Chris would say, “It’s only two of them.”
Mom would say, “That’s two too many.”
I don’t say anything, but I turn and give them my best Joseph Little Wolf expression while the lights dim in the hallway and there are no coaches anywhere around.
“Did your girlfriend drive you to school?” The talker makes a nasty looking gesture with both hands that probably has something to do with sex.
They stop six paces back, well beyond the danger zone, but then the lights dim more, except for a pair of halogens canisters above my head. Those keep me illuminated while the hallway fluorescents fade to black. I’m the only show in town. I consider running into the darkness, but then I’d have to look at a coward’s face when I practice being popular in front of the mirror.
I raise my hands into what I think must be a pretty good boxing stance, but there’s laughter beyond my zone of light and the sound of thug-steps closing in, and I wonder if Mom is right about the white man’s world falling apart, because I know she’s right about two being two too many.
A light flashes behind me. Once, twice, three times, bright and stroboscopic, like the light shows at rave parties I’ve only heard about. The two white boys move in jerky motions, but they move toward me. So when the lights start flashing again I hit the closest one in the nose, and swing a wild punch at the other. It lands somewhere soft, but I don’t know exactly where until the fluorescent lights come on. He’s lying on the floor with both hands on his stomach.
A cheer goes up in the classrooms. It’s for the lights coming back on, but it still feels good. The next three flashes don’t look so impressive now that the hallway is fully lit.
I turn and see a girl with a camera. She takes a few more pictures of the thugs on the hallway floor, who are looking for their gangster ways on their hands and knees.
“These won’t make the school paper,” the girl tells me. “But I can give you all the prints as you want. I’ve been watching you for a while.”
I wonder how that’s possible. She must know how to go invisible like me. Like a real Indian. The girl isn’t pretty right away, but she turns prettier as she talks and she is really pretty when she smiles. Brown hair, brown eyes, a little taller than I am, but she makes up for it by slumping.
Her eyes look at the floor. “Been meaning to talk to you for a while. This seemed like the perfect time.”
“Perfect.” I extend my hand white businessman style again. This time it works.
“My name’s Joseph,” I tell her, even though I’m sure she already knows. I don’t say my last name because I remember what happened in the locker room.
“Mine’s Karma.” Her voice cracks a little, but her eyes sparkle in the fluorescent lights when they meet mine.
Karma, what else could it be?
Work is done for Wylie E. Chatto.
“For today anyways,” the boss tells me. “ Maybe tomorrow too. Can’t shred paper when the electric’s off. Go on out and wait for the bus, Chatto. Time is money.”
I give my wristwatch a nice long look, because that’s what people do when time gets mentioned. I touch it on the side like there’s some kind of button that helps me keep track of something, but my watch doesn’t have buttons or batteries or confusing hands that point at different numbers every second, every minute, every hour. It’s a present from my best and only friend, Hyannisport Larkspur Smith. She says time is useless to an Indian, especially one who looks a little off.
I tell the boss, “It’s half past early thirty,” as I walk through the front door of Discrete Document Destruction, the only place in Oklahoma City that won’t hire you if you know how to read.
I say, “Hyannisport Larkspur Smith,” out loud to remind myself there’s someone waiting for me back at the halfway house. Something to keep in mind while I try to figure out which bus to take at half past early thirty.
Two girls stand on the sidewalk a few feet away trying to make their cell phones work. They’re backed up against the wall so I guess they heard me think out loud.
I tell them, “She’s my best and only friend.” Now they know I had a reason for saying Hyannisport Larkspur Smith. I could tell them things about her—like how she gave me my Indian-time watch, and braided my hair into a tail, and whispered my war name so no one else could hear it—but I don’t. That was two calendars ago. Maybe three.
Hyannisport Larkspur Smith said, “Your war name is Wylie E. Coyote. Don’t tell anybody.” I make the zipper motion across my lips to remind myself.
The girls get mad at their phones so they won’t have to look at me. They use angry-girl-words, halfway between shouts and tears like, “Not even,” and, “Whatever.”
