He stared at her, hard, then walked away. The women, she thought. It’s always a woman, alone with the men, when they go off their rockers. She waited a few minutes, breathing herself down, repeating a mantra, a form of the serenity prayer.
She took to the road with her duffel bag. After a few miles of chill in the woods, the road turned back close to the lake and a lonesome café. With its exposed siding and faded sign cracked down the middle, it served as a bus depot. The locals—unemployed lumberjacks, miners, Militia members—gathered to drink coffee. Two weathered faces stared through the plate-glass window, filmy with dust.
A bus was due. She waited outside in her black hoodie. The air was heavy; clouds gathered over the lake. Across the road the sheriff stood by his patrol car, his arms folded. He tipped his hat. A car taxied past, the driver rubbernecking her, but finally the gray bulk of the bus edged into the shell-covered lot. The driver, gaunt, fossil-like, opened the door. She hesitated, then climbed into an odor of ash and perspiration. She pulled a face mask from the pocket of her hoodie and put it on, just to be safe.
The sheriff caught her eyes before the bus rattled south. She turned from the tinted window, from his icy smile and the lake behind him. Before she did, she noticed a sailboat on the lake with a lantern swinging from its bow in the dusk. It was far out, almost at the horizon, heading for open water.
The Hummingbird
Mika’s husband, cop gofer by day and wannabe Marauder by night, had long ago convinced her that her Indian blood was something to live down, not celebrate, and now she accepted that the locked room adjacent to the kitchen where he kept his sacred totem (his phrase) was taboo. She understood that she had disappointed him, that she was no longer the woman he had married, the woman who had crooned songs from her childhood as she kept the house clean. Even so, she could not finger the crime that had convinced him to take each card in turn—the credit card, the department store card, the gasoline card—and snip it into a dozen pieces, clench a fist full of plastic, and toss the bits into the bin.
“There!” he said, glaring.
“You spend more than I do,” she said, breath difficult to locate, as though he had punched her in the belly. In fact, it had been more than a week since he’d beat her, which had to be a good thing, but her head turned dizzy and she wondered if she might be having a stroke. Things between them had not been so bad this week, but the contents of her purse, strewn over the kitchen table; the metal clasps of her coin purse, poking a hole in the plastic wrapper of a loaf of bread; her checkbook, flung open on the dull linoleum floor; and a tampon in the butter dish all told a different story.
“What have you done?” she asked. She bent down to pick up the checkbook, but he stepped in front of her and slipped it into a back pocket of his camouflage pants.
“We will not spend money,” he said. “We must scrimp. I’ve been assigned a mission.” He took the green lampshade off the kitchen lamp and the unshielded bulb forced her to squint. He sat her down to interrogate. “We will pay off debt. We will not keep money in banks. We will buy gold and silver. When there is no money, we will do without. Your daughter will not be spoiled.”
Lillooet, her wild onion, was not his. Though Mika had not heard from her daughter’s birth father since back in the day, she knew enough about mood to keep her mouth shut. “I’m putting you on strict notice,” her husband said. “This checkbook will go to my name and mine alone. You must account for every goddamned penny, either now or in your next life. We are warriors and must live as such.”
The word “warrior,” coming from him, made her stomach lurch. Afraid that his voice would waken Lillooet, she closed the door that separated the kitchen from the rest of the rented house. “You might be right,” she said carefully. “I have not been careful enough.” She smelled urine. Or something. On his breath, maybe, some kind of booze.
In fact, she had squirreled away a thousand dollars in cash, most of it a gift from her sister—“getaway money”—some scrimped and saved over the past year. She did it the way she kept a hummingbird inside her head, an invisible spiderweb charm, to guide her when she felt lost. She called it deep-brain massage.
Satisfied, he poured coffee, put the shade back on the lamp, and motioned as though actually helping her clean the mess. She knew that’s how he would remember it, as assistance. Once he completed his rant, and it took some time, he retreated to the room where he spent so much of his life. She sat at the zinc table and heard him mutter, heard him open and close books and preach to an invisible congregation. All the crazy things people believed had made him crazy, and she had to repeat it all when she was with him and pretend she too believed it, crazy talk.
If she went to the tribe, where she had never really been, that might be her name: Walking-on-Eggs Mika. It was what some had called her in jest. Lillooet, who had her dark hair and high cheekbones, would be Wild Onion, would experience the lodges and ceremonies, taste the sun as it rose from the plains, move like a flower for four days at the midsummer sun dance. Not like her family, she thought, and saw her father, dressed in a felt hat, a stained duffel coat, and a pair of gray cuffed pants as he spoke with a medicine man whose eyes radiated a glow like obsidian, who wore leggings and moccasins, feathers and fringe, a beautiful choker necklace of beads and turquoise. “We live and then we live again,” the medicine man said. “If you come clean, the door is there and you are made welcome.” The fierce man leaned close to her mild father. She had been hypnotized by the turquoise stone staring like an eye from the hollow of his chest. He had a magical pouch slung around one wrist. “Ascend the red road. Walk in the sacred manner,” he finished. It was a common phrase.
