Marian Palaia - Given World

“There is something out there. Animals. Rabbits, antelope, paint ponies.” Her voice deepened. “Gold in them thar hills.” She laughed as she said the last part, but still it had all come out headlong, a little precipitous; “paint” and “ponies” mashed together, so what he heard, even if it was not what she’d meant to say, was “pain ponies.” And she was right. He knew that land, those animals. He knew something about paint ponies. Knew about the pain ones too.

“Bones,” she whispered, or didn’t quite. She formed the word precisely, but not enough sound came out to actually hear. He was watching her mouth, though, so he knew what she’d said.

“What kind of bones?” He pictured human bones. Cow skulls. He wondered what she was on.

“All kinds. Jawbones, finger bones, ham bones.” Again the laugh that caught, and skipped, like a scratch on a record. “Bones no one is ever going to find.” She looked up again, pulled her sunglasses down lower on her nose. Her pupils were so dilated he could barely see the gold-specked green around them, but he could see it enough. “You just gonna stand there?”

“I guess not,” he said, and crouched down in front of her. “What’s your name?”

“Ginger Rogers,” she said.

He laughed. “Yeah, and I’m Fred Astaire.”

“You can’t be,” she said. “You’re an Indian.”

“And you can’t be Ginger Rogers. You’re too young, and I bet you can’t even dance.”

“Bet I can,” she said. She was going to be sixteen pretty soon. He was older. Almost twenty.

“My brother’s twenty-one,” she said, and picked up a small, sharp, white stone from the pavement and put it in her mouth. “He always will be.” For a quicksilver second, panic cut across her eyes again, but then it was gone, and she nearly smiled.

“What does that mean?”

She moved her face close to his, moved the stone into her cheek with her tongue. “It means I’m wasted.” She giggled, not exactly like a young girl would; the sound was a little bit raw, edgy, but had some lightness to it even still. He wanted to hear it again. “I can’t even see straight,” she said.

“I got that. What’s your poison?”

“Mescaline. You want some?” She reached into her pocket and held out a clear capsule filled with what looked like chocolate powder.

“Nah. I gotta drive.”

“Next time,” she said, like there would be a next time.

He had thought it would be easy to find her. The plates on her dad’s truck told him which county, and there was only one school. But it was almost a year later by the time he tracked her down, and so much had happened, and was happening, so fast — he was going away soon, and Leonard was already gone — it seemed either longer than the nine or ten months it had been, or like no time had passed at all. It didn’t matter. Time was inscrutable like that; he knew better than try to make it correspond to the calendar’s notion of days and weeks and years. He wondered if it would act the same in Vietnam. Slow one day, full tilt the next. He’d heard it did something like that.

“Hey,” he said again, louder this time. He liked the skirt she was wearing — a denim one reconfigured from a pair of bell-bottoms — the way she had the tail of her red-and-black-checked flannel shirt tied in the front, the bandanna around her wrist. She had to have heard him, but she still didn’t turn around. He tried once more. “Hey, Ginger. Where are your dancing shoes?”

She hesitated for a split second more and dipped forward, her hair covering her face and brushing the ground. From there she pushed off with one foot and spun on the ball of the other, lifted her head and flung her body upright in one motion. She looked surprised to be facing him when she stopped, not sure how she’d gotten there, but when she spoke, it was like she had known exactly what she was doing all along. “Why, Mr. Astaire,” she said. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

He walked casually to where the fence opened, trailing his hand behind him along the cold and wet twisted wire. When he got close to her, he put his hands in his pockets and she looked up at him, same as she had at the gas station, except this time without the sunglasses. Her eyes were that treacherous green — the one, like new grass, that never stayed. “You’re late,” she told him.

“Late?” He tried to sound indignant, falsely accused, but he couldn’t help smiling. This was the girl. “Late for what? How late am I?”

“I had a dream you were coming. But that was months ago. You. Are. Late.”

He couldn’t tell if she was serious. He’d be surprised if she had really dreamt of him; even more surprised that she would tell him she had. “What were we going to do when I got here?”

“I didn’t get that far.” She freed a strand of her hair from the mass of it and pulled it across her top lip to make a mustache. “I woke up.”

Out at Cherry Gulch, she let him kiss her, let him put his hand inside her shirt. She was flat as a boy, almost, and barely responded with her body, though her mouth was soft and seemed not unwilling, and when he went to sit up she held him tight against her. She smelled of rain and dog and hay. He felt as if some peculiar magic had turned him into an overgrown stuffed animal; a carnival midway bear or tiger. Something benign to hang on to. He didn’t know why she made him feel like that, or if her trust was something sensed but not entirely present. He wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to be doing, why he had even come, but the pull had been too great to resist. Something about her that first day, tripping her brains out in broad daylight, missing a fragment, obviously, of whatever it is that centers us.

He could feel the bumpy keloid of a long scar slanting along her rib cage; wondered what they had taken out.

“What’s the scar?”

“I fell.” She didn’t say any more then, and he didn’t ask. He already figured she didn’t tell things on demand.

If she were another girl, he would probably have tried to have sex with her, but this one felt breakable, and he didn’t want to break her like that. There were plenty of girls on the reservation he could sleep with, and white girls in town who thought Native boys were sexy, or fucked them to make their boyfriends jealous. There were fights, but they hardly ever amounted to anything. One guy had died a few years earlier, beaten with a crowbar and buried in a shallow grave out on the plain, where the coyotes dug him up and brought body parts to town. They never caught who did it, because they didn’t really look. He was an Indian. Insignificant in the scope of things. White people marching around. War. The price of cattle. The weather.

She rolled him over onto his back and sat up straddling his thighs. “I don’t understand,” she said, “all the excitement about sex.”

He laughed. He had a good laugh, and he thought maybe she liked it. “I don’t really either. But it’s fun sometimes. Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass.”

“Sounds complicated,” she said. She unbuttoned her shirt then, to show him the scar. It ran from her breastbone around her right side to a place in back where he couldn’t see the end of it. He traced it with his index finger. Instead of a bra, she was wearing a cutoff boys’ undershirt.

“Did it hurt?”

“I don’t remember that much. I was on the roof, and next thing I knew I was waking up in the hospital with a bandage wrapped all around me. I guess it hurt then. There were drugs. I was just a kid.”

“What were you doing on the roof?”

“Throwing rocks at my brother. I deserved to fall.”

“No one deserves that.”

“I did.”

Her voice did a little flip, and he saw a look in her eye that said, We are done talking about this, so he rolled up his shirtsleeve to show her his own ragged scar, in the meaty part of his arm just below the crease of his elbow. She touched it lightly and pulled her hand away.