Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (37 page)

“You always used to tell me I think too much,” Thomas said. “Now it sounds like you do.”

“Maybe I caught it from you.”

“Yeah.”

Thomas and Victor rode in a taxi to the trailer where Victor’s father died.

“Listen,” Victor said as they stopped in front of the trailer. “I never told you I was sorry for beating you up that time.”

“Oh, it was nothing. We were just kids and you were drunk.”

“Yeah, but I’m still sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

Victor paid for the taxi and the two of them stood in the hot Phoenix summer. They could smell the trailer.

“This ain’t going to be nice,” Victor said. “You don’t have to go in.”

“You’re going to need help.”

Victor walked to the front door and opened it. The stink rolled out and made them both gag. Victor’s father had lain in that trailer for a week in hundred-degree temperatures before anyone found him. And the only reason anyone found him was because of the smell. They needed dental records to identify him. That’s exactly what the coroner said. They needed dental records.

“Oh, man,” Victor said. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“Well, then don’t.”

“But there might be something valuable in there.”

“I thought his money was in the bank.”

“It is. I was talking about pictures and letters and stuff like that.”

“Oh,” Thomas said as he held his breath and followed Victor into the trailer.

When Victor was twelve, he stepped into an underground wasp nest. His foot was caught in the hole, and no matter how hard he struggled, Victor couldn’t pull free. He might have died there, stung a thousand times, if Thomas Builds-the-Fire had not come by.

“Run,” Thomas yelled and pulled Victor’s foot from the hole. They ran then, hard as they ever had, faster than Billy Mills, faster than Jim Thorpe, faster than the wasps could fly.

Victor and Thomas ran until they couldn’t breathe, ran until it was cold and dark outside, ran until they were lost and it took hours to find their way home. All the way back, Victor counted his stings.

“Seven,” Victor said. “My lucky number.”

Victor didn’t find much to keep in the trailer. Only a photo album and a stereo. Everything else had that smell stuck in it or was useless anyway.

“I guess this is all,” Victor said. “It ain’t much.”

“Better than nothing,” Thomas said.

“Yeah, and I do have the pickup.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “It’s in good shape.”

“Dad was good about that stuff.”

“Yeah, I remember your dad.”

“Really?” Victor asked. “What do you remember?”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire closed his eyes and told this story: “I remember when I had this dream that told me to go to Spokane, to stand by the Falls in the middle of the city and wait for a sign. I knew I had to go there but I didn’t have a car. Didn’t have a license. I was only thirteen. So I walked all
the way, took me all day, and I finally made it to the Falls. I stood there for an hour waiting. Then your dad came walking up.
What the hell are you doing here?
he asked me. I said,
Waiting for a vision.
Then your father said,
All you’re going to get here is mugged.
So he drove me over to Denny’s, bought me dinner, and then drove me home to the reservation. For a long time I was mad because I thought my dreams had lied to me. But they didn’t. Your dad was my vision.
Take care of each other
is what my dreams were saying.
Take care of each other.
”

Victor was quiet for a long time. He searched his mind for memories of his father, found the good ones, found a few bad ones, added it all up, and smiled.

“My father never told me about finding you in Spokane,” Victor said.

“He said he wouldn’t tell anybody. Didn’t want me to get in trouble. But he said I had to watch out for you as part of the deal.”

“Really?”

“Really. Your father said you would need the help. He was right.”

“That’s why you came down here with me, isn’t it?” Victor asked.

“I came because of your father.”

Victor and Thomas climbed into the pickup, drove over to the bank, and claimed the three hundred dollars in the savings account.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire could fly.

Once, he jumped off the roof of the tribal school and flapped his arms like a crazy eagle. And he flew. For a second, he hovered, suspended above all the other Indian boys who were too smart or too scared to jump.

“He’s flying,” Junior yelled, and Seymour was busy looking for the trick wires or mirrors. But it was real. As real as the dirt when Thomas lost altitude and crashed to the ground.

He broke his arm in two places.

“He broke his wing,” Victor chanted, and the other Indian boys joined in, made it a tribal song.

