Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5)

Lending Light

Rose Christo

1

Alone on the Salt Flats

I hit the ground on my hands and knees.  I coughed out sage water.  I could see the badlands underneath me, a ground of porous clay, cold and bright and really, really blue under the moon, like the turquoise earrings Grandma Gives Light had worn when she'd visited us for the raft race.  My eyes blurred, the blue fading.  Uncle Gabe kept saying I should get glasses, which probably meant he wanted another reason for people to point and stare at me.  They already had fifteen.

I sat up.  I picked up the shaman's bota bag, brown and leather and uncapped.  The bag was empty, but I didn't remember drinking all the bawattsi.  Whatever; that stuff tasted gross.  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.  I bit my tongue on accident.  My teeth were big and sharp and had probably needed braces at some point.  Too late now.

The Nettlebush badlands looked like icebergs.  Big, blue hills of clay ran up into crumbling gulches.  Sand fell under the canyons in lighter blues and spots of red.  I looked at my hands and my palms were covered in it.  I wiped them on my torn jeans.  My stomach tingled with a sucking pain.  I'd fasted all month for the Yakainna, the vision quest.  I hadn't wanted to, but everyone did it once they turned seventeen.  I was seventeen now.  I'd turned seventeen three months ago, on the Here Mahe Reservation in Oklahoma.  Uncle Gabriel had sent me away to "curb my temper."  Yeah, that worked out.

I remem
ber getting off the bus that March in Muscogee County, my bag on my shoulder and my map in my hand.  It was windy out, and gray-skied, and there were tumbleweeds on the dusty ground, like a really bad joke come to life.  A line of teenagers climbed off the bus after me and crowded around the bus stop, a wooden pole with a flapping sign in unfamiliar Creek syllabics.  The kids mingled right away, talking, laughing, showing each other the stuff they'd brought from home, Ute baskets and Navajo arrows and whatever.  Everyone left a wide girth around me.  The Creek tribe was holding some kind of medicine retreat, a hoyyoy for troubled teens.  I didn't know anybody here.  Even if I had, it wouldn't have made a difference.  Everyone back home hated me, like it was a rite of passage.

"Eyes up here," said a woman, loping toward us.

She looked low blood quantum, more white than Native.  I mean, her hair was blond; and yeah, some Mandan Indians are naturally blond, but not blond-blond, like they just stepped off a Norse ship.  Blood quantum doesn't matter, though, and anyone who says otherwise is full of shit.  The woman glanced at each of us with a shrewd, impassive stare.  She wore camouflage, hair swept up in a sporty ponytail, a thin scar running across her nose.  Great.  Boot camp.

"I'm Marcia Thunderbird," she said coolly, her hand on her hip.  "You're with me for the remainder of your stay.  Do anything to piss me off and you're going home.  None of us has to be here, so try not to waste my time."

I kind of felt tempted to piss her off anyway, but I didn't need Uncle Gabriel giving me that Look, the one where he rubbed his face with his hands, like he was dying to tell me how much I'd let my mom down.  I already knew I'd let my mom down.  I let my mom down every time I opened my eyes and woke up in the morning.  I let her down just by wearing my dad's face.

"Let's move," Marcia said.

The whole group followed Marcia through a low chain link fence and onto Creek territory.  There wasn't actually a creek here, just wheat-colored buildings on top of dry, dead ground, soft and flat, like it had given up even trying to live.  One of the buildings looked like an old west trading post, windows dusty and discolored.  I thought of cowboys.  I thought of Indians on horseback shooting at cowboys, poison blowgun darts and iron arrows flying on the air.  Hooves sounded in my head, and the muzzle blasts of imperfect muskets, the fizzling of gun smoke, the rattling of tin thunder boxes.

"What are you doing?"

Marcia Thunderbird's harsh voice cut through me.  I'd fallen behind the group.  Everyone else turned around to stare at me.  A couple of kids snickered.  My brain's a weird brain, slow and dull but always in overdrive.  Sometimes my imagination bleeds into reality.  That's what happened just then.  Everyone around me grew taller and taller, stretching into the yellow dust clouds in the sky until I was the smallest thing on earth.  I'm 6'3''.

"If you can't keep up," said Marcia's booming voice, somewhere above the clouds, "go wait for the bus to take you home."

