Lies My Parents Told Me

by Craig Hansen

  Tuco and Jori bowed their heads, while Jazz turned his back to the exodus of medical and law-enforcement personnel. Soon, the last car disappeared and they stood alone again in the park, at the foot of the promontory.

  “Gather your things. Pair up,” Tim said. “I don’t want any of you wandering off alone. It’s a little more than five miles to Cannon Beach. We were hoping to lunch there, but we’ve lost the better part of a day, so we’ll probably stay there tonight.”

  “Why’d Counselor Mystelle leave?” Brena’s voice sounded weak and childlike, whiny.

  “Her ankle wasn’t getting any better.” He explained another female counselor would be meeting up with them soon. “Enough questions. There’s a storm blowing up and we want to be off the beach by the time it hits, if we can. Move.”

  9

  3:16 p.m.

  “NEED A HAND?”

  Pulling on my backpack, I straightened and turned to see Jazz standing there, uncertain, but wearing an expression that indicated his eagerness to please me. My head felt thick, chilled ice picks burning into the back of my eyes.

  “M’fine.”

  “Yeah. Guess you are.”

  I sighed, impatient. “We don’t have to pair off, just because Tim said to.”

  A spark of disappointment flashed across his eyes and then his face darkened as he looked down at the sand. “You don’t want to walk with me?”

  The injured puppy sound of his voice tugged at my heart. I shivered as a gust of wind blew out of the southwest. “’S’not you. Just not in a mood to talk, so be warned. You can walk next to me, though, if you want.”

  The creases on Jazz’s forehead smoothed even as the wind gusted up again. “Cool.”

  Then, proving he’d been listening to me, he fell in step beside me without attempting to talk my ear off. I relaxed, and then noticed a disturbance back at the trail we were returning to. Tuco and Jori looked to be in an animated argument with Sam and Brena.

  “—bent, jerk!” Samara said, her voice carrying over noise of the rushing wind. “I’m walking with Brena. End of story.”

  “That’s a bad idea, Sammy-girl,” Tuco said, his Mexican accent sounding thicker when upset. “Boy-girl, boy-girl. That’s the plan.”

  “Whose plan?” Brena had the skin tone of her Hispanic father, but the accent of her Irish mother. “Yours?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Tuco rolled his eyes.

  “What’s wrong is, Brena and I want to walk together today. To talk. Stop making it such a—”

  Tim came jogging up, a look of concern tainted with annoyance on his face. His lip curled as he spoke. “Can’t leave for two minutes? What’s all this about?”

  I glanced over at Jazz, whose expression was stony. His complexion had paled.

  “What’s going on, Jazz?”

  He shrugged, but swallowed hard.

  I wanted to ask him something else, but became distracted when I noticed Tuco turn to confront Counselor Tim. Still about fifty yards away, I could see him holding something behind his back, though I couldn’t make out what it was.

  “No one asked you to stick your nose in this, Big Man.” Tuco’s voice had a booming, gravelly quality that made him sound dangerous, like a rabid pit-bull in a fight ring.

  My heart jumped in my chest as recognition flashed across my mind. The item in Tuco’s hand, behind his back, was a rock. A hefty, fist-sized rock.

  “Tim! Look out!” My voice sounded raw and shrieky, even to my own ears.

  My warning shout caused the counselor to look my way, but Tuco seized the distraction and brought his rock-holding hand around in a wide arc. Tim seemed to notice the flourish of movement, but not soon enough. The boy’s fist orbited his body and collided with Tim’s skull in a splash of cranberry mist.

  As Tim’s body collapsed beneath him, Jori jumped, whooped a curse in celebration and followed that with, “Take that! Damn right!”

  Brena fell backward against Samara, screeching in shock. Samara cursed, too, directing her wrath at Tuco, who straddled the counselor and raised the rock up again, over his head, young muscles taut in the graying, storm-covered light of day.

  I reacted on instinct, broke into a run, heading right for Tuco, determined to stop him. I had no plan more elaborate than tackling him around the upper torso as best I could and—

  THUMP!

