Everyday in the week I’m in a different city. If I stay too long people try to pull me down They talk about me like a dog
Talkin’ about the clothes I wear
But they don’t realise they’re the ones who’s square Stone Free, Jimi Hendrix
Sloe gin fizzes were so sweet they went down quick but quicker yet for me because I liked to guzzle. It wasn’t the taste, it was the buzz. And the quicker the better. The only prob- lem was, that as long as I was on the dance floor, I could spin and dance as if I were an exqui- site butterfly, free of gravity. But now that the concert was over, gravity had pulled my body onto the hallway floor, my head still spinning. I slowed it down by concentrating on the undu- lating shrills of the flute that still skipped and bounced along the shredded nerves of my ears. In no time, I was adrift in sloe gin when a familiar dreamscape floated by.
It was Allison, freckles, wild hair, heavy, black framed glasses, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. Joanne pouted with frosty lips, her honey hair glistening. We were riding the city bus, on our way to Allison’s house, passing over the cobblestone streets of St. John’s, lined with its brooding Victorian architecture. From Water Street, I saw the towering bows of tankers and freighters at dock. I could almost smell damp, salty harbor.
In my recurring dream, my friends always disappear and I end up alone, pleading with the driver, “turn here, turn there.” But it’s always the wrong turn taking me from one strange street to the other.
I held the happy image in my Sloe gin daze for as long as I possibly could. Somehow, I believed that if I could make the bus pass through the right turns and make it arrive, I would finally be at peace. But a more radical idea had taken root of late from reading Carlos
The images suddenly dissolved to the sound of my name. I opened my eyes to Twila’s face, her bleached blonde hair hanging in damp strands in front of me. She had on so much mascara her overly large eyes looked like huge blue spiders with their velvety legs smeared into her face. Her apple-cheeks were flushed bright red from dancing, pimples rising from her melt- ing Clearasil. She weaved above me.
“Got a schmoke?” She slurred.
”Nope,” I said trying not to hate her because she wasn’t Allison and that I wasn’t in St. John’s. It wasn’t her fault I was in Missoula and had been for almost a year. She was practically the only girl who spoke to me at school anyway. We had things in common. Sloe gin, anything Boone's Farm made, and whatever else we could get wasted on.
Grinning she shrugged, tipped the last of the bottle and disappeared with the rest of the concert crowd down the hallway.
After the floor finally leveled out, I stood up and checked my pockets for papers and tobacco and finding none, walked over to the third floor railing overlooking the atrium of the student union building. As I leaned over it, I suddenly wondered what it would be like to jump.
“Thinking of jumping?” A voice said, startling me. I turned to see who just seemed to have read my mind.
“I’ve thought about it,” he said, not smiling like he was kidding. He was leaning over the railing too, strings of long black hair hiding most of his face.
“You smoke?” He turned offering a cigarette. My stomach did a flip-flop when I saw his face, which was startlingly handsome.
“Sure,” I said. He had nice hands with long fingers and wide, flat nails. He took a wood- en match out of his jacket pocket and scratched it alive with his thumbnail. I sucked the filter deeply and then stepped back to get a better look hoping that my split ends hadn’t taken on a
life of their own and were hanging the way I had ironed them that night. But I knew it was more likely clustered in damp, flattened waves from dancing all night. I tried not to think about it.
He propped his foot on the wall and leaned back to take a drag of his cigarette, his other hand shoved into his pocket. His unbound hair draped thickly over his shoulders. It wasn’t real- ly black; but more blue-black, like ravens’ feathers. I tried to focus on his eyes to see why they were so unusual, seemingly suspended in a clear, mercurial liquid. But he would only hold my gaze for brief moments, looking away to somewhere over my shoulder. By the black of his hair, the tone of his skin, and his angular cheekbones I guessed he was an Indian.
“Your shirt’s far out,” I said pointing to the pink tie-dyed t-shirt he wore under his Levis jacket.
“Used to be red,” he said smiling. “I tie-dyed it myself.” “Really?”
He nodded.
“What about the necklace?” His hand went to his throat where a thin strip of leather held a large, yellow bead.
