Given World Page 5

  “Wyoming. Washington, DC, when I was a freshman. Some kind of Indian-kid award ceremony.”

  “For what?”

  “Good grades. Citizenship, whatever that means.”

  “Means you’d have made a great Eagle Scout, I bet.”

  “Right.”

  “Did you go on a plane?” Like she was asking if he’d gone on a rocket ship.

  “Nope. Four days on the train. It was cool.”

  “All by yourself?”

  “Me, myself, and I.”

  “Oh.” She nodded. “The three of you.”

  “Yup.”

  He remembered how lonely it was, how he wished Leonard could have come along. Everyone else seemed to be in groups, families, eating in the dining car, hanging out playing cards, kids running up and down the aisles. He’d watched out the window as the landscape changed, the lush green of Minnesota and Illinois, the thunderstorms, acre upon acre of corn and beans and flat land; he’d never been anyplace that didn’t have mountains on at least one horizon. Chicago blew his mind: more buildings, and taller ones, than he’d ever imagined. In DC, he’d wandered dizzily through the museums and the art galleries, knowing it would cost a lifetime to take it all in, and he didn’t have a lifetime to spend. He had three days. On one of them he met the president, LBJ.

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “He asked me if I played basketball.”

  “What did you say?”

  Darrell took an imaginary jump shot. It went in. “I said yes, silly.”

  “Not yes, sir?”

  “Probably.”

  “Is his nose as big as it looks on TV?”

  “Bigger.”

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s big.”

  The next time he came, no one would pick him up on the way home. He walked all night—six hours—along the highway to get back in time for work. All the way there he thought about telling her he was going away. He imagined the conversation they would have. Maybe there would be promises. Maybe she wouldn’t care.

  He taught her about real paint ponies, how the conquistadores had brought them to North America, and the natives had stolen them to ride. “They came with their own camouflage,” he said. “And it behooved them injuns to blend in.”

  She laughed when he said “behooved.” Which was why he said it. She didn’t laugh often or easily, but when she did, the sound flashed through his brain like a comet, scorching a trail.

  One day he told her about the ducks who’d made the continents by pulling up mud and plants from the bottom of a great sea. Before that, he said, the only creatures who survived were the ones that could swim. She said how she had always wanted to see an ocean—the Pacific especially—and how she imagined it was the same as Montana, only bluer and bigger, with no mountains.

  “In which case,” he said, “not exactly the same.” He was kidding, but apparently the humor escaped her. She stood up from where they were sitting on someone’s abandoned sofa behind the abandoned theater, out of the hot sun. Walked away from him about fifteen paces, like Jesse James getting ready to draw, and then turned to face him, took off her blue sunglasses, and pointed her finger at him.

  “Have you ever seen the ocean?”

  “No. I’ve never seen the ocean. But I’ve seen pictures of it.”

  “Pictures lie,” she said. “Everything does.”

  “Everything lies?”

  “Yes.” She stared him down—a dare to tell her she was wrong.

  “Come here.” He patted the seat next to him. “Crazy girl.” He saw in her eyes, as soon as he said it, what could only be identified as tears, if she had let them fall. He got up and grabbed her hand. “Come here.” She let him lead her back to the sofa. “You gonna tell me?” She shook her head. “You want to hit me?”

  “No.”

  “Sure you do.” She made a fist and punched him in the arm. Hard enough. It stung for a second. “Better?”

  “I’ll be better when you stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Just stop.”

  He didn’t know what he’d run up against, but he knew to quit messing with it.

  Out past the railroad tracks, a stretch of still and dusty plain lay unbroken except for the skeleton of an old railway spur and a couple of ancient and almost unrecognizable farm implements. Forty miles on was Alberta. He’d heard Canada was an option, but he’d never say it out loud; had never even formed the idea completely in his own mind. She put her hand back in his and with the other closed his fingers, one by one, around it. Dry bunchgrass grew up through the railroad tracks, and the spikes were working their way out in places. A train hadn’t been through in years, as there was no good reason to come this way anymore.

