Looks Over(Gives Light Series) (36 page)

I didn't know how to pray.  I'm sure that sounds dumb, but it's true.  I'd never prayed a single day in my life.  Do you start it like a letter?  Do you address it to someone?  I didn't know.  I closed my eyes--the sun was so bright--and concentrated.

Purpose.  Right.  I was supposed to find my purpose.  Not that I thought I had much of a purpose to begin with, useless lump of flesh that I was.  I started to laugh.  No, I told myself.  Be serious.

I thought about Danny and Mr. Patreya.  With any luck, they were getting ready for their next crab fishing trip.  I couldn't believe the government just took Indian children from their homes whenever they wanted to.  And why?  Because white couples wanted to adopt them?  A few nights ago I had looked up child protection laws on Granny's computer.  I hadn't found anything about the missing Native children--maybe because the government wanted to hush it up--but I had found something else, something called the Indian Child Welfare Act.  Basically it was supposed to prevent a disaster like Carlisle Indian School from happening again.  Well, it wasn't working.

Uncomfortable, I squirmed.  I took another drink of water.  I opened my eyes and found the sun ahead of me, preparing to touch the horizon.  An hour until sunset.  I could feel the wind on my skin and the sand beneath my thighs.

My pulses danced between my temples.  The sweat on my back had started to cool.  Gross.  Now I wanted to take a bath.  I debated taking another drink but decided against it.  I tied off the top of the bota bag and set it on my lap.  If I was stuck out here for three days, I needed to save what I had.  Three days without food.  Boy, did that sound nightmarish.  At least I had water.  Water's more important than food.

A prairie dog poked his chubby head out of the ground.  He glanced at me, then burrowed for cover.  Fine, I thought.  Be that way.  I'm just going to take a nap. 

I curled up on the ground and tried to get comfortable.  I tucked my hand beneath my head to keep the sand from my ears.  It wound up in my hair instead.  I was starting to feel lightheaded.  Stupid sun.  Stupid sand.  I smothered a yawn.  Maybe I could just sleep for three days...

I must have fallen asleep after all.  But as for how long, I couldn't possibly say.  All I knew was that the ground under my skin felt biting and cold.  I figured that meant it was nighttime.  I shifted slowly into a sitting position and rubbed the feeling back into my eyes.

My whole body froze.

Alright, I thought.  Calm down.  Obviously you're dreaming.

And really, it had to be a dream--because it doesn't snow in Arizona, much less in the middle of spring. 

I climbed weakly off the ground and stared around.  The entire expanse was covered in blankets of untouched snow.  The wind howled and licked at my ears, real pain shooting up my temples.  My clothes were wet where I had lain in the snow.  I touched my fingertips to the frosty dew in my hair and thought:  Do dreams usually feel this real?  I pinched myself, and it hurt; and I didn't wake up.

Snow drifted from the sky and into my eyes.  I pressed my teeth together to keep them from chattering and my skin rose in gooseflesh.  I huddled into myself for warmth.  It didn't work.  Weakly, I thought:  Did he drug me?  What is this?  If I'm asleep, why can't I wake up?  If I'm hallucinating, why am I aware of it?  And the more I looked around me, the more I realized:  I wasn't even in the badlands.  The tent rocks and gorges were gone.  The sun was invisible behind pregnant winter clouds.

Wake up, I thought desperately.  I smacked myself across the face.  It hurt like a son of a bitch.

"I wouldn't do that."

I turned around frantically, thinking that the shaman had come back to take me from this--this--whatever it was.  But no; it wasn't the shaman.  It was a young woman kneeling in the snow, a big wicker basket at her side and an empty cradleboard on her back.

At first I wasn't sure whether she was the one who had spoken to me:  Her head was bent, her fingers sifting through the snow.  But we were the only two people out here, so who else could it have been?  She wore a heavy winter Plains dress made of sheepskin, the soft white pelt still attached to the hide; and her tight leggings and moccasins, beige, looked like they were made from elk.  I couldn't think why she was dressed that way unless she was going to a pauwau.  She rummaged in the snow and unearthed the hidden rosehips and inkcaps, the mushrooms soft, the berries ripe.  She tossed her findings in the basket and stood with it against her hip.  And she looked at me, and she had my grandmother's water-gray eyes.

