The floodgates opened
and I held her
and then she sobbed
and blew her nose on my sleeve
and said she was
sorry.
I knew it was my job to stay strong right now.
That was all I knew.
I silently told the fuckin’ black dogs to fuck off
and they did.
And suddenly,
Old Man was in the little closet with us.
He looked a little older, a little more tired. Bent over.
I heard him speak in my head in the usual way.
Oh boy, he said, you sure got your hands full
and he nodded at Caitlan.
I shrugged. You look tired, I said silently to him.
Yeah, he said. I’ve been staying up late.
So much to think about on this side.
She’s pretty, he said.
But it looks like a bit of trouble.
I must have looked puzzled because he added,
It’s okay, though. It’s always okay.
Caitlan was pulling herself together
We’ve been in here a long time. Fred
will probably show up. But that’s okay.
It’s only Fred and he’s cool. But we
should get
to our next class. I’m sorry.
Nothing to be sorry about, I said.
Probably best if we don’t
leave here together
in case somebody sees.
Right. Old Man nodded.
And then she was gone
and I was alone again
with my grandfather. You like her? he asked.
What’s not to like? I answered.
She’s got Indian hair,
Indian eyes.
I noticed. That’s good.
It’s all good, he said.
When you get to where
I am, you get to see things
on a lot of levels.
And your eyes work in different ways.
I get to see the sunset
from the other side of the sun
and the sunrise too.
And people—
you can see people inside out,
if you know what I mean.
What can I do to help her?
You’ll need to be careful.
She could drag you down.
But she said she was trying to help me.
She’s kind. But a bit intense.
You noticed.
I don’t miss much.
She needs you. So there’s that.
Can’t ignore that.
Just don’t fall in love.
Oops.
Right.
Sounds like she’s still in love with Jenson Hayes.
There’s that.
That can’t be good.
She didn’t have closure.
Everyone needs that.
What can I do about that?
Old Man straightened his back. That’s what he
does when he’s about to leave me.
I’ll ask around. Everyone shows up
on my side
of the sunset eventually.
I’ll just Google him
and see.
And then of course he was gone. And leave it to Old Man to try to blow my mind by suggesting you could find someone on the other side just by Googling a name. But then that’s Old Man for ya.
Just then
the door opened
and I guess it was Fred
’cause he had a bucket and a mop. I was just sitting there
in a chair with my hands on my knees.
Fred looked surprised
but not too surprised. I guess he’d come to his janitor’s closet before
and seen lots of unusual things.
It’s okay, kid, he said. Finish up with whatever you’re doing and I’ll come back in a few minutes.
And he left.
So I don’t know if he thought I was doing drugs or whatever.
But it didn’t matter
much, I guess.
Not to
Fred.
The End of the Day
No one said, Why did you miss class?
I went to English then history
and then it was time to go home.
I looked around outside for Caitlan
but she was gone. I wondered what she did after school.
I had
nowhere
to go but home.
So I went home.
When I went in the door there was my mom
lying on the living room floor face up eyes closed
arms at her side.
Mom! I screamed.
She didn’t move but she spoke:
What?
She didn’t open her eyes.
Are you okay? Yes.
She sounded annoyed.
What are you doing? I’m meditating.
Just shut up so I can
meditate.
She was mad.
So I didn’t say another word.
Went into the kitchen
for peanut butter
and celery.
Peanut butter is smooth on the tongue and celery,
well, you gotta love celery: the way it crunches.
So after a few minutes
my mom
comes into the kitchen and lights a cigarette.
First one of the day, she says.
I promised myself I wouldn’t
smoke
until I meditated
for twenty minutes.
My mom could take the longest drag
on a cigarette,
like half the cigarette
and then hold
the smoke
in her lungs.
I chose not to say a word
about secondhand smoke
or any
of that shit
that would make her mad.
Instead, I said I was sorry
for messing up her meditation on the living room floor.
It’s hard, you know.
Everything is hard
for a single mother
who’s given up all
her addictions
except smokes
and alcohol.
I know, Mom, I said.
It can’t be easy.
My Mother Knows
She knows that I love her
and would do just about anything for her
except buy her drugs. She used to do that sometimes.
Give me money to buy her drugs from this guy named
Chevy. I liked Chevy.
Everybody did
even though he’d sell weed or coke or maybe even crack
to a kid like me
to take home to my mother. Chevy bought groceries
for families
that didn’t have any money, usually because the father
or mother
had spent it all on drugs.
When we moved away—off reserve
Chevy gave my mom a whole
carton of smokes
as a going-away present.
This was after my father was gone.
I think my mom liked Chevy
but didn’t want her kid
having a drug dealer
for a secondhand father.
I have to draw the line somewhere, she said.
And when we moved, she got real moody
’cause she gav
e up everything
but eventually went back to
nicotine and alcohol
in what she called “limited quantities.”
She worried about me
and took me to counselors
and healers
and psychics. I told them all about
Old Man and they all told me
that was great. The psychics said
they could see him. But I don’t know.
The psychics said I was an Old Soul and that part of me was damaged because of some kind of shit that happened in a previous life. The not-talking routine that I did sometimes was a good thing because the silence, they said, helped cleanse me of negative energy from my past lives. I asked one of them, Jack—Jack the side-burned psychic—if he could see Old Man and he said he could, that Old Man was standing over my left shoulder. And I turned and sure enough, Old Man was smiling. But that was nothing new.
So Jack said Old Man would always be there for me. He also said my father was somewhere Out West and kind of messed up but would come back one day. He said he saw the two of us as adults drinking beer in a gloomy bar. And there were no other people in the bar. Just black dogs.
And I said,
Yeah,
that’s probably
me
and him.
