by John Hansen
But she wasn’t a shoplifter, of course. Her and her friends were just killing time, bored of Browning, bored of the reservation, just milling around as they would a shopping mall.
She suddenly looked over at me and said, “You guys have any other CDs?” She scrunched up her nose a bit as she held up a John Denver CD.
Her voice was not as high as I expected, and she had a little of the Browning accent – a mix of Midwestern vowels and that Native American swallowing of consonants sound. I glanced over at the CD rack, trying to think of what she would want – our selection was more catered to older folks and had a definite outdoor theme – classical, orchestral, acoustic stuff. Aaron Copeland was popular, as was George Harrison and Jimmy Buffet.
“Not really, that’s all the stuff the Park gets.” I stared into those big eyes that looked up at me and I tried not to look away.
“It’s not bad stuff, I was just wondering…” She looked at the CD, and then aside at the store vaguely.
“You camping here?” I asked her, getting a little of my calmness back. I could tell she was a local, but didn’t want to offend her by asking if she was from Browning, like it was a stereotypical assumption based on her appearance.
She smirked. “No, I’m from Browning. You aren’t from Montana, I can tell.”
“From Georgia, the south,” I said, smiling a little.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Twenty-six.”
“Wow, ancient!”
“Thanks. You’re what… fourteen?”
“Nineteen,” she said, smiling coolly. We finally held each other’s gaze for a movement, our eyes saying something to each other, better than our clunky chit-chat could.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Alia.”
I chatted with her for a few more minutes, talking about where we were from some more, telling her about the store, until Larry came back downstairs from where he had been up on the 2nd floor and began ambling over towards us. He was scanning Alia with those big glasses, looking at her hands to see if she was buying anything. His simple mind operated in block letters, I imagined: GIRL. INDIAN. PURCHASE? LOAFER? SHOPLIFTER?
Larry seemed more guard-dog than man most days, and his presence next to such a beautiful and interesting creature as Alia was like somebody tossed a bloated bag of garbage onto a field of untouched, fallen snow.
Her friends came over to her with shakes in their hands and one for her, and then they started pulling her away to leave. I felt relieved as least her group had conducted some sort of purchase in the store – then I glanced irritably at Larry as Alia walked away.
But she looked back at me and said, “See you soon Will. Nice meeting you.”
I watched her walk out, memorizing unconsciously her every inch of her. Her little bottom outlined tight in her tiny shorts, the back of her stocky little tanned legs ending in small pink shoes, her mostly-up hair falling in little escaped strands onto her tiny, curved neck. I wanted to kiss that neck where the hair was falling.
“Red Alert!” Larry grunted, now right beside me. His big belly brushed up against my arm as he squeezed past me to open the cash register, a distasteful shock after just having been a couple of feet from that perfect creature.
“What?” I stammered at him, I was focused on Alia leaving. .
“I said ‘Red Alert’ – means ‘Indians in the vicinity.’” Larry smiled a crooked grin like he had shared a clever secret. Then he grew more serious, his brow furrowing above his thick lenses. “Gotta keep an eye on the Reds – sticky fingers. We ‘circle the wagons’ when they walk in.”
I looked at him a long moment with disgust, finally realizing what he was talking about, and I just shook my head at him. He shrugged and began fumbling with the cash register, opening the drawer to count the cash. I brushed past him and went back to the kitchen to get as far away from him as I could.
I didn’t see Alia for another week. She finally came in again after a few days, though, and this time she was alone, and this time I was determined to establish some kind of a date with her, my vow now forgotten. I was working the snack bar this time, so Larry’s barbaric presence wasn’t going to be an issue.
She was wearing much the same outfit as last time. She had on bright gold hoop earrings this time, and had put on some eye shadow that brought her already supernatural eyes out even more.
“So,” she smiled, “can you cook?”
“Let’s find out…” I said. “What can I get you?” I motioned to the menu on the wall behind me.
“I’m not hungry; I just came to kill some time.” Her large eyes looked at me, and then around the kitchen. “So do you like working here?”
“I do, I think. Just been a week and a half, but I think this place is growing on me.”
I grabbed a medium size cup and filled it with Coke, and handed it to her, so at least she’d have something. She smiled and took it, grabbing a straw from the counter. She seemed to have run out of conversation for a moment, and she actually seemed a little nervous. I liked that.
“Listen,” I said, my heart starting to beat a little heavier, betraying me again, that same nervousness in my stomach rising up, “why don’t you hang around until I get off in a couple hours, at seven, and we can maybe go canoeing?”
I felt strangely nervous talking to her now too, and I felt I had no control or confidence, but I just kept staring into those eyes, pushing down my reflex to look away, and I kept staring, and she stared back.
Larry had this metal canoe I had seen when I first arrived locked up to a tree with a chain by the lake shore. Nobody had used it yet, and Larry never mentioned it. I knew where the key was, and I thought it would be a simple, quaint little date activity. It was really the only thing I could think of, as well.
