There There(5)

    Maxine’s always known me and been able to read me like no one else can, better than myself even, like I don’t even know all that I’m showing to the world, like I’m reading my own reality slow, because of the way things switch around on me, how people look at me and treat me, and how long it takes me to figure out if I have to put it all back together.



* * *



—

How all this came about, all the shit I got in, is because these white boys from up in the Oakland hills came up on me in a liquor-store parking lot in West Oakland, straight up like they weren’t afraid of me. I could tell they were scared of being there, in that neighborhood, from the way they kept their heads on a swivel, but they weren’t afraid of me. It was like they thought I wasn’t gonna do some shit because of how I look. Like I’m too slow to do some shit.

“You got snow?” the one as tall as me in the Kangol hat asked. I wanted to laugh. It was so fucking white for him to use the word snow for coke.

“I can get it,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure if I could. “Come back here in a week, same time.” I would ask Carlos.

Carlos is hella flaky. The night he was supposed to get it, he called me and told me he couldn’t make it, and that I’d have to go to Octavio’s to get it myself.

I rode my bike over from the Coliseum BART Station. Octavio’s house was in Deep East Oakland, off Seventy-Third, across from where the Eastmont Mall used to be until things got so bad there they turned it into a police station.

    When I got there, people were pouring out of the house into the street like there’d been a fight. I sat back on my bike from a block away for a while, watched the drunks move around under the glow of the streetlights, all stupid like moths drunk on light.

When I found Octavio, he was all kinds of fucked up. It always makes me think of my mom when I see people like that. I wondered what she was like drunk when I was in her. Did she like it? Did I?

Octavio was pretty clearheaded, though, even through the heavy slur. He put his arm around me and took me to his backyard, where he had a bench press set up under a tree. I watched him do sets with a bar without weights on it. It didn’t seem like he realized there were no weights. I waited to see when he would ask the question about my face. But he didn’t. I listened to him talk about his grandma, about how she saved his life after his family was gone. He said she’d lifted a curse from him with badger fur, and that she called anyone not Mexican or Indian gachupins, which is a disease the Spanish brought to the Natives when they came—she used to tell him that the Spanish were the disease that they brought. He told me he never meant to become what he’d become, and I wasn’t sure what that was, a drunk, or a drug dealer, or both, or something else.

“I’d give away my own heart’s blood for her,” Octavio said. His own heart’s blood. That’s the way I felt about Maxine. He told me he didn’t mean to sound all sensitive and shit, but that nobody else ever really listened to him. I knew it was because he was fucked up. And that he probably wouldn’t remember shit. But after that I went straight to Octavio for everything.

It turned out those goofy white boys from the hills had friends. We made good money for a summer. Then one day when I was picking up, Octavio asked me in, told me to sit down.

    “You’re Native, right?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, and wondered how he knew. “Cheyenne.”

“Tell me what a powwow is,” he said.

“Why?”

“Just tell me.”

Maxine had been taking me to powwows all around the Bay since I was young. I don’t anymore, but I used to dance.

“We dress up Indian, with feathers and beads and shit. We dance. Sing and beat this big drum, buy and sell Indian shit like jewelry and clothes and art,” I said.

“Yeah, but what do you do it for?” Octavio said.

“Money,” I said.

“No, but really why do they do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Whatchyoumean you don’t know?”

“To make money motherfucker,” I said.

Octavio looked at me with his head sideways, like: Remember who you’re talking to.

“That’s why we’re gonna be at that powwow too,” Octavio said.

“The one they’re having over at the coliseum?”

“Yeah.”

“To make money?”

Octavio nodded, then turned around and picked up what I couldn’t tell at first was a gun. It was small and all white.

“What the fuck is that?” I said.

“Plastic,” Octavio said.

“It works?”

“It’s 3-D printed. You wanna see?” he said.

    “See?” I said.

Out in the backyard, I aimed the gun at a can of Pepsi on a string, with two hands, my tongue out and one eye closed.

“You ever fired a gun before?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Shit’ll make your ears ring.”

“Can I?” I said, and before I got an answer I felt my finger squeeze and then the boom go through me. There was a moment when I didn’t know what was happening. The squeeze brought the sound of the boom and my whole body became a boom and a drop. I ducked without meaning to. There was a ringing, inside and out, a single tone drifting far off, or deep inside. I looked up at Octavio and saw that he was saying something. I said What, but couldn’t even hear myself say it.