Nobody Cries at Bingo (35 page)

Later that week, Mom went to her monthly school board meeting. Mom was the first person ever appointed to the school board from the reserve and she took her duties very seriously. She wanted to ensure that we had the best education possible. It also gave the inside track on the best school gossip.

That night, Mom returned later than usual. She hurried into the living room and asked Celeste and me about the near-fight between Malcolm and the white guys. We told her what we had seen.

“The school board wanted to kick Malcolm out,” Mom told us.

“He never fought anyone!” I protested.

“The fight is just an excuse. It's because of that white girl. I set them straight,” Mom said, congratulating herself on her assertiveness as she nervously sucked on her cigarette. “I told them, this isn't the 1950's. No way, Jose. This is the twentieth century and he can date who-ever the hell he wants. This is what those black people were fighting for down south — you know with the bridge and the hoses and the water truck — for the dream or whatever that was — just like that I stood up to them, and told them all off — you bet your ass!”

Confrontation was as natural to Mom as a savings account and I knew we'd be hearing about this one for a few years at least. She retold her story several times, adding and refining her speech until it sounded like she had delivered Martin Luther King's “I have a Dream” speech to the school board.

Finally the adrenaline wore off and she became calm. Then a thoughtful look crossed her face. “Doesn't Malcolm have a girlfriend back home?”

He did. And when she found out about the white girl, Malcolm was ordered home. He left that weekend, deciding that pissed off gang-bangers were not as scary as a pissed off girlfriend.

Nathan hung on to finish the school year with the lost boys. While he lacked Malcolm's leadership skills, he had enough charm to seduce every Aboriginal girl within fifty miles. The lost boys followed in his wake; proximity to girls is more than enough reason to follow a leader.

Fun dominated their school schedules and I watched them frolic in the parking lot from my classroom window. They teased each other and play wrestled under the spring sun. I also noticed the tall, pale lost boy playing along with them, too slow to remember that he did not belong with them or wise enough to know that it didn't matter.

T
HE
R
ESERVE VS.
S
ATAN'S
B
RIDES

G
ROWING UP THE QUESTION,
“W
HAT ARE YOU
going to be?” never baffled me. A movie,
And Justice for All
, had sealed my fate. So when the question was asked, my answer was given without a moment's hesitation, “A lawyer, of course.” No one ever asked the follow-up question, “What does a lawyer do?”

Because if they had asked, my answer would have been revealing: “They wear pretty suits with high heels that clack smartly down the hallways of justice.”

When I went home after my first year of law school, my relatives had their legal questions ready for me. They sat across from me as I ate my cereal and laid out their legal dilemmas:

“Now let's say I punched a cop in the face . . . no, no, hear me out . . . you haven't heard the whole story . . . if I punched him right in the kisser after he accused me of stealing a car and everyone knows it was my brother, and not me . . . my question is: do I have a case for mistaken identity?”

“So I was coming out of the grocery store and the clerk stopped me and found three cartons of smokes . . . and this is the tricky part . . . the cartons were stuffed in my two-year- old's backpack. Even I know that two-year-old's can't be prosecuted so why am I getting charged?”

“Okay, so I stole a doctor's prescription pad and wrote myself a prescription — only so I could get some painkillers cuz my hand was killing me after punching out that cop. Isn't that self-defense or something?”

The cases were dazzling in their complexity. I pondered each question carefully, then applied my legal knowledge to the facts, formulated my answer and delivered it. This process took about twenty seconds. Then, I would accept my payment: a look of awe.

It's probably this appetite for approval that got me into trouble. I was at my parent's house on summer vacation when my older sister Tabitha called one night. In clipped words she asked to speak to Mom. I knew her tone. It could mean only one thing: trouble.

I told her Mom was busy and pressed the phone closer to my ear; my toe tapped on the floor as my body eagerly responded to the drama of the situation.

“I need you and Mom to come to my reserve immediately. They are charging our baby-sister with witchcraft,” Tabitha said.

“Sorry? Did you say . . . witchcraft?”

Tabitha gave a frustrated sigh, which I took as a sign to quit being a smart ass. She explained that her husband's reserve, the White Lake Nation had charged our youngest sister Pammy with four counts of witchcraft. (White Lake is a pseudonym to protect my family from further witchcraft-related accusations. Also, to protect the real reserve from ridicule, because accusing people of witchcraft in the twenty-first century is some crazy shit.)

The White Lake Band Council had summoned fifteen-year-old Pammy to face the charges against her. They had apparently arisen from her last visit with Tabitha a few months before.

“Wow that's so cool. You're going to a witch trial!” I said, enjoying her obvious annoyance. “Make sure to tell us all about it.”

“I'm not going. I have to work. You and Mom are going.”

“Sorry, I skipped the class on witchcraft law.”

“It doesn't matter if you believe or not, you have to take it seriously.” Tabitha knew she wasn't dealing with rational types. She had accepted that when she moved onto her husband's reserve. His community was different from ours, some might say backwards. But it was also rich, much wealthier than ours. They had money; we had science. It's hard to say who had it better.

Unlike my sister, I was not prepared to be diplomatic. I had inherited my mom's impatience and I dismissed people who believed in ghosts, aliens and witches with rolled eyes and a contemptuous shake of the head. I did not listen to them, question them, or worse, drive six hours out of my way to spend a day with them.

Tabitha believed that ignoring the witch hunters would make the problem worse. “If no one shows up, they can just ban our baby sister from the reserve. Forever. And then who will baby-sit for me?”

