A Deeper Love Inside (25 page)

When my dance was complete the crowd closed in on me. It was hard to shake the crowd of followers who wanted to know me, meet me, touch or pluck one or two feathers off my skirt, but eventually I shook them all.

Running back to NanaAnna’s in the feather-wear, even the deer and birds were checking me out like I was a new breed of animal moving through their territory.

Tomorrow, NanaAnna’s giving us a going-home party. Everyone believes we are campers going back home because August is coming to a close. Onatah, a Native girl who I met, will be one of the many kids who NanaAnna invited. She believes she is my best friend. Somehow me and Onatah keep getting connected back together. It turned out that my drummer is one of her brothers. He’s the rebellious one who didn’t want to live with his family in their mansion. I don’t know why. So he made his home and ran his business in the trees. The whole time I was in his tree house worrying if NanaAnna and Riot was worrying over me, she already knew exactly where I was. Momma, Onatah chills like how we used to chill before Poppa got tooken. She even has her own horse. Up here people go horseback riding like how we play cards or dominoes. I know you didn’t want me to get a pony or a puppy. Poppa told me so. He said you couldn’t stand even imagining the piles of poop. But I learned that sometimes to get to something really beautiful, you gotta stand in, lay in, or inhale a little poop! I’ll see you, Momma, in three days!

• • •

Dear Poppa,

Tense, that’s how I’m feeling. How about you, Poppa? Are you tense? I know, you are more tense than me. I always know and understand even the slightest difference in things. (You and Momma helped me with that.) So you are still in a cage? I have been out of my cage for forty days. I’m tense because now that I’ve been out for what seems like a long time to me, if I get captured, it will be much harder for me to cope and deal. I’m sure of that. So I am planning to not get caught to the best of my ability. I have been thinking, Poppa, of pretty heavy things for the past twenty-four hours straight. For example, how serious am I about not getting caught? Am I so serious that I would kill to defend my freedom? I have been fighting a lot for three years now, Poppa. I know some murderers but I don’t think I’m one of them. I hope the authorities never push me so hard and so far that I have to kill. And if I can’t kill anyone else no matter who they are, I can and am willing to hurt them enough to stop them from coming after me.

The toughest question is, could I kill myself as a means to not getting captured ever again? It’s hard to measure suicide. How does a person know if it’s better to be dead or alive, when life can switch up in a heartbeat and become so scary and painful? And if I get captured, I can still get released one day after time served. I can still then see you and Momma, Winter, Lexus, and Mercedes. If I kill myself, I won’t be able to see any of you unless there’s really a place called heaven. Heaven or hell, if I kill myself, I’ll be waiting there alone till any one of my loved ones passes away and arrives to join me. The problem is, I have already been alone for too long. Poppa, tomorrow we ride. You said you have a tight team. Me and my girl call ourselves Ivory and Ebony. We are definitely tight. If you knew Ebony, even you might want her to become one of your soldiers. She got a nineteen-year-old girl to ride with us. We call her Honey. That’s not her government, but that’s the name she wanted to be called. She’s driving, got a license, and a Social Security number, a credit card, and she’s renting a vehicle. She’s not doing us any favors. My girl met her outside a casino. Honey had a black eye and a habit! We have been using her habit against her. My girl Ebony says she been training Honey the same way she trains her Rottweiler. She makes her do tricks for treats. She starves her at the right time; “feeds” her at the right time. At first Honey thought Ebony was a man. She was used to having a pimp so she followed orders nicely and expected to get punched when she didn’t. Afterwhile, she got used to Ebony. When my girl showed Honey that she was actually a girl, Honey laughed a lot and says she knew she was too good to be true. “No man is so good,” Honey said about Ebony. By that time she was hooked on her trainer. I met her once. I don’t trust her, but I trust my girl. When I saw how nice my girl was treating her that one day, I thought the chick should have been named Money instead of Honey cause she ate and drank too much, plus she got a habit to feed. Honey said that Honey is her stage name. She caught it cause the men can’t leave her alone. Once they meet her once, they stick. That’s what she said. Now she say’s she tired of men. (Nineteen and tired of men. How does that happen, Poppa?) She wants to go to Hollywood and “Young,” that’s what she calls Ebony, is her manager. Poppa, Honey used to get beat up a lot. We don’t beat her, though. We treat her good even though it’s not good to feed her habit. I’ve learned, Poppa. Some people gotta get used. The weaker you are, the easier it is to use you. I hope Momma doesn’t get startled when we ride up to our Long Island home. I wouldn’t want her to start busting shots at us. Since she’s definitely not expecting them or me.

