“OK, kiddo. We’ve avoided this topic long enough.” Joey finally said looking at Elbe seriously. You realize what we’re about to do, right?” Elbe’s heart began to race.
“What do you envision when we get there? Tell me what you see.”
“You mean, the scene that I keep playing in my mind over and over again?” Elbe let out a slight nervous chuckle.
‘“Exactly. What you keep replaying in your mind’s eye?”
“I keep seeing me. Her face. Mine. Staring back at me.”
“Wait, you’ve lost me already.”
“My twin.” Elbe whispered, still playing with the tip of her straw. Speaking those words brought a wave of nausea. She could suddenly feel the gulps of vanilla shake she had ingested come back into her throat. She forced a swallow.
“I just keep seeing her face; it’s my face, except it’s not me. I think that for as long as I remember I’ve dreamed of having a sister. Someone who would be like me. who could understand me, you know?” Elbe felt her throat closing again.
“What about your parents? What do you see there?”
Elbe did not know what she saw. Every time she imagined the people who had brought her into the world, she drew a blank. All she could see was Marie’s face, her nervous smile, the way she pursed her lips when she was about to cry. Her father’s hands, his absentminded gaze. Their voices blended strangely together in her head.
“I don’t know.” She finally answered. “I have no idea.”
Elbe felt a sadness. A strange pang in her chest. She knew what it was. She had never named it but it has always been there. A void. This strange pit in the place of her heart. This is where she had always felt it, the pain of missing. The wanting to be held, to be soothed, to be rocked. To be filled and drawn in. She thought of Leon. She wondered what he was doing in this exact moment.
“It’s cool. No worries. What will be, will be.” Joey wanted to make Elbe feel better, but he knew that nothing he could do in this moment would take away the anxiety she was feeling.
Elbe wanted to be able to make room for the face of her real parents. She wanted to be able to conjure the faces of people who looked just like her, or even people vaguely related but she couldn’t. All she could see what her own face staring back at her and this feeling that in her own features, she could finally find an ally. Another one of her who would suddenly understand everything she had endured all of these years.
Over in the next table, Elbe watched a rotund family of four sit down with their meals. She watched their large round bodies finding each other in their resemblance and the way they each echoed each other visually. Mama’s hips were a mirror image of her daughter’s smaller, still well-squared and wide pelvis. Their asses were equally flat. The children bickered.
“You didn’t take enough ketchup. I told you to get more ketchup. How am I supposed to eat these fries without any ketchup?” Freckled boy’s face could be found in the line of his father’s jaw, in the short roundness of their pug noses.
“Just eat your damn fries, will ya?” the mother snapped right before taking a huge bite out of her oversized burger. Overhearing them, Joey jumped in.
“Poor kid might starve to death. Should we intervene? Should we send Child Protective Services over?”
“I think we might need to.” Elbe tried to joke to fight off the sadness devouring her. She did not know how she would survive this moment. The emptiness of this place, the longing she felt, the terrible pang of all the hope she had built up through the years. Twenty-eight years of sadness had built up and now it was all about to end. Or was it? She did not know. Elbe knew that it was the not-knowing that threatened to kill her. Thinking of herself as all alone on this earth had been strangely comforting. Having this sudden possibility of meeting others who shared the same DNA with her terrified her more than the pain itself. Hope was a burden Elbe could not afford.
When Joey and Elbe left the rest area, they drove in silence again. This time, Joey was doing the driving. Elbe counted the exits along the way. Twelve. Twenty-eight construction signs. Four white cars. Two trucks. Two lanes, one single line of hope ahead.
Part V
Chapter 18 – Edgar Owl Feather
Pine Ridge, South Dakota, 1973
I remember the red of her dress bleeding through the dark South Dakota night.
The memories tumble, everything falls together in my mind, out of sequence. I remember her hands on the day we first met. The lines in her open palms-—she had the hands of a woman who’d worked all her life, rough hands with calluses at the base of her fingers, hardened skin. Skin nobody could mess with. Felicia had been working a long time by the time I met her. Working the land with her mama Marie and her old man Larry. Working the kitchen in the little shack she shared with her family on the eastern end of the res. We call that part of the res the dead zone – the place where nothing grows. She’d been working all her life: she was only seventeen.
The first time I held her hand was at that dance at the Calico Community Center. We still had dances then. This was before that crook son of a bitch Washington came into power and his goons and their guns forced us to stay home. Felicia, she was quiet. “Don’t like dancin’” she said to me when I came up to her, all macho-like. She looked down at the ground real shy, but not weak. Not like those girls that make you think of wilting flowers. No, Felicia she was a willow, always bending in the wind, rarely breaking.
Felicia was smiling at the ground and I couldn’t hear if she was talking to me cause of the music, so I grabbed her hand all, gentle and pulled her to me. That’s when she looked up at me fiercely with sparks of rage in her eyes. Felicia, she didn’t like to be forced to do nothing she didn’t want to do. And it wasn’t me or nobody else who was going to change that for her. But then our eyes met. Our eyes locked and something changed in the way she looked at me; I felt her arm relax and her hand giving in to mine; her fingers loosened. We didn’t speak on account of the music playing. I remember the feel of her hands, like the feel of butcher paper, kind of soft and rough at the same time. I wanted her to wrap herself around me and hold me there for a long time.
