Burn Down The Night (15 page)

Shit! Why couldn't
I have done that. My leg feels like an ear of corn at a farmer's picnic.

I let loose of the
birdbath, Morrison grabs me and pushes, getting me going again. We tear across the
yard.

"Murderers! You
killed my—"
screams the fat guy in
the pool, trying to stand up, forgetting where he is, and falling backwards off of his inner
tube. He sinks with a soggy
phump,
cutting himself off in midsentence.

We hear him
thrashing around in the pool, hopefully drowning.

We run into a
chain-link fence, bounce off and try to pull a gate open that has to be pushed. We figure it out
eventually and go breathlessly stumbling through.

Despite all our
ducking and dodging, we hear the police car getting closer and closer. We run toward a big hedge
and duck down behind it, an alley at our backs. Suddenly the siren's screaming in our ear, we
both turn and see the cop car zipping into the alley at our backs.

"Yaaaaah!" says
Morrison.

We practically
shed our skins like snakes as we both explode through the bottom of the hedge. I lose some skin,
some shirt buttons and about two pounds of perfectly good flesh in the process.

The patrol car
crashes by us.

We come out under
a bunch of tall bushes and kind of collapse there. We've had it. If that cop saw us, he's got us.
Neither of us could run the length of a coke spoon.

Sound of brakes,
tires squealing.

"Oh, shit!" says
Morrison, on his stomach. "He saw us! He's coming back!"

Before the words
are completely out of his mouth, there is a rending crash, sounds like a kamikaze pilot crashing
into an aluminum can factory. The siren goes
WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeee... eeee... ee... 
ick... eee... ee ... ick... ick... ick.
And then fades, as if mortally wounded.

We're both panting
like two long-haired dogs with sweaters at Death Valley in the summertime.

"You think he saw
us?" I ask, scared crapless. If Morrison knew what I knew, he'd be equally crapless. Instead, son
of a bitch is almost laughing. Beginning to enjoy this razzmatazz.

"Well, this is
certainly another fine mess you've gotten us into, Stan," he says.

"Blow it out your
swivel, Ollie." I look around, scared. "Maybe we ought to run some more." I'm too tired to
breathe but I want to lift legs for the horizon and get the hell out of there.

"Let's homestead this claim, what say,
old partner?" says Morrison, from a bad cowboy movie. "Ah! The wide open spaces." He brushes the
leaf of a bush out of his ear.

I start to get up
but my running equipment seems to have a truck parked on it. I flop back down, let my tongue hang
even farther out and just concentrate on gasping for breath.

Morrison's out of
breath too but semi-pretends he isn't. You never see him unposed.

Neither of us has exactly been in
training for a marathon race. My stomach is doing loop-the-loops and Morrison, despite the jokes,
looks as green as a frog's bottom. I probably look even greener.

Nobody seems to be
coming for us. Down the alley we hear angry shouts. I guess the cop in the patrol car zigged when
he should have zagged.

"Looks like we won
the race," says Morrison. "I think the cop car raced somebody across an intersection and only
came out tied."

"Lucky for us," I
say. "That car we just ditched... (trying to talk between breaths) "was
hot!
I lifted...
lifted it this morning!"

Morrison rolls
over on his back, thrusts his startled face in mine, isn't sure he heard me right.

"You
what?"

"I stole it...
 
Keys...keys were in it. Found it parked just... just down the street from where I
was crashing... so I boosted it!"

Morrison looks
stunned. "You mean we've been doing all that wild-assing in a stolen car! You stupid turd, we
could have went to jail for eternity!"

That pisses me
off.

"Why is it that
whenever I go out and try to have a little fun somebody is always bitching and complaining and
telling me I shouldn't do it?"

"Asshole!" says
Morrison.

"Oh, yeah. Well,
you can just screw that horse shit! If you're gonna get parental on me, you can just fuck­ing
well
walk home!"

Morrison rolls his
eyes. "We don't have a car any­way, shit head! We're
both
walking!"

"Oh, yeah. I
forgot," I admit. "Well, if I did have a car, I'd make you walk!"

"Shut up," says
Morrison.

"Make
me."

"You're not my
type."

I roll over, turn
my back on him. The hell with him. I'll go unconscious on him and wait for a meteor to hit
him.

Now that all the
fun's gone by, my whole universe is demanding sleep. 
Sleep!

Morrison's saying
something. Something about Jean-Luc Godard and a weekend.

Me, I could have
cared less. I was Philip Marlowe, doing a Dick Powell scene from Raymond Chandler's
Murder, My
Sweet.
You know the one I mean.

Somebody saps him
with a blackjack and Marlowe/Powell says, "A black pool opened at my feet and I dove
in."

Me, I hit the
bottom of the black pool before Mar­lowe even got off the diving board.

Thou shalt never
sleep under bushes.

It was raining and
it never rains in Los Angeles.

Flavored yellow
rain

I open my eyes.
What the hell is going on?

Son of a bitch! A
goddamn poodle with upraised leg is hosing the bush I am sleeping under.

I kick out at him
from under the bushes where I'm lying. The dog yelps and runs away.

I stare up at the
thick bushes over my head, wipe the dog piss off my face and try to remember just where the hell
I am.

It all comes back,
the eyes focus, the head stops spinning around like a top and I roll over painfully, expecting to
see Morrison passed out beside me.

He's
gone.

