“What makes you think that? You suddenly all Magical Mystical Indian?”
“Hardly. I mean, that’s what I’m doing.” She looked at me, straight on, in ways she usually didn’t. “Look, I’m sorry. That was a bad scene. My first instinct? And my sister’s? To get out in one piece. You grew up on the reservation. We didn’t. There were a few other Indians in the city—”
“But not enough to feel like a group. I get it. I just wanted …” I wasn’t sure. Had I wanted them to stand with me? My original plan was just to see the place, nothing more. I wasn’t anticipating seeing that my brother getting shot in the ass would be a benefit to business. Lewis always said that, since sixth grade, he felt simultaneously threatened and feared in school. I always insisted that was ridiculous, but I felt it in Custard’s dining room.
How could white people really be afraid of us? They’d almost wiped us out across this entire frigging country and across Canada too. Wasn’t that proof enough that we weren’t a danger? Or were they wishing their ancestors had just done the job right in the first place?
“So why’d you want to go there anyway?” Maggi asked. “There’s a million places closer to home just as good. It’s ice cream. How bad can you screw it up?”
“Previews are starting,” I said, flicking lights at Lewis and Marie. I’d have preferred to just stay with Maggi, maybe reach over and hold her hand in the dark. If she’d known about Derek, then maybe we could have talked. No one on the Rez would talk seriously with me. Someone would make a Hamburglar joke, no matter how long we’d been friends, because that was how you survive there. If you’re hurting, you’re begging someone to tease you, to help you laugh.
But sometimes, I didn’t want to laugh. I just wanted to say it was messed up that my brother made a huge mistake, that he’d have a permanent physical scar, and that our dad was working overtime to make sure he’d have mental ones too. I wasn’t even looking for answers. Just a safe ear. But I wasn’t sure about Maggi just yet. She was from the Rez, but not of the Rez.
Lewis and Marie came back, and Maggi got out. Lewis climbed in the back, and then Maggi followed him in. He frowned at her as Marie leaned in the door, rather than getting in. “Listen,” Marie said. “I’m going to the bathroom and the snack bar. Anybody want anything? Looked like there was a long line, so I might be a while.”
“You’re the one who wanted to see this,” Lewis said. “I was hoping for Friday the 13th, but we’re here because you wanted to be here. We don’t need popcorn or—”
“Should do something about that desire to watch people getting killed, Lewis,” she said.
“It’s only a movie,” Lewis said, but I was with Marie on this one. I liked scary movies too, but I maybe didn’t like them as much as Lewis did.
“I don’t care about Fame,” Marie said. “Already saw it, but I wanted to see Little Darlings.” I’d planned on splitting before then. I’d seen Fame five times already, a couple alone. It took place in a New York City high school, where they gave grades for music performance, and was pretty great. Little Darlings I’d seen too and it was stupid.
Before I could say anything, Marie vanished, which we all pretended was perfectly normal. “Oh, I want to see that,” Maggi called out at the next preview. She was a Smokey and the Bandit type? No, a Smokey and the Bandit sequel type? I’d spent my whole life around Rez girls. It was nice to be around someone with a little mystery. Even with Marie, I remembered enough that there were just missing story chunks, pages missing.
Every time I looked in the rearview, Maggi was looking back at me. Lewis was still stewing that Marie had disappeared. I’d figured out pretty quickly that before Marie rang Lewis back on the phone, she’d made arrangements to meet someone here. Maggi’s look to me now was: Please don’t ask. Maybe I’ll tell you another time, but not right now. That’s a lot for a pair of eyes with too much mascara, but it was clear. I knew the expression of Please Don’t Ask too well. It was a more desperate version of Ask Me No Questions, I Tell You No Lies.
“How come they don’t use that David Bowie and Lennon song in this?” Lewis said, pretending he hadn’t just been ditched as easy as a used napkin.
“What song?” Maggi and I both asked, simultaneously.
“Um, ‘Fame’?” he said, and we laughed.
