a group home, and then again later at a foster-youth event. For a time, Opal and Lucas were model foster youth, always the first chosen for interviews and photos for flyers. They’d both learned from an elder what goes into making regalia, then helped her make it. Opal helped Lucas prepare for his first powwow as a dancer. Lucas and Opal had been in love. Their love was young and desperate. But it was love. Then one day Lucas got on a bus and moved down to Los Angeles. He’d never even talked about it. He just left. Came back almost two decades later out of nowhere wanting an interview for an Urban Indian documentary he was making and gave her the regalia. Then he died a few weeks later. Called Opal from his sister’s house to tell her his days were numbered. That’s how he put it. He didn’t even tell her why, he just said sorry, and that he wished her the very best.

---

But last night dinner was quiet. Dinner was never quiet. The boys left the table in the same suspicious silence. Opal called Lony back. She would ask him how their day went–Lony couldn’t lie. She’d ask him how he liked his new bike. Plus it was his turn to do the dishes. But Orvil and Loother did something they’d never done before. They helped their little brother dry and put away the dishes. Opal didn’t want to force the issue. She really didn’t know what to say about it. It was like something was stuck in her throat. It wouldn’t come back up and it wouldn’t go down. Actually it was like the bump in her leg the spider legs had come out of. The bump had never gone away. Were there more legs in there? Was that the spider’s body? Opal had stopped asking questions a long time ago. The bump remained.

When she went to tell the boys to go to bed, she heard one of them shush the other two.

“What’s that?” she said

“Nothing, Grandma,” Loother said.

“Don’t ‘nothing, Grandma’ me,

“It’s nothing,” Orvil said

“Go to sleep,” she said. The boys are afraid of Opal, like she was always afraid of her mom. Something about how brief and direct she is. Maybe hypercritical too, like her mom was hypercritical. It’s to prepare them for a world made for Native people not to live but to die in. shrink. disappear. She needs to push them harder because it will take more for them to succeed than someone who is not Native. It’s because she failed to do anything more than disappear herself. She’s no-nonsense with them because she believes life will do its best to get at you. Sneak up from behind and shatter you into tiny unrecognizable pieces. You have to be read to pick everything up pragmatically, keep your head down and make it work. Death alone eludes hard work and hardheadedness. That and memory. But there’s no time and no good reason most of the time to look back. Leave them alone and memories blur into summary. Opal preferred to keep them there as just that. That’s why these damn spider legs have her stuck on the problem. They’re making her look back.

---

Opal pulled three spider legs out of her leg the Sunday afternoon before she and Jacquie left the home, the house, the man they’d been left with after their mom left this world. There’d recently been blood from her first moon. Both the menstrual blood and the spider legs had made her feel the same kind of shame. Something was in her that came out, that seemed so creaturely, so grotesque yet magical, that the only readily available emotion she had for both occasions was shame. which led to secrecy in both cases. Secrets lie through omission just like shame lies through secrecy. She could have told Jacquie about either the legs or the bleeding. But Jacquie was pregnant, was not bleeding anymore, was growing limbs inside her they’d agreed she would keep, a child she would give up for adoption when the time came. But the legs and the blood all ended up meaning so much more.

---

The man their mom left them with, this Ronald, he’d been taking them to ceremony, telling them it was the only way they would heal from the loss of their mother. All while Jacque was secretly becoming a mother. And Opal was secrety becoming a woman.

But Ronald started to walk by their room at night. Then he took to standing in their doorway–a shadow framed by the door and the light behind him. On a ride home from ceremony she remembered Ronald mentioning something to them about doing a dream ceremony. Opal didn’t like the sound of it. She took to keeping a bat she’d found in their bedroom closet when they first moved in by her side, next to her in bed, had taken to holding the thing like she’d once held Two Shoes for comfort. But where Two Shoes was all talk and no action, the bat, which had written on its butt-end the name Storey, was all action.

Jacquie had always slept hard as night stays until morning comes. One night Ronald went over to the end of her bed-a mattress on the floor. Opal had the mattress across from her. When she saw Ronald pull at Jacquie’s ankles, she didn’t even have to think. She’d never swung the bat before, but she knew its weight and how to swing it. Ronald was on his knees about to pull Jacque up to him. Opal got up as quiet as she could. breathed in slow, then raised the bat up high behind her. She came down as hard as she could on top of Ronald’s head. There was a deep, muffled crack. and Ronald landed on top of Jacquie–who woke up and saw her sister standing over them with the bat. They packed their duffel bags as fast as they could, then went downstairs. On the way through the living room, there on the TV was that test-pattern Indian they had seen a thousand times before. But it was like Opai was seeing him for the first time. Opal imagined the Indian turning to her. He was saying: Go. Then the sound of him saying Go went on too long and turned into the test tone coming from the TV. Jacquie grabbed Opal’s hand and led her out of the house. Opal still had the bat in her hand.

---

After they left Ronald’s they went to a shelter their mom had always taken them to when they needed help or were between houses. They met with a social worker who asked where they’d been but didn’t push when they didn’t tell her.

Opal carried the weight of Ronald’s possible death around with her for a year. She was scared to go back and check. She was afraid that it didn’t bother her that he was dead. That she killed him. She didn’t want to go and find out if he was still alive. But she didn’t really want to have killed him either. It was easier to let him stay maybe dead. Possibly dead.

A year later Jacquie was gone from Opal’s life. Opal didn’t know where. The last time she’d seen her, Jacquie was getting arrested for what reason Opal couldn’t tell. Losing Jacquie into the system was just another shitty loss among Opal’s many. But she’d met an Indian boy her age, and he made sense to Opal, he wasn’t weird or dark, or he was, but in the same ways Opal was. Plus he never talked about where he came from or what happened to him. They shared that omission like soldiers back from war, all the way up until an afternoon Opal and Lucas were hanging out at the Indian Center, waiting for people to show up for a community meal. Lucas was talking about how much he hated McDonald’s.

“But it tastes so good,” Opal said

“It’s not real food,” Lucas said as he balanced and walked back and forth on the curb outside.

“It’s real if I can chew it up and see it come out the other side,” Opal said.

“Gross,” Lucas said

“Wouldn’t have been gross if you’d have said it. Girls aren’t allowed to talk about farts or poop or curse or–

“I could swallow pennies and poop them out. that doesn’t make them food,” Lucas said

“Who told you it’s not real?” Opal said.

“I had half a cheeseburger I forgot was in my backpack for a month. When I found it, it looked and smelled exactly the same as when I left it. Real food spoils,” Lucas said

“Beef jerky doesn’t spoil,” Opal said.

“Okay, Ronald,” Lucas said.

“What’d you say?” Opal said, and she felt a hot sadness rise up to her eyes from her neck.

“I called you Ronald,” Lucas said. and started walking back and forth on the curb’s edge. “As in. Ronald McDonald.” He put his hand on Opal’s shoulder and lowered his head a little to try to catch her eyes. Opal pulled her shoulder away. Her face went white

“What? I’m sorry, geez. I’m joking. If you wanna know what’s funny, I ate that cheeseburger, okay?” Lucas said. Opal walked back inside and sat down on a folding chair. Lucas followed her in and pulled up a chair next to her. After some coaxing. Opal told Lucas everything. He was the first person she’d ever told, not iust about Ronald but about her mom, the island, what their lives were like before that. Lucas convinced her it would eat her up eventually if she didn’t find out for sure about Ronald

“He’s like that cheeseburger in my backpack before I ate it,” Lucas said. Opal laughed like she hadn’t laughed in a long time. A week later they were on a bus to Ronald’s house

---

They waited for two hours across the street from Ronald’s house, hiding behind a mailbox. ‘That mailbox became the only thing between finding out and not, between seeing him and not, between her and the rest of her life She didn’t want to live she wanted time to stop there, to keep Lucas there with her too.

Opal went cold when she saw Ronald come home in his truck. Seeing Ronald walk up the stairs to that house, Opal didn’t know it she wanted to cry from relief, immediately run away, or go after him, wrestle him to the ground, and finish him off with her bare hands once and for all. Of all that could have occurred to her, what came up in her mind was a word she’d heard her mom use. A Cheyenne word: Veno. It means spider and trickster and white man. Opal always wondered if Ronald was white. He did all kinds of Indian things, but he looked as white as any white man she’d ever seen.

When she saw his front door close behind him, it closed the door on all that had come before, and Opal was ready to leave.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“You don’t want to–

“There’s nothing else,” she said. “Let’s go.” They walked the few miles back without saying a word to each other. Opal kept a couple of paces ahead the whole way.

---

Opal is large. If you want to say bone-structure-wise that’s fine, but she’s big in a bigger sense than big-bodied or bone-structure-wise. She would have to be called overweight in front of medical professionals. But she got big to avoid shrinking. She’d chosen expansion over contraction. Opal is a stone. She’s big and strong but old now and full of aches.

Here she is stepping down from her truck with a package. She leaves the box on the porch and walks back out through the gate of the front yard. There across the street from her is a brown-and-black tiger-striped pit bull baring its teeth and growling a growl so low she can feel it in her chest. The dog is collarless and time seems the same way here, time off its leash, read to skip so fast she’ll be dead and gone before she knows it. A dog like this one has always been a possibility, just like death can show up anywhere, just like Oakland can bare its teeth suddenly and scare the shit out of you. But it’s not just poor old Opal anymore, it’s what would become of the boys if she were gone.

Opal hears a man’s voice boom from down the street some name she can’t understand. The dog flinches at the sound of its name coming out of this man’s mouth. It cowers and turns around then scurries off toward the voice. The poor dog was probably just trying to spread the weight of its own abuse. There was no mistaking that flinch.

Opal gets into her mail truck, starts it, and heads back to the main office.

Octavio Gomez

BY THE TIME I got back to my grandma Josefina’s house I could barely stand. She had to drag me up the stairs. My grandma’s old and small, and I was pretty big even then, but Fina’s strong. She’s got that crazy strength you can’t see. It felt like she carried me all the way up the stairs to the extra room and put me in bed. I was hot and cold as fuck, with this deep-ass ache like my fucking bones were being squeezed or drained or fucking stepped on

“It could just be the flu,” my grandma said, like I’d asked her what she thought was wrong with me.

