Steal the North: A Novel (20 page)

“Why did you go over there without me?” I ask later when we lie together in Teresa’s bed. “And why didn’t you tell me you speak French?”

“I don’t.”

“What language was that then?”

“I mean, yes, I’ve had three years of French. But I suck. The concierge snickered.”

“The what?”

“I went to Beth’s to get my money and calling cards. Spencer gave me lots of money before I left Sacramento. We don’t have to worry.”

“We don’t need his money.”

“You sound like my mom.”

“What do you mean?” How could I possibly sound like a professor?

“Mom has problems with her wisdom teeth. The pain keeps her awake at night. Spencer loves her and wants to pay for a dentist, but she won’t let him. I don’t understand.”

“Be glad you don’t.” I respect Emmy’s mom for not taking the dude’s money.

“We’re using Spencer’s money for gas tomorrow,” Emmy says. “And for food.”

“No, we’re fucking not.” I pull away from her.

“Yes, we
fucking
are. You don’t have much money. I looked in your wallet.”

“Shit.” I sit up. “Not very cool.”

“You don’t have a dad to give you money.”

What’s her fucking point? “Neither do you, remember?”

“I know.” She sits up. “But I have Spencer.”

“Do you have a thing for him?”

“What?” She looks confused.

“Do you and Spencer have a thing? Don’t be shy. You know what I mean.”

She’s shocked. I am too. She jumps out of bed. “So, you
do
think I’m a slut?”

God, I’m an asshole. What a thing for me to imply, especially when she blames her “impurity” for the healing ceremony’s not working, and with our just having had sex together twice in the last twenty-four hours.

“I don’t fuck my mom’s boyfriend,” she says. “That’s disgusting, Reuben. How could you think that? He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a dad. He loves me.”

She has this way of sounding so young.

“He even told me so at the airport.”

She heads for the door, but I stop her. “I’m sorry. I was being a prick. I’m sorry.”

“If I had anywhere to go,” she says, “know that I’d be gone.”

I actually kneel. “Forgive me, Emmy.”

“We’re using Spencer’s money.” I shake my head. “You’re so stubborn. You drive me crazy.” She punches the tops of my shoulders, but lightly. Then she reaches under my arms and tries to pull me up. As if. I fall back on the floor, laughing. “Screw you,” she says. “I need a cigarette.”

“Come on then.” I stand up. “Have you ever smoked before?” She says no. We go out the back door. Her aunt’s trailer is dark. We stare at it a long time before I light her a cigarette. She’s a natural, doesn’t choke, inhales just right and exhales with ease. It’s damn sexy. She’s making it more so on purpose by being breathy, as she gets sometimes when we kiss.

“Jesus,” I say when she’s done with her cig, “you better not smoke that way in college.”

We both become silent. College seems irrelevant suddenly, which is scary. It’s all I’ve thought about for years. But I don’t want to go to college, or anywhere, without Emmy.

She gets up, says she has to get something out of her bag in Teresa’s room. “Look,” she says when she returns. It’s the diamond necklace she wore the first weeks she was here. Why show it to me? “We can hock it for gas money.” I’m not sure. “Come on, Reuben.” When I don’t respond, she sings, “R-E-V-E-N-G-E,” instead of R-E-S-P-E-C-T. I grin, but I still don’t want anything to do with the necklace.

“Did you know Connor has his tongue pierced?”

“Really? What a fag.”

“You shouldn’t use that word.”

“Sorry. What a cocksucker. Does he really?”

“Yeah, and sometimes he’d cover my eyes when we had sex.”

“What the hell?”

“So let me hock the necklace. It’ll make me feel better”

“Let me throw it in the fucking Dumpster.”

“He didn’t cover
your
eyes. He covered
mine
.”

Good point. I tell her we’ll hit the pawnshop on the way out of town.

“Wait in your truck,” Emmy says as I pull in front of Basin Gun & Pawn. “This is between Connor and me.”

“What? No way.” Pawnbrokers are sleazy. She can’t talk very well to people she knows, like Teresa, let alone a greasy-haired stranger with a pinkie ring and a sour toothpick dangling from his mouth. “I’m not letting you go in there alone. Forget it.”

“Connor always made me strip.
Always
. He’d never undress me. I was like his personal porn star.”

“Fine.” I cave. “Just don’t tell me any more shit about that guy.”

She comes back out ten minutes later with three hundred dollars. She probably got only forty bucks for the necklace. I can’t picture Emmy bartering. The rest of the cash is Spencer’s. I’m not an idiot. But I love her smile and the confidence she tries to fake.

