The Secret Letters

by Abby Bardi

  I decided on coffee. The coffee shop was crowded and smelled of burnt beans. “I’ll have a Kenya blend,” I said to the girl behind the counter, who looked kind of familiar.

  “Julie!”

  I squinted at her. It was Ricky’s girlfriend Star. “Oh, hey,” I said, “I didn’t recognize you.” I almost added “without my brother sucking your face,” but decided against it.

  “My treat,” she said, handing me my coffee. She fished some money out of her apron pocket and stuck it in the cash register.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to.” She smiled. “I’ll tell Ricky I ran into you. He’ll be so happy.”

  “Well, thanks a lot. Great seeing you.” I put two dollars in the tip jar, waved, and walked away wondering what girls saw in my little brother. Granted, he was good-looking, in his fuzzy, tattooed way, but he was such a loser. Of course, I thought, that’s what.

  There were no free tables, so I looked around for someone I knew. I noticed a guy named Ray who sometimes washed dishes at the Hare. He was sitting by himself, so I asked if I could join him. He had a bunch of napkins spread over the table and was drawing on them. That was what he did, mostly. He lived in a tent in the state park, so his overhead was low. He moved some napkins covered with weird, colorful doodling out of my way and I sat down. I found myself greeting him with my hand up, palm out, and saying, “How.” I wondered if Indians said that in real life—I had seen it a lot in cartoons.

  He held his hand up to me the same way. “How,” he said.

  “How—have you been?” I asked.

  “The stars are loose.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  I didn’t know what to say about this. “Well, I hope they don’t fall down.”

  “They’re not going to fall.” He looked at me like I was a moron. “They’re just loose. It’s an astronomical phenomenon.”

  “Well, whatever. We’ll be safe in our tepees.”

  “You got a tepee?”

  “Not yet.” I took a sip of my coffee and almost spat it out. “Jeez,” I said, “what do they do to this stuff?”

  “They brew it from dead possums.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m not kidding,” he said, looking very serious. He had long, muddy-blond hair and rotten teeth and could have been cast in Pirates of the Caribbean without needing any makeup. “I used to work here. So what’s new with you?”

  “I just found out who I really am.” I hadn’t meant to blurt this out, but you could say shit like that to Ray.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m a proud Native American.” I punched myself on the chest, hard.

  “Oh, yeah? I’m a Mughal warrior.”

  I had no clue what that meant. “Really?”

  “No.” He chewed one end of his drooping moustache. “So, you’re an Indian?”

  “Yep.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yep.” We were both quiet for a moment, since there was nothing more to say about it. Then for some reason, I said, “Yeah, I’m planning to open a casino here in town.”

  “Really?” He turned to look at me like he was seeing something he hadn’t noticed before. His eyes were like fireflies. “Oh wow, a casino. That’d be cool as hell.”

  “Yeah, I figure it’s a perfect location.”

  “Those things rake in millions. I heard about it on NPR.”

  I had no idea how he listened to NPR in his tent, but I didn’t pursue it. “Yeah, it’s going to be awesome.”

  “Where’s it going to be?”

  “I can’t give you that information right now, but I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Hey, do you need a dishwasher?”

  “Yeah, you know, I think we’ll probably need one for the evening shift, Tuesday through Sunday.” I said this like I already had the whole schedule mapped out.

  “Cool.”

  “Yeah, it’s going to be great.”

  “You’re really living the dream.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing, Ray. I’m living the dream.”

  He gave me a thumbs-up sign, then turned it into a little pattern, like he was writing something in the air. I could tell he had new respect for me now that I was going to be his boss. He was a pretty good worker, as long as you kept a tight rein on him. Milo’s problem was he was too nice to people and let them take advantage.

  We sat for a while, not saying much, and then he jumped to his feet, gathered up his napkins, and said he had things to do. I couldn’t imagine what those things could be, but it didn’t matter. I held my palm up again, and he held his up, too.

  It hadn’t occurred to me to open a casino until the words popped out of my mouth, but now that I sat and thought about it, I realized it was a great idea, the greatest idea I’d ever had. The one thing I knew about Native Americans was they had opened a bunch of gambling palaces all over the country and were living large. God knows we deserved it after the way we’d been treated by the white man, I thought.

  I finished my coffee, took the cup back to Star and thanked her again, then decided to take a stroll downhill toward my apartment. On the first floor of my building, directly across from the Wild Hare, was the Chelsea Grill. I’d heard a rumor they were in some financial trouble and could go belly-up any second. The front window lined their dining room like a picture frame, and inside were five rows of tables with white tablecloths, a little Perrier bottle of flowers on each table. All the tables were empty.

  I decided to go in and snoop around. At the sound of the front door opening, a woman rushed out the kitchen door, the manager, Heidi. When she saw it was just me, she wiped the customer-service look off her face and said, “Hey Julie.”

  “How’s business?” I asked, then was sorry because it made her look so sad.

  “Never better.” She added, “And I mean that.”