“He broke his wing, he broke his wing, he broke his wing,” all the Indian boys chanted as they ran off, flapping their wings, wishing they could fly, too. They hated Thomas for his courage, his brief moment as a bird. Everybody has dreams about flying. Thomas flew.

One of his dreams came true for just a second, just enough to make it real.

Victor’s father, his ashes, fit in one wooden box with enough left over to fill a cardboard box.

“He always was a big man,” Thomas said.

Victor carried part of his father and Thomas carried the rest out to the pickup. They set him down carefully behind the seats, put a cowboy hat on the wooden box and a Dodgers cap on the cardboard box. That’s the way it was supposed to be.

“Ready to head back home,” Victor asked.

“It’s going to be a long drive.”

“Yeah, take a couple days, maybe.”

“We can take turns,” Thomas said.

“Okay,” Victor said, but they didn’t take turns. Victor drove for sixteen hours straight north, made it halfway up Nevada toward home before he finally pulled over.

“Hey, Thomas,” Victor said. “You got to drive for a while.”

“Okay.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire slid behind the wheel and started off down the road. All through Nevada, Thomas and Victor had been amazed at the lack of animal life, at the absence of water, of movement.

“Where is everything?” Victor had asked more than once.

Now when Thomas was finally driving they saw the first animal, maybe the only animal in Nevada. It was a long-eared jackrabbit.

“Look,” Victor yelled. “It’s alive.”

Thomas and Victor were busy congratulating themselves on their discovery when the jackrabbit darted out into the road and under the wheels of the pickup.

“Stop the goddamn car,” Victor yelled, and Thomas did stop, backed the pickup to the dead jackrabbit.

“Oh, man, he’s dead,” Victor said as he looked at the squashed animal.

“Really dead.”

“The only thing alive in this whole state and we just killed it.”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I think it was suicide.”

Victor looked around the desert, sniffed the air, felt the emptiness and loneliness, and nodded his head.

“Yeah,” Victor said. “It had to be suicide.”

“I can’t believe this,” Thomas said. “You drive for a thousand miles and there ain’t even any bugs smashed on the windshield. I drive for ten seconds and kill the only living thing in Nevada.”

“Yeah,” Victor said. “Maybe I should drive.”

“Maybe you should.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire walked through the corridors of the tribal school by himself. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near him because of all those stories. Story after story.

Thomas closed his eyes and this story came to him: “We are all given one thing by which our lives are measured, one determination. Mine are the stories which can change or not change the world. It doesn’t matter which as long as I continue to tell the stories. My father, he died on Okinawa in World War II, died fighting for this country, which had tried to kill him for years. My mother, she died giving birth to me, died while I was still inside her. She pushed me out into the world with her last breath. I have no brothers or sisters. I have only my stories which came to me before I even had the words to speak. I learned a thousand stories before I took my first thousand steps. They are all I have. It’s all I can do.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire told his stories to all those who would stop and listen. He kept telling them long after people had stopped listening.

Victor and Thomas made it back to the reservation just as the sun was rising. It was the beginning of a new day on earth, but the same old shit on the reservation.

“Good morning,” Thomas said.

“Good morning.”

The tribe was waking up, ready for work, eating breakfast, reading the newspaper, just like everybody else does. Willene LeBret was out in her garden wearing a bathrobe. She waved when Thomas and Victor drove by.

“Crazy Indians made it,” she said to herself and went back to her roses.

Victor stopped the pickup in front of Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s HUD house. They both yawned, stretched a little, shook dust from their bodies.

“I’m tired,” Victor said.

“Of everything,” Thomas added.

They both searched for words to end the journey. Victor
needed to thank Thomas for his help, for the money, and make the promise to pay it all back.

“Don’t worry about the money,” Thomas said. “It don’t make any difference anyhow.”

“Probably not, enit?”

“Nope.”

Victor knew that Thomas would remain the crazy story teller who talked to dogs and cars, who listened to the wind and pine trees. Victor knew that he couldn’t really be friends with Thomas, even after all that had happened. It was cruel but it was real. As real as the ashes, as Victor’s father, sitting behind the seats.

