After the pet store, where we scored two bags of dog food and a thin red collar for ten bucks on a “buy one get one free” sale, we head over to the Stockton Shelter. Shelters for homeless people get a bad rap. Every time my mom tells someone where we’ll be staying, they always put on a frown, arch their eyebrows, and say, “A shelter? I’m so sorry.”
Emjay never tells anyone that we stay in shelters sometimes. Maybe that’s why he runs away so often. People have this image in their heads that shelters are these filthy places with human poop in the corner, where old dirty bearded men that smell like pee are fighting over the last slice of bread. But most shelters are pretty clean. And most smell okay. And even though you do see an occasional altercation with two dirty bearded men fighting over food, it’s usually pizza or chicken strips. Not bread. There’s plenty of bread for everyone. Shelters are the epicenter for stale donuts.
Shelters go by many names, depending where you are. So far, I’ve heard them referred to as the Hobo House, the Bum Base, the Bed Shed, the Rat Shack, Beggar’s Palace, the Toilet Bowl, and the BUB Hub, which stands for “Bottom Udda Barrel.” But the only people that call shelters these names are people who have never stepped foot inside one. People with homes. People who don’t know what they’re talking about.
Mom calls shelters Notels. You got hotels, where you brag about staying there. You got motels, where you are a little bit mo’ quiet about staying there. And then you got Notels, where you tell no one. Emjay calls them Coyote Farms. He says homeless people, like us, are like coyotes. We’re both trapped inside cities, only seen on the streets, near trash cans and restaurant parking lots, looking for a meal. And if a regular person sees us, they take a few steps back and walk the other way. And later tell their friends about it.
But if cities were wiped away and coyotes were free to run wild, then they’d be seen for how they truly are: beautiful, like wolves. Like Alaskan huskies. Like all other dogs. But coyotes are the bums of the canine world. Because humans built cities on their homes and made up a bunch of rules, making them poor, like how they made us Native Americans poor.
Mom says before our land was taken away from us by white people, there was no such thing as being poor. There was no rent, no bills. There were no evictions and late fees. There were no catch-22s and balance dues. It was just people living their life freely, amongst the animals, who were also free.
That’s how Native America was. We took what we needed. We gave what we could. We helped who was in need. And we fought whoever threatened our way of life. This was Nature’s law … But when the white people came with their guns and diseases and lies, they strangled Nature to death. They slaughtered the buffalo. They slaughtered the beavers and otters, and cut down our trees. They stole Native American kids and tried to turn them into white people to make their angry god happy. They killed the fathers and mothers, so the kids had no home to run back to. Then they poured wet cement all over our homes and built giant walls and invented barbed wire and sewed uniforms together and told us we now need to pay money to sleep here. Even though this is where our family has slept for thousands of years.
And they call us the savages.
We have a tradition. Before we arrive to any homeless shelter, Mom insists we listen to “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones. Not only because of the title making sense for our situation, but the song always puts us in a good mood. There’s no better way to arrive at a place than singing and dancing the whole way there. And when you’re about to walk into a homeless shelter full of depressed and hopeless people, being in a good mood is a necessity. Hopelessness is contagious. Music is the best way to combat it and give you a fighting chance against catching it.
We pull into the Stockton Family Shelter. It’s a pretty large place. There must be a lot of down-and-out families around here. That’s a good and a bad thing. Good, because I might be able to meet a friend while I’m here. Mom says I need to make friends everywhere I go because being social is a good way to understand other people. But making friends is hard. Well, making them isn’t the hard part, but keeping them is. Boozhoos are easy. Goodbyes suck—that’s why I call them boohoos, because saying goodbye always makes me sad.
And a large, crowded shelter raises the chances of running into a creep. But I have my fork in my pocket, so I’m not that worried about it.
Not many homeless people have cars, so this is the one place where we actually park up front near the main entrance and roll up all the windows. We are in the thick of a lot of desperate people now. And desperate people can be dangerous. We’ve definitely had busted-out windows and belongings stolen from us while staying at some shelters. Mom doesn’t blame the people who did it, though. She blames colonization, which is her fancy way of saying she blames America for selling people a dream but giving them a nightmare. They’re rigging the game, she says. Setting people up for failure. But life is unfair, so the best we can do is survive. If we can do that, we can win.
