Topping From Below (19 page)

FRANNY’S LAST STAND

by Frances Tibbs

The first thing that people notice about me is this: my hair is short, really short, maybe only half an inch, sticking out straight and stubbly all over. That wouldn’t be so unusual except that I’m a girl, which still wouldn’t be so unusual if I was in Davis, California, a place where no one much cares who or what you look like.

But now we live in Montana, my parents and me, where a girl looking like a guy isn’t too common. When I began cutting my hair—first just six inches of curls off the bottom, two weeks later another four inches up the sides, then an inch or two when I had a bad weekend, and another two when the rain came—when I started chopping it off, Mom never said anything at all. It was like she didn’t even notice, as if I had been nearly bald-headed for all the fourteen years of my life. My dad noticed, though. He said I looked scruffy with nearly all my hair gone, and with me always wearing jeans and a bead-studded jacket fastened with feathers and leather cords and horse hair. He told me to let my hair grow back, and then he forgot about it until we were eating dinner, six weeks later, when he looked up from his crushed-potato-chip-tuna casserole and said, Didn’t I tell you to stop cutting your hair? and then he shoved the fork in his mouth, crunching down on the potato chips, forgetting about my hair once again, while Mom just sat there, pushing carrots around on her plate, ignoring us, not hearing, not seeing, and it made me angry, her not being part of the family anymore, and I almost said, Stop playing with your food! but, me being the kid, she being the parent, I didn’t.

When Dad told me we were moving to Montana, the first thing I thought was this: so this is how life is gonna be now: Montana. And I pictured things you don’t see in California, old-fashioned country things, dusty roads, wooden-planked sidewalks, kids in wide-brimmed hats and faded overalls, kids not even knowing about acid-washed jeans or Day-Glo shoelaces or MTV or Madonna or Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Montana seemed as far away from life as you could get, far away from neon-lit malls, video arcades, chili-cheese fries at Murder Burger, and Joey Walker in his black leather jacket and high-top Reeboks, the boy I dreamed about constantly and almost kissed at the Davis water tower on Eighth Street. But all that changed for me, even before we moved to Montana, and Joey Walker wouldn’t recognize me now, not with my bristly hair.

This is what my mom told me before we moved here: Montana has soft rolling plains and you can look forever and not see anything but clear blue skies and brown hills that never end. My dad just said that the tule fog in winter was getting to him, and it was time for a change. But I know why we really moved, even if they didn’t say it: to forget. Maybe they thought we could start over here, that things would get lost in the rolling hills, that things would get absorbed in the wide open spaces in a way that they never could in Davis, Davis with its low-hanging January fog, trapping everything, even memories, under its misty gray haze.

But clear blue sky doesn’t help. No matter what you do, no matter where you go, memories are still there, popping up at unexpected times. It’s like the cars in Montana. People here don’t know what to do with cars. You can drive in the country—which is pretty much anywhere—and there’s nothing but land, maybe a cow or two grazing, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you see an abandoned Chevy, rusted with a door missing, or maybe an old Ford pickup with headlights smashed in, and it’s on the side of the road, in a ditch, and—get this—it’s upside-down. Every time we drive by one of those cars, my parents in the front, not talking, me in the backseat looking out the window, I think about extinct animals and endangered species, and for the next few miles I’m wondering. This has got to mean something, but I don’t know what. It’s times like this that make me wish Nora, my older sister, was here. She could explain the car situation to me, but with her not being here, I gotta figure it out for myself. People in California don’t abandon cars on the side of the road, just turn them over and walk away. It’s a Montana thing, I decide, like tule fog is a Davis thing, both of them reminding you of stuff you don’t want to remember.

Right after we moved here, about a year ago, I decided to do better in school to make things easier on my parents. I study a lot more, and as my hair gets shorter, my grades get better. I’m a straight-A student now, and when I show Mom my report card, she smiles dreamily and says, That’s nice, honey, and then she looks away and I can tell she already forgot about my A’s, forgot about me. The thing she doesn’t forget is this: Billy, my little brother, is dead.