“Or what?” said.

“I don’t know if your dad ever told you anything about curses.” She came over to my bed and felt my head with the back of her hand

“He gave me my mouth.”

“Curse words don’t count. They can do what they can do, but a real curse is more like a bullet fired from far off.” She stood over me, folded a wet towel, and put it on my forehead. “There’s someone aiming a bullet meant for you, but with that distance, most of the time it doesn’t hit and even if it hits it usually won’t kill you. It all depends on the aim of the shooter. You said your uncle never gave you anything, you

never took anything from him, right?”

“No,” I said

“We won’t know for now,” she said.

She came back up with a bowl and a carton of milk. She poured milk into the bowl, then slid the bowl under my bed, stood up, and walked over to a votive candle on the other side of the room. As she lit the candle she turned around and looked at me like I shouldn’t have been looking. like I should have mv eves closed. Fina’s eyes could bite. They were green like mine, but darker–alligator green. I looked up at the ceiling. She came back over to me with a glass of water.

“Drink this,” she said. “My own father cursed me when I was eighteen. Some old Indian curse my mom told me wasn’t real. That was how she said it. Like she knew enough to know it was Indian, and enough to know it wasn’t real, but not enough to do anything other than tell me it was an old Indian curse that wasn’t real.” Fina laughed a little.

I handed the glass to her, but she pushed it back toward me like: Finish it.

“I thought I was in love,” Fina said. “I was pregnant. We were engaged. But he left. I didn’t tell my parents at first. But one night my dad came to me to ask if I would name his grandson–he was sure it would be a grandson–if I would name the boy after him. I told him then that I wasn’t getting married, that the guy had left, and that I wasn’t going to have the baby either. My dad came after me with this big spoon he sometimes hit me with–he’d sharpened the handle to threaten me with it when he beat me–but this time he came at me with the sharp end. My mom stopped him. He’d cross anyone, any line. but not through her. The next morning I found a braid of his hair under my bed. That’s where my shoes went, so when I went for them the next morning I found the braid. When I got downstairs my mom told me I had to go.” Fina walked over to the window and opened it. “It’s better if we get some air in here. This room needs to breathe. I can get you more blankets if you get cold.”

“I’m fine,” I said. Which wasn’t true. A breeze came in and it felt like my arms and back were being scraped by it. I pulled the blankets up to my chin. “This was in New Mexico?”

“Las Cruces.” she said. “My mom put me on a bus out here to Oakland, where my uncle owned a restaurant. When I got here I got the abortion. And then I got real sick. Off and on for about a year. Worse than you are now, but the same kind of thing. The kind of sick that knocks you down and doesn’t let you up. I wrote my mom to ask for help. She sent me a clump of fur, told me to bury it at the western base of a cactus.”

“Clump of fur?’

“About this big.” She made a fist and held it up for me to see.

“Did that work?’

“Not right away. Eventually I stopped getting sick.”

“So was the curse just that you got sick?”

“That’s what I thought, but now, with everything that’s happened…” She turned and looked to the door. The phone was ringing downstairs. “I should get that,” she said, and stood up to leave. “Get some sleep.”

I stretched and a hard shiver ran through me. I pulled the blankets over my head. This was that part of the fever where you get so cold you gotta sweat to break it. Hot and cold, with sweat shiver running through and over me. I thought about the night that broke through the windows and walls of our house and brought me to the bed I was doing my best to get better in

---

Me and my dad had both moved from the couch to the kitchen table for dinner when the bullets came flying through the house. It was like a wall of hot sound and wind. The whole house shook. It was sudden, but it wasn’t unexpected. My older brother. Junior, and my uncle Sixto had stolen some plants from someone’s basement. They’d come home with two black garbage bags full. Hella stupid. That much weight, like some shit wasn’t tied to it. Sometimes I’d crawl through the living room to get to the kitchen. or watch TV on my stomach on the floor.

That night. whoever got their shit stolen by my stupid-ass brother and uncle, they rolled up on our house and emptied their guns into it, into the life we’d known, the life our mom and dad spent years making from scratch. My dad was the only one to get hit. My mom was in the bathroom and Junior was in his room at the back of the house. My dad put himself in front of me blocked the bullets with his body.

---

Lying in bed wishing for sleep. I didn’t want to but couldn’t help but think of Six. That’s what I used to call him. Mv uncle Sixto. He called me Eight. I hadn’t really known him growing up. but after my dad died he started to come around a few days every week. Not that we said much to each other. He’d come over and turn on the TV. smoke a blunt. drink. He let me drink with him. Passed me the blunt. I never liked getting high. Shit made me feel hella nervous, made me think too much about the speed of the beat of my heart–was it too slow, would it stop, or was it too fast, would it fucking attack? I liked to drink though.

After the shooting Junior stayed out even more than usual, claimed he was gonna fuck those guys up, that it meant war, but Junior was all talk.

Sometimes me and Sixto would be watching TV in the afternoon and the sun would come in through one of the bullet holes, one of the ones in the wall, and I could see the fucking dust in the room float in a bullet-hole-shaped ray of light. My mom had replaced the windows and the doors but she hadn’t bothered to fill the holes in the walls. Hadn’t bothered or didn’t want to.

---

After a few months, Sixto stopped coming over and Fina told me to spend more time with my cousins Manny and Daniel. Their mom had called Fina to ask for help. That made me wonder if my mom had called Fina to ask for help after my dad died, and was that why Six came over? Fina had a hand in everything. She was the only one trying to keep us all together, keep us all from falling through the holes life opened up out of nowhere like those bullets that ripped through the house that night.

Manny and Daniel’s dad had lost his job, and had been going harder at the drink. At first, I went over out of duty. You did what Fina told you to do. But then I got close with Manny and Daniel. Not that we talked. Mostly we played video games together in the basement. But we spent almost all our free time together–when we weren’t in school–and it turns out that who you spend time with ends up mattering more than what you do with that time.

One day we were down in the basement when we heard a noise upstairs. Manny and Daniel looked at each other like they knew what it was and like they didn’t want it to be that. Manny bolted up from the couch. I ran behind him. When we got upstairs the first thing we saw was their dad throwing their mom against the wall, then slapping her once with each hand. She pushed him and he laughed. I’ll never forget that laugh. And then how Manny took that laugh right the fuck out of him. Manny came up from behind his dad and pulled back on his neck like he was trying to rip all the breath he’d ever taken out of him. Manny was bigger than his dad. And he pulled back hard. They stumbled backward into the living room

I heard Daniel coming up the stairs. I opened the door and put my hand up like: Stay down here. Then I heard the sound of glass crashing. Manny and his dad had gone through the glass table in the living room. In their struggle Manny had managed to turn them around, so he landed on top of his dad on the glass table. Mann was cut a little on his arms, but his dad was all sliced up. He got knocked out too. I thought he was fucking dead. “Help me get him in the car,” Manny said to me. And I did. I picked his dad up from under his arms. On our way out the front door, when I was almost out the door, with Manny at the other end, holding his dad’s legs, I saw Daniel and Aunt Sylvia watch us carry him out of the house. Something about them seeing us. Crying because they wanted him gone. Crying because they wanted him back the way he used to be. That shit killed me. We dropped their dad off in the front of Highland, where the ambulances come in. Left him on the ground. Honked the horn once real long, then drove off.

---

I was around more after that. We didn’t even know if we killed him or not until a week later. The doorbell rang and it was like Manny knew, like he felt it. He tapped mv knee twice and sprang up. At the front door, we stood there and didn’t have to say a thing. We stood there like: What? What the fuck do you want? Go. His face was all bandaged. He looked like a fucking mummy. I felt bad for him. Sylvia came up behind us with a trash bag full of his clothes yelling, “Move!” So we moved out of the way, and she threw the bag at him. Manny closed the door and that was that.

It was around that time that me and Manny stole our first ride. We took BART to downtown Oakland. There were certain pockets of uptown where people had nice cars and people like me and Manny could be seen without someone calling the cops right away. Manny wanted a Lexus. Just nice enough but not too nice. Not noticeable either. We found a black one with gold lettering and tinted windows. I don’t know how long Manny had been stealing cars, but he got in quick with a coat hanger, then with a screwdriver in the ignition. The inside smelled like cigarettes and leather.

We rode down East Fourteenth, which had been International, but shit got so bad all up and down International that they changed the name to something without the history. I rummaged through the glove box and found some Newports. We both thought it was weird for someone we assumed was white to be smoking Newports. Neither one of us smoked cigarettes. but we smoked those. blasted the radio. and didn’t say a single word to each other the whole ride. There was something about that ride though. It was like we could put on someone else’s clothes, live in someone else’s house, drive their car, smoke their smokes–even if just for an hour or two. Once we made it deep enough east we knew we’d be fine. We parked it at the Coliseum BART Station parking lot and walked back to Manny’s house high on having gotten away with it so easily. The system scared you so you thought you had to follow the rules, but we were learning that that shit was fucking flimsy. You could do what you could get away with. That’s where it was at.

---

I was at Manny’s house when Svlvia called down into the basement to tell me Fina was on the phone. She never called me there. Daniel took the controller from me before I went up.

“He killed them,” Fina said.

I couldn’t even understand what she meant.

“Your uncle Sixto,” she said. “He crashed his car with both of them in it. They’re dead.”

I ran out the front door, got on my bike, and hurried the fuck home. My heart was some crazy mix of fuck-no-fuck-this and like it had slipped out of me. Before I got to Fina’s I thought, Well then Six better be fucking dead too.

Fina was standing in her doorway. I jumped off my bike in one motion and ran inside the house like I was gonna find someone else there. My mom and brother. Sixto. I had to believe it was a joke or any fucking thing other than what Fina’s face was telling me in that doorway that it was.

“Where is he?”

“They took him to jail. Downtown.”

