“Do you need somebody with you?” Annie asked, ready to stand.
“No,” I said. I wanted to thank her, but didn’t know how. “Just stay with Sky.”
I stumbled on down the corridor like an idiot. Beth Bright at the front desk got ready to yap at me. I waved my hand, aggravated. I shot out the swinging doors. The lights in the sky were a dim, rolling gold between puffy red clouds, the shadows on the ground so fat I knew it was a matter of minutes before the sun sank. Part of me wanted to stand still and watch it: the watery refractions on the doors of the log cabins, the first hint of dusk, the blue hour.
My legs carried me out of the parking lot, across the crossroads and north toward the badlands. I didn’t even have to pull open the door to my house. Uncle Gabriel was sitting outside with a bucket full of sheep brains, tanning a roll of wool for—I don’t know; bedding, maybe, or clothes.
“Welcome home,” Uncle Gabriel said, his arms stained with blood and black filth.
“Paul knows about Mary and he’s in on it,” I said in one breath.
In the old days, when you had a problem you couldn’t fix yourself, you went to the Daigwani.
“He’s—what?” Uncle Gabriel asked, visibly disarmed.
“I heard them talking,” I said. I collapsed clumsily on my knees. “He knows she wants to kill him. They were talking about—about using the blowgun, or a truck or something—”
“Could you have misheard?” Uncle Gabriel asked.
I shook my head emphatically, braids slapping my eyeglasses. “Uh-uh.”
Uncle Gabriel stood up. The tanning solution sloshed in the bucket. “Wait here,” he said.
He walked down the road without washing his hands. In spite of my apprehension, I couldn’t help feeling impressed. I took him literally, too, and sat stock-still beneath the southern oak. I gazed up the length of its trunk. The spread, mossy branches reminded me of an offered embrace. I might have returned the gesture if it wasn’t daylight. As it happened, it wasn’t daylight much longer. The big red sun rowed across the sky, shadows stretching across the badlands like dark waves. The horizon tightened; and then it disappeared.
Night was my favorite time of day. Dusk was my favorite part of night. Thousands of stars came out on a cloudy purple sky, but the place where the land climbed up to meet them glowed orange with vestigial sunlight. I spent so long watching the contrast I don’t know how much time passed. The crickets came out first, whispering in the pines. The owls came after them, whistling their dissent. The coyote calls came last, warbling and chattering, jesters if I’d ever known any.
“Rafael?” Rosa said.
She approached me in her hospital scrubs. I stood up, the backs of my thighs stinging. I reached for her and hugged her without thinking about it. She put her arms around me like she didn’t have to think about it, either.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yes.” Rosa pulled back. “Why are you sitting out here?”
‘Cause I preferred it to sitting indoors. I remembered. “Where’s Uncle Gabriel?”
“Looking for Mary,” Rosa said.
“What?” I asked quickly.
Rosa made me go inside the house with her. The lights were already on; I’d forgotten that Caleb was home. He gave us a weird look from the sitting room floor, but shrugged and went back to tinkering with a surge protector. He fashioned himself an electrician. I followed Rosa into the kitchen while she took a tray of tottsaa out of the refrigerator.
“We don’t know where Mary is?” I asked, my stomach sinking.
She put the tottsaa on the stove, warming it. She turned around and took my hands. With anyone else I would have dreaded the onslaught of emotions passing through my skin. I liked Rosa’s emotions. They reminded me of Sky’s in that they were well-meaning. I think most people are well-meaning; but with Rosa, you actually felt it.
“Let’s go to dinner,” Rosa said.
I carried the tottsaa tray and we went out to the community bonfire. Caleb declined to come with us. The At Dawn twins played the water drum by firelight while the Takes Flight family joined in on tin whistles and rivercane pipes. It was so festive of a night that I heard laughter every five seconds. I couldn’t discern my friends’ voices from strangers’. I saw Sky’s blond curls in the nook of a giant redwood tree, bent in conversation with a glossier head that probably belonged to Annie. I waited until Rosa sat down with George and Beth before I skulked over to the redwood. Aubrey and Zeke waved hello.
