Hunger of the Pine

by Teal Swan

  CHAPTER 20

  The three of them sat beneath a noisy underpass. It was the best place they could find to avoid the rain, which by noon was so heavy that it looked to drown everything in sight. Aria had found a giant blue rain slicker at a pre-Christmas clothing donation drive at one of the homeless shelters on the outskirts of the city nearly a month ago. She was gladder of it now than ever.

  Aria, Wolf and Taylor had visited a food pantry on their way from the public library back to the car lot. Wolf slid the hooked end of the can-opener blade on his Swiss Army knife across the lid of a jar of baked beans, breaking the metal tediously as he went. His long hair, not tamed into a ponytail like usual, blew in the wind as if it were caught in a water current. Aria stared at the veins that were woven like tree roots just under the surface of his hands. When he managed to open the can enough, he slid his fingers under the razor-sharp edge and forced the lid, still attached, to bend open. He handed the can to Aria, who began to spoon the contents into her mouth with two fingers. It confused her senses to be eating beans cold like this. Taylor had upended a plastic container of applesauce and was patiently trying to drink it so as to avoid getting his hands dirty.

  Taylor was in such fabulous spirits that the curve of the overpass might as well have been the curve of a spiral staircase in a palace. Due to his willingness to do anything and everything that would get him closer to his dreams, he had proven himself to be so useful to the acting studio that they had asked him to come four times a week now instead of two. Aria watched him in awe. Here he was, sitting underneath an overpass, no money, no car, no home, eating his only meal of the day, with a smile on his face as if he were a king. She was envious of his buoyancy.

  Having lost focus for just a second, Aria felt the acute sting of the lid of the can carving a small split into her knuckle. She winced, sucking in her breath loudly enough for Wolf to hear her. She watched the blood well up and weep down the topside of her fingers. Wolf dropped what he was doing, grabbed a handful of the dirt that had not yet been soaked through by rain and released it softly right over the top of the wound. The cardinal red of her blood mixed with the dust to make a muddy paste on the surface of her hand.

  “Just keep it there, it’ll stop the bleeding,” Wolf said, returning to what he’d been doing.

  “Thanks,” Aria said, trying hard not to think about whether the dirt he had used was clean or tainted by road filth or some other vagrant’s alcoholic urine.

  Their hunger made the effort of talking an expense that none of them seemed willing to afford for the most part, until Taylor grew anxious with the silence. “My class is putting on a play of The Little Prince.”

  He was talking to Aria, but Wolf was the one to respond to him. “That’s a good story,” he said.

  Both Taylor and Aria were taken aback that someone like Wolf would even know what that was, especially given that even Aria had no idea what the hell Taylor was talking about.

  “You know it?” Taylor asked, lit up with the potential for conversation.

  “‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly what is invisible to the eye.’ Yeah, I know it,” Wolf responded. Taylor stared at him, waiting for an explanation. “It was one of the books we read in one of them Head Start programs on the rez. The main character kind of reminds me of you, in’it?”

  “Really? I wanna know why?” Taylor pleaded, excited at the idea of being recognized by someone.

  “The little prince was kind of an alien, in’it?” Wolf said in the native cadence of his thick rez accent. “He doesn’t belong anywhere. And he’s got this big imagination, even though none of the other people do. He gets lost in this desert and, kinda like a vision quest, he learns about himself there. And he meets this rose and this fox and learns how to be responsible like a man and about what love really is. And the story kinda makes it good to imagine, like you always imaginin’. He even kinda looks like you, in’it?” Wolf’s teeth sparkled when he was finished explaining himself.

  “Hey, thanks,” Taylor said, so thrilled with the knowledge that he was significant enough for Wolf to have taken notice of him that he was oblivious to the sweet but subtle insult that his parallel contained. “I always thought I was so good, but goin’ to these classes makes me feel like intimidated, like I’m more insecure than I thought I would be. And when you’re acting, that just makes you look like an idiot.”

  “You just gotta find a part of every character you play inside you. And then it’s easy ’cause you’re not really acting and you’re not afraid to do it wrong ’cause it’s real,” Wolf told him.

  Taylor stared at Wolf in total shock, willing to soak up his obviously good advice. “Did you act or somethin’?” he asked.

  “No, it just makes sense. Besides, acting is all us Injuns are doin’ anyway. I’ve got to act and dress like a white man every day.” Wolf chuckled at his own humor.

  “Wait, I don’t get it.” Taylor said, staring squarely at Wolf as if his entire acting career hung in the balance of understanding the concept.

  “Let’s say you’ve got to be a character that’s really angry. You just gotta find the part of you that’s really angry and let it out,” Wolf said in between bites from a can of cold ravioli.

  Instead of indulging Taylor’s obvious desperation for tutelage, Wolf allowed what he had said to act as a tide, pulling him deep into the ocean of his own angst. He addressed Aria and Taylor as if they themselves had been the offenders. “The killin’ of us has been so effective that many of us Natives can barely say a word in our own language, much less recite the prayers the ways our ancestors did. This is what they did to us. The pain and the anger is so deep and ancestral that I got no idea what the fuck’s going on inside me or how to deal with it. But our perspectives and truths are met with deaf ears. The futility and hopelessness in all the people of Turtle Island is a wild fire destroying us from within.”

