“I’m not a moron,” she said, and did a simple, steady, boring 2/4. Doobie began singing gentle boom-booms into his cone, and Lewis lightly strummed until he felt their rhythm as his own. I started singing and could see Maggi’s eyes bugging to hear the twangiest, scrawny-necked cowboy voice come of my mouth. I grinned, and as we got comfortable, I started adding little lead lines on my guitar. We got through it pretty decently.
“Maybe later,” I said when Doobie started getting tricky in singing his bass line. I fought my hardest not to snap my eyes as I said it, keeping my direction softer, and he ironed back out.
“What am I gonna do when we do hit ‘Kaw-Liga’?” Maggi said after four more tunes of the Hank Williams variety. “There’s no way to play that without mixing in a little bit of Traditional drumming, or a half-assed version of it.” True, and we were sounding decent.
“Let’s find out,” I said, grinning even wider. I grabbed my capo and clamped it at the fret where I’d found a decent complement. “Remember what we did waiting for these girls?” I asked Lewis. Of course, he’d remember, but I was really asking if he was good with our diving into something a little complicated. He nodded, a little wrinkle of concentration developing on his forehead like a set of brackets. “You just remember the big change when we get to the chorus,” I said to Maggi. “If you don’t make the change at the right time, the rest of us follow you down.”
“A pretty fair number of Social Dance songs have time signature switches,” she said. “Maybe you’d know that if you went to more of them.”
“All right,” I said, blowing off that little piece of broken glass her tongue had thrown. “Let’s try this and if it goes, we head out there. The Bug’s gonna be yelling for us in a minute anyway.” We got a decent run-through, just past the chorus start, and I stopped us, smiling wide. “Showtime, kiddies. No matter what, keep on picking and grinning. If one of us screws up, whoever it is, pause, then jump back in. The rest of us are gonna keep playing.” They nodded, and we stood up at the same time. It felt kind of dorky, like something out of Fame. Did that mean things’d be all right? Man, I hoped so.
“’Bout time!” The Bug yelled as we came out, but he was laughing, so we still had a safe window. He was Happy Buzzed today. Though it could change lightning-fast, for now, luck was with us. We figured out a way for all of us to fit and then carefully turned to the crowd.
I started us with the quick three bursts of the same picked note, and at the changed note on four, the others all came in. By the second bar, everyone there recognized we were playing “Your Cheatin’ Heart” in a pretty traditional arrangement. No one even seemed to notice I was playing the fiddle part adapted to capo’d guitar. The Bug’s guitar remained in its case, and I was relieved. If he didn’t feel the urge to play on that one, we were safe.
For a band playing the first time together, we started out pretty decently. Some of the older couples even got up and danced on a couple of tunes. Not slow dancing since that was not so much of an Indian thing to do. Anyone slow dancing would get made fun of for trying to cop a feel at the party. Our home was more mid-tempo like “Lovesick Blues.”
We hit our groove more and more with each tune. Not even people singing badly in the crowd could throw me.
But when we got to “Kaw-Liga,” I was shocked. Maggi started in doing the fake-out Indian drumming that starts it, and everyone standing immediately drifted into a natural circle and started dancing. A bunch of other people who’d been sitting suddenly jumped up and met their rhythm too. The rest of us joined her rhythm, and I started singing.
“Kaw-Liga” was a ridiculous song about a Cigar-Store Indian falling in love with an Indian Maiden statue in an antique shop across the street. It was one we should hate, but maybe half the party was up on its feet. They did a wild variation of a Social round dance, like those trick 3-D pictures. Their dance was half-serious and half-goof, and somehow they all made the switch together. I’d never seen anything like it. When we finished, people started shouting “Play that again.” I shrugged, and Maggi began once more.
We closed out with repeats of some of the earlier songs, though Maggi chose to sit out “We Can Work It Out” at first. She knew there were changes, but she said she didn’t know the song well enough to be confident. I thought Lewis’s head was going to explode. By the second round of dueling verses, she had enough confidence to join back in. That felt like a good way to end. We were tired, and it gave The Bug room to jump back in and be the star of his own party if he felt like it. He said he might in a bit, and people largely went back to partying. Someone had been tending the bonfire, and after we put our stuff away, we wandered that way.
