Love Charms

by Multiple

  In the middle of screwing him, I tried to snap the connection between us, but I could feel that didn’t work. I could still sense a sort of carnal echo of what we were doing. I certainly enjoyed it, but it wasn’t helping with our disconnection. I sat back with shallow breaths, wondering what I could do to make things work, and where I wouldn’t have to live with any regret. The Old People say a child becomes an adult the day he discovers regret. I always felt I had become an adult when I realized—just possibly—tomorrow would be no better than today. If I were honest with myself, I just didn’t want to get blamed for anything.

  I looked into his empty eyes and thought, “Damn—that ship has sailed.” I appreciated the fact he crooned higher than most of the sopranos who had also tried to hit that note in the Music Room where I had sucked him dry of his virginity.

  I will admit I was trying to distance myself from how obsessive he had become, and from how soon the school officials would be showing up at my door, wanting to ask questions they didn’t even know how to formulate. I could feel the connection between us while he was beneath me, sucking happily on my cock. I tried once more to snip it, as if it were an unwelcome vine. Not only did it have no impact, but it felt as if Nathan was sucking harder. What can I say? I’m only human and leaned back and just enjoyed his attention.

  About twenty minutes later I looked at his passed out nude body on my bed, wondering once more how I could detach him from my existence, and also make sure how to restore the new guy to his position as the new guy, and not my shadow. I held out my hands, feeling for the thread that connected us. I found it at his navel, a sort of Spiritual umbilical cord. I wrapped it around my hands and pulled, but just felt more connected to him. I started to resent the fact I realized I knew more about how to avoid problems rather than how to fix them. That needed to stop now.

  I pried his empty eyes open and locked into them, shoving myself deeply inside of him. For a moment I had a sense of disorientation. Ever since I was six years old, my Aunt Beans would steal me away for a day or two to take me out into the mountains and force me to borrow the eyes of others. I’d spend hours striding the atmosphere with eagle eyes. Another day I’d be experiencing the cold wet reality of a beaver. I became a wolf and my head exploded with the massive sense of smell that suddenly became available to me.

  The hardest was trying to see through the eyes of a rock. You have to learn to see without judgment or preconceptions. You just saw what was in front of you. It had its uses, especially if you were stressing out about something. Borrowing the eyes of a rock meant you were completely detached from emotions.

  Once while she had me out I was getting ready to borrow the eyes of a cutthroat trout, and in the distance I sensed a Steeyaha, but I felt it was better to let that sort of mischievous nature Spirit alone. They were the supernatural types who prided themselves at wording a promise with the absolutely worse personal result you could have. I was capable of making my own poor choices. In fact, even at my young age at that time, I was very practiced at making poor choices.

  I finally grabbed one of my grandmother’s obsidian blades and traced the outline of his Spirit body with it. He sat quietly, wild eyed and finally keeping his hands off of me. I then reached out on a Spiritual level and tugged at his preternatural connection with me and began to hack at it with the obsidian. After a few quick strokes, I felt a sort of pop in my head, as if I had just experienced a drastic change in altitude.

  As I watched, awareness flooded back into his pale blue eyes and then he was overwhelmed by shock, apparently realizing new White guy was naked on the bed and leaking the cum of the new Native guy. I had to admit—that would have thrown me off my game, if I suddenly woke up surrounded by naked White students from Vermont. For years we would go visit our clan relatives at Hopi during the first Katsina dances of the year. A bus filled with college students from New England would drive all the way down to be part of the ceremonies.

  The Sacred Clowns—the Hopi call them the Koshare, but in my father’s language they are the Chifonetti, or the best translation into English—the Delight Makers. The Koshare loved to play with the students from Vermont. They would do their typical fertility based performances that had shocked the anthropologists for the last two centuries, and the Catholic Priests before them. One year, two of them had tied pantyhose around their waists, and had placed tennis balls in the “feet,” so they hung down like enormous cocks. They would gyrate their hips to get the Loaded pantyhose swinging, and then use them to knock things down.

  But my favorite time was when they escorted a few of the young blonde women from Vermont in front of the crowd and pantomimed tossing hoops on to corncobs that had been nailed upright onto a board. When the students nodded their understanding, a Clown turned them to face in the opposite direction while another quickly lay down in front of the corncobs, pulling his loin cloth up to reveal an enormous dildo. When the girls turned around with their hoops in their hands, they screamed at the sight and ran off to hide in their bus.

  If you were like everyone else, you enjoyed the Chifonetti as long as they weren’t concentrating on you. On my father’s reservation before the Feast Day ceremony, parents and relatives had visited the Clown Leader to tell him about their misbehaving children. When the Clowns had finished tormenting the crowd and everyone who wasn’t their targets was sore from laughing, they went forth to discipline the designated children, picking them up and slinging them over their shoulders. They threw them into the small Creek that divided the village into North Side and South Side. They sometimes say the water is so clear a blind man can see. The children emerge dripping wet, knowing it is a rite of purification and a message they have been disobedient, but they are so loved, the Divine itself will intervene to make certain they will change and be better.

