NORTH

North is the direction where the difficult teachers live. This is the direction of cold winds. The color is white, sharp and bare. It is the direction marked by the full moon showing the way through the snow. It is prophecy.

And whom do I call my enemy?

An enemy must be worthy of engagement.

I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.

It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.

The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.

It sees and knows everything.

It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.

The door to the mind should open only from the heart.

An enemy who gets in risks the danger of becoming a friend.

fter we lost my father when my parents divorced, my mother and our family of four children kept going, though we floated in the chaos of unknowing. Our mother worked several jobs. When word got out that our beautiful mother was single, men began showing up to court her. Most she dismissed. We children liked the Indian bull rider missing two fingers best. He showed us how to loop a rope, throw a lasso. We loved the twangy beat of his country guitar, his kind shine.

There was an angular preacher who wore black. He smelled sour and lonely. He carried a switch for beating behind his back. My mother did not invite him to return. In fact, she hadn’t invited him at all.

The last man who courted our mother was seventeen years older. He charmed her and us. He gave me a pair of skates. He took us for rides that ended in hamburgers and shakes. He sang songs and smiled with his eyes. He’d been watching our mother for some time.

He married our mother in a ceremony without us.

We moved from our childhood home with its familiar trees, plants, and creatures. We left our friends, our school, and the memories that were rooted there. As we drove away from the house we had known as our own, I disappeared into a cloud of sullen mourning.

We moved to a house with four bedrooms that my mother and stepfather found together on “Independence” Street. What irony. In that house I had nightmares and premonitions of evil. The first night there, with unpacked boxes surrounding me in the room I was to share with my sister, I woke up in the midst of a struggle with a dark being. I cried out for my mother. No one came. I remember being reprimanded by my stepfather the next morning. I was never to disturb their sleep in the night again. Any pretense of nice ended there.

The next Saturday morning I followed my five-year-old sister’s cries to the kitchen and found her being held aloft by one leg by my stepfather. I froze in terror. My brother closest in age stood with me.

“This is what will happen to you if you misbehave.” He swung our sister around.

He unbuckled and pulled off his belt in one slick motion. I still see the sweat crescents under the arms of his work shirt. I hear him grunt with the effort as he whips her.

When he was done he put her down, then slid the belt back carefully around his girth. His buckle made a satisfied click. Then he went into the living room, back to watching golf on the television.

I ran to tell my mother about the belt-buckle marks on the baby’s leg.

I imagine our mother hadn’t come out at the sound of the ruckus because she assumed she was finally getting help with disciplining us. The divorce and then the move had stirred up her gang of children. We were confused and acting out. She naturally believed that if he was spanking one of us, it was because we needed it. He’d signed on to be her partner in marriage.

My mother scooped up her bruised baby, who was hiccuping with tears. When she saw the marks, she was furious. She walked into the living room to confront her husband. I followed close behind her, trying to stay in her shadow so he couldn’t see me.

He denied hitting my sister with the belt buckle, though the mark was clearly delineated on her leg. He called me a liar. Then he and my mother went back to their room for the rest of the afternoon. It was the last time he hit my sister, but after that he had it in for me.

I begged my mother to leave him. I was still upset about the succession of events that had led us to this house of bad spirits and pain. There were literally hundreds of snakes in the yard. We were in the middle of one of those fairy tales that was rolling toward a nasty end. The pressure kept me up at night. From the time our stepfather married and moved us until the day I left home as a teenager, I kept sentry at night. I would doze lightly or not at all until I heard and saw the sun coming up over the horizon. Then I would sleep.

My mother confided that there was no way we could leave. He said he would kill her and her children if she divorced him. He’d leave our bodies in a burning house. He said it would look like an accident. No one would ever know. We both knew he would do it.

        

One night I woke up to a scuffle in the living room. My mother had just come in from her weekly date of playing shuffleboard at the bar with her girlfriends. I heard my stepfather grilling her. I heard my mother protesting and weeping. My sister slept peacefully beside me. My brothers were in their room. I wondered if they heard anything.

“Who were you with?” my stepfather demanded.

“I was partying with my girlfriends. You know I don’t have anyone else.”

“If you want to party, we’ll have a party right here.”

I wound tighter, ready to leap to save her. I heard him methodically popping open beers with a church key, one after another, and pouring beer down her throat and over her clothes. I heard ripping. My mother kept saying it wouldn’t happen again. It won’t happen again. It won’t happen again.

Then it was quiet. It was quiet until dawn, and then I got up for school.

After that, my mother’s few girlfriends called or came by only when my stepfather wasn’t around. She never went out except for work or to do errands he had specifically approved. He watched and marked her every step, her every word.

In those times there were no domestic abuse shelters. If either my mother or I had been brave enough to report him, the authorities would have accepted his word over ours because he was an employed white man. We would have been forced back with no protection, and he would have been given tacit permission to keep us in line.

        

I never heard my mother sing much anymore. Her singing used to fill the house. We would turn up the radio and dance to rock-and-roll together. Our house now was quiet with our labor to keep it in order. My sister and I had the bulk of the duties, because we were female. I was in charge of cleaning, doing laundry, including the ironing for the family, washing dishes, and child care. Our brothers emptied the trash and mowed the lawn. I tried making a case for rotating duties. I didn’t feel it was a fair distribution. There was no negotiating.

Our mother worked hard and long hours in restaurants, either cooking or waitressing or both. Our stepfather contributed only his share of the mortgage. Our mother paid for everything else. She bought all groceries, food, and clothes. Our father could not be found for child support.

The last and only time I saw my mother sing publicly was shortly after she and my stepfather got together.

Leon McAuliffe and His Cimarron Boys were gigging at a huge community picnic near the border of Arkansas and Oklahoma, not far from where my mother grew up. McAuliffe was known for his steel guitar solos, especially for playing with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. That McAuliffe had agreed to let my mother sit in for one of her original songs was a big deal. This had been her life. The bandleader Ernie Fields had even arranged one of her songs for his orchestra.

There was tension in the car as my stepfather drove us the two hours to the event. My mother sat up front with him, the four of us children crowded in the back. She was nervous. She hadn’t sung with a band for a few years. She was dressed for her musical coming-out party in satin, frills, and perfume.

My stepfather was already jealous and ready to go at someone because his wife, who was younger than he was, looked so pretty. She didn’t look like a jailed, beleaguered mother of four children. I was wary, because I knew our stepfather would make her pay.

My grandfather—my mother’s father—met us there. I sat next to him as I balanced my box of greasy fried chicken on my lap. I was nervous for my mother. I embodied her every emotional knot and fear. I wanted this opportunity to be good for her. I wanted to protect her.

I remember the moment she was called up to the stand to sing. My heart leaped as she stood up. She looked beautiful as she took the stage with Leon and the boys. At first she appeared startled, as if she had just escaped from a dark box. As the intro bars of the music started, my mother appeared tentative, nervous, but then she caught hold. I heard the mother who held my hands and sang and danced in the kitchen with her plants all around. I felt her spirit reach up and touch the sun when she sang.

And then, too quickly, it was over. Everyone clapped. My mother smiled a big smile as she came down from the stage.

I didn’t want to go back with my stepfather and mother. I wanted to stay with my grandfather. I clung to him.

I believed I was the favorite of all his grandchildren. Maybe all of us believed we were the favorite. He peeled apples for us. He made us a tree swing.

I was his dump companion. I loved to search the landfill at the edge of his small town with him. We’d find all sorts of treasure there: chairs with seats that could be woven back into place, toys with an eye or a fender missing, all usable stuff.

Other days we’d go to the spring to fetch water. I can still taste the fresh, clean water emerging from stones. Or we’d go fishing. He’d hook my bait and patiently unhook my line from the trees, his overalls, and anywhere else it landed from my faulty casting. Once in a while he’d even pull a fish off.

I didn’t want to go home because I knew my mother would have hell to pay. We would all pay, because we children were her accomplices. I remember looking back at my grandfather as my stepfather rushed our mother and us out of there.

My stepfather belittled my mother as we drove back home.

The car filled with ugliness.

When we got home there was no celebration, as there should have been. My mother disappeared into their room and slept and slept for what seemed like years.

