A violent shudder shot through my body. The book fell out of my hands and slapped loudly to the floor. My throat felt tight and narrow, the scars on my throat searing with phantom pain.
Dad never told me he was friends with Mom's killer.
5
Caltrop
Autumn rendered the grotto picturesque. The beech trees showered the ground in falling leaves; the creek, clear and swift, carried them east.
" 'Name a prominent chieftain from each Shoshone band,' " Rafael read from his history book. "I got Pocatello, Bear Hunter, and Washakie. Are we supposed to count the Bannocks? What about the Comanche?"
"Do it anyway," Annie suggested, her head bent over her notebook. "Maybe he'll give you extra credit."
Annie and Rafael and I sat under the gray sunlight and helped one another with our homework. Balto hovered by the edge of the creek, his muzzle dipping under the cold water as he snapped at the minnows swimming past. My thoughts kept straying: to Aubrey's father, sick in a hospital bed; to my own father, hiding secrets from me. Annie, too, was distracted. On occasion, I saw her looking at her wristwatch, counting the minutes until Aubrey arrived.
Aubrey finally arrived, but he looked as though he'd just come back from visiting a ghost.
"How is he?" Annie asked softly.
Aubrey sank into a seat by the creek. "Heart transplant," he said faintly. "Dr. Long Way says he needs a heart transplant."
Annie and Rafael and I looked at one another.
"Does the tribal fund cover something like that?" Rafael asked uncertainly.
"I don't think we have $200,000, no," Aubrey replied. He sounded astonished, like he'd never heard his own voice before.
I was almost glad I couldn't speak; because I couldn't voice my inhibitions. Aubrey's father was kind of advanced in his years. Would a doctor really give him a new heart when they could give it to someone younger instead?
No, I didn't think it was fair.
Aubrey jumped up from the ground, surprising me. He paced frantically, pulling at his short hair. "A heart, a heart," he said. "Where am I going to get a heart?"
"We'll come up with the money on our own," Annie said with fire. "We don't have to wait for crafts month. We've got the internet now, haven't we? I can sell baskets and ornaments--dyes and paints--Skylar, you can make recordings--Rafael, you can draw portraits on commission--"
"I can make knives and spears and stuff," Rafael said. "I make all my own earrings. And Uncle Gabe showed me how to make bird bone flutes."
What about medicines?
I signed.
A lot of the plants around here work better than antibiotics.
"That's perfect!" Annie leapt up, invigorated. "Let's go to Mr. Red Clay's house this very instant. We'll ask him to put advertisements on the tribal website."
Aubrey didn't say anything. He stood by the willow tree, his hands tangled together anxiously. The expression on his face...I don't know how else to describe it except incredulous. It was like he couldn't believe one person, let alone three, cared so much about him. Annie shot him an encouraging wink. I don't know whether he noticed it, but he went on staring at her as though seeing her for the first time.
We spent the next few days hard at work, none of us harder than Annie. She wove baskets until her fingers splintered and smashed dyes from the forest plants until her hands stained purple and blue. Rafael went into the badlands and came back with clay and goethite and made war jewelry--an inside joke, because Shoshone were historically the most peaceful tribe. He cut the branches from beech trees with his handsaw and carved spears from the wood; he fished smooth stones out of the bottom of the creek and knapped them into knives. I went into the cave because the acoustics were pretty good in there, and with my plains flute and Granny's old tape recorder, I played every Shoshone song I could think of. I scraped the bark from the willow tree and pulled the leaves from the low boughs. The bark's a decent remedy for joint pain, the leaves for fever. I went looking in the woods for elderberry and barberry and bitterroot and I clipped the creosote petals and the peppermint leaves. I tried very hard to find licorice ferns one afternoon, but couldn't. By the time I finally admitted defeat, the sun had already set.
"Caias told me what you're up to," Dad said one evening. "Is that why I hardly see you these days?"
