“Sounds like they’ve gotten angrier since the last time I stayed here,” Mary remarked.
I helped Sky up the incline. “When was the last time you stayed here?” I asked dubiously.
“Half a year ago,” Mary said. “Alright there, Grandma?” she said in Shoshone.
“You are a disgrace,” Grandma said.
“Cool beans,” Mary said.
The Fort Hall Reservation was a real prairie, not at all like arid Nettlebush. Hardy blond grass grew between uniform white houses with thin brown roofs. The Bannock Mountain range stood green-gray and beautiful on the horizon, round peaks colliding, occluding the sky. Nothing had the right to usurp the sky, but I chanced a peek at him and he looked like he didn’t mind. He craned his neck with awe, admiring the wet pearl clouds, the leafless sugar maple trees with homemade taps tacked into the trunks and cheery, scarlet birdhouses on the sleeping branches.
“Chief Pocatello lived on this reserve,” I told Sky. I put my arm around his waist and pulled him back against me, my chin on his shoulder. “We could visit his house later if you wanna.”
Sky ran his fingers along my wrists. Only reason it didn’t tickle me was because it was cold as hell outside, and my skin had kinda gone numb. I harrumphed into his hair. Grandma whipped around, eyes bulging. She cursed me out in Shoshone and I sulked, letting go of Sky. You’re not supposed to love people in public. On occasion I forgot about that. It wasn’t fair, because how was I supposed to keep it inside? When I loved someone, it threatened to pour out of me. It had to come out, because there was so much of it, too much of it, and if I wasn’t careful I’d probably burst open. Sometimes I thought that loving people was my only real talent. In the way of talents, it wasn’t a bad one to have.
Grandma Gives Light’s house was gray and dilapidated, the lumber porch sunken in, the banister covered in rotted brown moss. It was one of those saltbox varieties you only ever see on older reservations, one story in the front, two stories in the back. A sagging chicken coop stood behind a fenced in grain garden. Only the hardiest of winter grain had withstood the first snowfall, bleached yellow wheat and chilly camas without leaves. We went inside the house’s entrance hall and I tripped over potted herbs. I coughed at the purple incense sticks burning on the shelves, the long braids of sweetgrass hanging from the ceiling. I shrank at the ceramic mask leering threateningly at me from the wall, ogreish and green-black, angry slits for eyes.
“Wonder if Caleb’s here,” Mary said.
He was. We went into the sun parlor at the back of the house, a round sheet of glass cut into the ceiling. I put my head back and watched the snow build up on the ceiling, veiling the white sun. A bright oil lamp in a jawbone dish glowed in one corner of the room, a real buffalo skin hanging decoratively on the wall. Our cousin Caleb rocked angrily in his rocking chair, chomping on a wad of chewing tobacco.
“Get out of my house,” Grandma said.
“WHAT?” Caleb yelled. I flinched, because I’d forgotten he was practically deaf; although whether he yelled because he was deaf or whether he’d gone deaf from all the yelling was the question of the century.
Hi, Sky said with a bright grin. He took his bag off my shoulder, waving vigorously.
Caleb Kalispell was something like my first cousin once removed. He was turning forty-one this year, which made him older even than Uncle Gabriel, so I felt weird about addressing him like a peer. I’d tried to call him Uncle once, but he’d shouted me down, broken an ashtray, then wondered where his life had gone. He stared at me through one eye—the gray one, the other one electric blue. His cheek was patched over in wet and bloody bandages. Every time I saw him he looked beat up. If I hadn’t known how lazy he was I would have sworn he frequented a gym.
“How’s it hanging?” Mary asked wickedly, slugging Caleb’s shoulder.
Caleb jumped in his seat. “JESUS!” was his response.
It hit me that sharing a blood relation with these people was actually, hideously depressing. My whole body sagged toward the hardwood floor. Sky put his hand on my arm and peered at me, concerned. Freaking hippie. I told Grandma I wanted to take Sky upstairs and pick out a room for him. She turned her big eyes my way, amber and blank.
“Should I plant blue corn this year?” she asked.
I didn’t answer her, but my face went hot, my head tingly. I grabbed Sky’s hand and tugged him out of the sun parlor. I felt his questioning eyes on me even while we climbed the crazy, spiraling staircase, the wooden steps under our feet as thin as toothpicks.
What happened? Sky asked when we reached the second floor. The corridor was narrow, five doors squashed into the walls without symmetry.