One of them is blonde with skin that looks like the inside of a peach, and the other has brown hair and a woodpecker nose. Their eyes are outlined in solid black, so it’s hard to tell if they are pretty.
Coyote magic could make me go invisible. These girls wouldn’t have to think about a big Indian standing so close he could grab them in a minute, but something bad is coming so I keep on looking solid and dangerous.
The air smells like rosemary. The scent is weak so the badness is a might-be-thing and maybe Wylie E. Coyote can turn it into a never is. I flip my braided tail over my right shoulder so I can see it while I work out a plan.
The girls edge away like they’re balanced on a narrow ledge. They slide along as slow as a pair of snails moving over brambles. The rosemary smell gets stronger, so I speed things up with a war cry and a wild Indian face.
That starts the white girls moving fast. They run away just as tires start screeching like someone wants to stop real bad but can’t. The screech-noise turns into a car crash right into the front of Discrete Document Destruction exactly where the girls would be if not for coyote magic.
They are running faster now, all the way to the corner. The blonde one stops long enough to shout, “Goddamned retard.” She makes an upside down fist with her right hand and flips her insult finger straight up.
“I’m not retarded, just a little off,” I call after her, and then feel kind of bad because nobody says retarded at the halfway house. It’s hard to yell exactly the right thing when the insult finger goes up.
“Excuse me,” says a woman’s voice inside the wrecked car. She’s behind an airbag that’s going down a lot slower than it should.
“Can someone help me please?” The words have music in them, like a song that hasn’t quite taken hold.
“The door is stuck, and I think my leg is broken.” A flirty song. The kind of song that gives me ideas the halfway councilor says are inappropriate. Hyannisport Larkspur Smith calls them dangerous but natural.
When I get around to the driver’s side window, I see how pretty this woman is—prettier than the blonde girl and the brown-haired girl put together. This one’s hair is too red for a real color, but it looks good all messed up.
“Hyannisport Larkspur Smith’s hair looks just like that,” I tell her, “Except it’s brown.” Then I realize that Hyannisport Larkspur Smith’s hair is nothing like this woman’s—except in those dangerous, natural, inappropriate ideas I have sometimes.
The pretty woman gives me a big salesgirl smile, the kind that means I’m just in time for the best bargain ever. She puts her left hand through the window and tells me, “Delilah Munson is my name. What’s yours?”
She wiggles her fingers like she’s trying for a magic spell, and it might be working because I take her hand and tell her, “Wylie E Chatto.”
I shake her hand way too long, but I can’t tell she wants me to quit until she says, “You think a big strong boy like you could get my door open?”
“Sure.” I squeeze on the handle until I hear a pop, and give the door a jerk—quick and violent, the way a coyote breaks a rabbit’s neck. Going Batshit is what I call it, but that might scare the pretty lady so I just tell her, “Easy as pie.”
That gets me a bigger salesgirl smile.
“Everything
went crazy when the traffic lights quit working.” She turns herself on a bucket seat made of so much leather it must have used the outside of a whole cow. Her skirt is red—almost the same color as her hair—and so short I can hear the slippery sound her legs make on the upholstery.
When those legs stick all the way out of the car, they are almost all the way out of the skirt too. She pulls the material back a little more and says, “Look.”
I don’t have a choice.
The skirt is just a little scrap of cloth, but it folds across her legs like curtains over a crystal clear window that will let the sun shine in if you pull them back a little more. She takes my hand, guides it to the most naked leg. She moves my hand in circles over the spot she thinks is broken. I count the circles quietly, hardly moving my lips at all.
When I’ve counted four, the pretty woman says, “What do you think?”
Her eyes are as green as the bottom part of the traffic lights that quit working and caused the accident. I remember green means go, but I also remember what Hayannisport Larkspur Smith told me how inappropriate ideas are only OK if we keep them to ourselves.
“Is it broken?”
It takes me a few seconds to figure out what she is asking.