I smiled fleetingly. The truth is, I didn't know how to approach my dad. I couldn't get that photograph out of my head; and when I looked at him, I imagined I could still see his arm around Rafael's father.
Annie's morale was very high during the first week of sales. By week two, it had plummeted. "At the rate we're going," she said, sitting in front of her computer, tears of frustration in her eyes, "he won't have his heart for another three hundred years!"
I rubbed her shoulders.
It's just a lull
, I tried to tell her, but she wouldn't be consoled.
Halloween crept up on me while my head was turned the other way. I took the bus out to the nearest city and bought face makeup, the cheap kind, and made my face up like a skeleton's. Halloween's my favorite holiday, so I make my face up differently every year. Last year I was a tiger. Probably not the wisest choice. I went back to Nettlebush and made pumpkin candy and maple candy with Granny while Dad surrounded the outside of the house with his weirdly cunning jack-o-lanterns. We concocted fake spiderwebs out of hot glue threads and strung them about the windows. Granny even consented to wear a witch's hat for the day.
Turns out people in Nettlebush don't celebrate Halloween. Total number of trick-or-treaters: zero. I brought the candy over to Annie's house, but Joseph screamed when he saw my face.
"What's the point, anyway?" Rafael asked gruffly.
It had taken a lot of coaxing and wheedling, but I'd managed to convince Rafael to let me paint his face. He'd agreed only under the provision that I make him up like a red wolf. I'd never done anything that complicated before, so I consulted one of the drawings on the walls. We were in his bedroom.
I pulled back and looked at Rafael reprovingly. Sometimes he acted like the word "fun" wasn't in his dictionary.
"I mean, the Celts, I get that. Fear of the dead and all. But I'm pretty sure Americans aren't Celts."
I penciled in his fangs.
"I know I'm not a Celt."
Really, Rafael? I never would've guessed.
"Are you a Celt?"
I chucked the makeup pencil at his head.
A grin flashed like lightning across Rafael's face. He grabbed my arm and yanked it. I toppled onto the bed. He gripped me by the shoulders. I didn't give him the chance to pin me; I picked up his pillow and smacked him across the face with it. He laughed and cursed at me and tugged the pillow out of my hands. A good half of his red-brown makeup was smeared on the pillowcase.
"So much for that," Rafael said.
He tossed the pillow to the floor and tucked his hair behind his ears, unveiling his square jawline and his dagger-shaped earring.
It was uncanny, how much Rafael resembled his father. Sometimes it halted me in my tracks. Sometimes it stole my breath away and made me think I could cry.
"What?"
I shook my head quickly and smiled.
"Don't give me that."
I sat up against the headboard, reluctant.
My dad knew your dad
, I signed.
Rafael read my hands carefully. He bit his lip. His teeth were sharp, delectable.
"Your dad killed my dad," he said, in a very quiet voice. "I know."
I must have forgotten to teach him the sign for "know." My heart seized with pity. I couldn't honestly say that I lamented his father's death; but for Rafael, who had known him and loved him and been betrayed by him worst of all, I sort of did.
I tried again.
Our dads were friends.
Rafael's blue eyes shot wide open, then narrowed.
"Are you sure?" he asked. "Because I knew I'd met your mom before. But that's... How the hell do you kill your friend's wife? Never mind that; how the hell do you kill anyone?"
I shook my head. I loved that about Rafael. For all his ornery, introverted ways, he had the kindest, most compassionate heart. I loved his heart.
"Are you okay? What are you smiling at? Oh, hey, I forgot."
He bent over the side of the bed and reached beneath the floor-length comforter. I didn't know what he was looking for. But then he sat up and presented it to me--an orange caltrop.
For the longest time, I could only stare at the caltrop in disbelief. I thought: When Rafael makes a promise, he keeps it. Really...what was I supposed to do with a flower? Wear it? I took the caltrop from his fingers and felt laughter flutter across my lips. I wasn't laughing at him. I would never demean his feelings like that. I couldn't. Not ever.