Sometimes I get annoyed when Mom rambles on about how America and all the colonizers did us wrong. I mean, I know they did, we’ve read enough books in enough libraries to understand very well how dirty they did us, but every time I tell Mom that was the past and now is now, she always gives the same reply: “You can never become who you are until you overcome who you were. That goes for you, me, and the entire United States of America.”
I get it. I just wish we didn’t always have to talk about it. Most people say “let the past stay in the past” and “look forward, never backward.” But Mom isn’t most people. And she doesn’t want me to be like most people. But sometimes I do want to be like most people … Because most people have homes. Most people sleep in a bed, not the back seat.
But I can’t complain, not really, because even I know some people out there have it worse than me. Some people don’t even have a back seat. Some people have nothing but a cardboard box. I’m pretty lucky for an unlucky person, because I know it can always get worse. I just hope hope hope it doesn’t.
We lock up the car and walk into the shelter. I have Ani tucked under-into my coat, just in case they don’t allow pets. Which most don’t. Mom approaches the lady at the desk.
“Hello. We need three beds for the night,” Mom says.
The lady looks at her, then me, clearly not seeing who the third bed would be reserved for.
“My other son. He’s running an errand for me. He’ll be back shortly.”
She nods and hands over a sign-in sheet. “We’re pretty full. I can probably arrange two beds,” she says.
“That will work,” Mom says, and fills out the sheet.
“The soup kitchen opens up at six. First come, first served. So be in line early. They always run out,” she says, and accepts the sign-in sheet from my mom.
“Miigwech,” Mom says.
“Miigwech,” I say.
Somehow, the lady knows that means thank you, because she smiles and says, “No prob” as she points us to the wooden double doors.
I follow Mom in. The room is huge. It’s like a gymnasium where people play indoor basketball. In fact, I think it is. There are dozens of bunk beds lined up in a dozen rows from front to back. Wow. Stockton has a lot of homeless people. That usually means there aren’t many job openings around here, which is not a good sign for Mom. For us.
A lot of people with nice homes and comfy jobs think that most homeless are people are lazy and don’t want to work. But that’s not true. Homeless people work really hard every day. They’re just not paid for it. Imagine waking up and not knowing how you’re going to eat, shower, or wash your clothes. And where you’ll sleep that night. Figuring all that out day after day is hard work.
Mom finds a bunk bed with no belongings on it, which means it’s vacant. She plops her bag on it and tosses my backpack on the top bunk. It’s official. It’s ours for the night. And even though it is not nearly as fluffy and soft as Eleanor’s bed at the hotel, it will be much better than the back seat.
“How are your legs?” she asks.
“They work,” I say, and climb up to the top bunk.
I reach into my coat and pet Ani as my mom reaches up and massages my thighs and shins. The doctor we last saw told my mom to massage my legs every day to help with my blood circulation. If I go too long in a car, while sitting and not stretching or walking or running enough, my legs get numb. Then it’s hard to move them, and sometimes it hurts when I stand up. He said she needs to massage my butt too, but there’s no way I’m going to let my mom do that in front of all these people. That’s just weird. But apparently butt muscles are very important, so I try to massage my own butt when I’m alone, so my muscles work and I am strong enough to tighten them and hold in my poop. If they get too weak, the doctor said my muscles won’t work and the poop will just come out and ruin my underwear. One of my biggest fears now is accidentally crapping my pants. But that’s probably everyone’s fear. Especially people who wear shorts or white pants.
“Can I go outside and play with Ani?” I ask.
“Don’t go far. We got to work in about half an hour. After I rest for a bit,” she says, and lies down on the bed.
“Do I have to work too?” I ask.
“Not if you don’t want to. It can just be me. But I need you there to collect our earnings,” she says.
“Okay,” I say, and climb off the top bunk. I put Ani back in my coat and kiss Mom on the cheek. But before I head out, she reaches into her bag and pulls out one of her knee-high black lace-up boots.
“Here. You can use this until we get a real one,” she says, and begins to unlace her boot.
She hands me the long black shoelace. The leashes at the pet store were too expensive. Who would pay twenty bucks for a rope? That’s ridiculous.