  “Canada,” she said.

  “It sure is, eh?” He tried to laugh, hoping she would help him do it. But she just looked at him—he could see himself reflected in her eyes—and then back out at what was there. Not much, was what.

  In June, on his birthday, they broke into the clinic and gave each other tattoos with a hypodermic needle and ink leaked out of the doctor’s fountain pen. Hers was a tiny M on the back of her right shoulder, where she couldn’t see it, and under it the words “Rave On.” Darrell didn’t ask what the M stood for, and she didn’t say, but he had an idea. His was the outline of a black bird with a big, curved beak. He drew it on a piece of paper and she copied it onto his forearm.

  “Crow?” she asked.

  “Not exactly. More sparrow hawk.” She was incredibly gentle with the needle, biting her bottom lip the whole time, looking up at him every two minutes to see if she was hurting him. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said, “I promise.”

  “I wish we had some other colors of ink except black.”

  “We’ll fix them later. I know how to make some plant and bark dyes and stuff.”

  She smiled, and it dazzled him. “You’re the real deal, aren’t you?”

  “You betcha, sister.”

  She bent her head down and went back to work. When she was finished, she laid the needle aside and grabbed the hem of her T-shirt to pull it off over her head. She shrugged out of the boy’s undershirt she still wore for a bra and used it to blot the blood and the ink. When she put it back on, the bird was clearly visible in red and black—a repeat pattern, like an avian pileup on the prairie. Her scar, a wild vine, wrapped around her body. Darrell pulled her toward him, and she did not resist. He picked her up and carried her to the examining table, laid her down, and leaned in to kiss the scar where it began, just under her heart. He held onto the far side of the table, bent low with his arms stretched over her and turned his head to place his cheek in the hollow below her rib cage. She put her hands in his hair and sighed, blowing the air out soft and slow, until her lungs were empty, filled them again and held her breath. He couldn’t move. He didn’t want to.

  • • •

  Summer started to fade in August, with snow already falling on the Front Range. They watched from the couch behind the theater, where in the sun it was still warm, but wouldn’t be for long.

  “We should go camping,” she said, “before it’s too late.”

  “Like Lewis and Clark.”

  “Sort of. Only someone needs to be Sacajawea.”

  “Want to flip for it?”

  “Nah. You be her. You’d be better at it. I’ll watch and learn. For later.”

  “Deal,” he said, wishing there was just one thing he could change: that everything hadn’t gone and got all fucked up. By him. That he wasn’t such a coward.

  They packed sleeping bags and food out to a cottonwood-shaded beach by the river, a few miles east of town; cooked corn and potatoes over a fire, gnawed on too-rare elk, and sipped on a pint of Southern Comfort Darrell had brought because he thought she might like it. She liked it okay, and it made her less shy. She asked about his family; why he didn’t live with his parents.

  “Parents,” he repeated, like it was a word in an unfamiliar language. “Mom a
nd Dad.” He poked at a smoldering chunk of wood until it reluctantly caught fire again, and tossed the stick aside. “I don’t know a lot about my father, except he was a mix—a mutt Indian—and a wanderer. They say he was a pretty smart guy, a good businessman, like. I don’t know if I ever even met him. If I did, I don’t remember. I’m not even sure he’s still alive, but I guess someone would tell me if he wasn’t.”

  He looked down at his hands, spread his fingers wide, and put his fingertips together like he was fixing to play here’s the church and here’s the steeple. But he didn’t even know that rhyme. “My mom came from Browning, and she ran off with the carnival. She actually did that. She stands on a stage and lets a guy throw knives at her.”

  “At her?”

  “Around her. It’s an act.”

  “Wow. That’s kind of cool.”

  “Yeah, unless you’re her kid.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “It’s okay.” He picked up the stick again and dug a trough in the dirt. “I guess I don’t blame her. There’s not much here, is there?”

  “There’s stuff,” Riley said, and shrugged. “Did you ever live with her?”