“Grandma and Grandpa slept in separate rooms,” I started to explain. I grunted, heaving the bedroom doors open in exploration. “You can probably take Grandpa’s room, not like he’s using it much these days—”
Grandpa’s bedroom was austere, the bed plain and white and the walls plain and gray. In a normal house a photograph or two might have decorated the hardy chest of drawers. Grandma Gives Light was oldschool Shoshone, the kind who believed that photographing yourself weakened your soul. A solitary window hung behind the box-spring, but it was a good one, the glass twin-layered and sturdy. Sky leaned on the window and watched the heavy scraps of snow tumbling down from his namesake, pooling on the first floor skylight. He watched the snowflakes as they powdered Snake River on the horizon, my favorite, uncut blue jewel. I liked that this was Sky’s first time seeing snow. I liked that I got to see his reaction. He reminded me of a little kid in a toy emporium: He didn’t know which direction to look in, or what to think of it, but he readily drank it in, his smile burgeoning. He smiled at me.
My heart swelled and my head spun. I reached for Sky’s hips with hungry hands, my fingers cold. He grabbed the hem of my shirt, playful, and twisted it around his knuckles, like he didn’t know what I wanted. Liar. I kissed his forehead, his warm skin soothing my cool lips. He smelled like snow and cedar and pine resin and Sky. To be Sky was to be everything, pine resin and more.
What was your grandma talking about downstairs? Sky asked, pinching my elbow.
I think I must have blushed. “I’ll tell you some other time,” I mumbled.
After Sky got set up in Grandpa’s room I went out into the hall to pick one of my own. Caleb’s room was off limits, which left Mom’s old room and Uncle Gabriel’s. I stared at the door at the end of the hall. I touched the rusted doorknob and knew it for my uncle’s right away. I could still feel his emotions on the wood and brass, well-meaning but guarded, the quintessential Gabriel Gives Light. I pushed the door open and his room looked much the way it must have when he was a preteen, long before he and Mom had moved to Nettlebush. Giant, developing maps of America hung on one wall, because Uncle Gabriel really liked cartography for some crazy reason. The window looked out over a tin tool shed and a horse stable. Grandma only had the one horse now that Grandpa had passed away. I sat down on the bed and put my duffel bag beside the walnut wood table. “Gabriel Loves Samantha” was carved into the wooden bedpost. I smiled without meaning to, touching the grooves in the aged letters.
Above the bedroom door an unembellished, hanging mirror caught my eye. I flinched to look at it. I didn’t like seeing my reflection, although I can’t really explain that. Maybe I was a vampire like Carmilla after all. My hair was frazzled with winter wind, the collar of my jacket crooked. My jaw looked meaner and more square than I remembered. The light hanging around my shoulders glowed weak and runny, a vacillating blue-gray. I thought blue-gray a ruminant color. It could be happy, or it could be sad. Mostly it needed to be both.
What did a mirror look like when it wasn’t reflecting anything? What color was the glass if you weren’t standing in front of it?
“Rafael!” Grandma Gives Light yelled. “Cut camas for dinner!”
I trudged down the staircase and out the front door. I zipped my jacket up, snow piling around my feet. A pack of rez dogs came
bounding over to me, mutts with German Shepherds’ torsos and pitbulls’ stubby legs. I stopped walking and watched them warily, afraid that they would touch me, and then I wouldn’t be human, and even a second without humanity was unbearable now that I finally had mine. Dogs know when you’re not in the mood, though, and the rez dogs skirted around me and went loping to the next house over, some forty yards away. I climbed the fence to Grandma’s grain garden and ripped camas bulbs apart with my hands. I dropped them in a wiry basket at my ankles. I took a stalk of wheat and snapped it in fours, and I carried it to the hen house and put it in the clay kiln for drying. Cherry Eggers and Plymouth Rocks clucked around the chilly dirt floor, bobbing their red and speckled heads.
When I ducked outside the hen house again I saw that the rez dogs had made their comeback. I frowned, because if they dug underneath the grain fence they’d probably eat the deathcamas by accident. Deathcamas was good for keeping pests away, but nobody wants a dead dog on their lawn. I drew nearer and watched the mutts wagging their tails, leaping in and out of the snow mounds. My glasses fogged up; I wiped them with my fist. Sky was kneeling in the snow, and rubbing his hands all over the littlest mutt’s muzzle. He kissed the rez dog right on it nose.
