Vanishing Acts Read online

  My own weapon has been specially made by Concise. Having pulled the metal tip off a number two pencil, he's inserted a sharpened staple to the eraser end, and placed a fan of cigarette batting in the other side. The dart, jammed into the hollow tube of a Bic pen, can be blown into the eye of an enemy at close range.

  It is amazing to me, as we line up for rec, that the DOs do not realize what is going on. Everyone has a weapon packed somewhere under their stripes. Once we get to the yard, we congregate in larger groups than normal--no one wants to be separated from his allies. No one touches the basketball.

  "Stay cool," Concise whispers to me. My heart is as thick as a sponge, and sweat breaks out behind my ears, in the cool crevice where my hair once was.

  I do not see it coming, the sap that sings like a hummingbird and whacks me on my left temple. As I fall I am vaguely aware of the rush of bodies that push past me, the overgrown jungle of their feet. The officer's voice is high as a child's. Multiple inmates involved in a fight on the rec yard. Backup needed immediately.

  The window of the multipurpose room, which overlooks the rec yard, is suddenly full of faces pressed to the glass. Guards stream through the adjacent door, trying to pull apart the blacks and browns and whites whose limbs are knotted together. Violence up close has a smell, like coppered blood and charcoal burning. I inch backward, shaking fiercely.

  An opening in the wall of flesh spits a body into the space beside me. Sticks lifts his face and his eyes light up.

  The strangest details register: the locker-room smell of the pavement underneath me; the cut on Sticks's shoulder that is shaped like Florida; the way he has lost one shoe. My legs tremble as I back away from him. My hand curls around the blow dart.

  When he smiles at me, his teeth are covered in blood. "Nigger-lover," he says, and he holds up a zip gun in his left hand.

  I know what it is, because Concise had wanted to make one, but couldn't get a bullet smuggled in in time. You grind off the top and bottom of an asthma inhaler, and then tear the thin metal open. Flatten it; roll it around a pencil to make a tube that fits a .22-caliber shell like a sheath. Wrap it in cloth, and enclose it in one hand; in your other, hold the firing pin--anything that can hit the rim of the bullet's casing when you smack one hand against the other. It is deadly accurate at a five-foot range.

  I watch Sticks take a bent piece of metal--a handcuff key, I realize--and position it in his right hand. He spreads his fists apart.

  In slow motion I lift the tube of the Bic pen and seal my mouth over one end. The blow dart flies at Sticks, the staple embedding deep in his right eye.

  He rolls away, screaming; and with trembling hands I stuff the Bic pen tube down a drainage gate. The DOs begin to loose pepper spray that blinds me. When I hear something skitter by my ear, I try to look at it, but my eyes are the raw red of grief. I learn it by feel, the cool metal point of a miniature missile. Without hesitation, I grab the bullet Sticks has dropped.

  "Easy, now," a voice says behind me. A detention officer helps me to my feet. "I saw you field the first blow. You all right?"

  Somewhere between the moment I entered this rec yard, and the moment I will leave it, I have turned myself into a person I vaguely recognize. Somebody desperate. Somebody capable of acts I never imagined, until driven to commit them. Somebody I was twenty-eight years ago.

  Another life in the day of a man.

  I nod at the officer and bring my hand to my mouth, pretending to wipe off saliva. Then, untucking the bullet from the pouch of my cheek, I swallow.

  V

  The leaves of memory seemed to make

  A mournful rustling in the dark.

  --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Fire of Drift-wood"

  Delia

  Ruthann tells Sophie that when she was a child, Hopi girls would wear their hair in whorls, intricately twisted buns above each ear. She parts Sophie's hair, ropes each side, and coils it tight. "There," she announces. "You look just like a kuwanyauma."

  "What's that?" Sophie asks.

  "A butterfly, showing beautiful wings." She wraps a shawl over Sophie's shoulders, and winds two Ace bandages up her legs: makeshift moccasins. "Excellent," she says. "You're ready."

  Today she is taking us to the Heard Museum in Phoenix, where a festival is taking place. She has packed the car full of old board games and broken watches, pens that need refills, vases with chips and cracks. If you have nothing to do, she told us, I could use some staff.

  An hour later, Sophie and I stand in the grassy bowl outside the museum, surrounded by a collection of Ruthann's junk while she wanders through the crowd in her Barbie trench coat, flashing potential customers. People sit in folding chairs and on blankets, drinking bottled water and eating fry bread that costs four dollars. At the bottom of the outdoor pavilion is a circle, where a small canopy shades a phalanx of men bent over an enormous drum. Their voices vine together and climb into the sky.

  Many of the onlookers are white, but more are Native American. They wear everything from traditional costumes to jeans and American flag T-shirts. Some of the men wear their hair in braids and ponytails, and everyone seems to be smiling. Several other girls have hair wound to the sides like Sophie.

  Suddenly a dancer steps into the center of the circle. "Ladies and gentlemen," the emcee announces, "let's welcome Derek Deer, from Sipaulovi in Hopiland."

  The boy cannot be more than sixteen. When he walks, the bells on his costume jingle. He has a rainbow of fringe across his shoulder blades and down his arms, and he has tied a leather band around his forehead with a matching rainbow disk in the center. He wears biking shorts under his loincloth.

  The boy sets five hoops on the ground, each about two feet wide. As the drummers start throbbing out their song, he begins to move. He taps forward twice with his right foot, then his left, and in the instant it takes to blink he kicks up the first hoop and holds it in his hand.

  He does the same with the other five hoops, and then begins to make them extensions of his body. He steps through two and lines the remaining three up in a vertical line, then snaps the top ones open and shut in a massive jaw. Still moving his feet, he dances out of the hoops and fans all five across the breadth of his shoulders to turn himself into an eagle. He morphs from a rodeo horse to a serpent to a butterfly. Then he twists the hoops together, an Atlas building his burden, and spins this three-dimensional sphere out into the center of the performance ring. As the drummers cry, he dances a final circle and falls down to one knee.

  It is like nothing I have ever seen. "Ruthann," I say, as she steps up beside me, clapping, "that was amazing. That was--"

  "Let's go see him." She pecks her way between the people on the grass, until we are standing behind the drummer's pavilion. The boy is sweating profusely and eating a PowerBar. Up close I can see that the rainbow colors of his costume are hand-sewn ribbons. Ruthann boldly picks at the boy's sleeve. "Look at these; one thread away from falling off," she tsks. "Your mother ought to learn how to sew."

  The boy looks up over his shoulder and grins. "My aunt could probably fix them," he says, "but she's too busy being a business-woman to pay attention to the likes of me." He enfolds Ruthann in an embrace. "Or maybe you brought your needle and thread?"

  I wonder why she hasn't mentioned that the dancer is her nephew. Ruthann holds him at arm's length. "You are turning into your father's double," she pronounces, and this makes a smile split the boy's face. "Derek, this is Sophie and Delia, ikwaatsi."

  I shake his hand. "You were awfully good."

  Sophie bends down toward the hoop and tries to kick at it with her foot. It jumps a few inches, and Derek laughs. "Wow, look, a groupie."

  "You could do worse," Ruthann says.

  "So, how are you doing, Auntie?" he asks. "Mom said ... she told me that you went to the Indian Health Service."

  Something shutters across Ruthann's face that is gone almost as quickly as I notice it. "Why are we talking about me? Tell me whether I should bet