We danced like goofballs. I’m not a dancer. Never have been. In fact, this was my first dance, truth be told. But I wasn’t all bad either. I can’t remember the song that was playing. Sometimes, I try to remember it. I sit on my bed and stare at the ceiling and try and try to remember the rhythm of the music in that moment. I try to bring back the exact words but I can’t. The more I try to catch it the more I begin to forget.
Silence fell after that first song and this strange moment followed and hung in the air like a rotting piece of meat, dangling at the end of a rope in the sun. All the boys and me, we all eyed it like hawks, we just stood there in the silence, wanting. We were all hungry and vulnerable, and most of us broken somehow.
Felicia walked off the floor, grabbed her coat, and left the hall, knowing I would follow her. Came right up behind her without a coat or nothin’ and followed her out to the edges of the building where a few straggly trees were waiting for summer to return. Spring on the res can bring violent cold fronts, which means it was cold as fuck, but all I can remember is watching Felicia and thinking that I’d been asleep for most of my life.
It was early spring, the time when the magpie hides in its nest waiting for sweetness to return. Maybe the moon was full that night. Maybe it was full and awkward, rich and vulnerable like we were. I don’t know. But I remember Felicia’s face; she had a few freckles, a trail of them—a distant constellation that made me think the white man had a hand in everything, even in this beautiful full-blooded Indian woman I wanted to know. As full-blooded as any of us can ever be anyway. I tried not to look at her freckles. For once, I wanted to forget the white man had ever stepped on this land. How could I forget him? All I can do right now is see him in the way we held ourselves under that puny tree. In the way Felicia covered herself with her worn-out open coat, folding her arms on her chest because she h
ated her “used-up dress” she later told me. Her dress was the color of blood, blood or a tired sunset, with a fading pattern of aging cotton. I remember wishing I’d worn better shoes. Shoes without a hole in the front. Shoes with an attitude. The shoes of a warrior. But Felicia she didn’t care about my shoes.
“You work?” She asked me looking at the ground, trying to loosen a chunk of frozen dirt under her foot. I hadn’t worked in two years. Not since the factory had closed down the road.
“Nah.” I answered coyly like I was trying to sound proud. “I’m a free man, I don’t need to work.” I answered.
“Free men have the financial independence to travel the world and work anywhere they want. You ain’t free.”
When she said that, she looked up at me with that fire in her eyes again and I could see her looking through me like she was talking to someone else. Felicia’s hair was long and smooth. I could smell her from where I stood: pine and something sweeter, wild berries in late summer. I wanted to move closer, but she was still talking and I could hear the anger in her voice rising and falling like the motions of a flag in the wind.
“My brother, Mika, he left the res a few years ago so he could get work.”
I was listening to her now. There was no stopping her.
“Mika stayed around here for three years like the rest of us after he’d learned to be a carpenter from the Bureau of Indian Affairs training office. But there were no houses to build. He came back last month all fucked up and broken.”
I felt a strange piece of shame loosening in my chest as I heard her talking about her brother like that. She wouldn’t stop talking and I just stood there listening, letting the fire run its course.
“Mika came back with this white girl and their baby and all he talks about now is how much money he used to make. I tell him: “Why you back here then?” And one night when he was all drunk, he said to me: “I came back cause there ain’t no place for an Indian like me out there.”
I didn’t know what to tell Felicia. I wanted to be strong and to be whole and to come back with something clever to say but I had nothing. Truth is, I couldn’t imagine leaving this land, even if staying only meant spitting on the ground behind the out houses with my friends like Crazy Jimmy. This land was all we had. All that had been taken away from us. Since that crook Washington had been elected chairman of our people—the Oglala Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation—everything had gone haywire. Everybody knew that crook wasn’t really legally chosen by our people, that he was nothing more than a puppet through and through. He had this crazy private militia we called goons cause it stood for Guardians of the Oglala Nation. I don’t know what they think they were guarding, except their own best interests, running around beating and killing people like they were shooting kittens out of a bag. The truth is, I already knew all that, but I’d never thought I could do anything to change it before that moment with Felicia.
I blurted something out that I only began believing in later. “I think we should stay here and make something of this res.” Not sure if I was just sayin’ those words to be all hero-like for Felicia or whether I already believed them, deep down. But when I heard myself say it, I knew it was true. That was the moment when I began making it happen. Felicia looked up from the ground again. Her ankles were a deep copper color on account of the cold. She watched me like a hawk, like I had something she wanted. Maybe this is how I began to believe that staying was the solution. That was the moment I began to follow whatever I saw in Felicia’s eyes.
“Staying and building is the only path to our people’s survival.” That’s what she said. That was the night I first saw myself waiting to be born.
