Chapter Twenty-Eight

Doubled Up Inside

Orvil is driving Mike’s car to pay for staying at their place, and for the Blanx. He was taking more and more, and not selling any anymore. Mike was the one to tell him he needed to pay for staying. Sean and Mike fought about it. It was Sean’s idea about driving for Mike to make money. Mike had said this wasn’t gonna be a thing. Just this once. Said he would be fucked if Orvil got caught. Orvil said he would not get caught. But he went to his bag and got out his dream catcher.

Orvil had not wanted the dream catcher. He thought they were corny. But Opal had given it to him for Christmas, told Orvil to keep it with him, and to remember that he had it, to be able to know how to catch his dream when it came along. The gift had come with a new guitar and amplifier. Orvil’s first electric one. After all the ways he hadn’t been there for the family, all the ways he’d disappointed her, and she’d known what was special to him, that music meant something to him.

When he got into Mike’s Honda the first thing he did was hang it from the rearview. He hated how many non-Native people hung dream catchers from their rearview mirrors. It was the last place you wanted to be sleeping, the last place you should be dreaming. Did they think they could catch a car accident before it happened in the dream-catcher’s net somehow? Or were they using it just like Orvil, basically for good luck?

Lyft and Uber users wouldn’t know it’s not Mike. Not one person would ask him why his face doesn’t match the picture. Orvil had this plan to ask the passengers if they wouldn’t mind paying cash and canceling the ride through the app. Would tell them the app takes half, how it’s not fair. And he’s a community college student struggling to make rent. He’d read about the scam online and was for sure not gonna tell Mike about it. Not until he could hand Mike the cash. It was all a big risk. But didn’t feel like one. Not getting high when he kept wanting to felt like the only risk that mattered. Was.

Opal thought Orvil would stay the straightened arrow. Or he’d thought he’d heard her say that through his bedroom wall one morning. She was talking to Jacquie. What did that mean to stay the straightened arrow? He looked it up and saw a Reddit argument about whether the phrase was originally about a straightened arrow or staying straight and narrow, but immediately lost interest because they came to the same thing. And Orvil was not doing that.

When he got to Sean’s house after being away for so long, he got higher than he’d been in a long time, laid down on the floor next to Sean’s bed, feeling like he absolutely had to crawl under it.

Now he’s crawling through traffic under the shadows of semitrucks on that part of the 880 that always seems so stuck. He registers the Oakland Coliseum to his left as looming. It is bigger than it is. He’s on his way to wait in the cell-phone parking lot at the airport. He’s found people tip better if you get them from the airport to their home, so he tries to keep on that route. Orvil listens to music in the car when it’s just him, sometimes one of Mike’s stations, sometimes his own music, recordings he and Sean have made, and if someone young, who seems cool, gets in he might keep his music on, but if any old white people get in, he keeps it on public radio, knows it must bring some kind of comfort for white passengers, getting in with nonwhite drivers, the milk-white narrative calm of NPR, like some sonic indication of sophistication.

He doesn’t want to think about the powwow and he doesn’t, but being this close to the coliseum, he can’t not let it do its work on him.

Because the thing about trying not to think about something is that very elephant you’re trying not to think about, that is right there—smack-dab—when you go to not think of it, appearing as if to announce its absence. And then there is an actual elephant in front of him, up on the billboard, that dopey, lovable mascot for the Oakland A’s: Stomper.

He drives and he drops people off and he drives back to the airport and he drops more people off and time goes away and he likes that he can make it disappear like that. Some of them have cash and agree to his plan and others do not, or he does not ask them. All seem distracted and spend the ride on their phones.

Just now he doesn’t want to think about getting high later. He’s trying to keep some kind of balance. Earn his way there. But he pulls the car over thinking a passenger had put a suitcase back there that he’d forgotten to take out. Or because he’s curious about what Mike had back there. As luck or fate would have it, there is a bag. A duffel bag with some of Mike’s clothes in it, and a very decent-sized bag of crushed-up something. Whether it is Blanx or cocaine or MDMA he doesn’t know and he doesn’t care. But he looks both ways like he is about to cross a busy street, then brings the ziplock bag of white powder up with him into the front seat.

