The Lovebird (32 page)

The air between us was pulled into a taut ribbon. The curtain in the window hung straight and flat. The spider, who had been taking his time traversing the linoleum, froze. What was it? He didn’t like me after all. I didn’t like him. He appeared to radiate
care and gentleness, but he killed animals. No, I would not stay much longer. I would leave before that hunt.

We worked for a long time in silence. I ignored the cubes of blood-red meat thawing in a bowl. Then Jim spoke again, cautiously.

“So, what did you
do
, anyway, if you don’t mind my asking? Before you came here, what did you do to upset the feds?” He was wondering just how much trouble I was in, I thought, and how much longer it would take me to conjure the courage to leave. My face grew hot and my eyes welled, just as they had on that root-digging day when I’d told Granma I knew Jim didn’t want me around. He chopped an entire stem of celery before I answered.

“I got caught,” I said shakily, “talking to a crowd of people at a café called Gelato Amore about how to make an incendiary device—a firebomb. An undercover FBI agent in a newsboy cap”—Jim raised his eyebrows—“was there, and he recorded me on his cell phone.”

Jim shook his head. “Oh, that’s so ridiculous,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was referring to my public talk about how to start a fire or to Agent Fox with his cell phone. I looked at him with big wet eyes. “Oh, no, I mean, that they recorded you. It’s just so tricky. Is this upsetting you? You don’t have to talk—”

“They—the feds—called it ‘teaching the making or use of an explosive.’ But there’s other stuff, too, that they could charge me with down the road. Before that, I set fire to a restaurant that specialized in wild game. They served peacocks and—”

“What?”
Jim stopped chopping. “Did you do much damage?”

“It burned to the ground.”

“Wow, Margie. That’s serious. I can see why they’re eager to cart you off to jail. But I’m glad you’ve managed to stay out, so far. Jail’s not a good place to be. And I can’t picture you there at
all.” Could he picture me anywhere, I wondered, if he had never so much as looked directly at me? “My ex is there,” he added.

“Your ex-wife?”

“We weren’t married. Well, maybe we were, in the Indian way. For a while. But she had moved on long before she went to prison. Cora’s mom, Isabelle.”

“Oh. Cora has mentioned her. Once.” I thought of the peach pit stashed in Cora’s jewelry box, watched over by the ballerina. Its surface had grown quite smooth, its inner seed had been removed, and it was starting to resemble a ring. “She came from Georgia?”

“Yeah. Cherokee. You know, they’re supposed to be the most civilized of all us Indians?” Jim let out a mocking laugh, but the line between his eyes deepened. For the first time all day, I noticed a stubborn speck of red ink tucked in the crease, impervious to our afternoon swim. It gave him an injured look, and my left ovary ached. And where, where was the spot where that vertical line and his horizontal grin met? Cora would likely pinpoint the place exactly, without even offering her textbook. “It is utterly simple,” she would say, peering over her starry spectacles. “Just imagine them as two perpendicular lines and visualize the point where they intersect.” But I couldn’t allow myself to know for sure. “Well,” he went on, “Isabelle was not civilized. Isabelle was wild.”

“How wild?”

“Wild enough to keep making and using and selling methamphetamines after she had already been arrested and jailed because of it twice. Wild enough to walk away from Cora without a second thought.”

I remembered the resignation in Cora’s voice on the day she’d acknowledged that no letter had been waiting for her at the post office. “Why was she so wild?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know her that well, to be honest. When
we met, we were just seventeen. We were both drunk, and we stayed that way for the duration of our relationship. But I never got into drugs like she did. I’m grateful for that.”

“How did you meet her?”

“She came out here one summer for Crow Fair. She was with a bunch of friends, on a road trip. Then she just stayed. We had Cora within a year. Isabelle was my first real sweetheart.”

“And after her?” I wanted to know how many sweethearts his hands had known, his hands that might have cared but also hurt.

“After she went to jail the last time, Cora and I moved out here from Crow Agency to be with my mom. We’ve visited her some, though not recently.”

Either Jim misunderstood or pretended to misunderstand my question about sweethearts. Was it that he’d had so many he was too abashed to discuss them? “What about you?” he asked. “You have any exes in jail?” He grinned. “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“No. I’m the only jail-bound person I know,” I said, thinking of brilliant and brokenhearted Anna, who had wanted to see Simon punished, and who had not even known there would be a me, a lonely bicycle pusher with the flu in a sundress covered in stalks of wheat.

“She went from She-Bird to jailbird,” Jim intoned in a dramatic TV voice, and we laughed. “Aw, I think you’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m glad you have a safe place here with us. And I hope you don’t feel like you have to be in any kind of hurry to leave,” he added.

My hand grew damp as I twisted a stiff can opener. Jim hummed and turned a turnip root to fine granules against a grater.

“I know my mom is very, very glad to have you around,” he said. “And Cora, too.”

“Cora? I’m not so sure …”

“She is. Don’t be fooled. It’s just her way to act a little prickly
sometimes. She’s really tender. She’d probably be sweeter if she thought you were staying forever.” I nearly lost the can opener. “Wait till you see her do the Fancy Shawl Dance at Crow Fair. It will break your heart, it’s so beautiful.”

“How come you aren’t going to dance during Crow Fair?” I asked. “Or are you?”

“No, I’m not. I don’t dance anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I gave it up after my dad died twelve years ago. I gave it up as a way to honor him, because it was something I really loved. But that’s also when I started drinking. I traded a good habit for a bad one.”

“Was it bad? The drinking?”

Jim nodded. “Oh yeah. I drank to drown my grief.”

