Don’t know where to begin—Wait—Okay, so it’s like this:
All nights are stolen, and where night used to be a white gap floats in the sky. They say white is every color. It’s strange you don’t notice any of this until it’s too late.
The Honda out front of our house hasn’t run in over three years, it’s got a back seat and a good engine and the last time there was gasoline in it, it ran, and that was three years ago. We siphon from its tank time and again but you come away with a terrible taste in your mouth and even worse feelings. Now the gasoline is gone.
Everyone’s too poor to steal. All the houses on the reservation are so spread out no one has the gas money or even the proper transportation to go house to house rummaging for goods to take.
One day I’m a landmark deteriorating as people try to walk by me without saying a word and before you disbelieve me, know where I’m coming from or know where I’m going.
Daylight is what I’m saying and the Honda never runs is what I’m saying and I’m inside breathing last night’s air is what I’m saying and the coffee table is a metropolis of empty bottles of malt liquor with flies like helicopters is what I’m saying. The wood floor is a series of wet rings from bottles and cans that exploded and foamed over in people’s hands. People walking off with my night.
It hurts to eat anything but you know you’re starving.
You come up for air all throat and no class. My hands—wrapping and unwrapping, knowing one thing besides. All it needs is knowledge.
I find a digital camera on the table with beer spilled on it. I open the camera. I play the video on it and see a couple of frozen teeth and blurry noses. I switch to “record” and shoot the rows of open bottle necks screaming upward in unison as if the heat of a sun has long since rendered these ancient sand idols into glass.
“What you do lassnight?” Cowl said.
“Appropriate behavior,” I say.
“Seriously what you do?”
“Walkaround in circles. You see Tammy?”
“Who’s askin?”
“Tell her dark shapes are stalkin her.”
“Yeah, she won’t find that the least bit funny,” Cowl says.
“Tell her she’s comfort food…or just tell her I said hi.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell her Santa Claus beard.”
“What the fuck for?”
“Tell her Loch Ness memories, tell her David Bowie hair, tell her a black shadow is following her wherever she goes. Tell her hi.”
“Know this,” Cowl says.
“I’m listening.”
“Know this, man.”
“You see I got ears here. See?”
“Know that if her name is Tammy, she’s through with you.”
“Tell her the hand that shakes hands gets by and see what you come away with but say my name when you say it.”
“Her mom gets in the way. Always has always will. Tammy’s nuts.”
“Bring a cake,” I say.
“A what?”
“Bring a box a Twinkies.”
“How much is a box of Twinkies? She lives all the way out there. Who has gas money, you?”
I think about it. Shrug. “I’ll give you money.”
“That and hopes and dreams, unicorns and rainbows, little green men and J. Edgar Hoover in the form of the Destructor.”
“Let’s pray it don’t come to that, okay?”
“Chip in once in a while, Bus.”
“No one has the time or cash anymore, see. Go run into her by accident. Thing about accidents is they happen every once in a while. It’s Tammy. You’re gunna run into her. Shit, everybody does one point or another.”
“After that happens, I want you to pray.”
“To who and what for, Cowl?”
Cowl points to the sky. “For her at least, that’s who. You tell her black shapes, beards, other things besides the real things.”
“It’s what I feel that’s real.”
“There’s the party at Skate’s. Scare Bear’s there, every one of your cousins. And her. People clear out when they see her cuz she’s fuckin bats and moths up there.” He points to his cranium.
“Angels and demons come with wings too, Cowl. Tell her that. And tell her I said hi.”
Most people know who Tammy is. Including Cowl. I know her as well.
She lives down the road but sometimes she doesn’t. Her corpulent mother shuffles back and forth around her life. This mother exists no place else maybe because there’s only so much one can believe in order to see it. Her mother shifts from place to place. It isn’t walking I can tell you that. Shifts. She’s there and you turn away. You turn back around and all of a sudden her mother’s gone. You have to think of dust in terms of molecules or you lose your grasp of everyday occurrences. Daylight, nighttime, turbulence when you fly, joint pain when it’s cold, you lose track of these. I think Tammy’s mom operates under those same laws. I imagine that happening to Tammy over and over, see.