  Wolf beat his chest as he spoke. He paused for a moment and then went on, letting his anger spill forth from wherever it was stored within him.

  “It’s been like this ever since the moment they set foot on Turtle Island over 500 years ago in 1492 … when that murderer and sickened spirit Christopher Columbus stepped foot on the continent that’s been our home for thousands of years. He and his conquistadors tore Arawak babies from their mothers and fed them to their dogs alive. Tortured and raped our women in front of our Native men to break our spirits. We became infected with ’em.”

  Aria and Taylor had stopped eating and were instead watching Wolf guardedly. Neither of them was sure whether they were entering into a conflict with him or were simply watching a process of self-implosion. In truth, they had unintentionally wandered into a war that he had been waging long before meeting them, one that had started long before he was ever born.

  “We speak the same words from our mouths as the white man, but the language of the heart and how we communicate to the web of life is different,” Wolf continued. “It is a language the white man don’t possess. We are invisible to ’em unless we are used as their sports mascots or slaves. They exploit our medicine, ceremonies, culture and textiles. They sell us. They label us as Indians, Redskins and Savages, and change our tribal names to bastardized references so it better suits their ignorance. We Natives have so many ways of being, but we are seen by the white man only one way … as warriors on horseback with our shirts off and with long dark hair … with painted faces and buckskin and bows and arrows. They force us to play roles as the villains in every story told where the white cowboy is always the hero savin’ the day. Even the Lone Ranger’s sidekick is named ‘Tonto’ which is a word that means stupid. They call us savage and simple but they are the savages. They annihilated over 100 million of us. Ten times more people than Nazi Germany killed.

  “We call the white man ‘Little Brother.’ Because it’s the Little Brother that needs to be taught. He doesn’t know how to work with nature anymore, including his own nature. He has to be reminded of how
to take care of himself and all existence again. But Little Brother is a stubborn, defensive little shit and blind to the death he causes to the natural world. We have lost countless animals, tribes and holy grounds to extinction because of his ‘modern world.’ The heat even rises in our atmosphere and still Little Brother doesn’t believe what the wisdom keepers have been warning us about. We are banished or exiled by the white man into reservations and barrios, and those places don’t give us a place to belong. All that’s left is anger. We rot out there in the abuse, the alcohol, the poverty, the religions and the broken way of life that has been forced on us by the white man. We had to practice our own spirituality in secret until 1978.”

  Wolf fell silent. His soliloquy suddenly turned inwards against himself. The most deafening war within him was being fought because Wolf was a mixed breed. The rape, pillaging and slavery brought to his people by what Wolf called Little Brother meant that he, like so many other Natives, had both the victim and the villain in his veins. Many of his suicidal downswings were initiated by the fact that he had turned against his own blood. The white man was once a demon that had come to them. Now, he and his people faced new demons. Most of them, the kind that resided within. Wolf wanted the earth and its people to return to what it was before those demons had landed. The brawl against the modern way of life was a varnish covering the fact that he knew deep down that life would never be that way again. To Wolf, every rock and tree and animal and stream was not only family, it was himself. He dreamed of coexistence. He dreamed of Tribe. But he could not seem to create it. He screamed against the sickness that they had been infected with. That sickness was not smallpox. It was separation.

  Aria and Taylor said nothing and just let Wolf’s words wash over them. Both of them knew that Wolf was right about everything he said. But at the same time, neither of them felt that it was fair to be resented to such an obvious degree for crimes that they themselves had not committed. Nor did it feel fair to be expected to pay the price for what their forefathers had done. Especially given that they never asked to be related to them in the first place. Even if there was a way for someone to repair the damage done, Aria and Taylor were in no position to help themselves, much less sew together the patchwork of a fragmented past. The crimes of those who came before them, who bore the same skin color as their own, were like a yoke around their neck that they were born with. They would forever be seen as the villain for what their ancestors had done to people of other races, colors and creeds. Both Aria and Taylor knew that the resentment would immediately convert to both fury and ridicule if they were to say anything about the mutuality of pain inherent in being just as incapable of changing the color of their own skin. They were both aware that expressing the pain of the unwelcome inheritance of the stigma of being white was taboo. And so, they kept silent.

  For a few minutes, Taylor searched through the confusion of his feelings about what Wolf had said, until he recalled the original lesson that Wolf had meant to convey to him about acting. He looked for a part of himself that was as angry, but his search was cut short by a noise coming from across the street. A man, engulfed in multiple layers of clothing, had begun throwing handfuls of mud and rocks at the cars passing by. His sanity had been corrupted into a fight that he was having with the thin air. They watched him lost in the distressed pattern of muttering to himself before screaming an outburst of profanities and flailing his body around as if warding off imaginary attackers.

