One night, before the sun went down, Aria noticed someone flailing and moaning in the old broken-down Camaro. When she approached the car, she found EJ in withdrawal. His bone-thin body was writhing in pain. Sweat stuck the loose strands of his black hair to his forehead. His eyes were rolling behind his eyelids and he was breathing as if he was having a seizure. Aria sat in the driver’s seat and tried to soothe him. Under her touch, he quieted and tears started to roll down the side of his face toward his ear, which was pierced with a hoop earring.
Even though he was 23 years old, he reminded her of a small child stricken with the flu. EJ, who was an acquaintance of Ciarra’s, was addicted to fentanyl. He was used to injecting every five hours, but hadn’t managed to get his hands on a dose. EJ never spent the day at the car lot. He came and left, so absorbed in the cycle of his addiction that he was a mystery to everyone, more like a ghost that slept among them. The day after Aria had been with him through such a vulnerable moment, he went back to acting as if he didn’t know her at all, or perhaps didn’t remember.
Aria had also met Wolf. In truth, they had been introduced to one another by Robert and had only shaken hands. He didn’t sleep in a car or in a tent or beneath a tarp like everyone else at the lot. Except for when it rained, he would sleep out underneath the open sky, preferring to have nothing between him and the world. His real name was James, but everyone called him Wolf and it was the only title that was fitting. Out of everyone at the lot, Wolf intrigued Aria the most. He seemed to hang around the lot less because it was a home base and more because it offered a poor substitute for a missing sense of tribe. Aria watched him disappear into the woodland for hours and even days, as if on some sort of solitary vision quest. When he returned, he would sit with Robert and talk for hours, or throw a stick for Palin until she was too tired to fetch it anymore. And more than a few times, she saw him sitting with EJ in his car.
On one of those days, Aria had thought they were smoking weed. But, after watching them long enough, she realized that Wolf had gathered a tiny bundle of sage and was smudging EJ with it. Whether EJ was open to Wolf’s guidance or not didn’t seem to matter to Wolf. He appeared to be heavily invested in EJ’s recovery. He had imposed himself as a mentor to usher EJ out of his lost-ness.
Aria loved the feel of Wolf. He had a distrustful way of being. But his poverty and his ill-fitting clothes could not conceal what was truly magical about him. Aria could hear the pulse of the earth itself in his footsteps. She could hear its rivers in his veins. He seemed to carry both the earth and sky within him. His skin was the color of coffee. His 40 years upon this earth had only just begun to trace chicken-foot wrinkles from his eyes to his temples. He wore his long black hair in a ponytail that was tied just above the back collar of his shirt. His hands and arms were covered in tattoos, most of them representing some part of his life that he considered to be a rite of passage. Some of them, spiritual messages to himself, were etched into his skin so he couldn’t forget them. There was no way of telling where the black of his pupil ended and his iris began. The whites of his eyes were yellowed. Palin’s eyes looked more human than his did; and the consciousness behind them, more familiar.
Wolf was N’pooh-le, a tribe commonly known as Sanpoil. He had been raised on the Colville Indian Reservation in Okanagan County, Washington. His father had gotten into his beaten-up pick-up truck and disappeared when Wolf was eight. Most of his memories before then were of his father beating him and his mother. He remembered the days spent by himself, trying to fill up the vacuum of boredom with both his mother and father passed out cold in whatever part of the house their chronic drunkenness had left them. He never knew where his father went. And his mother never quit drinking.
In most ways, Wolf took up the place in his mother’s life where his father was supposed to be until he was 16 and she died of liver disease. His childhood had birthed a dream within him of reuniting the tribes. He saw the loss of their way of life as the reason for all their suffering. For a couple of years after his mother died, he dedicated himself to this vision, thinking that everyone would be quick to commit to the old way of life of their people if only he led them back into it. But he was wrong. They had given up. They had given in to the fissures that existed between each other and between themselves and that old way of life. So he left, bitter. He lived his life up and down the Pacific coast, looking for some tonic for the anger he felt toward himself, toward the white man and also toward his own people.
It was not uncommon to see Native Americans on the streets. Most of them