But the psychic said it was okay, that when I was an adult and we had that beer together, we’d both be pretty messed up but not totally fucked. And that, he assured me, was the way life worked for most people, even Old Souls like me.
You just got to work with
what the spirit world hands you,
and grow from there, he said.
Isn’t that true, Old Man? he asked.
And Old Man nodded, straightened his back and disappeared.
Then the psychic told my mother
That will be a hundred bucks.
Cooking
My mother stopped cooking when
my dad left.
She said I had to cook from then on.
I said I was okay with that.
So I shopped for food.
And cooked.
When my mom finished her cigarette
she took out another
and just looked at it for a long while
and then spoke to it:
You bastard, she said. Let go.
And then she put it back in the pack
and I asked her if she wanted me
to make
spaghetti. I love you, kid, she said. Someday.
Someday.
But she didn’t finish the someday sentence.
She never
does.
So I boiled water
and it got real steamy in the kitchen
and I kept thinking
I should expand our list
of stuff we would eat for meals.
Maybe start reading some of
those women’s magazines
I saw in the supermarket line
with recipes
for artichoke salads
and sautéed eggplant
and thirty ways to lose weight
and fifty ways
to have great sex.
As I dropped in the spaghetti—
the really thin stuff
called capelli d’Angelo angel hair
hair of the angels—
I told my mom about Caitlan.
Maybe I shouldn’t have done that
’cause she pulled that second smoke
out from her pack
and lit it,
took the signature long drag,
tilted her head back
and said
Holy fuck.
Maybe
sending you to school
was a total
absolute
mistake.
The First Time He Walked Up to Me
I didn’t know who he was at first.
Just another guy at school.
I didn’t know what he wanted.
You’re Jeremy, right? I’d been walking down the hall
my eyes looking at the dusty floor
thinking about Geronimo
preventing the sun from coming up.
I looked up, nodded.
Saw this skinny white kid
pale, like a lot of white people when
they don’t get out in the sun
with messy, kinda long hair hanging
down over his eyes.
Yeah, Jeremy, I said.
We need to talk. You okay with that?
I thought maybe he was selling weed
and assumed I was a stoner.
What do we need to talk about?
(The word “need” was freaking me a bit.)
Don’t be scared. Shit. I guess I looked scared.
I look that way a lot
(even when I’m not scared). So?
He looked puzzled now. Said, You can’t tell that I’m different?
I wanted to say all white people kinda looked the same to me
but I received a knuckle sandwich for that one once.
Lesson learned.
Dunno, I said.
You don’t know who I am?
Like what kind of bullshit, now?
How was I supposed to know who he was?
No, man. You somebody important,
someone famous?
No, dude. (Nobody had called me dude in a long while.)
Who are you, dude?
Jenson Hayes, he said.
I guess I stopped breathing and stared.
You okay, dude? he asked. I let out my breath and
took a new gulp of air.
I’m okay, I said. You?
He smiled a crooked smile, snorted a little.
Well, he said, you know, dude.
Yeah, We Needed to Talk
Can we go outside? he said.
I know you have a free period now.
So I followed him outside into some drizzling rain.
There was a lot of litter on the sidewalk.
Why me? I asked.
Old Man said you’d help.
I laughed. Of course. What did he do, Google you?
Something like that, Jenson Hayes said.
He’s very cool.
My grandfather invented cool.
Does Caitlan know
that you are around?
Not yet. But I saw you two
talking in Fred’s closet.
You saw us? You were there?
Not exactly but … you know.
I guess. Okay, so here you are.
Here I am and Old Man said
you’d be the one person
in the universe who would accept me
for who I am now
and not ask too many
bullshit questions.
I guess I could be that person.
But you really are …
well ... you know?
Yeah, he said, brushing the long hair
out of his eyes.
And in some ways it’s all okay now,
but in other ways
it really sucks.
At least you don’t have
to go to school, right, dude?
That’s one of the perks.
But I miss a lot of things.
I miss being a vegan,
I miss trying to change the world,
and I even miss arguing with
greedy assholes.
I miss being who I was.
B
ut at least you don’t have to go to school
and you probably don’t even have to
deal with assholes.
He nodded. True, but one more thing.
I miss Caitlan.
What Love Is
Love, Jenson said, stays with you even if you move on. Love takes up a whole lot more of who you are than most people realize. You think you are all about arms and legs and your big fat brain with ideas and all those opinions—let me tell you, I was the king of opinions. And you think some things are important: like what to eat and what you look like and what people think of you and how you are going to make it through life and what kind of grade you are going to get on the final exam.
But none of that is important.
Guess you’re right on that, I added.
So when me and Caitlan had this thing going,
I was stronger than I’d ever been before.
I mean strong and in a good way.
Nobody could get to me
like they had all my life.
Not my asshole father.
Not the mean teachers.
Not the creeps at school.
But then we had this
little argument,
Caitlan and me.
And we stopped
talking.
And I got stubborn.
Felt isolated.
All alone
and
weak.
He smelled it.
He knew I was weak.
He pretended to
be my friend.
Told me things about Caitlan that were not true.
Who did?
Thomas Heaney.
Paper Clip, I said.
I call him Paper Clip.
He had some of his buddies
say all kinds of weird crap about me.
And Thomas
told Caitlan some stuff about me
that wasn’t true.
I stopped going to school.
I should have been angry
and fought it.
Sometimes it’s not that easy, I said.
Instead, I got weaker.
And then I got a text message
that came from
Caitlan.
At least it came from her phone
and it said
we were over
and she was going out with Thomas Heaney.
Fuckin’ Paper Clip.
Just Standing Around in the Drizzle Talking to a Dead Dude
That pretty much sums up the situation
but I knew Jenson wasn’t just here to shoot the shit.
So, Jenson, what now?
I need you to help set things straight with Caitlan.
She can’t hear you
or see you