The Boys from Santa Cruz

CHAPTER EIGHT
1

Back in the Buzzard-mobile, zooming down a long dark tunnel of a highway, I was trying to explain to Buzzard John why I hadn’t stepped in to stop him from being beaten up.

“But sssee… hunh… what they done… hunh…to me,” he was saying, in this weird, thin voice, hissing on the s sounds and grunting between words. “Just sssee… hunh, hunh…what they done.”

I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t help myself. I turned and saw a vulture’s horrible red head bobbing and weaving at the end of the long snaky neck sticking up out of the collar of Buzzard John’s shirt. It fixed its beady little eyes on me and opened its beak. “Sssee what they done,” it hissed at me, its stubby crimson tongue wiggling in the back of its throat. Then it grunted again, hunh, and its head darted toward me. I scrabbled around for the door handle and couldn’t find it, pounded the window with my fists and couldn’t break it, threw my shoulder against the door and couldn’t budge it.

Now it had me by the shoulder with its vulture’s claw, three scaly, crooked fingers ending in horrible sharp nails. I made a desperate, backward lunge, throwing myself against the door, which for some reason was no longer there. Screaming silently, I fell out of the moving truck, and just before I hit the ground…

You guessed it: I woke up. Shawnee was kneeling by the edge of my mattress, her hand outstretched, looking startled. “Rudy told me to wake you for breakfast.”

I felt so relieved, it was like getting a second lease on life. But in a way that’s what was really happening. However the thing with Buzzard John had been resolved, Rudy had made up his mind to take me in. He didn’t care that I wasn’t a Hatchapec, or that the police were looking for me. That might even have helped, because Rudy had done time himself. No, all that mattered was that I was an orphan who’d showed up on his doorstep, and according to Indian notions of hospitality and responsibility, he wouldn’t have been much of a man if he’d turned me away.

There was, of course, another reason why Rudy might have wanted to take in a fifteen-year-old boy, but back then, it never even crossed my mind. All I knew was that for the first time in a long time, things were looking up.

I located the bathroom all by myself this time, then joined Shawnee down in the kitchen, which I found with only a couple of wrong turns. There was an old woman (she might have been the same one as last night or not, I wasn’t sure) making Indian toast, which was like French toast, only thicker and heavier. I met some people I hadn’t seen the night before, most of whom Shawnee seemed to be related to. It was kind of neat, seeing all those generations together. And educational: I noticed, for instance, that old Indian women were mostly pretty fat and old Indian men were so shriveled and skinny you’d think the old women were feeding off them. Best of all, nobody seemed to hold it against me that I was white, and a stranger.

After breakfast, I followed Shawnee outside, and she began showing me the ropes. Growing Humboldt sinsemilla, I learned, was a surprisingly labor-intensive affair. There were always chores to be done, from potting and sexing the plants over the winter, to planting them in spring (females only), to tending the drip lines, hand-watering and fertilizing the isolated patches, weeding, and mending deer fences throughout the summer.

In addition to all that work, this time of year was considered prime raiding season. An armed watch had to be kept over the crop twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to protect it from the pot pirates. (Because they were on a reservation, the Hatchapecs weren’t supposed to be subject to raids by state or federal authorities, but they did have to keep the palms of the rez police greased.)

With the grown men patrolling the fields, the edge of the property, and even the back roads leading in and out of the reservation, the rest of us had to take up the slack. Shawnee and I were assigned to tend the isolated plants hidden in the woods. All that first day, I tagged along after her, learning where the various plants were hidden, how to pinch back the dead leaves, and how to spot boughs that might be turning hermaphrodite in a desperate effort to reproduce. (The whole idea behind sinsemilla, which means “without seeds” in Spanish, is that without exposure to male plants, instead of throwing seeds, the females put all their energy into growing big, sticky, THC-laden buds.)

Naturally, hearing the word hermaphrodite reminded me of my stepmother. As we worked, I started to tell Shawnee about Teddy, but her reaction was entirely opposite from Dusty’s: she did not want to hear the details.

All morning, we worked our way up the mountain from secret plant to secret plant. For lunch, Shawnee had packed peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches that we washed down with warm Mountain Dew. Sitting with our backs against the trunk of a red-barked madrone at the edge of a high, grassy meadow dotted with white puffs of clover, we watched a pair of hawks riding the thermals, swooping and gliding so lightly and gracefully they looked like they were made out of paper.

After lunch we worked our way down the other side of the mountain, where the plants with southern exposure got so much more sun we had to tie up the nodding branches so they wouldn’t break off from the weight of the buds. When I took out the clasp knife with the buzzard head carved into the handle to cut twine for Shawnee, my nightmare, which I’d almost managed to forget, came rushing back so vividly that my knees went weak.

The best part of the day came after we’d finished our circuit, when Shawnee took me swimming in the river. It was still pretty hot out, and the current was slow. We floated on our backs, looking up through the feathery branches of the river willows to the powder blue sky. Shawnee had worn her swimsuit under her clothes; it was a white two-piece that made her bronze skin glow. Peeking sideways at her, I got a hard-on pushing up the underpants I was using for a bathing suit. Peeking sideways at me peeking sideways at her, she must have noticed it. She rolled over onto her stomach and swam away, then ducked under the water and popped up next to me. We exchanged long watery kisses floating in the shallows, then made out standing up, with the waist-high water pushing and tugging at us. I slid her top up over her breasts and pushed them together with both hands, sucking and nuzzling while she reached under my briefs and grabbed me tight, maybe a little too tight, working my joystick in a serious, goal-oriented manner.

The test of wills, with me trying to put off coming and her trying to make me come as quickly as possible, didn’t last very long. She was victorious, of course, but if any contest ever had a win-win outcome, it was that one. “There,” she said, laughing deep in her throat, then dove away upstream to get away from my hardy little swimmers.

Half an hour later we were trudging homeward along the dusty rutted track that followed the riverbank. Rudy drove up alongside us in his big red Dodge Ram pickup. “You kids want a ride?”

“Thanks, Uncle Rudy.” Shawnee went around back, put her foot on the bumper hitch, and climbed over the tailgate, but I was still kind of frozen in place by the side of the road, staring up at Rudy’s old straw cowboy hat, which now had three long white eagle feathers stuck into the side of the crown, sweeping backward at a rakish angle.

Time did one of those weird double-clutch, theory-of-relativity moves, slowing to a crawl on the outside, zipping along at light speed on the inside. All these visuals of Buzzard John started flashing through my mind like an ultrahigh-speed slide show. Behind the wheel of the Buzzard-mobile, fussily arranging the eagle feathers in his sweatband; driving with his head thrown back and laughing, wreathed in a cloud of pot smoke; on his knees in the stark light of the barn; behind the wheel in my nightmare, the vulture’s naked head darting cobralike at the end of his long scaly neck.

Then time snapped back like a rubber band. “What are you starin’ at?” Rudy was saying, leaning out the window of the pickup.

“Sorry.” I shook my head sharply to clear it. “Guess I must’ve spaced out or something.”

“You probably got too much sun,” said Rudy. “Here.” He took off his hat and handed it to me through the window.

“I can’t take your hat, Rudy,” I told him.

“You can’t not take it,” he insisted. So I did, and as I climbed over the side of the truck to join Shawnee, it occurred to me that I now had Buzzard John’s knife and the eagle feathers.

Lucky me.