Sky tugged his jeans on, except he couldn’t seem to find his belt. Before I could stop myself, I blurted out:
“It’s on top of the drawers.”
I slapped my hands against my eyes, recognizing my mistake. Unbearable discomfort settled around me. Gradually I heard the rustling of clothes, or maybe bedsheets. A few seconds later I heard rubber soles.
Sky touched the small of my back. I lowered my hands to look at him and he raked distracted fingers through messy curls. The discomfort wasn’t just my imagination; it was written all over his face. I was supposed to be the person who made him feel safe. I stammered an apology, horrified, but Sky shook his head. Sky put his hand on my elbow.
“I’m sorry,” I kept saying.
He picked up my hand and kissed the heel. He wasn’t fooling me any. I followed him down the staircase, but I wanted to kick myself. No one was allowed to hurt Sky, least of all me. Even Sky wasn’t allowed to hurt Sky.
“Have a good sleep?” asked Mary in the alcove.
She sat with a black cat on her lap, scratching behind its tufted white ears. I didn’t know how she could stand to touch living animals. Horses didn’t count. Sky tickled the cat’s chin and it purred with delight. God damn it. Now I wanted to pet it, too.
“GO FEED THE CHICKENS!” Caleb yelled at me.
I jumped. I knocked over the ceremonial cradleboard on the white ash table. Grandma’s pet crows squawked and screamed in the aviary next door. I dashed out of the alcove, my head splitting with pain.
The hens in the hen house were no less noisy when I shouldered my way inside. I tossed them stale bread crusts and sour milk and they squabbled and fought one another like gladiators. I scooped the eggs out of the nesting boxes and stuffed fresh hay in the roosts. Stale feathers and slimy droppings squashed under my boots. I tripped over them twice. When I went outside again a rez puppy sat staring at me with perked ears, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. I gave him the rest of the bread loaf. He snapped it up and sprinted away without a word of thanks.
Inside Grandma’s house Mary and Sky were still in the alcove. Sky had this weird rash on his wrists, which made me think that maybe he was allergic to cats without knowing it. Mary sat with her bass guitar on her lap, and Sky sat with his flute in his mouth, and they battled musically, furiously, but I’ll be damned if I could tell what song they were trying to play. I took two steps into the kitchenette and gave Grandma her eggs. She shook a peyote rattle around her head, too busy chanting to acknowledge me.
“Why’d you even ask me over?” I complained, trying not to glare.
Grandma shook the rattle harder. “For the spring crop!”
I slouched back into the alcove. Caleb made a cranberry torte for breakfast, which was when I decided I liked him again. He puffed on his cigarette and put it out in the chimney and stood with his hands on his hips while the rest of us ate. I felt sorry for Caleb. He had a son who didn’t like him any and an ex-wife who took his house in the divorce settlement. I wondered how the guy had managed to procreate while screaming. I wondered whether I ought to be wondering about that.
“You ain’t gonna eat?” I asked him.
He lit a second cigarette. “Nah.”
Grandma forced Mary to wash the dishes. Mary groaned. Caleb left the house to pick up the mail delivery. I went with him, ‘cause I’d forgotten that Fort Hall had a real post office, not like Nettlebush. If I was going to college in the future—and I needed to, for Sky’s voice—I had to get used to things like mail trucks.
“Whaddo you wanna study, kid?” Caleb asked me.
“Speech-language pathology,” I told him.
“DAMN IT!” he said. I just about fell into Snake River at our side. “All the money’s in ENGINEERING THESE DAYS!”
A crunchy black road ran past a lopsided gas station. We passed a grocery shop called the Trading Post, the signs made up in Old West typeface, and a newer sandstone building called the Shoshone-Bannock Hotel, something I’d never seen before. I wasn’t sure whether we were still on the reservation. We took the Warbonnet Road exit, and I watched half a dozen federal mail trucks pull up beside the black curb. I put my head back and stared up the facade of a weird, rocky building, the roof pointy and the doors yellow.
“Wait here,” Caleb instructed.
