Gives Light(Gives Light Series) (5 page)

"So we're looking Statewide when he might be in Mexico."

Quickly, I shook my head.  I wrote:
He doesn't work during the summer.
  Summertime had always been our time.  We'd go to baseball parks and the cinema and eat ice cream for dinner.  Not that we didn't eat ice cream for dinner the rest of the year.

Officer Hargrove thanked me before leaving the reservation, but she seemed incredibly annoyed with me.  And when she was leaving, it hit me:  Maybe she hadn't been able to find Dad before, but now he was guaranteed to go to prison when she did.

I didn't need to be told how big of a betrayal that was.

"What?" asked Granny sharply, coming out of the house.

I was sitting on the grass, my back against the sundial.  I didn't remember sitting down, but obviously I must have at some point.  I looked up, smiled at Granny, and shrugged dismissively.

"Don't you lie to me," she said briskly.  "And take off that jacket.  It's much too hot out."

Granny had me set up her loom underneath the bright blue canvas of sky.  The sky had never struck me as something so picturesque before; brighter than summer water, crisper than a fresh breath of spring air, the clouds seamless and pristine, I felt like it could swallow me up on the spot, and I don't think I would have minded one bit if it had.  Granny had made a lot of progress on her quilt in the past few days.  I wondered whether she was going to sell it to someone outside the reserve.  On the other hand, I couldn't think of anything she'd possibly need money for.  Nettlebush didn't need anything from the outside world.  It probably hadn't changed at all in the sixty-odd years that Granny had lived here.

I took a trip to Aubrey's farm to pick up crabapples for Granny; she liked the look of the blossoms, for one, and she used the fruit to make jam.  On my way back, I was thinking that she could use some more timber.  Timber kept her hearth warm at night and fueled the wood-coal stove she used to cook.  I didn't know what her ordinary method of acquiring firewood was, but I thought I ought to do that for her now.  Except I didn't know the first thing about cutting wood.  I was a city kid, and not at all self-reliant.

It was a heady, lazy summer day.  Rafael, unbidden, invaded my sleepy thoughts.  I'd been positive that he hated me--I guess I wouldn't have blamed him for that--so what was I supposed to do with the knowledge that he was leaving drawings in my old house?  It was such a poignant way to commemorate the dead.  I'd looked at my mother's drawing a lot between the night prior and the morning.  There wasn't any malice drawn in the soft lines of her face.  Just sincerity.

That evening was a warm one, dusk reluctant to leave the sky long after the sun had fallen.  The whole community sat around the bonfire, Annie's long-faced father telling a story about a shape-shifting coyote called the Trickster.  It was Annie, impatient, who took me by the hand and sat me down between her and her siblings.  Her little brother--Joseph--was about six or seven; incredibly shy, he wore hearing aids in his ears and kept pulling his hair in front of his face like twin curtains.  I caught his eye and signed
Hello
to him.  He shrank in his seat.  Lila, the cute little brat, shot me a simpering, long-suffering look.  I guess middle child syndrome didn't afflict her.

"The Trickster imitated his brother and took on the form of a wolf," Annie's dad was saying.

I spotted Rafael on the other side of the embers, his head bent over a book.  There was a girth around him, I noticed, not unlike the girth that usually surrounded me.  I didn't know whether that was his choice or not.

"At that time, we Plains People were one with the earth," said Annie's dad.  "We lived beneath the earth, a living part of the earth.  But the Trickster found his way beneath the soil, disguised as the Wise Wolf, and told tall tales of the land above."

I found the story fascinating, but I guess Rafael must have heard it before.  He turned the page in his book.

"Now we spend our lives trying to rejoin the earth from which we parted.  At the end of the long road, we rest again beneath the soil."

Rafael was staring at his book so intently, I thought he would eat it up with his eyes.  I suddenly realized that the intense look he usually wore wasn't hatred at all.  It was just his default expression.  The realization made me feel a lot better, somehow; I grinned in spite of myself.  Annie shot me a dubious look.

