We had passed the McLaughlin Cinema with the projector that whirred distractingly while the movies played, the Jack & Jill grocery with bars on the windows to prevent local teens from making a midnight munchy run, and the Wells Fargo bank, the only building in the town that didn’t look like a set piece for Tremors.
The occasion for our walk was less than wholesome. We had nothing better to do since having our computers taken away. We recalled back to the first evening of being granted internet access in our rooms, which consisted of a cranky dial-up modem and a yellow cross-over network cable that allowed me to steal most of the bandwidth.
“Wasn’t my fault! The computer froze,” Robert chuckled. Those were the days before triple-x YouTube knock-offs. Back then, if you were a lonely fifteen year old like we were, you either chased girls, which wasn’t an option for outcasts like us, or you tolerated a barrage of pop-ups.
“Stupid hippy!” I poked Robert in his dimpled, brown cheek. “Shoulda pulled the plug!”
“You’re the stupid hippy,” he jabbed me, much faster and harder, in the ribs until I submitted to his superior speed.
We were interrupted from our laughter and play by a sudden call from behind us. Neither of us stopped, though I turned around to glance. On the cement steps of a small corner bar that belched smoke and inebriated laughter sat a number of Natives, either waiting for happy hour or begging for more drinking money. One of them, a short-haired man with a body like a lump of dough and a face pocket marked like the moon if it was covered in chocolate, waved a chubby hand and called out something that I couldn’t catch.
I had little tolerance for the thought of beggars that lived off the taxpayer’s money. Not necessarily because I had any understanding of what that meant, but because all the people in the reservation town with skin as pale as mine told me to. I turned away with a smirk and was coming up with some insult of the drunk that I could mutter to Robert without offending him when my thoughts were interrupted.
“'Ey, Robert! Lookin' good, annah? Got some change?” The man's chubby face folded up like layered dough.
“That’s my dad, I think,” Robert's black eyes were focused straight ahead without heeding the chummy calls of the man. I looked in surprise from the boy before me, skinny and an inch or two shorter, with straight, black hair that hung down to cover his ears, back to the doughy drunk.
“You sure?”
“Think it’s Curtis. He was with my mom for a while. That was after Rick and Tessie’s dad. I think he’s Trisha’s dad, too. Riley has a different one.” We fell silent as I wondered what it would be like to have siblings from random drunks around the town. “That was before she ran over her new boyfriend.”
“Oh. That how come she’s in jail?”
“Yeah.”
I left it at that. While it was interesting to have him open up, I always felt uncomfortable pressing about his family. I never understood how he could come from such a broken, dysfunctional family of druggies and killers, and yet he would beat your face in if you ever said anything bad about them, even though there was plenty bad that could be truthfully said. I had tested the limits of what he would tolerate before, and it wouldn’t be the last time.
One of those tests came the next summer, when the two of us were again without the escape of computers for a summer. Our mutual surrogate parents had dragged us along for a “vacation” at a hunting lodge near Kulm, North Dakota, where I had spent four years living in two different houses throughout elementary school. The lodge, next to Flood Lake, had little to offer two teenagers beyond building fires of driftwood, snagging lines on sunken trees, and getting coated with the foamy, putrid slime of scum and dead fish as we swam in the lake. Bored of swimming, fishing, and breaking open fire crackers to pour the gunpowder into larger containers to make even bigger fire crackers, we usually entertained ourselves with arguing followed by an angry silence, reading followed by a lazy nap, and masturbation followed by guilty apologies to God. This was one of the former occasions.
Tensions run high when there are two young men trapped in a room together, and this instance was no exception. Annoyed by Robert’s stories of how he and his friends in Little Eagle would beat up anyone who looked at them the wrong way, I had the urge to press him to burst to make a haughty point of why violence was wrong.
“You guys were fucking crazy.” That immediately got his attention, with his eyes narrowed in the way that always made me fear that I had unlocked the hidden killer within him, but I had already put one toe into the hot tub and I wasn’t about to back down so quickly.