“Wow!” Albert yelled, coming up between Lewis and me, putting an arm around each of our shoulders. “All those lessons! Damn! They worked, isn’t it! Even when it didn’t seem like it.” Lewis pushed him, and the three of us laughed.
For the next hour, people came up and congratulated us, which I had to admit felt pretty sweet. But I also felt a little bit bad for Maggi. Almost three-quarters of them asked her some version of the question: “Now whose girl are you anyways?” She’d tell them, and then immediately, once they could place her with a Rez family and history, they’d get way friendlier. They’d tell her things about her parents that she’d never heard before. Sometimes, she could make an immediate connection right back and the tone would improve even more. I could see the waves of disappointment and delight crashing over her face with each approach of someone.
“We were good, huh?” Doobie said, in a brief lull. We all agreed.
“So you wanna tell me what you were talking about just before we started?” Lewis said to Doobie. He said it friendly, but I could hear all those knotted I’ve-Been-Left-Out-Again feelings rising to the surface. Could I blame him? No, not if I were being honest with myself. I should have had the conversation with him, but it was harder lately for me to be my cocky self. If I’d told him ahead, he might have bailed, and I wasn’t sure I had my old powers of persuasion anymore. That incident at the Sanborn Field Day had screwed me up more than I thought it would.
I felt Derek’s absence here too, the whole party. He knew our dad was going to be here, and wasn’t super enthusiastic about my playing in general. A lot of people thought of him as a slacker, and he knew that if I seemed dedicated to something, had some ambition, people might notice his lazy ways even more. Was his stupid choice from the pressure of needing to do something with his life suddenly? No, Carson, I told myself. Take Lewis’s advice and put your ego in a box for a little while. Sometimes people just did shit out of their own bad judgment. Still, I missed him here.
“We were good, right?” I said to Lewis. “Even with Doobie and Maggi joining us for the first time?”
“A little rocky sometimes,” he clarified. He was maybe a bit more unforgiving of himself than I was. “But yeah, for a spontaneous band, pretty damn good.” He took a draw from the beer someone had passed him. “But no one just brings a drum randomly to a party.”
“I wanted to try something,” I said. I had a feasible story, that Maggi had just happened to bring her drum with her, coming from their Vendor Table. And it was true, but it would have also been part lie, even if just a silent lie. “I think we can do this. This is a band. It’s not just you and me anymore. The four of us, we sounded good, with only a half hour to even get together. Imagine what we could do if all of us practiced like you and me do. Alone and together. We could be super tight in no time, could branch out beyond the Hank Williams songbook.”
“Maybe even some more Beatles,” he said, and I knew I was halfway there.
“I don’t know so many of their songs,” Maggi said. “I mean, I know it’s them on the radio, but I don’t know them know them. I guess I could learn some.”
“Some,” I said. “I’m asking you to be in my band. One bus driver. Remember?”
Just then, Albert swung back around, barging in our conversation. “Check this out!” he yelled, happ
ier looking than I’d seen him in a long time. This would be a tough time for him to influence Lewis, but I’d just have to ride this out too. “Some folks passed the hat for you guys!” He literally held a hat before us, a beaded cap as it turned out, and it was full of dollar bills. “Don’t know how much. Didn’t want to be rude, but it’s all yours. Great band out of nothing, isn’t it!”
Lewis took the cap from Albert, neatly folded over to keep the bills from spilling out. He knew, instinctively, that if The Bug found out others had paid us, he might get a case of amnesia before he paid us himself. Lewis was a grinning small businessman.
“So what do you think?” I figured I’d cash some of these new Rez Points while I could. “Starting tomorrow. You and Maggi, after work. I’ll come pick you up, we’ll round up Doobie from hanging out down at the Fire Hall, and we can get in a good two hours of practice a night.”
“What’s the hurry?” Lewis said, laughing. “We’ve got our whole lives to explore this.”
