“True,” was all I said.
Her words were true and I couldn’t front on even one of them. Still I was mad about the parts that I did not already know and understand before Riot brought them up and broke them down. I didn’t want to be treated like a kid and have everything hidden from me until it’s too damn late. I didn’t want to know everything except what someone older thought I didn’t need to know.
“What about Lina?” I asked.
“Lina is straight,” Riot responded, again without telling me nothing.
“Hamesha, Rose Marie, Ting-Tong, and Camille?” I asked.
“None of em could fit in the Porta-Potty or the trunk of the car,” she answered.
“So they all still locked down?” I asked, feeling like if we are all one clique, nobody in the clique should get left behind and forgotten.
“No,” is all Riot answered.
She had secrets. I could see she had plenty of secrets. I had my secrets, too, but less than she did.
“So it’s just you and me?” I pushed. Thinking there had to be a reason she only kept me. Then a feeling rushed over me.
She kept me. I repeated my thoughts to myself. Riot kept me. She did what Poppa and Momma and Winter were all unable to do. It made feel closer to her. Then I warned myself, She kept you so far . . .
“How long before you and I split up?” I asked Riot.
“Why? Do you want to split up?” she asked me. “I’m not the warden, Porsche. Leave if you want to. But I thought it would be better if you and me stuck together.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because we’re the same, except you’re younger than me. Right now you are the same age I was when I murdered a man. We both fight hard. We both love hard. We both smart. We both will never ever give up.”
“True, but my main thing is to get back to my family . . .,” I said.
Then we were both quiet. I felt fucked up because I didn’t mean to put Riot down because she had no parents or land or house to go back to.
“So you’re trying to get back your people and your things. I’m trying to get back the same, except my parents can never come back to life. That’s why I have no fear. The worse thing they could do to me they already did it. Now I’m ready to fuck the authorities. Everything they ever thought they controlled, I’m aiming at that. The money they love the most, I’m taking it, making it. I’ll use it to punish them,” Riot said.
Only the word money stood out to me from what she had just said.
“Yeah, let’s make a plan to get money,” I said.
“I already got a plan,” Riot said.
“I said ‘let’s.’ That means you and me make the plan together,” I told her. I knew she was right about the fact that we could work together.
“You got some ideas?” Riot asked, as though she was sure that she was the only one with ideas.
“I got some money,” I told her. “How about you, Riot? Do you got some money?” I asked her.
I was trying to get my weight up in Riot’s eyes. I needed things to get more even between me and her even though she was four years older. I needed to show her that I was really smart, not just because she says so, but because I am. Besides, if I thought that she secretly thought I was dumb, I would think of her the same way I think about people she calls “the authorities,” and that wouldn’t be good.
She paused before answering me.
“I used my money to get us out, almost fifteen thousand dollars. That all I had. But I got a plan to build it back up,” she said.
“I have five thousand dollars,” I told her.
She stared at me serious then laughed.
“I do,” I said, and I didn’t laugh.
“Where is it?” she said.
“I have a money tree,” I told her.
Riot squatted down and looked up to me.
“If we’re gonna be a team, Porsche, you gotta cut out all of this imaginary shit. It’s the only way you and I can build up more trust. I trusted you. That’s why I chose you for the Diamond Needles even though all the other members thought you were too young and might get us in an unnecessary mess.”
I ignored the burn of the thought that all the other older sisters were against me and swiftly said, “No, you chose me because of my hustle, cause I already had a crew in the C-dorm before you came along.” I reminded her of my status. “I agreed to be one of your sons because your hustle made my hustle easier and because . . .”
“And because I’m white, you knew I’d get more privileges,” she said, believing that she had finished my sentence. That wasn’t what I was thinking.
“No,” I answered swiftly. “I don’t even think like that.”
“You should,” Riot said swiftly and calmly. “That’s how the authorities think,” she added.
“Even though I was an inmate same as you; even though I murdered a man and you only assaulted a woman, they still saw me as being better than you and every other girl that was your same color or even close to it. I hate them for that. I used it to choke ’em though. And me and you plus all the Diamond Needles can keep using that race bullshit against them until they cough up everything they owe us.” She was calm but angry.
“I have a money tree buried in the backyard of my house in Long Island. If we can get to my house, I can get what I want first, to see my family. I know you can understand that,” I said sternly. “And you got a brother to see. That’s right, isn’t it? When I first met you and you told me your dope ass story, you left out that part. You killed a man, shot him with your rifle that your parents left in an underground bunker. The authorities captured you in the chicken coop on your family farm. But you never said what happened to him, your brother.” I gave her a stern stare.
“He got away. He was smarter than me. He stayed hidden right in the space where we agreed to hide in case there was another invasion,” she said.
“I knew he had to have gotten away. How could you have done all that you did to set your plan up and get us gone from the prison without him?” I said, revealing to her that I am smarter than she might believe I am. “I mean, you didn’t have fifteen thousand dollars from no prison hustle, right?” I asked, but I felt I already knew the answer. Riot didn’t say nothing. “See, you said you trusted me but now you’re not saying nothing. You knew that I couldn’t see who was in that car yesterday, but one of the people had to be him. The guy with the green eyes same as yours, right?
