Split Feather Page 12

  I fell asleep to the sound of a child breathing, and my demon came back. She was laughing, and I heard my tears falling on the pillow: tok-tok, tok-tok.

  17

  Grandpa had a lot of guns.

  Okay, so I grew up mostly in rural Northern Michigan, where everybody hunts—or at least pretends to be a hunter—so I’m used to seeing rifles hanging on a rack of antlers in the living room, or maybe tucked into a gun cabinet in the corner. But Grandpa John had a lot of guns. Shotguns and handguns, oh my… a really cool pistol with a scrimshaw grip, and some old rifles that were longer than I was tall. Muzzleloaders, maybe. They were pretty, but probably not very useful for what I had in mind.

  You’re a killer, Siggy, my demon whispered, and for once I turned my head toward her words. She was just behind my shoulder, stroking my hair in grotesque mimicry of a mother’s touch. My one true and honest companion, and she had a point. Someone with my past, with my temper, someone who has a demon whispering into her ear night and day, is really good for only one thing.

  I couldn’t keep a job, I didn’t have a home to go to, and I didn’t even really have a family, so why not? Someone needed to take out Monday and Slit-Throat Dude, and who better than me? I’d get caught and go to prison. Nothing in my life story so far suggested any other outcome.

  But Emily would be safe.

  Maybe that was all just an excuse, anyway. I burned to do it. My demon wasn’t the only one who wanted to see blood. The pain behind my eye pulsed like a living thing as I thought of what they’d done to me, these women in their cheap suits and expensive pumps. Of the foster fathers and brothers and “uncles” with their bad breath and grabbing hands, of broken arms and clumsy kids.

  I thought about the time one of my friends in school had told me only virgins can see a unicorn, and I cried myself to sleep that night beneath a roof that wasn’t mine, in a bed that wasn’t mine, and had all my stuff tucked under it in a ratty black plastic bag. Because I wasn’t a virgin, and I’d never see a unicorn.

  I was twelve years old.

  Not so much older than Emily.

  Reaching up, I touched a shotgun. It was a heavyset weapon, stout and unlovely, with a battered stock and a fuck-you attitude. Ugly but deadly, I thought, like me.

  The screen door banged open, and I jerked my hand away from the gun. Garvin walked into the cabin, took one look at me eyeballing Grandpa John’s arsenal, and stopped short.

  “Siggy,” he said in a careful voice, “what are you doing?”

  “I’m just looking at Grandpa’s guns,” I lied. “He sure has a lot of ’em.”

  “Siggy,” he said again. “You know violence isn’t the answer.”

  “Violence is always the answer,” I said, smiling to show him I was joking. He just looked at me with sorrow in his eyes and the lines of his face, and shook his head.

  “It’s not our way, Siggy,” he said, staying remarkably calm. “It’s not the way we do things here.”

  “Well, it’s my way,” I told him, and stuck my hands in my pockets because they wanted to smack him. “I wasn’t brought up here, remember?”

  “Yeah, I know,” he replied. “That’s why I’ve come to get you. We’re doing a dance for you over at the gym, and it’s time.” He jerked his chin toward the door and then turned and walked away, expecting me to follow.

  “A wha…?” I said after him. “A dance? Dafuck?” Standing in the doorway, I had my mouth hanging open. “Time for what?”

  “Time to bring you home, Siggy,” he said over a shoulder.

  “But I’m right here!” I hollered at his retreating back.

  “Come on, Siggy,” he said, loud enough that I could hear, “they’re all waiting. We don’t have time to argue.”

  “A dance,” I muttered. “What the fuck. A dance.” I shot a last, longing look at the shotgun.

  Garvin swung a leg over his four-wheeler.

  “You’re a pain in my ass, Garvin!”

  He just grinned and revved the motor.

  Well, I suppose I could shoot Monday tomorrow, as good as today, I mused. It’s not like she was going anywhere. So I rolled my eyes, stepped onto the porch, and let the door bang shut behind me.

  * * *

  The Tsone High School gymnasium was one of the nicest I’d ever been in. Its gleaming wood floors and white cinder-block walls wouldn’t have looked out of place in any town in America, and banners proudly tracked the local basketball team’s prowess all the way back to 1971. Their mascot—an angry grizzly—glowered down from on high as a stream of men in moose-leather vests and women in kaspeqs filed into the space.