  Without warning, I found myself face down on the last few feet before sandy beach gave way completely to black rock, green grass, and plants. The transition wasn’t smooth, though, and I felt my knee and shoulder collide with sizable rocks, just like the one Tuco used to strike out at Counselor Tim. The weight of another body pressed me down, slid off, then used my backpack to try to turn me over. Sand, embedded up my nose as a result of the fall, panicked me and I twisted my body to the side. With my face free from the ground, I tried blowing the sand out of my nose and ended up coughing, tasting copper in my mouth, feeling a syrup-like trickle running down my face.

  Jazz, his voice at once both hostile and panicked, spoke near my ear. “Sorry. Can’t let you kill yourself. Tuco’s dangerous.”

  “No shit.” I scooted away from Jazz, trying to regain my feet. “It’s him who should be tackled, not me.”

  “Won’t kill myself, either.”

  Woozy, I saw my shins and knees were bleeding. That sting was nothing compared to the pain in my shoulder. The rock I’d landed on must have been larger than the one my knee hit. My pack slipped as I sat up and when I tried to shrug it back in place, found I could barely move my arm. I screamed, more from shock than pain.

  “Jazz! You got Shabby?” Tuco’s menacing voice growled out over the short stretch between the murderous teen and where we lay on the beach.

  “Got her!” Jazz’s reply cast a scarlet haze over my vision. Pure rage. These weren’t random events spinning out of control: the boys had somehow planned this. This, or something like it.

  On the trail, Jori held Brena with a beefy arm looped under her shoulder, his hand grasping the back of her neck, a sloppy but effective half-nelson wrestling hold that seemed to be keeping the girl immobilized. Samara beat her fists against Jori’s back, swearing, commanding him to let go of her friend. Tuco, splattered with Counselor Tim’s blood, stood, turned toward Jori and the girls, and began advancing on them.

  Help. I needed to help. I rolled onto my knees, biting my lip hard enough to draw blood as the sand dug into my skin again. “You in on this?”

  Jazz, keeping his voice lower, replied, “No. I’m trying to keep you alive, dumbass.”

  Whatever. I didn’t trust him. I let my backpack fall to the ground, then pushed myself to my feet, still unsteady.

  “You planned this, all three of you,” I accused. “You knew this was going to happen.”

  Everyone deserves the benefit of doubt, Lootah had once advised me. Lie. I had no doubt about the intensions of these boys; or, if I had any, their sudden attack wiped the doubts away completely.

  Anyway, I didn’t give Jazz a chance to respond. I swung back one leg and brought it forward with all my might, burying my hiking boot in his midsection. I’d been aiming lower, but the kick was enough to keep him on the ground.

  I whirled, my mind racing, trying to come up with a plan. My knee and shoulder throbbed and a wave of nausea clouded over me. The wind picked up, a strong gust, and picked up some sand with it, spraying the air with a mist of the stuff. I sheltered my eyes. Fine rain blew in, too, driven hard by the ocean gusts.

  I chanced a glance up toward the trail, hoping to catch Jori and Tuco off-guard. But the darker boy was pointing at me with his free arm, shouting something I couldn’t make out over the wind. At Tuco’s feet, Samara lay unconscious, maybe even dead, and Tuco turned toward me, his mouth twisted in a snarl of rage, and he began running toward me.

  All my options robbed from me, I panicked and did the only thing the adrenaline coursing through my body would allow me to do.

  I turned and ran back toward the
promontory.

  10

  3:31 p.m.

  I RAN AS FAST AS I could, grateful for every inch of lead I had on Tuco. Pain sizzled through my legs, throbbed in my shoulder, stung my face as I ran through a stout wind, misty rain, a sheen of fine sand, all mostly blowing straight at me as I powered on through the discomfort, desperate to reach the trail before the menacing, murderous boy closed the gap between us.

  The weather forced blood and sand into my eyes, but I knew I couldn’t hesitate or Tuco would be on me instantly, tackling me to the ground, ready to do God knows what. I refused to think of it at first, then funneled the fear generated by the thought into my determination to keep on running.