I tie the end of the shoelace to Ani’s small red collar and fasten the other end in a loop to be a handle for me to hold. And as I walk toward the door, I take notice of all the other people here. Most are families, mothers with kids younger than me. But there are a few lone coyotes too. Women sleeping, women on the phone, and women going through stacks of paperwork laid out on the beds, which I’ve seen Mom do many times. The only men in here are either passed out or sitting on the bed staring blankly in front of them, looking either really depressed or really bored. None give me the creepy vibe … yet.
Outside, I find a nice patch of grass and walk Ani. She sniffs the air and wags her tail. Technically, she may still be homeless, but she’s not alone anymore. She has a family now. She has me, and I will never let anything bad happen to her ever again.
I was hoping someone my age would be out here. Sometimes, at shelters, kids my age want to play catch or kick a soccer ball around, but out here, it’s just me and Ani. Maybe Stockton kids do things differently.
Thirty minutes go by super quickly, because my mom meets me outside and in her hands are a bucket and her small radio that no one is allowed to touch but her. It’s our moneymaker. Without this little boom box CD player, we’d be in deep trouble.
“It’s rush hour. The sun is yawning. We need to get going,” she says.
I don’t have time to change my outfit, but I’m not really the main attraction here. My mom is. And she changed while I was out here with Ani. She wears her long brown skirt. The one that flows and whirls through the wind when she twirls. Up top, she wears her sleeveless black crop top shirt. Her hair is braided in two long snakes, which she does herself in less than ten minutes. She doesn’t even need a mirror to do it anymore.
“What music did you choose?” I ask.
“You choose. The powwow mixed CD we used in Redding or Run-DMC?” she asks.
“Do we need a lot of money?” I ask.
“When do we not, kiddo?”
“Then bring both.”
Mom and I stop at our car to fill a plastic bowl full of dog food and then walk a few blocks until we find the busiest street we can see. It’s Main Street, which is exactly where we want to be. All cities have a Main Street. It’s the street we always look for when we arrive somewhere new. Other street names we have found to always be the busiest are Broadway and Martin Luther King Boulevards. And if we are in a city near the coast, we’ll make the most money on Ocean Drives and Beach Boulevards. As chaotic as living on the streets is, if you pay attention to details, there’s a pattern that is pretty universal when it comes to where people hang out and where people are more likely to spend money. I told Mom we should always go where the tourists are, but she says everywhere we go is where the tourists are. If you’re not Native American, you’re a tourist. But I think she’s wrong about that. From the people we see in homeless shelters and poor neighborhoods, these people live more like refugees, not tourists on vacation.
I carry Ani, because she did a lot of playing in the grass and might be tired. At a busy intersection, we set up shop. It’s bumper-to-bumper traffic, which is perfect for what we are about to do. I sit on the curb, with the bucket at my feet, and my mom places her boom box on the sidewalk.
She pulls out the two long turkey feathers that she keeps sealed in her ziplocked bag. When she was younger, she says she danced with eagle feathers and red-tailed hawk feathers but has since given them away to people who needed them. Most people think turkeys are just big round birds that cannot fly, but they’re wrong. Turkeys are smart, and they can fly when they want to. They stick together in families, like Mom and me, and sometimes Emjay. And their feathers are beautiful.
She ties them to her hair, letting them hang down, so when she dances, they dance too. She puts on her bracelets, which have small bells on them. She straps on her leather belt, which also has a row of tiny bells attached. This is my mom at her utmost. This is when her smile is real. She says when she dances, no matter which kind of music is playing, she is never dancing alone. She is dancing with nookomis and nimishoomis, her parents. She says music transports her back to when she was a little girl, dancing at Gichi-onigaming, which is the name of our reservation back in Grand Portage. That’s the only time she likes to talk about her childhood. She calls this the aanikoobijigan niimi’idiwin. The ancestor dance. Sometimes she even closes her eyes while dancing, which I don’t like on a busy street full of cars, but I don’t get too worried because she moves like the wind, and no one, not even a fast car, can grab the wind. She mostly stays on the sidewalk anyway, but sometimes she dips into the street, depending on the song or the flow of traffic. She says she goes where her feet take her. That’s when I grab her hand and pull her back to the sidewalk. It makes me nervous, but the people love it. And if they love it, they pay up.
