The Lovebird (35 page)

“Are you glad you came to the hunt?” Granma asked, and I told her the truth—I was.

12
HORSE
(Equus ferus caballus)

CORA STIRRED ME OUT OF SLEEP
with her rustlings. It was barely past dark face time when I heard her scoop up her glasses, pour food into Daphne’s dish, brush her hair, and put on her clothes. She accomplished the last task with unusual effort. She wasn’t, by the sound of it, simply slipping into her summer uniform of shorts and a T-shirt. Her breaths bespoke a particular kind of concentration. She shimmied and strained, and shook the bunks when she plopped down to pause from her exertions.

I dropped my head over the edge of my bed, one woozy eye open, and saw her. She was partway into her dancing regalia. When she looked up to see me spying, she quickly crossed her arms over her bare top half, then covered herself more completely with the stuffed fawn. “How dare you!” she whispered. And then, “Get ready.”

“Hmm?” I rubbed my other eye open.

“Get ready!” she exclaimed.

Crow Fair was beginning. There would be, as Cora had explained to me again the night before, a powwow every day for four days, a rodeo, and horse racing, too. (“But you’re probly against that, right?” she’d added.) We would go today and we
would go again tomorrow. And today had not come fast enough for Cora. “Come on! Get up!”

She’d hoped to take the Pronghorn, but Jim said she wasn’t quite ready to be driven yet. So, a few hours after Cora woke, and subsequent to a big, long breakfast (during which she jumped out of her seat several times), we rode in the yellow truck to Crow Agency, the site of the fair.

On the way, I saw that some of the prairie’s verdant juiciness had disappeared. Though it was still a month away, a hint of September hovered in the air, bronzing the grass here and there, and I wondered where I would be at summer’s end, when I would turn twenty.

Crow Agency bustled with a rough kind of beauty. A pony carried a boy down the sidewalk past the Crow Mercantile, and her hooves sounded hard on the cement. The tangly cottonwoods were capricious in the breeze and gave away big and small bits of shade before snatching them back again. And many of the cars that crowded the streets were dented and rusty, but each in its own way, like inadvertent works of art. Jim, Granma, and Cora traded waves with countless people as we drove through town. I only waved to one person—a speck of a girl no older than two riding in the bed of her parents’ truck with a pair of teeny friends. She, after staring at me with inexplicable and intense fascination, had waved first.

Suddenly, an unwelcome tide of dread flooded my chest. I was going to be around people, lots of them, and if the wrong person saw me, someone, perhaps, who recognized my face from the wanted poster I often imagined … I pulled down my sunglasses and chewed on a fingernail.

“Don’t be nervous, Margie,” Granma whispered. “This will be so much fun. I almost forgot, I have something for you.” She reached into her tote bag and pulled out my long-lost navy blue baseball cap. “I know you’ll feel more comfortable wearing this.”
The fabric above the bill had been intricately beaded, and the beads formed a gorgeous buffalo. I gulped, remembering Rasha’s buffalo belt buckle, and opened my mouth, but Granma said, “Shush, I know you like it.”

“I love it!” I finally sputtered. “It’s breathtaking. The most beautiful—when did you do this?”

She delighted in her own sneakiness. “In my bed at night,” she said.

“But your hands—no wonder they’ve been so achy.”

She clasped them in her lap and said with conviction, “Everybody needs something special for
Baasaxpilue
.”

“What’s that?”

“Crow Fair, honey. It means ‘to make much noise.’ ”

Cora studied me thoughtfully when I donned the hat. Tipping her head she said, with the great simplicity of manner she sometimes adopted when deeply satisfied, “Incognito.”

We drove into a camp crowded with teepees. They were grand and white and supported with tall tree trunks, some of which still had leaves shooting out of them. The camp was crawling with people on horses, kids, dogs, and dancers in clothes that were ribboned, fringed, feathered, and belled.

“How come you don’t come down here and camp like these people?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Cora turned to Granma. “How come we don’t?”

“It’s a lot of setting up,” Granma said. “And I’m not much help to your dad with the teepee. Maybe next year. Our relatives will help us. We used to do it, when your grandpa was alive and your dad was small.” This image—her dad, small—plunged Cora into a dreamy state, and as she stared at cowboy-booted Crow boys of just three and four who straddled ponies and squinted at our passing truck, she seemed to try to reconcile the sight of them with the reality of her father, ink-stained Jim, towering and powerful behind the steering wheel,
Jim the rumpler of her hair, the restorer of her future car. She smiled.

He parked among a hundred other cars. Nearby, there was a big grassy dance arbor and, surrounding it, rows of bleachers filled with expectant faces. A ring of vendors encircled the bleachers, enterprising folk who had come from all over to sell food and souvenirs from lopsided tables, splintery wooden stands, and tiny travel trailers. Hand-painted signs and banners rippled in the wind and announced their offerings: fry bread, Indian tacos, popcorn, snow cones, funnel cakes, beef and buffalo burgers, pizza, Thai food. There were balloons, feathered headdresses, chintzy tomahawks, drums and dream catchers, stuffed animals, plastic toy machine guns, and plush blankets featuring the faces of the famous, including Marilyn, and also shirts screen-printed with the outline of the Bighorns. It was such a motley mix of stuff, and a scene of such ramshackle charm, that I—after my months of quietude—was dazzled.

