“Goddamn it, Samson. I can’t swim.” But the Oklahoma River isn’t very deep and she’s standing on the bottom. Her hands are on her hips and the makeup on her face that I didn’t see before is running down her neck.
“You’re leg’s not broke,” I tell her. “You can walk to the hospital.” I run away before she turns her magic on again. A coyote is no good without a tail.
My mother’s name is Hyannisport Larkspur Smith. She wrote it in oversize shaky letters at the bottom of the lavender-scented note she left for Dad, telling him she wouldn’t be around anymore. A big nervous signature, the way John Hancock would have signed the Declaration of Independence if they had amphetamines back then.
Dear Bob,
You know I can’t stay here anymore.
Love,
Hyannisport Larkspur Smith
P.S. Take care of Karma.
That’s me, Karma Chameleon Smith, a P.S. on a dear Bob letter. Dad says the name came from a song Mom listened to when she was stoned. Well he doesn’t exactly say it. Dad doesn’t talk much, but he plays Mom’s old Culture Club CD while he fans himself with the note and looks at our one and only family picture. I figured the stoned part on my own.
I ask him, “Did she love me?”
He points to the word love on the dear Bob letter, but she didn’t mention me until after that.
I ask him, “Is she still around?”
He blinks once, which means yes in Dad language. You have to get really good at reading people when you have a dad who barely talks.
“Do you know where she is?”
He looks at the ceiling for a second, then at his feet, then back at the sepia tone picture of the dysfunctional family of three. A father with a five-year-old girl sitting on his lap and a crazy mother standing behind us with her arms crossed. He’s wearing a suit. I’m wearing a dress. Mom’s in a pair of jeans with holes in the knees and an Oklahoma State University t-shirt that says, “Go Cowpokes” in big letters.
I can tell a lot more from that picture. A friend of Dad’s is the photographer. Mom doesn’t like him. She loves Dad a little, but hasn’t made her mind up about me. I see things in the way people stand, how they hold their hands, where they put their eyes. Dad says I always could. Well, he doesn’t exactly say it.
I ask, “Think she’ll ever come back?”
He says, “No,” the ordinary verbal way.
“I’m nothing like her, you know.”
One blink.
“I want to hear you say, I’m nothing like her.”
“Nothing.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Call me Bob.” He gets up slowly and stretches as if all this conversation is wearing him down. It’s his way of telling me the parent-child relationship has run its course. Time for us to be friends.
“Yo.” Dad clinches his right hand into a fist and holds it out for me to bump. Some days he’s a regular chatterbox.
• • •
My almost-boyfriend Joseph has two mothers and no father. I have one father and no mother. It’s a perfect match, except for the fact that he’s Native American and I’m not.
When he introduces himself he says, “My name’s Joseph Beaver. I’m Choctaw.”
He doesn’t say, “Kiss me. I’m Choctaw,” but almost. Oklahoma Indians are proud. Oklahoma white people are guilty. Another perfect match.
Joseph and I are only children, but he might have lots of half-brothers and -sisters because his dad was a sperm donor at a Tulsa fertility clinic. His Dad’s name is Anonymous, which is even weirder than Hyannisport Larkspur Smith.
Chris is Joseph’s Dad/Mom. She has hard muscles and soft eyes. She’d throw herself in front of a bear for Joseph, but not in front of Mona. That’s his Mom/Mom. Joseph has Mona’s chromosomes, and all he’s got from Chris is her bear-fighting love.
Mona isn’t sure her boy should have a girlfriend yet, especially a white one. When Joseph introduces us she starts right in on safe sex. According to her there’s no such thing, and the path to getting STDs starts off with a kiss.
She says, “Boys just naturally carry STDs around, once they finish with collecting rocks and baseball cards.” She puts an arm around Joseph’s shoulders to show she loves him anyway.
“Besides diseases there are babies.” Mona gives Joseph a squint-eyed look. “Be careful, Karma.” She kisses Joseph on the cheek, and he flinches. Who can blame him?
