The Ivory and the Horn

We start having regular powwows after that night, once, sometimes twice a month. Some of the skins they start to making dancing outfits, going backup to the reserve for visits and asking about steps and songs from the old folks. Gets to be we feel like a community, a small skin nation living here in exile with the ruins of broken-down tenements and abandoned buildings all around us. Gets to be we start remembering some of our stories and sharing them with each other instead of sharing bottles. Gets to be we have something to feel proud about.

Some of us we find jobs. Some of us we try to climb up the side of the wagon but we keep falling off. Some of us we go back to homes we can hardly remember. Some of us we come from homes where we can't live, can't even breathe, and drift here and there until we join this tribe that Albert he helped us find.

And even if Albert he's not here anymore, the stories go on. They have to go on, I know that much. I tell them every chance I get.

***

See, this Coyote he got in trouble again, this Coyote he's always getting in trouble, you know that by now, same as me. And when he's in jail this time be sees that it's all tribes inside, the same as it is outside. White tribes, black tribes, yellow tribes, skin tribes. He finally understands, finally realizes that maybe there can't ever be just one tribe, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying.

But even in jail this Coyote he can't stay out of trouble and one day he gets into another fight and he gets cut again, but this time he thinks maybe he's going to die.

'Albert,' Coyote he says, 'I am one crazy skin. I am never going to learn, am I?'

'Maybe not this time,' Albert says, and he's holding Coyote's head and he's wiping the dribble of blood that comes out of the side of Coyote's mouth and is trickling down his chin. 'But that's why you're Coyote. The wheel goes round and you'll get another chance.'

Coyote he's trying to be brave, but he's feeling weaker and it hurts, it hurts, this wound in his chest that cuts to the bone, that cuts the thread that blinds him to this story.

'There's a thing I have to remember,' Coyote he says, 'but I can't find it. I can't find its story...'

'Doesn't matter how small they try to make you,' Albert he reminds Coyote. 'You're still Coyote.'

'Ya-ha-hey,' Coyote he says. 'Now I remember.'

Then Coyote he grins and he lets the pain take him away into another story.

The Forever Trees

If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are.

— Zen saying

1

In the end, what she remembers isn't her name, not at first, who she was or even how and where she lived her life. What she remembers is this:

When I was a child I had this ability to simply go somewhere. It wasn't a good place or a bad place—just another place. I wouldn't hide there, but when I was there, I couldn't be found. I didn't have to walk there, I'd just be there, in that ghost place.

Sometimes now I think it was a part of me, a piece of my mind where I'd go when things were bad. But then I remember: I went there when things were good, too.

2

Tasha never stops thinking, thinking. She's a visual artist but her mind's always full of words, scuttling around inside her head like mice in an old house when the sun goes down, the eyelids are drawn, the shutters fastened, the body still sleeping, but that secret part of her where the spirit candle burns the brightest is busy- busy, talking to itself, remembering, dreaming. She paints because of those words.

It's like this: She sees colors for words, like a light mottled grey touched with soft green and purple for whisper. Free is a Prussian blue that goes on forever, acquiring a hint of violet just before it vanishes from sight. Cacti is a deep fuchsia, but cactus is a warm buttery yellow with streaks of olive green and greenish browns. New is the electric color of a kingfisher's wing and ford is the coppery red of an old pen nib, but Newford is a grey with highlights of henna and purple.

Joe doesn't pretend to understand. He looks at her art. He knows that her paintings are fragments of stories, conversations, essays, all chasing down those mice in her head, trying to put them into some semblance of order, but he doesn't get the translation. All he sees is color on the canvas, random patterns that make no sense even after Tasha reads them to him.

But it doesn't stop them from being friends.

They're just friends. Good friends.

'I don't want to exchange bodily fluids with you,' she tells him once. 'It always spoils things.'

He wonders at the time if that's how she really meant to put it, or if she just liked the way the words looked as she said them, but he understands what she means. Sex is good. Sex is fun. There's no better place to be, he thinks, than in the middle of a relationship when most of the awkwardness is gone and you're still crazy about each other. But one person always loves the other more, and the imbalance undermines the best of intentions and eventually it all falls apart. He's seen it happen. He's had it happen. Lovers have come and gone in his life, but Tasha's constant. She's not one of the guys, not even close. She brings out the best in him, the way a friend should, but too often doesn't. Asks hard questions, but doesn't answer them for him. Lets him work them out for himself. The way he does for her.

'Men always want to fix everything,' she tells him another time, 'and I can't figure out why. I'd settle for simply understanding things.'

Gets to where he knows exactly what she means. She talks about men, he talks about women, they're generalizing, like you do, but they're not talking about each other. It's not that they're sexless. The gender thing is there, it's part of what endears them to each other, the insights they get into what each is not, but the attraction's strictly platonic. Which makes it all the more confusing when Joe finds himself thinking not about her, Tasha, his friend, but about the curve of her neck and the way her hennaed hair lies so soft against it, how she fills her sweater and jeans with perfect contours that he wants to explore, palm to skin; soft, she'd be so soft, so smooth, like silk; touching her would be like touching silk, but warm.

He'd give anything to taste her lips, and all of a sudden everything's way too complicated and he wants to fix what's going on instead of understanding it.

3

To get to that ghost place, first I'd have to find the meadow. Summer growth slaps my knees as I follow the long slope up from the bottom of the hill where the hedge is an unruly thicket tangled up in heaps of gathered fieldstone. It's been years since the slope was ploughed, but not so long that the forest has resettled the open ground. The weeds are never too tall, and there are always windflowers in bloom, great stuttering sweeps of color that twist and wind in spiraling paths up and down the slope of the hill. Sometimes there's a hawk, high up, floating in the sky, bat I don't see it right away, rarely look for the grey-brown cut of its wings against the blue. As I make my way up the slope, my gaze is always on the forest.

It's a crown of trees on the crest of the hill, trunks and fallen snags slow-dancing around the granite outcrops, a hundred-acre wood, but Pooh doesn't live there and I'm not Christopher Robin. I wouldn't even want to be. I liked being a girl and I like being a woman.

Under the trees, the air is cool and dark and rich with the wet smell of old damp wood, of ferns and mushrooms and the moss that cushions my footfalls. Not far from where the edge of the meadow and the forest blurs, a natural spring bubbles up from a leak in the granite and trickles pell-mell through the leaf mold and around the stones. The water hurries with a jigging and reeling rush that's long since cut a narrow cleft through the dark red earth as it ribbons its way down the slope. All the trees seem to lean down to listen to it as it goes by.