The Lovebird (31 page)

Jim’s Pronghorn was slowly becoming complete. There were fewer and fewer parts scattered outside of her with every passing week. Now only ten or twelve pieces lay on the grass, waiting to be tucked into their right places, where they could whirr and purr and pass juices and propel her forward over the hot grass. All summer, Jim had worked on her steadily, most every weekend, humming to himself and marking his shirts with oil. He lay on his back and looked up into her underbelly, or stood and stared into her opened hood with an absorbed expression.

One steamy Saturday he took a break to visit with Cora and me on the porch where we wilted. My new navy baseball cap had gone mysteriously missing, and even under the metal awning there was no real respite from the sun’s blaze. Granma was flushed and breathless and had decided to lie down after breakfast. “How are you two holding up over here?” Jim asked.

“Hot.” Cora looked up from
The World of Math
, which she had opened on her lap. Her glasses were foggy and her face was pink.

“How’s the Pronghorn?” I asked. Through my sunglasses, I watched him wipe his hands on his pants, on his strong straight legs. Even in the heat his signature health radiance was aglow. He had a persistent succulence. All the nutrients in the meal we had prepared together the night before—Confetti Salad of Pasta and Vegetables—deepened the plum color of his lips and shone out of his clear eyes. Sometimes, looking sneakily at Jim, I recalled the images of snug sleeping babies that had always been part of the fantasies I’d constructed around the hill houses. In truth, I had never felt any specific desire to make babies with anyone. But when I looked at Jim in all his unwavering wholesomeness, which was evident to lesser degrees in both Granma, his progenitor (with her girlishly round cheeks and rich voice), and Cora, his progeny (with her fluttering hands and explosive laugh), I understood the impulse to reproduce. Jim’s body held a beauty in it, one that wanted to be made flesh again and again.

“Aw, she’s making progress, but there’s still work to be done.”

“Where did you get this car?” I asked.

“She belonged to my dad, and he passed her on to me. I drove her for a long time until I got my truck. I decided at winter’s end to rebuild her engine and fix her up. In a few years, I’ll pass her on to Cora. What do you think about that, Cor?”

Cora could only offer a parched “Hmp.”

Jim looked sympathetic. “What do you say,” he said. “Should we go for a swim?”

Cora slammed shut her book and rose. “I don’t have a bathing suit,” I said. Jim averted his face completely.

“We’ll find you something,” Cora said. “Come on.” She tugged at my hand. “It’s the most fun.”

WE WOKE GRANMA AND DROVE
to a place on the Little Bighorn River. The hum was inaudible there. The only sounds were the hurried whispers of the water, the wind ruffling the leaves of the cottonwood trees that stood all along the bank, and the papery rustling of the cattails, whose slender stalks were capped in brown, furry cylinders that broke apart to release soft tufts into the air as if surrendering to the heat.

Cora immersed herself and moved through the water sleek and straight as a muskrat, with just her head poking up above its greenish surface. Her movements made only the faintest of ripples, and they radiated away from her in rhythmic rings.

Jim laughed when he entered the river. His splashy swimming reminded me of a cacophonous and tuneless band. Still, he managed to stay afloat. Then he dove down and disappeared. He was gone for so long I began to feel worried, and to stare unseeing into the opaque depths. When he finally surfaced, his eyes had a sleepy look, and his smile was enormous. “Brrrufff,” he said, shaking his head like a delighted dog.

I slid in shyly, wearing one of Jim’s black T-shirts. Once wet, it hung almost to my knees. The river had a fertile smell of mud, moss, fish, ducks, and the slick green plants on the banks. A rash of gooseflesh spread over my arms and, grimacing, I slowly sank down until the water reached my chin. I stood still for a few moments and savored the blood-stirring sensation of the chill. Soon I wasn’t cold anymore and began an aimless half hop, half swim. When my feet no longer reached the bottom, I quickly moved back to a place where they did. Once, a blue dragonfly paused on my shoulder and sipped the droplets there. I tipped my head back and felt the water climb, slow and delicious, up the back of my scalp, soaking my hair, and I sucked in my breath at the sweetness of it.