  “Once when I was little and she stayed put for a few months, down in Wyoming. But I’ve lived with my uncle and my cousin Leonard since I was four or five. That’s home.”

  “So Leonard’s your brother, pretty much, right?”

  He thought about not saying anything, or making something up, but there was no good reason to do either of those things, so he told her how Leonard had fallen through the river ice the past winter, trying to free a goose whose foot was frozen to it. “I tried to get out to him, to pull him back, but the current got him before I could. I could see him under the ice for a few minutes, and then he was gone. We still haven’t found him.”

  He remembered what Leonard was trying to say as he headed out onto the ice. “Geese muhmuhmuhmuhmate for life,” he’d said. “She needs to go back to her muhmuhmuhmuh— Oh fuck it.”

  Darrell leaned his forehead into hers and made her look into his eyes. “If you’re going to go through the ice, do it on a lake. Or better yet, a pond. Preferably a shallow one.”

  “Then wait for you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What happened to the goose?”

  “Went back to her mate, I guess. Leonard got her foot unstuck before the river opened up.”

  She leaned into him, hard, and he had to lean back into her, or fall over.

  When it got dark, they zipped their sleeping bags together against the cold and slid in, lying on their backs while Darrell pointed out constellations and told her their Indian names. One was called “Seven Dancing Girls.”

  “You made that up,” she said.

  “I did not. Otherwise there’d only be one dancing girl.”

  They fell asleep side by side, but woke fully tangled front to front as the sun cleared the canyon wall. Darrell tried to pull away even before he had to, but her legs locked him in and her hips anticipated every move. A rodeo cowboy, he thought, trying to make eight seconds on a saddle bronc. Positions somehow reversed, but he was past the point of no return. When she finally let him go, he pushed himself up so he could see her face, blew out a long, uneven breath, and said, “God you’re strong.”

  He could tell she was trying really hard not to smile with her mouth, but her eyes gave her away. “Now I know,” she said.

  “Know what, exactly?”

  “What all the excitement’s about.”

  “Does that mean you liked it?”

  She put her hands flat on the sides of his face and stared at him. She looked briefly insane. “Liked what?” He laughed. His hair curtained both their faces. She grabbed a handful and pulled, but it didn’t hurt.

  Later, walking back, she nonchalantly aimed her chin at the Little Rockies range and said, “That’s where I’m going to spread my share of Mick’s ashes when they find him.”

  He was not surprised by what she said, or that she didn’t attempt any kind of foreword to the statement. M for Mick. He saw her reach over her shoulder to touch the tattoo, like she was making sure it hadn’t disappeared in the night.

  “You want to tell me?”

  “He went missing in a tunnel or something. They haven’t said very much about it. He was only about two months away from getting out.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Three years. Four months. Nine days.” She stopped, picked up a rock, inspected it and threw it toward the mountains. “A long time.” She walked on. “If he was here right now, he’d tell us what that rock is made of. Its whole entire history.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me too.” She slowed down and let him walk beside her. “That’s why my parents don’t really care what I do, so long as I do it around here.”

  “I bet they care.”

  “Yeah, I just meant they don’t track me or tell me.”

  “Do you want them to?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I know you do. That’s why I told you.”

  He’d meant to tell her some things too: about how his lottery number was too low, about how he’d agreed to enlist if they’d let him wait for a while, on account of Leonard and his uncle. Since that first day, he’d meant to.

  A few days after the camping trip he borrowed the work truck and came back, sooner than he usually would. He held her against the wall behind the theater, tipped her chin up, and kissed her. He locked her in with his long arms, and told her. For a few endless seconds she didn’t move. Then she pushed him away. Her eyes were crazy.

  “I hate you.”

  He grabbed her wrist and tried to pull her to him. “Don’t—”

  “Shut up shut up shut up.” She twisted out of his grip, backed up and closed her eyes. She shook her head so hard her face and hair were a blur.

  He knew there was nothing he could say to make it right; that anything he said would only make it worse.

