But—for all he was wearing, he was absolutely silent. Zero rustling, like you can usually hear with a fancydancer, when they’re all set to go, or have just finished.
Thing was? My father never danced. He didn’t go to the pow-wows to compete for cash. One of the few things I remember about him, it’s that he didn’t call the traditionals down at the town pump or the IGA “throwbacks,” like I’d heard. His words always got scrambled in his mouth—Dino’s got that too—so that what he came out with, it was “fallback.”
My father was neither a throwback nor a fallback. He didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the stories, and didn’t care that he didn’t. Once or twice a year, he’d sign on to fight whatever fire was happening, but it wasn’t to protect any ancestral land. It was because when you signed on, they issued you these green wool pants. He’d sell those to the hunters, come fall. Once a year, Mom told me, he’d usually walk home in his boxers, with a twenty folded small in his hand so none of the reservation dogs would nose it away.
That’s my dad, as I know him.
But in the year or two after he either drowned or was drowned—there’s stories both ways, and they each make sense—when we were still on the reservation, when his sisters would still watch us some days, they’d tell us about Dad when he was our age and his eyes were still big with dreams.
He’d been really into bows and arrows and headbands, they said, the toy ones from the trading post. I imagine that when you grow up in a cowboy place, then you’re all into saddles and boots and ropes. When you grow up in Indian country, the TV tells you how to be Indian. And it starts with bows and arrows and headbands. They’re the exciting part of your heritage. They’re also the thing you can always find at the gift shop.
Back then, Dad would always be in the stands at the pow-wows, his sisters told me—well, me and Dino, but Dino was one and two, so I think the stories just skidded right past him, pretty much.
As for me, I really keyed on that, on my dad watching those dancers with every last bit of his attention, his headband strapped tight over his hair. Like he was trying to soak all this in, so it could fill him up. So he could be that.
Who wouldn’t want to step into a fancydancer outfit? It would be the obvious next step.
The bustles, the armbands, the beadwork, the cool knee-high moccasins—and the facepaint. It makes you look like the assassin-aliens in space movies. With your face black and white like that, you automatically slit your eyes like a gunfighter, like you’re staring America down across the centuries.
I can see my dad slitting his eyes in the bleachers like that all those years ago. What he’s doing, it’s pretending. What he’s doing, it’s waiting.
“He was going to be the best dancer of us all, once he straightened back up again,” one of his sisters had told me. She wasn’t a dancer herself, but, playing it again in my head, I think she was talking about all the Indians on the whole reservation, maybe even on the whole pow-wow circuit. I think she was saying that if my dad would have just applied the same energy and forethought to his regalia and his routine as he did to what trouble there was to get in once the sun came down, there would have been no stopping him.
That’s how you talk about dead people, though, especially dead Indians. It’s all about squandered potential, not actual accomplishments.
My father, my dad, he could have been the best fancydancer of us all.
And that’s how I recognized him that first night, crossing from the living room through the kitchen.
His boots, his bustle. His fancydancer outline.
In death, he had become what he never could in life.
And now he was back.
Or, he had been for a few steps.
My heart pounded in my chest with what I wanted to call fear but what I know now was actually hope.
Our house, like I said, it was modular.
You can leave the reservation, but your income level will still land you in a reservation house, won’t it? I’d heard my mom say this on the phone once, and it had stuck to the inside of my head in a way I knew I was going to be looking over at that part of the inside of my skull for the rest of my life, probably.
I read once that a baby elephant doesn’t have the digestive enzymes it needs to live, but it can get them—and does—by eating its mother’s dung.
That’s an old Indian story, right there.
Anyway, the house we were renting, it was 1140 square feet. I knew that from a sticker on the backside of the cabinet under the sink.
Square feet don’t tell you anything, though.
For delivery purposes, our house was almost twenty feet wide and nearly three times as long, about. My tape-measuring involved Dino holding it steady for me every twelve feet, though, a red popsicle melting down his left fist, so there could have been some missing inches.
Twenty feet wide sounds like a trailer house, I know, which we’d also lived in, but the difference in a trailer house and modular one, it’s that a modular house, it gets delivered and it stays there, more or less, while a trailer house keeps its wheels and the tongue it gets pulled with, so it can still roam if need be. They’ve both got skirts that never last the winter, though, and the sidings are pretty much the same, and if you end up with one of each, you can kind of rub them together like puffy Cheetos and make a bigger, more complicated house.
I say all this because, the week after I saw my dad in the house, I scoured every single inch of those 1140 square feet for evidence of his having walked through.
What I wanted was a single lost bead, just one stray, bright-blue feather. Even a waxy smear on a doorjamb, that could be where he’d touched after he’d wiped an itch on his cheek.
He was back watching us, I knew.
It made me sterner with Dino, to prove the good big brother I was being in Dad’s absence. How I was picking up the slack.
It also made me ask Mom questions about Dad, on as much of the sly as I could manage. What was the first car he had? What was the last? Where did she meet him? What was he doing? Did he name me, or did she? What was the best fight he was ever in? How much could he lift if he had to?
They’re questions a nine-year-old would ask, I know, not a sixth-grader, but I think when you’re talking about your dad, you kind of go back in years—the more you become a kid, the more he gets to be the dad, right?
So, we ate crunchy fish sticks over the game shows of dinner, and Mom shrugged and chewed and told me some stories. Not the ones I was ever asking for but ones she remembered from when he was a senior and she was a sophomore. How Dad had come to school with his whole head shaved once, to prove something to a teacher. Or how one time she saw him standing by the lake and throwing a trash bag of shoes into the water, shoe by shoe.
He hadn’t made it through to graduation—who ever does?—but he’d been there all the same, and he’d clapped louder than anybody, and hooted for every person who crossed the stage, and Mom thought that was probably either the first or the second weekend he ever had to spend in jail.
When he died, they didn’t find him right off. The tribal cops, I mean. But everybody knew where he was. Probably some kids from my own class had even snuck out to see him, dragged by their older brothers and sisters, meaning they knew my dad was dead before I did.
Was it because a truck he was driving had thrown a rod he couldn’t afford to pay for, or was it because he was drinking and stumbled, and couldn’t get back up?