The Lovebird (19 page)

After a few minutes, Bumble spoke again. “Remember, it’s only temporary, Margie. And what comes after this is up to you.” I stared, listlessly.

We entered the reservation and drove through a small town called Crow Agency, where countless fluffy white tufts—cottonwood seeds, Bumble said—drifted from the trees and floated through the air, looking delicate and celestial amid the weathered buildings and the cars, which were older, louder, more beat up, and more creatively patched together than any I had ever seen. One stretch of asphalt we traversed was blotched with gleaming shards of broken Beirut-brown bottles, and Bumble drove around the glass with care.

“Nobody will find you here,” he continued. “Just hang out until things die down. It’s not as though you hurt anyone, after all. I mean, what on earth?” he exclaimed. “I know we’ve talked about it a million times, but I seriously doubt the feds are going to stay worried about some freckle-faced college girl who wanted to help out a few animals.”

“But you’re the one who told me I should go away because of
what Ronald Clack called the ‘green scare’—the witch hunt, you said. Remember?”

“Just wait it out. Wait a while.”

“What’s ‘a while’?” I asked. “How long is ‘a while’?”

Poor Bumble didn’t know, so he pretended he hadn’t heard me. Crow Agency was behind us in minutes, and we were once again surrounded exclusively by earth and sky. Driving north through Idaho, we had seen a few patches of persistent snow lingering in the shady places beneath roadside pines, though the first day of summer was just weeks away. Now the landscape was vacant and vast. There were too few trees to make shade for stubborn snow, and nothing new had grown in winter’s wake. The land was neither white nor green—it was an uninspiring shade of khaki and it had the quality of something incomplete, something waiting.

“Look at this place,” Bumble said. The prairie was so foreign, so full of secrets, and I had no key to unlock it. The softly sloping hillocks rolling away in every direction looked to me like a lot of lions sleeping. There were mountains in the distance that—with their absence of angles and their curvy shapes—seemed gentle, but I did not know their names. “No distractions,” Bumble went on. “Perfect for getting your thoughts in order and starting fresh. It’s so quiet. No more airplanes! And,” he added, “if it gives you any comfort, you don’t have to think of yourself as being in the U.S. or even in Montana anymore, but in Crow Country, because the way my mom explained it, the tribe is a sovereign nation all its own.”

“Hmm.” I watched the prairie pass in a blur of beige. The land was dotted here and there with abandoned cars and pieces of farm equipment dissolving into rusty crumbles. We passed through a town called St. Xavier where no one appeared to live. I saw a log cabin that had been converted into a church, a rusty trailer tipping precariously into a ditch and painted with
the words
EAR CLINIC
, and a place called Pretty Eagle Catholic School. Pretty Eagle’s exterior was embellished with a chipped mural featuring an Indian boy and girl, their heads bowed in prayer and a basketball hovering between them. It was early afternoon and all the students were out of sight, hunched over desks. St. Xavier was quiet, and as we left it I continued to search in vain for signs of life, studying the hillocks to see if the slumbering lions might awaken.

After a while, I did see life. I spotted a bent figure fifty yards from the road, carrying a short stick and making measured progress over a bluff. The person was long skirted, and the softness of her shape was reminiscent of the distant mountains. She paused, then crouched and pierced the ground and pulled something from the soil. She deposited her unearthed treasure into a sack slung over one shoulder. Wondering at what I had seen, I stared at the woman as we passed, poking my head out the window to watch her shrink to a speck behind us. She stared back, lifting up a hand to shade her eyes.

Bumble checked the hand-drawn map he’d received from his mother. “I think we’re getting closer,” he said, consulting the digital compass he had strapped to his wrist. “Yep. This is it.” He turned onto an unmarked dirt road, which we followed until it ended at a humble house that looked as much like a child’s drawing as an actual abode—perfectly square and symmetrical, with curtained windows, a peaked roof with a black stovepipe poking through, and a spotted dog lounging near its front door. The dog lifted its head at our approaching car, then lowered it again, unimpressed.

Bumble parked alongside an old tan-colored Cutlass with a raised hood. Its engine parts were all on the grass but arranged neatly into groups, categorized according to characteristics and purposes unknown to me. I took a curious comfort in their orderliness. There were also dozens of oily black tools, but these,
too, were tucked tidily away, stationed in a splintered shelf that appeared to be a fragment from an old row of elementary school cubbies. A forgotten name, “Ruteger,” was carved in callow cursive inside one of the compartments.

