There There(33)

“Let me see,” Loother says.

Orvil opens up the folds of toilet paper and shows Loother.

“What the fuck?” Loother says.

“Right outta my leg,” Orvil says.

“Are you sure it’s not, like, splinters?”

“Nah, look where the leg bends. There’s a joint. And a tip. Like the end of the leg where it gets skinnier, look.”

“That’s fucked up,” Loother says. “But what about the other five? I mean, if they are spider legs, there should be eight, right?”

Before Orvil can say anything else or put away the spider legs, Loother’s on his phone.

“You looking it up?” Orvil asks him.

But Loother doesn’t answer. He just taps. Scrolls. Waits.

“You find anything?” Orvil says.

    “Nah. Not even a little bit,” Loother says.

When Lony comes out with his bike, Orvil and Loother look down at it and nod. Lony smiles at their nods.

“Let’s go,” Orvil says, then puts his earphones in. He looks back and sees his brothers put theirs in too. They ride back toward Wood Street. As they pass the Target sign, Orvil remembers last year when they all got phones at Target on the same day as an early Christmas present. They were the cheapest phones they had, but at least they weren’t flip phones. They were smart. They do all they need them to do: make calls, text, play music, and get them on the internet.

They ride together in a line, and listen to what comes out of their phones. Orvil mainly listens to powwow music. There’s something in the energy of that big booming drum, in the intensity of the singing, like an urgency that feels specifically Indian. He likes the power the sound of a chorus of voices makes too, those high-pitched wailed harmonies, how you can’t tell how many singers there are, and how sometimes it sounds like ten singers, sometimes like a hundred. There was even one time, when he was dancing in Opal’s room with his eyes closed, when he felt like it was all his ancestors who made it so he could be there dancing and listening to that sound, singing right there in his ears through all those hard years they made it through. But that moment was also the first time his brothers saw him in regalia, dancing like that, they walked in on him in the middle of it, and they thought it was hilarious, they laughed and laughed but promised not to tell Opal.

As for Loother, not counting himself, he listens exclusively to three rappers: Chance the Rapper, Eminem, and Earl Sweatshirt. Loother writes and records his own raps to instrumentals he finds on YouTube and makes Orvil and Lony listen to them and agree with him about how good he is. As for Lony, they’d recently discovered what he’s into.

    “You hear that?” Loother had asked one night in their room.

“Yeah. It’s, like, some kind of chorus or choir, right?” Orvil said.

“Yeah, like angels or some shit,” Loother said.

“Angels?” Orvil said.

“Yeah, like what they have them sound like.”

“What they have them sound like?”

“I mean like movies and shit,” Loother said. “Shut up. It’s still going. Listen.”

They sat for the next couple of minutes and listened to the distant sound of the symphony, of the choir coming through an inch of speaker, muted by Lony’s ears—ready to believe it was anything, anything better than the sound they had the angels make. It hit Orvil first what the sound was, and he started to say Lony’s name, but Loother got up, put a finger to his lips, then went over and gently pulled Lony’s earphones out. He put one of them close to his ear and smiled. He looked at Lony’s phone and smiled bigger and showed it to Orvil.

“Beethoven?” Orvil said.

They ride up Fourteenth toward downtown. Fourteenth takes them through downtown to East Twelfth, which gets them to the Fruitvale without a bike lane, but on a street big enough, so that even though cars get comfortable, swerve a little, and go faster on East Twelfth, it’s better than riding the gutter-edge of International Boulevard.

When they get to Fruitvale and International, they stop in the Wendy’s parking lot. Orvil and Loother take out their phones.

“Guys. Seriously? Orvil had spider legs in his leg? What the fuck?” Lony asks.

    Orvil and Loother look at each other and laugh hard. Lony hardly ever curses, so when he does it’s always both super serious and funny to hear.

“C’mon,” Lony says.

“It’s real, Lony,” Orvil says.

“What does that mean, it’s real?” Lony says.

“We don’t know,” Orvil says.

“Call Grandma,” Lony says.

“And say what?” Loother says.

“Tell her,” Lony says.

“She’ll make it a big deal,” Orvil says.

“What’d the internet say?” Lony asks.

Loother just shakes his head.

“Seems Indian,” Orvil says.

“What?” Loother says.

“Spiders and shit,” Orvil says.

“Definitely Indian,” Lony says.

“Maybe you should call,” Loother says.

“Fuck,” Orvil says. “But the powwow’s tomorrow.”

“What does that have to do with it?” Loother says.