A Different Blue

Chapter Seven





Gloria Olivares, Manny and Gracie's mom, was never home. It wasn't because she was a bad mother. It wasn't because she didn't love her kids. It was because providing for them meant working non-stop. The woman was bone thin and 5'0 if she stood on her tiptoes, and day in, day out, she put in 18-hour days. She was a maid at the same hotel where Cheryl was a dealer, but she also worked as a housekeeper for a wealthier family in Boulder City. I didn't know if she was legally in the U.S. or if she had more family still in Mexico. She had a brother, Sal, who had supplied me with wood a time or two, but Manny and Gracie never spoke of a father, and there certainly wasn't money coming in from another source.

Gloria took her responsibility for her kids very seriously. They were clean, they were fed, and they were warm, but her options were limited, and she had had to leave them alone a lot. It wasn't as big a deal now that they were teenagers, but Manny said he had been babysitting Gracie since he was five years old. Maybe that was the reason Manny considered himself mama to his younger sister, even though they were only two years apart. Maybe that was the reason Graciela's transformation had Manny as jittery as a crack addict in need of a fix.

Gracie's insolence and attitude had Manny pacing the floor and demanding she come out of her room when I brought dinner over on Christmas Eve. Bev had sent home a little of everything from the cafe, and normally Manny would have been in heaven. But Gracie claimed she wasn't hungry and declared she didn't want to “eat with a slut.” Graciela had been downright nasty to me since Brandon had shown up at my house over a month before. Unfortunately, the less interest Brandon showed, the more aggressive and determined Gracie became.

I shrugged my shoulders, wished Manny a happy holiday, and headed back to my own apartment. Graciela might not want to “eat with a slut,” but she'd been more than willing to bum a ride home with me after school every day just so she could see Brandon in the parking lot. And she still studiously copied the way I wore my hair and makeup and mimicked my style down to the way I rolled my sleeves and buttoned my shirts. So she didn't want to eat with a skank, but she apparently wanted to look like one. I really missed the old spacey Gracie, and if she didn't knock it off soon, Manny was going to fall apart, and I was going to get pissed.





“Elizabeth the first was the daughter of a King. King Henry VIII, to be precise. Sounds ace doesn't it? Being a princess? Riches, power, adulation. Brilliant, eh? But remember the saying 'never judge a book by its cover?' I'm going to add to that. Never judge history by the so-called facts. Lift up that shiny cover, and get to the real story beneath. Elizabeth's mother was Anne Boleyn. Anyone know anything about her?” Wilson scanned the sea of rapt faces, but no hands shot up.

“Anne Boleyn's sister Mary was King Henry's mistress, one of them, at least. But Anne wanted more, and she believed she could get more. She plotted and schemed, and used her brain to catch Henry's eye and reel him in. For seven years, Henry tried to get a divorce from his Queen so he could marry Anne. How did she do it? How did she keep Henry not only interested but willing to move heaven and earth to have her? She was not considered beautiful. The standard of beauty for that time was blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin – like her sister Mary. So how did she do it?” Wilson paused for effect. “She kept the man hungry!” The class burst out laughing, understanding what Wilson was referring to.

“Eventually, when Henry couldn't get the Church of England to dissolve his marriage to the Queen, he cut his ties with the church, and married Anne anyway. Shocking! The church held incredible power in those days, even over a king.”

“Ahhhh!” a few girls sighed.

“That's so romantic,” Chrissy mooned, batting her cow eyes at Wilson.

“Oh yes, highly romantic. A brilliant love story . . . until you find out that three years after Anne succeeded in marrying the King, she was charged with witchcraft, incest, blasphemy, and plotting against the crown. She was beheaded.”

“They cut off her head?! That is so rude!” Chrissy was indignant and slightly outraged.

“She had failed to produce a male heir,” Wilson continued. “She'd had Elizabeth, but that didn't count. Some say Anne was seen as having too much power politically. We know she was no fool. She was discredited and taken out, and Henry let it happen.”