“Well,” Bumble said. He shut off the engine.

“Well.”

“Guess we should go say hello.”

But no one came to the door, though we knocked at a grandmother-friendly volume. And we could see through the parted gingham curtains that no one sat in the small kitchen, where bright blue dishcloths hung from nails in the wall above the sink, or in the living room, where white lacy ovals covered the armrests of a pair of faded recliners.

“Maybe they don’t even live here anymore,” I said, summoning a halfhearted hope. “Maybe they just moved away, and we’ll have to go back home.”

“I’m sure they still live here,” Bumble finally said. “Look at this dog. She’s not even hungry. We’ll just wait.”

I remembered the tiny flashing tongue of the green snake who had lived under Jack Dolce’s bed in Little Italy—Little Italy of the lemon light and the luminous oyster shells. The snake had used his tongue to test the air. Now I tested the air. I perched on our car’s hood, lay back against the windshield, closed my eyes, and breathed in. The prairie was sunwarmed, and it exuded a rich, lively smell, similar to the way skin becomes more fragrant when the hidden workings of the body heat it. There was a smell like baking bread in the blond grass, and also a dark, secretive smell like mushrooms, and, from further below, the fresh vegetal smell of the slick tangles of pale roots that formed subterranean nests. Throughout my life I had smelled the swoon-inducing saps of flowers and the salty tang of beaches, but never had I known such a strong smell of earth.

I sat up and opened my eyes to look around, wondering how
such a colorless place could say so much to my nose. The only trees nearby were three gnarled sentinels at the front of the house. No birds rested in their branches, but in the trees’ rippling whispers there was a salve for scared hearts, a secret lullaby. I leaned back and closed my eyes again. And then I caught hold of something that had eluded me for weeks: sleep.

I DREAMT OF A BUTTERFLY, THE ONE
drawn by Annette Mellinkoff that I had hung above my bed in Middletown. It fluttered away at the sound of a truck driving onto the grass beside me.

MY HEART POUNDED
. I had forgotten where I was and, once I remembered, could not believe I had fallen asleep in that strange setting, and on the hood of the car, too. The truck was big and noisy. I slid onto my feet, shaking with shyness. Bumble appeared beside me and we faced the driver, a big-boned, black-eyed lady with blunt bangs across her forehead and breasts that brushed up against her steering wheel. A young girl sat beside her. For what felt like five hundred years, they looked at us and we looked back. The truck rumbled and vibrated. Bumble smiled.

“You the animal rights kook?” the woman yelled. My cheeks flamed. I nodded affirmatively.

“Welcome!” she shouted. “Here’s Cora!”

The girl emerged. The truck bore her with a creak and swing of its door, and her long narrow feet, encased in purple sandals, fell upon the grass. She regarded us through a pair of cat-eye spectacles. The thick lenses seemed hefty for such a slight child.

“Granma should be back soon,” the woman told us, “and Jim’s usually home by seven or so.” The girl slammed the door of the truck shut with one spindly brown arm and stepped wordlessly into the house.

Like Bumble, I offered an awkward smile. “Okay, thanks!” I said to the woman. My arm rose with the beginnings of a bashful wave, but the truck had already spun around and stirred up a cloud of dust.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But the girl, Cora, she’s the one I told you about. She lives here.”

Even with Cora in the house, Bumble and I weren’t sure if we should enter or continue to wait outside. We shuffled, biting nails and clearing throats, until another person appeared in our midst without a sound. She was scarcely taller than the girl but considerably rounder and slightly stooped, with a sharp-ended stick in one hand and a flour sack hanging over her shoulder. Her silver hair was wound into a knot at the nape of her neck. Her skirt was so long it tickled the ground, and she wore a man’s western-style shirt with pearlescent snaps. She, I realized, was the person I had seen digging on the prairie. She, I supposed, was the grandmother.

