Looks Over(Gives Light Series) (33 page)

I carded my fingers softly through his hair.

It took nearly an hour before Gabriel and Rosa got into the car.  Annie, indignant, wasn't far behind.  She sat with her lamb doll on her lap, fuming.  "Where did he even get the alcohol?" she demanded to know.  "You don't bring alcohol to a pauwau!"

"Uncle Gabe, you okay?" Rafael asked.

"I'm fine, kiddo," Gabriel said.  "How are you doing back there?"

"M'sorry about my glasses."

"Don't you be sorry about anything," Gabriel said.  "We'll get you a new pair tomorrow."

"Costs too much."

"That's why we have a warranty."

Granny was next into the car; she sat beside Annie in the middle row.  Mary arrived after Granny and wouldn't say anything.  She sat on Rafael's other side, surveyed the two of us, then looked away.

"Ezekiel will not be coming," Granny said.  "He has decided to stay here until his father is released from police custody.  Meredith will stay with him."

"Might as well get going, then," Gabriel said, stifling a sigh, and put the car in reverse.

The ride back to Nettlebush was tense and morose.  Annie tried to make small talk, but though she was a good actress, she didn't have much to work with.  Rafael kept dozing off on my lap.  The roads outside the windows were dark and unlit and, honestly, a little creepy.  I was relieved once we pulled off the turnpike and into the hospital parking lot.  Gabriel parked the car and I climbed out on rubbery legs.  All I wanted was to go to bed.

"Thanks for helping him, Skylar," Gabriel said.  He went around the SUV and made sure all the doors were locked.

"Night, Sky," Rafael muttered.

"Good night, Skylar," Annie said, and kissed me on the cheek.

I walked home with Granny, my arm looped through hers.  The air smelled ashen; I wondered how many computers had burned while the rest of us were away.  Balto barked loudly from behind the pine trees and followed us into the cabin.  I locked up for the night, the hearth already lit.

"That was an unfortunate experience, Skylar," Granny said sternly.  "But all experiences are learning experiences."

I wondered about the meaning of her words.  I gazed after her as she hobbled off to bed, her bedroom door snapping shut behind her.

I don't know what time it was when I finally went up to bed.  My regalia was comfortable, but heavy, and I was eager to get out of it.  I opened my door and Balto padded into the room ahead of me.  I stopped.

The lamps were lit.  Dad was sitting on the edge of my bed, his head bent, a picture frame in his hands.  My heart wrenched.  I realized it was the photo of him and Mom when they were young.

The scent of cognac was heavy on the air.  Dad had been drinking.

"Cubby?" he said blearily.

I set my duffel bag on the floor and walked toward the bed.  Gently, I pried the picture frame from Dad's hands.  I placed it face-down on the bedside table.

"My fault," Dad said.  "My fault.  You used to have a voice..."

One drunk father was enough for one evening.  I wrapped my left arm around Dad's back and pulled him off the bed.  He leaned against me, much heavier than he looked.  I nodded toward the doorway--meaning that I'd help him back to his room--but I don't think he noticed.

Dad mumbled incoherently while we walked down the hall.  His breath was rancid, his gait uneven.  His door was ajar; I pushed it open with my shoulder.  I saw the moonlight spilling across his mattress from the uncurtained window and guided him over to the bed.

"Why Eli thought I'd want you gone...  You're my son...  Never should've left you..."

I lit the oil lamp on Dad's nighttable and looked around the room for fresh clothes.  Before I'd made it to his closet, I stopped short.

The unpainted walls were covered in photographs.  The photos looked grainy, like the quality of film you usually find in pictures from the 60's and 70's.  But what had really captured my attention was what the photographs depicted.  Each photograph was of the same little boy, short-haired and brown-eyed, no older than four or five; smiling, laughing, climbing trees, playing with New Year's presents, playing the Apache fiddle.  My uncle Julius was staring back at me from the walls of his old bedroom.