        

I imagine this place in the story as a long silence. It is an eternity of gray skies. It runs the length of late elementary school through adolescence. I do recall bright moments: getting the understudy for a part in an operetta based on the story of Cinderella, climbing and running through the quarry behind the elementary school with my friends, and having boxing bouts with the neighborhood boys. I was good at it.

There were three strange events during this time that baffled me.

I always had pets. My mother said I had a way with animals. One was a kissing fish I kept in a goldfish bowl. I hadn’t had the fish long before I began to realize it was too large for the depth of the bowl. It kept flipping itself out. One afternoon I accidentally stepped on the fish as I tried to capture it and return it to water. It flattened and bled. I carefully picked it up and returned it to the water. The fish floated on its side, nearly dead. I began to pray. I went deep into prayer for the life of this fish. I felt my heart open and the heart of the fish open. I felt at peace.

I took a break to sweep. When I returned, the fish had righted itself and was swimming in healthy circles around the bowl. In that small moment, I felt the presence of the sacred, a force as real and apparent as anything else in the world, present and alive, as if it were breathing. I wanted to catch hold, to remember utterly and never forget. But the current of hard reality reasserted itself. I had to have the house cleaned just right or my stepfather would punish me. So I continued on my path of forgetfulness.

One night my mother was still working and my stepfather was out bowling or at an Elks club meeting. We had a babysitter who was watching television in the living room. A light brighter than any light I’d ever seen appeared at the head of my bed. It grew larger and larger, and as it grew it terrified me. It was not evil, like the darkness that plagued the house and our family. The light was beautiful. Even so, I called out fearfully. The babysitter came running and turned on the yellowish bedroom light. The white light disappeared. I tried to explain what I had seen, but there were no words, just as words stumble inadequately now. She told me to get to sleep and clicked off the room light. I lay there and wondered at what I had seen. I wanted it to come back, yet I was fearful of its returning and lay there with the covers pulled up to eye level.

When I was ten, my mother and I stayed up to monitor Hurricane Carla. It took a rare path, tearing up the entire coastline of Texas before heading north to Tulsa. My stepfather was out for the evening. I inwardly rejoiced that my mother and I had a rare evening alone. The atmosphere of the storm was a huge aura of whirling particles. It stirred up danger in us.

We walked through the house, checking doors and windows. The younger children were all in bed, sleeping. We sat together and listened as the winds began slamming the city. We knew about tornadoes. They were quirky and strange creatures. I had watched one descend from a bruised sky, approach our neighborhood. It skipped us and tore up trees and cars on the next block, tossed them into the sky as if they were toys.

We were uncertain what this hurricane would do. It had lost force as it traveled north. We listened to reports on the radio as to the storm’s progress and sang along with the radio to songs we knew. Suddenly a ball of fire sizzled and crackled as it flew from the roof of the kitchen through the house. It disappeared down the hall, and then it was gone. I felt a panicked doom. The sign was ominous.

Then my stepfather drove up, and my mother didn’t have to remind me to hurry to my room. We would both have been in trouble if I had been up past bedtime. And he did not like us spending time together. I escaped to my room just as the front door opened.

The water monster lived at the bottom of the lake. He didn’t disappear in the age of reason. He remained a mystery that never happened.

In the muggy lake was the girl I was at sixteen. The story at the surface said she got there by car accident, or by drowning while drinking. Whatever it was, they’d say, it was an accident.

The story was not an accident, nor was the existence of the water monster. It lived in the memory of the people as they carried the burden of the myth from Alabama to Oklahoma. Each reluctant step on the trail impressed memory into the broken heart, and no one ever forgot it.

When I walked the stairway of water into the abyss, I returned as the wife of the water monster, wearing a blanket of time decorated with swatches of cloth and feathers from our favorite birds.

The stories of the battle of the water monster were forever ongoing. Those stories seeped into my blood since infancy like deer gravy, so when the water monster appeared as the most handsome man in the tribe, or of any band whose visits I’d been witness to since childhood, how could I resist?

The first time he appeared I carried my baby sister on my back as I went to get water. She laughed at a woodpecker flitting like a small red sun above us, and before I could deter the symbol we were in it.

My body was already on fire with the explosion of womanhood as if I were flint, hot stone, and when he stepped out of the water he was the first myth I had ever seen uncovered. I surprised him in a human moment.

My baby sister’s cry pinched reality. The red bird was a warning of disjuncture in the brimming sky.

What I had seen there in the body beyond the water needed the words of holy recounting.

I ran back to the village drenched in salt and sky. How could I explain the water jar left empty by the river to my mother, who deciphered my burning lips as shame?

My imagination swallowed me like a mica chip. In it, I had seen the water monster fighting with lightning. He broke trees, stirred up killer winds. In it, I had lost my brother to a spear of flame. I saw my beloved there, hidden in the skin of the suddenly vulnerable.

I was taken with a fever and nothing cured it until I dreamed my fiery body dipped in the river where it fed into the lake.

My father carried me as if I were newborn, as if he were presenting me once more to the world. And when he dipped me I was pronounced healed.

My parents immediately made plans to marry me to an important man who was years older and would provide me with everything I needed to survive in this world.

It was a world I could no longer perceive. I had been blinded, when I was most in need of a drink, by a man who was not a man. He stole my secrets, those created at the brink of language.

When I disappeared it was in a storm that destroyed the houses of my relatives. My baby sister was found sucking on her hand in the crook of an oak.

And though it may have appeared otherwise, I did not go willingly. That night when I had seen my story strung on the shell belt of my ancestors, I was standing next to a man who could not look me in the eye.

The oldest woman in the tribe wanted to remember me as the girl who disobeyed, who gave in to her desires before marriage and was destroyed by the monster disguised as the seductive warrior.

Others saw the car I was driving as it drove into the lake early one morning, the time the carriers of tradition wake up, before the sun or the appearance of red birds. They found the empty six-pack on the sandy shores of the lake.

The power of the victim is a power that will always be reckoned with, one way or the other. When the proverbial sixteen-year-old woman walked down to the lake, within her were all the sixteen-year-old women who had questioned their power from time before time.

Years later, she walked out of the lake and headed for town. No one recognized her. The story of the girl and the water monster was a story no one told anymore.

My stepfather was paying more and more attention to me as I grew into womanhood. I did everything I could to stay out of his way. I did not want his eyes on me.

Like most teenage girls, I felt sensual and awkward all at once. My body had its own mind, its own wisdom. I was tethered to its cycles. I was up and I was down.

I was attractive: I watched a boy wreck his car because he was staring at me. I was ugly: I had had a front tooth missing from the time I was seven. I cracked it while leaping on furniture to catch my brother while we were in the care of a babysitter. It was too expensive to replace the tooth properly. Without a front tooth, I learned to keep my mouth shut and my head down.

My head was often in my sketchbook. I sketched fashions. I made my own clothes. My designs and ideas would show up months later on the pages of fashion magazines, said my mother.

I made good grades. School was a refuge from home. I found friends who did not know my house or my family because they did not live nearby. I made friends across the various islands of school cultures, from the elite socs, who had everything from looks to money, to the renegade greasers, who could usually be found slinking up against the back fence, smoking. My friends were other Indian students as well as non-Indian students. I defied categories. I was considered “the brain” and “the artist” all at once.

My stepfather watched me closely. I felt like prey. I had to be stealthy. I was careful not to be anywhere near him alone. I didn’t want to be anywhere that he might be tempted to touch me in any manner.

I slipped up, because he found my hidden diary, broke the lock, and read aloud from it in front of the family. He read my day-to-day musings. They were small things, but they were mine and they were meant to be private.

I walked home with my friends and saved my bus money. Bought gloss.

Pepsi and a peanut butter cup for lunch.

Saturday at the library.

I imagined a kiss. Forever.

DK and Me. 2 Young 2 Be Together.

Bee To Gather.

“I shall love thee better after death.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning so cool.

He read those words with great delight. I was humiliated. Violated. I swore to myself I would never write anything again.

I had no thoughts of becoming a writer, though I checked out my quota of books every week from the local branch of the library, located in the strip mall down the road. I checked out books on physics, fat novels I could loll around in—from Louisa May Alcott, Dickens to cheap popular stuff—paranormal and ghost reportage, and human anatomy books. I was the library reference person for my friends. They asked questions about sex, unicorns, and religion, and I would look them up.

