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Moccasin Thunder

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

How to Get to the Planet Venus

Joy Harjo

I used to fly to the moon. I never had to think about it; it just happened. This was before I went to school and learned that I needed a degree in aerodynamics to understand how to get from here to there.

One night the moon was full, bright with an aura of ice as earth headed toward winter. My father hadn't come home again, and my mother waited in front of the television, the blue flickering glow turning her back and forth between light and dark. It had become more difficult to leave for the moon because I never knew what would happen, what he would do to her.

The luminescent road to the moon was strong and familiar as I made my way to the old man who was my guardian there. We did not need words to talk. That night he took me to a quarry of stones, and we walked down to the edge, where the scrap pieces were piled together. Below it we could see the world I had come from. Across town my father was coming out of Cain's Ballroom with a blonde woman on his arm. They were kissing and laughing. We could see my mother doze as the television screen blurred, and then the baby awakened and she went to him, changed his diaper, and held him close to her neck as she turned the light on in the kitchen to make his bottle.

This was the first time we had come here to this place together. I knew then that this would be the last time for a very long time I would see the old man, and I felt sad. We watched the story as it unwound through time and space, unraveling like my mother's spools of threads when I accidentally dropped them. But I would not recall any of it for years.

I returned at dawn, and my father showed up with smeared lipstick on his white shirt and the terrible anger of a trapped cat. Not too long after, my father left us for a dancer, and my mother immediately married a white man who didn't want children. I was sent away to Indian school.

The moon was a slender knife in the dark winter sky. We huddled in the ditch behind the boys' dorm, passing around a bottle of sticky sweet cherry vodka. It kept away the cold and the ghosts of sadness, and after a few sips I was free. Next to me was the new student, Lupita Bear. I had to keep from staring at her. She was beautiful. Her perfect skin was cafe au lait, and her black eyes were elegant like a sacred cat's. She announced she had checked out the male population of the school when she arrived earlier in the week and was giving a report.

". . . And what's the name of that Sioux guy with the geometric painting designs? With the nice smile and perfect back, always running touchdowns between classes?"

"John Her Many Horses," we chimed. We'd all noticed him.

"That one over there." She motioned to Herbie Nez. He was Navajo and slim as a girl. "He's much too pretty. I could eat him up in one bite!"

Herbie's hearing was like radar and tuned in to everything, even the songs and cries of spirits who hung around the school. In the past, children had been dragged there against their will. He looked over at us and batted his eyelashes. We all laughed as we downed the next round. Then suddenly our party was over. The dorm patrol surprised us in the nearly moonless night, and we scattered into the dark to save ourselves from detention, restriction, and being sent away.

I ran until I couldn't run anymore. By the time I made it back, my roommate had already been caught, judged, and tried, and was packing her bags for home. She was the first that semester to be kicked out of the dorm for drinking. She was to be the object lesson for all of us.

Her family came after breakfast the next morning, just as a light rain blew in over the mountains. We all watched apprehensively from the dorm living room as her father stiffly lifted her suitcases into their truck to take her back to Dulce. When she climbed in next to her mother and brothers and sisters, she turned and waved a heavy good-bye.

That night Georgette Romero woke up the whole dorm. First I heard her screams and then running as she fled down the hall toward my room, which was in the farthest wing. Lupita saw everything, she told me later, because she was up writing a letter to her mother at four a.m. When Georgette ran by, she was being chased by a ghost the color of sick green. Her roommates refused to let her back into their room and burned cedar to dispel the evil. No one wanted the girl with the ghost, but since I had the only extra bed it was decided she move to my room. That night and for many nights after, I stayed alert in the dark and didn't sleep, anticipating the return of the ghost.

Now Georgette's books were all over the floor, and her plastic beauty case spilled over with makeup and polishes, flooding the counter we were supposed to share. For hours she scraped and rubbed off chipped polish on her nails, then reapplied numerous thick coats, smelling up the room with polish and acetone. She left used dabs of cotton and underwear scattered on the floor. At first I was amused at this alien creature, told myself that she had made herself her own canvas, but she was getting on my nerves. I spent more and more time in the painting studio or sat on the fire escape listening to music.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Moccasin Thunder by Lori Carlson Copyright © 2005 by Lori Carlson. Excerpted by permission.
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