He strode inside the building. I put my hands in my pockets and stamped my boots on the clean, swept sidewalk, relishing the cold. A couple of girls waved at me in passing and I waved back, awkward. I thought about Sky. I’m not the kind of person who can just let shit go. I felt so terribly about looking at him, I knew I needed to apologize again. I just didn’t know how.
Caleb marched angrily out of the post office, a stack of letters under his arm. I followed him down a side road, Ross Forks, which wasn’t so much a road as it was a confused tangle of prairie grass and sage grass. It wasn’t snowing any. The blue clouds roared and curled open in ocean waves. A low foothill out west stood prickled with pine trees, the needles a murky red-gray.
“Ridiculous,” Caleb said.
I thought he meant me at first. I tore my eyes away from Henrys Fork, a runny, muddy tributary off the Snake River, ice floes crumbling on the current. I saw that Caleb was staring at a church to our right—Good Shepherd, or something like that; I’d gone there with Mom when I was little. A red steeple tapered above a squat exterior. Apart from the children’s swing set, the old gray bridge in front of the entrance, you could’ve mistaken the building for a barn.
“What’s ridiculous?” I asked.
Caleb shook his head; but I thought I knew what he was getting at.
“Believing in something makes people feel better,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“It’s a lie,” Caleb said.
I felt irrationally angry. “Nobody knows that for sure.”
“You believe in God, kid?” Caleb asked.
“Maybe not that God,” I said.
“But you believe in one, yeah?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Then you’re an idiot!” Caleb said.
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, alright.”
We kept walking. I wasn’t all that angry, I reflected; Caleb was so ridiculous it was hard to take him seriously. I started thinking about Sky again, but Caleb couldn’t let well enough alone. He interrupted my thoughts.
“Make me believe,” Caleb said.
I frowned. “You don’t gotta believe if you don’t want to.”
Caleb didn’t answer me. That was how I realized he wanted to.
“Uh,” I said, thinking. “Well,” I said. “I don’t think God’s a person or anything. I don’t think it judges you or cares about you or sends you to Heaven or Hell. I dunno if I’d even call it God. I just know it’s…there.”
Caleb snorted, which humiliated me. I explained through my teeth, “Maybe the Great Spirit’s a better name.”
“You’re not convincing me,” Caleb said.
“If you wanna believe something,” I said, irate, “then you’ll find a reason to believe it. But if you don’t wanna believe it, then nothing’s gonna change your mind. That’s the way people work.”
“Then what’s your reason?” Caleb asked. “Why not believe in unicorns? Or mermaids?”
I chewed on the inside of my mouth. I realized we’d stopped walking.
“Well?” Caleb asked.
“Because if you could scale the entire planet,” I said, “and pull apart all the prairies and savannahs, all the mountains and forests and rainforests and deserts, every inch of available land, you could prove that unicorns don’t exist. Or that they do. If you could assemble a really good diving team and send them throughout all the uncharted oceans until they were charted, you could prove that mermaids don’t exist. Or that they do. Everything that exists can be shown to exist. Everything that doesn’t exist can be shown not to exist. But not God. God is the only thing we’ll never be able to prove or disprove. That has to mean something. It has to.
”
Caleb made a derisive sound.
“You asked,” I defended, feeling stupid.
“I ain’t begrudge ya any, kid,” Caleb said. “Just…damn. Wish I had something to believe in.”
“People,” I said. “I mean. You can believe in people. ‘Cause even when they disappoint you, they’re only being the best versions of themselves they think they can be. They don’t know any better.”
“Even my bitch of a wife, ah?” Caleb said.
“She probably thought you were the one being the bitch at the time.”
We straggled back to Grandma’s house. Mary plodded listlessly out of the horse stable, carrying a brush and a feedbag. At some point it had started snowing again, milk-white flurries sapping the color from the sky. I held my hand out and caught two snowflakes. Two more fell on my palm.
“Caleb,” I said. “Look.”
