by Sarah Bird
I patted her back until she stopped coughing, judging with every whack what effect touching her was having on me. Did I want to do more? I remembered the crush I’d had on Scooter, my counselor back at Camp Lajitas. But I’d read enough Judy Blume to know that such infatuations were common among prepube girls.
“You’ve got that look,” Didi said, pinching the roach out between her fingers, then putting it into the pocket of her jeans. “You know, storm cloud brows.”
I touched the space between my eyebrows where they were bunching up, trying to come together.
“I’ve got it! I know exactly what we need to do. I read this account of an actual Lakota Sioux ceremony for taking a blood sister. Blood sisters, what do you think? You wanna be my blood sister?”
Sister. The word shone in my mind pure as light from a full moon. I nodded.
“Okay then, let’s do it!”
It was late afternoon as we cruised back down Nine Mile Hill. The sun had slipped below the horizon and the last slanting rays were turning the phone lines into sagging, golden spiderwebs as they looped along Central Avenue.
Didi sang/shouted along with AC/DC about all manner of dirty deeds involving cyanide and concrete shoes as we passed Old Town. She finished with a rousing accolade to all deeds dirty at the same moment that she screeched into the lot of Las Palmas Trading Post, where she parked and announced, “Of course, we have to have an exchange of ceremonial offerings. Wait here.”
“Deeds, hold on, I don’t know if—”
But Didi was already out of the car and sauntering into Las Palmas, which was not a trading post but a really good Indian jewelry store. The thought of all the valuables inside made me nervous, but Didi wasn’t wearing the puffy parka or carrying the diaper bag she usually took along on her “five-finger discount” shopping expeditions. In fact, in her lace-up hip-huggers and skimpy top, she didn’t have any place to stash items. Still, I didn’t relax until she sauntered back out with nothing in her notoriously sticky hands.
My relief disappeared the instant she jumped in the car, reached between her breasts, fished around in her bra, and hauled up a silver chain with a turquoise cross dangling from it. “Sorry about the cross. It was only supposed to be my cover while I was trying on this really cool screaming eagle pendant, but the clerk turned around too quick and I unhooked the wrong one, so the cross dropped down instead of the eagle. Sorry. Thought that counts, right? I’ll hang on to this until you get your offering.” She hung the turquoise cross around her neck. “Okay, your turn, sister.”
Sister. I repeated the word to myself as I crossed the parking lot and pushed open the door. There was no one in the store except a couple of women, tourists in shorts that showed more than most would care to see of their varicosed legs. A high school girl, Native American from the look of her apple-shaped body and sleek black hair, wearing matching glitter nail polish and eye shadow, was waiting on the tourist women. Two other clerks, hard-eyed, older women, gossiped by the far register. I was certain they all knew what I planned to do.
Harsh afternoon light sliced in the front windows and glinted off the silver and turquoise jewelry tucked into the black velvet trays filling the glass cases. One of the older women glared at me. “Can I help you with something?”
She knew. There was no question, she knew. I shook my head too quickly, answered, “No, just browsing,” and tacked off into a side room filled with baskets and kachina dolls. I hid out there while I came up with a plan: I would ask Didi if we could postpone the ceremony. I’d tell her that it would be better to come back on a Saturday when the store was jammed and clerks were trying to wait on three customers at a time. But I caught a glimpse of her, sitting in her father’s old Mustang, her elbow resting on the edge of the open window. She was singing along to the AC/DC tape. I thought about her driving away, just leaving me there in the store to find my way home by myself.
Home? What did that mean anymore? I turned back toward the glass cases filled with jewelry. Through the feathers hanging down from a row of ceremonial drums, I watched the young clerk with sparkly nail polish pull black velvet trays out of the case so that the tourist women could try on squash blossom necklaces. The women left without buying anything. While the young clerk was bent over, putting the trays back, I stepped out of the side room.
“Oh,” she said, surprised when she stood back up and I was standing there. “I didn’t see you come in. Can I help you?”
“Yes, I’m looking for a present for my mom. I want to get her something really special. My dad’s sick.”