  I saw the trail just ahead, the old two-by-fours laid out casually as an informal set of stairs toward the top. Then I was there and began taking them, climbing up. The pounding of Tuco’s pursuit grew closer and I felt a hand brush the back of my Windbreaker. But the storm had set in now and things were wet, including my clothes, and panic helped me surge forward enough that I slipped beyond his clumsy attempt to grab me. I screamed at the sensation and heard him stumble, then curse.

  My breath came in huge, gulping woofs; the problem with reaching an ocean coast in a mountainous state like Oregon is that, everywhere you walked felt tilted, like struggling to climb an extreme uphill incline or struggling to control your descent down one. Either way required intense effort physically, as well as sharp focus mentally, or falling down, going “ass over tea-kettle,” as Lootah often put it. No lie in that, at least.

  I refused to look back, just kept running, moving forward, ducking to avoid the tight overgrowth of bushes and tree branches lining the trail.

  “You’re dead, Shabby!” Tuco shouted behind me. I believed him. That’s how I’d end up if I allowed him to catch me. His voice sounded further behind me, and I decided to abandon the main trail. It made Tuco’s pursuit too easy for him. Spotting a gap between two spruces set further apart, I leaped off the trail, still running for all I was worth.

  My breath came in huge gasps, my lungs burning for more oxygen. I knew I couldn’t keep up this pace much longer, not without a chance to catch my breath. I darted between trees and bushes until I was well off the trail, and then found a grove of bushes with some space between them, in the center. I slipped in and ducked and listened. The roar of the wind, the beating of the rain, the lack of animal sounds during the storm, all registered with me. But I heard no pursuing footsteps, no heavy breathing from my pursuer.

  Had Tuco been hurt when he fell at the base of the trail? I had no idea, had never peeked back to see. If so, terrific. It’s what the murderous freak deserved. I had a moment to recall the plume of blood that had spritzed the air when Tuco first struck Counselor Tim with the rock in his hand.

  At least I split them up. I’d left Jazz clutching his stomach, in agony, on the edge of the beach. Tuco had followed me when I’d run. That left Jori alone with Sam and Brena. If Sam was alive, I mean. She’d been on the ground when Tuco had turned to pursue me. Was she dead? Unconscious? Just knocked down? There was no way for me to know, not for sure, but the thought of poor, small Brena, alone with the hulking Jori, dug spikes into my heart and pulled, threatening to rip it out of my chest with all the force of a Chrysler Hemi truck engine.

  I coughed, beginning to shiver in the tree-filtered rain as I struggled to slow my breathing down, collect myself.

  “Shabby!”

  Tuco’s voice turned my name into three syllables as he called out, virtually singing it. Despite his gravelly voice, I believed he was attempting to sound friendly.

  And failing.

  His voice sounded distant, and I wondered how far off the trail I’d managed to run before finding a haven in this grove of bushes.

  “I want to talk to you, Shabby. Come out. I think you got the wrong idea about what you saw. We need to talk. So you can understand.”

  I understood perfectly. At least to a degree. Well enough, at least, to stay put.

  Tuco, Jori, and Jazz had been chummy throughout the hike, hanging together, cracking jokes, ignoring us girls. I’d overheard scraps of conversation, low giggles, coarse language. I recognized it for what it was. The cheap talk of teen boys who refused to mature, who preferred talking about cars and bands they liked, and all the girls they weren’t having sex with, except in their imaginations.

  Was that it? Had the three boys, strangers before the hike, started talking about the girls while walking together? Maybe rating them, talking about which they liked most?

  Boys their age were pretty simple to understand. They all wanted one thing from girls. And it didn’t change when they got older, at least most of them didn’t. I knew that all too well, believed it to my marrow, shuddering at the memory of my mother’s boyfriend, of his skin on mine, of the stale, beery smell of him, of him moving inside me. Using me. Not even a person in his eyes. The same way Tuco had looked at me in the moment before he’d begun running toward me, before I’d fled.

  “Shabby!”

  Tuco’s voice was closer now, and the sound of it startled me. I leaned forward, peering between the bushes in the direction of the trail. It was out of my direct line of sight, just beyond a rise obstructing my view.