We drive north on highway 17 into the coulees. White people are fishing for trout and bass off the side of the road and in boats on the various reservoirs. These holding lakes, engineered together with pipes, pumps, smaller dams, and canals, make a fake branch of the Columbia—white man’s branch—so basin farmers can irrigate their thirsty crops. Just past Coulee City, I get on 155 to the dam. I could head west instead and take 97 north to Omak, but then we’d only skirt the rez. On 155, we have to go right past Grand Coulee Dam and then through a large portion of the rez to get to Omak. Emmy’s eyes practically pop out when she first sees the dam. Whose wouldn’t? It’s only fifty feet short of being a mile across. Whites love to brag about how much concrete Coulee Dam contains: enough to pave a highway from Seattle to Miami; three times more than Hoover Dam. It’s the largest concrete structure in the United States. Emmy knows how I feel about the dam, what it’s done to the river, the salmon, my people. I already told her. Her great-grandfathers probably helped build it. Fuck, so did mine.

We’re on the rez. She’s been sitting close but scoots closer. After about ten minutes, we pass the agency headquarters. I point them out to Emmy. Across the highway, I point out the Nespelem Community Center and powwow arena. We pass the state’s
POINT OF HISTORICAL INTEREST
sign for Chief Joseph’s grave. I don’t point to it—out of respect to Chief Joe and his descendants who live here. Emmy starts to point to the sign but then only looks back at it. As a rule, I don’t take white girls driving around the rez. Other Indian boys do, but not me. We pass decent-looking trailer houses, then junky ones, some even with the “skin” torn off, others bandaged with plywood. Emmy says nothing. Every once in a while there’s a nice trailer set off with a well-maintained yard and outbuildings. We pass houses and shacks in the town of Nespelem. She must see the rusted cars and appliances, strewn garbage, broken trampolines and swing sets, but she stays silent. “Poverty isn’t looked down upon on the rez,” I tell her as we pass the Nespelem longhouse. “The elders say we’re all in this together.”

The scattered pines thicken as we start to climb the pass.

When the trees get dense and shade darkens the cab, Emmy whispers, “I love you, Reuben.” I feel the words in my joints. “I love you
more
than I love Beth.”

“You don’t have to say that.”

“I
do
have to say it. I feel so guilty.”

“Just breathe,” I tell her. It’s not safe to pull over here—way too curvy—or I would. “We’ll go to Spokane first thing in the morning.”

“Are we in the Cascades?” she asks between breaths. “Aunt Beth and I stayed in the foothills.”

I explain that the mountains on the rez are part of the Okanogan Highlands, not the Cascades. “But you’ll see the Cascades as soon as we head west.”

Emmy relaxes when the land opens back up. Right here is one of my favorite parts of the rez. I point to the snow-covered Cascades in front of us. At least whites can’t flatten them as they’ve slowed and backed up the flow of the Columbia with their, what, fourteen dams on the main stem alone. When Coyote returns—and the elders promise he will—he certainly has his work cut out for him.

Emmy is doing much better. She points to horses and ponies that she finds pretty, which is damn near all of them, and there are a lot.

We’re back in sage as we make it to Omak by two in the afternoon. I drive Emmy around town, show her the stampede grounds, Suicide Hill, the high school. I want her to meet my mom while she’s at work, in hopes she’ll be somewhat sober. I try to find parking in front of the bar or the Laundromat next door. Shit. A church youth group is singing on the corner. I park across the street. We get out. Emmy seems mesmerized by the group of teenagers, holding signs and crosses and singing about victory in Jesus. “Can we watch for a minute?” she asks when I grab her hand to start walking.

“Sure.” I’d love nothing more. Not.

“Her voice is beautiful,” Emmy says about the girl holding a megaphone. “Like Beth’s.”

“That’s Jenny. She goes to my school.”

“She’s kind of pretty.”

I’ve never really thought so before. “Her dad’s a rodeo drunk.” I explain how the bar where Mom works caters to whites and Indians. Hence the Christians singing on the corner. Jenny’s dad drinks in the white cowboy bar a few streets over.

“I’m sorry I made you go to church with me,” Emmy says.

“You didn’t make me.”

We cross the street. Jenny, who is between songs, smiles at me. I think her dad hits her. She and I partnered on a school project last year and she had suspicious bruises. The project, proposed by a new-to-the-area teacher, was to incorporate some Colville Coyote tales into the literature curriculum. The Christian kids, white and Mexican, had a hard time grasping the “slipperiness” of Coyote. Was he considered a god or not? We Indian kids, for the most part, kept our mouths shut. The teacher finally concluded that Coyote, like Jesus, had been sent by the Creator to do work for humans. One kid decided Coyote was the Antichrist. Even Jenny struggled, though in a far less obnoxious way, with Coyote being both a good and a bad example. The teacher pointed out that the Greek gods were also “complex”—pursuing fleeing maidens, deceiving, losing their tempers, but also helping with wisdom and kindness. She stated that perhaps striving to mirror the perfection of Jesus Christ was self-defeating. Wrong thing to say. Flustered, she moved the class on to Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of madness, which practically sent the Gothic kids into orgasm.

