There There(6)

“This is how we’re gonna rob that powwow,” I finally heard Octavio say.

I remembered there were metal detectors at the entrance to the coliseum. Maxine’s walker, the one she used after she broke her hip, it set one of them off. Me and Maxine went on a Wednesday night—dollar night—to see the A’s play the Texas Rangers, which was the team Maxine grew up rooting for in Oklahoma because Oklahoma didn’t have a team.

On the way out, Octavio handed me a flyer for the powwow that listed the prize money in each dance category. Four for five thousand. Three for ten.

“That’s good money,” I said.

“I wouldn’t be getting into some shit like this, but I owe somebody,” Octavio said.

“Who?”

“Mind your business,” Octavio said.

    “We good?” I said.

“Go home,” Octavio said.



* * *



—

The night before the powwow, Octavio called me and told me I was gonna have to be the one to hide the bullets.

“In the bushes, for real?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m supposed to throw bullets into the bushes at the entrance?”

“Put ’em in a sock.”

“Put bullets in a sock and throw them in the bushes?”

“What I say?”

“It just seems—”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You got it?”

“Where do I get bullets, what kind?”

“Walmart, .22s.”

“Can’t you just print them?”

“They can’t do that yet.”

“All right.”

“There’s one more thing,” Octavio said.

“Yeah?”

“You still got some Indian shit to put on?”

“Whatchyoumean Indian shit?”

“I don’t know, what they put on, feathers and shit.”

“I got it.”

“You’re gonna wear it.”

“It won’t even barely fit.”

“But will it?”

    “Yeah.”

“Wear it to the powwow.”

“All right,” I said, and hung up. I pulled my regalia out and put it on. I went out into the living room and stood in front of the TV. It was the only place in the house I could see my whole body. I shook and lifted a foot. I watched the feathers flutter on the screen. I put my arms out and dipped my shoulders down, then I walked up to the TV. I tightened my chin strap. I looked at my face. The Drome. I didn’t see it there. I saw an Indian. I saw a dancer.





Dene Oxendene





DENE OXENDENE TAKES the dead escalator two steps at a time at the Fruitvale Station. When he makes it up to the platform, the train he thought he was missing comes to a stop on the opposite side. A single drop of sweat drips down the side of his face from out of his beanie. Dene wipes the sweat with his finger, then pulls the beanie off and shakes it out, mad like the sweat came from it and not his head. He looks down the tracks and breathes out a breath he watches rise then disappear. He smells cigarette smoke, which makes him want one, except that they tire him out. He wants a cigarette that invigorates. He wants a drug that works. He refuses to drink. Smokes too much weed. Nothing works.

Dene looks across the tracks at graffiti scrawled on the wall in that little crawl space underneath the platform. He’d been seeing it for years all over Oakland. He’d thought of the name in middle school but had never really done anything with it: Lens.

    The first time Dene saw someone tag, he was on the bus. It was raining. The kid was in the back. Dene saw that the kid saw that Dene looked back at him. One of the first things Dene learned when he first started taking the bus in Oakland was that you don’t stare, you don’t even glance, but you don’t totally not look either. Out of respect you acknowledge. You look and don’t look. Anything to avoid the question: Whatchyoulookingat? There is no good answer for this question. Being asked this question means you already fucked up. Dene waited for his moment, watched the kid tag in the condensation on the bus window three letters: emt. He understood right away that it meant “empty.” And he liked the idea that the kid was writing it in the condensation on the window, in the empty space between drops, and also because it wouldn’t last, just like tagging and graffiti don’t.

The head of the train and then its body appear, wind around the bend toward the station. Self-loathing hits you fast sometimes. He doesn’t know for a second if he might jump, get down there on the tracks, wait for that fast weight to come get rid of him. He’d probably jump late, bounce off the side of the train, and just fuck up his face.

On the train he thinks of the looming panel of judges. He keeps picturing them twenty feet up staring down at him, with long wild faces in the style of Ralph Steadman, old white men, all noses and robes. They’ll know everything about him. Hate him intimately, with all the possible knowledge about his life available to them. They’ll see immediately how unqualified he is. They’ll think he’s white—which is only half true—and so ineligible for a cultural arts grant. Dene is not recognizably Native. He is ambiguously nonwhite. Over the years he’d been assumed Mexican plenty, been asked if he was Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Salvadoran once, but mostly the question came like this: What are you?