This place is a hollow, like Jolene said, but not why she said it. It’s hollow because there’s no messages. This is the place we have to leave our messages so that when we go on we’ll know that the ones to follow will be able to figure things out.
8
Alberta says:
Inside and out, same thing. The wheel doesn’t change, only the way we see it. Door opens either way. Both sides in, both sides out. Trouble is, we’re always on the wrong side, always want the thing we haven’t got, makes no difference who we are. Restless spirits want life, living people look for something better to come. Nobody here. Nobody content with what they got. And the reason for that’s to keep the wheel turning. That simple. Wheel stops turning, there’s nothing left.
It’s like the woman who feels the cage of her bones, those ribs they’re a prison for her. She’s clawing, clawing at those bone bars, making herself sick. Inside, where you can’t see it, but outside, too.
So she goes to see the Lady of the White Deer—looks just like you, Jolene, the way you were last year. Big woman. Big as a tree. Got dark, dark eyes you could get lost in. But she’s smiling, always smiling. Smiling as she listens, smiling when she speaks. Like a mother smiles, seen it all, heard it all, but still patient, still kind, still understanding.
“That’s just living,” she tells the caged woman. “Those aren’t bars, they’re the bones that hold you together. You keep clawing at them, you’ll make yourself so sick you’re going to die for sure.”
“I can’t breathe in here,” the caged woman says.
“You’re not paying attention,” the Lady of the White Deer says. “All you’re doing is breathing. Stop breathing and you’ll be clawing at those same bones, trying to get back in.”
“You don’t understand,” the caged woman tells her and she walks away.
So she goes to see the Old Man of the Mountains—looks just like you, Bear. Same face, same hair. A big old bear, sitting up there on the top of the mountain, looking out at everything below. Doesn’t smile so much, but understands how everybody’s got a secret dark place sits way deep down there inside, hidden but wanting to get out. Understands how you can be happy but not happy at the same time. Understands that sometimes you feel you got to go all the way out to get back in, but if you do, you can’t. There’s no way back in.
So not smiling so much, but maybe understanding a little more, he lets the woman talk and he listens.
“We all got a place inside us, feels like a prison,” he tells her. “It’s darker in some people than others, that’s all. Thing is, you got to balance what’s there with what’s around you or you’ll find yourself on a road that’s got no end. Got no beginning and goes nowhere. It’s just always this same thing, never grows, never changes, only gets darker and darker, like that candle blowing in the wind. Looks real nice till the wind blows it out—you hear what I’m saying?”
“I can’t breathe in here,” the woman tells him.
That Old Man of the Mountain he shakes his head. “You’re breathing,” he says. “You’re just not paying attention to it. You’re looking inside, looking inside, forgetting what’s outside. You’re making friends with that darkness inside you and that’s not good. You better stop your scratching and clawing or you’re going to let it out.”
“You don’t understand either,” the caged woman says and she walks away.
So finally she goes to see the Old Man of the Desert—looks like you, Crazy Crow. Got the same sharp features, the same laughing eyes. Likes to collect things. Keeps a pocket full of shiny mementos that used to belong to other people, things they threw away. Holds onto them until they want them back and then makes a trade. He’d give them away, but he knows what everybody thinks: All you get for nothing is nothing. Got to put a price on a thing to give it any worth.
He doesn’t smile at all when he sees her coming. He puts his hand in his pocket and plays with something while she talks. Doesn’t say anything when she’s done, just sits there, looking at her.
“Aren’t you going to help me?” she asks.
“You don’t want my help,” the Old Man of the Desert says. “You just want me to agree with you. You just want me to say, aw, that’s bad, really bad. You’ve got it bad. Everybody else in the world is doing fine, except for you, because you got it so hard and bad.”
The caged woman looks at him. She’s got tears starting in her eyes.
“Why are you being so mean to me?” she asks.
“The truth only sounds mean,” he tells her. “You look at it from another side and maybe you see it as kindness. All depends where you’re looking, what you want to see.”
“But I can’t breathe,” she says.
“You’re breathing just fine,” he says right back at her. “The thing is, you’re not thinking so good. Got clouds in your head. Makes it hard to see straight. Makes it hard to hear what you don’t want to hear anyway. Makes it hard to accept that the rest of the world’s not out of step on the wheel, only you are. Work on that and you’ll start feeling a little better. Remember who you are instead of always crying after what you think you want to be.”
“You don’t understand either,” she says.
But before she can walk away, the Old Man of the Desert takes that thing out of his pocket, that thing he’s been playing with, and she sees it’s her dancing. He’s got it all rolled up in a ball of beads and cowrie shells and feathers and mud, wrapped around with a rope of braided sweetgrass. Her dancing. Been a long time since she’s seen that dancing. She thought it was lost in the long-ago. Thought it disappeared with her breathing.
“Where’d you get that dancing?” she asks.
“Found it in the trash. You’d be amazed what people will throw out—every kind of piece of themselves.”
She puts her hand out to take it, but the Old Man of the Desert shakes his head and holds it out of her reach.
