by Tommy Orange
* * *
—
Opal was on her route yesterday when her adopted grandson Orvil left her a message telling her he’d pulled three spider legs out of a bump on his leg. He’d scratched it open and out came those spider legs like splinters. Opal covered her mouth as she listened to the message, but she wasn’t surprised, not as much as she would have been had this not happened to her when she was around the same age Orvil is now.
Opal and Jacquie’s mom never let them kill a spider if they found one in the house, or anywhere for that matter. Her mom said spiders carry miles of web in their bodies, miles of story, miles of potential home and trap. She said that’s what we are. Home and trap.
When the spider legs didn’t come up at dinner last night, Opal figured Orvil was afraid to bring it up because of the powwow—even though the two things had nothing to do with each other.
A few weeks back she found a video of Orvil powwow dancing in his room. Opal regularly checks their phones while they sleep. She looks at what pictures and videos they take, their text messages, and their browser histories. None of them have shown signs of especially worrisome depravity yet. But it’s only a matter of time. Opal believes there is a dark curiosity alive in each of us. She believes we all do precisely what we think we can get away with. The way Opal sees it, privacy is for adults. You keep a close eye on your kids, you keep them in line.
In the video, Orvil was powwow dancing like he knew exactly what he was doing, which she couldn’t understand. He was dancing in the regalia she kept in her closet. The regalia was given to her by an old friend.
There were all kinds of programs and events for Native youth growing up in Oakland. Opal first met Lucas at a group home, and then again later at a foster-youth event. For a time, Opal and Lucas were model foster youth, always the first chosen for interviews and photos for flyers. They’d both learned from an elder what goes into making regalia, then helped her make it. Opal helped Lucas prepare for his first powwow as a dancer. Lucas and Opal had been in love. Their love was young and desperate. But it was love. Then one day Lucas got on a bus and moved down to Los Angeles. He’d never even talked about it. He just left. Came back almost two decades later out of nowhere wanting an interview for an Urban Indian documentary he was making and gave her the regalia. Then he died a few weeks later. Called Opal from his sister’s house to tell her his days were numbered. That’s how he put it. He didn’t even tell her why, he just said sorry, and that he wished her the very best.
* * *
—
But last night dinner was quiet. Dinner was never quiet. The boys left the table in the same suspicious silence. Opal called Lony back. She would ask him how their day went—Lony couldn’t lie. She’d ask him how he liked his new bike. Plus it was his turn to do the dishes. But Orvil and Loother did something they’d never done before. They helped their little brother dry and put away the dishes. Opal didn’t want to force the issue. She really didn’t know what to say about it. It was like something was stuck in her throat. It wouldn’t come back up and it wouldn’t go down. Actually it was like the bump in her leg the spider legs had come out of. The bump had never gone away. Were there more legs in there? Was that the spider’s body? Opal had stopped asking questions a long time ago. The bump remained.
When she went to tell the boys to go to bed, she heard one of them shush the other two.
“What’s that?” she said.
“Nothing, Grandma,” Loother said.
“Don’t ‘nothing, Grandma’ me,” she said.
“It’s nothing,” Orvil said.
“Go to sleep,” she said. The boys are afraid of Opal, like she was always afraid of her mom. Something about how brief and direct she is. Maybe hypercritical too, like her mom was hypercritical. It’s to prepare them for a world made for Native people not to live but to die in, shrink, disappear. She needs to push them harder because it will take more for them to succeed than someone who is not Native. It’s because she failed to do anything more than disappear herself. She’s no-nonsense with them because she believes life will do its best to get at you. Sneak up from behind and shatter you into tiny unrecognizable pieces. You have to be ready to pick everything up pragmatically, keep your head down and make it work. Death alone eludes hard work and hardheadedness. That and memory. But there’s no time and no good reason most of the time to look back. Leave them alone and memories blur into summary. Opal preferred to keep them there as just that. That’s why these damn spider legs have her stuck on the problem. They’re making her look back.
* * *
—
Opal pulled three spider legs out of her leg the Sunday afternoon before she and Jacquie left the home, the house, the man they’d been left with after their mom left this world. There’d recently been blood from her first moon. Both the menstrual blood and the spider legs had made her feel the same kind of shame. Something was in her that came out, that seemed so creaturely, so grotesque yet magical, that the only readily available emotion she had for both occasions was shame, which led to secrecy in both cases. Secrets lie through omission just like shame lies through secrecy. She could have told Jacquie about either the legs or the bleeding. But Jacquie was pregnant, was not bleeding anymore, was growing limbs inside her they’d agreed she would keep, a child she would give up for adoption when the time came. But the legs and the blood all ended up meaning so much more.
* * *
—
The man their mom left them with, this Ronald, he’d been taking them to ceremony, telling them it was the only way they would heal from the loss of their mother. All while Jacquie was secretly becoming a mother. And Opal was secretly becoming a woman.