  Older men and women first, then mothers with children, and last came the able-bodied men and younger guys. It seemed like there were more than the hundred-odd residents of Tsone present. I elbowed Garvin as he sat next to me.

  “What the hell is going on?” I whispered.

  “Shhhh,” he hissed.

  “But…”

  “Ssst!”

  I rolled my eyes and subsided. Pig-headed male. We might not be blood, I thought, but we sure as shit must be related. When the last people had been shepherded in and seated on the bleachers, the doors shut and the lights dimmed. The space around us changed subtly. It didn’t feel like we were sitting in a gleaming modern building with glass backboards and creaking bleachers, but that we had gathered round a fire in some ancient earthen building, with a smoke hole near the top and hard-packed soil at our feet. I shook my head, but the impression remained.

  Weird. I waited for my demon to lean over my shoulder and whisper into my ear about how this woman or that man should die, or that I should burn the place down. She loved crowded places with too few exits.

  But there were no lights, no crickets, and my demon was conspicuous in her absence. Maybe she was still back in Grandpa John’s living room, checking out the guns.

  As the people sat, hushed and expectant, eyes gleaming feral in the dim light, an old man stepped out of the boys’ bathroom. He was flanked by a trio of white-haired and sturdy old ladies. That made me chuckle, which earned me a poke in the ribs from Garvin. As Grandpa John came closer, I could see that he was wearing one of the leather vests, and that he had a bearskin flung over his shoulders. The dim light caught in his silver hair, creating for an instant a halo around his face.

  He walked with a stride that said he could kick your ass, and carried himself in a way that said he’d be happy to do it, too. This wasn’t just my grandfather—this was a warrior. He stepped up to the podium, facing those of us in the bleachers, and the three women fanned out behind him. They wore kaspeqs, as well, knee-length garments that I’d come to think of as Alaskan hoodies, brightly patterned and beautiful and trimmed with shining dark fur. They held in their hands lengths of cloth, scarves maybe, and their faces were solemn and strong.

  Grandpa John cleared his throat, and adjusted the microphone when it squealed. Then he began to speak.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said, his voice clear and powerful. “Our friends from Anvik and Nulato, Tanana and McGrath… thank you. I see some others here from Holy Cross and Kaltag. Some of you I don’t know, but we are all here. So thank you for coming.

  “Some of you know that my granddaughter, Siggy John, who was named after her father’s grandmother and me, was taken away from us when she was just a little girl,” he continued. “As so many of our children are taken, sent to schools, sold to white families. Most never come back. Even the ones who do come back, some of them are lost forever. Lost to their families, lost to themselves, because their souls are split down the middle like a feather cut by a knife.”

  He made a slicing motion with his hand. One of the old ladies behind him stifled a sob, and she wasn’t alone. There was an undercurrent behind the words, a low moan, an angry song.

  “My Siggy came back this summer,” he said, “but still she is lost, and now those people have come and want to take our little Emily, too… ‘for her own good,’ they say. Because we
don’t know how to take care of our own children, and she should be with someone better than her family.”

  The anger swelled in his voice.

  “Forgive me if I sound bitter, because my heart has been broken too many times to bear. And forgive me for singing this song of mourning, this song for death, because it is a kind of death that occurs when they steal our young people and take their lives away from them forever.” His voice went lower, more menacing.

  “As they have stolen our land and our language, and forbidden our potlatch and our dances. As they have killed the game and treated the animals with disrespect till they don’t return. As they murdered our brothers and sisters at Oldtown, as they steal our future from us, year after year, with each child they take. Forgive me, because I can’t forgive them anymore—I can no longer find it in my heart to say ‘we are all related.’

  “Forgive me.”

  He raised up his hands, half-clenched in shaking fists, and he raised up his voice, and he sang. As the crowd sat silent and rapt, as the older ladies swayed in place behind him, dancing and chanting and dipping their little scarves in graceful movements as if they were catching tears in the fragile cloth, he sang.

  I didn’t know the words, because what he’d said was true—the words had been stolen from me. I couldn’t describe how it sounded, because nothing had ever sounded like that before. Yet I knew it.

