CHAPTER ONE
There was something strange, mysterious even, about the White Horse tonight. Normally, it was merely an Indian bar. My Indian bar. But there was a milky, dreamy quality to the red lights swinging over the pool tables, like the wind from the open doors was bringing them something new, something I’d pushed away for as long as I could remember.
“Debby, do we have to talk about her again?” I took another swig of my beer and slammed it back down, eyeing my cousin as I did. She would never let this subject go, no matter how much I rebuffed her. I sighed, taking in the dank, wet-wood smell of the bar, the harsh laughter of the bikers in the booth behind me.
“The thing is, I found—”
I interrupted her with a brush of my hand.
I hoped Nick, the bartender, would come by and ask if I needed a refill, but all I could see was the mirror in front of me, the words Miller High Life emblazoned in gold cursive on the front. Right next to it a sign read, FIRST FIGHT. LAST DRINK. PERMANENT 86. Besides us, the bartender, and the bikers, the White Horse was empty. It was always empty, but I loved it. I loved the long wooden bar, the cats wandering in and out; the mangy orange one was my favorite. She liked to sit on top of the bar and let me pet her while she closed her cloudy eyes and purred.
Debby shifted her weight on the stool, the plastic crackling as she did, the bar stirring around me like a bad dream.
“All I’m saying is that you don’t know your mom’s story.”
“Yeah, okay, Debby. That’s great,” I said.
I signaled Nick when he came out of the bathroom. “Two more,” I said, hoping he’d remember.
A couple of Diné came through the doors, quiet the way they were, and made their way to a pool table in the back. One of them saw me when he came over to order a beer, and he gave me the friendly nod, his black hair glistening red in the faint bar light. I nodded back and that strange feeling I’d had earlier flooded back into me.
“The thing is,” Debby said, “you know how we check in on your dad?
I hung my head. “Yeah, so?”
“I went over there the other day to do that, and some cleaning, because I know the nurse is great and everything, but I like to see how he is, and I’d just come home from work, and was dropping the kids off—”
“Jesus, Debby, if you’re not going to let it go, spit it out.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, starting again. “So, Mom had been pushing me to clear some of the boxes in the attic. And like, we were going to haul them out and throw them in the dumpster, but Mom seemed to want to look through them. And mainly they were full of old toys, and papers and rusting appliances, but then, we found something.”
“What?” I whispered, and that dreamy quality snapped back.
“Something of your mom’s.”
I was silent. My mother. The woman who had abandoned me when I was only two days old. The woman who my father had been so devastated over he began to take long drives, a bottle of Jack between his legs. The woman who had made it so that I had to care for my dad like a baby, instead of the other way around, after he’d gotten into an accident that had left his body but taken his mind. Cecilia.
“And the thing is, Kari, it was some Indian jewelry—and it’s old.”
I felt like changing my drink to something stronger.
“And, like, since your mom was Apache and Chickasaw?”
I nodded.
“I’m just saying that it might be significant,” she said.
I continued to stare down at the wood of the bar, run my fingers along the rough edges.
“But the important part is, like, when she found it? When I picked it up, I felt weird.”
I was silent for a long time, my heart hammering in my throat. I signaled Nick and ordered a whiskey to go with my beer, the dark brown liquid splashing a bit over the rim of the tiny paper cup as he set it down. “Want one?”
“No, I gotta drive back,” Debby said, glancing at her clock. “It takes at least forty-five minutes to get from Denver to Idaho Springs, and I’m sure Jack’s already wondering why I’m not home.”
I rolled my eyes, and we sat in an uncomfortable silence.
“You know I don’t like talking about her,” I finally said, grumbling.
“I’m just going to like, give it to you, okay?”
“Fine,” I said, watching as she dug into her purse.
She pulled an ancient hammered-copper bracelet out of her bag, a bit of patina around the edges. It hummed with power, with history. My history. It was the kind that Indians used to wear all the time, and it was old. I squinted, thinking, upon closer inspection, that it was probably turn of the century. I could see, as Debby held it out in her little pink hands, that there were different objects carved into each thick copper square, links connecting each section—symbols I recognized from Indian jewelry of the time. Stuff that was common for urban Indians, or that had been lifted from plains culture. A thunderbird. A waterbird. A spiral. A Lakota chief’s headdress. Then there were others that I thought were perhaps Apache. Symbols for water. The sun and mountains. The moon and arrows. A war club—yes, that was definitely Apache. Stuff my Auntie Squeaker back in the Springs would know about, I was sure. And lastly, something that made me ill just looking at it—a stick figure that seemed to represent a monster of some sort. In the back of my mind, I could almost remember the name for it.
My thoughts wandered, unbidden, to my mother.