At the end of a ten-hour shift, Orvil drives through the dim piss-yellow light of the Webster Street Tube back toward downtown Oakland from Alameda. When he comes out of the tube, he sees the moon above the city. It is big and full and bright. He thinks of the first time Opal tried to point out the Indian in the moon for him.

They were driving back from Fentons after he came home with almost perfect grades on his report card. She’d picked him up, just him, to celebrate his good grades. On the way back home Opal pointed up to the moon with her lips.

“There he is, he’s sitting in Indian position, see him?” she said. Orvil squinted his eyes, said he couldn’t see him, then asked if Indian position came from India’s Indians or Indian Indians.

“You know, I don’t know where that came from,” Opal said.

“Just looks like a smudge,” Orvil said about the moon.

“Maybe you need glasses,” Opal said, and Orvil laughed, but then stopped when he looked over and saw that she might be serious.

He never saw the Indian in the moon. Even after he saw Lony and Loother see it. He looked online to see if he could have someone point it out for him there, but he couldn’t find anything about it and thought maybe his family was just making up that they saw it and that no one else saw an Indian in the moon, which made him think about being Native and how much of that was being made up to make up for the fact that they weren’t connected to the tribe or to their language or with the knowledge that other people had about being Native, and he hated to think thoughts like that but they came anyway. And soon he began to resent the moon, feeling like its light represented something false, like it was only light because of the sun, but it was sort of respected like it was its own light. He started to think of the moon as a lie.

Even now, Orvil has a certain feeling toward the moon, about the moon, it isn’t resentment anymore, and he doesn’t think it’s a lie, but he doesn’t like it.

Orvil hears a pulsing bass line and turns the music up. Doubled up inside, always doubled up inside. An eerie voice haunts the car. He wonders what being doubled up inside means. He thinks of the bullet. The star shard. How he hadn’t thought of it in so long. How the voice had gone without him noticing its absence. He thought about how different he must seem to everyone, like a different person. He thinks of himself having been taken over by the bullet. What if it wandered in his blood and poisoned him and changed him and he would never be the way he used to be again? He thinks about Opal changing too. How she came to look so different after the treatment.

His phone vibrates and he sees it’s Opal. She’s psychic like that. The car in front of him stops suddenly, its alarm-red brake lights send jolts of spiky adrenaline to the top of his skin, and Orvil watches his dream catcher sway from the rearview just before a car slams into him from behind. The airbag knocks him back. The hit from behind makes him hit the car in front of him. There is a loud ringing and he doesn’t know if it’s coming from outside or inside. Orvil gets out of his car and people are yelling. He can’t tell if it was his fault. He’d been stopped at a light, but was he supposed to be? He’d been looking at his phone. This is all bad, he thinks before he takes off running. He knows it’s stupid, and will look crazy, and will cause the people involved to call the cops immediately, and that will mean it will come down on Mike. Plus he’s got this big bag of drugs that is Mike’s, which means he can’t ever go back to their house, which means he can’t even run into either one of them anywhere, which means he will just be on the run now. And it also means that once this bag runs out he won’t have access to anything anymore.

He runs over to the lake and from the lake down International. He keeps running until he gets to East Twelfth. He hasn’t run like this in years, and he is sweating, and he is crying. He stops at a gate between him and the freeway. He watches the lights of the cars stream by on the freeway, listens to a BART train go by. And he wants to fix it. He wants to take it back. He doesn’t want to go through the shitty discomfort of quitting. The boredom. The regret. He wishes he hadn’t left the car. He could have driven off. What the fuck was he thinking, running? But then he hears a siren, and he gets back to running. He runs all the way home, where the door is locked and he doesn’t have a key, and he doesn’t want to knock, so he climbs over the fence and goes to the backyard, where he falls asleep on the lawn, looking up through the lemon tree, too tired to care about anything.