There There(68)

Daniel Gonzales





DANIEL HAS HIS VR goggles on. They weigh his head down a little. But that’s the same angle the drone flies—top heavy. In that way he feels as if he’s flying as he flies toward the coliseum.



* * *



—

Daniel is waiting before flying the drone over. He’s waiting because of the battery life. He doesn’t want to miss anything. He wants it to go right. He wants them to pull it off, but more so he doesn’t want the guns to get used. He’d been waking up in the middle of the night the week leading up to the powwow. Dreams of people running in the streets and gunfire all around. He’d thought they were the usual zombie-apocalypse-type dreams he’d always had, until he noticed the people were Indian. Not dressed like Indians, but he just knew like you just know stuff in dreams. The dreams all ended the same. Bodies on the ground. The silence of death, the hot stillness of all the bullets lodged in the bodies.



* * *



—

    The day is bright, and as he comes over the top of the coliseum, he hears his mom coming down the stairs. This doesn’t make any sense as she hadn’t come down those stairs since Manny died.

“Not right now, Mom,” he says. Then feels bad and adds, “Hold on a second.” Daniel lands the drone in the upper deck, which is empty if seagulls don’t count. He doesn’t want her to see the goggles because he knows she’ll think they look expensive.

“You okay?” Daniel says to her from the bottom of the stairs. She’s halfway down.

“What are you doing down there?”

“Same thing I’m always doing, Mom, nothing,” Daniel says.

“Come up here and eat with me. I’ll make you something.”

“Can you wait?” Daniel says, and knows he says it impatiently. He wants to get back to the drone, which is sitting by itself on the third deck of the coliseum wasting its battery.

“Okay, Daniel,” his mom says. And it’s almost sad enough, the sound in her voice, to make him want to leave the drone up there, leave it all alone and just go eat with her.

“I’ll be up pretty soon, Mom. Okay?”

She doesn’t respond.





Blue





BLUE DIDN’T KNOW WHY she became so aware of the safe. Or she did know why, but she didn’t want to know why she began to think of the safe. The money. All morning it hadn’t come up. And leading up to the powwow it hadn’t been a thing either. There were gift cards, and a heavy safe, and who would rob a powwow? There were other things to think about. She’d just seen her mom. Maybe. There are a few thuggish-looking guys standing nearby. Blue is bothered that she is bothered by their presence.

Edwin is next to her chewing and swallowing sunflower seeds. This almost bothers her more than anything else because you’re supposed to do the work of splitting the shells and reaping the seed benefit, and he’s just shoving handfuls in his mouth and chewing them up until he can swallow them shell and all.

These guys keep getting closer to the table. Kind of creeping up. She asks herself again: Who would rob a powwow? Who would even know to rob a powwow? Blue lets go of the whole idea but looks under the table to make sure the safe is still covered with the little red, yellow, and turquoise Pendleton blanket. Edwin looks over at her and smiles a rare proud-toothed smile. His teeth are covered in sunflower-seed shells. She hates and loves him for it.





Dene Oxendene





DENE IS IN his booth when he hears the first shots. A bullet whizzes through the booth. He moves to the corner and puts his back to the wooden pole there. He feels something hit his back, then the black curtain walls of the booth collapse around him.

The whole shoddily built booth is on top of him. He doesn’t move. Can he? He doesn’t try. He knows or thinks he knows he won’t die from whatever hit him. He reaches back and feels the piece of wood, one of four thicker poles that held the thing up. As he pushes the piece of wood away, he feels something hot lodged in it. A bullet. It’d gone all the way through and almost all the way out, almost into him. But it stopped. The pole saved him. The booth he built is all that came between him and that bullet. The shots keep coming. He crawls out through the black curtains. For a second the brightness of the day blinds him. He rubs his eyes and sees across from him something that doesn’t make any sense for more than one reason. Calvin Johnson, from the powwow committee, is firing a white gun at a guy on the ground, and two other guys are shooting on his left and right. One of them is in regalia. Dene gets on his stomach. He should have stayed under his collapsed booth.





Orvil Red Feather





ORVIL IS WALKING BACK out onto the field when he hears the shots. He thinks of his brothers. His grandma would kill him if he survived and they didn’t. Orvil breaks out into a run when he hears a boom that fills his body with a sound so low it pulls him to the ground. He smells the grass inches from his nose and he knows. He doesn’t want to know what he knows but he knows. He feels the blood-warm wetness with his fingers when they reach for his stomach. He can’t move. He coughs and isn’t sure if what comes out of his mouth is blood or spit. He wants to hear the drum one more time. He wants to stand up, to fly away in all his bloodied feathers. He wants to take back everything he’s ever done. He wants to believe he knows how to dance a prayer and pray for a new world. He wants to keep breathing. He needs to keep breathing. He needs to remember that he needs to keep breathing.