Given World (5 page)

I pushed on the gutter with my heels, in a hurry to get up and away, but the gutter came loose, and then bent, and came looser, and instead of sliding up the roof backward, I was sliding down. I tried to hold on to the shingles, but there was nothing to grab.

“Crap,” I said to myself. And just like that, I was airborne again.

It was nothing like flying, even from that height. I landed on my back, again, but with my arms straight out this time like scrawny, useless wings, and all the wind knocked out of me. It hurt a lot worse than the first time, all on one side, and as soon as I started to breathe again, I tried to stop. Mick was kneeling over me, blood from the cut on his forehead dripping onto my neck and chest, and he was telling me I had to do it, had to breathe, had to stay still. He kept wiping the blood off, saying, “It’s going to be okay.”

I wanted to say I was sorry, but couldn’t get the words out. He pushed the bangs off my forehead. He said, “Hang on, Riley. Hang on. I’ve got you.”

A helicopter came, and they strapped me to a canvas stretcher to lift me up and into it; I held on and didn’t make any noise. They flew me to the hospital in Glasgow and my mom came along. Dad and Mick drove over.

I remember a bright, cold light, and starting to count backward from a hundred. Then a thick bandage, wrapped completely around my middle. They were all standing around my bed.

I said, “Hi,” and tried to think back. I pressed on the bandage, to see if I could figure out where the pain was coming from. “What happened?”

Mick told me. Twenty-five feet. Three broken ribs and a punctured lung. I thought he was making it up. “I fell? Again?”

“Yup.” He nodded. He looked proud. “And this time you bounced.”

A few fuzzy seconds went by. “You didn’t know I could do that, did you?”

“Nope. I sure didn’t. You’re a clever girl.” There was a small piece of gauze taped to his forehead. I reached for it, and he leaned down so I could touch it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hit you.”

He said, “Sure you did.” And if he smiled, it meant that he forgave me. It meant there was no way he’d move away from home because his kid sister was rotten, not very bright, and a pain in the ass. No way.

Mom looked tired, and something else I couldn’t read. Trapped, maybe. Ready to run. But I knew that couldn’t be right. They all kept going in and out of focus. Dad stood at the end of the bed and held both my feet under the covers in his warm, rough hands.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t have a choice.

No one had to teach me to love the morphine, the way it dropped me into a warm pool of amber-colored light and forgetting. For a long time there was no clear boundary between what was real and where the shots took me. Mick and my folks came to visit as often as they could, and Mom stayed over sometimes, and sometimes I knew who was actually there.

After Mick came to say he was leaving, it was easy to believe it was a dream, that he’d changed his mind and wasn’t going anywhere. I could believe I’d grown hawk wings and could fly, so falling wouldn’t be a problem anymore. With the shots, I could believe all of it. I could believe whatever I wanted to.

S
he had a real name, but Darrell didn’t know it yet. Not that it mattered. He’d looked for her a few times—trying to stay inconspicuous, which wasn’t necessarily easy if you were so obviously rez-bred—and finally there she was, sort of like he remembered, sort of like someone he’d never laid eyes on.

It had rained, and stopped, and now a flimsy rainbow arced over the small town just south, more stretch of the imagination (the rainbow, although the same could be said for the town) than something you’d believe could harbor a flock of happy little bluebirds. And she wasn’t anywhere near the end of it. He couldn’t picture her in a fairy tale of any sort anyway—little hippie white girl with crazy green eyes, a pocketful of peyote, and a secret. Untamed and intangible. He wanted to know if he’d made her up, or if maybe the whole thing wasn’t just some sort of contact high.

Classes were over, the school yard was empty and she was alone, pacing around the buckled asphalt basketball court with her head down, chin almost touching her chest, setting one foot in front of the other heel-to-toe through the puddles, barefoot. The slight breeze fanned a broken swing to barely perceptible motion; it dangled by a single chain. Another had been wrapped around the high bar a few times and now hung looped there like a rusty snake with a broken back. The slide tilted to one side, its original red paint barely visible amid all the corroded metal. He stood outside the chain-link fence, which was eight feet high for some old and expired reason he’d bet no one would remember now, but he was so tall and long armed that he could easily rest his hands on the top of it. It couldn’t have been that high to keep anybody in, since it gapped in places and didn’t even have a proper gate. Maybe, he thought, it was there to keep dumb wild things out.

