Lifting the Sky (20 page)

“I should've told you,” Shawn said, giving me a sideways look. “This land is protected. The little people guard it. Only the medicine men and their helpers can go into the back country around here.” He touched my arm. “You're shaking again. I've got a jacket in the saddlebag. Want it?”

“I'm not cold,” I said, even though goose bumps ran all up and down my whole body.

“Those wavy lines around some of the drawings, some say they're water, and that those are the water ghosts,” Shawn said. “When people trespass, when they go where they're not supposed to, things happen. I've heard of folks being pulled into the lake by the water ghosts. Sometimes their truck batteries go dead. Or worse, they break a leg or something. Or a huge storm will come up out of nowhere, with black clouds and thunder and lightning.”

“Well, they did a good job of keeping things hidden today. At least the sky's blue and cloudless up here, so let's hope it's a good sign. And I
have
read about places
being guarded by spirits—like the pyramids, right? But those wavy lines…” I paused. “Could they also be auras? Because that's almost the same way I'd draw them….”

Shawn flung me a look. “Lucky you,” he said. He stood upright, held out his hand, and pulled me to my feet. “This isn't a good place to hang around.” He looked at Tivo, who seemed to pick right up on Shawn's thought because he snorted and trotted over.

We rode back along the edge of the mountains the same way we'd come. This time I noticed all the reddish brown beetle-killed trees mixed in with the green ones. I got the impression of trees shrinking into themselves as if each tree flinched away from its neighbors. I wondered,
Do the trees near the dead or dying ones sense that they might be next? Do they somehow know about the deadly beetles?

After a while we stopped. I pushed off Tivo's rump and stood with my hands on my knees, feeling the kinks of not having ridden for a while. We walked, with Shawn holding on to the reins and pointing out places along the cliffs and on the rocky outcrops where he'd already searched. “It's big country,” he said. “I'll probably be old and gray before I stumble across that rainbow.
If
I ever do…”

“You'll find it,” I said. But just looking about, it seemed it would be almost impossible to find something just scratched on a rock. And like he'd said, it might've been erased by the wind and the weather, or been chipped away. Or it might never have even existed. Maybe it was just a story. I mean, if you thought seriously about it, how could it be anything
but
just a story?

Or maybe it was just the search, and the
wanting,
the
yearning
his great-grandmother had known would build in him to do something with the gift of healing she knew he had. I mean, she'd seen auras, hadn't she? So she'd seen that he had that amazing light about him. Because even if he never found the rainbow I felt sure he'd use the gifts he already had.

I stopped in my tracks and screwed up my face. That was it! Shawn couldn't see his own lights. He didn't have any idea that he already had the power. He already could do anything and everything he wanted to do. I wanted to shout,
Why are we searching these hills when the light's already right there inside you? Why are you looking outside for this rainbow?

“What?” Shawn asked huffily.

The words almost shot out of my mouth. The look on his face made me stop. This was
his
quest. He'd invited me along, but for sure he'd never say another word to me about it if I said it might really be only a story.

“Nothing,” I lied. I looked at the ground instead of his face. I walked a few steps and then pointed to a rocky ledge that poked out above some trees. “Have you looked up there?” I asked brightly.

“Yeah. No rainbow, but it'd be a good place to have us a picnic.” He headed toward the trees, tugging Tivo behind him. When he reached the shade of the trees he dropped the reins and pulled a sack out of his saddlebag. He waved for me to follow.

It was way past noon. I hadn't realized how hungry I was. I scrambled after him.

It was an easy climb up a slope covered with fir trees and then up the big outcrop. On top, the perfect picnic spot! We sat on the ledge dangling our legs. Shawn handed me a can of pop and a sandwich. It was cheese, pickle, and baloney. I peeled the baloney out of mine and handed it to him. He smiled and stuffed it into his sandwich. For the longest time we sat eating and staring out at the huge landscape.