I belonged to the Columbia House Record Club. I bought recordings with money I made from my jobs. I baby-sat, I took in ironing, and one summer I took a job busing and washing dishes at the restaurant where my mother cooked.

In those junior high years I went for bands like the Yardbirds and the Byrds. I discovered Bizet’s Carmen. I even liked the gummy pop of the Monkees’ music. They were easy to sing. And always Motown.

If my mother was fire and my father was water, I was a little of each. My spirit found refuge in those watery realms. I too was looking for a vision that would lead me free of the domestic prison our home had become with my stepfather. Or rather, vision was looking for me, and I was still hiding and afraid. It carried responsibility.

I was fire and I was confused about the fire in my body. I was told it was wrong by the church to feel desire, yet I pondered on how desire must have been created by the same god that I was told created everything in the world. Power and shame tumbled together.

I created constantly. I drew, took photographs, and I loved to sing.

        

In the house, everything stopped when we heard my stepfather’s car pull up into the drive after he got off work around four o’clock. Everyone hid outside or in their rooms. When I heard his car I’d turn off the record player, stop singing or dancing, and find a broom or a rag and clean, even though I had usually finished cleaning by then.

One afternoon I forgot the time. I was singing along with an album spinning on my record player when the door of my bedroom burst open. My stepfather stood with his belt in his hand. He slackened and popped it forcefully. He forbade me ever to sing in the house again. Then he beat me.

I stopped singing. I didn’t write. I kept sketchbooks, made designs, and my art was even picked for student exhibitions, but for all that imagination, I couldn’t imagine another way through, or a way out.

        

I was excited to start all over in a new school at the beginning of my first year at Will Rogers High. And like every first day of school since kindergarten, I determined to do my best as I opened up my new pads of paper, sharpened my new pencils, lined up my new pens and packed them in my school bag.

Several junior high classes fed into the school. It was massive. At every bell students jammed the halls, streaming to make it to the next class. Now and then I waved to someone I knew and added my greeting to the din of voices. I’d always liked the discipline and ritual of learning. To know something gave me more ability to move within my mind. There was more territory to contemplate. There were more doors. Where I got stuck was in wanting to perfect what I learned; instead, we had to keep going, imperfect, from one assignment or set of lessons to the next. There was always something more to know.

And what happened, I wondered, if you read and took in every book in every library of the world, learned the name of every seashell, every war, and could quote every line of poetry? What would you do with all that knowing? Would it be the kind of knowledge that could free you? Or would infinite knowledge bind you with the junky posturing of human beings who didn’t appear to be that wise? And who decided what knowledge was important to know and understand?

I saw a posted flier about upcoming auditions for the next school play. I decided to challenge myself. I was terrified about standing in front of juniors and seniors and auditioning. Yet I was compelled. The stage was a place where magic could happen that could take you far away. Countries could rise up and be destroyed. Lovers could defy obstacles. Some would die, while others would find a way through the abyss.

My mother gave me permission to stay after school for the meeting to get script pages and be assigned a tryout time. Because I would miss the bus, I would have to walk the two miles home. I didn’t mind. The walk home would give me rare time to myself. I hoarded time alone and liked best spending it outside, in music, or buried in a book.

I liked being with my thoughts—which ran between sensual fantasy and conjecture over the nature of reality. What is eternity? And what about the presence of Time? Is Time a being who can be appeased? Or is Time a tyrant? And will I ever find love? Love was something distant. I did not associate it with the fumbles of boys who were only looking for quick gratification. I wanted someone to come and find me and take me away.

Though I rarely spoke up in my classes, I had a voice that carried. When I was in plays in elementary school, I loved the ritual preparations of rehearsal and finally the test of performance. I was able to escape from the hard reality of the Oklahoma of stolen Indian lands and the self-­righteous religious right.

The last play I had been in was in sixth grade. In junior high there had been no theater, except the shot-through hormone dramas that played out through all the linked social circles.

I walked home after the high school theater meeting excited and nervous. I patted my bag, making sure my script pages with my tryout time scribbled on it were there. I admired the trees that lined the streets in the upper-class neighborhoods near the high school. I breathed in air that felt like freedom. I imagined that one day I might even live in a neighborhood like this. My father had grown up in a house of twenty-one rooms in Okmulgee, a house bought by Indian oil money.

As I drew closer to our block, the houses were smaller, poorer. Though my stepfather was a house painter, our house was peeling and appeared ragged and in need of repair. The yard was barren and wild. Our house was noticeably the shabbiest house on the block.

I could have taken initiative with the yard, but I always lost energy when I stepped into the aura of the house. I struggled with lethargy and often had to force myself through chores and obligations.

I felt a warning in my gut. My stepfather’s car was in the drive. I tried to disarm the knowing.

The knowing was a powerful warning system that stepped forth when I was in danger. Still, I often disregarded it. I’d been asked by a boy a few years older than me to go for a walk behind the grounds of the teen recreation center. My knowing said to me in a loud, distinct voice, Do not walk alone with this boy. To do so would put you in danger. I must be imagining things, I said to myself. I walked with him. He knocked me down and attempted to rape me. Someone came on us and I leaped up and got away.

The knowing was always right. It could never be disarmed. It stood watch over me.

Still, I tried. I told the knowing to remember that my stepfather could be nice sometimes. He sang show tunes to my mother. The knowing didn’t respond. Truth does not lower itself to small-time arguments or skirmishes.

But, I argued with myself, you never knew what would happen. He could uncover or invent a transgression of weeks or months before and off would come his belt if he needed an excuse to hit you. Or, once when I thought I would get in trouble for climbing into the space between the ceiling and the roof and falling through into the living room, he just laughed.

I hugged my bag under my arm, to protect the play pages.

When I opened the door, he stood, smiling, with his belt in his hand.

He yanked me into the house, out of view of the neighbors.

“This isn’t fair. My mother told me I could go!” I cried as he swung the belt.

Because I protested, he hit me for a long time. He grounded me for a month and forbade me to try out for the school play. I had work to do at home. I had to take the bus with everyone else.

I didn’t care anymore what happened to me.

        

It wasn’t long after that I was invited by a classmate to go to a party. I barely knew her, and I didn’t have a good feeling about her or the situation. But I wanted to go. I wanted to have some semblance of a normal teenage life.

I lied to my mother and said I was going to my friend’s house to study for the evening. I didn’t want to lie. How I wished that was truly what I was doing. My friend’s boyfriend, who had been kicked out of high school, was waiting for us up the street in his busted-up car. We jumped in. A pair of fuzzy dice hung from the rearview mirror. I’d never been in a car with fuzzy dice.

No good can come from this, warned my knowing. What does it matter if you lose face now by backing out? Ask them to drop you off. Now.

I was still angry at my stepfather, and at my mother for supporting him. Whatever happened, she took his side. She didn’t want to see what was really going on.

What good was it to know anything anyway? I argued at the knowing. The more you knew, the more you endured.

My classmate pulled out beers hidden under her jacket. We drank. Her older, slick-haired boyfriend drove us farther and farther out from the city, beyond my circle of familiarity. The beer calmed my anxiety. Soon we were at the lake, at a huge party. The music pounded. Drunken strangers, mostly guys, surrounded me. I wanted to go home, but I didn’t want to go home at all. Hell, I reminded myself, I had no home.

So I drank. The prickling anxiety that constantly haunted me in my waking moments slid to my feet. The more I drank, the more I didn’t care that I couldn’t sing in the house anymore or try out for the play. I drank more to fly above the rude story. I drank to obliterate my life.

My classmate and her boyfriend disappeared. They left me alone without a ride home. I panicked. I had to find a way back by my stepfather’s curfew. If I were to show up late and drunk, I feared I could be beaten to death.

I found a ride and paid for it without money. I had nothing else, and I was desperate and out-of-my-mind drunk. I left part of myself behind.

        

After that, I drank intermittently, usually on weekends. I discovered that each kind of alcohol has its own spirit. Drinking the sticky-sweet Southern Comfort associated with the singer Janis Joplin evoked violence. The whiskey was born in a New Orleans bar in 1874, in the wake of my people’s removal. After I pulled down the front door of my apartment in my very early twenties, in a frustrated anger born of drinking Southern Comfort, I never drank it again.

