Riders on the Rez



  Riders on the Rez

  by Jan Lofton

  Copyright Jan Lofton 2010

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  The Good-Bye Man

  by

  Linda Brown with Jan Lofton

  1

  On the Bus

  We left the base at Oceanside, California way before daylight. We were out past the shopping malls at sunup, out to where oranges lit up hillsides, hanging round and orange orange orange on dark green trees like Halloween-colored Christmas ornaments.

  At first it was cool to be riding up so high above every-body else on the road. Little kids looked at me from the back seats of cars when we passed and I made faces at them. They fell over laughing every time.

  Then we got to the desert and that was like boring, just brown over and over again. There weren’t many cars on the road anymore, either and it seemed like we were on the bus forever.

  I played my video game until I got sick of it. I thought I’d go to the bathroom one more time. The one in the back of the bus had running water and everything.

  “Billy, sit still! We are almost there!” Mom gets like that when she is trying to study.

  I was just going to take another peek at the mom and two kids sitting behind us. They got on the bus at a place called Kingman, Arizona. The boy was a little bigger than me. A fifth-grader, maybe, with dark skin and cold black hair like mine, only his was down past his shoulders. His sister looked like she was about six.

  I tried to whisper. “Are they real Indians?” They were dressed pretty normal in jeans and tee-shirts.

  “Yes, they are. If they are from around here, they might be Mojave but they looked Navajo to me.”

  I’d never seen any Indians before except for my Mom and my Dad. People always asked if we were Mexicans or Chinese or Indians from India. Once in a while someone guessed Native American.

  Some kids used to call me names like Geronimo and Big Chief Sitting Bull. I beat them up, and nobody called me anything but Billy after that.

  My whole name is Billy Tsosie. My Dad grew up in a white foster home. My Mom was raised by a sister who died.

  I had always thought there were only three of us in my whole family, but I was wrong. Mom told me that after she got the phone call. Now, I was on my way to ‘the rez’ to meet the rest of them for the first time and I hoped they’d wear their war bonnets to the bus station.

  2

  Showing Off

  We got off the bus at Flagstaff. So did that other family. No one was waiting for us or for them either. I rolled our big suitcase into the waiting room.

  Mom sat down on a plastic chair and opened her book again. The other boy and his family took seats on the other side of the room. I looked at pictures of the Grand Canyon on a rack of postcards. I would have bought one for Dad if I had any money.

  The parking lot outside had bright lights overhead. It was empty, too, and all the stores were closed.

  “Look at it, Mom! It’s perfect! Let me go skate, O.K.?” I said. “Puh-lee-eeze?” She hadn’t wanted me to bring my board, but I knew I’d find some place to use it. It was bungeed it to the side of our suitcase.

  She thought about it for a minute. “OK, but remember, I'll be watching. You don’t do jump tricks in parking lots! And you don’t go near the street.”

  I tick-tacked across to the dry cleaner’s and nose-ollied back. The two kids watched me through the station window

  This would be a perfect place to practice my ollies over the yellow berms between parking places. They are easy, once you know how. So are pop-shove-its, if you jump high enough. Mom would have a fit if she saw me doing one of those without any pads on, but her head was down.

  I was about to try a quick one when the boy said something to his mother. He got up and headed for the door. When he came outside, I coasted over to him.

  “Yaah-te,” he said.

  That means hello. “Yaah-te,” I said. “Mom said you must be a Navajo. That’s what we are! My name’s Billy. What’s yours?”

  “Danny,” he said. “I’m Navajo- Mojave.”

  “I live in Oceanside. Where do you live?” I asked. “What grade are you in?”

  He wrinkled his face. “What’s with you? You talk like a bilagaana, but you look Dine.”

  “Dine” is what Navajos call themselves. It means “The People.” Danny had said I sound white, but look Navajo. I started taking my jacket off, just in case I was gonna have to fight him, too.