His dark hair kept blowing across his face. He tried a few times to tuck it behind his ear, but the wind would just catch it again, until finally he pulled a rubber band out of his pocket and bound it in a quick braid.

“Hey,” he said, not loud, almost a croak, but she heard. She had just taken a corner and was moving away from where he stood; she stopped but didn’t turn. He wondered if she knew it was him; thought there was a chance she’d remember.

He’d come from his uncle’s house on the reservation, thirty miles away, and the rain he’d hitchhiked through was welcome but early. He knew and everyone else knew it would turn to snow at least once more before the alfalfa and the wheat, the wildflowers and the grass came up again. Before long—and way too soon—the summer dust would cake over the aching green, a color that appeared and disappeared so quickly it was a new revelation every year. Even at three in the afternoon in late April, he was conscious of the sun’s arc in the sky. In what passed for warmth after a six-month-long winter of twenty-belows, he could begin to imagine those full summer days that stayed light until ten; shapes, outlines still discernible ’til midnight this far north on the Montana Hi-Line.

He’d seen her the first time the year before, 1971, in the summer, when her dad’s pickup had broken down taking a shortcut through the rez, coming back from a trip to Great Falls. Darrell knew how the shadows of the fence posts angled across the road on that stretch at that time of day; dead animals stuck fast and flat to the pavement, paws reaching for the borrow pits, caught in a run. The tow truck had taken the girl and her father to a service station just outside the boundary, where she’d sat at the corner of the building in a patch of sun, watching her father as he leaned against the pickup’s fender and smoked cigarettes, quietly shooting the breeze with the mechanic.

Darrell showed up with the new tie-rod from the parts store where he worked, handed it over to the mechanic and had him sign the invoice. He was getting back into his truck when he saw her sitting there, legs akimbo off the sidewalk, shirttail out, jeans cuffed and torn at the knee, ratty beaded moccasins tromped down at the back, long, unruly auburn hair covering half her face or more, sunglasses with blue lenses. By then, she was looking out at the prairie, like she was waiting for someone she knew would be coming along from that direction, not his. He left the truck door open and walked across the lot to where she sat, and then stood a little off to the side and looked where she was looking.

“Not much out there,” he said.

She turned her face up to him. “I guess.” She was clearly confused by his sudden appearance. Something else too. “Wait. No. That’s not right.” She sounded a little frantic, like his cousin Leonard, with the stutter, when he knew he was coming up on something hard and unavoidable, like an m-word, like “ma’am”; a word he and Darrell both used a lot, because they had been raised to be gentlemen.

“There
is
something out there. Animals. Rabbits, antelope, paint ponies.” Her voice deepened. “Gold in them thar hills.” She laughed as she said the last part, but still it had all come out headlong, a little precipitous; “paint” and “ponies” mashed together, so what he heard, even if it was not what she’d meant to say, was “pain ponies.” And she was right. He knew that land, those animals. He knew something about paint ponies. Knew about the pain ones too.

“Bones,” she whispered, or didn’t quite. She formed the word precisely, but not enough sound came out to actually hear. He was watching her mouth, though, so he knew what she’d said.

“What kind of bones?” He pictured human bones. Cow skulls. He wondered what she was on.

“All kinds. Jawbones, finger bones, ham bones.” Again the laugh that caught, and skipped, like a scratch on a record. “Bones no one is ever going to find.” She looked up again, pulled her sunglasses down lower on her nose. Her pupils were so dilated he could barely see the gold-specked green around them, but he could see it enough. “You just gonna stand there?”

“I guess not,” he said, and crouched down in front of her. “What’s your name?”

“Ginger Rogers,” she said.

He laughed. “Yeah, and I’m Fred Astaire.”

“You can’t be,” she said. “You’re an Indian.”

“And you can’t be Ginger Rogers. You’re too young, and I bet you can’t even dance.”

“Bet I can,” she said. She was going to be sixteen pretty soon. He was older. Almost twenty.