“After that ride, you had clothes that fit you perfectly, food, two knapsacks, and a watch. After we dropped Tiny and Lil’ Man, the car didn’t even make any stops. I’m just saying. You saw your brother yesterday, right? So you understand that I have to see my family, too,” I told her. “So let’s set that up. If you can set up a prison break for twelve girls, we can definitely pull off a trip to a Long Island backyard. If you help me get there, I’ll give you all the money as an investment. We will go in on a plan we both come up with, fifty-fifty. I’ll go from being a son to being a partner.” There was a long pause. I wasn’t sure if it was filled with doubt, suspicion, insult, or regret.
“Alright,” Riot said thoughtfully. “We can both compromise. I think we should stay here for one year. That’s when the authorities will start to pull back and forget about us if they haven’t made any captures, or maybe not forget but some other big thing will happen to shift the attention off of us,” she schemed. “My compromise is I’ll set it up to leave here in forty days instead of a year, right after the Autumn Festival. Tomorrow would be day one in the count. This gives me a chance to put some money together for our trip down to the city. Also, we gotta be smart and establish a new identity. We won’t be able to use our real names when we travel. We’ll need some type of picture ID, shit like that. That will take some careful planning. Let’s take one month and ten days, then we’ll travel to your Long Island house. If the money is there, we’re partners. If the money isn’t there and anything goes wrong, we’ll come back up here to the reservation together,
where it’s safer. If that’s the case, I can work up here until you grow up some more,” she proposed.
“Cool, the money is there. It’s a deal,” I told her.
“Porsche, no bugging out if things at home are not the same way you left them. And until we get to your house, you still gotta respect the rules that’s already in motion. We don’t make any phone calls to any family members or friends. We don’t read any newspapers or watch any television for the first three months.”
“No newspapers, no television, why?” I asked Riot.
“It won’t help us, that’s why. It will just cause us to panic. Then we’ll be acting nervous and end up giving ourselves away,” Riot said thoughtfully.
“True, but then we’ll never know if our pictures are in the newspapers or on the television, same as my Poppa’s. We’ll be walking around, everyone will know us, but we won’t know that they know!” I pushed.
“Our pictures will not appear on television or in any newspapers. We are juveniles. It’s illegal for them to post our names and photos,” she said like she was 100 percent sure. I thought about how Niecey had said something like that, too. I believed them both.
“We keep our code of silence. We don’t leave the reservation for any reason without letting each other know first. When we do leave the reservation together or alone, we dress and pose and move as though we are boys. We don’t bring new people to our temporary house. We take good care of ourselves so our health and mental problems don’t get us caught. That means, we both gotta eat and sleep. We respect the people on the reservation and don’t ever call them Indians. They’re not Indians, they’re Native Americans. Last, we don’t discuss our past with anyone who is not a Diamond Needle.”
“Whose house is that anyway?” I asked.
“You’ll see, come on.”
Chapter 15
Me and Riot grew tight on the reservation although the woman who owned the house, who Riot called “NanaAnna,” said her hidden house was actually next door to the territory owned by the Native American Seneca Nation. NanaAnna said her house was prime real estate that the State of New York and the feds would never have allowed the Natives to get their hands on without a hefty price tag and tax. She said she had the deed and property tax receipts to prove it. She said the Natives living on the reservations didn’t have to pay property tax to the United States government.
“So why didn’t you get your free house?” I asked her.
“They don’t pay property taxes to the U.S. government, but I do. I never trusted no blue eyes. Seems like they was driven by some powerful evil spirits that got mightier with every moon. Our fight to get a piece of what was already our land was so bloody. So many souls were lost from this world. I figured even though the whites signed a treaty and said that the reservation land was ours, it would just be a matter of time before they snatched it back and started unsettling and resettling and shuffling my people back and forth again. I figured, soon as they seen what crops we could raise, what businesses we could build, what good we could do with our territory for ourselves, they’d show up suited and shooting, and stealing, wagging that lying tongue and hiding their devil tails,” she said straight-faced.
“She’s great, isn’t she?” Riot asked me, smiling brightly.
The truth was most of the time I didn’t know what NanaAnna was talking about. Momma and Poppa didn’t talk this type of business with Winter and us. I didn’t know nothing about who owned the Long Island palace where we lived before we lived there. I just knew it was big and expensive and better than any house anyone we knew ever owned.
Riot loved to listen to this Native woman talk. Whenever NanaAnna was home and still, which wasn’t often, she would spit fire. NanaAnna said that she bought this property “fair and square,” and paid her portion to “the devils,” instead of being tricked into believing that the white man would honor any special reservation agreement with the Natives.
“I figured if I bought like the whites, paid taxes on it like the whites, I could keep it and defend it and even have rights like the whites. No one could show up saying they did me any charitable favors,” she said.