  She stopped shaking her head and tilted it backward, opened her eyes toward the cloud-covered sun, as if she were waiting for it to show and blind her. She was holding herself so tightly he thought she might crack a bone inside with just skin and muscle. He took a step forward, and when she didn’t move reached out and put his hands on her shoulders. She put the heels of her hands over her eyes for a few seconds and then dragged her fingers down the sides of her face and her neck until they reached his. She whispered, “Don’t go.”

  “I have to. I made a deal. I’m already in.”

  “No you aren’t. Stay. The rez will hide you.”

  “Not forever. They’ll find me. They’ll put me in jail.”

  She looked down at their feet, almost touching in the dust, raised herself up on her toes, spun, and walked away.

  “Hey, Ginger,” he said, and she stopped. Her back was to him, and she held her arms up in front of her, elbows bent, like she was waiting for someone to put the handcuffs on. He stood behind her and wrapped his hands around her wrists. He had to tuck his fingers into his palms to get a grip. When she tugged, he loosened up and she slipped away. Just like that.

  He left in late September. They’d found what was left of Leonard’s body washed up under a pile of deadfall on the riverbank—some bones gnawed or missing—and buried him a few days before Darrell took the bus to the induction center in Butte and then on to basic training in Oklahoma.

  He sent her letters, but she wrote back only once. She said, Someday I will learn to not get attached. Maybe that’s what this was all about. Don’t think you can come back here and marry me or anything, because I won’t be here. I am not going to wait for you too. There was a long space; he could picture her thinking, pen poised over the page, biting her lip. Then she wrote, But I am glad I found you. Or you found me. That’s the way it went, isn’t it? God I was high that day. Another space. I don’t know if I would have been more mad if you didn’t go. I can’t get to the place in me tha
t knows that. Another space and Don’t get killed please. She signed off, finally, at the very bottom of the page: Love, whatever that means, Riley, whoever that is.

  Even though she never wrote again, he kept writing to her, mostly about what they were trying to teach him: how to shine his boots, make his bed, shoot and clean an M16, throw hand grenades, eat C rations, perform first aid. He was introduced to the practices of land navigation, or how to read a map and operate a compass. (“No celestial navigation,” he said. “The army, she doesn’t trust the stars.”) He learned the rules of war (“Slightly more complicated, but basically the same as checkers”) and the proper way to salute, stand at attention, and march, in ranks inspection, parade, and graduation. They dressed him in camouflage, but the pony requisition never came through.

  After basic, they sent him to medic school in San Antonio for a few months, one night near the end of which he beat a redheaded white boy at pool and earned a mauling for it. It was in a honky-tonk he’d been to before, a few miles from the base, and usually he just kept to himself in a dark corner or at the end of the bar. But this night he was feeling good, like maybe he’d finally notched a chink in the armor of the pale world. He’d passed all the tests; everyone had started calling him Doc.

  The first blow came from behind him, a pool cue at the knees, swung low like a cricket bat. He grabbed the edge of the table on the way down, came back up with the nine ball in his hand, turned to see who’d hit him. Four guys were standing there, three of them holding cues by the skinny ends, the fourth with a quarter-full vodka bottle he commissioned to smash in one of Darrell’s cheekbones.

  Someone said, “How does that feel, you fuckin’ Cherokee?”

  He slid to the floor, one leg tucked under him and the other stretched to the side in some ill-conceived Twister position. He felt but didn’t really see until it was walking away the boot that came down on his shin and his ankle, three times, maybe four. He heard it, though—the cracking. On the jukebox, Tammy Wynette was singing “Stand by Your Man.”

  Darrell laughed, closed his eyes, and in the darkness conjured up an image of that dancing girl, the one he’d heard had left for Missoula. The big city. He’d never gotten a new address, and letters he sent to her parents’ house had started coming back. Still, he hoped she’d find what she was looking for; that someday he might see her again and could tell her about the ocean. He figured he’d let her know, somehow, if it was anything like Montana at all.