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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y
that plane, but only one of them was from Sacred Heart School, and only one of them was my brother.
Father and Sister stand with their shoulders sloped together, almost touching, and I stand right next to them, all alone, my shoulders square as rulers, not touching anything, pushing right past them before they can even reach out, pushing right out of the building, out into the woods. Away.
I have to get away from what I already know, from what I don’t ever want to have to know: my brother Bunna is dead.
Th
ey don’t even have to say it. I can feel it in the slope of their shoulders, in the air itself, in the way my chest gets tight like a cage that won’t let me ever breathe deep again. I can feel Bunna’s absence like you feel a part of you that’s no longer there—a leg amputated, a lung gone.
Bunna is dead.
I’m running through the woods, deep into the trees, where there are no trails. No way in. No way out. It’s getting dark, and I’m running blind. Maybe I’m running backward, watching the past wind away from me like a ruined fi lm of Roy Rogers and John Wayne spilling out of a projector onto a dusty fl oor in a dark, empty room.
Gone.
Or maybe I’m not even running at all, not even moving, just standing there, letting spruce branches slap me in the face, slash my skin raw. It’s a better kind of pain than the one I feel inside right now.
Inside there’s only one thing I know: I have to get away 164
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F O R E V E R / L u k e
from everyone and everything because I’m like a dog with pain and I don’t want nobody talking at me about it. I don’t want nobody being sorry at me or following after me with some crap about the compassion of Christ. I just want to run and keep on running. Let them try to catch me. Th
ey can’t.
Th
ey can’t because my pain’s taking me places no one else can go. Places I gotta go all alone. Without Bunna. Me and Bunna who never in our whole lives have been apart. Not once. Me and Bunna who were spliced together from the day he was born, sliced apart forever now. Forever.
Nieces and nephews too numerous to count. Th at’s what they
always put on peoples’ funeral papers, the ones they make at church. Funerals at the church back home are always packed full of people—nieces and nephews too numerous to count.
But not here at Sacred Heart School, where there’s no one to count family, no one counting me as left behind. No mom, no dad, no aunts, no uncles. No brothers.
I’m not running anymore, but my heart is banging at my ribs like a rabid fox. A fox locked up in a too-tight cage.
No brothers at all.
All of a sudden, anger washes over me in icy waves, making me clench my fi sts again and again, my worthless fi sts. I wanna beat the shit out of Bunna once and for all, but he’s not there. I want to box him up so bad, he’s gonna refuse to ever leave me. Th
en I’m crying, remembering how the last night
we were together, that’s just exactly what I did do. Beat the shit out of him until he stopped me with those words, those stupid words: “I gotta go home,” he said . What in the hell 165
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y
does home mean to him now? To me without a brother? To anybody?
It’s hot and sticky in the middle of all these Sacred Heart trees, and there isn’t a drop of wind anywhere. I’m itching like crazy from spruce prickles and mosquito bites.
Back home there’s a breeze coming in off the ocean ice, and I wish I could feel its cool breath on my sweaty neck right now. Wish I was sitting in a boat with chunks of ocean ice just sort of hanging there in between the smooth water and the cloudless sky—drifting with their refl ections white and ghost-like against the glassy water.
I’ve got my eyes closed, imagining it, but when I open them, it’s like the terror of a nightmare, looking into the darkness of Sacred Heart, trees blotting out everything.
Gone. Everything’s gone.
Suddenly I realize I’m crying, crying so hard I can hardly breathe.
How can anybody even breathe in a place where there is no wind, no open sky, no ocean, no family? Nothing worth counting?
Ever.
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PART IV
The Earth Can’t Shake Us
1963–1964
We
were here.
We were always here,
hanging on where others couldn’t,
marking signs the others wouldn’t,
counting kin our own way. We
survived. Th
e earth
can’t shake
us.
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He’s My Brother
SEPTEMBER 1963
CHICKIE
—
When he came to pick us up in Fairbanks at the end of the summer, Father Flanagan was driving the new bus. But Bunna wasn’t on it. Bunna would never ever sit next to me on