“What were you looking for?” She pointed down at the cases and named what was in them. “Bracelet? Ring? Pendant?”
“I don’t know. Just something really special. My father’s not doing real well.” I hadn’t planned to say that, to have to look away because tears filled my eyes.
“Oh. Wow. Sorry, that sucks.”
“Yeah.” The look of sympathy made her baby face seem even younger and my courage returned.
“Bracelets are good,” I said.
She swiveled over to the right section and pulled out a tray humped with rows of bracelets. With a glance at me to gauge what my taste would be, she plucked several delicate pieces set with pink mother-of-pearl in butterfly designs off the tray. “These are real popular.”
She’d nailed me because I loved them, but Didi? Didi sneered at both pink and butterflies.
I searched the trays still behind the case until I spotted the perfect bracelet, Didi’s bracelet. It was a band of beaten silver with a design that appeared abstract at first, but gradually revealed itself to be two stylized panthers coiled about each other, either fighting or mating. I asked the clerk if I could see the tray with the panther bracelet on it, then requested half a dozen others. She slid the trays onto the counter in front of me, before turning her attention to chipping the polish off her nails.
She had her middle finger in her mouth, gnawing at the nail, when one of the older clerks asked her, “Where did you put those small gift boxes?” Her peevish tone accused the younger clerk of putting the boxes in the wrong place.
“Right where they’re supposed to be.” The younger clerk pointed at a stack of boxes.
“Small, as in ring box small,” the woman said, pretending to be patient but actually almost sneering.
“Like she couldn’t have said that in the first place?” the clerk whispered to me.
“Really,” I said, adding a snort of sympathy as the girl pivoted away from her post to locate the ring boxes. I probably wouldn’t have done anything if she hadn’t turned away. I probably would have walked out of the store empty-handed, but she did, she turned away. I plucked out the panther bracelet, clamped it onto my wrist, and slid it up under my sleeve.
By the time the girl turned back around, I had returned all the bracelets to the tray. Maybe she would have counted them if the older clerk hadn’t been mean to her or if I hadn’t told her my father was sick.
“Thanks,” I said, backing away from the counter. “I’ll think about it.”
“Cool,” the clerk chirped, bending over to put the tray back in the counter. “Come again.”
The older clerks eyed me suspiciously and didn’t say “Come again” as I rushed out the door.
Didi was all over me the instant I opened the car door. “What did you get? What did you get?”
“Just drive!” I screamed. Thank God, Didi was at the wheel. Because she calmly backed out and pulled away. I would have been squealing rubber so bad, every shop owner for blocks would have taken down the license number.
Mrs. Steinberg was just waking up when we walked into Didi’s house. Curled up in her husband’s old recliner spooning frozen margarita out of a cereal bowl, she shot a question at Didi in staccato Spanish. I’d taken Spanish for all three years of my high school language requirement and, if I could have seen Mrs. Steinberg’s question written down, I would have been able to conjugate every verb in the sentence, but as far as understanding the spoken langua
ge, that was Didi’s department. Didi answered in even more rapid-fire Spanish but never made eye contact with her mother once as we both hurried through the living room.
Back in the Lair, Didi assembled everything she needed for our blood sister ritual. She got out the pricker thing from the kit her father used to use to test his blood sugar, lighted some patchouli incense, and read a passage from Black Elk Speaks, which didn’t appear to have anything to do with sisterhood.
“This is going to hurt like hell,” Didi promised when we got to the blood part of the blood sister ceremony. She jabbed my finger with the pricker and blood materialized in a perfect ruby bubble.
Didi turned her back to me and grunted when she stuck herself, then turned around, holding her finger hidden in the closed tunnel of her hand and captured my bleeding finger in it. We pressed our fingers together while she chanted her very own translation of the Lakota vow. “I take you as my sister. My heart now knows your heart. Your tears will flow if my blood ever falls. Your enemies’ tears will flow if your blood ever falls.”
