But I was getting ahead of myself. I didn’t even have a band to be competitive at Battle of the Bands and win that sweet grand prize. So I could definitely use Doobie, a decent bass player, and yes, I needed Lewis, who’d become a way better rhythm guitarist in the last three years than I’d have ever imagined. Having no friends left a lot of time to practice. He didn’t have my skills, mind you, but if I could make him not be such a chickenshit, we’d have a shot. It was May. I had time to get a reasonable band together before Lewis and I started our senior year in September.
To do this right, though, I had to get Lewis to believe he wanted to be in my brand-new band. If he thought you were manipulating him, he’d quit in a second, no matter the opportunity.
“Gloomis?” I said at the graveyard, after we’d done the work we’d planned. “How about we sing our dead an Honor Song?”
“I don’t know any Traditional songs, and neither do you,” he said. True enough.
“Well, what about the kind of Honor Song we both know? I brought my acoustic.”
“Like what? I can’t think of anything,” he replied, but really, he was keeping an eye on the other families scattered throughout the graveyard, doing the same things we were. Playing in front of anyone almost made his head explode.
“That’s true. Pretty much half of anything you say is meaningless,” I said, grinning.
“You serious?” he bleated, narrowing his eyes at me, not quite a righteous snap.
“As a heart attack,” I said. Whenever we played together, I restricted Beatles-related songs or that’s all he’d choose, but right now I was giving him a limited free pass. I liked the Beatles fine, John Lennon most of all, since he liked jabbing powerful people with a stick. Especially after they broke up.
“I mean, ain’t ‘Julia’ an Honor Song for an Elder who’s passed?” I knew full well it was a Beatles song Lennon had written to his mom years after she’d passed. Perfect, plus if you were willing to go all chords and ditch the fancy finger-picking, all it needed to sound decent was an acoustic guitar and two voices that could sound close. He didn’t need to harmonize, just fill out my lead.
“Okay,” he said. I didn’t think it would be that easy, but ten minutes later, with a few stray Indians drifting over to listen to us, we’d gone through “Julia” and a few others that we’d worked up. Lewis kept his eyes closed the whole time. He knew the others there, but he was okay, and he sounded stronger and better as we went along. When I transitioned into “Golden Slumbers,” I didn’t sing, to see if he’d start. He didn’t disappoint, and as “Carry That Weight” followed, a few of the churchier Indians joined him in the chorus. When I skipped over the fast opening of “The End,” cutting straight to its last lines, about the balance between the love you take and make, I slowed us to a nice close with the acoustic.
When we finished and some people mumbled Nyah-wheh in appreciation, Lewis opened his eyes, like he was waking from a trance. Over twenty people had joined us. Folks patted our shoulders, gave us hipster handshakes, and drifted to their own memories as we headed out. I let the experience sink in.
Dropping Gloomis and Albert off, trying on the blandest expression I had, I switched gears to make him think this could be a normal part of our lives. I also decided to use up a dash of my good-deed currency. It would relax him a bit to think we were back on even terms.
“You guys clean disgusting crap off the bus seats, right?” I asked. I figured he had access to good stuff, working at the school’s bus garage. “You got any industrial cleaner to do that?”
“Yeah, two grades. Pink for light crap, purple for worse. Why?” he said, cautious. I sometimes set him up for some joke about being grubby, so he was a little sensitive.
“In case someone pukes in my car. Can you sneak me out some? The purple stuff?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said, a little smile creeping across his mouth once he realized he was not the subject of a joke. “Probably can’t get you one of the squirt bottles, but I can get you some and you can put it in a squirty yourself. You want it tomorrow? Get rid of that weird smell?”
“Yeah, it does smell a little funny, now that you say,” Albert said. “What is that?”
“Gloomis’s breath,” I said, avoiding the obvious: Derek’s Jack Daniel’s-and-Blood Pants.
“For real, though,” Lewis said, laughing to acknowledge the jab. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. I’m not the only one who uses the Chevelle,” I said. “That purple stuff, if you can get it. You never know when disaster’s going to strike.”
I had larger plans, of course, involving our future as a band. But there would be time to ease Lewis into that later. It was Memorial Day and I had a little over a month to put my plan into play.