“Mr. Looks Over’s doing quite well now,” Annie reported mildly. “They’ve got him on fluids and antibiotics.”
My stomach turned. I peeked at Sky’s face, his smile tired, but pleased. He didn’t know his father was out of his mind. His father was out of his mind, and it was vile of him, and inexcusable. I couldn’t let Sky find out. If Sky found out, he would be devastated. Hurting Sky was not allowed.
“I know just the thing to cheer you up,” Annie said brightly. “I heard they’re having a Renaissance fair in Apache Junction. At the end of spring, I believe. We could go, the five of us.”
“What’s a Renaissance fair?” I asked.
“Oh, I love Renaissance fairs!” Aubrey jabbered, excited. “It’s—well—you go there and everyone rolls back the clock to the Elizabethan Era! There’s jousting, and fake executions, and—”
Zeke burst into nervous laughter.
I stared bewilderedly at Aubrey. “You don’t think that’s a little weird?”
He adjusted his eyeglasses, polite. “No weirder than pauwaus, why?”
“That’s a false equivalency!” Zeke shouted, jumping up and pointing.
“Shh!” Annie said, startled. Sky grinned like a goblin.
Zeke sat back down. “But yeah,” he said. “I get why it’s weird. I mean, America didn’t have jousting during the Elizabethan Era. We had the Aztecs. And Cahokia.”
“And the Hohokam Empire,” I said.
“And the Triple Alliance,” Zeke said.
“And the Hopewell Exchange,” I said.
“And, you know,” Zeke said, chuckling. “Not a whole lot of white people.”
“And they’re doing it in a place called Apache Junction,” I said. “That’s like—” Whaddoyoucallit. “An OxiClean.”
“Oxymoron,” Annie said.
“What did you call me?” Zeke said, crushed.
Sky threw his arm around Zeke’s shoulders, pretending to cry on him.
“For heavens’ sakes,” Annie said. “Are we going to the fair or not?”
Sky surfaced and nodded, grinning brightly. He bumped fists with Aubrey. Zeke looked at me, and I looked at Zeke. Zeke shrugged.
“Your sister never gave me back my basket,” Annie said to me.
My sister. Great. “I’ll remind her.”
Around that time Annie’s little brother flew across her lap, wailing because Jack Nabako had teased him about his hearing aids. Annie rubbed Joseph’s head and took his hand and went looking for Jack’s brother Andrew, no doubt to give him a piece of her mind. Sky’s grandmother made him sit with her, and Aubrey and Zeke got into an arm wrestling match; and Uncle Gabriel blazed past the bonfire without stopping to chat. Rosa and I both stood up and followed him.
We followed Uncle Gabriel home, where Caleb had pulled half the wires out of the sitting room wall. I was starting to regret having asked him to move in with us. Mary was sitting in the armchair, her bass guitar on her lap. I felt like she’d materialized from thin air.
“Where were you?” Uncle Gabriel asked calmly.
“Bused out to Los Portales,” Mary said. She plucked the bass strings with her pick. “Met up with an old friend. The band’s doing better without me! Pricks.”
“Probably ‘cause ya drank all their booze and banged all their women,” Caleb said.
“Well, sure,” Mary said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It ain’t professional is what I’m saying! Ya shot your own damn self in the foot!”
<
br /> “Mary,” Uncle Gabriel said. “I was patient with you when you first came home. That ends now. You are not to hurt Paul. You are not to go near him. Do you understand me?”
I thought about how much worse this situation would have been if Uncle Gabriel only knew about the blowgun incident, or the kneeldown bread. But I still couldn’t bring myself to betray Mary.
Mary regarded Uncle Gabriel, her fingers steepled beneath her chin. Mary asked, “Are you ordering me as my uncle, or as my Daigwani?”
I wanted to ask: “What’s going on? Slow down.” I looked from Mary to Uncle Gabriel. He wasn’t remotely surprised at the change in topic. She’d known all along, then; and he’d known that she’d known. My head spun.
“As whichever one will get you to listen to me,” Uncle Gabriel said.
“Paul killed Dad with his own hands,” Mary said. “Yes or no?”