“I know how it is,” Thomas said. “I know you ain’t going to treat me any better than you did before. I know your friends would give you too much shit about it.”

Victor was ashamed of himself. Whatever happened to the tribal ties, the sense of community? The only real thing he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams. He owed Thomas something, anything.

“Listen,” Victor said and handed Thomas the cardboard box which contained half of his father. “I want you to have this.”

Thomas took the ashes and smiled, closed his eyes, and told this story: “I’m going to travel to Spokane Falls one last time and toss these ashes into the water. And your father will rise like a salmon, leap over the bridge, over me, and find his way home. It will be beautiful. His teeth will shine like silver, like a rainbow. He will rise, Victor, he will rise.”

Victor smiled.

“I was planning on doing the same thing with my half,” Victor said. “But I didn’t imagine my father looking anything like a salmon. I thought it’d be like cleaning the attic or something. Like letting things go after they’ve stopped having any use.”

“Nothing stops, cousin,” Thomas said. “Nothing stops.”

Thomas Builds-the-Fire got out of the pickup and walked up his driveway. Victor started the pickup and began the drive home.

“Wait,” Thomas yelled suddenly from his porch. “I just got to ask one favor.”

Victor stopped the pickup, leaned out the window, and shouted back. “What do you want?”

“Just one time when I’m telling a story somewhere, why don’t you stop and listen?” Thomas asked.

“Just once?”

“Just once.”

Victor waved his arms to let Thomas know that the deal was good. It was a fair trade, and that was all Victor had ever wanted from his whole life. So Victor drove his father’s pickup toward home while Thomas went into his house, closed the door behind him, and heard a new story come to him in the silence afterwards.

VERONICA CHAMBERS

Ten years before Air Jordans, I learned to fly. It’s like the way brothers pimp-walk to a basketball hoop with a pumped-up ball and throw a few shots, hitting each one effortlessly. Like a car idling before a drag race, there is an invitation, perhaps even a threat, in the way their sneakers soft-shoe the pavement and the ball rolls around in their hands.

As double-dutch girls, we had our own prance. Three of us and a couple of ropes. It had to be at least three girls—two to turn, one to jump. We knew the corners where you could start a good game. Like guys going up for a layup, we started turning nice and slow. Before jumping in, we would rock back and forth, rocking our knees in order to propel ourselves forward; rocking our hips just to show how cute we were. It wasn’t a question of whether we’d make it in, we’d conquered that years before. The challenge was to prove how long we could jump. The tricks we would do—pop-ups, mambo, around the world—were just for show, just to work the other girls’ nerves. The real feat was longevity. So when we picked the corner where we were going to double-dutch, we came with ropes and patience.

There is a space between the concrete and heaven where the air is sweeter and your heart beats faster. You drop down and then you jump up again and you do it over and over until the rope catches on your foot or your mother calls you home. You keep your arms to your sides, out of the way, so they don’t get tangled in the rope. Your legs feel powerful
and heavy as they beat the ground. When you mambo back and forth, it’s like dancing. When you do around the world, it’s like a ballet dancer’s pirouette. In the rope, if you’re good enough, you can do anything and be anything you want.

On my side of the street is where we jumped rope because Drena, who lived by me, had the best rope, and like cattle, we followed the rope. The best kind of jumping rope was telephone wire because it was light, yet sturdy, and it hit the sidewalk with a steady rhythm—tat tat tat. The telephone wire that connected your phone to the jack was not long enough. The only way to get telephone rope was from someone who worked for the telephone company. Drena’s uncle was a telephone repairman so she always had rope.

The worst kind of rope was the kind you bought in the store—cloth ropes with red plastic handles that came in plastic packages with pictures of little blond girls on them. First of all, they were too short. It would take two or three to make one side of a good double-dutch rope. Second, the ropes were too soft for serious jumping (which only made sense because everybody knew that white girls were no kind of competition when it came to jumping rope). But in a clutch, you could run a soft rope under a hose and get it good and wet to make it heavier. The only problem was keeping it wet.