He stood in the yard, waiting, daring me to throw another one. I did. I missed again and grabbed the biggest one in the basket. I held it for a minute while we stared at each other, and then threw it as hard as I could. Mick didn’t duck or try to get out of the way. The rock glanced off his forehead, and it began to bleed. A lot. He disappeared and I heard his feet thump the porch steps.
I pushed on the gutter with my heels, in a hurry to get up and away, but the gutter came loose, and then bent, and came looser, and instead of sliding up the roof backward, I was sliding down. I tried to hold on to the shingles, but there was nothing to grab.
“Crap,” I said to myself. And just like that, I was airborne again.
It was nothing like flying, even from that height. I landed on my back, again, but with my arms straight out this time like scrawny, useless wings, and all the wind knocked out of me. It hurt a lot worse than the first time, all on one side, and as soon as I started to breathe again, I tried to stop. Mick was kneeling over me, blood from the cut on his forehead dripping onto my neck and chest, and he was telling me I had to do it, had to breathe, had to stay still. He kept wiping the blood off, saying, “It’s going to be okay.”
I wanted to say I was sorry, but couldn’t get the words out. He pushed the bangs off my forehead. He said, “Hang on, Riley. Hang on. I’ve got you.”
A helicopter came, and they strapped me to a canvas stretcher to lift me up and into it; I held on and didn’t make any noise. They flew me to the hospital in Glasgow and my mom came along. Dad and Mick drove over.
I remember a bright, cold light, and starting to count backward from a hundred. Then a thick bandage, wrapped completely around my middle. They were all standing around my bed.
I said, “Hi,” and tried to think back. I pressed on the bandage, to see if I could figure out where the pain was coming from. “What happened?”
Mick told me. Twenty-five feet. Three broken ribs and a punctured lung. I thought he was making it up. “I fell? Again?”
“Yup.” He nodded. He looked proud. “And this time you bounced.”
A few fuzzy seconds went by. “You didn’t know I could do that, did you?”
“Nope. I sure didn’t. You’re a clever girl.” There was a small piece of gauze taped to his forehead. I reached for it, and he leaned down so I could touch it.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hit you.”
He said, “Sure you did.” And if he smiled, it meant that he forgave me. It meant there was no way he’d move away from home because his kid sister was rotten, not very bright, and a pain in the ass. No way.
Mom looked tired, and something else I couldn’t read. Trapped, maybe. Ready to run. But I knew that couldn’t be right. They all kept going in and out of focus. Dad stood at the end of the bed and held both my feet under the covers in his warm, rough hands.
I closed my eyes. I didn’t have a choice.
No one had to teach me to love the morphine, the way it dropped me into a warm pool of amber-colored light and forgetting. For a long time there was no clear boundary between what was real and where the shots took me. Mick and my folks came to visit as often as they could, and Mom stayed over sometimes, and sometimes I knew who was actually there.
After Mick came to say he was leaving, it was easy to believe it was a dream, that he’d changed his mind and wasn’t going anywhere. I could believe I’d grown hawk wings and could fly, so falling wouldn’t be a problem anymore. With the shots, I could believe all of it. I could believe whatever I wanted to.
2. Bluer and Bigger, with No Mountains
She had a real name, but Darrell didn’t know it yet. Not that it mattered. He’d looked for her a few times — trying to stay inconspicuous, which wasn’t necessarily easy if you were so obviously rez-bred — and finally there she was, sort of like he remembered, sort of like someone he’d never laid eyes on.
It had rained, and stopped, and now a flimsy rainbow arced over the small town just south, more stretch of the imagination (the rainbow, although the same could be said for the town) than something you’d believe could harbor a flock of happy little bluebirds. And she wasn’t anywhere near the end of it. He couldn’t picture her in a fairy tale of any sort anyway — little hippie white girl with crazy green eyes, a pocketful of peyote, and a secret. Untamed and intangible. He wanted to know if he’d made her up, or if maybe the whole thing wasn’t just some sort of contact high.
Classes were over, the school yard was empty and she was alone, pacing around the buckled asphalt basketball court with her head down, chin almost touching her chest, setting one foot in front of the other heel-to-toe through the puddles, barefoot. The slight breeze fanned a broken swing to barely perceptible motion; it dangled by a single chain. Another had been wrapped around the high bar a few times and now hung looped there like a rusty snake with a broken back. The slide tilted to one side, its original red paint barely visible amid all the corroded metal. He stood outside the chain-link fence, which was eight feet high for some old and expired reason he’d bet no one would remember now, but he was so tall and long armed that he could easily rest his hands on the top of it. It couldn’t have been that high to keep anybody in, since it gapped in places and didn’t even have a proper gate. Maybe, he thought, it was there to keep dumb wild things out.
His dark hair kept blowing across his face. He tried a few times to tuck it behind his ear, but the wind would just catch it again, until finally he pulled a rubber band out of his pocket and bound it in a quick braid.
“Hey,” he said, not loud, almost a croak, but she heard. She had just taken a corner and was moving away from where he stood; she stopped but didn’t turn. He wondered if she knew it was him; thought there was a chance she’d remember.
He’d come from his uncle’s house on the reservation, thirty miles away, and the rain he’d hitchhiked through was welcome but early. He knew and everyone else knew it would turn to snow at least once more before the alfalfa and the wheat, the wildflowers and the grass came up again. Before long — and way too soon — the summer dust would cake over the aching green, a color that appeared and disappeared so quickly it was a new revelation every year. Even at three in the afternoon in late April, he was conscious of the sun’s arc in the sky. In what passed for warmth after a six-month-long winter of twenty-belows, he could begin to imagine those full summer days that stayed light until ten; shapes, outlines still discernible ’til midnight this far north on the Montana Hi-Line.
He’d seen her the first time the year before, 1971, in the summer, when her dad’s pickup had broken down taking a shortcut through the rez, coming back from a trip to Great Falls. Darrell knew how the shadows of the fence posts angled across the road on that stretch at that time of day; dead animals stuck fast and flat to the pavement, paws reaching for the borrow pits, caught in a run. The tow truck had taken the girl and her father to a service station just outside the boundary, where she’d sat at the corner of the building in a patch of sun, watching her father as he leaned against the pickup’s fender and smoked cigarettes, quietly shooting the breeze with the mechanic.
Darrell showed up with the new tie-rod from the parts store where he worked, handed it over to the mechanic and had him sign the invoice. He was getting back into his truck when he saw her sitting there, legs akimbo off the sidewalk, shirttail out, jeans cuffed and torn at the knee, ratty beaded moccasins tromped down at the back, long, unruly auburn hair covering half her face or more, sunglasses with blue lenses. By then, she was looking out at the prairie, like she was waiting for someone she knew would be coming along from that direction, not his. He left the truck door open and walked across the lot to where she sat, and then stood a little off to the side and looked where she was looking.