Reservation Blues

  The highlight of the evening came when Chess Warm Water, a local Flathead Indian, was pushed onto the stage for a few duets with Coyote Springs’s lead singer, Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Warm Water has a voice exactly like her surname, which provided an interesting, if not altogether beautiful, contrast with Builds-the-Fire’s sparkless vocals.

  The dictionary defines unforgettable as “incapable of being forgotten,” and Coyote Springs, all considerations aside, was certainly that. Unforgettable and maybe even a little forgivable.

  After the show at the Tipi Pole, Chess and Checkers helped Coyote Springs pack away all their gear. Actually, Junior and Victor passed out in the back of the van, so Chess and Checkers did most of the work.

  “So,” Thomas said, “how long you two lived out here?”

  “Long enough,” Checkers said angrily, because she wanted to go home.

  “Don’t pay her no mind,” Chess said. “We’ve lived here our whole lives.”

  “You’re Flatheads, enit?” Thomas asked.

  “Yeah,” Chess said. “And you guys are all Spokanes?”

  “Yeah,” Thomas said and struggled to say more.

  Montana filled Thomas’s mind. He used to think every Indian in the world lived in Montana. Now he had played guitar in Montana and sang duet with a beautiful Indian woman. Chess had never considered herself beautiful, but she liked her face well enough. She had broken her nose in a softball game in high school, which gave her face strange angles, and it had never looked quite right since. She didn’t believe that shit about a broken nose adding character to a face. Instead, her broken nose made her feel like her whole life tilted a few degrees from center. She never minded all that much, except that her glasses were continually slipping down her nose. She spent half of her time readjusting them. Still, she had dark, dark eyes that seemed even darker behind her glasses. They were Indian grandmother eyes that stayed clear and focused for generations.

  “So,” Thomas said again, “is Chess your real name?”

  “No.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “I ain’t going to tell you,” Chess said. “You’d run off if you knew.”

  “It can’t be that bad,” Thomas said.

  Checkers watched, surprised that Thomas chose her sister. Checkers usually received all the attention, but she didn’t miss it this time. Thomas Builds-the-Fire looked especially goofy as he stumbled his way through the first stages of courtship.

  They finished all the packing, even pretended to pack Junior and Victor into suitcases. The sisters stood with Thomas in the parking lot of the Tipi Pole Tavern. A few stragglers shouted lewd suggestions at Thomas, but he mostly ignored them.

  “Well,” Thomas said, “I hope to see you again.”

  “Maybe you’ll play here again,” Chess said.

  “Maybe,” Thomas said.

  Checkers sent a telepathic message to her sister: Invite him back to the house, you fool. You’ve got him snagged.

  “Listen,” Chess said, “you want to come back to our house? I’ve got you snagged, fool.”

  “You’ve got me what?” Thomas asked. He didn’t know what snag meant, although every other Indian on the planet understood that particular piece of reservation vocabulary: snag was noun and verb. A snag was a potential lover or the pursuit of a lover. Snagged meant you’d caught your new lover.

  “I meant,” Chess corrected herself, “that you must be all dragged out. Why don’t you come back to the house?”

  “What about them?” Thomas asked of Junior and Victor.

  “They can sleep in the van,” Checkers said.

  Thomas thought about the offer, but he felt a little shy and knew that Victor and Junior might be pissed if they woke up in the sisters’ yard. Though they always pretended to be the toughest Indian men in the world, they suffered terrible bouts of homesickness as soon as they crossed the Spokane Indian Reservation border.

  “I don’t know,” Thomas said. “We should probably head back.

  “Kind of crazy, enit?” Chess asked. “What if you fall asleep driving?”

  “Well,” Thomas said. “I’ll stay for a little while. Maybe drink some coffee. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds good enough.”

  Chess and Checkers jumped into the van with Thomas and directed him to their little HUD house on the reservation. All the lights burned brightly.

  “You live with your parents?” Thomas asked.

  “No,” Chess and Checkers said.

  “Oh. I was just wondering about the lights.

  “We leave them on,” Chess said. “Just in case.”