Chris says, “Don’t mind Mona.” She shakes my hand—starts off in the ordinary way but turns it into one of those elaborate rap-singer-shakes-with-fancy-finger grips. She tries to end it with an overhand two-person clap, but by then I’m totally lost.
After we listen to the sound of one hand clapping for an embarrassing two seconds, Chris says, “Tell me, Karma, have you got any Indian blood?”
That’s the real reason for Mona’s safe sex lecture. I know because Joseph’s already told me about his Mom/Mom’s “Indian thing.” She’d think sex was a lot safer if I was Native American. Mona is a quarter Choctaw. That means Joseph can document an eighth. That would be watered down to a sixteenth if he and I had children. Evaporating identity.
“The tribe is so diluted already,” Mona says, as if that’s totally reasonable. Her all-white girlfriend tries to change the subject, but Mona’s already talking about revolution and anarchy and Indians taking America back. She runs her hands through her long black hair and runs her voice up and down the scale. Her eyes get anime-big and beautiful. Her skin tone deepens from slightly tan to spray on bronze. Mona is a wild Indian who might not make a lot of sense but you listen to her anyway because she’s beautiful.
My almost-boyfriend’s mom is prettier than me.
Mona says, “The white man’s world is coming to an end.”
I’m not supposed to be offended because I’m a white girl, after all.
“Systems are failing,” Mona says. “The electricity, the food supply, medical care, the military.”
Just as she tells me this, the lights dim, and her computer backup batteries sound a warning that would make a dog howl, if Mona and Chris had a dog.
“You see.” She puts her hands on her hips. She gestures to the lights, gestures to the howling backup batteries.
“Technology is their Achilles heel.” She shrugs and holds it until I give her my best photo-ready smile.
“Golly,” I say, because that’s a word for all occasions if you’re under twenty. I want to change the subject, but no subject-changing words come to mind.
“Technology will sink the white man.” Mona’s eyes get a little wider. Her skin blanches into one of those ugly designer colors that everybody’s supposed to like but no one does. She’s just remembered I am white and she’s told me the Indian Revolution Plan.
“Please don’t tell anyone.”
I say, “Mum’s the word.”
Joseph smiles at my cross-cultural pun. He says, “Got to go, Mum,” then Mona and Chris get the joke.
They wave as we leave the house. Their waving hands go stationary but stay suspended like Mona and Chris are swearing an oath.
Joseph and I wait till we are a block away before we laugh, because we don’t want his two moms to think I’m a bad influence.
• • •
A police car stops beside us before we walk another block. The passenger cop gives us a hard look. There aren’t as many cop cars as there used to be because Oklahoma City is broke. The mayor says we’re in a temporary slump. Mona Beaver says it’s permanent. My dad doesn’t say anything as usual.
“Hey, you kids!” The passenger-cop is trying to think of a reason to make our lives miserable. The expression on his face tells me he has children. The way he puts both arms out the window and turns his hands into fists tells me they don’t get along. His anger drowns out everything else.
The driver-cop looks at his watch. He wants to be someplace else—any place but in this gas guzzling police car beside his kid-hating partner.
“You!” the kid-ha
ter stares at Joseph. “I’m talking to you, Sitting Bull.” He looks back at his partner, who looks a lot more like Sitting Bull than Joseph.
The driver-cop says, “Cool it William.”
My almost-boyfriend doesn’t say anything, but that’s not unusual. He almost never talks. Like my Dad—it occurs to me—but I don’t want to think about that.
Before I can say, “Is there a problem officer?” the radio inside the police car makes a noise like wood scraping across concrete. A robot-girl-voice recites numbers and words, and the driver-cop turns on the police car’s flashing lights.
He says, “Got to go, William. That’s a 10-24.” He gives his partner time to tell us, “This is your lucky day, assholes,” before he accelerates so fast he leaves rubber patches in the road. Too fast when gasoline is in such short supply unless it’s something like a 10-24.
“What’s a 10-24?” Joseph asks.