“This is the most unbroke leg I ever saw.” Not a bruise or even a rough place where the hair isn’t shaved away. No stockings either. “I need to go.”
The woman and the car and even the broken front of Discrete Document Destruction smells like rosemary so strong coyote magic can’t fix it.
“Somebody has to take me to the hospital.” She shows me the screen on her cell phone. “No signal at all.” She smiles at me the way Hyannisport Larkspur Smith smiles at the halfway councilor who comes around on Saturdays.
“Power’s off all over the city.” She waves one of her hands the way pretty magician’s assistants do on HBO magic shows, and I hear sirens coming from all over town—fire engines, ambulances, police cars all going different places at the same time. I try to open the front door of Discrete Document Destruction, but the boss has it locked up tight, and knocking won’t do any good if a car crash didn’t make him curious.
“Carry me.” She holds her arms straight out with her hands dangling like ripe fruit ready to drop onto the ground where it won’t be stealing if I take it.
So I scoop her up. I try not to run my hand under her bare legs but her skirt is too short for that. I put one arm around her waist, so my fingers are nowhere near her breasts, but she wriggles until they are. She reaches over my shoulder and takes hold of my coyote tail—the first woman ever to do that except for Hyannisport Larkspur Smith.
“You don’t look like a Wylie to me. I think I’ll call you Samson.” She sits in my arms like I’m the most comfortable recliner in the whole wide world and waits for me to say something.
“Get it? I’m Delilah and you’re Samson.”
“Bible,” is all I can think to say. It’s one of those story’s religious white people tell each other, I can’t remember it for sure, but I don’t think things worked out too well for Samson. “Don’t know where the hospital is.”
She kicks her legs around like a little girl on a swing, which I don’t think she’d do if one was broken. She whispers in my ear, “Don’t worry Samson, I’ll tell you exactly what to do.”
Those words go into to my ear all warm and whispery. It feels like a promise that pretty white women don’t usually make to an Indian who’s a little off. She gives my coyote tail a kiss and clucks her tongue like I’m a carriage horse.
“Giddyup Samson,” she tells me, and that’s exactly what I do.
• • •
“Go this way, Samson. Turn that way. Faster. Slower.” When Delilah Munson doesn’t tell me what to do, I freeze up like a picture of a statue.
She presses her fake red hair against my shoulder. She touches my face with the tips of her fingers like she’s a blind person trying to figure out the floors on an elevator panel. She moves my head around so I’ll look at exactly the right place.
“Look Samson. There’s our reflection in a store window.” Delilah Munson kicks her legs so I can see exactly what she’s wearing under that short skirt. I try to look away but can’t get my head to turn. My eyes won’t stay closed and neither will my brain.
“Look at us, Samson. Don’t we make a cute couple?”
Our shadows fall inside a Bass Pro Shop window that has a special percentage sale on rifles. The numbers are big, which means the prices are small—at least according to the Hyannisport Larkspur Smith.
“Twenty percent off,” I say, because some of those numbers are twenties.
Delilah smiles like twenty is the smartest thing she’s ever heard. She kicks her legs like a little girl again, and one of her shoes falls onto the sidewalk.
“Oh my!” Her voice is excited but it’s not surprised. She points a finger at the shoe so I bend over and pick it up.
“Put it on me, Samson. Put it on my poor broken leg.” She talks the way you talk to a dog when you want to make him whine. She wiggles her toes one at a time. So graceful I can’t take my eyes away.
“Over there, Samson.” She traces the shape of my lower lip with a fingertip, licks it, and points at a concrete bench. It’s cold and hard, so she shivers a little when I set her down, and even though it’s probably the concrete, I kind of think she’s shivering for me.
Delilah puts her bare foot in my hand and I slide the shoe on. It’s red, like her dress and her hair and the feeling building up behind my eyes.
“Breathe, Samson.” Delilah knows I’m holding my breath even though I don’t.