Distantly, I wondered whether she was supposed to be my grandmother, only younger.  No, I thought.  That's not Granny.  Granny's nose was rounder; this woman's nose looked long and straight, like my dad's.  Her chin was fuller than either of theirs, which gave the impression that she was squaring it in defiance, even when she wasn't.

Immediately, I knew who it was that my mind had conjured.

"You should say something," Taken Alive said.

"I can't," I said.

I checked at that, bewildered.

Taken Alive thrust her wicker basket into my arms.  The wood felt like splinters against my ice-cold hands.

"It's
your
vision quest," she said.

Just like that, she started away from me, the snowshoes attached to her moccasins leaving imprints where she had walked.

Dazed, I shook my head.  Please wake up, I thought.  Naturally, I didn't wake up.  That would have been too easy.  Taken Alive walked ahead of me without looking back.  Maybe I was supposed to stick with her.  I ran to catch up with her, my socks drenched, sneakers leaving trenches in the snow.

"Where are we?" I asked.  I stopped walking.  I hadn't heard my own voice in twelve years.  I laughed breathily against the cold wind, moisture biting my eyes, and touched my throat.  The scars were still there.  I didn't need to be told how crazy this was.  But I could
hear
it when I laughed, soft, and a little deep, definitely not a five-year-old's voice.  I wondered whether I could cough, too.  I would have tried it, except I didn't know how.

"Keep up with me."

"Oh, sorry," I said.  She had outstripped me again.

We stopped on the edge of a bright river cutting through the banks of snow.  On either side of the river were tall brown tipis, smoke escaping through the wooden poles at the tops of the canvases.  I thought back to history lessons with Mr. Red Clay.  The Western Shoshone used wickiups, but the Eastern Shoshone used tipis.  We were on Wind River.

Taken Alive knelt in the snow and pushed aside the flaps of a tipi.  She took the wicker basket from me and went inside her home.  She hadn't told me that I should follow her; but this was my vision quest, as she had said.  Wondering at my lunacy, I knelt and followed her inside.

The tipi was a lot roomier on the inside than the outside had suggested.  A small firepit filled with rocks burned brightly in the center of the home.  My cold skin sang with relief.  Hanging from the buffalo hide walls were any variety of tools--a bag of medicine, a bow and arrows, a needle and thread.  Taken Alive removed the empty cradleboard from her back and set more stones on the firepit.  She took a pot from behind her and filled it with the rosehips.

"Can I help you?" I asked, alarmingly aware that I was asking a figment of my imagination if I could cook with her.

Taken Alive looked analytically at me.  She set aside the pot of rosehips, as though a better idea had occurred to her.  Or maybe I was annoying her.  I don't know whether hallucinations can get annoyed.

"No, you can't," she said.  "I've been dead for over fifty years."

I felt a little silly.

Taken Alive thrust the rosehip pot into my hands.  "Fill this with snow from outside."

I really couldn't say no to that.  I've never been good at saying no.

I pushed aside the entrance of the tipi.  I dipped the pot in the deep snow and filled it to the brim.  Finished, I tied the door flaps shut--it was much too cold out there--and handed the pot to Taken Alive.  She set it over the firepit to boil.

The strangest thing happened to the melting snow.  It rose from the pot in vapors and crystallized in the air.  The crystals hung between us like dangling decorations.  My breath escaped my mouth in a mist.

"Why am I here?" Taken Alive asked.

I smiled faintly.  "I was sort of hoping you could tell me."

"That was presumptuous of you."

"I know.  Sorry."

It was getting really chilly in that tent.  I raised a hand to touch the ice crystals floating in the air.  The moment I touched them, they cracked and clattered back into the pot.

"Family," said Taken Alive.  The word had never sounded so sad as it did when it came from her lips.

I tried not to stare at the empty cradleboard.

"Family," she said again--this time like it was a breath of fresh air.

"I could tell you about Granny," I offered.  "I mean, Catherine.  Your great-granddaughter.  She's all grown up now.  She speaks highly about you."

