“Were you scared?” Dakota said.
“Oh yeah. When someone points a gun at you, don’t matter who you are, you look the grim reaper in the eye. In this case I figured the guy was either gonna shoot me or, more likely, call the cops and make me wait for my own arrest.”
Dakota shook her head, eyes alive. “I can’t even imagine it.”
“Yeah, but it worked out. We got to talking and Floyd was impressed with my process. He asked me if anyone had ever caught me before. I said no, first time. Turns out Floyd’s pretty much an insomniac. He was in prison once, long time ago, for dealing dope, when his cellmate tried to strangle him in his sleep. Nearly succeeded, too. Floyd woke up to the fucker, two hundred pounds, with his hands around Floyd’s throat, a crazed look in his eyes. Floyd was just lucky a guard walked by needing a piss.”
Dakota grimaced. “That’s terrifying. It’s no wonder he can’t sleep.”
Eddie nodded. “It was a wake-up call for me too. At some point someone else was gonna wake up and catch me, see my face. Or shoot me. So when Floyd said he had a job going, needed a guy could keep his cool, I jumped on it.”
Dakota sipped her drink and slid a little closer to him on the seat. “What was the job?”
“A jewelry store. My first. Which would mean armed robbery. I was graduating. We did a few more jewelry stores after that, Floyd and Sawyer doing it as a side thing, Saul not knowing about it. I wasn’t working for him yet. Which brings me to what I was originally trying to say: Sawyer’s driving. The last place we robbed the shit hit the fan. Up until then all the robberies had been easy, not a hitch, and we got cocky, sloppy. We had previously agreed not to rob a place if there was more than a couple customers inside, or if the street outside was busy, so we did the robberies early in the morning, just after the places opened. But this time we got held up because of an accident on I-5. Bumper to bumper for hours. We should’ve called it off, done it another day, but like I said, we’d gotten cocky. A couple cops were in the area when someone on the street who’d seen it happen ran into them. The cops caught us coming out, started shooting at us. I felt a bullet go past my ear. Eventually we made it into the car and Sawyer did his thing. You have to understand that, until then, we’d never had much need for Sawyer. We cruised away slowly from the robberies before then. So, in a way, I guess he was proving his worth. And prove it he did. By the time we got away from the jewelry store we had half the fuckin’ police force after us. Even a helicopter. But Sawyer got us away from them all without breaking a sweat. After that I swore no more armed robberies, or any kind of robberies. I don’t want to be shot at by cops. And I don’t want to shoot some poor cop either, his family at home. Didn’t fire a single shot that day.”
Dakota was still staring at him, a glimmer in her gaze. “Eddie Vegas, there’s a lot more to you than meets the eye.”
He smiled, enjoying the way she was looking at him. “It’s like anything, you get used to it pretty quick.”
She inched closer to him. “Have you ever had to shoot somebody?” The scent of sweet cherry vodka on her breath.
He looked at the floor. “Yeah.”
He felt her hand on his thigh and glanced up, saw the hunger in her eyes. But the face of the dead girl popped up in front of him, her eyes frozen open, mouth a gaping hole. Now the dead girl’s face became Dakota’s face, swimming in his vision with those eyes open wide, dead but forever afraid. He felt the drinks coming back up.
“You feeling okay?” Dakota said.
“Yeah, yeah, just need some water.” He picked up the glass of water on the table he’d not yet touched and sipped from it.
“Want to lie down? We can go up the room?” Her hand inched toward his crotch.
He felt better. “That sounds perfect.”
Her face was close to his, lips red and glistening. He moved his mouth toward hers and kissed her, gently at first, then putting more into it, his hand sliding up her leg.
Actually, he felt pretty fucking great.
9 | Dakota’s Tale
Floyd returned to consciousness as the cowboy flung a knife toward the door of the motel room. Floyd tried to twist to see but he was tied too tightly to the bedpost and had little strength left. The sound of a struggle ensued, and of a body thumping against the floor.
