Gives Light(Gives Light Series) (7 page)

The skin around the tattoo was very sore by the time Rafael had finished.  He warned that it would flake for a while, and then it would heal.  He leaned back to observe his handiwork; I did the same, except from an upside-down vantage point.  The atlas moth, tawny and ragged, looked stark against my skin.  It had eyes but no mouth.  I liked it already.  At the same time, looking at it made me feel indescribably lonely.

"Dads," Rafael said.  "Screw 'em."

I laughed.  It was soundless but tangible, rippling through my chest.  Rafael laughed with me.  Suddenly I didn't feel lonely anymore.

"I hate being indoors," Rafael said.  "Wanna go down to the lake?  We'll get watercress."

I didn't know what watercress was, but if he was going, I wanted to go, too.  I unfolded my legs and stood up.  Rafael stood with me and swung a friendly arm around my shoulders.  Instantly, I felt calm.

We walked through the woods, the cicadas in the treetops boisterous and loud.  Rafael pointed out the beech trees; he said they made for better firewood and he'd show me how to cut them sometime.  In a clearing beneath uninterrupted blue sky was a wide, silver-faced lake, and a few men sat on the muddy banks, fishing poles in their hands.  I spotted Annie's dad among them and felt a brief stab of returning anger; it ebbed away when Rafael twisted his hair back in a ponytail and knelt by the water, beckoning me with his hand.

"You should take your jacket off," he said.  "You'll get it wet."

I compromised by rolling back the sleeves.  Rafael gave me a long, scrutinizing look.  I replied with a neutralizing smile.  I don't think he fell for it.

We scooped sodden leaves of watercress out of the lake and laid them out beneath the sun.  Rafael scraped the dirt from the watercress with his jagged fingernails and handed me a bunch.  I hesitated, dubious.

"What?" he said.  "You let me draw all over your arm in permanent ink, but I hand you a vegetable and you chicken out?"

I pressed my mouth into a thin line, unamused, but resolved.  I snatched a leafy stalk from his hand and bit into it.  It was pretty spicy, I found, but not at all bad.

"Told you," Rafael said.

I grinned at him and shoved his shoulder.  He shoved back.

The men packed up their fishing gear and started to leave.  I saw Mr. Little Hawk frown at me but pretended not to have noticed.  Rafael had brought his notebook with him; arms wet, he propped it open on his knees and fished a pencil out of his pocket.  I leaned over his shoulder, curious, to see what he was sketching.

"Dunno yet," he said.  "Don't ask me."

He showed me old sketches of his, of coywolves and jumpseeds and an older girl he said was his sister, Mary, who had left the reserve a year ago to join a rock band.  I counted thirty-six chain links running up his right arm.  There could have been more, I realized, on the underside.  Thirty-six times or more he had wanted to hurt someone and had hurt himself instead.  For a moment I had a horrific flashback of his father, opaque as the memory was; how his father hadn't hesitated to hurt whomever he wanted; how different father and son were.  Rafael caught me counting the chain links and shot me a perplexed look.  I smiled, trying to throw him off my trail.

He smiled back.

I can't possibly describe the effect that a simple smile had on his face.  I can try, but even now I know I won't do it any justice.  Because when he smiled, he showed all his teeth--like a wolf--but it was inexplicably innocent, free from ferocity.  When he smiled, there was a light in his eyes that didn't usually occupy his visage.  When he smiled, his dimples were deep, like laugh lines, and I saw the missing tooth at the back of his mouth and the hidden laughter he had bottled up for years.

I noticed for the first time that his eyes weren't black as I had thought, but dark blue.

"There's gotta be something you like besides playing housewives with Annie Little Hawk," Rafael said.

I wrinkled my face at his description.  Now that he had mentioned it, I didn't have anything I would have called a hobby.  I'd enjoyed watching baseball with Dad, but not because I especially liked baseball; mostly because I liked the way Dad would scream and cuss and carry on like a ten-year-old.

I shrugged.

"Books?"

I tilted my hand.

"You're boring."

