CHAPTER SEVEN

1957

Me and Charlie started going together, and it seemed in the beginning like it never would end. He found me waiting in the tree like a present all wrapped up, and I didn’t have so much as a choice to look the other way.

I was always thinking about the world, and all the flatness that lay between me and it, and the television tapped me hints through invisible wires, and everybody’s pictures were always smiling in magazines. But that was the closest I could get to where I wanted to be. When I found Charlie, it was like he was the only thing I could see for miles around on that dry hot prairie.

When he climbed up in the tree house, Charlie didn’t so much as look at me. He didn’t say a word, not even his name. He just laid on his back stiff as a board, like something electric that wasn’t plugged in, his eyes wide open. I got all jumpy wondering what it was he decided wasn’t right. I thought he was disappointed on account of my panties maybe, and how I showed him they were no account. My sister Barbara had got all new ones when she married Rodney, and one day she spread them out on the bed for me to look at, saying panties like these were the secret to men’s hearts.

“Sorry,” I said to Charlie.

“How come?”

I tried to think of a reason, but there wasn’t a thing I could come up with to make me sound smart. “I don’t have anything to say. I’m not a talker,” I said, even though he should have been the one trying to get things going.

Charlie cleared his throat and kept his eyes on the sky like he was waiting for something to fall. “Not-a-Talker, huh? That your Indian name?”

I sat up, then, and pointed my finger at the .22. “Then you’re Shoots-Without-Looking.” It just came out. He grinned then, on account of me being so funny like that, out of the blue. It was one of those lucky things you couldn’t ever plan, like capturing the shadow of a cloud when your pencil hadn’t meant to do anything except doodle around.

“I got a friend from Pine Ridge, and he wouldn’t like you calling me that,” Charlie said, but I could tell he was only teasing.

“Who’s your friend?” I said.

“Jonny Magpie. We got an understanding.” Charlie sounded tough the way he said it, like a cowboy or an outlaw, and it gave me a secret thrill, me being there in the tree beside him, hiding out, like some girl he stole from a town with no laws. He rolled over on his side and looked right at me, with his eyes half closed like he just woke up. Only later I knew it was for needing the glasses, not on account of my face being so bright.

I smiled real sweet and almost reached out and touched him. “What’s your understanding?” I didn’t even know his name yet.

“You’re just a bitty girl,” he said, and shaked his head. “I ain’t even gonna bother trying.”

“I’m not,” I said, but a wind took my voice away and shivered the tree. My heart shivered right back with it. A cloud covered the light, and just like that it all washed over me again. I thought of Mother and Roe and how they didn’t ever listen, and how no one at school thought I’d turn out right. There I was all over again, biting my lip, staring hard at the sky so as not to cry.

“What’s wrong?” Charlie wanted to know. I could see the sun burning through the cloud, more like a moon than anything else. It gave me a strange feeling all of a sudden, like looking through the other side of a picture, where everything was put backward or upside-down.

“I’m not dumb,” I said.

Charlie’s eyes went soft. They could change like the sky. It was nothing I’d ever be able to draw. They changed too fast. “I know you ain’t dumb.” He held out his hand like he was making to touch my cheek, but then he tucked it back behind him. “I didn’t mean anything,” he said, and swallowed hard, kind of. “I don’t want you to think bad of me.”

“Why do you care what I think?”

Charlie didn’t answer. He sat up, took a yellow leaf off his arm that had come free in the wind, and got to pulling it apart. Everything was going so fast around us, like it was all caught up in a funnel. “You got a boyfriend?” he said.

My heart kicked up. He didn’t have a ring or a letter jacket, and I wondered what he could give me. “Not right now,” I said, like he caught me on a good day.

“You ever had one?”

I could only think of Kenny, who was ugly and tried to follow me home and grabbed me once behind the gym. I said, “One time, but not for very long.”

“Well, I don’t like him anyhow.”

I couldn’t help but smile over this. I didn’t like Kenny either. “Tell me the understanding you got with Jonny Magpie,” I said.

“It’s just that Jonny don’t want white people telling him what to do, and I don’t want no one telling me when and where to haul my trash.”

“Would you do what I told you?” I said. I pushed my knee out a little from between the kimono, but Charlie didn’t see.

“It ain’t fair for a man to tell another one how to live,” he said. “Jonny Magpie and me, we want to live our own way.”

“Why do you think I’m up here?” I said. “I want to live my own way too.”

Charlie grinned and laid on his side with his elbow holding up his head so he could keep on looking at me. I looked right back. He said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe what?” I wondered if he was thinking about kissing me, but he never so much as touched my pinkie.

“Maybe you and me got an understanding, then,” he said, and my heart got warm, on account of never having had an understanding with anyone.