  The presence of the man made all three of them nervous. Aria tried to pay attention to something else, sensing that if this man felt the pressure of her attention on him, she might show up on his radar enough to make him cross the street. He was trapped in an alternate reality, where everything and everyone was just a part of the world that only existed in his own mind. Aria did not want to show up in that reality. She knew that if she did, she would exist there as something other than herself. He would fit her into his story about her, and if that story about her was a bad one, he might become violent toward her.

  After a few minutes, a police car rolled up to the curb and two officers stepped out. The man began rocking back and forth. Aria felt her chest begin to ache. It was obvious that the police were trying to help him, even while they were getting him to stop throwing rocks at the cars. But she knew that the man had already fit the two police officers into his reality, the poisoned game of unintentional pretend that was taking place in his own mind. It was a false reality, where everything and everyone was out to get him. They were powerless; there was no way to avoid directly playing into his disordered storyline.

  Aria watched as one of the officers managed to convince him that he had come to take him to a safer place. The man rocked his willowy body over to the police car, shouting one more time at the cars on the road before getting into the back seat willingly.

  When Aria saw the cop car make a U-turn, she jumped behind Wolf, suddenly afraid that they would see her and Taylor, who looked younger than he was, and try to bust them both for truancy. But instead the car drove right past them. She eyed it until she couldn’t see it any longer and instead began to worry about what might happen to the man.

  Making sure the coast was clear, they got up and walked in the direction of the car lot. By the time they reached the lot, the moisture in the air, mixed with the brine of their sweat, had made their clothes adhere to their skin. Aria convinced Taylor and Wolf to walk to the stream in the woods, where Luke had taken her. Despite the overall chill of the day, being put off by the scent of herself, Aria had it in her mind for them to launder some of their clothes. She left Taylor and Wolf standing outside the fence, waiting so she could go see if Luke wanted to join them.

  When she approached his tent, it was empty. Though the door was zipped closed, she could tell that he had left with Palin for the day. But when she turned back around, something strange caught her eye. It was a little collection of items lined up on the hood of the Land Cruiser.

  Aria approached the broken-down car, which she now considered a home, with hesitation. She wasn’t sure if it was a practical joke or a cosmic blessing or even if she was seeing clearly. A packet of baby wipes, a water bottle, a pair of new socks in a plastic ziplock bag, three granola bars, fruit snacks, a new toothbrush and toothpaste, a burrito wrapped in silver foil and a Snickers bar. Aria stood in front of the hood, confused. She didn’t know if the items that were placed there were for her or for Taylor, or if, by some bizarre circumstance, someone else had left their personal stash there. She didn’t want to unintentionally find herself in a conflict, but she also didn’t want to lose an opportunity where one had presented itself, so she collected the items and stuffed them inside her backpack as fast as she could. She decided that if Taylor or anyone else came looking for them, she would pretend that she had taken the items for safekeeping. Until it was clear that no one would come looking for them, she would not allow herself to get excited or even to consider them hers.

  She rejoined Taylor and Wolf. They spent the rest of the day at the river, which had grown irascible and swollen with the California winter.

  Omkar had pored over various articles online about the things that homeless people need. He had searched the landscape of his conscience for an argument against taking items from the family shop and giving them to the girl he was in love with, but in the end, he couldn’t find one that was good enough. During his next shift, he collected the items in a little plastic bag and waited until he could find a perfect time to drive back to the car lot, hoping that she would still be there. Omkar had never intended to walk up to her and give her the items. He knew she would probably be embarrassed. He had always planned to put them somewhere for her to find.

  Sneaking into the car lot made him nervous. To him, the people who occupied these kinds of places seemed like animals. He was afraid of them. But he pushed through the fear, willing to take the risk that one of them might attack if they saw him. He had watched the lot for long enough to see that the girl wasn’t there. H
e lined up the items on the car that he had seen her get into, and ran back the same way he had come.

  Omkar knew there was a risk that one of the other people living in the lot might take them. But he justified the risk by telling himself that even if they did, it was because they needed it. He crouched behind the trees for so long he was almost ready to leave before he saw her walking down the road with two men beside her. He watched her tell them to wait and walk over to the car. He watched her look around and stuff the items he had placed there into her backpack. It reminded him of scenes he had seen in nature documentaries on television – those scenes where a wild animal finally takes the food that someone is offering, and the relief of knowing that the animal might then be OK.

  As he watched her, it occurred to Omkar that a man could stab a girl without making her bleed. He could break her heart without hearing it shatter. It was clear to him that she had been both stabbed and shattered, but that the affliction had not weathered the lily of her face. Unlike those men, he both saw and heard that pain.

  The assault of the worry that he felt for her was pacified by her immediate acceptance of the things that he had given her. To be a man, taking care of a woman, even to this small degree that she would currently let him, made him feel a strength that until this point had been unknown to him. He felt that strength spill through his muscles. He felt it fortify his spine.

  Omkar could not rationally explain his feelings for her to himself or to anyone else for that matter. She was still unknown to him and yet she was more known to him than his own breath.