There There - Tommy Orange Page 0,40

I called 9-1-1. When they came, because I told the operator about how it was just me and my brothers besides our mom, they came with two cop cars and a CPS worker. He was this old Indian guy I never saw again except for that one time. It was the first time I heard that we were Indian. He recognized that we were Indian just by looking at us. They carried our mom out on a stretcher while the social worker showed my little brothers a magic trick with a book of matches, or he was just lighting matches and it felt like magic, I don’t know. He’s the reason they called our grandma and why we ended up getting adopted by her. He took us to his office and asked who else there was besides our mom. After talking to our grandma Opal, we left and met her at the hospital.”

“And then?”

“Then we went home with her.”

“Home with your grandma?”

“Yeah.”

“And your mom?”

“She’d already left the hospital by the time we got there. Turned out she just got knocked out from the fall. She didn’t overdose.”

“That’s a good story. Thank you. I mean, not good, but thank you for telling it.”

“I get two hundred dollars now?”

Orvil and his brothers leave the Indian Center and go straight to Target in West Oakland to get Lony’s bike. Lony rides on the back of Loother’s bike—on pegs. Even though the story had been sad to remember, Orvil feels okay about having told it. He feels even better about the two-hundred-dollar gift card in his back pocket. He can’t stop smiling. But his leg. The lump that’s been in his leg for as long as he can remember, as of late it’s been itching. He hasn’t been able to stop scratching it.

* * *

—

“Some shit just went down in the bathroom,” Orvil tells Loother when he gets outside Target.

“Isn’t that what it’s supposed to do?” Loother says.

“Shut the fuck up, Loother, I’m serious,” Orvil says.

“What, you didn’t make it in time?” Loother says.

“I was sitting there in the stall, picking at that thing. You remember that lump I got? I felt something poking out of it. So I pulled, like, I just pulled one out, put it on some folded-up toilet paper, then went back in and got another one. Then one more after that. I’m pretty sure they’re spider legs,” Orvil says.

“Pfffffft,” Loother says and laughs. At which point Orvil shows him a neat pile of folds of toilet paper.

“Let me see,” Loother says.

Orvil opens up the folds of toilet paper and shows Loother.

“What the fuck?” Loother says.

“Right outta my leg,” Orvil says.

“Are you sure it’s not, like, splinters?”

“Nah, look where the leg bends. There’s a joint. And a tip. Like the end of the leg where it gets skinnier, look.”

“That’s fucked up,” Loother says. “But what about the other five? I mean, if they are spider legs, there should be eight, right?”

Before Orvil can say anything else or put away the spider legs, Loother’s on his phone.

“You looking it up?” Orvil asks him.

But Loother doesn’t answer. He just taps. Scrolls. Waits.

“You find anything?” Orvil says.

“Nah. Not even a little bit,” Loother says.

When Lony comes out with his bike, Orvil and Loother look down at it and nod. Lony smiles at their nods.

“Let’s go,” Orvil says, then puts his earphones in. He looks back and sees his brothers put theirs in too. They ride back toward Wood Street. As they pass the Target sign, Orvil remembers last year when they all got phones at Target on the same day as an early Christmas present. They were the cheapest phones they had, but at least they weren’t flip phones. They were smart. They do all they need them to do: make calls, text, play music, and get them on the internet.

They ride together in a line, and listen to what comes out of their phones. Orvil mainly listens to powwow music. There’s something in the energy of that big booming drum, in the intensity of the singing, like an urgency that feels specifically Indian. He likes the power the sound of a chorus of voices makes too, those high-pitched wailed harmonies, how you can’t tell how many singers there are, and how sometimes it sounds like ten singers, sometimes like a hundred. There was even one time, when he was dancing in Opal’s room with his eyes closed, when he felt like it was all his ancestors who made it