At first I thought it was touching.  In her own way, Granny was keeping her son alive.  But then I thought:  It's not touching.  It's morbid.  It didn't sit well with me that Dad had to go to sleep every night with his dead little brother reflected on every wall.

I hastened out of Dad's room and into mine.  Balto peered at me curiously from atop my mattress.  I scooped my duffel bag off the floor and hurried back down the hall.  Dad was already asleep by the time I returned to his room, his legs sliding off the bed.  I dropped my duffel bag--lightly; I crept across to him and tugged his shoes off his feet.  I pushed his legs up on the mattress with one soft shove and pulled the blanket over him.  I didn't feel like waking him just to make him change his clothes; and I didn't trust myself to get him dressed with one hand.

I shouldered my duffel bag, and as quietly as I knew how, I went around the room and took the photos off the walls.

I didn't think it was Dad's fault that I'd lost my voice.  And it certainly wasn't Rafael's fault that Mr. Owns Forty had lost his daughter.  There's really only one person you can blame when something horrible happens.  When you spend your time blaming everyone else, you live a little less.  You die a little more.  Life's already short.  It doesn't need our help making it any shorter.

When I had finished taking Uncle Julius off the walls, I hung Dad's sandpainting on one of the empty hooks.  I stood back to admire the Skinwalker in the low light from the oil lamps.  It really wasn't enough, I thought.  There wasn't a gift on earth that could express how grateful I was.  This man had raised me.  He wasn't obligated to; I didn't have his blood in my veins.  But he had loved me anyway.  He had loved me when I was a good kid and he had loved me when I was a brat.  He had sat with me through doctors' visits when I was sick with pneumonia; he had sat in the hall outside when I spent hours on end with a child psychiatrist.  He had taught me how to treat people, how to feel about them, and, against all odds, how to feel about myself.  If someone else had raised me...well, I might not have turned out to be me.

Imagine that.  Not being you.

I don't think I can.

23

Manna

Rafael didn't come to school on Monday.  I figured Gabriel had taken him into town to get his glasses replaced.  I sat between Aubrey and Annie at our table while Mr. Red Clay took attendance, frowning over Rafael and Zeke's empty seats.

"Crafts month is coming up," Annie whispered to me.

The Nettlebush Reserve opens itself to the public once a year, usually in May.  It's the time of year when tourists come swarming in off the streets and the Shoshone satisfy their curiosity by selling them authentic Native American trinkets--jewelry, pottery, wood carvings, dreamcatchers, even ancient weaponry.  It's an important way for the reservation to bring in revenue.

Frowning, I waved my wrapped right hand.  Most of the pain had dissipated, but I still couldn't use it for much.  I didn't like that I couldn't help Annie.

"Oh, don't worry," Annie reassured.  "You can help me crush dyes.  We'll go into the woods together."

"I'm sure whatever you're talking about back there is fascinating," Mr. Red Clay said, "but I'd appreciate your eyes up here, please."

I grinned like a demon.  Annie blushed.

Mr. Red Clay opened up the lesson with his usual combination of English and sign language.  Sign language was a lost Indian art, he always said.

"We're going to talk about a dark period in Shoshone history.  This is something most Shoshone don't like to talk about.  In fact, once you leave this classroom, you'll probably never hear about this again.  But it happened, and to ignore it is to be ignorant."

Mr. Red Clay looked sharply at the student body.  "Who can tell me what self-immolation is?"

Boy, this wasn't shaping up to be a peaceful school day.

"Miss Two Eagles?"

"Lighting yourself on fire."

"Why would anyone in his right mind light himself on fire?"

"He wouldn't," William Sleeping Fox said.

"Raise your hand."

William raised his hand.

Mr. Red clay struck himself on the forehead.  "Not
now
," he said.  "Oh, forget it.  Can anyone recall a moment in history when self-immolation was recurrent?"

Aubrey raised his hand.

"Yes?"

"When the Spaniards barged into Colorado in the late 1500s," Aubrey said.  "Most of them were hostile.  To scare them away without fighting them, the Shoshone men would light themselves on fire."

