Carry

by Toni Jensen

  By the time she’d decapitated her first row of Peeps, I had long since emptied my entire basket into myself, and, yes, I was side-eyeing hers, finding all the hiding places in the room we shared, the one with an actual piece of masking tape down its center. Which is to say, we are sisters, yes—we love each other—but we are not natural-friend sisters. We are not of similar natures. We are foreign to each other in essential ways that are equal parts colorful and jagged.

  IV.

  In the backyard of this summer, my nephew is with his half brother at an uncle’s house in a wealthy suburb of Denver. These young men are many things. My nephew is a biology student, is Métis and Irish and French and African American, is seldom found in his natural habitat without his laptop and its intricate online world of fantasy games; his brother is a high school student, is of similar descent, minus the Métis, is interested in basketball and travel and the outdoors. But in the language of this, our America, in this, our summer of guns, they are Black. They are Black boys by a private lake. Never mind they are here to fish, are holding fishing poles. Never mind they’ve been invited.

  The day passes into late afternoon when the baby monitor the uncle has been holding erupts with the sounds of the younger, inside children awaking from their naps. He goes to tend them, leaving my nephew and his brother alone to fish.

  When the neighbor sees them there, at the edge of her manicured lawn, waterside, she goes into her house and brings down her gun. She crosses the space of the lawn with it in front of her body, in the position we refer to as drawn—as in how is the scene drawn? Is the light just right? How is the timbre of her voice when she demands to know who they are and what they think they are doing, these boys? Who the fuck are they, who the fuck, who the fuck?

  David, the brother, keeps repeating his name. “I’m David,” he says, “I’m David.”

  His voice, his voice. I don’t know how to report this. I don’t. My nephew stands next to him, silent.

  Here is the thing about my sister’s children, my nephew and my niece: if my sister’s and my childhood is of the B-grade, family-saga variety, her children’s includes moments that rival a horror movie. The children’s father behaves as if he were a minor cult leader. Their childhood featured all the requisite trauma you can imagine and some you can’t. The curtains in their house were drawn against daylight, against prying eyes, because the world was going to end and their enemies lurked, and don’t tell anyone what goes on inside this house, or the bad men will come, and the bad men will take you away.

  But the bad men, of course, were already inside. It is the truth of this violence we call domestic that the bad men already are inside.

  In the backyard, near the woman and her gun, where the uncle has abandoned it, the baby monitor comes alive. Webster’s defines its crackle and hum as salvation. The uncle hears David repeating his name, hears the woman, her who-the-fucks. The uncle, though white and of privilege, he loves these boys. He shouts down his neighbor from inside the house, he leaves the house and crosses through the double doors, he crosses the lawn under the late afternoon sky at a run.

  No one calls the police, after. Headline after headline delivers the stories of Black men and teens and boys falsely arrested by police, shot by police, killed by police. If quantifying helps makes this clearer, statistician Patrick Ball in his report in Granta found that police are responsible for almost a third of all homicides committed by strangers.

  I am interested in the sociopolitical, familial, and geographic boundaries of this story, of our language, of our storytelling. If the lake is adjacent to but not located in the uncle’s backyard, is this considered a domestic space? How close does a relative have to be in order for a crime to be domestic?

  Does a domestic-violence bullet enter the body and exit differently than a regular bullet? What is an irregular bullet? If the move toward the language of domesticity is a lessening, a demoting of sorts, then what is the language of violence about race? An escalation? A shout to the whisper of the domestic?

  Don’t mistake me—I am not advocating here for more whispering. We have all of us been quiet too long and at such cost. I am asking for a shift in language that allows us to consider the intersections between these types of violence we hold separate—to consider them not so much as intersections, as places of sharp corners, but, rather, as places that exist most often in the actual, in the physical, in the soft bodies of our children, of ourselves.

