Steal the North: A Novel (6 page)

Sunday morning. I’ve been waiting. The aunt and uncle leave for church. The girl immediately opens the blinds that the aunt keeps closed all day. Next time I check, she’s outside. I have to at least go introduce myself and find out her name. She must be so bored. I am. And I have a TV and a truck. Tomorrow I’m going to start running three miles a day—and stop smoking—to get in shape for football. I’ve been doing push-ups, sit-ups, squats, but I need a field for sprints and monkey bars for pull-ups. The girl wears a hippie-looking sun hat, Hollywood shades, and she reads a book on the little stone bench in her aunt’s garden. Precious. Ray would splooge his pants. Maybe I shouldn’t disturb her. She’s not really concentrating—keeps looking at the poplars, whose leaves rustle in the wind, and playing with her necklace. I go out the back door, or attempt to. It sticks, since it’s totally off-limits for the kids and never used. The girl looks up. I jump off the last two steps and go over to her.

“Hey,” I say. She stands up with the book in her hands, then turns and puts it cover down on the bench, as if to hide the title. She takes off her hat before turning back around. “How’s it going? I’m Reuben.” She blushes deep red. Wow. I haven’t seen a girl blush like that since sixth grade. “You didn’t have to get up.”

“It’s not very good—the book, I mean.” She’s prettier up close than I expected. “I’m Emmy.”

“You from California?”

“Yeah.” She touches her ponytail, which is low and off to one side. “And you?”

“Here. I’m from here.”

“Of course.” She smiles. “Sorry.” Definitely pretty. Those teeth. What do they put in the milk down there?

“Sorry for what?” Now I feel nervous. Keep it cool. “You from L.A.?”

“Never even been there,” she admits. “Lame, huh?”

“I’ve never been there either.”

“I’m from Sacramento.”

“The capital, right?” She nods. “Palm trees?”

“And sycamores.”

The diamonds in her heart necklace look real. Cheap imitations can be bought at Walmart for under ten bucks or on HSN for under twenty plus shipping. A cowboy at the bar bought one for Mom. She exchanged it for a new toilet brush, a can of Folgers, and three two liters of Coca-Cola. A married white man once bought my sister a cross necklace with a real diamond in it. Are this girl’s teeth real? They’re distracting.

“Visiting your aunt and uncle?” I ask. ”How long’s it been?”

“I don’t remember.”

“That long, huh?”

“I mean, I don’t remember them at all.” Her voice gets shaky, or it’s been that way. “My aunt thought I would, but I was just a baby. They’re so nice to me. I wish I did.”

“You okay?” She’s scared shitless so far from home.

“Sure.” She takes a moment to get control. I give it to her. She’s way more fragile than I expected, except those teeth. I want to run my tongue over them. “I was born here.”

“No shit.”

“That’s the first swearword I’ve heard all week.”

“My apologies.”

“No. It’s refreshing.” She takes off her sunglasses. Her eyes are blue. No, gray. She squints them in the sun. I can’t tell. I like brown-eyed, dark-haired Indian girls, obviously, but white chicks—give them to me straight: blond hair, blue eyes.

“What book are you reading?” I ask. “It looks pretty thick.”

“Um—” She looks back at the book on the bench. “It’s boring.”

“Can I see it?” She hands it to me. Her fingernails are painted a funky turquoise, but she doesn’t wear a lot of makeup. I read the title. “
Sister Carrie
. Is it about a nun?”

“No.” She smiles.

“What’s it about?”

“It’s boring.”

“You said that already.” I can hear the kids thumping around in the trailer. They were entranced in cartoons when I snuck out.

“My mom’s a college English teacher. She makes me read old literature.”

“Ouch. So, what’s the book about?”

“A girl.”

“Named Carrie.”

We both laugh.

“She moves to Chicago during the Industrial Revolution. She compromises herself.”

“That part’s not boring, I’m sure.”

She blushes again and puts her sunglasses back on. I almost fucking blush. I’m standing in a garden discussing literature with a professor’s kid. What the fuck?

“It’s about railroad strikes and stuff,” she says. “Carrie becomes an actress.”

“And lives happily ever after?”

The thumping gets louder in my sister’s trailer. The kids must be hungry.

“Not at all. Dreiser is no Jane Austen.”

“Who?”

“No one,” she backtracks. “Never mind. Sorry.”

“Sounds like you’ve read the book already.” I examine its bulk. “Can I borrow it?”

“For real?”

“Indians read books, on occasion.” Hell, some even memorize the Bible.

