12
Greenville, South Carolina
“I’m glad we decided to drive,” Thorn said.
“Good thing I know how,” Marissa said. They were in her SUV, a small and sporty Honda, with enough weight to make the ride comfortable, on the highway between Charlotte and Greenville.
“Just because I don’t need a car doesn’t mean I never learned how. Having a chauffeur lets me get a lot of work done while I’m in transit.”
“So would taking the bus or a train,” she said.
“What, and ride with you rabble?”
She laughed. “I’m glad to see you loosening up, sweetie. I’d sure hate to have my grandparents think you were a stick-in-the-mud. Bad enough you are so melaninly challenged.”
“I’ll work on my tan,” he said.
“Even with your Native American blood, you’re always gonna look like a pale pink sock mixed into a load of new blue jeans, at least around my family.”
He chuckled.
“You travel much by car before you got so rich and started taking private jets to buy your hamburgers?”
Thorn smiled. “Oh, yeah. You want the condensed version? Or the full-length travelogue?”
“Tell all, Tommy. We have a ways yet to go to Grandma’s house.”
“Okay. When I was young and heading toward the height of my stupidity—this was the summer I turned thirteen, so I was still a couple years away—my grandfather took me on a road trip. Though our people were mostly from around Spokane, we had some distant cousins and great-aunts and -uncles who were Choctaw, and Grampa allowed as how I should meet them.
“I don’t know if you know the history. Along with the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, the Choctaw got rounded up and sent along the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, as part of the white man’s land grab. My distant relatives somehow managed to escape into the swamps along the way, down in Louisiana. There, they hid out and pretended to be black Dutch or something. Nobody ever came looking for them, people left them alone, and most of them became farmers or fishers. Nobody got rich, but nobody died cooped up on a dust-bowl rez in Oklahoma.
“Anyway, my grandfather decided it was time to go and introduce me to them. So he loaded up his old Chevy pickup truck, and off we went.”
Thorn smiled again at the memories that floated up.
“It was a long trip. About twenty-five hundred miles each way. My grandfather didn’t have much use for the Interstate system, so we took state highways wherever possible, sometimes county roads. Went through Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas on the way to Louisiana, and added in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and Oregon on the way back to Spokane.
“My grandfather did a lot of knocking around as a young man. We’d be tooling along at sixty in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas, and all of a sudden he’d pull over. We’d get out, and he’d talk about the place: ‘These are the Smoky Hills. That over there, that’s Pawnee Rock. The Spanish came here, the French. The Americans didn’t show up until 1806. The wind always blows.’
“We’d stretch, pee, hop back in the old truck, and hit the road again. Hot and sunny, pouring rain and thunder-storms, saw a tornado once. We made stops like that all across the country. We’d pull into a country store, buy a loaf of bread and some cheese and lunch meat, make sandwiches, have an apple, drink a soft drink, like that. At night, we’d crawl into sleeping bags, either in the back of the truck or on the ground. Look at the stars, and my grandfather would tell me stories. Places he’d been. People he’d known. Bars he’d gotten drunk in.”
The memory was fine and green in Thorn’s head. He smiled.
“There was a long and rich history here long before white men sailed the Atlantic. My grandfather knew some of it, and told it to me. I missed a lot, being full of myself, but some I remember.”
Marissa nodded. “The white men were hauling my people here belowdecks in chains back when they were slaughtering your kin,” she said. “Come Judgment Day, a lot of them will have a lot to answer for.”
Thorn nodded in return. “Bad times for a lot of people.
“Um. Anyway, I didn’t really understand how big this country is until I spent a couple weeks driving across it. Passing through the little towns, the long stretches of nothing between them. We stopped at Cherokee trading posts in Oklahoma; stopped at bars in Texas; we camped on the prairies, in the woods, fields, once in an old one-room schoolhouse that had been boarded up for years. One of the highlights of my life, that trip.”
“You loved your grandfather.”
“Oh, yeah. We didn’t talk about such things, being men and all, but he was always there for me. I miss him.”
“I’m sorry. I’m happy my grandparents are still around.”
“You didn’t tell them I saw those pictures of them on your wall, did you?”
She laughed. “Tommy, they know you and I sleep together, being as how they taught me that when it was time to get married I needed to be sure things worked in that arena before I tied the knot. So they’ll know you’ve spent the night at my place, and they know I’ve got those paintings on my walls.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I guess.” The paintings in question were of her grandparents, Amos and Ruth, as young adults, and her grandmother was altogether undressed in the one of her. Quite the looker as a young woman.