  3:

  Meeting Family

  A dusty red pickup truck wheeled into the parking lot and a tall man in a straw cowboy hat got out. Mom came running out of the bus station before he got halfway across the lot. She grabbed him and squeezed him hard. He had to be my Uncle Atsiti.

  “Look at how big you are!” she told him.

  Mom hadn’t seen any of her family since she was seventeen. She had run away from home when she was still a teenager and gotten a job in a burger joint near Camp Pendleton Marine Base. That’s where she met my Dad.

  “Margaret, don’t you know your own cousin?” Uncle Atsiti asked. He nodded toward the pregnant lady from the bus. She and the girl stood behind Danny now. “Mona got married a couple of years after you left the rez. These here are her kids, Danny and Shawna.”

  Mom squealed, almost girly-like, threw Uncle Atsiti away, and grabbed up Mona. Me and Shawna smiled at each other, but Danny turned away and walked back into the station. He didn’t seem too happy to be my cousin.

  Uncle Atsiti faced me. “And this has to be Billy!” He stuck out his hand. “Welcome home, stranger.” His palm was wide and callused.

  Danny struggled through the station door, pulling our bag behind him. He was carrying another suitcase in his hand and had one slung over his shoulder. Uncle Atsiti threw them in the back of the truck, along with my board.

  “Saddle up!” he said.

  Seemed like we were all going to the same funeral. Mom and I got into the front seat. The others squeezed onto a little seat behind us.

  I didn’t see any houses or stores, or lights from anywhere after we left the city. There were about a bazillion stars out, though. The last time I had seen the Milky Way was when Dad and I went camping before he left.

  The adults blah-blahed on about people I didn’t know. Danny whispered to Shawna. The truck rocked back and forth. I wanted to stay awake and listen but the last thing I heard was Shawna’s giggle.

  4

  In the Hogan

  The room was dark as a cave. This was my great-grandmother’s hogan. I remembered that she had nearly squeezed the life out of me last night before she let me stumble off to a pallet on the floor.

  A bed and chair stood in one curve of the round cabin. A old-fashion stove took up another wall and a lantern, the kind that worked on fire, hung from the ceiling.

  I heard the women talking outside the open door. Mom laughed at something someone said.

  I was about to get up when my great-grandmother came through the door. Her white hair was in a knot and she was wearing a long skirt.

  I pretended like I was still asleep and peeked to see what she was going to do. She picked up some plastic jugs and went to leave.

  “Ah-choo!” I faked a sneeze.

  She stopped and turned. “Well, look who’s awake! Good morning, Sleeping Bear!”

  She smiled at me like I was someone really special. “Get up and let your Shi-ima see you before the sun goes down again!”

  I crawle
d out from under the blanket and she wrapped her arms around me and said something in Navajo, some words I didn’t understand. She smelled like wood fires, wool sweaters and the sheepskin I had slept on. When she let go, she handed me the two jugs. “Here, boy, go on up to the house and get us some water.”

  5

  Spinning Yarn

  A little shade house with no sides to it stood a ways off from the hogan. Mom and Mona were there, sitting on a blanket with Shawna. Miles of open desert stretched down and out behind them toward a far-off snow-topped mountain. I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go. There wasn’t another house anywhere in sight.

  Mom was rolling up a kite string out of a basket of fluffy stuff. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Spinning yarn from sheep wool” she said. “I learned how to do this when I was about your age. Your great-grandmother takes the yarn and dyes it different colors with bark and roots and flowers. Then she uses it for her weaving”

  Mom waved the roll over her shoulder toward a tall wood frame, laced with strings. “That’s her rug loom, there. The small one inside the hogan is the one I used when I was little.”

  “We Navajo girls know we are old enough to learn to weave when we can touch the palm of our hand to a spiderweb without breaking it,” Mona said. “Margaret did it a long time before I did.”

  I looked around for a spider web. I wanted to try it, too.

  Mom saw the jugs I was carrying. “The water barrel is around the back,” she said. “Atsiti or one of the boys will show you.”

  6

  Ro, Mo, Joe, and