“What the fuck.” My knees gave out on me. I was on the ground, not crying, but like I couldn’t move, and I got real fucking sad for a minute, but then that shit did a one-eighty and I yelled some shit I don’t remember. Fina didn’t do or say anything when I got back on my bike and left. I can’t remember what I did or where I went that night. Sometimes you just go. And you’re gone.

---

After the funerals I moved in with Fina. She told me Sixto was out. They gave him a DUI. He lost his license. But they let him go.

Fina told me not to go see him. Never to go see him, to let it be. I didn’t know what I would do if I went over there, but there wasn’t shit she could do to stop me.

---

On the way over to his house I stopped in the parking lot of a liquor store I knew wouldn’t check my ID. I went in and bought a fifth of E&J. That was what Six drank. I didn’t know what I meant to do going over there. In my mind I had it like I would get him drunk and fucking beat the shit out of him. Maybe kill him. But I knew it wouldn’t be like that. Six had his ways about him. Not that I wasn’t mad enough to do it. I just didn’t know what it would be like. On my way out of the store I heard a mourning dove somewhere nearby. The sound gave me goose bumps–not the cold kind, and not the good kind either.

---

We had mourning doves in our backyard for as long as I can remember under the back porch. My dad once said to me, when we were in the backyard trying to fix my bike, he said, “Their sound is so sad you almost want to kill them for it.” Once my dad was gone, I felt like I heard them more, or it was just that they reminded me of him and his attitude toward most kinds of sadness. I didn’t wanna feel sad then either. And it was like those fucking birds were making me feel it. So I went into the backyard with the BB gun I got for Christmas when I was ten. One of them was facing the wall, like he’d really been singing toward me inside. I shot it in the back of the head and then in the back twice. The bird flew up right away, its feathers rising then falling slow while it flapped in a flash of crooked downward spirals. It landed in the next-door neighbor’s yard. I waited to hear if it would move. I thought about how it would have felt. The sting in the head and the back, after it flew up over me. I didn’t feel even a little bit sorry for the bird because of how sad it made me feel ever since my dad got shot, when I had to look down and see my dad’s eyes blink in disbelief, my dad looking back up at me like he was the one who was sorry, sorry that I had to see him go like that, with no control over the wild possibilities reality threw into our lives.

---

At Sixto’s house I knocked on his door. “Eh, Six, eh!” I said. I backed away from the house, looked at the upstairs window. I heard footsteps. Loud and slow. When Six opened the door, he didn’t even look at me or wait for me to say or do anything, he just walked back into the house.

I followed him to his bedroom, found a place to sit on an old office chair he kept in the corner. I was surprised to find it empty considering the state of the rest of the room clothes, bottles, trash, and a light sprinkling of tobacco, weed, and ash all over everything. He was hella fucking sad-seeming. And I hated that I wanted to say something to make him feel better. That was the first time I saw it different. Like felt for him and how he must’ve felt about what he did.

“I got us a bottle,” I said. “Let’s go in the back.” I heard him get up and follow me as I walked out of the room.

Six had a few chairs back there in that overgrown, crooked-fenced yard, between two fruitless orange and lemon trees that I remembered used to be full. We drank for a while in silence. I watched him smoke a blunt. I kept expecting him to start the conversation. Say something about what happened to my mom and brother, but he didn’t. Six lit up a cigarette.

“When we were kids,” Sixto said, “me and your dad, we used to sneak into your grandma’s closet. She had an altar set up in there. All sorts of crazy shit on that altar. Like, she had a skull. It was the skull of what they call little people. She told us the little people stole babies and kids. She had jars full of powders and different kinds of herbs and stones. One time she caught me and your dad in there. She told your dad to go home. He ran like hell. She can get pretty crazy in her eyes. They go all dark like she keeps a darker pair behind the green ones you usually see. I had that little skull in my hand. She told me to put it down. She told me I had something in me I wasn’t gonna be able to get out this time around. She told me I could handle it like a man. Die with it. But that I could also share it with family. I could give it away over time. Even to strangers. It was some old dark leftover thing that stayed with our family. Some people get diseases passed down in their genes. Some people get red hair, green eyes. We got this old thing that hurts real fucking bad, makes you mean. That’s what you got. That’s what your grandpa had in him. Be a man, she told me. Keep it to yourself.” Sixto picked up the bottle, took a deep pull from it. I looked at Six, looked at his eyes to see if he expected me to say anything. Then he dropped the bottle on the grass and stood up. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t brought up my mom and brother. Or was that what he was trying to get at? Was this some long explanation for why all the shit that happened to our family happened the way it did?

“Let’s go,” he said to me like we’d just been talking about going somewhere. He brought me to his basement. He pulled out a wooden box that looked like a toolbox. Said it was his medicine box

“You’re gonna have to help me out here,” he said. his words dragging a little behind. He pulled out a dried plant with red rope tied around it. He lit it. The smell and smoke were thick. It smelled like musk and earth and Fina. I didn’t know anything about ceremony–whatever he was doing–but I knew we shouldn’t have been drunk for it.

“This comes from a long way back.” Six said, and poured some powder into his hand. Then he gestured for me to move my head closer, as if to see it better. Then he took a big breath in and blew it all in my face. It was thick as sand and some got in my mouth, up my nose. I choked and kept blowing out my nose like a dog.

“We got bad blood in us,” Sixto said. “Some of these wounds get passed down. Same with what we owe. We should be brown. All that white you see that you got on your skin? We gotta pay for what we done to our own people.” Sixto’s eyes were closed. his head bent down a little.

“Fuck this shit, Six,” I said through a cough, then stood up

“Sit down,” Six said with a tone he’d never used with me before. "It’s not all bad It’s power too.”

I sat down but then stood right back un. “I’m fucking going.”

“I said sit down!” Six blew on that plant again. The smoke rose thick. I felt sick right away. Weak. I made it out to the front of the house, got on my bike, and rode to Fina’s.

When I woke up the next day, Fina came in and shook her car keys at me. “Get up, let’s go,” she said. I was still pretty tired, but the fever had broken. I thought we were maybe going to get groceries. When we got past Castro Valley I knew it wasn’t groceries or any kind of errand. We just kept driving, through the hills with all those windmills. I fell asleep looking at one of them that looked like a coin from Mario Brothers.

---

When I woke up we were in a field with orchards on either side of it. Fina was on top of the hood of the car, she was looking down at something. I opened my door, and when I did I saw Fina’s hand wave me back, so I sat down without closing the door. Through the windshield. I saw my grandma get onto her knees and yank something with a thread or fishing line, something I couldn’t see, until the creature came scrambling up on the windshield.

“Get his fur. get some of his fur!” Fina yelled at me. But I couldn’t move. I just stared at it. The fuck was it? A raccoon? No. And then Fina was on top of the thing. It was black with a white stripe that went from its nose to the back of its neck. The thing was trying to bite and claw her, but she had her hand on its back, and it couldn’t grip the metal hood. When it seemed to calm down, she lifted it up by its neck with the fishing line. “Come get some of its fur,” she said

“How–” I said

“Rip its fucking fur off with your hands!” Fina said.

That was enough to get me going. I got out of the car and tried to get behind the thing, but it was onto me. I swiped twice but didn’t want to get bit. Then on the third try I pulled a big clump from its side.

“Now get back in the car,” Fina said, and got to her feet. She let the thing down to the ground. She walked with it farther into the field and then into the orchard at the edge of the field.

When she got back into the car I was just sitting there with my hand up in a fist holding the clump of fir. Fina pulled out a leather bag with beadwork and fringes on it, opened it, and gestured for me to put the fur inside.

“What was that?” I said once we were on the road.

“Badger.”

“We’re gonna set up a box for you.”

“We’re gonna make you a medicine box.”

“Oh,” I said. like that was all the explanation I needed.

We drove for a while in silence, then Fina looked over at me. “Long time ago they didn’t have a name for the sun.” She pointed up to the sun, which was in front of us. “They couldn’t decide if it was a man or a woman or what. All the animals met about it. and a badger came out of a hole in the ground and called out the name, but as soon as he did, he ran. The other animals came after him. That badger went underground and stayed there. He was afraid they would punish him for naming it.” Fina flipped on her blinker and switched lanes to pass a slow truck in the right lane. “Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong. Like who we are deep inside, that thing we want to name but can’t, it’s like we’re afraid we’ll be punished for it. So we hide. We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it. The thing we most don’t want has a way of landing right on top of us. That badger medicine’s the only thing that stands a chance at helping. You gotta learn how to stay down there. Way deep down inside of yourself, unafraid.

I turned my head. Looked down at the gray streak of road. It hit me somewhere in the middle of my chest. All that she’d said was true. It hit me in the middle where it all comes together like a knot.

“Six have a box?” I said even though I knew.

“You know he does.”

“D’you help him make it?”

“That boy never let me help him make anything,” she said, her voice breaking. She wiped her eyes. “He thinks he can make it all up himself, but look where that got him.”

“I been meaning to tell you. I went over there to see him.”

“How did he seem?” Fina asked real quick like she’d been waiting for me to bring it up.

“He was all right. But we drank. And then he brought me to the basement, started talking about giving me some shit, lighting this plant in a shell, and then he blew some powder stuff in my face.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like I wanna fucking kill him. For real.”

“Why?”

“What you mean why?”

“He didn’t do any of it on purpose,” Fina said. “He’s lost.”

“He fucked up.”

“So did your brother.”

“Six was part of that too.”

“So? We all fuck up. It’s how we come back from it that matters.”

“I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do then. I can’t get him back, I can’t get them back. I don’t know what the fuck any of this is about.”

“You’re not supposed to,” she said, and rolled down her window.

It was getting hot. I rolled mine down too.

“That’s the way this whole thing is set up,” she said. “You’re not ever supposed to know. Not all the way. That’s what makes the whole thing work the way it does. We can’t know. That’s what makes us keep

going.”

I wanted to say something but couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say. It seemed both right and like the wrongest shit possible. I stayed quiet–the rest of the car ride and then for weeks after that. And she let me.