  Here is the thing about domestic abusers: they don’t quarantine themselves—they to and fro. They leave their domiciles at regular intervals. They go to the nightclub in Orlando; they go to the concert in Las Vegas; they go to the elementary school in Newtown; they go to all the places in between—they take down their guns and go.

  V.

  When I call my sister again nearly two years later, I am fact-checking. I’m asking how this day, this moment is or has been affecting my nephew and his brother. “You’re writing about this?” she says. She says my nephew’s name then, twice, with a long pause in between naming. “It was just David,” she says. She says my nephew’s name again like she’d like to kill me with it, like how dare you. “He was never there,” she says. “Why did you think that?”

  “Everyone’s moved on,” she says. “Everyone’s fine.”

  I tell her I’m not naming the half brother by his given name, which is distinctive. I tell her I’m making him “David.”

  “Tell it to me, again,” I say. “Tell the story to me again. I’m listening.”

  She is all of a sudden very busy. She has another call. She will talk with me soon. She will. She hangs up the phone as I say “okay,” as I say “goodbye.” It is an hour or more before it occurs to me she doesn’t have a landline, only the one phone, the cellphone on which we were speaking.

  Outside, in my backyard, I watch the lone hawk swoop and dive over the field. The clouds over him grow darker and darker, but I know if rain were imminent, he’d have gone back to his tree. I know only this little bit about the behavior of hawks. I know even less, perhaps, about the behavior of sisters.

  VI.

  In my childhood, the sky over the trapline is an early morning sky, still navy dark against the winter white below. Being a bad Métis involves not being able to follow tracks, to identify tracks. See also: dawdling waterside to look at the sky or the ice that forms on the pond. See also: falling into holes. For the uninitiated, traps are checked pre-dawn or at dawn and then again at dusk. For the uninitiated, girls aren’t the usual companions of their fathers on traplines, but no son is old enough yet for the trapline. Before her brother is born, the girl is named for a great-grandfather, Anton, and is raised to do the outside work while the sister stays inside. A brother will be born when the girl is nine years old, so the day she falls into the hole, she must be no older than ten or eleven years old. Because as a grown person she has a daughter who’s twelve, let’s make this girl at the trapline nine or ten. She’s not twelve years old. She’s not.

  They’re at the trapline, the girl and her father, because it’s trapping season. They’re at the trapline because the bottom won’t fall out of the fur market until later in the eighties. This day, a mink pelt still will fetch $24; a raccoon, $34; a coyote, $47; a river otter, nearly $80. They catch more muskrat, for $6 per pelt, than anything else, which seems unfair, given how the effort expended is equal. Beaver pelts sell for almost $35, but a beaver also is difficult—prone to thrashing and lunging with those sharp teeth, if the trap hasn’t pulled it under, if it’s not been drowned. So I imagine that day they’re hoping both for and against catching a beaver.

  The hole the girl steps in, it’s deep and narrow, a post hole most likely, and, yes, she is looking up, not down. One minute she has both feet on land, the next, right leg on land, left leg under, caught. The girl is up past her knee in under, in stuck. Her father is ahead, moving toward the reeds at the
pond’s edge.

  Here is the thing about checking traps with her father. It is the only time she’s with him alone. It’s the only time she’s with him alone when he’s taken one of his guns down from the high shelf. A pistol or a shotgun, depending on the traps they’ve set together, depending on what he’s expecting to catch. And she knows better than to yell, but what else? The birds are bringing their morning songs, and the sky is shifting from navy to the pale blue it later will be.

  When her father turns, the look on his face is one of deciding. He returns to her, crosses the ground, and she feels a measure of relief but also of dread. When he reaches her, instead of offering a hand, he uses one hand to steady the gun, a pistol this day, the gun at his side, and he uses the other to touch the girl’s hair as he says, “Maybe you’ll learn something once,” then turns away.

  It’s not yet light, not all the way, when he rounds the pond’s edge to check the other traps, all of them, one by one. He moves his body clockwise around the pond and checks and checks.