“Yes,” Uncle Gabriel said. “But—”
“Blood law says I have the right to kill whoever killed my family member. Yes or no?”
“Yes—”
“You’re going to tell me I should ignore Shoshone law? Because this law’s been around longer than you’ve been Daigwani, Uncle Gay. This sick, stupid law’s been around for thousands of years. We need to be serious right now. Are you ending it for good? Or are you just ending it for me?”
Uncle Gabriel looked so tired. Uncle Gabriel looked so young. He was twenty years old when he became a father. He was thirty years old and the tribal council consulted him on everything from grant planning to healthcare to water conservation. That had to be exhausting. The mere thought of it made me want to sleep for centuries.
“What would we use if not blood law?” Uncle Gabriel asked. “If we can’t get the police to care about us, and we can’t build our own prisons, how are we supposed to keep people from hurting one another?”
“Build the prisons anyway!” Mary said, pushing the bass off her lap. I felt sorry for her, because for the first time in a long time, she sounded desperate. “Build a prison we can put criminals in—they’ll see the prison and they won’t commit the crime—Uncle Gabriel, come on—”
“And when the feds drop in for a surprise visit,” Uncle Gabriel said, “as you know they like to do, and they see the prison, what do you think the consequences will be? Do you think they’ll fine us for money we don’t have? Or do you think they’ll rip up our treaty papers and take our reservation, because clearly we can’t manage it ourselves? All of Nevada and all of Utah are supposed to belong to our tribe. Did you know that? Do you know what the Treaty of Ruby Valley is? Salt Lake City belongs to us on paper, Mary, and that didn’t stop settlers from moving out there illegally, and building their houses illegally, and governing it illegally. Do you know why we can’t reclaim that land, Mary? Because there are more of them than us. That’s it. There are more of them, and as long as there are more of them we aren’t allowed to live the way we’d like to live. We have to make compromises, Mary. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
It was Uncle Gabriel I felt sorry for.
Mary stared in silence at Uncle Gabriel. Her whole countenance was so blank that for a moment I wondered whether my brain had stopped working. They say the brain takes eighty milliseconds to process information. We all live in the past.
“So my dad was just a compromise,” Mary said.
“Mary, for cripes’ sakes,” Caleb put in. “Your dad was a freaking mass murderer.”
Mary smiled. It hurt me, because it was one of those lost, confused smiles that little kids wear when they’re embarrassed, when everyone else has friends and they don’t know where to sit in school. She knew her dad was a mass murderer. She didn’t dispute that. She couldn’t help loving him anyway.
She got up and went into her room. I didn’t hear her close the door. I mumbled a quick “Excuse me” and stalked after her.
Mary lay on her back on her bed, her legs dangling over the side. I lay down beside her, second nature to me, and we stared at the fake candle lights hanging from her ceiling. The metal fan hummed on the floor, cool air coasting our faces.
“It was Paul’s idea,” Mary spoke to the ceiling. “Me taking out a blood law.”
I should have felt surprised, but I didn’t. “He came up with all this?”
“When I first came back here,” Mary said, “I talked to Paul. I called him a hypocrite. You punish murder by committing murder yourself? Paul said, ‘You’re right.’ We sat down and tried to figure out how we could get the council to realize how messed up this is. The second blood law was Paul’s idea.”
“He’s suicidal,” I said, and wanted to throw up. Nothing bothered me more than suicide did. Years later I still didn’t know whether Mom had intended to take her own life, or whether she’d only wanted to end the pain.
I felt Mary’s shoulder digging into mine when she shrugged. “The old ways have to go,” she said. “Doesn’t matter that Uncle Gay’s the Daigwani. If he’d never been born it would’ve been somebody else.”
“You’re going to ignore him?” I asked. Ignoring your Daigwani definitely wasn’t Shoshone law.
“I told you,” Mary replied. “The old ways have got to go.”
“But—”
“We’ll see what Paul says,” Mary said.
“How can Paul do this to Sky?” I asked.
Mary shook her head. “How should I know?”
“I’m asking you,” I said. “If Paul’s suicidal, he can kill himself. I don’t want you having anything to do with it. I’m asking you this time. Stay away from him.”
“For Skylar,” Mary deadpanned.
