There There - Tommy Orange Page 0,79
shudders. He looks up to see if he can find his brothers.
Tony Loneman
TO GET TO THE POWWOW Tony Loneman catches a train. He gets dressed at home and wears his regalia all the way there. He’s used to being stared at, but this is different. He wants to laugh at them staring at him. It’s his joke to himself about them. Everyone has been staring at him his whole life. Never for any other reason than the Drome. Never for any other reason than that his face told you something bad happened to him—a car wreck you should but can’t look away from.
No one on the train knows about the powwow. Tony’s just an Indian dressed like an Indian on the train for no apparent reason. But people love to see the pretty history.
Tony’s regalia is blue, red, orange, yellow, and black. The colors of a fire at night. Another image people love to think about. Indians around a fire. But this isn’t that. Tony is the fire and the dance and the night.
He’s standing in front of a BART map. An older white woman sitting across from him points to the map and asks him where to get off if she’s going to the airport. She knows the answer to this question. She would have already looked it up on her phone numerous times to be sure. She wants to see if the Indian speaks. It’s the next question she means to get to. The face behind the face she makes says it all. Tony doesn’t answer about the airport right away. He stares at her and waits for what she’ll say next.
“So you’re…a Native American?”
“We get off at the same exit,” Tony says. “Coliseum. There’s a powwow. You should come.” Tony walks to the door to look out the window.
“I would, but…”
Tony hears that she’s responding, but he doesn’t listen. People don’t want any more than a little story they can bring back home with them, to tell their friends and family around the dinner table, to talk about how they saw a real Native American boy on a train, that they still exist.
Tony looks down and watches the tracks fly by. He feels the train pull him back as it slows. He grips the metal handle, shifts his weight to the left, then rocks back to his right when the train comes to a complete stop. The woman behind him is saying something, but it can’t matter what. He steps off the train and when he gets to the stairs he takes off, skipping two steps the whole way down.
Blue
BLUE IS DRIVING to pick up Edwin. It’s that weird night-morning color, that deep blue-orange-white. The day she’s been anticipating for almost a year is just starting.
It feels good to be back in Oakland. All the way back. She’s been back a year. On a regular paycheck now, in her own studio apartment, with her own car again for the first time in five years. Blue tilts the rearview down and looks at herself. She sees a version of herself she thought was long gone, someone she’d left behind, ditched for her real Indian life on the rez. Crystal. From Oakland. She’s not gone. She’s somewhere behind Blue’s eyes in the rearview.
Blue’s favorite place to smoke a cigarette is in the car. She likes how the smoke escapes when all the windows are down. She lights one. She tries to at least say a little prayer every time she smokes. It makes her feel less guilty for smoking. She takes in a deep drag and holds it. She says thank you as she blows out the smoke.
She’d gone all that way to Oklahoma to find out where she came from and all she’d gotten for it was a color for a name. No one had heard of any Red Feather family. She’d asked around plenty. She wonders if maybe her birth mom made it up—maybe she didn’t know her own tribe either. Maybe she had been adopted too. Maybe Blue would end up having to make up her own name and tribe too, pass that on to her possible children.
Blue throws her cigarette out the window as she passes the Grand Lake Theatre. The theater meant many things to her over the years. Right now she’s thinking of the awkward, clearly stated non-date date she recently went on with Edwin. Edwin’s her intern, her assistant for the powwow event coordination for this past year. The movie