Didi lifted the turquoise cross up from between her breasts, kissed it, and hung it around my neck. When I removed the bracelet from under my blouse, Didi squealed with delight, snatched it out of my hand, and put it on her wrist herself in a way that made me think of Napoleon crowning himself.
I didn’t notice until she held my finger under the bathroom faucet that all the blood flowing had been mine; her skin wasn’t broken. I didn’t say anything when she put a Band-Aid printed with stars and smelling of rubber on my finger, then one on her own. I didn’t even feel cheated. I accepted that that was the way the ceremony was supposed to go. That the price of having Didi for my sister was that I would be the one who bled.
Chapter Ten
Didi and I had survived our senior year. It was the last day of school. As seniors, we had the week off, but most of us, like animals set loose into the wild who keep coming back to the cage even though they’re free, returned to Pueblo Heights.
The main hallway was jammed. Didi skipped away from me, jumped up, grabbed a big banner reading SENIORS RULE!!, ripped it from the wall, and ran outside with a pack of outraged Abercrombies trailing behind her. I started to follow, but someone behind me called out, “Cyndi Rae. Cyndi Rae?” No one called me Cyndi Rae anymore. Not since my mother had left.
It was Nita Carabajal, the girl who’d been assigned to be my lab partner when I first started at Pueblo Heights. Because we had absolutely no other friends, I had clumped with Nita in those lonely weeks before I met Didi. I say “clumped” because we sat next to each other at lunch and shared physics notes but were never actually friends. Nita was a Jehovah’s Witness so she didn’t do many “things of this world” like Christmas or pledging allegiance to the flag or shaving her legs or pits. She seemed to be a natural to hang with the Christians, but Nita alienated even them by informing anyone who wore a cross that Jesus had died on a stake.
She held her yearbook and a pen out to me. “Sign it, okay?”
I’d managed to avoid Nita since Didi entered my life, so of course she didn’t know that my mom had gone off to live at HeartLand HomeTown, and I’d moved in with Didi.
I took the yearbook Nita offered to me. “How’s your father doing?” Her eyes were two pits of gooey sympathy. She didn’t know about Daddy either.
“Same. About the same,” I mumbled as I scribbled Have a great summer!!!! My fingers had gone icy cold. I shoved the book back the instant I was done without even asking her if she’d like to sign mine. Nita darted away and was immediately swallowed up by the crowd, just another floater, one of the invisible ones who pass through high school as unnoticed as possible, bent beneath an overloaded Target backpack, hurrying to catch the bus, slipping through the halls like a wraith, scanning the cafeteria for a friendly or at least a tolerant face. Nita Carabajal was who I would have been if Didi hadn’t saved me. I caught my breath and ran outside to find her.
Since Didi declared the few graduation parties we were invited to “major dorkfests,” we had our own celebration that evening at Puppy Taco, where we spent most of our shift giving away tater tots to anyone who would yell, “Whore-nuts suck!” Between customers, Didi read the apartment-for-rent ads. Catwoman had sold most of Mr. Steinberg’s albums and all of his memorabilia and Didi figured the house wouldn’t be far behind. Didi’s mom still didn’t exactly speak to me. I wasn’t even certain that she realized I was living in her house, but, like a cat, she’d gotten used to my presence.
“I mean,” Didi asked me, “what does she have to stay in Albuquerque for?”
It was an odd gift that Didi never held any delusions about how important she was in her mother’s life. It was harder for me. I actually missed my mom and, in spite of everything, was hurt that, in the few letters she wrote, she sounded so happy with her new 1890s life. That bothered me more than her little reminders that I’d be burning in hell for all eternity unless I renounced Satan. She did send small checks, enough for clothes and makeup and to contribute to groceries at Didi’s house. She always ended her letters saying that whenever I put the Devil behind me, I would be welcome at HomeTown. She didn’t make any other effort to convince me to come. Not that I ever would have.