“Well, not exactly,” I said. At first, he looked stricken. “No, no one’s sick! Jeez, Gloomis. There is a time limit, but it’s good. First! Answer me this, we were better than those bands at the Field Day, isn’t it? You can agree to that.”
“Oh, hell yeah,” he said, and I knew I had him. This had been the right call. Not just for him, but for the whole band. I could see Maggi’s meeting people and connecting with them meant something to her. And Doobie seemed always eager to belong to something, though I had an idea we’d have to fight for his free time with the Fire Hall.
But that was a challenge for another day. I started telling Lewis about the Battle of the Bands. Doobie and Maggi filled him in on their parts, and we all agreed that, already, we had a shot if the competition was anything like those shitty bands we’d seen at the Sanborn Field Day. I almost wanted to tell Lewis about what we’d done for Albert, but something about Maggi, the risk that she had better Eye-Snap skills than me, helped me to keep a good secret. Before the end of the night, I had an agreement from the three of them that we’d begin regular practice soon—if not their first day back to work, then at least by the end of the week. That seemed good enough for me.
“I’m catching a ride with some friends,” I said to my mom. Technically, that was not a lie. Jim Morgan offered the week after Fourth of July break to take me to the Albright-Knox, that awesome art museum my seventh-grade class went to. He’d said it closed at five, so it was best to go on a Saturday. It wasn’t a good idea for us to leave the garage together on a workday, and I couldn’t hop into a strange car near home (particularly one as strange as a commercial dump truck) without questions. So we had to meet on some neutral ground.
It was tricky for a fifteen-year-old Indian girl and a thirty-year-old white guy to be friends without people getting ideas.
Our last holiday in July, celebrating our right to cross the borders as tribal people existing in both the US and Canada, fell in the middle of the month. The formal programming (speeches, Cute Indian Kid contest, etc.) was held on alternating years there and here. This year’s events were at Hyde Park, our side. Border Crossing was an Indian celebration, but enough white people came that Jim wouldn’t stand out much. The buying crowd would thin by three, so I could probably get out by two.
Right on the chosen hour, Jim got just close enough to catch my eye. He was wearing what looked like new Levi’s, dress boots (weirdly, like Lewis’s), and a neat, pale gray polo shirt. It looked like he couldn’t decide how to wear the collar—one side was up, while the other drooped. Dark Deanna wasn’t in a terrible mood, so I gave him the agreed-upon signal (knocking a drum to the ground and picking it back up). We’d planned to meet in the parking lot of a bar and grill across the street that had a train caboose in its parking lot. I figured there’d be no mistaking the Hitching Post for any other place with that kind of landmark to look for.
“I feel like we’re spies,” I said, walking up to his truck’s driver’s side window.
“Get in,” he said. I reached up to fix his collar, but he grabbed my hand and put it on my leg. He immediately dropped the truck into gear and peeled out of the parking lot. “Sorry. I forgot. That bar sponsors a team on my bowling league. We don’t wanna linger.” He put his left blinker on, but I told him to go straight instead. If we’d gone his way, we’d go right by the park and the Science Projects.
“Which way you like it? Up or down?” I asked, and he gave me Side-Eyes, grinning. “Your collar, doofus. You look like you don’t know how to dress yourself.” He glanced in the mirror, smiled wider, and leaned toward me so I could fold the right side down. I smoothed it against his chest, and he took a deep breath, expanding the collar opening wide. I pulled my hand away (it was having thoughts of its own that I didn’t think were good ideas).
We chatted about the Border Crossing, and the history of his bowling league, and a half hour later, we were in Erie County. To him, it probably was nothing, but to me, Buffalo was huge, mysterious. I wanted to think Exciting but my brain kept replacing it with Scary. What if we got separated (or he left me somewhere)? Who could I call? The only real answer was Carson. (And a part of my brain told me I’d never have those abandonment thoughts if I were in Carson’s silver muscle car. Jim’s world was different, uncertain.)