"You said you liked 'em," Rafael muttered defensively.
You silly boy, I thought. Thank you. Thank you. I tucked the stem of the caltrop safely between my fingers. I took his jawline between my hands. I kissed the corner of his mouth. I kissed his bottom lip. I kissed him again and again until I felt him responding, until he pressed his hands against my shoulders and my back hit the bed. I pulled him by the hem of his shirt and he straddled me, our mouths melded together. And when his hips fell down on mine, whether by accident or on purpose, I saw white.
A knock sounded at the door.
Rafael and I sprang quickly apart. He sat up and coughed. "C'min," he mumbled. I smoothed my hand over my heart and tried to think unpleasant, unappealing thoughts. Knives. I thought of rusty knives.
Gabriel stepped through the door, smiling amiably. His t-shirt and hiking pants were splotched with mutton blood. My stomach turned.
"Sorry, Skylar," he said. "I need Rafael to help me wrap the meat. Come on, Raf."
Rafael groaned in complaint and rose from the bed.
Gabriel's face suddenly turned dark and cold. It scared me, in a way; I'd seldom seen him without a smile. What alarmed me the most was that his eyes, light brown, were directed at me.
"What were you two doing in here?"
My heart rose into my throat. Why was he suspicious? What had I forgotten to cover up? Self-consciously, I ran my fingers through my curls. Gabriel's eyes were on Rafael now, Rafael's expression uncharacteristically timid.
"What?" Rafael demanded weakly.
"Wipe your face," Gabriel said. He retreated from the bedroom and slapped the door shut as he went.
Nonplussed, Rafael fished the pillow off of the floor. He shucked off the pillowcase and used it to wipe away the remainder of his messy makeup. He handed it to me when he had finished. I flipped it over to the clean side and wiped my face.
Gray and white makeup rubbed off on the pillowcase. So did reddish-brown.
6
Shaman Sighting
Our sales were still looking pretty dismal by week three. Annie and I carried our parcels to the hospital mail room--the reservation didn't have a post office--and I knew that underneath her carefully constructed veneer of resilience, she was just as disappointed as I was.
"Siobhan started a donation fund," she said calmly.
She was a good actress when she put her mind to it.
We decided to drop in on Mr. Takes Flight. His hospital room was airy, with a nice, wide window looking out on the pine trees. We'd been to his room several times since the autumn pauwau, and no matter when we visited him, he was never without a family member: whether it was Mrs. Takes Flight, jittery and red-eyed, or the stoic Reuben and his little daughter, Serafine, or Aubrey himself.
Today it was Aubrey with a shaky smile.
"Should I get you some wojapi?" he asked his father. "A book to read? Or--"
"All I need is this here radio, son," Mr. Takes Flight said. "I don't see why you're all fussing over me. I feel fine."
I went home and found Balto chewing on a dead opossum by the sundial. I grimaced, but pat him on the head. He'd grown rapidly since August. Already he was starting to resemble an adult coywolf in miniature, his torso and legs filling out. I guessed he was about five months old.
I went up the front steps and found Dad and Granny sitting under the porch eaves. Sitting with them was Officer Hargrove.
I hadn't seen Officer Hargrove since August, when the FBI took over the search for Dad. It was a shock to see her now, like stumbling upon an old photograph you've forgotten you took. She was a short woman, stocky, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. The ordinarily harrowed expression was missing from her face. Good, I thought. She deserved to relax.
"Hey, sweetheart," she said. She had the tendency to talk to me like I was a six-year-old. I couldn't blame her for it. A lot of people talked to me that way when they found out I couldn't talk back.
I started to smile, but stopped. My confidence drained. I shot Dad a hasty look.
"I'm not here to arrest anyone," Officer Hargrove said testily. "Couldn't if I wanted to. This is a reservation, isn't it? I'm a city cop."