Given World Read online

  “Yes. At the beach at the ocean. Where beaches are.” Mick popped off the spark plug wire, reached into his toolbox for the ratchet, and loosened the plug. The noise the ratchet made was a bit cricket-like. I wondered if I could tie that in somehow to make the conversation go further. Gave up.

  Mick looked over his shoulder at me. I wasn’t moving. I could have been dead. “Are you going to peel those apples or what?”

  “What,” I said, but that was it. I knew it was going to be.

  I got the peeler and began skinning apples, imagining for a short time they were small rabbits and me a wily trapper collecting pelts, but it didn’t make me feel very good; it made me feel a little sick, in fact, so I tried to take it back, in my head, but couldn’t. By the time I finished, Mick had disappeared into the garage. I took the apples inside and set them on the counter. “Here are your rabbits,” I said—whispered—to no one.

  I whistled Cash from his refuge under the table, and together we padded the two flights up to my room, which had once been the attic. It was small, because the whole house wasn’t very big—just a tallish box, perfectly square with the exception of a two-story addition off the back. I could get to the roof of it from my window but had to be careful on account of the steep pitch, for snow. The walls were blue, with tiny green and yellow fish trailing like ivy around the windows. Mick had painted them when he and Dad fixed the space up the summer before.

  I was nearly asleep on the floor, one hand buried deep in the fur around Cash’s neck, when I heard the bike start up. I bolted down the stairs, banked off the bannisters, miscalculated, and slammed my shoulder hard into the wall at the bottom. I hesitated just long enough to straighten a framed picture there, which was long enough to miss Mick’s turn from the long driveway onto the frontage road. I stood on the porch, tracking his progress beyond the hedgerow by the rooster tail of fine Montana silt he kicked up. I watched until all evidence of my brother and his bike disappeared from sight, a mile or more away. Cash leaned against my leg, and I reached down to scratch behind his ears.

  “Shit,” I said. I did not realize my mother was standing at the screen door until I heard my name.

  “Riley,” she said, “I really wish you wouldn’t swear so often.” Mick was teaching me. He was doing a good job.

  “Sorry, Mom. But damn . . .”

  “Riley. I know.” She pushed the door open and held it with her hip, laid her hands on my shoulders, rubbing the one that hurt. I wondered how she knew. “Maybe I’d like to go with him too.”

  I snorted. “You would not.” I tilted my head straight back so I could see her expression, but it was upside down and I couldn’t tell anything from that angle. Not that my mother was all that decipherable anyway. We never knew from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, which mom we were going to get. There was quiet mom, silly mom, fierce-but-not-mean mom, and mom with the faraway look in her eyes. That mom was almost but not quite the same as quiet mom, who still knitted and cooked and made us do our homework. Faraway mom just stood at the window, looking out at what I would remember later, after I’d gone away: the distant mountains, the buff-colored wheat fields, red-tailed hawks drifting with the thermals, poised to drop out of the sky, like missiles, onto errant field mice.

  “Mick’s leaving, Mom. Isn’t he?”

  She leaned down and kissed the top of my head. “Looks that way.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think he does either. Hopefully to college.”

  “When?”

  “Soon, I imagine. He hasn’t told us yet.” She did not sound particularly unhappy at the prospect of Mick going off to school, and that confused me, since I could see nothing good coming of it. At all.

  I went to his room that night after dinner to ask him about hawks. Dozens of drawings were pinned to the walls, of everything, seemingly, he’d ever seen when he went outside, or the pieces of outside he brought in: wildflowers, rocks, sticks, bones, trees, birds, reptiles, mammals big and small, mountains, clouds, planets.

  He finished the song he was playing on his guitar, set it down, pulled a dog-eared book from the shelf and read: “ ‘Krider’s Red-tailed Hawk is a very pale race found in the Great Plains. These are light mottled brown above and nearly pure white below. The belly band is often indistinct or absent, and the tail is usually light rust above and creamy below with faint barring.’ ”

  “ ‘A very pale race,’ ” I said, or mumbled. I was lying on the floor with a stuffed animal draped across my forehead like some bizarre woolly headdress. “Aren’t we a very pale race?”

