And now this.
“Mom,” I called out, just loud enough to wake her, not loud enough that she’d hurt herself trying to crash down the hall, “Dino’s having another seizure.”
This would be his fifth or sixth. That we knew about.
By the time Mom got there with the warm rag she was sure helped, I had the leg of one of Dino’s superhero action figures between his teeth. In the Western movies, they always use a belt or a wallet in the mouth. It’s never for a seizure, it’s usually for a bullet, but the principle’s the same, I figured.
After a few minutes of it, Dino settled down.
I stood to go to bed.
“What were you doing up with that?” Mom said.
I looked down to the jump rope evidently still hanging around my neck.
“Water,” I lied, like that was any kind of explanation, and then made good on that lie, felt my way to the sink.
On the way back across the linoleum of the kitchen, my bare foot kicked something that rocketed away. Something light and plastic and round.
My heart registered it the moment it hit the wall under the table, and then my hands reacted just about the exact instant it tapped against the roulette wheel of the heater vent in the floor.
My mouth named it while it was still falling down that ductwork: “Bead.”
One single bead.
It was as big as the whole rest of the world.
After school, I held Dino’s hand as soon as the bus pulled far enough away. If anybody saw, it wouldn’t help his cause any, I didn’t think. Probably not mine either, but I at least had the idea—mostly from action movies—that I could go wolverine, fight my way out of any dogpile of bodies.
This is something all Indians think, I think: that, yeah, we got colonized, yeah, we got all our lands stolen, yeah yeah yeah, all that usual stuff. But still, inside us, hiding—no, hibernating, waiting, curled up, is some Crazy Horse kind of fighter. Some killer who’s smart and wily and wears a secret medicine shirt that actually works.
Just, if you say this to anybody, you kill that Crazy Horse you’re hiding inside.
So, you walk around with this knowledge that he’s there if you ever need him.
But, also, you try not to need him. You wait till the bus is a plume of dust before taking your little brother’s hand in yours while you both walk past the neighbor’s house. It’s a ramshackle affair that might have been a tack shed originally, or maybe a camper with the wheels buried. There’s chainlink all around the property, and that’s usually high enough to keep his four dogs in. Dino walking in his jerky way, though, that activates whatever predator instincts those dogs still have, and they come at the chainlink hard, sometimes even bloody their face on it.
Me holding his hand, it was keeping his jerkiness under wraps, so the dogs just barked, didn’t gear down into killer-snarl mode.
Again, we made it, and, to prove to Dino that we’re not complete wimps, right at the end of the chainlink, I started making a hurt-rabbit sound in my throat, so that my mouth didn’t move—so that anybody in that ramshackle tar-paper house with the three galvanized chimneys wouldn’t see that I’m doing anything.
But the dogs knew.
They exploded against the fence but it was taller at the corner, from the remains of what had probably been a chicken coop back in 1910, and that was all they could do: bark. If they knew to double back, they could have cleared the fence, hamstrung us halfway to our porch, have a midafternoon kidmeat feast. But dogs are stupid.
Anyway, it was Mom who hamstrung us.
She was waiting, wasn’t at work.
She ran out to scoop us up, was enough of a surprise in the middle of the day that I had to swallow that hurt-rabbit sound and kind of go limp, let her pack us into the back seat of our big heavy car.
What happened, she explained, driving and smoking, it was that in the breakroom at her work, one of the other mom’s kids had turned up sick at school, so he was at work with her, was wrapped in a blanket watching cartoons. The first thing this meant was Mom couldn’t catch the last fifteen minutes of the soap opera she claimed not to care about, really. The second thing this meant was that, tapping ashes into the big brass ashtray of the breakroom, she was now watching a whole new set of commercials. Ones targeted at an audience into robots and dinosaurs and fighter planes, not vitamins and hygiene and vacations.
What this meant was that she ended up tracking the movements of an action figure on screen, and that cued up last night for her, Dino’s seizure in his bed, and then she was leaving her cigarette curling up smoke from the ashtray. She didn’t even clock out, just raced straight home to wait on the porch for us.
Because she knew.
I’m not saying she was the perfect mom, but she would always pick us over whatever else there was. When we left the reservation, it was for me and Dino. Not for her. Unlike Dad, she wasn’t still living her high school years five years after high school. But she did have her own sisters, and one brother still alive, and aunts and uncles and cousins and the rest, kind of like a net she could fall back into, if she ever needed them all.
But she cashed all that in. Because, she said, she didn’t want either one of us drowning in water we didn’t have to drown in, someday.
Only, now, one of us, he was malfunctioning. And she was the only one who could run him to the doctor in the middle of the day.
We had to sit in the waiting room nearly until dinner, but the emergency room finally took Dino back to X-ray his third-grade body. Not for whatever misfire was making him zone out and seize up—that had to be in his head—but for the superhero foot Mom knew would be there. In the breakroom at work, she’d flashed on the action figure I’d had him bite down on. It was lying beside him in bed once he calmed down. And it had been missing one red boot.
In the breakroom, I spent all three of the dollars Mom had left, ate two honey buns and one hot chocolate from the coffee machine. I sprinkled grainy sugar from the coffee table onto the second honey bun, then, hours later, walking across the parking lot holding Mom’s hand, I threw up right in front of a parked ambulance and couldn’t understand what was going on.
Mom tried to pull me away from the vomit—puley honey-bun paste, runneled through with dark chocolate veins—but I pulled back, studied it, trying to make a deaclass="underline" I would throw up that superhero boot for Dino. Please. It was my fault, anyway.
That’s not how the world works.
Dino was supposed to just keep eating like normal and wait to find that piece of plastic in the toilet. We didn’t have to watch for it, though. We could, the doctor had said, but really, the sign that it had hung up somewhere, it would be Dino’s appetite fading.
Except—what if his appetite started to go away because of whatever was happening in his head, to keep him from learning his numbers?
Mom was out of cigarettes, so she held on to the steering wheel with both hands and didn’t look into the back seat, even with the mirror.
After lights out, still trying to make deals, I snuck Dino’s one-footed superhero from his dresser, walked it into the kitchen and pried the vent up, dropped it down into that darkness, and then I tried to wait up for Dad, crossing the kitchen again, but fell asleep in the corner under the table and didn’t wake until Mom draped a blanket over me in the morning.
The whole next week was nothing. Dino kept eating as much as ever, Mom got another carton of cigarettes, and I started digging up what I told myself wasn’t a car from the front pasture, but a truck. The truck. Because ghosts need anchors in the physical, living world, don’t they? What might have happened was that, up on the reservation, Dad runs a truck too hard, throws a rod, so that truck gets left behind. But someone else picks it up, drags it down here with plans of using it for a parts truck, or maybe they have an engine from a car that’ll mate with the transmission.