But Ronald started to walk by their room at night. Then he took to standing in their doorway—a shadow framed by the door and the light behind him. On a ride home from ceremony she remembered Ronald mentioning something to them about doing a dream ceremony. Opal didn’t like the sound of it. She took to keeping a bat she’d found in their bedroom closet when they first moved in by her side, next to her in bed, had taken to holding the thing like she’d once held Two Shoes for comfort. But where Two Shoes was all talk and no action, the bat, which had written on its butt-end the name Storey, was all action.
Jacquie had always slept hard as night stays until morning comes. One night Ronald went over to the end of her bed—a mattress on the floor. Opal had the mattress across from her. When she saw Ronald pull at Jacquie’s ankles, she didn’t even have to think. She’d never swung the bat before, but she knew its weight and how to swing it. Ronald was on his knees about to pull Jacquie up to him. Opal got up as quiet as she could, breathed in slow, then raised the bat up high behind her. She came down as hard as she could on top of Ronald’s head. There was a deep, muffled crack, and Ronald landed on top of Jacquie—who woke up and saw her sister standing over them with the bat. They packed their duffel bags as fast as they could, then went downstairs. On the way through the living room, there on the TV was that test-pattern Indian they’d seen a thousand times before. But it was like Opal was seeing him for the first time. Opal imagined the Indian turning to her. He was saying: Go. Then the sound of him saying Go went on too long and turned into the test tone coming from the TV. Jacquie grabbed Opal’s hand and led her out of the house. Opal still had the bat in her hand.
* * *
—
After they left Ronald’s they went to a shelter their mom had always taken them to when they needed help or were between houses. They met with a social worker who asked where they’d been but didn’t push when they didn’t tell her.
Opal carried the weight of Ronald’s possible death around with her for a year. She was scared to go back and check. She was afraid that it didn’t bother her that he was dead. That she killed him. She didn’t want to go and find out if he was still alive. But she didn’t really want to have killed him either. It was easier
to let him stay maybe dead. Possibly dead.
A year later Jacquie was gone from Opal’s life. Opal didn’t know where. The last time she’d seen her, Jacquie was getting arrested for what reason Opal couldn’t tell. Losing Jacquie into the system was just another shitty loss among Opal’s many. But she’d met an Indian boy her age, and he made sense to Opal, he wasn’t weird or dark, or he was, but in the same ways Opal was. Plus he never talked about where he came from or what happened to him. They shared that omission like soldiers back from war, all the way up until an afternoon Opal and Lucas were hanging out at the Indian Center, waiting for people to show up for a community meal. Lucas was talking about how much he hated McDonald’s.
“But it tastes so good,” Opal said.
“It’s not real food,” Lucas said as he balanced and walked back and forth on the curb outside.
“It’s real if I can chew it up and see it come out the other side,” Opal said.
“Gross,” Lucas said.
“Wouldn’t have been gross if you’d have said it. Girls aren’t allowed to talk about farts or poop or curse or—”
“I could swallow pennies and poop them out, that doesn’t make them food,” Lucas said.
“Who told you it’s not real?” Opal said.
“I had half a cheeseburger I forgot was in my backpack for like a month. When I found it, it looked and smelled exactly the same as when I left it. Real food spoils,” Lucas said.
“Beef jerky doesn’t spoil,” Opal said.
“Okay, Ronald,” Lucas said.
“What’d you say?” Opal said, and she felt a hot sadness rise up to her eyes from her neck.
“I called you Ronald,” Lucas said, and stopped walking back and forth on the curb’s edge. “As in, Ronald McDonald.” He put his hand on Opal’s shoulder and lowered his head a little to try to catch her eyes. Opal pulled her shoulder away. Her face went white.
“What? I’m sorry, geez. I’m joking. If you wanna know what’s funny, I ate that cheeseburger, okay?” Lucas said. Opal walked back inside and sat down on a folding chair. Lucas followed her in and pulled up a chair next to her. After some coaxing, Opal told Lucas everything. He was the first person she’d ever told, not just about Ronald but about her mom, the island, what their lives were like before that. Lucas convinced her it would eat her up eventually if she didn’t find out for sure about Ronald.
“He’s like that cheeseburger in my backpack before I ate it,” Lucas said. Opal laughed like she hadn’t laughed in a long time. A week later they were on a bus to Ronald’s house.
* * *
—
They waited for two hours across the street from Ronald’s house, hiding behind a mailbox. That mailbox became the only thing between finding out and not, between seeing him and not, between her and the rest of her life. She didn’t want to live, she wanted time to stop there, to keep Lucas there with her too.
Opal went cold when she saw Ronald come home in his truck. Seeing Ronald walk up the stairs to that house, Opal didn’t know if she wanted to cry from relief, immediately run away, or go after him, wrestle him to the ground, and finish him off with her bare hands once and for all. Of all that could have occurred to her, what came up in her mind was a word she’d heard her mom use. A Cheyenne word: Veho. It means spider and trickster and white man. Opal always wondered if Ronald was white. He did all kinds of Indian things, but he looked as white as any white man she’d ever seen.