  “We are,” Mick said. “Paler than most.”

  A minute passed. Then two. “Most what?” I didn’t even know what I was asking.

  “Go to bed, Riley.”

  Mick played for a while. Bob Dylan. Peter, Paul and Mary. I loved the dragon Puff. Hated it when he had to go. Finally, Mick laid his guitar on the bed, scooped me up off the floor and carried me to my room. I tried to not be entirely deadweight, but I wasn’t so easy to carry anymore.

  “You’re going to be too big for this pretty soon, you know.”

  “I know. But you’ll be gone anyway. So it won’t matter.”

  I waited. I kept my eyes closed.

  Mick said, “Good night, Punk.”

  “Night, Bozo,” I said. I think.

  I heard him leave on his bike again, sometime in the deep middle of the night. Cash woofed in my ear.

  “Forget it, dog. He’s not taking either one of us.”

  When I rolled over I heard something rustle. I pulled a piece of notebook paper from underneath me and held it up to the light coming through the window. I could tell what it was by the straight-up tail and the bristles. It was standing under a palm tree on a beach, gazing out at the waves.

  I traced it with my finger. “Hey, little buddy.”

  I fell asleep, still hearing the sound of the motorcycle long after it had faded, and dreamt of rabbits, hairless and round, like little moons.

  At breakfast the next morning Mick didn’t even look tired. I searched his face for some clue as to where he might have been, or what he might have seen, or what he was thinking about. He looked exactly the same as he had every morning of my life.

  He said, “Quit, Riley.”

  “Quit what?” I stared at my bowl, at the cornflake crumbs floating there. Like I was an astronomer and they were a newly discovered constellation. Discovered by me.

  “Looking at me like that.”

  “I’m not looking at you. Obviously.”

  “Riley,” Mom said. She didn’t finish, but I knew.

  Arguing wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to go, especially since I didn’t know where that was. I sneaked a look at my father, on his second cup of coffee and getting ready to light a cigarette, to see if any help might be coming from that quarter. He tapped the cigarette on the table and a few strands of tobacco fell out. I could smell it, sharp and bitter. Mom stood up and started clearing dishes, raising an eyebrow at Dad when he looked at her. There was a new no-smoking policy in the house, and sometimes he forgot. He put the cigarette behind his ear.

  “Was there something you wanted to ask your brother, Miss Riley?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I think there is, and you’re probably not going to get your answer by staring a hole through his head.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “What,” Mick said, “do you want to know?”

  He said it gently enough, but it didn’t matter anymore. I knew if I asked, whatever it was, and got an answer, I wouldn’t like it, unless he said he was staying put, and I knew that wasn’t even a distant possibility. Mick didn’t want to be a farmer. He wanted to see the world. He’d been telling me that since I could remember, but I had never realized it meant he’d be leaving me. I’d always imagined us somewhere together; somewhere that looked a lot like home.

  I said, “Never mind.” I excused myself, put my bowl in t
he sink, and left by the back door. Cash came with me, wagging his tail hopefully.

  • • •

  When the college catalogues came, Mick pored over them at the kitchen table. I helped by tearing the corners off the pages, piling the bits of paper together, and blowing on them so they scattered. Havre and Great Falls were okay, close enough that he could come visit. Missoula was too far away, on the other side of the mountains. Mick had that catalogue open.

  “You aren’t thinking about going there, are you?”

  “Yes, nosy. I am thinking about it.”

  “But it’s so far.”

  “Not so far, really. Not nearly as far as some places.”

  “So far really.” I started another pile of corners. When it reached a decent size, I blew on it. Hard. Some fell on the floor.

  Mick looked at me like he might be angry this time, but wasn’t. “This is what people do, Riley. They get out of high school and go away to college. Or some do.”