  I decided to give her a job at the casino when I opened it, but I figured it was best not to mention that yet. I looked around. The dining room was wide and pretty, and the kitchen was in the back, behind a swinging metal door. Everyone knew it was an awkward kitchen because the restaurant backed onto the creek, so there was only the street entrance, and deliveries could only come through the front door. For years their chefs had been coming into the Hare after work and complaining about that until they got too plastered to care. There was a constant revolving door of them because they got bored and quit, and the Grill’s few customers tended to complain that the food wasn’t very fresh, probably due to the lack of turnover. The chefs found that depressing as hell, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. The owner lived in Vermont and didn’t care what went on. It was Heidi who put fresh flowers on the tables each morning and threw them out again each night.

  “I like this room,” I said. Something about it reminded me of those saloons in old cowboy movies. “It has potential.”

  “We always say that,” Heidi said. She was wearing a long, flower-pattern dress that made her look like a couch. “We tell Keith that all the time so he won’t close us down.”

  “How many people do you seat in here, about sixty?”

  “It’s seventy if we push it.” She waved at the tables like they were full of people. “In theory.”

  “How are the bathrooms?”

  “Brand new. No one uses them.”

  “This place has a nice vibe.” I wasn’t sure I’d ever used the word “vibe” before.

  “I’m glad you think so. Now tell all your friends.”

  My friends couldn’t afford to eat there, and that was part of the problem, but I didn’t say this. Instead, I told her things would pick up, though I was sure they wouldn’t.

  ***

  About a week later, I came downstairs from my apartment and noticed the Chelsea Grill’s handwritten chalk sign was not outside their front door. I pressed my face against their front window. No one was in there. Panic rushed through me—it hadn’t occurred to me they would
close down suddenly, and so far my plan was still only in the fantasy stage. I had no idea how to go about getting permission to open a casino. I figured you needed a gaming license or something, but I had no idea. I decided to talk to Milo about it, since he always knew a bunch of random stuff. I showed up at the Hare a little early and sat down next to him at the bar.

  “So I have this friend—” I started out.

  “Oh?” Milo looked at me with interest, like he genuinely wanted to know all about my friend. His total lack of suspicion might make some people think he was a chump, but I appreciated it.

  “My friend just found out her father is a—a Native American.” I still wasn’t sure this was the term we used.

  “Really? Why didn’t she know that before?”

  “Well, she didn’t know who her father was, exactly. But then she found out, and the guy is an Indian.”

  “Wow, how interesting!” Milo sounded excited for my friend. “That must really change the way she feels about herself.”

  “Yeah? How?” Then I laughed—it was the “how” thing again, but Milo took no notice.

  “I don’t know.” He looked thoughtful. “I guess we all have a sense of who we are, so it must be strange to find out you aren’t who you think you are.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I’m sure she finds it strange.”

  “But liberating, right?”

  “Um, right.” I had no idea what he was talking about. “So she wants to open a casino.”

  “A casino?” He laughed, like there was something funny about this. “Really? Where?”

  “I guess around here somewhere. And she needs to know how to go about it. Like, does she need a license or whatever.”

  “I don’t know if they grant them to individuals.”

  “No?” I tried to sound casual, like I didn’t care if my friend opened a casino or not.

  “You’d think the tribe would have to do it.”

  “Maybe she could do it for them.”

  “What tribe does her father belong to?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “Well, maybe she needs to find out. That would probably be a good first step.”

  “How?”

  He pondered this for a moment. “Maybe she could go down to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and ask them what she needs to do.”

  “I guess she could. Where is it?”

  “I don’t know, somewhere in DC. I think it’s part of the Department of the Interior.” He was still smiling at me in wide-eyed innocence, obviously with no idea who we were talking about. “I’m sure she could find it online.”

  “Okay, thanks. I’ll tell her.”

  “Thanks for sharing this with me, Julie. It’s really interesting. It must be amazing to suddenly discover something like that about yourself.”

  “It must be,” I said.

  “And to have gone all those years not knowing, thinking you were someone else—it’s pretty weird for her, I’ll bet.”

  “I’m sure she finds it weird.”

  “Your friend is lucky.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I said.

  ***

  I had walked around DC before, but had never been inside any of the big, official-looking buildings there except for the Washington Monument, where we always brought relatives from out of town so they could gawk at our nation’s capital. The Department of the Interior took up a whole city block, and its carved metal front door was so heavy I almost couldn’t open it. It seemed like everyone in the lobby was staring at me as I walked across a giant coin with a buffalo on it. A woman next to an x-ray machine asked me where I was going.

  “The Bureau of Indian Affairs,” I said, trying to sound official.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then who are you going to see?”

  “I don’t know. I just have some questions.”

  She eyed me with suspicion and said the BIA wasn’t open to the public. “You can have a pass to go to the museum,” she said. “But that’s it,” she added in case I was a terrorist. She gave me a visitor’s badge and waved me through the metal detector and into a long hallway with black and white checkerboard floors. I kept walking as if I knew where I was going.

