Steal the North: A Novel (5 page)

“Kate and Emmy.” I ignore his comment about surgery. “Do you really think we can find them?” I need to get my garden in order. “Oh, Lord willing.”

“He is willing.
We
have to be.”

I don’t always understand his comments. And Brother Mathias is attracted to my faith, not
my face. I almost tell Matt about Mathias hearing my cries, but it’s not the right time. It may never be.

“Cake?” I offer, ashamed of my deceit. The list of things I keep from my husband is short, but regrettably, there is starting to be a list.

“Let’s save it for at home.” He winks. “In bed.” He doesn’t mean sex. He never wants that when I’m pregnant or when he thinks I look tired. But he likes to hang out in bed with me and do things like eat pie or read me stories from
Outdoor Life
, which isn’t a Christian magazine, but we read it anyway. When we were younger and I still taught Sunday school, he liked me to tell him biblical stories in bed with my flannel board and felt characters. I agreed to do it in just my slip, but not naked. It seemed too sacrilegious.

“I could see the Cascades from up there,” he says on the drive home. Again I sit close. “Just the outline to the west.” He motions. “But what a spectacular view. I’d forgotten.” He looks flushed with the same earthly joy that I feel at moments in my garden and that he expresses when he lands a fish. Only now his joy, which I don’t think has anything to do with my pregnancy news, seems on such a grand scale that it frightens me: not for his soul, not in the Christian way, but because I can’t partake.

“The Lord is manifest,” I manage to say.

He reaches for my hand, which shakes. “Darling, if only I could’ve shown you the view.”

It is a Christian wife’s most important and rewarding duty to bind her husband to Christ, but for the first time I wonder what Matt’s life, rather than his afterlife, would’ve been like if he’d never met me.

Reuben

This is the second time I’ve seen the girl out watering her aunt’s garden by herself. She’s from California. My sister told me. She looks lost. Not confident. I assumed California girls were pretty sure of themselves. Pretty damn full of themselves, actually. But what do I know? Up north on the Colville Reservation, where I’ve lived on and off my whole life, most of the television screens are blurry. I dated a rodeo queen last summer with blonder hair and a better ass than this skinny California girl has. She’s not bad, though, and probably pretty up close. The aunt, now: she’s crazy. My sister disagrees—thinks the aunt is a healer, or could be. The lady wears a prairie dress and has hair longer than the oldest Indian. Her husband sometimes pauses a moment in his truck after work before getting out and going in to her. He’s a nice guy, always nods, waves, or whatever. We’ve shot the shit more than a couple times about fishing and elk hunting, and once, when I was working on my truck all goddamn afternoon, he came over and gave me a hand. He replaced a vacuum hose and got my truck running right in half an hour, which made me feel like a complete dumb-ass. The girl takes twice as long as her aunt to water the garden and shift the pots, which is perfectly fine with me. Next time she’s out by herself, I’ll go over and say hey. I’ve never been shy with girls, even white girls. Right now she sits on the garden bench and looks up at the sky, then over at the row of tall poplar trees that keep the trailer houses in this park from blowing away in the wind. When she looks over at me, I step back from the window. My sister has two sets of chimes hanging on the eaves outside the kitchen window and twice as many kids inside fighting over the remote control and the bag of Doritos I bought for them at the gas station. I hope the girl didn’t see me staring at her. She probably looked over because of the racket. I should’ve waved.

“No fucking way,” my cousin Ray says when I show him the girl the next day. She’s helping her aunt carry groceries from the car. “Get the fuck out of here.” He adjusts his Seattle Mariners ball cap—his prized possession. “And you thought your summer was going to suck.” We’re smoking cigarettes outside. It’s all I smoke, even when Ray offers more. “So, you get down her pants, bro?”

“She’s been here less than a week,” I say. “And shut up.”

“Losing your touch. Me and Benji, man, we’re just glad you’re away from the rez. Gives us a chance with the ladies this summer.”

“Maybe you’ll finally get laid.” He’d get laid if he’d quit stuffing his face all the time. He weighed two hundred pounds by sixth grade. Kids called him Sasquatch because he barely had a neck. He needs to set his sights a few dozen notches lower if he’ll ever get a girlfriend.

“I told you, bro,” he says, “your sister took my virginity years ago.”

He’s kidding. He’s the only one I let joke about my sister Teresa because he’d do anything for her—if he could, which he can’t without a job. I had two jobs last summer: one with the tribe’s Fish and Wildlife Department, which didn’t pay but was great experience and will look good on a college application, or so the school counselor said, and another shoveling hot asphalt from the bed of a dump truck, which I got paid for, but under the table because of my age. I’d planned to work again this summer, maybe thinning apple trees or picking cherries on one of the ranches near Chief Joe Dam. Mom and I could really use the cash right now—always—but Teresa begged me to come stay here with her in Moses Lake and help out with her kids since her latest man recently split. What could I say? She practically raised me.

