Give Me Some Truth

by Eric Gansworth

  “I’m familiar with the male anatomy, thank you,” I said.

  “Not from what I hear,” he said, laughing. So my virgin status had gotten around.

  “So why would you wanna join a band by watching crappy bands anyway? How does that work?” His logic was so flawed; it didn’t take anyone else’s desires into account. “Seems like he’d really never get onstage if he saw other people screwing it up.”

  “You might understand some male anatomy, but not that part. A guy? If he thinks he can outshine another guy? Will for sure try. Or if he thinks people got his back. Like that shithead Plaid-Shirt Man!” he said, suddenly punching the dash enough to rattle the gauges.

  “Okay, forget about him. Seriously, I don’t know about that plan,” I said, but I suddenly pictured Lewis wrestling because I’d teased him. I hadn’t really thought he’d do it (but I also hadn’t thought Jim would jump in). I’d figured Dave would take it easy and Lewis would feel like he belonged.

  “Albert could take that Plaid-Shirt asshole in a second, even if he’s a little funny. But that guy was all Beer Muscles. He knew Albert made a big mistake.” He hissed disapproval. I looked at him puzzled.

  “In the Book of Responsible Drinking for Indians,” he explained, letting off the gas as we left the Rez. “Lesson Number One? Never go into a bar with your ass exposed. If you’re alone, you’re cooked. Especially when you’re the only Rez Indian in a tent full of white guys.” Carson rapid-fire punched the dash, as if just thinking about that Beer Tent demanded release. This boy had a rage inside of him that even the best joke couldn’t simmer.

  “There’s even places around here that have No Indians signs up on the door. Right now!” I’d seen signs in the city like that. My mom had driven us around when we moved, warning us about neighborhoods. And if we ever saw a No Indians sign, we were not to press the issue.

  We got back to the Farmer John Dealie, but of course, we had a worse parking spot. When we finally made it to the Midway, we saw Lewis and my sister in the distance at the milk can game, watching some fool losing his money.

  “Can I ask you something? For real? No bull?” I looked into his eyes, serious. “My sister told me that you and Lewis don’t always get along.” Marie had in fact said that Carson might blow Lewis off entirely, or that he might abandon us tonight if he felt like pranking Lewis.

  “We been friends since kindergarten,” he said. I gave him an oh, please! look. “Okay. Not the whole time, but we’re from the same place. You know what that means or you wouldn’t have come to the Beer Tent in the first place.”

  Maybe this was a good learning experience, since I was going to be here for the foreseeable future. I held his gaze.

  “And truth?” he added. “Even people I don’t speak to on the Rez? I woulda gone in. No one ever has our backs except another one of us. It’s why so many Indians join these volunteer fire companies.”

  We joined Lewis and Marie, migrating to the rides. It felt like days had gone by. Marie insisted that the Trabant was the ride we should go on. The fiberglass cars rocketed us on a giant disk, heaving and tossing us into each other while Top 40 blasted out of mounted speakers, first forward, then backward. Lurching, you felt yourself falling. My head rattled, disoriented. A relieving distraction. We rode a few more rides and made our way to the bandstand, but after three shit bands, we made Let’s Blow This Pop Stand! Eyes at each other and left. Those “musicians” had clearly spent their preshow time waiting in that awful Beer Tent. They were all sloppy and got worse the longer they played.

  “I’ll bet you fifty dollars Lewis is not inspired to join your band after that,” I said, tugging on Carson’s sleeve as Lewis and my sister wandered ahead.

  “You’re on,” he said. “You don’t know him.” His voice was so cocky that I regretted the level of my bet (though I hadn’t shaken on it). “But let’s make this the bet. If I win, I take you to dinner at John’s Flaming Hearth.” This was one of two fancy restaurants in all of Niagara Falls.

  “How’s that a win for you?” I asked, realizing he was suggesting (in a super-clumsy way) that we go out on a date. From what little I knew of Rez culture, this was maybe the whitest White-Boy thing he had ever done. Before I could react, he shook my hand to seal the deal.

  “Hey! You guys,” he said, letting go and running up. “The Chevelle’s this way.”

