My appetite is still a ghost. It’s there, I know I’m hungry, but I can’t imagine going through the process of eating. I’m too tired to chew. In too much sorrow to swallow. The only thing I am is angry enough to bite.
We passed Fresno without stopping and continued down the 5 South until we reached a town called Bakersfield. As soon as we entered the city limits, Mom and I both immediately rolled up our windows. The smell of this place is awful. How can anyone live here? The air is filled with the stench of cow poop. Usually, I can take a lot of smells. I’m pretty dirty most of the time, and my showers are few and far between, but this amount of manure filling my nostrils makes me gag. Mom too.
And as if we both weren’t sad enough, our view of this horrible little place makes our hearts break all over again. Hundreds of cows on both sides of us, trapped behind fences, standing in their own feces, waiting for death.
“Is this hell?” I ask.
“For those cows it sure is, but not for us, we’re just passing through its gates,” Mom replies.
As we continue our drive, I try to get a look at as many cows as possible. Maybe if I see them, their lives were worth something. Maybe the image of each cow that goes into my brain makes them exist a bit more than they do now. I tell them, silently, how sorry I am for what we humans do to them. In my animal fact book, I discovered that cows and bison are related. They are from the same family, called Bovidae.
Hundreds of years ago, I’d be one of my ancestors, on horseback, riding past their ancestors. The only difference is that they’d be roaming free. They’d be happy and grazing and doing what they were born to do. But time is cruel. And over time, the white people came and slaughtered our buffalo. And now some of them make a living off slaughtering these cows every day.
“I bet they’re all women,” Mom says as she tries to keep her eyes on the road and away from the horror around us.
Her statement hits me in the gut. All women. Trapped their entire lives in these lots, and the only silver lining for them is the hope for a quick death. I’m so sorry, ladies. Humans are horrible creatures. And if it makes you feel any better, just know, sometimes, we even do this to other humans. Yeah, we can be that awful.
“Every butcher needs to be butchered,” I say.
“No, it’s not the butcher’s fault, Opin.”
“Why not?”
“The cow’s already dead by the time it gets to a butcher. The butchers chop it up and package it to make rent.”
“Who kills the cows?” I ask.
“Some kid making minimum wage. Or someone willing to do anything to make some money to send back to their family in Mexico or wherever. We can’t blame them either.”
“Then who is the villain?” I ask.
“Partly you and me. Each time we order it, we’re telling them to kill more. That’s how the world works. Supply and demand.”
“I don’t want to be the villain anymore,” I say.
“Me neither. All those cows are all of us. We’re all born from the same dirt, air, and water. They just look different. If you want to be the hero and tell those fat billionaires in their mansions that make all the money killing these innocent cows, all we gotta do is say no more.”
I look at her, then back at all the cows, and make myself a promise that I’ll keep forever: “I’m never eating a hamburger again.”
“You and me both, kiddo,” she says as we drive out of hell.
After driving through all the yellow hills and brown fields, we pass a green sign. I missed green. It’s the only green thing I’ve seen in hours. It reads LOS ANGELES 113 MILES.
This would have made me excited a day ago, but a lot has happened since then. I’m not the same person I was yesterday. With all the moving around we do, I’m never in the same place, but I’ve always been the same person … But that’s changed. I feel different. I feel all the hope inside of me being slowly eaten away by anger and sadness. I hate being sad, and I’m so sad that I allowed hate inside of me. It’s hard to believe that such a small, scrawny dog like Ani meant so much to me in our short time together. With her, I felt like everything was going to be okay, even as the world around me—in Stockton, especially—wasn’t okay at all. But with her gone, I’m no longer me. I’m just a part of myself looking for the other part of myself.
Mom puts a CD in. It’s not one of Emjay’s rap CDs. It’s one of hers. A Native American band from the seventies called Redbone. And since the air no longer smells like cow crap, we roll the windows down and turn the volume up. “This song is ‘Niji Trance,’” she says.
Niiji means “my friend” in Ojibwe. Are these guys my people? I close my eyes and await an answer from my blood. I hear Native chanting, drumming, then a guitar rip through the speakers. Mom starts to sing along. I guess I got my answer.
