The shaman signed to me again, looking none too pleased.
All young men and women must perform the vision quest
, he said.
The Wise Wolf tells me it is your turn.
But I'm not really Shoshone
, I wanted to reply. Of course I couldn't. I looked subtly at Granny, wondering why she hadn't told him as much herself.
The shaman snapped his fingers at me a second time.
Do you dare defy the Wise Wolf
?
I shook my head, very solemnly.
Then it is thus. Starting tomorrow you will begin fasting. You will eat only when the sun is down, and at that, nothing more than fruit. You will drink only water. You will not participate in any dances. When I've decided you are ready for more instructions, I will return.
The shaman abruptly rose. Just as abruptly, he stepped off of the porch and walked away. He didn't even bother saying goodbye to Granny.
"I'm proud of you," Granny said. "The vision quest means you're ready to be a man."
I wished I knew what all this was about. Aubrey had told me a little about the vision quest over the summer--a kind of trip to the wilderness that entailed spirits visiting you--but I hadn't given it much mind until now. I wasn't sure whether I believed in spirits to begin with.
Granny dismissed me with a trademark wave of her hand. I went inside to wash up and drop off my schoolbooks. Afterward I stopped by Annie's house and we baked sourdough bread for the nightly bonfire, a surprisingly quick endeavor, mostly because Annie already had the starter sitting in her kitchen cabinet. "Nancy!" Grandpa Little Hawk greeted me. I smiled politely, but I got myself out of there as fast as I could. Grandpa Little Hawk was harmless, but he usually didn't have nice things to say about my masculinity.
It was about four o'clock when I decided to see whether Rafael was home yet. I headed north through the reserve, the gnarled, mossy limbs of the southern oak tree prominent on the spring horizon.
I stood under the southern oak tree and knocked on Gabriel's front door.
Gabriel's smile was sunny when he swung the door open to greet me. If the bloody towel over his shoulder was anything to go by, I'd caught him while he was butchering.
"Hello, Skylar," he said. "What can I do for you?"
I smiled quizzically. As much as I liked Gabriel, there was really only one reason for me to visit his home.
Gabriel seemed to reach the same conclusion, too. The smile slid slowly off of his face.
"He's not with you? Did Rafael not go to school today?"
Alarmed, I couldn't respond. I had assumed--
"I'm going to kill him," Gabriel said.
I don't think he meant to, but he slapped the door shut in my face.
Alright, I thought. If Rafael wasn't with me, and he wasn't with Gabriel, then he had to have gone to one of his hideouts. I looked to the badlands beyond the southern oak. I couldn't see the promontory from here, but I knew it was his favorite place to visit.
Warily, I walked down the sloping terrain to the blue-gray clay. The air around the badlands was cool and swift, green-gray grasses swaying in the wind. The badlands were pretty to the eye, like something out of a child's dream--or nightmare, maybe. Every crevice was in danger of crumbling; all the gorges and gulches were slippery with sand. And don't get me started on the tent rocks, tall, topheavy stacks of stone. I don't know how the mule deer and the prairie dogs eked a living out there.
The promontory loomed in view, and the shadowy figure sitting on top of it. Of course, I thought, shaking my head.
I climbed precariously up the cliffside. Rafael looked up and offered me a candy bar.
I shook my head.
"Not in the mood for people," he said around a mouthful of chocolate.
I sat next to Rafael and inspected him while his eyes were on the horizon. His new glasses were a pretty good match for the old ones; had I been somebody else, and not a person who spent a lot of time staring at him, I never would have known the difference. The cuts around his eye had softened to scratches; the bruise on his cheek was purple and pronounced, but its radius had notably shrunk. Maybe the arnica had helped him a little.
"Do you ever look at me and see my dad?"
I had been subconsciously dreading a question like this. I regarded Rafael carefully. The truth was that I did see his father when I looked at his face. I couldn't help it. Rafael had inherited so many of his father's physical traits. The first time he had kissed me, it had scared me.
Rafael's eyes widened. I never did figure out how to hide my thoughts from him.
