There There(11)

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Back on BART, headed home, Dene sees his face in the dark reflection of the train window. He’s beaming. He wipes the grin from his face when he sees it. He got it. It was pretty clear that he would get it. Five thousand dollars. He’s never had that much money before, not once in his life. He thinks of his uncle and his eyes well up. He clenches them shut and keeps them closed, leans his head back, thinks of nothing, lets the train take him home.



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When Dene came home to an empty house, there was an old-looking camera on the coffee table in front of the couch. He picked it up and sat down with it. It was the gun camera his uncle had mentioned. With a pistol grip. He sat there with the camera in his lap and waited for his mom to come back alone with the news.



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    When she walked in, the look on her face said everything. She didn’t have to tell him. As if he hadn’t been expecting it, Dene stood up, camera in hand, he ran past his mom out the front door. He kept running, down their hill to Dimond Park. There was a tunnel that went below the park. About ten feet high, it stretched some two hundred yards, and in the middle, for about fifty of those yards, if you were in there, you couldn’t see a thing. His mom told him there was an underground waterway that went all the way out into the bay. He didn’t know why he came, or why he brought the camera. He didn’t even know how to use it. Wind howled in the tunnel. At him. It seemed to breathe. It was a mouth and a throat. He tried but failed to turn the camera on, then pointed it at the tunnel anyway. He wondered if he’d ever end up like his uncle. Then he thought about his mom back at home. She hadn’t done anything wrong. There was no one to be mad at. Dene thought he heard footsteps coming from inside the tunnel. He scrambled up the side of the creek and was about to run back up the hill, back home, but something stopped him. He found a switch on the side of the camera next to the words Bolex Paillard. He pointed the camera at the streetlamp, up the street. He walked over and pointed it at the mouth of the tunnel. He let it run the whole walk home. He wanted to believe that when he turned on the camera, his uncle was with him, seeing through it. As he approached the house, he saw his mom in the doorway waiting for him. She was crying. Dene moved behind a telephone pole. He thought about what it might have meant to her, losing her brother. How wrong it’d been that he’d left, like it was his loss alone. Norma crouched down and put her face in her hands. The camera was still running. He lifted it, pistol-gripped, pointed it at her, and looked away.





Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield





ME AND MY SISTER, Jacquie, were doing our homework in the living room with the TV on when our mom came home with the news that we’d be moving to Alcatraz.

“Pack your things. We’re going over there. Today,” our mom said. And we knew what she meant. We’d been over there to celebrate not celebrating Thanksgiving.

Back then we lived in East Oakland, in a yellow house. It was the brightest but smallest house on the block. A two-bedroom with a tiny kitchen that couldn’t even fit a table. I didn’t love it there, the carpets were too thin and smelled like dirt and smoke. We didn’t have a couch or TV at first, but it was definitely better than where we were before.

One morning our mom woke us up in a hurry, her face was beat up. She had a brown leather jacket way too big for her draped over her shoulders. Both her top and bottom lips were swollen. Seeing those big lips messed me up. She couldn’t talk right. She told us to pack our things then too.

    Jacquie’s last name is Red Feather, and mine is Bear Shield. Both our dads had left our mom. That morning our mom came home beat up, we took the bus to a new house, the yellow house. I don’t know how she got us a house. On the bus I moved closer to my mom and put a hand into her jacket pocket.

“Why do we got names like we do?” I said.

“They come from old Indian names. We had our own way of naming before white people came over and spread all those dad names around in order to keep the power with the dads.”

I didn’t understand this explanation about dads. And I didn’t know if Bear Shield meant shields that bears used to protect themselves, or shields people used to protect themselves against bears, or were the shields themselves made out of bears? Either way it was all pretty hard to explain in school, how I was a Bear Shield, and that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was my first name, which was two: Opal Viola. That makes me Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield. Victoria was our mom’s name, even though she went by Vicky, and Opal Viola came from our grandma who we never met. Our mom told us she was a medicine woman and renowned singer of spiritual songs, so I was supposed to carry that big old name around with honor. The good thing was, the kids didn’t have to do anything to my name to make fun of me, no rhymes or variations. They just said the whole thing and it was funny.



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We got on a bus on a cold gray morning in late January 1970. Me and Jacquie had matching beat-up old red duffel bags that didn’t hold much, but we didn’t have much. I packed two outfits and tucked my teddy bear, Two Shoes, under my arm. The name Two Shoes came from my sister, because her childhood teddy bear only had one shoe the way they got it. Her bear wasn’t named One Shoe, but maybe I should have considered myself lucky to have a bear with two shoes and not just one. But then bears don’t wear shoes, so maybe I wasn’t lucky either but something else.