I told her that my only travel plans were a trip to the beach followed by a quick jaunt to the local Dairy Queen.

Tabitha turned on the big guns. “I thought you were training to be a lawyer or something. Don't lawyers protect people from persecution?”

“Yeah, in a big city where people will notice.”

“Don't you want to show people who know you — like your cousins and your ex-boyfriend — what a great lawyer you are?”

Tabitha knew which buttons to press. Of course, I only had one button, labelled, “Ego.”

The next day Mom and I drove to my sister's reserve. We had so many questions on the way there such as, what would a witch trial look like? Why Pam? And, of course, who the hell still believes in witches?

Pam was guilty of many things but witchcraft was not one of them. If this crucible was prosecuting her for crimes against pairs of jeans, I could understand. She had a tendency to wear them so tight that their seams screamed for mercy — then again so did any Native girl under the age of forty.

If she were being prosecuted for delivering smartass remarks and being a general spoiled little shit, then that would also be more believable. Even if they had to invent a new charge for her say—“Assault against the English language,” then I would nod my head and say, “Yes, I can understand why you created a law in order to punish my sister for saying things like, ‘un-fucking-butt-ass believable.'”

As the baby of the family, Pammy was a little wild. The last five years had more than proven that to all of us. When she was a baby, we would stand over her bassinet and imagine her future. Would she be a lawyer? A doctor? A teacher?

“I want to be a stripper,” she baldly declared these days to anyone who listened. “Cuz they get to wear cool clothes and have fake tits.”

Where we once cheered every time she spoke, now we listened to her stories in open-mouthed horror. The same parents, who used to scream at us for being irresponsible and whiny, now hugged us close whenever we visited. “You're great kids. We didn't know. We swear, we didn't know.”

We watched her apply makeup thick enough to protect her against radiation poisoning and squeeze into tops that fit her when she was two. Then when Pammy was sixteen, she got a tattoo of a rose wrapped in barbed wire on her breast. “Like it? My friends say it's the sexiest fuckin' thing ever.”

“Are your friends the band Poison?”

“Who the fuck is Poison?”

That barbed wire tittie tattoo was the trashiest thing I'd ever seen until the next year when she followed it up with a tat on her arm that read, “Love 69.”

Word of the tattoo spread like wildfire over the phone lines. Celeste saw it first, and then she called Tabitha, who called me. Then I called home, asked my mom about it, who asked my brother David — who didn't know it existed and just said, “What the fuck?” Then the phone was passed to the Wild One herself who proudly described it to me. “My friends think it's fucking awesome.”

“Who are your friends, the cast of
Debbie Does Dallas
?”

“You're jealous cuz you don't have the balls.”

She bravely went against any notion of class or elegance and we had no idea why. Like conservative pundits, we blamed rap music, her friends, TV, cigarettes, and pizza pops for her behavior but never blamed ourselves. Although in our case, we were right. Nobody else in the family had turned out like Pam. It was like she had emerged fully formed from a mound of cigarette ashes.

But a witch? That was impossible. It was like we had fallen into a low budget horror flick. Except in that case, Pammy would turn out to be a witch and then would destroy the small reserve of White Pine with her powers. Not a bad movie idea really.

When I told her about the witchcraft charges, Pammy laughed raucously and started packing. As she threw her smokes and tube tops into her backpack, she said, “I can't want to hear their charges. I'm gonna laugh right in their stupid fuckin' faces. And then I'm gonna kick the shit outta the bitch who accused me.”

Mom was too scared to let Pammy speak on her own behalf. Give Pammy the floor and she would use it to rant for hours, probably implicating herself in a thousand other real crimes in the process. Also, what if this thing were for real? Real witch trials never had happy endings. We knew enough New England history to know that.

After Mom and I arrived at Tabitha's house, we spent five hours discussing everything related to the trial. I have no idea why it took that long since my older sister knew nothing. It was the reserve's first witchcraft proceeding and the particulars had not yet been set down. The trial was scheduled for the next day and over three hundred people planned to be there. “Maybe more, people always turn out for these things,” Tabitha said.

I asked her if by “these things” she meant other “witch-related hearings.”

She was referring to a half dozen inquiries held in the past year into aliens, werewolves and Sasquatch.

“Is this a reserve or an asylum for mental patients?” I asked.

Tabitha glared at me. “You have to take this seriously!”

I shouldn't have laughed. After all, Mom was a wreck. She sat on my sister's deck and chain-smoked. I couldn't put my finger on the source of her worries. I knew she was scared of speaking in public. It was also possible that she was scared of encountering a real witch at the trial as my sister was not the only girl being charged. I blamed Catholicism. If you believed that wine could be turned into blood, it wasn't so far a leap to believe that a broom could make you fly.

We drove to the White Lake Band hall the next day. It was a low building, hardly impressive enough to serve the needs of such a huge and financially successful band. That's because it wasn't, Mom explained. Down the road was the real hall, a huge modern building with a café on the ground floor.

This was the old band hall and had been left standing to serve the needs of the supernatural believers. Mom added that as a leader you were obligated to respect everyone's beliefs. “When your dad was chief, believe me, I had to deal with a lot of these assholes. In a respectful way, of course.”

When we got out of the car, people stared at us. We didn't take that personally because people always stared in White Lake. They recognized as non-band members and had to sift through their files of family trees to put us in the right place. We were related to two large families on the reserve so we were tolerated and received a modicum of politeness. Someone handed Mom a coffee and she gratefully slurped it in the cold morning air.