"God damn--"
He moved to stand up. I reached for him with my left hand and held on as tightly as I could.
"Even you?"
I pulled on his wrist until he had to sit down.
For a while, Rafael didn't say anything. I could see a nerve working along his jaw, taut and twitching; I guessed he was seconds away from blowing up.
I reached for his hand and took it in mine. He tensed, but didn't fight me. I rubbed my fingers over his knuckles, over the strong skin stretched across the back of his hand. I thought there was something profound in that, that I knew the back of his hand like the back of my mine.
I let go of him. He turned toward me, like he was going to question me, but decided against it, still bitter. I took advantage of his bitterness and slid the glasses from his face. I folded them and set them on his lap.
A flustered, confused expression overtook the bitterness on his face. He opened his mouth--but I don't know what he was going to say; I silenced him, my fingers on his lips. He complied; because for me, he always complied.
I ran the backs of my fingers along the bruise on his face. He tried to follow the movement with his eyes. He gave up after two seconds, his eyes jumping to mine. His eyes were blue, but dark, like the ocean at night, like the night before dawn; his eyes, on mine, felt like electric. I wondered briefly what he saw when he looked at me. Sometimes I longed to see myself through his eyes. Sometimes I wished I could show him what he looked like through mine.
I touched my lips to the scratches on his face. I kissed them, feather-light; I kissed the welt on his lip where the blood had dried. I heard him sigh through his nose--but with tranquility or defeat, I didn't know. He tucked my head against his neck, his arms around me. He wrapped me up in him and held me close, and I belonged there, and I knew it, and he knew it, and maybe that was his solace.
I don't think you always need words to share your heart with another person. Sometimes words are overrated. And that's fortunate for me, I guess. I'm not sure I'd know what to say even if I could say it.
"I was going to punch the shit out of him," he told me. I could feel his voice vibrating against my skin. "Luke. I didn't, though. You know why?"
I'd wondered about that.
"You asked me not to. Last summer. Remember? You gave me that note. 'Stop punching people.' It's the only thing you've ever asked me to do. I can do that much for you. I think I'd do anything for you."
I could feel myself still, in every nerve in my body, in every thought I'd ever had. To have so much power over one person--it was terrifying.
"Am I squishing your hand?"
I pulled back from his embrace, much as I didn't want to, and waved my injured hand, faint smile on my face. I didn't think he was capable of hurting me, not even on accident.
Rafael replaced his eyeglasses. He broke his candy bar in two and handed half to me. We sat and ate together on that cliff, the clouds inching toward us as the sun readied itself for its daily descent. In the back of my head I wondered how long it would be before Gabriel came and found us. He had to have known his nephew's affinity for the badlands.
"You know whether you're gonna start your vision quest yet?"
I looked at Rafael in surprise. It didn't shock me anymore when he read my mind like an open book, but I just couldn't figure out how he had deduced something like that.
He snorted. "The shaman always comes looking for you when you turn seventeen. I don't know why. I think in the old days, the age was twelve. Ask your grandma, she might know."
I smiled lightly. I didn't think she would appreciate me calling her old.
I realized: If seventeen was the vision quest age, then Aubrey must have been fasting back in February. No wonder we'd beaten him at shinny. I realized something else, too. Rafael was eighteen. Rafael had gone through his vision quest already.
He nodded, confirming it. "You're not supposed to tell anyone what happens during your vision quest," he said. "No one except for the shaman."
In that case, I wouldn't badger him for details.
Rafael paused. "Well," he stipulated, "I can tell you this. 'Vision quest' is kind of a misleading name. I mean, yeah, you're gonna have visions, really weird ones, but it's not about the visions. It's about figuring out what direction your life's supposed to take."
Oh. Like an aptitude test? I tried to imagine myself in a business suit.
Rafael grinned bashfully. "You thinking about work? Yeah, that can factor into it. Sometimes. Depends. You can get a message from the spirits, like, 'You are a healer.' So then you interpret it as, 'Oh, I'll be a doctor.' The shaman helps you figure it out. Not like I need him, though. I already know what I'm going to be."