I didn’t see what was so bad about that. “I love Sky.”
“Please,” Mary said.
“I do,” I said. “I didn’t love me. I didn’t know it was even possible to love yourself. But then Sky loved me, and I realized there must have been something really, really good about me, something I’d never noticed before. Everything Sky loves is good. He loved me, and he made me love me, and that’s—you can’t not love that, Mary. You can’t not love him.”
“What are you on about?” Mary asked. “I love you. Uncle Gay loves you. That wasn’t enough?”
“You guys have to love me,” I said. “You’re my family. Sky didn’t have to love me. He did it anyway.”
Mary settled down. Mary sighed, and I felt it resonate through me. In the past I would have known what it meant. I didn’t now.
At some point Mary decided she wanted to listen to goth metal on her stereo. Normally I would have stuck around to hear her imitate the growls, something she was really good at. Right now I wanted to talk to Uncle Gabriel. I crept out of the bedroom. I stole down the hall and found Uncle Gabe in the sitting room armchair. Rosa played a calming tune on the piano, but Uncle Gabriel’s eyes were out of focus. I didn’t know where Caleb had gone.
“Can I talk to you?” I asked Uncle Gabriel, ready to hide.
We went outside the house. It was chilly out, but I hadn’t thought to bring a jacket. Neither had he. The sky was pitch black between the glassy stars. God, but there were so many stars just looking at them dizzied me. It felt like they revolved around my head.
“A while back,” I muttered, “you asked me if you were a bad parent.”
Uncle Gabriel hoisted himself up onto one of the southern oak’s lower, sturdier branches. I wished I had the confidence to do the same. I sat against the trunk instead.
“You’re not,” I said. “You… You’re good. You took real good care of us.”
“I didn’t know you were dating Skylar,” Uncle Gabriel said.
“That’s not your fault,” I said. “I never told you.”
“I couldn’t see it?” Uncle Gabriel said. “As much as I love you, I couldn’t tell you loved this kid?”
“Maybe I wasn’t open with you,” I muttered. I put my hands in the soil and felt the earth breathe. “We’re Shoshone. We’re tight-lipped. When our babies are born, we cover their mouths so they stop crying.�
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“I don’t know,” Uncle Gabriel said beneath his breath.
“I do,” I said. “You’ve had a rougher time than all the rest of us put together. And you still took care of us through it. And it’s okay if you’re not perfect at—at whatever it is you gotta do. Because you’re doing good.”
“I swear to God,” Uncle Gabriel said, looking down at me. “I promise I wasn’t trying to replace your father.”
It took me a while to figure out what to say. I knew he was telling me the truth. Uncle Gabriel only ever lied if it was to protect somebody. Nothing on the planet could have protected me from what my father was.
“If you’d been my father all along,” I said, “I would have been better off.”
Uncle Gabriel visibly froze. “Don’t say that.”
“I’m not saying I don’t love my dad,” I explained. ” ‘Cause I’m always gonna love my dad. Doesn’t matter what he’s done. But that’s the problem. Loving my dad is the reason I grew up hating myself. Wearing his face like it’s mine is the reason I never completely trusted myself not to follow in his footsteps. If I’d never had to love my father, I could have felt free to hate him, like everybody else does. If I’d looked like you—”
I would have liked that. I would have liked having light brown hair and light brown eyes and a widow’s peak.
“I would have been lucky,” I said quietly. “That’s all.”
Uncle Gabriel had dimples. So did I.
“From now on,” Uncle Gabriel said, “we’re going to be honest with each other. We’re going to share what’s on our minds. Even if we think it’s stupid. Alright?”
“Does that mean I don’t have to go live with Grandma Gives Light?” I asked.
“Where did you get that crazy idea?” Uncle Gabriel asked, bewildered.
“You said you should’ve left me with her,” I mumbled.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Uncle Gabriel explained. “People say things they don’t mean when they’re feeling hurt. I’m sorry, Rafael.”
I felt better.
“Besides,” Uncle Gabriel said, laughing. “You’re turning eighteen in March. I can’t send you anywhere.”
Overlooked (Gives Light Series Book 6) Page 20