Sometimes Tammy stays with her mom just down the road. Sprinting behind houses where dogs bark at her and chase her down until one catches her so we wind up pulling it off her because it has her by the trapezius tearing her asunder trying to get to our shindig down at my house. Sure. I remember that. Back in the ninth grade.
Her mother raising her her alone, I imagine no better life for her other than eating to live and lofting her random thoughts to the only breed of stranger a girl like Tammy could find. The breed who drive black vans with interiors that reeked of cigarette ash and Wild Irish Rose.
I remember parts about being a child where you’re susceptible to hazards all over the rez. The typography is laced with jagged edges consisting of licentious and preternatural beings which you remember as shades of olive green and dingy white blobs in your vision, nothing specific. You can sense the corrupted colors in these people as a child but usually by the time you do it’s too late. Tammy would catch the full brunt of those type of people. Nobody else would. Like she cannot for the literal life and safety of her see how hazardous some people on the rez could be, and are, and always have been.
So people who know her ask me what I know about her.
I say: Tammy. You contour the shapes of moments where you have that control. If they’re boxed, you round them out to make them soft or indifferent, it’s no crime, you’re young, you do it.
I say: Tammy, you’re the rounded product of everyone else’s design. You’re a mockery of their idea of normal and so you fight like a kitten hung upside down with its tail caught in the wires of a cyclone fence. Sure. I catch you trying to square them and fighting them into a shape you can live with and failing.
I say: No one fails like you do and for that I am fascinated and then interested and then bored but before you know it I can’t talk about no one else.
I say: Don’t I make your blue eyes brown.
Most nights my house consists of nothing but people drinking, the TV on too loud, people pushing each other until anger ensues and everybody rushes out to the yard leaving me alone. I remember being solitary at one point. That’s the last I remember. Most nights, Skate invites our cousins over and no one else. For her that’s a party. I’m a cousin and so is Scare Bear and so is Cowl.
“I knew Skate since she was skinny,” Scare Bear says. “She’s thin now.”
Scare Bear’s right. He’s a rolling stone that still wound up gathering an extra eighty pounds of moss since high school. Skate looks like a scarecrow made with only broomsticks and no straw that just got back from an EDM festival in the Arizona desert. Back in high school at least she still had some straw.
I look around and tell her, “You have a way with folks. Call Tammy?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I mean I don’t want to call her.”
“Your house, your rules.”
“I know but you’re gunna feel what you feel anyway so why bother with rules?”
“How I feel?”
“Don’t lie. Not to me.”
“You know Tammy,” I say.
“I remember Tammy. So’s everybody else. What, sixteen, pulling Rottweilers off her with your bare hands, handfuls of dog hair, bites and stuff.”
“Bites I could handle. You know my mom never liked needles.”
“You got shots, Bus” Skate says. “We all did.”
“Not those shots. My mom hated needles. I never got the shots. When I got bit. I never got sick. But Tammy.” I don’t think Skate knows nor remembers. “Tammy got sick right away. Punched holes all over her stomach up and down.”
We’re quiet for a while.
“Gimme a minute I’ll call her,” Skate says.
I sit back down next to Scare Bear handing him an empty. He puts it in the case and hands me a new bottle.
“Know that tribal police visited my house looking for Anchor’s cousin Ronald about a fight that happened Saturday when I wasn’t around,” he says. I nod. “The whole key of thriving? You stagnate. You put a cap on it and stay that way. If you have a grand or two in your account, better off stretching it between August through February. Anyway, they found Anchor’s cousin Ronald in Biggs heading for Warm Springs. Charging him with burglary. Ronald stole his aunt’s entire DVD collection and hawked them for a hundred-fifty but then left fifteen-hundred dollars’ worth of her beadwork alone. Wuzzit you said? About the price of nothing, the value of everything?”