“That’s mine,” she says. “I lost that in the long-ago.”
“You never lost it,” the Old Man of the Desert tells her. “You threw it away.”
“But I want it back now.”
“You got to trade for it,” he says.
The caged woman lowers her head. “I got nothing to trade for it.”
“Give me your prison,” the Old Man of the Desert says.
She looks up at him. “Now you’re making fun of me,” she says. “I give you my prison, I’m going to die. Dancing’s not much use to the dead.”
“Depends,” he says. “Dancing can honor the dead. Lets them breathe in the faraway. Puts a fire in their cold chests. Warms their bone prisons for a time.”
“What are you saying?” the caged woman asks. “I give you my life and you’ll dance for me?”
The Old Man of the Desert smiles and that smile scares her because it’s not kind or understanding. It’s sharp and cuts deep. It cuts like a knife, slips in through the skin, slips past the ribs of her bone prison.
“What you got caging you is the idea of a prison,” he says. “That’s what I want from you.”
“You want some kind of . . . story?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not in a bartering mood—not about this kind of thing.”
“I don’t know how to give you my prison,” she says. “I don’t know if I can.”
“All you got to do is say yes,” he tells her.
She looks at that dancing in his hand and it’s all she wants now. There’s little sparks coming off it, the smell of smudge-sticks and licorice and gasoline. There’s a warmth burning in it that she knows will drive the cold away. That cold. She’s been holding that cold for so long she doesn’t hardly remember what it feels like to be warm anymore.
She’s looking, she’s reaching. She says yes and the Old Man of the Desert gives her back her dancing. And it’s warm and familiar, lying there in her hand, but she doesn’t feel any different. She doesn’t know what to do with it, now she’s got it. She wants to ask him what to do, but he’s not paying attention to
her anymore.
What’s he doing? He’s picking up dirt and he’s spitting on it, spitting and spitting and working the dirt until it’s like clay. And he makes a box out of it and in one side of the box he puts a door. And he digs a hole in the dirt and he puts the box in it. And he covers it up again. And then he looks at her. “One day you’re going to find yourself in that box again,” he says, “but this time you’ll remember and you won’t get locked up again.”
She doesn’t understand what he’s talking about, doesn’t care. She’s got other things on her mind. She holds up her dancing, holds it in the air between them.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” she says. “I don’t know how to make it work.”
The Old Man of the Desert stands up. He gives her a hand up. He takes the dancing from her and throws it on the ground, throws it hard, throws it so hard it breaks. He starts shuffling his feet, keeping time with a clicking sound in the back of his throat. The dust rises up from the ground and she breathes it in and then she remembers what it was like and who she was and why she danced.
It was to honor the bone prison that holds her breathing for this turn of the wheel. It was to honor the gift of the world underfoot. It was to celebrate what’s always changing: the stories. The dance of our lives. The wheel of the world and the sky spinning above it and our place in it.
The bones of her prison weren’t there to keep her from getting out. They were there to keep her together.
9
I’m holding the cartridge now, but there’s no need for me to speak. The story’s done. Somewhere up above us, the skies over the Tombs are still full of smoke, the Devil’s Night fires are still burning. Here in the hollow of this stone room, we’ve got a fire of our own.
Alberta looks across the circle at me.
“I remember,” she says.
“That was the first time we met,” Jolene says. “I remember, too. Not the end, but the beginning. I was there at the beginning and then later, too. For the dancing.”
Bear nods. He takes the cartridge from my fingers and puts it back into his pocket. Out of another pocket he takes packets of color, ground pigments. Red and yellow and blue. Black and white. He puts them on the floor, takes a pinch of color out of one of the packets and lays it in the palm of his hand. Spits into his palm. Dips a finger in. He gets up, that Old Man of the Mountain, and he crosses over to one of the walls. Starts to painting. Starts to leave a message for the ones to follow.
Those colors, they’re like dancing. Once someone starts, you can’t help but twitch and turn and fidget until you’re doing it, too. Next thing you know, we’re all spitting into our palms, we’re all dancing the color across the walls.
Remembering.
Because that’s what the stories are for.
Even for old spirits like us.
We lock ourselves up in bone prisons same as everybody else. Forget who we are, why we are, where we’re going. Till one day we come across a story we left for ourselves and remember why we’re wearing these skins. Remember why we’re dancing.
The Invisibles
What is unseen is not necessarily unknown.
—Wendelessen
1
When I was twelve years old, it was a different world.
I suppose most people think that, turning their gazes inward to old times, the long trail of their memories leading them back into territory made unfamiliar with the dust of years. The dust lies so thick in places it changes the shape of what it covers, half-remembered people, places and events, all mixed together so that you get confused trying to sort them out, don’t even recognize some, probably glad you can’t make out others. But then there are places, the wind blows harder across their shapes, or maybe we visit them more often so the dust doesn’t lie so thick, and the memories sit there waiting for us, no different now than the day they happened, good and bad, momentous occasions and those so trivial you can’t figure out why you remember them.
