TWO DAYS AFTER THE “LOST princess” question Michiko comes up with another crazy remark. She and Joelle are on their walk to school. Joelle has gone through the “what’s for lunch?” routine and a few others when Michiko suddenly turns to her and whispers: “You have a secret admirer!”
“A what?” Joelle snaps. “What are you talking about?”
“Look,” Michiko says. She points shyly with her lunch box, and there is Carlos sauntering up a side street, still some distance off. “He follows us every day.”
This is so absurd that Joelle laughs. “Of course he follows us. It’s how he walks to school. He lives down there somewhere, in the woods.”
Michiko says nothing more. She closes her mouth and looks smugly at the sidewalk.
“Why do you think he’s following me?” Joelle asks. “Maybe he’s following you.” Over her shoulder, she sees that Carlos now is, in fact, behind them, plodding along. His serious face is looking down, as if he’s hunting for arrowheads again.
Michiko sneaks another peek. She giggles and begins slamming her lunch box into the side of her leg.
“What’s so funny?” Joelle demands.
Michiko shrugs. If she knows something, she’s not telling. A minute later she spots one of her little buddies and runs off toward the elementary school, not even saying good-bye.
Joelle enters her own school at top speed and without looking back again. When Spanish class comes up, she gets there early and sits in the front row, where she stares at the blackboard while everyone else straggles in around her. She doesn’t look behind, but she feels that Carlos is there. Her back begins to prickle, as if his eyes had spikes in them.
This is stupid. It’s so stupid that she finally turns all the way around and stares angrily at the place where he usually sits.
He’s there, all right—slouched down, writing in a notebook and not noticing her a bit. Whatever Michiko thinks she knows is completely wrong. Joelle suspected it all along. She turns back, Spanish class begins, and that’s it. She dismisses Carlos from her mind. Well, sort of.
A few days later she happens to run into him again. She’s out doing a grocery errand for Aunt Mary Louise in the late afternoon and has taken a back route through the scruffy town park. This is to throw Michiko and her bloodhounds off her scent. Lately, they’ve taken to following her back to her house after school and hanging around outside the hedge. The one called Penny is older—she’s actually in third grade, not second—and the real ringleader. She dares the others to do things—touch the front porch, knock on the door—and then acts disgusted when they won’t. When someone tells her to do it herself, she says she can’t because she asked them first. From her upstairs bedroom, Joelle can hear everything.
Carlos is over on one side of the park, the really overgrown side near the swamp. He’s alone, except for a dark, lumpish figure seated at the old barbecue pit across the way. This is Queenie, the town vagrant and free spirit, who camps out there whenever she can get away with it. Her ancient red VW Bug is parked nearby, stuffed with newspapers and old clothes. Out of habit, Joelle gives her a wide berth. She could avoid Carlos, too, but at the last minute she veers over to him.
“Buenos días, amigo! What are you looking for now?” she asks in a loud voice.
He whirls around like the last time.
“Buenos días,” he echoes. After this a silence develops while he shifts his weight nervously. He’s worse in English than Spanish, it seems. Generously, Joelle decides to help him out.
“So tell me about these Indians who were supposedly around here,” she says, as if she’s never heard of Indians before. Which is laughable. Half the names of places in Rhode Island are Native American. There are statues of important chiefs in the parks and plaques that tell where this treaty was signed or that attack happened. Everyone has studied these first American people, they just don’t think about them that much now.
“Narragansetts,” Carlos says, bending down again, possibly to avoid looking at her. “They’re interesting.”
“Because their artifacts are still turning up everywhere.”
“Arrowheads,” Joelle says. “Sounds like constant warfare back then.”
“They used them to hunt, too,” Carlos says, warming up a little. “The Narragansetts were a great people. They were the largest tribe in New England, but they used their power to keep peace. Back in the woods there’s a place where they used to meet. A high council place. There are trails, too. You can tell they’re old Indian paths because of how deep they’re worn down. It would take hundreds of years of feet to wear down a path like that.”
Carlos looks to see what Joelle makes of this.
“Hundreds of years of feet?” she says. “Give me a break.”
“A thousand years, even. Some artifacts are that old and more. What’s amazing is how their whole culture got wiped out when the white man came. Fifty years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, most of the Narragansetts were gone, thirty or forty thousand people who lived right around here.”
“What happened?” Joelle asks, in spite of herself.
Carlos stares at her. “Disease, first, then they were killed off. A lot were sold into slavery down in the West Indies. It’s one of those histories people don’t like to remember.”
“But you do?”
“I’m part Native American.”
“Really?”
Carlos stands up straighter and looks at her defiantly, as if she might have a problem with this. She registers again his gray eyes, his brown hair, his long, thin face.
“Just a small part,” Carlos says quickly. “Like about one sixteenth or something. My grandmother never told anybody, but after she died, my father found out from an old birth certificate that her father was part Sioux. From out West, not around here.”
Suddenly Joelle feels out of her depth. Maybe Carlos’s long root of identity is too much to handle. Also, he’s talking easily now, acting too friendly. Another minute and he might start asking her about herself.
“Well, I have to go,” she says, moving off. “I’m on a top secret mission, one step ahead of the law.”
“Somebody’s on your tail again?” Carlos asks, glancing around. He examines the hunched form of Queenie at the barbecue pit with complete seriousness.
“I was kidding!”
“Oh.” He looks deflated. “Bye,” he calls, looking after her. He bends down to start artifact hunting again, then abruptly stands.
“If you ever want to see the council place, let me know. I can show you where it is,” he calls.
