by J. D. Palmer
“Prove it. Prove that this isn’t…” I wave a hand. I don’t know how to end the sentence.
The men look at each other, obviously confused. “She told us to wait for you here. She said you’d come this way.”
They go to get in their respective cars, one giving us little waves, beckoning us to join them, as if we’re sullen children and they the patient parents.
My vision swims. My breath is heavy, as if I forgot how the process works. One deep heave in… One long heave out.
She’s okay.
My knees feel empty. Drained. Rubber tubes that aren’t going to hold me up much longer. I feel a hand on my shoulder and I see Theo, tears streaming down his cheeks, an angry face weeping as he pulls me into a crushing hug.
“She’s okay.”
“And somewhere, wherever she is, she’s embarrassed by this display,” Sheila says, heading to the nearest car.
I ask questions. Just a few, my curiosity burning to know how Beryl came to be with these men. That she would be able to send them to meet us. But they only give me enigmatic smiles and say, “you’ll see.”
Which is fine by me.
Just knowing that she is safe is a balm to an overstrained heart.
My heart?
I almost cry three more times and I think I fall asleep, sitting in the back seat next to Theo, both of us grappling to contain emotions. Worry and relief and guilt, guilt perhaps sidestepped, and that most important of all.
The car is fancy. A bright blue on the outside. I didn’t notice the make and model, my eyes and mind were too far somewhere else for that. But now, as we speed along, that velvet hum of an engine made for open roads lets me know this isn’t something haphazardly scavenged.
There are a series of honks as the other car, a blur of yellow, speeds past us. Our driver gives chase, hand out the window with his middle finger extended.
I’d be mad if I didn’t suspect that Sheila was having some sort of effect on the driver.
And I don’t feel like getting angry. Not at their lack of caution. Or their lack of answers. They’re taking me to Beryl.
BERYL | 10
WE ARE LED to a post and told to sit. Ropes around our wrists are then tied to the wooden stake. They aren’t cruel, there is enough give in the tether that I can sit with my hands in my lap. But we aren’t left alone. Two boys and an old man are tasked with watching us. The young ones yell at us in a mix of English and some other language, jumping and poking sticks at us before leaping away. The old man has a gun and sad eyes. The look he gives me lets me know that, if we try to run, he won’t hesitate to teach these children about the harshness of the world.
Should I try?
Pike flops down and lays his big head on my lap, unknowingly thwarting any ideas of escape I was entertaining.
It’s hard to be mad at him though.
Rita tries to snap her fingers and hisses at him to come to her. He barely lifts his head before snuggling back into my lap.
“He’s mine!”
I don’t understand why this is important at this juncture. Maybe this is how she’s been all her life. Weighing and measuring herself by what she has. Maybe Pike is the last of her possessions.
It would be foolish to try to argue with her. I’d rather just kill her and be done with the whole thing.
Matt sits quiet, staring at the ground. Terry alternates between weeping and then begging the old man to set him free. He does not ask for the rest of us.
Dancing Ghost is long gone, departing to join a small company of men and women who stand straighter and laugh harder by his very presence.
He is loved here.
If there wasn’t the weight of whatever fate hanging above our heads I think I could relax. The tiny swish of the water as it laps onto the sandy shore. The swoosh of wind through cattails. The bite of the cold breeze that doesn’t seem to chill me. Can’t I guess, not with Pike lying on me.
But time to think is never a welcome thing. It’s a dangerous thing, as I know all too well. The urge to disappear into my sanctuary, to examine my keepsakes and find comfort in their warmth is almost overwhelming.
Stay present.
I scratch Pike’s head and watch the horizon. Watch for the first sign of the group. Of Sheila and Josey. Of Theo’s huge form. Of Harlan. I almost smile thinking about it. The way they would come in. Harlan stalking across the desert towards us. That worried, yet pissed off, look on his face. The anger. And then the blood. And then the moment he cuts me free. When I can walk out of this room…
It’s difficult not to drift into the past when your hands are tied. It’s hard not to revert into the trapped being that you were.
You are different now. You aren’t the same. Focus.
I haven’t counted my words today. Truth be told, I haven’t spoken very much.
Try.
I open my mouth. Look down at Pike. He lifts his head, as if waiting for the words, then heaves a sigh and flops back down.
Well screw you.
I scratch his ear. It’s hard to think of something to say when there’s no one there you want to listen. When there’s nothing important to say, but there is an importance to the act. I wonder if I should ask the old man his name. Or the children. Or maybe ask them what they’re going to do to us.
“That’s my fucking dog, I hope you know that. You bitch.”
I open my eyes at the petulant words. Rita was staring at me but immediately looks away, as if she hadn’t said anything.
“I think I might kill you, Rita.”
A name and a sentence.
Progress.
The sun begins to set. My favorite time of the day. The time when we’d stop walking, or driving, and make a fire. A fire for heating food and for sitting around until it’s time to sleep. A fire that keeps me warm until Harlan’s watch is done and he comes to lay beside me, hands finding each other’s and pulling the other closer. Slowly. Always slowly.