I get up on my
hands and knees and crawl out from under the bushes. Force myself to try standing up. I make it
but I am pretty shaky. I stagger around, blinking in the chill of the Los Angeles night. I hurt
every­where. I've got blood all over me, ruined clothes, aches and pains in every part of me.
Sore throat, splitting head and a nose that is so sore it hurts to breathe through it.

Moonlight feels
like a razor cutting into my eyes. Feel like I just want to roll up in a ball and die or like I
already did that. Keep asking myself how I got here, where I am going to land next. I never seem
to know. No direction leads home.

I'm thousands of
miles from the home I don't have.

Home.

That's what the
rock and roll world is instead of.

I had one once.
Sort of. I didn't start out here, in this dreamland of snow-white beaches, this L.A. nowhere. I
traveled to get here from my own personal nowhere. Fled in the beginning of the summer, another
Indian taking the highway the white man has driven across the world's heart.

I'm out here on
the streets, fifteen but passing for older, owned by no one and owning no one. I am an es­capee
from White Christmas, a despiser of holidays, of birthdays, of all official celebrations of love
and caring. I hated them all because I never got them.

I am one of the
people your parents warned you against. How I got here, it's not easy to tell. But they say some
are born to sweet delight and some are born to endless night, and it's been dark ever since my
world began. If you could cut me open with a knife, you'd find all the love I didn't get and all
the tears I couldn't cry.

• • •

I had been this
adopted creature who lived in a cold house with two white people who didn't love me enough or at
all.

Doctors had told
my adoptive parents when they were trying to have some children and couldn't that they should
adopt a child. Something was wrong with the woman, some kind of hormonal imbalance. The doctor
said caring for a child would cause some kind of physical, psychological change in her and she
could then get pregnant.

So they went
shopping for a child. Anyone would do, but white was their first choice. Thing was, white wasn't
available. I wasn't white, I was Cherokee, full-blood father and half-breed mother. They had to
take what they could get and I was all they could get.

My real parents
were killed in a car wreck. And the few other relatives I had were either indifferent or in the
process of dying from being Indian in a world that didn't have much use for Indians. As far as
close relatives go, I had two uncles, but they didn't live long enough for anyone to say they
even existed. One died in a bar fight and the other committed suicide. So there wasn't much of my
own people to hold on to.

I had only a small
child's memory of a tall man who drank too much and a dark-haired woman who took the beatings he
gave her in silence. And always traveling, always moving from one nowhere to another. The three
of us wearing a reservation face, some external brand that marked us, that set us apart from the
white people. We were tattooed by our way of life as surely as if we were inmates of a
concentration camp and had numbers on our arms.

Then there was
that train that was as inevitable as history and the car driven by a man who drank too much. Then
it was just me, a survivor in the back seat with blood all over me, all over everything. I still
remember their screams as the train crushed the front of the car, sheering it off. It's a
nightmare that waits for me when I sleep and never goes away. I can't seem to get their blood off
me, not in this lifetime.

After the train, I
didn't belong to anybody.

I got put in a
home where we were lined up in rows and hopeful people came and looked at us. We were taught to
smile and wag our little tails like puppies in a pet shop.

I guess I smiled
good 'cause I was a little too old to get chosen but I got chosen. My new parents didn't meet all
the qualifications for adoption, couldn't get a white baby through legitimate means. Least that's
what they told me later. So they made a deal somewhere along the way and money changed hands and
they took me home with them and they taught me just how empty empty can be.

It worked out for
them if not for me. The old lady got used to the idea of caring for a child, she got pregnant and
they had a kid. It took them two years but it worked out for them. Almost worked out for me too.
Almost. 'Cause those two years were the only two years of my life I ever remember anybody being
kind or loving. Two years of love, just long enough to begin to understand what it is to be
wanted.

And then there was
a boy, their first and only natural son. Suddenly I didn't exist anymore. I was only a device, a
dose of medicine once prescribed by a doctor and now no longer needed.

They fed me, gave
me enough clothes to keep me from running around naked and very little else. Christmas and
birthdays were the worst.

Christmas
mornings, when we were older, my brother raced down the stairs to that wonderful world of
packages and ribbons and strings and toys and surprises.

I was told to stay
in my room. For me, no toys, no surprises from the heart. Only an empty room and silent walls
without arms to hold me. Love went away without explanation. I felt like a toy that had been
broken, that no one had any use for anymore.

I had become an
embarrassment, a dark-skinned stranger who had overstayed his welcome. Only my little brother was
kind to me, late at night, when nobody would know.

An escapee from
White Christmas, a gift to the world with nothing inside, I hit the streets, seeing them as the
only home I was ever going to have. And those cold dark streets led me to L.A.

I had begun my
journey to L.A. just a few steps ahead of the cops. I'd been living on the streets of my
hometown, destined for trouble and had found it. Found it where no Indian has a right to be, on
the streets where the rich white people live.

I had walked past
all those big houses and all those fat well-fed citizens safe and warm inside. I guess I got the
idea I should break in and steal something. Stealing was nothing I hadn't done before. All the
last couple of months I'd been living off what I shoplifted from su­permarkets. I am good at
stealing.

I pick the biggest
house. I know who lives there. Everybody in my hick town knows the people in the big house. They
practically own the town. The husband, already rich, made optical lenses for bomb sites in World
War Two and made a fortune out of the death business.

All I ever hear is
talk about the parties they throw, the jets they catch to here and there. Servants and fancy cars
and all that trash.

The big rambling
house is dark in every room.

Maybe they are off
somewhere. Nobody home.