Tequila was closer to its plant origins. I could see the agave plant at the edge of my consciousness. It was a medicine. I sensed the plant as a mothering being. It would bend over me to take care of me even as it would punish me, like a fierce, protective mother.

All of these plant medicines, like whiskey, tequila, and tobacco, are potent healers. There’s a reason they’re called spirits. You must use them very carefully. They open you up. If you abuse them, they can tear holes in your protective, spiritual covering.

        

My stepfather began needling my mother to get rid of me. I was trouble, he said. I remember hugging myself under the blankets in the bedroom I shared with my sister as I overheard his plan to send me to a fundamentalist Christian school.

I had quit religion. He knew that to send me there would be the worst punishment.

Though I began attending the local Bible church after being lured to vacation Bible school in kindergarten, I stayed because I liked the treats. I grew to love Bible stories, and I hungered for God knowledge and loved the music. Church became an uneasy refuge from the chaos at home. Most of the children wouldn’t sit with me in church, because I was Indian and my parents were divorced. There were kind people in the church community, like the family who for years drove my sister and me to church twice a week or more, without compensation for gas or time. Another parishioner, Mr. Hughes, carried bubblegum in the huge pockets of his big blue jacket. After church he passed out gum to all the children. He had a heart as huge as his pockets. We would have followed him anywhere, even without the bubblegum.

By the time I was thirteen I had grown tired of the misuse of the Bible to prove the superiority of white people, to enforce the domination of women by men, and I didn’t agree with the prohibition on dancing and the warnings against prophecy and visions.

I decided to read the Bible through, searching to make my own sense of it. I read it through two or three times.

The Old Testament was basically tribal law for certain desert peoples in the Middle East. I found wisdom, poetry, and a great respect for dreams and visions. I also found no prohibition on dancing, which was proscribed by my church. King David danced before the altar. Women were as oppressed then as they were in Oklahoma.

Like the old-time powerful medicine people who spoke in metaphor, in poetry, Jesus Christ in the New Testament was an inspiration. He produced miracles and healed the people with words and deeds.

I delighted in scouring out shocking stories, like the one about Lot’s daughters drugging him so he would sleep with them, to read to my mother from the Bible. “These stories can’t be in the Bible!” she’d exclaim. And then I would point to the pages.

I often read to my mother. Once I read the opening to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to her. I thought she’d recognize her family’s story, as she had grown up poor during the time of the Dust Bowl. She did. For several weeks she read the novel between jobs and while cooking for us.

One night, a month or so after my mother had started reading, she marched into my bedroom while I was getting ready for bed. She was furious with Steinbeck and me. Why had I given her a story to read that left the family broken down in the middle of the road? How could a writer abandon the characters and the story at a place of ruin? Unlike the reality we appeared to be living, she wanted her stories to have good endings.

I loved the erotic poetry of the Song of Solomon from the Bible. These were in essence love songs for a beloved. The beloved was also God. I turned to these songs in the Bible to escape the pedantic sermons of the preacher. I preferred to consider God as a beloved rather than as a wrathful white man who was ready to destroy anyone who had an imagination.

One Sunday morning a well-meaning member of the congregation brought a trio of young Mexican-American sisters to church. They sat together in the front row, next to their sponsor. I was immediately uneasy. I knew how difficult it had been for me being Indian in church, and they were darker Indian-looking girls. I had a bad feeling.

In the middle of the sermon the preacher breached protocol and called them out directly from the pulpit for whispering. It was all right to save dark-skinned souls at a distance, from Korea or Africa, but he made it clear that he did not want these people in his church.

The pastor continued to have difficulty concentrating on his sermon. I watched as his face turned red from anger, and when he couldn’t stand it any longer, he demanded that the girls leave. I watched with the rest of the congregation as the girls walked out of the church. I wanted to leave with them. I didn’t have the courage to stand up with them and walk out. I never returned after that Sunday. From then on I suffered Sundays in a nervous silence in the house with my stepfather.

        

We didn’t live within walking or driving distance of a Creek church, nor did we have close relatives who would take us. My great-grandfather Henry Marcy Harjo had been a preacher, even a missionary to the Seminole Indians in Florida. Our great-grandfather Samuel Checotah was known as the first leader to convert to Christianity and became a Methodist minister. Because the tribe had outlawed Christianity, he was beaten for his faith.

As my stepfather continued his scheme to send me to church school, I began making plans to run away. Like many others of my generation, I was attracted by the hippy migration to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. I liked all of it: the hip notion of love, the way people dressed, and the hippy anthems of acid-inspired music that tripped the airways. I had always felt different from others, and now here was a youthful tribe of people who were united in their statement of difference.

Love, love, love . . . was the opposite of living in a house with a man who stalked about looking for reasons to beat us. My stepfather had started coming to my room after my mother left for work early in the morning, while my sister still slept. I’d curl into my stomach and hold my breath as he rubbed my back. I was going to have to get out of there before anything else happened.

Once, not long after my stepfather and mother married, I came home from church to find my brothers and sister huddled together in fear in my room, waiting for me. They’d just watched from a crack in the door as our stepfather made our mother play Russian roulette with a loaded gun.

We never knew what he might do.

I researched bus costs. I asked about hitchhiking. A man I had met at a party said that if I could make it as far as San Francisco, he knew someone who could prostitute me. I didn’t want to do that at all, but I was becoming desperate. If that was my only choice, I decided I would rather sell myself on the street than be imprisoned in a fundamentalist Christian school or surrender my body to my stepfather.

Though I was blurred with fear, I could still hear and feel the knowing. The knowing was my rudder, a shimmer of intelligent light, unerring in the midst of this destructive, terrible, and beautiful life. It is a strand of the divine, a pathway for the ancestors and teachers who love us.

My knowing told me that if I ran away, my life would turn even more chaotic. I saw my potential path as it ran from Tulsa to San Francisco. My lifeline was frayed and cut short.

As I pondered my dilemma as a teenager, curled up in my bed in the dark of night, I could feel the bright sun of knowing way in the distance, as if it were rising over the mountain of my distress. The sun gave me another way to consider God. The God I knew radiated such light. I could not accept an image of God as an angry white man who looked like my stepfather or the preacher.

The knowing told me there was another way. The knowing always spoke softly, wisely.

I told myself that the idea of running away should feel freeing, like flying, like hippies dancing in a love-in in a San Francisco park, but as I continued to consider it, I felt instead a heaviness, a terrible grief. I’d felt that kind of grief when I woke up from a dream of dying while giving birth on a South Pacific island.

In the dream I was in the story of a Polynesian girl. I speared food from the water. I loved the rhythm of the days. I remembered pig wrapped in banana leaves and cooked in an oven dug in the ground. I remembered how blue the ocean was. It was a blue rarely present now on Earth. I became pregnant. I had a premonition that the child and I would not survive. I went into labor, a labor that went on for more than two days. I died while giving birth. When I looked back as I turned toward the next world, I saw my exhausted rag of a body where I had cast it aside, and I saw the tiny body of my baby next to me.

At school I discovered information on opportunities for Indian students to go to Indian boarding school. I told my mother that I wanted to go to a school with other Indian students, a place where I would belong, where I would be normal. I wanted a smaller school, and I wanted to be far away from my stepfather. (I didn’t tell her I wanted to escape my stepfather.)

My mother took me to the Okmulgee Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to apply. The personnel at the BIA office were kind and helpful. They knew my grandparents and spoke highly of my father’s family and their contributions to our tribal society.

My mother and I began filling out the paperwork for me to attend the Chilocco Indian School. As we stood up at the end of the meeting with the agent, my mother mentioned my artwork. He then told us about the Institute of American Indian Arts. IAIA was a high school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and included a two-year postgraduate program. Indian students from all over the country attended. He’d sent other Creek students there.

I felt brightness as he gave us a brochure and an application. I submitted original art to be considered, consisting of my fashion sketches and a cartoon series I created. I was accepted.

After that, I heard no more of church school.

That fall my mother and stepfather drove me to Santa Fe. I noticed a marked change in the quality of light when we made it to New Mexico. It lit up the mountains at dusk. I could feel the strength of my path and knew I was headed in the right direction. I felt inspired about my life in a way that I hadn’t been since early childhood, when I used to go outside early in the morning to talk with the sun.