“He obviously wasn't hungry anymore,” I added caustically.

Wilson's ears turned pink, which pleased me deeply.

“Obviously,” he added dryly, his voice betraying none of his discomfort. “Which brings us back to our original thought. Things are rarely what they seem. What is the truth beneath the surface, beneath the apparent facts? Think now about your own life . . .”

I tuned Wilson out and laid my forehead down on my desk, letting my hair hide my face. I knew where this was going. Our personal histories. Why was he doing this? What was the point? I stayed that way, my head against my desk as Wilson finished his lecture and the sounds of papers being passed and pencils being sharpened replaced his buttery British accent.

“Blue?”

I didn't move.

“Are you ill?”

“No,” I grumbled, sitting up and shoving my hair from my face. I glowered up at him as I took the paper that he held out to me. He acted as if he wanted to speak, thought better of it, and retreated to his desk. I watched him go, wishing I dared tell him I wouldn't do the assignment. I couldn't do it. My sad little paragraph looked like chicken scratch on the wrinkled page. Chicken scratch. That's what I was. A chicken, pecking at nothing, squawking and ruffling my feathers to make myself appear strong, to keep people at a distance.



“Once upon a time there was a little blackbird, pushed from the nest, unwanted. Discarded. Then a Hawk found her and swooped her up and carried her away, giving her a home in his nest, teaching her to fly. But one day the Hawk didn't come home, and the little bird was alone again, unwanted. She wanted to fly away. But as she rose to the edge of the nest and looked out across the sky, she noticed how small her wings were, how weak. She was trapped. She could fly away, but where would she go?”



I added the new lines to my story and stopped, tapping my pencil against the page, like tiny seeds for the chicken to peck. Maybe that was the truth beneath the surface. I was scared. I was terrified that my story would end tragically. Like poor Anne Boleyn. She plotted and planned and became Queen, only to be discarded. There was that word again. The life she had built was taken from her in one fell swoop, and the man who should have loved her abandoned her to fate.

I had never considered myself a chicken. In my dreams I was the swan, the bird that became beautiful and admired. The bird that proved everyone wrong. I asked Jimmy once why he was named after a bird. Jimmy was used to my questions. He told me I had been abnormally resilient and mostly unaffected by the absence of my mother. I hadn't cried or complained, and I was very talkative, almost to the point of driving a man who had lived with little company and even less conversation a little crazy. He never lost his temper with me, although sometimes he just refused to answer, and I ended up prattling to myself.

But this particular time he was in the mood for storytelling. He explained how hawks are symbolic of protection and strength, and that because of that he had always been proud of his name. He told me many of the Native American tribes had variations of some of the same stories about animals, but his favorite was an Arapaho story about a girl who climbed into the sky.

Her name was Sapana, a beautiful girl who loved the birds of the forest. One day, Sapana was out collecting firewood when she had saw a hawk laying at the base of a tree. A large porcupine quill stuck out of his breast. The girl soothed the bird and pulled the quill out, freeing the bird to fly away. Then the girl saw a large porcupine sitting by the trunk of a tall cottonwood tree. “It was you, you wicked thing! You hurt that poor bird.” She wanted to catch the evil porcupine and take his quills so he wouldn't hurt another bird.

Sapana chased after him, but the porcupine was very quick and he climbed the tree. The girl climbed after him but could never seem to catch up to him. Higher and higher the porcupine climbed, and the tree just kept extending itself higher and higher into the sky. Suddenly, Sapana saw a flat, smooth surface over her head. It was shining, and as she reached out to touch it she realized it was the sky. Suddenly, she found herself standing in a circle of teepees. The tree had disapeared and the porcupine had transformed himself into an ugly old man. Sapana was afraid and tried to escape, but she didn't know how to get home. The porcupine man said, “I have been watching you. You are very beautiful and you work very hard. We work very hard in the the Sky world. You will be my wife.” Sapana did not want to be the wife of porcupine man, but she did not know what else to do. She was trapped.