Daniel Gonzales

THE GUYS LOST their shit when I showed them the gun. Pushed each other and laughed like they hadn’t done since forever ago. Everything got so fucking serious after Manny died. Which it should have. I’m not saying it shouldn’t have. But he would have loved to see them like that. He would have loved the gun too. It was a real gun. As real as any gun. But it was white, and plastic, and I printed it from a 3-D printer in my room, which is the basement, which used to be Manny’s room. I still can’t think ot him as gone. For now Manny’s not here or there. He’s in the middle of the middle, where you can only be when you can’t be anywhere.

The gun only took three hours to print. My mom made tacos for the guys while they watched the Raiders game. I stayed downstairs and watched the gun spool out in layers. When they came down we watched the last of it get printed in silence. I knew they wouldn’t know what to think. That’s why I had a YouTube video pulled up to show them. A thirty-second time-lapse of a guy 3-D printing then firing a gun. Once they saw that, that’s when they all lost their shit. They yelled and pushed at each other like they were kids again. Like it used to be over simpler shit like video games, like when we used to have all-night Madden tournaments and someone would win at four in the morning and we’d be all loud and my dad would come down with that little metal bat he kept by his bed-it was the bat he taught us to hit with when we were younger, an aluminum bat- and he’d hit us with that shit too, that same bat we got for free at that A’s game where they were giving them away and we showed up early to be sure to get one.

---

Manny wouldn’t like that Octavio came over so much after he died. I mean, in a big way it was Octavio’s fault. But he’s our cousin. And him and Manny had become like brothers. All three of us had. It’s true, Octavio shouldn’t have run his mouth at that party. For a while I hated him for it. Blamed him too. But he kept coming back around. Making sure we were okay. Me and my mom. Then the more I got to thinking about it, it wasn’t all on him. Manny’s the one who fucked that kid up. It was on all of us really. We turned our heads. Looked the other way when Manny fucked that kid up so bad on the front lawn. The blood stained brown on the yellow grass there until I got the mower out and cut it. And then when it was good, when money came in, before Manny died, we didn’t ask where it was coming from. We took the TV and the random cash he left on the kitchen table in envelopes. We allowed the shit in and only wanted it out when it took him from us.

---

I knew they believed in the white gun for real when I picked it up and pointed it at them. They flinched, but their hands up. Not Octavio though. He told me to put it down. There were no bullets in the gun. but I hadn’t felt in control for so long. I know guns are stupid. But that doesn’t mean they don’t make you feel in control when you’re holding one. Octavio pulled the gun out of my hands. He looked down the barrel, pointed it at us. That’s when it was my turn to get scared. Octavio holding it made it even more real. Made the white of it creepy–like some plastic message from the future about shit getting into the wrong hands.

---

After the guys left that night, I decided to write my brother an email. I’d helped him set it up. A Gmail account. Manny barely used it, but sometimes he wrote me. And when he did he said shit he never would have said in real life. That’s what was cool about it.

I opened up my Gmail and replied to the last email my brother sent. No matter what happens you know I’ll always be here for you. He was talking about fights he was getting in with our mom. She kept threatening to kick him out after he beat that kid up. The cops had come. Way too late, but they’d come, asked questions. She could sense shit was getting more serious. A tension was building in him. I could feel it too but didn’t know what to say. It was like he’d been moving toward that bullet, toward the front yard, way before he got there.

I scrolled down to reply.

Hev brother. Damn. I know you’re not there. But writing you at your email, with that last message up there, it feels like you’re still here. Being around the guys feels like that too. You must be wondering what I’ve been up to. Maybe you see. Maybe you know. If you do, you must be like, what the fuck? 3-D printed gun? Shit. I felt the same way when I first saw it. just laughing like a crazy person when it came out. And I know you wouldn’t approve. I’m sorry but we need the money. Mom lost her job. After you died she just stayed in bed. I couldn’t get her out. I don’t know where rent’s coming from next month. We’ll get an extra month if we get evicted, but shit, we been in this house our whole lives. Your pictures are still up. I still have to see you everywhere in here. So we’re not just gonna go. We been here our whole lives. We don’t have anywhere to go.

You know what’s funny? I’m all, like, street and shit in real life. But online I don’t talk like that, like I am now, so it feels weird to. Online I try to sound smarter than I am. I mean I choose what I type carefully, cuz that’s all people know about me. What I type, what I post. It’s pretty weird on there. Here. The way you don’t know who people are. You just get their avatar names. Some profile picture. But if you post cool shit, say cool shit, people like you. Did I tell you about the community I got into? The name or the place, the online community is: VunderkOde. It’s fucking Norwegian. You probably don’t know what code is. I got way into it after you died. I didn’t feel like going out or going to school or nothing.

When you spend enough time online, if you’re looking, you can find some cool shit. I don’t see it as that much different from what you did. Figuring out a way around a big fucking bully system that only gives those that came from money or power the means to make it. I learned from YouTube how to code. Shit like JavaScript, Python, SOL, Ruby, C++, HTML, Java, PHP. Sounds like a different language, right? It is. And you get better by putting in the time and taking to heart what all the motherfuckers have to say about your abilities on the forums. You have to know how to tell the difference. Whose criticism to take and whose to ignore. Long story short, though, is that I got hooked into this community, and I realized I could get whatever I wanted. Not drugs and shit. I mean I could but that’s not what I want. The 3-D printer I got was itself printed by a 3-D printer. No shit, a 3-D printer printed by a 3-D printer. Octavio fronted me the money.

Part of what kills me about you being gone is that I never really said anything to you. Even when you emailed me. I didn’t even really know how much I wanted to say to you until the day you left. Until I felt that feeling of losing you on the lawn out there, right on that same spot where that boy’s blood stained the grass. But you showed me. I knew how much you loved me. You did shit like, like how you got me that expensive-ass Schwinn. Probably used to be some hipster’s bike, you probably stole it, but still, you stole it for me, and in some ways that’s even better than if you bought it. Especially if it was from one of those white boys trying to take Oakland over from the West. You should know they haven’t made it to the Deep East yet. Probably never will. Shit’s mean out here. But everything from High Street to West Oakland, that shit seems doomed to me. Anyway, I mostly see Oakland from online now. That’s where we’re all gonna be mostly eventually. Online. That’s what I think. We’re already kinda moving in that direction if you think about it. We’re already like lucking androids, thinking and seeing with our phones all the time

You might wanna know more about some other shit, like, what’s going on with Mom. She gets out o bed more now. But she just moves to the TV. She looks out the window a lot too, peeks out the curtains like she’s still waiting for you to come home. I know I should be around her more, but she makes me feel hella sad. The other day she dropped a votive candle on the kitchen floor. Shit shattered and she just left it there in pieces. Like shit’s broken but we can’t just leave it broken, all out there in the living room like your picture on the mantel, shit feels like it cuts me whenever I see it, how you graduated from high school and we all thought shit would be okay from then on because you did.

After you died I had this dream. It started off I was on an island. I could just barely see that there was another island across the way. There was hella fog in the way, but I knew I had to get over there, so I swam over. The water was warm and really blue, not gray or green like the bay. When I got over to the other side I found you in a cave. You had all these fucking pit bull puppies in a shopping cart. You were duplicating them in the cart. The pit bulls. You were handing me the puppies as they duplicated in your shopping cart. You were making all those pit bulls for me.

So when I first heard about this 3-D printer that could print a version of itself I thought of you and the pit bulls. The idea about the gun came later. I learned to be okay with Octavio. He started talking to me like I wasn’t just your little brother. He asked me if I needed work. I told him about Mom being in bed all the time and he cried. He wasn’t even drunk. I needed to figure out a way to support me and Mom. I know you wanted me to get an education. Go to college. Get a good job. But I wanna be able to help right now. Not in four years. Not owing hella money just to work in an office somewhere So then I got to thinking about how I might help. I’d read about these guns you could print. I didn’t know then what they might be used for. I got the cad file, the G-code. After I got the printer I printed a gun–first thing I printed. Then I made sure it would work. I rode my bike over near the Oakland airport. That spot you took me to one time where you can see the planes come down close. I figured I could fire one off there and no one would hear it. Big-ass Southwest 747 came down and I shot a bullet into the water. It hurt my hand, and the gun got a little hotter, but it worked.

Now I’ve got six of these pieces. Octavio said he’d give me five thousand for all of them. He’s got something going. All my shit’s untraceable. So I’m not worried about the government coming after me. I am worried about what the guns will do. Who they might hurt or kill. But we’re family. I know Octavio can be a mean motherfucker. So could you. But here it is. Manny, he said they’re gonna rob a fucking powwow. Crazy, right? Shit sounded fucking stupid to me at first. Then it had me fucked up cuz of Dad. You remember he used to always tell us we’re Indian. But we didn’t believe him. It was like we were waiting for him to prove it. Doesn’t matter. Cuz of what he did to Mom. To us. That piece of shit. Deserved what he got. He had it coming. Long time coming. He woulda killed Mom. Probably you too if you hadn’t beat his ass. I only wish I had a white gun to give you then. So let them rob a powwow. Whatever. Dad never taught us anything about being Indian. What’s that got to do with us? Octavio said they could make fifty thousand. Said he’d give me another five if they pulled it off.

As for me. I mostly spend my time online. I’m gonna graduate from high school. My grades are all right. I don’t really like anyone at school. My only friends are your old friends. but they don’t really care about me except that I can make them guns now. Except Octavio. I know how much it all messed him up. You gotta know that. You can’t think it didn’t fuck him up, right?

Anyway. I’ll keep writing you here. I’ll keep you updated. It’s anyone’s guess what’s gonna happen. For the first time in a long time I got a little hope in my chest. Not that it’s gonna get better. Just that it’s gonna change. Sometimes that’s all there is. Cuz that means there’s something going on, somewhere inside all of it, all that turning the world is always doing, that means it was never supposed to stay the same heat. Miss you.

Daniel

Octavio brought me the first five thousand the day after I showed them all the guns. I left three thousand of it on the kitchen table in a blank envelope like Manny used to do. With the other two thousand, I bought a drone and a pair of virtual-reality goggles.