When she saw his front door close behind him, it closed the door on all that had come before, and Opal was ready to leave.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“You don’t want to—”
“There’s nothing else,” she said. “Let’s go.” They walked the few miles back without saying a word to each other. Opal kept a couple of paces ahead the whole way.
* * *
—
Opal is large. If you want to say bone-structure-wise that’s fine, but she’s big in a bigger sense than big-bodied or bone-structure-wise. She would have to be called overweight in front of medical professionals. But she got big to avoid shrinking. She’d chosen expansion over contraction. Opal is a stone. She’s big and strong but old now and full of aches.
Here she is stepping down from her truck with a package. She leaves the box on the porch and walks back out through the gate of the front yard. There across the street from her is a brown-and-black tiger-striped pit bull baring its teeth and growling a growl so low she can feel it in her chest. The dog is collarless and time seems the same way here, time off its leash, ready to skip so fast she’ll be dead and gone before she knows it. A dog like this one has always been a possibility, just like death can show up anywhere, just like Oakland can bare its teeth suddenly and scare the shit out of you. But it’s not just poor old Opal anymore, it’s what would become of the boys if she were gone.
Opal hears a man’s voice boom from down the street some name she can’t understand. The dog flinches at the sound of its name coming out of this man’s mouth. It cowers and turns around then scurries off toward the voice. The poor dog was probably just trying to spread the weight of its own abuse. There was no mistaking that flinch.
Opal gets into her mail truck, starts it, and heads back to the main office.
Octavio Gomez
BY THE TIME I got back to my grandma Josefina’s house I could barely stand. She had to drag me up the stairs. My grandma’s old and small, and I was pretty big even then, but Fina’s strong. She’s got that crazy strength you can’t see. It felt like she carried me all the way up the stairs to the extra room and put me in bed. I was hot and cold as fuck, with this deep-ass ache like my fucking bones were being squeezed or drained or fucking stepped on.
“It could just be the flu,” my grandma said, like I’d asked her what she thought was wrong with me.
“Or what?” I said.
“I don’t know if your dad ever told you anything about curses.” She came over to my bed and felt my head with the back of her hand.
“He gave me my mouth.”
“Curse words don’t count. They can do what they can do, but a real curse is more like a bullet fired from far off.” She stood over me, folded a wet towel, and put it on my forehead. “There’s someone aiming a bullet meant for you, but with that distance, most of the time it doesn’t hit and even if it hits it usually won’t kill you. It all depends on the aim of the shooter. You said your uncle never gave you anything, you never took anything from him, right?”
“No,” I said.
“We won’t know for now,” she said.
She came back up with a bowl and a carton of milk. She poured milk into the bowl, then slid the bowl under my bed, stood up, and walked over to a votive candle on the other side of the room. As she lit the candle she turned around and looked at me like I shouldn’t have been looking, like I should have my eyes closed. Fina’s eyes could bite. They were green like mine, but darker—alligator green. I looked up at the ceiling. She came back over to me with a glass of water.
“Drink this,” she said. “My own father cursed me when I was eighteen. Some old Indian curse my mom told me wasn’t real. That was how she said it. Like she knew enough to know it was Indian, and enough to know it wasn’t real, but not enough to do anything other than tell me it was an old Indian curse that wasn’t real.” Fina laughed a little.
I handed the glass to her, but she pushed it back toward me like: Finish it.
“I thought I was in love,” Fina said. “I was pregnant. We were engaged. But he left. I didn’t tell my parents at first. But one night my dad came to me to ask if I would name his grandson—he was sure it would be a grandson—if I would name the boy after him. I told him then that I wasn’t getting married, that the guy had left, and that I wasn’t going to have the baby either. My dad came after me with this big spoon he sometimes hit me with—he’d sharpened
the handle to threaten me with it when he beat me—but this time he came at me with the sharp end. My mom stopped him. He’d cross anyone, any line, but not through her. The next morning I found a braid of his hair under my bed. That’s where my shoes went, so when I went for them the next morning I found the braid. When I got downstairs my mom told me I had to go.” Fina walked over to the window and opened it. “It’s better if we get some air in here. This room needs to breathe. I can get you more blankets if you get cold.”
“I’m fine,” I said. Which wasn’t true. A breeze came in and it felt like my arms and back were being scraped by it. I pulled the blankets up to my chin. “This was in New Mexico?”
“Las Cruces,” she said. “My mom put me on a bus out here to Oakland, where my uncle owned a restaurant. When I got here I got the abortion. And then I got real sick. Off and on for about a year. Worse than you are now, but the same kind of thing. The kind of sick that knocks you down and doesn’t let you up. I wrote my mom to ask for help. She sent me a clump of fur, told me to bury it at the western base of a cactus.”
“Clump of fur?”
“About this big.” She made a fist and held it up for me to see.
“Did that work?”
“Not right away. Eventually I stopped getting sick.”