“Shut the fuck up, Nic! Don’t you fuckin’ talk shit about my friends!” He drew a paring knife from a pocket of the hoodie he always wore and waved it in my direction. He was seated across the large lodging room that took up most of the upper floor with a maze of beds between us, so I continued with feigned confidence in my tone.
“What, and go to jail like your mom?” That made him snap, as I figured it would, and he pounced at me, but I hurried back to keep some distance, not much of one for fighting physically. He lept over a bed and circled a bit with the knife in his hand but held it in more of a showing gesture than with any real intent to use it on his own foster brother. I didn’t realize that at the time, and I began to feel that maybe egging him on hadn’t been so bright.
Just when it seemed like he would move in for a jab, he dropped the knife and threw himself at me instead, agile as ever as he wrapped himself around me in a tight hold with his fingers digging into the deep ridge between my collarbone and neck and holding me pinned to the lower bunk in a stunned position as I wriggled weakly to resist.
“Don’t you fuckin’ say no more shit about my mom!” he spat in my ear before shoving me away, defeated but uninjured. I returned to my own bed, heart pounding and cheeks warm with indignant anger as he called after. “How would you like if I fuckin’ said shit about your mom?”
“I wouldn’t care,” I said with calculated calm and a small shrug, though I kept my eyes lowered. There was the typical post-fight grudging silence that lasted between us for a couple hours. I lay back thinking while the slow moments ticked by. I could hear Robert’s headphones crackling with hip-hop that I always hated to hear. “Kah-rap,” as I internally termed it. It was his typical way of letting off heat when very angry.
At first, I grumbled to myself about how unstable Robert was and how his friends and family members were a bunch of crazy druggies and violent maniacs. As my mind cleared, I again pondered why he would be so loyal to such a dysfunctional family. He had told me of his mother’s drunken beatings of him, and how his oldest sibling, Ricky, would humiliate and knock him around. Yet, he still had far more loyalty to them than I had to my own birth mother, Joyce.
I had known my birth mother most of my life, as I had always been familiar with my birth grandmother, Grandma Joyce, and the weird, fat lady who always hung around with her and liked to paw and coo at me. It wasn’t until third grade that I was explicitly informed that I was adopted and that the weird, fat lady with the shaky hand who called me “Nicky-baby” and I always wanted to get away from was, in fact, my birth mother.
I took the news without a blink when my adoptive mother had informed me.
“I’m adopted? Neat!” I blurted, at the time involved with a game of Galaxy Pinball on our old Packard Bell. My adoptive mother asked if I had any questions and if I was fine. I looked up from the game with a puzzled expression, not understanding why it would be anything but fine.
“Who’s my dad?”
“We don’t know, exactly. We just know that he was tall and thin.” It wasn’t until a much later year that I learned my mother was a fuck-and-chuck and that I had nearly been aborted.
Through it all, I held a curious, emotionless indifference. I had seen plenty of contrived plot twists about someone learning that they were adopted, then going nuts and forever blaming their real parents for letting them go or accusing their adoptive parents of not having told them from the very beginning.
I never understood what everyone’s problem was. It was as though I held no feeling whatsoever towards my real mother and father, aside from acknowledging that my birth mother was annoying. As I listened to Robert’s angry music growling in the bunk above mine, I wondered whether my haughty morals were truly so much greater. True, I wouldn’t attack anyone for badmouthing my family, but I doubted, as I thought about it, that I would throw myself in front of a bus for any of them, either. I didn’t feel guilty for what I felt, but I wondered whether maybe I should.
It wasn’t the first time I felt that lack of connection. Through early childhood, my only friends had been my parents. Time was spent playing with Legos or Lincoln Logs while Star Wars or Indiana Jones or some Disney cartoon played on the VCR. It wasn’t until kindergarten that I had my first friend.
Victoria was a little girl with a round face, red-painted fingernails, and the kind of bowl hair cut that seems cute to parents but the child avoids like the plague as soon as they’re old enough to be at all self-conscious. We went from our initial meeting of me pushing her in the snow to spending all of the school period playing together, often smootching or pretending to be married beneath a large oak near the slummy Lehr School’s old playground, much to the amusement of the older children.