Her father, unimpressed, had taken off his felt hat, scratched his head, stared into the overcast sky darkened by high buildings, and changed the subject. “That guy’s a clown,” he told her afterward, “making it up as he goes along. Don’t be impressed by bullshit.” He had a job in the city that put food on the table and kept a roof over their heads and was a proud man who worshipped, when he worshipped at all, at a Christian church. “Two of your uncles stayed on the reservation,” he told her. “One, you know who I’m talking about, got into liquor and the dope and couldn’t stop. He passed. The other one, he’s okay; traps leeches, collects cones, harvests wild rice, makes do. He stands proud, has freedom. Mumbo jumbo don’t impress him.”
Wasn’t that how it happened? It was all she had from the old days. She couldn’t remember if it had happened that way or if she had made it up herself over time, like a fairy tale, to give her something to hold on to. He had been a good man; she knew that much.
She had told her husband the story once, in the good days, or the better days anyway, and he had come to her during the night, nude and erect, singing. “The medicine man / The medicine man / The medicine man is here,” he sang. “And he’s got something nice / For you.” It had made her laugh. Back then, he was different; they had some good times. Though even back then, she remembered, he liked his sex rough.
The night he cut up her cards and seized her checkbook, she dreamed of the hummingbird, her version of the spiderweb charm, darting near the house. In her dream she was the sleepwalker, and the hummingbird gave her a pouch with medicine and made her understand that it was all she needed.
The next morning, she made him his breakfast and got him off to work with the cops. He had not slept; he was exhausted, eyes red-rimmed, stubble on his cheeks, skin sagging. An old man, she thought. “Pick up the phone each time I call,” he said.
He called her maybe a dozen times a day.
She made breakfast for Lillooet and got her off to school. The girl was subdued and groggy, as though medicated. She too lived in a dream, one that could be broken, Mika thought. The house to herself, she spent an hour jiggling through a box of keys, keeping the hummingbird with her, before she found the one that fit the locked door. The room smelled like sweat and whiskey and old newsprint, and she felt an overwhelming urge to fall to the unswept floor and weep. Instead, she forced open a window to air out the room. I’ll just clean up the damn place, she thought, but sunlight streamed to his cluttered desk and she sensed that she was breaking their bond. Like the hummingbird, she thought. He liked to tell strangers that he was a technical specialist with the cops; it sounded like big stuff, but in fact he was a clerk. He filled equipment and supply requests, though he did have a license to carry a gun and once, when they were both drinking, had threatened her with it, had made her put its barrel in her mouth. “Sweet, eh?” he asked, perspiration glistening on his forehead. Afterward, contrite, he had wanted her to understand that it was a joke, that the gun was empty.
“The truth is,” she had replied impulsively, “you’re a lowlife.”
He used the word often with his buddies who came to the house to drink and play poker. “Not even good enough to be a cop,” she had said. He had beat her, a bad beating, and she had left him, taken Lillooet to her sister’s cramped apartment above a greasy dive. Her sister insisted on photographs, but not even threats could make her turn him in to the cops. If she did, they would come and get her, not him. “A man could hunt a woman, beat one, kill one. Don’t matter,” she told her sister, “unless the lowlife is one they don’t like. The cops would get me, not him.”
Her sister had pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Then how about make them not like the bastard?”
He had apologized for what he did, even come to her sister’s apartment with a bouquet. A bundle of flowers for the first time in her life. “I’ll take the cure if you want,” he said; “you can scourge my flesh if that’s what it takes.”
She had returned, but he did not keep his word. Sometimes he whacked her. But not often. Still, she remembered in her loins the passion that had once existed between them. Her eyes found his, her heart jumped, and her blood took him in like a child and lover both.
I’m stupid, she thought. Stuck. The hummingbird goes up and down and back, never stuck, on the move, like the soul. Her mother had put family above freedom, above loyalty. And Lillooet needed a father, didn’t she, someone who made a living? At least he had a living.
And now her sister had moved out west close to the ocean. “Call me when you leave him,” she told Mika. “In the meantime, keep yourself to yourself.”
The gun lay on the desk next to a notebook. Beneath the odor of sweat and whiskey, the room smelled of gun oil. She forgot about the pouch of hummingbird medicine in her head and found the bottle, half empty, behind the desk, next to a moldy magazine of women doing things she could hardly imagine. She took a few tokes. It went down good. She held the bottle to her nose and enjoyed its sharp oak odor, then put it back and tidied up the small paper-cluttered room and sat in his chair in the light to read the notebook.