“Can I crash here tonight?” Ray asks. He laughs and adds, “In your sister’s bed.”

They aren’t cousins. Teresa and I have different dads.

“Don’t have the gas money to get back to the rez? You fucking loser.”

“I’m meeting a guy later.”

“Fuck, Ray.” He’s dealing again. His stint in tribal jail didn’t work, obviously, and neither did his forced sweats and drummings with the elders.

I give him the couch and take the floor. He tries to protest, but only halfheartedly, which could be one of his Indian names: Halfheart. The fat fucker looks like my old man sleeping on the couch. I remember how safe it made me feel when I was real young to have my dad sleeping on the couch—night or day, sober or drunk. He’d wake up so easily for me. I just had to touch his shoulder. When Mom tried to wake him to take out the trash, or to go to his job at the mill, or later, when things got real bad, to please go hunting or fishing and put some damn food on the table, he’d keep his eyes shut tight until she walked away cursing him and Teresa’s no-good dad in one breath and two languages. Then he’d sit up with a grin and go to work, or not. He’d go hunting, or not. More often he’d go to the casinos, win Mom a couple twenties to get us by, then disappear.

My goal: to not be like my dad. Not dead by the age of thirty-one. Not washed out by the age of twenty-one. People on the rez, even some elders, excuse too much of my dad’s bad behavior by thinking of him as a troubled trickster, means well, sometimes awesome Coyote type. Dad was funny as hell, sure, like the real Coyote, whom the Creator—way back—charged with readying the earth for humankind. Dad could also do great impersonations, like Coyote, especially of Mom’s boyfriends after my parents split for good. My old man had power, no denying. It came out during stick games and while he was fishing. My best memories are of fishing with my dad, despite his cooler of beer, but there were always root beers floating in the melted ice for me. I loved the stories he’d tell me of things that had happened on the rez before he was born, the pranks he’d pull on the priests at St. Mary’s, his dad’s Vietnam stories. But above all this, my dad was a drunk. His unquenchable thirst didn’t create the Columbia, as Coyote’s did. I don’t drink alcohol. The stuff scares the shit out of me. Nor do I go out with girls who drink. Ray and Benji wouldn’t hang around me, or so they claim, if I weren’t related to Ray.

I go to high school in Omak. The Okanogan River divides the town of Omak in two. The eastern half is on the rez. The high school is on the west side, the nonrez half. At Omak High, I’m in a program for kids whose parents didn’t go to college (95 percent of the student body) but who show promise (50 percent) and
ambition (5 percent). The head counselor, who grew up in Seattle, claims no one is too young to set goals, and we Omak kids, Indian and white, need something to reach for beyond the yearly rodeo and the lumber mills that keep the area afloat. I want to go to college. Teresa didn’t finish high school, but now she has her LPN certificate. She’s my inspiration. I want a degree in fish biology. I want to help bring the salmon back to the rivers on the rez, and I want to do more than pray for it. But who knows? The Colville is five hundred miles upstream from the Pacific. Nine dams. White and native fishermen on the lower and mid-Columbia. As I learned working with Tribal Fish and Wildlife last summer, we’re at the end of the food chain so far north. Mom says Dad dreamed of going to college. She always says shit like that. Sometimes I think she wants me to be my dad, even though she hates him. The truth is my old man dropped out of high school as soon as he was old enough to drive. He rodeoed for a bit, even did the Suicide Race a few years. He never won but always made it to the final night. He also traveled around for a time in a drum circle. Benji dropped out of high school. Ray attends school on and off. Sometimes he homeschools, which a lot of rez kids have to do because of distance. I try to encourage Ray and help him with math.

I play football at Omak High: wingback on offense and strong safety on defense. As an Indian I’m supposed to like basketball better. But I love knocking white guys on their asses, and even getting leveled by them, the yells from the crowd to get back up, and when I catch that ball, I run like hell—eighty yards for a touchdown last season. I’m not a big buff guy, even though I weight lift at school. I’m five foot ten and fast. Coach Wade would start me every game, he said, if I didn’t miss so many practices. I take care of my little sister, Lena, give her rides and stuff. I also give other relatives rides to wait in line for food distributions, health services, per capita and settlement checks. Seems we Indians are always waiting in lines. I wish Coach Wade yelled at me as much as he does the white boys when they’re late for practice. He knows the names of all their parents.