The cowboy returned and bent over Floyd and wrenched the knife from his chest. Blinding agony screamed through Floyd’s bones and erupted out his mouth. The shooter charged the cowboy but the cowboy had expected it and swung an elbow behind him. The shooter dropped onto the floor before Floyd recognized him as Sawyer, who was squinting up at him now, bright blood streaming from his nostrils while the cowboy strolled toward the door, one hand casually adjusting his hat, and disappeared into the parking lot.
Sawyer crawled toward his gun five feet away and grabbed it and pulled himself to his feet. He staggered toward the doorway as a vehicle screeched in the parking lot. He raised the gun in the doorway but soon lowered it again, the sound of the vehicle fading.
Sawyer shoved the pistol into his pants and crouched before Floyd.
“You okay?” he said.
“Do I look okay to you? The hell took you? Motherfucker was two seconds from killing me.”
Sawyer worked at the knot. “Who is he? He’s faster than the devil. Knocked the gun outta my hand before I could get a clean shot.”
Floyd shook his head. “Later. Just get me to a hospital, I’m bleeding like a bitch.”
Sawyer undid the knot and Floyd’s shoulders slumped forward and Sawyer had to catch him before he hit the floor. Sawyer pushed Floyd upright and recoiled, then quickly attempted to hide this reaction.
“It’s not my piss you fuckin’ idiot,” Floyd said. “That redneck, he …” Floyd looked away.
“Hey, it’s okay, you were tied up, there was nothing you could do …”
Floyd felt his eyes well up and couldn’t stop it. “I thought I was dead, man. I thought I was fuckin’ dead …”
“I know.” Sawyer gripped Floyd’s shoulder. “But you’re not, you’re alive.”
Floyd gazed into Sawyer’s eyes, thoughts of pulling him in close swarming his mind. Sawyer touched Floyd’s cheek.
Floyd remembered the tears on his face and felt ashamed.
“Get me the fuck outta here, will you?” he said. “I’mma ’bout to pass out.”
Sawyer helped Floyd to his feet, Floyd draping a throbbing arm over his neck, and together they shuffled toward the S.U.V.
“And don’t say a word ’bout that later,” Floyd said.
“About what?”
“Exactly.”
At last Eddie understood why they called it “making love.” Until now he’d only been having sex, and, my oh my, what he had been missing.
Dakota lay nude across him, her small breasts pressing into his chest, warm and firm, a look in her eyes he hadn’t seen before: peaceful, relaxed—maybe even content. Why not? He felt pretty damn content himself.
“I don’t know how people can hurt each other after doing something like that,” she said. “But we do.”
“I’d never hurt you.”
“I believe you, Eddie Vegas.”
They lay there in the serenity of the hotel room for a minute.
“Dakota, it occurs to me that while you know a lot about me, I know nothing about you.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Jesus, where to begin.”
“The first question that pops into your head.”
“Are you Native American?”
“Funny that would be the first thing you’d ask.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because what does it matter? It’s so superficial. But of course it matters. It always matters.”
Eddie slid backwards and sat up against the headboard. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“It’s okay. Yes, I am Native American, of the Oglala Tribe of South Dakota.”
“Your name …”
�
�It’s just a name. It reminds me of where I’m from.”
“So what’s your real name?”
“What does it matter? It’s just another name.” Holding back on him now.
“Okay. Who, exactly, are you looking for here in L.A.?”
She leaned a hand on his chest and sat up.
“My sister.”
“Oh.”
“But we were never close. We’re half-sisters, technically, sharing our mother. Until a few months ago, I hadn’t heard from Kaya in over two years. Since she left the reservation.”
Eddie watched her gazing deeply into her memories and waited for her to continue.
“For you to understand why I came here, now, to find her, you need to know more about her life. Our life.”
“I’m listening.”
Dakota sighed with a weariness far beyond her years and sat upright next to Eddie. “I don’t know …”
“Come on, I want to know. Please.” He held her hand.
“Okay.” She appeared to concentrate for a moment.