  In case of what? Thomas asked in his mind but remained silent.

  “Our parents are gone,” Checkers said.

  The trio walked into the house, left Victor and Junior in the car, and sat down to coffee at the kitchen table. Checkers emptied her cup quickly and said good night but left her bedroom door open a little.

  “Your sister is nice,” Thomas said.

  “She’s always crabby,” Chess said, because she knew that Checkers was eavesdropping.

  “Oh, I didn’t notice,” Thomas lied.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Chess said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say, because she wanted to know.

  “Not much to say,” Thomas replied, feeling shy. “What about you?”

  “Well, we grew up on the reservation,” Chess said. “Way up in the hills in this little shack with our mom and dad. Luke and Linda Warm Water.”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Thomas asked.

  “Yeah, we had a baby brother, Bobby. We called him Backgammon.”

  “What happened to him?” Thomas asked.

  “You know,” Chess said, “those winters were always awful back then. Ain’t no IHS doctor going to come driving through the snowdrifts and ice to save some Indian kid who was half dead anyway. I don’t know. We feel less pain when we’re little, enit? Bobby was always a sick baby, born coughing in the middle of a bad winter and died coughing in the middle of a worse winter.”

  “I’m an only kid,” Thomas said.

  “Did you ever get lonely?” Chess asked.

  “All the time.”

  “Yeah, you must have,” Chess said. “I get lonely when I think about the winters. I mean, it got so cold sometimes that trees popped like gunshots. Really. All night long. Pop, pop, pop. Kept us awake sometimes so we’d all play rummy by candlelight. Mom, Dad, Checkers, me. Those were some good times. But it makes me lonely to think about them.

  Thomas and Chess sipped at their coffee.

  “How about your parents?” Chess asked.

  “My dad’s still on our reservation, drinking and staggering around,” Thomas said. “But my mom died when I was ten.”

  “Yeah, my mom is dead, too.”

  “What about your dad?” Thomas asked.

  “He went to Catholic boarding school when he was little,” Chess said. “Those nuns taught him to play piano. Ain’t that funny? They’d teach him scales between beatings. But he still loved to play and saved up enough money to buy a secondhand piano in Missoula. Man, that thing was always out of tune.

  “He used to play when it was too cold and noisy to sleep. He’d play and Mom would sing. Old gospel hymns, mostly. Mom had a beautiful voice, like a reservation diva or something. Mom taught Checkers and me to sing before we could hardly talk. Bobby slept in his crib by the stove. Those really were good times.”

  “What happened after Bobby died?” Thomas asked, although he wanted to know more about her mother’s death, too.

  “You know, my dad never drank much before Backgammon died. I mean, he always brought home some food, and Mom always managed to make stews from whatever we had in the cupboards and icebox. We didn’t starve. No way. Checkers and I were just elbows and collarbones, but we didn’t starve.

  “It was dark, really dark, when Backgammon died. I don’t know what time it was exactly. But all of us were awake a
nd pretending to be asleep. We just laid there and listened to Backgammon struggle to breathe. His lungs were all filled up with stuff. No. That’s not true. It was just Mom, Checkers, and me who listened. Dad had tied on his snowshoes a few hours earlier.

  “‘I’m going for help,’ he said, and none of us said a word to him. Mom helped him put his coat on and then she kissed his fingers before he put on his gloves. Really. It’s still so vivid in my head. Mom kissed his fingertips, ten kisses, before he tramped out the door into the dark.

  “I don’t know for sure how long we waited for him. We weren’t even sure he could make it back. He walked out in a Montana snowstorm to find help. He wasn’t even sure what kind of help he was looking for. There weren’t no white doctors around. There weren’t no Indian doctors at all yet. The traditional medicine women all died years before. Dad just walked into the storm like he was praying or something. I mean, even if he made it to other Indians’ houses, like the Abrahamson family or the Huberts, they couldn’t have done much anyway. The Abrahamson family had their own sick kids, and the Huberts were an old Indian couple who didn’t speak English and only stayed alive to spite the BIA.”