A pair of twin girls started beating a hollow drum in song, and I got up from my seat and walked over to Rafael.

I'm not a shy person.  I know I've said that before Annie, I'd never had friends.  That wasn't shyness; it was self-preservation.  Rafael might've been scary-looking, but I didn't think he was going to give me any trouble.  Not if he was leaving drawings in my old house.  That sounded more like remorse to me, even guilt.

Not that he had anything to feel guilty about.

I think it took Rafael a moment to realize that I was sitting next to him.  He looked up, intense, but baffled.  "What?"

I took his drawing out of my pocket and handed it to him.

Rafael took the drawing from me.  He looked at it; I could see the anger melting off of his face.

He handed it back to me.

"This isn't mine."

If he meant that he hadn't drawn it...well, I knew he was lying.  But before I could press the drawing on him again, the anger had returned to his face.

"It's yours," he said.  "Keep it."

I smiled gratefully.  Truth be told, I hadn't really wanted to part with it.  But I hadn't known how else to get Rafael to talk to me.

The anger again melted away from Rafael's face.  I thought that had to be a pretty troubling existence, having all those stormy moods he couldn't control.  Now he looked guarded, but pensive, like he was trying to get to the bottom of a deep mystery he'd rather not step into.

"What do you want?"

I wasn't so sure of that myself.

Rafael went on looking at me in a helpless way.  I realized I felt sorry for him.

"I'm not my dad," he mumbled, voice low.

That was it.  He thought I blamed him for Mom's death.

I nodded softly. 
I know
, I wanted to say.  Of course I couldn't.

But he immediately looked relieved.

I looked at the cover of Rafael's book, tilting my head to read the title. 
To Kill a Mockingbird
, it said.  I grinned with recognition.  My lit teacher had made us read it at the start of sophomore year.

"Yeah?" said Rafael.  "Was it any good?"

I could feel the expression freeze on my face.  It was rare, really rare, that someone knew exactly what I would have said if I'd had the capability.  Granny had come close a couple of times, but until now, only Dad had ever established that level of complete, implicit understanding with me.

"Because I hate when you're reading a book and the ending sucks, but there's no way I'm skipping ahead."

I formed an "OK" with my fingers.  Rafael nodded, satisfied, and went on reading.

I stayed seated with Rafael for the remainder of the night, though he didn't say another word.  I watched Annie get up and dance with a flustered, fumbling Aubrey, who looked like he'd won a lottery.  A couple of men played a game with sticks and a moving hoop and the winner was surprised with a barrel of water tossed over his head, the whole reservation resounding with laughter.  Another barrel of water was tossed over the campfire; it snuffed out in the blink of an eye.  It was time to go home.

"Night," Rafael mumbled, and stalked off without looking back.

In a weird way, I felt like I'd won a lottery, too.

5

Cyrano

Annie spent the next day feverishly seasoning chickens that I guess had been waiting in her cellar for the occasion.  Just watching her made me feel sick.  I'm not sure whether I've mentioned it before, but I don't eat animals.  I know it sounds stupid, but my heart just won't let me.

"Poor idiot," Lila sighed at me, and dragged herself to the wood-coal stove to help her sister.  The way she did it, you would have thought she were making a great personal sacrifice.

"Oh, no, no, this isn't good!" Annie cried.  "I don't have any sage!  And I wanted to make bread--Skylar, please--"

Anything to get out of that kitchen, I thought.

Annie found a notepad and quickly jotted down directions; she ripped the page out, stuffed it into my hands, and took a sack of sugar out of a cabinet.

I left the house, staring dizzily at her hand-written notes.

The guy I was looking for was named Gabriel Gives Light.  Probably the most epic name on Earth, and probably just as hard to live up to.  He lived far to the north.  I've never been good with directions; I was afraid I'd miss him by a huge margin and wind up going back to Annie empty-handed. 
Just before badlands
, Annie had written.  I didn't know what that meant.