I’d been wanting a drone ever since I found out about the powwow. I knew Octavio wouldn’t let me go, but I wanted to see it. To make sure it went all right. Otherwise it was on me. And if shit went wrong, that was it. Octavio’s plan was all I had, with my mom like she was. Decent drones are affordable now. And I’d read that flying one with a camera and live feed, with VR google, felt like flying.

The drone I got had a three-mile range and could stay in the air for twenty-five minutes. The camera on it shot 4K resolution. The coliseum was only a mile away from our house on Seventy-Second. I flew it from my backyard. I didn’t want to waste any time so I went straight up, about fifty feet in the air, then straight over the BART station The thing could really move. I was in it. My eyes. The VR goggles.

Out in the back of center field, I went straight up and saw a guy pointing at me from the bleachers. I flew closer to him. He was a maintenance worker–holding a trash-grabber and a trash bag. The old guy got his binoculars out. I went even closer. What could he do? Nothing. I flew almost all the way up to the guy’s face, and he tried to reach out to the drone. He got mad. I realized I was messing with him. I shouldn’t have. I pulled away and dropped back down to the field. I headed toward the right-field wall. then down the foul line back to the infield. At first base I noticed the drone had ten minutes of battery life left. I wasn’t about to lose a thousand dollars out there, but I wanted to finish at home plate. When I got there, just as I was about to turn the drone around, I saw the old guy from the bleachers coming for me. He was on the field and pissed, like he was gonna grab the drone and slam it to the ground–step on it. I backed up but forgot to rise. Luckily I’d been playing video games for long enough that my panicked brain was hardwired to perform well under pressure. But for a second I was close enough to count the wrinkles in the old guy’s face. He managed to hit it, which almost caused the drone to come down, but I rose, went straight up, quick, like twenty or forty feet in seconds. I cleared the walls and came straight home to my backyard.

At home I watched the video over and over. Especially the part at the end where the guy almost got me. Shit was exciting. Real. Like I’d been there. I was about to call Octavio to tell him about it when I heard a scream upstairs. My mom.

Ever since Manny got shot I’d felt in a constant state of worry, half expecting some bad shit to happen all the time. I ran up the stairs, and when I got to the top I opened the door and saw my mom holding the envelope, flipping through the cash with her finger. Did she think Manny left it? Like he made it back somehow, or like he was still here? Did she think this was a sign?

I was about to tell her it was me, and Octavio, when she came over and hugged me. She pulled my head into her chest. Just kept saying, “Sorry, I’m so sorry.” I thought she meant about how she’d been in bed. How she’d given up. But then as she kept saying it I took it to mean how everything had happened to us. How much we lost, how we’d once been together as a family, how good it’d once been. I tried to tell her it was okay. I kept repeating, “It’s okay, Mom”–one for each of her sorrys. But then pretty soon I found myself saying sorry back. And we both said sorry back and forth until we started to cry and shake.

Blue

PAUL AND I GOT MARRIED tipi way. Some people call it the Native American Church. Or peyote way. We call peyote medicine because it is. I still mostly believe that in the same way I believe most anything can be medicine. Paul’s dad married us in a tipi ceremony two years ago. In front of that fireplace. That’s when he gave me my name. I was adopted by white people. I needed an Indian name. In Cheyenne it’s Otá’tavo’ome, but I don’t know how to say it right. It means: the Blue Vapor of Life. Paul’s dad started calling me Blue for short, and it stuck. Up until then I’d been Crystal.

---

Almost all I know about my birth mom is that her name is Jacquie Red Feather. My adoptive mom told me on my eighteenth birthday what my birth mom’s name is and that she’s Cheyenne. I knew I wasn’t white But not all the way. Because while my hair is dark and my skin is brown, when I look in the mirror I see myself from the inside out. And inside I feel as white as the long white pill-shaped throw pillow my mom always made me keep on my bed even though I never used it. I grew up in Moraga, which is a suburb just on the other side of the Oakland hills–which makes me even more Oakland hills than the Oakland hills kids. So I grew up with money, a pool in the backyard, an overbearing mother, an absent father. I brought home outdated racist insults from school like it was the 1950s. All Mexican slurs, of course, since people where I grew up don’t know Natives still exist. That’s how much those Oakland hills separate us from Oakland. Those hills bend time.

I didn’t do anything about what my mom told me on my eighteenth birthday right away. I sat on it for years. I kept on feeling white while being treated like any other brown person wherever I went.

I got a job in Oakland at the Indian Center and that helped me to feel more like I belonged somewhere. Then one day I was looking on Craigslist and saw that my tribe in Oklahoma was hiring a youth-services coordinator. That’s what I was doing in Oakland, so I applied not really thinking I would get it. But I got it and moved out to Oklahoma a few months later. Paul was my boss then. We moved in together just a month after I got there. Super unhealthy from the get-go. But part of why it went so fast is because of ceremony. Because of that medicine.

We sat up every weekend, sometimes it was just me, Paul, and his dad if no one else showed up. Paul took care of the fire and I brought in water for Paul’s dad. You don’t know the medicine unless you know the medicine. We prayed for the whole world to get better and felt it could every morning when we came out of the tipi. The world just spins, of course. But it all made perfect sense for a while. In there. I could evaporate and drift up and out through the crisscrossed tipi [oles with the smoke and prayers. I could be gone and all the way there at once. But after Paul’s dad died, everything I’d been praying about all that time got turned upside down and emptied on top of me in the form of Paul’s fists.

After the first time, and the second, after I stopped counting, I stayed and kept staying. I slept in the same bed with him, got up for work every morning like it was nothing. I’d been gone since that first time he laid hands on me.

I applied for a job back where I used to work in Oakland. It was the position of events coordinator for the powwow. I had no experience in coordinating events outside of the annual youth summer camps. But they knew me there, so I got the job.

---

I watch my shadow grow long then flatten on the highway as a car flies by without slowing or seeming to notice me. Not that I want slowing or notice. I kIck a rock and hear it ding against a can or some hollow thing in the grass. I pick up my pace and as I do a hot gust of air and the smell of gas blow by with the passing of a big truck.

This morning when Paul said he needed the car all day I decided to take it as a sign. I told him I’d get a ride home with Geraldine. She’s a substance abuse counselor where I work. When I walked out the door, I knew everything I left in that house I’d be leaving for good. Most of it was easy to leave. But my medicine box, the one his dad had made for me, my fan, my gourd, my cedar bag, my shawl–these I’ll have to learn to leave over time.

I didn’t see Geraldine all day and not after work either. But I’d made my decision. I headed to the highway with nothing on me but my phone and a box cutter I took from the front desk before I left.

---

The plan is to get to OKC. To the Greyhound station. The job doesn’t start for a month. I just need to make it back to Oakland.

A car slows then stops ahead of me. I see red brake lights bleed through my vision of the night. I turn around in a panic, then hear Geraldine, so turn to see her old-ass beige Cadillac her grandma gave her for graduating from high school.

When I get in the car Geraldine gives me a look like: What the fuck? Her brother Hector is laid out in the backseat. passed out.

“He okay?” I say.

“Blue, she says, scolding me with my name. Geraldine’s last name is Brown. Names that are colors is what we have in common.

“What? Where are we going?” I say to her.

“He drank too much, she says. “And he’s on pain meds. I don’t want him to throw up and die in his sleep on our living-room floor, so he’s riding with us.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me for a ride? You told Paul–“

“He called you?” I say.

“Yeah. I was already home. I had to leave early for this fucker,” Geraldine says, pointing with her thumb to the backseat. “I told Paul you had to stay late with a youth waiting for an auntie to show up, but that we were leaving soon.”

“Thank you.” I say.

“So you’re going?” she says.

Yeah,” I say.

“Back to Oakland?”

“OKC Greyhound?”

“Yeah.”

“Well shit,” Geraldine says.

“I know,” I say. And then our saying this makes a silence we drive in for a while.

I see what I think is a human skeleton leaned against a barbed-wire wood-pole fence.

“Did you see that?” I say.

What?”

“I don’t know.”

“People think they see stuff out here all the time,” Geraldine says. “You know that part of the highway you were walking? Up north a ways, just past Weatherford, there’s a town there called Dead Women Crossing.”

“Why’s it called that?”

“Some crazy white lady killed and beheaded this other white lady and sometimes teenagers go over to where it happened. The woman who got killed had her fourteen-month-old baby with her when she got killed. The baby made it out okay. They say you can hear that woman calling out for her baby at night.”

“Yeah. right.” I say.

“Ghosts aren’t what you have to worry about out here,” Geraldine says

“I brought a box cutter from work.” I say to Geraldine, and pull it out of my jacket pocket and slide the plastic clip up to show her the blade–like she doesn’t know what a box cutter is.

“This is where they get us,” Geraldine says.

“Safer out here than at home.” I say.

“You could do worse than Paul.”

“I should go back then?”

“Do you know how many Indian women go missing every year?” Geraldine says.

“Do you?” I say.

“No. but I heard a high number once and the real number’s probably even higher.”

“I saw something too, someone posted about women up in Canada.”

“It’s not just Canada, it’s all over. There’s a secret war on women going on in the world. Secret even to us. Secret even though we know it,” Geraldine says. She rolls down her window and lights a smoke. I light one too.

“Every single place we get stuck out on the road,” she says. “They take us, then leave us out here. leave us to dim to bone, then get all the way forgotten.” She flicks her cigarette out the window. She only likes a cigarette for the first few drags.

“I always think of the men who do that kinda thing like, I know they’re out there somewhere–

“And Paul,” she says.

“You know what he’s going through. He’s not who we’re talking about.”

“You’re not wrong. But the difference between the men doing it and your average violent drunk is not as big as you think. Then you’ve got the sick pigs in high places who pay for our bodies on the black market with Bitcoin, someone way up at the top who gets off on listening to the recorded screams of women like us being ripped apart, knocked against the cement floors in hidden rooms–

“Jesus,” I say.

“What? You don’t think it’s real? The people who run this shit are real-life monsters. The people you never see. What they want is more and more, and when that isn’t enough, they want what can’t be gotten easily. the recorded screams of dying Indian women. maybe even a taxidermied torso. a collection of Indian women’s heads. there’s probably some floating in tanks with blue lights behind them in a secret office or the top floor of an office building in midtown Manhattan.”