  “Your father must have been scared,” Thomas said. He didn’t know what to say to Chess.

  “Yeah, he must have been really scared,” Chess said. “But I don’t know how far he walked or when he decided to turn back. I always imagined he pounded on some stranger’s door, but there was no answer.

  “As he was walking back home, my mother held onto Backgammon and sang to him. Checkers and I lay quietly in the bed we shared. We heard Mom singing and the baby struggling to breathe. I reached across the bed and set my hand on Checkers’s chest to make sure she was breathing. She reached across and did the same on my chest. We felt the rise and fall, the rise and fall. We did that until we heard Mom stop singing and the baby stop breathing.”

  Tears welled in Chess’s eyes. She breathed deep and looked at Thomas, who kept silent and waited for the rest of the story. Then Chess excused herself and went to the bathroom, so Thomas just sat at the table and looked around the small, clean house. The kitchen sat in the center, while the living room, two bedrooms, and bathroom surrounded it. Nothing spectacular, but spotless by reservation standards. A clean, clean house.

  “Your sister left her light on,” Thomas said to Chess as she came back to the kitchen. “Is she still awake?”

  “She might be,” Chess said. “But she does sleep with her light on.”

  Just in case, Thomas thought.

  “Jeez,” Chess said as she sat down at the table. “You’re probably tired of me babbling, enit? You want some more coffee?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll be awake for weeks.”

  In her bed, Checkers listened to the conversation and cried a little. She remembered Backgammon. After he died, their mom held him against her chest and cried and cried. Checkers and Chess refused to move from their bed. They knew nothing touched them when they stayed still. Their mom cried even louder after their father stormed back into the room, shouted and cursed like a defeated warrior. He shouted until his wife raised Backgammon up to him like an offering.

  Luke Warm Water started to scream then, a high-pitched wail that sounded less than human. Maybe it sounded too human. Colors poured out of him. Red flowed out of his mouth, and black seeped from his pores. Those colors mixed together and filled the room. Chess grabbed Checkers’s hand and squeezed it until both cried out in pain.

  “Don’t look,” Chess said to her sister. “Don’t even move.”

  The sisters kept their eyes closed for minutes, hours, days. When Chess and Checkers opened them again, they buried Backgammon in a grave Luke Warm Water dug for three days because the ground was frozen solid. When the sisters opened their eyes, Linda Warm Water took a knife to her skin and made three hundred tiny cuts on her body. In mourning, in mourning. When the Warm Waters opened their eyes, Luke traded his snowshoes for a good coat, a case of whiskey, and stayed warm and drunk for weeks. Checkers remembered so much about her father. She was sure she remembered more than her sister ever did and wondered if Chess would tell Thomas any secrets.

  “You know,” Chess said to Thomas in the kitchen, just as Checkers fell into the sleep and familiar nightmares of her uncomfortable bed, “I still miss Backgammon. I didn’t know him very long. But I miss him.”

  “What did you do after he died?” Thomas asked.

  “We mostly kept to ourselves,” Chess said. “We’d wake up before our parents and be out the door into the trees and hills. We’d play outside all day, eat berries and roots, and only come back home when it got too cold and dark.

  “Sometimes we’d climb tall trees and watch the house. We’d watch our father storm out the door and down the road to town. He’d stay away for days at a time, drinking, drunk, passed out on the muddy streets in Arlee. Mom played the piano when Dad was gone, and we could hear it. We’d stay close enough to hear it.

  “I used to think her songs drifted across the entire reservation. I imagined they knocked deer over and shook the antlers of moose and elk. Can you believe that? The music crept into the dreams of hibernating bears and turned them into nightmares. Those bears wouldn’t ever leave their dens and starved to death as spring grew warmer. Those songs floated up to the clouds, fell back to the earth as rain, and changed the shape of plants and trees. I once bit into a huckleberry, and it tasted like my brother’s tears. I used to believe all of that.”

  Thomas smiled at her. He had just met the only Indian who told stories like his. He took a sip of his coffee and never even noticed it was cold. How do you fall in love with a woman who grew up without electricity and running water, who grew up in such poverty that other poor Indians called her family poor?