To celebrate our last day of high school, Alejandro gave us two quarts of his mother’s red chile and a short shift so I was Cloroxing Puppy Taco’s counters by quarter of five when an old Econoline van pulled up to the closed take-out window and honked. I held up the yellow latex gloves to show Didi that I was occupied and she roused herself enough to shuffle to the window and shove it open. “When the light that says DRIVE-UP OPEN goes out, boys, that means it’s closed. Okay, I know it’s pretty complicated, but you all got that?”
I smiled at Didi’s sarcasm imagining the carload of horny boys she was deflating. I waited for a high-pitched, honking answer from whatever puberty-ridden boy she was talking to. Instead an accent came over the loudspeaker that was the odd blend of English and hillbilly that people from places like North Carolina have.
“You’re Dirty Deeds, right?” the voice asked. “The Black Crowes told us you were cool.” The Crowes were some band Didi had groupied a few months back. “We’re here with the Whatevs.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Wanna come to a party?”
“What kind of party?”
“An after party after the concert.”
Didi joined the mechanical laughter that came over the loudspeaker. “Where’s this party going to be?”
“Right across the street at the Ace High Motel.”
“Ohmigod! I love the Ace High!” Didi said.
“So the Crowes told us.”
Didi laughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll think about it. But only if my friend will come.”
A chorus of male voices implored me, “Friend, whoever you are! Come, okay? Come to the concert. Didi, we’ll leave a plus one for you at will call.”
“Whatev, Whatevs.” Didi laughed and shut the window. The Whatevs honked wildly and roared off.
“Why did you say I had to come to their party? I never go with you to after parties. Besides, they’re not even with a band you want to meet.”
“I don’t know. It’s our last night of high school. We should stay together.”
“Yeah, but—”
Didi cut off my objections with a quick, “Let’s think about it over a trip to Le DAV.”
I snapped off the gloves even though I wasn’t completely finished with the counters. Most of our major great clothes scores had been made at the Disabled Veterans Store. At the thrift store, I always followed in Didi’s wake since she could scan a twenty-foot rack of castoffs in hardly more than that many seconds, dismissing bales of career separates and zeroing in on the one garment with potential.
Le DAV was housed in a huge building that had once been a roller-skating rink. Still, some days it didn’t hold a single garment worth looking at. But that day, our last as Whore-nuts, was a
lucky one.
“Here, take this,” Didi said, handing me what was clearly the prize find of the expedition: a scarlet, fitted ladies’ Western shirt with collar points.
“Are you sure?” I asked, already putting it on over my clothes.
“It was made for you.”
“But you saw it first.”
“I always do,” she said, moving on to a fabulous Mexican skirt with a matador swirling a red cape in front of a panting bull painted on it.
We each filled a large shopping bag, handed over a twenty for our combined finds, and got change back.
In the parking lot, we threw our bags into the trunk of the Skankmobile, paused to flip fingers in the general direction of what was now our alma mater, Pueblo Heights High School, then headed north. We took a left, and the instant the tires hit Central Avenue, Route 66, we started singing about getting our kicks on Route 66.
No matter how we goofed on the song, on the road’s tackiness, we loved our stretch of Route 66 stretching out toward all the infinite possibilities our lives held. Though we pretended to believe that Central Avenue embodied everything that was most tacky about our hometown, we loved to drive it at the exact moment right after the sunset finished its warm-up act when the Sandias were fading from pink to granite and the neon started to vibrate against a darkening desert sky. That was when the tires of the Skankmobile soaked up every dream of every traveler who’d ever headed west to start a new life out where the slate was clean. For that moment, it was us, Didi and me, who were going to drive through the night and see the sun come up over the Pacific Ocean and do things so amazing that future generations of Whore-nuts would talk about them.
Didi sang words she made up and set to the irresistible “Route 66” beat. “Now you go through Puppy Taco. Get your Big Red and your nachos!”
I joined in. And AlbuKooKay is mighty pretty.”
“Don’t forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow...” Didi started before segueing into a musical inventory of every cheesy store and flophouse motel we passed. “Round-up Motel. Pussycat Video. Winchester Ammunition. And, ohmigod!” Didi stopped singing. “The Ace High Motel!”