Then Charlie told me the things I’d been thinking all along, I just hadn’t been sure enough to know them. Like that rules were only one person’s way of looking at things, and that the white men took all the plains from the Indians and then pretended to act nice by giving them back only the crap-ass pieces and making them stay there. “The Sioux’re gonna get back up in those saddles sometime soon,” Charlie said, “and then the whole world better look out.”

“Who told you that?” I said.

“Who do you think?” Charlie told me there was a kind of fight in the two of us and people like Jonny Magpie and James Dean, who wouldn’t just lay down and take it from anyone.

He talked about us like we were part of the same thing. “It’s so easy to fall in love,” I said, looking right at him.

Charlie laughed at me. “Those ain’t even your words.”

“I like Buddy Holly.”

“He’s a candy-ass. Someone needs to bust him up.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Who cares what you think?”

Charlie just sat there chewing on his lip and scratching his head. Then he spat on his shirt, picked up the gun, and got to shining it like it was the last thing on earth. The whole sky just dropped away with the sun. The branches rattled like a bag of bones being shaked, and I hugged my shoulders to keep warm.

“Don’t be sore,” Charlie said, laying down the gun, his face all scrunched up like he really did mean it. “Come here.”

“Just ’cause someone else said it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” I said, but I wasn’t really sore.

“Come here,” Charlie said again, and slid up next to me. He put his arm around me, and I leaned my head back on his neck. I could feel his pulse like something wild, like a little animal. “You’re so tiny,” he said. “I get scared the wind’ll squish you.”

We sat like that for a while, still as salt, like something would break if we so much as moved a finger.

*   *   *

The wind had kicked up and whispered in the corn when I sneaked on through, and it seemed like all those husks were telling me not to take another step. But there was not a thing for me to do right then but go on back the way I had came and take whatever Roe and Mother threw my way. I didn’t have anything else just then but a little hope of Charlie loving me, like a tiny rock in the middle of an empty field.

I thought I’d sneak on through my bedroom window the same way I came out, as if I never had left, but someone had closed the window and bolted the sill, and no matter how I pushed I couldn’t lift it. There wasn’t any choice but to go around front. I went real slow around the side of the house and walked right up to the porch. There was Mother in the doorway bouncing Betty Sue up and down in her arms. Betty Sue was too old to get bounced, or even held like that; it was only going to make her more of a baby. She’d be in high school one day and still wearing a diaper, the way things were going. I mean, I could see it coming. I mean, it was just stupid.

Mother dropped open her mouth and stared at me like she couldn’t believe I showed up again after I had run away like that, like she almost hoped I never would come back. I hugged my sketchbook and looked down at my feet that were scratched and bleeding from all my running. I didn’t even feel it. “Where you been?” Mother said, biting her lip.

I didn’t answer.

“Where, Caril Ann? You tell me.”

“School.”

“Like that? Don’t you lie to me!”

“I tried to get a lift,” I said.

“You tell me the truth!”

“That is the truth.” Then I kicked a stone, and hurt my toe, and turned around to hide my wince. I squinted out at the road and a slip of sky far off turning green with weather.

“You look at me when I talk to you!” Mother yelled.

So I turned back around.

“I don’t know if I should thank God or shake my fist,” Mother said, and she started to cry. She held Betty Sue’s head against her neck like things would all be fine if she just kept her special baby near. “You’re going nowhere fast,” she said.

I snuffled a laugh, but a kind of sob came out instead. Mother looked so embarrassed of me and afraid. It was like everything inside me was going to do the opposite, and here I was feeling sorry for Mother, her being all hung up with a baby and an old man who always hobbled around rattling his cage, when I was the one everyone should feel sorry for. “I hate it here,” I said.

“You don’t understand what you got,” Mother said.

“Oh, I understand.” I went in my room and slammed the door and pushed the chair against it, but no one so much as tried to get in. I listened all through supper to Roe and Mother in the kitchen talk about tying me up and throwing me in the trunk if that’s what it took to get me where I needed to be. But somehow it made no difference anymore. Everything looked better to me now I had Charlie to think about.

*   *   *

I lay in bed later, kicking around so much I couldn’t sleep, thinking about a magazine I read. When you trust someone, it said, you love someone. I realized then, I never trusted Roe or Mother, but for some strange reason I already trusted Charlie. Love is not necessarily made out of blood, and anyway Roe and me didn’t have so much as a drop the same between us. I imagined love made out of different colored silk squares sewed together with stitches you can’t see.

A magic man pulled a scarf like this from his pocket a while back at the Lincoln County Fair. He kept pulling and pulling and it kept on coming out like a never-ending river running into the bright red sky. I knew it had to be a trick, though. It had to end somewhere because everything ends. When I narrowed my eyes at the magic man, he looked me in the face and winked to tell me I was not just some dumb girl with scuffed-up baton boots who had to repeat the eighth grade, but an important person like his own self, who understood how everything in the world all went down. And then there was a last orange square and he flurried his fingers into a puff of smoke, and when the smoke cleared his hands were empty, his pockets hanging, and it was as if all those colors had never been.

