The Removed(37)

“That seems to be what’s happening around here.”

“You may be right. Are you flummoxed?”

“I can’t figure anything out.”

“You look anxious,” he said. “I could tell the moment you walked in here. Everyone can tell, so choose carefully where you walk. Some roads lead to pain, others to your past. Anyone come up to you and ask you a bunch of random questions or make equivocal statements on purpose? Folks with twitchy mouths or protuberant eyes? Don’t dicker. Best thing for you to do, Chief, is just keep walking. Don’t talk to anyone unless you know them.”

“Why me?” I asked.

“There aren’t many Indians around here, JT.”

“It’s fucked,” I said. “Have you heard anything about this Jim Thorpe game?”

“Games? All I do is run the store and read hagiographies upstairs until I levitate. I don’t know much anymore. I don’t trust no one.”

Venery’s cell phone was ringing. He went over to the register and answered it. I wanted to browse through records and focus on something I enjoyed, since music always put me at peace. The more I thumbed through records, though, the more I realized I couldn’t find the motivation to continue browsing. I looked over at Venery. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he kept glancing over at me, so I waved goodbye and left.

I found myself thinking about fantasy, about what Venery had said about pretending to be other people. Part of why I liked leaving Oklahoma was that I could go places nobody knew me. I could walk around with Rae and be a new face. I never planned to stay in one place for very long.

Back at the rotting house, Jackson was preoccupied with an approaching storm. He sat on the edge of the couch, watching a meteorologist on TV. “I’m really high right now,” he said. “This is all freaking me out.”

“You smoked?”

“Yeah, while you were out. I was feeling anxious or something. Don’t look at me.”

On TV, the meteorologist looked pale and ghostly and exhausted. The radar showed red and yellow flashes of blocks ticking slowly eastward, indicating a severe thunderstorm. “This is the one they’ve been talking about for the past week,” he said, staring at the screen.

“Maybe tornado season is over,” I said.

“There is no tornado season in this goddamn hell,” he said. “It’s all the time. Tornadoes form even in the winter. Last year an F-four blew across the southern part of the land, ripping the roofs off houses and knocking down power lines. There are no seasons, haven’t you noticed?”

“The weather seemed fine just now.”

“Storms can stir up quickly. They’ve been talking about a flood for the past fifteen minutes. Here it is, heading right toward us. See those streaks of red? The flashing colors?”

We both stared at the TV screen as the meteorologist tapped his earpiece and we heard the static of a storm chaser’s voice saying something about winds blowing up to sixty miles per hour. The meteorologist kept tapping his earpiece.

“And the rain could flood us again,” Jackson said. “This house was underwater once. This house has mold. They all do. I hate floods. My lungs are probably black. A big rain would really put a damper on our game production.” He glanced at me. “Isn’t there a rain dance or something you could do to make it stop?”

I went into my room without answering him. I stayed in there for a while, looking out the window at the graying sky. Rae and I were once trapped in her apartment in Oklahoma during a terrible thunderstorm. Hail the size of softballs battered cars in the parking lot, shattering windshields and damaging the roofs of houses. Amazingly, there was no tornado then. The electricity was out, and Rae and I drank vodka with cranberry juice and lit candles and placed them all around the room the rest of the night. It was a miracle we didn’t burn the place down.

I thought of that night, the way the sky had turned the same yellow as the sky here. And soon the sky turned gray again, and it was raining hard outside. The wind came up, blowing the trees outside. I heard Jackson talking on the phone to someone about the wind speeds. The television was blasting loudly. The only way to pass the time during these storms was to focus on something else.

I was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, when Jackson came in and said the storm had shifted. “It turned north, so we’re in the clear. I was a little scared, Chief. You never know.”

“You never know,” I said.

“Storms do something to me. I can’t explain it.”

“Frighten you?”

“But the fear does something else, excites me, I guess. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“You’re high.”

He laughed a little, then sat on the edge of the bed near my waist, and we were both quiet. I had my hands behind my head, staring up at the ceiling. Jackson pulled off his T-shirt. I didn’t think anything about it. He turned to me and waited for me to look at him. When I did, he put his hand on my leg. I hadn’t seen him without a shirt on. His skin was pale, his body gangly and thin, not much different than mine. I wondered if he was waiting for me to say something. Then he leaned in to me, running his hand from my upper thigh toward my crotch. I stopped him with my hand and sat up.

“Sorry,” he said, pulling his hand back and looking away, embarrassed. I was a little shaken by what he was doing, not having understood.