I fixed a scowl on my face.  The skinny giants around me slammed back to earth, shrinking, the earth quaking, the clouds shaking in their absence.  The kids nearest me looked frightened.  Two girls even stepped backward.  I felt like something disgusting; maybe something evil.  I felt the shadows on the ground nipping at my ankles.

Marcia Thunderbird took all of us to the reservation's salt flats.  The ground was rich white, echoing and hard under my feet.  It smelled like an ocean without the water.  Looming ahead of us were a series of low, squashed clapboard cabins, five of them in total.  A few of the kids at the edge of the group murmured, complaining about the accommodations.  I'd grown up in a log cabin.  It was only two years ago my uncle had installed electricity.  I still wished he hadn't.

"Boys over here," Marcia said carelessly.  "Girls over there.  Split up in groups of ten."

A ball of nerves coiled in my stomach.  The group branched apart around me, the boys and girls drifting away from one another--and me.  I stood alone on the salt flats as the dust clouds moved over my head, freeing the sun from white shadows.  Sunlight rolled off the salt flats, the ground suddenly sparkling, gray, and I realized the terrain wasn't white after all, but reflective, like mirrors.  My reflection shone back at me in yellow light, brown skin and hunched shoulders and long, knotted black hair around an ugly square face.

"Hey, you!  You're Ray-Feel, right?"

A boy with a cat-like face jogged over to me.  His hair was yanked back in a tight ponytail, the ends split.  His eyes were thin slits between long cheeks.

I growled.  "Ra-fa-el," I said.  Ray-Feel.  That's bullshit.

"Whatever," the boy said.  "I decided you're sharing my cabin.  Come on."

He staggered away with a guy in a cowboy hat and a bumbling boy in braids.  I shifted my grip on my duffel bag.  I followed the three of them, reluctant.

Inside our cabin the floorboards were eroded, five bunk beds pressed against the walls.  I looked for the bunk nearest the window and seized it, planting myself on the bottom bed.  The window was filmy with grime and dust, a
spider web hanging from the corner.  I didn't care.  I hated being indoors more than I hated anything.  At least with the window I could stare outside at the reedy pond, river cane standing skinny beside shallow, muddy water.  I pretended I was out there, breathing in summer.

The afternoon started off crappy and got crappier.  I was sitting on my mattress, sketching monstrous mermaids in one of my notebooks, when a doofy-looking guy in a poncho stuck his head inside the cabin.  All the other boys were sitting together on Cat Guy's bunk.  They looked up at the sudden adult presence.

"Stomp Dance!" Poncho Guy sang.  He looked so freaking happy, like New Year's had come early.  It scared the hell out of me.

Poncho Guy left, and the rest of us dressed quickly in our regalia, our traditional clothing.  I was one of the few Plains Indians out here, and the only one wearing
deer hide, a fringed, light gray Grass Dance shirt and matching trousers under a Pendleton-patterned breechclout.  I didn't Grass Dance anymore.  I didn't dance period.  Cat Guy stole a shrewd glance at me.  He was wearing a dentalium bead breastplate, brown feathers in his hair.  I scowled; because I knew from regalia alone he was a Comanche.  Comanche and Shoshone don't like each other.  We used to be the same tribe years and years ago until in-fighting made us split up.

"Got a problem, Snake?" the Comanche guy asked.

Snake's an old derogatory word for Shoshone, something colonists called us during the Lemhi Trail of Tears.  I balled my hands in fists.  I would have liked to knock the shit out of this guy, except I remembered the look on Uncle Gabriel's face when I punched William Sleeping Fox square in the head a couple of months back.  Sleeping Fox had gone to the hospital afterward, blind for two days.  He had to wear glasses now.  It scared me.  I scared me.  Right after that fight I went home and tattooed a chain link on my arm.  Every time I felt like hurting somebody I put a new chain link on my arm.  It was an apology I was too cowardly to say out loud.  It was a correction.  If you have to hurt somebody, if you absolutely have to, then the only person you should hurt is yourself.

It was late afternoon when we all left the cabin, following Poncho Guy east through the Creek reservation.  Poncho Guy led us to what was supposed to be a lacrosse playing field, wide open and sprawling, only someone had sprinkled a dark green sage circle on the chalky grass.  Creek elders stood on the grass and on the bleachers and sang to us.  The poncho must have been a cultural thing, because all the Creek were wearing 'em: the women especially, whose ponchos were tailored to match their long skirts, color and all.