On the days when the roads were clear enough, I’d ride my bike to the eastern side of the res to see Felicia. She was always working outside, even in winter doing chores. I’d leave late mornings and I’d ride my old rickety bicycle that I’d left to rot and rust outside for the last two years. But after that first night at the dance, I fixed the bicycle in half a day’s work. The bicycle wasn’t anything special, but I loved it because I had fixed it and now it carried me around the res. Secretly, I felt powerful knowing that I could put my hands to work and mend the broken.
Felicia was a hard-working woman. She wasn’t a girl no more. This I knew from looking at her. I knew this when I watched her chopping wood behind the house. I knew it when I saw her carrying her three-year-old sister on her hip and a bucket of water in her other hand. I knew it when she looked at me that first day when I first pulled up with my bike.
“When are you going to do something worthwhile with your time?” She asked me.
I’d never consciously thought about having a mission until I’d met Felicia. I’d never even thought about my life as something that needed planning or fixing or direction. I knew somehow that I’d always stay on the res. This I knew. But it wasn’t a political statement. Not at first. Not then. I remember watching all the boys my age leave the res one by one. Most never came back. Some did and when they did, they were changed—filled with a strange need they couldn’t meet on the land. That’s when they usually started drinking. Those boys reminded me of a story I’d heard from a guy named Kohana who’d left the res and visited a zoo one day. Kohana said the zoo was the saddest place he’d ever seen. Sadder than anything he’d ever imagined, except for the res. He told me about the strange and beautiful animals that’d been removed from their homes and placed in cages for the white folks to see. And it made me think of the people who’d left and come back. These boys were turning, round and round on the res with nothing to do and nothing to build. Wound-up boys in the prime of their lives without any place to be strong. That’s what it meant to be broken.
When I met Felicia, I realized I was one of those broken boys circling the res round and round. I was never drawn to alcohol. This was a blessing and a curse. I’d envied those boys who could sit, drunk for hours and spit out their rage. I didn’t know what I thought, or felt about anything. I felt empty and I had no way of ever filling up the well.
Sometimes it’s hard to remember if things changed on the res because I met Felicia or if they’d been different before but I never saw them. Whatever it was, I could see it all clearly now.
Felicia borrowed her brother’s old beat up car one night so we could go and see the res. She said she wanted to show me the sacred places of our land, and I remember wondering what she meant or what she wanted to do with me. But I was happy I’d be alone with her in a car for one night.
We drove in the dark along Porcupine trail. The road was full of potholes and I could see tiny snowflakes throwing themselves at us in the reflection of our headlights. Felicia was driving.
“He wouldn’t want you driving it,” she said to me when I offered to take the wheel. I felt strange being driven by a woman on the land I’d known my whole life.
“You need to really get to know the res if you’re going to be a part of it.” She said.
I watched her silently and tried to figure out what she meant. We drove to Wounded Knee and Felicia stopped the car and left the lights shining onto the massacre site. I’d been there a thousand times I thought. I’d been there as a child. I’d played in the muddy land with my friends, trying to kill time. I’d sat at the back of the cemetery a million times, and shaded myself from the burning sun. But Felicia insisted we’d never been there before.
“Not really, not like this,” she said.
“The cavalry soldiers came from all sides on horseback. It was a cold day like this one, December 29, 1890,” she told me. “They were caught by surprise. Women carried their babies, they had no idea the soldiers were coming. The white folks began to shoot and they didn’t stop until nearly 300 of our people were lying on this soil, dead. Most of them were little children and their mommas.”
A strange silence came over the car now that the engine was off and our voices muted. Felicia took hold of my hand and held it tightly, letting me feel the presence of the spirits around us. It was
like they rose out of the ground and surrounded us. They held us there. I saw them for the first time. I saw the women and the children running in front of us, right past the line of our headlights; they were running and screaming and the soldiers were shooting behind them on horsebacks. I saw a young woman Felicia’s age run with her child in her arms, as she was shot in the back. She fell in the curve of the land, right where the hill begins to form and her child fell next to her crying and screaming for comfort. The soldier picked up the child and took it with him. Felicia was crying now. I heard her cry softly next to me and we sat still in the dark for a long time until we couldn’t sit no more. I turned off the headlights and wrapped my arms around her in the darkness holding the massacre site.
Felicia’s body was warm against mine. Warm and soft like fresh tilled earth on a late spring afternoon. I felt my body hunger for hers, both separate from, and entwined in the violence of our memories. My muscles tightened and I held her closer. We slid in the back of her brother’s car. Felicia was still crying when I kissed her. I caught a drop on the tip of my tongue and I thought of the ocean in our landlocked nation. We were held inside our desire for each other.
Felicia opened her shirt. She offered herself to me and I wanted to cry. I could still feel the spirits among us. Not watching, but holding us like a canopy under the sky, rocking us gently into each other. Her breasts were firm and soft like fruit wrapped in silk. Softer than anything I had ever imagined. I’d never touched breasts before. Never held a woman.
That day, I learned that Felicia liked to talk about the spirit world. She liked to close her eyes and tell me the stories she’d heard from her grandmother. Stories passed down through the generations all the way from Felicia’s great grandfather, a great medicine man who’d lived through the first Wounded Knee massacre – all the way down through the rabbit hole of time.
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