Mom is trying hard for me. We moved back to Omak my freshman year of high school. It’s not easy on her or my little sister. Both would rather live deeper on the rez, even though my sister’s half white, and we lived here in Moses Lake for one year of my childhood. When we first moved back to Omak, Mom stocked shelves at Walmart and then blended ice cream at Dairy Queen, where teenagers hang out, which was embarrassing. Now she works at a bar, serving whiskey to men who remind her too much of my dad. Next door to the bar is a Laundromat, where Mom goes on her breaks—my little sister and I meet her there sometimes—because bleach smells better than sour beer and stale smoke. We make the rent each month, but barely.

Ray begins to snore on the couch, so I head outside for a cigarette. Everyone else is sleeping. It’s eleven. If it were daytime, I’d instantly look west for an outline of the Cascades before remembering I’m a little too far south and east to see the mountains. But on superclear days, you can see Mount Rainier from here. The sprinklers click all day in the potato field across the road from the trailer park, which is a good five miles from downtown and bordered on two sides by poplar trees. It’s dustier here than in Omak, and the wind’s constant. Up north the wind gusts more, but at least there are reprieves. The lake, around which this town is built, is located at the tail end of a giant irrigation project that begins at Grand Coulee Dam. It reeks with farm runoff, and there’s so much algae on the lake’s surface I could walk across like Christ Jesus.

I wonder if the girl is up next door. Her aunt’s trailer and my sister’s trailer sit exactly parallel to each other, and they both face north, toward the rez. I smoke on the front porch. The back steps face the front porch of the aunt’s trailer. Singlewides have two bedrooms, one on each end. The girl is no doubt staying in the nonmaster bedroom located on the end by the gravel driveway. A strip of burned grass used to separate our driveways, but the aunt planted lavender bushes there. Teresa takes clippings when she’s in an especially good mood.

I pretend to be grabbing something out of my truck to get a better view of the girl’s window. The main light is off, but some smaller light glows in there. I wonder if she’s bored. I wonder what she’s doing here. The aunt—I forget her name or never knew it—doesn’t have a TV or a radio. Teresa said the aunt attends a Baptist church that forbids watching TV and prohibits pants for women. The girl wears pants, even shorts that I wish were shorter. And I noticed she doesn’t go to church with her aunt and uncle, who go all the time. Why doesn’t she? Maybe she’s an atheist. Not that I know what an atheist looks like, but I picture glasses and a lab coat. Maybe she’s a rebel. In Omak, rebel white girls either dye strips of their already bleached hair pink and wear barely any clothes, or they go Goth by piercing their lips and brows, wearing tons of eyeliner and layers of black clothes. I stay away from both. Their pissed-off, often laid-off dads scare the crap out of me. They blame Indians—the close proximity of the Colville Reservation, just across the Okanogan River—for their woes. And their hoes, as Benji says. We blame whites for the dams that keep the salmon from returning to the rez. It’s still fucking cowboys versus Indians up there in Omak and the other towns around the Colville.

I hear a couple coyotes yipyapping. The girl must’ve heard them also because she flips on the main light for a few minutes. She doesn’t peek through the blinds after shutting the light back off. I wonder what she sleeps in? God, what am I—thirteen? Getting hard just thinking about a girl in bed. I go inside, take a shower. Another goal: not to get a girl pregnant. Both Mom and Teresa had babies before eighteen. I won’t do that to a girl. Or me. It’s simple, really, or it should be. Wear a damn condom even if a chick says she’s on the pill. I went through boxes of condoms with Danielle, the rodeo queen, not that I’m complaining. She had a lot of responsibilities that her parents never let her shirk, mostly riding her horse in parades and roundups and speaking at camps and youth meetings and every 4-H and FFA club in Washington State, it seemed. She liked “to let her hair down” with me, or so she said. I think she meant “take her shirt off.” Maybe Danielle was just slumming it with me to mess with her parents, as Benji insisted, the asshole.

Tomorrow is my sister’s day off. I told her I’d go to the Laundromat because her washer is broken and her back sore from lifting patients. She can veg in front of the TV, watch Home Shopping Network or reruns of her favorite mystery shows. Besides, I barely have any clean clothes myself. I couldn’t get her washer to spin. If Ray could fix it, Teresa might actually let him kiss her on the cheek or at least hang out with her at the Fourth of July Pow Wow next month. Instead, before he fell asleep, he offered to move the washer outside. She told him we weren’t on the rez. The manager doesn’t allow appliances on the front porch, even if it is only a trailer park. He then offered to haul it to the rez and dump it. “Jesus,” she said.