There There(32)
* * *
—
Today the Red Feather brothers are going to get Lony a new bike. On the way they stop at the Indian Center. Orvil’s supposed to be getting two hundred dollars to tell a story for a storytelling project he read about on Facebook.
Loother and Lony sit outside in the hall while Orvil is led into a room by a guy who introduced himself as Dene Oxendene. Dene sits Orvil down in front of a camera. He sits behind the camera, crosses his legs, leans in toward Orvil.
“Can you tell me your name, your age, and where you’re from?” Dene says.
“Okay. Orvil Red Feather. Fourteen. Oakland.”
“What about your tribe, do you know what tribe you are?”
“Cheyenne. From our mom’s side.”
“And how’d you find out about this project?”
“Facebook. Said it paid two hundred dollars?”
“That’s right. I’m here to collect stories in order to have them available online for people from our community and communities like ours to hear and see. When you hear stories from people like you, you feel less alone. When you feel less alone, and like you have a community of people behind you, alongside you, I believe you can live a better life. Does that make sense?”
“Sure.”
“What does it mean to you when I say ‘story’?”
“I don’t know,” Orvil says. Without thinking about it, he crosses his legs like Dene.
“Try.”
“It’s just telling other people something that happened to you.”
“Good. That’s basically it. Now tell me something that happened to you.”
“Like what?”
“That’s up to you. It’s just like you said. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. Tell me something that’s happened to you that stands out, that you thought of right away.”
“Me and my brothers. How we ended up with our grandma, who we live with now. It was after the first time we thought our mom overdosed.”
“Would you mind talking about that day?”
“I barely remember anything from when I was younger, but I remember that day perfectly. It was a Saturday, so me and my brothers had been watching cartoons all morning. I went to the kitchen to make us sandwiches, and I found her facedown on the kitchen floor. Her nose was all smashed into the floor and bleeding, and I knew it was bad because her arms were curled up at her stomach like she’d fallen down on top of them, which meant she nodded out walking. First thing I did was send my brothers to the front yard. We were living off of Thirty-Eighth then, in a little blue house with this tiny gated patch of grass that we were still small and young enough to like playing on. I got out Mom’s makeup mirror and put it under her nose. I’d seen that on a show, and when I saw that it barely fogged up, I called 9-1-1. When they came, because I told the operator about how it was just me and my brothers besides our mom, they came with two cop cars and a CPS worker. He was this old Indian guy I never saw again except for that one time. It was the first time I heard that we were Indian. He recognized that we were Indian just by looking at us. They carried our mom out on a stretcher while the social worker showed my little brothers a magic trick with a book of matches, or he was just lighting matches and it felt like magic, I don’t know. He’s the reason they called our grandma and why we ended up getting adopted by her. He took us to his office and asked who else there was besides our mom. After talking to our grandma Opal, we left and met her at the hospital.”
“And then?”
“Then we went home with her.”
“Home with your grandma?”
“Yeah.”
“And your mom?”
“She’d already left the hospital by the time we got there. Turned out she just got knocked out from the fall. She didn’t overdose.”
“That’s a good story. Thank you. I mean, not good, but thank you for telling it.”
“I get two hundred dollars now?”
Orvil and his brothers leave the Indian Center and go straight to Target in West Oakland to get Lony’s bike. Lony rides on the back of Loother’s bike—on pegs. Even though the story had been sad to remember, Orvil feels okay about having told it. He feels even better about the two-hundred-dollar gift card in his back pocket. He can’t stop smiling. But his leg. The lump that’s been in his leg for as long as he can remember, as of late it’s been itching. He hasn’t been able to stop scratching it.
* * *
—
“Some shit just went down in the bathroom,” Orvil tells Loother when he gets outside Target.
“Isn’t that what it’s supposed to do?” Loother says.
“Shut the fuck up, Loother, I’m serious,” Orvil says.
“What, you didn’t make it in time?” Loother says.
“I was sitting there in the stall, picking at that thing. You remember that lump I got? I felt something poking out of it. So I pulled, like, I just pulled one out, put it on some folded-up toilet paper, then went back in and got another one. Then one more after that. I’m pretty sure they’re spider legs,” Orvil says.
“Pfffffft,” Loother says and laughs. At which point Orvil shows him a neat pile of folds of toilet paper.