“You’ve given this some thought,” I say

“I meet with a lotta women,” she says. “Trapped by violence. They have kids to think about. They can’t just leave, with the kids, no money. no relatives. I have to talk to these women about options. I have to talk them into going to shelters. I have to hear about when the men accidentally go too far. So no, I’m not telling you that you should go back. I’m taking you to the bus station. But I’m saying you shouldn’t be out here on the side of the highway at night. I’m saying you should have texted me, asked me for a ride.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I thought I’d see you after work.”

I feel tired and a little annoyed. I always get this way after a cigarette. I don’t know why I smoke them. I yawn a big yawn. then lean my head against the window.

---

I wake up to the blink-blur of a struggle. Hector has his arms around Geraldine he’s reaching for the wheel. We’re swerving, no longer on the highway. We’re on Reno Avenue just across the bridge over the Oklahoma River, not far from the Greyhound station. Geraldine’s trying to get Hector off of her. I slap Hector on his head over and over with both hands to try to stop him. He grunts like he doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing. Or like he’s woken up from a bad dream. Or like he’s still having it. We swerve hard left then harder right and go over the curb, over some grass, and then into the Motel 6 parking lot, right into the front of a truck parked there. The glove compartment comes in and crushes my knees. My hands fly toward the windshield. The seat belt pulls, then cuts into me. We stop and my vision blurs. The world spins a little. I look over and see that Geraldine’s face is a bloody mess. Her airbag is out and it looks like it might have broken her nose. I hear the back door open and see Hector fall out of the car, then get up and stumble away. I turn my phone on to call an ambulance, and as soon as I do I see that Paul’s calling again. I see his name. His picture. He’s in front of his computer at work wearing that I’m-a-hella-hard-Indian-dude look, with his chin lifted. I pick up because I’m this close to the Greyhound. He can say anything to me now.

“What, what the fuck do you want? We just got in a wreck,” I say.

Where you at?” he says.

“I can’t talk. I’m calling an ambulance,” I say.

“What are you doing in OKC?” he says, and my stomach drops. Geraldine looks at me and mouths: Hang up.

“I don’t know how you know that, but I’m hanging up now,” I say.

“I’m almost there,” Paul says.

I hang up. “Did you fucking tell him where we are?”

“No, I did not fucking tell him where we are,” Geraldine says, and wipes her nose with her shirt.

“Then how the fuck does he know we’re here?” I say more to myself than to her.

“Shit.”

“What?

“Hector must have texted him. Hector’s all fucked up right now. I gotta go after him.”

“What about your car? Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine. Get to the bus station. Hide in the bathroom until the bus is ready to leave.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Find my brother. Convince him to not keep doing whatever the fuck it is he thinks he’s doing.”

“How long has he been back?”

“Onlv a month,” she says. “And he gets deployed again next month.”

“I didn’t even think we were still over there.” I side-hug her.

“Go,” she says. I don’t let go.

“Go,” she says, and pushes me away. My knees are stiff and sore, but I run.

The Greyhound sign stretches up like a beacon. But the lights are out. Is it too late? What time is it? I look at my phone. It’s only nine. I’m okay. I look back and see Geraldine’s car where we left it. No cops yet. I could call and wait for the police, tell them what happened, tell them about Paul.

The station is empty. I go straight into the bathroom. On my feet, in a crouch, on top of the toilet in one of the stalls, I try to order my ticket on my phone. But he calls. I can’t order because his calls keep interrupting me. I see a text at the top of my screen and try to ignore it but can’t.

You here? the text says. I know he means the bus station. He must have seen Geraldine’s car, seen how close the Greyhound station was.

We’re at a bar around the corner from where we crashed, I text

BULLSHIT, he texts back. Then he calls. I press the top button of my phone in. He’s probably here. Walking through the bus station. He’s looking for the light of my phone. Listening for its vibration. He won’t come into the bathroom. I turn the vibrate on my phone off. I hear the door to the bathroom open. My heart is too big and fast to hold in my chest. I take a deep breath as quiet and slow as I can. Still standing on the toilet seat I duck my head down to see who came in. I see women’s shoes. It’s an old woman. Big, beige, wide, Velcroed shoes step into the stall next to mine. Paul calls again. I press the top button again. I see a text come in.

C’mon baby. Come out. Where are you going? the text says. My legs are tired. My knees throb from the crash. I get down from the toilet. I pee and try to think of a text that might lead him away from here.

I told you we’re down the street. Come down. We’ll have a drink. We’ll talk through this, okay? I text him. The door to the bathroom opens again. I drop my head down again. Fuck. His shoes. I get back up on the toilet.

“Blue?” His voice booms in the stall.

This is the women’s room, sir,” the woman in the stall next to me says. There’s no one in here but me.” And I know she must have heard me in the next stall when I peed.

“Sorry,” Paul says.

There’s still too much time before the bus gets here. He’ll wait for the lady to leave and come back in. I hear the door open then close again.

“Please,” I whisper to the woman, “he’s after me.” And I don’t know what I’m asking her to do.

“What time’s your bus leaving, darling?” the woman says.

“Thirty minutes,” I say.

“Don’t worry. When you get to my age, you can get away with that much time in here. I’ll stay with you,” she says, and I start to cry. Not loud, not a sob, but I know she can hear me. The snot comes and I sniff in hard so it won’t keep coming.

“Thank you,” I say.

“This kind of man. They’re getting worse.”

“I’m gonna have to run out, I think. Run to the bus.”

“I carry mace. I been attacked, robbed more than once.”

“I’m going to Oakland,” I say. And I realize just then that we’re no longer whispering. I wonder if he’s at the door. My phone isn’t ringing anymore.

“I’ll walk over with you,” she says.

I order the ticket on my phone.

We walk out of the bathroom together. The station is empty. The woman is brown, ethnically ambiguous, and older than I thought even from the shoes. She has those deep wrinkles on her face that seem carved, wooden. She gestures for us to lock arms as we walk.

I climb the steps into the bus, the old woman behind me. I show my ticket to the driver on my phone, then turn it off. I walk to the back and slink way down in my seat, take in a deep breath then let it out, and wait for the bus to start moving.

Thomas Frank

BEFORE YOU WERE BORN, you were a head and a tail in a milky pool-a swimmer. You were a race, a dying off, a breaking through, an arrival. Before you were born, you were an egg in your mom who was an egg in her mom. Before you were born, you were the nested Russian grandmother doll of possibility in your mom’s ovaries. You were two halves of a thousand different kinds of possibilities, a million heads or tails, flip shine on a spun coin. Before you were born, you were the idea to make it to California for gold or bust. You were white, you were brown, you were red, you were dust. You were hiding, you were seeking. Before you were born, you were chased, beaten, broken, trapped on a reservation in Oklahoma. Before you were born, you were an idea your mom got into her head in the seventies, to hitchhike across the country and become a dancer in New York. You were on your way when she did not make it across the country but sputtered and spiraled and wound up in Taos, New Mexico, at a peyote commune named Morning Star. Before you were born, you were your dad’s decision to move away from the reservation, up to northern New Mexico to learn about a Pueblo guy’s fireplace. You were the light in the wet of your parents’ eyes as they met across that fireplace in ceremony. Before you were born, your halves inside them moved to Oakland. Before you were born, before your body was much more than heart, spine, bone, brain, skin, blood, and vein, when you’d just started to build muscle with movement, before you showed, bulged in her belly, as her belly, before your dad’s pride could belly-swell from the sight of you, your parents were in a room listening to the sound your heart made. You had an arrhythmic heartbeat. The doctor said it was normal. Your arrhythmic heart was not abnormal.

“Maybe he’s a drummer,” your dad said.

“He doesn’t even know what a drum is,” your mom said.

“Heart,” your dad said.

“The man said arrhythmic That means no rhythm.”

“Maybe it just means he knows the rhythm so good he doesn’t always hit it when you expect him to.”

“Rhythm of what?” she said.

But once you got big enough to make your mom feel you, she couldn’t deny it. You swam to the beat. When your dad brought out the kettle drum, you’d kick her in time with it, or to her heartbeat, or to one of the oldies mixtapes she had made from records she loved and played to no end in your Aerostar minivan.

Once you were out in the world, running and jumping and climbing, you tapped your toes and fingers everywhere, all the time. On tabletops. desktops. You tapped every surface you found in front of you, listened for the sound things made back at you when you hit them. The timbre of taps, the din of dings, silverware clangs in kitchens, door knocks, knuckle cracks, head scratches. You were finding out that everything makes a sound. Everything can be drumming whether rhythm is kept or strays. Even gunshots and backfire, the howl of trains at night, the wind against your windows. The world is made of sound. But inside every kind of sound lurked a sadness. In the quiet between your parents, after a fight they both managed to lose. You and your sisters listening through the walls for tones, listening for early signs of a fight. For late signs of a fight reignited. The sound of the worship service, that building drone and wail of evangelical Christian worship, your mom speaking in tongues on the crest of that weekly Sunday wave, sadness because you couldn’t feel any of it in there and wanted to, felt you needed it, that it could protect you from the dreams you had almost every night about the end of the world and the possibility or hell forever–you living there, still a boy, unable to die or leave or do anything but burn in a lake of fire. Sadness came when you had to wake up your snoring dad in church, even as members of the congregation, members of your family, were being slain by the Holy Ghost in the aisles right next to him. Sadness came when the days got shorter at the end of summer. When the street got quiet without kids out anymore. In the color of that fleeting sky, sadness lurked. Sadness pounced, slid in between everything, anything it could find its way into, through sound, through you.

You didn’t think of any of the tapping or knocking as drumming until you actually started drumming many years later. It would have been good to know that you’d always done something naturally. But there was too much going on with everyone else in your family for anyone to notice you should probably have done something else with your fingers and toes than tap, with your mind and time than knock at all the surfaces in your life like you were looking for a way in.