Jim navigated various thruway exits, onto another thruway, never checking notes or maps, and then we pulled onto a street where I could see the museum directly in front of us. Maybe he really was an art lover! I figured that he’d probably taken an interest in my Freaky Beadwork objects because he’d (really) taken an interest in me. But it seemed he’d been here enough times that he knew the route by heart. You had to pay to get into the lot, so I started scrambling through my bag. The gas money to get to Buffalo was, I’m sure, a ton, but I could at least pay for the lot.
“What are you doing?” he asked, laughing and paying. “Don’t be a weirdo.” We walked into the building together, side by side. Neither of us looked over our shoulders, just two people, checking out art. As we got closer to the door, I worried about what I was going to say at the admissions counter. It was cheaper for me to be “Youth,” but I wanted to be “Adult.” I dug in my bag to have the right amount ready so I could say I was an adult.
“What are you doing?” he asked again, this time exaggerated. “I’ve got today. Put your money away.” He put his arm around my shoulder and shook me gently, in more of the Come on! way I imagined a big brother might. Instead of an admissions desk, there was a donations box, clear Plexiglas on a pedestal, with dollar bills and coins gathering in the bottom, and suggested amounts. Jim put two five-dollar bills in, two “Adults.” I smiled and reached my arm around his back, my hand touching his love handle on the other side. I squeezed and let go.
Stepping in, I tried to go left, remembering an Andy Warhol. The only other time I’d been here was with a bunch of other seventh graders and some freaked-out chaperones rushing us the whole time, trying to make sure we didn’t see the naked art. Now I’d get to see whatever we wanted, for as long as we wanted.
“This way,” Jim said. “I want to show you something.” He no longer had his arm on me, but I followed. We were flying by stuff I wanted to check out.
“Can you wait? Jeez, Jim! I wanna see things. No point in being here if I’m not going to be able to look.”
“You will. You can take however long you want until they kick us out, after I show you this one thing.” He clearly had been here before. Jim definitely had sides no one at the garage knew about. I couldn’t recall Lewis being interested in art, unless it was on an album cover. He sure never asked about the beadwork projects I worked on during lunch sometimes, and Carson? Please! He couldn’t be any less interested in stuff like that.
“Check this out,” Jim said, grinning. It was a big rectangular box, eight feet high by eight feet wide. It was about the size of our old Science Project unit’s kitchen (a tight squeeze when my mom insisted one of us help cook). A door cut into both sides of one corner w
as propped open. The box was wholly covered in neat rows of square mirrors, each about two feet per side.
You couldn’t help but look at your reflected self in those mirrors. Even in high-heeled clogs, I only came up to Jim’s Adam’s apple. People walked by, not noticing us, as if we belonged together. The only person paying attention was a guard in a gray suit (and he was being paid to pay attention).
“Come here,” Jim said, tugging his boots off, revealing blinding white tube socks (which suggested better hygiene than a lot of the Garage Guys had). I thought he’d lost his mind until he pointed to a sign. We could enter Room No. 2 but only if we removed our shoes and we had socks on. “This is the best part,” he said. Jim stepped in and seemed to float inside a massive shaft, like the one Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia swung over, escaping stormtroopers. The box’s interior was also mirrored, even floor and ceiling, stretching out in infinite directions.
“I can’t,” I said, lifting one leg and letting my clog slip off, revealing my bare foot inside. I was glad I’d emery-boarded and painted my toenails last night.
“Oh, but you can,” he said, reaching into the back pocket of his jeans. Even though I liked how he looked in his Work Blues, these jeans looked much nicer on him. The polo shirt he had on just looked nicer, dressier than those ringer T-shirts he loved.
“What are these?” I said, taking the cellophane package containing two foam oblongs, the color of vanilla pudding.
“Hospital slippers. They gave me a new pair every day I was in. The last day, I was discharged pretty quick. Insurance was already billed, so I just took ’em home. Here.” He reached out and tore the cellophane, handing me the two spongy objects. “One size fits all.”
“They’re men’s,” I said, holding them in front of me.
Give Me Some Truth Page 17
