More Than Good Enough (2 page)

The neighbors at the end of the block were really getting into Christmas. They had this massive palm tree in their yard. All the fronds sparkled with plastic snowflakes. It must’ve taken them forever to decorate it. At that moment, I couldn’t decide if I admired their efforts or thought they were balls-to-the-wall crazy. Maybe both.

Somebody had plunked a Dixie cup onto one of the lower branches. This made me so mad, I rolled over there and snatched it up. Then I didn’t know what to do with it. I kept skating until finally I just left it in this lady’s mailbox. She was mean, anyway. One time, she called the cops because I was playing my bass at night. It wasn’t even that late, but old people
have no concept of time. They’re always sleeping.

When I got back, the garage smelled like bacon grease, this morning’s leftovers. Mom hadn’t even started making dinner. A bad sign. I dumped my board near the door and barged inside. Dad was sitting on the couch with Mom. Even worse, he had his arm around her, like she was his personal possession. I watched him blink and knew he was telling some bullshit story.

“ … needs to learn how to restructure his time,” Dad was saying.

I wanted to restructure his face.

Mom got up, real fast. “Where have you been?” she asked. “You can’t just run off like that.”

Before she could hug me, Dad was there, smashing his gut between us. “Go to your room,” he said, which was totally laughable. There was no place I’d rather be.

Everybody was screaming. I could hear them from the kitchen, where I checked below the sink for Dad’s tackle box. His secret stash. Not exactly a secret. I pulled out a bottle and shoved it in my back pocket.

I slammed the bedroom door, making sure they heard. It didn’t matter. They were busy with their own issues. Besides. The High Life was calling. I took out my lighter and hooked it under the bottle cap. Just one twist and it was mine.

The Miller dribbled foam all over the carpet. Great. Now my room stunk like those crackheads on Biscayne Boulevard, the guys with the cardboard signs saying
WILL WORK FOR BEER
. I mopped up the mess with some dirty boxers I’d tossed under the bed. Then I took a long gulp. Dad was yelling in the other room.

“You think this has been a vacation for me?” he said. “Well, it’s not Disney World.”

Mom was blabbing about “negative emotions” and “talking it out.” I could hear everything through the cheap drywall. Yeah, this was officially the worst day in the history of Trent.

I grabbed my iPod and scrolled through the playlists. For some reason, I hadn’t deleted my ex’s stupid mix. Why? I had no idea. And another mystery I couldn’t explain: Why was I listening to it?

Maybe I should’ve tried harder. Michelle wasn’t the perfect girlfriend, but I had no right to judge. And now I was switching schools. This was insane. Part of me was like okay, good. This gives me a chance to start over. I could totally become a different person.

At the same time, I was kind of freaking out. Reality had sunk in. The blank days of Christmas break. Nothing to look forward to in this house. The same empty rhythms. Waste the whole day playing Gears of War on the Xbox. Just me and
the Delta Squad.

Man, this sucked.

I chugged the beer so fast, I almost gagged. Soon a fog settled inside me. Usually when I drank alcohol, it turned down the volume in my brain. This time, the beer had the opposite effect. All my dark thoughts multiplied. Their weight dragged me into a black hole, the final resting place for a billion dead suns.

My bedroom door swung open. Dad lurched over to the desk and sort of collapsed. No respect for privacy whatsoever. He looked so pathetic sitting in that troll-sized chair, gawking at my
Chiefs of America
poster. I couldn’t help noticing that he and Sitting Bull had the same pissed-off look.

“Your hair’s too long,” Dad said.

“Fine. I’ll take care of it,” I told him. Mom always let it grow when I was a little kid. She said it represented a mighty spirit. If I chopped it off, I’d lose my bond with the universe. How did she know all this stuff? She wasn’t Indian.

“And get rid of those headphones,” he added. “What’re you listening to these days? Hillbilly music?” He grabbed my iPod.

The Miller bottle was on the desk. Bet he could smell the fumes. If you lit a match in my room, it would burst into flames. Too bad this didn’t actually happen.

Here’s what did happen.

Dad was fumbling with the iPod. He landed on a playlist so old I’d forgotten about it. “What’s this? Some bootleg Hendrix?”

I burned with pride. “It’s this track I’ve been working on.”

“Want to run that by me again?”

“I wrote it.”

The quality was mega shitty. I’d spent a lot of time trying to adjust the recording levels on Audacity, this free software I’d downloaded. Whatever. I could totally do it justice now.

“You know something?” Dad said, wrapping the earbuds around the iPod. No doubt twisting the wires into oblivion. “Son, you don’t need that fancy school.”

The power of music had saved me.

“Your mother’s got it in her head,” he rambled on. “She’s got all these ideas about how things should be.”

Wow. He was finally making sense.

“I’m thinking, me and you. Maybe we could live on the Rez.”

“The reservation?”

I wasn’t exactly jumping with excitement.

The Miccosukee reservation was in the Everglades. The middle of nowhere. I was still getting used to the idea of Dad being around, much less camping with him in some grass-covered chickee hut.

On the other hand, Mom was all kinds of drama. When Dad wasn’t around, she was sneaking off with some dude. Mr. Nameless. And she was constantly up in my business. It would only get worse.

“Your mother and I have already discussed it,” he said.

“So basically I have no choice?”

Dad eased himself out of the chair. He reached the door and I figured I was home free. Then he looked at the empty beer bottle. I was freaking so bad, waiting for him to explode. He took the Miller and walked into the hall without saying anything. Just closed the door slowly, not making a sound.

The bottle had stamped a ring of dampness in the fake wood. I rubbed my fist through it, but the smear didn’t go away.

It probably never would.

My dad is one hundred percent Miccosukee. Ever since I could remember, I’d heard all these crazy stories about him. Stuff that involved stolen cars, pot brownies, and playing bass in a Jimi Hendrix cover band.