After only two years of knowing her as my best and only friend, we were forced to move because the job my adoptive mother had teaching us through kindergarten and first grade had been lost when they decided to close the school on account of whole grades consisting of three or four students.
That started a trend. First it was Micah, my best buddy through all of three grades at Kulm Elementary until he moved. Then it was a cute girl for the single semester I attended the Christian school back in Lehr. Finally, it was Robert, when he and his younger brother, Riley, joined our family in sixth grade.
Robert had been my only chum for the six years of high school, and I was forced to wonder, after all that, had I gained a loyalty for him that I lacked for even my own birth parents, or was that elusive connection still missing? I still wonder this as we go for the occasional walk, and I’m still not sure.
He has since mellowed into a hard-working, but silly man with a chubby face and long, untamed hair that hangs down his back in dire need of a hairdresser’s attention. He’s dutiful and loyal to his family, but still functional in society. After all my preaching to him about how violence is silly and how he should just cool it over his violent loyalty, who has come out as the better man in the end? I try not to think of it.
“That’s my dad, I think,” Robert's black eyes were focused straight ahead without heeding the chummy calls of the man. I looked in surprise from the boy before me, skinny and an inch or two shorter, with straight, black hair that hung down to cover his ears, back to the doughy drunk.
“You sure?”
“Think it’s Curtis. He was with my mom for a while. That was after Rick and Tessie’s dad. I think he’s Trisha’s dad, too. Riley has a different one.” We fell silent as I wondered what it would be like to have siblings from random drunks around the town. “That was before she ran over her new boyfriend.”
“Oh. That how come she’s in jail?”
“Yeah.”
I left it at that. While it was interesting to have him open up, I always felt uncomfortable pressing about his family. I never understood how he could come from such a broken, dysfunctional family of druggies and killers, and yet he would beat your face in if you ever said anything bad about them, even though there was plenty bad that could be truthfully said. I had tested the limits of what he would tolerate before, and it wouldn’t be the last time.
One of those tests came the next summer, when the two of us were again without the escape of computers for a summer. Our mutual surrogate parents had dragged us along for a “vacation” at a hunting lodge near Kulm, North Dakota, where I had spent four years living in two different houses throughout elementary school. The lodge, next to Flood Lake, had little to offer two teenagers beyond building fires of driftwood, snagging lines on sunken trees, and getting coated with the foamy, putrid slime of scum and dead fish as we swam in the lake. Bored of swimming, fishing, and breaking open fire crackers to pour the gunpowder into larger containers to make even bigger fire crackers, we usually entertained ourselves with arguing followed by an angry silence, reading followed by a lazy nap, and masturbation followed by guilty apologies to God. This was one of the former occasions.
Tensions run high when there are two young men trapped in a room together, and this instance was no exception. Annoyed by Robert’s stories of how he and his friends in Little Eagle would beat up anyone who looked at them the wrong way, I had the urge to press him to burst to make a haughty point of why violence was wrong.
“You guys were fucking crazy.” That immediately got his attention, with his eyes narrowed in the way that always made me fear that I had unlocked the hidden killer within him, but I had already put one toe into the hot tub and I wasn’t about to back down so quickly.
“Shut the fuck up, Nic! Don’t you fuckin’ talk shit about my friends!” He drew a paring knife from a pocket of the hoodie he always wore and waved it in my direction. He was seated across the large lodging room that took up most of the upper floor with a maze of beds between us, so I continued with feigned confidence in my tone.
“What, and go to jail like your mom?” That made him snap, as I figured it would, and he pounced at me, but I hurried back to keep some distance, not much of one for fighting physically. He lept over a bed and circled a bit with the knife in his hand but held it in more of a showing gesture than with any real intent to use it on his own foster brother. I didn’t realize that at the time, and I began to feel that maybe egging him on hadn’t been so bright.
Just when it seemed like he would move in for a jab, he dropped the knife and threw himself at me instead, agile as ever as he wrapped himself around me in a tight hold with his fingers digging into the deep ridge between my collarbone and neck and holding me pinned to the lower bunk in a stunned position as I wriggled weakly to resist.
