More Than Good Enough(3)

“Your hair’s too long,” Dad said.

“Fine. I’ll take care of it,” I told him. Mom always let it grow when I was a little kid. She said it represented a mighty spirit. If I chopped it off, I’d lose my bond with the universe. How did she know all this stuff? She wasn’t Indian.

“And get rid of those headphones,” he added. “What’re you listening to these days? Hillbilly music?” He grabbed my iPod.

The Miller bottle was on the desk. Bet he could smell the fumes. If you lit a match in my room, it would burst into flames. Too bad this didn’t actually happen.

Here’s what did happen.

Dad was fumbling with the iPod. He landed on a playlist so old I’d forgotten about it. “What’s this? Some bootleg Hendrix?”

I burned with pride. “It’s this track I’ve been working on.”

“Want to run that by me again?”

“I wrote it.”

The quality was mega shitty. I’d spent a lot of time trying to adjust the recording levels on Audacity, this free software I’d downloaded. Whatever. I could totally do it justice now.

“You know something?” Dad said, wrapping the earbuds around the iPod. No doubt twisting the wires into oblivion. “Son, you don’t need that fancy school.”

The power of music had saved me.

“Your mother’s got it in her head,” he rambled on. “She’s got all these ideas about how things should be.”

Wow. He was finally making sense.

“I’m thinking, me and you. Maybe we could live on the Rez.”

“The reservation?”

I wasn’t exactly jumping with excitement.

The Miccosukee reservation was in the Everglades. The middle of nowhere. I was still getting used to the idea of Dad being around, much less camping with him in some grass-covered chickee hut.

On the other hand, Mom was all kinds of drama. When Dad wasn’t around, she was sneaking off with some dude. Mr. Nameless. And she was constantly up in my business. It would only get worse.

“Your mother and I have already discussed it,” he said.

“So basically I have no choice?”

Dad eased himself out of the chair. He reached the door and I figured I was home free. Then he looked at the empty beer bottle. I was freaking so bad, waiting for him to explode. He took the Miller and walked into the hall without saying anything. Just closed the door slowly, not making a sound.

The bottle had stamped a ring of dampness in the fake wood. I rubbed my fist through it, but the smear didn’t go away.

It probably never would.

My dad is one hundred percent Miccosukee. Ever since I could remember, I’d heard all these crazy stories about him. Stuff that involved stolen cars, pot brownies, and playing bass in a Jimi Hendrix cover band.

Dad grew up on the Rez. He had to move out once he hooked up with Mom, who is one hundred percent London hippie chick.

That makes me half native, half white, and one hundred percent nothing.





two



The Rez didn’t look much different from the flat concrete houses in my old neighborhood. Most houses were painted ice cream colors, lime green and strawberry, all lined up next to a canal laced with water lilies. Each house had its own theme, judging from the life-sized Elvis statue on a front porch. Kids ran around, steering golf carts along the dusty road. I waved to a little girl in a SpongeBob T-shirt. Her bare feet could hardly reach the pedals.

At the end of the block, people docked their airboats. That’s how we got to the tree islands in the Everglades. Sometimes this big old gator would swim up to the docks. I’d give him slices of toast and he’d blink, like he was saying thank you.

Me and Dad were staying next door to Uncle Seth in the Little Blue House. More like a shed, it was so damn small. And with Dad around, it was even smaller. The house was behind the Miccosukee Welcome Center. That’s where tourists can buy tickets to airboat rides and gator shows.

After we got back home from the cookout, I snuck off with my air rifle. I started blasting a pile of crap my ex-girlfriend gave me. Puka shell necklaces I never wore. A keychain that was supposed to store a hundred digital memories. Instead, it got stuck on one—me and Michelle with our mouths smashed together.

“Which do you like better?” she’d asked, deleting shot after shot.

I’d told her they all looked the same.

Wrong answer.

At first, I tried to set fire to the stuff, but the freaking keychain wouldn’t burn. The plastic wrinkled like a slug. So I dumped all that shit on the hood of Dad’s Jeep, the “swamp buggy” he left rusting behind the shed. I loaded the rifle and took aim.

The pellets zinged through the trees. I was out there so long, I didn’t notice it had started sprinkling. Teensy little drops plinked in my eyes. I blinked them away, squeezed out another round.

The one thing I didn’t destroy was her mixtape.

Michelle was a DJ. I mean, she actually spun records instead of just punching buttons on an iPod. She even recorded stuff on cassettes. Michelle made this amazing mix for me over her grandmother’s Spoken Rosary on Tape. Between the creeping strings, you could hear nuns chanting like robots.

Her parents weren’t too thrilled once I started hanging around. I’d pull up in the monster-sized Jeep, which I called “The Yeti.” Then one of her frathead cousins would materialize on the front lawn. I couldn’t even keep their names straight.