Dad grew up on the Rez. He had to move out once he hooked up with Mom, who is one hundred percent London hippie chick.

That makes me half native, half white, and one hundred percent nothing.

two

The Rez didn’t look much different from the flat concrete houses in my old neighborhood. Most houses were painted ice cream colors, lime green and strawberry, all lined up next to a canal laced with water lilies. Each house had its own theme, judging from the life-sized Elvis statue on a front porch. Kids ran around, steering golf carts along the dusty road. I waved to a little girl in a SpongeBob T-shirt. Her bare feet could hardly reach the pedals.

At the end of the block, people docked their airboats. That’s how we got to the tree islands in the Everglades. Sometimes this big old gator would swim up to the docks. I’d give him slices of toast and he’d blink, like he was saying thank you.

Me and Dad were staying next door to Uncle Seth in the Little Blue House. More like a shed, it was so damn small. And with Dad around, it was even smaller. The house was behind the Miccosukee Welcome Center. That’s where tourists can buy tickets to airboat rides and gator shows.

After we got back home from the cookout, I snuck off with my air rifle. I started blasting a pile of crap my ex-girlfriend gave me. Puka shell necklaces I never wore. A keychain that was supposed to store a hundred digital memories. Instead, it got stuck on one—me and Michelle with our mouths smashed together.

“Which do you like better?” she’d asked, deleting shot after shot.

I’d told her they all looked the same.

Wrong answer.

At first, I tried to set fire to the stuff, but the freaking keychain wouldn’t burn. The plastic wrinkled like a slug. So I dumped all that shit on the hood of Dad’s Jeep, the “swamp buggy” he left rusting behind the shed. I loaded the rifle and took aim.

The pellets zinged through the trees. I was out there so long, I didn’t notice it had started sprinkling. Teensy little drops plinked in my eyes. I blinked them away, squeezed out another round.

The one thing I didn’t destroy was her mixtape.

Michelle was a DJ. I mean, she actually spun records instead of just punching buttons on an iPod. She even recorded stuff on cassettes. Michelle made this amazing mix for me over her grandmother’s Spoken Rosary on Tape. Between the creeping strings, you could hear nuns chanting like robots.

Her parents weren’t too thrilled once I started hanging around. I’d pull up in the monster-sized Jeep, which I called “The Yeti.” Then one of her frathead cousins would materialize on the front lawn. I couldn’t even keep their names straight.

“So how about them Marlins?” Brian (or Ryan?) would mumble.

Baseball was never my thing. Maybe if Dad had been around, he could’ve taught me the basics.

I must’ve been brain-dead not to realize Michelle was playing me. A couple weeks before I moved out to the Rez, we were making out in my room and her stupid cell kept buzzing against my leg. She just shrugged and tossed the phone in her purse. Later, she got up to use the bathroom and I checked her text messages. Yeah, it was shady thing to do. Not half as shady as what I saw:

Eric:
I can’t wait to see u babe.

I scrolled through the list of callers. Michelle knew so many people at school, it was hard to keep track. She would clomp through the hall shrieking some freshman girl’s name, then swoop her into a bone-crushing hug as if they were going off to war. It was kind of annoying.

When I asked about the message, she got mad, of course.

“Don’t you trust me?” Michelle chewed her lower lip. Her teeth were a little crooked. She’d been lazy about wearing her retainer, but I didn’t care. I buried my face in her neck, breathed in the burnt popcorn smell of that gunk she used to “sculpt” her split ends.

I wanted to tell her that I didn’t trust anybody.

When I got home after school, Dad was slumped in a beach chair behind the Little Blue House like he’d just woken up from a nap. There was no escaping him.

“Target practice, huh?” he said, looking at the mess.

“Something like that.”

“We should go down to Trail Glades. Shoot some skeet,” he said as we headed into the house.

Now he was making scissors with his meaty fingers, pretending to snip my hair. For a guy who’d been eating off prison cafeteria trays, he looked more like a Mexican wrestler than a menace to society.

He was already making plans for the weekend. “Is that bowling place still open? You know. The one near Dolphin Mall?”

“I think it got torn down,” I said, which wasn’t true.

“Really? That’s a shame.”

A twinge of guilt shot through me. “Maybe it’s still there. Whatever. It was kind of ghetto. I’ll look into it.”

A promise I wouldn’t keep.

Dad tapped my arm. “Where’s that bowling bag you used to carry everywhere? The one with the robots?”

The last time I’d gone bowling, I was in fourth grade. It was somebody’s birthday. Luke Swisstack. Why was I even there? I couldn’t stand that kid. He used to make fun of me nonstop. He’d point at the toilets in the boy’s bathroom, the lids stamped with the word
TRENTON
in loopy capital letters.

“Hey Trent,” he’d say, laughing like crazy. “Is this what you’re named after?”

My cell was ringing. Shouting, actually. The voice of Drake, rapping about how he wanted it to be “forever.”

I glanced at the screen.

Michelle.

“Do these things really take pictures?” Dad swooped over and grabbed the phone. Snatched it right out of my hand. He held it up to the light, as if he could see inside it.

“Yeah,” I said, snatching it back. “And you can make movies and stuff.”

“Could you show me?”

“Sure. No problem.”

“I mean, when you’ve got time.”

“Okay, Dad.” I inched toward the door.

He grinned. “Time is one thing we’ve got plenty of.”

Dad had been out of jail since December, but after we moved to the Rez, it seemed he was suddenly everywhere. I’d come home from school and he’d be passed out on the couch. Lights off. TV blasting. He’d reach for the remote, put the Travel Channel on mute. Then the questions would start
rolling.

Like they were now.

“How’re you liking that new school?” he asked.