Little dots far below would be cows. I could see where Far Canyon Ranch was, though the buildings were hidden by trees and the hills. To the east of the ranch, maybe two miles from Far Canyon as the crow flies, another ranch huddled in a valley surrounded by reddish pink hills. No road connected the two places, though tracks wandered off here and there and then lost themselves in sagebrush or gullies. I could barely make out a small house and some sheds and a barn. A bright blue truck stood out among rust-colored trucks that looked as if they'd melted into and belonged to the landscape.

“My grandma's place,” Shawn said.

I nodded. The silence around us seemed too big for words. We sat for a long time not talking.

“My people say that when we talk we can't hear the earth,” Shawn finally said.

It seemed a good time to ask. “Your people,” I said. “You never told me what tribe you belong to. I mean, if
it's okay to ask …,” I stammered, wondering if that was the kind of question you didn't ask, like asking a rancher how many cows he had, or how big his place was.

Shawn answered with a smile. “I'm Shoshone, Arapaho, and Lakota. And Irish.”

“Well,” I said, “then maybe we're related somewhere. I'm Irish too. And French. Or at least the parts that I know of.”

“I made a mistake,” Shawn said. “A whopper.”

My heart lurched up like it wanted to jump out of my throat. I closed my eyes.
Oh no,
I thought. He's sorry he opened his mouth, sorry he told me anything. Sorry he brought me here…

“I've been thinking a lot about something. Why I said what I did. About not liking white girls.” Shawn broke off a piece of sage, smelled it, and pressed it into my hand.

I buried my nose in it, eyes still clenched closed, not at all sure where his words were leading. All I knew was that my heart had sunk somewhere down close to my feet.

“It's hard to explain,” Shawn went on. “It's a whole lot of things. Like being angry because of stuff that took place long before I was born. Things that happened to my people because the white people came and changed everything. And the fact that the white people will never be able to admit that they live on stolen land. Or that they took our words from us. Our languages. Words are sacred. As sacred as this land.”

I licked my lips nervously. Even after reading all those books about the horrible things that'd been done to the
Indians, I couldn't say, “Yeah, I know how you feel.” No, I didn't. Not really, not deep, deep down where it mattered.

Shawn scattered some of his scraps and we watched as ants came and carried them off. “Sitting here, not talking. That's good. White people seem to talk a lot, maybe to fill up the silence. Like at school, in the lunchroom. We Indian kids sometimes just sit there. Makes the white kids nervous. But we listen and learn what's going on in their heads. Or their hearts.”

I managed a twisted smile.

“But with you, it's different,” Shawn went on. He bent toward me. “It's like we're on the same wavelength. So I apologize. I made a mistake. You're white, and I like you, so maybe I do like white girls. Maybe I've got to learn to give people a chance and not judge them, the same way I don't want to be judged.”

Somewhere, down by my feet, I could feel my heart picking itself up and dusting itself off. Feel it climbing back up to my chest, where it swelled out so big I had to take a huge breath to hold it. I looked at Shawn and he looked back at me. We stayed like that for a long time. More than anything I wanted him to bend forward and kiss me.

But he didn't. Instead, he dumped the crumbs out of the sack for the ants to gobble up, and then scrambled to his feet. He put out his hand, but I'd already jumped up and started back down the outcrop. He followed. At the foot of the outcrop Tivo neighed and trotted over to Shawn, who mounted and pulled me up behind him. This time I held on with my fingers barely touching his T-shirt.

We climbed into and out of a gully, and on the top of a ridge we stopped.

Shawn was the first to speak. He pointed toward a pink cliff where a rocky landslide showed up as a gray mass of rocks. “It's there, the other place where you said the ley lines met up,” he said. “I was going to take you there, but it's getting too late.”

I shielded my eyes with my hands, trying to remember exactly where the star of light had met up. If only I'd seen them more than just once!

“I told you there's a cave near there,” Shawn said. “You have to come to it from above or you'll miss it. A creek runs down and into the cave, but it's just a trickle by midsummer. Some people go there to have them a vision. My grandma always told me to stay away from caves, which isn't hard because I think caves are spooky anyway. But if the lines you saw met up there, maybe there's more to that spot than I thought.”