“Granny’s in pretty good shape for a woman heading toward eighty” she said. “Maybe if you ask, she’ll take off her clothes and let you see how well she’s aged.”
“Jesus, Marissa!”
She laughed. “Still a little bit of stick-in-the-mud there, sweetie. We’ll have to work on that.”
Circle S Ranch
Oatmeal, South Dakota
Jay guessed he must have been an Old West pioneer in some previous incarnation—either that, or he was more of a romantic than he liked to believe—because of his hand-built scenarios, several of his favorites were cowboy sequences.
In this one, Jay was a wrangler who was going to watch other wranglers ride bucking broncos. Yeah, sure, it was yee-haw kinda stuff, but information flows and datasets could be snorers, and anything that made them more interesting to parse was to the good.
But as he was climbing up onto the split-rail wooden fence to sit and watch, he glanced over at the weathered barn and saw Siddhartha Gautama, aka the Buddha, in a saffron robe, leaning against the faded wooden barn, smiling.
Jay laughed. Saji. She was the only one who had unrestricted access to his scenarios. Even Thorn had to knock. . . .
He climbed back down from the fence and ambled toward the thin and smiling figure. Buddha was sometimes depicted as a laughing fat man—the Hotai—but historically speaking, Siddhartha had been an ascetic at one point, barely eating enough to survive. Even after finding the Middle Way, the man who became the Realized Buddha had never given in to dietary excess. Jay knew this because Saji had taught him the rudiments of the philosophy and its history, even though he had not exactly embraced it. . . .
He strolled up to Saji in her Buddha form. “Hey, Buddy. How’s it goin’?”
“ ‘Buddy.’You make that same bad joke every time. And you’re a terrible cowboy—way too much corn pone in that accent.”
“Ouch. You got a mean streak, O holy one. What’s up?”
“Nothing much. We’re almost out of milk, and I wanted you to stop and pick some up on the way home.”
“Sure, no problem. And, uh, I’ll get the right kind, this time.”
“You better. Otherwise, it’ll be you up all night trying to calm the boy down.”
He laughed.
Buddha smiled enigmatically and then, like the Cheshire Cat, vanished, leaving only the smile, which faded shortly thereafter.
Jay shook his head, and headed back toward the corral. Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be programmers. . . .
Pinehurst, Georgia
Ruth was, as Thorn’s grandfather used to say, a pistol. After she hugged Marissa, she did the same for Thorn, and long past seventy-five or not, she had strength in her grip. She leaned back and looked closely at his face. “Good bone structure,” she said. “Must be more Indian than honky in you.”
Thorn laughed. “My mother’s doing,” he said. “The white man in our family woodpile was earlier.”
Ruth laughed, a loud, raucous rumble from deep down. “He doesn’t seem like such a tight ass to me.”
Marissa grinned, real big, and Thorn shook his head. “Well, I see where Marissa gets it from.”
“Come on in, you lettin’ the heat out. Amos has gone to take Sheila for her PT; he should be back in half an hour or so.” She closed the door behind him.
The house was a lot warmer than the blustery, raw Georgia morning outside, a big woodstove installed in front of the fireplace providing a radiant heat. “I just put biscuits in the oven. Stick your stuff in the bedroom and come on back down, I’ll fix you some breakfast. You look like a man who could use a few pounds, and Lord knows you won’t gain any weight from Marissa’s cooking. I hope she warned you.”
“Yes, ma’am, she allowed as how she wasn’t much of a cook.”
“I tried to teach the child, but she was always more interested in climbing trees and beatin’ up on the boys. Go on upstairs, let me go fetch some eggs.”
Ruth hurried away.
The house was fairly large, and probably well over a hundred years old. It was a big living room, a high ceiling with wainscotting, and had a dark blue couch eight feet long facing the woodstove. There was an overstuffed chair and a couple of end tables, and a coffee table, the latter three of which looked like cherry, matte-finished and waxed or oiled rather than shiny. A matching cabinet stood in one corner, and the door was ajar enough to see a fair-sized TV screen behind it. Must be a satellite dish out here somewhere; it was a long way from town for cable.
One entire wall was nearly all taken up by bookshelves, floor to ceiling, fifteen feet wide, at least, filled to overflowing with mostly hardbacks and a few paperbacks.