After a couple of deep breaths I feel normal again except for being watched by those traffic-light-green eyes and being touched by fingertips that I’ll bet have never touched an Indian before.
Delilah slides one of her hands between the buttons on my shirt. It’s delicate but hot.
“Your heart is beating really fast, Samson.”
Her words travel through her fingers and tell my heart to gallop like an Apache horse running from the U.S. Army.
“Carry me, Samson.” She keeps her fingers over my heart while her voice tells my legs where to go and her messy red hair makes me think of Hyannisport Larkspur Smith when she comes out of her private sessions with our Saturday councilor.
Delilah’s green eyes cross a little when they look at me, like there’s too much to see in close, but she doesn’t want to move away. Those eyes are a lot more complicated than I thought they were—prettier too, like green leaves hanging over clear water after a heavy rain.
I hardly notice the rosemary smell until I hear someone say, “Watch out, you clumsy bastard.”
We’re on a footbridge over the Oklahoma River, and I’m about to run into a big fat white man in a cowboy hat.
“Retard.” He rolls his shoulders like the fat is muscle, like he beats up Indians every day.
I don’t say, “I’m not retarded, just a little off,” because I’ve already made that mistake one time today.
“My, you’re a big one.” Delilah keeps her magic fingers over my heart while she turns her green eyes toward the fat cowboy.
“Isn’t he a big one, Samson?” She takes her hand out of my shirt and picks up my coyote tail. She kisses the tip of the braid then blows the kiss right at him.
His brain is so cluttered up with feeling fat and strong he can’t decide whether Delilah is insulting him or flirting. She clears that up by making her hand into a finger pistol and letting the thumb hammer fall.
“Bang. Why don’t you kill him, Samson?”
I put Delilah on the concrete railing. It’s exactly the right height to let her cross her legs in a way that leaves me wondering what they look like at the very top. The fat cowboy is looking at them too, so hard he’s almost forgotten about the crazy Indian he’s just insulted.
Until Delilah points that finger pistol at him again and says, “Get him, Samson,” without a trace of flirt.
�
�Get him.” Her green eyes are hard as broken glass and her voice sounds like a command to a killer dog and her finger stays pointed at the fat man.
That Batshit feeling comes on really fast, and I take a couple of steps toward the fat cowboy, trying to figure out which part of him I’m going to break first. I swing my coyote tail over my shoulder so he can see it when I come for him. I turn my hands into fists that are big and hard enough to break a fat man’s head.
“Oh shit.” The fat man falls on his butt and scoots along backward like a crab with broken legs. He rolls onto his feet and waddles down the bridge so fast he makes the whole thing shake.
“Twenty percent off,” I shout at his back, so he’ll know he’s been scared away by a wild Indian who knows his numbers.
“Samson.” Delilah pulls me to her with a curled finger and a smile. She pats the concrete railing, so I’ll know what she wants me to do.
“Two men fighting over little old me.” She kisses me on the cheek and takes hold of my coyote tail.
“You’ll do anything I say, won’t you Samson?”
Anything’s a lot. More than five, or ten, or even twenty percent, so I have to think about that for a while. I look at my Indian-time watch like people do when they don’t know what to do. That reminds me of Hyannisport Larkspur Smith, which reminds me of my war name that nobody knows but her.
“Maybe not,” I tell Delilah Munson. “Maybe not anything.”
She pokes out her lower lip, like I just told her something really sad, like maybe we’re not a cute couple anymore.
“You know what happened in the Bible?” She takes my coyote tail in one hand and sniffs at it, like she’s wondering where the rosemary smell is coming from. “You know what happened when Sampson disappointed Delilah.” She makes a pair of finger scissors and pretends she’s cutting off my tail.
I remember how those fingers work. How they change things in a minute—the way you think, the way you act, how fast your heart beats, how much you breathe.
Batshit is what happens next. I jump up. Delilah screams. She tumbles off the bridge right into the Oklahoma River. The dirty water washes her prettiness away.
Sacred Alarm Clock Page 3