There is a fire here tonight. Not one but two. Large ones. Larger than any we would have dared to make. We must be a long ways away from anybody else, or they are simply that confident in themselves.
Keep your eyes on the horizon, Har.
A group of men come and gather us. Not unkindly. But definitely impatient.
I try to count the figures clustered around the bonfire. They are moving about too much for anything definite. Thirty? Forty?
The space between the two fires is empty. Benches and fold-out chairs and simple blankets are spread out on the sides to create a square. We are escorted to the far pyre, to a bench that sits directly in front of the flames. They seat us together and Rita quickly scoots over to put space between her and I.
Across from us is an identical bench. The shadows of five people shift and warp and are only pieced together by a flare in the fire. My eyes are drawn to the woman in the center. She is the one I talked to earlier… Yet different. The same dark complexion offset by white hair that hangs, braided, down to her stomach. The hands that sit still yet draw the eyes. It’s not the bear hide wrapped around her shoulders that commands my attention. It’s the deference. The way the others sit slightly inwards, awaiting her signal. The way everyone quiets when she slowly raises a hand. Even the wind seems to hold its breath. Only the fire crackles on, ignorant of the proceedings. A different woman than the one I met in the tipi.
“My name is Sleeping Bear. I was a Paiute. Now I am of the One Tribe.”
A murmur, “I am of the One Tribe” is repeated by the audience.
“We forgot who we were. Allowed ourselves to fade into hollow shells of what we could be. Scattered. Forced into submission. Then, the Great Awakening. As death walked among us we remembered. WE REMEMBERED.”
She doesn’t raise her voice, but the words echo in the air, a thunderclap without a storm.
“We listened to the land. To the wind and the water. To the smoke in the fire. And we came here. All of us. One tribe.” She pauses and slowly scans the crowd on either side
of the great fires, meeting the eyes of everyone. “We are united. But there is still division. This day…”
She pauses and swings her head to the side. I see Julian, sitting with arms crossed, his scowl deepening as he catches his mother’s gaze.
“This day would come. And now it is here,” she continues. “These lands are not ours. But they also do not belong to the white man. Or to the black man. Or the brown. To that end we have driven them away.”
Another pause. She stands up and approaches the fire behind her. Holds her hands out. Everyone is silent, still, waiting for whatever is to happen.
“We are a mix of the young and old. The old ways and the new. The only thing that is the same is the blood. I ask you all to listen to it. As I will listen to it.”
She returns to her seat and there is a murmur, a rustling as people suddenly remember that they are leaning forward, shoulders tense and hands clasped together.
“I, for one, am still unclear as to what happened today.” The flickering flames show me a deeply lined face above a plaid shirt. Hands twist what looks like thick black hair, almost unconsciously plaiting it.
Julian heaves himself to his feet, a grimace crossing his face as he bends the leg I stabbed. “We chased them down out of the lower—”
“I would ask Dancing Ghost to explain.”
The man who put forth the question says it softly, but it might as well have been a slap across Julian’s face. For a second it looks like he’s going to argue. Instead he stays standing, smoldering eyes darting back and forth between the man and the emerging form of Ghost.
“We chased them out of the lower scrub, just like Julian said. They lost control of their car, ended up going off the road. Julian and his tribe got there—”
“We are all one tribe.”
“Yes. My apologies. Julian and his… group… got there first. There had been a fight. Julian had been stabbed in the leg.”
He lapses into silence.
“And?”
“And things looked like they were moving towards something a bit more bloody.”
“And?”
He sighs. “And I put an end to it. Got them separated. Brought them here.”
The old man leans forward. “And why were things ‘getting bloody.’ Why did Julian get stabbed?”
Ghost shrugs. “Tim isn’t so quick anymore. I only saw what came after.”
The man barely has time to turn his attention towards Julian before he is speaking.
“They got out of their car all pissed and screaming. And we were trying to tell them to leave, to just leave. That’s it! Then I hear barking and I’m gonna let that dog out and that bitch stabs me! Fuckin’ stabs me!”
He looks around the group as if seeking support. There is mumbling. Most look at Dancing Ghost, who is playing with a stalk of grass and doesn’t appear to be paying attention.
“What were you going to do?”asks Sleeping Bear. And it’s not the query of an elder. It’s the worried question of a mother.
Julian gathers himself, angry eyes scanning the crowd. A host of decisions crawl across his face. I wonder if he is going to lie. Or what truth he is going to tell.
“I was going to scalp ‘em.”
There is an uproar. At least I’d call it that amongst this laconic group of people. Harsh whispering coupled with backs going rigid. And then silence. A tension in bodies that makes the whipping wind sing as if it were gusting past knife blades propped in the desert.
“Is that wrong? Please, One Tribe, tell me why.”
No one steps forward to speak and he pounces on the silence. “No half measures, right? That’s what we agreed. No letting the white man find his way back into this land. No letting them push us into the corners of our own country and tell us that they are doing us a favor.”
He pauses, chest heaving, then points a shaking finger at me. “We shouldn’t be protecting these… devils incarnate. We should be scalping them and hanging their filthy fucking bodies on every edge of our borders. Tell me I’m wrong.”