NanaAnna was brown-skinned like me, with long jet black and gray hair. She was an antique, but her skin appeared teenaged young, without wrinkles. Her eyes were brown, bright, and clear. Her gaze was strong, steady, and still, like if she looked at anything for too long, she could burn a hole in it with those eyes. She was medium height and size, not bent over in any direction. I could tell that if anyone had the time to sit still she could tell ’em a gazillion true stories. I could tell she used to be considered a stunner like Momma and Winter. I wondered why I didn’t see no husband moving around her property or heard no mention of one either. I started imagining that maybe all husbands get tooken and locked in cages and all women, especially the pretty ones, get left lonely and heartbroken. Maybe all pretty women get punished for being pretty? But I didn’t really know the rhyme or reason to life.
I was still trying to put one and one together on how the old woman hated and distrusted whites, but trusted and protected Riot, and whoever Riot loved and trusted.
NanaAnna kept guns and knew how to use ’em. She didn’t walk slow, although she did talk slow. She’d be bent in the garden, climbing on the rocks, carrying heavy things, always moving and working. Maybe she hears music in her mind like I do.
One night, in the comfortable bedroom that we shared, I asked Riot, “How come NanaAnna likes you so much?”
“NanaAnna was one of my parents’ corporate customers,” Riot answered.
“Corporate,” I repeated, lying on my bed on my back in the dark.
“NanaAnna used to hustle weed. She was a distributor.”
“She doesn’t look like no hustler,” I said.
“The real smart hustlers never look like the hustlers,” Riot said calmly. “NanaAnna used to run distributions to medical marijuana houses. They supplied smoke to patients with chronic illnesses and pain. She’s a healer, a natural healer. Fuck the doctors. NanaAnna knows more than them. She saved you from all those bee stings after you collapsed. I carried you here on my back and NanaAnna healed you,” Riot said.
“So does she still hustle or not?” I asked, ignoring the debt I now owed to both Riot and NanaAnna for saving me. That’s what happens with debt, it seems. When you owe more than you can ever imagine paying back, you ignore it until being able to pay it back becomes a reality.
“Small scale, nothing big. When my parents’ land got raided and the weed crop got burnt, a lot of good people like NanaAnna got put out of business. My parents were the largest and most trusted suppliers. NanaAnna was a distributer. The people who NanaAnna distributed to were the retailers and dealers. The people buying weed in small amounts, they are the customers or users depending on how you like to say it,” Riot explained.
“Hmm,” was all I said, but my little mind was moving, comparing my candy hustle to the weed hustle and wondering about my poppa’s business as well.
“What about her husband?” I asked after a long pause.
“Husband and daughter are both dead, car accident. Me and you are both wearing the daughter’s pajamas,” Riot said softly.
I didn’t say nothing but Siri whispered, “I knew it.”
I felt crazy laying in a strange bed in a strange place wearing the dead girl’s clothes, but it was better than prison and just a stop on my way home to Momma in forty more days.
Chapter 16
We stood staring at the missing children posters on the wall in the entrance of Walmart’s where NanaAnna dropped us off while she parked her pickup truck.
She walked up behind us as we stared, and grabbed both our hands and yanked us forward like we were both her children.
“Don’t worry, those same children are missing every year. No one finds them cause no one’s looking. No one’s looking around here for you two either,” she said softly as we pulled out a shopping cart and began to stroll.
W
e were not confident like NanaAnna that no one was looking for us. It was day three since we escaped. We are not missing children, we are “wanted juveniles,” or as Riot said, “fugitives from the law.” On the low, this was one time that I didn’t mind pretending I was someone else, even a boy. Porsche L. Santiaga shopping in Walmart for fashion! No way could it ever be forgiven. I braided, then bandanna-ed up my hair and wore a cap over the bandanna. Rocking my cheapass sunglasses worked for me. They concealed the prettiest parts of my face. In baggy jeans and boy tees, we looked mannish. I thought of Lil’ Man and tried to move like a dude. It definitely didn’t come natural to me. Riot had it worse. Before getting dressed she had to bind her half a cup of titties down on her chest each day. That was funny. She better be glad she didn’t have big ones! So far, all I had were swollen nipples. But I did have hips and pretty legs. NanaAnna said we both looked like fools. We figured she thought so, only because she knew what we actually looked like as girls. No one else up here did.
On a list we gave to NanaAnna was all of the lotions and creams and girly stuff we needed. I was gonna get myself ready to be super gorgeous for my return. Riot had cut her hair off, but I couldn’t cut mine cause Momma said never cut it. I had already broken that promise once. I wouldn’t do it again.
We were in the boy section on our own, searching for a couple of pairs of pants and shirts to use while the only pair we had so far was getting washed. Plus, I needed a hat. We only had a hundred fifty dollars between us, donated by NanaAnna. I convinced Riot for each of us to save a few dollars so I could buy some magazines. Siri wanted to check out the fashions and all the stuff we missed on lockdown. I did, too.