“I’m Granma,” she said. Her voice was low and womanly. The dog rose and nipped at her skirt hem with adoring whimpers. “You must be our guest,” she said to me. She gave Bumble a slow nod, her eyes dancing over his unusual hairdo. “Welcome. This is Belly, our dog. She’s an old gal like me.” She hoisted her sack up higher on her shoulder and, as she made her way toward the house, I saw why we hadn’t heard her approach. Her gentle steps were rendered nearly silent by the thick soles of the bulbous orthopedic sneakers peeking out from under her skirt. They had Velcro closures. She used her back to hold the screen door open for us. “Please come in,” she said.

“Would you mind if I turned on the television?” Granma asked. “I have a show I try not to miss.” She clicked the remote until she arrived at what was unmistakably a soap opera. That day’s episode had already commenced, and a woman wearing
too much eye makeup insisted weepily, “But Slade, I swear, the child is yours!” Granma shook her head at the screen, whistling through her teeth in disbelief.

Bumble and I sat in the twin recliners. Granma stood and emptied the contents of her sack onto a glitter-flecked Formica table that wobbled on its metal legs. Dozens of roots rolled out of the bag, and a lush, loamy odor filled the room. She rolled the roots under her tanned hands, freeing them of the dirt that clung to their surfaces.

Bumble ventured a question. “What are those for?” Granma didn’t reply. Her eyes were fixed on the TV. A white-coated doctor stepped into a hospital waiting room. “Charmaigne is alive!” he said.

“Is she deaf?” Bumble mouthed to me. I shrugged.

Granma began to peel the bark-like skins off the roots. When that was done, she deposited the roots into a collection of old coffee cans she pulled from the kitchen. After a long while she said, “Jim will be home any minute.”

TWILIGHT DARKENED THE SKY TO PURPLE
. Granma fed Belly, and Bumble and I ate the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches she prepared for us after we, the virtuous vegans, politely refused everything else she had offered. She disappeared down the hall with a plate of food for Cora, who had been hiding since our arrival. Finally a truck—smaller and kinder sounding than the growling monster of the afternoon—pulled up outside. A door closed, footfalls crunched the grass, Granma emerged from Cora’s room, and the screen door opened.

I detected the fragrance of orange blossoms, a familiar solar sweetness, creamy, bright, and inexplicable on that unblooming prairie. I wondered if my homesickness was so severe as to cause an olfactory hallucination, a neroli memory.

Then I saw stained fingertips, stained hands, speckled and splattered all colors of the rainbow.

“Hello!” the painted man said, smiling. He looked toward me, then turned to Bumble. “You must be Bumble.” He extended a hand. “I’m Jim.” He seemed so quiet, but not because he spoke softly. In fact, his voice was rather sonorous. Still, he reminded me of a church with no one in it, the way Dad and I had found Holy Rosary on the rare occasions that we’d arrived early for Mass—glossy wood pews empty, votive candles glowing, streaks of sunlight through the stained-glass windows making visible the millions of motes that hung in the air—more complete and inviting than it ever was when bustling with activity. “And you must be Margie.” He directed his gaze away from mine and toward my left shoulder. I noticed a deep furrow between his eyes. “Welcome. I hope you’ll feel comfortable here and know you can stay for as long as you need.”

“Oh, thank you.”

My hand, for the quick second that he shook it, disappeared in his. “Sorry about the ink,” he said. He dropped a kiss atop Granma’s head. “Hi, Mom.” He set down a lunch pail and thermos and washed his hands in the kitchen sink until only a few persistent flecks of violet and orange remained. I tried not to look too long at the vertical crease between his eyes. It lent a wounded quality to his friendly smile that made my left ovary flame.

We joined him at the table under the glow of the star-shaped lamp that dangled from the ceiling, and Jim and Bumble talked. I mostly listened to the conversation between the two men—or, more accurately, between the man and the boy, for even though Jim was, I learned, twenty-nine and only five years older than Bumble, beside him Bumble seemed increasingly puerile, fiddling fondly with his compass watch, gnawing on a dreadlock. “I wish I knew more about Crow culture,” he said. “Is it true that you, like, worship the buffalo?”

I wondered what had happened in Jim’s life to carve that little line of hurt between his eyes. Then I considered how juvenile and ridiculous I must have seemed, a girl in trouble with the law, an animal rights kook, and I sat in self-conscious silence with my chin in my hand. I was just as relieved as I was perturbed that Jim would not look at me on the occasions that he directed a question my way. His eyes, so heavily lashed as to appear half closed, always fell just right or left of my face, but never on it.