Poppa, remember that time I fought with cousin Stacey over Aunt Sheila’s house? Remember Aunt Sheila spanked me and yelled, “Money don’t grow on trees?” I know you remember it well. Momma was so mad that Aunt Sheila had the nerve to spank me. I remember after Momma told you the story, you didn’t really react or bring it up again to me or none of us. Then on a late Saturday night, you walked into my bedroom with a money tree. When I woke up early the next morning I didn’t believe I had a real potted small tree at my bedside. Each thin brown branch had leaves made of real cash folded and dangling like birds. The lowest branches had ones, then fives, tens, twenties, then hundreds close to the top. The top branch had a new pair of gold earrings for me. I wasn’t sure what I was most excited about, the fact that you thought about me and took the time to do something so special to make me feel better, or the money, or the way my money was folded into the shapes of birds and other animals. Yes, the 24-karat-gold earrings were really pretty, but I’ll admit I thought about Winter. She would’ve gotten diamond earrings from you. But if you had put diamonds on the top branches of that money tree, I probably would’ve blacked out from an overdose of happiness.

I wanted to tell the whole world about my poppa. How could people not know how real you are? How big your heart is? You told me, “Sometimes when you have a good thing that no one else has, and everybody wants, you gotta keep it a secret. Hold it in your chest,” you said. “Keep it for a rainy day.” So I planted the tree out back. I listened to your instructions. Poppa, I know I pressed you to teach me how to fold the paper like you folded the cash, and wasn’t satisfied until you taught me the origami. It took so long for you to teach me, I figured you had to go find out and learn it for yourself first! But you did, Poppa, cause you always came through. Now I can make those origami birds and shapes easily. Poppa, to this day you are my only hero.

When you got tooken, Poppa, it was the darkest, coldest night ever. My plan was to give that money from the tree to Momma so she could help you. Then Momma got tooken. Then I got tooken. Mercedes and Lexus got tooken. I did one thing that might make you proud. Before I got tooken I thought ahead like you used to try and teach me to do. I took each folded bill out of the beak of my stuffed bird named Pretty. I buried the cash from my money tree in our backyard somewhere near where I had first planted the tree in the ground.

Tomorrow we ride. If anything bad happens to me, capture, murder, suicide, I want Momma to have that money, and to give it to you. I want your commissary to be endless. I don’t want you to even have to lift a finger, or to do what anyone else says for you to do, just to earn. I’m familiar with the cage, Daddy. Your middle daughter loves you more than you may ever know. Early tomorrow morning, I’ll bury this journal. I already set it up, so that if I don’t make it, this journal will be dug up and given to Momma so she can collect the money. I already know that anything I give to Momma is the same as I gave it to you. I am your middle daughter. If you receive this diary journal, this is my true voice and true feelings.

The end of Porsche L. Santiaga’s on the reservation journal.

Chapter 23

We met Honey at 10:00 a.m. in the additional parking area on the side wall of a local boutique. She was sitting in a rented white Volvo. Riot and I both did an eye search of the vehicle before we got up close. We had already done the same of the surrounding area. As promised, I had smoked the clothes I had worn for forty days, except for the one cheap outfit I had on. Tossing those items into the big blazing campfire the Natives had going the night before was easy. Wrapped in a couple of brown paper bags, the forty days turned to ashes in less than five minutes.