Caleb sped into the house in a blustery whirlwind. A fifth snowflake caught on my finger. I begged it not to melt. I think I must have been a nutjob, because melting snow made me inconsolably sad; but then why shouldn’t it have? One time I heard about these monks in Tibet who crafted giant mandalas from grains of dyed sand. Month by month, grain by grain they constructed these grueling works of art. You wouldn’t believe the intricacy if you saw it. The symmetry rivaled nature itself. When they were finished building the mandalas the monks destroyed them. I wanted to scream just thinking about it. Nothing was permanent, the monks said, not even beauty. But they were wrong. I knew at least one thing that was permanent. I’m not talking about God this time.
“Whatcha doing, squirt?” Mary asked.
Her hair was unbrushed. Her face was unpainted, buffed pink by icy wind. I thought she looked larger than life. She sauntered playfully over to me and I showed her the snowflakes in my hand.
“Cute,” Mary said, noncommittal. She scuffed my hair with her nails.
“No,” I said, irritated. “Look at them.”
She gave them a second cursory glance. “What about?”
“They’re all different shapes,” I said.
She laughed. “Well, duh.”
She didn’t get it. Because if you sat one of us down and asked us to name all the geometric shapes, we’d eventually run out of names. The sky never ran out of brand new shapes to give the snow. There was magic at our fingertips. The world was deliberate, and careful, and planned. And she and I still wound up as brother and sister; and she and I loved each other anyway.
And I loved Sky. I loved him so much I couldn’t remember not loving him; which made me think that maybe I’d always loved him. Maybe I was born in love with him. Maybe I wasn’t a Rafael unless I loved a Sky. You know what else I couldn’t remember? The first thought I’d ever had. The first time I was aware of my own awareness. You can’t remember that yourself, can you? That’s how you know there’s no beginning. There is no beginning to us, and there is no beginning to the people we love. And you can’t have an end unless you have a beginning.
Sky came out on the porch and sprinkled salt on the snow. He swept up crow droppings with a twined broom, his nose shiny and pink. I thought: Once you’ve loved somebody, you’ll always love them. I don’t mean that couples who break up should get back together, or that kids who were abused by their parents should crawl home and make nice. I just mean that none of us has the ability to erase our past, let alone the feelings that go with it. Would you be the exact person you are right now if you’d loved somebody else back then, or nobody at all? If you want to get rid of love, you’ll have to pick yourself apart first. You’ll have to reduce yourself to nothing. You can’t do that. You’ll never be nothing. If you are without end, then so is love. You are love itself.
I must have stared at Sky longer than I thought. He laid the broom against the banister and stared back at me, his eyebrows wrinkling up, but his eyes relaxed. I hated it when his eyes were relaxed, because that was when I couldn’t read his face. Usually his eyes were doing something; crinkling at the corners, or gleaming, or disappearing in laugh lines, foxlike and small. I wiped my hands on my pants. I climbed partway up the porch, but stopped on the middle step. It was the only time in his life Sky was taller than me. I decided to give him his moment.
“Sky,” I said. Moment’s over. “I’m sorry.”
Sky’s eyebrows twitched. The gold dots around his pupils went denser with understanding. I climbed the rest of the way up the porch to stand in front of him.
He scooped snow off the railing and balled it in his hand. He threw it at me.
I was so shocked I could only sputter, my mouth smarting with cold. I caught a flash of Sky’s unrepentant smile before he reached for a second snowball. Laughter cracked out of me. I grabbed him by the waist and hauled him off the porch. He shoved the snow in my face and it went in my mouth and my eyes and my nose. I tripped. We both went flying, falling in the bushy winter rye.
I loved the snow. I loved it so much I didn’t mind coughing and swallowing and sneezing it. I propped myself up on stinging elbows and watched Sky pick cereal grain out of his hair. He caught my eye and smiled, his face rosy with cold. Yeah, like I was letting him off the hook that easy. I lunged off the ground, grabbed him by the arms, and threw him into the closest snowbank. Chunks of snow rocketed everywhere before his head surfaced, his arms flailing. I doubled over with laughter, wheezing. I laughed so hard my gut hurt and I clutched it just to catch my breath.