  It was a song I’d been singing before I was born, in a language I’d never known except in dreams. It was a song that had been sung into log walls and wood and cement and hard iron nails for so long and in so many voices that it permeated the dwelling places of the people, and clung to the fabric of their clothes like the scent of woodsmoke. It was the cry of a stolen child, and of her mothers and grandmothers and the children she would never see. It was the song of my own heart, split like a feather down the middle so I could never ever fly.

  The tears rolled down my cheeks to fall into my cupped hands.

  The women danced, weeping.

  And my grandfather sang.

  18

  When the singing was over, the scarves and bearskin and tears all tucked away for later, there was food.

  It wasn’t really a potlatch, I think, because I’d read about potlatch and I didn’t see any giving of extravagant gifts or throwing away of sheets of copper. But it wasn’t the same as a potluck back in Bearpaw, either, with macaroni-and-mayo salads and walnuts in the brownies. This was a modern-day potlatch—part community intervention, part gossip hour, wrapped up in tin foil and served with a scoop of akutaq.

  There was the end of a rack of moose ribs, where the meat is most tender, and crowberry muffins so fragile they fell apart if you looked at them too long. Fish head soup, with most of a head and two eyeballs. I smiled to see them, and the woman who was handing me a bowl smiled back, dark eyes going to bright half-moons over her round cheeks, and I knew I’d eat every bite.

  Everyone I met was really nice to me—and not that awful artificial-sweetener kind of nice that looks at you with eyes full of pity and hopes you never date their son, the kind that makes your skin itch on the inside and drives you to live alone in a shitty trailer in the woods. This was the real deal. I sat down to a meal like I’d never had, and one I swore I’d remember on my deathbed. With every spoonful, every swallow, it felt like I was being nourished by my people.

  My people…

  That was the day I discovered frybread. Omifuckinggod, frybread. If frybread had fallen from the sky instead of manna, tell you what, Moses and his peeps never would have made it to the Promised Land. They’d have just sat in the desert getting fat and being happy forever.

  Snagging a third piece—or maybe a fifth—I wondered what frybread might taste like slathered with salmonberry akutaq, and whether there was some sort of rule against hiding in the corner and hogging it all for myself.

  Suddenly the gym’s double doors slammed open, and I mean slammed. The whole place shook, the glass backboards trembled. Hell, I even looked up from my frybread to see what the fuck was going on.

  There I was, standing in the wide doorway, the pale gold light of an Alaskan summer framing my head like a halo. I had a rifle tucked under one arm, a huge rucksack slung over my shoulder, and I grinned into the silence my dramatic entrance had caused.

  “I’m heeeeeere,” I announced, and I was relieved to hear it wasn’t me after all. “Let’s get this party started!” The girl who wasn’t me dropped the rucksack on the ground, leaned the rifle up against it, and lifted her arms as if expecting a round of applause.

  “Auntie Sam! Auntie Sam!” A little voice broke the silence, and I was surprised—maybe a little hurt—when Emily rose from a seat at the end of the bleachers and flung herself at this girl, strong and whole and sure—this warrior of a girl who wasn’t me. A mob of children swarmed her, and a few adults as well, no less enthusiastically. I wasn’t butthurt about it at all, of course, though I’d been feeling pretty special for a while there, thinking this party was for me.

  So I did the only thing I could think of. While nobody was looking, I snagged the last piece of frybread, scooped some akutaq onto it, and pretended not to notice when Garvin got up, too. But he turned back.

  “Come on, Grumpy Face,” he said laughingly, “you gotta meet her sometime.”

  “I’m eating,” I grumbled, but I got up to follow.

  The laughing stranger beat us to the punch. In the time it took me to stuff my face and get fish grease all over my fingers, she crossed the floor and stood facing us, her feet shoulder-width apart in a fighter’s stance, one hand outstretched and a wide smile on her face.

  “I hear I’ve got a new cousin,” she said. Her voice was low and smoky, a singer’s voice. “Hey. I’m Sam.”

  I wiped my fingers on my shirt, and spoke around a mouthful of frybread and fish.

  “Siggy.”