  “No, it’s not,” Lewis said. “You parked by the Fried Dough stand. Remember? Maggi headed there like it was a magnet and she was stuffed with iron filings.”

  “I, uh,” Carson started, but was clearly at a loss. All evening, he had proven not at all to be the slick and smooth guy Marie had prepared me for. Maybe she was the one who really didn’t know Rez Life.

  “I asked Carson to run me back home for something,” I said, which wasn’t much better (since I was clearly holding exactly zero objects).

  “What?” Lewis was all about the Eee-ogg. He just had to know everything.

  “A Kenny Skoal pad,” I said, knowing he’d be embarrassed. Kenny tried to shock me sometimes at work, wiping Skoal drip off his chin with a maxi pad he pulled from a box in the ladies’. It worked, Lewis turned red, got in the car, and Marie followed behind him.

  “You remember the school?” Carson whispered in my ear.

  “Duh,” I said. “They don’t wipe your memory when you move off the Rez.”

  “Meet me there in fifteen minutes, if you really want to know more about the ins and outs of Rez Life. Is that enough time to get from your house?” I found myself nodding to Carson.

  After we got dropped off, Marie crept quietly into the Shack, touching up her Old-Lady-Bingo Lipstick and borrowing my eye shadow as quick as she could. She was careful to dodge the creaks in our living room floor.

  “Already in bed,” Marvin said in his patented bored voice from the living room, carving a little soapstone person. He was watching Land of the Giants. The stranded little people on this show, for some reason, were helping a giant failed jazz trumpeter fool other giants into believing he had skills. They were always getting stuck in predicaments that played to the strengths of the show’s stars, whether or not that kind of story made sense in a show about humans stranded on a planet of paranoid conspiracy-minded giants.

  Marie cared less about that story than I did, picking up the phone. Before she could dial Mystery Man’s number, though, I stuck my finger on the tongue, disconnecting her. She gave me a What the Heck? look, and I motioned her out the kitchen door.

  “Listen,” I said. “Carson asked me to meet him at the school in fifteen minutes.”

  “Roof?” she asked, like this was the most ordinary of things.

  “He didn’t say,” I admitted, hating to confirm I wasn’t nearly as slick as I pretended.

  “Well, I’m going with you. Hang on.” She went back in, made her call, this time waiting for her Mystery Man to pick up, making final touches to her makeup in the kitchen mirror. “Corner. Half hour,” she mumbled.

  “Hey, check this out,” she said, holding up a cheapo threadbare T-shirt with the Beatles Help! album cover printed on it. “I won it at the milk can booth. Lewis was bummed, but there was no way he was winning.” No way he was winning with her either, I thought to myself. I knew what she was doing and I didn’t like it, only hanging with him because “an age-appropriate reservation boy” would throw our mom off her trail. Not that it was my business to fix her messes.

  “I didn’t think anyone won on those scam artist games. I thought they were all rigged.”

  “They are, but if you show the right amount of cleavage and juice it with a little flirtation, somehow, you can knock those milk cans over with your softballs when no one else can.”

  “That how you landed your Mystery Man?” I asked, and she immediately gave me the Shush! face, still afraid our parents might hear. For someone who claimed to be such an expert in the art of deception, she sure seemed pretty nervous.

  I’d gotten to believe that Sneaking Out was as much
fun for Marie as whatever happened after her man picked her up. Her plans were unnecessarily elaborate, but she played them like those girls chasing Davy Jones on The Monkees. (She’d conveniently forgotten that even the “Arabian Princesses” on that show were played by white girls with tans.) When our parents fell asleep, she’d sneak into the living room and call Mystery Man, let it ring twice, and hang up, beginning a fifteen-minute countdown. She’d finish her makeup, climb the camper table, and go out through the skylight. I always had to hold the table for stability. It would be easier if she snuck out the door, but she didn’t want to have to count on even one more person’s discretion. Marvin, zoning out on the couch to The Land of the Giants, was a liability.

  When she’d get back before sunrise, she’d tap on the window, and I’d tap back if our parents were asleep. If they were awake, I tapped twice, and she’d yell for me to help with the chemical toilet. She’d soon need something more convincing, since our mom didn’t think of us as the helpful sort.