I prodded him in the ribs. He couldn't just leave me hanging like that.
"A speech therapist," he said.
The whole world could have stopped. I wouldn't have noticed.
Rafael gave me an unusually stoic look. "I'm going to get your voice back someday," he said. "I thought that was obvious."
How much can one person give you before he stops giving? Sometimes it felt like Rafael would never stop giving. Sometimes I wondered how I could ever return what he had given me. I wanted to give him everything you could possibly give to a single person. I know that sounds crazy. It must be true when they say that love makes you crazy.
"Rafael, you're grounded!"
Rafael cringed. I winced sympathetically. Gabriel had found us after all.
I've heard it said that the bones in your hand are the most malleable; and maybe that's true. By May the pain in my right hand had vanished. I peeled the cast off and flexed my fingers. They looked a little knobbly to me, but maybe that was just my imagination. I could have cheered with delight. I stood in the front room of my home and practiced all the signs I hadn't been able to use since April.
I am awesome
, I signed, palms facing forward, fingers spread. It was shameless of me, sure. But it's not like anyone in the house would have known what I was saying.
Zeke came back to the reservation around that time. At first I didn't realize it, because he wasn't living with Dad and Granny and me anymore. Instead I found him on Ms. Siomme's ranch one afternoon, helping her to bale out hay. I took it as a bad sign that he wasn't living in his own house. I wondered whether the Navajo had released his father from prison yet.
In the mornings I awoke before Dad and Granny, before the sun had risen, and ate crabapples and prairie bananas to tide me over for the rest of the day. I had thought that fasting was going to be difficult, but it wasn't: I was already accustomed to waking at dawn, and I guess I wasn't a big eater to begin with. Dad invariably woke an hour after me, and he usually left the house right away, without saying much except "Study, Cubby." I figured out what he was up to when I walked back from school with Annie, Aubrey, and Rafael and found the whole reservation lined with empty wooden tables and stalls. Crafts month had officially begun.
The creative energy crackling in the air was practically tangible. Granny had me set up her loom on the lawn and she spent hours out there with her friends, skilfully weaving quilts and pendleton blankets in shocks of red and shades of blue. Ours wasn't the only lawn with a loom on it. I counted seven in one morning and grinned impishly. No one could contest with my Granny, and anyone who tried was in for a world of hurt. I saw women sitting on the ground with wet fingers and spinning wheels, shaping clay pottery with the palms of their hands. I saw men whittling shapes out of wood with their stone knives, bears and elk and eagles with their wings spread. Annie pinched my elbow while I stared.
"Let's go into the woods," she said, eyes sparkling.
I waited outside her house while she went inside and fetched Lila and Joseph. Balto came inching along, curious, and I scratched the scruff of his neck. The five of us went into the forest together; those of us with arms carried wicker baskets. Joseph's job was to collect stones and Lila's was to collect bones.
Skylar, you can collect the dyes
, Annie signed serenely. The signing was really for Joseph's sake.
I'll make the glass. We'll all meet at the grotto in an hour. And remember, stay
away
from the north woods. You don't want to bother the black bears, do you?
I was smiling when I veered off the woodland path, Balto darting ahead of me. Balto yipped just once, high and clear, and led me to the turmeric scattered across the forest floor. I knelt and picked them; the roots made for a great yellow dye. We walked a little farther and found the lupins, spiral flowers on climbing stalks, and I plucked them carefully. The petals were blue, but the stems produced gray. Wild indigo was a little harder to find--the flowers liked to disguise themselves as lupins--but Balto sniffed at the soil and bit the stalks and I laughed fondly when his teeth turned blue. We followed a small tributary trickling from the lake and I pulled the madder and the bloodroot from the wet ground, my fingers running red. I flaked the bark from the alder trees for orange dye and culled the fanlike, billowing puya for blue-green. I had to wait for walnuts and acacia before I could get black or brown, but Mrs. In Winter was usually nice about lending us some from her garden. And the only way to make a real green was to pick up red onions from Aubrey's farm.