I woke in the night like a shot and threw off the covers. I sat up in bed straight as a pin, but everything looked different. Maybe it was a different day, a hundred years later with people from Mars and everyone dead, and here I was in a world where everything had changed right around me while I was sleeping. The clouds were gone, and a moon was hanging so full and bright it made shadows and cast the mirror in silver. My sketchbook was open on the floor, and a picture I had done of a cottonwood rose up from the crease of it. I tried to figure out the time, but there was no way of knowing, really.

Then I heard something. My heart pounded like nails, and I thought Who’s there? I rubbed my eyes. The whole thing seemed like a dream, only I wasn’t sleeping. And then maybe I even said it out loud—“Who’s there?”—because just as I was thinking it, someone tapped out an answer. Tap-tap. It came from the window. I wasn’t so much scared as nervous maybe, not ready for whatever was coming. My mouth felt thick. I got out of bed and went to the window and squinted out into the dark; I could see something right there, some animal, but I couldn’t tell what. It had ears and a tongue and shiny eyes, and then it all came together. There was my dog’s face peering at me through the glass. I rubbed my eyes to see was I dreaming after all, and a shape rose up out of the dark. There was Charlie holding my dog in his arms like a baby and bending his little paw back and forth so it looked like a person waving. I snuffled a laugh. I couldn’t believe it. He had gone and got Nig off the chain, and I hadn’t heard so much as a bark. I pushed hard, and the window creaked open. I brushed a flake of paint off my elbow. “What are you doing here?” I said, real soft on account of Roe and Mother sleeping in the very next room.

“I don’t know. I had a dream and I couldn’t sleep. I gotta talk to you.” Charlie’s voice was full of something, about to burst.

Nig tinkled his collar and reached his head back and licked Charlie’s neck, and Charlie let out a laugh. “Hush,” I whispered.

“Come on out and play with us,” Chuck said.

“What are we going to play?”

“We’ll walk some. Right, boy?” he said, giving the dog a shake like he was supposed to answer. Nig didn’t so much as wiggle, and he could be a slippery little fellow.

“Hush,” I said.

“Then come on.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, but I was only pretending. I got my kimono off the peg and put it over my nightdress. Charlie crouched down on one knee and reached up his hand, and I pushed both feet out the window and stepped down onto his thigh like something in a movie.

“Don’t you got any other clothes?” he whispered.

“Don’t complain.”

“I ain’t complaining.”

*   *   *

Everything looked soft and silver like cobwebs in a world of ghosts. A million stars twinkled all at once. I knew that some of these weren’t stars at all but bigger, more important things like planets. “What makes them wink? The sun’s a star, and it doesn’t wink,” I said, and turned my head so I was staring at his ear.

“It ain’t a star, silly. It’s a ball of fire.” Charlie leaned me up against the chicken coop and pushed his lips to mine. His mouth was hot and hungry and all over me, and I had never known what it was to feel that way. I wanted to give my whole self up right then, just melt into his skin. But Barbara said you had to make boys wait, so just before I fell all the way in I let go. I ran into the corn. It was just a game. I didn’t want to be anywhere else but with Charlie. My heart lifted up and I had the feeling it was always going to be me and Charlie here underneath these same stars and all the planets turning.

I went this way and that until somehow I got doubled back behind Charlie, and there I was just watching him fumble around, calling my name. He was a good hunter, but he was not so good at hunting me.

Nig’s collar jingled close by with a happy silver sound. I thought about how we were all three of us free. It was so easy. All you had to do was climb out a window. I sneaked out from behind and put my palms over Charlie’s eyes. His whole body jumped like a scared little boy.

“It’s only me,” I said.

“Why’d you run? Did I go too fast?”

I shaked my head. “I was only fooling.”

He grabbed my arm. “I wanted to show you something.”

We went together back between the trees.

“I’ve seen it here,” I said.

“Not like this.”

Charlie took my hand when we walked, and I looked up at the branches. You could only see their shapes black against the lighter sky, gnarled up like some old person’s fist. There were shadows on the ground, and when a breeze came it seemed like the whole world moved together in one single dream.

“How’d you know it was my window, Chuck?” I asked.

He kind of laughed and squeezed my arm. “’Cause it used to be my window.”

“You used to live there?”

“I did. Me and my brothers and Ma and Gus.”

“Who’s Gus?”

“My old man. We’re Starkweathers.”

Starkweather. It was a name that belonged here with me, in the woods, in the middle of the night. I wanted to say I loved him right then, but I didn’t want to get it wrong. So I just walked beside him.

