There There

by Tommy Orange

  “So was the curse just that you got sick?”

  “That’s what I thought, but now, with everything that’s happened…” She turned and looked to the door. The phone was ringing downstairs. “I should get that,” she said, and stood up to leave. “Get some sleep.”

  I stretched and a hard shiver ran through me. I pulled the blankets over my head. This was that part of the fever where you get so cold you gotta sweat to break it. Hot and cold, with sweat shiver running through and over me, I thought about the night that broke through the windows and walls of our house and brought me to the bed I was doing my best to get better in.

  * * *

  —

  Me and my dad had both moved from the couch to the kitchen table for dinner when the bullets came flying through the house. It was like a wall of hot sound and wind. The whole house shook. It was sudden, but it wasn’t unexpected. My older brother, Junior, and my uncle Sixto had stolen some plants from someone’s basement. They’d come home with two black garbage bags full. Hella stupid. That much weight, like some shit wasn’t tied to it. Sometimes I’d crawl through the living room to get to the kitchen, or watch TV on my stomach on the floor.

  That night, whoever got their shit stolen by my stupid-ass brother and uncle, they rolled up on our house and emptied their guns into it, into the life we’d known, the life our mom and dad spent years making from scratch. My dad was the only one to get hit. My mom was in the bathroom, and Junior was in his room at the back of the house. My dad put himself in front of me, blocked the bullets with his body.

  * * *

  —

  Lying in bed wishing for sleep, I didn’t want to but couldn’t help but think of Six. That’s what I used to call him. My uncle Sixto. He called me Eight. I hadn’t really known him growing up, but after my dad died he started to come around a few days every week. Not that we said much to each other. He’d come over and turn on the TV, smoke a blunt, drink. He let me drink with him. Passed me the blunt. I never liked getting high. Shit just made me feel hella nervous, made me think too much about the speed of the beat of my heart—was it too slow, would it stop, or was it too fast, would it fucking attack? I liked to drink though.

  After the shooting Junior stayed out even more than usual, claimed he was gonna fuck those guys up, that it meant war, but Junior was all talk.

  Sometimes me and Six would be watching TV in the afternoon, and the sun would come in through one of the bullet holes, one of the ones in the wall, and I could see the fucking dust in the room float in a bullet-hole-shaped ray of light. My mom had replaced the windows and the doors, but she hadn’t bothered to fill the holes in the walls. Hadn’t bothered or didn’t want to.

  * * *

  —

  After a few months, Sixto stopped coming over and Fina told me to spend more time with my cousins Manny and Daniel. Their mom had called Fina to ask for help. That made me wonder if my mom had called Fina to ask for help after my dad died, and was that why Six came over? Fina had a hand in everything. She was the only one trying to keep us all together, keep us all from falling through the holes life opened up out of nowhere like those bullets that ripped through the house that night.

  Manny and Daniel’s dad had lost his job, and had been going harder at the drink. At first I went over out of duty. You did what Fina told you to do. But then I got close with Manny and Daniel. Not that we talked. Mostly we played video games together in the basement. But we spent almost all our free time together—when we weren’t in school—and it turns out that who you spend time with ends up mattering more than what you do with that time.

  One day we were down in the basement when we heard a noise upstairs. Manny and Daniel looked at each other like they knew what it was and like they didn’t want it to be that. Manny bolted up from the couch. I ran behind him. When we got upstairs the first thing we saw was their dad throwing their mom against the wall, then slapping her once with each hand. She pushed him and he laughed. I’ll never forget that laugh. And then how Manny took that laugh right the fuck out of him. Manny came up from behind his dad and pulled back on his neck like he was trying to rip all the breath he’d ever taken out of him. Manny was bigger than his dad. And he pulled back hard. They stumbled backward into the living room.

  I heard Daniel coming up the stairs. I opened the door and put my hand up like: Stay down here. Then I heard the sound of glass crashing. Manny and his dad had gone through the glass table in the living room. In their struggle Manny had managed to turn them around, so he landed on top of his dad on the glass table. Manny was cut a little on his arms, but his dad was all sliced up. He got knocked out too. I thought he was fucking dead. “Help me get him in the car,” Manny said to me. And I did. I picked his dad up from under his arms. On our way out the front door, when I was almost out the door, with Manny at the other end, holding his dad’s legs, I saw Daniel and Aunt Sylvia watch us carry him out of the house. Something about them seeing us. Crying because they wanted him gone. Crying because they wanted him back the way he used to be. That shit killed me. We dropped their dad off in the front of Highland, where the ambulances come in. Left him on the ground. Honked the horn once real long, then drove off.

  * * *

  —

  I was around more after that. We didn’t even know if we killed him or not until a week later. The doorbell rang and it was like Manny knew, like he felt it. He tapped my knee twice and sprang up. At the front door, we stood there and didn’t have to say a thing. We stood there like: What? What the fuck do you want? Go. His face was all bandaged. He looked like a fucking mummy. I felt bad for him. Sylvia came up behind us with a trash bag full of his clothes yelling, “Move!” So we moved out of the way, and she threw the bag at him. Manny closed the door and that was that.