  The museum’s automatic doors flew open, and I found myself in a room filled with props from an old cowboy movie: a crumbling wagon wheel, a barrel, a dirty stuffed owl, a cracked wooden jug. As I kept walking, more doors shot open and led me into a room of old photographs. Men with lined faces surrounded by crowns of feathers, pretty women with long braids, children with wide eyes.

  Suddenly, I understood what Milo was talking about. I had grown up with a family that, as Pam always said, “put the fun in dysfunctional.” Now, I had a new family, not just my father, but his people, my people, the beautiful ancestors whose lands had been stolen from them just the way my lands—my backyard, anyway—had been stolen from me. Maybe this was a little overdramatic, I told myself, but I understood how they must have felt when their woods were cut down by pioneers to build log cabins and their plains of roaming buffalo were fenced to make pastures. I had felt the same way myself when an exclusive community (luxury homes starting at 600K) was built where my favorite pond used to be.

  I stared at the faces of my new relatives. They stared back at me. Their eyes seemed to really see me, somehow understanding what I had gone through in my short, pointless life, and to feel sorry for me. But now that we had found each other and I was part of their great tradition (though I admit I knew almost nothing about it, apart from what I’d grown up seeing on TV), everything was going to be okay.

  A big map of the United States was dotted with places where the Bureau had offices, all out west. The names of tribes were written on the map, and the first place I checked was Arizona. I could see a big section near Flagstaff that said “Navajo,” and next to that, “Hopi.” One of these had to be my tribe. My tribe. I felt my heartbeat drumming in my chest. I had found what I was looking for, though I still wasn’t sure exactly what it was.

  Now I needed to find someone to tell me how to open a casino, but I didn’t know who to ask. A guard at the opposite end of the hall didn’t see me as I strolled back into the marble hallway to a bank of old-fashioned elevators with cursive numbers on the metal plates. I got in one, expecting someone to try to stop me, but no one did. I pushed all the buttons and peered out at each floor until, on the fourth floor, I saw a sign that said “Public Affairs.” I’m the public, I thought, and went in.

  “I need some information,” I said to a woman behind a counter.

  “What would you like to know?” She had straight gray hair and pale eyes and did not look like one of us.

  “Well—” I thought for a minute. What did I want to know? I wasn’t sure. “I guess my first question is, how does someone prove they’re Indian?”

  Oops, I forgot to say “Native American.” I guessed it was all right, though, because she asked, “Is one of their parents an Indian?”

  “Well—she thinks so.”

  “But she isn’t sure?”

  “She’s sure. But she has no proof.”

  “Well, she would need to have some proof.”

  “How would she get it?”

  “She could get a letter of acknowledgment from the parent. That would be one way.”

  “What if the parent didn’t actually know about the kid?”

  She looked at me kindly, like she got the whole picture. “She would have to tell the parent. The parent would then have to acknowledge the child.”

  “Okay.” Disappointment shot through me like an arrow. “Then, let’s say this person proves she’s Indian, how does she go about joining a tribe?”

  “Well, again, the tribe would have to accept her. She could apply, and then the tribe would decide whether to enroll her or not.”

  “But what if there aren’t any tribes where she lives?” I had noticed on the map that there were no tribes in Maryland.

  �
��She would have to apply elsewhere. The best thing to do would be to write to the father’s tribe and tell them the whole situation.” She glanced at a clock on the wall. “Do you have any other questions?”

  I took a deep breath. “Let’s say this person is accepted by the father, and then she gets accepted by the tribe—how can she open a casino?”

  She pursed her lips, like she was sick of this question. “An individual can’t open a casino. This has to be done by the tribe. If there’s already a gaming license in the state, the tribe can apply. What state are we talking about?”

  “Maryland.”

  “The tribe would have to apply. But there are—”

  “No tribes in Maryland,” I finished for her. “So the individual can’t do anything?”

  “Not on her own.”

  “No casino?”

  “No, sorry. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  I felt like I needed help with something, but I wasn’t sure what. I got back in the elevator and sank down to the ground floor. When I got off, I noticed a small gift shop at the end of the hall. Glass cases lined the front of the room, and in the back were colorful rugs and a wall of books. Inside the glass case was a row of tiny, carved stones. I asked the woman behind the counter if I could see them.

  “These are fetishes,” she said.

  I had always thought that was when someone had a thing for shoes, but I nodded like I knew.

  “Which animal are you looking for?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. I was hoping to find something for good luck.” I felt silly saying that, but she seemed okay with it.

  “How about a buffalo?” She reached into the case and took out a tiny piece of stone that looked vaguely like an animal. “This was carved from Picasso marble by a Zuni.”

  I had noticed the Zunis on the map near the Navajos and the Hopis, so they were okay with me. I nodded. She dropped the tiny buffalo into my palm. It was a smooth, shiny, brown and gray stone, with tiny flecks of blue that might have been turquoise. I closed my fist around it and waited for a surge of energy, or luck, or some other kind of sign, to come over me, but nothing happened. “I’ll take it,” I said anyway. As I waited for her to ring up my purchase, I looked up at the wall at a big mural of a buffalo with some Indian guys chasing it like faded cartoon characters.