There were tiny glitters coming up out of nowhere among the trees and moving all around us: rabbit eyes. The rabbits were chewing on things, the grass maybe, and when we came near they stared like flashbulbs, then scurried away to hide in the brush. A whole family lived under a woodpile, Charlie said, and there was a field beyond on someone else’s land where they all went to meet at night.

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen ’em.”

“Did you hunt them?”

“Not there,” he said. “If I went and did that, they’d never come back.”

An owl hooted somewhere close by like it was telling us a warning. My skin got bumps and I hugged my arms around myself, but it was not for being scared. I felt like I was looking into a far-off place. Me and Charlie were invisible ghosts with see-through hands, floating all over the world without so much as a care what other people did.

“You ever seen an owl tree?” Chuck said.

“I don’t know,” I said, and he pulled me past the ladder to the farthest tree along the fence. I could see there was only a sprinkle of leaves on the branches, which meant it was dying, and a hole in the trunk where the owl lived. I wondered what the owl would do when the tree got too tired to stand up on its own anymore.

We crouched down in the roots and Charlie showed me all the things the owl had left behind: the tiny jaws of mice that still had teeth, hunks of fur, a skeleton of something bigger, a baby prairie dog, and all the feathers the owl had dropped for so much ruffling around. The bones were white. The feathers shined. I held a jaw in my hand and felt how smooth it was, trying to remember it just right so I’d be able to put it down later in my sketchbook. It was a crazy thing how all these perfect bits had been in the stomach of a bird once.

“What happened when they died?” I said.

“I don’t know. I used to get all hanged up about it.”

I petted his hair and got to wondering why he was ever scared of the dark to begin with. We kneeled down in the chucked-up bones and got to kissing again. Charlie leaned against the tree trunk and I sat across his lap, staring up through the branches at the moon, that seemed to me then like a bit of bone itself. I wanted to stay like that with Charlie under the owl tree forever. But it couldn’t last forever. We had to go back. We got Nig and slipped back between the trees. The house was sleeping and everything was dark. When Charlie took me to the window, he tried to go back through with me. “It was my room. I wanna see it,” he whispered.

“Only for a minute,” I said. “Only if you’re quiet.” It didn’t seem right to let him in so quick, but I couldn’t help it, he wanted to so bad.

When Charlie stepped through, he didn’t so much as look around. He just got into bed and I got beside him. He put his head to my head, and we held each other real silent in the dark, listening to the sound of our hearts together. “You gotta go,” I whispered, even though I didn’t want him to. “I’ll get in trouble.”

“Whatta you care about trouble?” He put his mouth on my mouth so I couldn’t answer. He got to kissing my neck, and my ear, and my whole body shaked with trying to stay still. Somehow the robe came off and everything else, and I was laying there naked in his arms. His fingers felt everywhere, tiny lights waking up new parts, and it all rushed forward. And all of a sudden, there wasn’t a choice but to keep on going. The smell of everything secret rose up around him. Every muscle quaked with trying to be still. He was over me and pushing in, and then his body went crazy, like a bird cupped in your hand, trying to break free.

And then it all went quiet. Charlie sighed. I put my head on his chest and listened to his heart slow down after all that rushing.

“You ever did that before?” he whispered.

“No,” I said.

“Did it hurt?”

“No,” I said.

“I hope you liked it the way I did.”

“You better go,” I said, though I couldn’t think about him ever being anywhere else.

“How come?”

“I’ll get in trouble.”

“What kind? Your old man gonna beat you?”

“He’s not my true father,” I said, “but he thinks he is.”

“He ever hit you?”

“Not really,” I whispered, wishing I could say yes to show how bad Roe was. But I wasn’t going to lie to Charlie.

Inside of a minute, I had fell asleep. When I woke up, the sky was light, and Charlie was gone, and someone was beating down the door on account of the chair still propped against it. I rolled out of bed, put on my clothes, and got ready for school, on account of nothing being so bad now that Charlie cared enough to see me through it.

*   *   *

Things went like this for a while: I would cut out of school and meet Charlie at the tree house beyond the corn. That’s where I drew all the different parts of him and fell in love with them one by one till they added up to something. I hung my drawings up in the tree until the wind took them down. I didn’t care where they blew. I signed every one. Charlie and me would lay in the branches and pet each other’s hair until Roe found us and said I couldn’t go with Charlie anymore. But that wasn’t going to stop us. When I told Charlie, he kicked at the tires of his Ford and said how nobody thought he was any good. I pressed my palm to his greased-up ducktail and looked him in the flint-green eyes, saying “Me neither, Chuck, nobody sees my true self except you.”

“That’s how come I love you so much.” And Charlie put his head on my lap and looked up at me, chewing on a blade of grass like he was chewing on a piece of me. He touched my breasts and said, “And these bitty things. I love them too.” And the leaves in the trees shimmied around on the branches like they were all talking at once.