History is what I study the most. In Mr. Kendall’s class, we learned about the Plains Indians. That’s when I learned about Sitting Bull. He was the great leader who united all the Plains Indians, even if things didn’t work out so well for him at the end. Now when Dad orders me to change my bead-studded jacket or stop chopping off my hair, I just tell him I’m working on a school project, on the Sioux Indians I say, and he grunts and goes into the living room to watch TV. For some reason that seems to make sense to him; maybe he thinks all the kids in my class are bald-headed. Well, they’re not. They laugh at my stubbly head and my bead-studded jacket and my hair-fringed shirt. A Sioux warrior wannabe, is what they call me, Chief Sitting Bullshit. I’m not a guy and I’m not an Indian, I know that, and I never said that I was. But I like to do things the way Sitting Bull did them, like wearing feathers and horse hair and leather leggings. He was a determined man, Sitting Bull, and just by looking at a picture of him, you can tell that he was strong. If he wanted to hold on to his enemies, they wouldn’t be able to get away. He would wrap his fingers around their arms, fingers that were like the talons of an eagle, and clamp down, sink into the skin and flesh and even the bones if necessary, and hold on as long as he had to. Sitting Bull wouldn’t let anyone down.

I
figure I
can learn a lot from the Sioux. How to be strong, how to be brave, those kinds of things. Bravery was just about the most important thing to them. They saw things in black and white: if you weren’t brave, you were a coward. It was that simple. They never haggled over fine points or argued about shades of gray—better to die a hero, was their motto, than to live a coward. Because of that, a Sioux warrior preferred to fight an enemy up close, hand to hand, rather than kill him from a distance; it proved that he was brave because he was putting his life in danger. Anyone could just hide behind a rock and kill a Crow or Pawnee by shooting him with an arrow. But to go up and touch him, that was brave. It was a sign of courage, and the first man to touch an enemy was given points—counting coups is what they called it—and this is what it taught the Sioux: not to flinch in the face of danger. And that is what Sitting Bull is teaching me.

Once or twice a week, after school gets out, I go over to the high school and collect a few coups of my own. I dress in jeans and a bulky jacket so they’ll think I’m a boy; I wear a black ski mask pulled low on my face, just eyes staring out of narrow slits. I watch the football team, go to the sidelines and brush into those big guys, bump shoulders, knock knees, and they say, Watch where you’re going, runt, and sometimes they shove me like I’m on the opposite team. An enemy. I’ve been doing it for almost seven months, baseball, basketball, and now football, whatever’s in season. I’m the phantom Sioux, planning my attacks when the coach is upfield, his back turned, his attention elsewhere; he’s never seen me yet. Like last week. Or the week before. It’s always the same. I wait until all those bodies are scrunched down near the end zone, wait for the play to begin, wait for someone to be sidelined. The coach has the whistle in his lips, ready to blow away their fouls, and then I see him, this time it’s the nose tackle, lumbering across the field, big as a giant, each footstep—I swear this is true—shaking the earth. Number 63. I’ve clashed with him before. He takes off his helmet and there’s a head, blond, Nordic, attached to shoulders, no neck. His gut juts forward and white pads hang out of his green jersey, and I’m thinking, This is a sofa coming unstuffed. He stalks the sidelines, stopping to stretch his hamstrings, then kneels down to tie a shoelace, unaware that an attack is coming. I rush out from behind the bleachers. Smack. Get the fuck off this field! says 63 as I crash into his shoulder pad, and he raises one of his arms, the underside so creamy white that it hardly looks dangerous, making me think I’m going to get off easy this time, but then he backhands me and I go sprawling across the grass, onto the dirt, cutting my lip on a rock. I retreat behind the bleachers just as the coach sees 63 screaming into the empty air, flinging his arms as if he were a signal man waving to planes. The coach never sees me. Quit screwing around, he yells at 63, you’re supposed to be watching the goddamn play, which just gets 63 madder because he knows I’m there, peeking out from behind the bleachers. I taste blood on my lip, but it’s okay because every time I touch the enemy, I get stronger, braver. I learn to take my injuries without comment, welcoming them; my bruises become badges; my blood, symbols. I brush the dirt off my jeans, wipe the blood off my lip, and count another coup.