As we strolled, friends and relatives stopped to visit. Some of the women, old schoolmates of Jim’s, looked at him with the same sort of fawning, forlorn gaze I had so often seen directed at Dad. They reached out to him proprietarily with their long-fingered hands and brushed his shoulder, his chest. They flipped their sleek hair back over their brown shoulders, let loose throaty laughs, called him Jimmy, and teased him about his adolescent exploits and endearing quirks (the fastest runner, the best basketball player, the math whiz, the most talented writer of poems, the quietest date) with glints of hope and desire in their carefully made-up eyes. I stood back, tracing crescent shapes, which I knew were really orange slices, in the dirt with the tip of one shoe. Cora glowered at them from behind her glasses and possessed Jim’s hand all the while. She was resplendent in her flared pink skirt, her leather leggings blooming with wild roses, her tall moccasins, her silkily fringed shawl, and her tightly braided hair, and she
received many compliments. I got a few, too, on my buffalo hat, along with ten times as many curious glances.

“Those girls,” Jim said, shaking his head. “I’ve known most of them since I was three years old.”

Considering myself in contrast to the indigenous beauties, I felt ridiculous in my heart-printed sundress, my lucky red Chinese shoes. “They’re all so pretty,” I offered. An inexpressible jealousy made my face hot. Jim shrugged.

We spotted Josie at a distance, standing near the Indian taco stand. She shimmered in her silvery Jingle Dance dress, which dripped with the rolled-up lids of countless chewing tobacco tins. Pete Sings Plenty, he of the sparse and silky mustache, stood beside her, his jaw opened in adoration of the big-boned beauty. Cora giggled. Then she and Granma saw Miss Crow Nation and little Fern, who had been deemed Tiny Tot Crow Nation, holding court over by Feast from the East and moved to join the crowd of admirers surrounding them. Cora turned to Jim and me. “You guys want to come?”

“No thanks,” Jim said. “I’m going to get a snow cone. Anybody?” I nodded, still secretly steamed about Jim’s coterie of admirers. Cora didn’t want to risk dripping any food on her regalia, and Granma said the coldness of the shaved ice hurt her teeth. “Okay, I’ll catch up with you in a bit,” Jim said.

“You and Granma go ahead,” I told Cora. “I just want to stand here and watch everything.” Before she departed, I pointed to the empty dance arbor. Its grass glowed so green in the sunlight, and it looked like the perfect place for Cora to mimic a butterfly. “Will you go out there soon?”

“Yes, but only for Grand Entry, when everyone who will dance walks around in a big circle. I’m not actually dancing today. I’ll dance tomorrow.” Cora stared up at my face for a few moments. Then she added, “I know my dad doesn’t like any of those ladies.”

I shrugged.

Smiling to myself, I meandered through the bleachers, teeming with visitors from the world I’d left behind at summer’s start. But their figures were a blur to me because my thoughts were turned elsewhere, and I was dizzy with a new delight. I didn’t care about their conversations, their clothes, their cameras. I wandered, wondering at perceptive Cora and what she had seen in my face, and why she had said what she had when she could have just as easily walked away without those parting words. There was a heady smell of funnel cake in the air, and someone began to beat steadily on a deer-hide drum.

I found Ruby leaning on her cane. She was no longer as frail as she had been when she visited, and her coloring was more gold than gray.

“You look better, Ruby,” I said.

She clasped both of my hands in hers. “You look radiant yourself, my friend,” she replied. “Your cheeks are rosy. And why are you smiling so big?”

On the other side of the dance arbor, I saw Cora talking to Fern, who was garbed in elaborate garments befitting her new title. Cora leaned down and said something that made the chubby child toss her head back and laugh convulsively. It was a brief moment, but in it I saw Cora pull back the curtain around her heart and give a little portion of it to someone smaller than herself. And I realized she had done just the same for me a few minutes earlier, for she’d seen that I’d been feeling small, too. She had been so defended against me—the invader, the kook, the stranger in a series of crazy sundresses—that when she let one portion of her most protected organ show, it was ten times as significant as it would have been had she simply worn it all the time on her sleeve. And as I watched her whisper funny secrets to a child, my own heart melted for her. All the difficult and darling facets of her nature, which I had studied all summer long,
coalesced, like the rough ridges covering the surface of a peach pit. I considered:

the way she sometimes peeked at me so suspiciously through her slightly slanted eyes, which tilted so prettily upwards, echoing the shape of her glasses;

the way her arms appeared to be too long for her body and dangled with gangly helplessness at her sides until they lifted to facilitate the occasional avian flights of her hands;

the endearing mannerisms of her speech, including her frequent use of the word
utterly
and the way she said “leggins” instead of “leggings,” or “Granma” (for she had been the one to give Evelyn that name), not “Grandma”;

the elfin look of her pointy-tipped ears when they poked through her long cascade of hair, which she kept so scrupulously clean with apple-scented shampoo;

the smallness of her experience, for she had neither seen the sea nor smelled it, and had visited no city outside the reservation other than Billings—had never, in fact, stepped a single twinkling toe outside of Montana;

the largeness of her expectations for her own life, which included being “brilliant” at college, solving the world’s “most perplexing” problems, and wearing the most “
utterly
exquisite” clothes;

the sharpness of her mathematical mind, which sometimes amazed me with its power to penetrate matters and see down to the heart of everything—yes, to see the pit when she looked at the blushing fuzz of a peach;

the shrillness of her voice when she was excited, and how quickly it retracted to taciturn seriousness when she was not;