“You ready?” she asks, after she puts on her dance paint under her eyes and below her chin. She says it’s mostly to grab attention. People more often stop when she looks like an Indian about to go to battle. White people are amazed by a real Indian, not just someone they’ve read about in a history book. As if we are only from the past. And if someone is amazed, they’ll more likely drop a few bucks into the bucket.
“I’m ready,” I say.
Emjay gets pretty embarrassed about this, so he never participates, but I think it’s cool. Not only the dancing and the music, but the thought of my ancestors dancing with her. Even if I can’t see them, sometimes I actually do think I feel them around us.
Mom is a true performer. An elite entertainer. She grabs the audience like her dancing is a web and she’s the spider. And the entire crowd is just a bunch of houseflies. One random fly once argued with my mom that she was exploiting our dying Native American culture by dancing for change on the street. Mom told him to kick rocks and to mind his own business. She told me that stupid man couldn’t be more wrong. What we do isn’t exploitation. It is reviving our culture. It is our blood reclaiming our rhythm. It is our truth. Our dance. And in today’s world, if it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense. And we all got to eat.
Mom hits play on the boom box and turns the volume up as high as it will go. The drums begin. The singing starts. And my mom starts moving her hips. Then her shoulders. Then her arms and head. She begins dancing. Stepping high, then low, in a circle. Blending our Ojibwe dancing with her modern sixties rock-and-roll dancing. Becoming a sight no one has ever seen before.
I watch all the drivers, stuck at the red light, turn their heads toward us. Each face forms a smile. Eyes widen. Windows roll down. A few people honk in approval. A few people honk to tell the driver transfixed ahead of them to drive. Mom’s job is to paralyze them. And she is an expert hunter. My job is to run the bucket to as many cars as I can while the light is red.
Green light. Yellow … red. I get up and grab the bucket. In one hand is Ani, who is thoroughly transfixed by everything happening around her. She must love this music. The wolf inside of her must recognize it. I start at the front and work my way back.
Blue car. A man. He drops a dollar inside the bucket. “Miigwech,” I say. Mom says to always speak her mother tongue to the drivers. It not only makes the experience better, but it also teaches a stranger a new word. They may even go home and use it.
Next car. It’s silver. A woman. She pretends not to see me. No dollar. The next car. Black. Expensive-looking. A man and a woman. They both smile and drop a few dollars into the bucket. “Miigwech,” I say to both people, and move on to the pickup truck behind them.
It’s a woman. She drops a fiver into the bucket. Score. A motorcycle. He hands me a dollar. The van beside him hands me two.
Green light. I run back to the curb. My mom dances on. Heavy drums. Echoing chants. The speakers rattle. A few bystanders stop and watch. I offer them the bucket. The ones who stay dig into their pockets and drop cash and change into it. The ones who don’t give any money continue on. “Nothing is free in this world,” I say as they walk away.
I don’t know if Ani is good luck or what, but this is one of our most successful hunts yet. Stockton loves us. Red light after red light, I make my rounds, and in only about two hours, our bucket is almost completely full.
“What do you say, last song we give them some Run-DMC?” she asks, and I can tell by the way she’s leaning up against the pole and the amount of sweat glistening off her face and arms that she is exhausted.
I smile. “‘It’s Like That,’” I suggest.
Mom puts it in and presses play. I know all the words to this song. So do my mom and Emjay. I doubt there’s a human alive that doesn’t know all the words. And if there is, what the heck is wrong with them?
The song begins. People recognize it immediately. They clap along from their cars and bob their heads. A large crowd forms around us. I lip-sync. Mom lip-syncs. People rap along as we both dance on the sidewalk to Run-DMC.
I wish Emjay could see this. But as I scan the crowd, I know he’s not here. So my eyes leave the happy faces, and I keep my eyes on the bucket, making sure no one tries to take any of the money, because in the end, even though I am having fun, collecting the money is my job. And we are working hard for every single cent.
The song ends and is immediately followed by a loud round of applause. More people fill the bucket. Best hunt ever. But here’s the inevitable part that I find so strange. The lingerers. After each set, and today more than ever, I need to be a protective warrior and stand beside Mom as all the lingering men stay behind and try to talk to her. Some ask for her number, some give her their numbers, and some just flat-out ask her on a date. But she always turns them down with the same response. “I don’t mix business with pleasure. And this was all just another day at the office, boys.”