Even before we moved to Montana, I was familiar with Sioux country, though at the time I didn’t know it. My parents are big on the outdoors, and we always do the camping-national-parks-thing for vacations. We’ve been all over the country doing two weeks in a pitched tent. Yosemite, King’s Canyon, Bryce, Badlands, you name it. And just the four of us, Mom, Dad, me, and Billy, because Nora is older and has a job and doesn’t come along anymore. On our last trip, over a year ago, we went to Flaming Gorge in Wyoming, Shoshone territory I now know. You kids are going to love this, Mom had said as we drove there, The scenery is majestic. Purple mountains at sunrise, she said, candy-colored mountains; mountains that will take your breath away.

The first day there, we got up early in the a.m., the air so cool we could see it as we talked, all of us bundled in hooded sweatshirts and long pants just so we could see those famous mountains. Mom grabbed me and we started jumping up and down to get warm, both of us laughing and looking silly in our new pink warm-up suits—this was before I started dressing like a guy—and Dad looked at Billy, both of them dressed sensibly in jeans, and he smiled, quirking his eyebrows in our direction and rolling his eyes as if to say, Women, and then he put his hand on Billy’s shoulder and they looked up at the mountains, pretending that the cold air didn’t bother them a bit.

And Mom was right—shades of pink and purple and orange rose in front of us. Sherbet-colored mountains, they were, mountains that I just had to get to the top of, so we hit the trail, me running ahead, whacking bushes with a stick, smelling the flowery scent that exploded and filled the air each time I gave them a swat. I heard Billy huffing behind me, and I turned to see him stumbling up the mountain, air coming out of his mouth in short frosty bursts as he struggled to keep up with me, clapping his hands together to keep warm, his cheeks splotchy from the morning air. He was short and scrawny, a whole head shorter than me, with a face full of freckles and dark hair that fell in bunches over his forehead so you could never see his eyes. You kids, watch where you’re going, Dad yelled after us. I ran ahead of Billy, trying to lose him. He was a year younger than me, and was always tagging along when I wanted to be alone. A year ago he got sick, and now he can’t run very fast, and he’s smaller than the other boys his age, a lot smaller, and I get tired of Mom and Dad always hovering over him and not me, worrying that he might get even sicker. Wait! he called. Wait for me, Franny! but I just threw my stick in the air and ran faster.

When we lived in Davis, I had a paper route. This is what I do now, in Montana: steal bikes. Stealing a valuable horse from an enemy was another way the Sioux proved their bravery, another way for them to collect coups. If I wanted, I could do it in the middle of the night, Mom and Dad not missing me at all while I sneak into a neighbor’s open garage, the people inside asleep in their beds, cozy, not worried about crime or a phantom Sioux, while I’m prowling around, catlike, without a sound, searching for a tenspeed, careful not to bang into the garbage can or knock over boxes or drop my flashlight, then take the bike and wheel it away, as easy as one, two, three. just like that. But that wouldn’t be a real test of courage; it would be too easy. Instead, I collect my coups at school, in broad daylight. I feign an excuse to leave the classroom—like chewing on the skin of my finger until it bleeds, and then raising my hand and saying, I cut my finger. Can I see the nurse?—and I make a detour to the bike racks before I get my finger bandaged. I’ve already cased the bikes before the bell rang, so I know which one I’m going to take, which one doesn’t have a lock, which one is the most valuable, and I look to the right of me, look to the left of me, coast’s clear, so I grab the bike. I ride it down to the gully and throw it into the river, and then run back to the nurse, get my Band-Aid, say, Yes ma’am, I’ll be more careful from now on, check my watch, and return to class, wiping sweat off my forehead as I sink into my chair, ready to give the teacher an excuse if necessary, Sorry it took so long, but the nurse was busy, I had to stop at the bathroom, etc., but it never is, necessary that is, because, hey, I’m a straight-A student, an example to be followed, maybe a little eccentric with the bald head and everything, but that’s to be expected. After all, I am from California.

Each time a bike is missing, it becomes more dangerous, and each time I steal a bike, I come closer to Sitting Bull. I intend to fill that river with bikes. I never keep them like the Sioux kept the horses, but I figure the effect is the same. I entered the enemy’s camp, I survived, I have proof lying on the bottom of the river.