“Magic numbers that make cops disappear.” Talking about magic is the one sure way to get a one-eighth Choctaw boy to smile.
Now that there aren’t so many cops, you’d think they’d all be busy enforcing all the laws, but that’s not how it works. When there’s more crime than ever and not enough police, the cops mostly give up.
Joseph and I aren’t going anywhere special so we don’t hurry. We walk without talking, but that’s OK because the world is talking to me all the time. I point to a stray dog and tell Joseph how its owners moved away and didn’t take it with them.
“Pit bull mix,” I say. “Non-violent for the time being, you can tell by the way it holds its head.”
The dog crosses the street as we get closer because it doesn’t trust people anymore. It sniffs the air in case someone’s left a bowl of dog food out.
“Maybe I should take it home,” Joseph tells me. “Chris says I should get a dog.”
I say, “It’s a girl dog. You can tell she’s spayed because there aren’t any boy dogs around. She knows every square inch of the neighborhood because her people used to let her out to do her business.”
“Dog business.” Joseph laughs, the way boys always do at bathroom humor. He looks at me and says, “Dog business,” again, because I’m not smiling and he thinks I didn’t get it.
“When that dog stopped being a cute puppy her owners didn’t want her.” Maybe I’m talking about my mother now, but still, I’ve got it right.
“You can tell that just by looking?” Joseph starts to take my hand, but he remembers Mona’s warnings about safe sex.
“Dogs are easy reads. People are even easier.” I point to a group of three boys standing in front of the 7-Eleven across the street.
“The short one is the leader.”
The tallest boy is standing close to him listening to every word he says. He crowds so close the short one takes a step back. He puts a hand on the tall one’s chest so he won’t follow. The tall one smiles and leans into the touch.
“See the boy standing farthest away?” He might be Hispanic, or Indian. “That one’s thinking about what his mother told him earlier today.”
“Don’t hang around with white hoodlums,” is what she said. That boy looks my way when I tell Joseph this.
I ask Joseph. “Got your phone?” You can never tell if those things are going to work anymore, so I don’t carry one.
“Call 9-1-1,” I tell him. Those boys are going to rob the store.
By the time he fishes the phone out of his pocket and punches in the numbers, the short boy has a pistol in his hand. He and the tall one go inside, but the maybe-Hispanic boy doesn’t.
Maybe they’ll get a hundred dollars. Maybe they’ll get a case of Oklahoma 3.2% beer. Maybe they’ll kill the Iranian clerk who came to this country to get away from boys with guns.
The same two cops who bothered us before are the ones who come to save the day. They slide into the parking lot, draw their guns, and charge into the store. We can’t tell what is happening inside until there’s a gunshot. Then another. Like thunder and lightning behind the windows.
The might-be-Hispanic boy walks across the street and joins us.
The two cops and the Iranian clerk walk out together and stand by the police car. An EMSA siren wails in the distance, getting here fast because traffic is light since gasoline got hard to find.
One of the cops shouts at us. “You kids move along.”
Since he’s in a killing mood we do.
Joseph doesn’t usually talk, but he pats the might-be-Hispanic boy on the back and tells him, “Must be your lucky day.” Then we go to my house, because that had been the plan all along—even when there were just two of us.
• • •
It turns out the might-be-Hispanic boy isn’t Hispanic after all. His name is Rajneesh Patel. Indian was my second choice, but not that kind of Indian.
“People call me Raj,” he tells us. “Nobody likes to say Rajneesh.”
“Pleased to meet you Raj.” I introduce myself while we’re shaking hands. “My name is Karma.”
Raj thinks I’m making fun of him, but Joseph comes to the rescue.
“Really, dude. That really is her name.” Raj smiles because nobody ever called him dude before.
I can see this guy wants someone to like him so I tell him, “My mom was kind of crazy, and my dad was way too agreeable, otherwise my name would be something normal like Heather, or Amy.”
Bingo! Raj is smiling. He and I have something in common—we both have mysterious and exotic mothers. Doesn’t everybody?