“I didn’t know you were Indian.” She sounds excited. “I thought Hispanic. I have a friend, Harpreet. She’s Punjabi.”

I start laughing.
She’s
refreshing. “I’m American Indian.”

“Oh, my God. I feel like an idiot.”

“I’ll call you Columbus.” My nephews and nieces start appearing at the windows, pointing and giggling.

“Please, don’t.”

“So, can I borrow Mr. Dreiser’s”—I flip to the back cover— “‘great American novel of insight into appetite and innocence’?”

“Sure.”

“You want to hang out sometime?”

“I have a boyfriend—in California.” She touches her necklace.

Of course she does. “I said hang out, not make out.”

I hope the third blush is a charm. It takes her a moment to respond. “It will have to be when my aunt and uncle are at church.”

“This evening then?” I suggest. “Same place? I’ll bring a lawn chair.”

“Yeah. The bench is kind of small—pathetic.”

“Solid, though.”

“A solitary stone.”

She’s—what do you call it?—witty. Or maybe just goofy. She’s cool.

“It looks lonely,” I observe.

“But not
too
homely.”

“In need of a friend,” I say.

“I
am
.” She smiles wide.

Damn. What was that?

I’m out of breath by the time I make it back inside my sister’s trailer, and not just because the kids locked the back door and then the front door and then the back door again. Little shits. Even the older boy, Kevin, who usually sides with me because I call him bro. That girl, Emmy, her name should be Emily. She reads books in gardens, for Christ’s sake, but, then again, not romances or books about prairie girls, but a revolution and a compromised girl. Has she been compromised? California girls. They do take your breath away. But no, she was born here. She blushes but tells me my cuss words are refreshing. I need a sweat lodge. Virgil built one in his garage in Omak. He’s an elder but doesn’t preach or ask questions or try to talk to me about my dad. As soon as my sister comes home for lunch, I’ll go for a hard run, but she’ll probably bring cheap tacos from the taco van, which are almost as good as “Indian tacos” made with fry bread. Hispanic? That’s what most white people around here think, with my short hair, or prefer to think. It’s easier for them to dislike immigrants than
be
the immigrants. An Indian from India? Oh, shit, that would bust my dad’s gut.

It’s the first time in a long time I’ve wanted to tell him something.

Most of the time I’m glad he’s not around anymore. He died when I was thirteen. I spent my whole childhood waiting for that man to come home or to sober up. Sometimes I see my dad’s ghost sitting next to me when I’m driving alone in his old truck: only on the rez, those long miles between towns and usually where the land opens up, and most often at dusk when everything’s gray. Of course that’s also the time of day most people in the area see Sasquatch. Dad used to claim, when he’d come home smelling, that he had a Sasquatch lover. My dad’s ghost likes to rummage through the glove box.
Sorry, old man, no whiskey
. I put my football picture in the glove box once, nothing else, so he’d have to look at it. He did. He even put it in his shirt pocket. The next day it was back in the glove box. If there’s a girl with me in his—my—truck, he doesn’t appear. “Give the boy some space,” he used to tell Mom.

“I picked up your dad the other day,” an elder said to me a year ago, when I was staying far out on the rez for a few nights with my aunt. “By Coulee Dam.”

“You don’t say?” How did he want me to respond? My dad’s restlessness had caused enough pain. And he wasn’t the first elder—and certainly not the first Indian—to have seen my dad’s ghost and stopped to tell me. I almost suggested he and the other elders start a column in the tribal newspaper for sightings of my old man, put it right next to the column for neighborhood bear sightings.

“You’re a good kid, Reuben. He would’ve been proud.”

“Sure thing.”

“You coming to the meeting tonight at the longhouse?”

It had been the first weekend of summer break, but I said, “I got homework.”

He asked after my mom and sisters, then warned me not to get too caught up in the world of the white man.

“You want me to go my dad’s route instead?”

I didn’t mean to sound rude. He had known my grandfather. I should’ve just let him put his old hand on my shoulder, invite me to drum or to go pray by the creek with him and his wife for the salmon to return.

I’m back from my run and sweaty as hell. “Hit the shower, kid,” Teresa says, meeting me on the front porch. “I’ve got to leave in five.”

“Go,” I tell her. “I need to cool down first.”

“You’re supposed to jump into a cold river right away.”