Debby shoved it into my bag, and I kept drinking, nodding as she went on about her husband, listening to the eerie, lonely sound of the wind whistling through the open door. But though I tried to focus on everything but that bracelet, it began burning into my mind, glowing almost, roping me to thoughts of my mother, and my painful, locked-away past.
CHAPTER TWO
I looked at the clown’s face, the big, red mouth with the hole at the center for the ball, and thought about the two-odd years it had taken Jack—Debby’s obnoxious husband—and his best buddy from high school, Carl, to build a mini putt-putt into the old, rotting apartment complex that Jack had inherited from his father. Jack had decided, upon his father’s death, that what he really needed in his life was an indoor mini putt-putt course. Carl had been very supportive of this move. Debby less so.
Jack took an awkward swing with an ancient, rusty golf club, and the ball ricocheted off the clown’s face he’d built into an old fireplace, whacking him in the leg. “Goddamnit,” he said, picking up a can of Miller Light sitting on an old end table. The ball had hit uncomfortably close to his crotch.
Jack took another gulp of his beer and set it down.
“So, Kari—got a boyfriend yet?” Jack asked.
Carl perked up. We’d boned once in high school, and Carl had never forgotten it.
“Yeah, actually,” I responded. “I do.”
Jack blanched.
“Kari!” Debby said, squealing and clapping her tiny white hands. “You didn’t tell me about this! Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Well,” Carl said, “don’t keep us in suspense. Who’s the lucky guy?” He pushed the remaining dark blond wisps of his hair over his pate.
“Yeah, Kari,” Jack said suspiciously.
“Your dad,” I said, barely suppressing a cruel jag of laughter, and Jack’s expression blackened.
“Kari,” Debby said nervously.
“That’s not funny, my dad’s dead,” he said, and I could hear Carl muffling laughter.
“Jesus, Carl, be on my side for once!” Jack said, thwacking him in the arm. “She’s never gonna get on that d—”
“Hey!” Carl said. Then, “Ow.” He rubbed his tricep.
“Maybe you’ll stop asking me that kinda shit now,” I said, lifting my eyebrows up sharply, and holding my drink out to him for a cheers.
Needless to say, he didn’t clink. He grunted and took another swig. Beer ran down the side of his mouth, and he brushed his arm across his lips.
He was always after me to get a man. Thing was, Debby was too. She figured that Jack wouldn’t be such a jerk about us chilling together if I had a dude, and we could double-date. But that wasn’t my thing. At all.
Carl saddled up to take a shot at the clown.
Jack sighed, heavily. “Look, Kari, don’t take offense,” Jack said, stumbling slightly where he stood. “I don’t mean to try to push you or anything it’s just that…” he stopped, and I could almost see the gears slowly grinding in his mind.
“It’s that, you know, Kari, we want you to be happy. And like, when you have a partner in life, it like, means you learn stuff about yourself—” Debby started, and I groaned.
“Exactly,” Jack said, interrupting. “And it makes you more mature.”
I watched Jack, clearly the pinnacle of all that is male maturity, slightly stagger once more from too many Bud Lights, and wondered if he’d ever washed a pair of his own underwear in his life.
“Baby, I can speak for myself,” Debby said, giggling girlishly. But she was clearly irritated. Jack interrupted her a lot.
“I don’t—I mean, I didn’t,” Jack started. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, or like, speak for you.”
“Oh, you didn’t,” Debby said, and I tried to stop my eyeballs from rolling so far back in my head that they disappeared for the rest of time.
“I mean, look, Kari, you’re strong and independent, and that’s not a bad thing,” Debby said.
Jack stared at her slack-jawed for a moment, clearly confused about where she was going with this line of thought, and Carl took a whack. The ball sailed straight into the clown’s mouth, and the clown swallowed and yelled “Whooopeee!” Carl followed with a whoop of his own, walking into the bedroom to get to the ball.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Jack said, uneasily.
I suppressed laughter.
He knew he was being manipulated into something, and he didn’t like it one bit.
“She can take care of herself,” he said, hiccupping in the middle of his sentence.
“I completely agree with you. That’s exactly why I need to hang out with her sometimes—just her and me,” Debby said, pulling her club up and over her shoulder. It was Jack’s turn with the clown, and he was taking his sweet time. I always went last.
“What? No. No. That’s not—”
Debby rotated in my direction, sipped at her rum and Coke, and set it delicately back down on a glossy, wooden coffee table. The table was covered in stickers—mainly Care Bear.
“Because sometimes you get in trouble on your own, don’t you, Kari?” She said, her voice high-pitched and sweet as a child’s.
Copyright © 2022 by Erika T. Wurth