“My brother’s twenty-one,” she said, and picked up a small, sharp, white stone from the pavement and put it in her mouth. “He always will be.” For a quicksilver second, panic cut across her eyes again, but then it was gone, and she nearly smiled.

“What does that mean?”

She moved her face close to his, moved the stone into her cheek with her tongue. “It means I’m wasted.” She giggled, not exactly like a young girl would; the sound was a little bit raw, edgy, but had some lightness to it even still. He wanted to hear it again. “I can’t even see straight,” she said.

“I got that. What’s your poison?”

“Mescaline. You want some?” She reached into her pocket and held out a clear capsule filled with what looked like chocolate powder.

“Nah. I gotta drive.”

“Next time,” she said, like there would be a next time.

He had thought it would be easy to find her. The plates on her dad’s truck told him which county, and there was only one school. But it was almost a year later by the time he tracked her down, and so much had happened, and was happening, so fast—he was going away soon, and Leonard was already gone—it seemed either longer than the nine or ten months it had been, or like no time had passed at all. It didn’t matter. Time was inscrutable like that; he knew better than try to make it correspond to the calendar’s notion of days and weeks and years. He wondered if it would act the same in Vietnam. Slow one day, full tilt the next. He’d heard it did something like that.

“Hey,” he said again, louder this time. He liked the skirt she was wearing—a denim one reconfigured from a pair of bell-bottoms—the way she had the tail of her red-and-black-checked flannel shirt tied in the front, the bandanna around her wrist. She had to have heard him, but she still didn’t turn around. He tried once more. “Hey, Ginger. Where are your dancing shoes?”

She hesitated for a split second more and dipped forward, her hair covering her face and brushing the ground. From there she pushed off with one foot and spun on the ball of the other, lifted her head and flung her body upright in one motion. She looked surprised to be facing him when she stopped, not sure how she’d gotten there, but when she spoke, it was like she had known exactly what she was doing all along. “Why, Mr. Astaire,” she said. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

He walked casually to where the fence opened, trailing his hand behind him along the cold and wet twisted wire. When he got close to her, he put his hands in his pockets and she looked up at him, same as she had at the gas station, except this time without the sunglasses. Her eyes were that treacherous green—the one, like new grass, that never stayed. “You’re late,” she told him.

“Late?” He tried to sound indignant, falsely accused, but he couldn’t help smiling. This was the girl. “Late for what? How late am I?”

“I had a dream you were coming. But that was months ago. You. Are. Late.”

He couldn’t tell if she was serious. He’d be surprised if she had really dreamt of him; even more surprised that she would tell him she had. “What were we going to do when I got here?”

“I didn’t get that far.” She freed a strand of her hair from the mass of it and pulled it across her top lip to make a mustache. “I woke up.”

Out at Cherry Gulch, she let him kiss her, let him put his hand inside her shirt. She was flat as a boy, almost, and barely responded with her body, though her mouth was soft and seemed not unwilling, and when he went to sit up she held him tight against her. She smelled of rain and dog and hay. He felt as if some peculiar magic had turned him into an overgrown stuffed animal; a carnival midway bear or tiger. Something benign to hang on to. He didn’t know why she made him feel like that, or if her trust was something sensed but not entirely present. He wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to be doing, why he had even come, but the pull had been too great to resist. Something about her that first day, tripping her brains out in broad daylight, missing a fragment, obviously, of whatever it is that centers us.

He could feel the bumpy keloid of a long scar slanting along her rib cage; wondered what they had taken out.

“What’s the scar?”

“I fell.” She didn’t say any more then, and he didn’t ask. He already figured she didn’t tell things on demand.

If she were another girl, he would probably have tried to have sex with her, but this one felt breakable, and he didn’t want to break her like that. There were plenty of girls on the reservation he could sleep with, and white girls in town who thought Native boys were sexy, or fucked them to make their boyfriends jealous. There were fights, but they hardly ever amounted to anything. One guy had died a few years earlier, beaten with a crowbar and buried in a shallow grave out on the plain, where the coyotes dug him up and brought body parts to town. They never caught who did it, because they didn’t really look. He was an Indian. Insignificant in the scope of things. White people marching around. War. The price of cattle. The weather.