When we were kids, Tias’s parents took us camping at Hecla, which was about an hour east of the rez. It was in this park, Grindstone, and full of trees, water, and white people. We took out our tents and set up in one of the lots: a little tribe of brown-skins camping in pup tents while next to us a family of three was hunkered down in an RV worth more than our house—I always wondered what the inside of those giant machines looked like. Tias and I got on our swimming trunks and headed toward the beach, which was a twenty-minute walk through the park. All around us dandelion seeds billowed through the air, twirling like ballerinas. Tias’s face always seemed to soften whenever he was surrounded by nature; his usual pained expression disappeared, and the dimples in his cheeks rose like little stars.
On the beach the large waves whipped up from the wind swallowed us like crawfish. We waded into the water until it went up to our stomachs. Tias laughed and put his hand on my pouch and a finger in my navel. What a funny word, navel, but perhaps it was fitting, as my skin had pruned in the cold lake water and bubbled up like the skin of an orange—I too was full of juice. His finger continued to prod me, it felt like a leech suckling on the rump where nikâwiy cut me free. I pushed him away and then jumped on his back, laced my feet around his waist, and wrapped my arms around his shoulders, our long wet hair coming together like sweetgrass. He carried me out in the water as far as we could still stand, the shore drifting farther and farther, the water throwing our laughs back at us. When Tias was finally exhausted, he let go of me, and we stood there, looking at one another, the waves throwing us back to the shore.
“This is like Titanic, eh?” I said.
“Hated it, it was so long. Two fucking VHS tapes, what the—?”
“Don’t be such a smart ass.” I slugged him in the arm.
“Okay fine, I’m Jack, you can be Rose,” he said and put his arm around my head like he was rescuing me.
“You sure?” I said. “You know I’m dink-eyed as fuck. I’d cut your damn hand off if I had to chop you free with an axe.”
We continued to play in the water as our bodies became raisins—we looked like elders with tiny bodies, like NDN Benjamin Buttons. And time passed too quickly for two little Nates to measure. The sun was going down and we had drifted much too far to recount our steps. Our bodies were tired, legs drained of energy, so we linked arms and filled our bellies with air so that we could float like salmon swimming upstream. We stopped resisting the waves and let the water push us back to the shore, our shoulders and hair moussed with seafoam.
When we got back to dry land, our bodies were exhausted. I sat on the sand to catch my breath while Tias ran ahead to look for the towels we had recklessly thrown down. The sun was falling and tinted the sky lavender. Tias left a trail of prints in the sand, some disappearing from the pulse of the waves, others filling with water. I got up and followed the steady path of prints; I found him not too much farther ahead, lying exhausted in the sand. I quietly watched him for a few moments before he noticed me, his forearm glittering in the purple haze, his skin so bronzed that he melded with the sand. I sat down beside him, our naked shoulders rubbing, shaking our hair loose of the water like wet dogs, telling stories.
“You know,” he began—much like he always does, the way NDNs expect you to know every story like a telepath—“I have this photo at home.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Of my sister, she’s a baby—”
“You have a sister?”
“Yeah, well, had a sister.”
“What happen? She die or something?”
“Worse. She was taken.”
“You mean, like Liam Neeson kind of Taken?” I’ve never been able to handle uncomfortable situations very well. I always try to use humour to deal.
“You think this is a fucking joke?” he said, his hands rolled into fists. He kicked me and knocked me over and before I had a chance to get up, he climbed on top of me and punched me in the side of the head.
“What do you know about anything, Jonny?” Another punch. “You think because you’re gay you’re the only one with problems in this world?” And like that his face was pinched up with pain again, his wet ass up against my cock—I guess I got a half chub. I could tell he felt it pushing against his rear, and at first he sat there dumbfounded, didn’t move, just looked down at me, his eyes like two brown wormholes. And then he jumped off me.
“You’re sick, you know that? Who the fuck gets horny from being punched?” We sat in silence for a few seconds, then both burst into laughter. “You’re really something, you know that, Jonny?”
We got up and started to make our way back to the campsite—ready for the lickin we were bound to get for being so damned late. But first I wanted to collect a souvenir from the beach. As he went on ahead, I found a snail shell poking out where Tias had pushed me into the sand, and put it in my pocket. I looked down at the outline my body had made in the sand, and his right next to it; I traced the mark left from the soft hollow between his legs.
I caught up with him and we made our way back in the peppery light of the moon. The willows were shaking in the breeze, the waves now a distant world away. Tias’s back was glowing from dead stars, dead light. His parents were wicked mad and sent us both to bed without any supper, called us both a “goddamn curse” for making them worry. We giggled in the tent and made shadow animals with a flashlight. His was a wolf, mine an eagle.
I never had to tell him, that was how I knew I loved him—I never had to tell him.