Poor Sky had the worst of both worlds. His thin skin didn’t like the heat any, burning and flaking during summertime, but apparently he wasn’t built for winter, either. His bones rattled and his teeth chattered and his flushed cheeks took on a blue tint. He was always the first to laugh at himself. He laughed now. I had to get him indoors. I took his icy hands and hauled him to his feet. His sneakers slid on the ice. He was a city kid, my city kid, and didn’t know enough to invest in hiking boots. I marched up the staircase and into the house and into the kitchenette, where I planted him in front of the blazing chimney.
The both of our clothes were soaked through. I went upstairs and changed into warm flannel and brought back a lumpy sweatshirt of mine, Buffy Sainte-Marie emblazoned on the chest. It was Sky’s favorite shirt, I thought, because sometimes when he visited my house he stole it from my closet and used it for a pillow. I gave it to him to wear and left the kitchenette while he changed. When I came back he was drowning in the too-big collar, the too-big sleeves, but I swear he looked as happy as a freaking clam. That’s a weird idiom. I knelt in front of him and took his pink, pruned hands, rubbing ‘em between mine. He kissed my nose while I was warming him. His Eminence must’ve approved.
“We never went to Pocatello’s house,” I said. “You wanna go?”
Before we left Grandma’s house again I made Sky trade coats with me. I didn’t doubt Mrs. Looks Over meant well, but to my knowledge she’d never lived outside the desert before, and that thin fleece get-up she’d bestowed him with wasn’t gonna cut it. At least my coat was stuffed with down. Sky got dressed in my jacket very reluctantly, and then he immediately put up a fight, because when I pulled his jacket on over my arms the sleeves missed my wrists and the hem missed my waist. It’s like he kept forgetting I enjoyed being cold. I told him I wasn’t going anywhere with or without him unless he shut up. I tucked his scarf around his neck, careful when I touched his scars, because even though they’d long healed touching them was the same as touching him eleven years ago, that afternoon when I’d sneaked into his hospital room and watched him sleep.
We went into the stable next door. Grandma used to keep three horses, but she’d sold two when Grandpa passed away. The lone survivor was an Appaloosa called Tendoy. The poor bastard looked like an overgrown Dalmatian. I opened the stall gate and saw that his hay rack was full. I put my hands on his head and we talked without words, him telling me that he remembered me, me telling him that I’d missed him terribly. When Creator made horses he made them with man in mind. Maybe it was the other way around. Every
body should have had a horse, I thought, because without one, you only knew half of yourself.
I saddled up Tendoy and tightened his girth. I tied a feedbag to the girth ring and packed it with oats and sugar cubes. I helped Sky into the stirrup, and he swung his leg over the saddle; I mounted behind him. Tendoy could take about three hundred pounds in one sitting, and anyway, it wasn’t that long of a trip. Sky looked a little afraid, but when I put my arms around him and pulled him back against me I felt his shoulders slouch with concession. I nudged Tendoy with my knees and he bolted out the stable doors. Sky jumped.
Riding a horse was like gliding on air currents, except that your thighs chaffed, and your lower back cramped, and sometimes small bugs got stuck in your mouth. Alright, so it wasn’t much like gliding. It was fun, though, maybe the most fun I’d ever had outside of reading. I wished I could say the same for Sky. No matter how tightly I held him he grasped Tendoy’s mane as if it were his lifeline. His face fell piteously when the wiry hairs slipped between his fingers. I kissed the back of his neck to calm him, but I don’t think he even noticed. He breathed in a relieved gulp once we reached American Falls, Tendoy slowing to a trot. The Falls were the most scenic part of the reservation, noisy and blue-green, tumbling down walls of glistening gray rocks. Some jackass had built an iron diversion dam across the lowest waterfall’s peak, a real eyesore, but it could have been worse. I vaulted off of Tendoy and helped Sky down from the saddle. His upper body had gone stiff, but his legs were like gelatin. He leaned against me uselessly, which I didn’t mind in the least. I took Tendoy’s halter and tethered him to the post beside the dam, making sure he could get in and out of his feedbag okay. A couple of horses were already staked at the dam: an Azteca and an Andalusian, the latter of which looked very angry.
Overlooked (Gives Light Series Book 6) Page 17