I glanced at him from the bottoms of my eyelids and hoped I looked more threatening than I felt.  Probably not, because I couldn't keep myself from cracking a grin.

"Dancing, then."

I wasn't sure whether he was poking fun at me or not.

"No, listen," he said.  "Do you know what a grass dance is?"

I shook my head but propped my chin on my hands, curious.

"We have a story," Rafael said.  "Don't know how true it is.  Long ago, there was a boy who wanted to dance.  More than anything, he wanted that.  But he was badly crippled.  His legs didn't work right.  Dancing was impossible for him."

As I listened, I felt myself rooted to the soil, transfixed by an unspoken familiarity.

"His mom spoke to a medicine woman, and the wise woman said to leave him out in the prairie for three days without food or drink.  So that's what his mom did.  While the boy was out there, he had a dream that he could dance like the tall grass in the wind.  He woke up cured.  And he went back to his tribe and taught his people to dance like the grass."

Unconsciously, I touched my fingers to my throat.

I've wanted to sing since I was a little boy.  It's something I try not to think about, because unless medicine gets a whole lot better any time in the future, it'll never happen.  Often I've wondered what my voice might sound like if I had one.  In my crazier flights of fancy, I used to imagine that I could sing like Jon Vickers.  I'd first heard him in an old recording of Samson and Delilah when I was eight.  For a few weeks I would dream about that, that I could sing like Jon Vickers, and I'd invariably wake up crying.  Like I said, it's something I try not to think about.

"Why do you wear that jacket all the time?  Aren't you warm?"

For a moment, I'd forgotten where I was.  The reservation shifted back into focus.  I saw Rafael's eyes on my fingers, my fingers at my throat, the collar of my jacket hiding my neck.

I shook my head and smiled.

It was much later that night, when I was getting ready for bed, that Granny stopped me at the bottom of the staircase.

"Turn around," she ordered curtly.

I spun around to face her.  Over her shoulder I saw the smoke rising from the newly extinguished hearth.  I had acquired the habit of wearing a plain gray t-shirt to bed; the jacket was gone for the night.  I saw Granny's wet gray eyes travel to the atlas moth on my exposed upper arm.

"Is that a tattoo?"

I nodded.

"Did the Gives Light boy put that on you?"

I nodded again.

Granny considered the atlas moth in thoughtful silence.  Finally, she returned the nod, stiffly, and shuffled off to her room.

"Tell him I want a yellow rose."

My Granny, I learned that night, was an awesome gal.

7

Caliban

Come July, the reserve was unbearably hot during the daytime.  More and more I wanted to stay indoors, not solely because my skin kept flaking and rashing in places I hadn't known existed.  Every morning I set up Granny's loom on the lawn, fetched deliveries if she needed them, and left for Annie's house once Granny's friends came along to discuss whatever it is that old people discuss.  Because of the humidity, blistering and relentless, I looked forward to the shade of Annie's home.

But the more Annie saw of Aubrey, the less she saw of me.  She must have been up since before dawn making sure her brother and sister had meals for the day, chilled stews and cucumber sandwiches and thick dishes of wojapi, a kind of berry pudding the residents of Nettlebush ate with gusto.  By the time I arrived she'd usually be halfway through cooking whatever she was bringing to dinner that night, and there wasn't much I could do to help her before she chirped "Bye, Skylar!" and ran from the house like lightning.  I didn't need to be told she was visiting the farmland; and I didn't mind that she was otherwise occupied.  Actually, I really liked the idea that she had a boyfriend doting on her, especially if it was Aubrey.  I don't mean to sound like a thirteen-year-old girl, but it was ridiculously cute.

Restlessness, consequently, became a powerful thing.  Come midday, I didn't know what to do with myself.  Sometimes I entertained the idea of visiting my old house again, but it had been depressing the first time around; I wasn't sure what good would come out of repeating the experience. 