“I bet they just want songs to be for the kids in the movie,” Maggi said. “They don’t want you thinking about someone who’s already famous. Especially as famous as those two.”
“Still, seems like an obvious choice,” Lewis mumbled.
“The next movie uses one of your precious Lennon songs, so relax, Gloomis. Jeez,” I said, watching the cast of Fame singing and dancing on a congested New York City street, jumping on top of cars and everything.
“How do you know there’s a John Lennon song in Little Darlings?” Lewis asked. That one was about two virgins at a high school summer camp, competing to see who could lose their virginity first—not the kind of movie you let everyone know you’d seen all by yourself. So I did what came naturally.
“It’s in the commercials,” I said, the little lie floating off my tongue like a butterfly.
“No, it isn’t,” Maggi said. “I wanna see that movie, so I always watch the commercial.”
“Oh, are you a Beatles expert now too?” I asked.
“Kind of can’t help it, being around Lewis all the time,” she said, and he gave her shoulder a gentle push while they both laughed.
“I don’t know,” I said, using my last card. “Maybe I saw the soundtrack album at Recordland or something. Trust me, there’s one in there. Just relax and enjoy the movie. You can listen to all the Beatles you want when you get home, Gloomis.”
Lewis grumbled and went back to watching. An hour in, Marie showed, breathless and sweaty, smelling like a man’s cologne—even over the popcorn bucket she shoved in before her.
“Long line, I guess,” Lewis said, flat. Marie got in, pretending the first movie wasn’t half over. By Fame’s closing scene, her head slumped and her breathing slowed. Snoring was minutes away, at the longest. I unhooked the speaker and started the Chevelle. She woke up and didn’t have any objection.
Marie hadn’t come for Little Darlings. She’d seen some feature that the rest of us didn’t know about, except maybe Maggi. Her eyes still flashed their pleading signals in the rearview mirror, right up to the moment I dropped them off. I still felt the sting of their bailing on me at Custard’s Last Stand, but I kept my mouth shut.
Marie said thanks, jumping out and heading into their shack. “Thanks, Carson,” Maggi added. She smiled an apology and leaned in. I leaned too, but at the last second, she made sure her kiss hit my cheek. “Niagara Falls has nothing on New York City, but we already knew that, isn’t it?” she said, naturally using this Rez phrase at the end of her sentence. Maybe she wasn’t so far away after all. “See you Monday?” she said to Lewis, who nodded, looking at the door that had shut behind Marie. Maggi ran toward their porch light as Lewis got back in.
“How come you left before the second movie?” Lewis asked as we neared his house.
“You have to ask? A movie about camp with that girl from Family?” Of all the possible questions, this was maybe the oddest. “You really wanted to see that? For one stupid Lennon song you already own? As I recall, you were voting for the summer camp slasher movie.”
“I don’t guess I really wanted to see that second movie, but I’d like to have some say in what happens to me, even if it’s only a courtesy. You left because you decided you were done watching.” He stayed silent until we got to his driveway, where no one had left a porch light on.
“You wonder why none of us stayed at the counter with you,” he said. We hadn’t talked but he had known why we’d been there. “If I’d known ahead, I would have stayed.” He paused for a minute before shutting the door and leaning into the window. “You didn’t trust that I’d go with you if I’d known what you were up to. That’s where you failed.”
He left, walking up his dark driveway. It was a lonelier drive home than I’d thought it would be. I didn’t even bother doing any of the things I usually did, trying to avoid our house until the fireworks between my brother and my dad were over for the night. It was going to be a crappy night no matter where I spent it, so I just went home.
I’d go upstairs and ask my brother how his scars were doing. He’d show me how his were healing, never asking about mine.
Sometimes they gave us a break day from the endless rows of dirty buses, like yesterday. The job usually was so low concentration that while I scrubbed seat cushions, scraped off gum, boogers, and the occasional used-looking rubber (football team and cheerleader away games?), and washed it all out the emergency exit, I could put my mind anywhere.
