Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (27 page)

Why couldn't anybody tell me where evil came from?  Was it something you were born with, or gained over time?  Had Dad been aware that he was an evil person?  What about Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy--had they ever felt that what they were doing was wrong?  It hit me, maybe for the first time, that Dad actually belonged in the same class as those guys.  Dad was a serial killer.  Dad was a member of an elite, perverse club that celebrated the likes of Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, and Jack the Ripper.  Somewhere in the collective subconscious of the universe they all sat patting one another on the back.  Each and every one of those men had ruined countless lives for their own gratification.  I wished I could understand--but maybe I didn't--how exactly those deaths were supposed to be gratifying.

Sleeping Fox decided he wanted to head home rather than return to the Nuwinuwi.  He saw himself out with the rest of his sesame loaf and his empty yaupon cup--told you he'd drunk the stuff.  I picked up my own glass, still full, and went back outside the house.  I'd told Sky I was coming back to him.  I couldn't turn back on my word.

Halfway to the crossroads I stopped walking, gazing at the sky.  The meteors were faint now, their earlier vainglory worn off.  My imagination kicked in again.  The last of the shooting stars simmered quietly, falling at my feet.  Wisps of cosmic light rose off the ground, weaving elegantly in the shape of a woman.  She had small hands, a straight waist.  Her chin was sloping, her nose snub.

It didn't surprise me any to see my mom.  I saw her every year, and I'd anticipated it.  It was always the same combination of emotions: relief; longing; homecoming; fear.  There was no one I wanted to be with more than my own mother.  There was no one whose opinion of me scared me more.  Sometimes I wasn't sure whether I was really imagining her.  Your mind can be oppressive if it's the only thing you've been allowed to know for seventeen years.

"Hi," I mumbled.

Mom's forehead wrinkled.  "Mary's still not home yet?"

She walked with me.  "Nah," I said.  "She joined a rock band or something.  More like she just wants to shoot up all the time."

"Rafael," Mom rebuked.

"Sorry," I said.  You should always speak respectfully to your mother.

"What about Gabriel?" Mom asked.  "Is he finally seeing someone?"

"Yeah," I said.  "This really nice woman, Rosa.  You would like her, Mom."

"Rosa Gray Rain?  I remember when she was a little girl."

I heard ferrets rustling in the trees, crickets chirping their annoyance.  I put my flashlight down and sat on the road.  Mom sat with me.

"Would it have changed anything?" I asked.  "If I hadn't given you your medicine that night?"

"I don't think so," Mom said.

Mothers always tell you what you want to hear.

"I wish you'd take me with you," I said, throat tight.  "Into the sky."

Plains People believed we returned to the soil when we passed away.  Having met the boy of the same name, I believed something a little different.

"You don't wish that," Mom said.

She touched the back of my hand with stubby fingertips, the same shape as mine.  Feeling emotions from human beings was one thing.  Feeling emotions from space dust was another.  It was like wading through a dream with your eyes wide open, cognizance intact.  It was like speaking without words, with only understanding.

I didn't really wish she'd carried me into the sky.  If she had, I wouldn't be with Sky anymore.

Sky.  I already lived among the clouds, the sun.  I was already in the same place as my mother, every minute of every hour of every day.

Mom touched the dove's feather in my braid.  Mom kissed my cheek with stardust lips, welcoming me home.  Nuwinuwi means Coming Home.

"Raise your glass, dear," Mom said.

I'd forgotten.  I scooped up the yaupon tea at my side.  I looked for a meteor in the sky and held my glass up to touch its trail.  The clear brim flashed blinding white.  My ancestors from hundreds of years ago drank from today's bounty, thirsty after their long journey home.

A ball of energy built at the base of my spine.  It spread to my fingertips, clouding my eyes.  I had the feeling just then that everyone who had ever lived, everyone living presently, was of the same mind.  If I quieted my own mind I could feel the imprints they'd left without touching them; I could hear them without hearing their voices.  Somewhere in the windmill field Aubrey's big brother gathered up his drowsy daughter, content to have her in his arms.  Somewhere else William Sleeping Fox stared out his bedroom window, wondering whether his mother lived close enough to Arizona to see the meteors, too.

