There There(37)

     If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.





Last Names


We didn’t have last names before they came. When they decided they needed to keep track of us, last names were given to us, just like the name Indian itself was given to us. These were attempted translations and botched Indian names, random surnames, and names passed down from white American generals, admirals, and colonels, and sometimes troop names, which were sometimes just colors. That’s how we are Blacks and Browns, Greens, Whites, and Oranges. We are Smiths, Lees, Scotts, MacArthurs, Shermans, Johnsons, Jacksons. Our names are poems, descriptions of animals, images that make perfect sense and no sense at all. We are Little Cloud, Littleman, Loneman, Bull Coming, Madbull, Bad Heart Bull, Jumping Bull, Bird, Birdshead, Kingbird, Magpie, Eagle, Turtle, Crow, Beaver, Youngblood, Tallman, Eastman, Hoffman, Flying Out, Has No Horse, Broken Leg, Fingernail, Left Hand, Elk Shoulder, White Eagle, Black Horse, Two Rivers, Goldtooth, Goodblanket, Goodbear, Bear Shield, Yellow Man, Blindman, Roanhorse, Bellymule, Ballard, Begay, Yazzie. We are Dixon, Livingston, Tsosie, Nelson, Oxendene, Harjo, Armstrong, Mills, Tallchief, Banks, Rogers, Bitsilly, Bellecourt, Means, Good Feather, Bad Feather, Little Feather, Red Feather.





Apparent Death


We won’t have come expecting gunfire. A shooter. As many times as it happens, as we see it happen on our screens, we still walk around in our lives thinking: No, not us, that happens to them, the people on the other side of the screen, the victims, their families, we don’t know those people, we don’t even know people who know those people, we’re once and twice removed from most of what we see on the other side of the screen, especially that awful man, always a man, we watch and feel the horror, the unbelievable act, for a day, for two whole days, for a week, we post and click links and like and don’t like and repost and then, and then it’s like it didn’t happen, we move on, the next thing comes. We get used to everything to the point that we even get used to getting used to everything. Or we only think we’re used to it until the shooter, until we meet him in real life, when he’s there with us, the shots will come from everywhere, inside, outside, past, future, now, and we won’t know right away where the shooter is, the bodies will drop, the depths of the booms will make our hearts skip beats, the rush of panic and spark and sweat on our skin, nothing will be more real than the moment we know in our bones the end is near.

There will be less screaming than we expect. It’ll be that prey-silence of hiding, the silence of trying to disappear, to not be out there, we’ll close our eyes and go deep inside, hope that it’s a dream or a nightmare, hope that in closing our eyes we might wake up to that other life, back on the other side of the screen, where we can watch from the safety of our couches and bedrooms, from bus and train seats, from our offices, anyplace that is not there, on the ground, playing like we’re dead so not playing at all, we’ll run like ghosts from our own dead bodies in hopes of getting away from the shots and the loud quiet of waiting for the next shot to fire, waiting for another sharp hot line to cut across a life, cut off breath, bring too quickly the heat and then cooling of too-soon death.

     We’ve expected the shooter to appear in our lives in the same way we know death is and always has been coming for us, with its decisive scythe, its permanent cut. We half expect to feel the boom of shots firing nearby. To fall to the ground and cover our heads. To feel like an animal, prey in a pile on the ground. We’ve known the shooter could show up anywhere, anywhere people gathered, we’ve expected to see him in our periphery, a masked shadow moving through the crowd, picking people off at random, semiautomatic booms putting bodies down, sending them flailing through the broken air.

A bullet is a thing so fast it’s hot and so hot it’s mean and so straight it moves clean through a body, makes a hole, tears, burns, exits, goes on, hungry, or it remains, cools, lodges, poisons. When a bullet opens you up, blood pours like out of a mouth too full. A stray bullet, like a stray dog, might up and bite anyone anywhere, just because its teeth were made to bite, made to soften, tear through meat, a bullet is made to eat through as much as it can.

Something about it will make sense. The bullets have been coming from miles. Years. Their sound will break the water in our bodies, tear sound itself, rip our lives in half. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.





Tony Loneman





THE BULLETS WILL COME from the Black Hills Ammunition plant in Black Hills, South Dakota. They will be packed in boxes of sixteen, driven across the country, and stored in a warehouse in Hayward, California, for seven years, then stocked and shelved and bought in Oakland at a Walmart off of Hegenberger Road by a young man by the name of Tony Loneman. The two boxes of bullets will go into his backpack. He’ll take them out again for security to check against the receipt at the exit. Tony will ride his bike down Hegenberger, across the overpass and on the sidewalk past the gas stations and fast-food chains. He’ll feel the weight and hear the jangle of the bullets at every bump and crack.