Only I know the truth. She always mixes business with pleasure. But if you ask me, I’d say the reason why she never wants to go out with any of these guys after a dance is because her feet are too exhausted. Especially after today’s dance. Her feet will be so sore tonight.
Almost as sore as her cheeks will be. I haven’t seen her smile this much in a long time.
But music and dance can do that to people. Even my cheeks hurt.
I wonder if Ani’s cheeks hurt too.
As we collect our earnings and pack up our things, a car stops at the red light. Right beside us. It’s a silver SUV. The back window rolls down, and a blond girl my age pops her head out. Why is she smiling like that? She has braces. Her armored teeth match her vehicle. How fancy.
“Your dog is so cute,” she says to me.
I hold Ani up, facing the vehicle, and make Ani wave by holding her paw. The girl waves back. “Can I pet it?” she asks, and sticks her hand out.
She’s only three steps away from us, so I smile and take those steps to them.
“Her name is Ani,” I say, but as I approach, her mother in the passenger seat turns back to her daughter and says something. I can’t hear what she says, but I know by the girl’s reaction that it wasn’t nice. The girl says, “Sorry,” then rolls up her window.
I stand there beside their car and see my reflection against their window glass. Why did that lady not want her daughter to talk to me? Why didn’t she let her daughter pet Ani? Is it because I’m not in a fancy car like they are? Because all my clothes are hand-me-downs? Because my skin is a bit darker than theirs? My mom must be thinking the same thing as I am, because she walks up and starts shouting at the lady.
“Mom, don’t,” I say, because this isn’t the first time we were looked at as less-than people. Like we are just street people who are unworthy of interacting with the address-possessing folks. The girl’s mother keeps her eyes forward, pretending to not hear Mom. And as soon as the light turns green, they speed off.
“Some people shouldn’t be parents,” Mom says, and ushers me back onto the sidewalk.
I look down at Ani, who sees me for who I really am. She loves me, not because where I live and how I live or how I look. She loves me because she knows me. The real me. “At least she thought you were cute,” I tell her, and plant a kiss on her head.
Even if that girl had snatched Ani out of my arms and driven off back to their fancy home in their fancy gated community, where she’d be given a fancy bowl full of fancy dog food, Ani would still choose me. Because I can give her one thing those people can never give her: real love. I’d fight ten lions for Ani. I’d empty this entire bucket of money and spend every penny of it on medicine if Ani got sick and needed it. That family, I bet they’d toss Ani out of their home the moment they found something cuter.
“You okay?” Mom asks me.
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t take it personal. People fear what they don’t know. And they don’t know you. That’s all,” she says.
“Don’t take it personal? You were screaming at that lady. Sounded like you took it very personal,” I say.
Mom smiles. “Yeah, well, you’re a lot smarter than I am, Opin. You can take good advice. I’m still learning how to, even when the advice comes from my mouth,” she says.
“Advice taken. They just feared me because they don’t know me. Not sure that makes me feel any better.”
“You feel bad, but that little girl feels worse, trust me. She just realized what kind of person her mom is,” Mom says, and begins pulling the feathers from her hair and placing them neatly in the ziplocked bag she keeps in her purse.
I can tell by the way her restless body keeps moving that she’s still pissed at that lady. It’s good that she’s angry, because that will keep her talking and trying to calm herself down by focusing on the good stuff, like all the money we made and how time flew by and how fun it was to dance again. If she wasn’t angry, she’d be sad. And when Mom is sad, she’s quiet and doesn’t want to do anything but sleep.
“It’s a lot easier to be mad than sad,” I say as I hand Mom her jacket.
She puts it on and knows exactly why I told her that. “Don’t worry, kiddo. I’d rather beat her up than beat myself up about it,” she replies, and slings the boom box strap over her shoulder. “If we can’t knock it off, what do we do?”
I smile and take her hand. “Walk it off,” I say, and that’s exactly what we do next.
We grab all the bad mad sad thoughts we have about that lady in her stupid silver SUV, and we crumple them all up together and put them under our feet as we walk it off.