After a few more songs from Redbone, I pop in another CD and play a song that Mom and I perform sometimes. This song usually makes us a lot of money. It makes people happy. Happy people love to throw bills into the bucket. It’s called “Straight Up” by Paula Abdul.
We stop in a town called Santa Clarita. To my right, past the gas station, I see a huge theme park. The tip of a white roller coaster shines above the trees. Every two minutes, I see the roller coaster zip by. That must be so fun. It’s like a bunch of hollering and hooting people riding an albino dragon. “Someday, that will be us up there,” Mom says as she pumps five dollars’ worth of gas into the tank.
It probably won’t be, because even if we somehow get a place and have money for rent and bills, having money to blow at a theme park is highly unlikely … but it’s still a fun thought.
I wish Ani was here to see this place. It’s the opposite of Bakersfield. Everything here is green, and instead of smelling like poop, it smells like flowers and, well, gasoline, because I’m at a gas station.
Mom grabs snacks and drinks for us as I stand outside the car. A car pulls up to a gas pump beside us. It’s an expensive-looking silver van. The kind where the doors open from a button instead of a handle. A man drives. A woman sits in the passenger seat. Two boys are in the back and get out to stretch their legs. One boy is my age, and the other looks around Emjay’s age. A family. And I don’t know why, but something about them makes me uncomfortable. Maybe because they seem so comfortable. It’s as if I’m being mocked by what I could have had. What I could have been born into. What could be possible if things were different. They are white, which means they are not running from the cavalry. They have a nice car, which means they aren’t homeless and wondering how they are going to eat tonight. And there is a dad, which means he doesn’t hurt his wife and maybe he even loves his kids. She looks happy. The boys look happy. He must be the king of the world, or at least feel like he is.
“You just left Magic Mountain too?” the boy my age asks.
“There’s a magical mountain?” I ask.
He laughs. “Six Flags Magic Mountain,” he says, and points to the roller coaster.
“Oh,” I say, “yeah. We just left that place.”
“Us too. Wasn’t it so fun?” he says, and gets back into the van after the dad pumps the gas and plants a kiss on his wife’s lips.
I don’t know why I lied to that boy. Maybe I thought he asked if I wished I went too. Then it would be the truth. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll never see that kid ever again, anyway. He had the time of his life with that metal white dragon, while I rode in this metal red Pinto on my way to start my life all over again.
“Thirty-two more miles,” Mom says, and gets in the car.
I look up and see the sun is beginning its descent. The air feels cool, and the wind feels fresh. And even though I don’t have the life of the family in the silver van, I still have my mom. And with her hopes of Los Angeles being a better place for us growing as we get closer, maybe my new life won’t be so bad. It won’t be great, with Ani gone, but maybe the tiny shred of hope inside of me can start biting back at all the hatred and sadness that has invaded my gut. I reach for the car door and decide to give hope another shot. I hope it works.
As I get in, she tosses me a bag of potato chips and a peach Snapple. “Put on something we haven’t heard yet,” she says.
I flip through the CD case and grab a random one. “A Tribe Called Quest?” I suggest.
“Ooh, they sound Native. Put them in,” she replies.
I slip it in as our car cruises out of the gas station and enters the street. It’s rap. And the beat is so good. The first song is titled “Excursions.” And the rapper’s voice is so cool. Mom likes it too. She rocks back and forth in her seat as we hip-hop back onto the freeway. The second song is even better. They should change their rap group name to “A Tribe Called Best.”
But about twenty minutes into our drive, smoke starts coughing out of the hood and the car begins to shake.
My mom begins to curse and begs the horse gods to keep our little red Pinto alive. But as she panics, I don’t. I don’t panic because I know what’s happening. This is more of my dream. My vision. Our red horse was injured and took us as far as she could, but sadly, I know our horse dies.
“Our engine is shot,” she cries as she manages to pull the car over to the side of the highway.
“I’ve seen this, Mama,” I say.
After slamming her fists against the steering wheel a few times, she finally turns to me. “What do you mean, you’ve seen this?”
“In my dream. Our horse is dead,” I say.
