Taylor was in such fabulous spirits that the curve of the overpass might as well have been the curve of a spiral staircase in a palace. Due to his willingness to do anything and everything that would get him closer to his dreams, he had proven himself to be so useful to the acting studio that they had asked him to come four times a week now instead of two. Aria watched him in awe. Here he was, sitting underneath an overpass, no money, no car, no home, eating his only meal of the day, with a smile on his face as if he were a king. She was envious of his buoyancy.
Having lost focus for just a second, Aria felt the acute sting of the lid of the can carving a small split into her knuckle. She winced, sucking in her breath loudly enough for Wolf to hear her. She watched the blood well up and weep down the topside of her fingers. Wolf dropped what he was doing, grabbed a handful of the dirt that had not yet been soaked through by rain and released it softly right over the top of the wound. The cardinal red of her blood mixed with the dust to make a muddy paste on the surface of her hand.
“Just keep it there, it’ll stop the bleeding,” Wolf said, returning to what he’d been doing.
“Thanks,” Aria said, trying hard not to think about whether the dirt he had used was clean or tainted by road filth or some other vagrant’s alcoholic urine.
Their hunger made the effort of talking an expense that none of them seemed willing to afford for the most part, until Taylor grew anxious with the silence. “My class is putting on a play of The Little Prince.”
He was talking to Aria, but Wolf was the one to respond to him. “That’s a good story,” he said.
Both Taylor and Aria were taken aback that someone like Wolf would even know what that was, especially given that even Aria had no idea what the hell Taylor was talking about.
“You know it?” Taylor asked, lit up with the potential for conversation.
“‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly what is invisible to the eye.’ Yeah, I know it,” Wolf responded. Taylor stared at him, waiting for an explanation. “It was one of the books we read in one of them Head Start programs on the rez. The main character kind of reminds me of you, in’it?”
“Really? I wanna know why?” Taylor pleaded, excited at the idea of being recognized by someone.
“The little prince was kind of an alien, in’it?” Wolf said in the native cadence of his thick rez accent. “He doesn’t belong anywhere. And he’s got this big imagination, even though none of the other people do. He gets lost in this desert and, kinda like a vision quest, he learns about himself there. And he meets this rose and this fox and learns how to be responsible like a man and about what love really is. And the story kinda makes it good to imagine, like you always imaginin’. He even kinda looks like you, in’it?” Wolf’s teeth sparkled when he was finished explaining himself.
“Hey, thanks,” Taylor said, so thrilled with the knowledge that he was significant enough for Wolf to have taken notice of him that he was oblivious to the sweet but subtle insult that his parallel contained. “I always thought I was so good, but goin’ to these classes makes me feel like intimidated, like I’m more insecure than I thought I would be. And when you’re acting, that just makes you look like an idiot.”
“You just gotta find a part of every character you play inside you. And then it’s easy ’cause you’re not really acting and you’re not afraid to do it wrong ’cause it’s real,” Wolf told him.
Taylor stared at Wolf in total shock, willing to soak up his obviously good advice. “Did you act or somethin’?” he asked.
“No, it just makes sense. Besides, acting is all us Injuns are doin’ anyway. I’ve got to act and dress like a white man every day.” Wolf chuckled at his own humor.
“Wait, I don’t get it.” Taylor said, staring squarely at Wolf as if his entire acting career hung in the balance of understanding the concept.
“Let’s say you’ve got to be a character that’s really angry. You just gotta find the part of you that’s really angry and let it out,” Wolf said in between bites from a can of cold ravioli.
Instead of indulging Taylor’s obvious desperation for tutelage, Wolf allowed what he had said to act as a tide, pulling him deep into the ocean of his own angst. He addressed Aria and Taylor as if they themselves had been the offenders. “The killin’ of us has been so effective that many of us Natives can barely say a word in our own language, much less recite the prayers the ways our ancestors did. This is what they did to us. The pain and the anger is so deep and ancestral that I got no idea what the fuck’s going on inside me or how to deal with it. But our perspectives and truths are met with deaf ears. The futility and hopelessness in all the people of Turtle Island is a wild fire destroying us from within.”
Wolf beat his chest as he spoke. He paused for a moment and then went on, letting his anger spill forth from wherever it was stored within him.
“It’s been like this ever since the moment they set foot on