“Hello, Reuben,” Jenny says now.

“Hi, Jenny,” I reply, squeezing Emmy’s hand. Emmy smiles at her. Of course she does.

Emmy looks different from the Christian girls singing on the corner. She looks different from the most popular girls at Omak High, who have ten times Emmy’s confidence and just as many clothes. I didn’t fully realize the difference until now. It’s not just Emmy’s mix of styles but the way she wears each piece. I sound gay as hell. The popular girls here wear a lot of pink. Emmy doesn’t. Neither does she have long fake nails with white tips. She paints her nails but keeps them short. It’s also the way Emmy holds herself and walks: not with certainty, like the wealthy white girls, or attitude, like the tougher Indian girls, but something. Maybe grace. Femininity. But she’s not docile or even dainty. I can’t figure it out. Certainly I don’t think it’s a California thing. Every once in a while Emmy loses it in a big way and slouches or becomes awkward or even stumbles. The girl sure can move during sex, though, especially for someone who can’t ride a bike, shoot hoops, or supposedly dance.

Before Emmy and I left Moses Lake, Teresa said she’d call Mom for me and explain the situation. Mom was mad at me the last time we saw each other, and drunk. If Mom listened to Teresa, as she does on occasion, she’ll be a saint today. If not, she’ll be drunk off her ass in spite. Where Emmy and I stay the night depends on which it is.

We walk into the dark bar. I hear Mom calling my name before I see her.

She yells again over the honky-tonk music. She sits in one of the back booths, next to the white guy who’s been giving her so much hell lately. He wears a cowboy hat but sells cars, and I guarantee he’s never ridden a horse down Suicide Hill like Dad. Mom’s boyfriend has a wife, but he likes to screw Indian women on the side. Fuck him. I make it a point to never stick around when Mom has a new guy, Indian or white. I stay with one of my aunts or with Ray or wherever. Her relationships never last long. Dad was by far the longest. Until recently, my little sister, Lena, has been keeping Mom sober. Better than I ever could. Mom’s got two empty shot glasses in front of her. “Hey, baby boy.” She gets up to hug me. No wobbling. That’s good. I introduce her to Emmy. “You’re a doll,” she says to Emmy. “Isn’t she a doll, Harold?”

“Mom,” I whisper. “Can we get a different
booth?” I grip Emmy’s hand. “Away from Gerald?”

“Sure, baby. It’s
Harold
. Go grab a table up front. Let me refill some drinks and I’ll be over. You kids want a couple burgers?”

I, for one, am starving. “Definitely.”

We grab a table. There’s only about six other people in the bar. Emmy looks around at all the cowboy and Indian decor on the walls: dream catchers, horseshoes, oil paintings, neon signs, a beaded Indian vest. “You doing okay?” I ask her.

“I’m fine,
baby
.”

I grin. She’s being cool. I thought she might get instantly uptight in a joint like this. I wouldn’t blame her. And especially considering her aunt’s in a coma. We’ll leave extra early in the morning for Spokane. Luckily Beth isn’t in the same hospital where my dad never recovered. I can tell Emmy’s trying hard not to think about her aunt, but worry clouds her gray eyes. “You want a cigarette?” I offer.

She nods. “I’ve never been in a bar.”

“It’s a great atmosphere. Don’t you think?” I light us both a cigarette. “Desperation.”

“Assimilation.” Here comes the wordplay—and a smile.

“Proclamation,” I say. “As in the Emancipation Proclamation.”

“Confederation. As in twelve tribes on one reservation.”

“As in group masturbation.”

“As in taking your own ass to the station.”

I high-five Emmy.

Mom is standing beside the table, holding two Cokes and looking confused. She puts down the Cokes. I invite her to sit with us. She looks back at the booth where Harold is. “Okay. For a minute.” I can see now that she’s pretty drunk. She and Emmy talk a little. Mom’s going to think Emmy is stuck up, but she’s just shy and has a lot on her mind. Twice Emmy brings up Teresa’s kids and Grace’s beadwork. Mom’s not trying at all. She keeps looking just at me and calling me baby. She starts talking in our native language. I don’t know it very well. Just enough. But even if I did, I’d reply in English, which I do. The cook calls her. She gets up and comes back with our burgers and fries. “On Harold,” she says, serving us, but not sitting back down.