Granma sat on the bank beneath a cottonwood. She pulled back the Velcro straps of her sneakers and slipped her feet out. Then she peeled off her socks and laid them side by side on the grass like a pair of freshly caught fish. From my place in the water, I saw that the soles of her feet were a pale brown color that darkened to deep rose at the balls and heels. Her left sole bore a small, leaf-shaped birthmark, and it seemed fitting for the part of her body that came in frequent contact with the earth to be thus embellished. She wiggled and spread out her toes girlishly before reaching for a ball of yarn (“Booties,” she had told me in the truck, “for a friend’s baby in Lodge Grass”) and her needles. The needles (aquamarine metal ones from the American flag pencil box) glinted in the sun.

All was quiet for a long time. Then Jim snuck up alongside Cora, who was absorbed in swimming, and scooped her swiftly into his arms so she was cradled. “Dad!” She pretended to protest but her face was aglow. She curled her hands into tiny fists and hammered Jim all over his chest.

“Oh, you want to be free?” he asked.

“Yes!”

“Okay!” Jim tossed her high into the air above the water. She screeched with delight before landing with a splash. Then, thrilled, she swam immediately back to her father and piggybacked him, encircling his throat with her arms.

“Dad!”

I turned my face away from their display. Something in it hurt me even as I smiled.

Cora shouted in the magisterial manner of a river queen, “Get her! Get her!”

“Oh no,” I said, shrinking backward toward the bank. Jim approached with a devilish “Mwa-ha-ha-ha,” and Cora, clinging to his back, cried, “Yes! Yes!” I made a quick dart to the left but was no match for Jim, who appeared so clumsy in the water yet moved with a secret kind of stealth. At the prospect of being touched by him I panicked and made a dash to the right, but in a moment he had both hands curled around my waist and I screamed. Cora cheered when he lifted me out of the river, and I felt prettier than I ever had under the rambunctious gazes of that daughter and dad in my long saggy shirt, my soaked hair and wet, shining face, and she cheered louder still when he dropped me back in. And so the afternoon passed.

We climbed out of the river and sat warming ourselves and grinning without obvious cause. Granma broke from her knitting to walk along the muddy bank and pull the shoots off the cattails. “These will make a good salad for us tonight,” she said.

“What about the wild plums?” Cora called to her. “Are they ready?” Granma squeezed one purple globe hanging from a gnarled shrub. She said they were not.

“It’s been so hot,” Cora said. “They should be ready by now.”

“You forgot, Granddaughter, it’s the moon that ripens these. The moon is watery, and it makes water in the plums.”

What is this place? I thought, walking back into the river and diving down into it. What is this place where everything is all of
a piece, where tobacco seeds and stars are linked, and the moon ripens plums? What is this place and who are these people, I wondered, touching the silt at the river’s bottom—until a child, a mischievous muskrat, swam close to tickle my ribs and sent bubbles out of her laughing mouth.

We drank cold wild mint tea from jelly jars and ate the sandwiches we had packed. Then we lay, spent from swimming, with our backs on the earth. Cora, aloof again, put her glasses back on and plopped her head in Granma’s lap. Granma talked about the importance of avoiding otters while swimming in the river. “We Crows have always known never to let an otter brush alongside you. It would be very bad if that happened,” she explained in her soft voice. Cora closed her eyes. “Very bad for your future.” Jim nodded in assent.

I imagined the sudden slinky feeling of being brushed by an otter, and I believed that such an encounter would be ominous. In this place, where all aspects of creation seemed tied together, every living thing had its own significance within the system of symbols and stories through which people had once understood their lives. And some people, like Granma, still understood. The Crow world was a complex one. It wasn’t that otters were inherently bad—no animals were—but that brushing alongside one in a river could be.

We heard a drumming on the leaves of the trees, one that started slow and gentle and then grew stronger, and soon drops reached our heads and shoulders. “Rain!” Cora cried.

“Ah, thank you,
Iichihkbaalia
,
^*
we need this.” Granma tilted her head back and let her face get wet.

“Let’s pack up,” Jim said. “It’s really going to come down.” We gathered all that we had brought, and we were happy rushing around the bank, laughing like children being chased. By the
time we reached the truck, with towels and jelly jars and cattail shoots in our arms, we were soaked. We were a sticky, shivering foursome on the drive back. Big, bluish veins of lightning ripped through the sky, and we kept the radio off to hear the thunder. This is what I know, I thought. I know this place and these people. What had that other life been?