She doesn’t bother asking me anything more about my dream or telling me what I just said was ridiculous. Instead, she wipes the tears from her face, clears her throat, and hits eject on the CD player. “Keep this one. I like them,” she says, and hands me the disc.
Her panic is gone. Maybe she had the same dream I had? Maybe she knows there is no use beating a dead horse. Or maybe she’s just too darn tired to deal with another crisis.
I put the CD in the CD case and put the case in my backpack. “What do we do now?” I ask.
“We keep going,” she says, and gives a playful slow-motion punch to my chin.
I pretend it was an exaggerated knockout and slowly whip my head to the side.
“When we get knocked down, what do we do?”
“We get back up,” I say.
“And when life throws a punch, what do you do?”
“Punch it back,” I say.
“That’s right. And life has been swinging on us a lot lately. But who wins the fight? The one with the what?”
“The one with the better cardio,” I answer.
She smiles. “All that swinging. I can tell it’s getting tired. Now’s our time to swing back, kiddo,” she says.
“How do we swing back?”
“We look life straight in the eye, smile, and make a fist with our words. Then let it fly.”
“How do you make a fist with your words?”
“You have five fingers, right? Well, now you have five words … Is that all you got?”
“Is that all you got? That’s it?” I ask.
“That’s it. Look life right in the eye and shout, IS THAT ALL YOU GOT?” she shouts.
I feel my red Ojibwe blood running through my veins like wild horses. And on those horses are my ancestors, charging straight toward the cavalry. I close my eyes and feel their bullets whizzing by my head as I make my fist and let it fly. I scream at the top of my lungs, “IS THAT ALL YOU GOT?”
I open my eyes. Mom is looking at me. Her eyes are wet, but she’s smiling. “I’m sorry we have to fight to survive, but the best ones usually have the hardest beginnings.”
“Did I hit it?” I ask.
“Yep. Right on the chin,” she says.
RED. BLUE. RED. BLUE. RED. BLUE.
Mom looks in the rearview mirror. “It really didn’t like that,” she says.
I turn around and look through the back window. Oh crap. Flashing lights. It’s a cop car. It’s the cavalry. I led them right to us with my word-punch.
Mom collects herself and fixes her posture, while repeatedly cursing under her breath. She even wipes a few remaining tears from her cheeks and plants a doe-eyed smile on her face. “Follow my lead,” she says right before the officer approaches the driver’s-side window.
This isn’t our first time dealing with the law, but it never stops feeling scary.
“Car trouble?” the officer asks.
“Nope. My car just pulled over for a quick smoke,” she jokes, seeing that there is still smoke coming from the hood.
“What happened?” he asks.
“We were driving and then … we weren’t,” she says.
“I was talking to the boy,” he says, and taps his eye, referring to the bruise on mine.
“I fought the law and the law won,” I sing back to him, referencing the Clash, the band that made that song famous.
The officer smirks. I’m not sure if he gets it or actually thinks I fought one of his buddies.
“Have you called for a tow?” he asks Mom.
“Nope. Already got ten of them. Don’t need another. That would just look weird.”
He gives Mom a strange expression, like he’s trying to do math in his head.
“It’s a toe joke,” she adds.
“Oh.” He finally gets it and smiles. “Yeah, eleven toes would look weird.”
“Thanks for checking on us and have a good night, officer,” Mom says.
“Well, I need this vehicle off the road, so why don’t you two hop in my car, and we’ll follow the tow truck back to the foot,” he says.
Now my mom gives him a strange expression.
“And that was my attempt at a toe joke.”
Mom laughs. But I bet she got it right away. She’s playing him. This is how she builds a bond with the enemy. Make them think they’re funny and charming and smart. Even though it was actually kind of funny. “Tell you what, how about you just point me to the nearest grocery store?” she adds.
“Grocery store?”
“Yes. And as soon as we’re back from shopping, we can get this baby towed away. Deal?”
“How about I give you a ride to the grocery store? You and your boy.”
“I’m sorry, Officer. You seem nice, but the only way you’re getting me in that police car is while I’m kicking and screaming,” she says.
“And biting,” I add. “She bites.”
“I bite,” she agrees.