And then I did.

An expanse of blue-gray clay stretched endlessly north, tall, green-gray grass swaying with the wind.  What portions of terrain weren't cut with gullies and gulches sloped miles downward into dry canyons.  Here, the sun was its brightest, the wind its coolest; the landscape looked like a vivid retelling of a child's dream.

A wide, one-story house sat alone under a giant, gnarled southern oak.  It was unmistakable.  I wondered why Annie hadn't just said
He lives at the very end of the reserve
and left it at that.

I knocked on the door.  Seconds later, a very tall man appeared in the doorway.

I guessed this had to be Gabriel.  His hair was surprisingly light, almost blond, but I've heard that working under the sun can do that, sometimes, to dark hair.  He had a soft, downy beard, which I also hadn't seen much around the reserve.  And when he smiled, I saw that his cheeks were dimpled.

"Hi," he said easily.  "What can I do for you?"

I smiled back and handed him Annie's note.

Gabriel let me inside his house.  It was 50% walls and 50% windows; the view of the badlands from the north-facing window was sweeping and grand.  The house had a taller hearth than Granny's, the mantelpiece decorated with picture frames.  Freshly killed animals hung from the ceiling rafters, waiting to be skinned.  My stomach turned.  I kept picturing what would happen if one of them slipped from the rafters and fell on my head. 

Cacophonous music blared from somewhere down the hall--crazy power metal stuff, the kind my Dad always insisted was some kind of barbaric torture device.  I nearly jumped out of my jacket.  Up until that point, I had thought there wasn't any electricity on the reserve.

"Raf!" Gabriel shouted.  "Turn it off!"

Mercifully, the power metal stopped.

Gabriel left me standing in the front room and went into his pantry to fetch the wild sage for Annie.  Rafael came skulking down the hall and leaned against the wall opposite me, hands tucked into his pockets.

I glanced after Gabriel, then back at Rafael.

"My uncle," Rafael said.

I wanted badly to ask where his mother was.  Then I saw the look in his eyes, brief but guarded, and I didn't want to know the answer.

"I'll be a moment!" Gabriel shouted from his kitchen.

I raised my eyebrows at Rafael.  Power metal.  Really?

Rafael gave me a look of disgust.  "So what?  What do
you
listen to, that easy listening crap?"

I mimed a saxophone.

"That's even worse," he said dismissively.

I pretended to look hurt.

"Don't be an idiot," he said.  But the corner of his mouth twitched in an unmistakably repressed grin.

Rafael looked so much like my half-memories of his father, I'd thought I'd never feel comfortable alone with him.  My half-memories were the memories of a monster.  But this was a boy like any other boy, albeit a very surly one.  He liked reading and drawing and, okay,
really
terrible music.  And unless his uncle said otherwise, he had never killed anyone.

Rafael had skulked back to his room when Gabriel came back with a nice, thick sack of wild sage for Annie.

"Here you are," he said, handing the bag to me.  He followed my gaze down the hall and, correctly, my train of thought.  "He's a good boy," he said quietly.  "Much more like my sister than that horrible..."

That horrible man?  That horrible monster?  It didn't matter.  I could see that they were one and the same in Gabriel's eyes.  His eyes raked over my covered throat.

I smiled encouragingly, mouthed a "Thank you," and headed back to Annie's house.

I've said before that children born on the Nettlebush Reserve get their surnames from their mothers.  That's always the way it's been.  If Gabriel was Rafael's uncle on his mother's side, I thought, then Rafael's full name was Rafael Gives Light.

Poor Annie fell asleep halfway through dinner that night.  One of Aubrey's brothers had started singing a folk song when I went over and sat beside Rafael.  Rafael gave me a confused look, but without any of his previous hostility.  He opened his notebook and showed me the drawing he was working on.

A butterfly?  Questioningly, I hooked my thumbs together and mimicked fluttering wings.  Rafael didn't look amused.