It was very confusing, the way my thoughts tipped so steeply in one direction and then another. I remembered the old-fashioned scale I’d noticed during my last visit to Dad. He had pulled it from the attic and placed it on top of the television set. He’d dropped the keys to the Skylark in one of the brass pans, and I’d absently transferred them to the other and watched the scale tip. My thoughts and feelings were similarly vacillating. One minute I envisioned my departure from the reservation; the next, Crow Country’s charms captured me in a velvety embrace (the velvet of river water and cattail) from which I didn’t want to escape. But I was fatigued, I supposed, from all the heat and the swimming.

THAT NIGHT, JIM AND I COOKED AGAIN
. I had chosen a recipe for Pot Pie with Peas from
Three Hundred Thrifty Thirty-Minute Meals!
, and we’d decided to make two, filling one with some of the buffalo meat that was stored in the freezer and another with only vegetables. With Granma’s guidance, we would make the crusts using wild turnip flour.

After the thunderstorm, the prairie was fragrant, and the innumerable droplets that lingered on everything (the yellow truck, the Pronghorn and her parts, Belly’s fur, each blade of grass) refracted the rays of the reemerging sun. I stood, dried and dressed, in front of the open kitchen window, waiting for Jim and watching the curtain blow in and out like something breathing.

“Did I get all the right ingredients?” he asked. He looked scrubbed and shiny and wore a fresh white T-shirt.

“Yes, it’s all here,” I answered.

For a full minute, we stood and stared at the food, which I had spread upon the countertop. A spider, tiny and brown, crawled out of the droopy green carrot tops, paused, and made his way down the cabinet to the floor. We watched him go. The bright label on a can of mushrooms cried “Low Sodium!” at me six or seven times. Jim peered at the recipe and cleared his throat. “Well,” he said. Again, I heard the faint shake in his voice, the same one that was there the night he’d brought the cookbook home and handed it to me. When he picked up a potato for washing, it disappeared for a moment in his hand, just as my own hand had the one and only time he had touched it in greeting. We got started.

We had prepared six meals together and in recent weeks had agreed upon a kind of unspoken choreography. I had learned to anticipate when he would move right or left, or forward or back, and he, it seemed, had learned to anticipate the same in me. So we no longer collided while we cooked.

“Did you used to do much cooking?” Jim asked. “Before you came here and we put you to work in the kitchen?” He smiled.

“Oh, sometimes.” In Simon’s spotless kitchen, the curtains had not breathed. To mention it—the meals, little Annette, the mourning doves—was pointless. “I was pretty busy. With the Operation.”

“Yeah, I can imagine. What was it called again? The group you were leading?”

“Operation H.E.A.R.T.” For the first time, I felt self-conscious saying it. “It stands for Humans Enforcing Animal Rights Today.”

“That makes sense.” Jim nodded. “You know, I think I understand. About the animals and all. My dad—”

“Ray?”

“Yeah! I guess Mom’s told you about him. He was the greatest. He used to tell me that animals are our relatives, that they have things to give us and teach us, that we should pay attention to them and respect them. We’re not supposed to hold ourselves above. And I think he was right. Of course, he did hunt sometimes. And so do I.”

“Oh?” I cut through a carrot. My scale tipped again. Tomorrow, maybe. Maybe tomorrow would be the day to go. Of course, there was the problem of a car.

“We try, Mom and I, to be respectful. Most of the meat we eat comes from animals we’ve hunted ourselves. Once a year, I take a buffalo. Josie hunts deer. We share what we get with family and friends, and we use it all. The buffalo meat we’re using tonight, it’s from the one I got last summer. I hope it doesn’t bother you too much—”

“N-no—I mean—I grew up eating meat with my Dad, and it was all straight from the supermarket. You know, the flesh of some poor animal who had led a horrific existence on a factory farm. At least you are sometimes willing to …”

“Kill it myself?”

“Well, yeah …” In truth, I hated it, to think of his hands hurting anything.

“Do you want to come to the buffalo hunt in a couple of weeks? Granma, Cora, and Josie are all going to be there.”

“Oh, I don’t think I could.”

Jim and I were quiet for a long time. Then he said, “We’ve been doing it for centuries. It’s part of who we are—”

“I understand.”