I started seeing the beautiful art projects I’d make on my own, High-Concept Beadwork, sparked by something Marvin did. I showed him some music magazine Lewis had lent me, flipping to a pullout poster of this scandalous John Lennon and Yoko Ono album, Two Virgins (both of them standing face out naked!). Marvin laughed and studied it for so long I asked him if he wanted to be alone with it for a while. He shook his head and handed it back. The next day, when I got home from work, sitting on my bedroom shelf was an amazing near-perfect re-creation, using corn-husk dolls, with commercial doll hair on both, and tiny round glasses on the Lennon one. Next to it, he’d left a baggie with a tiny curled cylinder of husk and two tufts of doll hair, and a note (“in case you want to add on the parts you like best”).
Even when his life sucked, he still liked to make me laugh, but the dolls were strangely beautiful and incredibly accurate for such a tricky material. The next time we were alone, I thanked Marvin and suggested we could collaborate, re-creating famous album covers in beadwork, soapstone, corn husk, basswood, and sweetgrass. He seemed open to the idea. It was exactly where we could be Conceptual Artists. I loved picturing myself handing our mom an invitation to our first show (okay, yes, I was getting ahead of myself, but I’d already requested an art class for the fall). Planning them in my head sure made work more tolerable when it was slow, and Lewis regularly hung out with me to break up the day. He was turning out to be okay, I guess, for a boy obsessed with my sister.
But because Liz had maintained her level of fondness for me, even when she shook things up, she’d still given me a bullshit job yesterday (scrubbing the coffee cart with a toothbrush to work the grout between each tiny ceramic tile). Thinking about Jim Morgan had also become a decent distraction when I was sick of beadwork strategies. He’d filled my mind up until I slipped, gouging my cuticle with that raggedy toothbrush. “This is just harassment work,” I said to Lewis, bandaging my bleeding thumb.
“Oh, you poor thing,” he said as he wiped down the public lockers the Real Workers had in the break room. Even here, they still had centerfolds hung inside of them. Liz had put one of a full-frontal naked guy up in hers so the room had Equal-Opportunity Nakedness.
“I wouldn’t be doing stupid shit like this if I worked for Jim Morgan,” I said. I’d learned that Jim officially worked for Buildings and Grounds but had to punch in and out at our garage’s time clock. If you drove a district vehicle, you came through our doors at the beginning and the end of the day. The more I got to chat him up each day, the more I decided he was pretty cute, even though he was a little older than the youngest mechanics.
“I’d work here any day over being around Jim all the time,” Lewis said.
“You’re not doing this bull job,” I said. All he had was a spray bottle and paper towels.
“Look,” Lewis said, setting his bottle down. “The Real Workers? They hate being stuck supervising us poor kids. They’re always afraid of job security, and our presence doesn’t help. We make it look like kids could do a lot of these jobs.”
“So?”
“We’re getting minimum wage. They are not. Consider yourself lucky. Your friend Jim? He has no need to deal with me, but he makes a regular habit of finding me and giving me grief.”
“Bull! Like what? I’ve never seen that. He’s only been nice to me so far.”
“Well, duh,” he said and I didn’t like what that “duh” was suggesting. “He’s smart enough that the shit he pulls, I couldn’t prove it’s intentional. It started with him saying his nephew could do my job better than I do, but that he didn’t qualify.”
“Oh, how terrible for you,” I said. Lewis thought that was harassment?
“That was the beginning. When I said, ‘Oh, gee, sorry your family’s too far above the poverty line to get a job here scrubbing toilets—’ ”
“You never said that!” Lewis was like Marvin, trying to stay as invisible as possible. But when they did end up crossing someone they got out as quick as possible and, later, I’d hear them retell the story, adding Tough Guy things they’d never said.
“I did too, and that’s when it got worse. A couple times?” he said, pausing. “When they had me carrying tailpipes to the second floor, he’d come up behind me and pants me, since I couldn’t do anything about it, and then he’d snap my nuts through my undershorts while all these others laughed their heads off. You can be sure I’d never come here commando.”