My memories, however, are permanent. Leaving NanaAnna, the land, the sky above, the reservation, and the people was only outweighed by returning to Momma and my family. I couldn’t explain how a total of forty-two days had turned into real feelings. The fresh air, the stream, the lake, the organic gardens, and fruit fields caressed me. More than that, the first-time incidents were situations that flipped me over from young child to young woman. So many things that I could never possibly imagine happened. Having four Native girls from age ten to twenty-four celebrating my womanhood the same as if it was their own was awkward for me but it moved my heart some. So much so, I became uncomfortable in the cheap boy outfits I had been wearing. Onatah’s big sister, taking the time to explain the meaning of it all, how to keep myself super clean, and in what ways women are special, made womanhood desirable to me. I used to hate pretense. Now I hated it even more. I was liking being a young woman, falling into the feeling of my growing body and swirling emotions. It was already impossible to conceal the curves of my hips and backside in the first place. Now I had no desire to wear a too-big tee to make my small waist and young breasts disappear from sight. I didn’t want to flaunt it, seriously. My friend Ebony hated girls who only thought about their looks, kept messing with themselves and couldn’t stay out of the mirror. She hated them as much as she hated the “robots.” She believed that all dumb girls, no matter how good or
ugly they looked, were exactly the same, worthless. So I tried not to be that and never wanted to be associated with being dumb or inferior even before I met her.

I buried my journal as I promised Poppa. I dropped it inside an empty cornflakes cereal box along with Momma’s address and a special thank-you note to NanaAnna. I buried it under the soil closest to the eleventh tree on the straight path from the ivy leaf—covered, wooden, bush-blocked door of NanaAnna’s brickhouse house, simple.

In my hand I held my recipe journal that contained almost fifty recipes for lunches and dinners and desserts that I had made myself. It saved me from my “eating disorder.” The recipe journal also contained thirty-one days of learning from NanaAnna, which turned out to be better than any school on the planet. Inside I had cool things like pieces of sage and oregano, rosemary, bay leaves, cilantro, lemongrass, aloe vera, thyme, and peppermint. Also, I had a tiny bag of repellent, which I renamed “Back the fuck up.” It was a concoction of cayenne and other secret things that when blown in someone’s eyes or nose caused them to not see or balance themselves long enough for me to get away. All the ingredients were legal. If I got searched and found I’d shrug my shoulders and say, “Seasonings for our Labor Day holiday barbeque.” My recipe journal was the first book I ever wrote, the first book I ever read from cover to cover, and the first book I ever loved.

I would miss Onatah after all, although I would miss her horse more than her. Her horse was the first one I ever got to ride without some adult holding the reins. Her horse was the first one that actually galloped with me alone riding its back, instead of walking in small ovals or circles at the zoo or in the blocked-off street at a block party or carnival. I only got to ride like that once, right before my time on the reservation was over.

I liked Onatah’s father. He owned a construction company. His company had built many of the places on the reservation, even part of the casino. He was tall, heavy but not fat. The best thing about him was his voice. It was an instrument. I imagined if he wasn’t a construction guy, he’d be a singer, the type of singer who the whole audience turns completely silent for in anticipation of his voice coming from his gut and pouring out into the room so powerfully it shook the walls. One afternoon after my learning lesson with NanaAnna, he
was out watching Onatah ride. As I waited for my turn, he sang and Siri hummed some. I think his voice made her feel safe, and her voice moved him to tears. I had never seen any man cry before. Not even my strong poppa when he got cuffed and tooken. When I looked at this tall big Native mountain of a man, his tears didn’t seem like a weakness. He didn’t feel nothing like a sucker or bitch-ass nigga. That same afternoon, he walked out his house with me and Siri. He walked us to NanaAnna’s pickup truck. It was his first time ever doing that. We all stood there silently facing NanaAnna until me and Siri climbed in and NanaAnna pulled off. The next day Onatah was so happy that she promoted me to being her best-best friend.

My drummer was not the first man who ever rescued me. But he was the first man who drummed a beat only for me. He tapped in precision with the movements of my young body. He was the first one to ask me what my body was saying while and when it was moving. My drummer was the first person I ever met who lived in a tree. He was the first one to place me in a box and slide me on a zip cord across the forest, giving me that first-time flying feeling, a rush so nice and tingly. My last day seeing him he said, “Now go and grow up, then come back to see me, before . . .”