“You dumbass,” I said, grinning.
Sky grinned back at me, mischievous and innocent. Don’t ask me how that worked. He picked up the camas bucket and straggled over to my side. We went inside the house, his nose and cheeks flushed pink. I kissed them to make it better. He held my shoulders in place when I made to move away and I humbly obliged, kissing the rest of him, his brows and his ears and the curls at his hairline. He showed me he was satisfied by grabbing my jacket sleeves, dragging me down, and sealing my lips with his. He’d kissed a freaking dog with that mouth and I didn’t remotely care. No doubt that made me a loser of the very big variety.
“Hey, get a load of this,” Mary was saying.
We followed her voice into the sun parlor. She’d taken a tomahawk off the wall and stood twirling it effortlessly between her fingers. I worried that the heavy wooden handle would fly out of her grasp, that the sharp iron blade would rip her knuckles off. I needn’t have.
“PUT THAT BACK!” Caleb instructed her. “AH, JESUS! GODDAMN KIDS!”
Grandma Gives Light pounded the starchy camas at the coal stove under the spiral staircase. A giant black kettle bubbled in the stone chimney and I groaned, because it looked exactly like a cauldron. I wondered whether the reason Grandma asked us to bring friends over wasn’t so she’d have children to boil and eat. The five of us ate dinner in the alcove and Sky tried to catch Grandma’s eye and smile at her. She pretended she didn’t see him. I was ready to get angry; but after dinner she took me into the pottery room, and she said:
“Why does the boy not speak?”
It always surprised me when somebody asked that question. In Nettlebush everyone was connected by three degrees of separation.
“Dad cut his throat, ma’am,” I said, digging my heel into the floor. “He busted something in Sky’s throat and now it don’t work right.”
Grandma went on staring at me, blank and vaguely lunatical. It never occurred to her to offer her condolences. Have I mentioned I was scared of her? At the same time, this woman had lost her only daughter to her only son-in-law. It struck me powerfully that Grandma had brought Mom and Uncle Gabriel into the world, then watched Mom leave it. What does it feel like to bury your child? Without Grandma I wouldn’t have had a family at all.
“Grandma,” I whispered. “D’you miss Mom?”
“There is a Delgeth around you,” Grandma said.
“Huh?” I said.
Grandma grabbed long hanks of my hair, like she was checking it for lice. She sniffed the dove’s feather in my braid. I wriggled away from her, paranoid. I didn’t like the feel of her bony fingers, all that meanness concentrated in one place.
“You have a Delgeth,” Grandma announced. “Of this I am certain.”
“Ma’am,” I said warily. “Winter ain’t even antelope season.”
“WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE DOING?” Caleb shouted from the sun parlor. “COME PLAY DO’PEDI, GOD DAMN IT!”
The five of us spent the evening playing Do’pedi, a Shoshone dice game that had more in common with War than gambling. I sucked at Do’pedi, mostly because I couldn’t count very well and my reflexes were shit. Around eleven o’clock Caleb turned the oil lamps off and Grandma said it was time for bed. Mary had already passed out on the sheepskin armchair. Smart. I shook her awake and she snorted. She yawned widely, her tongue ring on display.
I trudged up the staircase to the second floor. Caleb stormed after me, slamming his bedroom door shut. I slinked into Uncle Gabriel’s old room, the glass lamp lit on the table. Liquid oil shadows danced cheerfully on the wall. It was strange how homesick I felt just then. I mean, I’d stayed on Fort Hall before, yeah; but Uncle Gabriel had been with me during those visits. Tonight Uncle Gabriel was 1,100 miles away. His absence was the catalyst for a thousand tinier, but equally troubling thoughts. I thought about what dry desert wind sounded like at night. You didn’t hear wind like that on Fort Hall, where the air was denser, heavier, not sharp and clear. I thought about the sparkling of fireglass. I thought about the kindness of Mom’s grave. Shadows crept up from the floorboards. I hadn’t seen them since the summer.
“Stop it,” I said out loud.
I shucked off my clothes, my glasses, and got in bed, the lamp still on. The mattress didn’t feel much like Uncle Gabriel, which might have been a good thing, because at least it meant I wasn’t lying in twenty-year-old blankets. I closed my eyes and listened to the snowflakes pattering on the slanted roof. Each snowflake was a different song: deep and hollow like drums; light and frantic like fiddles; soft and watery like flutes. Flutes made me think of Sky, which made me remember he was sleeping down the hall from me. This had never been true before.
