There There(35)

Loother laughs too, but he’s already looking at his phone.

They get back on their bikes, then look up and see lines of cars streaming in, hundreds of people getting out of their cars. The boys stop. Orvil gets off his bike. These are other Indians. Getting out of their cars. Some of them already in full regalia. Real Indians like they’d never seen before if you didn’t count their grandma, who they probably should count, except that it was too hard for them to tell what was specifically Indian about her. She was all they knew besides their mom, who’s too hard to think about or remember. Opal worked for the post office. Delivered mail. She liked to watch TV when she was home. Cook for them. They didn’t know much else about her. She did make fry bread for them on special occasions.



* * *



—

    Orvil pulls at the nylon straps of his backpack to tighten it and lets go of the handlebars, lets the front wheel wobble, but balances by leaning back. In the backpack is the regalia that barely fits, his XXL black hoodie, which was too big for him on purpose, and three now squished peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in ziplock plastic baggies he hopes they won’t have to eat, but he knows they might have to if the Indian tacos are too expensive—if food prices are anything like the food at A’s games when it’s not dollar night. They only knew about Indian tacos because their grandma made them for their birthdays. It was one of the few Indian things she did. And she was always sure to remind them that it’s not traditional, and that it comes from lacking resources and wanting comfort food.

To be sure they’d at least be able to afford an Indian taco each, they rode their bikes up to the fountain behind the Mormon temple. Loother had just been there for a field trip to Joaquin Miller Park, and he said people threw coins in for wishes. They made Lony roll up his pants and gather all the coins he could see, while Orvil and Loother threw rocks at the community building at the top of the stairs above the fountain—a distraction they didn’t see at the time might have been worse than the fountain scraping itself. Going down Lincoln Avenue after that was one of the best and stupidest things they’d ever done together. You could get going so fast down a hill there was nothing else happening in the whole world but the feeling of the speed moving through you and the wind in your eyes. They went to Bayfair Center in San Leandro and scraped out what they could from that fountain before being chased off by a security guard. They took the bus up to the Lawrence Hall of Science in the Berkeley Hills, where there was a double fountain, which they knew would be practically untouched because only rich people or monitored kids on field trips went to that place. After rolling up all the coins and turning them in at the bank, they came away with a total of fourteen dollars and ninety-one cents.



* * *



—

    When they get to the entrance at the coliseum, Orvil looks back at Loother and asks if he has the lock.

“You always bring it,” Loother says.

“I asked you to get it before we left the house. I said, Loother, can you get the lock, I don’t want it messing up my regalia. You seriously didn’t bring it? Fuck. What are we gonna do? I asked you right before we left the house, you said, yeah I got it. Loother, you said, yeah I got it.”

“I must have been talking about something else,” Loother says.

Orvil breathes out the word okay and signals for them to follow him. They hide their bikes in some bushes on the other side of the coliseum.

“Grandma’ll kill us if we lose our bikes,” Lony says.

“Well, there’s no not going,” Orvil says. “So we’re going.”





Interlude




    What strange phenomena we find in a great city,

all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open.

Life swarms with innocent monsters.

—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE





Powwows


For powwows we come from all over the country. From reservations and cities, from rancherias, forts, pueblos, lagoons, and off-reservation trust lands. We come from towns on the sides of highways in northern Nevada with names like Winnemucca. Some of us come all the way out from Oklahoma, South Dakota, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Minnesota; we come from Phoenix, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, New York City, Pine Ridge, Fort Apache, Gila River, Pit River, the Osage Reservation, Rosebud, Flathead, Red Lake, San Carlos, Turtle Mountain, the Navajo Reservation. To get to powwows we drive alone and in pairs on road trips; we caravan as families, piled in station wagons, vans, and in the backs of Ford Broncos. Some of us smoke two packs a day if we’re driving, or drink beer continually to keep ourselves occupied. Some of us, who gave up that tired life, on that long red road of sobriety, we drink coffee, we sing, pray, and tell stories until we run out. We lie, cheat, and steal our stories, sweat and bleed them out along the highway, until that long white line makes us quiet, makes us pull over to sleep. When we get tired we stop at motels and hotels; we sleep in our cars on the side of the road, at rest stops and truck stops, in Walmart parking lots. We are young people and old, every kind of Indian in between.

     We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum. We keep powwowing because there aren’t very many places where we get to all be together, where we get to see and hear each other.