  “What about the other ones?”

  “They do other stuff.”

  “Other stuff around here?”

  “Some of them.”

  I waited.

  “That’s not going to be me, kiddo.”

  I sat down hard on the chair next to his and flipped through the pages of the Havre catalogue. “This looks nice,” I said after a while, even though I wasn’t really seeing it.

  Mick laughed. “Relax. I haven’t decided anything yet.” He turned my chair around and tilted my chin up so I had to look at him. My eyes kept blinking, and I swallowed so hard my throat hurt. Mick pushed back from the table and pulled me onto his lap. “I was never going to stay here forever, Riley. I thought you knew that.”

  I leaned into him, lowering my head to bite one of the buttons on his shirt. “I didn’t,” I said, sort of, because I had a button in my mouth. “You should have told me.”

  “I should have,” he said. And we left it at that. For a little while it felt okay.

  Then he brought a girl home. There had been others, but I hated this one the most. She and Mick disappeared behind his bedroom door, and with my ear pressed to the wood I could hear them murmuring. Whispering. I hated her, and I hated it. He was telling a stranger his plans.

  I went down to the creek with Cash, to escape the house and the heat and the terrible tightness in my chest. We lay in the shallow water and I watched the cottonwood leaves turn in the sun, even though there wasn’t any breeze. I groped for stones in the sandy bottom and threw them at the far bank. After a while Cash started to retrieve them. “Silly dog,” I said, and hugged his wet fur.

  I wondered what they were doing in Mick’s room—if he was reading to her or playing songs for her on his guitar. I turned over and put my face in the water, to see if I could leave it there long enough to drown. He’d be sorry. He’d hate her too because she was there when it happened, distracting him. I held my breath as long as I could, staring at small, current-smoothed rocks, water plants and tiny fish. It wasn’t going to work. I raised my head and took a deep breath.

  “Crap.”

  Mick’s bike was still parked in the driveway when Cash and I got back to the house, and I didn’t want to go in there. I draped myself over the porch rail and watched the water from my hair puddle on the wooden planks under me. I was dizzy, and my face felt fat and bruised. When my stomach started to hurt from the pressure, I slid toward the edge, until my hands were flat on the porch and my legs stretched out behind me. My mom called, but I couldn’t answer. I tried to slide back to where I’d started, but instead I crept forward even farther, until my feet went up and over my head, and I did a handstand into the garden, landing on my back instead of my feet. I never was much of an acrobat.

  It might have been funny if it didn’t hurt so much. My right arm was twisted under me, and even though I’d never broken a bone before, I knew I’d broken one this time. Cash was crazy barking at the front door, and my mom and Mick and that girl came out. When Mick picked me up, the girl stood off to one side. She was crying. She was.

  At the clinic in town they set my arm and put my shoulder back where it was supposed to be. The shot they gave me knocked me loopy, but it drove the pain away, or at least deep enough I didn’t care about it.

  Back at home, Mick carried me up to my room and put me in my bed under the covers. I groped around for the stuffed animal I always slept with and sometimes still dragged around with me. When I found it, I laid it on my chest.

  Mick said, “What is that thing, anyway?”

  “It’s a rabbit. See?” I held it up by its one remaining ear.

  “Damndest rabbit I ever saw.”

  “Still a rabbit.”

  I slept for a few hours, and when I woke up saw that Mick and that girl had both signed my cast. I tried to rub out her name. It was Gail. Stupid name. Stupid girl.

  A few days later we met, officially. She said, “Well aren’t you a cutie pie?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

  Mick said, “You think she’s cute? Better get your eyes checked.” I wanted to hit him with something hard and heavy. They both laughed and walked away across the yard, her hand in the back pocket of his jeans. I sat on the porch steps and banged my cast against the handrail while Cash watched, looking worried. It hurt a lot. My dad found me doing it and made me stop. He sat with me and tried to tell me it’s natural for things to change, and for us to not like it much, but then we get used to it, and after a while it’s as if things are the way they were always meant to be.