  Sam wore cargo pants and a tank top that bared a ridiculously toned midsection. She was not, I noted with some satisfaction, quite as tall as me. I took her hand, and we may have indulged in a bit of a squeezing competition.

  “Siggy,” she said. “Sweet name.” Then she sniffed. “Oooh, frybread! Did you guys save me some?”

  I felt my face flush as I swallowed.

  I did not feel guilty. Not a bit.

  “There’s more in the kitchen,” Garvin laughed. “Come on.” They turned to go, and the meal I’d just eaten settled like a stone in my gut as I watched them. Sam stopped and glanced over her shoulder at me, a slight frown on her face.

  “Hey, Cuz, you coming?”

  I blinked, and blinked again, and then I joined her and Garvin. Linked arm-in-arm like those red plastic monkeys I’d had as a kid, we marched off in search of fellowship and frybread.

  * * *

  “That’s real bullshit,” Sam stated. “They can’t just come here and take Emily away. Bulllllll… shit.”

  Cousin Sam sat at the table with us, and the coffee wasn’t half as black as her scowl. She was fresh from a big fire in California, I’d learned. A pilot. Oh, yeah, and she owned her own airplane, too. I scowled into my own mug and listened to Garvin and Emily play-wrestling on the porch.

  “They’ve done it before.” Grandpa’s voice was quiet, but he didn’t sound as defeated as he had before. Was it because of the dance, I wondered, or because the prodigal granddaughter had returned?

  He’s not even really her grandpa, I thought, and knew I was being an asshole.

  He’s not yours, either, my demon whispered.

  “Well, not on my fuckin’ watch.” Sam leaned back in her chair, and I set mine down on all four legs. Wasn’t there some rule or something about cussing in front of kids? Sure, Emily was outside, but she could probably still hear us. “Screw that,” she said. “You’re gonna need a lawyer, Grandpa… oh, stop, I know you don’t like ’em, but you need one. I’m headin’ back into town first thing in the morning, and I’m gonna get some state troopers off their asses and get ’em out here. See if tha
t bitch can get her hands on Emily with half the force camped out in your front yard. I have a few favors I can call in. We’ll need to get a real search team organized, turn over every damn stone in Alaska if you need to, till we find Trudy and Mike. My pilots will help. I’ll get the whole fleet out here—”

  “Can you?” Grandpa’s eyes were bright. “But tourist season…”

  “Those rich assholes can sit in Anchortown and suck moose balls for all I care,” Sam replied calmly. “We’re talking about my family. My pilots will be happy to help… and those that aren’t can go look for jobs somewhere else.”

  “The whole fleet?” Grandpa’s hands were shaking so hard he had to set his cup down.

  “Your pilots?” I was so confused.

  Grandpa John and Sam both stared at me for a moment, like I was dumb.

  “Wait… no way. Sam? As in Sam’s Flying Service?”

  “Yep.” She smiled into her coffee. “Sam as in Sam’s Flying Service.”

  “Holy shit.” I realized my mouth was hanging open like a moron, and shut it. Cousin Sam didn’t just own an airplane, she owned a whole fleet of them. And here I could hardly keep the electricity on in my shitty little trailer.

  Scratch that… my shitty former trailer. I was homeless now.

  “That’s right, baby, you don’t just have family. You have family with connections.” Sam finished her coffee and pushed her chair back from the table. “I’m gonna get going, Grandpa, but I’ll be back before I leave. First thing in the morning, I’m outta here, back to Anchortown to rattle some fuckin’ cages. Gotta nip this shit in the bud.”

  “First thing in the morning,” Grandpa John agreed. He stood up and gave Sam a long hug.

  “See ya, Siggy-girl,” Sam called out in her musical voice, ruffling my hair on her way out the door. “Nice to meet you at last. We should get together sometime, after I’m done saving the world.”

  Yeah, I thought, great idea. Your mansion or mine? I forced a smile and a cheerful, “Nice to meetchoo, too!”

  Grandpa John followed Sam out the door, and I could hear Garvin’s fond farewells, and Emily’s little voice. I felt like kind of an asshole, sitting at the table and drinking coffee that had gone cold. I made myself drink the last bitter drop, alone in the quiet cabin, not saving the world.