“Kaya and I grew up in Pine Ridge Reservation. She’s younger than me. My father, Oglala like my mother, killed himself shortly after Kaya was born. He didn’t leave a note but everyone knew it was because he couldn’t live with the shame of my mother giving birth to a wasicu child—a white child. You see, my mother was raped by a wasicu. I never knew for sure who but I have reason to believe it was one of the F.B.I. agents investigating the murder of a white girl from Rapid City. Kaya, although half Oglala, is white. We look alike in subtle ways if you look closely enough, but to the reservation she was wasicu, and they never let her forget it. Kaya was born with the curse of the half-blood: two halves that can’t make a whole.”
Dakota let go of his hand and made a fist with it, her gaze on something far away.
“I didn’t treat her any better. I was Oglala like the other kids, trying to survive in that terrible place, and being accepted is a large part of how you do it. More than that, though, as I grew older I came more and more to blame Kaya for my father’s death. My father, like many of us, lived a life of abuse and neglect from his first breath. But he was a soft, gentle man, full of love, and one of the few who had managed to avoid the bottle. He made me feel safe. I think his presence in my life, even for what little I had of it, is a big part of the reason I coped better than most of the other kids. Better than Kaya. By the time I began to understand the complexities of trauma through generations, as well as the powerlessness an Oglala man would feel by his wife being raped by a wasicu, and then having to rear that man’s child—because he would have loved that child like his own, and he knew that—well, by then it was too late and the damage had been done to Kaya, to our relationship. I—”
Dakota’s voice broke and she lowered her head, one hand wiping at her eye.
“I could have been there for her, like a big sister should be. Kaya had no one. Our mother had been losing her mind steadily ever since my father died, and Kaya was picked on by everybody her whole life. She had the most difficult life of anyone I’ve ever known. Then one day, at seventeen years old, she left the reservation and I never heard from her again—until six months ago.”
Eddie squeezed her shoulder. “Shit, I don’t know what to say.”
Dakota wiped her eyes. “It gets worse. When she left, Kaya left a note on my pillow. In the note she made a list of all the times she’d ever been raped. Beside each was a name and a date. There were four names, but over a hundred entries.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“The first was dated November seven, two thousand and six.”
Dakota looked at Eddie. Her expression was of the most haunting sadness he’d ever seen.
“Eddie, that would make her seven years old.”
“Oh my god.” He felt sick.
Dakota slipped her hand around his. “She signed the note, ‘Your sister, the wasicu of the Oglala Tribe,’ and when I read that I cried and cried and cried. For days I cried. All the trauma I had repressed, hers and mine, came out in a torrent of tears. She wrote nothing of where she was going, just that she would never return. I had lost my sister, the only family I had, our mother long dead by then.”
“But then she contacted you.”
“Out of the blue, yeah. I had thought about trying to find her but I had no idea how. Where to even begin? She could have been anywhere. I walked the four miles to the nearest post office every day, hoping for a letter. Then, one day, almost two years later, it came. Kaya wrote that she was living in Los Angeles and doing well. She worked as a dancer at a club called the Pink Room and made good money, had even met a man there who treated her well and wanted her to live with him whenever he was in town. I sensed something not quite right with that part but I was just so glad to hear from her. She even wrote that she missed me and hoped that, in time, we could learn to be sisters. There was no mention of me coming to see her, and no return address, but for the first time in a long time, maybe my whole life, I felt hope.
“So, I bided my time and waited for the letter that would ask me to come see her, all the while thinking about how I could raise enough cash to get to L.A. But no more letters came. Eventually I couldn’t wait any longer. I arrived in L.A. five days ago to discover that Kaya had quit working at that place over four months ago. I had no money and wanted to talk to the staff about her, so I asked for a job. They gave me one and I started working there the next day. Then you showed up.”
Eddie let her story settle.
“So you lived on a reservation your whole life?” he said.
“I’d make trips into nearby cities with friends sometimes when we got older, but yes.”