  “I didn’t mean it, what I said back there. I was just angry that I fell. I just want to talk, Shabby. Really. You can trust me.”

  Trust? Like hell. Lootah had raised me smarter than that. “Uncle Kevin” Two-Bears’ actions had taught me to be smarter than that. I knew how to recognize empty words when I heard them.

  Words were meaningless. Actions were all that mattered, in the end.

  It was time for me to take some of my own.

  11

  3:58 p.m.

  MY NAME IS SHABBAT ABBOTT, and I remember the second lie my parents ever told me. And no, I’m not counting cultural lies like Santa and all that stuff.

  This one came about a year later, after the first. My parents’ divorce was close to becoming old news, even though, for me, the wound was as fresh, stinging, and bright red as a recently skinned knee. I had begun first grade a few weeks before.

  Now, understand, although I lived in a small town, we had three kindergartens. The first, the one I had gone to, was a product of the Veritas County public school system, known as Hope Elementary. The second kindergarten, St. Mary’s, was a private Catholic institution. The third kindergarten, Pinesong Elementary, was also a private institution, sponsored and funded by the Lakota Band of Northwestern Wisconsin. Normally, I would have attended Pinesong. My father, in one of his last acts before abandoning our family, made sure I was in the Hope Elementary. Living in a county with three kindergarten programs, though not full elementary schools, made first grade was more momentous in the life of a six-year-old than it might be in other counties. That’s because, in Veritas County, first grade marked the year when students from Hope, St. Mary’s, and Pinesong, were all blended together in a single public school system classroom. Class sizes ballooned from a kindergarten class of about ten kids each, to a first-grade class of about thirty. Except for a handful homeschooled by their parents.

  Of course, this often did not go smoothly. It certainly didn’t for me, anyway.

  As one of the few Lakota students not to attend Pinesong Elementary, one of my new formerly Pinesong Elementary classmates, Mato Emery, had taken an immediate dislike to me. He expressed this daily, by calling me Sacagawea even though he knew my name was actually Shabbat. In fact, if I pointed out my actual name, which he labeled my white name, he would only refresh his insistence on calling me Sacagawea.

  This led to frequent lunch-room conflicts, as well as me running home in tears at the end of the school day. One Friday in October, my father was picking me up for a weekend visitation. I came out of the schoolhouse, in tears, following a few choice parting words thrown at me by Mato.

  “Hey, baby,” my father said, gently. “What’s wrong? Why the tears?”

  “No reason,” I said,
wiping tears from my cheeks, determined to handle it myself. “I hate this school, that’s all. Why can’t I go to Pinesong like all the other tribal kids?”

  “Pinesong only offers kindergarten, Shabbat. You know that. You’re in first grade now. You didn’t hate this school last year. What’s changed?”

  “Only everything. New classmates, new classroom, new teacher. Why do I have to get older? Why can’t I just stay in kindergarten? I liked kindergarten.”

  Dad ruffled my hair. “Even kindergarten changes, Shabbat. They might have the same classroom and teacher this year, but the classmates you had last year are all in first grade now with you, too.”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, “plus a bunch of stinky new ones.”

  “Some of the new kids giving you a hard time?” Dad asked.

  Without really wanting to, I answered dutifully. “Not some. One.”

  “Who’s that?”

  My mouth kept running ahead of my brain. “Stupidhead Mato.”

  “You mean Mato Emery? I know the Emerys. Want me to talk to his parents?”

  I felt the blood drain from my face. “No. That won’t help.”

  “Hold on a second,” Dad said. “Mato is from Pinesong. You just said that’s where you wish you were going. Why would you want to go to Pinesong if that’s where the kid you’re having trouble with went?”

  Emotion clogged my throat. My voice sounded thick with it. “Because, Dad, I’m Lakota. Pinesong is where I was supposed to go. If I’d gone there, Mato would have no problem with me. He keeps calling me white girl, white squaw, and white Indian. And … And Sacagawea.”

  “Sacagawea was not Lakota,” Dad said. “But she was a hero. Which is more than I can say for Mato Emery.”

  “I kind of doubt he means I’m a hero, Dad,” I said.