“I know somebody like that,” I said. I missed him. I missed him so much, and I had left him alone in a house turned upside down with nothing but photo albums for company—one containing some baby teeth and a miniature gold ring. “How did you stop?”

“With my mom’s help. She never talks about it, but she knows a lot about healing. And after a certain point it really had become a physical illness more than anything else. I wanted to stop because of Cora.” Had Dad ever wanted to stop because of me, I wondered? Was that why he had cried during our dance?

“What kind of dancing did you do?”

“Oh, Grass Dance. I was just about to start Fancy Dancing when he passed. Ah!” Jim stopped grating. He balled up one hand and covered it with the other. “Mom and I made all my regalia,” he added.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, it’s nothing. Little scrape.”

I could almost picture him dancing, dancing in the same way he swam, big and splashy, but precise, too. If he danced
now, I would be able to anticipate his movements, the way I had learned to predict them beside the stove, before the sink. “Did you love it?” I asked, but Jim misheard me.

“Yeah, I really loved him.” He moved his hands apart, and I saw the smear of blood.

“Oh! What happened?”

“I shredded my knuckle on that grater. It’s all right.”

“Here.” I reached my hand out, touched his. “Sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

I held his hand under the faucet. The blood ran off of him and spiraled down the drain. Several short strips of skin hung off the knuckle. Underneath them, I could see, he was pink, glossy, like the interior of an oyster shell.

“What is that song you’re always humming?” I asked. “I feel like I recognize it.”

“I’m always humming?”

“When you work on the Pronghorn. And other times … just a few minutes ago …”

“Oh, I guess it must be that old song by Karen Dalton, a Cherokee singer from the sixties.”

“Yes! I used to know someone who liked her.”

“That song—‘
in the evening, in the evening, darling, it’s so hard to tell who’s going to love you the best’
—it’s always in my head.” Jim’s voice, usually so deep and strong, was quavering and uncertain when he sang.

“It’s a nice song.” I wondered if Jack Dolce really had been the hinge between one life and another. There was so much he had predicted, without knowing it.

I laid Jim’s loosened skin back over the exposed places. “Ouch,” I said. “You need a bandage.”

“I don’t think we have any.” He looked intently down the drain, as if searching for a wayward spoon, a stray bean.

“You don’t?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well.” I pulled three paper towels off the roll on the counter. I twisted them and wrapped them around his hand, tying the two ends together in a knot. A few rosy blots bloomed through, then stopped. They stopped the way Rasha’s poppies never had.

“Thanks,” he said.

“It was nothing.”

We stood for a few minutes looking out the window. The sun began to sink, and the curtain fluttered up again, and the air moved.

10
BUTTERFLY
(Anthocharis stella)

GRANMA WANTED TO GO OUT
and gather chokecherries. “It’s been hot, and the
baáchuutaale
are ripening. I saw some the other day, like pretty round rubies.” She took up her flour sack. “This will be much easier than getting turnip roots,” she said. “We just pick.” We left Cora and Josie at the table, surrounded by beads and deerskin, hard at work on the leggings and red-cheeked in the heat.

“Get extra,” Josie said. “My birthday’s coming, and I want chokecherry cake!” And I understood the reason for her leonine carriage and proud, pretty ways, for she had, like Rasha, been born in the Leo time of late July.

We weren’t far past the chickens when Granma began pointing out all kinds of plants we could eat, growing right under our feet. “There’s burdock,” she said. “And over here is some Indian lettuce—those thunderstorms and all this heat have made everything so lush for us—here, try a dandelion.” Granma broke the spiky yellow flower from its stem and handed it to me. “Go ahead. It’s good, I promise.” It tasted like its color—bright and sweetly tart.

“Mmm, not bad.”

“We eat the leaves, too. They’re so nutritious. We’ll get some of these greens on our way home and make a salad with them tonight.”

“It’s really wonderful,” I said, “that all this is here.”

“I know,” Granma replied. “Can’t you feel her throbbing in every living thing?”

The fuzz on my arms rose, but I didn’t know just why. “Who do you mean?”

“Your mother,” she said, looking straight ahead. “And mine.”

I was quiet. I knew Granma didn’t mean her own birth mother, who had been lost to her, or my Rasha of the red poppies, of whom I’d never spoken.

“This is what I’ve been knowing you would understand, honey,” Granma continued. “It’s why I wanted you to come stay with us, and to come with me on these walks. When I heard about you and what you were doing with the animals, I wanted to share it with you. Share
her
with you.”

I remembered the tendrils of the gourd vines that had grown in the Community Garden where I’d sat during many mournful Middletown nights, how they had reached out so intelligently toward what was nearest to them and coiled themselves around it in the most accurate of embraces. I considered my lifelong Mary musings—the tendrils might have been strands of Mary’s hair. And now Granma was talking about a “her”—a mother who throbbed in every living thing.

I told her about what the CCD sisters had said. The mother of God, they had called her. “But I have always thought of her as the mother of all creation.”

“Yes, Margie, I feel the same, that there is one mother for all living things. We call her
Káalixaalia,
^*
and she never stops giving birth.” I looked around us and of course it was true. The prairie,
which to my unaccustomed eyes had initially seemed so stingy with its beauties, was almost unfathomable in its abundance of animal, vegetable, and mineral offerings—the soil, the stones, the grasses and the occasional trees, the plants and their roots, the prairie dogs, birds, snakes, antelope, and deer, the insects, the river and the cattails. “All of it just keeps unfurling out of her, always,” Granma said, “so long,” she added, “as we care for her and what she births.”