---

You’re headed to a powwow. You were invited to drum at the Big Oakland Powwow even though you’d quit drum classes. You weren’t gonna go. You didn’t wanna see anyone from work since you got hired. Especially anyone from the powwow committee. But there’s never been anything like it for you the way that big drum fills your body to where there’s only the drum, the sound, the song.

The name of your drum group is Southern Moon. You joined a year after you first started working at the Indian Center as a janitor. You’re supposed to sav custodian now, or maintenance person, but you’ve always thought of yourself as a janitor. When you were sixteen you went on a trip to Washington, D.C., to visit your uncle–your mom’s brother. He took you to the American Art Museum, where you discovered James Hampton. He was an artist, a Christian, a mystic, a janitor. James Hampton would end up meaning everything to you. Anyway, being a janitor was just a job. It paid the rent, and you could have your earphones in all day. No one wants to talk to the guy cleaning up. The earphones are an additional service. People don’t have to pretend to be interested in you because they feel bad that you’re taking their trash out from under their desk and giving them a fresh bag.

Drum group was Tuesday nights. All were welcome. Not women though. They had their own drum group Thursday nights. They were Northern Moon. You first heard the big drum by accident one night after work. You’d come back because you’d forgotten your earphones. You were just about to get on the bus when you realized they weren’t in your ears when you most wanted them, for that long ride home after work. In the drum group played on the first floor–in the community center. You walked into the room and, just as you did, they started singing. Hign-voiced wailing and howled harmonies that screamed through the boom of that big drum. Old songs that sang to the old sadness you always kept as close as skin without meaning to. The word triumph blipped in your head then. What was it doing there? You never used that word. This was what it sounded like to make it through these hundreds of American years, to sing through them. This was the sound of pain forgetting itself in song.

You went back every Tuesday for the next year. Keeping time wasn’t hard for you. The hard part was singing. You’d never been a talker. You’d certainly never sung before. Not even alone. But Bobby made you do it. Bobby was big, maybe six four, three fifty. He said he was big because he came from eight different tribes. He had to fit all of them in there, he said, pointing at his stomach. He had the best voice in the group hands down. He could go high or low. And he was the one who first invited you in. If it was up to Bobby, the drum would be bigger, would include everyone. He’d have the whole world on a drum i he could. Bobby Big Medicine. Sometimes a name just fit right.

Your voice is low like your dad’s.

“You can’t even hear it when I sing,” you’d told Bobby after class one day.

“So what? Adds body. Bass harmony is underappreciated,” Bobby told you, then handed you a cup of coffee.

“The big drum’s all you need for bass,” you said.

“Voice bass is different than drum bass,” Bobby said. “Drum bass is closed. Voice bass opens.”

“I don’t know,” you said.

“Voice can take a long time to come all the way out, brother,” Bobby said. “Be patient.”

---

You walk outside your studio apartment to a hot Oakland summer day, an Oakland you remember as gray, always gray. Oakland summer days from your childhood. Mornings so gray they filled the whole day with gloom and cool even when the blue broke through. This heat’s too much. You sweat. Sweat from walking. Sweat at the thought of sweating. Sweat through clothes to where it shows. You take off your hat and squint up at the sun. At this point you should probably accept the reality of global warming, of climate change. The ozone thinning again like they said in the nineties when your sisters used to bomb their hair with Aqua Net and you’d gag and spit in the sink extra loud to let them know you hated it and to remind them about the ozone, how hair spray was the reason the world might burn like it said in Revelation, the next end. the second end after the flood, a flood of fire from the sky this time. Maybe from the lack of ozone protection. Maybe because of their abuse of Aqua Net–and why did they need their hair three inches in the air, curled over like a breaking wave, because what? You never knew. Except that all the other girls did it too. And hadn’t you also heard or read that the world tilts on its axis ever so slightly every year so that the angle made the earth like a piece of metal when the sun hits it just right and it becomes just as bright as the sun itself? Hadn’t you heard that it was getting hotter because of this tilt, this ever-increasing tilt of the earth which was inevitable and not humanity’s fault, not our cars or emissions or Aqua Net but plain and simple entropy, or was it atrophy, or was it apathy?

---

You’re near downtown, headed for the Nineteenth Street BART Station. You walk with a slightly dropped, sunken right shoulder. Just like your dad’s. The limp too, right side. You knew this limp could be mistaken for some kind of affect, some lame attempt at gangsta lean. but on some level that you maybe didn’t even acknowledge, you knew that walking the way you walk is a way of subverting the straight-postured upright citizenly way of moving one’s arms and feet just so, to express obedience, to pledge allegiance to a way of life and to a nation and its laws. Left, right, left, and so on. But had you really cultivated this lean, this drop-shouldered walk, this way of swaying slightly to the right in opposition? Is it really some Native-specific countercultural thing you’re going for? Some vaguely anti-American movement? Or do you only walk the way your dad walked because genes and pain and styles of walking and talking get passed down without anyone even trying? The limp is something you’ve cultivated to look more like a statement of your individual style and less like an old basketball injury. To get injured and not recover is a sign of weakness. Your limp is practiced. An articulate limp, which says something about the way you’ve learned to roll with the punches all the ways you’ve been fucked over, knocked down, what you’ve recovered from or haven’t that you’ve walked or limped away from with or without style–that’s on you. You pass a coffee shop you hate because it’s always hot and flies constantly swarm the front of the shop, where a big watch of sun seethes with some invisible shit the flies love and where there’s always just that one seat left in the heat with the flies, which is why you hate it, on top of the fact that it doesn’t open until ten in the morning and closes at six in the evening to cater to all the hipsters and artists who hover and buzz around Oakland like flies, America’s white suburban vanilla youth, searching for some invisible thing Oakland might give them, street cred or inner-city inspiration.

Before getting to the Nineteenth Street Station you pass a group of white teenagers who size you up. You’re almost afraid of them. Not because you think they’ll do anything. It’s how out of place they are, all the while looking like they own the place. You want to run them down. Scream something at them. Scare them back to wherever they came from. Scare them out of Oakland. Scare the Oakland they made their own out of them. Six feet, two thirty chip on your shoulder so heavy it makes you lean, makes everyone look at it, your weight what you carry.

Your dad is one thousand percent Indian. An overachiever. A recovering alcoholic medicine man from the rez for whom English is his second language. He loves to gamble and smoke American Spirit cigarettes, has false teeth and prays for twenty minutes before every meal, asks for help from the Creator for everyone, beginning with the orphan children and ending with the servicemen and servicewomen out there, your one thousand percent Indian dad who only cries in ceremony and has bad knees that took a turn for the worse when he laid concrete in your backyard for a basketball court when you were ten,

You know your dad could once play ball, knew the rhythm of the bounce, the head-fake and eye-swivel, pivot, shit he learned how to do by putting in time. Sure he leaned heavily on shots off the glass, but that was the way it used to be done. Your dad told you he hadn’t been allowed to play ball in college because he was Indian in Oklahoma. Beak in 1963, that was all it took. No Indians or dogs allowed on courts or in bars or off the reservation. Your dad hardly ever talked about any of it, being Indian or growing up on the rez, or even what he felt like now that he’s a certifiable Urban Indian. Except sometimes. When he felt like it. Out of nowhere.

You’d be riding in his red Ford truck to Blockbuster to rent a movie. You’d be listening to your dad’s peyote tapes. The tape-staticky gourd-rattle and kettle-drum boom. He liked to play it loud. You couldn’t stand how noticeable the sound was. How noticeably Indian your dad was. You’d ask if you could turn it off. You’d make him turn off his tapes. You’d put on 106 KMEL–rap or R & B. But then he’d try to dance to that. He’d stick his big Indian lips out to embarrass you, stick one flat hand out and stab at the air in rhythm to the beat just to mess with you. That’s when you’d turn the music off altogether. And that was when you might hear a story from your dad about his childhood. About how he used to pick cotton with his grandparents for a dime a day or the time an owl threw rocks at him and his friends from a tree or the time his great-grandma split a tornado in two with a prayer.

The chip you carry has to do with being born and raised in Oakland. A concrete chip, a slab really, heavy on one side, the half side, the side not white. As for your mom’s side, as for your whiteness, there’s too much and not enough there to know what to do with. You’re from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You were both and neither. When you took baths, you’d stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub.

---

How you ended up getting fired was related to your drinking, which was related to your skin problems, which was related to your father, which was related to history. The one story you were sure to hear from your dad, the one thing you knew for sure about what it means to be Indian, was that your people, Cheyenne people, on November 29, 1864, were massacred at Sand Creek. He told you and your sisters that story more than any other story he could muster.

Your dad was the kind of drunk who disappears weekends, lands himself in jail. He was the kind of drunk who had to stop completely. Who couldn’t have a drop. So you had it coming in a way. That need that won’t quit. That years-deep pit you were bound to dig, crawl into, struggle to get out of. Your parents maybe burned a too-deep, too-wide God hole through you. The hole was unfillable.

Coming out of your twenties you started to drink every night. There were many reasons for this. But you did it without a thought. Most addictions aren’t premeditated. You slept better. Drinking felt good. But mostly, if there was any real reason you could pinpoint, it was because of your skin. You’d always had skin problems. Since you can remember. Your dad used to rub peyote gravy on your rashes. That worked for a while. Until he wasn’t around anymore. The doctors wanted to call it eczema. They wanted you hooked on steroid creams. The scratching was bad because it only led to more scratching, which led to more bleeding. You’d wake up with blood underneath your fingernails–a sharp sting wherever the wound moved, because it moved everywhere, ended up on your sheets, and you’d wake up feeling like you’d dreamed something as important and devastating as it was forgotten. But there was no dream. There was only the open, living wound, and it itched somewhere on your body at all times. Patches and circles and fields of red and pink, sometimes yellow, bumpy, pus-y, weeping, disgusting–the surface of you.

If you drank enough you didn’t scratch at night. You could deaden your body that way. You found your way in and out of a bottle. Found your limits. Lost track of them. Along the way you figured out there was a certain amount of alcohol you could drink that could–the next day–produce a certain state of mind, which you over time began to refer to privately as the State. The State was a place you could get to where everything felt exactly, precisely in place, where and when it belonged, you belonged, completely okay in it almost like your dad used to say, “In’it, like, isn’t that right? Isn’t that true?”