  Later on, one of my cousins from the Pueblo would come spend some time with us on my mother’s reservation in the Pacific Northwest. He ended up in a motorcycle accident and a metal rod was inserted into his leg. Eventually he recovered and returned home. He was a Clown and was always the young and strong one who climbed the Pole.

  On the night before Feast Day, they would raise the Pole so tall it looked as if it should have telephone lines hanging from it—just the right height and circumference. The Chifonetti jump down from rooftop to rooftop, finally leaping down to the ground. They play out their routines of performance and discipline, and later in the day, they set out on a search and in wide-eyed awe, discover the Pole, which has been in the center of the large crowd the entire time. At the top has been tied a bundle of different types of food and often a whole sheep. The Clowns get excited as Coyote in the legends upon finding food.

  Unlike in my mom’s community, where there is only one Coyote trickster, among the Pueblos, there are often many Coyotes—Red Coyote, Blue Coyote, Striped Coyote—you get the idea. There’s a story that says Coyote was on top of a mesa and saw the Katsinas were practicing a dance below him, but the only thing he could see was all the food they had brought. He summoned the other Coyotes and said, “I have an idea,” which should have obviously indicated they should do the opposite—which is what kids are taught about Coyote.

  His plan? They would all line up and bite each other’s tail, and in the process, create a living chain of Coyotes, and they would be lowered down to steal the food of the Katsinas, and then the chain would be pulled up to the top of the mesa. Being Coyotes, they agreed, and chomped down on each other’s tails, and lowered themselves to the food. About halfway down, one Coyote farted. At that point, one that was above him opened up his mouth and asked, “Who farted?” And then all the Coyotes fell and died. Coyotes get killed a lot in our stories. In my mom’s stories, his brother Silver Fox always finds the dead Coyote, jumps over him five times, and brings him back to life. I have often wished for a Silver Fox Sibling. I have been very skilled at needing one.

  First the Clowns take out bows the size of their hand-span and shoot arrows of straw at their target. These f
ly a couple of feet into the air and then fall back down. The Pole has been greased, making it difficult to climb, and part of the humor is in watching their Keystone Kops attempts at shinnying up the Pole to gain the prize—or to symbolically feed the People, but most non-Natives aren’t looking in that direction. They just see the play. Our cousin was always the one to eventually climb the Pole to the vast cheering of the adoring crowd. I have vivid memories of how he would manage to stand up on the very top of the Pole, surveying all four directions. He would dance around, terrifying many like some distant and darker spawn of the Wollendas. He would then lower the bundle and the sheep to the eager arms of the other Clowns. At that point he would climb back down and they would all join in on the bounty.

  But the autumn he returned with the metal rod in his leg, he tried to climb and only got a few feet off the ground when he realized his climbing days were over. He was in his twenties. But he was a Chifonetti. He circled the Pole, his black and white stripped painted eyes constantly on his prize. He looked at the Pole and then looked at its shadow. It was the time of day when the shadow was the exact length of the Pole itself. He looked again at the shadow, and the Pole. To everyone’s surprise, he got down on his belly and he began to climb the shadow.

  I watched a very confused Nathan leave and was grateful I was living on my mother’s reservation and not my father’s. I would have spent a lot of time in the Creek. I was meant to be wicked. It’s a gift.

  Chapter Ten

  This was about the time I realized I had attracted the attention of Justin. I had never heard him speak aloud before. He lived with his grandmother Mrs. Suskin in a distant part of the reservation, unusually isolated even for us. It said a lot she was the only female Elder I knew of that was never given the honorific of some form of “Grandmother.” It was rumored her father had been found guilty of a crime in Montana, and that was why she and her sisters had moved to our reservation. My own grandmother was convinced that old man had committed incest, which results in being exiled.

  Mrs. Suskin belonged to the other Longhouse on the northern side of the reservation, while our family was of the Agency Longhouse, near the center of tribal government, the school and the clinic. That meant I only saw Justin in school, but we had never had the same classes since he was ahead of me.

  His grandmother was talked about a lot. It’s a traditional belief when you die you have to be buried with the bits and pieces of your body. It’s an automatic practice I still do—cleaning your brush or comb, rolling shed hairs into a small ball and placing them with others that would be buried with you when you died. I knew some who stuffed pillows with their collection. They would one day rest their dead head on the hair pillow in their pine coffin. No tooth fairies for our people—our children save their baby teeth, knowing one day they will be buried with them. The alternative is to throw them into the fire. We know how dangerous it can be if an enemy snatches a part of you away and uses it as a focus to harm you.

  I was eighteen when my grandmother passed away—we spent hours looking through her things, searching for stray hairs and other things that would be placed with her in her undecorated coffin. It was tedious work but it helped focus our grief. For years the Baptist Minister had been making the coffins to satisfy the requirements of the State, which had forbidden Sky Burials. The body is wrapped in buckskin, because we believe deer skin will decay at the same rate as the human body, so it all goes back to the Earth Mother at the same time, as the coffin decays. We are fed by the animals who feed on the plants and when we die, we feed the plants, so the Circle is complete.

