Chapter Fifteen

The Other Fruitvale

Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and her boys, and now Jacquie Red Feather, they all live up Fruitvale Avenue, far enough up past MacArthur where it becomes another Fruitvale Avenue, a Fruitvale off of Fruitvale, like a tree branching out, in a neighborhood where fruit trees—mostly citrus—grow in yards everywhere, here where between the Sausal and Peralta Creeks was made a little valley, and a traveling orchardist named Henderson Luelling once planted it with fruit and called it Fruit Vale.

The lemon tree in their backyard rarely ever got picked for practical use, the boys mostly used the lemons for a war game they made up, back when they were still young enough to not care about how much it hurt to get pegged with a lemon, or about how sticky it could get—literally and emotionally—once the game really got going. You had to squish the lemon to ignite it as a grenade, which also served to soften its blow, and you stepped on an enemy’s grenade to put it out of commission. Base was the house, which you couldn’t even throw in the house’s direction because there would be no ruining Opal’s paint, and no breaking any windows, especially the one above the sink, where Opal sometimes glared at the boys playing while she did dishes—mostly dirtied and almost never washed by them unless she made it a point to make them wash the dishes, which often meant more work than it was worth since she’d have to examine and rewash any dishes not washed well enough.

The neighborhood is not that deep into East Oakland, but not near Lake Merritt either, a kind of central East Oakland sometimes called the middle extent, because most of Oakland is East Oakland, but to tell anyone where they live in Oakland, if asked, they might just say they live in the Dimond.

Opal hadn’t known an owned home, had barely considered the possibility, all the way up until she’d saved enough to think beyond rented rooms, after she took the boys on and felt the need to sink some roots. Her and Jacquie’s grandsons, they hadn’t known what it meant to own versus rent either, but they knew consistency was nice, was preferable, stillness was, after all their mom, Jamie, put them through before she died, even before they were born, when they were still inside her, fish in water, taking what was given, born addicted to heroin, they spent what short time they had with her once they were out orbiting the pull, dragged along behind her doing what needed to be done, taking it and acquiring it and coming off of it, not acquiring it and being off it was as losing as being on it, was always as losing as she would ever feel no matter how far the horse carried her. It couldn’t get there. She only got anywhere worth the chase twice. The first was when she first stabbed the pinpoint hole into big wide bliss that left her chasing it like it’d taken a part of her with it, a part she wasn’t near done with yet, and the second was the last, which took her over the dose, over the lip of oblivion’s rimless, swallowing hole, when just before it sucked her over, she got herself together enough to aim a gun’s hole between her eyes, and steady enough to squeeze the trigger.

Opal was technically their great-aunt, but Indian-way their grandmother. She loved them. Already had them before they were hers.

Opal bought her house not long after the adoption became official, became a homeowner, though it felt plenty like it just meant paying higher rent to the bank, who actually owned it until you one day paid the whole thing off, along with all that interest, but it wasn’t rent because there was that one-day future quality built into it, whereas rent was only ever an empty strike against Opal’s income.

But when the house was first theirs, at the very beginning of owning it, they went with the new keys and flooded the place, moving through its rooms like water, or like drafts of air finding all of the house’s openings as they pushed one another through its many doors, finding its windows and that one ceiling door that led to a crawl space—they hadn’t known what a crawl space was. It’s for the rats, Opal had said. You gotta keep and feed them up there so they don’t come down and steal from the kitchen. No it’s not, but what’s it really for? Lony asked. It’s for crawling, Orvil had said, as if that were plainly true.

What was home if you never felt you belonged inside it, when its walls were gone after your mom was dead and your grandma gave you new walls, what was the home you were ashamed to call home for fear of betraying your dead mother? And what were feelings when you wanted to numb them, what did they become? More walls. The Red Feather brothers each found their way in the walling, with Opal’s steady hand to keep them housed and fed and schooled and disciplined, all the way up until the powwow—which dropped the whole bottom out, everything they’d learned to sit, stand, lean, lie, and rely on, bottomed out from under them as if the earth had quaked and taken all it could into cracks which widened into chasms.

Their newly made family was a chorus of noise and a throng of pain in waiting, because it was loved, and had been saved, and so loved desperately, knowing that whatever happened to any one of them happened to every one of them.

There had been a lightness to the load that was the boys, those years after Opal and her grandsons moved into their house, made it their home. It was like they just existed then. It hadn’t felt like peace at the time, but that was the way it felt looking back, to each of them in their own way, in their own time, that was what they came to think of the time before the shooting at the Big Oakland Powwow, as something sweet by comparison, and because it was sweet and not so pointed like a sharp thing that threatened to cut them if they moved even just a little toward or away from the sharpness of the event’s memory, so then they missed the time before, and missing it made them feel guilty like by missing it they were blaming Orvil, who’d been shot, like they blamed him for having to miss something so bad they’d already so naturally had, for what, the question why did he have to get shot made as little sense as why did he have to dance.

Wishing to have their old lives back became a wish they would regret each time it came, the complicated knot of it tying them up, or undoing them. They had to figure out how to live inside each individual part of themselves as best they could, to compartmentalize against the trap, to move carefully according to the rules of the trap, which weren’t ever clearly delineated in thought but felt clear to feel when they rubbed up against it. This at first was Orvil wincing, or changing the bandages on his wound. It was Orvil not going to school and getting as much screen time as he wanted, and Opal saying yes to everything and no to nothing, all of which led Loother or Lony—when they noticed it—back to the fact of the shooting, of him having been shot, and it was as if the hole made in him that day brought a new world out from inside him, and they watched Orvil change, all of them, Opal noticing she was doing a kind of spoiling too, but unable to do differently.

After a catastrophe, things could really shine looking back to when it was just normal. The house was made before it was theirs, but the home kept getting built and broken down. Home was their kitchen table sticking out too far so that it clipped your hip if you forgot it was there—the wider swinging the worse the wear—and the backyard with the lemon trees and the side yard where they kept the garbage and recycling, where they sometimes at sunset watched the light drop behind the big oak out front, that rose way above their house.

Just now Opal is signing loan disclosures in the kitchen for Orvil’s tuition. After being home his first high-school semester, homeschooling while he recovers, he will be starting in January. She’s happy to have the equity that freed up the money that will help Orvil’s future, but it is the paperwork she loathes, it’s so easy, but she will do almost anything to avoid it right up until she can’t anymore. She signs every line the sticky tabs the bank manager put there pointed to, saying “Sign Here” in yellow, pink, and blue. She can’t believe Orvil is in high school now. The years come no matter what you do to them. She feels as if she is signing Orvil’s life away. Making it official, signing off on the fact that he’ll be entering the part of his life where the real trouble can be had, and hopes even though she doesn’t mean to hope, that getting shot will keep him away from whatever trouble he might have otherwise gotten into. And anyway it is a private, Catholic school full of white kids. How much trouble do white kids get into is a question she does not ask herself. She just signs her big old name again and again like here I am and it is yours, my time, my work, my money, it is yours if you’ll just give me a little more, loan me this and you can have that, whatever it is just keep him safe, she is almost praying as she turns the pages on the agreement, just keep him safe, just keep him safe, just keep him safe, just keep him safe.