Without a second thought I crawled out of bed. I crept down the hallway, mind racing. I knocked on the door to Grandpa’s room, but Sky didn’t answer. The door swung open at my touch. I reached for the doorknob, ready to shut it again. I faltered.
Sky was one of those infuriatingly neat types. When he took off his clothes he actually bothered folding them. I’d never seen him wear the same socks twice. He was neat while he was awake; but asleep was a different story. He made for a comical scene, his bony legs splayed out and pale in snowy moonlight, knee hanging over the side of the bed, blankets drooping on the floor. He breathed through his mouth and got his curls stuck in his teeth. He snored like a freaking trucker. I’d never known that about him, and it amazed me to know it now. It made me wonder whether I’d have a reason to know it in the future.
I could hear the twin pulses in my temples. I could feel the third in my throat. I could see what Sky might look like in another ten years. Maybe his jaw and his arms would thicken out. Maybe he’d finally gain a few pounds. I turned eighteen in a couple of months. It made no sense that I was going to be an adult soon. It would have made more sense if Sky was an adult, too. Everything made sense if Sky was in it, which was how I knew that something had indisputably changed, that I wasn’t just me anymore, but Me and Somebody Else. That ought to have frightened me. I was all of seventeen years old and I was irreversibly connected to another human being. I should have been scared. I wasn’t scared.
Ten years from now, I thought, maybe Sky would have his voice back. Because I already knew what it sounded like; but he didn’t. And that was unforgivable.
I went back down the hall and grabbed the blankets and pillow off of Uncle Gabriel’s bed. I slipped inside Grandpa’s room and closed the door soundly. I wadded the blankets up on the floor, and I lay on them and hugged my pillow. Eyes squeezed shut, I listened to Sky’s noisy breathing. The air warmed around me, loving, comforting. I knew suddenly that no matter what the future looked like, I couldn’t possibly be alone for it.
When I woke up the next morning I didn’t immediately remember w
here I was. I panicked, because the floor was cool instead of warm, and I couldn’t hear Uncle Gabriel’s radio. And then I thought: Oh, yeah. Groggy, I flexed the bones in my back. I shifted; but when I tried to turn, I couldn’t.
Sky must have woken up at some point during the night. He lay inches away from me on the floor, his hand wrapped tight around mine. At least I thought it was Sky, but underneath all those blankets, bunched and bundled igloo-style, it could have been anyone. Freaking wimp. His hand was wide on his skinny wrist, his freckles golden in solstice sunlight. He felt like kindness and silliness even while he was fast asleep. That’s how you know someone isn’t faking it. There are only two times in our lives we’re incapable of lying: when we’re asleep, and when we’re bleeding.
“Sky,” I whispered hoarsely. “My fingers are numb.”
He didn’t budge. I would’ve just left him, fingers be damned, but Grandma probably had chores for us. I kicked him. He jumped out of his blankets like a frog on a furnace. They fluttered to the floor and he looked around, confused.
“You look dumb,” I said, but meant it as a compliment.
He scrambled to snatch his Plains flute off the nighttable. I jumped up before he could blast me in the face with it. He waved a dismissive hand at me, but couldn’t keep the smile off his mouth. I went down the hall to change clothes and give him privacy.
I must’ve been a faster dresser than Sky. When I stuck my head in Grandpa’s bedroom again Sky was only just pulling his shirt on. I jolted, my skin tingling. I turned my back, face burning. Sky hadn’t noticed me, which made me wonder whether he was deaf on top of mute, because even though his back had been turned to me I wasn’t the stealthiest guy on the planet. I covered my eyes with my hands. I turned my head over my shoulder and peeked between my fingers. A giant blue birthmark poked out from underneath Sky’s boxers, vaguely resembling a flowerpot. Every Native American’s got a mark like that, but I think the shape varies by family. Mine and Mary’s was more like a horseshoe. God, was Sky skinny. That’s what happens when you don’t eat meat. He was skinny, and he was elfish, and I’d never seen anything I wanted more. It was an uncontrollable want, the kind that sent the curious to the moon. I felt like I was bursting at my seams, the happiest pain you can imagine.
Overlooked (Gives Light Series Book 6) Page 16