  “You’re going to survive this, Riley.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I do think so, and I’m the dad. Got it?”

  “Sure.” I didn’t want to make him feel bad, but I didn’t believe him for a second. I leaned my head against his arm, and we sat there until my mom came out.

  “What are you two up to?”

  “Just sitting here.” He scooted me and him over a few inches, to make room.

  She sat down and smoothed her skirt over her knees. “Grass could use a mowing,” she said.

  “Thought I’d get to it tomorrow. That be okay?”

  “Sure. Or the next day.”

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  We all heard the bike but no one moved except Cash, and he only moved his head, and just a little. Mick and Gail waved as they headed down the driveway. We waved back, but they didn’t see.

  She came almost every day for a while. Sometimes she stayed for dinner. I don’t remember what she talked about, if she talked at all. She was pretty, and her hair was blond, but not as blond as Mick’s. She liked him a lot. It was kind of sickening to see.

  But then she stopped coming. I asked my mom why, and she said I should ask Mick. Because she didn’t know.

  “She wanted to go steady.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “Seems sort of pointless.”

  “Because you’re going away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  We were in the driveway. He reached into his toolbox, came out with a screwdriver and held it in his hand, looking at it like he’d never seen one before—like it was a new specimen; a previously undiscovered species.

  “Did you break her heart?”

  “She says I did.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  He put the screwdriver back and picked up a crescent wrench; tapped it on the hard-packed dirt.

  “Yes. I am. Is that okay with you?”

  “Sure.” I didn’t want him to feel so bad. Not about that. I knew he didn’t mean to break anyone’s heart. Not even mine.

  “That’s the way the cookie crumbles, isn’t it.”

  “It is,” he said. And he tried not to smile, but I saw.

  Eventually he took pity on me, bored out of my skull and not able to do very much. He let me help with the bike: hold and hand him tools, turn screws, tighten bolts, polish; especially polish.

  “Jeez, Mick, It’s shiny already.” />
  “So’s your face, punkin’ head. Keep rubbing. You missed a spot.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  And he took me riding. I didn’t even have to ask. I couldn’t believe it. He showed up one day with a new red helmet and we took off for the Little Rockies, a small mountain range thirty or so miles away, completely surrounded by the pancake flatness of the plain.

  I held on with my good arm, the mending one tucked between us like an injured animal, while we drove through a narrow canyon that began on the rez, just past a small white church and the picket-fenced graveyard behind it. I had to get off and wade while Mick coaxed the bike through a sandy creekbed to solid ground. We rode slowly through sunlight and shadow, between the craggy limestone canyon walls where windblown conifers and ferns improbably, and probably ill-advisedly, tried to grow. On the ridgetops I could see lines of stunted trees, like crouching soldiers waiting for their orders. Charge. Take cover. Retreat.

  Mick told me about some animals that lived in the Montana mountains not so long ago, like ten thousand years. Saber-toothed cats with canine teeth seven inches long; dire wolves; short-faced bears; a lion with long, long legs, bigger than a Bengal tiger.

  I asked him where they went.

  “Probably somewhere they thought people would stop trying to kill them all the time.”

  “Are there any left?”

  “Not the same ones. Newer ones.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like timber wolves. Elk. Bears.”

  “Regular animals,” I said.

  Mick laughed. “Exactly.”

  • • •

  The day he started packing for Missoula, I was ready on the roof outside my window. I had an old Easter basket full of rocks—bigger than pebbles, but nothing too lethal. I waited for him to come out of the house, to head out to the garage for a trunk or a duffel bag. I could see Cash in the yard, watching, with his head resting on his crossed front paws. Dad’s tractor was kicking up great clouds of dust along the far fence line; it hadn’t rained in months, and the grasshoppers were eating everything in sight. The forecast said soon, though, and I’d heard my parents talking about how they thought they could smell it coming, even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky you couldn’t see clear through.