  Here is the thing about waiting: it makes her patient, then impatient, then resourceful, even if she’d rather not be. There is a stick and she can reach it, just, and there is room for it in the hole, just, and she can wedge and shimmy. She can wedge and shimmy and free her leg. When she loses her boot down there, the stick works to retrieve it, though this takes some time, and now her hands are stiff, and the sun is up, and there is full light on the snow crust.

  Here is the thing about ice-cold water—it is good for ankle sprains. She doesn’t have to lean on anybody else to get to the pickup. She has that stick. She has her boot, which is back on her swelling foot.

  When she reaches the truck, her father has been in it long enough for it to have grown warm. Before she enters, she uses her stiff hands to break the stick into three distinct pieces, to throw them out to the snow. She takes her time with this process. Though the pieces do not go far enough to make the act satisfying, it helps her quiet herself, and so the drive back to town is a quiet drive under an all-blue sky.

  At the house, the domicile, the sister stands on the back porch with a plate of cookies she has made. The birds are in the trees, not offering much by way of color or song.

  The cookies, chocolate chip, are already wrapped in cellophane the sister has crimped tidy at the edges. The sister has been waiting for the father to return, so he can take her to an aunt’s house, to deliver the plate. Her face holds its impatience at a distance, almost.

  When the girl reaches the bottom step, the sister moves the plate to shoulder level, to where it is out of the girl’s reach. But, then, the girl takes the last steps, closes the distance, and the sister sees her face, and she reads the morning there—she reads it correctly. She brings down the plate and begins the slow and careful work of peeling back the plastic, of selecting. She offers to the girl the smallest of the possible cookies, and the girl takes it, and it is still warm, it is still soft.

  Give and Go

  I.

  The winter I turn ten, men come to my childhood home and lift it. One moment, the front door rests, hinged and ordinary. The next, it levitates, a portal for birds only. That cold, bright morning, I dribble the sidewalk out in front of our house in Brayton. It’s early morning, the neighbors in their houses awaken one by one to hear the sparrows screech in rhythm with the metal cranes, the whir and grind, the shouts of the men, directing flight.

  I have taken from my house the necessary things: my high-tops and teddy bear, my basketball. I imagine my mother has taken her cigarettes, my father, his guns. I dribble the sidewalk, shaking my bowl haircut side to side in disbelief until my mother threatens the ball and sends me to the street. My mother cut my pretty hair because I would not stop sneaking gum from her purse. I’d fall asleep with it tucked in the pouch of my cheek like a common squirrel. My mouth needed the gum, of course, the way hers needed her cigarettes, to work and worry, to keep the words in.

  She’d been Catholic before my father. She might have had worry beads, a rosary like her sister. But the priest saw my father, my five dark uncles, and declared the whole lot unfit to attend the wedding unless they converted en masse. The point or points scored after a touchdown in a football game are Webster’s fourth definition for the word conversion. But in our family this definition is primary.

  We cheer for our high school team, the Vikings. We cheer for the college team, the Hawkeyes. We cheer for the regional NFL teams, the Vikings and sometimes the Chiefs, whose fans perform an act they call “the tomahawk chop,” who wear red face, who perform limp imitation war whoops.

  For a time, we cheer, out of region and place, for the San Diego Chargers because my mother’s cousin Jack Pardee is their defensive coordinator. When cousin Jack is the head coach of the team from Washington, we cheer for them, this team whose fight song lyrics include “Braves on the Warpath!” The team from Washington has fans that tomahawk chop like the Chiefs. They put on red face and whoop. They wear dark wigs with single braids made from stiff synthetics that have more in common with plastic than with actual human hair.

  Their team jackets, though, are shiny like silk, like the darkest red silk. On the back, each jacket features a profile of America’s idea of a Native man. The team jackets are made of satin or sateen fabric, and I so very much want one—to hold and run my fingers over again and again and again, and then to hang in my closet. I don’t imagine myself wearing it. I can’t. The man on the back looks enough like my father to inspire mixed feelings. The tomahawk chop, the war whooping also make me feel strange. And everyone in my household, everyone in my town, worships at the altar of football.