  It was around that time that me and Manny stole our first ride. We took BART to downtown Oakland. There were certain pockets of uptown where people had nice cars and people like me and Manny could be seen without someone calling the cops right away. Manny wanted a Lexus. Just nice enough but not too nice. Not noticeable either. We found a black one with gold lettering and tinted windows. I don’t know how long Manny had been stealing cars, but he got in quick with a coat hanger, then with a screwdriver in the ignition. The inside smelled like cigarettes and leather.

  We rode down East Fourteenth, which had been International, but shit got so bad all up and down International that they changed the name to something without the history. I rummaged through the glove box and found some Newports. We both thought it was weird for someone we assumed was white to be smoking Newports. Neither one of us smoked cigarettes, but we smoked those, blasted the radio, and didn’t say a single word to each other the whole ride. There was something about that ride though. It was like we could put on someone else’s clothes, live in someone else’s house, drive their car, smoke their smokes—even if just for an hour or two. Once we made it deep enough east we knew we’d be fine. We parked it at the Coliseum BART Station parking lot and walked back to Manny’s house high on having gotten away with it so easily. The system scared you so you thought you had to follow the rules, but we were learning that that shit was fucking flimsy. You could do what you could get away with. That’s where it was at.

  * * *

  —

  I was at Manny’s house when Sylvia called down into the basement to tell me Fina was on the phone. She never called me there. Daniel took the controller from me before I went up.

  “He killed them,” Fina said.

  I couldn’t even understand what she meant.

  “Your uncle Sixto,” she said. “He crashed his car with both of them in it. They’re dead.”

  I ran out the front door, got on my bike, and hurried the fuck home. My heart was some crazy mix of fuck-no-fuck-this and like it had slipped out of me. Before I got to Fina’s I thought, Well then Six better be fucking dead too.

  Fina
was standing in her doorway. I jumped off my bike in one motion and ran inside the house like I was gonna find someone else there. My mom and brother. Sixto. I had to believe it was a joke or any fucking thing other than what Fina’s face was telling me in that doorway that it was.

  “Where is he?”

  “They took him to jail. Downtown.”

  “What the fuck.” My knees gave out on me. I was on the ground, not crying, but like I couldn’t move, and I got real fucking sad for a minute, but then that shit did a one-eighty and I yelled some shit I don’t remember. Fina didn’t do or say anything when I got back on my bike and left. I can’t remember what I did or where I went that night. Sometimes you just go. And you’re gone.

  * * *

  —

  After the funerals I moved in with Fina. She told me Sixto was out. They gave him a DUI. He lost his license. But they let him go.

  Fina told me not to go see him. Never to go see him, to let it be. I didn’t know what I would do if I went over there, but there wasn’t shit she could do to stop me.

  * * *

  —

  On the way over to his house I stopped in the parking lot of a liquor store I knew wouldn’t check my ID. I went in and bought a fifth of E&J. That was what Six drank. I didn’t know what I meant to do going over there. In my mind I had it like I would get him drunk and fucking beat the shit out of him. Maybe kill him. But I knew it wouldn’t be like that. Six had his ways about him. Not that I wasn’t mad enough to do it. I just didn’t know what it would be like. On my way out of the store I heard a mourning dove somewhere nearby. The sound gave me goose bumps—not the cold kind, and not the good kind either.

  * * *

  —

  We had mourning doves in our backyard for as long as I can remember—under the back porch. My dad once said to me, when we were in the backyard trying to fix my bike, he said, “Their sound is so sad you almost want to kill them for it.” Once my dad was gone, I felt like I heard them more, or it was just that they reminded me of him and his attitude toward most kinds of sadness. I didn’t wanna feel sad then either. And it was like those fucking birds were making me feel it. So I went into the backyard with the BB gun I got for Christmas when I was ten. One of them was facing the wall, like he’d really been singing toward me inside. I shot it in the back of the head and then in the back twice. The bird flew up right away, its feathers rising then falling slow while it flapped in a flash of crooked downward spirals. It landed in the next-door neighbor’s yard. I waited to hear if it would move. I thought about how it would have felt. The sting in the head and the back, after it flew up over me. I didn’t feel even a little bit sorry for the bird because of how sad it made me feel ever since my dad got shot, when I had to look down and see my dad’s eyes blink in disbelief, my dad looking back up at me like he was the one who was sorry, sorry that I had to see him go like that, with no control over the wild possibilities reality threw into our lives.

  * * *

  —

  At Sixto’s house I knocked on his door. “Eh, Six, eh!” I said. I backed away from the house, looked at the upstairs window. I heard footsteps. Loud and slow. When Six opened the door, he didn’t even look at me or wait for me to say or do anything, he just walked back into the house.

  I followed him to his bedroom, found a place to sit on an old office chair he kept in the corner. I was surprised to find it empty considering the state of the rest of the room—clothes, bottles, trash, and a light sprinkling of tobacco, weed, and ash all over everything. He was hella fucking sad-seeming. And I hated that I wanted to say something to make him feel better. That was the first time I saw it different. Like felt for him and how he must’ve felt about what he did.