“Um, thanks? I guess?” I said, trying to force a laugh. That was a jerky thing, but it seemed more like a guy thing. The Reynolds brothers who lived in the Science Projects kept a running tab on which one had pantsed the other the most for every year. “Commando’s gross anyway. You should always have something on under your pants. That’s just common sense.”
“That’s just one thing. He always pisses on the floor too, just after I’ve cleaned the johns, so I have to go back and do that patch a second time. But you’re kind of missing the point here,” he said. I wasn’t, I just wasn’t sure what to say to him about the dubious things he claimed Jim had done to him. I didn’t want to go there, because his face seemed to say that if I opened that door, he might tell me more things, worse things. So I went back to scrubbing. Mostly, we spent the rest of the day in silence. It made the day seem hours and hours longer.
“I wonder what other kids’ summer jobs are like,” I said as we punched in the next morning. I decided to try staying on more neutral ground so I at least had someone to talk to.
“Crappier or less crappy?” Lewis said, pretending we hadn’t tried to freeze each other out yesterday. We were better. “No kid’s summer job is going to be all that fun. Bosses know we’re desperate, so we get the jobs they don’t want to do. Darwin at his finest.”
“Darwin, from over on Bitemark? What’s he got to do with this?” I said, showing off how I was getting to know the reservation.
“No, Darwin. You know, Darwinism? Never mind,” he said.
“Don’t treat me like I’m stupid just because you have a couple of years of high school on me,” I said. “What’s Darwinism?”
“One of those things,” he said. “Hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. I live it. And so do you. It’s tied to the idea of evolution and—”
“Oh, that whole Man-from-Monkeys thing? Do you buy that?”
“Just what it means today. For you and me. The more power you have, the more you can make others do stuff you don’t want to do. We’re at the bottom. Liz could demand we do any job, and we don’t have much choice. Or I don’t. I need this job to help keep luxuries in our house. You know, like electricity.” He laughed.
“Dealing with Liz is just like living with parents,” I said. “Control is overrated. We’re gonna have to be decision makers at some point in our lives. Why rush it?”
Lewis went out and chained his bike to the fence like it was gold.
“It’s the way they remind you they’re in power,” he said, coming back in with his lunch bag. “Like this table. Don’t you think there’s any other place in this whole garage where we could eat lunch besides a dark corner of the ladies’ room?” It was gross once he pointed it out.
“Probably,” I conceded. “We don’t have to stay here. We
just can’t eat with them unless they ask us to.” The guys invited us often enough since I started working, but maybe that hadn’t been true for Lewis before. I didn’t want to speculate out loud that maybe they liked me better than they did Lewis. “But you let yourself get bossed around by all kinds of people. Like Carson. I don’t even know you guys that well and I can still see that.”
“My Uncle Albert taught me that life with Carson is a tally sheet. Most relationships are like this—Carson just makes it clearer. My uncle’s had similar go-rounds with Carson’s dad. He’s a little funny. Gets mad at things you shouldn’t get mad about. And we share a room, so …”
“Know all about the trickiness of sharing a room,” I said. “But if you just take a stand once, they get the message and back off,” I said. A frown came over Lewis’s face. He was going to give me reasons he couldn’t do that (I’ve been through those arguments with Marie). “Like even here. How come you don’t get involved in that stupid wrestling thing the guys do?”
I’d discovered almost immediately that, indeed, twice a week during lunch, the younger garage guys wrestled in the office trailer where the ladies worked. And I don’t mean like those TV shows Marvin loved where men shouted at each other and one man waited for the other to climb the ropes and crash-land on him. This was the real deal, none of that showy nonsense.
“Your life would be easier here if you’d do it,” I added. “Even once. Be one of the guys.”
“That,” he said, “would be insane.” He was trying not to sound exasperated, but his voice went up in pitch when he felt that way, and it rose now. “These guys? They’re giants.”
“You could challenge Dave. He’s from the Rez, right? He might take it easy on you.”
“Pass, thanks,” he said, shaking his head like I was a pitiable fool.
“How’d that wrestling get started anyway? Not something you see every day.”
Give Me Some Truth Page 8