He takes a deep breath and looks into the back of our car, then to my mom again. “Look. I get it. I know some cops can be real … jerks. But all I care about right now is you and your boy. Believe it or not, you’re not the only mother and child I’ve seen in your situation.”
“My situation?” she asks.
“Yeah. Unfortunately, this is a pretty common stop for highway patrol. I wish it wasn’t,” he says.
“We don’t have money for a tow truck. And we don’t have money for a new engine,” she says.
“And you don’t trust the cops. Like I said, I get it. But here’s what I am going to do. I am going to take you where you need to go. I don’t need to see your ID or insurance or registration. Nothing. I will just drop you off and leave. How does that sound?”
“Honestly, it sounds exactly like what I’ve heard before. And it didn’t end well,” she says.
“You have my word,” he says.
“A white man giving a Native American his word. History showed us that didn’t end well either,” she says.
“I’m trying to help you out here,” he says.
“If you want to help me out, go get me a shopping cart from the grocery store.”
He sighs. “If that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll do,” he says, taps our car door, and walks back to his police car.
We don’t say anything until we see him drive off. And when he does, she turns to me. “We got to go.”
“What? Why?” I ask.
“Did you not just see what went down?”
“I saw it all. He’s going to get us a metal pony,” I say.
That’s what I call shopping carts. When I was little, Mom would put me in the metal pony and I’d ride it up and down the aisles, shooting my imaginary bows at unsuspecting cereal boxes and gallons of milk.
“Opin. He’s going for backup. These people are unpredictable. And you don’t want someone with a freaking gun on their hip to be unpredictable.”
“Mom. You’re being paranoid,” I say.
“You’re not being paranoid enough. Have you ever come across a good cop?” she asks.
“No. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist,” I say.
“It doesn’t mean they do either. You want to take your chances with that guy? When we’re this close?”
“This close to what, Mom? Los Angeles? I know you think it’s going to be better, and I hope you’re right, but from where I’m sitting, it’s just another city just like every other city we’ve been through. And guess what? They all have cops,” I say.
“I don’t like your tone, Opin.”
“I don’t like how you’re ready to cut and run already when we haven’t even gotten off the freeway yet.”
“You’re sounding exactly like Emjay,” she says.
Ouch. That stung. Like ten angry hornets. I almost forgot about hating him until she mentioned his name. Now all I can think about is Ani. There are those hornets again. But they’re not angry ones, this time they are ten sad hornets, stinging me. “I’m sorry, gaagiizom. I’m just tired.”
She rubs her temples and takes three deep breaths.
“I’ll do whatever you say. If you want to run, we can run,” I say.
She looks at me and smiles. “You know what? You’re the man of the family now. Emjay ran. Maybe I should listen to you. You’re a clever and brave warrior now. What do you say we should do?”
“It’s not up to me. I was just thinking out loud, Mom.”
“Man up, Opin. It is up to you. You spoke up. That’s good. Now stand on those feet. You have two options. We quit the game now or we keep going. Both are gonna hurt.”
“We keep going. If he returns with the cavalry, we fight. If he comes back with a metal pony, we continue south,” I say. “But we don’t quit. Fighting on will hurt, but quitting will kill us.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do. We’ll ride it out,” she says, and goes into my backpack, pulls out the CD case, and flips through the CDs. Her eyes light up when she finds the one she was looking for.
It’s the band The The. The song is “This Is the Day.” We love this song. We never perform it for people. This song is basically just for her and me. I know why she chose this song for this moment. The chorus plays: This is the day your life will surely change. This is the day when things fall into place.
Mom and I dance for a bit and take turns lip-syncing to each other. In the back of my mind, I wonder if I made the right choice. This is my first decision as the man of the family. If I did, the cop will be back with the shopping cart. If I made the wrong decision, I just ruined our lives forever by basically handing us to the cavalry. But sometimes, you just got to put a little faith in people. And I bet my mom is worried about my decision in the back of her mind. She’s probably figuring out how we can get out of this once we are surrounded by a bunch of armed badgers. I mean badges. Geronimo did it. He fought through every attack. Many Native American legends did it. So, if it comes down to it, so can we. I hope.