“It’s an African trade bead. I put it on here.”
“What kind of beadwork is that?” He asked pointing his cigarette at the beaded designs on a fringed buckskin jacket I was wearing.
“Sioux, I think,” I said. “The jacket belonged to my Grandpa. He’s dead, died last year.” “So’s Jimi,” he said with distant eyes. “Hendrix.” he added when I responded with a blank look. “He was half Cherokee. Just listen to the rhythms and guitar leads and you’ll hear it.”
“Hmm,” I said pretending I knew what he was talking about and recalling Hendrix in a headband and fringed and beaded white buckskin outfit, playing an electrified version of the Star-Spangled Banner on the Woodstock movie.
Kenny played drums and had a band when he’d lived in Billings. His mother lived at the Crow Agency, which he said was on the Crow Reservation. But now he lived in Missoula with his older sister, Rainey, and a man named Jim, who were both studying at the university. Jim was his guardian.
“Jim’s only half Indian, but he hates his white half, so he’s OK,” Kenny said. “What about you?” I asked.
“I’m Crow/Cheyenne—a full-blood,” he said proudly.
It turned out we both went to Hellgate High. Ironically, so had my mother and father. Their unhappy experiences there told me it hadn’t changed much. “Yeah, a bunch of ignorant jocks,” I said remembering my first day, me in a mini-skirt, boots and a straw Bonnie & Clyde gangster-style hat with a carnation stuck in the brim, and them snickering and pointing like I had just stepped off the Starship Enterprise. My English teacher, an ancient woman who was probably teaching when my father attended, was especially upset by my mini skirts. She had found any opportunity to embarrass me in class. English had been my favorite subject, one I had always excelled in. Now I found any reason to skip it. Overall, I got the point pretty quick. Missoula was a Levis and flannel shirt kind of town.
“They’re all plastic,” Kenny said looking off into the distance, “ ’cause they’re white. White people fuck everything up. They fucked up my people. They fucked up my land. They’re fucking up the whole world.”
I tried to imagine myself as one of the white people Kenny hated. But he didn’t seem to notice I was white, so I pretended he was talking about some other white people and nodded in agreement.
“I read about what happened at Alcatraz. “ I offered. The article ran in Rampartswith a photograph of “Better Red Than Dead,” scrawled in red paint across the huge rocks outside the prison. Rampartswas a magazine my father brought home that I read and clipped pictures and poems from to make montages on the walls of my closet. But, I had never been this close to any of the things I had read about.
He’d never heard of Ramparts, he said and then looked past me for a while, taking deep drags from his cigarette.
“Where’s your dad?” I asked.
“Dead.” He said flatly and then, “Do you want to get high?”
“Yeah,” I said, the sloe gin buzz fading and knowing I wanted to get closer.
Outside the building, we stood in the snow while he loaded the bowl of a deer horn pipe with hash. All around us, snow crystals sparkling in the frozen stillness of the wee hours of the morning, clouds of our breath hanging in the air between us. Frost quickly formed in my damp hair, turning it stiff and white. I could feel the cold biting into my lungs, but I would have stood there until my boots were sealed in ice, as long as he was there too. He pulled another match from his pocket and scratched it to life, the fire illuminating the hard, handsome angles of his face as he puffed deeply. I coughed violently. I had never smoked hash before.
“You walking home?” He asked, offering to accompany me. I accepted, not knowing where Twila had disappeared.
“They don’t go for that in this town, you know, me a redskin and you white,” he said. “I don’t care if you don’t,” I said, not really sure of what he was talking about.
As we stumbled over the icy streets, he put his arm around me to keep me warm. Together we floated down the cobblestone lanes of old Missoula. Near the yellow brick Milwaukee Road tower, we stopped. He looked skyward.
“Listen,” he said. I heard the rumble of switcher engines and the intermittent crash of boxcars coupling in the train yards behind the depot. Then, the far off honking of geese as sev- eral V-shaped shadows slipped across the crisp, starry night.
“Northern geese,” he said, “going south for the winter. It’s a sign.”
Of what, I didn’t ask. I was too lost in the warmth of the arm around me. “Yeah, Northern geese.”