I was tremendously relieved to watch my stepfather pull away from the dorm, though I felt sad at my mother’s leaving. I was concerned about her safety, but through the years she’d found a way to make a relatively safe road through the abyss of her husband’s physical and psychological brutality.

        

After I left for Indian school my brother Allen, who was next to me in age, was forced from the house. Instead of taking a regular high school academic track, he went to vo-tech to learn auto mechanics. When he was forced onto the street as a young teenager, at least he had a skill and could make a living.

My knowing showed my sister, Margaret, as protected from any advances from our stepfather. I could see that my youngest brother, Boyd, would be forced to leave the house like our brother.

A palm reader would tell me in the eighties that in the palm of my left hand exists an alternate lifeline. In that line was a girl of sixteen or seventeen. She was dead of a drug overdose on the street of a California city.

As I turned back into the dorm at dusk after I watched the family car leave, I knew I was turning toward home.

        

When I started Indian school in Santa Fe in 1967, I was fresh from escaping the emotional winter of my childhood. I had been set free.

The famous Quapaw-Cherokee composer Louis Ballard was assigned as my adviser. Though I loved music and singing, I never took a class from him. I’d given up on music. In junior high, when the band teacher wouldn’t allow me to play saxophone because I was female, I quit band. This happened at around the same time my stepfather forbade me to sing.

I spent hours hanging out with Ballard in his office and studio. He was warm, affectionate, and liked having a young Oklahoma Creek around. He was like a father to me.

When I did return to music, after I was forty, Louis Ballard and I took up right where we had left off. I can still hear his voice urging me on in my creative musical efforts. Around five years ago he passed from this world. I spoke with him about a month before he moved on. He reiterated his belief in me, and I needed that belief. As we spoke, I saw him lifting up his feet and stepping over.

Music is direct communication with the sacred. It exists in a virtual invisible realm. There is no border of the corporeal, though words can be carried and lifted by music.

As adolescents we defined ourselves primarily by music. At Indian school we were either psychedelic visionaries with Jim Morrison and the Doors or Jimi Hendrix, or we were funky babies singing along with the Temptations, the Supremes, and the Four Tops. Or we danced Top Forty in white boots and bell-bottoms. If you were far, far out, you were a Frank Zappa freak. And then there were the country kings and queens with taped boots, up to the hats with attitude, waving them for Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn. There were also powwow and traditional music practitioners.

Most of us crossed back and forth between these types of music, or thrived somewhere in the middle. I tended toward Zappa, jazz, Morrison, and funk. I went to every dance in the canteen and attended the larger light-show extravaganzas put on in the gym by the arts faculty and advanced students. The enigmatic painter and teacher Fritz Scholder was one of the arts teachers who manipulated liquid gel projections for the light shows.

It was in the fires of creativity at the Institute of American Indian Arts that my spirit found a place to heal. I thrived with others who carried family and personal stories similar to my own. I belonged. Mine was no longer a solitary journey.

At Indian school we were Inupiat from Alaska, Seminole from Florida, and people from tribes from Oklahoma to Washington State. And though we were allied as young artists of a generation, we still contended with our tribal and historical differences. The Sioux students hung together. Their traditional enemies, the Pawnees, tended to avoid them, until they were paired as roommates or spent hours side-by-side making art in studio classes. Then those historical enmities fell away. Most joined with their traditional enemies when they were in the larger context of being a native arts student. All of us found commonality in creativity. I belonged to the “Civilized Tribes,” which included the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Seminoles.

We were all “skins” traveling together in an age of metamorphosis, facing the same traumas from colonization and dehumanization. We were direct evidence of the struggle of our ancestors. We heard them and they spoke through us, though like others of our generation, we wore bell-bottoms and Lennon eyeglasses.

Santa Fe was at the epicenter of hippiedom in the West. Canyon Road was a trail of incense, psychedelic music, art, and a place where you could get turned on if you found the right person who didn’t mind risking breaking the law by sharing with a minor. We were united by music, history, and art.

One of my classrooms was in a building originally constructed to teach “apartment living.” There were stoves lined up along the wall. Previous generations of students had been taught housekeeping, farming, janitorial tasks, and other vocational skills. The students were trained to be low-paid labor for white families in the towns and cities. A fine arts program at that time would have been considered irrelevant and beyond the minds and talents of Indians.

As we made art, attended cultural events, and struggled with family and tribal legacies, we sensed that we were at the opening of an enormous indigenous cultural renaissance, poised at the edge of an explosion of ideas that would shape contemporary Indian art in the years to come. The energy crackled. It was enough to propel the lost children within us to start all over again. We honed ourselves on that energy, were tested by it, destroyed and recreated by it.

The Indian school world was rife with paradox. Formerly run like a military camp by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the school had been transformed into a unique school for native arts, like the New York City Fame school but for Indian students. Almost overnight the staff, mostly established BIA employees, were asked to accommodate a fine arts curriculum and faculty—an assortment of idealistic and dedicated artists, both Indian and non-Indian.

We were given materials and encouraged to create, as we often did until three or four in the morning. Then we were awakened at exactly five-thirty a.m. by the dorm staff to report to details, jobs that included working in the kitchen and cleaning studios and offices. Then we went to our classes.

The most accomplished native and non-native artists taught our classes. Otellie Lolama, Hopi, taught traditional pottery; Fritz Scholder, Mission, taught painting; Allan Houser, Apache, taught sculpture; and Rolland Meinholtz, a Cherokee descendant, taught dramatic arts.

The academic classes were different. We had either stellar teachers who taught because they felt they could make a difference and loved what they were doing or those who signed on with the BIA because it was their last chance.

In one of my junior English classes we read aloud from fourth-grade readers. I always remember the story in that reader about a banker in a city in the Midwest who swept his sidewalk every morning before opening his bank. I looked around at our class. Many were gifted storytellers and speakers, but not in the English language. We were insulted and bored by the poor selection of materials. We could see that the teacher truly cared, but he didn’t know what to do with a class of students with widely varying skills in the use of English.

Reading aloud is the last thing you’d ask a class of shy Indian students to do. It was a painful process. While the story was read word by word, student by student, the rest of us wrote notes and poems and sent drawings to each other. My poetry notes were rhymed doggerel, mostly rude commentary.

I was soon removed from class and sent to study solo with a young Jesuit priest who had come through town to visit the school before returning to Holy Rosary Mission in South Dakota. When the school urgently needed a teacher to fill in, he agreed and stayed over to teach through the spring.

As I walked into his classroom that first day, I was hidden in my navy pea coat and long dark hair that always clouded my face. Father-to-be John Staudenmaier saw into me and took care of my spirit. He gave me the freedom to read what I wanted. The only requirement was that I observe carefully and write about my observations. I read the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson. I read O. Henry short stories.

I remember standing one night under the stars with him. I felt eternity running from the stars into us and between us. He was the first person to talk about the soul to me. He asked me to pay attention to the poetry of living.

In the spring the Preservation Hall Jazz Band came from New Orleans. They were on tour and played for us in an academic classroom. Because it was a Saturday afternoon, most of the students had checked out for the weekend or were in town. I was one of only three or four audience members to hear this renowned jamming band. The band blew us open with syncopated sound and soul. We could not stop smiling and moving.

        

We continued to battle with troubled families and the history we could never leave behind. These tensions often erupted in violence provoked by alcohol, drugs, and the ordinary frustrations of being human.

One afternoon our drawing class was given an assignment to draw from nature. We scattered across campus to luxuriate in one of the first warm days of spring. I was intoxicated by the smell of the earth as it threw off heat, as I sat on the steps of the theater building with a few other students. We smoked cigarettes, sketched, and contemplated the afternoon. We were momentarily content.

Then one of our classmates ran by us. He leapt onto the hoods of every car in the administration parking lot, crushing in the roofs, one by one. He kicked in a set of windows lining the academic building. Around him a whirling halo glowed a brownish red. Within the whirlwind were racial slurs, his abandoned baby self, the running-­away ghost of a father. Two teachers grabbed him and threw him to the ground.