He sets me in the Center of the Plain filled with Bones. I pay off Debt and walk among the Bones. They come to life with a rattle, Bone joins Bone. The Graves open and the Bones rise and walk. The Beast is disguised as a Man of God. He is Colored, a Spic, a Dago, Jewboy, Queer. A Terrorist. WE will rain down Bullets and Bombs, drown the Shitbrains and Scumbags in their Own Blood. We will cut off Diseased Dicks and stuff them in Bags. They will Drink their Own Blood filthy with AIDS and virus. We will keep Our God Emperor in Power.
It went on like that. The phone rang; she ignored it. She was fascinated. He had bullshit for religion. Bullshit for politics. She should have realized it long ago, when he and his kind frothed at the mouth when their election candidate lost, but there’s a first time for everything. He wrote the way she did when she was in third grade or sloppy drunk. She had seen him worship the cops who carried guns, but I mean to tell you, she thought, imitating him, momentarily amused, this shit is flat-out weird. She laughed, momentarily freed from his oppression. The phone rang again, kept ringing, and stopped. That meant he was on his way home in a hurry if he could get away; it wouldn’t be the first time, and that was too bad, but she would be damned if she would listen to his gravel-shit voice and let him beat her.
She sat at his desk in a plank of sunlight. How had this happened? She had a cataract in one eye, varicose veins in one leg. Lillooet’s life should grow like a plant, she thought, slow, with drums and chants, or just a life of peace and quiet in the city, but what she loved, except for Lillooet, was dead. She picked up the gun. Heavy, like a paperweight. The metal barrel greasy to the touch, rubber grips sticky, coated with his skunk stink. He played with it sometimes, twirled it with a finger in the trigger guard the way a kid plays bandito.
She cradled it.
I could blow his fucking head off.
Or blow my own goddamned head off.
Sunlight flooded the room; dust motes hung suspended. She reached to the desk and closed the book. She couldn’t stand his handwriting because it was his hand, writing—a cramped, crooked scrawl of poison. Like the gun. She dropped the gun on top of the book as if both objects were sticky with his stink.
She hated every bastard who had put her where she was.
She became drunk with hate.
“We live again,” the medicine man had told her father. “We live and then we live again.” It was the same thing, more or less, that the Christian minister would say.
Or was she making it up? The years take so much from us.
“To go on a quest is good,” the medicine man said. He stared at her. “It’s good to be in transit.” She turned quickly, but the room was empty, the door shut tight. A room of shit, she thought, filled with the noise of the stupid. Medicine man, my ass. My father was right. Fucking men. All the same. Worship ME; that’s what they all say.
She sat very still, rubbed away goose bumps, and worked the thing out. The pouch, she thought. That’s my object. That’s my thing. Then she picked up the gun and put it between her belt and flesh; she took his book into the yard, lit a match, and burned its pages. They crinkled and blackened to ash. The breeze took bits and blew them over the collapsing chain-link fence.
When her father was dying, he had raved about a potlatch, a burning ceremony where everything that could not be sent to paradise with the corpse, or given away, went up in flames. It was ancient history, nothing Ojibwa or Christian, but a thing he wanted. Burn it up, start over. So she had burned his felt hat and his overcoat, stood and stared into the sky as stars took notice of the flames. His forehead and limbs were themselves on fire with fever, heat radiating from every wrinkled pore, and the last thing she did after the busk was bathe him with a wet cloth.
I was a hummingbird then, she thought. I flew. I had hummingbird medicine.
She had once been a drunk, and her husband was still a drunk. It had taken her this long to get over her dry drunk. Confronting him would make for drama, and her life had been too long without drama, the right kind of drama. But he was drunk not just on whiskey but on the Bible and junk he heard and believed. That was the worst kind of drunk. People drunk on the word of God, convinced of their righteousness, would do anything to anybody. And he was hungover from whiskey. A smoky shape flitted in the corner of her bad eye with the cataract.
She put the thousand dollars in her purse and called Lillooet’s school. This is my potlatch, she thought. It’s time. She knew that there would be a price to pay for years of slavery to a bad man, but the price would be less if she paid it sooner, so she closed the suitcase and lugged it to the back door, which slammed behind her. She heard his truck screech around the corner and fishtail to a stop at the curb. She dragged the grip—her father had called it such—across the yard behind some bushes and a wooden fence on its last legs. In untucked flannel and old jeans, she waited, bent knees aching. She could smell fresh-turned soil and see a rusty red wheelbarrow half hidden by trash. She could feel the gun against her midriff.
He didn’t stay long, only glanced out back, shouted her name twice, and then screeched off in his truck. She stayed crouched where she was, working out something in her head, then went into the house and did what she had to do before she left for good. She put the gun back where she had found it. She would take nothing that belonged to him.
At the school a few minutes later, she picked up Lillooet, who frowned and bit a thumbnail. “Anything in your locker you can’t do without?” Lillooet shook her head. “Then let’s go, you and me. A long way.” Mika took her hand. “I have a hummingbird with me in a pouch. A secret pouch. Want to see?”
Lillooet said nothing. She scowled, perhaps thinking of the journey ahead.