Joelle doesn’t answer. She’s walking away fast, not about to be lured back into conversation. Carlos tries again:
“Hey! You know, you kind of look like them.”
“Who?” she yells over her shoulder.
“The Narragansetts,” Carlos yells. “Check it out in the library. There’s a painting.”
This is so clearly a last desperate effort for attention that Joelle laughs. She is now sprinting, past Queenie’s red Bug (she sees the old woman’s sharp eyes watch her go by), along the road, toward the grocery store. She pulls out Aunt Mary Louise’s grocery list and reads it between jogs to get herself back on course.
Hamburger, milk, frozen peas, paper towels. This guy Carlos is a total fruitcake. You could be one-sixteenth anything, raccoon or great white whale, and it wouldn’t mean a thing, she thinks. By one sixteenth there’s almost nothing left of the original. One-sixteenth drop of blood in water probably wouldn’t even show up.
“I could be one-sixteenth lost royal princess, for Pete’s sake!” Joelle calls angrily to the passing traffic as she runs. “Wait till Michiko hears that! She’ll go bananas!”
* * *
Joelle has been with Vernon and Aunt Mary Louise for as long as she can remember, which is over eight years now, she’s been told. From time to time, she’s tried to imagine what it must have been like to live in a wooden crate.
She’s looked back in her memory and tried to see the kind of crate it might have been. Was it like the big wooden packing case Vernon brought back from the dump to use for storing fertilizer? Or was it smaller, like the cardboard box the new washing machine came in? Their old washer overflowed for the last time and was kicked out the kitchen door. Things that break down get on Vernon’s nerves. He’s not a fixer, Aunt Mary Louise has explained. Some men are and some aren’t, she said, contrary to public notion.
In her mind Joelle has placed the crate, at times one kind, at times another, beside some tracks near a busy train station. The story goes that the crate was located “near a depot,” which is a kind of small freight station, according to Aunt Mary Louise. She isn’t Joelle’s real aunt, of course. Joelle has no aunts that anyone knows of. She has no uncles or cousins or grandparents, either. She was a lost child. Lost and found by the railroad tracks and then rescued by Vernon and Aunt Mary Louise at the Family Services Center in Badgerville, Connecticut.
“Can I see it sometime?”
“What, Family Services? There’s nothing to see. It was an office.”
“So who found me first?”
“The police, I suppose.”
“At the railway depot?”
“One day in late September. It was getting cool.”
“What was the old lady’s name who had me?”
“No word on that. She probably didn’t know herself. Imagine keeping a small child in a box!”
“Was there a bed in the box? Did I sleep there at night?”
Joelle used to ask such things, back when she was still dumb enough to think they were important.
“A bed!” Aunt Mary Louise snorted the way she does whenever something is completely the opposite of what someone thinks. Her cheeks quivered. She’s older than other kids’ mothers. Her hair is gray and her legs are fat. Nests of wormy blue veins bulge out behind her knees.
“You slept on a pile of greasy rags that wasn’t fit for rats, let alone you,” she told Joelle one time. “And dirt? Whew! The Family Services woman said you were the grimiest little child they ever picked up. You hadn’t had a bath for a year. Can you imagine that? A year!”
Recently, Joelle has quit asking direct questions about her past. She figures she has more than enough information already. She has eight years’ worth of information, assuming that Aunt Mary Louise is right about when she was adopted. She’s not always exact about facts, Joelle has noticed. This depot Joelle was found in, for instance—sometimes she says it’s outside New Haven and sometimes up near Hartford. Vernon could probably clear this up, but he isn’t a talker and doesn’t like questions.
It’s annoying enough to be told the same story over and over. What’s worse is when you can’t depend on the story being right. It’s happened too many times that just as Joelle begins to feel comfortable about her facts, Aunt Mary Louise will change something. She’ll come out with some new detail that messes everything up.
The pile of greasy rags is a good example. Before Aunt Mary Louise told her about it, Joelle had imagined the crate by the railway depot as being kind of an interesting place. It had a clean wooden floor and a sleeping bag, or at least a few blankets folded in a corner. When she finished looking for cigarette butts, the small child who was Joelle would snuggle down into the sleeping bag. She would look out the door of the box house at the lights of the trains that rumbled by at night. She would nibble on some crackers she kept hidden in a secret hole, and the way Joelle imagined it, she wouldn’t feel too bad.
Aunt Mary Louise’s sudden addition of the greasy rags upset this notion. They were so disgusting. The mention of rats made Joelle’s skin crawl. She stopped thinking about the box and started concentrating on what might have been happening outside it in the railway depot. It wasn’t easy at first. What did she know about train stations? They went everywhere by car. The only station she’d been in was for the bus one time, to go to Providence, when Vernon’s truck broke down. Then, it seemed she did know things. Her mind loosened up.
Trains rumbled into the depot. People waiting there hugged one another good-bye, then bent to pick up their suitcases. Engines screeched to a stop, blowing out humid air. The old woman who kept Joelle in the box was impressed by the number of butts Joelle found every day. One time the woman handed over a whole Snickers bar for a reward. A homeless dog came up and watched while Joelle ate it. She shared the last bite with the dog, and they became friends.
After this, in her imagination, Joelle always had the dog with her when she went out butt hunting. What was her name? Silver Girl or something like that. The dog slept with her at night, too, came inside the box with her because she was a small dog and afraid to be alone.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you. Stay with me. We’ll be safe,” Joelle told her.
The pile of rags was still there, somewhere, but the memory of sleeping with that dog, close up against her hot, furry side, spread over it. Gradually, the rags shrank in importance. The rats disappeared. Joelle took the box back, away from them, and made it the way she wanted.