There There - Tommy Orange Page 0,65

it on the kitchen table in a blank envelope like Manny used to do. With the other two thousand I bought a drone and a pair of virtual-reality goggles.

I’d been wanting a drone ever since I found out about the powwow. I knew Octavio wouldn’t let me go, but I wanted to see it. To make sure it went all right. Otherwise it was on me. And if shit went wrong, that was it. Octavio’s plan was all I had, with my mom like she was. Decent drones are affordable now. And I’d read that flying one with a camera and live feed, with VR goggles, felt like flying.

The drone I got had a three-mile range and could stay in the air for twenty-five minutes. The camera on it shot 4K resolution. The coliseum was only a mile away from our house on Seventy-Second. I flew it from my backyard. I didn’t want to waste any time so I went straight up, about fifty feet in the air, then straight over the BART station. The thing could really move. I was in it. My eyes. The VR goggles.

Out in the back of center field, I went straight up and saw a guy pointing at me from the bleachers. I flew closer to him. He was a maintenance worker—holding a trash-grabber and a trash bag. The old guy got his binoculars out. I went even closer. What could he do? Nothing. I flew almost all the way up to the guy’s face, and he tried to reach out to the drone. He got mad. I realized I was messing with him. I shouldn’t have. I pulled away and dropped back down to the field. I headed toward the right-field wall, then down the foul line back to the infield. At first base I noticed the drone had ten minutes of battery life left. I wasn’t about to lose a thousand dollars out there, but I wanted to finish at home plate. When I got there, just as I was about to turn the drone around, I saw the old guy from the bleachers coming for me. He was on the field and pissed, like he was gonna grab the drone and slam it to the ground—step on it. I backed up but forgot to rise. Luckily I’d been playing video games for long enough that my panicked brain was hardwired to perform well under pressure. But for a second I was close enough to count the wrinkles in the old guy’s face. He managed to hit it, which almost caused the drone to come down, but I rose, went straight up, quick, like twenty or forty feet in seconds. I cleared the walls and came straight home to my backyard.

At home I watched the video over and over. Especially the part at the end where the guy almost got me. Shit was exciting. Real. Like I’d been there. I was about to call Octavio to tell him about it when I heard a scream upstairs. My mom.

Ever since Manny got shot I’d felt in a constant state of worry, half expecting some bad shit to happen all the time. I ran up the stairs, and when I got to the top I opened the door and saw my mom holding the envelope, flipping through the cash with her finger. Did she think Manny left it? Like he made it back somehow, or like he was still here? Did she think this was a sign?

I was about to tell her it was me, and Octavio, when she came over and hugged me. She pulled my head into her chest. Just kept saying, “Sorry, I’m so sorry.” I thought she meant about how she’d been in bed. How she’d given up. But then as she kept saying it I took it to mean how everything had happened to us. How much we lost, how we’d once been together as a family, how good it’d once been. I tried to tell her it was okay. I kept repeating, “It’s okay, Mom”—one for each of her sorrys. But then pretty soon I found myself saying sorry back. And we both said sorry back and forth until we started to cry and shake.

Blue

PAUL AND I GOT MARRIED tipi way. Some people call it the Native American Church. Or peyote way. We call peyote medicine because it is. I still mostly believe that in the same way I believe most anything can be medicine. Paul’s