He thought about the wording of what he wanted to ask her. “Then how come you don’t seem like you’re from a reservation?” Still fucked it up.
She let it go. “I think that’s because, in my mind, I never was. I always wanted to get away, live a different life. Some of my friends left, the ones who didn’t become slaves to drugs. Even if Kaya hadn’t left first, I probably would have, one day. At least that’s what I told myself.”
“But you don’t sound Native American. You don’t even sound like you’re from South Dakota. You have an accent but it’s … kind of weird, to be honest, hard to place. And the way you speak is—”
“Like I’m from here?”
“Exactly.”
She smiled. “When I was fourteen, one of the older boys stole electronics from Rapid City. Cell phones, TVs, computers. We had a little TV at home but the coverage was awful and we got nothing good. He said he’d give me a D.V.D. player he stole in return for letting him see me naked. So I did.”
“You let him?”
“It was a good deal, and he was one of the nicer, gentler boys. I felt I could handle him. I mean, I was fourteen and grew up watching the women around me being exploited. I felt like a grown woman doing some smart business for herself.”
“And was it … okay?”
“Yeah, he just sat and jerked off, then left without saying a word. An hour later the D.V.D. player was on our doorstep.”
“Okay …”
Dakota pinched his cheek. “I know you find that confusing. The first night I came here I looked up lots of articles on Native Americans, Pine Ridge, other reservations. One article said that ninety-four percent of Native American women living in Seattle that they had surveyed claimed they had been raped or coerced into sex. Native American women are two and a half times more likely to be raped than any other ethnic minority in the United States. I once overheard a family friend ask my mother for advice. She said, ‘What do I tell my daughter when she is raped?’ When. Not if. Trust me, I got away lightly. Not like Kaya …”
“That’s totally fucked-up. I had no idea.”
“This terrible legacy of colonization and genocide and inherited trauma has devalued us even to ourselves, destroyed our communities. Sometimes I think beyond saving …” She gazed at the floor, seeing something else.
Edd
ie became aware again of her incredible beauty and felt an urge to kiss her, and did. She still tasted of cherry.
“So you got a D.V.D. player,” he said, prompting her.
“Yeah, and that’s when my whole world changed. I started borrowing D.V.D.s from Oglala Lakota College, a small tribal college on the reservation. They had a little library. The D.V.D. collection was small, mostly donations, but I didn’t care. I loved every single one I got my hands on. I would watch the movies over and over, knowing every word. I’d repeat the lines the characters would say and try to say it like them. When I was a bit older I got a membership at the library in Rapid City and borrowed as many D.V.D.s as they’d let me every few weeks, hitching a ride there with someone who had a car and was making a trip up anyway. One of my favorites was Thelma & Louise. I’d stand in front of the mirror pretending I was Louise rescuing Thelma from the man trying to rape her and say, ‘You let her go you fuckin’ asshole or I’m gonna splatter your ugly face all over this nice car.’”
Dakota had put on a Southern accent when she said it, giggling now into her hands. “I liked to pretend to be the badass women I saw in some of the movies, women who don’t let anybody mess them around or tell them what to do. When I saw Kill Bill I jumped around the room with an imaginary sword in my hands while Uma Thurman sliced up a million bad guys. I’d been a huge fan of hers since I saw Pulp Fiction, which was my favorite movie until then, but after Kill Bill, I was in love.”
“Pulp Fiction, you have that shirt—”
“Yes, although—” she shot Eddie an exaggerated look of guilt—“I stole that shirt, plus pretty much all my other clothes, from stores here in L.A. I had to, I didn’t have much else, and I wanted to look like I fit in, especially for when I see Kaya.”
“You’re pretty badass, Dakota.”
“I’m glad something rubbed off. I watched all those movies for years and tried to talk the way they talked. Not just that, I wanted to think like them, move like them—I wanted to be them. And when I arrived here, the home of all these movies and actors and that whole world, I think a part of me did become them. I’m not the same person who left Pine Ridge a week ago, Eddie.”
Nobody Move Page 9