“What river around here?” The reservation is bordered on three sides by rivers, and the Sanpoil flows just east of the center. “You must mean an irrigation canal. And no, thanks. I’m no farm kid.” Not only do the farm kids here swim in the ditches all summer, but they fish the spillways and canals in the fall for trout. My sister, for some reason, likes how both this town and the lake are named after Chief Moses. Or at least she’s not bothered by it. I think it’s a kind of insult. But Teresa can be surprisingly chill about certain things, like giving enemas to old dudes at work or feeding fruit cocktail to crazies or the fact that none of her kids’ dads pays child support. Sure, the dad of my older niece, Grace, leaves a cooler of salmon on Teresa’s porch a few times a year, but that’s not quite enough. Teresa is the complete opposite of chill with me about girls. She’s nosy and bossy as shit. She and I are both part Moses-Columbia on Mom’s side. Dad’s a mix of Sanpoil and Okanogan—hence our last name, Tonasket, who was a famous Okanogan chief. I’m a Colville Confederated Tribes mutt, and proud of it.

“There’s tacos on the counter,” she says. “Kevin insisted we leave you three.”

“He’s my bro.”

She lights a cigarette and offers me one, which I take. She wears scrubs with cartoon character prints. Not very attractive. But maybe a good thing. Teresa used to be kind of pretty, and still is, I guess, though she’s chubbier now than ever—but hell, she’s had four kids. I think guys like her, and they do, for two reasons, one of which a brother shouldn’t mention, but to quote Ray, “
Sesame
Street
is brought to you today by the letters
Double D
.” The other reason is she’s kind of fun and open and cool, though far from hip in her Minnie Mouse scrubs.

“The kids claim you have a new girlfriend next door.”

“We exchanged a few words is all.”

“Be careful.”

Of what? I hand her my cig so I can take off my shirt and wipe my face. “You’ll be home by six, at the latest?”

“Got a date with the California girl?”

“She has a boyfriend.” If it’s any of her business.

“You stink, quarterback. Hit the shower.”

“I’m not the quarterback.”

“You are in my playbook.” She chants in a mocking tone, “Go, Omak Pioneers!”

“Go, make money!” I chant back.

I know she’s proud of me. Prouder than Mom is. I’m superproud of her. This full-time LPN job she landed here at the county hospital, and not despite her being Indian but because, is the most secure job she or Mom has ever had. Teresa deserves a break, and she has the perfect personality for a health care worker. She’s not a bitch, and like I said, she can be chill, but also she’s tough enough to ignore the snide comments by the other female LPNs and RNs. And no dude, be he patient, orderly, nurse, or even doctor, is going to pinch her ass and get away with it, unless he’s decent looking and available, of course, and she’s feeling lonely. She can come off as abrasive at times—especially to white people, who probably deserve it—but deep down she’s a softy. And she’s proficient, despite her cluttered trailer and bad track record with men. Half of our relatives, and most of the Indian girls Teresa went to school with, judge her for living off the rez, but she claims she had to get away from the high drama and drugging. It’s far less upsetting for her to work at a hospital filled mostly with white patients than sick Indians who’ve lost their will. She worries, though, about her kids not learning traditions from the elders.

“Go to work,” I tell her. “I’ll watch your bratty kids.”

She drives away in her clunky Toyota van, which I’ve tried to fix, but can’t without money. My truck is easier to work on because it’s a Chevy and Dad took great care of it. I don’t have time for classes like auto shop at school with all the college prep work. I smoke another cigarette before showering. I’m starving. While the two younger kids nap in the bedroom they all four share, the older two and I watch a
Cosby Show
rerun marathon on TV. I give them the couch so they can stretch out and I hope fall asleep too. My sister’s latest man took the La-Z-Boy recliner with him, and she can’t get credit at the local furniture store for two more months, so that leaves the floor. The whole time I’m thinking of Emmy’s teeth and her brightly colored fingernails and her shaky voice when she talked about not remembering her aunt and uncle.

I doze off to the sound of Theo Huxtable, the only son on
The Cosby Show
, being his usual dumb-ass self, but I don’t dream. When I wake up, Dad’s sitting on the couch between Kevin and Grace. What the hell? They aren’t even really his grandkids. But he loved Teresa as if she were his daughter. Mom always gives him credit for that. Still, my first reaction is to tell him to get the fuck out. The last thing Teresa’s kids need is to fall for another man who won’t, or can’t, be there for them. My old man has never appeared to me off the rez, and I don’t like it one bit. Truth is, he shouldn’t be appearing at all. He should’ve moved completely into the spirit world by now. He watches Theo on TV, still being a dumb-ass. He’s smiling. Then he looks at me—full on, which certainly isn’t a good thing—and his smile fades. He does some gesture with his hand, a traditional gesture of warning that I didn’t know I knew until now.