  My sister on her birthdays wishes for dolls and fabric for sewing, but already, at eight or nine, I have my own Sports Illustrated subscription, which was the only item on my birthday wish list. Already, I know which defense a team is running—what a left tackle does, if a center varies the snap count and why, the difference between a wide receiver and a tight end. I know the role of each part of the holy trinity—offense, defense, special teams. I get attention for knowing—high fives from my father, low chuckles from my uncles. When we sit in the bleachers or in front of the television on Sundays, everyone shouts, but no one shouts in anger.

  My mixed feelings then are very mixed feelings. They also are personal, are feelings I know to keep to myself. There is no cultural currency for saying them out loud. I chew them away with the gum stolen from my mother’s purse.

  But this cold levitation morning, I have my basketball. I dribble the street, blow improbable bubbles, try to keep the popping mess off my glasses, my hands, my short hair, the ball.

  Our house is mostly white, a foursquare made of two stories. Its foundation has begun a tilt back to earth my mother hopes these men can right. If all inside our house is going to fail and fall, the outside, at least, can be made level.

  From the sidewalk before me, my mother shakes her pack, Virginia Slims Menthols, and together but apart, we watch the levitation of our house through her smoke. There rises the living room television, altar to Sunday football. There the brown shag where the children sit, the plaid couch for the parents. There, the site of our everyday violence turned each Sunday toward another target, unified, collective.

  Beyond, the bathroom, where my father tries every so often to drown my mother. Beyond, the first guns of what will become his collection. Beyond, the dining room table from which my father and I will rise when I’m fourteen, when he lays hands on me in a way never to be made right.

  My father is Métis, my father is all motion, my father teaches me about football, about the trapline. He teaches me about violence and destruction and despair. I grow up to teach my daughter some but not all, not all.

  We are levitating the house so we can sell it, so we can move a few miles up the highway to the bigger town, Exira. Instead of a hundred or so people, this town holds almost a t
housand. It holds my best girlfriend and basketball practice; it holds the library and school playground where the hoop has a net. This levitation is step one of the salvation miracle. And this morning, I want so very much to be saved.

  A few miles down Highway 71, kitty-corner from our non-Catholic church, sits the elementary school gym, where practice soon will be under way. When I arrive later that morning, I watch my best girlfriend from the doorway as she shoots free throws too hard, slamming the ball off the backboard and rim, missing on purpose so she can chase down the ball and lay it up.

  Webster’s defines this move, normally done with two people, as the give-and-go, “a play in which a player passes to a teammate and immediately cuts toward the net or goal to receive a return pass.” I am the usual passer. In my absence, she’s performing a sort of singular give-and-go.

  Her dark blond hair is cut short. She will have, then and always, wide shoulders and sharp cheekbones and such explosive stop-and-go power.

  Before we lose her, she will run track in the Junior Olympics. Her times will be close to qualifying her for the regular Olympics. Before we lose her, she will start with drinking and graduate to pills and return to drinking. Before we lose her, she will travel the world playing for the American Basketball League. Before we lose her, she will be the one I tell about my father, about what goes on inside our house. Before we lose her, she will be part and parcel of how I leave this place, and I will be complicit in how she does not. Before we lose her, I will be one of the first to take her to a party, to hand her a glass.

  What does it mean to be unified, collective? What does it mean to remove yourself from a trinity, a family, a friendship? What does it mean to memorialize the dead? What does it mean to be present for the living?

  When my best girlfriend and I are young, I ride my bicycle beside her on her training runs. I run and compete, too, sometimes in the same races, but this is how fast she is: I need the bicycle. We talk as we move, and the jokes she likes best are wordplay jokes. We trade them and laugh and keep pace up the hills and fly down. We trade them in the gym as she shoots and I rebound, and we start again.