The house immediately felt like a home—lived in, comfortable, full of life.
There was a hall with a room off to the left, and the kitchen straight ahead. It was clean, the painted and wall-papered walls looked fairly fresh, and the smell from the kitchen was great—biscuits baking. His own grandmother had been big on cooking breakfast, but Thorn had fallen out of the habit of eating much in the morning years ago.
As they headed up the stairs, Thorn asked, “Who is Sheila?”
“The dog. She’s got a bad hip. My grampa takes her in a couple times a week for PT.”
“The dog?”
“You didn’t have pets on the rez, Tommy?”
“Yeah, sure, but we didn’t have any doggy therapist, only a vet who mostly took care of horses and cows. Who would put out that kind of money on a dog?”
“Here’s another big gap in your education.”
They reached the top of the stairs, and Marissa led the way into a bedroom with a large window that allowed in a fair amount of light—or would if it wasn’t so gray and overcast as it was today. The bed was a double, with a brass headboard shaped like a big letter H with a second crosspiece, and there was a heavy patchwork quilt covering it. It was somewhat cooler than downstairs, and Thorn reckoned that the woodstove was the primary, if not the only, source of heat. Close the door here and it was apt to get pretty chilly on a winter’s evening.
“The little bathroom is at the end of the hall, and there’s a space heater in it—it gets cold. You can shower there, but the tub is in the big bathroom downstairs.”
“Nice.”
“This used to be my room. Fortunately, my grandparents didn’t make it into a museum after I grew up, so you don’t see the Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, and Tom Cruise posters I had up when I was fourteen.”
“Tom Cruise?”
“Even then I had a weakness for cute white boys.”
Thorn chuckled. “So, you were talking about Shelia?”
“Anybody who says, ‘It’s just a dog.’ has never really gotten to know one. My grandparents have owned—or been owned by—Sheila for ten years. She’s family. Before that, they had others: Titus, Laramie, and Winslow are the ones I remember.”
“I never had a dog as a kid,” he said. “Too many cousins in and out of our house, wasn’t enough room to keep a hamster.”
“People love their companion animals. They feed some of ’em better than a lot of people in this country eat. They take them to the vet when they get sick or hurt, give them medicine, have surgery done. Pretty much anything you can do to a person with a surgical scalpel, somebody has done to a pet—they fix torn tendons or broken bones, take out tumors, even replace bad hips. X-rays, MRIs, whatever tests you need. I knew a man once spent six hundred dollars on treatments for a budgie for a broken wing. Bird cost him thirty dollars originally.”
“Jesus.”
“So if your dog tears up his hind leg running through the field, you can get it repaired by a top surgeon who specializes in doggy orthopedics, and then you can take him to someplace like Canine Peak Performance, where a vet who does rehab will put him in a tank full of water with a treadmill in it and strengthen the muscles without putting as much weight on the injury as it would walking around your neighborhood. That’s what Sheila is doing.”
“Really?”
“It’s a coming thing. Been around for years, started out for rehab on show animals, or dogs entered in athletic competitions—catching Frisbees or agility competitions and the like—and once people started seeing how well it worked, they started bringing in the regular critters who were just ordinary door-blockers, like Sheila.”
“I had no idea.” Thorn shook his head. “And there is one of these places out here in the Georgia boonies?”
“My second cousin runs it,” she said. “She got trained in it out in Raleigh Hills, Oregon, by a woman vet named Helfer, who had flyball dogs. Cousin Louella has enough customers so she keeps busy, even out here.”
“I guess I need to get out more.”
“That’s for sure, Tommy. You are woefully lacking in general knowledge about the world. All those years as a computer geek. I’ll shape you up, though, don’t worry.”
He smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”
They heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. Thorn moved to the window and looked out. An old, dark green Ford pickup truck arrived. A tall and fit-looking black man alighted, reached back into the truck, and collected a large, short-haired, black and tan dog. Thorn didn’t recognize the variety. The man—that would be Marissa’s grandfather, Amos—squatted and set the dog gently onto the ground. She wagged her tail and headed for the front door, favoring her right rear leg.
Marissa said, “Let’s go down and let you meet Grampa and Sheila. If the dog bites you, you and I will have to rethink our relationship.”
Thorn grinned. For a second, Marissa kept her face serious. Just when he was getting worried that she was serious, she cracked a smile. “You’re funny,” he said.
“I am. Try and keep up. Nobody likes a slow white boy, even if you are cute.”