  One time my Aunt Pork was making her rounds, visiting tribal members who were at the hospital or in the tribal jail. She found a man at the jail who was passed out, and noticed he had weeping sores on his leg. She went to her car and brought back a salve made from rust colored tree bracket fungi that she had burned into ash and mixed with elk marrow. She rubbed it into his sores and then tightly wrapped deer skin around his pain, knowing the procedure would draw the toxins out. She was almost done when the man came to and looked up to see what she was doing. He recognized her as One Who Buries, and screamed out: “Am I dead!?”

  Justin’s grandmother had to have her leg amputated, and she kept the severed limb in her freezer, next to the elk and deer roasts. That was considered hard core even by my family’s standards. He kept looking at me in a way that held no erotic interest. Justin was looking a little past me, so I assumed he was examining my Spirit body, that was larger than my physical one. “When you do something of a Spiritual nature, you become shiny,” my mom had told me when I was preparing for my Vision Quest. That wasn’t the best of translations—in our language we have five different verbs that mean “to see,” but only one has to do with physical vision. The one she used was a ceremonial one. It’s most often spoken during Vision Quests, or for the Winter Dances during the healing rites as a Twatee examines a patient, trying to see what was wrong.

  During lunch as Justin approached me, a level of hostility radiated off of him, like heat waves over the state highway on a hot day. He did menacing well. I’d have to learn to practice that. “You’ve done something with the White boy,” he said, his voice too deep for one so young.

  “Which one?” I smiled. “You need to be more specific.” He looked once more just beyond me and I could feel him examining me. I remembered what my mom had taught me, and let my Spirit become a fluff of eagle down. “When your enemy reaches for you, if you are like the fluff, the very action of his hand reaching out to you will push you away to safety.” She had shown me this when I was barely past thirteen, and one of my uncles started sending me dreams. “He’s just testing you,” she had said back then. I never fully trusted my uncle after that.

  I became the fluff again and Justin jerked his head up, meeting my eyes for the first time and obviously angry. He spun around and walked towards the learning resources room. I was hardly worried. I had passed my uncle’s test and had slept soundly ever since. I had severed my connection with Nathan that weekend, so I knew I was untraceable on that level, but it seemed I was still shiny from the effort. Good to know. I thought about asking my mother how long the shine would last, but it probably varied from what had been done and how good the person might be at looking.

  The following Sunday I was surprised to see Justin in our Longhouse, sitting on the bench next to his grandmother in her wheelchair. Her dark embroidered shawl was carefully positioned on her lap, concealing her missing leg. Capricorn and I were both part of the seven drummers crew at the front of the Longhouse. It was common for members of different Longhouses to attend ours, but usually it would be in conjunction with a funeral, a naming ceremony, a wedding, or another public event. None of which were happening that weekend.

  I had my eyes closed, really getting into singing an old song that spoke of the beauty of the land. I suddenly felt something the size of a golf ball hit me around my solar plexus. It was such a distinct feeling for a moment I wondered if I had somehow hit myself with my own drumstick. Then I looked around to see if something had bounced off and was still on the floor in front of me. I saw nothing, and kept singing as if nothing had happened. I looked up in the direction of Mrs. Suskin and noted Justin was gone.

  After the worship dancing, we served everyone food at the tables—since it was not a formal Feast Day, people sat at tables rather than on the floor next to the woven reed mats. I set down the salmon and behind me Capricorn carried two plates of deer meat. Aries was a few steps behind with her two platters of bitter roots. The foods are placed in the order the Creator gave them to us, so salmon is first, and the huckleberries are last, since they are the final food to ripen. I was busy with clean up and helping put the folding tables away, so I didn’t have a chance to speak to my mother until much later in the afternoon. She was sitting with two of my aunts at one of the tables that always stayed up. The ancient industrial dishwasher was doing the last Load.

  I told her what had happened, but I d
idn’t mention Justin or Mrs. Suskin. I suspected he had learned from his grandmother, but on the other hand, no one had taught me how to do Nathan’s note. Once you have a working knowledge of things, it’s like cooking, or writing code. You can keep the basics and then experiment. What we did was a type of science, and as Buckminister Fuller indicated, the wonderful thing about science is you can’t learn less. Finding out what doesn’t work also has value.

  0

  She sat quietly and sipped her tea while her sisters drank her silence, clearly waiting to hear her response. She was the oldest one, although the sister after her was the bossy one who had wrapped the deer skin around the drunken prisoner. She usually assumed authority in most public situations, but yielded to my mother’s knowledge about such things. “To think this was done in our Longhouse,” she said it so quietly it was as if she was simply talking to herself. She set her cup down and made eye contact with my Aunt Beans who nodded and got up, followed by Aunt Pork, leaving us alone. I heard them in the back and assumed they were going to do a cleansing ritual on the Longhouse.

  “Do you remember what I told you when you started having those dreams?” She got up and topped off her cup and filled another with coffee and set that in front of me.

  “The pure in heart can’t be cursed,” I answered in our language, but “cleanly focused” was probably a better translation than the pure heart stuff. It was just that we had been assigned something on the pure of heart in my AP English Lit class, and I liked the way it sounded when I said it. In our language it rhymed. “You have to accept the curse.”