The same boys who’d chased me down the gully took me and Jean to the drive-in movies in their Mustangs and Darts. Those altar boys and thieves who’d stolen my butterfly barrette pleaded with me now: Just once, Ada — I promise I won’t tell.
I heard Jean in the back seat, going too far.
Afterward, I held her tight and rocked. Her skin smelled of sweet wine. I said, You’ll be okay. I promise, you will.
I am a woman now, remembering. I live in a trailer, smaller than my father’s cottage. I am his daughter after alclass="underline" there’s nothing I want to own. I drive an old Ford. I keep a pint of whiskey in the glovebox, two nips of tequila in my purse. I don’t think I know as much as I used to know. I sit in the car with my lights off and watch my father, the slow shape of him swimming through the murky light of his little house. He’s no longer fat and thin. It scares me, the way he is thin alone. He’s had two heart attacks. His gallbladder and one testicle are gone. In January, the doctors in Spokane opened his chest to take pieces of his lungs. Still he smokes. He’s seventy-six. He says, Why stop now?
I smoke too, watching him. I drink. I tell myself I’m too drunk to knock at the door, too drunk to drive home.
In the grass behind my father’s cottage, a green truck sits without tires, sinking into the ground. If I close my eyes and touch its fender, I can feel everything: each shard, the headlight shattering, the stained glass windows bursting at last, the white feet of all the saints splintering, slicing through a man’s clothes.
Twenty-one years since that night, but if I lie down beside that truck, I can feel every stone of a black road.
Fourth of July, 1971. This is how the night began, with my small lies, with tepid bathwater and the smell of lilac — with ivory silk under ivory gauze — with the letter opener slipped in my purse. I was thinking of the gully long before, believing I was big enough to protect myself.
Jean and I knew other boys now. Boys who crashed parties in the borderlands at the edge of every town.
I asked my father for the truck. I promised: Jean’s house, then up the lake to Bigfork to see the fireworks and nowhere else. I said, Yes, straight home. I twisted my hair around my finger, remembering my mother in a yellow dress, lying to my father and me, standing just like this, all her weight on one foot, leaning against the frame of this door.
We drove south instead of north. A week before, two boys in a parking lot had offered rum and let us sit in the back seat of their car. They said, Come to the reservation if you want to see real fireworks.
We scrambled down a gulch to a pond. Dusk already and there were maybe forty kids at the shore.
We were white girls, the only ones.
Jean had three six-packs, two to drink and one to share. I had a pint of vodka and a quart of orange juice, a jar to shake them up. But the Indian kids were drinking pink gasoline — Hawaiian Punch and ethanol — chasing it down with bottles of Thunderbird. They had boxes full of firecrackers, home-made rockets and shooting stars. They had crazyhorses that streaked across the sky. Crazy, they said, because they fooled you every time: you never knew where they were going to go.
The sky sparked. Stars fell into the pond and sizzled out. We looked for the boys, the ones who’d invited us, but there were too many dressed the same, in blue jeans and plaid shirts, too many cowboy hats pulled down.
One boy hung on to a torch until his whole body glowed. I saw white teeth, slash of red shirt, denim jacket open down the front. I thought, He wants to burn. But he whooped, tossed the flare in time. It spiraled toward the pond, shooting flames back into the boxes up the shore. Firecrackers popped like guns; red comets soared; crazyhorses zigzagged along the beach, across the water, into the crowd.
The boy was gone.
In the blasts of light, I saw fragments of bodies, scorched earth, people running up the hill, people falling, arms and legs in the flickering grass, one hand raised, three heads rolling, and then the strangest noise: giggles rippling, a chorus of girls.
They called to the boy, their voices like their laughter, a thin, fluttery sound. Niles. They sang his name across the water.
Then I was lying in the grass with that boy. Cold stars swirled in the hole of the sky. In the weird silence, bodies mended; bodies became shape and shadow; pieces were found. Flame became pink gasoline guzzled down. Gunfire turned to curse and moan.
This boy was the only one I wanted, the brave one, the crazy one, the one who blazed out. He rose up from the water, red shirt soaked, jacket torn off. I said, You were something, and he sat down. Now I was wet too, my clothes and hair dripping, as if he’d taken me into the sky, as if we’d both fallen into the pond.
I whispered his name, Niles, hummed it like the girls, but soft. He said, Call me Yellow Dog.
My purse was gone, the letter opener and my keys lost. The boy kept drinking that pink gasoline and I wondered how he’d die, if he’d go blind on ethanol or catch fire and drown. I’d heard stories my whole life. The Indians were always killing themselves: leaping off bridges, inhaling ammonia, stepping in front of trucks. Barefoot girls with bruised faces wandered into the snow and lay down till the snow melted around them, till it froze hard.
But tonight this boy was strong.
Tonight this boy could not be killed by gas or flame or gun.
He had a stone in his pocket, small and smooth, like a bird’s egg and almost blue. He let me touch it. He said it got heavy sometimes. He said, That’s when I watch my back — that’s how I know. I kissed him. I put my tongue deep in his mouth. I said, How much does it weigh now? And he said, Baby, it’s dragging me down.
My clothes dried stiff with mud. I remember grabbing his coarse braid, how it seemed alive, how I wanted it for myself. I thought I’d snip it off when he passed out. His hands were down my cut-off jeans. He knew my thoughts exactly. He whispered, I’ll slit your throat. I let his long hair go. His body on me was heavy now. I thought he must be afraid. I thought it must be the stone. He held me down in the dirt, pressed hard: he wanted to stop my breath; he wanted to squeeze the blood from my heart. I clutched his wrists. I said, Enough.
I imagined my father pacing the house, that sound in the hall. I heard my own lies spit back at me, felt them twist around bare skin, a burning rope.
I remember ramming my knee into the boy’s crotch, his yelp and curse, me rolling free. I called to Jean, heard her blurred answer rise out of some distant ground.
I remember crawling, scraping my knees, feeling for my purse in the grass. Then he was on me, tugging at my unzipped jeans, wrenching my arm. He said, I could break every bone. But he didn’t. He stood up, this Niles, this Yellow Dog. He said, Go home.
He was the one to find my purse. He took the letter opener, licked the silver blade, slid it under his belt. He dropped my keys beside me. He said, I could have thrown these in the water. He said, I didn’t. You know why? Because I want your white ass gone.
When I looked up, the stars above him spun.
I yelled Jean’s name again. I said, Are you okay? And she said, Fuck you — go.
I staggered up the hill. I saw my father at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. I heard every word of his prayers as if I were some terrible god. I felt that tightness in my chest, his body. I felt my left leg giving out.