  “Jeez,” Chess said, “there I go again, running at the mouth. You must be tired. Why don’t you sleep on the couch?”

  Thomas stretched in his chair, rubbed his eyes.

  “I am tired,” he said. “Do you think it’s okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Why don’t you go lay down and I’ll bring you a blanket.

  “Okay. But can I use the bathroom?”

  “Sure,” Chess said and went to look for bedding.

  Thomas used the bathroom and marveled at the order. The fancy soaps waited perfectly and patiently in their dishes, but Thomas used a little sliver of Ivory soap to wash his hands and face.

  “Are you okay in there?” Chess asked through the door.

  “Oh, yeah,” Thomas said, unaware of the time he’d spent in the bathroom. “Do you have a toothbrush I can borrow?”

  “Yeah, use mine. It’s the red one.”

  Thomas picked up Chess’s toothbrush, unsure if she meant it. She brushed her teeth with this toothbrush, he thought. She had this in her mouth. He hurriedly squeezed Crest onto the bristles and brushed slowly.

  “Jeez,” Chess said after he came out, “I thought you fell in.”

  “I had a life preserver,” Thomas said, embarrassed.

  “You can sleep here,” Chess said and motioned toward the couch. He lay down and pulled the quilt over himself. She sat beside him and touched his face.

  “You know,” she said, “my mom made this quilt.”

  Thomas studied the patterns.

  “You think Junior and Victor are okay outside?” he asked.

  “They’re fine,” she said. “It’s warm.”

  “How did your mom die?” he asked.

  “Of cancer,” she lied.

  “Mine, too.”

  “You go to sleep now. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  She leaned over quickly and kissed him on the cheek. A powerful kiss, more magical than any kiss on the mouth. She kissed him like he was a warrior; she kissed him like she was a warrior.

  “Good night,” he said.

  “Good night,” she said and walked to her bedroom.

  Chess tried to sleep, but the memories crowded and haunted her. The sisters grew strong in those Montana
summer days but felt weak when they crawled into their shared bed. Before Backgammon died, they had often listened carefully to their parents’ lovemaking. The hurried breathing and those wet, mysterious noises shook the sisters’ bodies. It was good.

  After the baby died, those good sounds stopped. The sisters heard their father push at their mom, wanting it, but Linda rolled over and pretended to sleep. She slapped his hands. Luke fought and fought, but eventually he gave up if sober. If drunk, however, he forced himself on his wife. Sometimes, he came home from drinking and woke everybody with his needs. He fell on their mother while Chess and Checkers listened and waited for it to end. Sometimes their mother fought their father off, punched and kicked until he left her alone. Other times he passed out before he did anything.

  The winters and summers arrived and left, as did the family’s seasons. Luke and Linda Warm Water raged like storms, lightning in the summer, blizzards in the winter. But sometimes both sat in the house, placid as a lake during spring or an autumn evening. The sisters never knew what to expect, but Checkers grew taller and more frightened with each day. Chess just wanted to be older, to run away from home. She wanted to bury her parents beside Backgammon, find a way to love them in death, because she forgot how to love them in life.

  Then it was winter again, and Linda Warm Water walked into the woods like an old dog and found a hiding place to die. Checkers and Chess nearly fell back in love with their father that winter. He quit drinking after his wife disappeared and spent most of his time searching for her. He refused to believe she had dug a hole and buried herself, or climbed into a den and lay down in the bones of a long dead bear. Because he’d convinced himself that Linda ran away with another man, Luke wandered all over Montana in search of his unfaithful wife.

  Whenever he returned from his endless searches, Luke brought his daughters little gifts: ribbons, scraps of material, buttons, pages torn from magazines, even food, candy bars, and bottles of Pepsi. One time, he brought the sisters each a Pepsi from Missoula. Chess and Checkers buried those soft drinks in a snowbank so they would be cold, cold. Luke sat at his piano then and played for the first time since the baby died. The sisters ran inside and sang with him. They sang for a long time.