“All right, Siren, you worked your magic,” my sister, Marie, said as the couple noticed us and wandered into the perimeter of Potential Customer range. She knew nothing about mythology. She was referring to the villain Joan Collins played on Batman. “Put that weird shit away before Ma comes back.” I tucked my personal beadwork bag under the Table.
I was supposed to work on regular beadwork when we were at the Vendor Table, but I did my own things whenever our mom went on her break. Mine were more like contemporary art, not so Traditional (the stuff we made for sale). Marie tells everyone that if it weren’t for my twin brother, Marvin (who looked like a young version of our dad), she’d swear I was an alien. When she says these things, I suggest it’s out of insecurity because I’m the cuter sister (and then quickly hold up a threaded beading needle to curb her desire to smack me).
“Are you from an Indian reservation near here?” the new groom asked, while his bride eyed up a pair of beadwork dangle earrings on our display. The Newlyweds had been drawn to our Vendor Table by my drumming and singing (which Marie hates, but tolerates).
Last summer, I started singing Traditional Social songs that men and boys were usually responsible for at gatherings. I accompanied myself on a water drum from the selection our dad made for sale. At first, it had been to amuse myself, but my mom noticed it attracted people and some even clapped a little. Those ones usually felt some obligation to buy something, even if it was just a jitterbug man, or a beadwork key chain. She said I was like the Pied Piper, and when I asked her what that was, she said, “Look it up!” (I haven’t.)
“We are from the Rez,” Marie said to New Groom. “Technically.” Immediately, his ears perked up with worry that he was flirting with fake Indian goods. Marie was all Serious Vendor Girl when our mom was around, but she had a taste for mild sabotage when possible.
“Either you are or you aren’t Indian, isn’t that right?” he asked. Unbelievable! Like it hadn’t been my water drum and singing a Social song that snagged their attention in the first place. Our mom was walking back from the ladies’ room (conveniently a million miles away).
“Definitely Indian,” Marie said. “You heard my sister singing and drumming.” New Groom’s face was all, Playing a drum doesn’t make you Indian. But Marie chopped his legs off with her laser eyes and a sensuous run of her bare arm, covered in goose bumps from the chilly river breezes. “Don’t my beautiful red skin prove it?”
Today was the Sunday before Memorial Day, our first busy weekend selling handmade Indian souvenirs at the Niagara Falls State Park. Not fun in actuality, but I got to enforce our tribal treaties with the likes of New York State (which gave me some juice in my otherwise wicked-bad powerless Fifteen-Year-Old-Girl Life).
Our mom gave us a few breaks each, but I mostly stayed at the Table for mine. If the tourist shop workers saw you and your dark skin hanging around often enough, they thought you were casing the place to boost Maid of the Mist snowglobes, or a pair of giant Day-Glo sunglasses with NIAGARA FALLS, USA stamped on them.
Normally, Marie might jump all over this fool and accept the losses, but she’d just come back from her own break and was all smiles and good humor. She thought I didn’t know what she was up to, but I was two
years younger than her, not stupid. I could see the way her Avon Free-Sample Old-Lady Lipstick was smudged. Her Mystery Man was back. Our mom might have been fooled, but not this chick (my eyes worked, thank you very much).
“We just don’t live on the reservation, anymore,” Marie said to New Groom, having fun laying on her Sad Indian Maiden Voice, thick as raspberry jam on Frybread. New Groom would have called Scotty for the transporter if he could have, but New Bride had already locked her tractor-beam eyes on the earrings. “Our family does and I’m tired of living in the city.”
“We long to be among our people,” I added, adopting my own Forlorn Indian Face, as our mom cruised in, plastering on her perfect Humble Indian Craftsperson face before she sat.
“So why aren’t you among them?” New Groom asked. We’d seen his pushy type before, acting like we were dogs at a kennel, making sure we weren’t cockapoos or some mixed breed. As per Parks Department rules, our vendor permit was laminate-fastened to the Pendleton blanket covering our Table (with its appropriately geometric design).