“Don’t you fuckin’ say no more shit about my mom!” he spat in my ear before shoving me away, defeated but uninjured. I returned to my own bed, heart pounding and cheeks warm with indignant anger as he called after. “How would you like if I fuckin’ said shit about your mom?”
“I wouldn’t care,” I said with calculated calm and a small shrug, though I kept my eyes lowered. There was the typical post-fight grudging silence that lasted between us for a couple hours. I lay back thinking while the slow moments ticked by. I could hear Robert’s headphones crackling with hip-hop that I always hated to hear. “Kah-rap,” as I internally termed it. It was his typical way of letting off heat when very angry.
At first, I grumbled to myself about how unstable Robert was and how his friends and family members were a bunch of crazy druggies and violent maniacs. As my mind cleared, I again pondered why he would be so loyal to such a dysfunctional family. He had told me of his mother’s drunken beatings of him, and how his oldest sibling, Ricky, would humiliate and knock him around. Yet, he still had far more loyalty to them than I had to my own birth mother, Joyce.
I had known my birth mother most of my life, as I had always been familiar with my birth grandmother, Grandma Joyce, and the weird, fat lady who always hung around with her and liked to paw and coo at me. It wasn’t until third grade that I was explicitly informed that I was adopted and that the weird, fat lady with the shaky hand who called me “Nicky-baby” and I always wanted to get away from was, in fact, my birth mother.
I took the news without a blink when my adoptive mother had informed me.
“I’m adopted? Neat!” I blurted, at the time involved with a game of Galaxy Pinball on our old Packard Bell. My adoptive mother asked if I had any questions and if I was fine. I looked up from the game with a puzzled expression, not understanding why it would be anything but fine.
“Who’s my dad?”
“We don’t know, exactly. We just know that he was tall and thin.” It wasn’t until a much later year that I learned my mother was a fuck-and-chuck and that I had nearly been aborted.
Through it all, I held a curious, emotionless indifference. I had seen plenty of contrived plot twists about someone learning that they were adopted, then going nuts and forever blaming their real parents for letting them go or accusing their adoptive parents of not having told them from the very beginning.
I never understood what everyone’s problem was. It was as though I held no feeling whatsoever towards my real mother and father, aside from acknowledging that my birth mother was annoying. As I listened to Robert’s angry music growling in the bunk above mine, I wondered whether my haughty morals were truly so much greater. True, I wouldn’t attack anyone for badmouthing my family, but I doubted, as I thought about it, that I would throw myself in front of a bus for any of them, either. I didn’t feel guilty for what I felt, but I wondered whether maybe I should.
It wasn’t the first time I felt that lack of connection. Through early childhood, my only friends had been my parents. Time was spent playing with Legos or Lincoln Logs while Star Wars or Indiana Jones or some Disney cartoon played on the VCR. It wasn’t until kindergarten that I had my first friend.
Victoria was a little girl with a round face, red-painted fingernails, and the kind of bowl hair cut that seems cute to parents but the child avoids like the plague as soon as they’re old enough to be at all self-conscious. We went from our initial meeting of me pushing her in the snow to spending all of the school period playing together, often smootching or pretending to be married beneath a large oak near the slummy Lehr School’s old playground, much to the amusement of the older children.
After only two years of knowing her as my best and only friend, we were forced to move because the job my adoptive mother had teaching us through kindergarten and first grade had been lost when they decided to close the school on account of whole grades consisting of three or four students.
That started a trend. First it was Micah, my best buddy through all of three grades at Kulm Elementary until he moved. Then it was a cute girl for the single semester I attended the Christian school back in Lehr. Finally, it was Robert, when he and his younger brother, Riley, joined our family in sixth grade.
Robert had been my only chum for the six years of high school, and I was forced to wonder, after all that, had I gained a loyalty for him that I lacked for even my own birth parents, or was that elusive connection still missing? I still wonder this as we go for the occasional walk, and I’m still not sure.
He has since mellowed into a hard-working, but silly man with a chubby face and long, untamed hair that hangs down his back in dire need of a hairdresser’s attention. He’s dutiful and loyal to his family, but still functional in society. After all my preaching to him about how violence is silly and how he should just cool it over his violent loyalty, who has come out as the better man in the end? I try not to think of it.