Maybe it was natural that I started seeing more of Rafael.  His mornings were spent hunting with his uncle in the badlands, but come midday, he was just as restless as I was--and a good deal more frantic.  He sought me out at Granny's house every afternoon, a stormy maelstrom of emotion until I let him inside and he calmed down, flopped on the floor, and asked for iced juniper tea.  He always asked for iced juniper tea, with the result that I became really good at brewing it in a really short amount of time.  He laughed at me the first time he noticed my sunburns, but then he showed me how to crush lavender, thankfully a summer plant, and make a soothing oil out of the spikes.  My burns disappeared in days.  Not that there was any winning with Rafael.  As soon as the burns were gone, he took to telling me that I smelled like a girl.

On other occasions, Rafael wanted to listen to the radio; Granny didn't have one, so we'd head back to his house and hole ourselves up in his room.  The only station we ever agreed on was the country station.  Sometimes I'd switch to jazz when he wasn't paying attention, just so he'd smack my shoulder and act disgusted.  I liked it when he did that.

But he never wanted to stay inside for very long.  He hated it; it made him act like a caged animal, more frantic than ever, until finally he'd snag my arm and drag me out of the house to find something else to do.  I had never known anyone with so many moods.  My own were pretty static by comparison; I think I've always been a mellow guy.  It was exhilarating, somehow, being friends with someone so different from me.  And it wasn't long before bumming around with Rafael became my favorite part of the day.

He showed me the windmills one day, great, spinning spires in a grassy field of their own just north of the farmland.  We lay on the grass, dry and green, and he read to me from
The Tempest
.

"I like Caliban," he told me.

It didn't surprise me that his favorite character was the monster.

"He follows his nature.  Like the elm and the elk.  When you try to give order to nature, you get a bunch of boring Ferdinands."  He added, gruffly, "Don't see why Miranda likes Ferdinand so much."

I gave him a placating, sleepy smile.  I didn't understand half the things girls did, but I knew better than to question them.

At dinner, too, he'd drag me away from the bonfire, insistent, and we'd sit by the lake and talk, the moon high overhead and full and bright on the surface of the argent water.  Sometimes I wondered whether it bothered Rafael that he was doing all the talking.  On the other hand, Rafael sure had a lot to say.  No one would have looked at him and pegged him for a chatty guy--not when he was scowling and skulking in the shadows--but he had an opinion on everything, absolutely everything, under the sun.  Like turbines and mouthwash and hardtack.  How do you have an opinion on hardtack?  The more he talked, the more I listened.  The more I listened, the more I forgot that I wasn't talking back.  I could scratch my chin or quirk my eyebrows or tilt my head and he knew exactly what the gesture meant.  He knew what I was feeling, if not what I was thinking.  He made me feel like I had a voice.

Then, one day, he actually gave me one.

He had wanted to show me the badlands from an inside perspective, but because I wouldn't go hunting with him, he'd had a hard time finding an occasion for it.  When it started to rain lightly one afternoon--and a good thing, because the land really needed it--he loaded us up with peppermint tea and led me out to the canyons.  We climbed down a grassy gulch, Rafael's hand on my arm to steady me; I didn't have his experience with the rough terrain, and underneath his own rough exterior, I suspect he was concerned.  Up close I saw that the grass was sparse and dry.  I wondered how the half-dead vegetation sustained any animal life even as Rafael stopped and pointed out a prairie dog burrowing beneath the clay.  He was still watching after the prairie dog when I spotted something small and pitiful lying on the ground, not yards away from our feet.  Alarmed, I grabbed Rafael's elbow.

"What?"  He followed my gaze and frowned.  He drew a couple of inches closer to the creature, but stopped short.

"It's a falcon fledgling," he said.

I didn't know exactly what "fledgling" meant at the time, but I could see that the bird, soft and pudgy and gray, was only a baby.  I jostled Rafael's arm.  I didn't mean to annoy him--he didn't look annoyed--but what if the bird was still alive?  Wasn't there any way we could return it to its nest?

Rafael shook his head; I caught a glimpse of the iron earring dangling from his right ear.  "Falcons don't build nests.  There's no way to tell where it came from.  Just wait for its parents to come along.  If the parents see us touch the fledgling, they might grow wary and abandon it."