Sapana missed the green and browns of the forest and longed to return to her family. Each day the old man brought her buffalo hides to scrape and stretch and sew into robes. When there were no hides to stretch, she would dig turnips. The porcupine man told her not to dig too deep, but one day the girl was daydreaming about her home in the forest and paid little attention to the depth she was digging. When she pulled the large turnip from the ground, she saw light shining up through the hole. When she looked into the hole, she could see patches of the green earth far below. Now she knew how to get home! She rolled the huge turnip back into the hole so the porcupine man would not see what she had discovered.

Each day Sapana would take the leftover sinews from the buffalo hides and tie them together. Eventually, she had a very long rope she could use to lower herself back to the earth. She tied the rope to a nearby tree and rolled the turnip from the ground. She lowered herself down through the clouds, and the patches of green grew closer and closer, but she was still high in the sky. Suddenly, Sapana felt a yanking on her rope and looked up to see the porcupine man peering down at her from the hole in the sky. “Climb back up or I will untie the rope from the tree and you will fall!” he roared. But Sapana would not climb back up. Suddenly, the rope loosened, and she was falling through the air. Then something flew up beneath her, and she settled onto the back of a large hawk. It was the hawk Sapana had helped in the forest the day she had chased the porcupine. He flew to the earth with her on his back. Sapana's family was so happy to see her. From then on, they left bits of buffalo meat for the hawk and other birds of prey as a symbol of their gratitude for Sapana's protection and return.

“You are like the hawk that saved Sapana!” I had squealed, delighted by the story. “I wish my name was Sapana! Then I would be Sapana Echohawk!”

Jimmy had smiled at me. But he seemed sad, and he muttered, “Sometimes I feel more like the porcupine man than the hawk.”

I didn't understand what he meant and laughed uproariously at his joke. “Icas is the porcupine man!” I said, pointing at the lazy dog with the shaggy coat. Icas raised his head and looked at me, as if he knew what we were talking about. He ruffed and turned away, as if offended by the comparison. Jimmy and I had both laughed then, and the conversation was forgotten.



“Once upon a time there was a little blackbird who was pushed from the nest, unwanted. Discarded. Then a Hawk found her and swooped her up and carried her away, giving her a home in his nest, teaching her to fly. But one day the Hawk didn't come home, and the little bird was alone again, unwanted. She wanted to fly away. But as she rose to the edge of the nest and looked out across the sky, she noticed how small her wings were, how weak. She was trapped. She could fly away, but where would she go? She was afraid . . . because she knew she wasn't a hawk.”





“Jimmy?”

The trailer was dark around me, and I listened to see if I could hear the sounds that Jimmy was still sleeping. Rain was pushing down on us from what felt like all sides, the little trailer rocking slightly from the water and wind.

“Jimmy?” I said it louder.

“Hmmm?” His reply was immediate this time, like he too lay listening in the dark.

“Did my mother look like me?”

Jimmy didn't answer right away, and I wondered if he was going to entertain this conversation in the middle of the night.

“She had dark hair like you,” he responded quietly. “And she reminded me of someone I used to know.”

He said no more, and I waited in the silence, hoping for crumbs.

“Is that all?” I said finally, impatiently.

“She didn't really look like you,” he sighed. “She looked more like me.”

“Huh?” I hadn't anticipated that response at all.

“She was Native, like me,” he grunted. “Her eyes and hair were black, and her skin was much browner than yours.”

“Was she Pawnee?”

“I don't know which tribe your mother belonged to.”

“But I'm still Pawnee?” I persisted. “Because you're Pawnee?”

Jimmy grunted. I hadn't recognized his discomfort for what it was. I hadn't realized what he wasn't telling me.

Jimmy sighed. “Go to sleep, Blue.”