Set Me Free (16 page)

“That’s what scares the shit out of me.”

“She’ll be fine.”

Ferdinand loped into the room, and Elliot raised an eyebrow. “I don’t go anywhere without old Fergus,” Helen said. “Hope he
won’t be a problem.”

“We’ve got plenty of land to go around,” Elliot said, patting the couch beside him so the dog would come. And then Elliot
smiled. A weary smile. But a smile nonetheless. “It’s good to have you here.”

She wasn’t going to say anything about that, about what was between them. “She’s a good kid.” It felt right to dispense a
little mercy.

C
AL

T
he first time I knew who my father was, I couldn’t have been more than four years old. My mother was long gone, but aside
from the occasional nightmare, I was a pretty happy boy. Maw-Maw kept me busy. She didn’t give me the option of feeling sorry
for myself.

The Neige Courante hosted one of the biggest powwows east of the Cascades in those days. I guess we were much more prone to
celebrating ourselves then, eager to dance in honor of our heritage. That’s probably because there were so many more elders
alive, people who could look way back into our past and remember the fiber of what our people are made of. Young people were
required to get in line. Eye rolling was not permitted. Perhaps it’s just that the grown-ups have gotten lazy.

In any case, here is what I remember: Jimmy Marron, an older boy, a fancy dancer, came up to me with a piece of straw between
his teeth and said, “I’ve got a secret.” He was smug and proud and he knew that, more than anything else, secrets were the
one thing I could not stand being kept from. All people had to do was tell me they had a secret and I’d do just about anything
to find out what that secret was. It didn’t matter if I didn’t know who Sharon and Bill were, let alone what “making it” meant.
All that mattered was that I got to be in on the secret too.

I begged Jimmy to tell me what his secret was. And as I was begging, a slew of other children gathered around us, salmon cakes
in their hands. The girls jingled and caught the light on their shell dresses. The jingling sounded like laughter in the breeze.

“Here’s what I’ll do,” Jimmy said. He squatted down beside me and pointed his finger. There, across the park, was a tall Indian
man in a suit, leaning against a fancy black car. “See that guy?” Jimmy asked. I nodded. “Guess who he is.”

“That’s not a secret!” I whined.

One of Jimmy’s older sisters, Alice, came up to him and pushed his shoulder. “Shut up,” she said to him. To me she said, “Let’s
go.” She reached down to pick me up.

But I didn’t want to be carried.“Tell me the secret!” I said.

The boys all laughed, and the girls shook their heads.“You heard him,” Jimmy said. “He wants to know the secret.”

“Come on,” Alice said, trying to pick me up, but I stood my ground.

“The secret,” Jimmy said, “is
that’s
your daddy.” All the boys laughed for real. Alice picked me up and perched me on her hip.

“You’re a real asshole, you know that?” she yelled over her shoulder to Jimmy as we walked away.

I didn’t see what was bad or funny or secret about knowing that this man was my daddy. I had never seen him before, and dads
were the kind of people who were always around. I decided I must have heard the word wrong. The man must have been something
else. (Incidentally, the charming Jimmy Marron is now a “self-employed” mechanic, which means that he sits on his couch night
and day, complaining. Needless to say, I’ve never given him the opportunity to fix my car.)

When I got old enough to understand what my own memory was telling me, I was already old enough to understand that what made
that man with the fancy black car my daddy was also what made me different. I was caught between two worlds, even though the
only world I’d ever lived in was that of the Neige Courante
reservation. Even then I knew that something was going to lead me away from the home my people had been assigned. It was as
if I could see ahead, into the future, though I didn’t know what the future was. All I knew was that every day I woke up feeling
as if I could never be happy where I was.

In that, I am not unlike the Neige Courante people as a whole. Hell, our name means “running snow,” and everyone knows that
once snow hits the ground, it’s a stationary substance. It takes a special kind of people to make snow move fast. We’re born
movers. Before the reservation, we were people of the Deschutes River. Some say French trappers gave us our name; the water
that sustained the Neige Courante is ice-cold, fed by mountain streams. It is hard to touch that water in the middle of the
hottest August afternoon.

In the old days, the Neige Courante camped. We roamed the length of the Deschutes River. We stayed mostly in the high elevations,
near what is now called Elk Lake on the mountain we now call Bachelor, and then, as salmon season approached, we made our
way north, up past the Metolius River, up past the mountain we now call Hood, to the Columbia, where we fished and fished
at Celilo Falls. We lived mostly underneath the verdant expanse of the lodgepole pine canopy. We came down from those regal
trees only for the salmon.

In the late nineteenth century, our tribal leaders signed a treaty—get this, “in good faith”—relinquishing the land we had
roamed for centuries to the white federal government. In exchange, we were “given” twenty-five square miles of steppe grassland.
This demotion likely means little to you, so let me explain it this way: let’s say you lived in Tuscany and someone decided
you “got” to live in Siberia instead. What happened to our traditions next, especially after we realized we were no longer
“allowed” to fish on the Columbia River—especially after they built a dam that drowned Celilo Falls—is on par with what you’re
imagining right this minute.

So there we were, the Neige Courante and me, locked in oddly parallel existences, bound to fates not fully our own. I did
not know that at the time, however. All I knew was that the man with the fancy black car was strange and enticing and mine.