With that he sits back down in his seat. There is whooping from behind him, and his followers slap his back and raise dark knives to point at me.
Sleeping Bear raises her hands for silence. A silence that is longer in the making. “What say you, Elder Reed?”
The woman at the end of the bench raises her head. “Did you know that this is a wildlife preserve? A place that we had fished and hunted since before the white man set foot on this continent. And after herding us onto reservations and taking away our rights, suddenly it is remembered that the birds here need to be protected. It is an odd thing to be jealous of a sandpiper.”
She doesn’t speak after that, and I don’t suppose she needs to say more.
The older man who spoke earlier holds up a hand, keeping it in the air as he speaks, as if swearing an oath. “If we behave as the white man, we become worse than him. This is not our path.”
Julian snorts derisively. “Most of us have some white in us. Enough of the devil in us to know what he’s capable of.” He spreads his hands, exasperated. “Is everyone serious? Did none of you think it would get to this point? That we’d chase them away and they’d never come back?” He labors to his feet again, taking a few limping steps into the center to point a knife at me. “They will always come. They will always trespass on our lands and try to make us something of their own. The only thing we can do is give them a fear so deep that, for once in their foolish lives, they will think twice before crossing the red man.”
There is more approval. The Awakening, as they call it, has brought up more than a sense of being. Grievances that have simmered since the 1800’s are freshly blooded.
“Elder Jenkins?”
A younger man, at least in comparison to the others, stands up. He has short hair kept under a ball cap. Cowboy boots and a large, gleaming belt buckle that dances in the firelight.
“We have not always had it easy. Haven’t always… Been good.” He pulls his hat off and rubs a forearm across a brow that shouldn’t have been sweaty. “And now. Here… I haven’t ever had…” He gathers himself. “Now we are One Tribe, come together. You can’t imagine what it’s like to suddenly remember who you are again. To be given purpose, and pride, and the strength you thought you had lost.”
I think I can.
He sits down after that, head bowed. The older man is staring back at him with a mixture of surprise and anger.
Julian nods along. “So we are united. One Tribe.”
“One Tribe,” repeated back by voices excited and subdued.
I see Sleeping Bear look to the man to her left, the last Elder, and I see the shake of his head.
She stands, using the time it takes for the crowd to fall silent to stare into the eyes of her son. To bore into him as only a mother can. And he meets her stare.
“They will be taken to the four corners of our lands. And their spirits will be set free.”
Julian is surprised, I think, by his mother’s decision. I don’t think he thought that he would win. Or at least so quickly.
Win.
There are no winners here. I understand that Sleeping Bear is trying to avoid the collapse of everything she has worked for. A united tribe. But one that will only stay united so long as they are not only safe, but in control of their destiny. Something that won’t be scattered by the first strong gust of wind.
I, too, have suffered. And if I had a home for my family, I might be tempted to do the same thing.
Rita wails, tipping on her side and kicking her feet like a toddler told to go to bed. Matt stares at the ground. Terry is shaking his head and talking to himself, a sickly grin plastered across his face, eyes darting to different people. Pleading. Laughing. Pleading. Laughing.
I feel an orphan again. Decisions made about me without my thoughts. Without my approval. The difference between a thing to take care of, and a person to take care of. I’m alone, again, with my rage at the unfairness of the world.
&nbs
p; “We should not delay this thing. To wait is to torture them. And that is evil.”
It’s Ghost speaking. This is an unforeseen blow. I am fearful, at this moment, yes, but I am also something harder. Heated and hammered and dunked into the waters of San Francisco Bay and then hammered again. The fact that it’s Ghost talking so calmly about my death is a new kind of hurt. A realization that I am allowing myself to trust people. To allow them access to me, no matter in how small of a capacity.
Not again.
“I agree with him. For once,” Julian says. A curious smile on his face as he stares at Ghost.
Dancing Ghost ignores him, his eyes on the elders. “With your permission I will depart for the southeast corner. Towards my home. I know the way.” And almost as an afterthought. “We will take the young woman. She is the lightest, and it is a long journey for our horses.”
“You may.” Sleeping Bear says it as Julian explodes with rage.
“No! She is… He will set her free!” Two limping strides towards Ghost, fists clenched. “He always does this! He will—”
“Silence!” Sleeping Bear strides towards her son, and for a second I think she is going to strike him. He towers over her but seems so small. So small in the face of her anger. And her power. “Your mind is clouded by pain. And your temper. You have convinced this tribe of the path that must be taken. But your heart speaks of revenge. You will take the northwest path. It has been decided. ONE TRIBE!”
The words are yelled back to her and the matter is over. Only Julian standing in between the two fires, a heat in his eyes that has nothing to do with the flames. And he stares at me. And at Ghost. A long glower before quickly striding away.
“We should go. Soon.”
Ghost pulls me up off the bench and ushers me from the fire. The night becomes dramatically colder away from the heat, and I find my shirt adhered to my back by cold sweat.
A swirl of activity behind us. I glance back to see the three others being led away by different clumps of natives.
