She knows that I love her
and would do just about anything for her
except buy her drugs. She used to do that sometimes.
Give me money to buy her drugs from this guy named
Chevy. I liked Chevy.
Everybody did
even though he’d sell weed or coke or maybe even crack
to a kid like me
to take home to my mother. Chevy bought groceries
for families
that didn’t have any money, usually because the father
or mother
had spent it all on drugs.
When we moved away—off reserve
Chevy gave my mom a whole
carton of smokes
as a going-away present.
This was after my father was gone.
I think my mom liked Chevy
but didn’t want her kid
having a drug dealer
for a secondhand father.
I have to draw the line somewhere, she said.
And when we moved, she got real moody
’cause she gave up everything
but eventually went back to
nicotine and alcohol
in what she called “limited quantities.”
She worried about me
and took me to counselors
and healers
and psychics. I told them all about
Old Man and they all told me
that was great. The psychics said
they could see him. But I don’t know.
The psychics said I was an Old Soul and that part of me was damaged because of some kind of shit that happened in a previous life. The not-talking routine that I did sometimes was a good thing because the silence, they said, helped cleanse me of negative energy from my past lives. I asked one of them, Jack—Jack the side-burned psychic—if he could see Old Man and he said he could, that Old Man was standing over my left shoulder. And I turned and sure enough, Old Man was smiling. But that was nothing new.
So Jack said Old Man would always be there for me. He also said my father was somewhere Out West and kind of messed up but would come back one day. He said he saw the two of us as adults drinking beer in a gloomy bar. And there were no other people in the bar. Just black dogs.
And I said,
Yeah,
that’s probably
me
and him.
But the psychic said it was okay, that when I was an adult and we had that beer together, we’d both be pretty messed up but not totally fucked. And that, he assured me, was the way life worked for most people, even Old Souls like me.
You just got to work with
what the spirit world hands you,
and grow from there, he said.
Isn’t that true, Old Man? he asked.
And Old Man nodded, straightened his back and disappeared.
Then the psychic told my mother
That will be a hundred bucks.