But I know this is true: When I was twelve years old, kids my age didn’t know as much as they do today. We believed things you couldn’t get by most eight year olds now. We were ready to believe almost anything. All we required was that it be true—maybe not so much by the rules of the world around us, but at least by the rules of some intuitive inner logic. It wasn’t ever anything that got talked out. We just believed. In luck. In wishes. In how a thing will happen, if you stick to the right parade of circumstances.
We were willing to believe in magic.
Here’s what you do, Jerry says. You get one of those little pipe tobacco tins and you put stuff in it. Important stuff. A fingernail. Some hair. A scab. Some dirt from a special place. You spit on it and mix it up like a mud pie. Prick your finger and add a drop of blood. Then you wrap it all up in a picture of the thing you like the best.
What if you don’t have a picture of the thing you like the best? I ask.
Doesn’t have to be a real picture, he says. You can just make a drawing of it. Might be even better that way because then it really belongs to you.
So what do you do with it? Rebecca asks.
I can see her so clearly, the red hairs coming loose from her braids, picking at her knee where she scraped it falling off her bike.
You stick it in that tin, Jerry says, and close it up tight. Dig a hole under your porch and bury it deep.
He leans closer to us, eyes serious, has that look he always gets when he’s telling us something we might not believe is true, but he wants us to know that it is.
This means something, he says. You do it right and you’ll always have that thing you like the best. Nothing will ever take it away.
I don’t know where he heard about it. Read it in a book, or maybe his grandmother told him. She always had the best stories. It doesn’t matter. We knew it was a true magic and that night each of us snuck out of our house and did it. Buried those tins deep. Made a secret of it to make the magic stronger is how Jerry put it.
I didn’t need the magic to be any stronger. I just needed it to be true. We were best friends, the three of us, and I didn’t want that to ever change. I really believed in magic, and the idea of the tin seemed to be about the best magic kids like us could make.
Rebecca moved away when we were in ninth grade. Jerry died the last year of high school, hit by a drunk driver.
Years later, this all came back to me. I’d returned to have a look at the old neighborhood, but our houses were gone by then. Those acre lots we grew up on had been subdivided, the roads all turned around on themselves and changed until there was nothing left of the neighborhood’s old patterns. They’re identical, these new houses, poured out of the same mold, one after the other, row upon row, street after street.
I got out of the car that day and stood where I thought my house used to be, feeling lost, cut off, no longer connected to my own past. I thought of those tins then and wondered whatever had happened to them. I remembered the drawing I made to put in mine. It was so poorly drawn I’d had to write our names under our faces to make sure the magic knew who I meant.
The weird thing is I never felt betrayed by the magic when Rebecca moved away, or when Jerry died. I just . . . lost it. Forgot about it. It went away, or maybe I did. Even that day, standing there in a neighborhood now occupied by strangers, the memory of those tins was only bittersweet. I smiled, remembering what we’d done, sneaking out so late that night, how we’d believed. The tightness in my chest grew from good moments recalled, mixed up with the sadness of remembering friends I’d lost. Of course those tins couldn’t have kept us together. Life goes on. People move, relationships alter, people die. That’s how the world turns.
There isn’t room for magic in it, though you’d never convince Ted of that.
2
Ted and I go back a long way. We met during my first year in college, almost twenty years ago, and we still see each other every second day or so. I don’t know why we get along so well unless that old axiom’s true and opposites do att
ract. Ted’s about the most outgoing person you could meet; opinionated, I’ll be the first to admit, but he also knows how to listen. He’s the sort of person other people naturally gravitate to at a party, collecting odd facts and odder rumors the way a magpie does shiny baubles, then jump-starting conversations with them at a later date as though they were hors d’oeuvre.
I’m not nearly so social an animal. If you pressed me, I’d say I like to pick and choose my friends carefully; the truth is, I usually have no idea what to say to people—especially when I first meet them.
Tonight it’s only the two of us, holding court in The Half Kaffe. I’m drinking espresso, Ted’s got one of those decaf lattés made with skim milk that always has me wonder, what’s the point? If you want to drink coffee that weak, you can find it down the street at Bruno’s Diner for a quarter of the price. But Ted’s gone health-conscious recently. It’s all talk about decaf and jogging and macrobiotic this and holistic that, then he lights up a cigarette. Go figure.
“Who’s that woman?” I ask when he runs out of things to say about this T’ai Chi course he’s just started taking. “The one at the other end of the counter with the long straight hair and the sad eyes?”
I haven’t been able to stop looking at her since we got here. I find her attractive, but not in a way I can easily explain. It’s more the sum of the parts, because individually things are a little askew. She’s tall and angular, eyes almost too wide-set, chin pointed like a cat’s, a Picasso nose, very straight and angled down. She has the sort of features that look gorgeous one moment, then almost homely the next. Her posture’s not great, but then, considering my own, I don’t think I should be making that kind of judgment. Maybe she thinks like I do, that if you slouch a bit, people won’t notice you. Doesn’t usually work.