H
ELEN

Stolen, Oregon
Sunday, October 6, 1996

Elliot was striding far ahead of Helen across the brusque landscape. It was a chilly seven
A.M.
on her first morning at the academy, and he had insisted that since it was Sunday, they should take a brisk walk before breakfast.
He had something special to show her. Helen considered herself to be in very good shape; her daily walks with Ferdinand around
the Prospect Park loop were a good three miles long. But apparently, she had nothing on Elliot. Beside him, she felt like
a gnome of a woman, round, huffing, unsteady, no match for his Nordic stride. They were heading north, the surprisingly warm
sun making a determined appearance to their right. Helen was proud of herself for knowing the direction they were walking.
She was proud of herself for remembering to pack two pairs of sensible shoes. She desperately needed caffeine, and as she
trailed Elliot and the eager, bounding dog, she tried to remember if she’d seen a coffee machine in his minuscule kitchen.

Helen realized how familiar this all felt. She remembered afternoons spent scuttling down Upper Broadway as Elliot made his
way south. From behind him, she was able to see what people thought. Especially women. He’d been striking in his brazen youth.
Long hair, T-shirt emblazoned with political slogans, a generous stride. Old women pitied him as if he were a stray puppy,
young mothers seethed against him with a kind of unnamed hunger, and single girls, free to flirt, made it clear they simply
loved what they saw. In the early days, Helen found this attention flattering. She told herself that every woman who wanted
Elliot was paying her a compliment. When she concentrated on this concept, she
almost believed it. And when he held her in his arms, she would repeat it to herself: the most desired man at Columbia had
chosen
her.
And he was not simply eye candy. He was brilliant. He was going to change the world. He had said more than once that he could
not change the world without her. They were lovers
and
they were comrades. Surely there was nothing more she could ask for.

Helen shivered and pulled herself out of the past. She was not going to do this. Dredging up that life, the person she had
been so brutally long ago, would simply cause her more pain. Elliot glanced back over his shoulder and motioned for her to
move faster. She pushed the memory of his taste as far out of her mind as was humanly possible.

When she caught up to him at the top of the hill, she had to brace her hands on her knees. She needed air. Elliot didn’t give
her much breathing room. He pointed eagerly.“Look!”

“What am I looking at?” She was looking. She was looking hard. All she could see was a shed at the bottom of the hill, and
Ferdinand lifting his leg against it. Literally. That was the only thing of note between where she was standing and the distant
horizon. Her stomach sank as Elliot spoke in excited tones.

“You can stay here! The nearest hotel is at least ten miles away, and anyway, I don’t have the money to put you up there for
more than a couple of weeks. The kids have been fixing up this old building since last year. There are pictures of it from,
oh, I’d say the fifties, maybe even before. And the kids! They’ve been having an absolute blast! It doesn’t look like much,
but let’s see—they’ve installed insulation, a generator for emergencies, we’ve got solar panels on the roof, a hand pump from
the creek. We even dug an outhouse!”

The use of the word “building” was generous at best. Helen numbly followed Elliot as he barreled down the hill, he in a euphoria
of explanation, she in a state of shock. He was pointing out all the fantastic details, and all she could see was a shack
a little bigger than a minivan parked in the middle of an open, dusty prairie,
without another man-made structure of any kind in sight. Elliot flung open the door and continued his sell.

“We wanted to cut down the trees ourselves and plane the wood, but it seems there are laws about kids using power tools. Insurance
we don’t have. But the kids picked out the wood themselves, and they measured and designed and built the bunk bed, the table,
the desk, that chair—it’s really quite comfortable, Helen, go ahead, try it. And the countertop—that was tricky, because we
had to get Formica down here, and we had to have a professional come in and install the gas stove, as well as a gas heater
for the water. No shower yet, but you can use the ones in the gym for now…”

Elliot rattled on while Helen peeked into the dark shack with horror. She didn’t know much about Oregon, but she could see
that there were big mountains surrounding the fields where the school lay, and she knew that people skied in those mountains,
and skiing meant snow, and snow meant winter, and winter meant cold. Freezing cold.

“It’s vital for them to learn practical skills like this. How to
build
things. How to build
homes
for themselves.” Elliot stopped midsentence. “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

How perceptive. Helen sized Elliot up and remembered how hard it was to tell him anything that might be unpleasant for him
to hear. For example, she had never spoken of the growing rift in their marriage until she was presented with its dissolution
in its most obvious, naked form. “How am I going to live here?” she finally managed to ask.

“What do you mean?”

She picked her words carefully. “Elliot, I live in a brownstone in the middle of Brooklyn. I’m constantly surrounded by people.
And I don’t mean to sound unreasonable here, but I’m also used to a certain number of amenities: a toilet, a shower, running
water, heat.”

“There’s running water here.”

“There’s a hand pump for a creek. Which will probably be frozen in about a week.”

“No, we’ve taken care of that. A gas heater. And you haven’t seen the woodstove.”

“No. Elliot, no. I don’t want to turn down your hospitality, but are you actually serious?” It was time to let him down. “Anyway,
I spoke to Cal. I know he doesn’t want me here, and his warm reception would have told me that even if he hadn’t. It’s untenable.
You don’t need your ex-wife directing a production of
The Tempest
with a bunch of teenagers and an audience who—don’t give me that look, Elliot, we both know I’m right—won’t be terribly enthusiastic
or—”

“Or smart enough to understand it.”

“I didn’t say that!”

“You didn’t need to. It’s written all over you.”

“What is?”

“Your privilege.”

“Excuse
me?”

“When was the last time you sacrificed something, Helen?”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, “here comes the martyr speech. Are you really still giving this pep talk after all these years?”

“Just answer me, Helen, when was the last time—”

“Save it,” she said. She was already seething. She’d forgotten how easily she became the fuse and he the match.