The troubled teens from the other cabins started filling the lacrosse field.  Marcia Thunderbird caught up with the whole group of us.  She looked me square in the eye and shoved a hollow, dried gourd in my hands.  The gourd rattled, small stones shaking inside.  It reminded me of the turtle shell rattles my tribe wore at the Ghost Dance, when we reconnected with the souls of the deceased.

"Tie it to your leg," Marcia said curtly.  "Do you know how to Stomp Dance?"

I knew she wasn't yelling at me, but it felt like she was.  I always thought people were yelling at me.  My scalp tingled, my heart going fast.  I shook my head.

"I do," a girl's voice said.

A little kid shuffled over to the pair of us.  She wore her black hair in one of those weird city cuts, longer in the front than the back.  Her regalia comprised a gown and shawl in matching lavender, and when she turned I saw the Plains Shoshone emblem stitched on the back, a blue eagle and a pair of red roses.  I knew this kid.  Nettlebush was small; I knew practically everyone who lived there.  Her name was Sarah Two Eagles, and she was a sixth grader.

"You show him, then," Marcia said listlessly.  She ambled away from us like she needed a drink and a cigarette.

Sarah Two Eagles' face was placid and closed, her mouth crooked, her cheek dimpled.  My cheeks were dimpled, too; both of them, not just one.  Sarah took the gourd from my hand and knelt in the sage, tying the leather straps around my ankle.  I felt weighed down by an invisible force, ghosts crushing me in my skin.

I found the tongue in my mouth.  "What are you doing here?"

Sarah hummed.  "I'm here for the hoyyoy."

I let out an impatient sound.  I didn't mean to.  "Yeah," I said.  "But why?"

Any minute now, I thought, and this kid was going to turn around and run away.  People were always running away from me.  But she didn't run away; she stood up.  A dusty wind blew past us, flapping her shawl.  I coughed at the burning scent of sage, wondering about the kid's hair.  It was short, framing her cheeks and touching her chin, but shorter and spikier in the back, like she wasn't in the habit of brushing it.  I never brush my hair.  Plains People aren't supposed to cut their hair.  Outside of mourning, it's not traditional.

"Grandpa caught me stealing stamps from the post office," Sarah said.

"Stamps," I repeated dully.

"I was trying to get one hundred," Sarah explained.  "But I only got seventy-six."

"Why?" I asked.  "You got a hundred people to write to?"

"One hundred times thirty-three cents is thirty-three dollars, Rafael Gives Light."

"The hell are you using my whole name like that for?"

"I wanted to give the money to that animal commercial," Sarah explained, rolling back and forth on the balls of her feet.  "The one with Sarah McLachlan and the one-eyed dogs."

I didn't know what she was talking about.  I didn't own a television.

"Hoka!" an old Creek lady shouted, breaking through my thoughts.  She banged, hard, on her heartbeat drum.  Sarah Two Eagles glided away from me and into the middle of the sage circle.  She lifted her foot and brought it down in an earth-shattering stomp, the rocks in her gourd clacking like hail.  She alternated between stomping and shuffling, the rattle whispering along with the elders' chants.

The doofy-looking counselor from before came up behind me, practically vibrating with excitement.  I threw him a dark glower over my shoulder.  He withered behind his clipboard.

"At least
try
to dance," he choked out in protest.  "You might like it.  How else are you going to stomp away the bad spirits?"

And then he buzzed away, like a really annoying hornet.  I got bit by a hornet once.  Still stings when I think about it.

Almost all the troubled teens had moved into the sage circle, stomping and shuffling and twirling without restraint.  They actually looked happy, smiling, laughing, like maybe there was some kind of transformative magic behind this hoyyoy stuff after all.  Hoyyoy.  Creek words are weird.  "Hiyohunihiya," the elders on the bleachers sang.  "Hiyowohalena."  I wanted to dive in.  I wanted to feel like everybody else felt, happy, transformed.  Only my brain kept telling me I'd look stupid if I tried.  I shouldn't have cared what people thought about me.  I cared too much.  I cared so much it ate me up sometimes.  It ate me up just then.  I looked down at my hands and saw imaginary hornets picking apart my stubby brown fingers.  I felt the electric sting all over again, skin bursting open in oozing sores.