The Lovebird (22 page)

“Why doesn’t Josie come in?” Granma asked.

Cora pulled a stone from her mouth. “She says she will tomorrow.” The stone was rough but glistening with saliva. “She has to go home and get ready,” Cora continued. She let her backpack fall to the floor, sucked in a big gulp of breath, and fluttered both of her hands with excitement, twin birds flapping at her sides. “She says she has a date with Pete Sings Plenty!” An explosive laugh escaped from Cora and she pushed the stone back into her mouth. Granma, too, stifled a snicker.

“Who’s Pete Sings Plenty?” I asked.

Cora actually answered me, though only because the subject was irresistibly amusing to her. “A really skinny guy who works at the rez casino and spends all of his paycheck there, too!”

“Shh, shh, Grandchild. He has a good heart,” Granma said. “What’s that rock?” She cupped her hand beneath Cora’s pointy chin.

“It’s not a rock. It’s the peach pit.”

“Give.”

“No, I want to keep it.”

“Say hello to Margie.”

“Hi,” she piped. Her manner was different from the night before, more confident and careless. She looked at my hands, squinting through her glasses at the brown crescent moons under each of my fingernails.

“Margie went root digging with me today,” Granma said. Cora was silent.

“It was so nice,” I said.

Cora blinked, and her warm amber eyes went frosty. Slipping one hand into the other, she turned away from me. “Granma,” she asked, “what’s for dinner?”

3
HIPPO
(Hippopotamus amphibius)

A WEEK AFTER GRANMA TOOK ME ROOT DIGGING
, Cora returned home from her last day of school and asked me a question. Apart from telling me about Pete Sings Plenty, it was the first time she had spoken to me directly without being prompted by a reassuring squeeze from her dad or a whispered Crow word from her grandmother.

“Why are you here?” she said. Granma was outside feeding the chickens.

I noticed, when she asked me, that her tongue was blue. I supposed this was due to a lollipop that a teacher—or (I imagined with a sudden shudder) a pedophiliac school janitor, lurking near the drinking fountain, dreaming of brown-skinned Lolitas—must have handed her as a parting gift. Her backpack, I could see, was much lighter because she had returned all of her textbooks but one
—The World of Math
. She unpacked that tome while awaiting my answer and slid it onto a splintery shelf alongside several framed photographs of her many relatives.

“Why do you still have that book?” I asked. My voice shook with uncertainty. I badly wanted to be accepted by the sharp-elbowed sprite, the long-tressed light sleeper, Cora of the bottom
bunk. Her bold question left me feeling as crushed as I had been when Violet Holmquist and the other junior high girls had deemed me unworthy of acknowledgment, much less friendship, after Dad’s conspicuous crying jag at the “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” Father-Daughter Dance. I swallowed. “I thought students were supposed to hand in all their books on the last day of school.”

“I asked you something first,” she retorted. She pulled her peach pit out of the tiny side pocket of her backpack and squinted with great consideration at its intricately grooved surface. Then she proceeded to roll it back and forth on the tabletop with the air of one who could wait all day to find out what she desired to know. And I had thought the purpose of my fleeing to that lonely landscape was to leave all threat of interrogation behind.

“Your tongue is so blue. Did you know Chow dogs have dark tongues?” I asked.

“That’s what I mean,” she replied. Her eyes burned with intimidating intelligence. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“People say you’re here because you like animals. Like, way too much.” One of Cora’s eyebrows rose above the upper rim of her sparkly frames.

“People who? What people? No one is really supposed to know why I’m here.”

“Well, just Josie, really. Only she knows. And us. Granma says it’s a secret. And Dad says if I tell anyone about why you’re here, I can’t dance at Crow Fair this year. Josie says you are an animal rights kook. She also says you are a hippo. And that all hippos try to act like Indians.” Cora paused and took in a big breath—her habit, I noticed, when speaking of matters of importance to her (the sum of a square, neatly braided hair, Crow Fair)—before asking me questions two, three, and four: “Why are you so skinny? Why are your cheeks so pink? Is that makeup?”

“I’m not a hippie,” I replied, “assuming that’s what Josie actually said. It’s not makeup. I was just born this way. And I’m skinny because it’s my body type, I guess, and because I haven’t eaten any animal products—except for the last week I’ve spent here—for over a year.”

“Why the heck would anyone do that?” Cora asked, mouth agape.

“As for being an animal rights kook, I’m not a kook, I don’t think. I just did a lot of things to try to help animals. Some people decided some of the things I did were wrong. Against the law. They, federal agents, wanted—
want
—me to go to jail.” Hearing this, Cora stilled the peach pit on the table and held it beneath her pinky finger. Her tiny fingernail was like the smallest of seashells. “So I have to hide,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“But why did you want to help animals? Animals can help themselves.”

“In the place where I come from, a lot of the animals need help. It’s not like here on the reservation. People breed them, and eat them, and use them—”

“People breed animals here, too. And eat them and use them.”

“It’s different …” I felt myself fumbling for all the reasons why, and wondered what Simon, articulate and erudite Simon, might say.

“You mean like the worms we dissected in biology?”

“What about the math book?”

“I just like it.”

“Who gave you the lollipop?”

She scooped up the peach pit and cupped it protectively in her palm.

“How did you know about the lollipop?” she asked with a glower. “Are you some kind of spy?”

“Your blue tongue.”

“Oh.” Cora seemed relieved. “Just my teacher, Mrs. Pennyray. She gave them to us for the last day of school.”