  “I got us a bottle,” I said. “Let’s go in the back.” I heard him get up and follow me as I walked out of the room.

  Six had a few chairs back there in that overgrown, crooked-fenced yard, between two fruitless orange and lemon trees that I remembered used to be full. We drank for a while in silence. I watched him smoke a blunt. I kept expecting him to start the conversation. Say something about what happened to my mom and brother, but he didn’t. Six lit up a cigarette.

  “When we were kids,” Sixto said, “me and your dad, we used to sneak into your grandma’s closet. She had an altar set up in there. All sorts of crazy shit on that altar. Like, she had a skull. It was the skull of what they call little people. She told us the little people stole babies and kids. She had jars full of powders and different kinds of herbs and stones. One time she caught me and your dad in there. She told your dad to go home. He ran like hell. She can get pretty crazy in her eyes. They go all dark like she keeps a darker pair behind the green ones you usually see. I had that little skull in my hand. She told me to put it down. She told me I had something in me I wasn’t gonna be able to get out this time around. She told me I could handle it like a man. Die with it. But that I could also share it with family. I could give it away over time. Even to strangers. It was some old dark leftover thing that stayed with our family. Some people get diseases passed down in their genes. Some people get red hair, green eyes. We got this old thing that hurts real fucking bad, makes you mean. That’s what you got. That’s what your grandpa had in him. Be a man, she told me. Keep it to yourself.” Sixto picked up the bottle, took a deep pull from it. I looked at Six, looked at his eyes to see if he expected me to say anything. Then he dropped the bottle on the grass and stood up. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t brought up my mom and brother. Or was that what he was trying to get at? Was this some long explanation for why all the shit that happened to our family happened the way it did?

  “Let’s go,” he said to me like we’d just been talking about going somewhere. He brought me to his basement. He pulled out a wooden box that looked like a toolbox. Said it was his medicine box.

  “You’re gonna have to help me out here,” he said, his words dragging a little behind. He pulled out a dried plant with red rope tied around it. He lit it. The smell and smoke were thick. It smelled like musk and earth and Fina. I didn’t know anything about ceremony—whatever he was doing—but I knew we shouldn’t have been drunk for it.

  “This comes from a long way back,” Six said, and poured some powder into his hand. Then he gestured for me to move my head closer, as if to see it better. Then he took a big breath in and blew it all in my face. It was thick as sand and some got in my mouth, up my nose. I choked and kept blowing out my nose like a dog.

  “We got bad blood in us,” Sixto said. “Some of these wounds get passed down. Same with what we owe. We should be brown. All that white you see that you got on your skin? We gotta pay for what we done to our own people.” Sixto’s eyes were closed, his head bent down a little.

  “Fuck this shit, Six,” I said through a cough, then stood up.

  “Sit down,” Six said, with a tone he’d never used with me before. “It’s not all bad. It’s power too.”

  I sat down but then stood right back up. “I’m fucking going.”

  “I said sit down!” Six blew on that plant again. The smoke rose thick. I felt sick right away. Weak. I made it out to the front of the house, got on my bike, and rode to Fina’s.

  * * *

  —

  When I woke up the next day, Fina came in and shook her car keys at me. “Get up, let’s go,” she said. I was still pretty tired, but the fever had broken. I thought we were maybe going to get groceries. When we got past Castro Valley I knew it wasn’t groceries or any kind of errand. We just kept driving, through the hills with all those windmills. I fell asleep looking at one of them that looked like a coin from Mario Brothers.

  * * *

  —

  When I woke up we were in a field with orchards on either side of it. Fina was on top of the hood of the car, she was looking down at something. I opened my door, and when I did I saw Fina’s hand wave me back, so I sat down wi
thout closing the door. Through the windshield, I saw my grandma get onto her knees and yank something with a thread or fishing line, something I couldn’t see, until the creature came scrambling up on the windshield.

  “Get his fur, get some of his fur!” Fina yelled at me. But I couldn’t move. I just stared at it. The fuck was it? A raccoon? No. And then Fina was on top of the thing. It was black with a white stripe that went from its nose to the back of its neck. The thing was trying to bite and claw her, but she had her hand on its back, and it couldn’t grip the metal hood. When it seemed to calm down, she lifted it up by its neck with the fishing line. “Come get some of its fur,” she said.

  “How—” I said.

  “Rip its fucking fur off with your hands!” Fina said.

  That was enough to get me going. I got out of the car and tried to get behind the thing, but it was onto me. I swiped twice but didn’t want to get bit. Then on the third try I pulled a big clump from its side.

  “Now get back in the car,” Fina said, and got to her feet. She let the thing down to the ground. She walked with it farther into the field and then into the orchard at the edge of the field.

  When she got back into the car I was just sitting there with my hand up in a fist, holding the clump of fur. Fina pulled out a leather bag with beadwork and fringes on it, opened it, and gestured for me to put the fur inside.

  “What was that?” I said once we were on the road.

  “Badger.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re gonna set up a box for you.”

  “What?”

  “We’re gonna make you a medicine box.”

  “Oh,” I said, like that was all the explanation I needed.