But each and every bottle you bought was a medicine or a poison depending on whether you managed to keep them full enough. The method was unstable. Unsustainable. To drink enough but not too much for a drunk was like asking the evangelical not to say the name Jesus. And so playing drums and singing in those classes had given you something else. A way to get there without having to drink and wait and see it the next day the State might emerge from the ashes

The State was based on something you read about James Hampton years after your trip to D.C. James had given himself a title: Director of Special Projects for the State of Eternity. James was a Christian. You are not. But he was just crazy enough to make sense to you. This is what made sense: He spent fourteen years building a massive piece of artwork out of junk he collected in and around the garage he rented, which was about a mile from the White House. The piece was called The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. James made the throne for Jesus’s second coming. What you get about James Hampton is his almost desperate devotion to God. To the waiting for his God to come. He made a golden throne from junk. The throne you were building was made of moments, made of experiences in the State after excess drinking, made of leftover, unused drunkenness, kept overnight, dreamed, moon-soaked fumes you breathed into throne form, into a place you could sit. In the State you were just unhinged enough to not get in the way. The problem came from having to drink at all.

The night before you got fired, drum class had been canceled. It was the end of December. The approach of the new year. This kind of drinking was not about reaching the State. This kind of drinking was careless, pointless-one of the risks, the consequences of being the kind of drunk you are. That you’ll always be, no matter how well you learn to manage it. By night’s end, you’d finished a fifth of Jim Beam. A fifth is a lot if you don’t work your way up to it. It can take years to drink this way, alone, on random Tuesday nights. It takes a lot from you. Drinking this way. Your liver. The one doing the most living for you, detoxifying all the shit you put into your body.

When you got to work the next day you were fine. A little dizzy, still drunk, but the day felt normal enough. You went into the conference room. The powwow committee meeting was happening. You ate what they were calling breakfast enchiladas when they offered them. You met a new member of the committee. Then your supervisor, Jim, called you into his office, called on the two-way you kept on your belt.

When you got to his office he was on the phone. He covered it with one hand.

“There’s a bat,” he said, and pointed out to the hallway. “Get it out. We can’t have bats. This is a medical facility.” He said it like you’d brought the bat in yourself.

Out in the hallway, you looked up and around you. You saw the thing on the ceiling in the corner near the conference room at the end of the hall. You went and got a plastic bag and a broom. You approached the bat carefully. slowly. but when you got close it flew into the conference room. Everyone, the whole powwow committee, their heads spinning. watched as you went in there and chased it out.

When you were back out in the hallway, the bat circled around you. It was behind you, and then it was on the back of your neck. It had its teeth or claws dug in. You freaked out and reached back and got the bat by a wing and instead of doing what you should have done–put it in the trash bag you’d been carrying with you–you brought your hands together and with all your strength, everything you had in you, you squeezed. You crushed the bat in your hands. Blood and thin bones and teeth in a pile in your hands. You threw it down. You would mop it up quick. Wipe clean the whole day. Start over again. But no. The whole powwow committee was there. They’d come out to watch you catch the bat after you’d chased the thing into their meeting. Every one of them looked at you with disgust. You felt it too. It was on your hands. On the floor. That creature.

---

Back in your supervisor’s office after you’d cleaned up the mess, Jim gestured for you to sit down.

“I don’t know what that was,” Jim said. Both hands were on top of his head. “But it’s not something we can tolerate in a medical facility.”

“The thing fucking…Sorry, but the thing fucking bit me. I was reacting–“

“And that would have been okay, Thomas. Only co-workers saw. But you smell like alcohol. And coming to work drunk, I’m sorry, but that’s a fireable offense. You know we have a zero-tolerance policy here.” He didn’t look mad anymore. He looked disappointed. You almost told him that it was just from the night before, but that maybe wouldn’t have made a difference, because you could have still blown an over-the-limit blood alcohol level. The alcohol was still in you, in your blood.

“I did not drink this morning,” you said. You almost crossed your heart. You’d never even done that when you were a kid. It was something about Jim. He was like a big kid. He didn’t want to have to punish you. Crossing your heart seemed like a reasonable way to convince Jim you were telling the truth.

“I’m sorry.” Jim said.

“So that’s it? I’m being fired?’

There’s nothing I can do for you.” Jim said. He stood up and walked out of his own office. “Go home. Thomas,” he said

---

You get down to the train platform and enjoy the cool wind or breeze or whatever you call the rush of air the train brings before it arrives, before you even see it or its lights, when you hear it and feel that cool rush of air you especially appreciate because of how much it cools your sweaty head.

You find a seat at the front of the train. The robot voice announces the next stop, by saying, or not saying exactly, but whatever it’s called when robots speak, Next stop Twelfth Street Station. You remember your first powwow. Your dad took you and your sisters–after the divorce–to a Berkeley high-school gym where your old family friend Paul danced over the basketball lines with that crazy-light step, that grace even though Paul was pretty big, and you’d never thought of him as graceful before. But that day you saw what a powwow was and you saw that Paul was perfectly capable of grace and even some kind of Indian-specific cool, with footwork not unlike break dancing, and that effortlessness that cool requires.

The train moves and you think of your dad and how he took you to that powwow after the divorce, how he had never taken you before when you were younger, and you wonder if it was your mom and Christianity, the reason why you didn’t go to powwows and do more Indian things.

The train emerges, rises out of the underground tube in the Fruitvale district, over by that Burger King and the terrible pho place, where East Twelfth and International almost merge, where the graffitied apartment walls and abandoned houses, warehouses, and auto body shops appear, loom in the train window, stubbornly resist like deadweight all or Oakland’s new development. Just before the Fruitvale Station you see that old brick church you always notice because of how run-down and abandoned it looks.

You feel a rush of sadness for your mom and her failed Christianity, for your failed family. How everyone lives in different states now. How you never see them. How you spend so much time alone. You want to cry and feel you might but know you can’t, that you shouldn’t. Crying ruins you. You gave it up long ago. But the thoughts keep coming about your mom and your family at a certain time when the magical over- and underworld of your Oakland-spun Christian evangelical end-or-the-world spirituality seemed to be coming to life to take you, all of you. You remember it so clearly, that time. It never moved far from you no matter how much time had carried you away from it. Before anyone was awake, your mom was crying into her prayer book. You knew this because teardrops stain, and you remember tearstains in her prayer book. You looked into that book more than once because you wanted to know what questions, what private conversations, she might have had with God, she who spoke that mad-angel language of tongues in church, she who fell to her knees, she who fell in love with your dad in Indian ceremonies she ended up calling demonic.

Your train leaves the Fruitvale Station, which makes you think of the Dimond district, which makes you think of Vista Street. That’s where it all happened, where your family lived and died. Your older sister, DeLonna, was heavily into PCP, angel dust. That was when you found out you don’t need religion to be slain, for the demons to come out with their tongues. One day after school DeLonna smoked too much PCP. She came home and it was clear to you that she was out of her mind. You could see it in her eyes–DeLonna without DeLonna behind them. And then there was her voice, that low, deep, guttural sound. She yelled at your dad and he yelled back and she told him to shut up and he did shut up because of that voice. She told him that he didn’t even know which God he was worshipping, and soon after that DeLonna was on the floor of your sister Christine’s room, foaming at the mouth. Your mom called an emergency prayer circle and they prayed over her and she foamed and writhed and eventually stopped when that part of the high wore off. the drug dimmed. her eyes closed, the thing was done with her. When she woke up they gave her a glass of milk, and when she was back with her normal voice and eves, she didn’t remember any of it

Later you remember your mom saying to take drugs was like sneaking into the kingdom of heaven under the gates. It seemed to you more like the kingdom of hell, but maybe the kingdom is bigger and more terrifying than we could ever know. Maybe we’ve all been speaking the broken tongue of angels and demons too long to know that that’s what we are. who we are, what we’re speaking. Maybe we don’t ever die but change, always in the State without hardly ever even knowing that we’re in it.

---

When you get off at the Coliseum Station, you walk over the pedestrian bridge with butterflies in your stomach. You do and don’t want to be there. You want to drum but also to be heard drumming. Not as yourself but just as the drum. The big drum sound made to make the dancers dance. You don’t want to be seen by anyone from work. The shame of your drinking and showing up to work with the smell still on you was too much. Getting attacked by the bat and crushing it in front of them was part of it too.

You go through the metal detector at the front and your belt gets you another go-through. You get the beep the second time because of change in your pocket. The security guard is an older black guy who doesn’t seem to care much about anything but avoiding the beeping of the detector.

“Take it out, anything, anything in your pockets, take it out,” he says.

“That’s all I got,’ you say. But when you walk through it beeps again.

“You ever have surgery?” the guy asks you.

“What?

“I don’t know, maybe you have a metal plate in your head or–“

“Nah, man, I got nothing metal on me.”

“Well, I gotta pat you down now,” the guy says, like it’s your fault.

“All right,” you say, and put your arms up.

After he pats you down, he gestures for you to walk through again. This time when it beeps he just waves you through.

About ten feet away you’re looking down as you walk and you realize what it was. Your boots. Steel toe. You started wearing them when you got the job. Jim recommended it. You almost go back to tell the guy, but it doesn’t matter anymore.

---

You find Bobby Big Medicine under a canopy. He nods up, then tilts his head toward an open seat around the drum. There’s no small talk.

“Grand Entry song,” Bobby says to you because he knows everyone else knows. You pick up your drumstick and wait for the others. You hear the sound but not the words the powwow emcee is saying, and you watch for Bobby’s stick to go up. When it does, your heart feels like it stops. You wait for the first hit. You pray a prayer in your head to no one in particular about nothing in particular. You clear a way for a prayer by thinking nothing. Your prayer will be the hit and the song and the keeping of time. Your prayer will begin and end with the song. Your heart starts to hurt from lack of breath when you see his drumstick go up and you know they’re coming, the dancers, and it’s time.

DMU Timestamp: February 21, 2023 13:31

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