Thomas walks around to various vendors, jewelry and blanket booths. He’s keeping an eye out for anyone from the Indian Center. He should just find Blue and apologize. It would make drumming the rest of the day better. It would make his drumming better, more true. He sees her. But there’s someone yelling. Thomas can’t tell from where.
Loother and Lony
THE SUN BEAT DOWN on Loother and Lony up in the stands. They’d run out of things to complain about to each other, and lost patience for the silence slowly growing between them. Without having to say it, they stand up and walk down to look for Orvil. Lony had said he wanted to get closer to the drum, see what it sounds like up close.
“It’s just hella loud,” Loother had said.
“Yeah, but I wanna see.”
“You wanna hear,” Loother said.
“You know what I mean.”
They make their way toward the drum—Loother’s head on a swivel looking for Orvil. He told Lony they could go listen if they could stop to get a lemonade first. Lony hadn’t shown interest in any of the powwow stuff Orvil had gotten into until this moment. Something about the drum, he’d said. He hadn’t realized it’d be so loud, and that the singers sounded like that in real life.
“It’s the singing, you hear that?” he’d said to Loother before they went down.
“Yeah, I hear it, and it sounds just like we heard a hundred times coming from Orvil’s earphones,” Loother said.
They pass dancers and look up and almost flinch. People don’t notice them, which makes them have to dodge the dancers coming their way. Lony keeps drifting toward the drum. And Loother keeps grabbing him by the shirt to pull him toward the lemonade. They’re almost to the lemonade stand when they both turn around at what they think is the sound of people screaming.
Daniel Gonzales
DANIEL HAS HIS VR goggles on. They weigh his head down a little. But that’s the same angle the drone flies—top heavy. In that way he feels as if he’s flying as he flies toward the coliseum.
* * *
—
Daniel is waiting before flying the drone over. He’s waiting because of the battery life. He doesn’t want to miss anything. He wants it to go right. He wants them to pull it off, but more so he doesn’t want the guns to get used. He’d been waking up in the middle of the night the week leading up to the powwow. Dreams of people running in the streets and gunfire all around. He’d thought they were the usual zombie-apocalypse-type dreams he’d always had, until he noticed the people were Indian. Not dressed like Indians, but he just knew like you just know stuff in dreams. The dreams all ended the same. Bodies on the ground. The silence of death, the hot stillness of all the bullets lodged in the bodies.
* * *
—
The day is bright, and as he comes over the top of the coliseum, he hears his mom coming down the stairs. This doesn’t make any sense as she hadn’t come down those stairs since Manny died.
“Not right now, Mom,” he says. Then feels bad and adds, “Hold on a second.” Daniel lands the drone in the upper deck, which is empty if seagulls don’t count. He doesn’t want her to see the goggles because he knows she’ll think they look expensive.
“You okay?” Daniel says to her from the bottom of the stairs. She’s halfway down.
“What are you doing down there?”
“Same thing I’m always doing, Mom, nothing,” Daniel says.
“Come up here and eat with me. I’ll make you something.”
“Can you wait?” Daniel says, and knows he says it impatiently. He wants to get back to the drone, which is sitting by itself on the third deck of the coliseum wasting its battery.
“Okay, Daniel,” his mom says. And it’s almost sad enough, the sound in her voice, to make him want to leave the drone up there, leave it all alone and just go eat with her.
“I’ll be up pretty soon, Mom. Okay?”
She doesn’t respond.
Blue
BLUE DIDN’T KNOW WHY she became so aware of the safe. Or she did know why, but she didn’t want to know why she began to think of the safe. The money. All morning it hadn’t come up. And leading up to the powwow it hadn’t been a thing either. There were gift cards, and a heavy safe, and who would rob a powwow? There were other things to think about. She’d just seen her mom. Maybe. There are a few thuggish-looking guys standing nearby. Blue is bothered that she is bothered by their presence.
Edwin is next to her chewing and swallowing sunflower seeds. This almost bothers her more than anything else because you’re supposed to do the work of splitting the shells and reaping the seed benefit, and he’s just shoving handfuls in his mouth and chewing them up until he can swallow them shell and all.