Sucks to be you, don’t it.
At least I’m alive, Grandpa.
Alive. Yeah. That woman, she made me feel alive. I didn’t care what was happening or if I was finally coming down with PTSD. Screw all that. I needed her.
I crawled out on my own while they warned me to stay put. The rest of the day was a fancy necklace of diamond reality moments strung on a flimsy line of breaking-heartbeat woman dream — emergency room, police report, psych eval, criminal and military record check, even a call to my old foster home to confirm I had no psychiatric history. There was also that golden call to the boss saying I wouldn’t be working the Java today because I just jumped in front of a train.
Through it all, I couldn’t get Medicine Snake Woman out of my mind. When we married, what would I call her — Medicine? Med? Snake? What would we name our kids? How would we be in bed — a dance, a firestorm, a tsunami? Would I be able to support her, or was I expected to stay home while she went on with whatever it was she did for a living?
Would my mixed heritage be a problem for her family, who obviously took pride in their lineage? What would it feel like to be scared of losing her?
Hell, I already knew that answer.
The dream came apart and was replaced by another when I fell asleep after a beer later that night.
Bet you think you’re something special.
Grandpa likes to talk from out of trees most times, but this night he was a big-ass bear standing on two legs taking a dump in the woods. His paw was bigger than me. So was his dump.
I studied the acorns by my foot and said, No, just crazy, like everybody says I am.
You can’t let her go, can you?
I didn’t answer because I knew it was going to be one of those dreams, like the one that took me to Afghanistan for four years to make a warrior out of me. Or the time in junior high when I landed in the hospital for standing up to older bullies picking on a skinny black kid who was also in a foster home. Or, best yet, who can forget popping my nine-year-old dream cherry the first time Grandpa paid a visit and convinced me my real mother lived in the next town over and I needed to see her because blood called to blood. Maybe I’d seen her last when I was two or three. Couldn’t remember her much, or my father.
Things didn’t stick to me even back then.
Grandpa even showed me where my foster parents kept the real cash stash and what bus to take when and where and the best time to go over to catch Mom. Ran away on a Friday night with a forged note for the bus driver just in case, and sure enough I found my birth mother, who told me about how my daddy died in the service with honor even if it was an accident. How she fell apart and had to give me up and was too ashamed of letting me and her husband and their families down to ever stay clean long enough to take me back. So she left me with people who could love me the right way until she got herself together.
Said she’d been trying. Told me, “You know how it is.”
By Monday I was back in my foster home, and we all knew that was the best place for me after that weekend. She gave me up for adoption. My foster parents made me theirs.
After the Marines, I never went back. Sent them a postcard every now and then. Guess they didn’t stick either. Sweet folks. They were a comfort, making me feel like I was loved. And I thought Mom loved me still, so that made two places. But not everything that loved was true.
Not sure what exactly made me stop owning my life and maybe my death. Might have been seeing my mother in her drunken junkie glory. Could have been afterwards, when Grandpa sent me to my father’s military cemetery and I saw Dad standing there on a Sunday morning, trees and grave marker visible right through him. Looked like he’d been waiting for me, seeing me coming from years away. Didn’t say nothing. Not that kind of spirit, Grandpa said. Killed before his time came to pick up the fight.
I never asked what Grandpa meant by that. I mean, bad enough I was doing whatever a voice in my head told me to do. Dad looked at me like he knew what was coming and couldn’t do anything to protect me. We couldn’t talk no matter how hard we tried, and Grandpa didn’t translate or act like a telephone between us. Dad did try touching my face. All I felt was cold. Wish it was him in my head instead of Grandpa. But apparently there wasn’t enough First in him to carry on that part of the tradition either. Well, I guess that was Grandpa’s fault.
Wish I’d cared enough to run away again and look for my daddy’s family. Ran away for everything else that popped into my head. But Grandpa told me they had enough problems without me, and I still believe him.
Wish a lot of things I can never have.
So here I was again in dream time, feeling Grandpa trying to steer me away again, but this time I wasn’t having it. I wasn’t letting life go through me again. And I wasn’t going to wait for that blood-cursed monster to hunt me down somewhere down the road. It was here, and so was I. I was going after it.
You’re going after it, aren’t you.
I still didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask about responsibility either. I knew I’d get a load of tradition and spirit talk. Grandpa came down on all fours with a thump that almost woke me up and stared at me through one eye, up close, so that it seemed I was peering through a furry porthole at a wooded landscape of rolling hills and bright streams under a golden full moon. I wanted to hump the moon.
What’s wrong with that?
You can’t have her.
Why? Because I’m not Indian enough?
Nobody gets her. She’s from the other world.
Same place as the monster?
Yes.
So the ones from the other world get us but we can’t get them?
That getting is a transgression. That’s why the ones who get us are monsters. If one of us caught her, that one would become a monster.
I held her.
That’s sweet. But it wasn’t getting. Do you need a talk about the difference?
I didn’t bother answering. Instead, I climbed up on to Grandpa’s back and rode while he walked through the woods, grabbing a beehive full of honey and gurgling up fish by dipping his jaws into a stream and snapping them closed when they swam over his tongue. Didn’t mind the fishing, but the pissed-off bees were a pain.
She likes me.
She likes everyone who’s brave and strong and full of medicine.
She ever like you?
Never saw her in my life.
Then you’re just jealous.
She’s going to be the death of you. Or the life. Either way, it’ll be the hardest thing you’ve done with your life yet.
Why?
This time it was Grandpa who didn’t answer. He shrugged me off on a hilltop and left me sitting on a rock. Waiting for a vision.
You ever fight the monster? I asked Grandpa.
But he didn’t answer that question either.
I woke up too late to get to work on time and thought I deserved a sick day to recover and said so when I called in. Showered, dressed in the nice jeans and shirt, the clean boots, just in case I found her. Put the 1911 .45 under my shirt, just in case I found the monster too. I call it a memento from the service, but of course they don’t issue .45s anymore.
I went out into the busy city day looking for my heartbeat woman.
I started at the train station where I’d made my jump. Scene of the crime. Works in old movies.
The train was pulling out just as I went through the turnstile. After rush hour and a train, the platform was empty, except for the requisite homeless guy on a seat with a bag between his legs, head down, asleep.