“Eh,” I shrug. “Close enough.”
Sometimes Tammy lives down the road and sometimes she doesn’t. Lately she has. Not five minutes after Skate rings her up Tammy’s walking through the front door. She homes in on me.
“You got here fast,” I say.
“I get rides like jokes,” Tammy says. “Occasionally.”
Tammy reaches out to Skate and Skate hands her a pack of Newport 100s.
“Stays the same all the time, right.”
“You’re here with me, I invited you,” I tell her.
“Okay.”
“I cope. I put the ‘cope’ in ‘copacetic’. You?”
People here are festering, curling like burnt plastic, floating out, kinetic, and one of them accidentally pushes Tammy closer. She wears a thin blue wool coat with steel buttons over a shirt with American flag colors splattered laterally across it. Her jeans are stretched tight over her thighs but her clothes are loose everywhere else. Her yellow hair is combed her yellow hair behind her ears. Her eyes are blue.
“You know that ‘copasetic’ came from the Chinook language?” she says.
“Right.”
“You can contribute to the conversation.”
“Really can’t add to that. It was Chinook. It’s American now.”
“I look these words up and I find them and tell people they come from places, they don’t do anything else but change every year but they go out and find you and become this thing.”
“The source of words.”
“I touch my neck sometimes,” she says. “That scar never goes anywhere. It’s like eighties music.”
Scare Bear saunters by slipping an icy bottle of Kokanee into Tammy’s hand. Skate tosses a dirty towel over a puddle of the spilled beer and leaves it there. I’m standing.
Tammy and I go outside and smoke those Newports. The wind is dry, cold, a culmination of thick odors drifting in from surrounding corn and hop fields. Beyond them only the hills reside masking from us the remainder of this world.
We take a walk around midnight and see a cop car waiting around the nearest corner in the dark and we ignore him. We idle. We touch and go. Shoving each other’s hand down the ass pockets of our jeans and she’s blushing, smiling, her eyes narrowing, hair thrashing loose from behind her round ears. My hand is warm for only a moment. She combs her hair back behind her ears.
Life is a series of forgotten and temporized notions that resurface as emotions and sentiments and actions that are felt and expressed and applied at random moments of the following day or week or month or year.
We taste each other. Her eyes are blue.
“So lassnight,” Cowl says.
“You weren’t invited.”
“You didn’t invite me but I wanna know.”
“You and the feds both.”
“Right but I wanna know bout lassnight.”
“Oral traditions are sacred.”
“I know you’re going to make it sound simple.”
“Because it’s not. If it weren’t I wouldn’t bother. You have no problem figuring it out for yourself, see. There’s math involved. You hate math.”
“I could always get it from your cousin Scare Bear.”
“He knows half of it.”
“And Skate?”
“About a quarter because there…well, there it was all words but with Scare Bear…Scare Bear had eyes.”
“Right.”
“Our ancestors made fun of spider. They called him four-eyes. Then he got glasses so they started calling him eight-eyes.”
“You can go to hell.”
“A notion. A fair one.”
Maybe it doesn’t last long. The night lives and breathes and grows solid and turns into a compactable mass and so then the night is stolen and I wake up with my chest dry and everything else cold and realized she’s left the front door open when she walked off. Most of my stuff is turned upside down and twelve dollars is missing from my pants and the bottle of Hennessy in the fridge is gone. So is she. Tammy. So you tell me about her. I tell you about her. You use words like Parts Unknown and Eventual and Subsidiary and these words don’t mean anything. Everyone runs into her and when I do those words might become real again. At some point everyone becomes inevitable even miles apart, with angry dogs in between. No one else needs to know. I know and that’s one too many for where I stand. In the darkest part of any room disavowed by the sun. An enemy of time and energy.
That’s all I got to say. Over. Done.