Years later I thought of him as I drove through his reservation in South Dakota. I was impressed by the power that encircled his people. The gulf of discrepancy between the world of loss and the horses on the plains could be met only with anger.

Women often turn their anger inward, and at Indian school some of us mutilated ourselves. Each scar was evidence that we wanted to live. We had to keep knives away from one student. She was one of the best painting students. We carried another student to the Indian hospital to have her stomach pumped. She was a beautiful dancer from southern New Mexico. We had to hunt down another friend before she froze to death in the snow. She was trying to go home to a home that wasn’t there in Montana.

One weekend some of my roommates decided to tattoo themselves with needles and black ink. I contemplated what I would tattoo on my hands, but I was not enough in love with anyone to tattoo his initials and L-O-V-E on my knuckles, as one girl was doing. It was an initiation of sorts, either for love or as a mark of blood, to show bravery or to record a particular event, a breakup or an accomplishment.

Years later I picked up my daughter from Indian school near Gallup and met the boyfriend she was mourning because they had to part for summer vacation. His hand blazed with her initials carved in a heart. The cuts were still weeping blood. I knew I had trouble.

I marked myself once with a knife. I was disappearing into the adolescent sea of rage and destruction. The mark of pain assured me of my own reality. The cut could speak. It had a voice that cried out when I could not make a sound in my defense. I never made such a mark again. Instead I chose to slash art onto canvas, pencil marks onto paper, and when I could no longer carry the burden of history, I found other openings. I found stories.

This next story I found in my memory in a tangle of Indian school stories. It is partially fictionalized.

I thought of the old man as we huddled in the ditch behind the dorms, passing around a bottle of sticky sweet cherry vodka. Alcohol kept away the cold and the ghosts of sadness, and after a few sips I was free to remember.

One night the moon was full, bright, with an aura of ice as earth headed toward winter. It was in the time when our father was still with us. He hadn’t come home again, and my mother waited up for him in front of the television, the blue flickering glow switching back and forth between light and dark.

The luminous road to the moon was strong and familiar as I made my way to the old man who was my guardian there. We did not need words to talk. That night he took me to a stone quarry, and we walked to the edge where the scrap pieces were piled together. Below it we could see the world I had come from. Across town, my father was coming out of Cain’s Ballroom with a blond woman on his arm. They were kissing and laughing. We could see my mother doze as the television screen blurred, and then the baby awakened and she went to him, changed his diaper, and held him close to her neck as she turned on the light in the kitchen to make his bottle.

This was the first time we had come to this place together. I knew then that it would be a very long time before I would see the old man again, and I felt sad. We watched the story below us as it unwound through time and space, unraveling like my mother’s spools of threads when she accidentally dropped them. But I would not recall any of it for years.

When I returned to my body at dawn, my father showed up at home with smeared lipstick on his white shirt and the terrible anger of a trapped cat inside him.

I watched the moon from a distance. It was a slender knife in the winter sky. I hoped the old man couldn’t see me sitting drunk here, beneath his home in the moon.

I had to keep from staring at the new student, Lupita. Her perfect skin was café au lait, and her black eyes were elegant like a cat’s. She announced that the first thing she had done when she arrived at school was check out the male population and she was going to give a report. We laughed and leaned forward to listen.

“What’s the name of that Sioux guy who paints large canvases with the geometric designs? With the nice smile and perfect back, always running touchdowns between classes?”

“John Her Many Horses,” we chimed. Every girl on campus had noticed him.

“Now that morsel over there . . .” She motioned to Herbie Nez. He was Navajo and as slim as a girl.

“He’s much too pretty. I could eat him up in one bite,” she teased.

Herbie’s hearing was like a finely cut crystal and tuned into everything, even the songs and cries of spirits who hung around the school. He could hear the cries of children dragged in the early years to the school against their will.

Herbie looked over at us and batted his eyelashes. We all laughed together and downed the next round. Then suddenly our party was over. The dorm patrol surprised us in the nearly moonless night. We scattered across the grounds into the dark to save ourselves from detention, restriction, and being sent back home.

I ran until I couldn’t run anymore. By the time I made it back to our room, my roommate had already been caught, tried, and judged and was packing her bags to go home. She was the first that semester to be kicked out of school for drinking. She was to be the object lesson for all of us.

Her family came after breakfast the next morning, just as a light rain blew in over the mountains. We all watched apprehensively from the dorm living room as her father stiffly lifted her suitcases into their truck to take her back to the reservation. When she climbed in next to her mother and brothers and sisters, she turned and waved a heavy goodbye.

That night Georgette Romero woke up the whole dorm. First I heard screams and then footsteps running down the hall toward my room, which was in the farthest wing. Lupita saw everything, she told me later, because she was up writing a letter to her mother at four in the morning. When Georgette ran by, Lupita saw her being chased by a ghost. Her Apache roommates refused to let her back into their room and burned cedar to dispel the evil. They didn’t want a girl with a ghost in their room, and neither did anyone else. My room had an extra bed, and it was decided that she would move to my room. That night and for many nights after, I stayed alert in the dark and didn’t sleep, anticipating the ghost’s return.

Georgette’s books were all over the floor. Her plastic beauty case overflowed with makeup and polishes, flooding the counter over the drawers that we were supposed to share. For hours she scraped and rubbed off chipped polish on her nails, then reapplied numerous thick coats, smelling up the room with polish and acetone. She left used dabs of cotton and underwear scattered on the floor. At first I was amused by this alien creature, and told myself that she had made herself her own canvas. But she was getting on my nerves. I spent more and more time in the painting studio or sat on the fire escape, listening to music.

One afternoon when I came back to my room from classes, I couldn’t hear anything for the whine blasting from Georgette’s favorite country station. I had just been summoned to meet with the head dorm matron, Mrs. Wilhelm, in half an hour, and after the bare escape I had every reason to be concerned. I had to make a plan about what I would do, where I would run if I got kicked out.

“Hey, I need that!” Georgette gestured to me with her nail polish applicator as I turned down the volume, almost muting it. “I had a rough day.”

“Peace,” I said, and made the peace sign with my fingers. I turned up the music a notch, then opened the windows to let in some air. I took a deep breath to relieve my panic. I had to get my thoughts straight before going into the meeting with the dorm matron. I had to have a plan.

I couldn’t go back to my family, I would tell her. I would kill myself first.

I thought about killing myself. Once when the pressure was too much, when the stepfather was bearing down on me, I sneaked a kitchen knife into my bed. I cut myself on the wrist. The cut was superficial. None of our knives were sharp. But the cut temporarily relieved the pressure. I felt calm. Then my mother came into the room, brought there by mother instinct. She lifted my blanket and saw the knife and my cut. Pain broke her face. I never tried it again. When I thought about it, I’d see her face guarding me.

Across the way, in the boys’ dorm, I could hear Herbie practicing his guitar. We shared a love for jazz, Jimi Hendrix, and esoteric philosophies.

“Our dark sides are compatible,” I told him one night as we flew with Jimi’s guitar, far from the dancers we could hear in the distance practicing in the gym, far from the school, from pain, high on smoke, sitting on the floor of his dorm room.

“Hmmmmmm,” he answered. “True as horses running across mesas, breathing clouds.”

“Perfect,” I answered.

And then we laughed. Though he was born in a hogan and didn’t speak English until he was sent to a Catholic boarding school, and I was born in a city speaking English, we fit. My father’s tribal language was a secret used by his relatives, who didn’t like my mother because she came from a poor family. My father’s relatives and ancestors were tribal leaders, beauty queens, and artists. My mother’s relatives were musicians and storytellers and didn’t like to hold nine-to-five jobs. My parents were from enemy tribes, which set up a conflict in my blood.

Herbie’s spirit gleamed and spun and called to me to climb higher and higher. We flew, and all the weight of fear and doubt fell away.

Georgette was in love with Clarence, Herbie’s cousin from the other side of the Navajo reservation. Clarence was one of those shy-eyed Navajo men with big eyelashes and a tight, tapered back. He lived for rodeo, for horses, bulls, and girls. Georgette’s moods fluctuated according to her sightings of Clarence. He was her sole focus and the reason for her beauty tricks.

“So did Clarence ask you to marry him today?” I joked.

Georgette glared at me. “That Mexican girl better go back where she came from, is all I can say,” she snapped. She was talking about Lupita.

