“No.”
“What’s your real name?”
“I ain’t going to tell you,” Chess said. “You’d run off if you knew.”
“It can’t be that bad,” Thomas said.
Checkers watched, surprised that Thomas chose her sister. Checkers usually received all the attention, but she didn’t miss it this time. Thomas Builds-the-Fire looked especially goofy as he stumbled his way through the first stages of courtship.
They finished all the packing, even pretended to pack Junior and Victor into suitcases. The sisters stood with Thomas in the parking lot of the Tipi Pole Tavern. A few stragglers shouted lewd suggestions at Thomas, but he mostly ignored them.
“Well,” Thomas said, “I hope to see you again.”
“Maybe you’ll play here again,” Chess said.
“Maybe,” Thomas said.
Checkers sent a telepathic message to her sister: Invite him back to the house, you fool. You’ve got him snagged.
“Listen,” Chess said, “you want to come back to our house? I’ve got you snagged, fool.”
“You’ve got me what?” Thomas asked. He didn’t know what snag meant, although every other Indian on the planet understood that particular piece of reservation vocabulary: snag was noun and verb. A snag was a potential lover or the pursuit of a lover. Snagged meant you’d caught your new lover.
“I meant,” Chess corrected herself, “that you must be all dragged out. Why don’t you come back to the house?”
“What about them?” Thomas asked of Junior and Victor.
“They can sleep in the van,” Checkers said.
Thomas thought about the offer, but he felt a little shy and knew that Victor and Junior might be pissed if they woke up in the sisters’ yard. Though they always pretended to be the toughest Indian men in the world, they suffered terrible bouts of homesickness as soon as they crossed the Spokane Indian Reservation border.
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “We should probably head back.
“Kind of crazy, enit?” Chess asked. “What if you fall asleep driving?”
“Well,” Thomas said. “I’ll stay for a little while. Maybe drink some coffee. How does that sound?”
“Sounds good enough.”
Chess and Checkers jumped into the van with Thomas and directed him to their little HUD house on the reservation. All the lights burned brightly.
“You live with your parents?” Thomas asked.
“No,” Chess and Checkers said.
“Oh. I was just wondering about the lights.
“We leave them on,” Chess said. “Just in case.”
In case of what? Thomas asked in his mind but remained silent.
“Our parents are gone,” Checkers said.
The trio walked into the house, left Victor and Junior in the car, and sat down to coffee at the kitchen table. Checkers emptied her cup quickly and said good night but left her bedroom door open a little.
“Your sister is nice,” Thomas said.
“She’s always crabby,” Chess said, because she knew that Checkers was eavesdropping.
“Oh, I didn’t notice,” Thomas lied.
“Tell me about yourself,” Chess said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say, because she wanted to know.
“Not much to say,” Thomas replied, feeling shy. “What about you?”
“Well, we grew up on the reservation,” Chess said. “Way up in the hills in this little shack with our mom and dad. Luke and Linda Warm Water.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Thomas asked.
“Yeah, we had a baby brother, Bobby. We called him Backgammon.”
“What happened to him?” Thomas asked.
“You know,” Chess said, “those winters were always awful back then. Ain’t no IHS doctor going to come driving through the snowdrifts and ice to save some Indian kid who was half dead anyway. I don’t know. We feel less pain when we’re little, enit? Bobby was always a sick baby, born coughing in the middle of a bad winter and died coughing in the middle of a worse winter.”
“I’m an only kid,” Thomas said.
“Did you ever get lonely?” Chess asked.
“All the time.”
“Yeah, you must have,” Chess said. “I get lonely when I think about the winters. I mean, it got so cold sometimes that trees popped like gunshots. Really. All night long. Pop, pop, pop. Kept us awake sometimes so we’d all play rummy by candlelight. Mom, Dad, Checkers, me. Those were some good times. But it makes me lonely to think about them.
Thomas and Chess sipped at their coffee.
“How about your parents?” Chess asked.
“My dad’s still on our reservation, drinking and staggering around,” Thomas said. “But my mom died when I was ten.”
“Yeah, my mom is dead, too.”
“What about your dad?” Thomas asked.
“He went to Catholic boarding school when he was little,” Chess said. “Those nuns taught him to play piano. Ain’t that funny? They’d teach him scales between beatings. But he still loved to play and saved up enough money to buy a secondhand piano in Missoula. Man, that thing was always out of tune.
“He used to play when it was too cold and noisy to sleep. He’d play and Mom would sing. Old gospel hymns, mostly. Mom had a beautiful voice, like a reservation diva or something. Mom taught Checkers and me to sing before we could hardly talk. Bobby slept in his crib by the stove. Those really were good times.”
“What happened after Bobby died?” Thomas asked, although he wanted to know more about her mother’s death, too.
“You know, my dad never drank much before Backgammon died. I mean, he always brought home some food, and Mom always managed to make stews from whatever we had in the cupboards and icebox. We didn’t starve. No way. Checkers and I were just elbows and collarbones, but we didn’t starve.
“It was dark, really dark, when Backgammon died. I don’t know what time it was exactly. But all of us were awake and pretending to be asleep. We just laid there and listened to Backgammon struggle to breathe. His lungs were all filled up with stuff. No. That’s not true. It was just Mom, Checkers, and me who listened. Dad had tied on his snowshoes a few hours earlier.
“‘I’m going for help,’ he said, and none of us said a word to him. Mom helped him put his coat on and then she kissed his fingers before he put on his gloves. Really. It’s still so vivid in my head. Mom kissed his fingertips, ten kisses, before he tramped out the door into the dark.
“I don’t know for sure how long we waited for him. We weren’t even sure he could make it back. He walked out in a Montana snowstorm to find help. He wasn’t even sure what kind of help he was looking for. There weren’t no white doctors around. There weren’t no Indian doctors at all yet. The traditional medicine women all died years before. Dad just walked into the storm like he was praying or something. I mean, even if he made it to other Indians’ houses, like the Abrahamson family or the Huberts, they couldn’t have done much anyway. The Abrahamson family had their own sick kids, and the Huberts were an old Indian couple who didn’t speak English and only stayed alive to spite the BIA.”
“Your father must have been scared,” Thomas said. He didn’t know what to say to Chess.
“Yeah, he must have been really scared,” Chess said. “But I don’t know how far he walked or when he decided to turn back. I always imagined he pounded on some stranger’s door, but there was no answer.
“As he was walking back home, my mother held onto Backgammon and sang to him. Checkers and I lay quietly in the bed we shared. We heard Mom singing and the baby struggling to breathe. I reached across the bed and set my hand on Checkers’s chest to make sure she was breathing. She reached across and did the same on my chest. We felt the rise and fall, the rise and fall. We did that until we heard Mom stop singing and the baby stop breathing.”