  This time, Marie grabbed a few things from the kitchen and joined me. Marvin waved us out like we were flies, bugging him. “I’ll tell him you’re in bed if he gets up to piss, but if Mom gets up, you’re on your own.” Our dad would never burst into our room, but Marvin was right. If Dark Deanna checked, we were doomed, and he was not involving himself in that cover-up.

  “So why does Carson want to see you?” Marie whispered once we got on the road. “You making promises you shouldn’t be keeping?” We stepped softly to avoid nosy dogs. Occasional distant porch lights broke up the dark woods. There were no lines painted on the roads and no streetlights (they apparently went along with the other things we didn’t get because we didn’t pay property tax, including but not limited to: running water and sewer lines, fire hydrants, trash pickup, regular road maintenance, and police). The trees were a dense canopy. I’d never walked our road at night, and it felt like I was heading into a fairy tale where bad things awaited.

  “Nothing like that,” I hissed back. “I’m not the one with fewer panties in our dresser than I had in June. We … we saw and did something earlier, and he wants to talk about it.”

  “Oh, really?” she said, sarcastic.

  “I’m not you,” I said. “And besides, I didn’t ask you to tag along. I can handle myself.”

  I wondered how Carson would respond if I told him that “Plaid-Shirt Man” worked with me: Skoal-Spewing Bus Garage troll, Kenny. He might really lose it if he knew that the man who got us the pitcher was Jim Morgan. I’d made Please Prayer Hands when I saw Jim behind Carson’s back. I had the feeling too that Carson would want to leverage Lewis’s uncle to his advantage and he was going to tell me tonight that he needed me quiet. (Not that I was eager to tell Lewis anyway.)

  For all the grief I gave her, my sister did understand the world of adults better, and I wished I could count on her now. But we hadn’t talked, talked for real, in months.

  “How do you know where we’re supposed to meet Carson? Or where I’m supposed to meet him and you’re blackmailing me into taking you along?”

  “Blackmailing!” she said. “Look, if Carson wants you alone, it’s for a reason.”

  “Sounds like someone else. Mystery Man prefers meeting you alone. Care to explain?”

  “Look, I’ve told you, there’s a reason you don’t know more. It’s for your own good.”

  “That’s what they all say.” I walked faster. I was in better shape than her from my job. “How do I know you’re not gonna wind up in a Dumpster downtown?” I asked when she caught up. “I couldn’t even give the police artist a decent description. All I could say was that he liked corduroy sport jackets, tan pants, those awful blood-clot loafers, and he drives that weird car. If you want to be secretive, maybe driving a car like nobody else’s isn’t the best strategy.”

  “It’s oxblood, not blood clot, Miss High Fashion, and I have to say, I’m regretting letting you see him even that much. And … I know what you mean about the car.”

  “You didn’t let me see anything! I caught you,” I said, then softened. Even though she was just using me tonight, I was still glad she was with me. “We used to share everything. Now all we share is a chemical toilet, a shower, and a couple squares of eye shadow.”

  “Okay, fine. I know where we’re going because Carson, Lewis, and Doobie and I used to hang out at the school. Some others too. A guy named Brian Waterson, Carson feuded with him even more than with Lewis. Carson’s cousin Tami too. Remember her?” I shook my head. It wasn’t fair that Marie had double advantages. She had history here and a new life in that other world, even if it was a secret one. “I answered your question. Now, what’d you see tonight?”

  “You know Lewis’s uncle?” I figured that was a safe enough entrance.

  “Frank or Juniper?” I didn’t know either of those names.

  “Albert?”

  “That’s Juniper. They call him that cause when he drinks gin, he is destroyed. Kind of the way they make nicknames out here. Be thankful you got an easy one, you’re just gonna be MaggiPie. But if you start slinking around, it’ll be emphasis on the Pie. Which you don’t want Dark Deanna to catch wind of.”

  “You should talk, but what does Juniper have to do with drinking gin?”

  “Gin, my dear girl,” she said, putting on a snotty teacher voice, “is made from the juniper berry, which gives the beverage its distinct flavor and faintly blue color.” I couldn’t tell if this was a put-on or some new identity Marie was developing to ditch her Stinkpot one.