I lowered my glass and Mom was gone.  I wasn't entirely sad.  Mom wasn't gone; not really.  Mom lived in the sky; and I did, too.

12

No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service

One morning I climbed the side of Sky's log cabin and knocked on his window until he rolled groggily out of bed.  The sun hadn't risen yet, but I made him come out to the sinkhole with me, where we sat on pieces of petrified golden wood, talking about a game show on the Navajo radio station.  It was called Name That Roundie, and the host, a former pauwau MC, had a really weird personality.  "Don't take it to the hogan if you can't smoke it," he'd declared one day.

"You're supposed to mail in your answers," I said.  "If you get all of 'em right, they give you a trip to the Grand Canyon or something.  The Navajo own a huge part of the park, but the Hopi own the other part, and the two of 'em are always fighting over land titles.  It's pretty dumb."

Sky wrinkled his face. 
Why can't they just share?

"Dunno.  I think they never got along.  It wasn't all milk and cookies before the colonists showed up."

Sky grinned roguishly.  I felt my face burn up.  I shoved him, but grinned back.

"Do you know any roundies?" I asked.

Sky lifted his flute to his lips and played the first few notes of the Song of the Fallen Warrior.  I interrupted him.  I said, "That ain't a roundie."

Sky swung at me with his leg.  I scampered out of his way and almost fell over backwards.

"Roundies follow a rhythm like this," I said, and slapped my tree stump with an open palm.  Bump-bump.  Bump-bump.  "S'only the singing that's any different."

Sky started playing Nights in White Satin.  I gave him a disgusted look.

The sun began to rise, hot glow cracking across the dark horizon, humidity spilling across the sinkhole.  The sun was a jealous competitor, I thought.  Sky's light was brighter by far, an enveloping white that contained within it every other color to ever grace the earth.  If I looked close enough at Sky's aura I could see every person to grace the earth, too.  I could see all the events in the annals of history: every postcard and report card, every wedding, divorce, childbirth, and war.  Two hundred years ago a man in Utah built a saltbox house for his aging parents.  Twenty thousand years ago it snowed and snowed, men with spears hunting mammoths.  Nu mantu satu.  All are related.

"I'm not going to the Ghost Dance this year," I said.

Sky looked sideways at me. 
Why not?

" 'Cause I hate dancing," I said.

Even though your mom liked it when you danced?

"Moms are weird like that.  You don't wanna see me dance.  I'd probably blind you."

I don't think you would.

The way Sky inspected me made me feel shy.  I looked away, scraping the fiery sand on the ground with the heel of my ratty old sneaker.

You should smile more often
, Sky said.

He reached between our amber tree stumps, light quavering around his arm.  He touched the dimples in my cheeks, pulling them gently upward.  Wherever his skin met mine the ill feelings siphoned out of me.  He harrowed the bad thoughts seeded across my mind.  Maybe everybody had somebody who made them feel like a good person with their presence alone.  Sky liked me so much, he made me like me, too.  How could I not like the things he liked?  That would be the same as denying how important he was.  He was so important the sun couldn't rise without him.  The sun only existed to contest his luminance.

"You're a freaking heyoka," I said.

Heyokas lived their lives in opposites.  All my life people used to see me coming and run the other way.  For Sky to think enough of me to stick around meant he was a heyoka.  He had to be.  I didn't mind.  Heyokas were healers.  I'd heard stories about how they'd brightened everybody's spirits during those first few years on the reservation, when Plains People realized for the first time that we weren't allowed to roam freely anymore.  Sky was a healer in the innocence of his smile, in the spark of his hearth-colored eyes.  He healed me every time he dug his elbow into my side, or touched my knee with wide hands.

Sky got up to stand by the sinkhole.  For a while he entertained himself throwing rocks inside, watching as the salty, acidic water devoured them whole.  That the smallest of natural phenomena gave him so much joy gave me joy, too.  He came back at length to sit down on the sandy ground beneath my tree stump, laying his head back against my knees.  I worried that he might be uncomfortable like that, and sat very still to make sure he wasn't.  He bent his head leisurely, braiding together two skinny strands of glasswort that had come up from the ground.  You see what I mean?  He had interest in and reverence for everything around him, no matter how commonplace.  I was willing to wager he'd never had a single bad thought: about anything; about anyone.