Joseph says, “I’m Choctaw,” so he won’t be left out while everybody else is bonding. “I have two Moms.”
Now Raj is grinning like the DMV is open for business again and he’s passed his driver’s test the very first time. He’s met two people who will never think he’s weird for not wanting to hold up a 7-Eleven.
As long as we are on the subject of Moms I tell him how mine abandoned me when I was five years old and my Dad won’t tell me where she went, and I’d really like to find her.
“Just to be sure I’m nothing like her.” We walk along in silence while I try to figure out if that’s the real reason. “And to ask her if she loves me.”
That makes Joseph uneasy, but Raj asks, “Do you love her?”
“Golly!” I throw out my all-purpose response again. No regular American boy would ask me that, but it sounds completely reasonable coming from Raj.
“That might be another reason you need to find her,” Raj says.
“And to ask her why she left,” Joseph says. “I’d really want to know that.”
I want to know it too, but my Dad won’t talk about her and nobody else knows anything. Mom doesn’t have family except for me and Dad. No old friends who come around. She doesn’t send birthday cards or Christmas presents.
Raj is really excited to hear about my missing mother, and I can tell by perky way he walks he thinks he can find her.
“People don’t just disappear.” Raj waves his arms around like he’s selling used cars on TV, probably because he thinks that’s what regular Americans do when they want to look sincere. “We need to look for clues.”
It’s not like there is Mom-stuff lying around the house. There’s nothing in the closets or in the garage, or anywhere else. Nothing except the dear Bob note and the sepia tone picture Dad looks at while he listens to Culture Club’s greatest hits.
“How about the attic?” Raj asks. “People hide the best clues in the attic.”
The three of us walk down the street side by side, so close our elbows touch, me on the inside, Joseph on the outside and Raj in the middle. It seems like the most natural thing in the world when Raj puts an arm around each of us, like we’ve been friends for years instead of minutes.
I ask, “You really think we’ll find something?”
He says, “Knowledge overcomes ignorance as sunlight overcomes darkness.” Inscrutable.
• • •
The television news is so bad nobody follows it anymore, so nobody knows when
power-downs are going to happen. By the time Raj, Joseph, and I get inside my house, the lights are starting to dim.
“It’s OK. We have lots of flashlights.” Dad works for Allied Radio Shack, guarding the warehouse where they keep all the supplies people never buy anymore. That includes batteries, so we have plenty sitting around.
He says, “It’s not exactly stealing when they stop paying you.”
Of course he might not work for Allied Radio Shack any more. Maybe he’s been fired so he’s just going to the warehouse to hang out and take batteries. I guess he’ll keep on doing that until he gets a termination letter, and that won’t happen because the mail stopped coming weeks ago.
The way we get up into the attic is through a door that pulls down from the ceiling in Dad’s closet. Raj knows exactly where it is.
Joseph asks “How?” Which makes Raj and me laugh because he sounds like a television Indian from the old time cowboy movies.
“Most attic entries are exactly like this,” I explain, but what I’m really thinking is, “Raj is a mystic from the east.”
Dad’s closet contains exactly four suits, two pair of Florsheim wing tips, a dozen shirts, six pair of dress slacks, and no jeans or T-shirts. I think that means he’s depressed. Joseph thinks it means he wants to be a lawyer.
Raj says, “No man is truly free who owns more than he can carry.” When he pulls down the ceiling doorway, we can see the light is still burning in the attic. It’s one of those old fashioned incandescent bulbs nobody can buy any more, glowing a dull brown, because there is barely any electricity in the wires.
The attic is much hotter than the house. Dustier too, and full of spider webs that look like cotton candy in the flashlight beams.
Raj holds out his free hand like he’s pushing an invisible barrier, the way panhandler mimes used to do at art festivals. He pretends his hand is a mystical antenna searching out mysterious broadcasts from inside the dusty crates.
“Here.” He points to an old chest that looks like it belongs at the bottom of the ocean. There’s a keyhole on a large metal latch but Raj says it won’t be locked because everybody loses keys to things like that before they store them in the attic.
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