Then I was relieved. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone predatory, cruel, creepy, or otherwise unworthy of cat-eyed Cora, a mathematician in the making, hovering over her, handing her a lollipop, or so much as looking her way. I felt protective. Something about Cora had coerced a sleeping lioness out from under the prairie hills and placed it in my heart, where it paced watchfully in front of her. Maybe it was the vulnerability inherent in her knobby knees, or in the sweet sag of her nightgown when she stood, barefoot, freshly showered and soggy-haired, to kiss Granma goodnight before slipping into her bed where, I knew, she snuggled with a stuffed fawn.

Still, as her pointedly impolite question had made clear, Cora most definitely did not reciprocate my regard, not like the other girl I had known, Annette Mellinkoff. But then Annette had never inspired such a protective impulse in me, though I knew that with her flaxen hair and her father’s mysterious, gemlike eyes she would someday suffocate under an avalanche of advances from leagues of libidinous boys whom Simon, I suspected, would be far too weary to repel. Little Annette used to climb (plaintively mewing) onto my lap while Simon and I discussed the different ways we might rescue cats from the research labs at the university.

Yes, in her sisterly sweetness Annette had loved to have me comb her fine, fair hair and to help me set the table each night for the weedy dinners I prepared. I didn’t think Cora would ever deign to do such things with me. Though a petite, elfin eleven, she wouldn’t fit quite so easily on my lap. But even if she could, her apparent distaste for me—and my accoutrements—would likely prevent her. Just a few days earlier, I’d seen her lift a discarded dress of mine from her bedroom floor with the absolute tips of her forefinger and thumb (lips pursed, eyes rolled heavenward) and hang it gingerly over one rung of the ladder leading up to my bunk. Since then, I’d been careful to keep all of my
belongings tucked into the Strawberry Shortcake suitcase, out of her spiteful sight.

But why, I conceded, should Cora like me? Unlike Annette Mellinkoff’s mother, Cora’s mom had not died or disappeared. Her place in the world was known and, evidently, fixed. She was in prison. And that, I suspected, was why when I explained to Cora that I was hiding in her house to avoid landing in jail, her eyes suddenly outsparkled the rhinestones on her glasses. She appeared to ponder, with mathematical logic, how she might trade me in for her mother, how she could subtract her mom from the prison population and add me to it, in the same way Granma had paid money in exchange for her best beaded belt, which a sticky-fingered relative had sold to a Billings pawnshop.

I didn’t know what Cora’s mother was serving time for, but I did know she had been locked up for eight years, and no one spoke about her as if she would be coming home anytime soon. And when I had asked Granma, a few days after my arrival, why she had refused to let me bring in my case of red wine, she pointed without comment to a photograph of a woman with a face like Cora’s, except the delicate pointed features had been hardened by misfortune. Granma had meant, I assumed, to warn me of the harm wrought by certain substances.

“Oh yeah,” Cora murmured, more to herself than to me, reaching once again into her backpack. “I almost forgot. Josie went by the post office on our way back from school, and I got the mail. Granma!”

“I’m right here, Grandchild,” Granma said. She stood just inside the screen door, rubbing the dust from chicken feed off her hands. I wondered how long she had been there.

“What’s this?” Granma outstretched her arm in the direction of Cora’s peach pit.

“The pit from the peach.”

“Give it to me. The peach is done.”

“No, I want to keep it.” Cora dropped the pit into the pocket of her shorts while Granma shook her head. “Granma, me and Josie got the mail.”

“Goody,” Granma said with a gappy grin. “Cora, turn on the TV, will you?” Charmaigne, the true love of Slade, threw a crystal vase at Victoria. “Oh, my,” Granma said. She sat down at the table and sorted through the stack of envelopes. She pushed some toward one end of the table, some toward the other. “These are Dad’s,” she told Cora, “and these are mine—”

“And I already know,” Cora said, “that there’s nothing for me. In a matter-of-fact voice with which no words could possibly be minced she added, “I checked. She didn’t write.”

Granma looked at Cora sideways, studied her slyly, and, satisfied by the child’s sturdiness of manner, went on sorting the letters. “It’s okay,” she said in her purring way. Her hands floated with uncharacteristic indecision over an elaborately illustrated envelope. It featured a killer whale leaping triumphantly over a surfacing submarine—a symbolic and hopeful image of sea life somehow surviving the devastating effects of navy sonar. I knew immediately that Bumble was the artist, but I was too shy, too desirous, to say anything. My throat went dry, and my palms grew hot with yearning for the note, something from the world I had left behind.

“This isn’t ours …” Granma examined the whale in fascination. “Wonderful!” she said. Then she flipped the envelope over.

“That one’s for Margie,” Cora told her. “No return address.”

“It is,” Granma said, smiling and sliding it across the table to me, “for Margie.”

“Is that from your boyfriend?” Cora asked me.

“Shh, shh, Grandchild,” Granma admonished Cora. Then she turned her own twinkling, curious eyes my way, awaiting my reply.

“N-no,” I said. “I think this is from the friend who drove me here. Bumble.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?” Cora asked.

“Bad girl!” Granma chided Cora before fixing me once more with an anticipatory look.

“No. No, I don’t.” Both girls (for Granma seemed to have straightened up out of her slight senior-citizen slouch and matched Cora’s natural air of perky prepubescence) bowed their heads as if my answer to the question was of no consequence whatsoever, as if the question had not even been asked, while I was momentarily lost in a montage of memories of my first and only boyfriend, my miller, my Melnikov.