I sank my fingers into Sky's hair, enjoying his curls between my knuckles, his warmth under my nails.  When he tired of his glasswort he played Ascending to Infinity on his Plains flute.  It surprised me, because I knew he hated my music, especially Luca Turilli's Rhapsody.  His notes were a little shaky, and he skipped the crazy intro altogether, but I realized he must have memorized the song with me in mind.  That he thought about me at all unfurled a moth's nest of nerves in my stomach.  It was the good type of nerves, the shy, excited kind.  But at the same time, it was confusing, almost painful.

"You're not my friend," I muttered.

What I meant was that he wasn't merely my friend.  He was more than that.  He knew it; I knew he knew it.  I didn't know why he pretended otherwise.  He was still afraid, maybe, but he shouldn't have been.  All I really wanted was to take care of him.  I would have leapt at the chance.  I would have given him anything he asked for.

In some ways Sky's silence worked in his favor.  No matter how easy I found it to read his facial expressions, his body language, they weren't actual words.  If he wanted to evade the subject, it was as easy as controlling the way his hands moved, or averting his eyes.  When I said to him, "You're not my friend," he acted like he hadn't heard me.  He played a couple of notes from Helloween's March of Time, another of my favorite songs.  I would have been annoyed at the evasion, except I couldn't be annoyed with Sky.  He had a voice now, clear and whistling through falcon bone, low and deep when he covered the right air holes with his fingers.  He had a voice, and that was all I cared about.  He sat between my legs, piping melodies on his flute, a modern day Peter Pan, Mr. Tumnus without the beard.  I didn't mind eternal childhood.  Eternal winter was even better.

Sky jumped up suddenly.  He snapped his fingers.

"What?" I said, alarmed.  I stood slowly.

Sky turned his back on me, hunched over, digging around in his pockets.  My eyebrows furrowed.  He turned around again, a pen tucked behind his ear, his grin miscreant.  He slapped a sticky note on my nose.  I spat at the stench of factory glue.  I ripped the note off and flipped it over, squinting at his handwriting.

I forgot to give you something!

It didn't surprise me any to hear that Sky had forgotten something.  Since becoming friends with Sky I'd learned he forgot a lot of things.  My favorite was when we bused out to Paldones for ice cream and he forgot his shoes.  With Arizona's heat under his socks, I wasn't sure how he'd managed such a thing, but the real accomplishment was that he didn't get us kicked out of the ice cream parlor--"No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service."  Yeah, the proprietor had been pretty angry, but one look at Sky and he'd melted compliantly.  Sometimes I swore Sky could sway whole armies with his puppy dog face.

"I don't want anything," I said.  I taped the sticky note to my arm.  Sticky notes were cool.

Sky
shook his head.  Sky took the pen out from behind his ear, showed me his back again, then whirled around and planted a second note on my nose.

Go to church
, he'd written, complete with a smiley face.

"It's not time yet, smartass," I said.  I taped the new note to my other arm.  It was Sunday, yeah, but mass didn't start for another hour.

No excuses!
Sky said.

He placed his hands on my back.  He shoved against me with all his weight until I stumbled in the direction he wanted.  I could almost hear him laughing over my shoulder, but then I realized I was imagining it.  His laughs were always soundless.

We came in view of the church, the cheerful morning sun spattering the cupola in blue dawn.  I wondered whether Sky was in a playful mood, and he was about to splash me in the face with holy water before he ran away.  Instead of entering the church, he steered me around the back of it, where the rusted water pump stood ready for use.  I nearly groaned to see how accurate my prediction was.  He didn't splash me, though.  He knocked loose the wood panel above the spigot and I started.  I'd never told him I liked to hoard spare drawing tools there.  Old pieces of charcoal fell out, and so did one of my lined notebooks.  So did a sketchbook I'd never seen before.