  “Damn!” Marie said as we got to the corner the school was on.

  “The fence? It’s chest-high.” It couldn’t possibly keep anyone over six years old out.

  “No,” Marie said. “Not the fence,” she added, jumping it. She led us toward a side entrance. I could hear a car in the distance, and she nudged me. We stood near the shrubs flanking the stone steps. She pulled a pocket watch from her shorts. “When did he say he was coming?”

  “He just told me to wait here,” I said. “Maybe he meant some other part of the school?”

  “No, this is it.” She snapped the watch lid and slid it back into her pocket.

  “If Mom finds out you boosted that, you’re gonna have something worse than an old nickname to worry about.”

  “No, of course I didn’t boost it.”

  “Oh, it belongs to your man,” I said, dragging the vowels in the Rezziest accent I could manage. “Engraved with ‘It’s Jigging Time’ or something like that?” I asked, laughing.

  “The one Rez slang you pick up, naturally,” she said. “And, no. I’m not crass like you.”

  “I’m not the one sneaking out all night to go jigging some stranger.”

  “Only because I came along,” she said. “And that’s not why we meet late at night.”

  “Then why? Lie to yourself, but I’m your sister. Even I know that if a man makes you meet him only late at night, his guhn-naeht is involved. Since you gave Mom a bullshit reason for wanting to move back here for your friends, I’m guessing you and Mystery Man are more than friends. You wouldn’t make that kind of jump for any regular kind of friend.”

  “Shut up,” she said. “Or I’ll leave you here. Besides, you’re the one named after a jeet-nuh,” she added, laughing at this tired, tired joke.

  “Jeet-neh,” I clarified for millionth time. Naming me for a bird, knowing what the Rez would do with that, was one of Dark Deanna’s darkest jokes ever. “I didn’t ask you to come.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t think to bring what I did,” she said. I’d somehow not noticed the two pork chop bones in her hand that she must have dug out of the kitchen garbage.

  “No thanks, I ate at the Farmer John Dealie.” I laughed. My sister was so weird.

  “It’s not for you,” she said, and stood back up. “It’s in case you get stranded and have to walk. You’re gonna want something to distract any dogs on the prowl. No leash laws out here.”

  “Hey, can I have that T-shirt
you won tonight?” It would be a perfect pattern for beadworking that cover.

  “I guess. I was gonna give it to Lewis for Christmas,” she laughed, and then looked directly at me. “Why do you want it? Do you need some help?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Won’t you please help me?”

  “You’re such a freak,” she said, laughing again as we watched a car head into the picnic grove with its lights off. It might have been Carson, but you never really knew who might be out on a Friday night, and I was beginning to feel like maybe I shouldn’t have come. Marie preparing for Carson stranding me wasn’t exactly a plus in his column, and yet, here we were, walking into a world my sister knew better, with only a rasty pork chop bone as protection. People said the city was more dangerous, but so far, I couldn’t confirm.

  I backed in to the picnic grove, stuffed a few things into a backpack, and headed for the bush line. At the school, Maggi and Marie popped out from shrubs where we always hid bikes.

  “Nice bone,” I said, eyeing up the pork chop leftovers Marie was hanging on to. “But I can probably offer you a more satisfying one.” I laughed.

  “You wish, gweess-gweess-Uh. What are we doing here?” she asked. “Before you even start, Maggi’s too young to sneak out, alone. I, on the other hand …” she said, spreading her arms out in front of her like a magician. She’d changed to different clothes and was less sweaty than me. Making an effort always impressed. Still, she’d just called me a piglet in Tuscarora.

  “I was going to show Magpie here what we used to do,” I said, tapping on her real name, the one she didn’t want anyone to know. If she had to learn one thing about life on the Rez, it was that there was almost no such thing as a secret, only the matter of who you heard it from. She’d blame Lewis, but I had watched Marie fill out the working paper forms for her the day they moved back. “Give her a Rez Kid history lesson. You want to go swinging from the flagpole for old time’s sake?” I grinned, tugging on the flag’s drawstring. “Gonna be too old pretty soon.”