“Canoeing?” she asked, wrinkling up her little nose. “You say it funny – “Cannewing…” She tried to say it in a southern accent, which was almost nonexistent.
I laughed. “So is that a ‘yes’?”
“Sure, that sounds nice,” she said, smiling back at me. I liked her slight smile, but it looked held back, cautious.
We arranged to meet a little ways down the lake shore past the store, which was my way of hopefully avoiding Larry, and even Ronnie, who would be all over this girl if he met her I feared. He already had shown his proclivity for showing up with random girls and bedding them down in his king-sized lair. As Alia left with our plans to meet up, I looked back into the kitchen, and I saw Ronnie peering down into the fat fryer in a kind of bored daze, not paying attention to the rest of the store, idly poking some floating dough around in the boiling oil with a spatula.
At 7 p.m., I was already down by the shore. The shore of the lake was made up of smooth stones and pebbles and a little sand underneath to keep it soft. The lake stretched out a couple of miles to the other side of the valley, and was oval shaped, from where I stood. The lake was also encircled by huge peaks that were still lit up by the distant sun, even this late in the evening, a rosy-red light brightly painted the tops of the highest peaks in the darkening sky.
I tried the key on the chain lock at the canoe and made sure it unlocked. Then I walked back down to a fallen tree spot on the lake I had pointed out to Alia before. A half-fallen tree stretched into the water, it had lain there a long time I could see. The water of the lake was very clear so I could look down into it and make out the stones and sand at the bottom, and the fallen tree limbs many feet down in the cold water.
As I looked out over the lake, I wondered if I was doing the right thing, now remembering my sacred vow. I was only here a week and a half, and had come here partly because of a painful and jarring breakup, and I had had some kind of revelation that that relationship had somehow compromised me and turned me into some office-dwelling automaton, yet here I was – waiting to meet a girl that thrilled me all over again. What would the Bandit do? The Bandit would be here, waiting to take her out in a canoe, I reasoned. It was very B
andit-like, what I was doing; so I muttered “what the hell” and resolutely sat down on the shore to wait.
After a while I started to think she may not even come. The evening light was fading and even the tallest peaks were not just dark spires against indigo blue. But then I heard crunching steps and saw Alia walking towards me on the shore. She had on her little pink sneakers, and a different rock band shirt, with the sleeves cut off, and cut-off jean shorts, cut very short, exposing the white pockets underneath, the corners peeking out over on her tanned, shapely thighs. She was wearing little earrings which dangled below her lobes; I looked closer and saw that they were little, metal arrowheads, pointing down to the earth as the swung.
A little shock of nervousness hit me again as I saw her, but it was faint, and I scanned her face to see how she was feeling. She seemed amused again, but still a little hint of shyness in her smile.
We dragged the canoe into the water part way, I held it steady as she got in, then I shoved it out and hopped into the back in the last second without getting wet. I only found one wooden paddle in the shed in the back yard behind the store, and I began paddling out on the smooth water. A small ripple of wind kissed the surface, but otherwise it was a very still evening, thankfully. The wind would often suddenly come down from the mountains many in the evening, ripping through the trees and shaking the windows, as if having waited all day for the sun to hide, it came down with a vengeance, intent on making itself known again. It was usually strongest in the in-between time, when the day turned to evening and the temperature would drop as the coldness from the mountains seeped down to us in the valley.
But this evening was relatively warm and peaceful. Even in June the evenings were cold very often, but not tonight. As I paddled the craft over the water, I could smell a sugary perfume that floated over from her, as she was sitting only about three feet in front of me in the middle bench seat. She was facing forward and rested her head in her hands, hunched over. I gazed at her curving spine and noticed how smooth her neck was under dark, straight hair – which she had put up again. I wanted to bury my face in her neck, smell her hair and kiss the delicate space under her ear.
I breathed deeply and smiled to myself at how perfect this scene was. This is what I had hoped for when I left Georgia, I thought to myself as I paddled. I gazed at the mountains in the distance. I had sworn off women, and I wanted to start a new life alone, but with her… something is different!
The act of gliding silently in the water in a canoe was mesmerizing us both into silence. A “V” ripple spread out behind us as we glided, I saw as I looked back that the store was a good distance away.
Here was this beautiful, young, mysterious Native American girl I had just met days ago, almost a total stranger, in Montana, in the middle of the mountains, in a canoe.
“What’s your last name, Alia?”
“Reynolds. Like the wrap,” she said without looking back.
“That’s not a very Native American sounding name.”
“No shit.” She looked back and offered me a smile to show she was teasing me.
There was a pause in our conversation as we glided over the water, and before it got too long, I asked, “So what do you think of Browning?”
“What do I think of it?” She turned around carefully on her little bench and smiled at me. “You’ve not been there then?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t go – it’s a real shit hole.” She looked past me back across the water. “I grew up on the reservation in Browning. Browning is on reservation land but it’s a separate town. I’m not full-blooded Blackfoot, though. My mom was…. I mean she is half-Japanese, and some white too. My dad’s full blood though.”
