Given World (6 page)

She rolled him over onto his back and sat up straddling his thighs. “I don’t understand,” she said, “all the excitement about sex.”

He laughed. He had a good laugh, and he thought maybe she liked it. “I don’t really either. But it’s fun sometimes. Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass.”

“Sounds complicated,” she said. She unbuttoned her shirt then, to show him the scar. It ran from her breastbone around her right side to a place in back where he couldn’t see the end of it. He traced it with his index finger. Instead of a bra, she was wearing a cutoff boys’ undershirt.

“Did it hurt?”

“I don’t remember that much. I was on the roof, and next thing I knew I was waking up in the hospital with a bandage wrapped all around me. I guess it hurt then. There were drugs. I was just a kid.”

“What were you doing on the roof?”

“Throwing rocks at my brother. I deserved to fall.”

“No one deserves that.”

“I did.”

Her voice did a little flip, and he saw a look in her eye that said,
We are done talking about this,
so he rolled up his shirtsleeve to show her his own ragged scar, in the meaty part of his arm just below the crease of his elbow. She touched it lightly and pulled her hand away.

“Did you stitch that up yourself?”

“Nah, my cousin Leonard did it. After he stabbed me with a bread knife.”

“What did he stab you for?”

“He was drunk. We both were. It was an accident. We were playing Trailer Trash White Folks.”

“Sounds like a terrible version of a bad idea.”

“Oh, it was.”

He waited a few weeks to come back, partly because it wasn’t so easy to get there, but mostly because he didn’t want to push. She reminded him of a deer who knew you weren’t out to shoot it. Like she’d let you get just so close, and then bolt to the edge of the clearing; the forest nearly impenetrable behind her where she knew you couldn’t easily follow. Even if you were a wily, woods-smart Apsáalooke bastard. A wily bastard who lived on the wrong reservation and didn’t have his own car, who usually got around by hitchhiking but could occasionally sneak the work truck out.

They walked the railroad tracks. Talked about places they’d been and other places they’d never seen but wanted to.

“I’ve been to the Badlands,” she said. “I went to Missoula once.”

“How was that?”

“Okay.”

“Just okay?”

“Yeah.” She shrugged, bit her lip, ducked her head. “Where have you been?”

“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 and 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.