on my bike from a block away for a while, watched the drunks move around under the glow of the streetlights, all stupid like moths drunk on light.
When I found Octavio, he was all kinds of fucked up. It always makes me think of my mom when I see people like that. I wondered what she was like drunk when I was in her. Did she like it? Did I?
Octavio was pretty clearheaded, though, even through the heavy slur. He put his arm around me and took me to his backyard, where he had a bench press set up under a tree. I watched him do sets with a bar without weights on it. It didn’t seem like he realized there were no weights. I waited to see when he would ask the question about my face. But he didn’t. I listened to him talk about his grandma, about how she saved his life after his family was gone. He said she’d lifted a curse from him with badger fur, and that she called anyone not Mexican or Indian gachupins, which is a disease the Spanish brought to the Natives when they came—she used to tell him that the Spanish were the disease that they brought. He told me he never meant to become what he’d become, and I wasn’t sure what that was, a drunk, or a drug dealer, or both, or something else.
“I’d give away my own heart’s blood for her,” Octavio said. His own heart’s blood. That’s the way I felt about Maxine. He told me he didn’t mean to sound all sensitive and shit, but that nobody else ever really listened to him. I knew it was because he was fucked up. And that he probably wouldn’t remember shit. But after that I went straight to Octavio for everything.
It turned out those goofy white boys from the hills had friends. We made good money for a summer. Then one day when I was picking up, Octavio asked me in, told me to sit down.
“You’re Native, right?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, and wondered how he knew. “Cheyenne.”
“Tell me what a powwow is,” he said.
“Why?”
“Just tell me.”
Maxine had been taking me to powwows all around the Bay since I was young. I don’t anymore, but I used to dance.
“We dress up Indian, with feathers and beads and shit. We dance. Sing and beat this big drum, buy and sell Indian shit like jewelry and clothes and art,” I said.
“Yeah, but what do you do it for?” Octavio said.
“Money,” I said.
“No, but really why do they do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whatchyoumean you don’t know?”
“To make money motherfucker,” I said.
Octavio looked at me with his head sideways, like: Remember who you’re talking to.
“That’s why we’re gonna be at that powwow too,” Octavio said.
“The one they’re having over at the coliseum?”
“Yeah.”
“To make money?”
Octavio nodded, then turned around and picked up what I couldn’t tell at first was a gun. It was small and all white.
“What the fuck is that?” I said.
“Plastic,” Octavio said.
“It works?”
“It’s 3-D printed. You wanna see?” he said.
“See?” I said.
Out in the backyard, I aimed the gun at a can of Pepsi on a string, with two hands, my tongue out and one eye closed.
“You ever fired a gun before?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“Shit’ll make your ears ring.”
“Can I?” I said, and before I got an answer I felt my finger squeeze and then the boom go through me. There was a moment when I didn’t know what was happening. The squeeze brought the sound of the boom and my whole body became a boom and a drop. I ducked without meaning to. There was a ringing, inside and out, a single tone drifting far off, or deep inside. I looked up at Octavio and saw that he was saying something. I said What, but couldn’t even hear myself say it.
“This is how we’re gonna rob that powwow,” I finally heard Octavio say.
I remembered there were metal detectors at the entrance to the coliseum. Maxine’s walker, the one she used after she broke her hip, it set one of them off. Me and Maxine went on a Wednesday night—dollar night—to see the A’s play the Texas Rangers, which was the team Maxine grew up rooting for in Oklahoma because Oklahoma didn’t have a team.
On the way out, Octavio handed me a flyer for the powwow that listed the prize money in each dance category. Four for five thousand. Three for ten.
“That’s good money,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be