You have lost your mind, I told myself.

Taken Alive looked right through me.

"Or her son," I went on, less certainly.  "He's grown up, too."

"You mean your father."

I hesitated.

"What am I?  Let's see...  Your great-great-great-grandmother."

I started to correct her.  "Actually--"

"My daughter had blonde hair, too."

I had to question that.  There just wasn't any way my imagination could have provided that sort of detail.  Unless Granny had mentioned it once and I'd retained the detail subconsciously.

"We called her Looks Over.  You know, in those days--my days--a Shoshone had about twelve different names in her lifetime.  My little girl was Looks Over.  She had the bad habit of looking over her shoulder all the time.  She was a jumpy girl."

I didn't know what to do except smile.

Taken Alive sighed.  She removed the pot from the stone firepit.  "Then the white men came back for her--took her to that awful school, so far away from me, from my arms--and they called her 'Amelia.'  Cut off her beautiful hair, too.  You know what that's about, don't you?  They're trying to erase us.  They're trying to pretend we were never here.  Maybe it's guilt.  Maybe it's disdain.  But we were here first.  Everything they've ever laid claim to was on our backs.  On our blood."

I was starting to feel a little ill, but for all I knew, it was a reaction to whatever drug the shaman had given me.

"We Shoshone, you know...we never fought back.  Maybe it's time for us to fight back."

"But I'm not Shoshone," I said.

Taken Alive pierced me with her gaze.  "That's what 'Amelia' said when they sent her back to me."

My stomach felt wrenched and twisted in a thousand coils.  I suddenly knew I was going to be sick.

"I'm sorry," I said quickly, and reached for the tent flaps. 

"Bring Looks Over back to me.  Won't you?"

I wasn't fast enough.  I doubled over and threw up. 

Water spilled from my mouth and onto the cracked and sandy ground.

I started with panic.  My nerves were jumping, my head throbbing.  My back was drenched in cold sweat and my throat was chalky and dry.

On my hands and knees, I gazed at the waning, luminous moon in the sky, hanging high above the badlands.

Thank God it was over, I thought deliriously.  I shot a mutinous look at the shaman's bota bag.  No way was I touching that thing again.

Slowly, my pulse calmed.  I sat back on my haunches and wiped the sweat from my brow.  I'd never realized how cold the badlands were at night.  A shiver trailed down my spine.  I could hear the coyotes yowling to one another from the gorges, no doubt getting ready to pair up for the nightly hunt.

Good thing coyotes get along with humans, I thought, unnerved.

I pressed the light-up button on my watch.  Eleven o'clock at night.  Too bad I wasn't feeling tired.  I hugged my knees for warmth.  Maybe if I stayed awake long enough I'd get to watch the sun come up.  At least I couldn't dream if I didn't sleep.

Man, were the stars bright out here.  That is, they were bright all over Nettlebush:  That's what happens when most of the community doesn't use electric.  But above the badlands they seemed brighter, somehow.  Maybe because there was nothing to distract me from the sight of them.  No houses.  No trees.  Nobody but me.

I raised my plains flute to my lips.  I stopped.  Right, I thought, dispirited.  Pray.

"Bring Looks Over back to me"--that didn't make much sense.  Amelia Looks Over had died many years ago.  Of course it didn't make much sense.  It was a hallucination.  My purpose.  What was my purpose?  How could I be sure that people like me even had a purpose? 

I checked my watch again.  Barely ten minutes had passed.

This was impossible, I thought.  I gave up.  I started playing the flute.

I played through Heavy Fog, a cheerful flag dance song, and the Song of the Fallen Warrior, mournful but powerful.  I tried out the Shoshone love song, simple and sweet, but I liked Morgan Stout's rendition a lot better.  I sampled a couple of Paiute pieces I had heard during the winter pauwau, but I didn't know them well enough to play them in their entirety.  I was on my third run-through of the Song of the Golden Eagle when a pair of coyotes yipped and cantered over to me, lured by the sounds of the flute.  I showed them my hands and they backed away, disappointed to see that I didn't have handouts for them.