I could see the Japanese in her; her small frame and petite figure, the olive shade to her skin competing with the Native American tanned, reddish tone. Most of the Blackfoot girls I’d seen off the reservation were chubby, more Hispanic-looking actually, not the small and exotic figure that Alia had, nor the paler skin and darker hair that drew me. And her eyes were not the ubiquitous brown the Indians had, but much darker, larger.
We glided on and she told me about how she was taken from her mother and the guy her mom was living with at the time when she only seven years old.
“I never met my father,” she said, “and my mom never told me much about him, except that he was full blood, and had been in the army and then was a truck driver. When I asked how he died my mom told me he had fallen through the ice on some iced-over lake up in Canada somewhere; but…” She trailed off for a minute, watching the water trail behind her fingers she dragged in the water as we moved.
“But I like to think he’s out there still driving a big rig, maybe up north in the Arctic, or at least that he died a more interesting death… some violent, terrible death – something more meaningful.” She looked back at me. “Is that weird do you think?”
“No,” I said. “I think I know what you mean.”
She looked back down at the water, her fingers of one hand trailing on the surface of the water. It was actually a very poetic image – a solitary, lonely girl riding on the mirror-smooth water and staring sadly into the dark mirror of the surface.
Evenings were strange in this part of the country. The sun would fade fast and hide behind the peaks early, the sky would darken and the wind kick up and you’d get ready for night, but then the expanse of sky overhead would hold onto its light until late, maybe 10 or 11 p.m., in the peak of summer, as night was pushed further and further back each day. It was one of those glowing, endless-dusk blue skies that we glided under. I shifted the paddle to the other side.
“Do you want to hear something really interesting?” Alia asked in a quieter voice. But before I could answer, she continued, “I was put in foster care after my dad was gone. My first foster family was ok, but they had to give me up after two years because they moved.
“My second family,” she paused, staring down into the water. “I don’t know if you care about any of this…”
“I do actually.”
“My second family… wasn’t ‘ok.’ My foster dad, Gary, was a high school teacher in Browning, but he drank a lot and was angry at his wife all the time – she was my high school cafeteria lady, actually. She was nice. Her name was Susan. She was a big fat lady and always baked cookies for me on Sundays – that was her thing, baking all the time. The house always smelled so good. After Gary got done teaching and would come home and pass out.
“Gary snuck into the bathroom one night when I was taking a bath and took his clothes off.” She was silent for a second, and I didn’t say a word. I noticed I had stopped paddling.
“He got in the tub with me, water spilled out over the edge all over the floor. He… did stuff I don’t need to say. I was so scared that I couldn’t even move. I was frozen. Like in some nightmare. Susan came in when the water began dripping through the downstairs ceiling. I remember her screaming; I can still hear it – her screaming. I remember her grabbing my wrist and yanked me out of the tub. Gary just laughed, and he stayed in the tub.”
She chuckled and glanced back at me, she tried to mask her embarrassment with a smirk. “I don’t know why the hell I told you all that. I don’t even know you. Now you think I’m some kinda psycho I guess.”
“No, I don’t, Alia,” I shook my head. “I can’t imagine what that was like… for you to go through that. What happened to that guy?”
She frowned and looked down at the water, creating her own little wake with her fingers again. “I was eleven when he did that. Damaged goods now.”
“Get in line.” I said.
“I was taken to a third family after that,” she said after a moment. “They were actually good people, but by then I had had enough of foster homes. In my junior year in high school, when I was seventeen, I was granted emancipation, from the court, because I already had a job and a place to live on my own, from money I got from the federal government because of being in the tribe, and I got in
my own place.”
“How much money did you get?” I asked.
“About six thousand,” she said, with a laugh.
The oar knocked sometimes against the side of the boat as we moved; otherwise the only sound was the distant ducks and loons sounding off, and a small plane going overhead that sounded like a bumble bee slowly crossing the sky.
“Ugh, enough of that shit,” she said, smirking at me as she flung a little water into my face. “So, tell me you’re story, Mr. Georgia.” She wiped her fingers on her shorts.
I paddled some more for a second. “I grew up in Atlanta, kind of a typical suburban kid, except I never seemed to fit completely. When I got to high school I was already playing guitar good enough to be in some bands, and I started liking art and literature, so I was a little different in my school, and even in my family. I’m an only child and my dad’s this lawyer in Atlanta, and set me up with the best high school in town. He set me up in college too, and then he set me up with a job afterwards to finish me off.”
I switched sides to paddle us closer to the shore. “He didn’t pay for college or give me money to live on, though, so don’t think I was some rich prick.”
She snorted with a laugh. “I didn’t think that.”
“He was good to have helped as he did, though”
“Were you happy growing up there?” she asked.
I thought about the question for a moment. “No,” I finally said, “except when I was by myself. I remember building a stick forts in the woods, fishing, hiking, reading, trying to write little guitar songs. I was lonely a lot, but I was happy.”