“You mean the opera singer,” I answered. Lupita wanted to be an opera singer, went the rumor, but the idea of any of us becoming an opera singer seemed preposterous. It was wildly possible, just not likely. Most of us girls would most likely move home, have babies, and do art at the kitchen table.

Partying in the ditch the previous weekend, Lupita hadn’t looked like an opera singer; she was one of us. I could still hear her laugh as we ran through the dark from the dorm police. It was a trained laugh—and for a moment I could imagine her as an opera singer, far away from here, on a stage where her talent and shine could amount to something. She was half Mexican, and her father was from a tribe in Oregon I had never heard of until I came here to school. The word was, this school was her last chance.

Herbie told me that Clarence had made a bet he could have Lupita within a week. She would be easy. All the boys were watching to see what would happen and were placing bets.

“Did you place a bet?” I asked Herbie.

“No way,” he answered. “But I’m placing a bet that I’ll have that Lewis wrapped around my finger by Saturday night.”

“Yes, the most improbable candidate for your love in the whole school.”

“I like a challenge,” he said.

We laughed at the incongruity. Lewis was Clarence’s best friend. He rode bulls and even looked like a bull. He was square to the earth and thought of himself as a stud. He would beat Herbie up if he caught Herbie staring at him in public.

Lupita’s singing pulled me up the hallway as I walked to my meeting with Mrs. Wilhelm. Her office was near the dorm entrance, where Lupita now perched, a crowd around her. I stopped to listen along with everyone else who was captured by her voice. Her voice was a living, breathing thing, like Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, like Jackson Pollock’s paintings.

My father had told me that some voices are so true they can be used as weapons, can maneuver the weather and change time. He said that a voice that powerful could walk away from the singer if it is shamed. After my father left us, I learned that some voices could deceive you. There is a top layer and there is a bottom layer, and sometimes they don’t match. My stepfather’s voice had a top layer. It was jovial and witty and knew how to appeal to women. The bottom layer was a belt studded with anger.

Everyone clapped when the song was over.

“Forget opera,” I blurted out. “You can sing anything you want.” Everyone turned to look at me, including Clarence, who was leaning against the wall, pretending he was an innocent audience member.

“Hey, thanks,” Lupita said warmly. “Do I know you?”

We had met at the ditch. Maybe she had forgotten, and then I saw her eyes move sideways toward the dorm assistants, who were listening to everything. We couldn’t be too careful. Maybe she too was waiting for Mrs. Wilhelm.

“I’m Lupita, from the planet Venus.” She smiled at me, aware of the rapt attention of the high school boys, who all snickered when she mentioned Venus.

I introduced myself as being from Oklahoma and added, “Oklahoma is a long way from Venus.” Everyone laughed. We were all in awe of this girl with the magic voice whose easy sexual suggestiveness reminded us of an earthy goddess. Though she was my age, Lupita seemed suddenly older as she slid her hands along her tight sheath skirt. Her nails were long and manicured, the look Georgette strived for but would never get. In that small moment I felt sorry for Georgette. She didn’t have a chance.

“Do you really like my singing?”

She glanced over at Clarence, who gave her a shy dance of his eyes. It was obvious that despite his bet, they had a thing for each other. There was a light that jumped between them, an electrical force so strong that it sparkled in the late afternoon sun. Who was after whom? I wondered.

“Lupita, can you move your admiration society outside?”

It was Mrs. Wilhelm. I had briefly forgotten about her. She motioned me into her office with her determined German chin and sharp gray eyes. Suddenly I was afraid again. The door shut with a precise click. She motioned me to sit at the table I had shined with lemon wax just that morning. My work detail was to clean her office after breakfast before I went to class. I did so diligently, with respect and fear.

“I have something I want to show you,” Mrs. Wilhelm said. Here it is, I thought. I expected her to pull out the weekend’s report on the ditch episode, or at least to point out an uneven wax job. Instead she put a letter in front of me.

It was addressed to her, and it was from my stepfather. I had no idea why my stepfather would write to Mrs. Wilhelm or any administrator at the school. I had never seen him write a letter to anyone. His routine was to come in from work at four, find a reason to hit my brothers or me, then open and read the evening paper. My mother would hide in the kitchen cooking dinner, though she was tired after waitressing all day at the diner for the old lady from back East who ran the place.

One time I lost it. My mother was exhausted from working a double shift. My stepfather sat in his huge chair barking out orders. He yelled at my mother to cut his meat, to bring him another glass of iced tea. Then he snapped at her because she wasn’t moving fast enough.

“Hurry up, bring me some more ice! What’s taking you so long?” He had just asked her for something at the other end of the house a few minutes before.

I had to say something.

“Why don’t you buy her a pair of roller skates so she can get around faster?”

I was belted. I was grounded forever. But it was worth it.

The envelope had been opened neatly by Mrs. Wilhelm with the electric letter opener I dusted every morning. I took out the letter. He had used my mother’s drugstore stationery and had written with blue ink.

Dear Mrs. Wilhelm,

I am writing to you because I think there are some things you need to know about our daughter who is now a student at your school. We had quite a problem with her when she was in our home and could not control her. Watch out for her. She will steal. She is not to be trusted.

I was not his daughter—I had never heard him call me that—nor had I stolen anything. Tears threatened, but I refused to give him that satisfaction, even if he was six hundred miles away. My face blushed; I was stung by his betrayal. He was the one who had stolen: he had stolen my mother’s life and was attempting to steal my reputation. I stuttered, but nothing came out.

“This is what I think about this letter,” Mrs. Wilhelm told me. She tore it into pieces and threw them in the trash can. I was both relieved and surprised. I had never believed it possible to be trusted over the word of a white man who belonged to the Elks. As I left her office, I promised myself that I would never drink again. Mrs. Wilhelm had believed in me. She had given me another chance.

I walked into my room after the meeting to find Lupita sitting on my bed while Georgette struggled to pull on my prized fake suede hip-hugger bell-bottoms. They were stuck at her hips. Everyone on our floor shared clothes, though they usually asked permission first. Georgette hadn’t asked.

“Excuse me!” I shouted over the radio just as she triumphantly snapped the top button.

“They fit,” Georgette said. She pushed a chair up to the dresser mirror and climbed up to admire herself front and back. “Do you mind if I borrow them?”

Lupita was absentmindedly sifting through Georgette’s box of polishes.

“Aren’t they a little tight?” I asked.

“No, they fit perfectly.”

For the sake of making friends with Lupita, I momentarily let it go, wincing as I watched Georgette make furtive dance movements as she watched herself in the mirror.

“Be careful,” I warned her as she hopped down from her pedestal. “Those are my favorite pants.”

Lupita’s kind of talent was rare and burned bright. The school saw this and was paying for private music lessons, she told us as Georgette picked through nail polishes and pulled out what I thought was a horrible color for Lupita. Lupita humored her, but I could see that she was no fool.

The music teacher wasn’t just teaching her to sing. She laughed as she told us about his wandering hands when he put his arms around her to demonstrate abdominal breathing.

“So where is your mother from?” I figured I might as well find out the answer directly. Lupita’s stories about being from Venus, her outrageous flirting, and her sudden appearance in the middle of the semester made her a target for rumors. Not only had I heard that this school was her last chance, but there was speculation on her mother’s absence.

“Venus,” she said.

She was serious. Her claim was not just a flirting device to attract boys. She had to believe this so she wouldn’t fall apart.

It was then I remembered the old man and how I used to fly to the moon. I remembered the stone quarry and my mother holding the baby. I remembered my father. I felt lonesome, my stomach scraped by the edge of sorrow.

Lupita opened up and we talked about everything—about our fathers, about the ability to fly in dreams. Georgette listened quietly as she polished Lupita’s nails. I told Lupita I wanted to paint, to be an artist. She told me that what she wanted was someone to love her. And then she said to me nonchalantly, as she looked sideways at Georgette, “What do you know about that Navajo boy, the cowboy with the eyelashes—Clarence?” She had perfect timing, the mark of a good hunter or singer. Then she said directly to Georgette, “He’s a good kisser.”

I hated confrontation and kept quiet.

“He’s spoken for,” spit Georgette, who stood up quickly to face Lupita, spilling acetone all over her and my prized suede pants. The whole room stank of rotten apples.