“A sad fact. Indians don’t much buy beadwork,” I said, a little lie. They do buy beadwork, but only a certain kind. Key chains, beaded trucker caps or baseball caps, disposable lighter cases, and eyeglass cases (bingo dabber sheaths were huge right now). “So here we are, building bridges to the larger culture with our art.” I shifted my look to resemble the Anti-Pollution Crying Indian TV commercial face, but I couldn’t squeeze that tear out. “This brooch is designed by my elders to go with those earrings.” I slid the little basswood carved pin that my dad designed toward the young couple. New Bride’s face said she didn’t love Indians that much.
“This is our specialty,” I added, which I did whenever that sour expression popped up. “Each Indian family has a signature.” I sprinkled my Mystical Indian Voice in heavy, all clipped consonants and draggy vowels, the Works. “Ours is the Double-Heart Canoe. Very popular among honeymooners.” Chopping the “y” in “very” and pronouncing the next word poplar, like the tree, I usually closed the deal. (You can spot Honeymooner Hands. New Bride fans fingers, advertising carats and settings. New Groom spins his new ring, like working a burst blister.)
What I’d said—though a sales pitch—was still true. All Indian craft vendors at the Falls had permits (keeping the Porter Agreement alive, though the State Parks official vendors have tried for years to break the treaty). We all did signature items. The best sellers were like Traditional Indian beadwork that also commemorated something for tourists.
My mom almost never went for my ideas, but I kept a sketchbook of new interpretations of our Traditional art. I hoarded cast-off materials to start making real ones soon. Someday, I’d have my own permit and no one could tell me what was worth putting out on the Table.
I had started thinking about my own ideas after my seventh-grade class field trip to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. A lot of kids said “This is stupid” or “I could do this,” in their quest for Naked People Art. But when I saw the Andy Warhol painting of stacked-up Campbell’s soup cans, I knew this painting was about its idea, not how close it could resemble a photo. The museum worker told us this was “conceptual art,” specifically “Pop Art,” because the artist was taking ideas from advertising and movies (like one by the same guy of Marilyn Monroe in another part of the museum). The worker said Warhol was celebrating and making fun of the way art surrounds us all the time. By the bus ride home, I knew who I wanted to be.
There was one small issue, from where I stood. I didn’t see even one Indian artist’s work in the museum. Maybe I’d be the first. But I’d have to be bold and new. Traditional crafts didn’t get your work in that kind of museum. I could imagine making my own painting, or doing it in beadwork, repeating rows of Commodity Food cans, maybe one we liked (Peaches) and one we hated (“Meat”), with their basic pictures on the can in case you didn’t know how to read.
For now, I curbed my ideas and helped design our signature piece, the one we were at this moment pitching to New Bride and New Groom. Niagara Falls is honeymoon capital of the world, for some reason, so combining our parents’ strengths, we came up with this Killer Idea for Newlywed Tourists. We stuffed my dad’s little birch-bark canoes with two of our mom’s plump velvet heart pincushions, customizable with the date and initials like a concert T-shirt—my idea, no matter what my mom claimed—while Newlyweds watched. I’ve carved so many initials and hash marks into little hearts that I could be a cardiac surgeon.
“Oh, hon, the cutest!” New Bride said as I dug out the tackle box we kept loaded for customizing (the same box I was skimming from for my own supply of beads and thread). New Groom searched the canoe for a hang tag.
“We could smudge it with some tobacco,” Marie said, reaching under the Table for her purse, where she had a pack of Kools. “Get you off on the right foot for a lifetime of happiness.”
“Is that extra?” New Groom asked. He had not learned his lines yet.
“My daughter jokes,” our mom said, kicking Marie under the Table, while she smiled at the tourists. It was just like on a sitcom, except when our mom kicked, she meant it. “We do, though, offer to bead your initials and the date. Usually ten dollars extra, but for you, on this beautiful Memorial Day,” she said, opening her arms wide to prove her generosity, “that part, we give you for free.” They ignored our dad’s carved tiny basswood and soapstone animals, bolo tie slides, insane brooches no Indian woman would wear. (I took after his adventurous streak.) New Bride’s eyes slowed a little at the sweetgrass baskets we braided into intricate shapes, but they only came to a full stop at the beaded picture frames among the barrettes, fancy Victorian lady-boot pincushions, ornamented velvet birds, and men’s belt buckles.