"Did it work?"

"Well, yes, it was preemptive, wasn't it?  'Get away from me, I'm scary, aagh!'  You know--"

"Thank you," said Mr. Red Clay, exasperated.  "That will do.  But we're not going to talk about the Spanish today.  We're going to talk about what those Shoshone men did, and the ramifications it had on our people for a long time afterward."

I thought that sounded kind of foreboding.

"At that time, the Plains Shoshone considered self-immolation a great sacrifice on their warriors' part.  The Shoshone men sacrificed themselves so the white men would keep away from their wives, from their children.  That's nice.  But as a result, the Plains Shoshone suffered a severe shortage of men in the 1600s.  Widows were marrying each other to help raise their children.  Marriageable girls had to wait years and years for the little boys to grow up.  And, perhaps most detrimental of all, the widows were giving birth to baby girls."

Mr. Red Clay perused us, his arms behind his back.

"Infanticide," he said, "is the killing of a baby.  And that is what happened in the 1600s.  The Shoshone murdered their girl babies in a desperate bid to balance out the population.  After all, we Shoshone were always a nonconfrontational tribe.  We didn't want the girls to grow up and fight each other when there weren't enough men for all of them to marry."

Everyone must have been transfixed by the story, because it was so quiet in that classroom, I could hear Aubrey breathing on my right.

"Do you know the song--'Rock-a-Bye Baby'?  Seems like a pretty grim lullaby to sing to your child, doesn't it?  'Down will come baby, cradle and all.'  There's a reason why it's so grim.  A white man wrote that song when he witnessed the Shoshone leaving their babies on tree branches to fall to their deaths."

"Why are you saying this?" asked Autumn Rose In Winter.  She sounded like she was going to cry.

"Because I don't want you to see the world in black and white.  Because I want you to realize that there are good people and bad people everywhere.  Some white men are good and some white men are bad.  Some Indians are good and some Indians are bad.  Every society has its demons.  You need to be aware of your demons if you're going to eradicate them."

I was feeling pensive when I left the schoolhouse with Annie and Aubrey.  A lot of people on the reserve looked at Rafael like he was some kind of demon that needed to be eradicated.  I thought it was getting better, though; like how Zeke and Rafael could finally stand to be in the same room together, or how Rafael hadn't put William Sleeping Fox in the hospital lately.  But the fact that Rafael wasn't here today was proof that he was still suffering for something he hadn't done.  I wanted people to see him as Rafael, not his father.  I just didn't know how to make them see him the way I did.

Annie and I followed Aubrey back to his farm manor for homework.  Aubrey's niece Serafine ran in and out of his room, distracting us, and ultimately we abandoned our studies to play tag with her.  I was feeling like a regular delinquent when I walked home that afternoon, my neglected books on my back and a smile on my face.

My smile fell with bemusement when I found Granny sitting on the porch with Shaman Quick.

I've said it before, but the shaman very rarely ventured out of the badlands.  To see him sitting on my porch in the middle of the day, breechclout and moccasins and all, came as a huge shock.  I remembered to smile and waved at him.  He shot me a sharp, unimpressed glance.

"Skylar," Granny said importantly.  "The shaman is here to talk to you."

Me?  I looked to the shaman for confirmation.  The shaman narrowed his eyes into squinty little slits.  I couldn't imagine what the shaman wanted from me.  I couldn't ask him, either; my hand was still broken.

"Tammattsi!" said the shaman.

"Nu kee sakka tsao suwangkunna!" Granny replied harshly.

I showed Granny a pleading look.  Granny only sighed, her lips tight.  Shaman Quick snapped his fingers; I started.

It is time for your vision quest
, the shaman signed.

I looked over my shoulder, just to be sure there wasn't someone standing behind me who also spoke sign language.

"Tammattsi!"

"So'o!"

I rubbed my forehead.  I could feel the headache coming on.  I sat on the bottom step below the porch.