Lupita knew exactly what Georgette had been up to all along when she invited her to our room. I wondered if she knew anything about Clarence’s bet and whether I should tell her, and if so, when. Lupita picked up Georgette’s sharp nail file and began to file her nails.

Georgette wasn’t through, though.

“You Mexican bitch!” she snapped. “Get out of here.”

“This is my room too,” I said. “She can stay. And by the way, please take off my pants.”

Georgette glared at me as she quickly replaced my pants with her skirt. She kicked the ruined pants aside.

“You’re both sick,” she spit out. “Nobody can be from Venus or anyplace else but here.”

She marched out of the room carrying her case of nail polish and a story she would vent to her friends in the next room.

Later I set out for the painting studio to get myself back together. When I painted, everything went away: the seductions, the sad need for attention, the missing fathers, fearful mothers, and evil stepfathers. I could fly to the moon, and to Venus too, if I wanted. I understood Lupita when she said she was from Venus. I was also from somewhere far away, the other side of the Milky Way, and would return there someday. I knew it, as I knew I could count on cerulean blue to be absolutely cerulean blue when I spread it on a canvas.

An approaching cold front froze the stars to the dark sky. The Powwow Club was practicing in the gym, and a song flew out the tall narrow windows toward the white shell of the moon. The moon leaned delicately toward the bright point of Venus, framed by the graceful cottonwoods lining the sidewalk. I felt flawed, imperfect, but what haunted me was not flamboyant like Georgette’s ghost. It was a subtle thing, a delicate force, like the field of stars under the sky when we danced in the summer. I was haunted by a paradox: if there is such beauty, then why are we suffering?

As I opened the door to the studio, Herbie jumped me. I screamed. I chased him, then held him down, made him promise never to frighten me again. Then I told him everything: about Lupita, about Georgette, about Mrs. Wilhelm and my stepfather, about the moon. He walked around me as I talked and got out my paints. He was high on possibilities, on hope, beer, and smoke. He reminded me that he had come over to take me to the dance at the canteen.

“No!” I told him. “No, I can’t. Today I made a promise to myself, and I can’t risk getting sent home. I need to paint.”

The incantations of the Doors wound through the campus and through the door of the studio, tempting me.

“You’re running away from yourself,” he said. “You’re hiding from reality. Let’s go! Besides, I need you for courage to check somebody out for me. Aieeeee.”

I knew he meant Lewis. And when I thought of Lewis, I remembered Lupita and the deal Clarence had going. Tonight was the deadline. I had to find Lupita and warn her before it was too late.

The canteen was jammed. Herbie immediately pulled me out onto the dance floor. Dancing was like painting, like flying. Through rhythm I could travel toward the stars. Herbie and I could stay on the dance floor for hours, and if we stayed in the canteen and danced I couldn’t drink or get into any other kind of trouble. While we danced I kept my eyes on the door, looking for Lupita. We danced every dance until a Mexican song interrupted us and all the Apache girls flooded the dance floor.

While they weaved back and forth to the bright music of the ranchero, Herbie bought us Cokes, and I looked around the room for Lupita. I didn’t see her anywhere. I didn’t see Clarence either. Georgette stood outside the glass doors of the entrance. She was small and alone. I watched her ask to borrow a cigarette from another student. She lit it. I remembered the night she upset the whole dorm with her panicked run from the ghost chasing her, and the big stink her roommates had caused when they demanded she move from their room. I felt sorry for the girl with the scratchy army blanket draped over her shoulders. The ghost had not reappeared, but the fear followed her.

I spotted Clarence coming up out of the dark, from the direction of the ditch. He was smiling and laughing too hard, walking with Lewis. Lupita wasn’t with them. Clarence grabbed Georgette a little roughly. She smiled and melted into him, and then they came through the door and onto the dance floor, Lewis following behind them. Georgette beamed and made sure I saw her.

“Where’s Lupita?” I demanded. A knot formed in my stomach. Georgette glared at me.

“She’s on Venus,” said Clarence, and he and Lewis laughed. I didn’t like the sound of their sly laughter.

I pulled a reluctant Herbie behind me. “We have to look for Lupita,” I urged. He slid out the door of the packed canteen with me.

“Wait, wait,” he protested as he stared back at Lewis, who had no idea Herbie was interested in him. But Herbie knew better than to reveal his attraction, and pantomimed his broken heart behind Lewis’s broad back.

We found Lupita almost immediately. “Over here,” she called brightly. She waved us into the shadow between the painting and drawing studios, where she was alone.

“Okay, Venus,” joked Herbie. “This better be good. I just left the man of my dreams to come and look for you.”

Her eyes shined as she pulled a pint of Everclear from under her jacket.

“You guys go ahead,” I said. “I’ll sit this one out.”

I was trying to be good. It was then that I saw the rough smudge of dirt on Lupita’s jacket, the dainty lace of twigs on her thick black hair, and the bruise decorating her wrist. I thought of Clarence and Lewis walking smugly into the dance. I knew they’d had their way with her. It was more than I could bear. I took a drink, then another.

I lost track of time. One minute we were all back in the canteen dancing in a line to “Cotton-Eyed Joe” and then the next we were sitting under the moon out near the ditch with a stranger from town we’d hired to make a liquor run for us. The earth was spinning, and we were spinning with it. We leaned into the burn. Lupita told us about her life, about how her mother had died when she was ten years old and left her with her father. She told how her father would tie her hair up every morning with her mother’s ribbons before they left to work the fields together.

Herbie showed us the scar on his back made by a man who beat him and then raped him for his girlish ways. He made it sound funny, but I didn’t laugh. I didn’t say anything: I was numb and flying far away, listening to the whir of the story as it unwound beneath the glowing moon.

Herbie disappeared somewhere in the dark, and I could hear him throwing up. Someone was singing round-dance songs. A dog barked far, far away. Lupita had drifted into the bushes for what seemed years when the warning bell sounded from the girls’ dorm. The sky was still spinning, but I willed myself to walk, step by step, to find Lupita, to make it back to the dorm in time. I looked for her through the blur of stars and sadness. I lost her.

Without warning I remembered the stacked stones in the quarry on the moon. I saw the unraveling story as it spun through time and space. And I saw what the old man had shown me that I hadn’t been able to recall until now—how each thought and action fueled the momentum of the story, how vulnerable we were to forgetting, all of us.

The final bell rang and I barely made it to my room, where I summoned a bit of soberness to save my life. I brushed my teeth so I wouldn’t smell like a drunk.

“Breathe,” said the dorm assistant, whose job it was on Friday and Saturday nights to go to each room and smell each girl’s breath for alcohol. She stood poised with her pen, ready to make a mark against my name. I admired her clean life. Her parents showed up every weekend to take her home, and returned her with chili and fresh bread. She stayed on the safe side of rules. I breathed. Then breathed again easily when she marked me present and sober.

No one had seen Lupita. Georgette floated into our room. “By the way,” she said coolly, “Mrs. Wilhelm is looking for you. She wants you to come to her office.”

I was still drunk when I entered Mrs. Wilhelm’s office, though I had learned to hide it. Lupita was sobbing. Mrs. Wilhelm looked disappointed.

“I want to go home. I want to go back to Venus,” Lupita cried as she buried her face in her arms.

I had failed to warn her in time, and I had failed the trust of Mrs. Wilhelm, who was the only person who had ever stood with me against the lies of my stepfather. Now Lupita would get sent home, not to Venus but to the father who had been sleeping with her since she was ten.

“Were you with Lupita tonight?” Mrs. Wilhelm asked me.

Immediately I thought of Georgette, the snitch. But I knew that wasn’t really what mattered. The truth was a path clearer than anything else, a shining luminous bridge past all human failures. I could see the old man on the moon who always demanded nothing less.

“Yes, I was with Lupita,” I confessed.

I knew I was most likely dooming myself to the house of my stepfather.

“Go take care of her,” Mrs. Wilhelm said. “I will talk with the two of you tomorrow when you’re sober.” Then she slapped each of us with a month of restriction. “I need you here so I can keep a closer eye on you,” she said.

I led Lupita back to her room. All night I held her while she cried for her mother, for home, all night, as we flew through the stars to the planet Venus.