“Oh, hon,” New Bride said, and New Groom got out his wallet.
“My blushing bride here,” he said, grabbing her shoulders and squeezing her close to him, “she’s a DAR, so her mother wanted us to get married on the Fourth of July.”
“Dar?” our mom said, burning her gas tank of charm. “Your name is Darlene? Darla?”
“D-A-R,” New Bride said, giggling. “Daughters of the American Revolution. It was important to my mother,” she hastened to add. “Both my parents. They wanted us to do it all up, get married on the Fourth of July, invite all their other DAR friends—we’re from Concord.” Apparently that was supposed to mean something to us. “But we’re not like that.” Then she leaned in, conspiratorially. “We eloped so we wouldn’t have to make a big production. It would be nice to have a memento. If they want to throw us a reception on Independence Day, great! But we get to be married the way and the place we want to.”
“We got these beaded picture frames too,” I said to New Groom, knowing New Bride was halfway there. “Make great thank-you gifts for new in-laws. Got some with two beaded birds, like lovebirds.” (I hate using poor grammar but it made sales smoother.) I pulled an elaborate velvet-and-beadwork picture frame from a bin under the Table. New Bride ran her fingers over the soft, rich velvet, leaving little trails. “I could even bead a couple little bees on it,” I said, joining her giggle. “Since this is your honeymoon.”
“Birds and bees.” New Groom grinned. “Not sure your mother would care for that.” He nudged his bride. My mom was about to blow a gasket, thinking I’d lost the sale with my little ad-lib off the script I’d been stuck with for a few years. “But it might be a fun secret joke. How long before it could be ready?” I was already breaking out my yellow and black beads to do a couple quick little bumbles.
“Fifteen minutes?” I suggested.
“Half hour,” our mom corrected, handing the Double-Heart Canoe to Marie and digging out her receipt book. “My daughters work quick, but it’s ver’ trick’ work,” she said, doing a Double-Drop “y.” I made big eyes at Marie. We could do this beading in our sleep. Our mom asked for 50 percent down since we couldn’t offer it to anyone else with their initials on it.
New Groom, still chuckling about the sec
ret sexy joke he’d be playing on his mother-in-law, said he’d pay in full. When our mom got their initials, she showed him the receipt, with a hundred dollars on the total line. His eyes bugged, but he paid. They said they’d go for ice cream and be right back, not wanting to miss art being created before their eyes.
The Newlyweds were stoked, but I was sick of working on these hearts. The only break we’d had for years was the period my parents couldn’t agree on a profit division after our mom left our dad to his Rez Shack when I was eight. She moved us into an apartment in some complex called The Projects, which made it seem like we were living in a classroom science experiment: What happens when you add an Indian woman and her three kids into a set of low-rent apartment buildings jammed with too many people, all colors except white?
Eight years later, our parents still each had the other over a barrel, and with the waterfall so close, they each wished to cast the other one in. But they’re Indians. They figured some two-person treaty soon after splitting and we’d been back to work ever since.
“Put this one back,” our mom said, eyeing up the canoe we’d been holding. One of the hearts was a little bigger than the other. That had been a Marie job, totally. “They’re paying a lot. Find the best one, and get to work. Marie, you do those bees.”
“How come I gotta do them?” Marie said, pissed and whiny. “She came up with it, so she should have to do it.” Her sense of self-preservation wasn’t so good.
“Because you’re not talented enough for hearts,” our mom said. “And we don’t got time,” she added, looking into the tote, “and we don’t have stock if you screw up. Magpie! Heart Duty!” I was not surprised.
Beading initials and dates on a flat picture frame was easy, but the hearts were 3-D objects, and they had to sit in the canoe right or the personalization didn’t show. Also, if your stitching was sloppy, the hearts got lumpy and knotted. No one wants a puckered and dented heart. If you were even a little off, they looked like a Three-Pack-a-Day Smoker’s Heart, or a Biscuits-and-Gravy-Loving Heart. Those were Marie’s hearts. She just didn’t have the knack.
Give Me Some Truth Page 2