I wanted to say,
Hey, let's go check it out. I'm not afraid of the dark because I always can see my own light.
But I swallowed the words. No boy I'd ever known appreciated a girl telling him
she
wasn't afraid of the dark.

“Some other time, then” is what I said instead. “You're right. It's getting late, and my mom's probably starting to worry.”

We weren't far from the ranch. Tivo carried us back across the tabletop of hills to the creek, through the tangle of berry bushes, and up the hill above the bowl-shaped valley. There I told Shawn to leave me.

I slipped off Tivo's rump and reached up my hand to Shawn. He bent and grabbed hold of my fingers. I could feel my heart thumping and everything suddenly went blurry. I tried to focus my eyes. He was just a dumpy kid on a horse. No. He was a pillar of blazing light floating on top of a dimly glowing, tired horse.

You're something else,
I wanted to say.
Whatever it is that you're going to be, I'd like to be in on it.

“Yo,
ni hinch
,” Shawn said. “Catch you next time, my friend.”

I couldn't talk. I just swallowed, squeezed his hand, and nodded.

My head whirled. If my thoughts had been whisked in a blender they couldn't have been more mixed up. I climbed up the back side of my hill, over the rocky ledge, and headed straight to my tree. I leaned against its shaggy trunk and gave it a hug. Its bark felt cool on my face. I picked up a stone and closed my eyes. For the first time I didn't even think about wishing for my dad to come back.

Instead, I tucked the stone into a branch and sent out a prayer for Shawn that the rainbow really existed. And that he'd find it.

I loped down the hill to the house. It wasn't till I rounded the corner that I saw the dusty brown pickup parked alongside of Ol' Yeller. I stared at the license plate. Who'd we know from Montana? I walked into the mud-room and stopped at the kitchen door. Put my ear to it. My heart thumped so loudly I could hardly hear the man's voice. Was it—no, it couldn't be. My dad?

“It wasn't my fault,” the man was saying. “You hid your trail as good as someone brushing their tracks with a broom.”

“I waited,” my mom's soft voice replied. “I couldn't believe you'd walked out on us. Then we got those letters saying you were coming back. Do you know what that did to me when you didn't? What it did to Blue? So I moved on. And on…” There was a long pause. “What'd you expect? You think it's been easy, this life?”

“It wasn't a piece of pie for me either. I was, how do you say it, fed up? Yes. Full to the top with arguments, fights.”

“It was partly the booze,” came my mom's voice, so soft I could hardly hear it. “Your drinking. As well as mine.”

“Well, I'm back. You're still my wife. And our daughter, she's still my little girl.”

I touched the doorknob as if it would bite. Flicked the door open.

I stared at this stranger. His eyebrows met at the top of his nose like a ram getting ready to charge. A scar ran down one cheek, giving him the dashing look of a pirate. He stood so straight he looked as tall as the sky, so tall he could reach up and grab stars, or at least touch the ceiling. How handsome he was—no wonder Mam's insides had turned to mush when he sang for the dudes by the campfire. And yes. His greenish brown eyes and dark reddish brown hair were the same exact colors as mine.

“Bleu?” he asked, making my name sound like a blur and a question.

“Papa?” I said.

“Happy Bastille Day! Your birthday! My little girl! I thought you'd be tall like me, but look at you! You're still small as a mouse.”

I'd already dived into his chest as if it was the deepest ocean, thinking,
I'm home. I'm home. My dad's back after a zillion trillion prayers and wishes.

But when I floated up from that plunge what I felt was pure anger.
How could you?
I wanted to yell.
Why did you do that to us? And by the way,
I wanted to say,
I've grown a whole bunch since you last saw me.
But I just stood there letting the waves continue to wash over me while his big silver belt buckle grated into my side.

Mam's wide eyes told me she'd been as shocked as I was. On the table, on top of a pile of books, lay a bouquet of red roses still in their cellophane wrapper. She turned
and rattled through the kitchen cabinets, holding up a brown pot, then a glass, and then a squatty glass vase. Her nostrils flared as she made a face at the choices. Then she rolled her eyes at the junk on the table. She reminded me of a spooked horse.